Hermeneutics

Although it has recently achieved a certain currency, the term can hardly be said to have a secure or well-defined place in the vocabulary of philosophers or philosophers of history, at least in the English-speaking world. It is generally understood that, as it is now used, this term denotes something far more ambitious than the exegetical work on biblical and other texts to which it was formerly confined. But as to just what this wider conception and practice of hermeneutics may be, there has not been much clarity and even less agreement. Matters are not helped by the fact that the term now often appears in pairings with other terms like structuralism and deconstruction in a way that suggests some underlying affinity with the lines of thought so evoked, although it is by no means clear that such affinities in fact obtain. In this paper I will try to sort out some of the issues that arise in connection with any attempt to arrive at a satisfactory working conception of hermeneutics, especially for the purposes of the philosophy of history. As a point of departure for this effort, it may be useful to recall the parallelism between hermeneutic(s) and rhetoric. These are both nominalized Greek adjectives that originally qualified words like techne or episteme, and thus designated an art or a body of knowledge that deals, in the one case, with speaking and, in the other, with understanding what is said by a speaker. Speaking and understanding are both skills that every human being possesses in some degree; and they correspond to one another inasmuch as speaking requires someone who can listen and understand and the other way around as well. At the same time, the ability that each of us has to speak and to understand stands in need of enhancement of the kind that requires the development of something like a corresponding art in which the experience of those who are most skillful in speaking or understanding is codified and made generally available. The status of rhetoric as such an art has been widely recognized; but even in Greece there were no teachers of the hermeneutic art in this broad sense and the situation is not very different among us at the present time. Nevertheless, the idea of reflecting upon what is involved in understanding as well as in speaking is a valid one, as a great deal of relevant experience, not only of foreign cultures, but of everyday exchanges within our own, clearly demonstrates. We have all had the experience of misunderstanding what someone says to us and of trying to work out subsequently what that person really did say to us; and a good deal can depend, for a variety of purposes, upon our getting

Dialectic · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Philosophy

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