Hermeneutics and Social Science (Routledge Revivals)

Approaches to Understanding

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136955532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Originally publishedin 1978, this important work, by one of the leading European social theorists, is arguably the best introduction to the hermeneutic tradition as a whole. It is designed to help students of sociology and philosophy place the problems of "understanding social science" in their historical and philosophical context. It does so by presenting the major current in sociological thought as responses to the challenge of hermeneutics. The idea that true knowledge of social life can be attained only if human conduct is seen as meaningful action whose meaning is accordingly grasped has been presented as a discovery of recent sociology.

In fact its history is long and its connections plentiful, reaching beyond the boundaries of sociology itself. Yet it is in sociology that the hermeneutic tradition has attracted most interest but most misinterpretation. The debate is in full swing and there is no attempt to offer "correct" solutions - the emphasis instead is upon revealing the strengths and weaknesses of each of the main approaches. However it is Bauman's view that the theory of understanding may achieve valid results only if it treats the problem of understanding as an aspect of the ongoing process of social life.

1
The rise of hermeneutics

It was the guiding idea of hermeneutics in Germany during the nineteenth century that—like the individual—every cultural system, every community, has a focal point within itself.¹ This focal point is constituted, above all, by a conception of reality and its evaluation.

This view of the community was a fair reflection of a century-long practice of historians, above all German historians, generated and sustained by the mood of Romanticism. This is how, indeed, historiography was performed—as a vivid insight into the mind of the nation viewed as a collective subject, complete with intuitive longings, emotions, a sense of unique destiny, distinctively individual colourings of world perception. Historical works of the era read like psychological treatises, so replete are they with terms either borrowed directly from psychology or otherwise calculated to send the reader’s imagination into the unfathomable depths of the Spirit.

It is difficult to say whether the Romantic conception of the work of art inflamed the imagination of Romantic historians, or the other way round. But surely both fed, at least in part, on the rising German nationalism—an ideology all the more passionate and compelling for its role as an overture to, and a temporary substitute for, the national state, rather than its spiritual adornment. Unlike the enthusiastic preachers of the Machtstaat later in the century, the German patriots of the Romantic era had no political structure or state-generated symbolism to fall back on. For the lack of better-defined objects, they turned to the elusive, intangible Volksseele with the same natural ease with which their successors would turn to the all-too-tangible powers of the Prussian Kaiserdom; and they sought to ground their nationalist urge in a continuity of spiritual tradition with the same matter-of-factness with which their successors would ground it in the claims of the Staaträson. It was ‘der deutsche Stamm’ which, in Schlegel’s words, was ‘alt und stark’. It was, correspondingly, ‘the original moral character of a people, its customs, its peculiarities’, which ‘must be regarded as sacred’.² The inscrutable and impenetrable, but stubborn and indomitable ‘spirit of the people’ was the only fount from which history could draw its meaning and human life its value. History in general, and the most imposing and memorable of its works in particular, had all been made of this sole creative stuff.

Herder called Germany the ‘Reich of ten peoples’. The Germans of the early nineteenth century did not face their nationhood as an aspect of nature, as a fact of life, the presence of which did not depend on reflection and active appropriation. On the contrary, Germans faced their nationhood as a fully spiritual phenomenon, to be intellectually grasped before it could be possessed. Herder called his contemporaries to search for the essence of their nationhood by digging deep into the rich lore of ancient songs as the earliest and the purest expression of the nation’s creative spirit. Fichte sought the mystery of Germany’s historical fate in the unique psychic traits of German people: Charakter haben und deutsch sein undoubtedly meant the same.³ Spirit came to fill the empty centre of the stateless nation; lacking the kings whose chronicle could form the subject of historiography, ‘the people’ usurped naturally the vacant role as history’s subject. Like all subjects, they were seen as spiritual beings, moved by thought and emotions, acting of their own decisions, bearers (at least potentially) of poĭein (doing) rather than paschein (suffering). Unlike other subjects, however, the people were many and anonymous. The individual psyche still served as their prototype, but it could be accommodated to the new purpose only if subjected to a subtle transformation: what had been an individual’s property became a supra-individual power; what had been the individual Seele turned into a collective Geist, and later Kultur; what had been a name for individual autonomy and freedom became the theoretical expression of the individual’s submission to a larger community, the Volks- or Zeit-geist which no individual could transcend, as only inside it could he fulfil his individuality.

All the same, at least on the surface, the similarity between the two was striking. In the Romantics’ view, the artist represented the human individual at his best, the human spirit at its highest reaches. And as for the substance of artistic work, ‘all art begins with a state of mind and ends with a work of art’, which was always an objectified residue of ‘an attempt on the artist’s part to discover the formal equivalent of a state of mind.⁴ Artistic creation is, therefore, a struggle between the artist’s vision and the medium, adamant to shrug off the form the artist wishes to impose. The work is a compromise between the two. But of the two elements who meet to beget it, only one carries the seed of life and meaning; the second is sheer stubbornness, pure negativity capable only of distortion, never of creation. If one wishes, therefore, to reach the original, pure meaning of the work of art, one has to go beyond the product, beyond the object itself, back into the ‘state of mind’ in which the artist’s vision, this sole spring of all meaning, still enjoyed pristine purity. To understand a work of art, in other words, is to reconstruct the artist’s intention which the artistic object, its end-product, could only deliver in a modified, mediated, and necessarily ambiguous form. The intention is always richer than its tangible traces, as these are invariably residues of its defeats.

If we now turn to the Romantic vision of artistic work (and remember, the artist is the fullest embodiment of human potency) projected at the large screen of history, we find strikingly similar patterns of thought anchored, however, in a ‘collective artist’ of creative nation. National institutions, law, literature, forms of government, modes of family life and all the rest are seen as residues of the age-long work of the national genius: they all are supreme works of art of sorts; there is an artist’s intention standing at their cradle, though the artist this time is the people, Volk, this uniquely German ‘collective singular’. Gustav Hugo, in the eighteenth century, had already taught that law is a product of national genius; the idea was taken over by his famous disciple, Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, and explored in full in the monumental History of German Law and Institutions, the work which set the pattern for the whole of the nineteenth-century historiography. Karl von Savigny and Jacob Grimm quickly joined forces with Eichhorn and used all their considerable skill and brilliance to help the idea of law as the product of Volksgeist to turn into a common-sense truth for at least a century. It would reach its most impressive in the work of Karl Lamprecht, already Dilthey’s contemporary, who impressed the learned public with a sweeping generalization of the century of the Romantic historiographic experience: what governs the history of any age is a unique conjunction of dominant psychical traits, the Zeitgeist, which shines through all significant historic events and ought to be recovered from them.

It was this practice of historiography, propped by the twin pillars of makeshift spiritual nationhood of a nation-in-search-of-a-state, und the romantic vision of creative work, which constituted the discursive formation inside which the nineteenth-century hermeneutic was born and sustained.

The author of the most comprehensive study of this hermeneutics, Joachim Wach,⁵ traced the beginnings of virtually all the significant topics of hermeneutical discourse to Friedrich Ast (1778–1841), pushing back the birth-date of the modern theory of understanding well beyond Schleiermacher, its widely acclaimed father. Following the final victory of the ‘moderns’ over the ‘ancients’, the ancient world, complete with its artistic, philosophical and legal accomplishments, was for the first time confronted by Europe as a stage in its history, rather than a paragon of timeless perfection. The ancient world had been present in European consciousness throughout most of the middle ages and certainly from the outset of the modern era; but it had appeared before either as a ready-made, timeless pattern of superior achievement, or as a self-enclosed entity with few, if any, contiguous points with current events. Only when Europe woke up to its own historicity could ancient Greece and Rome be disclosed as historic societies, as Europe’s past, as a contribution to Europe’s tradition. Ast stood in the long line of philologists who tried hard to take full stock of the consequences of the new situation, who tried, above all, to articulate the overall task of assimilating the ancient message into the emerging European tradition as a series of methodological postulates.

What was, in their view, at stake was the restoration of truth beclouded or downright distorted by centuries of scholastic treatment; or, as Ast would put it, the problem of Verständnis versus Missverständnis (understanding versus misunderstanding).

In confronting the task, Ast spelled out all the major problems which were to remain in the very centre of hermeneutic thought for many years. Above all, the very notion of understanding had been given the truly Romantic interpretation which came to be virtually identified with the idea of hermeneutics: ‘die Erfassung des Geistes’,⁶ the capture of the Spirit, which expresses itself in, and lives through, monuments of intellectual and artistic creation, as well as the ordinary forms of public life. The visible, tangible legacy of the past— texts, paintings, legal codes, recorded customs—had been thereby posited as Äusserungen—externalizations of the Spirit, sentient leftovers of Spirit’s self-estrangement, documents of its expressive powers; the true object of understanding was however perceived as standing behind them, never exhausted by them, always fuller and richer than any of its expressions.

Ast, and several generations of hermeneuticians after him, hoped that the road could be traversed in both directions: since the objects of historical study emerge from the Spirit, where their untarnished prototype is stored, since they emanate from the inner depths of spiritual Being—there seems to be no reason why one could not, starting from the known objects, perform a return intellectual journey back to the starting-point, from the objects to their spiritual origins, from the blurred copies to the pristine clarity of the prototype. Hermeneutics, at least at this early stage, was self-confident, not to say light-hearted, about the difficulties that venture might involve.

This self-confidence was grounded philosophically on the assumption of essential unity of the Spirit. It had been accepted that no understanding is possible between totally strange, unconnected worlds. (Wittgenstein would later say: if lions could speak, we would not understand them.) If there is any understanding, its very presence contains already the proof of a primeval unity and uniformity of the spiritual element hiding behind the messages. In Goethe’s words, which Wach quotes as consonant with Ast’s idea,

Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne könnt es nie erblicken,
läg’ nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,
wie könnt uns Göttliches entzücken?

Were not the eye sunny,
It would not descry the sun;
Had not we divine power,
How could the Divine enchant us?

A total strangeness would be totally numb. There is no understanding without affinity of spirits. Dem Verwandten erschliesst sich das Verwandte⁷—any object can disclose its meaning only to a kindred spirit. We can reach in our effort to understand only such objects as have been begotten of essentially the same Spirit which saturates our own thought. If the opacity of objects strikes us as a disturbance of what should be a clear and unimpeded perception, if it urges us to bridge the gap between us and the object, to ‘restore’ true understanding—it is only because our estrangement is relative and temporary, one component being temporarily out of touch with the spiritual developments of the other.

All understanding, therefore, starts from the establishing of an affinity between its subject and object; or, rather, between two subjects, standing respectively at the beginning and at the end of communication. We can rescue the meaning of antiquity from oblivion in as far as our Spirit forms a unity with the Spirit of the ancient Greece or Rome; a unity perhaps temporarily disturbed, marred by a transient estrangement, but unity all the same, struggling against all odds for its own restoration. What applies to antiquity can in fact be extended to mankind as a whole. However insuperable the differentiation of the human species may seem from a short distance, a truly historical perspective will justly reduce it to a middle stage which separates the primeval from the future unity. Everything in human history has emanated from the common Spirit and everything will return to the common Spirit in the end.

The interpreter (a historian, a philologist, a theorist of art) has a crucial role in this journey of the human Spirit back to its original unity. He is, in a sense, a cultural broker, mediating between ages and nations, and bringing about the gradual re-unification of divided humanity. He becomes, therefore, a genuine agent of history: it is he who unwinds the knots tied up by the spontaneous and unsystematic action of the Spirit. If the Spirit, following its insatiable creative urge, externalizes itself in its own creations, and so hides its universality behind a multitude of its own particular incarnations, the hermeneutician unravels the concealed spiritual content of the Spirit’s works, and thereby restores the totality lost in the particular. The hermeneutician is, in a way, forced to do this. It is not a matter of free choice in the method of action—even less a question of preferred cultural ideal. Understanding as such can be achieved only by ‘universalizing’ anew the Spirit hidden in the endless variety of human cultural creation. The famous ‘hermeneutic circle’ (another idea which Wach credits to Ast) is not a particularly ingenious and effective method of study; it is, in actual fact, the very logic of understanding as such. There is no understanding of history apart from the perpetual movement from the particular to the total and back to the particular, in order to render transparent what previously, in its uncompromised particularity, was impervious to our interpretation. One would rather speak of a hermeneutic spiral, to be sure: in our search of the lost affinity, in our urge to re-appropriate fully estranged creations of the kindred Spirit, we never really finish our job. But we move from the particular to the universal and back in ever-widening circles, ever closer to the ideal of the Spirit once again, but this time self-consciously, unified.

It was left to Schleiermacher, an active member of the Romantic movement, a personal friend of Schlegel, Novalis, Herz, and Mendelssohn, to bring these ideas into systematic order and thereby to lay the foundations of historical hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s contribution, above all, was to extend the notion of hermeneutics and hermeneutic circle beyond the confines of philology, exegesis, art criticism. Like Hegel, though naturally in a different way, he brought the problem of understanding and interpretation into the very centre of universal human experience; in Wach’s words, he located them in the practice of living, in daily life, in lived experience.⁸ With Schleiermacher, hermeneutics ceased to be a philologist’s analysis of the texts left by other writers: it became the question of a member of one culture struggling to grasp the experience of another, a denizen of one historical era trying to embrace another era’s practice of life, its ‘quotidianity’, the kind of experience which can be conveyed only by the German word ‘Erlebnis’. One can easily see the Romantic origin of this remarkable shift of attention. Romanticism’s paramount legacy—the elusive, polysemic notions of ‘Leben’ and ‘Erlebnis’. have from then on haunted forever the self-reflection of humanities.

There was another innovation for which Schleiermacher was responsible—one of perhaps yet greater import. In Gadamer’s words,⁹

Schleiermacher’s particular contribution is psychological interpretation. It is ultimately a divinatory process, a placing of oneself within the mind of the author, an apprehension of the ‘inner origin’ of the composition of a work, a recreation of the creative act. Thus understanding is a reproduction related to an original production, a knowing of what has been known (Boeckh), a reconstruction that starts from the vital moment of conception, the ‘germinal decision’ as the composition’s point of organization.

This means placing squarely the sought-for meaning of the act in its actor’s project. To understand this meaning, one has to literally ‘identify’ oneself with the actor. Sympathy is his major tool of impersonation. The idea of ‘losing oneself’ in the course of cognition, to forget oneself in order to ‘remember’ other people’s meanings, the strategy of bias-free investigation in terms of ‘indigenous categories’—are all germinally contained in Schleiermacher’s programme of ‘psychologische Interpretation’. Only germinally, to be sure. Schleiermacher’s psychology was unaware of late-nineteenth-century introspective ambitions and did not define itself as the quest for ‘inner’ thought and feeling. It did not ask ‘How did the intention look to its holder?’ ‘What did the actor feel when he experienced this or that?’ Sc...