The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics

Niall Keane, Chris Lawn, Niall Keane, Chris Lawn

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118529874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

THE BLACKWELL COMPANION TO HERMENEUTICS

" The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics is destined to become an invaluable resource for its incisive discussions of all aspects of hermeneutics within the field of philosophy."
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University

"This is an extraordinarily rich collection of articles on every aspect of hermeneutics. It covers not just the history of hermeneutics from the ancient Greeks to the present, but also topics ranging from aesthetics and politics to pragmatism and deconstruction as analyzed by key thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Vattimo, and Apel. This Companion is an essential guide to the hermeneutic tradition."
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

"Hermeneutics—the philosophical theory of interpretation—has been one of the most influential strands of European thought over the last two hundred years or more. This comprehensive volume of essays, with contributions by many leading experts in the field, constitutes an ideal point of entry into the hermeneutic tradition. Its range and level of detail will also appeal to those who wish to advance their knowledge of hermeneutic philosophy and its many important consequences."
Peter Dews, University of Essex

The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics is a collection of original essays that provides a definitive historical, systematic, authoritative, and critical compendium of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume explores the art and theory of interpretation as it intersects with contemporary philosophical and interdisciplinary schools of thought, including humanism, politics, education, theology, literature, and law. Essays also include cutting-edge discussions of the relation of hermeneutics to the history of philosophy, and address the major themes, topics, core concepts, and key figures at the heart of the discipline. The reference features 70 chapters from an international cast of leading and upcoming scholars, who offer historically informed, philosophically comprehensive, and critically astute contributions in their individual fields of expertise. In doing so, they identify and enact different aspects of hermeneutical aims and approaches in an attempt to bear witness to both the inherent diversity of hermeneutics, and also the constancy and fidelity of its return to history and tradition. Timely and thought-provoking, The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics is the only comprehensive reference work of its kind, and offers a wealth of information for everyone with an interest in hermeneutics.

Part I
Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy

1
The History of Hermeneutics

Eileen Brennan

The topic of the history of hermeneutics was always given at least some consideration in the varied and occasionally conflicting accounts of hermeneutic philosophy offered by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). Heidegger discussed the topic in an early work, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger 1999). In that work, he spoke about the original meaning and development of the word “hermeneutics.” His history of hermeneutics was, then, the story of a concept, a Begriffsgeschichte.¹ But that history of the concept was not to be taken as a “history” in any conventional sense of the term. That is to say, it was not narrowly historiographical.² Gadamer and Ricoeur shared a different view of the history of hermeneutics. It was, for them, the history of the “hermeneutic problem.” Gadamer presented his account of that history in Truth and Method (Gadamer 2003). Although the focus of Gadamer’s history of hermeneutics was not the same as Heidegger’s, Gadamer followed Heidegger in rejecting the standard model of intellectual history in favour of history as critique or “destruction” (Destruktion). Ricoeur’s history of the “hermeneutic problem” was more conventional, although he did make the point that it was impossible to assume a neutral perspective on that history. All that he could hope to do, he said, was “to describe the state of the hermeneutical problem, such as I receive and perceive it, before offering my own contribution to the debate” (Ricoeur 1981, 43). He presented his version of the history of the “hermeneutic problem” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.

This chapter has four parts. The first part tries to explain why Heidegger felt obliged to jettison the most commonly used senses of “history,” and how he arrived at the two senses that he considered appropriate for use in philosophical investigations. The second part then draws on those explanations as it comments on key features of Heidegger’s history of the concept of hermeneutics. The third part is devoted to Gadamer’s history of the “hermeneutic problem.” It discusses points of continuity between Heidegger’s version of historical inquiry and that of Gadamer; and notes the distinctive features of Gadamer’s history of the “hermeneutic problem.” The fourth part discusses Ricoeur’s version of the history of hermeneutics, underscoring its concern with two “preoccupations” in the recent history of hermeneutics: “deregionalization” and “radicalization.”

Heidegger’s Destruction of the Six Senses of “History”

In the Summer Semester of 1920, in a lecture course entitled, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept Formation, Heidegger identified six different senses of the word “history” (Heidegger 1993, 43–44). Theodore Kisiel lists them as follows:

1. My friend studies history.
2. My friend knows the history of philosophy.
3. There are people (Volk) who have no history.
4. History is the magister of life.
5. This man has a sorry history.
6. Today I underwent an unpleasant history (Kisiel 1993, 127).

Heidegger then analyzed each one of those senses in turn, using a modified version of Husserl’s method of intentional analysis.³ Heidegger had modified the method so that it would also permit the identification of a concept type which was unknown to Husserl. Husserl employed “order concepts” (Ordnungsbegriffe), which had a two-part structure: (1) a “content sense” (Gehaltsinn); and (2) a “reference sense” (Bezugssinn). But Heidegger was not interested in concepts of that type. His point was that it was also possible to encounter and indeed to use concepts that have a three-part structure: (1) a “content sense”; (2) a “reference sense”; and (3) a “performance or enactment sense” (Vollzugssinn). He gave the name “expression concepts” (Ausdrucksbegriffe) to that second group of concepts. As we shall see, he had a particular interest in “expression concepts”, believing that they were better suited to the task of capturing phenomena like history and indeed life itself.

The main purpose of Heidegger’s intentional analysis of the six senses of the word “history” was to establish which ones were “order concepts”, which ones “expression concepts.” And the plan was to work with the latter and simply disregard the former. To allow him to make the correct judgment about the six senses of “history,” his modified version of phenomenological analysis involved an attempted re-enactment of the “performance sense.” The idea was that if the attempt at re-enactment were to fail, Heidegger would know that he was dealing with an “order concept.” He used the term “destruction” (Destruktion) to refer to the attempted re-enactment of the “performance sense”; he used the term “phenomenological dijudication” (phänomenologische Diiudication) (Heidegger 1993, 74) to refer to the judgment that was made in the course of that exercise.

Heidegger looked upon “order concepts” as concepts that had had their “performance sense” severed (Greisch 2000, 103). They had, he thought, suffered an “erosion of meaning” (Verblassen der Bedeutsamkeit) (Heidegger 1993, 37). But, as Jean Greisch reminds us, this “erosion of meaning” had nothing to do with faulty memory or lack of interest. Nothing had been forgotten. Nothing had gone unnoticed. It was solely a matter of the cessation of a practice or performance. Of course, “order concepts” retained their “content sense” and their “reference sense,” and so could still be used to say something intelligible about things in the world. But this use-value was immediately offset by a characteristic failing: “order concepts” objectified history and other temporally structured phenomena. Heidegger hoped that his deconstructive strategy would allow him to counteract the tendency toward objectification which, he noted, was then prevalent in philosophical circles.

Of the six senses of the word “history,” whose “performance sense” Heidegger tried to re-enact, two were judged to be “order concepts.” They were (1) “My friend studies history” (i.e., “history” in the sense of scientific or academic inquiry); and (2) “My friend knows the history of philosophy” (i.e., “history” in the sense of the focus of such an inquiry) (Heidegger 1993, 43). Heidegger held that when the term “history” is used in either of those senses, the experience of life is diluted. Fortunately, there were, he thought, other nonobjectifying senses of “history” to be found, two of which he judged suitable for use by philosophers.

The first of those was (3) “There are people (Volk) who have no history” (i.e., “history” in the sense of tradition) (Heidegger 1993, 43). As Heidegger noted, the medieval Christians showed that it is possible to have or to live “history” in the sense of tradition. Having or living a tradition is all about relating to a people. And this relationship “involves a sense that I, as a latecomer, am following something that preceded me. I sense that this past is being preserved for the sake of my own becoming” (Kisiel 1993, 128). Heidegger thought that the following captured the second sense of the word “history”, which philosophers might safely use: (5) “This man has a sorry history” (Heidegger 1993, 44).⁴ He drew a careful distinction between the manner in which a man has a personal history and a people have a tradition. He held that the relationship that a man has with his own past is “deeper and more intimate” than the relationship between a people and their tradition (Kisiel 1993, 128). The man’s past has become part of who he is; it is present in his “inner tendencies.” And it was because of the depth and intimate nature of the man’s relationship with his own past that Heidegger considered “history” in the sense of having a sorry history to be the more “original” of the two.

Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Hermeneutics

Three years later, in the lectures on the hermeneutics of facticity, Heidegger would make the following statement: “A few references will allow us to narrow down the original meaning of this word [namely, “hermeneutics”] and understand as well the way its meaning has changed” (Heidegger 1999, 6). He would also comment on a series of phrases and some longer statements taken from works by Plato, Aristotle, Philostratus, Thucydides, Philo, Aristeas, Augustine, Johannes Jakob Rambach, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. If you did not know that he was already trying to work out an alternative to the existing model of historical inquiry, you would be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at the notes for a fairly standard history of ideas (Heidegger’s history of hermeneutics is essentially a set of concise and at times highly condensed lecture notes). But as the lectures of the Summer Semester of 1920 have indicated, Heidegger had a special interest in “expression” concepts and simply refused to use “order concepts.” So, even if the appearance of his history of the concept of hermeneutics suggests otherwise, it is not a conventional history of ideas.

The challenge now is to arrive at a clear understanding of what Heidegger meant by the history of the concept of hermeneutics. The first thing to clarify is the sense of the easily misunderstood phrase, “original meaning.” As Heidegger’s “destruction” of the six senses of “history” has shown, the “original meaning” of a word is not necessarily the sense it had for the first person ever to have used the term. Indeed, commenting specifically on the word “hermeneutics,” Heidegger notes that “its etymology is obscure” (Heidegger 1999, 6). What makes one particular sense of a word like “history” or “hermeneutics” the original meaning is its unsurpassed bond with a human agent. As we have already noted, Heidegger considered “This man has a sorry history” to be the most original sense of “history” because the relationship that a man has with his own past is the deepest and most intimate relationship with the past that it is possible to have (Heidegger 1993, 47–48).

In the lectures on the hermeneutics of facticity, Heidegger makes a statement about the way he uses the “expression ‘hermeneutics’,” which points to a relationship that could also be described as deep and intimate. Here is Heidegger’s statement: “The expression ‘hermeneutics’ is used here to indicate the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, accessing, interrogating, and explicating of facticity [i.e., the being of Dasein]” (Heidegger 1999, 6). It is easy to see how a man could be said to have a deep and intimate relationship with his own past, but could the same be said of a man’s relationship to “hermeneutics,” as Heidegger uses that expression? I believe so. Hermeneutics in the sense of a “unified manner” of conducting an inquiry into the being of Dasein is a way of going about that task that a man can rightly call his own. Indeed, he cou...