Hermeneutics

The Problematic

[Page 326]The modern Western philosophical notion of identity, the one which has been so problematic and has remained fundamentally unresolved, was the promise of a transparent presence of self as it was sought in Descartes’ methodical doubt, which then culminated in his dictum, “I think therefore I am.” The main problems were that this approach ultimately made purchases upon a nonempirical or transcendent substance, and it also legitimated kinds of doubt and skepticism which, in their own wake, generated modernist epistemological paradigms as attempted solutions. Immanuel Kant, as well, for all his ability to navigate between empiricism and rationalism, bequeathed to his successors a largely transcendental I. Today, this I who does the thinking, the supposed inner self who represents the world, has remained a proverbial ghost in the machine, one who continues to haunt the contemporary philosophical landscape.

The early hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher and, to a slightly lesser degree, Wilhelm Dilthey were reconstructive. Whereas prior practices of hermeneutics were mainly used when people encountered alien texts and knew that adequate understanding was lacking, Schleiermacher recognized and sought to deal with the naturally arising fact, even the priority, of “misunderstanding” due to various unnoticed obstacles and intervening variables between the interpreter and the author. Schleiermacher attended to the grammatical and linguistic features of the text that might lead to misunderstanding, and he also attempted a kind of empathic identification with the subjectivity of the author. Early reconstructive hermeneutics were therefore largely romantic. They sought to extricate and bracket out tradition, history, and the knower's own prejudices and to retrieve the worldview of the author or the creative genius behind the text. Dilthey expanded Schleiermacher's ideas and adapted a hermeneutics toward history and human existence more generally. Contrasting the explanations of events in the natural sciences to the ways of understanding parts to whole in the human sciences, Dilthey also sought to develop adequate methodological and theoretical foundations for the human sciences. Most broadly construed, then, the early relation of hermeneutics to identity was largely of recovering a self behind and beyond the text and of reconstructing the historical situation of the author. By understanding individuals as historically situated interpreters, hermeneutics sought to provide the grounds for rigorously recovering the subjective ideas and understandings of others.

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