Hermeneutics

Early Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics has had a rich and varied conceptual history. One of the early treatises on hermeneutics, Friedrich Ast's Basic Elements of Grammar, Hermeneutics, and Criticism, sets out the goal of hermeneutics as the understanding of the spirit of a text through three moments: historical understanding, grammatical understanding, and in relation to the text's author and the spirit of the age in which it was written. In this context, Ast proposed the principle of the hermeneutic circle: that to understand the spirit of an age, one can do so only through the individual works that exemplify that spirit; but these works can in turn be understood only through their relationship with the whole of which they are a part. Ast's three moments of understanding parallel three moments of explanation: the hermeneutic of the letter, of the sense, and of the spirit (referring to the life-world or controlling idea the text portrays). Friedrich August Wolf, also writing in the late 18th century, proposed that the goal of hermeneutics was to grasp the thoughts of the author by a “temperamentally suited” interpreter through dialogue with that author occurring through the medium of the text. Wolf, like Ast, believed that explanation must be grounded in understanding and also proposed three moments of interpretation: the grammatical, historical, and philosophical moments.

...