Hermeneutics

The term hermeneutics—the theory or science of interpretation—comes from Hermes, the ancient Greek messenger of the gods. Since the words of the gods were not intelligible to mortals, Hermes had to interpret their meanings and make them accessible to human understanding. The origins of hermeneutics also is associated with Greek poetics and rhetoric. Poetics is the theory of meanings made through words or other symbols, as in the Greek poieo, “to make.” Rhetoric refers to the art of reaching prudent judgments in matters where absolute knowledge is impossible. It is therefore an art of verbal persuasion rather than of cognitive domination through definitive proof. Hermeneutics also has roots in the Hebrew interpretation of the Talmud. These various traditions of interpretive knowledge were fused in the West in biblical hermeneutics, which began when early Christian Jewish scholars of the Roman empire combined Greek poetic and rhetorical methods of criticizing texts with the Hebrew tradition of interpreting religious scripture. As religion became the hegemonic ideology in the West, biblical hermeneutics (along with revelation) became the dominant form of knowledge.

Modern hermeneutics begins with Schleiermacher, who codified traditional hermeneutics into a systematic and critical method of biblical interpretation. Wilhelm Dilthey noted that historical knowledge is akin to biblical knowledge insofar as they both depend on the interpretation of written texts. Dilthey thus developed and extended Schleiermacher's critical and systematic biblical hermeneutics to what were then called the historical or human sciences—those disciplines that studied the embodied or objectified expressions of human mind. This included history, of course, but also archaeology, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology and others. Hermeneutic theory and method was further developed by Edmund Husserl, and by Martin Heidegger, who conceived of the natural sciences as symbolic constructions of a sacral Be-ing. Contemporary postmodernists, rhetorical theorists, cultural anthropologists, symbolic interactionists, and deconstructionists also, in their various ways, operate within and extend this tradition.

In contemporary theories of knowledge, hermeneutics usually is opposed to positivism, neopositivism, and rationalism. The positivist approach to knowledge and society has been criticized by neopositivist sociologists and philosophers themselves. For example, Karl Popper and other critical rationalists modified some of the basic assumptions of earlier positivist thought: The idea of causality was qualified by theories of probability, and canons of proof and verifiability were largely replaced by those of disproof and falsifiability. Likewise, Thomas Kuhn stressed the communal aspects of scientific activity and the consensual character of scientific truth.

Such circumspection would seem to safeguard contemporary positivists against criticisms from nonpositivist points of view. However, thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition have challenged the foundationalist assumptions of the positivist method and metaphysic. These critics have argued that the subject matter of social science—human conduct—cannot as such be known through purely objectivist methods and that, indeed, the more objective our observations, the further we are from what we want to know. The views of humans as objects, and of statistical experimentalism, deductive functionalism, or structural linguistics as explanatory ideals, say these critics, beg the very questions that the human studies should address.

[Page 363]The hermeneutic epistemologies that provide the bases of such critiques today include pragmatism, ordinary language analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, the philosophic history and sociology of science, rhetorical theory, and neo-Marxist critical theory. Though sometimes antagonistic to each other, philosophers as diverse as Dewey, Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Husserl affirmed the basic hermeneutic assumption that commonsense understanding of experience is the framework within which all inquiry must begin and to which it must return. John Dewey spoke of this framework as the social matrix within which emerge unclarified situations that may then be transformed by science into justifiable assertions. Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to knowledge as a “form of life.” Edmund Husserl wrote of the “life-world” within which all scientific and even logical concepts originate.

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