The hermeneutic mode of understanding

What, one might ask, are the characteristic ways in which hermeneutic theories differ from other approaches to meaning and understanding?

For a start, it can be said that, in one way or another, hermeneutics views texts as strange and far off. It is because of this alienation or ‘distantiation’ that the interpretative task is deemed to be problematic. Even so, talk of alien or distant texts needs to be tempered since, paradoxically, hermeneutics also assumes an affinity of some kind between text and reader—a commonality that provides a basis for the interpretation that is to emerge. Texts are not just antique or foreign curiosities. They are means of transmitting meaning—experience, beliefs, values—from one person or community to another. Hermeneutics assumes a link between the two that makes the exercise feasible.

Understanding interpretation in this fashion has immediate implications. For a start, hermeneutics obviously grounds the meaning of texts in more than their sheerly semantic significance. Account tends to be taken, for example, of features such as the intentions and histories of authors, the relationship between author and interpreter, or the particular relevance of texts for readers.

Secondly, to emphasise that hermeneutics is a sharing of meaning between communities or persons is already to indicate that it is no mere academic exercise. It has practical purposes in view. The origins of hermeneutics already suggest this, for religious hermeneutics has always been more than just a disciplined attempt to identify textual meaning and intent; it is very much a form of inquiry into how texts can and should be applied. The same is true of the long tradition of legal hermeneutics. It is equally true of modem hermeneutics: determination of meaning is a matter of practical judgment and common sense, not just abstract theorising.

Even more importandy, to see hermeneutics as a sharing of meaning between communities or individuals is to situate hermeneutics within history and within culture.

It has now become a commonplace to say that ‘we all interpret’. However, hermeneutics—the critical theory of interpretation—is the only current in western thought that has made this issue its own, notwithstanding its presence in both Marxism and that so-called science of phenomena, phenomenology. Through hermeneutics, interpretation has become part of our cultural self-understanding that only as historically and culturally located beings can we articulate ourselves in relation to others and the world in general. (Rundell 1995, p. 10)

Included in much hermeneutic theory is the prospect of gaining an understanding of the text that is deeper or goes further than the author’s own understanding. This aim derives from the view that in large measure authors’ meanings and intentions remain implicit and go unrecognised by the authors themselves. Because in the writing of the text so much is simply taken for granted, skilled hermeneutic inquiry has the potential to uncover meanings and intentions that are, in this sense, hidden in the text. Interpreters may end up with an explicit awareness of meanings, and especially assumptions, that the authors themselves would have been unable to articulate.

An even more consistent theme in the literature of hermeneutics is the notion of the ‘hermeneutic circle’. One form in which the hermeneutic circle is encountered is the claim that, in order to understand something, one needs to begin with ideas, and to use terms, that presuppose a rudimentary understanding of what one is trying to understand. Understanding turns out to be a development of what is already understood, with the more developed understanding returning to illuminate and enlarge one’s starting point.

Another way to conceptualise the hermeneutic circle is to talk of understanding the whole through grasping its parts, and comprehending the meaning of parts through divining the whole.

Our knowledge claims in regard to the meaning of a whole text or of the meaning structure of some society will be supported by evidence supplied by our knowledge of the meaning of particular sentences or acts. On the other hand, our knowledge claims in regard to the meanings of those individual elements will be supported by and justified in terms of our knowledge of the meaning of the entire structure. This is the classical form of the hermeneutic circle as developed in the nineteenth century. (Okrent 1988, p. 161)

Some have seen this attention to the whole as characteristic of the human sciences in particular. They accept that one can satisfactorily understand the natural world simply by understanding the parts that make it up. In the case of the human sciences, however, this simply will not do. To understand a text bearing upon human affairs or a culture that guides human lives, one needs to be able to move dialectically between part and whole, in the mode of the hermeneutic circle. This has been put forward in support of a claim we have considered already (and called into question)—that the human sciences and the natural sciences have quite different subject matters and that the understanding (Verstehen) exercised in the human sciences is not required in the natural sciences. In dealing with interpretivism in Chapter 4, we found this claim propounded by Wilhelm Dilthey.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.