Hermeneutics

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Hermeneutics may be described as the theory of interpretation and understanding of a text through empirical means. It should not be confused with the concrete practice of interpretation called exegesis. Exegesis extracts the meaning of a passage of text and enlarges upon it and explicates it with explanatory glosses; hermeneutics addresses the ways in which a reader may come to the broadest understanding of the creator of text and his relation to his audiences, both local and over time, within the constraints of culture and history. Thus it is a branch of philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of texts. Recently the concept of texts has been extended beyond written documents to include, for example, speech, performances, works of art, and even events.

Etymology

The word hermeneutics (Hermeneutic means interpretive) is a term derived from the Greek verb 'to interpret' (hermēneuō) and has two derivations. One is from the Greek god Hermes in his role as patron of interpretive communication and human understanding, while the other is from the syncretic Ptolemaic deity Hermes Trismegistus, in his role as representing hidden or secret knowledge.

Historical analysis

Biblical hermeneutics

Main article: Biblical hermeneutics.

Perhaps the most commonly used meaning of the word hermeneutics outside academic circles is in relation to Biblical interpretation. Throughout Christian history scholars and students of the Bible have sought to mine the wealth of its meanings by developing a variety of different systems of hermeneutics.

The question relates to the problem of how the reader is to understand Holy Scripture. By definition, this is a theological act, ie. part of the discourse of a faith-community. This does not mean that it is of no relevance to those who do not consider themselves to be part of that community, but rather that it is an issue that arises out of the particular needs of that community. Thus, whether or not presented in the absolute, as definitive, hermeneutics cannot be separated from the history of ideas.

Medieval hermeneutics

Medieval interpretations of text incorporated exegesis in a fourfold mode that emphasized the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the text. This handy scheme of various ways of interpreting the text was handed down from Patristic programs of Late Antiquity. The literal sense (sensus historicus) of Scripture denotes what the text states or reports directly. The allegorical sense (sensus allegoricus) explains the text with regard to the doctrinal content of church dogma, as a manifestation in which each literal element has a symbolic meaning. The moral application of the text to the individual reader or hearer is the third sense, the sensus tropologicus or sensus moralis, while a fourth level of meaning, the sensus anagogicus draws out of the text the implicit allusions it contains concerning metaphysical and eschatological secret understanding, or gnosis.

"The hermeneutical terminology used here is in part arbitrary. For almost all three interpretations which go beyond the literal explanations are in a general sense "allegorical." The practical application of these three aspects of spiritual interpretation varied considerably. Most of the time, the fourfold sense of the Scriptures was used only partially, dependent upon the content of the text and the idea of the exegete.... We can easily notice that the basic structure is in fact a twofold sense of the Scriptures, that is, the distinction between the sensus literalis and the sensus spiritualis or mysticus, and that the number four was derived from a restrictive systematization of the numerous possibilities which existed for the sensus spiritualis into three interpretive dimensions." (Ebeling)

The customary medieval exegetical technique divided the text in glossa ("glosses" or annotations) written between the lines and at the side of the text which was left with wide margins for this very purpose. The text was further divided into "scholia" which are long, exegetical passages, often on a separate page.

This fourfold categorization is also found in Rabbinical thought. It remains to be seen if this rabbinical conception predates the Christian one. The fourfold categorizations are, in Hebrew: Peshat (simple interpretation), Remez (allusion), Derash (interpretive), and Sod (secret/mystical). More information can be found at Torah Study.

Renaissance hermeneutics

The discipline of hermeneutics emerged with the new humanist education of the 15th century as a historical and critical methodology for analyzing texts. In a triumph of early modern hermeneutics, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the "Donation of Constantine" was a forgery, through intrinsic evidence of the text itself. Thus hermeneutics expanded from its medieval role explaining the correct analysis of the Bible. In the 19th century Wilhelm Dilthey's more historically conscious methodological hermeneutics sought to produce systematic and scientific interpretations by situating any text within the context of its production. Since Dilthey, the discipline of hermeneutics has detached itself from this central task and broadened its spectrum to all texts, including multimedia and to understanding the bases of meaning. In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger's philosophical hermeneutics shifted the focus from interpretation to existential understanding, which was treated more as a direct, non-mediated, thus in a sense more authentic way of being in the world than simply as a way of knowing.

Advocates of this approach claim that such texts, and the people who produce them, cannot be studied using the same scientific methods as the natural sciences, thus use arguments similar to that of the antipositivism. Moreover, they claim that such texts are conventionalized expressions of the experience of the author; thus, the interpretation of such texts will reveal something about the social context in which they were formed, but, more significantly, provide the reader with a means to share the experiences of the author. Among the key thinkers of this approach are Wilhelm Dilthey, a historian and philosopher; the sociologist Max Weber; the philosopher Martin Heidegger; and the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Jürgen Habermas attacked the principles of hermeneutics as conservative and advocated critical theory as an alternative, although in contemporary usage one could reasonably call hermeneutics an aspect of critical theory. Paul Ricoeur has attempted to reconcile and synthesize these two opposing traditions, although his own work is not hermeneutics in the Gadamerian sense at all.

Rather surprisingly (given its origins) hermeneutics has also become influential on some thinkers in the artificial intelligence tradition who see cognitivist or information processing views of human understanding as being inadequate.

Hermeneutic traditions

Hermeneutics in the Western world, as a general science of text interpretation, can be traced back to two separate sources. One source was the ancient Greek rhetoricians' study of literature, which came to fruition in Hellenistic Alexandria. The other source has been the contemporary Midrash traditions of Biblical exegesis, that were contemporary with Hellenistic culture. Scholars in antiquity expected a text to be coherent, consistent in grammar, style and outlook, and they emended obscure or "decadent" readings to comply with their codified rules. By extending the perception of inherent logic of texts, Greeks were able to attribute works with uncertain origin.

Although the Jewish Rabbis and the early Church Fathers deployed similar philological tools, their Biblical interpretation stressed allegorical readings, frequently at the expense of the texts' literal meaning. Their interpretations found within the visible sign a hidden sense in deeper agreement with the interpreters' preconceived theme. Scholars in other traditions approached scriptural texts with similar hermeneutics: the Vedas and the Qu'ran and other sacred writings. Prefiguration and allegory seem typical strategies for reconciling texts whose surface banality was seen as beneath the dignity of an enlightened or moral world view.

Hermeneutics in the Middle Ages witnessed the proliferation of non-literal interpretations of the Bible. Christian commentators could read Old Testament narratives simultaneously as prefigurations of analogous New Testament episodes, as symbolic lessons about Church institutions and current teachings, and as personally applicable allegories of the Spirit. In each case, the meaning of the signs was constrained by imputing a particular intention to the Bible, such as teaching morality, but these interpretive bases were posited by the religious tradition rather than suggested by a preliminary reading of the text. Thus, when Martin Luther and other 16th century reformers argued that Christians could interpret Scripture for themselves, the Catholic Church responded that the authority of tradition was necessary.

The rationalist Enlightenment and movement toward a more objective historical perspective led hermeneutics, especially Protestant exegesis, to view Scriptural texts as secular Classical texts were viewed. Scripture thus was interpreted as responses to historical or social forces, so that apparent contradictions and difficult passages in the New Testament, for example, might be clarified by comparing their possible meanings with contemporaneous Christian practices.

Hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey

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Friedrich Schleiermacher explored the nature of understanding in relation not just to the problem of deciphering sacred texts, but to all human texts and modes of communication. The interpretation of a text must proceed by framing the content asserted in terms of the overall organization of the work. He distinguishes between grammatical interpretation and psychological interpretation. The former studies how a work is composed from general ideas, the latter considers the peculiar combinations that characterize the work as a whole.

Wilhelm Dilthey broadened hermeneneutics even more by relating interpretation to all historical objectifications. Understanding moves from the outer manifestations of human action and productivity to explore their inner meaning. In his last important essay "The Understanding of Others and Their Manifestations of Life" (1910), Dilthey makes it clear that this move from outer to inner, from expression to what is expressed, is not based on empathy. Empathy involves a direct identification with the other. Interpretation involves an indirect or mediated understanding that can only be attained by placing human expressions in their historical context. Understanding is not a process of reconstructing the state of mind of the author, but one of articulating what is expressed in the work.

Hermeneutics since Dilthey

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See Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur

Applications of hermeneutics

Hermeneutics in Sociology

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In sociology, hermeneutics means the interpretation and understanding of social events by analysing their meanings to the human participants and their culture. It enjoyed prominence during the sixties and seventies, and differs from other interpretative schools of sociology in that it emphasises the importance of the content as well as the form of any given social behaviour. The central principle of hermeneutics is that it is only possible to grasp the meaning of an action or statement by relating it to the whole discourse or world-view from which it originates: for instance, putting a piece of paper in a box might be considered a meaningless action unless put in the context of democratic elections, and the action of putting a ballot paper in a box. One can frequently find reference to the 'hermeneutic circle': that is, relating the whole to the part and the part to the whole. Hermeneutics in sociology was most heavily influenced by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (see 'Truth and Method', 1960).

Hermeneutics as applied to sociology can be traced to the work of Max Weber who coined the term "action" to denote behavior to which the individual attaches subjective meaning. The subdiscipline in sociology, the sociology of knowledge, seeks to understand how one's position in the social structure relates to how one sees the world, so hermeneutics must be seen in the context of such variables as social class, group and subgroup memberships. Karl Marx, by postulating that the economic organization of society, its "substructure," determines its "superstructure," that contains the dominant ideas of that society, also contributed to our understanding of hermeneutics within sociology. So, in a capitalist society we have "capitalist art," "capitalist education," "capitalist philosophy," etc. As he put it: "The ruling class has the ruling ideas." One's social class position, according to Marx, largely determines his or her view of the world; his or her values and ideologies. Also, the subdiscipline of symbolic interaction utilizes hermeneutics by emphasizing how one perceives the world through his or her construction of reality, most notably promulgated by W.I Thomas' "definition of the situation," which states that if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. That is, we relate to each other and to the world largely based on our perceptions, rather than merely the objective features of a given situation. The interpretative nature of our social relations is a crucial area of study and may be seen to define hermeneutics within the discipline of sociology.

Hermeneutics in Law

Main article is at Legal hermeneutics.

Some scholars argue that law and theology constitute particular forms of hermeneutics because of their need to interpret legal tradition / scriptural texts. Moreover, the problem of interpretation is central to legal theory at least since 11th century. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the schools of glossatores, commentatores and usus modernus distinguished themselves right by their approach to the interpretation of "laws" (mainly, Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis). The University of Bologna gave birth to a "legal Renaissance" in the 11th century, when the Corpus Iuris Civilis was rediscovered and started to be systematically studied by people like Irnerius and Gratianus. It was an interpretative Renaissance. After that, interpretation has always been at the center of legal thought. Savigny and Betti, among others, made significant contributions also to general hermeneutics. Legal interpretivism, most famously Ronald Dworkin's, might be seen as a branch of philosophical hermeneutics.

Misuse

One prominent theme which arises in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer) is a serious calling into question of scientism. Scientism is the more or less unquestioned belief in the supremacy of the natural sciences when it comes to serving as models of knowledge. By calling scientism into question, hermeneutics is arguing for the legitimacy of (among other things) aesthetic, literary, spiritual, and philosophical knowledge, alongside (but not instead of) scientific knowledge.

Not surpisingly, this critique of scientism has won hermeneutics some enemies within the natural sciences. One of the most famous of these is a physicist by the name of Alan Sokal.

In an attempt to discredit hermeneutic, postmodern, and other forms of “non-scientific” knowledge, Sokal wrote a paper which he intended to be complete gibberish, to see if a postmodern cultural studies journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" [1] , was accepted and published in the journal Social Text.

Critics of hermeneutics and postmodernism view this, the Sokal Affair, as evidence that some claims made by non-scientific fields of study are nonsensical. Critics of Sokal have pointed out that scientists who publish articles in scientific journals based on fabricated data are often expelled from the community of respected scientists. In addition, they claim that, despite Sokal's protestations to the contrary, his article did have a meaning, and one worth publishing and studying.

Whatever the lessons of the Sokal Affair, it is clear that it, like many other things, it is capable of being interpreted in multiple ways, according to different intellectual (and political) interests. That, if nothing else, makes it a useful contemporary example of hermeneutics.

Techniques of hermeneutics

This section is a stub. You can help by adding to it. In the interpretation of a text, hermeneutics considers what language says, supposes, doesn't say, implies.

See also

• Content analysis
• Exegesis
• Pesher
• Literary criticism
• Literary theory
• Literary hermeneutics
• Grammatical-Historical

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia's article on hermeneutics, by Bjorn Ramberg and Kristin Gjesdal.
• John C. Mallery, Roger Hurwitz and Gavan Duffy, "Hermeneutics: From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?", 1986
• Hermeneutics in Russia (journal).
• Demeterio, F P A 2001. Introduction to Hermeneutics. Diwatao 1(1).
• Biblical Hermeneutics. Links to websites, articles and books on philosophical hermeneutics.
• Gerhard Ebeling, "The New Hermeneutics and the Early Luther" from Theology Today, vol 21.1 (April 1964)
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "Metaphor in Religious Discourse"
• BiblicaStudies.org.uk Extensive bibliography and full-text articles.

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