More About the Basic Elements of a First Draft

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Unit 2: Modern Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher and Dilthey

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the life of the author and his work as a whole. This would enable him both the author and his works within a historical setting. This will provide the interpreter a kind of knowledge that is not attainable even to the author he interprets. The knowledge places the interpreter in an advantage position to understand the text better than the author.

The interpreter needs an openness to understand others. This openness makes it possible for us to realise that what looks natural, true, or coherent may cover something deeply unfamiliar. The kind of openness we talk about here can be achieved, if we scrutinise our own hermeneutic prejudices. This would involve a strict practice of hermeneutics, which even still does not guarantee a just or fully adequate understanding. Nonetheless, such a strict practice is an indispensable aid. It helps the hermeneutician to avoid the error of using his own cultural, theological or philosophical frame of mind as a frame or filter of another’s speech or writing.

According to Schleiermacher, any use of language is between the radical individuality and the radical universality. None of these two poles exists in an entirely purified form. The individuality of language-use is not a reference to an inner, inaccessible layer of the mind, but a reference to something like the style, the voice, or the particularity of the language as used or applied.

Schleiermacher claims that to get the meaning of another person’s speech or text, we need to focus on the two aspects of the person’s language-use. These two aspects are;

i. The shared resources or grammar and syntax ii. The individual application.

For Schleiermacher, this is the task of combining grammatical and technical interpretation.

And in his opinion, there is no rule for this combination. What happens is that we compare the text with other texts from the same period, from the same writer, while we keep constantly in sight the uniqueness of the particular work in question. He refers to this as the capacity for divination. By divination he simply means the ability to move from particular to universal with the aid of general rules or doctrines. This movement or divination is done by a comparative approach combined with a creative hypothesis-making.

It is only by this that we can get a better understanding. Better understanding here does not necessarily imply a fully adequate understanding. He was quick to note that to misunderstand does not mean either a state of total alienation since ordinarily we communicate most of the time successfully without fully understanding the issue of our discussion. Better understanding does not necessarily imply that we have a fully adequate understanding. That better understanding does not imply a fully adequate understand itself

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does not mean that understanding is never final or that understanding can never be fully adequate.

3.2 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

After Schleiermacher, Dilthey and others further developed the concept of philosophical hermeneutics. The historian, J. G. Droysen, with particular reference to historical knowledge, stressed that the knowledge gained through interpretation is different from scientific knowledge. dilthey developed this view futher and firmly established it when he explained it as the contrast between understanding and explanation. While the knowledge gained from interpretation is denoted by understanding, scientific knowledge is denoted by explanation. According to Dilthey, knowledge of historical, social and cultural facts is essentially knowledge gained through interpretation. And this, in his opinion, explains why such historico-social and cultural knowledge is radically different from the knowledge of the sciences which is a product of the application of the scientific method.

Dilthey and his compatriots basically returned to Vico’s old problem. This is the problem of how to philosophically justify and account for the particular kind of objectivity in relation to the study of man. While Vico was interested in culture and history at large, Dilthey and others were more specifically focused on how we can justify the humanities within the university system that is based upon the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason and rationality. This would represent a shift from the hitherto system where authority, tradition, and theological canon were the foundations of studies in the universities.

Dilthey moved the search for philosophical legitimation of the human sciences further by arguing that the scientific explanation of nature must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to us through symbolically mediated practices. This is what the philosophy of the humanities is aimed at; to provide such a theory. With Dilthey, philosophical hermeneutics became a theory of interpretation of all bearers of meaning.

Thus, it transcends just the interpretation of texts to include interpretation of human actions and the various features of human culture and society.

4.0 Conclusion

Hermeneutics in modern and contemporary times was defined by three prominent thinkers in the field; namely, Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Heidegger. This unit explained the views of the first two. Schleiermacher moved beyond the traditional view of hermeneutics as the theory of particular textual interpretation to what universal hermeneutics. By this, he expanded the scope of the discipline to include linguistic meaning in general. Dilthey

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further developed Schleiermacher’s position by extending the scope of hermeneutics to include a study of how world is understood by man through symbolically mediated practices.

5.0 Summary

 Schleiermacher and Dilthey represent the modern development of hermeneutics.

 Schleiermacher expanded the inquiry of hermeneutics to include linguistic meaning in general.

 Dilthey further expanded the scope of hermeneutics to cover inquiry about how man understands the world through the symbols that convey historico-social and cultural knowledge.

6.0 Self-Assessment Exercise

 Explain Schleiermacher’s contributions to the development of hermeneutics in the modern era.

 How did Dilthey extend the scope of hermeneutics?

 Whats the point of divergence and convergence in Schleiermacher and Dilthey modern hermeneutics?

127 7.0 References/Further Reading

Unit 3: Contemporary Hermeneutics: Heidegger, Gadamer and Habermas