Post-Heideggerian Hermeneutics
Recent Debates 1960-1990
Hermeneutics
as Method, Philosophy and Critique, and the Structuralist and Deconstructionist
Alternatives
The Background
•On the one side, methodological debates in the
social sciences: Schleiermacher, Dilthey
•The new ingredient: Heidegger’s Hermeneutical
Phenomenology
•A third player: neo-Marxist ideological
analysis
•Finally, the Structuralist Revolution,
beginning already in the late 1950’s
The
Background (cont’d)
•The debate sparked by the publication of Wahrheit
und Methode (Truth and Method), by Hans-Georg Gadamer, in 1960.
•Gadamer deriving two vital ingredients from
Heidegger:
–human beings as ‘the (always situated) shepherd
of Being’
–language as ‘the house of Being’: the
linguisticality of human understanding
The Current Debate in Hermeneutics: Map
(A) Classical Hermeneutics
(which tends to be author
centred)
•From Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and the tradition
of Biblical exegesis and proper historical method until recently
•Includes: Historical Critical method.
•Social and human sciences are scientific, but
in their own way: objective meanings, which researchers need to get back to
•Now coming back, but in a chastened form.
(A)
Classical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Objective meaning = e.g. what the original
author(s) meant
•the object of interpretation is to get back to
this, by a reversal of the process of creation:
–Producer Text
Receiver
– Objective Meaning
(A)
Classical Hermeneutics believes in:
–Producer Text
Receiver
– Objective Meaning
•This requires knowledge of author and his/her
background and of literary styles and genre of the time etc.
•One brackets out ones prejudices and
presuppositions, and tries to read oneself into the original situation
(A) Classical
Hermeneutics believes in:
•The classical ‘hermeneutical circle’ of parts
and wholes:
• Parts
A --- N Whole
•I.e. you read parts in the light of the whole,
which however can only be understood via a reading of the parts
•Not a vicious circle however...
(B) Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics
(more reader-centred)
•‘Philosophical’ because of its connection to
philosophy, I.e. Heideggerian Hermeneutical Phenomenology
•‘Humanistic’ because reader-centred, and
fairly suspicious of method and scientific pretensions
•Gadamer as the key but not the only player
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•The positive significance of pre-understanding
(cf. Heidegger): no understanding without pre-understanding
•What we understand is always relative to our ‘horizon’
of understanding, I.e. the totality of where we are coming from, as
determined by total past and present experiences...
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Understanding of a difficult text = a process
of expanding horizons by dialogue with the text and its time, not a
matter of jumping into the original horizon, which is impossible anyway.
•Understanding is achieved when there is,
metaphorically, a fusion of horizons
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•‘Fusion of horizons’: I.e. when the horizon of
the reader is expanded so as to include sufficient of the ‘horizon of the text’
for the text to be somewhat comprehensible to that reader or reading community.
•The classical hermeneutical circle is
complemented by a (Heideggerian) ‘hermeneutic circle’ of reader and text.
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Thus:
• Reader (Reading
Community)
–
(I.e. the horizon of the reader)
– Broadens the horizon Enables the text to
–of the reader give its meaning
• Text
• (Parts Whole)
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•This being so, there is no such thing as the
objective meaning: the criterion of objective meaning is replaced by the
criterion of authentic understanding, which is always contextualized.
•This is not however subjective in a bad sense:
indeed it requires that I/we submit ourselves to the claim of the text,
allow the text to expand our horizons as we read it...
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•The dialogal character of understanding:
•Good understanding may therefore be compared to
a good dialogue
•Gadamer distinguishes three types of dialogue,
with good understanding comparable to the third type
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Gadamer’s three types of dialogue:
•1st Type: I -- It: I/we treat the thou and what
he/she/they say as a object to be explained
–e.g. Nietzsche, Marx, Psychoanalysis
•2nd Type: Paternalistic I -- thou: as if I
already know the partner’s claim…
•3rd Type: I -- thou, characterized by
fundamental openness and respect
(B)
Humanistic or Philosophical Hermeneutics believes in:
•I.e. I/we allow the partners to be themselves,
and assume in advance that he/she/they may well have something new to say to us
and in categories and backed by experiences other than the ones I take into
conversation with me…
•This is obviously just as important in
inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue as in text interpretation...
(C) Critical Hermeneutics (centred on author
- reader relationship)
•Coming out of the Ideology Critique of the
European tradition of Marxism and Neo-Marxism (inc.
•The key person = Jurgen Habermas (esp. Knowledge
and Human Interest (1971), Apel and Habermas, Hermeneutik and
Ideologiekritik, and Theory of Communicative Action 1985ff. (in two
volumes)
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics (centred on author - reader relationship)
•Also drawing on the inheritance of Freudian
psychoanalysis, and also Nietzsche
•(I.e the people Paul Ricoeur terms the 19th
Century Masters of Suspicion)
•Makes for a hermeneutics of
suspicion, but may also feed into one move within a hermeneutics of recovery
•Integrates well with feminist and liberationist
concerns
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•The fact that communication is rarely
completely innocent of unconscious and frequently conscious motives of
domination, power motivations of various kinds at work in and through texts
•This can happen both on the side of authors and
readers, esp. readers who claim to give authoritative interpretations
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Such phenomena of ‘systematically distorted
communication’ require to be unmasked and discounted for the sake of the
communication itself.
•This is ignored by both classical and
humanistic hermeneutics
•The aim = communication free from domination
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•But this aim requires that we discount for the
degree to which the situation differs from the situation of ideal speech
•There is no such thing as disinterested,
‘objective’ communication or interpretation or appropriation: the point is to
get the interest right, = the interest implicit in language itself in
undistorted communication.
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Challenge to Habermas: how to validate a place
to stand in order to do his critique.
Isn’t it just another tradition being brought to bear, namely the
tradition of enlightment reason, itself suffused with various power motivation.
•This challenge partly met in Theory of
Communicative Action
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•This shows that there are at least three kinds
of validity claims involved in any communication that wants to be taken
seriously.
•Critical hermeneutics focuses on claims 2) and
3), concealed ‘strategic’ actions, posing as communicative actions,
particularly those cases where the strategic character is concealed even from
the perpetrators.
(C) Critical
Hermeneutics believes in:
•According to Habermas, we want:
•1) What we say to be true = objective
validity
•2) The saying of it to be sincere or truthful =
subjective validity, and
•3) That we say it to these people in this
context is something that is right for us to do = intersubjective validity.
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•Intersubjective Validity: I’m/we/they are not trying to
dominate or seduce or seriously mislead you/them/us into thinking or doing
something we wouldn’t otherwise think or do if we had all the facts and were in
contact with all the values…
•Implicit in a claim to be taken
seriously is a claim to be valid in all three respects...
(C)
Critical Hermeneutics believes in:
•This however is enough to define critical
hermeneutics only very abstractly
•One needs an empirically determined localized
theory in order to give concrete substance to ones analysis.
•This means, in effect, that there is no one
critical heremeneutics, that it ends up being a localized deed...
(D) Structuralism/Structuralist Critique (very
much text centred)
•Structuralism: the movement which followed
Existentialism in European philosophy
•Includes such people as Levi-Strauss, Jacques
Lacan, Roland Barthes, but feeding in also to Derrida and Foucault and in
hermeneutics esp. to Paul Ricoeur.
(D)
Structuralist Critique
believes in/that:
•Methods and ideas from structural linguistics
and structuralist analysis of narrative provide the key to understanding
meaning production and consumption in human beings in a scientific fashion.
•Meaning is now regarded as a function of the
text as related to various systems of meaning production (rather than to either
author or reader)
(D)
Structuralist Critique
believes in/that:
•As soon as a text is written (or even spoken)
it distances itself from the intention of the author and takes on a life of its
own: it means willy nilly, dependent only on the public meaning codes in place
•This restores the notion of ‘objective
meaning’, but now as a property of the text.
(D)
Structuralist Critique
believes in/that:
•The discernment of such meaning codes can,
however, be very complicated.
•It soon became evident that structural analyses
could easily lead to rather different results, dependent on who was doing it.
•This tended to call into question the
scientific character of the enterprise, and helped to lead on to
(E) Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist
Reading
•= what comes after Structuralism, when its
practitioners lose their trust in its supposedly scientific character.
•Includes people like Derrida, Foucault,
Deleuze, Irigaray and other French Feminists. In its hay-day in the 70’s and
80’s (in
•History and process now matter once again, not
only synchronic determining structures
(E)
Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist Reading
•Once again reader centred.
•The trouble is, the codes keep moving under our
feet, and our appropriation of the codes at work in a text tends to be relative
to the codes at work in ourselves, something of which we ourselves have
little control.
•Meaning production and interpretation itself
disturbs the conditions for future meaning production and interpretation.
(E)
Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist Reading
•That is to say, “we are imprisoned in the
ongoing temporal process of semeiosis”
•In particular: structuralist discourse itself
admits to being deconstructed: structuralist pretensions to science are thus
doubly misguided.
•This is to say that there is no way to restore
the notion of ‘objective meaning’, not even as a property of the text.
(E)
Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist Reading
•Philosophy as White Mythology (Derrida):
the mythology of the ‘Whites’, also whitened myths, most of whose supposedly
scientific concepts are in fact ‘erased’ metaphors, metaphors with all the life
taken out of them.
•Binary concepts collapse into each other, each
is in the heart of the other
(E)
Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist Reading
•There is nothing outside the text, and
reference is indefinitely deferred, even ‘God’ ends up being just a character
in various stories.
•This has lead in theology, on the one side to a
re-invigoration of the tradition of Negative Theology, and on the other side to
a rehabilitation of Metaphorical Theology.
(E)
Post-Structuralist and Deconstructionist Reading
•Negative Theology: the effect is to deconstruct
‘God’, not necessarily God, and this is actually a good thing.
•Metaphorical Theology: if the choice is between
erased metaphors (‘systematic’ theology) and full blooded metaphors, we may as
well have the full blooded ones
•Cf. Kevin Hart for the first, Sallie McFague
for the second.
(F) Mediating the Conflict of Interpretations
(of interpretation)
•For example, Paul Ricoeur, David Tracy and a
host of others.
•How to preserve the advantages and strong
points of each theory, while making up for their weak points.
•Looking for an overarching structure within
which to integrate the different theories into one project for interpreting a
text
(F)
Mediating the Conflict of Interpretations (of interpretation)
•For example, Paul Ricoeur’s use of
structuralist analysis and critical analytic techniques generally as a way of
getting from a naïve reading to a deep reading of a text, and beyond that to a
moment of final (individual or communal) appropriation as expressed in the
final discourse of interpretation.
(F)
Mediating the Conflict of Interpretations (of interpretation)
•The other possibility is the option of a pragmatic
pluralism, making use of those methods on the hermeneutic menu which seem
most appropriate for the achievement of my here and now research goals.
•This can even mean a return to old and tried
methods of historical criticism, but now without illusion.