Hermeneutics

1
Hermeneutics

• Bertram C. Bruce
• U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2
History of hermeneutics

• Dilthey, 1914 (in Howard, pp. 15-17)
• Habermas interests
• Husserl
• Heidegger
• Hirsch meaning (one) v significances (vary)
• experience gt breaking down of old ways of seeing
  John Berger
• participating in language, history, world
  Palmer

3
Explanation v Understanding

• No Yes

radical skepticism (Nietzche, Foucault) romanticism (Shelly, Kierkegaard)
logical positivism (Neurath, Carnap) Hermeneutics (Howard)
No
Yes
4
Dilthey, 1914

• Nature we explain, the life of the soul we
  understand.
• Erlebnisa lived experience fits into patterns of
  significance we already entertain about our own
  lives connectedness
• that life reveals quite different sides to us
  according to the point of view from which we
  consider its course in time is due to the nature
  of both understanding and life. 1961
• part-whole-part
• in Howard, pp. 15-17

5
Husserl

• things-in-themselves v things intended
• eidetic abstraction

6
Heidegger

• Dasein (irreducible givenness of human existence)
• anti-dualism of subject/object
• Dreyfus Nazism
• broken hammer is more a hammer
• our situation (horizon) has its own past future

7
Gadamer

• Fusing of horizons (Tillich love as overcoming
  of separation)
• All understanding is hermeneutic
• Dialogue between past present
• Historical conditionedness

8
Meaning through Production

• Not occasionally only, but always, the meaning of
  a text goes beyond its author. That is why
  understanding is not merely a reproductive, but
  always a productive attitude as well.
• H. Gadamer, Truth Method

9
Communication is Educative

• Not only is social life identical with
  communication, but all communication (and hence
  all genuine social life) is educative. To be a
  recipient of a communication is to have an
  enlarged and changed experience. One shares in
  what another has thought and felt and in so far,
  meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.
  Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected.
  
• J. Dewey, Democracy Education, pp 5-6

10
Wirkungsgeschichte-liches Bewußtsein
(effective-historical consciousness)

• gt fusing of horizons
• Even when we ourselves, as historically
  enlightened thinkers, are fundamentally clear
  about the historical conditionedness of all human
  thinking and hence about our own conditionedness,
  we have not ourselves taken an unconditioned
  stand... The consciousness of the conditionedness
  does not in any way negate this conditionedness.
• Truth Method, p. 424

11
The hermeneutic circle

• No presuppositionless understanding
• No end point to understanding
• Part lt-gt Whole (cf. Dewey facts lt-gt meaning)
• Intentionality throughout