Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy

Chapter 1: From Philosophical Hermeneutics to Hermeneutical Philosophy

Chapter 1 From Philosophical Hermeneutics to Hermeneutical Philosophy§ 1. The Human Sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] as Problem The formulation of the question of philosophical hermeneutics may be understood from its historical context. It arises from the nineteenth century and achieves its particular profile with the development of the human sciences. Of course, hermeneutical questions, that is, those concerned with understanding and interpretation, may already be found earlier. Such questions are posed whenever a reflective relation to practices and writings is to be found, and whenever one attempts to clarify for oneself how one is to conceive of these, and how one is supposed appropriately to relate to them. It is first with the emergence of the human sciences, however, that these questions receive a fundamental significance. No longer are they confined to the practices of reading, explicating, clarifying, and commenting, and, for that matter, no longer are they limited by the context of an “art” of understanding. With the human sciences, understanding becomes a universal problem that overarches the individual disciplines. The answer to the question of what understanding actually is, is supposed, then, to lead to the essence of the human sciences themselves; the specific possibilities of understanding are supposed to be determined, and what is supposed to be demonstrated by this is its characteristic right in contrast to all other forms of cognition. Gadamer’s project of a philosophical hermeneutics may be understood as the most distinguished of its kind. Although it is quite removed from the foundational phase of philosophical hermeneutics, it nevertheless remains marked by the problems posed in this phase. To the author of Wahrheit und Methode and those writings that further develop and nuance the approach of his major work, the concern is not with a universal hermeneutics in Schleiermacher’s sense. A formal discussion of understanding and interpretation that aims to develop the rules of understanding “from the nature of language and from the fundamental conditions of the relationships between the one who speaks and what is heard” is far from Gadamer’s concern.1 Gadamer, and in this he takes 5 6 Objectivity up the bequest of Dilthey, wants to make a contribution to “self-reflection” in the human sciences. Yet, in contrast with Dilthey, who looked at the natural and human sciences as two fundamental possibilities of systematic science [Wissenschaftlichkeit], Gadamer doubts that the human sciences may be grasped by such science.2 Therefore, he wants to go beyond Dilthey’s “epistemological formulation of the question.”3 Whereas Dilthey “allowed himself to be profoundly influenced by the model of the natural sciences,”4 Gadamer wants to show that the claim of the human sciences to scientific systematicity is misleading as such because it is dominated by the scientific ideal of the natural sciences. This holds for him even if one attempts to demonstrate the “methodological independence”5 of the human sciences in contrast to the natural sciences; the comparative contrast already brings the human sciences closer to the natural sciences by subordinating them to the ideal of method. Despite all of the individual differences, “what is called ‘method’ in modern science remains the same everywhere”; it is simply “displayed in an exemplary form in the natural sciences.”6 According to Gadamer, however, the human sciences cannot be understood in their characteristic form if one orients oneself by the “concept of method in the modern sciences.”7 The human sciences do not follow any procedure given ahead of time by an edifice of rules that aims at the systematic deduction of a domain of objects, and, from the standpoint of certainty, the assurance of the achieved results. Rather, the concern of the human sciences is with another truth that is in principle inaccessible to the other sciences, with “modes of experience”8 that may not be replaced by or represented in them. This is to say, more precisely: The concern is with the experience of art and history, and with the experience of a philosophy that is directed toward its own tradition and confronted by a “claim of truth” arising from among the texts inherited from the tradition, “which contemporary consciousness can neither reject nor surpass.”9 What one calls the human sciences are persuasive alone as experience of art, history, and philosophy. Gadamer’s understanding of experience is clearly oriented by Hegel, although Gadamer does not ultimately follow him. Experience is a “reversal of consciousness,” a “dialectical movement”10 in which something proves to be different than one initially took it to be...