Published in M. C. HOROWITZ (ed.), New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol.

3,
Thomson Gale, New York/New Haven, 2005, 982-987.

HERMENEUTICS

Traditionally understood as the art of interpretation (ars hermeneutica) that provided

rules for the interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics today serves to characterize a
broad current in contemporary continental philosophy that deals with the issues of
interpretation and stresses the historical and linguistic nature of our world-experience.
Since this characterization is also valid for contemporary thinking as a whole, the
boundaries of hermeneutics are difficult to delineate with pinpoint accuracy. In
contemporary thought, it is mostly associated with the thinking of Hans-Georg
Gadamer (1900-2002), who situates himself in the hermeneutic tradition of thinkers
such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). All three
authors unfolded a distinct philosophical understanding of hermeneutics (i.e.
interpretation theory), that drew on the more ancient tradition of hermeneutics. Since
their thinking is a radicalization of and reaction to this older conception, it is with it
that one must start.

1. Traditional Hermeneutics : the art of interpretation of sacred texts. Originally, hermeneutics

was developed as an auxiliary discipline in the fields that deal with the interpretation of
canonical texts, i.e. texts that contain authoritative meaning such as sacred texts or
judicial documents. Hermeneutic rules were especially required when one was
confronted with ambiguous passages (ambigua) of Scripture. Some of the most
influential treatises in this regard were Augustine’s De doctrina christiana (427) and
Melanchton’s Rhetorics (1519). Since most of these rules had to do with the nature of
language, the major thinkers of the hermeneutic tradition, up until the 19th century,
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borrowed their guidelines from the then still very lively tradition of rhetorics, e.g. the
requirement that ambiguous passages should be understood out of their context, a rule
that later gave rise to the notion of a « hermeneutical circle » according to which the
parts of a text should be comprehended out of the whole in which they stand (say, the
whole of a book and its intent [scopus], of a literary genre, of the work and life of an
author). Supplying such rules, hermeneutics enjoyed a normative or regulatory
function for the interpretation of canonical texts. A specific hermeneutics was
developed for Holy Scripture (hermeneutica sacra), for Law (hermeneutica juris) and classical
texts (hermeneutica profana).
The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is a foremost
example of this tradition, but also an author that points to a more philosophical
understanding of hermeneutics, and in at least two ways. 1) At the beginning of his
lectures on hermeneutics, that were published posthumously by his pupil Friedrich
Lücke in 1838, he famously bemoans that there are only many special hermeneutics
and that hermeneutics does not yet exist as a general or universal discipline, i.e. as an
art (Kunst, Kunstlehre) of understanding itself that would establish binding rules for all
forms of interpretation. 2) Schleiermacher further laments that hermeneutics has
hitherto only consisted of a vague collection of dislocated guidelines. Hermeneutical
rules, he urges (Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. M. Frank, Suhrkamp : Frankfurt, 1977, 84)
should become « more methodical » (mehr Methode). A more rigorous methodology of
understanding could enable the interpreter to understand the authors as good or even
better than they understood themselves, claims Schleiermacher in a well-known
dictum.

2. Dilthey : Hermeneutics as the methodological basis of the human sciences. Most familiar with
the thinking and life of Schleiermacher, of whom he was the biographer, Dilthey
devoted his life-work to the challenge of a foundation of the human sciences
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(Geisteswissenschaften). Whereas the exact sciences have already received, in the wake of
Kant’s Critique of pure reason, a philosophical foundation and a methodology
guaranteeing the validity of their knowledge, the human sciences still lacked such a
reflection. Under the motto of a « Critique of historical reason », Dilthey sought for a
logical, epistemological and methodological foundation for the human sciences.
Without such a foundation, their own scientific legitimacy could be called into
question : is everything in the human sciences merely subjective, historically relative,
and, as we tend to say, but with a touch of derision, a mere matter of interpretation? If
these areas of our knowledge are to entertain any scientific credibility, Dilthey argued,
they need to rest on a sound methodology.
In some of his later texts (most notably in his essay on « The Rise of
Hermeneutics » of 1900), Dilthey sought such a methodical basis for the humanities in
hermeneutics, the old discipline of text interpretation that could receive renewed
actuality in light of this new challenge. His argument was almost syllogistic : all human
sciences are sciences of interpretation, the traditional discipline of interpretation is
hermeneutics; therefore hermeneutics could serve as the bedrock of all human
sciences. Hermeneutics could thus be called upon to fulfil a need that arises out of the
emergence of historical conscience and threatens the validity of historical knowledge.
Even if it remains largely programmatic in his later texts, the idea that hermeneutics
could serve as a universal foundation of the human sciences bestowed upon hermeneutics
a philosophical relevance and visibility that it never really enjoyed before Dilthey. Up
to this day, important thinkers such as Emilio Betti and E. D. Hirsch look upon
hermeneutics to deliver a methodical foundation for the truth claim of the humanities
and the literary disciplines. According to them, a hermeneutics that would relinquish
this task would miss the point about what hermeneutics is all about.
But there was an idea in Dilthey’s program that carried the bulk of the
hermeneutic tradition in a rather different direction. It is the insight that the
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understanding developed in the humanities is nothing but the unfolding of a quest of

understanding that characterizes human and historical life as such. Life articulates
itself, Dilthey says, in manifold forms of expression (Ausdruck) that our understanding
seeks to penetrate by recreating the inner life-experience (Erlebnis) out of which they
sprang. Dilthey’s far-reaching intuition is that interpretation and understanding are not
processes that occur simply in the human sciences, they are constitutive of our quest
for orientation. The notion that historical life is as such hermeneutical, i.e.
interpretatory to the core was, of course, only buttressed by Nietzsche’s
contemporaneous reflections on the interpretatory nature of our world-experience.
« There are no facts, only interpretations », wrote Nietzsche. This first glimpse of the
potential universality of the « hermeneutic universe » appeared to call into question
Dilthey’s dream of a methodical foundation of the human sciences, but it raised a new
hermeneutics task.

3. Heidegger’s Hermeneutics of Existence. Seizing upon this idea that life is intrinsically
interpretatory, the early Heidegger spoke of a « hermeneutical intuition » as early as
1919. It is his teacher Husserl who had reinstated the urgency and legitimacy of
primal « intuition » in philosophy. But Heidegger revealed himself a reader of Dilthey
when he stressed that every intuition is hermeneutical. That meant for him that it is
always motivated and replete with anticipations and expectations. Understanding is
not a cognitive inquiry that the human sciences would methodically refine, it is our
primary means of orientation in the world. It is this primary level of « facticity » that
interests Heidegger. Our factual life is involved in this world (« being there » : Dasein,
as he would later put it) by ways of understanding. Relying here on the German
expression sich auf etwas verstehen, which means « to know one’s way about », « to be
able », Heidegger puts a new twist on the notion of understanding when he views it
less as an intellectual undertaking than as an ability. It is more akin to a « know-how »,
 5

and it always involves a possibility of myself : the verb form sich verstehen (to understand
oneself) is reflective in German. « Understanding » is not primarily the reconstruction
of the meaning of an expression (as in classical hermeneutics and Dilthey), it always
entails the projecting, and self-projecting, of a possibility of my own existence. There
is no understanding without projection or anticipations.
We are factually (faktisch) thrown into existence as finite beings, in a world
which we will never fully master. Chronically insecure about anything, yet tormentingly
sure of its mortality, human facticity seeks ways to cope, to make do. This anxiety for
one’s own being is for Heidegger the sting of understanding. Because we are
overwhelmed by existence, confronted with our mortality, we project ourselves in
ways of intelligibility and reason, that help us keep things in check for a while. Every
mode of understanding is related to this concernedness of our facticity or our « being
there » (Dasein) in this overwhelming world. A momentous shift in the focus of
hermeneutics has silently taken place in the work of Heidegger : hermeneutics is less
concerned with texts or a certain type of science, as was the case in the entire previous
history of hermeneutics, but with existence itself and its quest of understanding.
It is this dramatic notion of hermeneutics and understanding that the early
Heidegger first developed in his early lecture course on the « hermeneutics of
facticity » (1923), that has only been recently published and plays an important role in
contemporary discussions of hermeneutics. The title « hermeneutics of facticity » is to
be understood in the two directions of the genitive (subjective and objective). There is,
first, a hermeneutics that intrinsically belongs to facticity itself (genitivus subjectivus) :
facticity is hermeneutical because it is 1) capable of interpretation, 2) desperately in
need of it, and 3) always already thrives on some interpretations that are more or less
explicit, but that can be spelled out (Heidegger, Ontology - Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 11).
This leads, secondly, to the more philosophical meaning of the program of a
hermeneutics of facticity following the lines of a genitivus objectivus : it is precisely with
 6

this hermeneutic condition that a hermeneutical theory is concerned with. Its intention
is however by no means merely theoretical. Its purpose is, on the contrary, to
contribute to a self-awakening of facticity or Dasein : it hopes to « make it accessible to
itself » by « hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten » (ibid.)
This ambitious program was carried over in Heidegger’s main work Being and
Time (1927), but with some slight modifications (Grondin 2003). While it remained
obvious that human faciticity is forgetful of itself and its interpretative nature, and
possibilities, the focus shifted to the question of Being as such. The primary theme of
hermeneutics was less the immediate facticity of our Being in this world, than the fact
that the presuppositions of the understanding of Being remain hidden in a tradition
that needs to be reopened (or « destroyed », as Heidegger puts it). Such a hermeneutics
still aims at a self-awakening of existence, but it does so by promising to sort out the
fundamental structures of our understanding of being.
These structures, the rest of the work will argue, are temporal in nature (hence
the title « Being and Time ») and have everything to do with the inauthentic or
authentic carrying through of our existence. Heidegger’s later philosophy, while
relinquishing the notion of hermeneutics as such, will nevertheless radicalize this idea
by claiming that our understanding of being is brought about by the event of an
overbearing history of being that commands all our interpretations. Postmodern
readings of Heidegger (Foucault, Vattimo, Rorty, Derrida) drew relativistic
conclusions out of this shift of hermeneutics towards the history of being. Hence, the
tendency, in recent debates, to amalgamate hermeneutics and postmodernism. It is a
tendency that the hermeneutics of Gadamer both seems to encourage and to combat.
An apparent inconsistency that we must now try to understand.

4. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics of the Event of Understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s project is

strongly influenced by Heidegger, but, in his masterpiece Truth and Method (1960), his
 7

starting-point is undoubtedly provided by Dilthey’s hermeneutical inquiry on the

methodology of the human sciences (a notion of hermeneutics Heidegger had
dismissed as derivative from the vantage-point of his more radical hermeneutics of
existence). While taking anew the dialogue with the human sciences and the open
question of their claim to truth, Gadamer calls into question the premise of Dilthey
according to which the experience of truth in the humanities depends on method. In
seeking a methodological foundation that alone could guarantee their scientific or
objective status, Dilthey subjected, Gadamer argues, the humanities to the model of
the exact sciences. He would thus have forfeited the specificity of the humanities,
where the involvement of the interpreter in what he or she understands is constitutive
of the experience of meaning : the texts that we interpret are texts that say something
to us and that are always understood, in some way, out of our questions and
« prejudices ». The implication of the interpreter in the « event » of meaning, as
Gadamer likes to put it, can only be deemed detrimental from the model of objectivity
heralded by the natural sciences. Instead of relying on this methodological notion of
objectivity, the human sciences would do well to understand their contribution to
knowledge out of the somewhat forgotten tradition of humanism and the importance
it bestowed upon the notion of Bildung (formation and education) : the humanities do
not seek to master an object that stands at a distance (as is the case with the exact
sciences), their aim is to develop and form the human spirit. The truth one
experiences in the encounter with major texts and history is one that transforms us,
taking us up in the event of meaning itself.
Gadamer finds the most revealing model for this type of understanding in the
experience of art since we are always involved, absorbed, as it were, by the
presentation of an art-work, which Gadamer understands as the revelation of the truth
or the essence of something : a play reveals something about the meaning of existence,
just as a portrait reveals the true essence of someone. Yet, it is a truth-experience in
 8

which we partake in that it can only unfold through a process of interpretation. This
notion of interpretation plays, of course, a crucial role for Gadamer and hermeneutics
generally, but in the case of Gadamer, it is to be understood, first and foremost, out of
the arts we call the « arts of interpretation » or the « performing arts » : just as piece of
music must be interpreted by the violinist (i.e. never arbitrarily, but with a leeway that
has to be filled by the virtuosity of interpretation), a theater play by the actors or the
ballet by the dancers, a book must be interpreted through the process of reading and a
picture must be contemplated by the eye of the beholder. It is only in this presentation
(Darstellung or Vollzug) of a meaning to someone, a performance which is always an
interpretation, that meaning comes to be realized. One notices here that
« interpretation » refers as well a) to the interpretation of a work of art by the
performers as b) to the « spectators » who attend the performance and cannot but also
« interpret » the piece.
The difference between the two forms of « interpretation » is less important for
Gadamer than the fact that the experience of meaning, and the truth experience it
brings about, essentially requires the productive implication of the interpreter. The
same holds, according to Gadamer, for the interpretation of a text or a historical
event, even in the « scientific » context of the human sciences. The major point here is
that interpretation is not the simple recreation of a meaning that always remains the
same and can be methodically verified. Nor is it the largely subjective, and potentially
relativistic, bestowing of meaning upon an objective reality (because the reality to be
understood can only be reached through a renewed attempt of understanding). In
other words : to claim that interpretation is relativistic on the grounds that it implies
the subjectivity of the interpreter is to miss the point of what the humanities and the
experience of meaning are all about.
The objectivistic model of the exact sciences is ill-equipped to do justice to this
experience of meaning. Distance, methodical verification and independence from the
 9

observer, Gadamer concludes, are not the sole conditions of knowledge. When we
understand, we do not only, nor primarily follow a methodical procedure, we are
« taken up », as the art experience illustrates, by the meaning that « seizes » us, as it
were. The instrumental sounding idea of procedure is somewhat suspect for
Gadamer : for him understanding is more of an event than a procedure.
« Understanding and Event » is indeed one of the original titles Gadamer thought
about for his major work, before settling on « Truth and Method », that underlines the
very same point : truth is not only a matter of method and can never be entirely
detached from our concerns.
But these concerns come to us from a tradition and a history that are more
often than not opaque to consciousness. Every understanding stands in the stream of
a Wirkungsgeschichte or « effective history », in which the horizons of the past and the
present coalesce. Understanding thus entails a « fusion of horizons », between the past
and the present, i.e. between the interpreter, with all the history silently at work in his
understanding, and his or her object. This fusion is not to be viewed as an
autonomous operation of subjectivity, but as an event of tradition
(Überlieferungsgeschehen) in the course of which a meaning from the past is somehow
applied to the present.
This leads Truth and Method to suggest that the best model for the humanities
was perhaps offered by disciplines that had been traditionally preoccupied with the
questions of interpretation such as juridical and theological hermeneutics, insofar as
the meaning that is to be understood in these fields is one that has to be applied to a
given situation : in the same way a judge has to creatively apply a text of law to a
particular case and in which a preacher has to apply a text of Scripture to the situation
of his congregation, every act of understanding, Gadamer contends, involves an effort
of « application » of what is understood to the present. Gadamer does not mean by
this that one first has to understand a meaning, of a text or a historical event, and then
 10

apply it to a given situation by bestowing new « relevance » upon it. His idea is rather
that every understanding is at its root an application of meaning, where our experience
and background are brought to bear. This « application » is, by no means, a conscious
procedure. It always happens in the course of understanding to the extent that
interpretation brings into play the situation and « prejudices » of the interpreter, that
are less « his » or « hers » than the ones carved by the effective history in which we all
stand.
Gadamer expands on this idea by comparing understanding to a process of
translation. « I understand something » means that I can translate it into my own words,
thus applying it to my situation. Any meaning I can relate to is one that is translated
into a meaning I can articulate. It is not only important to underline the obvious fact
that translation always implies an act of interpretation (a translator is also called in
English an intepreter), but even more so to stress that this interpretation is by no means
arbitrary : it is bound by the meaning it seeks to render, but is can only do so by
translating it into a language where it can speak anew. What occurs in the process of
translation is thus a fusion of horizons between the foreign meaning and its
interpretation-translation in a new language, horizon and situation, where the meaning
resonates.
Truth and Method draws on this insight to highlight the fundamentally linguistic
nature of understanding. Understanding is always an act of developing something into
words, and I only understand, Gadamer argues, to the extent that I seek (and find)
words to express this understanding. Understanding is not a process that could be
separated from its linguistic unfolding : to think, to understand, is to seek words for
that which strives to be understood. There is a crucial fusion between the process of
interpretation and its linguistic formulation. It will not be the only fusion of horizons
that will interest Gadamer in his hermeneutics of language. His thesis goes indeed
even further : not only is the process (Vollzug) of interpreting (interpretare) linguistically-
 11

oriented, what it seeks to understand (the interpretandum) is also language. Language

also determines the object (Gegenstand) of understanding itself. Any reality I have
access to is linguistically framed.
In its last consequence, there occurs a fusion between the « process » of
understanding and its « object », in the sense that no object (Gegenstand) can be
separated from the attempt (Vollzug) to understand it. Gadamer’s famous phrase to
express this fusion between the object and the process of understanding itself is :
« Being that can be understood is language ». This simple, yet enigmatic dictum can be
read in two quite different directions : it can mean, and in light of Gadamer’s
unmistakable stress on the historical nature of understanding seems to mean, that
every experience of Being is mediated by language, and thus by a historical and cultural
horizon (negatively put : « there is no experience of Being without an historical
understanding or language »). This would seem to draw Gadamer into the « relativistic
camp ». It is striking to note however that Gadamer always resisted this merely
relativistic appropriation of his thought. That is because his thesis on the linguistic
nature of understanding also goes in another direction. It is not only the case that
« Being » is always appropriated by language or some language. In this case, the stress
would lay on the instrumental aspect of language that would somehow « color » Being.
Gadamer sees in this an instrumental and very modern understanding of language.
This has been overlooked by postmodern readers of Gadamer, but in his
dictum « Being that can be understood is language », the stress can also be put on
Being itself. What Gadamer hopes to say by this is that the effort of understanding is,
in a way, ordained to the language of the things themselves. A difficult and unpalatable
notion for postmodernism, to be sure, but one that is essential to Gadamer’s
hermeneutics : language is not only the subjective, say, contingent translation of
meaning, it is also the event by which Being itself comes to light. Our language is not
only « our » language, it is also the language of Being itself, the way in which Being
 12

presents itself in our understanding. This is why, when one speaks and interprets, one
cannot say everything one fancies. One is bound by something like the language of the
thing. What is this language? Difficult to say since we can only approach it through our
language, and the language of tradition, but it is nevertheless the instance that resists
too unilateral or too violent readings of this Being. It is this language of Being which I
seek to understand, and to the extent that understanding succeeds, a fusion of
horizons has happened, a fusion between Being and understanding, an event I do not
master, but in which I partake.

5. Gadamer and his critics. Betti, Habermas, Ricoeur, Vattimo, Rorty and Derrida. The history
of hermeneutics after Gadamer can be read as a history of the debates provoked by
Truth and Method (even though this perspective does not do justice to major figures of
the hermeneutical tradition, such as Paul Ricoeur who, to a large extent, developed
their hermeneutical perspectives independently from Gadamer). It can only be
presented in a very sketchy manner in what follows.
1) E. Betti and E. D. Hirsch. Some of the first responses to Gadamer were sparked by
the methodological notion of hermeneutics that prevailed in the tradition of Dilthey.
After all, it had been the dominant conception of hermeneutics until Gadamer (with
the sole, albeit very peculiar exception of Heidegger’s « hermeneutics of existence »,
that had left behind the older hermeneutic tradition which had been concerned with
text interpretation and the human sciences). Since Gadamer, despite his Heideggerian
roots, took his starting-point in Dilthey’s inquiry on the truth claim of the humanities,
he was often seen, and criticized, from this tradition. Emilio Betti, the Italian jurist
who had published a voluminous General Theory of Interpretation (in Italian) in 1955,
which was intended as a methodical foundation of the humanities in the Dilthey
tradition, vigorously criticized, in 1962, Gadamer’s seeming rejection of the
methodological paradigm. If Gadamer’ own « method » for the humanities consisted
 13

in saying that one just has to follow one’s own prejudices, it had to be condemned as a
perversion of the very idea of hermeneutics. Betti, who was followed in this regard by
E. D. Hirsch in America, opposed the idea that interpretation always entailed an
essential element of application to the present, an idea he deemed relativistic. Surely,
texts do acquire different meanings or relevance in the course of their reception, but
one has to distinguish the actuality or significance (Bedeutsamkeit) thus garnered from
the original meaning (Bedeutung) of the texts, i.e. the meaning of the text in the mind of
its author (mens auctoris), which remains the focus of hermeneutics.
2) Habermas and the Critique of Ideologies. Coming from the Frankfurt School, Jürgen
Habermas hailed, for his part, this element of application in understanding, claiming
that knowledge is always guided by some interests. This hermeneutical insight, he
believed, could help free the social sciences, spearheaded by psychoanalysis and the
critique of ideology, from an all too objectivistic understanding of knowledge and
science. Hermeneutics teaches us, he argued, that our understanding and practices are
always motivated and linguistically articulated. It is Gadamer’s too strong reliance on
tradition and the importance of authority in understanding that Habermas opposed.
He faulted it for being « conservative », a devastating argument in the climate of the
time, to be sure, but Habermas’ lasting point is that language can also transcend its
own limits, following an idea that he discovered in Gadamer, but turned against him :
when Gadamer said that our experience of the world was linguistic, he also stressed,
for Habermas, that is what « porous », i.e. that it could, to some extent, overcome its
own limitations (by seeking better expressions or dissolving its own rigidity) and was
thus open to any meaning that could be understood. Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel
drew from this self-transcendence of language the important notion of a linguistic or
communicative rationality, which is laden with universalistic assumptions that can
form the basis of an ethical theory.
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3) Paul Ricoeur tried to build a bridge – a most hermeneutical task and virtue in itself –
between Habermas and Gadamer, by claiming both authors had stressed different, but
complementary elements in the tension that is inherent to understanding : whereas
Gadamer underlined the belongingness of the interpreter to his object and his
tradition, Habermas took heed of the reflective distance toward it. Understanding,
viewed as application, does not only have to appropriate naively its subject matter, it
can stand at a critical distance from it – a distance that is already given by the fact that
the interpretandum is an objectified text, for instance. This notion of a hermeneutics that
seeks to decipher objectivations came mainly from Dilthey, but Ricoeur used it in a
productive manner in his decisive confrontations with psychoanalysis (Freud) and
structuralism (Lévi-Strauss). He linked them to a « hermeneutics of suspicion », that is
most useful, and indeed essential, he argued, in that it can help us get rid of
superstition and false understanding. But such a hermeneutics can only be conducted
in the hope of a better and more critical understanding of understanding. A
« hermeneutics of trust » thus remains the ultimate focus of his work : the meaning we
seek to understand is one that helps us better understand our world and ourselves. We
interpret because we are open to the truths that can be gained from the objectivations
of meaning in the grand myths, texts and narratives of mankind, in which the temporal
and tragic aspects of our human condition are expressed. Ricoeur drew far-reaching
ethical conclusions from this hermeneutics of trust that has learned from the school of
suspicion.
4) Postmodernism (Vattimo and Rorty). Betti, Hirsch, Habermas (and, to a certain extent,
Ricoeur) all faulted Gadamer and hermeneutics for being, in some form or other, too
« relativistic » (that is, too reliant on tradition). Postmodernism went, to some degree,
in an opposite direction : it welcomed Gadamer’s alleged « relativism », but only
believed it did not go far enough. Gadamer would have been somewhat
inconsequential in not acknowledging fully the relativistic consequences of his
 15

hermeneutics. To understand this shift in hermeneutical debates (Gadamer too

relativtic for some, not enough for others), it is important to observe that authors such
as Heidegger (especially the later Heidegger) and Nietzsche play a paramount role for
postmodernist thinkers (by comparison, Betti, Hirsch, Habermas and Ricoeur were all
rather hostile to Heidegger and Nietzsche). One thinks, in this regard, of the
Nietzsche who said that there are no facts, only interpretations, or of the Heidegger
who claimed that our understanding was framed by the history of Being. The
postmodernists lumped this nietzschean-heideggerian outlook together with
Gadamer’s 1) seeming critique of scientific objectivity, 2) his stress on the prejudices
of interpretation and 3) his insistence on the linguistic nature of understanding.
Stressing these elements, that could even be radicalized from a nietzschean-
heideggerian backdrop, hermeneutics, they believed, jettisoned the idea of an objective
truth. There is no such thing given the interpretative and linguistic nature of our
experience. This lead Gianni Vattimo to « nihilistic » consequences (we don’t believe
in objective truth anymore, only in the virtues of tolerance and charity) and Richard
Rorty to a renewed form of pragmatism : some interpretations are more useful or
amenable than others, but none can per se be claimed to be « closer » to the Truth with
a capital « T ». In the name of tolerance and mutual understanding, one has to accept
the plurality of interpretations, it is only the notion that there is only one valid one that
is harmful.
5) Derrida’s Deconstruction. Derrida can also be seen in the « postmodern » tradition,
since he too depends heavily on the later Heidegger and Nietzsche, stresses the
linguistic nature of our experience and also urges a « deconstructive » attitude toward
tradition, and more specifically the tradition of metaphysics that governs our thinking,
an attitude that Paul Ricoeur would surely, and rightly, classify in the « hermeneutics of
suspicion ». But his deconstruction does not directly take the direction of the
pragmatist tradition of Rorty or the nihilism of Vattimo. Despite the Heideggerian
 16

origins of his notion of deconstruction and his pan-linguisticism, Derrida does not
identify with the tradition of hermeneutics either. His « deconstruction » is indeed
distrustful of any form of hermeneutics, and for a systematic reason : every
understanding, he contends, would involve or hide a form of « appropriation » of the
other and its otherness. In his discussion with Gadamer in 1981, he challenged
Gadamer’s rather commonplace assumption that understanding implies the good will
to understand the other. What about this will? asked Derrida. Is it not chained to the
will to dominate that is emblematic of our metaphysical and Western philosophical
tradition? Hence Derrida’s mistrust of the hermeneutical drive to understand (and thus
perhaps violently absorb) the other and of the hermeneutic claim to universality.
Gadamer was touched by this criticism to the extent that he claimed that
understanding implied some form of application, which can indeed be read as a form
of appropriation. This is perhaps the reason why, in his later writings, he more readily
underlined the open nature of the hermeneutical experience. « The soul of
hermeneutics », he then said, « is that the other can be right ».

Bibliography
Bernstein, Robert J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis.
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Sees in the hermeneutical
rehabilitation of common sense a parallel to pragmatism and a corrective to the
bugbear of relativism.

Betti, Emilio. “Hermeneutics as the general Methodology of the

Geisteswissenschaften” (1962). In Contemporary Hermeneutics. Ed. by Joseph Bleicher.
London / Boston : Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1980. Polemical defense of a
methodology of interpretation against Gadamer.
 17

Bleicher, Joseph, ed. Contemporary Hermeneutics : Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and

Critique. London / Boston : Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1980. A very useful collection
of essays by Betti, Gadamer, Habermas, Apel.

Caputo, John D. Radical Hermeneutics : Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project.
Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987. A postmodern, derridian reading and
critique of hermeneutics.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” In W. Dilthey. Hermeneutics and the

Study of History :Selected Works. Edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.
Volume 4. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1996, 235-258. Seminal study
on the significance of hermeneutics for Dilthey.

Dostal, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge : Cambridge

University Press, 2002. Authoritative collection of essays on Gadamer, with good
biographical and bibliographical material.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald
G. Marschall. New York : Crossroad, 1989. The « Bible » of contemporary
hermeneutics.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E. Linge.

Berkeley/L.A./London : University of California Press, 1976. Studies that complete
Gadamer’s opus magnum.
 18

Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. New Haven : Yale University

Press, 1994. History of the hermeneutic tradition from Antiquity to the present from
the vantage-point of the inner word.

Grondin, Jean. Le tournant herméneutique de la phénoménologie. Paris : PUF, 2003. A study

of the different conceptions of hermeneutics espoused by Heidegger, Gadamer,
Ricoeur and Derrida.

Habermas, Jürgen. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method”. In Understanding and

Social Inquiry. Edited and translated by Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy.
Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 1977; “The Hermeneutic Claim
to Universality”. In Contemporary Hermeneutics. Edited by Joseph Bleicher. A famous
critique of Gadamer inspired by ideology critique and psychoanalysis.

Heidegger, Martin. Ontology - The Hermeneutics of Facticity [1923]. Translated by John van
Buren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Seminal text of Heidegger’s early
hermeneutic conception.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York : Harper and Row, 1962. Heidegger’ s main work, based on a
hermeneutics of existence.

Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1967.

Defends a methodical conception of hermeneutics against Gadamer.
 19

Michelfelder, P. et R. E. Palmer, eds. Dialogue and Deconstruction. The Gadamer-Derrida

Encounter. New York : SUNY Press, 1989. Contains the basic texts of the famous
encounter between Derrida and Gadamer.

Palmer Richard E. Hermeneutics. Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger,

and Gadamer. Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1969. Groundbreaking and
clear presentation of the major figures of the hermeneutic tradition.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Translated by John B. Thomson.
New York : Cambridge University Press, 1981; From Text to Action. Essays in
Hermeneutics. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, Ill. :
Northwestern University Press, 1991. Both books document the hermeneutic itinerary
of a major hermeneutic thinker of our time.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton

University Press, 1979. Hermeneutics presented as the outcome of philosophy, out of
the tradition of American pragmatism.

Rorty, Richard. “Being that can be understood is language”. London Review of Books, 16
March 2000, 23-25. A tribute to Gadamer’s alleged linguistic relativism.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E.. Hemeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, Edited by
Andrew Bowie. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998. Classical texts of the
founder of modern-day hermeneutics.

Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation : The Meaning of Hermeneutics for

Philosophy.Translated by D. Webb. Cambridge : Polity Press, 1997;The End of Modernity :
 20

Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture.Translated by J. R. Snyder. Baltimore :

John Hopkins University Press, 1988. Both volumes testify to the postmodern
appropriation of hermeneutics.

Jean GRONDIN
Université de Montréal