How It All Got Started
Many ages ago our first ancestors realized they could make grunting noises or scribble on the walls of their caves if Biff wanted to make a point about his neighbor Trog’s inferior spear or if they wanted to plot out their next dinosaur hunt. Eventually, Wilma, a tribal chieftain’s daughter, explained the rudiments of agriculture to her nomadic tribe and asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” One puzzled cave-dweller queried what it meant to stand under Wilma. A new way to trap mammoths? And on that day hermeneutics was born.
At the time, no one called this inquiry into interpretation by the name hermeneutics, especially not after the Olympian god Hermes temporarily used the word as the name for his team of young grass-dwelling insects.
Still, the term popped up in stuff by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, but without much fanfare. Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (who was also made a saint), and Martin Luther, who were concerned with the proper interpretation of sacred Scripture, added their alms to the concept.
For most of its history, hermeneutics has been what we might call regional or genre-specific. Theologians were interested in the rules for interpreting sacred texts. Literary critics of various schools were interested in the rules for interpreting literature. Lawyers were interesting in, um, writing and interpreting the law.
It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey came along and developed general theories of interpretation, i.e., theories that covered interpretation across the board.
As he developed his theory, Schleiermacher’s mind kept spiraling around in what’s commonly known as the hermeneutic circle. He realized that to understand the parts of something, you have to understand the whole, but to understand the whole, you have to understand the parts. As you get a better sense of one, you get a better sense of the other. And around, and around, and around.
This circle isn’t vicious, as the saying goes, because it doesn’t prohibit understanding. Or bark, growl, or bite. Most everything in the field of hermeneutics revolves around some idea of this hermeneutic circle.