The Big Names in Hermeneutics
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey were the heavy hitters in early hermeneutics—heck, they pretty much invented the game and started selling crackerjacks.
Schleiermacher had two big goals in his hermeneutic project: gaining a) knowledge of universally valid rules of interpretation, and b) knowledge of the author by way of reading his texts. Dilthey, on the other hand, concerned with giving the human sciences a good name, sought to justify the work of hermeneutics with a respectable methodology.
Martin Heidegger, one of the heavyweights of twentieth-century philosophy, hit the first hermeneutic home run (or boxing equivalent) when he related the conditions necessary for interpretation to his description of humans’ state of “being in the world.”
With Heidegger, hermeneutics took on an ontological dimension. In other words, the hermeneutic circle isn’t just a way of interpretation; it’s a way of being, a way of life. In Heidegger’s high-theory jargon, it's a rug that ties the whole room together.
The chief dude of hermeneutics, however, is the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose opus Truth and Method is the closest thing to a bible of hermeneutics text that we’ve got. Building on the hermeneutic work of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and others, Gadamer formulated a theory of hermeneutics centered on belonging to tradition.
For Gadamer, there’s no seeking meaning and truth outside of some form of tradition—whether based on family, culture, skin color, favorite TV show, you name it. Every one of us is situated in various traditions, and those traditions form the way we think about the world.
Similarly, authors write works from within their traditions, and we read them from within our traditions (which are sometimes very different from the original—imagine a mohawked vegan postcolonialist in the tradition of, well, Portland, trying to get the tradition of Plato back in toga-wearing, doric-column-worshipping Greece).
Because neither the writing nor the reading takes place in a vacuum, the meaning of every work depends upon both the writing and the reading. Reading from within a tradition means that reading is a re-creation of the text. So now you can imagine Plato with a mohawk. Thanks, Mr. Gadamer!
One other fellow to keep in mind: Paul Ricoeur wrote bundles of essays on hermeneutics, usually using a blend of philosophy and anthropology. With that approach, his most important contribution might be his application of hermeneutics to self-understanding, which involves understanding other selves.
For Ricoeur, a person understands herself only by taking a “detour” through the other—whether a racial, sexual, ethnic, or other sort of other. Ricoeur followed Gadamer in seeing the interpretation of texts as involving a performance and a production of meaning. Texts are not objects one receives, but events whose meaning arises in interpretation. For Ricoeur, self-understanding is also reproduction, performance, and interpretation. Ready to interpret some texts? Better start interpreting yourself first.