Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
While the philosophers working to unlock hermeneutic doors tended to agree that interpretation generally happens and also involves some kind of rules, they didn’t all stand before the same passageways or have the same reasons for boldly going where no reader had gone before.
In fact, there were some pretty beefy differences and disagreements between the major figures in hermeneutics. And guess what? Knowing these debates will give you one “hermeneutic key” for understanding their work.
Romantic Hermeneutics vs. Critical Hermeneutics
If you’re someone who’s ever said something to someone else, then you, friend, are of interest to hermeneutics. You don’t even have to be particularly famous or influential or weird to catch their eye.
You’ll find, however, if some of these hermeneutic thinkers wanders over your way with a mind to interpret whatever it is you’ve expressed, that they’ll not all share the same agenda. Some will stare you down and start to pick you apart as someone who has said something. Others will be focused on the meaning of what you’ve said.
The early hermeneutic philosophers, the Romantics, took the first approach. Romantic hermeneutics, as the name implies, is interested in the psychic life of the author more than in what the author has to say (that’s right, Romanticism’s not just about flowers and chocolate hearts).
For them, what the author says is the key to understanding the inner experience of the author, and how that experience gave rise to the author’s words. Guys like Schleiermacher and Dilthey sought to enter the heart and head of the author—to make sense of the psychic experiences, both intellectual and emotional, underlying what the author had to say.
Getting to this hidden foundation was the Romantics’ one direction, and they went after it with the determination, if not the exuberance, of a popular musician’s groupies.
And then there’s Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. For them, Romance is dead. They argued that interpretation cannot unlock the inner life experiences of an author because the meaning of the texts produced by the author goes beyond the author. Not just sometimes, but always. None of these three took a text as separate from the author.
Ricoeur, for example, approached a text as autonomous from the author because the meaning of a text includes, but is not limited to, the meaning the author intended. No author is the complete creator or master of the language she uses, so no author can be the sole creator of meaning. Therefore, what an author has said cannot be taken as a sure path into her psychic life.
Bottom line: some critics care most about the beautiful words that flowed from the author’s quill and others are more into guessing what mood the author was in when dipping into the inkpot.
Hermeneutics as Epistemology vs. Hermeneutics as Ontology
After Kant (generally considered the conquering hero and granddaddy of Western philosophy), philosophers switched their focus from circling around that elusive bird called “reality” to taking a stroll around the human mind. The bulk of modern philosophers weren’t studying “being” with the goal of seeing whether the mind corresponded to it; they were intent on describing how the mind organized and categorized information.
Then Kant came along and was like, knowledge can’t extend beyond the physical world, and the way we’re taught stuff determines the way we categorize and understand objects, ideas, and pretty much the whole universe.
So, if our minds shape how we see “the things themselves” and around us, different minds that belong to different people in different historical and cultural contexts will see similar things in different ways (Hindus see cows as sacred and Americans see them as delicious, for example).
After Kant totally shook up the way people got their philosophy on with his badass concepts of transcendental idealism and empirical realism, the focus of a lot of philosophy switched to epistemology—the study of how we know the stuff we know. Bulls-eye for Mr. Kant!
But that switch presented a problem. If things themselves are inaccessible, then they can’t serve as a sure basis for objective knowledge. Without such a basis, we’re lost in the treacherous land of relativism, where how we understand cows, chairs, even morality can be different all the time.
So, deprived of the happy time when things could be trusted as stable and comprehensible in themselves, philosophers sought objectivity in refining the methods they used to do their thinkin’.
So far so good? Sweet.
Now that we’re experts in Kantian philosophy, it should be no surprise that early hermeneutics developed in this historical context. The natural sciences had their tried-and-true scientific method, and by golly the human sciences needed theirs as well. Following the Kantian search for the universal conditions of objectivity, hermeneutics sought the “universally valid rules of interpretation.”
Again, Kant said that we had to investigate the capacity of our knowledge before getting to questions of being. In turn, hermeneutics said that we have to lay out what it means to interpret before we can know whether we’re interpreting some text correctly. Both schools of thought developed an idea of the mind as the fertile, if not always consistent, ground for knowing and interpreting.
Hermeneutics as pursued by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, as it moved away from the Romantic focus on the mind, turned to exploring the world of the text and its ontological (meaning, related to the state of being) conditions. Following Nietzsche, they thought that the minds of other folks were always too distant and too unknown to serve as a foundation for framing universal rules of interpretation.
Their foundational question: what exactly is an object of understanding? Or, as Ricoeur posed it: “what is the mode of being of that being who exists only in understanding?” The fruitful terrain of being-in-the-world and the world of the text replaced the mental life of the author as hermeneutics’ locus of study.
Primacy of the Author vs. Primacy of the Text
As Romantic hermeneutics sought to get into the heads of the author and understand their inner experiences that gave life to the text, it’s not surprising that it would give primacy to the author. According to this method of hermeneutics, understanding a text is a means to understanding the author. Reading texts is a way to have a personal encounter with another. It’s psychological, dude.
Later hermeneutics, especially the branch captained by Ricoeur, give primacy to the text instead of the author who wrote it. Ricoeur talked about the “autonomy of the text,” arguing that sure, texts can’t be totally separated from their authors, since authorial intention usually has something to do with the text’s meaning, but neither can the meaning of a text be reduced to the author’s intention.
Ricoeur had two reasons for saying this. First, because meaning is contextual: the meaning of words depends on the context in which it was written and the context in which it is read. Second, the meaning of a whole text depends not only on its parts, but also on the linguistic and cultural worlds in which it’s situated. A text is a whole within larger wholes, and there’s no limit to the number of extra holes you can dig.
One example is Moby-Dick, which fits into a whole bunch of holes—the history of American literature, a tradition of Christian symbolism, the use of whales as metaphors, and books written in the English language, to name a few. It belongs in one way to Herman Melville’s world and in another way to AP English classes reading it today.
What Kant would focus on is how these are wholes in which the novel has a place, and they are each places from which one can approach and interpret the novel. Since no one can stand in every possible place, no one has a final say on what a text means. It’s as elusive as that darned cow that escaped the farm and got turned into a god!