Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"The Rise of Hermeneutics"
Understanding is what we call this process by which an inside is conferred on a complex of external sensory signs….Even the apprehension of our own states can only be called understanding in a figurative sense. To be sure, I say: "I can’t understand how I could have acted thus," and even, "I don’t understand myself anymore." Yet what I mean by this is that an objectification of my own being in the external world now stands before me as that of a stranger and that I am unable to interpret it, or alternatively that I suddenly find myself in a state that I stare at, so to speak, something alien to me. We therefore call understanding that process by which we recognize, behind signs given to our senses, that psychic reality of which they are the expression. Such understanding ranges from grasping the babblings of children to Hamlet or the Critique of Pure Reason.
Dilthey’s doing his best here to provide a universal definition of understanding in a way that covers all manner of expression. He mentions baby babbles, Shakespeare (which sometimes sounds like baby babbles), and the philosophical writings of Kant (which will put an end to any baby’s babbling by putting them right to sleep).
We could add all manner of texts from last night, morning chatter about reality TV, and motherly nagging about finishing homework five minutes after you get home from school. Some is easier to interpret than others, but it all has to do with understanding on a large scale.
How does Dilthey suggest that we bring all these kinds of expressions together? By entering the mental life or psychic reality of the speaker, of course. Any statement of any kind presupposes some psychic goings-on in the person doing the stating. Sure, language is used differently across genre lines, but its use is always rooted in some interior state.
Interpretation, however, is not intuition. The interior life of others is not plain to see—heck, it’s not always that plain in our own selves, as the Dilth bemoans. If it were, then it wouldn’t be an interior life.
To get to the interior life of others (and let’s not even worry about our own interiors for now—leave that to Mr. Freud), you have to go by way of signs. Signs may be spoken, or written down on paper, or posted with various shaped arrows on the side of the road. In people, they may be gestures or facial expressions, not just words.
Whatever form signs may take, says Dilthey, we can see them as referring back to the psyche. It’s the job of hermeneutics to take a peek into the psychic life by looking through the signs that express it. And once we get the hang of what those signs might mean, we start to get closer to that dodgy thing called understanding.