| Hermeneutics |
Website Links For Hermeneutics |
Information AboutHermeneutics |
|
Essentially, hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as art or sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary. In the last two centuries, the scope of hermeneutics has expanded to include the investigation and interpretation not only of textual and artistic works, but of human behaviour generally, including language and patterns of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviours (such as religious ceremonies, political rallies, football matches, rock concerts, etc.). Hermeneutics interprets or inquires into the meaning and import of these phenomena, through understanding the point of view and 'inner life' (Dilthey) of an insider, or the first-person perspective of an engaged participant in these phenomena. ETYMOLOGY The word ''hermeneutics'' is a term derived from 'Ερμηνεύς, the Greek word for ''interpreter''. This is related to the name of the Greek god Hermes in his role as the interpreter of the messages of the gods. Hermes was believed to play tricks on those he was supposed to give messages to, often changing the messages and influencing the interpretation thereof. The Greek word thus has the basic meaning of one who makes the meaning clear. SCRIPTURAL HERMENEUTICS See Also: Biblical hermeneutics Pesher Tafsir A common use of the word ''hermeneutics'' refers to a process of scriptural interpretation. Throughout religious history scholars and students of religious texts have sought to mine the wealth of their meanings by developing a variety of different systems of hermeneutics. Philosophical hermeneutics in particular can be seen as a development of scriptural hermeneutics, providing a theoretical backing for various interpretive projects. Thus, philosophical and scriptural hermeneutics can be seen as mutually reinforcing practices. Rabbi Ishmael of the Amoraic era of Judaism interpreted laws from the Torah through 13 hermeneutic principles. This is the first appearance of hermeneutics in the world, through the Exegetic interpretation of Biblical texts. HISTORY OF WESTERN HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutics in the Western World , as a general science of text interpretation, can be traced back to two sources. One source was the Ancient Greek Rhetoric ians' study of literature, which came to fruition in Alexandria . The other source has been the Midrash ic and Patristic traditions of Biblical Exegesis , which were contemporary with Hellenistic culture. Scholars in Antiquity expected a text to be coherent, consistent in Grammar , style and outlook, and they amended obscure or "decadent" readings to comply with their codified rules. By extending the perception of inherent logic of texts, Greeks were able to attribute works with uncertain origin. Ancient Greece and Rome Aristotle strikes a chord in his treatise '' De Interpretatione '' that reverberates through the intervening ages and supplies the key note for many contemporary theories of interpretation. His overture is here:
Equally important to later developments are texts on poetry, rhetoric, and Sophistry , including many of Plato's dialogues, such as '' Cratylus '', '' Ion '', '' Gorgias '', '' Lesser Hippias '', and '' Republic '', along with Aristotle's '' Poetics '', '' Rhetoric '', and '' On Sophistical Refutations ''. However, these texts deal more with the presentation and refutation of arguments, speeches and poems rather than the understanding of texts as texts. As Ramberg and Gjesdal note, "Only with the Stoics, and their reflections on the interpretation of myth, do we encounter something like a methodological awareness of the problems of textual understanding" (Ramberg & Gjesdal). Some ancient Greek philosophers, particularly Plato, tended to vilify poets and poetry as harmful nonsense—Plato denies entry to poets in his ideal state in '' The Republic '' until they can prove their value. In the ''Ion'', Plato famously portrays poets as possessed:
The meaning of the poem thus becomes open to ridicule — whatever hints of the truth it may have, the truth is covered by madness. However, another line of thinking arose with Theagenes Of Rhegium , who suggested that instead of taking poetry literally, what was expressed in poems were allegories of nature. Stoic philosophers further developed this idea, reading into the poets not only allegories of natural phenomena, but allegories of ethical behavior. Aristotle differed with his predecessor, Plato, in the worth of poetry. Both saw art as an act of Mimesis , but where Plato saw a pale, essentially false imitation in art of reality, Aristotle saw the possibility of truth in imitation. As Critic David Richter points out, "for Aristotle, artists must disregard incidental facts to search for deeper universal truths"--instead of being essentially false, poetry may be universally true. (Richter ''The Critical Tradition'', 57). In the Poetics, Aristotle called both the tragedy and the epic noble, with tragedy serving the essential function of purging strong emotions from the audience through Katharsis . Early Biblical hermeneutics The early Jew ish Rabbi s and the early Church Fathers deployed similar Philological tools; their Biblical interpretations stressed Allegorical readings, frequently at the expense of the texts' literal meaning. They sought deeper meanings below the outward appearance of the text. Examples of such interpretations include the views of Philo Of Alexandria , Origen , and the Talmud ic writings. Traditional Jewish hermeneutics differ from the Greek method in that the rabbis considered the Tanach (the Jewish bibilical canon) to be inviolate. They did not consider inconsistencies in the text to be mistakes or corruptions. These problematic sections of the text were believed to be deliberate and containing meanings which had to be teased out of the text through the process of exegesis. As a result, the rabbinical interpreters created a secondary, esoteric reading of the text based on these problematic sections. This was one of the bases of early Kabbalah and the Gematria, which posited mystical or "secret" meanings to the Biblical text based on the letters of the text themselves and even their numerical value. Medieval hermeneutics Medieval Christian interpretations of text incorporated Exegesis into a fourfold mode that emphasized the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the text. This schema was based on the various ways of interpreting the text utilitized by The Patristic Writers . The Literal Sense (''sensus historicus'') of Scripture denotes what the text states or reports directly. The Allegorical Sense (''sensus allegoricus'') explains the text with regard to the doctrinal content of church dogma, so that each literal element has a Symbol ic meaning. The Moral Application of the text to the individual reader or hearer is the third sense, the ''sensus tropologicus'' or ''sensus moralis'', while a fourth level of meaning, the ''sensus anagogicus'', draws out of the text the implicit allusions it contains to secret metaphysical and eschatological knowledge, or '' Gnosis ''.
Hermeneutics in the Middle Ages witnessed the proliferation of non-literal interpretations of the Bible. Christian commentators could read Old Testament narratives ''simultaneously'' as prefigurations of analogous New Testament episodes, as symbolic lessons about Church institutions and current teachings, and as personally applicable allegories of the Spirit . In each case, the meaning of the signs was constrained by imputing a particular intention to the Bible, such as teaching morality, but these interpretive bases were posited by the religious tradition rather than suggested by a preliminary reading of the text. The customary medieval exegetical technique divided the text in ''glossa'' (" Gloss es" or annotations) written between the lines and at the side of the text which was left with wide margins for this very purpose. The text was further divided into ''" Scholia "'' which are long, exegetical passages, often on a separate page. A similar fourfold categorization is also found in and explanation of the Torah , including the emergence of Kabbalah and the writings of Maimonides . Renaissance and Enlightenment The discipline of hermeneutics emerged with the new Humanist education of the 15th century as a historical and critical Methodology for analyzing texts. In a triumph of early modern hermeneutics, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla proved in 1440 that the " Donation Of Constantine " was a forgery, through intrinsic evidence of the text itself. Thus hermeneutics expanded from its medieval role explaining the correct analysis of the Bible . However, Biblical hermeneutics did not die off. For example, the Protestant Reformation brought about a renewed interest in the interpretation of the Bible, which took a step away from the interpretive tradition developed during the Middle Ages back to the texts themselves. The rationalist Enlightenment led hermeneuts, especially Protestant exegetes, to view Scriptural texts as secular Classical texts were viewed. Scripture thus was interpreted as responses to historical or social forces, so that apparent contradictions and difficult passages in the New Testament, for example, might be clarified by comparing their possible meanings with contemporaneous Christian practices. Schleiermacher Friedrich Schleiermacher (November 21, 1768 – February 12, 1834) explored the nature of understanding in relation not just to the problem of deciphering sacred texts, but to all human texts and modes of communication. The interpretation of a text must proceed by framing the content asserted in terms of the overall organization of the work. He distinguishes between grammatical interpretation and psychological interpretation. The former studies how a work is composed from general ideas, the latter considers the peculiar combinations that characterize the work as a whole. Schleiermacher said that every problem of interpretation is a problem of understanding. He even defined hermeneutics as the art of avoiding misunderstanding. He provides a solution to avoidance of misunderstanding: knowledge of grammatical and psychological laws in trying to understand the text and the writer. There arose in his time a fundamental shift from understanding not only the exact words and their objective meaning to individuality of the speaker or author. for more information: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy {Link without Title} Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey broadened hermeneutics even more by relating interpretation to all historical objectifications. Understanding moves from the outer manifestations of human action and productivity to explore their inner meaning. In his last important essay "The Understanding of Others and Their Manifestations of Life" (1910), Dilthey makes it clear that this move from outer to inner, from expression to what is expressed, is not based on empathy. Empathy involves a direct identification with the other. Interpretation involves an indirect or mediated understanding that can only be attained by placing human expressions in their historical context. Understanding is not a process of reconstructing the state of mind of the author, but one of articulating what is expressed in the work. Heidegger See Also: Martin Heidegger Since Dilthey, the discipline of hermeneutics has detached itself from this central task and broadened its spectrum to all texts, including Multimedia and to understanding the bases of meaning. In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger 's philosophical hermeneutics shifted the focus from interpretation to existential understanding, which was treated more as a direct, non-mediated, thus in a sense more authentic way of being in the world than simply as a way of knowing. Advocates of this approach claim that such texts, and the people who produce them, cannot be studied using the same Scientific Method s as the Natural Science s, thus use arguments similar to that of Antipositivism . Moreover, they claim that such texts are conventionalized expressions of the experience of the author; thus, the Interpretation of such texts will reveal something about the Social Context in which they were formed, but, more significantly, provide the reader with a means to share the experiences of the author. Among the key thinkers of this approach is the Sociologist Max Weber . Contemporary hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer 's hermeneutics is a development of the hermeneutics of his teacher, Heidegger. Paul Ricoeur developed a hermeneutics based on Heidegger's concepts, although his own work differs in many ways from that of Gadamer's. Andrés Ortíz-Osés has developed his Symbolic Hermeneutics as the Mediterranean response to north European Hermeneutics. His main statement regarding the symbolic understanding of the world is that the Meaning is the Symbolic healing of the real injury. Hermeneutics and critical theory Jürgen Habermas criticized the conservatism of previous hermeneutics, especially Gadamer, because the focus on tradition seemed to undermine possibilities for social criticism and transformation. Habermas also criticized Marxism and previous members of the Frankfurt School for missing the hermeneutical dimension of Critical Theory . Habermas incorporated the notion of the Lifeworld and emphasized the importance of both interaction and communication as well as labor and production for social theory. For Habermas, hermeneutics is one dimension of critical social theory. THEMES IN HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutic circle See Also: Hermeneutic circle The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text, rather, it stresses that the meaning of text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context. With Schleiermacher , hermeneutics begins to stress the importance of the interpreter in the process of interpretation. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics focuses on the importance of the interpreter '' Understanding '' the text as a necessary stage to interpreting it. Understanding, for Schleiermacher, does not simply come from reading the text, but involves knowledge of the historical context of the text and the psychology of the author. For Postmodernists, the Hermeneutic Circle is especially problematic. This is the result of the fact that in addition to only being able to know the world through the words we use to describe it, we are also confronted with the problem that "whenever people try to establish a certain reading of a text or expression, they allege other readings as the ground for their reading" (Adler 1997: 321-322). In other words, "All meaning systems are open-ended systems of signs referring to signs referring to signs. No concept can therefore have an ultimate, unequivocal meaning" (Waever 1996: 171). Meaning Horizon Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the process of interpreting a text as the fusion of one's own ''horizon'' with the ''horizon of the text''. He has defined ''horizon'' as "The totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture." APPLICATIONS OF HERMENEUTICS Sociology In Sociology , hermeneutics means the interpretation and understanding of social events by analysing their meanings to the human participants and their Culture . It enjoyed prominence during the sixties and seventies, and differs from other interpretative schools of sociology in that it emphasizes the importance of the content as well as the form of any given social behaviour. The central principle of hermeneutics is that it is only possible to grasp the meaning of an action or statement by relating it to the whole discourse or world-view from which it originates: for instance, putting a piece of paper in a box might be considered a meaningless action unless put in the context of democratic elections, and the action of putting a ballot paper in a box. One can frequently find reference to the 'hermeneutic circle': that is, relating the whole to the part and the part to the whole. Hermeneutics in sociology was most heavily influenced by German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (see 'Truth and Method', 1960). Law See Also: Jurisprudence Some scholars argue that Law and theology constitute particular forms of hermeneutics because of their need to interpret legal tradition / scriptural texts. Moreover, the problem of interpretation is central to Legal Theory at least since the 11th Century . In the Middle Ages and Renaissance , the schools of '' Glossatores '', '' Commentatores '' and '' Usus Modernus '' distinguished themselves right by their approach to the interpretation of "laws" (mainly, Justinian 's Corpus Iuris Civilis ). The University Of Bologna gave birth to a "legal Renaissance" in the 11th century, when the Corpus Iuris Civilis was rediscovered and started to be systematically studied by people like Irnerius and Gratianus . It was an interpretative Renaissance. After that, interpretation has always been at the center of legal thought. Savigny and Betti , among others, made significant contributions also to general hermeneutics. Legal Interpretivism , most famously Ronald Dworkin 's, might be seen as a branch of philosophical hermeneutics. Computer science Researchers in Computer Science , especially those dealing with Artificial Intelligence , Computational Linguistics , Knowledge Representation , and Protocol Analysis , have not failed to notice the commonality of interest that they share with hermeneutics researchers in regard to the character of interpretive agents and the conduct of interpretive activities. For instance, in the abstract to their 1986 AI Memo, Mallery, Hurwitz, and Duffy have the following to say:
International Relations Insofar as hermeneutics is a cornerstone of both Critical Theory and Constitutive Theory , both of which have made important inroads into the Postpositivist branch of International Relations Theory and Political Science , hermeneutics has been applied to international relations (IR). Steve Smith (Academic) refers to hermeneutics as the principal way of grounding a foundationalist yet postpositivist IR theory such as critical theory. An example of a postpositivist yet anti-foundationalist IR paradigm would be radical Postmodernism . Religion and theology The process by which theological texts are understood relies on a particular hermeneutical viewpoint. Theorists like Paul Ricoeur have applied modern philosophical hermeneutics to theological texts (in Ricoeur's case, the Bible ). See also: Biblical Hermeneutics , Qura'nic Hermeneutics , Talmudical Hermeneutics and Exegesis . HERMENEUTICS AND SEMIOTICS
See also Abductive Inference and Literary Theory – Pragmatism, Hermeneutics and Semiotics written by Uwe Wirth . REFERENCES
SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|