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Hermeneutics CHAPTER 9 HERMENEUTICS A SHORT RIDE IN THE HISTORY OF HERMENEUTICS After presenting these theories on the relation between music and language, we would still like to think that music in some way is pregnant with meaning. Music does not just reflect verbal meaning, and as the semioticians would say: verbal meaning cannot just be reflected in the music. Words transform latent meaning into actual meaning. They form the link between the work and the world. This link, and not restricted to verbal utterances, is the arena of hermeneutics. All kinds of relations between a work and our adaption of the work into our world are part of processes that have been studied as part of hermeneutics. The term ‘hermeneutics’ covers the theory of understanding and interpretation of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions. As a theory of interpretation, the hermeneutic tradition stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. In De Interpretatione, Aristotle offers a hypothesis that lays the groundwork for many later theories of interpretation and semiotics: Words spoken are symbols or signs (symbola) of affections or impressions (pathemata) of the soul (psyche); written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs (semeia), are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects (pragmata) of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies (homoiomata). (De Interpretatione, 1.16a4) In the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeneutics emerges as a crucial branch of Biblical studies, nearly synonymous with exegesis. Later on, with the German romanticism and idealism the status of hermeneutics changes to explore the conditions of possibilities for symbolic communication as such. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) studied the nature of understanding in relation not just to the problem of deciphering sacred texts but to all human texts and modes of communication. He distinguished between grammatical interpretation and psychological interpretation. The former studies how a work is composed of general ideas; the latter studies the peculiar combinations that characterise the work as a whole. During Schleiermacher’s time, a fundamental shift occurred from understanding not merely the exact words and their objective meaning to an understanding of the writer’s distinctive character and point of view. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) broadened hermeneutics even more by relating interpretation to historical objectification. Understanding moves from the outer manifestations of human action and productivity to the exploration of their inner 91 CHAPTER 9 meaning. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), he points to a fundamental difference between natural sciences and humanistic sciences. The natural sciences explain by showing how the isolated incident is part of a general law while the humanistic sciences interpret their each action/object as manifestations of human consciousness. In his last important essay, “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life” (1910), Dilthey made 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. Thus, understanding is not a process of reconstructing the state of mind of the author, but one of articulating what is expressed in his work. A new turn, this time ontological, was triggered by Martin Heidegger (1889- 1976) publishing Sein und Zeit in 1927. Now hermeneutics is not only about symbolic communication but raises the most fundamental question of human life and existence as such. After the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger stops engaging with explicit hermeneutic issues (as well as the terminology of understanding, interpretation, and the hermeneutic circle). His student, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), however, takes up this aspect of his thinking.1 He argues that we never know a historical work as it initially appeared to its contemporaries. We have no access to its original context of production or the intentions of its author. This is quite the opposite of Dilthey and worth noting in the discussion around authenticity and historically informed performances. As a part of the tradition in which we stand, historical texts have an authority that precedes our own. This authority is kept alive only to the extent that the present recognises it. We acknowledge the authority of a text (or a work of art) by engaging with it in textual explication and interpretation, by entering into a dialogical relationship with the past. Gadamer refers to this movement of understanding as the fusion of horizons. A premise to entering the work is to be open and non-critical; otherwise, it will be difficult to reach the full potential of meaning in the work. The traditional Master Class situation in music performance studies has many similarities to Gadamer’s idea of Bildung/education in culture. Jürgen Habermas (1929-) draws attention to what he takes to be the political naiveté of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In Habermas’s view, Gadamer places too much emphasis on the authority of tradition, leaving no room for critical judgment and reflection. Reason is denied the power of a critical, distanced judgment. What is needed is therefore not just an analysis of the way in which we de facto are conditioned by history but a set of quasi-transcendental principles of validity regarding which the claims of the tradition may be subjected to evaluation. Then we might discover elements in the text/work of art that be constituent to the –––––––––––––– 1 Gadamer wants to combine the Heideggerian notion of the world-disclosive synthesis of understanding with the idea of Bildung, of education in culture. This, on the whole, is the project of Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer, 1960), a work that Gadamer spent more than 30 years completing. 92 .
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