Truth and Method in Interpretation Author(s): Eric D. Hirsch Jr. Reviewed work(s): Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1965), pp. 488-507 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20124071 . Accessed: 18/09/2012 00:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Metaphysics. http://www.jstor.org CRITICAL STUDIES TRUTHAND METHOD IN INTERPRETATION ERIC D. HIRSCH, JR. Under the somewhat ironic title Wahrheit und Methode (T?bingen, 1960) Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer has published the most substantial treatise on hermeneutic theory that has come from Germany in this century. In scope, length, and learning it bears comparison with Boeckh's Encyclop?die (Leipzig, 1877), and it is precisely in such a comparison that the deliberate irony of Professor Gadamer's title appears. For this is a polemic against that nineteenth century preoccupation with objective truth and correct method of which Boeckh's work was representative and its full title symptomatic: Encyclop?die und Methodologie der philo logischen Wissenschaften. Against this preoccupation Gadamer protests that there can be no Methodologie of textual interpretation because interpretation is not, after all, a Wissenschaft whose aim is objective and permanent knowledge. "Truth" cannot reside, as in an mean Boeckh thought, the genuine re-cognition of author's ing ("das Erkennen des Erkannten") for this unrealizable ideal naively disregards the fact that every putative re-cognition of a text is really a new and different cognition inwhich the interpreter's own historicity is the specifica differentia. "The historicity of under standing" ("die Geschichtlichkeit des Verstehens") is what the nineteenth century overlooked. No "method" can transcend the interpreter's own historicity and no "truth" can transcend this central truth. What is new in Gadamer's theory is not this central thesis, which is widely held and probably has more adherents than critics, but his mode of presentation.1 He has introduced new concepts 1 One very important critic has been Professor Emilio Betti whose Teor?a Generale d?lia Interpretazione (Milan, 1955) is by far the most signi ficant recent treatise in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In a later booklet, Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissen schaften (T?bingen, 1962) he takes sharp issue with Gadamer, Bultmann. and their followers. TRUTH AND METHOD IN INTERPRETATION 489 new is not and given old words meanings. Vorurteil, for example, to be avoided but welcomed; interpretation does not require the horizon but involves a of neutralization of one's personal process a Horizontverschmelzung; the history of interpretation is history con of application?a Wirkungsgeschichte. In addition to these cepts Gadamer presents a detailed criticism of earlier hermeneutic theories, a series of extremely valuable excursuses into the history of ideas, and an illuminating theory of art as Spiel. Quite apart from its theoretical argument, Wahrheit und Methode is a book of substance that has begun to radiate an influence far beyond Ger many. In America the theologian James M. Robinson has ob served that, "in the present situation Dilthey and increasingly Heidegger are being superseded by the Heidelberg philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, a former pupil of Heidegger and Bultmann, whose magnum opus grounds the humanities in a hermeneutic oriented not to psychologism or existentialism, but rather to language and its subject matter."2 Gadamer's book extends and codifies the main hermeneutical concepts of Bultmann, Heidegger, and their adherents, and can be considered a summa of what Robinson calls "The New Her meneutic." By Robinson and other theologians, and by Con tinental literary critics, Wahrheit und Methode has been welcomed as a philosophical justification for "vital and relevant" interpreta tions that are unencumbered by a concern for the author's original intention. On this point "The New Hermeneutic" reveals its affinities with "The New Criticism" and the newer "Myth Criti cism." All three have impugned the author's prerogative to be the determiner of textual meaning. Gadamer, however, grounds his anti-intentionalism only partially in aesthetics (like the New Critics) and not at all in the collective unconscious (like the Myth Critics) but primarily in the radical historicism of Martin Heidegger. To Heidegger Gadamer owes much of the vocabulary and con text of his exposition. "Distance in time could only be thought of in its hermeneutical productiveness after Heidegger had lent an 2 See "Hermeneutic Since Barth" in The New Hermeneutic, ed. by J. M. Robinson and J. B. Cobb, Jr. (New York, 1964), p. 69. 490 ERIC D. HIRSCH, JR. existential sense to the idea of understanding" (p. 281).3 But despite the modesty with which Gadamer dedicates his work to "the new aspect of the hermeneutical problem disclosed by Hei degger's existential analysis of human being" (p. 245), the theory he puts forward belongs in many of its features to a skepticism regarding historical knowledge that long pre-dated Sein und Zeit. Still, Gadamer does owe to Heidegger the positive embracing of his torically distorted knowledge as something "real" and "phe nomenal" in contrast to academic pseudo-knowledge which is "abstract" and "constructed." For "in view of the of historicity our being, the rehabilitation of (a text's) original conditions is a futile beginning. What is rehabilitated from an alien past is not a the original. In its continued alienation it has merely secondary existence" (p. 159). on That is the flavor of Gadamer's attack the philological tradi tion in Germany and its "na?ve" aspirations to objectivity. From the start it had been a dead and spiritless enterprise that lacked validity, vitality, and "humane Bedeutung." But itmay be that in his polemical fervor Gadamer has thrown out the baby with the bath. For the new hermeneutics he offers to replace the tradition of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Droysen, Boeckh, Steinthal, Dilthey and Simmel may be more destructive in its implications than Gadamer had reckoned. In his contains inner any case, theory conflicts and inconsistencies which not one of the above named fallen masters would have allowed to pass into print. I. Tradition and the Indeterminacy of Meaning Although the nature of textual meaning is a crucial subject for hermeneutic theory, Gadamer has not devoted a substantial dis cussion to it. His primary concern has been to attack the premiss is same as that textual meaning the the author's meaning. To sup pose that a text means what its author meant is to Gadamer pure romantic Psychologismus, for a text's meaning does not lie in mental processes, which are in any case inaccessible, but in the 3 The page references throughout are to H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode; Grundz?ge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (T?bingen, 1960). The translations are mine. TRUTHAND METHOD IN INTERPRETATION 491 thing meant, the Sache, which, while independent of author and reader, is shared by both. Thus, the motto to the central section of Gadamer's book is Luther's dictum, "Qui non intellegit res, non ex sensum elicere." The not author potest verbis res, the is the determiner of meaning. Now Luther's point as I understand it is firmly valid. It is impossible to elicit the sense of the word "railroad" unless one knows what a railroad is. But Luther carefully distinguishes, as Gadamer does not, between res and sensus. Indeed, Gadamer res sensus as were an identifies and though meaning autonomous entity quite independent of consciousness?which is not simply a repudiation of psychologism but of consciousness itself. It will not do to invoke Husserl as an ally on this point (p. 211) sinceHusserl's repudiation of psychologism consisted in distinguishing between mental acts, meanings and things, not in abolishing the former two. Husserl describes meaning as distinct from, yet dependent on, mental acts, and for him the author alone is the determiner of a text's meaning.4 While Gadamer is right to reject the loose iden tification of mental processes and meanings in Schleiermacher and Dilthey, he mistakenly supposes that textual meaning can somehow exist independently of consciousness altogether. He finds sanction for this supposed independence in the nature seems us of written language: "It to to be the distinguishing feature and dignity of literary art that in it language is not speech. That is to say, while remaining independent of all relation of speaking, or being addressed, or being persuaded, it still possesses meaning and form" (p. 177). Accordingly, a written text is not to be as considered recorded speech, but as an independent piece of language. "Actually the condition of being written down is central to the hermeneutic phenomenon because the detachment of a or written text from the writer author as well as from any partic or an ular addressee reader gives it existence of its own" (p. 369). The text, being independent of any particular human conscious 4 See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band. Unter suchungen zur Ph?nomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. I. Teil, 2nd ed. (Halle, 1913), pp. 91-97. For a discussion of the distinction be tween an author's verbal meaning and the part of his meaning he pays see attention to, E.