My first brush with Hermeneutics. 1

I had my first brush with Hermeneutics Saturday before last. Curiously, it was not supposed to be  directed specifically to hermeneutics as a philosophical theory but served merely as an  introduction to a series of talk given by Dr. Lau  Kwai Biu (劉桂標) of the HKSHP in association with the HK Taoist Association (香港道教聯合會). He was supposed to talk on how the text of ChuangTzu or Zhuangzi (莊子) was edited and interpreted by Guo Xiàng (郭象)( d. 312 CE)  in the latter's revision and redaction of it. Guo cut down 52 original chapters of Zhuangzi to 33 by removing therefrom materials which he thought superstitious following which  he wrote a philosophic commentary to the text: his famous Commentary on Zhuangzi ((莊子注) . This Zhuangzi recension is traditionally divided into three sections: ‘Inner Chapters’ (1-7)(內篇), ‘Outer Chapters’ (8-22)(外篇), ‘Miscellaneous Chapters’ (23-33)(雜篇).

What do we mean by "hermeneutics"? According to Dr. Lau, the word comes from the German word "hermeneutik" which itself is derived from the Greek word "hermeneutike". Hermes was a god in Greek myth who acted as a messenger both between the gods and between the gods and men and also served to guide a man's soul to the underworld after he died. He is also thought to be the inventor of language, speech, an interpreter, a liar, a thief and a trickster. The Greeks learned long ago that language may serve to conceal as much as it may serve to reveal. The original Greek word "hermeneuo" means to translate or interpret. The hermeneutic method was later extended to the study of other ancient secular texts on arguments, speeches, poems. In Aristotle's De Interpretione, he says that the spoken words are symbols or signs (symbola) of affections or impressions (pathemata) of the soul (psyche) whilst the written words are the signs of the spoken words and that although the spoken word may differ for different peoples, yet the mental affections themselves represented by the words (semeia) are the same for the whole of mankind.  Hermeneutics started life first not with any written text but with the Jewish Oral Tradition that later became the Talmud and could be traced to the principles of  interpretation by Hillel the Elder according to whom, a word in a passage could be interpreted by reference to the same word in another passage, any apparent inconsistency to be explained through careful scrutiny of  a given text in the context of other texts and suggested that sometimes the same word might have different meanings at various levels of interpretation varying from its plain literal meaning to some secret or mystical meanings at a higher level..

According to the Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the term "hermeneutics" covers both first and second order theory of understanding and interpretation of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions.

In early Christianity, hermeneutics became a crucial branch of Biblical studies in respect of which it was thought that the most important hermeneutic principle in the interpretation of the Bible was whether it was consistent with the fulfillment of the relevant Biblical prophecies in the Old Testament such that often the New Testament was read to see if it corresponded to the prophecies of the Old Testament. In the Middle Ages, some Christians thought that words in the Scripture should be studied in such a way as to tease out four different levels of meaning: the literal sense  (sensus historicus), the allegorical sense (sensus allegoricus) in relation to church dogma, the moral sense (sensus tropologicus or sensus moralis) or how the individual reader or hearer should apply its meaning to his moral and spiritual life and finally any secret metaphysical and eschatological meaning or gnosis (sensus anagogicus) but the latter three senses may be grouped under the general category of spiritual or mystical sense (sensus spiritualis or mysticus), corresponding roughly to the four ways the Jews read the Torah which they call respectively simple interpretation (pershat), allusion (Remez), interpretative (Derash) and secret/mystical (Sod).  

In the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Luther emphasized faith and inwardness  and the idea of sola scriptura (the Bible alone) and Calvin too reverted to the earlier interpretative tradition of going back to the texts themselves with Calvin emphasizing the scriptura sui ipsius interpres and brevitas et facilitas to support their respective theology. In the period of Enlightenment, the Scripture was interpreted from the angle of what was thought to be the right kind of as responses evoked by historical and social forces so that difficult words and passages were interpreted by trying to see how their possible meanings might be related to the then contemporaneous Christian practices and by making the truths of the Bible one's personal truths such that reading and interpreting what one reads became a way of finding out and living out one's moral, spiritual and religious life.

Then Friedrich Scheiermacher (1768-1834) extended the hermeneutics not only to the study of the Scripture but also to other secular texts and modes of communication. To him, to interpret a text, we must have an overall understanding of the organization of the work as a whole. He distinguishes between so-called grammatical (which focuses on how the work may be related to general ideas) from psychological interpretation (which focuses on how the various elements are combined to form the work as a whole) and considers that problems of interpretation are really problems of understanding the work as a whole. To avoid misunderstanding the text and the author, we must know how the grammatical and psychological laws work, putting more emphasis not on the exact word and their objective meaning but to what the words could mean to an individual speaker or author subjectively and to that extent have an even broader understanding of the meaning of the words of the texts than the authors themselves. We must therefore have an understanding of the hermeneutic prejudices of the relevant authors and of ourselves and be careful not to understand another's speech or writing only through our own cultural, theological or philosophical mind-frames. To him, although language is a common resource and has its own grammar, syntax and commonly accepted meaning, in practice, we often use this common resource in a more or less individual way, especially in poetry, but less so in science. However, no matter how individual we are in our use of language, such use must still be based on the style, the voice or the specificity of this common language. We must compare the use of the relevant words against their use by others in similar or different contexts in the same historical period and even the use of the same words by the same author in different periods of his life under different linguistic contexts. Only by comparing their uses and by creative hypothesis forming may we hope to fully understand the meaning of a word in the right context. However, understanding of the meaning of words is never final and there will always be an indivisible remainder which requires further exploration.

Although Dr. Lau did not mention it, another important figure in the development of early modern hermeneutics is Giambattisto Vico, the author of Scienza nuova (1725) (New Science). According to Vico, to understand the meaning of a text, it is necessary also to take into account the text's cultural context because our thinking is intrinsically related to our ordinary language which may develop from the mythical, the poetic to the abstract and the theoretical and the technical such that to understand a text and ourselves, we must understand the genealogy of our own intellectual horizon through the study of our own history. Different from the natural sciences, the world which the historian studies is a world in which he himself is also actively involved. Therefore, such understanding can never be  completely divorced from his "self-understanding": our understanding is always oriented towards who we are in a given historical context and to the relevant practice of understanding. To that extent, in hermeneutics, we make our history aware of its own nature, its own limitations and prejudices. In understanding our own history, we ultimately understand also something of ourselves as a subject of some freedom, goals and desires. 

Before we arrive at contemporary hermeneutics, there is still another important precursor, Benedict de Spinoza. According to him, we must always keep in mind the historical context in which the Scriptures are written. To him, in the same way that we cannot understand Nature if we do not relate its parts to the whole, we cannot understand the particular parts of the Scriptural text if we do not understand the whole of the text. The whole can only be understood in terms of its parts and its parts can only be understood in terms of the whole. This inter-relatedness and co-dependence is what is called a "hermeneutic circle" : a constant movement back and forth between the parts and the whole of the texts such that texts which cannot be understood in isolation might have to be understood in terms of its historical and cultural context. In this process, philology and history are indispensable tools for unlocking the relevant hermetic meaning and language use.  Thus hermeneutics must sometimes rely upon the findings of philology and linguistics and not merely the intention of the author or writer of the texts and sometimes, even despite such intention.

With another thinker, Wilhem Dilthey, philosophic hermeneutics was brought even closer to contemporary hermeneutics. To him, in the same manner that we need a theory of Nature, we also need a theory of how we understand our social world and what he calls "human sciences" through symbolically mediated practices ie. through philosophy. To him, the human sciences differ from the natural sciences. Therefore we cannot understand human beings the way we understand things. There is something that he calls Erlebnis (lived experiences) which is connected to but which does not provide self-understanding as such. We can only understand ourselves to the extent that we treat ourselves "as if" we were looking and understanding someone else ie. in a mediated way. Erlebnis is the psychological basis of all experience later articulated and conceptualized in verstehen (understanding). Dilthey adapts Schleiermacher's romantic hermeneutic vocabulary of divination, congeniality and comparison with initial inductive hypothesis formation, followed by critical, empirical investigation and historical comparison for the purpose of revising and improving that hypothesis so that in the end, we may have a general theory of how to understand human life.

Hermeneutics underwent an even greater transformation under the hands of Heidegger. From a mere methodology, it became an ontological turn. To Heidegger, hermeneutics is not just a matter of understanding linguistic communication. Nor is it merely a method for doing human sciences. It concerns itself with ontology or the fundamental conditions of human existence or how human beings stand out from and confront the world in which they live. Just as Vico started by criticizing Cartesian certainty, he criticized the whole notion of human rationality. For Descartes, the problem was how to establish the norms of epistemic certainty and how to judge whether a proposition about the world is true or false. From this, it was just a short step to reliance upon the scientific method of the natural sciences. But to Heidegger,before we can even have science, there is a pre-scientific realm of understanding which is more basic, more fundamental, more immediate to which he wished to draw our attention. Thus to him, hermeneutics is not just one of several philosophical possibilities but what philosophy is all about in the first place. With him, hermeneutics concerns itself with what he calls a "hermeneutics of facticity".

Heidegger understands man's being in the world through the concept of verstehen (or understanding), conceived of not as a method nor the result of an intentionally and carefully devised procedure for critical reflection. Understanding is for him a mode of our being or how we live and exist as human beings, our Dasein. Our understanding of the world presupposes a kind of pragmatic (pre-reflective) know-how revealed through the way we orient ourselves in the world. We know and understand the world in a basic and intuitive way, not by gathering neutral facts about it and then reach a set of universal propositional conclusions, laws and judgements about them that correspond more or less to the world as it is.

To Heidegger, the world is thus already tacitly intelligible to us. But this fundamental and pre-reflective understanding of the world can only be brought into our conscious attention or brought out from the background to the foreground of our awareness through the act of our interpretation. It is the act of interpretation which makes things, objects, the fabric of the world appear as something standing out against the general background of the world, as something which opens itself to us by Dasein, conceived of as a totality of practices and intersubjective structures of the world. At this stage, there is still not yet any idea of truth as agreement between our subjective judgment and the objective world yet it is already a truth of what Heidegger calls world-disclosure. It is through the synthesizing activity of understanding that the world is disclosed to us as a totality of meaning, in the space constituted by Dasein. Such synthesizing activity of understanding and interpretation is brought to language through our assertion. In disclosing the "as-structure" of a thing, interpretation then discloses the meaning of the things forming the subject of our understanding to us and pins its meaning down linguistically. Thus the linguistic identification of a thing is not in that sense original. It is predicated upon the "world-disclosive synthesis of understanding and interpretation.". The world-disclosive truth of understanding is thus more fundamental than the truth presented through the propositional structure "s is p". It is prior to the reflectively grounded certainty maintained by the Cartesian philosopher. Thus the hermeneutic circle is no longer conceived of as between the text as a whole and its parts or between the text and the historical tradition in which such a text is used but as constituted by the interplay between our "self-understanding" and our "understanding of the world"". With Heidegger, hermeneutics has become an existential task which confronts each of us.  To Heidegger, Dasein is self-interpretory ie. its own being questions itself but as Dasein is fundamentally embedded in the world: we can only understand ourselves indirectly through understanding that world. This however is a perpetual process. We can never leave the hermeneutic circle and arrive at a lucid, clear and indubitable grasp of the meaning of the text. What is important is that we approach the text in the right way and be prepared to accept that the investigation into the ontological conditions of our life ought to work back to the way our life is led. In the hands of Heidegger, hermeneutics now has become a way of dealing with the meaning of life and an existential, not just a philological task. 

One of the latest development in hermeneutics involves what has been called philosophic hermeneutics, which refers to the theory of knowledge of Hans-Georg Gadamer as proposed in his Truth and Method, with applications in such fields as geo-politics, sociology and other fields of knowledge. Gadamer himself said that he wished in that book, which he took about 30 years to write, to elaborate on the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics" which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. According to Gadamer, it was St. Augustine who first pushed for the universality of the claims of hermeneutics because interpretation involves not only finding out the meaning of the words in a text but also trying to find out the deeper meaning of words for human existence and human self-understanding. Gadamer went back to Vico and the neo-Aristotelian humanism and combined Heidegger's idea of the world-disclosive synthesis of understanding with the idea of Bildung or eduction through culture. To him, man is a being in language: it is through language that the world is revealed to us. We learn about the world through learning how to master a language and cannot really understand ourselves without understanding that we are always already located in a linguistically mediated historical culture. Historical works are never neutral and value-free, like objects studied by scientists. They are part of the horizon in which we live and it is through language that we shape our view of our own world.He thinks man to be embedded in a "historically effected consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewussstsein) which shaped them culturally.   

To Gadamer, we can never hope to find the definitive objective, authentic, correct meaning of what certain key words in an important text mean. He was critical of both the approach of those social scientists who modeled their methods upon those of the natural sciences and also the approach of the so-called "romantic hermeneutics" of such traditional German thinkers like Schleiermacher and Dilthey who thought they could recover what they thought of as the correct "original intention" of the authors of the relevant texts. He says that his real concern is not "what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.".  He thinks that there is always a conflict between truth and the method used to discover or recover that truth. He suggests that the meaning of a text is always a "created" meaning. Whether or not we like it, whether or not we are aware of it, man is a historical being through and through. We are formed and influenced by the great historical works of the past even before we begin to approach them with what we think of as an objectivizing gaze. We never know a historical work as it originally appeared to its contemporaries and seldom have access to the original context of its production or to the author's intentions. We always approach a work through a particular tradition (intellectual, cultural or historical) but tradition is not fixed once and for all and is always under constant renewal and development. Thus trying to approach the meaning of a text as if it were a scientific object is doomed to fail. Our past always comes to us through a complex web of prior interpretations which gets richer and more complex with time. History is always effective or active history and provides us with the possibility of understanding ourselves through its study. In the final analysis, it is not only we who address the texts of tradition but the cannonic texts which address us. In studying history, our prejudices are brought home to ourselves. We will recognize the authority of a text or a work of art only by engaging with it in the process of textual explication and interpretation: by actively entering into a dialogue with our past. As we interpret and understand what at first appears alien, we produce a richer and more encompassing context for its understanding and will then come to understand not just the relevant texts but also something of ourselves too. Thus interpreting a text involves a "fusion of horizons" where the scholar finds out the ways that the text's history articulates with their own background. In this "fusion of horizons"( of the present with the past and vice versa), the initial appearance of distance and alienation emerges as a function of the limitation of our own initial point of view and our own prejudices which themselves are formed by the peculiar historical conditions within which we are then living. There is thus no question of which interpretation is more authentic or more correct, as thought by those traditional interpreters of the Holy Scripture who concentrated how what they thought the author "intended" by the use of certain words in the relevant texts.We do not, cannot and must never study the words of a text in a historical vacuum. Words and men must be studied only not in the abstract but only in relation to others and to the world. How a word is used may be affected by how it has been used by countless others and how we use it now may affect how it may be used in future.

To obtain what he calls "a fusion of horizons", we need to read the text in a productive and creative way, through doing the actual interpretation, by following the examples of others who have previously done so. We can neither deduce such knowledge from theory nor fully articulate it: it rests on a kind of tact or skill or sensitivity exhibited in the form of exemplary judgments and interpretations. Thus reading contributes to the text's effective history and adds to its complexity and the depths of its meaning. The meaning of the text is not something we can grasp once and for all but exists only the complex dialogical interplay between the present and the past. In the same way that we can never master the texts of the past, so we necessarily fail to obtain conclusive self-knowledge. Gaining knowledge of tradition and knowing ourselves are both on-going processes: tasks without determinate end-points. Our historically conditioned being, is always more being (Sein) than our conscious being (Bewusstsein). We are always more than what we think we are!

We see now that the word "hermeneutics" can thus be used to refer to not only the art of interpretation itself but also the theory and practice of interpretation itself. Traditional or classical hermeneutics is concerned with the interpretation of written texts in literature, religion and law but modern or epistemic hermeneutics is much wider and extends to the interpretative process itself  and the "text" is conceived to cover not only written, but also verbal language and all other non-verbal forms of communication. It may involve not only the relevant texts but also all the relevant contexts, including an analysis and the study of  various features in the practices of interpretation itself like our pre-suppositions, our pre-understanding, theories in the relevant philosophy of language and semiotics. With Gadamer, it has become a perpetual task of understanding both the world and through that process of understanding, of ourselves.