Hermeneutics by Michael N. Forster
Hermeneutics by Michael N. Forster
Hermeneutics by Michael N. Forster
Michael N. Forster
For the purpose of this article, "hermeneutics" means the theory of interpretation, i.e. the
theory of achieving an understanding of texts, utterances, and so on (it does not mean a
history, reaching back at least as far as ancient Greece. However, new focus was brought
to bear on it in the modern period, in the wake of the Reformation with its displacement
of responsibility for interpreting the Bible from the Church to individual Christians
Two fairly common but competing pictures of the course of modern hermeneutics in
Germany are that it began with a fumbling germination in the eighteenth century and then
early nineteenth century,2 or that it began with a fumbling germination in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then eventually flowered in the
1On the history of hermeneutics in general, and on the role of the Reformation in particular, see W. Dilthey
"Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics" (1860) and "The
Rise of Hermeneutics" (1900), both in W. Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
2 This is roughly the view held by the German scholar of hermeneutics Manfred Frank, for example.
twentieth century (hence the very word "hermeneutics" is today often treated as virtually
I take both of these pictures to be deeply misguided (especially the latter). What I
would like to substitute for them in the present article is something more like the
following picture: There has indeed been impressive progress in hermeneutics since the
eighteenth century. However, this progress has consisted, not in the attainment of a
accumulation of particular insights, both into the very nature of interpretation itself and
into the scope and significance of interpretation. And the thinkers who have contributed
most to this progress have not been the ones who are most likely to spring to mind at the
mention of the word hermeneutics (for example, Schleiermacher and Gadamer), but
instead certain thinkers less commonly fêted in this connection (especially, Johann
August Ernesti, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and more recently John Langshaw Austin and Quentin Skinner).
With a view to establishing this picture, this article will attempt to give a fairly
comprehensive survey of the field of modern hermeneutics, focusing on the ideas of its
some critical assessment of them along the way.4 The article will conclude with some
August Ernesti (1707-81). Ernesti's Institutio Interpretis Novi Testamenti [Instruction for
the Interpreter of the New Testament] of 1761 constitutes an important transition from a
hermeneutics focused exclusively on the Bible towards a more general hermeneutics. The
work was greatly respected by, and strongly influenced, important immediate successors
in the German hermeneutical tradition such as Herder and Schleiermacher. It makes many
Ernesti in particular takes five vitally important steps in hermeneutics. First, he argues
that the Bible must be interpreted in just the same way as any other text.5 He does not
follow through on this principle fully or consistently – for, while he does indeed forgo
any reliance on a divine inspiration of the interpreter, he assumes that, as the word of
God,6 the Bible must be true and hence also self-consistent throughout,7 which is not
something that he would assume in connection with profane texts. However, Herder and
Schleiermacher would soon go on to embrace this principle in a full and consistent way.
Second, Ernesti identifies the following twofold obstacle that he sees facing
5 Ernesti's Institutes, tr. C.H. Terrot (Edinburgh: Thomas Clark, 1832), 1:30-2, 127. A step of this sort was
also taken at around the same time by other progressive Bible scholars in Germany, such as Michaelis,
Semler, and Wettstein.
6 Ibid., 2:1-4.
7 Ibid., 1:36, 38.
conceptual resources;8 and (2) a particular author's concepts often diverge significantly
from those of his background language. 9 The conception that interpreters face such a
twofold obstacle in many cases would subsequently be taken over by Herder and
Schleiermacher, who would indeed make it even more fundamental to their theories. In
particular, this conception is the source of an acute awareness which they both share of an
etc.) expressed by a text to one's own, or to others with which one happens already to be
especially familiar. And principle (2), specifically, also grounds an intuition which they
Third, Ernesti argues that the meaning of words depends on linguistic usage [usus
usage of words.10 This is another vitally important move. It would eventually lead, in
Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, and Schleiermacher, to a stronger version of the same
thesis which grounded it in the further, revolutionary claim that it is true because meaning
is word usage.11 Ernesti's thesis also formed a sort of base line from which such
8 Ibid., 1:56-7.
9Ibid., 1:63-4. Ernesti identifies the language of the New Testament as a good example of this (cf.
1:121-3).
10 Ibid, 1:27, 63.
11Ernesti did not himself go this far. Instead, he still conceived meaning, in continuity with the tradition of
British Empiricism (especially Locke), as a matter of a regular connection between words and ideas (see,
for example, ibid., 1:15-17, 27).
successors would later set out to look for additional tasks that interpretation needs to
of the Bible which was still alive in his day –12 that interpretation must deploy a detailed
Schleiermacher, and August Boeckh would all take over this position in their
hermeneutical theories.14
Fifth, Ernesti insists on various forms of holism in interpretation:15 the parts of a text
must be interpreted in light of the whole text;16 and both of these in light of an author's
broader corpus and other related texts.17 Such holism is in particular necessary in order to
acquire sufficient evidence to be able to pin down word usages, and hence meanings.18
This principle of holism would subsequently be taken over and developed much further
would already place much greater emphasis on it,19 and also expand it to include
12
See on this Dilthey, "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant
Hermeneutics," pp. 67, 73-4.
13
Ernesti's Institutes,1:210, 2:260-2. This move was again shared by other progressive Bible scholars in
Germany from the period, for example Semler and Michaelis.
14Hermeneutics threatened to go full circle on this issue in the first half of the twentieth century with the
de-contextualizing position of the New Critics. But this particular piece of retrograde foolishness has
mercifully receded into abeyance again,
15 This principle was not altogether new with Ernesti.
16 Ernesti's Institutes, 1:70-1.
17 Ibid., 1:74.
18 Ibid., 1:70-1.
19 See especially his early works on biblical interpretation and his Critical Forests (1769).
consideration of the author's whole historical context,20 and of his whole psychology.21
circle" (later highlighted by Dilthey among others). For example, if interpreting parts of a
text requires interpreting the whole of the text, then, given that interpreting the whole
obviously also requires interpreting the parts, how can interpretation ever be achieved at
all? Herder in the Critical Forests, and then following him Schleiermacher, already
anticipate, and also develop a plausible solution to, that sort of problem: since
degrees, it is possible to interpret the parts of a text in sequence with some measure of
adequacy, thereby achieve a measure of understanding of the whole text, then deploy that
measure of understanding of the whole text in order to refine one's understanding of the
parts, thereby refining one's understanding of the whole text, and so on (in principle,
indefinitely).
Another very important early contributor to the development of hermeneutics was the
20 See especially his This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774).
21See especially his On Thomas Abbt's Writings (1768) and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human
Soul (1778).
22
Most, though not all, of Herder's works discussed in this article can be found in Herder: Philosophical
Writings, ed. M.N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
over and developing the five principles just described, Herder also made several further
important moves.
Perhaps the most important of these was to set hermeneutics on the foundation of a
grounded hermeneutics in the following three principles: (1) Meanings are – not, as many
philosophers have supposed, referents, Platonic forms, empiricist ideas, or whatnot, but
instead – word-usages. (2) Because of this, all thought (as essentially articulated in terms
capacity for linguistic expression – i.e. a person can only think if he has a language and
can only think what he can express linguistically. (3) Meanings are also essentially
grounded in (perceptual and affective) sensations – either directly (as in the case of the
"in" of "The dog is in the garden," for example) or via a sort of metaphorical extension
(as in the case of the "in" of "Jones is in legal trouble," for example).23 Principles (1) and
(2) essentially established modern philosophy of language in one fell swoop, and would
still be widely accepted by philosophers of language today. Principle (3) would meet with
nonetheless very well be correct too (contrary to first appearances, it need not conflict
with principle (1); and the widespread anti-psychologism concerning meaning due to
Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein that is likely to make it seem dubious to
23Herder also in a way believes the converse: that the sensations of a mature human being are essentially
grounded in meanings, and hence in language. This, together with his idea of metaphorical extensions,
distinguishes his position in principle (3) from that of a traditional empiricist like Hume. I shall accordingly
describe it as quasi-empiricist.
Now these three principles all carry very important consequences for interpretation.
Principle (1) grounds at a deeper level Ernesti's thesis that it is an essential task of
interpretation to determine linguistic usage and hence meaning. Principle (2) implies not
only that in order to access an author's thoughts an interpreter must explore the author's
language, but also that there is no danger that an author's thoughts will transcend his
capacity for linguistic expression. And the quasi-empiricist principle (3) implies that
thesis that interpretation requires Einfühlung, "feeling one's way in"). 24 Versions or
variants of these three principles, and of their consequences for interpretation, would
But Herder also took further seminal steps in his theory of interpretation. One of these
was to argue for the need to complement the focus on language which Ernesti had already
championed with a focus on authorial psychology.26 Herder has several reasons for
making this move. A first is the idea just mentioned that interpretation requires an
imaginative recapturing of certain authorial sensations. A second is the idea that recourse
is the idea that a focus on authorial psychology is an important means for penetrating an
24For some further details concerning these three principles and their consequences for interpretation, see
my "Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles," The
Review Metaphysics, no. 56 (2002). For a discussion of the various aspects of Herder's multi-faceted
concept of Einfühlung, see my Herder: Philosophical Writings, editor's introduction, pp. xvii-xviii.
25
Schleiermacher's debt is most straightforward in connection with (1) and (2). His variant of (3) lies in his
mature theory that concepts consist in empirical schemata, or rules for the production of images.
26See especially Herder's On Thomas Abbt's Writings and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human
Soul.
author's conceptual-linguistic individuality. Schleiermacher would subsequently take over
especially the third of the rationales for doing so just mentioned (which he developed
after Herder more generally is as a sort of progressive confirmation of his thesis that
and additional reasons why that is so (examples of this trend are, besides
a text will often express thoughts not explicitly in any of its parts but instead implicitly
and holistically, and Austin and Skinner's novel assignment of an essential role in
Herder also argues that interpretation, especially in its psychological aspect, requires
the use of what he calls "divination," by which he essentially means (not some sort of
divinely guided insight or infallible intuition, but instead much more reasonably) a
method of fallible and corrigible hypothesis based on but also going well beyond the
would again subsequently take over this principle, similarly holding that a method of
27 With a modicum of interpretive charity, Herder and Schleiermacher can indeed be seen as already hinting
at these two additional rationales. For a little more discussion of this (focusing on Schleiermacher), see my
"Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics: Some Problems and Solutions," The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol.
13, no. 1 (2005).
28 See especially On Thomas Abbt's Writings and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul.
conceiving this as a method of fallible and corrigible hypothesis based on but also going
its genre, and on the difficulty of achieving such a correct identification in many cases.
Herder conceives of a genre as consisting in a general purpose together with certain rules
of composition which serve it.30 He believes that identifying a work's genre correctly is
crucial for interpreting it not only because identifying the genre is in itself partly
constitutive of fully comprehending the work, but also because the genre often carries
meanings which are not explicitly articulated in the work itself, and because a proper
grasp of the genre is moreover essential for correctly interpreting many of the things
which are explicitly articulated in the work. This much would probably have been
broadly agreed to by several of Herder's forerunners in the theory of genre (for example,
Aristotle and Herder's contemporary Gotthold Ephraim Lessing). But Herder adds an
important new twist: Just as concepts often vary in subtle ways across historical periods
and cultures, and even between individuals within a single period and culture, thereby
to falsely assimilate the concepts found to ones with which the interpreter is already
familiar, so likewise the task of identifying a genre correctly is complicated by the fact
that genres often vary in subtle ways across historical periods and cultures, and even
between different relevant works by a single author,31 so that interpreters face ever-
familiar.32 In addition, Herder applies this whole position concerning genre not only to
linguistic works but also to non-linguistic art.33 Herder's insight into the vital role that
identifying genre plays in interpretation and into the difficulty of accomplishing this
properly would subsequently be taken over by Schlegel and Boeckh (by contrast,
The points discussed so far have all been concerned with the question of the very
nature of interpretation itself, but Herder also makes several important contributions in
connection with the question of the scope and significance of interpretation. One
contribution which straddles both questions concerns non-linguistic art (for example,
sculpture, painting, and instrumental music). Herder's views on this subject underwent a
dramatic evolution early in his career. In the Critical Forests he was initially inclined to
suppose that principles (1) and (2) in his philosophy of language precluded non-linguistic
art expressing meanings and thoughts, and he therefore took the position that it did not.
31For example, ancient Greek "tragedy" is not really the same genre as Shakespearean "tragedy,"
Shakespeare's "tragedy" not quite the same genre as Jonson's "tragedy," and indeed the genre of "tragedy"
even varies between some of Shakespeare's own "tragic" works.
32See on this especially Herder's classic essay Shakespeare from 1773 (in its several drafts). Herder even
countenances the possibility of a genre being found in just a single work by an author. That might seem
incoherent at first sight, but it is in fact not. For, as Boeckh would later go on to point out explicitly, what is
essential to a genre is not multiple instantiation, but only multiple instantiability.
33See, for example, his discussion of ancient Egyptian vs. ancient Greek portrait sculpture in This Too A
Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity.
34Boeckh, who includes generic interpretation among the four basic types or aspects of interpretation
which he distinguishes (along with historical, linguistic, and individual), seems to credit Schlegel as its real
inventor. But Herder has a stronger claim to that title.
However, in the course of writing the work he came to recognize the (really rather
obvious) fact that non-linguistic art often does express meanings and thoughts, and he
came to realize that this is not inconsistent with principles (1) and (2) after all, provided
that the meanings and thoughts in question are ones which the artist possesses in virtue of
his linguistic capacity. That was henceforth Herder's considered position. This position
entailed two important consequences for interpretation: first, that non-linguistic art often
requires interpretation, just as linguistic texts and discourse do (this constitutes a sort of
broadening of the scope of interpretation); and second, that its interpretation needs to
proceed via interpretation of the artist's language (this can be seen as a further insight
concerning the very nature of interpretation itself). One of the most interesting and
correct. For, while Herder's attribution of meanings and thoughts to non-linguistic art is
beyond much dispute and has been accepted by most hermeneutic theorists since (for
example, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Dilthey, and Gadamer), his further thesis
that such meanings and thoughts are always parasitic on the artist's linguistic capacity is
far more controversial, and has been contradicted by several prominent theorists
(including Hegel and Dilthey). I have argued elsewhere that this further Herderian thesis
recognizes that animals have mental lives even in the absence of any proper language, but
35See my "Gods, Animals, and Artists: Some Problem Cases in Herder's Philosophy of Language," Inquiry,
no. 46 (2003); and "Hegel and Some (Near) Contemporaries: Narrow or Broad Expressivism?" in Das
Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, ed. W. Welsch and K. Vieweg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 2003).
he also holds, plausibly, that once language is acquired it transforms the character of a
person's whole mental life, so that (for example) even his perceptual and affective
sensations become implicitly linguistically articulated.36 This position implies that any
interpretation. Hegel would subsequently take over this whole position. 37 It also
reappears in Heidegger's famous conception in Being and Time that Dasein, or Man, is of
These two steps of broadening the scope of interpretation begin an important trend in
hermeneutics which continues after Herder. For example, Hegel not only follows these
two steps (as already mentioned), but he also identifies a range of socio-political
and therefore as requiring interpretation, and he notes that human actions, since they
essentially express human mental life (in particular, beliefs and desires), which is
essentially imbued with meanings and thoughts, can only be properly understood with the
aid of interpretation as well. Dilthey subsequently takes over this even broader
36See especially Treatise on the Origin of Language and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human
Soul.
37See, for example, G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, pars. 2, 24 (Zusatz 1), and
462 (Zusatz), which argue that all human mental life is imbued with thought and that thought is impossible
without language.
38See M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pars. 31-4. Reading through Being and
Time, one might initially wonder whether Heidegger conceives the understanding of meanings in question
here to essentially involve language, for his opening discussion of the matter at pars. 31-2 focuses on
understanding and meaning alone. However, he goes on at par. 34 to make it clear that language is
essentially involved (and the later Heidegger is even more emphatic on this point).
conception of the role of interpretation from Hegel. 39 And as we shall see in the course of
this article, further forms of broadening have occurred since Herder as well (for example,
interpretation. One of these lies in his assignment to interpretation of a central role in the
discipline of history. He argues for this on the grounds that historians should focus less on
the history of political and military events than they usually do, and instead more on the
history of culture, where interpretation obviously plays a paramount role. 40 However, the
institutions, and actions which Herder himself began and Hegel extended further implies
a central role for interpretation even in the historian's treatment of political and military
events. And accordingly, Hegel would go on to assign interpretation a central role across
the whole range of the historian's work, political and military as well as cultural.
Subsequently, Dilthey would generalize this idea of the central role of interpretation in
history, identifying interpretation as the central task not only of history but also of the
human sciences more generally (as distinguished from the natural sciences, whose main
task is rather causal explanation). He would thereby provide a plausible solution to two
vexed questions concerning the human sciences: first, the question of their appropriate
39
For a little more discussion of this whole subject, see my "Hegel and Hermeneutics," in The Cambridge
Companion to Hegel (2), ed. F. Beiser (forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
40 For some details, see my Herder: Philosophical Writings, editor's introduction, pp. xxv-xxviii.
method, and second, the question of how they can claim the status of genuine sciences.
Also, Herder introduces the vitally important insight that interpreting, or coming to a
proper understanding of, (historical and cultural) others is essential for achieving a proper
self-understanding. There are two main reasons for this, in his view. First, it is only by
interpreting (historical and cultural) others and thereby arriving at a knowledge of the
nature of their concepts, beliefs, etc. that one can come to see what is universal and what
interpreting (historical) others who are one's forerunners in one's own cultural tradition
that one can come to see how one's own concepts, beliefs, etc. arose over time, this
Herder's justly famous "genetic method"). This whole position has been central to much
hermeneutically oriented thought since Herder. For example, it plays a vital role in Hegel,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault (all of whom are in particular strongly
Herder also develops several further compelling ideas concerning the significance of
of these is the idea that (once we drop the naïve and narcissistic assumption that we
represent a sort of historical and cultural pinnacle) it turns out that we have a lot to learn
from the sources in question, for example in relation to ethical and aesthetic ideals.
Another is the idea that accurate interpretation of historical and especially cultural
accurate interpretation of such others both expresses and encourages such respect,
both in connection with the very nature of interpretation and in connection with its scope
and significance.
One of the best known theorists of hermeneutics is Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
(1768-1834), who developed his views on the subject in lectures delivered during the first
father of modern hermeneutics. I would suggest, however, that this title may more
closely related and heavily indebted to Herder's) – in particular, a doctrine that meaning
consists in "the unity of the word-sphere," that thought is identical with language (or
inner language), and that meanings are constituted by empirical schemata, or rules for the
41F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
and Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1986).
But Schleiermacher is especially famous for insisting on the following points: that
must be willed and sought at every point"; that interpretation needs to complement a
linguistic (or "grammatical") focus with a psychological (or "technical") focus; that while
a "comparative" (i.e. plain inductive) method should predominate on the linguistic side, a
and that an interpreter ought to understand an author better than the author understood
himself.42
I would suggest, though, that there has been a tendency to exaggerate Schleiermacher's
importance for the development of hermeneutics, and that his contribution, while
To begin with the negative side of this assessment, when one views Schleiermacher's
theory against the background of Ernesti and Herder's, it turns out that much of what is
good in it is not new, much of what is new not good, and that it omits much that was good
Much of what is good in it is not new: This applies to the philosophy of language on
which Schleiermacher founds his theory of interpretation, which largely repeats Herder's.
interpretation, and even to his primary justification of this in terms of the need to
42 These doctrines can all be found in the two works cited in the previous note.
penetrate authorial individuality in conceptualization – both moves which, as we saw,
Herder had already made. It also applies to Schleiermacher's conception that the
the sense of fallible and corrigible hypothesis based on but also going well beyond the
holism in interpretation, and to his conception that, contrary to first appearances, this
does not make interpretation impossible because understanding comes in degrees and so
provisional understanding of a whole, which can then in turn be used to refine the
about meanings into an equation of meanings with empirical schemata à la Kant, for the
sharply dualistic way in which Kant had conceived schemata as only contingently related
with rules of word usage, or "the unity of the word-sphere." It also applies to
thumb that authors often conceptualize in idiosyncratic ways into an a priori principle
allegedly grounded in the very nature of reason that people always do so, so that exact
very a priori status, in its specific a priori argument concerning the nature of reason, and
decision [Keimentschluß]" which unfolds itself into his whole work in a necessary
manner (for how many works are actually written in such a way?). It also applies to
Herder had held, behavioral evidence more generally (for cannot non-linguistic behavior
constitute just as valid and important evidence for relevant psychological traits as
interpretation as a science rather like the natural sciences, that due to the role of
have we not since Schleiermacher's day come to see hypothesis as a paradigm of natural
scientific method?).
It omits much that was good in the preceding theories: This arguably applies to
Schleiermacher's omission of Herder's conception that Einfühlung, "feeling one's way in,"
genre, and of overcoming the serious obstacles that often stand in the way of doing so.
mainly consists of four things. First and foremost, he draws together in an orderly way
many of the important ideas about interpretation that had already been developed by
Ernesti and Herder (Herder in particular had left his own contributions to the subject
scattered through a large number of works, moreover works largely devoted to other
pupil and follower August Boeckh (1785-1867) in his Encyclopedia and Methodology of
the Philological Sciences (1877), which distinguishes four basic types or aspects of
Second, Schleiermacher's theory of the nature of meaning arguably takes one important
step beyond Herder's, in that Schleiermacher introduces several forms of semantic holism
(as distinct from – though no doubt also providing reasons for – interpretive holism): (1)
a doctrine of "the unity of the word sphere," which basically says that the several
different usages and hence meanings which typically belong to a word (and which will be
distinguished by any good dictionary entry) are essentially interdependent; (2) a doctrine
that the usages and hence meanings of cognate words in a language are likewise
for example "to work," "a worker," and "a work" in English, and to morphologically non-
evident ones, for example physis [nature] and nomos [custom] in Attic Greek); and (3) a
doctrine that the distinctive grammar of a language is internal to the usages and hence
meanings of the particular words in the language.43 These several forms of semantic
holism entail corresponding tasks for an interpreter (and furnish one specific rationale or
universal hermeneutics, a single theory of interpretation that will apply to all types of
interpretation of oral statements as to that of written, and so on. The conception of such a
project already had precedents earlier in the hermeneutical tradition, 44 and Herder had
Fourth, Schleiermacher further develops Herder's idea that one reason why linguistic
Schleiermacher sees this, more specifically, as due to the fact that where an author's rules
of word usage and hence meanings are idiosyncratic, rather than shared in common with
43Doctrine (1) is prominent in the hermeneutics lectures; doctrines (2) and (3) are especially prominent in
Schleiermacher's essay "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813), in German Romantic Criticism,
ed. A.L. Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982). Note that Schlegel had already developed a version of
doctrine (3) in his seminal work On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808).
44
See on this K. Vorländer, Geschichte der Philosophie, Band 3, 1. Teilband: Die Philosophie in der ersten
Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1975), pp. 58-9.
a whole linguistic community, the relevant actual uses of a word which are available to
serve the interpreter as his evidential basis for inferring to the rule of word usage that
governs them will usually be poor in both number and contextual variety, so that the
interpreter will need to have recourse to a further source of guidance, namely a general
A figure of at least equal, and probably greater, importance for the development of
hermeneutics is Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829). During the late 1790s, the period when
they both began working intensively on hermeneutics (and also translation theory),
Schlegel and Schleiermacher were close friends, even sharing accommodation for a time,
and there is a serious question as to which of them can claim the greater credit for the
think, turn mainly on that question. Rather, it rests on three contributions that he made
First, Schlegel makes the point that texts sometimes express meanings and thoughts,
not explicitly in any of their parts, but instead through their parts and the way in which
45
For further discussion of certain aspects of Schleiermacher's hermeneutical theory, see my "Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online), and "Schleiermacher's
Hermeneutics: Some Problems and Solutions."
46Concerning this question, see J. Körner, "Friedrich Schlegels 'Philosophie der Philologie,'" Logos, no. 17
(1928), and H. Patsch, "Friedrich Schlegels 'Philosophie der Philologie' und Schleiermachers frühe
Entwürfe zur Hermeneutik," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, no. 113 (1966).
these are put together to form a whole.47 Schlegel apparently believes that this feature is
especially characteristic of ancient texts,48 though not exclusive to them. 49 This point is
correct and extremely important.50 Consider, for example, Iliad, book 1. There Homer
communicates something like the following message, not by means of explicitly stating it
anywhere, but instead by means of artfully juxtaposing and contrasting, on the one hand,
the quarrel between the mortals Agamemnon and short-lived Achilles (which Nestor
attempts to mediate), with all its grandeur, passion, and seriousness, and, on the other
hand, the structurally similar but parody-like quarrel between the immortals Zeus and
Hera (which Hephaistos attempts to mediate), with all its ultimate triviality and even
ludicrousness: "You may well have supposed that the immortality and the other apparent
advantages enjoyed by the gods would be a huge boon to any being who possessed them,
raising their lot far above that of mere mortals like us, as indeed the gods' traditional
epithet 'blessed' implies, but in fact, if you think about it, since nothing would ever be
seriously at stake for such beings as it is for us mortals, their existence would be reduced
to a sort of unending triviality and meaninglessness, so that our lot is in a very real sense
sense in which, Herder was correct in thinking that linguistic interpretation needs to be
allowed for the imputation of inconsistencies and other forms of confusion to profane
texts, and Herder had extended that principle to sacred texts as well. Schlegel emphasizes
and develops the principle still more, not only stressing the importance of acknowledging
the presence of confusion in texts when it occurs, but also insisting that in such cases the
interpreter must seek to understand and explain it.52 This principle is valid and very
need for "charity" in interpretation which have become widespread in recent Anglophone
51That this message is not merely being read in here but is indeed intended by the poet is confirmed by a
famous episode in the Odyssey, book 5 in which the fair nymph Calypso invites Odysseus to stay with her
as her consort and become immortal as she is, but he (the most intelligent man in all of Homer, note!)
declines the invitation, choosing instead to return to Ithaca and his aging wife Penelope as a mere mortal
and eventually to die.
52Schlegel writes in about 1797: "In order to understand someone, one must first of all be cleverer than he,
then just as clever, and then also just as stupid. It is not enough that one understand the actual sense of a
confused work better than the author understood it. One must also oneself be able to know, to characterize,
and even construe the confusion even down to its very principles" (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe,
ed. E. Behler et al. [Munich: Schöningh, 1958-], vol. 18, p. 63).
53More questionable, though, is a philosophically ambitious general explanation which Schlegel sometimes
gives for the presence of, and consequent need to recognize, confusion in texts, namely that this is due to
the chaotic nature of the reality which texts aim to characterize: "Is this infinite world [of the texts of
science and art] not formed by the understanding out of unintelligibility or chaos?"; "It is a high and
perhaps the final step of intellectual formation to posit for oneself the sphere of unintelligibility and
confusion. The understanding of chaos consists in recognizing it" ("Über die Unverständlichkeit," in
Athenaeum, ed. A.W. and F. Schlegel [1798-1800], vol. III/2, pp. 350 f., 339).
and commendable agreement with Schlegel in insisting on a principle of this sort are
and thoughts in texts, and hence in their interpretation. The general idea that unconscious
mental processes occur already had a long history in German philosophy by Schlegel's
day: it had been a commonplace among the Rationalists, Kant had been strongly
committed to it, and so too had Herder, who had moreover discussed it in close
connection with questions of interpretation in his On the Cognition and Sensation of the
Human Soul (1778). However, it is above all Schlegel who develops this idea into a
principle that the interpreter should penetrate beyond an author's conscious meanings and
thoughts to include his unconscious ones as well: "Every excellent work . . . aims at more
than it knows";55 "In order to understand someone who only partially understands
himself, you first have to understand him completely and better than he himself does." 56
This is a very important idea.57 It has been pursued further in the present century by
Freud and his followers. However, their pursuit of it has perhaps done less to realize its
54Derrida's commitment to such a principle will be discussed later in this article. For Skinner's, see his
"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His
Critics, ed. J. Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
55 "Über Goethes Meister" (1798), Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2, p. 140.
56Athenaeum Fragments, p. 81. Schleiermacher uses the formula of understanding an author better than he
understands himself as well, but he means something much less ambitious by it – roughly, just that the sorts
of rules of word usage and grammar which the native speaker of a language masters unconsciously should
be known consciously by his interpreter – and is in general relatively hesitant to impute unconscious mental
processes to people.
57 Schlegel again has certain specific ways of developing it which are more questionable, though. In
particular, he conceives this situation less as a matter of properties that belong to an author than as a matter
of properties that belong to his text (a position which would no doubt find favor with recent French
theorists of "the death of the author," but perhaps not correctly), and that are moreover "infinite" or divine
in nature. (Concerning this aspect of Schlegel's position, see Patsch, "Friedrich Schlegels 'Philosophie der
Philologie' und Schleiermachers frühe Entwürfe zur Hermeneutik," pp. 456-9.)
full potential than to reveal its epistemological hazardousness, its encouragement of
arbitrariness due to the fact that the appropriate criteria for imputing unconscious
meanings and thoughts are even less clear than those for imputing conscious ones.58
Developing a proper methodology for, and application of, this aspect of interpretation
Another thinker who might be thought to have played an important role in the
Hegel can certainly claim considerable credit for taking over and further developing
some of Herder's most important principles concerning the scope and significance of
interpretation. As has already been mentioned: He takes over Herder's principles that non-
linguistic art (architecture, sculpture, painting, instrumental music, etc.) often expresses
meanings and thoughts, and hence stands in need of interpretation; and that the whole
mental life of a mature human being is implicitly linguistically articulated, and hence
stands in need of interpretation. He adds the principles that the socio-political institutions
58Derrida has aptly criticized certain Freudian readings of literature on the score of such arbitrariness. For a
helpful discussion of these criticisms, see Matthew Sharpe's treatment at Understanding Derrida, ed. J.
Reynolds and J. Roffe (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 67 ff.
59 As in the case of Schlegel's first point, it might be thought that this third point violates or stands in
tension with Herder's principles in the philosophy of language that meaning is word usage and that thought
is essentially dependent on and bounded by language. However, once again this need not be the case. For it
could be that the unconscious meanings and thoughts in question are always ones which an author has the
linguistic capacity to express (as Lacan indeed seems to hold).
which he calls "Objective Spirit" express meanings and thoughts and hence stand in need
mental life, do so too. And he accordingly espouses a richer version of Herder's principle
that the central task of the discipline of history is an interpretive one. In addition, he
adopts a form of Herder's principle that interpreting (historical and cultural) others is
essential for a full self-understanding, both as making possible insight into what is
distinctive and what universal in one's own outlook, and as enabling one to comprehend
But Hegel might also be thought to have achieved important progress on the question
of the very nature of interpretation itself. For he makes two moves in this area which
sharply contradict previous theorists of hermeneutics and which have been extremely
(1) Prior to Hegel hermeneutic theorists assumed that the meaning of a text or
discourse was as objective a matter as any other, in particular that it was independent of
whatever interpretations of the text or discourse might have taken place since – and that
the interpreter's task was therefore to recapture such an original meaning, which in
particular required resisting frequent temptations to falsely assimilate it to his own (or
other more familiar) meanings and thoughts. Hegel often seems to hold otherwise,
however, to embrace the assimilation of past meanings to one's own meanings and
thoughts. And this Hegelian position has been warmly praised and imitated by
Gadamer.60
60See H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2002), especially pp. 165-9. As Gadamer
notes, Hegel holds this position in the "Religion" chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), for
example.
(2) As we have seen, Herder had argued that the expression of meanings and thoughts
by non-linguistic art is always in fact parasitic on the artist's capacity to express them
linguistically. Hegel denies this, however – in particular arguing that ancient Egyptian
architecture and ancient Greek sculpture already expressed meanings and thoughts (of a
broadly religious nature) which were not yet linguistically expressible by the cultures in
question.61 This position of Hegel's was subsequently taken over by the later Dilthey
(who, having begun his career more favorable to a position like Herder's, apparently
absorbed this position of Hegel's while working on his classic study of the young Hegel,
Exciting as these two moves are, and influential as they have been, I strongly suspect
that they are both errors. Having argued this case at some length elsewhere,62 I shall
Concerning move (1), Hegel seems to rest his case for this on three main arguments:
(a) All past meanings and thoughts, when interpreted strictly, turn out to be implicitly
thoughts instead.
61 See especially Hegel's Aesthetics, tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
62See my "Hegel and Hermeneutics," and "Hegel and Some (Near) Contemporaries: Narrow or Broad
Expressivism?"
(b) All past meanings and thoughts can be seen to have been implicitly teleologically
directed towards the achievement of Hegelian meanings and thoughts in the modern
world.
(c) All mental conditions, including in particular all acts of meaning, are constituted by
that it is always possible, at least as long as a person is alive, for his "past" mental
these two principles together, it therefore seems that even the acts of meaning of a
dead individual from the past are always in principle open to modification by a later
communal tradition.
However, these arguments are problematic. Note, to begin with, that they seem to be
inconsistent with each other. In particular, (c) seems to be inconsistent with both (a) and
(b), for whereas (a) and (b) presuppose that there is such a thing as a determinate original
meaning (the point being merely that it always turns out to be self-contradictory, and to
But in addition, the arguments face separate problems. For one thing, it surely seems
very unlikely in the end that all past (i.e. pre-Hegelian) meanings and thoughts really
have been self-contradictory, or that they really have been teleologically directed towards
the achievement of Hegelian meanings and thoughts, as (a) and (b) claim. For another
thing, both the open-ended behaviorism and the social theory of meaning which serve as
the premises in argument (c) turn out to be very dubious. They both conflict sharply with
mental conditions may occur which receive no behavioral manifestation at all, and with a
commonsense intuition that, once a mental condition occurs, its character at the time to
subsequently; the latter with a commonsense intuition that if, for example, a cosmic
Robinson Crusoe, all alone in the universe, were to start using chalk marks in a
systematic fashion on his cave wall to keep a record of his goats and their numbers, then
those marks would have meaning. Moreover, the predecessor in the hermeneutical
tradition with whom Hegel is most taking issue in (1), namely Herder, had already
provided a plausible alternative theory of the nature of mental conditions, including acts
of meaning, which, unlike Hegel's theory, can do justice to all of the commonsense
intuitions just mentioned: mental conditions, including acts of meaning, are real "forces
[Kräfte]," in the sense of conditions of a subject that are apt to produce certain patterns of
(hence the "real") – or in other words, what a philosopher today might call real
"dispositions" to behavior.
Concerning move (2), Hegel's evidence for his thesis that certain forms of non-
linguistic art express meanings and thoughts which are not yet linguistically articulable
by the artist turns out to be dubious on closer inspection. In particular, while Hegel is
clearly right to think that ancient Egyptian architecture expressed religious meanings and
thoughts, his conviction that the architects or artists involved were not yet able to express
these linguistically seems to be little more than an error due to the fact that he and his
contemporaries are not yet able to identify any ancient Egyptian linguistic means for
expressing them because Egyptian hieroglyphics have not yet been properly deciphered
(Champollion only published his pathbreaking Dictionnaire and Grammaire in 1832, the
year after Hegel's death).63 And Hegel's conviction that Greek sculpture expressed
meanings and thoughts which were not yet linguistically expressible flies in the face of a
very plausible point which Herder had already made repeatedly: that the meanings and
thoughts which it expressed were drawn from past poetry, myth, and legend (i.e. from
linguistic sources).
In sum, while Hegel contributes significantly to the question of the scope and
significance of interpretation, his more dramatic ideas concerning the very nature of
Dilthey fails to make progress on the question of the nature of interpretation itself, but he
does make a very important contribution to the understanding of its scope and
significance.
63Hegel does mention Champollion's work in The Philosophy of History, but he presumably only knew his
preliminary publications and those only cursorily.
Dilthey's interest in hermeneutics, especially in Schleiermacher's version of it, began
Hermeneutics is from 1860) and remained pronounced throughout his career (for
and of the actual nature of interpretation turn out to be rather naïve and unsatisfactory.65
Where Dilthey really comes into his own is instead in connection with the question of
human sciences – including not only history but also such further disciplines as literary
64In the interim, he published the first volume of his Das Leben Schleiermachers in 1870, and continued
working on volume two (eventually published after his death in 1922). This material contains further
discussions of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics.
65 For instance, his account of Schleiermacher's theory of interpretation and his own theory of interpretation
tend to emphasize the psychological over the linguistic aspect of interpretation to a degree that is unfaithful
both to Schleiermacher's theory and to the actual nature of interpretation. Again, Dilthey conceives the
"divinatory" method which according to Schleiermacher's theory predominates on the psychological side of
interpretation as a sort of psychological self-projection by the interpreter onto the author or his text (see, for
example, "The Rise of Hermeneutics," pp. 248-9) – a conception which, while not entirely without a textual
basis in Schleiermacher (see Hermeneutics and Criticism, pp. 92-3), fails to do justice to Schleiermacher's
strong and proper emphasis, continuous with Herder's, on the need in interpretation to resist a pervasive
temptation to falsely assimilate the concepts, beliefs, etc. expressed by texts (from the remote past, for
example) to one's own (see ibid., p. 23). Again, Dilthey misconstrues Schleiermacher's theory as one that
advocates omitting the consideration of historical context from interpretation ("Schleiermacher's
Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics," p. 217) – an extraordinary
misunderstanding of Schleiermacher's principle that consideration of historical context should precede
interpretation proper (see, for example, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, p. 104), a principle
whose real purport was in fact exactly the opposite, namely to emphasize that the consideration of historical
context is a conditio sine qua non of any interpretation worthy of the name taking place at all. More
promising-looking at first sight is the mature Dilthey's shift in his own theory of interpretation away from
an exclusive focus on linguistic texts and discourse and towards a focus on a broader class of
"expressions" (see, for example, W. Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], pp. 168, 173, 230-1). However, the aspect of this shift that is
clearly correct, namely its insistence that not only linguistic texts and discourse but also, for instance,
architecture, sculpture, painting, and instrumental music express meanings and thoughts requiring
interpretation, was not new, having already been emphasized by Herder and Hegel (as previously
mentioned). And the aspect of it that is more novel, namely the claim, taken over from Hegel with slight
modification (unlike Hegel, who focuses on architecture and sculpture in this connection, Dilthey
especially focuses on instrumental music – see ibid., p. 245), that the additional forms of expression in
question are in some cases autonomous of language, arguably turns out to be mistaken (for an argument to
this effect, see my "Hegel and Some (Near) Contemporaries: Narrow or Broad Expressivism").
studies, classical scholarship, anthropology, and art history.66 His rationale for this
position has two sides – one negative, the other positive. Negatively, he is skeptical of
alternative accounts of the main task of the human sciences which have been offered. In
particular, he believes that the scope for discovering causes and causal laws in these
disciplines is severely limited;67 and he believes that grand systems which purport to
discover an overall meaning in history (Hegel's system, for example) are little more than
need for (interpretive) narration is more fundamental than that for (causal) explanation;69
and he argues that the interpretive achievements of the disciplines in question can enrich
our drab lives by acquainting us with types of mental experience that are very different
from our own.70 (This whole rationale for regarding interpretation as the central task of
the human sciences is heavily indebted to one that can already be found scattered through
Herder's works.71 )
interpretation is not a science but an art – that this interpretive function warrants a claim
66Over the course of his career he vacillates somewhat between assigning this role to interpretation/
hermeneutics and assigning it to psychology. However, because of the prominence of psychology in his
conception of interpretation itself, this is less of a vacillation than it may seem.
67See, for example, W. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989), pp. 88-9. Dilthey has a variety of specific reasons for this pessimism.
68 See, for example, ibid., pp. 145-7.
69 See, for example, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, pp. 261-2.
70See, for example, Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H.P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), pp. 228, 247, 257.
71 Concerning this, see my Herder: Philosophical Writings, editor's introduction, pp. xxv-xxviii.
that the disciplines in question have the status of genuine sciences, like the natural
sciences. His line of thought here does not usually question Schleiermacher's position that
the method of interpretation is sharply different from that of the natural sciences. Instead,
it is usually that, despite that difference in method, interpretation can still claim the status
of a science, namely for the following two reasons: (1) Its subject matter, the meaning of
"expressions," is as objective as that dealt with by the natural sciences (like almost
everyone in his day, Dilthey takes this for granted).72 (2) Due to the sorts of deep
variations in concepts, beliefs, etc. between different historical periods, cultures, and even
rigorous methods – just like natural science.73 However, Dilthey also on occasion
interpretation and the natural sciences, in particular suggesting that induction and
hypothesis are central to both –74 a position which is arguably more correct, and which
would furnish yet a third reason for according interpretation the status of science
72As objective, note, not simply objective – for in his conception of the subject matters of both
interpretation and the natural sciences Dilthey is strongly influenced by Kant's Copernican Revolution.
73 Thus in his Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey's explicit aim is to provide a methodology for the
"Historical School" (including Herder, the Romantics, and Boeckh) which "considered spiritual life as
historical through and through" (p. 48). And in "The Rise of Hermeneutics" he writes: "Interpretation and
its codification entered a new stage with the Renaissance. Because one was separated by language, living
conditions, and nationality from classical and Christian antiquity, interpretation became even more than in
ancient Rome a matter of transposing oneself into an alien spiritual life through linguistic, factual, and
historical studies" (p. 242).
74
See, for example, "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant
Hermeneutics," pp. 98, 158; "The Rise of Hermeneutics," pp. 253-7.
*
A further important development in hermeneutics that occurred during roughly the same
period was the growth of what Paul Ricoeur has aptly called a "hermeneutics of
More precisely, the defining feature of a hermeneutics of suspicion is a thesis that the
evident surface meanings and thoughts which a person expresses (and perhaps also
certain aspects of his behavior which at first sight seem meaningless, for example bodily
for deeper meanings and thoughts which are in some measure hidden (even from the
person himself), which are quite different from and indeed often quite contrary to the
surface meanings and thoughts involved, and which the person has some sort of motive
for thus concealing (both from others and from himself). Three examples of such a
position are Marx's theory that ideologies are rooted in class interests; Nietzsche's theory
that Christian morality, with its overt emphasis on such ideals as "love" and "turning the
other cheek," is in fact motivated by hatred and ressentiment (resentment); and Freud's
theory that a broad range of both apparently meaningful and apparently meaningless
behaviors express unconscious motives and meanings. What warrants classifying such
theories as forms of hermeneutics is the fact that they offer not only deeper explanations
75P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1970).
of the surface meanings involved but deeper explanations in terms of underlying
meanings.
one too large and important to be dealt with in any detail here. Accordingly, I shall
hermeneutics of suspicion. Moreover, since it seems plausible to say that class interests
individuals who compose the classes in question, the theory arguably also carries
implications concerning the interests and motives of individuals.76 And this points
towards a level of the theory which makes it even more clearly a hermeneutics of
suspicion.
Consider, for example, what for Marx is the very paradigm of an ideology, namely
religious belief. Marx's full account of (Christian) religious belief seems to be roughly as
follows: religious belief serves ruling class interests by defusing the dissatisfactions of
the working class on whose oppression the ruling class depends; it does so, in particular,
by (1) representing the working class's dissatisfactions in this world as natural and
76 Cf. Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968), who argues persuasively that Marxism needs
to bridge the gap between socio-economic classes and individuals, and that it should therefore call on
auxiliary disciplines such as psychoanalysis in order to enable it to do so.
inevitable, part of the very order of things, 77 and (2) providing illusory compensations,
the level of (at least many) individual religious believers: that (at least in many cases)
when members of the ruling class hold religious beliefs they do so in part from an
which serves their own socio-economic interests at the expense of others'; and that (at
least in many cases) when members of the working class hold religious beliefs they do so
in part from an underlying, unacknowledged, and rather contrary wish thereby to see their
assumption that texts mean certain things but not others, and that there is therefore a clear
distinction between good and bad interpretation. This is the Nietzsche who in The
Antichrist (1888) champions "philology" in the sense of "the art of reading well – of
reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience,
delicacy, in the desire to understand,"78 claims such philology for himself and certain
other people who stand opposed to Christianity,79 but denies it to Christian theologians.80
77This side of Marx's theory ultimately owes much to the "Unhappy Consciousness" section of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit.
78 The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 635.
79 Ibid., pp. 600, 627-8.
80 Ibid., p. 635.
However, there are also certain strands in Nietzsche which seem to point towards a less
conventional position – for example, his early hostility to careful philology as inimical to
life in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life (1873), and his general
interpretations" (which presumably implies that in particular there are no facts about
Now to our main topic, Nietzsche's hermeneutics of suspicion. In works such as The
Gay Science (1882) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) Nietzsche prominently
develops all of the central theses of a hermeneutics of suspicion: that beneath a person's
superficial conscious meanings (and other behaviors) there lie deeper unconscious
meanings, that his superficial conscious meanings (and other behaviors) function as
representative-but-masking proxies for those deeper unconscious meanings, that the latter
are moreover typically contrary to the former, and that the person involved has motives
Furthermore, Nietzsche applies this general model in some very plausible and
interesting specific ways. For example, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues that
Jesus's explicit, conscious message of love in fact concealed and represented at a deeper,
less conscious level a quite contrary motive of hatred and revenge (directed especially
against an oppressing Greek and Roman imperial order) that he shared with his Jewish
81 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), par. 481.
82 I shall not argue the case here, but for some hints as to why I find his latter position unattractive, see my
criticisms of Gadamer later in this article.
83
See especially F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), pars. 333, 354; On the
Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 57-8, 84-5.
forebears and contemporaries –84 a thesis which close scrutiny of the New Testament
Finally, a few observations about Freud. As I have already implied, Freud's hypothesis
of the unconscious, and even of unconscious meanings, was by no means new with him
(nor, in fairness, did he claim that it was).86 Indeed, as we just saw, even the additional
features of his theory which turn it into a real hermeneutics of suspicion – his theses that
masking proxies for those deeper unconscious meanings, that the latter are moreover
typically contrary to the former, and that the person involved has motives for thus
claim to real importance in this area largely rests on the plausibility of his specific
explanations (the worry, to put it pointedly, would be that he has merely added to a
In that connection, the picture is in fact very mixed. Generally speaking, the more
ambitious Freud's theory becomes, either in terms of the universality of its claims or in
terms of their surprise, the less plausible it tends to be. For example, his position in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that all dreams are explicable in terms of wish-
poetry in The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming (1908); as does his position in The
role in human psychology;89 as does his position in The Future of an Illusion (1927) that
all religion arises from an infantile longing for a protective father; as does his position in
Moses and Monotheism (1939) that the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular arose out
of, and replays, the trauma of a prehistorical murder of a "primal father" by other male
members of his tribe. By contrast, where Freud's theory becomes more flexible and
where his explanations of "parapraxes" such as slips of the tongue or pen and acts of
forgetting are quite various in nature, and usually quite intuitive (for instance, in terms of
repressed sexual impulses and feelings of aggression) – they are proportionally more
plausible.
phenomena which are usually seen as expressing meanings and thoughts and hence as
interpretable (for example, literature), but also many phenomena which are not usually
88 He does recognize the most obvious class of prima facie counterexamples: anxiety dreams. But his
attempts to explain these in conformity with his theory – see The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 168 ff.,
595-6 – are unconvincing. And as Jonathan Lear has pointed out, he seems eventually to have conceded
that such dreams constitute genuine exceptions (J. Lear, Freud [New York and London: Routledge, 2005],
pp. 110, 154 ff.). A less obvious, but perhaps no less important, class of prima facie counterexamples
consists of what might be called neutral dreams: dreams which seem not to relate to wishes either positively
or negatively.
89
Cf. Lear, Freud, pp. 180-3. Freud's theory of the "Oedipus Complex" probably in the end tells us a lot
more about Freud's own troubled relations with his parents than about the human condition generally.
seen in that light at all (for example, neurotic behaviors, parapraxes, and what we would
today call body language), or which are at least usually seen as expressing meanings and
thoughts only in an obvious and trivial way and hence as scarcely requiring or deserving
interpretation (for example, dreams and jokes). 90 This move significantly extends a
At this point in history, namely the early twentieth century, real progress in hermeneutics
more or less comes to an end in Germany, and indeed in continental Europe as a whole, it
seems to me (in keeping with a precipitous decline in the quality of German philosophy
generally at the time). However, there are several further continental thinkers who are
commonly thought to have made major contributions to the subject, including three who
are bound together by ties both of influence and of shared views: Martin Heidegger
fundamental view which they all share, and which they can be commended for sharing, is
90 Concerning jokes, see Freud's The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905).
Martin Heidegger has had a strong influence on the course of hermeneutics in the
twentieth century. But the value of his contributions to the subject has been greatly
exaggerated, in my view.
One of Heidegger's key ideas, developed in Being and Time (1927), paragraphs 31-4, is
that the understanding of meanings, and hence also the possession of language, are
have already seen, this (certainly very plausible and important) point essentially just
Another of Heidegger's key ideas, found in the same paragraphs of Being and Time,
develops an aspect of that first idea in a more specific way: fundamental and pervasive in
underpins explicit linguistic understanding, and which is involved for example even in
cases of perceptual or active engagement with the world where explicit linguistic
articulation is absent. Versions or variants of this idea have been fundamental to other
particular those of Rudolf Bultmann and Gadamer. Now it seems likely that this principle
is correct in some form, and also important. In particular, as I hinted earlier, one should
be skeptical about what is likely to be the main source of theoretical resistance to it,
psychologism about meaning, which denies that psychological states or processes play
any essential role in semantic understanding, on the grounds that semantic understanding
instead consists purely in grasping a quasi-Platonic sense (Frege) or in possessing
much less original than it may seem. In particular, it is similar to Herder's quasi-
empiricist principle in the philosophy of language (described earlier). Its claim to novelty
as compared to Herder's principle rests mainly on two features: (1) Heidegger, and
that bridges or transcends it). (2) Heidegger, and following him Gadamer, would claim
world than of theoretical contemplation of it, more fundamentally a matter of the world
which can seem to contrast sharply with Herder's conception in his Treatise on the Origin
language.92 However, it is doubtful that these two features really constitute a major
difference from and advance over Herder. Note to begin with that they would at least
leave Heidegger and Gadamer's position belonging to the same general family as
Herder's, constituting only a sort of family dispute within it. Moreover, feature (1) rests
on a rather questionable philosophical theory. And feature (2) is arguably much closer to
91While the later Wittgenstein's arguments that psychological states and processes are never sufficient for
semantic understanding are extremely strong, his arguments that they are never necessary are far weaker.
92 See "Treatise on the Origin of Language," in Herder: Philosophical Writings, especially pp. 87-9.
Herder's position than it may seem. For Herder's position in the Treatise on the Origin of
Language in fact seems to be the very similar one that the detached "awareness" or
background of active engagement with the world which human beings share in common
Finally, Heidegger is also famous for espousing a principle that, especially when
principle hovers between two ideas, one of which is valid and important, the other of
which is more questionable, but neither of which is original. One thing Heidegger has in
mind here is a version of Schlegel's insight that a text often conveys meanings and
thoughts which it does not express explicitly.94 That is a valid and important point, but
unoriginal. Another thing Heidegger has in mind, though, is something more like a
principle that one should interpret texts in the light of what one takes to be the correct
position on the issues with which it deals and as attempting to express that position, even
if there is no real textual evidence that the author had the meanings or thoughts in
question in mind, and indeed even if there is textual evidence that he did not. This idea is
Hegel (as discussed earlier). Concerning its value, much depends on exactly how it is
93M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), p. 141.
94 See ibid., pp. 140-1.
95For example, this is the force of Kant's famous remark in the Critique of Pure Reason concerning the
interpretation of Plato that we often "understand an author better than he has understood himself" (A314).
(This slogan would subsequently be taken over by Schlegel and Schleiermacher, but in each case with a
significant modification of its meaning.)
conceived, and exactly how executed. Provided that it is not meant to exclude more
textually faithful forms of interpretation, that the person who applies it is clear about
what he is doing (both in general and at specific points in his interpretation), and makes
this equally clear to his readers, and that the quality of his own opinions concerning the
subject matter involved is sufficiently high to make the exercise worthwhile, then there is
probably no harm in it, and there may even be a little good. 96 However, in practice these
conditions are rarely met, and in particular it is far from clear that Heidegger himself
meets them.
in Truth and Method (1960) and elsewhere are certainly learned and thoughtful, and can
be read with profit. But what is distinctive in his position is, I think, misguided and
indeed baneful.
Gadamer rejects the traditional assumption that texts have an original meaning which
something that only arises in the interaction between texts and an indefinitely expanding
96
For some similar thoughts delivered with greater enthusiasm, see R.B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty
Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 3.
seek to recapture a supposed original meaning, and instead holds that it must and should
Despite the strong generic similarity between this position and the Hegelian one
discussed earlier which Gadamer holds up as its inspiration, Gadamer's arguments for it
A central part of Gadamer's case consists in a large family of urgings that we should
etc., to various other sorts of activities from which, prima facie at least, and almost
These Gadamerian urgings hardly amount to an argument, however. Rather, they are just
Gadamer does also offer several somewhat more substantial arguments, though, in
(a) Both in the case of linguistic and non-linguistic art and in the case of linguistic
texts and discourse more generally, interpretations change over time, and these
changing interpretations are internal to the meaning of the art, text, or discourse in
question, so that there is after all no such thing as an original meaning independent
(b) The original meaning of artistic and linguistic expressions from the past is always
(c) The original meaning is something "dead," something no longer of any possible
interest to us.99
particular.100
But how convincing are these arguments? A first point to note is that arguments (a)-(c)
seem to be inconsistent with each other: argument (a) says that there is no such thing as
an "original meaning," whereas arguments (b) and (c) say that there is (but that it is
unknowable and "dead"); argument (b) says that it is unknowable, whereas argument (c)
97 See, for example, H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 339-40, 388.
98See, for example, ibid., pp. 246 ff., 293, 301-2, 265-307; also, H.-G. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), vol. 2, p. 475; vol. 8, p. 377.
99 See, for example, Truth and Method, p. 167; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, p. 377. Gadamer sometimes
alludes in this connection to Nietzsche's famous argument along similar lines in The Use and Disadvantage
of History for Life (see, for example, Truth and Method, p. 304; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, p. 326; vol. 8, p.
377). The debt to Nietzsche here is indeed probably a good deal greater than Gadamer lets on – being
downplayed by him not so much from a wish to seem more original than he is (he is often generous in
crediting influences, for example Hegel and Heidegger) but rather from embarrassment over Nietzsche's
association with Nazism. (As we shall see, Derrida subsequently repays Gadamer for this obfuscation of an
intellectual influence.)
100See, for example, Truth and Method, pp. 199-200, 230 ff. Here again there may well be a suppressed
debt to Nietzsche, namely to his perspectivism. Anglophone interpreters have tended, misleadingly, to deny
or downplay this relativistic aspect of Gadamer's position (see, for instance, several of the articles in The
Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. R.J. Dostal [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]).
implies that it is knowable (but "dead," of no possible interest to us). However, since the
arguments also face separate problems, I shall not here dwell further on this problem of
Argument (a) seems to be implicitly incoherent. Consider the case of texts, for
example. To say that interpretations of a text change over time is presumably to say,
roughly, that the author of the text meant such and such, that there then arose an
interpretation A which meant something a bit different from that, that there then arose a
further interpretation B which meant something a bit different again, and so on. In other
(indeed, a whole series of original meanings, one belonging to the text, and then one
Gadamer has no real argument to begin with for his surely very counterintuitive claim
occur, and that authors often expect and even welcome this, by no means suffice to
establish it.
Argument (b) runs into an epistemological problem. For if one were always locked into
a modifying fore-understanding, then how could one even know that other perspectives
101Gadamer's strange suggestion at one point that the interpreter's contribution always gets reabsorbed into
the meaning and so vanishes (Truth and Method, p. 473) is evidently a symptom of this incoherence in his
position. What he is really trying to say here is that there both is and is not a reinterpretation involved, but
he masks this contradiction from himself and his readers by casting it in the less transparently self-
contradictory form of a process of precipitation followed by reabsorption.
undergoing modification existed?102 Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, this sort of
whether in that case it would even make sense to speak of such perspectives.103
would be likely to find attractive is that the conception that fore-understanding is internal
which we owe to Frege and Wittgenstein. But, as I have already mentioned, such anti-
psychologism seems quite dubious on reflection, so it is not on this ground that I would
question Gadamer's assumption. Nor would I question its idea that fore-understandings
are historically specific (that too seems true). Rather, I would suggest that what is really
I would suggest that Herder's conception that Einfühlung ("feeling one's way in") plays
an essential role in the interpretation of texts from the past already quite properly pointed
towards an ability which we possess to perform just this sort of imaginative feat, and
102In one formulation of his position which especially prompts this sort of objection, Gadamer writes that
"the discovery of the historical horizon is always already a fusion of horizons" (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2,
p. 475). My brief statement of the objection here is meant to be suggestive rather than probative. For a
fuller statement of an objection of this sort against a relevantly similar position of Wittgenstein's, see my
Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 168-72.
103 See ibid., especially pp. 169-83. The argument is fairly complicated, so I shall not go into it here.
towards the essential contribution that exercising this ability makes to our attainment of
Argument (c) is one of the weakest parts of Gadamer's case. Far from inevitably being
"dead," or of no possible interest to us, the original meanings of texts and discourse from
the past, and also from contemporary others, can be of great interest to us, and for many
different reasons (a number of which had already been pointed out by Gadamer's
predecessors). One reason (which Herder and Dilthey had already pointed out) is simply
that the discovery of such meanings and of the views which they articulate satisfies our
intellectual curiosity and enriches our experience. Another reason (again already
important to Herder) is that it both expresses and promotes our respect and sympathy for
others. Another reason (again already important to Herder) is that it promises to acquaint
us with concepts, convictions, values, techniques, and so on which can help us to improve
our own in various ways. Another reason (again already important to Herder) is that it
how it arose. And no doubt there are many further good reasons as well. 104
Finally, argument (d) is unconvincing as well. One problem with it lies in the well-
known fact that the thesis of relativism seems to run into problems of self-contradiction
in connection with the awkward question of whether this thesis is itself of merely relative
validity. Gadamer touches on this problem at various points, but his answers to it are
104Insofar as Nietzsche's case from The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life lies behind Gadamer's
argument here, a full response would need to include some additional points (for example, concerning the
actual twentieth-century results of the attempt to enliven German culture by sacrificing scrupulous human
science in favor of new mythologies).
naïve and unconvincing.105 Another problem with the argument is that, contrary to
comparison with other subject matters, such as those dealt with by the natural sciences,
and consequently resistant to the sorts of methods which can legitimately be used in
of the natural sciences, this argument would leave meaning no less (if also no more)
In short, Gadamer fails to provide any good argument at all for his surely very
it is false, then it is so in a way which is likely to prove baneful for interpretive practice,
in that it actively encourages (as allegedly inevitable and hence appropriate) just the sort
others to the interpreter's own which it was one of the most important achievements of
105In one place (Truth and Method, p. 344) he concedes that a self-contradiction arises, but responds that
this merely shows the weakness of the sort of "reflection" that reveals this and objects to it! In another
place he argues that the thesis of relativism is not "propositional" but merely something of which one has
"consciousness," so that it and its own subject matter are "not at all on the same logical level" (ibid., p.
448). But surely, the alleged circumstance that what is involved here is merely a consciousness that
relativism is true, rather than, say, an explicit assertion that it is true, would not diminish either the fact or
the unacceptability of the self-contradiction one whit.
106
Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary. See, for example, recently R.B. Pippin, "Gadamer's
Hegel," in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, p. 236.
107It should be mentioned here that the later Heidegger's continued commitment to the principle of doing
"violence" to texts, Gadamer's denial to texts of an original meaning and consequent encouragement of
interpretations which adapt them to the interpreter's own purposes, and also the similar position held by the
deconstructionist Paul de Man have a much more sinister aspect as well. All of these men were Nazis or
Nazi collaborators who had left a trail of embarrassing pronouncements behind them during the Nazi
period. How convenient that they develop general methodologies of interpretation that warrant the
reinterpretation of such pronouncements to their own current advantage and taste!
*
hermeneutics is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. 108 However, here again
Derrida encapsulates his theory of meaning and interpretation in such concepts as that
of an open-ended "iterability" (a word which he uses in the double sense of other and
again) and "différance" (a word which he uses in the double sense of differing and
deferring).109 In its synchronic aspect, this is largely just a cryptic way of repeating
Saussure's point that meaning only arises through a system of linguistic oppositions.110 In
its diachronic aspect, it is largely just a cryptic way of repeating Gadamer's conception
108One of Derrida's most explicit general discussions of interpretation is "Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences," in J. Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), but many of his other works bear on this subject as well.
109For the concept of "iterability," see especially the essay "Signature, Event, Context," in J. Derrida,
Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For the concept of "différance," see
especially the essay "Différance," in the same volume and J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
110 See especially Writing and Difference, p. 280.
(re)interpretation.111 Derrida provides even less of an argument for this surely very
Derrida also has a number of more interesting ideas about interpretation, though. One
of these is a thesis that philosophical texts typically contain hidden contradictions, which
interpretation should reveal (Derrida famously calls this revelation "deconstruction," and
practices it on many philosophers from the tradition, including for example Rousseau and
Hegel).113 This thesis is probably true of many texts, including philosophical ones, and is
important. The thesis is not new; as we saw, Schlegel had already articulated it. But
Derrida's commitment to it is at least superior to dubious contrary ideas about the need
for interpretive "charity," and in particular the need to avoid imputing logical
111See especially Of Grammatology, pp. 66-7, 163, 296, 304, 311-14. There can be no doubt about the
intellectual debt to Gadamer here: like Gadamer, Derrida stresses the open-endedness of this process (p.
163), takes the re-presentation of such things as theatrical works as a model (p. 304), even has a version of
Gadamer's strange idea that the interpreter's contribution always gets reabsorbed into the meaning and so
vanishes (p. 313-14), and also in effect repeats Gadamer's sharp contrast between this whole model of
interpretation and Romantic hermeneutics' allegedly misguided contrary conception of interpretation as the
recapturing of an original meaning (Writing and Difference, p. 292). This raises an ugly question of
plagiarism. For, to my knowledge, Derrida nowhere acknowledges this intellectual debt to Gadamer. One
might have been tempted to ascribe that sin of omission charitably to a political motive, namely aversion to
Gadamer's conservatism and association with Nazism. However, this explanation seems implausible, given
that Derrida is far from shy about giving credit to Heidegger, a figure who is even more conservative and
tainted by Nazism.
112 This state of affairs also carries negative consequences for Derrida's central thesis in Of Grammatology
that writing is primordial. This thesis is far more ambitious than the sound and important point that the
introduction of writing not only itself involved significant novelties, such as the spacing of words, but also
thereby affected speech. And its greater ambition makes it prima facie absurd. How does Derrida propose to
defuse this prima facie absurdity? One strategy to which he resorts is that of more or less completely
redefining "writing" (see, for example, pp. 54-5 on "writing in the colloquial sense," "a vulgar concept of
writing" as contrasted with Derrida's "reform[ed] . . . concept of writing," which he sometimes calls arche-
writing). But this strategy is altogether intellectually boring, rendering the thesis that writing is primordial
merely a gratuitously confusing way of saying something quite different and much less surprising.
However, a more sophisticated strategy to which Derrida sometimes appeals is rather to exploit Gadamer's
theory about the nature of meaning and interpretation: since we end up in history with writing and speech
influenced by writing, this retroactively becomes internal to the nature of all earlier language use as well
(see especially pp. 314-15). But if Gadamer's theory is mistaken, then even this more interesting of
Derrida's two strategies for defending his prima facie absurd thesis that writing is primordial fails.
113For examples of this approach at work, see Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy, and Writing and
Difference.
inconsistencies to texts, which are currently widespread among Anglophone philosophers
Another interesting idea of Derrida's (shared with several other French theorists
Foucault) concerns what is sometimes called the "death of the author," or in other words
and his intentions.115 This idea involves a huge exaggeration; much of what is expressed
counterweight to equally one-sided author-centered positions which ignore the large role
played in texts by inherited linguistic conventions, borrowed formulas and tropes, and so
on. Avoiding both the Scylla and the Charybdis here – or in other words, recognizing that
texts involve a synthesis of "universality" and "individuality" – had in fact already been a
this, he sometimes mainly means recognizing the (alleged) situation that there is never a
discrete, pre-given meaning to interpret because of the sort of situation that Saussure and
Gadamer had described.117 But sometimes he rather means reading texts with a focus on
114Such ideas in the Anglophone tradition often stem in part from a sort of double error: a principle,
espoused by many philosophers in one version or another (including Aristotle, Kant, the early Wittgenstein,
and Quine), to the effect that it is impossible to think inconsistently; plus an inference from that principle to
the inevitable erroneousness of imputing inconsistencies to texts. This is a double error, first, because the
principle in question is mistaken (see on this my Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar, ch. 5), and
second, because even if it were true, it would only plausibly apply to explicit inconsistencies, whereas the
ones which need to be imputed to texts are normally implicit ones.
115 See, for example, Writing and Difference, pp. 226-7.
116 See on this M. Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985).
117 See especially "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."
aspects which the texts themselves present as only marginally important (for example,
aspects which carry an implicit political or social ideology). 118 Such readings can indeed
A far more important contribution to the development of hermeneutics than any made by
Heidegger, Gadamer, or Derrida is due to several recent theorists from the Anglophone
world, especially John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960)119 and Quentin Skinner (1941-
present).120 The contribution in question lies in their recognition of the central role that
illocutionary force plays in texts and discourse, and in their interpretation.121 (This role
can be seen as a further form of vindication of Herder's basic intuition that linguistic
In order to see that interpretation requires the identification not only of linguistic
meanings but also of something like illocutionary forces, consider the following example
(loosely borrowed from Skinner). If I encounter a stranger by a frozen lake who says to
me "The ice is thin over there," I may understand the meaning of his words perfectly, and
118Closely related to this strategy (or perhaps really just a special form of it) is Derrida's strategy in the
interpretation of visual art of focusing on such seemingly marginal features of an artwork as the
"subjectile" (i.e. the material medium), the "trait" (e.g. the brushstroke), and the "parergon" (e.g. the frame,
the title, or the signature). For a good account of this, see J. Wolfreys' discussion of Derrida's theory of art
in Understanding Derrida, ch. 10.
119
See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1955) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1975).
120 See Skinner's essays in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics.
121 The division of labor here was roughly that Austin invented the concept of "illocutionary force" and saw
its relevance for interpretation in a general way, whereas Skinner then brought it to bear on the
interpretation of historical texts in particular.
yet still not fully comprehend what he has said – for in order to do that I would in
addition need to know whether he was simply informing me, warning me, joking (for
I say "something like" illocutionary force because in order usefully to appeal to this
concept originally introduced by Austin,122 one probably needs to drop from it certain
implications that he built into it. In particular, one probably needs to drop his restriction
of it to cases where there are corresponding "performatives" (it does not seem helpful to
include here only such linguistic acts as promising, telling, and commanding, but to
exclude such linguistic acts as joking and insinuating, simply on the grounds that one can
promise, tell, and command by saying "I promise," "I tell [you]," and "I command [you]"
but one cannot joke by saying "I joke" or insinuate by saying "I insinuate").123 And one
probably also needs to drop his inclusion of "uptake" by other people in his definition of
an illocutionary act (there is indeed a sense of, for example, "to tell" in which it is a
success word, so that one only tells someone if he actually hears and understands what
one tells him, but there is surely also another and equally important sense of the word in
which one may tell someone even if he fails to hear and/or fails to understand). 124 The
really crucial point is just that there are clearly aspects of any intelligible writing or
well in order for full comprehension of the writing or discourse in question to occur
(aspects which can at least be defined by giving examples, such as the ones already
However, there are also some important further features of this situation which have
been overlooked or even denied by the theorists mentioned and their followers, and
which complicate the interpreter's task here still more. One of these is the fact that,
despite Austin's and especially John Searle's resistance to the point,125 but in accordance
seems to be indefinitely large.127 This raises the prospect, and the potential challenge, for
unfamiliar, and which he therefore needs not merely to select correctly from a range of
already understood types but to interpret in the first place in order for its selection to
become possible.
A second further feature of the situation which complicates the interpreter's task is that
in some cases the divergence of a newly encountered illocutionary force from any with
which he is yet familiar may take the specific, subtle form of similarity to one with which
he is already familiar but with significant differences (so that he might eventually be
inclined to say, not that the alien people involved employ an entirely unfamiliar type of
illocutionary force, but rather that they, for example, have a slightly difference practice
125 See Austin, How to Do Things with Words, and especially Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts."
126 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), par. 23.
127
For a defense of Wittgenstein's position on this subject against Searle's attack on it, see my "A
Wittgensteinian Anti-Platonism" (forthcoming).
and concept of "assertion" than ours).128 In its own way, this feature of the situation may
be even more challenging for an interpreter than the former one, because it insidiously
tempts him to falsely assimilate the illocutionary force in question to one with which he
is already familiar.
These two additional challenges facing the interpreter in connection with illocutionary
forces are precisely analogous to ones which Herder and Schleiermacher already
The points just made constitute a potential new horizon for hermeneutics. Let me
The linguist Roman Jakobson has written that "a faculty of speaking a given language
implies a faculty of talking about this language . . . a 'metalinguistic' operation." 129 This is
probably not strictly correct; in particular, "implies" seems too strong a word, since one
128For an argument that this situation in fact occurs historically, see ibid., where I draw in this connection
on some of my work in ancient philosophy concerned with the nature of Pyrrhonism.
129R. Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. L. Venuti
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 115.
130Think, for example, of some of the later Wittgenstein's primitive language-games in the Philosophical
Investigations and elsewhere.
Discourse and texts often make explicit use of semantic terms: we talk or write about
the specific meanings of words, about words being meaningful rather than meaningless,
about words sharing the same meaning (being synonyms) rather than having different
meanings, and so on. But this is only the explicit tip of a larger iceberg, for semantic
concepts also play a large implicit role in the construction of discourse and texts, and (at
the receiving end) in their interpretation. One example of this is the common occurrence
of puns and other word-plays in texts such as Homer's Odyssey (with its famous "Nobody
[Outis]" episode, for instance) or Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In order to compose
such features of a text the author needs to think fairly consciously about the meanings of
the words involved as such, and in order fully to understand him an interpreter needs to
order to compose such a text, an author frequently needs to look for (near-)synonyms so
needs to recognize that this is what is going on, and that, for instance, the author's shift in
two adjacent lines from one word to another, nearly synonymous word therefore
primarily has this sort of aesthetic significance rather than a semantic one. Another
example is virtually any discourse or text which strives for a high degree of semantic or
poetic precision (Shakespeare's plays are again a case in point). For this requires the
author to reflect on and compare the semantic properties of various alternative words
which are available to him, and full interpretation of such a text requires the interpreter to
sameness of meaning / difference of meaning, etc. common to all historical periods and
cultures, then this situation would present only a modest challenge to an interpreter. But
such concepts in fact vary significantly from period to period, culture to culture, and
perhaps even individual to individual.131 And this makes the situation a lot more
challenging. For it raises the prospect that, in addition to the sort of first-order
and the closest concepts initially available to the interpreter which has been recognized as
a major challenge for interpretation at least since Ernesti, there will also sometimes be a
implicitly articulate the discourse or text. Consequently, in order fully to understand the
alien discourse or text in such cases, the interpreter will need (in addition to his other
tasks) to recapture the author's distinctive semantic concepts and then construe the
Another new (or at least fairly new) horizon for hermeneutics involves a further
expansion of the scope of interpretation, beyond its traditional focus on human language-
use. So far this article has been exclusively concerned with human beings. But what
about animals? In recent years a wealth of fascinating research has been done into animal
language-use, which turns out to be surprisingly extensive and sophisticated, both among
certain animals in their natural state (for example, vervet monkeys with their
131For an elaboration of this point, see my "A Wittgensteinian Anti-Platonism," where I draw in this
connection on some of my work in ancient philosophy concerned with Socrates.
differentiated alarm cries)132 and among certain animals trained in language-use by
human beings (for example, bonobo apes).133 Philosophers have for the most part been
slow and reluctant to recognize this situation, tending instead (in continuity with a long
philosophical tradition that was originally rooted in religious assumptions) to look for
reasons to deny that animal language is real language, or at least to claim that it is
essentially different from human language.134 However, the reasons they have produced
have not been convincing (most of the criteria they have proposed in order to justify the
animal language-use or in most cases both). We therefore probably need to recognize that
some animals do indeed use language.135 And that of course implies a corresponding task
In addition, reflection on the case of animals suggests the need for another sort of
nature of interpretation. Animals' capacities for classifying perceptual experiences and for
certain sorts of intellection (for instance, recognizing predators or prey) often far outstrip
their capacities for linguistic expression (even when they do happen to use language),
132See D.L. Cheney and R.M. Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
133
See S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S.G. Shanker, T.J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
134 Two examples of this attitude are Jonathan Bennett and Charles Taylor.
135
For a little more discussion of this whole subject, see my "Gods, Animals, and Artists: Some Problem
Cases in Herder's Philosophy of Language."
136Nor should it be assumed that the fact that animal language-use is going to be in some sense more
"primitive" than ours ensures that such a task will be an easy or trivial one. As can perhaps be seen from
our experience in anthropology with attempting to interpret more "primitive" language-use by other human
beings, if anything the opposite may well turn out to be the case.
instead finding manifestation in other forms of behavior.137 A similar point applies to
human infants (as Jean Piaget and his followers have shown). We should arguably resist
the temptation to describe such cases as ones of meaning or thinking, in the strict sense
(hence avoiding conflict with Herder's first two principles in the philosophy of language).
But, if so, then we at least need to acknowledge that they are very similar to meaning and
thinking, and moreover that they constitute the evolutionary and individual foundations
for these (we might therefore describe them as proto-meaning and proto-thinking).
Accordingly, they also call for a type of interpretation (or if one prefers to reserve this
term for the identification of meanings and thoughts proper, then "interpretation") in
many ways similar to that which we apply in connection with language. For example, if a
certain animal's regular behavior of fleeing at the sight of predators provides evidence of
its possession of some sort of proto-concept of a predator, then questions can be pursued
concerning the more exact nature of that proto-concept, for instance concerning its exact
extension (precisely which types of animals, or which types of animals in which types of
situations, will provoke this flight response and which not?). And a similar point applies
to human infants.
interpretation itself and as it concerns the scope and significance of interpretation – is still
137
For a broad-ranging and rich discussion of both linguistic and non-linguistic cases, see D.R. Griffin,
Animal Thinking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Animal Minds (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).