Hermeneutics (Philosophical)

Hermeneutics is the theory of understanding and interpretation. In Gadamer's *Truth and Method* it is decisively transformed: from an art or technique of correct interpretation (the older theological, legal, and philological hermeneutics; Schleiermacher's "universal hermeneutics"; Betti's general theory) into a philosophical account of understanding as such — understanding not as one activity of a subject among others but, after Heidegger, as the mode of being of human existence, "the basic being-in-motion of Dasein that constitutes its finitude and historicity." Philosophical hermeneutics asks the transcendental question "how is understanding possible?" and is descriptive-ontological, not normative-methodological: it describes what always happens in understanding rather than legislating how to do it correctly.

Key Points

Not a methodology. "A philosophical theory of hermeneutics is not a methodology" (Supp. I, p. 535). Gadamer is "describing what is the case," not "proposing a method." Its concern is "not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing."
Universal. Hermeneutics is "a universal aspect of philosophy, and not just the methodological basis of the so-called human sciences" — because man's relation to the world is "absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and hence intelligible." Everything understandable is accessible to interpretation. See linguisticality.
The hermeneutic circle, ontologized. The circle of whole and part is not a vicious or merely methodological circle but "an element of the ontological structure of understanding": the interpreter projects a fore-meaning continually revised "by the things themselves" (Heidegger's fore-structure). See The hermeneutic circle below.
The fore-conception of completeness (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit): we presuppose a text's unity of meaning and its truth, understanding its content first and the author's psychology only secondarily.
The "in-between" (das Zwischen) is the true locus of hermeneutics — neither in the interpreter's subjectivity nor in the object, but in the polarity of familiarity and strangeness in which understanding happens.
Application is intrinsic to understanding; the Sache (subject-matter) is what understanding is about; understanding is an event of participation in tradition, not the reconstruction of an author's mind. See application-anwendung, hermeneutic-experience.

What the Concept Does

Philosophical hermeneutics performs a relocation of the entire question of interpretation. The older hermeneutics (and the human sciences modeled on natural-science method) treated understanding as a subject's operation on an object, to be secured against error by a method/canon. Gadamer dissolves this frame: by showing (via art, then the human sciences, then language) that understanding is a finite, historical, linguistic event in which the interpreter is always already implicated, he makes the demand for a presuppositionless method not merely unattainable but self-misunderstanding. The work hermeneutics does is therefore diagnostic and emancipatory at once: it frees the human sciences from a borrowed self-image (the natural-science ideal of objectivity) and discloses the mode of truth proper to them — a truth "prior to and wider than method."

What It Rejects

Hermeneutics as technique/method — the older "art of understanding" (Schleiermacher) and the demand for an objective canon of correct interpretation (Betti). Gadamer's reply: this mistakes the genre (quaestio iuris vs. quaestio facti); a method would "arrogate a false superiority" over the truth that speaks from tradition.
The Romantic-psychological model — understanding as re-experiencing or reconstructing the author's mental act (Schleiermacher's "divination"; "understanding an author better than he understood himself"). Understanding is productive, not reproductive; "we understand differently, if we understand at all."
Historical objectivism — the methodical bracketing of the interpreter's situation, which conceals (rather than escapes) its own historicity. See effective-history.
The reduction of hermeneutics to the methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey). Gadamer's universality is ontological, not methodological.

Stakes

If understanding is an event of finite, historical participation rather than a method, then: (i) the truth-claims of art, history, and philosophy are vindicated against the scientific monopoly on truth without retreating into irrationalism; (ii) the interpreter's prejudices and belonging to tradition become conditions of understanding rather than obstacles; (iii) the human sciences gain a self-understanding that does not measure them by a deficit from physics; and (iv) hermeneutics becomes first philosophy in a new key — coextensive with the universality of language and reason. The cost (the Habermas objection) is that a hermeneutics with no method also seems to have no critical principle against distorted tradition. confidence: medium for this last, contested implication.

Problem-Space

Hermeneutics articulates a recurring problem the wiki tracks under several vocabularies: how can finite, historically-situated understanding reach truth? The same difficulty appears as the historicism aporia (Dilthey), as the post-Husserlian question of the horizon and the life-world, and as the Hegelian question of whether finite consciousness can know without absolute knowledge. Gadamer's distinctive move is to make finitude enabling rather than limiting — see effective-history, hermeneutic-experience.

Details

Descriptive-ontological vs. normative-methodological (the Betti dispute)

The single most consequential clarification of what "philosophical hermeneutics" means comes from Gadamer's reply to Betti (Supplement I). Betti charges that without an objective norm/canon — the autonomy of the text's meaning, the "rethinking" of the author's creative act in reverse — interpretation collapses into subjectivism. Gadamer answers that the demand mistakes his project's genre: he asks the transcendental possibility question (quaestio facti — what always happens in understanding), not the normative question (quaestio iuris — how one ought to interpret). Betti's own appeal to objectivity, Gadamer argues, rests on a psychologistic "theory of inversion" that never escapes the psychology/hermeneutics ambiguity that "held Dilthey captive." (This dispute is recorded as a claim candidate in the source's extraction note, deferred to a promotion pass.)

The hermeneutic circle and the fore-structure of understanding

Gadamer adopts Heidegger's account (Being and Time §§31–32, raw p. 153): the circle of whole and part "is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle ... In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing." All understanding projects a fore-meaning; the only "objectivity" is the confirmation of a fore-meaning in being worked out against "the things themselves." The hermeneutically trained consciousness does not extinguish itself but foregrounds and appropriates its own fore-meanings and prejudices, so the text can assert its truth against them. See prejudice.

The "in-between" (silent key)

"The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between" (p. 307) — between the strangeness and the familiarity of the traditionary text, between its being a distanced object and its belonging to a shared tradition. In dialogue, "something is placed in the center (die Mitte)" which the partners share. This spatial figure carries the whole anti-subjectivist/anti-objectivist position: understanding happens neither in the subject nor in the object but between them, in the Sache that comes to language.

Connections

is founded by gadamer-1960-truth-and-method (the wiki's primary and first treatment).
takes over Heidegger's fore-structure of understanding and ontological hermeneutic circle.
requires linguisticality — understanding is linguistic through and through; the universality of hermeneutics rests on the universality of language.
is the condition of intelligibility of effective-history, fusion-of-horizons, application-anwendung, hermeneutic-experience — the positive theory of hermeneutic experience elaborates this concept.
contrasts with Betti's general theory of interpretation (normative-methodological) and Schleiermacher's psychological hermeneutics.
is contested by Habermas's critique of ideology (the missing critical principle).

Open Questions

Does philosophical hermeneutics' refusal of method leave it without resources to criticize distorted tradition? (The Habermas debate; see juergen-habermas.)
The relation between Gadamer's "belonging" (Zugehörigkeit) to tradition and Dilthey's "homogeneity" of subject and object is the precise hinge distinguishing them; it deserves a dedicated treatment.
How far does the universality claim extend into the natural sciences? Gadamer concedes even they have a hermeneutic component (the selection of relevant questions) — but stops short of a full account.

Sources

gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Introduction and Foreword (the project as transcendental, not methodological); Ch 3 (the genealogy and the ontologized circle); Ch 4 (the fore-conception of completeness, the in-between); Ch 5 and Supplement I/Afterword (universality; the Betti and Habermas replies).