Hermeneutics

• 1. Introduction

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  Hermeneutics, the theory and method of interpreting texts, handed the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla a remarkable tool in 1440. Valla examined the Donation of Constantine, a document many people had accepted as genuine. He needed no rival manuscript. Evidence inside the text itself showed it to be a forgery.

  That episode captures what is at stake whenever someone reads anything. A reader has to decide what a text means, what it never meant to say, and whether it can be trusted at all. Hermeneutics is the attempt to make those decisions with method instead of hunches.

  This documentary traces the idea from an ancient Greek word to the philosophy lecture halls of the twentieth century. Why did a trickster god become its emblem? How did Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian scholars write rules for reading holy books? What changed when interpretation turned from scripture to all human expression? And can any reader ever approach a text without carrying assumptions of their own?

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• 2. A Greek Messenger

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  The Greek verb ἑρμηνεύω, written hermēneuō, means to translate or interpret, and a hermeneus was a translator or interpreter. Where the word came from is uncertain. R. S. P. Beekes in 2009 and Zsolt Simon in 2019 both suggested an Anatolian origin, specifically Carian.

  Philosophy took up the related word hermeneia, meaning interpretation or explanation, mainly through Aristotle. Around 360 BCE he wrote Peri Hermeneias, known in Latin as De Interpretatione and in English as On Interpretation. It stands among the earliest surviving works in the Western tradition to treat language and logic together in a comprehensive, explicit and formal way.

  Popular etymology offers a livelier ancestor in Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. He carried words between the gods and between gods and humans. He also led souls to the underworld after death. The Greeks considered him the inventor of language and speech. He was an interpreter, but also a liar, a thief and a trickster.

  Socrates noted that words can reveal or conceal, and can deliver a message in an ambiguous way. That made a trickster an apt emblem for interpretation. The Greeks saw language as made of signs that could lead toward truth or toward falsehood. Hermes was said to relish the uneasiness of the people who received his messages.

  In its earliest uses, the word belonged to the sacred. Anyone receiving a divine message had to accept some doubt about whether it was true. That ambiguity was a kind of irrationality, even a madness inflicted on the receiver. Only a person with a rational method of interpretation, a hermeneutic, could sort truth from falsehood.

  Each religious tradition that adopted such a method then had to decide what its own sacred text could and could not contain.

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• 3. Rules for Holy Books

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  Summaries of how the Torah can be interpreted date back at least to Hillel the Elder. The best known list is the thirteen principles in the Baraita of Rabbi Ishmael. They range from plain logic, such as the a fortiori argument called kal v'chomer in Hebrew, to broader tools. One of these, Gezerah Shavah, lets a passage be explained by another passage that uses the same word. The rabbis did not treat all the principles as equally persuasive.

  Jewish interpretation parted ways with the Greek method on one point. The rabbis considered the Tanakh, the Jewish biblical canon, to be without error. Any apparent inconsistency therefore had to be resolved by studying a passage alongside other texts. Interpretation worked on several levels. Some reached the plain meaning, some drew out the law the text gave, and some sought secret or mystical understanding.

  In the Vedic tradition, the Mimamsa was the leading school for interpreting the Vedas, the earliest holy texts of Hinduism. Its main purpose was to learn what Dharma, or righteous living, required. Its scholars also worked out the rules for rituals that had to be performed precisely. The foundation is the Mimamsa Sutra of Jaimini, from about the 3rd to the 1st century BCE. A major commentary by Śabara followed, from about the 5th or 6th century CE.

  Buddhist readers faced a vast literature, especially texts said to be spoken by the Buddha, called Buddhavacana, or by other enlightened beings. Interpretation was tied to spiritual practice, and its ultimate aim was to extract skillful means toward enlightenment, or nirvana. The central puzzle was which teachings are explicit statements of ultimate truth and which are merely conventional or relative.

  Christian scholars were meanwhile building their own approach. One of their most influential teachers, Augustine, put humility ahead of technique.

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• 4. Four Senses of Scripture

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  Augustine treated hermeneutics and preaching together in his work De doctrina christiana. He stressed humility in the study of Scripture. He saw the double commandment of love in Matthew 22 as the heart of Christian faith. Signs mattered greatly to him, because God can speak to a believer through the signs of the Scriptures. Humility, love and knowledge of signs were therefore the starting conditions for sound interpretation.

  Augustine endorsed some of the Platonism of his time but recast it around a God-centered view of the Bible. He likewise adapted classical oratory in a Christian way. Diligent study and prayer, he argued, mattered more than human knowledge or speaking skill. He urged interpreters and preachers to live well and above all to love God and neighbor.

  The early patristic traditions of exegesis began with few unifying features, though later schools moved toward unity. Out of that tradition came a fourfold scheme of meaning: literal, moral, allegorical (spiritual) and anagogical.

  Encyclopædia Britannica states that in literal analysis, "a biblical text is to be deciphered according to the 'plain meaning' expressed by its linguistic construction and historical context." The authors' intention is taken to match this meaning. The approach is often linked to the belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible.

  Moral interpretation hunts for lessons about how to live, and allegories are often filed under it. Allegorical interpretation holds that biblical narratives point to a second level beyond the people, events and things they name. One form, typology, treats key figures, events and institutions of the Old Testament as patterns, or types. On that reading, Noah's Ark is a type of the Christian church that God designed from the start.

  The anagogical sense, often called mystical, claims to explain how biblical events relate to what the future holds. The Jewish Kabbalah shows it by seeking the mystical significance of the numerical values of Hebrew words and letters. The medieval Zohar shows it too. In Christianity, the same impulse appears in Mariology.

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• 5. From Reformation to Romanticism

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  Martin Luther and John Calvin gave the Reformation a principle, scriptura sui ipsius interpres, meaning scripture interprets itself. The Reformation renewed interest in reading the Bible and pulled readers away from the medieval interpretive tradition, back toward the texts. Calvin added his own guideline, brevitas et facilitas, as part of his theological hermeneutics.

  The rationalist Enlightenment pushed in another direction. Protestant exegetists especially began to treat scriptural texts like secular classical texts, read as responses to historical or social forces. Apparent contradictions and hard passages in the New Testament could be clarified by comparing their possible meanings with the Christian practices of the time.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher, who lived from 1768 to 1834, asked how understanding works for every human text and mode of communication, not only sacred ones. He separated grammatical interpretation, which studies how a work is built from general ideas, from psychological interpretation, which studies the peculiar combinations that mark the work as a whole. Every problem of interpretation, he said, is a problem of understanding. He defined hermeneutics as the art of avoiding misunderstanding, achieved through knowledge of grammatical and psychological laws.

  In Schleiermacher's era, a fundamental shift took place. Readers moved from seeking only the exact words and their objective meaning toward grasping the writer's distinctive character and point of view.

  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries then produced a full theory of understanding, called Verstehen in German. Its builders include Schleiermacher, August Böckh, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, each of whom gets a different label for the kind of hermeneutics he developed.

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• 6. Understanding as Being

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  Wilhelm Dilthey, who lived from 1833 to 1911, tied interpretation to what he called historical objectification. For him, understanding travels from the outer signs of human action to their inner meaning. His last important essay, "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life," appeared in 1910. In it he insisted that this movement is not empathy in the sense of directly identifying with another person. It is an indirect, mediated understanding reached by placing expressions in their historical context. The aim is not to reconstruct the author's state of mind but to articulate what the work expresses.

  Dilthey divided the human sciences into three structural levels. Experience means feeling a situation personally, and he saw it as very similar to the thinking of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Expression turns experience into meaning by addressing someone beyond oneself. Because a written expression can be revisited, he argued, it offers the same objective value as a scientific experiment, which is why the humanities can count as sciences. An expression may even say more than its speaker intends. Comprehension, the third level, contains both understanding and misunderstanding. Dilthey believed it creates coexistence: "he who understands, understands others; he who does not understand stays alone."

  Martin Heidegger, who lived from 1889 to 1976, moved the focus from interpretation to existential understanding. Understanding, for him, was less a way of knowing than a way of being-in-the-world, which he wrote as In-der-Welt-sein. He called for a "special hermeneutic of empathy" to dissolve the old philosophical problem of other minds, though he never completed that inquiry. Advocates of his approach argue that some texts and their authors cannot be studied with the methods of natural science, an argument similar to antipositivism. Such texts are conventional expressions of the author's experience, so interpreting them reveals the social context behind them and lets readers share that experience.

  Heidegger named the back-and-forth between text and context the hermeneutic circle, and the sociologist Max Weber was among those who developed it. The circle holds that grasping the parts of a text depends on grasping the whole, while grasping the whole depends on the parts.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer, who lived from 1900 to 2002, built on the work of his teacher Heidegger. Our understanding, he held, is never fixed and keeps opening new perspectives. He argued that prejudice, meaning pre-judgements about what we want to understand, is unavoidable and not worthless in itself. We can never step outside our tradition. All we can do is try to understand it.

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• 7. Rival Schools

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  Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling and James M. Robinson represent the new hermeneutic, which reads biblical texts through existentialism. It stresses that language does more than exist. It becomes an event within the history of an individual life, an idea called the event of language.

  The Marxist line runs mainly through Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson. Benjamin set out his theory of allegory in his study Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Trauerspiel literally means mourning play, though it is often translated as tragic drama. Jameson drew on biblical hermeneutics, Ernst Bloch and Northrop Frye in The Political Unconscious. In its first chapter, titled "On Interpretation," he took the fourfold scheme of literal, moral, allegorical and anagogical readings and secularized it. He used it to link interpretation to the mode of production and eventually to history.

  Karl Popper first used the term objective hermeneutics in Objective Knowledge, published in 1972. The name was also taken up by a German school, and in 1992 scholars founded the Association for Objective Hermeneutics in Frankfurt am Main. Its approach grew out of the empirical study of family interactions. Its founders argued that interpretation is the basic method for precise and valid knowledge in the social sciences. Standard quantitative methods, they said, are a shortcut justified by research economy. They did not reject those methods dogmatically.

  Jürgen Habermas, who lived from 1929 to 2026, attacked the conservatism of earlier hermeneutists, especially Gadamer. A focus on tradition, he argued, seemed to undermine social criticism and transformation. He judged Gadamer's approach unsuitable for understanding society because it could not account for labor and domination. Habermas also faulted Marxism and earlier members of the Frankfurt School for missing the hermeneutical side of critical theory. He brought in the notion of the lifeworld and treated hermeneutics as one dimension of critical social theory.

  Paul Ricœur, who lived from 1913 to 2005, built a hermeneutics on Heidegger's concepts. Karl-Otto Apel, who lived from 1922 to 2017, based his on American semiotics and applied it to discourse ethics. Rudolf Makkreel, who lived from 1939 to 2021, proposed an orientational hermeneutics that extends ideas of Kant and Dilthey to a changing, multicultural world. Andrés Ortiz-Osés, who lived from 1943 to 2021, offered a symbolic hermeneutics as a Mediterranean answer to the Northern European kind. His central claim was that meaning is a symbolic healing of injury.

  Gadamer had other critics, among them the Italian jurist Emilio Betti, who lived from 1890 to 1968, and the American literary theorist E. D. Hirsch, born in 1928. Georg Henrik von Wright and Peter Winch tried instead to combine hermeneutics with analytic philosophy, an approach Roy J. Howard named analytic hermeneutics.

  Bernard Lonergan, who lived from 1904 to 1984, is less well known. Yet Frederick G. Lawrence argued in several articles that Lonergan's work completed the postmodern hermeneutical revolution that began with Heidegger.

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• 8. Hermeneutics at Work

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  In archaeology, hermeneutics means interpreting material through its possible meanings and social uses. Stone tools show the problem. Calling an object a scraper can be highly subjective, and the label stayed unproven until microwear analysis arrived some thirty years ago. Proponents say every reading of artifacts is unavoidably hermeneutic, because nobody can know for certain what an object meant. Opponents call the approach too relativist and defend their own readings as common sense.

  Architecture drew on Heidegger and Gadamer too. Christian Norberg-Schulz and Nader El-Bizri worked in phenomenological circles. Lindsay Jones studies how critics, users and historians receive a building differently as time and context shift. Adrian Snodgrass treats architects' study of history and Asian cultures as an encounter with otherness, and explains design itself as a process of interpretation.

  The ancient Greeks put the interpretation of poetry at the center of education. Dilthey wrote that "systematic exegesis (hermeneia) of the poets developed out of the demands of the educational system." Gadamer later wrote on education as well.

  Law has wrestled with interpretation since at least the 11th century. At the University of Bologna, scholars including Irnerius and Johannes Gratian rediscovered Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis and studied it systematically. That revival is described as a legal Renaissance. The schools of glossatores, commentatores and usus modernus each took a different approach to reading laws. Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Emilio Betti contributed to general hermeneutics. Ronald Dworkin's legal interpretivism may be seen as a branch of philosophical hermeneutics.

  In sociology, the thumbs-up gesture marks a job well done in the United States but is an insult in some other cultures. Likewise, marking a piece of paper and dropping it into a box means little until you know it is an election ballot. The school was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Schleiermacher is widely regarded as its father.

  In 1900 Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. He explained that the title shows which traditional approach he favored, since interpreting a dream means assigning it a meaning. Jacques Lacan later extended Freudian hermeneutics, and his work of the 1930s to the 1950s drew on Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Hubert Dreyfus's critique of conventional artificial intelligence has also interested psychologists who prefer hermeneutic approaches. In safety science, the ergonomist Donald Taylor proposed that mechanist models of human behavior will only go so far in reducing accidents, so the field must ask what accidents mean to people.

  Mircea Eliade read religion as the experience of the sacred and treated myth as sacred history, with truth in it to be rediscovered rather than a lie. He called his approach total hermeneutics. In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI said the Second Vatican Council should be viewed through a hermeneutic of reform rather than a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture. Later discourse turned this into a contrast between continuity and rupture. Pope Francis warned against a hermeneutic of conspiracy, and Pope John Paul II taught a hermeneutic of the gift.

  Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, in their book Hermeneutic Communism, declared that "existence is interpretation" and that "hermeneutics is weak thought." During the 2019-2020 Chilean protests, Hugo E. Herrera wrote October in Chile: Event and Political Understanding in 2019. He argued that the crisis could not be explained by structural or economic causes alone. It also involved a breakdown in the ability of political institutions to interpret social reality. That account turns the old question of reading a text into a question about whether a government can read its own people.

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