Truth and Its Discontents: Subjectivity and the Hermeneutical Tradition

If epochs can, as many historians tend to believe, be summed up by themes (such

as Renaissance, Baroque, or Postmodernism), than the age that saw the birth of modern

hermeneutics was Rational. This extreme rationalism follows a line of ancestry that

began with the Greek Parmenides position that what ever is can not not be, crosses

through the Platonic Forms, Origin’s allegorical biblical interpretation, and culminated in

the German Romantic Idealism of Hegel’s System and Kant’s categorical imperatives.

These far ranging philosophical and theological methodologies have one unifying factor,

their ultimate search for objective Truth. Recent developments in the hermeneutical

tradition, however, have felt the enormous impact of the Phenomenological and

Existential schools of thought, whose underling motivation is one of subjectivism.

Kierkegaard’s claim that some contradictions found in the world (such as Faith) preclude

an all-encompassing theory of reality has forced hermeneutics and philosophy in general

to reinterpret its own essential existence, namely the motive behind the method.

The Romantic hermeneutics of Friedrich Ast was rooted completely in the

philological tradition, which emphasized the historical and grammatical understanding of

a given text with the sole purpose of comprehending its ultimate meaning. Ast believed

that "understanding arises not out of experience…but with it." In this respect the

interpreter is called upon to expand his or her knowledge of the "historical and

grammatical" circumstances of the author in order to better understand the meaning of

the text. Ast expected the interpreter to utilize this hermeneutic circle for the purpose of

reliving the creation process, which in his belief was inspired by the author’s direct

connection to Spirit [Geist], i.e. Truth.

The idealistic philosophies of Immanuel Kant and especially Georg Hegel had a

profound influence on Ast methods. Hegel’s System was all the rage in the early 19^th

century, and Ast was as susceptible to its influence as the rest of his intellectual peers.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

Argued that there were many different views of the world, that none of them

Friedrich Schleiermacher appropriated Ast’s objected purpose but not his Hegelian

ideology. Schleiermacher wrote that "meaning is not vested in the individual parts of

speech, but in their connection." This brilliant philological argument, when applied to

hermeneutical interpretation, fissures textual reading from complete and ultimate truth.

In other words, "our understanding of a whole is always provisional, always open to

revision in the light of new insights gained through a deeper examination of its parts."

And yet, while total truth is separated from hermeneutics, Schleiermacher still believes

that an approximate truth should be strived for (he even assumes that the informed

interpreter can understand the writer better than he understood himself). "All

grammatical difficulties are overcome by…repeatedly comparing what is already

understood with what is not yet understood, so that what is not understood is confined

within ever narrowing bounds."

The methods of "divination" and "comparison," Schleiermacher believes, should

be used to continually narrow that gap. By projecting himself into the place of the

author, the interpreter can better divine an image of the author as an individual. This

projecting though, is based on and supplemented by research which enlightens the

author’s situation and therefor improves the understanding of the interpreter. "Divination

is employed primarily to compensate for the fact that what we can learn through research

alone is inevitably limited with respect to detail."

Up until this time, hermeneutics was solely interested in textual analysis,

specifically interpretations of the Western canon (namely the Bible and the Greek and

Roman classics). Schleiermacher’s main disciple and proponent however, Wilhelm

Dilthey, made the important transition from textual interpretation to a general

methodology governing all human sciences, noting specifically their inevitable

interdependency. His other significant contribution was a placing of special importance

on the human sciences over the natural sciences, giving human subjectivity a preferred

and actually encompassing position with respect to scientific objectivity. What Dilthey

termed "the highest phenomenon of the empirical world" was the first hermeneutical

hint of what was to come. Here Dilthey believed that while the human sciences

inevitably take from the natural sciences, the opposite never occurs. For example,

nuclear weapons and the empirical make-up thereof had a profound effect on human

history, and yet the chemical reactions involved had no vested interest in the thousands

that died due to their use or the intricacies of the political standoff between the two major

super-powers they inspired. The kind of truth that Dilthey championed was not an a priori

truth in the Kantian usage, but an historical a priori that changes over time and space, not

truth in the traditional sense but relative degrees of validity.

Following Dilthey’s and Schleiermacher’s relativistic approach hermeneutics

was ready for Kiekegaard’s Knight of Faith to deal the final blow to objective fact.

And yet far more important to hermeneutical theory than Kiekegaard’s ideas of religious

absurdity, was his position on time, which was rooted in his concept of the present

moment being defined by the past and creating the future. Existential man, he believes is

destined to be free and with each decision he makes he recreates himself in the future. As

Jean-Paul Sartre, Kiekegaard’s intellectual grandchild, was to state, "I await myself in the

future."

This idea of the future as possibility directly influenced Martin Heidegger, the

founder of Existential Phenomenology which synthesized Kierkegaard’s philosophies

with Edmund Husserl’s. Heidegger developed a complicated model of human existence

called Dasein (Being-in-the-World) which simply stated that, for the human being,

existence is inseparable from temporal movement. So, Being is directly linked to Not-

Being, in that man is constantly living in the present as it influences the future (i.e.

actualized possibility). In his essay "Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory," Malcom

Bowie called Heidegger’s Dasein:

An eloquent repudiation of the chronometer in favour of a temporality appropriate

to the impassioned human subject and to his ‘throwness [Geworfehheit] into

being.’ We are not talking, Heidegger says, about a future that compromises a

procession of still to be actualized ‘nows,’ but a future that is already shaping in

the here and now – one that draws Being forward towards its fullest realization.

More important to hermeneutical endeavors, however, is the coupling of Being-

in-the-World with Being-with-One-Another, which demonstrates the interdependency of

existence. Heidegger believes that all individuals are created by their individual pasts

and in turn, create their individual futures. A good example would be language. An

existential subject is born into a language. He has no influence in the design of that

language and it’s underlying socio-cultural meanings, but, within the confines of this

preconceived tool, he is free to mix and match and inevitably create new meanings.

Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics borrow heavily from this interconnected relativism.

Where his predecessors had focused on the author and methods of divining ultimate

meaning, Heidegger looked instead to the interpreter and the interpreter’s inescapable

prejudices which make absolute understanding impossible. In Being and Time,

Heidegger defines interpretation as "grounded in something we have in advance – in a

fore-having." Truth for Heidegger thus lies in uncovering the interpreter’s preconceived

notions which disrupt communication. However, as some preconceived ideas are

unavoidable in any interpretation, only some of the wide range of biases will be

highlighted at any one time.

"Heidegger’s conception of the truth as disclosedness thus encompasses, but also

extends far beyond, the traditional conception of truth as involving primarily an

agreement of judgement and object." Some critics of Heidegger made the mistake of

assuming that therefor all truth was ‘subjective.’ Heidegger responded:

If one interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion,’ then it certainly

does not. For uncovering, in the sense which is most its own, takes asserting out

of the province of ‘subjective’ discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein face

to face with the entities themselves.

It then follows that interpretation is a dialogue with the text which breeds new

understandings about both the author and the interpreter himself, which when returned to,

gives a new reading of the old text. What then arises is an objective reality build upon a

subjective framework. Time, to elucidate, is relative to location. While in Los Angeles it

may be 5:30 p.m., in New York, it’s 8:30 p.m. Which one is right? Neither … or more

precisely, both. The hermeneutical theories of Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer

work upon just this sort of indeterminacy. Instead of new knowledge providing a

framework in which to understand (i.e. dominate) the meaning of the text better then the

author, Gadamer suggests that only a different view of the text is formed, not a better

one. And each new reading will provide a new interpretation for what becomes, at least

for the interpreter, a completely new text. As Gadamer notes in his magnum opus, Truth

and Method, "the viewer of today not only sees things in a different way, he sees

different things."

In effect, the interpreter becomes the author of a completely new text. Gadamer

goes so far as to suggest that there is no point in worrying about the author’s original

intentions because:

Even if the author’s intended meaning could be reconstructed (a goal which

Schleiermacher himself admits is in principle unattainable) what we would have

is a dead meaning … a meaning with which, for this very reason, we can not enter

into a living relationship.

The point is that once a text enters into dialogue with society and culture at large

it enters into a constantly fluid relationship with countless other ambient factors of

culture and history. It is invariably changed, and even the author himself, on a

subsequent reading, will be forced to reinterpret the text with those changes in mind.

Often the author will not even be the best authority on his own work. In Philosophical

Hermeneutics, Gadamer asserts that "we may attribute a privilege to a poet in the

explanation of his verse just as little as we may attribute it to a statesman in the historical

explanation of events in which he had an active part."

In this way critics often create new works of art with their criticism. The art

"style" Abstract Expressionism, for example started out with heavy roots to

psychoanalytic and surrealistic autonomism and the painter’s direct dialogue with the

canvas at hand. But, in terms of art criticism, Clement Greenburg, with his essay

"Toward a Newer Laocoon," restructured it into a movement towards artistic purity, and

his interpretation invariably effected the American Color-Field painters which came after

and were influenced by, the Abstract Expressionists.

So, in effect, while the interpreter can have no possible understanding of the

"original" meaning of the text, he can none the less understand it as it relates to his own

concerns in his own "life-world." The interesting aspect of this theory is that it is seen

expanded over time and space, and that not only does the interpreter change the meaning

of the text, but the text inevitable changes the meaning of the interpreter (concern of his

"life-world"). Gadamer believes that the we (as interpreters) are always in a situation

"determined by the prejudices that we bring with us. [These] constitute the horizon of a

particular present, for they represent that beyond which it is impossible to see."

When taken one step further it is easy to see how the question and answer

methodology is in a state of constant flux, due solely to the constantly changing level of

the horizon of the interpreter.

Gadamer, it seems, has attempted to create a theory that at once suggests

individual subjective truth while at the same time suggests an ever-increasing ability to

understand the material based upon knowledge of one’s own prejudices, in effect, a

relative objectivity. He saw the dangers of forcing the methods of the natural sciences

onto the human sciences. It was self deceptive to look for complete object truth as a

subjective individual. Following in the footsteps of Max Horkheimer and Theodor

Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Gadamer suggests that the search for objective

truth is inevitably plagued by the contradictions of its search.

In other words, the stance that truth must be free of all prejudices was a prejudice

in and of itself. Truth, in Gadamer’s terms can never be objective when interpreted by a

subjective individual, so there is no reason to search for ultimate truth. Hermeneutical

theory has been at the forefront of dissolving objectivity within philosophical exploration

and has had the encouraging effect of giving us as human beings a more expansive

definition of our own ontological existence.

Works Cited

Bontekoe, Ronald. Dimensions of the Hermeneutic Circle. Humanities Press, New

Jersey. 1996.

Bowie, Malcom. Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory. Blackwell, Oxford UK &

Cambridge USA. 1993.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Introduction to the Human Sciences: Wilhelm Dilthey Selected

Works, Volume 1. eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton

University Press, Princeton. 1989.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. ed. And trans. David Linge.

University of California Press, Berkeley. 1976.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2^nd revised edition. Crossroad, New York.

1989.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. ed. and trans. John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson. Harper and Row, New York. 1962.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. trans. James

Duke and Jack Forstman. ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Scholars Press, Missoula. 1977

Solomon, Robert C. Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Integrated Readings. 5^th

edition. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, Austin Texas. 1993.

In my citational notion, I have attempted to reference by the work’s author, except

where more than one work by the same author precluded such a method, in which case I

referenced by the work’s title, instead.