Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, by Richard E. Palmer
👍🤯😵💫🧐
Palmer’s classic text — published in 1969, during a time in which he not only made waves in literary interpretation with his integration of modern philosophical hermeneutics, but in which he met and studied with Heidegger and Gadamer — is shaped like an inverse bell curve. It starts slow, ramps up in the middle, particularly with his explorations of the hermeneutic innovations (and deficiencies) of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and pre-turn Heidegger, before going off the rails with a failed attempt to bring post-Turn Heidegger as well as Gadamer’s hermetic ideas into the light.
Nonetheless, the Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and pre-turn Heidegger explorations are more than worth the entry price. In Palmer’s hands, we learn:
Schleiermacher’s enduring contribution: the hermeneutic circle, the paradox of understanding in which the part can not be understood without an understanding of the whole, but the whole cannot be understood without an understanding of the part; or, to put it another way, the paradox that what is to be understood in understanding must already be known
Dilthey’s time-spanning concept of lived experience as
potentially encompassing many discrete and discontinuous moments that nonetheless unfold in the understanding of any particular moment;
the reality of what is there-for-me before experience becomes objective (and therefore admits of separation from the subjective)
Dilthey’s concept of meaning as fluid and historical, contextual and open-ended, “a perception of a real relationship within a nexus prior to the subject-object separation in thought”
Heidegger’s appropriation of Husserl’s phenemonology, while jettisoning the former’s transcendental subjectivity baggage
Heidegger’s understanding of understanding as the structure in Being which makes possible the actual exercise of understanding on an empirical level; and as structure, it’s temporal, always combining the past, present, and future, always related to projections of future possibilities arising out of the present as the dynamic appropriation of the past
Interpretation, per Heidegger, “is not a matter of sticking a value on a naked object, for what is encountered arises as already seen in a particular relationship”; “interpretation is never a presuppositionless grasping of something given in advance”;
Through these three thinkers, we see hermeneutics move from a focus on rules to guide textual interpretation (the legacy of Protestant hermeneutics) to the study of understanding itself, and it’s a solid journey that Palmer walks through. Unfortunately, he doesn’t stop there; he also tries to incorporate and elucidate the thinking of later (post-turn) Heidegger and Gadamer, and in particular the impact of each of those thinkers had on philosophical hermeneutics; but it’s at this point that the text devolves into a caricature of the hermetic and turgid prose that those two thinkers are infamous for.