Hermeneutics

Abstract

This chapter challenges a reading of Herder’s hermeneutics, or theory of interpretation, that assimilates it to Gadamer’s. For Herder, unlike Gadamer, interpretation is a matter of getting back to a text’s original meaning and avoiding contamination of this by distinctive features of the interpreter’s own viewpoint. Herder’s theory of interpretation rests both on his philosophy of language and on a principle that radical mental differences occur between historical periods, cultures, and even individuals—the latter principle posing the main challenge for accurate interpretation that his theory is designed to address. To that end he develops a whole series of important specific recommendations. These were subsequently taken over by Schleiermacher and Boeckh in their hermeneutic theories, and formed the methodological foundations that enabled the great flowering of the human sciences that occurred in nineteenth-century Germany. Moreover, Herder’s versions of them were in some important ways superior to his successors’.