Work to be Done

Abstract

As my title indicates, I believe there is still important work to be done in hermeneutics, particularly as regards three questions or really clusters of questions that I will turn to in the final section of my remarks. My proposals are motivated by two worries about philosophy as it presently exists. Let me say, first, though, that I do not intend to draw a distinction between what I have just called philosophical and then referred to as hermeneutic There may be important distinctions or nuances that could be drawn between these two labels, but I hope you will allow me here to use them interchangeably, or even simply to say It will suffice, in other words, in getting under way if we can agree that philosophy is philosophy that takes seriously the question of interpretation in relation to understanding, where understanding is both the result of interpretation and, quite paradoxically, also what motivates interpretation in the first place.Two general worries lie behind my belief that there is still work to be done. The first stems from a concern that talk about philosophy all too often today is reduced to recapitulating the history of hermeneutics. Most often this is presented as the history of so-called modern hermeneutics, the line that usually is presented as running from Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer and Ricoeur, with maybe a few other names mentioned as well: E. D. Hirsch or Ast or Vattimo, or even Derrida or even Nietzsche, for example. Sometimes this history extends back much further. This is likely to occur, for example, when one wants to include the history of interpretation of the Bible as an organizing thread. Then Luther, medieval fourfold exegesis, or the history of patristic or rabbinical modes of interpretation are likely to be included. Another long-term picture occurs when one is dealing with the history of history, in the sense of talk about the discipline that studies the past and the methods it uses and the results it is meant to produce. And sometimes this longer history of hermeneutics may be directed to the history of legal thought or, in even rarer cases, to literature or philosophy itself, although these latter cases usually get narrowed down to a specific period, to allegorical interpretations of Homer, for example, or to Hellenistic readings of early Greek philosophy. All these approaches to a historical understanding of the nature of hermeneutics can also take a more figure-oriented approach. Learning or talking about hermeneutics then means learning or talking-writing, actually-in more or less depth about Schleiermachers lectures on the topic, or Truth and Method, or some of Ricoeur's essays on the conflict of interpretations, or Augustine's distinction between the spirit and the letter. What is the problem here? In a word, repetition of what has already been said, even when the goal is to gain or convey greater insight-and greater understanding-into such classic figures or texts. To put it another way, such a historical approach to hermeneutics tends to reduce to an interpretation of what has already been said about interpretation in relation to understanding. In saying this, I do not mean to denigrate the value of a monographical approach to work that has already been done in hermeneutics. It has value. It may serve, for example, to help introduce a difficult text or thinker to a wider audience. It may also increase our understanding of how operative and thematic notions function in some portion of the existing tradition. So no, I am not condemning such work, only trying to add to it. My first point, then, is simply that there is more to be done under the heading of characterizing what it means to do philosophy.That interpretation in fact always begins from an existing interpretation is not necessarily a bad thing for hermeneutical philosophers. I think we would all agree that one of the great insights of hermeneutics is that we never begin from nowhere or nothing. …