HERMENEUTICS

PRESENTED BY:
BURAIRA (CIIT/SP19-REL-005/ISB)
Muhammad Adnan Saqib (CIIT/SP19-REL-007/ISB)
Interpretivism
The Way of HERMENEUTICS
• Foundations of social research
by
• Michael crotty
Historical Origin
• Historically, Hermeneutics comes from the science of biblical
interpretation (17th Century)
• How does one interpret the meaning of a holy text?
• The actual explanation of what a biblical text means is Exegesis.
Analogies
• Hermeneutics : Exegesis
• Grammar : Language
• Logic: Reasoning
• Hermeneutics expanded to texts beyond the bible, then to unwritten
sources i.e., human practices, human events, human situations in an
attempt to “read” these in ways that bring understanding.
Areas of Hermeneutics:
Verbal vs Nonverbal Hermeneutics
• Hermeneutics reinforces notion that we are essentially language
beings.
• Language is pivotal to and shapes:
• The situations in which we find ourselves enmeshed,
• The events which befall us,
• The practices we carry out and,
• In and through all of this, the understandings we are able to reach.
Hermeneutics
• In the old view of language, first came the “given reality,” then came
perception, then came language.
• In the linguistic turn, language and the way we “speak” shape what
things we see and how we see them and it is those things shaped for
us by language that constitute reality for us.
The Basic Premise of Hermeneutics
• Ricouer
• The Symbol gives rise to thought.
• The basic premise of hermeneutics:
• Hermeneutics is defined as a method for deciphering indirect
meaning, a reflective practice of unmasking hidden meanings
beneath apparent ones.
Hermes
• In Ancient Greek mythology, Hermes, the divine messenger used to
interpret the messages of the Gods to the humans. His job was to go
from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back
The Hermeneutic Mode of Understanding
• in hermeneutics, texts are seen as alien,
foreign, unfamiliar, distant. But there is also a paradoxical
affinity/connection between text and reader.
• Additionally, hermeneutics is interested in the implications and
applications of texts.
• Ex. Legal texts
• Texts are very much situated in communities and contexts of
negotiated meaning.
The Hermeneutic Mode of Understanding
• Imbedded in hermeneutics is the endeavor to reach beyond the
author’s meanings and intentions.
• Indeed the text cannot be contained by the author alone.
• What are the implications and potential pitfalls of this endeavor?
Hermeneutic Circle
• The Hermeneutic Circle
• In order to understand something, one need to begin with ideas, and
to use terms that presuppose a rudimentary understanding of what
one is trying to understand.
• Understanding turns out to be a development of what is already
understood, with the more developed understanding returning to
illuminate and enlarge one’s starting point.
The Hermeneutic Circle continued…
• Also…
• Understand the whole by looking at its
parts. Understand the parts by looking at the whole
• Also…
• Start with the familiar, address the unfamiliar, add it to the familiar
• (Gadamer’s bordering frontiers concept)
Modern Hermeneutics
• Famous hermeneuticists:
• I) Friedrich Schleiermacher
• II) Dilthey
• III) Heidegger
• IV) Gadamer
• Even though hermeneutics was formalized as a discipline within the
late renaissance,, early enlightenment time of Christianity, it was also
practiced by the Greeks and the Jews.
Modern Hermeneutists
• Founders of Modern Hermeneutics that moved it from the realm of
the strictly biblical beyond…
• Friedrich Ast
• Friedrich Schleiermacher
• 1) Empathy in the speaker-listener interchange can be extended to
the interpretation of texts
• 2) Attention to grammar situating and shaping literary context
• 3)Hermeneutics is grammatical and psychological
• 4) Creation of literary work.
Dilthey’s Objective Mind
• Dilthey’s Objective Mind
• Life and History are inextricably intertwined
• Philosophy as science of the real, all the real without truncations.
• Human understanding can never exhaust the real though and
there will always be mysteries and uncertainties.
Dilthey’s Objective Mind Continued…
• All life is historical life
• All people live within history and nothing, therefore, is definitive.
• Initially, Dilthey felt that through empathy, we could relive past
events.
• Later, he revised his position and accepted that people’s speech,
writings, art and behavior were a product of their times.
Dilthey’s Objective Mind Continued…
• The authors historical and social context is the prime source of
understanding.
• The human context is an objectification or externalization—an
‘expression’ of human consciousness. This is the—‘objective mind”.
• In Dilthey’s hermeneutic circle, the interpreter moves from the text,
to the historical and social circumstances of the author, and attempts
to reconstruct the world in which the text came to be and to situate
the text within it and back again.
Heidegger's Ontology
• Heidegger’s Phenomenological Hermeneutics
• Hermeneutics is the revelatory aspect of phenomenological seeing
whereby existence (its structures) and being come into view
• Heidegger’s focus is ontology?
Heidegger’s Phenomenological Hermeneutics
• “Only as phenomenology is ontology possible”
• Philosophy is ontology, ontology is phenomenology.
• Dasein: Phenomenology of human being
• Fore structure of being: pre-understanding of being within all of us.
• Hermeneutics is NOT a body of principles or rules for interpreting
texts, nor is it a methodology for the human sciences.
Heidegger’s Phenomenological Hermeneutics
• Heidegger’s hermeneutics starts with a phenomenological return to
our being, which presents itself to us initially in a nebulous and
undeveloped fashion, and then seeks to unfold that pre-
understanding, make explicit what is implicit, and grasp the meaning
of being itself.
Heidegger’s Phenomenological Hermeneutics
• Also describes hermeneutics as a circular phenomena.
• In our quest for being, we begin with and from a pre-
understanding of being. We then unfold the rudimentary
understanding and render explicit and thematic what is at first
implicit and unthematized.
Heidegger’s Phenomenological Hermeneutics
• Explicating the implicit and unthematized leads us to grasp the
structures of being that make human existence and behavior possible
and then on to a grasping of being itself. Then we then on to a
grasping of being itself. Then we are more enlightened and we begin
again (See figure 5, p. 98)
• For insights on being, look to poetry and history.
Gadamer’s historical hermeneutics
• People are thoroughly historical, “historically effected”
consciousnesses.
• 1) We stand in tradition
• 2) All tradition is wedded to language.
• The fusion of horizons that takes place in the understanding is
actually the achievement of language
• His is a historical understanding that mediates past and present.
Modern Hermeneutists
• If Heidegger finds meaning in poetry, Gadamer finds it in art.
• He is interested in judging historical art, rather than contemporary
art, why?
• History does not belong to us, it is not a private enterprise, we belong
to it.
• For Gadamer, the starting point is not the self, but the tradition in
which we stand and which we are meant to serve.
• Consider the cultural tradition as a “given”.
The Foundations of Social Research
• The Movement of understanding is from the whole to the part and
back to the whole.
• Expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally i.e., extend
the unity of understanding in ever-widening circles by moving from
whole to part and from part to whole.
Applications: Theory and literary criticism
• Continuum that privileges author or text at one end and reader at the
other…
• Eco: beware of overinterpretation, what is that?
• Eco wants to establish dialectical link between intentio operis
(intention of the work) and intentio lectoris (intention of the reader).
• Eco believes texts have a certain unity and coherence and there are
limits/boundaries to reasonable interpretations.
Applications: Theory and literary criticism
• What is the transactional reading of texts about?
• How should you think about approaching texts then, given such an
array of opinions and options?
Applications: Theory and literary criticism
• Empathy
• Interactive approach
• transactional
THANK YOU!!!