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• Today:– Hermeneutics:

• Heidegger• Gadamer• Jauss• Ricoeur

Hermeneutics

- Art, science, practice and teaching of interpretation- Descriptive:

- Describes how interpretation works; How it is that we understand something; How it is that something comes to mean

- Also normative: what to do to come to meaning properly;How to interpret something properly

• Hermes:– Messenger of the Greek gods; also patron of travelers, robbers and interpreters and god of the

roads– Important associated features:

– Deception– Cunningness– Creativity– Eloquence– Power to persuade

Hermeneutics in history:

• Antiquity: study of Homer & rhetoric• Middle Ages: study of sacred texts• From the 19th century onwards: all types of text & the problem of textual interpretation

as a whole

Literary theory:

• What does this text mean?• In what ways does this text come to mean?• What does this text say about the human condition?

Ideological agenda >>> ‘predictable’ answer >>> importance of structure of argumentation

Where to ‘locate’ meaning? How should we come to an understanding of a text?

• Meaning is the intention of the speaker, writer

• The text embodies the meaning; meaning as a product of language

• The context [production & reception] determines the meaning

• The meaning of the text is the experience of the reader

• Heidegger & Gadamer: to perform hermeneutics, to come to understanding, is a particular way of being in the world

Heidegger (1889-1976)

• Being and Time (1926)

• Temporal dimension in phenomenology

• Husserl: transcendental phenomenology: trying to establish a priori structures

• Heidegger: hermeneutic phenomenology: meditation on Being, beings, and Dasein

• Being [Sein]

• beings [Seiendes]

• being-there/there-being/Dasein:

– The being-in-the-world that human existence is

– Bound-up-ness with the world, things, others, time; Thrownness

– Time: being-towards-death; authenticity & wonder:

“Of all beings, only the human being…experiences the wonder of wonder: that things are”

– Being in a hermeneutical dialogue with the world; understanding forms part of human existence; pre-understanding

“in interpreting we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked things which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world”

• Defamiliarizing situations:

– Failure

– Art

“The Origin of the Work of Art”:

…by bringing ourselves before Van Gogh’s painting. This painting spoke. In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.

The art work lets us know what shoes are in truth. … What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. The entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia. We say “truth” and think little enough in using this word. If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work.

In the work of art the truth has set itself to work. ‘To set’ means here: to bring to stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining.” (Heidegger 35)

Gadamer (1900-2002)

• German philosopher

• Truth and Method (1960)

• Temporality of interpretation

• Horizon:– Prejudices; expectations; fore-structures of understanding– Pre-given orientations towards the world– Determines the questions we ask

• All interpretation is temporal, thus prejudiced; yet we should strive to remain open to the meaning of the text

• In the dialectics of understanding and interpretation, (some) prejudices are exposed (we become aware of them); prejudices that have not come into existence by the thing itself are replaced by more appropriate ones; arbitrary ones are let go of (841)

• Impossibility of metaphysics; we are always embedded in time; there is only a constant strain of interpretations

Horizontverschmeltzung = to create a horizon of interpretation:

• When our horizon of historical prejudices fuses with the work’s horizon

• Overcoming the alienation of the other

• Self-understanding is deepened

• Intersubjective unity in time

– Understanding occurs in language– Interpretation = the occurring of understanding [in language]

Jauss (1921-1997)

• German literary theorist

• Member of School of Constance; Reader response

• Proposal of aesthetics of reception, a kind of literary history:

– Tracing the historical succession of horizons of expectations (Erwartungshorizonte; the shared set of assumptions which can be attributed to a given generation of readers)

• This horizon is detectable through textual strategies (genre, literary allusions, the nature of fiction) which confirm, modify, or subvert the expectations of readers

– Establishing the aesthetic distance, that is, the distance between the horizon of the original readers and the horizons of groups of readers in different moments of time

Ricoeur (1913-2005)

• French philosopher

• Interpretation Theory (1976)

• Interpretation of a text happens after it is read in its entirety; after the performance of circular dialectics of understanding, explaining, and comprehending

• Interpretation means that the reader comprehends the text as showing and creating a way of being-in-the-world, a mode of being that was un-reflected before; this enlarges the reader’s self-understanding