1. Religion

The interpretation of texts is basic to most religions, and “Biblical hermeneutics is a course offered in many seminaries. It is in theology that the word “hermeneutics” finds its first use i!n modern times. Gadamer finds in the structure of encountering sacred texts a number of factors that are important for all interpretation of texts. Gadamer is indebted here to dialectical theology (Barth and Bultmann) for their emphasis on the address and the claim (Anspruch) of the text on the reader instead of the other way round. The reader does not simply interpret the text, the text “interprets itself,” according to Luther. It speaks and we listen.

In 1964, when I arrived at the Institute for Hermeneutics of the Theological Faculty of the University of ZŸrich, to study existentialist interpretation as the basis for a new kind of literary interpretation, I found that already in 1962 a seminar had been offered on Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960). Earlier, in the 1950s, theologians Gerhard Ebeling (in ZŸrich) and Ernst Fuchs were developi!ng a “New Hermeneutic.” This was popularized in America in 1964 through a book by John Robinson and John C. Cobb, The New Hermeneutic (1964) and another book edited by them, The Later Heidegger and Theology. Drew University’s Graduate School of Theology was a major source in the dissemination of this new hermeneutic until an uprising on behalf of the older tradition resulted in their being thrown out. Oh, well.

For the sake of time, let’s look at the twelve key concepts in Gadamer’s hermeneutics as see which are most relevant to religion.

1. Understanding. In the hermeneutics of Heidegger on which Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is based, the understanding of one’s self and one’s world, one’s existential self-understanding is basic to everything else we think and do!. We may try to understand this understanding, but in doing so we use the understanding we have in order to understand what it is, and who we are. In religion, a conversion experience is not just a sudden decision to affirm a set of propositions, it is a transformation of our understanding of ourself and our life. Understanding is the basis of human life. There is no human life without understanding, so it becomes important to understand understanding. That is what philosophical hermeneutics is about.

2. Ontology. Yale existentialist theologian Paul Tillich wrote a book about “new being.” For him, Christianity is a matter of ontological transformation. For the convert, it offers new being, a new way of being in this world. Theologian Gerhard Ebeling accounted for the rapid spread of Christianity in the ancient world with the factor of freedom. So many people were bound by laws, !by fear, by oppression or slavery, they jumped for joy at the word that God meant for them to be free, in fact, promised them freedom: Freedom from earthly circumstance through the promise of hope, the promise of an afterlife To understand yourself in the way is to understand your being in the world differently. It is a transformation in self-understanding. In a famous essay, “You are Accepted,” Tillich tries to describe this new understanding as an acceptance by God that can overcome all worldly rejections. You can see that for a black person in the South a hundred years ago or more this belief could make a radical difference. I think it was in play in the religion of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he encouraged his followers to martyr themselves rather than make a violent attack on the establishment. He wanted to win a change of mind, to win over those who disagreed with him, to treat the tormenter with respect but asking for a new order!. Live “as if” you were equal, as if you were respected.

Note: The absence of this tradition of nonviolence in Palestine has led to the suicide bombings and cause the newspapers in the world sympathize with the Israelis rather than the Palestinians. It has proved to be counterproductive. It has gotten Israeli attention, yes, but it has not gained their sympathies for the oppressed condition of the Palestinians. Instead, an increasing number of Israelis and Americans have diverted their attention from the thirty-five years of brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel to the victims of the suicide bombers. Likewise, the bombing other the trade towers in New York proved counter-productive. It gained the U.S. the sympathy of the world instead of causing the U.S. and the world to ask why so many people in the world seem to be angry at us. No revision of U.S. foreign policy has been broug!ht about. The battle for the hearts and minds of other peoples and for the people of the world will not be won through violence. My view is that war is not the way to peace, justice and peace are the way.

3. fusion of horizons. In religion, the encounter with a sacred text involves a “fusion of horizons”-the horizon of the reader and the horizon of the text. To make the horizon of the reader or investigator definitive of reality will undermine the effect of the text. This is the problem with objectivizing modes of interpretation: They make the horizon and methods of the investigator the measure of reality. Rather, the model must be dialogue in quest of the truth about a matter, openness to what is being said, the concern of the other. For this reason hermeneutics describes understanding as an event (#8), not as a doing, as something that happens to you rather than !something you do as an agent. This is the hermeneutical openness of dialogue described in #1.

4. contemporaneity. Gleichzeitigkeit refers to a phenomenon we often experience in reading a text. It is here and now. A text of a scripture from two thousands years addresses us here and now. It is as meaningful now as it was thousands of years ago. It “applies” to you. The lesson of a story in the Bible is as true today as it was in Biblical times.

5. experience. Although Gadamer uses the example of tragedy to illustrate the concept of experience, the concept also applies to religion. Our self-understanding, our world, must be shattered and made new.

II. Art

The categories of hermeneutics offer new wa!ys to describe the experience of art. But more than this, the experience of art offers the basis for the hermeneutical claim for the truth of the texts in religion and literature.

Hermeneutics offers a new way to understand/describe the experience of art as a way that truth presences/presents itself. This is an alternative to the mainstream “aesthetic consciousness” built on Kant that describes the experience of art in terms of a “disinterested pleasure.” While few would deny that encountering a work of art produces pleasure (usually), and few would deny that the category of usefulness in art distracts us from its intrinsic value, the question is whether pleasure accounts for the high value we attach to works of art and ontological truth of art.

But Gadamer takes the experience of art to be a way to demonstrate the “truth” of the work of art. Instead of learning from hermeneutics, we can say that hermeneutics learns from art that encounters with works of art can be powerful, overwhelming, and persuasive. According to Gadamer, after seeing a Greek tragedy, we say, “It is so.” [So ist es.] This is the way things are. It is an ontological truth, a truth about the way things are. But a landscape can be a truth about the way things are, and Guenica, the famous painting by Picasso depicting the evils of the Spanish civil war, gives the truth about the way things are. The speaking of a great poem “brings truth to light” or in Heidegger’s terms in the “Origin of the Artwork,” it brings truth to stand. Religious texts, literary texts, works of art, are not just pleasure objects, they are statements of ontological truth in ways that could not be brought to stand in an!y other way.

In Truth and Method, most people expected a treatise in methods of obtaining truth in the conventional sense. But Gadamer observed that methods require that one set up one’s questions in advance, and that the interrogator is the person who addresses questions in order to know the work better in terms of its origin, its structure, its creator’s intention, etc. The right questions will bring the right answers, so it becomes very important to have framed the right questions, questions that will yield reliable results, results that can be validated by other people dealing with the same work. But Gadamer pointed out that in dealing with artworks, being methodical is not always best. Laying down one’s questions in advance is not always best. Rather, he suggests that one try to find the question that is posed by the work of art. Instead of seeking control and predictability, o!ne can seek responsiveness, one can first let the work itself speak. One can seek the right spot from which to view a painting, a sculpture, or a work of architecture, or even the right situation and space in which to hear a musical work, in which it will speak with power.

Looking at the twelve concepts, we can see that #1, on the dialogical character of encounters, applies to encountering works of art. One must be open to the speaking of the work. One must be ready to have one’s own understanding of life changed-or deeply confirmed. The encounter with a work of art involves a fusion of horizons, that of the work and that of the viewer. And the best experiences of art leave one a different person, a person with a different understanding of the way things are (#2, ontology). In particular, #4, “The eventing of truth in art,” is relevant: The encounter with a work is !uote event,” it is something that happens to you. It has as much power today as when it was created! This is what Gadamer called “contemporaneity.”

Works of art are like the “immanent text” (#10) of poetry. That is, they do not require something outside them to authenticate their value. Their value comes from themselves. It is immanent. Zen theorists describe satori in this way. It has “categorical authority.” It does not require some authority outside itself to validate it. Its validity comes from itself. The category of experience (Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis). To encounter a work of art is an “experience” if it sets one back on one’s heels, amazes us, if it enables us to see something we have not seen before. It negates our expectations, shatters our experience of the way things are o!r ought to be. Instead, it states the way things are. It is an “ontological disclosure.” The categories of ontology in hermeneutical philosophy allow us more satisfactorily to describe what great art is and does. They give greater dignity to art and account better for its irreplaceability. The experience of an artwork is more than an irreplaceable pleasure, although it may also be that, too.

So we can say it is not just what hermeneutics can do for art but what art does for philosophical hermeneutics that is of interest here. The experience of the work of art claims a key place in Gadamer’s thinking, especially as he tries in Truth and Method to re-establish the value and dignity of the humanities. The truth of art as ontotological disclosure, as Heidegger before him had described it, enables Gadamer to describe what art, literature, and religion do, also. Gadamer e!stablishes a truth inaccessible to method and in doing breaks the iron grip of the sciences on truth. Yet the theory of art, too, can profit from the principles of philosophical hermeneutics: transformation of understanding, ontological disclosure, the encounter as a fusion of horizons, as an event, as possessing contemporaneity, and so on.

III. Literature

Philosophical hermeneutics has a special relevance for literature in describing the encounter with the work of literature. I address this on pages 223-253 of my book, Hermeneutics. I title it “A Hermeneutical Manifesto to American Literary Interpretation,” and I recommend to you if you have found the categories I have been describing this afternoon to be interesting. I will only indicate a few points I made there.

!lpar I argued in the first of two sections that philosophical hermeneutics reopens the question of interpretation and answers it in an untraditional way. This way is that of the twelve categories I have already described.

Following the section, “Re-opening the Question: What is Interpretation?” I conclude the book with “Thirty Theses on Interpretation.” Here I argue that the encounter with a literary work is dialectical, ontological, historical, event-like, objective in a new sense of the word (being guided by the object, the Sache, a new “Sachlichkeit”), is a disclosure of truth, and is more encompassing and foundational as a category than aesthetics. It also transcends the subject-object schema and offers a critique of the limits of scientific objectivity and of methodical procedures in literary interpretation. But most of all it offers a new !uote philosophy of interpretation,” a view of the “being” of works of literature that leads us beyond the traditional categories of literary criticism. Certainly it is true that much has happened in the forty two years since 1960, but I think Truth and Method still has a great deal to offer us today.

But Heidegger made understanding an existential category, a basic and foundational process in human being-in-the-world. We understand before we interpret, we sense our place in the world before we approach anything in our world. Heidegger distinguished between things that are so familiar to us that they are well-nigh invisible. They are our “world,” but not conceptualized and objectified. The carpenter knows from experience which hammer will be appropriate for a certain job. He will use this familiar tool without focussing on it. Instead he will focus on the job to be done. This category of the unobtrusive, the unobjectified, the UnauffŠllig, of UnauffŠlligkeit, is of great interest to sociologists.

! In particular, one can ask whether the description of social reality in terms of statistics really gets at its reality. A sociologist at Illinois College in the sixties, now at Boston College, wrote a book, The Methodology of Participant Observation. He showed through practice that the participant observer has access to social realities that cannot be seen by the uninvolved observer, especially in the category of community organizing.

Likewise, when Gadamer describes understanding as a fusion of horizones, then methodological challenges arise for an observer who never calls his own horizon into question.

More recently, a considerable number of sociologists are buying into the hermeneutical critique of method in the social sciences. A collection of essays along these lines is Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, by Ranbinow and Sullivan, co!ntaining readings by Robert Bellah, Stanley Fish (the literary critic), Gadamer, Cliffort Geertz, Albert Hirschman, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor. Gadamer contribution to this collection is “The Problem of Historical Consciousness.” That is, consciousness is not a process that takes place in a vacuum. It is continuously shaped by historical categories, including the historically evolved and evolving categories of the social sciences.

What is generally translated as “effective history” is also important in the critique of methodology, for it shows us that the methods we use and the conceptions we have are part of our historical consciousness (Wirkungsge- schichtlichesbewusstsein) and we use them unobtrusively in our processes of understanding social reality. There is no escape from the historicality,! nor the situationality, of understanding, nor from the linguistic categories in which we think.

Also, the sociologist can gain an access to the social reality of a period of time, including the present, not just from historical records, or statistics, or from reading various social theorists but also from the works of art, music, literature, religion, and philosophy. While usually not quantifiable, the experience of such works takes on the value of participant observation, and the sociologist may notice things not perceived by others.

While admittedly philosophical hermeneutics has more to offer our philosophical understanding of religion, art, and literature-the humanities-there are still benefits to scholars in the social sciences, especially those specializing in methodology, in studying what Gadamer and Heidegger have to say about! understanding.

Conclusion

Hermeneutics is not a fad. As the art of understanding difficult texts it stretches back to ancient times with interesting systems for interpreting dreams, laws, poetry, and religious texts, including not just Hebrew and Christian but also Islamic, Chinese, Hindu and other religious texts. In the 18th century, the more general question of the nature of the art of understanding and interpretation in general was raised, and general theories of interpretation developed, but they were usually oriented to the problem of textual exegesis. Dilthey’s, for all its originality and value, was oriented to creating a new methodology for the Geisteswissenschaften (humanities). It! remained for Heidegger to see interpretation in a broader context as an ontological category, as a basic process of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and for Gadamer to see in both this treasury of thought in Being and Time Heidegger’s views on the experience of art as an event of disclosure of truth in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes the basis for a philosophical hermeneutics that could rehabilitate the humanities and social sciences. His Truth and Method of 1960 offers concepts that are significant for religion, art, literature and even interpretation in the social sciences. The full extent of the significance of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has only started to be recognized. I hope some of the ideas I have offered here have whetted your appetite for more.