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Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation, especially the interpretation of texts. Hermeneutics is concerned with the question of how we understand meaning. It is based on the idea that meaning is not fixed or objective, but rather is created through a process of interpretation. This means that the interpreter's own background and experiences will play a role in shaping their understanding of the text. See also Interpretation, Texts, Hermeneutc circle.
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Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Friedrich Schleiermacher on Hermeneutics - Dictionary of Arguments

Gadamer I 171
Hermeneutics/Schleiermacher/Gadamer: In the beginning, Schleiermacher as well as Hegel are aware of loss and alienation from tradition, which challenges their hermeneutical reflection. Yet they determine the task of hermeneutics in very different ways.
Schleiermacher (...) is entirely focused on restoring the original purpose of a work in understanding. For art and literature handed down to us from the past have been wrenched from their original world. Thus Schleiermacher writes that it is no longer the natural and original, "when works of art come into circulation. Namely, each has a part of its comprehensibility from its original purpose". "Hence the work of art, torn out of its original context if it is not preserved historically, loses its significance. "He almost says, "So a work of art is therefore actually rooted in its ground, in its environment. It already loses its meaning when it is torn out of this environment and goes into circulation, it is like something that has been rescued from the fire and now bears scorch marks"(1).
Gadamer I 172
Gadamer: According to Schleiermacher, historical knowledge opens the way to replace what has been lost and restoring tradition, provided it brings back the occidental and original. In this way, the hermeneutic endeavor seeks to regain the "point of contact" in the spirit of the artist, who should first make the meaning of a work of art fully understandable, just as it is usually done with texts by striving to reproduce the author's original production. ((s) Cf. the discussion of various philosophical theories on >Meaning Change
).
GadamerVsSchleiermacher: (...) the question is whether what is gained here is really what we seek as the meaning of the work of art, and whether understanding is correctly determined when we see in it a Second Creation, the reproduction of the original production. In the end, such a determination of hermeneutics is no less absurd than all restitution and restoration of past life. Restoration of original conditions, like all restoration, is a powerless beginning in view of the historicity of our being.
Hegel/Gadamer: Hegel takes a different path than Schleiermacher: >Hermeneutics/Hegel.
Gadamer I 182
SchleiermacherVsDilthey/SchleiermacherVsTradition/Gadamer: Schleiermacher (...) seeks the unity of hermeneutics no longer in the content-related unity of the tradition to which understanding is to be applied, but detached from all content-related particularity in the unity of a procedure that is not differentiated even by the way the thoughts are transmitted, whether in writing or orally, in a foreign or in one's own simultaneous language. (Cf. >Hermeneutics/Dilthey).
Schleiermacher's idea of a universal hermeneutics is determined from
Gadamer I 183
there. It arose from the idea that the experience of strangeness and the possibility of misunderstanding is a universal one.
SchleiermacherVsTradition: (...) precisely the extension of the hermeneutic task to the "meaningful conversation", which is particularly characteristic of Schleiermacher, shows how the meaning of the strangeness that hermeneutics is supposed to overcome has fundamentally changed in comparison to the previous task of hermeneutics. Strangeness is indissolubly given in a new, universal sense with the individuality of the "you".
Gadamer: Nevertheless, one must not take the lively, even brilliant sense of human individuality that distinguishes Schleiermacher as an individual characteristic that influences theory here. Rather, it is the critical rejection of all that which in the Age of Enlightenment under the title "Reasonable Thoughts" was regarded as the common essence of humanity, which requires a fundamental redefinition of the relationship with tradition(2).
Gadamer I 188
Understanding/SchleiermacherVsTradtion: (...) instead of an "aggregate of observations" [it is necessary] to develop a real art of understanding. This means something fundamentally new. For now, the difficulty of understanding and misunderstanding is no longer reckoned with as occasional moments, but as integrating moments, the prior elimination of which is at stake. This is how Schleiermacher virtually defines: "Hermeneutics is the art of avoiding misunderstanding". It rises above the pedagogical occasionality of the interpretative
Gadamer I 189
practice for the autonomy of a method, provided that "misunderstanding is self-evident and understanding at every point must be wanted and sought"(3).
Gadamer I 191
Hermeneutics includes a grammatical and psychological "art of interpretation". Schleiermacher's own speciality, however, is psychological interpretation. It is ultimately a divinatory behaviour, a putting oneself in the writer's entire condition, a view of the "inner course of production" of the creation of a work(4). Understanding, then, is a reproduction related to an original production, a recognition of what has been recognized (Boeckh)(5), a reconstruction that starts from the living moment of conception, the "sprouting decision" as the organizing point of the composition(6).
Gadamer: But such an isolating description of understanding means that the thought construct that we want to understand as speech or text is not understood in terms of its factual content, but as an aesthetic construct, as a work of art or as "artistic thinking". >Genius/Schleiermacher, >Understanding/Schleiermacher.
Understanding/Schleiermacher: Schleiermacher [comes] to the conclusion that it is necessary to understand a writer better than he or she has understood him- or herself - a formula that has been repeated ever since and in whose changing interpretation the entire history of modern hermeneutics becomes apparent.


1. Schleiermacher, Ästhetik, ed. R. Odebrecht, S. 84 ff.
2. Chr. Wolff and his school included the "general art of interpretation" in philosophy, since "finally everything aims at the fact that one may recognize and examine other truths, if one understands their speech" (J. Walch, Philosophisches Lexikon, (1726), p. 165). It is similar for Bentley when he demands of the philologist: "His only guides are reason, the light of the author's thoughts and their compelling force" (quoted from Wegner, Altertumskunde, p. 94).
3. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik § 15 und 16, Werke I, 7, S. 29f.
4. Schleiermacher Werke I, 7, S. 83.
5. Schleiermacher Werke III, 3, S. 355, 358, 364.
6. Boeckh, Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaft, ed. Bratuschek,
2.Autfl. 1886, S. 10.

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Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich
Gadamer I
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik 7. durchgesehene Auflage Tübingen 1960/2010

Gadamer II
H. G. Gadamer
The Relevance of the Beautiful, London 1986
German Edition:
Die Aktualität des Schönen: Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest Stuttgart 1977


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