admirers and critics, and the attention it has received undoubtedly obliges
the author to improve the whole by drawing on all the really valuable
suggestions they have offered. And yet a line of thought that has matured
over many years has its own stability. However much one tries to see
through the critics' eyes, one's own generally pervasive viewpoint prevails.
The three years that have passed since the publication of the first edition
have proved too short a time for the author to put the whole again in
question, and to use effectively all that he has learned from criticism1 and
from his own more recent work.2
Perhaps I may once again briefly outline the overall intention and claim.
My revival of the expression hermeneutics, with its long tradition, has
apparently led to some misunderstandings.3 I did not intend to produce a
manual for guiding understanding in the manner of the earlier hermeneutics.
I did not wish to elaborate a system of rules to describe, let alone
direct, the methodical procedure of the human sciences. Nor was it my aim
to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in these fields in order to
put my findings to practical ends. If there is any practical consequence of
the present investigation, it certainly has nothing to do with an unscientific
"commitment"; instead, it is concerned with the "scientific" integrity of
acknowledging the commitment involved in all understanding. My real
*This refers to the second German edition, not this second, revised Englishlanguage
edition, which is based on the fifth German edition.—Eds.
XXV
concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do,
but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.
Hence the methods of the human sciences are not at issue here. My
starting point is that the historical human sciences, as they emerged from
German romanticism and were imbued with the spirit of modern science,
maintained a humanistic heritage that distinguishes them from all other
kinds of modern research and brings them close to other, quite different,
extrascientific experiences, especially those peculiar to art. Of course, this
could also be explained in terms of the sociology of knowledge. In
Germany (which has always been pre-revolutionary) the tradition of
aesthetic humanism remained vitally influential in the development of the
modern conception of science. In other countries more political consciousness
may have entered into what is called "the humanities," "lettres": in
short, everything formerly known as the humaniora.
This does not in the slightest prevent the methods of modern natural
science from being applicable to the social world. Possibly the growing
rationalization of society and the scientific techniques of administering it
are more characteristic of our age than the vast progress of modern science.
The methodical spirit of science permeates everywhere. Therefore I did not
remotely intend to deny the necessity of methodical work within the
human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Nor did I propose to revive the
ancient dispute on method between the natural and the human sciences.
It is hardly a question of different methods. To this extent, Windelband and
Rickert's question concerning the "limits of concept formation in the
natural sciences" seems to me misconceived. The difference that confronts
us is not in the method but in the objectives of knowledge. The question
I have asked seeks to discover and bring into consciousness something
which that methodological dispute serves only to conceal and neglect,
something that does not so much confine or limit modern science as
precede it and make it possible. This does not make its own immanent law
of advance any less decisive. It would be vain to appeal to the human
desire for knowledge and the human capacity for achievement to be more
considerate in their treatment of the natural and social orders of our world.
Moral preaching under the guise of science seems rather absurd, as does
the presumption of a philosopher who deduces from principles the way in
which "science" must change in order to become philosophically legitimate.
Therefore in this connection it seems to me a mere misunderstanding to
invoke the famous Kantian distinction between quaestio juris and quaestio
xxvi
facti. Kant certainly did not intend to prescribe what modern science must
do in order to stand honorably before the judgment seat of reason. He
asked a philosophical question: what are the conditions of our knowledge,
by virtue of which modern science is possible, and how far does it extend?
The following investigation also asks a philosophic question in the same
sense. But it does not ask it only of the so-called human sciences (which
would give precedence to certain traditional disciplines). Neither does it
ask it only of science and its modes of experience, but of all human
experience of the world and human living. It asks (to put it in Kantian
terms): how is understanding possible? This is a question which precedes
any action of understanding on the part of subjectivity, including the
methodical activity of the "interpretive sciences" and their norms and
rules. Heidegger's temporal analytics of Dasein has, I think, shown
convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible
behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself. It is in this
sense that the term "hermeneutics" has been used here. It denotes the
basic being-in-motion of Dasein that constitutes its finitude and historicity,
and hence embraces the whole of its experience of the world. Not caprice,
or even an elaboration of a single aspect, but the nature of the thing itself
makes the movement of understanding comprehensive and universal.
I cannot agree with those who maintain that the limits of the province
of hermeneutics are revealed in confrontation with extrahistorical modes
of being, such as the mathematical or aesthetic.4 Admittedly it is true that,
say, the aesthetic quality of a work of art is based on structural laws and on
a level of embodied form and shape that ultimately transcend all the
limitations of its historical origin or cultural context. I shall not discuss how
far, in relation to a work of art, the "sense of quality" represents an
independent possibility of knowledge,5 or whether, like all taste, it is not
only developed formally but is also a matter of education and inculcation.
At any rate, taste is necessarily formed by something that indicates for
what that taste is formed. To that extent, it perhaps always includes
particular, preferred types of content and excludes others. But in any case
it is true that everyone who experiences a work of art incorporates this
experience wholly within himself: that is, into the totality of his selfunderstanding,
within which it means something to him. I go so far as to
assert that the act of understanding, including the experience of the work
of art, surpasses all historicism in the sphere of aesthetic experience.
Admittedly, there appears to be an obvious distinction between the
original world structure established by a work of art and its survival in the
xxvii
changed circumstances of the world thereafter.6 But where exactly is the
dividing line between the present world and the world that comes to be?
How is the original life significance transformed into the reflected experience
that is cultural significance? It seems to me that the concept of
aesthetic non-differentiation that I have coined in this connection is
wholly valid; here there are no clear divisions, and the movement of
understanding cannot be restricted to the reflective pleasure prescribed by
aesthetic differentiation.7 It should be admitted that, say, an ancient image
of the gods that was not displayed in a temple as a work of art in order to
give aesthetic, reflective pleasure, and is now on show in a museum,
retains, even as it stands before us today, the world of religious experience
from which it came; the important consequence is that its world still
belongs to ours. What embraces both is the hermeneutic universe.8
In other respects too, the universality of hermeneutics cannot be
arbitrarily restricted or curtailed. No mere artifice of organization persuaded
me to begin with the experience (Erfahrung) of art in order to
assure the phenomenon of understanding the breadth proper to it. Here
the aesthetics of genius has done important preparatory work in showing
that the experience of the work of art always fundamentally surpasses any
subjective horizon of interpretation, whether that of the artist or of the
recipient. The mens auctoris is not admissible as a yardstick for the
meaning of a work of art. Even the idea of a work-in-itself, divorced from
its constantly renewed reality in being experienced, always has something
abstract about it. I think I have shown why this idea only describes an
intention, but does not permit a dogmatic solution. At any rate, the
purpose of my investigation is not to offer a general theory of interpretation
and a differential account of its methods (which Emilio Betti has
done so well) but to discover what is common to all modes of understanding
and to show that understanding is never a subjective relation to
a given "object" but to the history of its effect; in other words, understanding
belongs to the being of that which is understood.
Therefore I am not convinced by the objection that the performance of
a musical work of art is interpretation in a different sense from, say,
reaching understanding in reading a poem or looking at a painting. All
performance is primarily interpretation and seeks, as such, to be correct. In
this sense it, too, is "understanding."9
I believe that the universality of the hermeneutic viewpoint cannot be
restricted even with respect to the multitude of historical concerns and
interests subsumed under the science of history. Certainly there are many
xxviii
modes of historical writing and research. There is no need to assert that
every historical observation is based on a conscious reflection on the
history of effect. The history of the North American Eskimo tribes is
certainly quite independent of whether and when these tribes had an
effect on the "universal history of Europe." Yet one cannot seriously deny
that reflection on effective history will prove to be important even in
relation to this historical task. In fifty or a hundred years, anyone who
reads the history of these tribes as it is written today will not only find it
outdated (for in the meantime he will know more or interpret the sources
more correctly); he will also be able to see that in the f 960s people read the
sources differently because they were moved by different questions,
prejudices, and interests. Ultimately historical writing and research would
dissolve in indifference if it were withdrawn from the province of
reflection on effective history. The hermeneutic problem is universal and
prior to every kind of interest in history because it is concerned with what
is always fundamental to "historical questions."10 And what is historical
research without historical questions? In the language that I use, justified
by investigation into semantic history, this means: application is an
element of understanding itself. If, in this connection, I put the legal
historian and the practicing lawyer on the same level, I do not deny that
the former has exclusively a "contemplative," and the other an exclusively
practical, task. Yet application is involved in the activities of both. How
could the legal meaning of a law be different for either? It is true that the
judge, for example, has the practical task of passing judgment, and this
may involve many considerations of legal politics that the legal historian
(looking at the same law) does not consider. But does that make their legal
understanding of the law any different? The judge's decision, which has a
practical effect on life, aims at being a correct and never an arbitrary
application of the law; hence it must rely on a "correct" interpretation,
which necessarily includes the mediation between history and the present
in the act of understanding itself.
Of course, the legal historian will also have to evaluate a correctly
understood law "historically" as well, and this always means he must
assess its historical importance; since he will always be guided by his own
historical pre-opinions and pre-judgments, he may assess it "wrongly."
This means that again there is mediation between the past and the present:
that is, application. The course of history generally, including the history of
research, teaches us this. But it obviously does not follow that the historian
has done something which he should not have done, and which he should
XXIX
or could have been prevented from doing by some hermeneutic canon. I
am not speaking of the errors of legal history, but of accurate findings. The
legal historian—like the judge—has his "methods" of avoiding mistakes,
and in such matters I agree entirely with the legal historian.11 But the
hermeneutic interest of the philosopher begins precisely when error has
been successfully avoided. Then both legal historians and legal dogmaticians
testify to a truth that extends beyond what they know, insofar as
their own transient present is discernible in their acts and deeds.
From the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics, the contrast
between historical and dogmatic method has no absolute validity. This
raises a question about the extent to which the hermeneutic viewpoint
itself enjoys historical or dogmatic validity.12 If the principle of effective
history is made into a universal element in the structure of understanding,
then this thesis undoubtedly implies no historical relativity, but seeks
absolute validity—and yet a hermeneutic consciousness exists only under
specific historical conditions. Tradition, which consists in part in handing
down self-evident traditional material, must have become questionable
before it can become explicitly conscious that appropriating tradition is a
hermeneutic task. Augustine has just such a consciousness in regard to the
Old Testament; and, during the Reformation, Protestant hermeneutics
developed from an insistence on understanding Scripture solely on its own
basis (sola scriptura) as against the principle of tradition upheld by the
Roman church. But certainly since the birth of historical consciousness,
which involves a fundamental distance between the present and all
historical tradition, understanding has been a task requiring methodical
direction. My thesis is that the element of effective history affects all
understanding of tradition, even despite the adoption of the methodology
of the modern historical sciences, which makes what has grown historically
and has been transmitted historically an object to be established like
an experimental finding—as if tradition were as alien, and from the
human point of view as unintelligible, as an object of physics.
Hence there is a certain legitimate ambiguity in the concept of historically
effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches BewuEtsein), as I
have employed it. This ambiguity is that it is used to mean at once the
consciousness effected in the course of history and determined by history,
and the very consciousness of being thus effected and determined.
Obviously the burden of my argument is that effective history still
determines modern historical and scientific consciousness; and it does so
beyond any possible knowledge of this domination. Historically effected
XXX
consciousness is so radically finite that our whole being, effected in the
totality of our destiny, inevitably transcends its knowledge of itself. But
that is a fundamental insight which is not to be limited to any specific
historical situation; an insight which, however, in the face of modern
historical research and of science's methodological ideal of objectivity,
meets with particular resistance in the self-understanding of science.
We are certainly entitled to ask the reflective historical question: why,
just now, at this precise moment in history, has this fundamental insight
into the role of effective history in all understanding become possible? My
investigations offer an indirect answer to this question. Only after the
failure of the naive historicism of the very century of historicism does it
become clear that the contrast between unhistorical-dogmatic and historical,
between tradition and historical science, between ancient and modern,
is not absolute. The famous querelle des anciens et des modernes
ceases to pose real alternatives.
Hence what is here affirmed—that the province of hermeneutics is
universal and especially that language is the form in which understanding
is achieved—embraces "pre-hermeneutic" consciousness as well as all
modes of hermeneutic consciousness. Even the naive appropriation of
tradition is a "retelling" although it ought not to be described as a "fusion
of horizons" (see p.537 below).
And now to the basic question: how far does the province of understanding
itself and its linguisticity reach? Can it justify the philosophical
universality implied in the proposition, "Being that can be understood is
language"? Surely the universality of language requires the untenable
metaphysical conclusion that "everything" is only language and language
event? True, the patent objection implied by the ineffable does not
necessarily affect the universality of language. The infinity of the dialogue
in which understanding is achieved makes any reference to the ineffable
itself relative. But is understanding the sole and sufficient access to the
reality of history? Obviously there is a danger that the actual reality of the
event, especially its absurdity and contingency, will be weakened and
misperceived by being seen in terms of the experience of meaning.
Hence it was my purpose to show that the historicism of Droysen and
Dilthey, despite the historical school's opposition to Hegel's spiritualism,
was seduced by its hermeneutic starting point into reading history as a
book: as one, moreover, intelligible down to the smallest letter. Despite all
its protest against a philosophy of history in which the necessity of the idea
is the nucleus of all events, the historical hermeneutics of Dilthey could
xxxi
not avoid letting history culminate in history of ideas. That was my
criticism. Yet surely this danger recurs in regard to the present work?
However, the fact that ideas are formed through tradition, especially
through the hermeneutic circle of whole and part, which is the starting
point of my attempt to lay the foundations of hermeneutics, does not
necessarily imply this conclusion. The concept of the whole is itself to be
understood only relatively. The whole of meaning that has to be understood
in history or tradition is never the meaning of the whole of history.
The danger of Docetism seems banished when historical tradition is
conceived not as an object of historical knowledge or of philosophical
conception, but as an effective moment of one's own being. The finite
nature of one's own understanding is the manner in which reality,
resistance, the absurd, and the unintelligible assert themselves. If one takes
this finitude seriously, one must take the reality of history seriously as
well.
The same problem makes the experience of the Thou so decisive for all
self-understanding. The section on experience (Part Two, II.3.B) takes on
a systematic and key position in my investigations. There the experience of
the Thou throws light on the concept of historically effected experience.
The experience of the Thou also manifests the paradox that something
standing over against me asserts its own rights and requires absolute
recognition; and in that very process is "understood." But I believe that I
have shown correctly that what is so understood is not the Thou but the
truth of what the Thou says to us. I mean specifically the truth that
becomes visible to me only through the Thou, and only by my letting
myself be told something by it. It is the same with historical tradition. It
would not deserve the interest we take in it if it did not have something to
teach us that we could not know by ourselves. It is in this sense that the
statement "being that can be understood is language" is to be read. It does
not mean that the one who understands has an absolute mastery over
being but, on the contrary, that being is not experienced where something
can be constructed by us and is to that extent conceived; it is experienced
where what is happening can merely be understood.
This involves a question of philosophical methodology which was raised
in a number of critical comments on my book. I should like to call it the
"problem of phenomenological immanence." It is true that my book is
phenomenological in its method. This may seem paradoxical inasmuch as
Heidegger's criticism of transcendental inquiry and his thinking of "the
turn" form the basis of my treatment of the universal hermeneutic
xxxii
problem. But I think that the principle of phenomenological demonstration
can be applied to this term of Heidegger's, which at last reveals the
hermeneutic problem. I have therefore retained the term "hermeneutics"
(which the early Heidegger used) not in the sense of a methodology but as
a theory of the real experience that thinking is. Hence I must emphasize
that my analyses of play and of language are intended in a purely
phenomenological sense.13 Play is more than the consciousness of the
player, and so it is more than a subjective act. Language is more than the
consciousness of the speaker; so also it is more than a subjective act. This
is what may be described as an experience of the subject and has nothing
to do with "mythology" or "mystification."14
This fundamental methodical approach avoids implying any metaphysical
conclusions. In subsequent publications, especially in my research
reports "Hermeneutics and Historicism"15 (cf. pp. 505-541 below) and
"The Phenomenological Movement" (in Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr.
David Linge [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976]), I have recorded
my acceptance of Kant's conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason: I regard
statements that proceed by wholly dialectical means from the finite to the
infinite, from human experience to what exists in itself, from the temporal
to the eternal, as doing no more than setting limits, and am convinced that
philosophy can derive no actual knowledge from them. Nevertheless, the
tradition of metaphysics and especially of its last great creation, Hegel's
speculative dialectic, remains close to us. The task, the "infinite relation,"
remains. But my way of demonstrating it seeks to free itself from the
embrace of the synthetic power of the Hegelian dialectic, even from the
"logic" which developed from the dialectic of Plato, and to take its stand in
the movement of dialogue, in which word and idea first become what they
are.16
Hence the present investigations do not fulfill the demand for a reflexive
self-grounding made from the viewpoint of the speculative transcendental
philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, and Husserl. But is the dialogue with the
whole of our philosophical tradition—a dialogue in which we stand and
which as philosophers, we are—groundless? Does what has always supported
us need to be grounded?
This raises a final question, which concerns less the method than the
contents of the hermeneutic universalism I have outlined. Does not the
universality of understanding involve a one-sidedness in its contents, since
it lacks a critical principle in relation to tradition and, as it were, espouses
a universal optimism? However much it is the nature of tradition to exist
XXXIII
only through being appropriated, it still is part of the nature of man to be
able to break with tradition, to criticize and dissolve it, and is not what
takes place in remaking the real into an instrument of human purpose
something far more basic in our relationship to being? To this extent, does
not the ontological universality of understanding result in a certain onesidedness?
Understanding certainly does not mean merely appropriating
customary opinions or acknowledging what tradition has sanctified. Heidegger,
who first described the concept of understanding as the universal
determinateness of Dasein, means by this the very projectiveness of
understanding—i.e., the futurality of Dasein. I shall not deny, however,
that—among all the elements of understanding—I have emphasized the
assimilation of what is past and of tradition. Like many of my critics,
Heidegger too would probably feel a lack of ultimate radicality in the
conclusions I draw. What does the end of metaphysics as a science mean?
What does its ending in science mean? When science expands into a total
technocracy and thus brings on the "cosmic night" of the "forgetfunless of
being," the nihilism that Nietzsche prophesied, then may one not gaze at
the last fading light of the sun setting in the evening sky, instead of turning
around to look for the first shimmer of its return?
It seems to me, however, that the one-sidedness of hermeneutic
universalism has the truth of a corrective. It enlightens the modern
viewpoint based on making, producing, and constructing concerning the
necessary conditions to which that viewpoint is subject. In particular, it
limits the position of the philosopher in the modern world. However much
he may be called to draw radical inferences from everything, the role of
prophet, of Cassandra, of preacher, or of know-it-all does not suit him.
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions,
but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and
now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension
between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds
himself.
The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept
awake, recognizes that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority
has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of
man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to
the point of becoming a Utopian or eschatological consciousness, the
hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of
the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.
xxxiv
