9 - Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Summary

While his intellectual legacy is hotly contested (and not only because of his deep involvement in the cultural politics of the Third Reich), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a towering figure in twentieth-century hermeneutics. Working in a climate shaped by the historicist tradition, Heidegger creatively adapted ideas from Dilthey, Husserl, Nietzsche, and others to develop a new phenomenological conception of hermeneutics that influenced some of the twentieth century’s most prominent figures. Heidegger dubbed his philosophical approach “phenomenological hermeneutics” in 1919 and went on to develop what he called a “hermeneutics of facticity” familiar to readers of his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), as “fundamental ontology.” Crucially, Heidegger contends that our understanding of ourselves and of anything else at all is deeply historically situated. In a more critical register, Heidegger describes how this historical situatedness not only enables understanding, but also forecloses possibilities or allows them to slide into a kind of innocuous obviousness. Hence, as he spells out in some of the concluding sections of Being and Time, genuine historical understanding must be understood as repetition (Wiederholung), as a kind of struggle with the past aimed ultimately at liberating the meaning of the past for a new future. Heidegger’s famous and contentious readings of the history of philosophy and of religious thought, as well as of poets like Hölderlin and Rilke, exemplify this approach to hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was part of a cohort of brilliant students who experienced the development of Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics first-hand in the early 1920s. Starting with his earliest works on Plato and Aristotle, Gadamer develops his own approach that, like Heidegger’s, emphasizes the ubiquity of understanding in human life. In his enormously influential Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer takes the experience of truth in our encounters with great works of art and literature as a model for the kinds of insights that are distinctive to humanistic disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften). He argues that tradition furnishes the conditions for understanding, which he conceptualizes as a dialogical process that culminates in a “fusion of horizons.” Importantly, the nature of this dialogical process cannot be reductively captured in procedural terms.