phenomenon of understanding and of the correct interpretation of what
has been understood is not a problem specific to the methodology of the
human sciences alone. There has long been a theological and a legal
hermeneutics, which were not so much theoretical as corrolary and
ancillary to the practical activity of the judge or clergyman who had
completed his theoretical training. Even from its historical beginnings, the
problem of hermeneutics goes beyond the limits of the concept of method
as set by modern science. The understanding and the interpretation of
texts is not merely a concern of science, but obviously belongs to human
experience of the world in general. The hermeneutic phenomenon is
basically not a problem of method at all. It is not concerned with a method
of understanding by means of which texts are subjected to scientific
investigation like all other objects of experience. It is not concerned
primarily with amassing verified knowledge, such as would satisfy the
methodological ideal of science—yet it too is concerned with knowledge
and with truth. In understanding tradition not only are texts understood,
but insights are acquired and truths known. But what kind of knowledge
and what kind of truth?
Given the dominance of modern science in the philosophical elucidation
and justification of the concept of knowledge and the concept of truth, this
question does not appear legitimate. Yet it is unavoidable, even within the
sciences. The phenomenon of understanding not only pervades all human
relations to the world. It also has an independent validity within science,
and it resists any attempt to reinterpret it in terms of scientific method. The
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following investigations start with the resistance in modern science itself to
the universal claim of scientific method. They are concerned to seek the
experience of truth that transcends the domain of scientific method
wherever that experience is to be found, and to inquire into its legitimacy.
Hence the human sciences are connected to modes of experience that lie
outside science: with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history
itself. These are all modes of experience in which a truth is communicated
that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science.
Contemporary philosophy is well aware of this. But it is quite a different
question how far the truth claim of such modes of experience outside
science can be philosophically legitimated. The current interest in the
hermeneutic phenomenon rests, I think, on the fact that only a deeper
investigation of the phenomenon of understanding can provide this
legitimation. This conviction is strongly supported by the importance that
contemporary philosophy attaches to the history of philosophy. In regard
to the historical tradition of philosophy, understanding occurs to us as a
superior experience enabling us easily to see through the illusion of
historical method characteristic of research in the history of philosophy. It
is part of the elementary experience of philosophy that when we try to
understand the classics of philosophical thought, they of themselves make
a claim to truth that the consciousness of later times can neither reject nor
transcend. The naive self-esteem of the present moment may rebel against
the idea that philosophical consciousness admits the possibility that one's
own philosophical insight may be inferior to that of Plato or Aristotle,
Leibniz, Kant, or Hegel. One might think it a weakness that contemporary
philosophy tries to interpret and assimilate its classical heritage with this
acknowledgment of its own weakness. But it is undoubtedly a far greater
weakness for philosophical thinking not to face such self-examination but
to play at being Faust. It is clear that in understanding the texts of these
great thinkers, a truth is known that could not be attained in any other
way, even if this contradicts the yardstick of research and progress by
which science measures itself.
The same thing is true of the experience of art. Here the scholarly
research pursued by the "science of art" is aware from the start that it can
neither replace nor surpass the experience of art. The fact that through a
work of art a truth is experienced that we cannot attain in any other way
constitutes the philosophic importance of art, which asserts itself against all
attempts to rationalize it away. Hence, together with the experience of
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philosophy, the experience of art is the most insistent admonition to
scientific consciousness to acknowledge its own limits.
Hence the following investigation starts with a critique of aesthetic
consciousness in order to defend the experience of truth that comes to us
through the work of art against the aesthetic theory that lets itself be
restricted to a scientific conception of truth. But the book does not rest
content with justifying the truth of art; instead, it tries to develop from this
starting point a conception of knowledge and of truth that corresponds to
the whole of our hermeneutic experience. Just as in the experience of art
we are concerned with truths that go essentially beyond the range of
methodical knowledge, so the same thing is true of the whole of the
human sciences: in them our historical tradition in all its forms is certainly
made the object of investigation, but at the same time truth comes to speech in
it. Fundamentally, the experience of historical tradition reaches far beyond
those aspects of it that can be objectively investigated. It is true or untrue
not only in the sense concerning which historical criticism decides, but
always mediates truth in which one must try to share.
Hence these studies on hermeneutics, which start from the experience of
art and of historical tradition, try to present the hermeneutic phenomenon
in its full extent. It is a question of recognizing in it an experience of truth
that not only needs to be justified philosophically, but which is itself a way
of doing philosophy. The hermeneutics developed here is not, therefore, a
methodology of the human sciences, but an attempt to understand what
the human sciences truly are, beyond their methodological self-consciousness,
and what connects them with the totality of our experience of world.
If we make understanding the object of our reflection, the aim is not an art
or technique of understanding, such as traditional literary and theological
hermeneutics sought to be. Such an art or technique would fail to
recognize that, in view of the truth that speaks to us from tradition, a
formal technique would arrogate to itself a false superiority. Even though
in the following I shall demonstrate how much there is of event effective in
all understanding, and how little the traditions in which we stand are
weakened by modern historical consciousness, it is not my intention to
make prescriptions for the sciences or the conduct of life, but to try to
correct false thinking about what they are.
I hope in this way to reinforce an insight that is threatened with oblivion
in our swiftly changing age. Things that change force themselves on our
attention far more than those that remain the same. That is a general law
of our intellectual life. Hence the perspectives that result from the
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experience of historical change are always in danger of being exaggerated
because they forget what persists unseen. In modern life, our historical
consciousness is constantly overstimulated. As a consequence—though, as
I hope to show, it is a pernicious short circuit—some react to this
overestimation of historical change by invoking the eternal orders of
nature and appealing to human nature to legitimize the idea of natural
law. It is not only that historical tradition and the natural order of life
constitute the unity of the world in which we live as men; the way we
experience one another, the way we experience historical traditions, the
way we experience the natural givenness of our existence and of our
world, constitute a truly hermeneutic universe, in which we are not
imprisoned, as if behind insurmountable barriers, but to which we are
opened.
A reflection on what truth is in the human sciences must not try to
reflect itself out of the tradition whose binding force it has recognized.
Hence in its own work it must endeavor to acquire as much historical selftransparency
as possible. In its concern to understand the universe of
understanding better than seems possible under the modern scientific
notion of cognition, it has to try to establish a new relation to the concepts
which it uses. It must be aware of the fact that its own understanding and
interpretation are not constructions based on principles, but the furthering
of an event that goes far back. Hence it will not be able to use its concepts
unquestioningly, but will have to take over whatever features of the
original meaning of its concepts have come down to it.
The philosophical endeavor of our day differs from the classical tradition
of philosophy in that it is not a direct and unbroken continuation of it.
Despite its connection with its historical origin, philosophy today is well
aware of the historical distance between it and its classical models. This is
especially to be found in its changed attitude to the concept. However
important and fundamental were the transformations that took place with
the Latinization of Greek concepts and the translation of Latin conceptual
language into the modern languages, the emergence of historical consciousness
over the last few centuries is a much more radical rupture. Since
then, the continuity of the Western philosophical tradition has been
effective only in a fragmentary way. We have lost that naive innocence
with which traditional concepts were made to serve one's own thinking.
Since that time, the attitude of science towards these concepts has become
strangely detached, whether it takes them up in a scholarly, not to say selfconsciously
archaizing way, or treats them as tools. Neither of these truly
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satisfies the hermeneutic experience. The conceptual world in which
philosophizing develops has already captivated us in the same way that the
language in which we live conditions us. If thought is to be conscientious,
it must become aware of these anterior influences. A new critical consciousness
must now accompany all responsible philosophizing which
takes the habits of thought and language built up in the individual in his
communication with his environment and places them before the forum of
the historical tradition to which we all belong.
The following investigation tries to meet this demand by linking as
closely as possible an inquiry into the history of concepts with the
substantive exposition of its theme. That conscientiousness of phenomenological
description which Husserl has made a duty for us all; the
breadth of the historical horizon in which Dilthey has placed all philosophizing;
and, not least, the penetration of both these influences by the
impulse received from Heidegger, indicate the standard by which the
writer desires to be measured, and which, despite all imperfection in the
execution, he would like to see applied without reservation
