The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  27 On infinitary logic, see Bell (2012).

  28 Abriss der Algebra der Logik, Leipzig: Tuebner. Pt. 1, 1909; Pt. 2, 1910. This may also be found in the 1966 version of the Lectures.

  29 Logicians’ jargon for ‘if and only if’.

  30 Discussions of Boole and Peirce can be found in Hailperin (2004) and Hilpinen (2004), respectively. Schröder is discussed in Pekhaus (2004). All three are discussed in Grattan-Guiness (2000), chs. 2 and 4.

  31 See Priest (1998).

  32 Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Halle: L. Nebert, 1879. Translated as Bynum (1972).

  33 Funktion und Begriff, Jena: H. Pohle, 1891, ‘Über Begriff und Gegenstand’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 16: 192–205 (1892). ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosopische Kritik, 100: 25–50 (1892). All three essays are translated into English in Geach and Black (1952).

  34 Though it was orthodox to read the symbol in this way in the first half of the twentieth century, this is highly problematic. Frege is very careful not to read it like this. His gloss is more like: it is not the case that (…and not…).

  35 The precise details are a bit more complicated than this, but this is right enough for the present context.

  36 Strictly speaking, both axioms and rules were schemas. Ignore this if you do not know what it means.

  37 See Peckhaus (2004), 9.4.

  38 Discussions of Frege’s logic can be found in Sullivan (2004), Zalta (2012), and Grattan-Guiness (2000), ch. 4. The later chapters of the last of these also discuss developments in early twentieth-century logic.

  CHAPTER 21

  HERMENEUTICS

  ANDREW BOWIE

  21.1 PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES

  THE philosophical sources of the significance of hermeneutics in nineteenth-century philosophy can be indicated via three issues that arise in relation to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The resonances of these theoretical issues will, as we shall see, extend well beyond their initial contexts. J. G. Hamann (1730–88) makes a decisive move when he claims in 1784, in his critique of Kant, the Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, that Kant’s categories of the understanding cannot have the universal status which Kant attributes to them, because they depend on natural languages, and these cannot be reduced to a rationalist ‘general philosophical language’. The second issue is Kant’s account of judgement, where he argues that the application of concepts, as rules for identifying objects, cannot itself be bound by rules:

  If judgement wanted to show universally how one is to subsume under these rules, i.e. distinguish whether something belongs under the rule or not, this could only happen via a further rule. But because this is a rule it requires once more an instruction by judgement, and thus it is shown to be the case that the understanding is admittedly capable of being instructed and equipped by rules, but that judgement is a particular talent which cannot be given by instruction but can only be practised.1

  Without this ‘talent’, in the sense of practical ability, there will be a regress of rules for rules which would make judgement impossible. The third issue is indicated by Kant’s claim, in a discussion of Plato in the first Critique, that one can sometimes understand a thinker ‘better than he understood himself’.2 Why are these issues so significant?

  All the claims signal questions for an Enlightenment view of reason’s ability to give a foundation for interpretation which become apparent in relation to the consideration of language. Hamann, as part of a wider movement in the second half of the eighteenth century associated with J. G. Herder (1744–1803) and others, sees that language involves a crucial philosophical tension—that still plays a role in contemporary philosophy—between a striving towards expression of universality of the kind present in warranted scientific theories, and the fact that natural languages and the way they are used differ because they arise in particular contexts as a result of specific forms of social organization and contact with the world. Both Hamann and Herder see language primarily as a highly diverse form of expression of human existence, rather than just a means of representing or designating things in the world. Coming to terms with such diversity requires more than the ability to objectify what one is trying to understand, because understanding expressive forms involves elements which are not conceptual. Kant realizes that any account of cognition which seeks to give rules for cognition lacks a foundation, insofar as the application of rules cannot itself be governed by rules.3 When seen in relation to language, as the idea will soon come to be, this means that any attempt to render language ‘mechanizable’ will fail to account for actual processes of understanding, because judgement on the choice of the rules on which to base the interpretation of a word or utterance cannot itself be made in terms of a rule. This makes interpretation, as we shall see F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) claim it is, into a kind of ‘art’. Finally, the idea of the author being the sole or primary source of the authority over the meaning of their text is put in question by Kant, because authors, as he thinks Plato does with respect to the ‘Ideas’, may fail to grasp or express the real content of what they seek to say. This idea can more readily be exemplified via its later, intensified versions, in thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, where people can be shown to have said things they did not intend to say, even though the words they utter were, in one sense at least, what they meant.

  21.2 THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN HERMENEUTICS

  How, then, do these theoretical ideas relate to the historical development of hermeneutics? The question of the interpretation of texts plays a role in Greek philosophy, where the ideas, in Plato, that poets are the interpreters of the linguistic utterances of the Gods, and, in Aristotle, that language itself interprets the non-linguistic impressions made by things on the mind, already indicate the ambivalent status of language, as both the object of investigation and also in some sense playing the role of interpreting ‘subject’.4 Within the Christian tradition the status of the authority of Scripture becomes crucial with respect to hermeneutic questions. The scriptural texts are the established foundation of the Church’s doctrines, but they are confronted, particularly in relation to the onset of modern historical awareness, with a changing reality which clashes with the idea of a fixed set of authoritative meanings. Mediaeval Christian hermeneutics attributed a fourfold sense to Scripture: the sense was ‘literal’ or ‘historical’, and was approached via ‘grammatical interpretation’, which translated linguistic structures of the past into structures comprehensible in the present (this aspect of hermeneutics plays a role in most of its major representatives in the nineteenth century), but it could also involve allegorical, tropological, and anagogic meanings. Allegorical interpretation became necessary when the literal meaning, for example, of the erotic ‘Song of Solomon’, seemed in contradiction with its spiritual import.

  The challenge was to sustain the authority of the Word in relation both to the changing world, and to the differing ways of seeing things of the readers of and listeners to the Word. With the growing role of individualism associated with the Reformation and the Renaissance, this challenge becomes more difficult. For Luther the individual reader should be subjected to the authority of the Scripture, but this happens because they freely accept that it offers a higher truth than they, qua individual, are capable of attaining. Their individual self is thus reconciled with the external authority by willingly internalizing it. Theories of the reader–text relationship therefore already involve a characteristic tension between notions of the reader as active subject and as passive object, and the text itself as object and as subject. The changes with respect to the objective and subjective aspects of interpretation link hermeneutics both to key issues that form the substance of much modern philosophy, and to major developments in modern history that will become more and more pressing, particularly in the nineteenth century.

  With the growing power of the natural sciences, the claims of
mathematically based reason as the source of authority become more emphatic, and Enlightenment hermeneutics reflects this change by focusing on the ‘objective’ aspect of interpretation. Johann Martin Chladenius’ Introduction to the Correct Explication of Reasonable Sayings and Writings of 1742 asserts, for example, that: ‘One understands a speech or a text completely if one takes account in doing so of all the thoughts the words can awake in us according to reason and its rules of the soul’.5 Georg Friedrich Meier’s Attempt at a Universal Art of Explication of 1757 wishes to control meaning by a ‘science of rules, via the observation of which meanings can be recognised by their signs’.6 What begins to be apparent here are the roots of a split, of the kind which still exists in philosophy today, between the idea that the goal of interpretation is something as objective as other kinds of causally based knowledge, and the idea that it is impossible to render interpretation fully objective because it involves both the individual subject who makes the utterance and the never fully articulable contexts in which the utterance is made. Meier claims the meaning of an utterance is ‘the sequence of linked ideas (Vorstellungen) which the author wishes to designate via the utterance’,7 but he assumes a pre-established harmony between rational beings which makes agreement on the ‘sequence’ possible. One key to the advent of specifically modern hermeneutics will be precisely the disintegration of the idea of this harmony.

  However, one of the most familiar ideas in accounts of modern hermeneutics, that of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, is formulated most explicitly on the basis of the assumption of such a harmony. In 1808 Friedrich Ast (1778–1841), a pupil of F. W. J. Schelling, suggested a method for understanding texts from the past. For Ast, we are able to reproduce the thought of the past through its identity with our own thinking, the intelligibility of things being mirrored, in the manner characteristic of some versions of German Idealism, in the structure of thought, the principle of unity of the universe being ‘Geist’, ‘spirit’. He uses the idea of the organism to ground understanding in the idea that each thought can be understood as part of an intelligible whole (he is thinking in particular of the ancient world):

  The basis of all understanding and cognition is finding the spirit of the whole from the single part and grasping the single part via the whole…each is only posited with and by the other, just as the whole cannot be thought without the single part as a member of it and the single part cannot be thought without the whole, the sphere in which it lives.8

  That interpretation depends on the way in which particular aspects of texts and utterances relate to the contexts in which they occur is a modern hermeneutic truism. The real question is what kind of relationships between part and whole are in play, and how they are to be established by the interpreter. The reason Schleiermacher is so significant is that he brings to light the philosophical tensions involved in the differing aspects of what is involved in interpretation, in ways which reveal problems that are still germane to wider philosophical reflection.

  21.3 SCHLEIERMACHER: HERMENEUTICS AND DIALECTIC

  Schleiermacher is probably still best known as one of the most significant Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century. In his hermeneutics he insists, however, that his aim is a ‘general hermeneutics’ which does not involve a ‘special’ hermeneutics for the Christian scriptures. One reason for this is the development during the eighteenth century of ‘textual criticism’ (‘Kritik’), which, while seeking to establish the philological status of scriptural texts, also leads to concern with the historical truth of what is related in the Bible. This begins to undermine the idea that religious tradition has a prior authority over critical understanding and historical research. Schleiermacher is consistently concerned that philosophical and religious thinking should neither fall behind what has been established in the natural sciences and other disciplines, nor seek to usurp the authority of those disciplines in their own domains. The further point here is, however, that, read on their own, his texts on hermeneutics, most notably Hermeneutics and Criticism, often do read like philological manuals for the practice of interpretation of Biblical and other texts, rather than properly philosophical texts. So why is Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics so significant?

  One reason for the widespread failure—for example, on the part of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960), which sees Schleiermacher as a theorist of ‘empathetic’ interpretation who takes too little account of the primacy of language before the subject—to appreciate the philosophical significance of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is that it is not seen in relation to his Dialectic, when the texts are explicitly presented as complements of each other. This is because the relationship between the universal, in the form of knowledge, which is the object of the Dialectic, and the particular, in the form of interpretation of what a particular author and text means, which is the object of the hermeneutics, involves crucial problems:

  Looked at from the side of language the technical discipline of hermeneutics arises from the fact that every utterance can only be counted as an objective representation (Darstellung) to the extent to which it is taken from language and is to be grasped via language, but that on the other side the utterance can only arise as the action of an individual. …The reconciliation (Ausgleichung) of both moments makes understanding and explication into an art.9

  It is, therefore, ‘clear that both [hermeneutics and dialectic] can only develop together with each other.’10 What Schleiermacher means by ‘art’ echoes Kant’s reflections on judgement: art is ‘that for which there admittedly are rules, but the combinatory application of these rules cannot in turn be rule-bound’, on pain of the regress of rules for rules.11

  The philosophical point here is that in the Dialectic Schleiermacher puts in question the whole enterprise of establishing epistemological foundations. The ‘completion’ of episteme is ‘coming to an understanding’, which is ‘an art, techne’. As such, it is ‘an activity’ and both episteme and techne ‘are the same…both expressions are only specific ways in which what is designated by thinking occurs in reality in a temporal manner’.12 This means that a notion of understanding of the kind that later hermeneutic thinkers, like Heidegger and Gadamer, make central to their new vision of philosophy is already the core of his philosophical thinking. Instead of establishing a philosophical account of what grounds knowledge, such as empiricist sense-data, or an account of the transcendental structures of cognition, ‘the art of finding principles of knowledge can be none other than our art of carrying on conversation’.13 How does he arrive at this conviction?

  The key aspect of his approach lies in its pragmatist, non-representationalist orientation, which is suggested when he says, outlining a version of the notion of what Jürgen Habermas will term ‘communicative action’, that ‘[w]‌hat we call thought as a whole is an activity…such that everyone can act by designating in the same way’.14 Even though Schleiermacher is, like the German Idealists, concerned with showing how mind and world relate, and so talks in terms of the Absolute, as the goal of philosophy, his manner of doing so, albeit somewhat inconsistently, undermines, like his friend Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), the pretentions of philosophy as a foundational epistemological discipline: ‘Only the absolute as it never appears for itself in consciousness and the contentless idea of mere matter are free of all relativity. The subtractive procedure of excluding everything from the domain of knowledge that is tinged with relativity would permit no real knowledge at all’.15 We must therefore ‘be satisfied with arbitrary beginnings in all areas of knowledge’.16 In early German Romantic philosophy, in contrast to the Idealism of Fichte, one does not begin with an absolute foundation in the spontaneity of the subject, but rather ‘begins in the middle’, on the assumption that the search for the foundation leads either to another regress or to dogmatic assertion of the absolute nature of the subject. That absolute nature is already put in question by the dependence of the subject on natural languages which it did not create.

  Moreov
er, although Schleiermacher uses the idea of truth as correspondence of thought and its object, he repeatedly suggests that correspondence is only ‘the postulate of completed knowledge’, because ‘our thought never completely corresponds to the object’.17 Like Heidegger, it is not that he thinks the notion of correspondence is wholly mistaken, but it is not a notion which can do foundational explanatory work: ‘But as far as the expression knowledge corresponds to being is concerned: one could replace it with many others, all with the same value; but what it means does not get any clearer thereby, for because it is what is prior (das Ursprüngliche) in the orientation towards knowledge, from which everything else develops, it cannot be explained’.18 If the philosophical claim is made that ‘truth is correspondence of thought and reality’, this leaves one with the question as to how this notional truth is itself to be shown to correspond to reality.

  The reason for Schleiermacher’s stance is his conception of linguistic meaning as being dependent upon ‘schematism’. In Kant the idea of schematism arises from the attempt to overcome difficulties generated by the way receptivity and spontaneity are regarded as separate sources of knowledge. Intuitions given in receptivity can never be said to be identical, so identity is a function of spontaneous judgement that two things are the same in some respect. The schema of a tree enables the giant redwood and the bonsai to be seen as the same, qua trees. Hamann had already suggested that language, as perceptible phenomenon in the world and as that which is able to make phenomena intelligible, seems to be both part of receptivity and of spontaneity. Schelling, one of the key influences on Schleiermacher, linked schematism to language in a manner which also questions a strict divide between spontaneous and receptive. For Schelling ‘[t]‌he schema…is not an idea (Vorstellung) that is determined on all sides, but an intuition of the rule according to which a particular object can be produced’.19 As ‘intuition’, rather than as knowledge of a rule, the schema cannot itself be cognitively determined: for that, as Kant argued, intuitions require concepts. Schelling suggests that language’s capacity for using a finite number of words to articulate a non-finite series of meanings depends precisely upon this ‘intuition of a rule’—otherwise it becomes impossible to know how one would learn to use a word without getting into the regress of rules for rules of using a word.