Schleiermacher

Bauman distinguishes between the "legislative" notion of reason found in Kant and other Enlightenment figures and the "interpretive" rationality that characterizes much postmodern thought. The shift from the former to the latter was not accomplished all at once. Schleiermacher, for all importance in the rise of hermeneutics, was still aiming at "legislative" goals through legislative means: "Schleiermacher's most pressing worry was not the lack of understanding, and the passage from the absence of understanding to its presence, but the danger of misunderstanding: the suspicion (indeed, an unchallenged assumption) that without systematically codified methods of interpretation a false understanding may, and in all probability will result."

Thus, "The founding axiom of Schleiermacher's project was the unreliability and thus inferiority of understanding unaided by expert guidance. Hence Schleiermacher's major purpose was to establish grounds for the true representation of meaning; obversely, for the de-legitimation or refutation of all competitive interpretations." One suspects too that he did not consider the Quadriga a suitable method for modern interpretation.

Gadamer is the first to break through to a thoroughly interpretive understanding of reason: "the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process" (Gadamer's own words). Gadamer also challenged the earlier assertion that expert interpreters were needed to assure proper results: He denied "the special privilege claimed by professional hermeneutics" (Bauman). Thus, as Gadamer said, the task of hermeneutics was "not to develop a procedure for understanding, but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place. But those conditions are not of the nature of a 'procedure' or a method, which the interpreter must of himself bring to bear on the text, but rather they must be given. The prejudices and fore-meanings in the mind of the interpreter are not at his free disposal." Gadamer rejected the twin goals of legislative reason: to find a "procedure that guarantees the validity of the result by the sheer fact that it has been scrupulously followed" and "the principle that hte findings at the end of the methodological procedure carry superior validity no non-methodological effort can claim."

Two cheers for Hans, I say.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 04, 2006 at 05:24 PM

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