The Hermeneutic Circle

The Problem

Hermeneutics might be defined as the study of interpretation. Perhaps the two most important discussions of what Hermeneutics is and how it should be understood have been produced by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger approached hermeneutics in terms of a problem the very act of interpretation poses to anyone: since all interpretation involves some kind of prior understanding of the world or of ourselves, how can we ever proceed to an interpretation that is not influenced by a prior judgment? Gadamer wrote of Heidegger’s discussion of the hermeneutic circle that it produced the insight that “It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices” that constitute our understanding of ourselves and the world.¹ Thus, the problem of hermeneutics that Heidegger uncovers and attempts to grapple with might be taken to be bound up with the observation that “understanding always precedes interpretation”;² yet, if true, this also means that the truth of any interpretation must depend upon some prior understanding that acts as the very basis for the interpretation in question, leading to the impression that hermeneutics is a subject whose very methods of going forward involve question begging.

Contents:

1. Circularity
2. Circularity: Virtuous or Vicious?
3. Gadamer’s Emphasis on Revision
4. Conclusion
5. References

Circularity

This is precisely where the issue of circularity enters the picture. Circularity in argumentation amounts to a way of reasoning that always leads back to its logical starting point. Suppose someone wanted to show that the earth was not flat because it was round as follows:

1. The earth is round.
2. Therefore, it is not flat.

If the starting point of the proof is that the earth is round and therefore not flat, its circularity is very evident: the conclusion leads straight back to the premise because it is the premise that must be proved. The conclusion merely begs the question, “How do you know that it is round?”

Circularity: Virtuous or Vicious?

In the same way, Heidegger’s formulation of the hermeneutic circle makes this kind of circularity evident: if any intepretation requires a prior understanding of some kind, then we are always led back to question that prior understanding as a matter of discovering some foundation for our conclusion. For this reason, it appears interpretive understanding can never be scientific in nature. Heidegger writes, “if interpretation must in any case already operate in that which is understood and, if it must draw its nurture from this, how is it to bring any scientific results to maturity without moving in a circle….?” In this way, the hermeneutic circle might be considered vicious; however, Heidegger argues that it should be considered productive, even of the “most primordial kind of knowing.”³

To see how, let’s begin by taking a look at the “prior understanding” that Heidegger seems to have in mind. Heidegger envisions interpretation as a productive movement from the implicit to the explicit in the act of intepretation itself. In Being and Time H148, in his section on “Understanding and Interpretation” Heidegger Writes,

In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in
understanding.

Furthermore, the kind of understanding Heidegger has in mind need not be thought of as explicit in the sense of being “fully worked out.” In fact, he notices a very basic form of “understanding” that can be considered to be bound up with the act of perception:

Whenever we see with this sight [with the pure perception of something], we already do so understandingly and interpretively. In the mere encountering of something, it is understood in terms of a totality of involvements; and such seeing hides in itself the explicitness of the assignment-relations (of the ‘in-order-to’) which belong to that totality.⁴

Perception may therefore be understood as an act of interpretation that relies upon a pre-understanding that can be made explicit. This act of making explicit may be revealed where it takes the form of an “as” structure. A thing that opens a door, for example, when interpreted, may be interpreted as a door nob based upon a prior understanding of what a door nob is. We see it as a door nob in relation to doors and movement and in general its ready-to-handedness as a doornob.⁵

This kind of interpretive as-structuring that is bound up with the perception and everyday ready-to-handedness of things is one that Heidegger notices may precede a fuller articulation when the same object (doornob, stapler, etc.): “In such an assertion the ‘as’ does not turn up for the first time; it just gets expressed for the first time, and this is possible only in that it lies before us as something expressible.”⁶ Interestingly, language plays an important role in our orientation to items that we encounter as ready-to-hand such as door nobs and staplers whose inner workings and true “nature” have not become an issue for us. In H80 Heidegger writes that

A sign is not a Thing which stands to another Thing in the relationship of indicating; it is rather an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself.

This description of the role of the sign can be directly related to his description of the interpretive pure perception of a thing:

[D]oes not the absence of such an ‘as’ make up the mereness of any pure perception of something? Whenever we see with this kind of sight, we already do so understandingly and interpretatively. In the mere encountering of something, it is understood in terms of a totality of involvements; and such seeing hides in itself the explicitness of the assignment-relations (of the “in-order-to”) which belong to that totality.

The mere act of seeing a thing, he holds, “bears in itself the structure of interpretation”⁷ and given what Heidegger writes about the nature of the sign as indicating where a thing falls into place in the world of things, it may be argued that language acts to make explicit the groundwork for whatever as-structuring our interpretive understanding might be able to assign to such objects. Yet, it seems that, in order for this proto-structuring to take place, some sort of proto-linguistic basis for it must be operative.

It is possible to see objects in the world in a way that brackets out the as-structure of our relatedness to things in the world (as, for example, in the case of a phenomenological bracketing exercise) but such cases, he regards such exercises as a mere privation of a more primary way of seeing that he describes in H149 as the “pre-predicative seeing of the ready-to-hand” and as derivative.⁸ It is in this primary way of encountering such that we may have access to our “primordial” understanding of objects, as the basis for their further interpretation.

In sum, it might be said that, for Heidegger, our way of encountering the world always involves some form of understanding that can be made more explicit and further interpreted. In this sense, interpretation can be understood as always involving “something we have in advance-a fore having” or a “fore-conception.”⁹ The important thing is to make our fore-conceptions themselves a subject of investigation and testing in light of the “things themselves”:

In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.

(H153)

Gadamer’s discussion of the hermeneutic circle may serve to explicate Heidegger’s point and bring more light to its significance.

Gadamer’s Emphasis on Revision

Gadamer’s discussion of the problem in Truth and Method shows how the the problem of circularity may be thought of as being productive where he describes the task of textual interpretation in terms of a constant revision of fore-projections regarding the meaning of a text. He writes, “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text.”¹⁰ He envisions these fore-projections as revisable and as various steps toward acquiring a more adequate interpretation. His application of Heidegger’s way of dealing with the hermeneutic circle to the interpretation of texts is well expressed on page 270 of Truth and Method as follows:

A person who is trying to understand is exposed to distraction from fore-meanings that are not borne out by the things themselves [the text]. Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed ‘by the things’ themselves, is the constant task of understanding. The only ‘objectivity’ here is the confirmation of a fore-meaning in its being worked out. Indeed, what characterizes the arbitrariness of inappropriate fore-meanings if not that they come to nothing in being worked out? But understanding realizes its full potential only when the fore-meanings that it begins with are not arbitrary. Thus, it is quite right for the interpreter not to approach the text directly, relying solely on the fore-meaning already available to him, but rather explicitly to examine the legitimacy–i.e., the origin and validity–of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.¹¹

It is noteworthy that Gadamer poses a foundation for interpretation after all: the text, whose contents contain what he calls “the things themselves.” In this way, it might be said, the problem of circularity (or endless regress into interpretations of understandings posing as interpretations) is avoided. Yet, the apparent sleight of hand is not foundational in the traditional sense whose model might be geometry of physics. It is not possible in Gadamer’s framework of interpretive understanding to begin with the notion of a simplest element and thereafter construct a framework that interprets the text. Instead, the necessary first step is to pose an interpretation that can be justified by or found inadequate in relation to the text itself. It is this kind of process that leads to further interpretations that better fit the content before the reader.

Conclusion

By continually returning to our initial attempt to project meaning onto a text, we are both intentionally making ourselves aware of the limitations that we have imposed upon the activity of interpretation, and at the same time providing ourselves a way to get beyond it by working toward a more adequate interpretation. Seen in this way, the “scientific theme” Heidegger mentions that questions the legitimacy of interpretation as a method of understanding ourselves and the world appears to have a lot in common with the method of hypothesis utilized by scientific method itself. Perhaps scientific and interpretive reasoning are not so far apart as might have been thought. However, whereas scientific reasoning searches for a foundational basis for its reasoning, interpretive reasoning recognizes foundationalism as lying beyond its grasp, except insofar as it might postulate a “thing in itself” that it moves toward in spirit.

References

1. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by David S. Linge (University of California Press 2004) 9.
2. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John McQuarrie and David Robinson (Harper and Row 2008) 194-195. These remarks, as well as those that follow are based upon pages H 148-153 of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
3. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.152-153.
4. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.149.
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.149.
6. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.149.
7. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.149.
8. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.149.
9. Heidegger, Being and Time, H.150.
10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Edition (Revised), translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Continuum 2004) 269.