Table Of ContentHERMENEUTICS. METHOD AND METHODOLOGY
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY
Volume 50
Editor:
John J. Drummond, Fordham University
Editorial Board:
Elizabeth A. Behnke
David Carr, Emory University
Stephen Crowell, Rice University
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
J. Claude Evans, Washington University
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz
Gail Soffer, New School for Social Research, New York
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through
creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally,
offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses.
Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results
with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on
this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.
HERMENEUTICS. METHOD AND
METHODOLOGY
by
T.M. SEEBOHM
Johannes Gutenberg University,
Mainz, Germany
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON
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uxor carissima
philologiae magistra
Table of Contents
Preface........................................................................................................................x
Acknowledgments......................................................................................................x
General Introduction...................................................................................................1
Part I. The Development of Hermeneutical Consciousness
Introduction................................................................................................................5
Chapter 1. The Development of Hermeneutical Consciousness in Classical
Antiquity and the Middle Ages.............................................................10
§1. The semantic field of hermeneia......................................................................10
§2. The philological-rhetorical syndrome..............................................................12
§3. The exegetic-homiletic syndrome....................................................................20
§4. The development of hermeneutical consciousness in the Middle Ages..........25
Chapter 2. The Genesis of Philological-Historical Hermeneutics..........................34
§5. Reformation and humanism.............................................................................34
§6. Hermeneutics in the age of rationalism and the Enlightenment.......................41
§7. The historical school and the emergence of philological-historical
hermeneutics....................................................................................................46
Chapter 3. Methodological Hermeneutics..............................................................55
§8. Hermeneutics as a methodology of the philological-historical method...........55
§9. Boeckh’s critics and Dilthey............................................................................61
§10. Droysen’s theory of historical interpretation and critique...............................69
§11. Archaeological hermeneutics...........................................................................85
Part II. Toward a General Theory of Understanding
Introduction..............................................................................................................93
Chapter 4. A Typology of Understanding................................................................98
§12. The givenness of the other living body and animal understanding..................98
§13. Elementary understanding..............................................................................105
§14. Higher understanding and cultural tradition..................................................116
viii
Chapter 5. Cultural Understanding......................................................................... 125
§15. Preliminary remarks.......................................................................................125
§16. Non-literary cultural traditions.......................................................................126
§17. Texts and speeches.........................................................................................132
§18. Archaic cultures and archaic intercultural encounters...................................140
§19. The development of literary traditions and the advent of hermeneutical
reflection........................................................................................................144
Part III. Method and Methodology
Introduction............................................................................................................153
Chapter 6. The Unsolved Problems of Methodological Hermeneutics................155
§20. Levels and rules.............................................................................................155
§21. The theory of the levels of hermeneutics.......................................................158
§22. The second canon and its problems...............................................................162
§23. The first canon and its problems....................................................................167
Chapter 7. Parts, Wholes, and Circles..................................................................169
§24. Logical preliminaries.....................................................................................169
§25. The theory of the whole and the parts............................................................174
§26. The wholes and parts of texts and their meaning in pre-methodical
reading...........................................................................................................178
§27. Methodical interpretation and the two abstractive reductions........................183
§28. Grammatical interpretation............................................................................185
§29. Genre interpretation.......................................................................................196
§30. Summary and transition.................................................................................209
Chapter 8. The First Canon and the Philological-Historical Method...................218
§31. Preliminary considerations.............................................................................218
§32. The original givenness of the past in remembering and memory..................220
§33. Agreement and disagreement, understanding, misunderstanding,
and not-understanding in dialogues...............................................................222
§34. Dialogues between correspondents................................................................227
§35. The model of the stemma...............................................................................229
§36. New formulations for the first canon.............................................................232
§37. Efficient history and the consciousness of efficient history ..........................237
Concluding Remarks..............................................................................................245
ix
Bibliography...........................................................................................................251
Index.......................................................................................................................263
Index of names.......................................................................................................263
Index of technical terms.........................................................................................265
Preface
The introduction will clarify the general intentions of this work. This preface is re-
stricted to some remarks about my effort over more than thirty years. In 1970 I dis-
covered that the numerous and divergent contributions to the field of so-called
“philosophical hermeneutics” included almost nothing about the problems of herme-
neutics as the method of the interpretation of texts–which is the oldest signification
of the word “hermeneutics,”–and about the use of hermeneutics in the human sci-
ences in general, a use that has been made conspicuous in the work of Wilhelm
Dilthey. What had been said about hermeneutics as a method by philologists and
historians in the nineteenth century was also practically ignored. There are some
contributions in recent Italian literature, but that literature contains overwhelming
surveys of work in traditional hermeneutics and is dominated by a vaguely idealistic
spirit. Moreover, it has produced heated polemical criticisms against the first repre-
sentatives of philosophical hermeneutics. What has been missing overall are
attempts to develop new critical reflections on the problems of what can be called
“methodological hermeneutics.” Husserlian phenomenology has proven useful to
me in such reflections.
I have published my critical reflections in a monograph and in a series of lectures
and essays, most of them in English, since 1972. My results have often been sum-
marized in my teaching and I have been pleased to see a growing interest among
students in my final years at the University of Mainz. This growing interest came
chiefly from philology departments, especially the German Department, and in-
cluded an interest in the history of hermeneutics as well as in the methodological
problems. An American literature has also been growing in departments of English
since the late 1960s, but this literature has had no influence on the discussion of
philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction. This experience has led me to de-
velop the whole of my position. After some hesitation I decided to publish my posi-
tion in English because most of my other contributions to this area are in this lan-
guage and because a book in English can find readers in Germany and other coun-
tries more easily than vice versa. My chief hope is that a text by a philosopher might
show that there are questions in hermeneutics that have been omitted by the main-
stream of the last fifty years of philosophical discussion.
Acknowledgments
An enterprise like this is not possible without the support of other scholars. It is not
possible to mention all who discussed my essays and early drafts of the book with
me, giving advice here and there. But there is one who accompanied and supported
my research from the beginning to the end. Lester Embree read all the chapters of
the book, gave valuable suggestions and corrections, and polished the style. I am very
thankful for his support. I also appreciated the discussions with Dr. Ullmaier and Dr.
Trappen of the German Department at the University of Mainz, as well as the oppor-
tunity to participate in their work as a reader and external advisor of their disserta-
tions. Furthermore, the handling of large documents on the computer and the task of
the first formatting of the text, as well as the solution for many technical problems
xi
needed the support of a person who had the background of a trained computer scien-
tist and philosopher with an extended experience in the editing business. Olav Wie-
gand is well trained in these areas. I appreciate his support. I am also thankful for
Dr. Elizabeth Behnke’s copyediting of the book. Last but not least, I appreciate and
am thankful for the decision of the editorial board and the editor of the series Con-
tributions to Phenomenology and Kluwer Academic Publishers to publish the book
in this series.
Thomas M Seebohm
Bonn
2004
