Romanticism, Hermeneutics and the Crisis of the Human Sciences

Scott Masson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351149785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The human sciences established and developed in the nineteenth century have slowly disintegrated. It is an ironic end. It was in the name of the greater legitimacy of more universal psychological criteria that its architects disavowed the traditional theological standard for valuing and evaluating human words and deeds. With hindsight, we can see that universality was indeed gained, but only at the cost of alienating any sense of common legitimacy. Harold Bloom, defending the canon largely in the humanising, 'moral sense' convention of critics operating since Matthew Arnold, has resolutely maintained the common legitimacy of aesthetic value against the claims of particular interest groups. But the very universality attached to aesthetic value is at odds with the world of common sense, and thus lies at the root of the problem. To complicate matters, this universality has been understood as a traditional criterion. A more radical treatment of the subject is needed. This study begins by surveying the field of modern hermeneutics. Noting its repeated crises of self-legitimisation, it traces these to circular beliefs bequeathed by Romanticism that human nature is self-begetting, and can thus be known intimately and autonomously. After providing a historical overview of how human nature had been understood, the focus shifts to the attack in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria on Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and to a reading of some key Romantic texts. It reads Coleridge's famous definition of the imagination as an attack on Romantic hermeneutics, rooted in the traditional view that man has been created in Imago Dei.

Chapter 1
Modern Hermeneutics: The Development of Universal Relativity by Understanding Meaning in Terms of Truth

The majority of the issues that emerge in this study belong to the field of contemporary philosophy commonly designated hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a systematic discipline concerned with unearthing the principles regulating all forms of interpretation. It explores them both with regard for the traditional focus of interpretation, the text, and, since the time of the 'father of modern hermeneutics', Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), with regard for the relation of mankind to the internalised idea of universality as well. This new approach was developed in the late-nineteenth century by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who sought to establish a methodology for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) like that which Kant had provided for the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Dilthey maintained that the proper object of the human sciences was something specifically human, namely the inner, psychic life (Erlebnis, 'lived experience') of historical and social agents. For whereas the natural sciences sought to explain phenomena in a causal and, so to speak, external fashion of explanation (Erkláren), he asserted that the method proper to the human sciences was that of empathetic understanding (Verstehen).

I shall provide a more extended discussion of the main emphases of Dilthey's and Schleiermacher's work shortly. They are of particular interest to a discussion of the English Romantics because Schleiermacher and, to a lesser extent, Dilthey presented similar hermeneutic perspectives. The focus, however, will be upon the conjectures of the contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, because they have become central to contemporary discussions of hermeneutic issues. Gadamer appears to resolve a long-standing problem within the project of general hermeneutics. He promises to unite the now largely discredited 'methodological' or 'Romantic' hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey¹ with a Heideggerian form of ontology. Heidegger himself showed little interest in the general hermeneutic project of recovering meaning. What he appeared to establish though, which makes him crucial for Gadamer's purposes, was how mankind could engage with the truth of being.

The separation of being from truth had been a philosophical problem ever since Descartes separated being from appearance by his method of universal doubt, but it had also been the central problem of the general hermeneutic project (and thus of the humanities) since Schleiermacher. Heidegger's philosophy has been taken to offer the missing link. He provides Gadamer, as the title of his key hermeneutic work Truth & Method attests, with a means of uniting the 'truth' of his ontology with the method for recovering authorial 'meaning' characteristic of a general hermeneutics. The unity of the two appears to be a rather uninspiring aim, but examining the consequences of their separation soon belies that impression. Before I go on to summarise the importance of Heidegger to Gadamer and the general hermeneutic project, I wish to do just that: I wish to examine the project's fundamental characteristics and its inherent difficulties, and briefly note their relation to the crisis of self-legitimation in Romantic poetry.

It seems important to distinguish the basic tenor of my account of modern hermeneutics from an account by the influential hermeneuticist, Paul Ricoeur, which I shall in part relate in this chapter. Ricoeur, in commenting on the evolution of general hermeneutics since the Romantics, has described the development of hermeneutics as follows:

I see the recent history of hermeneutics dominated by two preoccupations. The first tends progressively to enlarge the aim of hermeneutics, in such a way that all regional hermeneutics are incorporated into one general hermeneutics. But this movement of deregionalisation cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics - its efforts to achieve a scientific status - are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being. The movement of deregionalisation is thus accompanied by a movement of radicalisation, by which hermeneutics becomes not only general but fundamental²

Ricoeur is certainly right in observing that since Schleiermacher, investigations into 'general hermeneutics' have shown an increasing awareness of the implications of universality. I think that there are two basic problems with his account though.

Firstly, what he terms its initial 'deregionalisation' is not merely the result of the broadening of the field it implies. It represents a shift in the 'locus' of meaning to be interpreted away from the primacy of divine revelation, which in the past had been applied to the world by analogy, towards immediate human revelation (or expression). Since, in the terms of the new dispensation, meaning is derived from divining the universality that had been interiorised in the psyche, which I called the 'logic of intimacy', all forms of human expression become 'meaningful'. This 'deregionalisation' followed the lines of the process I traced in the introduction.

Secondly, what Ricoeur presents as the movement's later radicalisation, its 'ontological preoccupations', reflects the growing awareness that Romantic universality had radically alienated human being and human knowledge from any worldly relational considerations, despite appearing to have established a more intimate knowledge of both. Among these relational considerations, it had alienated man from the common world of his senses, from 'external' human relations, and most significantly, from the God whose true image had explained the character and meaning of the marred image of man and the world which characterises human experience. In other words, this 'radicalisation' continued to employ the postulate of autonomy, but then tried to add the 'world' of being to it (through language, etc.). It is not then ultimately a radical movement, but a therapeutic one. But by trying to recover a sense of being in the world from the perspective of autonomy, it makes even the physical into something like a mundane form of metaphysics, even while claiming to 'be-in-the-world.'

To trace what I think are grave misapprehensions in Ricoeur's account, we must take a short step backwards to look at the understanding of the philosophical change that took place immediately prior to Schleiermacher, in Kantian philosophy. In many histories of philosophy, Kant's 'Copernican revolution', 'the basis of contemporary philosophy', is presented as a shift from objectivity to subjectivity that commenced with the subjective turn of Cartesian philosophy. This understanding informs Gadamer's and Ricoeur's accounts too. I wish to differentiate my emphasis from this however because understanding the shift as a change to a 'subjective perspective' actually misrepresents the motivation of both Kantian and Cartesian philosophy (even if it does so in Kantian terms). This in turn leads to an inevitable misinterpretation of the issues that were at work in the initial move to embrace a 'general hermeneutics.'

So as not to be misunderstood, I am not denying the anti-traditional dynamic of Enlightenment thinking. The changes wrought by Descartes and spun out more comprehensively by Kant did indeed question the objectivity of tradition. But they did not do so on the individualistic (and invalid) basis of 'subjectivity' or with the intention of subverting the concept of authority as such. To understand the effect of the change as its intention is to offer an incredible explanation for the two philosophers' motives, not to mention an historically inaccurate one. Descartes and Kant both disputed the objectivity of tradition and of language in order to embrace a more meaningful form of objectivity, i.e. universality, the perspective that transcended any particular events of history or culture. 'Romantic' universality was seen as a means of overcoming the particular 'objective' truths of tradition, whether they were of the Classical or the Biblical region of hermeneutics. It is only the self-defeating consequences of this universality that have appeared subsequent to the adoption of the universal perspective that have created the illusion that a change to a 'subjective perspective' motivated the attack on the objectivity of tradition and the turn to the feelings of the subject. It did not. Subjectivity, i.e. autonomy, and its absolute relativity, was the ironic consequence of the move in adopting a universal perspective on meaning.

As I argued in the introduction, this change to a universal 'subjective perspective' actually transpired because Kant and his successors had adopted a novel understanding of universality from Cartesian science, an understanding that preyed upon the fundamental two-world view of Western thinking. It had another consequence however:

With Galileo already, certainly since Newton, the word 'universal' has begun to acquire a very specific meaning indeed; it means 'valid beyond our solar system.' And something quite similar has happened to another word of philosophic origin, the word 'absolute', which is applied to 'absolute time', 'absolute space', 'absolute motion', or 'absolute speed', in each usage meaning a time, a space, a movement, a velocity which is present in the universe and compared to which earth-bound time or space or movement or speed are only 'relative.' Everything happening on earth has become relative since the earth's relatedness to the universe became the point of reference for all measurements.³

Ricoeur's account of the development of hermeneutics relays a different story. As we shall see, his own tendency to understand meaning in the universal terms of 'timeless' or absolute truth, which is a product of the fact that he thinks in the terms established by Romantic universality, leads him to explain the original attempt of Romantic hermeneutics to recover meaning as a project that had initially failed because it lacked an established 'ontological' basis, i.e. a basis in truth-claims. This lack of a basis for truth-claims at the centre of the Romantic hermeneutic project ultimately brought their claim to be meaningful into question. This could therefore be corrected by the re-orientation of hermeneutics towards a universal model of truth, in the model provided by Heidegger. For Ricoeur, as for Heidegger, the problem of meaning is equivalent to the problem of truth, and it follows that meaning can be recovered by reconnecting with the world. This seems to me naive at best. If we look back to the sceptical assertions of the thinkers of the past, even the 'unenlightened' philosophers of the ancient world, about the possibilities of deriving truth or meaning from our immediate experiences of the world, we must already begin to wonder how and when we arrived at this blessed acquaintance with the truth.

Prior to Heidegger's correction, this inversion of truth and meaning under a universal perspective created a fundamental divide between the processes of what Dilthey had called explanation (the scientific process of accessing truth) and understanding (the humanities' process of accessing meaning) within the ostensibly unified method of general hermeneutics. Claims for poetry's meaning could be made by means of a 'Romantic' hermeneutics, but claims for truth remained the prerogative of science. The claims of poetry were judged to be nothing but inferior truth-claims. Dilthey's development of the Geisteswissenschaften was based on an attempt to rectify that and, by modelling itself on the Naturwissenschaften, to establish the form of truth that was characteristic of poetry. The consequences of this were no less problematic than the attempt to base hermeneutics on the recovery of meaning from a universal perspective.

To take one significant example of the problem that was created by Dilthey's hermeneutics, the attempt to establish truth in poetry and avoid the ultimately reductive search for an author's intention (or meaning) was expressed in the famous claim by one of the New Critics of the 1940s that 'poetry should not mean, but be.' That project, which considered the text as an autonomous microcosm of the complexity of human experience, prescribed a process of 'close reading' that excluded the author's intentions or the reader's responses from consideration. It was advocated to preserve the organic integrity of the work of art and allow it to express its form of truth without reducing it to a series of historical processes extending ad infinitum. This methodology allowed poetry to be 'truthful', but it did so at the cost of permitting any interconnection between a poem and broader considerations - in ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction - Two Worlds' Words
• 1 Modern Hermeneutics: The Development of Universal Relativity by Understanding Meaning in Terms of Truth
• 2 Hannah Arendt's Study of the Human Condition
• 3 Wordsworth's Understanding of Nature in the 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads' (1802) and the Hermeneutic Significance of Feeling
• 4 Shelley's Organic Theology in Mont Blanc
• 5 Keats' s Eternal Urn
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index