ROMANTIC HERMENEUTICS © Serhiy Kvit

Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey Understanding and interpretation is an kind of art. A person always thinks by a concrete living language.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) the art of interpretation

Friedrich Schleiermacher General hermeneutics should proceed from the fact that it is self-evident not understanding but incomprehension, and that the "desire and search" of understanding is a real problem of the art of interpretation. The final result of general hermeneutics should be the formation of general rules of understanding.

Friedrich Schleiermacher Active and passive understanding.

Friedrich Schleiermacher The basis of understanding is the similarity and distinction between the author of the piece of art (text) and the reader, or between the two interlocutors.

Friedrich Schleiermacher Two main principles that make understanding possible and make it necessary are alienation and affinity. In the tension between the individual (the author) and the general (in language) the piece of art (a text) is born.

Friedrich Schleiermacher The art of interpretation is, on the one hand, in penetration into the "spirit of language", and on the other hand - in "the individuality of the writer". The interpreter should have a "linguistic talent".

Friedrich Schleiermacher Three levels of understanding:   for every day   as special hermeneutics   as an art

Friedrich Schleiermacher The operation of the hermeneutic circle differs from the formal logic operations of induction and deduction by the fact that in the latter there is no moment of uncertainty.

Friedrich Schleiermacher The essence of psychological interpretation is to "reconstruct" a certain speech (piece of art, text) as a creative act of its initiator (author). The subject of hermeneutics is internal thinking and external language (internal and external logos).

Friedrich Schleiermacher 1. The interpretation begins with a general overview, which allows you to see the unity of the work and the main elements of the composition. 2. Hermeneutics should always keep in mind the interdependence of the whole and the part. 3. The interpreter must achieve a final understanding of the style (in the linguistic and intellectual sense). 4. This can only happen "approximately". 5. It is necessary to "align" the positions of the author and the interpreter. 6. It is necessary to use "intuitive" and "comparative" methods. 7. It is necessary to find out the purpose of the piece of art (text), based on the content and the addressee.

Hermeneutic circle Friedrich Schleiermacher (reconstruction of the message / text content) the part the whole Hans-Georg Gadamer (creation of the message / text content)

descriptive psychology Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) descriptive psychology

Wilhelm Dilthey Hermeneutics, with its imperative to come from life "as it is," relies on individual consciousness, more precisely, on the individual's ability to experience psychological connections and to understand them in the another. Its purpose is to find an adequate experience through co-experience and co-understanding, from which the knowledge of art and existing social existence is formed.

Wilhelm Dilthey Humanities in comparison to natural sciences have advantages that "their subject is not a phenomenon that is given to us in the sensation, also not a bare reflection of reality in the mind, but direct internal reality, this is a connection that is internally experienced. However, from such approach, with this inner experience of reality, there are great difficulties for its understanding." And here the hermeneutics has to be very helpful.

Wilhelm Dilthey "Explanation" is a well-grounded logical transition from one level of understanding to another, bringing some objective phenomena under the common rule. "Understanding" as a method of knowing humanitarian phenomena characterized by the ability of the researcher to "get lived" in the studied period of history, put himself at the place of the author and thus understand the meaning of the historical phenomenon.

Wilhelm Dilthey "We explain the nature, we understand the spiritual life". The core of his conception of the grounding of the humanities assumes the only theoretical and cognitive foundation of such sciences - the human world of life. This kind of terminology has a large margin of uncertainty, which gives rise to a wide space for a variety of interpretations.

Wilhelm Dilthey Understanding is not a method but a goal. This strategy is close to Henry Bergson's intuition and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Later, Martin Heidegger picked up the idea of understanding as a movement towards a given right direction.

Wilhelm Dilthey Two models of understanding (personal and social experience) Understanding as a conclusion by analogy, on the basis of the unity of "human nature" and personal experiences (the person who cries). The basis of understanding is a communicative community in which one can learn to interpret not only the others but also their own experiences, identifying them as such already on the basis of (normed or not) rules of communication. This "basic social experience" is a necessary basis for understanding.

Wilhelm Dilthey "Interpretation is a consequence of individual art, and the art of mastering it depends on the genius of the interpreter. (...) What is history and society - the answer to this question must be given by true psychology as a theory that will soon be spoken along with history in general."

Wilhelm Dilthey "It seems to me that [hermeneutics] has [the main] task: to counteract the endless intrusion of romantic self-will and skeptical subjectivity into the sphere of history with the help of the theoretical substantiation of a universal interpretation on which is based all historical probability."

Wilhelm Dilthey Three classes of statements in the humanities: Historical component Theoretical component Estimated judgments

Wilhelm Dilthey The true biographical method can be characterized as the addition of anthropology and psychology to the task of a living and meaningful description of vital unity, its development and its destiny.

Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl Similarity: "general significance“ Difference: the unity of human nature / phenomenology