Schleiermacher develops the idea of the schema in the following manner:at different times the same organic affection [this is his term for the way the world is ‘given to us’ in perception] leads to completely different concepts. The perception of an emerald will at one time be for me a schema of a certain green, then of a certain crystallisation, finally of a certain stone…For anything which is perceived is never completely resolved into its concept, and determining this relativity, without which the concept would not be able to result at all, depends upon intellectual activity, without which even perception could not be limited.20
It is important to remember that what underlies the issues here is not just a theoretical point arrived at by philosophical argument. In the wake of Hamann and Herder, and like his contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), Schleiermacher is part of the anthropological current that emerges in the eighteenth century, which involves the realization of the diverse ways in which different cultures make sense of the world. This realization, which is connected to the spread of European capitalism throughout the world, both brings a new sense of the richness and plurality of the ways in which sense can be made, and poses the problem of how a culture is to understand the ways of sense-making of a culture whose origins and practices are radically different from its own.
Crucially, Schleiermacher goes further with respect to interpretation of the Other, insofar as he thinks these issues actually apply to any two people, including in the same culture, who seek to understand each other. Consider the issue of children’s primary language acquisition. Clearly we learn the meaning of lots of words by comparison of their use with the use of other words, but that is only possible once one has already acquired a language. Children ‘do not yet have language, rather they are looking for it, but they also do not yet know the activity of thinking because there is no thinking without words’.21 One of the reasons Schleiermacher was assumed to rely on the notion of empathetic interpretation has to do with his response to this problem. He invokes the notion of ‘divination’, but it has a straightforwardly logical basis. Comparison relies on already knowing something, but children initially do not know anything verbal: ‘on what side do they begin [i.e. by comparison or divination]? They have not yet got any points of comparison but they only gradually acquire them as the basis of an unexpectedly quickly developing comparative procedure; but how do they fix the first thing?’22 They have essentially to make an ungroundable, ‘divinatory’ judgement as to which aspect of ‘organic affection’ is being picked out by the words they encounter. This means there is an element of contingency in the way each individual acquires their sense of what words mean. Schleiermacher’s texts on hermeneutics are based, then, on a deep awareness of the way in which language is both what brings human beings together and what may lead them to intractable conflicts. While dealing in many ways with issues that will, for example, in the work of his pupil August Boeckh (1785–1867), form the basis of modern philology, his texts are consequently also strikingly prescient with respect to issues concerning language and philosophy that remain very much alive today.
21.4 THE ACTUALITY OF SCHLEIERMACHER
Much of the analytical philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century relied, for example, on the assumption that a clear division could be established between analytic judgements, which relied on logical necessity, and synthetic judgements, which required contingent empirical input. Well before W. V. O. Quine sets in train the questioning of this distinction, so undermining some of the key assumptions on which many analytical theories of truth and meaning depended, Schleiermacher makes Quine’s basic objection (albeit using an example which does not adequately make the point he intends—the key point is that the distinction is not a logical one, but one that depends on the function of a concept in a context):
The difference between analytical and synthetic judgements is a fluid one, of which we take no account. The same judgement (ice melts) can be an analytical one if the coming into being and disappearance via certain conditions of temperature are already taken up into the concept of ice, and a synthetic one, if they are not yet taken up. …This difference therefore just expresses a different state of the formation of concepts.23
All concepts therefore have to be understood holistically and contextually, rather than being amenable to straightforward definition. Schleiermacher’s version of the hermeneutic circle results both from the fact that ‘each person is…a location in which a given language forms itself in an individual (eigentümlich) way’ (that follows from the issue of divination), and from the fact that ‘their discourse is only to be understood via the totality of language’.24 The asymmetry between the sense that meaning is something that can be intended by an individual, and so can always be misconstrued, and the fact that meanings require a shared general symbolic order to be possible at all is what generates the need for the procedures outlined in the hermeneutics.
Schleiermacher sees the method of hermeneutics in terms of the following basic opposition: ‘grammatical’ interpretation, in which ‘the person…disappears and only appears as organ of language’, is distinguished from ‘technical interpretation’, in which ‘language with its determining power disappears and only appears as the organ of the person, in the service of their individuality’.25 He also refers to what he is concerned with in the latter in terms of ‘psychological’ interpretation: the use of the terms varies somewhat, but the basic structure of the relationship between grammatical and technical/psychological remains much the same in both his early and late work. Donald Davidson has maintained in his account of interpretation, which shares several features with Schleiermacher’s, that ‘[t]he method is not designed to eliminate disagreement, nor can it; its purpose is to make meaningful disagreement possible, and this depends on a foundation—some foundation—in agreement’.26 In the 1833 Introduction to the Dialectic Schleiermacher already makes Davidson’s point when he argues that: ‘Disagreement of any kind presupposes the acknowledgement of the sameness of an object, as well as the necessity of the relationship of thought to being…For if we take away this relationship of thought to being there is no disagreement, rather, as long as thought only remains purely within itself, there is only difference (Verschiedenheit)’.27 As soon as one realizes that thought depends on intersubjective articulation one enters what these days is termed the ‘space of reasons’, though how this space is to be characterized remains a highly controversial topic.
Many of the questionable interpretations of Schleiermacher’s own work are a result of the growing suspicion, later in the nineteenth century, of ‘psychologism’. The focus on individuality, rather than language, in ‘technical/psychological’ interpretation, seems to suggest a basis in some kind of empathetic access to the mind of the author of the text to be interpreted. The obvious objection to the notion of such access is that it must take place via the publicly available language used by the author and in terms of universally accessible logical criteria. Schleiermacher, however, very evidently does not think in psychologistic terms, even as he tries to do justice to the sense in which understanding should take account of the intentions and the individual nature of someone speaking or writing. The reasons why Schleiermacher cannot be seen as falling prey to psychologism can be shown by looking at how his new hermeneutic approach to issues of language and interpretation develops at much the same time as the beginnings of what will become the semantic approach in analytical philosophy.
21.5 HERMENEUTICS, PSYCHOLOGISM, AND SEMANTICS
The initial point is that some of Schleiermacher’s premises are shared by Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), despite the fact that the latter’s approach, which will be developed by Gottlob Frege, is that of a mathematician concerned with the relationship of logic to natural languages. The points at which Bolzano’s and Schleiermacher’s conceptions diverge are prophetic with respect to what becomes the notional division between analytical and European philosophy, between the ‘formal mathematically inspired tradi
tion’ of linguistic analysis, and ‘an anthropological, natural-historical, social-practical’ approach to language.28 The basis of Bolzano’s project is ‘the separation of meaning from psychological processes’, such that ‘the objective representation associated with the word “table” (i.e. the meaning of “table”) should not be confused with tables, the objects of that representation’.29 This view is not far, either from Saussure’s later differentiation between signifier (corresponding to ‘word’), signified (corresponding to ‘objective representation’), and world-object, or from Frege’s distinction between ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ (‘sense’ and ‘reference’, though the translation of these terms depends a great deal on how they are interpreted in their context in Frege’s work, where the ‘sense’ of ‘the morning star’ and of ‘the evening star’ is different, but the ‘reference’ turns out to be the same, namely what we have come to call ‘Venus’). The motivation for such conceptions is that words and sentences must convey something independent of local context if we are to make any sense of the regularized use of finite linguistic means for an infinite number of possible utterances, a thought made persuasive by the justified assumption that statements about well warranted scientific laws must be potentially justifiable to any community. The problem with such theories lies, though, in the status of ‘meanings’.
It is here that the grounds for the division between a strictly analytical and a hermeneutic approach to understanding become apparent. Michael Dummett, who belongs to the semantic tradition initiated by Bolzano, sees a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’, which is seen as having ‘objective’ status, as needing to give ‘an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’.30 Beate Rössler, using ideas from Schleiermacher, maintains, however, that, in terms of Dummett’s theory:
even for the understanding of a relatively uncomplicated sentence one could put together an indefinite list of necessary preconditions of understanding;…on the other hand such a list, even if it could be brought to a conclusion, would lead into an infinite regress.31
The regress, which is again related to the one that Kant identifies with respect to judgement, results because the specifications of the conditions for understanding one sentence must themselves be formulated as expressions and therefore have their own conditions of understanding, and so on. The question is whether this issue leads to the situation where meaning must be seen as inherently dependent on individual psychology, which would mean it would actually become indeterminate.
Much depends here on whether one has to think in terms of ‘meanings’ as things which are somehow attached to terms which articulate them. It is, though, arguable that one need not think that way, because such a notion of a word’s meaning is actually a myth. Samuel Wheeler suggests the reason: ‘If there are no magical, naturally referring words, then meaning is nothing deeper than uses of ordinary words in particular circumstances’.32 One version of the history of analytical philosophy can be seen as a move from the attempt to attach propositions to things given in the world (logical atomism), to the assumption that verifiable ‘observation statements’ offered a stable basis for meaning, other forms of utterance being consigned to some form of meaninglessness (the Vienna Circle), to the idea of language as a whole as a rule-governed practice (speech act theory), to a holism which sees language as part of the repertoire of means by which we find our way round the world as a whole (Davidson and pragmatism). By the time of the last stage the original notion of meaning, of the kind present in Bolzano’s ‘objective representation’ and Frege’s notion of ‘sense’, has effectively been abandoned.
It seems tempting to suggest that, for all the massive and undeniable logical advances and sophisticated arguments involved in it, the basic result of this trajectory is something akin to the hermeneutics that Schleiermacher begins to write in 1805—provided it is seen in conjunction with his Dialectic. The metaphilosophical question as to why hermeneutics until recently played no role in analytical philosophy is therefore vital to an adequate philosophical reflection on hermeneutics.33 The crude answer to the question seems to lie in the way in which the demand for scientific methods in all areas of culture occasioned by the success of the physical sciences is not fulfilled by the human sciences, and so leads to the attempt to use logical and mathematical resources to overcome the notional deficiency in philosophy’s accounts of meaning and language. So what of the demand for semantic approaches to language which cannot be reduced to psychology, that are central to analytical philosophy?
The problem with analysis in relation to the actual social and historical functioning of language is precisely that it seeks a methodological foundation in analysing small elements of language, hence the attention to the proposition, observation statements, and so on. Such an approach is useless with respect to many of the core linguistic products of a culture, as the widespread lack of attention to textuality and non-verbal symbolic forms in analytical philosophy makes clear. In actual textual interpretation, of the kind which forms the substance of much of the human sciences, one must, as any version of the hermeneutic circle demands, always begin with some projection of what one thinks is meant by a text as a whole, which can then be altered by engagement with the text: doing this piecemeal in terms of analysis of particular elements of language is simply impossible. Textual interpretation can, moreover, only be carried out by making further projections of meaning: these cannot all be directly connected to the text itself, because they rely on background knowledge, which is never finally determinable in semantic terms.
What refutes the idea of Schleiermacher the psychologizer who relies on empathetic understanding is that in technical and psychological interpretation the evidence must be open to public scrutiny. Schleiermacher is actually initially in agreement with the semantic tradition—the latter part of the following could have been said by Bolzano or Frege:
What we in general call thinking is an activity of which everyone is conscious that it is not particular to them, but the same in all people. …Thus it makes no difference whether the same thought is carried out by one individual or another individual, and every thought which is determined by its content is the same in and for every person.34
Even first-person utterances are not wholly subject to the authority of the writer/speaker, and this already prevents any kind of psychologistic reliance on empathy, a term Schleiermacher anyway never uses in the texts available to us:
The task can also be put like this: ‘to understand the utterance at first just as well as and then better than its author’. For because we have no immediate knowledge of what is in him, we must seek to bring much to consciousness which can remain unconscious to him, except to the extent to which he reflexively becomes his own reader. On the objective side he as well has no other data here than we do [the data being the speech or text itself and the background factors that help determine its meaning].35
Decisions on this procedure are pragmatic ones, precisely because the task is ‘endless’: ‘Complete knowledge is always in this apparent circle, that every particular can only be understood via the universal of which it is a part and vice versa’.36 Unlike Ast, who saw a harmony between universal and particular, Schleiermacher thinks this harmony is an unachievable regulative idea. The need to avoid misunderstanding is, as such, always present, and interpretation is never definitive.
21.6 THE AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL DIMENSIONS
Perhaps even more significant than the questions Schleiermacher poses for theorists who think semantics can be thought of prior to or independently of pragmatics are the ways in which he reminds us that language cannot be adequately understood just in terms of semantic content. The problem with an approach to understanding based on assumptions derived from scientific explanation is that:
Language never begins to form itself through science, but via general communication/exchange (Verkehr); science comes to this only late
r, and only brings an expansion, not a new creation, in language. As science often takes the direction of beginning from the beginning, it must choose new expressions for new thoughts. Forming new root words would be of no help because these would in turn have to be explained by already existing ones.37
As Heidegger will later argue, there is no way of explaining in causal terms the ways in which the understanding that makes science possible is generated by our being in the world.
The further dimension that is constitutively absent from many analytical approaches to interpretation is what Schleiermacher exemplifies by his understanding of ‘style’, the manner of combination of words which characterizes the individual aspect of a text. Wittgenstein, in a discussion of poetry, stresses the idea of ‘these words in these positions’ not being replaceable by other combinations of words without what the first combination conveys being lost. The question in Schleiermacher is how to deal with both subjective and objective dimensions of communication, and part of the answer is to suggest how this division is not sustainable in a definitive form:
Even the most subjective utterance of all has an object. If it is just a question of representing a mood, an object must still be formed via which it can be represented. …. There is nothing purely objective in discourse; there is always the view of the utterer, thus something subjective, in it. There is nothing purely subjective, for it must after all be the influence of the object which highlights precisely this aspect.38
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 79