Interpretation, central to the humanities, aims to uncover the meaning of human-produced objects, contrasting the natural sciences that study events without inherent meaning.
Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, introduces the concept of the hermeneutic circle, emphasizing the holistic nature of meaning. Meaning isn’t just the sum of its parts; the whole context influences the interpretation of individual parts.
For instance, the meaning of a word depends on its sentence, which in turn relies on its surrounding context. This interdependence leads to the hermeneutic circle, where understanding the part and whole is a continuous, iterative process.
Every comprehension of a part sheds light on the whole and vice versa. This process, rather than being a mere loop, is a progressive spiral towards deeper understanding. Interpretation is a skill, honed through practice, accessible to anyone. The hermeneutic circle describes, not prescribes, this interpretive process. Future discussions will explore how this impacts the nature of knowledge in the humanities.
(C) Copyright Leiden University – Faculty of Humanities – Videos on Philosophy by Victor Gijsbers
From the video’s transcript:
Interpretation finding out what the meaning of something is is an important activity of scholars in almost all the humanities whether you are trying to translate an ancient description understand the short stories of a modernist writer or make sense of a 17th century painting you are attempting to find out the meaning of the object that you are studying. This is a big difference with the Natural Sciences, natural occurrences don’t have these kinds of meanings. A volcanic eruption or the fall of an apple don’t mean anything they just happen but the humanities study products of the human mind and these do have meanings. Interpretation follows that an important part of the methodology of the humanities will be concerned with interpretation.
How do you interpret something? What makes one interpretation better than another and how can we argue about that in a scientific way? These questions are investigated by hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. In this lecture, we will look at the most influential idea about interpretation, an idea that almost all people who engage in hermeneutics agree with in one form or another, namely the idea of the hermeneutic circle. In later lectures, we will also get to know hermeneutics as a movement within the humanities which doesn’t just study interpretation but also emphasizes the importance of interpretation. But for now, let’s focus on this thing called the hermeneutic circle.
Meaning is holistic, the key insight upon which the hermeneutic circle is based is the insight that meaning is holistic. What does that mean? It means that the meaning of a whole, for instance, a text, is not just the sum of the meanings of its parts. Meaning is determined by the whole as a whole, not by the parts individually. Let’s try to make that more concrete. Take weight or heaviness. Weight is not holistic. The weight of a bag is simply the sum of the weight of the bag itself plus the weights of all the individual objects that are in the bag. If you add an apple that weighs 200 grams to the bag, the weight of the bag as a whole will go up by 200 grams. So we can assign weights to the individual objects and when we put them together we just add up the weights. That is not holistic but its opposite which is sometimes called atomistic. But now take tastiness. The tastiness of a dish is not the sum of the tastiness of the individual ingredients. Salmon tastes great, peanut butter tastes great but very few people would like to mix salmon with peanut butter. A great chef, on the other hand, can mix different ingredients to create a dish that transcends the taste of any of the individual ingredients. So there is an amount of holism here, the taste of the whole is not just the sum of the tastes of the ingredients. Now meaning is even more holistic than taste. Not only is it the case that the meaning of the whole is not just the sum of the meanings of the parts but in fact, the parts don’t even really have meanings if they are not part of a whole. Take for instance the word “can”. What does it mean? Well, you don’t really know. It means one thing in the sentence “I can do that” and it means something else entirely in the sentence “I open a can of beans”. The word “can” alone doesn’t have a determinate meaning apart from its context. It only gets a specific meaning when it is placed in a sentence. But obviously that means that the meaning of the sentence can’t be the sum of the meaning of the words because apart from the sentence, the words don’t have meanings. This is not just true about words, a sentence too doesn’t have a specific meaning when you look at it alone apart from its context. If you are in a meeting and your boss says “who will send out the email” and you say “I can do that” then the sentence “I can do that” is a promise to send out an email. If somebody says “nobody can run a mile in three minutes” and you say “I can do that” then the sentence “I can do that” is a boast about your superhuman athletic capabilities and so on. Just like a word only has a determinate specific meaning in a sentence, so a sentence only has a determinate specific meaning in a larger context. So we see holism all over the place. Smaller units of meaning have their meaning only by virtue of being part of a larger unit of meaning and of course these larger units have their meaning only because they consist of the smaller parts of which they do in fact consist. Change the sentence and the meaning of the words change, change the words and the meaning of the sentence changes.
In talking about holism we have also seen a second key insight of hermeneutics which is the insight that the context which determines something’s meaning is unlimited. The precise meaning of this word depends on the precise meaning of this sentence but that depends on the precise meaning of the paragraph which depends on the precise meaning of the chapter and so on. What exactly does the word “honor” mean for Shakespeare? Well, it could be useful to look at all his works to find out and not just his works but works written by other people in his time or about his time or all their works which he might have read and so on. In principle, there is no limit to the amount of material that you could study in order to refine your interpretation of one word in one text. Now we can define what the hermeneutic circle is. The hermeneutic circle is a process of interpretation in which we continually move between smaller and larger units of meaning in order to determine the meaning of both. Here’s how that works. You read a sentence, as your eyes move across the words you have a first guess about what the sentence means. Then you read a little further and realize that the sentence doesn’t mean what you first thought. It means something else. So you go back and adjust your interpretation of the sentence. Then you read a little further and you see that the sentence means something else still so you go back and adjust your interpretation of the sentence again and so on. This is the hermeneutic circle. Every time you understand something about a part, you understand something about the whole. Every time you understand something about the whole, you understand something about a part. This constant back and forth movement between part and whole is what is characteristic of interpretation. It is a circle because you go back and forth between part and whole but it is a progressive circle because each time you go around you understand a little more about the text you are interpreting. So it is a circle but also a spiral, a spiral that leads upwards towards a better and better understanding of the text. Interpretation is a skill. This is a very important point, interpretation is not just a method or a technique, it is a skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
Reading literature, looking at art, listening to music, these are all activities that hone our interpretative skills. Just like playing an instrument or playing a sport, you get better at it by doing it. Some people are naturally better at it than others but nobody is naturally so good at it that they don’t have to practice. It is a skill that needs to be developed. But it is a skill that can be developed. Anyone can learn how to interpret. It is not something that only a few chosen ones can do. It is a skill that is open to anyone.
The hermeneutic circle, then, is not a method or a technique, it is a description of what happens when we interpret. It is a description of a skill that we can all develop. And it is not a prescription of how we should interpret, it is a description of how we actually do interpret. So the hermeneutic circle is a description of the skill of interpretation and like any skill, interpretation can be developed by anyone who is willing to put in the effort. Now we understand what the hermeneutic circle is, the constant back and forth movement between part and whole that characterizes interpretation, and we understand that interpretation is a skill that anyone can develop.
