notion of language as the “house of being”. He develops the idea of language as the privileged vehicle of cultural tradition and focuses in particular on writing as the ultimate conduit of historical truths:

         Nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind either. In deciphering and interpreting it, a miracle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total contemporaneity and familiarity. This is like nothing else that comes down to us from the past. … Buildings , tools, the contents of graves – are weatherbeaten by the storms of time that have swept over them, whereas a written tradition, once deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present.7

This closing of the historical distance between the interpreter and the author of the text is the point of weakness in Gadamer’s theory according to the criticism of Paul Ricoeur. He points out the necessity of retaining a sense of “alienation between ourselves and things, in order to avoid the trap of believing that we can ever fully “recover” the past.

         Ricoeur goes on to point out, in the essay mentioned above, that it is the very “tension between proximity and distance, which is essential to historical consciousness”.8 Ricoeur develops this tension in his own work by returning to a concept of Heidegger’s, where he describes the work of art as “opening up” or “revealing” a world. For Ricoeur this is a world in front of the text, not the world of the author behind it, and he saw the beginning s of this understanding in the earlier thinking of Dilthey:

         He indicated the direction in which historicism could overcome itself, without invoking a triumphant coincidence with some sort of absolute knowledge. But in order to pursue this discovery it is necessary to

The interpreter attempts to step outside the actual conditions of the experiment in order to achieve a level of neutrality and repeatability in their observations. Gadamer saw this condition of estrangement between observer and observed as the exact opposite of the experience of belonging that he felt was essential to hermeneutic understanding.

         It is here that Gadamer’s thought becomes prone to the charge of conservatism, because of his emphasis on the sense of belonging necessary to his concept of interpretation. In fact, a brief definition makes this point all too clear, when he claims that hermeneutics consists of :”the bridging of personal or historical distance between minds … “5 This emphasis on the mind of the author recalls Schleiermacher’s neo-Kantian notion, which held the genius or the individual to be the sovereign creator of original meanings. This notion is somewhat reinforced by Gadamer’s description of understanding as dependent on the process of the “fusion of horizons”. A person’s horizon is the particular context in which the act of creation or interpretation takes place, being analogous to Heidegger’s idea of the network of equipment that defines the tool. In a later essay, Gadamer emphasizes this orientation towards the past when he illustrates his notion of art as a symbolic token of recollection:

         What does the word ‘symbol’ mean? Originally it was a technical term in Greek for a token of remembrance. The host presented his guest with the so-called tesserae hospitalis by breaking some object in two. He kept one half for himself and gave the other half to his guest. If in thirty or fifty years time, a descendant of the guest should ever enter his house, the two pieces could be fitted together again to form a whole in an act of recognition.6

          The “presence of the past” in Gadamer’s concept of the experience of art as recollection is also suggested in his support of Heidegger’s 

shifted dramatically once more. From being a question of epistemology concerning the different modes of knowledge, the issue then became one of ontology, or the fundamental nature of human being. In Heidegger’s work, understanding became the basic mode of being, and he set out to describe the world in which this being is situated. In Chapter 3 we discussed the general direction of Heidegger’s work as he progressed from an emphasis on the everyday “lifeworld” towards the gradual privileging of language. The discussion of tools provides a good example of the understanding of objects according to context, with the hermeneutic circle in this case consisting of a network of related practices. An object thereby becomes meaningful in relation to other pieces of equipment and, in Heidegger’s terms this opens up a world in which the object can in interpreted. There is also an anticipatory dimension to this structure of contextual relations, in that it necessarily precedes any particular object or act of perception. As Heidegger writes in Being and Time, concerning this quality of pre-existence:

         Whenever something is interpreted as something, the interpretation will be founded essentially upon fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us.4

         The emphasis on language as the “house of being” that becomes a characteristic of Heidegger’s later writing is one of the themes picked up by his student, a fellow German, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In his major work, Truth and Method, published in German in 1960, provided an in-depth history of hermeneutics as well as developing his own contribution. Gadamer also picked up on Dilthey’s notion of separating explanation from understanding, claiming that the sciences’ use of the former relies on an alienation between object and observer. The ideal of objectivity in the kind of knowledge sought by the sciences is seen to be premised on a clear separation of interpreter from experiement.

         Friedrich Schleirmacher is the figure most often credited with this innovation, a professor of theology who saw hermeneutics as a method for eliminating misunderstanding. His view that the understanding of a text depended on an understanding of the author can be seen as a consequence of Kant’s notion of art as the product of individual genius. This Romantic concept of the individual as the origin of all meanings has been challenged, as we now know, by the twentieth century philosophies of structure. However, in the early nineteenth century rebellion against the constraints of classical traditions, a new impetus was added to the search for reliable principles of interpretation. Schleiermacher developed the notion of the “hermeneutic circle” to describe the interpretation of a text based on the relationship between part and whole. This could involve working from the details in order to build up a sense of the whole or, more reliably, working dialectically from both directions at once. Included in this process would be a study of the author’s intentions which would again be compared with the actual content of the written text. The spatial figure of the circle also suggests another factor, the idea of a tradition being formed by a shared community of understanding. This again becomes important in later versions of hermeneutics where the idea of belonging becomes an influential theme.

         This subjective approach was picked up by the next great innovator in hermeneutics, another German, Wilhelm Dilthey, who was a professor in Berlin from 1882. Dilthey opposed the philosophy of positivism that had followed the spread of science and instead tried to define the “human sciences” as dependent on a fundamentally different form of knowledge. He set out to do for the humanities what Kant had done for science, in the sense of inquiring into the “conditions of possibility of “, not “pure” but historical reason. This was based on his distinction between explanation and understanding, where the former is the province of science and the latter of the humanities. Understanding for Dilthey was based on the historical context of the work, although the emphasis, as with Schleiermacher, was on the mental life of the author. It was only in the twentieth century with Martin Heidegger, in the book Being and Time, that the hermeneutic question

reference to scripture immediately highlights the religious origins of the term, in both the Biblical and the ancient Greek practice of interpreting the “word of God”. It derives from the Greek term used for the priest at the Delphic oracle, and also from Hermes, the wing-footed messenger-god. Hermes is the Greek equivalent of the angel in Christianity, the intermediary figure who communicates between people and the gods. We previously met this figure in the structuralist analysis of myth, as a device for explaining the causes of otherwise mysterious events. In hermeneutics, the god Hermes could be seen as a convenient metaphor, as a reminder of the idea that texts can be understood as “messages”. The fact that texts require interpretation at all, as opposed to being merely carriers of neutral information, can also be inferred from the great disputes over interpretation that have marked the history of religions based on allegiance to a “founding document”. The fragmentation of the Christian church within the last few hundred years is just one example of the scope for argument over the meaning of the “word of God”. More dramatically, the seventh century split between Islam and Christianity, as well as the earlier Christian divergence from the Judaic Old Testament traditions, also shows how powerful the rewriting of texts can be when it is carried out under the name of ever more authentic interpretation.

          The transformation of hermeneutics from a theological to an academic practice occurred with the eighteenth century expansion of scientific thinking in the humanities. As the contemporary French philosopher Paul Ricoeur described, in his essay “The task of Hermeneutics”, this could be seen as a shift from a regional to a general hermeneutics:

         Hermeneutics was born with the attempt to raise(Biblical) exegesis and (classical) philology to the level of a Kunstlehre, that is , a ‘technology’, which is not restricted to a mere collection of unconnected operations.3