Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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was not a theologian but a philosopher, and he had no hesitation about developing Schleiermacher’s insights into a full-fledged philosophical hermeneutics. His most important accomplishment was to make hermeneutics into the foundational and definitive method of the human or cultural disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften) as distinguished from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Whether one believes this distinction to be a great achievement or a confusion with disastrous consequences, one can hardly deny the importance of Dilthey’s conceptual innovations at this point. He argued that the human sciences differ from the natural sciences on the basis of their qualitatively different objects of inquiry. Natural scientists are able to observe their objects from an external perspective, so that the act of observation remains separate from the phenomena observed. The object of the human and cultural sciences, on the other hand, is not the outside world but what Dilthey calls Erlebnis, or lived experience, in which knower and known are related internally. Such an object one must understand, as it were, from the inside out, on the basis of one’s own lived experience. Dilthey refers to the more objective task of the natural scientist as explanation (Erklären), which he contrasts with the hermeneutical task of understanding (Verstehen). In the study of religion today, as in other humanistic disciplines, scholars often divide sharply just at this point. Those who follow Dilthey in emphasizing the difference between natural scientific explanation and hermeneutical understanding are typically critical of scholars who seek the objectivity of scientific explanation in religious studies. The latter, on the other hand, often suspect the former of using questionable hermeneutical theories to legitimate apologetic or uncritical accounts of religion ‘from the inside.’ Most theorists today would acknowledge that in some way both explanation and understanding are required in any adequate approach to the study of religion, though they often disagree fundamentally about the methodological consequences of this hermeneutical situation.

Dilthey’s ideas have been most influential in the continuing tradition of European hermeneutical speculation in the twentieth century, whose most important figures are Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. The entire philosophical program of Heidegger (1889–1976) can be characterized as hermeneutical (indeed, he originally did so himselfâ), and his philosophy also lies behind the more specifically hermeneutical theories of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Despite his considerable debt to Dilthey, Heidegger believed that he, along with most of the other modern philosophers since Descartes, had failed to escape from psychologism and subjectivity. Heidegger’s alternative is to propose a hermeneutical ontology, a philosophical analysis of Being, starting not from the subjectivity but rather from the existential situation of the interpreter. We humans find ourselves in a unique situation, because unlike other things in the world, which simply ‘are,’ we understand that we are. We exist, says Heidegger, ‘stand out’; he especially likes the implications of the German word for existence, Dasein, since it literally means ‘being there.’ In other words, only humans can raise the question of Being Itself. In the resulting philosophy, interpretation does not appear merely as one among various human activities but rather takes on a foundational role in which existence itself is characterized as interpretation. In so doing, Heidegger revolutionized the meaning of philosophy, as has long been recognized. For our purposes, however, it is more important to note that he also changed the meaning of hermeneutics. By rejecting the Cartesian concept of the ego as thinking subject, he turns away from the Romantic focus on the creative individuality of the author expressed in the text. Since for Heidegger hermeneutics has become the cornerstone of philosophy, its focus shifts away from texts and their interpreters to ontology. Far from being an isolated methodological inquiry, hermeneutics on this account gives us access to the most universal and fundamental truths

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about human life in the world. Heidegger’s approach has some particular implications that have profoundly influenced subsequent reflection on hermeneutics, even by thinkers who do not follow his philosophy in all its ramifications. Because of the existential situation of the human thinker, Heidegger emphasizes that understanding and interpretation never begin ‘in neutral’ without presuppositions but are always undertaken by people who are already involved, and who therefore have interests, presuppositions, and pre-understanding of the subject they are interpreting. But this situation implies that understanding is always circular in form; it can never begin in a hermeneutical vacuum. It is especially important to understand that for Heidegger and his successors this hermeneutical circle is not something negative; its circularity is not ‘vicious.’ Rather, it is a warning against any hermeneutical theory that tries to deny or ignore that necessary circularity of interpretation.

Heidegger ’s hermeneutical legacy

Relatively few students of religion are likely to master the difficult philosophy of Heidegger, but his ideas are nevertheless of major importance in religious studies, largely through the mediation of two thinkers who have appropriated significant aspects of his thought and presented them in works that are widely read, not only in philosophy and theology but also in religious studies.

A single book – Truth and Method, by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), which first appeared in German in 1960 – catapulted hermeneutics into the center of discussion in theology and religious studies in the second half of the twentieth century and has made Gadamer’s name synonymous with hermeneutical theory. While hardly an easy book to read, Truth and Method nevertheless makes accessible to non-philosophers an approach to hermeneutics that owes much to Heidegger. But Gadamer also returns hermeneutics to the traditional concerns of Schleiermacher and Dilthey: human understanding as it functions in the interpretation of authoritative texts. From Heidegger he takes his starting point within the hermeneutical circle; that is, he recognizes that understanding always and only takes place in the context of prior understandings – which is to say within a specific historic tradition of reading and interpreting texts. Gadamer’s controversial way of making this basically Heideggerian point is by attempting to rehabilitate the term ‘prejudice,’ which the Enlightenment had seen as an entirely negative encumbrance to objective knowledge. Gadamer insists that every act of understanding begins in prejudice, in the original sense of pre-judgment: one is not simply neutral or detached from the object of understanding but rather already stands in some relationship to it. Far from constituting a barrier to be removed, such pre-judgments play an essential role in all acts of understanding. Unlike Schleiermacher, Gadamer does not see hermeneutics as a way of overcoming the historical distance between interpreter and text but rather insists on the historical nature of understanding itself, since interpretation always occurs within a concrete historical tradition and makes no sense when removed from this context. It is this common link with the overarching tradition that allows the modern interpreter to understand an ancient text, for the two are in fact already related to one another through a process that Gadamer calls Wirkungsgeschichte, ‘effective history’ – a history of the effects by which everything later in a tradition has been influenced by all that has gone before. The continuum constituted by this history of effective relationships allows Gadamer to conceive the goal of interpretation as a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Horizontverschmelzung), in which the horizon of the interpreter merges into that of the text. Gadamer believes that this phenomenological account of how understanding takes place is

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superior to every ‘method’ by which other theorists seek to arrive at the truth – a conviction alluded to in the title Truth and Method.

In an ongoing debate that has attracted widespread attention, Jürgen Habermas has accused Gadamer of failing to do justice to the limits of understanding. On Gadamer’s account it would appear that understanding can always take place successfully as long as the interpreter acknowledges the context of tradition in which the text is embedded and is willing to enter into it. Habermas maintains that communication is often distorted in ways that the participants in a conversation do not and cannot recognize without the intervention of someone from the outside. An adequate hermeneutics must therefore be able to take into account the possibility and actuality of distorted communication. Otherwise the interpreter will be vulnerable to ideological bias, especially when he or she shares the bias of the text. The question raised by Habermas is whether or not Gadamer’s traditionalist hermeneutics amounts in effect to a conservatism without critical resources for recognizing and combating ideology.

The other important theorist with roots in Heidegger’s philosophy, Paul Ricoeur (1913– 2005), is much more attuned to hermeneutical distortion and conflict than is Gadamer. Indeed, one of his major writings is titled Conflict of Interpretations. As the first major hermeneutical theorist since Schleiermacher to take a particular interest in religion, his work has been especially influential in theology and religious studies. Ricoeur is a philosopher, not a theologian, but he writes out of an explicit commitment to Reformed Christianity and divided his academic career between Paris and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His thought thus represents a bridge both between philosophical and religious hermeneutics and also between the Continental and Anglo-American academic worlds. His early work was devoted to an attempt to mediate the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism, which led him to develop a philosophical account of the symbol as the starting point for his hermeneutical theory. A symbol is any sign that contains, in addition to its direct or primary meaning, a secondary or hidden meaning that requires intellectual effort to uncover. In other words, symbol and interpretation become correlative terms. His hermeneutical point of departure is captured in the aphorism that he uses as a title for the conclusion to his 1967 book The Symbolism of Evil: ‘The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought.’ The problematic relationship between symbol and critical thought is epitomized in the hermeneutical circle, which Ricoeur puts this way: ‘We must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in order to understand.’ The way beyond circularity lies in taking the commitment to the truth of the symbol as a wager (borrowing a notion from his French predecessor Pascal). The interpreter must take the risk of assuming that the symbol offers the best way to human understanding, which means making his presuppositions explicit and then trying to demonstrate the power of the implicit symbolic truth through interpretation in the explicit form of articulate thought. In a schema that has appealed to many, Ricoeur conceives the modern hermeneutical situation in terms of three stages. The first is the precritical situation of original or primary naïveté: the world of myth in which symbols are experienced as immediately true. But for the modern interpreter this world has been shattered by criticism, which ushers in the second stage. Now the problem is to find a way to restore the power of the symbols without simply returning to primitive naïveté (something we would be unable to do in any event). Ricoeur calls this third stage a ‘second naïveté,’ for in one sense it is a return to the first stage. But unlike the original naïveté, this stage has been through the fires of criticism and is no longer simply an unreflective or immediate grasp of the symbols. Ricoeur is not always clear about just what second naïveté would consist of or how one might

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reach it, but the articulation of the goal itself has found resonance in other modern thinkers, including many who do not follow the specific path recommended by Ricoeur. What is at least clear is that the way to second naïveté is through interpretation, which means not a rejection of critical thought but rather a constructive application of criticism.

Ricoeur’s most systematic attempt to work out his hermeneutical ideas in detail is contained in his 1976 book Interpretation Theory. Rather than seeking, like Schleiermacher, to go behind the text to find its meaning in the mind of the author, Ricoeur insists that the sense is to be found ‘in front of’ the text. Rather than seeking, like Gadamer, to fuse the horizons of text and interpreter, Ricoeur stresses the ‘distanciation’ from the author that first gives the text its autonomy and creates the hermeneutical situation. And rather than seeking, like Dilthey, to separate humanistic understanding from scientific explanation, Ricoeur sets the two in a dialectical relationship that forms the context for interpretation. He also seeks to go beyond Gadamer’s uncritical acceptance of tradition by introducing a critical element into hermeneutics itself, so that interpretation includes both a retrieval of tradition and a critique of ideology. Like Heidegger, Ricoeur emphasizes the existential significance of interpretation; it is our primary means for understanding ourselves and our existence in the world. Texts – especially religious texts – disclose possible worlds, so that the interpretation of texts becomes a primary means of reflecting on the meaning of human existence. Once again it becomes apparent that hermeneutics as an enterprise has a special connection with the study of religion.

The hermeneutics of suspicion

Paul Ricoeur’s attention to the conflict of interpretations has its roots in a historical thesis about the modern hermeneutical situation. He has coined the phrase ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ to designate a change that has taken place in the modern world, a hiatus in our relationship to texts, especially those authoritative texts that include the scriptures of the world’s religions. Ricoeur identifies this rupture in our hermeneutical history with three figures from the late nineteenth century whom he dubs the ‘masters of suspicion’: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Philosophers since Descartes had generally taken the ego, the thinking self, as a given – as the foundation and point of departure for understanding. With the masters of suspicion this assumption is subjected to scrutiny and found wanting. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche – each in his own way – suggest that subjectivity may indeed be deceived, not from without, but from within: it is self-deceived. Marx’s term ‘false consciousness’ could be extended to include the others as well: for all three of them, the goal of interpretation cannot simply be to establish the ground of an incorrigible selfconsciousness; rather, the thinking subject must also be called into question, treated with suspicion. According to Marx, for example, class interest distorts both text and interpreter because both are unaware of its influence. The Marxist therefore engages in a critique of ideology in order to uncover the covert interests lurking behind the apparent meaning of the text. A Freudian is suspicious of received texts for quite different reasons, but the hermeneutical effect is comparable. Here the ‘ideological’ factor is not economic and social but unconscious and individual: to understand a text rightly the interpreter must take into account the unconscious motivations that may be at work behind the façade of rational discourse. With Nietzsche the situation is more complex, as we shall see shortly, but the need to take a kind of false consciousness into account links his position to that of Marx and Freud.

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The true father of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the one from who the ‘masters’ first learned to identify false consciousness, is the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Originally a student of Hegel’s philosophy, Feuerbach rejected Hegelian idealism very early in favor of materialism, while nevertheless retaining the dialectical logic of the system. Whereas Hegel had identified thought and being, Feuerbach believed that material nature was the ground of human consciousness and therefore the origin of religion as well. His bestknown work, The Essence of Christianity, attempts to demonstrate how religion arises out of a dialectic of self-alienation, whereby humans project their own essential worldly attributes onto an illusory heavenly subject or subjects, the gods. In his later work, especially his Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach abandons even this inverted Hegelianism and argues that religion arises out of a misinterpretation of our experience with nature. In both versions of his critique, however, Feuerbach consistently identifies the imagination as the organ of religion, the source of all illusion. Religious people, he is convinced, ‘misimagine’ the world by reversing cause and effect, subject and predicate, of their experience. This account of religion entails that one cannot simultaneously understand the essence of religion and continue to be religious. The field of religious studies remains divided to this day between those who study religion as members of religious communities and those who, like Feuerbach, believe that understanding religion is incompatible with its practice. Both sides, however, can agree with Feuerbach that imagination is the organ of religious belief and practice while disagreeing on the question of truth. Feuerbach’s hermeneutical legacy is the lingering suspicion that at least some forms of religion falsify reality by their very nature. A more problematic corollary of this legacy is the assumption that religion is false because it employs imagination.

The hermeneutics of suspicion has made important inroads into religion in recent decades – into both the religious traditions themselves, insofar as they participate in the intellectual debates of the modern academy, and into the scholarly study of religion. Liberation theologians, for example, have appropriated Marxist suspicion about religion by trying to use it as a critical tool for purifying traditional belief and practice of its unholy alliance with the forces of oppression and exploitation. Their program entails a revision of classical Marxism, of course, insofar as liberation theology assumes that only ‘bad’ religion is vulnerable to ideological critique. A similar development has taken place among religious feminists, who seek to expose the implicit patriarchy of many or all authoritative religious texts. One finds this approach both within religious traditions themselves – primarily Christianity and Judaism, but increasingly in other traditions as well, including especially Islam – in the form of feminist theology, and also among feminist scholars of religion, who apply a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion to the religious traditions they are investigating. These approaches, of course, have been controversial, not least because in some of their more extreme forms, the practitioners of suspicious hermeneutical theory often succumb to ideology themselves, making implicit historical, philosophical, or theological claims that are immune to criticism. In response, some members of the religious studies community have proposed submitting the hermeneutics of suspicion itself to a suspicious critique. The debate is one more reminder that the ‘hermeneutical circle’ is unavoidable – and not only within the religious traditions but also in the practice of religious studies. For the same reason it is unlikely that any hermeneutical theory will ever achieve the status of an accepted method to be applied universally by scholars of religion without reference to their own convictions.