The Structure of Hermeneutic Experience and the Problem of Tradition

Abstract

W HEN THE HUMANE SCIENCES, in the second half of the nineteenth century, began to fashion their logical conception of themselves, this was due to the need, after the end of the humanist idea of culture, to legitimize hermeneutic practice as a distinct mode of experience against competition from a scientific ideal aligned upon the natural But remarkably enough, the theory of historico-philological hermeneutics was modeled entirely on the natural sciences, whose logic was expounded by John Stuart Mill as the inductive logic underlying all empirical science, including the moral sciences. Hermeneutic experience seemed analogous to the methodically established concrete experience of the natural sciences, with its power of mastering lawlike sequences; and continued to seem so even when, in recollection of the humanist theme of the unity of experience and practical life, experience was understood as a distinct element in the context of historical action, whose continuation is the concern of hermeneutic experience (Droysen). The contemporary theory of hermeneutics has endeavored to remove this aporia that marked its beginnings, by a revision of the concept of hermeneutic experience. The epistemology of the socalled humane sciences is particularly indebted to Hans-Georg Gadamer's researches for such a reworking of the concept in question. Experience, here, no longer appears primarily as a process of methodically assured, cumulative appropriation of findings, which are means to possible mastery of an objective order reflected therein. Experience--conceived as the interpreter's experience of his text, and thereby of himself-is defined here as something that precedes the methodical process of laying up scientific knowledge, and as a factor emerging from and reverting into practical life, which as a mode of such practical life may even give directives to empirical cognition of the objective kind. In Gadamer's account the occurrence of hermeneutic experience has the structure of a practical performance

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