Squaring the hermeneutic circle

Social Research, Fall, 2004 by Judith N. Shklar

PROFESSIONAL TREND-WATCHERS CANNOT HAVE FAILED TO NOTICE the appearance of a novel interpretive social science, and much must already have been written to introduce this literature to the public. There is bound to be more, but it is not my intention here to contribute to that enterprise. I do not propose to analyze or explain the emergence or progress of this intellectual development, nor to predict its future course. This essay is concerned first with the implications of an image that invariably turns up in the writings of the new interpreters, "the hermeneutic circle." It will then go on to ask what, if anything, this notion contributes to our sociological understanding, and specifically what place it might have in a comprehensive theory of the "sciences of man," a phrase that most usually refers to anthropology, history, sociology, and political science in their less formal and mathematical aspects. I shall try to do this in the most simple and everyday language, because, in spite of appearances, the issues at stake do not call for, and have not evoked, the kind of precision that alone can justify a resort to a specialized vocabulary. At first sight, my qualifications for this undertaking must seem poor at best. I am not, after all, either a philosopher of science or a practicing social scientist. I do, however, have a fair amount of experience in interpreting the classics of political theory, and hermeneutics, whatever else it may mean, is first and foremost a way of reading scriptures.

INTERPRETATION AND EXPLANATION

Hermes carried the messages of the gods, and hermeneutics is the art of reading them. The circle with a message, the hermeneutic circle, was a Neo-Platonic image designed to intimate the relation of an infinite, eternal, and omnipresent God to his creation, and it makes its most significant appearance in the late Middle Ages, never to leave our imaginative literature thereafter. God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is entirely in every part of this circle. Dante speaks of the poet's soul moving toward God, who is the center and circumference of all. The human soul is like trembling water in a round vessel. In keeping with Neo-Platonic cosmology, God is an overflowing source of energy of both love and knowledge who recreates himself in ever-diminishing reproductions. This is the great chain of being, which is formed by concentric circles in a descending order of microcosms, each a replica of the macrocosm. It is thus that the human soul is a miniature of the divine center.

This lovely vision has undergone a vast number of transformations, without ever quite losing its original character. Post-Cartesian psychology used the circle to represent the passions of the soul which from our center animates the body and maintains all the parts of the human organism in harmony. The poetry of the circle stretches all the way from the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century to Rilke. And the most psychological of novelists have resorted to it. Flaubert thought of memory, especially at its most treacherous and illusory, as the center of the emotional circle. Henry James in turn spoke of our groping efforts to reach a shifting world of other people in its terms. These are but a few examples of the uses of the circle, and many more can be found in Georges Poulet's excellent Les metamorphoses du cerde (1961). It does not, however, answer the question of what the circle is meant to do in the sciences of man today. It was transferred to this new intellectual territory by way of Protestant theology, which was from the first under considerable pressure to find an interpretation of the Bible that was independent of tradition. Protestants therefore built a system of biblical interpretation in which the circle has an obvious place. Every part of the divine scripture is related to every other and to the whole, as in a circle, of which the author, God, may be found.

This is how the hermeneutic circle came to Germany and was eventually adapted by Schleiermacher in his theological writings. Human faith, rather than a traditional deity, stood at the center, and the project was to encompass every form of knowledge within a single whole in a system by reference to that center. Schleiermacher's biographer, Dilthey, picked up the phrase from him and even wrote an essay on the history of hermeneutics. The current popularity of the hermeneutic circle may be traced to Dilthey, whose name is in fact routinely invoked by interpretive social scientists. This practice is also due to his claim that the methods of the natural sciences and those of literary and social studies were inherently different. There is, however, no evidence that his works are much read, and Gadamer (1979: 103-106) has shown very convincingly that Dilthey's writings really have no direct bearing on contemporary hermeneutics.

That does, however, leave the meaning and function of the circle rather up in the air. One would expect a group of theorists who claim to have made the interpretation of symbols their main business to show some interest in their own imagery, but that is not the case. As far as an outsider can judge, the hermeneutic circle is meant to signify the activities of interpreters whether they offer an addition to or a replacement for other ways of understanding the history of mankind. Interpretation is said characteristically to be the study of wholes in terms of their constituent parts, which are already identified by their places within that whole. It is a movement back and forth. Why there must be a center to this operational field is not clear. Is there only an interpreter at the center of his spiderweb, or is there an organizing and illuminating principle apart from him there at the core to be discovered? Nor is the circumference of the whole defined. The hermeneutic circle makes sense only if there is a known closed whole, which can be understood in terms of its own parts and which has as its core God, who is its anchor and creator. Only the Bible really meets these conditions. It is the only possibly wholly self-sufficient text.