The Unsolved Problems of Methodological Hermeneutics

The grammarians and philologists of the age of Hellenism created their own written genre and its tradition. It is the tradition of books on grammar in the broad sense of the ancients, which includes commentaries; interpretations of texts; critiques of texts; reports on poets, philosophers; and famous people; and other types of reports (§2, pp. 15ff) useful for the interpretation of texts. It is, in short, the genre of texts about texts, i.e., the genre of the written speeches of the scholars about written speeches, their genres, their tradition, and so on. Today the use of the term “literary” has the connotation of talking about poetic literature. But such a restriction is neither acceptable from the viewpoint of the original meaning of the adjective “literary” nor useful for the purposes of a general theory of understanding. The restriction is the product of the at least partially mindless separation of departments in universities of the twentieth century. A written tradition will be understood in the following chapters in a broad sense, i.e., the tradition represented by all texts, even including mail from the Internal Revenue Service. The emergence of a literary genre representing such traditions–i.e., the texts produced by grammarians and philologists of late Classical Antiquity and today by scholars belonging to the departments of the college of the humanities (or liberal arts) –is an ideal possibility in all literary cultures. It is possible because the ideal possibility of reflection, especially in reflections on the past–i.e., the possibility of remembering the past, and finally of remembering and reflecting on the past present in fixed life expressions–is an ideal possibility belonging to the essence of intentionality as such. Methodical hermeneutics is the systematically ordered sum total of the rules of the method of scholarship. As such, concrete scholarly hermeneutics will be different in different concrete cultures. The methodical hermeneutics analyzed in the following pages is a construction from material taken from a certain phase in the development of hermeneutics in the Western tradition. Nevertheless, it could be shown that some dimensions of the rules and problems mentioned are essential dimensions of scholarly activities as such, and there is therefore the ideal possibility of their occuring in the scholarly activities of other cultures as well.