Commentary

Abstract

Hegel, according to a famous anecdote, when lying on his deathbed remarked, amongst other things, that during his entire life only one person ever understood him The great philosopher then sighed and supposedly added: And even he did not really understand me. Unintended but tribute nonetheless to the philosophy of one of his great adversaries: Friedrich Schleiermacher. The hermeneutics of Schleiermacher is characterized by a great departure in view of the tradition. For Schleiermacher assumed that our primary response to a written text lay in mis-reading it. This view did not entail any general skepticism about communication. Indeed, far removed from all (such Hegelian) solipsism, the Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher’s sort fundamentally privileged oral dialogue as means of successful communication. The hermeneutical problem first really emerged in the face of a written text in the absence of its author. And the hermeneutical enterprise of exegesis emerged in response to this (Romantic) view that mis-reading was our primary relation to a written text, but that such mis-reading could be progressively remedied—by “hermeneutics”—even in the author’s absence.