Hermeneutics is a well developed philosophical study which has exerted considerable influence on Sociology in general and social theory in particular. In this booklet I am going to try to provide discussion of key definitions and applications. I shall also try to identify past and present traditions of hermeneutical thought.
In this booklet I start with definitions and show their scope. This provides the basis for examining briefly the contributions of Augustine, Gadamer, Heidegger. These particular contributions are set within their historical and intellectual contexts. In the final section I shall draw on the more directly sociological tradition which has now become fully concerned with hermeneutics.
. I will give a preliminary definition of the term here but will elaborate on the significance of the field later in the booklet. Grondin (1995) gives us the following:
hermeneutics strives to understand what is said by going back to its motivation, or its context…..it is only if one enquires into the underlying motivation of what is being said that one can hope to grasp its truth. In other words, what is the urgency that speaks through an utterance which alone makes its truth claim understandable. This is the prime question of hermeneutics. (ix)
Let us examine this more closely. Hermeneutics appears to be a form of study that is concerned with language and with the truth of utterances. It is not immediately clear what level of language we are talking about. Are we discussing the truth or otherwise of everyday utterances, e.g. over what to buy on a shopping trip or in which order to tackle the current batch of assignments? Or are we talking about less frequent but possibly more momentous occasions - an act of symbolic importance such as marriage or a funeral for instance? In saying this I have already added a distinction between the two occasions - the shopping trip and a wedding or funeral service without any apparent justification.
My point will be that both are susceptible to hermeneutic analysis but the outcomes may differ. If this is the case then we appear to be handling an area of linguistics or possibly psychology. This seems far removed from the realm of Sociology!
But we have a number of important utterances that address fundamental social issues in the world. Do they fall within the field of hermeneutic analysis? Let us take 2 well known statements. The first is from Marx and the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Hermeneutics invites us to consider the truth of this passage. What was Marx's motivation? What is the truth of the claim that 'forms of consciousness' correspond to real if hidden structures? What is the truth of the claim in the final sentence?
Hermeneutics is not exactly a textual discipline although this aspect is important. Modern work is not concerned with truth claims as such. We are not conducting an analysis to find out whether Marx was right or not. Of course that has been an important area of study.
A more hermeneutical insight at this point would be to ask whether if we understood the context and motivation of the passage we would agree that it expresses the lives and experiences of people both when it was written and today. Does the claim reflect, embody the experiences of people?
Hermeneutics is therefore concerned with emotion, with lived experience. That is why it is so different from logical forms of analysis and the making and testing of truth claims.
In fact Marx's scientific approach was concerned precisely with a scientific analysis of social organisation. The transition from feudal to capitalist society, the development of the economic base were phenomena that could be identified, analysed and placed in relation to each other. Marx is apparently arguing that if you locate a certain set of conditions within a particular context, then economic variables will act on this context and lead to certain outcomes.
If p then q.
Hermeneutics suggests that this form of analysis has been important and has led to a pecking order of appropriate scientific knowledges. But it is not enough. A hermeneutic reading of a passage seeks to uncover a former context and to discover the truth of it for people who lived in it. Hermeneutics is not satisfied with the surface manifestation of text but wants to burrow below to seek out motivations.
Before we deal with how hermeneutics might approach Marx's text let us look at an extract that might be more appropriate:
I learnt to name the new violence that I encountered in Canada - different from other violences that had structured my life in India, or patriarchy and class, but alongside them. This new violence I learnt was 'racism', a product of colonial capitalism rooted in slavery and genocide, and I also learnt that the country I stepped into has not paid its blood debt yet, and that its halls and corridors of power and wealth still echo with the sound of shackles and indenture ships 'landing'. I had heard in India of events in the United States regarding racism, about civil rights and Martin Luther King, of Selma and of Birmingham, Alabama. Musical names of states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, where such horrors happened, all began to come back and to add up - and I learnt that the war was still on, and that I was not alone, and that frightened suffering was not all that was possible.
It is then I looked to Black history, to history of Indigenous people of the Americas, and re-read the anti-colonial struggles. I took strength from an identification with Vietnam, Cuba, and subsequently from the African and central American revolutionary movements. The word 'Black', then a political metaphor rather than a territorial politics, filled me with a sense of pride and dignity, spelling a shared culture and politics of resistance….. It is at this point in my history that I have to name Frantz Fanon. I had read Marx before I left India, and I read feminist theories very soon after I came here.
(Bannerji, H. 1995, Thinking Through, pp. 9-10)
This extract takes some of the personal history of a feminist academic and activist who was influenced by the ideas from the first extract from Marx. It is a personal account concerned with the motivations and contexts within Bannerji's life. Her account is hermeneutical in that it is a self-consciously attempted piece of writing aiming to explore exactly what is meant by the truth of her life up to the point when it was written. She finds the contexts of racism, sexism and the impact of capitalism important explanations. But they are partial, they do not provide her with insights into the 'truth'. For her a first reading of Fanon achieved this:
Fanon became, and remains, with some shortcomings, especially influential for me. I remember encountering a drab little book from Grove Press in a bookstore, whose title attracted me because it used a phrase from the "Communist International," my very favourite song: "Arise ye wretched of the earth…" Attracted to the text by its echo of Marx, moved by the memory of communism I grew up with, I picked up this book, which kept me riveted to that corner in the store for over an hour. By the time I paid for it and came home, feeling its live presence in my handbag I had gone through a turning point in my thinking. I would never read Marx the same way again. As Fanon said, I needed to stretch Marx to make sense of colonialism and the history and social organisation of Canada and the United States that I had come to know. And I did that through combining Marx with Fanon. Anti-colonial, anti-imperialist revolutions became unthinkable for me without Fanon's embodied critique of colonialism, the voices of Amilcar Cabral, Ernesto Cardinal, and many others.
On our hermeneutic reading so far we seem to have found where Bannerji identified a crucial turning point in her life - the discovery of Fanon's texts (the discovery of Fanon?). For her the truth of her experience was encapsulated in her reading of this writer and her detailed account of the circumstances surrounding that reading. It gave her a centre, a means of self-identity and a way of confronting the future.
Bias
A critic, and I am sure some readers of this booklet will be amongst them, might say, "well, so all you are doing is prioritising the personal experiences of academic individuals who can reflect on their past. On the one hand what you are giving us is 'politically correct' for Sociology, i.e. extracts from Marx and a Marxist as if that was the whole of worthwhile human experience, while on the other hand you seem to have escaped from any responsibility for dealing with structural issues and with forces outside the direct experience or control of individuals".
If all that hermeneutics and associated scholarship involved was the kind of reading given so far then there would be merit in the attack. In fact I think there is merit and it is worth holding this criticism as one amongst a number I shall set up.
On the specific question of 'political correctness' I chose the extract from Marx because it has been so influential, but also because I want shortly to show blind spots within it. Bannerji's personal account is a means of achieving this. From Bannerji we might find a way of approaching racism, sexism and identity politics in a way that is impossible within Marx.
Perhaps more importantly the approach adopted above could be adopted with other political approaches. For instance, Burke's foundations of conservatism would provide a basis with Disraeli's imaginative conceptions in Sybil. This could be coupled with a contemporary account of conservative value experience, e.g. some of the writings of Bill Deeds.
There is nothing inherently partisan in a reading for meaning as we might describe the approach so far.
Non-Sociological
A further criticism might be made that the approach as outlined so far belongs more securely to literary criticism or related disciplines. It does not seem to be particularly sociological in scope. Obviously this begs a question as to what is sociological and what is not. 63. I have argued throughout the social theory course that all data whether obtained in the field, read or thought about constitutes material for the sociologist. The writings of the poet, novelist or dramatist are of no less interest than other forms of data. Certainly extracts from novels or seem less sociological in appearance but we should not hold this as a barrier.
I suggest there is a connection between the lived experience of Bannerji and the political values and theorising she believed in. An examination of the one can lead to an understanding of the other but it seems we have to work from the personal to the abstract. I want now to take an example from the Christian religion.
My next example will help us to clarify some more literary assumptions but will provide a way in to a more philosophical analysis. We shall return to Marx and Bannerji later. This extract comes from Augustine's Confessions. I suggest you look at the internet text on Augustine to provide some of the background. The extract, a well-known incident from his early life, has to do with stealing pears from a garden. Remember this text was written in the 5th century. In Book II of Confessions, Augustine describes his adolescent years. Recollecting the experience later in life he interweaves his initial awareness of his sexuality, his initial sexual experiences and stealing pears from a garden: