Johann Gustav Droysen is known as the leading historian of the Prussian School of Historiography. As a historian, his task is to interpret history in the context of verstehen. He thought that one should go beyond the purely semantic or rational meaning of an utterance and consider its psychological, emotional, and spiritual content. He believes that an utterance in order to be understood fully must also be comprehended as an expression of something internal. To understand history is to see history as an expression of man's inwardness and inner nature. It is the past within the present which makes us pursue our historical work. In other words, in order to obtain historical knowledge, one should find out (erkennen), explain (erklaren), and understand (verstehen). He thought that interpretation must always tend towards explicitness of historian's account of his findings. In this sense, auslegung is the methode of verstehen.
August Boeckh has the most comprehensive and carefully elaborated theory of interpretation in the 19th century from the perspective of a philologist. The philologist, Boeckh argues, must go beyond the obvious meaning of the author and instead is tasked to uncover and disclose the material and formal conditions of a text (i.e. cultural artifacts). These conditions are often hidden to the author. The philologist upon identifying these conditions must have better understanding than the author. For Boeckh, there can be no understanding of a text without the presence of all four modes of auslegung. These are grammatical, historical, generic, and individual interpretations. "Without grammatical understanding, the text would remain mute, but grammatical understanding without reference to the historical element in the language of the text would not be possible. The historical understanding in turn would be blocked without comprehending the generic characteristics of the text." Each of the four modes modifies and presupposes all the others and represents a specific competence which the philologist must acquire as part of his craft. Boeckh views auslegung as an act of verstehen. Verstehen is absolute and functions solely as auslegung.
Wilhelm Dilthey represents the ground between the outgrowth of 19th century Romanticism and the methodological concerns of the 20th century social and historical sciences. Dilthey thought that verstehen is a methodological concept which has its roots and its origin in the process of human life itself. Verstehen is primarily a lebenscategorie (category of life). According to him, we find ourselves in situations in which we have to understand what is happening around us so that we may act and react accordingly. Verstehen itself is a manifestation of life. Acts of understanding are lived by us. They constitute erlebnis (lived experience). A "life-expression" points back at a "lived experience" as its source and we understand its ausdruck (expressed meaning i.e. gesture, voice, movement, rhythmic patterns, visual forms, verbal expressions, actions, attitudes) in the form of a "lived experience" again. Verstehen becomes explication due to ausdruck. Dilthey maintained that hermeneutics is both the science and art of verstehen and auslegung. To understand is to interpret.
Martin Heidegger provided the ontological foundation of hermeneutics. According to him, human existence possesses an ontological priority with respect to the question of Being. Because of an intrinsic human concern with Being, the investigation and analysis of human existence in relation to Being necessarily involves interpretation. The problem of Being is the interpretation of Being. Man interprets Being in terms of his projects in relation to the world. Dasein (thrown there-being) always projects itself in an act of understanding towards self-realization which is the unfolding or explication of such understanding. Consequently, auslegung originates in verstehen and is always derived from it. Heidegger insists that all forms of interpretation in real life and in the human sciences are grounded in understanding and are nothing but the explication of what has already been understood. Thus, interpretation occurs only within a given horizon of preunderstanding. There can be no verstehen and auslegung on the part of Dasein without such preunderstanding. Given that the nature of auslegung itself is an outgrowth of verstehen, it follows that verbal explications are but the fulfillment of understanding. They are the forms which understanding takes in the human sciences. For Heidegger, verstehen is the starting point of auslegung. They are different only in terms of quantitative degree. Qualitatively, both are the same. The crucial difference is the fact that auslegung involves a conscious accumulation of the hermeneutic forestructures (vor-habe, vor-sicht, vor-griff).
Hans-Georg Gadamer is the best philosopher of contemporary hermeneutics. He synthesized the hermeneutic tradition of the past, presented it anew in the context of tradition, language, and dialogue, and labeled it as philosophical hermeneutics. He centered his inquiry on the relation of the auslegung and verstehen through the concept of horizontverschmelzung. This is expressed in dialogue. When we speak of dialogue, it always refers to a model of interaction between two subjective horizons, that is, of two subjects as they accomplish through a shared language of their prejudices. Gadamerian hermeneutics is patterned after this dialogue but not between two subjects, rather between a subject and an object, the subject being the interpreter and the text being the object. For him, dialogue is possible between these two elements and it actually happens in the moment of reading. Since Gadamer employs the concept of interpretation as play, the interpreter loses the status of being a subject as the text loses the status of being an object as they swirl into a dialogical play during reading. This means that there is no dualism between the subject and the object in interpretation and understanding. It is the process of interpretation itself which is central in understanding. In this kind of interpretation, the interpreter projects itself to the text with his life-world and the text in turn projects itself to the subject with its own life-world. The interpreter then in this play is tasked to find the question to which a text presents the answer, and the text becomes an object of interpretation by presenting the interpreter with a question. In this Q & A dialogical logic between the one who interprets and the object of interpretation, the horizontverschmelzung takes place. The interchange and exchange between these two elements, this conversation between the world of prejudices of the interpreter and the world of prejudices of the text, is a circular process until a certain level of consensus is reached. This consensus, the horizontverschmelzung, constitutes the existential meaning of the text. However, this consensus has mutable character and revisable nature due to the exposure of a horizon to other horizons. Both the interpreter and the text should be open to tradition. The act of reading which is the nature of dialogue exemplifies the historicity of understanding the text. Our horizon is in a process of continued formation through the testing of our prejudices in the encounter with the past and the attempt to understand parts of our tradition. It is inadequate to conceive of an isolated horizon of the present since it has already been formed through contact with the past. This awareness of effective history is to assist us in the horizontverschmelzung. This gives us some fairness in interpreting text. It is an encounter, an interaction, an intercalation between the past and present in order to have a fair interpretation of an account or character of an event, whatever that is. Auslegung is the explication of verstehen.
All hermeneutic systems of interpretation delve fundamentally on the classical problem of the relationship between verstehen and auslegung. It becomes an issue because of the problematization on the priority either of auslegung or of verstehen in every act of hermeneutic process. In the entire history of interpretation and meaning, the problem is always posed, do we understand first in order to interpret or we interpret first before we understand? In hermeneutics, to know is not necessarily to understand but to understand is a phrase that needs to be subject to a rigorous hermeneutic reflection. Every human person has the experience of being both the subject and object of understanding. But how do we really understand? Do we really have the capacity to understand and to be understood? How do we interpret? Definitely, we can interpret because we have found meaning in things such as texts and text-analogues. But do we have the ability to characterize the process of interpreting and understanding understanding? The German hermeneutic tradition gives us the historical text in finding answers to these questions. It shows that the two concepts have no clear distinctions at all. Based on the extrapolations of different explications on verstehen and auslegung, it tells us that the latter is the concretization of the former. This means that in order for us to understand, we need to interpret texts and text-analogues. It is through interpreting that we come to understand. The auslegung gives criteria in order for a text to be understood. This does not mean that auslegung is not verstehen. But to understand verstehen is to interpret it. To provide auslegung for verstehen requires strict hermeneutik. It calls for methodologies and theories to explain such. Schleiermacher and Dilthey introduced the idea that the process of interpretation has to emanate from the subject-interpreter through the text via the historical-cultural circumstances to arrive at the original intention of the author. Heidegger and Gadamer believed that such process of interpretation is circular, that is, a continuous dialogue between the subject-interpreter and text, until horizontverschmelzung is reached. However, Gadamer would later tell us that there is no methode that would capture warheit. There is no method that would actually explain the truth behind verstehen. This means that auslegung as the main expression of verstehen happens in the context of game and idea of flow. The actual experience of hermeneutic process of verstehen and auslegung in our everyday life seems to be the measure of their relation. It is the praxis of hermeneutik that would define for us the connection of the two concepts. Regardless of theoria or methode used in this hermeneutik, auslegung and verstehen are out there active in every hermeneutik act.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLEICHER, Jose. Contemporary Hermeneutics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 1980
GADAMER, Hans-Georg. Truth & Method. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. 2002
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. 1962
MUELLER-VOLLMER, Kurt (editor). The Hermeneutics Reader. New York: The Continuum Publishing
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QUITO, Emerita. The Philosophers of Hermeneutics. Manila: De La Salle University Press. 2000
