SOURCE: “Hermeneutics as Desire,” in Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 63-99.

[In the following excerpt, Ellison studies Schleiermacher's approach to interpretive theory through an examination of his major texts.]

THE “SYSTEM-SUBJECT”

After the publication in 1806 of his dialogue Christmas Eve, his last work in an early romantic mode, Schleiermacher's engagement with readers outside academic circles took the form of sermons and statements on public affairs.¹ During the uncertain years of the French invasion and occupation of Prussia (1806-14), Schleiermacher was first appointed lecturer at the University of Halle and preacher at the University Church; after his move to Berlin in 1807, he became preacher at Trinity Church in 1809 and professor at the newly formed University of Berlin, inaugurated in the same year. From his Berlin pulpit and chair, he urged a vehement but increasingly critical nationalism and set forth a pragmatic theology of feeling.² Except in his immense private correspondence, he never again invoked in secular rhetoric an intimate circle of friends, the stage for dramas of self-revelation and antagonism.

The confessional, polemical voices of On Religion, Soliloquies, and Confidential Letters on Lucinde seem at first to be lost or repressed in the academic treatises that form the core of Schleiermacher's publications after the turn of the century. A reader encountering the hermeneutic manuscripts after the works of the 1790s might well agree with McGann's ironic accusation that these texts have been “marked by that sign of Cain, a passion for systematic knowledge.”³ The logic is there, indeed, but the rhetoric of the system turns out to be remarkably continuous with the concerns of the romantic salonier.⁴ The language of method, labor, and systematic analysis confines and disciplines the impulses of erotic receptivity. But the integrated, flexible totality of the system itself also arises from a desire for the feminine, for divination. Even though divination is isolated within the system as its most extreme mood, this position expresses the ambivalent tendencies of romantic system-formation as a whole.⁵

Schleiermacher generalizes his hermeneutic experiments of the 1790s into a method of compensatory understanding in the face of inevitable misunderstanding. The “art of hermeneutics” substitutes the interpreter's comprehension for immediate access to others (to authors). Community is taken up into the circling mind that insists on totality. Schleiermacher does not oscillate, as Coleridge does, between critical aggression and the desire for ethical sanctuary in feminine domains. Instead, he argues from the start that classificatory energy and receptive intuition complement each other, imitating the wholeness of the phenomena they seek to understand. The only sign that the two exist in some kind of ambivalent tension is the peculiar redundancy by which each forms an independent path to the same end of understanding.

The tradition of philosophical hermeneutics still regards itself as a search for moral ways to mitigate interpretive aggression. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ethical desires of Schleiermacher's theory of understanding are perpetuated today in writings on hermeneutics through metaphors of intuition, speech, and mutuality. The trope of the feminine, however, has vanished into the suppressed romantic past of contemporary hermeneutic theory. This collective evasion becomes visible when we focus on the unintentional resemblance of the language of the hermeneutic tradition to the language of feminists. At the end of this chapter, therefore, I turn to a comparison of these two discourses, each drawing on the same inheritance of gendered metaphors, which reveals the failure of hermeneutic philosophers to reflect on the implications of their own desirous configurations.

The challenge to Schleiermacher's readers is to follow the thematic patterns of the 1790s through later works in which they are not directly represented. As a preliminary exercise to such a study of the hermeneutic writings, it is useful to look at Schleiermacher's Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811, 1830). Although the Brief Outline presents itself as a theological curriculum, the preface suggests that Schleiermacher is strongly motivated by the need to imagine the proper relationship among his own multifarious endeavors. The textbooks available to him, he observes, organize theological instruction according to their authors' viewpoints. It is “necessary for me to draw up my own” scheme because, he implies, such topographies are the formal manifestation of personal perspectives (BO 17).

The strictly methodical arrangements through which he distinguishes the three main branches of theology—philosophical, historical, and practical—and their numerous sub- and sub-sub-headings arise from a commitment to the subject's totality. This perfected diagrammatic condition, like Coleridge's “Noetic Pentad,” inherits the privileges of the circle Schleiermacher had defined in the 1790s as an interior domain. Then the craving for personal wholeness stemmed from the conviction that individual happiness and unity of intellectual endeavor depend on each other and on an “internal connection” among one's studies. This link between knowledge and feeling receives its scholastic representation in the outline form of Schleiermacher's handbook.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of the extent to which systems of knowledge are modeled on subjectivity in the Brief Outline comes in the figure of “the prince of the church” [Kirchenfürst]. This religious hero, the romantic “system-subject” or embodiment of “the will to system,” presides over the argument that the integrity of theology depends on the ability of individuals to understand the claims of all three theological modes.⁶ The structure of the discipline must be represented in the consciousness of its practitioners in order not to disintegrate into competing or simply unrelated specialties. For “if everyone should decide … to confine himself wholly to some one part of theology, the whole of theology would exist neither in one person nor in all together.” The problem is both social and linguistic, as threats to community always are in Schleiermacher's imagination: “with such a division of labor there would be no way for experts from different fields to cooperate. In fact, strictly speaking, they would not be able to communicate at all” (BO 21).

The solution to such alienation is an inward one. The structure of the profession must arise from the minds of its members. “If one should imagine both a religious interest and a scientific spirit conjoined in the highest degree and with the finest balance for the purpose of theoretical and practical activity alike, that would be the idea of a ‘prince of the Church.’” In the absence of this mental image of the place of one's work in relation to undertakings motivated by the same spirit, labor loses its meaning in a “muddle” of atomistic enterprises, each carried out “in the spirit of whatever particular science is proper to them” (BO 21-22).

The fascination with method comes from the same impulse that generates the notion of a hermeneutic circle, method as the mental activity of subjective comprehension in ordering diversity. In the eighteenth century, the renaissance of Western European imperialism, the proliferation of available mythologies, cultures, and languages gave rise to the strategies of the comparative disciplines. These disciplines have their analogue in the way that the mind of the scholar guarantees spiritual or psychological connections among his or her objects of study. For some authors, like Emerson, Carlyle, and Fuller, the capacity to play with the cultural matter of diverse histories is a sign of power. For others, including Schleiermacher and Coleridge, heterogeneity carries with it a more intense anxiety about the potential dangers of a fragmented self or environment. Consequently, their statements on method tend to emphasize—under the sign of the feminine—healing, integration, and mutuality. Insofar as the hermeneutic circle embodies the strategy by which a disunified culture is reorganized in the individual mind, hermeneutic understanding is almost by definition an allegory of community.

Schleiermacher, like Coleridge, thinks of method as an image of community existing within the mind, where a variety of subjects—in both senses of the word—are held meaningfully together by the scholar's higher comprehension. Since this kind of method is ultimately grounded in the conviction that all subjects and all subject matters peacefully coexist in the mind of God, the romantic concern with method is inseparable from religious preoccupations. We can see why the notion of the hermeneutic circle, above all other types of method, has tended to carry the mood of romantic Christianity into the critical arenas of the twentieth century. We might say of Gadamer and Ricoeur, modifying what Angus Fletcher has said of Coleridge, that hermeneutic “method is the expression, and the experience, of grace as it appears in this life.”⁷ More importantly for my present purposes, the link between the desire for mental wholeness and the commitment to methodical investigation provides us with the fundamental premise of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic schemes.

THE FOURFOLD FORMULA: SYMMETRY AND INFINITY

Schleiermacher's hermeneutic manuscripts are a complex series of texts. They include the sketchy aphorisms of 1805 and 1809-10; extended drafts on “grammatical interpretation” (1809-10) and on “technical interpretation” (1826-27); a series of elaborated theses referred to as the “Compendium” of 1819 [die kompendienartige Darstellung], annotated by Schleiermacher in 1828; and two addresses of 1829 to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, annotated in 1832-33 (HM 21-27). Together, they represent a curious body of writing, ranging from fragments and bare outlines of rules and formulae to extended passages of unusual eloquence displaying all the symptoms of the romantic sublime. It is clear that hermeneutics is, for Schleiermacher, a passionate endeavor. He calls into question every human word, spoken or written, and, having made himself the protagonist of an infinite task, generates a method designed to approximate the total understanding it is impossible to gain.

From his earliest notes on hermeneutics, Schleiermacher's terms for the “objective” and “subjective” reconstruction of a text are “grammatical” and “technical” interpretation, respectively.⁸ This second pair of terms comprises the founding binarism from which all elaborations derive: “Grammatical interpretation: To understand the discourse and how it has been composed in terms of its language. Technical interpretation: To understand the discourse as a presentation of thought. Composed by a human being and so understood in terms of a human being.” Schleiermacher insists simultaneously on the mutual necessity of both modes:

Grammatical interpretation: Not possible without technical interpretation. Technical interpretation: not possible without grammatical interpretation.

Grammatical interpretation. Viewed in isolation, the ideal is to understand in complete abstraction from technical interpretation [to the point where “the person and his activity disappear and seem to be merely an organ of the language”]. Likewise, in technical interpretation, the ideal would be to understand in complete abstraction from grammatical interpretation [until “the language and its determining power disappear and seem to be merely an organ of the person, in the service of his individuality”].

(BO 69, 161)⁹

The two terms refer to textual aspects. They are complemented by a pair of interpretive methods. “Comparison” [Vergleichung], the “historical” approach, is supplemented around 1819 by “divination” [Divination], or “immediate intuition” [Anschauung], resulting in the fourfold combination of two textual aspects (grammatical and technical) and two treatments of them (comparative and divinatory). Grammatical and technical interpretation are both preoccupied with a problem of unity. The first focuses on the unity of conceptual meaning [Bedeutung] that can be inferred from the multiple senses [Sinnen] of a word, the second on the internal connectedness of larger units of style. In 1819 Schleiermacher is able to state, “The rules for the art of interpretation must be developed from a positive formula, and this is: ‘the historical and divinatory, objective and subjective reconstruction of a given statement”’ (HM 171, 111). Since each interpretive approach can be paired with each textual aspect, the resulting diagram forms a chiasmic image of romantic totality, the chiasmus that, as Christensen says, “figures rather than resolves [the] will to interpretation.”¹⁰

Despite the ease with which such formulations lend themselves to symmetrical statement—and the manuscripts, as one would expect, show a strong tendency to parallelism—they are asymmetrical in application. In this asymmetry Schleiermacher's ambition to be an artist, a genius, of interpretation becomes visible. Neither the grammatical nor the technical approach, proceeding according to its own internal logic, can judge what proportion of the task of understanding belongs to it. The decision about the relative emphasis to be placed on grammatical or technical interpretation depends on the interpreter, the locus of this methodological dialogue.

The required exercise of readerly intuition in adjudicating the claims of language and author makes hermeneutics itself the object of hermeneutic art. But Schleiermacher's curious silence about the nature of art and authority in the interpreter—striking after the polemics against art in On Religion and Soliloquies—exhibits his characteristic reticence in the presence of the question of power. The task of combining grammatical and technical interpretation is “artful” because it produces a finite representation of an infinite amount of information. Schleiermacher's earliest notes, perhaps as early as 1805, already link the impossibility of complete knowledge, the compensatory substitution of hermeneutic method, and the artful character of the reader's discretionary freedom, as does the draft of 1809-10. “Because of this double-character of understanding, interpretation is an art”; the “art lies in knowing when one side should give way to the other.” Since, in any hermeneutic instance, “complete knowledge is impossible, it is necessary to move back and forth between the grammatical and psychological sides.” Schleiermacher adds, with a willfulness that arises from no other logic than the need for interpretive self-determination, “No rules can stipulate how to do this” (HM 59, 100).¹¹

The autonomy of the reader and the eternal romantic aspiration toward completeness form a pair of complementary desires.¹² Together, they generate the theory of an art of hermeneutics which creates understanding as something “finite and definite,” a positive response in the realm of representation to an infinitely receding horizon. Hermeneutics offers a solution to the laments about the unending labor of scholarship recorded in Schleiermacher's letters of the 1790s, a way of bringing labor and inspiration together: “the task is infinite, because in a statement we want to trace a past and a future which stretch into infinity. Consequently inspiration is as much a part of this art as of any other. Inasmuch as a text does not evoke such inspiration, it is insignificant” (HM 111). The experience of reading becomes a sequence of herculean efforts in this laborious but artful methodology. In every area the task is “infinite,” an adjective that pervades the hermeneutic manuscripts. The possible senses of a single word are infinite in number; the historical data about an author's linguistic context and generic influences are infinite; and the particulars of authorial biography are infinite. “Infinite” becomes a synonym for “unknowable,” a provocation to work, not to transcendence.

The compensatory nature of hermeneutics is not only due to the fact that we can never constitute perfect knowledge, however. Just as often, Schleiermacher attributes the necessity of method not to the infinitude of facts to be known, but to chronic misunderstanding. The epigraph to the hermeneutic writings could be taken from the Confidential Letters on Lucinde: “the talent for misunderstanding is infinite.” Schleiermacher calls for a “more rigorous practice of the art of interpretation … based on the assumption that misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.” Only out of the “negative formulation” of Schleiermacher's fourfold schema of misunderstanding can the “positive formula” emerge. If there is such a thing as immediately comprehensible (“artless”) language, it is not worthy of interest: “The distinction between artful and artless interpretation is not based on the difference between what is familiar to us and what is unfamiliar, or between what is spoken and what is written. Rather it is based on the fact that we want to understand with precision some things and not others” (HM 110, 108).¹³

The artfulness of hermeneutics derives, therefore, from the desire and interest of the interpreter. Schleiermacher's insistence on a general hermeneutics makes legitimate “such authors as newspaper reporters or those who write newspaper advertisements.” In the first of the 1829 Academy addresses, he defends the hermeneutic dignity of “works which have no outstanding intellectual content, for example … stories narrated in a style similar to that normally used in ordinary conversation to tell about minor occurrences, a long way from artistic historical writing, or … letters composed in a highly intimate and casual style [or] … epigrams.” In the fascination with the style of “ordinary conversation” or its surrogates, “highly intimate and casual” letters, we can detect the source of Schleiermacher's preoccupation with the mind of the author—the ghost that floats through twentieth-century hermeneutic philosophy as the specter of psychologism. Although Schleiermacher frequently refers the hermeneutic problem back from text to mind, he is in fact convinced that full understanding evades us in the psychological or interpersonal domain as well. Even “personal impressions” of immediate speech “must be interpreted,” a process that is “never certain.” Although he argues that interpretation has “the same aim as we do in ordinary listening,” he stresses the role of frustration in causing that aim to be pursued: “I often make use of hermeneutics in personal conversation when, discontented with the ordinary level of understanding, I wish to explore how my friend has moved from one thought to another or try to trace out the views, judgments, and expectations which led him to speak about a given subject in just this way and no other” (HM 36, 181-83).¹⁴

In focusing on the issue of “psychologism,” the purported confusion between persons and texts, commentators on hermeneutics have missed the true cause of this blurring, which is the strength of the reader's self-regard. By responding to writing as if it were speech, and speech as if it were writing, Schleiermacher's representative reader satisfies both the need for intimacy and the need to apprehend an analytical totality.¹⁵ The fourfold formula marks an intentional swerve away from the trajectories of transcendental idealism and from the transumptive will of Hegel. Its back-and-forth, both-and, shuttling, inclusive motions represent a decision to avoid the style of philosophical presumption. But we feel the strain. The construction and revision of the formula and the prospect of the labor that will be expended in meeting its demands suggest that hermeneutic method is doubly motivated, by the pleasures of theoretical mastery as well as by the longing for wholeness.

GRAMMATICAL INTERPRETATION

Grammatical interpretation (“To understand the discourse … in terms of its language”) is the earliest component of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics to take shape, the earliest in several senses. Its sphere, comprised of word meanings, inherits the techniques and problems addressed by Schleiermacher's predecessors, who focused on the linguistic complexities of the Bible and of classical texts. Grammatical interpretation thus predates Schleiermacher's hermeneutic innovations, though of course it is modified by them. Grammatical interpretation is predominant in his earliest manuscripts, the aphorisms. It is presented first in all subsequent hermeneutic manuscripts. “Language is the only presupposition in hermeneutics. … Grammatical interpretation comes first because in the final analysis both what is presupposed and what is to be discovered is language” (HM 55).

Nonetheless, the initiatory status of grammatical interpretation does not signify a priority of value. Grammatical tactics divide language into tradition and the individual talent; they precede consideration of the author because of their negative logic. The task of grammatical interpretation is to “construe … meaning from the total pre-given value of language and the heritage common to the author and his reader” in order for the individual creativity of the work then to be sharply distinguished from its conventional elements. It locates authorial art by defining it as what the conventional use of language is not. In practice, what this entails is a “precise determination of any point in a given text” in the light of “the use of language common to the author and the original public” (HM 70, 117).

To personify this mode of reading in terms of gender, it is masculine but antiheroic in character by virtue of its penchant for hard work and discipline. The “point” at which grammatical interpretation aims is the individual word. The exposition of grammatical procedures describes the exhausting prospect of arriving at the meaning of a word inductively, on the basis of a potentially infinite number of examples. This task is occasionally described in exalted terms as the resolution of multiplicity into unity, but this is not its prevailing mood. The slow accumulation of the senses [Sinnen] that constitute a “word-sphere” of unified meaning [Bedeutung] must start in the assumption that every word is problematic (including what Schleiermacher calls “formal” or “structural” elements, such as particles and inflections). Every use of a word “involves an infinite, indeterminate multiplicity” of contextual possibilities, and the word may be used in a given work, genre, or era innumerable times (HM 51, 79, 119, 42, 76, 121).

Consequently, when Schleiermacher turns to examples of how grammatical interpretation proceeds, it is difficult to feel that “science” is “constantly renewing itself from the center of its intuition.” Except for a few moments when the “organic connections” of “coordinating and subordinating” grammar begin to sound like a fable of interpersonal relations, the “determination of the word … by a process of elimination” does not seem radiant with philosophical intuition (HM 128-29). One is reminded of Schleiermacher's complaints during the 1790s about the “unspeakable trouble,” the “torment,” it cost him “to grasp … a [philosophical] book.”

The variability of meaning, which requires so much effort to understand, pervades the whole field of figurative language. Schleiermacher takes pains to clarify this and so should we, for it is through this admission of indeterminacy that the laboriousness of grammatical interpretation shades into its divinatory alter ego. The “distinction between the literal and the figurative. … disappears,” Schleiermacher writes, because the method for analyzing them is the same. Every word is read in context, and almost every context is to some extent figurative: “There … arises a pretension that scientific expressions should be ‘exact,’ but this pretension can never be fulfilled. There are always terms that are commonly called ‘figurative,’ and even when that does not seem to be so, it is only because the terms are no longer grasped genetically.” It is the task of philosophy, “the center of all science,” to understand words as a “living terminology” constantly in transition between figurative instability and “the hegemony of the concept,” or unified meaning. What might be called the density of differentiation, the multiplicity of Sinnen characteristic of words in a mature language is a philosophical opportunity: “duplicity of expression … is the basis for higher meaningfulness” (HM 119, 73-74, 87).¹⁶

Mirroring the “higher meaningfulness” of language, the collection of data about linguistic history “belongs to a higher understanding” than that experienced by the author. This comprehension is “higher” because it is self-conscious, and self-conscious because it is a willed solution to misunderstanding. “The statement that we must consciously grasp an author's linguistic sphere … implies that we understand the author better than he understood himself.” Because “difficulties arise … we must become aware of many things of which the author himself was unaware” (HM 131-32, 85, 118-19). The phrase “to understand the author better than he understood himself,” persistently associated by later writers with Schleiermacher's purported desire for empathic contact with the author's mind, in this rationalized area of hermeneutic theory is based on the reader's remoteness from linguistic habits automatic to the writer he studies. Temporal distance and the ethic of hard work needed to overcome it give hermeneutic understanding its priority of value over the author's unreflecting linguistic competence.

The defense of hard work nevertheless breaks down tellingly at a key juncture in Schleiermacher's reasoning, where the divinatory impulse, although unnamed, begins to make itself felt. In the 1809-10 draft on grammatical interpretation he starts to present the notion of the hermeneutic circle as a solution to the problem of distinguishing a word's unity of meaning from its particular variants. Because “this essential unity is never found as such [without the adulteration of the particular], it can never be presupposed”; rather, “unity is to be sought.” This logic leads to the theory of the hermeneutic circle: “Consequently, the task of grammatical interpretation is divided into two parts: (1) the task of determining the essential meaning from a given usage and (2) the task of ascertaining an unknown usage from the meaning.” Elsewhere, Schleiermacher predicts the success of the hermeneutic circle as an interpretive strategy more dramatically, as in the second address to the Prussian Academy: “As soon as we turn to a new part we encounter new uncertainties and begin again, as it were, in the dim morning light. It is like starting all over, except that as we push ahead the new material illumines everything we have already treated, until suddenly at the end every part is clear and the whole work is visible in sharp and definite contours” (HM 76-78, 198).

In the passage of 1809-10, however, we see what can happen when one interrogates the hermeneutic circle too closely (HM 76-78). A series of questions exposes the limits of this solution and rapidly propels Schleiermacher into a regression that leads to thoughts of children, savages, and the primacy of feeling. “How does one get hold of the meaning?” he asks. “That is, how does one first arrive at a given usage and then go farther? How does one learn to understand in the first place?” The need to “go farther,” to go back to “the first place”—the rhetoric of the readerly drive that motivates hermeneutic theory—impels Schleiermacher to reflect on the process of language acquisition. He describes this as an exact though unconscious replica of grammatical interpretation:

For a child every instance of relating a name to an object must seem indefinite. It does not become definite until after many comparisons. … Only by means of associating and comparing particular meanings does one begin to grasp the inner unity. The inner unity is that which is representable in every particular instance of the intuition [that is, every time the word is used]. But since the completeness of the particular is never reached, the task is unending.

The quest for a point of origin prior to hermeneutic labor, conflated with the desire to “get hold of … meaning” in an absolutely satisfying way, leads to a paradoxical vision of a childhood without hermeneutic innocence. The nostalgia we anticipate in Schleiermacher's text at the moment of temporal regress does not emerge. The surrogate for the “inner unity” of the text is the inner feeling of the interpreter. As it is throughout the whole range of Schleiermacher's theological and philosophical works, “feeling” is a supremely ethical sensation, almost a self-explanatory one. In his inability to believe in a possible “completeness of the particular,” Schleiermacher shifts again into the interrogative and answers his own questions in a passage of brilliant density: “Is there any substitute for this completeness? And even if one had such a substitute, would there be any guarantee that one had grasped the inner unity accurately? The guarantee could not be another rule having to do with method. It could only be feeling [Gefühl]. Thus this feeling [of unity] must be the substitute for completeness.” Feeling arrives to compensate for the inadequacies of method, just as emotional prose responds throughout this passage to the endlessness of the hermeneutic circle. But at the point where divination, the intuitive apprehension of authorial creativity, is about to become crucial, feeling itself is referred to grammatical confirmation, albeit of a continually shifting kind: “The foundation for the certainty of this feeling must be that every given usage may be easily coordinated to the presumed unity and that this coordination is appropriate to the character of language. But this is confirmed only by analogy with several other unities, and it therefore becomes certain only along with others.” The intuitive sense of “ease” and “appropriateness,” stricken with anxiety about divinatory mysticism, must be backed up by historical or comparative method.

The passage closes by making explicit the dissatisfactions that produced it and by accepting them once more. This resolution is brought about by the image of the primitive, a figure that predictably appears with the child in romantic theories of language. In the very earliest stages of linguistic development, primitive societies have a certain knowledge of their entire language which even the children of nineteenth-century Europe cannot attain. “Grasping the character of a language by means of the reflection of the totality of thinking in that language is possible,” Schleiermacher suggests, “only in the case of primitive peoples living close to nature.” Schleiermacher's sense of the fallen condition of the modern interpreter again reveals the extent to which hermeneutics is a compensatory strategy. “One who has lost his philological innocence [Unschuld] must for the most common cases rely on philological science. The task can be completed only by approximation” (HM 76-78).

Throughout this passage Schleiermacher has asked questions to which the strategies of the hermeneutic circle have been an admittedly imperfect answer, second best in the light of the wish for an immediate or early certainty about meaning. The hermeneutic circle characterizes, rather than resolves, problems of understanding. Its compensatory status points us toward an explanation of why Schleiermacher needed to introduce divination into his hermeneutic system. Only with the assistance of immediate intuition is the hermeneutic circle transformed into a source of comfort, however temporary, rather than unease.

TECHNICAL INTERPRETATION

Schleiermacher always conceived of hermeneutics as a dialectical process organized by a binary set of terms, grammatical and technical interpretation. The grammatical approach is the more stable of the two. Over the twenty-five years spanned by his hermeneutic manuscripts, its tasks and methods do not markedly change, though the energy expended on their description diminishes. Fully described later than grammatical interpretation, technical interpretation appears to balance its opposite term neatly. Once the tactics of comparison and divination are elucidated to complete the fourfold process of understanding, one would expect a certain stabilizing of all four terms.

The association of technical interpretation with divination undermines this symmetry, however, despite Schleiermacher's efforts to keep the four terms in balance. As grammatical interpretation (“understanding by reference to the language”) had as its aim the determination of the unity of the word-sphere, technical interpretation (“understanding by reference to the one who speaks”) pursues an analogous synthesis: it “is chiefly concerned with the over-all coherence [of the text] and with its relation to the universal laws for combining thoughts.” Because of its capacity for the perception of textual unity, technical interpretation executes the inaugural plunge into the hermeneutic circle, “an overview” or “preliminary [reading]” of the whole in which grammatical observations may then be situated. “At the very beginning [of technical interpretation] … one must immediately grasp the over-all coherence. The only way to do this is by quickly reading over the whole text” (HM 69, 166-67, 83, 57). Technical interpretation is associated with beginnings of at least three kinds. Its grasp of textual unity qualifies it to begin the hermeneutic endeavor, despite the competing claims of grammatical interpretation; it is oriented to what is new in language, that is, to individual style as linguistic innovation; and it seeks to understand the origin of that style in the author's mind, although Schleiermacher provides no vocabulary or methodology for psychological analysis.

The psychological element of discourse inheres in textual transitions, connections, and discontinuities and requires no reference to the author's mind. If “unity may be reduced to style, in the higher sense of the term,” then to understand the author need not entail the kind of telepathic empathy that the later Schleiermacher is frequently assumed to desire. In the 1819 “Compendium” the reader's inability to read minds gives rise to his or her compensatory mastery of style. And in the realm of readers all things are equal: “with respect to the objective [grammatical] aspects [of the work], the author had no data other than we have.” In the 1820s Schleiermacher increasingly discredits the writer's special authority: “It is normally supposed that the most direct way to find the inner unity of the work is to examine the author's own statements at the beginning or at the end. This is wrong. In many writings what the author declares to be his subject matter is quite subordinate to the actual theme.” Putting oneself “inside” the author, then, is the same thing as reading “between the lines” of the text, a process in which the reader's mind fills in the gaps in order to produce a coherent interpretation (HM 69, 112, 168, 182).¹⁷

Technical interpretation, true to its character as “a development of the beginning,” views content as “what moved the author” and form as “his nature moved by that content.” Its goal is to “grasp how the work is a necessary undertaking of the author,” and “a sense for this necessity emerges only if the genesis of the text is never lost from view.” The problem of “genesis,” especially when it is bound to individual unity that is known to be “indescribable,” leads to divination (HM 166, 172, 148).

Two kinds of motivation are at work in writing, according to Schleiermacher: primary and secondary thoughts, occasionally also called “purpose” and “idea.” The purpose, or primary thought, refers to the author's conscious choice of subject matter prior to composition and to the declared logic of his or her argument. It is the ideas, the secondary thoughts, that present a hermeneutic challenge. The idea is the theme that actually emerges in the text as written. Secondary thoughts are unplanned spin-offs or deviations from the intended direction of argument or exposition: “a free train of thought. … aroused in him [the writer] in the course of his work.” Individual creativity inheres largely in these “secondary representations” (HM 154-56).

Despite his numerous references to the mental origin of the work and to the mental surprises that created it, Schleiermacher never actually wants to get into the author's mind. What he wants is the sensation of recovering the experience of textual genesis. He values the artistic work because it calls forth the art of hermeneutics. Because “composition” provides him with evidence of “the way the connections between the thoughts have been constructed,” empathic contact with the author emerges out of the minutiae of composition, which tend, therefore, to take on the status of symptoms or behavioral data (HM 147). Schleiermacher will take whatever biographical information he can get, but technical interpretation presupposes his remoteness from the person. The psychology that matters is that of the interpreter, and what most matters about the reader is desire, not knowledge. Since this desire is attributed to any “artful” reader, psychology is even here the wrong word. Regardless of our psychic individuality, not because of it, we are drawn to literary origins.

DIVINATION

Schleiermacher's conflation of author and style allows empathy to be oriented to writing, albeit writing endowed with all the attributes of mind. “The hermeneutics of the spirit, insofar as it is not encompassed by the hermeneutics of the sense, lies beyond the scope of hermeneutics altogether” (HM 212). Since form provides adequate evidence for the divinatory recognition of the spirit that made it, a kind of psychologism is at work. The “method” (ill-named as such) of divination is the primary vehicle of Schleiermacher's desire for contact with another subjectivity. Whether the subject is a text or an author, the gift it ultimately provides is the reader's enhanced self-esteem. For divination is a pleasurable indulgence in antiscientific thinking, carefully contained within the flexible rationalism of the hermeneutic formula.

After emerging as the necessity for “immediate intuition” around 1809-10, divination is integrated into hermeneutic procedure at the very end of the 1819 Compendium, the “Kompendienartige Darstellung.” By the time of the Addresses to the Prussian Academy it has become Schleiermacher's central theme and, in his mind, one of his chief contributions to hermeneutic theory. This tendency is consistent with the rest of his theological and philosophical corpus, which is filled with efforts to define in abstract language the redemptive process of intersubjective understanding. In The Christian Faith this concern takes the form of a phenomenology of religious consciousness; in the Dialektik it surfaces in the imperative of consensual concept formation; in the hermeneutic manuscripts it appears as divination.

As technical interpretation must alternate with its complement, grammatical interpretation, so divination must refer back to comparison. Making explicit what has been implicit all along, Schleiermacher characterizes the two methods in terms of gender:

By leading the interpreter to transform himself, so to speak, into the author, the divinatory method seeks to gain an immediate comprehension of the author as an individual [das Individuelle unmittelbar aufzufassen sucht]. The comparative method proceeds by subsuming the author under a general type. It then tries to find his distinctive traits by comparing him with the others of the same general type. Divinatory knowledge is the feminine strength in knowing people; comparative knowledge, the masculine.

Each method refers back to the other. The divinatory is based on the assumption that each person is not only a unique individual in his own right, but that he has a receptivity to the uniqueness of every other person.

This assumption in turn seems to presuppose that each person contains a minimum of everyone else, and so divination is aroused by comparison with oneself.

As the conscious link between divination and “the feminine strength in knowing people” so powerfully shows, the divinatory method ushers into hermeneutics the scenario of Confidential Letters on Lucinde, On Religion, and Soliloquies. In the description of how the reader comes to know the author, we encounter a theoretical allegory: the community of understanding forms through discourse between androgynes in whom masculine individuality and feminine receptivity to it [Empfänglichkeit] peacefully coexist.¹⁸ “Comparison does not provide a distinctive unity. The general and the particular must interpenetrate, and only divination allows this to happen,” Schleiermacher writes (HM 150-51).¹⁹

The symmetry of these complementary temperaments may be illusory, however, for divination tends to unsettle the balance between them. Since under the rubric of technical interpretation, divination undertakes to understand the same textual attribute as comparison—individuality—and since it accomplishes this effortlessly and instantaneously, it threatens to replace research with intuition. Why shouldn't this alternate perceptual mode render methodical comparisons obsolete? Divination is consistent with Schleiermacher's critique of alienated logic. He turns to it because “it is impossible to characterize the ‘perfect understanding of style’ in terms derived from the metaphorics of decoding,” as Manfred Frank, one of the most acute readers of Schleiermacher in our century, remarks. “What is made commensurable by the ‘comparison’ cannot be the ‘new,’ … the as-yet incomparable of a phrase just heard, unless a conjectural hypothesis (‘divination’) had already made the … individual combinatory manner of the author … commensurable … by a leap of the imagination or an originary ‘guess.’”²⁰

The power of divination to outperform comparison suggests that within Schleiermacher's systematic hermeneutics resides the temptation to abandon systems altogether. He wants divination to play a double role, as the opposite of comparison in the fourfold strategy of hermeneutics (“We must employ both methods in both aspects” [HM 192]) and also as the energy that initiates, subsumes, or exceeds other kinds of understanding. The divinatory tendency of Schleiermacher's imagination strains the symmetrical apparatus designed to limit it. He strives to permit divination only as an opening move and a last resort, framing the methodical work of comparison. He says repeatedly that the hermeneutic results of comparison and divination are identical, except in their temporality: intuition apprehends instantaneously the whole that comparative study forms slowly, inductively.

Despite their identical conclusions, only divination that has been validated by comparison is worthwhile. Divination “becomes certain only when it is corroborated by comparisons. Without this confirmation, it always tends to be fanatical” (HM 151). The reference to the “fanatical” marks divination as the extremism against which symmetry must be constituted. In the end Schleiermacher prefers systematic procedure over spontaneous receptivity. The balanced relationship of textual attributes (grammar and technique) and their corresponding readerly approaches (comparison and divination) win out over positioning the reader in a “feminine” stance with regard to the work.

The 1829 addresses [“Akademiereden”] exhibit an easy and uninhibited tone more characteristic of On Religion or of Schleiermacher's letters than of the rest of the hermeneutic manuscripts. It is impossible not to feel that these qualities are bound up with Schleiermacher's apparent agenda: the judging of his contemporaries and predecessors in the field of hermeneutics, including the philologists Friedrich Ast (1778-1841) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), and the setting forth of the advantages of his own system. He seems to feel that divination is his own particular creation, despite its connection to Ast's notion of “spiritual” interpretation and to Wolf's ideal of perfect communication with the author.²¹ The tendency of divination to destabilize the fourfold logic of interpretation is surely related to its association with Schleiermacher's own philosophical inventiveness.

The error in calling divination a “method” quickly becomes apparent. The addresses focus on the sensations of beginning and ending, providing no work to fill the gap between the two. Divination is the attraction to unknown origins and the pleasure in contemplating them. Anything laborious required in the passage from mystery to illumination is relegated to the comparative method or to the field of grammatical interpretation. As pure desire and its projected fulfillment, divination elides the domain of method.

Divination enters these texts as a series of rhetorical indulgences in the poetry of quest romance oriented to lost beginnings (HM 193-95). In the first address, moving back to the individual discovery of language in childhood, Schleiermacher reflects, “Even as I am dealing here with the completion of the [hermeneutic] operation, I am driven back almost involuntarily to the very beginning.” As he has once before, he associates the beginning of both writing and interpretation with the linguistic experience of the child. He has not forgotten that he has described language learning as a form of grammatical interpretation and tries now to reconcile that suggestion with the “temptation” of a more intuitive theory. The involuntary nature of this ‘drive,’ like the reference to the potentially “fanatical” character of divination, hints again at the effort to keep receptivity under control. “This very beginning” of hermeneutics, he continues,

is the same as when children begin to understand language. … Children do not yet have language, but are seeking it. Nor do they know the activity of thinking, because there is no thinking without words. With what aspect, then, do they begin? They do not yet have any points of comparison. … Are we not tempted to say that each child produces both thinking and language originally, and that either each child out of himself by virtue of an inner necessity engenders them in a way that coincides with the way it had happened in others or gradually as he becomes capable of a comparative procedure he approximates others. But in fact this inner movement toward producing thoughts on one's own, although initially stimulated by others, is the same as that which we have called “the divinatory.”

As Schleiermacher tries to read his dialectic of hermeneutic methods back into early stages of development, he feels “tempted” to explain language acquisition as pure divination, the result of “inner necessity.” At the same time, he is still drawn to a less mystical theory of mimetic comparison, which attributes inner necessity to the child's comparison of himself or herself with others. Divination, an “inner movement toward producing thoughts on one's own,” prevails, though its beginnings may be in external stimuli. He concludes, “This divinatory operation … is original and the soul … shows itself to be wholly and inherently a prescient being [ein ahnendes Wesen].”

At this point Schleiermacher stops trying to establish the similarity between adult interpreters and children who are learning to speak and loses himself in admiration of the magnificence of these first beginnings:

With what an enormous, almost infinite, power of expression does the child begin! It cannot be likened to later developments, nor to anything else. … These first activities of thinking and knowing are so astonishing that it seems to me that when we smile at the false applications which children make of the elements of language they have acquired—and to be sure often with all too great consistency—we do so only in order to find consolation or even to take revenge for this excess of energy which we are no longer able to expend.

(HM 193-94)

The child's “power of expression” is manifested in the ability to “use,” “reproduce,” or “grasp” the “images” that form the basis for word-spheres or word meanings. Schleiermacher does not explain or really comprehend the process by which this occurs. What matters more is his sensitivity to his own emotions when confronted by such energy. The response he imagines—the smile of consolation and revenge—is an ironic experience of unassuageable desire in several moods: loss, envy, and vicarious gratification.

Trying to recover from this condition, Schleiermacher claims kinship with the child once again, not on the basis of the adult's quantum of energy but on that of our ongoing capacity for beginning again: “Viewed in this light, whenever we do not understand, we find ourselves in the same situation as the children, although not to the same degree. … On such occasions, we can always begin with the same divinatory boldness.” The boldness of the adult has the compensatory logic that imbues all of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics. Like Wordsworth, he modulates from the sublimity of childhood to the sociability of mature, if “sluggish,” knowledge: “we ought not simply contrast our present situation to those immense beginnings in childhood, for the process of understanding and interpreting is a whole which develops constantly and gradually, and in its later stages we must aid each other more and more.” This aid takes the form of offering “to others points of comparison … which themselves begin in this same divinatory way.” Translated into temporal terms, speed—a trope of imaginative energy—is exchanged for richness: “the soul … the more it possesses, becomes more sluggish, in inverse proportion to its receptivity” (HM 194-95).

Society is important because it provides a field for differentiating the self. As Schleiermacher wrote in the passage with which I opened the subject of divination, “each person contains a minimum of everyone else, and so divination is aroused by comparison of oneself” (HM 150-51). Here Schleiermacher's reader has become too ethical to be narcissistic but, as the hermeneutic manuscripts repeatedly show, is not averse to taking pleasure in distinctiveness. Whereas the true narcissist seeks gratification in his or her reflected image, as in the Soliloquies, this figure becomes absorbed in the contemplation of others who are partly the same, partly different. The enrichment of collective cultural life is ethically consistent with the individual reader's momentary sense of achieved objectivity. Or, put another way, objectivity sanctions Schleiermacher's version of the will to power, the will to understand. Since power and truth are joined in the linking of conceptual mastery with philosophical objectivity, the potential of hermeneutic pleasure to foster private egotism at the expense of the community of scientific discourse is blocked.

The temperate pleasures of self-love are immanent in the sensations of conclusive understanding. The condition sought by the reader is the “divinatory certainty” that results from reconstructing the genesis of the written work. Out of the “dim morning light” in which reading begins comes conclusive illumination: “suddenly at the end every part is clear and the whole work is visible in sharp and definite contours.” When divination and comparison have both been taken as far as they can go, “the internal process [of creation] has been made so transparent … that, since what has been intuited is a thought and since there is no thought without words, the entire relationship between the production of the thoughts and its formation in language is now fully and immediately evident” (HM 185, 198, 193). Such thematic and rhetorical shifts persistently bring together metaphors of unmediated vision and the achievement of understanding. Stylistic heightening and hermeneutic success coincide so regularly in Schleiermacher's two addresses that one wonders if the necessity for the divinatory method does not have more to do with the kind of writing it permits than with the hermeneutic work it accomplishes.

Schleiermacher describes the authority the reader may legitimately claim through a kind of pleasure principle, or principle of “enrichment.” In the process, he confronts the charge of psychologism and defines both authors and texts as means to the end of readerly representation. “Historical reconstruction[,] which we undertake in order to comprehend better a work of some author[,] will achieve true excellence,” he asserts, “not merely because it clarifies the work in question but also because it enriches our own lives and the lives of others.” Recognizing the heroic tonality in this statement, he goes on: “Such enrichment is sublime, and it should be added to our consideration of works so that we do not produce trivialities which demean ourselves and our scientific labor” (HM 207).

I cannot resist here introducing Emerson, a voice out of my own past, in order to point out what is at stake in Schleiermacher's hermeneutic ethics. “Culture,” Emerson proclaims, “is the suggestion … that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”²² In this passage a “range of affinities” with others different from oneself rescues one from the violence and monotony of temperament. The moral contrast between preponderant “master-tones” and the “succor” of “delicious … sympathy” indicates that cultivated discourse is an ethical imperative. Society “redresses” and balances the extremes of self-reliance. Emerson is never committed to the tempering virtues of culture for more than a paragraph at a time, but at such moments he articulates one of the key ethical features of romantic theories of understanding by grounding objectivity in interpersonal exchanges.

What Emerson allows us to see more clearly is the extent to which Schleiermacher's hermeneutic tactics are governed by ethical criteria. To translate Emerson's terms back into Schleiermacher's, the “violence” of the individual corresponds, in a morally chastened form, to the ability to subsume or incorporate the author into an understanding so complete that it generates a feeling of confidence and pleasure. Schleiermacher's reader must test and share his or her certainty in the realm of science, in order to ensure its contribution to collective “enrichment.” But this interpreter has already situated the saving difference of unlikeness in the dialectics of understanding itself. The reader is obligated to test divinatory conclusions against grammatical interpretation, which functions as the internalized conscience of the research community. The act of reading itself is an exercise in redressing imbalance, as the interpreter oscillates between the author's individual and cultural attributes and between his or her own artful and scientific tendencies.

Schleiermacher regards his own theorizing about divination as in itself creative. In a series of intricate readings of Wolf and Ast in the second address to the Prussian Academy, he brings forward the need for artistic intuition in understanding in order to amplify and heretofore impoverished role of divination. The reflexivity of this strategy, of hermeneutic theory conducted through applied hermeneutics, is extremely dense. Schleiermacher exercises his own creativity by developing the idea of readerly inspiration in a commentary on Wolf's notion of interpretive art. This associational chain accounts for much of the rhetorical urgency of the addresses.

In the second address Schleiermacher suddenly becomes defensive about divination. It “seems so underdeveloped and thin in comparison with [grammatical interpretation],” he concedes, “that it would seem completely improper to give it a place equal to the other in a new hermeneutics.” And again: “how trivial this method looks” (HM 206-7). These passages partly constitute a rhetorical ploy leading to the claim of the “sublime” benefit of divinatory fulfillment. But they also reveal Schleiermacher's awareness of the mildly deviant quality of a strategy like divination in the context of philological tradition (although, viewed in the larger context of German criticism after Herder, it is of course a development to be expected).²³

Schleiermacher's response to Wolf in both addresses shows how willfully and with what apparent disingenuousness he sought out the element of artistry in established works on hermeneutics and made it his own. He zeroes in on Wolf's “very surprising” stipulation that the interpreter needs the ability to “perform the actual operations which the ancients did … in a free and individual fashion.” Schleiermacher presents himself as confounded by Wolf's suggestion. “For my own part,” he confesses stodgily, “I would have been content to understand … fluency … as the mature fruit of long-term studies” merely. Like a pedant indignant at the sudden demand for artistry, he asks, “How then can Wolf demand such art from us as the admission fee … to the shrine of the science of antiquity? And by what honest means are we supposed to attain it?” Schleiermacher chooses not to acknowledge the most “magical” quality of divination, its effortlessness, and treats it as the means to “fluency,” not as fluency itself: “Assuming there is no magical way [Zaubermittel], I see no other than that of … adopting a procedure that is, fortunately, not merely imitative, but also divinatory—methods that would ultimately lead to fluency as the fruit of study” (HM 186-87).

The turning point in this oddly oblique presentation comes when Schleiermacher takes Wolf more figuratively. “Fluency,” he now observes, effectively directs us to “something other” than philology, interpretive access to “the internal intellectual activity of an author.” “Herewith,” Schleiermacher announces, “a new understanding of this side of interpretation is opened to us.” By the end of the second address, Schleiermacher has once again taken full responsibility for the idea of divination. “If it is a mistake, though I do not think it is, to assign both of these tasks [comparison and divination] to the interpreter, then it is my fault alone, for my guides do not accept this view” (HM 188, 208). This sentence is laden with negativity—the double negative of “not being mistaken,” the characterization of originality as a “fault” which his mentors “do not accept.” His pleasure in divination seems to have disappeared beneath his own modesty. In the realm of interpretive ethics, however, the disavowal of pride may be as certain an indicator of aspiration as an open celebration of it.

In view of divination's unsettled character, or Schleiermacher's character shifts in its vicinity, it is difficult to evaluate the status within it of the desire for a community of understanding. The first definition we looked at from the hermeneutic manuscripts strongly voiced this impulse. “Divinatory knowledge is the feminine strength in knowing people. … a receptivity to the uniqueness of every other person” (HM 151). If we follow the implications of the phrase “feminine strength” [weibliche Stärke], we are led deeply into the relationship of the image of community to the unreconciled logical and intuitive modes of hermeneutic understanding. Schleiermacher's inconsistency arises from the question of the direction of understanding. Does it operate in one direction only, in the reader's dialectical but not dialogical responses to texts, utterances, and their authors? Or is it bidirectional, the intersubjective construction of a “life world,” to use Habermas's romantic term, in which readers and authors/texts act on each other?

The extent of the reader's communal spirit varies with the degree of Schleiermacher's subliminal femininity at any given moment. Receptivity, the vision of understanding as communion, is bound up with the phenomenon of speech. Speech, in turn, “the medium for the commonality of thought,” is associated with woman. In Schleiermacher's defense of “feminine knowledge” as a talent required in social as well as textual affairs, he links speech, as the discourse of an individual's “whole being,” to the dynamics of conversation arising from “shared life”: “The immediate presence of the speaker, the living expression that proclaims that his whole being is involved, the way the thoughts in a conversation develop from our shared life, such factors stimulate us far more than some solitary observation of an isolated text to understand a series of thoughts as a moment of life which is breaking forth, as one moment set in the context of many others” (HM 97, 183). But such claims are rare, “moment[s] of life” that stand like islands of grace in the mediated universe of approximate understanding. Their position is analogous to that of women, who stand out as the self-conscious linguists of desire in male intellectual society.

SCHLEIERMACHER, PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS, AND THE QUESTION OF GENDER

Since the mid-1960s, hermeneutic philosophy has displayed a persistent ambivalence toward its romantic past and particularly toward Schleiermacher. Since Heinz Kimmerle published Schleiermacher's hermeneutic manuscripts in 1959, the crux of the debate has been his relative emphasis on authorial psychology as opposed to language.²⁴ The contest between the psychological and the linguistic is a version of the larger problem facing hermeneutic theorists, the tension between allegiance to a philosophical rigor that must eschew personification and desire for an ethic of communion that redeems the objectified relationships of technological society. This conflict accounts for the unresolved simultaneity in Schleiermacher's hermeneutics of comparison and divination, which arrive at the same goal by different interpretive paths. Recent hermeneutic writings display a similar tension between philosophy's need to purify itself of subjectivity and its dreams of a life world experienced as a “Thou.”²⁵

This predicament has discursive consequences in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and, to a lesser extent, that of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. In all three it takes the form of a constant emphasis on the metaphoric status of terms like “voice,” “conversation,” “question and answer,” or even “incarnation.”²⁶ Gadamer insists on the nonliteral meaning of his key words, sometimes laboriously: “It would be wrong to think that … what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the meaning of another person, who is a ‘Thou.’” The thing thus designated, rather, is “a meaningful content detached from all bonds of the meaning individual.” Nonetheless, in the next phrase Gadamer personifies content once again as “a genuine partner in communication, with which we have fellowship as does the ‘I’ with a ‘Thou.’”²⁷

Gadamer calls attention to his metaphoric patterning, for example, by setting up a comparison of “the hermeneutic phenomenon” to “the model of the conversation between two persons” in order to reveal what “these apparently so different situations have in common.”²⁸ These gestures dissociate Gadamer from what he perceives as the more literal use of dialogue and empathy in romantic hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of such figures of speech in post-Heideggerian hermeneutic writings suggests that they are needed not for logical reasons—their logic is constantly being corrected—but for affective and ethical ones. Metaphors of community, receptivity, and conversation constitute an ethical code that seems to require this strongly figurative dimension, in addition to more methodical articulation.²⁹ Such language betrays the uneasiness of hermeneutic philosophers in the presence of romanticism in general, Schleiermacher in particular, and, more universally, in the presence of metaphor itself.³⁰ What is striking, where inherited metaphors are so active, is the entire absence of the ambiguous figure of woman. For the image of the speech community to be acceptable to modern philosophers, its earlier figurative link with the feminine had to be extinguished.

Joel Weinsheimer makes the best possible case for the superiority of Gadamer's hermeneutics over Schleiermacher's and for a clear and genuine difference between the languages of contemporary and romantic hermeneutics. Weinsheimer's commentary, however, like Gadamer's Truth and Method itself, treats Schleiermacher polemically as embodying errors that Gadamer has corrected. This dichotomized mode of argument makes both philosophers appear excessively consistent, given the fact that the basis of their affinity is precisely the instability caused by the lurking ghost of divination.

When, over time, the “alienation of voice” leaves us only with “the meaninglessness of writing,” Weinsheimer explains, the mediating strategies of hermeneutics ensure that “the past does not live still but rather again, and the more fully for being interrupted.” Gadamer emerges as sophisticated and tough-minded in his insistence that the “given of hermeneutics is ‘a consciousness of loss and alienation’” and in his Hegelian affirmation of “difference [as] the condition of, rather than the obstacle to, assimilation and appropriation.” Schleiermacher materializes at this point in Weinsheimer's argument, as in Gadamer's, as “the initial wrong turn … toward methodologism in the human sciences.”³¹

The task of interpretation has been uprooted [by Schleiermacher] from the context of intelligent consensus within which the authentic life of understanding gets constantly negotiated. Now it has to overcome a complete alienation. The imposition of an artificial apparatus that is supposed to open up whatever is alien and make it one's own takes the place of the communicative ability in which people live together and mediate themselves along with the tradition in which they stand.³²

Both Weinsheimer and Gadamer view divination as Schleiermacher's naive attempt to overcome the unintelligibility of an estranged tradition “and thus return directly to the past as it originally was.”³³ They see quite clearly that, in his hermeneutic formula, divination compensates for method or system. What they fail to recognize is that, through the persistence of a romantic code of metaphor, divination is a corollary of the Gadamerian critique of method as well. Instead of occurring after misunderstanding, as in Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, divination (by other names) take place before it.

Gadamer, who loves the human voice even more than Schleiermacher, uses it to symbolize immediate understanding spontaneously experienced in the present. “Misunderstanding does not always come first,” he writes. “There is always a world already interpreted,” a realm of “artless language,” transparent speech, and “infinite dialogue.”³⁴ By characterizing tradition as dialogue, Gadamer gratifies the same interest in immediacy expressed in the psychological tendencies of Wilhelm Dilthey and the divinatory impulses of Schleiermacher.³⁵ The stance of receptivity derived from Schleiermacher's rhetoric of divination is carried into the modern hermeneutic arena under the rubric of voice, which now becomes a locus of comprehensibility.

Against Weinsheimer, then, I would argue that Gadamer's failure to remember the complex mixture of impulses which produced Schleiermacher's hermeneutic formula dooms him to repeat the gestures he wishes to avoid. He associates Schleiermacher with an excess of method (“artificial apparatus”), the technological thinking that represents modern “alienation.” By splitting Schleiermacher's hermeneutics into hyperrational method and mere empathy, Gadamer reinforces both his own distaste for method and his claims for more sophisticated feeling states. He espouses, however, romantic hopes for “the authentic life” of “intelligent consensus” and “a moral attitude” opposed to “objectivation” and favoring an ethos of “participation,” “concern,” and “affection.” He wants hermeneutics to be a philosophy of quasi-Christian intersubjectivity in which understanding is “not a form of domination but of service” [nicht Herrschafts- sondern Dienstformen].³⁶ In the context of such views the engagement with nonpersonal tradition begins to look like a way to avoid the discourse of psychology toward which they tend. By caricaturing Schleiermacher in this precise way, Gadamer can present his own hermeneutic theory as modernist while returning to romantic moods, minus the divinatory or empathic feminine.

The hermeneutics of Ricoeur similarly reveal the continued energy of a romantic conception of understanding. This is a continuity denied by his assertion that, in complicating the ostensibly psychologistic nineteenth-century view of understanding, he is moving “Beyond Romanticist Hermeneutics.” The relative autonomy of the text, its separation from living speech, is a fortunate fall or “productive distanciation,” according to Ricoeur. The fall from speech to writing means that “the primordial, the original” language is lost. Immediate communication, that “wonder” of “being-together” (which, I have argued, Schleiermacher denies even to speech), is no longer possible. In the aftermath of this event the “deepest wish of hermeneutics is to conquer a remoteness” between the text and the interpreter, a temporal gap (between past and present), and a linguistic difference (between speech and writing).³⁷ How does the interpreter overcome these distances?

Ricoeur, believing that he is at this point correcting Schleiermacher, rejects as illegitimate the ambition to know the mind of the author. “Authorial meaning” (as Schleiermacher himself had believed) “becomes properly a dimension of the text to the extent that the author is not available for questioning.” The absence of the speaker results in a surplus of meaning. The second part of the hermeneutic dialectic now occurs in the “struggle between otherness and ownness” by which the reader appropriates the work: “Reading is the remedy by which the text is rescued into proximity.”³⁸

Reading is also the way the reader is rescued, however, in a specifically ethical sense. Ricoeur's reader encounters in multiple meanings “the surging up of the possible,” “the grace of the imagination.” He or she is freed from the “egoistic and narcissistic ego” that seeks possession, for Ricoeur prohibits fantasies of power. He contrasts the “self,” which proceeds from the understanding of the text, to the “ego,” which claims to precede it. “The text,” he writes, “gives a self to the ego.”³⁹ Ricoeur is nowhere more like Schleiermacher than in this desire to create a more virtuous reader.

Habermas gives the ethical speech community a role in his social theory which is more delimited and more self-conscious in its idealizations than its place in the hermeneutics of either Gadamer or Ricoeur. “The goal of coming to an understanding,” he states, “is to bring about an agreement that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another.” His “theory of illocutionary action” takes as its theme the “establishment of interpersonal relations.” Speakers “are always already orientated to those validity-claims, on the intersubjective recognition of which possible consensus depends.” They act counter to institutional systems in a realm of what one might call domestic informality, where the “everyday certainty … characteristic of background knowledge in the life-world” prevails.⁴⁰

The historical background of the ideal speech community is investigated by Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests. His sympathetic analysis of the necessarily circular logic of Dilthey's divinatory hermeneutics indicates the extent to which his theory of the ideal speech community is derived from romantic philosophies. For Habermas, Dilthey's acceptance of a divinatory element in hermeneutics points to the inherently paradoxical nature of the hermeneutic enterprise. Hermeneutics, as the art of understanding the ordinary language of individuals, is by virtue of its object an impure theory. “Only statements of a pure language can be completely understood”; conversely, with “linguistic expressions … linked to a concrete life context,” “complete understanding is impeded.” Divination is the symptom, within the hermeneutic tradition, of our inability wholly to grasp the “ineffably individual” context that “ordinary language” makes “communicable.” The hermeneutic circle is defensible, according to Habermas, because understanding requires treating ordinary language as “the articulation of a life context, which represents an individual meaning that cannot be wholly grasped in general categories.”⁴¹

In the works of Habermas divination is not the power of immediate intuition, but rather the symptom of imperfect understanding. Nevertheless, because this resistance to pure logic characterizes the quasidomestic therapy of the informal speech community, the romantic links among understanding, speech, and community persist. They persist, however, without any recognition of the conventionally feminine character of this conversation. Like the hermeneutic school with which he takes issue, Habermas avoids noticing that the ideal speech community is based on complex metaphoric equations arising from the inherited blending of gender roles with ethical attitudes. In the hermeneutic tradition after Schleiermacher, in which at least certain aspects of Habermas's writings must be included, the conscious connection of the value of speech communities with the feminine and the divinatory has been repressed or evaded, the feminine more completely so than the divinatory. This history of forgetting produces, in part, the current failure of hermeneutic thought to admit into its discourse an analysis of its own desires.⁴²

Such evasion may represent a kind of progress, a move away from earlier mythologies according to which intuition and analysis are marked according to gender. A less sanguine argument seems more plausible, however. Hermeneutic philosophy—and the critical theory of Habermas to the extent that it draws on hermeneutic values—has not corrected its unconsciously gendered associations but has forgotten they were ever there. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as philosophy became more phobic about the remnants of sensibility that stubbornly persisted in its discourses, the gender-specific meaning of these ideas was suppressed. This fending off of the memory of romanticism occurred not only in order to exclude the feminine, but also to exclude the suspect modes of thought for which the feminine was the metaphoric vehicle: the romantic (including ‘romantic love’), the psychological, and the figurative. Hermeneutics is left with a desire for ethical consensus—and an aversion to the history of that desire.

It is perhaps incongruous, at this point, to introduce the language of feminist theory, for it has been pointedly ignored in the discourse of philosophical hermeneutics, and the reverse is also largely true. Kristeva's acerbic characterization of Heideggerian “care” as “a metaphor for. … the mother or the nurse. … promising something beyond the eternal frustration that it simultaneously proclaims” is the most direct statement of a feminist distaste for the unconscious feminine associations that pervade hermeneutic as well as Heideggerian philosophy.⁴³

But if there is feminist resistance to philosophical evocations of the maternal, there are also feminist parallels and analogues. The image of the speech community, of the “dialogue of love,” is central to both feminist and hermeneutic theory. To the feminist imagination, this configuration has taken the form of “the female world of love and ritual” or, more philosophically, the “speaking-among-women” within which “speaking (as) woman” can occur.⁴⁴ For hermeneutic theorists, dialogue descends from the androgynous conversation in which masculine reason is supplemented by feminine intuition. This common ground of feminism and hermeneutics reflects not agreement, but rather a shared idiom of desire. The speech community in which understanding takes place, for Gadamer, Ricoeur, and others, offers a moral alternative to the world of exploitative relationships reflected in theories of aggression, pathology, and mere signs.⁴⁵ Similarly, in much feminist writing the community of women's speech (the place of the mother) serves as moral ground for a revised history of authority.⁴⁶

A key difference between feminist and hermeneutic positions emerges in the writing of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who works in the area of biblical interpretation, the traditional domain of hermeneutics. Linking the ideal of community with the necessity for aggression, she rejects the hermeneutic evasion of conflict: “feminist biblical hermeneutics stands in conflict with the dialogical-hermeneutical model developed by Bultmann, Gadamer, and the New Hermeneutic [a theology oriented to the work of Bultmann]. … Its goal is not ‘identification with’ or ‘consent to’ the androcentric text … [but] critical solidarity with women in biblical history.” Feminist interpretation “begins with a hermeneutics of suspicion”—Gadamer's term for theories that reject the ethos of participation—and culminates in “a hermeneutics of creative actualization” of self and community in the church of women (author's emphasis). Communities, for Schüssler Fiorenza, are intrinsically oppositional.⁴⁷ The connection between legitimate aggression and the speech community within which aggression is suspended, if not prohibited, marks a distinctive shift away from hermeneutic dialogue. It also swerves away from romantic literary representations of dialogue, such as those by Schlegel and Schleiermacher, as well as from romantic perceptions of Platonic dialogue, both of which tolerate considerable conflict.

Once we shift our attention to nontheological feminist theory, we find a similar link between feminist aggression against existing philosophies and a feminist ethos of concord within the circle of women's language. One of the most informed articulations of this stance comes in Irigaray's version of “I-Thou” conversation. In her attack on categorically objectified relationships Irigaray imagines an “I” and a “Thou” taken beyond, if nonetheless alluding to, phenomenological intersubjectivity. In “feminine syntax,” she writes, “there would no longer be either subject or object.” Instead, speaking as a woman and among women “would involve nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would preclude … any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation” (would preclude, in Ricoeur's terms, any “ego”). This syntax would be generated by the desire for community expressed in “appeals to move, to be moved, together.” The “tightly woven systematicity” of rational male discourse, “the countable,” is surrounded by the looser web, field, or fluid of feminine language. The circle of speech resists the social and verbal forms of masculine rationalism which, as Adrienne Rich has observed, fails “to identify and assimilate its own surreal or nonlinear elements.”⁴⁸

Given the resemblance between the feminist version of the speech community and the one constructed by hermeneutic philosophy, the radical communicative and metaphoric value ascribed by Irigaray to the female body has a distinct value as a way of insisting on feminine difference. The structure of Irigaray's Ethique de la différence sexuelle reveals the interdependence of feminist desire and the feminist critique of desire. Her argument exposes the way the nostalgic longing for the feminine within masculine culture blocks the emergence of a feminine language community. In order to empower the feminist longing for a “space-time” in which such a language can develop, Irigaray grounds her ethics in a renovated sense of touch, in the “pre-discursive” caress, the gesture of desire that knows itself as such. I find it difficult to participate in Irigaray's move from critique to myth-making. The possibility of renovating romanticism from within the feminine—which, with her evocations of the divinatory, the infinite, and the maternal, is precisely what she is up to—seems undermined in advance by her exposure of philosophy's desires. And yet the ethical and political clarity that goes along with Irigaray's regenerated romantic metaphors tempts us to concede their ongoing efficacy.⁴⁹

In a spirit of synthesis that seeks to link what Irigaray puts asunder, Jean Bethke Elshtain attempts to mediate between feminism and the disciplines of psychology and social philosophy. The figurative equation between speech and community creates, for Elshtain, the point common to both feminist theory and critical theory. She proposes a blend of three elements: “psychoanalytic discourse” informed by feminism, Habermas's ideal speech situation, and feminist discussions of “female moral reasoning and maternal thinking.” The closeness of Habermas's ethics to those of the feminist project emerges, she argues, in his notion of the “life world” made possible by “ideal speech,” a world where “domination is absent; and reciprocity pertains between and among participants.” Her task in this article is somewhat similar to my own, that is, to unveil a kind of cultural forgetfulness. She reviews how feminist theorists have unknowingly “recapitulated … earlier arguments on language that erode the search for emancipatory feminist speech” and attempts to supply, from existing models, a more sophisticated view.⁵⁰

In proposing Habermas as one of her exemplary theorists, however, Elshtain repeats the history of error she seeks to correct. For Habermas describes a feminized environment from which the specifically feminine has been excluded so completely that it now requires a feminist supplement. If Elshtain is clear about the way feminism has adopted theoretical approaches to language which confuse or betray its orientation, she is less clear about the way the theoretical material to which she turns as a substitute has expelled the feminine. The hermeneutic tradition stands as a reminder to feminists that the ideal of feminine conversation descends to us, in part, through the ambivalent patriarchies of romantic literature and philosophy.

Notes

1. Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch (Halle, 1806). Trans. Terrence Tice, Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967).

2. Jerry F. Dawson, Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Evolution of a Nationalist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 43-121.

3. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 41.

4. As Albert Blackwell and the recent edition of Schleiermacher's Jugendschriften remind us, Schleiermacher had been engaged in writing philosophical analyses (“Philosophische Versuchen”) in tandem with more popular treatments of philosophy and ethics (“Kritische Briefe”) since 1787. Before 1800, he wrote simultaneously but in separate productions for academic and nonacademic audiences. The change apparent after 1800, when he began serious work on Groundwork to a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory (1804), marks only the intensification of an already fairly expert ‘scientific’ idiom. See Schleiermacher, Jugendschriften 1787-1796, ed. Günter Meckenstock (1984); KGA I.1 xviii, and Blackwell, Schleiermacher's Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy, Harvard Theological Studies 32 (Greenville: Scholar's Press, 1982), 9-10.

5. I share Robin May Schott's interest in the structural absence of the erotic in German idealism, although her treatment of this in Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon, 1988) is too remote from the specific dynamics of philosophy and philosophical texts to be useful except as an introduction to the issues.

6. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 33 (authors' emphasis).

7. Angus Fletcher, “‘Positive Negation’: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 147.

8. Around 1828 the much-debated term “psychological” interpretation is sometimes substituted for and sometimes designates a subdivision of technical understanding.

9. See also Aphorism #48 (HM 49): “If every spoken statement is viewed with language at the center, all personal nuance disappears, except in the case of the true artist of language who individualizes the language anew.”

10. Jerome Christensen, Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 27.

11. The art of hermeneutics corresponds to the art of composition, for authorial creativity calls forth the inventiveness of the reader or listener. The writer is present only as the problem of the work's origin. Schleiermacher does not permit literary genius to condescend to the interpreter but insists on a similar originality: “every individual constructs language; … every understanding of a given text contributes to understanding the language. Consequently, the same principle operates in both” (HM 42; see also 97).

12. McGann discusses the necessary failure of romantic systems in The Romantic Ideology, 47.

13. Relationships of fulfilled understanding are not normative for Schleiermacher's hermeneutics. Understanding comes closer to prevailing in the Dialektik, in which thought itself is necessarily a social process moving toward consensus. Even in that work, however, dialogue arises from the participants' knowledge of the merely relative validity of their individual perspectives (see Manfred Frank, ed., Hermeneutik und Kritik, mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], 97. Even the “potentiating linguistic spirit” of Christian churches, constituted by the discourse of their members, is founded in their need for differentiation from all other institutions (Aphorism #51, HM 50). Trutz Rendtorff's analysis of Schleiermacher's conception of the church is useful in extending my analysis of the desire for community at work in Schleiermacher's hermeneutics. Rendtorff discusses religion as “a particular mode of communication” and traces the implications of this characterization for the systematic structure of religion in Schleiermacher's works. Both Hegel and Schleiermacher, he writes, “recognize the Christian present … by the mediate way of a logical system” adapted to historical communities. Theology: The Systematic Function of the Church Concept in Modern Theology, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 118.

14. Elsewhere in the same extended passage he concludes, “The practice of hermeneutics occurring in immediate communication in one's native language” is “essential for our cultured life” (HM 182).

15. Wolfgang Iser, who is closely involved with hermeneutic concerns, though not identified with philosophical hermeneutics, discusses the relation of text and reader in terms of its “asymmetry” but comes to a different conclusion: while “the asymmetry between text and reader stimulates a constitutive activity on the part of the reader,” the text's “blanks” and “negations” create a structure which in turn “controls the process of interaction.” The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 166-70.

16. See also Aphorism #6 (HM 52).

17. When Schleiermacher links hermeneutics to dialectics (the “art of thinking”) the tension between the “communality” of speech as shared thought and the need for interpretation, once the “internal speech” of thought is externalized, becomes evident in a subdued way. “Communality” means only that hermeneutics is necessary: “Since the art of speaking and the art of understanding stand in relation to each other, speaking being only the outer side of thinking, hermeneutics is a part of the art of thinking. … Speaking is the medium for the communality of thought, and for this reason rhetoric and hermeneutics belong together and both are related to dialectics. … Thinking matures by means of internal speech, and … speaking is only developed thought. But whenever the thinker finds it necessary to fix what he has thought, there arises the art of speaking. … every act of understanding is the reverse side of an act of speaking, and one must grasp the thinking that underlies a given statement” (HM 97).

18. See Sara Friedrichsmeyer's discussion of how the association of woman with the nonrational made her the object of desire for male philosophers, in The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1983), 51.

19. Frank observes, further, “an individual praxis can become social praxis only when it successfully effects a rupture in the repertoire of the grammatical.” Frank, Hermeneutik und Kritik, 34.

20. Ibid., 49.

21. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 75-83, and Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 300-302.

22. The Conduct of Life, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4), VI, 136-37.

23. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 285-86, 282-306 passim. Frei's extended discussion of the way meaning moves, gradually and not without contradiction, from text to reader, and especially of the role of Herder in emphasizing the meaning-creating spirit of the reader, indirectly supports my arguments for the primary importance of the reader in Schleiermacher's hermeneutics. At the same time, Frei is more convinced by Kimmerle's view of the psychologistic later Schleiermacher than I am (290). See also Hermann Patsch, “Friedrich August Wolf und Friedrich Ast: Die Hermeneutik als Appendix der Philologie,” in Ulrich Nassen, ed., Klassiker der Hermeneutik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982), 76-107.

24. The question of how “psychological” Schleiermacher's hermeneutic theory became has been the focus of debates over its value since Kimmerle's edition, which contained a powerfully influential interpretation of Schleiermacher's theoretical development. According to what might be called the currently orthodox view of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, which has persuaded Gadamer, Ricoeur, and scholars like Palmer and Weinsheimer, Schleiermacher's work can be divided into a brilliant early phase, in which he focused on language, and a conventionally romantic second stage, in which he lapsed increasingly into the hermeneutics of empathy. This reading of Schleiermacher's texts serves the need of recent hermeneutic philosophers both to acknowledge their precursor and to accentuate their difference from him, a difference of which “linguisticality” is the sign. It is to the credit of Manfred Frank that he has argued strongly from a broadly informed theoretical position against Kimmerle. (The most accessible statement is Frank's article, “The Text and Its Style: Schleiermacher's Theory of Hermeneutic Language,” trans. Richard Hannah and Michael Hays, Boundary II 11, 2 (1983): 11-28. See also Das Individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und -interpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).

    Late in life Schleiermacher did distinguish two aspects of technical interpretation, designated “psychological” and “technical,” respectively. Insofar as the former “focuses … upon how thoughts emerged from the totality of the author's life” and the latter “upon how a set of thoughts arose from a particular thought or intuition” in the process of composition, it is clear that the desire for empathic intuition operates strongly in Schleiermacher's system (HM 223). My argument in the present study is that the register of desire operates throughout Schleiermacher's career, not simply in its later stages, and throughout twentieth-century hermeneutic discourse as well.

    For the relevant bibliography, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics,” Journal for Theology and the Church 7 (1968), 68-85; Heinz Kimmerle, “Hermeneutical Theory or Ontological Hermeneutics,” in History and Hermeneutik, ed. Wolfhart Pannenberg et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 107-21; Paul Ricoeur, “Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics,” Monist 60, 2 (1977): 181-97.

25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1975), 321-22, 404.

26. Ibid., 252, 321, 341, 333, 385.

27. Ibid., 321.

28. Ibid., 340-42.

29. In the region of the ethical the difference between argumentative and figurative language is never clear, as when Gadamer writes, “Understanding is a modification of the virtue of moral knowledge. It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment” (Truth and Method, 288). Insofar as understanding involves dealing with utterances, texts, and gestures, Gadamer's insistence here on concern for “the other person” invokes the full romantic drama of hermeneutic dialogue.

30. Domna Stanton links the motif of the mother in feminist theory with the privileging of metaphor as the means to “a transportation of meaning beyond the known.” This relationship among woman, metaphor, and transcendence likewise prevails in the hermeneutic tradition and is one basis for its hidden affiliation with feminist theory. “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” in Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 157-82.

    For a criticism of current hermeneutic philosophy from a different angle than my own, see Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 50, 58. Benn Michaels's argument is logical but surprisingly ahistorical. He demonstrates that, “for hermeneutics, a text means what its author intends but also necessarily means more,” which enables him “to attack the hermeneutic account of the role played by linguistic convention in constituting textual identity.” Benn Michaels's defense of authorial intention could be substantially reinforced and complicated by investigating the anxiety that the problem of authorial psychology has generated over the whole history of hermeneutics.

31. Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 129-31, 214.

32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 130.

33. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics, 131.

34. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” 1981 lecture, University of Michigan.

35. Wilhelm Dilthey's article, “The Development of Hermeneutics,” ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman, Selected Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 246-63, is largely responsible for the persistent view that Schleiermacher yearns constantly for empathic communion with authors. This text by no means reflects either Dilthey's whole view of Schleiermacher or the whole range of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic thinking.

36. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 130; “Text and Interpretation”; Truth and Method, 278.

37. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 2, 43, 15; “The Language of Faith,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 228-29; “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 101. See also his essays, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” and “Appropriation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).

38. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 30, 35, 43.

39. Ibid., 94-95.

40. Jürgen Habermas, Community and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1979), 3, 33; “A Reply to My Critics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 227.

41. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 169-70, 164, 163, 172.

42. The most detailed discussion of the relationship of the critical theory of Habermas to feminist theory has been undertaken by Nancy Fraser, who sharply criticizes his failures to reflect on the question of gender while seeking to elaborate his thought in a feminist direction. “What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97-131.

43. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 129.

44. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in A Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 311-42; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 134-36.

45. Gadamer, drawing on Ricoeur's usage, contrasts the Nietzschean tradition of the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutic ethos of “participation.” “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 54, 64-65. For his critique of language as a sign system, see Truth and Method, 377-78.

46. The impression of common ground is strengthened by the conjunction of the hermeneutic critique of scientific rationality and the feminist analysis of science. Beyond the more obvious parallels between the hermeneutic and feminist critiques of the myth of scientific objectivity and its supporting ideology of the rational subject, it is worth acknowledging the relationship between a book like Gadamer's Reason in the Age of Science and one like Sandra Harding's The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) or the discussion of science in Luce Irigaray's Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1984), 117-21, as works that explore the conditions under which a new theory of science can be formulated. See also Stanton on the relationship between the maternal metaphor and the metaphor of voice, in “Difference on Trial,” 166-68.

47. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 140, 15, xiv.

48. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 62.

49. Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle, 108-9, 143, 173-99.

50. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and Meaning,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 133, 144, 131.

Translations and Abbreviations

BO: Brief Outline of the Study of Theology. Trans. Terrence Tice. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966.

BR: Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen. 4 vols. Ed. Ludwig Jonas and Wilhelm Dilthey. Berlin, 1858-63.

BW: Briefwechsel 1775-1796. 2 vols. Ed. Andreas Arndt and Wolfgang Virmond. KGA V.1, V.2. 1985, 1988.

BZ: Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit 1796-1799. Ed. Gunter Meckenstock. KGA I.2. 1984.

H: Hermeneutik: Nach den Handschriften. Ed. Hans Kimmerle. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universität-verlag, 1974.

HM: Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Ed. Heinz Kimmerle. Trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press for The American Academy of Religion, 1977.

KD: Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen entworfen. SW I.1. 1843.

KGA: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 7 vols. to date. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1980-.

L: Schlegel, Friedrich. Lucinde in Dichtungen. Ed. Hans Eichner. Munich: Schöningh, 1962.

LF—. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.

M: Monologen: Eine Neujahrsgabe [Soliloquies]. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Friedrich M. Schiele. Leipzig: A. von Hermann Mulert, 1914.

OR: On Religion: Addresses in Response to Its Cultured Critics. Trans. Terrence Tice. Richmond: John Knox Press, 1969.

SW: Schleiermachers Sämmtliche Werke. 31 vols. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1834-64.

UR: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Ed. Georg C. B. Punyer. Braunschweig: E. U. Schwetschke, 1879.

VB: Vertraute Briefe über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde [Confidential Letters on … Lucinde]. SW III.1. 1846.