Abstract

In this dissertation I offer an interpretation of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics from within the perspective of his early writings on ethics and dialectics. In contrast to the prevailing picture of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics as governed by the predominantly expressivist orientation of what he refers to as his "positive formulation" for hermeneutics in which the principal dialectic between objective, grammatical interpretation and subjective, technical or psychological interpretation is crossed by a second opposition between comparative and divinatory procedures, I argue for giving equal weight to the predominantly dialogical, communicative orientation of his "negative formulation" which differentiates between a text's qualitative meaning and its quantitative meaningfulness both for its author and for its original audience ;In light of his deterministic account of agency and his communitarian ethics, I argue that Schleiermacher prizes texts not merely as repositories of cognitive insight but also and more importantly as emotive resources of inspiration and agency. His practical determinism will not allow him to presume a reader can spontaneously come to a richly meaningful and subjectively moving understanding of a given text any more than it permitted him to presume an agent to have the spontaneous power to do what she knows to be right. The attainment of either must rather depend upon what resources, both internal and external, are available to the particular individual involved at a given time and place. Thus in his hermeneutics, Schleiermacher is concerned not merely to teach the interpreter how to identify the text's objective content, but also how to gather the resources necessary to reproduce the original emotive power that had inspired its author to write it and its audience to read it and hand it down to us in the first place. It is these concerns that govern Schleiermacher's "negative" formulation. ;In a concluding chapter I show how Schleiermacher's communitarian hermeneutics compares with contemporary work on philosophy of language and theories of interpretation. I devote particular attention to a comparison with Donald Davidson's truth conditional semantics and his theory of radical interpretation.