Hermeneutics: 'Analytical' and 'Dialectical'

In this paper I will try to sort out some of the issues that arise in connection with any attempt to arrive at a satisfactory working conception of hermeneutics, especially for the purposes of the philosophy of history As a point of departure for this effort, it may be useful to recall the parallelism between hermeneutic(s) and rhetoric These are both nominalized Greek adjectives that originally qualified words like techne or episteme, and thus designated an art or a body of knowledge that deals, in the one case, with speaking and, in the other, with understanding what is said by a speaker Speaking and understanding are both skills that every human being possesses in some degree, and they correspond to one another inasmuch as speaking requires someone who can listen and understand and the other way around as well At the same time, the ability that each of us has to speak and to understand stands in need of enhancement of the kind that requires the development of something like a corresponding art in which the experience of those who are most skillful in speaking or understanding is codified and made generally available <BR> What I want to suggest here at the outset is that any expanded conception of hermeneutics -- as of rhetoric -- would do well to keep in mind these homely contexts of life in Much there is a difference that all of us rely upon between understanding and misunderstanding It would also seem reasonable to lay it down as a preliminary canon of judgment for such expanded (and presumably quite theoretical) versions of hermeneutics that, if they can be shown to have completely lost touch with anything that is applicable to such paradigm situations, their right to apply that term to themselves must be viewed as being at best problematic Or, to make the same point in a somewhat different way, I am suggesting that if, as is often claimed, understanding always involves interpretation, it is equally true that interpretation must issue in understanding... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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