General Hermeneutics

Summary

Copy made by August Twesten in 1811 of the original manuscript, which is no longer extant. Transcription by Wolfgang Virmond.

Introduction

1. Hermeneutics rests on the fact of the non-understanding of discourse: taken in its most general sense, including misunderstanding in the mother tongue and in everyday life.

2. Non-understanding is partly indeterminacy, partly ambiguity of the content.

So it is thought of without any fault on the part of the utterer.

3. The art of explication is therefore the art of putting oneself in possession of all the conditions of understanding.

4. Others wrongly include the presentation of understanding in this.

Whence in Ernesti the chapter on the writing of commentaries. This presentation is, though, itself a kind of composition, thus in turn an object of hermeneutics. – Cause lies in the Greek etymology of the word.

5. But the explanation seems to contain too much because it presupposes knowledge of the language and of the matter in question in the original reader and listener.

Hermeneutics first of all sends one to grammar and to the sciences, otherwise it would have to take over all [forms of] instruction itself.

6. But one only arrives at language itself and the knowledge of supersensuous things via the understanding of human discourse.

Hermeneutics is therefore not built upon philology, but instead there is a changing relationship between it and philology, which makes the borders between them hard to determine.