Hermeneutics is the science or art of interpretation. The ancient Greek term hermēneutikós means “to interpret” or “to explain,” and has often been associated with Hermes, the divine messenger and mediator of meanings — the archetypal translator of divine messages and symbols.
More precisely
Originally, hermeneutics referred primarily to the interpretation of sacred texts, especially within the Jewish and Christian traditions, where Scripture was read according to multiple senses — literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, its scope expanded to include the interpretation of legal and literary texts. In modernity it became a philosophical discipline concerned not only with interpreting texts, but with the very process of interpretation itself (cf. Schleiermacher).
In the 20th century, hermeneutics broadened further: it no longer applied only to texts but to the whole of human understanding. With Heidegger, to understand is not a secondary activity but the very mode of being of the human person — who is an “understanding-being-in-the-world.” Hermeneutics thus becomes ontological.
Following this line, Gadamer develops a philosophical hermeneutics based on the dialogical structure of understanding: comprehension is always a fusion of horizons — between interpreter, tradition, and history. Understanding is never purely objective; it is the fruit of a living encounter.
We may thus distinguish:
— Hermeneutics as method (interpretation of texts)
— Hermeneutics as philosophical inquiry into the conditions of understanding
— Hermeneutics as existential structure (our being is interpretive)
Extending now beyond textual interpretation, hermeneutics concerns all forms of sense-making: language, culture, history, symbols, art, religious experience, and human existence. At its core, hermeneutics asks: what does it mean to understand?
For further reading
- Aristotle, De interpretatione — On language, signification, and interpretation.
- Origen, Homilies on Scripture — On the plurality of scriptural senses.
- F. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics (Vrin, 2000) — On hermeneutics as the art of understanding an author better than he understood himself; method, intention, whole–part.
- W. Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences — Hermeneutics as foundation of the human sciences; life-expressions, historicity.
- M. Heidegger, Being and Time — Hermeneutics as ontological structure of Dasein; understanding, being-in-the-world.
- H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method — Understanding as dialogue, fusion of horizons, tradition, pre-understanding.
- Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations — Dialectic of symbol, text, subjectivity, world.
- Jean Borella, various works — On symbolic hermeneutics, sacramental intelligence, religious interpretation.
- Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press), trad. of Métaphysique pour tous (L’Harmattan, 2022); it. Sui sentieri della metafisica ; sp. ¿Qué es la metafísica? ; ger. Was ist Metaphysik? — On sacred hermeneutics, symbolic intelligence, and the spiritual structure of interpretation.