Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics Lectures and the Question of What Understanding Is

Friedrich Schleiermacher never wrote a book about interpretation. He lectured on it, on and off, from 1805 until shortly before his death in 1834, and what came down to posterity was a heap of course papers, marginal additions and student transcripts, first assembled into a volume four years after he died. The discipline he is credited with founding survives mainly as notes for classes he had to teach again the following year.

Two of those courses have now appeared in Turkish for the first time, translated directly from the German. Hermeneutik Dersleri — the lectures of the winter semester of 1809-10 together with those of 1819 — was published on 27 August 2026 by the Istanbul house Alfa, 216 pages, translated and introduced by Kaan H. Ökten, who has also given Turkish readers Heidegger's Being and Time.

A translation into one more language is not, in itself, international news. The material is another matter. These courses catch Schleiermacher where interpretation stopped being a trade with local rules and became a question about what minds do when they meet words. That question has, if anything, become harder to avoid.

Before him, interpretation was a set of local techniques#

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hermeneutics was plural. There was a hermeneutics for scripture, heavy with doctrine about what the text could be permitted to mean; one for law, concerned with statutes, intention and the reach of a rule; a philological one for classical texts, built around emendation, dating and corrupt manuscripts. Each had its handbooks. None asked the others for advice.

Schleiermacher's move was to ask what these practices had in common, and to answer: everything that matters. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as championing a universal hermeneutics, pertaining to all linguistic experience rather than to the concerns of particular fields — sacred and secular, spoken and written, ancient and modern, under one theory.

The consequence is larger than a tidying-up of methods. If there is a single art of understanding, reading the Epistle to the Romans and reading a letter from a friend are the same activity, differing in difficulty rather than in kind. Theology loses its interpretative privilege; so does philology. What is left is a problem in philosophy.

He began from failure, not from success#

Most theories of interpretation start from the ordinary case in which we read something and get it. Schleiermacher started at the opposite end. His governing assumption, as he put it in the manuscripts, was this:

Misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.

The reason is not that people are careless. It is that no two of us carry quite the same language. Words arrive with a different history of use, a different weight; a sentence passes from one idiolect into another, and something is lost unless attention prevents it. On this view the smooth reading, where you feel you have understood at once, is the most dangerous, because the feeling of comprehension is not evidence of it.

That is why he called hermeneutics an art rather than a science. No rule yields the right reading by mechanical application, as the rules of arithmetic yield the right sum. There are only skills, better and worse practised.

Two sides of one act#

The lectures divide interpretation into two operations, to be run together.

The grammatical side treats the text as an instance of a language. It asks what the words could mean given the resources available to the writer and the period: what the vocabulary permitted, what a given term was doing in that literature at that date. It is impersonal work, the reconstruction of a system.

The psychological — Schleiermacher also calls it technical — side treats the text as the act of a particular person. It asks why this writer, with this cast of mind, made these choices out of the available ones. The grammatical side attends to what the language made possible; the psychological, to what one individual did with the possibility.

Neither is sufficient. Read only grammatically, a text dissolves into the resources of a language and stops being anybody's utterance; read only psychologically, it becomes a guess about a stranger's inner life, unconstrained by what the words can bear. The two sides check each other, and the checking never ends: Schleiermacher thought the task infinite, which is to say a reading is always provisional.

The circle is not a vice#

To understand any part of a text — a sentence, a term, an image — you need a sense of the whole it belongs to. But your sense of the whole is built out of the parts you have already read. Understanding appears to require what it is supposed to produce. This is the hermeneutic circle, and stated baldly it looks like a proof that reading is impossible.

Schleiermacher's answer is that understanding comes in degrees. You begin with a rough and probably wrong sense of the whole; the parts revise it; the revised whole changes how the next part looks; and the process converges, or fails to, and you can tell the difference. The circle is not a trap but a description of what anyone does on a second reading of a difficult book. What makes it interesting is that it rules out the picture in which meaning sits inside the text like a coin in a purse, waiting to be taken out. Meaning is what emerges when a reader with expectations meets a text that resists them.

Can an author say more than they knew they were saying?#

Schleiermacher is the source of the claim that one may understand an author better than the author understood himself, and it has caused trouble ever since. Read one way it is arrogance — the critic informing the poet what the poem is about. Read another it is nearly trivial.

The sober reading, which the Stanford entry favours, is about rules. A competent speaker follows the rules of a language without being able to state them; an interpreter can make them explicit, and so know something about the writer's performance the writer never formulated. That is a claim about the difference between doing something and describing what you are doing, not about hidden depths. The wilder reading, associated with Friedrich Schlegel, has the text carry meanings the author could not have intended at all.

His own instrument for reaching an author's individuality was what he called divination: from the French deviner, to guess. The Stanford entry is careful to say this is a method of hypothesis, disciplined by evidence and open to correction, not a mystical projection of one soul into another. It has often been read as the latter, and the reputation has stuck.

The objection, stated fairly#

The line of descent is easy to draw. Wilhelm Dilthey, who wrote a long life of Schleiermacher, took hermeneutics as the method proper to the human sciences. Heidegger then shifted the question from texts to existence, making understanding a mode of being rather than a technique for reading. Gadamer and Ricoeur carried that shift forward, and hermeneutics moved from a theory of textual expression to a theory of lived experience.

The move was made partly against Schleiermacher. The charge, at its strongest, is that the psychological side gets the object wrong. Reading Plato, we are not reconstructing the mental states of a man in fourth-century Athens; we are working out whether what he says about justice is true. Gadamer accordingly puts the weight on tradition and on the reader's own prejudices — not obstacles to be cleared away but the conditions of understanding. Reconstructing an author's act is, on this view, unattainable and beside the point.

The defence is that the objection catches an exaggerated version. Psychological interpretation is not telepathy; it is inference from a text to the choices behind it, checked against the grammatical evidence. Some of the trouble is his own doing: the Stanford entry judges his attempt to locate a single authorial 'seminal decision' behind a work an unhelpful move. But the general thought, that a text is somebody's doing and not a natural object, is not easily given up. Anyone who tells a typographical error from a coinage relies on it.

What we are asking when we tell a machine to interpret#

Here is where the two-hundred-year-old lecture notes turn strange. When we hand a poem to a language model and ask what it means, we are inside a version of Schleiermacher's question without his vocabulary to hand.

The models are good at this. They gloss the poem, place the diction, summarise the statute, reconstruct the argument and mark where it fails. On the grammatical side of Schleiermacher's division — treating a text as an instance of a language, inferring rules of usage from evidence — they work at roughly the level of a well-read graduate, and faster.

The dispute is about the other side. Schleiermacher's criterion for understanding was the reconstruction of an author's act: not producing an acceptable paraphrase but grasping why this person, out of everything the language permitted, chose these words. Whether that is what a model does when it produces a correct reading is exactly what is in question, and neither confident answer is earned. The dismissal — it is only prediction, there is nobody home — assumes we know what more is required, which is the thing Schleiermacher spent thirty years failing to settle. The enthusiasm — it understands, look at the output — takes the paraphrase for the act, the error his whole distinction was built to expose. Anyone who has followed the argument about what we talk to when we talk to language models, or the afterlife of Searle's Chinese Room, will know the shape of the impasse.

What Schleiermacher offers is not an answer but a better division of the question. He separates the capacity to operate a language from the capacity to recover an individual's use of it, and insists the first can be excellent while the second is absent. The interesting cases, then, are not poems but the places where the two come apart: the ironic sentence, the coded manuscript, the statute whose drafters were hiding something. There the difference between processing correctly and understanding does real work.

The edition#

The volume is short and its purpose plain. It sets the 1809-10 course beside the 1819 one, so that a reader can watch a theory rebuilt a decade on by the man who first put it together. It opens with a long introduction by the translator covering Schleiermacher's life and works, the outline of the theory and the content of the lectures — the apparatus lecture material needs, since the notes assume a room of students who have been listening since October.

Lecture courses are often more candid than books: published work presents conclusions, courses show arguments tried and dropped. That is why recovered teaching material — Heidegger's Le Thor seminars among others — keeps proving worth the editorial labour.

Schleiermacher's claim was that understanding is not automatic and cannot be made so. Two centuries on we have machines that perform, at speed and often well, the operations he took to be the outward half of the art. Whether they perform the other half is a question we answer by intuition — and intuition is what he taught interpreters to distrust, since the feeling of having understood was, for him, the first symptom of not having.