Gadamer’s collected writings on the hermeneutic dimensions of faith and moral life
What the Work Is
Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics is an English-language selection of writings by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, first published in 1999. The volume gathers texts drawn from Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works) and presents them in English translation for the first time. The writings date from the years shortly before and after the publication of Gadamer’s landmark Truth and Method (1960), the work that established him as the leading figure of twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics. The collection brings together Gadamer’s reflections on three interconnected domains—religion, ethics, and the theory of interpretation—and examines how each is illuminated by a hermeneutic approach.
What the Book Is About
The central concern of this collection is the hermeneutic significance of religion and ethics. Gadamer probes what it means to understand texts, traditions, and moral claims that come to us from the past, and how the act of understanding itself is shaped by our participation in a living tradition. Rather than treating religion and ethics as separate from questions of interpretation, the volume argues that they are deeply embedded in the hermeneutic situation—the condition of being situated within a history and a language that precede and enable all understanding.
The book’s unifying thread is the conviction that understanding is never a neutral, objective procedure but always involves the interpreter’s own horizon, prejudices, and belonging to a tradition. This applies with particular force to religious and ethical texts, which make claims on the reader that cannot be reduced to mere historical documents or objects of detached analysis.
Key Ideas and Themes
Hermeneutics as the theory of understanding. Hermeneutics, in Gadamer’s sense, is the theory of interpretation and understanding. The term derives from the Greek hermēneuein, meaning to explain, interpret, or translate. Understanding involves the use of symbols; human beings are embedded in a world of signs and in a community that shares a common language. Meaning is present not only in texts but in all human creations, and disclosing that meaning is the hermeneutic task.
The universality of the hermeneutic problem. Hermeneutics originated as the art of interpreting foundational texts—especially the Bible and legal codes—in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the modern period, its scope expanded into a general theory of the conditions and methods of sound interpretation, and ultimately into a philosophy of understanding itself. Gadamer’s work represents the culmination of this development: he treats understanding as a universal feature of human existence, not merely a technique for specialized disciplines.
Understanding and historical situatedness. Since Kant’s critical philosophy exposed the limits of human cognition, hermeneutics has grappled with the problem of the historical embeddedness of human thought and understanding. Gadamer turned this limitation into something positive: he placed understanding within the context of a fundamentally interminable conversation about the meaning of important testimonies of historical and cultural tradition. Understanding is not a matter of escaping one’s own horizon but of genuinely engaging with what the tradition says.
The hermeneutic circle. The idea that one must understand the whole from the parts and the parts from the whole—articulated by Friedrich Ast and developed by Schleiermacher—is fundamental to hermeneutic method. Gadamer inherits this insight but transforms it: the circle is not a methodological inconvenience to be overcome but the positive structure of understanding itself, grounded in the interpreter’s belonging to a tradition.
Religion and the claim of the text. The writings in this volume explore how religious texts and traditions make claims that resist reduction to mere historical artifacts. The hermeneutic approach recognizes that religious language and religious experience carry meanings that demand a response from the interpreter—not merely analysis but engagement with what is being said.
Ethics and the hermeneutic situation. Similarly, ethical questions are not abstract problems to be solved by universal principles alone. They arise within concrete historical and cultural contexts, and understanding them requires attention to the traditions and practices in which moral life is embedded. Gadamer’s hermeneutics suggests that ethical understanding is itself a form of interpretation, involving the application of meaning to one’s own situation.
Tradition and authority. A recurring theme is the role of tradition in understanding. Rather than viewing tradition as an obstacle to objective knowledge, Gadamer treats it as a condition of understanding. Authority and tradition are not opposed to reason but are part of the fabric within which reason operates. This has particular relevance for religious and ethical traditions, which transmit meanings across generations.
Language and understanding. Language is the medium of hermeneutic experience. Understanding occurs in and through language, and the linguistic nature of understanding means that it is always dialogical—a conversation with the text, the tradition, and other interpreters. This dialogical character is essential to Gadamer’s account of how meaning is disclosed.
Structure and Approach
The volume is a selection of writings from Gadamer’s collected works, translated into English. It does not follow a single continuous argument but rather presents a series of essays and reflections that circle around the themes of hermeneutics, religion, and ethics. The approach is philosophical and reflective rather than systematic or dogmatic; Gadamer’s style is exploratory, moving between historical exposition, conceptual analysis, and phenomenological description. The writings date from the period shortly before and after Truth and Method, and they can be read as extensions and applications of the hermeneutic philosophy developed in that major work.
Significance and Influence
The publication of these writings in English made available to a wider audience Gadamer’s sustained engagement with questions of religion and ethics—areas that had received less attention in Anglophone receptions of his work. The volume contributes to the understanding of philosophical hermeneutics as a tradition that addresses not only textual interpretation but the fundamental conditions of human understanding in all its forms. By bringing together Gadamer’s reflections on religion and ethics, the collection shows how hermeneutic philosophy bears on the most consequential questions of human life, and how the theory of interpretation is inseparable from the practical and existential dimensions of understanding.
The source material traces the historical development of hermeneutics across several distinct periods, each contributing to the discipline’s evolution. In ancient Greece, the art of divination explored the hidden meaning of objects and was called Mantik. The interpretive doctrine dealt with meaning behind obvious meanings; in the exegesis of Homer’s works, the meaning of words and sentences was first commented upon, and only on a deeper level was allegorical meaning discussed and interpreted. Socrates provoked his fellow citizens with questions about their future fate and their soul, subjecting their answers to sharp criticism of meaning and attempting to show that everything must be questioned in order to gain firm ground.
Plato distinguished two sides of being that must be understood: the sensually perceivable constitution and the non-sensually perceivable essential being. The soul strives not for the sensually perceivable constitution but for essential being. According to Plato, complete spiritual knowledge of each thing comes about in five steps: the name we pronounce aloud; the linguistically expressed definition composed of nouns and verbs; what is perceivable through the five senses; conceptual knowledge through the rationally thinking spirit; and that which can only be recognized through immersion in reason—the true archetype, the idea of the thing.
For Aristotle, alongside the statement as expression and as elementary foundation of logical thinking, every statement always stands in question-relation to what is meant by it. Even stating itself was understood in classical Greece as an interpreting (hermēneuein). The statement transforms something inwardly thought into uttered language. The interpretation of what is spoken requires the reverse path from the utterance to the intended meaning: “The hermēneuein proves to be thoroughly a process of meaning-mediation that goes back from the outer to an inner meaning.”
In ancient interpretation of texts in both Greece and Judaism, allegoresis was significant—the determination of a hidden meaning of texts that differs from the literal meaning. The Stoa made an essential contribution to the development of allegorical interpretive methods, which in turn influenced Jewish Bible interpretation, especially that of Philo of Alexandria. Origenes, as an early Christian commentator on the Bible, assumed that alongside the literal meaning in Holy Scripture, a higher spiritual and soulful meaning is above all present. Early Christian dogmatics had to confront the conflict of meaning between the particular salvation history of the Jewish people as contained in the Old Testament and the universalist proclamation of Jesus in the New Testament. Influenced by Neoplatonic ideas, Augustine taught the ascent of the spirit over the literal and moral to the spiritual meaning. According to his view, things are also to be understood as signs (res et signa). Even the realm of things thus demands an opening up of the meaning of creation.
In the Christian Middle Ages, the tradition of ancient exegesis was continued in its basic structure of twofold division, with the Bible as its object. The patristic hermeneutics summarized by Origenes and Augustine was developed by Cassian into the method of the fourfold sense of Scripture and systematically presented. The limits of textual criticism were determined by a doctrine, the exegetical code. The reason was the conflict between the dogmatics of interpretation and the results of new research at that time. According to this doctrine, the Bible possessed an outer coat, the cortex, which surrounded a deeper core, the nucleus. On the cortex level, grammar and semantics were interpreted with regard to the literal sense (sensus litteralis) or the historical sense (sensus historicus); on the core level (nucleus), the deeper meaning, the sententia, was explored. For this purpose, the nucleus was divided into three depths of formations of meaning. On the first nucleus level, the moral meaning (sensus tropologicus) was explored, by which human conduct toward one another should be guided. On the next deeper level stood the Christological and ecclesiastical meanings (sensus allegoricus), with which the contents of faith were to be explicated. On the deepest level of the nucleus, exegesis concerned the sensus anagogicus, the leading sense that makes clear the depth of the mystery of revelation and thereby points to future things. The deepest meanings concerning the heavenly mysteries were considered not accessible to humans in this world. They are revealed to them only in the beyond.
The tradition of juridical hermeneutics gained new significance when jurisprudence became an economically and politically relevant art in the struggle of the rising urban bourgeoisie against the nobility. The struggle for the correct interpretation of juridical texts led to a secularized hermeneutic methodology. It became an interpretive procedure for thought-products of the past. By appealing to recognized historical authorities, juridical processes were to be influenced. It was necessary not only to understand the Roman jurists but at the same time to apply the dogmatics of Roman law to the modern world. From this grew for jurisprudence a close binding of the hermeneutic to the dogmatic task. The doctrine of interpretation could not rely solely on the intention of the legislator. It had rather to elevate the “ground of the law” to the hermeneutic standard.
With the Reformation and Humanism at the beginning of the 16th century, the object of hermeneutics was the correct interpretation of such texts that contain the actually authoritative, which must be recovered. This applied especially to biblical hermeneutics. The Protestant Reformation, which supported its legitimation essentially on the validity and interpretation of the Bible, gave hermeneutics lasting new impulses. The Reformers polemicized against the tradition of church doctrine and its treatment of the text with the allegorical method. They demanded the return to the wording of Holy Scripture. Exegesis should be objective, object-bound, and free from all subjective arbitrariness.
Martin Luther emphasized that the key to understanding the Bible is laid in itself (“sui ipsius interpres“). Every Christian person possesses the ability to interpret and understand Scripture themselves (the sola scriptura principle). According to Luther, one should not approach Scripture with a preconceived opinion but pay attention to its own wording. Scripture interpretation must not prevent Scripture from saying its own matter, since otherwise the interpreter would interrupt Scripture.
Philipp Melanchthon relied on the humanistic rhetorical tradition in working out an early Protestant hermeneutics. The conceptual vocabulary came entirely from ancient rhetoric. Melanchthon reinterpreted the ancient rhetorical basic concepts for the correct study of books (bonis auctoribus legendis). The demand to understand everything individual from the whole goes back to the relationship of “caput et membra” (head and members): the other members are subordinate to the head. Connected with this was a shift in accent away from the conception of an effective speech of one’s own (“ars bene dicendi“) toward the intelligent reading and interpretation of texts (“ars bene legendi“): “The occupation with rhetorical theory serves not to produce eloquence but to provide the youth to be educated with a methodological tool to competently judge elaborate texts.”
Melanchthon’s student Matthias Flacius emphasized the dogmatic unity of the canon, which he played off against the individual interpretation of the New Testament writings. Thereby he strongly restricted the Lutheran principle “sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres.” He underlined the necessity of solid language knowledge for understanding supposedly dark Bible passages, whose clarification he pursued through the systematic consultation of parallel passages of Holy Scripture. Often he could thereby connect to investigations of Augustine and other church fathers. The difficulties that hindered the understanding of the Bible in places were purely linguistic or grammatical: “Language is namely a sign or an image of things and, as it were, a kind of glasses through which we look at the things themselves. If therefore language is obscure either in itself or for us, we recognize the things themselves only with difficulty through it.”
In the Renaissance, textual criticism (ars critica) developed as an independent discipline. It endeavored toward the original form of texts. The existing tradition was broken open or transformed by the uncovering of its buried origins. The concealed and distorted meaning of the Bible and the classics was to be sought out again and renewed. In returning to the original sources, a new understanding was to be gained for what had been corrupted by distortion and misuse: the Bible through the teaching tradition of the church, the classics through the barbaric Latin of Scholasticism. The newly revived study of the transmitted classics of Roman, then also Greek antiquity led, in connection with the printing press, to a considerable expansion of the interpretation and explanation of texts. The need arose for a new methodology of the sciences sprouting everywhere. A new organon of knowledge was to replace or complete the Aristotelian one. Only now did hermeneutics come to its concept.
Johann Conrad Dannhauer conceived his hitherto little-noticed writing Idea Boni Interpretis of 1630 as “hermeneutica generalis.” In 1654 he published his work “Hermeneutica sacra sive methodus exponendarum sacrarum litterarum“: For true interpretation and “removal of darkness,” the following are required: incorruptibility of judgment, investigation of what precedes and follows, attention to analogy, the core statement (scopus) and the aim of the text, knowledge of the author’s usage of language, and consideration of translation errors. Dannhauer emphasized the significance of general hermeneutics: The goal of hermeneutics is to present the true meaning of speech and to distinguish it from the false. Dannhauer was concerned with a general science of interpreting, with a philosophical hermeneutics that should also provide other faculties such as law, theology, and medicine with the instrumentarium for interpreting written statements. In this universal orientation, it was a propaedeutic science that could be counted among logic in the classical spectrum of sciences.
The theological hermeneutics of the early Enlightenment rejected the doctrine of verbal inspiration and attempted to gain general rules of understanding. Historical Bible criticism found its first hermeneutic legitimation at that time.
Spinoza’s hermeneutics defends the freedom of philosophy vis-à-vis theology. Scripture should be examined freely and impartially, critically and historically. What cannot be taken from it in full clarity is not to be assumed. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, published in 1670, contains a critique of the concept of miracle and asserts the claim of reason that only what is rational, thus possible, may be recognized. What in Holy Scripture offends reason demands a natural explanation. It is not the intention of the Bible to teach science. Therefore the difference between reason and faith must not be abolished. The word of God teaches love of God and love of neighbor. It is not identical with Scripture. Scripture mediates only the knowledge required for understanding the divine commandment of love. The other speculations of the Bible about God and the world do not constitute the core of revelation. The entire content of Scripture is adapted to human comprehension and imagination. The miracle stories are therefore to be interpreted largely metaphorically. The method of Scripture explanation should correspond to the method of nature explanation and adhere to data and principles. Texts should be questioned for indications of their origin and transmission history. The biblical teachings should become understandable from the historical context of their origin.
Johann Martin Chladni introduced with the “viewpoint” (Sehepunkt) of the interpreter in 1742 an aspect that has remained current in various respects: “Those circumstances of our soul, our body, and our whole person which make or are the cause that we represent a thing thus and not otherwise, we want to call the viewpoint.” According to Chladni, the expression “viewpoint” was coined by Leibniz, who thereby characterized the irremovable perspectivism of monads. Only the consideration of the viewpoint enables objectivity, for only thereby does the chance arise to appropriately consider the individual “variations that humans have of a thing.” Chladni is thus concerned with correct understanding through reduction to the viewpoint guiding it. A linguistic objectivism that would disregard the viewpoint would completely miss the things. This is the fundamental doctrine of universal hermeneutics.
Like Chladenius, Georg Friedrich Meier, with his writing on the art of interpretation published in 1757, belonged to the age of Enlightenment. Meier extended the hermeneutic claim far beyond text interpretation to a universal hermeneutics directed at signs of all kinds, natural as well as artificial. Understanding therefore means ordering into a sign-context encompassing the whole world. The harmony of the world-whole in turn conditions, according to Meier, who here takes up Leibniz’s idea of the best of all worlds, that every sign can refer to another because in this world an optimal sign-context is given. Chladenius and Meier thus took their starting point in Leibniz’s thinking in different ways. Grondin sees in this two fronts of the contemporary hermeneutics discussion prefigured: “on the one hand the challenging ubiquity of perspectivism (which after the scientism of the 19th century believed it had to call itself relativism) in the continental sphere, on the other the semiotic undermining of hermeneutic thinking in structuralist linguistics, from which postmodern deconstructivism, for which every word signals a drift of signs, draws.”
That the hermeneutic approaches obligated to the rationality concept of the Enlightenment played no role shortly thereafter and seemed completely forgotten goes back to the effect of Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason had as a consequence the collapse of the Enlightenment-rational worldview in epistemological respects. In Kant’s distinction between the world of phenomena as mediated by the human cognitive apparatus and the “things in themselves” lies “one of the secret roots of Romanticism and of the upswing that hermeneutics has experienced since then.” With the insight into the limits of human cognitive capacity promoted by Kant, the problem of the historical boundedness of human thought and understanding presented itself for hermeneutics since the 19th century.
The thesis of the hermeneutic circle was probably first established by the classical philologist Friedrich Ast (1778–1841). The student of Schelling explained historical understanding in this sense through a “fundamental law”: It is valid “to find the spirit of the whole from the individual and to grasp the individual through the whole; the former is the analytical, the latter the synthetic method of knowledge.” According to Ast, the spirit of the whole is represented in every individual element. The idea of the whole is not first awakened by the composition of all its individual elements but already “with the apprehension of the first individuality.” The understanding and explaining of a work is “a true reproducing or re-forming of what has already been formed.”
For the development of hermeneutics in the 19th century, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher set fundamental accents. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was the art of understanding and the technique of correct interpretation. He reacted to the fundamental uncertainty that had occurred with regard to human reason through Kant: Its efforts at understanding were since Kant viewed in principle as limited, perspectival, and hypothetical. Schleiermacher emphasized: “The business of hermeneutics must not begin only where understanding becomes uncertain, but from the very first beginning of the undertaking to want to understand a speech. For understanding usually becomes uncertain only because it has already been neglected earlier.” He therefore wanted to take precautions against possible misunderstanding: The individual thought should be interpreted from the whole context of life from which it springs. Two levels of text interpretation should be observed according to the rules of art: the grammatical, which unlocks the linguistic context of the written testimony, and the psychological, which seeks to disclose the motives of the author, and indeed to such an extent that the interpreter ultimately understands the author better than the latter was able to himself. With this expansion, hermeneutics loses its traditional relation to texts as mediators of truth. Instead, these are conceived as the expression of the psyche, the life, and the historical epoch of the author, and understanding is equated with a re-experiencing and empathizing into the consciousness, life, and historical epoch from which the texts originate. Related to Bible exegesis that Schleiermacher envisioned, he maintained that the authors could only be understood from their entire life situation. Hermeneutics becomes a general art-doctrine of empathizing into the life that stands behind a given spiritual product. An interpreter attempts to put himself into the author’s thinking in order to retrace the creative act and in this way to reveal the possible meaning of the work of art. This theory of “empathizing,” which Schleiermacher calls divination, he connects with a general metaphysical theory according to which author and reader are both expressions of one and the same supra-individual life (of the spirit) that develops through world history. Already Schleiermacher introduced the foreignness of what is to be understood as one of the central themes into the hermeneutic discussion. He proceeds from a fundamental difference between the understanding subject and what is to be understood. The overcoming of this difference is the task of hermeneutics as the art of understanding and is in principle possible. This optimism of the principled overcomeability of the foreignness of what is to be understood has lastingly shaped the further hermeneutic discussion.
Johann Gustav Droysen first introduced “understanding” as a scientific concept to designate the method of the historical sciences. He distinguished it from “developing” or later “recognizing” for the philosophical-theological method and from “explaining” for the mathematical-physical method. The possibility of understanding rests on the spiritual-sensual nature of humans: Every inner process manifests itself in a corresponding outwardly perceivable process. This can be perceived by another human and then calls forth the same inner process in him. Hermeneutics became the foundation for all historical humanities, not only for theology. Psychological interpretation became—in the succession of Schleiermacher and supported by the Romantic doctrine of the unconscious creation of genius—the increasingly decisive theoretical basis of the humanities as a whole. The new epistemological interest had prevailed with August Boeckh in his lectures on “Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences” (1877). Boeckh was a student of Schleiermacher. Understanding is its own kind of knowledge that grasps the individual in an intuitive way. Boeckh defined the task of philology as the “recognizing of what has been recognized.” He distinguished various modes of interpretation, namely the grammatical, the literary-generic, the historical-real, and the psychological-individual.
With Wilhelm Dilthey came a systematic re-founding of the idea of the humanities on a descriptive and understanding psychology. The human, in contrast to nature, lives and has experiences. The experience is the only thing that is immediately certain: “Nature we explain, the life of the soul we understand.” Accordingly, Dilthey distinguishes two psychological modes of knowledge, namely descriptive and analytical psychology on the one hand and explanatory and constructive psychology oriented to the natural scientific method on the other. Understanding is above all the method of descriptive and analytical psychology.
