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Contemporary Cultural Theory

speaks only the truth, as by definition He does, then the intended
authorial meaning of His own texts must take an absolute priority
over any subsequent readings. For modern literary and philo-
sophical hermeneutics, which begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768–1834), the relevant meanings were those intended,
consciously or unconsciously, by the author of the text. In
Schleiermacher’s famous phrase, the task was: ‘to understand the
text at first as well as and then even better than its author’
(Schleiermacher, 1985, p. 83). For historical and sociological
hermeneutics, by contrast, the relevant meaning would be that
intended, again either consciously or unconsciously, by the histor-
ical or social actor. So Max Weber’s distinction between the
natural and social sciences would devolve precisely upon the
latter’s concern with ‘the empathic understanding’ of ‘psycho-
logical and intellectual (geistig) phenomena’ (Weber, 1949, p. 74).
During the twentieth century, the hermeneutic tradition was
refined and further developed by the existentialism of Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976), reaching its most sophisticated con-
temporary articulation in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer
(1900–2002). A former student of Heidegger, Gadamer was
concerned with the differences between truth in the humanities
and in the natural sciences. His point of departure is provided
by the way our pre-understandings, or ‘prejudices’, not only
condition our understanding and interpretation, but also
provide the conditions without which understanding cannot take
place. For Gadamer, as for Heidegger, both the interpreter and
that which is to be interpreted are necessarily historically
situated. This led Gadamer himself to a theoretical rehabilitation
of the notion of ‘tradition’. Historical consciousness is only
possible, he concludes, insofar as historical tradition connects our
‘horizon’ with that of those we seek to understand: ‘Our own
past and that other past towards which our historical conscious-
ness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which
human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and
tradition’ (Gadamer, 1990, p. 304).
The hermeneutic tradition represents German culturalism at
its most theoretically sophisticated. As such, it has been a power-
ful influence on the discipline of comparative literature; much less

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