The extension of the question of truth to understanding in the human sciences
Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ranke, Droysen, Dilthey, Count Yorck.
p 184
For [Schleiermacher] interpretation and understanding are closely interwoven, like the outer and the inner of a word, and every problem of interpretation is, in fact, a problem of understanding.
p 221
What we call experience (Erfahrung) and acquire through experience is a living historical process; and its paradigm is not the discovery of facts but the peculiar fusion of memory and expectation into a whole.
p 223
Experience is no longer divided between an act (a becoming conscious) and a content (that of which one is conscious).
p 224
For the real historical problem, as we have seen, is less how coherence is generally experienced and known than how a coherence that no one has experience can be known.
p 233
[Dilthey] explicitly justifies the human sciences' use of comparative methods by saying that their task is to overcome the accidental limits imposed by one's own range of experience and "to rise to truths of greater universality".This is one of the most questionable points of his theory. Comparison [...] openly makes both things contemporary. [...] Count Yorck [...] writes "Comparison is always aesthetic: it is always concerned with the form" [...] Hegel before him brilliantly criticized the comparative method.
p 245
Everything that is given as existent is given in terms of a world and hence brings the world horizon with it.
p 249
(Husserl) "The naivete of talk about 'objectivity' which completely ignores experiencing, knowing subjectivity, subjectivity which performs real, concrete achievements, the naivete of the scientist concerned with nature, with the world in general, who is blind to the fact that all the truths that he acquires as objective, and the objective world itself that is the substratum in his formulas is in his own life construct that has grown within him, is, of course, no longer possible when life comes on the scenes".
Heidegger's disclosure of the fore-structure of understanding, p 265
Our question [...] is how hermeneutics, once freed from the concept of objectivity, can do justice to the historicity of understanding.
p 276
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. [...] The prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitutes the historical reality of his being.
p 291
The movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole.
p 293
The circles describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition.
p 294
When we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken--i.e., the text is not intelligible-- do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be be remedied.
p 297
Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates.
p 299
The naivete of so-called historicism consists in the the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity.
p 303
The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true.
p 340
When a judge regards himself as entitled to supplement the original meaning of the text of a law, he is doing exactly what takes place in all understanding. The old unity of the hermeneutical discipline comes into its own again if we recognize that historically effected consciousness is at work in all hermeneutical activity.
p 347
Just as in the natural sciences experiments must be verifiable, so also must the whole process be capable of being checked in the human sciences also. [...] Experience is valid only if it is confirmed.; hence its dignity depends on its being in principle repeatable. But this means that by its very nature, experience abolishes its historicity and thus itself.
p 354
Experience is initially always experience of negation: something is not what we supposed it to be.
p 355
The concept of experience means precisely this, that this kind of unity with oneself is first established. This is the reversal that consciousness undergoes when it recognizes itself in what is alien and different.