What some major hermeneutic theorists contribute to museum interpretation

Hermeneutics comes from the name for the Greek god, Hermes, whose mythological responsibility was to bring messages from the gods to humans and vice versa. In that sense, Hermes served as the interpreter between the two realms. Hermeneutic theory has developed from its roots in theology to a “universal method of cultural and social understanding” (Davey) by which interpretation is thought to lead to understanding, to an existential hermeneutics by which understanding is thought to lead to interpretation. More recently an applied hermeneutics has developed which connects to the way interpretation could be grounded for the museum.

What follows is a summary of a few major hermeneuticists and their contribution to the field. For each theorist, I have included a brief statement about how their ideas remain important for me when I am creating a new museum exhibit that involves multiple historical or cultural perspectives.

Johann Martin Chladenius lived in the early eighteenth century in Wittenberg, Leipzig and Erlangen and was associated with biblical hermeneutics. He contributed the idea that a person’s perspective, or point of view, contributes to how they understand anyone or anything. This idea continues to inform how I think about interpretation in the museum especially when I am creating a new exhibit that involves historical or cultural perspectives. Not every visitor will understand any exhibit or idea in the same way, nor should they be expected to conform to how the museum understands it.

Friedrich D. E. Schlerermacher lived in Berlin from 1768-1834 and is considered the founder of both modern Protestant theology and modern hermeneutics. He was one of the first thinkers to move hermeneutics towards a “universal method of cultural and social understanding” (Davey). Schlerermacher described two “distinct modes of interpretation”: “grammatical and psychological” (Mueller-Vollmer). In other words, there is a way to interpret a statement or text according to its linguistic format. The subject verbs the object to the indirect object as modified by the adjectives and adverbs. The other way to interpret a statement or text is from its impact on the understanding of the person encountering the statement or text. Schlerermacher described that there is a “historical distance” that must be overcome through understanding between the interpreter and some historical phenomenon (Mueller-Vollmer). It is this notion of temporal distance that I extend to include cultural distance that remains essential to both identify and provide factual information to help a visitor navigate exhibits I create.

Wilhelm Von Homboldt was a French Huguenot who lived from 1767-1835. He was a linguist who believed that meaning could only be shared from one person to another if the two share a common language. He also believed that every language contributes a “unique manner and way of perceiving the world” through its grammar and vocabulary and that “studying another language meant to liberate oneself to some degree from the fetters of one’s own and to gain from the other language another perspective in the world” (Mueller-Vollmer). Humboldt toggled between understanding as an act that was simultaneously “non-understanding” (Ibid). This is an idea that impacts the museum’s priority on including “other” voices and that pushes the museum to take a position that is humble, does not impose conclusions or judgments based on the information it presents but, instead, demands honor to be conferred on each cultural and historical participant and contribution.

Johann Gustav Droysen lived from 1808-1884 in Pomerania and Berlin. He was interested in multiple paths to knowledge and in the enhanced depth of understanding to be gained by viewing an object “stereoscopically from two sides at once, or more accurately, from two points of view” (Mueller-Vollmer) He understood that there are layers in how anything historical can be understood. For example, he wrote: “the essence is to find out, to explain, to understand” (Ibid). He insisted that the historian, and for me, this role should be taken by the museum, apply criticism in the evaluation of the authenticity of any “purported fact” (Ibid). Only after that authenticity had been established could interpretation be used to explain what was determined to be a fact, according to Droysen. When I am creating a new museum exhibit, I intentionally explore and incorporate as many different authentic historical and cultural points of view as can legitimately be brought to the issue so that I can provide the visitor with a layered, multi-dimensional display.

Philip August Boeckh was a student of Scheirermacher who lived from 1785-1867. He is the first hermeneuticist to use the term “hermeneutic circle”, a concept that has developed over time. Boeckh was discussing how two types of interpretation, grammatical and historical, “condition one another” (Grondin). Typically, this hermeneutic circle relates to the relationship between the reader and a text. For the museum, it can be applied to the relationship between a visitor and an exhibit. It can also be about the reader and the author or, for the museum, about the visitor and the museum as a whole. The circle stands for the whole understanding that is only available once all the partial understandings have been gathered. It operates to expose and, perhaps sometimes to fill gaps between the present and the past, between cultures and interpersonally (Fry). Boeckh proposed four classes of understanding that are all important if an “adequate or correct understanding of a given cultural artifact” is to be derived: grammatical, historical, generic and individual. Grammatical understanding flows from the "literal meaning of the words”; historical understanding probes how the words would have been understood in the time and cultural context of the author; generic understanding is what is normally understood and individual understanding is particularized for each reader/visitor (Mueller-Vollmer). That meaning is layered and diverse, and that understanding is iterative are core concepts that I bring to the creation of new museum exhibits.

Wilhelm Dilthey lived in Basel from 1833-1911. He is credited with developing an “empathetic theory of understanding” (Davey). He applied hermeneutics, i.e. understanding and interpretation as a method, to the humanities in general, saying that hermeneutics: “unites all of their functions and contains all of their truths. At each instance understanding discloses a world” (Mueller-Vollmer). He suggested that it is only as they express themselves can anyone be understood by another. This is similar to the call I am making to the historic site or museum to become a place where the expressions of each individual, culture or point of view is juxtaposed with affective equality and mutual respect so that “all their truths” (Ibid) can be united into a broad, layered transformative understanding.

Edmund Husserl lived in Moravia and Vienna from 1859-1938. Husserl is known as the founder of phenomenology. He differentiated between psychological meaning and a fulfilled, intended meaning that results in understanding, perception, utterance or understanding of something in the world so that it is apprehended in the same way by multiple people. My research suggests that the prospect of this goal of same-meaning to be achieved in and by many different viewers in the museum is idealistic and unlikely.

Roman Ingardan lived in Poland from 1895-1970. A student of Husserl, Ingarden’s contribution to the development of hermeneutics is that the “consumer-recipient or active critic and literary scholar” (Mueller-Vollmer) determines how they both understand and explain a “text” by the attitude they bring to it. This is borne out by my participatory photo-voice research on the interpretation of diversity at the American historic house museum.

Martin Heidegger lived from 1889-1976. Heidegger found hermeneutics to be existential. He felt that “understanding is not what we aim at, it is what we do” (Davey). He decided that “interpretation originates in understanding and is always derived from it” (Mueller-Vollmer). As long as the museum exhibit creator, interpreter, knows that there are also always things they do not yet understand, Heidegger’s contribution may assist the museum to invite and to honor the perspectives and understandings of each cultural participant/contributor to past events and situations.

Rudolf Bultmann lived in Germany from 1884-1976. He is credited with developing a “new hermeneutics”. His contribution is that the interest, or, may I suggest: agenda, of the interpreter complicates his prior-knowledge and impacts the meaning he derives. He also emphasized the impact of the past on “historic phenomena” (Mueller-Vollmer). Unless the museum owns its interpretive agenda, it reduces its potential for creating socially just and inclusive exhibits about events that occurred in the past.  

Hans Georg Gadamer lived in Germany from 1900-2002. He explained that the interpreter and the phenomenon to be understood each represent a separate horizon and that when the two horizons meet and fuse, there, understanding is achieved. He defined the issue of “prejudice” or “prior knowledge” as the starting point for interpretation that finds its manifestation in a new expression. His priority, in contrast to the claims of historicism that we can set aside our prejudice or point of view to enter into a mind-set belonging to another time, place or person, is for meaning to be true (Fry). Gadamer brought more clarity to the idea of the hermeneutic circle by suggesting that when a person’s prejudice or prior knowledge includes the humility to admit that we each only possess partial knowledge, they can move to a different, more inclusive interpretation and understanding. Gadamer considered the idea of alterity, or otherness, which is a concept also addressed by cultural theorists and is key to how I approach museum interpretation and exhibit creation and development.

Jurgen Habermas, from Bonn and Frankfurt, was born in 1929. His work applies hermeneutics, or meaning, to explore how a person understands that their own subjective motivations color how they act and understand social, objective events, institutions and culture, in general. Habermas organized hermeneutics into four categories: language, linguisticality, communication and interaction (Mueller-Vollmer).

Works Cited

Davey, N. 1999. The Hermeneutics of Seeing. In: I. Heyword and B. Sandiwell, eds. Interpreting Visual Culture-Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. 1999 edn. London: Routhledge, pp. 3-29.

Fry, Paul H., Lecture.  http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-3#ch1, accessed October 8, 2017.

Grondin. “What is the Hermeneutic Circle?”. Revised version (2017) of an essay published in N. Keane and C. Lawn (eds.), The Blackwell Companionto Hermeneutics (Oxford, Blackwell, 2016), 299-305.

Mueller-Vollmer, K., ed. 1985, 2006. The Hermeneutics Reader. 2006. Edn. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

by Lesley Barker c. 2017