The (hermeneutic) circle of understanding

From Ancient Greece to modern echo chambers—A guide to better thinking

Modern echo chamber, by Midjourney.

The glasses through which we see the world are invisible to us—until someone points out their tint. This is the fundamental insight behind one of philosophy’s most powerful ideas: the hermeneutic circle. The word comes from the Greek hermeneutikos, meaning “of or for interpreting,” and is a reference to Hermes, the god of speech, writing, and eloquence.

We often pride ourselves on thinking clearly and objectively, yet the ancient Greeks grasped something we’re only now rediscovering: our very ability to understand anything depends on the biases and predispositions we’re so eager to eliminate. Rhetorician Robin Reames, in her highly recommended The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, writes:

“The point of the hermeneutic circle is to make us more aware of our predispositions and predilections that precondition and impinge on how we receive and interpret new information. … The hermeneutic circle sees biases as inevitable and even necessary to understand anything. … The point of recognizing our own hermeneutic circle is to try to become more aware of it, nevertheless realizing that complete escape is ultimately impossible.” (p. 6)

Nor is complete escape from the circle even desirable, for the simple reason that without a pre-existing framework and background information we wouldn’t be able to understand much about the world. The human mind—pace some misguided social scientists— is not a tabula rasa, a blank slate over which experience writes new things from scratch. On the contrary, we have, and need, certain layers of “pre-understanding,” which include our preferences, predispositions, and even the much dreaded biases. Think of the hermeneutic circle as a pair of glasses through which you see the world. Without them, you wouldn’t see a thing. But if the lenses are colored in particular ways then they filter everything through that color, and your understanding of the world will be “biased.”

Immanuel Kant, the most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment, said that we have two sets of tools to help us make sense of the world. He called one the “forms of intuition,” which are fundamental frameworks through which we can have any sensory experience at all. Two such forms are our innate conceptions of space and time, which we don’t have to learn from anyone, and without which perception would be impossible.

The second set of tools identified by Kant are the so called categories, from the Greek katēgoria, meaning that which can be said, predicated, or publicly declared and asserted, about something. The categories are concepts of understanding that we use to organize and make sense of our experiences. They are the basic ways our mind structures and understands the data received through sensory intuition. The categories include: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance-accident, cause-effect, community), and modality (possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency).

Let’s take a closer look at one of the relations I have just listed, that of cause and effect. Kant thought that an intuitive grasp of causality is crucial to navigate the world. [1] But of course we may be mistaken in any particular application of the concept, since sometimes correlations between events are not, in fact, the result of a causal connection. For instance, there is a perfect correlation between my age and the expansion of the universe, but it would be unwarranted to conclude that I cause the universe to expand or even, more modestly, that the expansion of the universe causes me to get older. (What happens instead is that both phenomena are causally connected with the so-called arrow of time, in turn related to the statistical tendency of closed systems to increase their entropy, in agreement with the second principle of thermodynamics.)

One could say that human beings are “biased” toward inferring causality, and that sometimes we jump to unwarranted conclusions in that respect. True, but we cannot simply eliminate the causation “bias.” It is built into us (presumably by natural selection) and it is often both accurate and useful.

With the above in mind, let’s get back to the concept of a hermeneutic circle. Apparently, the notion was introduced by Augustine of Hippo as a way to improve biblical exegesis, of all things. The idea was that some verses of the Bible may be misleading, so they need to be read in the context and the spirit of the book as a whole.

One of the early modern elaborations of the idea was due to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), according to whom understanding emerges from a continuous feedback between parts and whole. Consider, for instance, your understanding of this particular sentence. It depends on your ability to switch between the meaning of each word (parts) and the way in which the words connect to each other to form the sentence (whole).

Later on, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) deployed the notion of hermeneutic circle in his The Origin of the Work of Art, arguing that in order to understand a work of art we have to also know about the artist as well as about the very notion of “art.”

Here is a simplified sketch of how the circle works:

“Text” in the graph doesn’t have to be a literal text, it may represent whatever it is that we are trying to understand. Again, think of Augustine’s example of a particular verse of the Bible, or Heidegger’s one of a work of art. Both are instances of “text,” and both can better be grasped within a broader context that helps us reduce the chances of misunderstandings.