The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750-1800

364 Pages·1994·113.62 MB·English

by  Robert S. Leventhal

Robert S. Leventhal
The Disciplines of Interpretation
W
DE
G
European Cultures
Studies in Literature and the Arts
Edited by
Walter Pape
Köln
Editorial Board:
Philip Brady, London · Keith Bullivant, Gainesville
Frederick Burwick, Los Angeles · Mark Galliker, Heidelberg
Joachim Gessinger, Potsdam · Marian Hobson, London
Günter Jerouschek, Halle · Francois Lecercle, Lyon
Carlo Ossola, Torino · Terence James Reed, Oxford
Elinor S. Shaffer, Norwich · Barbara Stafford, Chicago
Volume 5
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1994
Robert S. Leventhal
The Disciplines
of Interpretation
Lessing, Herder, Schlegel
and Hermeneutics
in Germany 1750-1800
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1994
© Printed on acid-free Paper
which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure
permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leventhal, Robert Scott.
The disciplines of interpretation : Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and
hermeneutics in Germany, 1750—1800 / Robert S. Leventhal.
(European cultures ; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-014424-7
1. Criticism - Germany — History - 18th century. 2. Semiotics and
literature. 3. Discourse analysis, Literary. 4. Philology - History —
18th century. 5. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1729-1781 — Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744-1803 —Criticism and
interpretation. 7. Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1772-1829 — Criticism and
interpretation. I. Tide. II. Series
PN90.L48 1994
801'.95'094309033-dc20 94-19772
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leventhal, Robert S.:
The disciplines of interpretation : Lessing, Herder, Schlegel
and hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800 / Robert S.
Leventhal. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1994
(European cultures ; Vol. 5)
ISBN 3-11-014424-7
NE: GT
© Copyright 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in-
cluding photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis-
sion in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Germany
Typesetting: Greiner & Reichel, Köln
Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin
Cover design: Rudolf Hübler, Berlin
Cover illustration: Hendrik Bloemaert, Der heilige Hieronymus,
Bayerische Staatsgemälde-Sammlungen
Preface
Having read Hans-Georg Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode at the Universität
Freiburg in 1973,1 began to read the work of Michel Foucault when I arrived
at Stanford University in 1975. While Gadamer argued for the universal claim
of hermeneutics from a philosophical point of view, I began to ask historical
questions influenced by Foucault's work on the emergence of the human sci-
ences: was hermeneutics in the modern, philological sense - not simply as in-
terpretation theory, but as a specifically historical model of the relation be-
tween reader(s) and a text - as ubiquitous as Gadamer suggested? was it al-
ways implicitly the primary mode of the encounter with other persons and
the text, as Gadamer's hermeneutic reading of the history of hermeneutics
from Plato to Heidegger suggested? If not, what preceded it? when did it get
started? and why? How did it function as a discipline and as a technology for
the disclosure of textual meaning, for the establishment of self-identity, as a
"lesson" or "manual" for the new book-reading world? This book is an at-
tempt to graph this emergence, to state how, why, when and where
hermeneutics in the modern sense became a dominant modality for the en-
counter with others and literature.1
No discussion of the disciplines of interpretation is possible without a dis-
cussion of institutions that harbor those disciplines, and my debts to these
sponsoring institutions are considerable. The following academic and schol-
arly institutions were instrumental in creating the conditions that enabled me
Chapter 2 is a slightly altered version of an article that originally appeared in Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschnft für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60 (1986), No. 2. Chapter 4 is a
revised version of a piece that appeared in The German Quarterly 61 (1988), No. 4. This
revised version responds to Michael Morton's powerful critique that appeared in The
German Quarterly in 1991 entitled "'Verum est factum'." Section 2 of Chapter 5 — "Small
Science" - is taken from my contribution to the volume Herder Today edited by Kurt
Mueller-Vollmer (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1990). Chapter 7 is a revised version of an
article that appeared in Isis 77 (1986), published by the University of Chicago Press, © 1986
by the History of Science Society, Inc. - The second half of Chapter 6 - "The Asymmetry
of Reciprocal Influence" - derives from my contribution to the volume which I edited
Reading after Foucault: Institutions, Disciplines, and Technologies of the Self in Germany 1750-1830
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). I want to thank all of these publishers for
permission to revise and reprint this material.
VI Preface
to complete this study: the German Foreign Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) awarded me a research grant at the Institut für deutsche Philologie
at the Universität München, during which I concentrated on the philological
texts of Friedrich Schlegel. Washington University in St. Louis provided me
with two Summer Research Grants; the University of Virginia and the An-
drew W Mellon Foundation gave me an appointment at the Center for Ad-
vanced Studies 1986-88 when I could devote full-time to the book. The Uni-
versitätsarchiv at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen provided access
to vital materials on the emergence of modern (hermeneutic) philology and
the philological seminar under Heyne at Göttingen 1763—1812 during the
summer of 1984. I am grateful to these institutions and organizations for
their support. I am also grateful for the technical support of Gail Moore and
Judy Birckhead of the Word Processing Center of the Faculty of Arts and Sci-
ences at the University of Virginia, and of Brenda Sprouse and Melody Aylor
of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
This book could not have been written without the steady feedback of
friends and colleagues who continually encouraged me and gave me much
needed criticism. Three institutional sites mark the path of this book:
Freiburg, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. I want to thank in particu-
lar Werner Marx, in whose seminar on Hermeneutics at the Universität
Freiburg I first studied the classical texts in the field; Heinrich Bosse at
Freiburg who introduced me to the writing of J. G. Herder and had me read
Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, Bernhard Greiner, whose seminar on the Ro-
mantic Novel brought me into contact with the work of Friedrich Schlegel.
At Stanford, Kurt Müller-Vollmer scrutinized my work with great care; David
Wellbery, whose constant support and exact readings have been an ongoing
inspiration; Ian Hacking, who often climbed out of his sleeping bag in his of-
fice at Stanford in order to discuss with me the nuances of sentences. At Vir-
ginia, I want to express my gratitude to Benjamin Bennett, whose own writing
and incisive criticism were absolutely crucial to the writing of this book, as
was his enduring support; to Jerome J. McGann, who took the time, read and
commented on my work and encouraged me at every turn; and to Walter H.
Sokel, whose intellectual rigor, stimulating comments, and enduring friend-
ship have been a model of the critical enterprise. Conversations with Richard
Rorty since my arrival at Virginia helped me to de-divinize some entrenched
assumptions, and allowed me to see the hermeneutic paradigms that emerge
in this book simply as competing, but very different ways of describing the
interpretive operation.
I also want to thank good friends who have read parts of the manuscript
and listened to me while I tried to formulate my sentences on these and many
Preface Vll
other topics: Robert E. Sackett, Joel Black, Michael Prince, Helmut Muller-
Sievers, Jeffrey Bokor, Joachim Gessinger, Hans-Wolf Jäger and my colleagues
Volker Kaiser and Lorna Martens. Michael Kaufman allowed me to explore
the full range of my senses of this project. My father, David Leventhal, was
always generous with a word of encouragement and some much needed lev-
ity. I am grateful for their patience and friendship throughout the period in
which I was writing this book. A special thanks to Bettina Fischer, my Re-
search Assistant on this project, who assiduously looked after details and re-
sponded to many parts of this book delivered as talks. I would particularly
like to thank my editor Prof. Dr. Walter Pape, who assiduously went through
the manuscript and offered many necessary and extremely useful correctives
to what I had written. Without his diligence and care, this book could not
have been published.
I wish especially to thank Janet Warren, whose presence and enduring
friendship saw this book and its author through difficult times. Her unwaver-
ing support and encouragement were crucial for the completion of the
project. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Barbara
Levendial, a philologist in Lessing's sense of diat term, who taught me how
to see with my thoughts and touch with my eyes, and to her grandchildren:
Chelsea Rose and Alethea Danielle Leventhal.
Charlottesville, Virginia
January, 1994 R. S. L.

Contents
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Writing the Emergence of Hermeneutics 1
CHAPTER 2
Semiotic Interpretation 35
1. The Sign and Discourse 42
2. Semiotic Interpretation-Theory 45
3. The Invisible Author and the Transparent Book 52
4. Knowledge and Scholarly Disciplines
in the German Enlightenment 57
5. Enlightenment Interpretation vs. Critical Hermeneutics . . .. 62
CHAPTER 3
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: The Critical Breakthrough 69
1. The Critical Strategy of the Fmgmentenstreit 75
2. The Structure of Dialogue in Lessing's Ernst undFalk 80
3. Transcription, or the Interpretation of Antiquity 86
4. Death — The Body — Writing: Rhetorical Circumvention . . .. 92
a. The Semiotics of Art and Poetry 95
b. The Body 97
c. Writing 102
CHAPTER 4
The Parable as Performance: Interpretation, Cultural Transmission,
and Political Strategy in Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" 107
1. The Politics of Interpretation 110
2. Losing Ground, or Automatic vs. Manual Transmission . . .. 114
3. An Ethics of Reading: The Moral if the Political 119
4. Iridescent Structure: The Form of the Parable 129
5. Hermeneutic Complicity 134
6. Critical Realism and its Discontents . 136
X Contents
CHAPTER 5
Towards a Textual Hermeneutic in the Writing
of Johann Gottfried Herder 140
1. Structure and Reflexivity: Language as Text 144
2. Small Science 163
a. Enunciating the Difference: The Critique of Analysis
in Herder's Versuch über das Seyn (1764) 164
b. From Metaphysics to Pragmatism: Wie die Philosophie %um
Besten des Volkes allgemeiner und nützlicher werden kann (1765) . . 168
c. From Metaphysical Analysis to Linguistic Invention 173
3. The Self and the Other:
The Structure of the Interpretive Subject 178
4. Interpretive Reading and the Hermeneutics of Texts 186
CHAPTER 6
Discourse-Analytical Remarks on Herder's Concept of Science . . .. 205
1. Herder's Critique of Wissenschaft 207
2. The Asymmetrical Influence of Reciprocity 214
EXCURSION
Nine Theses on Johann Gottfried Herder 230
CHAPTER 7
The Emergence of Philological Discourse
in the German States 1770-1810 235
1. The Political Dimensions of Language Theory around 1770 . . 243
2. The Institution of Philology: Organization, Practice,
and Politics of the Göttingen Seminar under Heyne 249
3. The Transformation of Philology 255
CHAPTER 8
Friedrich Schlegel's Hermeneutic Philology
and the Eclipse of Aesthetic Culture 258
1. Difference and Modernity 261
2. The "Example," or Historicizing Kant 266
3. Towards a Hermeneutic Philology:
"Zur Philologie I & " (1797) 280
a. The Rulership of Philosophical Discourse
and the Death of Philology 281