Outlines of the New Rhetoric

Abstract

Friedrich Scheiermacher (1768–1834), one of the influential figures of the German Romanticism, paid particular consideration to the problem that emerges when attempts are made to endow a given text with an understandable content. Schleiermacher saw this problem as follows: Every act that leads one to the correct understanding of a text is (and must be) ultimately based on a dialogue between the author and the interpreter – that is, on some sort of an imagined conversation. Every author addresses his text to some interpreter. When this basic pattern is inverted and the matter is looked at from the interpreter’s viewpoint, the task then is to reply to the author’s oral or written expression in the context in which it was originally presented. In this way it becomes possible to have an authentic interpretation, an understanding of the text that is based on a dialogue between I (Ich) and you (Du).