Romantic Hermeneutics

1. Deregionalization - Schleiermacher set out to develop a general hermeneutics that would apply to culturally significant texts regardless of their subject matter.  He sought to identify the general features of interpretation that were common to rather than distinctive of the various disciplines.

2. The Hermeneutical Circle - The notion that the parts always have to be interpreted in terms of the whole--and vice versa.

3. Psychologism - It begins with the assumption that language is primarily to be understood as the outer expression of the inner psychic life.  This hermeneutics is often labeled "romantic" because it shares this expressivism with the wider cultural traditions call romanticism.  The goal of interpretation, then, is to reverse the process of writing, to work back from the outer expression to the inner experience, to reconstruct, re-create, refeel, reexperience, relive that inner experience.

4. Objectivism - Dilthey is especially insistent that interpretation be "scientific" so that its findings may be "objective" and rise to the level of "universal validity."  The prestige and power of the natural sciences seem to suggest that rational respectability requires that the disciplines that relate to distinctly human meaning (Geisteswissenschaften, humanities, human sciences) must aspire to a comparable objectivity, especially against the possibility of some sort of historical relativism.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)