Hermeneutical Approaches to Understanding Human Development

What does it mean to be human? On the surface, this question seems simple enough. Biologically, we are animals – carbon-based, oxygen-dependent, shaped by millions of years of evolution, composed of the same atomic matter as the stars. And yet, we write poetry. We ask about death. We build cathedrals and question whether God exists. Something in the human story exceeds what biology alone can account for. This tension – between what we share with the universe and what makes us uniquely, irreducibly human – is precisely the philosophical problem that hermeneutical approaches to human development seek to address. Rather than offering a single definitive answer, these approaches ask us to interpret human existence itself as a layered, historically situated, and meaning-laden phenomenon.

What hermeneutics actually means 🔗

The word hermeneutics comes from the Greek hermeneuein, meaning to interpret or to make clear. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline concerns not just the interpretation of texts, but “the meaning of interpretation – its basic nature, scope and validity, as well as its place within and implications for human existence.” In other words, hermeneutics is not merely a technique for reading ancient scriptures or legal documents. It is a way of asking what it means to understand anything at all – including what it means to understand ourselves as human beings.

Historically, the field moved from narrow textual interpretation toward a broad philosophical inquiry about existence itself. As traced in a history of hermeneutics, this shift was initiated largely through the German Romantic tradition, particularly the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, before reaching its philosophical peak with Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the twentieth century. Each of these thinkers progressively expanded the scope of hermeneutics until the question of interpretation became inseparable from the question of what it is to be human.

The philosophical dichotomy at the heart of the question 🔗

The core philosophical problem hermeneutics confronts when applied to human development is this: human beings are simultaneously part of the universe and apart from it. We share our physical composition with rocks and rivers. Our DNA overlaps significantly with that of chimpanzees and even simpler organisms. The atoms that make up our bodies were forged in the interior of long-dead stars. In this sense, we are thoroughly embedded in the material continuum of the cosmos. And yet, we are the only known beings in the universe that ask what the universe means. This is the philosophical dichotomy – being as a composite of commonality with the universe, and being as something uniquely, irreducibly self-aware and meaning-seeking.

This dichotomy is not new to philosophy. Aristotle described humans as rational animals – animals, yes, but defined by rationality. The scholastic tradition, developed extensively by Thomas Aquinas, treated humans as composites of matter and form, body and soul. The Cartesian era sharpened this into a mind-body split. What hermeneutics does differently is refuse to resolve this dichotomy by reducing one side to the other. It insists that both dimensions must be held together, and that understanding this tension is itself a form of understanding what human development means.

Dilthey and the human sciences 🔗

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was among the first to argue that understanding human beings requires a fundamentally different kind of inquiry than understanding natural phenomena. As discussed in the journal Hermeneutics, Human Sciences and Health, Dilthey coined the term Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) to describe a domain of knowledge – history, culture, art, language – that cannot be reduced to causal-mechanical explanation. For Dilthey, human beings express their understanding of life in the form of meaningful objects: texts, art, institutions, cultural practices. To understand a human being, therefore, is not to measure them, but to interpret the expressions of their inner life within their historical and cultural context.

This is critical for understanding human development hermeneutically. Development, in this framework, is not merely biological maturation or the accumulation of skills. It is the ongoing process by which a person makes sense of their existence in relation to others, to their history, and to the world. Development is interpretive from the ground up.

Heidegger: being-in-the-world and the question of existence 🔗

Martin Heidegger’s contribution to hermeneutics transformed the entire problem. Where earlier thinkers asked how we understand texts or other minds, Heidegger asked a more fundamental question: What kind of being is it whose very existence consists in understanding? His answer was the concept of Dasein – literally “being-there” – which refers to the specifically human mode of existence as always already embedded in a world.

As explained in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Heidegger, Dasein has a tripartite ontological structure: existence (projecting possibilities into the future), thrownness (always finding itself already in a historically and materially conditioned environment), and fallenness (existing amid other beings, absorbed in the everyday world). This structure captures both the embeddedness and the transcendence of human being at once. We are thrown into a world we did not choose – a body, a language, a historical moment – yet we also project ourselves toward possibilities, giving our existence a forward-looking, meaning-making character.

Crucially, Heidegger insisted that the human being’s substance is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body, but rather existence itself. This was a direct challenge to both materialist and dualist accounts of the human person. The question is not whether humans are matter or spirit, but how they exist – as beings uniquely capable of taking a stand on what they are. Heidegger distinguished three modes of being: substance (things), utility (tools), and existence (human self-reflective being). Only humans inhabit the third mode – only they can choose, consciously or not, what kind of being to identify with.

Gadamer: understanding, tradition, and the formation of the person 🔗

Hans-Georg Gadamer developed Heidegger’s insights into a full-scale philosophical hermeneutics, centering on what understanding actually does to a person. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gadamer connected interpretive experience directly to Bildung – a German concept of formation or self-cultivation – drawing on the Weimar classical tradition. For Gadamer, to understand is not merely to acquire information; it is to be enlarged as a person through the encounter with something other than oneself.

This has direct implications for how we think about human development philosophically. Development is not a linear progression from lower to higher states. It is an ongoing dialogue between the self and its traditions, texts, and world. Gadamer held that human existence is grounded in historicity – the interpreter is always guided by prejudices (pre-understandings) shaped by tradition, and it is precisely from this historically situated position that understanding becomes possible at all. Rather than treating this as a limitation, Gadamer saw it as the very condition of genuine understanding.

Gadamer’s concept of the fusion of horizons is particularly relevant here. When a person genuinely understands something – a text, another person, a tradition – their horizon of understanding merges with that of what they are trying to understand. Human development, in this sense, is a lifelong process of horizon-expansion: the self is not a fixed entity that passively receives experiences, but a being that is constituted and reconstituted through each genuine act of interpretation and understanding.

Ricoeur: narrative identity and the self as interpreted being 🔗

Paul Ricoeur brought a further dimension to hermeneutical accounts of human development by focusing on narrative as the medium through which human beings understand themselves over time. For Ricoeur, the human self is not a Cartesian substance that persists unchanged beneath its experiences. Instead, the self is a narrative construction – it understands itself through the stories it tells about its own life, integrating past, present, and anticipated future into a coherent, if always provisional, identity.

Research on hermeneutics and psychology drawing on Ricoeur’s work proposes a dialectic between understanding and explanation – one that honors both the interpretive, qualitative dimensions of human experience and the more structural, explanatory approaches of science. This is directly relevant to the philosophical dichotomy noted earlier: rather than choosing between a scientific account of the human being (as a product of evolution and material processes) and a humanistic account (as a meaning-making, transcendent subject), a Ricoeurian hermeneutics holds both in productive tension.

Ricoeur argued for what he called hermeneutic phenomenology – an approach that, as described in a study on Ricoeur’s philosophy, seeks to disclose authentic subjectivity not by bypassing the material conditions of existence but by moving through them, interpreting the symbols, metaphors, and narratives in which human existence expresses itself.

Human transcendence: beyond but not separate from the material 🔗

The hermeneutical tradition consistently resists two tempting but reductive moves: collapsing human beings entirely into their material and evolutionary substrate, or treating human transcendence as a purely supernatural event disconnected from natural development. Transcendence in philosophy literally means “climbing or going beyond” – and philosophically, it refers to the human capacity to exceed the immediate, the given, and the merely biological. But hermeneutics insists this transcendence is always situated: we transcend from within a body, a language, a history.

Research in evolutionary psychological science has documented various modes of transcendence – aesthetic, epistemic, group-directed – that appear cross-culturally and across human history, suggesting that the capacity for self-transcendence is itself deeply embedded in the human biological and social constitution. This does not reduce transcendence to mere biology; it raises the more philosophically interesting question of what it means that a material, evolved being is capable of surpassing its own conditions.

The hermeneutical answer is that transcendence is not the negation of our material commonality with the universe, but its fullest expression in one particular being. Humans are the part of nature that has become capable of questioning nature, interpreting it, mourning it, celebrating it, and asking what it all means. This is what distinguishes the hermeneutical approach from both reductive naturalism and naive supernaturalism.

The hermeneutical circle and human development 🔗

A concept central to all hermeneutical thinking is the hermeneutical circle: the idea that understanding any part of something requires understanding the whole, yet understanding the whole requires understanding the parts. Applied to human development, this means that understanding what a person is requires understanding the historical, cultural, and biological context they emerge from – but understanding that context requires seeing what kind of being is capable of emerging from it and questioning it.

This is not a vicious circle; it is a productive one. The philosopher does not step outside this circle but enters it with greater awareness. Each return to the question “What is a human being?” is enriched by prior engagement with biology, history, language, and lived experience. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, hermeneutics conceives of understanding as always educative – we do not just learn facts about human development; we learn something about ourselves, about our world, and about others in the very process of engaging with the question.

Why this approach matters for philosophy of the human person 🔗

Hermeneutical approaches to human development are philosophically significant because they refuse false dichotomies. They do not ask us to choose between being animals shaped by evolution and being spiritual beings capable of transcendence. They do not force us to choose between a scientific account of human origins and a meaningful account of human dignity. Instead, they ask us to interpret the human being as a composite – materially embedded in the cosmos, sharing its atomic constitution and evolutionary history with the rest of the natural world, yet uniquely characterized by the capacity to question, to interpret, to develop through understanding, and to reach beyond the given toward meaning.

The question of what makes humans uniquely human cannot, on this account, be answered by pointing to a single faculty – reason, language, consciousness – abstracted from the rest of our existence. It can only be answered hermeneutically: by engaging with the full, historically situated, meaning-seeking complexity of what human beings actually are and do, in a process that is never complete, always open, and always already underway.

What do you think? If human development is fundamentally an interpretive process – shaped by history, language, and the stories we tell about ourselves – does that mean there is no fixed “human nature” to discover, only an ongoing process of becoming? And how should we understand the relationship between our material origins in the cosmos and our capacity to transcend them: is transcendence something added to our nature, or is it what our nature, at its deepest level, actually is?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
2. https://daily-philosophy.com/figueiredo-brief-history-of-hermeneutics/
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17482620601016120
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
5. https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2147.html
6. https://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2011/08/substance-utility-existence-heideggers-modes-of-being/
7. https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.12.4.344
9. https://utppublishing.com/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.3.4.275
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(philosophy)
11. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-016-0059-3