Acts of understanding: Spontaneous subjectivity, hermeneutic receptivity, and the consequences of German idealism

Inaugurating German idealism, Kant's notion of self-caused, "spontaneous," mental activity continued to inflect and complicate hermeneutic reflection throughout modernity. This dissertation explores the difficulty, faced by post-Kantian authors, of reconciling the activistic notion of the subject with the requirement of receptivity towards the object of interpretation. To what extent meaning is found and made in interpretation and how hermeneutic receptivity can be combined with interpretive agency become inevitable questions in the wake of Kant's critique. The two parts of this dissertation focus on two interrelated forms of this tension.;Part one explores German idealist reflections on the problem of understanding written works in terms of their reference to a universal, transcendental subjectivity. Based on Kant's distinction between the literalistic imitation and the free emulation of artistic or intellectual models, I elucidate Kant's idea of revisionist interpretation, thereby setting the stage for an analysis of the hermeneutic implications of J. G. Fichte's and Friedrich Schlegel's revisionist Kantianism. Analyzing Fichte's and Schlegel's statements concerning the active role of the reader, I highlight their divergent attempts at devising a non-coercive form of writing that stands in the service of a transcendentally oriented Enlightenment pedagogy fostering the reader's independent thought.;In part two, I show how the relation between receptivity and interpretive activity changes once the task of interpretation is no longer seen to reside in the articulation of "Spirit" but in the understanding of another mind or an outlook different from one's own. Against the background of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I examine attempts undertaken by Theodor W. Adorno, M. M. Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Clifford Geertz at devising a phenomenology of the mind without reliance on idealist premises of the Hegelian kind. Whereas Hegel claimed to reconcile the internalistic, phenomenological comprehension of consciousness with the surplus insight enabled by constructive, theoretically mediated interpretation, these twentieth-century authors view the tension between immanent and extrinsic modes of understanding another mind as ineliminable and fruitful. Whether in the context of cultural critique, aesthetics, or cross-cultural interpretation, the implications of this tension can be better grasped in light of its origins in German idealism.