Betti Between Gadamer and Kelsen: From Interpretation as a Methodology to the Limit of Methodologism in Juridical Interpretation

Emilio Betti’s well-known criticism of Hans-Georg Gadamer is that his hermeneutics ‘in no way guarantees the exactness of the understanding’: it gives the interpreter ‘the monopoly of truth’ (Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, §XXIV). Gadamer’s approach would thus open the way to interpretative subjectivism. But Gadamer rejects hermeneutic subjectivism and rela¬tivism. Thus, the demarcation point between Betti and Gadamer should be sought in the gnoseological presuppositions underlying their respective conceptions of hermeneutics. The ontological-existential presupposition underlying Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding and historical knowledge is unacceptable to Betti. Betti, following a certain perspective of historical and gnoseological realism (Vico), believes that the works of mankind are interpretable and knowable by man, but never reducible to interpreting subjectivity. These works belong to a historical flux in which there is no mediating way that can serve as absorption and/or resolution of the past in the present. The works remain other and different, they remain ‘objecti-vations of the spirit’, and precisely as such interpretable. The formulation of a set of hermeneutic rules, and the very transformation of hermeneutics into a methodology, serves to correctly evaluate a true interpretation from a false one, serves to unmask hermeneutic abuses, and to appropriately lead interpretation towards objective knowledge. This is where Betti’s project (which is in line with Dilthey’s vision), to conceive hermeneutics as a general methodology of the humanities, and to outline a methodology-centred ‘general theory of interpretation’ takes shape. However, this approach encounters limitations and criticality precisely in the juridical sphere, spe¬cifically on the issue of the interpretation of norms. The problem emerges most clearly by comparing Betti’s conception with that of Hans Kelsen. The latter, in his General Theory of Law and State (1945), emphasises how a different but inevitable “interpretative problem” persists in every descriptive (static) and creative (dynamic) process concerning norms. Hence, the hermeneutic process may come to define a normative scheme or enter into the creative dynamics of the order but not govern (methodologically) the knot of gnoseological truth or falsity of a given interpretation. This paper will investigate this issue in depth, examining in particular the possi¬bilities of approximation and possible integration between the views of Gadamer, Betti, and Kelsen.