Thus the meaning of any sentence cannot be fully interpreted unless we know the historical circumstances of its utterance. He particularly stressed that meaning and meaningfulness were always contextual. Wilhelm Dilthey used the example of understanding a sentence as an example of the circular course of hermeneutic understanding. Hence we are brought to the sentence's larger historical context, depending on its location, and our own circumstances.

Thus, as we are reading this sentence, you are analysing single words as the text unfolds, but you are also weighing the meaning of each word against our changing sense of the overall meaning of the sentence you are reading, or perhaps misunderstanding, or maybe this sentence is reminding you of, or clashing with, another view about interpretation you have, in the past, advocated or disparaged. It is about establishing real relationships between reader, text, and context.' Even reading a sentence involves these repeated circular movements through a hierarchy of parts–whole relationships. Understanding the meaning of a text is not about decoding the author's intentions. Hence the idea of an interpretive or hermeneutic circle. Understanding involved repeated circular movements between the parts and the whole. įriedrich Schleiermacher's approach to interpretation focuses on the importance of the interpreter understanding the text as a necessary stage to interpreting it. According to the Confessions, misleading verses of the Bible shall be read at the light of the Holy Spirit God and in the context of 'the spirit of the Bible as a whole', intended as a unique and non-contradictory text divinely inspired. The circle was conceived to improve the Biblical exegesis and it was activated by the personal belief in the truthfulness of God.

Augustine of Hippo was the first philosopher and theologian to have introduced the hermeneutic cycle of faith and reason (in Latin: credo ut intellegam and intellego ut credam).

The circle is a metaphor for the procedure of transforming one's understanding of the part and the whole through iterative recontextualization. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. The hermeneutic circle ( German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically.

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