The article is devoted to understanding the methodological status of modern hermeneutics, which acquires features characteristic of a metaphysical view of the world ‒ its vision of social and humanitarian reality is ontologized. In Russian philosophy, the problems of hermeneutics as a methodology of humanitarian knowledge were dealt with by Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. He developed the original “philosophy of the Word”, in which special attention was paid to the procedures of understanding and interpretation. The interpretation of the meanings of statements becomes for him the starting point and the most important component of the philosophical discussion of the world (“the whole Universe is the Word”), and it is in this quality that hermeneutics comes into contact with the story (narrative) and acquires the status of the methodological foundation of the social sciences and humanities. In the manuscript “Hermeneutics and its problems”, Shpet examines the problems of interpretation and explanation in historical development, fixing the moments of change and expansion of hermeneutical problems in various historical eras. The original interpretation of hermeneutics as a Shpet methodology remains relevant for modern philosophy. The article shows that the idea that hermeneutics is first and foremost an intellectual practice immersed in the objective content of the social-humanitarian vision of reality gains particular significance today. Moreover, such a vision is not oriented towards the analytic dismemberment of the whole but is directed towards the cultural-historical perspective that holds the whole, which, in fact, gives this vision objectivity. According to the author, modern hermeneutics is in demand precisely as an ontologized philosophical methodology of social-humanitarian knowledge.