Prof: All right.
 
Let's hope we can free our
minds of these matters now and
turn to something a little more
substantive,
which is the question--before
we plunge in to Gadamer really:
what is hermeneutics?
 
Well, what it is is easily
enough explained despite the
sort of difficulty and
thorniness of the word.
It is the art or principles of
interpretation.
But hermeneutics has a history;
that is to say,
it's not something which has
always just been there.
It's not something that people
have always thought about in a
systematic way.
 
Strictly speaking,
what I have just said isn't
true.
 
Many of you probably know that
Aristotle has a treatise called
De Interpretatione.
 
The Middle Ages are rife
with treatises on
interpretation.
 
I suppose what I'm really
saying is that the word
"hermeneutics"
wasn't available,
and the idea that there ought
to be a sort of a systematic
study of how we interpret things
wasn't really current.
Of course, by the same token
the notion of hermeneutics
arises primarily in religion
first,
specifically in the Christian
tradition,
but that isn't to say that
there hasn't been,
that there wasn't long before
the moment at which hermeneutics
became important in
Christianity,
that there wasn't centuries'
worth of Talmudic scholarship
which is essentially also
hermeneutic in nature--
that is, to say concerned with
the art and basis of
interpretation.
 
What gave rise in the Western
world to what is called
"hermeneutics"
was in fact the Protestant
Reformation.
 
And there's a lot of
significance in that,
I think, and I'll try to
explain why.
You don't really puzzle your
head about questions of
interpretation,
how we determine the validity
of interpretation and so on,
until A) meaning becomes
terribly important to you,
and B) the ascertainment of
meaning becomes difficult.
 
You may say to yourself,
"Well, isn't it always the
case that meaning is important
and that meaning is hard to
construe?"
 
Well, not necessarily.
 
If you are a person whose
sacred scripture is adjudicated
by the Pope and the occasional
tribunal of church elders,
you yourself don't really need
to worry very much about what
scripture means.
 
You are told what it means.
 
It goes without saying
therefore what it means.
But in the wake of the
Protestant Reformation when the
question of one's relationship
with the Bible became personal
and everyone was understood,
if only through the local
minister,
to be engaged with coming to an
understanding of what is after
all pretty difficult--
who on earth knows what the
Parables mean and so on,
and the whole of the Bible
poses interpretative
difficulties--
then of course you are going to
have to start worrying about how
to interpret it.
Needless to say,
since it's a sacred scripture,
the meaning of it is important
to you.
You do want to know what it
means.
It can't mean just anything.
 
It's crucial to you to know
exactly what it means and why
what it means is important.
 
So as Protestantism took hold,
by the same token the arts and
sciences of hermeneutics took
hold,
and people began to write
treatises about interpretation--
but it was always
interpretation of the Bible.
In other words,
in this tradition religion came
first.
 
After that, the next thing that
happens is you begin to get the
rise of constitutional
democracies,
and as you get that,
you begin to become much more
interested,
as a citizen or as a person who
has suffrage or as a person who
in one way or another has the
rights of the state or nation--
you begin to become concerned
about the nature of the laws you
live under.
That's why hermeneutics
gradually moved--I should say,
it didn't desert religion,
but it expanded--to the study
of the law.
 
The arts and sciences that had
been developed in thinking about
interpreting scripture were then
applied to the interpretation of
something the meaning of which
had become almost as important;
that is to say,
it mattered what the law was
and how it was to be
interpreted.
You know of course that this is
absolutely crucial to the study
of the law to this day:
what are the grounds for
understanding the meaning of the
Constitution,
for example?
 
There are widespread
controversies about it,
and many of the courses you
would take in law school are
meant to try to get to the
bottom of these thorny
questions.
 
Well and good.
 
Once again you see that
hermeneutics enters a field when
the meaning of something becomes
more important and when that
meaning is recognized to be
difficult to grasp.
Now as yet we haven't said
anything about literature,
and the fact is there is no
hermeneutic art devoted to
literature during the early
modern period and for most of
the eighteenth century.
 
Think about the writers you've
studied from the eighteenth
century.
 
It's very interesting that they
all just sort of take meaning
for granted.
 
If you think about Alexander
Pope,
for example,
or even Samuel Johnson,
as they reflect on literature
and why it's important and what
the nature of literature is,
they aren't concerned about
interpretation.
 
They're concerned about
evaluation,
establishing the principles of
what's at stake in writing a
poem or in writing literature in
some other form and raise
questions that are largely moral
and esthetic.
They are not concerned about
interpretation because to them,
good writing is precisely
writing that's clear,
writing that doesn't need to be
interpreted but has precisely as
its virtue its transparency of
meaning.
In fact, during this whole
period playwrights were writing
prologues to their plays abusing
each other for being obscure--
that is to say,
abusing each other for
requiring interpretation.
 
"I don't understand what
your metaphors are all about.
You don't know what a metaphor
is.
All you do is make one verbal
mistake after another.
Nobody can understand you."
 
This is the nature of the prose
and verse prefaces to theatrical
pieces in the eighteenth
century,
and from that you can see that
interpretation is not only not
studied but is considered to be
completely extraneous to what's
valuable about literature.
 
If you have to interpret it,
it isn't any good.
Then as the eighteenth century
wears on,
you begin to get the sense--
with the emergence of
Romanticism,
as is well known and I think
often overstated--
you begin to get a cult of
genius.
 
You get the idea that
everything arises from the
extraordinary mental acuity or
spiritual insight of an author
and that what needs to be
understood about literature is
the genius of its production.
 
Well, well and good,
but at the same time,
if that's the case,
and if there is this
extraordinary emphasis on the
importance of the expression of
genius,
you can see what's beginning to
happen.
 
The literary creator starts to
seem a lot more like the divine
creator,
that is to say,
and in a certain sense could be
understood as a placeholder for
the divine creator.
 
Remember that secularization in
Western culture is increasing
during the course of the
Enlightenment--
that is to say,
during the course of the
eighteenth century,
and there's a certain way in
which Romanticism and what's
important about Romanticism can
be understood as what Northrop
Frye has called a "secular
scripture."
 
In other words,
the meaning of literature
becomes more difficult because
it's profoundly subjective and
no longer engaged with the
shared values that had made for
the importance of literature;
that is to say,
our sense of why it's so
important to understand it has
also grown because for many
people,
it begins to take over partly
at least the role of religion.
So with the rise of secular
scripture--
that is to say,
literature imagined as
something both terribly
important and also difficult to
understand--
naturally the arts and sciences
of hermeneutics begin to enter
that field.
In particular,
the great theologian of the
Romantic period,
Friedrich Schleiermacher,
devoted his career to
principles of hermeneutics that
were meant to be applied as much
to literature as to the study of
scripture,
and established a tradition in
which it was understood that
literature was a central focus
of hermeneutics.
 
So much then for the history of
hermeneutics.
What followed was the work of
Wilhelm Dilthey around the turn
of the century,
of Heidegger in his Being
and Time of 1927,
of Gadamer who in many ways can
be understood as a disciple and
student of Heidegger;
and a tradition which persists
today follows from the initial
engagements of Schleiermacher
during the Romantic period with
literature.
 
All right.
 
So what is the basic
problematic for hermeneutics in
this tradition?
 
It's what we probably all have
heard about and something that I
will briefly try to describe,
what's called the hermeneutic
circle.
 
So what is the hermeneutic
circle?
It's a relationship between a
reader and a text or--
as is the case for certain
kinds of students of
hermeneutics but not Gadamer,
I think--of a relationship
between a reader and an author:
in other words a relationship
which is understood to aim at
understanding the intention of
an author.
 
The author of the fourth
quotation on your sheet for
today, E.D. Hirsch,
belongs in that tradition and
understands the hermeneutic
circle as a relationship between
a reader and an author where the
text is a kind of a mediatory
document containing the meaning
of the author.
But for Gadamer and his
tradition, it's a little
different.
 
It can be understood as the
relationship between a reader
and a text, and this can be put
in a variety of ways.
It's often put in terms of the
relationship between the part
and the whole.
 
I approach a text and of course
the first thing I read is a
phrase or a sentence.
 
There's still a lot more of the
text and so that first fragment
a part,
but I immediately begin to form
an opinion about this part with
respect to an imagined or
supposed whole.
 
Then, I use this sense I have
of what the whole must be like
to continue to read successive
parts--lines,
sentences, whatever they may
be.
I keep referring those
successive parts back to a sense
of the whole which changes as a
result of knowing more and more
and more parts.
 
The circularity of this
interpretative engagement has to
do with moving back and forth
between a certain preconception
about the whole that I form from
studying a part,
moving then to the part,
back to the whole,
back to the part,
back to the whole and so on in
a circular pattern.
 
This can also be understood as
a relationship between the
present and the past--
that is to say,
my particular historical
horizon and some other
historical horizon that I'm
trying to come to terms with,
so that I refer back and forth
to what I know about the world
before I engage the text;
what the text seems to be
saying in relation to that which
I know,
how it might change my sense of
what I know by referring back
from what I know continuously to
an understanding of the way in
which the past text speaks.
 
Finally of course,
because hermeneutics isn't just
something that takes place
across an historical gulf--
because it also can take place
across a social or cultural
gulf,
or maybe not even very much of
a gulf--
when we engage each other in
conversation,
we are still performing a
hermeneutic act.
 
I have to try to understand
what you're saying and I have to
refer it to what I want to say,
and the circuit of
communication between us has to
stay open as a result of this
mutual and developing
understanding of what we're
talking about.
 
It's the same thing,
of course, with conversations
across cultures.
 
So understand that hermeneutics
isn't necessarily about,
as Gadamer would put it,
merging historical horizons.
It's also about merging social
and cultural and interpersonal
horizons and it applies to all
of those spheres.
All right.
 
Now the hermeneutic circle,
then, involves this reference
back and forth between the
entities that I've been trying
to describe.
 
Let's just quickly--and here we
begin to move in to the
text--listen to Gadamer's
version of how the circularity
of this thinking works.
 
This is on page 722 toward the
bottom of the left-hand column.
The reader [Gadamer's word is
'he']
projects before himself a
meaning for the text as a whole
as soon as some initial meaning
emerges in the text.
[In other words,
as soon as he sees what the
part is like,
he projects or imagines what
the whole must be that contains
this part.]
Again the latter [that is to
say,
the sense of the initial
meaning]
emerges only because he is
reading the text with particular
expectations in regard to a
certain meaning.
The working out of this
fore-project [that is to say,
the sense we have in advance of
the meaning of what we are going
to read]
which is constantly revised in
terms of what emerges as he
penetrates into the meaning,
is understanding what is there.
 
In other words,
what is there--which is a kind
of way of talking that Gadamer
inherits from Heidegger--
really has to do with what
Gadamer means when he talks also
about die Sache,
the subject matter.
In other words,
the effort of a reader in
coming to terms with the meaning
of a text is an effort to master
the subject matter,
what is there,
and--I suppose it's fair enough
to say as a kind of paraphrase--
what the text is really about.
 
That's what Gadamer means when
he says "what is
there."
 
Anyway, you can see that in
this passage on page 722,
Gadamer is describing the
circularity of our reading,
and he's describing it in a way
that may raise certain concerns
for us.
 
"What do you mean,
a fore-structure or a
fore-project or a fore-having?
 
Can't I view this thing,
as we might say,
objectively?"
 
In other words,
aren't I going to be hopelessly
prejudiced about what I read if
I've got some sort of
preliminary conception of what
it's all about?
Why don't I just set aside my
preliminary conceptions so that
I can understand precisely what
is there?
How am I ever going to
understand what is there if I
approach it with some sort of
preliminary idea which I never
really get rid of because each
revision of what I think is
there as a result of further
reading nevertheless becomes in
itself yet another fore-project
or preliminary conception?"
In other words,
this way of thinking seems to
suggest--
to tell you the truth it does
suggest--
that you can't get away from
preliminary conceptions about
things.
This, of course,
is disturbing and it's
especially disturbing when you
then get Heidegger and Gadamer
insisting that even though there
are always these preliminary
conceptions--
which Gadamer sort of boldly
calls "prejudices,"
and we'll come back to that--
even though there are always
these preliminary conceptions,
there nevertheless are,
as Heidegger puts it,
two ways into the circle.
 
All right?
 
A circle, in other words,
is not necessarily a vicious
circle.
 
See, that's what you are
tempted to conclude if you say,
"I can never get away from
preconceptions."
All right?
 
"I'm just going back and
forth meaninglessly because I'm
never going to get
anyplace."
Right?
 
But Gadamer and Heidegger say,
"No, that's not true.
That's not true.
 
A circle isn't at all
necessarily vicious.
The way into the circle can
also be constructive."
That is to say,
you really can get someplace,
and so you're entitled to say,
"Well, okay.
It can be constructive,
but how can that be?"
Take a look at the second
passage on your sheet from
Heidegger,
not the whole passage but just
the first sentence of it where
Heidegger says,
"In an interpretation,
the way in which the entity we
are interpreting is to be
conceived can be drawn from the
entity itself,
or the interpretation can force
the entity into concepts to
which it is opposed in its
manner of being."
 
"Now wait a minute,"
you say.
"If I'm just dealing in
preconceptions here,
how can I take anything from
the entity itself?"
Right?
 
That's just what seems to be at
risk if I can never get beyond
my preconceptions.
 
Well, let me give you an
example.
I was going to do this later in
the lecture but I feel like
doing it now.
 
In the eighteenth century,
a poet named Mark Akenside
wrote a long poem called The
Pleasures of the Imagination,
and in this poem there is
the line "The great creator
raised his plastic arm."
 
Now let's say that we're into
polymers.
We know what plastic is.
 
We have no concern or
hesitation in saying what
plastic is, and so we say,
"Oh, gee.
Well, I guess the great creator
has a sort of a prosthetic limb
and he raised it.
 
All right.
 
So that's what the sentence
must mean."
But then of course,
if we know something about the
horizon within which Akenside
was writing his poem,
we are aware that in the
eighteenth century the word
"plastic"
meant "sinuous,"
"powerful,"
"flexible,"
and in that case of course,
we immediately are able to
recognize what Akenside meant,
why it makes perfect sense.
The great creator raised his
sinuous, powerful,
flexible arm,
and we know where we stand.
Now notice this.
 
In other words,
this is an example of good and
bad prejudice,
right?
The good prejudice is our prior
awareness that plastic meant
something different in the
eighteenth century than it means
now.
 
And we bring that prejudice to
bear on our interpretation of
the line,
then that is a constructive way
into the circle according to
Heidegger and Gadamer.
The bad prejudice is when we
leap to the conclusion,
without thinking for a moment
that there might be some other
historical horizon,
that we know what plastic means.
The reason we can tell the
difference,
by the way, is that if we
invoke the eighteenth-century
meaning of plastic,
we immediately see that the
line makes perfect sense,
that it's perfectly reasonable
and not even particularly
notable;
but if we bring our own meaning
to bear--
that is to say our own sense of
what the word
"plastic"
means--
then of course the meaning of
the line must be crazy.
I mean, what on earth?
 
Why would he be saying this
about the great creator?
Now I think I'll come back to
this example next week when
we're talking about an essay
called "The Intentional
Fallacy by
W.K. Wimsatt,"
and I will revisit the
possibility that there might be
some value in supposing that
Akenside meant the great creator
raised his prosthetic limb,
but I'll leave that until next
week.
 
I think for the moment it
should be plain to you that this
is a good way of understanding
what the difference between a
useful preconception and a
useless preconception brought to
bear on an interpretative act
might consist in.
All right.
 
Now in giving the example,
I've gotten a little bit ahead
of myself, so let me reprise a
bit.
As you can tell from your
reading of Gadamer--
and of course,
the title of the great book
from which this excerpt is taken
is Truth and Method or
Wahrheit und Methode,
with its implicit
suggestion that there is a
difference between truth and
method--
the great objection of Gadamer
to other people's way of doing
hermeneutics is that they
believe that there is a
methodology of interpretation.
The basic methodology Gadamer
is attacking in the excerpt
you've read is what he calls
historicism.
Now that's a tricky word for us
because later in the semester
we're going to be reading about
something called the New
Historicism,
and the New Historicism
actually has nothing to do with
what Gadamer is objecting to in
this form of historicism;
so we will return to the New
Historicism in that context.
 
For the moment,
what Gadamer means by
"historicism"
is this: the belief that you
can set aside preconception,
in other words that you can
completely factor out your own
subjectivity,
your own view of things,
your own historically
conditioned point of view--
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have
said "historically
conditioned,"
I mean your own point of view--
that you can completely factor
that out in order to enter into
the mindset of some other time
or place: that you can
completely enter into the mind
of another.
 
This then is the object of
historicizing and,
as we'll see at the end of the
lecture,
there's a certain nobility
about it to be juxtaposed with
the nobility of Gadamerian
hermeneutics.
In the meantime,
Gadamer is objecting to this
because he says,
you simply can't do this.
You cannot factor out these
preconceptions.
All you can do,
he says, is recognize that you
do exist in,
you do live in,
you do think consciously within
a certain horizon,
recognize that you are coming
face-to-face with another
horizon,
and try to bridge your horizon
and the other horizon--
in other words,
to put it simply,
to find common ground,
to find some way of merging a
present with a past:
a here with a there,
in such a way that results in
what Gadamer calls
Horizontverschmelzung,
"horizon merger."
 
This act of horizon merger has
as its result what Gadamer calls
"effective history,"
and by "effective
history"
he means history which is
useful--
that is to say,
history which really can go to
work for us and is not just a
matter of accumulating an
archive or distancing ourselves
from the past.
 
I'll say again,
somewhat in advance perhaps of
the time I should say it,
that Gadamer thinks that
there's something immoral about
historicism.
Why?
 
Because it condescends toward
the past.
It supposes that the past is
simply a repository of
information,
and it never supposes for a
minute that if we actually merge
ourselves with the moment of the
past,
the past may be able to tell us
something we ought to know--
that is to say,
it may be able actually to
teach us something.
Gadamer believes that
historicism forgets the
possibility of being taught
something by past-ness or
otherness.
 
Now I think in order to make
this viewpoint seem plausible,
we probably should study it for
a moment a little bit more
philosophically.
 
That is to say,
you're asking yourself,
"Well, sure.
 
You know what?
 
I pride myself on this:
I can factor out all forms of
subjectivity.
 
I really can be objective.
 
I'm perfectly capable of
understanding the past in and
for itself without any
contribution of my own,
without, in short,
any preconceptions."
So let's look at a couple of
passages from your sheet,
from Heidegger's Being and
Time,
from his analytic of the
hermeneutic circle,
and see what Heidegger has to
say about this claim.
This is the first passage on
your sheet.
Heidegger says:
When we have to do with
anything, the mere seeing of the
things which are closest to us
bears in itself the structure of
interpretation and in so
primordial a manner that just to
grasp something free,
as it were, of the
"as"
requires a certain
adjustment...
What is Heidegger saying?
 
He is saying,
I stand here and I am just
looking.
 
I look back there and I'm just
seeing that sign that says
'exit'.
 
I'm not interpreting it.
 
I don't have any preconception
about it.
I'm just looking.
 
Right?
 
No, Heidegger says,
this is a total illusion.
How do I know it's a sign?
 
How do I know it says 'exit'?
 
I bring a million
preconceptions to bear on what I
take to be a simple act of
looking.
And then Heidegger says,
you know what?
It's not at all uninteresting
to imagine the possibility of
just seeing something without
seeing it as something.
It would be kind of
exhilarating,
wouldn't it,
to be able just to have
something before us.
 
Right?
 
But he says,
"You know what?
That is well nigh impossible.
 
It is in fact a very,
very difficult and derivative
act of the mind to try to forget
that I am looking at a sign that
says 'exit' and,
in fact, just looking at what
is there without knowing what it
is.
In other words,
I don't not know first
that that's a sign that says
"exit."
The very first thing I know is
that it's a sign that says
"exit."
 
There's no prior act of
consciousness.
It's the very first thing that
I know.
It's an interesting thought
experiment to try not to know
that that's a sign that says
"exit."
As Heidegger points out in this
passage, that's a thought
experiment which,
if it can be done at all,
derives from that prior
knowledge.
I always know something first
as something.
If I can just have it there
before me,
that is a very difficult and
derivative intellectual act,
and it cannot be understood as
primordial or primitive.
I am always already in
possession of an interpretation
of whatever object I look at,
which isn't at all to say that
my interpretation is correct.
 
It's only to say that I can't
escape the fact that the very
first movement of mind,
not the last movement but the
first movement of mind,
is interpretative.
Right?
 
We always see something as
something, and that is precisely
the act of interpretation.
 
We can never just have it there
before us or,
as I say, if we can--if we
can--it's a very,
very difficult act of
concentration.
Continue the passage:
"This grasping which is
free of the 'as' is a privation
of the kind of seeing [and you
see how attracted Heidegger is
to it because he shifts his
rhetoric]
in which one merely
understands."
 
In other words,
It would be an extraordinary
thing not to understand,
Heiddeger is saying.
We can't help understanding.
 
We always already understand,
which has nothing to do again
with whether or not we're right
or wrong.
We always already just
necessarily do understand.
It's a kind of imprisonment,
understanding,
and when Heidegger says,
wouldn't it be great not to
have to merely understand?
 
right, he's saying,
wouldn't it be great just to
have it there before us?
 
but he's also insisting that
this is an incredibly difficult,
if not impossible,
moment of thought.
All right.
 
So that's why--and this is
perhaps the essential,
the central passage,
and I don't want to pause over
it--
but you can look at passage
number three on your sheet,
which says roughly again what
Heidegger is saying in the first
passage--
that's why we must work always
as interpreters with
preconceptions,
with fore-understandings.
Now what about this word
"prejudice"?
It is a sort of a problematic
word.
Gadamer is a bit apologetic
about it, and he goes into the
appropriate etymologies.
 
The French
préjugé
and the German
Voruteil all mean
"prejudgment"
or "prior judgment."
They actually can be used in a
court of law as a stage toward
arriving at a verdict.
 
They needn't be thought of as
vulgar prejudices,
one of which is in fact the
"prejudice against
prejudice."
 
As Gadamer says,
this is the characteristic idea
of the Enlightenment:
its prejudice against
prejudice,
that we can be objective,
that we can free ourselves of--
Okay, fine.
But prejudice is bad,
we know prejudice is bad.
We know what prejudice has
wrought historically and
socially, so how can we try to
vindicate it in this way?
It's extremely problematic.
 
What Gadamer does in his essay
is actually an act of
intellectual conservatism,
it has to be admitted.
That whole section of the essay
in which he talks about
classicism--
and you may have said to
yourself as you were reading it,
"Well, gee,
isn't this sort of digressive?
 
What's he so interested in
classicism for?"--
the whole section of the essay
in which he's talking about
classicism and which he later
calls "tradition"
is meant to suggest that we
really can't merge horizons
effectively unless we have a
very broad and extensive common
ground with what we're reading.
 
The great thing about
classicism for Gadamer,
or what he calls
"tradition,"
is that it's something we can
share.
The classical,
Gadamer argues,
is that which doesn't just
speak to its own historical
moment but speaks for all time,
speaks to all of us in
different ways but does speak to
us--
that is to say,
does proffer its claim to speak
true.
 
The classical can do that.
 
"Okay, great,"
we say to Gadamer.
"Certainly you're entitled
to an intellectually
conservative canon.
 
Maybe other principles of
hermeneutics will place much
more stress on innovation or
novelty or difference,
but you're not sure people can
understand unless they share a
great deal of common
ground."
All well and good,
but you know what?
That's where the bad side of
prejudice sneaks in.
Slavery was considered
perfectly appropriate and
natural to a great many of the
most exalted figures working
within the tradition that
Gadamer rightly calls
classical--
classical antiquity.
A great many modern figures
never stopped to question
slavery.
 
Slavery was an aspect of
classical culture which had its
defenses.
 
Well, Gadamer doesn't talk
about this obviously,
but it is an aspect of that
prejudice that one might share
with tradition if one weren't
somewhat more critical than this
gesture of sharing might
indicate.
I just say that in passing to
call your attention to it as a
risk that's involved in our
engagement with a hermeneutic
project of the nature of
Gadamer's.
It's not to say that Gadamer
favored slavery or anything of
the sort.
 
It is, however,
to say that prejudice--
while plainly we can understand
it simply to mean preconception
which is inescapable and can
understand that
philosophically--
nevertheless can still be bad.
We have to understand the way
in which it's something that,
if we're going to accept this
point of view,
we need to live with.
 
All right.
 
So it is troublesome,
and it's troublesome also,
perhaps, in a variety of other
ways that I won't go into.
I think that what I'd like to
do in the time remaining is to
call your attention to two
passages,
one in Gadamer's text which I'm
about to read and the other the
fourth passage on your sheet by
someone called E.D. Hirsch,
whom you may actually know as
the author of a dictionary of
what every school child should
know and as a sort of a champion
of the intellectual right during
the whole period when literary
theory flourished,
but a person who also is
seriously invested in
hermeneutics and conducted a
lifelong feud with Gadamer about
the principles of hermeneutics.
The two passages that I'm about
to read juxtapose the viewpoints
that I've been trying to evoke
in describing Gadamer's
position.
 
The dignity and nobility of
Gadamer is that it involves
being interested in something
true--
that is to say,
in hoping that there is an
intimate relationship between
meaning,
arriving at meaning,
and arriving at something that
speaks to us as true.
 
Hirsch, on the other hand,
is evoking a completely
different kind of dignity.
 
What I want you to realize as
we juxtapose these two passages
is that it is impossible to
reconcile them,
and it poses for us a choice
which,
as people interested in
interpretation,
needs ultimately to be made and
suggests perhaps differing forms
of commitment.
 
Now the first passage is in
Gadamer's text on page 735,
the very bottom of the page,
and then I'll be going over to
page 736.
 
Gadamer says,
and here again he's attacking
historicism:
The text that is understood
historically is forced to
abandon its claim that it is
uttering something true.
 
We think we understand when we
see the past from a historical
standpoint, i.e.,
place ourselves in the
historical situation and seek to
reconstruct the historical
horizon.
 
[I've been attempting to
summarize this position and so I
trust that it's easily
intelligible as I read it to you
now.]
In fact,
however, we have given up the
claim to find,
in the past,
any truth valid and
intelligible for ourselves.
 
And, by the way,
this would also apply to
cultural conversation.
 
If I'm proud of knowing that in
another culture if I belch after
dinner it's a compliment to the
cook,
right, and if I'm proud of
knowing that without drawing any
conclusions from it,
that's sort of the equivalent
of historicism.
 
It's just a factoid for me.
 
In other words,
it's not an effort to come to
terms with anything.
 
It's not an effort to engage in
dialogue.
It's just historicizing
otherness in a way that somehow
or another satisfies my quest
for information.
So it's not just a question of
the past, as I say and as I've
said before.
 
It's a question of cultural
conversation as well.
Thus, this acknowledgment of
the otherness of the other,
which makes him the object of
objective knowledge,
involves the fundamental
suspension of his claim to
truth.
 
This is a devastating and,
I think, brilliant argument.
I think it ought to remind us
of what's at stake when we
invoke the notion of
objectivity.
Implicit, according to Gadamer,
in the notion of objectivity is
an abandonment of the
possibility of learning from the
object,
of learning from otherness.
It only becomes a question of
knowing the object,
of knowing it in and for
itself, in its own terms,
and not at all necessarily of
learning from it,
of being spoken to by it.
 
All right, but now listen to
Hirsch.
All right?
 
This is really a hard choice to
make.
>
 
What Hirsch says,
invoking Kant--rightly invoking
Kant--
is: "Kant held it to be a
foundation of moral action that
men should be conceived as ends
in themselves,
not as instruments of other
men."
 
In other words,
you are an end and not a means
to me unless in fact I'm
exploiting you and
instrumentalizing you.
 
Right?
 
That's Kant's position and
that's what Hirsch is leaping to
defend.
 
This idea that I don't really
care,
or that I don't really think I
can come to terms with the
actual meaning of an entity as
that entity,
is instrumentalizing the entity.
 
In other words,
it's approaching it for
me.
 
This turns the whole idea of
being open to the possibility
that the other is speaking
true--it turns it on its ear and
says, Oh, no,
no.
You're just appropriating the
other for yourself.
Right?
 
You're instrumentalizing the
other.
You're not taking it seriously
as itself.
That's Hirsch's response.
 
He continues:
This imperative is transferable
to the words of men because
speech is an extension and
expression of men in the social
domain and also because when we
fail to conjoin a man's
intention to his words,
we lose the soul of speech,
which is to convey meaning and
to understand what is intended
to be conveyed.
Notice that although the
nobility of this alongside the
nobility of Gadamer is obvious
and painful
>
 
and really does seem to bring
us to a crossroads where we
really want to be Yogi Berra,
right, and go in both
directions--even though this is
the case,
notice one thing.
 
Hirsch is not saying anything
about truth.
Right?
 
He's talking about
meaning--that's good--
and he's making the notion of
arriving at a correct meaning as
honorific as he possibly can,
but it is significant that he's
not talking about truth.
 
It's Gadamer who is talking
about truth.
For Hirsch the important thing
is the meaning.
For Gadamer the important thing
is that the meaning be true,
right, and that's where the
distinction essentially lies.
Gadamer is willing to sacrifice
because of his belief in the
inescapability of preconception.
 
He's willing to sacrifice
historical or cultural
exactitude of meaning.
 
He's willing to acknowledge
that there's always something of
me in my interpretation,
but it's a good something
because after all I am mindful
of the horizon of otherness.
I am not just saying
"plastic"
means "polymer,"
right,
but nevertheless there's
something of me in the
interpretation.
 
Hirsch is saying,
"There's nothing of me in
the interpretation.
 
Therefore, I am able to arrive
accurately and objectively at
the meaning of the other,
and I honor the other by
arriving with such accuracy at
the meaning,"
but notice that truth isn't
backing it up.
It doesn't seem to be a
question for Hirsch of whether
the other speaks true.
 
This is unfair to Hirsch,
by the way, because truth
actually is backing it up.
 
All you need to do is read him
and you will recognize that it
does matter to Hirsch whether
the other speaks true,
but it's not implicit in the
philosophical position he's
taking up here.
 
It's something that the
philosophical position
sacrifices.
 
Okay.
 
So that's the basic distinction
and,
as I say, as far as I can see
it's irreconcilable so it leaves
us with a choice that really
does have to be made,
and it's a choice which looms
over a course in literary theory
and coming to understand the
tradition of literary theory.
Some will take one side,
others will take another,
and we'll find ourselves siding
or not siding with them,
at least in part for reasons
that arise out of the
distinction between these two
positions that I've been making
today.
 
We may or may not have the
lecture on Iser,
but on Tuesday we'll be getting
into the varieties of formalism
and first we'll take up the
American New Criticism.
All right.
 
Thanks.
 
