Friday Review: Vahoozer's Is There Meaning chapter 3

In last week's review we looked at Vanhoozer's two chapters on the author: chapter 2 where he treats the deconstruction of the author and chapter 5 where we reconstructs his vision of authorial meaning.

The key to authorial intent for V is the illocutionary aspect of a text. Texts are acts of communication in which an author does something with a text--commands, asserts, promises, etc... Or to put it more lightly, when Voldemort tries to kill Harry Potter, some of his powers are transferred to Harry. Texts bear the scar of the author's intent on them.

OK, maybe not the most helpful illustration :-)

It is late enough in the day that I've decided to post my summary of Vanhoozer chapter 3 today and my summary of chapter 6 tomorrow. Unfortunately, Piper and Wright will have to wait till Monday for my next summary.

Chapter 3: "Undoing the Book: Textuality and Indeterminacy"
Chapters 2 and 5 had to do with the author. Now chapters 4 and 6 will have to do with the text itself. Chapter 3 will deal with deconstructive movements afoot. Chapter 6 will give V's attempt to reconstruct meaning in texts.

It seems to me that there are two key issues under discussion in this chapter. I want to apologize to Vanhoozer if I ever misrepresent him. Each time I pass by the material I gain some clarity on what I think his "design plan" was, but it has not always come easy. If nothing else, my attempts to systematize will start you out reading much further along in the understanding process than otherwise...

1. The first key interpretive issue in this chapter is the question of the "autonomy of the text" from its author, that is, the extent to which a text inevitably takes on a life of its own after it has been created. To be sure, this topic is to some extent the same as that of the previous chapter on the author, except now we are looking at it from the standpoint of the text receiving meaning from the author rather than an author giving meaning to a text.

a. Derrida, Rorty, and Fish
So it is no surprise that we hear the names of our old friends again. V gets into some issues of metaphysics a bit more at the beginning of this chapter (although this was really the professed topic of the previous one, chap. 2). He discusses Rorty's pragmatism as a User of reality. Rorty does not believe we can say that claims about the world are anything more than ways to function in the world--we can't say they're about anything truly "out there."

He mentions Paul Feyerabend's philosophy of science. From elsewhere, Feyerabend believes that ultimately there is no difference between a witch doctor's conception of the world and that of a medical doctor.

With regard to Derrida, we have already heard of his attack on "logocentrism" and his dictum, "there is nothing outside the text." Now in this chapter V discusses his sense of "grammatology." Grammatology is a word meant ;-) by Derrida to replace logocentrism. If logocentrism thinks words refer to things outside themselves, grammatology focuses on letters as arbitrary symbols that do not refer to anything but other letters. Derrida thus speaks of the end of the "book," since the idea of a book is the binding of ideas together. For him we have rather a text that has no glue.

b. Gadamer and Ricoeur
In this chapter, however, Vanhoozer's sparring partners are more the likes of Gadamer and Ricoeur. V of course likes them in some respects. They both believe that texts exists as "other" from us. They are not like Fish, who largely sees texts as mirrors of the communities reading them. They are not like Derrida, who sees meaning as an elusive dog chasing its tail. But V disagrees with the way that they divorce authors from the meanings of texts.

For Gadamer, the process of reading is a "fusing of horizons." My horizon, the horizon of the reader, fuses with the horizon of the text. What is key to understanding Gadamer is to realize that we cannot step outside ourselves to fuse with the text--we bring our "tradition" with us to the text, our pre-understandings. Unlike Descartes and modernism, which would bid us become "objective" about our approach to truth and the world (or the text, for Hirsch), Gadamer suggests that our pre-understandings are a good thing.

By the way, I am more and more convinced that this is the underlying hermeneutic of Green's book, Seized by Truth. As a good case study, we embrace the "traditions" with which we come to the text to fuse our horizon to it. For Vanhoozer, Gadamer does not take into account the authorial dimension of a text as a communicative act. Also, because we as readers all bring different traditions to the text, we do not have anything like a single correct interpretation in this scheme (106).

As far as Ricoeur is concerned, a text is "discourse fixed by writing" and as it is fixed it becomes autonomous from its author. It takes on a "surplus of meaning" that, again, precludes a single correct interpretation (107). But for both Gadamer and Ricoeur--unlike Derrida and Fish--a text is "other" from the reader and has the capacity to "read the reader," to change the reader's thought rather than merely mirror it in some way.

2. The second key interpretive issue in this chapter is the question of a text's polyvalence. In keeping with Vanhoozer's quest for the single correct interpretation, he takes a substantial part of this chapter addressing literal versus allegorical interpretation. Here he draws on the stereotypical distinction between Antioch (Theodore of Mopsuestia) and Alexandria (Origen). Predictably, he endorses literal interpretation over allegorizing interpretation.

a. Literal versus Literalistic
V does make some valid distinctions. First, he is not trying to make things literal that were never meant to be literal. There are many parts of Scripture whose "plain sense" is figurative. When Revelation depicts Jesus as a lamb, it is not being literal. V is not arguing for some thoroughgoing literalism in instances where the Bible never intended to be literal.

b. Allegory versus Allegorizing
V also acknowledges that the Bible uses allegory at some points. What V would argue is that the Bible is upfront about such allegories. What it does not do, he would say, is allegorize as an interpretive method in a way that dismisses the original meaning. This is important for much evangelical hermeneutics for, as I've said before, one of the core values of much evangelical hermeneutics is the importance of reading the Bible in context.

But what happens if, as we try to read the Bible in context, we find that the NT does not try to read the OT in context? A good case can be made that this finding would deconstruct evangelical hermeneutics or at least (as in my case), require some shuffling of it.

So V endorses typology as the way. Typology, so the story goes, acknowledges the original meaning before attaching a figurative meaning to it that is in continuity with it. Allegorizing, on the other hand, might not pay any attention to the intended meaning at all. It might even dismiss it in preference for some spiritualized or allegorical meaning.

I personally think there is much to commend Augustine's use of allegorical interpretation. Whenever the literal meaning of the biblical text would seem to contradict the "rule of faith," we are permitted to spiritualize the text in some way. This is, in my opinion, the way the NT authors themselves interpreted the OT.

I am aware also that this approach involves a host of interpretive and theological worms. I would also claim, however, that we are fooling ourselves if we think they were ever in a can in the first place.

c. Metaphor
The final part of this chapter is dedicated to various views of metaphor. Let's present three approaches to metaphor: 1) the Aristotelian approach, 2) the Ricoeurian approach, and 3) the Derridaian approach. My read is that V favors the second, as long as an author intended to use metaphor :-)

1) Aristotle apparently bequeathed us with a sense of metaphor as a poor substitute for the literal. Metaphor simply substitutes y for x. Hermeneutics is a can of worms. Aristotle would apparently say you should just say it literally: Hermeneutics involves all sorts of difficult questions.

2) Ricoeur rightly rejects this impoverished understanding of metaphor. For Ricoeur, a metaphor creates new meaning that was not present literally. It does this by placing two unlike things next to each other.

Tell me, I ask you, what is the literal equivalent of "the trees will clap their hands"? It doesn't nearly carry the meaning of the metaphor. I pronounce at an end the impoverished era of religious history in which things like ritual, myth, and symbol were derided as defective because they do not function on a literal level.

Hogwash! These are the richest levels of meaning--far greater than can be expressed in literal terms. I decry the embarrassing myopia of centuries of stupidity.

3) But Ricoeur does believe in literal meaning, as do I and as does Vanhoozer. Derrida, and a host of theologians in his train, however, do not accept that there ever is such a thing as literal meaning. Everything is metaphor without us being able to distinguish more from less literal.

I have a really big footnote to add to this comment. Someone who has followed my philosophical ramblings will recognize that my comment here seems to contradict things I have said elsewhere. For the moment let it suffice to say that I find the distinction between literal and figurative a distinction that works very well.

Chapter 6 tomorrow (d.v.)