I (Still) Believe: Walter Brueggemann

This week's sample from John Byron and Joel Lohr's, I (Still) Believe is Walter Brueggemann. Last week we sampled the chapter on Richard Bauckham.

1. The name of Walter Brueggeman will be familiar to many. The work that put him on the radar of many of us was The Prophetic Imagination, in which he traces the rise of power in the Old Testament and then shows the prophetic critique of that power. He is thus a champion for those who emphasize social justice and the social dimensions of the gospel.

In this chapter, we catch a possible hint of the origins of that emphasis in his childhood. His father was a dirt poor pastor for a community with extensive financial resources.

2. Brueggemann grew up in the "Evangelical and Reformed Church," which at the time he was being ordained merged to form the United Church of Christ. I have of course heard of the UCC, but knew nothing of its origins. It goes back to 1817 and Prussia when the king of Prussia got tired of the Lutherans and Calvinists fighting each other theologically and created a "Prussian Union." Because theology could not be the uniting point of the church, its principle of unity became more pietist and social justice focused.

Since theology was not the focus of Brueggemann's tradition, modernism did not create a serious crisis for his tradition. By the time he was born, his pastors and teachers already knew about German criticism but it was of little concern to them. The focus of preaching was on social justice and on an irenic spirit. He speaks of his rural home community: "The contrast between an evangelical congregation [his] and that of the Missouri Synod could not have been sharper. The Missouri Synod was (and continues to be) militantly exclusionary and vigilant about its doctrinal purity in a way that let the evangelical church be seen, by contrast, as wondrously free and open" (31).

This comment sparked a question about our current religious landscape in the US. I wondered if you took the fervor and organizational skill of a mega-church pastor and put it in a UCC pastor, might not that tradition be able to spark a revival among the nones right now, to save them from the abandonment of Christianity in a way that no remnant church is likely to do at this time? I don't expect it to happen, of course.

3. I'm probably telling too much. Pre-order the book! Brueggemann tells of the important teacher influences of his life at Elmhurst College and Eden Seminary. The Niebuhr's are mentioned, along with James Muilenburg, Brevard Childs, and Paul Ricoeur. His teachers/influences enabled him to listen to the story of the Old Testament as a story full of truths, rather than to get preoccupied with questions of historicity, along with source and form analysis.

"When our certitudes and our formulations of them are small, they cannot withstand the force of biblical criticism" (41). "I have never felt that critical study has in any way jeopardized my faith" (40). "The church is my 'natural habitat' for work" (41).

4. He gives some good advice at the end of the chapter, including "Do not arrive too soon at fixed, settled positions" (41). "Read widely and deeply." "Remember that we are not the first ones to struggle with these issues" (42). And perhaps most importantly, "We are always the 'junior partner' in interpretation. The senior partner is God's own Spirit."

5. Ricoeur has played a similar role in my own ability to transcend the "smally formulated certitudes" of fundamentalism. Brueggemann mentions Ricoeur's "orientation-disorientation-reorientation" schema. A solid training in biblical studies will often lead to disorientation to those who grew up in narrow circles. But this need not lead to a loss of faith. Faith-ful scholars like Brueggemann show us one way.

My Response to Ricoeur

For a little over a month now, I have been reading through Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory. I would now like to appropriate it (see what I did there).

1. First, let me mention some aspects of his enterprise that I most appreciated. The first is his sense that the approaches of philosophers of meaning like Ferdinand de Saussure and his trajectory ending with Jacques Derrida are insufficient because 1) they do not properly take into account the fact that a sentence is a different level of meaning than a mere word and 2) the fact that the sentence often involves a reference to the world outside language. There are reasonable, although not definitive, limiting factors in the proposed meaning of a text.

The second is his sense that a written text is severed from its author. It takes on a life of its own. We call this the semantic autonomy of the text. An author cannot control what a text will come to mean once he or she is no longer present. In that sense, it potentially takes on a universal audience. Once Paul dispatched his letter to the Philippians, he lost control over its potential meaning and he opened up the door that not just the Philippians would read the letter but that countless people 2000 years later would.

On metaphor, I am very good with his basic definition, which I take from Time and Narrative--a metaphor is the creation of a new semantic pertinence by the comparison of two unlike things. I agree that a metaphor is not a mere ornament but that new meaning is created in its use. Indeed, I believe metaphor, figure, poetry, and ritual tend to be far more powerful than the literal--a sign of the impoverishment of a certain strand of Protestant thinking (not Wesleyan).

2. I used to feel stupid a lot in school when I didn't understand a thinker. To be sure, there were those who were able to catch on to those thinkers from the start. But over the years I've come to have two other thoughts as well. First, sometimes those thinkers just didn't make sense. I didn't understand some of them because I expected what they were saying to make sense and they just plain didn't (Plato, Leibniz come to mind).

The second thought is really more a matter of annoyance. Some philosophers invent their own language and then call you stupid for not understanding them. I find Heidegger and Hegel the worse offenders here. I'm not sure I would entirely put Ricoeur in that category, but there were times reading this book that I wondered if he was being unnecessarily "poetic."

It's fine to engage in a discussion with peers who are already in the discussion with you. You don't have to explain Gadamer or Dilthey to a room of philosophers. Actually, in that respect Ricoeur explained a lot that he wouldn't have had to. Thanks, Paul. :-)

3. Ricoeur wrote in the hey day of structuralism, so his lingering on the text-in-itself was understandable. I thought his run through Jakobson's six factors in relation to the fixation of meaning in writing quite brilliant. Ricoeur rightly points to "ostensive" features of texts that refer to things in the real world outside of language.

However, I believe he is ultimately wrong to believe that a text has a meaning-in-itself. There is no sense inherent in a text-in-itself. There is no understanding that corresponds to the text-in-itself. There is no objectivity in the text. There is no logical or atemporal or ideological aspect of a text that is not a construct or an abstraction, a heuristic device, not truly something that inheres in the text itself. There is only a text-as-uttered and a text-as-received. A text has no fixed meaning-in-itself without a context.

The text-as-meaning does not exist in itself. It only exists as understood by a mind against a context. This is, I believe, a fundamental implication of Wittgenstein. There is no unambiguous meaning "behind" the text. The text does not point to a stable meaning beyond or behind it in itself. The text has a meaning as a function of a mind receiving it as interpreted against the language games the reader can play against the forms of life of which the reader is aware.

That meaning is a function of the language-games-situated-in-forms-of-life of the person receiving the text, including its own author. These interpretations of the text can be as varied as those who read the text. The understanding of the author is one of these interpretations, but it is not the only one. Concrete references to the outside world can be part of those language games and forms of life but they can also be fictive.

I think I'll leave it at that. It would be fun to rewrite this book and tweak it from my perspective, but no time or reason for that.

4. As relates to the Bible, we can apply these fundamental insights as I have repeatedly over the years. There was an event of meaning when these texts were fixed in writing. An expert will point out that some biblical writings were formed in multiple events of meaning, yielding at times complex layers of potential meaning in biblical texts beyond the bare polyvalence of texts in general.

These first meanings were overwhelmingly if not entirely functions of the language games and forms of life of the original authors and audiences. Even the original situation involved potential variations between the writer and audience/reader who shared the same forms of life and language games.

The language games and forms of life of those in New Testament times were already different from those of the Old Testament. Therefore, it is completely predictable and expected that the New Testament authors would interpret the OT texts in different ways than they were originally understood. The resistance of some to this notion in certain circles is intellectually perverse in the extreme.

The overwhelmingly vast sea of differing interpretations of the Bible especially in Protestantism is also entirely predictable. The "autonomous text," freed from the moorings of its original contexts, assumes the form of the countless readers throughout history reading these words in countless forms of life against the domain of possible language games within those forms of life. "Scripture alone" does not exist. Scripture-as-interpreted is all that exists.

When there is an external authority to render the "right" interpretation, the meaning of the text stabilizes.  This was the case to a great extent within Roman Catholicism and it is increasingly the case within the evangelical hegemony in the United States. But the stable meaning of the text in these cases is deceptive. What is stable is the interpretive community with its authoritative reading of the text.

The situation is complicated by the fact that we are more aware of historical meaning since the historical revolution of the 1800s. Fundamentalism was a reaction to this "attack from within." Whereas the pre-modern might simply reinterpret the words, history threatened to fix the meaning in the times and places when the texts were written. But these fixed points weren't always what traditional faith wanted them to be.

So boundaries were fixed to what you were allowed to let the text mean, and a kind of pretend historical method was used in the process. So you looked like you were playing the game of history, a game that you cannot, not play (or intentionally choose not to play), to the extent you understand it. But while the motions of historical evidence gathering were played, the game was rigged so that the right interpretation would be attained.

So fundamentalist and mainstream evangelical interpretation is a strange amalgam of old and new. We find original meaning glued to theological re-appropriations in order to create a sociologically enforced interpretation.

5. I would rather keep the hot part hot and the cold part cold. The text had a meaning-in-context. We cannot fully reconstruct the intention of the author but we can reconstruct a spectrum of more and less likely originally intended and received meanings to the biblical texts. Let them be what they are. Anything else is just dishonest and the sign of an errant hermeneutic.

But we can still allow for theologically reinterpreted readings of the text. This is a category that Spirit-oriented traditions should be open to. Cannot the Spirit speak in new ways through the same texts? The NT use of the OT would suggest so.

What is the excluded middle? The text-alone approach. The mainstream evangelical/high Protestant approach becomes the one that is more or less hermeneutically incoherent.

There is room for progressive revelation, which sees a developing and unfolding in the biblical texts, as God moves and speaks from situation to situation. There is room for an orthodox reading of the text, which takes as its Archimedian point the consensus of the Church written large but does not in pre-modern fashion pretend that these were always the original meanings. There is room for pneumatic traditions, that see the text still as an instrument of revelation by the Holy Spirit.

All these are coherent readings. Everything else is either unreflective or hermeneutically perverse.

Ricoeur: Conclusion

Finally, the conclusion of Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, a series of foundational lectures on hermeneutics that he gave in 1973 at Texas Christian University.

1. Language as Discourse
2. Speaking and Writing
3. Metaphor and Symbol
4. Explanation and Understanding

In these last seven pages or so, Ricoeur concludes his series of essays. He returns especially to a dialectic he presented in the second essay, the dialectic between the distanciation of a written text and our appropriation of it. We are estranged from a written text in that it has been severed of its context and author, yet somehow it creates a new way of being in the world for us.

This is the question of how distance can be made productive (89).

He finds the key to his answer in the text as a world in itself. He repeats his disagreement with Romanticist or "historicist" hermeneutics. To explain a text, for him, is not to see it as an expression of certain socio-cultural needs, a response to perplexities localized in space and time (90).

He is more sympathetic, although not uncritical of the trajectory of Frege and Husserl, which sees a text to have its own ideality. They pushed back against the hermeneutics of Dilthey--"the act of verstehen is less geschichtlich and more logisch" (91). Understanding a text is less historical and more logical. A text is "a kind of atemporal object."

Ricoeur says, "I agree" with the main presupposition of this trajectory--"the objectivity of meaning in general." "The semantic autonomy of written discourse and the self-contained existence of the literary work are ultimately grounded in the objectivity of meaning of oral discourse itself" (91). "The text--objectified and dehistoricized--becomes the necessary mediation between writer and reader," not the inner psychic connection of Dilthey.

Thus far he has summarized the element of distanciation. Now he moves on to appropriation.

"To 'make one's own' what was previously 'foreign' remains the aim of all hermeneutics" (91). "Appropriation remains the concept for the actualization of the meaning as addressed to somebody" (92). Now severed from its context, "potentially a text is addresse to anyone who can read. Actually, it is addressed to me, hic et nunc," here and now. "As appropriation, interpretation becomes an event."

He then addresses several misconceptions of appropriation. First, for him, appropriation is not a return to Romanticist hermeneutics. It is not about finding the intention of the author or the original historical situation. Those are technically lost. "What has to be appropriated is the meaning of the text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text" (92).

Appropriation is not about recovering the inner life of another ego, that of the author. It is about disclosing a possible way of looking at things for me as a reader. "Appropriation has nothing to do with any kind of person to person appeal. "To understand an author better than he could understand himself is to display the power of disclosure implied in his discourse beyond the limited horizon of his own existential situation" (93).

In Gadamerian fashion, the ideality of the text, its self-contained ahistoricity, mediates a fusion between the horizon of the reader and the horizon of the author.

A second misconception is the notion that it is the original addressee of the text that rules the hermeneutical task. For Ricoeur, "the letters of Paul are no less addressed to me than to the Romans, the Galatians, the Corinthians, and the Ephesians" (93). "The text has escaped its original addressee."

Finally, he rejects the notion that the interpretation of a text by a reader is contained by the finite capacities of the understanding of a reader (93-94). "What is 'made one's own' is not something mental, not the intention of another subject, presumably hidden behind the text, but the project of a world, the pro-position of a mode of being in the world that the text opens up in front of itself by means of its non-ostensive references" (94).

"If the reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself" (94).

In this way, appropriation is not a matter of possessing the text but a "dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego" (94). "Only the interpretation that complies with the injunction of the text, that follows the 'arrow' of the sense and that tries to think accordingly, initiates a new self-understanding."

The "ego," the I that precedes the text, receives a "self" from the understanding of the text.

Here endeth the reading.

Ricoeur Review 4: Explanation and Understanding

Now the fourth essay in Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, a series of foundational lectures on hermeneutics that he gave in 1973 at Texas Christian University.

1. Language as Discourse
2. Speaking and Writing
3. Metaphor and Symbol

Now the final chapter before the conclusion, "Explanation and Understanding."

The first essay in the series dealt with the speaker and an utterance--"What is meant when somebody speaks?" (71). The second dealt with a writer and a text--What is meant "when somebody writes?" Then the third essay dealt with the situation "when somebody means more than what he actually says."

Now this final essay deals with the reader and a text. "What is it to understand a discourse when that discourse is a text or literary work?"

1. Beyond Romanticist Hermeneutics
There is a little bit of background that Ricoeur draws on that we might clarify from the beginning. By "Romanticist hermeneutics," Ricoeur refers to a hermeneutic that aims to "understand an author better than he understood himself" (75). That is, it is an approach to a text that aims to recover the psychic state of an author in writing, the author's intention.

In an endnote, Ricoeur distinguishes himself from E. D. Hirsch on this score: "the intention of the author is lost as a psychic event" (100). In actuality, Ricoeur and Hirsch share much in common, especially over and against those like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida who have more or less completely divorced the meaning of a text from its writer. But Ricoeur nevertheless draws a clear line between the psychic intention of an author and what we as readers actually have in front of us, namely, a text.

In Ricoeur's description, Romanticist hermeneutics draws a sharp distinction between explanation and understanding. Explanation is something you do in science (Naturwissenschaften). You make a hypothesis and test it. By contrast, understanding relates to the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) where we understand the speaker on the basis of our common human experiences. Interpretation is then a subcategory of understanding in the case when we connect with the mind of the speaker indirectly through writing.

Ricoeur of course rejects this neat partitioning. "Understanding and explanation tend to overlap and to pass over into each other" (72). He thinks of understanding as comprehending a text as a whole, in one act of synthesis that pulls together the chain of partial meanings that go sentence by sentence. Explanation then, for him, is the unfolding of the range of propositions and meanings.

His understanding in this essay goes back to a maxim he set out in the first lecture: "If discourse is produced as an event, it is understood as meaning" (73). So in reading, in Ricoeur's terminology, understanding is the event of reading. "The first time, understanding will be a naive grasping of the meaning of the text as a whole" (74). "In the beginning, understanding is a guess."

Explanation is then, in his terminology, "is more directed toward the analytic structure of the text." (74). It relates to the meaning of the discourse (71). Meanwhile, he uses the term "comprehension" for "a sophisticated mode of understanding, supported by explanatory procedures." That is, after a circular process of understanding, then explaining, then understanding again, we move toward comprehending a text.

This entire process, in Ricoeur's terminology, is the process of interpretation. Interpretation is "the whole process that encompasses explanation and understanding" (74).

2. From Guess to Validation
So, according to Ricoeur, the first act of understanding a text takes the form of a guess. "With writing, the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with the mental meaning or intention of the text" (75). "Consequently, to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has been objectified."

"The author can no longer 'rescue' his work" (75). Inevitably, the meaning of the text surpasses the intention of the author (thus the subtitle of this book, the "surplus of meaning"). The dialectic (back and forth) of erklären (explanation) and verstehen (understanding) begins with this surplus of meaning in the text over and against the author's intent. "Misunderstanding is possible and even unavoidable" (76).

Guess is unavoidable at the start. "To construe the meaning as the verbal meaning of the text is to make a guess" (76). "There are no rules for making good guesses." However, "there are methods for validating those guesses we do make."

"The transition from guessing to explaining is secured by an investigation of the specific object of guessing" (76). Ricoeur suggests three dimensions to that investigation. First, there is a conceptualization of the text as a whole. This is more than just a sense of a text sentence by sentence because "a work of discourse [emphasis on the word, "work"] is more than a linear sequence of sentences. It is a cumulative, holistic process."

A complex work will have a certain "plurivocity" that goes beyond the "polysemy" of individual words and the ambiguity of individual sentences. There is a circular process of reconstructing the text's architecture, a construal of the whole in a recognition of the parts and then the parts again in the light of the whole, and around again.

Second, the individual text is located within known genres of texts. One may know a type of work with certain general characteristics. How does this specific text stand within that genre? There is a "process of narrowing down the scope of generic concepts, which include the literary genre, the class of texts to which this text belongs, and the types of codes and structures that intersect in this text" (77).

There is a "perspectival" aspect to these processes. "The text as a whole and as a singular whole may be compared to an object, which may be viewed from several sides" (77). "A specific kind of onesidedness is implied in the act of reading. This onesidedness grounds the guess character of interpretation" (78).

Finally, there is the question of "potential horizons of meaning, which may be actualized in different ways" (78). Ricoeur especially seems to have the question of metaphor and symbolism in view here. Are there multiple meanings beyond the meaning in general? Metaphor and symbol "provide a decisive extension to the field of meaningful expressions." They "open the work to several readings."

In exploring all the dimensions of reading a text above, the guess of the reader is the starting point of interpretation in the back and forth (dialectic) between understanding in the light of explaining and then explaining in the light of understanding and so forth.

We test our guesses, looking for validation. Ricoeur agrees with Hirsch that this process is "closer to a logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification" (78). That is to say, we will not find certainty in the meaning of the text, only perhaps probability of meaning. The "hermeneutical circle" is a dialog between a subjective approach to the text (the guess, the perspective, which relates to the Romanticist's Geisteswissenschaft) and the objective meaning of the text under investigation (which is something like the Romanticist's Naturwissenschaft). But these two converge rather than being clearly separate and distinct, as in Romanticist hermeneutics.

"To the procedures of validation there also belong procedures of invalidation similar to the criteria of falsifiability proposed by Karl Popper" (79). There is a competition between competing interpretations. "An interpretation must not only be probable, but more probable than another interpretation." "It is not true that all interpretations are equal."

3. From Explanation to Comprehension
Comprehension, for Ricoeur, is something like the goal of this dialog between understanding as a sense of the text's meaning as a whole and explanation as the unfolding of its parts. It is something like the goal of a reading process than has moved from guess to validation. Understanding in this process, for him, is the process of guessing meaning, while explaining is the process of validating or falsifying those guesses.

In his consideration of this goal of comprehension, Ricoeur returns to another dimension of communication from the first and second essays, namely, the dialectic between sense and reference. The second essay spoke of how "the referential function of written texts is deeply affected by the lack of situation common to both writer and reader" (80). It is even possible in some literary works for the referential intention to be suspended.

Ricoeur conceptualizes the dialog between explanation and comprehension to an adventure in the referential function of the text. He suggests two options for comprehending the text that open up when we consider the reference of the text from the standpoint of the reader.

The trajectory of this final part of the essay might be summed up in some statements at the end of the essay. "To understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says, to what it talks about" (87-88). The world behind the text had to do with the author. A text in relation to a reader, however, for Ricoeur, does not point backward. It points forward. "The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it" (87). It "points toward a possible world" for the reader.

While Ricoeur surely sees some relationship between this world the text creates and the event of text creation in its past, the final part of this essay seems to lose all track of the event of text creation and its encoded meaning. He suggests two attitudes in relation to the text as a reader, which form a sort of movement in his mind. [1]

First, he legitimates interpretations of texts that suspend the referential function altogether. Here he especially has in mind structuralist interpretations. "According to this choice, the text no longer has an exterior, it only has an interior" (81). [2]

For several pages, Ricoeur then addresses structuralist approaches to myth and narrative, which he considers examples of interpretations which suspend the referential function of language. He begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss' analyses of myth. Strauss analyzes the components of myth (mythemes) much like phonemes come together to make combinations of sounds and morphemes come together to make combinations of grammatical bits. Mythemes are for him the constituent units of the myth.

As an example, Ricoeur looks at Strauss' analysis of the Oedipus myth. Strauss makes four columns. In the first and second he puts family relationships that are over-esteemed and then under-esteemed. In the third and fourth columns he puts monsters with their destruction and then words relating to the difficulty of walking properly. Strauss sees polarities in these columns that imply a certain underlying explanation of the myth. (although Ricoeur would say, not an interpretation of it--we have not re-enacted it so that its power comes out)

As another example of suspension of the referential function, Ricoeur turns to the narrative analyses of Greimas. A narrative is segmented into units. The logic of action involves the linking together of action kernels. We see a certain underlying narrative logic. We also see relationships between the roles in the narrative, a "hierarchy of actors correlative to the hierarchy of actions" (85).

But these analyses, which suspend the referential dimension of the text, still point toward the reader in front of the text.

The second possibility that emerges from Ricoeur's analysis is that the text will be read against "a new situation" (81), namely, that of the reader. "Nobody stops with a conception of myths and narratives as formal as this algebra of constitutive units" (86). This whole "system of oppositions and combinations" points beyond itself to the underlying existential conflicts of human experience. The Oedipus myth would not be meaningful if it were not for the underlying human oppositions of "birth and death, blindness and lucidity, sexuality and truth." These are referential dimensions to the reader in front of the text.

"Could we not then say that the function of the structural analysis is to lead us from a surface semantics [the suspended referential dimension]... to a depth semantics, that of the boundary situations, which constitute the ultimate 'referent' of the myth?" (87).

So structural analysis is "one stage--albeit a necessary one--between a naive interpretation and a critical one, between a surface interpretation and a depth interpretation" (87). The structural analysis relates to the sense of the text and the depth interpretation relates to its reference. The depth interpretation "points toward a possible world."

"Understanding has less than ever to do with the author and his situation. It seeks to grasp the world-propositions opened up by the reference of the text. To understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says, to what it talks about" (87-88). [3]

"What we have said about the depth semantics that structural analysis yields rather invites us to think of the sense of the text as an injunction coming from the text, as a new way of looking at things, as an injunction to think in a certain manner" (88). "The text speaks of a possible world and of a possible way of orientating oneself within it."

[1] In this last section, Ricoeur seems to lose sight of one particular kind of reading scheme whose goal is, as much as possible, to try to reconstruct the most likely intended, historical senses and references of the text.

[2] We can question whether or not it is really possible truly to suspend the referential function of a text. All readings of texts are, in the end, reader readings that presuppose a world. There is no text-in-itself, as far as meaning is concerned.

[3] It seems to me that Ricoeur here slightly alters his use of the word "understand" from the way he has used it earlier in this essay. Earlier, he has used it of the first guess at a text's meaning. It seems that he would be more consistent here if he used the word "comprehend" instead of "understand."

Monday Ricoeur: Metaphor and Symbol 3

This is now my third installment of Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, a series of foundational lectures on hermeneutics that he gave in 1973 at Texas Christian University.

1. Language as Discourse
2. Speaking and Writing
________________
Now for the third chapter: Metaphor and Symbol

1. Introduction
Ricoeur considers a treatment of metaphor and symbol important for a theory of verbal signification to have its "greatest possible extension" (45). There were those in the early twentieth century, easily following the trajectory of Aristotle and others, who saw metaphors as non-cognitive and emotional, rather than cognitive features of language. By contrast, Ricoeur means to show that "metaphor is the touchstone of the cognitive value of literary works."

In this essay, Ricoeur will revisit a topic from his earlier work as well--the symbol. What distinguishes the symbol from the metaphor, in his view, is that symbols are not merely semantic (like metaphors). Symbols involve something non-semantic as well. More on this topic in a moment.

2. The Theory of Metaphor
In Ricoeur's day, it was common to see a metaphor as "bereft of any cognitive significance" (46). Metaphors were analyzed on the model of denotation and connotation. In this approach, "only the denotation is cognitive and, as such... of a cognitive order." Denotation refers to the basic meaning of a word.

I personally think of connotations as overtones beyond the basic meaning. The older approach to metaphor saw connotation as "extra-semantic because it consists of the weaving together of emotive evocations, which lack cognitive value" (46). He visits Aristotle, where metaphor is merely a matter of naming. For Cicero, metaphor is simply an abridged comparison.

Aristotle isolates words from one another (he thus can be critiqued by Ricoeur as not looking at meaning from the standpoint of the sentence). In the ancient rhetoricians, the function of rhetoric is to please or perhaps seduce the audience, to persuade them, and in that sense a metaphor might prove of some value.

Ricoeur sums up how the ancients treated metaphors: 1) as a trope, a simple substitution of one word for another, a figure of discourse relating to the "denomination" of an individual word or two, 2) as an extension of the meaning of a name, derived from the literal meaning of the word or words, 3) based on a resemblance of some kind, 4) with the literal word easily being substituted for the metaphor instead and the meaning remaining the same. Thus, 5) there is no semantic innovation with the use of metaphor and 6) no new information involved. It serves a merely emotive function (49).

Ricoeur's move is ingenius. He "shifts the problem of metaphor from the semantics of the word to the semantics of the sentence" (47). This move will allow him to provide a purely semantic definition for all literature in its three essential classes, poetry, essays, and prose fiction.

Ricoeur proceeds to reject the above presuppositions about metaphor. "Metaphor has to do with semantics of the sentence before it concerns the semantics of a word" (49). That is to say, it is a "phenomenon of predication, not denomination" (50). Metaphors involve a tension, not between two words or names, but between two interpretations. "A metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through an interpretation." Ricoeur thus undermines the second presupposition above.

Now he attacks the third. A metaphor is not the clothing of an idea in an image based on comparison or similarity. Rather, for him the key semantic feature of a metaphor derives from the dissimilarity. How can these two dissimilar things be connected, we ask ourselves? The act of "reducing the shock engendered by two incompatible ideas" helps us find the resemblance that gives meaning.

The tension between two interpretations of meaning brings the creation of new meaning. There is no mere substitution of one word for another as in #4, and a new meaning takes place, against #5 and 6. "A new signification emerges" (52). "A metaphor is an instantaneous creation, a semantic innovation which has no status in already established language and which only exists because of the attribution of an unusual or an unexpected predicate."

Ricoeur thus does not include dead metaphors as metaphors any longer. There is no longer a tension in their use ("the foot of a chair"). Their extended meaning has become part of our lexicon. "There are no live metaphors in a dictionary" (52).

Therefore, "real metaphors are not translatable" (52). They can be paraphrased in many ways but a single word cannot be substituted for them. And metaphors are not mere ornaments of discourse.

3. From Metaphor to Symbol
Introduction
Ricoeur now switches to a treatment of symbols, a topic which has not long been studied by rhetoricians and which, unlike metaphor, moves beyond the merely linguistic and semantic. For example, psychoanalysis deals with things like dreams and other symbols relating to deep psychic conflicts. Poetics in the broad sense can engage persistent figures within a culture or a school of literature. Then there is the religious use of symbols that engages symbols of space and time, of transcendence, and the wholly other.

Symbols thus belong to too many and too diverse fields of research for their study to be as easy as the study of metaphor, and they bring together the linguistic order together with the non-linguistic order.

Nevertheless, Ricoeur believes that his approach to metaphor can clarify the significance of symbols. He aims first to identify the semantic kernel of a symbol. This move in turn will help him isolate the non-linguistic stratum of symbols. This will finally allow him to complete his theory of metaphor.

The Semantic Moment of a Symbol
To begin with, "the symbol, in effect, only gives rise to thought if it gives rise to speech" (55). Within language, the tension theory of metaphor he is laying out can provide an entry point for understanding the semantic dimension of symbols. "The metaphorical twist, which our words must undergo in response to the semantic impertinence at the level of the entire sentence, can be taken as the model for the extension of meaning operative in every symbol."

There is an "excess of signification in a symbol," just as there is in a metaphor. "It is the recognition of the literal meaning that allows us to see that a symbol still contains more meaning. This surplus of meaning is the residue of the literal interpretation" (55). "Yet for the one who participates in the symbolic signification there are really not two significations, one literal and the other symbolic, but rather a single movement."

As a side note, he takes a moment here to distinguish symbol from allegory. "Allegory is a rhetorical procedure that can be eliminated once it has done its job. Having ascended the ladder, we can then descend it. Allegory is a didactic procedure" (56). I'm not sure if this will do, but it is suggestive.

In symbol, we speak of assimilation rather than apprehension. "The symbol assimilates rather than apprehends a resemblance" (56). "All the boundaries are blurred--between the things as well as between the things and ourselves." "There is more in a symbol than in any of its conceptual equivalents" (57).

But it gives rise to concepts. Ricoeur disagrees with those who make us choose between symbols and concepts. Rather, "symbols give rise to endless exegesis" (57). "No given categorization can embrace all the semantic possibilities of a symbol. But it is the work of the concept alone that can testify to this surplus of meaning."

The Non-Semantic Moment of a Symbol
After clarifying the semantic dimension of symbols, Ricoeur now seeks to clarify the non-semantic dimension of symbols. "The opacity of a symbol is related to the rootedness of symbols in areas of our experience that are open to different methods of investigation" (57). Psychoanalysis, for example, delves into sleep. Poetry, he says, connects to a global form of behavior. And religious symbols engage engagement with supernatural forces, "which dwell in the depths of human existence, transcending and dominating it" (58).

"It is the task of many disciplines to reveal the lines that attach the symbolic function to this or that non-symbolic or pre-linguistic activity" (58).

The rest of this section analyzes the symbols of these three areas: psychoanalysis, poetics, and religious symbols. Ricoeur's basic conclusion is that "what asks to be brought to language in symbols, but which never passes completely into language, is always something powerful, efficacious, forceful" (63). They involve a "dialectic of power and form... which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life."

For psychoanalysis, symbols skirt the boundary between desire and culture, the boundary between primary repression (of our impulses versus reality) and secondary repression (the restrictions of society and culture). "Psychoanalysis must develop a mixed language," a mixture of the inner and the outer (58). Dream accounts involve a kind of "palimpsest, riddle or hieroglyph," a distorted presentation of a mixed inner and outer reality.

Thus while "metaphor occurs in the already purified universe of the logos... the symbol hesistates [sic] on the dividing line between bios and logos. It testifies to the primordial rootedness of Discourse in Life. It is born where force and form coincide" (59).

Ricoeur's treatment of poetic language seems a little more forced, but we can see that he is engaging it with a hint of the same psychological underbelly as he approached psychoanalysis. "The poetic project is one of destroying the world as we ordinarily take it for granted" (59).

Boundedness is significant for Ricoeur in this section. As he will say of religious symbolism, "The bound character of symbols makes all the difference between a symbol and a metaphor. The latter is a free invention of discourse; the former is bound by the cosmos" (61). So in poetics, "the poem is bound by what it creates" (60) just as in dreams and deep psychology, there is a boundedness of the symbols to our psychic reality.

Yet, in regard to poetics, the hypothetical realm created brings to life new meanings, "new ways of being in the world" (60). "What binds poetic discourse, then, is the need to bring to language modes of being that ordinary vision obscures or even represses."

His discussion of religious symbolism brings this discussion of the non-semantic boundedness of symbol home. He references Rudolph Otto's sense of the numinous (the transcendent that creates awe, as in Isaiah 6) and Mircea Eleade's sense of hierophany (manifestation of the sacred). There is a power to the sacred that cannot be captured in speech. It does not "pass over completely into the articulation of meaning" (61).

"The numinous element is not first a question of language, if it ever really becomes one, for to speak of power is to speak of something other than speech" (60). There is a preverbal character of such experience.

"The bond between myth and ritual attests in another way to this non-linguistic dimension of the Sacred" (61). Perhaps Ricoeur again goes too far, but his fundamental point is that there is a logic of correspondences between the universe and the Sacred and this law of correspondences makes religious language bounded by the universe rather than freely composed, as in metaphor.

"A temple always conforms to some celestial model" (62). There are intrinsic correspondences between the body, houses, and the cosmos. The skull is like a roof. Our breath is like the wind. A rite of passage is like a bridge.

But without language, "the Sacred would remain unmanifested" (62). Ritual is also a "modality of making or doing--a doing of something marked by power." But it would "lack the power to organize space and time without an instituting word." "Symbolism only works when its structure is interpreted... a minimal hermeneutic is required for the functioning of symbolism" (62-63). But the interpretation presupposes the symbol. "The revealing grounds the saying, not the reverse" (63).

4. The Intermediate Degrees between Symbol and Metaphor
Having explored the character of symbols, Ricoeur now returns to the metaphor, to see if his venture might in turn further clarify his starting point in the essay.

Ricoeur suggests three ways in which the foray into symbols shows how certain metaphors--especially those that have a connection to symbols--can have staying power beyond the moment of invention. How can the metaphor of the moment, a moment of invention in an event of discourse, resist simply becoming trivial and then a dead metaphor? And why is it that symbols seem to have staying power, that symbols never die.

The first potential extending factor is the fact that metaphors can function in a network or chain of metaphors. This is when "one metaphor, in effect, calls for another and each one stays alive by conserving its power to evoke the whole network" (84). Ricoeur uses the imagery of God in the Hebraic tradition--he is King, Father, Husband, Lord, Shepherd, Judge, Rock, Fortress, and so forth. These interconnections create a kind of equilibrium.

There is a "root metaphor" here of sorts, Ricoeur claims, that both assembles and scatters. The network "assembles subordinate images together, and they scatter concepts at a higher level" (64).

A second factor that potentially extends the life of a metaphor is a potential hierarchical structure. "Certain fundamental human experiences make up an immediate symbolism that presides over the most primitive metaphorical order" (65). "This anthropological and cosmic symbolism is in a kind of subterranean communication with our libidinal sphere."

Then there can be metaphors that build on these more fundamental metaphors--what Philip Wheelwright calls archetypes. "Everything indicates that symbol systems constitute a reservoir of meaning whose metaphoric potential is yet to be spoken" (65). "The most insistent metaphors hold fast to the intertwining of the symbolic infrastructure and metaphorical superstructure."

The final factor that extends the longevity of metaphor is its potentially referential dimension, the use of metaphor as a model for interpreting the world. Here Ricoeur recaps Frege, whom he mentioned in the first lecture. The sense of a statement is "the pure predicative relation, the reference its pretention to say something about reality, in short, its truth value" (66). The sense is what it says. The reference is what it says it about.

As in science, metaphors can serve like a theoretical model in science, a way of exploring a complex domain of reality by way of a heuristic, somewhat imaginary perspective. Such a model is "an instrument of redescription" (66).

Ricoeur uses this notion in the remainder of his analysis. Metaphor can be an instrument whereby we redescribe the world. We "describe a domain of reality in terms of an imaginary theoretical model" (67, Max Black's sense of metaphors as models). It is a "way of seeing things differently by changing our language about the subject of our investigation." "Thanks to this detour through the heuristic fiction we perceive new connections among things."

So "poetry creates its own world" (67). Both poetic and scientific language "aim at a reality more real than appearances." We suspend the reality of ordinary language in the metaphor so that we can gain the benefit of a "second degree of reference" (68). We redescribe reality. From this tensive apprehension, "a new vision of reality springs forth." "the eclipse of the objective, manipulable world thus makes way for the revelation of a new dimension of reality and truth."

"Poetic language does not tell how things literally are, but what they are like" (68). "The literal 'is' is overturned by the absurdity [of the comparison and representation] and surmounted by a metaphorical 'is' [that is] equivalent to 'is like.'"

Therefore to conclude this section, he writes, "Can we not then call insistent metaphors--those metaphors that are closest to the symbolic depths of our existence--metaphors that owe their privilege of revealing what things are like [referential dimension] to their organization into networks and hierarchical levels?" (68).

Then to conclude the entire essay, he asserts to contrary propositions. "On the one side, there is more in the metaphor than in the symbol; one the other side, there is more in the symbol than in the metaphor" (68).

On the first score, a metaphor "brings to language the implicit semantics of the symbol" (69). Thus the metaphor brings out more meaning. But, on the other hand, "metaphor is just the linguistic procedure--that bizarre form of predication--within which the symbolic power is deposited" (69). "Metaphors are just the linguistic surface of symbols," while "symbols plunge us into the shadowy experience of power."

Monday Review: Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory 2

I'm making my way through Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, a series of foundational lectures on hermeneutics that he gave in 1973 at Texas Christian University.

The first chapter was Language as Discourse.
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Now the second of four: Speaking and Writing

1. Introduction
"No interpretation theory is possible that does not come to grips with the problem of writing" (25). Ricoeur has a two-fold purpose in the second essay. First, he wants to show that the theory of discourse in the first essay is what makes possible the transition from speaking to writing. Second, he wants to connect the intentional "exteriorization" of writing with a central problem of hermeneutics: distanciation.

2. From Speaking to Writing
Introduction
In writing, we have "the detachment of meaning from the event" (25). Nevertheless, Ricoeur disagrees with Derrida that writing has a distinct root from speech. Rather, "writing is the full manifestation of discourse" (25-26). He uses Roman Jakobson's schema of communication mentioned in the first essay with six main factors: speaker, hearer, medium, code, situation, and message.

Message and Medium: Fixation
The first of Jakobson's six factors Ricoeur discusses is the medium of communication in writing. "The most obvious change from speaking to writing concerns the relation between the message and its medium or channel" (26). This medium "fixes" discourse in some exterior bearer. It is not language as langue that is fixed (the system of language) but "what we want to fix is discourse." "Discourse as event disappears" (27).

"What writing actually does fix is not the event of speaking but the 'said' of speaking" (27). What is this "said" of speaking? It is "the intentional exteriorization constitutive of the couple 'event-meaning.'"

"The locutionary act exteriorizes itself in the sentence, the inner structure of which may be identified and re-identified as being the same, and which, therefore, may be inscribed and preserved." That is, the  specific words that are spoken can be exactly the same in writing as in speaking.

"To the extent that the illocutionary act can be exteriorized thanks to grammatical paradigms and procedures expressive of its 'force,' it too can be inscribed." Remember that the illocutionary force of speech is what that language is intended to do by the speaker (e.g., assert, promise, command, etc.). Because such force can often involve gesture, can involve mimicry, and other nonarticulated aspects of discourse (prosody), "the illocutionary force is less inscribable than the propositional meaning" (27).

"The perlocutionary act is the least inscribable aspect of discourse," that is, what the speaker intends the effect of the speech to be on the hearer.

"Writing is much more than mere material fixation" (28). Its invention had impact on the extension of political rule, the development of economic, the perpetuation of history, the creation of legal codes, etc. It also brings human thought directly to a material (or now electronic) medium. It is a short-cut that by-passes speaking in the communicative process. "The fate of discourse is delivered over to littera, not to vox" (29).

Message and Speaker
In spoken discourse, the "ability of discourse to refer back to the speaking subject presents a character of immediacy because the speaker belongs to the situation of interlocution" (29). "The subjective intention of the speaker and the discourse's meaning overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to understand what the speaker means and what his discourse means."

"With written discourse, however, the author's intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide" (29). "It is of decisive significance." And here is the clincher, perhaps the most important comment Ricoeur makes in his lectures thus far: "Inscription becomes synonymous with the semantic autonomy of the text, which results from the disconnection of the mental intention of the author from the verbal meaning of the text, of what the author meant and what the text means" (29-30).

This is the point where exegesis is born, because "a set of meanings... have broken their moorings to the psychology of the author" (30). Ricoeur suggests there are now two pitfalls to avoid. The one is W. K. Wimsatt's famous "intentional fallacy," which sees the author's intention as the "criterion for any valid interpretation of the text."

Yet Ricoeur also warns about what he calls the "fallacy of the absolute text: "the fallacy of hypostasizing the text as an authorless entity" (30). For Ricoeur, it is "impossible to cancel out" the fact that a text "remains a discourse told by somebody, said by someone to someone else about something." To say otherwise reduces texts "to natural objects."

Let me suggest, if I am understanding Ricoeur correctly, that he is not assuming here that the somebody speaking is the original author. In other words, autonomous texts can become something "said" by the reader to other readers/hearers. I have myself often said something similar. Meaning is a matter of minds. A text without a context (of minds interpreting it) is simply a collection of squiggles on a page.

"The semantic autonomy of the text makes the relation of event and meaning more complex... The authorial meaning becomes properly a dimension of the text to the extent that the author is not available for questioning" (30). Ricoeur is not around for me to make sure that my interpretation in the previous paragraph is the one he intended (although I'm quite certain there are Ricoeur experts out there who could reliably tell me). "The authorial meaning is the dialectical counterpart of the verbal meaning, and they have to be construed in terms of each other."

Message and Hearer
"Whereas spoken discourse is addressed to someone who is determined in advanced [sic] by the dialogical situation--it is addressed to you, the second person--a written text is addressed to an unknown reader and potentially to whoever knows how to read" (31). This is the striking "universaliziaton [sic] of the audience." The text is "liberated from the narrowness of the face-to-face situation."

On the other hand, this universalization is only potential. A book "is addressed to only a section of the public and reaches its appropriate readers through media that are themselves submitted to social rules of exclusion and admission" (31). Yet its ultimate readership and the "recognition of the work by the audience created by the work is an unpredictable event." "It is the response of the audience which makes the text important and therefore significant."

"It is part of the meaning of a text to be open to an indefinite number of readers and, therefore, of interpretations. This opportunity for multiple readings is the dialectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text" (31-32). "Hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends" (32).

Message and Code
Ricoeur suggests that the "code" of which discourse partakes when fixed in writing must certainly include literary genres. "Literary genres display some conditions which theoretically could be described without considering writing" (32). Speaking can have literary genres too, like poems, narratives, etc. Genres produce "new entities of language longer than the sentence, organic wholes irreducible to a mere addition of sentences."

Genres, Ricoeur suggests, "are the technical rules presiding over" the production of "works" like poems, narratives, and essays (33). These works are like works of art except they are "works of discourse." They are productions that involve craftsmanship.  "When discourse is transferred to the field of production it is also treated as a stuff to be shaped."

"Even oral expressions of poetic or narrative compositions rely on processes equivalent to writing. The memorization of epic poems, lyrical songs, parables and proverbs, and their ritual recitation tend to fix and even to freeze the form of the work in such a way that memory appears as the support of an inscription similar to that provided by external marks" (33).

Message and Reference
The most complex changes that take place in writing, according to Ricoeur, have to do with the reference function of communication. "The distinction between sense and reference introduces in discourse a more complex dialectic than that of event and meaning" (34).

"In spoken discourse the ultimate criterion for the referential scope of what we say is the possibility of showing the thing referred to as a member of the situation common to both speaker and hearer" (34). "All references of oral language rely on monstrations," on gestures and aspects of grammar that point to a common frame of reference between speaker and hearer (34-35). These monstrations "depend on the situation perceived as common by the members of the dialogue. All references in the dialogical situation consequently are situational" (35). [1]

"It is this grounding of reference in the dialogical situation that is shattered by writing" (35). "A gap appears between identification and monstration. The absence of a common situation generated by the spatial and temporal distance between writer and reader; the cancellation of the absolute here and now by the substitution of material external marks for the voice, face, and body of the speaker as the absolute origin of all the places in space and time; and the semantic autonomy of the text, which severs it from the present of the writer and opens it to an indefinite range of potential readers in an indeterminate time"--all these can contribute to a change in the reader's sense of the reference of the discourse."

What are the consequences of this "extension of the scope of reference beyond the narrow boundaries of the dialogical situation" (36)? First, "thanks to writing, man and only man has a world and not just a situation." It frees humanity up to refer beyond the limits of an immediate situation.

Second, we can now write fiction. We can now emphasize the message for its own sake at the expense of reference, relating to what Roman Jackobson called the "poetic" function of language, where it need not refer to the real world. Ricoeur contends "that discourse cannot fail to be about something" (36). However, there can be an "eclipsing of the reference" in fictional accounts. Only in a few very sophisticated texts, such as Mallarmé's poetry, is there a text completely devoid of reference.

"Poetic texts speak about the world. But not in a descriptive way" (37). "We ought to enlarge our concept of the world, therefore, not only to allow for non-ostensive but still descriptive references, but also to non-ostensive and non-descriptive references, those of poetic diction."

"For me, the world is the ensemble of references opened up by every kind of text, descriptive or poetic, that I have read, understood, and loved. And to understand a text is to interpolate among the predicates of our situation all the significations that make a Welt [a world] out of our Umwelt [environment, 'world around']" (37).

Ricoeur ends this section with a nod to Heidegger. "What we understand first in a discourse is not another person, but a 'pro-ject,' that is, the outline of a new way of being in the world. Only writing... in freeing itself... reveals this destination of discourse as projecting a world" (37).

3. A Plea for Writing
In this section, Ricoeur considers philosophical objections to writing. "Is not this intentional exteriorization delivered over to material marks a kind of alienation?" (38). Ricoeur intends to combat this objection with the argument that exteriority is a "necessary condition of the hermeneutical process."

Against Writing
Two philosophers in particular have attacked writing: Plato and Henri Bergson. For Plato, the exteriority of writing was "contrary to genuine reminiscence" (38).  In the Phaedrus, the Egyptian king argues that the invention of letters will make souls more forgetful. Ricoeur describes Plato's position: "Writing is like painting which generates a non-being, which in turn remains silent when asked to answer" (38-39). "Writings are indifferent to their addressees... heedless of whom they reach" (39).

For Rousseau, writing puts us on a path to separation, tyranny, and inequality. "Writing ignores its addressee just as it conceals its author" (39). "Instead of the Word of God, we have the rule of the learned and the domination of the priesthood."

For Bergson, "the written word... has severed its ties with the feeling, effort, and dynamism of thought" in the speaker... It scatters and isolates. This is why the authentic creators such as Socrates and Jesus have left no writings, and why the genuine mystics renounce statements and articulated thought" (40).

The dead imprint is unable to rescue itself.

Writing and Iconicity
These critiques call Ricoeur to legitimate writing. To do so, he considers "writing as a chapter in a general theory of iconicity" (40). In one respect, he will challenge Plato's sense that a painting is weaker and less real than living beings, mere shadow of reality.

Rather, Ricoeur suggests that images can be "iconic augmentation." The "strategy of contraction and miniaturization yields more by handling less" (40). [2] The main effect of a painting is "to increase the meaning of the universe by capturing it in the network of its abbreviated signs" (41). The paintings of the Dutch artists, for example, enhanced contrasts and gave colors their resonance. Painters of that period were "able to write a new text of reality."

"Iconicity, then, means the revelation of a real more real than ordinary reality" (42). It produces, not merely reproducing. This language seems very similar to what Ricoeur has said in the previous section about writing being able to produce a world. So also, the use of images ("iconicity") creates a new reality.

For Ricoeur, "this theory of iconicity--as aesthetic augmentation of reality--gives us the key to a decisive answer to Plato's critique of writing. Iconicity is the re-writing of reality. Writing... is a particular case of iconicity. The inscription of discourse is the transcription of the world, and the transcription is not reduplication, but metamorphosis" (42).

4. Inscription and Productive Distanciation
In this second lecture, Ricoeur has mentioned the autonomy of the text from its author, the detachment of a text from its writer. In this final section, he addresses the problematic counterpart--the "appropriation" of a text by its reader. "To appropriate is to make 'one's own' what was 'alien'" (43). "The problem of writing becomes a hermeneutical problem" at its complementary pole, reading.

The distance of a text from its reader is, on the one hand, a given, "simply a fact" (43). But it is more importantly a "dialectical trait." It stands at the center of a struggle between "otherness" and "ownness." This is the heart of overcoming cultural estrangement. "Distanciation," the otherness of the text, is the "dynamic counterpart of our need, our interest, and our effort to overcome cultural estrangement."

"Reading is the pharmakon, the 'remedy,' by which the meaning of the text is 'rescued' from the estrangement of distanciation and put in a new proximity, a proximity which suppresses and preserves the cultural distance and includes the otherness within the ownness" (43).

How can we "become contemporaneous with past geniuses," the question of the German Romantics (44)? Only this dialectic, this back-and-forth of distanciation and appropriation gives us hope in the absence of the kind of absolute knowledge that Hegel pretended to find.

"A tradition raises no philosophical problem as long as we live and dwell within it in the naiveté of the first certainty. Tradition only becomes problematic when this first naiveté is lost" (44). [3]

"The appropriation of the past proceeds along an endless struggle with distanciation. Interpretation, philosophically understood, is nothing else than an attempt to make estrangement and distanciation productive" (44).

Next Monday, lecture 3 on "Metaphor and Symbol"

[1] It seems quite easy to come up with objections to the idea of "all" here, but no doubt Ricoeur could address these objections and, in some way, surely my questions represent my own lack of full appreciation of what he is saying. Could not a literary work be recited in an oral conversation, in which the dynamics would be as distant as any writing? What of the many times when a hearer can't picture that to which the speaker is referring? I feel confident that I would have been lost in person to hear much of these lectures in Ricoeur's book, even if I had been present. What if you were to walk up on a conversation in progress that was not about the visible present of the two interlocutors? Would you always be able to tell by monstrations that to which the speaker was referring? No doubt Ricoeur would respond to this paragraph as in itself a misunderstanding of his intended meaning. Yet I feel confident I would not have understood more clearly if I had been present when he delivered these words (although I could presumably have questioned him then).

[2] Ricoeur does not mention Aristotle here, but we can see a glimpse of Aristotle's critique of Plato on art at this point. While Plato saw visual art as simply a copy of a copy of the ideal reality, which took us further away from the reality, Aristotle suggested that, for us to recognize that to which a picture referred, it had to capture the essence of the thing. The "less" that it showed was that which captured the essence or "form" of the thing.

[3] In his earlier work, The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur speaks of the possibility of a second naiveté, when we knowingly reclaim and find meaning in a tradition after we become aware that its meanings have changed in the process of transmission. The explanatory power of this brief comment above is astounding. If you look at my post on the doctrine of depravity yesterday, you can immediately sense how Paul's original understanding of sin changed almost imperceptibly as it passed to Augustine and Calvin and Wesley and beyond, not to mention the fact that Paul's own understandings were distinct from those of the psalmist or Genesis.

Book Review: Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory 1

I decided to take an interlude from more popular book reviews (having just finished Ehrman and hoping to move to N. T. Wright's Surprised by Scripture next). In this meantime, I want to blog on Paul Ricoeur's short Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.

Ricoeur was a French philosopher who was a key twentieth century figure in the area of hermeneutics. He was unusual as a devout Protestant in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1970-1985, and it was during this time that he delivered the lectures on interpretation at Texas Christian University in 1973.

While all of Ricoeur's work is significant, this small set of lectures is probably the best entry point to his philosophy of meaning. In no way does that make it easy. So I hope to walk through the four chapters these next four weeks, shedding light as best I can on what he is trying to say.
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Chapter 1: Language as Discourse
1. Introductory Comments
The Structural Model
Ricoeur's task in these four essays is to "rescue discourse from its marginal and precarious exile" (2). He was speaking at a time when a movement called structuralism was in vogue, and structuralism gave primacy to language as a self-contained system or "code" rather than to language as an actual tool of communication.

In structuralism, Ricoeur suggests, "Language no longer appears as a mediation between minds and things" (6). It does not really get from the dictionary, so to speak, to the actual use of words.

In the background of structuralism is the French philosopher of language, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He made a distinction between what he called langue and parole (Course in General Linguistics). Langue is the code, the system of meanings in their interrelationships between each other. Parole is a specific message that emerges from the code.

"Linguistics here becomes one province of the general theory of signs" (4). For de Saussure, signs more or less are a matter of the code of language. "The sign is defined by an opposition between two aspects... a signifier... and the signified" (6). The sign is the arbitrary symbol, such as letters or sounds. The signified for de Saussure, however, is not so much something in the real world but the "differential value in the lexical system."

That is to say, that to which a signifier points is a meaning that arises in the differentiation of meaning between one word and another. "As Saussure said, in a system of signs there are only differences, but no substantial existence" (5). [1]

The Sentence
Ricoeur ingeniously supersedes this entire trajectory of thought by contrasting the sign with the sentence. Following Plato's lead in the Cratylus, he affirms the idea that a word by itself is neither true nor false (1). By contrast, "the sentence is not a larger or more complex word, it is a new entity" (7). "A sentence is a whole irreducible to the sum of its parts."

These two levels of language--the sign and the sentence, allow Ricoeur to distinguish between semiotics, the study of signs so advanced by de Saussure and others like Emile Benveniste, and semantics, the meanings those signs have in relation to the outside world.

2. The Dialectic of Event and Meaning
Discourse as Event
In trying to rescue actual discourse from the abstract code of language, Ricoeur begins by locating discourse in an event of communication. He tries to shift the balance from the abstract system to the concrete use of language. "Only the message has a temporal existence" (9). "The system in fact does not exist. It only has a virtual existence. Only the message gives actuality to language, and the discourse grounds the very existence of language since only the discrete and each time unique acts of discourse actualize the code."

Discourse as Predication
There is an objective side of a speech event, a "propositional content," a "said as such" (9-10). "The sentence may be characterized by a single distinctive trait; it has a predicate" (10, following Benveniste). A subject stands alone but a predicate, involving a verb connects that isolated entity to "a quality, a class of things, a type of relation, or a type of action" (11).

The Dialectic of Event and Meaning
"It is the task of a concrete theory of discourse to take this dialectic as its guideline" (11), namely, the interplay between an event and its meaning captured in a sentence. A dialectic is a conversation or argument between two poles, which for Ricoeur here are the event and its meaning in a sentence. "The notion of speech as an event provides the key to the transition from a linguistics of the code to a linguistics of the message."

"If all discourse is actualized as an event, all discourse is understood as meaning" (12). The event is transient, but the meaning endures.

3. Utterer's Meaning and Utterance Meaning
The Self-Reference of Discourse
"To mean is both what the speaker means, i.e., what he intends to say, and what the sentence means, i.e., what the sentence means" (12). The former is the noetic element of meaning (the author's intention), the latter the noematic (how it ends up in a sentence).

On the one hand, "Languages do not speak, people do" (13). On the other hand, the mental intention of an author can only be found in the discourse itself. "The utterer's meaning has its mark in the utterance meaning." Ricoeur then unfolds a number of grammatical features of sentences that are "shifters," grammatical bearers of reference to the speaker. They include things like pronouns and tenses, "egocentric particulars" that point to a specific speaker at a specific time.

"The utterance meaning points back to the utterer's meaning thanks to the self-reference of discourse to itself as an event" (13).

Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts
The dialectic of event and proposition is further supported by two other factors. First, Ricoeur turns to speech-act theory, which indicates that what is said (locution) is said as an intended act (illocution) that is meant to have a certain effect (perlocution). A promise actually does something in saying certain words. It promises. A classic example is when a couple says "I do." When they say it, they are not merely informing but actually getting married by the words.

So there are semantic rules in the structure of a sentence that support the effect it has. "A specific 'grammar' corresponds to a certain intention for which the illocutionary act expresses the distinctive 'force'" (14).

The Interlocutionary Act
Discourse is addressed to someone. "Each illocutionary act is a kind of question" (15). "To assert something is to expect agreement, just as to give an order is to expect obedience." Even soliloquy is dialog "of the soul with itself."

"Communication... is the overcoming of the radical non-communicability of the lived experience as lived" (16). It is an attempt to overcome "the fundamental solitude of each human being" (15), meaning the fact that what is experienced by one person cannot be transferred whole as such and such experience to someone else" (15-16). [2]

"Dialog is an event that connects two events, that of speaking and that of hearing" (16). Then he asks what aspects of discourse are communicated in the event of dialog. A first answer is the propositional content of discourse. It opens discourse to the other. "Language is itself the process by which private experience is made public. Language is the exteriorization thanks to which an impression is transcended and becomes an ex-pression, or, in other words, the transformation of the psychic into the noetic... this elevation of a part of our life into the logos of discourse. There the solitude of life is for a moment, anyway, illuminated by the common light of discourse" (19).

Ricoeur in this section seems to assume that the listener wants to understand the speaker. He speaks of a "reciprocity of intentions" in communication, of the speaker to intend to be understood and the hearer to want to understand what the speaker is intending.

However, Ricoeur also recognizes the polysemic nature of words--their tendency to have more than one potential meaning (17). Context reduces the field of misunderstanding. An illocution (what is intended to be done in the speech act) is more easily confused than a proposition simply meant to state something. Non-linguistic features are often intertwined with the words themselves when various other illocutions (promises, commands, etc) are involved.

The intended effect of speech (the perlocution) is the least communicable aspect of the speech act (e.g., intention to frighten, seduce, convince, etc.).

4. Meaning as "Sense" and "Reference"
Thus far Ricoeur has been talking about the "inner" dialectic of the meaning of discourse. "To mean is what the speaker does. But it is also what the sentence does. The utterance meaning--in the sense of the propositional content--is the 'objective' side of this meaning. The utterer's meaning--in the threefold sense of the self-reference of the sentence, the illocutionary dimension of the speech act, and the intention of recognition by the hearer--is the 'subjective' side of the meaning" (19).

Ricoeur now moves further. "The subjective-objective dialectic does not exhaust the meaning of meaning." This is because the objective side of discourse is not only the "what" of discourse but the "about what." The "about what" of discourse is the "reference" of speech. The "what" is the "sense."

This is a distinction developed by Gottlob Frege. "Only the sentence level allows us to distinguish what is said and about what it is said" (20). "With the sentence... language is directed beyond itself." "Language has a reference only when it is used." In that sense, it moves beyond the mere code of structuralism into the external world. It becomes an event. "To refer is what the sentence does in a certain situation and according to a certain use."

"This notion of bringing experience to language is the ontological condition of reference... We presuppose that something must be in order that something may be identified" (21). "It is because there is first something to say, because we have an experience to bring to language, that... language is not only directed towards ideal meanings but also refers to what is." "If language were not fundamentally referential, would or could it be meaningful?"

"Semiotics appears as a mere abstraction of semantics." That is to say, we speak and have communication in the external world as events in the world, and the sign theory of de Saussure and others is only a virtual world we abstract from our experiences in the real world.

"Discourse refers back to its speaker at the same time that it refers to the world... Discourse in action and in use refers backwards and forwards, to a speaker and a world" (22).

5. Some Hermeneutical Implications
Ricoeur ends his first lecture, now the first chapter, with some hermeneutical implications. First, his analysis thus far calls into question the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, where the goal was "to understand an author better than he understood himself" (23). This was a "psychologizing" hermeneutic that gave priority to the author's intention and to the original audience."

For Ricoeur, this is a one-sided hermeneutic in that it does not give adequate attention to the text uttered. "A written text is a form of discourse" (23). There is a meaning in dialog with an event. There is a sense in dialog with a reference. The second essay will carry this discussion forward.
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[1] As a side note, de Saussure's way of thinking about language would be ripe for Jacques Derrida, who served at one time as a research assistant for Ricoeur, to argue for deconstruction. Derrida, in a sense, draws one implication of de Saussure, namely, that language ceases to have any stable meaning because it never reaches the real world. It is more or less a virtual dog chasing its tail.

[2] Here he references Roman Jakobson's fundamental construction of communication as a threefold relationship between 1) speaker and 2) hearer by way of a 3) message, with three complementary features than enrich the model, namely, the code, contact, and context.