SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
CHAPTER 1
HERMENEUTICS
[E]verything that is no longer immediately situated in a world... is estranged from its original meaning and depends on the unlocking and mediating spirit that we, like the Greeks, name after Hermes: the messenger of the gods.3
Much of the work aiming to re-introduce or further advance hermeneutical theory in the forty-five years since Palmer (1969)4 first introduced hermeneutics to the English-speaking world begins with what now seems an obligatory discussion of the term itself. In their opening pages we learn how the word hermeneutics carries an obvious relation to the wing-footed Hermes as its etymological roots lie with the Greek verb hermēneuein and noun hermēneia, generally translated as 'to interpret' and 'interpretation' by way of the Latin interpretatio. Although today this etymological connection to Hermes is questioned,5 the associative link is still valuable as a heuristic device to illustrate the complexities of interpretation. For Hermes' task was anything but simple. In order to transmit the messages of the gods to the mortals, he had to be fully conversant in both idioms. Never a mere verbatim announcement, each expressed delivery of what the gods had to say effectively involved intertwining levels of explanation and translation in order to render their words intelligible. So while the aim of hermeneutic interpretation suggested here – to bring that which is strange and unfamiliar to meaningful understanding – may appear to be straightforward, exactly how this is accomplished proves much more difficult to grasp. The first chapter approaches this methodological question not by way of the history of the term itself but rather through what this term has come to designate since its initial appearance in the mid-17th century.
Section 1.1 sketches out the historical trajectory from the emergence of the three regional hermeneutics during the Renaissance to the first articulations of the hermeneutical circle and the dialectic of understanding and explanation by Ast at the close of the 18th century. Section 1.2 opens with a discussion of Schleiermacher's general hermeneutical model and traces its influence on 19th century hermeneutical thinking up through Dilthey who provides the first significant distinction between the human and natural sciences. Section 1.3 focuses on hermeneutical phenomenology and its impact on 20th century thought especially after Gadamer's popularization of its approach in 1960 kicked off in the ensuing two decades a series of divisive and still relevant fundamental debates in the human sciences which drew in such diverse fields as modern philology, legal scholarship, American literary criticism, poststructuralism, and even Marxist discourse. At stake in these debates is methodology as such, whether it is a desirable tool in the appropriation of textual meaning or whether its conscious use should altogether be abandoned.
1.1 From Regional to General Hermeneutics
The earliest recorded occurrence of the word hermeneutics is apparently as part of the title of a book published by Dannhauer in 1654,6 which suggests that already by this time interpretation had successfully reached a level of self-awareness so as to differentiate critical explanation and analysis of texts (exegesis) from the rules, methods and theory governing it (hermeneutics). Like the advent of any new term, once accepted as designating the theory of exegesis, the field it covers can retroactively be extended back in time as far as desired. Thus the extraction of a hermeneutic from Plato and Aristotle might even prove possible based on work done in the field of literary criticism regarding their respective textual approaches.7 The survey undertaken in this chapter, however, begins with a cursory glance at those centuries immediately preceding Dannhauer, for the present concern is with what gave rise to modern hermeneutics8 in its remarkably flexible form, able at once to guide jurisdiction, assist in discussions of the language of texts and facilitate the exegesis of Scripture. Corresponding to these three capacities are the three regional hermeneutics – namely, the juridical with its legal concerns, the philological with literary texts and the biblical with Scripture – each of which enjoyed its own separate and relatively isolated history until the early part of the 19th century when they could be reconceptualized as part of one complex discipline and indeed as aspects of a single faculty of man. It is during the Renaissance that these three disciplines initially emerged to define themselves distinctly, well before Schleiermacher merged them together into the first general hermeneutical framework centuries later.
For its part, juridical interpretation was revived during the so-called 12th century Italian Renaissance by a renewed interest in Roman law. As scholars endeavored to elucidate the 6th century Code of Justinian, a hermeneutics of jurisprudence emerged and eventually spread to the rest of Europe. But its very success created its own set of problems and the need arose to deal with the increasingly differing exegesis produced over the ensuing centuries over legal matters. In 1463 Rogerius answered this call not only by summarizing the main tenets of previous legal exegesis, but also by introducing a fourfold distinction to explicate and harmonize the various parts of the Code, an effort which remained in force until the historical school of Savigny replaced it in the early 19th century.9
Philological interpretation also emerged during the Renaissance through an equal resurgence of interest in the past, in this case with classical literary monuments from Greek and Roman antiquity. A specific hermeneutics of philology was thus born, whose genealogy could also be traced back through the gradual merging of rhetoric and poetics into the art of textual verification. This hermeneutic tendency was largely driven by a practical interest, as Greek culture was seen to provide an aesthetic model for good living. Hence the overwhelming objective of humanist scholars was to establish the authenticity of these texts and to further reconstruct original versions from the fragments available to them. These early efforts provided a wealth of source material for the subsequent development of much more systematic approaches to textual interpretation beginning in the 18th century.
Yet these two regional hermeneutics were not without their interaction, for each lent the other certain ideas and concepts. For example, the mid-16th century humanist Hotomanus placed the basis of legal explication with the grammatical interpretation of philology; a hundred years later the pedagogue and jurist von Felde saw enough overlap with the two hermeneutical specialties that he endeavored to establish their shared interpretative principles and thus anticipated Chladenius; while in 1806 the jurist Thibaut would considered the purpose of the law and the intention of the lawgiver only when grammatical interpretation, directed at the literal sense of a given law, found its limit in the failure to understand its meaning from ordinary linguistic usage.10
Biblical exegesis remained much more isolated, at least prior to the Reformation, after which it underwent a profound formulation. It is by far the most important of the three regional hermeneutics owing to its longstanding concern with Sacred Scripture and thus provided the main impetus for the development of rules of interpretation in order to unearth the meaning of those texts. However, throughout the medieval period this impetus was virtually nonexistent as the Roman Catholic Church exercised a monopoly on biblical exegesis. Seriously unchallenged for centuries, the Church dominated the reading one could have of Scripture, a set of texts which it judged to have four levels of meaning.11 This fourfold approach was especially important as a way for medieval clergy to relate the Old Testament to Christianity. The first level is the literal where meaning is judged simply from the letter of the text. The second is the allegorical level which holds meaning in the context of the salvation offered by Christ and the Church.12 The third is the tropological level which can be grasped by applying Scripture to the soul and its virtues so as to produce a practical meaning as a guide to moral conduct. The fourth anagogical (or eschatological) level attends to Scriptural meaning in relation to God in His eternal and heavenly reality.
In contrast, for the Protestant Reformers thinking in terms of these four levels did not involve exegetical work which, etymologically speaking, aims to 'bring out' the meaning of the text, but rather simply produced eisegesis whereby meaning is 'read into' the text. This critique against the Church would prove profound. The earliest recorded use of the term hermeneutics in English, occurring in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1737, reflects what the Reformers must have had in mind in their protestation against the monopoly exercised by the Church when it came to the meaning of Scripture: 'Taking such liberties with sacred writ, as are by no means allowable upon any known rules of just and sober hermeneutics.'13 The importance of this early 16th century challenge to the authoritative readings of Scripture by the Church should not be underestimated and indeed with it the first great crisis of meaning arrives: biblical exegesis, once unified under the discourse of a single master, will now begin to fragment into a multiplicity of techniques increasingly governed by guidelines and provisional rules, resulting in a rapidly accumulating body of textual signification.
The response by the Church was swift. Inside thirty years of the first significant signs of protest, the Council of Trent (1545–63), perhaps the single most significant element in the Counter-Reformation,14 was convoked which emerged unwaveringly to reaffirm the Catholic emphasis on authority and tradition in interpreting Scripture. Now formally cut off from recourse to Church authority to decide questions of interpretation, the Reformers were equally determined to pursue the independent path they themselves originally opened up. Shortly after Trent Flacius published his Clavis Scripturae Sacrae, which established him as the most important Protestant theorist and apologist. This work marks the first major formulation in biblical hermeneutics, putting forth two principal arguments15 to be understood from a new point of view which takes Scripture as both perspicuous and self-sufficient. The first argument asserts the basic intelligibility and non-contradictory nature of Scripture so that if there is a failure in understanding, this is not be taken as an invitation to impose an external interpretation in order to render it intelligible as the Church had done for centuries; rather, such a situation merely reflects on the poor aptitude of the interpreters whose insufficient knowledge thus signals the need for thorough linguistic and hermeneutic training. The second argument forcefully re-asserts the thinking of the Reformers en masse regarding the internal coherence and continuity of Scripture. This effectively meant that each individual passage was now to be read in light of the whole within which it is found.
While this anti-dogmatic self-understanding of the early Protestant hermeneutics can easily be criticized for harboring its own dogmatism in the form of a presupposition regarding the wholeness of Scripture16 which, once accepted, would insure a high degree of consent in matters of Reformist interpretation for some time to come, we should not overlook what has been accomplished here. The two principles of perspicuity and of the self-sufficiency of Scripture acknowledge at a theoretical level for the first time the ambiguity of textual exegesis, along with the accompaniment of a proposed remedy. We might say that for Flacius, if the One-ness of Scripture somehow resists comprehension, then it is up to the interpreter to resolve this by falling back on the set of rules inscribed in the Other which accompanies this text, namely the Clavis. Granted, at this stage what resists is not deemed to be on the side of the textual object but rather as lying with the interpreter in the form of ignorance of proper interpretive methods. Yet this is also a positive first, for it subtly brings a subjective element into the discussion of interpretive technique, if only in a negative sense as a deficiency to be overcome
We should also pause at this point to reflect on the path we have hitherto been following and will largely continue to follow, if for nothing else than to explicitly acknowledge how it is – like most histories of hermeneutics – Diltheyan inspired. In his "The Rise of Hermeneutics" (1900) Dilthey tells us how he
would now like to demonstrate this lawlike evolution through the history of hermeneutics: how philological virtuosity developed out of the need for insightful and universally valid understanding, whence a promulgation of rules, and the ordering of those rules toward a goal further defined by the development of the sciences at any given time, until finally an adequate foundation for the formation of rules was discovered in the analysis of understanding itself.17
As will be seen in Section 1.2 below, the discovery he speaks of was made by Schleiermacher and indeed Dilthey's entire teleological trajectory is colored by this culminating point. The rise of hermeneutics can thus be seen as an orderly progress from the particularity of exegetical practice to the universalizing of theory. More specifically, prior to the Reformation the exegete assessed texts with intuition and common sense; with Flacius such sense begins to be systematized into rules abstracted from its practice and as argued above it is only at this point hermeneutics can be said to have properly arrived; two and a half centuries later this process will reach its apogee as those rules dissolve into a universal notion, that of Schleiermacher's understanding.
Yet the idea that all roads lead up to Schleiermacher18 is nevertheless too simple. The main problem is that Dilthey writes at the close of the 19th century and thus simultaneously views this trajectory as part of the general rise of historical consciousness. He presupposes that the regional hermeneutics were thoroughly ahistorical, that they simply lacked any historical sense. But this does not appear to be the case. As Szondi points out,19 both medieval philology and biblical exegesis were keenly aware of the historical gap which distanced the reader from the author. Practitioners were therefore only ahistorically-minded in the sense that they worked to annul this historical distance rather than actively incorporate it into a conscious methodology as their counterparts began to do in the 19th century. The two competing interpretive practices of the Reformation period, however, did so in different ways. The orientation of the philologists was to attend to the sensus litteralis (or sensus grammaticus) to establish what a passage says, literally seeking to substitute the unintelligible words in an ancient Greek text with a word in current use. Without attempting to reflect on the significance of these historical changes, their aim was to simply eliminate this historical distance to preserve original authorial meaning. Likewise with the sensus spiritualis approach of the Church, whose allegorical exegesis worked to provide fixed formulations for what the Scriptural words qua signs pointed toward, with the clear goal to guarantee the authority and tradition of canonical literature. In this case historical distance was not so much eliminated as sublated in the sense of being 'preserved as the difference between promise and fulfillment, while at the same time it is leveled in the preestablished harmony between the Old and New Testaments.'20 But despite their shared tendencies to surmount historical gaps, during the Reformation the two interpretive approaches locked horns and as we saw above, the more grammatically-minded Reformers criticized the Church clergy for deriving the meaning of Scriptural signs in a way which was not properly constrained by the conceptual world of the text itself.
What additionally upsets Dilthey's notion of orderly progress besides this dialectic between grammatical and allegorical interpretation is the attitude of their respective stances towards the question of meaning. While it is true that Flacius initiated the progress towards a general methodology through his insistence on the possibility of universally valid interpretation through hermeneutical techniques, with respect to the question of textual meaning this progress appears rather regressive and limiting. Historically speaking, one should recall how grammatical precedes allegorical interpretation so the former cannot strictly be seen as a critique of an inferior latter approach. This helps one understand that while the Reformers were adherents of the sensus litteralis and thus desired to keep the original intention of authorial texts from being historicized, the 'conservative' Church had always rejected this more narrow approach, 'narrow' because allegorical interpretation was in fact based on the more favorable possibility of manifold Scriptural meanings. The paradox is that the authoritative interpretive strategy of the Church did not close down potential avenues of extracting meaning from Scripture but rather opened them up because of its concern with maintaining its authority through shifting historical contexts. So even though the principle of grammatical interpretation eventually emerges victorious over allegorical interpretation and thus confirms Dilthey's schematic, this should not overshadow the lesson sketched out here, viz., how any close examination of a particular period in history often disturbs the notion of the commonly accepted universal trajectory within which this period is supposedly embedded, which of course calls for a refinement of that universal notion.
If Flacius and the Reformers had aspirations for a general hermeneutics through their formalization and application of medieval philological techniques to Scripture, we do well to remember that this universalizing tendency only extended to biblical texts. The tension between the intention of achieving a universal hermeneutics and the absence of Sacred and secular hermeneutics coming together in a historical and general form continued to characterize the ensuing centuries and is most strikingly seen in the failed projects of the 18th century. Such empty intentions will soon find support in the transcendental idealism of Kantian epistemology which Schleiermacher will leverage; but in terms of the pre-critical Enlightenment period it is perhaps Chladenius who best illustrates the costs of failing to grasp universality as a regulative ideal which comes well before the empirical possibility of its own realization. For by dogmatically placing his faith with the rules of reason and logic he is driven to exclude biblical as well as all other texts that are not deemed 'reasonable discourses and writings,' as the very title of his 1742 work21 suggests. In general Chladenius holds a position entirely compatible with the overall tendency of Enlightenment rationality to depreciate tradition, 'a position hardly compatible with the project of a universal hermeneutics.'22
His rationalist hermeneutics leads him to consider the art of interpretation and its concern with the meaning of statements as secondary and wholly apart from the primary philosophical examination of their claims to truth.23 Indeed hermeneutics was only to be used if the author failed to strictly utilize the rules of reason, which alone guarantee the stability of meaning of a text. In such cases what he calls unproductive and overly-productive texts produce obscure passages which could be clarified by acquiring the appropriate general concepts.24 He thus envisages his role as pedagogical and pragmatic, instructing the uninitiated reader in the proper concepts not so much to reconstruct the intention of the author but rather to grasp the thing meant by his words. With this 'objectivity' lies Chladenius' notion of universal interpretation. If the Reformers identified, isolated and attempted to overcome a subjective moment they sensed in the authoritarian hermeneutics of the Church, likewise Enlightenment rationality delimited a similar moment and endeavored to achieve certainty with the object at stake in the text by separating it from non-universal subjective moments. Here lies the theoretical framework for grasping the notion Chladenius is best known for, viz., his Leibnizian-inspired notion of perspective. In no way to be equated to or even considered a distant precursor of (post)Nietzschean and Foucauldian perspectivism which signifies the non-existence of facts and the infinity of possible meanings of a given text, for Chladenius perspective is a relativity of the account given, never a relativity of meaning. His running example to illustrate this point is a battle, an insurrection.25 That this historical event took place, and took place in a singular truthful way, is never in doubt. Such historical knowledge after all was initially confirmed by visual observation. If there is ambiguity after this fact, it lies simply in having been captured in conflicting textual accounts, and the duty of interpretation is thus to carry out a mediating role between the author with his perspective and the reader who has difficulty with the author's account. As with other Enlightenment hermeneutical theorists, difficulties for Chladenius always reside in the part of a given work as its rational whole is never in question. Since interpretation is here considered strictly a secondary representation of the primary event itself, it is little surprise the Enlightenment project failed to achieve a universal hermeneutics.26
It is only after the Kantian turn27 that classical philological hermeneutics increasingly gives way to Romantic interests, which begin to attend to the historical changes in the understanding of texts and not just with accounting for differing points of view authors may have of the objects in their texts. Armed with a new critical grasp on the subjective element in hermeneutics, in Romanticism the focus begins to shift to the understanding of the interpreter. Ast can be seen as a figure caught half-way between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. An accomplished classical philologist, his philological hermeneutical examination of antiquity was innovatively combined with a notion of understanding which proved a formidable influence on Schleiermacher. Besides giving the first articulations of the importance of literary history and genre criticism, one of his key contributions was to take hermeneutics away from the limited task of clarifying obscure passages to more broadly consider understanding as a reproduction of the entire creative process of the author, inclusive of the latter's psychology, personality and spirit. Through properly orienting oneself in 'what is originally One,... [t]he original unity of all being we call spirit,'28 Ast is able to overcome temporal distance in a way unimaginable to all previous philologists, since each age, each author in each age, and each work and part thereof participates in this whole Geist, including the interpreter himself. His historical and grammatical analysis of the texts of antiquity simultaneously points to and is guided by ever higher unities of Geist and thereby arouses a multiplicity of meanings for which the interpreter's own spirit is responsible. Plato and Pindar are thus examined through a complex dialectic of understanding (subtilitas intelligendi) and explanation (subtilitas explicandi). The three modes of understanding are thus the historical with respect to the content of the text (what the spirit formed there), the grammatical with respect to the language of the text (how the spirit formed it) and the merging of these two in the spiritual itself.29 Corresponding to these modes are three levels of explanation which seeks to explicate the letter from the subject matter, the meaning from its form, and the spirit, that one guiding and foundational idea which provides a unity of form behind every work no matter the extent of its multiplicity of meanings.30 Throughout his discussion of this dialectic Ast argues for a movement from the particular to the universal and vice versa, thus completing the circle Flacius only made half-way. That is, in explaining how the thought of a particular is said to posit the whole (Geist), while the former is deemed to be nothing but a manifestation of the latter, Ast in 1808 becomes the first to articulate the famous hermeneutical circle, which quite simply tells us that there is an oscillation from the comprehension of the particular through the whole and, conversely, the whole through the particular.31 Over the next two centuries only the relation one is capable of taking to this circle will change, for virtually all thinkers on the question of meaning will consider this circle inescapable.
Book based on this dissertation
FREE Lacanian-themed puzzles
