Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting

This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView.  Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the second part of a two part article.

 Part 2

Reading as the Stabilization of a Text

When I read a literary text, then I feel I should return to it; I should return to it again; and I shall discover more in it; it is not exhausted by the picking up of information conveyed by the text. Oh no! It becomes more and more a work.¹¹ 

 

We grow more and more familiar with it; it is a process of enrichment, which happens there. And I think going into the interplay of soundings and meanings, of allusions and descriptions, and moments of tension and moments of lowering the tension and all the different forms of literary works; all that is never exhausted by our acquaintance with it. But it is like a good painting: we begin to read it. We must read a text like a painting; a painting like a text.

 

And what is reading? Reading is a very complicated structure of temporal approach. It is not that we read one word or one letter after another; that is a form in which one learns reading but is not yet being able to read: then one must spell it, then one must construe. The construction in a foreign language: we learned it in Latin and Greek. Our schoolmasters would say: don’t divine it; construe it.

 

Well, this is reading, in the end: that in this process of going through the given text, and at some point a certain centralization of the whole begins to crystallize and we need not the last word of the poem to have the whole poem. Normally, we would even be able to supply the last word, even when it should not have been transmitted completely because of some corruption in the transmission.

 

So, I think, it is quite obvious, that the problem of reading is a certain access to the stabilization of a literary text, like for other works of art. We have to realize the unseparability of the different structures and movements. As the structuralist, Jacobson taught us — made a very good descriptive analysis of such symmetries and allusions — and so it seems to me something that a good reader should indeed do.¹² (I am not so sure that he needs for it the help of the scholars.)

 

My point is that the schema of the dialogue is indeed adequate also to literary texts. That we are giving different answers, that we are questioning them in different ways, that this whole process of reading and reading again has also its temporal aspect. You know that it is remarkable thing: that the discontinuity of reading does not prevent us from construing the unity of the literary work. We are not reading in one breath; we are not listening like the audience of the Rhapsodies in the oral tradition of Homer. We are breaking and resuming and nevertheless we can and we do construe the whole of the structured poem, whatever character it may have.

 

I cannot go into details here to describe that it is not a memorizing activity. It is a widespread prejudice; but we philosophers learned — especially from Husserl and later also Heidegger — that it is not a process of memorizing when I retain the past in the given moment.

 

Husserl gave a description of what a sound is: a temporal structure: it has its  extension in time.¹³ Well, I am hearing the sound now, and what I heard  a moment before I have in my memory? That’s a false construction: that doesn’t happen at all. Then, Husserl invented the concept of retention, to see it is “retained.” It is in way present as a past. Well, in the same way we should analyze; and that is, of course, not yet done. We should realize how the temporal synthesis of reading goes on.¹⁴

I think my hints are sufficient to accept that to read a text means to “construe” it, built it up, to let it speak. And when I should define what hermeneutics are, I would say “exactly that: to let speak again.”

 

So there is a continuing transition from reading and interpreting and, especially, in the case of the literary art. I would say that no reading is possible at all in which in which we are not articulating in very different directions and are listening and withdrawing, putting questions again, until we begin to cover the whole of the text and to listen with our inner ear to this life of speech.

 

I said, with the “inner ear” because I am indeed convinced that the transformation of a literary text in performance, recital, or whatever it may be, is always away from the apperception by reading, and goes in a way towards a new realm of contingencies where everybody has a different voice, everybody has a different modulation, and the only thing I know is that when I hear and listen to somebody who recites or performs a literary text, I say he does it well or he does it not well; and why can I say it? Because I knew it, I've heard it  better. So we do art.

 

You see, the givenness exactly of the voice, and the sounds of the poem, is idealized and, I think, that is the reason why literature, why poetry, can be called “literature” — letters are idealizations of sounds.

 

Well, now I think I should ask: if it is so, in the main lines, as I described, that reading and interpreting are a certain dialectical unity, so I cannot separate one from the other?  So that everybody wants to know, for example, did the reciter of the text understand it or not? It is obvious that so long as we are not understanding the text we cannot recite it; and, indeed, we need interpretation very, very often, in many, many ways, to read a text adequately. And therefore the ideal of real, natural and not deformed hermeneutics is to disappear. Why have you learned to read a text? This text? This special text?

 

Now, if it is so, how is it then, with the contribution of modern critical, methodical, efforts in this field? No question but that there are many things we can learn; and the sciences and humanities are also an immense store of scholarship and information; and we also have so many poets of a very high standard of information and education, and so it is clear that we need a lot of knowledge.

Nevertheless, I would say we have to discriminate between the scope of a work and the scopes of interpretation. Here, I can refer at first to the classic description of interpretation by August Böckh, the four modes of interpretation: grammatical, aesthetic, historical, psychological — it is not important to retain exactly these four; we will speak later about some others.¹⁵

 

My point is: what happens, what happens when I apply a grammatical scope? Well, I make a guess, an observation in the text and find there a word which I should perhaps examine and put in the context of the epoch, or of the author, or of the history of the word, or whatever. Certainly, it is an advancement in our  scholarship when we are able to have a new example for the use of this word, and the dictionary is enriched.

 

Is also our understanding of the poem enriched by it? Well, I would say “yes, we must understand the word; but certainly the intention of the grammatical explanation  is the enrichment of our grammatical scholarship; and when we speak about a literary genus, and we say that it is love poem; and we have the whole history and modifications of love poems in world history. We see, ah yes, that is a love poem; that is different from that and different from that — and all that you learn. Is it really so that this poem is enriched by it?

 

Perhaps, you are led to articulate the whole structure of the poem by these references to the genus in a better way? That can happen through historical conditions, biographical conditions. In short, this may be helpful, but may also be disturbing.

 

I would prefer not to know too exactly when Goethe wrote the poem, “Uber allen Gipfeln.” ¹⁶ I think the speech, the address of the poem is at least so that we are appealed to and we should answer to it. We have to listen, and I would say in the first place, to its silence.

 

Literary hermeneutics, I think, begins with listening to the silence; then it goes through a verbalization, an explanation, and must end in listening. ¹⁷

 

Well, that, of course, is — how would I call it? — the description of a hermeneutic of good will; it is our effort to to let it speak again; it is our openness to this effort.

 

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

 

There are other approaches, hermeneutics of suspicion, as we call them, and they have a very different intention, and I will not say that it is without interest:  to see for example a critique of ideologies, to see how in a literary creation, in a poem: a special social situation, and a special ruling class, and a special economic foundation of this ruling class reflects itself.

 

It is interesting, for example, to see how this famous poem, “Die Lampe” by Morike,¹⁸ which Staiger and Heidegger and Spitzer¹⁹ made so interesting in their different comments. It quite interesting to see, that after the break of a great tradition of Humanistic, Christian literature, one of the highest lyric talents writes a very fine and even deep poem about a lamp.

 

There are these so true and interesting points.  One can say:"Ah! Biedermeier;"  "Ah! Restoration Politics!" "Ah! And so on." Well, that’s quite nice, quite interesting. But I would not say that this poem is very enriched by the application of this critique of ideologists on our listening to it.

 

And how is it with psychoanalysis? Well, you know, there we have a very good illustration by the writings of this genius of researches, Freud, when he, for example, describes the Mona Lisa. Well, I have to forget it when I again look at and admire the Mona Lisa. In the Mona Lisa, I see, when I follow Freud, how this Leonardo missed the tenderness of his mother, and what not. I have no criticism against the investigation of the unconscious by means of such illustrations of excellent paintings. That is an experience that is perhaps a little more interesting than the very contingent client of a psychiatrist; that can be. But I would not say it is central for the interests of an admirer and interpreter of this “poem” and its mysterious smiling.

 

Or, we have the Structuralists when they discover so many symmetries in the mythological background or in the sounds, and so they forget sometimes the meanings. As I said before, that is something one should learn. And I understand completely that in an age when poetry is a little [disregarded], I hope that in such an age the emphasis, the underlining of the hand work in a good verse, this craftsmanship in fabricating this architecture of sound and meaning is indeed thematized as a warning to people not to take it in too superficial a form — of conveying information. So, I have no objection against that.

 

And, there are the Deconstructionists, that were discussed this morning: Is reading no longer possible? I think you should decide and not Yale University. If you decide to make the effort to read, when you read you will not deconstruct, but you would learn to construct.

But I should concretize the whole thing by a question that seems to me not easy to answer.

 

Sometimes I was confronted with this question and I must confess that, and I am, of course, old fashioned, and that therefore this confrontation had some challenge for me. I mean, for example King Oedipus, this greatest tragedy of the Greeks, as Aristotle says. How is our experience of this tragedy changed by the increasing knowledge and insight that we have regarding its many aspects?

 

Is my insight increased by what I know of Levi-Strauss: that the relation between father and son and wife and the oldest brother of the wife, and all that grammar that is indeed recurrent in many mythological traditions? Certainly, very interesting: how we can now see, even in this field where we have no approach at all, some rationality, and how fine! How we feel superior! Is it really the point of what we experience in reading or in seeing the tragedy of King Oedipus? How we are superior?

 

Psychoanalysis and Literary Meaning

 

What about psychoanalysis? Indeed I think no modern student is able to forget that King Oedipus has something to do with Freud! And so, certainly, he feels some immediate associations with things like incest, castration, [inaudible] all in this very interesting field of the mechanics of the subconscious. Probably, it has real scientific validity, not only a therapeutical one; but that is another problem. And I will not discuss the scientific validity of psychoanalysis. I will assume for the moment it is scientifically validated.

 

Would you say that to look to the tragedy gives us now an enriched insight into what happened there? Do you think the message of this poem is now more deeply grasped and accepted, since I feel this superiority in making reference to Freud and to say: Ah! Yes, yes! I know, of course, it's incest; that is clear!

 

Is it not much more so to get another, and I think a more old fashioned but not quite past approach?

 

King Oedipus, yes, of course: he was an underprivileged man, he should not have killed the man who would not yield in the crossway, so he is guilty. He had guilt and he is then punished, and in the whole tragedy with all these involvements; the gods are cruel and so because he was not disciplined enough as a traveler, he became this tragic hero. This is also obviously nonsense.

 

It is something we learned: the French and German theory of theatre; the theory of the tragic guilt and punishment. 

 

But obviously this also is not an apparatus for our understanding King Oedipus. When we are not open enough to accept that in the blindness of this man who runs with insistence into his own catastrophe; when we are not exposed by it to the feeling that we are, so blind we are, when it is not a recognition of our own human life situation; and when it is not a certain analysis even, by looking to the tragedy, that we realize our own blindness, without suffering the same pain of the hero; the catharsis theory of Aristotle is much better than the moralistic account or, I think, the elucidations by modern scientific advancements.

 

And so I think this paradigm may illustrate why our learning in scholarship, and in literary criticism and in languages and in mythology and in history and in psychology is not sufficient.

 

And so, I know, of course, the general disappointment of young people, when they begin to study literary criticism, that they have to learn so many things which are not fulfilling their own expectation concerning learning how to read and to speak more vigorously than they could do on their own. Even when that is all conceded, I would nevertheless say It is not just our own private decision. It is exactly the way in which human tradition goes on — just by our surrender to the voices of the work of art, especially; but of course also to many other voices of the past. It is exactly by this surrender that human life conveys its own richness.

 

And, perhaps, you will allow me to finish my presentation with a quite short allusion to a Platonic insight. 

 

Plato speaks at the Banquet ²⁰about Eros, an almost divine figure which is always in the metaxy, of which Dr. Voegelin spoke last evening. This metaxy  between the mortal and the divine; this longing for, this tension towards all this, is in Eros. Then, there is a special illustration. And this illustration says, that also in our human cultural activities we are doing the same as Eros does in the other forms of animals; the species survives by reproduction. That is the biological law of life.

 

Human life must do the same with its own human riches. No knowledge is definitively fixed; it must be renewed; it must be reproduced, like the species in the realm of living beings must reproduce themselves by individuals. The whole life of art, of knowledge, is an infinite process of re-enacting and just that is the form of human immortality.²¹

 

This is the Platonic description. Of course it is much more beautiful than my poor reproduction of it in my English. I hope, in the end, you see that behind this whole question is a basic problem of our culture: is it mastering of things or is it preserving and participating in the richness of our human world? The central task of humanity and, I think, the limitations of our mastering the world, should no longer be forgotten.    

[This is the second part of a two part article. Part 1 may be read here.]

NOTES   

 

11. See Rainer Maria Rilke poem on frontispiece of Gadamer’s Truth and Method: “Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst”

12. Roman Jacobson (1896-1982)

13. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

14. See, Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., with copious references to Northrop Frye

15. Phillip August Böckh (1705-1867)

16.  Goethe's poem is better known as “Wandrers Nachtlied II” ("The Traveler's Night Journey II”)

 

 

17. See, N. Frye, The Secular Scripture, p. 188/CW vol. 18, p. 124: “real silence is the end of speech, not the stopping of it”

18. “Auf eine Lampe” (“To a Lamp”) by Eduard Morike

 

19. Emil Staiger (1908-1987), Leo Spitzer (1887-1960); See, Staiger, Heidegger Correspondence;  For Staiger the word “scheint”  was to be understood in the sense of external appearance (videtur) and hence the poem is a comment on the classical concept of vanitas. But for Heidegger, the word had the meaning of the English term which derives from it, namely, “shine,” or the Latin that Heidegger mentions, lucet.  In this case, of course, the poem takes quite a different sense, namely a reference to an inner beauty following the classical ideal — an ideal that matches the esthetic perception of writers such as Schiller. Nicholas Graham.

20  Plato’s  Dialogue, The Symposium

21. Recreating Frye’s Creating and Recreating, CW vol. 4, 200, pp. 23-35

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