1

The goal Hirsch sets himself is that of establishing the bases of a science of interpretation. This is why, as he points out, he has (in a Popperian fashion) nothing to say about the art of making guesses as to a text‘s meaning, since this is necessarily an intuitive, imaginative, subjective, and unmethodological process for which no precise rules can be devised. It is not the divinatory but rather the successive, critical moment of interpretation, wherein one arbitrates between various possible interpretations in an attempt to arrive at the most valid one, that a science, as opposed to a mere art, can be established.

Now it is precisely this focus of Hirsch’s analysis on the notion of validation which makes for the strength of some of his arguments but which, at the same time, accounts for the many weaknesses to be found in his book. For the fact of the matter is that at no point does Hirsch ever ask if interpretation can or could be a science; he merely argues that if interpretation is to be a science, then it must be of such and such a sort. This is obviously an unpardonable petitio principii for a work which claims to deal with “general hermeneutical theory” and to determine its “general principles” (p. viii). Because Hirsch gratuitously assumes at the outset that hermeneutics can be a science, his analyses lack the necessary critical grounding. This also accounts for the principal difference between Hirsch and his archrival, Gadamer, for, whatever the deficiencies of Gadamer, it is at least the case that, unlike Hirsch, he has attempted a fundamental analysis of what is necessarily involved in all acts of understanding and interpretation. It is this fundamental type of analysis that is totally lacking in the rigorous yet superficial analyses of Hirsch. Although Hirsch proposes to defend the objectivity of meaning, at no time does he attempt to clarify in what sense knowledge can properly lay claim to objectivity and what the very meaning of objectivity is. The possibility of interpretation’s being a science is not, however, the only presupposition in Hirsch; the very notion of what science or scientific knowledge is is naively presupposed.

Hirsch wants to make of interpretation a science and a respectable business. “What is at stake is,” he says, “ . . . the right of interpretation (and implicitly all humanistic disciplines) to claim as its object genuine knowledge” (p. 205). To seek after genuine knowledge is a most laudable endeavor. Unfortunately, however, Hirsch uncritically takes over the doctrinaire positivistic position which dogmatically equates genuine knowledge with scientific knowledge, in the physicalistic sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that when it comes to the long-standing question of the relation between the humanities and the natural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften), Hirsch takes the direct, but simplistic, approach of denying that there is or should be any significant difference between the two at all. He writes: “ . . . the much-advertised cleavage between thinking in the sciences and the humanities does not exist. The hypothetico-deductive process is fundamental in both of them, as it is in all thinking that aspires to knowledge” (p. 264).

This identification of all rigorous knowledge with scientific knowledge—the identification of rigor with exactitude—leads Hirsch to conceive of the work of the textual interpreter after the model of the laboratory researcher in experimental science. He thinks of “literary study as a corporate enterprise and a progressive discipline” (p. 209). The logic of interpretation is none other than the classical logic of physical science, that of first of all marshaling all the evidence and then constructing hypotheses and claims which will explain the phenomena. What Hirsch calls for in interpretation is nothing other than the experimental method:

“In principle,” therefore, as Hirsch says, hermeneutics is no different from any other branch of genuine knowledge, i.e., any other science. Like all the other sciences, it does no more than draw “probability judgments”: “An interpretive hypothesis is ultimately a probability judgment that is supported by evidence” (p. 180). There is obviously much to criticize here, even if criticism be thought of only in the narrow sense as the pointing out of unanalyzed presuppositions. There are, however, further complications stemming from this identification of interpretation with natural science that should be noted.

Indeed, when one has assigned oneself the goal of setting up a new science, one must also look about for two additional things: a specific object and a particular method. A science is not a science, obviously, unless it is a science of something. Hirsch thus needs an object for his science of interpretation, and he accordingly devises one which will suit his needs. Like the scientist of former times who thought that he was looking for Laws present in Nature itself, waiting only to be reproduced in scientific, human language, Hirsch, qua scientific interpreter, seeks to discover and lay bare an equally “objective” entity existing independently of the inquirer. Hirsch calls this entity “the author’s meaning.” “The root problem of interpretation,” he says, “is always the same—to guess what the author meant” (p. 207). And as Hirsch goes on to describe it, “the author’s meaning” assumes all the characteristics of a self-subsistent, transphenomenal existence, not unlike a Platonic Form or a Scientific Law (as these were formerly understood). In order to defend the objectivity of interpretive knowledge, Hirsch insists on the strictly objective character of the author’s meaning, i.e., on its complete independence from the consciousness of the interpreter: “If a theorist wants to save the ideal of validity he has to save the author as well . . . ” (p. 6). Because Hirsch implicity and uncritically takes objective knowledge to be a form of knowledge that corresponds to and reflects a fixed, independent entity, he claims that the author’s meaning leads this kind of objective existence and can, accordingly, serve as a stable point of reference by which to assess the rightness or validity of interpretations.

“What an author meant” becomes for Hirsch an absolute object, a superhistorical essence, a determinate, selfsame object accessible to anyone and everyone alike provided only that they approach it scientifically. Such an object is properly noumenal; it is timeless, unchanging, determinate, stable, selfidentical, and so on, and so on. Witness the following statements:

The list of such statements could be extended considerably, but the ones quoted suffice to reveal some interesting points. They show, for instance, that Hirsch is arbitrarily constructing his object—the author’s meaning—to conform to a prior idea as to what validity is: the faithful reproduction or representation of a thing-in-itself. In other words, since validity is conceived of as deriving from the coincidence of an interpretive hypothesis with a definite, unvarying object, then the object of interpretation, textual meaning, must possess the characteristics of this invariant object. But what, above all, is striking in these quotations is the author’s uncritical acceptance of the traditional notion of substance. Hirsch endows meaning with all the properties of the classical notion of substantial reality (res), which is to say that he reifies it.

Such, then, is the object of scientific interpretation. However, once a wouldbe scientist has devised his object, it remains for him to find an appropriate method for dealing with it. Hirsch remains consistent with himself and proposes a method of interpretation that is fully in accord with its supposed object. If the object of interpretation is an absolute object, i.e., exists in and of itself (in et per se—the traditional definition of substance), then the only just method is one that leads us outside ourselves in such a way that we may coincide with the object itself. What is needed is a method that will enable the interpreter to conform or approximate to the object which, as something existing in itself, serves as the standard of the truth or falsity of all statements about it. Hirsch, after Betti, calls this method re-cognition. “All valid interpretation of every sort,” he writes, “is founded on the re-cognition of what an author meant” (p. 126). Since it is fully determinate in itself, meaning, for Hirsch, is something that needs only to be rediscovered and copied. Interpretation is nothing more than a matter of the psychological reconstruction of an author’s intention; it is a matter of putting one’s feet in the author’s shoes (see p. 238) or, again, according to Hirsch’s Cinderella analogy, a case of merely matching up the right person with the right shoe (p. 46).

Such, in outline, and presented with a view to its basic presuppositions, is the position Hirsch puts forward in his book. As should be evident, Hirsch is simply reiterating in his own way certain traditional concepts, those principally of substance and truth (as correspondence). An adequate response to Hirsch would have to proceed by way of a critique of these traditional categories. It is just such a critique that I shall attempt partially to sketch out in section 3 below. Before doing so, it would perhaps be useful to take a second look at the meaning of one author in particular to whom Hirsch appeals in an attempt to justify his realistic conception of the hermeneutical object. This author is Edmund Husserl, and what I wish to show is that Hirsch has himself insufficiently and incorrectly construed Husserl’s meaning. It will also become apparent that a different (and more faithful) reading of Husserl suggests a conception of interpretation altogether different from the one espoused by Hirsch.

2

Hirsch looks to Husserl for philosophical justification of the idea that the object of consciousness (or interpretation) is something “objective.” However, Hirsch does not look very far, for while it is true that a defense of the “objectivity of the object” can be found in Husserl, much more besides can be found there as well. Hirsch seems only to have read Husserl’s early work, Logical Investigations (this, at any rate, is the only work he alludes to). What interests Hirsch here is the notion of intentionality. According to this key phenomenological notion, it is the essence of consciousness always to be directed to an object, an object which, as Sartre would say, it—consciousness—itself is not; all consciousness is consciousness of something. That is, in all conscious states one can and must distinguish between an act of consciousness and an object of consciousness that this act intends. The object of which one is conscious cannot, therefore, be reduced to and be identified with the acts by means of which one intends it. According to this notion, many different conscious acts can therefore intend one and the same object, and, even more, different conscious subjects can intend one and the same object. The rainbow that I see is the same as seen by the person standing next to me. From a phenomenological point of view, Hirsch is thus quite correct in saying that textual meaning (as an object of consciousness) is not and cannot be identified with the subjective mental acts of the interpreter. He says:

It is, however, at this point that Hirsch leaps to a premature conclusion. Because the object of consciousness cannot be identified with acts of consciousness, Hirsch assumes that it must therefore exist fully in its own right as something permanent, self-identical, unchanging, and reproducible. If it were not autonomous in its own right, how else, Hirsch reasons, could it be intended by the same consciousness at different times or by different consciousnesses at the same or different times? While the main gist of Husserl’s antipsychologistic argument in Logical Investigations was to deny the identity of meaning with subjective acts, Hirsch is above all concerned to affirm the complete independence of the object. This leads him naturally into his version of Platonic realism as regards meanings alluded to in section 1 above.

Like Hirsch, the early Husserl was concerned above all with refuting psychologism and historicism; to this end he insisted on the irreducibility of the object to the subjective acts which intend it. Husserl’s position in Logical Investigations is, however, ambiguous. In certain ways he seems to be defending implicitly a modified version of Platonic realism. It is not without reason that some commentators refer to this as Husserl’s realistic period. However, as is well known, Husserl was not content to remain at the level of the early Logical Investigations and went on in later works (as well as in the revised, second edition of Logical Investigations, the sixth Investigation especially) to defend a position which to many seemed to represent an abrupt about-face.

Having hit upon the notion of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl was led to the notion of constitution. His thinking underwent a “transcendental turn,” and the meaning-object that in Logical Investigations he had interpreted antipsychologistically, he traced back to and linked up with, in his later works, certain constitutive acts on the part of consciousness itself. This is the reason why Husserl referred to his later thought as “transcendental idealism.” The object of consciousness, as Husserl went on to maintain, is an ideal (nonreal, irreal) object having neither meaning nor being apart from consciousness. “The objective world . . . this world, with all its objects, I said, derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche.”⁵

Husserl’s transcendental turn disconcerted many of his early disciples. What they saw appeared incomprehensible to them; Husserl seemed purely and simply to be changing positions and abandoning realism in favor of idealism. He seemed to have undergone a “conversion” to idealism. However, such a view is, in my opinion, impossible to justify if we keep in mind the general drift of Husserl’s thought, if we understand rightly his Problematik. Gaston Berger, a first-rate interpreter of Husserl, rejected the idea of a “conversion” in his thought, seeing instead a “progressive deepening of an investigation which does not wander from its axis”; “ . . . it is only a question,” he said, “of the normal progress of a thought which is not idling in place.”⁶

Indeed, Husserl, the “perpetual beginner,” the constant searcher after an ever more radical intelligibilty, could not but see that the bare notion of intentionality calls for a deeper analysis. It is not sufficient—necessary though it be at first—to insist merely on the objectivity of the object. It is above all necessary to account for this objectivity. “What it means, that objectivity is,” Husserl wrote, “and manifests itself cognitively as so being, must precisely become evident purely from consciousness itself, and thereby it must become completely understandable.”⁷ The notion of intentionalty is, therefore, not the final solution Hirsch takes it to be. Intentionality is a fact of conscious life, and, as such, just like life itself, it calls for further analysis if it is to become intelligible, if, precisely, we are to understand what it means that consciousness is intentional. Husserl’s originality does not consist in having discovered intentionality—this was not his discovery—but in his attempt to clarify this notion. Accordingly, after first having saved objectivity from psychologism, Husserl went on to ask what the meaning of objectivity is. And what he came to see is that the objectivity of the object is entirely relative to the subjectivity of the (transcendental) subject.

Intentionality is indeed a two-way street. If all consciousness is consciousness of an object, if there can be no act which does not intend some object, conversely, there can be no object apart from an actual or possible consciousness which intends it. To say that consciousness is intentional does not just mean, as Hirsch sees it, that consciousness transcends itself toward its object. This much would indeed justify philosophical realism, and phenomenology is—from one point of view—a realistic philosophy. But to say that consciousness is intentional means also—but Hirsch stops short here—that the object is always given with consciousness and in fact has no meaning, no significant being, apart from consciousness. This is assuredly an “idealistic” conclusion, but the idealism in question is a very special sort of idealism—a transcendental idealism—for in no way does it deny the reality or objectivity of the object. Rather, it clarifies it by linking it up with the structures of pure, transcendental consciousness. Reality is nothing other than that of which consciousness is conscious. This is to say that it is the correlate of consciousness and that the meaning of reality is to be sought for in consciousness alone.

Let us see what in this context the real object is for the mature Husserl. This will provide us with the means for conceiving of the hermeneutical object quite differently from the way Hirsch does; it will, in short, provide us with a countermodel for a theory of interpretation. In the fourth part of Ideas, entitled “Reason and Reality,” Husserl takes up the question of the relation of consciousness to the object (reality). This widening-out of the preceding noeticonoematic analyses is a source of perplexity for many of his readers. The question of what the object is seems to have been dealt with already in the preceding section of the book. Is not the object of consciousness nothing other than the noema, which itself is ideally immanent to consciousness? Has not Husserl bracketed the “real” object and substituted for it the intentional object (noema)? Paul Ricoeur, translator and commentator of Ideas, remarks: “This rebound of the description poses the most extreme difficulties of interpretation.”⁸ These difficulties can be alleviated if we realize that what Husserl is attempting to do in this fourth part of Ideas is, precisely, to give an immanent account not only of the conscious object but also of reality itself. For this reason, the question of what the real object is, the object itself apart from consciousness, cannot be simply bracketed and ignored; reality itself must be clarified phenomenologically, i.e., explicated in terms of consciousness.

Having already, in his description of the intentional structure of consciousness, distinguished between the intentional act and intentional object, Husserl now says that both the act (noesis) and the intentional object (noema—the “content” of consciousness) are themselves related to and intend an object, the “real” object: “Every intentional experience has a noema and therein a meaning through which it is related to the object.”⁹ This is the object simpliciter, what in ordinary language is called the real object outside consciousness. The intentional object is merely the object qua intended, the object as it appears; it is not itself identical with the object simpliciter, which is what gives rise to a multiplicity of determinations or meanings (noemas or intentional objects). What, then, is the object itself? “What properly does the ‘claim’ of consciousness to really ‘relate’ to something objective, to be ‘valid’ (triftig) mean?”¹⁰ As this question makes evident, the problem Husserl is dealing with is essentially none other than the one which so absorbs Hirsch: the validity of consciousness or interpretation. What is it that legitimates, that validates conscious meanings? For Husserl this is the question: What is the status of the object? What is the relation between consciousness and reality? What is Reality?

The essence of Husserl’s answer can be given succinctly, even though a fully faithful and adequate presentation of his thought on this matter would necessitate a considerable amount of careful interpretation. Husserl writes: “ ‘Object’ as we everywhere understand it is a title for eidetic connexions of consciousness.”¹¹ And again: “ . . . [the] ‘real object’ . . . acts . . . as an indication of fully determined systems of conscious formations teleologically unified.”¹² In essence, Husserl is saying here that the transcendence of the real object is itself something constituted in consciousness. The “object” or “reality” is nothing other than that which corresponds to an “infinite ideal manifold of noetic experiences.”¹³ Thus the difference between the intentional object and the object simpliciter is that while the former is the correlate of only one type of intending, the latter is that which corresponds to an ideally indefinite number of intentional acts. As such, it is, therefore, not something “outside” consciousness and unrelated to it.

Reality is inseparable from consciousness; it is consciousness which “in itself legitimates this reality.”¹⁶ Interpreting Husserl, Ricoeur writes: “The true being of the thing remains an Idea in the Kantian sense, i.e., the regulating principle of an open series of appearances which are continuously concordant.”¹⁷ And in an interpretation that Husserl himself countersigned, Eugen Fink stated:

The relation between the noematic object and the object simpliciter, between consciousness and reality, is itself constituted by consciousness. Reality is nothing other than the ideal object of all possible conscious acts, and in this sense it is immanent to and inseparable from consciousness. It is the immanent teleological goal or ideal pole of all conscious acts.

With this conception of objectivity, Husserl has succeeded in overcoming the subject-object dichotomy, the traditional dilemma which is still at the very heart of Hirsch’s analyses. Husserl has succeeded in making sense of reality by showing what, in concrete terms of experience, it means to speak of reality. The real object is not some mysterious Ding-an-sich outside consciousness to which we approximate without ever knowing if, in fact, we have coincided with it; it is, rather, nothing other than the immanent, ideal unity of an indefinite number of experiences. The object, reality, or the world, is for Husserl nothing other, and nothing more, than a “pole of unity”¹⁹ within experience and of experience:

Now what I wish to suggest is that the hermeneutical object is best understood when it is conceived in the way in which Husserl conceives of the “object” and “reality.” On this analogy, various interpretive “hypotheses” would correspond to the different noemas, the different ways in which an object may be intended. These interpretive meanings are themselves related to and intend the hermeneutical object simpliciter, i.e., the meaning of the text. When, then, is the meaning of the text? Obviously, it is not in this case something subsisting apart from the interpretive, reading consciousness, “out there” in some mysterious, transcendent realm of self-subsistent, reified meanings. It exists only in the interpretive consciousness as the meaning which is there for this consciousness. This is not to say that the meaning of a text, e.g., a text of Heraclitus, is purely and simply what I decide to say it is. This is not to open the door to arbitrariness, subjectivism, relativism, historicism, and so on, and so on. The meaning of the text is no more identical with any given interpretation than the object simpliciter is reducible to any given noema or intentional object. But the meaning of the text, like the object, is not, of course, something totally other than its various determinations, either. It is precisely the ideal (nonreal) telos of interpretation, its immanent teleological goal. This is the only meaning that the meaning of the text can be said to have. The objectivity of the text cannot be divorced from the subjectivity of the interpreter; in fact, the only conceivable criterion for textual meaning is the interpreter (the whole interpretive tradition). Apart from interpretive consciousness, it is impossible to speak of the meaning of a text.

This is not a subjectivistic position, for consciousness here is not understood subjectivistically, i.e., as the consciousness of myself or of any other empirically existing human being. One could say of the text what Peirce says of Reality: “reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it.”²¹ The opposite of the naive realism we find in Hirsch is indeed a kind of subjective idealism. But we need be impaled on one of the horns of the realism-idealism dilemma only if, like Hirsch, we persist in operating with concepts expressive of the modern subject-object dichotomy. We will fear subjectivity and overreact by investing our hopes in an uncontaminated—and illusory—realism only so long as we have not fully elucidated the sense of reality itself. Had Hirsch been less selective in his reading of Husserl, he would perhaps have come across the following admonition regarding subjectivity:

3

Our counterreading of Husserl has furnished us with a countermodel for the hermeneutical object and, by implication, for interpretation in general. An adequate presentation and defense of this new model would require as fully developed a treatise as Hirsch’s own. Therefore, I shall take a different line, a negative approach, so to speak. If Hirsch’s position can be seen to be unsatisfactory, then the need for a different approach to basic hermeneutical theory will be appreciated. There are three areas where Hirsch’s position necessarily results in especially undesirable consequences, those, namely, having to do with the questions of truth, time, and creativity. The remainder of this essay will consist of a number of observations in regard to these notions.

In general, it can be said that Hirsch’s basic conceptual framework wherein the subject-object dichotomy dominates generates a number of false dichotomies and pseudo-alternatives which serve only to obscure the real issues. This is certainly the case in what has to do with the issue of truth and meaning. As we have seen, Hirsch wishes to make of interpretation a serious business, i.e., a science. Now to be a science a discipline must be able to lay claim to truth or validity as regards its statements. And validity is achieved when what we say about a thing actually corresponds to what the thing itself is: Veritas est adequatio intellectus ad rem. Or as Hirsch puts it: “Validity implies the correspondence of an interpretation to a meaning which is represented by the text . . . ” (p. 10). Furthermore, if correspondence is to be achieved, then there must be something that can be corresponded to, i.e., there must be a fully determinate object if valid determinations of it are to be possible. In pursuing this line of reasoning Hirsch is led into absolutizing the hermeneutical object. Without a fixed object there can be no rigor in interpretation. Hirsch leads his reader in this way into one of the most pernicious of pseudo-alternatives: absolultism vs. relativism—either there is an absolute or else everything becomes utterly relative. Now sheer relativism is indeed an inadmissible position for any discipline seeking genuine knowledge, for it destroys the very notions of truth and validity. It is something we can accept no more than can Hirsch. However, what I wish to suggest is that on Hirsch’s own grounds relativism is inevitable.

Hirsch’s correspondence theory of truth actually renders truth inaccessible, which is to say, impossible. Hirsch himself admits that we can never know if, in fact, our interpretations are valid, i.e., faithfully reproduce the author’s meaning: “I can never know another person’s intended meaning with certainty because I cannot get inside his head to compare the meaning he intends with the meaning I understand, and only by such direct comparison could I be certain that his meaning and my own are identical” (p. 17). But in order nonetheless to save the abstract notion of truth as coincidence, Hirsch immediately adds: “It is a logical mistake to confuse the impossibility of certainty in understanding with the impossibility of understanding.” But it is actually Hirsch who is the victim of a logical mistake and of fuzzy thinking. For while he maintains, on the one hand, that the hermeneutical object is the author’s intended meaning and maintains as well that this is a fully determinate, self-subsistent, really existing entity, he denies, on the other hand, that we can ever know (or, to be more precise, know that we know) this meaning. Such a statement is devoid of any concrete logic. Actually, it might be more appropriate to say that what Hirsch offers us with one hand he takes away with the other. Of course, this is not a perversity of Hirsch alone; it is, as Montaigne observed, a characteristic of all metaphysical defenders of “absolute” truth and meaning. The fact of the matter is that the notions of absolute truth and meaning are meaningless notions, for the simple reason that they have no equivalent and play no actual role in our own experience; they have no experiential content. As Merleau-Ponty observed in a passage which is too pertinent and too eloquent not to quote at length:

To be sure, Hirsch does try to salvage the notion of absolute truth by saying that if I can never be absolutely certain of an interpretation, I can nonetheless be probably certain. Such is the way in which the notion of probability judgments come to play a decisive role in his thinking. It is, one might say, a kind of stopgap measure—but one which is doomed to failure as well. For if, as I have maintained, absolute truth and self-subsistent meanings are meaningless notions, then the notion of an approximation to such entities (probability) is equally meaningless.

Thus, if we are arguing against Hirsch’s conception of understanding, this is not because we wish to deny the possibility of understanding, as Hirsch would have it, but because we wish to conceive of understanding anew—precisely in order to defend (in a meaningful way) the possibility of undertanding and of truth. It is actually Hirsch’s position which gives rise to relativism and skepticism, for an inaccessible, absolute-in-itself, which must necessarily be a source of continuous frustration when it is searched after, ends up by provoking a doubt as to its very existence or, at the least, a kind of resigned agnosticism. As Nietzsche well understood, nothing devalorizes human experience and truth more than the positing of an absolute value and truth. The only conception of understanding capable of justifying the possibility of understanding is, consequently, one which conceives of it in purely experiential terms, one, that is, which does not divorce the hermeneutical object from the interpretive experience but which, instead, gives an immanent account of it, the only meaningful kind of account possible. Such a conception is the phenomenological one, the one sketched out by Husserl.

Even though it denies the notion of the absolute object, Husserl’s position does not for all that lead to subjectivism and relativism, for to give a purely experiential account of the object is not to “subjectivize” it. There is indeed something about a real object that induces one to posit for it a kind of extraexperiential existence. When falsely interpreted, however, this fact of experience can give rise to the philosophical absurdity of an absolute-in-itself. To avoid this kind of absurd realism and to conceptualize experience properly, we should perhaps speak rather of a transexperiential reality, for to speak of a real object at all is indeed to speak of a kind of transcendency. But we must never forget that this is a transcendence that we ourselves discover within our own experience. Therefore, we should say of the object not that it is a reality in itself but, rather, that it is a “transcendence within immanence.” The concept of “transcendence within immanence,” properly worked out, is, I maintain, the only viable alternative to an absurdly naive realism, as well as to an unacceptably subjectivistic idealism. It is just such a concept which can provide the basis for a satsifactory theory of interpretation. A totally extra-experiential reality is a meaningless notion, but it is not impossible that we should discover, in our experience, a transcendence which, though related to this experience, could never be reduced to it.

In opposition to Hirsch’s highly abstract approach, we would perhaps be better off to ask not: What makes an interpretation true or valid? since this can easily induce us to take refuge in a copy theory of truth and will expose us to all the pitfalls latent in such a theory. Instead, we should ask: Why in fact do scholars working on a given text accept one interpretation over another? When the question is asked in this concrete way, we immediately see what the answer cannot be. We cannot say that they accept the interpretation because it is the true or most valid one, for obviously this is begging the question and tells us absolutely nothing. They cannot compare their interpretations with the truth and choose accordingly, for the “truth” is something they will possess only after or when they have opted for and agreed upon a given interpretation. It would make more sense, pragmatically, at least, to say that the true interpretation is true for no other reason than because it is accepted as so being. To say that an interpretation is true comes down to, and is no more than, saying that it is generally accepted by the community of interpreters. Any other notion of truth can (as is the case with metaphysical entities in general) have only a merely verbal significance.

The answer to the question: Why is one interpretation accepted over another? can only be: because it seems more fruitful, more promising. It seems to make more and better sense of the text than other interpretations; it opens up greater horizons of meaning. This amounts to saying, of course, that truth is essentially of a presumptive nature. All interpretation works under the promise of truth. To speak of promise is to speak of the future. “Validity” does not, therefore, come from the past but from the future; validation is nothing other than the harmonious unfolding and reciprocal confirmation of successive experiences (interpretations). This is to say also that knowledge is not so different from faith. When we opt for a given interpretation, we do not do so because we know it to be true (even Hirsch admits to this) but because we believe it to be the best, the one which offers the most promise and is the most likely to make the text intelligible, comprehensible for us.

Just as we have seen Husserl say that the world’s existence is an entirely presumptive existence, and just as for Husserl to say that the real world exists is to say only that we believe that experience will continue to unfold harmoniously (Husserl’s Urdoxa, what Merleau-Ponty called la foi perceptive), so also we should say that the reality of the hermeneutical object is entirely presumptive. The meaning of the text is in no way separable from its meaning for us; what a text means is nothing other than the immanent goal of the interpretive process. Its being is essentially futural. Deciding among possible textual interpretations is, as Hirsch himself would say, not all that different from deciding among interpretive schemas of reality in science. But, I believe, a better grasp of just what goes on in science is to be found in Thomas Kuhn rather than in E. D. Hirsch (or, perhaps I should say, in Karl Popper, who furnishes Hirsch with his canonical texts on scientific knowledge). In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn, considering the question as to why scientists opt for a given interpretive schema, or “paradigm,” as he calls it, writes:

It is perhaps no coincidence that certain of Kuhn’s remarks are applicable in the matter of hermeneutics.²⁵ For one thing that Kuhn has in effect shown is that science itself is to be understood as one way in which human beings interpret the world. And what is of interest above all in Kuhn’s exposition is its overall implications regarding the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. Our usual picture of science is that it is an “objective” representation and description of nature. The history of science and of scientific revolutions has, however, quite a different story to tell. It shows that science is, in actuality, something quite different from this abstract idea of it. What science says of the world is dependent not on the way things supposedly are in themselves but on the fact that the scientist views the world by means of a particular paradigm or model (interpretive schema). The way the scientist views the world determines what the world that he sees is. This is to say that when a scientific revolution occurs, it is not merely the doctrinal content of science that changes; it is the world itself that undergoes a transformation: “When paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.”²⁶ This is perfectly understandable when we realize that what the world appears to be is entirely dependent on our way of looking at it and of acting on it. The only answers the world gives are to questions we have asked of it. And Nature answers the scientist’s questions in much the same way as the god whose oracle is at Delphi, neither affirming nor denying, as Heraclitus said, but only indicating enigmatically. Indeed, as Heraclitus also remarked, Nature likes to hide, answering only those questions asked, and then with all the ambiguity and sly reticence permitted by the question itself. As the answers change and vary according to the questions asked, it is immensely difficult ever to know if we have the answer we’re really looking for (can we ever be sure we have asked the right question?). The lesson to be learned from this is that before we tempestuously set out in a Quixotic search for a pure and pristine “objectivity,” we should first of all clarify our own subjectivity, for it is precisely this which determines what we shall find. This is why Husserl ended his Paris lectures with the following exhortation of Saint Augustine: Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.

Scientific knowledge is, therefore, no passive copying of reality but is, rather, an active construction or constitution of it. In sum, science is but one way in which we creatively interpret reality, and no more than in any other mode of interpretation do we have access here to absolute reality and truth.

As I see it, the morale of Kuhn’s historical-hermeneutical analyses is that we must change our traditional idea of what science is. Not only that, we must change our very conception of truth and reality. Kuhn himself seems actually to be hinting at as much when he remarks in passing about the need for “a viable alternative to the traditional epistemological paradigm.”²⁷ Kuhn expresses dissatisfaction with the “epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries,”²⁸ but, lacking a developed alternative, he cannot quite bring himself to relinquishing entirely that viewpoint. What is called for, we might say, is precisely a viable and well-workedout alternative to the traditional metaphysical and epistemological viewpoint, the same one that we have seen at work in Hirsch. Philosophy, whose business is the articulation and elucidation of basic “paradigms,” is itself in a state of crisis today, not unlike the periodic crises in science which Kuhn describes and which are more often than not the prelude to a revolution or change of paradigms. The traditional philosophical paradigms are proving more and more unsatisfactory to more and more people, but as yet there seems to be no general consensus as to what should replace them. Radical critiques of the traditional metaphysical and epistemological outlook have been formulated in this century by movements as diverse as phenomenology and pragmatism. The traditional concept of substance has come under heavy attack in more than one type of philosophy and by contemporary thinkers who otherwise have precious little in common. But if the tradition has been severely criticized, it has not, at least as regards philosophers in the aggregate, been overcome successfully. Philosophy in general still lacks a viable alternative to the traditional substance-oriented paradigm, to the traditional conceptual framework, or Begrifflichkeit, as Heidegger would say. However, a certain movement in a given direction does seem to be discernible. Philosophy in general seems to be moving away from a conception of reality as something static, immutable, self-identical, and timeless to one which views it as essentially historical and creative, as some would say, or as process, as others would say. It is understandable nonetheless that in the present crisis many thinkers will prefer to hold on to the traditional Begrifflichkeit when the only alternative they can see is one which abandons fixity in favor of chaotic flux, relativism, skepticism, the denial of truth altogether, with the nihilism which follows from this. Nietzsche is here paradigmatic of the present malaise. While his critique of the tradition is absolutely devastating, the only alternative to the “will to truth” he denounces which seems to follow or to be found in his thought is an abysmal nihilism—notwithstanding his own proclaimed aversion to nihilism. If there is nothing better than a Nietzsche, it is understandable that many will wish to deny and ignore his criticisms, clutching even more desperately to a worn-out, bankrupt system. A little light is preferable to the absence of all light; the will to truth is preferable to the idolization of madness and irresponsible innocence.

Thus the task confronting philosophy is that of developing an alternative to the traditional epistemological paradigm, as Kuhn would say. The subject-object dichotomy arising from Cartesian subjectivism which has plagued all of modern thought, which was incorporated into the conceptual framework of natural science, and which Hirsch is now attempting to impose upon the humanities—it is this dichotomy that philosophy must overcome in a decisive way. Just as, in science, the Newtonian epoch has come to an end, so also the more basic and inclusive Cartesian epoch has reached its conclusion. However, like Zarathustra’s townsmen who ignored the “death of God” (i.e., the end of Platonism), many today seem oblivious to the fact that the bases of their traditional world are collapsing under their feet. Philosophy lacks the Einsteins and Heisenbergs necessary to effectuate for it the needed conceptual revolution, or, rather, it may already have had them; it may be that we have still to learn from them the necessary lesson. Philosophical revolutions, it is true, occur in more subtle ways than do scientific ones.

The basic defect with Hirsch is that his attempt to rethink hermeneutics in the light of positivistic science has prevented him from seeing that it is the traditional paradigm of scientific objectivity and the traditional notions of truth and reality that are themselves in need of rethinking. It is not so much that Hirsch is wrong as that he is misguided and has been misled into fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a cause which has by now lost most if not all of its vital force and “relevance.” Hirsch’s error in hermeneutics is of the same order as that of the hard-line behaviorist in psychology; in both cases the attempt to be ultrascientific and an irrational aversion to everything “subjective” has led them into modeling their disciplines after a conception of physical science which is by now plainly outdated. Hirsch’s positivistic conception of science is one which has been demolished by many recent theoreticians of science, by Michael Polanyi, for instance, who writes:

It is precisely this kind of absurdity that we encounter in Hirsch’s hermeneutical realism.

Up to now I have dealt with the underlying notion of truth in Hirsch. In addition to this, there are two other key items which call for at least a minimal criticism: time and creativity. Hirsch’s naive copy theory of truth leads him to conceive of meaning as something copyable, reproducible, i.e., as a self-subsisting, determinate entity. Such a way of conceiving of meaning makes it all but meaningless. Hirsch’s uncritical scientism also results in a hypostatization of meaning as a timeless entity. He says, as we have seen:

Indeed, for Hirsch meaning must be changeless, subsisting outside the ebb and flow of history, if it is to be—as it must be if it is to be “objective”—always the same meaning which is “reproduced” in different interpretations. Once again it is Hirsch’s fear of relativism which makes him overreact by investing meaning with of kind of petrified eternity. Hirsch argues for the timelessness of meaning since without this “there would be no permanent norm on which validating judgments could be made” (p. 21). He says even: “The significance of textual meaning has no foundation and no objectivity unless meaning itself is unchanging” (p. 214). Once again we are forced into the straitjacket of an uncompromising either-or: Either there is an absolute, timeless foundation to the phenomenal world (to interpretations) or else all is relative and vain.

This false and unacceptable alternative leads Hirsch to make a pseudodistinction between “meaning” and “significance,” i.e., between the meaning of the text in itself (which is unchanging) and its meaning or significance for us, for contemporary criticism (which is necessarily in constant change). It is not textual meaning that changes, merely our interpretations of it: “the historicity of interpretation is quite distinct from the timelessness of understanding” (p. 137). While the “meaning”-“significance” distinction might seem, on the face of it, rather ingenious, it is actually rather difficult, if not impossible, to see what experiential reality it corresponds to. If, as Hirsch himself admits, our interpretations are constantly changing, what is it that so much as enables us to form the idea of an unchanging meaning (understanding) beyond interpretation? Certainly not these interpretations themselves, since by definition they are characterized by “historicity.” Since as a matter of fact the most we can do is to devise good interpretations, the actual consequence of Hirsch’s position is to condemn us to an eternal errancy in the shadows of an inaccessible, timeless Understanding. Once again it is actually Hirsch who is destroying the possibility of any real understanding. His overvaluation of the hermeneutical object results—although obviously he does not see this—in a complete devaluation of human understanding. One would have to possess the timeless mind of a Thomistic angel to grasp Hirsch’s timeless meanings. Hirsch’s notion of understanding certainly does not have any relation to the finite understanding of historical human beings.

Hirsch grants that the “cultural givens” of interpretation change in the course of time, but he asks: “does this imply that textual meaning itself changes?” (p. 213). This is, of course, merely a rhetorical question, since for Hirsch it is unthinkable that meaning itself should change; if it did, there would be no norms, just sheer chaos. Nevertheless, we must say that meaning does change; the history of human understanding is not for all that an utter chaos. One can always find in it a kind of inner logic. It must be said that with new interpretations the meaning of a text itself undergoes a development, just as the world itself changes, as Kuhn said, when scientific paradigms change. There can be no other meaning of a text than its (actual or potential) meaning for us, and this does change. To say that our understanding of textual meaning undergoes change is equivalent to saying that the meaning which is there for us also changes. When, in the course of interpretation, we draw more and more meanings out of a text—and often one of these newly formulated meanings will appear to contradict a previous one—when we actively discern more and more meaning in a text, it is the text itself which becomes more meaningful, more laden with meaning. To be sure, there is something about a text considered in its own right that justifies and solicits its own interpretation—not any text will permit any interpretation—but these interpretations are not mere copies of fully developed meanings existing already in the text; they are realizations of an ever richer meaning. Instead of drawing false dichotomies between textual meaning in itself and its meaning for us, between “understanding” and “interpretation,” and others of this sort, we should recognize the existence of a dialectic between text and interpretation, an irreducible dialectic which is the proper locus of emergent meaning. Interpretation, it could be said, is a motivated creation.

Hirsch’s distinction between “meaning” and “significance,” between “interpretation” and “criticism,” could possibly be retained if in each case the two terms are not taken as polar opposites. It is the task of what Hirsch calls “criticism” to make a textual meaning relevant to one’s contemporaries by relating it to their own interests and preoccupations. And it is quite true that a meaning can be made relevant only if it has first of all been determined by interpretation. There is a difference between the discernment of meaning (interpretation) and the application of meaning (criticism). However, the meaning of a text as determined by interpretation is not for all that immutable and self-subsistent; it arises and exists only in and through acts of interpretation and is related essentially to them. While interpretation and criticism are two somewhat different kinds of activity and have two somewhat different kinds of roles to play, it is, nonetheless, impossible to separate them radically, in Hirsch’s fashion.

In the last analysis, Hirsch’s position leads to a thoroughgoing devalorization of history, a devalorization of the same order as we find in the usual scientific view of things. The history of his discipline is a matter of little or no interest to the ordinary practitioner of science. His knowledge of this history usually does not extend beyond what he has learned from text books. And in these, as Kuhn has shown, a very particular conception of history is present, one which looks upon it as a merely cumulative affair wherein what is old is quite simply superseded and displaced by the more developed current truth. History is here seen as proceeding in a linear fashion, with various truths being replaced by ever better and more comprehensive ones. When, through the practice of Hirsch’s “experimental” method, a “valid” interpretation is arrived at, this automatically displaces all preceding interpretations which are therewith relegated to the garbage dump of history. Here the history of human understanding is no more than an enormous rubbish heap of invalidated interpretations.

Finally, what is perhaps the most disconcerting element in Hirsch’s position is its implications for creativity. As a matter of fact, Hirsch (like Popper) has practically nothing to say on this score, and what little he does say is purely negative. This is not surprising, of course, since Hirsch is attempting to be “scientific” and in his haste to be so fails completely to see that science is itself, basically, a creative enterprise. There are no objective, in-itself truths which constrain scientists to formulate their revolutionary theories in the way they do. In cases such as these, the world achieves a greater intelligibility only because scientists have freely chosen to view it in a certain, original way. Freedom and creativity, however, have no place in Hirsch’s “science” of interpretation; “when we construe another’s meaning we are not free agents” (p. 142). Scientists, it is true, often like to say that they had no choice but to formulate the theories they did; it was, they may say, the “evidence” which forced them to their conclusions. The history of science shows this up for the myth it is. Not only does the “evidence” not automatically produce a given theory in the mind of the scientist, what the “evidence,” the “facts of the matter” are depends on the way the scientist chooses to view the matter. Thus, far from maintaining that creativity and freedom should be banished from interpretation, we should recognize that interpretation is possible only because human understanding is creative.

The issue does not stop there, however. Just as Hirsch banishes creativity from interpretation, so also, I believe, he renders meaningless the notion of creativity in the composition of texts. For when we speak of inspired works, we mean, if anything at all, that the meaning of what the author wrote surpasses what he either knew or willed.³⁰ It is precisely this extra- or transintentional element in a work that makes it a classic, a living classic, as we so aptly say, a work which is capable of leading a life of its own beyond that of its author and which makes it something more than a lifeless object of merely historiographical and archival interest. A text itself is not a self-contained, determinate meaning but is, rather, the “promise” of meaning. Unlike the physical document which is its support, the meaning of a text is not a substantial entity (if it were, we would be faced with the absurd question: Where does this entity exist?). The meaning of a text is what the text gives us to understand; it is an invitation and a call to interpretation, and interpretation is the effective realization of a text’s promise. What a text really means is, therefore, inseparable from the history of the interpretations that it engenders. The text, one might say in a way reminiscent of Rudolf Bultmann, is an event whose essence is eschatological. Or as Paul Ricoeur has said:

Ricoeur has attempted to interpret action on the model of a text, but one could turn this analogy around and say of the text what Hannah Arendt says of action:

In the case of great, thought-provoking, “eminent” texts, we are in contact with an overdetermination of meaning, and it is precisely this surplus of meaning that actually calls for and engenders an open-ended process of creative interpretation, a process which ultimately confirms the text in its own meaning. However, as long as like Hirsch we persist in thinking according to the metaphysical category of substance, creativity will ever remain a vain word.

In conclusion, it could be said that the main value of Hirsch’s book lies in its deficiencies, for it is precisely these which can force us to recognize the urgent need for a theory of human understanding capable of overcoming them.