Hermeneutics: the issue of our era

1. Hermeneutics: the issue of our era Thinking through the implications of postmodern hermeneutics & epistemology for theology and praxis

2. Author, text and reader “rising again” Critical Realism A broad based inter-disciplinary response to postmodernism Neither modernist nor postmodernist

3. The Author • Master-slave is not the only way to describe the human being in relation to language. Citizenship is a better description. It concerns the interrelatedness of communication and communion. • Vanhoozeruses 3 scholars on speech-act theory: • John Searle – Ordinary Language Philosophy (Oxford) – era of later Wittgenstein – Ordinary Language (Cambridge) • Paul Ricoeur – Language as discourse • Jűrgen Habermas – Language as communicative action • “With the notion of meaning as a form of action, the author returns, not in his or her Cartesian guise as an all determining self-conscious subject, but as a communicative agent” (p 203)

4. The Author • Language is not so much about the language system (semiotics) but about sentences that do something (semantics). • Language is like a toolbox, which is used when a sentence is made: saying is a kind of doing, a performative act. • Details: The speaker as doerLocutionaryact (utterance) Illocutionary act (what we do in saying something)Perloctionaryact (what is brought about - persuasion) • Common language in the interrelation of community actually works well enough. “Derrida asks us to choose between the alternative of absolute certainty and utter skepticism” (p 211). Common sense hermeneutical realism is the language equivalent of critical realism.

5. Language • Language is not about the subject-object dichotomy (Descartes and modernist philosophy) but about the structures of inter-subjectivity (i.e. relationality). • “Meaning is ‘there’, inscribed in the text, prior to and independent of reading or interpretation, in much the same way that human actions are what they are prior to the investigative and interpretive work of the historian. To deny this would be to deny the reality of the past. The past, however, is real” (p 218). • This understanding has links with the contemporary discipline of communication studies as the transmission of messages. The speaker/author acts to put the sign system into action which the addressee then decodes.

6. The Author • The text is a communicative act of a communicative agent fixed by writing. • Illustration: the artist to a work of art. It is neither the same nor wholly different from the creator. The work of art is something done. What is meant when we say: “This is a Picasso.” • Illustration: legal examination. A person has not acted criminally without intention to do the act. Yet mere intentions never put into action do not constitute legal guilt either. Intention is acting to bring about a result. • So, every text is the result of an enacted intention. • Every text is an embodied intention (put into the “body” of the text).

7. In summary • “Textual meaning enjoys an independence and integrity of its own, apart from the process of interpretation, thanks to the nature and directedness of the author’s communicative act … Hermeneutic realism is a matter of past communicative action” (p 254). • Many readers are more interested in the present than the past – what does the text do now? Here one must distinguish between meaning (what the author intended) and significance. The meaning does not change, but its significance can change. “Hermeneutic realism ultimately rest on this distinction between meaning and significance” (p 260).

8. The Text

9. Building on ordinary language • The aim here is to “sketch a model of interpretation that answers to the requirements of hermeneutic rationality and yields literary knowledge, which, while not absolute, is nevertheless adequate” (p283). • Rather like ordinary language philosophy, the average reader holds a common sense view that the text expresses the thoughts, about the world, of the author. The deconstructionist claims that the “obvious” meaning is not discovered but invented by the interpreter. • However, belief in determinate meaning is not immoral, but “properly basic.”

10. Critical realism • Naïve realism is oblivious to the problems of interpretation that tends to identify the way things are with the way they appear. “The notion that the mind simply apprehends the world as it is overlooks the way in which theories shape our observations” (p 300). • But, does it follow that such theories or models of reality are totally culturally relative? The issue to be exposed is the “all or nothing” approach to knowledge. For Derrida, “if he cannot have ‘perfect’ knowledge, then he won’t have any of it. Yet the move from naiveté to stubborn skepticism is at best a dubious achievement” (p 300). • “The new challenge of dealing with interpretive conflict is to arrive at a model of interpretive rationality that does not presuppose either absolute foundations of a value-free standpoint, on the one hand, or arbitrary and value-laden readings, on the other” (p 300).

11. Philosophy of science • “In science and textual interpretation alike, we come to the data with an interpretive scheme and look for feedback. In response to creeping relativism, a number of recent philosophers of science have proposed a kind of realism that avoids reductionism on the one hand and relativism on the other. The difference between these newer, moderate realists and earlier naïve realists is that the former are aware of the inevitability of descriptive frameworks” (p 320-321). • “Like the world, the text is ‘there’, independent of our attempts to interpret it … Some descriptive frameworks, therefore, enable us to ‘read’ the world better than others, thus ‘improving the legibility of nature’.” (p321)

12. Ben Meyer: NT Studies • 1. Naïve realism, “which assumes that merely by converting signs into words, the reader straightforwardly allows the already fully constituted meaning of the text to register or imprint itself on the mind.” This is the fallacy of insight as pure reception. • 2. The Nietzschean view, which assumes that reading is a creative assembling of elements within one’s own resources and the projecting of this meaning onto the text. There is no way of isolating the contribution of the text and no way of deciding whether the reading is “accurate.” This is the fallacy of insight as pure projection. • Meyer, Reality and Illusion, 87.

13. Ben Meyer: NT Studies 3. “The critical-realist view” affirms “that reading not only assembles elements of meaning from within one’s own resources and ascribes it to the text, but does all this under the controlling guidance of textual warrants, so as (in the best case scenario) to assemble and ascribe to the text those meanings that the writer intended and managed to express in and through the text.” For critical realists, the richer the reserves of the subject, the better the reading, “provided that textual warrants are allowed to define it. Its ethos is responsibility.” Meyer, Reality and Illusion, 87.

14. Vanhuysteen For this approach, in which the scientist and therefore also the theologian attempts to say something about a reality beyond our language by means of provisional, tentative models in terms of human constructs, the term critical realism might be fruitful. van Huyssteen, Justification, 142. The two sides of the “realist” and “critical realist” language in this statement are the phrases “reality beyond our language” and “provisional, tentative models.” The first statement affirms that our language is more than mere helpful symbolism. It is referential, or says something about reality. However, it can never be directly referential, prelinguistic or pretheoretic, since we describe reality through our interpreted experience using models that derive from our context in language and culture. Such models or metaphors thus exist somewhere between the human subject that the object being so described.

15. In summary • “Critical realism thus stands as a middle position between epistemological absolutism (‘there is only one correct interpretive scheme’) and epistemological relativism (‘every interpretive scheme is as good as any other’)” (p 323).

16. Critical realism and eschatology • The reason why I am not a fundamentalist concerns eschatology, and in particular the tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. To begin with, eschatology puts into question a fundamentalist (foundationalist) epistemology that aspires to absolute truths and objective certainties. Pentecost celebrates ‘first fruits’, not the whole harvest” (p 429). • Citing Colin Gunton: “Nearly all the most discreditable actions of church institutions … flow from an improper anticipation of eschatology” (p 429).