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Objective Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

E. D. Hirsch Jr.
E. D. Hirsch Jr.*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

The fact that the term “criticism” has now come to designate all commentary on textual meaning reflects a general acceptance of the doctrine that description and evaluation are inseparable in literary study. In any serious confrontation of literature it would be futile, of course, to attempt a rigorous banishment of all evaluative judgment, but this fact does not give us the license to misunderstand or misinterpret our texts. It does not entitle us to use the text as the basis for an exercise in “creativity” or to submit as serious textual commentary a disguised argument for a particular ethical, cultural, or aesthetic viewpoint. Nor is criticism's chief concern—the present relevance of a text—a strictly necessary aspect of textual commentary. That same kind of theory which argues the inseparability of description and evaluation also argues that a text's meaning is simply its meaning “to us, today.” Both kinds of argument support the idea that interpretation is criticism and vice versa. But there is clearly a sense in which we can neither evaluate a text nor determine what it means “to us, today” until we have correctly apprehended what it means. Understanding (and therefore interpretation, in the strict sense of the word) is both logically and psychologically prior to what is generally called criticism. It is true that this distinction between understanding and evaluation cannot always show itself in the finished work of criticism—nor, perhaps, should it—but a general grasp and acceptance of the distinction might help correct some of the most serious faults of current criticism (its subjectivism and relativism) and might even make it plausible to think of literary study as a corporate enterprise and a progressive discipline.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1960 , pp. 463 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 August Boeckh, Encyclopadie und Méthodologie der philologischen Wissenschaflen, ed. E. Bratuscheck, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1886), p. 170.

2 Gottlob Frege, “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrifl fiir Philosophie und philosophische Krtiik, 100, 1892. The article has been translated, and one English version may be found in: H. Feigl and W. Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1949).

3 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York, 1956), Ch. xn. This chapter is by Wellek.

4 See, for example, Theory of Literature, p. 31. E. D. Hirsck, Jr.

5 Theory of Literature, p. 144.

6 It could also be explained, of course, by saying that certain generations of readers tend to misunderstand certain texts.

7 Theory of Literature, p. 144. My italics.

8 Theory of Literature, pp. 166–167.

9 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Seected Essays (New York, 1932).

10 Most of my illustrations in this section are visual rather than verbal since the former may be more easily grasped. If, at this stage, I were to choose verbal examples I would have to interpret the examples before making my point. I discuss a literary text in the second and third sections. The example of a box was suggested to me by Helmut Kuhn, “The Phenomenological Concept of ‘Horizon’,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).

11 See Aaron Gurwitsch, “On the Intentionality of Consciousness,” in Philosophical Essays, ed. cit.

12 Although Husserl's term is a standard philosophical one for which there is no adequate substitute, students of literature may unwittingly associate it with the intentional fallacy. The two uses of the word are, however, quite distinct. As used by literary critics the term refers to a purpose which may or may not be realized by a writer. As used by Husserl the term refers to a process of consciousness. Thus in the literary usage, which involves problems of rhetoric, it is possible to speak of an unfulfilled intention, while in Husserl's usage such a locution would be meaningless. In order to call attention to the fact that I use the word in Husserl's sense, I have consistently placed inverted commas around it—an awkward procedure which may avert misunderstanding.

13 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phdnomenologie und Théorie der Erkennfnis. I Teil, 2nd ed. (Halle, 1913), pp. 96–97.

14 Ibid., p. 91.

15 See Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urtett, ed. L. Landgrebe (Hamburg, 1948), pp. 26–36, and H. Kuhn, “The Phenomenological Concept of ‘Horizon’,” ed. cit.

16 The phrase, “piece of language,” comes from the first paragraph of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (New York, 1955). It is typical of the critical school Empson founded.

17 Vol. I. Language, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven, 1953). It is ironic that Cassirer's work should be used to support the notion that a text speaks for itself. The realm of language is autonomous for Cassirer only in the sense that it follows an independent development which is reciprocally determined by objective and subjective factors. See pp. 69, 178,213, 249–250, et passim.

18 Theory of Literature, p. 144.

19 Every interpretation is necessarily incomplete in the sense that it fails to explicate all a text's implications. But this kind of incomplete interpretation may still carry an absolutely correct system of emphases and an accurate sense of the whole meaning. This kind of incompleteness is radically different from that postulated by the inclusivists, for whom a sense of the whole means a grasp of the various possible meanings which a text can plausibly represent.

20 Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” in M. D. Zabel, ed., Literary Opinion in America, 2nd ed. (New York, 1951), p. 736. F. W. Bateson, English Poetry. A Critical Introduction (London, 1950), p. 33 and pp. 80–81.

21 This is the “synchronic” as opposed to the “diachronic” sense of the term. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1931). Useful discussions may be found in Stephen Ullman, The Principles of Semantics (Glasgow, 1951), and W. v. Wartburg, Einfuhrung in die Problematic, und Methodik der Sprachwissenschaft (Halle, 1943).

22 See, for example, Cassirer, p. 304.

23 Sewanee Review, 54, 1946. Reprinted in W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954).

24 T. S. Eliot, “From Poe to Valéry,” Hudson Review, 2,1949, p. 232.

25 The word is, in fact, quite effective. It conveys the sense of “memorable” by the component “memorial,” and the sense of “never-to-be-forgotten” by the negative prefix. The difference between this and Jabberwocky words is that it appears to be a standard word occurring in a context of standard words. Perhaps Eliot is right to scold Poe, but he cannot properly insist that the word lacks a determinate verbal meaning.

26 To recall Husserl's point: a particular verbal meaning depends on a particular species of “intentional act,” not on a single, irreproducible act.

27 This third criterion is, however, highly presumptive, since the interpreter may easily mistake the text's genre.

28 Exceptions to this are the syncategorematic meanings (color and extension, for example) which cohere by necessity regardless of the context.

29 The reader may feel that I have telescoped a number of steps here. The author's verbal meaning or “verbal intention” is the object of complex “intentional acts.” To reproduce this meaning it is necessary for the interpreter to engage in “intentional acts” belonging to the same species as those of the author. (Two different “intentional acts” belong to the same species when they “intend” the same “intentional object.”) That is why the issue of “stance” arises. The interpreter needs to adopt sympathetically the author's stance (his disposition to engage in particular kinds of “intentional acts”) so that he can “intend” with some degree of probability the same “intentional objects” as the author. This is especially clear in the case of implicit verbal meaning, where the interpreter's realization of the author's stance determines the text's horizon.

30 Here I purposefully display my sympathies with Dilthey's concepts, Sichhineinfuhlen and Verstehen. In fact, my whole argument may be regarded as an attempt to ground some of Dilthey's hermeneutic principles in Husserl's epistemology and Saussure's linguistics.

31 Spranger aptly calls this the “cultural subject.” See Eduard Spranger, “Zur Théorie des Verstehens und zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Psychologie” in Festschrift Johannes Volkelt zum 70. Geburtstag (Munich, 1918), p. 369. It should be clear that I am here in essential argeement with the American anti-intentionalists (term used in the ordinary sense). I think they are right to exclude private associations from verbal meaning. But it is of some practical consequence to insist that verbal meaning is that aspect of an author's meaning which is interpersonally communicafiie. For this implies that his verbal meaning is that which, under linguistic norms, one can understand, even if one must sometimes work hard to do so.

32 Charles Bally calls this “dédoublement de la personalité.” See his Linguistique générale et linguistique française, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1944), p. 37.