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Allyson Presswood

PHIL9402: Contemporary Philosophical Hermeneutics


May 16, 2013
Personal Philosophical Perspective
The NOBTS class, Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics, changed my life. For the first
time I began to comprehend how to make sense of obscure passages, adjudicate seeming
conflicts between passages, and extract applicable meaning from ancient texts without reading
them as if they were addressed to me. It cant mean to us what it didnt mean to them,
Context is key, and Genre! were mantras oft-repeated, and I diligently applied them to the
texts I had read all my life with amazingly productive results. Up to that point, I read my Bible as
if it were Gods Word directly to me; if I failed to understand something, my incomprehension
seemed a judgment on my spirituality. I must be missing the meaning because of my carnality, or
not praying hard enough for enlightenment. Realizing that the Bible was not, in fact, penned
directly as a hand-book for my twenty-first century life was one of the most liberating
experiences I have had. For this reason, anything about hermeneutics intrigues me, and so a
doctoral class on the subject seemed like a fascinating and thrilling idea! If a little bit of
hermeneutics was immensely helpful, a lot would be extraordinarily so.
Wellyes and no. Reading in Philosophical Hermeneutics challenged everything I
learned in my Masters class. Is it fair to interpret an ancient text with information from other
interpreted ancient texts? What makes us think we can ever understand what it meant to them?
Are we really just finding what we look for? Is a text autonomous and full of meaning on its
own, so that no bridge to the past is necessary? Can language be referential and effective in
communication, or are words (especially those set down in writing) just empty jars ready to be

filled with whatever a reader feels like putting in them? Has my interpretive community already
decided and taught me what a text means, so that I understand only through an inherited lens?
Does any scientific-sounding method actually yield good interpretations, or is the process more
complicated than any method could hope to capture? These questions and more smashed my It
cant mean to us what it didnt mean to them into a million pieces.
Starting from scratch, then, in building up my own understanding and attempting to
define a goal and method for hermeneutics, what I kept coming back to was relationship.
Interaction with God in Biblical hermeneutics and interaction with Others in general
hermeneutics seems to me to be the goal, albeit a simplified one, of hermeneutics. We want to
expand beyond our own horizon, so we communicate with others through speech and writing.
We crave connection with others, and thus we speak and write and read and listen. What kind of
method could fulfill this relational goal? One which keeps relationship central in every
theoretical interpretive decision. How did the author relate to his audience? How does the text
relate to each of them? How do we relate to the author and audience and text? Each of these
relationships deserves study, and ultimately we strive to deepen our own relationship with the
Other we encounter through a text.
Philosophical hermeneutics is a veritable rabbit warren of issues. Attempting to isolate
even one or two to the exclusion of the others is like yanking one or two silken threads out of a
tapestry for closer detailed inspection: the immediate partial purpose is served to the detriment of
any further holistic value. A problem in understanding the field, at least for me, is delineating
and categorizing the issues. For the purposes of this paper, I will employ a categorization scheme
based on the six Ws (where, who, how, when, what, and why) and answer them with relation to
hermeneutics.

One of the huge questions in interpretation is where to look for meaning, or alternately
(depending on your perspective on the matter) who controls it. Does the author imbue a text with
meaning, does a text itself contain a surplus of meaning (of which some is not authorially
derived), or does a reader give meaning to a text? All three of these options actually locate
meaning formally in the text and the disagreement really regards how it gets there. Viewing
language as a structural system with inherent rules allows a meaning to be in a text without the
involvement of a person; this view can also be called semantic autonomy. From my study of
linguistics and especially pragmatics, I have concluded that language as a system depends on
language as it is used, not the other way around. Language as it is used requires people, and thus
the only options (a who and not simply a where) for meaning derivation are author or audience
(at least in the traditional trichotomy of choices). Certainly a meaning might be in the text that no
one put there, since language is structural in many ways and a simple application of agreed-upon
community rules can result in a (or several) meaning(s), but to me, a meaning found in this way
holds no value. Furthermore, people use language for communication, normally with others but
sometimes with themselves. In so doing, they do not speak or write with no regard for the people
with which they wish to communicate. Therefore I would hold that both author and audience are
essential as a starting point for discovering the meaning in a text.
Continuing in answering the who question, any contemporary reader approaches an
ancient text with an entirely different set of circumstances from the original audience and a
unique perspective based on their own life experience. Most probably, any meaning they find in
the text will not be exactly the same as the original audience, since their shared context with the
author is not the same. Simply because something is impossible, however, does not mean that it
is incorrect. If no contemporary scholar can find the original meaning because of historical

distance, then it does not follow that finding that meaning should not be the goal of hermeneutics
if one concludes that the intersection of author and audience seen in the text does actually hold
the texts meaning. Inability to perfectly attain a good goal (in my view, a texts original
communicative use) does not require substitution of a completely achievable bad goal (any
meaning which any reader derives through interaction with the text). Analyzing the lens through
which they viewed the text and the lenses through which we tend to view the text can allow
comparisons between them and thus corrections to some of our interpretations based on wrong
assumptions. Just because our who has its own set of presuppositions and assumptions does not
mean that it cannot at least approach an understanding of how the ancient whos were
communicating with each other.
Another huge question is how meaning gets in and out of the text. Here most
philosophers rely on linguistics those looking for the meaning turn to speech act theory or
the like, those looking for a meaning base their work on structuralism or semantics, and those
looking for no (particular) meaning look to post-structuralism or post-modern reader-response
theories. I would answer this question by appealing to Relevance Theory, although appealing to a
descriptive linguistic theory to answer a philosophical problem provides a rather weak basis for
my answer. Still, Relevance Theory holds that communication is based on cognitive processing
cost and benefit, so that people will say or write exactly as much as they need to explicitly and
leave implicit what can be inferred from shared context. The meaning in the text, then, stems
from the communication between people, and includes not only the explicatures but also
implicatures from context. How becomes infinitely more complex when intertextuality is in
view, since one must consider not only the intersection of author and audience of the text in view
but also intersection of author and audience of the text being quoted or alluded to (as well as

several other factors). For these instances, Richard Hays provides an excellent intertextual
method to help unravel some of the knotty problems.
Diverging a bit from the way the other W questions were used but keeping the theme
nonetheless, when the text originated is also an incredibly important question for hermeneutists
to answer. This question is part of the application and not the theory of certain types of
hermeneutics in that the when only matters to those who hold original context to have some
determinative force on meaning. I would certainly fall into that camp, and thus when is a huge
part of the hermeneutical method in my view. To use an analogy from Jennifer Knust, the past is
a foreign country, meaning (to her) that historical distance works much like the language and
cultural barriers faced by tourists or new immigrants in that it keeps them from being able to
comprehend much of anything. Extending the analogy, though, the longer you live in a foreign
country the better you understand it. In the same way, immersing yourself in the language and
culture (admittedly, mostly discovered through literature, but also helped quite a bit through
archeological contributions) in which a text originated helps in understanding it more fully.
Social-science methodology is overwhelmingly (and I believe rightly) concerned with
reconstructing the when of a text in order to interpret correctly.
What the text means may seem to be end of the hermeneutical journey and not technically
part of it, but ideological hermeneutics turn the what into the main controlling goal. Liberation
hermeneutists look for opposition to oppression; hermeneutists of love interpret everything
through the lens of covenantal or self-sacrificial love. This flipping of the what question to the
beginning instead of the end of the hermeneutical process causes much confusion and seems to
make the ends justify the means in interpretation, but valid cases can be made for preferencing
an idea in this fashion. Going back to relationship being the main goal of hermeneutics,

ideological hermeneutics privilege an abstract idea over a relationship with a tangible Other, so
that the controlling relationship of interpretation is that of the reader and love or the reader and
freedom instead of the reader and the original communication by anOther.
Why then do we interpret? I practice hermeneutics because I care about what those
around me think and feel; I practice Biblical hermeneutics because the record of Gods
communication with other people informs my own communication with Him. Though the issues
involved in hermeneutics are far more complex than those discussed in the introductory Biblical
hermeneutics class, I still think those basic principles are incredibly helpful and essentially
sound. Philosophical Hermeneutics has challenged me to think more deeply and has given me
questions to ponder that may take me more than a lifetime to answer! But discovering the
questions is the first step to answering them

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