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Part Five: analysis of the interpretational quality of the why questions

We said that the first why question was of an epistemological sort: why do the whats and hows of my existence themselves exist? It is asked within the ambit of the ‘how do we know what we know’ category. In so doing, we recognize the second why question as one of ethics: what is the purpose of my specific existence, given everything else I have understood about it thus far? Ethics claims, and from the first instance, that the very idea of purpose is held within the world, and does not emanate from any possible otherworld. Indeed, this latter space was held to be the source of morality, not ethics, and the chief difference between the two oft-confused conceptions is one of hermeneutics. Morals presents the Logos as if it were still Mythos; morals are meant to be timeless and choate principles, echoing the transparency of meaning available to the gods themselves. But ethics involves us in a real-time decision-making process which understands the world to be diverse and inchoate enough – as Gadamer famously put it, ‘life is vague’ – to require the acknowledgement that what might have been ‘good’ in or for one context might not be in the next, and hence the same for ‘bad’.

Morality is thus epistemological in terms of our two why questions; morality is the template of how we do what we are supposed to do. Ethics, by contrast, is, unsurprisingly, ethical; it presents to us the purpose of doing what we actually do or, in hindsight, helps us interpret and even analyze what we have already done. Ethics does not disclose the world of a piece; sometimes we will not know if we have made the ‘right’ decision for some period of time, while we wait to see ‘how things actually turn out’. What it does disclose is more akin to the way of the world in its worlding with us. This way is hermeneutic precisely because our actions require that others interpret them, and we must enjoin ourselves to theirs in kind. Even unspoken behaviors must be interpreted. That this occurs seemingly automatically in most mundane cases does not obviate its hermeneutic tenor. It is just that we are well-practiced in many things having their order in the common sociality of the day. When we are first exposed to poetry, for instance, as young people, what is first called to attention is that this habituation is something that is learned; it is a process of understanding which, as we have noted, requires comprehension first, just as when the revolutionary thinker has been moved to change because she has absorbed much of the relevant discourses already extant and thus found them in some way wanting. In a word, the first why question gives the rebel a cause.

This is a major trope in much fiction. The heroine must first comprehend what is going on before she attempts to either change it, stop it, or throw herself under its suasion. Indeed, at first joining with her enemies might be the only way to eventually sabotage them, hence knowing their ‘what’ becomes yet more crucial. This trope maintains it popularity simply because this is exactly how all of us must function in our youth. We must join society as full members before we begin to dismantle it, whatever be the scope of this latter action. A studied youth then, is the key to a successful revolution in adulthood. Note that both Lenin and Mao, amongst many others, took this road. From politics to philosophy, there is a sense that what is of the utmost demands first the comprehension of tradition before any confrontation with it can commence. Kant’s ‘silent decade’, occurring while he was working on his first critique, is evidence of this patient upswing. It is therefore all the more remarkable that his catalyst, Hume, completed his own masterwork at the tender age of 29. This makes even Heidegger, who was 38 when Being and Time appeared, look like a seasoned veteran of thinking. By contrast, my first book was published when I was 37, and if I have written a masterwork, I am not quite blissfully unaware of it! However such may be, it is clear that in order to make a substantial impact in one’s quarter of the world at large, one must come to terms with one’s object, before coming to grips with it.

We shall have much more to say about how ‘worlding’ and interpretation get along or conflict with one another in the final main section below, but for now, we should recognize that what Saussure stated was true for sentential meaning is also the case for comprehension in general. We can apply the same rubric; history has an x-axis; this is the ‘going rate’ of how this or that event or figure is interpreted today. But these historical notables have many other possible interpretations, arranged along the y-axis and intersecting with the going rate whenever we ask the appropriate questions. We bring not only doubt into play as part of the hermeneutic in hand, but as well, the ability to both differentiate elements laid out along the y-axis and thence differing along that same spectrum. If we begin to imagine that the going rate does not tell the whole story, then the meaning held within the x-axis becomes deferred, We have had occasion to nod to Derrida at this point, due to his remark that the combination of Saussurean characters at the very point of intersection of axes does not does not so much fix meaning, as might be implied – though we should remind ourselves that the 1916 Cours is, after, composed of student’s notes – but rather sends it spiraling off into indefinite ‘différence’. Perhaps both senses are a trifle overdone. In use, we do decide upon a meaning, even if in theory, or even in the actual structure of language itself, the lack of fixity is the very thing that allows us the freedom and flexibility to understand meaning in the first place.

In text, the going rate is to assume that the author or writer has made such decisions for us, and thus is able to present his vision in whole cloth, without the nagging doubt of différence and the pesky alternate elements of the y-axis. And this presumption is appropriate to the first why question. Glosses relevant to text include ‘how does the character present herself?’, ‘how is she perceived by others?’ ‘are her actions consistent with her presentation?’ and the like. We can attribute a more or less specific series of meanings to what we are reading. In so doing, we set ourselves up to ask the second why question of the text in itself: ‘what is the purpose of presenting such a character at all?’, and ‘how does this character disclose part of the world in which I actually live?’. These are much more pointed, personal, and profound questions that work within the sphere of ethics, and not epistemology. The process of interpreting a fictional text is at first almost as semi-conscious and habituated as is that of social interaction in the real world. At once this is salutary for ‘realism’ in and of itself; the narrative at hand should invoke, at least at first, feelings of recognition and even comfort. But as there is no story to be told without conflict, these immediate emotions should soon be jostled, if not utterly overtaken, by the sensation of dis-ease; when this occurs in the traditional plot structure, we have the incipience of what has been referred to as the ‘rising action’. At the moment of greatest discomfort with our presumed meanings, the usual climax in the fictional narrative occurs. If we are a moralist at heart, we may be taken with a resolution which restores the balance that we imagined we had at the beginning of the story. But if we are an ethicist, we are hoping rather for some kind of change, however small, but always wise and to the good, which does not restore the original status quo but rather improves upon it.

Yet even if we cleave to the more conservative sensibility, we recognize that the second why question must still be asked. It has the function of a moral audit, in this view. Is my sense of the good life, or the good person, or even the general ‘good’ really all that it is chalked up to be? The only way to find out is by throwing it on the table. It may well be, pending the kind of text we have chosen to read, that we retrieve our original bet and nothing in itself is altered other than I now know the better why, exactly, my moral viewpoint was, after all, at least viable. If we hanker after revolution, or at the very least, some kind of ‘progress’, we nonetheless enact the same gambit as does the perhaps stuffy stoic at our side; by putting it all on the table with the second why question, we are out to not merely to prove him wrong, but as well, wrongheaded. The first simply addresses the ‘stuff’ of his thinking, but the second confronts the thinking itself.

If we are proven correct by the climax and subsequent resolution of the narrative conflict, we make some gains at the table, and are able to then say, ‘well, after all, your morality was not quite up to snuff!’, with as well, one would hope, a tacit caution to ourselves to not hold too closely to our own moral sensibility, given case in point. Either way, the hermeneutic process holds equally. Our Saussurean author may not have been fatally wounded by our Derridean reader, but he has certainly been brought face to face with his own risking ambit, and thus if there is a balance in textual interpretation, it occurs between the authorial risk and that readerly. And this is a patently hermeneutic balance, attained through a process of dialectical dialogue. As a fiction writer, this is in fact what I want of the reader. As a philosophical author, I am more presuming upon the text itself to engender the necessary confrontation. That the latitude available for the interpretation of fiction is wider than that of non-fiction, let alone the latter’s scholarly subset, is a necessity, outdone only by that of poetry. With fiction, the y-axis is much longer and more agile in its ability to intersect with any presumed or even concluded meaning. If différence is the very engine of poetry – even in simpler verse forms, such as the incantation or the limerick, the y-axis still has its moments – and in non-fiction the x-axis flexes its more blinkered, if ongoing and processual, musculature, fiction gifts to us the balanced differed-deferred dynamic. It is thus not surprising that when people think about the very idea of ‘interpreting text’, they are usually referring to fiction, and especially to the narrative form. There is an assumption, however, that hermeneutics seek to expose and revamp, and that is that non-fiction does not require such interpretation, and that sacred texts are somehow beyond it or, at the least, sacrosanct and thus protected from it. Let us now examine these common misunderstandings of interpretation in the light of textual hermeneutics.