252. Hermeneutics and literature

I have a hermeneutic question: how should we interpret hermeneutics? If it means the search for the single, true or ultimate meaning of a text, I do not go along with it. If it means that multiple interpretations may remain, and ever new ones may arise, I go along with it. That, I think is implied in the ‘hermeneutic circle’.

I discussed that earlier, in item 36 of this blog, but here is a summary. Language use entails that terms for concepts (on a ‘paradigmatic axis’) get inserted into sentences in action contexts, composed by grammar and syntax (on a ‘syntagmatic axis'). Paradigmatic concepts arise in abstraction from use in specific contexts. That entails generalization, a reduction of meaning to apply more widely, beyond contexts of application and origination. When inserted again in sentences they connect with other terms, increasing the richness of meaning with context-specificity, narrowing the reference to something specific to the context. This ongoing interchange between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes forms the hermeneutic circle.

I tried to connect this with the ‘cycle of invention’ proposed in this blog and summarized in a preceding item (no. 250). There, invention of a novelty at first  yields a variety of alternative tentative new forms, which next gets narrowed down, converging onto a dominant form (paradigm), abstracted from the context where it originated, and more precise, after getting rid of remnants of the old and ambiguities of the new. This also means that what was liquid gets petrified. This then is embedded in other, new contexts (syntagm), in a variety of forms according to the different contexts, becoming more liquid. Misfits may then be encountered, and novel opportunities for novel modifications, which can yield a novel concept, with trials of different modifications, where we are back at the beginning of the circle. Liquid becomes gas, mixed with other gases, to yield a new distillation.

In the exploration of novelty, unable to specify something in language that does not yet fit, and misses or distorts it, one needs indirect images, associations, or metaphors. After new meaning becomes more determinate, in a new language, then one needs metaphor again for getting novelty across to others still dwelling in the old language.

Note, however, that metaphor is also misleading. For example, the thesis of an ‘object bias’ in language, proposed earlier in this blog, entails that we conceptualize abstract notions using metaphors from objects in space, and the handling of them, with containers, avenues, vessels, materials, flows, channels and the like, thereby misconstruing those nations. Like being ‘in’ love, ‘grounding’ an argument or theory, then ‘bringing it across’, taking a ‘position’, sending information across a communication ‘channel’, the ‘content’ and the ‘boundary’ of a concept, the ‘expressing’ an idea, ‘absorbing’ a message, and so forth.

The notion of ‘digging’ for an ultimate ‘ground’ of a theory may be a linguistic delusion, Like sticking a spade into the ocean.

Now, I propose literature is connected to all this as follows. It explores new meanings, in images or metaphors. It is not theoretical, i.e. not abstract, not paradigmatic, concerned with the general, the universal, but specific, contextual, syntagmatic, concerned with the singular, the individual. It puts familiar ideas into unfamiliar contexts, deviating from established, taken for granted general meanings and truths, and thereby shifts them. Dare I say it, with a bow to Derrida: it deconstructs. This applies also to conventions, rules, morality, and identity. Crime may turn into virtue, the ugly into beauty. People turn out not be what they were thought to be. Reading literature is an exercise in exploring and shifting meaning and morality. Earlier, in item 120 I asked whether reading literature ‘makes people better’, in exercising and developing their moral sense.

So, literary texts are not only subject to deconstruction by readers, they may deconstruct the reader.

In exploration, science also needs to do all this, and as a result it has a taste of the literary, for which is often condemned, for not (yet) being rigorous, well defined, univocal, unambiguous, determinate, abstract, tightly argued. It is blamed for being ‘ad hoc’, incidental, particularistic, indeterminate. And it is, has to be. The petrification of theory comes later.

Feyerabend once said that demanding a budding theory to be clear and exact is like letting a baby box against a grown man.