Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning

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Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning

by Paul Ricoeur

3.86 · rating details · 29 ratings · 3 reviews

Paperback, 108 pages

Published January 1st 1976 by Texas Christian University Press

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Jun 08, 2009

Steven Peterson rated it

Paul Ricoeur's focus is interpretation--how to decipher texts. Language is ". . .itself the process by which private experience is made public." When we try to understand the author of a written text, we no longer have the immediate dialogue that we have with a person to whom we are speaking. As a result, we have a ". . .detachment of meaning from the event." In essence, we now must interpret the words in a piece of writing without being able to clarify them through dialogue ...morePaul Ricoeur's focus is interpretation--how to decipher texts. Language is ". . .itself the process by which private experience is made public." When we try to understand the author of a written text, we no longer have the immediate dialogue that we have with a person to whom we are speaking. As a result, we have a ". . .detachment of meaning from the event." In essence, we now must interpret the words in a piece of writing without being able to clarify them through dialogue with the author.

But how can we make sense of this alien written discourse, now separated from the mind of its author by the simple act of putting words to paper? First, the reader must take a guess! Ricoeur says:

"With writing, the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with the mental meaning of intention of the text. This intention is both fulfilled and abolished by the text, which is no longer the voice of someone present . The text is mute. An asymmetric relation obtains between text and reader, in which only one of the partners speaks for the two. The text is like a musical score and the reader like the orchestra conductor who obeys the instructions of the notation. Consequently, to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has been objectified."

In other words, we have to guess the meaning of the text because the author's intention is beyond our reach. A musical metaphor: Listen to Wilhelm Furtwangler's World War II recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Compare it with Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra version a decade later. The tempos are slow to the breaking point in Furtwangler's reading--except for the latter portions of the fourth movement. Toscanini's interpretation maintains a tension in pace throughout (simply put, his is a "fast" version and Furtwangler's a "slow" one--until the latter's manic reading of the last segments of the fourth movement). The same notes on paper, but two very different guesses about Beethoven's meaning. Who is right in their reading of the text? How do we establish that? Since we cannot converse with Beethoven, can we ever know the "real" text, can we apprehend "reality," in a word?

Ricoeur does not believe that it is a hopeless situation. He believes that there are ways of validating our guesses. He claims that:

"An interpretation must not only be probable, but more probable than another interpretation. There are criteria of relative superiority for resolving this conflict, which can easily be derived from the logic of subjective probability."

In a sense, different interpretations that are advanced to describe the meaning of a text (and a text can be a work of art or the written word, for instance) must be compared and examined separately and against each other to see which seems to make the most sense. A kind of discourse takes place, perhaps analogous to two persons speaking, where they can concretely ground their speech. Some interpretations of Beethoven, like the Furtwangler performance, do violence to the structure of the symphony as a whole and are less compelling than others, such as Toscanini's version.

What about the relationship of the author to his or her reader(s)? Ricoeur points out that it becomes irrelevant what the author's original audience was and what the historical circumstances of the author were in creating a text. The meaning of a text is open to anyone who can read. The context in which the original words were composed has no special weight in our interpretation of that text. He notes that ". . .since the text has escaped its author and his situation, it has also escaped its original addresses." In a sense, the text belongs to anyone who can read it and interpret it in convincing ways.

To conclude, Ricoeur presents one argument about how we might read and interpret texts. Those who believe in "original intent," in trying to understand exactly what the authors of texts meant will be critical of this work. The value of works like this (and also note Gadamer's work, e.g., "Truth and Method") is that they challenge our efforts to understand the meaning of texts. By doing that, such works make us more self-reflective and critical in our own efforts to understand texts.
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Jun 25, 2007

Carl rated it

Shelves: literarytheory

A nice, short book that ranges from Structuralism to Speech Act Theory to Metaphor and manages to bring it all together into a fairly easy to understand thesis on how we read. A bit out of date now, I suppose, but I think I see some foreshadowing of Cognitive Poetics, though of course with Ricoeurs own phenomenological twist to it all.
It's been a while since I read this, so I'll try to go back over it and give a more detailed review at some point.

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Jul 28, 2008

Andrew rated it

A killer reflection on the nature of language and interpretation. It was so good I had to write an m.a. thesis on it.

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About Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (...morePaul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).

The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.

In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.(less)

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