Item 0006

2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 1 2 Hermeneutics, Textual and Other i Language, Gadamer observes in Truth and Method (354), is essentially writable and gains by being written. This observa-tion is incontestable, although, as earlier noted, Gadamer's work was too early to take note of the now vast studies (Havelock, Goody, Ong, et al.) concerning what language and thought were like in primary oral cultures (cultures with no knowledge of writing or even of its possibility--which is to say almost all human cultures over the ages, from some tens of hundreds of thousands of years ago until only some 5000 years ago, when the first writing appears). p~Ricoeur states that "writing is the L:/.li,)! full mani~esta.ti.on of dd.scour se " (Interpretation 25-26). _ In, its J' ,r(,.:,;y- ~~~aI#;.l'!.~j¥m.t~t~~A ,~-Wnt~ .»~f~nv~[A.lif!""icv:'!.~~., -I~;, ( inattention t '" nntras such orI\to computer-:--Teenrated),b-e~- .n i~FegaJ:;d-G-:L:I;..fle.-flew-We'l:-J:-a-t-;-fta.ce.sL.ttheat-w-r:-i-ti-BI3-e-l-imiBa-c~ · ",.,~ res-eef-t-atn-Fl0SS:lbili-t±es-operrto--or-a-i-tcuurles (stleh-a-.s the truly oral epic), Ricoeur's statement might be contested as being another example of the textual bias that had characterized most thinking about language until recent times and that only now is being adverted to and seen for what it is. writing does entail certain losses ,for discourse. We know, for example from Lord's and Havelock's work, that writing culture can no longer produce fl~0Jan Iliad or a Beowulf ~f!a Mwindo Epic (Ong, Orality 78-116)@ 2. HERMENEUTICST,EXTUALANDOTHER 2 r/ wfi~~ But in a qualified sense Ricoeur's statement is certain-ly true. llew~r-, ~s a time-obviating and space-obviating mechanism, writing p~~e~ massive gains which are impossible without writing and which are retained and strengthened as well as transformed almost beyond measure in print and in computer-generated text. Se±enee-,-for-exampl.e-,--i-n-the-sense-.Gf elabora-te-ly f o.rmeL, linear exposition conce rnd.nq phys-ieal or~ othe.r_phenom-ena or theories, is impossible w.ithout wr-it-i-ng-.' Moreover, writing is connected with and often brings about fundamental reorganization of society in countless ways, however gradually, varying from culture to culture, as Jack Goody has shown with I;.~):v'~ worldwide detail in The Logic of Writing and the Organization of ?;,,",d.t;;~< f!:P'~ ~.-r:;'{ Society and asj;he studies collected by Harvey J. Graff instance .--iZ~;"'""4-u..,. bAr. r· 1-' ~Ij,,~,·3,? 'VirU- ;-.--di..::(~-,t..-c;:?fr-~-rl/.,#rJL ;;r"/~;..J· ~-:f- -rA?fi" d-f:, S-n,;zt"k wm.v# .~~.:~~... /"-r:t?b However, if it is true that language gains by being written, ~~ it is also true that language did not begin by being written. By;;,/~;c~ J;;~k' far most languages in the world have never been written and never ""0'''',,, 7A,.~ .,y...-v'......-p ..•~ ~..-' ..-... , I ~ ,!I ...••. "A,-<. ?tU- A , f " ,,!-~.-I -: 1~_:;a(H.;;'~r{~ doubtless existed since Homosapiens first appeared on earth, 1.t,;>,--,;-,'r·~~\",-< }/l.7h-~y1Vl. .r~':A--"''- »c ..v J-1"-<,' has been estimated that only 106 have a literature, and of the '/,; ~·"5,,! j;..:.cw . .rr.v.r';'-':~' some 3000 t 0 4000 1anguages stO1l.l more or 1e""ss r.n exi st ence td0 ay drrc~d.l(/,~.;,v';it: '7'1'.,1 ;Y'.,trl.a-..-I.oj.;;.<...-<-, (many are dying very fast) only some 78 have a literature (Edrno- 7..,., ,.w--;.~ .,-,,~(t//f" /~ u ! ~.!'_ /·r.AJO-' nson 323, 332). The total variety of human language activity has:';,'":'w'~l"'</ "(*";,v7A7°'i ." I;:;;;;' /" will be. Of the tens of thousands of languages which have thus, almost all of it, never been affected in the least by writing, which we recall first appeared in the basically pic- 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER torial cuneiform script of Mesopotamia only around 3500 B.C.E. (Ong, Orality 85). 3 ii The Semitic alphabet, first of all alphabets and source, directly or indirectly, of all other alphabets across the world (but not of all writing systems) appeared only around 1500 B.C.E. The Semitic alphabet was basically consonantal. Semitic lan-guages, such as Hebrew, to this day do not normally write vowels, except for schoolchildren in the early grades, for whom the consonantal texts are supplied with special vowel "points" which are not part of the alphabet but special aids for the not-yet-competent learner. In ordinary Hebrew texts the unwritten vowels are supplied by the reader, who must be reasonably familiar with the vocabulary and grammar of the language to manage the re-quisite guesswork for supplying the unwritten vowels. Vowelless alphabets are feasible in Semitic languages because in Semitic languages consonants are more important than vowels in determin-ing the lexical content of words. Vowels largely determining grammar and construction (Coulmas 144).--as, for example, the different vowels in the English words man and men distinguish singular and plural, and in run and ran, present and past tenses. But vowels do not do these things regularly in Indo-European languages, so that Indo-European languages are virtually un-manageable in an alphabet of consonants only. Faced with this fact, the ancient Greeks devised the first alphabet with letters for vowels as well as consonants, often called the vowelized or 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 4 vocalized alphabet, or simply the alphabet (Ong Orality, 85-89). We might say that the Greeks lucked out. Since the vowelized alphabet in various forms (alphabetic letters can be variously shaped and/or variously arranged to make words) is so commonly used and becoming more and more common across the world, it is well to note here why the vowelized alphabet (an alphabet of consonants and vowels) is paramount in writing systems and, it would appear, unimprovable in its general principle. (This is not to say that it has every advantage any script can have--Chinese character writing, for example, has special advantages as well as great disadvantages of its own--in a computer age particularly urgent disadvantages.) No other kind of script is so democratic (easy for anyone to learn), so sparse, and so abstract as is the vowelized or vocal-ized alphabet--hereafter often referred to simply as the alphabet when the context is clear. Although it can be incidentally improved by such measures as the addition of letters or diacriti-cal marks fitting it better to the phonemic system of one or another language, the alphabet appears essentially unimprovable as a match for oral utterance because of the fact that its visual patterning system in principle is based quite exactly on the sound patterning system used not in one or another spoken lan-guage but in every spoken language. More than other scripts, the alphabet provides the visual equivalent of oral speech. (This does not mean that those who first devised the alphabet were able to explain the nature of the match they had achieved or, in the 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 5 absence of a science of phonetics, could have been aware of it.) This match of the visual alphabet with the oral patterning system of all human speech is achieved by using the meaningless to construct meaning. All spoken language exhibits what has been called duality of patterning (see Pyles and Algeo, origins 4): (1) meaningful sound units, or, better, morphemes (words and word parts, such as the separately meaningful sound units Mary, like- , -d (signals past tense), peach-, and -es (signals past tense), in the sentence "Mary liked peaches") and (2) sound units in themselves essentially devoid of meaning which are used to make up the meaningful units (the sounds or, better, phonemes) repre-sented by the symbols M, £, £, and y in Mary are in themselves meaningless--in a given context, of course, the symbol £ may represent a complete word, but this is because of the context not because of simply the letter as such. All the characters in the alphabet are of this sort, in themselves meaningless--in prin-ciple although not of course historically, for it appears that the letters of the alphabet derive, in ways we have not complete-ly puzzled out, from meaningful signs, generally pictures. In sum, one can say that to invent the alphabet one had ultimately to isolate the meaningless units in the sounded, spoken language and encode them only. Since Saussure, spoken language itself has been recognized as a system of structured relations of otherwise meaningful sound elements. But the alphabet is a similar pheno-menon in the visual world: it provides meaning by the way it 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER structures into visual (and/or tactile) units, each in itself otherwise meaningless. It could hardly be a coincidence that the 6 discovery of the primacy of structure in speech grew up in an alphabet-using milieu. The consonantal alphabet, such as the Semitic alphabet, also uses meaningless units to construct meaning, but it does not do so to the full as the vowelized alphabet does. To read a text written in a consonantal Semitic alphabet, one has to understand the language and know the general context of a given word in order to determine from the general context of meaning what the missing vowels are. The missing vowels are thus not entirely free of meaning in the sense that they are generated out of the meaning that the consonants suggest. The reader must have laid hold of some meaning in order to supply the to in the word the proper vowels the consonants suggest. In context, the Hebrew letters dbr can be gathered to stand for "word" and thus, because one knows how "word" is pronounced, the vowel sound £ can be generated in the two proper places between the consonants to produce the pronunciation dabar. Thus the writing symbols of the consonantal alphabet are, in an indirect, operational way, not quite so free of meaning as the symbols of an alphabet which includes also vowels, and thus uses them in themselves as distin-guishable visual units. iii Faur has discussed the well-known propensity of the Hebrew tradition (see also Boman 68-69, etc.) to link writing and vocal 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER speech where the ancient Greeks tended to separate the two, as Plato does quite vigorously. This propensity is doubtless connected in various ways with the differences between the consonantal and the vowelized alphabets. But the propensity of the Hebrew culture to link writing and oral speech and the propensity of the Greek to separate the two are also related to the varying etymologies of the Hebrew word for "word," dabar (original root meaning "drive forward"), and of the Greek word for "word" logos (a cognate of the verb legein--original root meaning "gather, collect, arrange"--see Boman, 68-69, etc.).s The Hebrew dabar means "word," but it also means deed (an action the use of muscular involving power, just as a spoken word is an action involving power). The Greek logos does not mean "deed" but suggests, rather, arrangement (orderly, more or less static, spatial, visualizable arrangement). More will be said later on the contrast between the Hebrew and the Greek concepts of "word." But here we should note that the tendency of the Greeks to dissociate writing and speech is 7 evident in the Phaedrus and elsewhere, where Plato's Socrates explicitly separates writing from speech and rates oral dialogue well above writing, above even written dialogue (Havelock, Preface; ong, Orality). It is significant that the Greek gods were illiterate, although quite vocal. Divinity for the Greeks entailed the power of speech, but it did not involve knowledge of writing, a quite separate matter. Literacy was not particularly godlike. But "the God of the Hebrews is eminently literate" and 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 8 the Torah "was written before the creation of the world" (Faur 33). It appears that a literate God implies a ranking of writing (suggesting a deed or act of power) at least on a level with oral speech, whereas for Plato writing is far beneath the oral. Writing systems that, unlike the alphabet, are pictographic or phonographic build permanently on symbols which are in them-selves meaningful, although original meanings of symbols may eventually be varied, adjusted adroitly to new meanings. Thus in Chinese character writing the written character for "good" [pronounced approximately haul is formed by joining the character for "woman" [pronounced approximately as the French nul and the character for "child" [pronounced approximately dzuh]. The visual etymology of the written words here is clearly not the same as the oral-aural etymology of the spoken words. Chinese speakers unable to write in standard Chinese characters do not have the explicit association woman-child-good that writers of Chinese all have. The combinations adduced here are very simple ones: other ways of combining and adjusting meaningful Chinese written characters to produce other meaningful written characters can and do become fantastically complex (DeFrancis). There are meaning-less elements, of course, in the Chinese characters, namely, the relatively small number of standardized individual strokes of brush or pen used in constructing the characters, but these are not set up to correspond, each one, to individual meaningless units of which sounded words are composed. They are simply 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 9 standardized ways of using the writing instrument (brush, etc.). Thus they do not function as an alphabet. written words made out of meaningful components, as in Chinese, can be and often are tremendously rich in associative signification. Chinese character writing is far more charged with meaning and far richer than spoken Chinese, and knowing the characters means knowing in greater depth a whole culture, but a writing system thus grounded in meaningful units is also very difficult to learn compared to the alphabet. The K'anghsi dictionary of Chinese in AD 1716 lists 40545 different individual characters (Ong Orality 87)--compare the 26 different characters of our English alphabet, which are all the parts that have to be integrated in our English alphabet! So long as the units in a script retain in themselves vestiges of meaning, the writing system simply cannot match the abstract economy of the vowelized (vocalized) alphabet. One needs to know individually around 2000 of the 40545 different characters in order to be functionally literate in Chinese. As Chinese friends have mentioned to me, not reading Chinese for a good many years makes reading it difficult: you forget the meaning of many individual characters. We can recall that the 26 marks which we call the letters of the alphabet are in themselves completely neutral so far as meaning goes: their use in principle depends not directly on what they mean but only on what is constructed out of them, on how they are combined. By contrast with Chinese, one can appreciate more, it would seem, what was here noted earlier, namely, that 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 10 Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal view of language, as consisting of structure rather than of meaning, is a specialized view, true indeed, but more immediately accessible to users of the alphabet than to those using other writing systems. Since hermeneutics deals with meaning, various ways of mixing meaning and meaninglessness in various writing systems will encourage various kinds of hermeneutics when one is working with texts or, among literates, when one is working with tests and with oral expression as well. These present reflections treat textual hermeneutics basically in a western, alphabetic setting, and generally, though not always, in a vowelized or vocalized alphabetic setting. iv The formal study of hermeneutics or exegesis or interpreta-tion, as such study is known as a more or less formalized subject in Western learned circles today, began by centering on texts. with reference to the hermeneutical tradition as it had developed from Western antiquity, Gadamer summarily states (146), as has already been seen, "The classical discipline concerned with the art of understanding texts is hermeneutics." He goes on im-mediately to explain how the concept of hermeneutics must be enlarged to include aesthetics, "the whole sphere of art and its complex of questions," and later notes that hermeneutics extends also to oral utterance. But aesthetics and oral utterance are presented in Gadamer's perspectives as "extensions" of the narrower original focus of what has long been styled her- 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 11 meneutics, the Western textual focus, which Gadamer generally retains as a centering point. He insists (353) "that the task of hermeneutics was originally and chiefly the understanding of texts." This observation appears to have applied historicallY from the start not only in the Greek-based and Latin-based classical tradition but also in the rabbinical tradition, even in the light of the interplay of text and orality in this tradition described by Susan Handelman in The Slayers of Moses. Gadamer has noted how the study of hermeneutics that began thus by focusing on texts and then extended itself to provide interpretations of nontextual art--and oral utterance--has extended its range more and more to embrace all the human scien-ces (146-147). It has moved on more recently, we might note, to include explicitly such matters as the scientific study of gesture and other "kinesics," a term dating from around 1952 and referring to the use of nonlinguistic bodily movements, such as shrugs, eye movements, manual gestures, and so on to communicate meaning. Eventually, hermeneutics or interpretation has been extended even more widely, corning to include any human action that conveys "meaning" (Tyler, Said 12-14). Interpretation or hermeneutics has here a much wider sense than when these terms refer directly to intentionally programmed words. As already noted, we can even speak of interpreting nonhuman phenomena, as a sunset. For, in its widest sense, as has been suggested earlier, hermeneutics or interpretation eventually means making evident to a given audi- 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 12 ence or milieu something in any manifestation that is not evident to this audience or milieu. "Evident" is here, of course, a relational term: it means evident enough for present purposes, in a given, concrete, existential setting. One can go on to explain further and further without end, though eventually not without inducing boredom. v Here, as elsewhere, rather than the term "relative," I use the term "relational"--related to other, often unspecified items, items which are simply assumed or are often lodged in the senses or in the subconscious or unconscious--rather than the term "relative." "Relative" and its cognate "relativism" suggest a certain exclusiveness: the entirety of knowledge is relative only to the knower, so that knowledge in two or more persons can in no sense be the same. "Relational" as I have just defined it, and its cognate "relational ism" suggest not exclusion but inclusion: everything is related to everything else, and not simply but complexly. This view makes for great, but involved, specificity, including both articulate and inarticulate elements. vi "Relationism" enters into all in-depth explanation (inte-rpretation, hermeneutics). As Basil Willey has observed (13), "One cannot ... define 'explanation' absolutely: one can only say that it is a statement which satisfies the demands of a particular time or place." Put another way, this is to say that all explanation--even the most abstractly scientific--is in its 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER 13 deepest roots a rhetorical operation. It is rhetorical in the sense that, immediately or remotely, expressly or by implication, all explanation is situated in a real, existential dialogic setting, a setting not fully reducible to abstract logical articulation. By dialogic here, I refer to a live verbal ex-change between two (or more) persons at a given time and place and in a given setting, where the speaker knows, at least for practical but not totally articulable purposes, what his or her hearers can be counted on to be aware of and what they cannot. In the case of texts, the given existentialist setting of the writer and that of the reader are different, but they are both existentialist settings. As there are no time-free words, so there are no time-free explanations. There never has been and never will be any abstract, ahistorical audience to whom an explanation can be tailored. Again, this is not to say that false explanations are indistinguishable from true explanations or false conclusions or statements from true conclusions or statements. It is simplY to say that you cannot judge what is true or false outside a real historical context, never fully verbalized, with which you are in contact, reflectively or unreflectively, immediately or, perhaps by dint of exhaustive research, mediately. It also means that nothing can ever be totally explained--related to the potentially infinite everything else. This state of affairs is covered by the earliest observation that total verbal explicitness is impos-sible. 2. HERMENEUTICS, TEXTUAL AND OTHER Dealing with words alone cannot reveal their truth or falsity. Rhetoric, in the sense of expression addressed in a real historical context from one person to another or others in a context always more than verbal.with an intent to affect the 14 addressee(s) here and now, is more inclusive than any logic. Rhetoric is the most inclusive of what medieval Latin-speaking academics called the artes sermocinales, the verbal arts, which they summed up under grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Or, we may say, pragmatics is the context of semantics (see Tyler, Said 461- 465)--what words mean depends on how