Can a Text Mean What it Never Meant?

This was a one page paper for the class Jesus and Hermeneutics at Boston College with Dr. Daniel Harrington S.J. The purpose of the paper was to engage two hermeneutical  theorists: E.D. Hirsch, and Paul Ricoeur to see which approach was more helpful in interpreting Jesus.

Thesis: Hirsch’s interpretive approach is more useful for interpreting Jesus because his methodological emphasis on honest historical investigation into the author’s permanent textual meaning gives a stronger foundation for the hermeneutical process.

Can a text mean what it never meant? For Ricoeur, the answer is in the affirmative. Ricoeur is certainly helpful in the way he describes the pathway of the life of a text. In the first stage he sees the discourse-event as immediately causing distanciation.[1] The crux of Ricoeur’s argument comes when discourse is written down, “what the text signifies no longer coincides with what the author meant; textual meaning and psychological meaning have different destinies” (R, 139). The goal of interpretation for Ricoeur then, is the decontextualization and recontextualization into a new situation (R, 139). This is what he calls appropriation, “to make one’s own what was initially alien” (R, 185). For Ricoeur absolute knowledge is impossible making appropriation over the distanciation of the text the only viable hermeneutic (R, 193).

Hirsch, on the other hand, asserts that there can be permanent meaning found in authorial intent. For Hirsch textual meaning does not change over time, therefore it cannot be used “creatively” to propagate a “specific viewpoint.”[2] He rightly points out that if textual meaning is changing, it does not free readers from historicism but “destroys the basis for agreement…and objective study” Of course the question with holding to a permanent textual meaning is: how does appropriation work? Hirsch deals with this by recognizing that even with a permanent meaning, the authorial mind could not have been privy to specific implications (H, 220). Hirsch’s discussion on verification provides the framework in which this hermeneutic would work. He recognizes that the interpreter can never be certain of a correct reading, but that he can show relative probability (H, 235-236) based on the criteria of legitimacy, correspondence, generic appropriateness, and coherence (H, 236-237). While this seems negative, it allows humility on the part of the interpreter to allow for correction from the greater community of interpreters.

[1]. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” and “Appropriation” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (ed. J. B. Thompson; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132-133. (In-text citations from this point on).

[2]. E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 209-212. (In-text citations from this point on).