Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer. He died in 2002 at the age of 102.I sometimes get questions from students about my approach to interpreting Jewish and Christian scripture, and thought it might be worth laying out a few thoughts here.

If I have a real teacher here, it's Hans-Georg Gadamer.  In particular, I've long been influenced by his Truth and Method, one of those books that is often critiqued but rarely so cogently that it ceases to be worth reading.

When I was forming my opinions about how to read and think about God (and everything else), Jacques Derrida and the great post-structuralists were very much in vogue.   Their critique of the meaning in texts struck (and still strikes) me as pretty sharp: language is a game in constant play, the meaning of words slips and changes, and the reader is as important as the writer in making meaning.  More so, since readers invariably outlive writers: there are a lot more of us.

But Gadamer (who had some difficulty coming to terms with Derrida) was and remains for me a very powerful voice.

He emphasized the "historically effected consciousness": that is, meaning for us is a matter of our historical and cultural situation.  And so far he agrees with the post-structuralists.  He dealt a death-blow to the Romantic view that the intentions of the author were of paramount importance.  (Take note, George Lucas!  Yes!  You did inspire me to write this blog post, you insufferable tinkerer!)  Gadamer defends the idea that there are truths that are intersections of complex cultural, psychological, philosophical, and artistic horizons that cannot be distilled down to bare axioms comprehensible to science or to a logical positivist.

But Gadamer's aim was to describe how all of us read, all the time.  Every text, from Star Wars to scriptures to poems to television shows, is generated in a context where author and audience share certain common fields of meaning.  Interpreting a text into new situations necessarily involves relocating the text in fields of meaning appropriate to a new time and place: and sometimes this involves great changes, other times small ones. 

If it's true therefore that "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is an ethical command that makes as much moral sense now as it ever did, it is not entirely clear that it makes precisely the same sense.  That I should not defraud my neighbor of his romantic honor is not the same as saying I should not defraud him of his property or patrilineage, and the strong emphasis on the latter in the Torah makes it a little bit of a foreign text, something not written directly to me (or my neighbor, or my neighbor's wife), and yet quite comprehensible.

To see the text in the same way that the writer did involves a bit of a shift, a kind of motion towards his world and his point of view without entirely relinquishing my own.  His way of viewing things is (hopefully for women) not "right," but it is of great interest for anybody approaching the texts with anything like love.

And the only way to do that is to know a hell of a lot about the writer's world, and his audience, and what sorts of things they said and felt.

History is sometimes a matter of fact, partially (sometimes dimly) recoverable: but never with the sort of certainty that the scientific method generates.

Certainly that is so of the history of thought and feeling.  And to approach a text is to approach the heart of another person who might not be entirely like ourselves.