Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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Hermeneutics and postmodernism
The most recent and radical development in the hermeneutics of suspicion could be called the postmodern turn. So different is this variety of theory from the nineteenth-century ‘masters of suspicion’ identified by Ricoeur that it needs to be treated as a significant new departure in hermeneutics. Its historical connection with the older tradition is through Nietzsche, who plays a double role in modern interpretation theory. On the one hand, there is what we can call the ‘modernist Nietzsche,’ the one whom Ricoeur classifies together with Marx and Freud because he in effect identifies religion as a form of false consciousness. His variation on this theme locates the root of distortion in a Jewish and then Christian ‘slave revolt of morality,’ in which the weakest elements of society inverted the values of classical Greek nobility. What had been virtues – strength, valor, physical beauty – came to be represented as vices, while their opposites were exalted as virtues – that is, all the sickly values of the weak and diseased elements of society, above all pity. For Nietzsche this ‘transvaluation of values’ is epitomized in the cross of Christianity. This moralistic disease, Nietzsche believes, is not confined to religion but has its modern secular forms as well, such as socialism. The hermeneutical point is that texts, especially religious ones, cannot be taken at face value but must be subjected to radical critique. It is not only the misunderstanding of texts by interpreters that is the problem, one could say, but also the distortions of reality embodied in the texts themselves.
The other Nietzsche is the source of postmodern hermeneutics – the Nietzsche who declares that ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’ (Whether or not the modern and postmodern Nietzsches can be reconciled is a serious question for Nietzsche scholars but one we need not address here, since both impulses flowing from this brilliant and bizarre mind have powerfully influenced hermeneutics in the century since he wrote.) Those recent thinkers who have come to be called ‘postmodern’ – especially Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) – have developed the ‘other Nietzsche,’ with help from Heidegger, into a powerful if controversial force in the contemporary intellectual world, one that has important consequences for hermeneutics. Derrida’s position depends on a theory of language that emphasizes the instability of signs. Every linguistic sign refers, not to non-linguistic realities lying beyond language, but rather to other signs, which in turn refer to still other signs – and so on, in an endless deferral of meaning. The implication is not that communication is impossible but that it is always incomplete, continually in flux. The attempt to evade this situation, to appeal to some bedrock of certainty and meaning, constitutes the popular but ultimately futile quest for what Derrida calls a ‘transcendental signified,’ that is, a sign that refers to no further signs but only to itself. The hermeneutical implications of this state of affairs have particular importance for religious studies, since religions would appear to have a significant stake in interpretive stability and certainty – just what postmodernist hermeneutics denies is possible. Instead, interpretation appears endless and incapable of achieving closure. Another contemporary French theorist, Jean-François Lyotard, defines postmodernism as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ – a position that might appear to set all traditional religions in opposition to postmodernity.
The most important idea to emerge from Derrida’s philosophy is deconstruction. For all its familiarity in the contemporary academic world, it is notoriously difficult to define – and the difficulty is presumably intentional on Derrida’s part. Deconstruction is clearly the heart of his hermeneutics, yet he denies that it is a method or a technique for interpreting texts. In the hands of some of his devotees, however, it has in fact become a technique, a critical
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device (even a blunt instrument) for uncovering the covert ways in which texts try to stabilize meaning and disguise the flux of signs. Derrida intends deconstruction to be an antidote to what he calls ‘logocentrism,’ the prevalent assumption throughout Western thought that words have a fixed relationship to reality, that they can therefore put us in direct touch with a reality beyond or behind language. He labels the pursuit of such an essential reality the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and endeavors to show that it is based on the seductive but illusory ‘myth of presence.’
The other French postmodernist whose influence on contemporary hermeneutics one can scarcely overlook is Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Mixing writing and lecturing with political activism and sexual experimentation, his life epitomized the Nietzschean postmodernism that he advocated in his writings. Even his academic discipline is difficult to pin down: trained in philosophy, psychology, and psychopathology, he focused much of his attention on the social sciences while calling himself an ‘archaeologist of knowledge’ and devoting much of his writing to historical studies. Although he did not choose the label postmodern, his passionate rejection of the Enlightenment and the modernism it produced has helped to define postmodernism. Like Derrida, Foucault rejects every attempt to establish a single meaning for a text, and opposes every theory that sees language as representing reality. Especially interested in anthropology, he opposes the typically modern assumption that ‘man’ has a ‘human nature’ that somehow persists through change. He prefers to follow Nietzsche by practicing ‘genealogy,’ the method of uncovering the historical layers underlying the present ‘order’ (another Enlightenment notion he criticizes). Genealogical analysis destroys the myth that there are laws or principles of development guiding the course of history, and shows the arbitrary and haphazard ways in which the present situation has emerged out of the conflicts of the past. His intent – virtually the opposite of Gadamer’s at this point
– is to call into question the legitimacy of the established order. But the point at which Foucault has had the greatest impact on hermeneutical thinking – including the study of religion – is his theory of the intimate relationship linking knowledge and power. Because knowledge is always embedded in actual social institutions and practices, it is never neutral but always involved in power relationships. So intimate is the relation between knowledge and power that the two virtually merge into a single concept in Foucault’s thought (one of his books bears the title Power/Knowledge). The effect on hermeneutics is virtually to collapse the distinction between theory and practice: theorizing is the uncovering of the hidden sources of truth in specific power interests. The inevitable bias of this kind of theory is against every established order – a bias that Foucault, for whom the student uprising of 1968 was a defining event, by no means tries to deny. Consequently, his hermeneutic approach has been most eagerly adopted by those who see themselves as victims or outsiders to the established institutions of knowledge, and thus of power. Feminists, for example, in various fields, including theology and religious studies, have found Foucault’s ideas useful in their attempt to wrest control of ideas and the institutions in which they are embedded from a patriarchal establishment. If Gadamer’s hermeneutics portrays interpretation as a means for reclaiming tradition, Foucault makes the act of interpretation inherently subversive of every established order.
Ad hoc hermeneutics
The duality or ambivalence within contemporary hermeneutics that we noted at the outset can lead to very different overviews of its history and significance. It is perhaps inevitable
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that in writing about hermeneutics one will emphasize those thinkers who present their task explicitly in terms of hermeneutical theory. But we need to remind ourselves that most of the activity that would today be called hermeneutical – that is, the actual practice of interpreting texts in order to understand and use them in all kinds of social and individual ways – has been (and still is) carried out without the benefit of any theory of hermeneutics. Thus scholars of religion studying the ‘hermeneutics’ of various religious communities seldom encounter the kind of self-conscious reflection on the meaning of interpretation found in Schleiermacher and his successors right up through Gadamer, Ricoeur, and the postmodern philosophers. Religious studies needs to pay at least as much attention to the implicit hermeneutics of religious communities as to the explicit hermeneutical theories, both religious and secular, that dominate so much academic discussion.
Those who have tried to give theoretical voice to such an ad hoc approach to hermeneutics often appeal to the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) for inspiration and support. Like most recent philosophers, Wittgenstein focused his attention particularly on language, which he believed to be the proper subject matter of philosophy. His posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) supplied the original impulse for what came to be known as ordinary language philosophy. Wittgenstein is the champion of language as used nontechnically in everyday situations, where communication typically takes place without benefit of formal theorizing. The negative correlate of this emphasis is the thesis that we – especially if we are academic philosophers and theoreticians – allow ourselves to be ‘bewitched by language,’ and Wittgenstein thought of his own philosophy as a kind of therapy for the linguistic conundrums of modern philosophers. His way of doing philosophy, in keeping with his point of view, is unsystematic and ad hoc – often aphoristic. He is the opponent of every essentialist theory that tries to understand phenomena by reducing them to a shared essence, something they all have in common. Using the example of family resemblances, he demonstrates that our recognition of kinship need not depend on any single shared trait. The notion has had considerable influence in religious studies, making scholars far more cautious about claims concerning the ‘essence of religion.’ We call phenomena religious for a variety of reasons and should be wary of over-schematizing their interrelationships. The implications of Wittgenstein for hermeneutics might be summed up by invoking one of his best-known aphorisms: ‘Look and see!’ Taken as a watchword, this non-theoretical advice is a reminder to keep one’s eyes open, to look at the bewildering variety of religious phenomena without forcing them too quickly into preconceived theoretical molds. It is not that scholars ought to eschew theory altogether but rather that they should use it heuristically rather than systematically, that is, as a source of suggestion and a goad to new discovery, applying it in ad hoc ways as each situation requires.
An example of ad hoc hermeneutical practice within a religious community is found in the work of Karl Barth (1886–1968), a theologian in the Reformed tradition, and one of the major figures in twentieth-century Christian theology. Barth’s chief opponents, including Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, were heavily influenced by Heidegger’s existentialism. Bultmann in particular appeals to the notion of pre-understanding in his theological hermeneutics, a practice that caused Barth to accuse him of importing an alien philosophical criterion into theology instead of taking his hermeneutical bearings from the symbolic world of scripture itself. Their debate is far too complex to deal with here except to note that Barth’s insistence on doing theology out of a theological perspective rather than basing it on prior acceptance of a philosophical theory represents a hermeneutical approach that one can find in many religious traditions and which ought to be given its due in religious studies. A classic
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statement of this approach is the Protestant Reformers’ principle that ‘scripture interprets itself,’ meaning that the way to understand obscure or difficult passages of scripture is not by importing a hermeneutical theory from philosophy but rather by attending to the intratextual relations of the scriptural canon itself. Religious studies should resist the temptation to supply a supertheory, focusing instead on the implicit hermeneutical ideas and practices of the religious traditions themselves. After all, the notion of the hermeneutical circle – according to which one always interprets out of prior immersion in a tradition of reading texts and not as a ‘neutral’ outsider – has been a mainstay of the major hermeneutical theorists of the modern (and postmodern) age. Applied to religious studies, the hermeneutical circle implies that an ad hoc application of theory, hermeneutical and otherwise, is the wisest course to follow in studying the diverse phenomena of the world’s religious traditions and practices, because it respects the unique features of those traditions while seeking to interpret them both sympathetically and critically.
Bibliography
Auerbach, E. (1953) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Caputo, J. D. (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ebeling, G. (1959) ‘Hermeneutik.’ In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft. 3rd edn. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 3: 242–62.
Ferraris, M. (1996), History of Hermeneutics. Translated by Luca Somigli. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.
Feuerbach, L. (1957 [1841]) The Essence of Christianity, New York: Harper. —— (1967)ÂLectures on the Essence of Religion, New York: Harper.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
Fowl, Stephen E., ed., (1997) The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Frei, H. (1974) The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1991) Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
Green, G. (2000) Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grenz, S. J. (1996) A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing.
Jeanrond, W. G. (1991) Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. London: Macmillan. Kant, I. (1960 [1794]) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by Theodore M. Greene and
Hoyt H. Hudson, New York: Harper.
Ramm, B. L. (1976) Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House.
Ricoeur, P. (1974) The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
—— (1976)ÂInterpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press.
Schleiermacher, F. (1977) Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, edited by H. Kimmerle, translated by J. Duke and J. Forstman. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press.
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—— (1988 [1799])ÂOn Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translated by R. Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2001) Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with a Revised English Translation, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Suggested reading
Caputo, J. (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Hermeneutics reconceived in the light of postmodern philosophy.
Ebeling, G. (1959) ‘Hermeneutik,’ in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, 3rd edn., Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 3: 242–62.
A definitional essay by the leading proponent of the ‘New Hermeneutic.’
Ferraris, M. (1996) History of Hermeneutics, translated by Luca Somigli, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.
A comprehensive overview of philosophical hermeneutics.
Fowl, S., ed. (1997) The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
An anthology of primary texts in theological hermeneutics.
Green, G. (2000) Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hermeneutical issues in modern European religious and secular thought.
Grenz, S. (1996) A Primer on Postmodernism, Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans. An introduction to postmodern philosophy for beginning students.
Jeanrond, W. (1991) Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance, London: Macmillan. A comprehensive history of theological hermeneutics.
Ramm, B. (1976) Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. A conservative Protestant account of biblical hermeneutics.
Ricoeur, P. (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress. The best collection of Ricoeur’s essays on religious themes.
—— (1991) From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
A second collection of Ricoeur’s essays on hermeneutics, supplementing The Conflict of Interpretations [1974].
Zimmermann, J. (2004) Recovering Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of Interpretation, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.
A compelling argument against the secularization of hermeneutics.