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Hermeneutics: Brick Hermeneutics

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A. K. A. Adam offers a useful critique of what he calls “brick hermeneutics.” Taking a cue from George Herriman’s early 20th-century comic strip Krazy Kat, he describes brick hermeneutics as follows: “Most of our discourses take for granted the premise that we communicate by infusing ‘meaning’ into some expression, then throwing that meaning-laden word toward others, whose job it is to extract the meaning from what we wrote or said.” He also suggests “bubble hermeneutics”: “we blow meaning into a bubble that floats toward an interlocutor’s ear then bursts, emitting the ‘meaning-content’ for a listener’s edification.”

In reply, Adam reminds us that many things besides words mean:

“words constitute a peculiarly specific subset of the more general phenomenon of meaning. Light outside our bedroom window means morning, a dress suit means professional, a smile means happy, green means go, and so on ad inifinitum (Latin means ‘sophisticated’). None of these instances abuses the syntax of meaning, nor does any lend itself to the hermeneutics of subsistent meaning. There’s no ‘morningness’ in sunlight, no professionalism in the suit, no happiness in the smile, no locomotion in the traffic signal – there’s no meaning in the painting, as Magritte would insist. Meaning is always ascribed, whether in anticipation (as a communicator) or in a moment (as an interpreter). Thus when we perceive light outside the window, we ascribe to it the meaning that morning has come (even though the light may come from klieg lights for the movie they’re filming outside your window), and so on. The meaning isn’t in the expression or the apprehension, but – if anywhere – in their functional convergence.”

Brick hermeneutics evades responsibility: “That’s not what I meant” is an excuse for sloppy expression. Adam’s alternative presses the responsibility of speaker/writer and interpreter, a responsibility that cannot be displaced to a theory of meaning or language: “Each of us has to stand accountable for her or his choice of expression (can’t just shrug it off as ‘lern 2 take a joke’ or ‘that’s not what I meant’), for our style of expression, for the all the various gestures by which we broadcast who we are and what we’re about. And by the same token, we’re responsible as detecters of meaning for the ways in which we construe the clues around us. That responsibility is not circumscribed, though, by the methods and laws that govern the historical-critical method (without conceding that there even is such a method in a singular sense) or speech-act theory or whatever. Rather, we are constrained by the interwoven patterns of expectation and satisfaction, of confusion and frustration that constitute the (flexible but extremely durable) semiotic infrastructure of our common lives, the ‘forms of life’ that shape our expectations about meaning.”

There’s much to like here, but Adam’s discussion of interpretive truth doesn’t display the same nuance as the discussion of meaning. He says, rightly, that “Interpretive truth thus functions not as a methodological criterion that ensures correct hermeneutical ethics, but as a characterization of how life ought to look. Truth, on such an account, offers itself to us not as something to be used, but as a characteristic of divine life by which, toward which, in which we should order our way.”

The truth of a text is certainly much more than correspondence to what is the case, and for many sentences correspondence may be a very subordinate or non-existent concern. Imperatives are not true by correspondence; often quite the contrary – the imperative aims to change what is the case. But in many cases the truth of a statement depends (at least) on its correspondence to what is the case. “Jesus rose from the dead” is truth in all kinds of senses, but it is at least true in the sense that He did.

Adam’s entire address is available at: http://akma.disseminary.org/?p=1485#more-1485.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 7:24 am

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Hermeneutics: Brick Hermeneutics

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