14 / Thirty Theses

on Interpretation

ON THE HERMENEUTICAL EXPERIENCE

I. The hermeneutical experience (the encounter with a

literary work of art) is intrinsically historical. Because of our
prevailing misconceptions of history, understanding, language,
and the ontological status of the literary work, however, it is
difficult even to comprehend what this means. This failure is a
clear symptom of the prevailing lack of historical conscious-
ness.
2. The hermeneutical experience is intrinsically linguis-
tic. It is not possible to understand the full importance of this
until language is conceived within the horizon of "linguisti-
cality," that is, not as the tool of a manipulating consciousness
but as the medium through which a world comes to stand be-
fore us and in us.
3. The hermeneutical experience is dialectical. The fruits
of this fact can only be reaped when experience is conceived of
not as consciousness perceiving objects, but as understanding
encountering a negativity which broadens and illuminates self-
understanding.
4. The hermeneutical experience is ontological. The
meaning of this will not emerge until the ontological function
of understanding and language has come into view; both are
ontological, for they disclose the being of things. But they do
not disclose being as an object over against subjectivity; rather,
they light up the being in which we are already standing. Nor is
the being that is disclosed merely the being of an object but our
own being, that is, "what it means to be."
[242]
Thirty Theses on Interpretation I 243
5. The hermeneutical experience is an event-a "lan-
guage event." Literature is robbed of its true dynamism and
power to speak when it is conceived of in the static categories
of conceptual knowing. As experience of an event and not as
mere conceptual knowing, the encounter with the being of a
work is not static and ideational, outside of all time and tempor-
ality; it is truth that happens, emerges from concealment, and
yet eludes every effort to reduce it to concepts and objectivity.
6. The hermeneutical experience is "objective." This
statement will be understood in the wrong sense so long as the
old and presently prevailing definition of objectivity, the
"scientific" definition, is not rejected. According to this concep-
tion, deriving from the Enlightenment struggle against super-
stition, bigotry, and naive acceptance of tradition, objectivity is
'the means by which clean, clear, conceptual knowledge unal-
loyed by subjective preconceptions is obtained by accepting
nothing that the "natural light" of reason cannot "verify"
through experiment. The verifying reason becomes the final
court of appeals, and all truth finds its validation in the reflex-
ive operations of the mind, that is, in subjectivity. This
"subjective" form of objectivity is not meant here in the state-
ment that the hermeneutical experience is "objective"; what is
meant is not a scientific but a truly "historical" objectivity. This
objectivity refers to the fact that the being which appears in
language and which comes to stand in a literary work is not the
product of a reflective activity of the mind. What appears is not,
on the other hand, a discrete entity which is imagined to give
off a meaning somehow outside of time and history. Rather, in
meeting the resistances of the world which he does not really
shape, form, and control, one moves within and conforms him-
self to the forms that have been handed down to him historical-
ly, that is, within a tradition of ways of understanding and
seeing the world.
The proper word for man's relationship to language, history,
and world is not "using" them but "participating" in them; one
does not personally shape language, history, or his "world"; one
conforms his linguistic activity to them. Language is not one's
tool, really, but the way being can come to appear. When one
wishes to convey the being of a situation, he does not devise lan-
guage to fit it, so much as find the language demanded by the
situation. Thus what comes to expression in the language is not
really one's "reflexivity" but the situation itself; words do not
primarily function to refer to this subjectivity but on the con-
244 I A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO

trary to the situation. The ground of objectivity lies not in the

subjectivity of a speaker but in the reality which comes to ex-
pression in and through language. It is in this objectivity that
the hermeneutical experience must find its ground.
7. The hermeneutical experience should be led by the
text. The text is not fully analogous to a partner in dialogue
because it must be helped to speak, which need brings about the
difficulties peculiar to genuine -hermeneutical experience: the
need to feel the objective claim of the text in its full otherness
without, at the same time, making it a mere object for our
subjectivity. We must See the task of interpretation not primari-
ly-as analysis-for this immediately renders the text object-
but as "understanding." Understanding is most open when it is
coqceived of as something capable of being seized by being
rather than as a self-sufficient grasping consciousness. An in-
terpretive "act" must not be a forceable seizure, a "rape" of the
text, but a loving union that brings to stand the full potentiali-
ties of interpreter and text, the partners in the hermeneutical
dialogue.
The surrender of the interpreter to the text, therefore, can-
not be an absolute surrender but is, like the femininity referred
to in the Tao Te Ching,l ali overcoming from beneath. The
hermeneutical encounter is not a denial or negation of one's
own horizon (for one must see through it and can never see at
all without it) but a willingness to risk it in a free opening -of
oneself. Paul Tillich defines love as the overcoming of separa-
tion;2 the union of text and interpreter overcomes the historical
estrangement of the text, a union made possible by a common
ground in being (that is, in language and history). In the fusion
of horizons which is the core of the hermeneutical experience,
some elements of one's own horizon are negated and others
affirmed; some elements in the horizon of the text recede and
others come forward (e.g., demythologizing). In this sense,
then, every true hermeneutical experience is a new creation,
a new disclosure of being; it stands in a firm relationship to the
present, and historically could not have happened before. Such
is man's "participation" in the ever new and fresh ways that
being can come to stand.
8. The hermeneutical experience understands what is
I. See Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the "Tao Te
Ching" and Its Place in Chinese Thought, esp. poems 6 and 28.
2. See his Love, Power, and Justice.
Thirty Theses on Interpretation / 245
said in the light of the present. Another way to say this is that
every true interpretation involves an "application" to the pres-
ent. It is not enough to say what a poem means grammatically
in the light of the context of its own historical horizon. In-
terpretation is not a taxonomical task of philological recon-
struction and restoration (if this were possible). Interpretation
calls upon the interpreter to render explicit a work's mean-
ing today; interpretation calls upon one to bridge the historical
distance between his horizon and that of the text. In both theo-
logical and legal interpretation, the moment of application is
explicitly necessary and even central. Literary interpretation
could learn from a study of the struggle within theology and
law to overcome the challenge of historical estrangement; the-
ology and law could furnish helpful models of the hermeneuti-
cal situation which might lead literary interpretation back to
the historical consciousness it has lost.
g. The hermeneutical experience is a disclosure of truth.
The interpreter today cannot, without a new ground in objec-
tivity (described above) and a new definition of truth, see the
nature of what is meant here by disclosure of truth. Truth must
not be conceived as a correspondence of statement to "fact";
truth is the dynamic emergence of being into the light of mani-
festness.:J Truth is never total or unambiguous; the emergence
into "unconcealment" is rather the simultaneous covering up
of truth in its inexhaustible fullness. Truth is grounded in neg-
ativity; this is the reason that the discovery of truth proceeds
best within a dialectic in which the power of negativity can
operate. The emergence of truth in hermeneutical experience
comes in that encounter with negativity which is intrinsic to
experience; in this case the experience comes as "aesthetic
moment" or "language event." Truth is not conceptual, not fact
-it happens.
10. Aesthetics must be swallowed up in hermeneutics.
The "aesthetic moment" must be defined not in terms of sen-
suous pleasure in form but in what makes a work of art truly
"art" - the fact that-in a definite form a world is abidingly able
to come to stand, to open up a space in being, to enable the truth
of being to become manifest. The so-called aesthetic moment
does not have an existence (phenomenologically speaking)
apart from the dynamics of the hermeneutical experience; to

3. See PL in PL-BH.
246 I A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO

try to separate the aesthetic element from the hermeneutical

experience creates fundamental misconceptions and artificial
problems. Every distinction between the "aesthetic" and the
"nonaesthetic" rests on invalid form-content separations and
represents a falling-away from the true experiential character
of the aesthetic moment. The aesthetic moment cannot be
understood apart from the total interpretive encounter.

ON TRANSCENDING THE SUBJECT-OBJECT SCHEMA

1 I. The leading challenge to literary interpretation in Amer-

ica today is to transcend the subject-object schema (through
which the work tends to be placed at a distance from the inter-
preter as an object of analysis). Phenomenology opens the way
to meet this challenge. The German hermeneutics of Heideg-
ger and Gadamer is one avenue for doing this. Another way is
shown in French phenomenological literary criticism (Sartre,
Blanchot, Richard, Bachelard)4 and contemporary French phe-
nomenological philosophy (Ricoeur, Dufrenne, Gusdorf, Mer-
leau-Ponty5). Many avenues are open.

ON THE AUTONOMY AND OBJECTIVE STATUS OF

THE WORK OF ART

12. The New Criticism is essentially right about the au-

tonomy of the literary work of art; to look in a work for the
subjectivity of the author is rightly held as a fallacy (the inten-
tional fallacy), and the testimony of the author as to his own in-
tentions is correctly regarded as inadmissible evidence. For
instance, one is not centrally interested in Milton's own inten-
tions or feelings about the archangel who plummets headlong,
flaming, from the ethereal sky; rather, a way of seeing Satan
here comes to stand in the text. One's interest is in the "thing
said" itself, not in Milton's intentions or personality. In the text
a "reality" is brought to stand. In the Garden of Eden scenes in
Paradise Lost, a reality is brought to stand; one is not deeply
4. See Neal Oxenhandler, "Ontological Criticism in America and France,"
MLR LV (1960), 17-23.
5. Works by these authors are available in translation from Northwestem
University Press.
Thirty Theses on Interpretation I 247
interested in whether Milton actually had these feelings, nor
does one really care whether Adam and Eve "actually" had
them, for in them something deeper and more universal is com-
ing to expression: the possibilities resident in being, lighted up
now for a moment in their truth, not in a scientific truth, but in
a truth, nevertheless.

ON METHOD AND METHODS

13. Method is an effort to measure and control from the side

of the interpreter; it is the opposite of letting the phenomenon
lead. The openness of "experience" - which alters the inter-
preter himself from the side of the text - is antithetical to meth-
od. Thus method is in reality a form of dogmatism, separating
the interpreter from the work, standing between it and him,
and barring him from experiencing the work in its fullness.
Analytical seeing is blindness to experience; it is analytical
blindness.
14 The modern technological way of thinking and the will-
to-power that lies at its root lead one to think in terms of "mas-
tery of the subject" and "attacking" the matter. In literature
this technological focus is seen in the seeking out of such
knowledge of the "object" -the text-as will give knowledge or
control of it. Such rape theories of interpretation, if we may call
them so, take such an ego-centered, dogmatic, closed approach
to the work that it becomes frigid. An argument for the
"pleasures" of literature is little advanced by cold analyses of
structure and pattern.
15. Form should never be the starting point of a literary
interpretation, nor should the moment of form be separated
out and labeled as the truly "aesthetic" element. On the con-
trary, the belief that form is separable from content and/or
from the total meaningful unity of the work is a misconcep-
tion based on wrong philosophical premises; there is no pure
aesthetic, just as there is no art for art's sake. The separation
of idea or theme from its material form is also a purely reflexive
activity, for it has no ground in one's experiential encounter
with the work itself. Therefore, to assert that the aesthetic
element of a work belongs to its form apart from the non-
aesthetic elements is invalid; any separation of aesthetic and
nonaesthetic becomes a word game based on erroneous defini-
248 I A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO

tions, for the aesthetic moment is a unity in which a world

comes to stand. The meaning or idea content of this world can-
not be separated from the sensuous form of the work, and it is
not, in fact, separated from it in the moment of aesthetic en-
counter. Since the separation of form from content is invalid
aesthetically, and since it is a product of reflexive thinking after
the experience itself, to start with considerations of form
means that even at the outset literary interpretation has fallen
away from the unity and fullness of the aesthetic moment.
16. The beginning point for literary interpretation must be
the language event of experiencing the work itself-i.e., what
the work "says." The saying power of a literary work, not its
form, is the ground of' our meaningful encounter with it, and
is not something separate.,from the form but rather speaks in
and through the form. The inner unity of form and what is said
is the basis of the inner unity of truth and aesthetic experience.
The saying done by a literary work is a disclosure of being; its
shining-forth is the power of the truth of being; the artist has
the power to use the inner light of the materials (e.g., the
texture of sound, the hardness of metal and its shininess, and
the powers of color) to bring the truth of being to stand. Lan-
guage has the power to say, to bring a world to stand. This is
what Heidegger means when he says, with Holderlin, that man
dwells "poetically" on this earth.6
17. True love of literature is not and has never been a de-
light in pure form. Love of literature is a responsiveness to the
saying power of literature. Just as decking out a poodle to fur-
nish "aesthetic delight" may be an act of egotism unconnected
with any deeper love for the animal himself, so also the view of
literature as mere play or as entertainment shows no true un-
derstanding of literature. The domineering tendency in an in-
stant demand for conceptual mastery is not love either, but a
mothering and a smothering.
18. It is not the interpreter who grasps the meaning of the
text; the meaning of the text seizes him. When we watch a play
or a game or read a novel, we do not stand above it as subject
contemplating an object; we are caught up in the inner move-
ment of the thing that is unfolding - we are seized. This is a
hermeneutical phenomenon which is largely ignored by a
technological approach to literature; one wrongly interprets the
hermeneutical situation if one sees himself as the master and
6. See "H!>lderIin und das Wesen der Dichtung" in ERD; EB 27crgl.
Thirty Theses on Interpretation I 249
manipulator of the situation. On the contrary, one is a partici-
pator and not even quite fully that, since one cannot step into
the situation to change it but is powerless to alter the fixity of
the text.
19. Some approaches to art emphasize the craftsmanship,
but it takes great craftsmanship to make a shoe, to carpenter, or
to make any utensil. A work of art is not a utensil. The enjoy-
ment of art is not simply sensuous delight in form; a work of art
is not some cheap pleasure object. Craftsmanship is involved,
yes; sensuous pleasure is involved; but to take these as the
starting point or the central aspect of art is naive reductionism.
Art is art when it brings a world to stand before one; and great
art has such a fullness of the truth of being that one finds his
own horizon negated (in part), and a freshness of understand-
ing occurs that can only be understood in terms of the category
"experience." Encountering a great work of art is always an
experience, in the deepest sense of the word.
20. Reading a work, then, is not a gaining of conceptual
knowledge through observation or reflection; it is an
"experience," a breaking down and breaking open of one's old
way of seeing. It is not the interpreter who has manipulated the
work, for the work remains fixed; rather, the work has im-
pressed itself on him and he is so changed he can never regain
the innocence lost through experience.
21. Present methods of trying to "understand" a literary
work tend to operate with conceptual definitions of understand-
ing that are not true to the hermeneutical experience. Too often
they take set formulae and hold them in mind in advance: they
anticipate irony and paradox, or recurrent images, or archetypal
situations. They do not so much listen to the work as cross-
examine it. The interpretation of literature should not have the
character of an Aristotelian formal analysis, its categories all
marked out in advance; the process of coming to understand a
literary work is more like a Socratic dialogue of dialectical
circling and advancing into the subject itself through question
and answer. There is a great difference between a question
asked by the analyst who is merely looking for an answer and
sure of his own position, and the real query that arises from self-
questioning, from admission of one's own uncertainty. This
questioning says: Is it not so that ... ? This latter is no longer a
mere questiOning of the "object," but of the "subject" (to put
the matter in subject-object terminology).
250 / A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO

22. A method receives its validation only if it works. Now if

the way of being of a work of art-as event that discloses a
world-recedes and escapes from present methods, then even
on scientific grounds of their incommensurability with the
nature of the phenomenon the results of the method have ques-
tionable value. Even on scientific grounds, they lose their
validity.
23. To understand a text is not simply to bombard it with
questions but to understand the question it puts to the reader. It
is to understand the question behind the text, the question that
called the text into being. Literary interpretation needs to de-
velop the dynamics and art of hearing, of listening. It needs to
develop an openness for creative negativity, for learning some-
thing it could not anticipate or foresee.

THE NEED FOR HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN

LITERARY INTERPRETATION

24. A critical problem in American literary interpretation

today is a lack of historical consciousness and, consequently, an
inability to see the essential historicality of literature. A sizable
fraction of the teachers of literature in America, probably the
majority, may be classified either as "formalists" or ."anti-
quarians." The former take their lead unconsciously from the
errors of subjectivized aesthetics and believe that the es-
sence of the aesthetic moment of encounter is fundamentally a
matter of form. For this reason the encounter with the literary
work is seen in static, atemporal categories, and the "historical"
character of literature is lost. The antiquarians are not taken in
by the effort to transform the interpretation of literature into
formal analysis, but they take as their aim to understand the
work in terms of itself and its time, so that a scholar of eight-
eenth-century literature sees his task as that of living in the
eighteenth century as fully as possible. He imagines that that
century may even be more interesting than the present, for
coffee houses and the atmosphere they symbolize are less in
evidence today. Neither the antiquarian interest in exploring
the past, however, nor the reduction of literature to its formal
dynamics shows any authentic historical awareness. On the
Thirty Theses on Interpretation / 251

contrary, they are symptoms of the modem lack of understand-

ing of what history is.
25. Literature is intrinsically historical. To understand a
work of literature, one does not primarily use formal or scien-
tific categories; rather, in the pre structure of one's understand-
ing, he must refer to his historically formed vision of himself
and his world. The shape of one's intentions, preconceptions,
and way of seeing-this is bequeathed from the past. So one
moves and exists in the historically formed world of his under-
standing; when a work of literature is encountered, it presents
another "world." This world is not absolutely discontinuous
with that of the reader; on the contrary, to experience it in sin-
cerity is to find one's own self-understanding deepened. It sup-
plements and augments one's own historically formed under-
standing; to read a great work of literature is a truly "historical"
experience.
"Experience" is a significant word, for experience is itself
historical in character. It is the way in which one's understand-
ing of "world" is shaped. Just as experiences in daily life teach
something one may have forgotten or did not know before, so
the encounter with a literary work is truly "experience" and
becomes a part of one's own history, a part of the stream of tra-
dition-bequeathed understanding in which he lives and moves.
26. The task of interpretation, then, is that of bridging
historical distance. When interpreting a text from a past age,
the interpreter does not empty his mind or leave the present
absolutely; he takes it with him and uses it to understand in the
dialectical encounter of his horizon with that of the literary
work. The idea of historical reconstruction, or knowing the past
solely in terms of itself, is a romantic myth, an impossibility
like the idea of "presuppositionless interpretation." There is no
such thing. Literary interpretation must, like theological and
legal interpretation, relate to the present or die. That in litera-
ture which cannot be related to us standing in the present is
dead. The task of interpretation may in some cases be to take
what seems to be dead and to show its relation to the present,
I.e., the present horizon of expectations and the present world
of self-understanding. Demythologizing (which is not the dis-
solving of myth but the realization that we must see what it is
in myth that is meaningful) should, in principle, be the task of
literary interpretation. Only when interpreters today acquire an
252 I A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO

historical consciousness, and therefore a grasp of the historical

problems in interpreting literature, will they see the signifi-
cance of demythologizing for literature.
27. Historical understanding and historical consciousness
must, for us today, come in the form of the phenomenologist's
critique of scientific seeing. The basis for this critique is the
analysis of preunderstanding, which reveals the historicality of
our understanding and world. And a leading result will be the
discovery of temporality. Understanding literature or any work
of art stands within the modes of temporality. That is, one en-
counters the work in the present, but also on the basis of recol-
lection (one's historically formed understanding) and anticipa-
tion (the way in which one's understanding projects a future).
Understanding is not a static knowing outside of time; it stands
in a specific place in time and space-in history. Its interpreta-
tion will take on a different character as it makes its appearance
to the reader now, in this hour, in this place.
28. Understanding a work of literature, then, is not to be
grasped in the spatial, static, nontemporal categories of concep-
tual knowledge, for it has the character of event (i.e., history).
The meaning of a literary work is dynamic, temporal, personal.
In conceptual knowing, only a part of one's mind is really in-
volved, but in understanding literature one's self-understand-
ing must come into play. The work addresses one as a person, or
the encounter with it has been to no avail. Literature, in short,
is not conceptual knowledge but experience.
29. Science and conceptual knowing go together; experi-
ence and history go together. Literary interpretation must come
to know itself as belonging with the latter. This does not mean
that one rejects conceptual knowing but that one must tran-
scend and encompass it.
30. The task of interpretation today, then, is to break out of
scientific objectivity and the scientist's way of seeing and to
recover a sense of the historicality of existing. So overcome
with the perspective of technological thinking are we that only
in scattered moments does our historicality come into view at
all.
We come up against the historical character of interpreta-
tion when we recognize that no interpretation is "once and for
all" the "right interpretation"; each age -reinterprets Plato,
Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the other great lights in our
heritage. We glimpse this fact in our tentativeness before art
Thirty Theses on Interpretation I 253
and literature that is contemporary. We cannot know the
"verdict of history" on John Barth, John Updike, and James
Baldwin, despite our reviews and brave talk. In fact the verdict
on Hemingway, Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot is far from final. We
become aware of historicality when we ask for something be-
yond the bogus objectivity of the theoretical and scientific, the
visualizable and the mathematical-indeed, all the static, me-
chanical, purely ideational things that stand outside of history
and do not involve our self-understanding to grasp them. We
are reaching for the historical in the plea for "personal knowl-
edge," 7 in the impatience with science's frantic search for ori-
gins, causal grounds, neurological antecedents, and in the plea
for a return to the richness and complexity of concrete aware-
ness in interpreting literature." We glimpse the historicality of
existence when we juxtapose the clean, clear world of scientific
concepts with the world of conflict, ambiguity, and suffering in
which we live our daily lives, for "lived experience" is histori-
cal in its structure. Language is historical-the repository of
our whole culture's way of seeing. In short, interpretation itself
is historical, and if we try to make it something else, something
less, we have impoverished interpretation -and ourselves.

7. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge.

8. Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature," in
Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences, pp. 79"""100.