lectures part two: is it still possible to interpret texts?

Lectures

Part Two: Is it still possible to interpret texts?

Quentin Skinner

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9EF, UK —[email protected]

My aim in what follows1 is simply to raise some questions about the possibility andthe limits of interpretation. I am chiefly interested in the interpretation of textsand, above all, of texts in the history of philosophy, from which I shall mainly drawmy examples. But I believe that my argument may have wider implications for theactivity of textual interpretation, including the interpretation of literary texts, andperhaps also of texts in the wider sense in which paintings, for instance, can be readas texts. I mainly want to offer some reflections on this general theme, but as wellas thinking about the issue itself I want to make some comments on where thegreat hermeneutic thinkers of recent decades – Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gad-amer, Paul Ricoeur – may be said to have left us as we try to confront the questionraised by my title.

It scarcely needs stressing that this past generation witnessed the emergence of ascepticism about textual interpretation so radical that we were left with the implica-tion that its goal, as traditionally conceived, might simply have been misconceived.One leading target was what theorists of interpretation such as E.D. Hirsch hadcalled validity in interpretation. According to this view, a valid interpretation is onethat succeeds in recovering the meaning of a text, where its meaning (the meaningof what is said) is equated with the meaning intended by whoever wrote it.2

Traditionally, theories of hermeneutics had generally run along such lines. Butthe reason why it increasingly came to seem that these lines might be goingnowhere was that, as it began to be urged, the yardstick of intentionality was sim-ply not available. During the past generation, several strands of thought convergedon this point, with the most sensational scepticism emerging from the early work ofJacques Derrida, especially in such texts as his Grammatology and �perons, inwhich the very notion of interpretation was questioned in the name of the thesisthat ultimately there are only misreadings rather than readings to be given of texts.

We need to be careful about directly asking what grounds were given by Derridaand his followers for insisting on these maps of misreadings, if only because theyrefused to be co-opted into the humanist discourse they rejected. But it was alwaysfairly clear what reasons Derrida himself had for rejecting traditional hermeneutics.He associated the project with what he called logocentrism, the belief that meaningsoriginate in the world and are conveyed to us by the capacity of words to refer to

1Professor Quentin Skinner gave this presentation at the meeting of the Applied Section on 26 September 2007.The argument draws on several chapters from Quentin Skinner, Regarding method (Cambridge, 2002).2E.D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in interpretation (New Haven, 1967).

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things. This belief was held to give rise to ‘a metaphysics of presence’; that is, tothe illusion that the truth about the world can be made present to the mindthrough the medium of a denotative language.

This doubt about denotation had of course been voiced long before Derridaexpressed it. But he certainly carried the attack a long step further with his sugges-tion that the terms we use to signify not only fail to do so univocally but floatapart from what is purportedly signified until they come to exist in a state of freeplay. As he declared, the misguided figure whom he labels ‘the hermeneut’ conse-quently faces an insuperable difficulty. This is that language in its inherently poly-semic state of play inevitably writes itself over any intention to communicate,thereby deferring to the point of absence our capacity to be sure of any ascriptionsof intended meanings to utterances.3

I say all this merely by way of reminder. Now begins my attempt at a reckoning.How far does this form of scepticism oblige us to abandon the aspiration to makeit one of the goals of interpretation to recover the intentions of authors and tograsp the meanings of what they wrote? What I want to suggest is that there canbe no straightforward answer, one reason being that the two key concepts here –meaning and intentionality – have been deployed by so many parties to the debatewith such villainous imprecision that we have no option, it seems to me, but tostart afresh. So let me begin by trying, very sketchily, to gesture at that task.

There are two separable senses in which we may be interested in the interpreta-tion or understanding, and hence in the meaning, of an utterance or text. We maybe concerned with the dimension of linguistic meaning, the sense and reference con-ventionally supposed to attach to words, phrases, sentences. We may be interested,that is, in what a certain word or phrase in a text means, or in the meaning of anentire passage. Putting the point as one about authorial intentionality, the interestlies in grasping what the speaker or writer intended or meant to say. Of the variouslexically possible meanings of an utterance, we are asking which one was intended.

Alternatively, we may be interested in the dimension of what I think is best calledlinguistic action. We may be concerned, that is, with the range of things thatwriters and speakers may be capable of doing in (and by) using words andsentences. To put this point as one about authorial intentionality, the interest herelies in recovering what a given speaker or writer may have meant or intended bysaying what they said; how they may have meant or intended their utterances to betaken and understood.

There, then, are two senses in which we may be interested in intentionality andinterpretation. As I began by remarking, it seems to me that they have very oftengot tangled up, especially by those who have wished to repudiate the relevance ofintentionality for interpretation. If there has been a standard confusion, it has,I think, stemmed from the assumption that anyone who argues that intentionalityis relevant to interpretation must be referring to the first of the two senses I havetried to isolate. But we surely need to keep them distinct and assess themseparately. This, then, is what I should next like to attempt.

Consider the first claim: that, in order to interpret a sentence or passage in a text,what we need to recover is the meaning that was intended. This is the intentionality

3J. Derrida, Of grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD, 1976, esp. pp. 6–73). AlsoWriting and difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978, esp. pp. 278–93).

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we must recover, according to theorists such as Hirsch, if we wish to arrive at avalid interpretation. But this is precisely what, according to the sceptics I havecited, we cannot hope to attain.

It seems by now to be generally agreed that the sceptics were victorious in this par-ticular battle. But I wonder if even this alleged conquest was complete. By way ofillustrating my doubt, let me consider an example from the poetry of W.B. Yeats.There is a passage from the sixth stanza of Yeats’s poem Among school children inwhich he compares Plato and Aristotle. As Yeats expresses it, the contrast is betweenPlato, who ‘thought nature but a spume that plays ⁄ Upon a ghostly paradigm ofthings’ and the seemingly more worldly and practical figure of ‘soldier Aristotle’.

The phrase ‘soldier Aristotle’ caused some perplexity, and one critic (in fact itwas Delmore Schwartz) suggested that Yeats was perhaps alluding to the story thatAristotle had accompanied his pupil Alexander the Great on his last campaign.But Yeats himself came forward at that juncture to explain that the line had beenmisprinted. What he had intended to say was ‘solider Aristotle’, the contrast beingwith Plato’s ghostliness. And if you now read the verse in, for example, Yeats’sSelected Poetry, that is the form in which you will find the line.4

What are we to say about this type of case? We cannot, I think, avoid respondingon-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. On the one hand, I do not see how we canfail to concede that Yeats is the final authority on what he intended to say, and thusthat we now know the meaning of the line. We now have, as Hirsch would say, a validinterpretation. Since we have no reason to disbelieve Yeats’s testimony, we may saythat, of the possible range of meanings, we now know the one that was intended.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the sceptics, even in a case like this, have animportant point to make. It is true that they misstate it with their claim that theyardstick of authorial intentionality is never available. I have just described aninstance in which it plainly is available. The important point is surely that, even whenit is available, it may not be what we want. In the example I have given, we mayinstead wish to argue that ‘soldier’ gives us a more striking line, and that this is whatreally matters. Or we may wish to note that the assonance of solider with soldiermeans that the unintended meaning is certainly present, and thus forms a part of themeaning of the line, even if this duality was no part of what Yeats himself intended.

Of these two types of reaction, the first is the one that we constantly encounteramong exponents of the ‘reader response’ school of criticism popularized by Wolf-gang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss. The second is the type of reaction that Derridaconstantly registers in his Grammatology, in which he argues that the nature of lan-guage, and especially figurative language, is such that any complex text will far out-run, in what it might be held to mean, whatever its author may have intended.

The ‘reader response’ approach is marginal to my present purposes, but Derrida’sargument is at once a crucially relevant and a very powerful one. As he indicates,it would be nothing less than extraordinary if all the allusions, connotations andresonances that an ingenious interpreter might properly claim to find in such textsas those of Rousseau (to take his own example) could be shown to reflectRousseau’s intentions at every stage. However, it would be a very crude mistake tosuppose that this gives us any reason for excluding such elements from an accountof the meaning of Rousseau’s text. If these elements of meaning are present, then

4W.B. Yeats, Selected poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London, 1962, p. 129).

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they are present whether or not Rousseau intended to put them there. We thereforehave no reason to equate the quest for meanings with a quest for the meaningsintended by authors, and excellent reasons for not doing so. As Ricoeur once nicelyput it, there will always be too much surplus meaning.

I agree, in short, with what I take to be the essence of Derrida’s critique of tradi-tional hermeneutics. Furthermore, it seems to me that his characteristic stress onambiguity and lack of authorial control – which it has become the hallmark ofpost-modern cultural criticism to emphasize – has been a liberating force in theinterpretative disciplines. Such insights help us all, if we will allow them to do so,to complicate and add nuance to interpretations that might otherwise become tooclear-cut, too hard-edged. The deconstructive moment may have passed, but on thewhole its legacy seems to me to have been one of enrichment.

I need to make it very clear, however, that everything I have so far said appliesexclusively to the first of the two separable ways in which we may be interested inintentionality in relation to interpretation. What of the second, in which we are notasking what an author may have intended to say, but what he or she may haveintended by saying what was said? Here we are raising a question about speech-acts, about what a speaker or writer may have been doing in saying what was said.We are thereby asking about intentions in the way that we always enquire intothem in assessing any kind of voluntary act. We are asking, that is, about thedescription under which the episode was intentional; about the nature of the inten-tions embodied in the performance.

Let me now consider whether we need to get at this sense of authorial intentionalityas part of the project of understanding texts. I am struck by the extent to which recenthermeneutic theories have paid no attention to this question, and have rarely evenasked whether the recovery of intentionality in this sense should or should not formpart of the interpretative task. This is not true of Derrida, and I shall come back tohim. But generally, even such distinguished hermeneuticists as Gadamer have, I think,tended to confuse and so conflate this question with the first one I raised.

I stress this point because my own belief is that the recovery of intentionality inthis second sense forms an absolutely vital part of the heremeneutic task. By way ofdefending and illustrating this commitment, I should next like to examine an exam-ple drawn from the history of philosophy. The example is admittedly much too briefand schematic, but it is sufficient, I think, to indicate the grounds of my belief.

A considerable time ago, John Passmore published a book about the philosophy ofDavid Hume, which he actually entitled Hume’s Intentions.5 However, its focus wasnot on what Hume may or may not have intended to say in the Treatise of HumanNature, but almost wholly on what you might call the character of his project. Whatwe learn from Passmore’s book is that, far from being an increasingly scepticalalthough recognizable follower of Locke and Berkeley – as scholars at the time hadgenerally maintained – Hume was overwhelmingly affected in shaping his Treatise byhis critical engagement with Bayle and especially Malebranche. Neither of these writ-ers is ever mentioned in the body of Hume’s text. But Passmore’s achievement wasto uncover the extent to which it might nevertheless make sense to say that Hume’sTreatise is about them. What Hume was doing was meditating on them, reacting tothem, responding to them, so that his text was largely shaped by their texts.

5J. Passmore, Hume’s intentions (Cambridge, 1952).

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The example is of course concerned with meaning and intentionality. But inspeaking here about meaning we are asking what a particular author may havemeant by arguing in a particular way, and in speaking about intentionality we areasking what the author may have been doing in developing his particular line ofthought. We are describing, in other words, a kind of writing that always takes theform of an intervention in a pre-existing conversation or debate. So, if we are tounderstand this kind of writing, we shall have to find means to identify the natureof the intervention it may be said to constitute.

The same point can be formulated in a different way by noting that there is asense in which we may need to understand why a certain proposition was put for-ward if we wish to understand the proposition itself. The notion of understandingis not a purely semantic one. To understand a given proposition, we may need tosee it not just as a proposition but as a move in an argument. Fully to comprehendit, we may need to grasp why it seemed appropriate to make just that move, andhence to issue just that utterance.

If these arguments are valid, they suggest that that the recovery of intentionalityin this second sense is crucial to the hermeneutic task. But, while this recovery maybe necessary, it does not follow that it is possible. Can we hope to recover this kindof intentionality? Within recent discussions about interpretation, this is one of thebattlegrounds on which there has been a clash of Titans. If you look at those theor-ists of culture who have been deeply influenced by the philosophy of the later Witt-genstein, such as Clifford Geertz in his last book Available Light, you will findthem affirming that of course it is possible to get at meanings in this sense.6 But ifyou look at the work of Derrida and his followers, especially at Derrida’s earlytexts, you will find him insisting that we can never come to understand this kind ofintentionality either.

This I take to be the force of Derrida’s now celebrated example from �perons ofthe fragment, found among Nietzsche’s papers, which reads: ‘I have forgotten myumbrella’.7 For the interpreter, as I have been saying, there are two discriminablequestions here. One is about what Nietzsche’s words mean. But even Derrida seemswilling to concede that in this instance the answer is unambiguously clear. As herather surprisingly declares, everyone knows what these words mean.8 Alternatively,we may wish to know what Nietzsche meant or intended by writing just thosewords. Was he merely telling someone? Or was he reminding them, or warningthem, or reassuring them? Or was he instead explaining something, or apologizing,or criticizing himself, or simply lamenting his lapse of memory, or what? Derrida’sanswer to these further questions is that we shall never know. We can never beassur�s de savoir what is going on.9

Let me crudely introduce the next step in my argument by asking: Geertz or Der-rida? Whose side are you on? The first observation I want to make by way ofgiving my own answer is that, as always, Derrida’s example is strikingly chosen; orrather, in this instance, chosen with striking unfairness. There will undoubtedly becases in which we cannot hope to recover the explanatory contexts necessary

6C. Geertz, Available light (Princeton, NJ, 2000, esp. pp. xi–xiii).7J. Derrida, Spurs [�perons], trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, IL, 1979, pp. 122–3).8Derrida, Spurs, p. 128.9Derrida, Spurs, p. 128.



for identifying particular speech-acts, and it certainly looks as if the Nietzschefragment is one such case. But this is hardly a concession of a substantial kind.What Derrida’s example shows is that, if we cannot construct such an explanatorycontext, we cannot hope to give an account of the significance of the utterance.Well, obviously. But what the example equally obviously cannot show is that wecan never hope to construct such explanatory contexts.

However, it is the further contention of Derrida and other anti-intentionalist crit-ics that there are in fact no such explanatory contexts to be recovered, because ofthe problem, in effect, of other minds. To speak of intentions, we are repeatedlytold, is to refer to purely mental events, and these are irreducibly private and inac-cessible.

What should we think of this argument? As before, my answer is on-the-one-handand on-the-other-hand. On the one hand, it seems to me that the objection is welltaken as a criticism of the way in which the claim about the possibility of recover-ing intentions has often been expressed. Followers of Gadamer in particular havecomplained, surely rightly, that the traditional idea of hermeneutics asks for theimpossible if it asks us, in R.G. Collingwood’s unfortunate phrase, to think otherpeople’s thoughts after them. It is surely right to object that we can never hope toabolish the historical distance between our forebears and ourselves in the way thatthis project seems to presuppose.10

On the other hand, it seems to me a further misunderstanding to suppose thatthis is what someone like Geertz or any other follower of Wittgenstein is committedto attempting. To recover the kinds of intentions of which I have spoken, we donot need to perform any such conjuring trick as that of re-entering the minds ofhistorical agents. We are speaking of intentions embodied in acts of linguistic or rit-ual communication. But these intentions, including as they do the intention to com-municate and be understood, will ex hypothesi be publicly legible in the manner ofany other kind of voluntary act. This, I assume, must be the significance of the titleof Geertz’s book, Available Light. The light is provided by the elements of the cul-ture itself, of which the texts or other social actions in which we are interested forma part. We recover meanings by finding their place within forms of life.

To illustrate, let me revert to John Passmore’s suggestion that (to simplify dra-matically) Hume’s Treatise is about Malebranche. This is certainly an assertionabout Hume’s intentions. But the business of recovering them is nothing to do withsuccessfully re-creating the ideas inside Hume’s head at the moment when he beganto write. It is rather a matter of pointing to a series of relationships and intercon-nections between his text and certain other texts. It is a mistake to suppose thatPassmore’s claim about Hume’s intentions depends on any act of empathetic re-cre-ation, and equally a mistake on Gadamer’s part to suppose that those who speakabout the recovery of intentions must be committed to what he too quickly stigma-tizes as that ‘romantic’ belief. We are engaged in nothing more mysterious than theenterprise of establishing intertextuality. We are embarked upon the circular –hermeneutically circular – business of placing texts within whatever intertextualcontexts turn out to make the best sense of them.

The core of my argument is thus that texts are, among other things, social acts.To understand texts, one of the things we need to recover is what their authors were

10For Gadamer on Collingwood, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and method (London, 1975, pp. 333–6, 467–8).

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doing in writing them. But this is not the romantic or mysterious process thattraditional theorists of interpretation and their adversaries have alike supposed.For social acts are also texts. They embody conventional meanings which, when weknow the language involved – whether it be a natural language, a musical or pictor-ial language, or a language of gesture – we can hope to read off.‘Reading off’ is Wittgenstein’s phrase, but it is true, as I next need to acknowledge,

that it runs into a notorious difficulty. I think it would be fair to say – to go back tothe Hume example – that what Passmore offers us is an account of the force ofHume’s argument. If we accept Passmore’s thesis, then we are saying that Hume’sTreatise is, among other things, a commentary on, a critique of, a response to,Malebranche’s De la recherche de la verit�. However, it is one thing to show thatHume spoke with this force; it is quite another to show that he spoke with thisintended force. This is the objection, as I have already noted, that Derrida registerswith his Nietzschean example in �perons. As he insists, we can never be certain insuch instances what linguistic code is being followed or – as I would prefer to say –what speech-act is being performed.

What are we to say to that? You could respond that we do not need to raise thisquestion at all, because what makes the intervention is the text itself, on which weshould accordingly concentrate without troubling ourselves about authors andagency. The suggestion, in other words, is that the performativity lies in the text,and that we ought to be writing histories of texts.11 As the post-modernist sloganhas it, there is no hors texte, nothing beyond the text to which we can appeal, andnothing further to which we should therefore address ourselves.

This seems to me a good answer, and perhaps we should simply accept it. How-ever, I do not myself see that we can wholly dispense with agency and thus with thefigure of the author in the manner of Barthes or Foucault, for it keeps comingback. For example, the assertion that Hume is commenting on Malebranche is cer-tainly a claim about his intentions, and so is the assertion that he is criticizing him,both of these being intentional concepts. But if we insist on that point, don’t weonce more run up against the criticism that such intentions are purely mental enti-ties, and thus that we have no access to them?

Here, one last time, I want to answer on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand.On the one hand, I agree. The claim, in my example, about the force of what Humeis saying is an assertion about language, and is, I think, in principle completelysecure. But the claim about intentionality is obviously an hypothesis, and irreduc-ibly so, so that of course we can never be assur�s that it is correct. But on the otherhand, who ever supposed – apart apparently from Derrida – that interpretationscan ever hope to provide certainty? Moreover, while the hypothetical claim is ofcourse not ‘sure’, it is one for which we can hope to assemble a great deal of evi-dence, and evidence of such a kind as might well persuade you that, for example,Passmore was in fact successful in identifying what Hume meant by what he wrote.There is available light.

So there is my modest proposal: that, by placing texts in the contexts that enableus to see what kinds of intervention they constitute, we can often hope to recoverwhat their authors may have meant by saying what they said. Even if you are still

11As proposed, for example, in Annabel Brett, ‘What is intellectual history now?’ in David Cannadine, ed., What ishistory now (London, 2002, pp. 113–31).



with me, however, I can well imagine that you might have a final doubt to raise, adoubt of a different character. Even if this operation can be performed, how muchdoes it matter? When we learn, for example, that Hume’s Treatise embodies a cri-tique of Malebranche, what more are we being offered, as one critic has com-plained, than a meagre platitude?12

The best way to answer this doubt is I think to revert to the emphasis thattheorists like R.G. Collingwood – or indeed Wittgenstein, or more recently Geertz– have placed upon the importance of recovering underlying purposes. If, forexample, Passmore’s contention about Hume intentions is correct, what we learnfrom his characterization of the Treatise is something crucial about Hume’s ownconception of his project. But this is to acquire far more than a meagre platitudeabout Hume’s text; it is to acquire a means of accounting for many of its detailedarguments. We may now be able to explain, for example, why Hume’s Treatise isorganized in a certain way; why it employs a particular vocabulary; why it concen-trates on specific lines of argument – why in short it possesses its distinctive shapeand character. But these are hardly meagre results. Rather, I am tempted to say,they form the core of the interpretative task.

I should like to close by adding a word about the kinds of histories that wouldresult from treating the recovery of speech-acts as the principal goal of interpreta-tion. Such histories would not be greatly interested in the possible truth of thepropositions and arguments put forward by philosophers in the past. They wouldof course examine those arguments, but less for their truth-content than in order tofind their place in the business of philosophizing at the time. They would treat philo-sophy essentially as an activity, and study it in the way that we study any otheractivity carried on in the past.

Such histories would be largely Foucauldian in character, for they would focus ondiscourses and on the activity of thinking rather than on authors and the assess-ment of what they said. But they would not be wholly Foucauldian, for they wouldnot concentrate so exclusively on discourse as to bring about the death of authors.Rather they would continue to focus on the relationship between individual authorsand the intellectual traditions they invoke or react against, the lines of argumentthey take up, the changes they introduce into existing debates.

The outcome of writing such histories, however, would certainly be to bring abouta radical de-centring of authors and authorial voices. Every thinker and writer, how-ever original or eminent, would figure essentially as a contributor to a number ofbroader traditions of debate. The resulting histories would not so much aim to pro-vide interpretations of individual texts, but rather to offer us the spectacle of anentire culture arguing with itself. This, I have come to believe, is the task that all theinterpretative disciplines should try to set themselves.

12Graham Hough, ‘An eighth type of ambiguity’ in On Literary intention, David Newton-De Molina, ed.(Edinburgh, 1976, pp. 222–41, at p. 227).

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