MEANING

THOMAS W. GILLESPIE

2. MEANING

Implicit in the debate about the scope of interpretation is the ques- tion of “meaning.” For meaning is the subject matter of interpre- tation in all of its functions. Traditional hermeneutics focuses upon textual meaning, the meaning expressed in ancient literature, which it qualifies as historical meaning, the meaning expressed in the text at the time and place of its origin. This is further qualified as authorial meaning, the meaning intended by the author or editor of the text, as the case may be. It is possible, therefore, to speak of the meaning of the text and to make its clarification the goal of interpretation.

This goal is surrendered, however, by some advocates of the new hermeneutics. For reasons which will be discussed when the issue of understanding is addressed, they believe that it is impossible to achieve an interpretation which makes the meaning of the text au- dible to the modern reader in the same way as it was to the audience for whom it was intended. Further, they argue, when discourse is committed to writing and enters into the stream of literary tradition, it is severed from the intention of its author and attains a “semantic autonomy” which requires its meaning to change with every differ- ent situation in which it is read. The focus here is upon the present or contemporary meaning of the text, which inevitably becomes its meaning to the interpreter. Much confusion is generated in the de- bate between these so-called “objectivist” and “subjectivist” posi- tions by the lack of a common concept of the nature and scope of

“meaning.” In order to clarify the confusion, certain distinctions are necessary.

One is the distinction previously mentioned between the sense and the sign$icance of a text. Initiated by Heidegger in his philosophical work, this distinction is predicated upon his understanding of the nature of language and its relation to both thought and being.6 In the order of knowing, Heidegger gives the priority to being over

6. The implications of Heidegger’s philosophy for hermeneutics are admirably explicated by Anthony C. Thiselton in The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 143-204. See also Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 124-61.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 197 thinking. Thought is dependent upon the reality of being that calls it forth. It is the human response to the silent toll of being that is heard in the beings that we encounter in our experience. This ex- perience is meaningful when two conditions are met. One is the intelligibility of the being of beings which present themselves to view as what they are. This is Heidegger’s way of insisting that meaning is not an “add-on,” something that thinking attaches to being as an

“extra.” M eaning as intelligibility is anchored in and expressed by being itself as it unveils itself to thinking through beings. The sig-

@came which the being of beings has for our universe of concern is the second condition of meaning. Intelligibility alone does not constitute meaning. For something to have meaning it must be re- lated to the concerns of human-being. If thought is dependent upon being, however, it is conditioned by language-the particular lan- guage tradition in which it occurs. Because thinking occurs only in and through language, meaning is a linguistic matter. Through the conventions of language, what is intelligible and of concern to a speaker or an author is expressed as the sense and significance of discourse. To speak of the meaning of a text, therefore, is to speak of its sense and its significance.

By including within the scope of “meaning” that which is of con- cern to us, Heidegger’s thought rings true to ordinary human ex- perience and common parlance. Like the story of the little boy who was being examined by his minister for confirmation in the Church of Scotland: “Do you understand the Catechism?” the pastor asked.

“Aye,” the youngster replied, “I it dinna mean a thing.”

understand every word of it, and Similarly, when people in the pew complain that the Bible has “no meaning” for them, they are not saying that it makes no sense. They are usually saying that the sense of the text has no significance for them. It seems clear, therefore, that an ad- equate definition of “meaning” must include both sense and signif- icance as constitutive elements.

Before leaving Heidegger, however, it is important to note a hermeneutical inference which he draws from this distinction. The definition of meaning which controls composition also controls interpretation. A text that has meaning for an interpreter must be intelligible and significant to the interpreter. But it is presumptuous, Heidegger argues, to think of the concerns of the interpreter and the author as being identical. To the extent that they differ, the meaning of the text will also differ, not only from the author to the interpreter but from one interpreter to another. Heidegger thus leads the chorus of the advocates of the “semantic autonomy” of the text. While that is so with regard to the text’s significance, is it true of its sense? Is that also a variable or is it a constant?

One who contends strenuously for the stability of textual meaning

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is E. D. Hirsch, Jr. In fact, it is his conviction that the definition of meaning in terms of the sense and significance of a text is both logically fallacious and hermeneutically pernicious. His intention, therefore, is to defend “the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant.” Hirsch carries out his critique of what he calls the

“banishment of the author” by defining textual meaning in terms of what I have referred to as its sense. That a text had a significance to its author and its intended audience and that it continues to have mutable significance to its interpreters is not denied. What is chal- lenged is the notion that textual meaning includes both sense and significance. The crux of the matter, according to Hirsch, is that the meaning (sense) of a text is determined by authorial intention and remains constant. Every text represents someone’s meaning, for meaning is an affair of human consciousness and not merely of words. Hirsch explains,

almost any word sequence can, under the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one complex of meaning. A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it. There is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness. Whenever meaning is connected to words, a person is making the connection, and the particular meanings he lends to them are never the only legitimate ones under the norms and conventions of his language.7

Since the only possible choice is between the author of the text and its interpreter, its meaning must be ascribed to the author if the text is to have any determinate and thus determinable meaning.

The theory of the “semantic autonomy” of the text actually is predicated upon its significance rather than its sense. What changes is not the sense but its significance. Since it is misleading to say that textual meaning changes, Hirsch is intent upon eliminating the ter- minological confusion by limiting the concept of meaning to that of sense.

Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Sigruficance, on the other hand, names a relationship be- tween that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable. . . . Significance always implies a rela- tionship, and one constant, unchanging pole of that relationship is what the text means. Failure to consider this simple and essential distinction has been the source of enormous confusion in hermeneutic theory.8

7. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 4.

8. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 8.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 199 Corresponding to this distinction between meaning and significance is another between interpretation and criticism. Hirsch argues that meaning (sense) is the province of interpretation and significance is the domain of criticism. Hermeneutics, accordingly, is understood in the traditional sense of the theory of exegesis. Hirsch’s book is in fact a modern statement of the procedures necessary for establishing with some degree of probability the meaning of a text, which is the author’s meaning, which is the historical meaning.

The insight that theories of changing textual meaning have ref- erence primarily to the mutability of significance rather than sense is helpful. What is missing, however, is a recognition of the fact that textual meaning frequently, if not always, bears both an intentional sense and an intentional significance that depend upon the author.

In writing his letter to the Galatians, for example, the apostle Paul certainly intended it not only to have an intelligible sense but to bear a particular significance for the situation of the Galatian churches. It is in fact difficult to imagine how that text could be understood in terms of Paul’s intention without reference to both its sense and significance. To limit textual meaning to sense is to fore- close in advance on the fullness of the letter’s meaning. Put simply, meaning may be more adequately conceptualized when it includes the interacting poles of sense and significance. Hirsch is convincing only in his insistence that the constant pole in this relationship is the intentional sense expressed by the author. If that pole is the basis for speaking of “validity in interpretation,” the other is not irrelevant for establishing criteria for discerning legitimacy in ap- plication. For the historical significance intended by an author and understood by the original audience provides a model for developing applicable historical analogies in the process of discerning contem- porary significance. Thus the intended significance of the letter to the Galatians was its refutation of the claims of religious legalism against the priority and sufficiency of grace. Although the forms of religious legalism were quite different in first century Galatia and sixteenth-century Europe, the significance which Luther perceived in Paul’s letter for his own situation was based upon legitimate historical analogy. The extent to which Luther comprehended the historical sense of this canonical epistle is debatable, but it is beyond question that his interpretation of Galatians would have been defi- cient had he not translated its historical significance in terms that spoke with power to his own historical situation.

A second important distinction that requires recognition in the discussion of the meaning of “meaning” is that between the sense and reference of discourse. Actually, this is a refinement of the meaning of “sense” in human speech and writing. Not all speech is referential

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in character, of course, but most of it is.g And this use of language has special importance for the Bible in its role as a witness. What is at stake in the distinction between “sense” and “reference” in the meaning of discourse was established by the German logicians Ed- mund Husserl and Gottlob Frege. According to Husserl, a meaning experience has two components: (1) the “intentional act” (the act of awareness by which I perceive an object) and (2) the “intentional object” (the object of awareness as perceived by me).” By “inten- tion” Husserl means “awareness” as constituted by act plus object.

Such awareness has both nonverbal and verbal aspects. The former is constituted by the “experience” as such, while the latter is com- posed of cognitive, emotive, phonetic, and (in the case of writing) visual elements which establish and express the “content” of the experience. For Husserl verbal meaning is a special kind of inten- tional object. Once expressed it is independent of the generating psychic experience and objective in its self-identity. Verbal meaning is thus unchanging and sharable. It is the sharable content of a speaker’s or a writer’s experience of an intentional object. As such the concept of verbal meaning (content) must include both “sense”

(what is said or written) and “reference” (what it is said or written about). Frege demonstrated the necessity of this distinction within discourse in his famous essay “Sinn und Bedeutung” (“On Sense and Reference”) .l 1

Paul Ricoeur develops this distinction fruitfully in his Interpretation Theory. l2 He points to the basic miracle of human communication whereby we overcome the solitude of our individuality. What is communicated between us is not our experience as lived but the meaning (content) of our experience. In other words, experience remains private while meaning goes public.

The medium of this miracle is the dialectical relationship of event and meaning in speech as discourse. Ricoeur observes that the pri- mary unit of speech is not the word but the sentence, which has as its chief function the relating of identification and predication.

Someone says something (predication) to someone else about some- thing (identification). The sentence is thus a “subjective” act in which signs are integrated to produce an “objective” meaning. All

9. G. B. Caird offers a succinct treatment of the five uses of language, which he distributes between referential and commissive uses, in The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), pp. 7-36.

10. See Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. B.

Gibbon (New York: Collier Books, 1962).

11. An English translation of “On Sense and Reference” is available in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. P. Geaeh and M. Black (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1952), pp. 56-78.

12. Rlcoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth:

Texas Christian University Press, 1976), pp. l-24.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 201 oral discourse occurs in the concrete polarity between speech as event and as meaning. In describing this polarity, Ricoeur speaks of a noetic act and its noematic content, of the “utterer’s meaning”

and the “utterance meaning.” Because of the self-reference of dis- course to itself as event, the “objective” pole always points back to the “subjective.” Yet the “objective” has an identity of its own once it is actualized, which is its propositional content, the “said as such.”

For the speech event passes away while its meaning abides in under- standing and memory, and can thus be repeated.

The “objective” side of the dialectic, however, has an inner di- alectic of its own between the “what” of discourse (its sense) and the “about what” (its reference). Ricoeur argues that speech is or- dinarily directed beyond itself. The sense is immanent to the dis- course and objective in the sense of ideal. The reference expresses the movement in which language transcends itself and makes contact with the world. Put otherwise, the sense correlates the identification function with the predication function in the sentence and generates thereby the reference which relates speech to the world of objective reality. The structure of the sentence (its sense) is used by the speaker to indicate something beyond the sentence (its reference).

Both, according to Ricoeur, are dependent upon the intention of the speaker and constitute together the meaning of the speech-act.

When he comes to the subject of meaning expressed in written discourse, Ricoeur seeks to find a way between “the intentional fal- lacy” (in which the intended meaning of the author becomes the norm of valid interpretation) and “the fallacy of the absolute text”

(in which textual meaning is treated as authorless). The former overlooks the semantic autonomy of the text, he explains, while the latter forgets that a text remains a discourse told by someone to someone else about something. The necessity of this quest is occa- sioned by the very nature of writing.

The theory of semantic autonomy is required, Ricoeur argues, by the fact that writing explodes the dialogical situation which char- acterizes oral speech. Oral discourse is predicated upon a face-to- face relationship between speaker and hearer which allows for ques- tions and answers about the speaker’s intended meaning. With the inscription of meaning, however, the possibility of a real dialogue between text and interpreter is severely limited. Ambiguity in the text creates the possibility of multiple meanings. Thus it may be construed differently by interpreters without having the power to correct misunderstanding. Nevertheless, the range of possible mean- ing is not limitless. The autonomy of the text, Ricoeur acknowl- edges, is not absolute. It remains, even at a greater distance than is common to oral discourse, in a dialectical relationship with the intention of the author. Thus Ricoeur cites with approval the view

.d

202 CURRENTASSESSMENTS BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 203 of Hirsch that interpretation can achieve probable validation with

regard to the sense of a text if not absolute verification.13 With this concession, however, Ricoeur seems to give back what he has taken away by his advocacy of semantic autonomy. The latter turns out to mean little more than a recognition of semantic ambiguity that is characteristic of all discourse, and, in the case of literature, im- possible to clarify by direct appeal to the author. Here the semantic autonomy of a text is based upon the absence of its author rather than upon a banishment of its author from consideration.

If writing limits the dialogical character of speech, it also tran- scends the situational nature of oral discourse. When meaning is committed to writing, it escapes the immediate and original hori- zons of the author. This impacts the reference of meaning decisively.

For the ordinary ground of reference in our conversations is the common situation of speaker and hearer. We refer to realities which are ostensive, and even when reference is made to inostensive real- ities they can be identified more clearly by the speaker where there is confusion over what he or she is talking “about.” Authors of literature and their readers, other than those originally intended, do not, however, share a common situation. The reference pole of meaning is for this reason more difficult to establish than the sense pole. Fortunately, human beings who do not share a common sit- uation do share a common world. To the extent, therefore, that textual meaning refers a reader to realities which transcend situa- tions and which constitute the world of human experience, it opens up for the reader the possibility of experiencing those realities per- sonally and thus appropriating at a level of fundamental depth the meaning of the text as reference. When that occurs, of course, “ref- erence” has achieved “significance. ” For Ricoeur the referential as- pect of textual meaning is of central importance for interpretation theory, and it will be discussed further when the counterpart of

“meaning” is taken up, namely, “understanding.”

For biblical interpretation, the following results of this exposition of the meaning of “meaning” may be offered in summary fashion.

The Bible is written discourse. It participates fully in the nature of such discourse. The meaning of a biblical text is, therefore, consti- tuted by its sense, its reference, and its significance. Consequently, textual meaning is nuanced according to the particular constitutive element of meaning that is under consideration. The sense of a text is determined by the linguistic conventions of biblical Hebrew and Greek. Meaning at this point bears the sense intended by the author or editor and is a constant. Where the sense of a text is theologically referential, as the Bible is in its witness to God, to Jesus Christ, to

13. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 78.

the Holy Spirit, or to the themes of the gospel, it directs the reader beyond the text itself to the realities attested. The assumption is that such realities are potentially significant to the interpreter.