It will eventually be argued in this discussion that Tristram's whole enterprise is a hermeneutics, a process of self-interpretation which is required by his awareness of being part of a family and of a tradition in which there has been serious misinterpretation. It is not surprising that the parson whose sermons interpret biblical texts by imaginatively filling out the human setting of those texts should raise the problem of a general hermeneutics in a work that professes to give an account of the mind. Nothing is more obvious to the most casual reader of the novel than the fact that in Shandy Hall every mode of experience down to the simplest sense perception—of the crevice in the parlor wall, say—offers a problem of interpretation. Historically, hermeneutics may still have been an ancillary discipline of rules for interpreting biblical and legal texts, but in Sterne's novel it undergoes an intuitive expansion of application that was not to reach its full theoretical development until the twentieth century.⁹

A reasonable starting place is with the narrower question of interpreting the novel, and Tristram does not leave us without advice on that point:

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. [I.ii. 108-09]

"Conversation" in Tristram's remark is more than metaphoric: it is an effort to preserve the original spontaneity of spoken language and to overcome' the inherent recalcitrance of the written word in catching the movement of thinking. The intention acknowledged in this passage is to write in a way that will keep the reader's imagination "as busy as my own"; but that indication of how the writing is to be carried forward also implies how reading is done when it is rightly done, implicitly, a prescription about how the text is to be interpreted. In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer makes extensive use of the analogy of conversation as a means of describing the event of interpretation which underlies even the most sophisticated epistemological methods. Tristram's similar concern with the event of understanding the spoken word is also concentrated in that term conversation which is the foundation of his reflections, and it invites one to consider what exactly constitutes authentic conversation and authentic interpretation. Three features in Gadamer's discussion (pp. 330 ff., 344 ff.) are especially revealing, though the analysis may appear to make illicitly free use of a casual analogy in the passage quoted above from the novel. I believe, however, that the point of view will be amply justified in the course of the ensuing discussion when interpretation is viewed ontologically, that is, as a way of being instead of merely a way to knowledge.

The first requirement for conversation is that the conversants engage in a give and take in which each tries to enter into what the other says rather than talking at cross-purposes. Such an openness to the other is the posture of one who, unlike the Shandys, is willing to risk the security of one's prior grasp of reality by listening to what another says. Authentic conversation presupposes such an attitude of true enquiry and such a will to understand. Since the implication of that openness for the reader is a requirement for considerably more than mere aesthetic appreciation of the form and technique of his book, it will be well to ask what exactly Tristram requires in this respect, what quality of openness he expects in the exchange with his text. The question is important enough to him that he teases and taunts the reader throughout the novel for inattention, misreading, and misinterpretation. Most conspicuous, however, is the vivid example of how Yorick's sermon on a good conscience, the most important self-contained text within the book because of its normative function, is abused by inattention to its inner significance on the part of the company assembled at its reading in the parlor. It attacks conscience as undependable, inconsistent, and deceptive, thereby accounting for its own poor reception as due to human resources for subverting it. The reading completed, Walter expresses an attitude of abstract aesthetic appreciation: "Thou hast read the sermon extremely well, Trim, quoth my father.… I like the sermon well … 'tis dramatic, and there is something in that way of writing, when skilfully managed, which catches the attention" (II.xvii. 140-41). The character in the novel most guilty of the self-deceptions which the sermon anatomizes listens only to the aesthetic surface, one might say "listens away from" the moral and religious meaning that informs the words and that he is called upon to appropriate. Thus well before Kant's Critique of Judgment completes the subjectivization of aesthetics, Sterne criticizes that aesthetic consciousness which ignores the existential roots in the context of the world from which and about which a text speaks and makes it accessible to an audience. Language for him is still preeminently a signifying milieu which demands that one understand what is said. Walter's response demonstrates how those connections between a text and its world may be dissolved by the preference for the pure immediacy of surface attractiveness, stripping it of its power to speak, judging it in abstraction from the context to which it belongs, and neutralizing its claim to truth.

How fully Steme is in agreement with his conservative Augustan forebears, for whom art and nature were complementary and nature the framework and norm within which art functioned, may also be inferred from the passage. Aesthetic consciousness was destined to dissolve that old sovereignty of nature and to detach art from reality. In Either/Or Kierkegaard makes a moral analysis of the aesthetic as a way of life that demonstrates how it abstracts its object of interest from all ties with the life to which it belongs and attempts to hold it in the simultaneity of purely immediate experience. To do so is for the ego to assume a universal and sovereign authority over everything in a manner comparable to the spirit of technology. Inherent in that spirit is the impulse to dissolve the unity of being and to make the ego the measure of all things, treating the world as a collection of tools or, in the case of the aesthete, pleasures to be manipulated for the immediate gratification of the ego.¹⁰ The subjective consequence which interests Kierkegaard is that the need for continuity and unity in life itself is frustrated by that self-destructive demand for immediacy. Tristram plainly discourages our dwelling on the aesthetic appearances of his work by encouraging us to see the significance of the work in its relation to reality and to grasp what it attempts to say. His criterion of conversation, in contrast to autonomous aesthetic consciousness, demands that one become engaged with the extra-aesthetic content of his work, with the book's context of meaningfulness. Gadamer's description of the way in which a common world of reference underlies the comprehension of a text summarizes the point clearly:

Inasmuch as we encounter the work of art in the world and a world in the individual work of art, this does not remain a strange universe into which we are magically transported for a time. Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in it, and that means that we preserve the discontinuity of the experience in the continuity of our existence. Therefore it is necessary to adopt an attitude to the beautiful and to art that does not lay claim to immediacy, but corresponds to the historical reality of man. The appeal to immediacy, to the genius of the moment, to the significance of the 'experience', cannot withstand the claim of human existence to continuity and unity of self-understanding. The experience of art must not be side-tracked into the uncommittedness of aesthetic awareness.… Art is knowledge and the experience of the work of art is a sharing of this knowledge. [Gadamer, pp. 86-87]

However, openness even to the world that speaks through the work does not exhaust the implications of Tristram's example of interpretation as conversation.

The second characteristic of conversation that is pertinent to Tristram's statement is a "fusion of horizons" that occurs when there is a meeting of minds. One who suspends his own point of view in order to understand the perspective of another, as when the physician interviews his patient or the attorney his client, is not conversing in the true sense of the term: no conversation can occur because the with is suspended and there can be no exchange of views and mutual expansion of the understanding of both parties. Likewise, in interpreting the text, if a reader tries to suspend his own point of view and to cultivate a detached appreciation of the perspective Tristram adopts toward his life, he thereby ignores the historical dimension of his own being and fails in his task, for all understanding is interpretation and requires assimilation of the new materials to the old structures of its preunderstanding. The aim is "not to get inside another person and relive his experiences"; reproduction, were it possible, would not be interpretation.¹¹ Detaching himself from his own orientation, attempting to suspend his own historical conditioning insures a reader's failure as conversationalist, for Tristram has laid down the prior condition that his reader engage in an exchange that presupposes the integrity of each person's horizon. And he never forgets that the reader is maintaining his own horizon as demonstrated by frequent interrogation about what he thinks, how he feels, how he is responding. Never in the annals of fiction is the awareness of the integrity of the reader more explicit and sensitive than here.

The third feature of conversation according to Gadamer's analysis is that when it is real it is an activity that guides the conversants rather than being guided by them. Its extraordinary value in this regard is that it leads one into new territory, revealing the unthought and even uncovering what heretofore lay concealed in one's own thinking. Thus when Tristram comments on his "most religious" manner of proceeding, writing "the first sentence and trusting to Almighty God for the second" (VIII.ii.540), he is not being facetious; he is admitting that he is surrendering himself to the conversation rather than approaching his task with a preconceived method. His ideal requires that both he and his reader abandon themselves and their methods of procedure to the free play of the event in which new meanings unpredictably occur. This question of method is exceedingly important, for choosing a rational method establishes a ratio between reader and text. Questions imply answers and methods filter from experience what the methods have prejudged as important. The general problem of interpretation is not a matter of settling on a procedure for finding what one seeks as in those enquiries where the goal is established in advance; it is a more primitive experience and a more extensive concept than the scientific one of method. Whereas the question of method properly belongs to the domain of objective knowledge, the general problem of understanding is concerned with a mode of being rather than a mode of knowing. In fact, understanding is coextensive with "the total human experience of the world."¹² However, the example of conversation—and hence the denial of method—would appear to be limited by the stasis of Tristram's side of the exchange. How can the relationship be a dialogue when the printed word is a unilateral speaking, a kind of denial of reciprocity? The answer is that the text speaks in the reading and, by Tristram's having anticipated and in large measure controlled our responses, we participate, even more than in reading most books, in the advent of meaning that is not only a common ground of understanding, but also a literal fusing of horizons.¹³ This is the real meaning of Tristram's confidence that our association with him in the reading will lead gradually from acquaintance to the kind of unique understanding and affection that exists between friends (I.vi. 10-11).

According to contemporary hermeneutic theory a linguistic event does not consist merely of univocal statements about particular things or events; it puts into words in a less intense way than does poetry the manner in which one comports oneself toward the whole of being. In authentic conversation, then, one listens not only to what is said but to the unsaid, the horizon of meaningfulness, that wells up within it. In the complicated act of reading this means that while holding on to one's own relation with being, one must catch, beyond the literal references of words spoken, another manner of comportment within the whole of things which is part of the meaning of what is said. It is in this sense that language is inherently speculative. In Gadamer's words, "the finite possibilities of the word are oriented towards the sense intended, as towards the infinite" (p. 426). Accordingly, it will be part of the purpose of this critical study to attempt to retrieve in all its original vitality the problem that occupies Tristram's attention. He insists that we respond to the question with which he is engaged and that we think it through with him. Our thinking is not a reiteration of his, but a reworking which is completely unlike abstract aesthetic appreciation. To retrieve Sterne's problem may even involve a certain violence in wresting the book free from the pattern of references that customarily surround it, and it is in this sense that the present study is speculative: to retrieve the problem of being that lies at the heart of the work and to explore new ways in which the meaning of the text deploys itself in the cultural horizon of the twentieth century. The tension between Tristram's thinking and our own parallels the dialectical relation between his thinking and the family tradition from which he springs and which occupies most of his reflections. The close relation between understanding an "other"—person, event, text, or tradition—and understanding oneself, Tristram's ultimate aim in his book and ours in the reading, occupies Paul Ricoeur in his essay "Existence and Hermeneutics." He remarks that "all interpretation is to conquer a remoteness, a distance between the past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself.… It is thus the growth of his own understanding of himself that he [the exegete] pursues through his understanding of the other. Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-understanding by means of understanding others" (pp. 16-17).

Tristram's enquiry is stimulated and shaped by a need to understand himself through discovering his relations to a tradition. He does not look back for positive historical fact, doubting, questioning the integrity of his tradition, for the old dichotomy between reality and appearance, events-in-themselves and events-as-they-appear, has been obviated by the ontological character of the events of understanding. His, like other histories, is no more discovered than invented. As readers often observe, there is no way that he could have a visually accurate picture of Trim's oratorical posture as he reads the sermon in the parlor or know his exact tone of voice as he discourses on death to the servants in the kitchen. He could not have positive knowledge of a thousand other details, many of which occurred before he was even born. What is important is why this lack of verification is at the least irrelevant, and perhaps even an advantage. Tristram's procedure leaves little doubt that his imaginative grasp of his heritage has, from the point of view of historical objectivism, altered the "facts"; but the ultimate result is a kind of preservation of the truth that he is, as a participant in that tradition, rather than positive knowledge of alien events with which he has no living tie. To the scientific mind such an apparently careless disregard for verfication must remain fallacious until it recognizes that the empirical principle itself derives, laden with prejudgments, from just such a primitive and precritical engagement with the historical world. In an entirely different sense, Tristram is highly critical, not factually but morally. His reflections are critical of the aberrations in the life of Shandy Hall, and he comes gradually to a superior understanding which in effect is a purifying of the tradition as represented in a comically debased form by Walter, Toby, and Elizabeth Shandy. The form of that purification is the retrieval of a much older and wiser stratum of his tradition represented by Yorick. His problem is not one of historical knowledge; it is interpretive and, hence, necessarily historical in a more radical sense. While it may be assumed, then, that Tristram has not deliberately misrepresented his family history, on the ground that misrepresentation would hinder rather than serve his purposes, the issue of historical accuracy simply does not fall within the purview of his project. His concern is with the primitive events of understanding as a mode of being. Our own act of participation in his book, which on his model requires that we let the text become contemporaneous and address us in our present world, will, however, raise the issue of validity in an urgent form.

The implications of Tristram's analogy interpreted in this way are extensive for criticism and need to be made explicit since they demand an approach to the text substantially different from critical methods based on the model of scientific knowledge which assumes a false objectification. In fact, the implications weigh heavily against all procedures which stress either side of the subject-object schema that underlies most modern literary theory. On the one hand there is the realist assumption that a text is an objective thing-in-itself to be manipulated according to specified methods by an unconditioned reader, and, on the other, the idealist assumption that the reader projects his own meaning into the text, using it to launch into his own orbit. Both ignore the fact that the event of understanding is anterior to this epistemological model of a subject confronting an alien object and calls for a critique of positivity. That model is not simply given in primary experience as is so often assumed; it is an abstraction, derived from concrete experience, for the purpose of dealing with a world of objects. As such it is specifically unsuited to literary criticism. More appropriate for critical purposes is the analogy of human relationships such as Tristram's conversation. Gadamer uses the term I-Thou to distinguish three different qualities of relationships which parallel ways of addressing a text and offer distinct critical alternatives.

The first is an "I," a subject, confronting a "Thou" who is not a thou at all but an it, an object with which the subject has nothing in common; the resulting relationship of "objectivity" consists in subsuming the object under various universal concepts by specific methods of procedure. Thus one may find that a person exemplifies one or another trait of "human nature," to use an eighteenth-century category, or, as in twentieth-century social science, he may predict how the person would behave under some specified circumstances. In such a "scientific" procedure everything about the person that does not exemplify some universal concept is submerged, including the uniqueness that is the person himself. The objective habit of mind approaches all reality with what Victor Shklovský calls an "'algebraic' method of thought" which facilitates one's dealing with a world of objects with great economy though the price of that abstract economy is the gradual evacuation of reality which, one might argue, it is a function of art to rehabilitate.¹⁴ An objectivist posture toward a text strips it of its power to make a personal claim on the reader and effectively silences it. In the domain of natural science it is as true as in the study of literature that the event of understanding cannot itself be understood by constructing and retrospectively imposing such a pattern on the event of interpretation. Subjects and objects are possible only because of the rich texture of relationships that obtain in the world prior to reflection. A realist criticism that attempts to study the text objectively, as if it were an autonomous entity, is uninterested in the concealed processes by means of which the object is accessible and in the subjective conditions that influence the way it presents itself to consciousness. "To speak of the being of a thing as it 'actually is' is to indulge in metaphysical speculation: as it is for whom? There is no human perspective from which one can say what a being 'actually is.'"¹⁵

Underlying the objectivist position is a legitimate concern with the question of verification and an apprehension of the critical anarchy, not to say generally shabby thinking, that would be fostered by an unrestrained impressionism. Hermeneutical theorists, especially Gadamer, though the criticism applies better to Heidegger, have been blamed for an indifference to the possibility of valid interpretation.¹⁶ All critics are convinced, of course, that there is a discernible difference between getting a point of interpretation right and getting it wrong, but that does not imply that only one way of interpreting a text is admissible. What needs to be examined carefully is the notion of objectively valid results. Just as the object "as it really is" is as problematic in physics as in historical criticism, so is the notion of objective validity. In the introduction to the Cartesian Meditations, Edmund Husserl observes that the phrase "objectively valid results … signifies nothing but results that have been refined by mutual criticism and that now withstand every criticism" (p. 5). Not even the positive sciences "attain actualization of a system of absolute truths"; they must settle for "an infinite horizon of approximations" (p. 12). As Aron Gurwitsch puts it, objectivity is "identifiableness, i.e. the possibility of reverting again and again to what, through the present experienced act, is offered to consciousness."¹⁷ Hence, that claim may be said to have objective, empirical validity which withstands public criticism. In discussing the historian's effort to achieve objectivity, Ricoeur says that the meaning of such objectivity is an educated subjectivity, that is, "not just any subjectivity," not "a subjectivity adrift," but one shaped by history whose predispositions derive from the tradition of which it is part and "are dimensions of historical objectivity itself."¹⁸

The task of criticism is not to dissect a rationally structured object with the intellectual scalpel from a position of detached contemplation. There are dimensions of the critical enterprise that can be and should be reduced to method, regions that require empirical research and formal analysis; but those regions of enquiry presuppose a more primitive living relationship with the text which makes rational analysis worth the trouble and establishes the directions of interest which it will take. A pertinent example for the study of Tristram Shandy is the case of the historical text. Approached as an objective entity the historical text can be nothing more than an object of antiquarian interest which has lost the power to speak. Antiquarianism which attempts to reconstruct some original meaning or the response of the original audience fails utterly to understand the historical nature of either the text or the interpreter and thus misses the work entirely. As R. G. Collingwood correctly observes, the historian "is a part of the process he is studying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of view which at this present moment he occupies within it."¹⁹ The proper aim is not the futile effort to restore the irretrievable life of the past or to return to some original meaning; it is to establish that reciprocity between historian and text that was described above as a fusion of horizons. When judiciously practiced, historicism escapes its absurdly deterministic implications by searching for formative influences rather than "causes" in the strict sense. Its excesses are frequent enough, however, to justify the observation that whatever antecedents might be recoverable, a writer is a self, a transcendence, that does not respond to ideas in books as billiard ball responds to cue.²⁰ In his relatedness to himself there is an open space of reflection that breaks the deterministic friction of causality, setting him at a distance from the self that is acted upon by causes and motives. The motives for thought and the influences giving it shape are as likely to be "a good dinner" or "a bad wife"²¹ as the reading of Montaigne; but, in any case, there is an agency guiding from the front as causes push from behind.

The idealist who stresses the opposite pole of the subject-object relation in criticism chooses a relation to the text that corresponds to Gadamer's second "I-Thou" model in which the thou is a reflection of the I. In personal relationships the thou is thereby allowed a uniqueness of its own, but at the same time that uniqueness is subordinated to projective patterns of explanation by which one establishes supremacy over the other. There is reciprocity in this relationship, but it does not allow the other to speak for himself. As a model of interpretation it has one advantage over the objectivist position in that it closes the distance between reader and text and allows the intimacy of encounter that is the beginning of meaning. But the advantage is offset by the absence of any principle restraining the imposition of wanton subjective patterns that distort the objective outlines of the text. The threat posed by this subject-centered impressionism is qualified by one fact that is not always recognized: the projecting of patterns of meaning is not the completely private gesture of a solus ipse isolated within the walls of its own subjectivity. The fabric of prejudgments that are thus imposed on the text are part of the historical sedimentation of the tradition in which one lives with others and with the text itself. The issue is simply the difference between what Ricoeur calls a "bad" or uncultivated subjectivity and a "good" or educated one.²²

Criticism based on the subject pole of the subject-object schema contains a practical truth which has often been overlooked to the detriment of literary studies. Classroom experience richly demonstrates the impossibility of engaging readers in abstract analysis of such features of a work as form until imaginative reading or imaginative teaching has enabled the text to establish its authority over the prestructured consciousness of the reader by means of the dialectic of participation. Once that interaction has taken place, analysis has its raison d'etre, namely, the extension of the understanding and the power of the work. To proceed in the opposite direction is to encourage the common, naive misunderstanding of criticism as stifling the life of the text. When all the formal problems have been explained, the life of the author written, the books in his library cataloged, sources and influences traced, and archetypes explicated, the central challenge of the text and the reason it is read will still be untouched unless the reader's separation from the work has been overcome by a bridging of the gulf that divides his values, experiences, and preconceptions from the horizon of the work. What is needed is close attention to the actual patterns of understanding in concrete experience which can show the way that interpretation occurs, as distinguished from the calculation of abstract methods with their lumber of philosophical presuppositions.

The third "I-Thou" relation illuminates the hermeneutic experience in precisely the way that is needed; the thou, whether person or text, is allowed to reveal itself in its own integrity in the manner of authentic conversation. It assumes neither a commitment to an underlying philosophical system nor a presuppositionless starting point; it leaves the act of interpretation in its inherent setting, what Heidegger has taught us to recognize as "the hermeneutical circle," and thereby makes full allowance for the historical and finite character of both reader and text. By means of the sedimentation of experience in his tradition, his standpoint in history, and his language, he brings a rich texture of prejudices to his reading which are the subjective conditions out of which his kinship with the text grows and which are to some extent objectively present in the work itself. Increase in understanding causes revisions and corrections in those prejudices, but without them there could be no understanding, the text would not even be identifiable as a work of art. It should also be observed that the understanding of the necessary role of bias encourages such corrections, whereas objectivism conceals them from itself by assuming the possibility of an ideal or at least a partial objectivity. This structure of preunderstanding completes the circle of believing in order to understand and understanding in order to believe. Such a basis of criticism combines the ideals of truth to the objective outlines of the work with authentic response on the part of the historically situated reader whose horizon of interests makes his kinship with the text possible. Tristram Shandy, for example, attracts our attention first because it says things that seem true and important in the context of modern life and of our own thinking. At the same time that we attend to the author's intent in what the novel says, insofar as that is knowable to him or to us, we also understand it in ways he could not have foreseen, in the light of modern ideas and historical events of which he could have no knowledge. When Melvyn New remarks that the "meaningful context" of the novel "is not the novels of Proust and Beckett, but rather the Augustan view of man," he corrects a frequent error in historical understanding, but he also uses the term "meaningful" in a highly uncritical way that excludes the necessary contemporaneity of all understanding.²³ It is important to note that this dialectic is not a mere theoretical compromise between realism and idealism. That would combine the philosophical disadvantages of each rather than going behind both to their origin in the "life-world" and thereby escaping the disadvantages of each.²⁴ It is a description of the process of interpretation, what, for better or worse, happens in the event of understanding, combined with the thesis that although the inherent process may be elaborated by rational and methodical enquiries, the relationship is and must remain hierarchical. Systematic enquiry can bring speculative processes to clarity in retrospect, but it can only make explicit what is already implicit in the exchange in which one has been caught up and transformed. It cannot control without destroying that relationship: "The question is," as Humpty Dumpty says, "which is to be master—that's all."

It has been remarked above that the act of reading is an effort to recover more than is actually said, more than the work considered as a series of discursive statements can say. A criticism that aspires to become engaged with the text in the manner of conversation may properly be called speculative. The shift in emphasis in the word speculation over the last two hundred years illustrates the problem well: the primary meaning of the term in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary is "contemplation" and only secondarily "conjecture," whereas the reverse is now the case, so influential has the ideal of exact knowledge become. But since literature belongs to the world in which we live rather than the world known to science, the old and venerable sense of the term may be employed to articulate that free play of mind which Tristram properly demands. To engage in such a venture is to accept the risk of doing criticism under the aspect of the hobby-horse. The restriction of the concept of validity to those derivative enquiries which admit of genuine scientific precision and objectivity frees the critical impulse to attend to all that happens in the interaction with a text but without thereby enabling it to claim immunity from rational examination and revision. It might be objected that such an unmethodical criticism, in seeking to stimulate imaginative explorations of new appropriations of meaning such as renew the vitality of a cultural tradition, also encourages idiosyncrasy and even nonsense. That is no doubt true, but little is risked. There has never been a noticeable shortage of nonsense in the world, whatever methods have been in the ascendency, and the fact has rendered a service to humanity in that it "opens the heart and lungs … and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round" (IV.xxxii.338). Besides, "so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?" (I.vii. 13). What is compelling in criticism as in any other discipline, is the advent of understanding, the act of interpretation in which illumination occurs. The important difference is between the comic incrustation of Walter Shandy's rationalism (which entertains without convincing because it offers no direct enlightenment) and the experience of clarity in the understanding of our common mode of being which derives from Tristram's reflections … Just as it is possible for conclusions to be valid which are of no interest to anyone, so it is possible, at the opposite extreme, for insights to be of the greatest moment to a whole culture and yet lie beyond the bounds of validity in any rigorous sense of the term. Something of the kind is evident in the cases of mystery and paradox. Or again, Heidegger's reflections on the poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke or his explorations of the etymologies of Heraclitean Greek are, on the one hand, a scandal to objective criticism and deserve severe examination for the liberties that they take with texts, and yet they may be seen, on the other hand, as of greater importance to the life of the culture in some cases than the texts that occasion them. It is surely an important dimension of the life of those German poems and those Greek fragments that they have fostered such radical thought and illumination. Moreover, it is a predictable consequence of critical finitude that among the hobby-horses of today is the orthodoxy of tomorrow and the dogma of the day after.…

Notes

⁹ The modern development of hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher who undertakes to interpret texts, specifically scripture, by means of understanding the individual personalities of the writers (Hermeneutik, trans. Heinz Kimmerle). Wilhelm Dilthey deepens the study of the writer by claiming that the individual can be understood only from the broad perspective of historical lived experience. Heidegger, in turn, overcomes the romantic illusion that reader and text, subject and object, interpenetrate in the interpretive encounter and avoids Dilthey's relativism of historical perspectives with its underlying psychological notion of lived experience by expanding the hermeneutic question to the nature of interpretation itself as the primary activity of man (Dasein), the being who seeks to interpret his own experience. Heidegger's own development of the question moves from interpreting the interpreting being in Being and Time to attempting to understand the hermeneutical experience in Unterwegs zur Sprache, the essence of which he locates in language and the role of Hermes, the bringer of tidings and the god of boundaries.

¹⁰ See pp. 184-92 [of James E. Swearingen, Reflexivity in "Tristram Shandy" (Yale University Press, 1977)] where this dimension of Walter's character as rhetor is explored.

¹¹ Gadamer, p. 345. This reconstruction of others' experience was the goal of the early hermeneutics of Schleiermacher.

¹² Schleiermacher, p. xi.

¹³ The phenomenological metaphor of horizon brings into view the whole spatial, temporal, and cultural context of meaningfulness of an object or phenomenon, the encircling sphere that constitutes the setting within which an object reveals itself as what it is. Thus Heidegger introduces the thesis of Being and Time with the statement, "Our provisional aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being" (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, p. 21). Later Heidegger gives up the concept of horizon as belonging to metaphysics and its concern with objects (Siendes) and their representation rather than with being (Sein).

¹⁴ "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marian J. Reis, p. 11.

¹⁵ Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, p. 229.

¹⁶ Emilio Betti in Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften and E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation both argue this point against Gadamer. Hirsch is concerned with limiting hermeneutics to a philological method of establishing the "verbal meaning" of a text as opposed to its "significance" for the reader. But Gadamer is interested in a different question, and one that apparently does not interest Hirsch since he excludes it from hermeneutics, namely, the distinguishing features of all events of understanding. Based on Gadamer's response to Betti in Supplement I of Truth and Method where he insists, "I am not proposing a method, but I am describing what is the case" and thus going "beyond the concept of method … to envisage … what always happens" (Gadamer's italics, pp. 465-66), one suspects that his intention is to dissolve the question of validity in instances of premethodical understanding by confining it to its proper scientific sphere.

¹⁷ "On the Intentionality of Consciousness," in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber, p. 83.

¹⁸ "Objectivity and Subjectivity in History," in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley, pp. 30-31.

¹⁹The Idea of History, p. 248.

²⁰ See the discussion of the epistemology of sophism in chapter 4 [of James E. Swearingen, Reflexivity in "Tristram Shandy" (Yale University Press, 1977)].

²¹ Duke Maskell, "Locke and Sterne, or Can Philosophy Influence Literature?" Essays in Criticism 23 (1973), 25.

²² "Objectivity and Subjectivity in History," p. 30.

²³ "Sterne and Henry Baker's The Microscope Made Easy," Studies in English Literature 10 (1970), 597.

²⁴ Husserl introduces the term life-world (Lebenswelt) to refer to the primordial world of immediate experience as opposed to the complexly conditioned, cultural world given by science.

Works Cited

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