Hermeneutics and history

Author(s): Philip Gardner

Source: Discourse Studies, Vol. 13, No. 5, Special Issue on Hermeneutics and Discourse
Analysis (October 2011), pp. 575-581
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24049947
Accessed: 29-04-2016 01:24 UTC

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Commentary

Discourse Studies
13(5) 575-581
Hermeneutics and history © The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1461445611412700
dis.sagepub.com

Philip Gardner
University of Cambridge, UK

The history of academic neologisms tells us that the primary impact of Allan Bell's
thoughtful essay is unlikely to result in a lasting change in field nomenclature. This is
unsurprising. Scholarly identities are deeply implicated in the names by which we have
been accustomed publicly to announce ourselves and our interests, and we should not
perhaps expect an imminent field adoption of Discourse Interpretation over Discourse
Analysis (Bell, 2011: 520). The latter designation, to use the terms that Bell himself
applies to the vagaries of translation, may indeed come to be seen increasingly as 'unhelp
ful', but in any event it will continue to enjoy the residual force of its 'established' status
(Bell, 2011: 528). However, there are more important consequences of Bell's interven
tion. Long-term changes in practice will ultimately yield outcomes reaching beyond
short-term changes in nomenclature. We might therefore more realistically expect
some productive elaborations of the characteristic ways in which we seek to approach
and investigate discourse as a consequence of Bell's timely engagement with hermeneu
tics as it has been theorized and practised in the writings of Paul Ricoeur. An encyclopae
dic scholar, complex, scrupulous and prolific, Ricoeur was also an exceptionally
hospitable thinker, and it is no surprise that his ideas have continued to exert a widening
attraction across the human and social sciences since his death. Allan Bell's essay can be
seen as a significant contribution to this gathering tendency, particularly highlighting
perceived affinities between contemporary discourse analysis and Ricoeurian hermeneu
tics, to the degree that Bell is able to claim that many of the observations and inflections
of the latter might almost be seen to 'have come from a CDA manifesto' (Bell, 2011: 536).
As Bell notes, careful and judicious borrowing from other intellectual fields can
sharpen or even transform the customary principles and practices of the parent disci
plines within which each of us, so to speak, has been raised. In my own case that field is
history, and specifically the history of education; my work involves both archival

Corresponding author:
Philip Gardner, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK.
Email: pwgl000@cam.ac.uk

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 576 Discourse Studies 13(5)

research and oral history interview, particularly in relation to the history of school
teachers and teaching - and consequently invokes consideration of the fundamental
discursive distinctions between the written and the spoken word to which Ricoeur has
always drawn close attention, the written word being designed to be read and the spoken
word to be heard. My comments on Bell's intervention, therefore, are not those of a
discourse analyst, and are made primarily with an eye to its relevance for my own dis
cipline; I offer my thoughts upon it only, as it were, over the disciplinary fence. I also
confine my observations to issues arising from the Ricoeurian methodological herme
neutics from which Bell draws much of his inspiration, rather than to a consideration of
hermeneutics more generally.
Like Bell, in recent years I too have found that an increasing engagement with
Ricoeur's signal contribution to the hermeneutic tradition has held out a rich and ini
tially unanticipated benefit for my understanding of my discipline and for my substan
tive work within it. Historians are perhaps more immediately fortunate in this regard
than discourse analysts. We enjoy the advantage of Ricoeur's direct and long-sustained
interest in the historical enterprise - of the task of representing absent pasts to the pre
sent - from The Reality of the Historical Past, published in 1984, to his last great book,
Memory, History, Forgetting, which appeared 20 years later. We also commonly display
a propensity to see ourselves historically on the 'understanding' side of the elemental
division which Dilthey - so damagingly in Ricoeur's judgement (Ricoeur, 1981: 153) —
sought to establish between 'understanding' and 'explanation'.
It is this fateful distinction which has lastingly rendered 'interpretation' such a
comfortable and accessible notion for historians, even of the most positivist stripe.
Interpretation is already our word; it is always on our lips and we do not have to be
convinced of its claims. Many historians will therefore readily accede to 'understanding'
as their cardinal objective and will not have to be convinced - as Bell endeavours to do
for discourse analysts - 'that analysis is not the chief activity' (Bell, 2011: 522). It is
perhaps this which makes history - according to Zygmunt Bauman 'the most keen and
grateful client of hermeneutics' (Bauman, 1978: 7) at its inception within the academy -
now too often rather careless of, and inattentive to, its close formative association with
the hermeneutic tradition. Indeed, Geoffrey Elton, the great Tudor historian and putative
historical methodologist, once remarked that, 'Hermeneutics is the science which invents
meaning; historical study depends on discovering meaning without inventing it . . .
Therefore, hermeneutics is a term not only not applicable to the historian's operation but
positively hostile to it; its use enables the student to impose meaning on his materials
instead of extracting meaning and import from them' (Elton, 1991: 30). Such misunder
standing is by no means uncommon and has had unfortunate effects for the discipline.
Though some practitioners like the cultural and social historian Jonathan Rose may
readily allude to historical research as engaging 'highly sophisticated hermeneutic skills'
(Rose, 2007: 605), it has not always proved easy to show how such skills are deployed and
exercised in a systematic way. However exhaustive, the historian's archival labour -
the central focus of his or her disciplinary endeavour - is often methodologically taken
for granted, sometimes appearing to non-practitioners as a kind of exclusive alchemy, as
an exercise in archival immersion by which raw documents from the past are magically
transformed into authoritative historical narratives in the present. In this respect,

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 Gardner Sil

historians are not always prepared, as some school examination papers used to demand,
to 'show all your working'. For this reason, one of the most valuable features of Bell's
account for historians will be his careful elaboration, drawn from a combination of
insights derived chiefly from Ricoeur but also from Gadamer (in relation to the pre-view
stage) and from Hirsch (in relation to initial guessing at the naïve stage of proto-under
standing), of the operation of the Interpretive Arc. In Bell's six-stage model, operational
ized through the appropriate and illuminating case of the story of Babel, many historians
will recognize the elements of their own characteristic but too-often unexamined ways of
going on. Committed philosophically to travel the long route and to follow successive
intellectual detours, Ricoeur's meticulous but densely layered writings on the problems
of textual interpretation are not easy for new readers to resolve into the clear principles
of practice which Bell has condensed here. In this respect, his model will present a
very helpful stimulus for taking forward discussions of archival practice and historical
method.
In developing the model, however, to the eye of the historian it seems that there are
two areas to which Bell might attend further. The first of these constitutes a question
which Ricoeur himself, despite the implications of much of his own work, does not
satisfactorily address; this is the issue of the place accorded to authorial intention. A
second and closely related problem concerns the matter of the historical text and how we
might seek to approach it more systematically in seeking to address the 'how it was' of
the past. On each of these issues a few brief thoughts might be offered.
Ricoeur, of course, does not dismiss the author entirely (Ricoeur, 1981: 201), but he
is far more concerned with the semantic autonomy of the text and its capacity to generate
surplus meaning as a consequence of the processes of distanciation (Kearney, 2006:
xviii-xix). Here Ricoeur seeks to challenge the ascription to the text of a dialogical
model of understanding - associated chiefly with Gadamer - which belongs properly to
the realm of the spoken word, and in which meaning and intention may be seen to coin
cide. When I interview former teachers about, let us say, the administering of corporal
punishment in the elementary school classroom of the 1930s, intention and meaning are
brought together in a way that is impossible if my research confines itself to the scrutiny
of contemporary school punishment books alone. When we talk to historical actors in
face-to-face settings, the 'subjective intention of the speaking subject and the meaning of
the discourse overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to understand
what the speaker means and what his discourse means' (Ricoeur, 1991: 148). The split
ting apart of meaning and intention in the process of writing gives a new fullness of
interpretive potential to language; Ricoeur therefore commends us to strive to read not
behind the text, but in front of it, searching not for an author but for the world that the
text opens to us. In this process, the author is placed under a kind of discursive shadow.
In this respect, Bell is content to follow Ricoeur in arguing that 'it is best to regard author
intention as a factor in interpretation but not the determining one' (Bell, 2011: 535). But
in further asserting that 'we cannot know what an author's intentions were, what was in
her or his mind' (Bell, 2011: 535), the question of the nature of authorial intentionality
and its relation to the meaning of the text needs more careful consideration; in particular,
the idea of the 'psyche of a text's original author' needs explicitly to be distinguished
from the notion of his or her 'intentions' (Bell, 2011: 535), and not conflated with it. Here

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 578 Discourse Studies 13(5)

the work of the distinguished intellectual historian Quentin Skinner comes particularly to
mind. Skinner shares with Ricoeur an abiding interest in the speech-act theory of J.L.
Austin, particularly in relation to the illocutionary force of speech-acts - what is an
utterer doing in issuing this or that declaration?; what are they doing in writing?; what
ideological intervention are they seeking to achieve? What, indeed, might Bell or Ricoeur
be seen to be doing in putting pen to paper? Here Skinner separates intention and mean
ing in writing, as does Ricoeur - though in a more fundamental way. As Skinner claims,
original authorial meaning '(w)e cannot hope to attain' because this ultimately refers 'to
purely mental events, and these are irreducibly private and inaccessible' (Skinner, 2008:
649, 652). Ricoeur makes and develops the same point:

My experience cannot directly become your experience. An event belonging to one stream of
consciousness cannot be transferred as such into another stream of consciousness. Yet,
nevertheless, something passes from me to you . . . This something is not the experience as
experienced, but its meaning. Here is the miracle. The experience as experienced, as lived,
remains private, but its sense, its meaning, becomes public. (Ricoeur, 1976: 16)

By way of the public nature of inscription, by the fixing of the 'said' of speaking, the
sense of the text is opened for successive generations of readers to try to complete, by
means of their attempts to interpret it. To this extent Skinner is with Ricoeur; he is 'far
from supposing that the meanings of texts can be identified with their authors' (Skinner,
2008: 652). But, as he immediately continues, 'what must be identified with the inten
tions of their authors is only what their authors meant by them' (Skinner, 2008: 652).
Here, in other words, our understanding of an historical text can be seen to be achieved
not in seeking to uncover the configuration of authorial mental events, but by grasping
the significance of speech acts; what was an utterer seeking to do in making this or that
intervention? Through exhaustive documentary and textual labour directed towards the
recovery of the normative linguistic contexts of this or that time and place from the
past - in something like the manner of that which Ricoeur calls 'explanation' and Bell
'analysis' - Skinner finds a warrant for claiming that it is indeed possible to return to an
actor's originary intention in writing, possible to recover the illocutionary force of their
utterances as they were initially issued, possible 'to grasp their concepts, to follow their
distinctions, to appreciate their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way'
(Skinner, 2002: 3).
The rehabilitation of the author in this specific illocutionary sense is actually some
thing to which Ricoeur himself also comes close, most notably as a consequence of his
own extensive invocations of Austin. Ricoeur thus reminds us that a speech-act 'may be
identified not only according to its propositional content but also according to its illocu
tionary force'. Moreover, he sees both of these elements as coming together in the
speech act to 'constitute its "sense-content"' (Ricoeur, 1981: 205). In other words, at
least some part of the legitimate 'sense-content' of a text may be seen to comprise that
which the author can be shown to have been doing in issuing an utterance as and when
he or she did. The question then arises, as Ricoeur himself puts it, 'To what extent may
we say that what is done is inscribed?' (Ricoeur, 1981: 205). To what extent is the
illocutionary act itself inscribed, along with the meaning of the text? And if what is

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 Gardner 579

done - that which Ricoeur speaks of as the 'action event' - is indeed inscribed, where
does such inscription take place? The answer he gives is that, in much the same way that
discourse is textually inscribed in writing, human actions are inscribed directly in the
'course of events', in the quasi-text of history itself: 'History is this quasi "thing" on
which human action leaves a "trace," puts its mark' (Ricoeur, 1981: 207). This formula
tion allows us to ask to what degree such a process of inscription - the leaving of a mark
upon time in the form of an action event - might yet direct us towards a legitimate con
cern for authorial intention as well as for the operation of semantic autonomy, or, in this
case, the autonomy of the action event. As a historian, Skinner's work is consistently
occupied with the possibilities of this performative question in a way that Ricoeur's is
not. Ultimately, both in relation to written texts and to action events, Ricoeur's central
interest continues to focus upon the hermeneutic 'surpassing of the intention by the
meaning' in written discourse (Ricoeur, 1976: 76), or, in relation to human actions, with
the way in which 'an action is detached from its agent and develops consequences of its
own' (Ricoeur, 1981: 206). The question of the intention of the author in writing, as
opposed to the question of the meaning of text, is not fully engaged as a central problem
as it is for Skinner. But this does not detract from the fact that intention conceived in this
way may be recoverable through the reconstruction of historical normative linguistic
contexts, as demonstrated by Skinner, and that original illocutionary force may form
a legitimate part of the 'sense-content' of a speech act, as hinted at by Ricoeur. To
the degree that we fail to recognize this sufficiently, we are likely to remain, as Pol
Vandevelde succinctly puts it, 'doomed to conflate meaning and meaningfulness'
(Vandevelde, 2008: 158). For historians who remain concerned to demonstrate what
actors from the past were seeking to do in acting, as well as to explore the full meaning
of the documentary traces that they have left behind them - who recognize, in other
words, the dual reference of texts and actions from the past - this recognition would
necessitate in practical terms the addition of some further stages in Bell's existing model,
and in intellectual terms might be perceived more broadly to contribute towards
history's own particular 'reciprocal benefits to hermeneutics' (Bell, 2011: 537).
The idea of dual reference takes us to a second and related question, namely the
complex notion of the matter of the text. Though the terminology might not be familiar,
most historians could readily identify the central goal of their own discipline in Bell's
commentary on the legitimate business of discourse analysis: '(o)ur prime task is to
unfold the matter of the texts we analyse . . .'; to 'keep faith with the thrust of the text
in its own right' (Bell, 2011: 546). But where does the matter of the text reside if, by
virtue of the process of distanciation, a text is forever open to the interpretation of
all - past, present and future - who are able to read it? Where, in other words, are the
limits of interpretation and textual meaning? Ricoeur, of course, addresses this: the anti
historicist impulse of distanciation and the expansive notion of semantic autonomy are
disciplined by Ricoeur's reassuring assertion that 'it is not true that all interpretations
are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions' (Ricoeur, 1976:
79; also Bell, 2011: 536). As Bell points out, for Ricoeur the validation of competing
interpretations depends largely upon the application of a principle akin to Popper's
falsifiability thesis, by which valid interpretations can be seen as those which most
consistently and convincingly repel successive attempts to invalidate them (Bell, 2011:

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 580 Discourse Studies 13(5)

537). Bell further limits the range of valid interpretation by appealing to the 'form and
reception-context of a text' (Bell, 2011: 536) and to an assertion - with strong echoes of
Collingwood's idealism - that 'our highest calling as discourse interpreters is to "say
again" what the text has already said' (Bell, 2011: 546). These observations direct us
towards the problem of how the matter of the text itself actually works upon the range
of possible interpretations, how '(t)exts limit their own meanings' (Bell, 2011: 536),
and how the text itself therefore 'allows us to move between the two limits of dogma
tism and skepticism' (Ricoeur, 1976: 79). An analogical way of thinking about this may
be to draw upon another conceptual familiar of Ricoeurian hermeneutics, namely the
idea of narrative identity which, although designed to apply to the theory of selfhood,
is perhaps helpful here in drawing attention to that which is constant and immutable
(idem) in time by contrast with that which grows and develops through contact with
others (ipse) across time (Ricoeur, 2004: 165). There may be a sense in which, like the
self, the text may be seen to possess a discernible narrative career which invites growth
through successive episodes of interpretation by new interpreters who themselves come
and go; Bell implies this process through speaking of 'a chain of interpretation ... each
version and commentator building on their predecessors' (Bell, 2011: 536). But at the
same time, the interpretive scope of every text is also always defined by 'the clues
which the text itself offers' (Bell, 2011: 546). Some such clues might be seen to be
particularly those elements of its identity which are unchanging through time. These
refer to the historical date, circumstances and place of its creation - as Ricoeur observes,
it 'is not by chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place' (Ricoeur, 2004)
- and, as suggested above, to its original illocutionary force. The application of a for
mulation echoing the coming together of the idem and the ipse in the temporal career of
an historical text may then offer a heuristic device for traversing its full referential
capacity together with the amplitude of its meaning, with '(t)he difference between
idem and ipse' standing for 'the difference between a substantial or formal identity and
a narrative identity' (Ricoeur, 1988: 246). In other words, as historians, we may recog
nize an historical text in much the same way as we do a person, identifying and reiden
tifying it as the same constant entity across time, in the same moment that we also
recognize its capacity to hold open to us new ways of interpreting it, of seeking to
complete its meaning.
In his systematic exploration of the important and illuminating links between the
fields of discourse analysis and hermeneutics, Bell has raised questions and offered
solutions which will be of interest to many historians as they reflect upon the business
of archival research. He also seems to me to have offered us a productive example of
interdisciplinary scholarship which will stimulate debate more widely and which also
has the potential to impinge significantly on practice. It will certainly be of value to
those, like myself, who have sought to explore the potential of Ricoeurian methodologi
cal hermeneutics for our discipline, by helping us better to understand the ways in
which we habitually go about our daily work of documentary interpretation and show
ing us how this work might be undertaken both more systematically and more transpar
ently. These are noteworthy achievements. It reminds me that in pondering the many
potential pitfalls attending the idea of interdisciplinarity, Frederick Cooper, the eminent
historian of empire, has recently observed that 'the remedy for (the) difficulties

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 Gardner 581

of interdisciplinary work ... is not disciplinarity but discipline: a more thorough and
critical engagement with other fields, a more rigorous and wider reading of social theory
that both reconfigures and deepens methodological understandings' (Cooper, 2005: 6).
By this demanding criterion, Bell's methodological intervention constitutes a contribu
tion to interdisciplinary understanding that is as disciplined as it is thought-provoking.

References

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California Press.
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Kearney R (2006) Introduction: Ricoeur's philosophy of translation. In: Ricoeur P, On Translation.
London: Routledge, vi-xx.
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Ricoeur P (1984) The Reality of the Historical Past. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Ricoeur P (1988) Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur P (1991) From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. London: The Athlone Press.
Ricoeur P (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rose J (2007) The history of education as the history of reading. History of Education 36(4—5):
595-605.
Skinner Q (2002) Visions of Politics, Vol. I 'Regarding Method'. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Skinner Q (2008) Part two: Is it still possible to interpret texts? International Journal of
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Vandevelde P (2008) The challenge of the 'such as it was': Ricoeur's theory of narratives. In:
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Philip Gardner is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Education, University

of Cambridge, specializing in the history of education. He is a Fellow of St Edmund's
College and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written widely on the his
tory of education, on the theory and practice of oral history, and on historical methodol
ogy more generally. His most recent book is Hermeneutics, History and Memory
(Routledge, 2010). He is currently researching aspects of the relationship between
education, empire and citizenship in the early 20th century.

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