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“On Interpretation” Josef Mitterer • University of Klagenfurt, Austria

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“On Interpretation” Josef Mitterer • University of Klagenfurt, Austria “On Interpretation” Josef Mitterer • University of Klagenfurt, Austria You should read Kant! You should read Kant! (End of a discussion between Hans Albert and Herbert Marcuse at the European Forum in Alpbach 1967) 1. Interpretations of philosophical texts can differ so much that the discussants claim that their opponents have not even read the texts they are talking about, let alone understood them. The request to read Kant was the result (not only) of different interpretations of the “Cri- tique of Pure Reason.” I can’t remember in detail the discussion I experienced as a gymnasium student at the European Forum in Alpbach, but I do remember that Herbert Marcuse and Hans Albert referred to the same text passages. 2. In Vienna after the war, Wittgenstein and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were not even worth mentioning in academic philosophy. For analytical philosophers, even a few years ago, Hegel and Heidegger were proponents of simple and dangerous nonsense. Meanwhile quite a few of them are developing new sympa- thies for metaphysics, and a combination of Continental and Analytical philosophy is a good choice if you want to make a career in academic philosophy. The variety and range of interpretations of Nietzsche in Germany before, during, and after the days of the Third Reich are amazing. According to some interpreters, Richard Rorty, Martin Heidegger, Jaques Derrida, Ernst von Glasersfeld or Paul Feyerabend belong to the most important philosophers of the last century whilst according to others, they are not philosophers at all…and similar claims were (and still are) made about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Allegations that a text or a book does not belong to philosophy have, for a long time, been used as a popular killer argument against qualifying works such as dissertations or habilita- tions. It is said of a still-famous British Wittgensteinian that to study with him is bad for an academic career and the same was claimed for Richard Rorty in Princeton and Paul Feyera- bend in Berkeley. The fame of a philosopher during his lifetime often fades away soon after his death and sometimes starts already to vanish once he turns emeritus… but then he has a chance for a renaissance once he has been dead for long enough. 3. What would be the result of lining up the interpretations of Kant of more than two hundred years except a library of several thousand volumes? A deeper and deeper understanding of Kant? New aspects? A critique of earlier Kant interpretations? New light? The same applies for Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, and all the other great dead in the history of philosophy. Have the differences become less and the quarrels died down? Has it been decided what be- longs to which body of texts, where which fragments belong, which translations or posthu- mous editions are reliable and which are not? Which works of philosophy will be forgotten (like the fine books of the pragmatist philoso- pher, F. S. C. Schiller) and which ones will continue to proliferate new interpretations: this is a matter of contingency and depends on conditions that cannot be standardized. Philosophical fashion is hard to predict. Do interpretations of philosophers get more consistent because our distance to them in- creases over the course of time? Or because the interest in them is dying down and less work is done “on” them? Sometimes the actuality of philosophers depends on when they have died, except when this happened a very long time ago. Birthdays and anniverseries of death of Plato & Co are not celebrated with congresses or conferences. However, when philosophers have been dead for no more than two or three hundred years, anniversaries are often a welcome chance for re- evaluations and new assessments. What would have been the impact on the reception of Wittgenstein if he had edited and published the “Philosophical Investigations” or even “On Certainty” himself? In the “arenas of philosophy” (an expression by Wilhelm Flasch) the discussions are about interpretations, rankings and evaluations, and the ongoing competition between philosophical schools and methods. Who belongs to the heroes, to the good guys, and who belongs to the bad guys, these are classifications that have changed in history more than once. 4. “The curricula of philosophy mainly consist of … reading and interpreting texts.” This is a quote from the homepage of a well-known department of philosophy and may serve as an indication of the importance of interpretation in philosophical education and philosophical discourse in general. The idea that we first read the texts, get practice reading them, and only then interpret them, leads to a strong distinction between text and interpretation, – except we really “stick close” to the text. Is it possible to imagine a non-interpretative reading of texts? Evangelical Christians some- times emphasize that they do not interpret the bible – but they already do so via the transla- tion and even more so by preaching the gospel. And of course books with titles such as What Jesus (or Popper, Kant, Stalin, Einstein) really said are interpreting their heroes as well. 5. Interpretation is related to explanation, to translation, analysis, exegesis, and critique, to different ways of reading, to commentaries, evaluations, and judgments. Almost everything can be interpreted, whether man, nature, word and world, literature or god. We interpret data, clouds, texts, and much more; in this paper, however, I want to restrict myself to the interpretation of texts. Philosophical texts get interpreted, analyzed, discussed, critized, commented, translated, and explicated. We read “into” texts to understand them. If we only want to know approxi- mately what they are about, we read them “across” or “diagonally,” but we can also do an “ex- act reading” so we can then interpret them “more closely to the text.” In English we can differentiate various types of reading: Critical Readings, Close Readings and Distant Readings, even Absolute Readings and Radical Readings plus Re-Readings and Fresh Readings. Readings named after different philosophers are also quite common, for ex- ample Hegelian, Wittgensteinian, Aristotelian, and Kantian Readings, and nowadays Rortyan, Lacanian, and Zizekian Readings. And I remember my perplexity when many years ago Rich- ard Rorty wrote to me that he did not quite understand my Feyerabendian Reading of Witt- genstein. 6. Now, what is the relation between text and interpretation? A text that is interpreted is often itself no more than an interpretation of texts that the author has read. Primary literature is nearly always to a large extent secondary literature to other texts, which we may be unaware of. The relationship between text and interpretation can be determined in at least two basically different ways: namely as a dualistic relation or as a nondualistic relation. The dualistic model of interpretation can be sketched like this: a text, for example the “Cri- tique of Pure Reason,” gets interpreted in different ways. When this happens, two levels are presupposed: a “lower” text-level where the text “lies” or “stands” or simply “is,” and a “situat- ed above” interpretation-level. The interpretations are directed towards the text, they get re- ferred to it, and an evaluation/weighting of the interpretations is basically possible: depending on their relation to the text they are either correct or not, adequate or inadequate. The relation to the text determines whether the interpretations match the text, whether they correspond to it, or whether they are correct or not, do justice to the text or not. The text has an authority over and against the interpretations: it serves as referee, and as instance and criterion for competing interpretations. At the same time the text itself is dumb and silent, but fortunately the interpreters represent the text, they speak on behalf and for it. 7. The dualistic model of interpretation not only dominates philosophical discourse, it also determines many teaching-learning situations, including seminars at universities. Here is an example. A student writes a seminar paper on the “Critique of Pure Reason” (or on a section of it). The professor usually rates/grades/judges the student’s paper depending on if the basic ideas have been grasped, if the student has understood the text, if he considers additional literature and puts his work into a certain context, and if his argumentation is clear, consistent, and comprehensible. According to the self-understanding of the dualistic mode, the professor checks the inter- pretation of the student above all “against” the text, by referring it “to” the text – and in addi- tion he may also judge and grade the student paper for style and length, and even for spelling. But what does it mean to check the interpretation against the text? How shall this work? The professor already interpreted the Kant text himself before the Kant seminar started and there- fore before the student interpreted it. In other words, the professorial interpretation precedes the student interpretation and, in addition, the professor has a certain knowledge of the Kant literature – that is, of various interpretations of Kant – otherwise presumably he would not have offered the seminar on Kant to begin with. The foregoing knowledge of the professor, his ante-knowledge – even if it is not made explicit and remains largely tacit – together with the text, forms the reference basis for the student’s interpretation of Kant that is going to be rat- ed/graded by the professor. This “tacit knowledge,” this subliminal knowledge, is even necessary to be able to judge the work/paper of the student. Why? Well, the Kant text alone is not judicious, is not capable of discriminating, and does not talk by itself – and Kant is no longer available as an interpreter of his own text.
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