Hermeneutic Ontology in Gadamer and Woolf

The Being of Art and the Art of Being

Adam Noland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429558252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume analyses Virginia Woolf's novels through a philosophical lens, providing an interpretive overview of her works through Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic ontology. The text argues that interpretation itself is the central subject matter of Woolf's novels: in order to understand these novels in all of their complexity and depth, it is both useful and helpful to comprehend the interpretive pillars that inform these narratives. Indeed, interpretation became a central theme during the Modernist movement, and Woolf's novels took part in this conversation. For his part, Gadamer was in important voice in these discussions, dedicating his life's work to the concept of interpretation. Gadamer focused on the universality of interpretation, arguing that it is inescapable and irrevocably bound up with existence. In many ways, Woolf's novels represent an enactment of Gadamer's philosophy, as they emphasize the radical questionability of the world—what this interpretive imperative requires of its participants and the potential yield that may result. On the other end, Gadamer's philosophy acquires a concrete praxis when applied to Woolf's novels. His philosophy hinges on the universality of interpretation as it manifests itself in daily existence; the literary text and its interpretation participate in this universality and is shaped by it.

1 Introduction

There are many ways to interpret Virginia Woolf’s novels, but, up until now, no one has chosen to organize his or her interpretive effort around Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology. For its part, hermeneutic ontology concerns how people interpret at all: the world is meaningless until it is presented. For Gadamer, the originary presentation is language. Language is the means by which people acquire a world (Truth and Method 440). Nevertheless, language is occasional: it belongs to an overall meaning while never fully able to express that totality. People, then, are tuned to engage with presentation, as a part of their/our linguisticality. We make and engage with art to enact our interpretive project: artworks are always what they are meant to be, but that meaning is inexhaustible. Undoubtedly, artworks do compel: through art we gain knowledge that we would have in no other way. As examples of art that take place in language, Woolf’s novels provoke the reader: what is language? What is art? What does it mean to be? The answers, of course, are contained within the novels and are central to their interpretation; some of them will be fleshed out, too, in the following pages.

In particular, I will be interpreting two of Woolf’s novels: Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse. For their part, these novels are lyrical texts that explore language, art, and the wonder of being human. In all three, there is an interpenetration and codeterminacy: as one’s relationship to language, art, or being changes, the other two morph also. In her novels, she tells the stories of characters who are presented as people—but with an emphasis on how the stories are told; the narrator takes center stage: the exact meaning or nature of these characters is not known; all views and portraits are productive, and lacking at the same time, in tension; who and what people are do vary, but each does have an identity that depends on assertion—each has to be someone or something, whoever or whatever it may be. Here, the narrator describes and presents by way of language; the identity of these characters depends on that description; the only way that the reader knows these characters—the only way that they are anything at all. This particular aspect of the narrative reminds the reader: we are by way of language. Of course, Woolf’s novels are not just reminders of the indeterminacy of identity and the neediness of language; they call attention to the text as text—the concept of text—and to art as art—its concept too. That is, Woolf’s novels are about characters who interpret and negotiate existence, but they are also about novels and how they can mean. Certainly, Woolf plays with form; she makes a kind of argument: the meaning of a story depends much more on its narrative posture than its action. These novels jar the reader: part of their identity is to demand interpretive awareness, that is, the ubiquity of interpretation and its vital importance.

Like Woolf, Gadamer recognizes that human being and interpretation are inseparable. In his case, though, he is not an artist. He writes about art. As for Woolf, because she is a novelist, her commentary on art or the novel is embedded in the text itself: hers is not a direct commentary; instead, she takes the path of inference. As an instantiation of art, her novels create the terms of their identity: what they mean and how they mean are determined by the particulars of each novel; each changes the identity of the genre and the identity of art. This particular nature of art and the novel is considered by Gadamer. The meaning of art and novels depends on what has come before: each new artistic creation is in dialogue with the past; in the moment of creation, though, its aim is to engage with the particulars of the present moment; to create something new; to gain insight. So it is that change, openness, newness—all are part of the identity of art. But it is not only art that Gadamer confronts: he also takes aim at the concept of language and the idea of the human being as he or she relates to the world. Gadamer’s starting point is the concept of text and its proper interpretation. He argues that a text is contemporaneous with all of its readers and that part of its identity is to endure; texts stem from the need for posterity, the urge to carve out a stance on the present moment that nevertheless remains understandable and open to future application (“Text and Interpretation” 34). Furthermore, texts are written because they assert themselves: the words are always the same even if the meaning changes with the reader or the cultural moment. In texts, there is a self-legitimacy and self-attestation. There is intentionality too: it is what it is meant to be. The reader faces this dynamic of the text and wants to do it justice: he or she is pushed to think about what the words mean; the reader is caught between two poles—that of his or her own world and that of the text. When confronted with a literary text, interpretation is inescapable. The meaning of the text, though, does not lie directly with the text or with the reader; it lies somewhere in between. It lies in the basic function of language, of the recognition of the true world.

The reader’s task is to recognize the world for what it is. Individuality demands that the world be different for each person, but, at the same time, language is the product of a shared context; in all cases, language is so intimately bound with what it means to be human that any and all language is potentially understandable, for each manifestation is a testimony of the human being’s relationship to the world. It is this relationship that the concept of text provokes. A text stakes a claim and makes an assertion: this is what the world means. Of course, a text is also an answer to a question and makes its own query to the reader (Gadamer, Truth and Method 367). This process never ends. So, when a reader faces a text, the reader is reminded of his or her own opinion of the world, for the language of a text is always alien and different: the reader’s task is to make sense of the world now that his or her horizon has been disrupted—a task of assimilation.

Indeed, Gadamer’s starting point for his philosophy is the proper interpretation of texts, but his concerns are not straightforward. Like Woolf demonstrates in her novels, Gadamer argues that human being, language, and art are part of the same fabric, each impinging the one on the other (Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History 90). In order to properly interpret a literary text, it is first necessary to understand the role of language in human being and the role of art in human being. In other words, the literary text is not just an object; its meaning depends on language and history and presentation—just like we do; something about how we understand the world and what it means to us; we are implicated every time we read. This dynamic will guide my project as I move forward.

Before further entering into the particulars of this project, it is worth outlining the pillars of this interpretive approach. To begin with, Virginia Woolf’s novels are literary texts that engage the meaningfulness of the world. This meaning, though, depends on the participation of the reader and his or her enactment of the text. The words are forever the same, but their meaning will change with each reader. Each reader belongs to his or her own world, and this world is perceived and understood within language. This is the case for all people, in fact. This interaction between the individual and the world is primary, decisive for all interpretation. Gadamer organizes his entire interpretive structure based on this interaction. His interpretive approach might be summarized in the following manner:

1. To be human is to have language. Before we even realize it, we already use and understand language. The world is meaningful and reality is understandable because of language.
2. More can always be said. As we live in language, and language is necessarily meaningful and interpretive, we forever strive to reach a correspondence between all that the world might be and all that we proclaim it to be. However, as we describe the world, this act of description belongs to the occasion of its utterance; the identity of the world becomes something else as it is described. The potential meanings of the world forever outpace our engagement with these meanings.
3. 3 All interpretation is perspectival. We always belong to a situation, and this situation necessarily demands interpretation. In all, we interpret because each of us brings a unique perspective, and it is our task to account for this perspective, so that we might approach a correspondence between the meaning of the world and our understanding of this meaning. This effort, though, is always an approximation, never completing itself.
4. All interpretation is dialogical. Texts provoke the reader: they demand that we share in an overall meaning, a meaning which envelops both the reader and the text. It is only within the context of this overall significance that the text has meaning, and the reader understands. When someone is about to read a text, he or she cannot but anticipate its content, its meaning. It is only as an answer to a question that the text can mean anything. At the same time, the text will necessarily disrupt the presuppositions of the question, the text itself becoming the questioner, forcing the reader to answer. This dialogue is made possible because both the reader and the text belong to an overall meaning, with neither possessing a monopoly on this meaning, each with an equal share. This sense of an overall meaning is forever present, but the particulars change with the passage of time.
5. The historicity of meaning. In general, possibility is shaped by the historical moment. It is necessary to account for historical difference, to acknowledge one’s historical moment and that of the text. In doing so, one might avoid anachronistic falsehood. Time comprehends change: there is always difference but, at the same time, this difference is shaped by a shared ontology—each of us has a world, and it is this belongingness that determines historical difference.
6. A fusion of horizons between text and reader. All interaction between text and reader is a matter of mediating identity and difference: the worlds of the text and reader are both the same and different. In the end, a new meaning emerges each time a text is read, a meaning that accounts for this tension between sameness and difference.

Overall, the point of this project is to plumb the affinities between Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic ontology and Virginia Woolf’s novels—how these affinities illuminate and contribute to an improved understanding of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Woolf’s novels. For their part, Gadamer and Woolf belong to a similar cultural and historical milieu, each, in one way or another, a participant in the intellectual and artistic movement known as Modernism. This movement arose in response to the encroaching impersonality of scientific objectivity: both Woolf and Gadamer recognized the pitfalls of this objectivity, as it necessarily discounts the interpretive opportunity and responsibility of the individual. In Virginia Woolf’s novels, we witness an intensification and enactment of one’s interpretive imperative. In their structure and thematics, we encounter narratives that emphasize interpretive experiences and concepts—in them, there is a heavy accent on those experiences that are binding, those experiences that shape consciousness and determine one’s interpretive horizon. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical outlook is especially useful for an analysis of these novels because his philosophy concerns the interpretation of day-to-day existence as it relates to the interpretation of a literary text. For its part, this philosophical framework hinges on the primacy of language—its universality and our unconsciousness of it—our belongingness to art—its ability to engage the meaningfulness of our perceptions and alter them too—and the dialogical situation in which all language use occurs—every utterance belongs to an occasion, its meaning only understandable as it relates to its context. Woolf’s novels, for their part, highlight and emphasize these hermeneutic and ontological precepts. In these narratives, we encounter characters who interpret their existence; this interpretive dynamic—and the philosophical precepts that undergird them—are decisive for the significance and impact of these novels; interpretation and meaning are, in fact, the primary subject matter. I will argue that—as others have noted—a philosophical approach is useful for understanding these novels in their full scope, that there is a philosophical undercurrent that runs through these narratives, but that the philosophical scholarship on Woolf fails to fully appreciate the hermeneutic and ontological underpinnings that are decisive for their meaning. Instead of reading these novels through a lens of radical interpretation and questionability, the present scholarship relies on static concepts such as world, self, and reality. My argument is that these concepts are not static, that they are in movement as the individual engages with language, with art, and with others. In many ways, these novels are defined by this movement—how one’s understanding and horizon are shaped by this engagement—and the consequences and implications therein. In relating Woolf’s novels to Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the reader acquires an improved sense for the reference of the words that populate her novels, words that determine the meaning of a world and the characters who inhabit it: these narratives include characters who strive to understand, who either fail or succeed based on their willingness to privilege and engage with experiences of language, of art, or dialogue with others. Now, in relating Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to Woolf’s novels, the reader encounters an enactment of Gadamer’s philosophical outlook: interpretation is inescapable—whether reading or living an average day, the world and its meaning are forever in motion, and it is up to the individual to respond in kind.

Gadamer on Language

As has already been mentioned, Gadamer’s starting point is the concept of text. For him, the text is the hermeneutic object par excellence. A text demands that the reader become aware of his or her relationship to language and to history; the words of a text belong to a historical situation and are a result of history, too; these words confront the reader, whose own situation is unique also. A text, then, makes a claim that the reader cannot discount. Necessarily, the reader grows from this encounter: the texture of his or her being has become more intricate, stronger. In this process, there is a doubling back: as the reader wonders about the meaning of the words in the text, he or she wonders about the meaning of words in general, about their role in deciphering what the world means. For Gadamer, “the midworld of language has proven itself to be the true dimension of that which is given” (“Text and Interpretation” 29). A text transports the reader into this mind-set: that the world is only understandable when it is presented, when it comes into language. The reader is reminded of his or her relationships, of his or her process, of those conditions and situations that have yielded the self-presentation of being. The reader is reminded to honor and privilege language, for there is no world unless it is named: “To come into language does not mean that a second being is acquired. Rather, what something presents itself as belongs to its own being” (Truth and Method 470). When reading a text, the participant is drawn into this dynamic: the world appears different every day, is different, but it is not necessarily alien and strange; it can be appropriated, even understood—the world belongs to its presentation.

Each view, though, each presentation of the world, is always deficient, never complete. For Gadamer, part of the identity of language is that it is occasional; it belongs to the occasion, never able to fully name the whole, the unity; each particular instance is new and different, contextualized by the whole, even changing it, but never complete and entire:

But there is another dialectic of the word, which accords to every word an inner dimension of multiplication: every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally. All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out. That is why the hermeneutical phenomenon also can be illuminated only in light of the fundamental finitude of being, which is wholly verbal in character. (Truth and Method 454)

That is, we all have a vague sense of the world and its truth, and we are always moving toward some sort of confirmation or complete understanding, but language is discursive and situational: it unfolds through time, and it changes with each new moment; because of this, we only acquire an aspect or view of the way things are. This nature of language is both productive and frustrating: it leads us to continuously search and try; it also means that we will never reach our goal. Nevertheless, we engage with texts and language for this very reason: as a reminder of our humanity and its potential.

Gadamer on Art and Literature

If language is the means by which we have a world, one wonders how art fits into this estimation. Language is the original self-presentation of being; art takes notice of this situation and reminds us that all meaning must first be presented; there is no interpretation if there is no appearance. Gadamer states this dynamic directly: “The world that appears in the play of presentation does not stand like a copy next to the real world, but is that world in the heightened truth of its being” (Truth and Method 132). Language is the originary presentation, but art mines this dynamic, playing with our natural receptiveness to engage with presentation. So, when we encounter an artwork, we are reminded of ourselves; we are reminded that the world depends on its presentation. Each presentation, though, is new and different and always intentional. An artwork is always more than what we make of it—its interpretive possibilities are inexhaustible: yet all artistic production “intend[s] what it produces to be what it is” (The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays 25). Because art is a self-enclosed, internally coherent world that hinges on its self-fulfillment, the artistic product creates the terms of its own interpretation: the task of the interpreter is to do justice to those terms.

Gadamer makes the argument that art is arresting: part of the nature of art is to captivate; so much so that the participant forgets about him or herself, for a moment at least. In that captivation, the participant notices nothing else but the appearance itself: “In the apparent particularity of sensuous appearance, which we always attempt to relate to the universal, there is something in our experience of the beautiful that arrests us and compels us to dwell upon the individual appearance itself” (The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays 16). This concept of the beautiful is important to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. He argues that beauty closes the gap between the appearance of something and its true identity. Therefore, when we encounter beauty in art, we encounter the thing for what it is and nothing else. For this reason, because it allows us to encounter the world for what it is, the experience of art signifies “an increase in being” (The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays 15). Of course, like being, a work of art comprehends the fundamental tension between revealment and concealedness. (“The Truth of the Work of Art” 107). We never fully know the meaning of existence or of art, but we are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1 Philosophical Preparation
• PART 2 Application
• Index