Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 147 Reviews HERMENEUTICS ANCIENT AND MODERN. By Gerald L. Bruns. Pp. xii + 318. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Cloth, $37.50. Gerald Bruns, a professor of English at Notre Dame, has produced a fascinating, philosophically-oriented "meditation" on the nature and purpose of hermeneutics using the history of hermeneutics as his backdrop. Along the way he devotes chapters to Socrates, Thucydides, the Hebrew Bible, Philo, midrash, the mysticism of al-Ghazali, Luther, romantic hermeneutics, Shakespearean tragedies, the use of tradition by Petrarch and Gadamer, the radical hermeneutics of Derrida and Caputo, and the approaches of Heidegger and Ricoeur. Bruns' own hermeneutical stance conforms closely to that of HansGeorg Gadamer (Truth and Method) whose approach falls in between that of traditionalists such as E. D. Hirsch and the nihilism of the deconstructionists . Bruns, unlike deconstructionists, does not substitute the "reader's response" for the "author's intent," and yet with Gadamer he affirms repeatedly , "We understand differently, if we understand at all." The most striking thing about Bruns' analysis is the way he finds value in various, seemingly incompatible approaches to interpretation. By this he does not intend to say (with Postmodemism) that texts are meaningless, but rather that there are in texts more meanings than we know what to do with. For example, studies of the history of hermeneutics regularly condemn the allegorical method of Philo as a preposterous reading of Neo-Platonism into the law of Moses. Likewise Jewish midrash, though it can be admired as aesthetic discourse, is, as interpretation, nothing but "free-wheeling, unrestrained eisegesis." Bruns, however, is much more sympathetic. He sees in Philo and the midrashim hermeneutical practices that tell us a good deal about what it means to understand a text. He states, "Allegory is, crudely speaking, the squaring of an alien conceptual scheme with one's own on the charitable assumption that there is a sense (which it is the task of interpretation to determine) in which they are coherent with each other" (p. 85). To Bruns, the true goal of hermeneutics is akin to allegory so defined. More than exegesis, it is reading texts written in the past in such a way that they throw light on the present-day mind of the interpreter. Both the midrashim and Luther rightly focused on one's personal responsiveness to the claims of texts, seeking to know not merely what they "meant," but how they are to be applied in this or that situation today. It is clear, then, that for Bruns appropriation via contemplation is the fundamental goal of hermeneutics. Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 148 Reviews Fuller understanding, says Bruns, requires going beyond analysis to an experience of the text. Here he finds analogy with al-Ghazali's mystical experience with the Qur'an. True understanding requires a gnostic experience with what is known. Somewhat related to this is the romantic hermeneutics of Wordsworth, where one imagines oneself to be in the place of an author, in flight of fancy seeking to "become" the author, to enter into the dead author and bring life into her from the inside out. At the same time, Bruns agrees with the postmodern critique of Romanticism that denies that we can ever do this adequately, and thus a reader is ever in tension between wanting to enter into mystical union with one's text and yet never quite being able to do so. Bruns reserves his strongest criticism for what he calls "Cartesian hermeneutics" or the "allegory of suspicion," going back to Spinoza (compare "the historical-critical method" in biblical studies). In Cartesian hermeneutics, the interpreter takes a detached, impartial regard to a text; interpreting it, as it were, at a distance. The readers in this method are unresponsive except to their own self-certitude that they know better than the text, and in the end the text remains remote and strange. Such an approach "restores the hermeneutical condition of allegory in which one rationalizes the alien text or naturalizes it within a prevailing philosophical outlook" (p. 149). Cartesian hermeneutics, says Bruns, reduces the text to a dead letter and fails to produce genuine understanding. Some texts, to be sure, defy one's...