Robert J. Dostal
With the publication of two books and a series of articles in the late 1960s and 1970s, E. D. Hirsch Jr. established himself as a major voice in the debates about interpretation and literary criticism. Against the mainstream, he proposed and defended an “objectivist” hermeneutics. His voice has remained alive in the debates as the proponent of objectivity in interpretation. Hirsch first established himself as a scholar of romanticism. Since the 1970s, he has devoted himself to efforts to reform education, and it is for these efforts that he is most widely known.
E. D. Hirsch Jr. was born in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of a cotton merchant. He studied at Cornell University and Yale University, where he received his PhD in 1957. His dissertation on romanticism served as the basis for his first book, Wordsworth and Schelling (1960). He began his teaching career at Yale. His second book was a monograph on William Blake, Innocence and Experience (1964), in which he argued against Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom that Blake’s views changed significantly from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience. This work won the Explicator prize of 1965.
He then turned his attention to the debates around interpretation that had followed the publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method and the rise of postmodernism. In 1967, he published his most important work, Validity in Interpretation. This was followed by a series of lectures and articles, many of which were collected in The Aims of Interpretation (1976). These publications defended and developed the position presented in the earlier work. During this time, in the late 1960s, he moved from Yale to the University of Virginia, where he became the English department chairman and head of the composition program. His interest in what makes writing readable led to his publication of The Philosophy of Composition (1977), in which he developed the concept of “relative readability.” Following on his hermeneutics, Hirsch argued that writing was to convey the “semantic intentions” of the author. A text is “relatively” readable inasmuch as it is clear, effective, and efficient.
His further exploration of the concept of readability led to his realization of the fundamental importance of the background knowledge of the reader. Not only does reading require what might be called formal decoding skills, that is, the syntax and semantics of the language, but also the requisite cultural background—what he sometimes calls the “taken for granted knowledge.” Without this background knowledge, the reader is unable to understand many of the text’s concepts, references, analogies, implications, and so on. In 1987, he published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. This became a best seller and a major player in the “culture wars” of the 1990s. The book has a long appendix with lists of what any American reader should know. The book appeared at the same time as Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Though Hirsch did not ally himself with Bloom and found his pairing with Bloom unfortunate, the two books were often criticized together as neoconservative, traditionalist, and a lily-white rejection of the contribution of ethnic minorities to American culture. Hirsch’s work was attacked additionally as a promotion of a reactionary pedagogy that relies too much on drill and memorization. In response, Hirsch argued that any education that wished to be socially progressive must be conservative.
This book was quickly followed by the publication of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988). At the same time, he founded the Core Knowledge Foundation that, among other things, began to publish a series of books in the Core Knowledge Series that lay out what content knowledge should be taught at each grade level. Eight books have been published—pre-kindergarten through the sixth grade. Recently, the books have begun to be adapted for use in the United Kingdom. The foundation has developed a variety of other publications, including teacher’s guides and a Core Classic Series.
In 1996, Hirsch continued efforts to reform education in America by publishing The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them. He argues that what he calls “anti-knowledge” theories of education predominate in American schools of education. These theories have their roots in romanticism and were given focus and force in America by John Dewey. This pedagogical view gives primacy to teaching skills rather than content. His argument and critique of educational theory and practice in America have been continued in many articles, interviews, blogs, and two more recent books: The Knowledge Deficit (2006) and The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (2009). This series of books by Hirsch on American education provides an extended argument for a core curriculum.
Hirsch sees his work on education as theoretically following on his hermeneutics that he developed in the 1960s. His work on reading and learning began with a concern for the semantic intentions of the author, a concern at the heart of his hermeneutics, but it moved to a concern for the importance of what the reader brings to her reading of the text. This concern follows from the well-known and undisputed principle or canon of interpretation that any text is to be understood within its context.
As the title of his major book on hermeneutics—Validity in Interpretation (1976)—suggests, Hirsch’s primary concern is the validation of an interpretation. His first published paper on any topic was entitled “Objective Interpretation,” whose central concept was “verification.”1 A few years later, Hirsch tells the reader that he has come to consider “validation” to be “the fundamental task of interpretation as a discipline.” (170) This change from verification to validation is to recognize that the correctness of an interpretation can never be certain. “Certainty,” he writes, is “unattainable” (164). This follows from the circularity of the hermeneutical process, the so-called hermeneutical circle. There is an ineluctable part/whole circularity in any interpretation: any part of the text is to be understood in the context of the whole text and the text itself in its larger context. The text and its context are importantly inexhaustible. The validation of an interpretation can show at best what is the “most plausible” interpretation. Establishing plausibility is a matter of a making a “probability judgment” based on evidence. Any interpretation is subject to critique and to correction. Perhaps this shift from “verification” to “validation” was due in part to Karl Popper’s critique of verificationism.2
According to Hirsch, validation is one of two sides of the interpretive process. The first step of any interpretation is “guessing” at its meaning. Hirsch’s “genial guess” was Schleiermacher’s “divination.” Hirsch has little to say about the process of guessing or divining. The very terms suggest that this phase has no method: “There are no methods for making guesses, no rules for generating insights” (203). But the principles of validation, according to Hirsch, can be explicated, and it is to this that the book is dedicated.
His principles of validation govern “the weight and relevance of interpretive evidence” (197). They are as follows (197–198):
Hirsch contrasts these principles with the traditional canons of interpretation. He tries to show how these canons are inadequate for a proper methodology.
Most importantly, what the interpreter is guessing at is the meaning of the text. The meaning of text for Hirsch is determined by the author’s intention. He writes: “Nevertheless, despite its practical concreteness and variability, the root problem of interpretation is always the same—to guess what the author meant” (207).
The book begins by defending the author against the banishment that was taking place in critical discourse. Hirsch names T. S. Eliot and Martin Heidegger as leading proponents of the thesis of “semantic autonomy.” According to Hirsch, the abandonment of the normative role of the author’s intention is tantamount to the usurpation of the author’s role by the critic. He considers a number of arguments for the semantic autonomy of the text: (1) that the meaning of a work changes—even for the author; (2) the author may have intended something but failed to carry it out; (3) the author’s meaning is inaccessible; and (4) the author often does not know what he means. Hirsch acknowledges that determining the author’s intention may be difficult but that these difficulties do not preclude the author’s intention as what is sought in interpreting a text. Against these claims that make the author’s intention irrelevant, Hirsch argues that meaning is public not private (and thus not inaccessible), that meaning is a matter of consciousness (and thus an author must in some sense know what he means), that to recognize a failed intention is to know the intention, and, finally, that we must distinguish between the meaning of a text and its significance. According to Hirsch, the significance of a text may change but not its meaning.
Texts are determinant and reproducible. For Hirsch, it follows that the meaning is fixed, though its significance may change. He finds that Gadamer’s hermeneutics rejects this distinction between meaning and significance. This rejection leads to a relativistic and radical historicism that Gadamer shares with his teacher, Martin Heidegger. Hirsch argues that their hermeneutics leads us to a view that makes all past texts non-understandable in their original meaning. We can only see things within our contemporary context. More than any other theorist, Gadamer is singled out as Hirsch’s main opponent.
It goes without saying that for any speech to make sense, to have meaning, it must conform to the norms of the language. These norms are not only syntactical and semantical but also generic. Written works belong to a certain genre, and it is important to understand the genre to understand the work. Hirsch argues “that an interpreter’s preliminary generic conception of a text is constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands and that this remains the case unless and until that generic conception is altered” (74). This generic conception provides a kind of frame within which the text is interpreted. In the process of interpreting, the understanding of the genre may change. This is an aspect of the hermeneutical circle—which Hirsch pointedly asserts is “less mysterious and paradoxical than many in the German hermeneutical tradition have made it out to be” (77). Hirsch also considers the development of new genres and the problems of recognizing and identifying a genre.
In the course of his discussion of genre, in order to clarify his view of interpretation, Hirsch mentions Emilio Betti’s classification of three types of interpretation: (1) re-cognitive (historical and literary), presentational (dramatic and musical), and normative (legal and religious) (112). Hirsch argues that the only proper sense for the interpretation of the meaning of a text is the first—the re-cognitive. This is the proper task of interpretation: “All valid interpretation of every sort is founded on the re-cognition of what an author meant” (126). The other two kinds of interpretation, according to Hirsch, assume a grasp, that is, re-cognition, of the meaning of the text and then the “application” of this meaning to the circumstance—legal, religious, musical, or dramatic. Hirsch takes particular umbrage at Gadamer’s rejection of the distinction between meaning and application, which distinction is a version of the meaning/significance distinction that Hirsch defends.3 Hirsch points out that, for Gadamer, all interpretation is on the model of reading the Bible or the constitution. This is a fundamental mistake, according to Hirsch. Literature, on his account, should not be so read.
To support the distinction between meaning and significance (or meaning and application), Hirsch distinguishes between understanding and judgment (143). One “understands” meaning, and one “judges” something’s significance. “Understanding” is a matter of submission, according to Hirsch. He suggests we take the word quite literally, that is, in understanding we “stand under” what is to be understood. Hirsch objects to any treatment of understanding as constructivist. “Judgment” is of a different order. In judging, one acts independently and on one’s own authority—like a judge.
This book collects a number of essays that Hirsch published subsequent to the publication of Validity in Interpretation. The book marks no change in his views. The book both situates his views within the larger context of discussions and debates about interpretation and brings his views to specific debates and issues, for example, a debate between Murray Krieger and Northrop Frye concerning the separation of literature from ideology and taste. What unites these chapter essays on various topics is the central and all-important distinction for Hirsch between meaning and significance, one version of which is meaning and application. He takes up the topic of the distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic,” interpretation. He shows how this distinction does not line up entirely with the meaning/significance distinction, though evaluation (significance) is “largely extrinsic.”
In the first place, he situates himself as a representative of general hermeneutics in opposition to local hermeneutics. Historically, the primary, but not sole, example of local hermeneutics is the view that there are different hermeneutical principles for reading the Bible than for reading secular texts. Hirsch aligns himself with Schleiermacher and the subsequent tradition of general hermeneutics (he mentions Boeckh, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer). Within this tradition of general hermeneutics, he distinguishes the “objectivist” tradition from the relativist. Hirsch, of course, is an objectivist and, on his account, joins Schleiermacher, Boeckh, and Dilthey in this regard. Heidegger, Gadamer, and French postmodernism are relativist.
In the last chapter, the “Afterword,” he criticizes Thomas Kuhn and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as one the most important contemporary proponents of relativism. He laments the way that humanists have appropriated Kuhn’s concept of the “paradigm.” This is symptomatic of the way that the humanities, especially literary study, have come to accept that ideology determines the result of inquiry. Thus, for Hirsch, “literary study is at present the most skeptical and decadent branch of humanistic study” (149). He argues that the “dogmatic relativism” of Kuhn, which has been so influential, has been best “exposed” and refuted by Karl Popper and his critique of the “myth of the framework.” Though Hirsch acknowledges that there are important differences between the natural sciences and the humanities, he argues that “the cognitive elements in both have exactly the same character” (149). He distinguishes “knowledge” and “value.” This pair is a version of the distinction between meaning and significance.
The book concludes with the claim that “the humanities have the greatest value when they aim at knowledge. The knowledge they provide is greatest when humanists accept both the cognitive and valuative sides of humanistic study without confusing them” (157). Yet, at times, “evaluative criticism” may be more important than knowledge. But “without scientia, humanistic evaluation is empty and pointless” (158).
Hirsch’s last substantive publication on hermeneutics is the 1984 essay “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted.” In this essay, Hirsch revisits the distinction between meaning and significance that is central for all his work in the theory of interpretation. He returns to Husserl’s account of meaning and insists that he sees no good reason to change his view about the importance of maintaining this distinction and putting it to use in the way that he has done. Yet, he acknowledges that he had not earlier confronted the “futurity of intention” which “produces a paradox for the theory that a text can be taken to represent a fixed meaning” (205). What the author intends cannot be fully anticipated by the author, since the author cannot see the future. The intention is the meaning and, inasmuch as the meaning is, in part, futural, the meaning cannot be fully and adequately cognized by the author. What remains open is the future application of the authorial intention. Thus, Hirsch here writes that he must “reject my earlier claim that future applications of meaning, each being different, must belong to the domain of significance” (210). He now recognizes that his views are closer to those of Gadamer than he had previously argued. And he states that the “main purpose” of the essay is to acknowledge “that Gadamer was right to say that application can be part of meaning” (214). Hirsch stands by the distinction between meaning and significance, but he would “split the realm of application between meaning and significance” and not simply identify application with significance (215). Hirsch develops his new view of application as lying between meaning and significance by appealing to Saul Kripke’s account of meaning in Naming and Necessity. In particular, Kripke’s account of how a speaker’s mental content changes while the meaning-reference stays the same helps make sense, for Hirsch, as to how meaning both stays the same and changes. He calls this feature of meaning “the provisionality of language” (224).
He reformulates his “chief divergence” from Gadamer as follows: “Gadamer argues for the necessity of differentness of meaning, and I for the possibility of sameness of meaning, in different applications of the text” (214). He also insists, as he did in his previous work, that in Gadamerian hermeneutics “meaning is made to conform to the critic’s view about what is true” (218).
Hirsch calls this revision of his views on meaning and application “a new and different theory” (223). The ramifications of his “new theory” are not entirely clear. Does the new theory alter Hirsch’s previous insistence that the goal of any interpretation is to determine the original meaning intended by the author? This last essay on hermeneutics by Hirsch makes no reference to this principle of interpretation. Hirsch’s newly found proximity to Gadamer gives rise to a number of questions about the remaining differences between their views. Is it fair to say that on Gadamer’s account meaning is made to conform to the critic’s view?
E. D. Hirsch has provided us with the leading “objectivist” account of interpretation in the Anglophone world. The theory of meaning is at the heart of his account, and his late revision of the theory leaves us with numerous questions as to whether this revision requires other substantive revisions of his objectivist theory of interpretation.