Course Introduction

"To live an intelligible life, I have suggested, is to act out interpretations of the social roles or protoscripts that form our sociocultural horizon. Coherence and meaning can be achieved at the level of understanding just what protoscripts and roles one is living out. This gives us coherence but not closure, for, unlike an actor in a play, we do not know how the play will end, what will become of the characters, how roles will intersect, conflict and so on. An awareness of the roles we are enacting will give us some guidance with respect to how to act, but otherwise we are inventing ourselves in a field of contingency as we go along. Life is thus more like improvised acting, with a theme but not much in the way of a script, with coherence but not closure.

Yet, in making sense of our lives to ourselves and to others, we do tell stories, with beginnings, middles and ends. This sense-making is enabled by provisional points and hypothetical projections of closure; thus St. Augustine tells the story of his becoming a Christian, or Proust, of having become a writer. To find meaning is to be able to tell such provisional stories, such petits recits, each with its own kind of closure."

"My experience is a text, as I suggested above, but it is one that is being continually written. It is a text, in the making. This endows it with an openness over and above even that of a completed text or historical epoch. The latter are, in a sense, definite and finished but open to an indefinite number of appropriate interpretations or appropriations. Experience, then, has the openness of being incomplete as well as that of being open to interpretation. (I return to this in Chapter Five, when I discuss some disanalogies between life and texts.) The meanings which I extract from my experience contribute to and point to, intend, an always incompletely realized sense of my life which furnishes me with further anticipations for interpretation. In the sense, then, in which it might be reasonable to speak of a perfect knowledge of a text, or of history, or of a perfect appropriation of the meaning of experience. (Interestingly, some very influential contemporary physicists hold on to the dream of a Final Theory uniting the four fundamental forces of nature; see Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York Pantheon, 1993); and the reservations voiced by Roger Penrose in 'Nature's Biggest Secret,'The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993, pp.78-82.) Gadamer expresses this by claiming that inquiry into the meaning of a text or historical inquiry cannot be regarded as inquiry guided by an object (in itself) in the way that natural scientific inquiry arguably can be so seen (even if that object is at best a regulative ideal for science, and despite the complications introduced by the so-called nonconvergence thesis, the belief that succeeding scientific paradigms represent radical, if not incommensurable, shifts from, rather than progressive developments of, preceding frameworks). One thinks here of Mary Hesse's own call for 'perfect metaphors' to serve the purpose of theoretical explanation. She expresses that call in terms reminiscent of our discussion of objectivity as a regulative ideal for science: 'The (perhaps unattainable) aim to find a 'perfect metaphor'' (Hesse, 'The Explanatory Function of Metaphor,' p. 119). One might regard the ideal of the perfect metaphor as the postempiricist counterpart of the ideal of objectivity, an ideal in terms of which science could be regarded as research guided by an object. But Hesse's metaphor is a metaphor with a difference. To illustrate one implication of this: while one and the same instance of love might, in ordinary language, be fruitfully referred to metaphorically as both young and old--young because of its vital and robust nature, old because of its being experienced as having been somehow ordained from the beginning of time--the existence of contradictory metaphorical characterizations in science demands adjudication."

"'The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication.  To be means to communicate.'  Michael Baktin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans.  Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 287."

"They are going to launch a large vessel called a 'Clipper' at noon today.  Another of these American inventions to make people go faster and faster.  When they have managed to get travelers comfortably sealed inside a cannon so that they can be shot off like bullets in any given direction, civilization will have made a great leap forward.  We are making rapid strides towards that happy time when space will have been abolished; but they will never abolish boredom."

"We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit..."

"The disease is images...language is the cure."