Kevin Vanhoozer focuses on the metaphysical implications of “meaning.” His work surveys the collapse of foundationalisms, their postmodern alternatives, and his own speech-act hermeneutics that paves the way forward from the postmodern morass, albeit sympathetic to some of Jacques Derrida’s criticisms.
Risking some oversimplification, Vanhoozer sees the three eras as the Age of the Author (we can know the author’s meaning in a text), the Age of the Text (e.g., late Modernity; we can’t know the author’s psychological intentions, but we can find meaning by focusing on the structure of the text), and the Age of the Reader (there is no transcendent meaning in the text; we create meaning).
Vanhoozer characterizes postmoderns as either “Undoers” (Derrida, deconstruction) or “Users” (Rorty, pragmatism). Vanhoozer goes to great pains to understand postmodernism, even if he doesn’t affirm it. Derrida is correct there is no pure realm of meaning and presence of which we have hermetic access. All such knowings and readings are situated knowings and readings. But that doesn’t mean we can’t know. Derrida himself admits he is not a relativist. He simply says if all meanings are situated meanings and that there is no Transcendental Signifier, what privileges one reading over another?
Vanhoozer’s answer is along the lines of the Trinity. God is first and foremost a communicative agent. Being and Speech is not reduced to a monad. It is indeed deferred. There is differance (though not ontological difference) but not violence in the Trinity. His very being is a self-communicative act. Trinitarian hermeneutics affirms both the One and the Many. There is meaning and unity in the text, but arrived by a plurality of literary methods.
With Paul Ricouer Vanhoozer agrees that metaphor is not simply literary window-dressing. It has ontological significance. The goal of Matthew is not to get to Romans. Metaphors can actually “break” deconstruction: they are determinate enough to convey stable meaning without being exhaustively specifiable (130). With Derrida we agree that all language is ultimately metaphorical (and thus problematic for metaphysics). But with Ricoeur and against Derrida, we believe that metaphors are meaningful and do communicate truth, even if they don’t exhaust the truth.
Pros
This book is magnificent. I sing its praises. Aside from the brilliant crash course in continental philosophy, Vanhoozer introduces readers to speech-act philosophy. He has a sensitive reading of sola scriptura which nicely rebuts communitarian claims.
Cons
Many of the chapters were excessively long (several were 300+ endnotes).
Derrida and Deconstruction
- Derrida is a good example of the relation of literary theory to theology (Death of God = Death of Author).
- Derrida tries to “un-loose” (gr. analusis; analyze) the structures, usually those made of binary oppositions (hot/cold, good/evil).
- Logocentrism: a preoccupation with meaning, rationality, and truth. Privileging presence (speech) over absence (writing).
- pharmakon: poison or cure. Writing is both poison and cure. It is poison because it threatens presence, but is necessary for the transmission of thought.
- nihilism: nothing real in the world. Only human creations. No real correspondence. Only immanence.
- Logocentrism: a preoccupation with meaning, rationality, and truth. Privileging presence (speech) over absence (writing).
- Signs: for Derrida signs are sideways. It is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and sound patterns.
- differance. signs acquire meaning only in difference to other signs.
- Deferral: meaning is only deferred. The play of signs goes all the way down
- Defers presence.
- Metaphysics is the science of presence. Derrida, argues, by contrast, that that presence is always already mediated by the play of signs. Thus, there is no pure presence.
Masters of Suspicion: The Turn from the Subject
- Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche all argue that the human subject is neither self-conscious nor self-present
- our “self” is subject to numerous social and psychological factors outside our control.
- The self does not stand behind language but in the thick of it (Lacan).
- Lessening the suspicious blow: against totalizing
- totalizing is trying to achieve a unified perspective. Reducing difference to the One.
Towards a Christian Response
- Jesus is God’s Sign of God’s Being and Presence.
Undoing Metaphysics
- Demeaning Meaning
- Aristotle saw words as signs that point to a determinate reference beyond themselves. A true idea is when the form is present to the mind’s eye.
- Grammatology: writing is the site of differance.
- Textuality means that there is no knowledge that is not mediated by some signifying system.
- To affirm textuality is to affirm the text as incomplete in itself.
- Ricoeur and Metaphor (129).
- Metaphors are not window dressings to the real truth that is propositions.
- Metaphors are irreducible.
- Metaphors can actually “break” deconstruction: they are determinate enough to convey stable meaning without being exhaustively specifiable (130).
- With Derrida we agree that all language is ultimately metaphorical (and thus problematic for metaphysics).
- But with Ricoeur and against Derrida, we believe that metaphors are meaningful.
- Metaphors are intertextual.
- this (Israel’s history) means that (Jesus’s history).
- This means texts are open.
- Levinas and the Other
- “other” : that which the self encounters.
- Ethics should resist the attempt to reduce the Other to the Same.
- Transcendence and Immanence:
The Text as Communicative Action
The text moves in terms of parole, not langue.
God’s Word is something God says, something God does, Something God Is.
Austin and Serle on Speech acts
Locutionary (The speaker)
Illocutionary (what is spoken)
Perlocutionary (the effects of the speech)
This triad collapses Rortian pragmatism. Texts aren’t just something we operate on, but rather are themselves acts which have continuing effects.
Paul Ricouer says texts create a world. Discourse refers to the World of the Text.
A formula (226)
M = F(p)
Meaning = Illocutionary Force AND proposition
M = F(p) + x
x = author’s ulterior purpose.
A text is a communicatory act with matter (propositional content), energy (illocutionary force), and purpose (perlocutionary effect), 228).
“meaning”–like mind–is an emergent property.
- a property that characterizes a higher-order phenomenon (like the brain) that has attained such a level of organizational complexity that it displays new properties (e.g., consciousness, mental rather than physical) and requires new categories (e.g., mind) to explain them (249).
- There is some level of discontinuity between meaning and text (though not total).
- meaning supervenes on the written marks.
“I believe in the reality of the author’s intention, for without it I cannot explain the emergence of meaning, that is to say, how meaning supervenes on written marks” (249).
Sola Scriptura
- textual meaning is independent of our interpretive schemes and independent of our communities.
- If the community is what gives meaning to a text, then how can the community ever err in interpreting the text? Who is to challenge them? By definition, any such individual challenge will be wrong, even sinful.
- The canon functions as an instrument of ideological critique and a check against totalizing communities.
Trinitarian Hermeneutics
Do texts have singular or plural meanings?
- Monists: Only one meaning
- Pluralists: many meanings
- plurality of authorial intentions
- plurality on the level of the text
- plurality of readers and readers’ contexts
- plurality of reading methods
God is first and foremost a communicative agent. His very being is a self-communicative act. Trinitarian hermeneutics affirms both the One and the Many. There is meaning and unity in the text, but arrived by a plurality of literary methods.
Logical Investigations 