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Philosophy of Art, Media and Society lecture notes
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Philosophy of Art, Media and Society lecture notes
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LECTURE IV - 19/09/19Week IV: Interpreting Texts: Ricoeur on Narration
• Question: What is the meaning of interpretation and interpreting a text? What is the di erence between
interpreting an image and a text?
• Group Discussion: How do we interpret the narration in di erent texts (Why a novel is di erent than a text
on twitter)?
• Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in The Continental Philosophy Reader, ed. R. Kearney and M.
Rainwater, (Routledge 1996), pp. 136-158.*
Hermeneutics: understanding is an interpretive thing
• Act of meaning giving, and only when you give meaning to things you can begin to understand them
1. Hermeneutics
i. Meaning and understanding are not “already” in the text or speech
ii. Meaning and understanding belong to the historically-e ected part of our consciousness
iii. The historical formation is the basis of our being able to understand former cultures and narration is how
we transmit our understanding and experiences to others (other people and cultures)
iv. Art is particularly good example for how we experience and interpret things and transmit our
experiences
1.a.I. Meaning and understanding are not “already” in the text or speech
• Understanding is an active participation in meaning giving
• Dialogue
• You have to actively try to interact with something otherwise you won’t understand it
• Dialogue is needed to understand
• Play
• Listening to understand what the person is saying.
• Playing is sincere. Whenever you’re playing with something, you’re in it/you’re ‘there’.
• = active involvement
• A model of ‘being there’
• Active involvement in the In nite realm of possible expression: “saying further”
• In each interaction the dialogue can alter/change
• Dialogue is something open: it can change over time or with another person
• You can always ‘say further’ meaning there can always be another dialogue/another understanding of
something
↳ In nite dialogue, in nite play
1.b.ii. Meaning and understanding belong to the historically-effected part our our consciousness
• = Hermeneutics claims when we understand things, this understanding involves the interaction to the
tradition (e.g. values, norms)
• Every understanding is determined by past experiences and is thus historical
• Your experiences, past generation experiences
↳ Understanding is historical
• “Every proposition has presuppositions the it does not express” (Gadamer)
• Consciousness is always e ected by history
1.c.iii. Narration and Historical Formation In Ricoeur
• Narration is a verbal composition that constitutes a text. A text satis es the “need for delimiting, ordering
and making explicit.” (p139)
• Text when in a formal telling will become a story, a story can turn into a narration of a text
• Paintings can still be a text, it can tell a story
↳ Text is a broad notion
• “(…) the common feature of human experience, that which is marked, organized and clari ed by the fact
of storytelling in all forms, is it temporal character.” (p139)
• In all stories, there is part ction, because you use your imagination. What we remember and what we
think is supposed to be there comes together (you use a little imagination)
fi fi fifffi ff ff fi ff fffi
, • We tell things about things in the past, recalling from memory. The memory is a combination of the past
and present and ll the gaps with imagination. Our own narration is temporal, because experiences
belong to the past. We catch the present in the past.
↳ As if we put these experiences into a “plot”
• We are writing reality, putting it into a story: like a plot
2. Narration and History in Ricoeur
• Past reality is unveri able: hence all historical discourse is a reconstruction
• “History in that sense combines narrative coherence with conformity to the documents. This complex tie
characterizes the states of history as interpretation.”
• Reality is not something as it is, rather: “In one way or another, all symbol systems contribute to shaping
reality.” (p143)
• There’s no objective reality
• This is for human sciences, because the language system is not as systematic. Human sciences are far
more complex and not comparable to other sciences.
• Whenever there is language, there is narration,
Context changes our interpretation: Each context contains symbols. By putting symbolic images, symbolic
languages together you create context.
Conclusion
• We can think only within the limits of language
• Dialogue is a way in which we exchange our thoughts
• Our aim to understand leads us to pose questions and to give answers (whether it is a question to one’s
self, to another or to a text).
• Narration is a special form of transmitting this dialogue to others, to future generations.
• Questions and answers are the way we “interpret” and “understand” things, because every linguistic
expression is a transposition of what we see or what we read or what we hear
• Hermeneutics is the eld of investigation of the di erences of these interpretations and understanding,
which crystalizes in Gadamer’s notion of play.
• Understanding (as in the case of a work of art) is an in nite process.
• We built culture in the in this process.
fi fifi ff fi
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