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Although this is an historical study, Stack’s specific concerns do lead to some omissions in both thinkers’ intellectual biographies. The discussion of solitude and the natural superiority of powerful individuals leads the reader to expect Thoreau to make an appearance. He does not. And although there is reference to the influence of German Romanticism upon Emerson, it does not receive elaboration.

Stack makes some especially provocative remarks about fictionalism in both Nietzsche and Emerson; he also alludes to the influence of Lange upon Nietzsche and Vaihinger. But beyond using fictionalism to characterize the metaphorical nature of experience, the view receives little development. However, Stack does present the conscious self as a place of illusions where we live on the surface of experience in his treatment of fate. Finally, Stack introduces Hindu thought as the source of Nietzsche’s vision of the life beyond good and evil, but no attention is paid to the influence of eastern thought upon Emerson.

Stack’s Nietzsche becomes someone who remains open to the possibility of God as the highest power, or a moment of culmination, bringing him closer to Emerson by accepting the possibility of a higher soul. But no matter how much Nietzsche and Emerson shared an appreciation of solitude, Emerson demonstrated a commitment to social problems and the value of community in both his life and his thought. At the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra leaves the higher men behind realizing that his final sin had been pity for them. Emerson is more at home with dualities, seeing individuality and community in a dialectical relationship. Nietzsche recognizes the role of fate and herd morality, but then puts the duality behind him in an attempt to construct individuality in opposition to cultural forces.

So although Stack has several exciting insights on the intellectual kinship of Nietzsche and Emerson, his historical thesis leads him to blunt some of his own discussion. Did existentialism really originate in the United States with Emerson? I hope so, but that is a question for the historians.

Anthony Graybosch Department of Philosophy California State University Chico, C A 959294730 USA

Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. By Gerald L. Bruns. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. 381.

Bruns’s Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern is an extremely interesting, dense and wide-ranging book. Bruns takes as his subject the “loose and

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baggy monster” that hermeneutics is, in his view. Hermeneutics is to be conceived of, not as a school of thought or a movement in literary criticism, but rather as the whole of the variegated ways in which the question of understanding has itself been understood. As Bruns writes, hermeneutics “is not a method or system or theory or any sort of position to be defended or advanced but exactly a context of argument about understanding - a context whose boundaries are determined not by conceptual traditions, much less by school disciplines, but by the thing itself, that is, by the question of what it is that happens . . . when we try to make sense of something.” (p. 8)

Bruns takes his inspiration for this sort of approach to hermeneutics from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. For Bruns, the virtue of Gadamer’s work is to have shown that the question of hermeneutics is not a question about meaning or the objective meaning of either a text or such text analogues as actions, concepts or laws. I t is, instead, a question about the interaction of interpreter and text or text analogue. As Bruns puts the point: “. . . with respect to a discourse or a text, verstehen is less knowing what the text means in itself than it is knowing how we stand with respect to it in the situation in which we find ourselves.’’ (p. 8) What Bruns calls a hermeneutical situation, then, refers to the situation in which we are addressed by a text in our concrete circumstances and have to answer to it in such a way that the interaction between our questions and answers and those of the text compose our understanding. Bruns takes his book to be a historical survey of the different ancient and modern reactions or accounts of such “hermeneutical situations.” “Hermeneutics,” he writes, is just “this whole network of lines and angles on the question of verstehen.” (p. 8)

Still, the sheer number of “lines and angles” that Bruns investigates on the question of understanding is astounding, as is the depth of his reflection on them. The first part of his book, that which deals with the “ancients,” begins with an analysis of the character of Socrates’s self- understanding in his “Apology” and then considers, in turn, the relation between history and memory in Thucydides, the question of how a text achieves authority in relation to the Hebrew Bible, the idea of allegory that Philo constructs, midrash as a tradition of argument and . ~ ~ f i r r a or what Bruns calls the mystical hermeneutics of Al-Ghazali in which he tries to get beyond merely listening to or even understanding the words of the Koran to experiencing them. The second part of the book, on the “moderns,” is equally impressive, ranging from Luther’s revolt against the church and the confrontation between spirit and letter in under- standing to current debates among Richard Rorty, Alasdair Maclntyre and others on questions concerning the relation between understanding, tradition and reason. Since a review cannot possibly consider all the facets of such a robust and fascinating work, I shall try to give some idea of its richness by focusing here on two chapters: first, Bruns’s

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provocative account of midrash in Chapter Five, an account which seems central to his idea of hermeneutics in general and, second, his concluding chapter in which he develops a hermeneutics of freedom, itself indebted, I think, to the tradition of midrash.

The chapter entitled “The Hermeneutics of Midrash” is an attempt to get clear on the concept of understanding at work in the ancient rabbinical interpretation of the Scriptures. Bruns suggests that two aspects of this sort of interpretation need to be considered. First, Torah is meant to speak “to a public, communal situation, not to the solitary, single-minded, private reader.” (p. 107) This situation means that whereas modern hermeneutics is structured in terms of the individual reader, in midrash “interpretation is bound to be many-sided and open- ended . . .” Second, midrash involves a process of linking. One can use a text (a “letter, a word, a phrase, a verse, a piece of narrative, in principle a whole book like the Song of Songs” [p. 1091) to illuminate another text or one can focus on the echoes certain words have of other words, emphasize puns and so on. Bruns comments that “we probably do not have a very good idea of what the rabbinical textual imagination looks like.” But the effect of linking, again, is that midrashic interpretation is open-ended. It is not meant to provide a definitive analysis of a text or even to offer a better interpretation than any other. Rather the hermeneutical questions that a particular text raises “can be carried on at considerable length, or in several directions, and to no determinate end.” (p. 110)

To exemplify his point, Bruns investigates a midrashic interpretation of Eccl. 12:ll: “The words of lhe wise are us goads, and as nails well fastened (literally planted) are those that are composed in collections; they are given from one shepherd.” The midrash involves a report on a Sabbath exposition by Rabbi Eleazar by disciples of Rabbi Joshua and what initially interests Bruns about it is the way it uses the process of linking. The midrash offers multiple interpretations of the words of the Torah: they are likened to a goad, for example, for many reasons and in many ways. Torah directs those who study it along the “paths of life” just as a goad directs a cow along furrows “in order to bring life to the world,” but also in order to “direct a man in the ways of the Holy One” (p. 108) Goads (kebdarbanoth) also recall “kaddar she1 banoth” which means “like a little children’s ball.” Since a goad or ball can be shifted or thrown about, Torah, according to the midrash, adds “as nails well fastened” and because nails can contract as well as expand, it states “fastened (lit. planted)” to signify its similarity to a plant that is “fruitful and increases,” (p. 107) but also to show that although a nail is easy to draw out, the words of the Torah are not (p. 110) and “in the same way that the roots of a tree penetrate in all directions, so the words of the wise enter and penetrate into the whole body.” (p. 109)

But the midrash does more than offer various different interpretations

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of the meaning of the text. It also offers a theory of midrash or a theory of the possibility of multiple interpretations. The point of interpretation in midrash is neither to resolve problems with the text nor to bring about consensus on its meaning. Rather it is to expand the text in different directions, to disclose its various possibilities of meaning. “Midrash is more reflective than demonstrative,” Bruns writes, “divergent rather than convergent. Indeed the text is treated as something moving rather than fixed, something that is always a step ahead of the interpreter, always opening onto new ground and . . . always calling for interpreta- tion to be begun anew.” (p. 111) Any one interpretation becomes, as Rorty would say, not an objective mirror of the meaning of the text but instead part of an ongoing conversation. The scholar who wants to study Torah must picture it “not as a formal object (so many fixed letters) but as an open canon whose boundaries are shaped and reshaped by the give-and-take of midrashic argument.” (p. 116)

Suppose we were to adopt this niidrashic view of interpretation as opposed to what Bruns calls a transcendental outlook, one which “has, in Western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding and that even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild?” (p. 112) The midrashric view, which Bruns focuses on, itself confronts the problem that seems to emerge. The phrase “those that are composed in collections” is said by Rabbi Eleazar to apply “to the scholars, who sit in groups and study the Torah, some of them declaring a thing unclean, others declaring it clean; some pronouncing a thing to be forbidden, others pronouncing it to be permitted; some disqualifying an object, others declaring it fit.” But how is one to study Torah in such circumstance, Rabbi Eleazar asks. His advice is to “make your ear like a grain received and acquire a heart that can understand the words of the scholars who declare a thing unclean as well as of those who declare it clean; the words of those who declare a thing forbidden as well as those who declare it permitted; the words of those who disqualify an object as well as those who uphold its fitness.” (pp. 107-8)

This answer seems to anticipate the postmodern hermeneutics that Bruns investigates in his final chapter in which he contrasts MacIntyre’s view of the plight of understanding in the contemporary world to Rorty’s. For MacIntyre, according to Bruns, the modern world contains too many interpretive possibilities, all of which have been unhinged (or unfastened in the words the midrash explores) from the traditions and social worlds in which they made sense. The result is too many competing and fragmentary frames of reference for interpretation. “I am modern just insofar as I don’t know where I belong in any of this; or, rather, I float free among all the fragments of discourse and action that swirl through time and space like radio waves and electronic images.” (p. 249) The solution for MacIntyre is to rid interpretation of the playful

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and open-ended qualities the tradition of midrash seemed to encourage. Rather, the point of interpretation and discussion is to ground one’s beliefs by testing them against others, by taking them as true and trying to advance to “something like ‘the best theory so far’.’’ (p. 252) Rorty, in contrast seems to extend midrash on its wild side. In its full scope, midrash concerns the Torah, words that are planted and nailed down as the beliefs of one tradition or “shepherd” however variously and imaginatively they can be interpreted. But Rorty’s view is not that we look for new dimensions of texts that we take seriously in order to mine them for every possibility that they contain. Rather, we should “recontextualize for the hell of it.” (p. 257) That is, we should seek many edifying and interesting stories about ourselves giving up on MacIntyre’s truth or best theory so far.

Bruns himself wants a hermeneutics of freedom that can sail “between the Scylla and Charybdis of MacIntyre and Rorty.” As he writes “On the one side, freedom confronts squarely the ancient claims of rationality with its inescapable exclusionary logic . . . On the other side, freedom confronts ironic modernity, or the idea that once we understand . . . that we are only so many webs of belief and that the point is, Penelope-like to unweave and reweave these so as not to get caught by them, there is really nothing left to call freedom . . .” Instead, a hermeneutics of freedom would follow the tradition of midrash, it seems, in seeking neither to reduce the multiplicity of our possible hermeneutical responses to texts or text analogues nor to abandon the ideal of finding out truths about ourselves and our traditions through them.

Bruns’s idea here is one 1 find quite congenial and useful. We do not need canonical interpretations of who we are that would limit our possibilities in ways that Rorty abhors. But nor do we need a reckless abandon in which all understanding is conceived of as simply an ironical performance. The route between these options ‘‘will keep hermeneutics, like old Odysseus, on the way.” (p. 266)

Georgia Warnke Dept. of Philosophy University of California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92,25214201 USA

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