On Meaning and Discovery

We do not take a philosopher seriously enough if we are satisfied with the mere feel of his philosophy: if his propositions, taken at their face value, are false or contradict each other, if he relies on equivocations and his arguments are invalid, all that is worth pointing out, though insufficient. The question remains whether his propositions are meant to be taken at their face value.

Some readers fasten on a single exoteric interpretation; others, more sophisticated, make a catalogue of possible exoteric meanings; still others seek an esoteric meaning reserved for initiates - and all three types of readers ignore the context.

Few philosophers place confidence in any of their own propositions. The poor student and the eclectic fasten on the proposition to champion it; the positivist/analytic (Michael), to refute it. The reader for whom one writes goes beyond the proposition to see what is meant.

Propositions can be multivocal without being equivocal: to the perceptive they speak with many voices, signify many things, and mean a great deal.

First, a proposition functions not only in an immediate context on the page where it occurs, but also in a larger systematic context, in the author's over-all attempt at the time of writing. Secondly, there is the chronological context - the place of the proposition in the author's development. This is especially important if the statement does not formulate his considered opinion but only a passing fancy or a provisional stage of his thought. We must ask what the author meant by the terms he used, and whether he used these terms in the same sense in his early and his late works, or even throughout the work at hand.

All this will seem a matter of course only to those who have never read much theology or philosophic criticism.

Besides the systematic and developmental meaning there are the many symptomatic meanings. The proposition may be symptomatic psychologically: the author's choice, and especially his abuse, of words, his imagery and his examples, his style and attitude, may invite psychological study. A proposition may also be symptomatic historically and reveal something about an era.

After we have asked about these three kinds of meaning - systematic, developmental, and symptomatic - yet another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.

At this level we must go behind not only what he said, but even what he meant, to recapture his vision. We use untenable propositions as clues in our search for truth. Even as it is the fascination of a detective story that the truth is finally discovered on the basis of a great many accounts of which not one is free of grievous untruths - even as it is sometimes given to the historian to reconstruct the actual sequence of events out of a great many reports which are shot through with lies and errors - those who study philosophers in the way here suggested use a lot of unauthentic pictures to draw a true map.

A philosopher may claim, for example, that A influenced B, and this may be disproved; but perhaps he noted a similarity which leads to the discovery of a common source or to a better understanding of A and B. Some of Nietzsche's and Freud's suggestions are open to conclusive objections; yet both men called attention to things which are much more important than their errors. To cite Nietzsche: "The errors of great men . . . are more fruitful than the truths of little men."

Hegel's statement that truth can be offered only in a system is a case in point. He overstated the case for the system, but recognized the inadequacy of any proposition and saw the need for an interlocking web of propositions; he understood the principle of cross-illumination and the essential circularity of truth; he knew that, as T.S. Eliot has put it since, "in my beginning is my end" and "every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning".