A paradox in intentionalism

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 32-48

  Nathan, Daniel O ^a  

^a TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34249430372     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/ayi003     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. This may seem to be a reductia of the intentionalist view, but it is indeed held by important literary theorists, specifically in the work of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels: see 'Against Theory', in W. J, T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)
2. and 'Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction', Critical Inquiry, vol. 14 (1987). That is at least what they said in their writings; what they meant, of course, might be different
3. To make that clear, however, requires separate argument. I make the argument in 'Irony, Metaphor and the Problem of Intention', in Gary Iseminger (ed.), Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1992)
4. In his recent book, A Matter of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1997)
5. Justice Antonin Scalia calls himself an 'originalist', but it is clear from his discussion that his theory more closely matches what I call here 'textualism'. On the other hand, Robert Bork, in The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1990), pp. 154-155
6. comes much closer in his explication of original understanding to advocating originalism as I define it here. But the clearest popular example is found in E. Meese, 'The Battleground for the Constitution', Policy Review, vol. 35 (1986), pp. 32-35
7. On some of the salient differences between the two, see Jeremy Waldron, 'Legislator's Intentions and Unintentional Legislation', in A. Marmor (ed.), Law and Interpretation: Essays in Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon 1995), pp. 329-356
8. The ambiguity of the word 'intent' is such that it can be used on the one hand to refer to a mental state or, on the other, interchangeably with 'meaning'. This ambiguity is mirrored in the word 'meant', (Consider the uses of 'meant' in 'I meant to unplug the iron' and 'His gesture meant we were invited in'.) Thus, 'intent' applied to assessing an agent's motivation refers to a background mental state, as in 'Was his intent to set the house on fire?' while 'intent' applied to, for example, some linguistic entity, as in 'What was the intent of the sentence?' can be synonymous with 'meaning'. There is, yet, at least a third sense of'intent' referring to the possession of abroader sort of aim or purpose. It is in a special understanding of this last sense-perhaps related to Aristotle's notions of final or formal causes, decidedly not efficient cause-that we may find the necessity of intent for any sort of interpretation. (Cf. Alexander Nehamas, 'The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal', Critical Inquiry, vol. 8 [1981]
9. and 'What an Author Is', Journal of Philosophy [1986], pp. 685-691
10. Also, Daniel O. Nathan, 'Irony, Metaphor and the Problem of Intention', in Iseminger, Intention and Interpretation.)
11. In Interpretation and Legal Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Andrei Marmor argues for intentionalism with respect to statutory interpretation by basing it on a theory of legal authority generally. I do not mean to suggest that the common-sense point about the authoritativeness of the framers has anything important to do with Marmor's more serious argument
12. In law, for example, see Paul Brest, 'The Misconceived Quest for Original Intent', Boston University Law Review, vol. 60 (1980), pp. 204ff
13. Fred Schauer, 'An Essay on Constitutional Language', UCLA Law Review, vol. 29 (1982), pp. 797ff.
14. David Lyons, 'Constitutional Interpretation and Original Meaning', in Moral Aspects of Legal Theory (New York: Cambridge U.P., 1993)
15. Ronald Dworkin, 'The Forum of Principle', New York University Law Review, vol. 56 (198), pp. 12-13
16. Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1996), among many others
17. Cf. Jerry A. Fodor, 'Déjà Vu All Over Again: How Danto's Aesthetics Recapitulates the Philosophy of Mind', in Danto and His Critics (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 41-55
18. Anthony Savile, 'Instrumentalism and the Interpretation of Narrative', Mind, vol. 105, no. 420 (1996), pp. 556-561
19. That is, the meaning conveyed in language, for example, as contrasted with natural symptoms
20. The idea of levels or a hierarchy of intentions is not new. Randall Dipert drew attention to a layering of intentions in musical works in 'The Composer's Intentions', Musical Quarterly, vol. 64 (1980), pp. 205-218
21. and Ronald Dworkin discusses levels of intention in Law's Empire (Cambridge, iMA: Harvard U.P., 1986), and elsewhere. But my specification of the second-order intention here differs from either of their approaches, as do what I take to be its implications
22. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen introduced a relevantly similar notion in Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) when, in their discussion of the concept of literature, they referred to an 'intention to invoke a literary response'. And their successive discussion of the "literary stance' understands that in terms of an institutional practice that is 'constituted by a set of conventions and concepts which both regulate and define the actions and products involved in the practice' (p. 256, all emphases theirs). This is directly consistent with my underlying approach to art as one of several related normatively driven social enterprises. Although when I first developed the basic line in this paper it was independent of awareness of (and in fact pre-dated the publication ot) Lamarque and Olsen's work on the topic, it is open the reader to understand my project here as arguing for specific implications (implications that they indeed might not accept) of their basic insights
23. There are many different senses in which the arts or individual works of art have been claimed to be autonomous. It will become apparent that the autonomy I am attributing to art works here is quite modest relative to many others
24. To point out this idea of the potential detachment of authors from their own work, Ronald Dworkin famously makes use of an example from John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman in 'How Law Is Like Literature' (reprinted in A Matter of Principle [New York: Oxford, 1985])
25. Dworkin does not quite commit to the conceptual claim being asserted here, though he toys with it when he expresses the 'suspicion' that even 'regarding something one has produced as a novel or poem or painting, rather than a set of propositions or marks, depends on regarding it as something that can be detached and interpreted ...'. Anthony Savile discusses the Fowles example and responds to Dworkin's position in 'The Rationale of Restoration', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3 (1993), p. 473
26. Similar expressions are to be found in writings actual authors, among them Melville and, unsurprisingly, T. S. Eliot, as well as a number of contemporary authors. John Cheever, for example, speaks of the conflation of autobiography with fiction as an insult to fiction
27. Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth', translated and reprinted in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge U.P., 1986), p. 113
28. Again, compare Lamarque and Olsen's description of the literary stance as being 'defined by the expectation of... a certain type of value, i.e., literary aesthetic value, in the text in question' (Truth, Fiction, and Literature, p. 256)
29. One can see the framing implicit, for example, in Danto's interpretability condition on artworks
30. Gerald Graff, 'Literature as Assertions', in Ira Konigsberg (ed.), American Criticism in the Past-Structurlist Age (Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, University of Michigan, 1981), p. 146
31. Tatarkiewicz claims that Aristotle took art to be universal in two senses: (i) in dealing with general problems, and (ii) in doing so in a way that could be understood by everyone, specifically where this means it is not to merely reflect the personal vision of the artist. See his History of Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970-1974), vol. I, pp. 149-150. Also, in Metaphysics 981a 5: 'art arises, when from many notions gained by experience, one universal judgment about a class of objects is produced' (trans. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross)
32. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'Theory of Interpretation', Harvard Law Review, vol. 12 (1899), p. 418; quoted in Brest, 'Misconceived Quest', italics added
33. There is an important literature on this issue in American jurisprudence, specifically concerning the role of Framer's Intent in interpreting the Constitution and its relation to democratic principles and popular sovereignty, See Lyons, 'Constitutional Interpretation'
34. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (New York: Oxford U.P., 1961), pp. 38-39
35. R. Dworkin, Law's Empire, ch. 9
36. A. Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation, p. 17 (emphasis added)
37. This point overlaps with the notion of externality, and it suggests that the possibility of objectivity of the law requires the rejection of both actual intentionalism as well as reader response approaches to interpretation
38. Cf. Richard Wasserstrom, The Judicial Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford U.P., 1961), pp. 110-111
39. Cf. Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 29ft"
40. I mean this to be distinct from, though not unrelated to, Hart's notion of the persistence of law. As may be apparent, persistence in Hart also has implications for the issue of second order intentions in the law. (See Hart, The Concept of Law, pp. 60-64.)
41. Drafts and elements of this paper have been presented in various places over a span of about a decade. The initial version was given at Dartmouth College, as part of its Sapentia Lecture Series, and I want to thank Robert Fogelin, Susan Brison, Walter Sinott-Armstrong, Fred Schauer, and the other members of the Humanities Institute for their comments and encouragement at that time. Parts were later presented at sessions of the American Society for Aesthetics, and I received helpful comments there from William Tolhurst, Berel Lang, Robert Stecker, and my colleague Aaron Meskin. I also want to thank Stephen Davies for his discussion of the paper with me, and for the clarity and intelligence of his own work on intentionalism