Category: Symbols Turning

The number of coherent interpretations of a text may be infinite, but not all interpretations are coherent.

Texts frequently say more than their authors intended to say, but less than what many incontinent readers would like them to say. Independent of any alleged intention of the author is the intention of the text. But a text exists only as a physical object, as a Linear Text Manifestation. It is possible to speak of text intentions only as the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader. The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text intention. A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. Such a Model Reader is not the one who makes the only right conjecture. A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. But infinite conjecture does not mean any possible conjecture.

— Eco (1990, 148)

Eco follows this up with an example of how some conjectural readings of a passage in Finnegans Wake – which is ‘itself a metaphor for the process of unlimited semiosis’ (Eco 1979, 70) – are tested and refuted by invoking the principle of ‘internal textual coherence.’ The scientific method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (Popper 1968) also takes coherence as a leading principle, although it also brings experience of the external world to bear on the question, by making observations which could refute even an internally coherent conjecture. The method of the artist is essentially the same, according to Gombrich (2002); he calls it ‘schema and correction’ or ‘making before matching.’ If the goal of a drawing, for instance, is an accurate depiction of an object, you have to make the drawing before you can see how well it matches the object.

A hypothesis is a model or theory on probation. An explicit model is a habit on probation; an established (‘fixed,’ ‘proven’) habit acts implicitly.

It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception.

— Northrop Frye (1947, 427-8)

This would certainly apply to works of literary art – and to scriptures – which function as turning symbols. Do they differ in this respect from scientific works, or philosophical works, which can also work as turning symbols? That depends on the nature of the objects of these symbols, and the nature of the collateral experience of those objects which the reader brings to the act of meaning. That is always the reader’s act, although the Truth of the symbol (argument or proposition) must be, for the reader, independent of the reader’s personal belief.

How can scripture reading come to pierce an ox hide?

— T’ien-t’ung (Cleary 1997b, 322)

Where does a gnox hide? Who knows?
Our habit is to read utterances like these as rhetorical questions – as if we gnew the answers. A reading practice like Dogen‘s challenges this habit, challenges us to penetrate the shell of habits. Symbols which are only symbols do not act as turning signs: ‘Strictly pure Symbols can signify only things familiar, and those only in so far as they are familiar’ (Peirce, CP 4.544n, 1906). The turning symbol must involve an Index directing attention beyond the familiar.

Where is the Index in this sentence?

Nor are Symbols and Indices together generally enough. The arrangement of the words in the sentence, for instance, must serve as Icons, in order that the sentence may be understood. The chief need for the Icons is in order to show the Forms of the synthesis of the elements of thought. For in precision of speech, Icons can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings.

— Peirce, CP 4.544, ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’

How do you Feel?