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PARTISAN REVIEW
is therefore possible is " Kanti ani sm gone mad ." Kant was concerned
to
show, in regard to
N aturw issen schaft,
that there was a uni versal
structure of subj ectivity tha t secured the possibility of scientifi c know–
ledge. Hirsch describes how Dilthey extended Kant 's reasoning to the
a rea of
Geisteswissenschaft,
and overcame the nightmare of total
rel a ti vism by demonstra ting tha t the perspective we learn from our
culture is not totall y determining. Any reader can in principl e under–
stand an y writer because he is abl e to adopt alien cultural ca tegori es (a
capacity tha t Vico and Herder, the fa thers of cultural relativi sm, never
doubted ). Husserl refined this idea by arguing, in opposition to
Heidegger, that we are able
to
" bracket" our cha racteristi c way of
seeing; no thing requires that the altitudes of a culture or of an
individual be homogeneous; each of us can to some extent detach
himself from his customary perspective. Piaget added that as children
we in fact all learn continuall y to correct the hypotheses we construct
about the world. Heidegger's idea that we are all trapped by our
W elt
is, in Karl Popper' s words, merely "a diffi culty exaggera ted into an
impossi bility."
The structuralist critics have attempted to circumvent the idea of a
correct understanding between persons by insisting that the lang uage
of a text is separate from the mind of its producer. Hirsch effecti vely
counters this argument by pointing out that a pa rticul ar linguisti c
form cannot be said to control meaning completely because several
forms may have the same meaning and several meanings the same
form , when the context permits. There is, in other words, no escaping
the idea of intenti on embedded in a lingui stic context (something like
J.
L.
Austin 's " ill ocutionary force," a force beyond mere locuti ons but
ari sing from them ). This sort of intenti on, of course, is quite different
from the extrinsic intenti on marked off by the New Criti cs as irrele–
vant. Nor does it lead us back to a fixed independent meanin g that
rul es out the possibilit y of many correct interpreta ti ons; the ques ti on is
whether, in view of tha t possibility, we can say we are looking at the
same o bj ect and on that bas is define o bj ectivity.
The idea that interpreters, despite their different viewpoints,
perceive the same obj ect is crucial to Hirsch 's di stincti on between
meaning and significance, roughl y description and eva luati on . T his
distincti on has practical importance (although it is often diffi cult to
tell in parti cul ar cases -Hirsch never descends to cases -where one
leaves off and the other begins) but even more importance theoreticall y.
Obj ectivity in criticism, as indeed in science, can onl y be measured by
consensus. But meaning can never be consensual since it is by defini-
