Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the "I"

Although we tend unreflectively to think of interpretation as carried on in language and as applied to linguistic expression in oral utterance or in text, interpretation can in fact be much larger than language in human life. In a quite ordinary and straightforward sense, to interpret means for a human being to bring out for another human being or for other human beings (or for himself or herself) what is concealed in a given manifestation, that is, what is concealed in a verbal statement or a given phenomenon or state of affairs providing information. We can interpret anything that provides information: not merely a verbal statement but also a sunset, a rumble in an automobile transmission, a gesture, a performance of instrumental music, a person’s gait. The terms “concealed,” “manifestation,” and “revealed,” just used, betray that we are thinking of knowledge here, as is common, by analogy basically with the sense of vision, rather than of hearing (voice-and-ear) or smell or taste or the manifold senses we group under “touch” (hot-cold, wetdry, rough-smooth, soft-hard, resistant-yielding, and so on). Interpretation could be considered with regard to knowledge conceived by analogy with one or another of these other senses, too, but to do so would make a long, long story, and we can forego such considerations here. As interpretation can apply to any sort of phenomenon, so it can be expressed in all sorts of human ways, not merely verbal but also nonverbal—for example, by raised eyebrows, a wave of the hand, a thumbs-down gesture, a knowing grin, or in non-gesticulatory ways, as by a grumble or by the clothes one wears or by a fireworks display. These nonverbal interpretations are always to some degree dependent on the culture in which the interpreters live, but some are also to some degree common to all human cultures. Thus, there are different kinds of smiles