James K. A. Smith - The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic

2000, 2012 by James K. A. Smith

Published by Baker Academic
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Ebook edition created 2012

Ebook corrections 08.16.2022

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ISBN 978-1-4412-3632-6

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For Deanna,

still, always.

There is a kind of striving that is appropriate to a human life; and there is a kind of striving that consists in trying to depart from that life to another life. This is what hubris isthe failure to comprehend what sort of life one has actually got, the failure to live within its limits... the failure, being mortal, to think mortal thoughts. Correctly understood, the injunction to avoid hubris is not a penance or denialit is an instruction as to where the valuable things for us are to be found.

Martha Nussbaum, Loves Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 381.

I was doing a lot of different things at every moment. Even as I was crying, I was also scanning the ground for the missing piece of my tent, and taking my camera out of my pocket and trying to capture the celestial beauty of the light and the landscape, and damning myself for doing this when I should have been purely mourning, and telling myself that it was O.K. that Id failed in my attempt to see the rayadito in what would surely be my only visit to the islandthat it was better this way, and that it was time to accept finitude and incompleteness and leave certain birds forever unseen, that the ability to accept this was the gift Id been given and my beloved dead friend had not.

Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe , David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude, The New Yorker , April 18, 2011, 93.

All practice divination, however intermittently, erroneously, dishonestly, or disappointedly; most of all, disappointedly. For whether one thinks that ones purpose is to re-cognize the original meaning, or to fall headlong into a text that is a treacherous network rather than a continuous and systematic sequence, one may be sure of one thing, and that is disappointment. It has sometimes been thought, and in my opinion rightly, that the world is also like that.... In any case, a sense of mystery is a different thing from an ability to interpret it, and the largest consolation is that without interpretation there would be no mystery. What must not be looked for is some obvious public success. To see, even to perceive, to hear, even to understand, is not the same thing as to explain or even the same thing as to have access. The desires of interpreters are good because without them the world and the text are tacitly declared to be impossible; perhaps they are, but we must live as if the case were otherwise.

Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 126.