Interpretation: Is that All There Is?

In 1969, Peggy Lee recorded a song by Lieber and Stoller (legendary rock 'n' roll songwriters) called "Is That All There Is?", in which the singer recollects significant life experiences, followed by a sort of Joycean reverse-epiphany, where she realizes that the experiences are invariably disappointing, leading her to ask "is that all there is?" The chorus is remarkable:

Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends,
Then let's keep dancing.
Let's break out the booze and have a ball,
If that's all there is.

The song quite intelligently presents a profound philosophical issue (really, a religious issue) in a way that resonates with listeners of all different types of background and intelligence. It's no easy feat to present the struggle to find meaning in life, dealt with by Plato, Boethius, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Camus with varying levels of success, in four minute pop song. Go over to YouTube and check it out...after you read this.

The reason I wanted to lead off with a reference to a little gem of popular music from about 40 years ago is because it leads into an interesting question. If the hermeneutic task extends from texts to all of life, if indeed there is nothing but interpretation, then we have a right to ask ourselves, "is that all there is?" It leads into the final verse of Miss Peggy Lee's song: "I know what you must be saying to yourselves: if that's the way she feels about it, why doesn't she just end it all?"

I've grown to see value in the work of Jacques Derrida, but my first brush with his thought inevitably left me feeling a little bit existential. Could that really be it? Is that what the Western tradition has come down to, binaries deconstructing themselves? Of course, this sells frere Jacques and his ideas a bit short, but it does lead me to wonder if all these theories are ultimately destructive. If interpretation is all there is, where was humanity before the seeds of hermeneutic theory were first developed by Schleiermacher in the 18th century?

If I didn't think that the task of interpretation was embedded in the thought of philosophers and thinkers stretching back to late antiquity, I would abandon it, of course. I am one of those pesky types who thinks that truth is truth, and we've all been batting at it, but never quite been able to get our mitts on it as a race. I'm not interested in developing the implications of this for religion, but I think that truth can be found in a variety of places and in a variety of cultures and traditions. Where ultimate truth resides is a question I can leave for another day.

Ultimately, everything might be interpretation, but that doesn't mean that we have to ask "is that all there is?" Although E.D. Hirsch maintained that the way to discover the validity of an interpretation was to discern the meaning of the author, I prefer Paul Ricoeur's move (as he titles his subheadings in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning) from "guess to validation," from "explanation to comprehension." These are important moves; I will deal with these ideas in a later post.

This is a very rough sketch of an overall defense of interpretation as a practice which adds meaning to life, which is not antagonistic or destructive to ancient wisdom. I do not advocate blind loyalty to a tradition (in this case, I suppose, the so-called "Western" tradition), but part of the task of hermeneutics as I see it requires continuing interpretation of the ideas that have lead us to where we are today.

A hermeneutics of development and continuance will allow us to approach the hermeneutic task in such a way that it could conceivably offer answers to the question "is that all there is?"