Does Interpretation Change a Work’s Meaning?
Another way of putting this question is to ask whether an
artwork changes its meaning over time due to the accretion of differing
interpretations. No one denies that with
each interpretation works of art have a trivial new property of now having this
new interpretation. But does the
interpretation actually have an affect on the work? Do interpretations of Hamlet change
Hamlet? The theory that interpretations change
meaning is called constructivism. The
interpretation, on this view, contributes to the creative process. The creative process does not stop with the
artist or author’s completion of the work. Those who oppose constructivism usually try to
distinguish between significance and meaning:
meaning, on this view, remains the same, but significance changes. As Stephen Davies puts it “Its significance is
what we make of its meaning when we consider the relation between its meaning
and matters of interest or value to us.”[1] The trouble is, when one looks at one’s
interpretation of a work, it is not clear how one is to distinguish the experience
of meaning from that of significance. Davies and a number of other philosophers
reject constructivism. There does seem
to be a problem with the notion that the meaning of the work changes. You can’t have a metaphysical theory in which
things change in two completely different ways at the same time because the
same thing is interpreted differently at that time. The problem however is based on entrenched ways of speaking and thinking. We can make a strong case for constructivism
by describing the matter in a different way.
On this view, there is no thing strictly called “the meaning” but rather
there is actualization of a potential, and each interpretation actualizes the
potential in a different way. (Joseph
Margolis has similarly said that there is no determinate meaning, but that
meaning is determinable.) The “meaning”
in the traditional sense is still an object of thought, but it is simply an unrealizable ideal: a fiction.
The meaning in this sense does not change, but then it has no content. There is nothing wrong of course with holding
(as a kind of useful myth) that the work has one true unchanging interpretation or
meaning. The real-world meaning is the potential a
thing has for interpretation: the potential that is actualized in the interpretation. This
potential (the meaning of the work in the only sense that there is a real
meaning rather than just an ideal one) does
change over time, which is to say that the possible actualizations of the
meaning of the work change. You can interpret the work in way a, b or c at
time t, but some possibilities fall out and others arise later, so that you can
interpret it in way c, d or e at time t2. Actually, with the arrival of a new interpretation other possibilities
for other interpretations emerge. The
interpretation constructs the work anew, but it also opens up a field of
possibility. What opponents of
constructivism fail to account for is what Margolis has called the flux of
history. Meanings do not exist eternal and unchanging, there for us to find...not any more than Platonic Forms do. There is not evidence for such things. Finally, there
is no problem, on this account, with multiple interpretations interpreting
different objects, for example, of there being a different Hamlet for each
interpretation. Hamlet remains the same
as does its ideal but content-less “meaning.” The notion that what changes is
how we look at the work and not the work itself depends on a strict mind/world
dualism that I cannot accept. Works of
art as living things: they gain their
life by being part of a creative process that continues in the understandings
and interpretations of their audiences.
