Forms of Authorial Presence

Rainer Specht, in an essay on Alfred North Whitehead's interpretation of John Locke, develops a schema of six forms of authorial presence.  The purpose is to explain how Locke was present to Whitehead, although Whitehead misunderstood and misquoted Locke in many ways (which is the main theme of the paper).  These forms are:

1. Institutional presence.  "In this case, the institution, for reasons that can be reconstructed, identifies itself with an author to such an extent that an attack on him is also an attack on the institution that needs to be punished politically or through disciplinary sanctions."  The examples Specht gives are St. Thomas Aquinas in the Roman Catholic Church (at least, for many centuries) and Karl Marx in the Soviet Union.  (This essay comes from a book published in 1990, just before the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall: the back-cover blurb highlights that it is mainly the work of authors from West Germany.)  We might also think of Mao Zedong in Communist China, or the Founding Fathers in the United States.
2. Scholastic presence or presence of direction.  This is a more individual form than the prior one; in this form, "the adherents of the school or direction must relate their own philosophy to the model authors of the school; in this case, deviations are either made difficult or are punished within the school."  So any Thomist or Neo-Thomist must relate to Thomas himself, to be worthy of the name.
   
3. Presence by means of education.  Here, "the authors serve as conventional objects of instruction and admiration or of degradation within the group so educated without there being any more definite sort of obligation."  Such would be the various "canons" of authors, such as the "Western Canon" of literature and philosophy.
4. Working presence.  "This type of presence arises when someone within the framework of his own reflection takes literally an author handed on by education, and either accepts or rejects individual theses of that author as he understands them, when he takes them as occasions for the movement of his own thought, and rearranges terms and patterns of thought at his discretion."  This is a more individual version of presence by means of education, and a much more detailed one.  Key, though, is the fact that the later author is using the prior author as a stepping-stone, as a goad to thought, and that he does not busy himself with being exact to the former author's thought ("rearranges terms and patterns of thought at his discretion").  It is this presence that Specht argues Locke has for Whitehead.
5. Presence of meaning.  This presence is much less free-wheeling than working presence; here "precise wording and contents are carefully respected and are interpreted and attributed a certain meaning from the perspective of life-world and from a doctrinal point of view, without the application of philological methods and without obligation towards the intention of the author.  One is not in control of texts in this case, but rather binds oneself to them in a definite way."  In working presence, the author is in control of the texts, unlike here.
6. Philological presence.  This presence is about "reconstructing an author's intentions according to textual criteria."  Specht says that his interpretation of Locke in this essay is under this presence "because the philological presence in principle allows the deformation of an author's reception to be ascertained and judged."

It is an interesting and useful schema, though some distinctions are not wholly clear.  Philological presence, Specht says, "is not immediately occasioned by the life-world or by doctrine," which he says distinguishes it from the former five presences.  Whose life-world and doctrine?  Not the author who is present, it seems: presence of meaning pays attention to these two, but without caring for the author's intentions.  It seems presence of meaning is precise in its quotations and in its portrayal of the "contents" of the text, yet, somehow, while ignoring the author's intentions.  One somehow binds oneself to these accurate texts, and to the doctrine they express, without caring for whether the author himself expressed that doctrine.  Whose doctrine, then, is ruling this presence?  That is where I am little unclear.

(I find a little relation of the presence of meaning with the deconstructionist idea of the text betraying itself, of analyzing what the text is really saying, absent author's intentions.  In such interpretation, the precise words used in the text are critical, and the goal is to be exact to what the text is saying, regardless of what the author was trying to say.  Often, deconstructionists find that the texts express unconscious biases of the author: are these the "life-world" and "doctrinal point of view" that Specht mentioned?  Or was Specht instead talking about a doctrine that ignores the author's individual intentions in order to apply a quotation as a proof-text, as many lump all the Fathers together into a single doctrine, ignoring the individualities of each author's thought?  Once again: whose is the doctrine?)

Still, all in all, I find this a fruitful schema, and one that could be very useful in analyzing how authors relate to their predecessors, to the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

Source: Rainer Specht, "Whitehead's Interpretation of Locke in Process and Reality," in Whitehead's Metaphysics of Creativity, eds. Friedrich Rapp and Reiner Wiehl (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1990), 49-50.  The full essay is in ibid., 34-56. 

Text ©2024 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.