Comment on David Summers's Paper

Abstract

T HESE REMARKS are suggested by David Summers's paper rather than criticisms of it. Certain figures which we have been considering serve to give the works to which they apply a more deterministic character than they would otherwise have-to suggest that they are not in fact made by a human creator and consequently to put more stress on the role of the interpreter. The figure of the river is popular in religious language (Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away, they fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day). It is equally popular in descriptions of unwritten law. For example, the eighteenth-century Scottish judge Lord Kames, author of Elements of Criticism, urged the historical study of the law of any country by comparing it with the river Nile. When we begin at the source and follow the current of the law ... all its relations and dependencies are traced with no greater difficulty than are the many streams into which that magnificent river is divided, before it is lost in the sea.1 Calvin Woodard's paper recalls the same image, and we have learned that when Kafka wanted to suggest that he was driven on by forces beyond his control he adopted the same figure. On the other hand, when we want to minimize the role of the interpreter we use different figures which emphasize the creator, and of these intention is the prime example. To speak of intention implies that the work in question is an expression of the author's will. At that point we have to consider whether the author wished what he said to be understood in the context of his own time-as his contemporaries would probably have understood it. If, as we have learned, Beethoven's contemporaries may have expected every crescendo to be accompanied by an accelerando and every diminuendo to be accompanied by a ritardando, must we assume that whenever he wrote cresc. he intended the contemporary conventions to be followed? Perhaps, but not certainly. Intention in relation to legal interpretation became prominent in the nineteenth century, when lawyers in civil law systems saw all legal acts, whether a contract, a testamentary disposition, or a legislative enactment, as acts of the will. This raises the question whether will