Dialectical Readings: Three Types of Interpretations

by Stephen N. Dunning

Interpretation pervades human thinking. Whether perception or experience, spoken word or written theory, whatever enters our consciousness must be interpreted in order to be understood. Every area of inquiry―art and literature, philosophy and religion, history and the social sciences, even many aspects of the natural sciences―involves countless opportunities to interpret the object of inquiry according to very different paradigms. These paradigms may derive from the language we speak, the nature of our education, or personal preferences. The abundance and diversity of paradigms make interpretation both fascinating in its complexity and often frustrating for the conflicts it generates. In Dialectical Readings , Dunning distinguishes three types of interpretation, each defined in terms of a distinctive dialectical way of theoretical interpretation, which assumes binary oppositions; transactional interpretation, which seeks reciprocal relations; and transformational interpretation, which discerns paradoxical meanings. Dunning offers new and insightful readings of familiar texts by B. F. Skinner, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lee Benson, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault and sheds new light on works by Thomas Kuhn, Joseph Campbell, Reinhold Niebuhr, Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Paul Ricoeur. Dialectical Readings enables readers to recognize diverse dialectical approaches to understanding―their own as well as those of others―in a way that provides new and helpful insights into a wide variety of subjects in which conflicting interpretations abound.

Genres: Philosophy

200 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 1997

About the author

Stephen N. Dunning is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Ambitious work to take on such a wide breadth of philosophy, postmodern and early western psychological literature. Not only that, but to do so while operationally defining ideas like “love” dialectically in reference to someone like humanist psychologist and vocal Marxist Erich Fromm. What a challenge to take such a rationalist lens to the endeavor. The ideas as dialectic are so profound in and of themselves. That’s what makes this book so impressive. This kind of philosophy is interesting and needs more exploration.

All that said, it’s easy to lose track of when we’re supposed to be objectively critiquing dialectic from a reductionist perspective vs. when we’re supposed to be recognizing the individualistic attributes of a great thinker like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, referenced to have pointed out the paradox of Christianity. A work like this will get confusing. In one way the credibility of the writing holds up very well and touts a mountain of evidence. In another way, it’s missing its humanist/postmodern identity. Every logician who mixes and matches so many philosophies and sciences inevitably become a postmodernist, in reality, much more objective than they could ever come across, even after accumulating all the reductionist evidence. The logic of the ideas, as evidence, holds up well without needing to draw distinct lines of scientific credibility.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has crossed my mind so often since reading it a year and a half ago that I am inspired to review and reread this academic publication from the Philosophic lexicon of postmodern time. What Dunning has mapped is a simple yet highly effective topology of theory, from Foucault to Joseph Campbell, Dunning holds the lens of duality or seeming duality up against some fairly famous theorists and then shines a rather classic philosophic light through that lens, namely what are the binaries in this or that theorist's approach to mapping out what we are and who we do as what. Dunning gives us the 30 minute review of the ancient questions, "Where I do end and the other begin?" If there be a thought or a word or a deed it will be reducible to no less than a binary, unless one can "transcend" any given duality through a kind of swing between the poles until the objective and subjective become intertwined or even somehow merged together through transforming their original meanings. The theorists whom Dunning uses as examples are only scrutinized as polarized (such as Foucault whom Dunning views as a staunch subjectivist to Fromm whom thought the "other" and the "I" might have a complimentary nature given any relationship between them and finally the transcendentalists whom Dunning credits with the ability to state a position on life that is neither rooted in subjective or objective dominions but whose positions merge and blend the poles, actually changing their very nature through their interplay. There is a way of theorizing (which always boils down to some form of dialectic, or duality) that combines, merges and ultimately transforms the very nature of the original polarity.
While Dunning claimed that he was just making up a humble and arbitrary topology of how to view theory, which might just help his students read more critically, and he claimed that the polarized theory was not inferior or superior to the transcendental type of dialectic I took neither claim to heart. I thought his simple topology was brilliant and universal and I was delighted to see Foucault reduced to what was clearly a lesser light than say Huxley or some of the deep thinkers who can swing between the poles of objective empiricism and dreaming intuition as easily as bread with jam is both a pleasure and a substance. Anyway I thought he had a very thoughtful lens to look with. Try it and read