Mauricio Beuchot's Analogical Hermeneutics

Mauricio Hardie Beuchot Puente is a Mexican philosopher, research professor, poet, and Dominican priest who was born in Torreón, Coahuila in 1950. He entered the Dominican Order in 1971 and was ordained a priest in 1976. In 1973-1974, he studied at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and in 1980 he received his doctoral degree in philosophy from the Ibero-American University (UIA). Since 1985, he has been a professor at the Institute of Philological Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has also been a member of the Mexican Academy of History (since 1990), the Mexican Academy of Language (since 1997), the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (since 1999), the Mexican Academy of Human Rights (since 2000), and the Seminary of Mexican Culture (since 2006).
      He is the author of more than one hundred books, as well as many hundreds of articles and book chapters, and he has written on such topics as the history of philosophy, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, analytic philosophy, semiotics, structuralism, and hermeneutics. 
      In his Tratado de Hermenéutica Analógica: Hacia un Nuevo Modelo de Interpretación (2019, Treatise on Analogical Hermeneutics: Toward a New Model of Interpretation), Beuchot describes analogical hermeneutics as a theory and practice of interpretation that mediates between univocal and equivocal interpretations of a text. It is an alternative to univocality or equivocality of interpretation, allowing for more than one valid reading of a text and making space for plurality and depth of meaning.
      While a univocal model of interpretation allows for only one valid reading of a text, and an equivocal model may allow for diverse readings that are incompatible or incommensurable with one another, an analogical model allows for a plurality of correct or valid readings, while recognizing that some readings may come closer to the truth of the text than others.
      Beuchot argues that the univocal model of interpretation is in fact a denial of the possibility of hermeneutics, because hermeneutics can only exist if there is a multiplicity or diversity of meaning. On the other hand, the equivocal model of interpretation is also a denial of the possibility of hermeneutics, if there is no way of determining whether one interpretation is more correct than another.
      Analogical hermeneutics avoids the relativistic view that all interpretations are equally valid, and it also avoids the positivistic view that the only valid interpretation of a text is one that can be scientifically verified.
      Analogical meaning is closer to equivocality than to univocality, because it allows for both sameness and difference in meaning, with difference predominating. Analogical hermeneutics recognizes that a perfectly univocal interpretation of a text can never be achieved.¹ Thus, it avoids the extremes of both univocality and equivocality, and it seeks the most correct or valid reading among multiple possible readings of a text.
      According to Beuchot, the interpretation of a text is always undertaken with the aim to answer such questions as "What does the text mean?" "What does it want to say?" "Who is it addressed to?" and "What does it say to me?"²
      Since explanation of a text tends toward univocality, analogical hermeneutics may be more directed toward comprehension than explanation, although comprehension itself contains aspects of explanation.³
      Analogical hermeneutics may also be described as synchronic or diachronic (depending on whether it is more concerned with the systematicity or historicity of a text), and as syntagmatic or paradigmatic (depending on whether it is more concerned with the horizontal axis of language in which linguistic elements sequentially follow one another or the vertical axis of language in which linguistic elements may potentially be substituted for one another).
      Beuchot also explains that hermeneutics is always undertaken within a theoretical framework, conceptual scheme, frame of reference, or tradition. Interpretation of something from the past from a contemporary perspective will introduce an aspect of innovation in hermeneutics, which may be seen as a continuation of, or a break with, hermeneutic tradition.⁴ Thus, hermeneutics always involves the contextualization of a text, placing it within a (social, cultural, literary, or historical) context and avoiding the misunderstanding that may arise from decontextualizing it.⁵
      Hermeneutical argumentation (or argumentation to prove a particular interpretation) must itself be contextualized within a hermeneutical tradition to which its audience belongs if it is to be persuasive and convincing. Such argumentation may be more dialogic than monologic in nature, but it may employ various rhetorical or discursive strategies in order to demonstrate its own consistency, coherence, and rationality.
      The task of providing the global context for hermeneutics belongs to metaphysics, says Beuchot. Hermeneutics leads to metaphysics, and metaphysics supports hermeneutics.⁶  Metaphysics is a space of possibility for hermeneutics, insofar as the world can only be interpreted in light of Being. The horizon of Being illuminates and transcends the horizon of the world,⁷ and Being is therefore a horizon of possibility for any questioning or knowing. Hermeneutics leads to metaphysics by thematizing the world, and metaphysics is only possible through a hermeneutics that understands itself in and through Being.

      Analogical-iconic hermeneutics may resolve the struggle between literal and symbolic interpretation, since both kinds of interpretation may be necessary in some contexts. The icon or symbol may not allow interpretation to be imposed on it in some contexts, and it may demand more to be seen or heard than read.⁸ Thus, an analogical-iconic hermeneutics may move from an analogical to an iconographic understanding of the meaning of linguistic signs and symbols.
      The use of analogy as a means of reconciling differences between texts may open up possibilities for interpretation by avoiding the extremes of univocity and equivocation.⁹ Thus, analogy may be a kind of dialectical mediation between, rather than a synthesis of, the two extremes. Dialecticizing analogy and analogizing dialectics may lead to a more dynamic analogical hermeneutics that can recognize the becoming of events as texts and texts as events.¹⁰ The exploration of the dialectical nature of analogy may also be helpful when we encounter epistemological thresholds or limits where formal, categorical, or analytical knowledge cannot be applied.¹¹


FOOTNOTES

¹Mauricio Beuchot, Tratado de hermenéutica analógica. Hacia un nuevo modelo de interpretación (Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019), p. 57
²Ibid., p. 29.
³Ibid., p. 63.
⁴Ibid., p. 70.
⁵Ibid., p. 16.
⁶Ibid., p. 112.
⁷Ibid., p. 113.
⁸Ibid., p. 199.
⁹Ibid., p. 206.
¹⁰Ibid., p. 216.
¹¹Ibid., pp. 216-217.