3. The philosophical level: or ars interpretandi
Owing to the fact that it is not easy to write, exactly because the basis of writing are found in the history and the ways of writing, or according to the psycholinguist and philosopher Jacques Derrida’ in his “L’ecriture et la difference,” those basis of writing are in a close relation with differences within the various ways of writing, it is natural to say that if we talk about the philosophical concept of time from the literal aspect, we should “borrow” facts also from the science of philosophy; or according to Edward Levines (in his “The Totality and Infinity”), with “ the way of interpretation of the intellectual production of man as a onthologic totality”. Otherwise, will not have all the indispensable elements of analysis. The literary critique, the one that is responsible of evaluating the work of art; one of the most essential elements in the aesthetics of reception (at least according to the German philologist Hans Robert Jauss), has the main part in the analysis of the work of art. The basis or better the highest level of such an analysis the philosophical branch of hermeneutics, which in turn represents the philosophical analysis (or better decomposing) of the work of art, in its narrowest sense. But, hermeneutics does not stop only to that. It concerns also the analysis of human values (which basis is in axiology and psychology), as well as the revising of the different phases of the literary text by the side of the author. As a consequence of this, the hermeneutics from the literal point of view considers principally these two grounds, which represent a totality from the philosophical point of view. Examples: if the novels of Henry James or of Dostoyewski represent the culmination of the psychological novel, we would put the question, what was the way in which the author, through the examples of the narrators has formulated the concept of time? Or, another question: when did Stephen Dedalus speak in the first person singular or Ulysses; are such expressed opinions, opinions of the author or they belong to someone else? Or do they represent a half-awakened psychological status of the protagonist that would represent a reminiscence or a half-reminiscence of his or her actions? Hermeneutics, according to the scientists themselves, represents a higher level of analysis in comparison with semiotics, exactly because it builds a critical and a self-critical approach. That is the reason for the saying that hermeneutics is the art of interpretation (“ars interpretandi”), which consists of ars explicandi and ars syllabandi. Examples: if Iago in the play “Othello” by William Shakespeare is a modus vivendi protagonist, how do the other characters behave? How do we explain the victory of Othello with the army, taking into account the humiliating element that surrounds him, and the unseriousness of his naпve behaviour? Did the author really foresee to have such characters? These are the questions which hermeneutics would put forwards, keeping of course always in mind, not to run into ad absurdum, or to close the hermeneutic circle. And this can be explained by the fact that philosophy, or according to Heidegger (we mention him because “without a phenomenology there is not ontology”), the onthical and ontological determination of the human being passes to the extra-logical field, in the frames of the irrationality; and we have to find the solution in the abstract hermeneutic decomposing of categories. In that context, speaking concretely, semiotics would put forwards the following questions: which would be the communication channel through which we would understand the marital relationship between Othello and Desdemona? Is there something that has gone wrong? Or: why Macbeth should be so “black”? The semiotic topos of ambition, the desire for the crown, is developed through its trip within the frames of the communication channel; whereas the message that comes out on the other side of the communication channel are the tragic consequences, which are being described.
If we take linguistics as a basis, especially the theory of Ferdinand de Sossire, we can conclude the following: hermeneutics and semiotics as binary oppositions, as an interrelation, as main factors in the process of interpretation, are linked by the category of time. Further: an encoding and precoding process must occur of the signs themselves, the semic codes of Roland Barthes are being constituted, we obtain this way the toposes of Algirades Jullien Greimass, coming this way to the deep structure. Seen from semiological aspect, it represents a relationship between the structures. If two semantic entities communicate we have got the correlation between them; we create this way the complex structure of the temporal parallelism in the frames of the global event (the contents in the novel, the epical narrating in epics, the development of the dramatic situation in dramaturgy, the development of the main theme and the implication of the secondary theme and their correlation in reaching the culmination in the sonata, symphony, ect). This, as a matter of fact explains the art as a temporal correlation among all these elements.