SURPLUS OF MEANING AND EFFECTIVE HISTORY

In philosophy, there are two branches which try to explain the relation between the past and the present/future. They are Paul Ricoeur’s theory of ‘surplus of meaning’ and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of ‘effective history’.


Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) is a French philosopher and anthropologist. He proposed that the ‘semantics’ career of a text would last longer than its ‘semiotic’ status. A text becomes the trace of the past in the present and future from which people in the present and future can try to experience the past. An event in the past will become a discourse in the future which can represent the past. The ‘surplus of meaning’ of a text arise when the text distanciated from its author and its original context.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) is a German philosopher. He proposed the theory that between the past and the present, a dialogue is exist. The present belongs to the past just like a listener belongs to a speaker. The meaning of the past is not complete without the present. The past continues in the present with an incomplete meaning. The people in the present could see into the past through the text until the limit of the horizon.

After trying to understand Paul Ricouer’s theory of ‘surplus of meaning’ and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of ‘effective history’, I find that what we know as present is the result of the past. The present prepares the ground for the present to exist. However, the past itself will not be complete without the works in the present as Gadamer said in his theory. The continuity of the past depends on the interpretation of the people in the present. The way they interpret works of the past is effected by how they receive their understanding of the past itself.
The works in the present are not merely the repetition of the works of the past but they are the outcome of the present’s creation in interpreting the past. Through time, the meaning of works of the past keep on folded and folded. The ability of the present to re-create the meaning of the past is also folded by the modification of tradition passed from generation to generation.
When we observed the work of the past, we try to re-create the meaning of the object observed and try to re-define the meaning of it. The result of the re-creation and re-definition in the present will never be the same as the result created by the people before us because the atmosphere of the re-creation and re-definition is different.

As the past does not bring its complete meaning itself to the present, it will never appeared completely to the future of it because the effort to re-create and redefine the work will never recovered the true meaning of the work. The result of these efforts will always be the modification of meaning which will prepare the ground for the future works.
In the other hand, the present itself will not be complete without the work of the past because without the past, the present will not have its root in our consciousness. This root is important to state the position of the work of the present in our consciousness. The present is the reflection of the past but it is not like our reflection in the mirror; the reflection of the past in the present is distorted by the modification of tradition.