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.

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T.S ELLIOT AND TRADITION

No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. This literary observation is proposed by T.S. Elliot in his essay ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’ published in 1917. Tradition, according to Elliot, is a price of great labour. People in the present do not have tradition just like that but they have to gain it with the effort to understand the tradition itself. Tradition is something that passes down toward generation boldly because each generation will try to learn and understand the tradition from they has in their historical sense.

Elliot described in his observation that in any work of art, there must be the trace of the work in the past. And also to analyze a work of art, we should put it side by side with the work from the past. We do this thing not to judge which one of them better than the other but to compare and to contrast one to another aesthetically because from the very beginning there is already a structural order of art in every culture. The aesthetic value of a poem which we try to compare and contrast is purely about the poem itself, not then life of the poet.
The work of art in the present is only the continuation of the existing order of art. If we try to measure the work of art without the previous work, we could not find the real value of that work because the value of a work of art is in its position in the simultaneous order of art in tradition. The work of a poet in the present contains the poet’s appreciation toward the works of the earlier poet. This appreciation is the result of the poet’s historical sense. The historical sense which the poet has is not only deal with the pastness of the past but also the presence of the past in the present. The historical sense of the artist is the result of his knowledge upon the work of artists in the past and his experience in his youth period.
The poet could takes he past as his standpoint in creating his work. The poet should be aware that the order never changes; the existence of the art itself never changes but the material to build the art always changing. An artist should always aware that he should become the part of this order; he will never stand alone as an individual in art. That is why an artist should have a good knowledge about this order, about artists who came before him. He should sacrifice himself, his personality to acquire his position in this order.
The good criticism of art should always put the work of art as the main point of analysis in its criticism, not the artist’s life. A good work of art will always apart from the artist’s life. The artist should be able to create his work as his manifestation of his observation. The better the artist, the more he depersonalizes his work. The good criticism will show the work in the present’s position in the existing order of art. The good criticism will try to find the race of the work in the past in the work of the present.
The mind of the artist just becomes the media to produce the creativity of art without making any obvious influence in it. In his mind, an artist will treat the emotion he discovers from external world to transfer in his work. The work of art is the artist’s creativity to materialize his observation toward the world. The emotion that he put in the work is not his personal emotion but it is the emotion that he extracts from the outer world. If an artist able to gather more emotion in his work, the work will be better. He artist should be able to arrange and organize the emotion in his work to make it more artistic.

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