This is all fairly abstract, of course. Well, so it should be. It is, after all, a theory. We will later see how other categories, more culturally determined ones, get added to the list. But you should be able to see also that it is a theory about the place of theory. It is a hypothesis, an abstract figure pointing us towards the ideal truth about things. And it puts that ideal truth on one side of the boundary. The boundary itself is supposed to represent the difference between the transcendental (ideas, concepts, thoughts) and the empirical (stuff we see, hear, taste, touch and smell). Now, throughout philosophy there are endless variations, hypotheses, arguments, debates and discussions about what the difference between these two dimensions is. Some people have even tried to argue that there is only one or the other side of it. A "materialist" might try to argue that there is only empirical matter and that that independent mind is just a myth. So what is the stuff of myth? An idealist or an "immaterialist" like George Berkeley, the 18th century British Philosopher, would on the other hand argue that there is only the ideal dimension. The world we perceive is not material but made up of ideas sent by God. In each case the argument doesn’t abolish the other side. Rather it attempts to explain it and in theory nothing changes. But generally there is hardly any question about the existence of the difference itself. It is in fact very difficult to think without taking for granted, taking as unquestionably given, that there are both sensible and intelligible dimensions to experience and that they are different. The difference is what leads the philosophical tradition to see the two sides as being categorically opposed. In theoretical terms they are binary oppositions.

Take the experience of consciousness. The moments pass without my being quite able to pin a moment down, to arrest the sweep of time. But the space around me seems fairly stable and while I blink nothing much changes, even though I am very much aware that the space I can see is only a tiny fraction of what there is. You know that there is more to all this than meets the eye. Our senses let the world around us in for the duration but we also have thoughts about it, which we bring to it, add to what we see, even though the thoughts may be dreamlike, half-formed, learned from others, hypothesised. Thoughts may also be brought to bear on the empirical world so that these trees, this road, those buildings, these people can be ordered into categories, understood in certain ways, set into view in a particular way. As we have seen that is the basic activity of theory. It is a gift from the Greeks who set into view that way of setting things into view.

So it's not enough simply to say that there are things out there and lots of different ways of setting those things into view. To say that is to subscribe to the philosophical notion of Weltangschaungen or "world-views," which suggests that there are lots of different conceptions of the world depending on the historical period and cultural placement of the "viewers." Any notion of cultural difference based upon the idea that my experience is determined by the dominant perspective of the culture I belong to, and that different cultures set the world into view in different ways, must also take into consideration the fact that that is itself a particular way of setting the world into view. The notion of a world-view is only possible if one maintains the classical western distinction between the transcendental and empirical dimensions themselves. The empirical is a concept that makes it possible to posit a straightforward world of objects; and the transcendental is a concept that allows for different subjective perspectives. The subject-Object distinction is, however, a conception itself and as such belongs on the "transcendental" side of things, leaving open a massive question about whether there indeed is an empirical world.

The other major western tradition is, as I have already suggested, the towering and contradictory edifice sometimes called Judaeo-Christian thought. Western thought is not, therefore, a twin edifice exactly, but a triumvirate. If Christianity is to be thought of as an extension to and an attempt at closure of its Judaic past, as history suggests it must be, then whatever we say about Christianity is going to be qualified by its relationship to Jewish thought. The question about how Christian thought (and institutions) and Greek philosophical principles come to be so eloquently combined (by the scholastic philosopher-monks of the Middle Ages) concerns the basic conditions in the western world for the history and experience of what people today call Modernity. The great civilising missionaries from crusaders of the 13th Century to the 19th Century Parson in the heart of the colonised world always held the metaphorical combination of the Bible (old and new testaments) in one hand and Plato and/or Aristotle in the other. Writers from William Shakespeare in England to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany (to name only two of the most widely respected) whether consciously or not assumed the Judaeo-Christian-Greek system in all its glorious complexity and specificity for their own extraordinary expressions. Philosophers throughout western history have taken as their basic problems those that emerge from this unnatural triumvirate. For these reasons contemporary thinking often returns to those basic questions as they emerge in the form of modernity as we know it. We can see already why the role of Judaism should be a point of real concern.

Recent work in Critical Theory has drawn increasingly on influences informed by the Judaic tradition itself, so this is a good point to introduce some of the terms of what turns out to be a very interesting tension. The best way of thinking about it may be through the problem of interpretation. After all interpretation is what we’re talking about and doing throughout this book. It’s important to take as little for granted here as you possibly can. Interpretation traditionally implies some kind of Hermeneutics (a science of interpretation and explanation) and therefore, like everything else, a theory. Hermeneutics begins as a branch of theology setting out laws according to which the meaning of the Scriptures should be determined. Whenever you have laws you can be certain of two things. First, a situation has demanded, called for or encouraged some kind of legislation. And second, a situation (not necessarily the same one) has granted some authority the force of legislation.

The link between interpretation and legislation will become much clearer in our chapter on politics but for now it is enough to simply note that if legislation has been called for there might be an unexpected or unexamined reason behind it. This is one of the most important clues for a developing critical theory. Why do you need laws for interpreting the meaning of The Bible? Why is the meaning of The Bible not self-evident in what is written there? Well, if The Bible is not just the tip of a vast iceberg--and its status in the history of interpretation means that we have to take it rather seriously--it is something like the tip of an iceberg because it is only a conspicuous example of the evident inability of any existing or possible text to guarantee a definitive single interpretation. In order to say of The Bible: "It means this and only this," you absolutely need to lay down laws because it can be interpreted in God knows how many different ways. But it is the necessary absence of the single (monotheistic) God that is behind all this, as we shall see.

One of the important assumptions shared by Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy (though not Greek Theology) is the need to affirm a dimension of irreducible and eternal singularity: one truth (for the Greeks); one God (for the Judaeo-Christians). And for both, this essentially singular truth is (devastatingly) absent. Even though you can neither see it, nor in any way prove its existence as such, you still feel that you must insist on it, believe in it, maintain irresistible faith. And so the Christian hermeneutic tradition concerns itself with commentaries and exegeses on passages of The Old and New Testaments of The Bible, insisting that a single spiritual truth is each time enfolded within.

There is, however, an alternative tradition of biblical exegesis, called Midrash, which denotes various rabbinical investigations of Old Testament writings and includes many self-consciously conflicting interpretations. The commentaries of the ancient "Midrashim" emerge from the Jewish oral tradition and appear in writing between the second and eleventh centuries. Midrash itself is divided into the Halachah, which deals with the legal sections of the Bible (the ones that record the laying down of laws), and the Haggadah, which includes the varied history of interpretations as well as commentaries on civil customs and doctrines. A crucial difference between Midrash and the Christian tradition lies in the text itself. Where the Christian Bible is based on a relatively unambiguous Greek text, the Midrashim concerns the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), which is much less stable as a text and has many alterations, emendations and alternatives, with obscurities that demand scholarly interpretation in nearly every verse. So while the Hebrew text might be difficult it nonetheless has the virtue of being richly readable, whereas the Christian text lends itself more to dogmatic and unreflectively singular readings. The differences that result between Jewish and Christian exegetes and preachers point to a fundamental difference in the interpretation of religion itself. The Jewish tradition concerns the potential plurality of interpretations, which can be considered neither true nor false, for nothing in the Hebrew Bible can be regarded as a definitive singular statement. Yet the Christian tradition is based on a dogmatic notion of singular fundamental truth, which must be defended against the permanent danger of falsification by fallible interpreters. It is this that calls for legislation.

The point here is to show that the difference between the Jewish and the Greek traditions involves something like the difference between a law that governs diverse and plural interpretations, which never get back to a singular truth, and a law that governs singular interpretations, which always gesture towards a singular truth that nonetheless itself stays out of reach. It is the difference between the plural and the singular.

It is important to understand that deciding on one or the other of these alternatives cannot solve the question of interpretation. Rather the difference and the productive tension between the singular and the plural may bring to light a situation that allows us to rethink the basis of interpretation itself. The formulations of the tradition can be a great help in this. The tension between the singular and the plural is everywhere. Thomas Aquinas, the great Church father who perhaps did the most in sewing together the Greek and Christian teachings, gives a clear exposition of the problem. He tells us that because humans lack a perfect language we cannot speak unmediatedly of a single God. If we could the result would be what he calls a univocal utterance. That is an utterance that means only what it means, means it once only, and cannot be used to mean anything else at all, ever. Catholics know the problem. All kinds of people speak of God, including pagans, but they do not speak of the same God (the same idea of God)--and only the catholic really knows what the word God means. In other words, "God" is an equivocal word in so far as it means lots of different things in different contexts. Because we have no access to univocal language, Aquinas tells us, we must make a compromise. So we use analogy, which he says lies somewhere between equivocality and univocity. As we have seen, analogy, and its whole family of rhetorical devices like metaphor and allegory, do an excellent job of standing in for concepts or things or even whole dimensions (i.e., the transcendental) that are radically, drastically and chronically absent from the finite world of everyday empirical experience. And, as we have seen, analogy is the concept par excellence of concept construction. Is there anything else? It looks as if Christian dogma is reduced to laying down the law but only by analogy, for there are no grounds available for lasting authority on these things. Enter the need for faith.

So far I have been focusing the discussion on trends and tensions to be discovered in the writings of the Greek, Judaic and Christian traditions but it is important to see that the problems uncovered here can be used as veritable resources by a developing Critical Theory and it is precisely these problems that persist in the later stages of what we are calling modernity. They are decisively historical yet we might resist reducing them too hastily (in a dogmatically historicist gesture) to localised historical periods if we want to see the relevance of history for our own critical condition. Hermeneutics begins as a form of religious interpretation but Aquinas’s problems (and his solutions) are maintained throughout all secular realms of interpretation and they crop up again and again during the modern period, in surprising contexts, for instance wherever the problem of the difference between the singular and the plural is posed. It is the problem of language that mediates the questions of truth (for the Greek) and of God (for the Christian). In the modern period it is language and the question of meaning that brings the grounds of the whole puzzle to light.

These are deceptively ordinary concepts. They are apparent opposites. To close something (a box, a road, a factory, a shop) is to act on and thus to change its condition of being open. To open something, on the other hand, either reverses its former condition of being closed (in the case of a box or a shop) or institutes a condition that is new (in the case of a road or a factory). I am not being unduly simplistic (simplicity is what we crave here so go with me on this) when I say that these two opposing concepts are fundamental and deserve clarification. In the world of the Hebrew exegete there is a fundamental openness of interpretation (no "single right way" closes down the possibility of alternative readings). In the case of the Christian preacher, however, reading imposes a form of closure. Closure prevents newness and is always reactive--you don’t begin something by closing it. You can, however, bring closure to an end and that (oddly enough) brings about a new condition. Opening Pandora’s box (in the Greek myth) brings sin into the world. Opening a new Ford factory brings employment to Dagenham. The great closure of Western theology and metaphysics attempts to relegate everything that is missing or said to be missing from the finite world to a fabulous beyond in which all things infinite, eternal, perfect and true reside. The opening is a straightforward consequence of the metaphysical and theological failure to maintain that desired closure.