No Elsewhere': Fish, Soloveitchik and the Unavoidability of Interpretation: Fish, soloveitchik, and the unavoidability of interpretation

Contemporary pragmatists often distinguish between epistemologies: those committed to interpretation, and those rooted in metaphysics. But if Richard Rorty, assuming such a distinction, argues for the advantages of a liberal hermeneutics committed to contingency, then Stanley Fish has argued that even liberalism presupposes its own metaphysical assumptions. Fish's skepticism towards liberal universalism and his concomitant emphasis on local interpretations, this essay argues, echoes an earlier Rabbinic skepticism and praxis. But where even the radical skeptic Fish re-instates the Enlightenment opposition between pragmatics and theology (thereby casting aspersion on theological hermeneutics), the works of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, an expositor of the epistemology of the Talmud, provides a hermeneutics which fully acknowledges the 'risks of interpretation', without, however, abandoning truth. Indeed, in Soloveitchik's halakhic epistemology, metaphysics collapses into practice, and truth emerges through interpretation.