BOOK REVIEW

Open secrets: reading and understanding

James Douglas Fleming: Milton’s secrecy and philosophicalhermeneutics, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, 2008,xiv + 196 pp, �55.00 HB

Sandra Lynch

Published online: 11 March 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

This scholarly and engaging text focuses on John Milton’s poetry and prose as the

locus of a hermeneutic model of the interpretation of meaning which is radically

different from modern scientific understandings of interpretation as a matter of

discovery or the uncovering of knowledge. Milton’s reader is seen as invited to

recognise and empowered to understand his texts in a process which violates the

commonsense opposition between intention and expression. The standard that

Adam articulates in Paradise Lost is ‘‘the standard of intention maintained in unity

with expression, inwardness with outwardness’’ (p. 91).

Fleming criticises both strong intentionalism and the exclusion of strong

intentionalism as interpretative principles; the former because it undermines the

stability it appears to promise and the latter because it cannot overcome the primafacie plausibility of the intentionalist impulse. While trivial expressions might be

usefully analysed on a strong intentionalist model, ‘‘the more worth saying

something is—the more it makes a genuine contribution to our understanding—the

less we can plan, form, or intend it before we start to say it’’ (p. 117). In matters of

great significance, Fleming emphasises that we find out what we mean as we express

ourselves. He argues that strong intentionalism is inimical to Milton’s depictions of

the ideal exoteric conscience since strong intentionalism is esoteric, consisting in an

interpretative penetration from outward appearance to an underlying or inward

reality.

Milton’s dramas construct an ideal in which intentional secrets must be displayed

for all to see if its sincerity is genuine. As Fleming puts it, Milton is drawn ‘‘to the

secret as open’’ (p. 108). This creates a paradox upon which Fleming elaborates via

a theory of conscience. He argues that the seventeenth-century English Protestant

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Metascience (2010) 19:345–348

DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9373-8

conscience generates an Austinian logic of definitive iteration, while at the same

time manifesting a Derridean sense of iterative interminability. However, he insists

that the conundra this raises leave the early-modern English Protestants untroubled;

they perceived no contradiction between the ideal of conscience as an inward

faculty—‘‘in the midst of our hearts’’ protecting individual interiority—and as

synteresis, that self-evident dimension of conscience which is the agent of God

himself, acting as ‘‘a certain mean between God and man’’ (p. 69). Fleming seemingly

suggests that contemporary readers should be equally untroubled by a hermeneutic

theory which accommodates this kind of conundra.

Milton’s polemical self-presentations in Volume 4 of his Complete Prose Worksconstitute a casuistical mechanism iterating and reiterating his conscience so that

reading Milton’s casuistical texts is akin to representing his conscience. They may

actually be his conscience if we think of ‘‘synteresis as book’’ and ‘‘conscientia [the

fallible dimension of conscience] as secretary, or notary, or judge’’ (p. 53). Conscience

itself, Fleming argues, works through reiteration. So in reading Milton’s reiterations,

we are reading his conscience and taking part in a form of hermeneutic recognition,

rather than discovery; since Milton’s conscience becomes open or exoteric to the

extent that he is able to textualise its processes so that it displays his intention.

Fleming argues that in early-modern England the alienation of secrecy appears to

have become a core matter of policy. Early moderns want to show that they are

revealing their secrets for the public good; so that an exoteric hermeneutics is both

anti-secrecy and anti-discovery, requiring us to understand data in and through the

forms that are proper to it, without relativising it or making it a matter of subjective

determination. Fleming emphasises this by arguing that the meaning of a text can be

identified with its meaning for the reader or ‘‘understander’’, as Fleming puts it, but

that rather than being a licence to relativise the text, this involves an attempt to find

in what way the text is binding upon the reader. A text becomes binding when it

makes clear to its reader that its meaning is a game in which he is involved.

According to Fleming, finding meaning is something that happens to a reader,

rather than something the reader makes happen. Reading is about determining the

intention behind the exoteric, linguistic value of words. Thus while we work to

understand subject matter, understanding is a function of text and language which is

not a matter of subjective determination; rather it depends on the recognitive

structure of understanding and requires open dialogue. Fleming explains God’s free

choice of open dialogue in the scriptures as definitive of God. Satan wishes to

undermine God by leading and manipulating Eve. However, it is partly the fact that

we know Satan’s intent that allows us to recognise his opposition to real, open,

exoteric dialogue, despite his call to Eve to focus on empirical evidence; and it is the

fact that we have faith in God’s goodness and his good intent that helps us to

conclude that God is authentically playing the ‘meaning’ game in which we are

involved. Understanding, belief and appreciation of intent become entwined here;

and Fleming implicitly acknowledges this when he explains in his conclusion that

exoteric reading is difficult and in his discussion of Paradise Regained. Quoting

Said, he tells us that the text is ‘‘the verbal realisation of a signifying intention’’ but

that that intention ‘‘is synonymous not with a psychological intention but exclusively

with a verbal intention’’ (p. 160). While Fleming convinces the reader that Milton

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disapproves of secrecy, that his disapproval defines his work and demarcates his

hermeneutic system, he notes that the problem of secrecy seems to reappear at the

centre of Milton’s hermeneutic system: ‘‘Arguably, his (anti-secrecy) eats itself up’’

(p. 168). Fleming explains this by arguing that Christ in Paradise Regained is

involved in the process of finding the exoteric path. But this might also suggest that in

fact some of Fleming’s distinctions are overdrawn; if so, the relationships between

the concepts upon which they depend require some further attention. This concern is

also relevant to Milton’s concluding comments on method.

In his conclusion Fleming is at pains to argue that although we work to

understand subject matter, we cannot understand understanding and that ‘‘method is

the [mistaken] idea that we can understand understanding’’ (p. 172). This is a crucial

point in his argument, but this argument is less clear than it might be in these final

sections of the book. While he discusses meaning and understanding clearly in the

context of his discussion of exotericism, he also makes reference to knowledge,

judgement, belief, empiricism, objectivism and method without undertaking the

philosophical groundwork which would allow the reader, particularly any reader

less familiar with Milton, to fully appreciate the significance of these concepts in his

argument.

Fleming states that secrecy is the sole power and defining attribute of Milton’s

God but that Milton is the champion of the exoteric or open secret. As Sissela Bok

argues in Secrets: The Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, ‘‘to keep a secret from

someone ��� is to block information about it or evidence of it from reaching that

person and to do so intentionally ��� [Secrecy] presupposes separation��� It bespeaks

discernment, the ability to make distinctions, to sort out and draw lines: a capacity

that underlies not only secrecy but all thinking, all intention and choice’’ (New York,

1982: 6). Fleming uses the term and the concept of the ‘open’ secret creatively to

argue for a different kind of discernment; that is for the recognition of the

coincidence of intent and expression which is crucial to the process of understanding

and to the hermeneutic model of interpretation in which meaning is recognised rather

than discovered. This is a worthwhile enterprise since it acknowledges the power of

secrets to transform those who engage in open dialogue with the texts in which they

are expressed.

However, Fleming’s use of language is sometimes laboured and ambiguous.

Strong, often delightful and even theatrical use of language occasionally slides into

convoluted and complicated expression. For example, Fleming refers to Milton’s

Samson Agonistes in which Milton records Samson’s recognition of his situation:

‘‘Dalila sought, Samson says, ‘to make me a Traytor to my self (402)’’’ (p. 104).

Fleming notes that ‘‘[t]his enterprise conforms, not to the hermeneutics of discovery

but to the hermeneutics of recognition’’ (pp. 104–5). Samson recognises a situation

which obtained but which he had not understood. He recognises himself as having

been tricked into telling Dalila the truth. This recognition creates no change in his

situation, rather there is a change in his understanding of his situation; just as for

Adam and Eve after the fall, a change occurs not in their state but in their

understanding of the same state. The change for Samson before and after Dalila and

for Adam and Eve before and after the fall is described as ‘‘a change from an exoteric

to an esoteric conception of normative secrecy’’ (ibid.). These are not uncomplicated

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ideas, and what Fleming argues is that Samson experiences exposure, falling into a

binary of secrecy and openness in which ‘‘openness can only be understood as

privation of normative secrecy’’ (ibid.). However, the relationship between the

hermeneutics of recognition and the hermeneutics of discovery could be clarified.

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