The interpretation of the texts

We have two options: find out what the author meant by a phrase or try to interpret what it means for us today.

The texts usually have some special attraction that serves to call attention: puns, rhyme, musicality, the contradictions, the paradox, are featured in a text function as magnetic attractive, as seductive lures as condiments feted our sense of (good) taste.

Another factor is the supposed authorship dazzling text. When we see something written by A. Einstein, imagine being faced with a genius, if the author is Groucho Marx, we prepare to laugh, if the author is Jesus, we will read some moral teaching.

If we read the phrase: "The institutions fail victims of their own success", we are attracted to anything that contradicts common sense, but then we found out that was expressed by the French thinker Baron de Montesquieu (1689 - 1755), perhaps exclaim "Well, well! What genius we have here? ... But what does he mean? "

On this way I want them to react a comment.

Almost all were educated by the experience to want to know what others think when we say something. As you read this sentence of Montesquieu, our mind turns to the experiences the first few times we spoke our mother and we despair because we understood him.

Of course this despair (anxiety) was the engine of our desire to learn to speak. Without such distress would not know to communicate, but the story was changing, though not our desperation to know what we wanted to say, as if our existence continue depending both on the messenger as when we speak our mother.

Few people today will benefit from understanding what Montesquieu meant for centuries. In any case, what many today we want to know is why our success might make us fail.

Note: Original in Spanish (without translation by Google: La interpretación de los textos.

 

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