Search results for "hermeneutics "
The Great Dark Book
Some notes on Gadamer's analysis of the history of hermeneutics - 'The Questionableness of Romantic Herneneutics' in Truth and Method (1997 [1960], Continuum: New York).
- p307: the three parts of hermeneutics:
subtilitas intelligendi - subtlety / acuteness of understanding
subtilitas explicandi - that of interpretation
subtilitas applicandi - that of application - p174: the twofold roots of hermeneutics - theological and philological - emerge out of an attempt to recuperate texts: in the former, by reformists such as Luther to rescue the Bible from the dogma of the clericy; the latter to rescue the classics from naturalisation by the 'Christian world'.
- p175: such recuperations make the following claims: rather than requiring a tradition in order to achieve a proper understanding of scripture, nor an 'art of interpretation', we need only derive the 'univocal sense' of the text - to take it literally.
- however, the text itself is not 'univocally intelligible' in every place and at every moment'. A circular movement of interpretation between the parts and the whole is necessary (by analogy with the head and limbs of the body); thus developed "the universal principle of textual interpretation that all the details of a text were to be understood from the contextus and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims." Here the contextus refers (I presume) to the interconnectedness of the parts of the text to each other rather than to the wider 'context' as such (the material and psychological historicity of the text and its author); the scopus is the 'target' or aim/purpose of the text (the Greek skopos is a target such as that aimed at by arrows). - p176: it's difficult to avoid seeing a Hegelian dialectic in Gadamer's argument here: the reformists see themselves as rescuing the Bible from the Church's self-serving dogma; however, the idea of the text as a unity (even in the case of the Bible) is dogmatic, ignoring the "relevant context of a text, its specific purpose and its composition"; Dilthey recognises the inconsistency of the reformist position, from a position of his own which he might view as 'self-aware' ("the full self-awareness of the historical sciences"); however Gadamer suggests we might question whether such apparent self-consciousness is a justifiable stance towards interpretation of scriptures "in their own terms", since there is always the need for "support from a generally unacknowledged dogmatic guideline" - you cannot escape the hermeneutic circle.
- p177: once you extend the "the old interpretive principle of understanding the part in terms of the whole" beyond the dogmatic assertion of the unity of the text, and instead include the "totality of historical reality to which each individual historical document belonged" you discover that world history itself "is, as it were, the great dark book, the collected work of the human spirit, written in languages of the past, whose texts it is our task to understand". [I take this to be a foreshortened summary of Gadamer's project - the engagement with the inheritance that informs us which is in opposition to the revolutionary rejection of dogma as would be claimed by Habermas - hence Gadamer then moves on to discuss the "querelle des anciens et des modernes" - the "quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns", which exemplifies the contest between tradition/authority and progress/revolution].
- p178: with the erosion of the act of interpretation based on the unity of the text, the issue moves to understanding itself - note that in traditional hermeneutics the subtilitas intelligendi (understanding) precedes subtilitas explicandi (interpretation as the explication of understanding to other recipients), and then subtilitas applicandi (evaluation, implementation). Now that we cannot rely on an autonomous text whose meaning we can interpret (explicandi), we can no longer depend on our own understanding (intelligendi). Another way of thinking about this is to say that we shift our attention from examining how we interpret the content of texts and instead attend to the very foundations of our ability to understand content at all.
Serendipity
Tuesday, 13 January, 2009 - 23:19
There are often serendipities (though I'm talking about reading theoretical works here, so when I write 'serendipity' you may read 'pain in the arse') in the way I discover new avenues of critical thought to pursue, though now I think about it, the serendipity probably resides in my limited ability to discern and decipher connections rather than the rarity, inscrutability - or even coincidence - of the connections themselves. Perhaps I'm like a half-wit, or at least the opposite of a Quasimodo, who given any chance sees the rightness and absolute simplicity of analogies and apposite moments as though they were the salty truth of the world. I, on the contrary, make hard work where there might be restful ease.
In any case, I was reading Lave and Wenger on the subject on legitimate peripheral participation [1] (their precursor to the inexaggerably important idea of communities of practice) when I was drawn to their description of Bourdieu's ideas of 'conductorless orchestras' (what other metaphor for benign anarchy could you hope for?) and thus led to Michael Grenfell's edited work, Bourdieu and Education, in which I was teased by the characterisation of Bourdieu's work as an attempt to resolve the dichotomy of objective knowledge ('knowledge without a knowing subject') and hermeneutics (subjective and individual understanding).
His intent is to find a theory which is robust enough to be objective and generalizable, and yet accounts for individual, subjective thought and action. [2]
This for me is another case of serendipitously discovering more justification for resolving such dichotomies (e.g. the subject / object dichotomy) by encapsulating the whole dyad under the reunified sign of 'practice', as Mike and I discussed (if you can be arsed to read pages and pages of burbling) at the CEMP blog.
In any case, if you cannot see the woods for the trees, try banging your head on those trees until they tire of your bloody-minded importuning and give you a map of the locality.
[1] Lave, Jean & Wenger, Etienne, 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
[2] Grenfell, Michael, 1998. Bourdieu & Education: Acts of Practical Theory,
Florence, KY, USA: Taylor & Francis, Incorporated
