Episode 111: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: How to Interpret

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living.

0:14 Seth: And then thought better of it.

0:15 Mark: Our question for episode 111 is something like, what is it to interpret a text or interpret anything for that matter? And we read a selection of readings from Hans Georg Gadamer, ranging from 1960 to 1972. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer listening here with the Good kind of Prejudice in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Owen in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Mark: So specifically, we read a little bit of his masterwork, his magnum opus, Truth and Method, which is from 1960. We just read some parts of chapter four, pages 268 to 273 and 291 to 299. So stuff about prejudice, as I just referred to. And then we read some later essays. The Universality of the hermeneutical problem from 1966, aesthetics and hermeneutics from 1964, and finally, hermeneutics as practical philosophy from 1972. Should we say what hermeneutics is? Who wants to start us?

1:22 Dylan: The short answer, right, is hermeneutics is the process of understanding.

1:26 Wes: That's kind of the more sophisticated version, though, right?

1:29 Dylan: Yeah, that's the short, sophisticated version. We can just stop now. We don't need to explicate that any further at all, because we understand exactly what it is.

1:39 Wes: I mean, it grows out of. It's kind of a straightforward kind of activity where you are interpreting texts so paradigmatically religious texts or ancient texts that require translation and where all sorts of interpretive, interpretative. I don't know what I'm saying. Problems arise where you interpret things exactly. And then the relation to understanding in general, I think, comes later.

2:10 Mark: That's Gadamer's innovation, right?

2:11 Wes: The idea that you can sort of expand that and see every. And see the problem of knowledge in general as a sort of hermeneutical type of problem, you're expanding from the interpretation of text realm and broadening that idea to make it encompass other things.

2:26 Dylan: So that basic idea, even aside from interpreting religious texts, which would be the hard case, even without Gadamer's innovation of it, would it be safe to say that hermeneutical activity would be just trying to understand what somebody is saying or anything is saying? Or is that Gadamer's innovation where historical Understandings of hermeneutics would be really trying to explicitly interpret texts and say what the Bible says or say what so and so said.

2:57 Mark: Right, Both of those.

2:58 Wes: Yeah. It's the what someone is saying that might become tricky, since he's going to reject the notion that it's the subjective intent of their communication, that that is the object of interpretation. But, yeah, I get what you're saying. I think it's a good way to phrase it, given that it's going to create another hermeneutic problem for us.

3:17 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, Gadamer understands himself as revising a tradition of hermeneutics, sort of recapturing it. And maybe he would argue that he is doing something that is natural and he has a kind of his own hermeneutical explication of what he's doing himself.

3:38 Wes: Yeah. So for Schleiermacher, the phrasing, trying to understand what someone's saying is spot on. Right. And for what he calls romantic hermeneutics, this gets us at his use of this word historicist, where the idea is to understand so much about the historical context in which the text was generated, the language, the customs, things like that, that you can inhabit the spirit of that age or even inhabit the particular subjective consciousness of the author, really bridge this gap between past and present in order to get a true understanding of something that poses some interpretive problem. I'm going to stop using that word because I can't say it interpretative or whatever it is.

4:20 Seth: So I was under the impression that what he was doing was working out of the tradition, where Schleiermacher is definitely referenced by him and is in this tradition, but distinguishing between a scientific knowledge, which in theory can be completely objective, and knowledge of history or social sciences, or the human condition, which engages with things out of our past. And instead of trying to overcome them and look at things objectively, it's acknowledging that in order to understand the human condition or human sciences, some humanist kind of studies, you have to recognize when you're engaging with something that was written, you know, in the 9th century or what have you, that the authors were working in a different paradigm and had a different language and a different set of assumptions.

And you acknowledge all that, but you also have to acknowledge your position and that the task is to find something in that text that you can then bring into your own understanding. And the reason that it comes out of the religious tradition that that's the paradigmatic case, is because you have the sacred texts which are intended to be reinterpreted in each generation to make them relevant, you know, the moral lessons or what have you to make them relevant for each succeeding generation as the world changes, as societies changes, technology changes, and so on.

5:44 Mark: Or even if you don't think that you should have to reinterpret the text this way, you end up, if you actually read them and pay attention to them, having to do that regardless. Because either some things just strike you as really, really offensive or they're contradictory, right? Parts of the Bible contradict other parts of the Bible, or there was the thought that is some of it allegorical or mythological, so that we should, as people in the modern age, still appreciate the spirit of it without taking it word for word as true. He talks about in the Protestant Reformation, where the idea was we're sick of the Catholic priests interpreting it for us. Everybody should interpret themselves. Well, that's pretty problematic.

6:24 Unknown speaker: So that.

6:24 Mark: That tradition developed its own hermeneutic strategies for understanding the Bible. So it's a particularly thorny text that gave rise to a lot of this. And even, you know, he cites as far back as Augustine just trying to say how the New Testament and the Old Testament could be part of the same thing. How do you interpret the weird stuff in the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the coming of Christ?

6:47 Dylan: Well, and part of this is your strategy of interpretation and whether or not your goal is to interpret what the authors intended to say, what they explicitly said, what they mean. Gadamer, I mean, has an understanding of what that goal is. But in this conversation about interpreting those texts, those sort of live conversations about, like, you know, just think about the Constitution. Are we supposed to interpret the Constitution in terms of what the Founding Fathers intended to do? Or we understand that as a live document that ought to be reinterpreted with passage of time according to the needs of each age of American government. Those are different goals and strategies of interpretation. Those would, I guess, in the context of chapter four, amount to the kinds of category prejudices you would have about what your own interpretive activity ought to be doing.

7:47 Wes: I think it's in the hermeneutics practical philosophy that he says that each age requires its own reinterpretation. Even though he's not a relativist, of course, he's objecting this notion that we approach these texts as if they were the objects of the natural sciences and in which we could in some sense kind of cancel ourselves out with enough historical context, with enough scientific study of the. Of the context of those texts. Texts. Instead, it's better to Recognize that we have our own sorts of preoccupations in our age. We have our own sorts of questions.

When St. Augustine comes along, he's going to see new sorts of contradictions because within his age, new sorts of questions are relevant and those sorts of questions have to be answered. And those are the sorts of interesting problems for the hermeneutics, making the text speak to our current concerns. Not because got to keep everything current, man, but because the fact that we've changed with tradition, that we've sort of accrued as a society over time, all of these different sorts of traditions and beliefs and sorts of things that furnishes us with an expanded theoretical framework for addressing these texts, or in some cases, a narrowed theoretical framework, but certainly one that's different and certainly one that has the potential to reveal new things about those texts.

9:07 Mark: So maybe just to get straight on the. The important stages of the history here of since we're introducing this whole tradition of hermeneutics with Gadamer, who's actually sort of a late figure, although he's maybe the one that made it most philosophically interesting, which is why we read him and not when we had our Schleiermacher episode. We didn't read him on hermeneutics because that would have been just more biblical interpretation. And why would we want to do that? But just the idea that while folks like Augustine self consciously had a purpose in mind with the Enlightenment, with scientific method coming into the fore the picture.

And I don't think Gadamer talks a lot about this directly, but it's by the natural light of reason, you should be able to evaluate a text if you really want to see what it says. You just have to sort of is it sensible? Use your reason. And then what the Romantics, what Schleiermacher added to that seemingly is you still have to know a lot about the history to understand. Yes, you need to use your reason, but you need to know the history too. So even though he's representing the Romantic period, he still, according to Gadamer, was hewing pretty close to this Enlightenment methodology, that its ideal is for this objectively correct interpretation, right?

Scientifically reproducible. And so that is the thing that Gadamer is then trying to overcome. And it turns into a general critique, as Seth referred to of is hermeneutics a social science? And even if it is a social science, is social science supposed to be just like natural science where it has these are the methods that we follow? And if you follow these methods, then everyone can reproduce your experiment and come up with the same interpretation, or is it more like an art?

10:40 Dylan: Let's say a little bit more about his characterization of natural science here. It seems to me that his presentation of it is pretty much right about the role of scientific method for someone like Descartes and the generation of objectivity. By getting rid of uncertainty and so figuring out some way in which to be certain and such that anybody who looked at it would agree, then that agreement wasn't a kind of consensus, but that agreement was based upon. There's no other way it could be because it's clear and distinct in Descartes case, for instance, and the conclusions are objective. They're not dependent upon any time period or any way you grew up or

11:29 Wes: any specific prejudices or bias. It's a bias reduction procedure which is.

11:34 Dylan: Yeah, yes, the notion of being unbiased goes hands in hand with the notion of being objective. And in fact, the activity of being objective really is a process of getting rid of bias.

11:46 Wes: Right.

11:47 Dylan: I think that's probably right. Though some of this in the development of science was a reaction to try to, you know, subvert cloistered authority and decisions and judgments based on merely political or merely inherited kinds of knowledge.

12:06 Wes: Yeah. And we know Gadamer has been criticized for this, for the authoritarian implications of what he's doing, but.

12:12 Mark: Yeah, well, it seems Gadamer has a very dialectic, like the Hegelian dialectic take on these advances of the history of hermeneutics and what he's trying to propose. So I'm glad you described it that way, Dylan, as, yes, science was right in trying to get objectivity instead of authority. And Gadamer actually provocatively says what he's doing is actually returning the role of authority in tradition. But he's not trying to go back to the old way. He's not saying that this was a mistake. He's trying to take the next dialectical step and say, yes, of course we need to understand the history, of course we need to get rid of bad prejudice.

But don't go too far. We need to sort of swing the pendulum back a little bit and understand that there are bad prejudices, of course, that distort our readings. But if we think that we can have a presuppositionless understanding, you're sadly mistaken. You would just have no, you know, okay, let's get a computer that can read. We'll figure out how to get it to read and then just see if it can understand the text. No, it needs. You need a complicated set of presuppositions that you're applying unconsciously. And that is a necessary window to understanding.

So that's the good kind of prejudice versus the bad kind of prejudice. And so his whole task, the task of hermeneutics, is to how do you sort out the good from the bad?

13:29 Wes: Yeah, so what the computer needs is software. And what a mind needs is at the very minimum. And we've talked about this before with the idea of perception, for instance, being theory laden. It's the same sort of thing where theory and this broad idea of prejudice or preconception is related. We need. So for Kant it was basic categories of experience. And then as we move on in that history, it also becomes not just cognitive categories, causality and time and space, but also these cultural sorts of presuppositions that enter into our perception of the world.

14:04 Dylan: I think Gadamer is criticizing Enlightenment science for being guilty of the exact problem of authority and not evaluating evidence that it was reacting against. And by pushing the authority to this objectivity some level, his criticism is that, well, that's just not going to work. And he's not, I mean, Gadamer is far from the first person we've talked about who tries to make this kind of point, that there's going to be content to that understanding. As Wes just reminded us, it's going to be theory laden in some respect. And he's basically criticizing the Enlightenment philosophy for thinking that they could get out of that trap.

14:51 Mark: In particular, trying to apply that to all knowledge, trying to apply that to the social sciences and the universality of the hermeneutical problem. Our selection here does talk about that actually physical science itself, hermeneutics do apply to it as well because they apply to everything. But that's sort of later in the game that initially we just need to say that hermeneutics itself should not, as Schleiermacher tried to make it, be a social science where social science is trying too hard to ape the natural sciences. And that's sort of the end of that.

15:23 Dylan: That fight about social science trying to ape the natural sciences is a familiar one. And of course the result is not just that the social sciences aren't like the natural sciences, but the natural sciences don't have the characteristics that you might have thought they had in the first place, the ones that social science was trying to ape. My own feeling is that as a matter of practice, science does this kind of revisionist activity all the time and always has, in spite of the protestations of the those who think that they had sorted it all out. And I think most scientists are pretty. Scientific activities are pretty comfortable with the

16:00 Wes: idea of being the fallibilism that he describes in these essays doesn't seem at all inconsistent with the natural sciences. I don't know. Did we want to discuss the end of the essay where he talks about the applicability of hermeneutics to natural science? Because it seemed a kind of limited applicability. We can wait if you guys want,

16:19 Mark: but yeah, yeah, let's get into more what it is in the truth and method stuff first.

16:23 Seth: I was just trying to bring out a contrast to explain the motivation and a little bit of the origin. But we've had so many of these, like science versus the humanity, you know, science versus philosophy discussions over the years. I was just like, oh, we better mortal enemies. I think there's so much more that was interesting about this. I don't want to just think that that's all that's going on.

16:42 Mark: Yeah. So the truth and method stuff, you could just read it all as just applying to texts.

16:46 Dylan: Yes.

16:46 Mark: There's nothing that jumps out. So the two parts we read in it, chapter four, first section, and then it jumps ahead a little bit. The first one is most explicitly how he gets this out of Heidegger. So Gadamer is a student of Heidegger. And this whole experience gave me a greater appreciation for Heidegger because it's really hard to figure out what Heidegger is actually saying. Certainly not what the practical upshot of what he's saying is. And if you think you know it, then Heidegger will tell you. No, no, no, I didn't mean that. I didn't mean be independent in an existential way.

I didn't mean what Sartre thought said that I meant. I mean, so at least whether Heidegger would agree with Gadamer or not. And from what I read, Gadamer explicitly picked up on what Heidegger was doing in his early work Being and Time. And that Heidegger said at some point later, like, well, I don't do that kind of stuff anymore. What I was doing back then.

17:35 Wes: Gadamer does that right after Heidegger's turn.

17:39 Mark: Yeah, it's some sort of approval of a continuation of the project. Seth, do you want to start us on what the connection is? The fore-structure stuff?

17:48 Seth: Oh, God.

17:49 Wes: I had my fore-structure actually removed at birth.

17:53 Seth: Not at birth. It's 10 days after became presuppositionless. Yeah, I'm not going to claim that I have a solid grip on this. But remember that Heidegger calls Being and Time the analytic of Dasein. It's the structure of our human being in the world that make it such that we are the beings that we are, that we have the experiences that we do, that we relate to things the way we do. And there are a couple things that he pulls out of this analysis of the structure of human being. We comport ourselves towards things in the world. Structurally, we are always directed towards something, and it's not intentionality in the sense of subject, object, but we always are somehow directed towards things.

And we have an interest in things. We have an interest in things, we have an interest in other people's, we have an interest in ourselves. It's part of what makes human beings, human beings versus other types of entities. And this interest that we have, this directedness that has this interest in it manifests itself as understanding. Our way of being in the world as human beings is that we want to understand things. We seek to understand the world, understand the objects in the world. That's not understanding in the sense of knowledge at this level.

It's more like structurally, this is the way we are built. And so you have to take understanding kind of with single scare quotes around it. On top of that, our being is temporal. We are projected out of our past and into our future. And we're directed, not just kind of in the present, at different things in the world, but also we are projected and directed towards our own future. And so it's this notion of this structure, that understanding that we comport ourselves with this desire to be directed towards things in the world and directed towards our own future, out of our past, that Gadamer is picking up on to expand not just about the structure of Dasein, but he's using Heidegger's notion that this is our way of being, not as a strictly ontological exercise, to try to do some kind of quasi Kantian analytic of the structure of human being, but instead Gadamer is saying, this is the way we are.

And so this is how we apply ourselves to our tradition, to texts. And then he'll go broader and say, to other people, to other things, and that this is the fundamental structure of how we engage with ourselves and with the world. And he gives it the name hermeneutics. Well, Heidegger gave it the name hermeneutics, and he takes it right.

20:30 Mark: So specifically, Gadamer, this being temporally oriented toward things, if you want to talk about what particular human faculties are at play here, well, he talks about in general, the fore structure of understanding, F O R E dash structure, the fore having the foresight, the fore conception. These are all distinct things that he doesn't really tell us exactly how to distinguish them, but they all have to do with the fact that when you read anything, there are certain things you anticipate, there are certain expectations you have. And I think the important thing here is you shouldn't read this how I just said it, like as if I'm having this experience, I'm about to read some things.

And what are these expectations I have? Because they're generally subconscious expectations. It's not that just there's stuff that are in our minds as conscious contents, and then we read this thing and compare it to the stuff in our minds. He's really trying to get away from this. I read it in a secondary source as subjectism, as opposed to subjectivism, the idea that everything is sort of relative to your subjectivity or something, but just the focus on the Cartesian point of view as the starting point for philosophy, where all I'm sure of are the contents of my consciousness and then I have to go from there.

That even Sartre, even Merleau, Ponty, maybe. Well, certainly Sartre seemed to start at that point, but Heidegger, half his reason for inventing all these alternate terms for things is to avoid that. To avoid the subject object distinction.

21:54 Wes: Yeah. It's the idea that we could clarify all of our prejudices, all of our presuppositions before we even begin the task of inquiry, which is sort of right. We saw with Descartes. That's what he does. He tries to clear the slate, come up with the one foundational thing that we can be certain of, and then build from there. So it's not that we aren't doing this thing which is firmly within the tradition of philosophy, this dialectical activity where we try and address our presuppositions and try and bring them to light. It's just that many of them are unconscious and they certainly we're not going to be able to identify them or have some methodological way of ensuring that they don't encroach upon our inquiry before the inquiry even begins.

The whole dynamic of presuppositions arising into consciousness, perhaps, or us becoming aware of them will happen after we've already used those very presuppositions to frame our inquiry and to draw up the very questions that our inquiry involves and to conduct our initial interpretations so we can still engage in this kind of dialectical engagement. With our presuppositions, it's just not happening the way Descartes it would.

23:03 Mark: We want to bring our presuppositions to light. We want to distinguish the good kinds of prejudice from the bad kinds of prejudice. Again, but even the rules on which we would do that, you know, so the last article that we read today was just about how hermeneutics has practical philosophy, how it is more of an art instead of a method. And that of course is right there in truth and method as well, that

23:23 Wes: you can I interject.

23:24 Mark: You don't think that he explicitly rejects

23:26 Wes: the idea that it's an art in the sense of a techne. Practical philosophy is not. I think you're speaking, maybe you're speaking broadly, but he's comparing hermeneutics to practical philosophy as in something motivated by trying to figure out some conception of the good and to apply that in some sense. But it's not a techne. Remember, he explicitly says it's not a techne like cobbling or some other art like that. Because those are method based. Those are things you actually can have a method for.

23:56 Mark: Right?

23:56 Wes: Yeah.

23:57 Mark: I mean, we could argue over whether a cobbler learns explicit rules on how to cobble or whether still a bunch of it is unconscious or like riding a bike or any other. But still, once you've got this thing that you learn how to do, there are kind of right ways and wrong ways to do it. And for sure they're not going to get undermined. And there's so much more uncertainty. That's why an art in terms of there's not only the influence of unconscious factors that's unavoidable. You can't possibly make them all explicit because that could be the case with any sort of techne at all.

But that there's something more problematic about the idea of interpretation, you know, for reasons that we'll get into that. Because your participation in it is such that you're sort of changing the landscape as you go and history is changing every moment and culture is changing every moment. And so these things make it more complicated to learn this kind of stuff than to learn cobbling.

24:49 Wes: Right.

24:50 Mark: We get in here the hermeneutic circle. So what that meant for folks before him, the thing that he's going to riff off of was that the circle is when you're reading a text, you have to go back and forth between the individual little sentence that you're reading and then sort of thinking of the text as a whole and then back to the little part you're reading and use those to alter your interpretations as you go. You can't just go word by word. Right. That's why you can't just like have a computer program that just goes through and translates this, that even he actually uses the translating for a foreign language as an example, quite often as a simplified version of this that you would have to try to figure out in the context of the utterance, what would make sense.

You can't just say word by word because that's going to under determine your translation. So you have to look at the whole. What do we think the whole message is? But of course you don't. You probably don't know what the whole message is in advance. You don't know what the whole book is about in advance. So you read little bits of it, make sense of what you can, then you get an idea of what the whole thing's about, and you use that to guide your interpretation of the next line and keep going back and forth.

25:54 Wes: Yeah, we can interpret specific parts without the whole. So in the case, it could be a word without the sentence, or the sentence without the paragraph, the paragraph without the book. And then on the other hand, we don't have the whole until we have all the parts. So even before we get to translation. It's a pretty simple idea. If I'm reading a book and someone uses an indefinite pronoun, look over there. And it refers to something before it, obviously I can't establish the meaning of that without reference to the context of the paragraph that surrounded it. If you took that away from me, I wouldn't be able to interpret it as specifically.

26:29 Dylan: I mean, he points out that this is one of the underlying conditions for the activity itself is it's even a kind of prejudice that the text has a wholeness to it that is intelligible and that in reading it and interpreting it, you are doing so on the basis of expecting it to be intelligible.

26:50 Wes: Yeah.

26:51 Dylan: The alternative of throwing up your hands and say, well, look, it just doesn't make any sense is not. The only possible way you could come to that conclusion is, according to Gadamer, would be after a tremendous amount of work. And in doing so, you're basically denying the intelligibility of the work itself. You're saying it's just simply not intelligible.

27:11 Mark: Well, so the innovation with Gadamer is the hermeneutic circle is not just from part of the text to whole text, but it's from what you're trying to read to the larger context. The history in which it was produced, right. Even your own expectations, you have to sort of look at your own and becomes a process of self analysis that you yourself in the interpretation are part of the context.

27:30 Wes: Your own expectations are sort of what resolve this dilemma. This hermeneutical circle is related to Meno's problem of how can you inquire into something that you don't know unless you have some sort of knowledge of it. And that's the presupposition part of this. And Dylan mentioned this principle. Well, the broadest principle that guides these presuppositions is that we expect it to be an intelligible whole. We expect to be able to fit the isolated sentence into these various levels of context. So in the case of, for instance, look over there, if I'm supplied with that sentence in isolation, there's a whole horizon of possibilities. So it could be, oh, there's a freight train coming, or there's a cougar, or you know, all the familiar things that could.

28:11 Dylan: How many cougars do you have in Boston?

28:14 Wes: Familiar and unfamiliar things that sort of just pop up in your head, no matter how, no matter how relevant they actually are. But you know what I'm saying, all the possible ways to frame that sentence such that it's makes sense. I expect there to be something there. It doesn't have to be a freight train, but I expect there to be something there to have it make sense. So in the case of translation, you're reading a difficult passage in Herodotus and you read some sentence which doesn't make sense, which is usually what's happening when you're trying to translate Herodotus and you have to look to the end of the paragraph and figure out what all the context is.

And then you can go back and really get at what that sentence means. But you still, through one's presuppositions and one's sort of entertaining of all the different possibilities, you don't just blank on that sentence. You have a sort of provisional interpretation that you bring to that sentence. And that's where the usefulness of prejudices or presuppositions comes in. I can't really continue my inquiry unless I can do that work of making a provisional assumption, interpretive assumption, and then coming back and revising it when I have more context.

29:24 Dylan: I know that he speaks mainly about text and stuff like that, but it's hard for me not to just see all kinds of examples, detective work, or just walking into a room and someone leaves the room. And you have a range of expectations that, well, they're in the next room or maybe they walked outside or whatever that you use hypotheses. Yes, yes. And they, as Wes pointed out, would be unconscious or just sort of the normal everyday process of. We would just call it just of understanding what's going on and sorting things out and getting from here to there.

That we presume a kind of intelligibility to the world just driving to work. Right. I guess I just found Gadamer exactly right. About that is the process of understanding. I see why it's so important in the question of interpreting texts. And maybe it's because of my own prejudices in the time in which I live that I just don't find it so surprising that you would be constantly going back and forth about it.

30:30 Mark: It does sound like a lot of this is sort of, of course, you know, common sense. But he's putting it in, especially in this part where he's talking about Heidegger in this weird terminology. Like, is he really just saying something obvious in a crazy way? He says we need to allow our fore. Having our foresight and our foreconception to be worked out in terms of the things themselves and not by fancies and popular conceptions.

30:52 Wes: There he's describing Heidegger's conception of hermeneutics. Right.

30:56 Mark: I think before he elaborates, he follows.

30:59 Wes: Well, I thought he was going to give a twist on that though.

31:01 Mark: I thought he was just applying Heidegger.

31:04 Dylan: That seemed to be the way he was understanding himself, as pointing to Heidegger's understanding of hermeneutics in the context of being. And then Gadamer understands himself as adding something to that, different from it.

31:17 Wes: So Heidegger, the whole way out of the hermeneutic circle is a sort of primordial knowing. It's this attention to content, it's attention to the matter at hand. Do you remember that phrasing? Or to the things themselves, which sort of anchors us in getting away from distractions. You know, these Gadamer calls the constant distractions that arise within the self. You know, honestly, I don't know if he differs from Heidegger. You know, that was my general impression, that he's laying out Heidegger's view and he was going to say how he moved beyond that. But the main thing is that the fact that our four meanings need to be non arbitrary and that we examine the origin validity of them. It doesn't happen up front. I don't know where Heidegger is on all that.

31:57 Seth: But the point of the four Meanings. The point of having these four meanings are these prejudices, which are just judgments which haven't been proven or disproven at this point. Not the negative connotation is that the hermeneutic act is an act of openness. You have to recognize and acknowledge that you have these judgments in place, and then you have to be open to putting them in question. He says something to the effect of, you have to put your judgments or your prejudices at risk, and only then are you truly on the way to understanding. And the idea is not that you shouldn't have them, not that there's anything wrong with it.

It is the structure of who we are. For us to have built a worldview. We believe things, we have certain knowledge, and we have certain judgments about other people and other things which we bring to any encounter with those people or those things or texts, whatever they are. And the point is not to not have them. The point is to acknowledge that you have them and be open to having them. Questions are changed by bringing new beliefs and knowledge and so forth into play.

33:08 Wes: Yeah.

33:09 Mark: And the thing that he thinks that Heidegger. Why he thinks Heidegger's weird language is all justified is because he wants to establish that this situation is permanent, that it's ontological, that you might think just methodologically, like, oh, we're going to be distracted by our prejudices. And so we have to test them, we have to put them in the line. But then you might have the Schleiermacher model, where you think that once you get them out there and you examine them, then you're living the examined life in respect to this text. And then you can embrace the thing, that text itself, and you can get an adequate understanding of it, and you're done. But according to Gadamer, it's really an unending process that we need to be guided by the interpretation of the things themselves as the first, last and constant task.

33:54 Wes: Yeah. So the guiding of the things themselves, that's supposed to help us, for instance, at some point question a presupposition. And there is a good passage where he sorts of gets at. This is on page 270 in the middle of the page. How do we discover that there's a difference between our customary usage and that of the text? I think we must say that generally we do so in the experience of being pulled up short by the text. Either it does not yield any meaning at all, or its meaning is not compatible with what we had expected. This is what brings us up short and alerts. Us to the possible difference in usage, so on and so forth. So the way in which our presuppositions get challenged is just that they're to bring back the hypothesis thing that Dylan made me think of as they are sort of inadequate hypotheses to the text at hand and have to be revised.

34:42 Dylan: Because of that, we're either confused or surprised.

34:46 Wes: Yes. And it moves on into that passage that I think that Seth was getting at where something has to be at risk. So he goes on to talk about. Yet this presupposition is not something that makes understanding easier, but harder, since the four meanings. Sorry, that's out of context.

35:00 Seth: Yeah, Wes, how are we supposed to understand if you don't give us the context?

35:04 Wes: I'm hoping. I was hoping you guys would provide me. So how can our misunderstandings of a text be perceived at all if there is nothing to contradict them? How can a text be protected against a misunderstanding from the start? And then he gets into this idea that we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text. I don't know. Does someone have a better way to.

35:22 Mark: You gave the answer to your question before you gave the question, which is that being pulled up short. That's how we.

35:29 Wes: Right, but he elaborates it then in this other. In this idea of openness.

35:34 Dylan: Well, just after that, in addition to being pulled up short, he points out on 271 that we find meanings cannot be understood in an arbitrary way. Just as we cannot continually misunderstand the use of a word without its affecting the meaning of the whole. So we cannot stick blindly to our own fore meaning about the thing if we want to understand the meaning of another. And he goes on a little bit further on and says, the fact is that meanings represent a fluid multiplicity of possibilities. But within this multiplicity of what can be thought, not everything is possible.

And if a person fails to hear what the other person is really saying, he will not be able to fit what he has misunderstood into the range of his own various expectations of meaning. Thus, there is a criterion here also. The hermeneutical task becomes of itself a questioning of things and is always, in part, so defined. This place is hermeneutical work on a firm basis. And it's that last sentence that I wanted to kind of talk about a little bit, because it's the remnants of the ledge of objectivity in Gadamer. The way in which you have some kind of grounding, some kind of foundation that is born out of this hermeneutical circle is that meanings, whatever they are, aren't arbitrary.

And even if there are revised as a part of questioning, that itself gives the whole process a firm basis. There's a different kind of firmness than what someone like Schleiermacher or Descartes would appeal to.

37:06 Wes: The firmness comes out of the possibility of correction. Right. Do you understand what I'm saying? The person trying to understand something will not resign himself from the start to relying on his own accidental four meanings, ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as possible the actual meaning of the text until the latter becomes his. So that idea of being pulled up short by the text, you get correct, affected by context. If your interpretation is just arbitrarily bad, if your preconception is arbitrarily bad, it'll create meaninglessness.

37:35 Seth: Yeah, I read this a little differently. The way I read this section was that this ties in. I don't remember if it's in this essay or somewhere else where he basically says the hermeneutic act is understanding is always an asking of a question. Something like that.

37:49 Wes: Yep.

37:51 Mark: It's always trying to understand the question that is being answered by the text.

37:55 Seth: Yes. What does he say? The structure is a question and answering as opposed to something else. That understanding is seeking an answer, which means there's always a question.

38:05 Wes: Yeah, every statement is a question. And every question can be treated as another statement which evokes a new question, so on.

38:12 Seth: Yes, every statement is a question. That's what I was thinking of. And so he's saying that hermeneutics is on a firm basis, because hermeneutics as an activity is an activity of questioning. I thought the implication was that because you're not in the process of making objective claims or you're trying to assert something, what you're actually doing is asking a question which is in essence always a legitimate activity as long as it's done in the appropriate spirit.

38:41 Mark: Right. So it's not saying that we are hooked into by any Cartesian certainty to the objects. It's just that we're in this interrogative relationship with it. So that in itself methodologically provides a firm basis. It's not the same as that you have some certain knowledge that then everything else gets based on.

38:58 Wes: Right.

38:59 Mark: Seth and I, when we were reading Heidegger. Heidegger talks about being in relation to things so that you let the things be as they are. Which sounds like, well, when you're sophisticated and spiritual enough, then you get the true view of things in the manner of Plato or something. But that's not really what even Heidegger is saying according to this interpretation. It's just that by interrogating them, you're letting them interrogate you. You've sort of created this ongoing shifting relationship temporal. And that in itself is supposed to characterize what makes for good interpretation. That is supposed to be different than the idea of I'm sitting back and I'm judging the text. That would be the subjectist view.

39:40 Wes: Yeah. I'm getting as bird's eye view as possible by framing all the historical context and so on.

39:47 Mark: Right. That engaging with it, you're putting your own presuppositions at risk. Then there's something more active going on.

39:54 Wes: Yeah. He calls it the foregrounding of one's own meaning. The foregrounding and appropriation of one's own four meanings and prejudices. This is at the bottom of 271. The important thing is to be aware of one's own bias so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one's own four meanings.

40:12 Mark: Yes. Be sensitive to the text alterity and that it is other than you.

40:17 Wes: So this is what I mean by correction. The idea of correction and the idea of it's the subject matter at hand or that's the things themselves that are going to provide pushback against your interpretation and lead to revision necessarily.

40:31 Dylan: But there's this activity of listening to the text or trying to understand the text in itself. And this strikes me as being something like a method. Right. That there's a set of working prejudices that you have in the activity of interpreting a text even consciously. And one is that the text has something to say on its own. And there are other prejudices you want to be aware of. And there's other prejudices you're not never going to be aware of. And you're going to. In the process of being surprised or confused, you may be will confront those. But it does seem like the method is. Well, the text has something to say on its own. And that's different than saying the author has something to say on his own.

41:15 Wes: I think though why he doesn't want to call it a method. Although, Dylan, I think you're right. It's perilously close. Is that he's thinking of method ultimately as rule based.

41:25 Dylan: Yeah. He's thinking of Descartes Method. Right.

41:27 Wes: And so in the same way, you know, in the last essay, the sense in which hermeneutics is like practical philosophy is that contra Kant and the categorical imperative are Practical decisions and actions cannot be determined by a rule. There's no algorithm for what we're going to do and there's no algorithm for interpretation that's going to ensure that we do it well or objectively.

41:52 Dylan: Let's say, just like he wants to save the word prejudice from the curse of Enlightenment philosophy and French thinking, I want to save method from the curse of merely algorithmic thinking. It's a way.

42:09 Wes: That's a good point.

42:10 Mark: Yeah. So the comparison is apt to Aristotle's ethics, another kind of practical philosophy where if you go back to our episode on that, his ethics is not rule based. But there's still, it seems like there's some tips on how to make yourself into a virtuous person who will do the right thing when the time comes.

42:29 Dylan: Okay, we have to have a complete decide. We have to come up with a YouTube channel that has Aristotle's tips for better self empowerment or something. And we just like 30 second tips that we come out with just of this. Anyway.

42:46 Wes: No, I was just imagining someone discovering a lost text of Aristotle. The tips. Oh yeah, even better, the tips.

42:55 Dylan: How to save your marriage.

42:58 Wes: No, but I was also thinking about the job writing about engineering and the. The whole idea of a method, as in say mechanistic empirical design for designing roads, let's say, where you run everything through a computer, all these presuppositions about what the weather is going to be and other factors, and you generate a conclusion about what thickness the asphalt pavement above will need to be or something like that, versus the way it's traditionally done, which is more intuitive. They call it empirical, but it's more like based on this vaguer notion of best practices or tips.

So that's the two different senses of method we're getting at. The kind of method, the rule based methodology that Gadamer is rejecting here, and then the idea of having these more vague prescriptions or best practices. Although I wonder if Gadamer would even think he's doing that. I think he might think of himself as doing something more descriptive than prescriptive.

43:56 Mark: Well, isn't there another lost text of Aristotle? The BMP's the best management practices.

44:03 Wes: Yeah, I read a summary of that actually.

44:06 Mark: All these transportation research jokes in here, it's going to get us a whole new audience.

44:11 Dylan: Dots across the world.

44:15 Mark: Seth, any more Heidegger?

44:18 Seth: No, I think I'm done being the Heidegger guy. I don't want to be responsible for explaining Heidegger anymore because I've forgotten too much and it's too painful. To go back and pick it back up.

44:31 Mark: Right. So in the parts of Truth and Method that we skipped in chapter four, it looks actually like a lot of Truth and Method does. I browse through the book a little in that he gives these historical genealogies that we only got in our reading. We got that in the Hermeneutics is practical philosophy, where he goes through all the history of hermeneutics. But in Truth and Method, it's very leisurely, and it should strike us as very reminiscent of the Eva Brann book that we read and Heidegger himself. So what is common sense? What is practical wisdom?

And sort of going through the history of these terms as they developed, like going through the genealogy and stuff, is going to teach you something about the. About what's going on now. And so he does that with prejudice here, that in French legal terms, it was well before you actually try the case. This is the hypothesis you come up with, or something like that.

45:19 Wes: And he goes through provisional legal verdict. Yep.

45:23 Mark: Yes, the provisional legal verdict. Okay. So how does the Enlightenment screw that up?

45:27 Dylan: Make it bad, make prejudices bad, and

45:30 Mark: thereby deny tradition its power or make

45:33 Wes: prejudices out to be necessarily false or, you know, something you suspect as being a false judgment?

45:38 Seth: Yes.

45:39 Mark: So we jumped over that historical story to subsection 3, the hermeneutic significance of temporal distance. And he says here we're going to really get down to brass tacks on how hermeneutics actually works. What does it actually entail when you say that belonging to a tradition is a condition of hermeneutics?

45:57 Wes: Well, first of all, I just wanted, before we got off the last part of the first section. So he does say how the Enlightenment screws it up. Right. Which is to. It's sort of a denial of prejudice itself and a denial of traditional. Trying to pretend that we have no prejudices. That's part of the development of the negative connotation of prejudices.

46:14 Mark: Or that they're necessary.

46:16 Wes: Yeah.

46:16 Mark: Whereas he's trying to argue that they're ontological.

46:18 Wes: And then the way he ends it up, it's the loss of this anchoring foundation in things themselves or in the subject matter at hand. Because that denial of prejudice becomes a distraction from attending to the things at hand. So we actually handicap ourselves by trying to take this bird's eye, prejudiceless view. We distance ourselves from the, let's say, the text or whatever it is we're trying to interpret.

46:41 Dylan: In some ways, we make it dead. Isn't that.

46:43 Wes: Yeah.

46:43 Dylan: This process of the circle of hermeneutics Seems to me keeping the text alive as something that maybe it's not just the text alive, but our interaction, the activity of understanding stays active as a moving living. Now I'm being completely analogical.

47:00 Wes: Well, he talks about this in the Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem, the second essay we read. He talks about sterility. That's at the end, actually, where he's talking sterility, methodological sterility, and he's thinking specifically about the sciences, but also scholarship. So this idea that you could have scholarship focused, sort of churning out on all these trivial problems or industrial scientific research facilities which sort of do this sort of hit or miss research. So the question is one of what's salient? What problems are worth one's attention?

47:32 Dylan: Yeah, questions are live things.

47:33 Wes: And that's a hermeneutical sort of problem that science itself. I don't know if science itself can answer, but it's a hermeneutical as opposed to strictly scientific problem.

47:42 Mark: I mean, he talks about the hermeneutic circle in the way. I think we've already said quite a bit about that. What maybe has not become clear is whether this whole Heideggerian argument against the subjective objective distinction, how central that is. But Gadamer returns to that here, that he looks at Schleiermacher's take on the prejudices that we need to get rid of, that there are sort of two aspects of what we have to look at. We have to look at the subjective aspects, and that means actually getting at the author's inner life. That that is the goal is to reproduce the author's inner life in ourselves.

That's how we'll really understand. But Schleiermacher distinguishes that from the objective aspects of interpretation, which has to do with the context of the literary genre and things like that that we're not going to understand even if we knew what was going on in the author's mind, unless we understand like what the author is trying to do in terms of what social practice he is engaged in, you know, outside of his own intention, in his own mind, that we wouldn't understand and so on. 292. Gadamer asks, Is this breakdown understanding the text in its own terms, watching out for these two kind of considerations, is that an adequate account of the circular movement of understanding?

He says we do not try to transport ourselves into the author's mind, but instead we try to transpose ourselves into the perspective within which he has formed his views.

48:50 Wes: Yes.

48:51 Mark: So even when we're sort of imagining this sympathy, which is the thing that Romanticism Schleiermacher added over and above. We just, oh, use the natural light of reason. No, we're trying to sympathize with this person. But of course we don't actually do that. We transpose ourselves into an object, subjective perspective within which he's formed his views. We can't actually put ourselves in their minds. We imagine what somebody of that background in that sort of situation trying to do that kind of thing would be doing. And Gadamer urges, but this simply means that we try to understand how what he is saying could be right.

49:18 Wes: Exactly.

49:19 Mark: See, things that way of formulating just cuts right through all these objective and subjective aspects. No, just basically use the principle of charity, make sense as a whole and don't just dismiss it out of hand because it looks ridiculous.

49:32 Wes: Yeah. So what's a good example of that?

49:34 Seth: If I'm reading our Ayn Rand episode.

49:37 Wes: Well, I was just going to think of reading Shakespeare or something and thinking that. But that's trickier because it's art. Reading some text and thinking that in order to truly understand it, I have to essentially become that author and transform this radical empathy where I get into their particular mind. And I think empathy in a way does have something to do with it, but it's more like he says, ultimately, understanding is not a communion of souls, but sharing a common meaning. So when I try to understand what someone is saying or understand a text, it's not like my goal is to get inside there is a communion with their soul.

Exactly. It's to understand. And this gets us back to, say, some of the Wittgenstein stuff and no private language and things like that. But I'm trying to get at the meaning, which is actually something much less particular to a particular subjectivity or a particular human being. It's more of a public, objective thing, let's say.

50:30 Dylan: Is that what you meant, Mark?

50:31 Mark: Yes.

50:32 Dylan: Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about when you said reading with charity. I thought that you meant something different than that. I mean both of them. That seems to be something that's in Gadamer for sure.

50:43 Unknown speaker: Right.

50:43 Mark: Okay. Maybe I was swept away by Wes's giving correct things from the text.

50:48 Wes: Yeah, well, it's the same. It's basically the same paragraph or two that Mark and I are. What page is it on?

50:54 Mark: Right. It's in 292. The task of hermeneutics is to clarify this miracle of understanding, which is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in A common meaning.

51:02 Wes: Yeah, it's just at the end of the same paragraph with Mark.

51:04 Mark: He doesn't say the principle of charity anywhere.

51:07 Seth: No, but that's what being open to the text means.

51:09 Mark: Right.

51:10 Dylan: It might be a different principle, but it's at least as important as what was just said about. It's another part of the method of hermeneutics.

51:17 Wes: Yeah, well, it's directly relevant. Right. So to bridge the gap, you know, I was talking about. Or not me, but God, you don't need a communion of souls is a shared common meaning. And the principle of charity just says, pay attention to the meaning. Right.

51:31 Seth: The principle of charity says, there's something in there, there's something that is trying to be said and that it's worth paying attention to and that it makes

51:38 Wes: sense in the broadest sense. It is just as Dylan has pointed out. Yeah, it makes sense. The world is knowable. There's something to be interpreted and to make sense of.

51:48 Mark: So I think it's in the last essay that Herman Hicks Practical Philosophy, he talks about psychoanalysis a little. And just the fact that. So really, if you have a breakdown, this text really just doesn't seem to make sense, then you might. So if you're reading Ayn Rand and you see things that look self contradictory, then you might start, as we did, to say, what kind of weird person is this that would say that? But you don't do that. You hopefully don't start by saying, they're a weird person, and I expect it to be weird. You start by trying to make it, using the principle of charity into a coherent whole.

And if you come up with, oh, well, but here it seems like some extreme romanticism is being advocated, while here it says explicitly, this is not extreme romanticism, then you know, if you can't honestly make sense of those two things being said together, then you do have to retreat to, there's something going wrong with the vessel, with the writer. Try to understand that in some other way.

52:36 Wes: But not until you've really tried to add as many epicycles as possible to the whole theoretical apparatus, make it work.

52:43 Dylan: When I was in undergrad, there weren't that many times where one of my professors came in just spitting nails about anything. But remember one particular time we were doing. Maybe it was Nietzsche, I forget who it was, but there had apparently been a lot of complaints about things being hard to make sense of or understand. And he just came in and said, you know what? When you're having a hard time understanding something, you just got to sit back and think about the fact that the problem is with you and not with the text. The problem is with you. And you need to come to that text a little more open and a little more willing to analyze and think it through. Because it's not because the text has a problem.

53:26 Mark: Well, bringing up psychoanalysis, right, can cut both ways as well. That the idea is you're trying to unearth your own prejudices and put them on the line. It might be really hard to get at some of those. And so maybe that is what's going on, that Heidegger in his saying everybody's neglecting the question of being. You don't really get that this is really something that's questionable. You think it's just basic and obvious, but it is questionable. You know, this is really trying to get you to do an analysis not just on why you didn't think before, oh, that this is a real question, but why, even when he's telling you why, you're denying him.

There's something wrong with you and your historical upbringing and your psychological hang ups that is making it so you cannot properly see the question of being. Come on, you gotta just sit back and let being be. Then you'll see the question of being. I'm sure there's a Heideggerian mistral therapy

54:10 Dylan: there, some scream therapy, you can start howling.

54:14 Mark: So on 293 he says more about how Heidegger's view is better than the older part versus whole circle of hermeneutic circle. Right. It's better than looking at the formal relationship between the part and the whole or its subjective reflex, the intuitive anticipation of the whole and its subsequent articulation in the parts. So it's interesting that he's saying that that's wrong when it sounded like that is a really good idea for doing hermeneutics. But I guess the point he's saying is that you don't just run around in this circle until you achieve understanding, then stop when you're perfectly in line to the authority.

In contrast to this approach, Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of or understanding. The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding, but on the contrary, is most fully realized.

54:57 Wes: Yeah. And then the circle then is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter.

55:06 Dylan: And this makes more clear what you could mean by having something of the sort Be foundational. That it could have a structure that would compete with the purported foundation of objective understanding. à la Enlightenment. Understanding that he's turning away from.

55:23 Wes: Yeah.

55:24 Dylan: This whole idea of being fully realized. I mean it's a different paradigm. It's not that you get perfect understanding. So all confusion and all uncertainty has gone away. This last phrase is most fully realized. Points to the kind of constructivist activity that's going on. Not in the sense of making shit up but. But in the sense of building understanding. That understanding is an activity. It's not simply a kind of distillation into pure self evident clarity.

55:50 Wes: Yeah. And it's not even individual activity. Because he goes on to say this anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition.

56:01 Dylan: Yeah. This consensus thing is interesting because there seems clearly no understanding that's genuinely individual.

56:10 Seth: I was going to follow up on Dylan's point. It's on page 296. A writer like. Did anybody know who this guy was? Chladenius?

56:17 Wes: No.

56:18 Seth: Okay. I'm glad we all went to the trouble of looking him up.

56:21 Dylan: We should assume that he's awesome.

56:23 Seth: Who does not yet view understanding in terms of history as saying the same thing in an ingenuous way. When he says that an author does not need to know the real meaning of what he has written. And hence the interpreter can and must often understand more than he. But this is of fundamental importance. Not just occasionally, but always the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.

56:46 Mark: There you go.

56:47 Seth: Is this where he talks about mens auctoris? Is this in a different. Our goal in understanding. And I noticed that he uses the word understanding and not interpretation. Must have been his people later on who modified that to break away from the concept of knowledge and understanding and put it into interpretation and meaning. But our goal isn't to try to reconstruct what the author meant. Which goes hand in hand with not trying to get inside the author's mind or live inside their worldview. But the point is as soon as you remove that restriction, there really are no limits on what kind of productive activity the understanding can be other than the anchoring of the text itself.

So that is why you can read a Shakespearean sonnet or you can interpret a work of art based on the symbols and the imagery and the form that it has. You can also look at it in relation to other elements in the author's body of work, you can look at it against contemporary. You can review it in contrast to something that's happening in your contemporary society. As soon as you're not just simply trying to say, this is what Shakespeare meant, then you're turning it into a productive activity. And there's really the only limit to that productive activity are the bounds of your own historical experience.

57:57 Wes: It's a little bit of a complicated example with the Shakespeare, again, because of the symbolic nature of that type of meaning, where this represents this or this represents that. And we know that artists do a lot of that unconsciously. So the average literary critic isn't trying to go out and say, let me figure out what Shakespeare consciously meant, as if he were doing all of that symbolizing consciously. Because of course, artists. It just comes out unconsciously. It's still a meaning of the text. It's so legitimate interpretation to say, look at the symbolism here. But we don't think of it as the conscious intent of the author. Your point is well taken. I just. It just started me thinking about the particular difficulties of that particular example.

58:32 Seth: My reading of this is that there would be no point to reading historical texts if the point of understanding was just to explicate them. Somebody would have already done it, and you wouldn't even read the text. You'd just be like, oh, well, what is the meaning of, you know, Herodotus's histories, right? Or how do I understand that? And somebody would say, well, here's what Herodotus was trying to do. You see, he traveled around the world and he did this. And you go, oh, okay, I got it. I understand. But we don't do that. We read stuff and we. And every generation continues to read more things.

And that's why it's the fact that there's. He uses the term a surplus of meaning at one point. I think that this is what it means to understand things. If understanding didn't have this surplus of meaning, if it wasn't a productive activity, there'd be no point in doing that. And that's. I think Wes becomes a more interesting conversation when you talk about philosophy, where it's not so much authorial intent or you're not reading the text as literary. But in theory, there's some sort of an argument that is supposed to have some kind of scientific like status by virtue of the logic or the validity of its reasoning, where that becomes a more problematic or interesting question.

But it also makes sense why Gadamer uses art as his paradigmatic case, because he says explicitly in the aesthetic and hermeneutics essay, which we're not at yet, but that the reason why art is a paradigmatic case for hermeneutics is that works of art always have a present. They always challenge us to try to understand them in the present. They're essentially the thing in the world. Or art is something that makes explicit this structure that we have of understanding and engaging the way we do in this hermeneutic activity.

1:00:22 Wes: Yeah, I'm a little unclear on the status of art because that essay is basically an argument that art is an object of hermeneutic inquiry. It's a little different. Right. So we think of, well, I want to understand some ancient text. The initial hermeneutic instinct arises out of something that's been written a long time ago and maybe in a different language. And in a way, it's a historical problem. So to argue that that's applicable to art, that's an extra. He's sort of extending that into the domain of aesthetic interpretation.

1:00:54 Mark: But it's interestingly circular in the same way that Dylan brought up the idea of that a critique of science is one of the things that launches this. But then I pointed out. Oh, but really he just wants to launch it. And then he does a critique of science later in this other essay. Well, the same kind of thing happens with art that. Yes, we read this article that says hermeneutics is primarily linguistic. Right. Well, then how could it apply to nonverbal works of art? And puts this as a problem. But in the course of Truth and Method, he actually introduces a lot of this.

Like the whole beginning of the book is about aesthetics and starts really with aesthetics. Works of art as his prime thing to set up the play of how it's not just the subjectist picture of me sitting back and being a viewer of whatever the thing is. So he's saying, you might think the text, it's just there. It's just. You read it. So he starts off with the idea of a game. And this is of course, fun to compare to Wittgenstein talking about language games. But the idea is that if you're playing a game, then you're reacting to the other person who's playing the game.

Or even if you know why Cat plays with a ball of string. Well, a ball of string is more fun than other things because the physics of string gives it some reaction back. So any kind of play, he thinks, it's not a matter of you being a spectator. You end up being a spoil sport if you're doing that like you have to actually engage in it, enter into it, put yourself under its spell. So then he, he says, well, really, it's the game that's playing you, right?

1:02:29 Seth: In Russia, game plays you.

1:02:34 Mark: And so it's only a short step from there to then consider works of art in this respect. Like, well, what if you're actually putting on a play? Then like, you're likewise engaging in this script and you're doing things with the other actor. Well then what is the spectator doing with that? Well, the spectator is also playing the part. You're sort of all engaged in this. The spectator becomes yet another participant in this interactive thing. And so that's his way of setting up that you are like somebody who's watching a play, you looking at a text, have to interact with it, engage in it in this way that has a back and forth to it and not a spectator quality to it.

1:03:09 Wes: So make sure you get out your highlighters when you're doing your reading. Active reading. No, I'm just kidding, right?

1:03:17 Mark: We got that in the Jaspers a couple episodes ago. And he was like, well, that's how you have to engage past philosophy like that. It's one leg and you have to be the other leg so you can run together. And it was unclear to us from that little we read of Jaspers what that meant. Well, Gadamer, who is also influenced by Jasper's as well as Heidegger, certainly they're in the same bailiwick, is really spelling out exactly what that means. What does active reading amount to?

1:03:43 Dylan: I feel like this matters directly to art, especially at least my experience of seeing anything that's modern art, like anything in the past practically hundred years. If I go to a museum, there's whole wings of the museum that I'm completely befuddled by. Usually I just leave befuddled because I don't actually get out my highlighter and start trying to.

1:04:07 Wes: You don't read the little cards next to the floor?

1:04:09 Mark: I do read the little cards.

1:04:11 Dylan: They're generally so pompous and self important.

1:04:14 Wes: Or you get that little telephone thing. That's the only way I can really enjoy.

1:04:18 Dylan: I try. Well, I'm probably violating the first rule of the hermeneutical method in that I have a bad attitude sometimes when I walk into certain wings of the.

1:04:26 Wes: You hate context, man.

1:04:28 Dylan: I'm like, it's a fucking piece of canvas with a red square on it, people.

1:04:34 Wes: What the hell, right?

1:04:37 Mark: So if you try to figure out like Gadamer is advising us, what question, what challenge is this work, trying to answer. So maybe if it's all these people that were painting pretty landscapes before, that there's something missing. And so I'm trying to take the next step in just putting a square instead of putting the whole thing and to actually understand, like, why that would be a coherent response to this historical.

1:04:58 Wes: There are a whole series of artists who tried and failed to get the square perfectly in the center. They call it the off center period.

1:05:09 Seth: This just in, kids get off Dylan's lawn.

1:05:16 Dylan: So I just think it would be much more interesting if you walked up to one of those paintings and based upon how high it was on the wall, it looked square. But if you looked at it from some other perspective, you realize that, like, from straight on, it wasn't square. Something like that. The context of art, or more contemporary art, in which it seems to revel in only being a reaction against other traditions of art, just has always struck me as petulant in the most banal way possible. And I cannot understand why stuff like that just gets adored so much.

1:05:55 Seth: Ladies and gentlemen, for the answers, please listen to our episode on Arthur Danto, number 16. Okay. You'll learn about the art world and how this modern art came to be.

1:06:07 Mark: And the idea is that typically, it's not purely a reaction to what came before. It's that what came before was missing something, was not expressing something. Maybe it was being too saddled into our human ways of seeing. And so what I'm trying to do now, even though it only makes sense if you understand the artworks that came before, really once you get in that space, then you can ignore the artworks that came before and enter into the newly created world that this thing has established. And the way to relate it back to Gadamer, in this end of Truth and Method here, the part we read, he says, for understanding comes from being concerned with the same subject, right?

Actually caring what the thing is talking about. What would be interesting is if in a museum you had, like, I'm not going to group things by style, but, like, this whole room is reactions to war. And so if you are concerned with reactions to war, then you're concerned with the same subject. And that will be a great tool for understanding that will enable you to appreciate all this stuff.

1:07:06 Dylan: You're right, of course. I'm sorry to walk out, my grumpy old man.

1:07:09 Seth: I don't have the same attitude that you have. I'm much more open. But I'm also very agnostic with respect to the production and the history. So I prefer to try to have an aesthetic experience first, that's independent of the history or anything like that. And then I'll come to it and learn more about it if it somehow engages me. So there's a lot of stuff I probably miss out on precisely because I'm not willing to engage with that tradition. So it doesn't make me angry the way it seems to make you. But it's a secondary part of the experience for me. And maybe that's the wrong thing.

1:07:45 Wes: So I've had both reactions, and I think. I don't know. It's almost like if you come to it expecting anything, it's irritating. I mean, I've had that experience, but I've also had great experiences in contemporary abstract art galleries where I'm just sort of put away my mind and say, okay, let's have the raw aesthetic experience. But I wonder how any of that fits into what Gadamer is suggesting we do. Because I think it's almost. It's a better experience, I think, with that particular kind of art, if you're simply presuppositionless and not really doing much interpreting at all. I think it's actually better.

1:08:20 Seth: Here's what it comes down to for me, Wes. I kind of have a tendency to agree with Gadamer. Like, I would believe that we are meaning creating beings. And that our way of being in the world is to ascribe meaning to things. And we bring our history and our body of knowledge to our experience of objects in the world and other people. And we try to understand. But in my mind, the understanding is really just the creation of meaning, not necessarily some kind of sense of knowledge in a stricter sense. But that's fucking exhausting to imagine that that's what the activity of life is, is just wearing.

1:08:57 Mark: Well, he says in practical circumstances, of course, even though the project of hermeneutics is never ending. In practical circumstances, yes, it ends. You don't have to keep engaging and keep questioning and keep open to everything all the time, such that you would be exhausted.

1:09:14 Dylan: Well, and in fact, on an everyday basis, there's some huge percentage of what we interact with. We don't bring any hermeneutical work to bear on it. Right. But in principle, the way of his articulation of understanding wouldn't apply to just highfalutin things like reading hard books or interpreting modern art or things like that. But it would be literally walking across the street, getting out of bed in the morning and going to get a cup of coffee, that his articulation of understanding, in that case, you're just not bringing interpretation to bear on it.

Except maybe when you go to the sink and your favorite coffee cup isn't in the cupboard or you see it on the cupboard. A better example, you say, I didn't put it there. You realize somebody else used your coffee cup. You know, Three Bears, Goldilocks thing. It seems to me that his articulation of understanding works on that kind of figuring out and making sense, being surprised, being confused about the world in just a very basic rudimentary way.

1:10:20 Seth: Right.

1:10:20 Mark: But certainly what happens when we explicitly bring hermeneutic apparatus to bear is supposed to be an extension of our general being in the world. So it's all set up. And of course, the reason why crossing the street we have to bring hermeneutics to bear is because we recognize that it's a street and cars could be coming and hit us and have all these other expectations that it's just part and parcel. It's a more intelligent way of maybe making the most out of the process of understanding that's going on all the time.

1:10:49 Dylan: And that's what I particularly really liked about the Gadamer is the way in which his articulation of understanding ran that gamut of everyday activity that is utterly familiar. And that the understanding of complicated things that you sit down and say, I'm going to try to understand this, that it works for that. In fact, the activity of that hard work is the small everyday activity writ large. And that's what I really liked about it.

1:11:22 Mark: Well, what you suggest, you know, this line, it does make me want to bring in more the aesthetics article. We could still put in a few more points from Truth and Method as we go. But is the idea that aesthetics shouldn't be this isolated space from the rest of our lives? So if we think that normally we're just kind of going about on autopilot, and then sometimes we stop and we bring our hermeneutic apparatus to bear. That sounds very anti gotamer that. That sounds like we enter into the special realm of that only the upper classes could afford to do, only the educated and sit back and read some hard philosophy, engage in these useless activities, or sit back and take in some art that has been specifically put out for people like us to contemplate and judge.

Where he says most of these things, of course, most of the time, when you're interpreting something like you're interpreting the stop sign, this works on all kind of texts. It's not just specifically artistic texts. And then even works of art are generally meant to actually serve a function in society. That it's kind of a weird, corrupt late historical period that we'd have this specifically upper class aesthetic realm of criticism when you know, really it should be much more familiar to us in like the music that we hear on the radio all the time or painting your house a pretty color or yelling something, you know, making a gesticulation of love to.

To someone you're trying to seduce. That these are all to various extents involve artistic apparatus. And they're trying to say something that really in general. And this is why Kant is so wrong about aesthetics, that Kant wants to make it all disinterested that you were just merely contemplating all that form and you're ignoring the matter as opposed to the.

1:13:11 Wes: They're making statements. I forget the exact language he used.

1:13:14 Mark: Yes, it's what you're talking about which sounds like the matter. In other words, what. What's the matter? What are you talking about? Now it is different. That, and this is part of Gadamer's challenge to Kant is that for Kant, you know, the prime examples of. It's actually not even art we didn't even talk about. It's like natural beauty or explicitly very non verbal things didn't have any artistic intention behind them. And just contemplating that and then you sort of move to these artificial creations as like, you know, it's only beautiful insofar as you made something that's kind of like a sunset or kind of like a, you know, something that would naturally be beautiful.

It's all parasitic upon the natural, which doesn't leave open for Gadamer's basic point of view that appreciation of beauty is all about appreciating the message, what is actually being talked about and that it's. Yeah, it's a derivative form of that. To even like contemplate nature as you would a work of art. The work of art is something intentionally created to communic something to you is the primary thing.

1:14:15 Wes: Yeah, so like a classical Greek statue which is about the gods, let's say it's not simply there primarily as a aesthetic phenomenon for people who are actually not religious to say, oh, isn't that interesting. It's this primal experience he calls a mysterious intimacy that grips our entire being. The work of art speaks to us most directly. It's this. This idea that it's saying something to us about the world. It's not simply disconnected from problem in the world.

1:14:42 Mark: I just got the image of some ancient sculptor guessing like thousands of years from now people are going to walk by in a museum and be mildly interesting.

1:14:50 Wes: Exactly.

1:14:54 Mark: I wonder what it would look like with orange.

1:15:01 Wes: We're such philistines.

1:15:03 Seth: Speak for yourself.

1:15:06 Wes: But it's. Yeah, he's taking a stance against the strictly aesthetic approach to art. So is it really the case that a work of art which has come out of a past or alien life world and is transferred into our historically educated world, becomes a mere object of aesthetic historical enjoyment and says nothing more of what it originally had to say? That's page 97.

1:15:27 Mark: And actually, this gives us an opportunity to introduce one of the points from Truth and Method that we didn't make, which is about historical distance. That, yes, we want to get what was said, but again, that doesn't mean just what the authority meant. And especially that would be hard. Like, what if it's a piece of instrumental music? What does it mean? What did the author mean by that? So what you're trying to figure out in figuring the meaning of a work like this is quite a lot of stuff that. I think we had an episode on Nelson Goodman that went into a lot of detail on the other ways that a work could mean something besides just representing it.

It could exemplify something, it could express something. You know, so this means rage or something like that. Or this is an example of this kind of modern art that is reacting to the historical period before it, et cetera. That these are all ways that we could get at it. And then historical distance, according to Gadamer, that sort of gives us an advantage in assessing some of those things that we might not know for contemporary works. Is this a great work or not? What does it sort of mean in the broader scope of artworks, but, you know, give it a hundred years or two.

1:16:34 Wes: Yeah, but it's not that it gives us an advantage in the sense of we develop some bird's eye or more objective view because time has gone by. It's because he talks of the alienness of it. That's the advantage. The alienness of it is a provocation from these sort of. He calls them traditionary, I think. Or is that my mistyping of what he actually said? So these traditional texts that are so foreign to us provoke us in the sense of having us question our presuppositions. And so they become a temporal distance actually helps us distinguish good from bad prejudices. It's not that we, 300 years later, can be historians and treat the text scientifically. It's actually more intimate.

1:17:15 Mark: But so it can provide good prejudices in the way that we've talked about. There's a quote 297 Time is no longer the gulf to be bridged because it separates. It is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted.

1:17:28 Wes: Yeah, that's exactly where I was trying to summarize. Yeah.

1:17:31 Mark: And a lot of the purpose of talking about tradition here is that we take tradition as, for good or ill, as something that's fixed. But he wants to emphasize that tradition is changing all the time, that we are in the very act of doing this, changing that our apprehension of our own futurity affects what we take to be tradition in this sense, how we take the work to speak to now. And this again connects to the idea that we brought up of the work of art in particular, seems to create its own. Now, it demands, like this, its own timelessness. But really what that is is not a timelessness like an aesthetic sphere. You're stepping out of the ordinary, but is just connecting to our own historicity in some strong way that sounds like it doesn't mean anything. So make it mean something. Give an example or say, what's wrong with that?

1:18:20 Wes: Or.

1:18:21 Seth: So, Mark, I think you're talking about what I mentioned about, that art always has a present or draws us into the present.

1:18:27 Mark: Yep.

1:18:28 Seth: So he uses the example of, like a statue of a Greek God that in context 2000 years ago, or whatever it is, it has a religious significance. It's not something that stands as a work of art, but in our time, we are able to engage it and it actually not in a religious context, but as a work of art. It has something that compels us, so to speak, to engage it aesthetically. And he mentions that he agrees that Kant was onto something since we just not too long ago did the. The Critique of Judgment. He's. Here we go this page 98 in Aesthetics and Hermeneutics.

1:19:10 Mark: Right. In the collection Philosophical Hermeneutics.

1:19:12 Seth: Yep. Right. In any case, when we say that a work of art says something to us and that it thus belongs to the matrix of things, we have to understand assertion is not a metaphor, but it has a valid and demonstrable meaning. The work of art is an object of hermeneutics. And there's really no difference here between saying a text or a work of art. He's saying it has the same function where the key is it's trying to say something. He says that art, more so than anything else, has that urgency of wanting to say something to us. Like, say, for example, there might be a text, a historical text that we may regard as Strictly a curiosity of history.

Now, the text may be trying to say something to us, but it's hard for us to hear it. Whereas something that is much more visual, symbolically, it's more abstract or different than language, which is something that he's obviously concerned in, in some of what we read the art somehow demands of us. Because we see works of art as saying something.

1:20:16 Mark: Right. It's not just visual versus linguistic, certainly, that he would say. Anything that constitutes a work of art, a poem or whatever, would have this.

1:20:23 Seth: Yeah, well, he. So later on in this essay, he says, in the last analysis, Goethe's statement everything is a symbol is the most comprehensive formulation of the hermeneutical idea. It means that everything points to another thing. This everything is not an assertion about each being indicating what it is, but an assertion as to how it encounters men's understanding. Representational art, or in the case of, you know, square on a canvas, non representational art is clearly symbolic, clearly pointing to something else, clearly demanding understanding, interpretation in a way that I think is much more immediate and visceral than written language or history.

1:21:06 Wes: Really?

1:21:07 Seth: I think so.

1:21:09 Wes: It seems like the harder case to me.

1:21:11 Seth: We are more likely to see history or texts as already part of our understanding. I see art puts a demand on us that's much more immediate.

1:21:21 Wes: It demands interpretation, or at least. You mean non representational art, where.

1:21:25 Seth: Well, I would say even representational art, anything symbolic, that's not the language that we use in our everyday life.

1:21:31 Dylan: Okay, so at the beginning of this, Seth, you characterized the change of our disposition with respect to, say, a religious artifact, that now it would be interacted with as a work of art, whereas before it was interacted with as. Let's call it, a religious artifact? And I just wanted to understand more a little about what the implications of that. Is it that somehow this hermeneutical activity is something that's new or sort of modern from Gadamer's perspective, and therefore it wasn't an activity that was available to ancient peoples or something like that.

So that would be one tack on it which has its own set of questions. Or is it that things go from being not art to art, and one sign of that is hermeneutical activity with respect to it, meaning that then it's art? I have another set of questions in that respect. What does it mean to have transformed from being not a work of art to a work of art, or vice versa?

1:22:40 Mark: Isn't the whole idea that there really is no distinction? I mean, that it's a matter of

1:22:45 Seth: degree yeah, More the former than the latter. Dylan.

1:22:47 Dylan: Okay.

1:22:48 Seth: I think his point in bringing that up was more about what we were talking about earlier in the vein of historical distance and context and all that. Where, as a work of art, you sort of have to be cognizant of its. That it was an artifact that originally was used with a different. Not strictly speaking, as an aesthetic object. That it had another purpose that's somehow not decisive in a way that it might have been for an understanding of that when it was originally created. Not that it transforms from being a religious object to a work of art, because it was both simultaneously, and it's still a religious object, but not in the same way that it was.

1:23:31 Dylan: I found myself thinking about cave art when we were talking about this or cave paintings. And the way in which, in my experience, we tend to interpret such really old paintings or old artifacts as primarily cultural signs. And anthropologically, as opposed to aesthetically.

1:23:53 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think he thinks there's more than. So if we're using the aesthetic to mean what Kant meant by aesthetics or the sense in which it's beautiful through its form. And then there's this historical context. I think there's this third thing for him, this what it says. Right. The sense in which everything is a symbol, as Seth pointed out. I'm not sure exactly what that means. There's something on the bottom of page 100. Hermeneutics bridges the distance between minds and reveals the foreignness of the other mind. But revealing what is unfamiliar does not mean merely constructing historically the world in which the work had its original meaning and function.

So that sort of historicist approach. And then, of course, he's already rejected the idea that it's simply about the form, what makes it beautiful, the aesthetic. It also means apprehending what is said to us, which is always more than the declared and comprehended meaning. So this is the I take to be the symbolic effect that's always going on. Whatever says something to us is like a person who says something. It is alien in the sense that it transcends us to this extent. There's a double foreignness in the task of understanding, which in reality is one and the same foreignness.

I have a vague sense of what that means. I was trying to think about the sense in. For instance, one might interpret an abstract painting. And oftentimes, if you look at those interpretations, if they're not pretentious and idiotic, they're unsatisfying. And I'm wondering if, even though we're talking about what a piece of art might say to us, I'm wondering if it's really ultimately non linguistic.

1:25:21 Mark: Right. So that's the central puzzle of the essay, is that it seems like hermeneutics applies to linguistics, so how could it apply to this as well? And so he says early on, so all tradition belongs to hermeneutics because it is the fundamental constitution of the historicity of human design to mediate itself to itself understandingly. So that's just what Seth was saying at the very beginning of that. Understanding is kind of our primary mode of being. The encounter with art belongs within the process of integration that is involved in all human life, that stands within traditions.

I mean, it sounds like when you encounter something, you're trying to make sense of it, you're trying to pull it into your life. You know, generally that means you're trying to determine what it has to say to you. So if you see a dog wandering not on a leash on a street, then that means certain something. It's not just a dog. It means that somebody's pet is escaped or something like that. So at one point he says, anything that you can try to make sense of linguistically is in essence linguistic, which is a little strange.

1:26:22 Wes: Well, at the very end of the. So it sort of ties to the end of the essay as well, because that's where he gets into the idea that. So on page 101, to understand what the work of art says to us is therefore a self encounter, an encounter with the authentic familiarity that includes surprise. The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self understanding of every person. This I saw as related somehow to that integration mark that you just mentioned at the beginning of the essay. This idea that there's a sort of hermeneutic activity which somehow gets at our understanding of ourselves as opposed to simply interpretation of the work itself.

1:27:01 Mark: Right. I guess that's kind of what I was referring to in saying that the work of art makes us engage our own historicity, because that's what we are. We are Dasein, we are temporal. And to engage with a work of art, or really with anything, that's a point that we've already made, that to apply hermeneutics is to pull our own presuppositions up, put them at risk. What is that other than to know thyself in the Socratic sense? I mean, it is to engage with yourself. So that hermeneutics just becomes what Socrates

1:27:31 Dylan: said philosophy is, especially the part of only knowing what you don't know.

1:27:36 Mark: But what's special about a work of art is it is open in a limitless way to new integrations. So it challenges us. Maybe a more unique way than reading an old phone book.

1:27:45 Wes: Yeah, the interpretations are more open ended, more ambiguous.

1:27:51 Mark: Even though, as he said, you could take everything as symbolic. And that's again part of what, when you get to avant garde art and John Cage and the urinal and stuff like that, is being able to reflect in take this apparatus which we typically use for art, and realize that it can be applied to everything. That you can take everything as symbolic or try to pull everything in the realm of aesthetic appreciation or something like that. Gadamer doesn't talk about this, but he could have. He was writing recently enough. This is 1964. All that stuff was on the table.

1:28:20 Dylan: So let's push back on this a little bit harder. Maybe not all the way to the. All aesthetic art is, you know, formalism, the way we had with Kant, but in the midst of the effect of our own historical location and the way in which our understanding is working on interpreting a piece of art. I'm brought back to the. I guess it's in chapter four that not everything is up for grabs. It's not like they're isn't some kind of nugget of interpretation that is, let's just call it correct. Gadamer doesn't exactly use that word, but he's not that far from it.

And it's not a correctness born of certainty or doubtlessness, but it's a correctness born out of refinement and constant questioning. The circle, hermeneutical circle that grounds the interpretation. But it seems hard to. You would have a couple of options in terms of art. You'd have that a new interpretation or revised interpretation corrected some mistakes that you would say now where you've understood some prejudices that were there before that were hidden prejudices in the bad sense and that a new interpretation revealed those and opened up that work of art.

But it's not like any old interpretation is going to work. Right. It's not that the artwork doesn't have its own thing to say even if that gets revised.

1:29:56 Mark: Well, even if it was completely open ended, we don't have a choice about what interpretations are going to be available to us.

1:30:03 Dylan: Yes, we don't have a choice because it lies in the art itself, in our connection.

1:30:09 Mark: We shouldn't be saying what's in the art itself and what is in us. It's the game.

1:30:13 Dylan: Yeah, but this seems to me the way we're talking Right now we're going down this road of infinite interpretations that have little way of adjudicating themselves. And this seems destined for confusion in a way that is at odds with other stuff we were talking about before. That the activity of understanding takes the parts and unifies them into a whole. And that's the presupposition of the activity of understanding is that there's an intelligibility, yada, yada, yada. For instance, it seems to me that you would not allow for there to be. Everybody can interpret art any way they want to, that it's all just their own personal experience. It doesn't seem to me that Gadamer can consistently.

1:31:00 Wes: Yeah, I don't think.

1:31:01 Dylan: Advocate for that.

1:31:02 Wes: No, no, but that's not. When I said the open endedness of interpretations, that's not what I meant. I just mean that. So you take a particular literary text, for instance, and there are lots of bad essays, but lots of good essays too. There's an endless amount of good interpretation that people can do. I'm not saying that conflicting interpretations, that there's no way to adjudicate or one might not be better than the other. I'm just saying that the richness and so you could even take the same passage in a literary text and the richness of the different possible interpretations could produce many great interpretations. So that's all. That's the open endedness of that.

1:31:37 Mark: He's not condemned to relativism because we have, say, the interpretations.

1:31:41 Dylan: No, but I just think we should be clear about that because he defends himself against this. But it's easy to. I mean, the language of open endedness, especially with respect to artistic interpretation, very quickly becomes however you want to take it is how art works.

1:31:59 Wes: Right.

1:32:00 Dylan: And regardless of whether or not that's valid or not, that's at odds with what Gadamer's saying.

1:32:05 Wes: Right? He's against that.

1:32:06 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:32:07 Mark: I shouldn't have said that. It is. I was just opposing this subject versus object and comparing it to like. Well, this is just the chemical reaction of the two of them. That sounds more like some of the other figures that we've considered, like Santayana, that this is just something that happens, that you can encounter an artwork and this is what you get out of it. That's not really the model Gardner is working on. It's again more like a game where, yes, the unit is you and the work tussling together, but you're doing so according to rules, according to schema, that you could then violate, you could screw up.

So if you don't obey the guidelines that have been set, the tips for good interpretation here, then, yeah, you're going to come up with a crappy take on the work, an unqualified assessment of its meaning. We're not trying to figure out what the meaning is in terms of figuring out what the artist had to say, that it has a surplus of meaning. The work speaks for itself. That's sort of what's new here, right?

1:33:02 Wes: What do we think he means at the end of the essay? I mean, I know Seth, you guys have probably explained this to some extent before, but the work of art is the absolute present for each particular presence and at the same time holds its word in readiness for every future. The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in an enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar. It is not the this art thou disclosed in a joyous and frightening shock. It also says to us, thou must alter thy life. That's a passage for interpretation.

1:33:37 Seth: I read this as that. I don't know if we've really talked about it explicitly, but Gadamer thinks that the hermeneutic process is a process of ultimately comes back to altering one's self per self understanding. So you're bringing all of your stuff to bear on this exercise of understanding. You encounter something that's different than you this something that's outside of you. Right. So you mentioned earlier, Wes, the alterity. And this thing challenges your self understanding, your understanding of the world and your self understanding, either in its completeness or in its consistency or in some other fashion. And so I think what he's saying here is art. And he's probably thinking about really good art, right? Not the kind of four dogs playing poker on velvet or whatever

1:34:30 Mark: that changed my life.

1:34:32 Seth: This is more like Cy Twombly and the wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That art is an affront. It's shocking in its otherness. It challenges you and you engage it. You will end up being changed by the experience of trying to understand it.

1:34:47 Wes: I see. So it's an extension of the sense in which the encounter with the things themselves or the text leads to a revision of one's presuppositions. This broadens that idea into the idea of altering oneself.

1:35:02 Seth: That's my reading of it.

1:35:03 Wes: What about the absolute present?

1:35:05 Seth: Well, I think the absolute present means that a work of art will, it says, is the absolute present for each particular present. You know, he talks before about every generation or every age reinterpreting a text the work of art is always present for each present as it comes up. And it somehow retains this would be anti-Gadamer, not a characteristic of ahistoricity. God, how can I say that? It's not ahistorical in comparison with all other linguistic and non linguistic tradition. The work of art is the absolute present for each particular present and at the same time holds its word in readiness for every future.

1:35:51 Wes: Yeah, I think you're on the right track with what you were just saying. Yeah, because I know he's trying to get at the sense in which. All right, he's arguing against this purely historicist type of interpretation. And it's the sense in which it engages us now and speaks to current questions and our current preconceptions and our. Maybe it's something about. When Mark was talking about, with this. The element of playfulness in the sense in which it pulls you into that game like relationship that. That keeps it in the present for us, as opposed to some being merely a historical artifact, let's say.

1:36:26 Mark: I mean, I think the trouble we're having here is already there in Heidegger, that if you take this imagery of letting the beings be themselves so you get yourself in such a state that a clearing is created so that the beings can reveal themselves. That sounds like a subjectivist, a subjectist opening yourself up to watch the beings on TV or something. Gadamer and Heidegger want to say that that's not what's going on, that it is a real engagement and it's a historical engagement with it. So that this interaction is somehow drawing on our historicity.

Just the fact that we sort of don't exist at a particular time and place, that we temporal beings, we exist in the future, in the past, simultaneously or something like that, that's what enables works of art to grab us. A dog seeing the same thing, even if it sees all the same shapes or if it could see colors, is not going to get that experience because it doesn't have the same attitude toward time.

1:37:25 Wes: Well, that's also interesting.

1:37:27 Mark: So I'm not sure I understand all of what I just said, but that's

1:37:29 Wes: the best I can put together.

1:37:33 Dylan: Animals like a dog clearly recognize things and they do make decisions and maybe even have habits and stuff. That taking understanding as hermeneutical activity is not something that we see dogs doing.

1:37:48 Mark: At least Gadamer's position is that the dog simply does not have a world. Yes, like I think he says that explicitly, which I think has got to be wrong. But it follows from the idea that it's all linguistic. That to have something be a world requires that it be potentially interpretable in linguistic forms. And so in that sense everything, including paintings, is broadly speaking linguistic.

1:38:14 Dylan: An interpretable is equivalent to linguistic. There's no such thing as musical interpretation in which you would do it musically. It has to be language.

1:38:24 Mark: Doesn't that seem wrong? Like if you dance together to a song and you're sort of focusing on your partner and your dance, isn't that coming to a shared understanding of some aspect of the work that is non linguistic? And to try to explain it would actually screw it up.

1:38:39 Dylan: Wait, no. Wouldn't you have to say that it's its own kind of explanation?

1:38:42 Wes: Right.

1:38:42 Dylan: To try to articulate it in words would be to mess it up. But it is a kind of explanation. If you were to follow Gadamer's attack in parallel, if you were to admit non linguistic modes of hermeneutical activity, then they would have to be explanations and understandings.

1:39:01 Mark: So I'd be fine with that. But then you have to allow that dogs can do it too. That you could have rituals of let's go get the treat together or whatever the thing is and that. But certainly you are communicating something.

1:39:13 Wes: But it kind of.

1:39:14 Mark: So he's an anti-animal chauvinist.

1:39:16 Seth: Is the dog asking a question?

1:39:18 Wes: It doesn't also. It doesn't get us to this point

1:39:20 Mark: of can I has tree.

1:39:22 Wes: It doesn't get us to this point of self understanding which he emphasizes. So it must be integrated into the self understanding of each person. That seems to be a requirement here.

1:39:32 Mark: Do people do that most of the time either. You could say that. Sort of the most lofty and explicit applications of hermeneutics such that you then engage in philosophy and transform yourself. Of course that is specific to humans and requires, you know, maybe. Probably requires language.

1:39:46 Wes: So there's hermeneutics.

1:39:47 Mark: Light. Yeah.

1:39:48 Wes: Called Hermenetics by L. Ron Hubbard.

1:39:53 Mark: The hen grams. Should we stop talking about dogs?

1:40:00 Wes: I think we covered the dogs in art.

1:40:02 Mark: They're just problematic here. If we say that even though art is not necessarily explicitly linguistic, I think we're just not going to get. He says a lot more about language. Like in other parts in Truth and Method and we just don't. We didn't read enough to get a really clear picture of that. And he doesn't say enough about it. It just sounds weird what he says in this article about aesthetics. That how everything is potentially linguistic. And I think we're just going to have to explore that in some other reading.

1:40:29 Seth: There is another place in something we read where he ties it back to Heidegger.

1:40:32 Mark: Well, language is the house of being, we know.

1:40:34 Seth: Yeah, yeah, he ties it back to that.

1:40:36 Wes: Yeah. Language is the fundamental and the second, the universality of the hermeneutical problem.

1:40:40 Mark: Well, yeah, that's where we are now. Okay.

1:40:42 Wes: Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being in the world and the all embracing form of the constitution of the world. Science, by the way, involves a lot of non verbal signs like mathematics, which is an interesting contrast there.

1:40:56 Mark: This essay, The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem is 1966. So it's actually two years after they went on aesthetics. It's only proper that we cover this afterward. And I think we can do it fairly quickly because he only makes a couple of. Of additional points here.

1:41:08 Seth: Can I point something else out about that? This essay that the editor of this book of essays that this is in wrote a 50 page introduction. It's like a whole nother book.

1:41:18 Mark: Not to this essay, to the whole thing, but still.

1:41:22 Wes: Is it a good introduction or is it a.

1:41:24 Mark: It seemed I didn't read the whole thing, but I read. The chunk I read was good.

1:41:27 Seth: What I did read was really good, but I could. Didn't have the energy to go through the whole thing, but I was like, shit, man, 50 page introduction, that's like a whole nother book. It's longer than any of the essays in the book.

1:41:38 Mark: So you were reading this quote. Language is the fundamental operation of our being in the world and the all embracing form of the constitution of the world. Our task is to reconnect the objective world of technology which the sciences place at our disposal and discretion with those fundamental orders of our being that are neither arbitrary nor manipulable by us, but simply demand our respect. So this article is going to be the most straightforwardly about the science versus philosophy or science versus everything else and why hermeneutics is not supposed to be a science like the physical sciences and how in turn involves some criticism of a model of physical science that thinks of physical science as purely method based.

So it finally says some of those things, Dylan, that you wanted to say. Yeah. What you think is worth studying is not going to be something that the scientific method itself delivers. There's a hermeneutics involved in interpreting, you know, one set of experimental results to figure out like, well, what is the next experiment I should put on? Or he has a whole section here on statistics that interpreting statistics definitely requires. Hermeneutic savvy or just in the sense

1:42:43 Wes: of you could be asking the wrong questions, right? And there's a lot of bad statistical studies out there. I mean, it's. There's a cottage industry of this stuff. publish or perish science, quote unquote. So his objective to that is that you could be asking other questions entirely. For instance. So again, it comes back to this matter of salience and the need of hermeneutic inquiry to frame questions. Towards the end of the essay, before he gets into that idea of sterility,

1:43:08 Mark: this abstract idea alignment idea of science, of being without any biases, and that the only real knowledge that there is is this objective knowledge of this sort, you know, that objective knowledge is possible and that anything that doesn't fall into that category is not science and maybe not even worth doing. That would, for one, lead to the problem with art that we just talked about, that it gives the artist no role in society. Right? The artist could not be saying something that is true, could not be producing knowledge of any sort. It's just like they're doing something that's purely decorative, that is purely.

Could induce pleasure in people that contemplate it and does not have any social function beyond that. And likewise, to appreciate art is to retreat from the practical world into this special aesthetic realm. Gadamer says this whole situation of alienation into aesthetic consciousness is entirely brought about by this screwed up model of scientific objectivity that governs everything.

1:44:06 Wes: Well, this other place for hermeneutics is just the, you know, he talks about page 10, the sense in which technology can be destructive. Right. Critique of science, or so called scientific progress. First of all, he talks about the fact that we can't really limit science. There's no point in. What's his example in genetics. It is senseless, for instance, to hinder a genetic researcher because such research threatens to breed a superman. Hence the problem cannot appear as one in which our human consciousness ranges itself of the world of science and presumes to develop a kind of anti science.

Then he goes on to say towards the end of that, but if the presuppositions of these possibilities for knowing and making remain half in the dark, cannot the result be that the hand applying this knowledge will be destructive? So the idea is that. That we at least must hermeneutically address some of the presuppositions going into this knowing and making. Not that we're going to stop the path of scientific inquiry, but that being aware of those presuppositions can help us deal with the potential destructiveness of the technologies that result from that.

1:45:08 Mark: Right. That the scientific naive attitude of I'm just trying to find truth. I'm just trying to find, make it work. So researching the bomb or whatever, he is trying to think that to be whole people, to connect the technological attitude with the things that demand our respect. Right. The rest of the world with ethics requires thinking about these things being humans as well as scientists.

1:45:31 Wes: And I don't think he thinks that you're really going to have any effect on people developing nuclear bombs, for instance, through this. It's just using your nuclear bombs more responsibly. Or the sense in which there's a hermeneutic or ethical task which is not itself scientific, but is related to science because of the enormous effect that technology has on the world and on us.

1:45:50 Dylan: It's that science doesn't bring its own self understanding along with its equations.

1:45:55 Mark: So we've got that you need the extra scientific, the pre theoretical motivations to determine what is worth researching. You should be using them to think about the applications of what you're creating while you're researching. And he also thinks that again, if you think of science as just mere application of a method, you've not captured what makes a great scientist or a productive scholar. He says that you need imagination, the sense for what is questionable. It serves the ability to expose real productive questions. This is page 12.

1:46:24 Wes: Yeah.

1:46:24 Mark: And so that works in all areas of scholarship and certainly in science as well.

1:46:29 Seth: Yeah.

1:46:29 Wes: So I could be focused on very scholastic sorts of irrelevant little, which is sort of, of course, is the tendency when you're vying for funding and it's the humanities of the sciences. There's a lot of research of questionable value, let's say, to put it mildly.

1:46:44 Dylan: The reason for that is complicated. Right. It's not necessarily paucity of imagination of the scholars, but it's certainly a significant effect of those that are doling out the dollars and the kinds of answers they are expecting for their own questions

1:47:03 Wes: and pressures for tenure and pressures to

1:47:05 Dylan: do what you have to do. So it's routinely the case that scholars, even of great imagination, find that they can't get money to pursue the very questions they think are most worth asking because they just won't get money for them. Because the people who are giving out the money want them to pursue questions that they already know the answers for. They want sure things. They don't want genuine questions asked. They want to only fund things for which their guaranteed to get a result that they can work with. And usually that's just guaranteed to get a result that they already know the answer to. So that's not the fault of the scientists.

1:47:47 Mark: Right? So Gadamer in this essay is not trying to give us practical tips on how as a scientist to incorporate hermeneutics into your practice. You know, again, the title is the Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem. To just say you might think that you were in doing physical sciences immune to do this kind of hermeneutical thinking. But no, it's all over the place. And then I think the rest of the. At least my notes for the rest of this essay is more about the stuff about language. The consciousness that is affected by history has its fulfillment in what is linguistic. Language has a teleology operating within it, A definite articulation of the world as is built up as if guided. I'm not sure what to make of this over and above what we've already said. Do you guys have any other points you want to make about?

1:48:33 Dylan: I'm fully understanding. I have no more questions to get answers to.

1:48:38 Mark: Understanding is language bound.

1:48:39 Dylan: Yes.

1:48:40 Mark: This is not linguistic relativism because there is no captivity within a language. So I guess that's an interesting point that we have made that if everything is linguistic, doesn't that mean like, oh, our minds are trapped within this particular. If we don't have a word for it, we can't even think it. But he thinks that what's awesome about language is that it is open ended, that it is as the house of being, we are able to, you know, not just permutations, but change what individual words mean.

1:49:08 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:49:08 Mark: You just explain yourself enough and you can say, well, what I mean by this word is something slightly different and sort of give examples, give a context, you know, even though language is a tradition that passes down to us. He makes this point in general about tradition. Traditions are not unitary, that they branch off in all directions. There's sort of self contradictions within traditions and we can use that to our benefit in communicating something unique. The meanings are not arbitrary or subjective, but we can still, if we're trying to make an original statement with another person, at least in a conversation or in a well presented work of art, we can break new ground.

1:49:44 Dylan: Yeah, but in part of what you were saying, Mark, I hear the language of multiplicity and plurality. And I guess I keep getting pulled back to Gadamer's language of richness. And that infinity of interpretation has to do not with genuine multiplicity, but with the richness of the question asking activity.

1:50:07 Mark: Well, maybe that's one way in which meanings change. Is that they're answering a different question or something. Yeah. So anybody else want to respond to that thing of what the open endedness of language amounts to?

1:50:18 Wes: Well, he talks about this precisely through our finitude, the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages. The infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of truth that we are. So this, I mean, there's two things there. There's one, this idea that truth has something to do with our being. And then this idea, I think, Mark, you were getting at, which is that the multiplicity of languages, multiplicity of traditions, the sense in which those contradictions open up a dialogue and allows us to say, question our four understandings and engage in that kind of activity. So it's fortuitous.

1:50:55 Mark: I have a note that says read the bottom of page 16 about lovers because it's weird.

1:51:01 Seth: Do you guys want to hear what the editor who wrote that long introduction has to say about language?

1:51:05 Mark: Tell me.

1:51:06 Seth: For Heidegger and Gadamer alike, man not only uses language to express himself, but more basically he listens to it and hence to the subject matter that comes to him in it. The words and concepts of a particular language reveal an initiative of being. The language of a time is not so much chosen by the persons who use it as it is their historical fate. The way being has revealed itself to and concealed itself from them as their starting point. The universal task of hermeneutical reflection, as Gadamer conceives it in these essays, is to hearken to and bring to language the possibilities that are suggested but remain unspoken in what the tradition speaks to us.

1:51:45 Wes: Being is so playful, concealing itself and revealing itself at the same time.

1:51:51 Mark: What a tease is being.

1:51:55 Wes: That's a good segue into the lovers.

1:51:57 Mark: When we hear modern lovers talking to each other, we often wonder if they are communicating with words or with advertising labels and technical terms from the sign language of the modern industrial world. It is inevitable that the leveled life forms of the industrial age also affect language. And in fact, the impoverishment of the vocabulary of language is making enormous progress, thus bringing about an approximation of language to a technical sign system.

1:52:20 Wes: He sounds like a German who's living in America. Did he live in America? This is the way they all talk when they get to America.

1:52:27 Dylan: Culture shock, too many miniskirts, bikinis, the underlying language of love or what?

1:52:33 Mark: So he's contrasting this open endedness of language like you're trying to say something original. It sort of takes an I and thou real connection, like Jaspers was saying. Of talking at length or spending a lot of time with a text or a lot of time with a work of art and really achieving a rapport. But, you know, primarily we're talking about people as opposed to merely mouthing cliches to each other that, you know, they serve, just like Slab, to go back to Wittgenstein, they serve an instrumental purpose. I want to get in your pants, basically, is here. But that they are not authentic in some way because they're not not using language to let the beings be what they are.

1:53:11 Seth: Yeah.

1:53:11 Wes: He talks about the leveling tendencies and then somewhere he suggests it's language getting less complicated. Right. And less expressive. The result is the actual relationship of men to each other. So it's not just languages in English or German, it's languages in the system of signs, that sort of culturally determined bits of communication we engage in. And that's all commercialized and technologized. It can be impoverished. So our way of communicating with each other and being with each other can be impoverished by the cultural effects of the industrial age and technology and things like that.

1:53:46 Mark: And isn't the criticism of technology ultimately a criticism of being too practical in a narrow sense? If everything has to achieve a purpose, if every word out of your mouth means you have a desire that you want someone else to accomplish, or else you would not bother saying the word, then you've thrown away a lot of what language's whole capacity to be a house of being, to be a place of real, authentic thought. And so that's actually what part of the emphasis of the last essay that we're not going to talk about in any real depth. But we've already brought up themes from this.

Hermeneutics as practical philosophy, which is a little later from 1972, is to contrast the scientific thinking with hermeneutics, which he thinks is. And we've already said this is not rule based. So he has kind of a subtle point that he wants to make in terms of Aristotle, that the ordinary way that we think of the difference between theory and practice, in other words, philosophy is just theory and it's useless do something practical. That that's just a weird modern way of looking at it. And that even if you take Aristotle's take, for him, what we would call theory still amounts to a type of practice.

1:54:58 Wes: Yeah, we actually discussed that during our Aristotle politics episode.

1:55:02 Mark: Right.

1:55:03 Wes: You know, what makes it praxis is not that, oh, I'm doing something, I'm applying something, it's that it's moral or political.

1:55:10 Mark: I thought he was distinguishing praxis from practical philosophy. Is that right?

1:55:15 Dylan: Phronesis?

1:55:16 Mark: Oh, sorry, he's. No, praxis is the good. Praxis is the good practice from tekne, techne.

1:55:20 Seth: And techne is the bad. No, techne is not bad. None of them are bad.

1:55:24 Mark: No, but techne is the one that's more rule based, like cobbling. You know the way we were talking

1:55:30 Seth: about techne is a craft or an art. Right. Praxis is practical.

1:55:35 Wes: He's thinking of praxis as this is. So it's techne, it's theory and then theorea and then praxis and then techne. So theory can be praxis. Engaging in theoretical contemplation is a kind of praxis and then techne is the more being an artist. That's why I brought up the whole cobbler thing. I think we got our lines crossed earlier on because I was thinking of art in this sense. Art in the sense of techne.

1:56:01 Mark: Yes, exactly.

1:56:03 Wes: But that's the more rule based sense of. You have a certain applied method. So there's a contrast between what you're doing when you're being a cobbler or engaging in some other sort of craft and what you're doing as a moral or political being. Making decisions about your life where there is no algorithm or rule or habit, let's say that's going to with some certainty resolve that whatever dilemma you're facing, it happens on some different level.

1:56:33 Mark: And that this practical wisdom as Aristotle talks about it is tied in with the good. Yeah, right. Whereas a techne is. Well, yeah, I mean you want to make. Make good shoes, but that's not tied in with the good in the way we would normally think of it. It's not tied in with arete, with virtue.

1:56:50 Wes: Right.

1:56:51 Mark: So just to restate the point of what I was taking the previous essay is that the insistence of people do something practical, don't be philosophical. That's too pie in the sky, head in the clouds is turning everything toward techne.

1:57:04 Wes: Exactly.

1:57:05 Mark: And is saying everything besides that is useless. But remember, so we just had that criticism, you know, that's the same thing that says, well, all artists and people that pay attention to art are really doing something that is just. They should stop because do something practical, do something useful. But there's a wider sense of practical that Aristotle had in which thinking about virtue is practical and all this philosophical work is practical and art is practical, but that is not practical in the sense of it'll get you a good job or something like that it's not a techne.

1:57:38 Wes: Right.

1:57:39 Seth: Well, listen, what he's talking about in this essay, I don't think. I mean, maybe what you're saying, Mark is in there. But what I thought he was trying to get at was he was saying, okay, if you talk about theory, then knowledge in that realm is the knowledge of reason. It's. You come to grasp something, you understand it, and once you know it, you know it. But hermeneutics as an activity is more like a practice, which means you're constantly doing it and you must continue to do it. And you don't gain knowledge through hermeneutics, that you then say, oh, okay, now I understand it, you know, now I know such and such.

A squared plus B squared equals C squared, or something along those lines. It's something that you're constantly interpreting, constantly moving, and you get better at it. But that's not quite the same thing. He says it's not like a skill, which is something that you also have to do over and over again. And so he's just trying to place hermeneutics as an activity in this sphere of knowledge that's not skill, but also not theoretical or scientific knowledge.

1:58:41 Wes: Well, I think it can be theoretical in the broad sense. Right. Praxis. Theorea can be a kind of praxis. So that was his earlier point.

1:58:50 Mark: Right. That's the way he's twisting apart our preconceived notion of what counts as practical and what doesn't count as practical, because the way that our modern technological way of looking at these things has led to cultural destitution of creativity.

1:59:04 Wes: Let me give you a quote here. So he doesn't want to contrast hermeneutics, I think, with theory. It's 231. Since practice comprises this broad range of significance in Greeks, the most important delimitation that it undergoes with Aristotle is not vis a vis theoretical science. Rather it is the delimitation over and against production based on knowledge, the poiesis that provides the economic basis for life of the polis. So it's about technical production and material poiesis is making. Yeah.

1:59:33 Seth: What do you mean?

1:59:34 Wes: So the making of things, the technology, craft, production of stuff. The proper distinction is not between theory and practice as in applied stuff. That's not the distinction Aristotle's making. It's between praxis, as in related to the good and virtue, and basically ultimately decisions, moral and political decisions.

1:59:57 Seth: Moral, political decisions. Right.

1:59:59 Wes: As opposed to making stuff. Yeah. And then so hermeneutics ends up aligned. It's not techne. It's not about production in this similar sense, where there's a methodology and all that stuff. It has much more in common with the kind of decision making you make morally or politically, which is again, there's no decision procedure for that, there's no method.

2:00:18 Mark: So here's a quote from near the end, 245. So when I speak about hermeneutics here it is theory. There are no practical situations of understanding that I'm trying to resolve by so speaking Hermeneutics has to do with a theoretical attitude towards the practice of interpretation, the interpretation of texts, but also in relation to the experiences interpreted in them and in our communicatively enfolded orientations in the world. This theoretic stance only makes us aware, reflectively of what is performatively at play in the practical experience of understanding.

2:00:46 Wes: I figured he'd be into theory.

2:00:47 Dylan: Yeah. So a little bit earlier on, 241 is a statement that I think is similar, but to me a little more clear. In the middle of the first paragraph he says one of the more fertile insights of modern hermeneutics is that every statement has to be seen as a response to a question. That the only way to understand a statement is to get hold of the question to which its statement is an answer. That's joining to me that practical and

2:01:10 Mark: theoretical aspect of it that is giving an example.

2:01:14 Wes: It's practical in the sense of it's a decision making activity. Hermeneutics.

2:01:19 Seth: You're doing something, you're not creating something, you're answering a question. Yeah, that's how it's practical as opposed to productive.

2:01:27 Mark: Yeah, it's making you more wise, it's making you more oriented in the world so you can make intelligent decisions about anything.

2:01:35 Wes: But there's still a contrast to the scientific activity or the activity of the natural sciences where there is a scientific method. And it's not like making a decision, it's more like research. Hermeneutics is not research.

2:01:48 Dylan: Well, wouldn't hermeneutics be part of deciding what to do your research on?

2:01:54 Wes: Yeah, that kind of goes back to the other essay.

2:01:57 Mark: Sure, yeah. Looking at past research to figure out what are the questionable things that are still remaining.

2:02:03 Dylan: And to be honest, depending upon the kind of research you were doing, there would be occasions in which it was more blatantly hermeneutical than others. A lot of research proceeds where you decide to investigate something. And the fact is the kinds of surprises and confusions you have along the way are pretty mundane. That the Confusions have more to do with understanding your apparatus and understanding stupid mistakes and that kind of thing. And the surprises tend to be ones that again, are relatively mundane. But every researcher hopes that they will be confronted with confusions that end up being deep and surprises that end up causing a revision of the way they were thinking in the first place.

And in those cases, I think you end up having to bring much more of this hermeneutical activity to bear on the actual activity of research that is going on where you're really reflecting on why you're asking the question. What kind of answer are you looking for in asking that question? How is the answer that you're getting really an answer to the question that you asked? Or is it really an answer to a different question? And all those sorts of activities that seem to be more in line with the practical judgment that Gadamer's talking about in this last essay, maybe more or

2:03:28 Mark: less finish up the discussion just quoting the very end of the essay. The beginning of the last paragraph is what I already read about hermeneutics's theory. The end of the last paragraph. The universal desire to know does not break off at the point where concrete practical discernment is the decisive issue. The connection between the universal desire to know and concrete practical discernment is a reciprocal one. So it appears to me that heightened theoretical awareness about the experience of understanding and the practice of understanding, like philosophical hermeneutics and one's own self understanding, are inseparable.

2:03:59 Wes: Well, it sounds just like what Dylan was talking about, the dynamic between scientific activity and hermeneutic activity. Not that I know how he really, you know, would think about that. I mean, it's a good question what that relationship actually what he thinks it is, science specifically.

2:04:14 Mark: So the truth is, I found this essay before the others. And then Dylan and Seth and I all read it, and then I found these others that I thought were more on point. But I kept this on the syllabus because at least three of us had already read it. So I didn't.

2:04:28 Dylan: I liked it.

2:04:29 Wes: I liked all of them.

2:04:30 Mark: Give us some wrap up. What do you think is awesome here in this essay or the whole thing?

2:04:35 Wes: You know, he's getting at difficult ideas and sometimes it verges on that sort of Heideggerian mysticism, or what seems like to me to be something like mysticism, but there's a level of. And I know some of these were lectures, but clarity. And I just like his writing. And I have a particular interest in questions of artistic interpretation that's Kind of up my alley. And this is all very useful to me in the broad sense of useful.

2:04:59 Dylan: It's not merely theoretical.

2:05:03 Wes: I'm going to mow my lawn with these texts tomorrow.

2:05:07 Mark: I kind of, when I heard about hermeneutics, here's how to read texts well, then I kind of want a method. I kind of want Tell me how to read text well. And what's a little frustrating, looking at parts initially essays like this last one that we discussed that are discussing in very high level, from a bird's eye view, you know, how the hermeneutic project relates to other kinds of projects, or there's another one that's right after this in the same collection of how it relates to rhetoric and things like that. And I was pretty unsatisfied and wanted to get down into Truth and Method.

And then I started looking at Truth and Method and well, that was all like that Eva Brann Heidegger going on for pages at a time outlining the genealogy of certain cultural terms. And I was like, between those two, certainly there's got to be something that actually gets at the crux of it. I do feel like I was very satisfied with the parts that we ended up reading and felt like it was very much on point and very, you know, of course, anything about aesthetics always confirms my own aesthetic theory that I, that I voice in every aesthetics episode of, you know, how you can't just sit back and say, oh, I don't like that kind of work or something.

You have to engage it in some strong way and it's a challenge to you to adjust yourself to it. It's a dialogue. So I liked having a new way of looking at that, new ammunition for. I wrote a blog post in the late fall about how we don't do debate on this show, that we have conversations and why I think getting, you know, a die hard libertarian on the show for the Nozick would have been counterproductive because we just don't operate like this. Well, we get a very similar kind of picture from both Jaspers and Gadamer to what I was saying, fleshing out more details of what the alternative is, that if you sort of start, this is my position, like you're a lawyer, and then I'm going to argue against you who has the opposite position, then you just don't get anywhere.

Like, you need to actually put your views at risk. You need to not be so haughty and like, I've already made up my mind. So it's good that we don't have Experts in here all the time, that it's just us stumbling and our guests often stumbling across tentative hypotheses about what these things mean and whether we like it or not, so that we actually have some growth out of here instead of just the fireworks of crossfire, unstoppable force hitting an immovable object.

2:07:21 Dylan: Well, I mean, the example of judicial proceedings as being adversarial and therefore the mode to get towards truth is the diametrically opposed counterexample.

2:07:32 Mark: Right.

2:07:32 Dylan: That via aggressive, jealous defense of your position, that somehow the truth will, by procedure, come out.

2:07:42 Mark: If you have a third party that's judging, that is essentially playing the spectator as both these things are bouncing off them. It's not just an unmoderated two lawyers battling it out that would then lead nowhere.

2:07:55 Dylan: You're exactly right that there's actually three participants in that adversarial process. Maybe a fourth if you include a jury.

2:08:02 Mark: Yeah, the jury and their common understanding.

2:08:05 Dylan: You know, and maybe there's a separate episode to talk about that. But I think that that mode of trying to understand something, you're right, that it's not the kind of give and take, it's not hermeneutical. It's not trying to understand anything at all.

2:08:21 Mark: Seth, any last words?

2:08:23 Seth: I don't know that I have anything more poetic to say. I certainly agree. I think this idea that we already have a kind of understanding that we bring to bear and that being able to recognize that, and as you say, Mark put it at risk, really speaks to how I try to approach what we do here. And more than anything, I'm having some kind of like a quasi nostalgic, like maybe this is the guy I should have been studying in grad school. We have all these texts that we've come in the last five years to read. Some of them, of course, we're reading again for the first or 10th time, but a lot of them are ones that I never read, but I felt like I should have.

You know, they're in the canon and sometimes they satisfy and sometimes they disappoint. And I just really like his thought process. I like the writing. I'm sympathetic to the project and I'm actually glad we did this now because I think it shines a light on a few things we've done and some other things that I've read, but I really think it sets the stage for us to read. Some of the people that follow in the so called continental tradition now will be much better off trying to tackle some of the more difficult modern figures. I think I'd be interested to go back and.

Well, somebody mentioned that he specifically was an influence on Ricoeur. So maybe it's good that we did this now since we were planning on following up with that soon.

2:09:48 Mark: Well, yes, that is why we chose this for now. Because next time.

2:09:51 Seth: What? It was intentional. You did it on purpose.

2:09:54 Mark: We're having Law Ware, our guest for our racism episode. Come back to us. And race.

2:10:00 Seth: The episode was on race, not racism on race.

2:10:07 Wes: Speaking of four understandings.

2:10:11 Mark: And so he also has a lot of cred in religious philosophy and had suggested this in particular that Ricoeur in his circle of suspicion. So we're going to read two essays by him, the Critique of Religion and the Language of Faith. Please join us. We are supported by your donations. Go to partialexaminelife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Peter Thigpen, Paul Rowe, Mariko Francis, Tanya Binos, Walter Nidokis, Stephen Goodsell, Scott Venners, Sharad Bharadwaj, Gordon Reed, Joshua Garoud, Brian Hawthorne, Adrian Katz, Stephen Robinson, Susan Kalman, John Townsend, Tom Van Den Bogard, Jeff Chergoski, Mark Valen, Konstantinos Fotis, Jonathan Wolgin, Clinton Whitehouse Jr.

Gave Ornsby Lim, Damien Cosmo, B? Tita, Lori McClory, Richard Martin, Pierre Dupreux, Andrew Scott, Philip Czerny, Nicholas Berlou, Peter Zaplinski, Lauren Josephson, Alan Collister, Chris Larson, Joshua Hounshell, Jonathan Hussain, Linda Pullman, Keith Morrison, Christopher McGowan, David Norbury, Maurice Frank, Jeannie Carey and Trent Eady. Thanks to them and to the smaller donors, including those who are newly or on a continued basis signed up for our $5 a month citizen site. I also want to thank the musicians who are chiming in and helping me with the songs for the end of these episodes.

This new one you're about to hear features Chris Chamis on drums and Ben Kelly on lead guitar and keyboard. It is about the sad state of political discourse in the country and I will warn you that it does feature a lot of swearing. If you are a musician of any sort, please drop me a line@markartiallyexaminedlife.com Let me know what you do. Send me a link to your stuff. I'd love to have you contribute to some of these songs in the future. We also have a Facebook group. We have Twitter feed. We have a LinkedIn group. Well, good night, everybody.

2:11:54 Dylan: Good night.

2:11:54 Seth: Good night.

2:11:56 Unknown speaker: I think in order to understand you, I'd have to shed my skin. I Think in order to really know you I'd have to fit into the space you're in Reactions only make sense in light of what's been done to

2:12:17 Mark: you

2:12:20 Unknown speaker: what that was I can't imagine all that you've been through Communications broken down there's nothing left to do so fuck off so fuck off the default relation between you, me, your Fuck off and your mama too and all the shit she did to you we don't like the same damn things Guess that's safe to say we barely live in the same world I wish you'd stayed a hell away the things you choose to eat and vote for do you even care what you want? I can't imagine Are you even a person under there? Communications broken down, there's nothing left to do so fuck off so fuck off the default relations ween you, me yeah fuck off and your mama too and all the shit she did to you oh fuck off yes fuck off the default relation twixt you and me are oh fuck off and your mama too and all the shit she did to you it's not on the point to think of you as someone that I could be in another life.

Why would would you point to humanity as a common bond? Cuz it's a bond that's ch me. Well harmony has long left town One note still rings true Fuck off fuck off the default relation between you and me I fuck off and your mama too and all the shit she did to you so fuck off so fuck off the default position for society to rub off it's cakey shitting to our eyes so we can't see so fuck off fuck off Keep on fucking off Never can't fuck off far enough Keep fucking on all that stuff I sign no contract I can't stand you round here.