Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

Carnavon:

All that a large number of people coming to the same interpretation proves is that the group likely shares the same assumptions about hermeneutics and the text itself. Given that Christianity in a systematic way indoctrinates people with a common set of beliefs and assumptions, it's unremarkable when a bunch of Christians agree on a particular interpretation. The "truth" of a text or a history is no more legitimate because of the assumptions of a large group than those of a lone individual. Truth, as such, is not based on argumentum ad populum, regardless whether it's a scientific hypothesis or the interpretation of a text. (Except in a special sense, which is part of my own theory of truth. The most common assumption about truth among lay people is the correspondence theory of truth. And that theory doesn't admit of evidence by numbers.)


"We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning."

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Gadamer's philosophical project, as explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics", which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. In the book Gadamer argued that "truth" and "method" were at odds with one another. He was critical of two approaches to the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). On the one hand, he was critical of modern approaches to humanities that modelled themselves on the natural sciences (and thus on rigorous scientific methods). On the other hand, he took issue with the traditional German approach to the humanities, represented for instance by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, which believed that correctly interpreting a text meant recovering the original intention of the author who wrote it.

In contrast to both of these positions, Gadamer argued that people have a 'historically effected consciousness' (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. Thus interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons where the scholar finds the ways that the text's history articulates with their own background. Truth and Method is not meant to be a programmatic statement about a new 'hermeneutic' method of interpreting texts. Gadamer intended Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things (even if we do not know it): "My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing".

"il n'y a pas de hors-texte." — Translation: There is nothing outside the text (alternatively, and possibly more accurately, translated as 'there is no outside to the text')

Jacques Derrida

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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets. (Derrida)

s/monster/God/?