Hi David,
I'm trying to understand the play of language as structure and metaphor.
It is Gadamer I'm trying to decipher. The aspect of Barfield's
writing that helps me understand Gadamer is how the power of metaphor,
which is generated in living expression, seems to have more *passion* than
more conventional consensual meanings that develop through shared use of
the metaphor over time as the metaphor develops more collective meaning. IF
this quality of metaphor is accurate, then maybe the reason why Gadamer is
attracted to the texts of ancient Greece is the living metaphorical images
and figures generating and expressing the *passion* of poetic vision.
I want to summarize a section of a book of Gadamer's writings that gives a
sense of his project.
Gadamer's project was to *see through* the myth of a universalist notion
of hermeneutics as objective. His project was to question
the ontological ground of *philosophical* hermeneutics. Gadamer comments,
"the question is not what we do or what we should do, but what
happens beyond our willing and doing".
This question of how we are constituted within the horizon of historical
temporality that is beyond our self-control. Gadamer wants to free us from
the methodologisms that pervade modern thought, For Gadamer horizons of
understanding constitute the interpreter's own immediate participation *in*
tradtions that are not themselves the object of understanding but the
*condition* of the horizon's occurence. No method can free one from this
condition.
Gadamer is critical of the project of hermeneutics as an attempt at a
disciplined reconstruction of the historical situation in which a text
originated, as the object of hermeneutics. This search for objective
universal hermeneutical understanding as an approach is biased or
prejudiced towards a *critical* stance that is a methodologically
*controlled* interpretation and makes understanding a product of the
discipline of hermeneutics.
For one example, Dilthey identified the meaning of the text or action with
the subjective intention of its author. Starting from the content
[documents, artifacts, actions,] of the historical world the task for
Dilthey was to recover the original life-world. For Dilthey the knower
*negates* the temporal distance that separates him from the text and
becomes cotemporaneous with the text.
For Dilthey the knower's own present situation has only a negative value
and the text is privileged. Dilthey views prejudices and distortions as
blocks to valid understanding and therefore the interpreter must attempt to
*transcend* one's own limitations and prejudices. Historical understanding,
according to Dilthey IS the action of subjectivity, purged of all
prejudices and it is achieved in direct proportion to the knower's ability
to *set aside* his own horizons by means of an effective historical method.
The subject, through priveleging a particular hermeneutical method,
extricates himself from the entanglements of history and the prejudices
which come from these entanglements. What the interpreter negates, is his
own present as a VITAL extension of the past.
This methodological alienation of the knower from his own historicity is
PRECISELY the focus of Gadamer's criticism. Gadamer rejects that a knower
can separate or leave his immediate situation merely by adopting an
*attitude* [an ideal of understanding] that asks us to overcome our present
as if our own historicity is an accidental factor. For Gadamer, THIS factor
is an ontological awareness and the knower's present situation is
constitutively involved *in* any process of understanding. Gadamer takes
the *boundness* of a present horizon and the temporal gulf that IS
separating him from his object to be the productive ground of ALL
understanding rather than a factor to be overcome. our prejudices do not
cut us off from the past but initially open it up to us.
In his own words, Gadamer states,
"The historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal
sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability
to EXPERIENCE. Prejudices are the biases of our openness to the world"
Shaped by the past in an infinity of unexamined ways, the present situation
is the "given" in which understanding is rooted and which reflection can
never entirely hold at a critical distance and objectify. This is the
meaning of Gadamer's "hermeneutical situation". The givenness of the
situation cannot be dissolved into critical self-knowledge in a way that
the prejudice-structure of finite understanding might disappear.
Gadamer argues,
"To BE historical means that one is not absobed into self-knowledge.
Prejudice and tradition define the ground the interpreter himself occupies
when he understands. The historical hermeneutics of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, with its affirmation of the historicity and
RELATIVITY of every human expression and perspective reaching us from the
past, stopped short of affirming the interpreter's *own* historicity along
with that of his objects. This for Gadamer inevitably leads to an
experience of alienation that distorts what actually takes place *in*
aesthetic and historical interpretation. [David, I read your post as making
a similar point]
What Gadamer asks us to *see through* [unveiling] is that the dominant
ideal of knowledge involves a powerful prejudice that controls most
philosophy. This fate has befallen every hermeneutical theory that regards
understanding *as* a reproductive procedure and duplication of a past
intention. For Gadamer understanding is not reconstruction but rather
*mediation*. We are conveyors of the past into the present. Understanding
remains essentially a mediation or translation of past meaning into the
present situation. Gadamer's specific emphasis is on the fundamental
continuity of history as a medium encompassing every subjective act and the
objects it apprehends.
Understanding is an event, a movement of history itself, in which neither
interpreter or text can be thought of as autonomous parts.
Gadamer writes,
"Understanding itself is not to be thought of so much as an action of
subjectivity, but as the ENTERING into an event of transmission in which
past and present are constantly mediated.. This movement is what must gain
validity within the project of philosophical hermeneutics. In the past
hermeneutics was too dominated by the ideal of a procedure, a method.
This was a summary from the introduction to Gadamer's writings by David
Linge the editor and translator of a book of Gadamer's writings titled
{Philosophical Hermeutics}
David, I see places of overlap with your comments, so thought I would bring
Gadamer into the conversation.
Larry
On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 6:26 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
> Linguistics is stalked by a terrible succubus, the succubus of
> structuralist reification. I guess the worst example of this is the
> Chomskyan "revolution", a technical means of diagramming sentences which
> people mistook for the way in which people actually formulated them.
>
> When this was clearly disproved by psycholinguistic experiments in the
> sixties and seventies, it was immediately replaced with exactly the
> opposite idea: that potential language and real language are exactly the
> same thing; that is, everything that can be said actually is being said or
> has been said somewhere in the world. Ergo corpus linguistics, the
> linguistics of ever-larger computer corpora, is the real thing. I think
> that the "five million books" idea is just the latest instantiation of
> this opposite idea, which is ultimately behavioristic.
>
> As Andy says, real philosophy, and real science, is what starts where
> the popular myth, the current Zeitgeist ends. The problem is that the
> NEXT big thing, the NEXT popular myth, also starts where the current
> Zeitgeist ends; behavioristic "realism" in linguistics started exactly
> where the structuralist succubus expired (and, I might remark
> parenthetically, it started up precisely because we did not listen to
> Merleau-Ponty's remark to the effect that structuralism's main crime was
> not valuing structure ENOUGH to link it firmly enough to value).
>
> I'm afraid that's how I read the Owen Barfield quote Rob and Larry refer
> to below (though I'm ALSO afraid I will not have time to track it down and
> read it in context). It seems to me we are in danger of going back to the
> structuralist succubus: we are in danger of reifying the language system
> and attributing all of linguistic creativity to this great bag of God
> sentences.
>
> I don't believe language is an abstract system that is capable of
> generating any and all sentences. I believe in language that is still warm
> from the lips and breath of living breathing humans, and I believe that
> there is no actual poetry without an actual poet (whether that poet is
> wearing laurels or just wearing a baking cap and an apron). But I also
> don't believe that language and all of its poetic moments are just the sum
> total of everything that ever has been said, is being said, or even will be
> being said by living breathing people.
>
> If this seems like a contradiction, then it is only because we are not in
> the habit of thinking of potential as truly infinite (mathematicians had a
> similar problem explaining what it really means when we say something like
> given an infinite number of opportunities, everything that can happen will
> happen).
>
> Every unit of language, from sounds to words to the most complex and
> intricate of wordings, is both a car horn and a traffic light. That is,
> there is always some element (what Volosinov calls 'theme" and Vygotsky
> calls "sense") that is mutable and negotiable, where you have to look over
> your shoulder and see if you know the guy who is honking.
>
> In sounds, intonation and stress are like this. In words, the prefixes and
> suffixes and particles and pronouns. In sentences, subgrammatical fragments
> like "What about you?". But in language generally, this is the predominant
> nature of spoken discourse, and that is why it is consistently missing from
> the Google N-grams base (which would have you believe that swearing was
> invented in the late twentieth century).
>
> Then there is this other element (what Volosinov calls meaning proper and
> what Vygotsky calls "signification") that is quite fixed and systematic.
> Red always means stop and green always means go (although the precise
> meaning of yellow depends on where you are with relation to the
> intersection).
>
> In sounds, vowels and consonants are like this. In words, the common nouns
> and workaday verbs, the independent morphemes of all kinds. In sentences,
> the independent clauses that make up the overwhelming majority of our
> (non-novelistic and non-dialogic) written text. This is where we find all
> of our dictionary meanings, (and, alas, almost all of the meanings in the
> N-gram system).
>
> The infinite potential of language, which is what the poet exploits and
> which is why language is not reducible to the sum total of everything that
> has been, is, and will be said, is the product of the way these systems
> interact. So there is no contradiction. But if there were, it would only be
> a contra-diction; it would still be perfectly true.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> --- On Thu, 4/19/12, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Measuring culture
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012, 6:45 AM
>
>
> Hi Larry,
> I am intrigued with the passage from Owen Barfield.
>
> Which book is that found in?
>
> RL
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:53 AM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Andy, thanks for this post which I find exploring experience and
> culture.
> > These insights of Dewey's seems to parallel themes I've been reading in
> > Gadamer's perspective on prejudice .
> >
> > especially the section,
> >
> > It [experience] is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to
> > sophisticated thought,
> > which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive
> > empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by
> > the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed
> > borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call
> > these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their
> > source and authority is unknown), then /philosophy is a critique of
> > prejudices/.
> >
> >
> > I would like to juxtapose, or put in play, these insights of Dewey's
> with a
> > quote from Owen Barfield,
> >
> > More particularly, it (i.e. pleasure) can be aroused by a language which
> is
> > at an earlier stage of development than the one which is our own, because
> > it is the nature of language to grow less figurative, less and less
> couched
> > in terms of imagery, as it grows older. We notice, we relish figurative
> > quality in older language, and we EXPERIENCE this figurative element in
> the
> > same way in which we experience those new metaphors which poets make for
> > us. But it does not follow from this (and this is where most of the
> > philologists of the 19th Century and the early twenties have really made
> > their mistake) it does not follow from this that that figurative element,
> > that presence of living memory, that we find in earlier language was
> made,
> > invented, created by the individual genius of a poet. On the contrary,
> it
> > couldn't have been. It was simply there in the language as such; it was
> a
> > 'given' kind of meaning, a 'given' kind of imagery.
> >
> > I also want to bring in Emily's comment posted today,
> >
> > I just wanted to call attention to play as in the way play ' plays '
> us...
> > Gadamer talks about this in Truth and Method, noting that when we engage
> > in in play, play can overtake and seem to become something more that the
> > participants.
> >
> > As I read Dewey's, Barfield's, and Gadamer's notions of experience I see
> a
> > theme of experience and expression as playful.
> >
> > Larry
> >
> >
> >
> > More parti
> > On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:37 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Wagner, your post sent me into my book of the writings of John Dewey,
> > > where I became happily lost for half an hour. I couldn't find the
> maxim I
> > > was looking for, but this one will do:
> > >
> > > "Experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of
> > > the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled
> > > with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought,
> > > which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive
> > > empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by
> > > the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed
> > > borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call
> > > these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their
> > > source and authority is unknown), then /philosophy is a critique of
> > > prejudices/. These incorporated results of past reflection, welded
> > > into the genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become the
> > > organss of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon. If
> > > they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort.
> > > Clarification and emancipation follow when they are detected and
> > > cast out; and one great object of philosophy is to accomplish this
> > > task." (PJD 276)
> > >
> > > The quote I was looking for and couldn't find made an allusion to
> Hegel's
> > > famous aphorism:
> > >
> > > "As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so
> > > philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as
> > > foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present
> > > world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over
> > > Rhodes." (Pref. Phil Rt.)
> > >
> > > and went on to say that while no philosophy worthy of the name can
> simply
> > > reflect the prejudices of its own times, it is given by its own times
> the
> > > prejudices against which it must protest. Those who are blindly swept
> > along
> > > by the fashions of the times are quite incapable of doing this and are
> > not
> > > worthy of the name of philosophy or science.
> > >
> > > Andy
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Wagner Luiz Schmit wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hello,
> > >>
> > >> I don't know if you already saw this... I am still thinking about it
> and
> > >> what to say about it...
> > >>
> > >> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/**pt-br/what_we_learned_from_5_**
> > >> million_books.html<
> >
> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/pt-br/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
> > >
> > >>
> > >> A new tool or a new way to reduce human to numbers? In some places i
> > >> already see scientists from fields like neuroscience, evolutionary
> > >> psychology and etc pointing to me and saying "Marx? Vygotsky? Gosh you
> > are
> > >> obsolete and should be in a Museum". And they have funding...
> > >>
> > >> Just trowing toughs...
> > >>
> > >> Wagner Luiz Schmit
> > >> ______________________________**____________
> > >> _____
> > >> xmca mailing list
> > >> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > >> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/**listinfo/xmca<
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > > --
> > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**
> > > ------------
> > > *Andy Blunden*
> > > Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/**toc/hmca20/18/1<
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1>
> > > Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> > > Book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/**product/1608461459/<
> > http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608461459/>
> > >
> > >
> > > ______________________________**____________
> > > _____
> > > xmca mailing list
> > > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/**listinfo/xmca<
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca>
> > >
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
>
>
>
> --
> *Robert Lake Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA 30460
>
> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.
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