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Thought of the Week Archives
September 2001
September 3
A complex but important thought from Jean Grondin on Hans-George Gadamer's
philosophical hermeneutics (essentially, the science of interpretation
of meaning). The point here is that to understand experience, we must
"story" or "digest" it into our own story (that is, the story we and others
tell about ourselves):
If...Gadamer can maintain that understanding is in principle linguistic,
it is because language embodies the sole means for carrying out the conversation
that we are and that we hope to convey to each other. It is for this reason
that hermeneutics permits itself an aphorism such as "Being that can be
understood is language." The emphasis should be on the "can." Understanding...must
be capable of engaging the whole content of language in order to arrive
at the being that language helps bring to expression. The essential linguisticality
of understanding expresses itself less in our statements than in our search
for the language to say what we have on our minds and hearts. For hermeneutics,
it is less constitutive that understanding is expressed in language --
which is true but trivial -- than that it lives in the unending process
of "summoning the word" and the search for a sharable language. Indeed,
understanding is to be conceived as this process, for this process --
the corresponding realization of the inner word -- is what grounds the
universality of hermeneutics.
- Jean Grondin
Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (p. 120)
September 10
The stories we create influence the stories of other people, those
stories give rise to still others, and soon we find meaning and connection
within a web of story making and story living. Through our personal myths,
we help to create the world we live in, at the same time that it is creating
us.
- Dan P. McAdams
The Stories We Life By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
September 17
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September 24
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