Saturday, May 9, 2009

Essay Exam

The exam will be evaluated as two essays of about two pages each(formatted the same as the first paper). The guidelines for evaluation will be rigorously applied. Because the essays bear a direct relationship to the texts we read and our discussion of them, I expect the essays to reflect an understanding of the basic concepts in hermeneutics as espoused in the texts and as developed in our discussion. This being a philosophy exam, the questions are also geared to require that you go beyond what we have said in class and display your ability to philosophize in ”the continental style,” using the text to ground your discourse. You may, of course, converse with your colleagues about the questions (How could it be otherwise, given our discussions of hermeneutical conversation?), but the essays must be comprised of your own thoughts in your own words.

Papers are due “in the box” by Friday, May 15, at 3 p.m.

Choose two of the following, and put the question you are responding to at the top of the first page.

1.Gadamer, as we know, was Heidegger’s most influential student and arguably his philosophical heir. With that in mind, discuss the relationship between a central concept in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, namely hermeneutical experience, and the aspect of Heidegger’s project that he called “undergoing an experience with language.”

2.Explain the following two quotes from Truth and Method and discuss the light they shed on one another and on the relationship between question and experience they imply.

“Every sudden idea has the structure of a question” (329).

“It is clear that the structure of the question is implicit in all experience” (325).

3. On p. one, Davies claims that “philosophical hermeneutics is philosophical in that it strives to discern objectivities within the subjective voice.” That claim is rather theoretical. But Gadamer, I believe, turns theory into practice with his very practical and basic guideline for hermeneutical conversation: “ To conduct a conversation means to be conducted by the object to which the partners in the conversation are directed” (330). You may choose either quote as the theme of your essay, explaining it and discussing its significance, using ( if you wish) the other as a backdrop.

4 .As I suggested in class, I believe that though Gadamer’s hermeneutics might be romantic it is also very practical, by which I mean doable. Assuming the “doability” of Gadamer’s recommendation in the following quote, identify and explain the difficulties involved in putting the recommendation into practice and discuss some possible ways of overcoming these difficulties:

“It is not the art of arguing that is able to make a strong case out of weak one, but the art of thinking that is able to strengthen what is said by referring to the object” (331).

5. In our discussion of Gadamer’s essay, “To What Extent Does Language Preform Thought?” I mentioned Kenneth Burke’ observation that “language does your thinking for you.” Grounding your response in Gadamer’s text, discuss the degree to which you think Gadamer’s argument successfully counters Burke’s observation?

Note: Please feel free to post questions of clarification on the blog, and I will do my best to respond to them in a timely fashion (beginning Sunday evening when I return), without, of course, giving away too much.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Why do we have language?

Going through this reading a second time, I feel that Gadamer is saying that language does preform thought, but that this in no way inhibits the possibility of all that can be thought (and maybe is even the source of our infinite possibility within language). It is almost impossible for us to think of a world were we don't think in language, but even then, we don't think solely in language. We all have had a pre-linguistic experience where we used gestures, facial expressions, and movement (?) before we ever began to speak in a language, and we continue to do so even with the presence of language. Furthermore, we are capable of having experiences which are not linguistic in nature (thought is not entirely linguistic, at least it doesn't need to be fundamentally speaking). We are capable of having linguistic experiences only because we are capable of experiencing the world in the first place.

Regardless, now that we have language it almost seems to make thought a bit too "easy" (because we tend to look for a word and fill it in when we need it). By using language (trying to manipulate it into something it isn't) in such a way we really begin to worry that language may already be the source of all our thoughts, in that we cannot think of anything beyond the use of language. Does language preform thought/Are we doomed to think what we were predetermined (by language) to already think? Gadamer however says that this concern is simply not an issue because language really doesn't limit us but in reality makes it a possibility in the first place for us to have any meaningful thought. I found this to pull from Heidegger in that the words can point, or hint, at something that isn't necessarily in the words being used. Sure language seems limited but it really isn't, language is possibility. "Listen to the logos and not to me". By listening to the logos we see that language cannot be forced into something it is not. This would limit it because then it wouldn't be language, but rather what we hope language becomes. Language does preform thought because it has to, it knows what is going to be said and all that can ever be said, and through this it allows us to speak infinitely about a subject because it opens up the avenues for conversation, and thought, to occur. We need language or else we are incapable of forming any thought beyond experience.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Thought?

I think that this might possibly be my favorite reading of anything that we have read on language. Everything was well laid out and explained, yet being very insightful and informative. My favorite quote from the text is, Plato, “the essence of thought the interior dialogue of the soul with itself.” Part of the reason that I like this so much is the fact that for the most part it is true. A person feeds himself or herself with knowledge every day, or at least this may be a little haughty to say, we philosophy majors do, just to converse with ourselves about what it was we just experienced or learned. Talking about language and the souls reminds me of a quote that I read last week, that I think adds something my liking of Plato’s quote. “To speak two languages, means a person possesses two souls.” Second part of the article that I really enjoyed was the fact that Gadamer pointed out that anyone can spit back out facts on a specific question being asked to him or her. However, that does not make them smart. It only proves that they can spit back out facts, they are not using questioning correctly or language correctly.

Gadamer

“One would want to admit rather that every linguistic experience of the world is experience of the world, not experience of language.”(495)Language is the means to how we understand the world – understand others – understand ourselves; it is not experience of the words but rather experience of the what the words hold or imply implicitly within. Through experience, we come to ask questions. Questions are implicit in experience. And to the extent that language preforms thought, the same language that one asks questions in, then ones way to form a thought of a question by means of language is preformed by the end result it wants to accomplish. When we undergo an experience with language, we do not undergo an experience with the conventions of the language, but rather what the word could open up in terms of possibilities in the world. Language influences our thoughts, but take away the world and language is nothing more than empty utterances.

We think in terms of language, without language we would have no way to communicate our thoughts to others, and maybe even our thoughts to ourselves. We are able to experience this infinite dialogue within ourselves, because of the possibilities of what language and the words hold implicitly within, that of questions and we experience the world but without language we would be nothing more than animals. Language allows us to form thoughts, indefinite as they are lead one on an experience into the unknown. Why? Because the word holds more than just the letters one uses to spell or pronounce it with, the word holds what ones thoughts are and what one’s way of experiencing the world are like. We experience the world, by doing this we ask questions because we can think and language allows us to speak to one another but means of more than just conventions.

Thinking in Language

I'm going to disagree with Cameron here. Language does not create a finite world - the world is finite with or without language. The fact that language, however, constructs the world is what is important. Language transcends the world and also creates the world. Whatever is, is in language, and whatever is not, is also in language, but not in the world. Thus, language constructs and at the same time deconstructs (negates) things as they appear to us in the world (phenomenology). This is why language is infinite - it doesn't "create" the world, it creates the way we understand the world, and we understand the world through language, and in this way, language transcends itself and, hence, is infinite. This is how language "preforms thought". Thinking only occurs in language - we think in language. At the same time, language doesn't necessarily "think for us" (it can, and at time might, but it doesn't always). Language defines the limitations of what can and cannot be said, or thought, rationally, about a specific transcendent truth. 

Does Language preform Thought?

Gadamer seems to suggest that yes, language preforms thought. He talks about how people are incapable of having thoughts without words. He says "We think with words. To think is to think something with oneself; and to think something with oneself is to say something to oneself" (491). This passage shows that people use language even on the nearly subconscious level and that language seems to be unavoidable. People are born with it and it's a tool that comes naturally to them to use.

infinitely cool

John, I think I can conceptualize the problem you are having with infinite language. When I read the reading I thought about it in terms of math. For example, words are mere letters. Let the letters each represent a differnt number. Now that being said, there is an infinite number of possible words for us to use. I don't know if this answers your question (perhaps my impression of your question was entirely differnt than yours...than again, it is isn't it). What I found interesting or at least difficult was trying to imagine experienceing the world without language. I know that at some point early on in our life we are without language, but I find it interesting to try and imagine experiencing the world absent of language.

possibilities of dialogue are infinite

To take a stab at John's problem I am going to look real quick at what I think Gadamer means by language being infinite. For Gadamer language creates a finite world for us in that we can only understand or even think about that which can be expressed in language. In this way language becomes an ideology because the world is now trapped within the confines of the way our language allows us to examine, understand, and speak about the world around us. It forms the basis of our thoughts and creates the way in which we develop value judgments about ideas and things in the world by the way in which they are understood through language. Yet at the same time the possibilities are infinite in that given the lexicon of language there are an infinite compilation of words to create and infinite amount of phrases and ideas to understand the world even in it's finiteness.

Faithful Gadamer

The question posed by Gadamer is whether thought preforms language. The danger in such a conception is that if such is the case we have no choice in where language leads us globally and are doomed to destruction caused by industrialization and planetary abuses. Gadamer says that "... because this dialogue is infinite, because this orientation to things, given in the pre-formed schemas of discourse, enters into our spontaneous process of coming to an understanding both with one andother and with ourselves, there is opened to us the infinity of what we understand in general and what we can intellectually appropriate"(493).

What I'm having a hard time understanding is how are we capable of infinite dialogue? Obviously, Gadamer can't be speaking individually. Is this a kind of Hegelian interpretation of dialogues in the form of Geist? That's the interpretation that I'm taking to the right one, but I want to insure I'm not mistaken. The other interpretation that I can conceive of is that the possibilities of dialogue are infinite. My problem with either of these is that I don't see or I missed the foundation for the claim.

For me the only reasonable way to assert and justify this presumption would be to develop a certain concept that was unexpressable (how you would express it would be difficult, though) and show that language could not get there naturally. Now, in Gadamer's case, if Gadamer is referring to the capacity for us to reconceptualize, again, this would be Hegelian, I think, and find new possibilities for all possible concepts in that, I think he has a better argument. This kind of argument seems to be illustrated in "... the mediation of an experience pre-formed by language that we grow up in our world, does not remove the possibilities of critique"(495). This is the famous Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis notion. However, even this seems to have a predetermined destination. While the argument can be said to have more leniency in formulation of new conceptions, I don't see that all possibilities are possible through it.

Exhileration

I am excited to hear from Gadamer how free we really are. He describes the problem at hand of the chance of a primordial falsity to our experience of the world. This is possible because of the extent to which we are bound by language. Our thought is shaped by the words we know. Simultaneously, our existence is an ongoing self-dialogue which is a "constant going beyond oneself and [returning] to oneself" (492). Some theories propose that we are truly imprisoned within the particular schematization formed by the conversation we learn from birth. Yet Gadamer says boldly that "there are no limits to the interior dialogue of the soul with itself" (493). He says we have the ability and the potential to say everything in words and there can be a universality to what we say.
At first thought, I am amazed to think of the freedom we have to express what we may not even understand in our language. This links to Heidegger's idea that we are able to be authentic at any time. It would seem we posses the power to go further than we would expect given our language capabilities into who we really are. How is this possible? What is happening when the dialogue between our soul and itself reaches beyond the limits of what language affords? Is this possible because it is afforded by experience, and we simply don't have words to describe our experience? To what extent does our experience preceed our words and our understanding of ourselves?

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Undergoing Understanding

So much could be said about what is happening in conversation and in the interpretation of language. What first strikes me is that understanding is a process of coming to an agreement about an object, not "getting inside the other person and reliving their experience" (345). Coming to this agreement then happens through conversation, which has a life of its own. Understanding is a process that "happens to us", says Gadamer. What one undergoes in engaging in conversation toward understanding is like being catechized into a new something, a new world of understanding. The hermeneutical paradox is that clarity and understanding is greatest when understanding is interrupted from in normal, everyday understanding of itself. Similar to Hiedegger's notion that within language, the process of understanding comes from the breaking down of assumptions, the death of one aspect that gives birth to a new, more truthful perspective. A person must make them selves vulnerable, and in Kierkegaardian form, resign themselves existentially to thier perpetual lack of understanding. The true conversationalist must let go of himself and allow language to take hold of him. He can do this because he realizes how weak he is compared to language, interpretation and converstation. Every view he has has been constructed by him based on the world he has been brought up in, and so his view is limited to the terms he is used to. Each person has the power to manipulate and control language for their purposes, in every act of translation or "understanding". But if someone truly desires to understand authentically, they have to have the how of their understanding always before them. Gadamer calls this a "constant renunciation". The difficulty seems to enter when one must make decisions about the meaning of something while still being resigned to how they are understanding.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Gadamer

Gadamer talks about how a “fundamental conversation is never one that we want to conduct.”(345) But why does he use the word “want” and not “can”? So is he saying that a conversation that “is” being conducted could be bring about the type of conversation where it could lead one to something unfamiliar? I just found it interesting he didn’t say “can”. When a conversation is underway, the type of conversation Gadamer is concerned with, one does not need to understand the person from the inside, trying to undergo the same experience they underwent. Rather, they come to agree upon the object of discussion.

When translation is used, there will always be the gap between the original word and the new context it has taken up. It seems that the gap between the translation of the word, from language to language and the understanding of a word, from person to person, would be somewhat of the same. Because the original language holds something it can only contain and the person with the experience of something, trying to describe it in words to another (in the same language) would seem to lose a part of the whole that was present in its original use. The talk about the common language, seems to go with what we were talking about last week, a common language is established in the conversation and cannot be pre-established. And by finding this common language, it is used as a tool for attaining an understanding between two people in a ‘real’ conversation.

Language as the Medium

“Language is the middle ground in which understanding and agreement concerning the objects take place between people.” People especially as pointed out in the whole translator part of the essay. Two people cannot talk about the same thing in the same thing. Something is lost form what they are trying to convey to one another, and is almost impossible when there is a translator. An objecting is passing from one person’s conception of it, thought a person that misses something possibly because of translation, and the translator has to pass it to another person on the other side getting his own interpretation of what is being said. Conversations are two people understanding each other. They fall into conversation they do not conduct it. Conducting a conversation means people are in control of the of it, which is obviously false. Because if people are open and in a good conversation it can take them anywhere.

Conducting vs being conducted

I thought it was really interesting that Gadamer talks about the conversation that conducts its subjects as being the conversation most worthy of spending time on. It goes along with what we've talked about earlier in the class about how the conversation guides by the subject of the question and the way of questioning. On top of the conversation that the subject conducts being most time-worthy, Gadamer says it's also the one that is most preferred by the interlocutors. Could this be because there is a playfulness to having the subject of the conversation guide itself through the language of the conversation?

all i need is some good conversation

Conversation is discussed in great detail in today's reading. Accordingly, conversation and translation are not entirely different things as one may suspect. "As in conversation one tries to get inside the other person in order to understand his point of view, so the translator also tries to get right inside the author." (pg 348). I admit that initially I saw little difference between the two things, conversation and translation. However after reading the text I was able to make the connection. I did have one question after reading the material. in conversation, when we are trying to understand what another person has said, when we think we have understood what has been said, can we truly claim to know what the other person means? I don't think we can Know beyond doubt what others mean (epically during exchanging of intangible ideas), but I think that the role of conversation is key to what being human is all about, an essential part of being human.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKFW5OkJb4U

Golly Gadamer!

In this section, Gadamer talks about conversation, about what it means to be able to have a conservation. He writes that a conversation can't be structured, can't be intentional. It's something that comes about at a time when it is unexpected. Conversation leads those who converse. His description reminded me of Heidegger's "Dialogue with a Japanese," in that both parties have to be open and receptive to hearing what the other has to say, in order to move forward and understand each other and the object of discourse together.

Gadamer also writes that translation is not conversation - something of the original message, the original meaning, is lost via the translator. This got me thinking - isn't all conversation merely translation? Of course, the goal of hermeneutics, as I understand it, is to eliminate this translation - to explain how two parties can come to understand each other, to really know what the other person is saying, to enable themselves to think beyond themselves and put them in the person's position mentally. But is this ever possible? Isn't there always some sort of translation that needs to take place? Of course there is. But the way in which this translation is eliminated is through the transcendence of language. We come to understand the other through language by transcending the words of the language, and realize the concepts, the ideas, the meaning expressed by the Other. 

Translation

Hermeneutics is at work in translation from one language to the other in a way that is different from understanding from one to the other. The difference comes from several different points the first of which is that the translator is making the attempt to become the author in order to produce the most faithful translation. This attempt to be in the mood of the author is different than other hermeneutic encounters because it is not about creating an understanding or a strengthening of an argument. Instead it is about reproduction of a view point. The second most crucial difference comes from the differences in language. The move from one language to another is a changing of worlds from one perspective of perception to another. Due to this change in perspectives the translator can not merely translate the words but must rework the them to convey the spirit of the words to convey the same ideas in the new world it is trying to be understood in. With these in mind it really makes me wonder about philosophy translation. What am I missing and what important thoughts could have been lost by my inability to understand other languages.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

For Tuesday

Intensive Re-reading of Gadamer 337-341.
Careful Reading of 345-351.
Suggested Post: Conversation and Translation