The Hermeneutical Imperative | Hacker News Reader

The Hermeneutical Imperative

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

30 pointspanic21 comments

I think a helpful point for most would be that hermeneutics is the study of how to interpret things (most generally). For example, how do we interpret the constitution of the USA? You choose a hermeneutic either implicitly or explicitly by which you then interpret the document.

I think the duality in US politics today is largely one of what hermeneutic one uses to interpret the news, for example.

I feel like I'm missing why this article was written.

It requires more conscious interpretation to speak via the Internet compared to in person. The Internet is a weird museum filled with stuff to interpret.

Ok, seems true, but it's not really a new point. Does it make more sense if I read the other posts? Was there another section at the bottom I missed due to their mobile UI (happens all the time)?

This scratches at the surface of the very complex field of hermeneutics (basically how can humans* understand the semantics of utterances or other representations).

In the west it got its start in religious enquiry (loosely: the Bible is ambiguous, or at least people disagree about interpretation; can we figure out what the real underlying message is and thus correct errors made by humans because obviously the "real" text must be absolutely correct).

In the 20th century this discipline was broadened primarily by Heidigger whose work is famously incomprehensible yet filled with insight along with many others; it also lead to insight (e.g. semiotics) and extreme absurdity (e.g. 99.9% of the deconstructionists, sadly despite their having started with a useful insight).

* and in more modern times, machines. I spent several years in the 1980s working on how it even makes sense to talk about a machine "understanding". It definitely changed how I view the world, but IMHO so far has had essentially no impact on the world itself.

Can you recommend some texts that would be good reads towards understanding this subject better?

There’s a very nice documentary movie titled “Being in the world” (available on YouTube and elsewhere) which introduces the Heideggerian perspective. I’ve also heard good things about Hubert Dreyfus’ interpretation/translation of Heidegger.

Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good.

The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the history that led to this point.

Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT being unreadable. I think this is primarily because Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+ years of physics education.

> Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good.

I disagree (I've never tried reading him in translation). His German coinage and turgid sentences are legendary. I had one particularly obscurantist sentence from Sein und Zeit on my whiteboard for over a year and it was always a source of discussion, both jocular and serious, when someone came into my office.

"I had an equation from The Quantum Theory of Fields on my whiteboard for over a year..."

And did it lead to better understanding?

This is the kind of phenomenon I miss in remote work

Out of curiosity, what was that sentence? (Or a translation of it)

OK. And is there any basic foundation for starting, that enables one to understand Heidegger well? Some kind of primer for continental philosophy?

The "very short introduction" series has done a lot of work trying to make these folks more presentable, with varying levels of success.

You could also start with some of heidegger's shorter works like What is Called Thinking? or the one about technology (I'm not sure what the popular translation of the title is).

It seems buried here:

> Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us.

The idea is that interpreting content on the Internet leads people to become more self-conscious about how they interpret reality, which causes it to be less "real."

Prefacing that I am not a philosopher, but I think that hermeneutics would reject the idea that "real" and "reality" can exist outside of the interpretation that people have of something that has happened. To an extent, real and reality is the same and one with its interpretation. You get into these weird spots where two people could experience the same event, interpret it in different ways, leading up to two different "realities" of the event. I don't know enough to know how this would be reconciled within hermeneutic epistemology, but that's something interesting to keep in mind.

I have to say, hermeneutics is something our western culture has become catastrophically bad at. When the failure of postmodernism became apparent (truths unfortunately must be shared to take any corporate action in society), we seem to have reverted directly back into a Nietzschian nihilism, every group only exists as a means to power. This has begun to erode traditional modernist western ideals which the postmodernists seemed to allow: offensive speech isn't necessarily wrong, interpretation and truth are two sides to the same coin, etc.

> we seem to have reverted directly back into a Nietzschian nihilism

Alternately, we seem to have fulfilled his prediction that this would come to pass in 100-200 years, and would erode the ideals held by the Western mindset.

TBC: Not intending this to be read as a fatalism, merely that his concern was less with nihilism itself, and more with its effect on future society and people.

But isn't "determining the one true actual meaning of a thing" the entire point of hermeneutics? Or rather, hermeneutics is a technique for objectively determining what something does _not_ mean, which is incompatible with the idea that reality doesn't exist outside an interpretation.

I honestly don't know. I am not well read in hermeneutics to have any sort of opinion on it.

It looks like Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy [^1] might have a good introduction on the intersection of truth and hermeneutics. A quick skim of that section appears to fuse together ideas from aesthetics, ethics, and linguistics to build a conception of truth that is not based in traditional positivist epistemology. Again, I am not a philosopher so I don't really know what I am talking about.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#ContHerm_1

Yeah same here, just wondering.

Detecting wrong answers doesn't tell you anything about how many right answers there might be.

There only has to be one objectively wrong answer to show that it's not all subjective, which is the point under discussion.

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