211. The Hermeneutic Circle

In order to understand this text (as you are doing) you must understand the individual words that make it up...but the overall meaning isn't contained in the words themselves. It's almost like you have to consider the whole & its parts simultaneously. Curious.

- Links for the Curious -

[benmusgrove]

I find this idea of a Hermeneutic Circle really appealing actually....it removes a tonne of the hand wringing from looking at a text and trying to mentally account for every possible bias I have at that exact point by nature of being iterative. As you point out though we don't always have time (or motivation honestly) to do a hundred rounds of the circle to get a more nuanced view so I can still see some value in trying to start from a reasonably bias-aware viewpoint when taking on a text for the first time.
I'll have to engage said Hermeneutic Circle to appraise the concept of the Hermeneutic Circle as to whether or not I give it priority over my current method of basically just handwriging about how poorly I'm accounting for my biases when learning something. Cue Alanis Morissette's Ironic....

[CompilerHack]

I'm listening to HoPwaG podcast on St. Augustine. About parts of religious Texts that he considers to require an allegorical reading, St. Augustine says they should be interpreted with a certain principle as a constraint (in his case, the reading should make one more Charitable) and if multiple such interpretations are possible, all of them are intended by God, so it's a collaborative effort to study and interpret the texts in various ways with the principle of Charity in mind.
And I don't see why we can't apply this to any interpretation. The more innovative the research on a given phenomenon under constraints of quality, the better! The hermeneutic circle feels like *a* way of doing this where the focus seems to be (unless I missed something) more on author-related stuff.

[Xob_Driesestig]

I agree with Luis Shökel that a circle is not really a good word for this process and that a spiral might be a better metaphor. People who find the hermeneutic circle plausible and want to expand a similar type of thinking to more domains may be interested in (epistemological) voluntarism. Of course a common objection to both hermeneutics and voluntarism is that it doesn't constrain enough. You are allowed to pick "arbitrary" and "ridiculous" starting positions and are allowed to ignore information.
I personally think that this type of methodology is pointing in the right direction, but isn't quite there yet.

[himanshutahiliani]

OMG OMG
Call it coincidence, but i have been studying this topic for about 2 weeks now. And now you put out a video on it🤗🤗🤗 made my day.
Also, quick suggestion for further reading(for the curious)
Hermeneutics: A very short introduction by Jens Zimmerman.
Understanding hermeneutics by Lawrence Schmidt.

Both these have good further reading sections, one of which I'm going through right now.

[CasualPhilosophy]

My first exposure to hermeneutics was as a reference to *self* interpretation. Specifically, how certain theories become popular idioms for people to understand their own experience, like Freudian psychology. Seeing discussions of it in the context of artistic interpretation feels like going backwards :)

[joaquinbecerra]

Fantastic video! Keep it up my dude :D

[ThatAnimeSnob]

all that sound like a mix of projection and the intent of the author. One is what the reader sees and one is what the author was thinking/feeling.

[galek]

Before its too late, the correct spelling is Hermeneutic.

[enlightenedonewon]

Everything i love ends up giving me pain

[odetoazam]

Hmm. What’s your take on exegesis? For example. There is a methodology followed by mufassirun or exegetes who decode the Quran by understanding things like root words, morphology, grammar, how the word is used in other parts of the Quran and so on. There are numerous sciences that go into it. Curious how the hermeneutic circle would approach such an endeavor.

[Baroncognito]

I had to rewatch because I kept getting side tracked by thinking about translation.

[CompilerHack]

If you like wry humour on misery mainly involving mosquitoes, definitely follow.

[threethrushes]

Everything I touch
Please oh
Remains like a bush