[Buddha-l] Views of Information & Knowledge (Culture & Religion)

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Barnaby Thieme schreef:

> Hello Erik,
>
> This problem of meaning that you describe has been considered for many 
> centuries as the hermeneutic circle. My feeling is that you go too far 
> here in the degree to which you say that meaning is bound to 
> discourse. I prefer Gadamer's resolution: meaningful utterance is a 
> "fusion of horizons", and a compromise between the parameters of 
> intelligibility and the verbum interius. Speech says something beyond 
> itself, or it says nothing at all.
>
Hi Barnaby, 
I'll try not to digress to much here. Gadamer meant in this case the proces of hermeneutics itself, but in his 'Truth and method' he does not seperate a discourse from it's pragmatics. On the contrary, he mentions the jurisprudence as a hermeneutical tradition which he thinks is a good example to show the relation between text and action. I think Buddhist hermeneutics is not different because many texts are incomprehensible without taking int o account the practise of meditation, the struggle for power between different schools and the life of a practitioner (beit a monk or a yogi or a lay person). My argument is based on Wittgenstein who showed that the meaning of a word is the use and the use is based on the life form. As far as I can understand the life form of a Buddhist abbot in India during the first half of the first millenium AD is very different from that of a scientist in the 20th century.  

Erik


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