[Buddha-l] Age of the Sutta Nipata

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> As I said (I hope not too impolitely) to Erik, the age of a text tells me 
> nothing about its value. Even if one could know for sure that a text was the 
> very words of the Buddha, it could be total nonsense. And if one could know 
> for sure that a text was written 1000 years after the Buddha died by a gang 
> of carousing drunken yak merchants, it might still make a great deal of 
> sense. In short, we must always be wary of the genetic fallacy, that is, the 
> fallacious view that one can know whether a statement is true if one can 
> figure out who said it.
>   
Perhaps I should have replied you the first time, Richard, but I was 
afraid of getting involved in questions about your dressingcode, an area 
of science in which I don't consider myself an expert. The question 
reminds me of the discussion between Umberto Eco and Richard Rorty. 
Rorty, being a pragmatist, insists that you can read a text in whatever 
way you please, while Eco still holds on to the art of interpretation, 
i.e. there are worse and better ways to read a text. For both Richards, 
a text is an instrument, for Eco (and me) a text is also a monument. I 
think this has a lot to do with the pragmatics of a text, which of 
course doesn't mean that reading a text is solely a pragmatic affair. If 
you want to learn a language for instance, the textbook you use is an 
instrument and you couldn't care less whether it was written in 1900 or 
2000, by a Russian or a Chinese, as long as it does the job. If you're 
interested in the history of ideas however, the history of the text is a 
part of its meaning. This is because history only has meaning to us if 
we're part of it ourselves. This is what most pragmatists don't accept, 
but I fail to see how you can ignore it.
So, Richard, I think that by talking about the value of a text, you mix 
instrumental and monumental value, and  that subsequently you deny the 
last one as a real value.


-- 


Erik


www.xs4all.nl/~jehms
weblog http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/pub/blogs/blog.php?uid=2950
products: http://stores.lulu.com/jehmsstudio