Classroom Talk
Winter 2002 Archive
Re: Licking my wounds . . . and making amends. Posted by Douglas on March 22, 2002 at 18:56:02:
In Reply to: Licking my wounds . . . and making amends. posted by John on March 22, 2002 at 11:33:00:
Welcome to Spring everyone (save it happens to be -6º C. here and snowing):
John:
Forgiveness is hardly necessary here; besides what would I be forgiving you for — “not being perfect, perhaps?”.
I do believe that you are having me on.
The following sentence though does give me pause:
“I was trying to inspire you to make more efforts at being easily understandable, minute by minute, to your oh-so fallible friends
like me.”
Lately, you have been bantering about the word “Hermeneutics” — by definition the principles of interpretation. Part and parcel of
the hermeneutic process is judging the correctness of one’s interpretation. The study of a text, any text, is a process of learning
and this is a textually based Classroom given the nature of the medium. As one learns, one discovers more and more the questions
that concern the author and, more and more, one comes to set aside one’s own initial interests and concerns to share those of the
author — a form of empathy — to reconstruct the context of his or her thought and speech.
I should like to emphasize the word “context” here for it alludes to “experience”. I am entering the territory of Social
Phenomenology here, Social Phenomenology being the science of my own and others’ experience.
“It is concerned with the relation between my experience of you and your experience of me. That is to say, with “inter-experience”.
It is concerned with your behavior and my behavior as I experience it, and your and my behavior as you experience it.”
R. D. Laing. The Politics of Experience
But enough of this pedantry.
What concerns me is the question: “How does one convey that context in fifty words or less?”, the horizon of experience being so
circumscribed.
Hmmm . . . this would appear to be my Koan for the weekend.
Douglas
Continue with Winter 2002 Classroom Talk or
Post a new discussion in the current Classroom Talk
Archived 05/02/2002