40 Being in the world

When considering the good life, we should note that life is being in the world, with ‘being’ as a verb, not a noun, a process, not a thing. Not spectator theory: the self is not pre-established, looking at the world from outside, but is constituted by action in the world. This view was propounded, in particular, by Martin Heidegger (in his Being and time, with much obfuscation in weird terminology), and together with other work (e.g. of Nietzsche) formed a basis for existentialism.

This is, I think, the ultimate philosophical basis for pragmatism and my view of knowledge as presented in previous items of this blog (23, 26, 28). At any moment we act from ideas, views, normative assumptions and goals that we have, but we adjust them depending on what we encounter in problems and new opportunities.

Going back to the discussion of meaning, and in particular hermeneutics, in item 36, I note that Hans Georg Gadamer, with my preferred brand of hermeneutics, was inspired by this view of Heidegger. He adds that when we interpret texts or actions, we do so from the perspective of prejudice or unconscious presumptions or horizons, as that literature calls it, which are embodied in our language, in an accumulation of shared experience in the past.

However, as I discussed previously, language and the meaning of words are not monolithic but vary between people, in the repertoires of associations they connect with words, in sense making, tapping from their life experience.

The term ‘prejudice’ is mostly experienced in a negative sense, but prejudices are inevitable. They are enabling constraints: enabling and thereby constraining interpretation. See my discussion of practical prejudice in item 34.

Thus there is no single, objective, correct interpretation of a text. This does not yield unmitigated subjectivism, with different subjective interpretations existing apart from each other, beyond debate, but yields a basis for debate in which people with different perspectives may revise their interpretations. Interpretation is dialogical, a matter of dialogue between alternative interpretative frames. Here I refer back to my discussion of cognitive distance in item 55.

While from experience and debate prejudice can be corrected, the outcome remains imperfect: imperfection on the move (see item 19). And as I also discussed previously (in item 29), our thought and language may be bound tenaciously to prejudice that is difficult to correct.

Another implication is that a text has a much wider range of possible meanings than the author intended. I think many if not all authors have experienced this: surprise, sometimes, at how one’s texts are interpreted. At first, this upset me, with a feeling that ‘my’ text was violated, but later I became intrigued and tried to learn from surprising interpretations. That lends much greater scope to one’s text, and leaves a longer trace of novel interpretations. I hope that this will happen also to this blog, and that readers will tell me.