No one knows the count of stars in the Milky Way. Estimates run between 100 and 400 billion. It’s not for want of counting. The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft recently made a survey of 1.3 billion stars, but that’s a long way from the estimate. Also, the galaxy seems to be home to uncounted millions of small black holes. Estimates are difficult when walls of matter block one’s view. Being inside all the time isn’t an option; we don’t have a means of getting outside to look in.
And that’s the way we also see traditions that house us. Now, you might find my interpretation disagreeable, especially if you are a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, but I find that we are steeped in the details of traditions as numerous as the stars and that we can’t know all those details because some of them block our view of others. We’re inside, and, regardless of what philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Gadamer tell us, we really don’t have an objective method to make comprehensive new and more accurate counts. Simply, I say, because we are inside, we can’t fully rethink what we are; something hidden behind the walls and out of view might influence us, and we’ll never really know.
That pretty much sounds pessimistic, but we have to deal with what we have to deal with. The view that we are inside tradition’s house as we are inside the Milky Way has its flaws, of course, flaws that I recognize. One might say, for example, that if we look at other galaxies, we can draw very good comparisons, and if we look at a variety of cultures and traditions, we can see how ours might compare. But that’s assuming we can truly understand the hidden details of another culture. Remember, we can see the Andromeda Galaxy, but we really only estimate its star count because it, too, has interior walls that block details of its composition. Billions of stars lie between outside observers and billions of other stars.
“The conceptual world in which philosophizing develops has already captivated us in the same way that the language in which we live conditions us,” says Gadamer.*
“Baloney,” you say. “What about multilingual people? Don’t they see one language from the perspective of another? How are the details hidden from them.”
That’s a good point, and I’m glad you made it (I can’t say how much I enjoy your challenging input). But if anyone who communicates in any language suffers from the inside-the-house blindness, those who attempt to adopt a linguistic tradition are similarly bound. We just can’t see all the details of another tradition just as we can’t see all the details of neighboring Andromeda.
“But look at what astronomers are discovering!” you continue. “They’re finding new stuff all the time, stuff that overturns previous knowledge and that provides new information. And their technology is giving us ways to see that we never had. We even have a gravity-wave sensor in LIGO.”
Yes, and as Gadamer says, we can be surprised every so often by some insight, some discovery about tradition that we previously didn’t recognize until experience gave us new details. Some new way of seeing. Yet, that aha! adds only another detail to our understanding, not the sum of details, not all the details. No, you might disagree, might call me too Freudian or even Jungian, but I’m going with a hermeneutics of hermeneutics that says we’re fundamentally driven to interpret our world, our societies, and ourselves by largely opaque traditions.
Does that mean we shouldn’t send satellites to look for more details of the Milky Way or that we shouldn’t look to see where experience reveals something about tradition? No. But here’s a dilemma that Georgia Warnke says is worth examining. In “Experiencing Tradition versus Belonging To It: Gadamer’s Dilemma,” Warnke writes:
“On the one hand, our socialization into historical traditions means that we are part of them and that they set the terms for our orientation toward our world. On the other hand, we can have experiences of our historical traditions in which they surprise and challenge us.”
Warnke follows that with poignant questions all of us might ask: “Yet if we are part of historical traditions, how can we experience them in this way? If they orient us how can they also surprise us?” (347)**
See the implication? If you can see a “detail” through personal experience, aren’t you separated from that former position on the “inside?” (Ibid.) That’s the dilemma: Being inside while having an outside experience. Being bound and unbound. Being part of something but simultaneously separate from it.
Look, I’m certainly not going to tell you not to count stars. The more you count the more we’ll know. But we’re limited by time in this. Galaxies keep making stars, so just when you think you’ve counted them all, darn, there are more, some hidden by the very stars you already counted. And just when you think you fully understand the tradition that predisposes you to interpret the world in a particular way, darn, you find some hidden detail all the while becoming part of an evolving tradition.
So, here we are, some 13.8 billion years after the origin of the universe and some 2,500 years after the birth of philosophy. We’re bound to the “traditions” of both. In the West, we think Greek. Plato and Aristotle and their immediate predecessors in Miletus. What’s that you say? Yes, we’ve incorporated some of the East, we’ve added a layer of Buddhist tradition, Confucianism, and several other traditions. All that did was add stars, like some merger of galaxies. It was tough enough to discern the star count with just one galaxy; with the merger, we added more walls to the house that hides uncountable details.
*Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, translated by Joeld Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. 2ndrevised edition. New York Crossroads Publishing Co, 1992, p. 358.
**The Review of Metaphysics,Vol. 68, No. 2 (December 2014), 347-369.
And that’s the way we also see traditions that house us. Now, you might find my interpretation disagreeable, especially if you are a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, but I find that we are steeped in the details of traditions as numerous as the stars and that we can’t know all those details because some of them block our view of others. We’re inside, and, regardless of what philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Gadamer tell us, we really don’t have an objective method to make comprehensive new and more accurate counts. Simply, I say, because we are inside, we can’t fully rethink what we are; something hidden behind the walls and out of view might influence us, and we’ll never really know.
That pretty much sounds pessimistic, but we have to deal with what we have to deal with. The view that we are inside tradition’s house as we are inside the Milky Way has its flaws, of course, flaws that I recognize. One might say, for example, that if we look at other galaxies, we can draw very good comparisons, and if we look at a variety of cultures and traditions, we can see how ours might compare. But that’s assuming we can truly understand the hidden details of another culture. Remember, we can see the Andromeda Galaxy, but we really only estimate its star count because it, too, has interior walls that block details of its composition. Billions of stars lie between outside observers and billions of other stars.
“The conceptual world in which philosophizing develops has already captivated us in the same way that the language in which we live conditions us,” says Gadamer.*
“Baloney,” you say. “What about multilingual people? Don’t they see one language from the perspective of another? How are the details hidden from them.”
That’s a good point, and I’m glad you made it (I can’t say how much I enjoy your challenging input). But if anyone who communicates in any language suffers from the inside-the-house blindness, those who attempt to adopt a linguistic tradition are similarly bound. We just can’t see all the details of another tradition just as we can’t see all the details of neighboring Andromeda.
“But look at what astronomers are discovering!” you continue. “They’re finding new stuff all the time, stuff that overturns previous knowledge and that provides new information. And their technology is giving us ways to see that we never had. We even have a gravity-wave sensor in LIGO.”
Yes, and as Gadamer says, we can be surprised every so often by some insight, some discovery about tradition that we previously didn’t recognize until experience gave us new details. Some new way of seeing. Yet, that aha! adds only another detail to our understanding, not the sum of details, not all the details. No, you might disagree, might call me too Freudian or even Jungian, but I’m going with a hermeneutics of hermeneutics that says we’re fundamentally driven to interpret our world, our societies, and ourselves by largely opaque traditions.
Does that mean we shouldn’t send satellites to look for more details of the Milky Way or that we shouldn’t look to see where experience reveals something about tradition? No. But here’s a dilemma that Georgia Warnke says is worth examining. In “Experiencing Tradition versus Belonging To It: Gadamer’s Dilemma,” Warnke writes:
“On the one hand, our socialization into historical traditions means that we are part of them and that they set the terms for our orientation toward our world. On the other hand, we can have experiences of our historical traditions in which they surprise and challenge us.”
Warnke follows that with poignant questions all of us might ask: “Yet if we are part of historical traditions, how can we experience them in this way? If they orient us how can they also surprise us?” (347)**
See the implication? If you can see a “detail” through personal experience, aren’t you separated from that former position on the “inside?” (Ibid.) That’s the dilemma: Being inside while having an outside experience. Being bound and unbound. Being part of something but simultaneously separate from it.
Look, I’m certainly not going to tell you not to count stars. The more you count the more we’ll know. But we’re limited by time in this. Galaxies keep making stars, so just when you think you’ve counted them all, darn, there are more, some hidden by the very stars you already counted. And just when you think you fully understand the tradition that predisposes you to interpret the world in a particular way, darn, you find some hidden detail all the while becoming part of an evolving tradition.
So, here we are, some 13.8 billion years after the origin of the universe and some 2,500 years after the birth of philosophy. We’re bound to the “traditions” of both. In the West, we think Greek. Plato and Aristotle and their immediate predecessors in Miletus. What’s that you say? Yes, we’ve incorporated some of the East, we’ve added a layer of Buddhist tradition, Confucianism, and several other traditions. All that did was add stars, like some merger of galaxies. It was tough enough to discern the star count with just one galaxy; with the merger, we added more walls to the house that hides uncountable details.
*Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, translated by Joeld Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. 2ndrevised edition. New York Crossroads Publishing Co, 1992, p. 358.
**The Review of Metaphysics,Vol. 68, No. 2 (December 2014), 347-369.
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