Topic: Hermeneutics

Quotes

Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

• It is the framing of the actions, not the actions themselves, that makes them rituals. Thus both partaking of the Eucharist and shaking hands can be understood as actions that are framed ritualistically. They can also be understood nonritualistically, at least on their margins.#
• Ritual can also take place with no concern for meaning (at least in its standard discursive sense), and in many cases informants refuse to spin out meanings, but simply say that they perform rituals in certain ways because that is the tradition. Most of the meanings we can read into ritual, after all, come into play outside the frame of the ritual itself. Ritual… is about doing more than about saying something.#

Caroline Humphrey & James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994)

• Ritualization, by presenting action to experience as already-constituted and hence apprehensible elements, allows a wide variety of actual conduct to be counted unambiguously as successful performance, and this is independent of the attribution of particular propositional meanings to the acts.#Quoted in Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

• Humans routinely expect literal meanings to be false, uninformative, banal and/or irrelevant. We may have recourse to a shared code, but that’s never enough. In real life, successful communication presupposes inferential abilities… If language works at all, in other words, it’s because humans have a sense of humour, can detect irony, cope with metaphor, enjoy the absurd. The system works, in short, because we are willing to rejoice in patent falsehoods, valuing them as windows into our own and one another’s minds.#
• No physical entity, then, can be digital in itself. An object’s changing states may serve as digits, but only to a receiver programmed to ignore intermediate states.#

Arjo Klamer, “Towards the Native’s Point of View: The Difficulty of Changing the Conversation” (1990)

• Explanatory techniques are a hindrance to an understanding of the ‘deep meaning’ of a text—its existential significance—only if we allow ourselves to believe that they are an adequate substitute for interpretation.#

Tom Palmer, “The Hermeneutical View of Freedom” (1990)

• If one reads Aristotle on politics merely to find out what Aristotle thought, one does a disservice to Aristotle; one should read Aristotle’s Politics to learn about politics.#