Between Ikon and Eidos: Image and Hermeneutics in Meditation (Part 2)

We started this talk by pointing out that, for many people, even when there's a lot of interest, a lot of attraction to practising this way, and exploring this whole realm and the possibilities of sensing with soul, imaginally perceiving, and even when one has been practising in those ways for a while, there can still be a kind of force or pull of the culturally dominant view that is entrenched, in many respects, in some way or another, entrenched in our psyche, and exerting its influence, its kind of stern judgment on what we might be thinking or how we might be practising, sometimes in very quiet and subtle ways. It may be, for many people, that the practices of sensing with soul, and that whole orientation and opening, needs some support in terms of an intellectual exploration or exploration of ideas and concepts that might be inhibiting it, preventing it, judging it, dismissing it. And being aware of those, looking at them, questioning them, and seeing: are there other possible ideas that can give this opening and this kind of opening of direction a legitimacy, a support, a grounding, so that we can feel space in which to explore? Can we pry open the space by considering the influence of ideas, and questioning those ideas, and finding ideas that will open up the space, that will provide a ground, a legitimization, etc., for sensing with soul and all the possibilities that that brings?

We were saying that, as part of that, we are heirs to a complex and confusing legacy of ideas coming to us through the culture, through history and, as I said, forming something of a sort of bedrock in the psyche for us. In recognizing that fact, recognizing and being aware of, what exactly are those ideas? Where do they come from? What influence do they have? And beginning, as I said, to question them, to poke a little at that bedrock and the rocks that make up that bedrock, so that that imprisonment is not happening automatically and unconsciously, so that those ideas don't just automatically, unconsciously, or without our consciousness, imprison us. And perhaps we can then, if you like, turn the soil, to use a different metaphor of the ground, made up of these clumps of ideas and rocks and soil. Perhaps in looking at it and working that soil, we can turn it, and it becomes a different ground -- a ground that, the soil now turned, actually supports a fertility there, a fecundity of imaginally perceiving and sensing with soul.

It might be, at some point, for some of you, that this very questioning and consideration of ideas, and playing in the realm of ideas as they relate to or inhibit or support or open this whole opening of practice that we're talking about, it may be that that kind of play and engagement is itself actually soulmaking, or becomes at some point soulmaking. And also one's sense of being at a certain place, in a certain culture, with certain needs, and certain perspectives, and certain dominant trends, etc., so one's whole participation in the culture, and the kind of evolution or contest or conversation of world-views within a culture as it moves forward in time, that that whole vision and sense of one's own engagement with different ideas becomes soulmaking. So that's a possibility too.

In the first part of the talk yesterday, we looked at some of the threads that we can identify within the legacy from the Scientific Revolution and the sort of classical scientific world-view kind of overstepping its boundary into scientism, and the overstepping of the epistemological view there, and what William James called the 'vicious abstractionism,' and several other aspects, and how that actually comes into our life and gives rise to doubt or inhibition or hesitation, or downright forbids certain orientations in practice, certain directions, disvalues/devalues certain perceptions, experiences, openings, etc., and aspects of our being.

Alongside the scientific, or as well as the scientific, we can consider a little bit about the Western philosophical legacy, again that we inherit, which is a complex and rich interweaving of different philosophical traditions as well, alongside the scientific, and in dialogue, in fact, with science. What I'd also like to try to weave in and include for our consideration in all this are some of the attempts within Western philosophy to open up and question the established and taken-for-granted epistemologies, ontologies, and world-views, etc., that were kind of established and then became entrenched with the Western Enlightenment, and shaped what some would call the modernist world-view. As I said, there were these attempts to open those ideas up, open those world-views up, question them; question, again, challenge the almost utter domination of scientific thinking. But as I mention some of these and draw attention to them, look also at how they often fall short of what we might need and be helped by in opening up and grounding our work, and how some of those attempts in Western philosophy actually fall short because they're still (I don't know what to say) infected somehow, or still influenced, oftentimes unwittingly, by some of the limited thinking that they sought to break free of. So hopefully we can look at some of that, and weave that in, and consider where they might be expanded or added to, or themselves challenged and opened up in different ways.

[9:00] Where I'd like to pick that long story up is actually in the early twentieth century. There was this evolution of science that I talked about. There was the First World War and the Second World War, and a lot of, obviously, concern about values and morals, and where on earth is humanity going. Several people pointed out the kind of divorce or disconnection between scientific exploration on the one hand, and just the whole human context that it happens in on the other hand, and the consideration of values -- moral values and other values. So science tells us nothing about value, certainly not moral values. A German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, wrote a book called The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, and other pieces. He was living in Germany after the Nazis rose to power, seized power -- actually, were elected. That was part of his concern, but was pointing to science and, in his words, "The positivistic reduction of the idea of science to mere factual science."^[1] 'Positivistic' means basically the idea that if it's not material, and you can't measure it, it's nonsense, in a nutshell. So that idea of positivism really started to take over in certain philosophical lineages, and more widely in sociology, and as a kind of life view as well.

Husserl points out that that positivistic reduction of the idea of science to mere factual science means that, as I said, science has nothing to do with human values or this question of what human freedom is, etc. I'm quoting now. Science, and this kind of scientific investigation when it's then transferred to other realms like sociology, and philosophy, and the human sciences, "excludes in principle precisely the questions which [humanity], given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals ..." He's writing at the time, as I said, the Nazis had come into power in Germany. Can we not say something similar in our time?

[It] excludes in principle precisely the questions which [humanity], given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.

So that was part of his concern. This kind of way of thinking that had forgotten about or devalued the human context as something material and measurable, akin to science, was using the methodology of classical science to the human sciences, to the study of humanity, and then had nothing to say about value and human life, or very little. So one of the things Husserl did was to respond by focusing on what he called the 'life-world.' I'm actually paraphrasing now from a book. Some of you, if you're a little bit interested in these ideas, but don't want to go whole hog into reading volumes, there's a really, I think, nice introduction to a lot of these philosophical ideas in a book by a guy called David West. It's called Continental Philosophy.^[2] I think it's really good. It's not too long, and you can dip in and out of it. If you get kind of 'the bug' with these ideas, as I said earlier, it might be an interesting book for some of you.

So I'm paraphrasing a little bit what he said here in that book. Husserl responds to this kind of crisis partly with this idea of the life-world. He wants to explore the life-world. What's the life-world? Well, it's basically our sense of life as we live it, and also that that's a kind of context, this life-world, like the ordinary presumption of "I exist, and you exist separate from me, and I'm in my house right now, and the table's in front of me," and just the conventional kind of view of the world, that this is the context and the sort of basic presupposition of all thought and action. So it's almost like giving a context to science and philosophy, and understanding them as practices which take place in the life-world, and which are given a certain power through the life-world, through our culture, through the social networks, but also through what Husserl called an 'unquestioned ground of presuppositions.' This is really important: unquestioned ground of presuppositions, a background of unreflective assumptions, values, and practices. There's a lot going on there: assumptions, values, and practices which make up the life-world.

In all scientific inquiry, philosophical inquiry, etc., Husserl says:

The everyday surrounding world of life is presupposed as existing -- the surrounding world in which all of us (even I who am now philosophizing) consciously have our existence; here [are] also the sciences, as cultural facts in this world, with their scientists and theories. In this world we are objects among objects in the sense of the life-world, namely, as being here and there, in the plain certainty of experience, before anything that is established scientifically, whether in physiology, psychology, or sociology. On the other hand, we are subjects for this world, namely, as the ego-subjects experiencing it, contemplating it, valuing it, related to it purposefully.^[3]

There's a lot in that. It's quite a dense quote. But one piece there I'd like to highlight is the emphasis on the life-world. His philosophy then emphasized or limited itself to the investigation of the appearances of the life-world. So there was again this kind of, "Let's stay with appearances." The appearances of what? The appearances of life as we experience it: everyday life that we take for granted, containing all these unreflective presuppositions, assumptions, etc.

It wasn't a new word or a new kind of philosophical direction, but in a way, he gave birth to or started the phenomenological movement, although Hegel and Kant had used this word before. But 'phenomenology' as the study of, the limiting of philosophical investigation to the appearances that are part of our everyday life, inner and outer. So this phenomenological movement was born in philosophy, staying with the appearances of the life-world. Now, you can hear, if not the language, at least some of the tenor of that, you can hear that in a lot of our current explorations of Buddhist practice or insight meditation or mindfulness. People will use slightly different emphases there, but there is also, in this kind of Dharma, the emphasis on attention to and investigation of the appearances of everyday life, the experiences/appearances of our lives. So, you know, "Can we bring attention to that with mindfulness? Can we bring a bare attention to that?" These are common tropes in the contemporary Western -- not just Western, but contemporary Dharma teaching.

[19:04] But again here, even though science started with "let's give attention to the appearances," again, in both the presuppositions that exist there, and also the kind of ways those practices developed, bring new appearances as I'm investigating appearances. It moves out of the life-world. In other words, we start with appearances, but either we're approaching with a certain network of ideas that become concepts that influence the way of looking and thus what is experienced (as I'll come back to shortly), or we're just saying "give a really close bare attention" to my experience of the world and my inner experience right now of the life-world, if we call it that. Give a really close mindfulness to that, and what happens is the attention kind of starts to deconstruct one's everyday life-world experience. And then, again, as I mentioned before, there's a kind of reductionist paradigm, or deconstructionist and then reductionist paradigm, operating: "Ah, you see, when I look closely, this is what I find. That must be reality, these atomic units of perception, sensation, vedanā, consciousness, etc." So sometimes this kind of what we might call a phenomenological intention in mindfulness and in bare attention actually pushes, opens up the sense of the range of what the life-world is, and then sometimes declares what it experiences through a certain lens as a kind of reality.

Let's stay with the Western philosophy a little bit. We'll come back to Dharma shortly. An Italian philosopher called Gianni Vattimo points out what I really want to highlight here. Husserl with his idea, "Let's just bring it back to this basic sense of existence, and the basic experience we have of life-world, inner and outer, and all that we take for granted in there, wrapped up in that experience." It's a really good idea. Problems with it though. Quite a few problems with it. One is (I'm quoting Gianni Vattimo now):

There is no [he puts it in inverted commas] 'phenomenological' analysis of experiences.^[4]

This is what Husserl wanted to do: a phenomenological analysis and description, investigation, of experience. But Vattimo points out (he's a much more recent philosopher) there is no phenomenological analysis of experience. Then he writes:

The inverted commas cannot be avoided here. [He's put 'phenomenological' in inverted commas.] There is no 'phenomenological' analysis of experiences that is not conditioned, that is, made possible and qualified, by the fact of belonging to a tradition.

In other words, everything that Husserl wanted to see as a kind of universal of human existence, how everyone in his society, at his time, basically, in a certain tradition, sensed existence. How different it would be if we talked about a phenomenological investigation of, say, a tribe in Papua New Guinea, or the Amazon, or somewhere or other that had not had any contact with Westerners. Their experience, their phenomenal -- 'phenomena' means 'appearance' in Greek, by the way, so the investigation, the logos of phenomena, of appearance. Their world, their life-world, would have been completely different.

So Vattimo is pointing out it's always belonging to a tradition. It's not like there is an experience, and then after that, we add all kinds of intellectual abstractions to it. Vattimo goes on to write, "Is this not," this fact of belonging to a tradition, and that colouring, shaping, limiting, etc., our phenomenological -- that actually being part of the fabrication of our life-world, but also of our phenomenological analysis of that life-world:

Is this not a situation familiar to hermeneutics [familiar to this whole branch of philosophy that deals with the interpretation of texts and of existence], that one who is dominated by prejudices cannot recognize and thematize them as such?

Something Nietzsche pointed out even before Husserl was writing. So the life-world is something that is a life-world for a certain history, or for a certain historical/cultural context. And then the analysis of that life-world is also an analysis dependent on historical/cultural tradition, philosophical tradition and context, etc.

One of the things Husserl was famous for saying or writing was "to the things themselves."^[5] In other words, let's put aside metaphysics. Let's put aside this kind of positivism of science, and actually 'to the things' that present themselves to us. When we consider the historical/cultural context, and what we bring to that investigation, and also to our experience itself, that, his sort of rallying cry for phenomenology, "to the things themselves," it seems kind of naïve once we've seen the dependence of any perceptions of things on the way of looking in the moment (which I'll come back to), and on the concepts entertained within the way of looking at any point (which I've mentioned and I'll come back to). Those concepts, the concepts that operate in us, will include scientific and other ideas for us now, different than they would for, say, someone living exactly in the spot where I am now in England, say, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, in medieval times, before the Scientific Revolution. The very way we perceive 'the things themselves,' so-called, would not be coloured, implicitly, almost tacitly coloured, infected, shaped, and limited by a scientific world-view that we've all been educated in, and other ideas.

So actually it becomes hard to separate phenomenology from science, or rather it becomes hard to separate a phenomenological investigation from -- it's infected with ideas from science. More generally, we see that a person's experience of phenomena is hugely conditioned, shaped, determined, allowed or not (this or that sense of things, this or that experience) by the current world-view, the Weltanschauung, in the culture in which they live. But actually, even that is not quite -- it's a little too simple. Heidegger, or some interpretations of Heidegger, have him stressing what's called a kind of historical 'thrownness' into a zeitgeist. In other words, I am born at a certain time, in a certain place in history, and I'm thrown into a kind of cultural world-view, and that's part of the problem that needs to be realized. And this changes over time. But even that is not universal. In other words, not everyone thrown into, let's say, like I was, born in England in the sixties, and then living through that, and maybe living some time in the States, and coming back, is going to have the same world-view or even the same set of influxes, strands of influxes. The history now, or the strands of history, are broad. So it's not universal, even the influences operating for someone in a certain location in time and space, thrown by their birth into a certain location in time and space. For Westerners living today, for most Westerners living today, there's no longer just one common world-view or way of experiencing the life-world.

[29:01] So this historical thrownness, or what's called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, is not an objective fact, a reality, what some philosophers like to call a 'facticity,' something that's just there and you can't do anything about it. There are lots of different influxes of ideas, and it varies from individual to individual, and sub-culture to sub-culture, which are the dominant ones, how they are valued, etc. Even the whole movement of history, you know, the victor of a war -- even if it's only a cultural war -- the victors write the histories. You might know Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States.^[6] It's a history of the United States not that they get taught in high school, etc.; history from the perspective of, say, Native Americans, or African-American slaves, etc. Who writes the history books? There are many histories, and many influxes of ideas given different weights and different influences in shaping, limiting, fabricating the world-view and then the analysis, in what we might call attempted phenomenological analysis, of that world-view. All this needs to be taken into account.

Sometimes with insight meditation we might be tempted to assume that employing an attention or a mindfulness -- or that we are employing, in insight meditation and through mindfulness, a kind of attention that reveals what things are, the way things are. And if we employ an attention that 'reveals' (and I'll put that in inverted commas, 'reveals') an atomistic world of sensation, and a kind of atomistic world of experience, we might be tempted to think, "Oh, that's a phenomenological approach." I'm just looking at my experience, looking at the appearances as I take them for granted, and looking carefully, and investigating them carefully. I think, "Oh, I don't have any presuppositions," and then what I see, it 'reveals,' perhaps, depending on how you're applying mindfulness (that's the key point), it 'reveals,' say, an atomistic view, and I think, "Oh, so this is the phenomenological approach. When I employ the phenomenological approach, this is what I see." And then I'm corroborated by certain texts that say, "Yes, the self is the five aggregates. There is just this, or atoms of vedanā and sensation, moments of consciousness, etc."

So there's that approach in philosophy, and there is sometimes that approach within the Dharma, when we think that's kind of something like the phenomenological approach. There was another German philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and in some ways, we could say he could be regarded, even more than Husserl, as the kind of grandfather of the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century. He really didn't like this kind of reductionism in psychology or philosophy, and so he was kind of scornful and pointed out that (I'm quoting now):

We live and move not in a sphere of 'sensations' but of objects presenting themselves to us, not in a sphere of 'feelings' ['sensations' and 'feelings' are in inverted commas here] but of value, meaning, and so on.^[7]

In other words, we can deconstruct appearances, but in deconstructing, we also miss something. It's like looking -- what's the phrase? -- not seeing the forest for the trees.

So we've got, on one side, this reductionist reducing down to atomized moments of sensation and consciousness and vedanā and whatever, and another view that's more like, "That's not actual experience. Actual experience involves objects, values, meanings, etc." To me, though, neither perspective realizes fully enough the dependence of experiences on ways of looking. It doesn't realize also how broad and diverse is the range of ways of looking, and therefore of experiences. In other words, when I look a certain way, I get this experience. It might be an atomistic sense of appearances, appearances of the atoms. When I look that way, I get very different experiences of objects, and values, and meanings, etc., and way broader than all that. So insisting that one or the other is the 'real' way we experience things just misses the whole dependence on ways of looking. Conceiving of phenomenology as an investigation and an uncovering of the universal human experience of a life-world, or the life-world -- there are lots of problems with that.

What I would like to stress and open is a conception of what I call the phenomenological approach (just as far as we're concerned, or what I have been calling the phenomenological approach in previous talks the last few years) as an investigation of how experience of 'the life-world' or how appearances vary. One is, they vary in a historically contingent way, as Heidegger emphasized. And also depending on mood, or we could say 'mind state' in Dharma language. But far more widely than any of that, and subtly -- and the gradations are extremely subtle -- depending on what I've been calling the 'way of looking' in the moment.

There's another philosopher, Richard Palmer, who wrote a book on hermeneutics in philosophy. And he writes about Wilhelm Dilthey's thought:

Experience is precisely the reality of what is there-for-me before experience becomes objective (and therefore admits of a separation from the subjective). [Palmer is emphasizing that idea of Dilthey.] His fruitful insight lay in seeing experience as a realm before subject and object.^[8]

So this is quite a common theme or emphasis or stance of some phenomenologists, saying, "Actually, when we really look at our experience, there is no subject and object. That comes later. That's some kind of intellectual superimposition there. When you investigate experience, experience is just before subject and object division." Continuing, Palmer writing about Dilthey:

[Dilthey's] fruitful insight lay in seeing experience as a realm before subject and object, a realm in which the world and our experience of it are given together. He saw with clarity the poverty of the subject-object model of human encounter with the world.

I personally have problems with this, and if you've done enough practice in some of the ways that I've suggested, you would have problems with it as well, or you should have problems with it as well, because the sense of subject/object split that I or you experience, the sense of them being split -- "There is a subject, and there is an object. They're somehow loosely connected, but they're really split" -- or them as being kind of poles of a polarity, or the dissolution of that polarity in some kind of oneness or unity or whatever, varies in experience dependent on the way of looking. The very sense and experience of subject and object, and their relationship, or what they are in relationship to each other, varies dependent on the way of looking.

[39:04] So there is a poverty, as Palmer points out, to the subject/object model of human encounter with the world. But it's not because the reality of our basic experience is devoid of the subject/object split. A model that insists that experience is always pre-reflectively devoid of, or pre-reflective experience is always devoid of or before subject and object is equally poor: "This is how it is, and then we add something, the idea of subject and object, based on all kinds of intellectual ideas or whatever." That's equally poor. To insist on the reality of subject/object split, either implicitly or explicitly, is as poor as a model as it is to insist that always there is no subject/object split, it's only added to or split later by the intellect or whatever. The sense of subject and object -- and I mean the pre-reflective; I'm not talking about intellect here -- the sense of it depends on the way of looking in the moment for its intensity, its vividness, and the degree of its separation. Just how much of a duality, or polarity, or oneness, or total alienation, or whatever, between subject and object depends on the way of looking in the moment. A meditator will see that very, very clearly.

What's more, the state or the perception of the subject/object polarity in our experience is affected by the very investigation of it. So in investigating it, in giving it careful attention, in paying attention to it with curiosity -- "Let's see. Where's that subject/object split now?" -- as I pay attention to it, that paying attention to it is itself a way of looking, and it changes. Attentive curiosity to the state of the subject/object nexus or gestalt or whatever we're going to call it, that paying attention to it curiously affects the state of it, and therefore the perception of it. Just like as Heisenberg pointed out with the observation of matter, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and what's a fundamental sort of tenet of quantum mechanics: dependent on the way of looking. Even just trying to, being interested in the subject/object split, try it.

What's common to a lot of these endeavours is, I think, maybe just a human tendency. Maybe it's part of what the Buddha called basic avijjā, this kind of need or want to say, "This is how it is." So Dilthey says this about subject/object, and someone else says that, or whatever, if that's what we're talking about: "This is how it is." And "this is how it is" means "this is how it is independent of the way of looking."

So historical context is a conditioning factor in what appears to us, in our sense of the appearance of the life-world. That historical context is not even a universal for everyone alive today. And even more than all that, dependence on ways of looking. Ways of looking can be deliberate, consciously played with, manipulated, experimented with, but they operate anyway. There's always a way of looking. When there's any experience, when there's any appearance, when there's any life-world at all, when there's any perception, there's a way of looking. And that way of looking includes concepts, even if we're not conscious of them at the time, what they are. They're implicit. They're tacit. They're very, very subtle. I mean, I've gone on and on about that, so you know that by now. But for our work, when I refer to the phenomenological approach, it's really the investigation of, how do different ways of looking affect or fabricate appearances differently? How does the world, inner and outer, how does experience, appearance, perception get constructed, built, experienced differently dependent on the way of looking in the moment? What's involved in that? What's the possibility there? Is there some stance that is not, or some perception, some appearance, that we can then say it's not dependent on the way of looking? Find out. But the phenomenological approach, when I borrow that word from philosophy, I really mean that: the investigation of how different ways of looking fabricate differently.

So in that context, bare attention or mindfulness, these are ways of looking. They're not revealing a reality, any kind of objective reality. They're ways of looking. What we see with any kind of mindfulness, bare attention, or this or that, is what we then experience, sense, through that particular lens at that time. Involved in that are concepts, and involved in that is metaphysics. I really want to insist on this. What do I mean by 'metaphysics'? It's a big, problematic and contentious word, 'metaphysics.' I'm going to say, and I've said, I think, a little before, but I'm going to say that it includes ontological beliefs and assumptions, epistemological beliefs and assumptions (in other words, beliefs and assumptions about what's real, and about how we know or what constitutes valid knowledge, knowledge to be respected concerning what is real or not real, etc.), and also a whole cosmology (what is the nature of this world, etc., and of a human being).

So 'metaphysics' is really any time there's any belief, assumption (I would say conscious or unconscious, implicit or explicit) around ontology, epistemology, cosmology. And these are not just abstract; they're commitments we have. They shape what we value, how we practise, what we intend, how we invest our energy, what we devote ourselves to, but also how we move in the world, and how we talk to each other. They involve ontological, epistemological, and cosmological commitments, beliefs, and assumptions wrapped up in perception -- any and all perception. That's one aspect of metaphysics, all that. It's quite a broad sweep there.

But also metaphysics has come to be very contentious as the kind of speculation about anything that's behind appearances. So if you talk about gods or souls or any kind of mysterious energy, or something like that, this is regarded and dismissed because it's metaphysics, and modern people are not interested in metaphysics, so the thrust goes. But as we pointed out when we talked about science, even the fundamental particles are something behind appearances. They're not immediately discernible to the senses, and they're not even discernible with high-powered -- an electron microscope still can't see an electron, let alone a quark or whatever. Assuming that there is a reality behind our everyday appearances of this -- the atomistic reality, or atoms of matter, or atoms of sensation and consciousness, etc. -- assuming that's the reality behind appearances, that's also a metaphysics. And as I said, even physical laws are something, so to speak, behind appearances, and can be extremely abstract. We might say, "Ah, yeah, but scientific laws are at least amenable to empirical checking through experiment. We can hone in on the truth there." Not so simple, that distinction. Spiritual laws, if we can even use such a term, psychological laws, soul laws, if we can use those kind of ideas, are also kind of testable, and can predict what happens. But anyway. There's metaphysics -- ontology, epistemology, cosmology. There's metaphysics as the postulation of what is behind appearances as a reality.

[50:05] And then there's also -- and I want to draw this out; it's kind of wrapped up in those other two definitions or aspects of metaphysics -- what I would call the 'metaphysics of objectivity.' That is the assumption of a singular objective reality that it's possible for us to know: "This is how things are." So that metaphysics of objectivity, it's all over the place. Even when people say, "I don't believe in truth," or "The Buddha wasn't interested in truth," or this or that, it's hiding, often, in people's approach to existence, etc. There's a metaphysics of objectivity, an assumption of a singular objective reality that it's possible for us to know. That actually is an ontological/epistemological belief, assumption, and/or commitment, as I said in the first aspect.

These metaphysical concepts and ideas are wrapped up in perception. They walk around with us and they shape things for us. Sometimes it's, "Oh, just get rid of metaphysics. Dispense with it. Put it aside. Cut it out." And that's often the sort of rallying cry of some people who have more of an existentialist bent. But, you know, I'd say we can truly avoid or dispense with metaphysics about as successfully or to the extent that we can truly avoid or dispense with experiences in the six sense spheres. In other words, where there is sensing, where there is sensation, there is metaphysics. There are ontological beliefs, assumptions, about what's real, about what experiences we can trust, about what constitutes knowing something -- all of this and more. And also the sense of something being, so to speak, 'behind,' that we don't have direct experience of, but we can trust, and that it's part of reality.

People say, "Cut out the metaphysics, throw it away," etc. Great. You can do that about as easily as you can get rid of all of your sense experiences in the five sense spheres and the mind, of thought and imagining. It's important to point out: you can't just pretend that we don't have ontological, epistemological, cosmological commitments, meaning that's actually where we invest our energy, our time, our dedication, etc., and also what we trust, what we rely on, and what we value. One of the even more interesting things about all this is that epistemology, I said, is the kind of ideas about or beliefs about or exploration about what knowledge can we trust concerning, let's say, what is real. But when you really probe and ask questions epistemologically, you will inevitably come to some kind of answer that you realize rests on some other assumption. And that assumption, whatever it is, is actually ultimately unprovable. In other words, you're going to come -- if you really probe, "Okay, I think this is real. How do I know? Because I value this kind of way of gaining knowledge, and that kind of way of gaining knowledge. I don't value that one and that one." Why do you value that? And then you keep asking: why, why, why? You'll come down to some kind of assumption that you then can't prove, okay? This is a really important thing to acknowledge.

As I said, a lot of this ontology/epistemology operates wordlessly and unconsciously as logoi in the perceiving consciousness, so to speak. Any moment of mindfulness has some metaphysics with it. You can see, again, if you've done a lot of more intense mindfulness practice, you will see how, for instance, the sense of materiality varies. Once there's a lot of momentum to the mindfulness, and close mindfulness, the solidity of things, of materiality, actually starts to unsolidify. So the separation between mind and matter, the subject/object split between mind and matter, also begins to loosen or melt a little bit, depending on how much and what kind of mindfulness one is applying. And then if that melts a little bit, this dichotomy between mind and matter, and also between subject and object, that melts just a little bit, that polarity eases, the sort of split between the two poles of mind and matter or subject and object kind of eases, melts a little bit together, then at that point, the mindfulness has a different ontology and epistemology (if one's really going with it and into it) than it did when it started. But even just with the instructions of mindfulness in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the experience that opens up in applying different of the mindfulness instructions in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta will also bring with it or carries with it and then unfolds different ontologies, epistemologies, etc.

So mindfulness is actually not one way of looking; it's many ways of looking. Imagining your corpse disintegrating, falling apart in a charnel ground, is one of the instructions in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, in the sutta of mindfulness, the Buddhist discourse on mindfulness. That's a certain way of looking. The experience of sitting in a very calm state and contemplating the mind states, or contemplating the feeding and starving, the presence and absence of, the seven factors of awakening or something -- this is a very different way of looking. So any moment of mindfulness carries with it a certain set of metaphysical assumptions, certain metaphysics. And our lives are lived and experienced with or from, if you like, whatever is our habitual set of metaphysical ideas, beliefs, concepts. Heidegger wrote:

Metaphysics is not something which can be put aside like an opinion. Nor can it be left behind us like a doctrine in which we no longer believe.^[9]

This whole idea of putting aside metaphysics, cutting it out, just not engaging in it -- when you actually understand what's involved there, you realize we can't do that. We carry it with us. What we can do is explore different metaphysics, or see how different metaphysical concepts have different effects on our experience.

[59:06] So there was this phenomenological current in Western philosophy from a whole other direction. It's not such a big deal, but a whole other different direction in philosophy. Then we have someone like Richard Rorty, who died not too long ago, an American philosopher. He was quite influential for some people. He wrote -- he's talking about two other philosophers now, Wilfrid Sellars and W. V. O. Quine. They're what's called analytical philosophers. It's a very different kind of philosophy than what we just talked about with Husserl and Dilthey and people like that. So this kind of analysis of human thought, analysis of theory, analysis of what are the elements of reality and how we can form scientific opinions about things -- that kind of philosophy.

Rorty investigated all this, and kind of came in that tradition, for the most part at least. And then he said, "I interpret Sellars's attack on givenness" -- Wilfrid Sellars had talked about, you know, we have this idea of what is given to us by experience, like, "This is the basic givenness. Life gives us this or that, this or that appearance, and then we do X or Y with it, but there's a basic givenness." Wilfrid Sellars actually just kind of demolished that idea. And then Quine, again an analytical philosopher, and famous for concluding after his investigations all so-called 'raw data' are already theory-laden. So, similar to Wilfrid Sellars's attack on givenness. And similar, you'll hear, to what we've been harping on and on about, about emptiness and ways of looking. All so-called 'raw data' -- you think, "Let's just get to the basic fact and not add anything more to that." A very attractive idea to many people. But after all his very scrupulous, logical, and philosophical investigations, Quine just concluded all so-called 'raw data' are already theory-laden, which is just what I've been saying. We're already bringing concept in the ways that we look at experience. There is no 'raw data' that we can have. There is no 'givenness.'

Rorty's saying,

I interpret Sellars's attack on "givenness" and Quine's attack on "necessity" as the crucial steps in undermining the possibility of a "theory of knowledge" [in other words, epistemology]. The holism and pragmatism common to both philosophers, and which they share with [others], are the lines of thought ... that when extended in a certain way [they] let us see truth as, in [William] James's phrase, "what [it] is better for us to believe," rather than as "the accurate representation of reality."^[10]

"What is better for us to believe." Now, that's a very Dharmic -- at least, as I would present the emptiness teachings, what is better for us, or how is it better for us to look? That's slightly different. "What is better for us to believe, rather than as 'the accurate representation of reality,''' which is usually how we think about truth, or that it's possible to look in meditation in a certain way and see, "This is how it is. This is the accurate representation, because I'm super equanimous, and very calm, unruffled, unemotional, or mindful, or whatever it is."

Then he says:

Or, to put the point less provocatively [I think this is more provocative, but anyway], they show us that the notion of "accurate representation" is simply an automatic [or] empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do.

In other words, it's convenient to call something 'real' depending on what we want to do with a certain point of view or a certain assumption about reality. It's a little unclear from that quote there what he means by "what we want to do." He might mean whether we want to apply technology, or whether we want to build up a relationship with someone, or whatever it is.

But there's a quote from Nietzsche, which I actually can't find. And again, Nietzsche, so much the kind of forerunner with so much thinking, so much philosophy. He said something like, "People select their philosophy about reality, etc., based on [I'm paraphrasing now in our language] what kind of freedom their soul wants." In other words, if they want to set something free in themselves that they really care about, set their soul free in relation to that, then they adopt a philosophy, and therefore a whole world-view and sense of existence, real and unreal and all that, dependent on just what the soul wants, what do we want to do.

So when we're practising mindfulness, mindfulness is also wanting something. Mindfulness wants something. It's set in and it's determined by a context of desiring that is shaped by the Four Noble Truths. What do I want when I'm mindful? I want liberation. I want ease of dukkha. I want to move towards the Third Noble Truth. What's that? Well, I have to understand the First Noble Truth. Mindfulness is also set in the context of the Fourth Noble Truth, the eightfold path, all of that, and a certain understanding of what gives rise to dukkha in the Second Noble Truth. So it's set in a conceptual context, but it's also wanting something. There's a desire there. "What we want to do," says Rorty. What do we want to do? What do we want to do?

So letting that question actually shape our ideas of what truth is, and realize what we might loosely now term 'truth' or 'reality,' dependent on what we want to do. What do we want to do? Collectively, this is interesting, because it's like our collective global crises now, and the crisis of the species and the earth and the climate, etc. -- what do we want to do? We want to solve those crises, I hope. If we want to solve the crises by purely technological thought, technological thinking, technological perceptions, it's purely an issue about carbon dioxide levels, and if we can get some technology to remove the carbon dioxide, great. Really important. Is that the limit of what we want to do? Solve our crises by those kinds of ways of looking, those kinds of value systems, ontologies, all that? 'Nature as machine and commodity' might have been part of how we got into this mess in the first place. What do we want to do?

And caring for people. What does that mean, to care for people? What do we want to do? What is a human being? What is a person? Are we caring by giving so much attention to the GDP, and relentlessly being entrenched in the view of growth economics? What do we want to do? And what's the relationship between what we want to do and our views of what's real and what is the case, what a human being is, what nature is, what the world is? What do we want to do together as a society, and what do we want to do as individuals? Because individuals, we have very different directions of our desire, of our longing, of our aspirations.

[1:08:21] One of Richard Rorty's main concerns was actually social. He was famous for saying something -- I can't remember the exact quote, but his basic intention, or the point of all his philosophy, was just to keep the conversation going. In other words, he wanted this idea of non-truth to -- his statement about why it was important was so that we could keep talking to each other, so that there is this kind of conversation that's possible between different points of view, etc. I mean, I don't know all his writings, but I've read some. What seems strange to me is that he kept saying this thing about "the basic point of all this is to keep the conversation going." There's a social concern there. But I'm not aware of him actually engaging in much conversation about different points of view in a way that was really productive, or changed anyone's mind, or brought anyone into at least being able to experience someone else's world-view and what opened from that. Is the conversation ongoing? I'm not sure, in our wider culture. Did he take part in that? I'm not sure. And if so, how much power and significance? Because if it's just an intellectual conversation, it actually doesn't enable one, as I said, to really open up the sense of existence and the world-view. The playing with ways of looking, the flexibility with ways of looking, that's what I call meditation. And that actually allows an altering of view, meaning experience, meaning appearance.

This idea that Rorty actually at least said that he felt was important, to keep the conversation going, as a model of that or an example of that kind of social opening up, and social cohesion, and openness of conversation, and openness of the relationship with truth, as a model, there is the midrashic tradition in the Jewish tradition. Midrash is a kind of commentary or interpretation of the whole set of sacred scriptures. Now I'm paraphrasing another philosopher called Gerald Bruns, who writes about hermeneutics, but in this chapter he's writing about the midrash.^[11] He's talking about, people go to study in the beit midrash, in the house where this hermeneutics of the Bible is studied. There are these fierce debates going on, but fierce as they are, and polarized as they are in terms of the difference of opinions, they don't split the community. So there are polarly opposite opinions on the interpretation of this passage or that passage; this rabbi says this, the other rabbi says completely opposite. A student says, "How am I supposed to study in such an environment? It's chaos, this chaos of opinions and contradictory viewpoints. One guy says this. The other guy says the opposite. A third guy says a third thing. What am I supposed to do with that?" And the idea is that is exactly the perfect environment for studying, relating to, opening up and being opened up by the sacred text.

I would like to, as I said right at the beginning of this talk, to remind us that 'hermeneutics' means the interpretation not just of texts but also of existence. So here's a social situation that took place, that was ongoing for hundreds and hundreds of years in Judaism -- I'm not sure if it's still going -- but of openness to different points of view. Multiple interpretations were viable. An infinity of interpretations was conceivable. There was this great fecundity of different viewpoints, different chewings over, different reworkings, different connections made regarding any passage from any sacred text, but then regarding the whole thing also. In this social context, those engaged in relating to, in this case, the Torah, or other texts this way (I'm quoting Bruns now),

we see that they imagined themselves as part of the whole, participating in Torah ['Torah' is the Old Testament in Hebrew] rather than operating on it at an analytic distance.

Participating in it. So it's not something that I look at from a cold distance; I'm actually somehow part of it in my engagement with it, in this whole tussle and multiplicity of opinions and interpretations, and slants, and elaborations, and connections. That actually is part of it. I'm participating in it. We are participating in it. This conversation is participating in it. This social scene is part of it.

From the idea of participation,

it follows that the words of interpretation cannot be isolated in any rigorously analytical way from the words of Torah itself.

In other words, where does the Old Testament end, and the interpretation of it begin? All of it is Torah; it's all this whole. The subject and the object, the way of looking and what appears, the concept brought to bear and the world that opens up there -- it's all Torah. You cannot separate the text. You cannot separate existence. If we elaborate what's said here in terms of text, we elaborate that, extend it to include existence.

Again, Bruns:

In other words, the Torah is constituted as an open canon. To be sure, the letters of the original Scriptures are fixed, but they are not dead. [There's something alive here.] Openness here has to be construed as the openness of what is written, that is, its applicability to the time of its interpretation, its need for actualization. [We'll come back to that point shortly.] Now you must picture the text not as a formal object (so many fixed letters) but as an open canon whose boundaries are shaped and reshaped by the give-and-take of midrashic argument.

So here's this whole community of passionate debate, and creativity, and probing, and wider study, and elaboration, and contextualization, and that is something that shapes, and shapes the boundaries of, in this case, the scripture, the text, and we could also, again, say about existence. So those who study in this way, with this passion, and with this knowledge, and with this elaboration, they make the text what it is. And above all, they open it to the present and the future.

The Torah [the text, or existence] emerges as what it is and comes into its own only in the dialogue it generates; and only by entering into the dialogue can one enter the Torah [enter the text].

This is a social situation I'll come back to, but we can also just translate this to our own individual -- if we can even create an individual, isolated; we're always influenced by ideas that we get from the past and our contemporaries as much as what emerges for ourself. But there's this dialogue, this flexibility of interpretations, of elaborations, of contextualizations, and a multiplicity of interpretations there.

[1:18:19] So this would be an example, socially, of the kind of thing that Rorty at least claimed that he was interested in. But it's more than what Rorty was getting at. It's a different notion because of this idea of participation. Those who study, who passionately engage with, in this case, a text, or reality or the sense of existence, whatever it is, they're participating. They see themselves as not separate. It's not something that we have this kind of objective stance with in the scientific epistemology. Participating in the text, and participating in the holiness, yeah? So this whole view, very different than Rorty. It's a view of a social situation, of a conversation that keeps going, of an openness in regard to notions of truth, etc., but it preserves holiness. I think, in terms of Richard Rorty, he's quite an influential (and popular in some circles) philosopher; I really get the sense, reading him, that he had a hidden agenda and a hidden kind of dogmatism of physicalism. Despite all this talk about open truth, he often kind of let slip statements or passages that just sound like his basic view is a view of atomic, meaningless movement of meaningless material, particles in a meaningless universe. And that that was a kind of bedrock that he couldn't shake, a hidden dogmatism there for himself that also spread through his writings, and a kind of hidden agenda that was, if you like, favouring that view, that metaphysics, that ontology and epistemology, etc., over and against any kind of religious or spiritual view or something else.

But again, this midrashic example, this example of midrashic debate, and the passion, and the give and take, and the complexity, and the variability, and the wideness, and the multiplicity of that was an example of something that was actually creative. I'm not sure if it's still ongoing, or if it sort of came to a halt at some point, perhaps a few hundred years ago. But it actually was a creative, ongoing debate that worked its way into people's psyches, and then into their actual views and how they lived their life. In other words, it was a conversation, an actual conversation, that actually did affect the perception, senses of existence, commitments, practices, devotions, orientations, all of that.

Let me quote from a rabbi called Rabbi Efraim of Sudlikow. We're talking about hermeneutics now, the interpretation of usually sacred texts. But as I said, I want to expand that to the interpretation of existence. So the interpretation of texts, of teachings, but also of existence. Using this model of what's quite alive and insisted on in the Jewish tradition, this kind of multiplicity, etc., and this non-singleness and non-objective status of the truth -- so the truth as something amenable to multi-perspectives, infinitely variegated, infinitely mineable, infinitely fertile, and dependent on our participation, dependent on all kinds of things. He writes, this Rabbi Efraim writes, "Until they" -- and he means the people who are engaged wholeheartedly, passionately, with integrity, with commitment, to this interpretation of sacred texts, of Torah, "Until they [had] interpreted it, the Torah was not considered complete, but only half-finished."^[12] Again, it's not a thing existing by itself. It depends on my participation. Same as the point I'm trying to -- the wider point is: same with existence, same with Dharma.

Until they [had] interpreted it, the sacred text was not considered complete, but only half-finished. It was the [rabbis], through their interpretations, who made the Torah whole.

Then he continues, "Such is the case for each generation and its leaders," or explorers in this case. They complete the Torah. They complete the text. "The Torah is interpreted in each generation according to that generation's needs." Nowadays we say we have -- the needs are diverse; that's part of what some people call the postmodern condition. We have different perspectives and different needs. But the point here is, again, this non-fixity of the truth, the amenability to different interpretations, which are also historically contextualized.

The Torah is interpreted in each generation according to that generation's needs [which we might add now today are multiple*,* varied] and according to the soul-root of those who live at that time. [That may be an idea we come back to.] God thus enlightens the sages of the generation in [the interpretation of his] Holy Torah. One who denies this is as [one who] denies the Torah itself. [God forbid.]

So you could read that as a kind of attempt at consolidating rabbinic authority. But actually it opened up, it was part of a movement that kept open and insisted on keeping open this multiplicity of interpretation, and kept open not just the possibility but the fact of the interpretations evolving and changing over time, dependent on the historic or cultural context.

Isaiah Berlin, some of you will have heard about him. He's another philosopher kind of person. He wrote a fair amount on a guy called Giambattista Vico, who was an Italian philosopher who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vico wrote about history, and he had quite different ideas, quite revolutionary ideas for his time on history and culture and world-view and all that. So this is a passage from Isaiah Berlin, writing about Vico around all this:

[Vico's] importance in the history of the [Western] Enlightenment consists in his insistence on the plurality of cultures and on the consequently fallacious character [the mistaken character] of the idea that there is one and only one structure of reality which the enlightened philosopher can see as it truly is, and which he can (at least in principle) describe in logically perfect language -- a vision that has obsessed all kinds of thinkers [and then he names a bunch of philosophers].^[13]

There again, the notion of a singular, objective reality that's universally true for all people, all times, all cultures, and all situations. And how endemic that assumption is, whether or not you're a philosopher, or you consider yourself a philosopher, an intellectual, any of that. It creeps into our Dharma practice. It creeps into our everyday discourse. It creeps into all kinds of things. This is Berlin continuing:

For Vico, men ask [humanity asks] different questions of the universe, and their answers are shaped accordingly: such questions, and the symbols or acts that express them, alter or become obsolete in the course of cultural development [in the course of history]; to understand the answers one must understand the questions that preoccupy an age or a culture; they are not constant [nor] necessarily more profound because they resemble our own more than others that are less familiar to us.

Then he bemoans the fact that Giambattista Vico was/is a philosopher that very few people actually bother to read.

"Different questions." We're back to this question I posed earlier: what do we want? Rorty, we were left hanging with his quote, "what we want." And Nietzsche's quote that I couldn't remember, about we actually have different questions that we bring, and we want different answers or we choose different answers depending on what we want, depending on the world-view that we want to support because it supports something in our soul. Different questions. In other words, when we talk about hermeneutics, when we talk about all this in relation to practice, that's why I emphasized the passion and the involvement of the midrashic context, and that kind of heated debate, and the endless sort of creativity, and soulful investigation, and probing, and teasing out, and elaboration on texts -- it matters.

For all this, for what I'm saying to make sense, it makes sense in the context of it being passionately important. Something in us is important to us. I mean, it probably would not be the case, but if someone was just listening to this and they just weren't interested in opening up a sense of existence or what truth was or any of that, none of this would -- it would be completely ridiculous to be hearing it. It would just sound like a bunch of words that's maybe perhaps mildly interesting or something. Mattering matters. When we talk about hermeneutics, when we talk about the sense of existence, what we're bringing to it, and how we can see or sense existence, and how we can legitimate this or that, it matters that it matters to us. When we talk about the way we sense existence, and when we want to open up those possibilities, we're talking about something that some level of our soul, its passion is connected.

Again, Gerald Bruns points out that an interpretation, whether it's of sacred text or whatever, has to matter. You can't have a good interpretation by anyone of anything when that thing, text or sense of existence, doesn't really matter to them. This is quoting Gerald Bruns:

Say that interpretation [hermeneutics] is an act performed by a person to whom things matter, not by a consciousness primed to produce pictures of how things are in the world or in the text or in whatever state of affairs is put before it [in] analysis. [It's different than the picture of cold scientific epistemology that we talked about, absence of emotion.] The Torah [he continues] is a text that makes things matter; it preserves the smallest details of life from inconsequence and triviality.^[14]

If you know the Torah, there are hundreds of pages about every little, minute detail of life, and bringing all that into the realm of mattering passionately, and bringing all that into the possibility of being made holy, being sacralized, being sanctified. Again, Bruns: "Mattering at all events is what the midrashic text I have been quoting ..." He was talking about a certain passage. It was actually that student complaining about there were so many different opinions there, and how can he possibly study and understand what the Torah is when there are all these people with completely different opinions explaining in the house of study, in the beit midrash.

Mattering at all events is what the midrashic text I have been quoting from presupposes with respect to interpretation. Midrash is not a formal operation but a form of life lived with a text that makes claims on people. A text that makes claims upon people turns them into respondents: they are answerable to the text in a way that is qualitatively different from the answerability of disengaged observers to the scenes they wish to depict.

Now, we could substitute the word 'existence' for 'text,' and talk about what we're talking about now, this whole exploration of ontology, epistemology, conceptuality, and opening up sensing with soul. So this whole probing of ideas and the possibilities in sensing with soul is not a formal operation, but a form of life lived with an existence or perceptions of existence that make claims on people. That kind of sense of existence that makes claims on people turns them into respondents: they are answerable, we are answerable, to existence in a way that's different from someone who is just coldly, aloofly, analytically describing it.

Notice there: desire, eros, this longing to understand, this passion connected with what I want to open up, and how I perceive existence, and what is legitimized or not, and what senses are valued or not. There's passion, and there's desire, and there's eros in that investigation, in that debate that we're talking about. There's emotion there. So desire, eros, and emotion, because they're necessary for the kind of hermeneutics that we're talking about, and the kind of debate about hermeneutics that we're talking about, they're necessary, they're included, in the epistemology. We're not talking about, "Now I'm in a neutral mind state. Now I don't want anything, therefore I see clearly. Now there's the quietening of emotion, and a calm, equanimous mindfulness, therefore I trust what I see." Nor the kind of scientific epistemology that I pointed out devalues or tries to put aside emotion or any kind of wish (theoretically pushes that aside; it doesn't really). Desire, eros, emotion are necessary and included in the kind of epistemology that we're involved with and trying to open up, and in the whole debate around that.

So it needs to matter. You wouldn't be listening, I presume, at this point, if none of this mattered to you. It needs to matter. It needs to matter passionately. We need to be involved, engaged. Our lives are on the line. Our sense of existence is on the line. It needs to matter for us. And it matters also in what comes out of it. It matters because, as some guy called Moscovici wrote and pointed out:

Questions of epistemology are also questions of social order.^[15]

Questions of epistemology are also questions of social order -- we might say 'pecking order.' I've talked in the past about epistemicide, epistemic cleansing, epistemic colonialism, etc. -- in other words, the dominant world-view of secular modernism taking over other cultures, and disregarding, devaluing, dismissing, putting aside, sometimes even outlawing their world-view, their ontology, their cosmology, their epistemology. Questions of epistemology are also questions of social order. They're questions of hierarchy and pecking order within a culture: whose voices get ridiculed, whose voices just become the entrenched, dominant, unquestioned, accepted view of what reality is, and therefore policy (political, economic, governmental, social, environmental policy) is based on certain world-views, which are based on certain epistemologies, certain cosmologies which are based on certain epistemologies.

So this needs to matter to us, and it matters in the world. And then, again, does the victor, the cultural victor or the epistemology that is a cultural victor, become at some point a prisoner of that very epistemology, of the very rigidifications and entrenchments of whatever epistemology one is in? As a victor, it then becomes the prisoner.

---

1. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 5--6. ↩︎

2. David West, Continental Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 103--4. ↩︎

3. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 104--5. ↩︎

4. Gianni Vattimo, "The Reconstruction of Rationality," Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). ↩︎

5. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume 1, tr. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 168. ↩︎

6. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492--Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1980). ↩︎

7. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften VI, quoted in Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 109. ↩︎

8. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 109. ↩︎

9. Martin Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics," The End of Philosophy, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85. ↩︎

10. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 10. ↩︎

11. Gerald L. Bruns, "The Hermeneutics of Midrash," Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104--23. ↩︎

12. Byron L. Sherwin, Jewish Ethics for the Twenty-First Century: Living in the Image of God (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 6. ↩︎

13. Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 248. ↩︎

14. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 117--8. ↩︎

15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15--6. ↩︎