The concept of ‘lived hermeneutics’ belongs to Karl Popper’s World 3, the world of ideas, and can be viewed as a conceptual artefact – a tangible thing or tool, in that it can be put to work to achieve a particular purpose.[1] In this article I want to consider what the ‘lived hermeneutics’ construct might mean for us, and reflect on its capacity to guide action as we live out our lives. First, however, I need to set the backdrop and introduce several themes that lived hermeneutics has embedded within it.
When humanity’s first atomic bomb went off in the second world war, Einstein said everything had changed except for the way we think. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and author, believes that in view of the seriousness of present-day, human-induced changes to the planet, it is high time we started changing the way we think.[2] Changing the way we think is central to the concerns of this blog, but there’s more to it than simply that. I am referring to the difference between the task of cultivating ‘hermeneutic consciousness’ – the most fundamental process for changing the way we think – and living out the implications of that changed perspective – what I’m calling lived hermeneutics.
Meaning perspectives: Recognising individual differences in meaning making
Educators sometimes think about teaching for understanding through the lens of ‘meaning perspectives’, a key component of transformative learning theory. As Jack Mezirow put it,
"meaning perspectives, or generalised sets of habitual expectation, act as perceptual and conceptual codes to form, limit, and distort how we think, believe, and feel and how, what, when, and why we learn. They have cognitive, affective, and conative dimensions. These habits of expectation filter both perception and comprehension."[3]
In 2014 I responded to that formulation in this way:
"The stance I adopt, the fore-understandings I bring with me in any act of textual engagement, colours my interpretation. However fluid my ‘meaning perspective’ might be over time, it is my present tense meaning perspective that does the filtering that Mezirow points to. The ‘meaning perspective’ construct can thus be viewed as a logical link in a theoretical account of meaning making. We can employ the term to help make sense of and discuss how each individual’s life story – my cumulative experience of meaning making – impacts on how I conceive myself and the world, and thus on who I am. Every individual’s meaning making experiences are unique because one’s meaning perspective is thoroughly informed by one’s unique life experience ... One’s meaning perspective is both reflected in and fashioned through one’s past experiences of meaning making."[4]
There is value in considering the role of an individual’s meaning perspective in the puzzle of how we think and how we can change the way we think. When I embarked on my doctoral research into our (humanity’s) continuous experience of ‘making meaning’ – our ingrained proclivity to try to make sense of things – my conceptualisation of the meaning making experience already had some useful reference points, indeed, weightings or lures. In the mid-1990s I had argued in my master's thesis that meaning making is a form of ‘landmark-spotting’. Later, I wrote that
"for me, the power of this metaphor lies in its emphasis on the uniqueness of individual meaning making. In a sense a landmark is recreated each time people scan a landscape …. Just as in the case of visual perception in a physical landscape, so in the case of meaning making: what I value and how I think determines how I render my world. Landmark-spotting is a personal, subjective occurrence, albeit culturally informed."[5]
In an experimental distance learning module developed for my masters project I proposed that an individual’s value system is fundamentally involved in the process of landmark-spotting, as when, for example, we fashion an otherwise random series of life experiences into meaningful, themed accounts of our life stories. An individual’s value system is
"a deeply ingrained set of valuing biases that makes it possible for us to judge what is more important to us, and what is less. My value system is the engine room of my value judgments; with it, I weigh up the importance of this sliver and that sliver, of this factor and that …. [W]hatever the trigger, we make a rounded, composite human response to each landmark. The milestones of my life are all my landmarks, and my complex relations with them […] what I see is what stands out from the background; what stands out is what I value; yet where do my values come from, if not from what I see?"[6]
Much has been written about perspective transformation; see, for example, the literatures of transformative learning theory and of intellectual and cognitive development. My aim here is not to provide a literature review of this area, but more modestly to give an account of my own learning and research journey into meaning making, one that gave me a creative, experiential encounter with philosophical hermeneutics as I wrestled with the conundrum, if meaning making, what then?
Thinking about changing the way we think
One useful way to conceptualise human meaning making practice, as I just intimated, is the foregrounding-backgrounding metaphor of landmark-spotting, especially when associated with the ideas of meaning perspectives, value systems and one’s historical meaning making tendencies that reinforce certain cognitive routines at the expense of other potential strategies. I immediately think of ways of working in the arts versus the ways of science, and how most of us lean towards one or other constellation of meaning making strategies.
Once I had coined my landmark-spotting conception of meaning making, I soon pushed the idea further by conceiving ‘landmark-knowing’ as the realisation that all knowing is landmark-spotting. While the literatures of cognitive and ego development since the pioneering work of William G. Perry have been largely concerned with ‘third person’ theories of cognitive development, that is, researchers focusing on human growth as something to be observed and theorised ‘out there’, at arm’s length, in others, my interest lies in searching for and describing (‘enwording’) an activity regime by which meaning makers themselves may engage in the human lifework of growth in understanding. I am best placed to appreciate that my meaning perspective (the meaning making filtration system that determines how I think) is both reflected in and fashioned through my own past experiences of meaning making (my unique life story). This is because no-one knows my life story and my stream of consciousness more intimately than I do. As I learn to reflect on why I am who and what I am, I not only come to better understand myself but also, my theory goes, I develop a wider repertoire of meaning making strategies, indeed, a mode of cognitive attack that I can use in all my engagements in the world.
If landmark-knowing is a dawning realisation that all knowing is landmark-spotting, we can think of it as a state of awareness in which one resides. Residing in this state would seem to provide a setting in which epistemically sophisticated judgments will naturally emerge for the critically inquisitive meaning maker. For Karen Kitchener, epistemic cognition is the stage of cognitive development in which
"individuals reflect on the limits of knowing, the certainty of knowing, and criteria of knowing. Epistemic assumptions influence how individuals understand the nature of problems and decide what kinds of strategies are appropriate for solving them."[7]
Hunch alert: perhaps it is a mark of having reached such a plateau of understanding that humans find the possibility of hermeneutic consciousness so alluring.
… the human lifework of growth in understanding. Small wonder that I should assert that growth in understanding is the lifework or calling of humankind, given my primary value belief that the defining feature of human kind is the fulfilment it gains from growth in understanding.[8] Aha moments are wonderful things, wherever we are on life’s potentially transformative journey.
Hermeneutic understanding/consciousness
Reaching understanding of something may sometimes feel like a discreet achievement, but it is more than that. By its very nature, understanding seeks an integration that preserves or demonstrates a relatedness between elements, or between subjects and their contexts. There is an important sense in which growth in integrating understanding – that is, global, holistic or hermeneutic understanding – gives a meaning maker a qualitatively different outlook (what we have been calling meaning perspective) or state of awareness from which to set the direction and timbre of thought. Cultivating hermeneutic consciousness is the most fundamental process for changing the way we think. Nicholas Davey’s introduction to his eleven theses on philosophical hermeneutics deftly evokes the character of critique (the direction and timbre of thought) naturally launched from within such a state of consciousness:
"Philosophical hermeneutics betokens a reflective practice. While it addresses hermeneutic questions of aesthetic, historical, and philosophical understanding, it reflects philosophically on the ethical dimensions of interpretative practice: how to orientate oneself toward and how to interact with the claims of the other be it a text, a person, or a remote historical horizon? Practises are, however, informed by the received historical labyrinths of working traditions. They cannot in consequence be definitively articulated. Though the practice of philosophical hermeneutics cannot be conceptually captured, its nature can be discerned among the spectrum of philosophical refractions that a variety of interpretative perspectives bring to light. This essay argues that as a practice, philosophical hermeneutics is more a constellation of philosophical outlooks than a specific philosophical system or method. The character of these outlooks becomes more apparent when juxtaposed against one another. We shall, accordingly, present eleven theses concerning philosophical hermeneutics with the purpose of bringing more of its implicit nature to light.[9]
‘Though the practice of philosophical hermeneutics cannot be conceptually captured,’ writes Davey, ‘its nature can be discerned among the spectrum of philosophical refractions that a variety of interpretative perspectives bring to light.’ Perhaps I was struggling with a similar difficulty when writing up my masters – the problem of adequately clothing an elusive mass of ideas in words. Playing with the metaphor of meaning maker as wandering nomad, I heard myself thinking that my autobiographical texts were like
‘artefacts of me’,
snapshots in time … permanent tent clearings – for my tent and I have moved on. My tent and I continue on our way in the cosmic flow, living and cognising in the present, which is the only time I have in which to understand.
Have I reached the point of saying that a passage from landmark-spotting to landmark knowing may be found via self-knowledge? by contemplation of that mystery, deeper in space, where my deeply-ingrained valuing biases stem from; where thought, feeling and intent are one; a mystery only ever detectable by the tent clearing it has left behind?[10]
Please understand, as I previously intimated, that the landmark-knowing construct simply serves as a placeholder for something that we may confidently aspire to, notwithstanding the fuzziness surrounding it, nor its ‘folk philosophy’ flavour. We can think of it as a state of awareness in which one resides, in which epistemically sophisticated judgments will naturally emerge. The case being put here is that one’s own life story provides one with a rich trove that offers the reflexive, reflective meaning maker bounteous resources for making sense of making sense or, if you will, for epistemic knowing.
A major thrust of my doctoral research was concerned with the implications of human understanding for university curriculum design for professional practice in a struggling, floundering world, but as I have indicated here, I am just as keenly interested in exploring how learners themselves may engage in the human lifework of growth in understanding – in our ability to chart our own future by changing the way we think, in tandem with a resolve to live out the implications of one’s changing perspective. In the language of philosophical hermeneutics, hermeneutic consciousness signifies, arises from reflective practice (see quote from Davey), from the timbre of our thinking and the texture of our questioning.[11] Beyond this, what is also important, for our own sake and for the planet, is the conceptual artefact of lived hermeneutics. But how can these ideas be drawn together?
My complex relations with my meaning making past
According to the hermeneutic circle metaphor, holistic understanding advances as a meaning maker switches inquiry back and forth between the elements of a thing and the thing as a whole, bootstrapping step by step. I will now outline one way of thinking of pursuit of hermeneutic consciousness, growth in global understanding, through hermeneutic cycling.
My plain English distillation of growth in global understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.[12] Here the locus of attention abandons the traditionally reified self-consciousness to embrace simultaneous awareness of self in world, but this awareness is a fleeting thing, like one frame from the movie of your life. The next important consideration is the flow, the movement between each still frame in the individual’s sense of self in the world. A meaning maker who is on a growth in global understanding trajectory is one whose sense of self in the world is becoming ever more subtly sophisticated, inclusive and robust. Note carefully this: hermeneutic consciousness is acutely aware of the irreconcilability of many of the frameworks and constructions that vie for our attention and allegiance in life. It is not easy, embracing a philosophical hermeneutic worldview.[13] The coherence, the robustness that I am attributing to the emergent whole of our imagined case study meaning maker is not one of harmonisation, of integrity of worldview, but rather one of mature acceptance of the irreconcilable within one’s experience – shall we say a robust integrity of selfhood. A term that came to mind while writing this piece is philosophy of homecoming, I think because this term holds within it the notion of progressive acceptance of the nature of things, including the capacity of human beings to renew themselves and their world.
I am guessing that there could be any number of ways of applying the hermeneutic circle motif onto our quest for growth in understanding. Take for example the text you are reading now, with all its abstract terms and word pictures. Consider the process I went through in composing this as a micro journey towards my own lifelong growth in understanding. Consider your journey as you have engaged with it. Hermeneutic composition or interpretation of a text follows a circular or cyclical path, as the writer or reader struggles at each node or decision point by considering the needs of the moment in the light of the mental blueprint of the emergent whole. Let me randomly recall an earlier comment: perhaps it is a mark of having reached such a plateau of understanding that humans find the possibility of hermeneutic consciousness so alluring. That is not quite the same as unhelpfully stating that A equals A, because in the first case the answer is more than A; we are perhaps in a better position, having read the whole article (so far), to recognise the sublime allure that we associate with enlightenment.
According to this way of thinking, the common denominator that distinguishes humankind from other life – the ‘defining feature’ of humankind – is the fulfilment, the sense of arriving we gain from growth in understanding. Valuing growth in understanding, whether as a concept or an experience or both, seems to me to fit like a glove with a valuing of one’s journey to self-realisation.[14]
The hermeneutic circle can be a key to understanding lived hermeneutics because life is a hermeneutic journey of savouring my complex relations with my meaning making past, in which the savouring is hermeneutic cycling in action. (See journey keyword in this blog). As I apply the hermeneutic circle tool to the task of understanding, the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ elements may take on different guises, depending on the context of one’s particular thought flow at the time:
To the reader who points out that such musing requires thought, which is quite different from self-awareness, I ask for your provisional suspension of disbelief. Consider this. The pilgrimage of a human life is marked by deepening sophistication in understanding, which in turn colours the individual’s conscious awareness in the continuous present, an animal capability that underpins and lies at the heart of our human reflexive lived experience. The proposal here is that one’s primal awareness of self and surroundings starts to be illuminated by one’s accumulated understanding of self and world at the moment of reflexive thought; indeed, there may be no time delay separating primal awareness from reflexivity. I chose ‘sense of self in the world’ for my definition of growth in understanding because it has greater word appeal than ‘accumulated understanding of self and world’, and because it reminds us of the interrelationships between selfhood and world.
Personal agency in the service of personal, community and planetary wellbeing
The pursuit of global understanding is the whole-some quest for hermeneutic consciousness, that state of awareness conducive to epistemic thinking and holistic perception-conception. The final subheading in this article conjures up an image of expanding ripples of ‘rings of concern’. I care, therefore I am. The biosphere loses its ecological integrity at its peril, and humans are the only ones capable of understanding this. For me, the constellation of ideas just argued, distilled in the notion of lived hermeneutics, centres on the primary value belief that growth in understanding is the realisation of an ever more complex, comprehensive and coherent sense of self in the world.
From a lived hermeneutics standpoint, a philosophy of homecoming feels like opening oneself to the universe. The integrity of the biosphere is conceivable and achievable only insofar as the life forms that populate it act as if its welfare is their – our – welfare. The question yet to be considered is offered rhetorically, for gentle rumination in our quieter times: does the notion of lived hermeneutics look like something we might use to change our way of thinking and change the way we live and change our impact on others and the planet?
Endnotes
[1] C. Bereiter, Education and mind in the knowledge age, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2002, p. 64.
[2] ‘Science in the soul’, The Drawing Room [online audio], interview with Patricia Karvelas, Radio National, 31 October 2017, <http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2017/10/drm_20171031_1915.mp3>, accessed 2 November 2017.
[3] J. Mezirow, Transformative dimensions of adult learning, Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco, 1991, p. 34.
[4] A. McKenzie, Meaning making: a university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken, ISBN 978-3-659-52667-1, p. 112.
[5] ibid., p. 113.
[6] A. McKenzie, ‘Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers’, Master's thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1996, p. 135.
[7] K. Kitchener, ‘Cognition, metacognition and epistemic cognition: a three-level model of cognitive processing’, Human Development [online journal] no. 26, 1983, pp. 222–232. <https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/272885>, accessed 20 October 2017.
[8] A. McKenzie, ‘Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers’, loc. cit., p. 102.
[9] N. Davey, Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2006, p. 3.
[10] A. McKenzie, ‘Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers’, loc. cit., p. 101.
[11] Recall my earlier remark: one’s meaning perspective is both reflected in and fashioned through one’s past experiences of meaning making.
[12] A. McKenzie, Meaning making, loc. cit., p. 2.
[13] Nicholas Davey gives a persuasive account of the challenges involved. See Davey, loc. cit.
[14] A. McKenzie, ‘A meditation on holism’, One giant learning curve for humanity – A blog about learning and teaching in the twenty-first century, 3 July 2017, <http://bit.ly/2t6uV3s>, accessed 16 November 2017.
Bibliography
~ Bereiter, C., Education and mind in the knowledge age, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2002.
~ Davey, N., Unquiet understanding: Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2006.
~ Kitchener, K., ‘Cognition, metacognition and epistemic cognition: a three-level model of cognitive processing’, Human Development [online journal] no. 26, 1983, pp. 222–232, <https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/272885>, accessed 20 October 2017.
~ McKenzie, A., ‘Improving the effectiveness of distance education for farmers’, Master's thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1996.
~ McKenzie, A., Meaning making: a university curriculum framework for the twenty-first century, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken, ISBN 978-3-659-52667-1. Available from <https://www.morebooks.de/store/gb/book/meaning-making:-a-university-curriculum-framework-for-the-21st-century/isbn/978-3-659-52667-1>.
~ McKenzie, A., ‘A meditation on holism’, One giant learning curve for humanity – A blog about learning and teaching in the twenty-first century, 3 July 2017, <http://bit.ly/2t6uV3s>, accessed 16 November 2017.
~ Mezirow, J., Transformative dimensions of adult learning, Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco, 1991.
~ ‘Science in the soul’, The Drawing Room [online audio], interview with Patricia Karvelas, Radio National, 31 October 2017, <http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2017/10/drm_20171031_1915.mp3>, accessed 2 November 2017.
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