Interrupting

What we have called “belonging” is nothing other than the adherence to this historical lived experience, what Hegel calls the “substance” of moral life. The “lived experience” of phenomenology corresponds, on the side of hermeneutics, to the consciousness exposed to historical efficacy. Hence, hermeneutical distanciation is to belonging as, in phenomenology, the epoché is to lived experience. Hermeneutics similarly begins when, not content to belong to transmitted tradition, we interrupt the relation of belonging in order to signify it.

I took a detour. That happens to me a lot. It brought back a memory. I remember when I first started studying literature. My point of entry was William Blake. Growing up, he seemed so dense, so impenetrable, and yet so compelling. I wanted to understand what he was on about. I remember well the feeling of drowning, positioning myself at the genesis of the Romantic period in literature. I commented to the Medievalist on campus, after having read “The Wanderer” just how lost I felt. It seemed like there was an ocean of literature stretching both directions from the period that interested me, and I didn’t know what to do, other than jump in and see if I could swim. She answered that this was all that any of us can do.

I thought about how that relates to where I find myself now. I can’t buy goal oriented models for a very simple reason. Things never start at the beginning, and they only “end” when we insist on a false sense of historical closure. It’s a waste of time, things just don’t work that way. We always are swept up, somewhere in the middle, and in order to find out where we are we have to stop, imply a false closure, and fix our relation to the moment. But then the moment becomes lost, as we find ourselves engulfed in yet another sea of meaning.

I started reading From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II by Paul Ricoeur. I’m a philosophical neophyte. Sure, I’ve dug into a few— Locke, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, etc., but only as they relate to very specific issues. I’m still struggling with that big picture of philosophical history the same way I struggled with literary history. But I’m starting to swim a little. Tentative strokes, mind you, but strokes nonetheless. I’m drawn to Habermas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, etc., rather than the rest of the crowd. But I’m wandering in the desert, trying to make sense of it.

I’m drawn to this concept of distanciation. It makes me think about the problems that a writer has when they think too much about their audience, and reminds me of what I thought of as my task as a documentary photographer. You can’t make sense of things if you are too close. There has to be some distance involved. Distance seems imperative in this process of making meaning. But distance is the hardest quality to achieve, when you find yourself thrust in the middle of an ocean of possibilities.