This paper addresses the Buddhist terms and concepts in early medieval Daoist texts in the light of hermeneutic and onto-hermeneutic theory with an example from the Benji Jing. It argues that onto-hermeneutic strategies of interpretation allow us to understand Daoist texts with Buddhist terms and concepts as an expression of complex and creative philosophical thoughts without losing track of the essence of Daoism and thus as Daoist philosophy in its own right.

Liang Qichao's Discourse on the New Citizen was serialized in 1902 in the New Citizen Journal. In "On Public Morality",1 one of his most widely studied articles, Liang inserts a brief interlinear comment explicating what it is that has contributed to the Chinese people's lack of a "new morality." Printed in a size one-third smaller than the rest of the text, the passage conveys a view that seems marginal to arguments Liang makes in the article as well as the scholarly (...) interpretations it has received:2 … recent scholar officials who support reform … call for everything new except new morality. This is because they cannot dispose of their academic slavishness... (shrink)

¿This splendid volume is a fitting tribute to the remarkable range of rich and revealing contributions Professor Cheng Chung-ying has made to our understanding of Chinese and comparative philosophy and constructive philosophy from a global perspective.¿ ¿Philip J. Ivanhoe, City University of Hong Kong.

Chung-ying’s project of onto-hermeneutics draws in order to shed light on the relations between ontology and epistemology in the hermeneutic act. In the process, not only will we be thinking with Cheng and some Western hermeneutic theorists, but we will also be thinking through history by examining the Confucian act of reading. To the extent that any hermeneutic exercise, in accordance with Cheng’s construal, cannot merely be a disembodied act of theoretical knowing but is also moral effort that (...) entails personal cultivation—or, in Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s terms, Bildung—its espousal and its practice necessarily embody a larger conception of culture. In fact, precisely in terms of the intimate engagement with culture, Confucian insights, filtered through Cheng’s onto-hermeneutic lenses, may have much to offer contemporary hermeneutics. (shrink)

The essay imagines a dialogic interlocution that features the points of convergence and divergence between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-hermeneutics, taking note of the fact the latter is an ongoing response to and revision of the former, to the extent it seeks to construct a theory of reading that takes into account both the phenomenological and ontological dimensions of interpretation and understanding. The essay furthers identifies Cheng’s theory as a Eurotropic construct that sensitively represents (...) the Chinese philosophical worldview while strategically employing appropriate western analytical apparatuses. (shrink)

The review essay critically evaluates, synoptically presents, and admiringly celebrates Chung-ying Cheng latest work, The Primary Way: Philosophy of Yijing. It sees the book’s publication as an emblem of an intellectual jubilee – a half-centenary of scholarly lucubration and achievement in Chinese and comparative philosophy by Cheng, who was trained at Harvard in American pragmatism and analytic philosophy. The essay reveals why Cheng returns to the Yijing time and again. The principal reason is that this ancient classic, to his way (...) of thinking, offers us “the primary Way,” the anchoring normative criteria, perspectives, and values in a nutshell, whereby reality may be deciphered, discerned, and distinguished. To put it in metaphoric terms, the Yijing is the fount of Chinese philosophy. Whether interpreting Chinese thoughts in general or reading the Yijing in particular, Cheng brings western theoretical perspectives to bear on the understanding of the Chinese texts, which are, in and of themselves, replete with deep philosophical meanings. Cheng appropriates the Yijing for his own primary end, which is to disclose, via his onto-hermeneutic reading, a living, transformative ethico-moral philosophy that is onto-cosmologically alive and onto-generatively fecund: the primary Way. In doing so, he not only offers us innovative scholarship on the ancient classic but also opens up a theoretical and methodological frontier, an onto-hermeneutic one, where Chinese thought and philosophy may be explored anew. (shrink)

In light of developments in Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-hermeneutic philosophy during the years after his dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer took place in Heidelberg in May 2000, I explore several new issues related to Cheng’s understanding of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. First of all, I argue that Cheng has not addressed the vital concept of the “inner word” in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and point toward some of its fecund hermeneutic significance, especially with regard to its characterization of Sprache/Language and its dynamics (...) within human understanding. Secondly, I underscore the fact that Cheng have not understood the profound impact of Christian philosophical writings in Gadamer’s work, particularly in his claim that Christian ontology offers an alternative to ancient Greek ontologies that are “categorically significant.” Finally, I describe and analyze the development of a new theistic understanding of reality within Cheng’s post-dialogue publications, suggesting ways of critically advancing his claims in the light of Gadamer’s account of the “inner word” and the Christian ontological claims grounded in the logos-theology as presented in the prologue to the Gospel of John. (shrink)

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. In this article, first of all, I shall identify the strengths of these two aspects of the hermeneutic in the main development of hermeneutics in Western world. Heidegger and Gadamer take ontological receptivity as the source of the meaning of existence as well as the meaningfulness of texts. In my view such a form of receptivity has shaped the predominant paradigm of hermeneutic thinking in contemporary Europe or (...) West. Therefore, I move to the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy, namely the Yijing《易經》philosophy in Chinese tradition. In these two contrasts we shall not only notice the strong divergence between the two paradigms but come to see how receptivity and creativity of the hermeneutic could be divergently identified and located in concrete understanding of nature of reality and nature of the human being. (shrink)

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. In this article, first of all, I shall identify the strengths of these two aspects of the hermeneutic in the main development of hermeneutics in Western world. Heidegger and Gadamer take ontological receptivity as the source of the meaning of existence as well as the meaningfulness of texts. In my view such a form of receptivity has shaped the predominant paradigm of hermeneutic thinking in Contemporary Europe or (...) West. Therefore, I move to the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy, namely the Yijing《易經》 philosophy in Chinese tradition. In these two contrasts we shall not only notice the strong divergence between the two paradigms but come to see how receptivity and creativity of the hermeneutic could be divergently identified and located in concrete understanding of nature of reality and nature of the human being. (shrink)

In examining phenomenology as a base onto-generative hermeneutics I find the gradual movement from pure phenomenology in Husserl to an ontological phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty through Heidegger and Gadamer. I argue thus that there is an implicit connection between the phenomenological and the ontological. In order to bring out the desirable connection between the two we must have hermeneutic interpretation of one in terms of the other. This leads to the idea of onto-hermeneutic circle of phenomenology and ontology (...) based on the integration of the four phenomenologies which represent a wider comprehension and deeper intuition. It is in terms of this wider comprehension and deeper intuition of reality I introduce the Chinese notion “ben-ti 本體” as “onto-generative” as well as onto-phenomenological. I suggest five principles as constituting the basic formulation of such a hermeneutic system as both theory and methodology: Principle of comprehensive observation ; Principle of objective reference 1 ; Principle of perception, reflection, and memory ; Principle of intersubjective understanding and interpretation based on ; and Principle of practical end and action. (shrink)

The hermeneutical dimensions of Chinese philosophy from the Changes of Zhou through its Confucian, Daoist, and contemporary developments have been a creative inspirational source and guiding intellectual thread in the thought of Chung-ying Cheng. Cheng's extensive engagement with the Classic of Changes, its role in the formation of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its comparative interconnections with occidental philosophies, has disclosed its deep hermeneutical orientation. The Yijing encompasses processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of “images,” (...) or prototypical models that are “form-objects” or “process-events,” which performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and one self. I examine three issues in outline arising from Cheng's works in this situation: to what extent Chinese philosophy is hermeneutical with respect to modern European understandings of hermeneutics, and the possibility of the distinctive “onto-generative hermeneutics” that has been articulated for over forty years in the context of Chinese and Western thought in Cheng's prolific works concerning the Yijing. (shrink)

Chung-ying Cheng has been systematically expounding, expanding, and extending the insights and parameters of Western hermeneutics, producing a new understanding of Chinese philosophy by way of an onto-generative hermeneutics that unravels not only the epistemological workings of the ineluctable human process of interpreting and understanding, but also encapsulates the ontological conditions of which the process is an integral expression. His work functions as the bedrock of a philosophy of culture; the practical expression of Cheng's onto-generative (...) class='Hi'>hermeneutics, construed as a valid and consistent theory of culture, dismisses the ideality of meaning by subjecting all cultural realities to constant reinterpretation, based on a non-foundationalist conception of culture, while squarely rooted in the ontological source of creativity. (shrink)

Overcoming Onto-theology is a stunning collection of essays by Merold Westphal, one of America’s leading continental philosophers of religion, in which Westphal carefully explores the nature and the structure of a postmodern Christian philosophy. Written with characteristic clarity and charm, Westphal offers masterful studies of Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul and Augustine, the idea of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Derrida, and Nietzsche, all in the service of building his argument that postmodern thinking offers an indispensable tool for rethinking Christian (...) faith. A must read for every student and professor of continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion, Overcoming Onto-theology is an invaluable collection that brings together in one place fourteen provocative and lucid essays by one of the most important thinkers working in American philosophy today. (shrink)

Gadamer's linguistic turn has been criticized for eclipsing ontological grounds for truth by conflating the meaning of existence with history. Chung-ying Cheng's recognizes the nihilistic implications of a ceaseless quest for meaning that cannot but perpetually slip away and in response, discloses the cosmo-ontological grounds that Gadamer's interpretive acts presuppose. In so doing, Cheng initiates a theoretical appropriation and integration between Western philosophy and the Yijing tradition. However, Cheng also interprets Gadamer from a Heideggerian perspective without due regard to Plato. (...) When Gadamer's turn to language is understood in terms of his claim that Socrates removes the contradiction between the Pythagorean One and the many by studying the forms in language, then there is room in the said turn for temporalizing the meaning of Being in the dialogue form. It is through the dialectical interplay between the auditory and visual dispositions underlying orality and literacy, the two mediums in which human understanding is entangled for Gadamer, that the “creative” emerges in his thought from within and out of a prior historically effected consciousness that in the final analysis attests to the universality of Cheng's onto-generative hermeneutics. (shrink)

Gadamer’s linguistic turn has been criticized for eclipsing ontological grounds for truth by conflating the meaning of existence with history. Chung-ying Cheng’s recognizes the nihilistic implications of a ceaseless quest for meaning that cannot but perpetually slip away and in response, discloses the cosmo-ontological grounds that Gadamer’s interpretive acts presuppose. In so doing, Cheng initiates a theoretical appropriation and integration between Western philosophy and the Yijing tradition. However, Cheng also interprets Gadamer from a Heideggerian perspective without due regard to Plato. (...) When Gadamer’s turn to language is understood in terms of his claim that Socrates removes the contradiction between the Pythagorean One and the many by studying the forms in language, then there is room in the said turn for temporalizing the meaning of Being in the dialogue form. It is through the dialectical interplay between the auditory and visual dispositions underlying orality and literacy, the two mediums in which human understanding is entangled for Gadamer, that the “creative” emerges in his thought from within and out of a prior historically effected consciousness that in the final analysis attests to the universality of Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. (shrink)

Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutical studies of the foundational philosophical texts of China and the Western philosophical traditions expand the horizon of comparative interpretative analyses. The origin of onto-generative hermeneutics is multifaceted, ranging from the Yijing 《易經》 and the Neo-Confucian text of Zhang Zai, Ximing《西銘》 to the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and to the hermeneutics of Gadamer. Building on Cheng’s examination of the relation between phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the classical texts of Chinese philosophy, the present (...) discussion begins with an exploration of the origin and the continuation of phenomenology and hermeneutics in a comparative frame of reference of Chinese and Greek texts. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Two recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age (...) is ultimately not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing anything, which radically changes everything from a resented painful burden into a celebrated enhancement of freedom and (...) power. I show how he could have derived the idea from Schopenhauer, his own embarrassing past, by performing the technique on Schopenhauer. The same attitude toward past texts of recreating them according to one’s present interests and concerns simultaneously releases one’s present texts for future readers to impose their readings onto them, just as Zarathustra tells his followers not to follow him. Heidegger takes the idea up in a far more nuanced account than he is usually given credit for and applies it, among other places, to the history of philosophy. All philosophers say the same as it keeps returning. Derrida then recreates this as iterability, the deconstruction of the no/change dichotomy that Nietzsche began. (shrink)

My aim is to respond to the charge that Gadamer has not been specific enough about a positive account of Truth in Truth in Method. Rather than denying this charge, however, I turn to his writings on Plato in order to develop a more detailed and viable conception of Truth. At the same time, I also seek to show how Gadamer's Truth project relies on, but is not reducible to, Heidegger's notion of aletheia. Assessing Gadamer's Truth project in terms of (...) both Plato and Heidegger results in the claim that Gadamer replaces Heidegger's onto-hermeneutic view of Truth with an ethico-hermeneutic one. What is distinctive about Gadamer's ethico-hermeneutic notion of Truth is that it is characterized by a two-step movement of self away from self and toward another, followed by a Heimkehr. In other words, if we are going to speak about the radicality of Gadamer's Truth project, we must read it as validating the generalization of hermeneutics that is witnessed in its fundamental concern with the Truth of understanding beings, rather than true interpretations of texts as such. The paragon movement of Truth, for Gadamer, is the understanding that occurs with another in light of the Good. (shrink)

Confucius must have inspired his disciples to identify the process and structure of the human self and required self-cultivation in embodying and developing virtues within and practicing virtues as potential ways for its full self-realization. My discussion will be carried out through a conceptual and onto-hermeneutic analysis of the underlying self (ji) structure and its born nature and mind as content as deliberated in the Lunyu (the Analects). On the basis of this approach we will come to see how (...) a moral psychology of virtues is founded and how such a moral psychology has implications for moral onto-generative metaphysics and onto-generative ethics. (shrink)

Confucius must have inspired his disciples to identify the process and structure of the human self and required self-cultivation in embodying and developing virtues within and practicing virtues as potential ways for its full self-realization. My discussion will be carried out through a conceptual and onto-hermeneutic analysis of the underlying self structure and its born nature and mind as content as deliberated in the Lunyu. On the basis of this approach we will come to see how a moral psychology (...) of virtues is founded and how such a moral psychology has implications for moral onto-generative metaphysics and onto-generative ethics. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding (...) and topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

We describe some of the ways that the field of content analysis is being transformed in an Era of Big Data. We argue that content analysis, from its beginning, has been concerned with extracting the main meanings of a text and mapping those meanings onto the space of a textual corpus. In contrast, we suggest that the emergence of new styles of text mining tools is creating an opportunity to develop a different kind of content analysis that we describe (...) as a computational hermeneutics. Here the goal is to go beyond a mapping of the main meaning of a text to mimic the kinds of questions and concerns that have traditionally been the focus of a hermeneutically grounded close reading, a reading that focuses on what Kenneth Burke described as the poetic meanings of a text. We illustrate this approach by referring to our own work concerning the rhetorical character of US National Security Strategy documents. (shrink)

Theology after Heidegger must take into account history and language as constitutive elements in the pursuit of meaning. Quite often, this prompts a hurried flight from metaphysics to an embrace of an absence at the center of Christian narrativity. In this book, Conor Sweeney explores the "postmodern" critique of presence in the context of sacramental theology, engaging the thought of Louis-Marie Chauvet and Lieven Boeve. Chauvet is an influential postmodern theologian whose critique of the perceived onto-theological constitution of presence (...) in traditional sacramental theology has made big waves, while Boeve is part of a more recent generation of theologians who even more wholeheartedly embrace postmodern consequences for theology. Sweeney considers the extent to which postmodernism a la Heidegger upsets the hermeneutics of sacramentality, asking whether this requires us to renounce the search for a presence that by definition transcends us. Against both the fetishization of presence and absence, Sweeney argues that metaphysics has a properly sacramental basis, and that it is only through this reality that the dialectic of presence and absence can be transcended. The case is made for the full but restless signification of the mother's smile as the paradigm for genuine sacramental presence. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is now widely recognized as the most influential philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Until the late 1960's, this impact derived mainly from his early magnum opus, 1927's Being and Time. Many of this century's most significant Continental thinkers---including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Gadamer, Marcuse, Habermas, Bultmann, and Levinas---acknowledge profound conceptual debts to insights first elaborated in this text. But Being and Time was never finished, and Heidegger continued to extend, develop, and in some places revolutionize his own thinking for (...) another fifty years. This "later" Heidegger's prolific body of work has decisively influenced the next generation of Continental thinkers, shaping the concepts and concerns of important figures such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Blanchot, and Baudrillard. Despite this unparalleled impact, several basic aspects of Heidegger's later philosophy remain shrouded in mystery, confusion, and controversy. ;The End of Onto-Theology: Understanding Heidegger's Turn, Method, and Politics explains four central aspects of Heidegger's later thought: his controversial understanding of metaphysics as onto-theology, his famously recondite Kehre, his heretofore overlooked philosophical methodology, and his appalling misadventure with Nazism. ;Chapter I introduces the basic structure and unifying thesis of the text. Chapter II clarifies and periodizes Heidegger's mysterious Kehre or "turn," the philosophical transformation which distinguishes his "early" and "later" work. Chapter III uncovers another sense of Kehre, connecting this "turning" to Heidegger's infamous political misadventure. Chapter IV reconstructs Heidegger's famous Destruktion of the history of metaphysical foundationalism, showing how this "deconstruction" both disabused Heidegger of his own politically disastrous metaphysical ambition to recover a "fundamental ontology" and provides the necessary philosophical background for understanding Heidegger's later philosophy. Chapter V explicates Heidegger's later methodology, "ontohistorical placement through hermeneutic altercation," using the case of Nietzsche to demonstrate how Heidegger developed and deployed this method to situate other philosophers' contributions to the history of intelligibility. Chapter VI addresses the complex intersection of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche's nihilistic legacy with his failed bid to assume philosophical leadership of the National Socialist "revolution," isolating its philosophical sources and establishing the important philosophical lessons Heidegger learned from his "great political error.". (shrink)

This article compares two currents of thought that are in search of a philosophy beyond onto-theology: the differential ontology of Jean-Luc Nancy and the asubjective hermeneutical phenomenology of Jan Patočka. Both claim that the demise of traditional metaphysics culminates in a new understanding of the “world.” Their reflections on the primacy of the world, on freedom, and on meaning which exceeds rational understanding show remarkable similarities. The discussion of their differences results in a few critical remarks concerning ideas of (...) Nancy. (shrink)

The article considers a particular case of Richard Kearney's characteristic hermeneutical exploration of `the possible' as an `imaginative' way of casting light upon philosophical issues. This particular case is his recent hermeneutical and phenomenological consideration of `Otherness' in the context of philosophy of religion. This consideration, strongly influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida, is developed in two of his recent works Strangers, Gods and Monsters and The God Who May Be . The article examines how he (...) seeks to navigate an interpretation of divine otherness as an ethical appeal which escapes the dilemma of a God either so transcendent as to be anonymous or so immanent as to be a mere projection. It outlines how, rejecting onto-theology in favour of eschatology, Kearney envisages the divine as an ethically enabling possibility. This possibility, he claims, enables us to achieve, beyond our own intrinsic resources, an ethical order of justice and love through which the kingdom of God — the God Who May Be — is accomplished. There is a co-relativity between the divine as enabling possibility and humanity which accomplishes this possibility. It investigates the way in which Kearney seeks to legitimize, within a phenomenological frame of reference, an experiential affirmation of this conception of divine transcendence as eschatological possibility. It argues that this phenomenological consideration needs to be qualified and complemented by certain metaphysical considerations which Kearney disputes. Key Words: eschatology • ethics • God • hermeneutics • metaphysics • Otherness • phenomenology • possibility. (shrink)

This article argues that philosophical hermeneutics, despite its onto-logical character, can inform higher education teaching in a meaningful way. After discussing theoretical aspects of philosophical her-meneutics, focus will turn to pre-understandings and historically effected consciousness. These concepts will lead to hermeneutics’s transformative nature, with the notion of openness serving as a com-mon thread. The review of three further concepts of philosophical hermeneutics—hermeneutical experience, authentic dialogue, and Bildung—will provide insight into openness as a vanishing point without being (...) a culmination. Parallels to Mezirow’s method of trans-formative learning will be drawn and the concept of Bildung, central to philosophical hermeneutics, will be considered through the Hum-boldtian lens to better extract its practical implications, which lay beyond Gadamer’s theoretical focus. Finally, the last section will cement the applicative intent of the article by presenting concrete teaching practices that ????low from philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact (...) be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable. (shrink)