Hermeneutics as Epistemology

If you look back a previous posts, you can see that I have quite a bit of reading material to get through in this next phase of my life. The book I decided to start with has been Overcoming Onto-Theology, by Merold Westphal. The book examines objections that post-modern philosophy has with religion and vice versa. It is a collection of pure philosophy essays and lectures, and as such it has been a slow, though enjoyable, read. I am not a philosopher, nor have I ever really studied pure philosophy so I often read a page and then have to go online to get a crash course in certain thinkers or ideas. Though, because so many post-modern philosophers (like Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc...) are linguistic in nature, my Lit background, with all its emphasis on critical theory, does help some. In fact, I would say that very little of what I have read so far is something that I hadn't already worked with or thought about, directly or indirectly, through the study of literature, though it has been useful to hear someone address the issue more directly in itself instead of seeing the issue as it trickles down into other disciplines and modes of expression. 

One of the issues of particular importance to me lately is epistemology, the study and acquisition of knowledge. How do you know that what you believe, or know, is actually true? How can you say something is true? The availability and reliability of personal knowledge has always been a big deal to me. The senses can be deceived, so perception isn't a great way to go about it. The mind and emotions can be preconditioned, traumatized, and repressed, so intuition isn't super useful either. The list could go on.

I enjoyed the chapter in Westphal's book entitled "Hermeneutics as Epistemology." In it he explores the idea that we never actually see things as they are, we see things as they come to us, in the symbols and signs that we create to make order of our experience. We never experience a "thing" purely, it is always systematized into a sign. As such, our only mode of acquiring knowledge is by analyzing and interpreting these signs. Again, these ideas aren't new to me (linguistically, they are the basic building blocks of Deconstruction theory), but I still like the way he verbalizes them. Allow me to highlight string together some quotes I enjoyed.

"In summary, radical hermeneutics finds that "there is nothing outside the text" and this means both, epistemologically, that "being must always be conceptualized" and, ontologically, that "the thing itself is a sign." 

"Like signs, things essentially point to beyond themselves. We must abandon the search of the transcendental signified and, what is the same, the distinction between sign and signified. For there is no signified that would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign by failing to refer beyond itself. Things are not substances or atoms that stand alone. Their very being is constituted by their relations." 

[This theory] signifies our exile from sheer immediacy, pure presence. Texts as a veil that separates  from Truth as directly and fully present. Interpretation is what we do east of Eden, after the Fall, poor to the beatific vision. 

The task of interpretation is to retrieve the divine voice in the written word, to return as nearly as possible to the garden where truth is immediately present. The broken immediacy and the inevitable incompleteness of interpretation evoke nostalgia, and even guilt...[but we still dream of finding a truth that escapes the play and order of the sign]. 

"Hermeneutical traditions as an alternative to those epistemologies that seek to locate knowledge in some Alpha or Omega point beyond interpretation." 

I have struggled with this concept since college; not to understand it, but to assimilate it, to accept the possible ramifications. I think, in great part, my current crisis has to do with the fact that I have been suppressing and ignoring these ideas since first studying them back in the day. I have more to say on this, but I'll leave it for today.