 I'm recording this episode on July 4th, a day where I can celebrate my freedom to read truth and method and try and make some sense of it. Happy Get American Independence Day. Everything I touch, with tenderness, alas, pricks like a bramble. It's a pretty poem, but do you understand it? The process of understanding a text like this is fairly involved if you think about it. The first time you hear or read it, each word carries multiple possible meanings, recontextualizing everything you've heard so far. When you've gotten through the whole thing, it's not like you hear the final word and immediately think, oh, well, now I get it. You roll it around in your head with a new idea of what it might be trying to say. You reflect on possible implications and significance, maybe revisiting individual words and considering why those words were chosen instead of others, how they fit with or emphasize certain vibes of the poem. Of course, there are other things that might play into that process of interpretation that aren't contained in the text itself. This is a translation of a haiku by a prolific 16th-century Japanese poet and Buddhist priest, Kobayashi Issa, widely regarded as one of the masters of the form. His mother died when he was very young, and he suffered numerous tragedies over the course of his life, including the loss of a wife and three children. All of these facts can color and change the meaning of his poem, giving us new insights and ways to think about it as we shift between different perspectives and consider it in new ways. Historical, biographical, literal, aesthetic. Importantly, none of these ways of looking at the poem is logically prior to or independent of any other. In the process of understanding, we cycle through them repeatedly, using insights from one to unlock or enrich another. Many philosophers who study meaning, understanding, and interpretation grouped under the philosophical category of hermeneutics, place special emphasis on this sort of alternating pattern of focus, the hermeneutic circle, a metaphor for how we cycle through various analytical perspectives again and again, using each new realization as a tool to gain further insight about what the poem might mean. This recursive view contrasts with the way many people think about interpretation, as a more linear process with a beginning and an end. You start from a bedrock of certainty, using whatever contextual information you have to eliminate any preconceptions or bias that might mislead you about the true meaning of the poem. This was written in the 16th century, so Bramble is probably not referring to the Donkey Kong Country 3 character. After sanitizing your thought process of these potentially misleading subjective influences, you methodically build up an interpretation, step by justified step, until you have fully recovered the author's intended meaning, a reference solidly grounded in some undeniable objective foundation. That sounds plausible, but much of the philosophical work that led to the development of the hermeneutic circle stresses how impossible it is to start an interpretive process from some truly objective point devoid of any preconceptions, because those preconceptions are baked into the act of reasoning itself. Like tick language. Skipping over the fact that this is someone's translation of ISSA, in the process of interpreting this poem in the first place, you have to understand English. English is not just some inert interchangeable vehicle of ISSA's meaning. Like you can't just plug the poem into Google Translate and switch what language it's in without affecting the message. Each language has its own specific character and conveys meaning in different ways. English words have a certain rhythm and flavor. There are certain things that English speakers pay attention to that speakers of other languages would ignore, and vice versa. Odds are, if you speak English, your whole manner of thought and the concepts you use to parse English text are, in some important sense, influenced by the linguistic traditions of English-speaking people. We haven't even started reading yet, but even with a herculean effort to sanitize our interpretation of anything the author might not have intended, we're going to be interpreting his work in English, with all the interpretive baggage that entails. What's more, really understanding ISSA requires reaching out over centuries and across substantial cultural and biographical divides. It's remarkable that we can understand him in any capacity, but I have never been a 16th century Japanese master poet who has lived a life of tragic loss. And no matter how hard I try to get into that headspace, all I'm really doing is imagining myself and what I think I'd feel in his place. Trying to backfill the text with my own framework of understanding to find some interpretation of that text that means something to me. I've never lost a wife and three children. I've had some pets pass away. I can call on that experience to try and wrap my head around the sort of circumstances that compelled ISSA to write these words, but any meaning I can find there is always going to be in the language of my own understanding of the world. A foundationalist might be excused for feeling helpless in the face of that disconnect. We can look up the definitions of words in research historical contexts all day long to try and start from somewhere objective, but we're never going to be able to define an algorithm by which any interpreter can reconstruct the meaning of the text. It's inevitably going to be different for every person, regardless of how diligently they work to avoid polluting it with their preconceptions. In contrast, the hermeneutic circle doesn't get bent out of shape about that stuff. We start from somewhere with all our mental and emotional baggage in tow, recognizing that baggage may bias us unfairly, but is necessary to bootstrap ourselves into some initial understanding of whatever we're reading. After we've formed a first impression, we continuously refine it with an eye towards enriching, clarifying, and uncovering new meaning, using a sort of triangulation between different perspectives to show us where our initial assumptions might be leading us astray and revising them if necessary. Now, this is all fascinating theory about different approaches to literary analysis of a very metaphor-laden poem, but while hermeneutics was initially developed in the context of textual interpretation, philosophers have found these ideas to be a powerful way of thinking about how we interpret everything. Paintings, music, history, code. Take the interpretation of scientific findings. A foundationalist might approach a scientist and say, look, we have to eliminate all possible sources of bias. Start from a place of absolute certainty and build our understanding of this phenomenon from there. We're going to need control groups, double-blind studies, independent peer review of what? What is it? I'm studying the migration patterns of butterflies. Someone who's more familiar with hermeneutics might suggest that no matter how much data you pile up in one place, no matter how much you control for sources of bias and measurement, the translation of that data into an understanding of the universe is always going to be colored by the interpreter and their particular mental framework. One person looks at the butterfly migration data and sees an ancient majestic journey of thousands of miles. Another sees a snapshot of an ecology slowly corroding as the global climate changes. Someone else sees hundreds of hours of scientific labor wasted on bugs. These interpretations are all valid in their subjective contexts, but none are intrinsic to the data. You're not going to be able to reconstruct any paper's discussion section just by looking at the numbers, but you can use those numbers in your own hermeneutic circle, considering them through different lenses and building a deeper and more nuanced interpretation with them in mind. Rather than relying on the diligence of the researcher to cleanse the data of any conceivable bias, we consider the context of that data. Why it was collected? Why the researcher might want to tell a particular person about it? Why it has come to your attention out of the hundreds of papers published every day? Integrating each of those factors into a deeper and deeper understanding of what's really going on. Of course, depending on who you ask, that process is potentially endless and we're all very busy people. Maybe the meaning you can construct out of a book of poetry isn't worth the effort and time that you'd need to exert pacing around the hermeneutic circle but maybe you've only ever thought of it as a foundational exercise to recover the author's original meaning and we get more out of it with this new lens. Everything I touch with tenderness, alas, pricks like a bramble. What sort of meaning do you get out of Issa's poem? Do you find the hermeneutic circle to be a more compelling approach to interpretation than a foundational one? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to above all subscribe, watch, share, and don't stop dunking.