Using Disclosure to Build Coherence

This summer I have taken the time to stop reading Indian Philosophy, and turn West, to a collection of thinkers that I now see as crucial for my own practice of appreciating and articulating the worlds of medieval India with a growing conviction in its deep relevance for 21st century planet earth.

Here is one such thinker:


Hans-Georg Gadamer was deeply influenced by Heidegger and added a potent dose of historical awareness to H's picture of being-in-the-world. He also added an edge to H's critique of Kant by revealing the way human subjectivity is formed by one's own location in time and culture, problematizing the notion of an ahistorical, rational 'self' that is universally evident cross-culturally. Concomitantly, a new view of truth emerges from Gadamer's constellation of insights: by paying serious attention to the locatedness and particularity of our consciousness, we are able to disclose a picture of truth which is itself alive in the formation of our reality. This disclosure is more faithful to our cultural life than a Universal notion which is used to retrofit all the contours of our worlds into a pre-given framework.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a relativist. There are clearly aspects of human ideation, vision, and perspective taking from 'other' cultural spaces and epochs that I see as vividly integral and sincerely meaningful to our own contextualized endeavors. This is where Gadamer can help us start to build a trans-cultural, inter-traditional arena for universals that are generalizable yet built on a grounding in the actual features of the life-world(s) we inhabit. Using Gadamer, in a certain way against himself, I suggest we launch from his stance of allowing the irreducibility of our historical moment break down static overarching narratives and generate contextualized insights that can then be compiled into 'cumulus universals'. These insights constitute a compendium of living experiments on how to be; they are built from the strength of an in-depth understanding of our own culturally shaped vantage point and the appropriate insights needed to expose the unconscious and automatic immanent frame that forms it. Paradigm busting of a particularly potent strain.

This can helpfully be conceptualized as a practice of liberation anthropology put into service of a constructive theology -- imagining human metaphors built from the friction of real communities to collectively build a universal patchwork that actually resonates through the indigenous streams that form us.

Thanks Gadamer!