Suprahermeneuticexpialidocious

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 24

Over the summer, the word curriculum had a bit of a viral moment. Suddenly, there were people all over TikTok telling you about their personal curriculum. The idea, it seems, is to grab a visually pleasing stack of books and tell us all about how these particular books are connected in some way that allows you to better yourself. In fact, here’s an explainer. But, the point is, I’m here for it.

I’m not entirely sure this is how you DIY a curriculum, but I’ll give it a shot. Photo by Meg Jenson on Unsplash

It doesn’t feel like it ought to be a flex to say that I’m all for anything that moves us closer to learning and further from scrolling; that I support lifelong learning shouldn’t ought to be a controversial take. Yet, at this moment, in kind of feels like it is. So, let me see if I can string some thoughts together.

I like learning. That’s where the title of this newsletter comes from. And I’ve been building curricula, both professional and personal, for a couple of decades now. (See: Learned 3.48 DIY MA and also Learned 8.3 Curriculum Vital amongst many others.) But at some point, for me, the journey stopped being about learning things and became more about learning as a philosophy, as a way of being curious about the world.

Being that can be understood is language.

—Truth and Method (1975), Hans-Georg Gadamer

What that means in practical terms is I quit worry about new facts and trivia and instead starting trying to feel my way through the intangible lay lines that bind everything relationally to everything else. And, again, I don’t just mean a chain of connections or list of canon events, I mean looking at Schrödinger’s dead-alive cat and asking, “Why not start with a mouse? What did ol’ Schrödinger have against cats, anyway?”

Okay, maybe that’s a little glib. The point I’m trying, and failing, to get to is that there is more to learning than the base ingestion of new material. The better part of learning means asking what something means, how that meaning is transmitted, and what the creator thought they were doing in making it — not because intention defines meaning, but because it’s one of the many lenses through which we keep meaning alive. In other words, looking at the semantic, pragmatic, and hermeneutic¹ aspects of our DIY curricula.

Still with me?

The trouble with semantics is that it too often assumes a fixed meaning. “Hello” just means “hello.” Only, anyone who’s ever watched David Tenant play The Doctor can tell you that’s not the case. Sometimes, “hello” means, “Well, this is new and interesting and has totally captured my attention.” In other words, the trouble with semantics is that it is inherently limited by what we’ve all accepted as the collective truth.

Pragmatics is not any better. Pragmatics tries to go beyond the limits of mere meaning by encoding each unit of meaning with an entire field of possible expressions of that meaning. To oversimplify an example, pragmatics insists that waving at someone means hello or goodbye when it may only have meant hello or goodbye in that specific moment between those two parties. At other times, waving might mean any of a thousand other things and we assign meaning as befits our personal experience, background, knowledge, and reading of the momentary context. We usually get it right. But not always.

And so we search for something else, a heuristic that lets us interpret both those set meanings and the possible expressions thereof and we land squarely on the practice and theory of hermeneutics. Was the person in the previous examples shouting “hello” and waving at us merely greeting us? Or were they trying to get our attention so they could sell us something? Maybe they were just obscuring what was happening behind them? Or maybe they were simply obfuscating the arising of the great old ones by momentarily distracting us?

But this isn’t just a one-sided interpretation. Hermeneutics² - with a capital H - developed as a dialogue between speaker and listener, author and reader. Classically, this was a formal stance, one used by theologians studying the Bible or by lawyers practicing law. In fact the word hermeneutics comes directly from a similar sounding Greek word that means to interpret or to translate. And that’s something we humans do innately, possibly even instinctively.

What I mean is, there are no easy answers and nothing is set in stone. Instead, every act of communication requires active interpretation to derive meaning from it. And while it is a natural skill inherent to every human, it is one that nevertheless needs practice and forming. We have to learn how to understand what we think is happening if we want to have any hope of allowing others to understand us.

If there is a single illustrative tome to accompany this essay it would be Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. In the book, Einstein’s, and the readers’, perhaps, perceptions of time are explicitly experimented with and upon coming to the conclusion that within the perception of time, it is experience and memory that allows us to shape how meaning is made and understood.

I’m not sure what tradition is being celebrated here but I’m reasonably sure it’s not the one Gadamer had in mind. Photo by Dibakar Roy on Unsplash

It’s a gorgeous, sometimes haunting work that demands both attention and interpretation. But I’ve already read it. Like a dozen times³. So, in the interest of building a curriculum for myself with the express idea that the works in it should invite interpretation and deep consideration, I’ve identified a couple of gaps in my cultural empire: I’ve never read Borges and I’ve never watched any of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films⁴.

So that’s my contribution to this particular trend - an open-admission of some stuff I ain’t read or seen. Stuff that, reportedly, is difficult to assign definitive meaning to, stuff that plays with expectations and meaning and how do we even begin to interpret that? Play along, let me know what’s on your personal curriculum, or just tell me why I’m wrong. There is, after all, always meaning to be found in a conversation.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Yes, I’m oversimplifying. A lot. Like a whole freaking lot. Go read a book for Hans-Georg’s sake.

2. Okay, my stair-stepping of semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics probably wouldn’t survive a decent literature review. But, thinking less academically and more holistically, they form a neat triangle for the act of learning. Or so I think anyway.

3. Ooooh. Much smart. So read.

4. Half of you are absolutely shocked about this. The other half of you are scratching your heads thinking, who? It’s okay. There’s room enough in this circus tent for all us little weirdos.