Yeah, that's a great question and my thinking is that one of the key elements is, in terms of my own reading of a lot of European philosophers, is that I read them through a lens of suspicion and scepticism, which is a natural way of hermeneutics for me. I think it's present in Ricoeur as well, where there is a certain element of scepticism and suspicion. As a matter of fact, there is a whole genre of the hermeneutics of suspicion and so forth. So, I tend to look at their writings from that perspective. But it's not just European writers. It's almost any written text. You can interrogate the text. You cannot interrogate the author, per se, because, in many cases, the author is dead. Ricoeur often says that the text is mute; that the author cannot be cannot be interrogated.
Most texts, as a rule, outlive their authors. So, the text is always in need of understanding and in need of explanation. These are two of Ricoeur's ubiquitous terms. But the bottom line is you cannot look at a text and really assume the intention of the text or the intention of the author. And so when I when I look at these texts, I often see what's lacking. But at the same time, try to see if there is any applicability or appropriation of this text to my own experience in life and so forth.
Hawkins: [00:19:04]
All right. Well, I was thinking more of basic linguistic problems. For instance, Hegel's Ph??nomenologie des Geistes is often translated as either the phenomenology of mind or spirit. And so, it becomes a problem around the word geist, which also translates to ghost. One thinks of poltergeist. You can read a couple of different translations of Hegel's work and you get slightly different variations of important words and phrases. All of the translations of the Bible have similar problems attached to translation.
Harris: [00:20:05]
I have had this argument in my discussions with biblical scholars and persons who teach Greek and Hebrew, and so forth. Part of my argument is that these languages are not necessarily original either. And, in theological studies [there's] interest in using the original language, let's say, of the Old Testament and the New Testament, which is pretty normal. But at the same time, I think that even those languages themselves, and the translations that emanate from them, are grounded in experience and grounded in culture. There is no absolute pure translation of any text, including biblical texts. Even the [biblical] translators had to figure out what was being said on the papyri and what was being said on these other arcane ways of writing and communicating.
Harris: [00:21:52]
So, while it's important for people to have knowledge of as many languages as possible, I personally, don't have that gift of other languages and translations. One of the phrases that comes back to me from Derrida is from his Monolingualism of the Other: I only have but one language and that language is not mine. That phrase from Derrida stuck with me because I could not help but think about the fact that language was extirpated and erased from Black consciousness as a part of the slave-ocracy. And you know, it was a part of the orientation to American society and culture to erase the language of the slaves. And so, I often say that even the spoken English that I have is a language that is not mine.
Hawkins: [00:23:26]
In the foreword of your highly regarded book, Beyond the Tyranny of the Text, Larry Bouchard cites the French philosopher and linguist Paul Ricoeur as the source of the title, and he quotes: "The sense of text is not behind the text, but it's relevant. It's not something hidden, but something disclosed." Can you explain that?
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