I don't feel I have worked out the
borders between 'knowing,' 'understanding,' and 'interpreting.' There probably
are no clear borders, but 'knowing' in general seems less related to the
hermeneutic circle. I know that x is the case. States of affairs. Or logical
implication and analytical truths. The things positivists like. The second act
of the mind, more generally speaking. The first act of the mind, conceiving
what some x is, clearly does involve the hermeneutic circle. Since so much of
it happens pre-reflectively, just living in the world (hinge beliefs), I think
Gadamer's Vor-urteile, or pre-understandings fits. But when trying to deepen
these concepts, I often use 'understanding' and 'interpretation'
interchangeably. And what to distinguish both from 'knowing.' I want to try to
sort that out.
Thesis
1
Knowing, understanding, and interpreting are
not three separate activities but three aspects of one and the same movement of
the mind. We can distinguish them, but in lived experience they constantly
overlap and depend on one another.
Thesis
2
Knowing is the act by which we say that
something is the case. It has the form of a judgment: “this is so.” It aims at
truth and tries to settle a question, at least for the moment.
Thesis
3
Understanding is the act by which we grasp
what something is. It is not primarily about truth or falsity, but about
meaning, structure, and relation. It deepens rather than settles.
Thesis
4
Interpretation is understanding made
explicit. It occurs when we try to say what something means, especially when
meaning is not obvious or when more than one reading/understanding is possible.
Thesis
5
Sometimes I use ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’
interchangeably because interpretation is understanding that has become conscious
and expressed in language. Not something essentially different.
Thesis
6
Understanding often happens before
reflection. We already live in a world we understand in a basic way. This
pre-understanding shapes everything we later think or say.
Thesis
7
What Wittgenstein understood as “hinge
beliefs” belong to this level of pre-understanding. They are not usually stated
or proved, but they make all knowing possible.
Thesis
8
Knowing depends on understanding. We cannot
judge that something is true unless we already have some grasp of what it is we
are judging. Factual statements presuppose agreement in concepts.
Thesis
9
The boundaries between knowing,
understanding, and interpreting are therefore not sharp. Each leads into the
others, and none can stand alone.
Thesis
10
There is a tension between the desire for
stable knowledge and the fact that all understanding is shaped by our situation
and history. Any adequate account must hold both together without reducing one
to the other.
Thesis
11
Knowing, understanding, and interpreting can
be related to conceiving, the first act of the mind. Conceiving is the
mind’s grasp of “what something is” without yet affirming or denying anything
about it. In this sense, conceiving corresponds most closely to understanding.
When we understand something, we have already conceived it in some way: we see
it as something. We do not yet say that it is true or false, but we have
formed a meaningful grasp of it. Knowing, by contrast, goes beyond conceiving.
It takes what has been conceived and affirms or denies something about it. When
I say “this is a tree” or “this action is unjust,” I am no longer merely
conceiving but judging. Thus, knowing depends on conceiving but is not
identical with it. Without some prior conception of “tree” or “justice,” no act
of knowing would be possible.
Thesis
12
Interpretation, in this light,
can be seen as the refinement and expansion of conceiving under conditions
where the initial conception is unclear, partial, or contested. When we
interpret, we are not starting from nothing; we are working with an already
given conception and trying to deepen or correct it. Interpretation therefore
belongs to the ongoing development of the first act of the mind, especially in
complex or ambiguous cases.
Thesis
13
Conceiving is never a simple or purely
immediate act. Even our first grasp of something is shaped by prior experience,
language, and expectations. What we conceive is already influenced by how we
have learned to see the world. In this sense, conceiving itself is not free
from the dynamics we have associated with understanding and interpretation.
Thesis
14 / Conclusion
All of this can be related to the hermeneutic
circle as described by Gadamer. The hermeneutic circle is the idea that
understanding always moves between parts and whole. We understand a part only
in light of the whole, but we understand the whole only through its parts. This
is not a problem to be eliminated but the very structure of understanding
itself. In more concrete terms, when we encounter something, whether a text, a
person, an event, we do not approach it without assumptions. We already have a
preliminary sense of what it is. This initial understanding guides how we
interpret particular details. As we attend to those details, our sense of the
whole may change. This revised whole then reshapes how we see the parts. The
movement continues in a circular, but not vicious, way.
Understanding is constituted by this
circular movement. It is never a simple, one-step grasp, but a process in which
meaning emerges through the interplay of part and whole. Interpretation is the
conscious working out of this process. When we interpret, we are actively
moving within the circle, testing our assumptions, revising them, and trying to
arrive at a more adequate understanding.
Knowing, within this framework, appears as
a moment where the movement of the circle is provisionally stabilized. We
arrive at a judgment and say: “this is what it means” or “this is the case.”
But this stability is never final. Further engagement with the parts or a
broader sense of the whole may lead us to revise what we thought we knew.
A simple illustration can make this
clearer. When reading a poem, we may begin with a vague sense of its mood. This
is our initial grasp of the whole. As we attend to individual lines and images,
we interpret them in light of that sense. But certain details may not fit, and
we adjust our sense of the whole. That new whole then changes how we read the
lines. In the end, we may arrive at a coherent interpretation and state what
the poem is about. Yet this “knowledge” remains open to revision as new aspects
come into view.
Or a person. We understand
someone through lived experience, interpret their actions in light of that
experience, and know certain facts about them. Yet the full reality of the
person always exceeds our grasp. Deeper understanding could, in principle,
transform what we think we know, but such complete understanding is never
available to us.
Aquinas
and the Acts of the Intellect
Aquinas distinguishes three acts of the
intellect: simple apprehension (conceiving, understanding), judgment, and
reasoning (logic). Understanding corresponds most closely to simple
apprehension, but in a deeper sense that includes lived and historically shaped
meaning. Knowing corresponds to judgment, where the mind affirms or denies
something as true. Interpretation lies between these two: it develops what has
been apprehended and prepares or revises what can be judged. It is not a
separate act in Aquinas, but can be understood as the unfolding of apprehension
under conditions of finitude. Reasoning then becomes the disciplined movement
from interpreted understanding toward stable knowledge.
Finite
and Absolute Knowledge
Absolute knowledge would involve complete
understanding, perfectly adequate concepts, and judgments that fully match
reality. Human knowing is of course finite. Our understanding is always
partial, our interpretations are revisable, and our knowledge depends on a
limited horizon. Understanding therefore remains open-ended, interpretation
provisional, and knowing dependent on what has been grasped so far. The gap
between appearance and reality cannot be fully closed for us, not because
reality is inaccessible, but because our grasp of it is never complete. We
truly know reality, but never exhaustively.
Metaphysics, understood as the translation
of reality into thought and language, unfolds through the same three moments:
understanding, interpretation, and knowing. First, reality must already be
understood in some basic way before any translation can begin. We live in a
world that already appears to us as meaningful: things show up as trees,
persons, causes, purposes, goods. This pre-reflective understanding is not
something we construct from scratch. It is the condition under which anything
can be thought or said at all. In this sense, metaphysics does not begin with
abstract theory, but with a lived familiarity with reality.
Second, interpretation enters when we try
to make this implicit understanding explicit. We begin to ask what these things
really are. What is a person? What is causality? What is being? At this point,
different interpretations become possible. We articulate, compare, refine, and
sometimes revise our initial grasp. Metaphysics, at this level, is not yet a
system of final truths, but an ongoing effort to say what is already, in some
sense, given in experience.
Third, knowing appears when we formulate
judgments about reality. We say: this is a substance, this is a cause, this is
good, this is true. These are attempts to fix meaning in propositions.
Metaphysical knowledge, in this sense, is the effort to state what is the case
at the most fundamental level. But this translation is never complete. Our
understanding of reality is always partial, our interpretations always shaped
by our situation, and our knowledge always dependent on what we have so far
been able to grasp. Reality always exceeds the concepts and propositions we use
to describe it. This means that metaphysics is not a finished system that
perfectly mirrors reality. It is a continuous movement in which reality is
gradually rendered into thought and language, without ever being fully captured
by them. But this does not entail that metaphysics is arbitrary or merely
subjective. The process is constrained by reality itself. Some interpretations
are better than others because they do greater justice to what is given. Some
judgments are true and others false. Translation here is not free invention,
but a disciplined responsiveness to what is.
Metaphysical thinking is no different in principle
than interpreting how a Bach fugue or a Beethoven piano sonata should be played
(interpreted, translated into sound). I would boldly assert that a great
organist and Bach. Glen Gould, it is said, Gould approaches Bach as if the
music were a structure to be made intelligible. If Gould emphasizes structure, András
Schiff emphasizes musical meaning as experienced, more speech-like, humane. Now
I can hear the difference between Gould and Schiff but only someone very-well
versed in music can make such judgments. Metaphysics is analogous. Plato, Aristotle,
Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger – these are interpreters and translators of Being
into thought and word. I believe, after spending much of my adult life with these
thinkers, I can make analogous judgments about them, though I would perhaps defer to certain others
even more qualified, i.e. wiser. There is nothing democratic about
interpretation / translation / understanding.
I conceive metaphysics is like translating a
rich and inexhaustible text. The text is reality itself. Our understanding is
our initial familiarity with its language. Interpretation is our attempt to
grasp its meaning more precisely. Knowing is our effort to state that meaning
in clear propositions. But no translation ever exhausts the original. Which
brings me back to the problem of finitude and knowledge. Because we are finite,
we never stand outside reality to compare our translation with the original in
a complete way. We are always already within the text we are trying to
translate. This is why the distinction between appearance and reality cannot be
fully secured from an external standpoint. And yet, it does not collapse,
because our translations can still be more or less faithful to what is. Thus
metaphysics becomes neither a closed system of absolute knowledge nor a free
play of interpretations, but a serious and ongoing attempt to let reality speak
within the limits of human understanding.
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