Mediating Humanities and Natural Sciences

Forthcoming: Rendezvous: Journal of Arts and Letters Vol. 43 no. 1-2 Mediating the Humanities and Sciences: Justifying Feminist Positional Epistemology in Light of Gadamer’s Visual and Auditory Dialectic by Andrew Fuyarchuk [email protected] E. O. Wilson and E. Slingerland have tabled arguments from the side of the natural sciences about how to mediate between the latter and the humanities and thereby curtail the drift in the humanities toward epistemological insignificance. However, neither scholar’s theory for mediation takes into account the irreducible uniqueness of the mode of cognition fitted to the humanities. This suggests there is a dimension of their thinking that inclines toward the possibility of integration that is simultaneously being suppressed. That dimension vindicated by both impasses their arguments generate and by statements they make is a particular ethos or disposition prefigured in the insights of Gadamer into the role of visual and auditory orientations for determining how beings are understood in the humanities and sciences. 1 Yet the dialectical interplay between these two dispositions and corresponding modes of learning to which his phenomenology of the senses of hearing and seeing point is also called up short by feminist philosophers of political location. This in turn justifies incorporating those feminist philosophies into both courses and departments of learning that seek a unity of understanding. H.-G. Gadamer’s objection to the natural sciences is that they discredit inquiries into the existential conditions of their truth claims by limiting knowledge to propositions and the logical relations between them. This cannot but become an impediment to finding common ground among positions that are reputed to be contrary to one another such as we find represented in the humanities and natural sciences. The former attend to broadening the scope and depth of 1 understanding of meaning, and the latter to causal explanations about entities. In the past few decades efforts to unite these two modes of learning and cognition have surfaced from the side of the natural sciences. In Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson writes: For centuries consilience has been the mother’s milk of the natural sciences. Now it is wholly accepted by the brain sciences and evolutionary biology, the disciplines best poised to serve in turn as bridges to the social sciences and humanities. There is abundant evidence to support and none absolutely to refute the proposition that consilient explanations are congenial to the entirety of the great branches of learning (291). According to Wilson, theories and explanations in the natural sciences have been taking into account evidence from many sources for centuries. While this may have been greeted with apprehension in the past by natural scientists, advances in the brain sciences (cognitive science) and evolutionary biology have begun to close the divide between the sciences and above all between them and the humanities. For this reason, he believes that the contemporary age is unique. As Wilson says, “There has never been a better time for collaboration between scientists and philosophers, especially where they meet in the borderlands between biology, the social sciences, and the humanities” (11). It is not clear however that the “borderland” at which the sciences and humanities might meet is as receptive to the humanities as his optimism about the sciences revitalizing the liberal arts in higher education would lead the reader to believe (269). Wilson speaks from the side of the natural sciences and, therefore, measures the findings and insights of historians and philosophers for instance according to standards of scientific credibility. This is evident in the esteem he expresses for what he calls the “Ionian Enchantment,” which he describes being the idea “that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws” (4). According to him, everything from “the birth of the stars to the workings of social institutions” is reducible to laws of physics (291). These valuations are not atypical of a positivist and could have been uttered by either August Comte or J.S. Mill. Not 2 unlike Mill whose defense of individual liberties does not sit well with his applauding the stages in Comte’s idea of history culminating in an age of positivism, the goals Wilson sets for “consilience” to unite diverse forms of inquiry does not square with his allegiance to the “Ionian Enchantment.” That is not to say that the project to unite the great branches of learning is impossible, but rather that he is insufficiently reflective about the conditions of his quest for unity of knowledge. Another instance of the conundrum of reaching for unification between the humanities and sciences with a method that undermines this very aim comes by way of E. Slingerland. In contrast to Wilson who does not reflect upon the conditions for his epistemic claims, in What Science offers the Humanities, Slingerland is explicit about the anthropological terms in which to address the problem. He sides with Paul Bloom’s thesis in Descartes’ Baby that we have evolved to be Cartesian dualists. 2 This does not mean that we are a composite of immaterial mind and extended matter/body and instead, that we have evolved to believe it and that this belief now shapes our encounter with the world. Two examples suffice to make his point. On the one hand, the “life-world” of experiences teaches him to believe that the sun orbits the earth; on the other hand, he knows that the solar system is geocentric (10). Similarly, although he continues to experience his daughter as “Anne,” he also knows that she is a bundle of D.N.A. We are trapped in somewhat of a paradox and live in a bifurcated world. This acknowledgement of the human condition by him bodes well for his project to integrate the humanities and sciences with one another. Slingerland puts forward “vertical integration” as a method by which to harmonize the two worlds; the experience of meaning in day to day life and rational-scientific knowledge about it. He claims of his method that it “involves a balancing act that serves as a testament to our 3 human ability to hold multiple, mutually contradictory perspectives in our minds at once” (293). However, like Wilson, he undermines this possibility by (1) defining the humanities according to epistemic standards of the scientific method and (2) treating the humanities as the handmaids of science. With respect to the first, Slingerland specifies that the humanities are concerned with “Verstehen . . . the mysterious process by which one human mind grasps the product of another human mind” (226). It would not be inaccurate to infer that he is thinking about Gadamer’s notion of “common ground.” For Slingerland, this ground of understanding between people is mysterious because he believes that experience belongs to people’s inner private lives. Endeavors to justify knowledge on those bases cannot but yield to human caprice and fancy. This trivialization of hermeneutics and by implication its legal and theological history and practices, however, is a direct function of his natural scientific perspective. “Vertical Integration,” therefore, does not, as he claims, demand much of a “balancing act” between contradictory perspectives. This is above all evident in the role to which he consigns the humanities in the progress of “pragmatic realism.” According to Slingerland, pragmatic realism “represents precisely the alternative story that we in the humanities have been looking for, and one that takes seriously the suite of intuitions that make up human common sense” (147). The suite of intuitions he has in mind refers to unfounded beliefs about the world. The humanities are replete with them, e.g., the soul is immortal and human beings are “god-like.” These unfounded intuitions are nevertheless useful because they act as hypotheses to test against the facts. Given enough time, the sciences ought to correct false beliefs about the world generated by “verstehen” and in so doing select for individuals to survive who do not routinely mistake private mental experiences for reality and instead, are capable of modifying their beliefs in light of the facts. According to Slingerland, this experimental approach to the acquisition of knowledge has played 4 a role in the survival of Homo sapiens. His pragmatic argument for purging the universities of humanities that are measured by the yardstick of scientific credibility is backed by the theory of evolution. Slingerland’s and Wilson’s attempt to reconcile the humanities and sciences with one another is not feasible because they approach the issue from the perspective of the natural sciences alone. Their intention to mediate between the two modes of learning is a smoke screen for the incremental erosion of the uniqueness of the humanities at the university in the name of epistemic standards that belong to another discipline. Gadamer witnessed this development during the rise of logical positivism in the early 20th century. His response was typical of a philosopher whose ear for nuances of meaning discerns inconsistencies in an argument the explanation of which reveals unacknowledged prejudices. In keeping with this approach, upon a closer examination of their language, Wilson’s and Slingerland’s aim to unite knowledge alludes to, indeed requires, an understanding of existential conditions that dovetail with what I have dubbed Gadamer’s dialectic of stance. Wilson’s prologue to The Future of Life (2002) is a tribute to Henry Thoreau and concludes with a “tribute to protest groups” whose wisdom, he says, “is deeper than that of many of the power brokers they oppose” (188-189). In the Prologue to The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) he sees in Paul Gauguin’s painting “D’ou Verrons Nous/ Que Sommes Nous/Ou Allons Nous” what he saw in Thoreau—a retreat from the cacophony of urban life into the wilderness (Walden Pond) and primitive tribal world (of Tahiti) in order to perceive there the essential facts that could unite life. This suggests that there is an experience of beauty in art and nature that is not wholly subjective, and on the contrary, provides the grounds for a universality of understanding. 5 Slingerland inadvertently inclines in the same direction as Wilson toward a non-scientific basis for science. On the one hand, he embraces the contemporary cognitive scientific position that the mind is embodied. Once this is granted, objectivity in the sense of a “god’s eye point of view,” is not feasible. How then is objectivity possible? He reverts to common sense pragmatic realism, sides with Nancy Cartwright and argues for “the objectivity of local knowledge.” 3 By this he means that such “objectivity” can be proven (or inferred) from experimenting with and learning from experience over the course of time, e.g., balls fall down when dropped. Experience thus convinces the mind that facts can exist without as he says, “committing us to a God’s ideal of objective knowledge.” But to what extent does his a posteriori argument for “local objectivity” presuppose the a priori argument he rejects? The experiments with experience that he believes yield “local objectivity” or an encounter with brutish Searlean facts, as he puts it, presuppose the knower is not a participant to the construction of knowledge, and instead stands over and against phenomena from a distance at which the latter can be objectified. Consider his words, “cognitive science has created an intellectual environment where bracketing our human predisposition toward dualism may finally be a real, rather than merely notional, possibility for us” (What Science offers the Humanities 10). His language about “bracketing” disposition suggests a predilection for the isolated transcendental ego of a Husserlian phenomenological reduction. The route out of this conundrum of both denying yet presupposing a mind independent of the body is for Slingerland to consider the full implications of an embodied mind for epistemology; namely, that objectivity in the natural sciences is itself a function of a particular way of comporting ourselves toward entities that can be modified, corrected and challenged from other positions, for instance, from one attuned to the underlying assumptions and conditions of an argument or opinion. 4 6 Wilson’s love of the arts and nature and the ramifications of the mind being embodied for Slingerland’s concept of objectivity attest to another ground for achieving a unity of knowledge than the natural sciences and propositional reasoning. This ground has been opened up by Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein; by Gadamer’s surpassing him by prioritizing hearing over sight and thereby enabling the circularity of understanding. 5 In contrast to the individuating projection toward death in Being and Time, from the time of his early studies on Plato in the 1930’s and 40’s to The Enigma of Health in 1993 Gadamer’s work is replete with references to harmony, equilibrium, balance, symmetry of opposites such as the one and the many, limited and unlimited expressed above all in the ethic of phronesis that the art of interpretation is intended to cultivate. What then is the nature of the poles that hermeneutics strives to balance with one another? Perhaps the most pertinent division within which Gadamer lived that applies to the task at hand is between the humanities and sciences. Gadamer was vexed by the extent to which the humanities were being made to conform to standards of scientism. He feared that they would, as evinced by the arguments of Wilson and Slingerland, become increasingly marginalized in the wake of the rise of a technological society. His reply was to revive the importance of self-understanding, which for him is formed through Bildung, to the truth of a truth claim (or its conditions). This entailed a return to the ancient Greeks. In contrast to the scientific method that seeks to divest quality of character from the process of acquiring knowledge, the Greeks believed that ethos, temperament, or the soul’s orientation is prior to and conditions the truth-value of epistemic claims. While ethos might well refer to the four cardinal virtues, for a phenomenologist ethos is above all a perceptual way of relating toward beings. As Heidegger is prone to point out, nous is aisthesis. This is evident in Gadamer’s essay, “Theory, Technology and Praxis.” Therein he quotes Galileo in support of the 7 position that the kind of making in which modern science is entangled depends on a mental projection (5). Mental projection of what an entity is in advance of its appearance is a function of a visual orientation toward the world for which he is critical of E. Husserl. Gadamer explains that he projected an “idealized world of exact scientific experience into original experience of the world, in that he makes perception, as something directed toward merely external physical appearances, the basis of other experiences” (Truth and Method 342). This Gadamer contrasts with being open to others as “Thou” and not “it”—“anyone who listens is fundamentally open” (355). In short, sight underlines the spectator standpoint toward beings. In this way, Gadamer follows Heidegger who had decided from his reading of Plato’s philosophy that ideas are thrown in advance of an appearing appearance as a standard against which to determine what something is. Consequently, it is not only the scientific method that defines the modern age, but in addition the primacy of a visual relation toward objects of knowledge that dovetails with the Toronto School’s insights into the habits of mind nurtured by print technology. 6 The tendency of sight to stabilize movement in a form detached from “this thing here” in order to explain what the latter is, which Heidegger detected in Plato’s theory of ideas (idein – to see) and resurfaces in Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a perceptual disposition that is coordinate with a mode of cognition formed by a reading culture. According to Walter Ong, it was the invention of writing and later print-technology (an extension of sight) as the medium through which to interpret and understand beings that formed the logical mentality. After citing his argument, Jim Cheney and Anthony Weston state conclusively, “The written word conspires with the visual metaphor to turn the world into a passive object for human knowledge and to focus our attention on language as a sign system primarily designed to encode beliefs” (121).7 The written word as the medium with which to interpret and experience the world pre-dates yet is commensurate with 8 the scientific logical mentality. The common ground between them is the metaphor of sight for the acquisition of knowledge, e.g., “I see the light,” “enlightened.” Gadamer’s cross-over with the Toronto school however lies not only with the role of vision in defining the age of reason. In addition, he agrees with them on the extent to which a mono-logical reading culture and related objectification of phenomena has displaced understanding beings from the side of beings, the appearing appearance of phenomenon (“howbeing”) opened up by an auditory disposition. Central to Gadamer’s modeling interpretation of a text on a conversation is his urging his readers to exercise their “inner ear” and hone the capacity to hear the voice of the other.8 Consider that in “Intuition and Vividness,” Gadamer distinguishes intuition yoked to epistemology from intuition yoked to language with a view to reconfiguring what the imagination does in Kant’s Third Critique.9 Whereas sight produces a representation whose accuracy is measured by reproducibility, he explains that there “is a kind of self-giving intuition . . . it is much closer to a restless flux of images that accompanies an understanding of the text, but does not finally become a stable intuition, as some kind of result” (“Intuition and Vividness” 163). He is referring to an auditory intuition. In contrast to the seer who occupies the center of a field of vision,10 sound surrounds the hearer who does not define what falls within their range of perception and instead, is affected by and follows it. Relative to the visual, the auditory disposition is open, receptive, a channel to the emotions and movement. These two forms of intuition as Gadamer refers to them represent distinct ways of relating to the world on par with the position of the spectator and participant and yield outcomes that tend to be contrary to one another. Whereas sight whether through the printed word or visual-arts is constrained by both its representative function (that implies truth as correspondence) and as Gadamer says elsewhere, by the intractability of matter (“Poetry and Mimesis” 119), hearing through tonal 9 affinities or consonance and rhythm is prized by him for being analogous to a living organism, i.e., a self-unfolding unity that does not separate and instead, fuses sound and sense “in perfect equilibrium” (“Aesthetic and Religious Experience” 146) ; hence his regard for W. Dilthey whose favorite metaphor for an organism was a melody (“Hermeneutic Access to the Beginning” 23). The esteem in which Gadamer held music, that is to say musiké including poetry and dance for its capacity to disclose truths of experience that is beyond the means of the visual arts constrained as they are by the necessity to stabilize the movements of life in a form, carries over into his understanding of the dialectical structure of the dialogue form. When thought about within the context of the living language, the event of understanding, that Gadamer says is a “ringing true” and “pure tone of an original sensation” calls to mind the One, hen, arche or principle of a Pythagorean cosmology that runs through all things, i.e., the many or unlimited. The interplay between them defines not only the order of the cosmos, but in addition forms the ethos of speakers. That is to say, when speakers are attuned to one another’s voices, or hearken to as in recollect the common ground between them, which in speech is a tonal resonance or affinity that each voice produces in unison yet belongs to neither, then the conditions are in place for the thing itself to announce itself in language (in the middle voice). Understanding the topic at hand (die Sache) depends on hearing from an ontologically distinct auditory disposition (gehören) the hidden/inner word that holds the conversation together. By attempting to discern the voice of the other in a written work Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics cannot but take into account and strive to integrate and balance with one another the visual (distanced observer) and the auditory (participant to understanding) modes of perception and cognition. This is not incidental to sorting out how to relate the humanities and sciences to one another. The modern scientific mentality is intensified by using print technology 10 as a medium for understanding and the humanities, by a re-introduction of a listeningparticipatory temperament to a reading culture. For Gadamer, the two departments of learning are in a dialectical interplay with one another that is analogous to one and the same knower shifting between the visual and auditory dispositions. Stated otherwise, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics reconfigures the tension in Wilson’s and Slingerland’s thinking between nonscientific aims for unity and a method fit for analyzing discrete objects of knowledge by shifting the angle of interpretation from propositions alone (presupposing mind independent of the body) to a visual-scientific and auditory-participatory-open stance toward beings/entities (presupposing an embodied mind). The integration of the sciences and humanities thus depends on striking a balance or mean between these two dispositions exemplified by Gadamer in his treatment of the medical arts in The Enigma of Health (1993). Lorraine Code writes of that book, “Gadamer speaks of a balance between science and art in medical knowledge, thereby refusing to participate in a forced ‘science or art’ choice. In his insistence that all knowledge . . . is achieved in cooperation between observation and interpretation, science and art, he is deeply critical of orthodox positivism” (Ecological Thinking 87). What Code presupposes and has been argued for here is that their cooperation depends on the knower’s disposition and related capacity to think a contradiction expressed for Gadamer in the art of tact.11 Gadamer’s dialectic of stance explains how to coordinate understanding and causal explanations with one another. By reframing the way in which to think about the problem of consilience and vertical integration from epistemology to perceptual dispositions/ethos, it is possible to find common ground between the two departments of learning while also holding them apart (or respecting their distinctness). Tact is the middle medium in his dialectic. Tact is the art of groping for unity. It does not have rules. It is acquired during the course of living in 11 circumstances ridden by tensions between allegedly mutually exclusive positions. However, not every social location within a “social imaginary” is equally open to being tested by points of view contrary to its own and by implication hones the capacity to reconcile opposites with one another.12 In general, those in a privileged and for that reason non-self critical location are less likely to be challenged by values and priorities from people who experience a significantly different life-world. Having been groomed in a culture that clones itself by reproducing the same pedigree, the intellectual elite are less likely than those in a politically subordinate or marginal position relative to a social imaginary such as fieldworkers, artists, women and Indigenous Peoples, to live in different worldviews. Not only do women in general occupy a social location in which they are compelled to negotiate common ground with an oppressor, they are also habituated to experiencing the practical consequences of instituted forms of knowledge and on that basis understand both its operating assumptions and limits. However, it is not clear that Gadamer understood the relevance of socio-political locations to hermeneutics. This has been pointed out by Lorraine Code. 13 For purposes of mediating between the humanities and sciences the upshot is that Gadamer’s account of the auditory disposition and capacity to weave harmony between opposites, i.e., tact is incomplete. In order to compensate for this deficiency, I defer to the research of feminist philosophers and argue that while there is scope in his philosophy for a politics of epistemic location according to which he would be critical of the extent to which the social structures he inhabits generate epistemic ignorance, he does not acknowledge or apply a politics of epistemic location. This shortcoming in his hermeneutics vindicates the importance of feminist philosophy to mediating between the humanities and sciences and by implication, justifies incorporating feminist positional epistemology into their curriculums. 12 Silja Freudenberger acknowledges that Gadamer allows for different voices, different starting points for interpretation (“The Hermeneutic Conversation as Epistemological Model” 261-262). Yet she is also critical of him for maintaining a unique regard for the Western tradition and authority (267-268). These two characteristics of his work attest to there being a discrepancy in Gadamer’s philosophy between speech and deed to which Catherine Zuckert alerts the reader. In “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus” (1978) Gadamer explains in what "the methodological problem" in reading Plato’s dialogues consists as follows: “We must establish the philosophical significance of the scene, the setting of the dialogues, or the relationship of the speaker to what is spoken, of evolving meaning as it unfolds in live discussion” (159). Gadamer’s acknowledging the relevance of historically effected consciousness, hermeneutical situation, the development of character and drama to interpreting Plato's dialogues is however not applied. Zuckert explains that Gadamer, “often violates his own strictures about the need to read the dialogues as discrete works or wholes in which the character of the particular participants must be related to the specific setting and action. He does not pay any attention to the difference between Plato’s philosophical spokesmen (Parmenides, Socrates, Timeaus, the Eleatic Stranger, and the Athenian Stranger) or to the dramatic dating and setting of the dialogues” (“Hermeneutics in Practice: Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy” 219-220). Gadamer’s nodding in the direction of listening to the other as other and then turning a deaf ear toward them is indicative of constraints on his life of inquiry about which he was not fully aware. This suggests that he has more of an affinity for a mono-logic reading culture that tends to detach interpretation from the life-world than he would lead the reader to believe. For some feminists, this is because his thought is conditioned by an androcentric social milieu. 13 Gadamer's dialectic of stance shifts the question of mediating between the humanities and sciences from epistemology to ethics, but only slightly toward sociologies of epistemic knowing. He partakes in the very logocentrism of which he is also critical. Contrary to his intentions, he presupposes, in the words of Code that “uniformity among knowledge subjects and among objects of knowledge, once they are extracted from the messiness of situation and circumstance” (Ecological Thinking 11). He assumes that thought can be epistemologically credible without taking into account the concrete political and social context in which it is framed. For this reason, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics might well include what Linda Alcoff calls hermeneutic injustice in the sense of being unaware or ignorant of voices that do not conform to a preconceived idea about the criteria for a dialogue (“Epistemic Identities” 13). Hence, the equilibrium and reciprocity between reply and address that animates a conversation for Gadamer, presupposes equality of socio-political locations. The common ground between speakers is effectively formed by the male-centered status quo. Given this shortcoming, it makes sense to incorporate a feminist philosophy of epistemic location into the curriculums of the humanities and sciences not in order to repeat Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s antipathy toward the positive sciences, but in order to alert scholars to the limits of their gendered reasoning skills. This might in addition entail democratizing epistemic practices, as argued for by Code in Ecological Thinking, since it is by including the voices of those most adversely affected by the pretense toward gender neutrality in the humanities and sciences that their excesses are checked and corrected. In the true spirit of critique a listening consciousness might be formed at the academy that is fit to find creative ways in which to build unity out of differences. The survival of the humanities at the university would seem to depend on it. 14 In conclusion, Slingerland’s “vertical integration” cannot be the basis for mediating between the two modes of inquiry on account of suppressing the conditions for knowledge. His reasoning is entangled in propositions. Nevertheless, his very drive for unity of knowledge, like that of Wilson, stems from an auditory and participatory disposition in dialectical interplay with the visual-scientific. Gadamer detects this movement in the very art of interpretation. He models interpretation on a conversation in order to let the ideas in written form speak for themselves. This entails honing a capacity to hear the meaning or rather relations between gaps/spaces in words. However, upon closer examination it is clear that he does not reflect on the influence of his socio-political location on his thought. He does not have a theory of power. 14 For this reason, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not completely free of being determined by the method to which he objects. Like the positive sciences he thinks within the orbit of a classical concept of objectivity or “god’s eye point of view.” Consequently, his argument for a dialectical interplay between orientations typical of the humanities and natural sciences is incomplete and beckons reflection on the extent to which the prejudices of hermeneuts are embedded not only in prior understandings or ideas, but also in social structures. This possibility is opened up by feminist positional epistemologies. The endeavor to mediate between opposing sides of a question and in so doing create the stress and pressure from out of which creative possibilities emerge requires the application of democratic epistemological practices argued for by Code in “ecological thinking.” Works Cited Linda Martin Alcoff, “Epistemic Identities.” Episteme: A Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 7.2 (2010): 128-137. Print. Bloom, Paul. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What makes Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Print. 15 Cartwright, Nancy. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print. Cheney, Jim, and Anthony Weston. “Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette: Toward an Ethics-Based Epistemology.” Environmental Ethics: an Interdisciplinary Journal Dedicated to the Philosophical Aspects of Environmental Problems 21. 2 (1999): 115134. Print. Code, Lorraine. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. −−−. “Why Feminists do not Read Gadamer.” Feminist Interpretations of Gadamer. Ed. L. Code. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, 1-38. Print. Freudenberger, Silja. “The Hermeneutic Conversation as Epistemological Model.” Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed. Lorraine Code. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, 259-284. Print. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timeaus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Ttrans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, 156-193. Print. −−−. “Aesthetic and Religious Experience.” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 140-153. Print. −−−. “Intuition and Vividness.” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 155-170. Print. −−−. “Poetry and Mimesis.” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 116-122. Print. −−−. “Hermeneutic Access to the Beginning.” The Beginning of Philosophy. Trans. Rod Coltman. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1993, 19-32. Print. −−−. “Theory, Technology, Praxis.” The Enigma of Health: the Art of Healing in the Scientific Age. Trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 1-30. Print. nd −−−. Truth and Method. 2 revised ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Print. Havelock, Eric. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Print. Jonas, Hans. “The Nobility of Sight: a Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses.” The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Delta Book, 1966, 135-152. Print. 16 Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding the Media: the Extensions of Man. Toronto: Signet Books, 1966. Print. Ong, Walter J. “World as View and World as Event.” American Anthropologist 71. 4 (1969): 634-647. Print. Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print. Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action, II, Essays in Hermeneutics. Trans. K. Blamey and J. B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Print. Risser, James. Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Print. Slingerland, Edward. What Science offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Print. −−−. The Future of Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print. −−−. The Creation: an Appeal to Save Life on Earth. London: W.W. Norton and Company Ltd., 2006. Print. −−−. The Social Conquest of Earth. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012. Print. −−−. “Mission Statement.” Biodiversity Foundation. http://eowilsonfoundation.org/missionstatement/ 19 June, 2016. Zuckert, Catherine. “Hermeneutics in Practice: Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Ed. Robert J. Dostal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 201-224. Print. 1 The auditory disposition is characteristic of an oral culture of participation, e.g., that of the ancient Greeks, and the visual of literate peoples or peoples whose spectator standpoint towards beings is conditioned by print technologies. This way of setting up the relation between the humanities and sciences is in debt to the findings of “the Toronto School” of Marshall McLuhan and Eric Havelock for instance, and is implicated in Gadamer’s endeavor to recover the living voice from within and out of the tradition passed down in writing. Eric Havelock. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986; Marshall McLuhan. Understanding the Media: the Extensions of Man. Toronto: Signet Books, 1966. 2 The habit of sorting information from the world in to mutually exclusive categories that pertain to either the mind or the body is for Bloom the product of evolutionary forces. We are all accordingly “natural Cartesians.” Paul 17 Bloom. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains what makes us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 3 Citing Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 23-24. 4 Had he admitted that language and culture influence understanding, which is implicated in his concept of the embodied mind, he would create a problem for his argument that leads back to Gadamer. As soon as Slingerland admits that there is a multiplicity of possible ways of defining common sense, or that what he presupposes is common about the use-value of things is not common, then he is on the verge of incorporating historically affected consciousness into his version of pragmatic realism. 5 Heidegger’s understanding of the hermeneutic circle is overly determined by the projective character of sight. For this reason, Dasein is inherently non-relational and cannot find the meaning of Being for which it strives. Gadamer overcomes this propensity toward incompletion in Heidegger, fragmentation and self-destruction by prioritizing the relational self through hearing or openness. 6 See note 1 above for “the Toronto School.” 7 Citing Walter J. Ong, “World as View and World as Event,” American Anthropologist 71 (1969) 63-67. 8 James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 9 See Kant’s Critique of Judgment, section 9. The “aesthetics of non-differentiation” in which there is a disinterested non-conceptual delight in the cooperative play of the imagination and understanding that depends on the capacity, argues Gadamer of effectively seeing with the ears, or yoking the imagination to hearkening (gehören). In this way Gadamer believes that the separation Kant effects between nature and freedom can be overcome. 10 Hans Jonas intends to explain why sight has been heralded since the Greeks as the sense par excellence, why sight has a higher role in mental performance. He argues that visual thinking is prone (1) toward seeing wholes rather than contingent particulars and (2) toward the formation of objectivity. Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Delta Book, 1966) 135-156. 11 I see tact as being the capacity to weave contrary positions together and thereby remove a contradiction between them while also holding them apart (or respecting their differentness). 12 For a definition of “instituted social imaginary” see Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), 30. She explains that the imaginary consists of an interlacing of structures (ethical, social, cultural) in which people develop and then use to interpret their experiences. Citing Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. by David Ames (New York: Oxford University Press 1991), 62. 13 Lorraine Code. “Why Feminists do not Read Gadamer.” Feminist Interpretations of Gadamer, edited by L. Code. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 14 This was first brought to my attention by John Arthos at the 10 th annual meeting of the NASPH in Philadelphia Sept. 17-19, 2015. 18