Fractures of the mind

Problems of communication are often explained in terms of the inherent limitations of language. But this, of course, assumes that the mind’s thoughts are whole, complete, and comprehensive until they have the misfortune to issue into the cold nasty world in speech and writing. But this, of course, is just another version of gnostic hermeneutics.

Much better, as Gadamer argued, to see the fractures not in language but in the human mind itself:

“the imperfection of the human mind ocnsists in its never being completely present to itself but in being dispersed into thinking this or that . . . Because our intellect is imperfect . . . it needs the multiplicity of words.” Texts mirror the minds of their authors; but the mind is always confused, it “does not really know what it knows.”

Lundin picks up this point to make sense of the multiplicity of right interpretations of texts: “The author . . . is not an indifferent, independent will determining meaning from behind the text, but is instead the subject whose mind is mirrored in the language of the text. Neither the author who writes the work nor the interpreter who reads it represents a self-consciousness so exhausive in its capacities that it can fully determine and limit the meaning of that work. Because we intend more than we realize and because our language reveals more than we self-consciously know, the texts we produce invite many right interpretations, which are of those texts but not identical to them.”