Galing, Rad Alem D.

July 25, 2019

College Four – Class of St. Benedict of Nursia Hermeneutics

Interpretation of Narrativity: Exploring and Understanding the Human Capacity for

Knowledge and Comprehension

“All human behavior is used on making sense of things, even if unconsciously, and this is

the best evidence for the universal claim of hermeneutics.” Man truly lives questioningly and in

questioning, he tries to make sense of things. However, the truth that is contained in his making

sense of things varies in different degrees for the human capacity for knowledge and

comprehension, concerning his experience, is very much limited by spatio-temporal elements.

The claim of naïve realists, “what you see is what it really is,” is untenable in this regard.

Moreover, the limitedness of the human capacity for understanding makes itself fallible. Thus

confusion and misunderstanding come into the fore.

Man has a natural capacity for knowledge. This is manifested in all of his behavior, from

infancy to senility. Thus it can be said that every human statement and actuation are

interpretations and bound to be interpreted. Gadamer claims that “every statement has limits in

principle, which derives from our historical finitude and our being bound to the opacities of a

preconstituted but still open language.” Therefore, the human capacity for knowledge is deeply

bound to language and historicity. The only way to escape this is to employ a certain way of

transcendence which we will discuss in the succeeding paragraphs. Furthermore, the untenability

of naïve realism is noteworthy. What one sees is not necessarily what it really is. What one sees

has already been ‘trimmed down’ by our being bound to historicity and the opacities of language.

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 The limits that history and language bring in our being in the world constitute that our

interpretation of our experience is fallible. Limitedness begets fallibility unless it is transcended.

Thus our interpretation of things, events, etc. could be wrong. This gives man a certain level of

humility wherein he eventually realizes that he can only know as much and his knowledge of

some things, if not properly looked into could be misleading. An interpretation could be

misleading if it is partly true but because the interpreter only focused on that part of the truth, the

whole truth of an experience is therefore obscured. This could lead to a series of unfortunate

decisions and events in life. Here we find the clear connection between hermeneutics and ethics.

This connection is concretely manifested in the 2007 romantic war tragedy film, Atonement.

“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion

and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are

as real as you,” says Ian McEwan, the writer of the film. The truth of this statement is

personified in the character of Briony Tallis. She was the one who made a lot of unfortunate

decisions that led to a series of equally unfortunate events in the lives of his elder sister, Cecilia,

and the lover of his sister, Robbie Turner. Truth is perspectival but if one does not go beyond

that perspective, it could lead to the destruction of other people’s lives. Briony’s incapacity to go

beyond what he saw and clarify the things that he saw with the people involved gave too much

weight on her succeeding actions. Thus regret hunted her for the rest of her life. The only thing

that Briony did to appease her conscience was to write a book giving Cecilia and Robbie a happy

ending, an ending which, she believes, she stole from them. He went beyond actual reality to

create a fictive reality just to appease her conscience.

Regrets are inevitably always at the end. But logically it could be prevented or at least,

lessened. Realizing one’s limits does not only give us humility. It also leads us to find ways to go

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beyond that limit. It is true that the human capacity for knowledge and comprehension is limited

and are thus fallible. But one can transcend that by looking beyond one’s perspective, bearing in

mind that what he knows is simply one perspective. It could be done by opening oneself to other

perspectives. Here we can see the practical application of Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of

suspicion’ which is tied to his perspectivism. But we have to take out the mistake in Nietzsche's

view which “lies in rather in equating what is merely a fruitful perspective with the thing itself.”

Minus the error, Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is “a critical and hermeneutical

perspective espoused by a philosophy whose job is to protect us from knowledge that cannot be

proven.” If only Briony Tallis employed Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ her life and the

lives of Cecilia and Robbie could have happily ended in actual reality.