B. Making Hermeneutic Circles Visible
[INDEX]
01. Browsing
Back in the day, prior to MOOCs and podcasts being a thing, we students irritated our professors at the philosophy department with the idea to record their lectures and publish them online. This idea didn’t make sense to them for several reasons. One of these reasons was that they couldn’t imagine how these lectures could be beneficial to people outside our department or curriculum. They couldn’t imagine why anyone would sit down in front of the computer for hours and listen to a lecture without getting accreditation for it.
Well, it turns out (almost) nobody does that. Learning comes in degrees. Between the first encounter with an idea and an actual committed exposure to its complexity and depth often lie years. And our first encounter with an idea often comes in the form of mere browsing. We didn’t intend to publish these lectures to replace the engaged, embodied, and synchronous learning experience. What we intended was to ‘fill the gaps’ in between moments of full commitment — which are actually rare — with content of orientational value.
What I mean is that quite a lot of our daily routine consists of temporal gaps in which you can’t really do something that engages your mind, but you can browse at best. While you are on a run, while you travel to work, while you clean your kitchen. In all these gaps, you can’t really pick up a book and read. It could actually be argued that reading isn’t particularly effective unless you devote a minimal quantum of time to it. I personally can’t read productively unless I devote a time span of more than two hours to it.
This is not so with lectures and podcasts. The propositional density of the content is so low that you can take in the content passively, even while driving a car. And yet you can get a sense of the potential of a line of thought, of an approach or paradigm, and whether it might be relevant to you. This way, you gain orientational value of what lies outside your current horizon of understanding. You get a ‘feel’ for it. Even though at this low resolution you can’t yet repeat the arguments you just heard, nevertheless you already have a sense of where they are going, just as you can’t repeat a musical phrase by just listening to it once, but you get a first sense of its potential impact on you.
With this orientation at hand, you are informed and motivated to devote the necessary amount of time in the future to properly study something which you believe will indeed expand your mind. Without such orientational knowledge, you end up in high commitments which you didn’t want to make in the first place. This is the horror of being forced to attend lectures you know will do nothing for you but — brace yourself — waste your lifetime.
Passively consumed content or browsing is not in principle opposed to Bildung. But for Bildung to be passively accessible though, it has to be put into the right form and resolution. It has to be reduced down into ordinary language and pressed into scenes that can be consumed with minimal attention span. There are literal geniuses out there who are capable of performing that reduction of complexity and pressing ideas into images, metaphors, or even memes. Oftentimes, these people are not the actual knowledge specialists who came up with the idea in the first place.
02. Skimming
The value of conscious skimming is largely underestimated. Skimming is a highly important act of preselection, determining whether we will end up with something valuable in our hands, more than anything else. It is, to a high degree, driven by intuition and a sense of how the bigger picture fits together.
Because it is so underappreciated, many of us don’t actually realize that in more cases than they are aware of, it was successful skimming that led them to important insights. Skimming, animated by others who pointed them at the right thing to see at the right time. If, in the process of skimming, you end up with the right intuition pumps for your mind, the rest will be easy. If you don’t, your learning experience might be nothing but pointless pain.
The point of skimming is to get a sense of the whole territory and then consciously choose your commitment. In a sense, you know the result, and what remains is to understand it.
Skimming, as it is instantiated today, is not particularly effective, though, precisely because you don’t get a sense of the whole. It is very difficult to at a glance see the major ideas and theses that dominate a discourse. You can’t really skim for them. The only option you have left is to commit to a field and study it for a few years, get to know and be part of the paradigm, and then be able to adequately know what the paradigm grasps and what is not within its reach.
Building for skimming means that whatever specialized content a paradigm comes up with must also be communicated to the top-level most superficial representation of the field available. Building for skimming means that even those who are not committed to a field should be able to immediately spot its major ideas and evidence. These exist, and everyone socialized within the field knows them, but they are not publicly visible to visitors.
03. Commitment
While browsing and skimming are an essential part of learning, neither of them will make me change my mind on anything of significance. Quite the opposite, while I’m browsing and skimming, I expect a world-mind relationship, i.e., I expect the world to adapt to my own expectations and biases. If it doesn’t, the respective content cannot become relevant to me because it will remain incomprehensible. Skimming and browsing can provide me, at best, with a sense and hint of the unknown, for that which will require commitment to be yet accommodated.
The process of accommodation or changing your mind requires active commitment. Commitment is quite difficult to induce. For something to be convincing and change your mind, it must have a degree of differentiation and systematicity to it that cannot be easily communicated through orientational channels and through browsing and skimming alone. If, on the other hand, content happens to change our mind on the spot, it is more likely we haven’t thought about the issue systematically at all.
What actively changes our mind must have functional fit with our bias and yet extend our position in meaningful ways, as to cover more ground that matters to us than our previous position. Accommodation usually is experienced as friction and painful. Browsing and skimming can set the stage for new content to become psychoactive, but they cannot replace the — oftentimes painful — act of committed engagement.
Studying something places you in a vulnerable position. In a position where you are willing to admit that the author might have a point which you don’t understand yet. In a position where you admit to maybe not knowing something. In a position where you admit that your chosen frame of approaching a problem might be inadequate. Commitment, in other words, is in part a spiritual act. It is a stepping back from yourself and looking at yourself.
It is something that needs a protected space. Something which requires degrees of intimacy and knowing that nobody else is watching you. This is why the commitment phase itself has, in parts, to be potentially hidden from others. Being able to openly share commitment phases with others, on the other hand, is a sign of your ability to transcend yourself. The more we train to consciously make commitment visible, the more orientational content we share with others; but also, almost more importantly, the more transparent our minds, the more we practice self-transcendence and self- awareness, the more we ‘model’ freedom from ourselves to others.
Such spaces adapted for full commitment must be carefully designed, though, and carefully prepared. Everything, from the degree of intimacy, the people surrounding you, the injunctions to take up, the topics to discuss, must cohere with the expectation of full commitment. To set up a space for this commitment is quite challenging. If I give you the daily newspaper to commit to with full commitment, the result won’t be transformation or Bildung. No matter how hard you commit. Such spaces bordering transformation are rare, and we need to point them out and replicate them more successfully. Just because someone is holding a lecture on something, this doesn’t mean they have been able to create circumstances that allow for full commitment.
MOOCs became a big thing in the past decade. “Massive open online courses” where students from all over the world can freely choose their topic of interest and favorite professors to listen to. But MOOCs have been criticized as being ineffective. Less than, I think, somewhere around 5% of attendees actually watch courses in full and pass virtual exams.
This made some of the big players in the game change their strategy from just making content available to switching to a much more classroom-like experience, where you have deadlines, participation is limited, and the timeframe of attendance is limited as well.
It turns out it’s not enough for people to just find something “interesting”; they need much more than that to actually assimilate new challenging knowledge. They need commitment, an act of actual choice to commit your attention and life to a topic over a period of time. This is why entrance exams and limiting access make sense. They make sure the first step of taking up an actual commitment is taken.
Now, I personally think this shouldn’t mean we should, therefore, revert to making what happens in learning spaces invisible to the public again, as it was prior to the MOOCs. MOOCs have orientational value. After listening to a MOOC, you get a sense of where certain knowledge and certain teachers are going; based on that, you can then more consciously decide whether to actually commit yourself or not.
Choosing a commitment is something that we need to raise into consciousness and perform consciously. For example, when I was a kid, I didn’t really choose commitment; I just ran for full commitment because I felt an inherent drive to be a good boy. I had to learn the hard way that in some contexts, the situation demands from me that I choose a lesser commitment so that I can commit to other, more potentially relevant areas. This knowledge and awareness of our relationship towards a knowledge practice is emancipatory knowledge. And as with other forms of knowledge, it is painful to learn. It is painful to learn for a lesser grade and not be perfect, just as for some, it can be painful to learn for a better grade and try to be perfect.
Thinking back when I was a student, commitment usually happened based on a page outlining the course content. If that spoke to you, you would sign up for a course. This basically tells you nothing about what you are about to experience and commit to. It’s like a forced marriage for half a year on the first blind date. Some people, it seemed to me, decided their entire careers based on having read a few such descriptions of what their chosen “discipline” is about. I can remember such guides being given out to us as we still were in school, breaking down every academic discipline into how much you will earn, what you can do with the degree, etc.
04. Layering
As a kid, I had a notion of learning that was quite off. For some reason, I thought of learning as something linear. You start a book and read all of it. You open the Well- Tempered Clavier and play all of it. You learn a language by opening the dictionary and starting with the letter ‘A’. In this spirit, I went to the library and picked out random books. Some of them academic. Obviously, I didn’t understand a word of them.
It turns out this attempt at ‘doing learning properly’ was upside-down. The result of whatever it was that was doing there was that I basically remembered nothing, started hating making music and expressing myself. Most of the input just didn’t stick at all, and I felt like I had nothing to say anyway. Why would I even try to make my own music when Bach had said it all? Why would I even try to think when Aristotle had thought it all?
That was stupid. But it’s not obvious why. I’ve revised my notion of learning a bit. It turns out learning can be fun if you do it in a non-linear way. What I mean is, instead of playing all the fugues in the Well-Tempered Clavier, listen to it first. Let it sink in. Listen to others talk about it. And then pick out the pieces that speak to you.
The same thing with books. What works for me now is not to pick out random books but skim through books first. Pick out a few quotes that others talk about. Only read something after I feel that it speaks to me. The same thing with thinking. Start with what seems relevant to me — even though Aristotle wouldn’t deem it proper ‘thought’.
It turns out other people have thought of this approach already. They call it the hermeneutic circle. The basic idea being that if you want to learn something, you have to start with your own — however stupid — pre-understanding of an issue and articulate it. Then against this background, you can try to take something in as inspiration from the external world. Most of the input won’t stick or be compatible.
It’s a very slow process. You will read a book and retain only one sentence. You will listen to dozens of albums but retain only one phrase. However, it will feel meaningful. You will feel your mind move and expand. And if we find ways to hack the hermeneutic circle digitally, we might even experience learning together with others. Taking up something that matters to us with every cycle of engagement.
While being such a slow process, the hermeneutic circle is fun. It feels rewarding. It feels like you have truly made something your own. And seeing the multiple engagements of others, the multiple circles and layers which they took to understand something, might help guide and model our understanding.
The memex allows for such circles and layers of approaching a text anew. At every circle, you can take out something else or read things in a different light. The memex distinguishes in which circle of reading a text you add certain annotations. Tracking the development of your understanding.
05. Ideas as Ideas
I have grown up with the idea that reading means reading a book from cover to cover. You don’t skip a page. You don’t even skim. You have to pay attention to all the author has to say.
But my experience with books so far has been that most of them feel like listening to the one uncle who just won’t stop telling you a bunch of horribly boring and irrelevant random anecdotes, or as he would call them, ‘important truths’. These might be relevant to him but not necessarily to the reader.
I guess it depends on your knowledge interests, but if you really want to learn something and progress in an area systematically — and don’t just read without expectations and for the fun of it — it feels to me that most literature on any propositional topic is thin soup.
Maybe the distinctions made were relevant when the author wrote the text, but what remains relevant today I often find to be disappointingly thin or vague. That’s even how I feel about our greatest classics. I seriously feel that you could summarize Kant in a few dozen basic ideas.
That’s why a few years back, I stopped reading non-fiction books cover to cover. It just doesn’t feel worth it. Why would you spend, on average, two full days to fully read a book that has barely half a dozen ideas worth sharing? It sometimes even feels as if someone forces people to write even though they know they have nothing to say.
What I’m saying is that this is a systemic problem of books and knowledge sharing. Books are designed to be filled with narrative. But often people have no narrative to offer that is relevant today, merely singular observations. But with a few valuable observations, you can’t write a book. And sometimes ideas worth rethinking are hidden behind many mostly irrelevant narratives.
We need to rethink how we read and share ideas. What we need to learn is to share ideas as ideas, to decouple them from the narratives they are embedded in. Sometimes this is not possible, but sometimes it is. And when it is, it should be much easier for us to browse through ideas and find relevant inspiration instead of spending many hours in narratives that don’t get us anywhere we want to get.
The memex is built for this. Because it captures precisely the ideas you take out of a text and become relevant to you. And it captures them in your language. Using the memex, it would thus be possible to just see the pure ideas that affect people.
06. Modelling
I often hear people say that supposedly all our knowledge is on the internet, as if it somehow makes people smart by just visiting it. That’s poppycock.
There are ways for you to get pretty much any book ever published for free on the net. But this physical availability of knowledge doesn’t make it mentally more available to you. It’s like visiting the biggest library ever and believing that banging the books against your head will make you smarter.
Actually, a small but fine collection of ten books is more likely to educate you than the biggest library. What matters more than the availability of smart sentences is someone to guide you to figure things out in the sequence that is relevant to you.
But apart from the guidance problem, much of human knowledge is passed down through example, by being modelled and shown, and not written down or recorded on tape. Quite a lot of highly relevant knowledge consists of knowing where to look and comes by simply being part of a knowledge community. Socialization into a knowledge practice is different from the products of a knowledge practice.
It is like sitting in and listening to lectures of Niklas Luhmann. The experience of seeing him doing sociology in action, including his silly jokes and remarks, is incomparably more educational than reading his books. In his lectures Luhmann models how to do sociology and in his books he just summarizes the propositional footprint of that practice. No ordinary teacher of sociology can make up for that experience of modelling and learning from the source of inspiration for entire academic fields by being part of their lectures.
By just being part of it, you learn the relevant questions, the most promising directions you can take, the relevant literature. You learn what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Institutional structures of decision-making, implicit knowledge of communities, none of that is as such on the internet. The internet is an unordered cluster of notes that matter to those who wrote them but are meaningless to those who don’t know the context. Just as musical notation or philosophical texts in the past were regarded as a reminder of and not the musical experience or act of philosophizing itself.
We can make a conscious effort to lift these still invisible domains of human learning and development into the light. To make visible the literature that influences our opinion leaders, to make visible the metaphors in which they reason, the major ideas they process, etc. We can consciously make these structures transparent and visible and thus truly democratize knowledge. That is the untapped potential of the internet.
07. Depth
I’ve often heard people say that social media make everything ‘transparent’. In one case, during an online discussion about transparency, one of the presenters forgot to turn off her microphone during the break. Everyone heard her flush the toilet. This was then taken as a ‘Zen moment’, supposedly proving that we are becoming increasingly transparent.
But are we? Yes, social media can make transparent where I went on vacation. They make transparent what I find funny or appalling. But do they make transparent the depth of my understanding on any issue? What has been called the ‘depth’ of consciousness or ‘wisdom’ is generally our ability to feel connections between separate things and see how they are actually or potentially related.
Thus, a wise position is not necessarily the best or most informed factually, but it is a position that is aware of the domains that one would have to research, consult, and connect to come up with a tenable point of view. The major challenge with communicating wisdom or depth is that to get it across, one has to communicate an entire web of connections.
When communicating wisdom, we have traditionally resorted to grand narratives because they allow us to connect the parts to the whole and vice versa. We can’t take a fragment and use it to communicate depth. Fragments communicate singular points of focus. They don’t communicate the entire frame of distinctions or web within which a fragment becomes meaningful in the first place.
Social media are great at transferring and replicating fragments. They are, by design, built to transfer surfaces and not depth. Social media can transfer and make transparent when you flush the toilet. But without explicit effort to write it down as a grand narrative, you can’t simply transfer your overall understanding of any complex issue. Social media make you into a surface, no matter how deep you are.
Fortunately, we are far from having reached the potential of new media. And if we frame the problem properly and understand the actual challenges, we can develop new technologies and learn to use new media so that the very structure of the medium makes the depth of others visible on the spot and ‘forces’ depth upon our own perspectives.
08. Implicit Subjectivity
Someone once said that the funny thing about social media is that if you meet person just on social media and never in person you might learn intimate details about them without knowing whether they have a dog, which, on the other hand, is most likely the first thing you would notice if you were to meet them in person. One of the foundational principles behind social media is to make visible aspects of our version of reality that would otherwise remain unseen.
Think about times prior to social media. If you wanted to make visible to others that you like a specific book or a specific idea, you had to write about it. You had to keep a blog or write an article. But traditional media often is not the place to express all the forms of engagement and attunement that you experience on a daily basis because you would have to embed them in a narrative to meaningfully make them visible.
Social media, on the other hand, provides you with fragmented, already-made units of meaning that you can ‘subscribe’ to with a click and without having to tell a story. By clicking on the ‘like’ button, you establish or ‘subscribe’ to a visible relationship with a picture that you just liked.
This ‘mapping’ of our experiences onto such public fragments of meaning has developmental potential if you frame it properly. It is now possible to share relevant details about your perspective that you might not otherwise be able to. And yes, I said ‘relevant details’.
For example, if I wanted to know what Habermas’ favorite book of the year was, there would be no way for me to know, even though it might be relevant to know. He doesn’t use social media, and it is highly unlikely that he would ever write an article about his favorite book of the year.
This is where social media shines. If we come up with relevant units of meaning, such as which ideas are the most relevant to you on a certain topic or which sentences in a book you found most relevant, we can push social media to make more than mere surfaces visible.
Social media can thus potentially make visible aspects of subjectivity that otherwise lack a medium to be expressed.
Once we figure out how to model the developmentally relevant processes of consciousness — such as reading, discourse, and note-taking — with the help of such units of meaning or fragments, we can build depth into the very medium itself. But we can also keep posting pictures of cats.
09. Sequence
One of the main challenges in education is the sequence in which certain ideas are encountered. When someone shows you the right thing at the right time, it can ignite a lifelong journey of discovery. Skilled educators have a sense of where you are coming from and can provide appropriate guidance and instructions based on your current needs.
This ability to point out and direct your attention to the relevant aspects is considered by pedagogues like Klaus Prange as the central gesture that defines an act as pedagogical. It is a highly exclusive process that focuses your scattered attention on what truly matters in the present moment.
Sometimes, I believe it is the sequence that makes all the difference in why we disagree on certain issues or why some of us are inspired to delve deeply into a subject and achieve excellence while others are not. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but the sequence does matter more than we often realize. It should be considered on the same level as nature and nurture. Even with the right nature and nurturing, if the sequence is wrong, success may still be elusive.
I can recall how I ended up picking up Heidegger’s “Being and Time” as my first book by him. That book made me dislike Heidegger for half a decade. It was only years later when I stumbled upon his “Introduction to Phenomenological Research” that Heidegger started to make sense to me. The sequence would have made all the difference in my understanding of what Heidegger intended to convey.
When I hear people arguing about ideas, such as idealism and realism, science and religion, it often seems that they would hold very different positions if they had encountered these topics in a different sequence. For instance, if you come across religion after studying phenomenology, the science of introspection and first-person experience, you would interpret the major religious concepts in a completely different light.
You would question whether ‘hell’ is a place or a state of mind, whether ‘Christ’ is a physically extended body existing in time or a way of perceiving what is given, and whether ‘holy war’ is an external event or an inner struggle within consciousness. All of these alternative interpretations arise because with phenomenology you have learned to clearly distinguish between first-person and third-person facts.
The significance of sequence is also one of the reasons why curricula will continue to exist in the distant future. In their present state, social media often lead us in circles rather than on a cumulative learning path. However, the true potential of social media lies in its ability to model the right sequence for each individual. A curriculum that is suitable for me may not be suitable for you. But if we can enable social media to provide everyone with the sequence that is right for them, it would inherently become a pedagogical tool.
10. Genesis
The traditional approach to research has involved individuals sitting down privately to ponder a question, take notes, have private conversations with opinion leaders, and read extensively. After an extensive period of exploration and contemplation, they would eventually publish their findings as a coherent and well- defended narrative.
This process is valuable, but it can also be a lonely endeavor, and often the insights gained do not reach those who could benefit from them. This lack of visibility hinders the potential impact and effectiveness of research.
The current approach does not make the process of research itself visible. It fails to reveal the genesis of perspectives and the evolving nature of understanding. However, universities serve a crucial purpose in creating spaces where conversation and a slow, deliberate pace allow for the transition from a shared lifeworld to specialized knowledge, which we refer to as “knowledge metaphors.”
Understanding truly occurs when we witness the act of learning itself and observe the emergence of metaphors, rather than simply absorbing and memorizing the end- results of learning. Unfortunately, our manner of publishing research is often counterproductive to education.
Universities provide an environment where researchers can communicate what would otherwise remain unwritten. They begin with simplifications that serve as building blocks for further understanding. Additionally, one can inquire about teachers’ personal associations with a topic, what they remember from reading Kant, what aspects they found challenging, and what sparked their own intellectual journey. However, these valuable interactions and insights rarely make their way into final publications.
Yet how important such marginalia and notes are we can deduce from how they are being treated in secondary literature. It is from such marginalia, from private exchanges, from talks, that we learn to reconstruct how thinkers came up with their very specific perspective on something.
If we can digitize and apply the fundamental principles that have guided education for centuries, we can make the research process itself visible to others. By doing so, we can transform research into a social endeavor, enabling it to become more impactful and connected to reality.
