Synopsis:
- Hermeneutic phenomenology
- The symbols of pre-rational culture (myth, religion, art, ideology) hide meaning that can be discovered by interpretation
- Interpretation can be backward (towards the archaic, e.g. Freud) or forward (towards the telic, e.g. Hegel)
- There are always a patent and a latent meaning
- Ultimately, meaning can only be revealed indirectly
- Two-dimensional character of human existence: voluntary and involuntary
- The voluntary and involuntary dimensions of human existence are complementary
- This conflict is what identity and meaning to life
- The problem of evil
- Caused by the gap between the finite and the infinite dimensions of a human being
- Caused by the gap between bios (one's spatiotemporal life) and logos (one's ability to grasp universal spacetime)
- Human discourse and action both depend on and are independent of the context: they are meaningful only against the background of the context
- The context might give our performances unintended meanings
- Action is bilateral, not unilateral
- "Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other"
- A language is timeless because it is only a system of signs, but discourse always occurs at some particular moment of time
- A language is a necessary condition for communication, but it itself does not communicate
- Only discourse communicates
- The signs in a language system refer only to other signs in it, but discourse "refers to a world that it claims to describe, to express, or to represent."
- Analogy between texts and actions
- All action is in principle interaction just as all discourse is in principle dialogical
- Action, like discourse is inherently subject to interpretation
- Like discourse, actions are "open worlds" whose meanings are not fully determined by their performers and their immediate audiences
- Action remains open to interpretation
- There is cosmic time, the uniform time of the universe, and there is lived time, the discontinuous time of our lives
- "On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise."
- A calendar "cosmologizes lived time_ humanizes cosmic time"
- Historical time harmonizes these two kinds of time and gives meaning to human action
- Historical time becomes human time "to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode"
- "The narrative constructs the identity of the character_ It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character"
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