Questions and Answers

My brother came to Santa Fe this week to meet Helena Iara, so she and I didn't have as much time alone as we often do to talk about philosophy.  This lapse in our conversations allows me to go back to a chat we had almost two months ago, before leaving Brazil, one that says a lot about why I would possibly want to talk philosophy with a girl who almost certainly can't understand most of what I have to say.

We were sitting on the hammock on the front veranda, enjoying one of the first warm days of the Spring in the south of Brazil.  She would say "é" with the intonation of a question, I would respond with "ó" or "é", now more like a statement, and she would respond with another question or what sounded like an answer, and we went on for half an hour like this, just swing back and forth on the hammock as we swung back and forth in the conversation.

Questions and answers, I explained to Helena, are one of the basic issues of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation of texts), especially in the form adapted by Hans-Georg Gadamer.  Gadamer said that the real challenge of any attempt to interpret a book is to find the question to which the book is the answer.  What issues mattered to the author?  Why did he or she address them in that way?  Looking for the question is a way to try to get into the head of the writer (or just someone with whom you are talking), to see the world from his perspective for a second.  In the language of hermeneutics, the challenge is to find the horizon of the other, what is the limit of what he or she can see?  The job of the reader is to try to make his own horizon overlap that of the other, so that there is some kind of an encounter of perspectives on the world.  An exchange of questions and answers: not as in "you ask the questions and I answer," but "I am trying to find out what questions really matter to you."


To a certain degree, Helena and my exchange on the hammock was exactly this kind of negotiation of horizons.  I try to figure out what matters to her, what questions she is asking: it is about the tree moving behind me?  About the light warm wind?  About the shadow of the house moving slowly across the front lawn?  What matters to this baby?

I can't possibly see the world from her perspective.  She has a kind of innocent wonder to which no adult can return, and the raw nature of her perceptions, un-encumbered by the experience that older people have, would be impossible to recover.  But these conversations help me to encounter her horizon, to see what she is capable of seeing, what questions matter to her.


The same is true of this whole blog.  How can my philosophical concerns (my horizon) encounter the limitless curiosity of a baby girl?  From time to time, the encounter is productive.  Other times, it's a dialogue of deaf people.  But that's like almost any encounter, isn't it?