Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 173.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.172: experience & theory? (174)
[2] From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.172: experience & theory? (10)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-21 09:49:39+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.172: experience & theory?
Dear Willard,
> I
> am inclined to ask if, for example, an anthropology of some distant
> people whom one has never lived with, or a treatise on a manuscript one
> has never had in hand (suitably gloved) would not be suspect?
let me try myself on a tripartite comment.
(1) Most obviously so.
(2) It's even worse.
(3) But wait a moment.
(1) Most obviously so.
My favorite example showing that talking about something you have not
experienced leads to absurdity comes from Heidegger.
When he starts his attempt to base hermeneutic thinking on conceptual
ground that is strong enough to avoid the dangers of the hermeneutic
cycle, he of course addresses it from the tradition of antiquity,
creating a definition of a work of art, from which the way to understand
it can then be derived. In a key quotation he writes:
<quote>
Dastehend ruht das Bauwerk auf dem Felsgrund. Dies Aufruhen des Werkes
holt aus dem Fels das Dunkle seines ungefügen und doch zu nichts
gedrängten Tragens heraus. Dastehend hält das Bauwerk dem über es
wegrasenden Sturm stand und zeigt so erst den Sturm selbst in seiner
Gewalt. Der Glanz und das Leuchten des Gesteins, anscheinend selbst nur
von Gnaden der Sonne, bringt doch erst das Lichte des Tages, die Weite
des Himmels, die Finsternis der Nacht zum Vor-schein.
or:
Standing there, the building rests on rocky ground. This resting of the
work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet
spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground
against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself
manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though
itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings
to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of
the night.
[Martin Heidegger: “Origin of the Work of Art”, in: Albert Hofstadter
(ed. and transl.): Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper &
Row, 1971, 15-88., here: 42]
For the pupil of a Wilhelmine gymnasium whom one of his teachers almost
certainly has shown a representation of the towering Acropolis as the
apotheosis of a Greek temple, commented upon in the bombastic rhetoric
of the late Wilhelmine era, this explanation is obvious. For a
contemporary of the late 20th / early 21st century , who has seen the
temples of Paestum, lying there peacefully in the meadows, without
contemplating storm or violence; or the ruins at Olympia equally
peaceful among the pine trees; or the temple of Asclepius organically
embedded into the buildup area of Epidaurus; or … Well, for anybody who
has actually <emph>seen</emph> the remainders of the ancient world, this
reads more like the heroic wet dream of a Wilhelmine gymnasium pupil
than an actual description of the old world and its artwork.
And Heidegger carefully avoided to visit the antiquity which drove his
understanding: during his journeys to Greece in 1962 and 1967 he almost
never left the ship and consistently avoided museums and excavations,
and rather contemplated "the gods that had left" on board [Wokart 2004].
Reality might have endangered his complete understanding of antiquity.
[Norbert Wokart: „Wie die Wahrheit ans Licht kommt: Heidegger in
Griechenland“, in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 56
(2004) 374- 376.]
Basing your understanding of something you have never seen in reality
can completely distort your interpretation of it - leave alone a theory
you build upon such flimsy ground.
(2) It's even worse.
Unfortunately, such pipedream theories can become so established in the
educated world, that even people who have - or could and should have
seen reality - may stay convinced by it.
So Heidegger's basing of theories on a gymnasium antiquity which never
was did not prevent his reception until today, of course. Gumbrecht
quotes Heidegger’s origin of the work of art approvingly in his attempt
to show, that there is an immediate understanding of art created by its
material presence.
[Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: The Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot
Convey, Stanford University Press, 2003. ]
At the early twentieth century the difficulty actually to visit the
reality may excuse a lot; at the beginning of the twenty first,
swallowing such a pipe dream interpretation, hook, line and sinker ...
And even having encountered an ethnographic reality does not necessarily
imply to understand it - consider Margaret Mead and her very peculiar
Samoans. A look, and even a second and a third one, may not be enough.
[[ The argument about Heidegger and Gumbrecht is embedded more
extensively in
https://www.academia.edu/78848177/On_Hermeneutics_And_Computing ]]
(3) But wait a moment.
There is only one small reason, why my comment is not simply an
enthusiastic straightforward endorsement: When one fully subscribes to
the notion that theories (or interpretations or simply arguments) are
only valid if they are based on unfiltered sensory experience, you
declare that the study of history is simply impossible. (And with
"history" here I mean the historical branches of the whole of the
Humanities.) If you need an authentic manuscript right in your hands,
what can you say about Socrates?
In my opinion that leads to a requirement for historical understanding /
explaining / theorizing: Differentiate as cleanly as possible between
the representation of some item of the past and your interpretation of
it. And take that serious. Complaining, that we are only able to analyze
capta, not data, particularly when presented with the flourish of
rhetoric is fascinating. Making sure that the first step from the data,
which are most certainly there, towards a representation that is
practicable for handling but still as free from any distortion as
possible, before you are theorizing about it, is much more boring. But
possibly less embarrassing in the long run than fabulating about temples
that never ware.
Photographs, like other representations or visualizations,
<emph>may</emph> be totally misleading. The are not required to be so.
Kind regards,
Manfred
Am 20.10.25 um 08:14 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 172.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2025-10-20 05:56:39+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: experience & theory?
>
> As is my habit, here is a statement of principle to be put to the test:
> that for any activity for which use of a tool is essential, theorising
> its use has value for others in proportion to the theoriser's experience
> with it--and even then requires exercise of both modesty and bravery.
>
> My current example is not computing (though the principle, I think,
> applies), rather photography. In the first of two of his wise books on the
> subject, The Spoken Image (1999), Clive Scott cautions that,
> "Photography is such a fluid, mobile, unstable medium, so diverse in
> its applications, that any writer who takes it as a subject should avoid
> being too categorical about any aspect of it." Having recently waded
> through writings on the subject in which theorising triumphs over
> experience, if indeed any experience lurks in the background at all, I
> am inclined to ask if, for example, an anthropology of some distant
> people whom one has never lived with, or a treatise on a manuscript one
> has never had in hand (suitably gloved) would not be suspect?
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
> Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-10-20 14:55:46+00:00
From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.172: experience & theory?
And what immediately comes to mind:
Dr. Albert Einstein has a famous quote: “In theory, theory and practice are
the same. In practice, they are not.”
--henry
P.S. I came across this saying a long time ago - so I searched for an
attribution and I found this one on the web.
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