Wellness Calendar: Monday 27 October

Truth-seeking
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, seeing absolutely everything as a matter of interpretation. However many layers we manage to unpeel, we’ll never get to a pure fact or a pure truth. These things simply do not exist. Instead, there’s only interpretation and more interpretation.
Opinions, slants, angles, points of view, perspectives, reflections, a take on things – we all have them, but that’s not to say that some interpretations aren’t more truthful or more factual than others. For example, a Holocaust denier has a certain belief, though there’s no creditability or evidence to go with this viewpoint – quite the opposite.
Science looks to understand how one thing causes another thing, while the humanities seek meaning and understanding around civilisation. The desire to understand is what unites both of these fountains of knowledge with hermeneutics. The art of understanding is the art of interpretation, and this too links hermeneutics to our everyday life. For how do we come to make our own interpretations? What processes do we use?
In science there’s proposing, speculating, hypothesising, etc., which is all open to interpretation and is all done by humans with their own quirks and passions.
This is where hermeneutics can get interesting for individual learners and Self Detectives striving for authenticity and greater understanding of themselves. For what this field of study is saying, over and over again, is that there are no absolutes and there are no certainties in life, no matter how comforting it would be to believe so – instead, there’s only how we construct our own world and our own lives.
With this in mind, let’s start to ask and answer some questions:
Q: How do we decide when someone is telling the truth (including ourselves)?
Q: What methods of enquiry do we use when we seek truths?
Q: Without any solid 100% truths, 100% facts and 100% certainty, how do we construct our world?