Turning Signs

Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.

— Voltaire

It is obvious enough that translation into another language can change the meaning of a text, despite the best efforts of the translator to be “faithful” to the original. But even the copying process which has brought most ancient scriptures to their readers in the original language can change the original text. Continue reading Transmission and gospel

In his ‘Afterword’ to the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson 1988, 547), Richard Smith gives this account of Harold Bloom’s hermeneutic theory:

Bloom’s argument is that literary influence always proceeds by ‘a deliberately perverse misreading … an act of creative correction, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism whose purpose is to clear away the precursor so as to open a space for oneself.’

Continue reading Writing wrongs

Some sayings in the Gospel of Thomas appear ‘cryptic’ at first – that is, difficult to decode, which serves to remind us that the message is coded.

Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.’

— Thomas 7 (5G)

Continue reading The lion code

Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection. Continue reading The fountain of youth

Walt Whitman, addressing ‘Workmen and Workwomen’, has this to say about sacred texts: Continue reading Shedding leaving reading returning

In one version of his essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (see Chapter 7), Peirce suggested that religious authority, or rather the ‘decay’ of its influence, prepares the ground for the emergence of dialogue, or ‘fermentation of ideas,’ where reasoning carries more weight than anyone’s authority. Continue reading Composting religions

If the natural world is ‘the primary scripture’ (Berry 1988, 105), the quality of our presence on this planet depends on how we read the earth and practice what it preaches. As for our reading of the secondary scriptures, our judgments of their relative worth are worthless; what counts is the practice our reading determines, the turning of the symbols we are. Continue reading Turning the Dharma wheel

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

— Joyce, Ulysses (45)

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jeté is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 70)

According to Popper (1968, 174), ‘every language incorporates and preserves countless myths and theories, even in its grammatical structure.’ Science begins when myths and theories become self-modifying. ‘There is much less accumulation of knowledge in science than there is revolutionary changing of scientific theories.… science advances by the tradition of changing its traditional myths.’

Kuhn on the other hand says that ‘normal science’ consists of filling in the details of established theories, that revolutions are exceptional. Vague as they are, these are quantitative estimates, and perhaps we can account for the difference between them by considering what their respective authors chose to count. Kuhn is looking primarily at the everyday lives of ordinary working scientists: Popper might agree that their work may not advance science very much, and Kuhn would certainly agree that normal science prepares the ground for the revolutions which really advance it. The disagreement here is similar to the debate about “gradualism” vs. “saltations” or “punctuated equilibrium” in biological evolution; or the debate among Buddhists about whether “enlightenment” is sudden or gradual.