folksy
Belated but hearty thanks to AKMA for taking the time to address questions I had about his distinction between two terms which I think he is responsible for articulating - integral and differential hermeneutics - as well as for his enlightening discussions with David Weinberger and the Happy Tutor.
Having spent most of yesterday helping a friend install a “floating” wood floor, I was drawn to consider his thoughts and their relevance to the undersupports of our understanding of texts, interpretation, and the directions lives take as a result of both.
I especially value this:
On my account, the place that integralists fill with “the true meaning” can just as well be occupied by “the most convincing account of the text in question,” where “convincing” will always remain a more-or-less local set of criteria to which the (local) social formations adhere. That’s not because I don’t believe in God or transcendence or truth — it’s because I don’t know how to de-localize myself to recognize the universal/transcendent in a way that’ll convince anyone but me and my local colleagues.
I'm reminded of the battle Galileo faced when some within the Vatican began to fear that his researches into the way things work could, if not defused, compromise a couple of the fundamental professions of the faith: 1. That the realm of the miraculous could be threatened by the physicist's evidence that natural objects obey natural laws; 2. That the miraculous is evidence that nature is subservient to a free, all powerful supreme being; 3. That the Church, not Science, is the one, true, integral interpreter of God and nature.
Galileo didn't so much say, as perform, his response, to wit: 1. that the insights into the workings of nature, and the control those insights gave those who understood them, could never be more than a local notion of the inexhaustible possibilities of that which exists; 2. that anyone with a reasonably thought-out notion of the Christian God would have nothing to fear from honest labors of the human mind, because, A. Even that which scientists think of as natural law is a very small part of the fabric of the universe; B. God can probably take care of himself. (Fwiw: I wrote about some of this in the chapter on Galileo in Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World).
I also associate this ''inability to delocalize'' with the wisdom of the folktale and of the storyteller who knows he or she can only take away a small part of an event, the precious splinter of experience one has of it. The mode doesn’t try to tell us what something means, but what someone heard, felt, saw.
One of the ways to apprehend something of what is going on in the Bible is to notice that no revelation is ever said and done. There is always another element, which can radically change how one understands what came before.
Command-and-control reports that purport to give us the bottom line, the essence of what something ultimately amounts to, by this criterion are doomed. (I would merely note that much of the public discourse of the government, the military and non-tabloid journalism appears to fit the “command and control” model.)
The planetary errance of differential hermeneutics seems less akin to the bright lights of officialese than to the wanderings of Romance, a mode of allegory and imagination. Easy to get lost in there, but in there, at least, one knows one is lost.
11:46:41 PM 
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