Interpretation Entails an Ecology of Strange Attractors: Modelling the Complexity of Hermeneutics

Kobus Marais

doi:10.25159/2663-6573/20597

Authors

Kobus Marais UFS

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6573/20597

Keywords:

hermeneutics, complexity thinking, constraint, trajectory

Abstract

Hermeneutics, or understanding, has fascinated humanity for most of its existence. The emergence of sacred, legal, and literary texts and their concomitant social contexts raised even more interest in understanding as values such as pure–impure, right–wrong, or aesthetic–non-aesthetic gained importance in human culture. The article models hermeneutics as, at least, a sextuplet pendulum that is constrained and hence attracted towards the key agents in a hermeneutic process, namely the sender, text, receiver, contact, code, and context. Based on the model, I try to work out a conceptualisation of hermeneutics that is non-reductive and non-linear. In particular, I explore a causality in hermeneutics that is based on the creation of possibilities through constraints. The article considers two aspects of this complex of constraints: (1) an ecology of strange attractors constrains the possibility space of interpretation, and (2) an ecology of strange attractors constrains a trajectory without specifying a path. As with most other scholarly endeavours, reductionism, linear logic, and billiard-ball-like causal explanations dominate in a variety of hermeneutic approaches. Since the rise of reception theory in the 1960s, understanding was reduced to what a receiver could understand from a text, whether critically or popularly. I close by suggesting the ecology of attractors in the hermeneutic process as an antidote for the dominance of the receiver.

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