Andrew Fuyarchuk

An education in literature, the arts and sciences contribute to understanding ourselves, nature and humanity. At the same time, they are as institutionally and culturally divided from one another as fact and fiction. As a result, they pursue projects, functions and curricula of study independently of one another without due regard to shared sources of inspiration, transformation and change. In “Naturalism, Reification and Interpretation,” Chung-ying Cheng exemplifies how to respond to this condition. While he shares W. V. O. Quine’s commitment to think about what we can know and how we acquire knowledge without appealing to substance, he also discerns a pattern in Quine’s thought that obscures its own grounds. Hence, in response to the junctions that Quine hesitates to affirm, e.g., determinacy in the indeterminacy of translation and ultimate reality in ontological relativism, Cheng does not hesitate to foreground them.1 He concludes “It is through interpretation that our understanding of natural world is not limited to surface of the object of concrete experience [but instead] that can be extended to deeper levels and structures of natural reality.”2 Excavating the latter from philosophical entanglements is the space for interpretation into which Cheng dives to impart unity to various facets of naturalized epistemology. He thereby indicates how to articulate the underlying source of change with which to renew humanity amid disparate dispositions and orientations in literature, the arts and science.

The Western tradition of metaphysics has been criticized by Chung-ying Cheng on the grounds that it does not have any fruitful bearing on practice. This judgement, however, depends on a concept of metaphysics that Gadamer overturns with a Pythagorean-Platonic ontology. When this side of his philosophy is developed in tandem with Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics, in particular its doctrine of harmonization, new possibilities for self-understanding in relation to the grounds of existence are charted: The event of Being emerges from the reciprocity of rhythm in a dialogue self-similar to the rhythms of nature grasped by Cheng in terms of yin and yang. This consolidates a cross-fertilization between Cheng and Gadamer on the trans-historical foundations of hermeneutics.

Interpretations of the inner word overlook the fact that for Gadamer language is both written and spoken and that these two mediums are in a dialectical relation. After disputing Zimmermann’s interpretation of the inner word, the paper uses McLuhan to explain Gadamer’s dialectical method for understanding how thought that comes to language participates in the self-unfolding structure of a living organism. Central to this argument is a turn of the inner ear which in contrast to sensory memory based on sight recollects the musical origins of language in acoustic space and renders the movements of a dialogue comparable to song.