[Buddha-l] Fw: Charity as a moral conversational ethic; hermenutics of suspicion

[jkirk]

>
>
> > On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 09:52 +0700, Randall Jones wrote:
>
> > > I would like to mention the principle of charity, alongside your
mention
> of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
> >
> > The textbook I have been using to teach a course called "Reasoning and
> > critical thinking" has a wonderful section on the importance of the
> > principle of charity. (The text is John Hughes, Critical Thinking.) The
> > hermeneutics of suspicion, it seems to me, is a dramatic failure of the
> > principle of charity; it seems, in fact, to be almost the opposite. The
> > principle of charity begins with the assumption that the person whose
> > words one is interpreting is being honest, benevolent, and basically
> > sensible until it can be established conclusively that he or she was
> > being deliberately deceptive, malevolent or seriously mistaken.
> > Occasionally I have encountered people who find this principle of
> > charity unconscionably naive. Personally, I find it no more naive than
> > the principle that a person should be assumed innocent until proved
> > guilty.
=======================
This topic, originally titled "Can an Air Force cadet have Buddha nature?,"
sadly, has flown by without much of a discussion. I had never come across
the phrase "hermeneutics of suspicion" until it first got posted on the
list. It seems to accurately describe the dominant critical process in much
scholarship of several past few decades and of today, including earlier
studies on ideology (Mannheim e.g.,), in which it is taken for granted that
there is a hidden agenda to be uncovered.  I too have written in such mode.

I wonder if it is not necessary to employ such a hermeneutic when dealing
with texts, as opposed to dealing with live interlocutors--students,
friends, colleagues, et al., for whom the moral imperative to be trusting
and charitable seems, to me anyway, to be more compelling. This hermeneutic
strikes me as very productive. One can, for ex., apply it with benefit to
the speeches of GW Bush (e.g., the "Clean Air" act and his support of it),
or in a different context, to printed matter that advertises the spiritual
benefits of various Buddhist centers and/or teachers, while obscuring the
monetary fork-overs that reveal themselves on further searching.

Joanna