Gadamer 1

Had a really fun lunch today with about ten youth workers from the Princeton area. We talked about postmodern thought, youth ministry, and emergent. The dude from Young Life took a few hits, but he was a great sport. Really, we just used YL as the straw man that stood in for modern ministry in general — fact is, it could have been almost any ministry/church. Anyway, it was a great time.

I’ve spent the rest of the day climbing the 575-page Everest that is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960). I’ve got to read it by Friday morning and I’m on page 300 right now. Here’s a little taste of my current agony:

“Under the rubric of a ‘hermeneutics of facticity,’ Heidegger confronted Husserl’s eidetic phenomonolgy, and well as the distinction between fact and essence on which it depended, with a paradoxical demand. Phenomenology should be ontologically based on the facticity of Dasein, existence, which cannot be based on or derived from anything else, and not on the pure cogito as the essential constitution of typical universality — a bold idea, but difficult to carry through.” (254)

I can hear you all ripping up you PhD applications…