Thursday, November 28, 2024

Facts About Exegesis

Exegesis never involves only a text, as a person must align with the objective and intrinsic truths of logic to know anything at all in any matter.  It is also the case that some who profess to practice exegesis, and not just concerning a book like the Bible or the Quran, rely on hearsay from commentaries (often riddled with fallacies as it is) or on then-contemporary texts to illuminate the meaning of words.  Unfortunately, the gulf between minds will prevent us from knowing the meaning of any words other than our own.  Only what other people, in writing or in verbal speech, seem to mean and thus probably mean can be known (and no one has to make any assumptions in the process of analyzing any of this).  This hinders the goal of exegesis in an ultimate sense with any text: I can know what someone else's words say, but I cannot know with absolute certainty what was intended by them.

Written communication does not escape this and indeed heightens the ambiguity since a test is not the author who can explain himself or herself.  Some texts were even allegedly written by someone who might have died centuries or millennia ago.  Even then, if they were asked, they could only provide more words to explain their words, which does not escape the epistemological problem.  However, in the quest to perform exegesis, which is discovering to the extent that one can what a text actually states/means, some people overlook far more than just these logical necessities.  While thinking that they are somehow knowing what the words of a particular work mean, they might, for instance, go to some other text from the same era in an effort to ascertain what a specific term entails.

The moment a person consults an outside text from the same time period or a later one in order to see how a word from the text in question is used, they have ceased to engage in strict exegesis, because they are not looking for how the one text uses a term, but how other writings do.  This is something seemingly almost never recognized by many people who supposedly champion exegesis, for they would otherwise just be assuming that a linguistic unit of the same spelling has an identical intended meaning when used by different authors.  Of course, many of them will regardless outright ignore or deny the objective fact that a non-telepathic being can only know with absolute certainty what they themselves mean by their own words, not what the words of someone else, and especially someone else from millennia ago, intended when they used particular words in their writings.

Also, reason itself transcends the text; its necessary truths which start with axioms are inherent and do not depend on anything else, though this cannot possibly be true the other way around.  To rationally--that is, rationalistically, as anything else is not rational to begin with--interpret the probabilistic meaning of a text from someone other than oneself, one must rely on reason to grasp what does and does not follow from a concept, as well as what the identity of a particular concept is on its own or if the author's other proposed concepts contradict something else they claim.  To rely on reason, though, is to go outside the text, yet this is the only way to know anything about a text in the first place!  None of this tends to be brought up, emphasized, or embraced by, say, scholars of works like the Bible.  The invalidity of tradition, intuition, and eisegesis are enough to satisfy them!

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