prejudice and interpretation

 

We live in a world of hermeneutics—a world of interpretation, of striving to understand and explain the world around us. We often think of understanding as an act, something we control, a gesture of mastering the truth.

But understanding is not merely an act. It is an event.
An event that may strike like lightning from a clear sky, or emerge gently like a whisper seeping through the cracks of memory and history. Understanding does not arrive upon invitation. It often comes unexpectedly—in a single sentence, a glance, a line of text that opens like a new horizon. And then, we are changed.

Yet before understanding, there is prejudice. Before reason, there is context. Before the question, there is a history we did not choose—but which has chosen us.

No one understands from a void. No subject enters dialogue without carrying the invisible baggage of language, tradition, sensibility, and patterns of thought. We come into the world as inheritors—of a nameless legacy, a network of orientations embedded in the way we see, the way we ask, and the way we await answers.

This is prejudice.

Prejudice: The Silent Guardian of Understanding

Prejudice, in its original sense, is not the enemy. It is the gatekeeper, the foundation from which questions arise. It is the faint light that allows our eyes to adjust before the dawn fully breaks.

Without prejudice, there are no questions. Without questions, there can be no understanding.

Yet like all gatekeepers, prejudice can become authoritarian.
When it no longer opens but closes; when it no longer listens but judges; when it ceases to move and sits as though it has arrived—then prejudice becomes a wall against truth, a lonely fortress echoing only its own voice.

We think understanding means conquering, but it doesn’t.
To understand is to be conquered.

The Encounter: Where Horizons Merge

Every act of understanding is an encounter—not with objects, but with another person, another tradition, another horizon. As though someone from a distant world arrives, carrying something oddly familiar that we cannot name.

To prevent this encounter from becoming a monologue, we must do something paradoxical: step out of ourselves.
We place our own prejudices in brackets—not to discard them, but to observe them. Like a pilgrim stepping back to see the map they are walking upon.

When two horizons meet—not to dominate one another but to illuminate each other—truth begins to emerge. Not as an answer, but as a crack in the silence, a ray of light that reshapes the entire space.

It is there that understanding happens.

Conditions for Possible Understanding

To truly understand, one must have courage.
Not the courage of a debater, but the courage to be transformed.

Commitment to Truth

Not "my" truth, nor "your" truth, but the Truth—revealing itself in the encounter. A truth unfinished, always beyond us, yet calling us.
No one is the master of this game—all are summoned.

Awareness of One’s Own Prejudices

I must know where I stand. Know which history speaks through my mouth, which culture writes through the words I use. Not to eliminate them—but to not be blinded by them.
Reflection is the first light of freedom.

Going Forth to Meet the Other

I must go, like a pilgrim, carrying little.
To meet the Other not as a bearer of answers, but as one searching for questions.
Only when I allow you to appear in your radical otherness, can I begin to see myself anew.

And then we realize: understanding is not a destination. It is a journey between horizons.
A river that never flows the same way twice.
A return—but never a return to the same.

Hermeneutics, then, is the fundamental adventure of being human:

An adventure into language, into lived history, into the very possibility of truth.

Hermeneutics is an ethical act—an ethics grounded in truth, in respect for all who enter the dialogue—especially those who are absent.
Joseph