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Thinking Society: How is understanding possible?Add to your list(s) Send you e-mail reminders How is understanding possible against the backdrop of a prevailing spirit that tends to neglect the richness of understanding by reducing the experiences of human intellects to activities such as cognition or reasoning? We ask this question in a time where there are fewer frameworks of understanding; intellectual activity being increasingly narrowed to only a few valid ways of interpreting the world and extracting truth, such as positivist and capitalistic outlooks. In this sense, how can we make sense of music, art, literature and other artifacts of human creativity in order for them to mean something to us across cultural and historical distances that separates us from their creator? How is this process of understanding different from or similar to the scientific understanding of nature? How can understanding grasp a truth whose validity is not dependent only on the possibility of scientific falsification, truth that whilst belonging intimately to the understander is no less about that which is understood? Eventually, how can a consciousness of how understanding is possible broaden our possibilities for expeiencing the world?
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