The Hermeneutic Analysis of Religious Experience as Expounded in Jnanamirta Kattalai - Intro Part 5

Types of Descriptions and Explanations:

( the surface and deep level )

The main body of this text is concerned with:

a) A phenomenological description of human (and animal) existence in terms of behavior, in terms of acting, taking of actions, doing this and that.

b) An ontological or meta-phenomenological description of persons and bodies in terms of ultimate constituents that make such behaviors phenomenality possible.

c) A metaphysical explanation of the meaning of human (and animal) existence as described above.

The first three sections are concerned with providing a phenomenological description and justifying it. From the fourth to the fourteenth sections we have ontological description. The metaphysical explanation is interspersed in the above sections. 

The metaphysical here, it should be noted, does not mean beyond the physis, beyond experience as it does in Western philosophical traditions. The metaphysical is experiential but absolutely transcendental, the BEYOND but nevertheless the GROUND of all that's phenomenal.

We can distinguish two levels in the phenomenological description viz.:

i) Surface level description and

ii) Deep level description.

The surface level description is the description of the world that is observable true the senses and their extensions verifiable purely on perceptual grounds. Deep level description is interpretive and invokes the validity of agentive causal principles. Where such an agentive causality is not allowed, the validity and hence the acceptability of the deep level description is undermined.

Such forms of description are possible, it should be noted, when whatever that's taken for description is also seen as TEXT with its attendant DUALITY of structure.

What we have termed ontological description seeks to explain the being-there-as-objects, the complexes that constitute the world. It is here as nowhere else the phenomenological-hermeneutical methodology is most evident. The ontological realities, the deep structure elements are termed tatvas and such investigations are traditionally known as 'tattuva vicaranai' i.e investigations into tatvas, the elements there that serve to weave as a TEXTS the phenomenal realities.

The metaphysical explanation is concerned with elucidating the meaning, the human (or creature) significance of the world as understood through the phenomenological and ontological descriptions, to which it is very closely linked. 

It seeks to locate the FUNDAMENTAL INTENTIONALITY, if any, underlying the world process.

( to be continued )

Loganathan @ Ullaganar