Waiting for Meaning While the Days Refuse to End !

 

Hermeneutics, Headaches, Hope, and My Mother’s Food

Some days feel like footnotes.
Not chapters. Not even paragraphs.
Just footnotes at the bottom of an already exhausting page of life.

These are those days.

Exams on the head. Philosophy in the veins. Coffee pretending to be hope. And time—time doing what it does best: passing painfully slowly. I am overburdened, not just with syllabi but with meaning itself. Because once you study hermeneutics, nothing remains innocent—not texts, not people, not even your own silence.

Hermeneutics: Or, How Understanding Became a Burden

Let’s begin where the headache begins.

Schleiermacher politely told us:

“To understand a text is to understand the author better than he understood himself.”

Great. As if understanding myself wasn’t already difficult. Now I’m supposed to emotionally stalk dead authors too?

Then came Dilthey, who said life must be understood from within lived experience. Suddenly philosophy stopped being abstract and started asking uncomfortable questions like:

• Why are you tired?

• Why does history feel personal?

• Why do your notes feel heavier than bricks?

Dilthey made it worse by insisting that human sciences cannot be treated like natural sciences. Meaning: no formulas, no shortcuts, no MCQs for life. Just pain, memory, context—and interpretation.

And just when I thought, okay, manageable, Heidegger entered the room like that one senior who ruins your self-confidence forever.

He didn’t ask what we understand.
He asked who is doing the understanding.

Boom.

Understanding, he said, is not an activity—we are understanding. We are thrown into the world (Geworfenheit), already interpreting, already anxious, already tired before breakfast. No neutral observer. No escape. Just Being… and exams.

Then Gadamer, smiling gently, finished the job:

“Understanding is always a fusion of horizons.”

Which basically means: you can never read a text without dragging your whole life into it. Your caste. Your country. Your politics. Your hunger. Your mother’s food you haven’t eaten in months.

Thanks, sir. Very helpful during finals.

And when hermeneutics was almost spiritual, Habermas walked in and said:

“Wait. Who controls meaning? Who benefits from interpretation?”

Now interpretation became political. Power entered the classroom. Ideology sat beside grammar. And suddenly I wasn’t just tired—I was angry.

Then Paul Ricoeur, like a tired therapist, tried to reconcile everything:

• Suspicion and faith

• Explanation and understanding

• Distance and belonging

Ricoeur said texts can liberate us—but only if we accept that meaning is never exhausted.

Just like my syllabus.

Sartre: Or, Congratulations, You Are Free—Now Suffer

If hermeneutics gave me a headache, Jean-Paul Sartre gave me insomnia.

“Existence precedes essence,” he said.

Meaning: there is no excuse.
No destiny.
No syllabus-blaming.
No hiding behind systems.

You choose.
And because you choose, you are responsible.

Even not choosing is a choice.

Thanks, Sartre. I was just trying to pass.

But Sartre’s freedom is brutal. It doesn’t comfort—it exposes. It tells me:

• You are anxious because you are free.

• You are tired because meaning is your job.

• You are afraid because nothing is guaranteed.

And still—you must act.

Dussel and the Philosophy That Refused to Be European

Enter Enrique Dussel, calmly dismantling centuries of Eurocentric arrogance.

He asked:

“Whose suffering did philosophy ignore while talking about universals?”

Dussel reminded us that liberation does not begin in libraries but in the cry of the oppressed. That philosophy must start from the margins—from Latin America, from Dalits, from the poor, from those crushed under ‘development’.

Suddenly hermeneutics wasn’t about texts anymore.
It was about bodies.
And politics.
And whose pain is interpretable.

This hit home. Hard.

Cosmology, Mind, and Eternal Sunshine of Emotional Damage

Meanwhile, cosmology keeps telling us the universe is expanding, entropy is winning, and everything ends in silence.

Comforting.

And philosophy of mind keeps asking:

• Are we brains?

• Are we patterns?

• Are memories all that remain?

Which brings me to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

What happens when memory is erased but love still leaks through?

That movie taught me something no textbook did:

Meaning is stubborn.
It survives deletion.
It refuses to disappear.

Even when memories go, emotions haunt.
Even when exams end, fatigue remains.
Even when systems fail, love sneaks back in.

Karl Jaspers and the Weight of Boundary Situations

Karl Jaspers spoke of boundary situations—death, guilt, struggle, suffering.

You don’t solve them.
You face them.

Exams feel trivial compared to death—but they mimic it just enough to train us for anxiety. Waiting. Uncertainty. Powerlessness.

And yet—communication, Jaspers said, is salvation.

Which is ironic. Because I’m communicating with books while desperately wanting to go home and eat my mother’s food.

Euthanasia, Ethics, and the Uneasy Silence of God

A Belgian Jesuit once spoke gently about euthanasia—about dignity, autonomy, mercy.

In India, the debate feels heavier. Life here is sacred—but also expendable. We worship life publicly and neglect it privately.

Where does compassion end?
Where does control begin?

No easy answers. Only unease.

Politics, the Country, and the Feeling That Something Is Slipping

And the country?
Ah. The country.

We know where we are heading.
Everyone knows.
We just pretend not to.

Truth is inconvenient. Silence is comfortable. And someday the bill will arrive—with interest.

Waiting, Hoping, Surviving

So here I am.

Overburdened.
Waiting for exams to end.
Waiting to return to the province.
Waiting for my mother’s food.
Waiting for normalcy to feel meaningful again.

Days passing slowly.
Hope passing quietly.
Faith refusing to leave.

Do We Understand Enough to Change Anything?

So what did all this hermeneutics, existentialism, liberation philosophy, cosmology, cinema, and suffering teach me?

That understanding without transformation is just intellectual entertainment.
That philosophy means nothing if it doesn’t wound us a little.
That interpretation is ethical—or it is useless.

And the real question remains:

• If we understand injustice, why don’t we change it?

• If we know where we are heading, why do we keep walking?

• If love is the last meaning standing, why do we treat it like a luxury?

Maybe exams will end.
Maybe fatigue will pass.
Maybe my mother’s food will heal something books cannot.

But unless we change—
no philosophy will save us.

And that…
is the most uncomfortable interpretation of all.

 Ronnie --- Student of Philosophy