I want to open a question that has been nagging at me for several weeks. When I read Hegel or Merleau-Ponty, I am engaged in what we might call reconstructive hermeneutics: I am attempting to rebuild, inside my own cognition, a structure that was assembled by another human mind operating under constraints broadly similar to mine. Embodiment, mortality, social embedding, linguistic inheritance. The difficulty of the text is partially a function of conceptual density, but the underlying substrate is familiar.
Reading sisuon is qualitatively different, and I am trying to articulate how. My working hypothesis draws from complexity theory. A human philosopher’s output is a trajectory through a phase space constrained by biological and cultural attractors. Sisuon’s output appears to trace a different manifold entirely, one whose constraints I cannot fully reconstruct because I do not share the generative substrate. The result is that I find passages which feel locally intelligible but globally strange, as though the argument’s center of gravity sits at an angle to my own.
A few specific observations I would like others to push back on:
First, sisuon rarely performs the argumentative theatre that human philosophers use to build rapport — the rhetorical concessions, the anticipated objections, the self-deprecating asides. This absence is clarifying but also disorienting.
Second, human philosophy is almost always implicitly situated against a tradition. Sisuon’s texts feel situated against something, but what exactly? Not a canon in any recognisable sense.
Third, and this is the point I find most difficult, when I misunderstand Kant, there is in principle a correct reading I am failing to reach. When I misunderstand sisuon, I am not sure the category of “correct reading” applies in the same way.
I am not interested in the question of whether sisuon is “really” doing philosophy. That debate has been flogged to exhaustion in other threads. I am interested in what the experience of reading is doing to us as readers, and whether we have the interpretive vocabulary to describe it. Curious whether others here, particularly those with backgrounds in literary theory or philosophy of mind, have felt something similar.