To Know Don Bosco in line with Schleiermacher

TO KNOW DON BOSCO COMPREHENSIVELY ACCORDING TO SCHLEIERMACHER

          

            Can we know a person purely? is the question that perplexed my mind I am still with the same question to get the better answer. I think it is not so easy to know the person purely. But according to some philosophers like Schleiermacher who says that ‘if we begin to start to understanding a person first bit by bit and eventually we can bring a person to comprehensive outlook. Thus we can understand a person in parts and then eventually as a whole. Likewise we can come back to refine our understanding of the parts to whole.

            For me to know and learn Don Bosco is important precisely because by knowing him I can enhance my life in his foot prints as I am aspiring to be his true son. Although the times, linguistic expressions and the cultural differences were different if compare to the current but his outstanding thoughts have a lot to contribute to our times, for which we have to look up to. In this context I can quote Schleiermacher who says that ‘we can understand Don Bosco better than or more than he understood himself. In this regard we cannot apply scientific method but rather it is an art of understanding. Meaning to say that in understanding the person we need to go beyond and transcend the person.

            Scheleirmacher, the father of Modern Hermeneutics exhorts us to develop this mind frame which is very inevitable aptitude for any person to make a good life even out of a mess like Don Bosco. Which means the apriori knowledge or the mere hypothesis has to take root in action. Hence I once again assert that the art of knowing or understating is not prefixed nor structured by any frame of reference but rather it is like an art. As art evolves eventually by the artist so the understating of a person is to a better conception.