Corresponding Author:  

David W Jardine, PhD 

Retired, University of Calgary 

Email: jardine@ucalgary.ca 

Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 

April 16, 2018 

The Author(s) 2018 

 

 

 

“Asleep in My Sunshine Chair” 

 

 
 

 

 

 

David W. Jardine 

 
 

Abstract 
 

This paper takes up themes from Kevin Aho's (2018) paper and links its explorations of the 

history of neurasthenia to the nature and aim of hermeneutic inquiry itself. 

 

 

Keywords 
 

neurasthenia, hermeneutic method, hermeneutic topics, aletheia, energeia ("aliveness"), 

depression, naturalistic reductionism 

Rifling through two-hundred-year-old diaries, unfurling bundles of love-letters like 

flowers, saying every name in an orphanage registry under my breath, getting lost in a 

farmer’s field, gingerly lifting leaves long folded with perfumey motes, falling asleep in 

my sunshine chair, drooling spittle puddles onto a crackled map of Nunsmoor. The 

stories I stumbled across in the archives were often painful, shocking, and occasionally 

joyous. At first, they seem far away but after a short while they begin to move closer (or 

maybe it’s we who are moving?) and I begin to comprehend, just barely, a great aliveness. 

(Dawson, 2013/2015) 

 

“The Joy of Recognition” 

 

Kevin Aho’s (2018) “Neurasthenia Revisited: On Medically Unexplained Syndromes and the 

Value of Hermeneutic Medicine,” was a real pleasure to read – that odd scholarly pleasure of not 

only delicious and meticulous detail, but, with this, feeling folds of intimate, unspoken 

inheritances peeling back and away, almost from the inside out. “The joy of recognition is the 



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 Article 7    2 

joy of knowing more than is already familiar” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 114) while, in the same breath, 

experiencing the familiar now almost-embarrassingly brought to life, enlivened, by this “more.”  

 

That this particular inheritance of neurasthenia can wake up and I can feel how it has always 

already “draw[n me] into its path” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 198) is both startling and humiliating. It 

“begin[s] to move closer” and then suddenly jumps up, animate and feral and afoot.  

 

I wake with a start from my sunshine chair.  

 

That I’ve been long familiar with what is wonderfully called in Old English grevoushede makes 

reading about “the deficiency or exhaustion of . . . ‘nerve force’” (Aho, 2018, p. 1) a bit like 

reading an historically detailed, almost-autobiographical reading of how my own life might have 

already been lived “beyond my wanting and doing” (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxviii). 

 

Darning Needles 

 

I’ve just been writing another piece and exploring, in part, an old term used by my grandmother 

to name dragonflies: “darning needles.” This, in fact, originates in old, shall we say, “folktales” 

meant, I expect, to simply frighten or reprimand:  

 

The devil’s darning needles . . . sew up the mouths of scolding women, saucy children, 

and profane men. Even more sinister is the belief that the devil’s darning needle will 

enter a person’s ear and penetrate the brain. (Mitchell & Lasswell, 2005, p. 20) 

 

The reference to dragonflies and darning has to do with their hovering, criss-cross, back and 

forth movement over open fields like the darning of the toes of socks that I’m old enough to 

recall my grandmother hunched over. Weaving. Latin textus, now re-read in reverie. 

“Dragonflies” was, for me as a child (and lingering since), enough of a name to keep me rather 

alert. Something about silent, hovering needles, though, was a different matter. The point was 

received as a boy even though the folktale history was never mentioned and probably not even 

explicitly known, even though it haunted the tale being told. Reading about it recently wasn’t 

exactly a surprise, and yet it was. The joy of knowing more. 

 

I mention this because of the nebulous ways in which the images and ancestries and mixed and 

muddled language of the life-world, as Kevin Aho demonstrates, find their way down to us, more 

often than not, apparently (but not actually) untethered from the links that bore them here. Hence 

the work of hermeneutics. Many of us might have obscure memories of our forbearers talking 

about delicate or weak nervous conditions, of “the miseries” or the like, or, as my wife’s 

grandmother called one malady “weakness in the body” -- full of that now-strange, Victorian 

distancing and repression. There is even an old, apocryphal joke/non-joke about Victorians 

covering up bare table legs with linens for fear of offense (The Guardian, n.d.). That distancing 

that is caught in the objectifying phrase “the body” is itself a mixed and muddled sign of a sort of 

nervous exhaustion the remembering of which moves it closer and enlivens. 

 

Reading Aho’s piece also reminded me a bit of reading Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good 

(1989), and discovering already-all-too-familiar images of the punishing of willful (“saucy”) 



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 Article 7    3 

children – breaking their will, darning up their mouths -- found in late-19th century “black 

pedagogy” manuals: 

 

It goes without saying that pedagogues not infrequently awaken and help to swell a 

child’s conceit by foolishly emphasizing his merits. Only humiliation can help here. 

(from The Encyclopedia of Pedagogy, 1851, as cited in Miller, 1989, p. 22) 

 

One of the vile products of a misguided philanthropy is the idea that, in order to obey 

gladly, the child has to understand the reasons why an order is given, and that blind 

obedience offends human dignity. I do not know how we can continue to speak of 

obedience once reasons are given. These [reasons] are meant to convince the child, and, 

once convinced, he is not obeying us but merely the reasons we have given him. 

Respect. . .is then replaced by a self-satisfied allegiance to his own cleverness. (The 

Encyclopedia of Pedagogy, 1852, as cited in Miller, 1989, p. 40) 

 

This would have been the imaginal atmosphere in which my grandmother was raised and taught 

and thereby my parents and thereby, well, here we are. In the work I have done in schools, these 

images are both repressed and rife even though we think of ourselves in education as 

encouraging precisely aliveness, independence, and thoughtfulness. A link lingers here of 

regarding a fear of the wild, and the need to domesticate, to tame and tether. Bubbling nearby 

this, of course, are the root fears of “aliveness” that have led to our current ecological 

circumstances. 

 

This sort of unravelling and explicating in Aho’s work is precisely one of the goals of 

hermeneutic work in general. We can easily be unwittingly held fast in the binds of these 

ancestral tethers even though – perhaps especially when and because – they have fallen from 

memory, fallen from view, become sewn up and hence “unspeakable.” “Insight . . . always 

involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 

357). It should be noted, however, that Gadamer’s point is more complex than it might seem, 

perhaps more complex than he intended.  

 

The deception is not that what has captured us is simply false and that the work of hermeneutics 

is to disprove something. The deception is that what has captured us in nets of numbing 

familiarity and goes-without-saying-ness is ontologically reified into what is presumed to be 

simply “the way things are” (Aho does a nice job of exploring some of this in his explorations of 

“naturalism” and the nature of “scientific/biological reductionism”). It is this capture itself that is 

false – the amnesia-like forgetting, the sleepy taken-for-granted-ness that can lead to believing, 

for example, that only a biological/medical description is a description of what is. The deceit is 

in thinking that what is in fact a possible way of giving an account of some phenomenon is not 

only necessary (i.e., simply “what is,” simply “objective”) but precisely thereby exclusionary of 

all other ways of making sense of our suffering.  

 

That is the captivity that hermeneutic insight aims to free us from. In that freedom, biological 

and naturalistic accounts do not disappear in favor of “lived-experience.” Rather, these very 

accounts finally appear as just and precisely that: accounts of our lives that arise in relations of 

dependent co-arising with specific and identifiable domains our language, our hopes, our 



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 Article 7    4 

presumptions, our time, and in light of inherited regimes of methodology, warrant and 

accountability. 

 

Energeia and Aletheia 

 

So, in reading Aho’s lovely piece, something popped up that I have found to be perennial in 

hermeneutic work: that the topic of a hermeneutic study (in this case, the long and involved, live-

wire history of neurasthenia), and something about the nature of hermeneutic understanding 

itself tend to have an often-secret affinity. I can only sketch some speculative ideas here, and beg 

forgiveness in this regard. I am on the verge of being guilty of avoiding precisely the sort of 

exemplary and careful work found in Kevin Aho’s work that led me here in the first place. 

 

One of the threads of hermeneutic insight is that human consciousness tends towards a certain 

sleepiness and lethargy regarding the ancestral currents that “bear us forward in their fine, 

accurate arms” (Wallace, 1989, p. 49). Lethargy, Lethe, forgetfulness, lethality. A certain 

“weakness” (Greek, astheneia) and heaviness and blandness and flatness and closure, where 

potentiality, possibility, interpretability, questioning, and venture, seem not only too exhausting 

to contemplate but, worse yet, simply uncalled-for in light of what moribundly “is.” It was 

Martin Heidegger (1962) who first gave contemporary hermeneutics hints of the numbing effects 

of what he called “idle talk,” (p. 211 ff.) “levelling down” (p. 127) and the stitched-up-mouths 

effects of the “it goes without saying” and “everybody knows” familiarities that come from the 

sways of the “they-self” (p. 163 ff.; see Jardine, 2018). 

 

In light of such interpretive weakness and weakening, the world itself seems precisely equally 

not in need of my own interpretive energetics. As with depression, this is not merely an internal 

pathology or state, but is experienced as precisely in sync with a depressed world that has no 

openings, no hidden bloodlines and memory. As James Hillman (2006, p. 30; see Jardine, 2016) 

put it so deftly, “sickness is now ‘out there’” and any attempts to then simply turn “inwards” and 

cure ourselves of our grievousness can end up leaving in place an objectified codification of our 

suffering in the ways and means of the world itself. Differently put, and following George M. 

Beard’s (1881, p. vi), insights, “neurasthenia is not the result of some new organic pathology but 

of ‘modern civilization [itself]’” (Aho, 2018, p. 2). 

 

So, when we then read “Neurasthenia Revisited: On Medically Unexplained Syndromes and the 

Value of Hermeneutic Medicine” we can start to sense that those very closures (of our own 

pathology and the closure that the world itself invites and promotes and sustains) are themselves 

open to interpretation, and to the slow unwinding of ancestral threads, of live bloodlines, of 

movement instead of “sedimented” intransigency and inertness: 

 

To use the hermeneutic adage, the world has become open to interpretation [to exactly the 

extent that I am open to the interpretability of the world]. And here is the great, 

seemingly paradoxical situation: “keeping ourselves open” and "keeping the world open" 

(Eliade, 1968, p. 139) are the same thing. As we become experienced, having cleaved 

with affection and made ourselves “roomier,” the world's roominess can be experienced. 

(Jardine, Bastock, George, & Martin, 2008, p. 53; cited in Jardine, 2016a, p. 81) 

 



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 Article 7    5 

Even the insistent reductionism of naturalism is itself an old wives’ tale oft told and re-told, often 

precisely as a condescending rebuke to the sauciness, the scolding, the profanity, that can seem 

to come with hermeneutic insight. 

 

And hence the great irony, that the opening of such burgeoning alertness regarding neurasthenia 

is precisely what tends to fail under the shadowed suffering of neurasthenia itself. That is why, in 

reading Kevin Aho’s piece, I found myself searching out this: 

 

I take a different approach to the question of what truth, aletheia, or unconcealment, 

really means. I invoke the concept of energeia here, which has a special value because in 

dealing with it we are no longer moving in the realm of sentence truth [to which 

reductionist and naturalistic means and measures might apply]. With this new conceptual 

word Aristotle was able to think a motion [a movement, motility, animation] . . . 

something like life itself, like being aware, seeing, or thinking. All of these he called 

“pure Energeia.” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 213) 

 

In an alternate translation, Sheila Ross (2006, p. 108) renders part of this passage as “something 

like aliveness itself” and she links it directly to the sort of whiling or “tarrying time” (p. 108; see 

Jardine, 2008; Ross & Jardine, 2009) requisite of interpretive work. As Aho’s piece shows, 

lingering intently over this long and long-buried history with the sort of loving suspicion of 

interpretive insight wakes it up and simultaneously wakes up in us our deeply suppressed 

complicity in its wakes. “It is only through these shared self-interpretations that we can 

experience and make sense of our suffering” (Aho, 2018, p. 12) and, I suggest, this very “making 

sense” is itself something of an alleviation of precisely that which it studies.  

 

It is not just that we can counterweight the reductionist and naturalistic accounts of our ennui 

with those of living accounts of those living with such matters. In interpretive work, as Aho’s 

piece demonstrates so vividly, those very reductionist and naturalistic accounts themselves come 

alive. They are not just the inert, dominant accounts of “what is.” Instead, we see that they 

themselves have dependently co-arisen out of (and into) our living, in response to circumstances 

and streams and forces and hopes and desires.  

  

“They begin to move closer,” just as we, now, are moving. Reifying reductionism into feigns and 

sought-for objective permanence is thus foregone in favor of arising and perishing, since even 

our confidence in and need for such reification comes and goes. “Gadamer explains [that] 

Aristotle apparently coined [energiea] in his exploration of the question of the being of 

becoming” (Ross, 2006, p. 107). 

 

Suffering Itself is Impermanent 

 

As you continually experience whatever suffering is appropriate to you, you absolutely 

must know how to bring it into the path. If you accept the suffering, you let the basic 

suffering be and do not stop it, but you never have the suffering of worry that creates 

discontentment when you focus on the basic suffer. Since you are using a method to bring 

even basic sufferings into the path, you greatly lessen your suffering, so you can bear it. 

(Tsong-kha-pa, 2004, pp. 172-173) 



Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2018 Article 7    6 

 

The energeia that comes from the interpretive venture is not just a way to study one’s 

grevoushede through studying the dependent co-arising of its ins and outs and the intimate body 

auras of its licks and shifts and criss-crossing darts and darnings. Interpreting it can also help 

ameliorate it to some small degree. Even my own decision to not use the phrase “seasonal 

affective disorder” and to come to deliberately call it, instead, “seasonal affectedness” allowed 

me, in some small way, to side-step or at least deliberately and consciously interrupt the 

pathologies of disorder and to more deeply experience how profoundly well-ordered is this 

seasonal affectedness. “Disorder” was simply an added layer of, following Tsong-kha-pa, a sort 

of “secondary suffering” that, in fact, masked and occluded the “basic suffering” and did not 

allow it to be brought onto the path of interpretation, the path, that is, of un-reifying its grip on 

me and my grip on it. 

 

Key to hermeneutic work, then, is that “the concept of substance [permanence, the A=A of 

objectivism and reductionism] is . . .inadequate. [There is a] radical challenge to thought implicit 

in this inadequacy” Gadamer (1989, p. 242). Part of the challenge to thought is that grief and 

suffering themselves, like depression or nervous exhaustion, have no substance.  

 

From Robert Bly (n.d., p. 11): “Grief is not a permanent state; it is a room with a door on the 

other wall.” 

 

Our relation to grief is an “infinite task” (George, 2017) taken on by a finite being. But this is not 

because grief is permanent but precisely because it isn’t. It is, rather, perennial, seasonal in its 

affectedness. Go through the door on the other wall and, sure enough, another waiting room in 

which things will once again accrete, forgetting will again accrue, and then, also sure enough, 

Coyote will rustle in the bushes outside (see Beamer, 2017) and the whole thing, all over again, 

will jump up unexpectedly when something just happens to happen, slobbering spittle on your 

face and then biting down hard and fast into the quick of memory. 

 

Welcome. Again. This is the tough work of hermeneutic insight: 

 

The first Noble Truth is all about accepting or welcoming unsatisfactoriness or suffering 

(dukkha) rather than trying to resist it. You will notice then that its nature is to change 

and drop away. (Sumedho, 2010, p. 37) 

  

It drops away, arises, drops away, providing we remain, as steadfastly as we can, ready to escape 

its capture all over again.  

 

So, don’t sit too long in that sunshine chair. You’re apt to fall, like me so very often, again and 

again, into asleep and spittle drooling, only to be startled all over again. 

 

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