Existentia Hermeneutica: Understanding as the Mode of Being in the World 3643911513, 9783643911513

Table of contents :
Contents
1. Introduction
1. 1. Doing Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as the Practice of Interpretation
1. 2. Hermeneutic Existence as Phronetic Existence: The Radicality of Human Responsibility
2. Hermeneutic Discovery of a Theological Insight: Toward a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Religion
2. 1. The Ambiguities of Proximity: Between Philosophy and Theology
2. 2. Thinking Hermeneutically: Opening toward Transcendence as the Imperative of Self-Understanding
2. 3. Questioning the Absolute: Toward the New Beginning
2. 4. Understanding as the Happening of Truth
3. Poetic Disclosure: Language as the Medium of the Hermeneutic Experience
3. 1. Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment
3. 2. Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement
3. 3. Nothing Shall Be Forgotten: Poetry and Ways of Understanding
3. 4. Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity
4. Hermeneutic Challenge: The Future of Hermeneutics
Credits/Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Nachtr"agliche Korrekturen sind kostenpflichtig)

freigegeben:

Andrzej Wierci´nski

´ Andrzej Wiercinski, Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Warsaw, and President of the International Institute for Hermeneutics.

Existentia Hermeneutica Understanding as the Mode of Being in the World

´ Andrzej Wiercinski

Existentia hermeneutica is phronetic existence with the aim of cultivating practical wisdom in human life: It comes from life, influences life, and transforms life. Understanding what is happening in life requires reaching the hermeneutic truth, which is the truth of understanding. The experience of hermeneutic truth calls for personal commitment and existential response, and, thus, expresses the hermeneutic moral imperative. Referring to Heidegger’s phenomenological analytics of Dasein, Gadamer emphasizes that understanding is not only one of the human capabilities, but a way of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Hermeneutics, as a practical philosophy, motivates a person to actively participate in the life of the community, which is our inseparable duty, inalienable right, and moral imperative. Participation in the life of the community is one of the basic issues addressed by many social sciences, including pedagogy. To prepare for such an engaged life is one of the main goals of upbringing and education.

Existentia Hermeneutica

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International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology Vol. 11

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Andrzej Wierci´nski

Existentia Hermeneutica

International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology edited by

Prof. Dr. Dr. Andrzej Wierci´nski (University of Warsaw)

Volume 11

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Andrzej Wierci´nski

Existentia Hermeneutica Understanding as the Mode of Being in the World

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Contents 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 7 1. 1. Doing Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as the Practice of Interpretation .......... 7 1. 2. Hermeneutic Existence as Phronetic Existence: The Radicality of Human Responsibility ............................................... 33 2. Hermeneutic Discovery of a Theological Insight: Toward a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Religion ................................. 57 2. 1. The Ambiguities of Proximity: Between Philosophy and Theology .......... 60 2. 1. 1. The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius .. 60 2. 1. 2. Incarnation as the Empowerment of Thinking the Difference: The Understanding of the Logos and the Permanent Task of Interpretation ........................................................................................... 91 2. 1. 3. Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation .................... 127 2. 1. 4. The Inexhaustibility of Understanding: From the verbum interius to the verbum entis ...................................... 135 2. 2. Thinking Hermeneutically: Opening toward Transcendence as the Imperative of Self-Understanding......................................................... 147 2. 2. 1. The Hermeneutics of the Gift: Mutual Interaction Between Philosophy and Theology in Hans Urs von Balthasar .......................... 147 2. 2. 2. Trinity and Understanding: Hermeneutic Insights ................................ 168 2. 2. 3. Gadamer and Theology: From a Work of Art to Faith or Distance with Respect....................................................................... 186 2. 2. 4. The Hermeneutic Understanding of the In-carnation and the Eucharist: Paul Celan’s Tenebrae and the Interpretive Character of Communion through Body, Blood, and Image ................................ 202 2. 2. 5. The Hermeneutics of Existential Attention: Faith is Conversation–Our Matter with God ........................................ 211 2. 3. Questioning the Absolute: Toward the New Beginning ........................... 230 2. 3. 1. Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief............................ 230 2. 3. 2. Infinity and the Challenge of Heideggerian Thinking: Bernhard Welte and the Question of God ............................................. 257 5

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2. 3. 3. Martin Heidegger’s “Divine God” in the Thinking of Bernhard Welte and Gustav Siewerth .............................................. 269 2. 3. 4. The Destiny or Fate of Metaphysics: The Empowerment of Thinking and the Forgetfulness of Being ......................................... 283 2. 4. Understanding as the Happening of Truth ................................................ 311 2. 4. 1. The Lingual Mediation of Being and the Infinite Process of Understanding: Gadamer’s Radicalization of Heidegger’s Question of Being ........................................................ 311 2. 4. 2. Phronesis as the Mediation between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility........................................................................................ 329 2. 4. 3. The Truth of Hermeneutic Experience .................................................. 344 2. 4. 4. The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher, and the Philosophizing Believer ...................................... 355 2. 4. 5. The Courage to Ask and the Humility to Listen: Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology...................................................................... 380 3. Poetic Disclosure: Language as the Medium of the Hermeneutic Experience.......................................................... 393 3. 1. Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment .................................. 393 3. 2. Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement ............................................. 422 3. 3. Nothing Shall Be Forgotten: Poetry and Ways of Understanding ............ 439 3. 4. Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity ........... 454 4. Hermeneutic Challenge: The Future of Hermeneutics ........................... 485 Credits/Acknowledgments ................................................................................ 495

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1. Introduction 1. 1. Doing Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as the Practice of Interpretation The Greek word ερμηνεύω means the activity of interpreting (expressing in words, explaining, and translating), and ερμηνεία the interpretation as such.1 The words invoke Hermes, the messenger god of the Greek pantheon. Hermes relays messages between mortals and divinities. Thus, hermeneutics is always between speakers who are otherwise alienated from each other. It works with “the tools which human understanding employs to grasp the meaning and to convey it to others.”2 Contemporary hermeneutics, as a general philosophical discipline, seeks to illuminate the basic structures of human understanding. Like all genuinely philosophical disciplines, it claims for itself a universal scope and validity.3 In the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method Gadamer, the interpreter par excellence defines the scope of his philosophical hermeneutics: Heidegger’s temporal analytics of Dasein has, I think, shown convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself.... The term “hermeneutics”... denotes the basic being-in-motion of Dasein that constitutes its finitude and historicity, and hence embraces the whole of its experience of the world. Not caprice, or even an elaboration of a single aspect, but the nature of the

See Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias, in idem, The Categories; On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). See also Andrzej Wierciński, “Phenomenological Hermeneutics: The Horizon of Thinking,” in idem, ed., Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2005), ix-xii. 2 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 13; idem, “Heideggerian Ontology and Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 113-121. 3 Gary B. Madison, “Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 24. According to Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics must be universal because understanding takes place in all aspects of experience; it encompasses the way we experience one another, historical traditions, our own existence and our world. In our being-in-the-world we are opened to this universe. See James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997). 1

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thing itself makes the movement of understanding comprehensive and universal.4 Hermeneutics as the art of interpreting began as a legal and theological methodology, a set of rules governing the application of civil and canon law, and the interpretation of Scripture. It developed into a general theory of human understanding, particularly through the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. These authors proved that hermeneutics is much more than theology or legal theory, for it is not only the application of laws and theological texts to various situations that requires hermeneutic understanding; the comprehension of any written text requires hermeneutics. The interpretation of a literary text, for example, is as much a hermeneutic act as the interpretation of Scripture. The historicity of human understanding is the foundational insight of hermeneutics.5 Without collapsing critical thought into relativism, hermeneutics recognizes that understanding is always situated and determined by historical, lingual, and cultural horizons of meaning. Problems and questions can only be genuinely understood through a grasp of the historical situation within which they first arose. Thus, hermeneutics is the practice of historical retrieval and re-construction. Unlike the study of history, however, hermeneutics does not re-construct the past for its own sake, but always for the sake of understanding the particular way a problem or question must be engaged in the present. It is only by addressing the old questions within ever-new hermeneutic horizons that understanding breaks through the limitations of any particular cultural setting to the matter which calls for thought.6 In part four of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger attempts to lay a ground for metaphysics in a retrieval. He explains:

4

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2000), xxx. See also Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Hermeneutics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). For a recent comprehensive presentation of Gadamer’s hermeneutics see Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997); Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, Dennis J. Schmidt,and Friederike Rese, ed., Hermeneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (Tübingen, Mohr, 2000); Robert L. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (New York: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002). 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Historicity of Understanding as Hermeneutic Principle,” in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978); idem “The Historicity of Understanding,” in Paul Connerton, ed., Critical Sociology (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976). 6 For the hermeneutic notion of tradition see Andrzej Wierciński, “L’Ermeneutica Filosofica della Tradizione,” Ars Interpretandi: Annuario di ermeneutica giuridica 8 (2003): 21-40. 8

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By the retrieval of a basic problem, we understand the opening-up of its original, long-concealed possibilities, through the working-out of which it is transformed. In this way, it first comes to be preserved in its capacity as a problem. To preserve a problem, however, means to free and keep watch over those inner forces which make it possible, on the basis of its essence, as a problem. Retrieval of the possible does not just mean the taking-up of what is “customary,” “grounded overviews [which] exist” from which “something can be done.” The possible in this sense is always just the all-too-real which everyone manages to manipulate in its prevailing mode of operation. The possible in this sense directly hinders a genuine retrieval, and thereby, in general, it hinders a relationship to history.7 Hermeneutics opposes the radical relativist notion that meaning cannot be translingual. As the speculative grammarians of the Middle Ages recognized, the grammars of the world’s languages are rooted in depth grammar of human meaning.8 This depth grammar is not codifiable; it is not a meta-language in which everything can be said. Rather, it is the single horizon of human understanding, which makes speakers of various languages members of a human community. On the other hand, hermeneutics opposes the rationalist tendency to downplay the uniqueness of languages. Hermeneutics is not satisfied with translating the language of the other; it wants to speak with the other in the language of the other. Claiming to be a universal discipline9 while at the same time accentuating the finite nature of understanding and the linguality and textuality of experience,10 7

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th. ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), 139. 8 The modern linguistic theory taught at the universities these days is largely the theory of Chomsky which posits an underlying condition (equal in all peoples and places) of lingual potential. The difference of each specific historical and cultural determination can be preserved without scarifying the whole interpretative project. Preserving the difference and attaining communication creates the antinomy that needs to be actively surmounted in each attempt at translation and communication as such. See Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky’s Classic Works, Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume (New York: New Press, 1998), idem, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), idem, On Nature and Language, ed. Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 9 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11; also “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II: Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986), 219-231. See further, Jürgen Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik: Aufsätze. Hans Georg Gadamer zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Rüdiger Budner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1970), 73-104. 10 On the hermeneutic primacy of language and the universality of hermeneutics see Andrzej Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” in 9

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philosophical hermeneutics rejects both foundationalism in philosophy and fundamentalism in religion and theology.11 For Gadamer, the universality of hermeneutics is grounded in historical consciousness, in language, historicity, and the understanding of philosophy as hermeneutics.12 The universality of hermeneutics is the universality of a lingually mediated experience, the ontological disclosure of Being. The persistent claim of hermeneutics that understanding is essentially presuppositional is most radically opposed to the search for and return to “fundamentals”—“unvarnished, literal truths”—the distinctive traits of both foundationalism and fundamentalism. In contrast to religious fundamentalism, hermeneutics sees the “either/or of relativism and absolutism” as an untenable metaphysical opposition. As such, hermeneutics is philosophy in the Greek sense of the word, the love (φιλία) and the desire for wisdom (σοφία), i.e., as comprehensive an understanding of human existence as is possible. Practicing Hermeneutics By facilitating hermeneutic thinking, hermeneutics contributes to thinking with each other, rethinking what has been thought, and thinking on to what is yet to be thought. In this play of Mitdenken, Nachdenken, and Weiterdenken, hermeneutics shows itself as the practice of φιλοσοφία, of listening to oneself, the tradition, and the other, with the devotion (Hingabe) that expresses our self-givenness to the living truth.13 Hermeneutics is not only the practice of opening up the world of the text; it is also the practice of opening ourselves to the world of the other. It is the art of asking questions, conscious of their history and with undivided attention to what calls for thinking, primordially an encounter with otherness, and thus a relationship to the other. Without pre-understanding, understanding is not possible. Hermeneutic consciousness concerns itself with the prejudgements that condition understanding, that is, with the historicity of thinking. Prejudice is not an obstacle to understanding, but rather, the very condition of its possibility; it is not to be abandoned, but revised according to die Sache selbst: “The important thing is to Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 2-7. See also Jean Grondin “Gadamer on Augustine: On the Origins of the Hermeneutical Claim to Universality,” in idem, Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), 99-110. 11 Andrzej Bronk, “The Anti-foundationalism of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 102-112. See also Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1987). 12 Gary B. Madison, “Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 349-365. 13 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik als Philosophie,” in idem, Hermeneutische Entwürfe: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr, 2000), 1-66. 10

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be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.”14 Historical beingin-the-world seeks new understanding while reinterpreting what has been understood; it mediates prejudice and the matter to be thought, the self and other, the familiar and the strange. We must persevere in this tension, “the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanciated object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.”15 Dwelling between the human and the divine, between the earth and the sky, between what we already understand and what we yearn to know, constitutes human facticity.16 The in-between that we are is the site of the Ereignis, the unconcealment of Being, ἀλήθεια, truth. One of the preliminary conditions of understanding each other is a translation. Translating foreign languages is a particular case of the pragmatics operating in any act of understanding. We represent various lingual backgrounds and traditions, and each of us comes from a unique historical perspective. Translation happens in every conversation, not only on academic questions but also on the personal level, for thinking is a way of being. Even soliloquium, the inner dialogue, is a translation; we are not transparent to ourselves, but on some primordial level determined by difference. The conversation is a simultaneous and ongoing translation on all these levels. The person is a being that understands, and always understands differently, not only rationalis naturae individua substantia, intellectualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia but primarily existentia hermeneutica. Gathering together to listen and speak, representing a wide range of professional interests and fields of expertise, we want to break through traditional barriers, thereby creating an interdisciplinary forum for hermeneutic dialogue, a conversation which revolves around our relationship to history and its texts, “the conversation that we are,”17 a dialogue in which we are “far less the leaders than the led.”18 We see Gadamer approaching “the mystery of language from the conversation that we ourselves are.”19 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269. See also 270: “The recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice gives the hermeneutic problem its real thrust.” 15 Ibid., 295. On the hermeneutic notion of in-between see Nicholas Davey, “Between the Human and the Divine: On the Question of the In-Between,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 88. 16 See Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” and also “… dichterisch wohnet der Mensch,” in GA7, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 1936-1953, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000). 17 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 378. 18 Ibid., 383. Philosophy of conversation is, in Gadamer’s words, “the essence of what I have been working on over the past thirty years.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. Richard Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 56. 19 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 378. 14

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What I tried to do, following Heidegger, was to see the linguality of human beings not just in terms of the subjectivity of consciousness and the capacity for language in that consciousness, as German Idealism and Humboldt had done. Instead, I moved the idea of conversation to the very center of hermeneutics. Perhaps a phrase from Hölderlin will make clear to you what kind of turn this move involved. Because Heidegger could no longer accept the dialectical reconciliation with Christianity that had marked the whole post-Hegelian epoch, he sought the Word through Hölderlin, whose words “Since we are a conversation and can hear one another,” inspired him. Now Heidegger had understood this as the conversation of human beings with the gods. Perhaps correctly so. But the hermeneutic turn, which is grounded in the linguality of the human being, at least also includes us in the “one another,” and at the same time, it contains the idea that we as human beings have to learn from each other. We do not need just to hear one another but to listen to one another. That is “understanding.”20 Listening to one another is a constitutive element of belonging together (Zueinandergehören): In human relations the important thing is... to experience the Thou truly as a Thou—i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another, there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always means being able to listen to one another.21 When we listen and respond to a voice that addresses us first, we experience the other truly as Thou. Representing different generations of philosophers and theologians, we are united by the common task of understanding how we understand our respective traditions, in order to better understand each other and promote the unity of knowledge. By situating hermeneutic praxis within the context of general philosophical hermeneutics, we discuss general and specific issues in hermeneutics. If we are to succeed in articulating interdisciplinary hermeneutics, the general presuppositions and the foundational disputes operating within academia must be made explicit. We go beyond hermeneutics as a theory or an academic discipline to the practice 20

Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, 39, translation altered. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361. Good will is a hermeneutic condition of a dialogue is particularly elaborated by Gadamer in a long and multifaceted dialogue with Jacques Derrida. According to Caputo, Gadamer’s dynamics of a good will is still tainted with the metaphysics of the subjectivity of the subject. John D. Caputo, “Good Will and the Hermeneutics of Friendship: Gadamer and Derrida,” Philosophy Social Criticism 28, no. 5 (2002): 521. 12 21

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of hermeneutics, interpreting the texts that constitute the diversity of understanding. Rethinking the relationship between philosophical and theological hermeneutics, we ask: How can theology appropriate hermeneutic philosophy without losing its specific character, that is, without accommodating itself to a criterion of rationality alien to its own horizon of understanding? On the other hand, how can philosophical hermeneutics engage theology without conceding its rigorous criteria of independent research to a religious Weltanschauung? There is a need to reestablish the place of thinking in a technological age. According to Heidegger, our greatest danger is not the threat of annihilation posed by the atomic age, but the monopolization of all thinking by calculative thinking: Let us not fool ourselves. All of us, including those of us who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world.... The growing thoughtlessness must, therefore, spring from some process that gnaws at the very marrow of man today: Man today is in flight from thinking.22 This daring but much needed effort to encourage meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) goes against the dominant currents of our culture. Following Heidegger’s diagnosis of being dominated by calculative thinking, Gadamer elaborates on the genesis of the idolatry of the natural sciences. I think, then, that the chief task of philosophy is to justify this way of reason and to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology-based science. That is the point of philosophical hermeneutic. It corrects the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness: the idolatry of scientific method and the anonymous authority of the sciences and it vindicates again the noblest task of the citizen—decision-making according to one’s own responsibility—instead of conceding that task to the expert. In this respect, hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.23 22

Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 44-45. “What great danger then might move upon us? There might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature. Therefore, the issue is in keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement toward things and openness to mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking.” Ibid., 56. 23 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics and Social Science,” Cultural Hermeneutics 2 (1975): 314. 13

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Calculative thinking has never seemed so irresistible.24 Yet, overcoming adversity is an intrinsic element of human experience; and with it comes also the experience of suffering. Learning through such experience does not mean only that we become wise through suffering and that our knowledge of things must be first corrected through deception and undeception…. What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates the human from the divine.25 In our hermeneutic endeavor, the emphasis is on the hermeneutic priority of the question. In the dialectic of our hermeneutic praxis, the dynamics of question and answer, the hermeneutic mystery of the being-that-we-are, being-unto-death, and being-toward-God may, if we are attentive, emerge into understanding. “In order to be able to ask, one must want to know, and that means knowing that one does not know.”26 We are called to speak in the language that is an infinite source of new possibilities for thinking, a self-manifestation, and self-expression of Being. Participating in the “conversation that we are” in the light of Being, hermeneutics thrives in the in-between of the human and the divine, the mysticism of the ordinary. It is not our task to know what will be revealed to us or how it will be revealed. In embracing limitations, we seek understanding where it might be found. If our conversation is genuinely hermeneutic, we will be “transformed into a communion in which we [will] not remain what we were.”27 Seeking Understanding: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics The complex and multi-faceted relationship between philosophical and theological hermeneutics calls for tracing the development of philosophical hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, with particular attention to Gadamer’s lingually oriented hermeneutics. It requires a further examination of the application and transformation of hermeneutics in theology and addressing the future of both philosophical and theological hermeneutics. The emphasis on the pivotal moments in the development of contemporary hermeneutics leads us to a more complex understanding of our hermeneutic situation: We live in the “age of interpretation.” Andrzej Wierciński, “Non-calculative Responsibility: Martin Heidegger’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Responsibility,” in Marcelino Agís Villaverde, Carlos Beliñas Fernándes, Fernanda Henriques, and Jesús Ríos Vicente, ed. Herméneutica y responsibilidad: Homenaje a Paul Ricoeur (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, Servizo de Publicatión e Intercambio Científico, 2005), 413-432. 25 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 356-357. 26 Ibid., 363. 27 Ibid., 379. 14 24

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According to Gianni Vattimo, the existential analytics of Being and Time makes us aware that knowledge is always an interpretation, and it can only be seen as a complex response to a historically determined situation. Interpretation is the only “fact” of which we can speak; the more we attempt to grasp interpretation in its authenticity, the more it manifests itself in its historical character. Vattimo stresses, in particular, a point which uncovers the presuppositions that underlie the conception of the world-in-itself. The metaphysical notion of “natural reality” and “objectivity” is merely “ruinous realism,” which produces its corollary: authoritarianism. Vattimo’s paradoxical claims that Nietzsche and Heidegger speak from within the biblical tradition, that the claim of the death of God signifies the maturing of the Christian message, and that nihilism constitutes the truth of Christianity are dealt with in greater depth in After Christianity.28 For Vattimo, the hermeneutic approach to Christianity reveals the necessity of abandoning literalism and natural metaphysics and dissolving the Church's claims to objectivity, for the truth of Christianity is the dissolution of the metaphysical idea of truth; the truth of the scriptures is the truth of love, of charity. The hermeneutic project stands in some ways as evidence that hermeneutics is much more than the methodology of interpretation practiced in the human sciences. Contemporary hermeneutics has turned from the art of textual interpretation to the world-constitutive functions of language and symbolic representation. It has effected a radical temporalization of thinking, what the young Heidegger called a “hermeneutics of facticity.”29 Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has shown us that all understanding takes place within horizons constituted by history and language. In the process of interpretation, we fuse horizons by bringing the prejudgments of our own traditions to the understanding of historical texts, the political and ethical world, and one another. This is not a reductive appropriation, but a dialogue within which a common meaning is created. Meaning does not reside in the subjectivity of the interpreter, nor the intentions of Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); idem, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1997); idem, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 29 Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity originates in his philosophy prior to Being and Time, a thesis which has been only recently fully elaborated, undoubtedly due to the publication of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures (1919-1923). To name but a few studies of early Heidegger in recent English-language literature see Kisiel and van Buren; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994). See also Jean Greisch, L’Arbre de vie et l’Arbre du savoir: Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique Heideggerienne (19191923) (Paris: du Cerf, 2000) and Hans-Helmuth Gander, Selbstverständnis und Lebenswelt: Grundzüge einer phänomenologischen Hermeneutik im Ausgang von Husserl und Heidegger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001). 28

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an author or speaker, but emerges from encounter and engagement. Both interpreter and interpreted are transformed in the process of interpretation. Written texts have the double function of preserving the meaning of the past for us and, at the same time, of presenting the past to us as a question of current and enduring interest. Understanding a historical phenomenon from the necessary historical distance characteristic of our hermeneutic situation, we read a written text as belonging to the “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte).30 We cannot leave our own horizon, because the Wirkungsgeschichte of a continuing tradition depends on ever new appropriation and interpretation.31 Projecting a historical horizon... is only one phase in the process of understanding; it does not become solidified into the self-alienation of a past consciousness but is overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding. In the process of understanding a real fusing of horizons occurs—which means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously superseded. To bring about this fusion in a regulated way is the task what we called historically effected consciousness.32 By recognizing the historicity of the text, we can consciously and critically engage with the present. Acknowledging the contemporary cultural anti-fundamentalism and philosophical anti-foundationalism in which contemporary Christian theology is enacted, we address the question of the place of philosophy in Jewish, Protestant, and Roman-Catholic theological reflection. The guiding question is: How can philosophical hermeneutics, being antifoundationalist, form the philosophical source of theology which in its very nature is foundational since it is founded on Revelation? As the deconstruction of the dichotomy between epistemological foundationalism and pessimistic antifoundationalism is central to hermeneutics, we attempt to step beyond this metaphysical dichotomy. Revelation and hermeneutic insistence on the primacy of interpretation are not opposed to each other. The hermeneutic orientation in theology is a call for the abandonment of literalism and objectivism in regard to religious truths. Hence a new question: Can these philosophical sources be translated by theological hermeneutics into the language of theology? Building on the ultimate religious foundation of divinely revealed truth, theological hermeneutics reflects upon theology as the site of a circular mediation of Scripture, tradition, and culture. Within the hermeneutic universe, we are not only interpreters of the Bible: The Bible interprets us and gives us a paradigm for Ricoeur entertains the idea of extending the Gadamerian concept of Wirkungsgeschichte “by introducing the question of death as a paradigm of distance.” Paul Ricoeur, “Temporal Distance and Death in History,” in Malpas, Arnswald, and Kertscher, ed., Gadamer’s Century, 239-255, at 239. 31 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 390-391. 32 Ibid., 306-307. 16 30

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our interpretation of the world. The recurring problem for theological hermeneutics is the question of normativity. All theologians will agree that theological interpretation requires critical distance, but does this amount to a need for philosophical input? Alternatively, does a philosophical hermeneutics appropriated by theology thereby become theology? What then happens to critical distance? Hermeneutics is not only “between the human and the divine.” It is also a mediation between philosophy and theology. Hence, hermeneutics may significantly contribute to the retrieval of philosophically important theological insights.33 Verbum interius situates the theological phenomenon of Verbum at the center of philosophical hermeneutics. The rehabilitation of medieval thinking opens the hermeneutic horizon for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. Tracing the development of the concept of language in Augustine and Aquinas, Gadamer insists, contra Heidegger, that the history of Western thought is not merely a history of the forgetfulness of Being, for medieval Trinitarian theology opened up the hermeneutic horizons by stressing the priority of language. The most significant development in hermeneutics is the historical movement from the Platonic concept of language to the “full integration of incarnation of meaning” in Augustine's conception of the word. This is a movement from exclusively philosophical sources to new discoveries that lie in a rich mixture of philosophical and theological thought. Hence hermeneutics transcends disciplinary limitations; it primarily lies in between. The other nonphilosophical sources, particularly poetry, explicate the crucial aspects of philosophical hermeneutics: the power and powerlessness of language, historicity, and linguality. 34 The question of the in-between turns out to be not merely a question of how philosophical themes can ground theological thought, for these themes are already infused with nonphilosophical insights; hermeneutics is a mediation between philosophy and theology. The question of the between is central to this discussion on philosophical and theological hermeneutics. Gadamer writes: The theme of this congress, “Between the Human and the Divine,” is an invitation to listen to the languages with which we speak of our being-toward-God and ourselves, to hear the resonances and discordances between them, and to hearken to what shows itself in that play of words. It is an opportunity to reflect upon the between, for historically effected consciousness always remains between horizons, between traditions, between “den

33 34

Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. Hee-Yong Lee, Geschichtlichkeit und Sprachlichkeit des Verstehens: Eine Untersuchung zur Wesensstruktur und Grundlage der hermeneutischen Erfahrung bei H.G. Gadamer (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2004). 17

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Sterblichen und Göttlichen.” In the constantly changing structure of our essentially finite languages, we might find, with Hölderlin, that we “still have access to much of the divine.”35 Hermeneutics connects the problems and questions arising from the philosophical and theological traditions to concrete problems of application in our contemporary post-modern context. The guiding question is: How do the problems and questions arising from the philosophical and theological hermeneutic traditions relate to concrete problems of application in the contemporary postmodern context? The resurrection of medieval philosophy in the passage to postmodern hermeneutics deals with issues concerning ethical/hermeneutic responsibility in the face of the other and questions concerning the risks and limits of the theological appropriation of hermeneutics. Celebrating the Confusion of Voices and the Fusion of Hermeneutic Horizons In 1917, in his Inaugural Lecture at the University of Freiburg i.Br., Edmund Husserl stated: “Most recently, the need for an utterly original philosophy has reemerged, the need of a philosophy that—in contrast to the secondary productivity of renaissance philosophies—seeks by radically clarifying the sense and the motifs of philosophical problems to penetrate to that primal ground on whose basis those problems must find whatever solution is genuinely scientific.”36 At the beginning of the new millennium, Husserl’s statement is still relevant. Philosophy stands in need of renewal. We are convinced that philosophical hermeneutics can be the vehicle for that renaissance. With our focus firmly on the epistemological limitations of the hermeneutic situation and theological interest in hermeneutics, it was inevitable that Paul Ricoeur would be a central figure in our discussions. His critical engagement with Gadamer, Habermas, and Lévinas, as well as his creative work in biblical interpretation and the philosophy of religion, give him particular credibility in theology. While emphatically maintaining that he is not a theologian, and insisting on keeping his philosophical and biblical writings separate, Ricoeur nonetheless has a significant impact on both philosophical and theological discourse. 37 His work

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Greeting to the First International Congress on Hermeneutics,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, x. 36 Edmund Husserl, “Pure Phenomenology, Its Method and Its Field of Investigation,” trans. Robert Welsh Jordan, in idem, Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 37 Andrzej Wierciński, “The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher and the Philosophizing Believer.” in idem, ed. Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), xv-xxxiv. 18 35

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brings us to the guiding questions of the relationship between philosophy and theology: Can a theological hermeneutics re-translate philosophical sources into the language of theology? Is philosophical hermeneutics a “detour” through which theology must pass, while each acts as a check on the other’s claims to ultimacy? Predominantly a philosopher, Ricoeur worked across the subjects of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, history, religion, legal studies, and politics. He has been lecturing around the world and critically engaging his contemporaries, be they structuralists, phenomenologists, psychoanalysts, theologians, or hermeneuticians. Drawing on the full amplitude of the resources present in language, Ricoeur makes apparently familiar phenomena be thought-provoking and fresh. Language has a privileged position in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics: Only this dialectic [sense and reference] says something about the relation between language and the ontological condition of being in the world. Language is not a world of its own. It is not even a world. But because we are in the world, because we are affected by situations… we have something to say, we have experience to bring to language.38 Ricoeur, “the son of a victim of the First World War,” a prisoner of World War II for five years and a witness to the atrocities of our time, made his personal and intellectual journey a passionate search for the balance between love and justice. He has been a remarkably interdisciplinary scholar, a philosopher of all dialogue, whose mission was to bring the tradition alive to his contemporaries. Although he was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Ricoeur’s intellectual depth allowed him to maintain a self-critical stance, and to foster dialogue partners instead of disciples, a crucial requirement for hermeneutic understanding. Ricoeur, who dedicated much of his scholarly work to metaphor, uses the metaphor of a journey to depict his life and his philosophy. As a traveler, he is on the way to the new destinations that open up, but, at the same time, always grateful and mindful of his precious (and often painful) memories of the past. Like in Cavafy’s Ithaca.39 Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics can be understood as an itinerary. With reference to St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, we can say, however, that it is not a philosophical journey of the human mind into God, but rather, and this is an essential trait of phenomenological hermeneutics, that it is an existential journey of the whole human being toward God: Itinerarium totius hominis in Deum. Being on the path as a human being expresses the modus existendi of a 38

39

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press), 20-21. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 19

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homo viator. In fact, status viatoris connotes not so much moving toward a designated place to be reached, but the very structure of a human being as a temporal and historical being with all the “not yet” dimensions of a finite being. What is fascinating in human history is the possibility, or even more, the reality of hope in this “not-yet” of the eschatological promise. The criterion for the validity of an interpretation of his hope in the “not yet” is not its falsifiability but its compellingness. A god can do it. But tell me how a person can flow like that through the slender lyre. Our mind is split. At the crossroads in our heart stands no temple for Apollo. Song, as you teach us, is not a grasping, not a seeking for some final consummation. To sing is to be. Easy for a god. But when do we simply be? When do we become one with earth and stars? It is not achieved, young friend, by being in love, however vibrant that makes your voice. Learn to forget you sang like that. It passes. Truly to sing takes another kind of breath. A breath in the void. A shudder in God. A wind.40 Rilke’s brief summary of human struggling for life is a compelling reminder that we are invited to be one with the very Being’s rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. Moreover, the attentiveness of a human being who encounters Being results in translating this life-giving relationship into living a good life and witnessing to the source of Being in great works of human culture. Rilke’s poetry is such a witness. It is through poetry that we become ourselves and a tongue for Being’s utterance. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is such a witness. The personal experiences of a philosopher are shifted to the level of a discourse on things said and always imply the relationship between the testifier and the hearer. Thus, hermeneutics calls for the total engagement of words and acts and discloses that a capable person (l’homme capable) is a person capable of desiring, deciding, choosing, acting, doing wrong, failing, consenting, stopping himself, fighting, interpreting, speaking, listening, reading, telling stories, dreaming, remembering, forgetting and forgiving. In the tension between activity and passivity, between giving and 40

Rainer Maria Rilke, In Praise of Mortality, trans. and ed. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, III. 20

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receiving, a finite human being discovers the most powerful of human capacities: Love. Ricoeur understands his philosophy as a tension between suspicion and sympathy. He is conscious that this tension can threaten the unity of his work. Instead of surrendering to established patterns in the history of philosophy, Ricoeur invites all possible interpretations without being capable of “mastering” them. Thus, he creates an unstable yet tenable equilibrium. It was his most significant contribution to phenomenological hermeneutics when he felt compelled to complement suspicion with sympathy. Learning from his encounter with Freud, Ricoeur situates hermeneutics in-between and calls for a dynamics between the reader and the text, which is the task of interpretation.41 Ricoeur found great inspiration in, and support for, his project of the restoration of meaning: “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.”42 Ricoeur masterfully balances his hermeneutics of suspicion with the hermeneutics of sympathy. One of the most important of Ricoeur’s contributions to hermeneutics is his notion of conflicting interpretations. His critical reading reminds us that any interpretation stands in a clear ethical obligation to that which needs to be understood. Hermeneutic reading is always an encounter with the other. It was therefore so very crucial that Ricoeur should develop a comprehensive hermeneutics of the self, as found in its great elaboration in Oneself as Another.43 The dialectical tension between suspicion and sympathy complements yet another tension essential for him: Between critique and conviction. Critique and Conviction is a conversation about Ricoeur’s life and work with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Talking about his life and philosophy, Ricoeur shows the unity of his life and work while striving for a new meaning for both through a process of permanent reinterpretation. His hermeneutics is a way of thinking motivated by a dialectics of a constant building up and breaking down of our partial understandings that issue from the matter (Sache) which needs to be understood. In that sense, destruction and construction accompany human endeavors to understand and are not separate processes but happen at the same time and in the horizon of conflicting interpretations. Out of the inevitable conflict of interpretation, an understanding is born: Nothing permanent, nothing stable, but provisionary, yet the best a human being can achieve in factic life (hermeneutics of facticity). Ricoeur assigns to himself the role of a patient mediator between continental and analytical tradition. Throughout his life, he endeavors to overcome the 41

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 27. 42 Ibid., 32. 43 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 21

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artificial divide between ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy. His involvement with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida was matched, by engaging analytic philosophers like John L. Austin, Donald Davidson, Derek Parfit, and John Rawls. An excellent synthesis between the personal and the professional in Ricoeur, through his long and accomplished life, results in his philosophy being a permanent invitation to thinking about living well with and for others in just institutions in our increasingly multi-lingual, multicultural, multi-religious, and global world. Ricoeur elaborates on the complementary and paradoxical relations between sign, symbol, and metaphor: “The symbol gives rise to thought, Le symbole donne à penser.” The symbol makes us think. In that sense, Ricoeur’s important and lasting contribution to philosophy consists in making us think: Think hermeneutically while finding ourselves always anew between suspicion and sympathy, critique and conviction. The hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur can be understood as a diaphor: The movement (φορά) through (διά) the concrete experience of a wounded cogito (cogito blessé), which produces new meanings. On several occasions, Ricoeur addresses the question of the philosopher encountering the message of Christian Revelation. He confesses: “This is my case, I am a believer, a Christian of the Protestant confession, to whom it is important to maintain a necessary distance between my faith and my philosophical practice.” His philosophical thought undoubtedly influences his Christian faith. However, the reverse is equally true: his religious convictions make him aware of philosophical problems: evil, suffering, responsibility, and the relationship between love and justice. The real power of the personal God of Christianity lies in a disarmed love. The only icon of God that we have access to is the human face, which is also the face of God, a face of weakness, and therefore, the power of love. Ricoeur’s role as mediator between European and Anglo-American Philosophy cannot be overestimated. No one has better bridged the gap, by dialoguing with such analytic philosophers as John L. Austin, Donald Davidson, Derek Parfit, and John Rawls, while continuing his conversation with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida. He is one of the great commentators of the European Tradition. His hermeneutics can be seen as an alternative to postmodern deconstruction. Situating Ricoeur between suspicion and sympathy emphasizes the dialectical tension between Ricoeur’s two modes of hermeneutic investigation. Ricoeur himself stresses the importance of acknowledging the dialectical tension in his work: It is with great joy and gratitude that I receive the volume of the “hermeneutic series,” which you have gathered and published. The title [Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium] renders precisely the tension which runs through all my work: between suspicion and sympathy. This tension resonates with another one, which is equally dear to me, between critique and conviction. I am conscious of the fragility 22

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of the balances that in turn, threaten the unity of my work and welcome the dynamism, which pushes me from one work to another. I am grateful to the pleiad of authors you have solicited. The totality of my work is thus covered, and the dominant tone of the authors themselves situates it ... “between sympathy and suspicion”!44 Opening a spectrum of possible interpretations, Ricoeur creates unstable yet tenable equilibriums. According to him, a narrative is produced by predicative assimilation, which “integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematizing the intelligibility attached to the narrative taken as a whole.”45 Equilibrium, disruption of equilibrium, and restoration of equilibrium create a dynamic of the strategy implemented by each microelement in establishing the unity and meaning of the narrative. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has influenced not only literary criticism, but the humanities, theology, and the social sciences. According to him, hermeneutics is “animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.”46 Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion is, in fact, a hermeneutic circle. Openness, the dynamic between the reader and the text, cannot be closed since the written text is a disembodied voice, which only comes to life in being interpreted. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic project attempts to develop a hermeneutics that will uncover the ontological structures of meaning, the worlds which unfold in front of the text. Three masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud opposed interpretation as the restoration of meaning. It was Ricoeur’s exploration of their work which led to the coining of the now-famous phrase, “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”47 Ricoeur’s theory of reading enables us to talk about interpretation without becoming trapped in the binaries of sympathy versus judgment, historical objectivity versus subjective response. Ricoeur works out a hermeneutics that extends beyond the reading of literary works to constitute a theory for reading life. The radicalization of a lingually oriented hermeneutics inscribes the reading subject into the process of interpretation. Suspicion must be balanced by sympathy. The hermeneutics of historical sympathy does not overlook the problems of the ethics of a sympathetic reading: Paul Ricoeur’s letter to Andrzej Wierciński, dated June 11, 2003, translation mine. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 185. 46 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 27. 47 Ibid., 32-35; Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and The Human Sciences, trans. and ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge; Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987), 34. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, ed., Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 54-65 and David Stewart, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Journal of Literature and Theology 3 (1989): 296-307. 44 45

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reading sympathetically still means reading critically.48 Hermeneutic reading treats any author and text as an “other” to whom we have an ethical obligation. The supposed opposition between sympathy and history began with Schleiermacher’s notion of “divination,” the reader’s intuitive grasp of the mind of the author. Dilthey attempted to historicize Schleiermacher’s psychologistic approach. Heidegger moved the hermeneutic problem from the epistemological to the ontological level. Gadamer emphasized that the individual subject is subordinated to the play within the historical conversation. The historical conversation is always more comprehensive than the individual horizons of the author, the text, and the interpreter. Here Gadamer’s otherness of the conversational partner meets Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, particularly as developed in Oneself as Another. Ricoeur’s work has been at the cutting edge of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics for several years. For him, phenomenology and hermeneutics presupposed each other. Following Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology, and particularly Gadamer’s lingually oriented hermeneutics, Ricoeur perceives the ontological basis of understanding in language. His hermeneutic theory of interpretation emphasizes pre-lingual experience and attempts to disclose the meaning of Dasein. As with Gadamer, preconceptions or prejudices are not obstacles to understanding, but its very condition. Ricoeur argues that there is no interpretation without preconceptions. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of selfhood thematizes personal identity as narrative identity, addressing the issues of alterity and sameness. Here his semantics of identity critically engages phenomenology. The hermeneutic philosophy embarked upon by him offers new ways of interpreting ourselves in terms of otherness. Navigating a winding path between ontological and ethical categories of otherness, his diacritical hermeneutics makes us more hospitable to others, which represents a real transformation from text to action. His hermeneutics of testimony situates him within the Christian tradition. Ricoeur’s original and provocative contributions continue to be an inspiration to theology. His work on the philosophical interpretation of the Bible has become indispensable to the study of religion. Ricoeur is critically open to sign, symbol, metaphor, and narrative, and exhaustively investigates the relationship between hermeneutics (interpretation) and deconstruction (textual reading). The formation of new signification in metaphor relies on the imaginative human experience of being-in-the-world. Modern hermeneutics situates understanding in history. Classical physics had also started out from a strict division between subject and object, presupposing that the physicist can separate himself from his experimental arrangements. Quantum physics has exposed the fallacy in this assumption.

Erin White, “Between Suspicion and Hope: Paul Ricoeur's Vital Hermeneutic,” Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991): 311-321. 24 48

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Ricoeur is also dedicated to the social sciences. Following Gadamer, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics incorporates a critique of ideology. Critical theory is a necessary complement to philosophical hermeneutics. When interpreting a text, we must adopt a critical self-understanding, which mediates between the interpreter’s immediate horizons and the emerging horizon: a dialectic between the horizons of the text and the reader. A critical distanciation is a necessary requirement for understanding the text. The tension between the “is like” and “is not” elements projects a whole world in front of the text. Our interaction with the world in front of the text is a search for a metaphor beyond demythologization, a second naïveté beyond iconoclasm.49 Ricoeur emphasizes the role of language and historical critique, and the poetic performance of reference. He redirects his critical hermeneutics toward poetic hermeneutics. The implicit question to which the text responds is not the same as the one opened up by the text. The reading and interpreting subject has to lose one’s initial naiveté through criticism. On that condition, poetic hermeneutics can propose a second naïveté. The hermeneutic task of assigning functional roles to words and symbols is dedicated to uncovering the meanings and desires (particularly those with many layers of meaning—polysemy) hidden behind symbols. Demythologization, i.e., the recovery of hidden meanings from symbols, and demystification, i.e., the destruction of the symbols by revealing their illusionary character or falsehood, are two major psycho-analytical venues visited by Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics. The critical question is, whether a hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory and therapy can offer us a bridge between the natural and the social sciences. Ricoeur has pointed out many times that he means to continuously develop his thinking, to expand his own understanding, or even to modify his previous interpretation. As a philosopher, who insists that existence itself is essentially hermeneutic, he could hardly avoid endorsing the ideal of an ever-developing interpretation. Only thus does hermeneutic thinking show us its full radiance. Ricoeur’s is a genuinely polysemic voice, sacrificing neither truth nor variety. His voice has been true to the confusion of voices, which constitutes the tradition that we are. Phenomenological Hermeneutics: The Horizon of Thinking The elaboration on the complexity of the relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics requires addressing the tension between phenomenological hermeneutics and hermeneutic phenomenology. Thus, this debate happens in the spirit of the privatissimum, a seminar where questions are asked because there is 49

Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 25

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something that needs to be thought through, not just alone, but in a community of scholars who understand themselves as being addressed by the matter at hand. Here the German Angesprochensein is understood not as a kind of mysterious, undefined call by Being, but as a personal responsibility to give an answer to the voice that addresses me, an individual in the community of thinkers. This voice is an unmistakably recognizable συντήρησις, the intuitive knowledge of what is right, the divine spark of the soul requiring my comprehensive answer (respondeo). A hermeneutic discussion is a lively debate where the participants respond to each other, posture to one another, and clarify their positions. While abandoning the presupposition that there is one correct interpretation for presenting ‘the truth of the matter,’ hermeneutics does not forsake the search for that truth. Hermeneutics does not abandon truth.50 Every reading is a new reading and every act of understanding a pathway to new understandings.51 The real meaning of the hermeneutic conversation goes beyond clearing the matter at hand; it truly transforms us, the participants of that never-ending Gespräch.52 The most decisive element in this hermeneutic conversation is not a particular understanding of something, however important, but the happening of our personal transformation. In a genuine conversation, the question takes over.53 As partners in dialogue (colloquium), 50

See Lawrence K. Schmidt, The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995); Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994); 51 See Werner Kogge, Verstehen und Fremdheit in der philosophischen Hermeneutik: Heidegger und Gadamer (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001). 52 For Heidegger, we are conversation and language is conversation: “Wir ‘die Menschen’ sind ein Gespräch. Das Sein des Menschen gründet in der Sprache; aber diese geschieht erst eigentlich im Gespräch. Dieses ist jedoch nicht nur eine Weise, wie Sprache sich vollzieht, sondern als Gespräch nur ist Sprache wesentlich... Was heißt nun ein Gespräch? ... Offenbar das Miteinandersprechen über etwas... Redenkönnen und Hörenkönnen sind gleich ursprünglich. Wir sind ein Gespräch—und das will sagen: wir können voneinander hören... Seit ein Gespräch wir sind, hat der Mensch viel erfahren und der Götter viele genannt. Seitdem die Sprache eigentlich als Gespräch geschieht, kommen die Götter zu Wort und erscheint eine Welt... Und das so sehr, dass im Nennen der Götter und im Wort-Werden der Welt gerade das eigentliche Gespräch besteht, das wir selbst sind.” Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung,” in idem, Erläuterung zu Hölderlins Dichtung, GA4, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1981), 38-40. 53 For Gadamer, the question and the answer belong together. A dialogue operates on the model of question and answer. We are always interpreting the content of a dialogue as an answer to a question, which in turn raises new questions requiring new answers. It is particularly manifested in the experience of the work of art. Gadamer writes: “But how it is with artwork, and especially with the linguistic work of art? How can one speak here of a dialogical structure of understanding? The author is not present as an answering partner, nor is there an issue to be discussed as to whether it is this way or that. Rather, the text, the artwork, stands in itself. Here the dialectical exchange of question and answer, insofar as it takes place at all, would seem to move only in one direction, that is, from the one who seeks to understand the 26

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we always experience a back and forth movement; listening to each other, understanding our prejudices, and verifying our positions, we are led by the very dynamics of the dialogue: after participating in a hermeneutic conversation, we are not the same anymore. The hermeneutic conversation becomes a modus vivendi for our life, a communion in the self-understanding of humankind, and in sharing, together, the world in which we live. In Gadamer’s lingually oriented hermeneutics the understanding of language as conversation, Sprache ist Gespräch, means that we always think in a language, but it does not need to occur always in the same language. Every conversation has a lingual character, even if this is a conversation one has with oneself (soliloquium). The conversation is the way in which we come to understand both ourselves and the matter that needs to be thought through. In a conversation, the main concern of the participants is not just to win the argument, but to deepen their understanding and, as such, to contribute to building a more human culture of life, a task that becomes more and more important in the increasingly global structure of the world in which we live. The hermeneutic significance of the work of art is decisively developed by following Gadamer's sharp critique of “aesthetic consciousness”; we can talk about the hermeneutic centrality of the work of art in revealing the truth. Truth experienced as the event of meaning overwhelms us. By participating in that event, we listen to the art that speaks to us in an unprecedented way by situating ourselves between concealment and unconcealment. In recent years, the bibliography of hermeneutic literature has increased significantly, showing the diversity of the Wirkungsgeschichte of the pioneering work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. They are irreplaceable and will be dearly missed. We are filled with sorrow, but our sorrow is an expression of gratitude for the gift of their thinking. In the infinite “conversation that we are” they will always have a voice. Phenomenological hermeneutics as developed by Heidegger, who moved phenomenology in a direction which Husserl himself had made possible as a style of thinking, is a philosophical attitude rather than a school labeled for the sake of simplified classification. The development of phenomenology follows a certain internal logic dictated by the things themselves. For both Husserl and Heidegger, the proper subject of phenomenology is meaningful as such. What differentiates these two thinkers is the structure and mode-of-accessing of the meaningful. Heidegger is situated within the horizon of his understanding of truth as ἀλήθεια. Tracing Heidegger’s development from his hermeneutics of facticity to the hermeneutics of the word, an existence-giving Logos will be placed in the artwork… The dialectic of question and answer does not here come to a stop…. Apprehending a poetic work, whether it comes to us through the real ear or only through a reader listening with an inner ear, presents itself basically as a circular movement in which answers strike back as questions and provoke new answers.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 43-44. 27

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center of hermeneutic phenomenology. Truth as disclosure will preserve the unconcealed in its unconcealedness. Heidegger’s development of hermeneutics (as Auslegung to hermeneutics as Andenken can be seen as his decisive contribution to the hermeneutic tradition, which has been further transformed and radicalized in Gadamer by paying particular attention to the notion of truth and understanding. As Gadamer himself noted, philosophers are thinkers whose identity is to be found in the continuity of their thought. By addressing our hermeneutic heritage, we want to re-address the most important of questions: the question of Being, which Being asks us. Lingual and personalistic hermeneutics thematizes the other as the person: The text is always his or her voice that confronts the face of a reader. A special place in the historical development of phenomenology and hermeneutics belongs to Paul Ricoeur. In the constructive encounter of phenomenology with hermeneutics, we develop the different perspectives that are opening up an intense dialogue with other philosophical traditions. Phenomenological description, interpretive narration, and discursive argumentation are dialectically related and, as part of a “practical whole,” they are substantially complementary to each other. By addressing the phenomenological moments in the philosophical tradition, we discover the crucial issues of historicity and the nature of the phenomenon. The radicalization of the phenomenological reduction brings fully to light the matter at hand. A connection between the radical reduction and existence as such is shown by exploring death and holiness. If the task of the philosopher is to understand that which needs to be understood, the hermeneutic question of the quality of an interpretation needs to be asked with ever greater sensitivity. By encouraging a variety of interpretations, hermeneutics decisively states that not every interpretation has equal merit. An interesting phenomenon in the development of phenomenological hermeneutics is the movement toward the theological, which originated within French phenomenology.54 The now-famous term “the theological turn in phenomenology” encompasses the increasing interest in exploring and analyzing traditionally theological themes, religious experience in particular. Dominique Janicaud is well known for his very critical position on the lack of methodological justification for the theological turn within French phenomenology. According to Janicaud, phenomenology is moving away from being the science of things as they are given, toward a theological meditation on phenomena of religious experience. Janicaud’s position is contrary to that of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Jean-François Courtine. For Janicaud, the concern for the theological rather than the philosophical is an error of choice, the wrong methodology, thus modifying the phenomenology of the absolute toward being a transgression of phenomenology. He insists Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: Éd. de l’Éclat, 1991). 28 54

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that “phenomenology and theology make two,” without thereby amalgamating them into one. The recent movement toward religion must be viewed within a broader context of postmodernity. We could say that, as modernity celebrated the secular, postmodernity is carefully restoring the sacred. Jacques Derrida, by deconstructing all simple opposition between philosophy and theology, explicitly turns to religion.55 Thinking with Martin Heidegger The revolutionary genius of a young philosopher from Freiburg was triumphantly celebrated by students everywhere. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt reports, “there was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king.” Heidegger himself profoundly influenced the reception of his philosophy. He claimed that die Sache of his thinking, the question about Being, was already present in his early teaching and writing. His collected writings, die Gesamtausgabe, edited by Vittorio Klostermann, was begun during Heidegger’s lifetime and under his careful supervision. He insisted that those writings are presented as “ways not works.” The dissemination of his ideas should follow the inner logic of his own development: To employ courageously new ways of thinking and willingly risk new thought experiments. Speaking of his thinking as “the way,” Heidegger was most certainly fully aware of the biblical connotations. In Jn 14: 6, Jesus calls himself “the way” and invites his disciples to follow him, to walk in his footsteps, since “no one comes to the Father except through him.” In the early Church, Christianity was called “the Way” (Acts 9: 2). The Holy Spirit teaches the followers of Jesus the way and guides them through the different paths of life. Heidegger is not a definitive answer to philosophical problems but rather a guide and, with it, an invitation to be mindful of the task of thinking. Confronting the way Heidegger thinks that which needs to be thought, reminds us that thinking is an event (Ereignis) that is renewed every time we think and continues to be renewed (Wirkungsgeschichte). Participating in this event makes us think and thank. It reminds us that thinking is thanking (Denken ist Danken). If thinking is thanking, this means that thinking receives (empfängt) its thoughts. Thinking fills us with deep gratitude. “What do we have that we did not receive?” (1 Cor 4: 7). This solicits a response from us. Thinking is responding 55

Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Mere Reason,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, ed., Religion, trans. David Webb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); idem, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also James K. A. Smith, “Determined Violence: Derrida's Structural Religion,” Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 97-212 and John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997). 29

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(re-spondeo), which puts us into the moral horizon of radical responsibility toward truth. If “questioning is the piety of thinking,” this piety is compliant to the covering and uncovering of truth. The more generous our response, the more thinking transforms us, and we become witnesses to the task of thinking. Heidegger reminds us that thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in our globalized contemporary world. Overwhelmed by technological thinking, we know all too well how easy it is to take flight from thinking and become thought-poor and thought-less. Moreover, this flight from thinking happens everywhere in the world, including Academia. The universities close down departments, particularly in the humanities, because of the lack of funding. Those decisions are made entirely on financial grounds. The humanities, at least in most cases, do not produce money. And that which does not generate money is useless and is commonly perceived, at best, as an extravagance of the intellectuals and an unjustified burden on the educational system in a democratic society. The univocal logic of success in an economy-driven academic setting supports calculative thinking, which proves its excellence in solving problems. Contemplative thinking, to the contrary, does not solve problems but inspires us to confront the world we live in with sensitivity and care (Sorge). In fact, it rather allows for seeing problems and creates the possibility of understanding them. The vulnerability of thinking calls for our persistence and courage to be contemplative beings, to remember that we are not only sensual (sinnliche) but meditative beings (besinnliche Wesen). There are definitely significant differences regarding the understanding of the impact Heidegger’s philosophy has on present-day thinkers. However, learning to discover those differences, and even more, to welcome and enjoy them might be the best way to honor Heidegger’s work. He himself stated in The Word of Nietzsche: “We show respect for a thinker only when we think. This demands that we think everything essential that is thought in his thought.” Acknowledging the importance of Heidegger’s work requires addressing the matter to be thought. Moreover, it happens not because of Heidegger’s indisputable fame, but because there is something in his thinking which captivates us and inspires us to rethink Heidegger’s significance for philosophy today. Despite being a controversial figure, mainly due to his problematic affiliation with National Socialism and his often undifferentiated polemic with Christian theology, Heidegger, himself a theologian of the unknown God, remains a highly influential and inspiring philosopher who challenges our approach to thinking: “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” Can we responsibly say that having been inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy and its Wirkungsgeschichte we begin to think? Of the utmost importance is that we neither take Heidegger’s philosophy for granted nor act as mere advocates for the continued relevance of his philosophy for contemporary thinkers. How30

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ever, similar to rethinking the relevance and influence of Karl Marx for intellectuals, at least in the West over the last 150 years and more, it seems highly beneficial to address the question of the importance of having a philosophical position on Heidegger. From Max Weber’s notion of the “iron cage of rationality” to Georg Simmel’s “tragedy of culture,” the irrationally rational meaninglessness of modern society and its angst-inducing disenchantment, are not only a prevalent intellectual theme but a call for rethinking the imperative of a new ethics in the age of science. Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, praises Heidegger—along with Hegel, Marx, Frege, and Freud,—for thinking of something new and calls him—with Dewey and Wittgenstein—“one of the three most important philosophers of our [20th] century.” Following Hannah Arendt, we can modify Rorty’s evaluation by saying that Heidegger never thinks about something, but he always thinks something. His thought is fittingly characterized by himself as ways and not as works. Therefore, our project is primarily an invitation to reassess our own relationship to Heidegger’s ways, and not so much to perform exegetical analyses of his works. In the speech delivered at Heidegger’s funeral on May 28, 1976 at his birthplace, Messkirch, Bernhard Welte, Heidegger’s fellow countryman, a Catholic priest and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Freiburg, exalted Heidegger as “perhaps the greatest seeker of this [20th] century,” whose thinking “has shaken the world and this century.” In this project, we wish to reevaluate Heidegger’s inspiration for seeking the truly revolutionary power of philosophy by entrusting ourselves to the groundlessness of radical questioning. What is at stake here is the call to wakeful thinking, when thinking is understood as the being of a human being in the sense of the being of Being. The co-belonging of being and thinking calls for our radical responsibility toward thinking, which in turn, will hopefully inspire others to act in its wake. Beginning in his early lectures on Aristotle in Marburg, Heidegger brought metaphysics along new paths. He reminds us that we name the time when we say: Every thing has its time. This means: Everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.56 Aristotle redivivus to his contemporaries, Heidegger is still a powerful inspiration for asking the question of the opportune time, not by providing answers but by opening the horizon in which we seek a way of thinking, not one merely content to make itself intelligible, but a thinking able to embrace the unknown and act accordingly. This calls for taking his appeal seriously to a way of thinking 56

Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 3. 31

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more rigorous than the conceptual. The new way of thinking opens up the questioning of language by questioning the common understanding of the relationship between language and the human being: “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while, in fact, language remains the master of man.” If language is “the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself,” our task is to discern the call of Being in language and respond poetically by becoming attuned to this call and to transcribe our experience into discourse, which bears witness to the encounter with the truth of Being.

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1. 2. Hermeneutic Existence as Phronetic Existence: The Radicality of Human Responsibility How should a human being live? Socrates already thought whether philosophy could answer this question. It was he who pointed to the need for a philosophical reflection on how to live. Moreover, it was he who stressed, brilliantly, that reaching an understanding on how to live by way of asking this question and then reflecting on it, is, in fact, a participation in that very understanding, as it reveals the sense of one’s own existential commitment. In this manner, he paved the way for hermeneutics to be a mode of living that strives for self-understanding. All understanding is always self-understanding (Alles... Verstehen [ist] am Ende ein Sichverstehen1). Henceforth, the history of hermeneutics will always be the history of self-understanding; it is hermeneutics in action (Hermeneutik im Vollzug). One of the central tenets of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is its existential orientation: Hermeneutic reflection originates in life itself, it concerns life, and creatively transforms life. St Paul, in the 12th chapter of his Letter to the Romans (Rom 12: 1-2), encourages us not to conform to the pattern of this world but to move away from it, by renewing the mind, to recognizing God’s will, i.e., what is good, what is pleasing to him, and what is perfect. The phronetic recognition of what is good reveals to the human being where to find the path of true freedom, which is not an escape from the world. This recognition serves, not so much to satisfy a human being’s intellectual curiosity (intellektuelle Neugier), but, above all, to make us human beings sensitive to the need of actualizing the potential that is in human life and includes our intellect. Faithful to the belief that it is always worth reaching an understanding, we ask ourselves the question about how to live, so that our life would indeed be a way to freedom and not just a trade agreement with the world, even if it were formally the most consistent and orderly agreement. The renewing of the mind is nothing else but a hermeneutic reflection on our understanding of the world, an attempt to look critically at our pre-judgments and prejudices and, above all, a reflection on ourselves in the concreteness, uniqueness, and irreplaceability of our lives. It is the way to understand human existence in its fundamentally ethical dimension, which is not an addition within the process of a critical reflection on life but is its constitutive element. 1

Gadamer distinguishes between understanding as Sichverstehen and Selbstverstehen. In fact, every understanding is self-understanding (Sichverstehen), which can happen only through the Other. However, the essential difference is not between the self and the Other, but between what has been understood already and what needs to be understood (das schon Verstandenene und das noch nicht Verstandene). Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Gadamer i teologia: Od dzieła sztuki do wiary albo dystans z respektem,” in Andrzej Przyłębski, ed., Świat, język, rozumienie: Szkice (nie tylko) hermeneutyczne (Włocławek: Expol, 2007), 141-159. 33

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The philosophical question of how to live lives on: It does not ever cease to be valid. We are posing it today and in the context of our everyday life, in which the reflection on the toxicity of our relations with the world plays an increasingly important role. We are also, more and more often, under the illusion that—thanks to the efficiency of human reason as well as scientific progress and well-developed organizational and legal structures now available to us—that we will be able to create an optimal environment for ourselves and our life. Therefore, instead of living in a world that is given (as a gift—Gabe) and also assigned to us (as a task—Aufgabe), we allow for being fed by increasingly well thought over ideologies and escape into the utopia of happiness without realizing that we are tormented by various kinds of toxins. Yet the purpose of life can often be glimpsed as merely coming down to this: To be purified of toxins. We multiply “zero tolerance” programs, create more and more detailed and formalized ways of verification and screening, and build a broadly acceptable environment as well as “transparent” structures of social and personal life. Maybe it is worth looking at the truth of life and pondering over what happens to us and with us when we live, that is when we make life choices in concrete everydayness. Hermeneutic existence is a phronetic existence. Practical wisdom is a genuine alternative to ruthlessly promoted attitudes that lie stranded, helplessly, between total arbitrariness and absolute necessity. Hermeneutic Truth Hermeneutic truth is the truth of understanding.2 So we can talk about hermeneutic truth in terms of the objective genitive (genitivus obiectivus), which is the genitive that determines the person or the object that are being the subject/object of activity. The truth of understanding is, therefore, the truth of what is to be understood. In this sense, it concerns the internal compatibility or adequacy of understanding. The genitive indicates here the bearer of the feature expressed by the defined noun (i.e., truth). The truth of understanding can also be expressed with the subjective genitive (genitivus subiectivus),3 that is, as the truth that constitutively belongs to understanding as such. It is the kind of understanding of truth that it also extends to an understanding of the one who understands. Therefore, the one who understands

Cf. Jean Grondin, “Hermeneutic Truth and its Historical Presuppositions: A Possible Bridge between Analysis and Hermeneutics,” in Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1987); ibid., Hermeneutische Wahrheit? Zum Wahrheitsbegriff Hans-Georg Gadamers (Hanstein: Forum Academicum, 1982). 3 Both, the object genitive (genitivus obiectivus) and possessive genitive (Saxon genitive) (genitivus subiectivus) are adnominal genitive (genitivus adnominalis). 34 2

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belongs to, and co-creates, that which is to be understood. Experiencing hermeneutic truth is part of the meaning of human existence. The truth of understanding is thus not something that can exist outside oneself, that is, irrespective of the understanding subject. An experience of the hermeneutic truth is that kind of understanding which comprehensively affects the whole of the human being in the most existential dimensions of his/her life. In this sense, it is an encounter with the truth which happens in the particular conditions of time and space. In contrast to the so-called objective truth (e.g., the logical truth), which everyone can understand without specific regard to the realities of their existence, hermeneutic truth may be partly or completely incomprehensible to others. However, one does need to distinguish hermeneutic truth from so-called subjective truth. Hermeneutic truth is neither objective nor subjective, yet it happens within the horizon of one’s personal involvement, in that which is to be understood. That is why its existential character is its decisive aspect for us: It demands the maximum of ethical sensitivity from us, and a radical response to that which confronts us in our concrete lives. Hermeneutic truth has nothing to do with cognitive or moral relativism, quite the contrary. Just because it is possible that no one but me will experience the hermeneutic truth, my personal response to a concrete existential call and challenge has the character of a hermeneutic moral imperative. Even if no one except me would recognize the hermeneutic truth, or even more, precisely because it is possible that I am the only one who experiences this truth, my answer to it must be radical, critical, and definitive. Therefore, one can speak about the accordance of this truth with reality (in the sense of adaequatio), even if, or perhaps primarily because, it is I who am responsible for recognizing that which is to be understood (in the sense of responding to the voice of reality which speaks to me—re-spondeo). Such radical responsibility (responsibilitas, Ver-antwortung)4 does not allow us to be content with the recognition of a reality which is apparently common to all people. It is, rather, a challenge to accept radical uncertainty and existential sensitivity, which are characteristic of human existence. The early Heidegger developed the hermeneutics of facticity (Hermeneutik der Faktizität and Hermeneutik des faktischen Lebens) in a fascinating debate with St Paul, St Augustine, and Luther. Heidegger’s analyses of uncertainty (Unsicherheit) and perplexity (Zerrissenheit) are particularly important and interesting, as well as his original interpretation of quaestio mihi factus sum—I am a question to myself. The clashing with oneself is the existential task that Heidegger picks up 4

We can talk here about the logical structure of responsibility: someone, the subject of responsibility (Jemand—der Träger der Verantwortung) is responsible for something, the area of responsibility (für etwas—Verantwortungsbereich) to someone, instance of responsibility (gegenüber jemandem—Rechtfertigungsinstanz) in a concrete dimension, the dimension of responsibility (hinsichtlich von so-und-so—Rechtfertigungshinsicht). 35

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and analyzes, with reference to the Augustinian understanding of tentatio, as temptation, also in the sense of suggesting false happiness (falsa beatitudo)—the temptation of an easy life. Already in 1921 in Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus,5 Heidegger discovered the fundamental illumination of the understanding of the Being that we are—das Sein, das wir sind—in Augustine’s Confessiones: Das Sein, das wir sind, is Dasein, that is, everything that concerns who (das Was) and how (das Wie) we are, as historical beings. Augustine discovers the truth about human Dasein, in its concern, fear, and self-reflection, in the ontological relation of a human being to God. His conversion, or restoring the relationship with God, was an overcoming of self-forgetting, Selbstvergessenheit. In Heidegger’s reinterpretation, the restless heart, inquietum cor, is not only a phenomenon that belongs predominantly to religious life but a fundamentally human experience, the source of continuous existential anxiety. Sein und Zeit is an attempt to formalize inquietum cor, to detach this phenomenon from its transcendental reference. In this way, Heidegger creates his own vision of the torn-apart Dasein, the Dasein without reference to God, which, according to Augustine, is the main reason for fear but also the only chance to overcome it. Augustine’s brilliant meditations on memory (memoria) and care (cura), in chapter ten of the Confessions, are fundamental to the illumination of the historicity and temporality of Dasein. The dramatic inner life of a human being happens in time, and to know this and understand it is possible only by narrating one’s own history. This self-narration makes us realize that we narrate ourselves differently each time we do it and discover new dimensions within ourselves. For Augustine, care involves the challenge of “positioning” oneself in life. Dasein can either be dispersed in the world or united with God. It is “positioning” that is a burden and an existential test for a human being (tentatio): I am a burden to myself, Oneri mihi sum (Ich bin mir selber zur Last). In this “positioning,” a human understands him/herself as a question: In cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum, et ipse est languor meus (Confessions: 10, 33, 50); I made myself into a question. Augustine transforms himself here into the subject of the question, which, on the one hand, is the consequence of the logic “get to know yourself” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), and, on the other, the answer to the question about oneself, which is not so much dependent on the wisdom of the asking person as on God’s grace. Augustine also states clearly, why he is a torment for himself: “Because I am not full of you, God, I am a burden to myself” (quoniam tui plenus non sum, oneri mihi sum, Confessions: 10, 28, 39). An understanding of the embarrassment over oneself, the penetration of the depth of the existential perplexity, is possible and purposeful for Augustine only in the horizon of seeking God and longing for Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA60, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995). 36 5

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Him. When Augustine says later, nec ego ipse capio totum quod sum (Confessions: 10, 8, 15), “I do not understand all that I am,” he emphasizes that his own reality transcends him, that understanding himself sends him back to something that is beyond him. It is in relation to God that a human being understands his/her being in the world as a torment (molestia). For him/herself, a human being is not transparent; only God sees everything. This is the source of existential anxiety: “I am terrified of my secrets which your eyes see and mine not” (multum timeo occulta mea, quae norunt oculi tui, mei autem non, Confessions: 10, 37, 60). Heidegger understands Augustine’s attempted “escape” from this reality, in making the restless human soul to be quieted by God: tu excitas ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te (Confessions: 1, 1, 1): “You yourself make it blissful to bless you. You have created us as directed toward you. And our heart is not quiet until it rests in you.” What Kind of Interpretation? By accepting Hermes as the patron of interpretation, especially remembering his penchant for a specific deception—ambiguity, resorting to tricks, and setting up traps, it is easy to bring hermeneutics to the apotheosis of ambivalence, blurriness, and complete arbitrariness of interpretation. Following Heidegger, we can say that all experience is interpretative. Thus, the experience of truth happens in the horizon of interpretation: “While the truth is also outside the boundaries of scientific methods, there is no experience of truth that would not have an interpretative character.”6 The experience of truth happens as an experience of interpretation. Hermeneutics is fulfilled in action, yet not so much by interpreting again and again but as the very event of interpreting. Hermeneutics realizes itself in the concrete being-in-the-world of Dasein. Therefore, one can speak not only of the closeness between hermeneutics and ethics but of their identity. An experience of truth is not a theoretical-cognitive addition discovered during the interpretative process: It defines the way of being a human being in the world, which I call existentia hermeneutica. In this horizon, hermeneutic existence is an ethical existence. The conflict that arises in interpretation, and which we continuously experience in life, makes us sensitive to the fact that none of the interpretations is an exclusive or a final one. This conflict does not resemble the rivalry between ide-

6

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. D. Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 4. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “The Truth of Hermeneutic Experience,” Analecta Hermeneutica 1 (2009). 37

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ologies or different views on the matters of the world; rather, it is a humble attempt to be at home in a polyphonic world, as also an invitation to the Other to join the interpretative community.7 The openness to the Other happens in the dialectical tension between the call (An-ruf) and the answer (Ant-wort). The call (An-ruf) or a question (Frage) are issued in language. However, we can say that the call as such just opens the world of language. The call reveals the horizon within which the dialects of question and answer take form. It has a linguistic character, fulfills itself in language, but is not yet speech itself (Sprechen). Therefore, the answer to the call is firstly a response to the gift (Gabe), which is the word (Wort). In this sense, the answer to the gift becomes an existential task (Auf-gabe). The dialectic tension between the call (An-ruf) and the answer (Ant-wort) discloses the ethical dimension of the call. The answer is always a concrete “positioning”: I either accept the word or ignore it; I will turn to it, or I will turn away from it (and this is also present in Heidegger’s fundamental ontological tension between Da-sein and Weg-sein). The answer, however, is not just an answer to the question addressed to me in the spirit of Gadamer’s dialectic of question and answer (Dialektik von Frage und Antwort). For Gadamer, the dynamics of receiving and giving (Dynamik von Geben und Nehmen) is decisive. For him, the best condition for understanding is to reflect critically on that which lies behind the answer to the question (das Gesagte). This response must be understood within the horizon of the question to which it is an answer. The dialectic of the call and the response precede the dialectic of the question and the answer and conditions them. Therefore, it is not about an understanding of the primordiality of conversation (whose source lies in misunderstanding), which motivates a desire to understand. What is crucial here is definitely the much more fundamental understanding of the answer as a way of being in the world, as a radical responsibility (Ver-antwortung, not in the sense of accountability (Zurechnung), but as an intersubjective moral answer) in the face of any particular question. However, it is only within the horizon of the answer (Ant-wort) that the original meaning of the call (An-ruf) can be understood ontologically.8 In terms of hermeneutics, the human experience of the world has a lingual character. Understanding is participation in meaning. As a historical event, it is

7

The ethics of hermeneutic interpretation thematizes the relation of Dasein to Being (Sein), which characterizes the understanding of Dasein as being the shepherd of Being (Wächter des Seins). Here, a human being appears to be the shepherd of Being. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” in idem, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, GA9 (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004). 8 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “The Primacy of Conversation in Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in idem, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 11-33. 38

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rooted in language.9 The true meaning of language exceeds the boundaries of methodological interpretation. Meaning cannot be determined from the perspective of propositional logic. Language as a medium of history is itself a place of mediation. Hermeneutic understanding is not a process of meaning’s creation of the text, but a constant dialogue in which the mediation of meaning takes place. Therefore, dialogue is a model of hermeneutic understanding. Understanding is always an interpretation. Interpretation is Dasein’s way of living in the world. Therefore, it has an inimitable ethical character. As historical and finite beings, we have a sense of our belonging to the heritage of tradition and culture. This belonging is realized through building the culture of conversation, which is the most meaningful and responsible way (in the sense of re-sponsibilitas) of moving toward the Other. Here conversation builds up a community, not by overcoming differences toward reaching consensus, but by approaching the Other in the full richness of our diversity. In this spirit, we can understand the Christian ideal of charity as a call to receive the Other just as they are, in their otherness and incompatibility with our own expectations and imaginations.10 Mediation in language is carried out through the phenomenon of hermeneutic conversation, which is of a lingual nature. Language and history determine understanding. The conversation alone is ‘living speech.’ Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which is the philosophy of conversation, has a definite telos. It is a pursuit of understanding. The dialectics of question and answer, when applied to the practice of interpretation, require posing a question to which the interpreted text is an answer. In this way, there is not only the text which demands understanding within the horizon of the question but also the interpreter. It is the interpreter who situates him/herself in the face of the text. The text unravels its world for the interpreter. It is the hermeneutic requirement of the text’s truth (Wahrheitsanspruch des Textes). Hermeneuticians clash with this truth, that is, with what has been said or written, as the task to understand (die Aufgabe des Verstehens). Our pre-understanding and pre-judgments are tested in the confrontation with the truth of the text. Following Heidegger, Gadamer understands the text as a derivative of existence. Thus, an understanding of the text is closely related to “Actually, language is the ‘house of Being,’ living wherein the human being exists, by belonging to Being while protecting it.” Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” 333. Heidegger clarifies his understanding of the proximity of language and Being, when he writes: “Language is the ‘house of Being.’ The human being lives in this home. The thinkers and poets are the shepherds assigned to this home. Their wakefulness allows language to be the executor of Being, in so far as it brings Being into being spoken openly and preserved in the words of language.” Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” 313. 10 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself? No, Thanks! (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 9

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the understanding of existence. Being convinced that the text has a specific message, which is important to me and my self-understanding, the interpreter seeks to grasp that which is not explicitly expressed in the text. It is about the unspoken (das Ungesagte), the verbum interius, about the word in which human thinking and being are rooted.11 If conversation is the privileged existential form of Dasein, it should be understood as a hermeneutic activity in which its partners most fully recognize their own subjectivity, as well as experiencing the otherness of the Other. The ethics of hermeneutic conversation makes us sensitive to the need (and even the obligation) to respect the otherness of the Other and does not allow for oversimplifications and shortcuts on the way to understanding. An exaggerated longing for harmonious unity—but also an artificial boosting of diversity—cast a shadow over the uneasy topos of conversation. However, only an ethical, i.e., radical opening up to a partner in conversation, allows one to get involved in a conversation, that is, to be led by conversation without just being the one who is its leader.12 Conversation is, therefore, the topos of reaching for an understanding per viam longam. This opening up to the Other is, at the same time, not only an acceptance of his otherness, but also an expression of belonging to cultural heritage, which—as Gadamer says—we are ourselves (Tradition, die wir sind). Obviously, since the horizon of interpretation is the horizon of tradition, the problems of tradition become the problems of interpretation. Therefore, interpretation does not mean here an idealization of the interpretative horizon, which has created and consolidated many painful cultural stereotypes over the course of the centuries, but it means a courageous opening of oneself to a conversation. This does not guarantee the success of approaching the Other. By breaking the existing framework, a new framework is created. The critics of the affirmation of conversation, who see in it a utopian hope of hermeneutics, can only be invited to a conversation, to relocating themselves, to situating themselves in the world (con-versatio). This is similar to Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” in idem, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 1-23. 12 “We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus, a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, the conversation may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. Thus, we can say that we had a good conversation, or that it was ill fated. All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 385. 40 11

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Ricoeur’s approach to translation: Instead of debating on the impossibility of translating, or the deficiencies of an existing translation, we can offer an alternative translation. A translation can only be “corrected” by another translation, by trying to say the same once again. However, it will always be a different translation. An understanding of that which demands to be understood is happening within the horizon of reaching for an understanding of ourselves and what is happening within us when we try to understand. It is also a desire to understand the world, and us in this world, in which understanding takes place. Hermeneutics is an art that allows creatively (and not only reproductively) to understand interpersonal communication, ourselves, and the world in which we live. Therefore, it is the hermeneutics of communication—in the sense of our reflection on the horizons of understanding communication—and the boundaries of the verbal and nonverbal impact on a human being: It is the reflection on the art of understanding communication. Hermeneutics is not a methodology of interpretative theory. It allows us to look critically at the legitimacy and purposefulness of speaking about the methodology of research on communication, based on the research apparatus that was taken over from the general methodology of the sciences. In its essence, it is the art of interpretation (ars interpretandi, ars explicandi). The ultimate goal of interpretation is self-understanding, which is achieved by understanding the texts of the tradition. They help in an understanding of our being in the world (in-der-Welt-sein). By postulating the universal character of hermeneutics (Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik), philosophical hermeneutics illuminates the fundamental structures of understanding. As historical beings, we always understand in relation to our pre-understanding of the world. Our pre-judgments (Vor-verständnisse) shape the horizon of understanding, which is conditioned by the historical, lingual, and cultural horizons of understanding. Interpretation is based on the assumption that each time we understand, we understand differently (Wir verstehen immer anders, wenn wir überhaupt verstehen). There is no unambiguous or finite interpretation of the text. By discovering new horizons of understanding, we open ourselves again and again to the hermeneutic truth which challenges us to dialogue. Moreover, it is this constant dialogue that creates the tradition that we are. By showing the hermeneutic experience as an experience of human finitude (Bewusstsein der menschlichen Endlichkeit), we understand the purpose of interpretation as the clarification of the structures and conditions of understanding, and not as overcoming them (Überwindung der Vorurteile). In this way, we develop an awareness of effective history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). In the introduction to the 2nd edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer illuminates the horizon of understanding in philosophical hermeneutics. Like Kant, who originally asked the philosophical question about the conditions of our cog-

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nition (Bedingung der Möglichkeit des Erkennens) and by our knowledge (Bedingung der Erkenntnis), Gadamer understands Truth and Method as a philosophical journey toward the illumination of the phenomenon of understanding. However, he goes further than Kant, as he is not only concerned with the opportunities for, and the boundaries of, cognition in the humanities. He broadens our understanding of scientific experience by including every human experience. He asks a question about the conditions needed for cognizing in the broadest possible way. This is a hermeneutic question par excellence: How is understanding possible; what happens in us and to us when we understand? (Both to us, who understand, and with that which wants to be understood). Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of understanding and interpretation. By clarifying the nature of understanding as such, Gadamer admits that he does not mean to create a new hermeneutic system that somehow resembles traditional hermeneutics, which in its essence is, in fact, the methodology of interpretation. It is essential to preserve the scientific character of hermeneutics by upholding the scientific integrity of the task of interpretation. Thus, we can speak exactly about having an obligation (Verpflichtung). We mean here a philosophical duty to understand that which calls for understanding. Therefore, when Gadamer talks about the necessity of understanding (Aufgabe/Pflicht des Verstehens), he emphasizes the openness of the hermeneutic consciousness happening in an encounter with the Other as the hope of overcoming one’s own limitations. This is the most certain way to deepen ethical sensitivity. 13 The task of the hermeneutician is not to reflect on what we should do as interpreters, but on what happens to us when we understand, going beyond our actual activity, or even our self-understanding.14 Referring to Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein, Gadamer is convinced that understanding is not so much one of the human being’s possible behaviors, but a way of being a human being. It is the very fundamental-ontological optics that decides about the self-understanding of hermeneutics, which dynamically results in the human being to be stranded, i.e., in his/her being left stranded between finitude and concrete historical conditionality. The idea of hermeneutics comprises its overall embracing of the world and of the human being who lives in the Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik als praktische Philosophie,” in idem, Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), 78-109. 14 “I did not intend to produce a manual for guiding understanding in the manner of the earlier hermeneutics. I did not wish to elaborate a system of rules to describe, let alone direct, the methodical procedure of the human sciences. Nor was it my aim to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in these fields in order to put my findings to practical ends. If there is any practical consequence of the present investigation, it certainly has nothing to do with an unscientific “commitment”; instead, it is concerned with the “scientific” integrity of acknowledging the commitment involved in all understanding. My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxv-xxvi. 42 13

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world. For Gadamer, what gives hermeneutics its proper dimension is not methodological musing, but an attentive attempt to understand that which calls for understanding.15 Gadamer’s hermeneutics is phenomenological hermeneutics, which does not propose a method of interpretation but describes the event of understanding as such.16 Understanding happens between description and interpretation. It is not delimited to some mysterious community of the like-minded: It is an event (Ereignis). As hermeneuticians, we want to understand the nature of this event, in order to understand what happens when we understand. A convincing and successful interpretation leads to understanding.17 We can talk of the inseparable relationship which exists between the interpreter and that which is interpreted. The historical thinking of the interpreter stems from his/her self-understanding, which is conscious of its own historicity. In the hermeneutic horizon, the text becomes the other (der Andere), which (precisely as the other) becomes part of my past. An understanding of the text cannot be reached without an understanding of this otherness, which is a constitutive element of personal identity. An understanding of the text and self-understanding condition one another. The real object of history is not an object in itself, but the unity between the past and the interpreter. In this very dimension, we can speak of the mutual relationship between the reality of history and the reality of understanding, which, as

15

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17

“Kant certainly did not intend to prescribe what modern science must do in order to stand honorably before the judgment seat of reason. He asked a philosophical question: what are the conditions of our knowledge, by virtue of which modern science is possible, and how far does it extend? The following investigation also asks a philosophic question in the same sense. But it does not ask it only of the so-called human sciences (which would give precedence to certain traditional disciplines). Neither does it ask it only of science and its modes of experience, but of all human experience of the world and human living. It asks (to put it in Kantian terms): how is understanding possible? This is a question which precedes any action of understanding on the part of subjectivity, including the methodical activity of the ‘interpretive sciences’ and their norms and rules.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxvii. Cf. Ingrid Scheibler, Gadamer: Between Heidegger and Hermeneutics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997); Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Friederike Reese, eds., Hermeneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (Tübingen, Mohr, 2000); Robert L. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (New York: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002); Donatella di Cesare, Gadamer: Ein philosophisches Porträt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). “Basically, I do not propose a method; I describe what is.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 394. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 111. 43

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such, is always historical and lingual.18 The medium of understanding is language. Based on the Greek tradition of the word, for which λόγος is both the word and thinking itself, and which expresses the primordial belonging together of thinking and speaking, Gadamer created an inspiring formula, which is probably one of the most recognizable phrases from Truth and Method: “Being that can be understood is language” (Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache).19 Gadamer underlines it clearly that it is neither about an understanding of the Other, nor his/her intentions, but it is about the recognition of the truth of that which has been expressed. It is truth itself that reaches me in the presence of the Other, assuming my openness to the Other and to the truth of the said. This fundamental openness creates the horizon of understanding, in which also the dictum: “Being that can be understood is language” inscribes itself. As Gadamer emphasizes, this does not mean that the one, who understands, defines “Being” as such. In fact, it is a departure from calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken versus besinnliches Nachdenken), in which the subject who cognates also creates a network of meanings and senses. It is about such an approach that everything that happens can be understood. Therefore, we can talk about the fundamental closeness of Being and language. For Gadamer, that which is expressed in language is always this very Other, rather than the uttered word itself, “Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as ‘history of effect.’ Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 299. Gadamer clarifies the epistemological conditions of historical knowledge, pointing to important difficulties: “The only thing that gives a judgment dignity is its having a basis, a methodological justification (and not the fact that it may actually be correct). For the Enlightenment the absence of such a basis does not mean that there might be other kinds of certainty, but rather that the judgment has no foundation in the things themselves—i.e., that it is ‘unfounded.’ This conclusion follows only in the spirit of rationalism. It is the reason for discrediting prejudices and the reason scientific knowledge claims to exclude them completely. In adopting this principle, modern science is following the rule of Cartesian doubt, accepting nothing as certain that can in any way be doubted, and adopting the idea of method that follows from this rule. In our introductory observations we have already pointed out how difficult it is to harmonize the historical knowledge that helps to shape our historical consciousness with this ideal and how difficult it is, for that reason, to comprehend its true nature on the basis of the modern conception of method. This is the place to turn those negative statements into positive ones. The concept of ‘prejudice’ is where we can start.” Ibid., 273. “The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.” Ibid., 277. 19 Ibid., 470. 44 18

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although the word is a word by that which has been expressed in it.20 It is from this dialectics that Gadamer draws the limitedness and inexhaustibility of any process of thinking and understanding that manifests itself in language. (Gibt es eine Grenze für das menschliche Denken?) What distinguishes the work on refining hermeneutic practice from mere working on a method of text interpretation is the awareness of the dependence of one’s own self-understanding, and hence the individual consciousness, on historical consciousness. It is history that co-determines the self-consciousness of a hermeneutician. This dependence, therefore, determines the nature of understanding as such. What has been understood, carries with itself an inner strength of conviction, which creates new forms of conviction (Überzeugung). The event of understanding is not so much about giving a testimony to that which has been understood, but it concerns a situation in which what has been understood can give a testimony about itself. The more a hermeneutician opens him/herself to the richness of the hermeneutic experience, the more one realizes one’s own pre-suppositions and prejudices, the more does one make it possible for the truth of Being to arise (die Wahrheit des Seins), the truth that illuminates itself in the constant dynamics of concealment and disclosure (Verbergen-Entbergen). It is worth adding here that such an attitude, in a hermeneutician, is not the fruit of one’s theoretical musings, but that it is achieved in hermeneutic practice. The hermeneutic practice is not delimited to the experience of a text’s interpretation. It concerns an interpretation of the whole of human life as such, as the reaching of an understanding of the way a human being in the world should live.21 “The speculative mode of being of language has a universal ontological significance. To be sure, what comes into language is something different from the spoken word itself. But the word is a word only because of what comes into language in it. Its own physical being exists only in order to disappear into what is said. Likewise, that which comes into language is not something that is pregiven before language; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness.” Ibid. 21 “It distinguishes hermeneutic practice and its capacity to ‘be acquired’ from a mere technology—whether one calls it social engineering or critical methodology—by the fact that it is always co-determined by an historically effective factor influencing the consciousness of the one who understands. This is why, as a significant turn-around, what is understood always develops a certain power of persuasion, which facilitates the development of new convictions. I do not in any way deny that if one wants to understand, one has to try and distance oneself from one’s own opinions on a matter. Whoever wants to understand does not need to affirm that which he wishes to understand. And yet, I think that hermeneutic practice teaches us that critical effort is only effective when used sparingly. That which one understands, always also speaks for itself. That is the basis on which the whole richness of the hermeneutic universe rests, being open to everything that can be understood. By engaging in the whole width of its capacity, it forces the one who is in the process of understanding to forfeit his/her own prejudices. These are gains due to reflection, which in practice come one’s way only out of practice. The world of experience of the philologist and his ‘Being, 20

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Gadamer also makes us sensitive to the closeness between hermeneutics and rhetoric, underlining their common endeavor to present convincing arguments (different from those that are logically certain). This closeness is particularly noticeable in controversial situations when it is not the strength of the logical argument that is decisive, but a reasonable analysis (vernünftige Überlegung). By referring to human emotions, rhetorics does not become unreasonable. Just to the contrary: It emphasizes the need to capture the richness of human experience in its complexity and multidimensionality.22 Gadamer’s hermeneutics is an important contribution to an understanding that the issues of truth and understanding cannot be adequately explained by scientific methods alone. This results from the basic fact that hermeneutics is not a method of interpretation, but a philosophical reflection on the nature of understanding which exceeds the conceptual range of a scientific method. In the Introduction to Truth and Method, Gadamer discusses the autonomy and independence of the humanities and the specific nature of truth and understanding. He sets himself up in opposition to the all-powerful scientific method. He intends to seek to discover the perspective in which the experience of truth is taking place. It is a search for the context of the experience of truth, wherever it focused upon the text,’ to which I gave priority, is—in truth—only a part of (and a methodological example for) hermeneutic experience, which is fully interwoven in the fabric of human practice. Within this whole, what is in writing is particularly important for being understood, but it is nevertheless a late phenomenon (and hence of secondary importance). Hermeneutic experience reaches as far, in truth, as the readiness of sensible beings to talk reaches among them in any case.” Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 466. 22 “I look in vain for the acknowledgement of the fact that this is the region shared by hermeneutics and rhetoric: The region of convincing arguments (and not just those that are compelling in logic). It is the region in which hermeneutics acts, in practice, under the banner of humanity as such, whose task is not just to be present where the power of ‘iron-fisted closure’ (before which one has to yield without discussion) rules, though also not where the emancipatory reflection of its ‘contrary’ agreement is assured, but where controversial points need to be decided upon after reasonable ‘thinking them through (to the end).’ Here we will find at home both eloquence and the art of arguing (as well as their silent opposite of thoughtful consultation with oneself. Though eloquence speaks to the emotions – which has been known for ever and a day—it does not thereby leave the region of what is reasonable. Vico rightly emphasizes a value all of its own: The copia, the richness of its viewpoints. I find it frighteningly unreal when one assigns to rhetoric—as does Habermas—the character of being an imposition, something that one needs to leave behind in favor of rational and unimposed discourse. This not only leads to undervaluing the danger of verbal manipulation and the disempowering of reason, but thankfully also to the chance of verbal understanding, which is the bedrock of social life. All social praxis—and indeed also the revolutionary one—is unthinkable without the function of rhetoric. It is specifically the culture of science in our epoch that can illustrate this point. It has posited an ever-growing task before human communication, i.e., that of integrating the specifically appropriate area of scientific subject knowledge into how society’s reasoning absorbs it and makes it ‘its own’: This is where the modern mass media come into their own (themselves).” Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 466-467. 46

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is happening. It is clear that this search is not, and cannot be, dominated by the scientific method. The justification for this fact is relatively simple. Personal experience, which is the subject matter of the humanities, refers to the way in which a human being in the world exists, and as such escapes the scientific method which is empirical, intersubjective, and based on falsification.23 One cannot measure it physically and determine it in the form of conclusions drawn from experimental research. The phenomenon of the understanding of human existence in the world and the issue concerning an understanding of that which wants to be understood are directed toward the fullness and completeness of human existence. In this sense, hermeneutics is much closer to human experience than an ideal of the validity and reliability (das Ideal der Gültigkeit und Gewissheit) of the natural sciences. Understanding, in the humanities, cannot be in the service of any specific and concrete methodology. The central verifying criterion of hermeneutics is the hermeneutic horizon of human experience.24 Therefore, for Gadamer, understanding, and interpretation of texts do not belong to the domain of science, but to the human experience of being in the world. Although understanding cannot be subordinated to a specific method, it is related to cognition and truth. Our hermeneutic task is to outline both the nature of that cognition and the truth which is related to it.25

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“The phenomenon of understanding not only pervades all human relations to the world. It also has an independent validity within science, and it resists any attempt to reinterpret it in terms of a scientific method. The following investigations start with the resistance in modern science itself to the universal claim of the scientific method. They are concerned to seek the experience of truth that transcends the domain of the scientific method wherever that experience is to be found, and to inquire into its legitimacy. Hence the human sciences are connected to modes of experience that lie outside science: i.e., with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself. These are all modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science. Contemporary philosophy is well aware of this.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, xx-xxi. More about method and methodology in Gary Shapiro, and Alan Sica, ed., Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, in particular, in the Author’s Introduction. “The understanding and the interpretation of texts is not merely a concern of science, but obviously belongs to human experience of the world in general. The hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all. It is not concerned with a method of understanding by means of which texts are subjected to scientific investigation like all other objects of experience. It is not concerned primarily with amassing verified knowledge, such as would satisfy the methodological ideal of science—yet it too is concerned with knowledge and with truth. In understanding tradition not only are texts understood, but insights are acquired, and truths known. But what kind of knowledge and what kind of truth?” Gadamer, Truth and Method, xx. 47

Existentia Hermeneutica

It is the hermeneutic truth that is inextricably linked to understanding and interpretation. This is an integral aspect of the event of understanding. Thus, hermeneutics is not a method for reaching the truth, but a practice that makes it possible to reach an understanding. The hermeneutic reading of the text is an attempt to understand the conditions that enable the truth to happen (facere veritatem).26 The truth of the text reveals itself in reaching the conditions for understanding (Bedingungen des Verstehens).27 Gadamer accentuates the ontological importance of hermeneutics for the problem of understanding and interpretation in the humanities. The basic hermeneutic intuition is the dependence of understanding on the historical and cultural conditions in which it happens. The historicity of human experience and the historicity of understanding belong to the ontological dimension of human existence. They also indicate clearly the inextricability of hermeneutic truth and its interpretation. Understanding and interpretation of the text are dependent on the historical conditions, as well as on the context in which interpretation happens. Because there is no absolute interpretation, various interpretations can coexist as legitimate, when we provide binding arguments in favor of a given interpretation. Hermeneutic understanding happens as a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). Aware of our historicity, as well as the historicity of the very process of understanding, we clash against the text (as the voice of the past), and we confront our existence, our self-understanding, with that which demands to be understood. Philosophical hermeneutics clarifies the truth which is inaccessible to the logic that is characteristic for scientific methods. Gadamer proposes a non-objectivist version of interpretation which happens in the fusion of the horizons of the text and the text’s interpreter. Following the Heideggerian understanding of historicity,28 Gadamer elaborates on the implications of the historicity of understanding for an understanding of the text.29 Hermeneutic understanding is the way of being that is appropriate for a human being in the world. It is not a subjective relation to a specific object, but the history of its effects. Understanding belongs to the essence of that which is

Cf. James Risser, “The Imaging of Truth in Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Lenore Langsdorf, Stephen H. Watson, and E. Marya Bower, eds., Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996), 159-174. 27 For a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of understanding in reference to prejudgments and prejudices see Lawrence K Schmidt, The Epistemology of Hans-Georg Gadamer: An Analysis of the Legitimization of “Vorurteile” (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1987). 28 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row), 1962, § 74. 29 James DiCenso analyzes Gadamer’s hermeneutics in relation to Heidegger’s ambivalence concerning the historicity of Being. Cf. James DiCenso, Hermeneutics and the Disclosure of Truth (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 79-83. 48 26

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understood.30 Therefore, each of the subsequent understandings cannot break away from the Wirkungsgeschichte (the effective history), and thus from the history of interpretations that belongs essentially to that which is understood. An awareness of the effects of history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) expresses our being anchored in history and culture, which create us. Our historical consciousness is a polyphonic consciousness. It consists of all the voices of history. In the current event which wants to be understood, the entire symphony of history can be heard. This symphony of history is the tradition that we co-create and of which we are heirs. We hear this tradition in every new experience which can be understood, only through being rooted in history and the opening to the heritage of the past, as a new voice in the symphony of tradition. An understanding of the coexistence of historical horizons and of our belonging to this multifaceted heritage allows us to experience the horizon of history, which is not added to our experience but grows out of it and co-creates it. Individual awareness of the effects of history is contained in the singular historical horizon. This horizon, as well as the horizons of history which make up the symphony of history intermingle and codetermine the environment of life. It is the rootedness in history (that makes the human experience of oneself and the world possible), which, at the same time, participates in and co-creates the tradition that we are.31 The very event of understanding and interpretation draws attention to the important role of rationality.32 Hermeneutic experience is a special kind of experience because it is an experience which is conditioned both historically and lingually. It is in the hermeneutic practice, in an attempt to understand the message “Understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the history of its effect; in other words, understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxviii. 31 “Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. Only in the multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern historical research itself is not only research, but the handing down of tradition. We do not see it only in terms of progress and verified results; in it we have, as it were, a new experience of history whenever the past resounds in a new voice.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 285. “When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien worlds unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. Everything contained in historical consciousness is in fact embraced by a single historical horizon. Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition. Understanding tradition undoubtedly requires a historical horizon, then.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 303. 32 Cf. Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Luis Umbelino, and Andrzej Wierciński, ed., The Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012). 30

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of tradition, that we see the corrective role of the hermeneutic experience that allows us to render the rationality of understanding and interpretation historically and lingually, exceeding at the same time the limitations of a particular language.33 The hermeneutic experience is, therefore, a process, i.e., an open event. Its essence is openness to a new experience. We can even say that hermeneutic experience is fulfilled in openness to what is new, different, and other. In this context, we can also grasp the essence of the truth in the hermeneutic experience. This truth implies an opening to a new experience. Thus, the hermeneutic experience is not about reaching absolute or logically proven knowledge, but it is about the grasping of the processual character of understanding. The hermeneutic experience itself enables one to open oneself to a new experience, which is a condition for all understanding.34 In this sense, we can also talk about an experienced hermeneutician. It is not the one who has developed a particular efficiency, but the one who is essentially open to a new experience (Offenheit für Erfahrung). This openness is a radically undogmatic opening as an expression of hospitality to the new and the other, to that which wants to be understood. After Gadamer, we can repeat that only such activity is worthy of being called the hermeneutic experience, which is not guided by the logic of expectation that ensues from a calculative attitude to oneself and the Other as well as to that which is understood. Gadamer also emphasizes the characteristic significance of negative experiences, to which he ascribes a special didactic role. Combining the historical nature of the human being with the fundamental negativity of the experience, he shows the difference between experience and insight (Erfahrung und Einsicht). Insight is more than knowledge about a particular situation. It assumes a departure “The work of understanding and interpretation always remains meaningful. This shows the superior universality with which reason rises above the limitations of any given language. The hermeneutical experience is the corrective by means of which the thinking reason escapes the prison of language, and it is itself verbally constituted.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 403. 34 “The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience. That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences. The consummation of his experience, the perfection that we call ‘being experienced,’ does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to be, on the contrary, someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 350. For Gadamer, “the fullness of experience is not the fullness of information or scientific knowledge, but a radical openness to new experience.” Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” in Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Hermeneutical Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990), 290. 50 33

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from the usual way of thinking and understanding. It is, therefore, a discovery made on the basis of the already existing self-understanding in new areas of selfawareness and on the way to a fuller understanding of oneself as being-in-theworld.35 We can, therefore, speak about hermeneutic virtue (hermeneutische Tugend). It is, in the first place, about an understanding of the duty of hermeneutics. For Gadamer, the point of departure and the goal are both needed for understanding: Both are impossible without self-understanding (since every understanding is self-understanding) and without an opening to the Other. Hermeneutic virtue is thus the fundamental opening to the Other. In this, Gadamer sees a chance for hermeneutics as such, and also a chance that hermeneutics may be understood as the hope we can entertain for humanity. It is a hope for human solidarity in the dimension of living together and survival, so that we may realize our vocations and fulfill our duties.36 Hermeneutic interpretation is rooted in the conviction that every reading is a new reading, that each understanding opens the way to a new understanding. The author of the text remains the same. Every reader is a different reader. That is why every understanding happens in a unique context, and that is why every new reading is a new understanding. One cannot talk about a definitive, ultimate meaning. As long as we exist and as long as there are texts that want to be understood and readers who want to understand them, we witness an endless dialogue. Gadamer emphasizes that dialogue is the last chance for humanity to defend itself against the self-destruction that inhabits technical civilization. Therefore, we can talk about the hermeneutics of hope (Hermeneutik der Hoffnung), which is a feature of a hermeneutic existence. Hermeneutics in action is, above all, a steady path to self-understanding within the horizon of an encounter with the Other. Therefore, it contributes immensely to the building of the civilization of tolerance and respect for the Other “Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus, insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense. Insight is something we come to. It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man—i.e., to be discerning and insightful.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 350. 36 “If we do not learn about hermeneutic virtue, that is, if we do not comprehend that it is, first of all, about understanding the Other, in order to see if perhaps, in the end, something like solidarity among men as a whole—as well as in relation to living with each other and surviving together—may become possible, then we shall be unable to fulfill vital tasks regarding humanity either in small things or in extensive ones.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Wort zum Begriff: Die Aufgabe der Hermeneutik als Philosophie,” in Jean Grondin, ed., Gadamer Lesebuch (Tübingen: Mohr 1997), 109. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy,” in Bruce Krajewski, ed., Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002), 1-12). Cf. James Risser, “From Concept to Word: On the Radicality of Philosophical Hermeneutics,” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 309-325. 35

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and otherness. In this sense, hermeneutics is a conscious transformation of the world (bewusste Veränderung der Welt). The call for interpretation is an ontological, ethical, and transcendental call because it is a clear indication of our rootedness in a different reality. It requires from us a personal answer, not only as being here (Da-sein) but as a sign of gratitude to Being. I am thinking here of gratitude in the Heideggerian sense, i.e., “Gratitude—thinking is being grateful”—Dankbarkeit: Denken ist Danken.37 Thinking is not science: It is gratitude. In particular, it seems essential to draw attention to the interpretative character of truth and communication. This involves an indication of the creative possibilities proposed by philosophical hermeneutics in its critical reflection on both the essence of communication and its practical dimension, within the concrete life of concrete people. Since hermeneutics is not a methodology of interpretative theory, but is, in its essence, an art of interpretation, it seems that hermeneutic thinking can be particularly creative for an understanding of communication. Hermeneutics, as the horizon of understanding, makes a human being sensitive to self-understanding and reminds us incessantly that understanding is not a selected, or even privileged aspect of human existence, but a way of existing. Therefore, an attempt to see the multidimensionality of human existence in the horizon of its self-understanding is the decisive factor for successful interpersonal communication. Understanding is always an interpretation (Verstehen ist immer Auslegung). It means that, when we understand, we apply our own prejudices and pre-judgments to that which wants to be understood. Understanding is not a simple re-production, but it is always productive (Verstehen ist kein reproduktives, sondern stets auch ein produktives Verhalten).38 Understanding changes alongside the history of the reception (Wirkungsgeschichte) of that which wants to be understood. Understanding is always understanding differently (anders verstehen). Understanding differently is not a purely pragmatic or relativistic approach to the truth of the message but an expression of the awareness that each subsequent understanding takes place in the interpretative context of being enriched by the preceding one. This is done in such a way that what is to be understood can speak to us. It is rather like in the case of a work of art, which says to us: You have to change your life! Just like in Rilke’s poem:

Archäischer Torso Apollos Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (1951-1952), GA8, ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando (Frankfurt a.M: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2002), 149. 38 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 301. 52 37

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Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Archaic Torso of Apollo We did not know his mighty head, his eyes ripening like apples. And yet his torso was aglow as if a torch, just muffled, shone out his looking: full, lustrous and firm. No other thing could make his breast so glorious, nor could the turning to his side elicit such delight in loins whose centered mid-point once begat. Else would the stone be deformed and short Below the invisible escarpment of his frame And would not glimmer like wild creatures’ pelts; and would not break out of all its borders like a star: There is no dot that does not see you. You must change your life.39

39

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaischer Torso Apollos” (Frühsommer 1908, Paris) from Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2000). My own translation. 53

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It is precisely the ethical imperative that is characteristic of poetic discourse. It concerns such sensitivity in contact with an artwork that it opens us to its message. The work of art begins to talk to us. Moreover, it expects an answer (Ant-wort) from us. Hence comes our responsibility (Ver-antwortung). We cannot fall silent in the face of the revelation of Beauty. A true hermeneutician is a wandering thinker and debater, one who sets his sights on intellectual trips, moving away from the one-dimensional, simplified reaching of the main thought. Customarily, this approach is defined as pejorative in its effects, because it seems to hinder interlocutors in reaching their aim effectively. ‘Effectively’ means, here, as soon as possible. And also, in the easiest way; with the conviction that it is the interlocutors that dominate the conversation and lead the course it takes. In a hermeneutic conversation, partners are guided, rather, by the problem they want to understand. Conversation, thus, reaches its own dynamics, in which it is not the will of the interlocutors that decides how the conversation happens. Ideally, the interlocutors let themselves be led by the dialectics of question and answer. Therefore, the model for hermeneutic discourse is not thinking in shortcuts, but, as Ricoeur says, through detours, per viam longam. It is very often the detours that allow us to see something new that we would never notice if we were going straight or the shortest way to a visible goal. It is clear that, where the fastest reaching of the target point is the top issue, every detour (Umweg, Umleitung, detour) is seen as a loss, a stop, and an impediment. It is a loss in the dimension of calculative avarice. However, for those who want to understand, the ‘long way’ is not so much generosity or an intellectual extravagance, but a natural necessity, without which there is no life. It is an antidote to the temptation of oversimplification and an easy understanding in the form of shortcuts. Again, as in Rilke’s poetry: I fear the word so very much I am in great fear of human word. Everything sounds very clear: This is a dog and that is a house, beginnings start here and the end beckons there. I’m troubled by their sense, their playing with laughs, they know everything, what will be and was; no mountain means magic for them any more, while they boast of neighboring God. I will always warn and shout: Beware. I do so love music in things. 54

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At your touch, things fall silent and die. You’re killing the whole of my world. Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort. Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus: Und dieses heißt Hund und jenes heißt Haus, und hier ist der Beginn und das Ende ist dort. Mich bangt auch ihr Sinn, ihr Spiel mit dem Spott, sie wissen alles, was wird und war; kein Berg ist ihnen mehr wunderbar; ihr Garten und Gut grenzt grade an Gott. Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern. Die Dinge singen hör ich so gern. Ihr rührt sie an: sie sind starr und stumm. Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um.40 Uncertainty, ambiguity, perplexity... These are not only the intellectual fascinations of a young Heidegger. It is so easy to succumb to the temptation of a simple understanding and hence reconciliation with the world. Hermeneutics makes us sensitive to the ethical dimension of human existence. Being in the world is a response to the call and the challenge that demands a constant deepening of ethical sensitivity. If to understand means to apply an understanding of that which is to be understood in particular existential circumstances, then understanding is a form of concrete activity directed toward itself in radical openness to ourselves, the world and the Other (Alles rechte Verstehen ist Anwendung des Verstandenen auf uns selbst). As it is so in the case of medicine, and especially in the case of psychiatry, Gadamer places his accent on the patient who heals him/herself. Each one of us is called and challenged to actively take care of ourselves (aktive Selbstsorge). Hermeneutics encourages and motivates us not to surrender to the dominant power of experts. It rather prompts us to a permanent overcoming of passivity toward a courageous being-in-the-world. In this sense, hermeneutics is a practical

40

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort” (21. 11. 1898, BerlinWilmersdorf) from Mir zur Feier (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 188. My own translation. 55

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philosophy with a clear ethical message: Human activity in the world, a prerequisite for our participation in the life of the community (Teilnahme an der Gemeinschaft), is our inalienable right and moral imperative.41

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und Psychiatrie,” in idem, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 201-213. 56 41

2. Hermeneutic Discovery of a Theological Insight: Toward a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Religion I situate the contemporary debate regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology beyond Athens and Jerusalem. The original antinomy of Tertullian collapsed in light of the undeniably theological development of modern Western philosophy. The intellectual legacies of the Middle-Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment demonstrate that philosophy and theology are inseparably entrenched with one another. The representative theologians of the twentieth century were thoroughly philosophically informed. The theological profundity of Bultmann, Barth, Rahner, and von Balthasar, each in his own way, was the profundity of classical German philosophy. On the other hand, philosophy has to thank theology for its unmistakable radiance. Modern philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Schelling are unthinkable without a theological background, not to mention postmoderns like Heidegger or Lévinas. The necessity to pose philosophical questions and contemplate natural theology became a dominating concern not only for Christianity but also for Western philosophy as a whole. Hermeneutics thoughtfully pursues a degree of mediation between the two poles of opposed misunderstandings between religion and the secular world. Hermeneutics comes to the aid of a strained relationship like a middleman and becomes ever more conscious of the finitude and historicity of understanding. The divide between theology and philosophy in the Western tradition is simply not a problem that must be overcome. In fact, this divide gave rise to a fruitful legacy that provoked both philosophy and theology to pose hermeneutic questions. On the basis of hermeneutics, I invite rejection of Heidegger’s call for a radical separation of philosophy from theology. Such a separation is hermeneutically untenable. Independently of how strictly the disciplines attempt to maintain their distance from one another, the opposing influence cannot be avoided. It is already a historical fact. Hermeneutics calls for a new and renewed consideration of the problematic connections between theology and philosophy, and even at different levels. Philosophy and theology are not simply static disciplines that must somehow become methodologically associated, but historical disciplines with their own distinctive intellectual histories. They are fertilized by the very individuals whom they nourish. The hermeneutico-critical apparatus, narrative identity in particular, is necessary in order to reclaim, in a constructive articulation, the tradition of respect and connection between philosophy and theology. The space that is to be established anew between philosophy and theology, thanks to the contemplation of the incommensurable is an invitation to hermeneutics. That which happens in the no57

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man’s land between the two disciplines is hermeneutics and can only be hermeneutics. It is hermeneutics between the courage to inquire and the humility to listen. I claim no final judgment regarding the single proper connection between philosophy and theology but attempt, rather, to show another way, a way that is to negotiate between the two disciplines. The sole possibility of disclosing this way lies in actually practicing hermeneutics. The incommensurability of philosophy and theology yearns for a myriad of interpretations. Philosophy and theology cannot eliminate such an open space for the manifold of interpretations, not even with reference to the distance between the two. Neither can one forbid the other to understand and interpret their connection differently. The belonging-together of philosophy and theology discloses that Western philosophy and the theological tradition have developed, historically, with and alongside one another. Throughout intellectual history, there were movements that would be interpreted as philosophically autonomous but were nonetheless entangled with the theological background. On the other hand, we can also ask the theological side what would have become of Christianity without the encounter with Greek metaphysics. Surely something completely other, perhaps unthinkably other. Luther would not have been able to rediscover original Christianity without metaphysics because, to put it hermeneutically, this would have passed over the historical facticity of the matter. Hermeneutic philosophy must incorporate theology because it can do nothing else. The reverse also applies. The object of hermeneutics, the matter itself, is theological in such a way that it incorporates voices which the tradition that we are generates. Hermeneutics is not theology but must remain open for it. Hermeneutics, which finds itself “between” the divine and the human can reveal a modus existendi for the people of the age of interpretation. This “hermeneutics of between” of philosophy and theology wants to let the plenitude of diverse voices come to speech in order to be able to address the drama of human existence with the acuteness that it deserves. In the hermeneutic age, philosophy has lost its claim to speak from an absolute perspective. Many of the arguments against the integration of theology into philosophy draw the false conclusion that if philosophy as “pure reason” is free from cultural entanglement, then it is also not subject to theology since the latter is always culturally conditioned with respect to its particular and historical belief community. Hermeneutics helps to recognize that Western philosophy is just as much a cultural phenomenon as Western theology. It is a kind of confession of faith in critical thinking, founded by Socrates, refined in the Middle-Ages, and fully developed in the rational triumph of the Enlightenment. That this creed strives toward antinomy does not change the fact that it is anchored in culturally and theologically conditioned situations. Actually, philosophy in the West is just as much a form of life or art of living as theology. This is an idea that existentialism rediscovered from the Greeks. If philosophy and theology are both forms of living (as Wittgenstein opined) neither of the two has any a priori primacy over the other. 58

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Theology thus loses this privilege along with philosophy, and yet one can speak with reference to the relation between them from a philosophical and/or a theological perspective. Two forms of living are speaking with one another. However, theology has something of which no philosophy can assure itself, namely, the authority of God. Philosophy also has something that theology cannot have: A skeptical freedom from authority. In our conversations, we must thus clearly distinguish between the theological and philosophical perspectives and recognize that the other view, theological or philosophical, remains ever possible. Such an understanding gives theology and philosophy the freedom to continue to develop themselves in dialogical independence from one another and to liberate themselves from the idealism of a synthesis of the two disciplines. Only in becoming conscious of their differences can one retain a firm foundation for a conversation between them. Like in every other hermeneutic conversation, it comes to be a recognition of opposing indebtedness to one another that has this desired and transformative character. As the art of understanding, hermeneutics stipulates that an undertaking of this kind should integrate the theoretical dimension of the question with the factical one. Theology is no mere academic discipline. It is a mode of our being-inthe-world. With certain reservations, the same can be said of philosophy. Not only are two disciplines colliding, but two alternative ways of being human are observing each other with a suspicious eye so that the other constitutes a provocation and a threat of its peculiar belief and conception of reality. An important contribution of hermeneutics consists in that it precludes any rash problem-solving, independent of whether it concerns itself with a liberal synthesis of two different discourses or a post-liberal burial of antagonism between them. This perpetual dialogue admits of no ultimate conclusion. Indeed, it would be a bad hermeneutician who would think that he has the last word, must have the last word, or even could have the last word.

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2. 1. The Ambiguities of Proximity: Between Philosophy and Theology 2. 1. 1. The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius

Das Gesagte ist das Dürftige, das Ungesagte erfüllt mit Reichtum.1

Hans-Georg Gadamer summarized the universal aspect of his language-oriented hermeneutics as “the verbum interius;”2 not the word that is the subject of the philosophy of language or linguistics, but the inner word, the core of Augustine’s teaching on the Trinity. This already famous formula, short yet complex, was delivered in a Heidelberg pub, a point which once again proves that a conversation belongs as much to Wirkungsgeschichte as philosophical opera magna. The conversational model of hermeneutic understanding is grounded in the nature of language, which has true being only in conversation.3 Gadamer’s hermeneutic principle opens up the horizon of mediation between the manifestation of Being and human understanding. The crucial development in his hermeneutics—from a logicist’s understanding of language to full integration of the incarnation of meaning—can be understood as the transition from Plato to Augustine, from the concentration on exclusively philosophical sources to the discovery of insights in non-philosophical discourse. The hermeneutic approach is not a mere duplication of the past, not the subjective, fashionable celebration of diversity, but a reliving of the event of the past: a process of an undoubtedly transformative character. Identifying the act of interpretation with the

1

Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter GA), vol. 3, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 249. That which will never be written, which is unsaid and inexpressible, which is detached from any form of representation, encompasses the enormous richness of the thinking of being, and is, along with what is said, the mode of disclosing being. 2 Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), XIV. 3 “Language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding. This is not to be understood as if that were the purpose of language. Coming to an understanding is not a mere action, a purposeful activity, a setting up of signs through which I transmit my will to others… It is a life process in which a community of life is lived out.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 446. 60

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act of transformation, Gadamer emphasizes that what is first and foremost transformed is the interpreter.4 The past is engaged and brought together with the present—opening the way to new questions and traditions, which have been evolving along with the original meaning—thus building its own history. Fusing horizons, we go beyond something that is already familiar to us. In the interplay of that which is understood (das Entborgene) and that which is veiled and in need of being disclosed (das Verborgene) we realize that our access to that which wants to be disclosed is in and through language.5 We discover that language itself lives in the in-between of concealment and unconcealment, im Zueinandergehören von Verbergung und Entbergung. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger accentuates the passivity and receptivity of Dasein in the revelation of Being: “But it is not we who presuppose the unconcealment of beings, rather the unconcealment of beings determines us in such an essential way that we are always placed after unconcealment in our conceptions. Not only that toward which knowledge is directed must already be somehow unconcealed, but also the entire region in which this directedness toward something moves and also that for which an adequation of a sentence to the subject matter is manifested must already take place as a whole within unconcealment.”6 Being has to reveal itself to us to open us toward its selfmanifestation. On our way to Being, language is both bridge and barrier7: It reveals Being, but only as a being. Moreover, the correlation of the manifestation of Being and the understanding of Dasein exposes the fact that they belong together in language.8

Gianni Vattimo, “Gadamer and the Problem of Ontology,” in Gadamer’s Century. Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002), 299-306. 5 For Gadamer the world is lingual in nature. The world is disclosed in and through language: “Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world… is verbal in nature. …Language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it. Thus, that language is originally human means at the same time that man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 443. 6 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in idem, Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); originally published as “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” in Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), 41. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II: Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986), 336. 8 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 477. 4

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The Hermeneutic Primacy of Language and the Universality of Hermeneutics The ontological relationship between Being and a being is hermeneutically expressed as the relationship between the self-manifestation of Being and Dasein’s understanding of Being. Disclosure and understanding constitute the hermeneutic dimension of the ontological difference. In language Being uncovers itself and makes itself understandable. “Being that can be understood is language.”9 The dialectic of understanding, in which the same is always understood differently, originates in the infinite constellations of meaning characterizing human thinking. The language contains the one, which is at the same time, the other. Speaking is dwelling in the totality of meaning. Every lingual expression is grounded in that totality, which encompasses all individual expressions and overcomes them. The statement “Being that can be understood is language” might be interpreted as participation in that totality of meaning, and not as lingual idealism. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Being, thinking, and language constitute the unity of Being and thinking (meaning ‘thinking of Being’) in language. Thinking is not possible outside of language. That which is thought is experienced as lingual being and is expressed in language, thus not only revealing Being (constituted lingually in itself), but also placing Being within a relationship with Dasein. Thinking and language are indivisible. The object of understanding is always determined by its lingual nature since to be means to exist in language.10 Does language have an outside? Is the unexpressed non-lingual, or does it belong to language, like a horizon belonging to the object that makes it possible? According to Heidegger, the meaning of Being in its self-manifestation is not something that lies outside of Dasein, but it constitutes Dasein’s understanding of Being. Dasein has not an outside. Since history and language form Dasein, it never exists without history and language.11 In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein delimits language from within; outside of language, there is nothing. He endeavors to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should, therefore, have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.”12 We could 9

Ibid., 474. See ibid., 468. Hermeneutic experience and the lingual nature of human experience are in contrast to the propositional logic, which subordinates language to statement. 11 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 86-90. 12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden (London: Routledge, 1990). See also 4.116: “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly”; 4.12: “Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common 62 10

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only define the world if we also could get outside it, but then, according to the nature of the world, it would cease to be the world for us. Hermeneutics mediates thinking and speaking; it is fundamentally mediation, like the messenger-god Hermes, a mediator between the human and the divine by transmitting the messages of the gods and making them intelligible to humanity. In itself, the word is mediation; the word mediates itself. The powerlessness of language, the pain of being unable to express everything brings us to hermeneutics. We have to mediate the limitation of experience with all that we have said and all we wish to say and need to say. It is not that we are surrounded by things we cannot name; we are beings held out into the unsaid. When Being comes to be, it appears as a word in us. A new being is always accompanied by a word. The ideality of the meaning lies in the word itself. It is meaningful already. But this does not imply… that the word precedes all experience and simply advenes to an experience in an external way, by subjecting itself to it. Experience is not wordless to begin with, subsequently becoming an object of reflection by being named, by being subsumed under the universality of the word. Rather, experience of itself seeks and finds words that express it. We seek the right word—i.e., the word that really belongs to the thing—so that in it the thing comes to language.13 The hermeneutic task is to find a right, fitting word, which expresses, even if never completely, the thing itself. This never-ending search for language is finite in its nature. The hermeneutic experience mediates infinite and finite being, and as such, is a lingual enactment of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. It is a mediation in which divine and human being meet and unite. In language, God manifests Godself to human thinking, and in language, human thinking finds its way to God. In the chapter entitled “The development of the Concept of Language in the History of Western Thought,”14 Gadamer discusses the forgetfulness of language which began with Greek metaphysics: “Verfallen upon the logoi.”15 Plato’s diatribe against sophism and conventionalism distinguishes truth from language— with reality in order to be able to represent it—logical form. In order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to be able to station ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world”; 4.121: “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it.” 13 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 417. 14 Ibid., 405-438. 15 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, GA19, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 19, 27, 47. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie: Probleme, Gestalten (Tübingen: Mohr, 63

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the locus of truth is vision, not speech—and leaves unthematized language as the house of Being. Forgetfulness of language implies forgetfulness of historicity: Truth becomes independent of lingual contexts.16 That which was disclosed through language was misapprehended as the existing things themselves. In the Cratylus, Gadamer sees the root of the approach to language as the revelation of Being. The relationship between a thing and a name lies in the disclosing character of the word. Although Plato assigns priority to thought over language, language is the medium that enables the manifestation of ideas in words as true copies of the things themselves. Language plays a subservient role to the inner dialogue, which is the essence of thinking. The thought is this inner conversation, a soliloquium, consisting of question and answer. The one who asks and the one who responds are the same. Language finds its expression in the inner dialogue grounded in the dynamic of questioning and answering, rather than in the statement itself. Dasein possesses the faculty of thought and comprehension; it is able to conduct a silent discourse with its own mind. In Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato, the relationship between the human and the divine is situated in the ontology of Dasein.17 Ideas and appearances are separated; Chorismos is the cleft between the two worlds. The appearances participate in the ideas (methexis), striving for an imitation of their archetypes (mimesis). Logoi mediate both ideas and appearances.18 The necessity for ever new attempts at mediation originates in its lingual nature and the powerlessness of language. Gadamer interprets the limits of language positively. As a consciousness of the parameters of historical being in the world, the confines of language bring us to the crucial recognition of the temporality of our being, the difference be-

1999), 200-201. In “Was ist Wahrheit” Gadamer criticizes the propositional language of the natural sciences, which governs contemporary thinking and contributed to the forgetfulness of language. Understanding of the event character of meaning, of the dialogical nature and of ultimate openness of truth encompasses the lingual character of Dasein. Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 44-56. 16 Incarnation contributes to the restoration of the lingual nature of thinking, the central event in the history of mankind. In Jesus Christ the personal, Triune God manifests Himself to humanity as Redeemer. This non-Greek idea results in a revival of theologically oriented speculation on the nature of Verbum and subsequently leads to the overcoming of the forgetfulness of language. 17 The spirit of Heidegger is clearly discernable in Gadamer’s Plato interpretation. See P. Christopher Smith, “Plato as Impulse and Obstacle in Gadamer’s Development of a Hermeneutical Theory,” and Nicholas Davey, “A Response to P. Christopher Smith,” in Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Gadamer and Hermeneutics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 23-41, 42-59. Davey argues that “Plato’s dialogues are of importance for Gadamer not per se but because of what his Heideggerian philosophical inheritance allows him to bring to light within them,” 42. 18 “Logos means originally: gathering… Logos, as the gathering of opposed elements, composes them all into one, yet without suppressing their mutual opposition.” John Sallis, The Gathering of Reason (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980), 12. 64

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tween the human and the divine. Human understanding asymptotically approaches truth.19 Thrown into language, we find our own way through language, yet we realize, at every attempt, that words cannot express the complexity and richness of our experience. The static nature of words is inadequate to temporal experience, which is open-ended and never finished.20 This experience not only points to the powerlessness of language but awakens a particular awareness toward what is unsaid. There is no understanding without taking into account the motivation, intent, addressee, and context of a statement. As participation in shared meaning, lingually mediated understanding depends equally on that which is not and cannot be said. In dialogue, we engage not only that which is said, but also that which is unsaid. The basic and universal problem of the inadequacy of articulation in language allows Gadamer to make his case for the claim of the universality of hermeneutics.21 The universality of language and hence the universality of hermeneutics lies in the dialectic of question and answer. Yet this hermeneutic Ur-phenomenon, as Gadamer calls it, specifies that “no assertion is possible that cannot be understood as an answer to a question, and assertions can only be understood in that way.”22 The words refer to the “dialogue we are,” yet they cannot bring us closer to our experience: “What is stated is not everything. The unsaid is what first makes what is stated into a word that can reach us.”23 Speaking is based on prior meanings which are not named in conversation, not even in the inner conversation with ourselves. It points to possibilities for meaning. The spoken has a life of its own. The Stoics drew an important distinction between the λόγος ενδιάθετος (thought, ideal or unspoken word) and the λόγος προφορικός (expressed thought, a spoken word).24 Hermeneutics, in the Aristotelian perspective, means the expression and

See Gianni Vattimo, “The Truth of Hermeneutics,” in Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 75-96. 20 “The verbal world in which we live is not a barrier that prevents knowledge of being-in-itself but fundamentally embraces everything in which our insight can be enlarged and deepened. It is true that those who are brought up in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition see the world in a different way from those who belong to other traditions. It is true that the historical ’worlds’ that succeed one another in the course of history are different from one another and from the world of today; but in whatever tradition we consider it, it is always a human—i.e., verbally constituted—world that presents itself to us.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 447. 21 See Jürgen Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik: Aufsätze. Hans Georg Gadamer zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Rüdiger Budner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1970), 73-104. 22 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11; also “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” in Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 219-231. 23 Ibid., 504. 24 Gadamer acknowledges Augustine’s influence in “The Development of the Concept of Language in the History of Western Thought,” Truth and Method, 405-438. Grondin calls it crucial, since it was Augustine’s hermeneutics that helped Gadamer “to overcome the for19

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communication (λόγος προφορικός) of the inner thought (λόγος ενδιάθετος). Like Hermes, who was able to understand and interpret the communication of the gods,’ the hermeneutic task embraces both the art of understanding and the theory of interpretation.25 That which is thought resides in the λόγος της ψυχής. Understanding is grounded in the expression of inner thought. The theoretical task of interpretation and the art of understanding texts as the externalization of the inner word describe the very essence of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics does have a universal appeal since language exists in all human modi of communication. As Czesław Miłosz declares, language witnesses to us, the word testifies to what calls to be understood.26 Language acts on us. The poem “bears witness to itself and does not admit anything that might verify it.”27 The word witnesses not only to the inner experience of the individual but to the encompassing constellation of meaning, to ἀλήθεια. The false Cartesian model that language proceeds from within, that we externalize our inner life into words is destroyed by the notion that language itself speaks; it speaks to us, and through us.28 Language contains in itself the richness of human experience in its historical transmission. With Novalis, we can say that language takes care only of itself. getfulness of language typical of Greek ontology, with its nominalistic and technical conception of language.” Grondin, Introduction, 33. Grondin seems to stress that Augustine took over the distinction made by the Stoics between λόγος προφορικός and λόγος ενδιάθετος. Augustine, rather, discovers a third distinction, verbum interius, to complement the verbum prolatum and verbum insitum. See Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), 99-110, particularly 102-103. See also Günter Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 102-125. 25 Hermeneutics is used by Aristotle in the title, Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, where he analyzes the logical structure of language and the nature of things in the world. The discussions between Socrates and Hermogenes about the origin of language are depicted by Plato in Cratylus. Plato credits Hermes with the invention of language to facilitate communication between the gods and the humans. Being a mediator and a contriver, Hermes can explain and deceive. Plato sets up a problem concerning the relationship between interpretation and understanding. He thereby signalizes the necessity of addressing the particular needs of any communication. 26 See Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, On the Contribution of Poetry and the Search for Truth, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 110. 28 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959): “Die Sprache spricht,” 32; “Zum Erscheinen aber kommt durch das Sagen Anwesendes, dass und wie es anwest; zum Erscheinen kommt im Sagen auch das Abwesende als ein solches. Eigentlich sagen, d. h. Erscheinen lassen kann nun aber der Mensch nur solches, was sich selber ihm zeigt, was von sich her erscheint, sich offenbart und sich zuspricht,” 107; “Die Sprache allein ist es, die eigentlich spricht. Und sie spricht einsam… Der Mensch vermag nur zu sprechen, insofern er… auf sie hört. … Das Wort verschafft dem Ding erst das Sein,” 259ff; see also Stephan Grotz, Vom Umgang mit Tautologien: Martin Heidegger und Roman Jakobson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000). 66

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Revealing itself to us, language invites us to share its most profound mystery.29 Insofar as language speaks to us, it is our primordial duty to re-spond, to give an answer to this inner voice that addresses us first. The search for language, for attunement to the ultimately unfathomable mystery of Being, requires from us an undivided devotion to what is to be thought. We can be truthful to our language only if we heed the voice of Being, seeking manifestation within the dialectics of concealment and unconcealment. To facilitate the understanding of Being in language, we must be willing to listen to Being, to hear its revealing voice. We must care for language, allowing it to mirror the beauty and the mystery of Being. Faithful mother tongue, I have been serving you. Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch as preserved in my memory. This lasted many years. You were my native land; I lacked any other. I believed that you would also be a messenger between me and some good people even if they were few, twenty, ten or not born, as yet.30 Listening to Being is not esoteric; it can be as everyday as caring for the language we speak, for the precision and excellence with which we express our intimate relation with language. Being addressed first (Angesprochene), we know that language needs us as hearers, to empower us to entsprechen. Understanding constitutes the fundamental structure of Dasein, an existential way of being, in which the other is always co-given, a cohabitant in the house of language. Understanding as an enactment of life is open to Being, self, and otherness. The third part of Truth and Method can be understood as an ontological

“Gerade das eigentümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich bloß um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner. Darum ist sie ein so wunderbares und fruchtbares Geheimnis, daß wenn einer bloß spricht, um zu sprechen, er gerade die herrlichsten, originellsten Wahrheiten ausspricht. Will er aber von etwas Bestimmtem sprechen, so läßt ihn die launige Sprache das lächerlichste und verkehrteste Zeug sagen.” Novalis, “Monolog,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (München: Hanser, 1978), 672. 30 Czesław Miłosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” from City without a Name, in New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 244-245. 29

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shift in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, from hermeneutics as a methodology of interpretation in the human sciences to a universal philosophical hermeneutics.31 Because understanding is the ontological structure of the human being pervaded by language, hermeneutics is ontology.32 Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as the universal inquiry of philosophy springs from the universality of language, from the fact that “language can keep pace with the boundlessness of reason.”33 Language is a productive dialogue in which substantively different views confront one another and are ultimately fused into new and deeper insight. The Power and Powerlessness of Language The essential incompleteness of the human word is an expression of our finitude. We embrace it as one of the limits of being-in-the-world; it becomes a spirituality of imperfection, an attitude toward Being. The experience of imperfection affects our responsiveness to the disclosure of Being; it inspires an openness toward receptivity of the infinite possibilities with which Being speaks to us. There is always more to be thought, more to be said. The existence of the “always more is the ontological indication, “quantitatively and qualitatively, of the temporal structure of our being. It shows our thoughtful, undivided attention to the dynamics of concealment and unconcealment. Unlike the divine word, the human word is essentially incomplete. No human word can express our mind completely. But as the image of the mirror shows, this does not mean that the word as such is incomplete. The word reflects completely what the mind is thinking. Rather, the imperfection of the human mind consists in its never being completely present to itself but in being dispersed into thinking this or that. From this essential imperfection, it follows that the human word is not one, like the divine word, but must necessarily be many words. Hence the variety of words does not in any way mean that the individual word has some remediable deficiency, in that it did not completely express what the mind is thinking; but because our intellect is imperfect—i.e., is not completely present to itself in what it 31

For Gadamer, ontological, philosophical and universal are synonyms for hermeneutics. Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 504. Madison believes that hermeneutics can bring us beyond modernism and postmodernism to a genuinely postmetaphysical thinking. For the relation of deconstruction to hermeneutics see Gary B. Madison, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics, Contributions to Phenomenology, vol. 42 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001); The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought, ed. Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbarn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1999); “Beyond Seriousness and Frivolity: A Gadamerian Response to Deconstruction,” in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, 119-135. 33 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 401. 68 32

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knows—it needs the multiplicity of words. It does not really know what it knows.34 Being manifests itself in language, yet language is infinitely various. Mirrored in the infinity of language, Being is never exhausted, never manifested as a whole.35 Language, as the final instance in Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, does not reflect the absoluteness of language itself, but the lingual nature of human thinking, the intimate unity of language and thought. The word of human thought is directed toward the thing, but it cannot contain it as a whole within itself. Thus, thought constantly proceeds to new conceptions and is fundamentally incapable of being wholly realized in any. This incapacity for completeness has a positive side: it reveals the true infinity of the mind, which constantly surpasses itself in a new mental process and in doing so finds the freedom for constantly new projects.36 Schleiermacher showed us that human beings are fundamentally lingual creatures, that understanding and interpretation are rooted in their lingual nature.37 Building on Schleiermacher, Dilthey argued that human life consists in understanding and interpreting. The verbal (das Wörtliche) refers to the pre-verbal (das Vorwörtliche). Stressing the importance of re-search into the inner word, into the very relation between the word and that which is expressed through it, his arguments 34

Ibid., 425. Augustine addresses the phenomenon of the inadequacy of the human word in uncovering the truth of Being. The fact that we use words differently in different languages proves the essential inefficiency of language. Only through divine grace, and particularly the Incarnation, is the human natural lingual faculty renewed. Uniting the divine and the human in the Verbum Christ overcame the inadequacy of human language. See Tilman Borsche, “Macht und Ohnmacht der Wörter. Bemerkungen zu Augustins De magistro,” Ars Semeiotica 8 (1985): 231-52. 36 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 425-426. 37 Since Chladenius’s Introduction to the Correct Interpretation of Reasonable Discourses and Books (1742) much attention has been paid to establishing a consistent and specific theory of interpretation. When attributing two components to the spoken or written word, the language common to a culture, and the individual qualities of the particular author, Schleiermacher advanced the praxis of interpretation. The understanding depends upon merging the lingual context of speech or text in which they appear (grammatical or objective interpretation) with the personal context of an author (psychological or subjective interpretation). By transposing the interpreter into the subjectivity of the author, Schleiermacher formulated the impossible goal of hermeneutics, “to understand the author better than the author understands himself,” making hermeneutics into a reconstructive technique for understanding the author’s mind in its specificity. When moving toward understanding as a process of life itself, Dilthey not only corrected Schleiermacher, but made understanding into an existential category, a way of life, interpreting verbal and written expressions as one of the primordial modes of human being. 35

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awaken self-awareness within the human subject to this inner conversation according to the principles of experience (Erlebnis).38 Being tends toward expression. Even if this experience is always accompanied by an ultimate lack of fulfilment, everything can in principle be expressed in language. Paradoxically, the whole is never grasped in words. There is another dialectic of the word, which accords to every word an inner dimension of multiplication: every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone is a world. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus, every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally.39 No particular expression can completely articulate all that could be thought on the subject. The limitedness of language demands from Dasein faithfulness to that which calls to thinking. The externalization of language is the struggle to respond to the call of Being. The externalization of meaning analogically indicates Dasein’s likeness to God, who in the Kenosis of the Incarnation manifests and externalizes Himself. Similarly, the human word externalizes thinking. God’s self-externalization is perfect and complete—“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14: 9)—in a way that human expression never is. The interminable search for speech is a struggle within Being itself, a suffering felt keenly by poets, the guardians of language. In one of his early poems, Czesław Miłosz depicts the incompleteness of the human word concisely and profoundly: “The hermeneutics of our time must determine its relation to the universal epistemological task of demonstrating the possibility of knowledge from the structure of the historical world and finding ways to realize this possibility.” Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Bernhard Groethuysen (Leipzig/Berlin: Tübner, 1927), 217-218. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity originates in his philosophy prior to Being and Time, the thesis which has been only recently fully elaborated, undoubtedly due to the publication of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures (1919-1923). To name but a few studies of early Heidegger in recent English-language literature see Kisiel and van Buren; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994). See also Jean Greisch, L’Arbre de vie et l’Arbre du savoir: Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique Heideggerienne (1919-1923) (Paris: du Cerf, 2000) and Hans-Helmuth Gander, Selbstverständnis und Lebenswelt: Grundzüge einer phänomenologischen Hermeneutik im Ausgang von Husserl und Heidegger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001). 39 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 458. 70 38

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I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn’t notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn’t the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is! She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.40 Names are not things themselves,41 but things can only be understood insofar as they exist in language.42 The poet attempts to fulfill his metaphysical desire to put Czesław Miłosz, “Esse,” from Uncollected Poems (1954-1969), in New and Collected Poems, 249. 41 “But no matter how hard we try for linguistic expression of such a history congealed in things, the words we use will remain concepts. Their precision substitutes for the thing itself, without quite bringing its selfhood to mind; there is a gap between words and the thing they conjure.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seaburg, 1973), 52-53. 42 Language is not Being itself, but it manifests Being. Being can only be understood in language insofar as it is present in language: “The speculative mode of being of language has a universal ontological significance. To be sure, what comes into language is something different from the spoken word itself. But the word is a word only because of what comes into language in it. Its own physical being exists only in order to disappear in what is said. Likewise, that which comes into language is not something that is pregiven before language; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 475. 40

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into words the epiphany of Being experienced in the facticity of human life.43 He searches for a word that will be able to testify to the epiphany of a word free from domination, outside the realm of tyrannical technology.44 In seeking ex-pression, thinking points to that which is thought, not to itself; the word is not the expression of thinking that thinks itself, but the disclosure of the thing. The limitedness of the human word is not so much a question of the inability to express that which is thought, but the primordial limitation of Dasein. It might be the case that language has no limitations, that it is as infinite as Being itself, esse ipsum; however, the human word always reflects the finitude of created being.45 We are left with the powerlessness of language, the powerlessness of our being, but this finitude conveys our openness to the ever-new. Dasein is constantly confronted with the inadequacy of its expression.46 It is not because of the powerlessness of language that Being cannot be expressed, but because Being does not allow itself to be definitively articulated. We are always on the way to Being and, therefore, on the Plato writes in Ion: “Many are the noble words in which poets speak… they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only;… for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us…. For in this way, the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed. Was not this the lesson which the God intended to teach when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs?” Plato, Ion, in Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin E. Jowett (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 534 d-e. Plato testifies to the fact that God discloses himself to humans in their language, because it is his desire to be understood by them. What is mediated in the language is not God himself, but the way he is presented, his re-presentatio. 44 See Andrzej Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein. Versuch einer philosophischtheologischen Deutung des Dichterseins am Beispiel von Czesław Miłosz (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1997), particularly 146-150. 45 Heidegger’s notion of finitude points to the radical contingency of existence, ontologically revealed through “nothingness,” as experienced in Dasein’s Being-toward-death. An authentic existence is an ontological-temporal disclosure of Dasein’s finitude. Heidegger’s ursprügliche Zeit indicates its inseparable relation to existence. Being in its primordial sense is presencing (Anwesenheit). “What determines both, time and Being, on their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation.” Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 19. 46 “The most commonplace observation and the profoundest thought, both lament the inadequacy of language.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, trans. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 298. See Tilman Borsche, Sprachansichten. Der Begriff der menschlichen Rede in der Sprachphilosophie Wilhelm von Humboldts (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). 72 43

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way to language.47 According to Gadamer, “the fact that words fail demonstrates their capacity to seek expression for everything.”48 The powerlessness of language calls us to think of the phenomena of limitation. It is no more to be overcome than our finitude.49 The Hermeneutic Word: Verbum Interius Gadamer traces the hermeneutic priority of language to medieval Trinitarian theology. “The inner mental word is just as consubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father.”50 Λόγος is not an a-temporal spirit, but an event: The emergence of the word from the act of understanding. In developing his view of language, Gadamer moves beyond the concept of Greek λόγος to the Christian Verbum.51 Even more surprisingly, Gadamer traces the inner dynamic of language to the development of Trinitarian dogma, with decisive implications for his philosophical hermeneutics. Trinitarian theology figures the relation between speech and thought. God is always manifest in and through the Word. Similarly, thought is externalized in and through language. The unity of thought and verbum interius mirrors the unity of God the Father and Verbum Dei. The analogy between Verbum Dei and verbum interius is for Gadamer the key to hermeneutics’ claim to universality, for it stresses the ubiquity of language.52 The identity of Father and Son figures the identity of expressing and expression. As the Verbum Dei shares the same essence with God, so the inner word is one with thinking. The Word that is with God in the beginning and is identical to God (Jn 1: 14) also proceeds from God into history,53 a model for the processual character of language: “The unity Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache: “Die Bewegung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen) als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden Wort),” 262; “Die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen,” 242. See also Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements. Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 48 Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 185. 49 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Grenzen der Sprache,” in idem, Evolution und Sprache. Über Entstehung und Wesen der Sprache, Herrenalber Texte 66 (Karlsruhe: Evangelische Akademie Baden, 1985), 97-98. 50 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 421. 51 Ibid., 418. See also Petra Plieger, Sprache im Gespräch. Studien zum hermeneutischen Sprachverständnis bei Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wien: WUV, 2000), 187-192. 52 Bernd Springer, “Die Bedeutung von Augustinus’s verbum interius für die Hermeneutik Gadamers,” in Die antiken Grundlagen der neuzeitlichen Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2000), 338-343. 53 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God: everything was made through him, and without him nothing was made of all that exists.” (Jn 1: 1-3) “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us; 47

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of the word that explicates itself within the multiplicity of words manifests something that is not covered in the structure of logic, something that brings out the character of language as event: the process of concept formation.”54 The processual character of language does not only break with the forgetfulness of language, but it also shows language to be fundamentally an event. For Gadamer, the universality of hermeneutics is grounded in historical consciousness, in language, historicity, and the understanding of philosophy as hermeneutics. The universality of hermeneutics is the universality of a lingually mediated experience, the ontological disclosure of Being. Commenting on Gadamer, Jean Grondin states: “The universal claim of hermeneutics could indeed be derived only from the doctrine of the verbum interius, that is, from the insight (stemming from Augustine read through Heidegger) that spoken discourse always lags behind what one wants or has to say, the inner word, and that one can understand what is said only when one derives it from the inner speech lurking behind it.”55 Since the theological horizon of the debate on the universality of hermeneutics has not yet been thoroughly discussed, Gadamer’s contribution and the general awakening of interest in Verbum that he initiated is even more important. The Christian teaching on Verbum refers to the theology of the Gospel of John. In the Prologue, John calls the second person of the Trinity the Λόγος: In His relation to God, λόγος ενδιάθετος, and His relation to creation, λόγος προφορικός. The primordial speaking (Ur-sprechen) of God finds its expression in Verbum, Filium Dei Unigenitum. According to the analogy of Verbum Dei, the inner word that originates in Dasein, created in the process of human cognition, both leaves yet remains within the understanding. The verbum interius is the primordial horizon of understanding within which meaning occurs. The lingual structure of Dasein elevates language to ontology, and hermeneutics to a universal theory of understanding.56 Unlike the supra-temporal universality of metaphysics, philosophical

and we saw his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (Jn 1: 14) “He was in the world and the world was made through him, yet the world did not recognize him. He came among his own people, but his own did not receive him.” (Jn 1: 1011) “But to all who received him, he gave the power to become sons of God: to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Jn 1: 12-13) “No one has ever seen God: it is the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known.” (Jn 1: 18) 54 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 427-8. 55 Grondin, Introduction, xiv. Jean Greisch in his Hermeneutik und Metaphysik applauds Jean Grondin’s understanding of the verbum mentis as the pivotal point of his systematic presentation of the history of hermeneutics. Jean Greisch, Hermeneutik und Metaphysik (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 85. Greisch acknowledges the importance of the inner word for the attempt to objectively situate hermeneutics in language, nevertheless without attributing to this notion a central relevance in the grounding of hermeneutics. 56 Grondin, Introduction, 15. 74

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hermeneutics is grounded in the historicity of language, retrieving temporality as the forgotten horizon of the being that we are. Just as the incarnated Verbum Dei remains identical with, yet different from, the second person of the Trinity, so the outer word is identical with, yet different from, the inner word. Verbum Dei is an event, an Ereignis, a word that not only describes reality but also creates it.57 Gadamer emphasizes the processual character of the Verbum as an advancement of Christian over Greek thinking.58 Greek λόγος is a static and eternal form. “When the Greek idea of logic is penetrated by Christian theology, something new is born: the medium of language, in which the mediation of the Incarnation event achieves its full truth.”59 The emergence of the inner word reflects the primal unity of thought and speech. “The inner unity of thinking and speaking to oneself, which corresponds to the Trinitarian mystery of the Incarnation, implies that the inner mental word is not formed by a reflective act. A person who thinks something—i.e., says it to himself—means by it the thing that he thinks.”60 When we think the word, our mind is not directed back to its own thinking but to die Sache, the matter being thought. Verbum interius is der Sachverhalt thought through: The inner word is certainly not related to a particular language, nor does it have the character of vaguely imagined words that proceed from the memory; rather it is the subject matter thought through to the end (forma excogitata). Since a process of thinking through to the end is involved, we have to acknowledge a processual element in it.61

Dabar Jahve is (and not only has) a power of realization, a true dynamis, energeia, as “ins Werk setzen,” putting into work. The word dabar appears a number of times in the Bible. It is translated differently in various texts, appearing as: speak 840 times; say 118 times; talk 46 times; promise 31 times; tell 25 times; commune 20 times; pronounce 14 times; utter 7 times; command 4 times; misc. 38 times; a total of 1143 appearances. George G. Wigram, The Englishman’s Hebrew Concordance of the Old Testament (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1984). 58 “That the word is a process in which the unity of what it means is fully expressed—as in speculation on the verbum—is something new that goes beyond the Platonic dialectic of the one and many.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 434. 59 Ibid., 428. In this same section Gadamer credits Nicholas of Cusa with overcoming in De docta ignorantia the neo-Platonic emanation concept of words that sees them as manifestations of the mind: “Nicholas of Cusa has decisively overcome the emanistic schema of the Neoplatonic doctrine of explication. He opposes to it the Christian doctrine of the verbum. The word is for him no less than the mind itself, not a diminished or weakened manifestation of it. Knowing this constitutes the superiority of the Christian philosopher over the Platonist.” Ibid., 435. 60 Ibid., 426. 61 Ibid., 422. 57

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Actus signatus, what a statement says, and actus exercitus, the enactment (Vollzug) of what has been understood, constitute the dynamics of understanding. In actus exercitus, the expression of the inner meaning is fully realized; it goes beyond what is expressed in words, and also embraces the application of what has been said and understood. Meaning is not only communicated in what is said but also how it is expressed, what Heidegger calls formal indication.62 The inner word calls for a multiplicity of external words: The production of word is a remaining with self, not a change, a move from potency to act, but a procession of act from act. In forming a word, the mind is not directed toward its own reflection: There is no reflection when the word is formed, for the word is not expressing the mind but the thing intended. The starting point for the formation of the word is the substantive content (the species) that fills the mind.63 As the inner unity of thinking and speaking, the inner word indicates the direct and spontaneous character of thinking.64 The word is not an articulation of the human mind reflecting upon itself, but a similitudo rei. That which is externalized in the language is already word before it is uttered. The inner word is pre-reflective; it expresses the thing that has been thought. Heidegger hit upon the phenomenon of verbum interius early on in his career, although he did not name it as such. In 1925 he argued that our comportments are in actual fact pervaded through and through by assertions… they are always performed in some form of expressedness. It is also a matter of fact that our simplest perceptions in constitutive states are already expressed, even more, are interpreted in a certain way. What is primary and original here? It is not so much that we see the objects and think but rather that we first talk about them. To put is more precisely: we do not

62

See Grondin, Sources, 148-149. Martin Heidegger, GA21, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 410: “Sie indizieren nur Dasein, während sie als ausgesprochene Sätze doch zunächst Vorhandenes meinen.… Sie indizieren das mögliche Verstehen und die in solchem Verstehen zugängliche mögliche Begreifbarkeit der Daseinsstrukturen. (Als diese ein hermeneuein indizierende Sätze haben sie den Charakter der hermeneutischen Indikation).” The propositions about Dasein only indicate Dasein. The young Heidegger, concerned with facticity, turned his phenomenological interest toward pre-theoretical experience, which he calls “faktische Lebenserfahrung.” Formal indication was Heidegger’s answer to Husserl’s theoreticization of factical life. See John van Buren, “The Ethics of Formal Indication,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXIX (1995): 157-70. 63 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 426. 64 Ibid., 426. 76

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say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.65 Our understanding of Being comes from the revealing character of the word. Language empowers us to see, to think, and to express what has been disclosed to us. Seeing, thinking, and speaking belong together. It is not a question of a temporal primacy of one over the other. The application of understanding is the Vollzug of the event of understanding. For Gadamer, language itself… has something speculative about it… as the realization of meaning, as the event of speech, of mediation, of coming to understanding. Such a realization is speculative in that the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite.66 The word is not exhausted in its lingual expression; the unsaid belongs to what is said. Gadamer’s understanding of word goes beyond significative function to the word as an enactment of thinking. As such, it is never a final word, for thinking is always thinking further; there is always more to be said. The processual character of language makes it possible for Gadamer to think Dasein’s finitude in relation to divine infinity. “Christology prepares the way for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity.”67Verbum mediates the human and the divine.

65

Martin Heidegger, GA20, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), 75; English: History of the Concept of Time, Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985), 56. Grondin writes: “The meaning of language cannot be reduced to the realm of the utterances and words that circumstances have brought to the fore. Behind or, rather ‘in’ language lies a meaning which surpasses the limited scope of the perceptible sounds or the visible signs…. The interiority of the word is rather an invitation to venture into what is said, what is uttered, but at the same time in what is silenced, if one hopes to get at the truth of what is always only babbled. Behind every manifestation that calls for understanding, something else is going on which can only be alluded to by the words or traces it leaves behind. This interiority is not that of the soul, but that of meaning itself. It is the interiority of what is signified, but also hidden, by the words that present themselves to us more than we come to them. There is no method to get at this unsaid, only understanding. Indeed, the fact that this unsaid always exceeds what can ever be said is what ultimately constitutes our finitude.” Grondin, Sources, x. 66 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 469. 67 Ibid., 428. 77

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Augustine’s Hermeneutic Turn to Language Augustine’s notion of Verbum, related to his teaching on Incarnation, emphasizes God’s self-manifestation in language, the activity of the divine intellect.68 As God reveals Godself only in a Word, so Being reveals itself only in language. To thematize the Trinity, Augustine articulates the nature of verbum interius as mirror and image of Verbum Dei. While remaining distinct from God the Father, God the Son is one with Him. The incarnated Verbum Dei reveals God; it is the historically situated divine-human word that opens up the Godhead. The immanence of the unconditioned in the conditioned is the essence of Augustine’s teaching on Verbum.69 The Verbum Dei becomes human, the historical manifestation of God (Jn 1: 1, 9, 14), the Mediator who empties Himself into human nature without ceasing to be God. God the Father is identical to God the Son in terms of the nature of Godhead, yet at the same time, non-identical in terms of the humanity of Christ. God the Son manifests the ideality of the eternal Λόγος; the Incarnation manifests its historicity. In this respect Gustav Siewerth speaks of the identity of identity and non-identity.70 Carrying the analogy into language, the identity and non-identity of the inner and outer word disjoins meaning and verbalization, thus calling for hermeneutics. Interpretation is needed where meaning is not transparent and expressions are open to different understandings. The person of Christ, the only Teacher of true knowledge, the mediator who dwells in humanity, bridges Augustine’s neo-Platonic approach to the language of his early De magistro with the more hermeneutic view of De trinitate.71 De See Jean Grondin “Gadamer on Augustine: On the Origins of the Hermeneutical Claim to Universality,” in Sources of Hermeneutics, 99-110. 69 See Emerich Coreth, Grundfragen der Hermeneutik. Ein philosophischer Beitrag (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1969), 9. 70 Gustav Siewerth, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes,” in Gustav Siewerth. Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wolfgang Behler and Alma von Stockhausen, vol. 1, Sein und Wahrheit, rev. with an introduction by Franz-Anton Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1975), 651-85; vol. 2, Der Thomismus als Identitätssystem, rev. with an introduction by Franz-Anton Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1979); vol. 4, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger, ed. Alma von Stockhausen (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1987). See also Andrzej Wierciński, Über die Differenz im Sein. Metaphysische Überlegungen zu Gustav Siewerths Werk (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1989), and Die scholastischen Vorbedingungen der Metaphysik Gustav Siewerths (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1991); Manuel Cabada Castro, Sein und Gott bei Gustav Siewerth (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1971). 71 Chang Rae Kim shows that Gadamer’s philosophy of language can refer to Augustine’s De magistro and De trinitate without falling respectively into linguistic skepticism or purely theological speculation. See Chang Rae Kim. Sprache als Vermittlerin von Sein und Seiendem: Die Logik des Darstellens bei Hans-Georg Gadamer (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 1999), 197-201. Augustine says: “Ille autem qui consulitur, docet, qui in interiore homine habitare dictus est Christus (Eph 3: 16-17), id est incommutabilis Dei Virtus atque sempiterna Sapientia: quam quidem omnis rationalis anima consulit; sed tantum cuique panditur, quantum capere propter propriam, sive malam sive bonam voluntatem potest.” De magistro 11, 38 78 68

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magistro follows Plato and disjoins thing and word. Augustine still has not made the breakthrough to the hermeneutic priority of language. He emphasizes the powerlessness of the word with the neo-Platonic ocular model of knowing: We say only what we have first seen. The finitude of the human word is confronted by the infinity of the Verbum Dei. Between these two is the inner word, the mediator between the Verbum Dei and the outer word, and the focal point of lingually oriented hermeneutics.72 Written for his son, Adeodatus, De magistro is a dialogue on learning the language. Asserting that we gain knowledge about things, not from words alone, Augustine stresses the limitation of language: And if I can, I shall try to prove to you above all that we learn nothing through those signs which are termed words. For it is more correct, as I have said, that we learn the meaning of the word, that is, the signification which is hidden in the sound when the thing itself which it signifies has been cognized, than that we perceive the thing through such signification.73 At the end of the dialogue, Adeodatus reaffirms Augustine’s conception of language: “But I have learned through being reminded by your words that man is only prompted by words in order that he may learn, and it is apparent that only a very small measure of what a speaker thinks is expressed in his words.”74 More interesting than the Platonic point, words have an untameable life of their own: (PL 32: 1216); PL = Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844-1865). 72 See Johann Kreuzer, “Et ecce est ante nos. Zur Kritik der Sprache bei Augustinus,” in Zeit und Zeichen, ed. Tilman Borsche, Johann Kreuzer, Helmut Pape, and Günter Wohlfart (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 31-46. 73 Augustine, De magistro 1, 34 (PL 32: 1214-1215): “Quod ut apertius intelligas, finge nos primum nunc audire quod dicitur, caput; et nescientes utrum vox ista sit tantummodo sonans, an aliquid etiam significans, quaerere quid sit caput (memento nos non rei quae significatur, sed ipsius signi velle habere notitiam, qua caremus profecto, quamdiu cujus signum est ignoramus): si ergo ita quaerentibus res ipsa digito demonstretur, hac conspecta discimus signum quod audieramus tantum, nondum noveramus. In quo tamen signo cum duo sint, sonus et significatio, sonum certe non per signum percipimus, sed eo ipso aure pulsata; significationem autem re, quae significatur, aspecta. Nam illa intentio digiti significare nihil aliud potest, quam illud in quod intenditur digitus: intentus est autem non in signum, sed in membrum quod caput vocatur. Itaque per illam neque rem possum nosse quam noveram, neque signum in quod intentus digitus non est. Sed de intentione digiti non nimis curo; quia ipsius demonstrationis signum mihi videtur potius, quam rerum aliquarum quae demonstrantur, sicut adverbium quod, Ecce, dicimus; nam et cum hoc adverbio digitum solemus intendere, ne unum demonstrandi signum non sit satis. Et id maxime tibi nitor persuadere, si potero, per ea signa quae verba appellantur, nos nihil discere; potius enim, ut dixi, vim verbi, id est significationem quae latet in sono, re ipsa quae significatur cognita, discimus, quam illam tali significatione percipimus.” 74 Augustine, De magistro 1, 46 (PL 32: 1220): “Ego vero didici admonitione verborum tuorum, nihil aliud verbis quam admoneri hominem ut discat, et perparum esse quod per locutionem 79

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Now, therefore, not even this is left to words, namely that at any rate they express the mind of the speaker, since a speaker may indeed not know the things about which he speaks… words not only do not disclose the true intention of the mind, but they may serve to conceal it.75 The need for mediation connects this early dialogue with Augustine’s later hermeneutic view of language. The inadequacy of ordinary learning and communicating via signs and the natural limitations of our ability to know call for a mediator; mediation is the condition of the possibility of knowledge. Augustine says: But, referring now to all things which we understand, we consult, not the speaker who utters words, but the guardian truth within the mind itself because we have perhaps been reminded by words to do so. The need for divine assistance or rather, and stronger, faith, is necessary in order to avoid a skepticism or a solipsism of the deepest and most frightening sort.76 The mediator saves us from radical skepticism and allows us to turn to God.

aliquanta cogitatio loquentis apparet: utrum autem vera dicantur, eum docere solum, qui se intus habitare, cum foris loqueretur, admonuit; quem jam, favente ipso, tanto ardentius diligam, quanto ero in discendo provectior.” 75 Augustine, De magistro 13, 42 (PL 32: 1218): “Quare jam ne hoc quidem relinquitur verbis, ut his saltem loquentis animus indicetur; si quidem incertum est utrum ea quae loquitur, sciat. Adde mentientes atque fallentes, per quos facile intelligas non modo non aperiri, verum etiam occultari animum verbis. Nam nullo modo ambigo id conari verba veracium, et quodammodo profiteri, ut animus loquentis appareat; quod obtinerent omnibus concedentibus, si loqui mentientibus non liceret. Quanquam saepe experti fuerimus, et in nobis et in aliis, non earum rerum quae cogitantur, verba proferri: quod duobus modis posse accidere video, cum aut sermo memoriae mandatus et saepe decursus, alia cogitandis ore funditur; quod nobis cum hymnum canimus saepe contingit: aut cum alia pro aliis verba praeter voluntatem nostram linguae ipsius errore prosiliunt; nam hic quoque non earum rerum signa quas in animo habemus, audiuntur. Nam mentientes quidem cogitant etiam de iis rebus quas loquuntur, ut tametsi nesciamus an verum dicant, sciamus tamen eos in animo habere quod dicunt, si non eis aliquid duorum quae dixi accidat: quae si quis et interdum accidere contendit, et cum accidit apparere, quanquam saepe occultum est, et saepe me fefellit audientem, non resisto.” 76 Augustine, De magistro 12, 38 (PL 32: 1216): “De universis autem quae intelligimus non loquentem qui personat foris, sed intus ipsi menti praesidentem consulimus veritatem, verbis fortasse ut consulamus admoniti. Ille autem qui consulitur, docet, qui in interiore homine habitare dictus est Christus, id est incommutabilis Dei Virtus atque sempiterna Sapientia: quam quidem omnis rationalis anima consulit; sed tantum cuique panditur, quantum capere propter propriam, sive malam sive bonam voluntatem potest. Et si quando fallitur, non fit vitio consultae veritatis, ut neque hujus, quae foris est, lucis vitium est, quod corporei oculi saepe falluntur: quam lucem de rebus visibilibus consuli fatemur, ut eas nobis quantum cernere valemus, ostendat.” 80

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In De doctrina christiana, an explication of the interaction between classical learning and Christianity and a foundational text for hermeneutics, Augustine develops the notion of verbum interius, which leads him to break with the neoPlatonic model of language.77 Language limits our knowledge of God, and yet it is our only means to it. Given the powerlessness of language, and our human condition as natura lapsa, we cannot arrive at the full understanding of the Verbum Dei. With knowledge of things (rerum notitia) and knowledge of languages (linguarum notitia) we can better interpret scriptural signs, both literal (signa propria) and figurative (signa translata). The interpretation of Scripture is made possible by the divine charity. Augustine’s hermeneutics is the hermeneutics of love. The gap between the human and the divine, the eternal and the temporal, the word and the thing is bridged by the charity. Conceptualizing the relation between the sign (signum) and word (verbum), Augustine refers to the Stoic distinction of inner (λόγος ενδιάθετος) and outer word (λόγος προφορικός).78 Appropriating this distinction to his teaching on the divine and human λόγος, Augustine interprets it in a new Trinitarian context. Λόγος ενδιάθετος describes the hidden God; λόγος προφορικός signifies the manifest God. Augustine compares the divine Λόγος to the interior speech of the soul, not to the articulated word.79 The verbum intimum that is embodied in a particular language precedes its expression in any human word.80 Augustine fully grasps the gap between λόγος ενδιάθετος and λόγος προφορικός, between the internal word of the soul and the external word. The whole intended meaning, and not merely the uttered word, is what is to be understood. Thinking proceeds via an inner word, a spontaneously generated act of understanding. When we speak, we give voice to the word of the heart: So the inner word, by expressing thought, images the finiteness of our discursive understanding. Because our understanding does not comprehend what it knows in one single inclusive glance, it must always draw what it Ebeling calls De doctrina christiana “historically the most influential work of hermeneutics.” Gerhard Ebeling, “Art: Hermeneutik,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), 249. In 1, 13 (PL 34: 24) Augustine writes: “Sicuti cum loquimur, ut id quod animo gerimus, in audientis animum per aures carneas illabatur, fit sonus verbum quod corde gestamus, et locutio vocatur; nec tamen in eumdem sonum cogitatio nostra convertitur, sed apud se manens integra, formam vocis qua se insinuet auribus, sine aliqua labe suae mutationis assumit: ita Verbum Dei non commutatum, caro tamen factum est, ut habitaret in nobis.” 78 Max Müll, “Der logos endiathetos und prophorikos von der älteren Stoa bis zur Synode von Sirmium 351,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 7 (1962): 7-56. 79 For Augustine’s analogy between the Divine Word and human speech see De trinitate 9, 7, 12 (PL 42: 967); 15, 10, 17 (PL 42: 1069). 80 Ibid., 15, 11, 20 (PL 42: 1072): “Nam quando per sonum dicitur, vel per aliquod corporale signum, non dicitur sicuti est, sed sicut potest videri audirive per corpus.” 77

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thinks out of itself and present it to itself as if in an inner dialogue with itself. In this sense, all thought is speaking to oneself.81 This word of the heart is neither Greek nor Latin; it does not belong to any particular language.82 Like the Son who proceeds from the Father and points back to Him, the word does not possess itself and points to that from which it proceeds.83 Augustine’s hermeneutic view of language is perfected in De trinitate.84 Addressing the possibility of our knowledge of God, Augustine examines the nature of language as the medium through which we access theological mysteries. The powerlessness of the human word is confronted with the power of the Verbum Dei.85 Human knowledge is distinguished from divine knowledge by temporality and is characterized by distentio, extendedness in time. The processual character of human knowledge is the ontological foundation of Augustine’s notion of verbum interius. The word that proceeds from our understanding is in one respect unlike the Word of God born of the Father, for it is temporal and capable of being false: “sicut nostra scientia illi scientiae Dei, sic et nostrum verbum quod nascitur de nostra scientia, dissimile est illi Verbo Dei quod natum est de Patris essentia. 81

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 422. Augustine, De trinitate 15, 10, 19 (PL 42: 1071): “Necesse est enim cum verum loquimur, id est, quod scimus loquimur, ex ipsa scientia quam memoria tenemus, nascatur verbum quod ejusmodi sit omnino, cujusmodi est illa scientia de qua nascitur. Formata quippe cogitatio ab ea re quam scimus, verbum est quod in corde dicimus: quod nec graecum est, nec latinum, nec linguae alicujus alterius; sed cum id opus est in eorum quibus loquimur perferre notitiam, aliquod signum quo significetur assumitur.” Gadamer says: “Thus the inner word is certainly not related to a particular language, nor does it have the character of vaguely imagined words that proceed from the memory; rather it is the subject matter thought through to the end (forma excogitata).” Truth and Method, 422. 83 Augustine, De trinitate 15, 12, 22 (PL 42: 1075): “Tunc enim est verbum simillimum rei notae, de qua gignitur et imago ejus, quoniam de visione scientiae visio cogitationis exoritur, quod est verbum linguae nullius; verbum verum de re vera, nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur”; Ibid., 15, 15, 25, (PL 42: 1078-1079): “Et tunc fit verum verbum, quando illud quod nos dixi volubili motione jactare, ad id quod scimus pervenit, atque inde formatur, ejus omnimodam similitudinem capiens; ut quomodo res quaeque scitur, sic etiam cogitetur, id est, sine voce, sine vocis cogitatione, quae profecto alicujus linguae est, sic in corde dicatur.” 84 See Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1996). Stock shows how Augustine interprets in De trinitate the transition from the outer words (in scripture) to the inner words that are the imperfect images of the Verbum Dei in homine. 85 Heidegger in his lectures at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1923 critically appropriated the hermeneutic tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, calling it “hermeneutics in the great style.” See Martin Heidegger, GA63, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 12; John van Buren, “The Hermeneutics of Facticity,” in The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics, ed. Roy Martinez (New York: Humanities Press, 1997), 166-84. 82 82

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Tale est autem ac si dicerem, de Patris scientia, de Patris sapientia; vel, quod est expressius, de Patre scientia, de Patre sapientia.”86 In chapter 15 Augustine asks: “Quanta sit dissimilitudo verbi nostri et Verbi divini. Verbum nostrum sempiternum esse aut dici non potest.”87 Verbum Dei is truly truth (vere veritas) and is unchangeable: “Et falsum habere aliquid hoc Verbum nunquam potest: quia immutabiliter sic se habet, ut se habet de quo est.”88 In another respect the human verbum interius images Verbum Dei (aliquam Verbi illius similitudinem).89 Like Verbum Dei, which preexists in God prior to its externalization in the Incarnation, the inner word precedes human speech. However, Verbum Dei is unchangeable (immutabiliter); the human word is intrinsically temporal. This inner word is never true from itself but only by the power of the Holy Spirit.90 The crucial hermeneutic text is the end of chapter 15: Sed quid est quod potest esse verbum, et ideo jam dignum est verbi nomine? Quid est, inquam, hoc formabile nondumque formatum, nisi quiddam mentis nostrae, quod hac atque hac volubili quadam motione jactamus, cum a nobis nunc hoc, nunc illud, sicut inventum fuerit vel occurrerit, cogitatur? Et tunc fit verum verbum, quando illud quod nos dixi volubili motione jactare, ad id quod scimus pervenit, atque inde formatur, ejus omnimodam similitudinem capiens; ut quomodo res quaeque scitur, sic etiam cogitetur, id est, sine voce, sine vocis cogitatione, quae profecto alicujus linguae est, sic in corde dicatur. Ac per hoc etiam si concedamus, ne de controversia vocabuli laborare videamur, jam vocandum esse verbum quiddam illud mentis nostrae quod de nostra scientia formari potest, etiam priusquam formatum sit, quia jam, ut ita dicam, formabile est; quis non videat, quanta hic sit dissimilitudo ab illo Dei Verbo, quod in forma Dei sic est, ut non antea fuerit formabile priusquam formatum, nec aliquando esse possit informe, sed sit forma simplex et simpliciter aequalis ei de quo est, et cui mirabiliter coaeterna est.91 Augustine speaks of a thing that is formable but not yet formed while we think. The human word comes into being. As a thing is known, so also is it thought, i.e., said in the heart, prior to external articulation. The inner word can be called a word before it is spoken aloud because it is formable. The Verbum Dei, by contrast, exists co-eternally in God: it is never in potency to form. In its perfect simplicity, Verbum Dei is identical to Him from whom it proceeds. The inner word 86

Augustine, De trinitate 15, 13, 22 (PL 42: 1076). Ibid., 15, 15, 24 (PL 42: 1077). 88 Ibid., 15, 14, 23 (PL 42: 1077). 89 Ibid., 15, 10, 19 (PL 42: 1071). 90 Ibid., 15, 17, 27 (PL 42: 1080). 91 Ibid., 15, 15, 25 (PL 42: 1078-79). 87

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is inner speech; in a revolving motion (volubili motione), human thinking becomes a word. Our thinking, in which seeing, speaking, and listening belong together,92 is this verbum intimum, the speech of the human heart (verbum cordis): “Cogitatio quippe nostra perveniens ad id quod scimus, atque inde formata, verbum nostrum verum est.”93 Augustine’s psychological or modal analogy of the Trinity explicates the relationship between the divine Persons by reference to the procession of understanding, knowledge, and love in the human intellect. God as Father begets God the Son (ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula; genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri), and God the Holy Spirit proceeds from both (qui ex Patre Filioque procedit). The mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Spirit, the internal relationality of God, signifies a trinity of persons but a unity of essence. The three Persons are modi existentiae of the divine Being: In the Godhead, there is one being, but three modi of existence. The unity in God originates in the non-contingent divine Life, the difference expressing the relationality between three divine persons. Distinctiveness and inseparability constitute personality. Since God has made human being “in His image and likeness” (Gn 1: 26), Augustine sees an image of the divine Trinity in human cognition, the triad of memory (understanding), intellect (knowledge), and will (love); lover, beloved, and love; object, vision, and attention, etc.94 Augustine favored triads involving mental faculties and activities because, for him, the most divine dimension of the human being is the intellect. Aquinas’s Contribution Drawing upon Augustine’s psychological analogy of the Trinity, Aquinas developed a processual theory of knowledge: on the basis of sensation, we first understand and express the inner word, and on the basis of understanding, we first know and express the outer word.95 As the Verbum Dei proceeds from the Father, so does the inner word proceed from the act of understanding. Analogous to the procession of the Spirit, the act of the will proceeds from understanding, the inner word.96 The processual character of the verbum interius reflects the finitude of the 92

Ibid., 15, 10 (PL 42: 1069-1071). Ibid., 15, 16, 25 (PL 42: 1079). 94 Ibid., 9, 3, 3 (PL 42: 962): “Trinitatis imago in mente hominis noscentis se et amantis. Mens se ipsam per se ipsam novit. Mens enim amare se ipsam non potest, nisi etiam se noverit: nam quomodo amat quod nescit?” 95 Neil Ormerod, “The Psychological Analogy for the Trinity: At Odds with Modernity, “Pacifica 14, no. 3 (October 2001): 281-294. 96 See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 2 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 152: “The analogy to the procession of the Holy Spirit lies in the act of love, 84 93

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human mind.97 The word is formed in thinking, which must proceed discursively, i.e., thinking has no access to intellectual intuition. It is in and through verbum interius that thinking enacts itself. The word is the mirror in which the thing is seen, and human understanding occurs. In Aquinas, Verbum is the mediating element that makes possible the exposition of the difference between ipsum esse and actus essendi, and actus essendi and actus essentiae. This is the heart of the analogia entis.98 Aquinas distinguishes three semantic areas of meaning in Verbum (triplex Verbum):99 the word of the heart, id quod per intellectum concipitur, verbum cordis sine voce prolatum; the interior word, exemplar exterioris verbi, et hoc dicitur verbum interius quod habet imaginem vocis; and the external word, verbum exterius expressum, quod dicitur verbum vocis. In the process of cognition, the departure point is the experience of what has been said. The object of understanding is verbum mentis.100 Both verbum interius and exterius are signs, the former a natural sign that refers to a thing, the latter a human creation that refers to an act of understanding. The verbum exterius is only valid for the verbum interius insofar as it preserves verbum cordis, the preconceptual ground of thinking. The spoken verbum exterius is replaced by the written verbum exterius and becomes a text. Just as the intentions of an artist are directed toward the work, the artistic intention finding expression first in the image and second in the actual work, so does the word of the heart precede the inner

not as within the will for that is processio operationis, but as grounded in a perfect inner word, a judgment of value.” 97 The doctrine of the verbum interius was developed by Aquinas particularly in Contra Gentiles 4, 14-15; De natura verbi intellectus; Quaestiones disputatae de veritate 4; De potentia 2-8, 1; STh I-I, 27; 34; 37; De differentia verbi divini et humani. Thomas rediscovers the identity of meaning, as elaborated by Augustine (De trinitate 7, 2, 3), between the terms Son and Word: eo Filius quo Verbum, et eo Verbum quo Filius. Cf. STh I-I, 27, 2; Contra Gentiles 4, 11. 98 Cf. STh I, 93, 1,2; STh I, 35, 2, 3. 99 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate 4, 1: “Finalis quidem, quia verbum vocale ad hoc a nobis exprimitur, ut interius verbum manifestetur: unde oportet quod verbum interius sit illud quod significatur per exterius verbum. verbum autem quod exterius profertur, significat id quod intellectum est, non ipsum intelligere, neque hoc intellectum qui est habitus vel potentia, nisi quatenus et haec intellecta sunt: unde verbum interius est ipsum interius intellectum. efficiens autem, quia verbum prolatum exterius, cum sit significativum ad placitum, eius principium est voluntas, sicut et ceterorum artificiatorum; et ideo, sicut aliorum artificiatorum praeexistit in mente artificis imago quaedam exterioris artificii, ita in mente proferentis verbum exterius, praeexistit quoddam exemplar exterioris verbi.” See also Aquinas’s De intellectu et intelligibili: “Notandum etiam quod triplex est verbum: verbum cordis, sive intellectuale: verbum imaginationis, sive imaginabile: verbum oris, sive vocale. Primum est manens; secundum disponens, tertium operans.” 100 John O’Callaghan, “Verbum Mentis: Philosophical or Theological Doctrine,” in Fides et Ratio: The Notre Dame Symposium 1999, ed. Timothy Smith (Notre Dame, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2001). 85

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word, the concept, and the inner word precedes the spoken word. Just as the Godhead is the ground of all relations in God, the word of the heart is the ground of all thinking and speaking.101 Bernard Lonergan elaborates the epistemological significance of the Thomistic notion of Verbum.102 The ground of all concepts is a pre-conceptual act of understanding (insight) which expresses itself in a word.103 When thought conceives something, it speaks an inner word, of which the outer word is the expression; the inner word is the cause of the outer, and the meaning of the outer word is the inner word. The inner word of the definition must be distinguished from the inner word of one’s judgment.104 The inner word emerges at the end of a process of inquiry. The first act of the intellect is knowledge of essence, answer to the question ‘what is it?’ Here intellect knows not the thing, but the idea of the thing; hence definitions are neither true nor false. The second act of the intellect is knowledge of existence, answer to the question ‘is it?’ Here intellect knows the thing to which the idea refers; judgments can be true or false. Direct understanding yields the inner word of definition through insight into a phantasm and the reflective understanding of the inner word of judgment through insight into the conditions necessary to the existence of the idea. The act of understanding is in one respect a movement: the emergence of perfection in what is perfected, and a reduction to acting of the possible intellect. In another respect, it is a procession, the emergence of one act from another: the procession of the word from the insight. The possible intellect is a passive potency that receives, while the agent intellect is an active potency that produces. The former is in potency to the act of understanding: as something that changes and becomes, it has no analogy to the Divine. However, the inner word produced by the agent intellect is an act proceeding from an act; it is not a change, a becoming, but a procession, and as such, an image of the Trinity. Scholastic Trinitarian theology offers a figure for understanding the emergence of the word as a procession from act to act. Overcoming the neo-Platonic opposition of words and things, the model of knowledge as the wordless confrontation with Being, the medieval understanding of the lingual nature of Being awakens philosophy to the hermeneutic

Thomas writes in Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, 4, 1: “Verbum cordis, quod nihil est aliud quam id quod actu consideratur per intellectum, proprie de Deo dicitur, quia est omnino, remotum a materialitate et omni defectu; et huiusmodi proprie dicuntur de Deo, sicut scientia et scitum, intelligere et intellectum.” 102 Lonergan, Verbum, 12-222. 103 Bernard Lonergan. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th rev. and aug ed., ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 104 Francisco V. Galán, “La Estructura del Conocimiento Humano segun Lonergan y la Analogia Trinitaria de Beck,” in Sein—Erkennen—Handeln: Interkulturelle, ontologische und ethische Perspektiven, ed. Erwin Schadel and Uwe Voigt (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1994), 255-66. 86 101

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word. As God is manifest in and through the Word, thought comes to its disclosure in and through language.105 The Rehabilitation of Medieval Thinking Gadamer has reminded us that medieval Trinitarian theology opened up the hermeneutic horizon by remembering the priority of language. The effect of this tradition resonates in the early Heidegger’s notion of λόγος.106 Husserl understood his phenomenology as a description of what is given in pre-verbal experience.107 Paul Natorp rejected the possibility of describing immediacy on the grounds that language is always mediation: the moment a word is attached to the immediate it “stills the stream of life.”108 Heidegger’s response, drawing on Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition, was the claim that the object with which phenomenology deals is not a wordless something, but lingual.109 The task for phenomenology is to try to retrieve a more original way of talking about the phenomenon that recovers the original way in which things are always already expressed. The later Heidegger will continue with this theme by saying that it is in language that beings come to be and are.110 “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being 105

See Matthew Charles Ogilvie, Faith Seeking Understanding: The Functional Specialty, Systematics in Bernard Lonergan’s “Method in Theology” (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2001), 177-223. 106 Heidegger, Being and Time: “The Concept of the Logos,” 55-58 and “Being-there and Discourse. Language,” 203-210. 107 “For the life-world—the ‘world for us all’—is identical with the world that can be commonly talked about. Every new apperception leads essentially, through apperceptive transference, to a new typification of the surrounding world, and in social intercourse to a naming which immediately flows into the common language. Thus, the world is always such that it can be empirically, generally (intersubjectively) explicated and, at the same time, linguistically explicated.” Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §59. Husserl describes the life-world as the “world of immediate experience,” as “pre-given,” the world as experienced in the “natural, primordial attitude,” that of “original natural life.” See also Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997). 108 See Kisiel, The Genesis, 48. 109 Jiro Watanabe, “Categorial Intuition in Husserl and Heidegger,” in Reading Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992). See also Einar Øverenget, Seeing the Self. Heidegger on Subjectivity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). In this paperback edition of his 1998 study on Heidegger’s subjectivity Øverenget shows Heidegger’s use of Husserl’s theory of wholes and parts and the concept of categorial intuition. 110 Martin Heidegger, GA40, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. James Manheim, 4th ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). 87

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from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as. Projecting is the release of the throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such.”111 For Heidegger, access to the meaning of Being is only in and through language. Dasein is the clearing, the place of disclosedness in which beings can present themselves, the Lichtung that opens up the possibility of truth.112 This presencing is language: Dasein names what emerges from unconcealment, and in naming it brings it into understandable, lingual existence. A close reading of Heidegger’s Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning reveals that Heidegger’s notion of the linguality of Being has important analogies with Scotus’s notion of primary intention, the simple apprehension of the given prior to conceptualization.113 Verbum or λόγος for Heidegger is not the concept of the thing which is set over against a knowing subject, but the original disclosure of the thing in Dasein’s everyday experience. The λόγος does not define and give reasons for positing but lets the thing be seen in itself. Heidegger’s emphasis on language marked the hermeneutic turn in philosophy: to think a concept it is necessary to think the history of the concept and the history of the concept is implicit in the language which expresses it. Thus, there is no a-historical access to ideas; an idea is essentially a historical entity. Its historicity is a function of its being. Adopting the language of negative or mystical theology, and pushing language to its limits, Heidegger attempted to deconstruct onto-theological thinking. His later hostility toward the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages, after his early fascination with Scholastic speculative grammar, questions the very possibility of philosophical dialogue with medieval theology. However, the Gadamerian retrieval of verbum interius renews the young Heidegger’s project of a phenomenological and hermeneutic rehabilitation of medieval theology. Hermeneutics must never forget that the remembering of language was effected through the retrieval of a theological insight. Heidegger’s contention that a theist cannot think Being is thrown into question by his own legacy.114 Hermeneutics is not only between the human and the divine, it is also between philosophy and theology. Hermeneutic philosophy must engage theology, Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 73. Heidegger relates the Lichtung to the Scholastic notion of lumen naturale, the natural disposition of the intellect. Heidegger, Being and Time, 171; The relationship between lumen naturale and the opening of Being is discussed by Heidegger when he treats Nietzsche: Nietzsche, vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 429f. See also Claudius Strube, “Die existenzialontologische Bestimmung des lumen naturale,” Heidegger Studies 12 (1996): 109-119. 113 Martin Heidegger, GA1, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, in Frühe Schriften (1912-1916), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978). 114 See Martin Heidegger, GA40, Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 8-9. 88 111 112

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which grounds and permeates the Western tradition. Conversely, the theological tradition is incomprehensible without philosophy. This is not just a historical consideration: the subject-matter of hermeneutics, die Sache selbst, is theological. Hermeneutics is not theology, but it must be open to theology if it is to be receptive to the voices that constitute the tradition that we are. In Search of the Verbum Entis The essential linguality of understanding, the enactment of historically effected consciousness in language, calls for an ongoing search for the primal words in which Being is always already expressed, the verbum entis. Language is the mirror of finitude, that is, the mirror of temporality, because “every language is constantly being formed and developed the more it manifests Being. It is finite not because it is not all other languages at once but simply because it is language.”115 Language is the Vollzug of the self-disclosure of Being. We speak because we must speak, Being speaks to us. After speaking, we remain convinced that there is much more to say. A comprehensive Vollzug of meaning takes into account the unsaid, the intention, the context: “To make oneself understood—means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning and to ensure that it is understood in this way.”116 Expressing what has not yet been said and what is yet to be said represents our ongoing search for language, more than the externalization of inner experience, the primordial expression of Being. In this search for Being, the dialogical nature of our understanding plays an essential role. Being comes to language in the dialogue with ourselves, each other, and the tradition, the ongoing ‘conversation that we are.’ The verbum interius is the ground and modus experiendi of being. The nature of language needs to be rethought in the light of the uncovering of the verbum interius as the ground of the universality of hermeneutics. The “inner” of verbum interius is not a spacial “inner.” The procession from the verbum interius to the verbum exterius is not a movement through space, but a procession in time, an ecstatic self-transcendence. The limitations we experience in language do not reflect limitations in ipsum esse, which John tells us is always with Word and the Scholastics confirm as infinite. In a certain respect, they are the limitations of being-in-time. Being manifests itself in language, which is also our language, in which our understanding finds its Vollzug. Language makes possible the infinity of constellations of meaning. That which can be said can never be fully exhausted since what is said is only an answer to a preceding question and invites another question. “The ongoing dialogue permits no final conclusion. It would be a poor hermeneuticist who 115 116

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 457. Ibid., 469. 89

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thought he could have, or had to have, the last word.”117 The infinity of the possibilities of expression image the infinity of Being. With Miłosz we ask: “Why isn’t the power of sight absolute?” And we admit: I am able only to repeat harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is! No particular constellation of words can definitively articulate hermeneutic experience. Yet we cannot but continuously search for a more meaningful form, to find that one and only word, suffused with all the pain and joy of temporality and filled with all the colors of life, a word that could adequately convey our thinking, something dear to us, almost absolutely inaccessible, and yet concrete, tangible. That is, after all, what it means to dwell between the human and the divine.

117

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Ibid., 579.

2. 1. 2. Incarnation as the Empowerment of Thinking the Difference: The Understanding of the Logos and the Permanent Task of Interpretation Introduction to the Topic Thinking the Incarnation enables the ‘thinking the difference’: It is a thinking of a particular kind. The belief in the personal union of the divine and the human nature in the incarnation of the divine Λόγος challenges us to an ever renewed and enlivened interpretation, if man, in the here and now of his life history, is to understand, or get near to understanding, the unique phenomenon of the self-manifestation of God in history. In what follows, theological hermeneutics will be presented as the art of interpretation that lies within incarnational-kenotic horizons and is structured as being trinitarian in conception at the same time. Moreover, the ‘thinking the difference’ made possible by the Christian belief in Incarnation refers itself to the linguistic nature of human thinking and thus contributes significantly to overcoming the ‘linguistic forgetfulness’ inherent in the classical Greek-metaphysically-oriented history of Western philosophy. I begin with two testimonies: one given by a poet, and a second, given by a theologian. Tadeusz Różewicz’s Theodramatics: The Concretization and Consolidation of the Human Being’s Relation to God in the Context of the Birth and Death of God Tadeusz Różewicz, born in 1921, one of the greatest among the living Polish poets, thematizes the birth and death of God - in his poem entitled “without” - as representing the limits of the perspective within which human life can be interpreted. His precisely sketched poetic description of human forlornness and selfalienation, in a world that seems to have no wish for achieving reconciliation, makes the problem that arises from the indefiniteness and indeterminacy of postmodern man’s lack of destination in his singularity quite understandable.1 I introduce Różewicz’s poem “without” in my own translation:

1

“Ambivalence is the least that should be expected in present-day world conditions.” Wolfgang Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990), 192. Further, idem, “Topoi der Postmoderne,” in Hans Rudi Fischer, Arnold Retzer, and Jochen Schweitzer, ed., Das Ende der großen Entwürfe (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 35-55; idem, Vernunft: Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1996); idem, “Verteidigung des Relativismus,” in Hans Rudi Fischer and Siegfried J. Schmidt, ed., Wirklichkeit und Welterzeugung: In memoriam Nelson Goodman (Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme, 2000), 29-50. 91

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without2

bez

the biggest event in the life of man is the birth and death of God

największym wydarzeniem w życiu człowieka są narodziny i śmierć Boga

father Our father Why like a bad father at night

ojcze Ojcze nasz czemu jak zły ojciec nocą

without trace and without signs without a word

bez znaku bez śladu bez słowa

why have you forsaken me why have I forsaken you

czemuś mnie opuścił czemu ja opuściłem Ciebie

a life without god is possible a life without god is impossible

życie bez boga jest możliwe życie bez boga jest niemożliwe

because as a child you were my food I ate your body I drank your blood

przecież jako dziecko karmiłem się Tobą jadłem ciało piłem krew

maybe you left me when I tried to open my arms to embrace life

może opuściłeś mnie kiedy próbowałem otworzyć ramiona objąć życie

foolhardily I opened my arms and let you go Maybe you fled my laugh was too much for your ears You are not laughing

lekkomyślny rozwarłem ramiona i wypuściłem Ciebie a może uciekłeś nie mogąc słuchać mojego śmiechu Ty się nie śmiejesz

Tadeusz Różewicz, “ohne/without,” in idem, Letztendlich ist die verständliche Lyrik unverständlich: Späte und frühe Gedichte (München: Hanser, 1996), 38-39. 92 2

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maybe you have punished me that sinister little squirt for the arrogance for this that I tried to create a new human being a new language

a może pokarałeś mnie małego ciemnego za upór za pychę za to że próbowałem stworzyć nowego człowieka nowy język

you left me on the quiet no rush of wings no lightnings like a field mouse like water that seeps into the sand

opuściłeś mnie bez szumu skrzydeł bez błyskawic jak polna myszka jak woda co wsiąkła w piach

busy distracted I did not notice your flight Your absence in my life

zajęty roztargniony nie zauważyłem twojej ucieczki twojej nieobecności w moim życiu

a life without god is possible a life without god is impossible

życie bez boga jest możliwe życie bez boga jest niemożliwe

Różewicz speaks of a concrete person in his/her real relation to God. In this sense, and in a concentrated way, the poem describes the drama of bringing a human being into relation with God in a specific life story. For, it is true that every generalization keeps its distance, as being remote and alien to poetry. Poetry is always in the service of the individual and the concretely real. Czesław Miłosz strongly opposes any generalization, basing his image of the ‘enemy of man’ on the fact that a human being is no longer understood within the dimension of transcendence, but only in the dimensions of history, which neglects the idea of the person. History is reduced to understanding the bare necessity, and that is it. Thus, it is based on something inhuman and incompatible with the order of transcendence. Poetry, on the other hand, is always in the service of the individual, of the real, that is to say, that which remains unthought, in the extrapolation of history, and thus unworthy of the thoughtfulness of existential attention and hence unimportant: The true enemy of man is generalization./Prawdziwy wróg człowieka jest uogólnienie. The true enemy of man, so-called history,/Prawdziwy wróg człowieka, tak zwana Historia, It attracts and repels by making use of the plural./Zaleca się i straszy swoją liczbą

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mnogą.3 Other than in the inclusion of the individual in the universal, everything that is existentially important and therefore realistic, is always in the singular, open and receptive to the determinate, the ‘ever mine,’ to the concrete human being in his/her real life situation, in which he/she meets with God and discovers an answer to the question of man in the divine trinitarian self-revelation. In the concrete openness of God met in Christ, he/she understands that they are not only asking the question about God but that they themselves are the real question about God. Różewicz succinctly brings the drama of humans who refer to God to the point, for his poem begins with the assertion: “the greatest event in the life of man is the birth and death of God.” With the birth and death of God are meant, at the same time, the delimitations and cardinal points at either end of Jesus Christ’s life (or the Incarnation of the Son of God), as these are perceived to be the biggest event in the life of every human being. For the Christian believer, this statement undoubtedly has the character of a statement. However, it describes a target state and not an actual state, as the statement is subsequently followed by the striking and deliberately contrasting statement of the lamented abandonment of the poetic ‘I.’ Różewicz, the poet, first wants to say to us, by means of this tension: even if it is objectively true that the soteriologically most significant event for every human being is the birth and death of God, nevertheless the individual person can live for himself, at least temporarily, as if this were not true; everyone can live without God, especially without the Christian God. The information that a life without God is possible challenges the poet to think through his own life and ask about the possible causes for God’s abandonment of him. The poem first shows how a life without God can come about: for instance, when, like a wicked father, secretly and in the darkness of night, God disappears from the life of a human being, leaving no trace and without saying goodbye. Yet how can this happen? Is the Christian “our father” simply stealing away from the life of a human being like a bad human father, in a cowardly and irresponsible way? The poet now adds to his questionnaire: “Why have I left you?” The painful experience of our abandonment by God could be caused by ourselves; we could be the guilty ones in our apostasy, as the poet himself conjectures: “Maybe you left me when I tried to open my arms to embrace life.” He confirms this conjecture and makes of his gesture the guilty party, by accusing himself: “foolhardily I let you go, my laugh was too much for your ears, you do not laugh.” He continues to search for his own possible failures as the reason for God’s flight and withdrawal from his life, naming pride, superbia, the arrogance of his quest: “Perhaps you Polish: Czesław Miłosz, “Sześć wykładów wierszem: Wykład IV,” Berkeley, 1985, in the volume of poetry Kroniki (1987), in idem, Wiersze, vol. 3 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1993), 305-311. “Six lectures in poetic form: Lecture IV,” in Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein, 115. 94 3

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punish me, that sinister little squirt, for being arrogant, for this, that I tried to create a new human being, a new language.” A human being has—by embracing life, with his/her cocky laugh, his/her arrogant attempt to create a new human being and a new language—made God disappear from his/her life; in other words, a human being has put him/herself in the place of the Creator God who created him/her and his/her language. Not even this disappearance and the absence of God, who was once the poet’s nourishment and drink when he was a child and at the forming of his poetic ego—in form of his body and blood—not even God’s disappearing or his disappearance is noticed any more by the postmodern human being, once he/she lives without God. This observation of the poetic ego is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s formulation of the extinction of God’s mark in our postmodern life-worlds. For the human being of our time is so “busy distracted,” as the poetic ‘I’ says of himself in the second but last stanza of our poem, that he no longer recognizes God’s flight or absence from his life. A life entirely without God, without any relationship, not even having a memory of him anymore, is therefore possible. For such a life is in many cases genuine, as is shown by the poetic ‘I’ that is representative of our times, at least in sections of his life. And yet, this life without God—in which the paradox of our time shows up so precisely, as it deals with the man-God relationship—should at the same time be impossible. The absence of God in one’s own life is felt as painful at some point also by postmodern people, hence felt and noticed in the first place. At least Różewicz is still convinced of that. Moreover, this comes about when the postmodern human being is checked in his distraction, for example, when forced into this by mighty crises or borderline situations. Then he becomes painfully aware of the absence and—if he had previously been Christianized—the disappearance of the Christian God from his life. And then he learns that a life without God is impossible in the long run. The belief in the incarnate God was once given to him, and was his, in his childhood. Also, this belief now reaffirms itself as a painful absence of what was once believed. Różewicz’s poetry articulates the contradictory turmoil, the dramatic indecision in the relationship of postmodern man with God: a life without God is simultaneously possible and impossible, the postmodern starting point for this factually contradictory and therefore undecided, indeterminate relationship to God is ‘being without’—hence “without” (namely, living without God), which is precisely why the poem bears this title. Różewicz’s contemporary drama lends tension and meaning to the postmodern human being’s question about God. The human being’s situation at the beginning of the 21st century is marked by the inner conflict that arises when both possibilities exist, that of shaping one’s life with God, or without God. The poet cannot give an unequivocal answer to this question, for he is one of those who did not notice the flight or absence of God in their 95

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lives, busy and absent-minded or distracted as they are. Różewicz situates the dilemma of any decision within the context of a tension that carries you along like a torrent, that is, the tension released by the question why and ending dramatically with: “father Our Father/why/like a bad father/at night/without trace and without signs/without word/why have you/forsaken me.” The early “why,” so long before the actual question about God’s abandonment is put, emphasizes the existential meaning of human self-understanding in its ongoing and ever-relevant search for the ultimate reason and meaning of all reality. In his poem, Różewicz shows us the existential tension, which is not being taken off the human being’s shoulders during his/her lifetime: “a life without God is possible/a life without God is impossible.” You can live without God; you cannot live without God. The scales try to balance around the point of equilibrium. Will one of the weighing bowls register a significant win? The postmodern human being described by Różewicz is not left ‘high and dry’ by the poet—s/he is ultimately given a self-definition: A potential belief or unbelief cannot be substantiated either way, in the end, as long as the central premises of postmodernism, which speak of a fundamental and existing impossibility of defining human being or his/her destiny, are accepted.4 This assumption of the indeterminability of human being, which was programmatically declared by Foucault in connection with Nietzsche,5 leads to an undecidability-in-principle as the main feature of the style, and in the logic, of thinking the difference.6 Yet the postmodern human being, in his contradictory disunity and indecision, is precisely the addressee of the Christian truth of faith, that it is for him/her and his/her salvation that God became man, was crucified, died and has risen. It will be our task to open up the question of the possibility of access to this truth of faith within the horizon of a hermeneutics that is both incarnational-kenotic and a trinitarian hermeneutics. Karl Rahner: Risking an Approach to the Mystery of the Incarnation as a Response to the Insufficiencies Found in Theology The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ opens the door to the mystery of the triune God and thus is for us Christians the center out of which we live and think. In his Wolfgang Welsch speaks of a playful approach to insecurity. See Wolfgang Welsch, “Die Kunst, mit der Unsicherheit zu leben,” in Richard van Dülmen, ed., Die Zukunft des Menschen: Selbstbestimmung oder Selbstzerstörung? (Saarbrücken: Stiftung Demokratie 1999), 143-174. 5 Cf. Arnold Davidson, ed., Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985). 6 Cf. Gregor M. Hoff, Die prekäre Identität des Christlichen: Die Herausforderung postModernen Differenzdenkens für eine theologische Hermeneutik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). 96 4

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essay “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” Karl Rahner urges us to make thinking about this center the main task of the thinking faith because it is the only responsible way of speaking about God. He writes: We should think about this center in theology and the Christian life. And sometimes, we should talk less about a thousand other things. Because this mystery is inexhaustible, and compared to it, most other things that we talk about are irrelevant. It is a bleak sign, given out by both theology and the Church’s proclamation, that everything we hear about this all-encompassing mystery is almost only a repetition—and a somewhat bored one—of what has always been said before. But the following applies here too: only those who earn their own ‘present’ by hard work can rightly possess their ‘past.’7 The mystery of the Incarnation, therefore, challenges us to strive over and over again—because of its inexhaustible depth—for an ever better and more adequate understanding that is based in the mystery, in order to understand—out of this mystery—the mystery of God and human life. In our failure to do this, Rahner, even quite literally, sees a failure within theology. This understanding is about an active, full, and fruitful participation—in the sense of an actuosa participatio— in the historical tradition (traditio). Keeping the tradition—praeservare—means: To pass on what has been received. It involves a certain way of translating and translating what has been received (translatio traditio est).8 It is clear from the beginning that there is a fascinating movement between tradition and interpretation. To preserve means that one keeps and maintains that which has been ‘served,’ the truth. The failure of theology in both doctrine and preaching consists in the mere repetition of what has already been said, again and again, without even attempting a fresh appropriation, updating, and actualization of the old beliefs Karl Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Menschwerdung,” in idem, Menschsein und Menschwerdung Gottes: Studien zur Grundlegung der Dogmatik, zur Christologie, Theologischen Anthropologie und Eschatologie, in idem, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 309. 8 As given in the Italian saying, “traduttore, traditore,” the translator is a traitor; any translation that goes beyond merely reproducing the language spoken in one language into another, when transforming the syntax of one language into the other, makes us aware of what is “traitorous” in language, that is to say, of the potential within the language to announce something that is not yet directly shown in that language. In this sense, language demands that we escape from our “old” thinking by questioning the “old” language again and again. Since we assume, in hermeneutics, the coherence between thought and speech, we must always get involved anew, in thinking and speaking, with the thing that wants to be understood. See Andrzej Wierciński, “Die ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen,” in Andrzej Przyłębski, ed., Das Erbe Gadamers (Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang, 2006), 65-83. 7

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such as the creed concerning the Incarnation.9 Rahner contrasts the living faith of the Church to this theological failure, a hope “that there are people who are connected to the Lord in faith, hope, and love in life and death.”10 Rahner’s provoking statement should be filed as a historical fact in any case, if only in relation to his Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity.11 Yet one can justifiably ask whether Rahner’s dictum does actually still apply today when we have a wealth of Christological studies before us. Unfortunately, I cannot go into detail here on the extension of Christology since his days.12 Even though man essentially believes that in Jesus Christ the mystery of God’s salvation is totally and fully revealed and that God’s Son in the incarnate Word is true man and true God, the depth of the divine mystery remains transcendent and inexhaustible in itself. Therefore, the truths of faith require permanent interpretation, which brings us closer to God who reveals and reveals himself and closer also to the truth he reveals. Since human concepts can fully grasp the richness of this mystery, we need a succession of new theological explanations and expansions that help the presently existing person to achieve the living out of his/her faith. All these attempts and approaches must constantly keep the fullness of the mystery of the Incarnation as a salvific event for the whole of humanity present before their eyes, so that they never lose their inner connection with the “One, who is God, and rests at the heart of the Father.” (Jn 1: 18)

“All failure is in itself a saying-that-has-gone-wrong, i.e., a making manifest. What does the failure of a being say in this failing? Of what does it say that it has failed? Of that which could and should somehow be granted in existence. And what is that? Precisely the possibility of doing and letting be of its doing. Failure does not speak about it, does not open a negotiation about it, but rejects it and makes it known by denying it.” Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit (Wintersemester 1929/1930), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 211212. 10 Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Menschwerdung,” 309. 11 Karl Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums, in idem, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 26, ed. Nikolaus Schwerdtfeger and Albert Raffelt (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1999). 12 For an assessment of Rahner, given recent Christological work, we will only mention some recent publications on Christology by way of window-shopping: Gerhard L. Müller, Vom Vater gesandt: Impulse einer inkarnatorischen Christologie für Gottesfrage und Menschenbild (Regensburg: Pustet, 2005); idem, “Die Christologie: Die Lehre von Jesus Christus,” in Wolfgang Beinert, ed., Glaubenszugänge: Lehrbuch der Katholischen Dogmatik 2 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1995), 1-297; Ulrich Kühn, Christologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003); Christoph von Schönborn, Gott sandte seinen Sohn: Christologie, assisted by Michael Konrad (Paderborn: Bonifatius Verlag, 2002). For the most recent Protestant Christology it is essential to mention Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundzüge der Christologie, 7th ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1990), Gerhard Ebeling, Wort und Glaube, vol. 1-4 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960-1995) and Ingolf U. Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte: Zur Grammatik der Christologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994). 98 9

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According to Rahner, the theological question of the meaning of our belief in Incarnation as a fides quae represents an interminable task, one that challenges us to this ever-renewed endeavor. With him, we can ask: What do we Christians mean, when we profess our belief in the Incarnation of the Word of God? To say this, after applying ever new effort, is the whole task of Christology that never reaches the end.13 It is, first of all, a question of the fides quae, i.e., what we believe in when we believe. The Greek verb πιστεύειν and the Latin verb credere embrace the two aspects of faith: fides quae creditor—accepting as true, fidelity in belief—and fides qua creditor—our active conduct based on trust and confidence and resulting in lived faith. Thus, we can point to the triadic structure of belief: Believing in somebody” means that “someone (Nominative) believes something (Accusative) that comes from someone (Dative). This “ever-renewed endeavor” demanded by Rahner, to appropriate anew what has always been believed by the Church—only afresh and more profoundly —is tantamount to saying that the challenge to interpret the ecclesiastical truths of faith ever anew never ends. This is not a mere verbal repetition of the old, but also not an entirely new interpretation, separated from tradition. Rather, and with Rahner, we may hope that every understanding comes from the fact that the understanding of those who want to understand does not stand frozen and alone but is released into that nameless mystery that carries and underlies all understanding. If this is generally the case, that is, if true understanding has always been the opening of the understanding into a vast mystery, and if this mystery is not just a remainder or left-over of a concept, which is still provisionally unresolved but also the condition of the possibility of the individual to avail him/herself of comprehension, the surrounding incomprehensibility of the primordial whole, then it is not surprising that such a thing must happen especially where the tangible fate of the incomprehensible Word is meant to be understood.14 To grasp this “tangible fate of the incomprehensible Word” is not, to understand the Incarnation of God as one of God’s works but, rather, as the revelation of his own reality. The thing that wants to be understood, that is, the nameless mystery of God, enables and sustains all understanding of it. True understanding here means that the person who would understand this nameless mystery is opening their mind for it. The existential being-rooted in this mystery is the condition for the possibility of understanding. This is not about a partial, qualitative and 13 14

Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Menschwerdung,” 309. Ibid., 310. 99

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quantitative potentiality of increasing the comprehension of what is not yet understood, but rather about an insight into the “encompassing incomprehensibility of the original whole.” This circumscribes what the most hermeneutically appropriate conception of the original Christian mystery of the Incarnation of God is. The understanding of the Incarnation must include the understanding of the Word of God and, conversely, the understanding of the Word of God includes the understanding of his becoming human. This mutual conditionality of the two horizons of understanding draws our attention to the circularity of the understanding that is required here. In the hermeneutics of the understanding of the Incarnation, as in the question of God in general, there can be no presuppositionless understanding. Following Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle of all understanding, Walter Kasper therefore also deconstructs the postulate of a theology that is not based on presuppositions: There is absolutely no prerequisite-free understanding. All human cognition happens in the medium of language, which has always given us symbols and schemata of interpretation for reality. Therefore, we cannot begin theological questions any other way than by asking what the religions and the theological traditions have understood as God. We need to ask the story of God-talk to help us unlock the problem that lies hidden in the word “God.”15 Kasper, here, emphasizes the linguistic and the historical dependence—or, more accurately expressed—the dependence of all theological discourse on tradition. A hermeneutically appropriate understanding of the theologumenon of the Incarnation is therefore not without presuppositions, but must take into account that the Incarnation represents only one case—albeit the most radical one—of the Godman-relationship for which the following axiom is fundamentally valid: Because in the Incarnation the Logos creates by accepting, and accepts by divesting himself, therefore, here too, and in the most radical, specifically unique way, the axiom that governs all relationships between God and creature, namely, that the closeness and distance, the availability and the power of the creature in itself do not grow in the opposite direction to God’s, but 15

Walter Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1982), 14. Kasper explains the need for the prior understanding of a subject matter for the emergence of the dynamics of question and answer to be possible: “The question therefore is: how can we get to such a pre-concept of God? What should we start with in theology? Certainly not with a proof for the existence of God, though apparently there are no presuppositions in play. For whoever puts together a proof for the existence of God must already have an idea of what he wants to prove; every meaningful question presupposes a certain precognition available to the person in question; even a proof for the existence of God presupposes a preconcept of God.” Ibid. 100

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to the same degree. That is why Christ is man in the most radical sense and why his humanity is the most powerful, the most free, not ‘although,’ but ‘because’ it is accepted as divestiture by God himself and set by him as his divesting himself. The humanity of Christ thus is not a “manifestation” of God in such a way, that it is the semblance of emptiness and illusory ‘smoke-and-mirrors’ that have no self-validity before that-which-appears or him-who-witnesses-the-appearance, i.e., God.16 Because divine and human nature behave in such a way that the autonomy of human nature and the divine decree about it grow to the same degree, both the independence from human nature and the divine decree about it are at their peak in the incarnated Christ, because his human nature is accepted by God, or rather, set as his relinquishment of self.17 The Incarnation, if viewed as this acceptance of human nature by God, therefore shows the apex of man’s total dependence on the infinite mystery of God. In radicalizing the events in the Incarnation, the ‘becoming flesh’ is to be understood as the assumption of human nature by God, in which God relinquishes himself. In this respect, the Incarnation is to be taken as the hermeneutic criterion in which the indefinable nature of man has, as its limit, the unlimited dependence on the infinite mystery of divine fullness. God, as an infinite mystery, as the Wholly Other, enables an ontologically founded thinking-the-difference-in-principle, through his self-manifestation, as we will try to show in what follows. Thinking the Difference The Incarnation makes thinking the difference possible as thinking of an original difference in God himself, a difference which presupposes the simplicity of the divine essence. For, thinking the difference is then based on the primordial difference between the divine persons, which would not have been recognizable to us without the Incarnation. In this respect, it is with the Incarnation that this thinking the difference unfolds itself to its full extent. The personal difference in God himself is in no way less original than the simplicity of the divine essence: They are

16 17

Rahner, “Zur Theologie der Menschwerdung,” 320. In connection with the acceptability of human nature by the Son of God we refer to Rahners conception of potentia oboedientialis. “He who correctly understands in a theological way what potentia oboedientialis means for the hypostatic union, the acceptability of human nature by the person of the Word of God, knows that this potentia cannot be a single faculty among other possibilities in the human condition but is factually identical with the essential nature of man. Yet he who understands this cannot deny, in scholastic theology, that it must be possible and justified to describe this human being in such a way that it appears to fit such potentiality most exactly.” Ibid., 313. 101

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equally primordial. Therefore, genuinely Christian thinking must think the difference (or being-different) to be just as original (in God) as is unity. In this lies the primary and essential differentiation between the Christian understanding of difference and that which is found in the ‘monistic metaphysics’ of Greek-speaking Platonism and Neoplatonism. There is therefore a real relational difference between the divine Persons (the Father is the originating principle but not the result of another principle within the Godhead, the Son is the moment originating in the Father, the Spirit is the personal moment in God, connecting the other members of the Divine Relationship in that personal moment within God); furthermore, there is also a rational, but real, fundamentally set difference in God between the nature of God and the divine Persons. This formal distinction or formal non-identity (Scotus) between the divine persons and the nature of God is the condition of the possibility of the Trinity as three subsistent persons, constituted by real and different relations. The difference in God is not to be understood as a negation (in Hegel’s sense), which would serve to overcome indeterminacy.18 In the infinitely positive identity of God, all otherness is not necessary for the overcoming of a possible original indeterminacy, but rather the expression of bottomless freedom. With Michael Schulz, one could substitute the Hegelian formula omnis determinatio est negatio for the Christian understanding of God and reality into the formula omnis determinatio est relatio. In this relationally understood original determinateness of the divine act of life, God can refer to himself as a non-divine Otherness, both in himself (in the respective difference between the persons by which the father is not the son, etc.) and in creation.19 Because God possesses a primary difference within himself, he can, as it were, step out of himself and put something else into Being. Formally, creation is the product of the difference between God and a non-divine realm. However, it is based on the god-immanent difference between Father and Son since the Father produces the world he has created according to the model of the divine ideas or exemplary causes that are realized in the Son. Through his Incarnation, the Creator confirms, so to speak, the difference between himself and the world by appropriating it while removing its separating character. Thus, on the one hand, the incarnate God is the affirmation of the difference between God and the world and, at the same time, their reconciliation, achieved by eradicating every possible rupture between the two sides. Cf. Michael Schulz, Sein und Trinität: Systematische Erörterungen zur Religionsphilosophie G.W.F. Hegels im ontologiegeschichtlichen Rückblick auf J. Duns Scotus und I. Kant und die Hegel-Rezeption in der Seinsauslegung und Trinitätstheologie bei W. Pannenberg, E. Jüngel, K. Rahner und H.U. v. Balthasar (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1997), 328-351; idem, Überlegungen zur ontologischen Grundfrage in Gustav Siewerths Werk “Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger” (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2003). 19 Cf. Giovanni Ventimiglia, Differenza e contraddizione: Il problema dell’essere in Tommaso d’Aquino: esse, divisum, contradictio (Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 1997). 102 18

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The Ontology of the Difference in Being The originality of the transcendental interpretation of Being, meaning the thinking of Being in its being-Being with reference to the difference between Being and being, characterizes the thinking of the difference as its main feature.20 In the understanding of Being, the thinking of the difference plays the decisive role, because it enables the unity and the diversity of Being to be thought at the same time (transcendental unity and difference).21 The ontological determinateness of Being cannot be understood as an overcoming of indeterminacy but must be understood as an abundance and a relationship event in relation to the original difference in Being, which is grounded in God himself. The first content of our reason is Being. Knowledge of Being is effected on the basis of the relationship between Being and thinking, by showing and revealing the real in its manifestness. Thus, our thinking does not begin with the concept of Being (conceptus entis), but with a reasoning comprehension (conceptio entis). It is only with the event of revelation that human thinking, which had been weakened by original sin, is once more empowered to think Being. This empowerment allows the discerning subject to grasp reality directly from God. In a “theologically empowered metaphysics,”22 Being is a mediating center that manifests itself in the difference in Being, i.e., between actuality and subsistence. The difference between the divine persons and their selfsameness with the essence of God is reflected in the difference between act and subsistence. This difference is closely related to the real difference between the divine persons; Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are relationally different from each other. It establishes a relational “Being, as well as being (esse and ens), however, are primarily also to be seen under the transcendental view of unity or simplicity (omne ens qua ens est unum, individuum, simplex, et omne ens ut compositum est totum; esse est aliquid simplex). Thus, the difference can only be conceived out of and within this unity and simplicity, without which it would become ‘infinite’ or ‘incomprehensible.’ For what has not previously been determined as a mode of unity cannot be understood as ‘differentiated,’ if only because ‘infinitely different’ can no longer be compared with one another. Therefore, difference is always the bi- or multiplicity of something, the non-identity of an identity, the otherness of a self. This otherness can evidently behave in a manifold manner with respect to sameness.” Gustav Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte. Zur Gottesfrage bei Hegel und Heidegger, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, ed. Alma von Stockhausen (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1971), 106. 21 Being is present in beings, but ontologically different from beings: “Being is in beings, it governs them and keeps them in some of their reality, whereby it brings them both into luminous brightness and into effective reality without fitting them as passive building blocks into a whole. Therefore Being, which on one hand holds on to the difference between beings without being the same as beings, can on the other hand not be detached from beings in the same sense in which one being is separate from another.” Gustav Siewerth, Philosophie der Sprache (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), 94. 22 Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2003), 82. 20

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difference in God and at the same time expresses an original consubstantiality. In addition to this real relational difference between the divine persons, there is also a difference in the way of thinking, with a fundamentum in re that exists between the divine act of Being and the divine persons. It is about the difference between act and subsistence within God. However, since created Being has the character of being an image with respect to its creator, an original difference still rules in it, namely the difference between created Being as the first-born of all that has been created and the created being in its particularity. This ontological difference between the Being of the creature and the creaturely being, which needs to be understood differently from Heidegger’s understanding, forms the inner divine difference between father and son and must therefore be understood as an original abundance granted to all created things, as well as the relational richness provided for it by the Creator. However, even the difference between the divine persons on the one hand, and the divine essence on the other corresponds, in the creature, to the difference between the actuality of creatureliness and its subsistence. To see everything in this light, however, is only possible for the thinking that has been empowered by the event of Revelation—the Incarnation—to thinking the ontological difference. Incarnation Theology as an Exemplary Case of Thinking the Difference Following the definition of the person by Richard of St Victor, “persona est intellectualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia,”23 we can say that in God, by virtue of the simple divine nature, the divine persons act by realizing love as the highest form of relation that can exist between persons and is, at the same time, an openness toward a third person. The self-communication of God in the mystery of the Incarnation also reveals the difference within God, which is kept in the absolute simplicity of the divine essence and thus excludes any radical difference. Speculatively one can think of negativity in the act of divine self-comprehension, or the emergence of the Son, in particular with Hans Urs von Balthasar24 and Gustav Siewerth. Because not-being-father and not-being-son belong to the divine essence, the processio of the son in the eternal divine being-different can also be thought of as the self-penetration of the divine spirit and his love.25 This formal

23

Richard of St Victor, De Trinitate 4, 22. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik II: Die Personen des Spiels 1: Der Mensch in Gott (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), 241f. and note 36. 25 “What therefore medieval theology called ‘the imitability’ of God, is his eternal differentiation, which in the self-pervading of his perceiving spirit and his love causes the abyss of non-Godhead to unravel within itself, because ‘not-being-father,’ or ‘not-being-son’ belong to his simple nature. This ‘non-Godhead’ necessarily contains the whole abyss of possibili104 24

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non-identity expresses the difference between the divine persons. It is an expression of communication within God, which takes place at the level of inner trinitarian relations and is reflected in the level of exemplary identity between God and his creation. Yet the reason for both the divine communication and the corresponding relationship between God and his creation is God’s love, which in the Incarnation completes the covenant between God and his creation. The facticity of the Incarnation sheds new light on the correct assessment of thinking the difference. By becoming a man, Christ himself “in the fullness of maturing time, of time that has matured in the heart,” becomes “flesh” out of the subsistent depth of the divine act of Being, and surrenders himself, as the “comprehensor of all creation,” to the fate of the decay implied in the transposition of existence and substance, as the “Lamb of God.” All the differences are directed back into the unity of the divine life, and, at the same time, the most absolute difference in his final decision and leaving becomes visible.26 The kenotic Incarnation event reveals God’s creative decision to take up into the mystery of divine life the difference in Being between God and the world that was created by him and made possible by the difference within the divine persons and between them. Insofar as the history of Being is called upon to live in God Himself, by God’s original decision and in the act of fulfilling God’s love in the unity and that which is reconciling in the divine life, it becomes conformed to divine subsistence. Just as the difference between Being and non-Being springs from the divine difference, God also assumes the structures of difference obtaining in the created world, both with the Incarnation of his Word and in the outpouring of his Spirit and reconciles these within his own nature.27 With regard to the New Testament passages such as 2 Pt 1: 4-5; Jn 1: 12; 14: 20; Rom 6: 5 (Cf. 1 Cor 1: 9; Acts 17: 28; 1 Jn 4: 19-5, 13; Gal 5: 25), we can say that God, through his Incarnation, wants to bring creation back to himself. The divine Father shows, not only love for his Son—in the Incarnation of Christ—

ties that unfold between the pure, threefold, subsistent Being of God and absolute nothingness. These possibilities, therefore, are a thought-out and designed product of that generating primal word which in the ‘begotten word’ has imparted itself to itself as pure selfsameness from its difference to itself or to its infinite abundance of life and essence. Its original unification and differentiation, therefore, only comes to be itself by, at the same time, covering itself in its selfhood against absolute otherness and nothingness.” Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend,” 123. 26 Ibid., 126. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth’s Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), 148166. 27 Cf. Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend,” 126. 105

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but also his will to include the whole of creation in his divine life.28 The thinking of Being in its being-Being and the fate of the history of metaphysics refer to the singularity of the redeeming, kenotically aimed historical incarnational event and thus raise the mysterious becoming man of God to the hermeneutic principle of all reality.29 The identification of God with the destiny of man, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus transfigures, in the Holy Spirit, the story of fallen humanity into the history of redeeming love. The incarnate Son has both similarity to and dissimilarity vis-à-vis the divine father, as Thomas Aquinas explains in Quaestio 4 De Verbo, from Quaestiones disputatae De Veritate.30 For Thomas, the incarnated Verbum Dei is both the same with, and at the same time different from, God the Father. The Verbum is identical with the Father insofar as it is the content of the self-knowledge of the Father, whose image of knowledge it is.31 As the image of the Father, the Verbum Dei is also the mediator between the Creator and creation at the same time: Verbum dicitur esse medium inter patrem et creaturam.32 The fact that the Verbum Dei is the image makes it possible to understand the role of mediator: God, as the recognition of himself, is identical with the Verbum. In this respect, the verbum is the mediating mediation: the mediator between the Creator and the creation, who is both in God and in creation (albeit only secundum similitudinem): Verbum dicitur esse medium inter patrem et creaturam. The verbum is exemplary for creation, and the creation is the image, the exemplum of the verbum: Verbum est 28

This argument is a descendens, being thought here in the light of revelation. In philosophy, we prefer an ascending argument that starts from the ground upward. Cf. Wierciński, Die scholastischen Vorbedingungen der Metaphysik Gustav Siewerths, 58. 29 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Das Geschick oder Das Schicksal der Metaphysik: Die Ermächtigung des Denkens und die Seinsvergessenheit,” in Michael Schulz, ed., Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes (Freiburg i.Br.: Katholische Akademie, 2005), 75-109. 30 Cf. Wierciński, Über die Differenz im Sein, 63-71. 31 De veritate, q. 4 a. 1 ad 6. “Ad sextum dicendum, quod verbum incarnatum habet aliquid simile cum verbo vocis, et aliquid dissimile. Hoc quidem simile est in utroque, ratione cuius unum alteri comparatur: quod sicut vox manifestat verbum interius, ita per carnem manifestatum est verbum aeternum. Sed quantum ad hoc est dissimile: quod ipsa caro assumpta a verbo aeterno, non dicitur verbum, sed ipsa vox quae assumitur ad manifestationem verbi interioris, dicitur verbum; et ideo verbum vocis est aliud a verbo cordis; sed verbum incarnatum est idem quod verbum aeternum, sicut et verbum significatum per vocem, est idem quod verbum cordis.” 32 De veritate, q. 4 a. 1 ad 4. “Ad quartum dicendum, quod medium quod accipitur inter terminus motus, aliquando accipitur secundum aequidistantiam terminorum, aliquando autem non. Sed medium quod est inter agens et patiens, si sit quidem medium, ut instrumentum, quandoque est propinquius primo agenti, quandoque propinquius ultimo patienti; et quandoque se habet secundum aequidistantiam ad utrumque; sicut patet in agente cuius actio ad patiens pervenit pluribus instrumentis. Sed medium quod est forma qua agens agit, semper est propinquius agenti, quia est in ipso secundum veritatem rei, non autem in patiente nisi secundum sui similitudinem. Et hoc modo verbum dicitur esse medium inter patrem et creaturam. Unde non oportet quod aequaliter distet a patre et creatura.” 106

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similitudo creaturae, non quasi imago eius, sed sicut exemplar.33 At the same time, however, the Verbum Dei is also the fullness of the identity of thinking and that which is thought. For with Thomas Aquinas, we can understand the identity of the Father with the Son as the identity of knowing and that which becomes known. However, the incarnated Son also has a non-identity with the Father in his created Being. The incarnate Son of God is, therefore, the identity of identity and non-identity with God-the-Father. Thinking the Difference as a Bridge between the Classical and the Postmodern Primordiality of the Difference The postmodern discourse about the other and otherness is based on an interpretation of the other and otherness that is determined by the difference. We can legitimately speak of having abandoned the logic of identity in favor of the logic of difference. Especially in regard to the Levinasian criticism of ontology, which should serve to open up the dimension of transcendence and the unsuitable ‘others,’34 it should be remembered that in the classical metaphysical conception ‘the other’ does not serve the purpose of overcoming the indeterminacy of the subject but represents an a priori readiness for the other, as the original and insurmountable substantial potentiality for this. The difference in thinking to be unfolded here could also serve as a bridge between the thinking of the metaphysical tradition and its attempts at renewal in neo-Thomism (e.g., in the transcendental Thomism of a Maréchal and Rahner, or the existential Thomism of a Gilson) and Derrida’s35 postmodern thinking, and De veritate, q. 4 a. 4 ad 2. “Ad secundum dicendum,... quod in aeque ordinatis ad invicem, recipimus similitudinis reciprocationem; ut scilicet unum dicatur alteri simile, et e converso. Sed in his quae se habent per modum causae et causati, non invenitur, proprie loquendo, reciprocatio similitudinis: dicimus enim quod imago Herculis similatur Herculi sed non e converso. Unde, quia verbum divinum non est factum ad imitationem creaturae, ut verbum nostrum, sed potius e converso; ideo Anselmus vult quod verbum non sit similitudo creaturae, sed e converso. Si autem largo modo similitudinem accipiamus, sic possumus dicere, quod verbum est similitudo creaturae, non quasi imago eius, sed sicut exemplar; sicut etiam Augustinus dicit, ideas esse rerum similitudines. Nec tamen sequitur quod in verbo non sit summa veritas, quia est immutabile, creaturis existentibus mutabilibus: quia non exigitur ad veritatem verbi similitudo ad rem quae per verbum dicitur, secundum conformitatem naturae, sed secundum repraesentationem, ut in quaestione de scientia Dei dictum est.” 34 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, “Gott und die Philosophie,” in Bernhard Casper, ed., Gott nennen: Phänomenologische Zugänge (Freiburg i.Br.: Karl Alber, 1981), 81-123. 35 Cf. Derrida’s notion of the primordiality of absence and his critique of the metaphysics of presence, which excludes the possibility of transcendence as otherness. See James K.A. Smith, “A Principle of Incarnation in Derrida’s (Theologische?) Jugendschriften: Towards A Confessional Theology,” Modern Theology 18, no. 2 (April 2002): 217-230. The title 33

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perhaps even include how some French phenomenologists such as Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry are understood, but this cannot be further elaborated here. By thinking Being as inseparable from the difference within Being, classical thinking of the difference will not understand itself as in contradiction with the postmodern thinking of différance, without however embracing the vast number of ways of thinking of the différance, and thus subordinating ourselves to the absolutization of subjectivity. In its confrontation with post-metaphysical thinking, thinking the difference has special significance for the hermeneutic conception of tradition, thus acting as a bridge builder between the varied current philosophical positions. The theological confrontation with classical thinking-the-difference and the recently-modern and contemporary-postmodern thinking-the-difference can be understood as an answer to the challenge of opening up to ‘thinking’ openness to God’s transcendental otherness—and thus to the traces of the transcendent—and not just to its becoming a disinterested functionary of God. The Theology of the Word as Logos-Christology The idea of the λόγος inhabiting the human spirit-soul has its origin in the philosophical tradition of the Stoics. Even in Plato, thinking is described as “a conversation the soul holds with itself about the object of its investigation.”36 Having recourse to Plato, Gadamer refers to the close relationship between thinking and its articulation - the outward word as a manifestation of thinking. However, Gadamer does not only emphasize the originality of Plato’s reasoning on the relationship between thinking and speaking, with regard to the maturing of the incarnational idea of verbum interius in early Christianity, but also the dynamic or discursive nature of thinking.37 According to Gadamer, the Platonic conception of

“Derrida’s (Theologische?) Jugendschriften” is an allusion to Hegel’s Theologische Jugendschriften and to Heidegger’s “Natorp Bericht,” which Gadamer named “Heidegger’s theologische Jugendschrift.” Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 76-86. 36 Plato, Theätet, in idem, Sämtliche Dialoge, vol. 4, trans. Otto Appelt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998), 108, (189e4). 37 “To me, the matter presents itself as if the soul, when it thinks, does nothing other than speak, asking itself and answering the question and affirming and denying it. But when proceeding more slowly, or faster, has reached clarity and, having agreed with itself, no longer wavers in its assertions, then, as we call it, it has reached an opinion. I therefore call that which I mean a talking and the opinion itself a judgment, only not against others and not spoken loudly, but softly to oneself.” Plato, Theätet, 108, (1906). Similarly, in Sophistes, Plato understands the inner conversation of the soul with itself as: “Thinking (dianoia) and statement (Logos) are the same; only that the former is a conversation of the soul, inwardly with itself 108

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the linguistic character of thinking reached its definitive completion and empowerment only through the Incarnation of the Verbum Dei. From verbum cordis to verbum mentis: Thinking as the Emergence ut actus ex actu, as processus perfectus de actu in actum Augustine derives his term verbum cordis from the Stoic concept of λόγος ενδιάθετος and gives it a central role in his theology of the Trinity. He translates the Greek word λόγος with the Latin concept of verbum. He interprets the verbum, which he associates with the thinking on creation and Incarnation, as potentia operativa, as a creative outward manifestation of God, which manifests itself both in the Incarnation of the Son of God and in the creation of the world:38 In principio erat verbum. Quod Graece logos dicitur, Latine et rationem et verbum significat. Sed hoc loco melius verbum interpretamur, ut significetur non solum ad patrem respectus, sed ad illa etiam quae per verbum facta sunt operativa potentia. Ratio autem, etsi nihil per illam fiat, recte ratio dicitur.39 Augustine calls the verbum cordis ‘word’ because it is something formable (formabile) and can thus become a word. This formabile, as potentia operativa, expresses the possibility of thinking to express the facts about thinking by becoming language. Augustine also draws attention to the difference between verbum cordis and Verbum Dei, by distinguishing the ‘something formable’ of the human word from the simple everlasting form of the divine Λόγος. Thomas Aquinas, having taken over the Augustinian understanding of verbum cordis, develops the concept further by including the concept emanatio to create the concept verbum mentis. Without becoming specific here on the Aquinas’s teaching on Verbum, we can depict the concept emanatio intelligibilis as being within the horizon of interpretation in which the species intelligibilis represents the starting point and the verbum mentis, the perfection of cognition. and without spoken utterance, which is why it received just this name from us: thinking.” Plato, Sophistes, 119, (263d). 38 The Latin word incarnatio means Incarnation (becoming flesh). Yet the Greek word used in the context of incarnational thought is ενανθρωπήσαντα or ενανθρώπισης, Incarnation (becoming a human being). Here ανθρωπος means a human being in differentiation to nonhumans. In Patristics and in Orthodox liturgy, the terms σεσαρκωμένος (incarnate) or σεσωματωμένος (flesh) are also used. 39 Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, 63 (PL 44). Schindler points to the shift in emphasis between verbum and sermo, but not to the opposition between the two terms. Cf. Alfred Schindler, Wort und Analogie in Augustinus Trinitätslehre (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1965), 116-117. 109

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In Gadamer’s view on the hermeneutics of the word, thinking is presented as an emergence ut actus ex actu, as processus perfectus de actu in actum,40 following the occurrence-character of the inner word in Thomas’s theology of the Trinity: The process and emergence of thinking is no process of change (motus), insofar as it is not a transition from potency to act, but an emergence ut actus ex actu: the word is not first formed after cognition has taken place, that is - Scholastically speaking - after the intellect has been fully informed by the species, but it is the completion of knowledge itself. In that respect, the word is a happening that is simultaneous with this formation of the intellect (formatio).41 The inner unity of thinking and saying corresponds to the trinitarian mystery of the Incarnation. The inner word is not formed by a reflexive act. Gadamer explains: He who thinks something, that is, tells himself something, means to say what he thinks, i.e., the matter and principal object. He is therefore directed back to his own thinking when he forms the word... Whoever ‘thinks,’ does not proceed from one thing to another, from thinking to saying something to himself... The thinking that seeks to express itself is not concerned with the mind, but with the matter in hand... It is the intended matter (the species) and the word that belong together most closely.42 Thus, thinking is related to the matter or thing, and happens via the inner word, via the spontaneously generated concept of understanding. When we speak, we give voice to the word that is in our mind: The inner word, in expressing our thinking, thus reflects the finitude of our discursive mind, as it were. Because our intellect does not encompass what it knows in one overall thinking glance, it must first deduce from the mind

Thomas Aquinas, De natura verbi intellectus: “Prima autem actio eius per speciem est formatio sui obiecti, quo formato intelligit, simul tamen tempore ipse format, et formatum est, et simul intelligit, quia ista non sunt motus de potentia ad actum, quia iam factus est intellectus in actu per speciem, sed est processus perfectus de actu in actum, ubi non requitur aliqua species motus.” 41 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1, 427-428. More about the hermeneutics of the word in Thomas Bettendorf, Hermeneutik und Dialog. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Denken Hans-Georg Gadamers (Frankfurt a.M.: 1984), 186-195. 42 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1, 430. 110 40

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what it is thinking and place it before itself, like when one has an inner debate with oneself. In this sense, all thinking is a telling-oneself.43 In this inner dialogue, which Gadamer distinguishes from the Platonic conversation of the soul with itself, the word for ‘thinking’ is neither Greek nor Latin; it does not belong to any particular language.44 Like the Son who emerges from the Father and points back to him, the word is not in possession of itself but refers to its origin.45 Language, Verbum, and Incarnation Gadamer traces the hermeneutic primacy of language back to the medieval theology of the Trinity. The inner word of the mind is connected with thinking in the way the divine Son is connected with the divine Father. The word is not a supernatural mind but an event: it is an emergence of the word in the event of our understanding. In developing his conception of language, Gadamer reaches out beyond the Greek notion of λόγος. For him, the only historical alternative to the forgetfulness of language caused by Greek philosophy is the Christian teaching on the Verbum in the context of the thought of the Incarnation.46 Gadamer finds the decisive implications for his philosophical hermeneutics in theological speculation. In the theology of the Trinity, the relation between thought and speech is thematic. God reveals Himself in His Word and through His Word. Similarly, human thought is realized in language and through language. The unity between thought and verbum interius reflects the unity between God-the-Father and Verbum Dei. For Gadamer, the analogy between Verbum Dei and verbum interius is the key to the claim of his hermeneutics to universality, for 43

Ibid., 426. Augustinus, De trinitate 15, 10, 19 (PL 42: 1071): “Necesse est enim cum verum loquimur, id est, quod scimus loquimur, ex ipsa scientia quam memoria tenemus, nascatur verbum quod ejusmodi sit omnino, cujusmodi est illa scientia de qua nascitur. Formata quippe cogitatio ab ea re quam scimus, verbum est quod in corde dicimus: quod nec graecum est, nec latinum, nec linguae alicujus alterius; sed cum id opus est in eorum quibus loquimur perferre notitiam, aliquod signum quo significetur assumitur.” 45 Augustinus, De trinitate 15, 12, 22 (PL 42: 1075): “Tunc enim est verbum simillimum rei notae, de qua gignitur et imago ejus, quoniam de visione scientiae visio cogitationis exoritur, quod est verbum linere guae nullius; verbum verum de re vera, nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur “; ibid., 15, 15, 25 (PL 42: 1078-1079): “Et tunc fit verum verbum, quando illud quod nos dixi volubili motione jactare, ad id quod scimus pervenit, atque inde formatur, ejus omnimodam similitudinem capiens; ut quomodo res quaeque scitur, sic etiam cogitetur, id est, sine voce, sine vocis cogitatione, quae profecto alicujus linguae est, sic in corde dicatur.” 46 “The uniqueness of the event of salvation leads up the arrival of historical essence into Western thought.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1, 423. 44

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it emphasizes the ubiquity of language.47 The identity of the Father and the Son represents the identity of the one who expresses something with the expression itself. As the Verbum Dei is of the same essence as God, so the inner word is one with thinking. The Word that is with God in the beginning and is identical with God (Jn 1: 14), enters history48 and is thus a model for the occurrence-character of language: In addition, the unity of the word, which interprets itself in a multiplicity of words, makes something visible that is not absorbed in the essential structure of logic and emphasizes the occurrence-nature of language, i.e., the process of forming a concept.49 The notion of the occurrence-character of language does not only overcome the forgetfulness of language; it illuminates the fact of language as being, substantially, an event.50 It was possible only through the event of the incarnation that the occurrence-character in human language could be recognized. The Christian teaching on the Verbum refers to the theology of John’s Gospel.51 In the introduction, John mentions the second person of the Trinity as Λόγος in his relation to God, λόγος ενδιάθετος, as well as in his relation to creation, λόγος προφορικός.52 The analogy of the inner and outer word gains exemplary Cf. Bernd Springer, “Die Bedeutung von Augustinus verbum interius für die Hermeneutik Gadamers,” in idem, Die antiken Grundlagen der neuzeitlichen Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a.M.: 2000), 338-343. 48 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In the beginning it was with God. Everything has become through the Word and without the Word nothing has become what has become.” (Jn 1: 1-3) “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (Jn 1: 14) “He was in the world, and the world became through him, but the world did not recognize him. He came into his possession, but his own did not receive him. But to all who received him, he gave power to become the children of God, to all who believe in his name, not born of the blood, not of the will of the flesh, not of the will of man, but of God.,” (Jn 1: 10-13) “No one has ever seen God. The one and only, who is God and rests at the heart of the Father, he has brought news.” (Jn 1: 18) 49 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1: 431. 50 Cf. Wolfgang Ullrich, Der Garten der Wildnis: Eine Studie zu Martin Heideggers EreignisDenken (Munich: Fink, 1996), and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis: Zu Heideggers Beiträge zur Philosophie (Frankfurt a.M: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994). 51 The Johannine notion of Λόγος follows the direction of the Old Testament wisdom literature of a transition from image to concept and thus reveals not only its Gnostic origin, but also its clear roots in the Old Testament and early Christianity. 52 The original terminology of λόγος ενδιάθετος and λόγος προφορικός is attributed to the philosophical tradition of the Stoics. These are not two different λόγοι, but two aspects of the same λόγος. The mental function of man and his ability to think discursively is described by λόγος ενδιάθετος. But λόγος προφορικός is, instead, the articulated voice, an expression of spiritual energy, an indication of the concretization of the abstract. Cf. Vasilios Stravoravdis, “The Revocation of the World in the Λόγος: The Relationship of λόγος ενδιάθετος and λόγος 112 47

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value in the Christian conception. The miracle of the Incarnation of God consists in that there is no change in the nature of God occasioned by the becoming of the incarnated Son. The original ‘speaking’ of God (Ur-sprechen) is expressed in the Verbum, Filium Dei Unigenitum. In man, and in analogy to Verbum Dei, the inner word leaves the horizon of thinking and yet remains within the horizon of understanding. The verbum interius is the original horizon of understanding, and that is why, in understanding, meaning as such arises and comes to the fore. Language becomes an object of ontology and hermeneutics a universal theory of understanding through the linguistic structure of Being (or Dasein). Philosophical hermeneutics is rooted in the historicity of language and regains itself in temporality as being the horizon of Being (that we are). Just as the Incarnate Verbum Dei remains identical with the second person of the Trinity and yet differs from it, the external word is identical with, and at the same time different from, the inner Word. The Verbum Dei is an event, that is, a ‘word’ that not only describes reality but also creates it. Gadamer emphasizes the occurrence-character of the Verbum as an advance, namely as the advance of Christian thinking over and above Greek thinking.53 For, the Greek λόγος is an eternal and eternally static form. On the contrary, in the midst of the penetration of Christian theology by the Greek thinking of logic something new arises, i.e., the center of language, in which the mediation of the incarnational event first reaches its full potential of truth.54 The emergence of the inner word thus reflects the original affiliation of thinking and speaking and is an image of the relationship between the Father and the Son.55 The talk of Jesus Christ as Son of God, which describes the equality in essence as well as the diversity between God the Father and Jesus Christ, makes use of an analogy that is adopted from the human domain. The clarification of the Fatherπροφορικός among the Stoics and Merlau-Ponty,” Phenomenological Investigations (2003): 171-187. 53 “That the word is a process in which the unity of what is meant reaches its perfect expression—as is thought in the speculations about Verbum—means something new in the Platonic dialectic of the one and the many.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1, 438. 54 Ibid., 432. In the same section Gadamer praises the overcoming of the Neoplatonic emanation theory of Cusanus in his De docta ignorantia: “The Cusan overcame the Emanatist schemata at the crucial point. He actually plays off the Christian doctrine of the verbum against them. For him the Word is no being other than the mind, no diminished or weakened appearance of it. To know that, makes for the superiority of the Christian philosopher over the Platonists.” Ibid., 439. 55 The decisive importance of the Christian teaching on the Verbum is the clear reference to the character of the image, for human existence. Man receives the enlightenment of his existence as a creature through the Incarnation of the Verbum Dei. 113

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Son relationship, especially in relation to the equality, in essence, reaches Christology, with its interpretation of the Biblical tradition of the image of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, through the concept ‘Word of God.’56 By referring to the mystery of the Incarnation, Verbum Dei inspires human thinking to reconsider the identity and the diversity of the person as it affects God-the-Father and God-theSon.57 For this, we turn to the teaching on Verbum as being helpful here: The inner word of the mind is essentially the same as thinking, as much as is God’s Son with God-the-Father... The mystery of the Trinity is reflected in the wonder of language, in that the word, which is true because it says how the thing is, is nothing in itself, and does not wish to be anything in itself: nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur. It has its Being in its manifestation.58 Here we have the selflessly manifesting function of the true word being compared with the relation of the divine Son vis-à-vis the divine Father. Moreover, the word is consubstantial with thinking, as is the Son with the Father. When Gadamer speaks of the wonders of the word’s utterance in the vox (the live voice)—the miracle of language—he does not emphasize that the word becomes flesh and escapes into external Being, but that what emerges and expresses itself in the utterance has always already been the Word. That the Word is with God, and in fact from eternity, that is the doctrine of the Church which was victorious when she defended herself against subordinationism, and which also allows for the problem of language to enter into the very heart of thinking.59 When we think a word, we are not referring to thinking itself, but to the thing, to the matter that has to be thought. The verbum interius is, as Gadamer emphasizes, the well thought out matter or state of affairs. Therefore, the inner word is certainly not related to any particular language, and it does not at all have the character of producing words from out of the The term ‘word’ shows itself to be central to the interpretation of the divine sonship of Christ and thus as the hermeneutic principle by which reality is interpreted and understood as creation. In accordance with the understanding of the divine inner intelligere, in which God recognizes himself and that which is other than he as non-God, the Verbum Dei is not only the expression of the Father, but also of creation. 57 Cf. Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi, 230-231. 58 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, GW1, 425. 59 Ibid., 424. Together with the rejection of subordinationism, the direct reference to the utterance of the ‘word’ also fell into oblivion. This shows up the importance of hermeneutics for Christian dogmatics, the need to rethink one’s own original premises and thus to re-devote oneself to the mystery of language in the teaching on the Verbum. “And if the direct reference to the utterance, even to the mention of the ‘word,’ is in the end thrown out in Christian dogmatics—together with the act of rejecting subordinationism—then it becomes truly necessary, precisely because of this decision, to re-examine afresh the mystery of language and its philosophical connection with thinking.” Ibid., 424. 114 56

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memory: it is the matter, or state of affairs, that has been thought through to the end (forma excogitata).60 The word is therefore not the expression of the human mind reflecting itself, but similitudo rei: that which is being expressed in language had long been a word before it is being spoken. The inner word expresses the thing that was thought. Thus, the word is not depleted when being used in spoken language. What is left unsaid—the internally abiding word, is indispensable to the word that is spoken, just as the divine word mediates between the divine and the human. Gadamer’s notion of the word understands the word as the completed end result of understanding. As such, the spoken word is never the last word, since thinking goes on and on. In addition, according to Gadamer, the occurrence-nature of language allows one to think the finite nature of existence (Dasein) in relation to divine infinity. “Christology becomes the forerunner of a new anthropology that mediates between the mind of man in its finiteness and divine infinity in a new way.”61 Gadamer dis- and uncovers the insight into the linguistic nature of thinking in the Christian concept of Incarnation, that is, into the constitutive meaning of the inner word for human thinking. This exemplary recovery of Christian theology for the purposes of serving what philosophy needs, brings out again the universal significance of Christian incarnational and λόγος theology, something that Walter Kasper has expressed as follows: The Christology of the Logos can make it understandable that we have, in Jesus Christ and at one and the same time, a revelation of God’s innermost essence as well as the ultimate reason for, and meaning of, all reality. It makes clear that Jesus Christ is the head of all creation, and that in him as the one Word of the Father, all reality has its say and finds its deepest meaning. Only those who know Jesus Christ ultimately understand the human being and the world.62 Kenotic Incarnational Thinking as the Empowerment of Thinking the Difference The highly philosophical Christology of the Λόγος of traditional theological thinking requires a complement and a deepening by means of the biblical theology of the Word. The biblical notion of the Incarnation as the ‘becoming flesh’ of the 60

Ibid., 426. Ibid., 432. “It is impossible to quarrel with the extent, the depth, and the consistency of this classical theology of the ‘word.’ It is well founded in Scripture and tradition, and it is an inestimable aid for a deeper understanding of Revelation, its inner context, and its correspondence with human knowledge.” Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi, 234. 62 Ibid., 234. 61

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Son points to the decrepitude and mortality of man. It is no coincidence that the expression used for the Incarnation of the eternal Word, σαρκωσις (becoming flesh), was later—when confronted with Hellenism—largely replaced by the concept of the Incarnation as ‘becoming man,’ so as to emphasize the incarnational assumption, by Jesus Christ, of the whole of human existence (mind, soul and matter). Thus, the Christology of the Λόγος should now be supplemented by a Christology of the kenosis. For the cross, from the point of view of a Christology of the kenosis, is not only the consequence of the appearance of Jesus on earth but the aim of his Incarnation from the very outset. The cross is therefore not something added to the life of Jesus but the purpose of his life, to which purpose all life’s associated moments are ultimately ordered. Thus the starting point for any Christological reflection should not be the inner divine generation of the Son by the Father, conceived according to the analogy of the production of the spiritual Word, but the giving-away of the Son by the Father and the Son’s self-giving to the Father and for the many.63 If we see the central hermeneutic task of systematic Christology in a constructive tension between Christian tradition and interpretation, that is, in the hermeneutic appropriation of the biblical foundations and even the authentic belief traditions that go beyond those foundations, then we must take up the idea of the self-giving relinquishment—the kenosis—of God in the Incarnation, think it through further, and try to deepen it. Our task lies in providing a hermeneutic analysis and interpretation of the traditional faith in the Son of God, who became man and took on Jewish flesh, which stands up and is good enough for our time. Together with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology of the cross, which he connects to drama, we can see the atoning death of Christ for the salvation of all human beings as the soteriological center of the history of God with us humans, as the theodrama, and at the same time, see it as an expression of the inner freedom of the Son’s eternal self-giving to the Father within God, out of bottomless love (passio caritatis). With Paul (Phil 2: 6-8), von Balthazar combines the idea of the self-giving relinquishment of the Son - as revealed to us (κένωσις), and the idea of his self-giving - in the flesh, with the cross, by which “God made him … to be sin for us.” (2 Cor 5: 21)64 Therefore, the incarnational self-renunciation can be understood as the principle of God’s self-communication, self-distinguishing, and self-limiting, for 63

Ibid., 235. Von Balthasar speaks of the original kenosis, a separation within God himself: “That God (as Father) can give away his deity in such a way, that God (as Son) does not merely receive it as a loan but possesses it as ‘being of the same essence and essentially equal,’ is such an incredible and unsurpassable ‘separation’ of God from himself, that every separation made possible (by this one!), and be it the darkest and most bitter separation, can only happen within this one.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik III: Die Handlung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980), 302. 116 64

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the inner-trinitarian love is the condition for the possibility of being Three Persons and the confirmation of the difference between the divine persons. Understanding the nature of the Trinity as the outgoing movement of self-giving love shared out equally to one another is fundamental for the theology of the divine Word.65 God’s almighty love is definitively revealed in the way he acts in the life of Jesus. The story of the faithfulness of the Father to the Son in the Holy Spirit, full of suffering though it is, refers us to the divine love as the convergence of meaning for the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection. In this convergence, and only then, the inner-trinitarian love becomes perfect through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. In becoming man, God has divested himself right into the deepest depths of human experience, thereby revealing his love for man even where man feels abandoned by God. Kenotic incarnational thinking, therefore, leads to a pneumatological understanding of both the reality of God and his creation. According to Holy Scripture, the eschatological transformation and transfiguration of the world is the work of the divine Spirit. Moreover, because the Holy Spirit is, in the trinitarian sense, the reconciliation of the difference between the loving Divine Persons, this love story does not come to a halt with the one or with the other but is resolved solely in the relationship of each to each other. Love is no mere sacrifice offered by lovers to those who are beloved. Rather, it is primarily and first of all a kind of surrender to someone other, such that it encapsulates a life-giving relationship to one another. Ultimately, it is not about one of those that are affected gaining the upper hand in the course of loving, but that those who will love each other can find one another. Openness in love means to be vulnerable to being hurt quite easily. We can treat this as a concept by saying: To love means to make ourselves vulnerable. God proved this to us in an exemplary way in the death of his only Son. The encompassing incomprehensibility of the mystery of God’s love lets us comprehend God as the fulfilling and executing will to emptiness, which he himself can fill and which goes beyond physical death: Love signifies a unity that does not make the other non-functional but simply accepts and affirms him/her in their otherness and thus installs him/her in their true freedom. Love, which is not giving ‘something’ to the other, but him/herself, means, in that very self-communication, the distinction and limitation of the self at the same time. The lover has to hold back because it is not all about themselves, but about the other. Even more, the lover allows the other to draw them into a relationship; he/she in effect become vulnerable in their love. That is how love and suffering belong together. The suffering of love is nevertheless not just a passive way of beingaffected, but an active way of allowing it to come in. And because God is 65

Cf. Richard of St Victor, De Trinitate, 266f. 117

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love, he can suffer and reveal his divinity in that very suffering. Thus, the self-emptying through the cross does not signify the de-divinization of God, but His eschatological glorification. The eternal inner-divine distinction of father and son is the transcendental theological condition of the possibility of God’s self-emptying in the Incarnation and on the cross. That is more than a more or less interesting speculation; this statement states, after all, that there is a space for man with God from eternity, space too for real sympathy with the suffering of human beings. The Christian God, i.e, the God as Jesus Christ thinks him, is thus not an apathetic God, but one who, in the true sense of the word, is a sympathetic God who suffers with man.66 Kenotic incarnational thinking leads to a pneumatological appreciation of reality: The eschatological transformation and transfiguration of the world is, according to Scripture, the work of the Spirit of God. Because he is, according to the theological tradition, the reconciliation of the difference between the lover and the beloved, between Father and Son; he is also—and in his earthly work too—the might of the eschatological transfiguration and reconciliation of the world.67 The pneumatological and thus also the theologico-trinitarian element of incarnational thinking, therefore, substantially deepens the understanding of the historical event of the Incarnation. The incarnate Word of God (who became flesh) is the proclaimer and bearer of the definitive history of salvation and the full disclosure of God so that humans will be able to gain access to the necessary knowledge about God and the full love community with God. For it is crucial to our relationship with God that Christ, as a human being, is the one true mediator between us and the one God (and Father). (1 Tim 2: 5) Kenotic incarnational thinking is an empowerment for thinking the difference, not in the sense of thinking in terms of mastery or superiority—as was the rule within the metaphysical tradition as expressed in the Christian West—but rather an ability to understand the uniqueness of Christ as God’s ultimate selfrevelation and self-emptying and thus as an historical necessity. Here, mastering the difference in thinking does not mean exercising control over thinking. It is not about the kind of empowerment for thinking that would be like the art of domination exercised over the mode of thinking that was shaped in the age of technology (in the sense of Heidegger’s distinction between calculating and contemplative thinking), but rather, it is about a mode of thinking that is made possible through the original difference within God and comes to us from God.

66

Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi, 244. Ibid., 245. 118 67

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In this sense, kenotic incarnational thinking must be understood as empowerment for thinking the difference, because it opens up to human thinking the primal possibility of thinking the difference within God himself, and thus is the powerful potential key to thinking the difference altogether. Incarnational thinking, when seen as the highest instance of man’s completion in essence once and for all, enables us to have a concept of thinking a human reality that reveals the essence of man by means of God’s total self-giving and ‘giving away’ by self-emptying. Kenotic incarnational thinking draws us a picture of philanthropic theology, which brings us closer to a “sympathetic” God as revealed in the incarnate God (and not a God who does ‘not laugh,’ as in Różewicz’s poem), closer too from the experience of παρουσία, and who also is the definitive answer to the question of theodicy.68 Human being’s questions (to God) are thus situated in the very center of faith. Through God’s speaking to man, and thus making-himself-approachableby-man, God shows himself to be, not a god of speculative abstractions but a God who freely manifests himself to a historical human being in historical circumstances as divine mediator. The pneumatological approach to incarnational thinking enables faith to be understood as the light that (not only) will not get out of (or ignore) questions as if they were not being asked, but even leads them on toward the very abyss where a human being can engage with God as one who emptied himself. Here we would have to admit that the suffering of the divine Λόγος goes beyond the purely existential consolation of man in his suffering and will therefore only achieve a full and comprehensive significance in its redeeming and liberating function as the way of Christ—and thus also our human way—to the resurrection. Reception and Interpretation as the Task of a Theology in the Service of Faith The crucial statement in the Nicene Creed (at the First Council of Nicaea), which is based on the symbol of baptism, uses Biblical formulations in an updating interpretation; it was supposed to provide an answer to the issues raised by the teachings of Arius and thus preserve the endangered unity of the Church: We believe... in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only born begotten of the Father, that is, of the essence of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not created, consubstantial (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father, through whom all things were created that

68

Ibid., 244. 119

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are in heaven and on earth, who came down for us men and for our salvation, and became flesh and man.69 The Council’s decision ad hoc was only supposed to define the primary direction of the faith, with the help of the philosophical term ὁμοούσιος, and at the same time provide new impulses for any subsequent theological reflection. “Therefore, the Council was not even interested in clarifying, there and then, how this one nature of God-the-Father and God-the-Son would relate to the distinction and difference between the two. In Nicaea, we have a resolution ad hoc - as happens with most Council decisions. The clarification of the implication of such a statement is left open for the theologians to sort out and interpret, following the Council.”70 Even though the teaching decisions of the Council on the finality and completeness of Revelation in the mystery of the Incarnate Son of God keep within the parameters of Biblical statements, the decisive clarification of the fundamental question and factual issue—the ontological status of the person of Jesus Christ— is addressed and taken up in the language of philosophy, notably by the non-Biblical concept ὁμοούσιος. With this, the Council consciously made use of, and went for, a non-theological tradition and thus introduced the metaphysical thinking on essence into the dogmatic language of the Church and its theology. The inclusion of the philosophical way of speaking and thinking in theology led to the critical phase of de-eschatologizing Christianity as a precondition for, and consequence of, its Hellenization, that is to say, a transition from the primarily eschatological thinking of the theology of the earliest Christians—based on Scripture, hence eschatological, yet historically salvation-oriented—and the primarily speculativeabstract thinking of the later Christian theology. Therefore, it is exceptionally important to take note of the kenotic character of many Biblical utterances on the Incarnation, in order to bring out and contrast the Biblical image of a God who is sympathetic to man to the point of suffering for man with the purely philosophical understanding of a God who is sorrowless and incapable of suffering. 69

Cf. the solemn statements made at the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon: Concilium Nicaenum I solemniter proclamavit suam fidem in “Iesum Christum, Filium Dei natum ex Patre unigenitum, hoc est de substantia Patris, Deum ex Deo, lumen ex lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, natum, non factum, unius substantiae cum Patre: per quem omnia facta sunt, quae in caelo et in terra; qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit, incarnatus est et homo factus est, et passus est, et resurrexit tertia die, et ascendit in caelos, venturus iudicare vivos et mortuos.” (Nicene Creed, DH 125). Concilium Chalcedonense professum est se “unum eundemque confiteri Filium Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum... eundem perfectum in deitate, eundem perfectum in humanitate, Deum vere et hominem vere... consubstantialem Patri secundum deitatem et consubstantialem nobis eundem secundum humanitatem... ante saecula quidem de Patre genitum secundum deitatem, in novissimis autem diebus eundem propter nos et propter nostram salutem ex Maria virgine Dei genetrice secundum humanitatem.” (Creed of Chalcedon, DH 301) 70 Kasper, Der Gott Jesu Christi, 227-228. 120

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The mutual relationship between Father and Son lies at the center of the Council’s attention. Hence the emphasis on the tight connection between Father and Son, which expresses their similarity in essence (μούσιος), is of crucial importance.71 Christ is placed on the side of God as begotten, and not on the side of the creatures as created. The Council of Nicaea deliberately left the detailed distinction between the divine persons from each other to the further theological interpretation based on the ecclesiastical tradition. In that way, this Council also determined, in essence, the direction of the theological reflection that followed it. In theology, it should not primarily be about the clarification of philosophical premises used in theological statements, even though their understanding is of great importance to Christian theology. Rather, the Council clearly showed that the soteriological element must always be at the center of the Christian faith and its proclamation. God did not call us to be His scientific assistants and spokesmen, He made us to be His sons and daughters. (Rom 8: 15)72 Tradition and interpretation are essentially to be understood as a service to be given to the faith, because their object is not primarily about a merely intellectual confrontation with different traditions for the sole purpose of speculation, and neither is it about just clarifying one’s own understanding. Thus, it is a service given to faith, to demonstrate theologically that the post-Easter developments of the proclamation of the faith have their roots in the Biblical faith in Jesus, the incarnate God. In giving this service, we can legitimately speak of interaction between Christian tradition and interpretation, as it leads to a creative proclamation of the truths of faith. This is because the interpretation of the truths of faith is found in the interaction between the lived truths of the faith and the challenges to the faith that come to it from each respective historical situation it encounters. In his divine and human existence, the Incarnate (made flesh) Word of God embodies the perfect encounter between God and man. In his/her self-transcending search for God, a human being finds his/her origin and ‘place of arrival’ in this Word of God. With the Incarnation, we are given a radically new understanding in relation to the extra-Biblical image of God, and in relation to the Old Testament, a radically deepened and widened image of God which in the early Church had, in a most legitimate manner, been compared to the existing philosophical patterns of interpretation. Referring to this, we can speak, with Kasper, of an aggiornamento (updating) relating to that time, “in order to proclaim, with a necessary hermeneutic attempt to do so, the one and only “The ‘new’ statements on essence are not a Hellenization at all, but a Dehellenization of Christianity. Arianism was the illegitimate Hellenization that dissolved Christianity into cosmology and morality. The Council, in contrasting response, wants to record the statements of the New Testament on the Son and to affirm that God himself is involved in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Council must say that Jesus Christ does not belong to the side of the creatures but to the side of God, that he is not made but begotten and one in essence (μοούσιος) with the Father.” Ibid., 227-228. 72 Cf. ibid., 228-229. 71

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valid Christian message in the face of new questions being raised in the language of that time. The supposed Hellenization is thus a sign of incarnational power and spiritual presence of mind.73 The Fullness of the Mystery of Salvation of the Incarnate Word and the Permanent Challenge to Interpretation The Incarnation of Christ is to be understood as the once-and-for-all, and, therefore, the final and eschatological event of the self-revelation and self-communication of God. In his Incarnation, God empties himself to take on something other—i.e., human nature—in order to prove this other to be the Other of himself. The professing Christian is called upon to understand the Incarnation as a historical event in which the Word of God irrevocably enters into history. The Word that was “in the beginning with God” (Jn 1: 18) is the same Word that was “made flesh.” (Jn 1: 14) Belief in the order of salvation constituted by a triune God, whose source and center is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, seeks a deeper understanding of this event. The self-revelation of God in Christ, as the universal and unsurpassable truth brought to our attention by God, requires from the human mind that it would seek, again and again and ever deeper, to assimilate this truth, and therefore never stop at the present state of its attempts at appropriation once reached (ne umquam consistat). Hence the historical Revelation of God in Jesus Christ is a permanent challenge to interpret it ever anew. The actual historical Revelation should, therefore, be understood as a supernatural and cognitive event of the Revelation of the Word. In the midst of the creation story, the divine communication in the history of salvation culminates with the Incarnation of Christ and calls for an unceasing confrontation of each individual person with Christ as being the last word of the παρουσία. This ever new confrontation, which enjoys considerable space for interpretation, means that the understanding of the content of Revelation must be increasingly deepened in that the dogmatic conceptions are taken seriously in their claim to truth and the factual statements substantiated ever more radically, so as to do justice to their increasing development. Theological statements will always be understood afresh in their respective claims to being the truth and will, therefore, continue to be widened (development of dogmas). The task of interpreting dogmatic statements such as the doctrine of the Incarnation will, therefore, consist in the widened explication of its infinite content of meaning and significance, which for us humans is inexhaustible in principle. It is principally about making the faith in the Incarnation understandable for all people of all eras and all cultures. This necessarily includes a creative approach to the tension that exists between the linguistic divergence of religious statements 73

Cf. ibid., 227. 122

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and the functional convergence, which is supportive of the orientation of man in relation to his spiritual well-being, in his respective historico-cultural environment. Concerning the incarnational belief, its universal and absolute claim to being the truth may therefore on no account be abandoned in favor of a purely metaphorical interpretation, or reduced to a particular and merely relative claim to being the truth, as for instance in the case of a pluralistic theology of religion, which, strictly speaking, denies the redeeming exclusivity of the Christ event and reduces it to being on the same footing as many other offers of religious salvation with equal rights to be heard. In contrast, the unsurpassable salvation truth of the Incarnation of God in Jesus can only be accepted within the faith of the Church without shrinking the content of its meaning or putting up barriers against it. Yet this reception is required despite the variety of salvific forms in which the human response to the question of God operates. The appropriate historical understanding and acknowledgement of a healer beyond compare is based upon the premise of the absolute assurance of the grace of God being given to man. It is precisely this God who, in his self-communication, wants to adapt himself to the existing historical and cultural condition of his addressee in such a way that he/she can understand and accept the self-revelation of God, even though his/her reception is linked to a never-ending challenge to change their life. Moreover, the reception of Christ’s message finds its existential fulfillment only in this fundamental willingness to change one’s own life in the sense of being disciples of Christ. The mystery of Christ and the mystery of the Holy Spirit are directly linked to each other from eternity, that is, from before their historical revelation. This close connection allows us to understand the fullness of the revealed mystery of salvation of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit more deeply. The uniqueness of Christ and the truth in the Christian way of salvation are not sufficiently recognizable for the human being just like that, i.e., by the human being’s own natural means and effort. For this, the human being needs the assistance of the Holy Spirit and the interpretive help of the Church’s interpretation. Theological interpretation must always prove its legitimacy by respecting the officially defined statements (dogmas) of the Christian faith and making them available to all in the fullness of their meaning. For the Spirit of God is active and alive also in the ecclesiastical tradition. That is why this tradition is a regulator one cannot do without, as well as an indispensable aid to a deeper understanding of the Christian truths of faith. In our case, the Christian belief in the Incarnation, theological interpretation has to be carried out in accordance with the doctrine that the universal salvific will of the one triune God has been offered to man and has become reality once and for all in the mystery of the Incarnation, the death, and the resurrection of the Son of God. The justification for the content of the faith can only come from— 123

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and the support of the human being in his/her search for God can only become real in—the obedience of faith vis-à-vis the revealed truth of salvation, together with respect for man’s freedom. Accordingly, the task of theological research is to look into the whole of the mystery of Jesus Christ and to consider and appreciate it responsibly in relation to the cultural needs of our time. The uniqueness of the salvific event of the coming of Christ as the incarnate, crucified and risen Son of God, sent by the Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit, requires that Christ himself be the center of, and the aim for, all theological reflection. The call to rethinking the whole of the Christian truths of faith again and again is a challenge, not to shy away from constantly interpreting what has always been known, and beyond that, an indirect plea for an incarnational-kenotic and trinitarian hermeneutics. This is what brings us to a deeper comprehension of the whole richness of God (Cf. Col 2: 9-10), in that the many truths of revelation are discussed within their inner context and as images of the mystery of the Incarnation of God, of which they are all part. The statements found in the Scriptures are explained in service of the belief in the salvific universality of Christ and the light of the tradition and the Church’s magisterium. The task of an incarnational-kenotic and trinitarian hermeneutics today is to receive, to affirm and to understand the divine revelation and its development into theological faith within the context of believed and lived faith, so as to give an account of the hope that fills us Christian-faithful, in a rationally convincing and responsible way, to the humans living at the beginning of the third millennium. This hermeneutics is then the art of interpreting the historical event of the Incarnation and thus, at the same time, an instrument for opening up the possibility of understanding the salvific mystery of the incarnate God to those who are rather skeptical about Christianity or even closed to Christianity, and who are the real addressees of the Christian proclamation. The once-and-for-all revelation of God in the Incarnation of his Son categorically incorporates the uniqueness of this all-embracing divine self-manifestation and self-disclosure. To repeat: A more profound comprehension of the whole fullness of God (Cf. Col 2: 9-10) can develop because the many truths of Revelation, within their inner context, are discussed as forms of the one mystery of God in relation to the mystery of man, thus enabling an analogous comprehension to grow. In the service of our faith in the uniqueness of the plan of salvation of the Incarnate Word and the saving universalism of Christ, the statements of Scripture are explained in the light of general and ecclesiastical tradition. We can emphasize, with Walter Kasper, that the challenge of interpreting resides in the tension between a clarifying conclusion of the debate about faith and a new beginning, which arises from this clarification of the issues and thereby finds its justification and indispensability. In view of the fact that the Nicene Creed,

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faithful to Scripture and Tradition, solved one problem that led to creating others, it is our task today to resolve those new ones on the basis of what was decided in Nicaea. Thus, the dogma of the first general Council already shows us that dogmatic formulations are never merely the clarifying conclusion of a dispute but always contain, at the same time, the beginning of new questions and problems. Precisely because dogmas are true, they require interpretation again and again.74 Tradition and interpretation form a dynamic unity that represents the unifying interpretive principle of incarnational-kenotic and trinitarian hermeneutics. In paraphrasing my doctoral supervisor in Theology, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, I can say that theological hermeneutics is not a game of glass beads giving us an unlimited number of options for our interpretations, but must give an account that is true to the self-communication of God in the flesh that bears the real enough name of Jesus Christ, who is, himself, the name that was revealed to us: “God full of Grace and Truth.” (Jn 1: 12.18) The close belonging together of experience and knowledge is a key feature of theological hermeneutics and starts from the premise that the self-communicating God also reveals the means that make possible his becoming known. This then means that one can never think of the method for theological thinking without also thinking the thing that wants to be understood. Therefore, it is decisively important for theological hermeneutics, that the correspondence of the interpretation and the self-understanding of the self-revealing God be watertight, just as this very revelation is attested by Scripture and the content-related tradition of a Christ-oriented faith community. Hence, the starting point of an incarnationalkenotic and trinitarian hermeneutics has to be the recognition of the reality of God in the concretion of his free self-giving to man, that is, in the incarnation of what is absolute into what is finite by transgressing the limits of logic, through which the Creator—in the Incarnation—has become a part of his creation. The transformative character of this hermeneutics concerns not only the theological state of affairs, which must always be considered anew but also the thinkers and believers in their lifelong quest for spiritual maturity and theological sharpness of thought while sincerely aware of their own inadequacy. Thus, this hermeneutics does not only become the important and critical art of interpreting the uniqueness of the historical Incarnation but also and beyond those limits, a reflection that can and does develop the fullness of the mystery of salvation that is offered to us humans through the Incarnate Word. Faith, in its belief, always precedes the reflection on, and the linguistic version of, the Incarnation event. For, only the belief in the historicity of the Incarnate Word, which enlightens the believer through the Christian revelation, that is, the belief in the Christ event, only this justifies the profession of faith in the Word 74

Ibid., 229. 125

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made flesh which has always lived within God. The interpretation of the historical event is also only justified by faith in it because otherwise, the event would just be—underivable and contingent in history—an accidental moment in a previously developed idea that needs to be interpreted. The prehistoric existence of Jesus (His pre-existence) is the hermeneutic place from which the Christ event must be interpreted, for the linguistic and intellectual expression of the mystery of salvation requires an interpretation that communicates the incarnational event of salvation and makes it understandable and recognizable in the mode that is used by communication and its modern means of talking about itself. The task of a hermeneutics understood in this way is, above all, to call attention to this self-interpretive redemption-historical event, which testifies to Jesus’ identity with the God who, in history, manifested himself in him as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this respect, the Incarnation of God as the original event of Christology is already the starting point for any theological hermeneutics and must be understood as the art of incarnational and trinitarian interpretation. Since the redeeming-historical self-revelation of God proves to be the revelation of the Trinity, the eschatological salvation that is God Himself has always been and is always to be understood in this Christological-Trinitarian perspective. Thus every argument about a “progressive Christian constriction of the perspective” is already refuted,75 because Christ, as the historical self-communication of God is not only the center of world history but also an absolute reference to God the Father, who—in the history of redemption—presents himself as God the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Giver-of-Life.

75

In a critical commentary on John Hick’s, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1993), John Milbank presents a Christianity “that is not based on a ‘Christocentric fixation’ but on a ‘social project’”: “Very little is given in Myth to the idea that religions can be considered as social projects as well as worldviews. This is particularly apparent in the assumption… that Christian uniqueness resides essentially in its Christocentric claims.... [What is] wrong with the Christocentric fixation is that it implies that Christological claims are only to do with the fetishization of the particular, rather than with the very constitution of the Christian mode of universality and the Christian social project. Yet the gospels are not actually all that much concerned with Jesus as an individual, but rather present him as exemplifying perfect humanity, perfect sonship, and through this exemplification making a later repetition of this sonship possible in the church.” John Milbank, “The End of Dialogue,” in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York: Orbis, 1990), 179.

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2. 1. 3. Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation An increasing number of contemporary philosophers engage with religion in general, and with Christianity more specifically. The turn to the religious in Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Badiou, Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, René Girard, Slavoj Žižek, and Gianni Vattimo happens from within their own thinking and is not very much concerned with any institutional dogmatic position of any particular religious denomination. Empowered by Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, and particularly by Heidegger’s attempt to overcome onto-theology, the search for a post-metaphysical God, a God who is wholly other, became the significant task of contemporary, primarily continental philosophical reflection. This turn to the religious happens not necessarily so much because of the predominant interest in religion as such, but because dealing with religious phenomena brings the thinkers to the limits of their own thinking or their personal beliefs and religious commitments. What is particularly striking, however, is the reoccurrence of Christological matter.1 Thematizing the uniqueness of Christianity, especially the event of Incarnation, helps us to turn to the essential question of the limits of philosophy, and specifically the limits of phenomenological thinking. The question to be addressed focuses on the “why” of the limits. Are we at the limits of the potential of human thinking, of the phenomenological description of that which wants to be shown as it is, or it is a limit that belongs to the phenomenon itself and its unique way of letting itself be seen and caught in linguistic description? Language, Ambiguity, and the Task of Interpretation Philosophically striking is the relationship between transcendence and the event (Ereignis) of the Incarnation. Incarnation allows us to see the face of God in Christ, God in human flesh as imago Dei. This seeing happens through the Word; it is a lingual recognition of the face of the Father in the face of the Word, who became man. This lingual recognition happens prior to any expression in a particular language. In Scripture, God presents himself in Christ in a language, which is also our human language. We can say that Christ’s Incarnation is a way of achieving a poetic condensation (Ver-dichtung) of God in his Word, i.e., the loving re-velation of himself. Unlike in any other human ritual, for instance during 1

Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (London: T&T Clark International, 2008). 127

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the marriage ceremony, when the face of the bride is unveiled by the priest (velatio nuptialis), God himself performs the unveiling of his own face. Incarnation is a divine con-descension and con-densation. It is as much a con-densation (Ver-dichtung) as a con-descension, Herablassung Gottes (also in the sense of the self-abasement or self-emptying which is implied in the term κένωσις, Erniedrigung). The Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, expresses the lingual character of God’s self-manifestation: In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remains intact, the marvelous “condescension” of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, “that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature.” For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.2 The word of Scripture is here compared to the incarnated Word, and the Scriptures to the Incarnation of Christ. This analogy between Christ, who is fully human, however without sin, and the Scriptures, also fully human and within the confines of language, history, and culture, stresses the divine will to express the infinite within the confines of finitude. This does not hinder God from being fully divine in Christ and yet fully human. Consequently, Scripture as the lingual revelation of the triune God lets us see him as he is: God as the lingual being. The event of Incarnation is carefully presented by the New Testament authors with the linguistic sensitivity required by this mysterious phenomenon. It seems that the Biblical authors were fully aware of their role as “mediators” between the human and the divine and that they understood their own linguistic expression of divine mysteries as an adequate attempt to let the divine being become expressed and seen by fellow human beings. Saying and seeing comprise their effort in dealing with phenomena that bring the human mind to the limits of the imagination and understanding which can in fact be put into words. When St Paul says, “when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman” (Gal 4: 4), and also “for what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8: 3), he accentuates the limits and limitedness of human language in dealing with divine mysteries. This language does not reveal whether the Son of God already existed in God and was born of a woman, or came into existence at the point of being 2

The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 13. Cf. Paul XII’s Encyclical Letter, Divino Afflante Spiritu, 37. See also James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980).

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born of a woman.3 Jn 1: 6 says, “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.” This sending forth of John from God does not imply that John had a preexistent life in God, although the writer uses similar language as found in Gal 4: 4. However, if Paul’s intention would have been just to stress the sending of Jesus like John the Baptist or other prophets, there would have been no need to add that Jesus was born of a woman. The linguistic similarity can be seen, rather, in Gal 4: 6, when Paul speaks of the Spirit of Jesus sent into our hearts. Paul uses the same verb ἐξαπέστειλεv, which may suggest that the Spirit was the Spirit before God sent him. Similarly, the Son was the Son before God sent him.4 In fact, the ambiguity residing in many passages of the Scripture calls for interpretation. Moreover, as Ricoeur reminds us, even though they can be interpreted in different ways, not every interpretation is equal.5 Thomas Aquinas makes us aware that “in Scriptura autem divina traduntur nobis per modum quo homines solent uti”: “In Scripture divine things are presented to us in the manner which is in common use amongst men.”6 The canonical approach to Scripture calls for the theological interpretation within the whole context of the Bible. The expression coined by Aquinas, “the divine economy of scripture,” practically means the attention to the uniqueness of and unity within Scripture. For him, “officium est enim boni interpretis non considerare verba, sed sensum,” “the duty of every good interpreter is to contemplate not the words, but the sense of the words.”7 It is truly unfortunate that some of the most recent theological approaches, particularly with regard to the re-translation of the liturgical texts of the

However, it is not difficult to find the notion of Christ’s preexistence throughout Paul’s letters, Phil 2: 6-8; Col 1: 15-18; 1 Cor 8: 6; 10: 9; 2 Cor 8: 9. 4 “Does the ‘sending’ of the Son imply his pre-existence? If the Spirit was the Spirit before God sent him, the Son was presumably the Son before God sent him.” Frederick F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 195. 5 “An interpretation must not only be probable, but more probable than another interpretation. There are criteria of relative superiority for resolving this conflict, which can easily be derived from the logic of subjective probability... If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal The text is a limited field of possible constructions. The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism. It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.” Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in idem, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 160. 6 Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura, 1, 4. 7 Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Matthaei lectura, 27. See also Disputed Question on the Union of the Word Incarnate: Quaestio Disputata de Unione Verbi Incarnati http://www4.desales.edu/~philtheo/loughlin/ATP/De_Unione/De_Unione1.html. 3

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Catholic Church aim at the literal translation as if there were a possibility of a literal translation without a serious call for interpretation. In a Letter to the Philadelphians, Ignatius of Antioch speaks of the Scripture as the flesh of Christ: The author takes refuge in the Gospel as the flesh of Jesus (“while I flee to the Gospel as to the flesh of Jesus: πρoσφυγὼν τῷ εύαγγελίῳ ὼς σαρκὶ Ἰησοῦ).8 Other Church Fathers proclaim the analogy between the incarnated Word of God and the words of God expressed in human language, particularly frequently John Chrysostom.9 Origen made a similar comparison: “Just as this spoken word cannot according to its own nature be touched or seen, but when written in a book and, so to speak, become bodily, then indeed is seen and touched, so too is it with the fleshless and bodiless Word of God; according to its divinity it is neither seen nor written, but when it becomes flesh, it is seen and written.”10 To speak about Incarnation means to dwell in the realm of mystery. Several theologians throughout the history of systematic theology critically addressed the enigmatic dogmatic expression of the phenomenon of the Incarnation. They declared the notion of the Word of God joined together in a personal union with Christ’s human nature not only as outdated but unhelpful for understanding essential concepts of classical Christology within a broad Chalcedonian framework.11 It becomes clear that the key issue here is the interpretation of the language in which the phenomenon of the Incarnation is described, discussed, and translated into the article of faith as it found expression in the Council of Nicea’s ontological statement, that “the Son is one in being (oὐσία) with the Father” (ὁμοούσιος). The further affirmation of Christ’s two natures, the divine, and the human, helps to understand that he is a true human being, born of a Virgin Mary (Council of Ephesus). As the Mother of the Incarnated, Θεοτόκος, she is the one who gives birth to God. The Council of Chalcedon clarifies additionally that there are two natures in Christ but only one Person who is divine. The unity between the human and the divine will happens in the will of the Person of the Incarnated God. One of the main questions is the applicability of the language of περίχώρησις (perichoresis—circumincessio—mutual interpenetration from περί —around and χορεύω—to dance) to the unity between Christ’s two natures. Can

8

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Philadelphians, 5. See Mary Healy, “Inspiration and Incarnation: The Christological Analogy and the Hermeneutics of Faith,” Letter & Spirit 2 (2006): 27–41. 10 Origen, Commentary on Matthew (PG 17, 289AB). 11 Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9

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the language of περίχώρησις be an alternative to the classical notion of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties)?12 Another vital issue is the unique status of the human nature of Christ, which needs to be seen in the wider context of the philosophical notion of the person and of nature. It is interesting to see the significant difference between the use of the terms ανὑπόστᾰσις and ενὑπόστᾰσις in order to describe the human nature of Christ.13 Christ’s human nature has no personal existence independent of the Son of God but has its existence only in the person of the Son. The affirmation of the anhypostatic and enhypostatic character of Christ’s human nature connotes a unique mode of relationship to God. Following late Barth, we can say that, while Christ’s humanity is essentially the same as ours, it is a humanity of God. The task of accentuating this notion cannot be shirked, but must also not be undermined: We should not simply fall back on, and repeat, the positions that interpret the difference between the relationship of Christ’s and other human beings’ human nature to God in terms of degree and not essential uniqueness.14 To fall back on this would mean that our humanity is, at least since Christ’s Incarnation, also a divine humanity: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.15 Yet it is clearly God’s wish to make us divine, a task we call θέωσις (divinization, Vergöttlichung, theosis). Through the Incarnation, a human being will not be God but will be divinized (vergöttlicht). Incarnation—Limit and Excess—The Positivity of Limit—Freedom and Dealing with the Confines Incarnation has something to do with enclosure, with the vessel containing Christ’s humanity. The vessel, Gefäß, comes from the German verb fassen, which means “to take hold of, catch, enclose, package, load, dress, even decorate.”16 Latin continere emphasizes the material aspect of holding together and enclosing. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Trinity and Understanding: Hermeneutic Insights,” in Giulio Maspero and Robert Wozniak, ed., Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (New York: Continuum, 2012). 13 Cf. Barth’s defense of the anhypostasis and enhypostatic character of Christ’s human nature in Church Dogmatics IV, 2, 49–50, 52–53, which differs from his earlier position in the previous volumes of his Church Dogmatics. 14 Cf. Cyril, Third Letter to Nestorius, 4. 15 St Irenaeus, Adv. haeres. 3, 19, 1 (PG 7/1, 939). 16 Friedhelm Mennekes S.J., “How Do I Attain Knowledge of Love? Artistic and Mystical Aspects of Devotion,” in Young-Jae Lee, 1111 Schalen, ed. Reinhold Baumstark, Exh. cat. for the exhibition Young-Jae Lee: 1111 Schalen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006). 12

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The Greek σκεὒoς also refers to the metaphorical meaning of the vessel as an image for body and soul. In Biblical tradition, the Torah was seen from a transcendental perspective, to use Rabbi Akiva’s description as “the precious vessel by which the world was created.”17 Moreover, a human being was created as a precious vessel of God. Following the second creation story in Genesis, we can say that the vessel, the outside shell, allows for the preserving of the breath of life: This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth, and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.18 This new creation becomes a living being out of the creative breath of God. A vessel is now filled with life. Alternatively, life is encompassed by the vessel. Moses was not allowed to see the face of God. (Ex 33: 20) What has diametrically changed with the revelation of the Revelation is the fact that the same God, whose face remained hidden to Moses, shows his face to human beings in the Incarnated. Now we can see the face of God in the face of the Son who came down from heaven. Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity remarks on Hölderlin’s motto for his Hyperion “Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est” (“Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine”). Hölderlin refers here to a Latin epitaph used for Ignatius of Loyola and composed by an anonymous Jesuit scholastic: Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est. The human way of thinking God positions him as a consciousness like ours with all its limitations, as someone who can never embrace the whole. For Ratzinger, this Latin maxim summarizes the Christian image of the true greatness of God, for whom nothing is too small: The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the “greatest,” so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and reaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit. At the same time we see here a reversal in value of maximum and

17

Abraham Joshua Herschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, ed. and trans. Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum, 2006), 241. 18 Gn 2: 4-7. 132

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minimum, greatest and smallest, that is typical of the Christian understanding of reality. To him who as spirit bears up and encompasses the universe, a spirit, a man’s heart with its ability to love, is greater than all the milky ways of the universe. Quantitative criteria become irrelevant; other scales become visible, reckoned by which the infinitely small is the truly embracing and truly great.19 We can call the Incarnation a paradigm of divine pedagogy regarding the relationship between the unlimited and the limited, the immortal and the mortal, the almighty and the powerless, the boundless and the bounded. Incarnation is the concretization of God without removing its mysterious aspect. Incarnation and the End of Transcendence In the post-secular era, faith in the personal and transcendent God of Christianity has been increasingly substituted by the belief in the immanent and non-personal spiritual energy. The inner-worldliness and immanence of the divine occupy the mind of many contemporary philosophers, who seem to proclaim loudly the end of God’s transcendence. The event of the Incarnation is perceived, along with the customary reading of Hegel, as the death of God as Father. Thus, it is the end of transcendence. However, to recognize, in the wisdom of the Incarnate, the eternal plan of creation and salvation is to recognize God. In the figure of the Incarnated, God really dwells among human beings. Christ as the only Son of God is truly God, and not merely one who has experienced God in a special way, like other enlightened individuals, who, in the religious sense, do not matter as concrete persons but, rather, for the path they are pointing out. The Incarnation invites us to wonder about the mystery of language and communication. We might quote here Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Perhaps all men, as well as the man of letters, can only be present to the world and others through language; and perhaps in everyone language is the basic function which constructs a life as it constructs a work and which transforms even the problems of our existence into life’s motives.20 19 20

Josef Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 146-147. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 19521960,” in idem, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. John Wild, James Edie, and John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 18, and Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1995), 30. See further Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Bloomington, Ind.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), and 133

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A human being is for another human being a mirror, and all together are a reflection of God’s image, imago Dei. The Incarnated Verbum Dei is for us humans an icon of God, of the Trinity. The reflection regarding the relationship between divine persons takes place above all in language. It is a communicative event. Interpretation is the mode of divine and human being. Thematizing the limits of phenomenology and hermeneutics opens a way of thinking that is impossible within the confines of phenomenology alone. Thinking Incarnation sensitizes phenomenology toward relationality, which is not only the essential dynamics of the innerTrinitarian life of God but sets God in his self-manifestation in Christ’s incarnated life in a relation to the world and human beings. Hermeneutics helps us to avoid any disinterested reading of our intellectual tradition, just so that we can appropriate some useful notions and ideas. Since thinking is never “from the outside” of tradition, our preoccupation with the limits of phenomenology with regard to thinking Incarnation serves as much as an exposition of the philosophical and theological tradition as a development of our own thinking and consciousness of the limits of our thinking. In that regard, the review of the theological positions concerning Incarnation serves not simply as a re-visiting of the archaic dogmatic formula by attempting the simple archeological re-construction of the past with possibly no effect on the faith commitment of contemporary believers, but, is a decisive hermeneutic insight: It serves as a re-vision, which focuses on the vision, inherently inscribed into the very heart of the event of the Incarnation. This vision is a powerful invitation for us to engage with the great things God is doing among his people and to see him, the Incarnated Word of God, as the absolute challenge to our human thinking.

Gary Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981). 134

2. 1. 4. The Inexhaustibility of Understanding: From the verbum interius to the verbum entis The Hermeneutic Primacy of Language and the Universality of Hermeneutics Reaching out for (and to) understanding is done in language, in the process of interpretation.1 Language is the medium for understanding. The very view of language as an intermediary, it enables both our self-understanding and the understanding of the world in which we are. Thus, it reveals the fundamentally linguistic nature of the mediation of all access to oneself and the world. The experience of the world is a lingual experience of understanding; therefore, we can call it a hermeneutic experience.2 Gadamer’s lingually oriented philosophical hermeneutics opens the horizon of mediation to the manifestation of Being and human understanding. The decisive development of his hermeneutics—from the λόγος-oriented understanding of language to the full integration of the incarnation of meaning—can be understood as the transition from Plato to Augustine, from an exclusive concentration on philosophical sources to the discovery of creative intuitions (Einsicht) achieved through theological reflection.3 The ontological relation between Being (das Sein) and existence (das Seiende) is expressed hermeneutically in the relationship between the self-manifestation of Being and the human understanding of Being. The revelation of Being (Entbergung) and understanding (Verstehen) constitute the hermeneutic dimension of the ontological difference (ontologische Differenz). In language, Being unveils itself and appears as ‘possible to be understood’: “Being that can be understood is language: Das Sein das verstanden werden kann ist Sprache.”4 This statement, as Gadamer writes, says that what is, can never be understood completely. Everything that language is, goes beyond what takes the form of a sentence. The understood is what takes the form of language—but it is always taken as something that is taken-in-its-truth (wahrgenommen). It is a hermeneutic dimension, in which Being reveals itself. See Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutics and the Indirect Path to Understanding,” in Edward Fiała, Dariusz Skórczewski, and Andrzej Wierciński, ed., The Task of Interpretation: Hermeneutics, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Studies (Lublin: Catholic University of Lublin, 2009), 11-44. 2 See. James Risser, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (Bloomington, Ind. Indiana University Press), 2012. 3 See Andrzej Wierciński, “Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation,” Analecta Hermeneutica (2012). 4 “Being that can be understood is language,” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 470. 1

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The dialectic of understanding, in which the same is always understood differently (we always understand differently, if we understand at all, wir verstehen immer anders wenn wir überhaupt verstehen),5 stems from the infinite constellation of meanings that characterize human thinking. Language expresses a particular meaning, which at the same time is something different. Speaking is dwelling in the horizon of wholeness, in the totality of meaning (Bedeutungsganzheit). Every linguistic expression is rooted in this wholeness, which embraces all individual expressions and transcends them. Gadamer’s dictum, “Being that can be understood is language” can be interpreted as a participation in this wholeness, in the totality of understanding, but not as linguistic idealism. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics of Being (Sein), thinking (Denken) and language (Sprache) is the unity of Being and thinking (in the sense of “thinking Being,” Seinsdenken) in language. Thinking is not possible outside of language. That which is thought is experienced as language and is expressed in language. Therefore, it not only reveals Being (which itself has a linguistic character) but also binds Being (Sein) with Da-sein. Thinking and language are inextricably bound together. The subject of understanding is always defined by its lingual nature because to be means to be in the language. Is there anything outside of language? Is the unexpressed not language, or does it belong to language, just as the horizon belongs to the object which makes it possible to be? According to Heidegger, the sense of Being in its self-manifestation is not something that lies beyond Dasein, but that which constitutes an understanding of Being in Dasein. Dasein has nothing but itself. Because history and language form Dasein, Dasein does not exist without history and language. Everything that exists is in language; it has a linguistic character. There is nothing outside of language. If we want to set the boundary of thinking, or rather not so much thinking but expressing thoughts, we do it in order see the boundary of thinking as enabling us to think on both sides of the boundary (hence we should be able to think that which is unthinkable). The boundary can, therefore, only be determined in language. That which will be on the other side of the boundary is simply nonsense. We would only be able to really determine the world if we could find ourselves outside of it. However, then, according to the nature of the world, it would stop to be the world for us. Hermeneutic consciousness partakes here only in something that constitutes a general relationship between language and reason. If all understanding remains in the necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation, and if understanding knows no boundaries, then linguistic rendition which experiences this understanding in interpretation must carry infinity (which would be like an overcoming of all limitations). Language is the language of reason itself. Hermeneutics mediates thinking and speaking; it is mediation, fundamentally. Rather like Hermes—the messenger of the gods—who is an intermediary 5

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296.

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between people and gods and transmits their messages, making them understandable to people. The word is mediation in itself; it mediates itself.6 The powerlessness of language—the pain of not being able to express everything—leads us to hermeneutics. Let us recall here Miłosz’s struggle concerning “How to tell you about it? To send you to what chronicles?” from the first of the “Six Lectures in Verse,” and, even more dramatic, as brilliantly expressed in English: “How to tell it all,” with the accent on “all.”7 The subject of mediation is our limited experience in confronting everything that has been said and what we would like to and should have expressed. It is not that we are besieged by a world that we cannot express. We are, however, beings who live within the horizon of the unspeakable. Thus, every new revelation of Being is accompanied by a word. The ideality of meaning, as Gadamer says, is in the word itself. It has a sense in itself. It does not mean that the word anticipates the experience of the world and simply joins the experience, as if from the outside. Experience is not dumb, only to become the object of reflection through being expressed in language. On the contrary, the experience itself looks for words and finds those that are able to express it. We say that we are looking for a word. As Norwid did: Above all your charms You! poetry, and you, expression One will be aloft for eternity: **************** To grant a thing with a suitable word!8 We look for an appropriate word, the word that actually belongs to the ‘thing.’ Then, in this word, the thing appears in the language (kommt zur Sprache).9 The task of hermeneutics is to seek the right word that would befit the thing by expressing it at its most profound level. This never-ending process of finding words is finite in its very nature. Hermeneutic experience mediates between the infinite and the finite and is—as such—the lingual realization (Vollzug) of the human being’s being-in-the-world. This is the mediation in which the divine and the human meet and unite. God reveals himself to the human being in language, and in language can human thinking find its way to God.

See Andrzej Wierciński, Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology: The Imperative to Think the Incommensurable (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2010). 7 Czesław Miłosz, “Six Lectures in Verse,” in The Collected Poems (New York: The Ecco Press, 1988). 8 Cyprian Kamil Norwid, “Generalities.” 9 “In experiences, which we have by using language, it is language that expresses itself.” Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Günther Neske, 1959), 161. 6

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The necessity to go on seeking for new and adventurous ways of mediating between them is rooted in language’s linguistic nature and its powerlessness. Gadamer interprets the boundaries of language positively. Being aware of the historical conditions of being-in-the-world, the boundaries of language lead us to recognize the fundamental temporality of our Being (Temporalität des Daseins), which accentuates the difference between a human being and God. Thrown into the lingual world, thrown into language, we find our own way through language. In each attempt, we also realize that words do not fully convey the complexity and the richness of our experience. The static nature of words is not adequate for capturing temporality (Temporalität) and the complexity of experience, which is open and never finite. As in Miłosz’s “Esse”: “I remained within the vastness of existing things; a sponge that suffers, because it cannot fill with water, a river that suffers because the reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.”10 Such experience not only points to the powerlessness of language but makes us especially sensitive to the unsaid (das Un-gesagte). There is no understanding when we do not take into account the (listening) motivation and intention of the addressee and the context of the utterance. As participatory understanding, lingually mediated understanding depends as much on what is not said as on what cannot be said.11 In conversation (das Gespräch, das wir sind), which is the central and privileged place where hermeneutics happens (Hermeneutik im Vollzug), we engage not only in what is said (das Gesagte), but also in the unsaid (das Un-gesagte).12 The fundamental and common problem of the inadequacy of any expression in language allows Gadamer to develop the thesis of the universality of hermeneutics. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger not only broadens the horizon of understanding, quite poetically, he also revolutionizes the mutual relationship between that which is said and the unsaid: “What is said is poor, what is unsaid abounds in richness: Das Gesagte ist das Dürftige, das Ungesagte erfüllt mit Reichtum.”13 Czesław Miłosz, Esse, idem, Wiersze, vol. II (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1993), 71. See Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein and idem, “Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being and Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity,” in Barbara Weber, Karlfriedrich Herb, Petra Schweitzer, Eva Marsal, Takara Dobashi, eds., Cultural Politics and Identity: The Public Space of Recognition (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 147-174. 11 See Andrzej Wierciński, “Nichts wird vergessen sein: Das Dichtersein und die Wege des Verstehens,” Heinrich-Seuse-Jahrbuch (2008): 121-135. 12 See Andrzej Wierciński, “‘Sprache ist Gespräch’: Gadamer’s Understanding of Language as Conversation,” in idem, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2 011), 37-58. 13 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, ed., Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 249. 10

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For Heidegger, that which is not expressed (das Ungesagte), which perhaps will never be said or written, which does not and will not exist in any form of representation, is an inexhaustible richness of thinking about Being.14 In connection with what is said (das Gesagte), it reveals Being (das Sein) to us, i.e., Being in its being-Being (seiend-Sein). The universality of language and hence the universality of hermeneutics lies in the dialectics of question and answer. This hermeneutic primary source phenomenon (hermeneutisches Ur-phänomen), as Gadamer calls it, means that it is not possible to say anything which would not be understood as an answer to a question. Words refer us to the “dialogue we are” (das Gespräch das wir sind). However, they cannot bring us significantly closer to our experience, because what is said does not exhaust reality. Only what is unsaid makes that which is said a word that can reach us (das Wort, das uns erreichen kann). Speaking rests on previous meanings which were not captured in a conversation, not even in the inner conversation with oneself (soliloquium). This points us toward possible meanings. What is said attains its own life. The Stoics paid attention to the important difference between λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, thought—an ideal or inexpressible word, and λόγος προφορικός—an expressed thought, the uttered word. Hermeneutics, in the Aristotelian perspective, means expression and communication (λόγος προφορικός) of the inner thought (λόγος ἐνδιάθετος). Like for Hermes, who was able to understand and interpret the message of the gods, the task of hermeneutics is both the art of understanding and the art of interpretation. What is thought is contained in λόγος τῆς ψυχῆς. Understanding is rooted in an

14

Ingeniously, this intuition was expressed by Norwid, speaking about the unspeakable freedom of silence, which is not an escape from speaking, but the choice of speechlessness, to remain silent: All over the world, there is One great desire for the Word to become And so that the century would blossom with understanding by what? will it happen ... by scepter? by law? by custom? The word has already gained all its power, From the internal psalmody to speech and the book. It has a song and a parable—a riddle—a proverb— Dialogue—drama—Epos—rules in pronunciation. It has a harangue, and a novel, and finally a Greek romance – Pamphlet and panegyric of the Senate, noble ... Once it has already reached the end of maturity: It felt that there is also the FREEDOM of SILENCE, Not only the Freedom-of-the Word. Cyprian Kamil Norwid, “A Thing About the Freedom of Speech.” 139

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expression of the inner thought. The art of interpretation and the art of understanding texts as an externalization of the inner word express the essence of hermeneutics.15 Hermeneutics has a universal power to attract because every human communication has a linguistic character. Language works for us. The word is not only a testimony to the inner experience of an individual but also an overall constellation of understanding, ἀλήθεια. The Cartesian model—which understands language as flowing from within, as the expression of our inner life through words—is confronted with an understanding of language which speaks itself (die Sprache spricht),16 speaks to us and through us. The language contains in itself the richness of human experience in its historical account. After Novalis, we can say that language cares only about itself (sich um sich selbst bloß bekümmert).17 Revealing itself to us, language invites us to participate in its profound mystery. Since language speaks to us, our fundamental duty is an answer (re-spondeo), giving an answer to the inner voice of Being which addresses us. Searching for language, attuning ourselves to the inexhaustible mystery of Being, requires undivided attention (Aufmerksamkeit) from us, an attention that is directed to that which demands to be thought over. We can be in the truth (in veritate) with regard to language only when we listen to its voice when we experience the manifestation of language within the dialectics of concealment and unconcealment (Dialektik von Verbergen und Entbergen).18 In order to make it possible to have an understanding of Being in language, we must be ready to listen to Being in order to hear its voice (Hören und Horchen). We need to take care of language, as Miłosz says in My Faithful Mother Tongue, so that it can reflect the beauty and mystery of Being.

See Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutic Legacy,” Phainomena 15, no. 55-56 (2006): 243283. 16 Cf. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 191n. Man speaks (spricht) only when he responds (ent-spricht) to language. “It is language which speaks, not the human being.” Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, Ed., Petra Jaeger, GA 10 (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Kostermann, 1997), 161. 17 “Speaking and writing are a harebrained thing; correct speaking is mere wordplay. One really has to take one’s hat off before people’s ridiculous error of thinking they speak for the sake of the matter in hand. None of them knows that what most belongs to language is precisely that it cares for nothing but itself, which is why it is the carrier for such a wonderful and fruitful mystery – that the one who speaks, just for the sake of speaking, he/she is in fact prone to expressing the most gorgeous, most original truths. And that, however, if someone speaks wanting to express something that has specific value, fickle language lets him or her say the most cranky or ludicrous things.” Novalis, “Monolog,” in idem, Schriften, vol. II (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981), 672-673. 18 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Poetry between Concealment and Unconcealment,” Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 14, no. 27 (2005): 173-204. 15

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My Faithful Mother Tongue My faithful mother tongue, I served you. Every night I put bowls with colors in front of you, So that you have a birch and a grasshopper and a bullfinch preserved in my memory. It took many years. You were my homeland because there was no other. I thought you would also be an intermediary between me and good people, even if there were twenty, ten, or not yet born. Now I admit to have doubted. There are moments when it seems that I have wasted my life. Because you are the tongue of the humiliated, The tongue of the unreasonable, hating themselves more than other nations, the tongue of informers, the tongue of the confused, of those who suffer because of their own innocence. But without you, who am I. Only a student somewhere in a distant country, and success, without fear and humiliation. Well, who am I without you. A philosopher like any other. I understand, this is to be my upbringing: individuality deprived of glory. To a sinner in a morality play a red carpet is thrown by the Great Glories, and at the same time a magic lantern throws on canvas images of human and divine anguish. My faithful mother tongue, Maybe it is for me to save you. So I will continue to put bowls with colors in front of you, if possible light and clear, because in misfortune some order or beauty are needed. 141

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Listening to Being is not an esoteric exercise. It can be a daily concern, even with the language one actually speaks; a concern with precision, richness, and the excellence of our intimate relations with language. As those to whom language turns first (An-gesprochene), we know that language needs us as listeners and enables us to be in relation with itself (ent-sprechen). So, I put bowls filled with colors in front of it, for it to have a birch and a grasshopper and a bullfinch preserved in all our memories. The Verbum interius For Gadamer, the universality of hermeneutics is rooted in historical consciousness, language, historicity, and the understanding of philosophy as hermeneutics. The universality of hermeneutics is the universality of lingually mediated experience, an ontological revelation of Being. Indeed, the universality of hermeneutics can only be justified through an understanding of the verbum interius, that is, a conviction (which stems from the reading of St Augustine in light of Heidegger), that linguistic discourse always lags behind what one wants or needs to say, and that we are able to understand that which it said only when it results from an internal speech that lies hidden underneath it.19 Now, because the theological dimension of the debate on the universality of hermeneutics has not yet been taken up, Gadamer’s input and the general awakening of interest in the Verbum—to which he significantly contributed—is even more important than it might be otherwise.20 The Christian teaching on the Verbum refers to the theology of St John’s Gospel. In the Prologue, John calls the Second Person in the Trinity Λόγος: In His relation to God, he is λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, and in his relationship to the creation he is λόγος προφορικός. God’s original speech (Ur-sprechen) finds its expression in Verbum, Filium Dei Unigenitum. According to the analogy to the Verbum Dei, the inner word which is born in human Dasein in the process of human cognition both leaves and remains in understanding. And the Verbum interius is the primordial horizon of underSee Andrzej Wierciński, Philosophizing with Gustav Siewerth: A New German Edition with Facing Translation of “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes”/“Being as Likeness of God,” And A Study, “From Metaphor and Indication to Icon: The Centrality of the Notion of Verbum in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Lonergan, and Gustav Siewerth” (Konstanz: Verlag Gustav Siewerth Gesellschaft, 2005). And again, the genius stanzas of Norwid. “Word and word”: And as with all humanity, and as with a detachedly thoughtful human being, and so it will happen With the word: because, taken separately, what does it mean? Unfaithful sound!—and it can bring to despair; So fragile!—and so untrue to its inner meaning, As if you wanted to recognize the dead after the bell ringing. 20 See Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 123. 19

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standing, in which meaning comes to a realization. The lingual structure of Dasein raises language to the rank of ontology, and hermeneutics raises it to being a universal notion of understanding. In contrast to the timeless universality of metaphysics, philosophical hermeneutics is rooted in the historicity of language: It is the recovery of temporality as the forgotten horizon of ‘Being, which we are’ (das Sein, das wir sind). Like the embodied Verbum Dei that remains identical (identisch) with, but is different from, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, so the external word is identical with, but is also different from, the inner word. The Verbum Dei is an event (das Ereignis), a word that not only describes reality but creates it (dabar Yahweh). Gadamer underlines the processual character of the Verbum. This represents a significant richness in the Christian thought (when compared to the Greek one). The Greek λόγος is static and is an eternal form. As Gadamer writes, “When the Greek idea of logic is penetrated by Christian theology, something new is born: The medium of language, in which the mediation of the Incarnation reaches its full truth.”21 The appearance of the inner word reflects the primordial unity of thought and word (ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen ).22 The internal unity of thinking and speaking to oneself—which corresponds to the Trinitarian mystery of the Incarnation—assumes that the inner word is not formed by reflection.23 A person who thinks something (denkt etwas), says it to him/herself, i.e., he/she understands what he/she thinks (die Sache, die sie denkt). When we think a word, our mind is not directed back to its own thinking, but to the thing (die Sache), to that which is the matter being thought. The Verbum interius is that which is thought over thoroughly (der durchdachte Sachverhalt). The inner word is certainly neither concerned with a particular language, nor has it the character of vaguely imagined words that are retrieved from memory. Rather, it is something that is thought over ‘to the end’ (a form of excogitata). Since a process of thinking to the end is meant here, it is worth emphasizing the processual element in this process. The actus signatus, that which is said, and the actus exercitus, the realization (Vollzug) of that which has been understood, constitute the dynamics of understanding. In the actus exercitus, the word of the inner meaning is fully realized, it goes beyond that which is expressed in words and embraces the application of that which has been said and understood. The meaning is not only communicable through what is said (das Was), but also by that which is expressed Gadamer, Truth and Method, 427. See Wierciński, “Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation.” 22 See Andrzej Wierciński, “Die ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen,” in Andrzej Przyłębski, ed., Das Erbe Gadamers (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2006), 65-83. 23 See Andrzej Wierciński, “Inkarnation als die Ermächtigung des Differenzdenkens: Das Logosverständnis und die permanente Herausforderung zur Interpretation,” in Christian Schaller, Michael Schulz, and Rudolf Voderholzer, ed., Mittler und Befreier: Die christologische Dimension der Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2008), 162-204. 21

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(das Wie), which Heidegger calls ‘formal indication’ (formale Anzeige). The inner word calls for a multiplicity of external words: The Word comes into being while remaining with Itself, it is not a change, a transition from potency to act, but a procession from act to act (ein Hervorgehen ut actus ex actu). In creating the word, the mind is not directed toward its own reflectivity: There is no ‘reflection’ being employed in the creation of the word because the word does not express the mind but the object of thinking (die gedachte Sache). The starting point for the creation of this word is the content that fills the mind. In the inner unity of thinking and speaking, the inner word indicates the direct and spontaneous character of thinking. The word is not the articulation of the human mind which reflects itself, but it is the likeness of things, similitudo rei. That which reveals itself in the language is already the word before it is spoken. The inner word is pre-reflective. It expresses the thing that has been thought over. Our understanding of Being uses the word that reveals Being. Language enables us to see, to think, and to express this revelation of Being. Seeing, thinking, and expressing belong together. This is not a matter of temporal primacy of one over the other. The application of understanding is the realization (Vollzug) of the event of understanding (das Ereignis des Verstehens). For Gadamer, language itself has something speculative about itself as the realization of understanding - as an event (Ereignis) of speech and mediation, of reaching an understanding. Such a rendition is speculative, inasmuch as the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward intentional meaning, oriented toward infinity.24 The word does not exhaust itself in its lingual expression. The unsaid belongs to that which is said. The way Gadamer understands the word goes beyond the signifying function of the word and toward the word as a realization of thinking. As such, it is never the last word, because thinking is always thinking further, there is always something more to think of and to say. The processual character of language enables Gadamer to think of Dasein’s finitude in relation to God’s infinity. Christology prepares the way for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between the human mind in its finitude and the infinity of God. The Verbum mediates between the human and the divine. Heidegger’s insistence on language has initiated a hermeneutic turn in philosophy: To think a notion, it is necessary to rethink the history of the notion, and its history is expressed in language. Therefore, there is no a-historical access to an idea; the idea is essentially historical. Its historicity is the function of its being (seiend-Sein). By adopting the language of negative theology and mystical theology, and forcing language to its limits, Heidegger deconstructed onto-theology. His later hostility toward the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages, after his early fascination with speculative grammar, questions the very possibility of philosophical dialogue with medieval theology. However, Gadamer’s development of 24

See Wierciński, “Gadamer i teologia: Od dzieła sztuki do wiary albo dystans z respektem,” 141-159.

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the verbum interius renews the project that was dear to the young Heidegger and becomes the project of the phenomenological and hermeneutic rehabilitation of medieval theology. Hermeneutics cannot forget that an appreciation of language and rescuing language from oblivion (Sprachvergessenheit) has been achieved through making use of theological intuition instead of ignoring it. Heidegger’s claim that a theist cannot think Being is being questioned by how his own thought has been received by others. Hermeneutics is not only a mediator between a human being and God, but also between philosophy and theology. Philosophical hermeneutics must be (and remain) in dialogue with the theology that underlies the Western tradition and penetrates it. Otherwise, the theological tradition is (and remains) incomprehensible without philosophy. This is not just a historical analysis. The object of hermeneutics, die Sache selbst, is theological. Hermeneutics is not theology, but it must be open to theology if it is to be open to the voices that constitute ‘the tradition that we are.’ In Search of the verbum entis The fundamental linguality of understanding and the actualization (Vollzug) of the historically conditioned consciousness (wirkunsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) in language require a continuous search for the primordial words in which Being is expressed; it is a search for the verbum entis. Language is the reflection of finiteness; it is a mirror of temporality, because every language creates itself and develops more in itself, the more it reveals Being. Language is finite (endlich), not because it supposedly does not include all other languages at once, but simply because it is a language. Language realizes the self- revelation of Being. We speak because we have to speak. Being speaks to us. After each conversation, we remain convinced that there is still much to say. The comprehensive realization of understanding always includes that which is left unsaid and is not fully expressed. To be understood, one must take into account not only that which is expressed but also the infiniteness of that which has not been expressed. All this must somehow be rendered in one. Expressing that which has not yet been said, and that which can still be expressed, testifies to our constant search for language; and not so much within the dimension of the externalization of the inner experience, but in the dimension of the most primordial expression of Being. In this search for Being, the dialogic nature of understanding plays a fundamental role. Being appears in dialogue with oneself (soliloquium), with the Other, and with tradition. It is an incessant conversation that we are.25 The Verbum 25

Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutyka egzystencjalnego skupienia: Wiara jest rozmową, czyli nasza sprawa z Bogiem,” in Michał Staniszewski, ed., Miasto postępu (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Forum Naukowe, 2007), 187-211. 145

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interius is the ground for, and the way of, experiencing Being (modus experiendi). We must rethink the nature of language in light of the understanding of the verbum interius, this understanding then being the source for the claim to universality by hermeneutics (Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik). The interiority of the verbum interius is not spatial. The transition from verbum interius to verbum exterius is not a shift in space, but a procession in time; it is an ecstatic self-transcendence. Limitations that we experience in language do not reflect limitations in the ipsum esse, which, as St John says, is always with the Word, and is what Scholasticism understands as infinity. In some sense, these are the restrictions due to being-in-time. Being manifests itself in language that is also our language, in which our understanding finds its realization. It is the language that makes the infiniteness of the constellations of understanding possible. That which can be said can never be fully exhausted because that which is said is only an answer to the question that precedes it and invites further questions. Conversation, which ‘happens,’ does not allow final conclusions. It would indeed be a poor hermeneutician, who would think he/she may, or must, have the last word. The infiniteness of the possibilities of expression reflects the infinity of Being. There is no particular constellation of words that would exhaustively convey the richness of hermeneutic experience. However, we cannot live other than by continuously looking for a more-embracing form of hermeneutics. So, if possible, we continue to put in front of our faithful mother tongue bowls of light and clear colors. All that, just to find this one word, filled with the pain and joy of our temporality (Temporalität), the one word that is saturated with all the colors of life, the word that could adequately (in Norwid’s sense of adequacy) render our thinking as intended; something that is so dear to us, yet almost completely inaccessible, but concrete, tangible, within reach. Ultimately, this is the sense to be found in living on the earth: Dwelling here (on earth) between the human and the divine.

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2. 2. Thinking Hermeneutically: Opening toward Transcendence as the Imperative of Self-Understanding 2. 2. 1. The Hermeneutics of the Gift: Mutual Interaction Between Philosophy and Theology in Hans Urs von Balthasar

There is only one way of truth like a river, but from this and that side, many streams flow into this river.1 The question of the mutual relations between philosophy and theology has been discussed since the beginning of Christian theological reflection and answered in widely differing ways.2 In a much-quoted text, Tertullian radicalizes the relationship between Greek philosophy, faith, and systematic reflection on the experience and teaching of the Church (θεωρία and πρᾶξῐς): What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What is the unanimity between the Academy and the Church?... Our teaching comes from the school of Solomon, who himself taught that we should seek the Lord in the simplicity of the heart... We do not want an inquisitive disputation since we have Jesus Christ and no penetrating research since we take pleasure in the Gospel. With our faith, we do not long for any further convincing beliefs. For therein lies our supreme belief, that there is nothing beside the Gospel that we should believe in.3 Tertullian’s voice was something of a lone voice. Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and theology made a covenant, as a result of which Christian theology developed within the horizon of Greek philosophy (Platonism): The Christian faith was integrated into the surrounding culture and systematically thought through and

1

Clemens, Stromateis, 1.5. Cf. Lev Sestov, Athens and Jerusalem: Attempt of a religious philosophy. With an essay by Raimundo Panikkar (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1994); Jan Jaroslav Pelikan, What Has Athens To Do with Jerusalem?:Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Otto Kaiser, Zwischen Athen und Jerusalem: Studien zur griechischen und biblischen Theologie, ihrer Eigenart und ihrem Verhältnis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003); Klaus Müller, “Athen versus Jerusalem, via Jena. Neuzeitliche Weichenstellungen im Vernunft-Glaube-Problem,” in Tobias Kampmann und Thomas Schärtl, ed, Der christliche Glaube vor dem Anspruch des Wissens (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2006), 4368. 3 Tertullian, De praescriptione, 7. 2

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passed on in philosophical terms. In a study, Platonism in Christianity,4 Werner Beierwaltes polemicizes against Adolf von Harnack, who had stigmatized the philosophy-friendly decision of the Church Fathers with the slogan: “Hellenization and Secularization of Christianity.” In doing this, Beierwaltes shows to what degree, within the process of the “Hellenization of Christianity,” the concepts of Greek metaphysics had significantly influenced the dogmatization of Christian truth. However, he also proves—in his philosophico-historical analyses—that there are a number of theological approaches (theologumena) which have ‘found themselves’ through philosophical reflection and theoretical form, or have actually gained in their power to persuade, which turned out to be of benefit to the faith. In general, the relationship between theology and philosophy has been intensively discussed throughout the history of theology, with Aquinas playing a special role in this discussion.5 Thomas Aquinas believed that harmony between faith and knowledge was possible, provided a clear distinction was made between philosophy and theology. According to Thomas, philosophy and theology are two autonomous sciences, each with their own objects of knowledge and their own methods, though they are also ordered toward one another.6 By his/her natural light of reason, the human being ascends—via creation—to the knowledge of God, and the divine truth—which is beyond human understanding—descends to us in the Revelation.7 Aquinas distinguishes between philosophy and theology, only to bring them together (in unity) in some form of hendiadys: ἓν διὰ δυοῖν (ἓν — “one,” διὰ— “by,” δυοῖν—“two”: “expressing one, but in two distinct ways”).8 In the twentieth century, Hans Urs von Balthasar creatively rediscovered the theologico-philosophical reflection of the Aquinate and developed it further.9 4

Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus im Christentum (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998). Walter Andreas Euler, “Was hat Athen mit Jerusalem zu tun? Was die Academie mit der Kirche? Das Verhältnis der Theologie zur Philosophie in der Geschichte,” Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 109 (2000): 85-101. 6 Pope John Paul II praised Aquinas in his encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998) under the subtitle “The Lasting Novelty of the Thinking of St Thomas Aquinas,” (no. 43-44). 7 Cf. Summa contra Gentiles IV, c. 1. 8 Cf. Helmut Hoping, Weisheit als Wissen des Ursprungs: Philosophie und Theologie in der “Summa contra gentiles” des Thomas von Aquin (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1997). 9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Thomas und die Charismatik: Kommentar zu Thomas von Aquin, Summa theologica, Quaestiones II/II, 171-182: Besondere Gnadengaben und die zwei Wege menschlichen Lebens (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1996). Cf. James J. Buckley, “Balthasar’s Use of the Theology of Aquinas,” The Thomist 59, No. 4 (1995): 517-545; Henry Donneaud, “Hans Urs von Balthasar contre saint Thomas d’Aquin sur la foi du Christ,” Revue Thomiste 97 (1997): 335-354. Balthasar repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the distinctio realis in Thomas and elevates it, in Herrlichkeit, to being one of the most important philosophical achievements of the Aquinate. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik. vol. III/1: Im Raum der Metaphysik. Part I: Altertum (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1975), 354. Furthermore, Balthasar developed the distinctio realis to a teaching on analogy. He follows Erich Przywara, for whom the teaching on distinctio realis and analogia entis belongs together. Cf. Julio Terán, Dutari, Christentum und Metaphysik: Das 5

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Balthasar’s reception of Aquinas’s understanding of the tension between philosophy and theology is determined by his examination of German Idealism and Heidegger.10 Balthasar made great contributions to the distinction between philosophy and theology by rigorously differentiating between the actual subjects of the two disciplines, thus demonstrating the true relationship between philosophy and theology.11 In order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology according to Balthasar, two ways are possible in principle: One can approach Balthasar’s thoughts from the philosophical sources on which he drew, or from those philosophies, for which he himself later became the source. In my contribution, I will not go into many philosophical issues, though they are important in themselves, such as the details of the interpretations of Thomas and Bonaventure12 or the relationship between Balthasar and Heidegger, which is a

Verhältnis beider nach der Analogielehre Erich Przywaras (München: Berchmanskolleg Verlag, 1973); James V. Zeitz, SJ, “Przywara and von Balthasar on Analogy,” The Thomist 52, No. 3 (1988): 473-498. Although Balthasar did not devote any book solely to analogy, he repeatedly emphasized the fundamental importance of the teaching on analogy: “Analogia entis means—however it may be described in Philosophy—the non-traceability of terms to a generic concept.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik: Die Personen des Spiels, vol. II/2: Die Personen in Christus (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1978), 203. Furthermore, Balthasar distinguishes analogia attributionis, analogia proportionis and analogia proportionalitatis (ibid., 203 note 2) and rejects the analogia proportionis. Cf. Georges de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de l ’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983), 52-57. It can be shown that the distinctio realis provides the philosophical starting point for Balthasar, for thinking the Aquinate through further from the theological point of view. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mein Werk: Durchblicke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990); Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective (Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1995); Angela Franz Franks, “Trinitarian Analogia Entis in Hans Urs von Balthasar,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 533-59. 10 The hermeneutic ideas of the rendition and reiteration of the medieval tradition have been presented in detail in the context of my reinterpretation of the metaphysics of Gustav Siewerth. Cf. Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth’s Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition, especially “Retrieving Medieval Philosophy,” 7-12 and “Interpreting Thomism,” 12-16. 11 Cf. Giovanni Giorgio, “Il rapporto di corrispondenza tra filosofia e teologia nel pensiero di Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Ricerche teologiche 10, no. 1 (1999): 271-296 and Carlo Sini, “Senza filosofia nessuna teologia,” “Solo l’amore è credibile,” Rivista Internazionale di Teologia e Cultura: Communio 120 (1991): 110-115. For a development of the relation of philosophy to theology in the hermeneutic context cf. Jean Grondin, “The New Proximity between Philosophy and Theology,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, 97-101. 12 Luca M. DiGirolamo, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: ‘un interprete del pensiero bonaventuriano,’” Miscellanea francescana 102, No. 1/2 (2002): 143-186. 149

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differentiated one in itself.13 A complex analysis of Balthasar’s view of the relationship between philosophy and theology is also not being offered here: Balthasar starts out from the primacy of theology over philosophy, because it is only possible to give an adequate answer to Revelation, and especially to the self-communication of God in Christ, in theology. Only in Christ, the form of all forms is the theologian able to unlock the trinitarian depth of God for human understanding. So, what I mean by the interaction of philosophy and theology in Balthasar is, on the one hand, the influence of philosophy on the shape of Balthasar’s theology and, on the other hand, the effect his theology has on contemporary philosophy. I will try to show this on the basis of two philosophical figures: Gustav Siewerth, the forgotten German thinker, “The man with the lion brain and the child-like heart,”14 and Jean-Luc Marion, the French phenomenologist whose Balthasar repeatedly points out the similarities between Heidegger’s search for the lost meaning of Being and his own theological aesthetics. Cf. Mario Imperatori, SJ, “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Nouvelle revue théologique 122 (2000): 191-210. Balthasar emphasizes the importance of ‘marveling,’ partly in order to distance himself from Heidegger’s question about the “why” of a being. Heidegger’s question, “Why is there a being in the first place, rather than nothing?” needs to be understood in the Aristotelian context: For the Stagirite, marveling begins with the observation that there is actually anything at all. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b, 11-19. Balthasar finds an answer to the question of the “why” in his philosophy of freedom and love: “But when that-which-hasbeen-created is viewed through the eyes of love, then it is understood, against all the probabilities that seem to point toward the dearth of the world and its lack of love. Understood, in the sense of its ultimate ‘what for’-intention, not only of its nature, (which, to some extent, seems capable of elucidation because of the many connections that exist between the individual natures), but of its Dasein altogether (for which no philosophy can otherwise find a sufficient reason). Why, in fact, rather something than nothing—quite apart from whether one affirms or denies the existence of an absolute being? If this does not exist, what can the possible reason be for having, in the middle of nothing, all these finite, perishable things, which can never result in the ‘absolute,’ however you sum them up or let them evolve? But if it does, and is sufficient unto itself as an absolute, it is almost more incomprehensible why there should be something else beside it/the absolute. Only a philosophy of free (and selfsufficient) love can justify our Dasein, our existence, but not without at the same time expounding the nature of that-which-exists-finitely as being focused on love.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2000), 94-95. Cf. also Osvaldo Rossi, “Herrlichkeit e Sein: Heidegger nel pensiero di Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Rivista Internazionale di Teologia e Cultura: Communio 147 (1996): 94-105; Matthew A. Daigler, “Heidegger and von Balthasar: A Lover’s Quarrel over Beauty and Divinity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1995): 375-394. 14 “The many friends, whose name I now keep to myself, will not blame me if I only mention one more: Gustav Siewerth, the man with a lion’s brain and a children’s heart, terrifying in his philosopher’s wrath against those who move in the ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ sunny and gentle when he speaks of the intimate mysteries of reality, of the God of love, of the heart as the center of the human being, of the pain in a being, of the cross of the child of the Father. Without him, the third volume of Herrlichkeit would never have been given its shape.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mein Werk: Durchblicke (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990), 72. Balthasar paid tribute, more than once, to his friendship with Siewerth, which dates back to the 13

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name has become the main representative of French theological phenomenology.15 For Balthasar, the most important interlocutors are Thomas Aquinas and Hegel.16 Balthasar receives the interpretation of Thomas from Siewerth; it is influenced by Siewerth’s study of Hegel and comes to the fore in his work Der Thomismus als Identitätssystem (Thomism as the System of Identity). 17 Even though Balthasar himself played down Hegel’s influence on his thinking, he cannot be understood without Hegel: “From his first to his last book, Balthasar thinks hand in hand with Hegel.”18 In naming the sources of philosophical inspiration for Balthasar’s thinking, one must certainly not forget one name: Ferdinand Ulrich.19 The latter’s influence was initially overshadowed by Siewerth’s negative judgment on Ulrich, but later Balthasar addressed Siewerth directly on this matter, in order to protect Ulrich: Ulrich is unhappy with what you wrote to him, as he believes that there is definitely something wrong with it historically. He says he doesn’t think of himself as dependent on the “Identity System,” but that he has strayed into the same patch as you by his own thinking, which I can well believe when time spent together in the novitiate with the Jesuits. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unser Auftrag: Bericht und Entwurf (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1984), 33. About the friendship between Balthasar-Siewerth, cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “A Testimony to a Remarkable Friendship,” in idem, ed., Between Friends: The Hans Urs von Balthasar and Gustav Siewerth Correspondence (1954-1963). A Bilingual Edition (Konstanz: Verlag Gustav-Siewerth Gesellschaft, 2005), xi-xix, and Manfred Lochbrunner, “Gustav Siewerth im Spiegel von Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Remigius Bäumer et al., ed., Im Ringen um die Wahrheit (WeilheimBierbronnen: Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie, 1997), 257-272. 15 Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Dominique Janicaud et al., ed., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard Prusak, Jeffrey Kosky and Thomas Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 16 Jörg Disse, Metaphysik der Singularität: eine Hinführung am Leitfaden der Philosophie Hans Urs von Balthasars (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996); Martin Bieler, “Meta-Anthropology and Christology: On the Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Communio: International Catholic Review 20, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 129-146. 17 Gustav Siewerth, Der Thomismus als Identitätssystem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. FranzAnton Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1979), 300-334. 18 Peter Henrici, “Zur Philosophe Hans Urs von Balthasars,” in Karl Lehmann and Walter Kasper, ed., Hans Urs von Balthasar: Gestalt und Werk (Köln: Verlag für christliche Literatur Communio, 1989), 247. 19 Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo abyssus: das Wagnis der Seinsfrage (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961). Ulrich’s ontology is inspired by Thomism from the beginning and is marked by the poverty and richness of Being. In addition to the abovementioned habilitation thesis, the following short summary should also be mentioned: Ferdinand Ulrich, “Armut und Reichtum der Freiheit: Eine philosophische Meditation,” Evangelische Theologie 46, no. 1 (January-February 1986): 46-73. 151

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I think of his type. Don’t, at least, insist on this “dependence,” but rather, be a good guide to him, as he needs one at the human level. He must somehow pull through, we have so few.20 Siewerth was personally taken aback by Ulrich’s lack of recognition. Philosophically, Siewerth’s influence on Ulrich is hard to deny. Yet one observes that the interpersonal factors in the relationship are difficult to separate out from the purely scientific ones. Siewerth judges Ulrich harshly: Concerning Ulrich, I do not understand his plaintive behavior. I did not reproach him for not specifically emphasizing the considerable correspondence to the Identitätssystem, rather I acknowledged this fact quite positively, seeing that it serves the cause more in that way, and is also more in greater accord with his own creative idiosyncrasies. He, therefore, has no grounds for complaint. Thus, his claim, that “everything he writes comes from himself,” is surely at best a charming misconception, in view of his thorough study of the Identitätssy[s]tem and his previously expressed tribute to my work. When, for instance, he develops a line of thought, using my words and my concepts, only to remark “that is Siewerth’s aim too,” it is about the same as saying when interpreting today the “being-in-theworld,” “that is also Heidegger’s aim.” But I would not even dream of taking Ulrich’s remarks amiss. He is put at risk to such a degree by the intellectual enthusiasm peculiar to him, both internally and on the outside, that one needs to protect him and carry him along. His is certainly a promising talent if he keeps his head, and with it the energy and the courage needed for sober thought rationally conveyed.21 Siewerth’s philosophy of Being, and then Ulrich’s as well, have had a decisive influence on Balthasar’s theology. That Ulrich was Balthasar’s most important interlocutor, especially after Siewerth’s death and at the time when Theodramatik was being written, is beyond question. In what way Ulrich influenced Balthasar philosophically during Siewerth’s lifetime cannot be judged objectively, because Ulrich’s Homo abyssus is actually close to Siewerth’s metaphysics. One can only wish that the existing Ulrich-Balthasar correspondence will be made accessible to the public and allow us to fully appreciate whether Ulrich’s influence on Balthasar should possibly be given an earlier date.22 Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Basel, Münsterplatz 4, the 30.11.[1961], in Wierciński, Between Friends, 110. 21 Gustav Siewerth to Hans Urs von Balthasar, St. Blasien, Jägerhaushaldenweg 14, 28.12.1961, in Wierciński, Between Friends, 228. 22 In 2015, a Ferdinand Ulrich-Archive was created in the Diocese of Passau. As the local bishop, Dr. Stefan Oster, SDB, explains, numerous letters by Hans Urs von Balthasar can be found among its treasures. 20

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The list of philosophers who were in lively dialogue with Balthasar and made an important contribution to the development of his philosophy could well be expanded: Josef Pieper, Romano Guardini, Joseph Bernhart, and Alois Dempf. In historical and systematic work, Manfred Lochbrunner presents the philosophical analysis of Balthasar’s friendship with five philosophers who widely contributed to Catholic philosophy in post-war Germany and thus co-determined it.23 Siewerth’s Influence on Balthasar: The Way to Becoming Aware of One’s Own Pre-judgments Balthasar finds not only a friend in Gustav Siewerth but a mentor. Philosophically, one can look at Siewerth’s influence in two ways. Firstly, Siewerth is revealed as responsible for correcting Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth. Siewerth sees in Barth’s Gnostic-fideistic way of handling dogmas the pinnacle and the realization of the theological loss of truth which was largely caused by the forgetfulness of analogy: It is quite moving to see how [Barth] feels his way out of the “conglomerate” of his disparate philosophies and heretical dogmatisms in ever newer approaches to the truth of the analogia entis. He probably never found it in good shape, since it was indeed an emphatically asserted “thesis” in Catholic theology while being unfolded in a world of conceptual rationalist adulteration. Thus, Przywara tries to develop it in his “analogia entis” from the basic principle of Essence rationalism, the logical contradiction theorem, whereby he had to clamp the “analogy” into a contradictory dialectic of pure identity and pure difference and finally into a lively dynamic between the two. This Platonic metaphysics of validity (being-thus-over-andabove-Dasein) has absolutely nothing to do with Thomas Aquinas.24 Although Balthasar is deeply convinced by Siewerth’s critical destruction of Barth, especially in relation to the lack of understanding of the analogia entis, he is decisively against Siewerth’s way of writing, which is richly spiked with rants

Manfred Lochbrunner, Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Philosophenfreunde: Fünf Doppelporträts (Würzburg: Echter, 2005). Cf. also idem, Hans Urs von Balthasar als Autor, Herausgeber und Verleger: Fünf Studien zu seinen Sammlungen (1942-1967) (Würzburg: Echter, 2002); idem, “Gustav Siewerth im Spiegel von Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Remigius Bäumer, J. Hans Bernischke, and Tadeusz Guz, ed., Im Ringen um die Wahrheit (Weilheim-Bierbronnen: Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie, 1997), 257-272. 24 Gustav Siewerth, Das Schiscksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1959), 434-435. 23

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and condemnations.25 As for the matter in hand, Balthasar agrees with Siewerth. He writes to his friend: “You do not know how much of this I owe to you; you threw me off my Barth-track on to earlier ones, which you returned to me in a very enriched form.”26 In fact, Karl Barth began one of the most important disputes with the Catholic tradition by rejecting the possibility for natural theology to exist, thus questioning the possible embodiment of divine ideas by means of an earthly Institution.27 The question of natural theology—in our context, it is a debate between Barth and Balthasar on the analogy of Being—became the center of the theological debate during the twentieth century.28 Balthasar’s study on Barth had a tremendous impact on his further theological development.29 The critical examination of Barth’s analogia fidei opened a wide horizon to Balthasar for speculative development of the teaching on the analogy of Being and its significance for theology.30 This speculative unfolding, which is the Christological interpretation of

Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Castiglioncello, 2.5.1959, in Wierciński, Between Friends, 56. 26 Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Castellina in Chianti, 29.6.[1961], in ibid., 104. 27 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Zur Bedeutung des Analogiegedankens bei Karl Barth: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 78, no. 1 (1953): 17-24; Reinhard Hütter, “Barth Between McCormack and Von Balthasar: A Dialectic,” Pro ecclesia 8, no. 1 (1999): 105-109; J. Ben Quash, “Karl Barth und Hans Urs von Balthasar im Exil ihres Herkunftslandes,” in Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele, ed., Theologen im Exil-Theologie des Exils (Mandelbachtal: Ed. Cicero, 2001), 37-48. 28 In his Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, Barth writes polemically: “I consider the analogia entis to be the invention of the antichrist and think it is the reason why one cannot become Catholic.” Karl Barth Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. 1/1 (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947). Cf. Engelbert Gutwenger SJ, “Natur and Übernatur: Gedanken zu Balthasars Werk über die Barthsche Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 75 (1953): 82-97, 461-464; John Thompson, “Barth and Balthasar: An Ecumenical Dialogue,” in Bede McGregor OP and Thomas Norris, ed., The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), 171-192; Roland Chia, Revelation and Theology: The Knowledge of God in Balthasar and Barth (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). 29 In his Barth study Balthasar traces the successive adoption of the analogia entis. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (Köln/Olten: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1976). Bruce McCormack rejects Balthasar’s thesis by showing that no change from dialectics to analogy has taken place in Barth’s book on Anselm. Cf. Bruce McCormack, K. Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). A critical exploration is offered by Stephen D. Wigley, “The von Balthasar Thesis: A Re-Examination of von Balthasar’s Study of Barth in the Light of Bruce McCormack,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56, no. 3 (2003): 345-59. Further to Barth and Balthasar and the analogia entis, cf. Thomas G. Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 82-100. 30 Edward T. Oakes calls the “analogia entis one of the central avenues of access to Balthasar’s thought in particular.” Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994), 10. 25

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the analogia entis, can be traced in detail in Balthasar’s trilogy.31 Karl Barth’s vehement rejection of the analogia entis was for Balthasar an additional impulse for a deeper reading of the analogy of Being as taught by his teacher in philosophy, Erich Przywara.32 As a result, the other major correction concerns Przywara’s interpretation of the analogia entis.33 Siewerth, who vehemently disagrees with Przywara’s interpretation of his Thomism as the System of Identity, only wants to draw his friend’s attention to the speculative understanding of this analogy in Thomas Aquinas, and thus hopes to overcome Przywara’s influence.34 However, Balthasar nevertheless reports to Siewerth, quite diplomatically, that his publishing company is to re-issue Przywara’s publications. He tries to play down an earlier, factual agreement with Przywara, by referring to his old attachment to his teacher of philosophy:

31

Cf. Francesca A. Murphy, The Sound of the Analogia Entis: An Essay on the Philosophical Context of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology, Part I and Part II, New Blackfriars (November, 1993): 508-521 (Part I) and (December, 1993): 557-565 (Part II). One of the important aspects that Balthasar takes over from Barth, is the inclusion of ethics in dogmatics: “We now understand that, for Barth, ethics of dogmatics belong to each other (as inherent) as such, and that he writes the appropriate ethics for each article of faith... without which dogmatics would not be the full exposition and representation of revelation.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (Köln/Olten: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1976), 232. Cf. also Vincent Holzer, “Analogia entis christologique et pensée de l’être chez Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Théophilyon 4 (1999): 463-512. 32 Bernhard Gertz, Glaubenswelt als Analogie: Die theologische Analogielehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in der Auseinandersetzung um die analogia fidei (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1969), especially 270-274. Cf. also James Collins, “Przywara’s Analogia Entis,” Thought 65 (September 1990): 265-77, and Edward T. Oakes, “Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being,” in idem, Pattern of Redemption, 16-44. 33 Erich Przywara, Schriften I: Frühe religiöse Schriften; Schriften II: Religionsphilosophische Schriften; Schriften III: Analogia Entis. Ur-Struktur und All-Rhythmus (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962). For an introduction to the philosophy of Przywara, cf. Stefan Nieborak, “Homo analogia”: Zur philosophisch-theologischen Bedeutung der ‘analogia entis’ im Rahmen der existenziellen Frage bei Erich Przywara S.J. (1889-l972) (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1994); Paolo Molteni, Al di là degli estremi: introduzione al pensiero di Erich Przywara (Milano: Ares, 1996); Thomas F. O’Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World, with an introduction by Michael A. Fahey (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 34 Cf. Gustav Siewerth, “Auseinandersetzung mit Erich Przywara,” in idem, Der Thomismus als Identitätssystem, 300-334. Cf. also Siewerth’s critical remarks on Przywara’s teaching on the analogy of Being: “Gedanken zur Formalstruktur der Metaphysik bei Przywara,” in ibid., 335-344. Siewerth does not shy away from making a critical judgment: “These works, in their rational, almost popular intelligibility, are speculatively almost impenetrable and do not only present difficulties to the intellect but also torment—due to their ‘hard shuttering,’ which resists allowing one to get near to their powerful essential meaning by ‘reading from the inside,’ and must first be penetrated with courage and effort at every point.” Ibid., 344. 155

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I had a lot of trouble with the new edition of old Przywara titles; please do not get annoyed, for me it was a duty of the regard I hold him in, and also due to my conviction that one should at least once have gone through this ordeal.35 For Balthasar, Siewerth was a source of constant philosophical inspiration. It was enough to be in his “electrical” proximity, to be able to recharge his inner batteries. Balthasar believes that he can think with Siewerth, be inspired by him, but not work independently of him.36 The intensity of their exchange was, for Balthasar, the reason he could enjoy knowing this philosophical genius, and he could not thank Siewerth enough for the inspiration given him by the depth of the latter’s thinking: [… how best to thank you.] Particularly for understanding a simple human gesture of loving as such, and accepting it, as I have nothing to offer you in the field of thinking but can only gratefully accept so much from you, insofar as I am capable of comprehending it. That’s how it really is.37 Philosophically, one could actually show in detail how much Siewerth’s philosophy influenced Balthasar’s thinking. Here, it must be enough to draw attention to the numerous references to Siewerth’s Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger,38 especially in Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit III.39 The Siewerth-Balthasar correspondence shows clearly that “The Fate…” book was conceived and developed jointly by the two friends. The philosophical thinking common to both was so internalized by Balthasar that it was no longer necessary to refer separately to Siewerth. Thus, a systematic historico-cultural study of Balthasar’s theology would help us to understand just how profoundly his theology is shaped by philosophy.40 Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Basel, Münsterplatz 4, [From 1962], in Wierciński, Between Friends, 128. 36 Balthasar writes to his friend: “It is a rush until the middle of January; maybe I will find some time afterward for a visit. But how to work in your intense proximity? At best I could count on my batteries being recharged.” Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Basel, Münsterplatz 4, 30.11.[1961], in ibid., 108. 37 Hans Urs von Balthasar to Gustav Siewerth, Basel, Münsterplatz 4, 27.6.[1963], in ibid., 148. 38 Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger. This book was reissued as a third edition in 2003, for the 100th birthday of its author. 39 Cf. notes 152 (p. 179), 50 (p. 363), 57 (p. 365), 4 (378), 12 (p. 385), 17 (388). 40 For the philosophical sources of Balthasar, cf. Hans Otmar Meuffels, Einbergung des Menschen in das Mysterium der dreieinigen Liebe: eine trinitarische Anthropologie nach Hans Urs von Balthasar (Würzburg: Echter, 1991), 144f.; Schulz, Sein und Trinität: Systematische Erörterungen zur Religionsphilosophie G.W.F. Hegels im ontologiegeschichtlichen Rückblick auf J. Duns Scotus und I. Kant und die Hegel-Rezeption in der Seinsauslegung und Trinitätstheologie bei W. Pannenberg, E. Jüngel, K. Rahner und H. U. v. Balthasar; 35

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Theology as a Source of Inspiration for Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion—whose name is intimately connected with the theological turn in French phenomenology41—acknowledges that Etienne Gilson, Jean Daniélou, and Hans Urs von Balthasar are ‘his teachers.’ However, of course, the immediate question is this: how can he, at the same time, understand himself as a pupil of Jacques Derrida and a follower of Balthasar?42 How does such a choice of intellectual companions come about in the first place? Theologically, Marion is undoubtedly influenced by Balthasar, with whom he has worked as a member of the French section of the International Catholic Journal Communio, founded in 1972 by Balthasar. The early Marion (as in God without Being43) must be distinguished from the later Marion, who by then is less hostile to Balthasar.44 Marion tries to understand the really Other. According to Marion, only solipsistic answers have been found—starting with Descartes—on the philosophical question of the self. By contrast, Christian caritas is able to perceive the really Other, since, biblically, the Other will be perceived as someone who has a right to my attention because

Medard Kehl, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Portrait,” in Medard Kehl and Werner Löser, ed., The Von Balthasar Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 3-54. For the theological implications of Balthasar’s ontology, cf. Martin Bieler, “The Theological Importance of a Philosophy of Being,” in Paul J. Griffith and Reinhard Hütter, ed., Reason and the Reasons of Faith (New York: T & T Clark, 2005). Cf. also Martin Bieler, “The Future of the Philosophy of Being,” Communio 26, no. 1 (1999): 456-85. 41 Cf. Kathryn Bevis, “Emmanuel Levinas and the Theological Turn in Phenomenology: Toward a New Theology of the Human Person,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between Description and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Turn in Phenomenology (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2005), 487-500; Clayton Crockett, “The Double Helix: Of Philosophical Theology,” in ibid., 513-523. Cf. also Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Jean Greisch, “Un tournant phénoménologique de la théologie?,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: Achèvement de la traduction française de la trilogie, Transversalités: Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 75-97. 42 John D. Caputo, “Derrida and Marion,” in Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003), 119-134. 43 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). 44 Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998); idem, Being Given, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); idem, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); idem, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). 157

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he stands vis-à-vis to me, at first waiting for my reply in the sense of total dedication to him/her. Marion tries to free God from metaphysical perceptions and to think of him as difference, gift, challenge, and love.45 In Herrlichkeit, Balthasar understands philosophy as being the love of wisdom, rather than the consummation of wisdom as such. It is also evident that he sees the theology of Bonaventure as comprehensible and regulative, above all through his integration of transcendentals and his connecting philosophy and theology in the sense of “getting closer through being different,” as paraphrased from the title of a book by Hans André, which comes close to Siewerth’s thinking.46 Balthasar understands Christological love as being the main theological principle and can nevertheless develop philosophy to its true metaphysical range.47 The primal relationship between philosophy and love guarantees the connection between the uniqueness of the person of Jesus Christ (Christological principle) and human reason—in their common search for first principles.48 The trinitarian love revealed in Jesus is not just the object of theological reflection. It is the main principle in theological thinking. For Balthasar, love is the epitome of what is called Catholic, as it brings together that which is “from above” and that which is “from below” in a harmonious way. Thus, grace and nature and, accordingly, theology and philosophy form a differentiated unity that is plural without being pluralistic and united without being uniform. Many researchers agree that, in Herrlichkeit, Balthasar tends to favor Bonaventure. (Nevertheless, one sees quite clearly that he thinks Aquinas of great importance too.) This explains the preference for Bonaventure in God Without Being (rather than Aquinas), in which Marion refers exclusively to Herrlichkeit, without con-

Joseph S. O’Leary, “The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?” in Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, ed., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Cf. also Jean-Luc Marion, “On the Gift: A Discussion Between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion,” in John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon, ed., Of God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 54-78; idem, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift,” trans. John Conley SJ and Danielle Poe, in Merold Westphal, ed., Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 122-143. 46 Gustav Siewerth, “Andrés Philosophie des Lebens,” Wort und Antwort 22 (Salzburg: Müller, 1959). 47 On Balthasar’s understanding of metaphysics, Edward Oakes states: “By ‘metaphysics’ Balthasar is not simply referring to ‘philosophy,’ narrowly conceived, but to that total complex of views that constitute a culture, within which one may detect, however inchoately, a ‘metaphysics’ in the sense of a world-view.” Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 177. 48 Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism,” in idem, Sponsa Verbi. Skizzen zur Theologie II (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961); idem, Das Wunder des Seins und die Vierfache Differenz, in idem, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik. III/1: Im Raum der Metaphysik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), 943-957. 45

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sidering Theo-Logik, vol. 1. This tie-in is crucial for understanding such a preference in the context of its genesis; Marion himself later tried to modify his position, at least to a degree. What connects Balthasar and Marion is their analysis of Heidegger’s thinking. Without going into details, it can be said that Balthasar saw the need to address the question of the ontological difference in theology in order to get out of the blind alley of the forgetfulness of Being. The early Marion had, on the other hand, described the theological preoccupation with the question of Being as a kind of “conceptual idolatry.”49 Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics revolves around the problem of ontotheology as being the science of the “highest being,” which was reduced to a metaphysics of presence.50 In criticizing the concept of God in ontotheology as “causa sui,”51 Heidegger emphasizes the finiteness of human reason, in order to leave an unoccupied space open for faith. Ontotheologically, one must hold that everything is in God and therefore God is in everything. The finite thus requires an infinite basis, which itself does not need any substantiation. The finite must be thought of together with God, so as to uphold the reality of the world. When critiquing Heidegger’s conception of ontotheology, one would have to ask whether human reason can actually remain neutral. The assumption, that reason is “godless” and in no way directed toward God, requires philosophical justification.52 In

49

The most significant idols today are the ideologies, the conceptual idols that are presented to us as divine, and thus, that they should not (or cannot) as such be scrutinized any more. Cf. Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002). 50 “Metaphysics thinks Being as such, that is, in general. Metaphysics thinks a being as such, that is, as a whole. Metaphysics thinks the Being of a being is both in the probing unity of what is most general, that is, of what is of equal validity everywhere, as also in the foundational unity of allness, that is, of what is the most exalted and above everything else. That is how we anticipate our thinking of the Being of a being as the foundational ground. Therefore, all metaphysics is, basically, the founding foundation of everything, that which accounts for things from the ground up and justifies itself to the ground, and in the end confronts the ground. Why would we mention this? So that we can experience the tired and worn-out expressions like ontology, theology, ontotheology for what they are really worth.” Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 55. Cf. Theodorus Christiaan Wouter Oudemans. Ernüchterung des Denkens oder der Abschied der Ontotheologie (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1998). 51 “Causa sui. That is the proper name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray to this god, nor offer sacrifices to him. Man can neither fall to his knees in awe before the ‘causa sui,’ nor can he break out into music and dancing before this god. Accordingly, the god-less thinking, which is being urged to give up the god of philosophy, of the ‘causa sui,’ may perhaps be nearer to a God that is divine.” Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 64-65. 52 Cf. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia 159

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this context, the phenomenology of Marion, which situates God outside of reason, can be understood. Marion claims that God can no longer be thought of in the ontotheological categories because “Dieu” is a purely human concept. Influenced by Heidegger’s notion of phenomenological destruction, Marion demands that God must be thought outside the ontological difference and beyond the question of Being.53 When Marion crosses out the word “God,” in imitation of Heidegger’s way of writing that word, he intends to imply that the Biblical God, who reveals himself above all in the cross of Christ, stands in clear contradiction to the concepts of human reason that grew out of a metaphysics that was ‘forgetful of Being.’ These concepts, especially the concepts used by Descartes in his ontotheology, are not the same as those of the metaphysical tradition of Christianity. The late Marion sees a connection between the ipsum esse subsistens of Aquinas and the thought of the Areopagite, for God ‘cannot be adequately understood within the metaphysical categories but transgresses them in every respect.’ Here, the category “in excess” can come in useful, because God is actually “semper maior”; he is always larger than we can perceive or understand him. The god of metaphysics is the mirror in which we can observe ourselves. The God of Jesus Christ, the crucified God, is not a concept, but a phenomenon that shows itself to us, so that we can be witness to his redeeming love. Man is called to give a reply to the Biblical God who is first in addressing him. The late Marion retracts his criticism of Aquinas as ontotheologian and instead demands that we should not think God ontotheologically (together with Aquinas). Marion admits that he has changed his interpretation of Thomas because he had understood that Aquinas’ esse could not be reduced to any essence, hence also not to any metaphysical essence of Being. Aquinas’s concept of esse is as unknown as God, to whom the concept of esse refers.54 The metaphysics of Thomas is not ontotheology because it culminates in apophatic theology. The esse divine (supposedly) has an exclusively negative meaning. Regardless of the odd passages, in which Thomas identifies God with primum ens, Marion wants these statements of Aquinas to be understood in the broader context of apophatic theology, within which God and Being are separate from each other.55 For Marion, this Press, 2003); Gianni Vattimo, “After Onto-Theology: Philosophy Between Science and Religion,” in Mark Wrathall, ed., Religion After Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Cf. Siewerth’s Onto-Theology, in Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? 200208, where I deal extensively with the debate on the ontotheological problem in Siewerth and Heidegger. 53 Jeffrey Bloechl, “Dialectical Approaches to Retrieving God after Heidegger: Premises and Consequences (Lacoste and Marion),” Pacifica 13 (2000): 288-298; Arthur A. Vogel, “Catching up with Jean-Luc Marion,” Anglican Theological Review 82 (2000): 803-811. 54 Jean-Luc Marion, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théologie,” Revue thomiste 96 (1995): 31-66, especially 61. 55 Michael B. Ewbank, “Of Idols, Icons, and Aquinas’s Esse: Reflections on Jean-Luc Marion,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42, Vol. 2 (2002): 161-175. 160

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opens up the possibility to speak of God without reference to Being or event.56 Moreover, the demand to think God as love is what brings Marion and Balthasar together once more. Marion’s critique of ontotheology and his call to think God outside the question of Being are based on a wrong understanding of Being and the essence of God as causa sui. For that reason, the assumption that God should be conceived without Being or outside of Being—which inevitably leads to a rejection of ontotheology—needs to be questioned again too. Marion’s presupposition that natural reason, and thus metaphysics in its classical understanding, cannot understand God, requires further argumentation.57 It follows from the assumption that reason can neither know the nature of God, nor know how we can perceive God, that the God who is understood metaphysically is, in fact, an idol, a phenomenon of experience, and that this God must remain unknown to us.58 Balthasar’s theology offers a response to Marion’s philosophical reservations. According to Balthasar, Being is “from above” and not “from below,” as Marion thinks. Balthasar emphasizes the divine transcendence: In his interpretation of the analogia entis, God is not outside Being. The self-transcendence of God (ekstasis) intrinsically belongs to Being. The fact that metaphysics underlies theology does not contradict the autonomy of the faith. Faith must be rational. The glory of God pervades both the created Being and human reason, which is faced with the task of understanding God and also Being. Human reason is also ‘ecstatic’ and is both dramatic and dialogical in character, i.e., it too must be able to perceive challenges that come from beyond reason. Balthasar places theology before metaphysics, but without replacing metaphysics with theology. By contrast, Marion excludes the possibility of dialectical and pluralistic interaction between philosophy and theology. According to Marion, the Biblical understanding of reality can neither be questioned again and understood by phenomenology, nor supplemented by it. The two thinkers share the conviction that esse (Balthasar) and givenness (Marion) are what enable an intentional and intuitive consciousness in the first place. It would be important to examine the relationship between Balthasar’s esse non subsistens and Marion’s givenness more deeply.

Tobias Specker, Einen anderen Gott denken? Zum Verständnis der Alterität Gottes bei JeanLuc Marion (Frankfurt a.M.: Knecht, 2002). 57 In contrast to Jean-Luc Marion, Joseph A. Bracken argues for an established validity of metaphysics as the logical basis for systematic theology today, provided that metaphysics is reconsidered in the face of a new logic of intersubjectivity. Joseph A. Bracken, “Toward a New Philosophical Theology Based on Intersubjectivity,” Theological Studies 59, no. 4 (1998): 703-719. 58 Richard Kearney, “A Dialogue with Jean-Luc Marion,” Philosophy Today 48, no. 1 (2004): 12-26; Alexander Cooke, “What Saturates? Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenological Theology,” Philosophy Today 48, no. 2 (2004): 179-187. 56

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The Glory of Theology: The Hermeneutics of Balthasar’s Thinking and the Re-theologizing of Theology No special argumentation is needed by most theologians to uphold the thesis that theology makes use of philosophy. What is meant is that one specific philosophy becomes the method for doing theology. It is important both for the clarification of concepts and for the inner coherence of faith contents, that is, for demonstrating the plausibility of the faith by rational argumentation. If one understands philosophy as a method for doing theology, one can declare theology to be the queen of the sciences without more ado. However, then it must not happen that theology simply becomes a cryptophilosophy, just because it makes use of philosophy, and is not being done in the service of the self-revealing God.59 Although Jean-Luc Marion tries, in his phenomenology, to keep philosophy strictly separate from theology, he has been accused repeatedly of doing crypto-theology.60 Marion insists that the argumentation in his exclusively philosophical works is without assumptions that are borrowed from Christian theology. Even when dealing with theologically inspired topics, he is convinced that he does this in a purely philosophical way as a phenomenological procedure, i.e., by uncovering the phenomenon as a phenomenon. Hermeneutically speaking, a phenomenological analysis does not allow for consistent methodological separation of theology and philosophy without renouncing the phenomenological range of the phenomenon that is to be thought. Thus, it becomes necessary to constantly consider the gains and losses in excluding certain facts, instead of following the logic of the matter itself and sticking to how it needs to be thought.61 59

Paul Ricoeur argues against crypto-philosophical theology and tries to protect himself from the possible accusations of being an adept in crypto-theology. The crypto-theology, which according to the foreword to Das Selbst als ein Anderer should be avoided, has become part of the concept of acceptance of the Other. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher and the Philosophizing Believer,” in idem, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), xv-xxxiv. Boyd Blundell calls Ricoeur’s attempt to keep his philosophical and theological writings strictly separate from one another “Ricoeur’s double life.” Cf. Boyd Blundell, “At Arm’s Length: Theology, Hermeneutics, and Ricoeur’s Double Life,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, 440-455. 60 The decisive critique came from Janicaud and Derrida. Cf. Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Eclat, 1991); idem, La phénoménologie éclatée (Paris: L’Eclat, 1998) and Jacques Derrida, Psyché: inventions de l’ autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987); idem, Donner le temps, Vol. 1: La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991). 61 Cf. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Horner shows in detail the consequences 162

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Marion’s autonomous philosophy, which is based only on the phenomenological argument and yet allows itself to be influenced by the Christian Revelation as a source for phenomenological hypotheses, points to the perpetual tension between philosophy and theology, which must always be re-addressed. Balthasar is radically consistent, from the very beginning, in his self-understanding as a theologian. He starts out, in his theology, with the Revelation of the trinitarian love of God in Christ. This Revelation is also the unifying principle to which his whole theology is directed.62 Balthasar sees this tradition as a living reality, which he tries to communicate and make plausible to the human being shaped by modernity.63 However, his interpretation is at the same time the destruction of present-day interpretations caused by their fruitlessness. Here Balthasar is close to Heidegger. One would have to examine Balthasar’s differentiated attitude toward modernity more closely. Sometimes one can read his comments on Descartes, such as in Herrlichkeit III/1, as a Descartes interpreted by Levinas (in contrast to the interpretations by Hegel or Heidegger). In his preoccupation with modernity, Balthasar revisits the genealogy of nominalism. At this point, the already known influence of Gustav Siewerth is easy to recognize: The clear devaluation and rejection of Scotist metaphysics, which is understood as the forerunner of German Idealism. The hermeneutic key to Balthasar’s theology is the self-revelation and selfcommunication of God in the event that is Jesus Christ: “The Whole in the Fragment.”64 The ‘whole’ emerges into view only in Christ, and only in him does it appear in every single fragment. Balthasar’s theology is a kind of Catholic symphony: the truth we are talking about is symphonic.65 Balthasar’s claim is maxi-

of the phenomenological thinking of Marion, who tries to be philosophically autonomous. She repeatedly speaks of the “threads of exclusion.” 62 Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theologie und Heiligkeit,” in idem, Verbum Caro: Skizzen zur Theologie I (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1960), 195-225. 63 Cf. Cyril O’Regan, “Balthasar: Between Tübingen and Postmodernity,” Modern Theology 14, no. 3 (1998): 325-353. A detailed analysis of Balthasar’s theology is provided by Aidan Nichols, The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998); No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Dramatics (Edinburgh: Clark, 2000); Say It Is Pentecost: A Guide Through Balthasar’s Logic (Edinburgh: Clark, 2001). 64 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Das Ganze im Fragment: Aspekte der Geschichtstheologie, 2nd impr. ed. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1990). Cf. also Kevin Mongrain, The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval (New York: Crossroad, 2002). 65 “Symphony means a harmony of sound. It sounds. Different things sound. The different things sound together.... In the actual symphony, however, all the instruments integrate into one and create the overall sound.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Die Wahrheit ist symphonisch. Aspekte des christlichen Pluralismus (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1972), 7. Even Balthasar’s life was some kind of symphony. There is a telling and often-quoted statement made by Henri de Lubac about Balthasar: “He was perhaps the most cultivated [man] of his time.... 163

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malist: the theologian can neither conceal nor over-emphasize the individual aspects since they only function as fragments of the whole and can only be grasped symphonically within the whole of the event that is Jesus Christ.66 For Balthasar, the understanding of truth is a crucial principle in interpretation. Moreover, whether it is really true that he consciously concealed everything that was alien to his understanding of truth or might possibly harm the Catholic faith, this would have to be examined more closely and in detail.67 I myself consider it quite possible, given that even Siewerth was sometimes more concerned about the philosophical consequences for Catholic dogmatics than about the arguments used for a philosophical position that seemed implausible to him.68 In Theologik 1, Balthasar emphasizes that the entire Catholic tradition must make use of philosophy, in order to grasp the divine Revelation in its fullness. By making the analogia entis a principle determining his re-theologized theology, it

If there is a Christian culture, then here it is! Classical antiquity, the great European literatures, the metaphysical tradition, the history of religions, the diverse exploratory adventures of contemporary man and, above all, the sacred sciences, St Thomas, St Bonaventure, patrology (all of it) —not to speak just now of the Bible—none of them is not welcomed and made vital by this great mind. Writers and poets, mystics and philosophers, old and new, Christians of all confessions—all are called on to make their particular contribution. All these are necessary for his final accomplishment, to a greater glory of God, the Catholic symphony.” Henri de Lubac, The Church: Paradox and Mystery (Staten Island, N.Y.: Ecclesia Press, 1969), 105. 66 Concerning Balthasar, we can speak of a theological style: It is characterized by three ontological features: “three ontological demarches skillfully woven into a unity: existential, dialogical, and analogical.” Angelo Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 34. 67 Taking our queue from how Balthasar received St Therese of Lisieux, we can show that he received the example of her life just as he needed to do it, for accommodating the preliminary decisions of his own systematic thought. “La tendenza di Balthasar che consiste nel favorire una lettura più dominata dall’intuizione personale che dal rigore inerente ai metodi scientifici, non gli ha probabilmente permesso di evitare qualche scoglio.” Karin Heller, “Esperienza e fede secondo Teresa di Lisieux. Una rilettura dell’interpretazione di von Balthasar,” in Manfred Hauke and André Marie Jerumanis, ed., Atti XIV Colloquio di Teologia di Lugano: Esperienza mistica e teologia. Ricerca epistemologica sulle proposte di Hans Urs von Balthasar, Rivista Teologica di Lugano 6 (2001): 152. 68 Cf. for example Gustav Siewerth, “Der Triumph der Verzweiflung,” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte: Zur Gottesfrage bei Hegel und Heidegger (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1971), 201-263: “If the modern ‘world process’ of social dialectics and despair does have its roots in the rupture of the corpus christianum and its belief, it has in that way also become clear that there is no other escape but the escape into hell, whether it be from the kingdom of God or from the world. Therefore, this falling into hell can only be stopped by the recentering of all the denominations on the One Church of the Lord, outside of which there is no salvation, neither in heaven nor on earth. If this church were to be united, the night of the demons would have come to an end/would be over, and the day would dawn in all spheres and countries of this world.” Ibid., 263. 164

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became possible for him to relate philosophy and theology with one another without negating the insurmountable difference between them.69 The relationship between created truth and divine truth needs to be addressed and made fruitful for theology.70 Balthasar formulates this as a program in the preface to Theologik 1: The whole trilogy has from the beginning been structured according to the transcendental determinations of Being, in each case with regard to the analogous relationship between their validity and form in worldly and divine Being: thus, in aesthetics, worldly “beauty” corresponds to divine “glory,” and in drama, secular-finite corresponds to divine-infinite freedom. Here, in the theological logic, the relation between the structure of creaturely and divine truth will have to be considered accordingly. And after that, whether divine truth can be expressed within the structures of creaturely truth. By their nature, theological insights about God’s glory, goodness, and truth, postulate a structure of wordly Being that is not only formalistic or gnoseological but ontological: no theology without philosophy.71 Philosophy is here not even meant to be a source for possible concepts needed by the matter in hand for theology, but in its Platonic sense as eros, as being in love with Being. This ‘being in love’ represents the greatest effort that man can make, in order to understand what wants to be understood. Human thinking needs to be awakened by wonderment and maintained by ‘being in love,’ to give the logical stringency of God’s glory a human expression. The Hermeneutics of the Gift In the synthetic show of the insights that become accessible to him, Balthasar meets us as the man who wants to tell us of the gift-giving nature of Being, which is the first self-expression of God, who wants to share with us that there is a God, a God who communicates himself, who in his self-emptying wants to draw our attention to the inner mystery of his own life, namely the interaction of a loverelationship. And this love is always active because there is always someone who should be told of the brightly shining light of God. The metaphysical background Cf. Victoria S. Harrison, Holiness, “Theology and Philosophy: Balthasar’s Construal of Their Relationship and Its Development,” Philosophy and Theology 12, no. 1 (2000): 53-78. 70 “It must be said that the relationship between God and creature is more than a relationship between a being and being but transcends this as free personality.” David C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 48. 71 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik: vol. 1: Wahrheit der Welt (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), vii. 69

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of a hermeneutics of the gift is provided by God himself, in his inner-trinitarian love-relationship and the shining overall shape that emerges in his self-communication, and not by individual phenomena from which the overall picture must first be painstakingly composed as if they were individual pieces of a puzzle.72 Everything that is Christ is the gift of God the Father. Christ’s willingness to fulfill the will of God makes him the condition of the possibility of the gift in itself and of us humans being given the gift. In Christ, the gift of the Father is fulfilled; it is realized in Christ in the sense of a processio from possibility to reality. As a gift, Christ is access to the Father. By giving himself unconditionally to his Father and becoming receptive to his Father as a gift, he opens the way to his Father thanks to his openness. “No one knows the Son, only the Father, and no one knows the Father, only the Son and the one to whom the Son wants to reveal him.” (Mt 11: 27) In Christ, our access to God was not only made possible but also actualized. Therefore, human existence can only be lived authentically in Christ, in response to the inviting challenge of God. In the hermeneutics of the gift, two aspects are of crucial importance: the giving and what is being given. The giving is itself the accomplishment of communicating oneself to the Other. This mediation is based on the will to mediate oneself to the Other, who initially is unknown. For it is about what distinguishes a person altogether, something that unmistakably belongs to me personally. In the relationship with others, it is not primarily about the mediation of a ‘something,’ which could be exchanged for something else in a factual exchange. Rather, it is about such a mediation that it reaches the limits of incommunicability, a mediation that demands the impossible because it makes the impossible possible, that is, a mediation that is called love. However, at the same time, the gift is to be grasped as the gift itself, the objectivity of the gift-giving, i.e., the what, the whatness of the gift, with which the recipients bestow one another or allow themselves to be given the gift of the Other. The gift is inextricably linked to the task—indeed the undeniably recognizable necessity—of giving a reply to the gift. Because, with the gift’s coming, something must be done or undertaken; and that is the real meaning of responsibility (re-spondeo—to give an answer to someone who has spoken to me). This responsibility comes into play in the interaction between being addressed or being given a gift and the personal response to the gift. Thus, the responsibility opens up to us as a life challenge, which we need to recognize and perceive, that is, as a creative task and also as a defined demand to implement in our own lives what we have accepted and recognized. If here we understand Balthasar’s theology as the visualization of the glory of God, then we are invited by him to get ourselves on the road with him. With 72

Cf. Martin Bieler, “Die menschliche Freiheit und der Gabecharakter der Wirklichkeit,” in idem, Freiheit als Gabe: Ein schöpfungstheologischer Entwurf (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1991), 453-500.

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this being-on-the-road, we can help to guard Being as the most precious likeness of God in these times of forgetfulness of Being and God.

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2. 2. 2. Trinity and Understanding: Hermeneutic Insights Understanding Differently: Shrouded in the Mystery One of the fundamental hermeneutic insights of the Trinity is the possibility of experiencing God in different ways. Thinking the Trinity helps us to glimpse the meaning of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and their communitarian interest (in the deepest sense of inter-esse) in transforming their inner-Trinitarian life and the history of creation into the universal history of salvation. Laden with mystery, Trinity clearly endorses the plurivocity of meaning and, therefore, calls for multiple interpretations. Since the triune God manifests himself to his creature, it means that he wants to be understood in his inner-Trinitarian life. In a powerful dialectic of question and answer, we can experience a profound divine logic, which can be seen in the history of Christian dogmatics. This history can be symbolically described as a movement toward the condensation of meaning, which, in turn, calls for decondensation, in order to grasp the multiplicity of the possible perspectives, just to be recapitulated again in the form of a condensed singular interpretation. Welcoming this circularity and clearly endorsing the plurivocity of meaning, hermeneutics presents itself as a philosophical reflection not only on what needs to be understood, but on the understanding of understanding. It is a philosophical deliberation on what is happening to us when we understand. Any theological reflection cannot escape the hermeneutic circle between the Biblical revelation and the context in which this revelation originally came to life and still comes to life in being interpreted. The understanding of the Trinity is the privileged subject of theological hermeneutics since it thematizes the tension between unity and diversity, the One and the Many as revealed in the mystery of the divine inner life of the infinite, omniscient Creator. This disclosure contains an infinite depth, which corresponds to God’s infinite mind. As such, it is an invitation to the infinite task of interpretation. Since the Bible is an infinite revelation, it opens up a horizon of infinite possibilities for understanding. Theological hermeneutics fully embraces those infinite possibilities for interpretation, while understanding the Christian life as a living response to the living God. In that hermeneutic horizon, we situate ourselves as the participants in a conversation in which we not only engage the other in order to be understood but allow the subject matter, in this case, Scripture, to raise questions. We can go even further by saying that in that non-methodological disclosure of divine truth, we allow Scripture to question us. In our hermeneutic gesture of openness, we accept the divine claim to validity and the fact that this disclosure has something to say to us with all possible consequences, including the free recognition of the imperative to change our lives. If to understand a question means to ask it, we need to encounter the mystery of the Trinity in the horizon of 168

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being questioned by God, who in his eschatological-historical self-disclosure as the Trinity invites us to participate in a conversation, which is his own mode of being. The Inner Life of the Trinity as a Mode of Understanding: The Interpenetration of Invocation and Donation of the Holy Spirit God’s self-manifestation in the events of Incarnation and the Pentecost recapitulates the revelation of the inner-Trinitarian mystery. Our deepening awareness of the Holy Spirit within ourselves enables us to see things differently, to understand differently, to remember that what needs to be comprehended is not a historical record of God’s self-revelation, but a living reality. By understanding that God speaks to each one of us directly, we confirm that our belief and faith in God make this experience a reality. The Holy Spirit is the outpouring of a plenitude of love from the Trinity. This outpouring does not diminish the plentitude; on the contrary, the processio out of the Trinity is grounded in the inner-Trinitarian passage from the one to the other and from the two to the one. This processual explanation of the Holy Spirit helps us to see his truly mediating character, which allows him to be the same and different in the constantly changing inter-Trinitarian manifestations without instrumentalizing any of the relations for any particular purpose. As the interpreter of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit will lead all people of all time to the whole truth. The role of the Holy Spirit does not so much consist in being a “giver” of the “proper” interpretation. The Holy Spirit is himself the interpretation of the Trinity. The responsibility of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity can be seen in its horizon of meaning. Re-spondeo captures the essence of the communicative performance: The persons of the Trinity are in a constant dialogue. This main characteristic of the inner communicative dynamic is disclosed to us in the event of Incarnation and the Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is the understanding of the Trinity and, as such, is an invitation to understanding. The history of Christianity can be seen as a continuous attempt to find the human expression of and for the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as we profess the Creed. Our baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity and every subsequent sign of the cross are a powerful recollection of the rootedness of our life in the primordial relationship between the divine persons. The inclusion in the divine reinterprets our very life as the relationship, which embraces all our being and thus consecrates us in the name of the Trinity. Thus, in the sign of the cross, there is a powerful proclamation of faith that generates faith. The Gospel’s passage about the Last Supper speaks of Christ, who promises His disciples to pray to the Father for another Paraclete (άλλον παράκλητov) who will remain with them forever (Jn 14: 16). In Ephesians 1: 13, we encounter “the Spirit of the promise, the Holy”: τῷ πνεύματι τῆς ἐπαγγελίας τῷ ἁγίῳ. This 169

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promised Paraclete is God himself who comes to live with and in his people. He is a true epiphany of the Trinity. The recorded event of Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-13) can be seen as the beginning of the Church (der Anfang der Kirche) and the Church of the beginning (die Kirche des Anfangs). The acting of the apostles takes origin in the gift of the Spirit himself. The account of Pentecost confirms that the new divine breath upon humanity in the form of the Holy Spirit as the new and powerful self-communication of God belongs to the dialogue between the Trinity and creation. It involves everything created, human beings and the whole cosmos, together with its history and culture. The Trinity as communication between the divine persons discloses, by sending the Holy Spirit, God’s plan toward humanity. This plan can be seen as a communion, which is the mode of Trinitarian life. This profound mystery of divine inner life is communicated to us through the incarnated Word. In the Word, access to the unspeakable reality of God is given to us. The inner life of the Trinity discloses to us the essential traits of the mode of understanding. It is a transgression of one’s own personal way of thinking and acting toward a communitarian sensitivity. The multiple languages at Pentecost promote the plurivocity of understanding as manifested and fore-grounded in the unity of the Spirit. It is an invitation to what hermeneutics calls “understanding differently,” not in the sense of essential disbelief in absolute truth, but as a fundamental conviction of the plurivocity of understanding and the demise of a singular world-view. Genesis 11: 1-9 tells us that in Babel, everyone spoke the same language. The dispersion of languages as symbolically depicted in the Tower of Babel made it impossible for people to understand one another. It stopped their common growing in wisdom. The poetics of Proverbs (8: 22-31) further personalizes Wisdom as the Lady created by God before the creation of the world to communicate God’s love toward his creation and reveal his divine nature. Personalized Wisdom is an anticipation of the Holy Spirit. Wisdom is, on the one hand, intimately involved with God, and is the mode of communicating his divine nature. On the other hand, Wisdom is needed to discern God’s unity in his self-manifestation to the created world. As emanated from the triune God, Wisdom is superior to all things created, due to her origin, as begotten by God at the beginning. At the same time, Wisdom is most visible to us and invites us to reflect on the eternal quality of her relationship to the Creator.1 Her attributes signalize that the essence of the relationship with God is not merely the intellectual capacity of analyzing the accumulated data but the willingness to participate in the original experience of God in his threefold unity. At Pentecost, the diversity of languages no longer impedes communication between people. However, it is essential to discern that the reason for overcoming 1

De Veritate 4, 1: “We say that God creates by means of His wisdom predicated essentially; hence, His wisdom can be called a medium between God and creature. Yet, this very wisdom is God.”

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the linguistic impediment is the empowerment to understand what is proclaimed in the name and the praise of God. This empowerment happens as the gift of the Holy Spirit in order to create the inter-human union in a world permeated by God’s presence, which goes beyond the boundaries of languages. The Holy Spirit helps us to understand not just Jesus’s words but guides us toward a personal experience of the intimacy of God himself. What we discover is not an infinite solitude, but a communion of life given (actio) and received (passio) in an everlasting dialogue between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From a hermeneutic perspective, it is important to note the threefold use in John 16: 12-15 of the verb ἀvαγγελω (future active indicative, first person singular, to announce in detail, to declare, rehearse, report, show, speak, tell). The promised Spirit will announce the future and disclose the things to come (v. 13). The Spirit will proclaim what he has ‘received’ from Christ (v. 14). The third time the verb is used to repeat the disclosure of that which the Spirit has received from Christ (v. 15), but with an important accentuation of the unity between the Father and the Son: πάντα ὅσα ἔχει ὁ πατὴρ ἐμά ἐστιν. This threefold usage indicates a critical discernment of belonging: Everything which belongs to the Father belongs to the Son because the Father and the Son belong to each other. The communitarian notion of belonging to the Father and the Son is grounded in their personal primordial unity. The mission of the Holy Spirit, to take what is of Christ and to disclose it to us, indicates a special relationship between Christ and the Holy Spirit.2 He will “take it of mine,” says Christ: ἐκ τοῦ ἐμοῦ λήμψεται (v 14). This taking what is of Christ indicates a profoundly personal contact with him. Christ willingly accepts something to be disclosed of him by the Holy Spirit. It happens in the spirit of the glorification of Christ: ἐκεῖνος ἐμὲ δοξάσει (v. 14). In fact, the reason for this revealing is the glorification of Christ. Since he lives in this primordial unity with the Father, the disclosure of the Son is also the glorification of the Father. Moreover, it is happening through the Holy Spirit, who is in no way a stranger to the communion between the Father and the Son. The increasing glory of God is this progressive revelation of the Trinity. Here we deal with two increases: δoξασει indicates that the Holy Spirit will render Christ glorious to us. And the other increase deals with the further disclosure of the inner life of the Trinity. By glorifying Christ (and the Father in their divine unity) in the disclosure to the world, the Holy Spirit overcomes a one-sided relationship with regard to his external mission. Christ is essentially present in the representation of the Holy Spirit, who will take something of Christ and reveal it to the world. Christ will be there in the action of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will disclose the Son in a very particular way. The art of disclosure in the Holy Spirit will serve the presentation of Christ (and the Father) in full glory. Therefore, the art of disclosure, which we 2

See John R. W. Stott, The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church, and the World (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1990). 171

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can call the art of the happening of truth, is not incidental to the mission of the Holy Spirit. In fact, it is so essential to the task of the disclosure of truth that it needs to be seen as belonging to the very Being of the Holy Spirit and thus as the expression of the inner life of God in his inner-Trinitarian communion. This disclosure of the truth of the Trinity as an emanation of the intensity of the relationship between the divine persons is the experience of an increase in Being. It emanates an overflow. By revealing the fullness of life as the overflow, it presents itself as superabundance. Therefore, the disclosure does not decrease the richness of the mystery of the Trinity but rather contributes to the revelation of the fullness in its superabundance. By unconcealing the inner life of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit contributes to the increase in Being, hence increasing truth and meaning. This increase is not in the sense of adding something that was not there before. However, what is genuinely new is the event of disclosure itself. If the prevailing reason for that disclosure, of which Christ speaks in the Gospel, is his own glorification, then being glorified in the world is an increase in the glory, not necessarily in the sense of quantity, but definitely in the aspect of its lived intensity. It indicates that the disclosure of the mystery of the Trinity is not happening primarily for any other external reason, but because of the immanent intense relationship between the persons of the Trinity. In fact, the mission of the Holy Spirit can be seen not only as the externalization of the divine life but as the task of bringing the external world to participation in the inner life of the Trinity. The proclamation of the things received from Christ needs to be seen as the promise of the continuation of Christ’s mission to the world.3 If we understand Incarnation as the superior event of divine self-manifestation, the task of the Holy Spirit will be to interpret the meaning of this divine self-manifestation in its Wirkungsgeschichte, in the light of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. Therefore, this interpretative task needs to be understood as a search for a deeper meaning, which may have stayed undisclosed to Christ’s disciples also due to their lack of historical distance. With the guidance of the Paraclete, the inspired disciples of Christ will be empowered (ermächtigt) to understand Jesus’s teaching on God in the light of the events succeeding his personal history and the history of the lives of his followers. At Pentecost, the fact that the Apostles speak different languages does not hinder their being understood. In fact, everyone understands the message in his own tongue. It means that no individual language is able to express the whole of the “one” message, which is sent by the Holy Spirit. We need to understand this message in a variety of languages and in a variety of ways. The hermeneutic criterion for the discernment of the plurivocity of understanding comes from the effusion of the Holy Spirit.

3

See Robert S. Coleman, “The Promise of the Holy Spirit for the Great Commission,” Evangelical Review of Theology 16 (1992): 271-283.

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The revelation of the essentiality of the plurivocity of understanding at the Pentecost is, at the same time, the opening of the horizon of understanding.4 On the one hand, it is the speculative opening in the sense of getting a more in-depth insight into the very nature of understanding. On the other hand, it is a spacial widening of the horizon of understanding. By overcoming the historical, cultural, and religious barriers to this new outpour of divine energy into the created world, we are reminded of the universality of hermeneutics. It is, in its essence, the call to understanding. Moreover, this universal task of understanding questions the common expression of universality as connected with the number 12. In fact, Luke broadens the horizon by going beyond the number 12: “We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God.” Luke goes beyond the familiar geographical horizons of Asia and northwest Africa by welcoming the (in)habitants of islands (Cretans) and of another main land (Arabs). He embraces the strange Western world as represented by the Romans and extends the gesture of hospitality toward the Jews and proselytes. The appearance of tongues as of fire can be seen as a powerful self-manifestation of God, as the expression of Trinity’s logic of self-giving. It is a selfcommunication of God, who cares about his people and will not leave them bereaved and comfortless as ὑμᾶς ὀρφανούς (Jn 14: 18). The relationship between God’s manifestation on the mountain of Sinai and the Pentecost is of particular hermeneutic interest. The understanding of God’s revelation is happening here in the vivid memory of the marvelous experience of Sinai. The flame of the Holy Spirit burns but does not destroy. The fire of the Holy Spirit reminds us of the bush that burned without being consumed (Cf. Ex 3: 2). As an eloquent sign of the Holy Spirit, whose burning is the paradigm for purification, this flame brings about profound transformation. The passion for understanding, which is at the heart of the hermeneutic task, has its powerful transformative character. Both, the “tongues” as signifiers of the mission of proclamation and witness to God’s call, and the “fire” as the expression of God’s power to renew the face of the earth, become in their junction as “tongues of fire” a new paradigm for the mission from the Pentecost onwards, as interpreted in the light of the past salivific history of the covenant with Jahwe as the empowerment to prophesying by the outpouring of the divine Spirit (Acts 2: 17; Joel 3: 1-5).5 As a sign of the awareness of the interpretative task of the Christian community in her statu missionis, the “tongue” represents truth and love of God. 4

See John Habgood, Varieties of Unbelief (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000) and Curtis Chang, Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine and Aquinas (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000). 5 See Luz Iglesias, “Mission: A Paradigm from Pentecost,” MJTM 6 (2003-2005): 9-17. 173

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Therefore, language receives, in the event of Pentecost, a new dimension as a communicative tool in truth and love. The thinking, speaking, and acting of people filled with the Holy Spirit contribute to the edification of their real community as a visible sign of overcoming the symbolic historical impediments from the Tower of Babel. Language is not only the tool of communication between people talking to each other and understanding the diverse dialects but becomes the mode of communication with God. As the house of God, language is also the house of the human being, invited by the Spirit to participation in the inner life of the Trinity. We could say that the Holy Spirit is the language we speak and truly are. With the invitation to life in God, we can understand the Trinity from now on as our homeland. Moreover, the Holy Spirit, as God’s Spirit of Truth and Love, is our mother tongue. Within this Trinitarian paradigm, we can share our new homeland with everyone, and yet speak our own language while being understood by others. The Philosophical Discourse on the Theological Insight: Verbum Interius The philosophical world has been profoundly surprised by learning that the revolutionary discovery regarding the nature of language is not of philosophical, but specifically theological provenance.6 In an opening statement of “Language and Verbum,” in part three of Truth and Method, “The Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language,” Gadamer explains: “There is, however, an idea that is not Greek which does more justice to the being of language, and so prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western thought from being complete. This is the Christian idea of Incarnation.”7 Since the human relationship between thinking and speaking corresponds, despite its imperfections, to the divine relationship within the Trinity, a deeper understanding of how language connects to the world can be understood by seriously engaging Augustine’s doctrine of the verbum interius. Gadamer summarizes the universal aspect of his language-oriented hermeneutics as the verbum interius by shifting the accent from the word as the subject of the philosophy of language to the inner word, the core of Augustine’s teaching on the Trinity.8 Taking into consideration Gadamer’s understanding of Augustine’s verbum interius, it is instructive to see the importance of the preferred translation of λόγος as verbum and not as ratio. Following further Gadamer’s claim that the universality of hermeneutics consists in the verbum interius, an insight Gadamer learned from Augustine’s De Trinitate, the notion of verbum transcends See Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 123. 7 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 418. See also Petra Plieger, Sprache im Gespräch. Studien zum hermeneutischen Sprachverständnis bei Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wien: WUV, 2000), 187192. 8 See Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), XIV. 6

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all its particular manifestations in any given language.9 By identifying the task of theology as grasping the independent personal existence of Christ within this sameness of Being, Gadamer emphasizes that the human analogue to Christ is the mental word, the verbum intellectus. “The inner mental word is just as consubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father.”10 In God, there is no distinction between his thinking and the expressed thought. There is an identity between the Creator and his verbum mentis. By criticizing the prevailing instrumental relationship to things, which, since Plato, reduced language to a tool for thinking and communicating, Gadamer rediscovers the fundamentally ontological connection between words and things and redefines language as the medium of hermeneutic experience. Through language, the world is disclosed to us, and our understanding of the world is happening in the dynamic interplay of revealing and concealing. The genius of his theological reflection on the Trinity with its speculative insight into the inner-Trinitarian life of God, and, in particular, the Christian notion of Incarnation, allow for disclosing the essential mystery of language. Gadamer is not a theologian and is not particularly concerned with the theological implications of the speculative teaching on the Trinity, similarly to Heidegger, who is not really interested either in disclosing the Christian belief (orthodoxy—oρθόδoξία) or in the particular way of living the faith in the Christian community (orthopraxis—oρθόπραξισ), but in the primordiality of the Christian life experience, which serves him as a methodological Zugriff to factic life and as a formal indication of primordial temporality.11 For Gadamer, the Christian conceptual resources from the medieval interpretations of the Trinity shed light on philosophical problems, particularly illuminating language and history. However, what is not to be underestimated is the fact that both Augustine and Aquinas, who serve as the inspiration for Gadamer’s reflection, develop their respective philosophies of language not primarily because of engaging the philosophical sources of Aristotle and Neoplatonism, but because of their profound Trinitarian and particularly Christological interests, which shapes their understanding of the ontological relationship between words and things.

See John Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). See further, Mirela Oliva, Das innere Verbum in Gadamers Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 10 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 420. 11 See Wierciński, Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology: The Imperative To Think the Incommensurable and his “Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief,” in Sean McGrath and Andrzej Wierciński, ed., A Companion to Heidegger’s “Phenomenology of Religious Life” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 151-180. See further Sean J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006) and his, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008). 9

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Gadamer compares the relation between the verbum mentis and thought to the consubstantial relation between the Father and the Son. As the Father and the Son are of the same substance, language and human thought are of primordial unity, also essentially one. The essential unity does not mean, however, that its elements are not distinguishable. Oneness does not mean sameness. Gadamer stresses the unity of human thinking and speaking.12 By rejecting the priority of thinking over speaking, he stresses that language is not a mere communicative tool, something which can be added to thought. Being appreciative of Augustine’s contributions to the notion of the verbum, Gadamer clarifies that the verbum interius is not the Greek λόγος, the dialogue that the soul conducts with itself. Gadamer stresses that the universality of verbum lies in transcending all particular manifestations of it in any particular language. What he finds illuminating in Augustine is the idea that the Word, as the second person of the Trinity, progresses from the Father (as Son) and becomes Incarnate. However, the Incarnation does not deprive God the Father of virtually anything. On the contrary, the Incarnation of the Word is an appropriate and faithful expression of the divine nature.13 In fact, the Word Incarnate reveals the Father, but, as Aquinas says, “the eternally generated Word has manifested Him to Himself. Consequently, the name word does not belong to the Son merely in so far as He is Incarnate.”14 Gadamer also honors Aquinas’s contribution to the Christian notion of the verbum, which is essentially based on the Prologue to John’s Gospel systematically elaborated with reference to Aristotle.15 Gadamer realizes that for Aquinas, λόγος and verbum do not completely coincide. By emphasizing, in the process of a word’s formation, the ontological character of an event, it is important to see the relationship of the inner word to a possible externalization, neither related however to a particular language, nor to an ambiguous procession of a word from memory, but to a process of thinking the subject matter through to the end (which Aquinas calls “forma excogitata”). In following Aquinas, Gadamer stresses the processual character of the word, which proceeds per modum egredientis, thus achieving the perfection of thought. For Aquinas, the Neoplatonic idea of emanation, of flowing out without diminishing its source, serves as an analogy for the procession within the Trinity and the procession of the word.16 The Father is not lessened or deprived when he See Wierciński, “Die ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen,” 65-83. See Wierciński, “Inkarnation als die Ermächtigung des Differenzdenkens: Das Logosverständnis und die permanente Herausforderung zur Interpretation,” 162-204. 14 De Veritate, 4, 1. 15 See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto, 1997). 16 De Veritate, 4, 1: “Now, because the vocal word is expressed by means of a body, such a word cannot be predicated of God except metaphorically, that is, only in the sense in which creatures or their motions, being produced by God, are said to be His word inasmuch as they are signs of the divine intellect as effects are signs of their cause. For the same reason, the 12 13

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generates the Son.17 Aquinas’s treatment of verbum interius in De Veritate is an example of a fruitful symbiosis of the Neoplatonic endeavor to describe God as a divine mind with the properly Christian reflection on the human being as imago Dei and resemblance of the Trinity.18 Aquinas emphasizes the importance of the analogy between the human concept and the divine Verbum for finding the proper language to speak about God: “Our intellectual word, which enables us to speak about the divine Word by a kind of resemblance, is that at which our intellectual operation terminates. This is the object of understanding, which is called the conception of the intellect.”19 We can call the divine word a word because of its resemblance to the inner word.20 In expressing human thinking, the inner word reflects the finiteness of our understanding, which has a discursive character. Our comprehension is the process of an inner dialogue in which the human mind draws on the subject matter for what it thinks out of itself and presents it to itself as if in an inner dialogue. In this sense, human thinking can be rightly called “speaking

word which has an image of the vocal word cannot be properly predicated of God, but only metaphorically. Consequently, His ideas of things to be made are called the Word of God only metaphorically.” 17 “In the process of emanation, that from which something flows, the One, is not deprived or depleted. The same is true of the birth of the Son from the Father, who does not use up anything of himself but takes something to himself. And this is likewise true of the mental emergence that takes place in the process of thought, speaking to oneself. This kind of production is at the same time a total remaining within oneself. If it can be said of the divine relationship between word and intellect that the word originates not partially but wholly (totaliter) in the intellect, then it is true also that one word originates totaliter from another— i.e., has its origin in the mind—like the deduction of a conclusion from the premises (ut conclusio ex principiis). Thus, the process and emergence of thought is not a process of change (motus), not a transition from potentiality into action, but an emergence ut actus ex actu. The word is not formed only after the act of knowledge has been completed—in Scholastic terms, after the intellect has been informed by the species; it is the act of knowledge itself. Thus, the word is simultaneous with this forming (formatio) of the intellect. Thus, we can see how the creation of the word came to be viewed as a true image of the Trinity. It is a true generatio, a true birth, even though, of course, there is no receptive part to go with a generating one. It is precisely the intellectual nature of the generation of the word.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 422-423. 18 Cf. Wierciński, Philosophizing with Gustav Siewerth. 19 De Veritate 4, 2. 20 De Veritate 4, 1: “We give names to things according to the manner in which we receive our knowledge from things... Consequently, since the exterior word is sensible, it is more known to us than the interior word; hence, according to the application of the term, the vocal word is meant before the interior word, even though the interior word is naturally prior, being the efficient and final cause of the exterior... The interior word is that which is expressed by the exterior. Moreover, the exterior word signifies that which is understood, not the act of understanding, nor the habit or faculty, as the objects of understanding, unless the habit and the faculty are themselves the things that are understood. Consequently, the interior word is what is understood interiorly.” 177

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to oneself.” This inner unity of thinking and speaking to oneself corresponds to the Trinitarian mystery of Incarnation. The verbum interius, also called by Aquinas the principal word, tends toward manifestation. As it is true that the manifestation of something happens through a word that is vocally expressed, there is a manifestation to oneself, as in a case of soliloquium, which is mediated by the verbum cordis. For Aquinas, the concept as a representation of an object does mediate understanding and signification.21 He refers to the concept “by which our intellect understands a thing distinct from itself originates from another and represents another.”22 The concept represents an object due to its formal principle by directing the intellect to its object. Therefore, the concept is the intentio intellectus, which directs an intellect to an object of understanding. For Aquinas, another term for the concept or intentio intellectus is verbum mentis. He occasionally uses the term verbum cordis or verbum interius, which is an image of the vocal word.23 By calling the concept a verbum, Aquinas makes a clear reference to the second person of the Trinity as expressed in the Prologue to John’s Gospel. This, maybe one of the most profound doctrinal statements in the New Testament, relates the mystery of the beginning of the world with the Incarnation: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. In the Latin translation, the Divine Λόγος in God becomes verbum, qui caro factum est. All processions within the Trinity are the expressions of the one eternal divine act. The mystery of the procession of verbum from God inspires philosophers to analogically interpret the formation of a concept or verbum interius in the human intellect. The process within the Trinity can be seen as a pattern for the processual character of human thinking. The hermeneutically interesting successiveness characteristic of De Veritate 4, 1: “A medium can be understood in two ways. First, it can be understood as being a medium between the two terms of a motion, as pale is a medium between white and black in a process of blackening or whitening. Second, it can be understood as existing between what is active and what is passive, as the instrument of the artist is a medium between the artist and his work. In fact, anything by which the artist acts is a medium in this sense. It is in this second sense, too, that the Son is a medium between the creating Father and the creature created through the Word. The Son, however, is not a medium between God creating and the creature created, for the Word is also God creating. Hence, just as the Son is not a creature, so also He is not the Father.” 22 “Huiusmodi ergo conceptio, sive verbum, qua intellectus noster intelligit rem aliam a se, ab alio exoritur, et aliud repraesentat.” De Pot. 8.1. Cf. In Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3, c.; d. 8, q. 2, a. 1d, ad 1. 23 John O’Callaghan shifts the importance of Aquinas’s verbum mentis into the properly theological horizon. “It has the theological purpose of providing nothing more than an image or metaphor for talking about man, made in the image and likeness of God as Trinity.” John O’Callaghan, “Verbum Mentis: Philosophical or Theological Doctrine in Aquinas?” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 (2000): 103-119. See also his Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 21

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the discursiveness of human thought emphasizes that thinking is not a temporal relation but a mental process, an emanatio intellectualis. The analogy of bringing something to language and becoming incarnate as the Word is the expression of the inner life of the Trinity and discloses the mystery of language. Similarly to the divine procession within the Trinity, the coming to language of something is not a diminishment of the Being of that particular being (das Sein des Seienden—esse entium), but an actualization of it, its coming to subsistence.24 With Gadamer, we can say that “the true Being of things becomes accessible precisely in their linguistic appearance.”25 Actus signatus, what a statement says, and actus exercitus, the enactment (Vollzug) of what has been understood, constitute the dynamics of understanding. In actus exercitus, the expression of the inner meaning is fully realized; actus exercitus goes beyond what is expressed in words and also embraces the application of what has been said and understood. Meaning is not only communicated in what is said, but also in how it is expressed, what Heidegger calls “formal indication.”26 The inner word requires a multiplicity of external words: The production of words is a remaining with self, not a change—a move from potency to act—but a procession of act from act. In forming a word, the mind is not directed toward its own reflection: There is no reflection when the word is formed, for the word is not expressing the mind but the thing intended. The starting point for the formation of the word is the substantive content (the species) that fills the mind.27 As the inner unity of thinking and speaking, the inner word shows the direct and spontaneous character of thinking. The word is not an articulation of the human mind’s reflection upon itself, but a similitudo rei. That which is externalized in language is already word before it is uttered. The inner word is pre-reflective; it expresses a thing that has been thought. With his deep fascination for Augustine’s account of the verbum interius, Gadamer clarifies the understanding of language with words being not just tools at our disposal for describing reality, but are, in fact, ontologically connected to things. Similarly to the Word as the second person of the Trinity, who as the Son See Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things,” in idem, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976), 77. 26 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA21, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 410. The propositions about Dasein only indicate Dasein. The young Heidegger, concerned with facticity, turned his phenomenological interest toward pre-theoretical experience, which he calls “faktische Lebenserfahrung.” Formal indication was Heidegger’s answer to Husserl’s theoreticization of factical life. 27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 426. 24 25

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proceeds from the Father and becomes the incarnated Word, thus allowing us to access the mystery of the Trinity, the human word makes it possible to see the true Being of things (das Sein des Seienden) in their linguistic appearance. The other element of similarity refers to the idea that the incarnated Word of God takes nothing away from God the Father. By analogy, coming to language does not diminish the Being of a thing, but is, in fact, an actualization of the possibility for being. The word is not exhausted by its linguistic expression since the unsaid also belongs to what is said. Gadamer’s understanding of the word goes beyond its significative function to the word as an enactment of thinking (Vollzug des Denkens). As such, it is never a final word, for thinking is always thinking further: There is always more to be said. The processual character of language makes it possible for Gadamer to think Dasein’s finitude in relation to divine infinity. “Christology prepares the way for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity.”28 Verbum mediates between the human and the divine. The essential point here is that the procession from the verbum interius to the verbum exterius is not a movement through space, but a procession in time, an ecstatic self-transcendence. Scholastic Trinitarian theology offers a figure for understanding the emergence of the word as the procession from act to act (ut actus ex actu, et non ut actus ex potentia). Without engaging in the details of Gadamer’s endorsement of Trinitarian theology for the rediscovery of the truth of language, we can definitely emphasize that Augustine and Aquinas’s philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are profoundly indebted to their theology, in particular to their deep Trinitarian and Christological thinking. It is precisely this intellectual heritage, which helps us to situate the question of the ontological relation between things and words in the proximity of theological thinking. In Praise of Thinking the Self-Revealing Triune God As the Arian heresy stimulated the crystallization of the speculative notion of the Trinity, the attempt to delineate the understanding of the Trinity within the confines of a solemn definition perpetuated the negativity of a dogmatic perception of the “captive mind” as the enemy of freedom of expression and the prison of the human spirit. The dogmatically interpreted Scripture lost, for many, its genuine hospitable character as the realm of trust and freedom, respect, and reverence. Dogmatics became, therefore, a big Non-sense (das Unwort), both an ugly but also an unwanted word. However, the task of thinking the Trinity is definitely one of the most exciting intellectual enterprises. Already starting from the address of the ontological 28

Ibid., 428.

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status of Christ as the second person of the Trinity, we discover the potential for disclosing and expressing God in an absolutely unique way. This Christological approach to the mystery of the Trinity serves as the critical context for understanding not only the concept of the divine immutability but also of the relationship between the Creator God and his creation. The obedience of Christ, as demonstrated in the event of Incarnation, opens up a new horizon of the disclosure of the Trinitarian God. This Christological-Incarnational revelation, along with the kenotic nature of God’s self-manifestation in the event of the Cross and Resurrection calls into question the notion of the divine immutability. In fact, the divine kenosis indicates a profound movement and indeed a transformation in God not as imposed on him by the logic of creation, but as accepted by his own disinterested self-giving in the event of Incarnation, which, in turn, is understood not as the enfleshment and external radicalization of the divine power but as the kenosis of the intra-Trinitarian life of love. This Trinitarian event of the intra-Trinitarian self-giving is the very condition of the possibility of God’s externalization. In other words, the intra-Trinitarian dynamics of life, which is love, is the paradigm of any externalization of God in his kenotic expression from creation through the Incarnation, and the Cross. God’s intra-Trinitarian disinterestedness calls him to kenosis in order to exteriorize a liveliness within the Trinity, which in a divine superabundance becomes the heritage of the whole of humanity. The complexity of the life of the Incarnated God is a revelation of the Trinity under the particular aspect of kenotic obedience. The hermeneutic circle seems clear: The privileged access to the mystery of the Trinity is the mystery of the Incarnated God. However, thinking the mystery of the Trinity is, in turn, the condition of the possibility of thinking the supreme expression of God’s kenotic selfmanifestation in the Incarnation, and finally in the event of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. Holding on to the ‘two natures’ distinction, Christ’s suffering, which occurs in his human nature, does not necessarily imply univocal suffering in the Trinitarian God. An enduring and incommensurable difference between the Creator God and his creature prevents the logical necessity of the suffering of the whole Trinity. However, if we accept the fact that God’s nature is intrinsically interpersonal, then we must open up the horizon of a possible acceptance of being personally affected by Christ’s suffering by the whole Trinity in their mutual interpersonal relations. The mystery of the Trinity is the essential identity of God as a personal communio. God, in his deepest reality, is not a solitude but a communio of life and love, and therefore, this community cannot remain immune to the pain and suffering in the history of its externalization. The community of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the prototype of the human community with the concept of

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the intimate indwelling, περιχoρεσις, as the structural axis.29 If we are further inclined to call the fatherhood and the sonship in the Holy Spirit a family, in truth, a divine family, then thinking the Trinity also discloses something essential about the family. It is a discovery of a profoundly engaging and dynamic relation, which out of its lived love shares its own spirit of love with others and invites them to participating in the eternal feast of love. By implementing the ontological difference between the Creator God and his creature, creation can be interpreted as a participation in the role of the Son as an image and expression of the Father within the Trinity. Creation can be seen as God’s own gift to himself: Coming out of Non-Being (ex nihilo-Nichts) and yet empowered to Being by God. What is striking here is the fact that God remains not unaffected by his own decision (Entschluss). The transformation in God is substantiated by his own inner-Trinitarian event of love. This transformation we can interpret in the sense of an increase in Being. The postmodern challenge inspires us to uncompromisingly argue for genuine theological thinking. It is a thinking which thinks the truth of God and Being and strives to reach back into the essential ground from which all thinking emerges. Hermeneutics situates theological systematics in a critical relation to the history of theological thinking. It reminds us of the historically conditioned character of understanding. We are always historically situated and live with a deep conviction in the plurality of writing the history of theological thinking. Hermeneutically speaking, we will never have one “true” history of theology. The task of a theologian is to combine a hermeneutic commitment to both theological speculation and historical engagement. In that sense, there is no systematic theological thinking deprived of, or without, the critical engagement with the past. Particularly in the age of a jittery search for a “non-metaphysical” and “non-dogmatic” theology, we can experience some profound difficulties with the theological task, difficulties which are in my understanding largely related to mistrust in hermeneutics, preventing the adequate address for that which needs to be thought.30 We can speak of the Not, in a similar way to Gadamer’s attempt to discover anew the inherent potential of language. Theological hermeneutics is not a method of interpreting the event of faith, but it thematizes an ontological relationship between an interpreter and that which needs to be interpreted. It engages 29

30

“Die trinitarische gegenseitige Durchdringung (perichoresis) ist der grundlegende und höchste Archetyp des Lebens als Gemeinschaft, wo Einheit und Unterschiedlichkeit völlig und gleichzeitig zum Ausdruck kommen.” Gisbert Greshake, Der dreieine Gott: Eine trinitarische Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2001), 189. See also Oliver D. Crisp, “Problems with Perichoresis,” Tyndale Bulletin 56, no. 1 (2005): 119-140. See Jeffrey W. Robbins, In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group Publishers, 2004); see also his Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Robbins’s non-dogmatic theology is a post-critical affirmation of the traditional theological pattern of fides quaerens intellectum and transformed religious and theological sensibility.

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the complexity of a personal act of believing in the Greek sense of πιστεύειv and Latin credere, which embraces both aspects of faith: holding for true (das Fürwahr-halten, geglaubter Glaube, fides quae creditur), and the active pursuit of trusting (glaubender Glaube, fides qua creditur). Our personal faith relates our very life to the Trinity as the source and the summit (fons et culmen) of all mysteries. If we understand the postmodern age as the flourishing of religious pluralism, philosophical skepticism, and cultural relativism, we also need to address a question of “dogmatism” in systematic theology. Is it necessarily for systematic theology to be orthodoxic? Orthodoxic or orthopractic? Or maybe just instructive and supportive in the realm of right-living and on the way to individual self-perfection? We would certainly need to ask further about the specific traits of systematic theology.31 Historically confronted with the secularization and pluralization of Western society, which undoubtedly contributes to the much-hated relativism, some versions of theology vehemently oppose the attitude of resignation regarding absolute truth. However, the history of Christianity, which profoundly shapes Western culture, is a symphony of voices constituting the tradition, which we are. Hermeneutics calls for the discernment of truth in history, which cannot happen without acknowledging the cultural contributions and enduring presence of traditions, also those substantially different from our own. It is the hermeneutic gesture of hospitality and welcoming the other as the possible disclosure of that which is undisclosed to us. It is particularly urgent there, where, despite being conscious of the plurivocal horizon of meaning, we still stubbornly declare that we have the one and only interpretation. Goethe extends his powerful inspirational invitation to everyone: “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.” The hermeneutic task is to discern the meaning of action, which is distinguishable from its occurrence as a spatio-temporal event. Every reading of action and text requires interpretation. This leads us to the insight that no theoretical expertise will make us into masters of understanding. Instead, hermeneutics repeats a call to search for understanding by always interpreting anew while being conscious of the operative force of the tradition which we are. Understanding, then, is an act of Wirkungsgeschichte, which conditions us in the same way our consciousness of being is influenced by the course of history. Doing theological hermeneutics in the context of the much celebrated “theology without God,” “God without Being,” “religion without religion,” means conscious participation in the interpretative understanding of the dynamics of the event of faith in the

31

See Thomas Ruster, Der verwechselbare Gott: Theologie nach der Entflechtung von Christentum und Religion (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2003). 183

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triune God.32 The theological task concerns our understanding of the image of God as revealed by him and the implication of this revelation for our life. This understanding happens as a creative interaction between the perception of God and the perception of the world we live in. Doing theology cannot be, in fact, separated from doing the history of theology and philosophy, since it is essential to be aware of the extent to which tradition and language fashion us as lingual beings. Tradition shapes and in-forms our very being and understanding. With regard to the hermeneutics of the Trinity, we need to theologize about the mystery of the inner life of God by trying to understand all preceding theological questions and answers and to situate ourselves in a dialogue with the theological tradition to disclose the mystery of the Trinity in its speculative richness. We gain our insight into the mystery of the Trinity by way of doing a theological exegesis of God’s self-manifestation in Scripture. This is a powerful hermeneutic experience of searching for an understanding of God’s mystery by engaging his Word and, at the same time, of allowing the biblical texts to reshape our previous understanding while offering the referential language for our theological enterprise. The hermeneutic plaidoyer for not holding to the distinction between philosophers, theologians, and exegetes speaks loudly for theological exegesis and biblical theology, which further a theological insight altogether. It is also a constant reminder that doing theological hermeneutics advances our understanding of the triune God by exegeting his Word, which forms and transforms us who listen. As in the case of the ancient Greek word φαρμακόv, there is no single translation which would capture the play of its signification. Since the Greek word as a poison transformed, through the Socratic λόγος, into a cathartic power to awaken the soul to the truth, is overdetermined, the very notion of signification gets overloaded. Here we touch upon the hermeneutic problem of overdetermination. It is not a simple question of translating the Greek word into a modern language. The overdetermination of the word opens up the possible horizons of interpretation and situates the philosophical and theological discourse in the realm of ambiguity. The question remains, whether this ambiguity needs to be dogmatically dismissed as an infertile equivocity, vagueness, fuzziness, and deceptiveness. If δoκεω means to think, then dogmatics is truly the matter of thinking, in truth, a special concentration, and intensity of thinking, since it relates the human mind to its origin. It needs to overcome fearsome apologetics in the sense of avoiding or combating the erroneous opinions of the individual thinkers. Maybe we can even see the interpretive ambiguity and an apparent doctrinal laxity as a counter32

Frank T. Birtel, ed., Reasoned Faith: Essays on the Interplay of Faith and Reason (New York: Crossroad, 1993) and Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World (Rocklin, Ca.: Prima Publishing, 1997).

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act to the poison of ‘simplification’ or oversimplification, as an antidotum (ἀvτίδoτov) to the leveling democratic reductionist tendencies of our time, and foremost, as an endorsement of the plurivocity of understanding in the unity of the Spirit. In the process of translation and interpretation, we realize that by choosing only one of the meanings we do injustice to that which is translated, somehow annihilating the original plurivocal meaning. The translation and interpretation are then not necessarily incorrect but are definitely incomplete. In theological thinking, we are no less incomplete. Every interpretative translation is both, violent and impotent, as Derrida tells us.33 The resulting sense of dissatisfaction leaves us somewhere between happy acceptance and bitter rejection.

33

See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 185

2. 2. 3. Gadamer and Theology: From a Work of Art to Faith or Distance with Respect In one of his last interviews, Hans-Georg Gadamer said: “people cannot live without hope; this is one of the statements I can defend without any reservations.”1 With all the multidimensional understandings of hope, it is impossible to exclude hope, especially when it is understood in terms of soteriology. Just on the contrary. Looking at the development of philosophical thought in Western civilization, it is easy to see that it is built on religious foundations. Calculative rationality (which Heidegger calls rechnendes Denken, unlike besinnliches Denken)2 merely aims at dominating and controlling nature, including human nature.3 One can speak of a specific culture of calculative rationality since the Enlightenment.4 In borderline situations, the one-sidedness of such an approach manifests itself in all its drama. Religion, however, still reminds us that there are dimensions of life that we are unable to control entirely; with suffering and death as the dominant ones. Religion is the recognition of the limits of cognition in the post-Enlightenment scientific sense of the control and domination over nature. Gadamer’s critique of

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Menschen können nicht ohne Hoffnung leben.” Rhein-NeckarZeitung, Februar 11, 2002. 2 In Gelassenheit, Heidegger juxtaposes calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) in opposition to contemplative thinking (besinnliches Nachdenken): “Calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is. There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking (das rechnende Denken) and meditative thinking (das besinnliche Nachdenken). This meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight-fromthinking.” Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 46. 3 According to Gadamer, Heidegger’s attempt was to revolutionize the post-Enlightenment understanding of the tasks which thinking is confronted with: “His task consisted, rather, in thinking towards the resolutions proposed by the industrial revolution and what lies behind their basic impulse, which had brought them down to the level of calculation and mere doing, and to recall them to the level of thinking.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” in idem, GW3: 184. 4 Popper calls an acceptance of the rational approach, which validates argument and experience in particular, an “irrational faith in reason.” As for Popper’s critical rationalism” see, Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1990). Cf. An important study of the relation between reason and rationality, Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 1

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post-Enlightenment reasoning concerns, among others, the problem of the tension between the humanities and the natural sciences: The humanities differ from natural sciences not only in terms of their methods but in their everyday attitude to things, by participating in the tradition that they are constantly expressing for us. For this reason, I proposed the extension of the ideal of objective cognition, which governs our concepts of knowledge, scientificity, and truth, by including the ideal of participation and involvement. Participation in the essential expression of human experience, such as has been developed in the artistic, religious and historical messages, not only of our culture but also of all other cultures—this possible participation is the most appropriate criterion for judging the richness or poverty of the research results in the humanities.5 The hermeneutic turn in philosophy draws attention to the fact that the central issue of philosophy is not that of developing a method for ‘understanding,’ through which one could build a knowledge that is ‘certain’—according to the methodical ideal of science—but a cognition that would clarify the factical existence.6 The subject of this study is the importance of theological reflection for the development of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, with particular reference to the Marburg period.7 As Gadamer stated himself, when looking retrospectively at the years in Marburg, he cannot ignore the name of Rudolf Bultmann.8 Neither can

5

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik—Ästhetik—Praktische Philosophie. Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch, ed. Carsten Dutt (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag,1993), 17. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft: Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976). 6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Gesammelte Werke, Hermeneutik 1, vol. 1. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990), 1-2. 7 Cf. Jean Grondin, “Gadamer and Bultmann,” in Petr Pokorny and Jan Roskovec, ed., Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 121-143; cf. French text: “Gadamer et Bultmann,” in Guy Deniau and Jean-Claude Gens, ed., L’héritage de Hans-Georg Gadamer (Paris: Vrin, 2003), 113-131; and also the German version: “Gadamer und Bultmann,” in Mirko Wischke and Michael Hofer, ed., Gadamer verstehen/Understanding Gadamer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 186-208. It is worth paying attention to Lawrence’s works, as he thematises the problem of the relationship between hermeneutics and ‘doing’ theology. Cf. Frederick Lawrence, “Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology,” in Robert J. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), 167-200. 8 “In effect, if (when looking back to the Twenties) I had to say what Marburg represented then, the name of Rudolf Bultmann would not be missing.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 14. 187

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Martin Heidegger’s be omitted.9 Gadamer called himself “one of the heirs to the great task,”—named and baptized thus by Heidegger, “the genius of thinking”— a co-heir “to the new life of thinking.”10 On the one hand, Gadamer felt he was his loyal student, and, on the other, he looked for a critical distance from his intellectual master, particularly concerning the Platonic dialogues.11 The biography of Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s relationship is documented quite well. Cf. Bernd Jaspert, Sachgemäße Exegese. Die Protokolle aus Rudolf Bultmanns Neutestamentlichen Seminaren 1921-1951 (Marburg: Elwert, 1996). The correspondence between the two friends: “Martin Heidegger–Rudolf Bultmann. Briefwechsel 1925-1975,” ed. Andreas Grossmann and Christof Landmesser (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009). See also, Helmuth Vetter, “Hermeneutische Phänomenologie und Dialektische Theologie. Heidegger und Bultmann,” in Andreas Grossmann and Christoph Jamme, ed., Metaphysik der praktischen Welt. Perspektiven im Anschluß an Hegel und Heidegger. Festgabe für Otto Pöggeler (Amsterdam: Atlanta, 2000), 268-286. 10 “Well, in the Marburg of the Twenties there was quite a choice among others, who knew how to foster our development: e.g., Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Robert Curtius, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Friedländer, but also Richard Hamann and all the others, whom I have described in my autobiography. Likewise, Heidegger’s own capacity to concentrate was, so to speak, poured out over us as if his energy were something like a baptism into a new beginning, a new liveliness of thought. At that time, as one can imagine, we were all bristling with an excessive and undeserved self-confidence (and pride in ourselves)—that’s how young people actually are. We felt as inspired as this master was inspirational, and I can somehow imagine how difficult it must have been for Heidegger’s colleagues in Marburg—of all kinds of other scientific backgrounds—when the imitators of Heidegger in his radical thinking energy and questioning energy brought a sense of insecurity into the seminars and other teaching arrangements by their own, so-called radical questioning. Heidegger was a great challenge to us all. When I think back to all of this, and in what penurious circumstances we had to struggle for our getting to be scholars, after the big inflation, after the destruction of the wealth of the Middle Classes, while depending on a system of scholarships that had not yet settled into a solid financial and organizational functionality and was, characteristically, called Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Crisis Organization for the German Sciences). Ultimately, it was the power of Heidegger’s impulse which made it possible for us to keep up our strength, to do without things and to concentrate fully upon our own task— an encouragement of the highest order. It helped us that we were friends with one another, that the debates and the spirit of emulation, while living together, promoted a togetherness in ‘doing without’ and in daring. All that needs no explanation. Then followed the years, when Heidegger, who from Marburg had gone back to Freiburg, left us young lecturers in philosophy to our own devices—or perhaps we should just say that he let us go free. Because it makes a big difference, whether or not one can pass on what one has learnt in one’s own way, without constantly feeling the closeness of one’s teacher. It was a splendid opportunity which opened up before us, the young lecturers: I am talking about Karl Lowith, Gerhard Krüger—to whom I also want, today, to dedicate a word of thanks and grateful remembrance—and myself. We had suddenly been called as heirs to a great task.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Von Lehrenden und Lernenden,” in idem, GA10: 332-333. 11 “By the thought-provoking impulses, which I received from Heidegger in my young years, a standard had been set for me; I had to learn to measure up to it. This always required the sort of distance that presupposes having gained an idea of what position one may have reached oneself, before I could move from pure discipleship to seeking out my own paths of thought, 9

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Gadamer studied in Marburg from 1919 to 1923 and was influenced by Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Natorp. At the time, he did not contact Bultmann. Soon after his doctorate with Hartmann (1922)—about the meaning of pleasure in Plato,12—Gadamer was going to occupy himself with the Nicomachean Ethics and habilitate in Aristotle. Paul Natorp, knowing Gadamer’s interests, familiarized him with the reading he was just doing, which we now know as the “Natorp Bericht.”13 This reading became a real breakthrough in Gadamer’s life. He not only became Heidegger’s student, but he regarded the text, which followed, as the best in all his output. When in 1989 he wrote the afterword to the publication of the “Natorp Bericht,” he called it Heideggers Theologische Jugendschrift, alluding—with this title—to Dilthey’s discovery of Hegel’s early theological writings.14 Under the influence of the Natorp Bericht, Gadamer left Marburg and went to Heidegger. In Freiburg, in 1923, he attended his lectures on Hermeneutik der Faktizität.15 Thus, hermeneutics became the leitmotif in Gadamer’s thought. Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer began volens nolens with the problem of religion. Young Heidegger understood that the main task of theology is “seeking a word that could summon to faith and keep (someone’s) faith going.”16 Heidegger was fully engaged in reconstructing the ontological tradition in order

so that I might be able to demonstrate Heidegger’s thinking paths, as it were, within their own parameters.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heideggers Wege: Studien zu Spätwerk (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), 5. 12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Das Wesen der Lust nach den platonischen Dialogen. Gadamer’s doctoral thesis accepted at the University in Marburg 15 May 1922. 13 Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation,” ed. Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Dilthey Jahrbuch vol. 6 (1989): 236-269. 14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 76-86. 15 Martin Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, GA63 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988). In the expression “Hermeneutik der Faktizität,” the genitive is to be understood as genitivus obiectivus (interpretation of facticity as a hermeneutic problem) as well as genitivus subiectivus (“self-interpretation of facticity”): “The problems of philosophy touch upon Being-as-it-occurs in factual life. In this respect, philosophy is principally ontology, that is to say, that the particular individual worldly regional ontologies take on their reason for being a problem or an explanation of why they are a problem from the ontology of facticity. The problems of philosophy touch upon Being-as-it-occurs in life, in the respective “how” of its being addressed or interpreted. This means that philosophy, as ontology of facticity, is at the same time the categorial interpretation of being addressed and interpreted, and that means, it is logic.” Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 29. 16 “The true task of theology, to which it must find its way again, is to seek out the “word” which is capable of calling to faith and keeping in faith.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Marburger Theologie,” in idem, GW3: 197. 189

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to reach its Greek sources.17 This reconstruction was, for him, destruction: the original understanding of the Greeks can only be reached by overcoming the Judeo-Christian contamination. On the other hand, to understand what is genuinely Christian, one has to give up the Greek philosophical apparatus.18 Without entering into a detailed debate on the subject of demythologization and dehellenization, it is worth paying attention to the fact that both of these terms have become an extremely important element in the development of philosophical and theological thought.19 In going back once more to Aristotle himself—an Aristotle purified of neo-Thomistic interpretations—Heidegger sought a way that would lead to a radical understanding of Christian self-awareness. According to him, philosophy must be atheistic, if one wants to go beyond formal disputes over religiosity as such. The philosophy needs to be ‘atheistic,’ neither in the sense of the theory of materialism nor of any similar theory. Any philosophy which, being what it is, understands itself, needs to become aware of the fact that—being a factical ‘how’ of an understanding of life, especially when it has at least some ‘concept’ of God—it is also a kind of ‘taking back’ of life (by force) and directing it toward itself Cf. Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? idem, “Martin Heideggers ‘göttlicher Gott’ bei Bernhard Welte und Gustav Siewerth,” in Markus Enders and Holger Zaborowski, ed., Phänomenologie der Religion: Zugänge und Grundfragen (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 2004), 525-541, idem, “Das Geschick oder Das Schicksal der Metaphysik: Die Ermächtigung des Denkens und die Seinsvergessenheit,” 75-109. See also Joseph S. O’Leary, Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 67, Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001) and Jeffrey Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003). 18 In Sein und Zeit Heidegger pointed out the direction that theology needs to take very clearly: “Theology, on the other hand, seeks for a more primordial interpretation, one that is sketched out from the meaning of faith itself and is found in its permanent interpretation of the Being of man in relation to God’s. Theology slowly begins to understand Luther’s insight once more, that its dogmatic systematics rests on a foundation which has not primarily been based on the questions of a believer, and whose conceptualization is not only insufficient for the problems of theology, but (actually) conceals and distorts them.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986), 10. 19 In Platonismus im Christentum, Werner Beierwaltes polemicizes with Adolf von Harnack’s well known thesis concerning the sympathetic attitude of the Fathers of the Church to Greek philosophy, called the Hellenization and secularization of Christianity. Beierwaltes shows that during the Hellenization of Christianity, the concepts of Greek metaphysics influenced the dogmatization of Christian teaching quite substantially. In his historical-philosophical studies, he also proves that there are theologoumena which—though only in their contact with philosophy—take on both a theoretical shape and increase their strength in the message of faith. Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus im Christentum (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). 17

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(rather than God), which, religiously speaking, comes to the same as raising one’s hand against God (Himself). However, only then can philosophy stand honestly before God, that is, in accordance with the parameters within which it can operate as philosophy; here, ‘atheistic’ means keeping itself separate from deceptive care and concern, which touches upon religiosity as mere chatter. Is it not possible that the very idea of a philosophy of religion, especially if it draws its conclusions without taking account of the facticity of the human being, comes to be the most absurd nonsense?20 When interpreting the hermeneutics of facticity, Gadamer also draws attention to the Christian roots of the problem, especially to Hegel’s synthesis of faith and knowledge. Yet it is Gadamer’s dialectical interpretation of the hermeneutics of facticity that sets Heidegger in direct opposition to the rationalistic illusion of adequate self-knowledge. According to Gadamer: When we start from the hermeneutics of facticity, i.e., from the self-interpretation of Dasein, then it is clear that Dasein always projects itself toward its future and therefore becomes aware of its own finitude. This is what Heidegger, in his famous saying, “heading toward death—Vorlaufen zum Tode,” characterized as Dasein’s authenticity. So, Being, in its “here—da,” is Dasein between two darknesses: Its future and its provenance. This is what the hermeneutics of facticity teaches us. It aims at an understanding that is a radical counterbalance to Hegel’s absolute spirit and its self-transparency.21 For Gadamer, an essential element in shaping his own understanding of hermeneutics was his contact with Bultmann. Rudolf Bultmann (born 1884) and Gadamer (born 1900) shared an interest in Greek literature and shared it hands-on. For fifteen years Gadamer attended the Thursday meetings at Bultmann’s, which he called “Graeca.” Bultmann also played an important role in building up the young Gadamer’s confidence, when his philosophical future began to be questioned by Heidegger. (He returned to this motif in a letter sent to Bultmann on his ninetieth birthday.)22 Occasionally, Gadamer also participated in the meetings of the Theologische Gesellschaft (Theological Society) in Marburg, where he witnessed Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, 28. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und ontologische Differenz,” in idem, GW10: 4-65. 22 In a birthday letter to Bultmann dated August 1974, Gadamer writes: “Whoever, like I am, is given the opportunity to think of your 90th birthday—when it is surely 50 years ago that I became a frequent guest in your house—cannot suppress a feeling of heartfelt gratitude for having been given a long-lasting and sustained presence such as yours. It began with the encouragement represented by your invitation to join in with your Graeca and what this meant to me, precisely at the time when my deepest doubts regarding my suitability for the sciences and for philosophy had befallen me. Since then and for many years now, through 20 21

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Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s personal and intellectual intimacy. Later, he wrote about himself: “I cannot claim that I was a competent listener at these meetings— only later did I deepen my theological studies and began to learn from Bultmann.”23 It is difficult to find any texts by Gadamer, from the Marburg years, that would testify to his theological studies. After Heidegger’s return to Freiburg in 1928, Bultmann remained the leading authority for Gadamer in Marburg. It is possible to conclude from Gadamer’s scanty testimonies that it was at that time that his theological education took place. One of them is the recollection of Bultmann’s seminar, where Gadamer writes (in the text: “Socrates Frömmigkeit des Nichtwissens”—“The Piety that Resides in Not-Knowing”): When I was a young professor in Marburg, I attended a seminar of the famous New Testament biblical scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, who was my dear friend. I remember that he asked students how one would appropriately say in Greek: ‘The Faith of the Greeks.’ Of course, he meant the word εὐσέβεια. He liked none of the students’ answers. Then I proposed ‘The Gods of Greece.’ It also did not find his approval. To this day I think it was the only right answer. I wanted to say that, for the Greeks, when they thought about gods, it was neither about the human relation to gods nor about the inner certainty of a religious consciousness (die innerliche Gewissheit des courage and (presumptuous) high spirits, through encouragement and confirmation, your own Dasein and its sphere of influence have helped me to stay standing on my own paths. And when I consider that I may now even call you a member of my Order, then this day is a truly blessed one. When I put myself in your place, I of course know that much has been asked of you over the years—the parting from your wife after so much illness, leaving behind so many friends (of whom one is our shared friend Gerhard Krüger), the diminishing of your strength—something I also begin to feel as the first harbingers come my way, the growing and unstoppable isolation which comes with increasing age. Who can possibly take all this into account and judge it correctly. And yet there is much that is not temporary and becomes ever more settled. I don’t just mean what every person, who grows old, has to go through, that childhood and youth take on a new freshness in their representation and form a secret pact that leads to the generation of grandchildren, and soon also of great-grandchildren. I also mean—in your case especially—your contribution to insight and knowledge. This is not just the more or less modest contribution made to science by the researcher. In your case it is, in a unique way, more. The meetings of the ‘Old Scholars of Marburg,’ which you yourself can no longer attend personally, and which—I too, could only attend on an ad hoc basis– prove something else: i.e., that your teaching is of lasting and available help to the countless ones who are engaged in being priests. The discussions around demythologization, the misunderstandings, and the resentments, but also the emancipation of the younger ones—all that is now behind you, and I am fully aware that I share my joyous commemoration of your 90th birthday with a huge crowd of others. My ‘Memoirs from Marburg’ will have told you something of this already. May your own treasure of memories, intuitions, and the present gild your ‘day of honor.’” Bultmann Archive. University of Tübingen. 23 Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre, 37. 192

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gläubigen Bewusstseins). The Greeks lived lives that were turned outward (nach aussen) and were completely convinced that the surrounding reality is the spiritual presence of the gods.24 From Gadamer’s particular statements, and from his participation in the Theologische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alter Marburger meetings, it can be inferred that Gadamer’s interest in theology was maintained thanks to his friendship with Bultmann and that, thanks to that, his theological consciousness deepened, which resulted, among other texts, in Wahrheit und Methode, and in the concept of verbum interius preceded by his studies on Augustine. Gadamer explained the universal aspect of his lingually oriented hermeneutics as verbum interius; by that, he did not mean a word that is the subject matter of the philosophy of language or linguistics, but the inner word, which is at the center of the Augustinian understanding of the Holy Trinity.25 Twice there were Gadamer texts, published in the works which honored Bultmann: “Prometheus und die Tragödie der Kultur” in 1949, celebrating Bultmann’s 65th birthday,26 and “Die Marburger Theologie” in 1964, his 80th birthday.27 Also, in Wahrheit und Methode it is clearly noticeable that in the develop-

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Sokrates’ Frömmigkeit des Nichtwissens,” in idem, GW7, 88. In the text, Gadamer refers to two well-known and famous books of the time, one of them being Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Woellendorf, Der Glaube der Hellenen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959) in Walter F. Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands: Das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes (Frankfurt a.M.: Schulte-Bulmke, 1947). Further, Gadamer explains his standpoint: “‘The gods are everywhere. Apparently, this was said by Thales, according to Aristoteles. My own suggestion, to say ‘The Gods of Greece’ instead of ‘The Belief of the Hellenes’ was, in fact, an allusion to another, rather famous, book of Walter F. Otto, who had also once been a pupil of Wilamowitz. In this book, Wilamowitz tried to prove that the Greek modes of appearing of the world, aspects of reality which appeared before man’s eyes in their overwhelming importance. Here it is not, in the first place, about the inner state of mind of the person undergoing this religious experience, and also not about faith—as if one could doubt reality. Even the appropriate-looking use of the word εὐσέβεια, which Bultmann had in mind for that which he could call something like ‘piety,’ is apparently further from the mark of Greek religious experience than the concept of ὅσιον, what is ‘holy.’” Ibid., 88-89. 25 Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. Cf. also Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), XIV. 26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Prometheus und die Tragödie der Kultur,” in Rudolf Bultmann, Festschrift: Rudolf Bultmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed., Ernst Wolf (Stuttgart-Köln: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1949), 74-83. 27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Marburger Theologie,” in Rudolf Bultmann, Zeit und Geschichte: Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Erich Dinkler (Tübingen: Mohr 1964), 479-490. Reprint in Hans-Georg Gadamer “Die Marburger Theologie,” in GW3: 197-208. 24

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ment of the element of application—which is needed for ‘understanding’—Gadamer drew upon legal and biblical hermeneutics.28 There is no understanding when there is no application of that which is to be understood in the concrete existential situation of a human being. As for the philosophical closeness of Gadamer and Bultmann, it focuses on the issue of self-understanding (Selbstverständnis—and according to Gadamer, Selbst-verständnis is the fundamental concept for Bultmann).29 At this point, it is worth reminding ourselves that Gadamer was originally going to entitle Wahrheit und Methode as Verstehen und Geschehen. Understanding (Verstehen) and happening (Geschehen) create specific dynamics in existence. As Gadamer writes, the process of understanding “is not so much our action, as that which happens to us when thinking guides us on the paths of thought.”30 The title of Gadamer’s magnum opus calls to mind a four-volume edition of Bultmann’s essays, Glauben und Verstehen, which was released in 1933, 1952, 1961 and 1965.31 The first volume, from 1933, is dedicated to Heidegger.32 The hermeneutic self-understanding—Selbstverständnis—lies far from the ideal of self-possession (Selbstbesitz), which is reached through self-reflection. Hermeneutically, self-understanding is achieved through the experience of failure and misfortune (Scheitern). Overcoming adversity is an indispensable element of human experience. Opening up to the world also brings about an openness to pain and suffering (πάθει μάθος). Learning through experience does not only mean that we become wise through suffering, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Das hermeneutische Problem der Anwendung” in idem, Wahrheit und Methode, 312-316. “Interpretation is not an additional or occasional act before there can be understanding, but understanding is always interpretation; hence interpretation is the explicit form taken on by understanding.… Application [is] an equally necessary part to the integration of the hermeneutic process, just like understanding and interpretation.” Ibid., 312-313. 29 Gadamer, “Die Marburger Theologie,” in idem, GW3: 203-206. “Since, if there is something indispensable in the idea of revelation, then it is precisely this: that the human being cannot by himself reach an understanding of him/herself. This is a very ancient motif arising out of the faith-experience, which goes right through Augustine’s review of his life, that all man’s attempts to understand himself by his/her own efforts and starting off with the world that surrounds him/her (and which is seen by a human being as his/her own), will come to nothing.” Ibid., 203. 30 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Kehre des Weges,” in idem, GW10: 75. 31 Rudolf Bultmann, Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr, 19331965). 32 Dedication: “This book is dedicated to Martin Heidegger in grateful remembrance of the time spent together in Marburg.” Heidegger confirmed publicly the importance of this period for himself and for the development of the friendship, which survived the difficult years of Heidegger’s Rectorship at the University of Freiburg, but not earlier than in the “Festschrift for Bultmann’s 80th,” dated 1964, where he inserted his lecture in logic from the spring semester 1928 entitled “Aus der letzten Marburger Vorlesung.” Cf. Erich Dinkler, ed., Zeit und Geschichte: Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag, im Auftrag der Alten Marburger und in Zusammenarbeit mit Hartwig Thyen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1964). 28

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nor that our knowledge of the world must first be corrected by mystifications and demystifications. A human being learns through suffering, but not something specific; it gains an insight into his/her own limitations, in the absoluteness of the boundary that separates the human from the divine.33 For Bultmann, the realization of the impossibility of self-possession becomes a conversion (Um-kehr). It is a gift (Gabe), which carries with it the Word of God, calling for transformation and conversion. The human being’s task (Aufgabe) is the answer to this gift. Gadamer does not stress the religious character of understanding oneself, but he talks about the understanding of oneself as an event (Selbstverständnis als Ereignis), accentuating the dimension of play (Spiel) that seems to be involved.34 Play becomes for him the leitmotif of ontological explication.35 That which makes play a play, is not so much the subjective behavior of the participating subjects; it is much more about the movement that is being created (die Formation der Bewegung selbst), which, like in a subconscious teleology, subordinates the behavior of the participating subjects.36 It is in the horizon of play—when understood in that way—in which Gadamer situates the relationship between faith and understanding. This is the point of view in which I would like to see the relationship between faith and understanding. The self-understanding of faith is most certainly conditioned by the fact that faith, understood theologically, is not a human possibility, but is an act of God’s grace that is happening in a believer. Maintaining this theological understanding and religious experience is difficult; however, when it becomes dominated by modern science and “That which the human being is supposed to learn, by means of suffering, is not ‘this’ or ‘that,’ but an insight into the limitations of our human nature, the insight into the impossibility of doing away with the boundary that separates us from the divine.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 362-363. 34 “To bring together the deadly seriousness of belief and the arbitrariness of play may seem surprising, at first. In fact, if one understands ‘play’ and ‘playing’—as is usual—to be a subjective way of behaving, rather than a dynamic whole that is sui generis—yet also includes the subjectivity of the one who is playing—then there would be no sense in the juxtaposition, as it would cancel out completely. Yet I think that precisely such a concept as play is needed here—as I hope to have shown in my book [Wahrheit und Methode, GW1: 107n. 491n.]—because it seems to be the actually legitimate and primordial concept; and therefore, the relationship between faith and understanding needs to be given full attention under the aspect of play.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses,” in idem, GW2: 128. 35 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Spiel als Leitfaden der ontologischen Explikation,” in idem, Wahrheit und Methode, 107-139. 36 Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses,” in GW2: 129. 33

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its methodology. The concept of knowledge developed on that basis does not tolerate any limitation to its own eligibility to universality. It is because of this that every self-understanding is made to appear as a form of selfpossession, which latter does not exclude anything to the degree that nothing could possibly happen to it, thus alienating it from itself. At this point, the concept of play could come in very handy. Losing yourself in play, an ecstatic self-forgetfulness is not so much experienced as a loss of self-possession, but rather, as the positive lightness of being able to rise above yourself. This cannot be achieved at all within the subjective aspects of selfunderstanding.37 For Gadamer, self-understanding is the space where understanding takes place; thus, one can say that every understanding is self-understanding.38 Gadamer also distinguishes between Sichverstehen (understanding oneself) and Selbstverstehen (self-understanding). However, according to him, Selbstverstehen is a misleading term, because it overemphasizes the element of self-awareness, which often leads to the total impossibility of understanding oneself. In fact, there is no separation between the understanding subject and the Other in the ‘event of understanding.’ Understanding is the understanding of both oneself and the Other, and one cannot speak here of temporal primacy: both dimensions fulfill themselves simultaneously. By understanding ourselves, we understand the Other; as a matter of fact, the only way to demonstrate self-understanding is to understand the Other. There is no such dimension as αὑτός, which would exclude ἕτερος.39 It is not only in the dimension of faith that we speak of self-understanding. Every understanding is eventually a self-understanding, but not if one means an anticipatory or a follow-up self-possession. Understanding oneself is always realized in the sense of understanding something specific; it is not just free self-realization. The ‘self,’ that we are does not own itself. One could say, rather, that the self ‘happens to itself.’ And that is just what the theologian seems to be saying when he/she says that faith is an event in which one becomes a new human being. And the theologian says, furthermore, that it is the ‘word’ that needs to be believed and understood; the Word, through which we overcome the immeasurable ignorance in which we live, the ignorance about ourselves. The concept of self-understanding is primordially marked in a theological way…. It is focused on the fact that we do not understand ourselves unless we stand before God.40 37

Ibid. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 265. 39 Cf. Donatella Di Cesare, “Stars and Constellations: The Difference Between Gadamer and Derrida,” Research in Phenomenology 34, no. 1 (2004): 73-102. 40 Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses,” 130. 38

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For Bultmann and Gadamer, understanding is not so much a conscious process, but something that happens to someone (etwas, das einem geschieht).41 Genuine self-understanding takes place when we recognize the impossibility of self-cognition. Philosophically, it is an overcoming of subjectivism. It is not self-ownership and control (verfügbarer Selbstbesitz) which are the goal, but the very movement within understanding (Bewegung des Verstehens), so that it is open to the possibility of correction by encountering the word, also the Word of God.42 Gadamer remained guardedly open to Bultmann, interpreting Karl Barth’s critical attitude to Bultmann first of all through Bultmann’s and Heidegger’s philosophical closeness. Gadamer states his position particularly clearly where he analyses the example of mythology. According to him, if Barth was not enthusiastic about Rudolf Bultmann and his thesis of the demythologization of the New Testament, it is not justified by any factual argument, but—as it seems to me—it is connected with his linking of the historicalcritical method and theological exegesis, and with the influence exerted by the methodical self-reflection on philosophy (Heidegger).43

41

Ibid., 125. “Self-understanding should have the meaning assigned to it by a historical decision and should not mean perhaps available self-possession. Bultmann always emphasized this point. Therefore, it is utterly mistaken to understand the concept of pre-understanding, used by Bultmann, as a bias towards prejudice, a kind of prescience. In truth, we are dealing here with a purely hermeneutic concept, which Bultmann developed from the inspiration received through Heidegger’s analysis of the hermeneutic circle and the general pre-structure of human Dasein. He means the widening of the scope for asking questions—which is needed before understanding can flourish and take place—and he does not mean that one’s own preunderstanding could not be corrected by meeting up with the Word of God (or any other word, by the way). To the contrary, it is the significance of this term to make the movement of understanding visible as just such a correction. Yet it will have to be taken into account that, in the case of a call on faith, where belief is to be consulted, this ‘correction’ has to be quite specific, as it is hermeneutically neutral only as far as its formal structure is concerned. The theological notion of self-understanding joins this perception at this point. It too has obviously been developed from Heidegger’s transcendental analysis of Dasein. Dasein—to which its ‘Being’ matters a great deal—represents itself (by its understanding of Being) as the path of access to the question of Being as such. The liveliness obtaining in the understanding of Being, itself is shown to be historical, as the fundamental constitution of historicity. This is crucial for Bultmann’s concept of self-understanding.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und Historismus,” in idem, GW2: 406-407. 43 Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und Historismus,” 391.” “The theological problems do not pertain to the hermeneutic phenomenon of demythologization as such, but to their dogmatic outcome, that is to say, whether the limits of what becomes a candidate for demythologization have been properly drawn by Bultmann from the dogmatic point of view of Protestant Theology.” Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses,” in idem, GW2: 121. 42

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For Gadamer, it was clear that every biblical exegesis is some kind of demythologization since it is based on the hermeneutic conception of understanding as a translation—into one’s own language—of that which is to be understood. Thus, Gadamer interpreted demythologization as a methodical problem, rather than a dogmatic one, while nevertheless seeing the somewhat provocative nature of the term as such. After Bultmann, Gadamer’s understanding of exegesis is based on the hermeneutic principle that “understanding, if it wants to be an understanding, is a translation into one’s own language.”44 Experiencing a work of art—and not biblical inspiration (as was the case for Bultmann or even Heidegger, and certainly Paul Ricoeur)—was fundamental to the development of Gadamerian hermeneutics. Looking retrospectively at Gadamer’s “long life,” one can responsibly name his attitude to theology as ‘a distance with respect.’ The constant turbulences (of a religious nature) that Heidegger experienced were alien to Gadamer. Gadamer, for one, could not speak of having to endure a painful detachment or of dramatic internal storms. As a nominal Protestant, brought up, above all, in the atmosphere of worship toward the natural sciences (as his father was a wellknown pharmaceutical chemist), he was used to accepting religion without giving it a special place in his own life.45 It was not until later—when he discovered that his mother, whom he lost at the age of four, had pietistic inclinations—that he asked questions about the possible shape of his life of faith if he had grown up under her influence. It was different in the case of Heidegger, who, being the son of a sexton from Messkirch, was permeated with an awareness that the ‘good God’—der liebe Gott—had concrete plans for him. As someone malicious might say, it was necessary for him to have Elfriede—another Eve—who seemingly helped him to break with the past, thus exposing him to spiritual torments of a higher order, which lasted throughout his life. Gadamer discovered the richness of religion through his contact with works of art. Religion, apart from art, language, myth, ritual, and worship, is, for him, one of the elements of mediation between people who live in the world of symbols and the reality that surrounds everyone. Thus, the delimitating of art to being a purely aesthetic experience, is, for Gadamer, a tragic forgetting about the essential anthropological dimension of the experience of beauty as such.46 It is art, which, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rudolf Bultmann,” in idem, GW10: 391. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Ethos mondiale et giustizia internazionale. Dialogo a cura die Damiano Canale;” Ars Interpretandi 6 (2001): 6: “I am a Protestant, but only within the limits set by a situation in which one can say such a thing. By that I refer to the fact that I would really like to believe in everything that is affirmed by religion, but I don’t always succeed in this.” “Io sono protestante, ma soltanto nei limiti in cui si può dire una cosa simile. Con questo mi riferisco al fatto che io per primo vorrei credere a tutto che la religione afferma, ma spesso non ci riesco.” 46 Hermeneutics opens new possibilities to an understanding of art as a place in which a revelation of truth ‘happens.’ Gadamer devotes a lot of space to Kant’s critique of aesthetic 44 45

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through its transformative nature, opens us to the experience of truth. The artistic experience of truth is often expressed by Gadamer in language that is close to being a religious language. Although he does not emphasize the religious dimension of artistic experience, he often uses words like ‘transformation’ (Verwandlung), ‘meeting’ (Begegnung), ‘event’ (Ereignis). When analyzing the poetry of Stefan George, Gadamer uses, for example, the Platonic concept of ‘participation,’ and not the biblical vocabulary.47 As for the language in which the divine would be most adequately expressed, Gadamer is fascinated with the later Heidegger.48 By his reticence in recognizing the groundbreaking nature of Bultmann’s hermeneutics, both in theology and in philosophy, Gadamer seems to suggest that Bultmann—in faithfulness to Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics from the Sein und Zeit period—underestimated the complex nature of Heidegger’s philosophy. It was Bultmann’s undervaluation of the later Heidegger that became a loss for theology, as it did have the chance of finding a new language for speaking more adequately about God in a world ‘abandoned by the gods.’ Since we live in an age (im Weltalter), in which the night of the world (Weltnacht) has taken over, because the gods do not come, we must open ourselves to the saving power of poetry if we still want to truly expect the παρουσία.49 An authentic experience (eigentliche Erfahrung) is the experience in which a human being becomes aware of his finitude (der Mensch wird seiner Endlichkeit bewusst). According to Bultmann, this experience is not always ‘made to appear’ through the action of a human being, but it appears to him as an endless opportunity (als beständige Möglichkeit). Is human existence, in its essence, focused on the question of God (Gottesfrage)? Does the experience of one’s own finitude have to be called die Gottesfrage? These are the questions that nuance Bultmann’s and Gadamer’s understanding of an authentic experience, the experience of one’s own finitude, the typically Christian character of experience, and also the experience of faith. These questions draw our attention to yet another critical issue concerning the separation between philosophy and theology, which is very distant from a simple division of tasks: it is a specific division of labor that is required here. Gadamer’s understanding of tradition is an important correction to the conviction, cherished since the Reformation, that reaching truth is possible only through returning to the primordial sources, both in philosophical and theological awareness. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Freilegung der Wahrheitsfrage an der Erfahrung der Kunst,” in idem, Truth and Method, 9-174. 47 Stefan George’s poetry accompanied Gadamer ever since they were both in High School together. He also devoted a lot of space to it in his essays: “Der Dichter Stefan George,” Hölderlin und George,” “Ich und du und die selbe Seele,” “Der Vers und das Ganze,” “Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, GW9, 211-270. 48 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die religiöse Dimension,” in idem, GW3: 308-319, idem, “Sein Geist Gott,” ibid., 320-332. 49 Martin Heidegger, “Wozu Dicher,” in idem, Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 265-316. 199

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thought. The discovery of the authentic origins of philosophical reflection in the Pre-Socratics, and of “true” Christianity in the model followed by the life of the first communes, was to serve as an antidote to forgetting the source of thinking and faith. Gadamer deepened the reflection on tradition, pointing out that it is thanks to a living relationship with the events of the beginning that we can creatively understand our own roots. The historical distance does separate us from the mystery of the beginning, but at the same time, it reveals to us the possibility of a creative relationship to it. Because we are historical beings, our self-awareness is always a consciousness of our relationship with tradition. This relationship is continually being fulfilled, both in our need to understand ourselves and in the world around us. Just as we can never “jump over” the historical distance, the very experience of a hermeneutic understanding comes to fruition in light of the history of events and their influence on tradition. Gadamer’s notion of “the history of effects”—Wirkungsgeschichte—sets us up (as reaching an understanding) in the footsteps of the tradition which connects us to that which is to be understood, and that which has its own tradition of being understood throughout history.50 We understand the tradition we did grow from, as well as that which is to be understood and what is in the historical distance to the present, always in the ‘hermeneutic arc.’ These two factors condition one another: that which is to be understood (i.e., the very mystery of the beginning), we understand in the light of tradition, and we understand tradition in the light of the beginning. It is the hermeneutic arc that opens the interpretative space in which that which has been understood and passed down in history is presented to us as that which wants to be understood again, (only this time) understood “differently.” It is in this interactive dimension, which Gadamer calls Ineinanderspiel (working hand in hand), in which that which has already been understood and that which concerns the “happening now” modify one another. A specific tension is generated between that which is unknown and that which is well-known, that is, between a historically understood objectivity and our belonging to the tradition. It is in this in-between that Gadamer sees the right place for understanding, the locus hermeneuticus.51 In this perspective, understanding—as rooted in a specific interpretative tradition—is always a “different understanding”; it is a task that is a constant challenge to us. In the moment of our apprehension, when we understood something, we use the past tense, and yet the task of the understanding of the facticity of our existence concerns the “now,” in 50

51

The notion of the “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) is the fundamental notion of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Cf. Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), 17; 94. “[The tension] varies between the otherness and the familiarity which tradition presents us with, between the historically intended, concrete objectivity and the belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is to be found in this in-between.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 300.

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a productive relationship with the past and the future. There can be no static rendering of understanding. By understanding, we point to that which grows out of tradition, and, on the other hand, we show how tradition allows us to illumine the phenomenon of human existence in its specific conditions. For Gadamer, the actual event of understanding goes far beyond that which can be done, by methodical care and critical self-control, to understand the words of the Other. It even goes far beyond that which we are able to internalize in the very process of understanding. This is so for every conversation, by which something has become something else. Even the Word of God, which calls for conversion and carries the promise of a better understanding of ourselves, cannot be understood as ‘facing a word’ that needs to be left alone. As a matter of fact, it is not us who can say ‘we understand.’ It is always already something past that allows us to say: I have understood.52 There will always be something that we would like to add, emphasize, say again— but this time differently, because we noticed that what we have already said expects an answer: “Das Gesagte ist das Dürftige, das Ungesagte erfüllt mit Reichtum.” (“What has been said is poor, (whereas) what has been left unsaid is filled with richness.”)53 However, this is not an encouragement for ‘not speaking.’ It is, rather, paying attention to the transformative nature of understanding. The impossibility of control—of the total control over the dynamics of conversation—leads to a change understood as Um-kehr (conversion), as a response to the calling and challenging power of the word, also the Word of God (Einladung und Aufforderung). This invitation is also an invitation to the discussion because it is only through dialogue that one can understand deeper, differently. Therefore, there is no last word because every word is an invitation to a response. Moreover, where there is an invitation, there is also a hope for it to be received: i.e., the hope to which we become witnesses by our co-thinking in the spirit of the dynamics of Wort and Antwort (word and reply).54

Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses,” in idem, GW2: 132. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 249. The unexpressed (i.e., what is devoid of any form of representation), embraces an unmeasurable richness in the thinking about Being, and is at the same time that which has been said, the way of Being’s revelation as Being. 54 “What is uttered… is not the expression of any old opinion as such, but—by that means— the experience of the world itself, which always includes the whole of our historical traditions. Tradition is always open to letting what has been handed down to us get through. Every reply to the prompting of tradition, and not only the word which needs to be sought and found by theology, is a word which preserves.” Gadamer, “Die Marburger Theologie,” 208. 52 53

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2. 2. 4. The Hermeneutic Understanding of the In-carnation and the Eucharist: Paul Celan’s Tenebrae and the Interpretive Character of Comm-union through Body, Blood, and Image Since the beginning of history, the relationship between a human being (as a creature), and God (as Creator) has been very intimate and corporeal (Cf. Ps. 63). Desire and longing vividly express the intimacy of the relationship that exists and develops between a human being and God. The yearning of the body is compared to the longing of the soul. We can hear a reference to Genesis, here, to the creation of a human being from the dust of the earth. A remarkable description in Genesis shows how God created a human being from the dust of the earth; it is a true revelation (re-velatio) of the relationship between the Creator and his creation. “Then God made a human being out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and as a result, a human being became a living being. Moreover, having planted a garden in Eden in the east, God placed there a human being whom he had made.” (Gen 2: 7-8) The body created from the dust of the earth longs for the living water, for the breath of God which enlivens the dust. In the Book of Jeremiah 3: 14 God says: “I am your Lord.” This affirmation can be understood as the voice of the Creator to the human being when he speaks about the intimate relationship of the betrothal, which—in reference to Genesis 2: 24—reminds us of the declaration of becoming one body. It is a particularly powerful dimension, especially in relation to the Messianic promise that a “Virgin will conceive and give birth to the Son, and he will be given the name of Emmanuel, that is, ‘God with Us.’ (Mt 1: 23; cf. Is 7: 14) It is the promise of God who ensures his closeness to us humans. The voice of God ‘who is close’: It is with his people. In John’s Gospel 6: 5-58, Jesus speaks of himself as a body to be eaten in order to have eternal life: “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the desert and died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven: whoever eats it, will not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever. The bread that I will give is my body for the life of the world. So the Jews disagreed among themselves, saying: “How can he give us his body?” Jesus said to them, “Indeed, indeed, I say to you, unless you eat the body of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, you will not have life in you. Whoever eats my Body and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. My Body is real food, and my Blood is a real drink. Whoever eats my Body and drinks my Blood, lives in me and I live in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, will live through me. This is the bread that came down from heaven – it is not like the one your ancestors ate and died. Whoever eats this bread, will live forever.” This part of the Gospel begins with an important formula—ἐγώ εἰμι, I am; it is used by Jesus to speak about himself. It evokes the way in which God reveals 202

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himself to Moses in Exodus 3: 14: “‘I AM WHO I AM.’” And He added: “Yes, you will say to the children of Israel: I AM sent me to you.” Just as God the Father uses the word ἐγώ εἰμι to introduce himself to people, so does Jesus as the Son of God. The Father reveals himself as the one who is. The Son says that he is a living bread. Jesus incarnates himself, becomes a human body (in carne) to be with the people. He gives himself to a human being to become one body with him/her. The telling gesture of ‘being with his people’ in his body and blood happens to be made at night, just before being sentenced to be crucified. It creates a new covenant in the body: from now on, anyone can get food and strengthen himself on his journey. Maybe! This is a matter of utter importance. In order to have life! That is why Jesus warns: “If you do not eat my body and drink my blood, you will have no life in you.” This warning sounds even more dramatic in Latin: Nisi manducavéritis meam carnem, et bibéritis meum sánguinem, non habébitis vitam in vobis ipsis. “This is the bread that came down from heaven—it is not like the one your ancestors ate, and they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” In the Eucharist, Jesus gives not so much the crumbs of bread that are necessary for life, but the food for eternal life. Manna sustained the lives of the Israelites in their pilgrimage to the Promised Land. Jesus, who offers himself to the human being, becomes food in his/her pilgrimage to eternal life. This not only refers to the Eucharist as viaticum, i.e., receiving communion when a person is about to pass from earthly to eternal life. Each communion is help on the way of the pilgrim; it is passing (passing-over, passio) over oneself. It is also compassion (com-passio) for others who are in need. It is also compassion, kindness, and goodness toward oneself. Compassion is goodness and mindfulness toward oneself and others, an openness to reality with “maximum attention.”1 It is active compassion, which encourages a creative search for understanding oneself, others, the world, and God. The Eucharist as Comm-union When the New Testament speaks of the community (κοινωνία), it means a communion, intimate participation (intima participatio). Communion is a union, a covenant between Jesus and a community that lives in his presence. The unique bonds developed in the earthly salvific mission of Jesus reach a new and profound level of intimacy, unprecedented in the history of mankind, in the consumption of his body and the drinking of his blood. Anyone who ever does it and remembers the gift offered by Jesus at the Last Supper becomes one body with him. 1

Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (New York: Routledge, 2004), 240. 203

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Moses gave manna to Israel in the desert. God clearly shows that the fate of his people is not indifferent to him. He nourishes his people and cares for them both in a spiritual and physical dimension. The absolute novelty of Jesus is that he does not only give something that a human being needs. He gives himself. As “real bread from heaven,” he feeds with his body and blood. Recognizing the needs of a human being, Jesus shows his com-passion. His com-passion is the most profound form of sympathy (συμπάθεια), the ability to accurately reach another person where it matters, to understand that person’s needs, to empathize with his/her experiences (εμπάθεια, empathy, Einfühlung). As an incarnated God, he took on the role of a human being, and through empathizing he showed an understanding for the needy, thus teaching us a sensitivity to the Other’s needs, a tolerance for otherness, helping to shape an attitude of mutual help and support. Jesus’ sympathy and empathy lead him to such solidarity with the needy that he takes their burdens on himself, not only suffering with people: He also does everything with a view to their salvation. There is something totally unique in the bodily communion with Jesus. He does not automatically change the human body into being a single organ with him through his saving mission. The human being is too important for him to impose anything on him or her: Jesus simply does not impose himself. He only turns to us and asks us to eat his body and drink his blood. It is a great gift and invitation. It is the vocation of the human being to accept this gift. Only when a human being accepts the body and the blood of Jesus does it become one body with him. Clearly, this intimate, visible gift of Jesus demands a human response (Wort-Antwort). This answer is an entry into the sphere of responsibility (Ver-antwortung). The bodily gift gives Himself: A carnal gift, which gives itself. We can speak here of the fundamental dimension in the most original passio essendi of the Eucharist. It is such a giving of oneself that it wants to be in the Other, (re-ceptio, re-ceived to be). The conscious reception of the divine gift motivates us to accept the body and the blood of Jesus. Nothing can ever happen without the human Amen, without the unconditional ‘yes’ uttered to the one who wants to be one body with the human being. The Eucharist: The Feast of Love and Life At the Last Supper, Jesus says to the apostles: Take and eat; a wonderful unification. He does not exclude anyone, not even Judas, although he knows that Judas will soon go to betray him and has, moreover, already betrayed him in his heart. The Eucharist is not a reward for a flawless life! Jesus does not speak of a perfect or imperfect union with him. On the contrary, he unambiguously encourages everyone to come to him: “He that eats my body and drinks my blood lives in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live through me.” Consuming Jesus’ body and drinking his blood 204

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is the only guarantee of life in him. There is no personal trans-formation without the acceptance of the Eucharistic gift of Jesus. He, the real bread of life, will not be available to human beings through their own effort. He comes to a human being as a carnal gift of God’s love: He becomes a body to give his body as a gift at the end of his life on earth. A human being is to ask for this body and blood and to receive them with joy if he wants to live forever. It cannot go unnoticed that the invitation to a bodily communion does not come from just any human being. It always comes from the one who gave his body and blood to eat. The chance of this invitation being heard assumes that there is already a communion between Jesus and the human being invited by him. In the Eucharist, the mystery of the further strengthening and development of the already existing communion comes to be realized. Particularly moving in the meaning of the Eucharist is its carnal dimension. The desire of the human heart to unite with Jesus, although it is a spiritually enriching experience, cannot replace the physical union with him, though there are no limits to God’s intervention; his love can change a human being in various dimensions. However, a special meaning in this existentially momentous event— when the historical Jesus shares his body and blood with the disciples at the Last Supper—is attached to the bodily union with him in this life. The trans-formation of a human being takes place when it is fed and given life through God’s action. Each trans-formation is a formation. By establishing the Eucharist, Jesus takes into account the reality of his disciples’ lives, and therefore indirectly of all people. It seems that this reality is not, and cannot be, an obstacle to the personal bodily union with him. On the contrary, it motivates Jesus to offer himself to anyone who will ever eat his body and drink his blood. There is no other way to have life (eternal life) than to allow Jesus to enliven us, so that we will, indeed, get life from (and through) him. However, there is yet another and an especially important aspect to the bodily union with Jesus. After the Last Supper, we can talk of a new meaning for comm-union with him, that is, in terms of visual perception. Consuming Jesus’ body and drinking his blood becomes a visible communion with him. While not deprecating the role of the invisible communion with the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ wish is to be visibly united with the people. Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us that the Christology of the Greek Fathers of the Church, developed in the spirit of Neoplatonic thought, did contribute decisively to the overcoming of the Old Testament criticism of images.2 They saw, in the event of God’s Incarnation, the fundamental confirmation of how important an appearance that 2

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 136: “It seems to be the Greek Fathers’of the Old Testament’s hatred of images when it came to Christianity. They regarded the Incarnation of God as a fundamental acknowledgment of the worth of the visible appearance, and they legitimated THUS works of art. In Their overcoming the ban on images we can see the decisive event That enabled the development of the plastic arts in the Christian West.” 205

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is visible (and therefore external) can be and is, and thus they validated works of art (which were then banned outright). In overcoming the ban on the cult of images, we can see a decisive impulse for the development of fine arts in the Christian West. Let us give voice to art. Paul Celan, Tenebrae3 Nah, sind wir Herr, nahe und greifbar. Gegriffen schon, Herr, ineinander verkrallt, als wär der Leib eines von uns dein Leib, Herr. Bete, Herr, Bete zu uns, wir sind nah. Windschief gingen wir hin, gingen wir hin, uns zu bücken nach Mulde und Maar. Zur Tränke gingen wir, Herr. Es war Blut, es war, was du vergossen, Herr. Es glänzte. Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr. Augen und Mund stehn so offen und leer, Herr. Wir haben getrunken, Herr. Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr. Bete, Herr. Wir sind nah. We are close, Lord, tangibly close. Already snatched, Lord, clawed into each other as if one of our bodies were your body, Lord. Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are close. Windswept our gait, where we went, where we went, bending our backs toward hollow and maar. We went to the trough, Lord. It was blood, blood that was shed by you, Lord. It glistened. It cast your image in our eyes, Lord. Eyes opened wide, mouths empty forlorn, Lord. We drank, Lord. The blood, and the image that was in the blood, Lord. Pray, Lord. We are near.

3

Paul Celan, Tenebrae, in idem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 163.

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Celan’s inversion: “Pray Lord, pray to us, we are close” seems at first only a simple blasphemy. Especially when we do not agree with Theodor W. Adorno’s statement that creating poetry after Auschwitz is barbarity (“nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”), Celan’s reversal can be a way of coping with life’s experiences.4 It is the experience of a human being who, after the horror of the Holocaust (Ὁλόκαυστος ), cannot overcome frustration and despair and wants to re-establish a relationship with the Absolute. It is an experience of a lack in orientation, a lack of direction. Celan, a Jewish survivor from Chernowitz (who lost his parents in the concentration camp and was himself a prisoner in a Romanian labor camp), de-sacralizes the object of worship (in the formal dimension), seeking instead for a new language of intimacy with God. His rhetoric is a rhetoric of fascination and alienation and underlines, at the same time, an unusual longing for Transcendence, with all the incredibly intricate complexity of a personal relationship to a personally understood God. With terrifying power, Celan describes the emptiness of life after realizing dramatically that, despite the brutality of actual people, language did not die. Not finding words to describe the cruelty of the war, language persistently carried the burden of history. Perseverance in difficulties, ὑπομονή, turned out to be the richness that is intrinsic in language; its greatest strength, being capable of moving people’s hearts. It is ὑπομονή, understood as patience, perseverance in adversity, which summarizes the call to, and the challenge of, a human being (Herausforderung) to be faithful to his vocation, even, and perhaps especially when he does not fully understand the sense in struggling for the truth of his own heart. The experience of one’s own powerlessness can become the source of creative power, a (dis)agreement with fate. According to Celan, in “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (Todesfuge), it was people who prepared this fate for people, just as they once did for Jesus. Moreover, today we are clinging to each Other for various reasons, which are not always clear to us, just like once the victims of the Holocaust clung to each other in the face of horror and death. Every time when Celan speaks to God, he needs a deep breath. The word “Lord” is always preceded by a comma; the pause in the discourse is to allow the unexpected to happen. Perhaps it gives God the chance to breathe life into Celan’s 4

“The more totalitarian the society the more reified will the mind be, and the more paradox the mind’s stirring to free itself of this objectification all by itself. Even the remotest awareness of this disastrous fate threatens to degenerate into pure chatter. The critique of culture finds itself facing the dialectics of culture and barbarism at the very lowest level: To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbarous, and this view also bites into the realization which expresses why it became possible to write (post-Auschwitz) poems today after all. The critical mind— which assumed the progress of the mind as one of its key tenets, and which today is under threat of total absorption by this progressive reification—is not up to the mind’s absolute objectification so long as it just remains absorbed by itself in self-sufficient contemplation of itself.” Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), 26. 207

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nostrils. The invocation, “Lord,” resembles the experience of the Old Testament, when the Lord’s name was called upon in times of misery and thanksgiving: “Lord, I am your servant, I am your servant, the son of your servant/You have released my chains/I will make you a sacrifice of thanksgiving/I will call upon the name of the Lord.” (Ps 115: 17) After the Holocaust, everything is wounded: A human being is wounded, the word is wounded, and God is wounded. If the essence of prayer is to come close to the one you believe in—especially in drinking his blood and seeing his image in the blood—then being in the presence of God is a way of revealing oneself. While Jesus reveals Himself to a human being as the incarnate Word of God, the Verbum Dei, Celan seems to ask God to reveal himself to people once more, to be with us in prayer, because we are close. The praying God can be in our presence and reveal himself to us. Of course, it is a different God, and it is a different human being who invites God to pray to him. However, everything is different after Auschwitz.5 Celan’s inversion is based on a transition from prayer—when understood as a human being’s self-revelation to God—to God’s self-revelation to a human being. “Pray, Lord” is a call for just such an existential concentration that it can recognize the order of the world even in its drastic and brutal disorder. “Pray to us” is a request to God, for him to reveal to himself the drama of the human being whom he had created in the first place. Moreover, the condition sine qua non of every prayer is ‘being with’ (essere con). The condition of a modern human being is to be in a state of being tortured by various forms of enslavement, up to the sacrifice of his own blood. It is sad that not much has been changing in the history of the world. Even more tragically, history repeats itself, because crucifixions do not cease. One can always find some reason for guilt: From Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος ὁ Bασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων (Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum) to being a Jew, to thinking otherwise. Celan’s words, when he writes that “[The blood] cast your image in our eyes, Lord./Eyes opened wide, mouths empty forlorn, Lord./We drank, Lord. The blood, and the image that was in the blood, Lord./Pray, Lord./We are near” are a powerful emphasis. The repeated tragedies of crucifixion undermine faith in human beings and also, at least indirectly, in God, and at the same time, bring with them a chance for a different future. Open eyes and lips are necessary to receive a gift. And emptiness reveals the necessity and the desire for fulfillment even more dramatically. It seems that both openness and emptiness are the condition 5

Cf. Richard L. Rubinstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Hans Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine jüdische Stimme (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987); Birte Petersen, Theologie nach Auschwitz?: Jüdische und christliche Versuche einer Antwort (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1996); Manfred Görg and Michael Langer, ed., Als Gott weinte: Theologie nach Auschwitz (Regensburg: Pustet, 1997); Jürgen Manemann and Johann Baptist Metz, eds., Christologie nach Auschwitz (Münster: LIT, 2001).

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for the possibility of something extraordinary to happen.6 It is that “possibility stands above reality.”7 Nothing, however, will change in human vulnerability due to being wounded: Undoubtedly everything can happen. Prayer is a sacrifice of inexhaustible energy that can lead to a community between a human being and God, in the body and the blood of Jesus. The ultimate hope of humanity is the experience of prayer. Communion and prayer (contemplation) cannot be separated. They express God’s true care for a human being, and a human being’s care for God. That which happens between a human being and God—comm-union and prayer—requires understanding. It is a call for a diacritical hermeneutics of communion and prayer, in order to contribute to the self-awakening of our existence by clarifying the fundamental structures of our understanding of Being. Eucharist: The Limits of Explanation No law or institution could and would embrace all dimensions of human life. Jesus, as God and man, unconditionally offered his body and blood at the Last Supper to all who want to have life through him.8 This requires comm-union with him. At the same time, through consuming his body and blood, communion is deepened and perfected. The great lesson of the bodily communion with Jesus teaches us that, as human beings, we cannot satisfy our deepest desires and fulfill our expectations and promises, if we do not, like Jesus, make an unconditional gift to God and others in response to the gift constantly received in the communion with Jesus. In his famous chapter of Truth and Method, entitled “Language and Verbum,” Gadamer speaks of Incarnation and the Incarnation’s fundamental meaning “We too would like to agree with Szondi, when he alters Adorno’s sentence with his eye on Celan: No poem is possible any more after Auschwitz, unless it be based on Auschwitz. Perhaps we can even go one step further and say that today, in Germany, an unselfconsciously unabashed poem may again be written because Celan, with his poetic output, has been able to give our embarrassment a language that can be listened to in a brotherly spirit and can be repeated after him without choking. In this we see—beyond all initial clinging to aesthetics—not only some moralistic or a political stance, but the expression of an almost messianic ‘taking our place,’ which, after the catharsis due to the subdued reading of these poems, perhaps enables us to become less weighed down by self-consciousness once more because of Celan.” Harald Weinrich, “Befangenheit vor Paul Celan: Der Poet des Schweigens und die Beredsamkeit seiner Interpreten,” Die Zeit, 23.07.1976, 38. 7 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38. 8 Theologically, it is important to understand “pro multis” as “for all” or “for many,” however, without forgetting that every translation is an interpretation. See the letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Archbishop of Freiburg Robert Zollitsch, http://www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20120414_zollitsch_ge.html. 6

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(and significance) for an understanding of the nature of language.9 The Hermeneutics of the Incarnation reveals the deepest dimension of language and understanding. Understanding incarnates itself and, as such, is an answer to human life in all its aspects. Each understanding is an application to the concrete life of concrete people as executed (vollzogen) in the body and the blood. Hence, there is no understanding that would not be an application to life within the horizon of its corporeality. The hermeneutics of corporeality, the hermeneutics of the body (carnal hermeneutics, the hermeneutics of the body) are used here in the sense of the objective genitive (genitivus objectivus), which is the subject of interpretation. The human body is hermeneutic because it is both capable of interpretation and requires it. This interpretation contributes to enabling the body to reach out to itself. The ancient Jews could boast and say: “Which other nation is so great as to have their gods near to them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him?” (Dt 4: 7) In Jesus, God became a human being. Nothing which is truly human can be alien to him. He will never be a foreigner, never foris, alien, outside. Those who eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood can genuinely be happy that they are really with him; they are blessed (bene-detti). He decided to remain with people until the end of time; and with a pierced side, from which his blood poured out. After Émile Cioran, we can say something similar about Celan: “he was not a man but a bleeding wound,” “Celan war kein Mensch, sondern eine blutende Wunde.” There can be many objections to my translation and reading of Celan’s poem. One can even speak of a specific darkening of the interpretative space. Celan saw the darkening of many in his work, understanding it as a condition for writing that corresponds to the human condition: Tenebrae, or darkness. Human life is made up of ‘the lessons of darkness,’ leçons de ténèbres. The apparent reversal of roles between God and a human being always demands anew that we should listen continuously to the dialogue that has been taking place since the creation of the world. The roles in which any dramatis personae appear are apt to change, constantly, but their appearance is always about this relationship, without which ultimately there is no life. Therefore, when Celan calls God to pray to us, it is still a call; and Psalm 145 reminds us that “the Lord is close to all who call him.” Celan undoubtedly can rely on a whole panoply of genius predecessors— from Jeremiah through to Job—who, out of the depth of their existential despair, directed their lamentation and their disagreement with fate directly to God.

9

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 418-426.

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2. 2. 5. The Hermeneutics of Existential Attention: Faith is Conversation– Our Matter with God Every day I am more and more convinced that it is both a religious and secular duty to be dissatisfied with ready answers—no matter where they come from. How long can the world survive if based on institutionalized slogans? Thomas Merton to Czesław Miłosz Reflection on the dogmas of the faith, as a methodologically ordered reflection on one’s way to thinking about God today—from the perspective of our fears and anxieties—is an invitation to a journey that is undertaken in common: vade me cum. The reigning of God is a space of hope for a human being. This vade me cum: The journey can also be initiated with oneself as the end, as something useful, something that is always worth having. It is worth it, because in the reflection on the mystery of God’s presence in the world—which is the space reserved for salvation—it is not knowledge that is the subject of what is meant to be achieved, but a life that is worthy of a human being (and worthy of being lived by a human being). The human being, who is the bearer of a certain name, a given name, is called and challenged to dialogue and invited to a polyphonic conversation. In accord with the tradition of the early Christian polemics with the pagan world, the mission of fundamental theology is fulfilled in its dialogical dimension: Speaking of the foundations of faith and revelation, every human being can discover for him or herself the validity of Jesus’ call to follow him. The point is to grasp in faith and express in human words the relationship between God, a human being and the world, to make a human realize that by asking questions about Jesus he/she actually asks about themselves. Each of the interlocutors finds himself in the middle of ‘our matter with God’ and is invited to seek an understanding of the Church’s faith from its very inside, from where God meets a human being hic et nunc. Theology, as reaching for an understanding of God, always happens in the very center of our human experience. Speaking of God always concerns a human and his ‘matter with God.’ This God is God for the world, God who calls for responsibility, that is, for conversation. A free and responsible human being becomes a place of encounter with God, the real locus theologicus. Thinking about the reigning of God (βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ), we do not look for a guide that is merely useful to us, or for quick orientation in the maze of problems associated with understanding faith and religious experience. What is meant here is co-thinking (with God) on the way to discovering the future. This is neither about ideology nor pragmatics. The image of God is closely related to the concrete existence of a particular human being. The reality of salvation is ex-

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perienced in the community of the Church. The theological reflection on it indicates, in its essence, the reality of God—the Creator and the Savior. The ‘reigning of God’ combines these realities and is a key concept for fundamental theology. Being aware of the speculative multidimensionality of the very question about God—who is nothing in this world, but is everything for this world—it is important to accompany a human being in his/her reflection, which leads to an encounter with the thing itself (die Sache selbst) and with its author; to read the situation like that, is to be ‘at the thing you read about.’ The intellectual and moral condition of the reader is essential here. The richness in the spiritual life is not indifferent to understanding as such. An impossibility of understanding is usually rooted in the spiritual darkness that reigns in a human being. Biblical history clearly emphasizes that spiritual matters are given to those who are of the Spirit: “For the sensual human does not understand that which is from God’s Spirit. It is foolish to him, and he cannot know it, because only in spirit can it be judged.” (1 Cor 2: 14) This sensual human being is a human disrespecting the light of grace. Hence, and in freedom—which forms the core of Christian responsibility, a human being is called to pursue these possibilities prudently. Although it is not impossible that God may speak (in his unlimited love and freedom), even though Balaam’s ass (Nm 22: 28), it cannot be a matter of indifference to us how we discover and shape our future salvation in God. Even the most detailed orientation in the history of the question about God shows that we can only get closer and closer to understanding. In the hermeneutic dynamics of question and answer, we open ourselves to more and more dimensions that call for thinking. We still remain unsatiated, however, because the explanations of the Church’s faith lead us to understand that we ‘remain standing’ with the question as such: finis lectionis, maneat quaestio. If we have already understood, we cannot remain passive. We intensify the dynamics of question and answer, discovering (in our lingual understanding) that in which we believe, and that which can always be thought about and said in a different way (fides quaerens intellectum), responding more and more sensitively to the gift of the Word. Understanding faith and thinking faith is not doing without the intellect, sacrificium intellectus, but is the highest concentration of cognitive power. It is a creative and dynamic commitment to the discourse on the content of faith. The intensity that characterizes this commitment means that we live with God in a poetic space, in which the bulking up of the perspectives proceeds alongside the understanding that is opening up and also able to sidestep any univocal meaning. In the event, our matter with God nevertheless remains incomplete or uncompleted. Participating in the great theodrama, we feel an increasing need for the tenderness of our God who, becoming a concrete place for us to meet others, enables us (ermächtigt) to be a meeting place in the communion of loneliness, in which each one of us discovers in his/her own way, and in freedom, his/her own difficult happiness, while repeating: O beata solitudo, o sola beatitudo. 212

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Vocation, or Building One’s Life on the Conviction of the Necessity of Being a Sign and a Testimony to God’s Presence In the deepest and most important dimensions of our lives, we are all too often alone. And there, on the border between loneliness and happiness, we reach the mystery of our vocation. There we also discover that none of us is ultimately alone and is not alone in any place of his/her history—neither in the best nor in the worst places, nor any other place. The reigning of God (as a rescue for the human being) does not diminish in any way the drama of this search for the means that are needed for accepting and realizing the presence of God. God assures the human being only that he is with him/her, and for him/her; he invites the human being to discover its future in him, that in him it may reach the mystery of its own humanity. Rainer Maria Rilke writes excellently about this difficult journey toward oneself, to understand oneself and one’s place in a fast-moving world, where things tremble in the face of amazing hustle and bustle: Gehen Sie in sich. Erforschen Sie den Grund, der Sie schreiben heißt; prüfen Sie, ob er in der tiefsten Stelle Ihres Herzens seine Wurzeln aus-streckt, gestehen Sie sich ein, ob Sie sterben müßten, wenn es Ihnen versagt würde zu schreiben. Dieses aber vor allem: fragen Sie sich in der stillsten Stunde Ihrer Nacht: muß ich schreiben? Graben Sie in sich nach einer tiefen Antwort. Und wenn diese zustimmend lauten sollte, wenn Sie mit einem starken und einfachen “Ich muß” dieser ernsten Frage begegnen dürfen, dann bauen Sie Ihr Leben nach dieser Notwendigkeit; Ihr Leben bis hinein in seine gleichgültigste und geringste Stunde muß ein Zeichen und Zeugnis werden diesem Drange. Dann nähern Sie sich der Natur. Dann versuchen Sie, wie ein erster Mensch, zu sagen, was Sie sehen und erleben und lieben und verlieren. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 1929, 8. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. But this most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night—must I write? Dig into yourself for an answer that comes from the depths. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life around this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and a witness to this impulse. Then you will come close to Nature. And then, as if no one had ever tried this before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

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Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, ed. Ray Soulard, Jr., Portland, Oregon Scriptor Press, 6. Trans. modified. It is an amazing dream and challenge: To say—just like the first human being to do so—what I see, experience, love, and lose. It is a longing for the ability to recognize one’s true vocation, for an uncompromising understanding of the task which God calls me to fulfill. This uncompromising stance costs one’s life; above all, it requires a constant readiness to pose fundamental questions, again and again. In fact, it is not even about asking questions, but about listening to the voice of God who speaks to me. This is not the God of philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who “spoke many times and in various ways to our fathers through the prophets, and in these last days he spoke to us through the Son. He made him the heir of all things.” (Heb 1: 1-2) The Incarnate Word, which is the foundation for all other words about God, is the Person of Jesus Christ, God, who became a human being. It is the word of all words through which everything happened. The Divine Λόγος, consubstantial with the Father, is the Word of life. He is the voice of history into which the Incarnated God has entered. The radical nature of Christ’s call to follow him must be understood by us in the context of the history of God’s self-giving to the human being. Also, in the sense of the radicality which was experienced by Abraham in his faith, in all its drama and ruthlessness. None of us, when courageously and consistently asking him/herself the fundamental questions, has ready and simple answers. The whole of life becomes one great exercise in the faith which—more and more sensitively—understands that God can place a human being into borderline situations that are so difficult that they resemble the drama of Abraham. If we are sincerely moved by the drama of our father in faith, then we cannot think of his trial as a rhetorical call to obey God, which out of necessity must have ended with his kind intervention. The uncompromisingness of Abraham’s situation lay precisely in the fact that he really believed that his God demanded Isaac’s death. Moreover, Abraham was ready to kill his son: To kill in the name of his faith. God’s kindness and magnanimity do not weaken the drama of this trial. Abraham could not fail to believe in the radical nature of God’s challenge. Each of us can be confronted with the same radicality. And we must not think that God always intervenes with kindness, in order to protect us against tragedy (understood in a human way). But that is the essence of a trial of faith. The deepest consent is demanded of us, so that God’s great matters may happen through us and in us. Only with all the radicality of living by faith can we demonstrate effectively the true existential sensitivity to the needs of the Other. This is at the heart of our call to love. The fulfillment of this vocation is conditioned by being consciously and uncompromisingly moved by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Our readiness to sacrifice is an obvious ingredient in any radical experience of faith. We can rest assured that there will always be people who live in this readiness to 214

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be radical witnesses of their faith in the hour of trial. This confidence is given to us by our rootedness in the faith of the Church, which precedes, gives birth to, leads and nourishes our faith. Theology that Happens in Faith If we assume that theology is the passion of thinking about faith and sharing this thought and faith too, then it happens in faith. Sharing faith is a creative co-participation in the Paschal Mystery, which creates an entirely new world order. Sharing faith goes far beyond the formally understood proclamation of faith in the sense of propaganda fidei and becomes life in the service of faith. In the hermeneutically privileged position of ‘the question’ residing within the structure of understanding—which for Gadamer is the heritage of Schleiermacher’s biblical hermeneutics—the subject of our understanding addresses us in the specificity of our existential situation. Every understanding, if it is an understanding, has its beginning in the question according to the logic of question and answer. According to the hermeneutic principle of kindness (das Prinzip des Wohlwollens—the Principle of Charity), there are no questions that would ever lose their existential validity. When today—as heirs to postmodernism—we are addressed by the depositum fidei, we feel the engaging power of this message. It is true that we probably find other questions and difficulties in it than those which created a struggle for our ancestors in faith. Furthermore, today’s encounter with the depositum fidei may provoke us to ask questions that differ from historical questions. Perhaps our understanding of today goes far beyond the first intentions of the originator of the questions. This does not mean that it is irrelevant to get to know them in their historical context. It is important to realize that the process of understanding is an attempt to scrutinize the essence of a historical question through an effectively awakened consciousness (wirkungsgeschichliches Bewusstsein) of our own. An essential help in the mature understanding and experiencing one’s faith lies within theology. Through a methodologically ordered reflection on the phenomenon of faith, theology as an academic discipline participates in the transformation of scientific discourse, defining the criteria that apply to its scientificity and subjecting these to a critical reflection within all the other sciences. Its creative involvement in a dialogue with other fields emphasizes its sincere concern with its own academic format, because only in such a way while maintaining its autonomy, can it participate in the struggle for truth and for living in truth. It is the practical orientation of theology that allows it to be what it is: A reflection on faith within the space of Revelation, which helps a human being to clarify for itself the phenomenon of the world and human existence (Welt- und Daseinserhellung). The specificity of theology as a science lies in the fact that it tries to be faithful to God’s self-revelation and self-giving in Christ (Selbsterschließung und 215

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Selbstmitteilung Gottes). As a faith that seeks understanding (denkender Glaube), it differs from any other scientific reflection on faith in that it is radically dependent on Transcendence (radikale Angewiesenheit auf die Transzendenz), while at the same time remaining radically open, as a science, to every possible question and every possible problem which demands understanding. One can speak here of a decisive primacy of Revelation over theology (die Vor-Gabe der Offenbarung). The task of theology is to give a rationally justified testimony of the presence of God in the world. It supports faith, dynamically rendered, which is the faith of the Church understood as creatura verbi, sacramentum salutis et communio ecclesiarum. At this point, it is crucial to be aware of the fundamental interdependence between theology and the Church’s Magisterium. With a full recognition of the specificity of their respective vocation, the service to faith stands in the center (im Dienst des Glaubens), understood, above all, as a message of faith for the contemporary human being and also for future generations. Theology has probably never before in the history of Christianity—agreed so thoroughly with the Magisterium. What is most important now is not the polarization of positions, but a united concern for the faithful realization of the call to proclaim the Good News of salvation. In the postmodern world, theology and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church must unite efforts to win in the case of the matter that a human being has with God. Inviting human beings to live in the space of faith, both theology and the Magisterium remind them that they belong to God in everything that they are pleased with or do not like about themselves—that is, that they are saved. The polarization of positions is visible even in the example of the history of interpreting the Bible. It is clear that it cannot be separated from the Church, which is the environment of its creation. On the other hand, it is the Holy Bible that is fundamental to the Church for ensuring the continuity of its self-awareness. The theologian’s vocation is a constant exercising in the freedom of faith which reaches an understanding, and which verifies itself in everyday life in the sense of an ultimate responsibility before God, experienced in the community of the Church (ecclesia visibilis). Possible tensions between theology and the Magisterium draw attention to the need for the freedom of theological research, which is not free from the possibility of erring. If “where the Spirit of the Lord is—there is freedom” (2 Cor 3: 17) is a good guide, then we can boldly trust the power of this Spirit. “Christ freed us to freedom. So, abide in it and do not give up again under the yoke of slavery!” (Gal 5: 1): This is how St Paul admonishes us. The radical otherness of theology enables unity, which cannot be destroyed by subtle systemic differences. What is more, they are the source of the vitality of theology and its effectiveness. The harmonizing of the thought about God and belief in Him is not the highest goal of theology. Disputes and tensions in the history of theology have not only failed to destroy theology but have largely 216

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broadened the horizon of theological thinking. The system’s crevices that had opened up, actually allowed us to understand better what the essence of the problems that demanded our understanding might be. Great theology has always been convinced of its serving nature toward the Magisterium and its common serving mission to the message of Jesus, to Revelation, and God the Revelator. With a radically new discovery of God in Jesus, it is now impossible to remain in fear of losing a privileged position. “He who is afraid has not perfected himself in love.” (1 Jn 4: 18) History probably does not know of a single theologian whose teaching would be (have been and remain) fully accepted by the Magisterium. Omitting even important aspects of St Augustine’s or St Thomas Aquinas’ theology does not diminish their importance for developing the Church’s selfawareness. Hence theology, as a spokesperson for theological pluralism and deeply rooted in the Bible, understands itself in its autonomy not as outside of or against the Magisterium, but in a symbiosis, which is a free and unconstrained act of partaking in the universal community of receiving the Good News. All believers unite in the community proclaiming the “crucified Christ, who is a scandal to the Jews, and a trifle to the pagans; to those, however, who are called, both from the Jews and from the Greeks, he is Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Cor 1: 23-24) Faith takes on a particular dimension in the Church, when she, rooted in the truth of the Gospel, preaches this Gospel, and this Gospel message is assimilated by a believer. Every believer and a theologian, in particular, must obey faith uncompromisingly, even when this obedience might place him/her very close to certain interpretations that may still be in need of some work before they are clarified in all respects. The Magisterium can neither unduly inhibit the development and flow of theological discourse, nor accept it uncritically. The mere possibility of erring cannot be the reason for limiting both the asking of questions and the giving of answers. Historically, there have been attempts to explain theology’s existence as a defense against heresy. In this spirit, even St Paul’s admonition taught: “Besides, there must be tensions among you, so that it would turn out who are those who have been proved.” (1 Cor 11: 19) Oportet haereses esse was eagerly understood as a challenge to answer heresy and reject it. Theology, however, has a creative mission, and not a reactionary one. In its constantly intensified relationship to its source, theology is becoming a testimony to the authenticity and truth of this source and opens critical access to it for anyone who, on their different paths as well as in the wilderness, lives his/her life in an ultimate responsibility before God. The ups and downs of theology interpreting the meaning of Revelation in its historical message—in order to discover its meaning for the present and the future of the Church—show it to us as a fascinating adventure, taken care of by a human being. A theologian, by the very nature of his/her vocation, is obliged to

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keep faithful to the historical Revelation. Being obedient to this call, he/she becomes a conscious builder of the Church, urging us to open ourselves to the gracious presence of God. In a confrontation with the mystery of God’s reign, the future that we desire and expect is already present. Divine posse becomes esse. The theologian cannot become just a passive holder of the idea of Christ, which he/she will inflect according to their intellectual and spiritual conformism. However, he/she also cannot succumb to the temptation of novelty and desire a cheap sensation, based on avant-garde experiments and hypotheses. There is room in the Church for any radical talk about God, even if it is connected with the risk of moving on unknown ground. Moreover, this place must be guaranteed if the Church wants to remain faithful to its divine mission. Only thanks to such openness in the Church can we be strong in faith. And, in the perspective of openness, any unfaithfulness to the self-revealing God—even if it were given the name of ‘absolute faith, blind faith, not-understanding (Derrida)—turns out to be an empty category. However, God is always greater, always more generous. He responds to every loss of a human being not otherwise than in His presence: God-the Son in Jesus, who as the “light [that] shines in darkness,” (Jn 1: 5) is with a human being who walks in the darkness, so that darkness would not overwhelm him/her. The richer, the more contemplative, and the more open to the questions and problems of other sciences theology is, the closer is it to the evangelical message, and therefore the less susceptible to intellectual simplifications and ideological pressures. Such theology clearly aims to clarify the phenomenon of the whole human being in his/her relationship to God and the community of believers. And in fulfilling its mission, it does not compromise, does not use short-cuts, but decisively strives only to sharpen the understanding, being perfectly aware of its limitations. Reaching out for an understanding of faith always has to do with the phenomenon of boundaries. The boundaries can be overcome, but they do not disappear when crossed. God comes to a human being so that he/she can be who they can possibly become. God allows us not only to discover a chance of a different possibility, but he also becomes its ‘executor.’ Accepting a promise in faith is to favor possibility over actuality, to place posse before esse. Ultimately, God is the eschatological possibility to which Nicholas of Cusa gave the name of Possest. It is this “possible” God who is more than impossible, who becomes an opportunity for us, who comes to us and calls us beyond the present to the promised future. It is a call to ‘transgression’ par excellence, crossing all boundaries that become clearer in the process of overcoming. Christ himself, transfigured on Mount Tabor and exceeds the limits of our imagination and perception. As participants in the event of Christ’s transfiguration in faith, we have a choice for transforming our world, including crossing the boundaries toward him who comes to us from the future, or of remaining caught in a fixation on an idea, which indeed offers an

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easy understanding of the limits of identity, but in the event is not able to transform our life. It Can Be Different The vision of the Church is a vision dense with the concrete experience of faith. Hence, we can speak of flavors, colors, smells, and sounds of the Church. Often, these concrete experiences place a believer in a dramatic situation, in which he discovers the necessity to stand up for Christ, as a kind of disagreement with his/her way of living and understanding that has so far been docile and abiding. This disagreement can be, and often is, the voice of conscience, which does not allow us to adopt the commonplace ways of understanding, simply because they are commonly accepted. The radical nature of faith in Jesus calls us to be ready for “different” understanding, and hence to “different” experiencing of one’s response to the gift of faith. “Otherwise” becomes the fundamental hermeneutic category of the experience of faith. An understanding of this category requires sensitivity and openness because more often than not, a human being is confronted with an existential situation dissimilar to those in which he was, or found him/herself, or which others experienced. One can, therefore, speak of the necessity for an absolute intensity of sensitivity, or an absolute concentration and existential attention (Aufmerksamkeit) to the ‘matter-in-hand.’ At this maximum intensity of attention, we discover that our incommunicable struggle for shaping our own lives makes us closer to the Other, whom we discover as the co-witness of the Paschal event. In this way, we experience existentially the mystery of the apostolic and universal Church, which cannot be (and is not) the Church, if it is without any of those people who are called to it. In this Church, there are no ‘masters of the faith’; strong in faith, we are all household members and co-creators of the joy that comes from faith. (see 2 Cor 1: 24) Let us give voice to poetry: Wisława Szymborska, “Courtesy of the Blind,” from the volume Dwukropek (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2005; my translation): Courtesy of the Blind The Poet reads poems to the blind. He did not expect it to be so difficult. His voice is trembling. His hands are shaking. He feels that every line is exposed here to the maw of darkness. It will have to cope by itself, without light or color. 219

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A dangerous adventure for the stars in his poems, the aurora, the rainbow, clouds, neon lights, and the moon, for the fish, so far and so silver below water and a hawk so quiet, high in the sky. He reads as it is too late not to read of a boy in yellow jacket on green bench, and red roofs, distinguishable in the valley, busy numbers on players’ shirts, and a naked stranger in a door that is open. He would like not to speak—although it is impossible all those saints on the ceiling of cathedrals, or the gesture of farewell from the carriage, slides in the microscope, a ray caught in a ring, screens and mirrors, and an album of faces. Yet the courtesy of the blind is great, and great is their forbearance, magnanimity. They listen, smile and clap. Someone even comes up with a book, topsy-turvy and open for the autograph, invisible to herself. The experience of an encounter, which is fundamental to a human being, makes him/her collide with the question about presence. It refers not only to the question about the presence of God, about His way of existence but also about the presence of the Other. Szymborska talks dramatically, and in a poetic way, about the embarrassment that is felt in an encounter with the Other, which is the greater since the poet, who sees and describes, meets the blind. A difficult barrier exists, but not only between poet and reader—almost impossible to overcome: Being unnoticed, unheard, or heard without understanding. An encounter with the Other makes us sensitive, continuously and anew, to the otherness of the Other, at the same time intensifying our question about ourselves, about our understanding of ourselves. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, an understanding of oneself is a place where understanding happens. Thus, one can say that every understanding is an understanding of oneself. However, one cannot overlook the fundamental truth about the mutual dependence of self-understanding and understanding God: There is no understanding of oneself without an understanding of God! Reaching the heart of 220

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the matter is discovering that God is with us. The essence of Christianity is the experience of the presence of every human being in the heart of God and the discovery of the possible presence of the wholeness of God’s cause in the heart of every human being. Theological hermeneutics lives the event of Christ in its uniqueness and allows us even now—albeit per speculum et in aenigmate (δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι 1 Cor 13: 12)—to understand the eternal love of God, that is, to experience God’s presence as a tangible reality in the Church in which God is “everything in everyone” (ὁ θεὸς πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν. (1 Cor 15: 28) Understanding as a lingual and historical event brings a human being, who strives to understand him/herself, closer to the Other. Self-understanding happens neither in isolation from an understanding of the other nor in omitting the Other. One must even emphasize the necessity of the simultaneous occurrence of understanding of both oneself and the Other. Understanding ourselves, we understand the Other, because of the dimension of ετєρος belongs, constitutively, αύτός. In confronting otherness, we always stand helpless: The more sensitive, the more helpless. Helpless in the face of responsibility for ourselves and the Other, timidly, but with faith in accepting that what is, is always different. Szymborska’s poet, rich in props of helplessness, is seriously concerned with the words exposed to the “trial of darkness.” He is afraid of their fate, he does not trust their power. Perhaps only the “courtesy of the blind,” their “great forbearance and magnanimity” will allow him to re-pose the fundamental question about himself in an encounter with the Other. In the perspective of the confrontation with the Other, we are given a chance to understand that life is a “trial of darkness,” in which we meet “great understanding and magnanimity” from the Other, not because we deserve it, but because we exist. No certainty, only the necessity of being constantly vigilant toward oneself and other proclaimers of the truth about perception, and not only a poetic one. It is an ardent plea for readiness to risk, which involves crossing boundaries with uncompromising questioning, with a subtle sensitivity to the non-obviousness of seemingly apparent matters. In Courtesy of the Blind, we can also see a bold call for faithfulness to our deepest convictions, even if in concrete collisions with reality they seemed inappropriate to us. How to remain open when the recognition of reality is paralyzing? These kind blind people who see differently, can genuinely intimidate us, and to the extent that we “would like to remain silent.” And yet it is impossible. An impossible silence, and how difficult it is to express what we see. The more difficult, the greater is the awareness of the illegibility of our own testimony. The kindness of others, their great forbearance and magnanimity, their listening, smiles and applause, even their request for an autograph intensify further the tension of the “trial of darkness.” ‘Distrust toward the Other’ does not even come close to describing the whole drama of the encounter. Is there a need for constant transgression? Coming up “with a book, topsyturvy and open” and a request “for the autograph, invisible to herself,” which 221

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means something illegible, make us sensitive to the ambiguity of human gestures. How to respond to the gesture of the presence when the waves of uncertainty engulf us? Perhaps Szymborska warns against the temptation of an easy division between those who can see and the blind, those who are uncertain, stutter out of nervousness, have sweaty hands, and the good-hearted listeners who “smile and clap.” Maybe in order to realize ourselves in our unrepeatability and uniqueness, we have to accept that we are ‘touch contradictions,’ because there where we touch them, we discover a mysterious and unreachable reality that patiently asks for presence. Moreover, in this uneasy agreement with what is real, we are left with the hope that “mercy and truth will meet each other, and justice and happiness will kiss each other.” (Ps 85: 11) It may even be the case that it is God’s voice that is shaky, that it is His hands that tremble in contact with a human being. He wants to communicate to a human being something that He knows the human being is not capable of understanding fully. And in this “trial of darkness,” He trembles, but with all His self He wants everything that He is not. And even if Szymborska’s poet realized—in an encounter with the different way in which the blind see—the problematic nature of his own perception and understanding of the world and himself in this world, this change could be received as the kindness of God who is, in Jesus, the one who ‘did not succeed.’ Everywhere where people in happiness and unhappiness are close to each other, just as everywhere where they are far away, as soon as hands stretch out, lights turn on and the door opens: God is and saves even if none of these signs is understood and accepted. To understand differently does not mean to accept each proposed interpretation uncritically. After all, each of us in our own way ultimately cares for the same thing: To understand that which demands understanding and to communicate with the Other in our understanding. Because we are finite beings (endliche Wesen), our understanding is never full understanding. By participating in the unifying efforts to understand, it is becoming more and more clear to us that each of our understandings is, in fact, an anticipatory understanding (ein überholendes Verstehen) because we cannot take in the existent history of understanding within brackets. Can we use comparative and evaluative categories here? Must caution in evaluating and being satisfied with the category of “the otherwise” mean an escape into relativism? Every understanding that brings us closer to truth is an enrichment of Being (Zuwachs an Sein). Thus, it can never be treated instrumentally as “a something” (ein Etwas) and separated, as such, from truth and freedom. There is no human authority that can definitely and obligatorily declare that understanding is complete and as such closed to further cognitive efforts, or ready to be used in practice. The Eros of striving for understanding makes a human being focus on that which requires understanding, and thus on himself. In turning one’s attention to the subject of cognition and one’s inner life, one discovers a vocation to share the truth one recognizes, which one cannot resist, except by 222

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incapacitating oneself. Understanding never ends. Language provides us with an infinite constellation of meanings. What is understood is a kind of answer given to the question that precedes and immediately provokes another question. After Gadamer, we can repeat that “an endless dialogue does not allow for final conclusions. A weak hermeneutician would be the one who would think he might or must have the last word.” A Few Lines about Hope: The Language of Theology Reflection on the vocabulary of theology is connected with the possibility of building a language in which one could effectively speak about God today. Its effectiveness is verified by its adoption by a contemporary human being, (who is) often completely confused in the tensions created by a pluralistic ‘theology of religion,’ the promise carried by the word of salvation, and an invitation to the community in which this salvation takes place. The task of the language of theology is therefore to create the identity of people saved in Christ and through him enabled to freedom. The problem of the language of theology is a matter of a human being’s self-understanding in his referral to himself and the Other. The form of the message of the Good News about salvation is inseparable from the content. The language of theology, like the word of God itself, is understood as a word that is an event. It not only describes reality but creates it (Wort und Ereignis). The Hebrew dabar Jahveh and the Greek ῥῆμα are its driving force and do not only have force. It is a real dynamis, energeia, a creative power that ‘calls into existence’ (ins Werk setzen). When God speaks, what is spoken is what ‘becomes.’ The word of God is a living word, viva vox; it is an event; it happens (ereignet sich). It is the word that has the power to speak about God and the human being, who is “the heir of God and co-heir of Christ.” (κληρονόμοι μὲν Θεοῦ, συνκληρονόμοι δὲ Χριστοῦ, Rom 8: 17) Every word has its source in this Word. Hence, there is no human language that could not be a language about God. In this word, a human being has a chance to express itself. In all the words of love, he or she knows. He/she can see him/herself, their inner being in the word (vor-tragen, vor sich selbst tragen): Present to themselves, the truth about their understanding (including self-understanding), and the recognition of themselves as present in this truth. The point is, to take seriously everything that happens to us in life. Thus, that self-reflection would be a way of living, and such an experience of ourselves in the world as to make it reflexivity that is inseparable from life itself. Speaking and thinking about fundamental things is one of the major concerns of theology. It is worth paying attention to the hermeneutic primordial belonging together of thinking and speaking (ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen). It points to the lingual structure of thinking and understanding, and not to the limit of the potential of thinking which we are able to 223

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express in language. It is in the space of thinking and speaking that a human being—in statu viatoris—endeavors to reach an agreement with him/herself and with the Other, trying to respond to the inviting presence of the Other. Re-spondeo means to give an answer to the one who spoke to us, who was the first to make us the addressees of his message. An unbounded willingness to talk, resulting from a trust in language and its community-creating potential, describes the condition of a human being who, discovering the truth about co-existence in the word, experiences the transforming nature of the conversation. After Gadamer, we can confidently say that conversation “transforms” interlocutors. Gadamer consciously uses the word Verwandlung (“Das Gespräch verwandelt beide”), transformation, metamorphosis, which clearly suggests the exceptionally elevated, perhaps even sacral dimension of this event (consider the word Wandlung—Transubstantiation). This change, which becomes the blessing of conversation, is the liberation of a human being to the possibility of being ‘the one’ and only human being—in its own place, in its own time and its own name. To be fulfilled as a human being, one must discover the causative power of faith. This is done in conversation (Glaube im Gespräch). Moreover, faith is a conversation (Glaube ist Gespräch). And not only in the sense of saying the creed, uttering it (den Glauben aussprechen: Glaubensbekenntnis). To take faith seriously means to accept the voice of God who speaks. It is an invitation to a conversation understood from a hermeneutic perspective. After all, the conversation is an event that opens us to who and to what comes to us with our consent: It cannot destroy our most fundamental freedom to accept the invitation—and thus to make a choice—and also the freedom of not being forced to participate in this conversation. However, the one who comes to us and his message are simultaneously beyond the scope of our possibilities of “controlling” the conversation, which in its most profound dimension is an opening to ‘presence.’ It is ‘consenting’ to confront the future that is happening before our eyes and thanks to our consent. At the same time, it is a dialogue with the past in which we are rooted, and in which the experience of conversation finds a real foundation—understood as the earth’s blessing, the blessing of tradition. In our openness to God, which we experience as grace, we discover that God is a place of encounter—the one that cannot ‘not want all the meetings, for which it is open,’ and which does not impose any of them. The encounter is a conversation that happens, although not independently of us, but also without a possibility of our direct controlling of its course. After Hölderlin, we can repeat that “we are a conversation (‘Wir sind ein Gespräch’). And in this conversation, as Gadamer teaches, we are much more led than leading (“die Partner des Gesprächs [sind] weit weniger die Führenden als die Geführten”).

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Todtnauberg Arnika, Augentrost, der Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem Sternwürfel drauf, in der Hütte, die in das Buch –wessen Namen nahms auf vor dem meinen? die in dies Buch geschriebene Zeile von einer Hoffnung, heute, auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen, Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, Orchis und Orchis, einzeln, Krudes, später, im Fahren, deutlich, der uns fährt, der Mensch, der’s mit anhört, die halbbeschrittenen Knüppelpfade im Hochmoor, Feuchtes, viel 1 Todtnauberg Arnica, eyebright, the drink from the well with wooden star 1

Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 255-6. 225

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in the hut, the entry in the book —whose name is there in front of mine? the line in this book about hope, today for the thinker’s word to come from the heart, forest sward, not levelled orchid upon orchid, all single. Pointedly, later, while driving Clear he who drives us he hears it too the barely trod log paths on the high moors humidity much Todtnauberg, the mountain of death, is at the same time a place of encounter and a place of hope for healing. This is symbolized by arnica and eyebright. And hill water, straight from the well, decorated (and kept safe) with a wooden star. Our struggles are inscribed in nature, in its dramatic beauty. The beauty of the Black Forest mists, the beauty of the stones that hurt one’s feet, and the beauty of the uncertainty about which path is the right one for us to take. Talking about Heidegger and reflecting on his philosophy, it is worth getting to know the vocabulary of foresters, woodcutters, and farmers. It is especially early Heidegger, who, wishing to radically exclude himself from theology in philosophy (Radikale Freimachung von der theologischen Vorprägung), made us sensitive to the need of working on a language for theology, which would be adequate to talk about faith and religious experience. It is necessary to look for a language that is sensi-

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tive and close to life; a clear language of theology that shapes the symbolic imagination of a human being in his relation to God who, accepting the human being, introduces this being to the mysteries of His inner life—into this constant and lifegiving exchange—in which, and through which, He exists and reveals Himself to the human being. I chose Celan’s Todtnauberg because of its unique, irreducible, extremely condensed ambiguity in the use it makes of language. This poem is the result of documentary precision, with which the poet describes his encounter with Heidegger—a meeting which took place on July 25, 1966, at the philosopher’s cottage in the Black Forest—as well as of a multidimensional semantic depth, which becomes poetry’s testimony par excellence in this poetic form. It is poetry’s testimony to itself which calls for the contemplation of reality, and which is also a protest against the spirit of generalization. The testimony of poetry happens through the poet. It is he who becomes the witness and mediator of poetry’s testimony. Similarly, our matter with God is a concrete encounter with the one who ‘comes to us.’ The Church’s faith is the testimony of God. It is God who shows how important his creation is, and which he loved so much that he gave his Son so that we would no longer have to lose his presence. The hut, which was Heidegger’s true refugium, becomes for Celan a locum spei, a place where hope can arise. Seeing the wellspring enlivens in him the hope for the truth of the heart. And since the desire for a ‘word’ (from the great man) is great, the word “today” enters this poetry as a prayer for truth, uttered with the most significant concern, in an absolute concentration of attention. That which is important happens in the meeting of incommunicable existences, which are symbolized here by the orchids: “orchid upon orchid, all single.” However, it comes to an encounter within the horizon of the communion of loneliness, about which the poet dreams. So, they are walking; but only for a short way. It is getting wet. Everyone must return to his own place. Much—that is how I understand the German viel, deliberately ambiguous—so much humidity that one must cease walking on the shared path—and ‘enough,’ nothing more, a dramatically interrupted expedition from which so much was expected. Or maybe even ‘too much’ for one heart that longs for reconciliation, forgiveness, understanding? In this context, I place Krudes as not ripe, without class, immature, something that happened and erupted while traveling by car. It must have been something important, since Celan calls a witness here, the one who drove them. Almost in all interpretations of Celan’s Todtnauberg the aspect of hope for the word of truth, for consolation that brings forgiveness, dominates. Poetry does not make it possible to disambiguate understanding. It is an invitation to think about life without inappropriate simplifications. Reading poetry is meeting it in its poetic nature, in that which makes it what it truly is. Therefore, every reading of poetry is an attempt to dwell in the kingdom of poetry, without a hasty transla-

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tion into an even very desirable language of life’s usefulness. How—in this context—not to think about our existence within the horizon of the reigning of God? And about the language which, being a mirror of finitude (Endlichkeit), that is, the temporality of existence (Zeitlichkeit) that is calling us to seek the primordial words that express Being (Sein)? We are all pilgrims to this verbum entis, to the word in which Being expresses itself in a constant dialogue with each one of us and with tradition. The more this language is closer to Being, the more does it become a manifestation of Being, and the more is it language. Opus Magnum Vocat Nos The publication of the book ends a certain period. However, it also starts a new one: The period of further reflection on the reigning of God in relation to human freedom—as the key to the theological horizon of interpretation of the Church’s faith—and a discussion of how the issues may best be presented in the publication. This clarification must essentially remain unfinished and open, just like the time of our salvation remains open. Opus magnum vocat nos: A great task awaits us. We are left with the question, maneat quaestio. We befriend a reflective way of living at our own request. It is maneat, coniunctivus optativus, which expresses a wish. Therefore, let the question last. And thus, begins the next period of a debate over the problem of the Church’s faith, which demands understanding in the changing conditions of God’s encounter with a particular human being. It is our encounter with God, our hope that is never nameless, our faith that brings hope because it brings forgiveness and because it contains the promise of communion with God. It is essential here to grasp the transforming power of faith, to perceive it in an inseparable connection with a concrete human existence. This is not only a matter of integrating faith and life but also of integrating faith and learning, taking up the challenge of the constant deepening of understanding, refining one’s own culture of thinking, of a patient discovery of the richness and multidimensionality of life. Integration is not only a simple combining of particular dimensions of life, as if one could live without faith or without growth in understanding. Integrare is, above all, a renewal, refreshment and recreation of the whole (Wiederherstellung eines Ganzen). In this integrative effort, each one of us in his own way discovers the otherness of the Other, who in the incommunicability of his/her existence co-creates the communion of presence. The processes around integration can be very different from one another, and their practical effects vary anyway. And yet, despite the differences, or perhaps because of this versatility, we see a chance, in the Paschal event, to overcome the alienating character of loneliness and a sense of being abandoned. This is, for every one of us, the very possibility of ‘reconciliation with oneself’—in recognizing, accepting and loving one’s own life, the life which God wants to have together with us. At the same time, it is an opportunity to include in one’s own world the life of 228

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every human being. In this, I see the most profound sense of integration in its vertical and horizontal dimension. Understanding our place in the Church creatively, as a community that is not only a possibility of reconciliation but, in its essence, an expression of reconciliation with God and people (which is happening in each human being), we are seriously moved, not only by our own fate but by anyone who cannot be indifferent to us. Therefore, patiently showing one’s own ways of thinking, even if it takes place per viam longam, as Ricoeur would put it, we want to reach—through the hermeneutics of signs, symbols, and texts—the actual life (Faktizität des menschlichen Lebens) of human beings. We do not succumb to the temptation of taking a shortcut, which allows us to communicate the ready results of our thoughts quickly and practically: We only retell the life of Jesus as a parable of God’s love for us. It is a great art to live in such a way as to co-create the universitas studiorum, clearly indicating the unconditional future of a human being in God. Not obscuring the decisive elements of one’s own, often dramatic, dialogue with God, so that words may heal and carry life. So that they may be of a bright yellow like arnica montana, helpful in treating bruises and swellings, and snowwhite like euphrasia, or light blue like eyebright (Augentrost), and friendly to our weakening eyes.

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2. 3. Questioning the Absolute: Toward the New Beginning 2. 3. 1. Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief And who would want to conceal that on the whole of my previously traveled path the argument with Christianity continued silently, an argument, which is not and was never an abstract problem, but a question about the appropriation of one’s origins—the parents’ house, the homeland and the youth—and the painful separation from it all. Only he who is as deeply rooted in a truly lived catholic world can imagine something of the necessity of my interrogations, which to this day affect my way like underground earthquakes.1 The Onto-Theological Context The question of God in Heidegger has been a subject of passionate debate from the first critical examinations of the author who was born as a son of a sexton in the conservative Catholic farmlands of the Black Forest and became the thinker of Being.2 The young Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity and the late Heidegger’s fundamental ontology address the question of the divine as a decisive philosophical topic. Heidegger’s companions on his way to the nearness of the divine were Paul, Augustine, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart and the German Mystics, Martin Luther, and later Nietzsche, Schleiermacher and Hölderlin, a poet standing bareheaded in the storms of the divine. Heidegger has effectively questioned the totalitarian thinking of metaphysics and onto-theology. Nevertheless, he has neglected the thinking that thinks back to its own origins, which in turn could allow for the new proximity between philosophy and theology. With the growing literature on the subject of Heidegger’s relationship to theology and the philosophy of religion we have an elaborated variety of interpretations concerning 1 2

Martin Heidegger, GA66, 415. Emerich Coreth, “Heidegger in heutiger Sicht. Heideggers jüngste Schriften: Orientierung,” Katholische Blätter für weltanschauliche Information 19 (1955): 153-56; idem, “Auf der Spur der entflohenen Götter. Heidegger und die Gottesfrage,” Wort und Warheit 9 (1954): 107-16; William J. Richardson, “Heidegger and God,” Thought 40 (1965): 13-40; idem, “Heidegger and Theology,” Theological Studies 26 (1965): 86-100; Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube,” in Gerhard Noller, ed., Heidegger und die Theologie. Beginn und Fortgang der Diskussion, Theologische Bücherei, vol. 38 (München, Kaiser, 1967), 72-94; Richard Schaeffler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens?: Martin Heidegger und die katholische Theologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), Claude Ozankom, Gott und Gegenstand: Martin Heideggers Objektivierungsverdikt und seine theologische Rezeption bei Rudolf Bultmann und Heinrich Ott (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994).

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the relationship between metaphysics and theology, onto-theology and Christian theology, theology and faith, and Being and God.3 What Lawrence Hemming calls “Heidegger’s refusal of a theological voice” is a destruction of the metaphysical God, and thus anticipation of a “divine God.” The archives reveal new aspects of Heidegger’s relationship to theology, especially the young Heidegger’s interest in the phenomenology of religious life. The 1995 publication of the 1920/21 lectures on the phenomenology of religion, “Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion,” and “Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus” has substantially changed the understanding of Heidegger’s transition from the neo-Scotistic phenomenology of his Habilitationsschrift to the hermeneutics of facticity of Sein und Zeit.4 The development of Heidegger’s understanding of the question of God is the theme of two major publications: Heidegger et la question de Dieu,5 a result of the 1979 international symposium at Collège des Irlandais in Paris, and “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.” Martin Heidegger und die Gottesfrage,6 a 1997 Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft conference in Messkirch.7 The onto-theological nature of metaphysics is based on the experience of Being as Being.8 As such, it is a proper inquiry into Being, but Being itself remains 3

Jeff O. Prudhomme, God and Being: Heidegger's Relation to Theology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1997); Ludwig Weber, O.P., Heidegger und die Theologie (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997); Wolfgang Baum, Gnostische Elemente im Denken Martin Heideggers?: Eine Studie auf der Grundlage der Religionsphilosophie von Hans Jonas (Neuried: Ars Una, 1997); Philippe Capelle, Philosophie et théologie dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998); Jean Greisch, L’Arbre de vie et l’Arbre du savoir: Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique Heideggerienne (1919-1923) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2000); Luca Savarino, Heidegger e il cristianesimo: 1916-1927 (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2001); Dieter Thomä, ed., Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003); Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski, ed., Martin Heidegger/Bernhard Welte: Briefe und Begegnungen:Mit einem Vorwort von Bernhard Casper (Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotta, 2003). 4 For an elaboration of the development of Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of transcendence and the world prior to Being and Time see Markus Enders, Transzendenz und Welt: Das Daseinshermeneutische Transzendenz- und Weltverständnis Martin Heideggers auf dem Hintergrund der neuzeitlichen Geschichte des Transzendenz-Begriffs (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1999), particularly 59-116. 5 Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary, ed., Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980). 6 Paola-Ludovica Coriando, ed., “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.” Martin Heidegger und die Gottesfrage (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1998). 7 Cf. Jean Greisch, “Das grosse Spiel des Lebens und das Übermächtige,” in Coriando, ed., “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” 45-65. 8 See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Robbins argues that ontotheology is the very condition of Being and thought, not a discourse to be overcome. He calls for a radical rethinking of contemporary philosophical theology, suggesting an alternative relationship between faith and thought. 231

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concealed in the search for ἀλήθεια. Christian theology utilized Greek philosophy for the interpretation of the original experience of the first community of believers, acting somehow against the admonition of the Apostle Paul: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1: 20) The wisdom of the world, σoφία τoῦ κόσμoυ, the essence of philosophy, is foolishness that exalts itself against God (2 Cor 10: 15): “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom.” (1 Cor 1: 22-25) Is Heidegger supporting New Testament humility or ridiculing the Christian intellectual tradition when he states: “Christian theology, the philosophical ‘speculation’ standing under its influence, and the anthropology always also growing out of these contexts all speak in borrowed categories that are foreign to their own domains of being.”?9 Alternatively, is Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysics as onto-theology a regression into gnosticism?10 “Our Origins Always Lie Before Us” Heidegger spent six years as a high school seminarian, followed by a short Jesuit novitiate, from which he was dismissed for health reasons. Already as a high school student, Heidegger was fascinated by the ontological questioning discovered in Franz Brentano’s, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle.11 Heidegger’s intellectual career began with his enthusiasm for Scholastic ontology and thinking, which attempts to uncover the ontological ground of any philosophical question. Marking himself as a Catholic philosopher, whose life goal was to develop the enormous intellectual and spiritual potential of Scholasticism, Heidegger set his sights on the hermeneutic-phenomenological retrieval of the Middle Ages.12 Seeing Catholicism as a legitimate synthesis of metaphysics and

Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” trans. John van Buren, in idem, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002), 139. 10 See Mario Enrique Sacchi, The Apocalypse of Being: The Esoteric Gnosis of Martin Heidegger (South Bend, Ind.: St Augustine’s Press, 2002). 11 Franz Clemens Brentano, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, ed. and trans. Rolf George (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981). 12 On the relationship of Heidegger to Scotus see S. J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy. Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 88-119. 9

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religion, Heidegger was originally faithful to the faith of his upbringing. His academic development began in philosophical theology, yet with time he disengaged himself from theology. Hugo Ott claims that this detachment was primarily biographically motivated.13 Others see essentially intellectual motives.14 Heidegger himself says in On the Way to Language “Without this theological start, I would never have come onto the path of thought. But our origins always lie before us (Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft).15 Heidegger’s fundamental training in theology allowed him to appropriate speculative theological tools into philosophical discourse. His theological origins doubtlessly determined his philosophy. Heidegger’s essential development is to a large extent not understandable without a reference to Christian experience as a sui generis genius loci, however complex and problematic.16 Thematizing the problem of addressing the Christian experience Heidegger admits: Genuine philosophy of religion does not arise from preconceived concepts concerning philosophy and religion. It is rather from a determinate religious devotion—for us Christian devotion—that the possibility of its philosophical comprehension emerges. Why precisely Christian devotion lies at the center of our consideration is a difficult question; it is only answerable through the resolution of the problem of historical coherences [geschichtliche Zusammenhänge]. The task is to achieve a genuine [echtes] and original relation to history, which is to be explicated through our own historical situation and facticity. It is a question of understanding what the sense of history can mean for us [was der Sinn der Geschichte für uns bedeuten kann] so that the “objectivity” of the historical “in itself [an sich]” disappears. History emerges only out of the present. Only as such is it possible to comprehend the possibility of a philosophy of religion.17 Hugo Ott argues that the Catholic roots of Heidegger’s thinking remain to be fully uncovered. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1988). See also Hugo Ott, “Zu den Katholischen Wurzeln im Denken Martin Heideggers. Der Theologische Philosoph,” in Christoph Jamme and Karsten Harries, ed., Martin Heidegger: Kunst-Politik-Technik (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1992); Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus,” Stimmen der Zeit 137 (1940): 18. 14 See Emil Kettering, “Nähe als Raum der Erfahrung: Eine topologische Besinnung,” in Günther Pöltner, ed., Auf der Spur des Heiligen: Heideggers Beitrag zur Gottesfrage (Wien; Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1991), 9-22; Emil Kettering, Nähe: Das Denken Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1987). 15 Heidegger, GA12: 91. This now famous dictum comes from Heidegger’s essay “A Dialogue on Language.” 16 See Frank Schalow, Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred: From Thought to the Sanctuary of Faith (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), especially chapter 2: “At the Crossroads Between Hermeneutics and Religious Experience,” 23-51. 17 GA 60, 124-125. 13

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The contradictory relationship between Heidegger’s thinking and his religious roots has been often noted. Heidegger’s polemic against the Catholic dogma, against the mixture of faith and thinking, philosophy and theology, against a Christian philosophy, which he calls a total misunderstanding, “a square circle,” seems to contradict his view of thinking as a “way” and “being on the way.” This contradiction is highlighted by Heidegger’s lasting proximity to the Catholic rite. Whenever Heidegger visited his native Messkirch, he apparently attended the Mass in the parish church, St Martin: nomen est omen. With the monks in the monastery in Beuron, he always prayed the liturgical “Night Prayer.” He used holy water, adhered to the practice of bending knee, participated in the first Mass celebrated by his nephew. The ambivalent judgment of Max Müller seems convincing, given the ups and downs of their relationship. According to Müller, Heidegger was tremendously deep, but an internally tormented and disrupted human being, who never succeeded to overcome the faith, he received in baptism and his pious education: He hated the church just as much and just as often as he loved her. Müller never doubted that Heidegger was a deeply religious man, but always hesitated to classify him as a Christian or a Catholic.18 In the secondary literature, there is a dominating conviction that Heidegger’s Catholic roots were critical in the development of his a-theology.19 Yet some recent interpretations claim that Heidegger’s denominational convictions had no substantial influence on the development of his phenomenology.20

See Martin Heidegger, Briefe an Max Müller und andere Dokumente, ed. Holger Zaborowski and Anton Bösl (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 2003). 19 See for example, Wolf-Dieter Gudopp, Der junge Heidegger. Realität und Wahrheit in der Vorgeschichte von ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Frankfurt a.M.: Marxistische Blätter,1983), 102f.; István Fehér, ed., Wege und Irrwege des neueren Umganges mit Heideggers Werk: Ein deutschungarisches Symposium (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991); Hugo Ott, “Martin Heidegger’s Catholic Origins,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1995): 137156; Hugo Ott, “‘Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.’ Zum katholischen Kontinuum im Leben und Denken Martin Heideggers,” in F. Werner Veauthier, ed., Martin Heidegger—Denker der Post-Metaphysik Symposion aus Anlass seines 100. Geburtstags (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1992), 87-115. 20 “Der in der Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger immer wieder mit grossem Elan nachgegangenen Frage nach den ‘katholischen’ Wurzeln oder der Verwendbarkeit seines Denkens im Rahmen fundamentaltheologischer Überlegungen der ein oder anderen Konfession soll hier kein eigener Raum gegeben werden. Am Ende eines Jahrhunderts, das nicht nur umfangreiche Einsichten in die Entwicklung der christlichen Konfessionen vermittelt hat, sondern diese selbst erheblich zu wandeln vermochte und sich zugleich der Vielfalt christlicher Lebensformen in den unterschiedlichen Kulturen immer bewusster wird, sind Attribute wie ‘katholisch’ oder ‘protestantisch’ in solchem Umfang einer kritischen Neuaneignung ausgesetzt, dass sie vorläufig wenig zur Bezeichnung phänomenologischen Denkens beitragen können.” Gerhard Ruf, Am Ursprung der Zeit. Studie zu Martin Heideggers phänomenologischem Zugang zur christlichen Religion in den ersten “Freiburger Vorlesungen” (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 14. 18

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At the beginning of his 1923 lecture course Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger writes: “Young Luther has been my companion through my search. Aristotle, whom Luther hated, was my model. Kierkegaard spurred me on and Husserl gave me eyes to see.”21 In this statement, Heidegger summarizes the intellectual heritage of his concept of facticity. Through Luther, Heidegger reads Paul, Augustine, and Kierkegaard. Bultmann’s note on Heidegger’s religious outlook offers the insight of an insider: This time the Seminar is especially instructive for me, due to the participation of our new philosopher, Heidegger, a student of Husserl. He comes from Catholicism but is entirely Protestant. This he demonstrated recently during a debate after one of Hermelink’s lectures on Luther and the Middle Ages. He not only has an extraordinary knowledge of Scholasticism, but also of Luther, and he somewhat embarrassed Hermelink by conceiving the question more profoundly than this latter thinker. It is of interest that Heidegger—also familiar with modern theology and having special respect for Herrmann—knows Gogarten and Barth as well. The former, above all, he values exactly as I do. You can imagine how important it is for me that you come here to join in on the discussion. The older generation is unable to participate because its members no longer even understand the problem to which we are lending our efforts.22 In Paul and Augustine, Heidegger examines early Christian experience in terms of the attachment to life as facticity, discovering structures of the soul which do not originate in itself.23 Puzzled to clarify the relationship between theology and philosophy, Heidegger is concerned with the possibility of establishing a necessary correspondence between theological conceptualization and the specific contents of the New Testament. He realizes that: Protestantism is only a corrective to Catholicism and cannot stand alone as normative, just as Luther is Luther only on the spiritual basis of Catholicism. If Catholicism degenerates, then “surface sanctity” arises—if Protestantism degenerates, then “spiritless worldliness” arises. In the process, what would appear in Protestantism is a refinement that cannot develop in 21

GA63: 5. Bultmann’s letter to Hans von Soden, December 23, 1923, 202. See also Barash, Martin Heidegger, especially “The Theological Roots of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” 132-156. 23 For a development of the notion of temporality in the Freiburg lectures on Paul and Augustine see Adriano Ardovino, Heidegger: esistenza ed effettività; dall’ermeneutica dell’effettività all’analitica esistenziale; 1919-1927 (Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1998), especially 195198. 22

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Catholicism. For in the latter, when a representative of its principle degenerates into worldliness, then he brings upon himself the odium of worldliness—when a representative of Protestantism degenerates into worldliness, then he is praised for his godliness and frankness. And this is the case because in Catholicism the universal presupposition exists “that we human beings are really scoundrels”; “the principle of Protestantism has a special presupposition: a human being who sits there in mortal anxiety—in fear and trembling and great spiritual trial.”24 It is this “disgrace of worldliness,” which prompts Heidegger to re-think the fundamental relationship between philosophy and theology, as well as the even more essential relationship between the human being and God. Diatribes of an Apostate: Against a “System of Catholicism” Karl Löwith summed up Heidegger's shift from Catholicism to Protestantism in these dramatic words: A Jesuit by education, he became a Protestant through indignation; a scholastic dogmatician by training, he became an existential pragmatist through experience; a theologian by tradition, he became an atheist in his research, a renegade to his tradition cloaked in the mantle of its historian.25 The chronologically first known statement regarding Heidegger’s problems with Catholicism comes from his wife, Elfriede. In a conversation on December 23, 1918, with Engelbert Krebs, a friend and professor of Catholic dogmatic theology in Freiburg, who also married them, Elfriede said that they would not baptize the child as promised (even though it was she who pushed for a Catholic wedding) because her husband had lost his institutional faith and she still has not found it.

Martin Heidegger, “The Problem of Sin in Luther,” in idem, Supplements, 110. Here Heidegger refers to a passage from Kierkegaard. See SørenKierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed., Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1975), 669-672. On Heidegger and Luther see John van Buren, “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther,” In Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 159-74; McGrath, Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy, 151-184. McGrath regards Heidegger’s Lutheran assumptions as a “hidden theological agenda” that determines the philosophical structure of Being and Time. 25 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic, 1993), 120. 24

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“We have both ended up thinking along Protestant lines, i.e., with no fixed dogmatic ties, believing in a personal God, praying to him in the spirit of Christ, but outside any Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy.”26 Early in 1919, Heidegger wrote a letter to Krebs announcing that the “system of Catholicism” had become problematic and unacceptable to him:27 Dear Professor, The past two years, in which I have sought to clarify my basic philosophical position, putting aside every special academic assignment in order to do so, have led me to conclusions for which, had I been constrained by extra-philosophical allegiances, I could not have guaranteed the necessary independence of conviction and doctrine. Epistemological insights applied to the theory of historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable for me—but not Christianity per se or metaphysics, the latter albeit in a new sense. I believe I have felt too keenly – more so, perhaps, than its official historians—what values are enshrined in medieval Catholicism, and we are still a long way removed from any true assessment or interpretation. I think that my phenomenological studies in religion, which will draw heavily on the Middle Ages, will do more than any argument to demonstrate that in modifying my fundamental position I have not allowed myself to sacrifice objectivity of judgment, or the high regard in which I hold the Catholic tradition, to the peevish and intemperate diatribes of an apostate. That being so, I shall continue to seek out the company of Catholic scholars who are aware of problems and capable of empathizing with different points of view. It therefore means a very great deal to me—and I want to thank you most warmly for this—that I do not have to forsake the precious gift of your friendship. My wife (who has informed you correctly) and myself are anxious to maintain our very special relationship with you. It is hard to live the life of a philosopher; the inner truthfulness toward oneself and those for whom one is supposed to be a teacher demands sacrifices and struggles that the academic toiler can never know. I believe that I have an inner calling for philosophy and that by answering the call through research and teaching I am doing everything in my power to further the spiritual life of man—that and only that—thereby justifying my life and work in the sight of God. Your deeply grateful friend, Martin Heidegger. My wife sends her warmest regards. The “system of Catholicism” is an ersatz religion. It is a deterioration from an authentic religious life into an organized religion based on the legal and dogmatic rules. Heidegger, in a true Lutheran spirit, objects to the authoritarian governance

26 27

Quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 108. Letter from Heidegger to Krebs, January 9, 1919, quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 106-107. 237

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of the Church, which suppresses the original factic sources of religious life and prevents an original and genuine experience of religious value. In a letter to Rudolf Otto from March 5, 1919, Edmund Husserl referred to the possibility of his influence in Heidegger’s changed religious views: My philosophical effect does have something revolutionary about it: Protestants become Catholic, Catholics become Protestant. But I do not think about Catholicizing and Protestantizing; I want nothing more than to educate the youth to a radical honesty of thought, to a thinking which guards against obscuring and violating by verbal constructions and conceptual illusions the primordial intuitions which necessarily determine the sense of all rational thinking. In arch-Catholic Freiburg I do not want to stand out as a corrupter of the youth, as a proselytizer, as an enemy of the Catholic Church. That I am not. I have not exercised the least influence on Heidegger’s and Oxner’s migration over to the ground of Protestantism, even though it can only be very pleasing to me as a “non-dogmatic Protestant” and a free Christian (if one may call himself a “free Christian” when by that he envisages an ideal goal of religious longing and understands it, for his part, as an infinite task). For the rest, I am happy to have an effect on all sincere people whether Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.28 Heidegger’s departure from his Scholastic formation was inspired by his conviction that the heart and soul of the Scholastic tradition was the inscription of the divine into metaphysics, God becoming the first principle of thinking. At that point, he rejected neither Christianity nor metaphysics. His motives were purely philosophical: he wanted to be a philosopher unrestrained by outside influences.29 Scholasticism had two effects: on the one hand, reason presumed the power to access divinity; on the other hand, theoretical science, scientia, assumed a divine and absolute legitimacy. Heidegger’s counter-position redresses both aberrations: Divinity is strictly a topic for theologians; where and how the theologian accesses the divine is not for philosophy to judge. Secondly, science is historical, provisional, and relative, one particular way of relating to beings, never absolute or divine. The “God of the philosophers” is the God of metaphysics, a causa sui, which is a causa prima (in the sense of Leibniz’s first cause which metaphysically grounds every ontological proposition). Heidegger attempts to overcome onto-

28

29

Cited in Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent Press, 1981), 25. Thomas Sheehan, “Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times,” in Charles Guignon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70-96. The first section of that paper has a provoking title: “The End of a Catholic Philosopher.”

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theological metaphysics. In Identity and Difference, he argues that dogmatic theology is inseparable from the whole tradition of Western ontology. Onto-theology has departed from its existential origins in the New Testament (cf. Heidegger fascination with St Paul’s letters).30 Patristic theology perpetuated the metaphysical tradition of the Greeks. Onto-theology treats God as the efficient and knowable foundation, a univocal concept contained within and grounding metaphysical speculation. As a mode of thinking, it privileges the activity of human subjects in objectifying knowledge and temporal presencing over alternative categories of Being and ecstatic time.31 The Task of Thinking God and The Relationship Between Philosophy, Theology, and Christianity Heidegger’s preoccupation with the relationship between philosophy and theology has been interpreted in a variety of ways.32 His views on the subject range from the critique of secularized theology, through the theological deconstruction within Christian theology and the epistemological delimitation of the two disciplines, to the preparedness for the appearing of the last god, which describes a new proximity to the divine.33 See Jaromir Brejdak, Philosophia crucis: Heideggers Beschäftigung mit dem Apostel Paulus (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1996). 31 See Martin Heidegger, “Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in idem, Identity and Difference, 42-74. 32 For a summary of the literature on the problem prior to 1972 see Annemarie GethmannSiefert, Das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Theologie im Denken Martin Heideggers (München: Kaiser, 1974). For the development in later discussions see Matthias Jung, Das Denken des Seins und der Glaube an Gott. Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Theologie bei Martin Heidegger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990); idem, Erfahrung und Religion: Grundzüge einer hermeneutisch-pragmatischen Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg i.B.: Alber, 1999). See also Matthias Jung, Michael Moxter, Thomas M. Schmidt, ed., Religionsphilosophie: Historische Positionen und systematische Reflexionen (Würzburg: Echter, 2000). 33 “Viewed from this perspective, with his theology of the last god, Heidegger has not grasped a possibility that would have lent itself from an earlier work and that at the same time could be understood as a correction of the earlier conception. This correction would show the “understanding of being” (Seinsverständnis) that occurs in religious experience and theological conceptualization, and it would point to the religious dimension of the “understanding of being” (GA9” 63) instead of claiming that with this theology of the last god a “purely rationally conceivable content” is brought to bear. But in principle there is no impediment to reading the philosophical theology in Contributions in this sense. When one orients oneself less according to the historical “situation” of the book than according to the structures revealed in it, Heidegger’s investigation may be understood as a clarification of the “between” of god and humans, and this is a contribution to the hermeneutic task that, according to Plato’s Symposium, philosophy has to accomplish according to the demon that enlivens it: to mediate between gods and humans.” Günter Figal, “Forgetfulness of God: Concerning the 30

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After 1917, Heidegger vehemently criticized Scholasticism for confining philosophy and theology to the region of the prevailing theoretical consciousness: Scholasticism, within the totality of the medieval Christian lifeworld, severely jeopardized the immediacy of religious life and forgot religion for theology and dogmas. This theorizing and dogmatizing influence was exercised by church authorities in their institutions and statutes already in the time of early Christianity.34 To understand time in terms of temporality means to think time temporally, not in relation to eternity.35 In his 1924 lecture The Concept of Time to theologians in Marburg, Heidegger said: “The philosopher does not believe. If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time in terms of time.”36 Within the philosophia crucis, a philosopher is not concerned with God, eternity, or the transcendent.37 Only faith has eternity given to it in advance. On a different occasion, Heidegger makes his position even more explicit: Within thinking nothing can be achieved which would be a preparation or a confirmation for that which occurs in faith and in grace… Within faithfulness one still thinks, of course; but thinking as such no longer has a task. Philosophy engages in a kind of thinking of which man is capable on his own. This stops when he is addressed by revelation.38

Center of Heidegger’s ‘Contributions to Philosophy,’” in Charles E. Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega, ed., Companion to Heidegger's “Contributions to Philosophy” (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), 210. 34 Cited in Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley. Calif.: University of California Press, 1993), 74. See also Thomas F. O’Meara O.P., “Heidegger and His Origins: Theological Perspectives,” Theological Studies 48, no. 2 (1986): 205-226; and O’Meara’s commentary on Heidegger in his new book, idem, Erich Przywara, S.J., His Theology and His World (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 35 See Pietro Di Vitiis, “Il problema del tempo e il divino in Heidegger,” Annuario Filosofico 14 (1998): 309-322, also idem, Il problema religioso in Heidegger (Roma: Bulzoni, 1995). 36 Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 37 Brejdak interprets Heidegger’s preoccupation with St Paul as a meeting point between philosophy and theology. For a short commentary on The Concept of Time see Brejdak, Philosophia crucis, 124-127. 38 Hermann Noack, “Conversation with Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), 64. 240

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Heidegger specifically encourages theologians to “abide in the exclusiveness of revelation.”39 Faith must be alert to the claims of thinking and the danger of possibly “watering down its own claims. Faith and thinking cannot be made to coincide.”40 In 1970 Heidegger republished his 1927 lecture, Phenomenology and Theology, in which he thematizes the relationship between philosophy and theology. John Caputo calls Phenomenology and Theology “Heidegger’s farewell to Christian theology as a matter of explicit and personal concern.”41 Philosophy can be genuinely helpful for theology as a science, though not in the sense of being a science of faith (Wissenschaft vom Glauben). Heidegger writes, Philosophy is the possible, formally indicative ontological corrective of the ontic and, in particular, of the pre-Christian content of basic theological concepts. But philosophy can be what it is without functioning factically as this corrective.”42 On the other hand, theology is for philosophy anything else but a help: This peculiar relationship does not exclude but rather includes the fact that faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that is factically ever-changing. Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy that philosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do battle with it.43 The existential opposition between faithfulness and the free appropriation of one’s whole Dasein means that theology must be the “mortal enemy” of philosophy. This brings Heidegger to the now-famous metaphor of Christian philosophy as a “square circle”: There is no such thing as a Christian philosophy; that is an absolute “square circle.” On the other hand, there is likewise no such thing as a neo-Kantian, or axiological, or phenomenological theology, just as there is no phenomenological mathematics. Phenomenology is always only the name for the procedure of ontology, a procedure that essentially distinguishes itself from that of all other, positive sciences.44 39

Ibid. Ibid., 65. 41 John Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” in Guignon, ed., Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 276. 42 Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in idem, Pathmarks, 53. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 40

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Heidegger defines his understanding of theology as an academic discipline: As conceptual interpretation of itself on the part of faithful existence, that is, as historical knowledge, theology aims solely at that transparency of the Christian occurrence that is revealed in, and delimited by, faithfulness itself. Thus, the goal of this historical science is concrete Christian existence itself… To grasp the substantive content and the specific mode of being of the Christian occurrence, and to grasp it solely as it is testified to in faith and for faith, is the task of systematic theology.”45 As a self-interpretation of faith, “theology is not speculative knowledge of God… Theology itself is founded primarily by faith, even though its statements and procedures of proof formally derive from free operations of reason.”46 According to Heidegger, theology needs to return to its origins in the New Testament faith: The Christian experience is something so completely different that it has no need to enter into competition with philosophy. When theology holds fast to the view that philosophy is foolishness, the mystery-character of revelation will be much better preserved. Therefore, in the face of the final decision, the ways part.47 After returning to Freiburg in 1928 as Husserl’s successor, Heidegger was deeply antagonistic to Christianity in general and to Catholicism in particular.48 Among Catholics who experienced a hostile treatment were two talented students of Martin Honecker, Heidegger’s colleague at the University of Freiburg, Gustav Siewerth and Max Müller. Heidegger’s philosophical critique of Christianity is based on his distinction between faith and metaphysics. In the Introduction to Metaphysics, he writes: Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth already has the answer to the question ‘why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?’ before even asking the question, insofar as everything that is not itself God, is created through him. God himself ‘is’ as the increate creator… Anyone who stands in the soil of such faith… can only act ‘as if’…. but on the other hand that faith, if it does not remain constantly in the possibility of unfaith, 45

Ibid., 46-47. Ibid., 48-49. 47 Hermann Noack, “Conversation with Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), 65. 48 Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” 270-288. 46

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is no faith, but only a convenience and a set-up to hold fast to a commonly accepted doctrine. That is neither faith nor questioning, but an indifference which can busy itself with everything, perhaps with a great show of interest even with faith as in much the same way they do with questioning.49 Striving for God does not mean reaching Him. To take God seriously means to be called from out of the divine essence: It is possible, thinking crudely, to believe that Nietzsche’s word mastery over beings passes from God to man, or, even more crudely that, Nietzsche sets man in the place of God. Those who take it that way, however, are not thinking very divinely about the essence of the divinity. Man can never be set in God’s place because the essence of man never attains the essential realm of God. On the contrary, compared with that impossibility, something far eerier happens, the essence of which we have scarcely begun to reflect upon. The place which, metaphysically thought, is proper to God is the region of causal effectivity and the preservation of beings as created beings. This region for God can remain empty.50 The Catholic notion of faith and the fundamental presuppositions of Christianity embrace the theoretical formulations of the divine in a metaphysical conceptualization. The divine is not Being. This speculative appropriation of philosophy in theology endangers the experience of personal faith. In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger describes mortals as they save the earth, receive heaven as heaven, await the divinities as divinities and are capable of death as death. Heidegger’s divinity is a god of hope and anticipation: Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope, they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune, they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.51 Heidegger rejects the divinity of the Christian God, at least as He has been conceptualized in the history of metaphysics. “A divine god” cannot be the theoretical 49

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 5, quoted in Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 180-181. 50 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead,” in idem, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 190. GA5: 255. 51 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 150. GA7: 152. 243

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subject of metaphysics.52 “A divine god” is a god “beyond” the god of Christian philosophical theology. Is biblical theology, nurtured by the New Testament, a chance for theology to become a theology, i.e., an acknowledgment of the reality of God in His voluntary disposition toward the world and a religious experience of reality as such? Would a reflection based primarily on the act of faith satisfy a philosopher? Can theology be completely free of any metaphysical distortions? Heidegger demands “a more divine god,” a possibility for an encounter more genuine than a theological reflection: Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.53 The Necessity of Atheism in Philosophy In his 1922 “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” Heidegger clearly rejects the possibility of any synthesis of Christianity and philosophy. This position is understandable in the context of the early Heidegger’s antagonism regarding natural theology. Philosophy’s preoccupation with God stands in clear opposition to its own true vocation of questioning knowledge by following reason alone. Committed to research and not to generalities and worldviews, philosophy is a hermeneutics of facticity; its spontaneous self-interpretation of life cannot be theistic. Bernhard Welte, “Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers,” in Franz Pöggeler, ed., Innerlichkeit und Erziehung. In memoriam Gustav Siewerth. Zum Gespräch zwischen Pädagogik, Philosophie und Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1964), 177-192; “Gott im Denken Heideggers,” in idem, Zeit und Geheimnis. Philosophische Abhandlungen zur Sache Gottes in der Zeit der Welt (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1975), 258-280; idem, “Erinnerung an ein spätes Gespräch,” in Günther Neske, ed., Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 249-252; Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte. Zur Gottesfrage bei Hegel und Heidegger, ed. Alma von Stockhausen (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1971), 280-293; idem, “Martin Heidegger und die Gotteserkenntnis,” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte, 264–279. Stjepan Kušar, Dem göttlichen Gott entgegen denken. Der Weg von der metaphysischen zu einer nachmetaphysischen Sicht Gottes in der Religionsphilosophie Bernhard Weltes (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder), 2-5. See also Kwang Seop Shim, Der nachmetaphysische Gott: Überlegungen zur Problematik des Verhältnisses von Gott und Metaphysik in den Entwürfen von Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Weischedel und Bernhard Welte (Bielefeld: Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, 1990). 53 Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 72. See Bernhard Casper, “Der Gottesbegriff ens causa sui,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 76 (1968/69), 315-331; idem, “Martin Heidegger und die Theologische Fakultät Freiburg (1909-1923),” in Remigius Bäumer, Karl Suso Frank, and Hugo Ott, ed., Kirche am Oberrhein, Freiburger Diözesanarchiv, vol. 100 (Freiburg, 1980), 534-541. 52

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If in the first place philosophy is not an artificial occupation that merely accompanies life and deals with “universals” of one sort or another and arbitrarily posited principles but is, rather, a knowing that simply questions, as research, the explicit and genuine actualizing of the tendency toward interpretation that belongs to the basic movements of life in which what is at issue is this life itself and its being; and if, secondly, philosophy is set on bringing into view and conceptually grasping factical life in terms of the decisive possibilities of its being, i.e., if relying upon its own resources and not looking to the hustle and bustle of worldviews, it has radically and clearly resolved to throw factical life back on itself (as this is possible, in the factical life itself) and to let it fend for itself in terms of its own factical possibilities, that is, if philosophy is in principle atheistic and understands this about itself – then it has resolutely chosen factical life with a view to its facticity and, in acquiring it as an object for itself, it has preserved it in its facticity.54 In a footnote to the word “atheistic” we are given the following explanation, which clarifies that “atheism” is meant here, not as a personal belief system, but as a fundamental hermeneutic principle: “Atheistic” not in the sense of a theory such as materialism or the like. Any philosophy that understands itself in terms of what it is, that is, as the factical how of the interpretation of life, must know—and know it precisely if it also has an “intimation” of God—that this throwing of life back upon itself which gets actualized in philosophy is something that in religious terms amounts to raising one’s hand against God. But philosophy is thereby only being honest with itself and standing firm on this, that is, it is comporting itself in a manner that is fitting to the only possibility of standing before God that is available to it as such. And here, “atheistic” means: keeping itself free from the temptations of that kind of concern and apprehension that only talks glibly about religiosity. Could it be that the very idea of a philosophy of religion, and especially if it does not take into account the facticity of human being, is pure nonsense?55

Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle,” 121. See István M. Fehér, “Heidegger’s Understanding of the Atheism of Philosophy: Philosophy, Theology, and Religion in His Early Lecture Courses up to ‘Being and Time,’” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (1995): 189-228. According to Gadamer an understanding of Heidegger as an atheistic thinker can be based only on a superficial appropriation of his work. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die religiöse Dimension,” in idem Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987), 308-319. Gadamer emphasizes that not with the help of theology, but in renouncing theology and onto-theology Heidegger was seeking for the new language for the religious dimension. He found real support in Nietzsche and Hölderlin. See also Holger Helting, Heideggers Auslegung von Hölderlins Dichtung des Heiligen: ein Beitrag zur Grundlagenforschung der Daseinsanalyse (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999). 55 Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle,” 121, 193-194. 54

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Philosophy cannot seriously engage faith since faith cannot ask philosophical questions. According to Heidegger, the fundamental definitions of human being are dogmatically theological, and as such, they have to be excluded from a philosophical reflection on the human being, who has no natural experience of God. Therefore, faith as the disposition of a human being who already has his answers hinders radical philosophical inquiry. Pre-philosophical belief in a God disturbs the authenticity and radicality of thinking, abandoning factic life, which is philosophy’s proper datum. A philosophy of religion based on a theological presupposition is pure nonsense: factic life experience is non-theistic. “In the sense of a theory,” atheism is not a method but a substantive philosophical position. Genuine philosophical thinking is atheistic thinking: As long as phenomenology understands itself, it will adhere to this course of investigation against any sort of prophetism within philosophy and against any inclination to provide guidelines for life. Philosophical research is and remains atheism, which is why philosophy can allow itself ‘the arrogance of thinking.’ Not only will it allow itself as much; this arrogance is the inner necessity of philosophy and its true strength. Precisely in this atheism, philosophy becomes what a great man once called the ‘joyful science.’56 Philosophy, being concerned with the question of Being, is true thinking, whereas theology, though giving thought to faith, cannot be authentic thinking. In philosophical theology, the theological uncertainty implies a circular movement from the unknown to the known: God is the beginning and end of that circle: What we have said about security in faith as one position in regard to the truth does not imply that the biblical ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ is an answer to our question. Quite aside from whether these words from the Bible are true or false for faith, they can supply no answer to our question because they are in no way related to it. Indeed, they cannot even be brought into relation with our question. From the standpoint of faith our question is ‘foolishness.’ Philosophy is this very foolishness. A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square and a misunderstanding.57

56

57

Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 80. GA20: 109-110. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 6. GA40: 9. Cf. Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1999), 130-134. See also Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, ed., A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

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In the 1946 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger summarizes his philosophy of religion and gives us a hint of his personal religious convictions. Responding to Sartre’s atheistic appropriation of his phenomenology, Heidegger positions his Being and Time beyond the description of atheistic or theistic: The thinking that thinks from the question concerning the truth of Being questions more primordially than metaphysics can. Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. Or should we not first be able to hear and understand all these words carefully if we are to be permitted as men, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a relation of God to man? How can man at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is not lighted and in its lighting is near man. Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that is the sole malignancy [Unheil].58 Further, in the letter, Heidegger argues that a thinker can be neither theistic nor atheistic: But with this reference the thinking that points toward the truth of Being as what is to be thought has in no way decided in favor of theism. It can be theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude, but out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as such, indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought, by the truth of Being. Insofar as thinking limits itself to its task it directs man at the present moment of the world’s destiny into the primordial dimension of his historical abode. When thinking of this kind speaks the truth of Being it has entrusted itself to what is more essential than all values and all types of beings. Thinking does not overcome metaphysics by climbing still higher, surmounting it, transcending it somehow or other; thinking overcomes metaphysics by climbing back down into the nearness of the nearest.59

58

Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, GA9: 352; English, in idem, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 230. 59 Ibid., 230-231. GA9: 352. 247

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The thinker cannot call God by His name. With respect to God, thinking reaches its limits. With that, the question of God remains a question, yet the answer is clearly determined by the unpassable limit. The contemplation of the Holy is an essential prerequisite for Heidegger for elaborating the question of God and the relationship between the Holy, Being, and God. Heidegger’s question of God is situated in his seinsgeschichtliches thinking. The concept of the Holy is for Heidegger a central category for his phenomenology of religion. Heidegger’s a-theological philosophy is a philosophy that does not philosophize about faith. The negation of the possibility for Christian philosophy and a philosophical theology does not necessarily lead to atheism.60 The negation of a philosophical concept of God does not exclude the possibility of the existence of God. Heidegger’s critique does not question the possibility of a theology within the realm of Revelation and authentic religious experience within the Church. A philosopher is not concerned with personal faith; this is not his topic. Heidegger’s atheology is a careful way of preparing a space for a “divine God.” The possibility of a divine god beyond Christian reference can be thought only in the disclosure of Being. The divine god does not reveal himself as a revelation of the Revelation, of the God, who is ipsum esse per se subsistens: ex quo oportet quod totam perfectionem essendi in se contineat.61 The divine god discloses himself as the everpresent transcendence of Being and the diffusion of Ereignis. Heidegger’s silence of God is often interpreted as the best way to address the unspeakable God.62 One The variety of interpretations of Heidegger’s atheism would require a separate study. In his recent book, Hemming reads Heidegger’s pious atheism as a vibrant pedagogy. He fails to address other interpretations that include the Wirkungsgeschichte of the problem. See Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism. As an example, see Eberhard Jüngel, “Gott entsprechendes Schweigen? Theologie in der Nachbarschaft des Denkens von Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Fragen an sein Werk. Ein Symposion (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1977, 37-45. Jüngel summarizes Heidegger’s philosophical insight with a deep understanding of the problems regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology: “Dennoch führte die Verneinung der Möglichkeit christlicher Philosophie und philosophischer Theologie nicht in den Atheismus. Die Negation und Destruktion überlieferter Gottesgedanken ist etwas anderes als die Verneinung Gottes. Heidegger war viel zu nachdenklich und unmittelbar, viel zu reflektiert und naiv in einem, um mittelbar, viel zu reflektiert und naiv in einem, um je auf den törichten Gedanken zu verfallen, ‘einen Gott’—wie er zu sagen pflegte—negieren oder gar durch Denken destruieren zu können. Die Destruktion galt dem metaphysischen GottesGedanken.” 61 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a, q. 4, a. 2. 62 Cf. Hemming, Heidegger's Atheism, 290: “To say nothing, that God might speak. To say nothing, that no objects, no thing, nothing intervenes between God and me, God and the soul (understanding soul here in no supersensory, but an entirely immaterial, sense). Every entry into this silence collapses, into words, into the speaking, the babbling that being is. This silence is therefore one to which I must return again and again. What I describe are not techniques of saying something, or even nothing, of God, but a way, a path, which, Godgiven, is a being underway to God. To come to myself means I both discover my separation from God, and I become open to who the God is. To come to myself requires that I exceed 60

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of Heidegger’s Marburg students remembers Heidegger saying, “We honor theology by keeping silent about it” (Die Theologie ehren wir, indem wir von ihr schweigen).63 Silence on the topic of theology is what Heidegger meant by the methodological stricture that philosophy must be atheistic: Questioning is not religions but can lead to a situation of religious decision. In philosophizing, I am not religious, even though as a philosopher I may be a religious man. “The art lies in this,” philosophizing and, at the same time, remaining genuinely religious, that is, in philosophizing, factically taking up one’s worldly historical work in conduct and a concrete context of action, not in religious ideology and fantasy. In its radical self-directed questioning, philosophy must in principle be a-theistic. It cannot presume to have and to define God. More radically and determinately, philosophy is a way from God, and in its radical enactment of its “way,” a “being-near” God, with its own difficulties. Incidentally, philosophy is not on that account poorer in speculation; it has its own work to do.64 A methodologically atheistic philosophy does not refer to a personal conviction of an atheist philosopher. A philosopher can lead a Christian existence. He can legitimately talk about his faith; nevertheless, his philosophy has to be in principle atheistic. Being exposed to the theological context, he remains open for a religious experience which eludes philosophical formalization. A philosopher’s confrontation with theology and Christianity is not against faith and Christian life.65 Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s thesis “God is dead” as the preparation for a new arrival of the God Hölderlin speaks of. The last god has its most unique uniqueness and stands outside those calculating determinations meant by titles such as “mono-theism,” “pan-theism,” and “a-theism.” “Monotheism” and all types of “theism” exist only

myself: to come to myself means to seek union with God, to abandon the self I have become for the sake of what else I might divinely myself become. To come to my-self and seek union with God demands, at every step along the path, that I say nothing of God. This could be taken within Heidegger’s atheism: indeed, this would be a holy atheism.” Cf. Rainer Thurnher, “Bemerkungen zu Heideggers theologischer Abstinenz vor der ‘Kehre,’” in Coriando, ed., “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” 183-197. 63 Helmuth Vetter, “‘Die Theologie ehren wir, indem wir von ihr schweigen.’ Zur Seins- und Gottesfrage im Ausgang von Heideggers Vorlesung ‘Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie,’” in Eva Schmetterer, Roland Faber, and Nicole Mantler, ed., Variationen zur Schöpfung der Welt (Innsbruck: 1995), 65-80. 64 Martin Heidegger, GA61: 197. 65 See Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead,” 164. 249

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since Judeo-Christian “apologetics,” which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the death of this god, all theisms collapse. The multitude of gods cannot be quantified but rather is subjected to the inner richness of the grounds and abgrounds in the site for the moment of the shining and sheltering-concealing of the hint of the last god. The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history. For its sake history up to now should not terminate but rather must be brought to its end. We must bring about the transfiguration of its essential and basic positions in crossing and in preparedness. Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture of the truth of being, by virtue of which alone man succeeds in restoring beings.66 Deciding whether or not Heidegger’s analysis is to be deemed “atheistic” requires an elaboration of such texts. If it is decided that God is necessarily an all-powerful and ultimate entity, then the question of whether or not Heidegger’s thought is atheistic will have to ask whether that which is ultimate and single for Heidegger, namely, Being or the event, is an existent entity. If God need not be single, and if believing in the existence of God can mean believing in the existence of gods, the question might be asked whether the “gods” which the event sends can be said to “exist,” and in what way. This means asking about the way in which these gods are. In case both of these questions are answered in the negative, which I believe they must be unless the terms existence and entity are being used in an extraordinary way, then the conclusion that Heidegger’s thought is atheistic follows if and only if it is decided that “atheism” is equivalent to “not believing in the existence of an omnipotent entity called God,” so that a sense of the holy as the overpowering which does not lead to belief in the existence of an omnipotent entity in any ordinary sense amounts to atheism.67 Martin Heidegger, “The Last God,” GA65: 409-417, in idem, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emand and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999, 289. See also Robert S. Gall Beyond Theism and Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 70; Günter Figal, “Philosophie als hermeneutische Theologie. Letzte Götter bei Nietzsche und Heidegger,” in Hans-Helmuth Gander, ed., “Verwechselt mich vor Allem nicht!” Heidegger und Nietzsche (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 89-107; Otto Pöggeler, Schritte zu einer hermeneutischen Philosophie (Freiburg i.Br.: Karl Alber, 1994); Paola-Ludovica Coriando, “Zur Ermittlung des Übergangs. Der Wesungsort des ‘letzten Gottes’ im seinsgeschichtlichen Denken,” in idem, ed., “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft,” 101-116, idem, Der letzte Gott als Anfang: Zur abgründigen Zeit-Räumlichkeit des Übergangs in Heideggers “Beiträgen zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)” (München: Fink, 1998); Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Der letzte Gott,” in idem, Die Lektion des Jahrhunderts: ein Interview von Riccardo Dottori (Münster: LIT, 2001). 67 Cf. Sonya Sikka, Forms of Transcendence. Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997), 269. 66

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How are we to balance this sense of atheism with an early letter to Karl Löwith, in which Heidegger describes himself as “a Christian theologian?”68 Gadamer interprets this statement as an authentic attempt to tackle the true call of theology: “to find a word, which can call to faith and preserve in faith.”69 Such a personal vocation is the highest challenge for a thinker. The Holy as the Object of Poetry Shall I name the High Once then? No god loves what is unseemly; To grasp him, our joy is scarcely large enough. Often we must keep silence; holy names are lacking, Hearts beat and yet does speech still hold back?70 For Heidegger, the Holy emerges in poetic language. In the conversation with poetry, the Holy discloses itself to thinking. The relationship between thinking and poetry is particularly emphasized in Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlins’ poetry. In the postscript to his inaugural lecture at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität at Freiburg What is Metaphysics? published in 1943, Heidegger writes: The thinker says being. The poet names the holy. And yet the manner in which—thought from out of the essence of being—poetizing, thanking, and thinking are directed toward one another and are at this same time different, must be left open here. Presumably thanking and poetizing each in their own way spring from originary thinking, which they need, without themselves being able to be a thinking.71

In the letter to Karl Löwith, August 19, 1921, Heidegger writes: “I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live… To this facticity of mine belongs what I would in brief call the fact that I am a ‘Christian theologian.’ This involves a particular radical personal concern, a particular radical scientificity, a strict objectivity in the facticity; in it is to be found the historical consciousness, the consciousness of ‘intellectual and cultural history.’ And I am all this in the life-context of the university.” Cited in Kisiel, Genesis of Being and Time, 78. See also Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Apology: Biography as Philosophy and Ideology,” in idem, Heidegger’s Way of Thought, ed. Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz (New York: Continuum, 2002), 1-35. 69 Cf. Gadamer, “Die religiöse Dimension,” 315. 70 Friedrich Hölderlin, Heimkunft, as quoted in Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” trans. Douglas Scott, in idem, Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), 241. 71 Martin Heidegger, “Postscript to What is Metaphysics?” in idem, Pathmarks, 237. GA9: 312. 68

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In his 1946 essay “Why Poets?” Heidegger grapples with the question of the Holy in Hölderlin’s elegy “Brot und Wein.” “… and what is the use of poets in an impoverished age?” An impoverished age is for Hölderlin the night of the world determined by the absence of God. If God has withdrawn Himself from the world, the poet attempts “to grasp the Father’s lightning-flash/And to pass on, wrapped in song/The divine gift to the people.” (Hölderlin) “Dwelling poetically on the earth” is the universal vocation of every human being. Our duty is to “name the Holy, thus creating space for God’s return: It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is coming. It is the time of need because it lies under a double Not: The No-more of the gods that have fled and Not-yet of the god that is coming.72 Heidegger’s statements on God, the Holy, and the relationship between philosophy and theology are multilayered, disparate, and subject to important changes in the course of the development of his philosophy. The later Heidegger no longer addresses the question by thematizing the relationship of faith and knowledge but by turning to the Holy and the flight of the gods. The now-famous statement, which is also used as the title of Heidegger’s 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God Can Save Us” (published some ten years later) addresses a “god,” who is yet to be revealed. We are here in the vicinity of Hölderlin. Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing, we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or the absence of the god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.73 We need a footpath, some kind of directional inspiration. Heidegger’s last remark in this interview was, “For us today, the greatness of what is to be thought is [all] too great. Perhaps the best we can do is strive to break a passage through it – along the narrow paths that do not stretch too far.”74

Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” trans. Douglas Scott, in idem, Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), 289. 73 Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us.’ The Spiegel Interview,” in Sheehan, ed., Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker, 57. 74 Ibid., 65. 72

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Between Homelessness and Home-Coming [Heimholung] Overcoming metaphysics means opening up new avenues to a deeper nearness to Being. A human being experiences the alienation from Being and is on a constant search for Being. Throughout the history of Being’s concealment and disclosure, a human being is on the path away from home. Calculative thinking is a mode of being in the realm of homelessness in a world devoid of God. Heidegger understands the human being as being essentially underway, on a journey home, in search of the essence of dwelling. Homesickness that is never satisfied is part of our essence. Heidegger echoes the question addressed by Novalis: “Where are we going?” For Novalis philosophy is homesickness, the wish to establish one’s home in the Absolute. We are always going home, but we cannot deceive ourselves that we have finally arrived. Homesickness is the absolute determination of philosophy. In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger describes homelessness as the symptom of the oblivion of Being. Homecoming means rediscovering our essence in our primordial relationship to Being: The homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to Being. In such nearness, if at all, a decision may be made as to whether and how God and the gods withhold their presence and the night remains, whether and how the day of the holy dawns, whether and how in the upsurgence of the holy an epiphany of God and the gods can begin anew. But the holy, which alone is the essential sphere of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when Being itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has been illuminated and is experienced in its truth. Only thus does the overcoming of homelessness begin from Being, a homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man stumbles aimlessly about. Homelessness so understood consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being. Because of it, the truth of Being remains unthought. The oblivion of Being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that man always observes and handles only beings. Even so, because man cannot avoid having some notion of Being, it is explained merely as what is “most general” and therefore as something that encompasses beings, or as a creation of the infinite being, or as the product of a finite subject. At the same time “Being” has long stood for “beings” and, inversely, the latter for the former, the two of them caught in a curious and still unraveled confusion. As the destiny that sends truth, Being remains concealed.75

75

Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 218-219. 253

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Only as true “shepherds of Being” do we reduce our distance to Being, thus restoring our essence and our dignity. Homelessness is for Heidegger the condition of a human being painfully exposed to the Wirkungsgeschichte of the forgetfulness of Being. Homelessness is a call to the dwelling. Heidegger’s purpose, as a thinker rather than a philosopher, is to overcome metaphysics itself, because it failed in the history of its forgetfulness of Being to address Being and questioned only the beings in the world. Heidegger replaces the traditional philosophical discourse with a poetic meditation on Being, the ultimate ground of all beings. Topos Poietikos Paths, Paths of thought, going by themselves, vanishing. When they turn again, what do they show us? Paths, going by themselves, formerly open, suddenly closed, later on. Once pointing out the way, never attained, destined to renunciation— slackening the pace from out of the harmony of trustworthy fate. And again the need for a lingering darkness within the waiting light.76 In this poem written in 1971, Heidegger meditates on the paths of thought, which manifest themselves in the poetic. Poetic thinking uses the metaphoric path: the path of responding that examines as it listens. Responding is always risky, but the mere fear of going astray cannot stop us from practicing our responsibility.77 The path to Being is the path to ἀλήθεια, unconcealment. Poetry allows truth to happen.78 “The lingering darkness” is the existential context of the lyrical subject,

Martin Heidegger, “Poem Written in 1971,” trans. Keith Hoeller) in Philosophy Today (21): 287. 77 See Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet” in idem Poetry, Language, Thought, 1-14. 78 See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, 17-87, GA5: 1-74. See Graeme A. Nicholson, “Experience of Truth in Heidegger and Gadamer,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, 81-87. Hans-Georg Gadamer devotes Part One of his Truth and Method to the significance of the aesthetic experience in revealing truth. See “The question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1-169. 76

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who is waiting for the light. This darkness can be perceived as the absence of God, who is light. (1 Jn 1: 5)79 The lyric subject can only listen to this self-revealing and disclosing path. In its attentiveness, it can recognize the nature of its true vocation: to think what calls for thinking. In the inter-play between listening and responding, the essence of a human being in its relationship to Being is disclosed. The voice of conscience, the call (Ruf), “has the character of an appeal (Anruf) to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self.”80 This call, which is a mode of discourse, breaks through the noise of the inauthentic self’s chatter and recalls Dasein to the self whose voice Dasein has failed to hear because of its “listening away” to the they (das Man). “That which, by calling in this manner, gives us to understand, is the conscience.”81 Heidegger’s reverence for “the Holy” determines his religious duty: clearing “the clearing of Being.” In his poetic meditation, Heidegger overcomes the traditional sense of homelessness as a lost relationship with God. He admits: I came out of theology, and that I harbor an old love for it and that I have a certain understanding of it. If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word “being” would not be allowed to occur in it.82 Heidegger never pursued writing a theology, yet he remained interested in the idea of divinity.83 Particularly in an apophatic style in his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger calls God neither a Being nor a non-Being, but a unique and indescribable divinity who needs Being in order to be God. In the language of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Böhme, Heidegger postulates emptying human hearts and minds and waiting to be filled with a God understood as an ecstatic event.84 79

Cf. Jn 1: 1-5, 3: 17-21; 1 Jn 1: 1-10. SZ: 269. 81 Ibid., 315-316. Heidegger analyses here the existential-ontological foundations of conscience. 82 Cited in Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism, 292. 83 John Caputo has consistently argued that while we must respect Heidegger’s claim that he is not writing an onto-theology, we must nevertheless demythologize Heidegger. See John Caputo, “People of God, People of Being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heidegger’s Path of Thought,” in James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall, ed., Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85-100. 84 According to Heidegger’s biographer, Safranski, Contributions to Philosophy were written during the late 1930s when he became disillusioned with the Nazi Party. Heidegger asked his brother to publish it only after his death. Creating a new kind of language to address the relationship between the human and the divine, Heidegger let himself be inspired by poetry, believing that poets know more about Being than philosophers. Nevertheless, Heidegger was afraid that his critics would dismiss the book as pure mythology. For the elaboration of similarities and differences in addressing the question of God by Eckhart and Heidegger see 80

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Heidegger’s thinking of God does not fit into the traditional discourse of the confessional Christian faith nor the Western tradition of metaphysical speculation. While theology and philosophy belong to different domains with distinctively different kinds of discourse, Heidegger preserves the possibility of thinking religion, which thinks meditatively rather than calculatively. The religion thought by thinking is a religion determined by the radically indeterminate and undeterminable. Metaphysics has ended since it has exhausted its possibilities. Heidegger’s post metaphysical thinking was concerned with opening the question of Being, thus making room for the “divine god.” By appropriating the language of negative and mystical theology, Heidegger deconstructs the onto-theological tradition and initiates a theology that is still to come.85 Heidegger surprised many of his followers and critics when near the end of his life he confessed that he had never left the Church, despite the widespread conviction that he became Protestant or even an atheist.86 On May 28, 1976, Heidegger was buried in his native Messkirch with a Christian burial. Heidegger’s early mentor and promoter, the Freiburg Archbishop Conrad Gröber had never failed to hope that the promising motto of his pupil, “origins always lie before us,” would one day come to fulfillment. However, Heidegger’s question about the relationship between faith and thinking remained the old crux. There is no cross on Heidegger’s gravestone, rather a star. The message: that the goal is still before us, we are to move toward the star. However true it is that the origin is our future, it is quite clear that Heidegger never intended to make a future arrival his final goal.87

Holger Helting, Heidegger und Meister Eckhart: Vorbereitende Überlegungen zu ihrem Gottesdenken (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), particularly 66-78. 85 See Franco Volpi, “Itinerarium mentis in nihilum. Heidegger e l’ascesi del pensiero,” in Marco Olivetti, ed., La recezione italiana di Heidegger (Padova: Cedam, 1989), 239-264. 86 “Ich bin niemals aus der Kirche getreten.” Heidegger, quoted in Sheehan, “Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times,” Cambridge Heidegger, 72. 87 Bernhard Welte, “Seeking and Finding: The Speech at Heidegger's Burial,” in Sheehan, ed., Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker, 74-75. A few days before his death, Heidegger composed a motto for his collected edition: “Ways, not works.” He chose “collected edition” over “collected works” (Gesamtausgabe versus Gesammelte Werke) explaining: “The collected edition should indicate various ways: it is underway in the field of paths of the selftransforming asking of the many-sided question of Being… The point is to awaken the confrontation about the question concerning the topic of thinking… and not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless.” Heidegger, Frühe Schriften: 1912-16, GA1: 437-438. 256

2. 3. 2. Infinity and the Challenge of Heideggerian Thinking: Bernhard Welte and the Question of God One of the major concerns in Bernhard Welte’s philosophical search for God was his critique of positivistic thinking, which eliminates the question of God as superfluous for the scientific understanding of reality and his critique of philosophical thinking developed by linguistic philosophy since the word “God” brings with itself a strong suspicion of senselessness. For Klaus Hemmerle, Welte’s approach was the most significant contribution of the twentieth century on the crossfield philosophy and theology. It was Hemmerle, who inspired by Welte came up with a very eloquent formula, “faith is a friend of thinking.”1 The “Heideggerian” Philosopher of Religion from Freiburg, Bernhard Welte (1906-1983), who profoundly reflected on the intersection of Christian faith with contemporary culture is virtually unknown to English-speaking scholars. One of the main reasons for this neglect is the lack of English translations of Welte’s oeuvre.2 Born in Messkirch, Welte was a student of Heidegger’s in Freiburg and was ordained in 1929. From 1956 till his retirement, Welte was a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Freiburg. Welte’s Collected Writings have only recently appeared in German.3 Crucial contributions of Welte’s intense discourse on the question of God and religion are now presented in the volume On

Klaus Hemmerle, “Glaube ist dem Denken Freund,” Christ in der Gegenwart 33 (1981): 109110. 2 See Bernhard Welte, “Seeking and Finding: The Speech at Heidegger’s Burial,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 12 (1977): 106-109, reprinted in Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago: Precedent, 1981): 7375. See also Bernhard Welte, “God in Heidegger’s Thought,” trans. William J. Kramer, Philosophy Today 26, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 85-100. This publication consists of two pages of Welte’s introduction to the topics, and a translation of his paper “Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers,” in Franz Pöggeler, ed., Innerlichkeit und Erziehung: In memoriam Gustav Siewerth. Zum Gespräch zwischen Pädagogik, Philosophie und Theologie (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1964), 177-192. This essay has been later reprinted in Bernhard Welte, Auf der Spur des Ewigen (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1965), 262-276. See also Bernhard Welte, “Der Übermensch Nietzsche und seine zweideutige Fragwürdigkeit,” Concilium 17 (1981): 397-401; English, “The Ambiguity of Nietzsche’s Superman.” trans. John Cumming, in Claude Geffre and Jean-Pierre Jossua, ed., Nietzsche and Christianity, A Special Edition of Concilium 145 (1981) (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), 53-57. See further Anthony Godzieba, Bernhard Welte’s Fundamental Theological Approach to Christology (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). 3 Bernhard Welte Gesammelte Schriften im Auftrag der Bernhard-Welte Gesellschaft und in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Arbeitsbereich Christliche Religionsphilosophie der Theologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg herausgegeben von Bernhard Casper (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2006-2010). 1

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the Question of God.4 Welte’s reflection on the question of God can be presented as a set of attempts to address the pressing question of our time with the seriousness and sincerity it deserves. Holger Zaborowski, the editor of volume III/3 of Welte’s Collected Writing, On the Question of God, speaks of the careful movements of thinking (vorsichtige Denkbewegungen)5 to encourage people to personally meditate on the question of God and one’s own faith commitment while critically engaging one’s own experience of God. For Welte, who has been called “attorney of the Holy” (Anwalt des Heiligen), even in a godless time, the presence of God can be sensed everywhere. As a phenomenologist of religion, Welte inspires his readers to think with him about God’s epiphany in the world and seriously seek God’s presence in his creation.6 It is an invitation to “see” God in the world, and maybe, even more, to let God “be seen” in his creation. Following Heidegger’s commitment to the basic ideal of phenomenology of letting things show themselves, Welte requires an understanding of God and Being as a condition of the possibility of Dasein. The historicity of Dasein und the lingual character of human thinking are Welte’s focal point in his hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to religion.7 Welte elaborates a post-metaphysical philosophical theology as the result of a confrontation of Jaspers and Heidegger within the Neoscholastic tradition that was the dominant theological tradition in the first half of the twentieth century. Welte’s conduct from metaphysical to non-metaphysical philosophy of religion can be seen, in fact, as shifting his accents from Jaspers to Heidegger.8 Heidegger’s philosophy was for Welte paradigmatic for a new attempt at convincingly and credibly (glaubhaft) proclaiming the Christian faith to a contemporary human being. One of the main concerns was, for Welte, to express the permanent legitimacy of the Christian message in the language of the contemporary believer. Welte situates the human being within the horizon of transcendence. Therefore, the human search for God means also a quest for self-understanding. The horizon of faith is the locus theologicus, where, while experiencing God in the act of faith, a human being reaches to the depth of one’s very existence. Thinking in the proximity of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, Welte interprets the final character 4

Bernhard Welte, Zur Frage nach Gott, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III/3, introd. and ed. Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2008). 5 Holger Zaborowski, “Einführung,” in Welte, Zur Frage nach Gott, 7. 6 See Jörg Splett, “Ein Phänomenologe des Heiligen: Bernhard Welte (1906-1983),” Theologie und Philosophie 81 (2005): 241-246. 7 Giovanni Molinari, Die Religionsphilosophie Bernhard Weltes: Ein Denken im Spannungsfeld zwischen Phänomenologie und der Lehre von Gott (Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1987). See also Hubert Lenz, Mut zum Nichts als Weg zu Gott (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1989). 8 See Bernhard Welte, Der philosophische Glaube bei Karl Jaspers und die Möglichkeit seiner Deutung durch die thomistische Philosophie (Freiburg i. Br.: Alber, 1949). See also Ingeborg Feige, Geschichtlichkeit: Zu Bernhard Weltes Phänomenologie des Geschichtlichen auf der Grundlage unveröffentlichter Vorlesungen (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1989). 258

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of human consciousness not as a negative barrier, but rather as a positive determination of the human condition. Welte thinks the nature of the Holy in the light of the nature of God.9 Thinking of the nature of the Holy is the condition of God’s self-disclosure. Therefore, only in the realm of this unconcealing of God’s selfmanifestation can we attempt to understand the meaning of the word “God.” With a clear reference to Heidegger, Welte interprets the Holy not as God but rather God’s foreclosed depth, “eigene noch verschlossene Tiefe.” The original source of Welte’s philosophy of religion was the metaphysical concept of God, elaborated in his discussion on Aquinas’s substantia in difference to Jaspers’s transcendentia. Addressing the question of God from the metaphysical perspective of the thinking of Being, Welte identifies Being itself (das Sein selbst, ipsum esse) with God. In a further confrontation with Heidegger, Welte problematizes the possibility of understanding God.10 In response to the Heideggerian clearance of Being (Lichtung des Seins) and this revelatory disclosure of Being, Welte situates human thinking in the proximity of the Holy. Welte calls this primordial thinking of Being and the meaning of Being recollection (Andacht). Everything which exists needs to reverse the Holy as the most unapproachable omnipresence of the inevitable.11 Welte was one of the important interlocutors in Heidegger’s last years before his death on May 26, 1976. It was Welte, who on Heidegger’s explicit request 9

See Elke Kirsten, Heilige Lebendigkeit: Zur Bedeutung des Heiligen bei Bernhard Welte (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1998). See also further Stefan Raueiser, Schweigemuster: Über die Rede vom heiligen Schweigen. Eine Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Odo Casel, Gustav Mensching, Rudolf Otto, Karl Rahner, Wilhelm Weischedel und Bernhard Welte (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1996). 10 Bernhard Welte, “Der philosophische Gottesbeweis und die Phänomenologie der Religion,” in Studi Filosofici intorno all’esistenza, al mondo, al trascendente (Rome: Aedes Universitatis Gregorianae, 1954), 283-304, reprinted in Welte, Auf der Spur des Ewigen, 315-336, and finally in Kleinere Schriften zur Philosophie der Religion, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. III/2, introd. and ed. Markus Enders (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2008), 17-39. 11 “The thinking that thinks from the question concerning the truth of Being questions more primordially than metaphysics can. Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word God is to signify. Or should we not first be able to hear and understand all these words carefully if we are to be permitted as men, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a relation of God to man? How can man at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is not lighted and in its lighting is near man. Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that is the sole malignancy [Unheil].” Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, GA9 (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004); English: Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 352. 259

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at their last meeting on January 14, 1976, spoke at his grave, and, at least indirectly problematized the latter’s break with Catholicism. The Welte-Heidegger correspondence (1945 to 1976) is marked by a student-professor relationship, despite the relatively small age difference, and by being compatriots from Messkirch. In fact, one of the first letters from Heidegger is a letter of condolence after the death of Welte’s mother who happened to be a friend to Heidegger’s mother. Being strongly influenced by Heidegger, Welte introduced his thinking to theology in place of the then-dominant Neo-scholastic theology. Welte’s last seminar at the University of Freiburg in 1973 was dedicated to Heidegger’s thinking as a homage to the philosopher, whose presence permeated Welte’s whole academic career. Being critical of contemporary philosophy, Welte praises Heidegger for his keen and careful way of thinking (ein waches und sorgfältiges Mitdenken) and must have been particularly content to hear, in turn, Heidegger’s friendly comment that Welte’s “careful and cautious thinking alongside is as enjoyable as rare” (Ihr sorgfältiges vorsichtiges Mitdenken ist so erfreulich wie selten). Apart from the evident politeness, Heidegger usually did not engage Welte’s interpretations. One of the few exceptions is his critical remarks regarding the possibility of understanding Aquinas’s ipsum esse in the horizon of Heidegger’s question of Being, which can be rather beneficially related to Meister Eckhart’s understanding of Being. In the philosophical-historical recourse on Meister Eckhart, Welte situates his own philosophical theology in the proximity of the divine God (dem göttlicheren Gott entgegenzudenken).12 In his evident endorsement of Heidegger, Welte interprets his philosophy neither as nihilistic, nor atheistic, but rather sets a possible connection to Aquinas and Meister Eckhard. By addressing the human condition, the homelessness, and the historicity of the human existence, Welte demonstrates that the question of God and Non-Being are constantly present in Heidegger’s thinking and determine his path of thinking. In fact, Welte proclaims Heidegger as a prophet of the vicinity of God (Prophet der Nähe Gottes). Bernhard Casper suggests, in the introduction to Briefe und Begegnungen, that Welte may be one of the key sources for

12

See Stjepan Kušar, Dem göttlichen Gott entgegen denken. Der Weg von der metaphysischen zu einer nachmetaphysischen Sicht Gottes in der Religionsphilosophie Bernhard Weltes (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder), 2-5. See further also Kwang Seop Shim, Der nachmetaphysische Gott: Überlegungen zur Problematik des Verhältnisses von Gott und Metaphysik in den Entwürfen von Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Weischedel und Bernhard Welte (Bielefeld: Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, 1990). Here Welte follows Heidegger unconditionally: “The godless thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.” Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Günther Neske), 1957; English: Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker (New York: Philosophical Library Inc, 1960), 72.

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understanding the religious implications of Heidegger’s philosophy in the future.13 Welte reads Heidegger piously as a religious seeker, albeit understanding his critique of theology as inseparable from the whole tradition of Western ontology. Reading theology as the intra-theological departure from its existential origins in the New Testament, Heidegger contributes to the necessity of reassessment of theology freed from its metaphysical distortions. Since the God of theology is nothing more than Leibniz’s causa prima, Heidegger feels compelled to reject the divinity of the Christian God. In his profound debate with Heidegger, Welte realizes that the question of God can be adequately addressed in an existential symbiosis of homo religiosus and homo philosophicus. However, the problem remains, if God can reveal himself regardless of the self-manifestation of Being. Here we only touch upon the notion of the ontological difference, which seems to be a common horizon for Welte and Heidegger toward the understanding of Being and thinking God. Delimitating the indeterminable God and drawing upon Heidegger’s phenomenological Destruktion, Welte thinks God outside the ontological difference and outside the very question of Being. The post-Christian self-acclaimed prophets declare formally the overwhelming success of processio from the immaturity of faith vis-a-vis the selfconsciousness of unbelief. There is a striking similarity between the recent arguments against God and religion and the nineteenth-century critics of religion. Max, Nietzsche, and Freud, three “masters of suspicion” along with Feuerbach, serve as a corrective to any kind of mediation of Christian faith. The fact that talk of the death of God or at least human doubts about God’s existence are far louder than the personal testimonies of the real experience of God cannot still be a valid argument for proclaiming the question of God as irrelevant for the contemporary human being. The question of God plays an essential role in Welte’s thematization of the human experience of God (Erfahrung Gottes). What we learn from Welte’s philosophical and theological engagement with the phenomenon of faith and its meaning for the contemporary society, is to see the present lack of experience of God (Nicht-Erfahrung Gottes) as a valid human experience, which needs to be taken seriously and be reflected upon. Welte addresses infinity’s questioning of thinking (Infragestellung des Denkens durch das Unendliche) and inspires us to essentially question the certainty of faith (Gewissheit des Glaubens). For him, the transmitted 13

Martin Heidegger-Bernhard Welte, Briefe und Begegnungen, with an introd. by Bernhard Casper, ed. Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003). According to Casper, Welte has clearly recognized that Heidegger’s thinking was not atheistic in the sense of an absolute denial of any religious dimension. It was rather a quest for “the divine God,” a god beyond the god of the Christian tradition as the dominant paradigm of Western metaphysical thinking. For a more critical reading of Welte’s interpretation of Heidegger’s search for “the divine god” see Wierciński, “Martin Heideggers ‘göttlicher Gott’ bei Bernhard Welte und Gustav Siewerth.” 525-541. 261

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certainty of faith (überlieferte Gewissheit) cannot be unreflectively taken over. The faith (der religiöse Glaube) is a free and completely self-involving decision to commit oneself to God. The unambiguous characteristic of the religious enactment (religiöser Vollzug) is an active involvement in and a total commitment to an all-embracing reality of the divine mystery (Sicheinlassen auf and Sichüberlassen an das göttliche Geheimnis). In his excessive treatment of atheism, Welte stresses that the negation of the existence of God is definitely not the last expression of human thinking, which represents intellectual integrity (intellektuelle Redlichkeit—intégrité intellectuelle) and epistemological humility before the mystery of God. On the contrary, even though the atheistic critique of God and religion needs to be taken seriously, we do not need to bow out of the persuasive rhetorical nature of its arguments. Tradition is, for Welte, an epochal conversation (ein epochales Gespräch). If there is the last word, it is the word of God’s encouraging assurance and declaration of his liberating permanent presence in the world (ein Wort des Zu-Spruchs Gottes). The Possibility of the Philosophical Knowledge of God Moving beyond the biblical argument that God’s existence is, in fact, self-evident because of creation, it became necessary in a dialogue, especially in the confrontation with the rationalistic philosophical questioning of Peter Abelard and the inquisitive spirit of Muslim scholarship, to address particular philosophical definitions of God. Augustine’s theology still safeguarded the transcendence of God as Creator, while the development of philosophical theology subsequently leads to placing divine revelation and human reason on an equal footing. Traditionally we speak of two ways to God: a personal faith (der Glaube an die göttliche Offenbarung) and reason (Vernunftweg, which is called by Welte the philosophical faith, der philosophische Glaube). The rational justification for faith is maybe one of the most speculative tasks the human reason can get engaged in. For Welte, God is, in a philosophical sense, a “meaning postulate” (Sinnpostulat). The traditional proofs for the existence of God are still needed despite the apparent disregard for the validity of the historic attempts of addressing the question of God within the history of human thinking. What seems common to all human life of all times is the necessity of living one’s own life and to find, beyond the fulfillment of essential practical obligations, the way to giving to life the meaning it deserves. The experience of giving meaning to one’s life is accompanied by a sense of the contingency of our life. The knowledge about our non-existence thereby projects into the very experience of life. A human being is embraced by Non-Being (das Nichts). Welte speaks of the clasping together of existence and Non-Being (Verklammerung von Existenz—Dasein und Nichts— Nicht-Dasein). 262

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With reference to the experience of death, Welte entertains two possibilities. Since in death, all existence flows into Nothingness, we could assume that death revokes the meaning of human Dasein. However, Welte considers also the other opportunity. It is not impossible to think that behind that which we regard as Nothingness (Nichts) there is, in fact, the final ground of meaning, as concealed for us in our status viatoris. This second alternative opens up a possibility for a universal horizon of meaning (universaler Sinnhorizont). For Welte, the experience of Non-Being (die Erfahrung des Nichts) has the potential for sending light into our human life, the light of Non-Being (das Licht des Nichts), which makes a meaningful life (Sinnerfahrung) of our personal history. The experience of meaning in our life is rooted in the experience of being carried by the invisible power that is nevertheless unmistakably felt by us, and which we call God. The longing for God can lead our human life to a powerful experience of God (wahrhaft göttliche Erfahrung Gottes), a true and sense-giving light from above. Welte speaks of the reasonable hope (vernünftige Hoffnung) with which we can relate our lives to God. One of the essential traits of Welte’s philosophy of religion is his thematization of Non-Being (Nichts), which is a simple fact of life. We find ourselves in the world as beings-in-the-world, without at first noticing at our prior nonexistence. Our present being proceeds from the previous Non-Being. However, there is a fundamental relationship between Non-Being (Nichts) and our present Dasein. Both are unmistakably identified as our personal experience of ‘non-being and existing.’ The Non-Being (Nichts) is the ground from which everything which exists originates. For Welte, this Non-Being is not a pure idea, but, in fact, it has the “negative face” of God. This “negative face” is, for Welte, synonymous with the personal face of God, who enters into a salvific dialogue with a human being and makes this dialogue into a unique mysterium salutis. God is the ultimately unfathomable answer to the question of Being and the relationship between Being and human Dasein. In what we call “the proof of the proofs,” the contested ontological argument, the striking point is that there is a connection between metaphysics and phenomenology. Welte questions the meaning of the proofs. It is indisputable that the proofs are not the beginning of religion (der Anfang von Religion). However, they might be rightly considered as a mode of thinking of this beginning (das Denken dieses Anfangs). With a careful rereading of Aquinas, Welte confirms that the quinquae via were truly a meditative path of thinking, a way of recollection toward that which is in itself impossible to be intellectually grasped (das Unausdenkliche) and expressed (das Unaussagbare). Welte proceeds from Husserl’s demand that for every science, the noematic content of its fundamental ideas (der noematische Gehalt ihrer Grundbegriffe) must be clarified by deriving the

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fundamental eidetic ideas (grundlegende eidetischen Gehalte) from their primordial ground. This command of Husserl’s is binding also for the science of religion and, in particular, for Christian theology. For Welte, the proofs for the existence of God are the exact metaphysical articulations of the original mental procedure. The phenomenal essence of thinking is primordially and profoundly religious. Speaking of the philosophical proof, from our experience of God, we use the word “experience” and the expression “the experience of God” in a phenomenological sense. If a human being can only experience that which is in the world (das Innerweltliche), and experience and faith are interconnected (as Welte postulates), and not opposed, the recollecting human spirit can reach the Holy in its absolute withdrawal and its committed selfmanifestation. And exactly this experience of Being, when confronted with the Holy, is an appeal to freedom. This call to consent to the presence of the Holy motivates the free human spirit to an acceptance of God in his personal self-manifestation (das freie Ja). The noetic element (die Noëse) of this experience is the recognition of the divine presence which leads to a personal acknowledgment of the completely inexpressible personal “You.” The phenomenal character of this event allows not only for the ontological experience of God as God, but for a personal experience of God as my God (Deus meus). In our being-in-the-world, we realize that we are beings who ask questions and are worthy of asking questions. We are moving ourselves onto the path of questioning (Gang des Denkens) toward the answer, which unveils itself in the course of our being-in-the-world. Usually what provokes us to ask those questions, are the particular issues concerned with the different aspects of our beingin-the-world, and everything which confronts us in our existence. The questions can be answered at first fairly easily and every answer inspires us to ask further questions. This dynamic of question and answer elucidates the subject of our inquiry and satisfies our thinking. The question-answer dynamic makes further questions possible. In fact, it compels further questions. Every answer is the beginning of new questions. Thus, the deeper meaning of what has been asked in those questions has been revealed and yet, at the same time, the real meaning of what we are asking is concealed, and what we are trying to approach recedes from our grasp. In this sense, our interrogatory thinking experiences present an even more urgent need to see further within the horizon of revealing and concealing (Entbergung and Verbergung). The world and the elements in the world confront us as being (als seiend) in their being-Being (seiend-sein). In all that which confronts us, the word “God” is still not present. At the level of pure positivity and immediacy, we cannot but realize that things are. This is sense certainty. Things are as they appear to us as beings, i.e., as simple, present, and real things. The task of phenomenology is to show that even with this simple sense certainty, there is implicitly a progressive history of consciousness, which is to say, a phenomenology of the spirit. 264

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As beings, we experience a certain inquietude (inquietas-Unruhe) which urges us into motion. Seen from the perspective of a subject who is questioning, it is a motion of inquiring (Bewegung des Fragens). I am not only a subject who is inquiring about things around me and things that confront me. Those things face me the way they are, i.e., as beings. This means that they are requesting my answer (re-spondeo) in the form of accepting them as beings in their being-Being. Therefore, they are putting me in the position of being distinct from what I view.14 In sense certainty, I am both experiencing my self and not my self, i.e., my separation from the world. At that stage, we are only aware of our selves and things that are. Through seeing things and our selves we realize that we are not the things we see, i.e., that there is a difference. This means that we already are using negativity as a transcendental category of our understanding. At this stage also, we can realize that what we perceive is not only pure presence (things are what they are, i.e., a coffee cup is a coffee cup), but they are not something else (a coffee cup is not a wall). Each one of the properties is different from the spectrum of possible differences (i.e., a coffee cup is firm, not soft, cylindrical not spherical, etc). Each of those spectra is also different from all others (i.e., cylindricality is not temperature, and temperature is not color, etc). Hegel calls these spectra “indifferently related to each other,” i.e., their shape does not effect their color, etc. The negative and the positive view of the objects seem to contradict each other. How could the object be both, i.e., self-identical and existing, only as difference. Dialectically speaking, we can see something as self-identical because of the difference it has to something else and can see something as different to something else because we know of existing things that are purely themselves. The resolution of the contradiction opens up the possibility of thinking of things which, while being themselves are also and necessarily in opposition to, and contradiction with, other things. Things are different from each other because of their position in the system of differences. Things are what they are and not the other things. Something only is when it is different from other things in the system. To this point, the difference is based on pure negativity, i.e., the difference from other things, and, not being indistinguishable from each other. From the perspective of our being-in-the-world, we are worthy of questioning (Fragwürdigkeitwerden). We realize that the things around us have a point of view, including potentially a point of view of us. There are many beings that are in relation to each other, and they are also in relation to the totality of beings which are different from each other. This concrete totality is Being, which nevertheless is not a simple sum of all possible beings. Based on the insufficiency of each one, all of those beings are reaching outside of themselves. They are in interaction with 14

I am, and I am also not the wall which is in front of me. Hegel would call this “holding the moments apart”; the consciousness of seeing the wall and also being the one who is seeing the wall. 265

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each other, and each one reaches beyond itself toward the totality of Being. This reaching signifies the inquietude and lack of self-sufficiency of the beings. Just as we are disquieted by our difference from other existing things, the things are likewise disquieted by their difference from other things and are reaching outside of themselves. This disquietude is based on the difference to the existing things which, in turn, creates the necessity of reaching out of their simple self-identity. In our interrogatory approach to understanding the whole of reality (das Ganze), we realize that the horizon of that which needs to be questioned is tremendous. With the many answers to the particular questions, our amazement grows. We realize that the world escapes our grasp and urges us to our continued questioning. The more light we cast on the unknown phenomena, the more opaque they become. The meaning of Being remains withdrawn despite the partial illumination we have cast on it. The interrogatory movement of our thinking experiences, at one and the same time, both fulfillment and fatigue when confronted with the vastness of the questions that cannot be fully answered. On that level, our concentration is moved away from asking any particular questions and toward questioning the Being of a being (das Sein des Seienden). The prevailing question is: what does it mean that something is? We can talk of a certain turn in our questioning (Umschlag des Fragens). This turn means that we are not asking particular questions but everything in one go (alles in einem). While asking the questions of why there is something and not nothing, we realize that not only do things exist, but we as questioners are. The question of the meaning of Being (Sinn des Seins) becomes a question of the meaning of our being (Sinn des Daseins). In this sense, the question we ask becomes a totalizing question (eine totale Frage), as far as what is addressed is, in fact, the whole. This totalizing question cannot be fully answered with reference to a being, because it embraces and concerns a being as questionable (das Fragliche). As such, the mystery of the Being of a being (das Sein des Seienden) will not be dispelled by any reference to a particular being (das Seiende). Therefore, the questioning reaches out beyond its initial impulse, and beyond that which exists in any form, i.e., toward Non-Being (das Nichts). In this intellectual confrontation with Being and Non-Being, the question incessantly presses itself upon us: Why is there something rather than nothing? As questioning subjects, we find ourselves in the realm beyond Being and Non-Being. The mystery of this interrogatory dynamic makes us aware that in order to ask the question of the meaning of the Being of a being we first needed to be somehow familiar with the Being of a being and yet have not yet fully embraced its meaning. We would not ask, indeed could not ask, why there is something rather than nothing, unless we find ourselves in a world in which we are commanded by Being to ask questions of the meaning of Being. We realize that in the innermost foundation of our thinking, there is something from which the words “being” (seiend) and “non being” (nicht seiend) slide 266

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away and do not say anything. In a mysterious way, we are familiar with what we will never grasp and cannot articulate and what, in an unfathomable way, calls us to thinking from out of a being and beyond all beings. Human thinking reaches into a realm in which it cannot find any firm ground. Thinking can hold on only to something which exists, to the thought which is comprehensible. Because any determination is also a dividing line (κατηγορεîν), whenever we determine something, we also confine it: we say that something is in one way and not the other. Therefore, our thinking, which asks why there is something rather than nothing, ends up in indetermination and infinity. This infinity must halt our thinking. We can only think what is conceivable in the form of a judgment. This judging comprehension (urteilendes Begreifen) is the fundamental form of conceiving and, therefore, also of a thinking which conceives of itself. The outside of thinking is also its innermost and primordial because it puts everything into motion. With his reflection on the question of God, Welte offers the first step toward the philosophical knowledge of God. So far, it is only the first outline of something that cannot be outlined, because it is infinite and therefore without any confines. It can bestow all that is finite with meaning for its beings. In the language of religion, it is called the living God (der lebendige Gott). This philosophical analysis can also motivate a human being to believe in that which cannot be fully comprehended and, in turn, to entrust to that living God not only oneself but all that exists. Welte speaks of the philosophical proofs for the existence of God as the expression of the metaphysical formalization of a genuinely religious thinking of the absolute mystery of God, which is the origin of religion in its primordial sense of revealing that which is inaccessible to the human mind by means of reason alone. The Deficiency of the Philosophical Proofs, the Restless Heart, and the Unanswerable Evidence of God’s Existence The deficiencies of the philosophical proofs for the existence of God are hugely due to the overtrust in an autonomous human reason and the common disillusionment with the God of the philosophers. However, for Welte, the philosophical engagement with religion is not only an intellectual exercise and a fascinating academic adventure, but a socially responsible activity (humane Intergration) designed to open up the possibility for contemporary society to rethink its social dynamics as the interplay of the divine encouraging promise of his permanent liberating presence (göttlicher Zuspruch), the event of the Holy (Hierophanie as das Aufscheinen des Heiligen im Profanen), and a human answer to God’s address

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to situate human history in a position of correspondence to his salvific call (einem Anruf zu entsprechen).15 In his philosophical thinking, Welte is careful enough not to offer any simple objective certainty for an eschatological future of the human being. Taking our own final destiny seriously, we need to move beyond a theoretical deliberation. Welte calls here for a particular sensitivity to our being-in-the-world. Confronted with the experience of suffering, the injustice, and the lack of peace, a human being is called to a socially responsible practical behavior. Therefore, the moral decision of an individual has not only an impact on one’s own present life and the life of the community one is a part of, but is, by the same token, an expression of this universal horizon of meaning and as such a clear protest against universal meaninglessness. Welte senses, in this human solidarity for the weak and needy, not only a great potential for humanity to advance on a peaceful pathway to prosperity and a significant clamor against absolute meaninglessness but the essential expression of a totality of meaning, which is grounded in the personal God. If to think is to thank, the philosophical proofs for the existence of God are the expression of thankfulness for our human potential to rationally move toward God and for his ubiquitous presence in the life of his people, which fills us with a deep sense of joy and gratitude for the infinite God who, although beyond the full grasp of our reason (ἐν αἰνίγματι), is close to us. This God-with-us (Ἐμμανουήλ, the name denotes the same as θεανθρωπος) shows himself to us as a God who loves us, and whom we can know and love.

15

Bernhard Welte, Die Würde des Menschen und die Religion: Anfrage an die Kirche in unserer Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Knecht, 1977); reprinted in Kleinere Schriften zur Philosophie der Religion, vol. III/2, 59-105.

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2. 3. 3. Martin Heidegger’s “Divine God” in the Thinking of Bernhard Welte and Gustav Siewerth The polemics around ontotheology is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing debates in the current discussion on philosophy versus theology, for it shows the intimate closeness of the two disciplines without at the same time wishing to transform them into a theologizing philosophy or philosophical theology.1 Thinking and faith are inseparable and yet non-fusible. Heidegger’s polemics against the priority of what is, strictly speaking, just theoretical, goes back to, and is based upon, his lecture from 1920/21 called “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.”2 Theology becomes ontotheology when it accepts criteria of rationality that are alien to its own horizon of understanding, or, expressed metaphorically, when Jerusalem sells its soul to Athens.3 However, it is precisely the ontotheological discussion that brings together Gustav Siewerth (1903-1963) and Bernhard Welte (1906-1983), two important Heidegger researchers and devotees, and yet also separates them from one another as far as this is objectively achievable. In this discussion, the question of God will be given its due level of importance, which is central. In his “Reminiscence of a Late Conversation,”4 Welte speaks, among other things, of his essay “God in Heidegger’s Thinking”5 and reports on Heidegger’s 1

See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlotteville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003). In the way he conducts his dialogue between so-called “continental philosophy” and contemporary theology, Robbins elaborates a model for a more co-operative and less antagonistic philosophical theology. 2 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (= GA 60), ed. Matthias Jung (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995); Thomas J. Sheehan, “Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’” in Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., A Companion to Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” (Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1986), 40-62; Jean Greisch: L’Arbre de vie and l’Arbre du savoir: Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique Heideggerienne (1919-1923) (Paris: Les Éd. du CERF, 2000). 3 A detailed analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of the ontotheological problem is provided by John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 133-156; Cf. also Walter Strolz, “Herkunft und Zukunft. Martin Heideggers frühe Auslegung urchristlicher Lebenserfahrung,” Herder Korrespondenz 4 (1996): 203-207. 4 Bernhard Welte, “Erinnerung an ein spätes Gespräch,” in Günther Neske, ed., Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 249-252. 5 Bernhard Welte, “Gott im Denken Heideggers,” in Bernhard Welte, Zeit und Geheimnis: Philosophische Abhandlungen zur Sache Gottes in der Zeit der Welt (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1975), 258-280. 269

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friendly reception of his earlier study on the same topic. Heidegger must, therefore, have been very pleased with Welte’s interpretation if he made the decision to recommend that essay for a compendium on contemporary European philosophy, which was to be published with additional comments by him in Brazil. Welte himself refers to that earlier study, “God in Heidegger’s Thinking,” which had been published as “The Question of God in the Thinking of Martin Heidegger” (1963) in Innerlichkeit und Erziehung: In memoriam Gustav Siewerth.6 The similarity in the formulation of his “The Question of God in Martin Heidegger’s Thinking” with that in an earlier essay by Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God,” (1961) remains intriguing.7 Although Welte’s essay commemorates the recently deceased colleague from the ‘Freiburg i. Br. College of Education,’ one searches in vain for an allusion to Siewerth; there is not even a bibliographic reference to Siewerth in that volume. In “God in Heidegger’s Thinking,” Welte writes that some important references in the earlier essay could not now be maintained after all and that the problematics of God in Heidegger must be thought through once again. The reader is, therefore, referred to an essay by Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God,” in which the reconsideration of the problematics used by Heidegger would have to be undertaken in any case and was recommended.8 In “God in Heidegger’s Thinking,” Welte pays tribute to Heidegger, who at that time was being “taken out of the foreground of the present”: “His thinking preserves its own rank in the background of the present.”9 Yet he also says that Heidegger makes other thinkers who get involved in his thoughts ‘uneasy,’ especially when it comes to the question of God. Since I wish to deal with the similarities and differences in the reception of Heidegger in Welte and Siewerth, I will try, in the main, to elaborate on their essays, which happened to be published around the same time: Welte’s “The question of God in Martin Heidegger’s Thinking,” and Siewerth’s “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God.” The question of God seems to be one of the crucial questions that separate different receptions of Heidegger from one another. I deliberately do not choose, for this attempt, Welte’s essay “God in Heidegger’s Thinking,” since it originated much later.

Bernhard Welte, “Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers,” in Franz Pöggeler, ed., Innerlichkeit und Erziehung: In memoriam Gustav Siewerth: Zum Gespräch zwischen Pädagogik, Philosophie und Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder 1964, 177-192. The essay then appeared again in Bernhard Welte, Auf der Spur des Ewigen (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1965), 262-276. 7 Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” in Gustav Siewerth, Gott in der Geschichte: Zur Gottesfrage bei Hegel und Heidegger, ed. Alma von Stockhausen (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1971), 280-293. 8 Bernhard Welte, “Gott im Denken Heideggers,” 258. 9 Ibid., 259. 6

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Thus, I should first start with, and address, some of the general philosophical traits that are characteristic of the two Heidegger researchers. Special attention will be given to determining the role given by them to Being, in order to have access to God. Bernhard Welte’s Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Theology Bernhard Welte used, in his philosophy of religion, the post-metaphysical theology and the philosophy developed by Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in their difference vis-à-vis the neo-scholastic tradition in thinking.10 He sees a possibility of conveying the Christian faith in a way that is credible today in the opening up of theology to modern philosophy and especially to Martin Heidegger. Klaus Hemmerle once called Welte’s elaboration of the borderline areas between philosophy and theology as being his most significant contribution to this topic in the twentieth century.11 On his 80th birthday, Heidegger asked the following question: “Do the people living today stay put where the sublime is withheld?”12 Only in light of the nature of the deity, which Welte thinks in terms of the nature of the sacred, and which in turn is the presupposition for the possible rising of God, can one say what is named by the word “God.” Being is “the holy,” yet neither God nor, as Gustav Siewerth sees it, a “likeness of God”13 but rather, “its own depth that is still unknowable.”14 As a phenomenologically oriented philosopher of religion, Welte interprets religious tradition as an epochal conversation. In this conversatio with a tradition that is shaped by the epoch, Heidegger is of increasing importance to Welte. One could interpret this movement in Welte’s thinking—from metaphysical to nonmetaphysical philosophy of religion—as a certain shift in emphasis, away from Karl Jaspers and toward Martin Heidegger.15 Bernhard Welte, Der philosophische Glaube bei Karl Jaspers und die Möglichkeit seiner Deutung durch die thomistische Philosophie (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1949). 11 Klaus Hemmerle, “Glaube ist dem Denken Freund,” Christ in der Gegenwart 33 (1981): 109110. 12 Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Zum 80. Geburtstag von seiner Heimatstadt Messkirch (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann,1969). 13 Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” 288. 14 Ibid., 285. 15 Cf. Stjepan Kušar, Dem göttlichen Gott entgegen denken: Der Weg von der metaphysischen zu einer nachmetaphysischen Sicht Gottes in der Religionsphilosophie Bernhard Weltes (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1986), 2-5. Cf. also Kwang Seop Shim, Der nachmetaphysische Gott: Überlegungen zur Problematik des Verhältnisses von Gott und Metaphysik in den Entwürfen von Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Weischedel und Bernhard Welte (Bielefeld: Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, 1990). 10

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Welte tried hard to demonstrate the continuously ongoing legitimacy of the Christian message in the language of modern man. The historicity of human existence and the variability of thinking and language, which belong together, form Welte’s basic experiences.16 His hermeneutics of finitude, like that of Heidegger and Gadamer, does not find its limits in the finitude of human consciousness, but rather, in the affirmative determination of its possibility. Similar to Siewerth’s, it is his understanding that the human being’s selffulfillment takes place within the horizon of transcendence. Welte made it clear that man finds not only his way to God, in believing but also his way to himself. By resorting to Meister Eckhart, Welte tries to think toward a more divine God. Gustav Siewerth’s Theologically Inspired Metaphysics Siewerth, on the other hand, tries to substantiate the “divine God” in continuation of the metaphysical tradition, by resorting to ontotheology.17 He nevertheless sets himself apart from Thomas Aquinas, in his argument with Heidegger, when he interprets Thomism as a system of identity.18 Yet like Heidegger, he sees the human being as the place where the understanding of Being is originally played out and takes place. The third part of his book The Fate of Metaphysics19 is dedicated to the question of God. In it, Siewerth discusses Heidegger’s most important statements on the question of God. However, he also criticizes Heidegger’s “epochmaking metaphysics” and places the whole of philosophical thinking within the event of the revelation, as something that, in accordance with its fate, exists (only) within revelation.20 He systematically tries to bring Aquinas into conversation Cf. Ingeborg Feige, Geschichtlichkeit: Zu Bernhard Weltes Phänomenologie des Geschichtlichen auf der Grundlage unveröffentlichter Vorlesungen (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1989). 17 For the question of God in the thinking of Siewerth, cf. Cabada Castro, Sein und Gott bei Gustav Siewerth, 175-265. 18 For the history-of-effects of Siewerth, cf. Cabada Castro, Sein und Gott bei Gustav Siewerth; Emmanuel Tourpe, Siewerth ‘après’ Siewerth. Le lien idéal de l’amour dans le thomisme spéculatif de Gustav Siewerth et la visée d’un réalisme transcendental (Louvain-la-Neuve: Éd. de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1998); idem, “‘Actualité’ et ‘potentialité’ de Gustav Siewerth,” in Peter Reifenberg and Anton van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt: Henri de Lubac, Gustav Siewerth und Hans Urs von Balthasar in ihren Grundanliegen (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 2001), 146-163; Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth’s Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition; idem, Über die Differenz im Sein. Metaphysische Überlegungen zu Gustav Siewerths Werk; idem, Die scholastischen Vorbedingungen der Metaphysik Gustav Siewerths; Walter M. Neidl, “Gustav Siewerth (1903-1963),” in Emerich Coreth, ed., Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 3: Moderne Strömungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1990), 249-272; idem, “Kritische Erwägungen zum metaphysischen Rezeptionshorizont bei Gustav Siewerth,” in Reifenberg and van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt, 132-145. 19 Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger. 20 Cf. ibid., 604. 16

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with Heidegger, so as to open up a new philosophical horizon for the ‘divine God.’ In “The Fate of Metaphysics,” Siewerth, therefore, considers Christian revelation as the empowerment of thinking par excellence. His “metaphysics inspired by theology” takes the word of revelation as that Word, which “in the historical space occupied by man calls for attention to itself, being inspired by the understanding of Being.”21 So, we have here a metaphysics substantiated by the philosophy of Being. Siewerth’s Philosophically Substantiated Metaphysics and His Ontological Understanding of God In Siewerth’s case, Being is the mediating center, the way to God. He calls Being the supreme likeness of God22 which, however, does not depict the Christian God, since “‘Being itself,’ as a pure, simple, non-subsisting act [is] not ‘an image’ of the ‘real God.’”23 Only when there is an infinite movement of Being toward reality, taking place within Being itself, is Being “the pure likeness of the Absolute.”24 Regarding the forgetfulness of Being, Siewerth takes on Heidegger’s basic theme. He sees the transformation of metaphysics into logic in the philosophical development of the late Middle Ages, especially in the thinking of Scotus and Suarez, and he sees it as a signpost for the demise of metaphysics in German Idealism. The forgetfulness of Being fatefully overcomes thinking, due to an inadequate understanding of Being.25 Only when Being is understood as a mediating mediation between God and his creation—in this sense, therefore, as the likeness of God, can we eschew the erroneous thinking of our time and the eschaton of the ‘dismissal of Being.’26 Siewerth criticizes the theological constitution of metaphysics, which does without the ontological mediation of the finite toward the infinite and prevents immediate contact with God. Being is now conceived as an abstract concept, and thinking is fixed merely on beings; this essentially determines the fate of the modern mind and the fate of philosophy, which has fallen victim to the forgetfulness of Being.

21

Cf. ibid., 82. Cf. Gustav Siewerth, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes,” in idem, Sein und Wahrheit, 651-685; idem, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 472. 23 Ibid., 473. 24 Ibid., 474. 25 Stephan Grätzel, “Das Schicksal der Metaphysik und seine Deutung durch Gustav Siewerth,” in Reifenberg and van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt, 199-209. 26 Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 135. Cf. Wierciński, Philosophizing with Gustav Siewerth. 22

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A Critical Comparison The time has come to examine the two essays published almost contemporaneously more closely: Welte’s “The Question of God in the Thinking of Martin Heidegger,” (1963) and Siewerth’s “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God” (1961). Bernhard Welte: Thinking Things Through with Understanding In his essay, Welte deals with the question of God in Heidegger’s thinking, while distancing himself from Heidegger’s personal relationship with God. In contrast to most Heidegger researchers, who claim that Heidegger’s ontology and theology are strictly separate, Welte tries to show instead that there is an essential relationship between the question of Being and the question of God. Heidegger’s thoughts are interpreted step by step within the horizon of the theological problematic. Heidegger is accompanied, in this manner, by both the question of God and the attempt to think it through with Welte. In a letter dated October 13, 1964, Heidegger writes to Welte: “Diligence and careful judgment also characterize your essay in memory of G. Siewerth, for which work I hereby give thanks. The conversation between theology and philosophy will be slow in getting into a fruitful factual stage.”27 Welte first addresses the question of God within the closed entity of Heidegger’s way of thinking, without binding him to any static system of thought. Hermeneutically, and concerning the text, Welte relates to paragraph seven of “Being and Time,” in which he sees the connection between Heidegger’s question of God and the preceding concept of phenomenology when understood as ontology. The Being of beings is actually given, but it remains hidden. The transformation of concealment into unconcealment, that is, the letting-itself-be-seen, is what makes up the meaning of phenomenology. Heidegger’s approach was to think God together with the idea of Being. The basic originality of the question of Being motivates Heidegger to going back to the basis of metaphysics.28 On the way to unveiling Being, Heidegger first reaches ‘nothingness,’ and not Being. Thinking ‘nothingness’ is decisive for thinking of Being, because “this nothingness brings out Being in an excellent way.”29 By thinking Being as ‘the other of that which exists,’ Heidegger reaches truth as a-letheia, as the “initial greatness, compared with which everything that is methodical is derived and of 27

Martin Heidegger/Bernhard Welte, Briefe und Begegnungen, ed. Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003), 19f. 28 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1949), Introduction. 29 Welte, “Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers,” 266. 274

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different descent.”30 In this context, the question arises, of whether the question of God is worth asking. Should Being be more original than everything that exists, then God would be a being among beings, albeit a Supreme being.31 The intriguing relationship between God and Being (in relation to what we call God), is addressed by Welte in the manner of Heidegger. By understanding Being as an event, Heidegger understands the fate of Being as historical. The unthought thoughts of metaphysics cause the ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ which is “basically the fate of what happens to Being itself.”32 Welte interprets Heidegger’s question of God by starting out from the fate of Western thinking. Heidegger’s critique of the concept of God begins at the point where thinking is descriptive, where God is conceived as something that is being described to us, albeit as a Supreme being. In that way, the God of occidental ontotheology was not a divine God. Moreover, though Welte does raise the question as to whether Heidegger is leaving out the question of God, he gives us a clear and negative answer to this question. What is it that should ‘move forward’ this question of Welte’s, which he refers to as a ‘moving’ question? Moreover, although Welte agrees that Heidegger, together with Hölderlin, proclaims the absence of God, he nevertheless sees him as preparing for a future turn that will enable us to think a divine God. The impossibility of naming God constitutes a limit that is reached by the thinker when he poses the question of the divine God in the right way. The emergence of ‘the holy’ is, at one and the same time, the revelation of the unreachability of God. Thus Welte “frees [Heidegger] for the possibility of an encounter with the divine God and even more: he seeks to contribute his part, in order to prepare for the freedom [needed] for the possible nearness of this God.”33 Heidegger’s preparation consists in thinking within the inspiration provided by Being. Welte sees in Heidegger’s way of asking the question of God the “most delicate attempt to express the unsayable, without hurting it by doing so.”34 Yet even if one might appreciate Heidegger’s effort to prepare the way for the divine God in the sense of negative theology, as Welte seems to do, one cannot overlook the fact that the interpretation of Heidegger’s idea of God as a negative theology is not covered by its classical interpretation. The main purpose of any negative theology has always been to effect a personal conversion. This applies not only to the masters of Christian mysticism, such as Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, little Theresa of Lisieux but also to Plato’s Symposium, Plotinus or 30

Ibid., 269. When Being is understood analogously, the ontotheological problem does not arise at all. God can be identical with Being without having to be included in beings. It is here that the tension between the analogical and univocal understanding of Being becomes clear. This understanding also reveals Heidegger’s Scotist roots. 32 Ibid., 271. 33 Ibid., 275. 34 Ibid., 276. 31

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Proclus. All of them were not only moved to ask the question of God: They were instrumental in making the decision for God. One just cannot deny that in this case, we have a very different history of effects before us. Following Heidegger, Welte does not address the question of the personal God. This question loses its right to be asked at all.35 In a letter to Heidegger dated April 23, 1966, Welte writes during his visit to Paris, where he had spoken about Heidegger and his possible impact on theology, that he has distanced himself from both Siewerth and Lotz.36 This statement, one of the few that Welte has voiced openly, confirms his sincere desire to be understood and accepted by Heidegger, which brought with it, as a consequence, the objective distancing from a theologically empowered metaphysics. It is interesting to note that neither Siewerth nor Welte invoke the young Heidegger. Both clearly see “Being and Time” as the beginning of Heidegger’s concern with the question of God. Both, however, do not resort to Heidegger’s Habilitation thesis, “The Teaching of Duns Scotus on Categories and Meaning,”37 which had already been published long ago. However, it is plausible that Heidegger himself did not welcome a call to resort to his earlier position, i.e., that it might be possible to justify a possible doctrine of God on the basis of Scholastic philosophy via phenomenology. One may say that Heidegger preferred that his early Lectures on the phenomenology of religion would remain unpublished before his death. It seems that a significant change of direction, noticeable in the case of the earlier writings and “Being and Time,” is due to an inherent objective necessity. However, the former positions can no longer be maintained. Gustav Siewerth: A Critical Inquiry to Heidegger Both Siewerth and Welte agree that the question of God is present throughout in Heidegger’s work. It is indeed provided with different accents but already articulated with due seriousness from “Being and Time” onwards. Siewerth begins his essay “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God” by placing the question within the context of the unveiling of existence in “Being and Time” and Heidegger’s reply in his “Letter on Humanism” in Holzwege and also in Identität und Differenz. If one accepts Heidegger’s thesis that the history of Being “necessarily begins with the forgetfulness of Being,”38 then one cannot ask about God before resolving the essential hiddenness of Being. Heidegger is concerned with the interpretation of the being of God from out of the truth about Being, which makes the 35

Hubert Lenz, Mut zum Nichts als Weg zu Gott (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1989). Heidegger/Welte, Briefe und Begegnungen, 26. 37 Martin Heidegger, “Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus,” GA1: 189-401; in English: Duns Scotus’ Theory of the Categories and of Meaning, trans. Harold Robbins (Chicago: De Paul University PhD, 1978. 38 Heidegger, Holzwege, 243. 36

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question of the existence of God superfluous. Siewerth refers us, in this context, to the famous Heideggerian accusation against the faithful and their theologians, who have degraded God to being an object of ethical esteem.39 That criticism once more relates to the ontotheological position which Siewerth points to—after Heidegger—as the bowdlerization of the name of God into some rigid notion of being without essence.40 Siewerth’s critical inquiry to Heidegger—with his barely answerable questions—indicates that he sees Heidegger circling around the living God, disguised in the earnestness and severity of his questioning “whether God is coming nearer or withdrawing.”41 Siewerth asks whether the divine God and the God of Christian theology and of the Christian faith is, for Heidegger, merely “the memory of something that was lost,” or whether Heidegger knows, after all, about “the ‘absent’ God who is nevertheless the living God.”42 This critical questioning of Heidegger, both in terms of the Kantian demonstration of the limits of thinking and Hegel’s movement of Being from its emptiness to its developed abundance, leads Siewerth to argue for negative theology in a particularly fruitful recourse to Aquinas. Siewerth cannot follow Heidegger’s assumption uncritically that giving up God in the godless thinking as causa-sui brings the divine God closer than ontotheology wants to admit. Siewerth shows that “Thomas Aquinas was the first who, in the light of the sacra doctrina, was able to separate the Being of beings from the substance [of God] and, at the same time, to make God’s thinking will the basis of all reality, with the help of traditional theology.”43 By virtue of the analogy, the Being of the beings only brings God’s existence and essence “into the light in the mirroring likeness. God Himself, however, hides in the abyss of his eternity, in his inaccessible freedom, in his transcendent ‘being unrelated’ and ‘being without needs,’ and above all in his unmeasurable ‘needing no basis.’”44 The nature of theology consists in the mediation of the self-revealing God through ‘thinking a faith’ that focuses on God’s essential nature. Siewerth agrees with Heidegger that the godless God of ontotheology is closer to the divine God than the causa-sui God.45 However, he scrutinizes how the fall into the forgetfulness of Being came about. If Heidegger’s thesis were “Not that God’s existence is proved to be unprovable is the biggest blow to God, but that the God who is considered real is given the highest (possible) value. For this blow does not come from those who aimlessly stand around and do not believe in God, but from the believers and their theologians, who speak of ‘the most full of being among all that is, without ever having the slightest wish to think of Being as such, and therefore also without realizing that this thinking and that talking, as viewed from the direction of the faith, is a blasphemy par excellence, especially if (and when) they get to interfere in matters of the theology of faith.” Heidegger, Holzwege, 240. 40 Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” 282. 41 Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 37. 42 Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” 282. 43 Ibid., 287. 44 Ibid., 288. 45 Ibid. 39

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correct, that the history of Being began with the forgetfulness of Being, then one had to be at the mercy of the false god of logic from the outset. By way of attempt, Siewerth criticizes the idea of ‘hope without a redeemer.’ In this context, he again asks the question of the personal God. By addressing the question of Being and ‘the holy,’ Heidegger’s concept of God is not thoroughly exhausted. In our contemporary historical fate, we can only expect to resolve the mystery of the distance of God while paying our fullest attention to it, so as to keep ourselves open to Him in our waiting. In light of the withdrawing God, faith in God is secured by his Incarnation and crucifixion, that is, faith in a God who, through his self-emptying, has brought redemption to man-abandoned-by-God. Siewerth asks whether the Being of beings—when conceived within the difference in Being—shows us that there is no conceptual limit imposed on thinking before it can open itself toward the divine. For the thinking that is hit by the fate of the ‘forgetfulness of Being’ cannot resort to its original potential without being theologically empowered. Siewerth’s Paradigm Shift Siewerth’s erstwhile fascination with Heidegger turns into an increasingly critical questioning of him as time goes on. Early on, when he was very impressed by his teacher, Siewerth believed he could reconcile Heidegger’s existential analytics and his hermeneutics of existence with classical metaphysics. In a speech to Heidegger, the young Siewerth gives clear expression to his enthusiasm: However, we would like to ask you to believe that the god-given spark of ‘enthusiasm,’ fruitfully creative among the spirits, has its hidden share in the play of light before your eyes, that here, in concentrated movement, is visibly expressed something that grew in the silence of your work: namely, the emotion of awe before the treasures and grounds of the ‘logos,’ which is divine, both in the early-born genius of language and in the eternal creation of the Greeks, in the god-filled spirituality of the Middle Ages and in the mighty mind-struggle of German Idealism.46 Siewerth’s early death prevented the development of his increasingly critical stance toward Heidegger from coming to fruition. We can look at his essay “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God” (1961) as a starting point. According to Alma von Stockhausen, “This criticism was carried forward orally in the working groups of the Catholic student community in Freiburg, following (upon) the 46

Siewerth made this speech on May 29, 1930. It was published in the Freiburger Zeitung, no. 147 (May 30, 1930) along with Heidegger’s reply. Here I quote Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, 264.

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last major lecture of M. Heidegger on ‘Time and Being.’”47 Siewerth’s only daughter, Irene Joekel-Siewerth, gives us an additional insight into possible reasons for Siewerth’s increasing criticism of Heidegger: “On October 5, 1963, my father died of a heart attack in Trento at a meeting of the Görres Society. His body was in a weakened state, and I suspect that his heart had suffered badly when he finally realized that there could be no consensus between Thomas Aquinas and Martin Heidegger.”48 Gustav Siewerth was always concerned with the problem of God in Heidegger, but we first find a direct reference to this in his 1957 essay: “Martin Heidegger and the Knowledge of God.”49 In that essay, he still tried to reconcile Heidegger’s question of God, if not uncritically, with Aquinas’s Christian philosophy of Being. For him, Heidegger was “an original thinker, deeply moved by the power and brightness of Being, listening reverentially to its impenetrable mystery, probably in secret affinity with Thomas Aquinas like none other before him despite all the daring and creative modernity.”50 Siewerth sees himself as the one who honors Heidegger by taking up the matter in hand and thinking it further. He says, “I have tried to be in a thinking conversation with Heidegger as I developed his thoughts. In spite of all the misunderstandings to which this thinking is exposed on the part of many, I would like to conclude by saying that every strongly disciplined devotion to Being is a bulwark against the decaying times produced by the forgetfulness of Being. May it be given to Heidegger that he will be receptive ever more in regard to the mystery of Being and the Word of Truth and the mystery of history, which were revealed in the historical appearance of God in Jesus Christ.”51 No trace of this hope—albeit expressed rather piously—can be found in Siewerth’s 1961 essay “Martin Heidegger and the Question of God.” His reservations about Heidegger are very clear. In her introduction to the third volume of Siewerth’s Collected Works, Alma von Stockhausen illustrates Siewerth’s stance by using the language of a religious denomination. Who is the divine God, Siewerth asks. However, surely it is He who prevents people from necessarily going astray. The hope in the divine God is based on the Christian message of redemption. Going astray can only be understood as a fate for Christians… To overcome the fate of being in error Alma von Stockhausen, “Vorwort,” in Siewerth, Gott in der Geschichte: Zur Gottesfrage bei Hegel und Heidegger, 8. 48 Cf. Irene Joekel-Siewerth, “Erinnerungen an meinen Vater,” in Reifenberg and van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt, 283. 49 Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Gotteserkenntnis,” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte, 264-279. 50 Ibid., 279. 51 Ibid. 47

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means, for Siewerth: to reveal the original sin, through which the withdrawal of what was at first ‘the holy’ and ‘the whole’ came about, in order to be open to, and free for, the second coming of Christ. Confessing one’s personal guilt is the precondition for experiencing the divine God.52 Hubert Lenz expresses a similar concern with regard to the question of the divine God, by asking, in Mut zum Nichts als ein Weg zu Gott (Courage to Nothingness as a Path Leading to God): “whether the forgetfulness of Being and the lamented missing of God are not exactly the consequence to be expected when the personal call that is offered to every person and calls him/her to a response, is often forgotten, repressed, fled from, denied or openly rejected. Since nothingness is not only an expression of trans-categoriality, unavailability, unity of, and distance from God, but also of his rejection by the human being, it is not only a clear signpost pointing the human being toward union with God, but also (and above all) an admonition to turn one’s life around first of all and to become a believer.”53 On the occasion of a panel discussion held at the University of Education in Freiburg, Max Müller gave a negative evaluation of Siewerth’s critical inquiry to Heidegger. Müller, who himself was very familiar with both Heidegger and Siewerth, sees an unbridgeable divide between Heideggerian and Siewerthian thinking, though Siewerth intended to think of the divine God in response to Heidegger. Thus, Siewerth also made it the main task of the history of metaphysics, when thinking in terms of the ontological difference, “to trace back the existing beings to God in such a way that God and the world can be ‘one’ without straining the argument.”54 Rejecting Siewerth’s intention as alien to Heidegger, Max Müller analyzes the relationship between Heidegger and Siewerth in the following terms: Heidegger has always appreciated Siewerth as belonging—and belonging in greatness—to what he himself is leaving behind and has left behind, that is, the kind of metaphysics which, as great metaphysics, is at the same time philosophical theology and cannot allow for the divine God in philosophical theology, but can only admit the ‘noesis noeseos’ as the absolute spirit; and the absolute spirit is, in Aristotle, that (kind of) God who does not care for people and who strives for ‘hos erumenon’ and is loved, but is not himself our partner. For, that there is a divine ‘thou’ has been revealed and Von Stockhausen, “Einleitung,” in Siewerth, Gott in der Geschichte, 44. Lenz, Mut zum Nichts als ein Weg zu Gott, 312. Cf. also Hubert Lenz, “Mut zum Nichts: Was dem Glauben Leben gibt. Religionsphilosophische Anstöße Bernhard Weltes zum Anliegen der Neu-Evangelisierung,” in Ludwig Wenzler, ed., Mut zum Denken, Mut zum Glauben. Bernhard Welte und seine Bedeutung für eine künftige Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Katholische Akademie der Erzdiözese Freiburg, 1994), 63-88. 54 Thus, Alma von Stockhausen in her contribution to a podium discussion, in Behler, ed., Gustav Siewerth zum Gedächtnis, 41. 52 53

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made possible through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is one of the revelations of God, and for us Catholic Christians, it is the final one, and one that integrates everything that came before.”55 Toward Meeting the Divine God In the essay “In Search of the Lost Origins,” Welte writes: No one has thought of the misalignment of the origins as earnestly as Heidegger, and no one has been as determined as he was, either, in his search to uncover and recover them. One may find his thinking idiosyncratic and strange. However, those who seriously engage with his idea will always be uneasy once more and afresh.”56 This recurring theme of anxiety describes Welte’s relationship with Heidegger very aptly. It was a perpetual search for the origins, and not only in the sense that a shift in accentuation might have taken place, e.g., from the contemplative thinking of the Greeks—with their fundamental relationship between language and nature—to the calculating thinking of the modern age—with a structure prescribed and imposed by humans. The (thoughtless) shifting of the origins is the reason for their substantial obscuration, which makes it impossible for the origins to speak and to show themselves. In this way, even the divine origins are obscured (for us humans). It is obvious why, for Welte—the philosopher of religion—the increasing proximity to Heidegger was influential in shaping and broadening his thinking. That closeness allowed for a juxtaposition of Welte’s basic philosophical intuitions and his theological stance, in which the relation of the human being to transcendence and the mystery of God becomes inspiring and evokes a rational decision to believe. One of Welte’s and Siewerth’s main concerns was to uncover the traces of transcendence: The human being’s self-fulfillment takes place within the horizon of transcendence. Both Welte and Siewerth go out to meet the divine God, who is not Being itself. Welte addresses the tension between the worldly comprehension of the human being-in-the-world and religious experience, which transcends the practical living of life. Man can meet the divine God and entrust him/herself to him only in faith and not in thinking transcendence and grasping at it. The finite human existence (Dasein) is based on an infinite meaning. 55 56

Cf. Max Müller’s contribution to the podium discussion, in ibid., 49. Bernhard Welte, “Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Ursprung: Essay über ein Gedicht von Karl Krolow und einen Gedanken von Martin Heidegger,” in idem, Zwischen Zeit und Ewigkeit. Abhandlungen und Versuche (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1982), 114. 281

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Welte, unlike the increasingly critical Siewerth, makes Heidegger into a prophet of the closeness of God,57 a prophet who, “in his thinking, [carries his share of] the distress and the hardship of these God-distant times, and otherwise [interprets] the path taken by time and the world as a path [toward the divine].”58 Those who are on the path toward the divine, are, according to Heidegger, “the messengers of the deity, who are waving to us.”59 In Welte’s estimation, Heidegger was faithful to his path ‘toward the divine.’ This was his true vocation: “It was important to listen to [those who are on that path] and to await, patiently and with [the help of] this waving of the divine messengers, the epiphany of the divine God.”60 Naming Heidegger as one of “perhaps the greatest seekers of this century,” Welte concluded that “He was seeking—while waiting and listening to the message—the divine God and his splendor.”61 This critical inquiry actually concerns Heidegger’s and Siewerth’s understanding of Being as such. Despite the enormous differences between the two, concerning individual Heidegger interpretations, we may responsibly reach the conclusion that the thinking of both Welte and Siewerth is based on searching and finding and is determined by its proximity to Heidegger.

Cf. Is 40: 3: “A voice of one crying: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Cf. Mal 3: 1. 58 Bernhard Welte, “Suchen und Finden,” in Neske, ed., Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, 255. 59 Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 150. 60 Bernhard Welte, “Suchen und Finden,” 255. 61 Ibid., 256. 57

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2. 3. 4. The Destiny or Fate of Metaphysics: The Empowerment of Thinking and the Forgetfulness of Being The Forgotten Being Ever since Sein und Zeit was published, in 1927, Heidegger’s thesis that metaphysics is not concerned with Being (das Sein), but always only with a being (das Seiende), namely about the first and highest beings (in the sense of a causal, causeand-effect relationship), this subject became the central point in philosophical debates. According to this thesis, the history of metaphysics is a history of the forgetfulness of Being.1 Yet, to examine this forgetfulness in metaphysics means, first of all, that one has to prepare a path which could possibly do justice to the likely essential nature of the truth about Being-in-itself.2 Hence Heidegger, starting from his basic experience of the forgetfulness of Being, or finding himself too distant from Being in his thinking, strives for a new and re-formulated repetition in how to pose the question of Being-as-such (in Being and Time).3 Metaphysics, shaped by the forgetfulness of Being since Plato, refers to the Being of a being as to eternal primary forms and thus makes it something permanent, that is, something akin to the beingness of beings. Thus, the question of the “is” gets assigned to the question of the “what,” and is sidelined. The forgetfulness, in the occidental philosophical tradition, now signifies an understanding of Being in the sense of substantiality or permanent presence in things and beings. Philosophy as metaphysics brings about its completion in the history of its forgetfulness of Being. Completed forgetfulness of Being (and with Heidegger, we can say that completed metaphysics is technology) means: To be left in the greatest of dangers. As thinkers, we are fully exposed to this danger. Completed forgetfulness of Being is this danger as such, for it seduces the thinking person into total forgetfulness with regard to the question of difference in the ontology. The forgetfulness of Being springs from the forgetfulness of the ontological difference between Being and a being. Heidegger discusses in detail the question of the ontological difference in Der Spruch des Anaximander (The Saying of Anaximander), in which he thematizes the connection between Being and being, or See John McCumber, Metaphysics and Oppression, Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press,1999); Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 2 Heidegger accuses both Plato and Aristotle of forgetting the essence of truth (which must also include untruth), such as unconcealment to concealment, concealment to revelation, evil to good. 3 See the introductory idea of recovery, Metaphysics as Retrieval, in Wierciński, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth’s Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition, 7. 1

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presence and being-present. Omitting the difference between Being and a being causes the overshadowing of the meaning of Being and makes Heidegger realize that the forgetfulness of Being makes Being into mere beings. From early on, it seems that presence and what-is-present are each a something-for-itself. All of a sudden, the presence itself becomes somethingthat-is-present. Presented, as it is, by what is present, presence then becomes what is most present and thus the first or highest of all-that-is-present. When naming presence, that-which-is-present has already been presented. Basically, presence as such is no longer distinguished from thatwhich-is-present. It is only considered to be the most general and highest of that-which-is-present, and therefore just as such. The nature of the presence, and with it the difference between presence and being-present, remains forgotten. The forgetfulness of Being is the forgetfulness of the difference of Being vis-à-vis beings.4 Following the trail left by his basic experience of Being, Heidegger thematizes the provenance of a being as originating in the presence. Here, the forgetfulness of Being is defined as the forgetfulness of the difference between the presence and being-present. The question of the ontological difference in metaphysics can be interpreted from two points of view: Coming from the side of Being, it is a participation, and from the side of a being, it is (pure) transcendence.5 One could say that in order to understand a being, we must have the possibility to pass over into Being, that is, have the possibility of transcendence.6 However, this Being is never Being itself; it is the Being of a being. 4

Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980), 360. Heidegger writes: “In order to be able to ask this question at all, of where to locate the... difference between a being and Being, the difference, the two aspects (Zwiefalt) of both must already have been given, inasmuch as it was given in such a way that no special attention is paid to the Zwiefalt itself and as such. The same applies to all transcendence. When we pass from a being to Being, we pass through the two aspects of either of them in transition. The transition, however, is never the one which lets the Zwiefalt arise in the first place. The Zwiefalt is already in use. It is, in all things that are said or presented, done or left undone, the most used and therefore, par excellence, the most customary.” Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954), 175. Cf. Enders, Transzendenz und Welt: Das daseinshermeneutische Transzendenz- und Welt-Verständnis Martin Heideggers auf dem Hintergrund der neuzeitlichen Geschichte des Transzendenz-Begriffs. 6 The essence of Heidegger’s conception of how ontology is constituted is summarized in the unconcealing and concealing of Being: “Being eludes being noticed by unconcealing itself in a being. This holds true for its truth, in the same way. Keeping to that way is the earlier way of its unconcealment. The early way of keeping to that way is Aletheia. By bringing the un-concealment of a being, the early way actually makes the concealment of Being possible. Yet the concealment remains in the course of keeping itself to itself, by way of refusing to let go of itself. We can call this illumining of its keeping-to-itself in the truth about its nature 5

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Heidegger wrote comprehensively in What is Metaphysics? on the relationship between Being and a being, in his Inaugural Lecture at the University of Freiburg i.Br. In the postscript to the fifth edition, he describes this as an ontologically necessary correlation: Without Being, whose most profound but still undeveloped nature sends us nothingness in the form of intrinsic anxiety, all-that-is would remain caught in ‘lack of Being.’ Only, this too cannot be said to be an empty nonentity, if, on the other hand, it is part of the truth that Being never exists without a being, that there is never a being without Being.7 Neither an overcoming of the forgetfulness of Being nor a Hegelian suspension brings salvation or relief here. Only a gradual becoming-aware of the danger that ends in self-awareness can make the turn to the question of the ontological difference happen: To remember the question that lies at the origin of the thinking about Being. “That is why the possibility of a turn—in which the forgetfulness of the nature of Being is turned for the better in this way—essentially conceals itself in this danger so that with this turn the truth about the nature of Being can then enter into beings especially.”8 Heidegger’s forgetfulness of Being is to be thought of as a conflict between unconcealment and concealment. The individual ways, in which Being shows, are part of history as an event, indeed they make up history. By always thinking a being as existing and not in relation to Being itself, a being is determined by predictability and feasibility:

the epoch of Being… The epoch of Being belongs to itself. It is thought out of experiencing the forgetfulness of Being. The epochal nature of its destiny, which comprises what can actually be called the history of the world, comes from the epoch of Being. Every time when Being holds on to its destiny, the ‘world’ suddenly and unexpectedly happens… However, the equivalent to the epochal character of Being, which we can experience in the first instance, is the ecstatic character of Da-sein (being-there). The epochal nature of Being makes the ecstatic nature of Da-sein happen.” Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), 333-334. 7 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1949), 46. 8 Cf. Martin Heidegger Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), 40. Heidegger was deeply convinced that our technical civilization compels us to take a philosophical step back: “Art corresponds to the physis and is, nevertheless, no copy or image of being-(already)-present. Physis and techne belong together in a mysterious way. But the element, in which physis and techne belong together, and the realm, with which art has to engage in order to become what it is as art, remain hidden ... ‘Stepping back’ is the withdrawal of thinking from world civilization by gaining distance from it, and not at all by denying it, so as to engage in what had necessarily had to remain unthought at the beginning of Western thinking, while in some way already named then, and thus prompts our thinking.” Martin Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 139. 285

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Because metaphysics questions beings, it remains with beings and does not bother itself with Being as Being. ... Modern research, with its different ways of presenting or producing instances of a being, has found a different way to the truth, according to which all-that-is is marked by the will to will, and has begun to appear in its early form as the ‘will to power.’ ... [Modern science], as a kind of calculative objectification of beings, is a condition set out for it by the will to will.9 For Heidegger, it is important to address the forgetfulness of Being and thus the metaphysics to date as a form of fatefully misdirected thinking, in favor of the truth about Being. Heidegger’s critique of the times, drawing deeply on the forgetfulness of Being when he characterizes them as the mastery of technology and of calculating reason, was to be a countermovement that would reshape his original optimism of the thirties and transform it into a hope for the coming of the gods or of a god.10 For Heidegger, modern technology is the completion of metaphysics and thus the consummation of its forgetfulness of Being, which latter cannot be directed by calculative thinking.11 Regarding the question of technology, it is the need of our times to overcome the technical-will thinking, and that can only be done by taking a step back and into contemplative thinking in serenity (Gelassenheit).12 Humans can recognize their authentic being only as living mortals, not as overly powerful subjects in the technical world. In their role, that is, not as masters of beings but as shepherds of Being,13 humans can shape their true relation to the

9

Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik?, 43. Cf. the interview “Only A God Can Save Us,” in Martin Heidegger: “Das Spiegel-Interview,” in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, ed., Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 81-114. 11 Cf. Günter Seubold, Heideggers Analyse der neuzeitlichen Technik (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1986); Aman Rosales Rodriguez, Die Technikdeutung Martin Heideggers in ihrer systematischen Entwicklung und philosophischen Aufnahme (Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1994). 12 Cf. Barbara Mahoney, Denken als Gelassenheit (Freiburg i.Br.: Univ. Diss., 1993); Maria Perrefort, Opfer und Gehorsam: Kritische Untersuchungen zur Struktur von Heideggers Gelassenheitsidee (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1990). 13 “Technology, whose nature is Being-itself, can never be overcome by man. That would mean that man is master over Being.... Perhaps we are already in the shadow of this turn, a shadow cast in advance of the turn’s arrival. When and how it will happen (according to its fate), no one knows. It is also not necessary to know such as this. A knowledge of that kind would even be the most pernicious thing for man, because his nature is to be the one who waits, who waits upon the nature of Being (Seyn) by thoughtfully guarding it. Only when the human being, as the shepherd of Being, waits upon the truth of Being, can he at all expect the arrival of another fate for Being, without being caught up in the mere wish to know.” Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, GA 79, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994, 69-72. 10

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world: By shepherding and taking good care of Being they can creatively live and shape their (own) being-in-the-world.14 When destroying the occidental way of thinking, Heidegger recommends going straight to the pre-Socratics, so as to uncover the real meaning of Being and bring its sense to light once more: It is about the question of Being as Being, that is, of the unconcealment, the clearing, and the openness of Being. Following on from the original understanding of Being by the pre-Socratics, Heidegger poses the question of Being in contrast to a being and existing beings. The problematic of the ontological difference, of the difference between Being and the being of a being (made possible by Being), is elaborated by Heidegger with the methods used in phenomenology and hermeneutics, in that he proceeds from the already existing understanding of human beings (regarding Being) and their tendency toward self-interpretation.15 Metaphysics is determined by the nature of the ontological difference. However, in its forgetfulness of Being, metaphysics has understood Being only from the side of beings and not as Being itself, i.e., in its difference to beings. Since the entire history of Western philosophy has been following an erroneous path, one must now search for a more adequate conceptual terminology. The critical phenomenological analysis of existence (Dasein) in Being and Time cannot simply follow a new path, just like that, and thus break new ground for philosophy.16 Even the jargon of authenticity, as Adorno called the Heideggerian playing with words and language, touches upon the limits of what can be expressed. Only a kind of thinking that does attempt to think the truth of Being-itself and, in this way, truth-itself as Being, can get away from this forgetfulness of Being. Ultimately, however, only the poets can still speak. Heidegger chose Hölderlin as his partner in this discourse: The ability to penetrate the poetic system of a poet should be able to get the philosopher himself into speaking mode.17 14

The question of the completion of metaphysics is addressed by Fernando Lleras, Zu Heideggers Gedanken vom Ende der Metaphysik (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1986. One can distinguish three essential elements in the figure of thought concerning the end of metaphysics: the completion of metaphysics, completed metaphysics, and the end of metaphysics. These coincide with the essential elements of the basic movement in thinking. 15 Cf. Hee-Cheon Oh, Martin Heidegger: Ontologische Differenz und der Anfang des Wissens (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2002); Wolfgang Herrmann, Die ontologische Differenz und ihre spekulative Überwindung (Freiburg i.Br.: Univ. Diss., 1974); Reinhold Kuehn, Hinweise auf die ontologische Differenz bei Martin Heidegger (Tübingen: Univ. Diss., 1974); Frank Werner Veauthier, Die Seinsanalogie—Analogie des Seins und ontologische Differenz (Freiburg i.Br.: Univ Diss, 1953). 16 Peter J.T. McDonald, Daseinsanalytik und Grundfrage: zur Einheit und Ganzheit von Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1997), especially on the question of the ontological difference regarding the hermeneutic notion of understanding: “Das daseinsmäßige Verstehen als Zurückweisung des traditionellen Leitfadens,” 62-70. 17 Martin Heidegger, Zu Hölderlin-Griechenlandreisen, GA75, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000); idem, GA65, Beiträge zur Philosophie, (Vom Ereignis), 287

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Metaphysics became aware of the stasis in the unfolding of its initial question as the basic question of Being by way of the history of its forgetfulness of Being. The unfolding of the initial question of Being-as-a-whole was changed into asking the fundamental question of the constitution of Being-as-a-whole. Starting out from a being as a whole, the questions of its constitution and manner (of existing) are thematized, that is, taken up existentially. The Being of beings must be included in Being-as-a-whole as well as its own, and the determination of Beingas-a-whole can only be found, by derivation, from having (first) determined the Being of beings. The question of the Being of beings originates in human wonderment. This wonderment led Heidegger to his well-known formulation: “Why is there anything, rather than nothing?”18 “Why is there anything?” is in part directed at Being, by way of the is. On the other hand, this question aims at nothingness, which, in essence, brings to light again the nature of the ontological difference that is played out in the dialectics of concealment and unconcealment: Being is not! Otherwise, it would be a being. And vice versa: Being is also not without a being! Otherwise, it would be an empty form. In What Does Thinking Mean? Heidegger revolves around the seemingly simplest question that man can ever ask. He quotes Parmenides, who says: “It is necessary to say and to think that beings are.”19 This self-evident fact, that Being is, leads to the forgetfulness of Being. The fact that something “is” is thoughtlessly expressed, without pondering over what it means. Human thinking is essentially bound up with Being and a being. Otherwise, it would have to be grounded in non-Being. Non-Being is un-

ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994); idem, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996). 18 Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA40 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 1. Introduction to Metaphysics, published only in 1951, is the processed version of a lecture held by Heidegger in the Summer of 1935, in which he far exceeds the question of Being, as hitherto held in Being and Time, and radicalizes his earlier understanding. 19 Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? 110. In Hourly Transitions (Stundenübergänge), Heidegger analyzes the saying of Parmenides: “The content of the saying. He helps us to slide away too easily into the self-evident. He barely offers our usual imagination a reason to hold on to it and stay with it. He gives us nothing to think about. Why are we then in danger of getting shot of a sentence like ‘a being is’ so easily? For one thing, because when we hear the sentence, we find nothing memorable in it. For we believe that the subject and the predicate of the sentence are equally clear: beings—who does not know beings? And that ‘is’—who cares a fig about it, when one has more than enough to do with what is, to which also belongs all that has been and will be on the way, and all that which is no longer and which is not yet, and consequently always somehow belongs to is. We are already done with this ‘is’ before it is spoken. Not only us. On the other hand, and above all, the danger of the frivolous dismissal that threatens here is due to the fact that even thinking has gradually become accustomed to the idea of what is said in the sentence, over the course of two and a half millennia. Thus, the doctrine was able to form that nothing further could be said about what is being said with the ‘is’ [...].” Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? 166-167. 288

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derstood as an existential judgment on Being, as a negative act of thinking in relation to Being, which ‘Is.’ This does not mean that when we forget to associate thinking and Being, we then move into Non-Being. The forgetting of Being does not break our link with it. To be nevertheless able to plumb the true depths of human thinking and the comprehension of Being, one has to get to the forgotten mystery of Being.20 In What Calls for Thinking, Heidegger discusses Aristotle’s comment on his physics (Delta 10-14). With his answer to the question on the nature of time, Aristotle already moves in the forgetfulness of Being.21 At the center of Heidegger’s metaphysical understanding of Being is the presence, which prefers to be in the temporal dimension of the present. “Since Being means ‘presence’ for all metaphysics from the very beginning of occidental thinking, Being, if it is to be thought at its highest level, has to be thought as pure presence, i.e., as the presence that is present, as the abiding presence, as the permanently standing ‘now.’ Medieval thinking says: nunc stans. That, however, is how the nature of eternity is interpreted.”22 In Aristotle, Heidegger finds traces of a pre-categorially funded truth that stands in opposition to the categorial or gnoseological concept of truth. The task of the thinker is not to ignore the basic questions of existence, but to try to respond to them as needed. For Heidegger, the medieval way of understanding Being, as influenced by Christianity, reinforces the downward decay of metaphysics into the forgetfulness of Being.23 In place of the quite simply general ‘being or Being,’ which one can only try to describe, we have, with the coming of Christianity and its orientation, the God-created Being, entering into metaphysics.24 Being is ‘a something,’ a hypostasis, it is already objectified. Hence too, Heidegger’s famous question on “… why there is something, rather than nothing?”—which it is meaningless to ask, on an essentialist level. The classical answer to this question is theologically preconditioned: It requires one’s having entered into the mystery of God, this ‘entry’ 20

Cf. Gereon Piller, Bewusstsein und Da-Sein: ontologische Implikationen einer Kontroverse; zur Relation von Sein und Denken im Ausgang von Husserl und Heidegger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996); Rainer Thurnher, Wandlungen der Seinsfrage: zur Krisis im Denken Heideggers nach “Sein und Zeit” (Tübingen: Attempto-Verl., 1997). 21 Aristotle, too, has implicitly oriented himself toward a leveled-down presence-at-hand understanding of knowledge, which prevented him from specifically asking the question of the way of Being that is appropriate to man. See Franco Volpi, Heidegger e Aristotele (Padova: Daphne Ed., 1984). 22 Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? 41-42. 23 Cf. Helmuth Vetter, ed., Heidegger und das Mittelalter (Frankfurt a.M. 1999), especially a contribution by Augustinus Karl Wucherer-Huldenfeld, “Zu Heideggers Verständnis des Seins bei Johannes Duns Scotus und im Skotismus sowie im Thomismus und bei Thomas von Aquin.” 24 Is Being really something that is universal? That which is universal is only in thought, not outside of thought. Here arises the question of the relation between the infinity of Being and the boundlessness of thought. 289

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being the reason for the explanation of the contingency. 25 God is thereby understood as concrete Being, and indeed the highest Being there can be, summum ens, esse ipsum subsistens, perfectio omnium perfectionum, which transcends all other created essences while always already being ‘a being.’ The theologization of metaphysics had led to the overemphasis of beings and a being and to the attempt to conceptualize Being itself, rather than, as was the original intention of philosophy, to strive for its elucidation and the description of its basic structure.26 Decisive, in metaphysical thinking, is the relation of beings (open to us in our daily experience) to their original source, their ground. In the philosophical tradition, this is called the principium, arche. The question of the nature of the relation between Being and beings can be answered in two ways. One is the monistic interpretation of reality, whereby the multiplicity of beings is either a mere illusion or appears to be the necessary result of the dialectical development of the original “absolute,” namely, of Being as self-existing and effective by itself. The whole of occidental philosophy was largely influenced by this monistic dream of the simple, undivided ‘one’ as the original principle that governs reality. Thus reality is either the result of some dialectical evolution or of a knowledge acquired at a lower level, as already mentioned in Parmenides when he characterizes the diversity of beings as the appearance of the one Being.27 The beings, in which Being itself unconceals itself, are to be understood as the last phase of that emanation which necessarily proceeds from the primordial (ἓν) via the λόγος as a multi-unit (ἓν καὶ πάντα) and into the world of multiplicity. The circular movement of the emanation brings the beings back in a retraction from the plurality (πάντα), via the λόγος (ἓν καὶ πάντα) and into the pleroma (ἓν).28

25

Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, ed., Vernunft, Kontingenz und Gott: Konstellationen eines offenen Problems (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); Michael Makropoulos, Modernität und Kontingenz (München: Fink, 1997). 26 “In this scheduling of thinking toward beings, however, the power of the ‘forgotten Being’ necessarily asserts itself. The ‘Being of the existent,’ as that which is unifying in what is different, can, of course, no longer be understood as an actuality that comes from God and governs the creature throughout. Thus, the unifying bond between beings acquires an abstract or a conceptual, or even an ideal character. ‘Being-itself’ becomes a pure concept, which initially still participates in divine ‘ideality’; however, this concept urges itself to become a ‘spawn’ (concept) of ‘pure reason’ and to share a spawn’s formal as well as potential nature. What is likely to happen, if this thinking, which is empowered by the divine spirit, gets in motion in its participatory ideality as well as in its univocal rationality without the assurance and the firm base of the tradition of faith as ‘pure philosophy’ or ‘absolute science’?” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger, 146. 27 Cf. David C. Jacobs, ed., The Pre-Socratics after Heidegger (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999); Jochen Schlüter, Heidegger und Parmenides: Ein Beitrag zu Heideggers Parmenidesauslegung und zur Vorsokratiker-Forschung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979. 28 Cf. Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998). 290

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The other possibility arises from the pluralism of beings, the main problem of which is that the diversity of real existing beings is linked to their original source, to what is called Being in the full sense. In relation to the original Being, the derivative being is also a kind of Being, which nevertheless depends essentially and necessarily on the first one. The nature of Being’s connections was not analyzed with due attention by the post-Socratics, either on a monistic or a pluralistic basis.29 The relation between Being as the original source and the beings has been forgotten, as Heidegger rightly notes. Moreover, later on, no attention was paid to this issue. Only Plotinus turns to this problem, namely when he attempts to resolve the Platonic aporia of the relation of all ideas to the idea of goodness, to which all ideas (in the dialogue of Parmenides) are assigned. This attempt found expression in his theory of gradual emanationism, in which he described the source of all beings as “the one.”30 Cusanus’ central notion of unity could be seen here as a basis for a true pluralism of Being, in relation to the Absolute, whereby each individual being is a differentiated partial expression of the Absolute.31 The experience of Being and beings is the simplest and most natural thing to have for every thinking subject. However, the attempt to describe Being brings a host of difficulties with it.32 On the one hand, and in order to distinguish Being from beings, one has to agree on some boundary which allows one to include a non-Being in one’s thinking. On the other hand, one can determine Being only if it is grounded on something that is very close to it and self-evident. However, this difficulty is insurmountable because Being is already what is closest to human beings, as they encounter it as the simplest thing to experience in everyday life.33 29

From the pre-Socratic tradition one can mention the natural philosophy of Tales, Heraclitus and Zeno of Elea. For Heraclitus, reality was a connection of various elements organized by the Λόγος. For the Eleates, the relationship between Being and beings was clearly aligned with the original Being. For Parmenides the beings were attainable only in a recognition of Being at a lower level. Cf. Norbert A. Luyten, ed., Wege zum Wirklichkeitsverständnis (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1982). 30 Cf. John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Louvain: Peeters, 2000). 31 Cf. Clyde Lee Miller, Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2003). 32 “Being, therefore, is not determined by thought from its origin, and is limited, for man, in terms of his modal way of comprehending. It is not a concept, nor an abstraction or an idea or a category, nor is it encompassed by an abstract kind of totality. All comprehension and abstract thinking is actually situated and happens in what is most primordial in Being-thatis-present, whose totality and unity conceals and withholds itself in the nearness to existence, just as it declares itself immediately in the difference of a being, due to its undifferentiatedness.” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 57. 33 Forging ahead to reach Being is, according to Siewerth, connected with experiencing existence. When he writes about “Being, as an event of existence,” he specifies what he really means by Being: “This Being is in fact no concept, no universe, no whole, nothing objective and nothing that is contrary in an adverse way, no subject-object relation, no epitome of allthat-is, nothing that is universal and not the totality of existence, it is not an idea and no 291

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The effort of describing Being brings with it the question of whether the concept of Being is a real concept that belongs to the ontic ordering of things, or whether it is only a concept of thinking that belongs to the realm of logic. In addition, however, one still knows of the ontological order, in which the nature of Being is recognized by an act of the intellect. Conceptus entis, ratio entis, and realitas entis can actually be objects which are understood in the act of thinking, as well as a kind of Being that is intentional in its nature. Siewerth is a particularly interesting author, who takes to speaking in important philosophical and contemporary historical debates and exerts considerable influence on the general analysis of the occidental intellectual heritage. In many philosophical circles, especially the German ones, he is regarded as a speculative thinker of the highest order, as a supporter of Thomas Aquinas and as a connoisseur of Hegel and Heidegger.34 Referring to the forgetfulness of Being, Siewerth adopts Heidegger’s basic themes but maintains that Aquinas was the last great philosopher who was aware of Being and had seen the importance of the question of Being and the constitution of Being.35 The solution proposed by Thomas was not only forgotten by later philosophers, but also in the cultural history as such and in general. The reason for this was the epistemology and logic of Duns Scotus, whose philosophy, in Siewerth’s opinion, had been followed by the whole European tradition. This tradition came to a close with the Hegelian system of philosophy and is thus responsible for the destruction of metaphysics by German Idealism.36 For Siewerth, the thinking about Being under the aspect of the difference in Being is the culmination of metaphysical speculative thinking. With his constant efforts to advance the transcendental interpretation of Being and its precedents, Siewerth attempts to fulfill Heidegger’s assignment to do justice to Being ideal, not the absolute spirit and not God.... It is Being-itself, in which everything that exists is situated and lives, proceeding from it in such a way.” Ibid., 105. 34 Cf. Tourpe, “‘Actualité’ et ‘potentialité’ de Gustav Siewerth,” 146-155. Cf. Idem, Siewerth ‘après’ Siewerth: Le lien idéal de l’amour dans le thomisme spéculatif de Gustav Siewerth et la visée d’un réalisme transcendantal; idem, “Différence ontologique et différence ontothéologique : Introduction à la pensée de Gustav Siewerth I,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 3 (1995): 331-369; idem, “Connaissance et transcendance: Introduction à la pensée de Gustav Siewerth II,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 1 (1996): 92-133; idem, “Gustav Siewerth et la métaphysique. Libres approches. Introduction et présentation,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 2 (1997): 201-212; idem, “Ens et bonum convertuntur: Introduction à la pensée de Gustav Siewerth III,” ibid., 254-278; idem, “La divine tragédie: Le christianisme et le tragique selon le jeune Gustav Siewerth,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica 91 (1999): 372-386. 35 Cf. Neidl, “Gustav Siewerth (1903-1963),” 249-272, especially, 257-271. 36 A succinct presentation of Siewerth’s basic approach to the further development of Aquinas’ way of thinking about Being is offered by Johannes B. Lotz, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes,” in Wolfgang Behler, ed., Gustav Siewerth zum Gedächtnis (Freiburg i.Br.: Pädag. Hochschule, 1989), 23-40. 292

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in its being-Being: “This interpretation of the meaning in Being culminates in the discussion of the ‘difference between Being and being,’ named by Martin Heidegger as that essential assignment to philosophical contemplation which could break open the narrowed horizons of contemporary philosophy and reopen the hidden or forgotten origin of philosophical questioning.”37 The identity of God’s creative act with Being and being moves Siewerth to think about the constitution of Being. The ontological difference is not added to the thinking of Being. It belongs to the essence of Being and is connected with the constitution of Being-itself. It expresses the difference between Being and beings. Siewerth is not interested in any ontic difference (between that which is given in Being), nor in any logical difference (between that which is given in thinking), because both differences presuppose a false concept of Being. Thinking about Being is metaphysical thinking only insofar as it does not forget the ontological difference. There are basically two paths that can be taken to achieve this: the path of considering the difference that exists between Being and being, or that of considering the question of the nature of the ontological difference. Being is present in beings but ontologically different from the latter: Being is in beings, it governs them and keeps them in the unity of their reality, whereby it brings them at the same time into luminous brightness as well as into effective reality, without having to fit them into one whole as if they were passive building blocks. Therefore, this Being, which holds on to the difference between it and the beings is not the same as the beings, but neither can it be detached from them in the sense in which beings are separated from other beings.38 Being is not just the simple element mediated in the constitution of Being, the transition, the place through which the creative power flows in order to call beings into Being. It is precisely by having the character of being a likeness of God, that the Being of a being communicates itself to those who are and lives in them, yet without identifying with them. However, one needs to underline the otherness of the relation between Being and beings very clearly when comparing it with the relation between beings, for this is precisely where the essence of the ontological difference shows. The latter is simply what belongs most intimately to Being, that is, it does not express itself solely in the ontological process of its constitution. Siewerth writes: The ‘analogy of Being’ analogically [refers] to the real unity and the real difference in the Being of beings toward God and [means] a ‘similarity’ of Gustav Siewerth, Grundfragen der Philosophie im Horizont der Seinsdifferenz (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1963), 7. 38 Gustav Siewerth, Philosophie der Sprache (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), 94. 37

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both [...]. For, the ‘similarity’ essentially signifies ‘not equality’ and thus also ‘dissimilarity,’ which rules in the Being of beings and therefore simply destroys Being in its analogy, as a ‘non-ending dissimilarity,’ and identifies it with ‘nothingness.’ However, ‘nothingness,’ like ‘evil,’ is not to be found in Being, but only in the mind that thinks of, or strives for, nothingness.39 It may, therefore, be said that the ontological difference forms the basis of the constitution of Being and makes the difference between Being and beings possible. Forgetting the ontological difference makes the comprehension of Beingitself impossible. According to Siewerth, having an insight into the nature of the ontological difference opens the horizon to a description of Being, and to human persistence in remaining in the light of Being in its perfection. Siewerth claims that, when it comes to naming the term used, one could also speak of the “concept of Being” in Thomas. His differentiation was based on the conception of the analogy of Being, wherever it is a question of understanding the univocity of concepts. Yet if it is about perception, not in the sense of statements made about objects, but of judgments reached, one must emphasize that Thomas then has no useful concept of Being (conceptus entis). Rather, he seeks for a description of Being (conceptio entis), which Siewerth calls a discerning comprehension.40 Siewerth says of Thomas’ epistemology and theory of abstraction that it forms a necessary metaphysical phase in the cognitive process but should not be absolutized separately. The basis of our knowledge is always the general apprehension of Being; only in its framework do we come to the knowledge of beings: Therefore, there can be no ‘concepts’ at the beginning of our thinking. However, if Being (ens) is the first content in our reason, it follows that there can be no ‘conceptus entis’ but only a ‘conceptio entis,’ not a concept of Being but only a comprehension of Being. All comprehension or cognition, however, takes place in a ‘judgment’ and an ‘inference,’ whose nature is not that of ‘linking concepts,’ but of showing the ‘real’ that ‘is’ in its manifestation, i.e., to reveal it as ‘true’ and to confirm it.41 The grasping of Being, its cognition, thus does not take place by means of a priori concepts or through any logical relations between them. The reason for knowing remains the relation between Being and thinking but stays clear of any logical 39

Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 435. “From this it follows that for Thomas the ‘intended Being’ is not a ‘concept’ at all, but a conceptio, that is, a judging kind of understanding. a discerning comprehension.” Ibid., 158. 41 Gustav Siewerth, “Die Abstraktion und das Sein nach der Lehre des Thomas von Aquin,” in idem, Sein und Wahrheit, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, GW1, ed. Wolfgang Behler (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1975), 586-587. 40

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link-ups between concepts. It is, rather, the revelation of that which is, exists and is present. For Siewerth, conceptio entis means an absolute necessity for thinking, actually of metaphysical thinking. Because of his/her nature, the human person is, among all creatures, the closest to the truth. From their origins, persons recognize truth intuitively. In fact, Being appears to the human person in its actual structure: This process is described by Thomas as ‘intuitive’ comprehension of ‘the principles of Being.’ ‘Intuition’ here means ‘direct insight,’ which always has the mediating rational discourse with itself and behind itself and therefore is practically like an assured understanding of a being without lacking in judgment. This understanding is the first content of our reason, enabling us to all further cognition and thinking, which, therefore, leaves behind, at the origin, the ‘abstracting enlightenment’ of the intelligible forms by the active mind, as well as its immediate, quidditative acceptance (simplex apprehensio) and only, comes to ‘own’ them as constitutive elements of the judging, intuitive recognition of the truth of Being, without specifically becoming aware of this truth. Furthermore, this completion of our knowledge embraces the consequences of abstraction and perception and holds them where they essentially belong, in metaphysical thinking.42 Essential, for Siewerth, is to find proof that no complete concept of Being has been presented, either in his understanding of epistemology or in Aquinas, or that Being-as-Being is thematized conceptually. Being is not about to seize or to get hold of something, rather, it shows itself to beings in self-giving: Being is simple and universal; it is the highest kind of concept—but, at the same time, it conflicts with conceptual universality through its transcendentality and all-embracing wideness (which includes all single things), by letting go of what is abstracted in generalities, at the same time holding (the difference closely to itself, that is, closely in the pure element of Being. As such, Being is not detachable from subsistence. That is why Being is the empowerment of thinking, its first, most general and most certain knowledge, and at the same time its radical removal from subjectivity and conceptuality into the subsistence of what is real.43 Being, in its perfection, gathers together all differences into one, but is, at the same time, differentiated from them. The more differentiated thinking about Being becomes, the clearer is the impossibility of gaining access to a logical concept in the process of cognition: “At first it seems that in the word Being and being, 42 43

Ibid., 588. Gustav Siewerth, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes,” in idem, Sein und Wahrheit, 664. 295

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nothing is named but the highest ‘abstraction,’ which ignores—as is the usual manner for general concepts—everything that is special, individual, the specieslike, and the generic.”44 Even in the simplest conception, neither Being nor being exclude themselves completely from one another: “But Being and being-Being do not stop in this conceptual and generic generality; well, it even basically conflicts with such a generalization or conceptualization in need of being determined.”45 Being is not a concept of the understanding that can be determined and objectified in relation to beings.46 Being does not allow itself to be actualized through conceptualization or an unfolding of its content, on the way to its realization. The conceptio entis, developed by Siewerth as the notion of judging comprehension, shows that beings can only be understood when one looks from the side of Being. The being-present of Being is the condition for every conceptual understanding of Being (when understood as the origin and basis of all-that-is), as well as of every individual being. Being is not present in the concept of Being; also, it is not possible to understand Being in the concept itself. In the proof that Being always remains the same, that it communicates itself, that the thinking of Being (Seinsdenken) is more essential than the thinking about Being, we recognize how thoroughly we are caught up, like prisoners, within the mystery of Being. The linguality of Being talks to humans in the language of the human being: it is the language of Being that challenges humans to dialogue and understanding. Only the access into comprehending Being in its original structures, not the alienation from Being due to any kind of conceptual constriction, makes possible a metaphysics as envisioned by Siewerth. The conceptio entis allows us to “accept” Being in its “now,” which constitutes the history of Being and which is actualized in beings and by beings. When comparing the medieval conception of Aquinas’s philosophy with Heidegger’s attempt to describe Being, it suggests itself that a carrying forward of the efforts of both thinkers would be beneficial; though, of course, it promises certain peculiarities. Siewerth tries to show that, as far as Being can be reduced, for Thomas, to a sum of perfections, to infinity and the absence of any defects, for

44

Ibid., 659. Ibid. 46 “According to its origin and its inner sense, [Being is] not a concept of the understanding, or a content of meaning inherent in the thinking subject, a content which is predicated or objectified as a possible intentio logica on things or circumstances. Rather, we think Being essentially and fundamentally the Being-in-itself or the subsistence of existing real things. A non-real, ‘pure idea of Being,’ or Being as a mere concept, as a possible logical content, as a species in need of being determined or as a category, is therefore a mindless contradiction that is self-destructive. Therefore, whoever thinks Being or being is always in judging mode with things and never with his/her concepts. Thus, from the very origins of our thinking, there is no concept of Being, but only a judging comprehension of Being (conceptio entis).” Ibid., 659-660. 45

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Heidegger it must be linked to concrete forms of existence. However, if one forgets the ontological difference, thinking about Being becomes identical with the conceptual perception of Being. Ultimately, Being is a mystery. Siewerth links Aquinas’ and Heidegger’s understanding of Being at this very juncture. While for Thomas, Being, in the end, is an esse per se, i.e., God, for Heidegger, it cannot possibly be God.47 Siewerth, on the other hand, seeks to link both positions and develops his conception of Being as the likeness of God. He takes on, from Thomas, that the actus purus is God, whereas his Being, as the likeness of God, is an actus essendi. The Forgetfulness of Being as the Fate of Metaphysics Siewerth devoted The Fate of Metaphysics to the hope of reconciling the philosophical views of Heidegger and Thomas Aquinas. Like Heidegger, Siewerth realized that the forgetfulness of Being is the source of the greatest mishap in the history of metaphysics, indeed, that it seals the fate of metaphysics. The history of metaphysics is the story of its decline. Owing to the tension that comes from seeing the light of flickering embers while pursuing individual destinies and having gone astray, history is formed.48 Siewerth’s philosophy consists of constant questioning of Being. Only such a philosophy is not threatened with falling into the chasm of the forgetfulness of the origin.49 Persistence in staying near the In Humanismusbrief, Heidegger writes: “Yet Being—what is Being? It is Itself. To experience and to say this, must be learnt by future thinking. ‘Being’—it is neither God, nor a basis for a world. Being is wider than all-that-is, and yet it is closer to man than any being that exists, whether it be a rock, an animal, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is what is closest.” Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 328). The previous metaphysics, the metaphysics of the forgetfulness of Being, thought God and Being in such a way that it was, for Heidegger, the greatest blasphemy: “The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values, does not know what it is about. If one proclaims ‘God’ altogether as ‘the highest value,’ that is a belittling of the nature of God. Thinking in terms of value is here or at other times the greatest blasphemy that can be conceived concerning Being.” Ibid., 345-346. 48 “Going astray therefore springs from the ‘forgetfulness of Being,’ in which ‘the difference between Being and being’ remains ‘forgotten’ and is no longer considered.” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 58. “Without the going astray, there would be no relations from one fate to another, and there would be no history. Although chronological intervals and causal scrambles for attention belong to storytelling, they are not history. We are neither at a great distance from the Greeks, nor at a small distance from them. But we stand on the wrong foot concerning the Greeks.” Heidegger, Holzwege, 333. 49 “We must always keep up with this simple-minded ‘collection’ in thinking mode, so that the ‘Being of beings’ remains in focus. Whoever were to abstract ‘Being’ from being and detached it from opened existence, would at the same time close off the original and actual place of his/her illumination, insofar as Being ‘is present’ and ‘lights up’ only in existing things, manifesting itself in the complex happening of existence in its unifying and opening 47

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source, a constant return to the origins, and going assiduously round in circles in order to find some enlightenment concerning Being, are the only possibility for useful philosophizing.50 The history of Being begins with its being forgotten. The difference between Being-itself and the Being of beings remains forgotten. Metaphysics speaks of Being and the concrete object in one, forgetting the difference between them: Being-itself, which is different from the Being of beings. Forgetting the ontological difference is a crucial event in the history of metaphysics.51 According to Heidegger, however, one should not speak of a fate of metaphysics that is its own fault,52 which is how Siewerth speaks of it. The peculiarity of Heidegger’s notion of forgetfulness is to regard the latter as a fate, a notion that is derived from comprehending history as if it were not history but a happening (in the sense of taking place, geschehen), instead of comprehending it as destiny, as an epochal event (in the sense of fate or destiny, Geschick).53 The story is fundamentally no longer historical but viewed, as from the future, as being-historical (seynsgeschichtlich) and interpreted as an event. The forgetfulness of Being is the fate of metaphysics because it has lost its very nature from the very beginning. The utter terminological confusion, when asking and answering metaphysical questions, has led classical metaphysics to move in circles concerning its loss of essential credibility. The overcoming of this vicious circle is Heidegger’s only hope, and he, therefore, wants to see it done and dusted by saying goodbye to metaphysics altogether. nature. Furthermore, it conceals itself before ‘pure thinking.’” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 56. 50 Cf. an interesting account of Siewerth’s understanding of the history of metaphysics in the context of the postmodern debate on pluralism: Stephan Grätzel: “Das Schicksal der Metaphysik und seine Deutung durch Gustav Siewerth,” in Reifenberg and van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt, 199-209. 51 “The forgetfulness of the difference, with which the fate of Being begins in order to complete itself in this fate, is nevertheless no defect, but the richest and widest-ranging event in which the occidental history of the world is settled. It is the event of metaphysics. What is the case now, stands in the shadow of the already accomplished fate of the forgetfulness of Being.” Heidegger, Holzwege, 360. 52 “But now metaphysics constantly speaks about Being in the most varied modifications. Metaphysics itself awakens and secures the appearance that it had been instrumental in asking as well as answering the question of Being. But metaphysics does not answer the question of the truth of Being anywhere at all, because it never asks this question. It does not ask, because it only ‘thinks’ Being, when presenting beings as beings. Metaphysics means allthat-is as a whole yet speaks of Being. It mentions Being and means a being as just that. The assertions of metaphysics move from beginning to end in a strange way, in a continuous confusion between beings and Being. Of course, this confusion is to be thought as a happening, not as a fault.” Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 11. 53 Cf. two essays by Heidegger, originally unpublished: “Die Geschichte des Seyns” from 1938/40, and “Koinon. Aus der Geschichte des Seyns” from 1939/40. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA 69, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). 298

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Out of the forgetfulness of Being springs the going astray, that is the fate of metaphysics. Siewerth raises the question of the necessity for this error and its causes. If Heidegger’s thesis is to be accurate, Siewerth sees the need to accuse God himself for having allowed the appearance of the forgetfulness, because we are living at a time when God has already revealed himself to the world in his Word-Son: What does it mean, then, that the ‘history of Being necessarily begins with the forgetfulness of Being’? What is the basis for such a necessity? If, however, man does not decide regarding the ‘arrival of the gods and the history of Being- itself,’ and if the ‘shepherd of Being’ failed to take proper care and good shepherding of Being seriously, is then not everything necessarily dependent on God’s Word and healing act?54 Siewerth describes the going astray as decay and tries to explain it with the forgetfulness of the original structure of Being. He sees one chance of getting reconciled with Heidegger’s interpretation of the fate of metaphysics in accepting the necessity for the decay as a need and a necessitation to return to the true source of philosophy: “Is then in fact not everything dependent on all this answering, gathering correspondence, that is, on the revelation of the basis, by which Being, as essentially his likeness in everything that ‘illumines’ thinking,’ is filled with itself and toward him?”55 Siewerth tries to interpret Heidegger in such a way that it might be possible to reconcile the Christian history of salvation with the fate of the forgetfulness of Being. In interpreting history as a destiny, Siewerth combines the stages of history throughout which God revealed Himself to the world. In the light of Revelation, he seeks to identify a specific plan of God’s, in which both the meaning of God and of the Church can become visible in history as such.56 Siewerth links the testimony of philosophy and Revelation and sees in the linkage a chance to overcome

54

Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 133. Ibid., 134. 56 “The course of occidental history harbors a divine-human destiny, in all its phases, that puts every qualifying positive or negative label in its place. It is therefore necessary to look into the mystery of the spirit and of history by means of the fate of the forgetfulness of Being, inasmuch as, in the straying days, the irresolvability and untouchability of Revelation and its establishment in the pastoral task of the Church as well as the faith and love of Christendom, become all the clearer. The course of the Church is not a straightforward unfolding of her divine heritage, but she stands herself, as a fellow-sufferer, in the mystery of the eschatological course of history. She is given the task to share the fate of the world in faith and in love, not only to endure her visitations (often close to home), but to turn them as best she can with a ‘creative mind,’ without thereby eschewing the cross of abandonment and weakness. For such a turn cannot happen without the redeeming power of the Cross.” Ibid., 263. 55

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the metaphysics of aberration without having to abandon the basic elements of the classical reflection on Being: How would it be, if God himself illumined the truth of Being and the difference in Being itself, and if, furthermore, the belonging-together of man and Being were cleared in the kind of dimension that, with a ‘solid word’ from Him, the ‘house of Being and of man’ were then a given, and that everything that wants to ‘let-be’ and arranges the understanding in thinking would then sink into helpless embarrassment before the historically ruling fate of Being? Could not all understanding letting-be be called, at the same time, into the ‘most intimate intimacy’ of being one with a ‘divinely-unifying One’ in a ‘last asunderness,’ and every merely thinking arrangement be condemned to impotence vis-à-vis any ‘humanly-impossible-to-unify’ situation? Accordingly, could the forgetfulness of Being not be rooted in an abstruse decision and turning away—in ‘a being-controversial-in-Being,’—out of a divinely designed or admitted discord, whose ultimate horizons and excesses are God’s and his will’s, which rests on Being but remains beyond understanding to the thinker?57 Siewerth’s interest in the dialectics of German Idealism enables him to work out an antithesis to the history of metaphysics that traces the course of the reconciling role of contradiction proclaimed by Hegel together with Heidegger’s suggestion to understand the forgetfulness of Being as a fate. According to Hegel, the world is shaped by the wonderful principle of contradiction. Reconciliation is not in his mind as a striving to overcome contradiction. Rather, Hegel was intent on portraying the disclosure of any contradiction between good and evil, infinite and finite, truth and untruth, love and hatred, as being only an apparent one. Siewerth paints his own original picture of the history of the forgetfulness of Being in metaphysics, which can be traced back to, and sees, the erring period as a repetition of man’s original guilt vis-à-vis God. In his interpretation, he assumes that contradiction is to be understood as a consequence of original sin and thus contradicts Hegel, who places contradiction in the structure of Being itself. 58 It is, 57 58

Ibid., 134-135. “Hegel in fact already took the path to his later solution in his Jugendwerk (his early writings). In that the Absolute or the All of Life has its fullness and movement in that it recovers itself from its finite forms and manifestations to its pure life-unity in cognitively illumined love, by Hegel reconstructing this process philosophically, in the end, and defining ‘the contradictions’ (in speculative understanding) as the domain of ‘reflective’ good sense or ‘reason,’ from which the speculative good sense reverts to pure life-unity, he has in fact empowered philosophy to be part of the generality of this life, and so does not need to take any further step later on. Even though philosophy itself is not yet the actual driving, dissolving, overcoming, generating depth of the universal mind, all forms and possibilities have been addressed and circumscribed by it, at least negatively.” Gustav Siewerth, “Der Widerspruch

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therefore, necessary for Siewerth to include the suggestions from the Bible if he wants to overcome the difficulties arising from the erroneous metaphysical decisions in thinking of Being-itself.59 Siewerth tries to reconcile Heidegger’s approach with his own position and sets his hope on Revelation, as it is a theological a priori for him. 60 It is safe to say that the key to Siewerth’s interpretation of the fate of metaphysics is to be found in the Christian message. This is particularly clear in the interpretation of the chance to overcome the forgetfulness of Being as a Christian event: We are confronted with the task to uncover this unthinkable of thinking and to understand the fate of occidental philosophy as a ‘Christian event,’ without thereby dissipating its content, which has been determined by Being and the being of things (all-that-is), and its truth. For all philosophy, even in its empowerment by the Word of God, remains in the all-encompassing and primordial nature of Being and thus in something insurmountable, out of which it moves and thinks itself in necessity and with rigor.61 The Christian has special access to the Revelation; it is the source of the surest instruction about the original unity of all creation with God, which was lost through the guilt of man. This unity is the measure of the relationship between God and the human being, which is shaped in its present form throughout history. Getting as far as Being by thinking, which has only become possible through the human mind being enlightened by the Word of God, means participation in the im Werk des jüngeren Hegels,” in idem, Gott in der Geschichte, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, GW3, ed. Alma von Stockhausen (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1971), 110. 59 Under the title “The Word of God from Creation as the Empowerment of Thought,” Siewerth writes: “From such a perspective, the word of God, i.e., his self-testimony, is also always an event in the fate of Being in its thinking. [...]. Are then beings and Being itself not essentially in the realm of the presence of ‘Revelation,’ coming from an eternal clearing for a luminous perception? Is then the event of the Being of beings not the ‘primordial talk of the mind with the spirit,’ which will not end and will one day be completed with the loving conversation of our hearts in the Holy Spirit, which is truly the ‘clearing of the truth’? This conversation is, of course, necessarily bound up with the lasting ‘conversatio mutua’ of divine-human friendship and becomes an incalculable danger when the ‘living God of faith’ simply becomes the a priori of thinking.” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 608. 60 To pose the transcendental-philosophical question about the possibility of Revelation is one of the important tasks of fundamental theology. Cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, ed. Hansjürgen Verweyen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998). Karl Rahner attempted to show, in a transcendental-philosophical way, that man, because of his referred dependence on God, is obliged to reckon with a historical Revelation. Rahner claims that the basic human constitution, shaped by transcendentality, is revelation. Cf. Karl Rahner, Geist in Welt: philosophische Schriften, ed. Albert Raffelt, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf: Benziger, 1996) and idem, Hörer des Wortes: Schriften zur Religionsphilosophie und zur Grundlegung der Theologie, ed. Albert Raffelt (Düsseldorf: Benziger, 1997). 61 Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 83. 301

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absolute truth, at the source of truth.62 Siewerth’s point of view is a haunting confirmation of Catholic dogmatics. In The Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, he states that the history of the world is a constant stride in the perspective of the mystery of original sin.63 Siewerth does not take sin to be a subjective event that affects only the individual believer. The history of the world, and the human being in the world, is the story of the ever-new turning away from God, of walking in the darkness of sin. It is an objectification of original sin, which is the source of every sin and all calamity. The forgetfulness of Being, which permeates the whole of philosophy, results for Siewerth as a consequence of this guilt, which governs the whole world. He tries, at all costs, to attribute the decay of metaphysics and the misfortune of the world to the guilt of man, who remains caught up in the slavery of sin. In his analysis of the history of philosophy, and by highlighting the aspect of the forgetfulness of Being as the center of metaphysical thinking, Siewerth rejects all existing attempts to besmirch the reputation of metaphysics, which can be traced back to the dialectics of German Idealism, itself prepared for by the late Scholastic theologizing metaphysics. This negative attitude can be understood, insofar as it makes possible a decisive clarification for the Christian standpoint in philosophy. This offers him the opportunity to see salvation and reconciliation only in God, whose revelation is the pivot of history.64 Siewerth only sees the “Existence which is thinking of Being, is, in the Word of God, shown more deeply into the mystery of the Being of beings and consolidated in it for perseverance, in such a way that possibilities are now opened up, clarified and secured in the historical course of the thinking mind.... At the same time, however, this fact opens up a completely new position, provided that the epistemology governing the faith itself does not leave behind for any moment or in any form the ‘participation in the first truth,’ which is intrinsic to one’s own thinking when informed by Being, but makes its light more luminous, elevating it to the light of the ‘reality of all realities,’ which has been revealed.” Ibid., 142. 63 “Thus, the history of unredeemed pagan humanity, in the midst of a grand unfolding of natural gifts and faculties, is a process of increasing confusion of realms of Being, of agonizingly aggravated ethical tasks, of a hidden dissolution and weakening of the higher organizing powers of the mind in favor of vital (or zestful) inclinations, of a progressive turning away from God and an awakening obscuration of his original and holy nature. For, a painful and senselessly confused world no longer bears the image of eternal goodness for all to see, it is no longer a symbolic revelation of its holy nature. In its twisting and destroying, existence can no longer be related to a holy God as the creative world-ground, and therefore it disrupts the idea of the absolute more than it reveals it.” Gustav Siewerth, Christliche Erbsündelehre (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1964), 54-55. 64 “The appearance of the Word, therefore, was not preceded by the greatest illumination of Being, but by a kind of separation from God or the divine, inasmuch as the somatic and psychic remnants of demonic demiurges pushed in where human existence had enjoyed the pneumatic good of truth and salvation. Without Christ’s appearance there would be nothing but this terrible tragedy of thinking, its turn into nihilistic gnosis.” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 611. “Salvation is the source and center of a reconstituting and reunifying, a resurrecting humanity, which had done, in the world moment of the ‘fullness of time,’ what 62

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radicalization of the forgetfulness of Being as having taken shape in late Scholastic philosophy. He does not really go back to the Greeks, to see how they shaped their thoughts. Yet because of the Greek understanding of metaphysics, the Christian understanding of Being as creation was accomplished, though not without theologizing metaphysics, whereby the entity of a being was derived directly from the creative ground. Being was nevertheless forgotten, as the mediating mediation that is not illumined in the clearing of Being but is obscured (or concealed).65 Siewerth explains: The roots of this happening are well known. They seem to be philosophical at first, if the thinking after Thomas, influenced by the commentator Avicenna, brought to an end the metaphysics of Aristotle in the Ousia of beings or the formally determined ‘beingness’ (essentia) as such. It was radicalized by the fact that the difference between essence and Being, which arose in Thomas, urged thought into reaching an unambiguous and agreed version of ‘Being as such’ in the scholarly confrontation. Moreover, it gained its characteristic in the Platonizing Augustinian theology, in which human knowledge was interpreted as a participation in the ideal light of the deity. And finally, this essential metaphysics comes to completion, albeit ‘theologically,’ inasmuch as the thinking person is looking back to the created essences, thinking them from out of the theologically obvious and creative view as being called by the deity to eternal bliss, interpreting them from the point of view of their created nature as well as their possible knowledge of God and vision of God. It turned out, however, that the failing “Being of beings” left only the theological advance toward the ground of God and toward his ideality—which makes beings possible—as a possibility of preserving the philosophy of essences from decay into a merely finite phenomenology.66 Siewerth accuses Scotus and Suarez of having misunderstood the role played by Revelation, whereupon the thinking of Being is replaced by theological speculation.67 Siewerth sees the chance for overcoming the forgetfulness of Being in the it was able to do, and was about to succumb to the pagan attitudes in mystical terms of the Orient... When seen from this point of view, the appearance of Christ proves to be the great creative moment of history. He signifies the salvation and exaltation of ancient civilizations, which historically steps up to us as the reality of Western civilization.” Siewerth, Christliche Erbsündelehre, 72. 65 Cf. Schulz, Überlegungen zur ontologischen Grundfrage in Gustav Siewerths Werk “Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger,” especially “Die vermittelnde Mitte und Brücke: das Sein als Weg zu Gott,” 21-26. 66 Gustav Siewerth, Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend, in idem, GW3, 143-144. 67 “This thinking of Being retains its importance also for a believing thinking, since in Being an ultimate and insurmountable degree of actuality and of grounding, all-encompassing and 303

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meeting of philosophy with Revelation and, instead of saying goodbye to classical metaphysics, as Heidegger does, he postulates the acceptance of Revelation as the empowerment of thinking and the apprehension of Being.68 The interpretation of the history of metaphysics makes Siewerth elevate the fact of God’s Incarnation in history to a hermeneutic criterion. In the history of the world and the individual history of each person, sin generates new sin, that is, misfortune expands potentially. However, it cannot be overlooked that God joined human history and its story of fallen humanity in the mystery of the birth and death of Christ. Therefore, the history of the world is not just a story of decay and distancing of, or from, God, but also the story of his redeeming love. When clarifying the relationship between philosophy and Revelation, Siewerth speaks against the incontrovertibility of the fate of world history or the history of philosophy.69 His main question, however, is still the question of guilt for the fate of metaphysics: This question is all the more weighty, as the going astray in our time and the eschaton of the ‘discharge of Being,’ as well as the terrifying ‘fate of the death of God’ belongs, in God’s own testimony, to the essence of the divine word prophecies, at least in part to its content, as the revelation of the mystery of evil.70 The fate of philosophy is a Christian event, and since his Thomism as the System of Identity, Siewerth endeavors to think the Being of beings and to trace Being back to God without going astray in onto-theological errors. The mature Siewerth profound depth is revealed; and it is illumined, in Revelation, not from outside, but from its own inescapable and inalienable transcendence. It is due to this fact that the original brightness cannot be extinguished, but co-determines, as an essential measure for (and to be used in) thinking, the theological permeation and unification of the truth which can only be received in faith.” Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 139-140. 68 “Such an encounter [with Revelation] must come from a theologically illumined metaphysics, provided it is aware of its nature and knows the ‘word of Revelation’ as a word that does not, as the Protestantism that is alienated from philosophy teaches, go forth in a person that is detached from historical existence, in a ‘punctum mathematicum’ (Luther) of the spirit, beyond any irretrievably decayed and darkened nature, but announces himself in the historical human space that is already illumined in its understanding of Being. In this way, He proves himself not only as a transcendental ‘salvation,’ but also as ‘salvific’ in a freely accepted and completed ‘course of salvation’ in history, preserving the truth that rests in thinking and illumining the pressing mystery of truth and empowering it anew.” Ibid., 82. 69 In determining the relationship between philosophy and Revelation, Siewerth is essentially influenced by the speculative Trinitarian theology, especially in relation to the difference between act and subsistence. Cf. Schulz, Sein und Trinität: Systematische Erörterungen zur Religionsphilosophie G.W.F. Hegels im ontologiegeschichtlichen Rückblick auf J. Duns Scotus und I. Kant und die Hegel-Rezeption in der Seinsauslegung und Trinitätstheologie bei W. Pannenberg, E. Jüngel, K. Rahner und H.U. v. Balthasar, 20-28. 70 Siewerth, Schicksal der Metaphysik, 135. 304

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makes it clear, without any doubt, that only a mind thinking in terms of the possible fate of Being, yet empowered by divine Revelation, can think the “divine God”: Is this thinking that is open to guessing or to being inspired anything other than the continuing grace of faith, which thinking believed to have safely left behind, on account of the unassailability and the impenetrability of Being? But can ‘Being’ be historically conceived as an ‘event’ as well as a ‘noncompliance,’ without at the same time opening it as being the right space for a divine revelation, which, in view of the appearance of having thought of the ‘holy’ indicates (at least to a thinking that is open to guessing or to being inspired) as a possibility? Because when Heidegger, together with Hölderlin and Jacob Böhme, thinks ‘God’ as the ‘joyful’ and the ‘delighted,’ to whom ‘the play of a freely swinging reverberation swings back in what is most decidedly nothing other than pure affinity’ with ‘the father,’ as a father who loves ‘to open and brighten,’ by allowing mortals to get an ‘inkling’ about the most original of any beginning, or by healing them when they are mourning, an inkling that all ‘mourning’ only comes from ‘past joy’; such saying then truly points to an ‘intimacy’ in the loving unity between God and man, which cannot be taken seriously (in one’s thinking and) in view of the real world, unless it be by the revealed fatherhood of creative love.71 To think Being in its being-Being means to correspond to the rigor of thinking the ontological difference. Illumining the history of the forgetfulness of Being as a destiny due to going astray in a critical way leads to having to rethink the difference between Being and being, and finally also to the transfer of the difference to the transcendent God, to whom the Being of beings has to be traced back. Philosophy becomes a transcendent ‘analogue.’ Philosophy can illumine the ground of beings only in the mode of the existing and by mediating itself and coming into presence in itself, but it cannot by itself become a ‘tasting touch’ of the ground, that is, become sapientia (wisdom). That is why there is a chasm between God and the world, between pure Being and a being, between the divine good and guilty-finite existence, which points philosophy toward the lack of substance of an esoteric endeavor or the expectation of a divine disclosure of Being. For this reason, it is part of the essence of the historical occurrence of the mind that philosophy cannot grasp or define the principle that governs it, i.e., the Being of beings, as well as the depth and the nature of the difference (between them). Its thinking remains attached to the order of essences and the immediacy of their 71

Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” in idem, GW3: 292. 305

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presence. It is in danger, in turn, of progressive decay, which, in the desperation of skepticism, reaches the highest degree of futile indifference. Therefore, only in the event of the Revelation of the creative spirit will ‘Being-itself,’ as well as the ‘absolute difference,’ become the empowerment of thinking, in which philosophy gets to its own essential nature in completing the God-willed and Being-historical ‘sacra doctrina.’72 The skipping of the difference in Being by metaphysics is a fate that “rules from a dialectics of thinking that is determined and empowered by Revelation and theology, so its turn is also, and essentially, a matter of contemplative thinking, which, by penetrating the difference between ‘Being and being,’ can cover the distance between them and catch up with this event in the occidental intellectual history in the deepest decision of its mind.”73 The overcoming of the forgetfulness of Being as a Christian event means, from Siewerth’s point of view, a return to true thinking about Being in its being-different. The tasks that Siewerth sets for metaphysics contain a new necessity: the search for the forgotten path, which is the way to ‘Being as the likeness of God.’ Siewerth’s Metaphysics as the Empowerment of Thinking In The Fate of Metaphysics, Siewerth looks upon Christian Revelation as the empowerment of thinking. As a theologically illumined metaphysics, it takes the “word of Revelation” as the word that “announces itself in the historical human space that is already illumined in its understanding of Being.”74 In this theologically empowered metaphysics, Siewerth tries to think the Being of beings, the actus essendi, as the mediating center between Being and God, between contingency and necessity. In this way, Siewerth also establishes the possibility of Divine Revelation. His metaphysics, in its philosophical orientation toward the Being of beings actually functioning as the mediating mediation between Being and God, was intended to show the possibility of acquiring knowledge of the totality of reality.75 The actus essendi is the mediating center of thinking and cannot be missed out by the Christian faith either. Being is always the Being of beings, illumination for, and behest of, existence in one, as well as the event of existence that opened the world. That is why, as light and as an act, Being is abandoned and forlorn, drawn out from Gustav Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend,” in idem, GW3: 140. Ibid., 200. 74 Cf. Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 82. 75 Cf. Manuel Cabada Castro, “El problema de la culpa y del ‘otro’ en Heidegger y Siewerth,” Pensamiento 47 (1991): 129-152; “Ser y Dios, entre filosofía y teología, en Heidegger y Siewerth,” ibid., 3-35. 72 73

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‘subsistence,’ from the event of existence and its sustained and lasting revelation, from the disclosure of its richness and its unifying power. It falls into the void and uniformity of something that is abstract and non-existent, if it is not an agreed and illumining being-present, as that which allows things to spring forth, as that which is self-sustaining, all-embracing and revealing, as that which shows itself in everything and is related to everything, as the all-releasing and all-happening, as the all-realizing and, at the same time, the all-surpassing and gathering-in-itself basis and abyss.76 In order to provide reasons for his theory of the forgetfulness of Being, and in order to make Being the most important question in philosophy, Siewerth starts from the trinitarian concept of God as given to us by Christian faith and Revelation. According to the Revelation and the subsequent theological tradition, God creates the world and preserves it through his Word. God reveals himself in his Word and creates everything through his Word. The very Word, the true likeness of the infinite richness of God, takes on the role of the mediator and establishes Being, which is stretched out over and between the abyss of the Being of God and the existence (Dasein) of beings. Siewerth’s speculation does not range so much in the direction of establishing what is exemplary—the Word is God’s first full expression—but to where it is a copy, that is, meant for everything that is created by God: omnia per ipsum facta sunt. This relationship was also called non-identity by Siewerth. In this view, beings depend indirectly on God’s Word, since the Word is the center. It is no coincidence that Siewerth handles the problem of guilt and, with it, personal responsibility.77 Human thinking was weakened by original sin and re76 77

Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 487. Siewerth’s interest in the problematics around the doctrine on original sin shows in his study that was published anonymously, due to the various prohibitions then in force: “Die christliche Erbsündelehre entwickelt und dargestellt aufgrund der Theologie des hl. Thomas von Aquin,” which appeared in Georg Feuerer, Adam und Christus als Gestaltkräfte und ihr Vermächtnis an die Menschheit. Zur christlichen Erbsündelehre (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder. 1939). It has been republished by Hans Urs von Balthasar (with his foreword) in Johannes Verlag, this time with Siewerth’s name, as Die christliche Erbsündelehre, Ensiedeln 1964. It is interesting to note that precisely this work was then translated into foreign languages: Gustav Siewerth: The Doctrine of Original Sin Developed and Presented in Accordance with the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Marc Oraison, ed., Sin (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 111-177. It is an English version of the French translation, cf. Gustav Siewerth, La doctrine chrétienne du péché originel: Developpée et exposée par référence à la théologie de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, in Marc Oraison, ed., Le Péché (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959), 169248. Another text in English is the translation of the chapter “The Primordial Grace as Part of the Essence of the Exemplary Human Being: The Inability of ‘Pure Nature,’” which appeared as “Original Sin and Concupiscence,” translated by Adrian Walker in Communio 27/1 (2000): 46-57. My own translation of “Being as Likeness of God” appeared as Wierciński, Philosophizing with Gustav Siewerth: A New German Edition with Facing Translation 307

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empowered by salvation.78 It is right here, in the problem of guilt and personal responsibility, where Siewerth differs from Heidegger’s interpretation of the forgetfulness of Being. For Siewerth, it came about by overcoming the human being’s thinking as a fate due to his/her inadequate view on Being.79 Only the thinking that is empowered by Revelation can comprehend Being in its depth. With Siewerth, Being is the mediating center, the way to God. He calls Being a supreme likeness of God,80 which nevertheless does not portray the Christian God, since “‘Being-itself,’ as a pure, simple, non-subsistent act, [is] not an ‘image’ of the ‘real God.’”81 Only the infinite movement of Being toward reality, which takes place within Being, is “the pure likeness of the Absolute.”82 Only if Being is understood as the mediating mediation between God and his creation, that is, as the likeness of God, can we escape the lunacies of our time and avoid the eschaton of the “dismissal of Being.”83 Siewerth writes: What is then closer than comprehending God himself as ‘the highest being,’ which exists out of itself, out of and because of its infinite essence, in fact, it exists as a ‘being’ directly opposite the other, formally individualized beings? Is it not a consequence, then, that the theological, faith-assured of “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes”/“Being as a Likeness of God,” and a study, “From Metaphor and Indication to Icon: The Centrality of the Notion of Verbum in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Lonergan, and Gustav Siewerth.” 78 “[Original sin] is an inner defect or weakness of the soul. Not a weakness in the sense that nature lacks something that belongs to it as part of it, but a weakness that overcomes a spiritual creature, inasmuch as it steps out from its originally intended place. A being that is on its own, having been detached from God, is necessarily burdened with original sinfulness (if it is not demonically evil), because it is no longer up to the divine depth of Being. That is why a purely natural state, without grace, is a state that may not and should not stand before God.” Siewerth, Die christliche Erbsündelehre, 29. 79 Grätzel, “Das Schicksal der Metaphysik und seine Deutung durch Gustav Siewerth,” 199209. 80 Cf. Gustav Siewerth, “Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes,” in idem, Sein und Wahrheit, 651-685; idem, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 472. For Siewerth’s 100th birthday, Johannes Verlag reissued this work to the public in an improved form. “All the important Thomas researchers of the present (and here again, beside Étienne Gilson and Johann B. Lotz, particularly the already mentioned ‘trio’ Fabro-Geiger-Siewerth, and here once again, most importantly Siewerth) have opposed this classification of Aquinas, which they mistakenly felt was a ‘verdict’ against him. Especially Siewerth, who, in his Fate of Metaphysics fully agrees (especially by agreeing with Heidegger’s account of it) with the forgetfulness of Being as the destiny of occidental metaphysics, and who believes that Thomas’s unique position can be justified by the circumstance that he has succeeded in a true ‘thinking-Being-as-such,’ such as has not existed either before or after him. In fact, his whole book serves primarily to strengthen this fundamental thesis.” Max Müller: Existenzphilosophie im geistigen Leben der Gegenwart (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1964), 239. 81 Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, 473. 82 Ibid., 474. 83 Ibid., 135. 308

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thinking of God does not look back on Being as Being, but on a self-made solid-base world of beings, in order to center this world only now absolutely in itself and directly in God by attaching it to God, since every speculative step from the beings to Being takes one straight to the divine ground in virtue of abstract concepts? Such thinking, that thinks out of the a priori presence of God assured in the faith and fits in all beings, as directly created, into a plan of construction and ordering that issues from God, is of course anchored in thoroughly theological roots and must indeed be understood as ‘forgetfulness of Being.’ However, the power of the ‘forgotten Being’ necessarily makes itself felt by the way it ends up in thinking toward the beings. The “Being of the being” can, of course, no longer be understood as (the) unifying in the different, as an actuality that governs the creature and comes from God.84 Siewerth criticizes the theological condition of metaphysics, which does without the ontological mediation of the finite toward God, as it thereby prevents immediate contact with God. Being is now conceived as an abstract concept, and thinking is merely fixed on beings. Thus, the destiny that awaits the modern mind and the philosophy of the forgetfulness of Being has been essentially determined already. Siewerth adds a new element to understanding Heidegger’s thinking, namely how he links his reflections on the primordiality of Being with the JudeoChristian revelation. The recognition of God the Creator in his relationship to the created world is for Siewerth a valuable stimulus, which allows him to take a guessing stab at the possibility of overcoming the forgetfulness of Being as a Christian event. Siewerth’s metaphysics, founded on his philosophy on Being and theologically permissible, is an attempt to penetrate to the comprehension of Being and to illumine it in its original structures. That is why Siewerth’s illumining of Being is based upon the conceptio entis. Coming off the conceptio entis (as an attempt to describe Being), gives us the key to the forgetfulness of Being (as a forgetting of the source for any kind of metaphysics). Though Siewerth’s view of Being is highly speculative, because it implies the acceptance of Christian Revelation as the root of philosophizing in general, it is also the path he takes from primordial Being right up to illumining the existing multiplicity of beings. Is there any other than the Heideggerian path that one can take, to describe—with the help of what is disputable in Being—the dramatic forgetfulness of the original way of thinking Being in its difference? Is Christian metaphysics capable of posing the question of Being and of God, the source of Being and the realization of beings? In the intellectual history of the Absolute Spirit, Siewerth discovers, in his later metaphysics and with unmistakable decisiveness, that “an unfolding and 84

Ibid., 146. 309

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completion of the philosophical thinking of Being... is still mediated by theology.”85 The specifically Siewerthian difference between the act of Being (actus essendi) and subsistence, already developed in Thomism as the System of Identity, is clarified by the theologically mediated insight, in that the structure of the actsubsistence difference reflects the “difference in the divine persons and their selfsameness in the nature of God.”86 It follows, from summarizing the structures of difference, that human thinking, which ‘is present’ in the space of the absolute essence and the composition of Being, is onto-theological. In the happening of Revelation, Being, as a likeness of God, becomes the empowerment of thinking.87 This thinking is “fundamentally mediated by the theology of Revelation,”88 and it is in theologically empowered metaphysics that it finds its historical completion. As thinkers, we are faced with the task of cultivating the piety of thinking in our questioning. The task is to keep one’s ears and mind open for the questioning of Being, because thinking, as finite reason, needs Being, before it can recognize God (in Being) as ‘the likeness of God.’ “Knowledge of God happens only in the contemplative thinking of Being, that is, in the slow and long course pursued by metaphysics.”89 The historicity of thinking and the fate of the forgetfulness of Being indicate the perspective in which the relation between Being and truth must be thematized and re-addressed, always anew.

Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend,” GW3: 143. Ibid. 87 Based on the ontological presuppositions of the concept of Being as likeness of God, Lambinet attempts to outline Siewerth’s anthropology. Cf. Julien Lambinet, “Das Sein als Gleichnis und der Mensch als Bildnis Gottes,” in Reifenberg and van Hooff, ed., Gott für die Welt, 182-198. Cf. also Matthias Remenyi, Die Anthropologie im Werk Gustav Siewerths (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003). 88 Siewerth, “Die Differenz von Sein und Seiend,” GW 3, 160. 89 Gustav Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Gotteserkenntnis,” in idem, GW3: 270. 85 86

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2. 4. Understanding as the Happening of Truth 2. 4. 1. The Lingual Mediation of Being and the Infinite Process of Understanding: Gadamer’s Radicalization of Heidegger’s Question of Being “Die Sache”—the Matter of Hermeneutics The aim of this study is to address critically my own reading of Heidegger and Gadamer, not in the sense of disputing my former convictions or resolving the tension in my different readings of the hermeneutic tradition, but rather to give a testimony to the relevance of this tradition for the task of thinking.1 The extent of Heidegger’s crucial influence on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics became fully visible only relatively recently with the discovery of the young Heidegger.2 It became clear that not Being and Time but far more early Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) had a profound impact on Gadamer. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity was the attempt to understand human existence. Human facticity is forgetful of itself and its interpretive nature. Gadamer, who received his doctorate in 1922 with Paul Natorp in Marburg, got at the beginning of 1923 a copy of Heidegger’s manuscript “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.” In Gadamer’s possession was, however, only the introduction, which served as a decisive argument for Heidegger’s appointment to Marburg because of the evident lack of his other publications. The text, which has become known as the “Natorp Bericht,” was written for Paul Natorp by the young Privatdozent from Freiburg in 1922. Gadamer’s essay, which accompanies the first publication of a newly-discovered manuscript by Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät (1922), to mark Heidegger’s hundredth birthday, discloses the importance of the philosophy of the young Heidegger for Gadamer. Heidegger’s “‘theologische’ Jugendschrift” became a real inspiration for Gadamer, particularly for the way the history of philosophy can be read in a

For that reason, I freely use some of my former writing on this subject: Wierciński, Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology: The Imperative to Think the Incommensurable; “Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief,” 151-180; “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. 2 Cf. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, ed., Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994); Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994). 1

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productive way, so as to understand the contemporary situation better.3 Heidegger’s preoccupation with Aristotle was, for him, a necessary philosophical detour for exposing Dasein to its own historicity. Phenomenology, as a way of doing philosophy comprises three basic components: reduction, construction, and destruction. They belong together and even the most radical attempt to begin all over again is pervaded by traditional concepts. The dismantling of horizons helps to understand Western history in its productive possibilities by confronting what is expressed in Tradition (Überlieferung) and what has been left unsaid. The Destruktion of the metaphysics of presence reveals the fundamental temporal structures of our understanding of Being. The destruction of philosophical Tradition discloses the inexhaustible strangeness of the unfamiliar and allows Heidegger to escape the language of metaphysics. The Being of factic life is the proper task of philosophy. The hermeneutics of facticity does not attempt to get at theoretical truths about existence in general. On the contrary, by grasping basic movements of factic life, it attempts to understand what is always its own (das Eigene). By his critical appropriation of the hermeneutic tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Heidegger reformulates the question of Being on the basis of facticity and the everyday world.4 For him, human Dasein is the actual object (eigentlicher Gegenstand) of philosophical research, and as such represents the specific How (das bestimmte Wie) of factic life. Hermeneutics, as the self-explication of the facticity, indicates formally what human Dasein is. Facticity points to a primordial articulation of the world prior to any theoretical experience of the world. Thus, facticity as such is not an object for investigation. Factical beings are called to question their own existence in their facticity. Therefore, this basic direction of philosophical questioning is not externally added on to factic life but rather confronts life in what is most familiar and strange vis-à-vis one’s presuppositions in moments of revelation. However, what

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers ‘theologische’ Jugendschrift,” in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, ed. Günther Neumann with an essay by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 76-86. A new edition in Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. Anhang—Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation—Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät, GA62, ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005); English, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, trans. Michael Baur, Man and World 25 (1992): 355-393. 4 Cf. Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Early Lecture Courses,” in Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., A Companion to Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1986). 3

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is most familiar in its everydayness still remains unquestioned. Factic life, as concerned about its own Being, is difficult to bear and avoids itself. The tendency to make things easy for itself is the most unmistakable manifestation of factic life.5 Since the object of philosophical research is factic life, or human Dasein questioned in its Being, the task of philosophy is to apprehend explicitly basic movements of this questioning. Dasein’s self-interpretation is not a process that is added to understanding. Rather, interpretation as a mode of being a human being belongs to life’s own basic movements. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity emphasizes that the task of philosophy is to strengthen radically the factical character of life in its decisive possibilities of Being. By making factical life speak for itself on the basis of its very own factical possibilities, phenomenology must remain in the propensity of factical life, which is illuminated by phenomenological inquiry. The main paradox of the hermeneutics of facticity lies in the twofold structure of facticity itself. On the one hand, it designates everydayness, which is paradoxically already known insofar as it is unknown. On the other hand, it indicates that which potentially resists comprehension. Thus, the hermeneutics of facticity highlights the tension between the understanding of factic life and the fundamental questionability of life and its manifestations. In fact, the conflict of interpretations appears to us as a positive characteristic of factic life. Philosophy must remain in this questionability. It calls for attentiveness to Being, which will allow for questioning a human Dasein in one’s own Being to the point of becoming a question to oneself: “mihi quaestio factus sum.” This Augustinian struggle for understanding oneself was instrumental for the way Heidegger read Aristotle and admired his primordiality of questioning. What Heidegger discovered in Aristotle was, on the one hand, his faithfulness to the Parmenidean notion of the oneness and unity of Being, and, on the other hand, the twofoldness of Being, which has been often overlooked in the traditional substance-oriented readings of Aristotle.6 In his phenomenological approach to the reading and understanding of Aristotle, Heidegger confronts Aristotle with questions relevant for philosophy today. It was exactly this radical questioning which distinguishes Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Aristotle and contributed to his fame among the students from Freiburg and Marburg. The absolute novelty for his students was the way Heidegger read Aristotle. It was Aristotle redivivus (Gadamer), “the Philosopher” who was brought back to life.7 The radicality of questioning was rooted in the way Heidegger understood burning contemporary philosophical questions. What matters in philosophy, is the 5

Cf. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, 359. 6 Cf. Walter A Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005). 7 Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle was very different from that of Hegel who understood himself as promoting Aristoteles redivivus et perfectus. 313

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radicality with which human beings question their own life (Lebensverständnis der eigenen Gegenwart). It is precisely this “existential understanding of one’s present life,” which needs to be brought back to life. Therefore, what becomes essential is not the further elaboration of ontology, but the understanding of understanding as intimately involved and integrated into Tradition (Überlieferung). Practical reason is not the right model for the disclosedness of one’s Dasein, but for historical knowledge. The hermeneutic task of this knowledge is to make Tradition speak to us and thus to understand presence in its relationship to Tradition (Überlieferung). This radicality of questioning, an existential appeal to the anticipation of death, and the call for authenticity, inspired Heidegger in his reading of the history of Western philosophy. It was not only Aristotle, St Paul, St Augustine, and Kierkegaard, who brought him to the upper limits of his thinking. It was Heidegger’s fascination with a sentence from Schelling, “Fear of life itself drives people out of the center,” which heralded something significantly new coming up: Being and Time.8 It was the shift from a “Dasein of a human being” to a “Dasein in a human being.” However, it was through his originary engagement with the Greek beginning, especially with Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Heidegger could reinterpret Dasein. Given the emphasis that Heidegger places on the ἀρχή, his philosophical program was becoming clear: To rewrite the history of Western philosophy (and maybe even the political history of the West) according to the topology of Greek thinking. The inspiration, which Heidegger got from reading the pre-Socratics, brought him to interpret ἀ–λήθεια as unconcealedness. The task of a philosopher is to elucidate the disclosure of an ontological world. At his point, it was obvious that Heidegger will not be Aristotles redivivus, but a thinker of Being, whose proper vocation is the preservation of the True. The ethos of a philosopher is to rescue the True. Understanding ἀ–λήθεια as unconcealedness, places it in the dialectic horizon of concealment (Verbergung) and unconcealment (Entbergung) and opens up a world in which things are made intelligible for human beings in the first place. Dasein is always lost into the world since it is always concealing when it unconceals. It is the mystery of language, which allows us to capture the nature of Dasein as disclosure. Disclosing itself to itself points to Dasein as disclosing its own possibilities. Heidegger’s philosophy is characterized by an immense feeling for awareness of his Sprachnot, which is not a simple struggling with the language, but the expression of an authentic urgency required for successfully addressing that which needs to be thought. Moreover, there is nothing paradoxical in speaking about Sprachnot in the case of a philosopher who was a master in German. This Sprachnot is a noble distinction made by somebody who dares to think (Denknot) and thus has something to say. 8

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), 217.

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Hermeneutics, Truth, and Method Heidegger, in Being and Time, stresses that understanding is not an epistemological but an ontological category.9 If the truth of what it means to be a human being cannot be captured within fixed epistemological boundaries, we must inquire into the existential possibility of a human being. However, Heidegger is not interested in providing an anthropological account of the human being: “The analytics of Dasein remains wholly orientated toward the guiding task of working out the question of Being.”10 Only fundamental ontology, as the inquiry into the Being of beings, can disclose the truth of the human being: Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.11 By failing to look at the Being of human Dasein, the traditional metaphysics’ anthropocentric fixation leads to a forgetfulness of the proper dignity of the human being.12 Fundamental ontology is concerned with a new method of thinking that is unconstrained by the metaphysical focus on beings but places human Dasein in relation to Being. For Heidegger, the question about the essence of Being is intimately linked to the question of who the human being is. Yet the determination of the human essence that is required here is not a matter for a free-floating anthropology, which at the bottom represents humanity in the same way as zoology represents animals. The question about human Being is now determined in its direction and scope solely on the basis of the question of Being.13 Since everything we talk about, and everything we have in view, is Being, philosophy requires an inquiry into Being. Heidegger holds that “it is fitting that we

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer,1993), 31. Ibid., 38. 11 Ibid., 31. 12 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in David F. Krell, ed., Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1978), 213–266, esp. 233ff. 13 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 219. Derrida calls Heidegger’s critique and attempted correction of metaphysical humanism, “a sort of re-evaluation or revalorization of the essence and the dignity of man.” Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30, no. 1 (1969): 49–50. 9

10

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should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being.”14 He emphasizes that Being does not conform to fixed logical categories, but as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered. Accordingly, what is to be found out by asking—the meaning of Being—also demands that it be conceived in a way of its own, essentially contrasting with the concepts in which entities acquire their determinate signification.15 In reversing the hermeneutic problem, Heidegger understands das Dasein als Verstehen, as the mode of being that exists through understanding Being.16 Our explanation of the world (Auslegung) is preceded by our pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) of our Being-in-the-world (in-the-World-sein). For Heidegger, Dasein is a form of Being which understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. With reference to a human Dasein, Heidegger instantiates a mode of thinking that overcomes the anthropocentric triumphalism of the human being as the lord of beings. In fact, a human being is the “shepherd of Being.”17 The actual importance of a human Being lies in its subordination to Being: Man remains referred to Being, and he is only this. This “only” does not mean a limitation, but rather an excess. A belonging to Being prevails within man, a belonging which listens to Being because it is appropriated to Being.18 It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility: To be itself or not itself. Dasein’s understanding of Being pertains with equal primordiality both to an understanding of a world, and an understanding of the Being of beings accessible within the world. Understanding is Dasein’s ability to grasp the possibilities for Being and thus the mode of Being-in-the-world. Understanding is ontologically fundamental and prior to the act of existing. Following Heidegger, Gadamer conceives understanding as the mode of being. Heidegger’s emphasis on the interpretative character of understanding and on language marks the hermeneutic turn in philosophy: To think a concept it is 14

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1. Ibid., 26. 16 Ricoeur criticizes the way Heidegger relates understanding and Being as a “short route.” See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974, 6-8). 17 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 245. 18 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 31. 15

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necessary to think the history of the concept, and the history of the concept is implicit in the language which expresses it. Thus, there is no a-historical access to ideas; an idea is essentially a historical entity. Its historicity is a function of its being. Adopting the language of a negative or mystical theology, and pushing language to its limits, Heidegger attempts to deconstruct onto-theological thinking. His later hostility toward the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages, after his early fascination with Scholastic speculative grammar, questions the very possibility of a philosophical dialogue with medieval theology. However, the Gadamerian retrieval of verbum interius renews the young Heidegger’s project of a phenomenological and hermeneutic rehabilitation of medieval theology. Hermeneutics must never forget that the remembering of language was effected through the retrieval of a theological insight. Heidegger’s contention that a theist cannot think Being is thrown into question by his own legacy.19 Human Dasein discloses Being through thinking and language. Since thinking concerns Being, it is always in relationship with Being. Thinking is intimately linked to language. Thinking Being and not beings moves philosophy beyond the binary oppositions of metaphysics and is, as such, more rigorous than the conceptual. If thinking is the thinking of Being, thinking discloses Being to the human Dasein. The disclosure of Being occurs in language. However, language is not an instrument of disclosure. Since understanding is ontological as the fundamental mode of being-in-the-world and being-in-the-world is lingual, the activity of interpretation consists in bringing to the fore what is already there. As such, interpretation is a mode of being, not a way of doing. As human beings, we interpret insofar as we are. Heidegger holds that “we are within language.”20 Human Dasein resides within language. “Language is the house of Being.”21 Therefore, language is a constitutive aspect of the human being. We are not in a position of stepping outside of language. It is not we that speak, but “language that speaks,”22 (die Sprache spricht). Coming to an understanding is made possible by language. Language provides the medium or middle ground. It is the place, where understanding happens. Thus, the hermeneutic problem concerns not the correct mastery of language but coming to a proper understanding of the subject matter, which takes place within the medium of language.23 Language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs. Understanding happens in interpreting. The difference between the language of a text and the language of the interpreter, or the gulf that separates See Martin Heidegger, GA40, Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), 8-9. 20 Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in Krell, ed., Basic Writings, 398. 21 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 217. 22 Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” 411. 23 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 387. 19

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the translator from the original, is not merely a secondary question. On the contrary, the fact is that the problems of verbal expression are themselves problems of understanding. All understanding is an interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words and yet is at the same time the interpreter’s own language.24 The task of hermeneutics, from its historical origin as theological and legal hermeneutics goes beyond the limits that the concept of method sets to modern science. The phenomenon of the understanding of texts and their interpretation is the most vital part in the human experience of the world: The understanding and the interpretation of texts is not merely a concern of science but obviously belongs to the human experience of the world in general. The hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem of a method at all. It is not concerned with a method of understanding by means of which texts are subjected to scientific investigation like all other objects of experience.25 Hermeneutics is concerned with knowledge and truth but is not a method for reading texts. According to Gadamer, there is no hermeneutic method. Hermeneutics means not so much a procedure as the attitude of a person who wants to understand someone else, or who wants to understand a linguistic expression as a reader or listener. But this always means: understanding this person, this text. An interpreter who really has mastered scholarly methods uses them only so that the experience of the text becomes possible through better understanding. He will not blindly exploit the text in order to apply a method.26 What hermeneutics is concerned with is not a prescription for the practice of understanding, but a philosophical reflection of the way interpretive understanding is achieved. The problem of hermeneutics becomes universal in scope, even attaining a new dimension, through his transcendental interpretation of understanding. The general structure of understanding is concretized in historical understanding, in that the concrete bonds of custom and tradition and the corresponding possibilities of one’s own future become effective in understanding itself. We can say that given the intermediate position in which hermeneutics operates, it follows

24

Ibid., 390. Ibid., xx. 26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1997), 161. 25

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that its work is not to develop a procedure of understanding but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place.27 Our understanding is always historically situated. The central notion of prejudice represents the link with our tradition. We can never entirely escape from our prejudices. Gadamer overcomes the negativity of prejudices that was imposed by the Enlightenment’s task to free the human spirit from all prejudices due to its admiration for the Cartesian method and in opposition to tradition, prejudice, and authority. In fact, the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice itself,” closes the possibility of understanding human nature in its historicity and finitude. In a critical encounter, we can attempt to understand our prejudices and the way they condition our understanding. Hermeneutics reminds us that there is no presuppositionless access to what needs to be understood. When something is interpreted as something, the interpretation will be founded primarily upon the forestructure with its components: fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception (Vorhabe, Vorsicht, and Vorgriff). These three modes of understanding constitute the ontological realm of all understanding. Every understanding is thus happening in the horizon of primordial pre-understanding. The circular character of interpretation enables the interpretation of a text rather by stressing that the meaning of a text is to be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context. The hermeneutic circle as a key feature of the process of understanding a text circles around the reference to the individual parts. The understanding of each individual part is informed by reference to the whole. The whole text and the individual parts can be understood with reference to one another. In fact, “what is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way... In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.”28 The hermeneutic circle has an ontological status and is paradigmatic for any understanding. It refers to the basic structure of human cognition. The temporality of understanding makes us aware of the limits of our cognition. Understanding is never a subjective act. Interpretation is an inner unfolding of meaning. When we interpret a text, we cannot fix its meaning. Particular meanings reveal a new sense to the whole. In turn, this new disclosure changes our self-understanding. Gadamer is fully aware of the fundamental importance of Heidegger’s three-fold structure of interpretation: Heidegger is not concerned with a prescription for the practice of understanding, but with a description of the way interpretive understanding is achieved. The point of Heidegger’s hermeneutic reflection is not so much to prove that there is a circle as to show that this circle possesses an ontologically positive significance. For the interpreter to let himself be guided by the things themselves is obviously not a matter of a single, conscious decision, but is the constant task in hand. For it is necessary to keep one’s gaze fixed on the

27 28

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295. Heidegger, Being and Time, 194-195. 319

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thing throughout all the constant distractions that originate in the interpreter himself. A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some original meaning emerges in the text. The initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is an understanding of what is there. This description is, of course, a rough abbreviation of the whole. The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation.29 Every understanding is based on some preliminary assumptions. As historical beings, we always understand in reference to our fore-understanding of the world. Prejudices shape the horizon of understanding, which is situated and determined by historical, lingual, and cultural horizons of meaning. The task of interpretation is based on the presupposition that each time a text is read, it is read differently; there is no definitive or final interpretation of the text. By opening up new horizons of meaning, we open ourselves to the truth of the text, which challenges us to participate in the ongoing dialogue that constitutes the tradition that we are.30 The truth of hermeneutics embraces the possibility of various interpretations of the matter to be interpreted. By illuminating the hermeneutic experience as the experience of human finitude, we discover that our task is to thematize the conditions of our understanding; not to overcome them but to develop our consciousness of the effects of history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). With Gadamer, we can say that the task of hermeneutics is to clarify the miracles of understanding, which is not a mysterious communion of souls but sharing in a common meaning. The essence of the hermeneutic problem is the consciousness of the historicity of human understanding. In Gadamer’s words, In fact, history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.31 29

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269. Ibid., 363. 31 Ibid., 276-277. 30

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Tradition and history are understood by the interpreter’s ever-changing horizon. We are thrown into a world and called to understand ourselves in our being-inthe-world as historical, finite, and lingual beings. However, and by modifying Heidegger, Gadamer holds that the real purpose of Dasein is to co-operate for mutual benefit with other Dasein (Mitsein). For that reason, instead of Heidegger’s rather general notion of being with other Dasein (Mitsein), Gadamer speaks rather of a concrete being-with-the-other (Miteinandersein). The Hermeneutic Primacy of Language and the Universality of Hermeneutics The ontological relationship between Being and a being is hermeneutically expressed as the relationship between the self-manifestation of Being and Dasein’s understanding of Being. Following Heidegger, we can accentuate the passivity and receptivity of Dasein in the revelation of Being. In our attempt to allow Being to show itself, we realize that there is a constant play between concealment and unconcealment.32 Being has to reveal itself to us to open us toward its self-manifestation. On our way to Being, language is both bridge and barrier33: It reveals Being, but only as a being. Moreover, the correlation of the manifestation of Being and the understanding of Dasein exposes the fact that they belong together in language.34 Gadamer’s hermeneutic principle opens up the horizon of mediation between the manifestation of Being and human understanding. The hermeneutic approach is not a mere duplication of the past, not the subjective, fashionable celebration of diversity, but a reliving of the event of the past: A process of an undoubtedly transformative character. Identifying the act of interpretation with the act of transformation, Gadamer emphasizes that what is first and foremost transformed is the interpreter. The past is engaged and brought together with the present—opening the way to new questions and traditions, which have been evolving along with the original meaning—thus building its own history. Fusing horizons, we go beyond something that is already familiar to us. In the interplay of that which is understood (das Entborgene) and that which is veiled and in need of being disclosed (das Verborgene), we realize that our access to that which wants to be disclosed is in and through language. We discover that language itself lives in the in-between of concealment and unconcealment (Zueinandergehören von Verbergung und Entbergung). Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); originally published as “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), 41. 33 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II: Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986), 336. 34 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 477. 32

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Disclosure and understanding constitute the hermeneutic dimension of the ontological difference. In language, Being uncovers itself and makes itself understandable. “Being that can be understood is language.”35 The dialectic of understanding, in which the same is always understood differently, originates in the infinite constellations of meaning characterizing human thinking. Language contains the one, which is at the same time the other. Speaking is dwelling in the totality of meaning. Every lingual expression is grounded in that totality, which encompasses all individual expressions and overcomes them. The statement “Being that can be understood is language” might be interpreted as the participation in the totality of meaning, and not as lingual idealism. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Being, thinking, and language constitute the unity of Being and thinking in language. Thinking is not possible outside of language. That which is thought is experienced as lingual being and is expressed in language, thus not only revealing Being, which is constituted lingually in itself, but also placing Being within a relationship with Dasein. Thinking and language are indivisible. The object of understanding is always determined by its lingual nature since to be means to exist in language. The meaning of Being in its self-manifestation is not something that lies outside of Dasein, but it constitutes Dasein’s understanding of Being. Dasein has not an outside. Since history and language form Dasein, it never exists without history and language.36 Hermeneutics mediates thinking and speaking; it is fundamentally mediation, like the messenger-god Hermes, a mediator between the human and the divine by transmitting the messages of the gods and making them intelligible to humanity. In itself, the word is mediation; the word mediates itself. The powerlessness of language, the pain of being unable to express everything brings us to hermeneutics. We have to mediate the limitation of experience with all that we have said and all we wish to say and need to say. It is not that we are surrounded by things we cannot name. We are beings exposed to the unsaid. When Being comes to be, it appears as a word in us. A new being is always accompanied by a word. The ideality of the meaning lies in the word itself. It is meaningful already. But this does not imply… that the word precedes all experience and simply advenes to an experience in an external way, by subjecting itself to it. Experience is not wordless to begin with, subsequently becoming an object of reflection by being named, by being subsumed under the universality of the word. Rather, experience of itself seeks and finds words that express it. We seek the right word—i.e., the word that really belongs to the thing,—so that in it, the thing comes to language.37 35

Ibid., 474. Heidegger, Being and Time, 86-90. 37 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 417. 36

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The hermeneutic task is to find a right, a fitting word, which expresses, even if never completely, the thing itself. This never-ending search for language is finite in its nature. The hermeneutic experience mediates infinite and finite being, and as such, is a lingual enactment of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. It is a mediation in which divine and human being meet and unite. In language, the divine manifests itself to human thinking, and in language, human thinking finds its way to the divine. Our task is to find the right root words for every new encounter and not rely on old lingual abstractions that served as a shortcut through a different meadow or field. As participation in shared meaning, lingually mediated understanding depends equally on that which is not said and cannot be said. In dialogue, we engage not only that which is said, but also that which is unsaid. The basic and universal problem of the inadequacy of articulation in language allows Gadamer to make his case for the claim of the universality of hermeneutics. The universality of language and hence the universality of hermeneutics lies in the dialectic of question and answer. Yet this primordial hermeneutic phenomenon, Ur-phenomenon, as Gadamer calls it, specifies that “no assertion is possible that cannot be understood as an answer to a question and assertions can only be understood in that way.” 38 The words refer to the dialogue we are, yet they cannot bring us closer to our experience: “What is stated is not everything. The unsaid is what first makes what is stated into a word that can reach us.”39 Understanding constitutes the fundamental structure of Dasein, an existential way of being, in which the other is always co-given, a cohabitant in the house of language. Coming to an understanding (Verständigung), then, is always coming to an understanding about something. Understanding each other (sich verstehen) is always understanding each other with respect to something. From language we learn that the subject matter (Sache) is not merely an arbitrarily chosen object of discussion and quite independent of the process of mutual understanding (Sichverstehen), but rather, it is the path and goal of mutual understanding itself. Understanding as an enactment of life is open to Being, self, and otherness. The third part of Truth and Method can be understood as an ontological shift in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, from hermeneutics as a methodology of interpretation in the human sciences to a universal philosophical hermeneutics.40 Because understanding is the ontological structure of a human being pervaded by language, hermeneutics is ontology. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as the universal inquiry of philosophy springs from the universality of language, from the fact that “language can keep pace with the boundlessness of reason.”41 Language is a Ibid., 11; also “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” in Gadamer, Hermeneutik II, 219-231. 39 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 504. 40 For Gadamer, ontological, philosophical and universal are synonyms for hermeneutics. 41 Ibid., 401. 38

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means of productive dialogue in which substantively different views confront one another and are ultimately fused into new and deeper insight. Hermeneutic Transcendence The essential linguality of understanding, the enactment of historically effected consciousness in language, calls for an ongoing search for the primal words in which Being is always already expressed, the verbum entis. Lingually oriented hermeneutics considers language as the manifestation of Being in which Being reveals itself in the primal conflict (Urstreit) between concealment and unconcealment. It was Heidegger, who first thematized the dynamics of concealing (Verbergen) and revealing (Entbergen) as the essence of truth: ἀ-λήθεια. Language as the mediation between human beings and the world discloses their original belonging together.42 According to Gadamer, “we can only think in a language,” “we are always encompassed by the language that is our own.” 43 Understanding always happens as a lingual event: Verstehen vollzieht sich im sprachlichen Geschehen. Gadamer stresses the tension by inscribing language within the phenomenological process itself. Language is not a supplement of understanding. Understanding and interpretation are always intertwined with each other. Explication in language brings understanding to explicitness; it makes concrete the meaning that comes to be understood in the encounter with what has been handed down to us. Language is the mirror of finitude, that is, the mirror of temporality, because “every language is constantly being formed and developed the more it manifests Being. It is finite not because it is not all other languages at once but simply because it is language.”44 Language is the Vollzug of the self-disclosure of Being. We speak because we must speak, Being speaks to us. After speaking, we remain convinced that there is much more to say. A comprehensive Vollzug of meaning takes into account the unsaid, the intention, the context: “To make oneself understood—means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning and to ensure that it is understood in this way.” 45 Expressing what has not yet been said and what is yet to be said represents our ongoing search for language, more than the externalization of inner experience, the primordial expression of Being. In this search for Being, the dialogical nature of our understanding plays an essential role. Being comes to language in the dialogue with ourselves, each other,

42

Ibid., 474-476. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976), 62. 44 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 457. 45 Ibid., 469. 43

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and the tradition, the ongoing ‘conversation that we are.’ The event of understanding has a dialogical character. It is always possible to say something in a different way, to express a concrete meaning differently while facing the different language as the language of the other. It is a struggle to bridge two separate worlds while acknowledging the (difficult) gift of the other without however sacrificing the otherness of the other. Hospitality and responsibility describe the basic characteristic of a human being dwelling in-between familiarity and strangeness in the mode of διά-λέγειν, of welcoming the difference and the richness of the relationship with the Other. The initial distantiation, caused by the encounter with the unknown stranger (both as a person and as a meaning), calls for the appropriation of the original meaning, which describes the path to understanding oneself through otherness. The conversational model of hermeneutic understanding is grounded in the nature of language, which has true being only in conversation. The conversation is a process of coming to an understanding. Thus, it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands, not the particular individual, but what he says. Language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding. This is not to be understood as if that were the purpose of language. Coming to an understanding is not a mere action, a purposeful activity, a setting up of signs through which I transmit my will to others. Coming to an understanding as such, rather, does not need any tools in the proper sense of the word. It is a life process in which a community of life is lived out. To that extent, coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals. However, human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, the “world” is disclosed. Reaching an understanding in language places a subject matter before those that are communicating like a disputed object set between them. Thus, the world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another. This understanding of the subject matter must take the form of language. It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way of understanding occurs—whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person who raises an issue with us— with the coming-into-language of the thing itself.46 The language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting 46

Ibid., 370-371. 325

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our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.47 Gadamer was particularly attentive to Schleiermacher’s notion of the process of understanding as a dialogical relationship. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is the art of hearing. In the process of understanding happens the reconstruction of the speech act in order to disclose the meaning of the said “Sinn der Rede.” To convey a meaning, a speaker constructs a sentence, which, in turn, needs to be reconstructed by the receiver. But speaking and hearing happen simultaneously. We can speak of a dialogical event that happens face to face (Reden und Zuhören geschehen dialogisch von Angesicht zu Angesicht). The mysterious process of creating meaning from words that have been heard is the hermeneutic process.48 In one of his last interviews, Gadamer says: For me, conversation is the essential thing in life. We have to always speak to SOMEONE. Nobody speaks, if one does not speak to SOMEONE. I can say this from my life experience; it is important that the other feels involved in a conversation. I visited Heidegger a few days before his death. After the meal, we went into his study. He said: “Would you still say that language is only in a conversation?” I have answered, “yes.” No yeah, he said. Thus, was our conversation over.49 There is something terribly distressing when the conversation is over. It is a defeat of hermeneutics; a defeat of hope and optimism that we can come to an understanding. As long as we allow ourselves to be led by a conversation, we can maintain a positive trajectory of being on the way to understanding. Even despite significant differences, there remains a ray of hope that we become the persons we are capable of being.

47

Ibid., 371. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik: Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, ed. and with an introd. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977). 49 “Ich verlange: das Gespräch ist das Wesentliche. Wir haben immer zu JEMANDEM zu sprechen. Niemand spricht, der nicht zu JEMANDEM spricht. Dies kann ich aus meiner Erfahrung sagen, es ist wichtig, daß der andere sich ins Gespräch verwickelt fühlt. Ich besuchte Heidegger wenige Tage vor seinem Tod. Nach dem Essen gingen wir in sein Zimmer. Er sagte: ‘Also Sie sagen, Sprache ist nur im Gespräch?‘ ‘Ja,’ erwiderte ich. ‘Ja, ja.’ meinte er. Damit war unser Gespräch beendet.” http://www.bildung-und-mensch.de/schoengeistiges.htm. 48

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Heidegger’s Question of Being and Gadamer’s Radicalization of Heidegger Gadamer does not ask the question of Being. For him, the question of Being has become the question of understanding which is essential for the entire human experience. Understanding involves interpretation: To understand the meaning, that meaning must be expressed in our own language. Thus, understanding as such is an event (Ereignis) that happens to the interpreter above and beyond our will. Hermeneutic philosophy, as concerned with the possibility of understanding, is situated within the horizon of praxis. By overcoming the naive objectivity of traditional hermeneutics with its attempt to domesticate the correct understanding, hermeneutics recognizes that it is impossible to grasp Being in an immediate intuition. Philosophical hermeneutics understands itself as philosophy, as the thinking of a beyond, beyond physical reality, hence μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ. What hermeneutics is concerned with is human self-understanding. Hermeneutics is a philosophy of finitude: Human finitude is the awareness of the limit, i.e., not the awareness of having a limit, but rather of being a limit.50 In that sense, the condition for the possibility of understanding is a “historically effective consciousness.” This reflective activity of consciousness is connected with the consciousness of Being. Being mindful of Heidegger’s critique of his hermeneutics, Gadamer holds that any reflection on a given pre-understanding brings before a human Dasein something that otherwise happens without being noticed. Moreover, this something, as Gadamer writes, is “what I have called the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein is inescapably more being than consciousness, and Being is never fully manifest.”51 Thus, hermeneutics is not a philosophy of consciousness. This form of consciousness has the structure of experience understood as the experience of finitude and limit. Therefore, hermeneutic philosophy, which accentuates human finitude, is thinking of the limit. The dialectics of the limit is an expression of our awareness of our finitude. What makes a limit a limit always also includes knowledge of what is on both sides of it. It is the dialectic of the limit to exist only by being superseded. Thus, the quality of being-in-itself that distinguishes the thing-initself from its appearance is in-itself only for us. What appears in logical generality in the dialectic of the limit becomes specified in consciousness by the experience that the being-in-itself distinguished from consciousness is the other of itself, and is known in its truth when it is known as self, i.e., when it knows itself in full and absolute self-consciousness.52

Cf. Wierciński, “Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1977), 38. 52 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 338. 50 51

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Philosophical hermeneutics is a hermeneutics of finitude. Philosophical recognition of finitude situates all human understanding in the horizon of human finitude and incompleteness. The historicity and linguality of understanding belong to the ontological conditions of human existence and uncover the limitations of the philosophical concept of experience. Philosophical hermeneutics limits the possibility of getting to a definite knowledge of the world. With Gadamer, we can say that “there is no claim of definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: The acknowledgment of the finitude of human being in itself.”53 Experiencing the finitude, we understand ourselves as rooted in the (un)realizable future-to-come. We are in need of wisdom, clear conviction, and vision, always hoping for the impossible understanding and courageously dealing with all those feelings that no one can cope with.

53

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World,” Analecta Husserliana 2 (1972): 185.

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2. 4. 2. Phronesis as the Mediation between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility The core of the Gadamerian engagement with phronesis is its mediating character between the general and the particular, which accentuates the hermeneutic task. Each time we address the tradition, or in fact, are addressed by tradition, we understand ourselves through the tradition differently. This understanding differently in our concrete lived situatedness calls for an ongoing search for rationality, which is not determined by any particular rules. We can speak of a non-technical rationality, which is not determined by a set of pre-established rules. Phronesis as a mode of knowing in the particular situation is the mediation, and in Gadamerian hermeneutics, it has an undoubtedly lingual character. This lingual mediation characterizes hermeneutic rationality, which by being inseparable from dialogue (Plato) cannot be fully grasped as a virtue (Aristotle). Hermeneutics is not an abstract theory but is concerned with factic lived experience and human conduct. The hermeneutic task is to reflect on human experience in the world in order to help us to reason better (rationality) and live well together (ἦθoς as a habitual gathering place, a place shared with others). Therefore, the link between rationality and ethics is the core of philosophical hermeneutics. Hermeneutic praxis is this type of action that aims at achieving its goal consisting of ευ πραττειv, acting well.1 The future role of hermeneutics is to assist the human being in deepening the understanding of oneself in the modern age of science. By hermeneutically rereading the history of philosophy, we can discover the importance of φρόvησις as the art of the responsible being-in-the-world, facing the concrete challenges of our factic life. Rediscovering the importance of Aristotelian Ethics for hermeneutics, Gadamer reaffirms that the good, which manifests itself as wisdom, is the mediation between λόγος and ἔθος, between the universal and the particular. The crux of Aristotle’s philosophical ethics, then, lies in the mediation between logos and ethos, between the subjectivity of knowing and the substance of being. Moral knowledge does not climax in courage, justice, and so on, but rather in the concrete application that determines in the light of such knowledge what should be done here and now.2 See Panos Dimas, “Happiness in the Euthydemus,” Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy 47, no. 1 (2002): 1-27. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” in idem, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, trans. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 285. “So liegt der Schwerpunkt der philosophischen Ethik des Aristoteles in der Vermittlung zwischen Logos und Ethos, zwischen der Subjektivität des 1

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Φρόvησις is not so much the application of a general rule to the concrete reality, but rather a mode of living. It is a concretization of ethical deliberation, which allows us to recognize what needs to be done here and now in the sense of πρακτόv ἀγατόv. This acquired skill empowers the acting person to perceive what needs to be done. It is characteristic of the moral experience that the acting person is fully aware of the possibility and necessity of making a personal decision, and nobody can take this responsibility from him/her. The multiple meanings of λὀγoς are centered around the ordering principle that governs the universe, the reasoning behind all things. The concept of λὀγoς is closely related to the concepts of language and logic as in Aristotle’s ἡ λoγική (the logical) in the sense of rational thinking. As a mode of ἀληθεύειv, φρόvησις enacts as a mutual mediation between λόγος and ethos.3 Practice is a ἐvέργεια, a way of living or βίoς. For Aristotle, the acting persons are characterized by the πρoαίρεσις, the free choice of their βίoς. Practical philosophy is concerned with the responsibility of the acting person toward living a good life. It fosters human beings to deepen their moral responsibility and encourage the phronetic attitude as a guiding principle for all action. Thus, practical philosophy emphasizes the freedom of the acting person, who is responsibly able to apply practical knowledge to a concrete existential situation. This kind of moral virtue is significantly different from the acquired skill of the expert that Aristotle calls τέχvη. Therefore, practical philosophy is not engaged with learnable crafts and skills. Rather, it helps an individual to understand his/her conditions as a responsible agent for a personal and social order. It assists a human being in discovering their individual potential and duties as a citizen, which leads to personal growth. This is the αρητη, excellence, specifically excellence in wisdom. With reference to the Aristotelian understanding of πρᾶξίς τε καὶ πρoαίρεσις, it is important to emphasize that πρoαίρεσις needs to be interpreted as a “pre-choice,” that which comes before the actual decision. In this sense, moral character as a state of mind of the human being is the necessary condition for an activity like choosing appropriately. Therefore, πρoαίρεσις encompasses the state Wissens und der Substantialität des Seins. Nicht in den allgemeinen Begriffen von Tapferkeit, Gerechtigkeit usw. vollendet sich das sittliche Wissen, sondern in der konkreten Applikation, die das hier und jetzt Tunliche im Lichte solchen Wissens bestimmt.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik,” in idem, GW4: 183. 3 “Aristotle’s last word in the detailed description of the virtues and right behavior is therefore always hos del or hos ho orthos logos. What can be taught in the practice of ethics is logos also, but it is not akribes (precise) beyond a general outline. The decisive thing is finding the right nuance. The phronesis that does this is a hexis ton aletheuein, a state of being in which something hidden is made manifest, i.e., in which something is known. N. Hartmann, in the attempt to understand all the normative elements of ethics in relation to ‘values,’ made this into the ‘value of the situation,’ a strange extension of the table of the Aristotelian concepts of virtue.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 92. 330

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of mind and the appropriate choosing of an individual and, as such, makes the particular action into this person’s choice. Hence practical philosophy needs to raise to the level of reflective awareness the distinctively human trait of having προαίρεσις, whether it be in the form of developing those fundamental human orientations for such preferring that have the character of ἀρετή or in the form of the prudence needed in deliberating and taking the counsel that guides action. In any case, it has to be accountable with its knowledge for the viewpoint in terms of which one thing is to be preferred to another: the relationship to the good. However, the knowledge that gives direction to action is essentially called for by concrete situations in which we are to choose the thing to be done, and no learned and mastered technique can spare us the task of deliberation and decisionmaking. As a result, the practical science directed toward this practical knowledge is neither theoretical science in the style of mathematics nor expert know-how in the sense of a knowledgeable mastery of operational procedures (ποίησις), but a unique sort of science.4 Practical knowledge cannot be learned in the sense of acquiring skills (τέχvη).5 Applying practical knowledge in everyday life requires constant thinking and making decisions. We can effectively cultivate practical knowledge by exercising ourselves in sensitivity of recognizing what needs to be done in a concrete situation and, in fact, by being disposed to act in an expected manner. However, it is necessary to remember that the dynamic law of human life situates moral 4

5

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” (1972), in idem, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 92. “The old Aristotelian distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge is operative here—a distinction which cannot be reduced to that between the true and the probable. Practical knowledge, phronesis, is another kind of knowledge. Primarily, this means that it is directed towards the concrete situation. Thus, it must grasp the ‘circumstances’ in their infinite variety. This is what Vico expressly emphasizes about it. It is true that his main concern is to show that this kind of knowledge lies outside the rational concept of knowledge, but this is not in fact mere resignation. The Aristotelian distinction refers to something other than the distinction between knowing on the basis of universal principles and on the basis of the concrete. Nor does he mean only the capacity to subsume the individual case under a universal category—what we call ‘judgment.’ Rather, there is a positive ethical motif involved that merges into the Roman Stoic doctrine of the sensus communis. The grasp and moral control of the concrete situation require subsuming what is given under the universal—that is, the goal that one is pursuing so that the right thing may result. Hence it presupposes a direction of the will—i.e., moral being (hexis). That is why Aristotle considers phronesis an ‘intellectual virtue.’ He sees it not only as a capacity (dunamis), but as a determination of moral being which cannot exist without the totality of the ‘ethical virtues,’ which in turn cannot exist without it. Although practicing this virtue means that one distinguishes what should be done from what should not, it is not simply practical shrewdness and general cleverness. The distinction between what should and should not be done includes the distinction between the proper and the improper and thus presupposes a moral attitude, which it continues to develop.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 19-20. 331

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action within the horizon of the relentless inner tension between illumination and concealment. From the hermeneutic perspective, not only interpretation of the text is always a work in progress, but the existential project of understanding one’s life is always only an attempt, an approximation, which is never definitive. 6 The hermeneutic openness, which is the basic requirement of any understanding, exposes human beings to the unknown, and as such carries with itself the danger of incompleteness, of our existential insecurity of not being able to foresee the full consequences of our action. However, this existential risk is complemented by the widening of our hermeneutic horizon. Understanding, like action, always remains a risk and never leaves room for the simple application of general knowledge of rules to the statements or texts to be understood. Furthermore, where it is successful, understanding means a growth in inner awareness, which as a new experience enters into the texture of our own mental experience. Understanding is an adventure and, like any other adventure, is dangerous. Just because it is not satisfied with simply wanting to register what is there or said there but goes back to our guiding interests and questions, one has to concede that the hermeneutical experience has a far less degree of certainty than that attained by the methods of the natural sciences. But when one realizes that understanding is an adventure, this implies that it affords unique opportunities as well. It is capable of contributing in a special way to the broadening of our human experiences, our self-knowledge, and our horizon, for everything understanding mediates is mediated along with ourselves.7 Hermeneutic experience is always an encounter with oneself as the other and the other in the variety of personal, contextual, linguistic, and historical horizons. Understood as a fusion of horizons, hermeneutic experience needs and can be brought into language. All experience can be expressed in language: Experience is language; however, not in the sense that it is reducible to linguistic articulation. The lingual character of experience calls for hermeneutic work in articulating and developing it in order to make it become itself.

Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” 105. Gadamer also explains that “this, then, is a kind of progress not the progress proper to research in regard to which one cannot fall behind but a progress that always must be renewed in the effort of our living.” Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” 110-111. 7 Ibid., 109-110. 6

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Hermeneutic Application and the Ethics of Concretely Lived Praxis Traditionally, in the hermeneutic task of interpretation, we distinguish three elements: Subtilitas intelligendi (understanding), subtilitas explicandi (interpretation), and subtilitas applicandi (application). The subtilitas applicandi refers to the ability of relating the meaning of a text (originally a Biblical or legal text) to a particular situation of its reader. Understanding of the text has a concrete implication for human conduct, on the way to being in the world together. This application is not so much a question of applying general laws and rules to the concrete case, but of discerning the relevance of tradition for here and now in such a way that it cultivates our lives. Therefore, the hermeneutic reading requires that the text is understood in “every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way.”8 Understanding is a mode of human conduct, a way in which we live in the world. It is an ethics of concretely lived praxis.9 Understanding as ethical praxis is permeated by application in which we correlate that which needs to be understood with our hermeneutic situation. Gadamer’s preoccupation with the legacy of the Aristotelian Ethics helps him to discover the relevance of φρόvησις for his philosophical hermeneutics.10 Aristotle on Phronesis Aristotle thematizes φρόvησις in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics. As the practical wisdom, φρόvησις is contrasted to technical skill in arts and crafts 8

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 308. “If we relate Aristotle’s description of the ethical phenomenon and especially the virtue of moral knowledge to our own investigation, we find that his analysis in fact offers a kind of model of the problems of hermeneutics. We too determined that application is neither a subsequent nor merely an occasional part of the phenomenon of understanding but codetermines it as a whole from the beginning. Here too application did not consist in relating some pregiven universal to the particular situation. The interpreter dealing with a traditionary text tries to apply it to himself. But this does not mean that the text is given for him as something universal, that he first understands it per se, and then afterward uses it for particular applications. Rather, the interpreter seeks no more than to understand this universal, the text—i.e., to understand what it says, what constitutes the text’s meaning and significance. In order to understand that, he must not try to disregard himself and his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relate the text to this situation if he wants to understand at all.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 320-321. 10 Gadamer attended the famous seminar that Heidegger gave in 1924 that focused on Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. In a critical response to Heidegger, Gadamer states: “When Aristotle, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, distinguishes the manner of ‘practical’ knowledge... from theoretical and technical knowledge, he expresses, in my opinion, one of the greatest truths by which the Greeks throw light upon ‘scientific’ mystification of the modern society of specialization. In addition, the scientific character of practical philosophy 9

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(τέχvη), the knowledge of science (ἐπιστήμη), the theoretical wisdom of philosophy (σoφία), and intuitive reason (voῦς). Aristotle calls these abilities intellectual virtues in order to distinguish them from moral virtues. The thematization of φρόvησις begins in chapter V in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics and is subsequently taken up in chapters VII-XIII. Practical knowing related to making things is designated by τέχvη, which provides the kind of knowledge acquired by a specialist. Practical knowing associated with human acting is signified by φρόvησις, which describes the person who knows how to live well. In contrast to ἐπιστήμη, which as a pure science deals with phenomena that cannot be otherwise than they are, φρόvησις is a deliberation on things that can appear in different ways, and as such it involves reasoning about the best way to act. Therefore, φρόvησις is not an instrumental form of knowledge, something which we have ready at hand, but is an intimate relationship between the acting person and the action itself. As a person of practical wisdom, the φρόvιμoς is able to deliberate well.11 The prudent man knows the general rules but living a good life requires more than the application of general rules to a particular situation. The virtue of moral knowledge (die Tugend des sittlichen Wissens) is not a something, which can be acquired and then applied to a specific situation when needed.12 When Aristotle elevates φρόvησις to the major characteristics of acting rationally, he refers to the aspect of ἀληθεύειv, being-in-truth.13 Practical reasoning in matters good and bad for humans is the fundamental requirement for human acting.

is, as far as I can see, the only methodological model for self-understanding of the human sciences if they are to be liberated from the spurious narrowing imposed by the model of the natural sciences.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” trans. Jeff L. Close in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, ed., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979), 107. 11 Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, 1140a25, 1141b10. 12 “Obviously this is not what we mean by knowing in the realm of science. Thus the distinction that Aristotle makes between moral knowledge (phronesis) and theoretical knowledge (episteme) is a simple one, especially when we remember that science, for the Greeks, is represented by the model of mathematics, a knowledge of what is unchangeable, a knowledge that depends on proof and that can therefore be learned by anybody. A hermeneutics of the human sciences certainly has nothing to learn from mathematical as distinguished from moral knowledge. The human sciences stand closer to moral knowledge than to that kind of ‘theoretical’ knowledge. They are ‘moral sciences.’ Their object is man and what he knows of himself. But he knows himself as an acting being, and this kind of knowledge of himself does not seek to establish what is. An active being, rather, is concerned with what is not always the same but can also be different. In it he can discover the point at which he has to act. The purpose of his knowledge is to govern his action.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 312. 13 Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, 1140b5. 334

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Practical wisdom is itself not an art (τέχvη), but excellence (ἀρετή).14 In difference to art, which can be practiced well or badly, φρόvησις cannot be practiced badly. It involves deliberation on universal and general principles and particulars of everyday situations, which aims at the best thing attainable by us through action.15 Furthermore, the consequence of the deliberation of the acting person is a true conviction that one acts correctly in assessing what is conducive to a good end.16 Deliberating well is not only about the correct (in the sense of productive) reasoning regarding the manner of attaining the goal. It is rather a concern as to how to achieve a good goal. Aristotle stresses the accuracy of reasoning needed regarding the accomplishment of a good goal, particularly when taking into account the possibility of achieving a good goal through the wrong reasoning.17 Aristotle also differentiates φρόvησις from σύvεσις.18 Whereas σύvεσις is the ability to judge well according to the common law, as a recognition of what one ought to do, φρόvησις not only tells one what to do but commands one to do it. Aristotle sums up his deliberation on φρόvησις saying: “These considerations, therefore, show that it is not possible to be good in the true sense without Prudence, nor to be prudent without Moral Virtue.”19 Practical wisdom is instrumental in making ethical choices as an exercise in the moral ability to make wise choices in order to live a good life. Since what is at stake is the concrete good of the concrete person, φρόvησις is a moral ability. For Aristotle, practical wisdom and moral virtues are complementary, since they lead to living a good life (εὐδαιμovία). The wise man, the man of virtue, φρόvιμoς, not only knows the right thing to do but also does it, in a specific situation. Both, φρόvησις and ἀρετή are related to each other. Virtue in the full sense cannot be attained without practical wisdom, because ἀρετή is guided by right reason, and right reason, in turn, is determined by φρόvησις. “This is why some say that all the virtues are forms of practical wisdom.... It is not merely the state in accordance with the right rule, but the state that implies the presence of the right rule, that is virtue; and practical wisdom is a right rule about such matters. Socrates, then, thought the virtues were rules or rational principles (for he thought they were, all of them, forms of scientific knowledge), while we think they involve a rational principle.” Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, 1144b20. Here the final “involve a rational principle” can be understood in the sense that the virtues cooperate with the rational principle. 15 Ibid., 1141b10. 16 Ibid., 1142b30. 17 Ibid., 1142b20. 18 Interesting is the notion of φρόvησις and σύvεσις in St Paul, especially his usage of συvησις in Col 1: 9, “For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.” “All spiritual wisdom and understanding” render the Greek σoφία καὶ συvέσει πνευματικῇ. Paul insists here that there is no real wisdom apart from the knowledge of God’s grace. 19 Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, 1142b20. 14

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By knowing how to act, and, at the same time, by bringing the universal and the individual together in the context of factic life, φρόvησις motivates human acting. In practical reasoning, we not only deliberate about the good but are moved toward the decision regarding the particular form of acting in given situations. Therefore, what is essential in the notion of φρόvησις, is not the knowledge of moral rules, but the practice of making wise existential decisions. As the capacity for judgment in a given existential situation, φρόvησις requires flexibility, openness, and improvisation. Living a good life is not a question of following a set of moral rules, but requires perceptiveness, sensitivity, and responsibility. The tension between the general and the particular, to which the general needs to be applied, is addressed by Aristotle in his deliberation on ἐπιείκεια (equity). The universality of the law needs to be corrected by ἐπιείκεια. Hence, while the equitable is just, and is superior to one sort of justice, it is not superior to absolute justice, but only to the error due to its absolute statement. This is the essential nature of the equitable: it is a rectification of law where the law is defective because of its generality. In fact, this is the reason why things are not all determined by law: it is because there are some cases for which it is impossible to lay down a law, so that a special ordinance becomes necessary... It is now plain what the equitable is, and that it is just, and that it is superior to one sort of justice. And from this, it is clear what the equitable man is: he is one who by choice and habit does what is equitable, and who does not stand on his rights unduly but is content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side. And the disposition described is Equity; it is a special kind of Justice, not a different quality altogether.20 In his interpretation of φρόvησις, Aristotle emphasizes that the acting person concretizes in a given situation the guiding principles, which are useful as schemata. Those general rules correspond to the nature of the thing. Judging in factic life means to appropriate those guiding principles with a moral consciousness. Aristotle stresses the difference between moral and technical knowledge by modifying the conceptual relation between means and end. Moral knowledge does not have a particular end. It is concerned with living a good life and contains a kind of experience in itself, which is the fundamental form of experience.21 Technical 20 21

Ibid., 1137b. “The self-knowledge of moral reflection has, in fact, a unique relation to itself. We can see this from the modifications that Aristotle presents in the context of his analysis of phronesis. Beside phronesis, the virtue of thoughtful reflection, stands ‘sympathetic understanding.’ ‘Being understanding’ is introduced as a modification of the virtue of moral knowledge since in this case it is not I who must act. Accordingly, synesis means simply the capacity for moral judgment. Someone’s sympathetic understanding is praised, of course, when in order

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knowledge is always particular and serves particular ends. Moral knowledge requires self-deliberation. As excellence in counsel, sound judgment or deliberating well, εὐβoυλία, means a deliberation with a view to the practical good as an end in itself. Only such a deliberation is appropriate to φρόvησις.22 Following Heidegger: Gadamer and the Importance of Phronesis for Hermeneutics The young Heidegger’s reading of Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics resulted in the discovery of ἀληθεύειv as a process of disclosing and ἀλήθεια as unconcealment.23 Truth is an event, an activity, a to judge he transposes. Finally, Aristotle makes the special nature of moral knowledge and the virtue of possessing it particularly clear by describing a naturally debased version of this moral knowledge. He says that the deinos is a man who has all the natural prerequisites and gifts for this moral knowledge, a man who is able, with remarkable skill, to get the most out of any situation, who is able to turn everything to his advantage and finds a way out of every situation. But this natural counterpart to phronesis is characterized by the fact that the deinos is ‘capable of anything’; he uses his skills to any purpose and is without inhibition. He is aneu aretes. And it is more than accidental that such a person is given a name that also means ‘terrible.’ Nothing is so terrible, so uncanny, so appalling, as the exercise of brilliant talents for evil.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 320. 22 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1142b. “Thus, we are dealing here with a fundamental relationship. It is not the case that extending technical knowledge would obviate the need for moral knowledge, this deliberating with oneself. Moral knowledge can never be knowable in advance like knowledge that can be taught. The relation between means and ends here is not such that one can know the right means in advance, and that is because the right end is not a mere object of knowledge either. There can be no anterior certainty concerning what the good life is directed toward as a whole. Hence Aristotle’s definitions of phronesis have a marked uncertainty about them, in that this knowledge is sometimes related more to the end, and sometimes more to the means to the end. In fact, this means that the end toward which our life as a whole tends and its elaboration in the moral principles of action described in Aristotle’s Ethics cannot be the object of a knowledge that can be taught. No more can ethics be used dogmatically than can natural law. Rather, Aristotle’s theory of virtue describes typical forms of the true mean to be observed in human life and behavior; but the moral knowledge that is oriented by these guiding images is the same knowledge that has to respond to the demands of the situation of the moment.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 31819. 23 Reading Heidegger from an Aristotelian point of view leads to the ontologization of human life in terms of interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics Z. See Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. and ed. in English by Michael Gendre, (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991) and his “Heidegger et les Grecs a l’époque de l’ontologie fondamentale,” Etudes phénoménologiques 1 (1985): 95-112; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); Franco Volpi, “Being and Time: A ‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?” in Theodore Kisiel, and John van Buren, ed., Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest 337

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ἀληθεύειv, not a thing, but a movement. It is expressed as a verb. Thus, ἀληθεύειv as living in truth accentuates the relationship between λόγος and ethos. The multiple layers of the meaning of Being correspond with the modes of ἀληθεύειv.24 The famous statement of Heraclitus ἀληθεύειv εστι κoιvωvειv emphasizes the sharing aspect of experience and knowledge. The understanding human being as a person, as somebody who has his/her face directed to others, situates the responsibility at the very core of human existence.25 Dasein, eigentliche Existenz, is an authentic action in the sense of praxis, which is the proper mode of Being-in-the-World.26 Heidegger’s ontologization of praxis tends toward the disclosure of the authentic way of being a human being. With reference to Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, he uncovers the five ways of ἀληθεύειv, of being-in-truth27: τέχvη, technique; ἐπιστήμη, science; φρόvησις, practical wisdom; σoφία, theoretical wisdom, and voῦς, reason. Those five ways of ἀληθεύειv of psyche correspond to fundamental modes of being a human being.28 In Gadamer’s opinion, Heidegger “disregarded φρόvησις and brought up the question of Being in its place.”29 In turn, Gadamer raised φρόvησις to a central Thought (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 195-211 and his Heidegger e Aristotele (Padova: Daphne Editrice, 1984). For Kisiel, “the project of Being and Time thus takes shape in 1921-24 against the backdrop of unrelenting exegesis of Aristotle’s text, especially Nicomachean Ethics Z, from which the manifestly pretheoretical models for the two Division of Being and Time, the techne of poiesis for the First and the phronesis of praxis for the Second, are derived.” Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” 9. 24 Truth is understood as ἀλήθεια, as a composition of a derivativum and λῆθoς, partizip perfekt passiv of λαvθάvω, be concealed, covered. 25 “Within logos Heidegger himself emphasizes the preverbal over the verbal functions, and within the preverbal he privileges the ‘practical’ logos virtues (phronesis and techne) over the ‘theoretical’ (nous, episteme, sophia).” Thomas Sheehan, “Hermeneia and Apophansis: The Early Heidegger on Aristotle,” in Franco Volpi et al., ed., Heidegger et idée de la phénoménologie (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1988), 70. 26 “The phenomenon of the world gets approached [namely in Greek philosophy] ontically and gets diverted into an extant (vorhandene) realm of ideas accessible to a mere looking. Among other reasons, this is because transcendence, from early on, was taken primarily in the sense of theorein, which means that transcendence was not sought in its primordial rootedness in the real being of Dasein. Nevertheless, Dasein was known to antiquity also as authentic (eigentliche) action, as praxis.” Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, GA26, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), 236. 27 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, GA19, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997). 28 See Daniel L. Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis: Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical Culture,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36, no. 1 (2003): 77-102. 29 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2004), 127. Gadamer explains, “in considering the structure of the hermeneutical process I have explicitly referred to the Aristotelian analysis of phronesis. Basically, I have followed here a line that Heidegger began in his early years in Freiburg, when he was concerned with a hermeneutics of facticity, against neoKantianism and value philosophy (and, probably ultimately, against Husserl himself). It is 338

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notion of his lingually oriented hermeneutics.30 It is Gadamer himself who testifies that influenced by Heidegger’s “Natorp Bericht,” he understood the practical knowledge as the condition of any theoretical knowledge. Gadamer confesses: “From this point, I went on, particularly by reviving the concept of phronesis for the philosophical dimension of hermeneutics.”31 What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.32 The hermeneutic ethics of the feasible is not just about asking metaphysical questions in the sense of philosophia perennis, but a recognition of the hermeneutic consciousness, which is seeking to confront the eschatological with the reality of hic and nunc. Gadamer is concerned with factical historical life in its self-interpretation. It is clear that he understands his lingually oriented hermeneutics as practical philosophy with elevating φρόvησις to hermeneutic virtue.33 Hermeneutics is practical philosophy in its unveiling of truth in action (ἡ διάνοια καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια true that Aristotle’s ontological basis became suspect for Heidegger even in his early investigations, a basis on which the whole of modern philosophy, especially the idea of subjectivity and that of consciousness, as well as the aporias of historicism, is founded (what in Being and Time is called the ‘ontology of the present-at-hand’). But in one point Aristotelian philosophy was at that time much more than a mere countermodel for Heidegger; it was a real vindicator of his own philosophical purposes: in the Aristotelian critique of Plato’s ‘universal eidos’ and, positively, in the demonstration of the analogical structure of the good and the knowledge of the good that is required in the situation of action.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 536. See also Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Destruction of Phronesis,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 48 supplement (1989): 127-153. 30 “Erstmals wurde mir davon etwas bewußt, als ich Heidegger 1923—noch in Freiburg—kennenlernte und an seinem Seminar über die Nikomachische Ethik des Aristoteles teilnahm. Wir studierten die Analyse der Phronesis. Heidegger zeigte uns am Aristoteles-Text, daß alle Techne eine innere Grenze besitze: ihr Wissen sei kein volles Entbergen, weil das Werk, das sie Entbergen, weil das Werk, das sie zu erstellen verstehe, in das Ungewisse eines unverfügbaren Gebrauchs entlassen werde. Und nun stellte er den Unterschied zu Diskussion, der all solches Wissen, insbesondere auch die bloße Doxa, von der Phronesis schied: λήθη μὲν τῆς τοιαύτης ἕξεως ἔστι, φρονήσεως δ ̓οὐκ ἔστιν (1140b 29). Als wir an diesem Satz unsicher und ganz in die griechischen Begriffe verfremdet heruminterpretierten, erklärte er brüsk: ‘Das ist das Gewissen!’” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers Wege” GW3: 199-200. 31 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 332. 32 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxxiv. 33 Gadamer was working on his annotated translation of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics till the very old years of his life. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik 339

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πρακτική).34 Following Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, with its phronetic look at καιρός, at what is momentarily concrete, Gadamer emphasizes the importance of φρόvησις in the experience of understanding.35 For him, hermeneutic understanding is the art of applying that which needs to be understood to the factic life of its interpreter. Every application is a phronetic application since it cannot be performed as a technique guided by the set of established rules. It requires far more the reciprocal illumination of the general principles in the particularity of factic life experience. What is important in a hermeneutic application is the intimate involvement of the interpreter with that which is interpreted. Criticizing the false objectivism of traditional hermeneutics, Gadamer stresses the direct confrontation with the text, which requires φρόvησις as the mastery of dealing with the general rules in a concrete situation of the hic et nunc. For the hermeneutical problem too is clearly distinct from “pure” knowledge detached from any particular kind of being. We spoke of the interpreter’s belonging to the tradition he is interpreting, and we saw that understanding itself is a historical event. The alienation of the interpreter from the interpreted by the objectifying methods of modern science, characteristic of the hermeneutics and historiography of the nineteenth century, appeared as the consequence of a false objectification. My purpose in returning to the example of Aristotelian ethics is to help us realize and avoid this. For moral knowledge, as Aristotle describes it, is clearly not objective knowledge—i.e., the knower is not standing over against a situation that he merely observes; he is directly confronted with what he sees. It is something that he has to do.36 Hermeneutic application as the art of relating the general to the particular requires assertiveness, which cannot be governed by a formal methodology and a set of rules. Therefore, what is required from the φρόvιμoς is the hermeneutic perceptiveness, sensitivity to the general and particular alike, and responsibility. In any given situation, the φρόvιμoς is wholeheartedly involved in everything that needs

VI: Herausgegeben und übersetzt von Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998). 34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a 27. 35 Gadamer systematically analyses φρόvησις in Part II of Truth and Method, “The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 310-321. See also his Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, trans. Robert Wallace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991) and The Idea of the Good in PlatonicAristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). 36 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 312. 340

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particular attention. It is not a matter of calculating the amount of necessary involvement to make the expected results happen, but it is the result of the unreserved devotion to the matter to be understood. Moreover, when we speak here of the φρόvιμoς, we do not keep in mind only an individual, not even a human being with any exceptional or even heroic sensitivity toward the miracles of Being, but include the collective φρόvιμoς, a condensation of the most sophisticated modes of being in the world. Gadamer’s deliberation on φρόvησις is directly connected with the notion of understanding. The φρόvιμoς is always situated within the situation, which requires from him/her the hermeneutic application. It is a hermeneutic action from within the factic life experience. As such, application can never signify a subsidiary operation appended as an afterthought to understanding: the object of our application determines from the beginning and in its totality the real and concrete content of hermeneutical understanding. Application is not a calibration of some generality given in advance in order to unravel afterwards a particular situation. In attending to a text, for example, the interpreter does not try to apply a general criterion to a particular case; on the contrary, he is interested in the fundamentally original significance of the writing under his consideration.37 The interpreter belongs to the interpreted object. One does not relate to that which needs to be understood as subject to an object. Rather it is an attempt to understand that which constitutes the meaning and significance of the subject matter. The interpretation is not a question of independent external expertise but requires much more personal involvement. It presupposes a historically contingent preunderstanding, which is confronted with the particular existential situation. This existential situatedness, which takes seriously one’s own life and one’s particular hermeneutic situation is the condition sine qua non of any understanding. Hermeneutic interpretation is always directly applicable and effective in the concrete contingencies of the existential situation where, in the absence of theoretical rules, the general and the particular relate to each other in the dialectics of mutual illumination. Since understanding is the mode of temporal experience, it stands in creative tension with practical human conduct. It stresses the intimate relationship between understanding and the enactment of factic life. The essential hermeneutic task is to foster knowledge that guides human action. What is called for, is the cultivation of the ability to find the fitting response of the freely choosing person to the challenges of practical human conduct,

37

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, ed., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, trans. Jeff Close (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987), 125-26. 341

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which constitutes one’s civic virtues. This kind of hermeneutic knowledge or insight, which is not about learnable craft and skills, arrives from concrete praxis and, through the process of phronetic reflection on what is feasible here and now, relates itself back to praxis. As such, it is progressive learning with all the challenges of transformation. Being a mediation between universal and particular, φρόvησις is a hermeneutic virtue, which capacitates the interpretation and reasoning in a particular life context without surrendering to the principles governed by the formal scientific criteria. Through training in reasoning, a human being becomes an experienced person. It is further fostered by the collective experience of a community. 38 This is what the Greeks called theoria: to have been given away to something that in virtue of its overwhelming presence is accessible to all in common and that is distinguished in such a way that in contrast to all other goods it is not diminished by being shared and so is not an object of dispute like all other goods but actually gains through participation. In the end, this is the birth of the concept of reason: the more what is desirable is displayed for all in a way that is convincing to all, the more those involved discover themselves in this common reality; and to that extent human beings possess freedom in the positive sense, they have their true identity in that common reality.39 Learning through experience does not automatically make one into an expert in moral judgment but allows one to become more sensitive and receptive to the contingencies of factic life experience and facilitates the responsibility of one’s personal decisions. Without being able to provide the exact justification for one’s judgment, φρόvησις allows for a reasoned justification of the evaluations and resolutions of the acting person. Gadamer subsequently found “a better basis for phronesis... not in terms of virtue, but rather in terms of dialogue.”40 Hermeneutic conversation proves to be a very valuable experience for reasoning, precisely by situating the matter to be understood in the real life context and by reciprocally exposing the partners of the conversation and that which needs to be understood to each other. Guided by φρόvησις, what we learn in a conversation is knowledge, which rises from the being of a person and the richness of our human existence. The task of hermeneu-

38

We can talk about the wisdom of the community in a similar way we talk in theology of the “faith of the Church.” See John Arthos, “Who Are We and Who Am I? Gadamer’s Communal Ontology as Palimpsest,” Communication Studies 51, no.1 (2000): 15-34. 39 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “What is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason,” in idem, Reason in the Age of Science, 77. 40 Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, 21. 342

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tics for our new century is the return of “practical philosophy to its ancient privilege of not merely recognizing the good, but demanding it as well.”41 It will not miraculously transform the world but will help us to ask better the questions we ourselves must ask in our factic life in our pursuit of living in truth.

41

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy,” in idem, Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 116. 343

2. 4. 3. The Truth of Hermeneutic Experience In his now-famous statement, John Caputo formulates the paradox at the heart of the notion of the hermeneutic truth: “The cold, hermeneutic truth, is that there is no truth, no master name which holds things captive.”1 Thus, expressing the postmodern belief that objective truth does not exist, we are invited to hold to the idea that all truth claims are equal. In fact, hermeneutic truth is inseparable from the interpretive process and, as such, is not “objective,” especially if we accept that the ideal of objectivity is one that is based on the concept of validity as found in the scientific method. Rather, hermeneutic truth is the integral aspects of the event of understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics contributes in an essential way to the understanding that truth cannot be adequately explained by the scientific method. Hermeneutics then is not a method of interpretation but is an investigation into the nature of understanding, which transcends the concept of method. The validity of the scientific method is independent of the content of knowledge. The universal validity of the scientific method cannot be applied to the experience of truth and understanding. In the “Introduction” to Truth and Method, Gadamer addresses the question of the autonomy and independence of the human sciences and the specific nature of truth and understanding: The following investigations start with the resistance in modern science itself to the universal claim of scientific method. They are concerned to seek the experience of truth that transcends the domain of scientific method wherever that experience is to be found, and to inquire into its legitimacy. Hence the human sciences are connected to modes of experience that lie outside science: with the experiences of philosophy, of art, and of history itself. These are all modes of experience in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means proper to science.2 The phenomenon of understanding as a mode of being-in-the-world, as well as the interpretation of what has been understood, are oriented toward the whole of human life. In that respect, hermeneutic understanding is much closer to basic human experience than the ideal of validity and certainty applied in the natural sciences. Understanding in the human sciences cannot be ruled by any specific

1

John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 192. See also idem, That’s Just Your Interpretation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001). 2 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xx-xxi. 344

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methodology but needs to be confronted and verified in the hermeneutic horizon of the experience of life.3 It is for this reason that Gadamer can say: The understanding and the interpretation of texts is not merely a concern of science but obviously belongs to human experience of the world in general. The hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all. It is not concerned with a method of understanding by means of which texts are subjected to scientific investigation like all other objects of experience. It is not concerned primarily with amassing verified knowledge, such as would satisfy the methodological ideal of science—yet it too is concerned with knowledge and with truth. In understanding tradition not only are texts understood, but insights are acquired, and truths known. But what kind of knowledge and what kind of truth?4 Gadamer argues that hermeneutics is not a method of determining truth, but that it is a practice of reading texts while trying to understand the conditions which make truth possible.5 The truth of the text is disclosed while discovering the conditions of understanding.6 Truth is not something which may be defined by a particular technique or procedure of inquiry; truth transcends the limits of methodological reasoning. Gadamer stresses the ontological significance of hermeneutics for the problem of understanding and interpretation in the human and social sciences. Following the basic hermeneutic assumption that human understanding is contingent upon historical and cultural conditions, we realize that every knowledge of the universal is required historically. The historicity of human experience and the historicity of understanding belong to the ontological conditions of human existence and point toward the very inseparability of hermeneutic truth from the interpretive process. Understandings and interpretations of a text are dependent upon the historical conditions in which they are made and on the particular context within which interpretation is happening. Since there is no absolute interpretation, different interpretations can remain justifiable when providing conclusive arguments for justifying one interpretation over another. 3

On the concepts of method and methodology see Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, ed., Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst. Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), especially the editors’ Introduction. 4 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xx. 5 Cf. James Risser, “The Imaging of Truth in Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Lenore Langsdorf, Stephen H. Watson, and E. Marya Bower, ed., Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 19 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996, 159-174. 6 For a detailed analysis of hermeneutic understanding from the perspective of prejudices see Lawrence K. Schmidt, The Epistemology of Hans-Georg Gadamer: An Analysis of the Legitimization of “Vorurteile” (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1987). 345

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According to Gadamer, the role of hermeneutics in the human sciences is not the same as the role of methods of research in the natural sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics operates within a non-foundationalist and non-essentialist understanding of truth.7 It discovers truths hidden from the logic of discovery. Gadamer offers a non-objectivistic view of interpretation in which understanding happens within a fusion of horizons of the text and its interpreter. Following Heidegger’s account of historicity,8 Gadamer elaborates on the implications of the historicity of understanding for textual understanding.9 In the “Introduction” to Truth and Method, Gadamer provides the hermeneutic analysis of understanding as the primary mode of human experience: understanding is never a subjective relation to a given “object” but to the history of its effect; in other words, understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood.10 Historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) expresses our embodiment in the particular history and culture that shape us: Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. Only in the multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern historical research itself is not only research but the handing down of tradition. We do not see it only in terms of progress and verified results; in it we have, as it were, a new experience of history whenever the past resounds in a new voice.11

Cf. Jean Grondin, “Hermeneutic Truth and its Historical Presuppositions: A Possible Bridge between Analysis and Hermeneutics,” in Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1987). 8 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row),1962, section 74. 9 James DiCenso puts Gadamer’s historical hermeneutics in relation to Heidegger’s ambivalence concerning the historicity of Being. See James DiCenso, Hermeneutics and the Disclosure of Truth (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 79-83. 10 Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxviii. 11 Ibid., 285. “When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien worlds unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. Everything contained in historical consciousness is in fact embraced by a single historical horizon. Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition.” Ibid., 303. 7

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Understanding happens to us when we are confronted with the tradition, a tradition that is far beyond our individual control.12 Gadamer wants to examine the experience of truth which goes beyond the domain that is subject to the control of scientific methodology and to look for its specific legitimization. This is the philosophical experience, the experience of art and of history itself. The work of understanding and interpretation always remains meaningful. This shows the superior universality with which reason rises above the limitations of any given language. The hermeneutical experience is the corrective by means of which the thinking reason escapes the prison of language, and it is itself verbally constituted.13 Gadamer focuses his inquiry on the hermeneutic experience as an open process. It is, in fact, fulfilled in openness to the new experience.14 The experienced person is characterized not by a particular amount of experience but predominantly by one’s openness to a new experience (Offenheit für Erfahrung). This openness is a radically undogmatic approach of welcoming everything which wants to be understood. Every experience worthy of the name runs counter to our expectation. By emphasizing the significance of learning more from a negative experience, Gadamer links the historical nature of man with the fundamental negativity and elaborates the essential difference between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus, insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we call experience in the proper sense. Insight is something to which we come. It too is ultimately part of the nature of a man, i.e., to be discerning and insightful.15 Human understanding is fundamentally lingual. By learning a language, we inherit a past that becomes our past, though it has not been temporally our past. If we do not learn hermeneutic virtue, i.e., if we do not come to see that we must first just understand the other in order to see whether in the end perhaps something like a solidarity of all humanity is possible in relation to Cf. Wierciński, “Ermeneutica filosofica della tradizione,” 21-40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 403. 14 According to Gadamer, “completed experience is not the completion of knowledge, but rather the completed openness for new experience.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” in Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Hermeneutical Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990), 290. 15 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 350. 12 13

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living together and surviving, then we will not be able to accomplish the essential human tasks, the small ones and the large ones.16 In Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato, the discourse must be written in the soul of the other. This discourse is a conversation that has a distinctly transformative character. By being written in the soul of the other, it not only transmits the information to the other but challenges the other to a radical transformation. The power of words does not only transform the other but also transforms the person initiating the dialogue. Only he is truly capable of speaking who has acknowledged that of which he knows how to persuade people that it is something good and right and thereby he is able to stand up for it. This knowledge of the good and this capability in the art of speaking does not mean a universal knowledge of the “good”; rather it means a knowledge of that of which one has to persuade people here and now and how one is to do it.17 We truthfully understand the other (a person, der Andere, or a text, das Andere) only when we accept the fact that this other makes a truth claim upon our very being. The application (Anwendung) of the understanding is an event that not only adds some new insights into the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us, but it changes our mind. “Hermeneutic” philosophy... does not understand itself as an “absolute” position but as a path of experiencing. Its modesty consists in the fact that for it there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation. This means, however, constantly recognizing in advance the possibility that your partner is right, even recognizing the possible superiority of your partner. Is this too little?18 “Wenn wir nicht hermeneutische Tugend lernen, d.h. wenn wir nicht einsehen, es gilt erst einmal den Anderen zu verstehen, um zu sehen, ob nicht vielleicht doch am Ende so etwas wie Solidarität der Menschheit als ganzer auch in Bezug auf ein Miteinander-Leben und Überleben möglich wird, dann werden wir wesentliche Menschheitsaufgaben im Kleinen wie im Groben nicht erfüllen können.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Wort zum Begriff: Die Aufgabe der Hermeneutik als Philosophie” in Jean Grondin ed., Gadamer Lesebuch (Tübingen: Mohr 1997), 109. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy,” in Bruce Krajewski, ed., Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002), 1-12. See James Risser, “From Concept to Word: On the Radicality of Philosophical Hermeneutics,” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 309–325. 17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task,” in idem, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Fred Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), 121; “Hermeneutik als theoretische und praktische Aufgabe,” in Gesammelte Werke 2: 306. 18 Gadamer, Reflections, 36. 16

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We are thus requested to recognize the possible correctness and in some cases, even the superiority of the position of our partner. In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” of Truth and Method, Gadamer describes the philosophical character of his inquiry into human understanding. He is concerned with clarifying the conditions in which understanding itself takes place: I did not intend to produce a manual for guiding understanding in the manner of the earlier hermeneutics. I did not wish to elaborate a system of rules to describe, let alone direct, the methodical procedure of the human sciences. Nor was it my aim to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in these fields in order to put my findings to practical ends. If there is any practical consequence of the present investigation, it certainly has nothing to do with an unscientific “commitment”; instead, it is concerned with the “scientific” integrity of acknowledging the commitment involved in all understanding. My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.19 Truth and Method is in its nature deeply phenomenological. Gadamer describes his approach by saying: “Fundamentally I am not proposing a method, but I am describing what is the case.”20 Understanding happens then between description and interpretation. Understanding is not a mysterious communion of minds; it is an event (Ereignis). We want to grasp the character of the process of understanding, to comprehend what happens when we understand something. Convincing and successful interpretation brings us to understanding.21 Understanding is participation in meaning. As a historical event, it is embedded in language.22 The true meaning of language transcends the limits of methodological interpretation. Language as the medium for history is itself a place of mediation. Human understanding is always interpretive. Hermeneutic truth acquires a distinct density and fullness of meaning. Hermeneutic understanding is not a process of construing a self-identical meaning of the text, but a continuous dialogue in which a mediation of meaning takes place. Dialogue is the model of hermeneutic understanding. Meaning cannot be determined from the perspective of propositional logic.

19

Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxv-xxvi. Ibid., 512. 21 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 111. 22 “Rather, language is the house of Being, in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it.” Heidegger, Pathmarks, 254. 20

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Mediation in language happens through the lingual phenomenon of conversation, which is itself the living language. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a philosophy of conversation. The dialectic of question and answer applied to the interpretation of the texts requires addressing the question to which the text serves as an answer. This puts into question not only the text that needs to be understood, but also, and, in fact, primarily the interpreting subject itself by confronting him or her with the truth claim of the text. The hermeneutician is not concerned with individuality and what it thinks, but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth.23 Our pre-understanding and pre-judgment that condition understanding are tested in this confrontation. Following Heidegger, Gadamer understands the text as deriving from existence. Therefore, the understanding of the text must originate with the understanding of existence. Since the text has something to say, the interpreter, in order to understand what needs to be understood, has to include in the event of understanding this invisible existence suppressed by the text. Hermeneutic understanding happens as a fusion of horizons. Conscious of our own historicity, we encounter a text from the past and confront ourselves in understanding the meaning of it. Language and history condition understanding. There is an inseparable connection between the understanding subject and that which needs to be understood. Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding.24 Understanding is limited because it is conditioned by the historical situation of the human being: it is by nature, temporal and finite.25 23

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 296. Ibid., 299. Gadamer clarifies the epistemological conditions of historical knowledge by stressing the fact that it is difficult “to harmonize the historical knowledge that helps to shape our historical consciousness with this ideal and how difficult it is, for that reason, to comprehend its true nature on the basis of the modern conception of method. This is the place to turn those negative statements into positive ones. The concept of ‘prejudice’ is where we can start.” Ibid., 273. “The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.” Ibid., 277. 25 “What is at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal character of temporal experience. The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world… Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, 24

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Consciousness of being affected by history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation—i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation— reflection on effective history—can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.26 As historical beings, we are subject to the effects of the Wirkungsgeschichte. According to Gadamer, “precisely through our finitude, the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.”27 Language is the medium of all hermeneutic experience. One of the most famous of Gadamer’s claims, yet often misunderstood, is “Being that can be understood is language.”28 It is not a metaphysical statement about Being’s full lingual intelligibility. Human understanding is lingual; there is no discourse without words. In conversation, an infinity of possible meanings is available to the concrete situation. Conversation mirrors the structure of factic life experience; it is an event in which the enactment of meaning takes place. “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try to understand everything that can be understood.”29 The process of disclosing new layers of meaning is truly unending. Participating in the event of understanding, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.” Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 26 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 301. 27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976), 16. 28 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 470. In the “Foreword to the Second Edition,” Gadamer explains: “But I believe that I have shown correctly that what is so understood is not the Thou but the truth of what the Thou says to us. I mean specifically the truth that becomes visible to me only through the Thou, and only by my letting myself be told something by it. It is the same with historical tradition. It would not deserve the interest we take in it if it did not have something to teach us that we could not know by ourselves. It is in this sense that the statement ‘being that can be understood is language’ is to be read. It does not mean that the one who understands has an absolute mastery over being but, on the contrary, that being is not experienced where something can be constructed by us and is to that extent conceived; it is experienced where what is happening can merely be understood.” Ibid., xxxii. 29 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 31. 351

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we testify to the ever-new horizons for understanding that open up and disclose new possibilities of interpretation.30 Hermeneutic truth does not signify the correspondence of mental states to objective reality. It is not a matter of adequation between the cognizing subject and the object in-itself, according to the definition adaequatio intellectus et rei.31 For Gadamer, hermeneutic truth is a matter of mutual agreement between partners engaged in dialogue and seeking common understanding. It is far more existential and, in this respect, an ethical aspect of being-in-the-world. The Truth of Art Truth and Method begins with an analysis of the experience of the work of art as the authentic space for the experience of how truth occurs. The whole of Part One is devoted to the question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art. Gadamer is determined to do justice to the truth of aesthetic experience and overcome the radical subjectivization of the aesthetic and argue against reductionist philosophy in which truth can be found only in science. The truth of art is prior to its demonstration by interpretive methods.32 The work of art, through indetermination open to mediation and interpretation, includes its Wirkungsgeschichte. Gadamer reads the truth of art in the context of play, symbol, and festival. Hermeneutic truth is inseparable from the play of understanding as a process of communication. In this sense, it is not something to be discovered (in the Cf. Robert Bernasconi, “‘You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal,” in Lawrence K. Schmidt ed., The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995). 31 For Thomas, “Veritas intellectus est adaequatio intellectus et rei, secundum quod intellectus dicit esse quod est, vel non esse quod non est.” Contr. gent. 1, 59, De verit. 1, 2. “In rebus neque veritas neque falsitas est nisi per ordinem ad intellectum.” Sum. th. 1, 17, l. “Veritas habet fundamentum in re.” 1 sent. 19, 5. Cf. Heidegger comments on the correspondence theory: “This dual character of the accord is brought to light by the traditional definition of truth: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. This can be taken to mean: truth is the correspondence [Angleichung] of the matter to knowledge. But it can also be taken as saying: truth is the correspondence of knowledge to the matter. Admittedly, the above definition is usually stated only in the formula veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem [truth is the adequation of intellect to thing]. Yet truth so conceived, propositional truth, is possible only on the basis of material truth [Sachwahrheit], of adaequatio rei ad intellectum [adequation of thing to intellect]. Both concepts of the essence of veritas have continually in view a conforming to... and hence think truth as correctness [Richtigkeit].” Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, trans. John Sallis, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ heidegger 6a.htm. 32 This is also true, for Gadamer, with regard to historical consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). 30

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sense of re-presentatio), but something that happens through the exercise of communicative rationality. Gadamer does not intend to prove that the work of art demonstrates its own truth but rather to make sense of the experience of art. This already requires the admission of the truth value of works of art because, despite the efforts to rationalize it away, in the work of art truth is experienced in a way that cannot be constituted any other way. The beautiful imposes itself by the way in which it attracts us, the way it convinces us of its truth and justness. It emerges both in nature and in art, in such a way that it convinces us all and makes us recognize that, in fact, this is the truth.33 Gadamer argues that the community created by the work of art is a universal community that embraces the whole world. In fact, all artistic creation challenges each of us to listen to the language in which the work of art speaks and to make it our own. It remains true in every case that a shared or potentially shared achievement is at issue. This remains true irrespective of whether the formation of a work of art is supported in advance by a shared view of the world that can be taken for granted, or whether we must first learn to “read” the language of the one who speaks in the creation before us.34 For Heidegger, the event of disclosure is the event of “truth.” Truth is understood in terms of the dialectic of concealment and unconcealment, an unconcealment that conceals while revealing. It is an endless interplay between closing off and opening up. What is most important here is the fact that those two aspects of disclosure belong together. The unconcealment of the world is grounded in the concealment of the earth.35 In the interplay of veiling and unveiling itself, the truth of art is an occurrence of meaning that is effected in its reception.36 It captivates a 33

Gadamer, GW9: 19. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 39. 35 Gadamer describes his philosophical hermeneutics as an attempt to take up and elaborate the late Heidegger’s way of thinking. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in Lewis Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 47. 36 Although Gadamer follows Heidegger’s ontological emphasis in defining truth as Unverborgenheit and Erschlossenheit, there has not always been agreement over the exact nature of their similarity. See, for example, Robert Dostal, “The Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and Sudden Lightening,” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “What is Truth?” James Risser, “The Remembrance of Truth: The Truth of Remembrance,” in Brice Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994). 34

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human being and presents itself as a challenge to encompass truth itself. It is not a truth to be discovered but arises as the consequence of applying a practice. For Gadamer, the artistic and poetic languages demonstrate a particular relationship to truth as an event (Ereignis). It has been proven by experience that the work of art leaves an important impact on us, thus shaping the understanding we have of ourselves. In showing itself what it is, the work of art captivates us and calls us to change our life. There is a very strong bond between truth and our self-understanding in the horizon of human finitude and incompleteness. Hermeneutic understanding of the human being concerns not only particular aspects of life as if the human being were only a thinking being. It is rather an attempt to understand the human being in its complexity and totality without ever losing the perspective of the essential fragmentariness and incompletion of any human insight and cognition. The Fundamentality of Understanding For Gadamer, understanding is fundamental for Dasein. Only from the horizon of understanding can a human being understand oneself and one’s world. Every understanding is interpretation. Gadamer’s lingually oriented hermeneutics is situated between Aristotelian practical philosophy and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity by focusing on the concept of Aristotelian phronesis. His ethics is based on the hermeneutic experience and its corresponding practical truth. Hermeneutic truth is not an epistemological concept but a mode of being-in-the-world with its concrete existential and ethical implications. A hermeneutically informed notion of truth, liberated from its traditional epistemological paradigm, 37 helps us to understand that the experience of truth cannot be verified empirically. Due to the processual nature of hermeneutic truth and the temporality and finitude of human being, there is, and can be, no final or absolute truth; it is a matter of openness to the ever-new experience. No absolute truth means, for philosophical hermeneutics, that it does not have the final word because there will be no final word; understanding is a never-ending process. Hermeneutic truth is a lived experience of a merging of horizons enabling us to encounter the other and to reach a mutual understanding that can serve as a base for a creative Mit-einander. Gadamer’s dialogical notion of understanding as a process of communication provides the model for a social order based not on domination (Herrschaft) but on the good will that seeks to understand the other. The hermeneutic truth is the horizon in which we live our hermeneutic existence.

37

See Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), 187.

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2. 4. 4. The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher, and the Philosophizing Believer Philosophy and Theology: Vexata Quaestio Although Paul encountered mockery on Areopagus, (Acts 17: 32) the Revelation he announced permeated philosophy. The need to address the relationship between philosophy and theology became not only the fate of Christianity but Western philosophy. Philosophy and theology do not exist apart from philosophers and theologians. They can only be unified in the believing philosopher and the philosophizing believer. The methodological boundary between philosophy and theology needs to be preserved, yet that does not mean subordinating the matter to be thought to methodology. There is a perennial danger of transgressing the methodological boundaries of disciplines: theology absorbing philosophy or being absorbed by philosophy. Ostensibly for the sake of preserving the integrity of biblical faith, Kant segregated the faculties of philosophy and theology; however, it is clear to any careful reader that for Kant, whatever truth may occur in theology, it is subordinated to the criterion of philosophical rationality. One may legitimately ask whether a similar subordination covertly determines Paul Ricoeur’s work in the philosophy of religion. How can theology appropriate hermeneutic philosophy without losing its specific character, that is, without accommodating itself to a criterion of rationality alien to its own horizon of understanding? On the other hand, how can philosophical hermeneutics engage theology without conceding its rigorous criteria of independent research to a religious Weltanschauung? Theology could be embraced as a philosophical reflection by the subject, who is an active “hearer of the word,”1 or as Revelation, a divine message of salvation to be hermeneutically interpreted and applied. Addressing the relationship between the human and the divine opens up a horizon for the coexistence and mutual enriching of philosophy and theology. Paul Ricoeur is neither a philosophical theologian nor is he a Christian philosopher, who engages philosophical discourse to prove the claims of Christianity. Rather, he is a scripturally-informed philosopher. Ricoeur formally opposes the relationship between philosophy and theology as understood in the concept of “negative theology.”2 Negative theology, the via negativa, does not attempt to be 1

2

Cf. Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word, trans. Michael Richards (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), which reveals Rahner’s own underlying understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy, of anthropology and the nature of Revelation. In his transcendental argument Rahner demonstrates that God must be thought as personal, though not a finite person, who in his free decision self-manifested Himself in the human realm of history and language. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc De Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49. 355

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the science of God and His creation in the classical sense of scientia de Deo et de deibus,3 but an explanation (expositio) of what He is not, following Aquinas’s basic assumption that “we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not.”4 Ricoeur’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology, which is both very important and challenging to define, oscillates around a creative coexistence of the two disciplines by keeping to a rigorous methodological division. On the one hand, a philosopher can continuously deepen his sensitivity to philosophical problems as he engages the Scriptures. On the other, a theologian implementing the methodological apparatus of philosophy can reach a more profound understanding of theology and his own personal religious conviction. To better understand Ricoeur’s position on this relationship, we will proceed in five steps. First, Ricoeur will be situated within Gadamer’s hermeneutics of finitude, one of the sources for Ricoeur’s appreciation of the limits of philosophy. Second, Ricoeur’s three-stage hermeneutic arc will be explicated, with special attention to the explanatory stage that ensures a place for philosophical analysis. Third, we will examine Ricoeur’s construal of philosophy as a modest endeavor, one which must be willing to acknowledge its own finitude and assume a stance of agnosticism. Fourth, we will explore Ricoeur’s insistence on the autonomy of philosophy with respect to theology and religious conviction, an autonomy that is secured by his agnostic stance. Finally, Ricoeur’s preoccupation with rationality and evil results in the primacy of reason in philosophy, and that prevents Ricoeur from ever taking up the mantle of a theologian. The Hermeneutics of Finitude Ricoeur’s concern with the notion of human finitude goes back to his Philosophy of the Will.5 Under the influence of the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Ricoeur elevated human transcendence to a fundamentally human experience, discrediting human finitude and fusing it with guilt. He contends:

Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, 1, 2, 2: “Et hoc modo sacra doctrina est scientia: quia procedit ex principiis notis lumine superioris scientiae, quae scilicet est scientia Dei et beatorum.” 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy,” in idem, Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 116. 5 In French, under the comprehensive title Philosophy of the Will, Ricoeur has published three volumes: Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), Freedom and Nature. The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), and The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 3

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I had the impression or even the conviction, that these two terms [finitude and guilt] tended to be identified in classical existentialism at the cost of both experiences, guilt becoming a particular case of finitude and for that reason beyond cure and forgiveness, and finitude, on the other hand, being affected by a kind of diffused sense of sadness and despair through guilt.6 In Fallible Man, Ricoeur goes far beyond the existentialists’ horizon. Grounding his analyses on openness, perspective, and the receptivity of perception, he elaborates the experience of finitude in relation to his own body, as far as it is “a mediation of appearance,” that is, not “what is finite, but what is open into.”7 “Primal finitude consists in perspective or point of view. It affects our primary relation to the world, which is to ‘receive’ ‘receptivity’ itself, which consists in our openness to the world.”8 The central claim of hermeneutics is the elucidation of the fact that human existence, and with it human understanding, are radically finite.9 The “hermeneutic consciousness,” a consciousness of historical efficacy (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) is based on the notion of finitude. Speaking of the most fundamental gesture of philosophy, Ricoeur states: “The gesture of hermeneutics is a humble one of acknowledging the historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed in the reign of finitude.”10 Offering an examination of the creative experiences that are allowed to human beings in their finitude, Ricoeur admits that the only real absolute as far as human understanding is concerned

Paul Ricoeur, “From Existentialism to the Philosophy of Language,” Philosophy Today 17 no. 2-4 (Summer 1973): 89. 7 Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Merold Westphal, “Hermeneutical Finitude from Schleiermacher to Derrida,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, 5065. Westphal makes a clear point as to how his interpretation of the hermeneutics of finitude could be applied to contemporary theology. He writes “The theistic affirmation of God as a personal creator may be the best horizon for understanding human finitude, and the notion that this God is a performer of speech acts and through the mediation of human writers inscribes those speech acts in a holy book may be best understood in a context which acknowledges that different hearers (readers) will understand the same speech act differently by virtue of being in different hermeneutical circles… Other than the extension of the hermeneutical circle beyond the realm of text interpretation and the sciences, I have suggested that Heidegger’s distinctive contribution is in his double reduction from the theoretical, the cognitive, the assertoric to the realms of our practices and affects. This hermeneutical move could be the basis for reuniting metaphysics and spirituality, whose separation has been such a plague on so much western theology.” Ibid., 65. 10 Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and Critique of Ideology,” in idem, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 87. 6

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is the absoluteness of its own finitude. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, “experience is the experience of human finitude.”11 Finitude in Gadamer is deeply rooted in Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity. In Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the finitude of Dasein. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger further emphasizes that thinking the finite presupposes the idea of infinitude: In this question of the going-beyond of finitude, we find a wholly central problem. I have said that it is a separate question to ask about the possibility of finitude in general, for one can argue simply: As soon as I make assertions about the finite and as soon as I want to determine the finite as finite, I must already have an idea of infinitude.12 Heidegger’s notion of finitude points to the radical contingency of existence, ontologically revealed through “nothingness,” as experienced in Dasein’s Beingunto-death. Authentic existence is an ontological-temporal disclosure of Dasein’s finitude. Heidegger’s ursprügliche Zeit indicates the inseparable relation to existence. Being, in its primordial sense, is presencing (Anwesenheit). “What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation.”13 Thinking the finite means to think what is limited, the “event of Appropriation.” But the limitation needs to be thematized, not overcome.14 The human experience is the experience of historicity. Tradition is not an object to be comprehended, but language expressing itself as a Thou: “Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness.”15 Gadamer says: A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the 11

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 357. See also James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997). Thiselton highlights that, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, understanding works toward the goal of a fusion of the horizons of meaning and understanding. He also emphasizes the distinctiveness, uniqueness and radical finitude of each act of understanding. Anthony C. Thiselton, “Hermeneutics, Biblical,” in Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (London: Routledge, 1998), 389-395. 12 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 197. 13 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 19. 14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Grenzen der Sprache,” in idem, Evolution und Sprache. Über Entstehung und Wesen der Sprache, Herrenalber Texte 66 (Karlsruhe: Evangelische Akademie Baden, 1985), 97-98. 15 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 357. 358

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opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.16 The meaning of a text is not governed by its author’s self-understanding. The text has a sense and significance that surpass the authorial intention and continuously unfold in thought and tradition. The essence of the hermeneutic problem is the consciousness of the historicity of human understanding. In Gadamer’s words: In fact, history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.17 According to Ricoeur, philosophical hermeneutics is “the hermeneutics of preunderstanding hermeneutics of finitude.”18 Holding to the basic presupposition of the intrinsic finitude of all human understanding, philosophical hermeneutics limits the possibility of achieving a definite knowledge of the world. As Gadamer says, “there is no claim of definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: The acknowledgment of the finitude of human being in itself.”19 For Gadamer, “Language itself… has something speculative about it… as the realization of meaning, as the event of speech, of mediation, of coming to understanding. Such a realization is speculative in that the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite.”20 However, the spoken word is not exhausted in its lingual expression; the unsaid belongs to what is said. Gadamer’s understanding of word goes beyond significative function to the enactment of thinking. As such, it is never a final word, for thinking is always thinking further; there is always more to be said or thought. The processual character of language makes it possible for Gadamer to think Dasein’s 16

Ibid., 358. Ibid., 276-277. 18 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 96. 19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Science of the Life-World,” Analecta Husserliana 2: 185. See also Christopher P. Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude: Toward a Theory of Ethical Understanding (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991). 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 469. 17

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finitude in relation to divine infinity. “Christology prepares the way for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity.”21 Verbum mediates the human and the divine. The Hermeneutic Arc Heidegger’s primary contribution to the hermeneutics of finitude lies in a radicalization of the notion of interpretation. Gadamer stresses that in the task of interpretation, the meaning of the text itself has to come to the forefront: By being re-actualized in understanding, texts are drawn into a genuine course of events in exactly the same way as are events themselves. This is what we described as the history of effect as an element in hermeneutical experience. Every actualization in understanding can be regarded as a historical potential of what is understood. It is part of the historical finitude of our being that we are aware that others after us will understand in a different way. And yet it is equally indubitable that it remains the same work whose fullness of meaning is realized in the changing process of understanding, just as it is the same history whose meaning is constantly in the process of being defined.22 Attributing to the actualization of understanding the potential of what is to be understood, Gadamer makes us aware that we will always understand differently. This is the very condition of our finitude. Ricoeur’s theory and practice of interpretation are deeply situated in the hermeneutics of finitude. Interpretation is a process that encompasses explanation and understanding. The polarity between Erklären and Verstehen is a complex and mediated dialectic. Ricoeur recognizes three phases in the “hermeneutic arc”: naive understanding, objective explanation, and appropriation. The first stage is to allow the text to unfold for the reader while being read. At this stage, there are no imposed limits on interpretation. Ricoeur’s “naive understanding” stresses the relationship between the reader and the text based on the reader’s loyalty to the text: “An asymmetric relation obtains between text and reader, in which only one of the partners speaks for two.”23 At the naive stage of 21

Ibid., 428. Ibid., 373. 23 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 75. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, his hermeneutic phenomenology, is focused on the text and on the world of the text. Yet life is lived not thought. We could append a similar critique toward Husserl’s idea of pure phenomenology or Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. On the limitations of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics see Marcelino Agís Villaverde, “Du monde de la vie au monde du texte,” in Stefan Orth and 22

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reading the accent is put on what the author said, which is the verbal meaning of the text. Theological sources are interpreted in light of the readers’ situation. We have to acknowledge the epistemological limitations of the hermeneutic horizon in which they are read. Every reader is a real person living in a particular linguistic and cultural community. The horizon of the past, i.e., the text, is engaged from the perspective of the present horizon. Each text represents the specific language used, the specific moment in time, the specific place where it originates. Similarly, the reader embodies corresponding particularities. Every interpretation is a projection of a reader’s possibilities of understanding. Understanding can happen only when we have some pre-understanding, which conditions our projections. Whenever we interpret, we already have some understanding of what is to be interpreted.24 The hermeneutic circle is at play: The whole of the text can only be embraced through its parts, and the parts can only be illumined in terms of the whole. Moreover, the process of interpretation has a circular character, as we bring our past with us into the future. As Heidegger states: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way.”25 Entering the circular structure of understanding is to recognize the essential conditions of interpretation. A fusion of horizons takes place: One intends to understand the text itself. But this means that the interpreter’s own thoughts too have gone into re-awakening the text’s meaning. In this the interpreter’s own horizon is decisive, yet not as a personal standpoint that he maintains or enforces, but more as an opinion and a possibility that one brings into play and puts at risk, and that helps one truly to make one’s own what the text says.26 The community of addressees is historically constituted. What are the implications of this notion of the “situatedness” of the interpreter for theology? How can the message of the Bible and tradition be faithfully translated and interpreted in a theological horizon? The world of the text must unfold in front of the reader before he or she can address any existential question. The explanatory moment in Ricoeur’s hermeneutic is a necessary moment in the application of his philosophical hermeneutics. The task at the second stage Andris Breitling, ed., Vor dem Text: Hermeneutik und Phänomenologie im Denken Paul Ricoeurs (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 2002), 15-37. 24 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & RowHarper, 1962), particularly section 32, Understanding and Interpretation, 188-195. See also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269-270. 25 Heidegger, Being and Time, 195; Gadamer puts it in a similar way: “To try to escape from one’s own concepts in interpretation is not only impossible but manifestly absurd. To interpret means precisely to bring one’s own preconceptions into play so that the text’s meaning can really be made to speak for us.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 397. 26 Ibid., 388. 361

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is to construct possible interpretations that do not do violence to the text as it is structured. Texts need to be interpreted in a way in which they were literally structured. The verbal meaning of the text needs to be re-constructed as a whole, allowing the potential horizon of meaning to be actualized in different ways. This form of rigorous explanation is a necessary detour in the hermeneutic process.27 Ricoeur says: If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions. The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism. It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our immediate reach.28 This very important statement clarifies the most confusing issue lurking in hermeneutics. By allowing for the variety of interpretations, or even more, encouraging this variety, hermeneutics does not relativize interpretation.29 The sense of a text is not behind the text but in front of it. It is not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points toward a possible world, thanks to the nonostensive reference of the text. Understanding has less than ever to do with the author and his situation. It seeks to grasp the world-propositions opened up by the reference of the text. To understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says, to what it talks about. In this process, the mediating role played by structural analysis constitutes both the justification of the objective approach and the rectification of the subjective approach to the text. We are definitely enjoined from identifying understanding with some kind of intuitive grasping of the intention underlying the text.30 The final aspect of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic arc is appropriation. It is a process of discovering and implementing the possible meanings disclosed by the text. The appropriation is a “second naiveté” that allows the matter of the text to come to the fore. “What is appropriated is indeed the matter of the text. But the matter Boyd Blundell, “Philosophy Without Shoes: Paul Ricoeur on Sacred Ground,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Expressing the Inexpressible: Philosophy Encounters Religious Mystery, Studia z Filozofii Boga, Religii i Człowieka 3 (2003). 28 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79. 29 Bernstein calls the truth of hermeneutics ‘relativism,’ as he refers to the possibility of various interpretations of a matter to be interpreted and opposes it to the truth of foundationalism, called by him ‘objectivism,’ which imposes a limit to interpretations. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). 30 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 87-88. 27

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of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text be. So, I exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text.”31 The hermeneutics of appropriation concerns the positive aspect of self-distanciation. Borrowing Gadamer’s category of play, Ricoeur explains the process of self-understanding in light of the text. In the process of genuine play, Gadamerian conversation comes to its most comprehensive fruition in language. Understanding occurs in language because language is the medium where the human being and the world meet, manifesting their original belonging together.32 Understanding “is a genuine experience (Erfahrung)—i.e., an encounter with something that asserts itself as truth.”33 Gadamer defines truth through his concept of play. Truth emerges from being subject to a text and its traditions, rather than being the subject. Gadamer says: When we understand a text, what is meaningful in it captivates us just as the beautiful captivates us. It has asserted itself and captivated us before we can come to ourselves and be in a position to test the claim to meaning that it makes. What we encounter in the experience of the beautiful and in understanding the meaning of tradition really has something of the truth of play about it. In understanding, we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.34 Understanding—the event of truth—happens when we are addressed, when we are subject to the meaning of the text. The texts are transmitted to us in and through tradition. Being players, we are subject to rather than the subject of the game. As listeners and receivers, we must speak the truth about that which we are experiencing. The experience of play must, in the end, find its application in our practical life: it cannot remain wordless, because we are lingual beings.

The Modesty of Philosophy: The Agnostic Philosopher Encounters the Word On a number of occasions, Ricoeur has addressed the question of the philosopher encountering the message of Christian Revelation. He confesses: “This is my case, I am a believer, a Christian of the Protestant confession, to whom it is important

31

Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 37. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 474-476. 33 Ibid., 489. 34 Ibid., 490. 32

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to maintain a necessary distance between my faith and my philosophical practice.”35 Specifying his position, he prefers to talk about himself as a someone who professes a “cristianesimo da filosofo”—a Christianity in the mode of a philosopher.36 Nevertheless, his Christian faith has undoubtedly influenced his philosophical thought.37 However, the reverse is equally true: His religious convictions made him aware of philosophical problems: evil, suffering, responsibility, and the relationship between love and justice. As human beings, we encounter the Absolute in “the trace of the language.”38 The real power of the personal God of Christianity lies in a disarmed love. The only icon of God that we have access to is the human face, which is also a face of God, a face of weakness, and therefore true power, the power of love.39 Ricoeur declares his philosophical agnosticism in the introduction to Oneself as Another, explaining the reason for not including in the final text the two Gifford lectures that dealt more directly with a philosophical theology: “to pursue, to the very last line, an autonomous, philosophical discourse.”40

Bertrand Recillon, “900, L’ora del perdono,” SWIF: Rassegno Stampa (8 agosto 1999): http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/rassegna/990808e.html: “Questo è il mio caso: io sono credente, cristiano di confessione protestante, ma tengo a mantenere la distanza necessaria tra la mia fede e la mia pratica filosofica.” 36 “Preferisco definirmi come un qualcuno che professa un ‘cristianesimo da filosofo.’” Ibid. 37 Speaking for example on Resurrection, Ricoeur contends: “I do not claim that this hermeneutic of resurrection alone is valid and orthodox. I only say that, more than any other, it gives rise to thought.” Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” in idem, Figuring the Sacred, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 203-216, at 205. 38 “No, dato che la credenza in un Dio personale viene dalla Rivelazione: la sola ragione, al massimo, ci porta a intuire l’esistenza di un assoluto. Assoluto di cui vediamo la traccia nella lingua… Nessuno ha inventato il linguaggio. Ci precede sempre, è sempre là prima che iniziamo a parlare, è sempre presupposto. Non è per nulla che i cristiani evocano la Parola di Dio. La parola è, secondo me, contemporaneamente umana e più che umana. Essa è, per riprendere una espressione di Emmanuel Lévinas, una traccia di Dio.” Recillon, “900, L’ora del perdono.” 39 “Evocando il ‘volto’ di Dio, l’uomo ha scelto di metaforizzare la parte del corpo umano più esposta. Il volto umano è il luogo dell’estrema vulnerabilità ma, anche, con la bocca e con gli occhi, il luogo dell’uscita da sé. È il luogo della singolarità. Io credo che il volto sia la sola icona che noi abbiamo di Dio. E questo volto umano, volto di Dio, è anche il volto della debolezza, della non potenza di Dio, e in questo senso solamente, della potenza di Dio.” Ibid. 40 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24. Ricoeur himself recognizes the reasons for excluding “natural theology” from Oneself as Another as debatable or regrettable. Ibid. Despite his attempts to present a purely philosophical discourse, Ricoeur is nevertheless criticized for taking a strong philosophical position on the question of God, in the last pages of his study. See Marc Richir, “Paul Ricoeur: Soi-même comme un autre,” Annuaire (1998): 41-63. See also another critique: Merold Westphal, “Review of Oneself as Another,” American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1994): 385-386. 35

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The ten studies that make up this work assume the bracketing, conscious, and resolute, of the convictions that bind me to biblical faith. I do not claim that at the deep level of motivations these convictions remain without any effect on the interest that I take in this or that problem, even in the overall problematic of the self. But I think I have presented to my readers arguments alone, which do not assume any commitment from the reader to reject, accept, or suspend anything with regard to biblical faith. It will be observed that this asceticism of the argument, which marks, I believe, all my philosophical work, leads to a type of philosophy from which the actual mention of God is absent and in which the question of God, as a philosophical question, itself remains in a suspension that could be called agnostic, as the final lines of the tenth study will attest. It is in an effort not to make an exception to this suspension that the sole extension given to the nine studies conducted within the dimension of a philosophical hermeneutics consists in an ontological investigation that involves no ontotheological amalgamations.41 Ricoeur keeps to a consistent policy of separating philosophical from theological issues. Arguing against a crypto-philosophical theology, he also defends his writing against the accusation of crypto-theology.42 The distinction between philosophy and theology manifests itself in the organization of Ricoeur’s writings. Ricoeur suspects that Karl Barth might have fallen into some aspects of cryptophilosophy “with respect to speculation termed onto-theological,” which in turn led to a decision not to mix philosophical and theological reflection.43 By eliminating the two studies on “natural theology” (which had been requested for the Gifford Lectures) from the final publication, Ricoeur wanted “to keep the promise I have made to myself not to mix the philosophical and the theological.”44 He prefers to deal with the accusation of a personal inconsistency rather than risking a “confusionism, mixing crypto-theology on the philosophical plane and cryptophilosophy on the plane of exegesis and theology!”45 In Critique and Conviction, elucidating his philosophical agnosticism, Ricoeur writes: My mistrust of the proofs of the existence of God had led me always to treat philosophy as anthropology—this is still the word I adopted in Oneself as 41

Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 24. Ibid. 43 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 150. Boyd Blundell calls this attempt to separate philosophical from theological writing a “double life.” Cf. Boyd Blundell, “At Arm’s Length: Theology, Hermeneutics, and Ricoeur’s Double Life,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 440-455. 44 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 90-91. 45 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to David Stewart,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 449. 42

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Another, in which I border on the religious only in the final pages of the chapter on the voice of conscience, when I say that moral conscience speaks to me from farther away than myself; I cannot say then if it is the voice of my ancestors, the testament of a dead god, or that of a living god. In this case, I am agnostic on the plane of philosophy.46 As a philosopher, Ricoeur is convinced that agnosticism is the only religious orientation a philosopher can assume that does not jeopardize the limits of the autonomy of philosophy. Finally—and perhaps most of all—if, under the title of “mandated self” and “respondent,” the determinations of the self in this work are found to be intensified and transformed by the recapitulation that biblical faith proposes, this recapitulation by no means serves as a sly revenge of the foundational ambition that my hermeneutical philosophy never ceases to combat. The reference of biblical faith to a culturally contingent symbolic network requires that this faith assume its own insecurity, which makes it a chance happening transformed into a destiny by means of a choice constantly renewed, in the scrupulous respect of different choices. The dependence of the self on a word that strips it of its glory, all the while comforting its courage to be, delivers biblical faith from the temptation, I am here calling crypto-philosophical, of taking over the henceforth vacant role of ultimate foundation. In turn, a faith that knows itself to be without guarantee, following the interpretation given by the Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel in God as the Mystery of the World,47 can help philosophical hermeneutics to protect itself from the hubris that would set itself as the heir to the philosophies of the cogito and as continuing their self-foundational claim. In these matters, the present work recognizes that it belongs to what Jean Greisch48 has called the hermeneutical age of reason.49 In many ways a Kantian, Ricoeur maintains a strict division between philosophy and theology, while still hoping to overcome the conflict between these disciplines. Philosophy should be an autonomous, agnostic field of study that suspends the question of God. Theology should also be regarded as a self-contained enterprise that refuses the temptation to ground its inquiries on a crypto-philosophical foundation.50 Ricoeur corrects Kant’s method, moving from a presuppositionless 46

Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 150. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Edinburgh: Clark, 1983). 48 Jean Greisch, L’Age herméneutique de la raison (Paris: Edition du Cerf, 1985). 49 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 25. 50 Pamela Sue Anderson, Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 1-39. 47

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critical philosophy to a regional application of critical philosophy to religious questions. As he says: “A hermeneutical philosophy… will try to get as close as possible to the most originary expressions of a community of faith, to those expressions through which the members of this community have interpreted their experience for the sake of themselves or others’ sake.”51Initiating his discourse with the experience of faith, he adopts the rule of critical inquiry to enrich the understanding of this experience. Ricoeur maintains, “it is an old conviction of mine that the philosopher’s opposite in this type of debate is not the theologian, but the believer who is informed by the exegete; I mean, the believer who seeks to understand himself through a better understanding of the texts of his faith.”52 In his essay “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,”53 Ricoeur elaborates the relationship between philosophy and theology, not in relation to faith and reason, but to the question of hope. Intellectus spei, the intelligibility of hope, “point[s] to a structural change within philosophical discourse.”54 Referring to Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope,55 Ricoeur formulates the task of a theology of hope as needing “to revise all the theological concepts on the basis of an exegesis ruled by the preaching of the kingdom to come.”56 This is the central preaching of the church, that of the Risen Christ. Philosophically, “this structural change could concern what we might call the act of closing this discourse.”57 Arguing against a Hegelian “conclusive” or “closed” dialectic, Ricoeur favors a more Kantian “nonconclusive dialectic.” He elaborates “the relation of approximation”: By approximation, I mean the effort of thought to come closer and closer to the eschatological event that constitutes the center of a theology of hope. Thanks to this active approximation of hope by dialectic, philosophy knows something and says something of the Easter-preaching. But what it knows and what it says remain within the limits of reason alone. In this self-restraint abide both the responsibility and the modesty of philosophy.58

51

Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 37. Paul Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutics of the Idea of Revelation,” in idem, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, trans. and ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 7475. 53 Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” in idem, Figuring the Sacred, 203-216. 54 Ibid., 203. 55 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 56 Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” 204. 57 Ibid., 203. 58 Ibid., 216. 52

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Within the Kantian limits of reason alone, Ricoeur, a philosopher, defines his own self-restraint. His re-sponsibility can be measured in his re-sponse to the instance of reason alone. Keeping the autonomy of philosophical discourse, he does not want to transgress the boundaries of two disciplines. This self-restraint is also the power of philosophy, the modesty of philosophy, based on the philosopher’s consciousness of finitude. Locus Theologicus—Locus Hermeneuticus Ricoeur’s substantial writing on biblical hermeneutics does not break this carefully drawn line between philosophy and theology.59 In contrast to Derrida’s “faith without religion,” Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics is an alternative discourse that allows for the acceptance of the Christian God as a religious and theological category. Nevertheless, even in the texts in which he reflects on biblical Revelation, he remains the philosopher, a philosopher of the poetics of the faith.60 Ricoeur applies the general rules of hermeneutic interpretation to biblical hermeneutics, and warns against overlooking the necessary “passage from speech to writing.”61 The application of hermeneutic rules to the interpretation of biblical texts does not threaten the uniqueness of Scripture. In accordance with the distinction between philosophical and theological writings, Ricoeur’s contributions to scriptural exegesis and biblical studies are never published in the same volume with his philosophical work. In David Tracy’s view, Ricoeur does indeed keep the phil-

André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Paul Ricoeur, “Nommer Dieu,” Études théologiques et religieuses 52 (1977): 489-509; idem, “Herméneutique et l’idée de révélation,” in Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur at al. ed., La Révélation (Bruxelles: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1977), 15-54. However, it is interesting to note that Ricoeur’s most influential writings on biblical hermeneutics in English are compilations of essays edited by Mudge and Wallace. 60 Margit Eckholt, “‘Poetik des Glaubens’: Hermeneutik und Theologie bei Paul Ricoeur,” in Orth and Breitling, ed., Vor dem Text, 237-264. See Paul Ricoeur, “De l’Esprit,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 93 (1994): 250-251. 61 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 93. 59

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osophical distance appropriate to the relationship between philosophy and theology.62 As a “professional of philosophy” and a member of what he calls “a community that listens to and interprets biblical Scripture,”63 Ricoeur does not pretend to deliver the paradigm for the appropriation of hermeneutics by theology. Not claiming to be professional in the area of biblical studies, he refers to himself as “an amateur of enlightened exegesis.” Using the parallel between Lévinas, who calls himself a “talmudiste du dimanche” and Ricoeur, Boyd Blundell has therefore wittily labeled him a “weekend exegete.”64 The process of understanding biblical texts is, in fact, the equivalent of a hermeneutic circle: to understand the Bible one has to believe, while at the same time an understanding of the Scriptures is the essential prerequisite for religious belief. Philosophically speaking, the understanding of biblical texts is never complete, as might indeed be said of the understanding of any other text: every understanding opens up new questions, and this calls for a more complex understanding. In his practical hermeneutics, Ricoeur develops a unique understanding of religion and the texts of religion. His primary concern is with the Christian religious tradition. Ricoeur engages the work of theologians very little, but it is clear from his position that he is well versed in contemporary theological, and particularly Protestant theological thought. John van den Hengel stresses that Ricoeur’s emphasis on action, and human agency, “opens up the human as the possibility of being. This, according to Ricoeur, is the only way that theology and philosophy can explore reality after the Kantian critiques.”65 Lewis S. Mudge calls Ricoeur “an occasional preacher,” “a dialoguer with biblical scholars, theologians, and specialist in the history of religions,” “a philosopher committed to constructing as comprehensive a theory as

“Ricoeur’s impact on contemporary Christian theology has been enormous, of course. However, that influence has always been, from Ricoeur’s side, intended as a strictly philosophical contribution to theological self-understanding. Unlike some of his admirers, Ricoeur himself never allows philosophy or theology to be confused or conflated.” See David Tracy, “Ricoeur’s Philosophical Journey: Its Import for Religion,” in Richard Kearney, ed., Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996). 63 Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to David Stewart,” in Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 448449. 64 Blundell, “At Arm’s Length,” 454. 65 John van den Hengel, “Between Philosophy and Theology: Ricoeur’s Testimony of the Self,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 137; idem, “From Text to Action in Theology,” in Johann-Baptist Metz, ed., Proceedings of the Ricoeur Symposium at Trinity College, Dublin, March 20 (Münster; London; New York: LIT Verlag, 2002); idem, “Can there be a science of action?” in Richard A. Cohen and James Marsh, ed., Ricoeur as Another (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002), idem, “Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another and Practical Theology,” Theological Studies 55 (1994): 458-481. 62

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possible of the interpretation of texts,” and “a thoroughly modern man, a neoEnlightenment figure.”66 Ricoeur calls himself “a listener to the Christian message”: “As a listener to the Christian message I believe that words may change the ‘heart,’ that is, the refulgent core of our preferences and the positions which we embrace.”67 Ricoeur’s attentive position—as someone who is sensitive to the voice of Revelation—makes him aware that there are some matters of thinking not accessible in a purely philosophical mode of discourse: “Yet, it is in terms of one certain presupposition that I stand in a position of a listener to Christian preaching. I assume that this speaking is meaningful, that it is worthy of consideration, and that examining it may accompany and guide the transfer from the text to life where it will verify itself fully.”68 Ricoeur’s sensitivity to the Christian message prepares him for a transformation from text to action. Ricoeur called himself an “intellectuel chrétien,” confirming that, while his Christian faith calls him to thinking, it does so as a philosopher, not as a theologian.69 His reflection on the relationship of his Christian faith to his hermeneutics can serve as an encouragement for addressing the issues that can be understood fully only in the light of Revelation. For Ricoeur, his personal Christian faith is “un hazard transformé en destin à travers un choix continu.”70 Faith is always a challenge, a risk, which, by our continuous choice can be creatively transformed into destiny. Ricoeur says, “My belonging to this particular field of experience and language is, first of all, a biological, geographical and cultural contingency.”71 There is a certain blessing in “soil and tradition,” an aspect of belonging (Zugehörigkeit), which enriches our attentiveness and responsiveness to our personal vocation. Between Atheism and Religion In an essay entitled “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” Ricoeur expresses his commitment to Christianity even while accepting the atheistic critique, specifying “to Lewis S. Mudge, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation,” in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 1. 67 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 5. 68 Paul Ricoeur, “Naming God,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34 (1979): 215. 69 Paul Ricoeur, “L’attribution de la mémoire à soi-même, aux proches et aux autres: un schème pour la théologie philosophique?” Archivio di filosofia 69 (2001): 21. 70 Paul Ricoeur, “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” in Jean-François Courtine, ed., Phénoménologie et théologie (Paris: Criterion, 1992), 25. 71 Paul Ricoeur, “The Self in the Mirror of the Scriptures,” in David E. Aune and John MacCarthy, ed., The Whole and the Divided Self (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1997), 204. 66

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what extent I am willing to accept the critique of religion which has emerged from an atheism like that of Nietzsche and Freud, and to what extent I consider myself a Christian in spite of and beyond such a critique.”72 What is particularly interesting are these “in spite of and beyond” arguments. Ricoeur’s essay invites more questions than it provides answers.73 Summarizing his argument, Ricoeur says: We have thus indicated a certain correspondence between this philosophical analysis and an interpretation of the kerygma which is faithful to the origins of the Judeo-Christian faith and at the same time bears a contemporary significance. Biblical faith represents God, the God of the prophets and the God of the Christian Trinity, as a father; atheism teaches us to renounce the image of the father. Once overcome as idol, the image of the father can be recovered as symbol. This symbol is a parable of the foundation of love; it is the counterpart, within a theology of love, of the progression that leads us from simple resignation to poetic life. I believe that such is the religious meaning of atheism. An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin to speak.74 As a self-professed Christian, Ricoeur does not, in fact, reject atheism. As a philosopher, Ricoeur does not reject religion. Without specifying his Christian faith (the question if there is any textual evidence in that essay pointing to Ricoeur’s personal faith remains open), he sketches the path from atheism to faith, stating that it must be circuitous. There are several reasons why the philosopher is not this prophetic preacher. First of all, because the philosopher belongs to a time of dryness and thirst in which Christianity, insofar as it is a cultural institution, still remains “a Platonism for the people,” a kind of law in Saint Paul’s sense of the word. Second, the process of nihilism has not achieved its end, perhaps not even its culminating point. The period of mourning for the gods who have died is not yet over, and it is in this intermediate time that the philosopher does his thinking. Third, the philosopher, as a responsible thinker, remains suspended between atheism and faith. For he cannot content himself with the simple juxtaposition of a reductive hermeneutics which would dethrone the idols, i.e., the gods who have died, and a positive hermeneutics, which would be a recollection, a repetition—beyond the death of the god of morality—of the Biblical kerygma (the preaching of the prophets and the primitive Christian community). The philosopher’s responsibility is to Paul Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in idem, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 440. 73 David Detmer, “Ricoeur on Atheism: A Critique,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 477-489. See also Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998). 74 Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 467. 72

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think, that is, to dig beneath the surface of the present antinomy until he has discovered the level of questioning that makes possible mediation between religion and faith by way of atheism. This mediation must take the form of a long detour; it might even appear as a path that has gone astray. Heidegger refers to some of his essays as Holzwege, pathways in the forest that do not lead anywhere, except perhaps to the forest itself and the work of the woodsmen.75 In his reply to David Detmer, Ricoeur emphasizes that even if some theological discourse on a religious subject-matter poses a challenge to philosophy, it is still not a proper subject for a philosophical treatise. Similar challenges are possible on the other side of the dividing line.76 The Autonomy of Philosophy: Ricoeur’s Theological Hermeneutics? As a philosopher, Ricoeur is interested in an investigation of the possibilities of the conditions for religion as such and the sensibility to the biblical message in particular. Following Kant, Ricoeur promotes creative coexistence between the disciplines, as long as they remain within the limits of reason alone. Kant contends: Among the sciences, however, there is, over and against Biblical theology, a philosophical theology, which is an estate entrusted to another faculty. So long as this philosophical theology remains within the limits of reason alone, and for the confirmation and exposition of its propositions makes use of history, sayings, books of all peoples, even the Bible, but only for itself, without wishing to carry these propositions into Biblical theology or to change the latter’s public doctrines—a privilege of divines—it must have complete freedom to expand as far as its science reaches. And although the right of censorship of the theologian (regarded merely as a divine) cannot be impugned when it has been shown that the philosopher has really overstepped his limits and committed trespass upon theology, yet, the instant this is in doubt and a question arises whether, in writing or in some other public utterance of the philosopher, this trespass has indeed occurred, the superior censorship can belong only to the Biblical theologian, and to him as a member of his faculty; for he has been assigned to care for the second interest of the commonwealth, namely, the prosperity of the sciences, and has been appointed just as legally as has the other. Moreover, under such circumstances, it is indeed to this faculty and not to the philosophical that the ultimate censorship belongs; for the former alone is privileged in respect of certain doctrines, while the latter investigates its 75 76

Ibid., 448. Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to David Detmer,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 495.

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doctrines freely and openly; hence only the former can enter a complaint that its exclusive rights have been violated. But despite the approximation of the two bodies of doctrine to one another and the anxiety lest the philosophical faculty overstep its limits, doubt relating to such trespass is easily prevented if it is borne in mind that the mischief occurs not through the philosopher’s borrowing something from Biblical theology, in order to use it for his purpose—even granting that the philosopher uses what he borrows from it in a meaning suited to naked reason but perhaps not pleasing to this theology—but so far as he imports something into it and thereby seeks to direct it to ends other than those which its own economy sanctions. For Biblical theology will itself not want to deny that it contains a great deal in common with the teachings of unassisted reason and, in addition, much that belongs to historical and philological lore, and that it is subject to the censorship of these disciplines.77 The idea of borrowing and importing discourse from one discipline to another is legitimate, as long as it suits “naked reason.” Kant stresses that neither philosophy nor theology can serve as a foundation for the other.78 It remains to be asked whether Ricoeur has a specific theological hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s reading of the Bible is from the point of view of a philosopher of religion, interested in the Bible as a religious, cultural, and literary icon, which has shaped Western civilization and profoundly influenced the history of the world. Transferring his philosophical argumentation to the field of theology substantiates Ricoeur’s interest in the conditions of the possibilities left to religion in the Kantian sense as such, and the Christian message. On the other hand, Ricoeur’s reading of the Bible is motivated by his personal religious conviction. Here we note the mutual dependence of the philosophical and the personal approach, which is characteristic of Christianity. For a mature Christian, his or her faith can only be a faith that is consciously held. Conversely, a mature Christianity is a reflective Christianity. This involves a philosophical approach to the Scriptures, upon which Christianity rests. Ricoeur as a theological thinker within the biblical traditions is allowing himself to be appropriated by the possibilities contained in the biblical texts. This in itself represents a vital step in personal growth. 77

Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper, 1960), 8-9. Cf. particularly the preface to the first edition, 3-10. 78 See Andrzej Bronk, “The Anti-foundationalism of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 102-112. See also Evan Simpson, ed., Anti-Foundationalism and Practical Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis (Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1987); for a different view cf. Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, ed., Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 39-63. 373

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Emphasizing the intrinsic superiority of diversity over unity, Marc Wallace calls Ricoeur’s hermeneutics a “cosmologically sensitive reading,” which allows for: the ‘full display’ of the biblical world with its nonanthropological coordinates… Ricoeur’s world… contains a global horizon that seeks to maintain a balance between the many components of experience, between the human and the nonhuman orders within the divine care. By maintaining that nature is the divine mediator in the creation and fulfillment of humankind, not a way station for the march of the covenant through history, Ricoeur upholds a vision of the natural world that echoes the cadences of the Bible’s initial creation hymn, “And behold, it was very good.”79 Concentrating on philosophical anthropology and his reading of the Hebraic Bible, which is, in fact, a “reading of faith,”80 Ricoeur is fully aware that his biblical interpretations are made from the standpoint of a philosopher and do not necessarily reflect the Christian depositum fidei. Speaking about his interpretation of the Resurrection, Ricoeur admits: I confess I move away not only from the dominant interpretation but from what is still the tacit consensus, at least, of dogmatic theologians. But this is perhaps where the philosopher that I am acts upon the apprentice theologian that moves within me. It has always seemed to me that the enormous narrative power of the accounts relating to the discovery of the empty tomb and the apparitions of the risen Christ blotted out the theological significance of the resurrection as a victory over death. The proclamation: “It is true; the Lord has risen” (Lk 24: 34) seems to me in its affirmative vigor to go beyond its investment in the imaginary of faith. Is it not in the quality of this death that the beginning of the sense of the resurrection resides? I find support for this in John, for whom the “elevation” of Christ begins on the Cross. It appears to me that this idea of elevation—beyond death—can be found after-the-event scattered narratively among the accounts of crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, which occasioned, retrospectively, four distinct Christian feasts. It is here that, perhaps once again pressured by the philosopher in me, I am tempted, following Hegel, to understand the resurrection as resurrection in the Christian community, which becomes the body of the living Christ.81 Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1990), 78. On Wallace’s interpretation of Ricoeur’s relationship to theological hermeneutics see ibid., 27-45. 80 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 151. 81 Ibid., 152. 79

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Specifying his position on the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, Ricoeur provides some critical insights into the way he relates to the Magisterium, the authority entrusted with preserving the Christian deposit of faith: It seems to me that the problem of the split between Catholicism and Protestantism rests finally on the problem of authority, and it is true that here there is, for the moment, an unbridgeable gap. But I am not at all interested in institutional ecumenism because I believe in the originally plural destination of Christianity—it is, undoubtedly, for this reason that I am not Catholic. My knowledge of Catholicism is that of a neighbor. I experience this in two ways: on the one hand, in terms of local, parish life—that of communities in proximity—and, on the other, in terms of intellectual, exegetic, philosophical, and theological work. In this way, I feel entirely at home with the Jesuits on the rue de Sèvres and with my friends at the Institut Catholique in Paris: they have the same problems I have, problems of sense and nonsense, and they also have problems with their own authority, their own ecclesiastical hierarchy; they simply live from the inside what I, for my part, perceive from the nearby neighborhood where I reside.82 Ricoeur’s vision of Christianity as a plurality of confessions is visibly not subject to any orthodoxy. Defining general and regional hermeneutics, Ricoeur says: biblical hermeneutics is a regional hermeneutics in relation to philosophical hermeneutics, considered a general hermeneutics… Theological hermeneutics presents features that are so original that the relation is gradually inverted, and theological hermeneutics finally subordinates philosophical hermeneutics to itself as its own organon.83 This is a complex relationship of mutual inclusion. It is not a question of a onesided relationship, as if the philosophical hermeneutics were only a theory of understanding, i.e., a methodological tool for biblical hermeneutics. It is, rather, a mutual relationship: “Inversely, the specificity of the religious serves as a cover for its own organon. By turns, one envelops the other. The condition of mutual enveloping is not uncommon.”84 Biblical hermeneutics “can claim to say something unique, if this unique ‘thing’ speaks as the world of the text that addresses us, as the ‘thing’ of the text.”85 Ricoeur delivers a message of a personal liberation:

82

Ibid., 167. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 89-90; Cf. idem, Figuring the Sacred, 41-47, especially 45. 84 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 151. 85 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 98. 83

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This final consequence of a hermeneutics that places the “thing” of the text above self-understanding is perhaps the most important one if one considers the most general tendency of existential hermeneutics, accentuating the moment of decision in the face of the text. For my part, in line with a hermeneutics starting from the text and the “thing” of the text, I shall say that the text first speaks to my imagination, proposing to it the “figures” of my liberation.86 Being fully aware of the limitations of both philosophy and theology, Ricoeur encourages coexistence between the disciplines. Philosophical hermeneutics and theology can reciprocally protect each other from the deficiencies of the cogito philosophies.87 Emphasizing the fact that “faith eludes hermeneutics,”88 Ricoeur clearly states that hermeneutics can have neither the first nor the last word.89 In his essay “Philosophy and Religious Language,” Ricoeur clearly formulates the purpose of philosophical hermeneutics with respect to religious faith as expressed in language, an assumption shared by linguistic analysis and hermeneutics: The first task of any hermeneutic is to identify these originary modes of discourse through which the religious faith of a community comes to language. To serve this purpose philosophical hermeneutics will provide certain specific methodological tools, aimed at the clarification of the notion of modes of discourse.90 Ricoeur recognizes the hermeneutic constitution of biblical faith itself, which “cannot be separated from the movement of interpretation that raises it to the level of language.”91 Biblical faith is in need of “ultimate care,” which has been “educated and formed throughout the centuries.” Philosophy and theology need to coexist in order to rise to their hermeneutic task. Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics thus serves partly as a warning to the theologian not to fall prey to the medieval

86

Ibid., 101. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 25. 88 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 99. 89 Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer,” in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, ed., Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honour of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 155-172. 90 Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” in idem, Figuring the Sacred, 35-47. 91 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 99. 87

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claim to the primacy of theology over philosophy,92 therefore not “assigning to biblical faith a crypto-philosophical function.”93 Elaborating on the relationship between philosophy and religion Ricoeur speaks of the cultural and institutional reasons for protecting himself from too immediate an infiltration of the religious into philosophical discourse: It was very important to me to be recognized as a professor of philosophy, teaching philosophy in a public institution and speaking the common language, hence assuming the mental reservations that this entailed, even if it meant that I would periodically be accused of being a theologian in disguise who philosophizes, or a philosopher who makes the religious sphere think or be thought. I take on all the difficulties of this situation, including the suspicion that, in actual fact, I would never be able to maintain this duality in watertight compartments. At the beginning of Oneself as Another, I even proposed a language of transition, or rather a sort of armistice, when I distinguished between philosophical argumentation, in the public space of discussion and the profound motivation of my philosophical engagement and of my personal and communitary existence. By motivation, I do not mean the psychological sense that signifies having motives, which after all serve as reasons, but what Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self94 calls “sources,” understanding by this something that I do not master. The word “source” also has its neo-Platonic connotations and belongs to the philosophical religious language that may sometimes seem to be close to the specific, confessional religious, connoting the idea of a living source. It is not surprising to find analogies in both orders that can become affinities, and I assume 92

The Medieval understanding was based upon the conviction that the canonical scientia should embrace all philosophy; the whole of philosophy should be subjected to the canonical scientia which comprehends everything. A theology-bound philosophy, philosophy as ancilla theologiae, stands in clear opposition to Ricoeur’s concept of a creative coexistence. Since theology is preoccupied with the Truth, its primacy over other disciplines is evident. Regarding the necessary concordance between faith and reason, Aquinas says, in Summa contra Gentiles: “Quamvis autem praedicta veritas fidei christianae humanae rationis capacitatem excedat, haec tamen quae ratio naturaliter indita habet, huic veritati contraria esse non possunt. Ea enim quae naturaliter rationi sunt insita, verissima esse constat: in tantum ut nec esse falsa sit possibile cogitare. Nec id quod fide tenetur, cum tam evidenter divinitus confirmatum sit, fas est credere esse falsum. Quia igitur solum falsum vero contrarium est, ut ex eorum definitionibus inspectis manifeste apparet, impossibile est illis principiis quae ratio naturaliter cognoscit, praedictam veritatem fidei contrariam esse.” ScG 1, 7. Even though the truth of the Christian faith exceeds the capacity of human reason, the theological principles with which reason is naturally endowed cannot be contrary to the truth. This is just one of the many arguments for the heterogeneity of theology. 93 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 24. 94 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 377

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this, for I do not believe that I am the master of this game or the master of meaning. My two allegiances always escape me, even if at times they nod to one another.95 Speaking of the polarity between theology and philosophy, of a “methodological polarity between two manners of understanding, of thinking by totality,” Ricoeur distinguishes two polarities, a passionate and a culpable one. Regarding pathos, there is a theological and a philosophical pathos: Thus, philosophy and theology encounter each other throughout the course of Western history by means of their peculiar passional expressions. The philosopher denounces the Inquisition and intercedes on behalf of Galileo against clerical violence. The theologian denounces the hybris of towering philosophical systems, even if and especially if these systems pretend to be the system of God. The philosopher and the theologian both evince something essential, the one the audacity of truth and the other the obedience to the Truth. But perhaps it is not the case that they are cured of their vice to such an extent that they may declare the truth which would prove their position. Perhaps it is not possible for the theologian to declare, without a spirit of annexation and bitter satisfaction, the frightful word: “I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I shall dumbfound the intelligence of the clever.” Perhaps it is not possible for the philosopher to make use of the glorious and overwhelming freedom of Socratic doubt without arrogance.96 Opposing the philosophical pathos of freedom to the theological pathos of authority and the theologically propagated obedience of faith, Ricoeur suggests to Christian theology an effort to bring together an eschatology of truth and eschatology of history, seeing in “eschatology the cure for clericalism.”97 The audacity of truth and the obedience to the Truth are the essential requirements for a philosopher and a theologian, respectively. It is an openness to the disclosure of truth that allows a human being to be addressed by the unconcealment in the happening of truth. In a theological sense, Ricoeur refers here to the potentia oboedientialis,98 the intrinsic aspect of human nature that allows the human person to be receptive to God’s invitation as well as to transcend his or herself in freedom.

95

Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 150. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 181. 97 Ibid., 191. 98 Karl Rahner, “Potentia oboedientialis,” in idem, ed., Sacramentum mundi, vol. 3 (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1969), 1245-1249. 96

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The Heterogeneity of Thinking and the Unity in Ricoeur’s Work The interpretation of the heterogeneity of thinking brings us to the question of unity in Ricoeur’s work. He himself says: “It is difficult for me to see my books and my articles as steps or stages in a single development. Each seems to be rather a response to a particular question determined by the questions left unanswered in the preceding work.”99 He misses a systematic continuity in his writings.100 Responding to John B. Thompson’s paper, Ricoeur writes: The perspective which he proposes corrects the inverse impression, to which I have a tendency to succumb: That of a certain lack of continuity in my writings. For each work responds to a determinate challenge, and what connects to its predecessors seems to me to be less the steady development of a unique project than the acknowledgment of a residue left by the previous work, a residue which gives rise in turn to a new challenge.101 One of the major trajectories in Ricoeur’s thinking stems from his work on the question of evil, begun in The Symbolism of Evil.102 The book is not unrelated to Ricoeur’s personal experience as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. Ricoeur grounds his own experience of suffering and pain in the terrifying history of the twentieth century. This, then, is the continuity in Ricoeur’s work, the enduring presence of Ricoeur, the believing philosopher, and the philosophizing believer. Maintaining the boundaries between philosophy and theology is a methodological necessity if both are to preserve their integrity. For this reason, philosophy and theology are, to some degree, segregated in Ricoeur’s critical reflection. We might want to question this segregation. However, a synthesis occurs in the person of Paul Ricoeur.

Paul Ricoeur, “Preface,” in Charles E. Reagan, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press), 6-7. Domenico Jervolino, “The Depth and Breadth of Ricoeur’s Philosophy,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 533-535. Cf. also Domenico Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics. The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur, trans. Gordon Poole (DordrechtBoston-London: Kluwer, 1990). 100 Here we quote just a few examples. See Paul Ricoeur, “Foreword,” in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), XIII; idem, “Foreword,” in Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics, xi: “In effect, when I look back, I am rather struck by the discontinuity among my works, each of which takes on a specific problem and apparently has little more in common with its predecessor than the fact of having left an overflow of unanswered questions behind it as a residue. On the contrary, Domenico Jervolino’s interpretation of my works... stresses their coherence.” 101 Paul Ricoeur, “A Response by Paul Ricoeur,” in idem, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences, 32. 102 Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil. 99

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2. 4. 5. The Courage to Ask and the Humility to Listen: Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology Hermeneutics, characterized by a genuine spirit of openness and with a persistent philosophical inquiry into all that which needs to be understood, calls for the revision and reinforcement of many traditional concepts and situates human thinking in the horizon between suspicion and sympathy. Hermeneutics promotes an awareness of the interpretive character of the world. With regard to the difficult and complex relationship between philosophy and theology, hermeneutics calls for a critical rethinking of the Heideggerian postulate to exclude theology from philosophy on the grounds of the autonomy of philosophy, and to exclude philosophy from theology on Barthian revelational positivist grounds. Heidegger’s philosophy has a long history of being interpreted as an invitation to theology to think about God and religion in a new, non-metaphysical way. Re-examining the question of the meaning of Being, he influenced the necessity of searching for new paths of thinking God outside the established onto-theological tradition. For me, both exclusions are hermeneutically untenable. Drawing on Gadamer and Ricoeur, it became apparent that neither a simple methodological division between the disciplines nor their total separation was sustainable. Hermeneutics calls for the possibility of a productive interaction between philosophy and theology while maintaining their respective integrity. An interactive relationship between philosophy and theology allows for their mutual enrichment in a hermeneutically redesigned horizon of new proximity of the disciplines.1 Theology can be illumined by philosophy, and philosophy by theology, without suppressing the inescapable tension between them. A Levinasian hermeneutics of reciprocal relationship allows for a mutual critique of philosophical and theological positions and can play a powerful role in informing the work of philosophers and theologians alike. For understanding the relationship between philosophy and theology, the two need to be perceived as equal yet different. Looking at the much-troubled relationship between those two disciplines, and at the long history of despicable falls but also strange and successful recoveries, we can hope for hermeneutic insight in the age of the return of the religious. Hermeneutics calls us not only to negotiate the space between the disciplines but also to re-think the reasonability of merely translating the unique discourse of one discipline into the 1

Here the proximity is understood in the Levinasian sense: “Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into ‘images’ or be exposed in a theme. It is the relationship with what is not disproportionate to the αρχή in thematization, but incommensurable with it, with what does not derive its identity from the kerygmatic logos and blocks all schematism.” Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 100.

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language of the other. It shows us that the confinement of language to just one theoretical idiom can end up stifling the quest for that which cannot be fully articulated. This hermeneutic insight is based on Heidegger’s understanding of the formal meaning of phenomenology, as letting “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.’2 The French turn toward the theological has been perceived, particularly by Dominique Janicaud, as philosophically inconsistent, by problematizing the phenomenology of the absolute as a transgression of phenomenological method in favor of predominantly theological concerns. Janicaud’s call for maintaining phenomenology within clearly defined and assumed methodological limits, without losing sight of the ideal and constraints of scientificity, emphatically favors strong boundaries between philosophy and theology as autonomous and mutually exclusive disciplines. Janicaud provokes a critical dialogue with the inclusive approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology, which, on the theological side, flourished with a polyphonic concept of “the worshiping self, before the face of Christ and other people, in an “economy of superabundance.’’3 Hermeneutically, phenomenology already problematized the Husserlian ideal of scientificity long before the theological turn occurred. If life is already interpreted by phenomenology before it is disclosed to it, there would seem to be no way of excluding theology as a possible interpretant. In Search of a Universal Language The “between” is a hermeneutic category, which allows for the critical engagement of philosophy and theology in their relationship to each other.4 Existing as conflictual discourses, both disciplines unapologetically demonstrate their evident commitment in showing up that faith and reason are not simply opposed to one another. The emancipatory potential of Christian theology and the return of the religious in contemporary philosophy challenge the understanding of the very meaning of theology and philosophy and their reciprocal relationship. Hermeneutics exists “between” philosophy and theology because it is its nature to mediate in conflictual discourses. For Ricoeur, “in front of the court, the plurivocity common to texts and actions is exhibited in the form of a conflict of interpretations, and the final interpretation appears as a verdict to which it is possible to make appeal.”5 Thus, philosophy is a critical reflection on the cultural signs and symbols, which need to be 2

Heidegger, Being and Time, 58. David F. Ford, Self and Salvation. Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2006). 5 Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 162. 3

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interpreted by deciphering the narrative of human existence in its particularity. The unveiling of reality needs to negotiate ideological distortion. As an endless task of interpretation, hermeneutics always happens within the dynamic of revealing/concealing. Since one of the tasks of philosophy is to assist people in their struggle in making sense of their life, it will unavoidably face contradictions in interpretations. The mission of philosophy will remain to arbitrate between conflicting discourses while taking into account the coexistence of often contradicting interpretations without either dismissing them or idealizing the possibility of complete understanding. Understanding will always remain fragmentary if it does not attempt to silence the provisionary character of any interpretation. In order to understand the complexity of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Ricoeur refers to two types of hermeneutics. Freud was usually associated with analytic hermeneutics, which is by nature regressive and demystifying. However, Ricoeur complements this reductive reading of Freud by speaking of his synthetic hermeneutics, which is progressive and revelatory. By reading Freud along with the masters of suspicion, Nietzsche and Marx, Ricoeur concentrates on Freud’s demystification, by showing the centrality of his interpretation of signifiers.6 Situating philosophy within the plurivocity of meanings, Ricoeur applies his basic hermeneutic framework to Freud’s psychoanalysis as the mode of understanding and arbitrating the claims of making sense of human life. His understanding of psychoanalysis as a type of textual interpretation offers a critical correction to Freud’s claim to the universality of psychoanalysis with regard to the understanding of the human condition. Ricoeur’s reading of Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus complex invites hermeneutics to reveal the complexity of understanding the human being while acknowledging the impact of psychoanalysis on the uncovering the truth about the conditio humana. This exemplary reading of Freud clarifies the possible role of hermeneutics in the relationship between philosophy and theology. Ricoeur’s interpretation of Freud does not aim at imposing his own reading of the Oedipus complex. On the contrary, Ricoeur shows, with high consistency, that Freud’s reading is incomplete, not incorrect. In fact, following Heidegger’s understanding that untruth or concealment is inherent to the nature of truth itself and there can be no disclosure without concealment, Ricoeur stresses the complementarity of “the two readings in the unity of the symbol in its power to disguise and reveal.’7 The hermeneutic contribution to the understanding of our human condition is its thematization of the historicity of the Dasein that we are. Thus, hermeneutics raises questions about the understanding of the human condition, which need to be addressed

6

For the centrality of the Freudian interpretation of signifiers see Jerrold R. Brandell, Narration and Therapeutic Action: The Construction of Meaning in Psychoanalytic Social Work (New York: Routledge, 1996). 7 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 517. 382

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in the context of an unstable equilibrium or subtle conflict between different approaches to the human being. Understanding psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur advocates for greater] sensitivity to deception in language. With reference to the notion of Verstellung, which combines the two universes of discourse and expresses the fusion of these two concepts, Ricoeur clearly shows that a disguise is a type of manifestation and, at the same time, a distortion that alters that manifestation. Therefore, it is the violence done to the meaning. The task of an interpreter is to reveal the tension within the relation of the hidden to the shown in disguise.8 The analyst searches for meaning beyond what is visible and common. Since psychoanalysis is concerned with the interpretation of a patient’s language, it has to take into account the polyvocal nature of language. In fact, the understanding of an encountered problem is not an achievement notched up by the analyst nor the patient, but an advancement toward the grasping of the problem (die Sache) that needs to be understood. Therefore, the interpretative powers of the patient and the therapist are essential to the success of the psychoanalytic treatment. Ricoeur’s reading of Freud emphasizes the importance of hermeneutics for both philosophy and psychoanalysis. On the one hand, it is a question of arbitrating between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of sympathy. On the other hand, it initiates the process of integrating interpretations into the whole of the philosophical enterprise. Ricoeur stresses the importance of the symbol. Accepting the anti-phenomenological character of psychoanalysis, Ricoeur shows that symbols can be read both backward (reductively) and forwards (phenomenologically). The validity of both readings is grounded in the overdetermination of the symbol. By showing the manner in which Freud works backward in revealing the regressive aspect of human behavior, searching for and pointing to primordial meanings, Ricoeur emphasizes the convergence of conflictual discourses and the conflictual nature of existence in the tendency of the ‘I’ to close a circle within itself. Following Lacan, Ricoeur shows how condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) reveal the mixture present in different discourses. Based on the inherent plurivocity of meaning, which symbols demonstrate in their overdetermined semantic texture, Ricoeur formulates the hermeneutic task: an interpretation that develops the intentionality of multiple meaning in symbols. This dialectic task is patient progress toward understanding. Starting with the interpretation of the meaning of the psychoanalytical statements with respect to their validity and limits, Ricoeur elaborates the place of analytic experience in the total field of human experience. By examining the archeology of the subject, Ricoeur points toward the interdependence of analytic disciplines which can be applied to the relationship between philosophy and theology. The concept of the subject secures a philosophical ground for analytic discourse. On the other hand, 8

Cf. ibid., 92. 383

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theology, aware of the discourse of its own archeology, becomes a concrete reflection and thus overcomes the danger of abstraction. What is essential in a hermeneutic relationship between philosophy and theology is their situatedness in a horizon of complementary opposition. Hermeneutics dialectically relates regression and progression as two possible directions taken up by interpretation, opposed but complementary.9 The task of hermeneutics is not so much the overcoming or reconciling of opposed interpretations. As with Ricoeur’s conflict between a hermeneutics that demystifies religion and a hermeneutics that tries to grasp, in the symbols of faith, a possible kerygma, the task is not to offer a solution to the conflict, but to articulate the tension between the conflictual discourses and disclose naive expectations for a solution to a hermeneutic conflict.10 It is precisely the hermeneutic reflection, and specifically, the hermeneutics of the symbol, which provides the structure for handling any hermeneutic conflict. The main characteristic of the hermeneutic reflection is its concreteness, which is achieved in the movement of interpretation. This movement fuses together its essential necessity and the contingency of the cultural signs and symbols through which it recognizes itself. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is an excellent reminder that neither theology nor philosophy speaks with a single voice. In fact, the polysemic nature of philosophical discourse, or maybe even an inevitable “confusion of voices’ is ultimately necessary to elucidate that which needs to be understood by the finite human being. Following Ricoeur’s treatment of philosophy and psychoanalysis, we can see the radicality of a hermeneutics situated between philosophy and theology in a transcendental logic of double meaning established at the level of the conditions of possibility. Ricoeur’s task to arbitrate the discordance between a definition that is too ‘long’ and a definition that is too ‘short,’ leads to a delimitation of the field of application of the concept of the symbol by reference to the act of interpretation. He further stresses that it is the linguistic expression, which lends itself by its double or multiple meanings to a work of interpretation. For Ricoeur, what gives “The challenge comes not only from without, it is not only the voice of the ‘intolerant’ logician; it comes from within, from the internal inconsistency of hermeneutics, torn by contradiction. As we already know, not one but several interpretations have to be integrated into reflection. Thus, the hermeneutic conflict itself is what nourishes the process of reflection and governs the movement from abstract to concrete reflection. Is this possible without ‘destroying’ reflection?” Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 54. 10 “In giving precedence to the problem of method, we reduce the entire symbolism of evil to the rank of an example. We shall not regret doing so: one of the results of reflection will be precisely that the symbolism of evil is not one example out of many but a privileged example, perhaps even the native land of all symbolism, the birthplace of the hermeneutic conflict taken in its full extent. But this we shall understand only through the movement of reflection, a reflection that at first knows the symbols of evil merely as a given or arbitrarily chosen example.” Ibid., 40. 9

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rise to this interpretive task is an intentional structure which consists not in the relation of meaning to thing but an architecture of meaning. This architecture is a complex project, which calls for a thematization of the relationship between meanings in the full spectrum of possible constellations. What is essential, is to understand that it is this texture that makes interpretation possible; however, the visibility of this texture, the whole architecture of meaning, is made evident only by doing hermeneutics in the actual movement of interpretation.11 As for Ricoeur, the transcendental logic of double meaning is complex but not arbitrary, rigorous in its articulations but irreducible to the linearity of symbolic logic. With Ricoeur, we can advocate for a logic that is not built upon the conditions of objectivity of nature but the “objectivity” of human desire, a logic, which is no longer formal, but transcendental.12 The semantic structure of symbols reveals an overdetermination of meaning. The task of interpretation cannot be reduced to being the prevention of overlapping, by the respective fields of application. However, in symbolic narration, we deal with an excess of meaning over which we have little command. The symbol in its density of manifold meaning gives rise to thought. What inspires the relationship between philosophy and theology, particularly for seeing hermeneutics as situated between those different modes of thinking, is the hermeneutic insight that interpretation consists less in suppressing ambiguity than in understanding and in explicating the richness of the traditions that we are. With Ricoeur, we can emphasize the richness of hermeneutic symbolism and oppose it to the emptiness in logical symbolism. As Ricoeur plays with the poetics of the symbol by emphasizing the apparent opposition between the way symbols bind us and give thought content and density, he builds up the argument for the hermeneutic realm of double meaning in the horizon of ambiguity (equivocity of words and amphiboly of statements). In the battle with the artificiality and emptiness in logical symbolism, hermeneutics is forced to radically justify its own raison d’être by exposing the ambiguity of arguments that are based not on an ideological compromise but on the internal symbolic structure of the matter itself. Nevertheless, since theological symbols can also be read reductively or phenomenologically, we face the irreconcilability between philosophical and theological discourses. Affirming a sharp sense of the irreconcilability of the discourses, our task is not that of silencing the differences, but rather, to call for the most extreme oppositional readings of the respective discourses as requested by the matter itself. Therefore, hermeneutics can serve as a site for addressing the questions that are

11 12

Cf. ibid., 18. Charles W. Allen, “The Primacy of ‘Phronesis’: A Proposal for Avoiding Frustrating Tendencies in Our Conceptions of Rationality,” The Journal of Religion 69, no. 3 (July 1989): 359-374. 385

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relevant to both disciplines. It is not an attempt to water down the distinction between the disciplines but to exacerbate it. Where understanding breaks down, there hermeneutics begins. This is not a license for chaos, but an invitation to enter into a horizon, where dialogue can occur. Philosophy and theology must be free to be themselves, without being translated into each other instead. Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” reveals and conceals something about the nature of Being. By reflecting upon the hermeneutic relevance of Freudian psychoanalysis, Ricoeur notes that Freud does not speak of a “science” of dreams but the “interpretation” of dreams.13 For both Freud and Ricoeur, language itself is refracted; it means something other than what it says. The equivocal nature of language points toward a double meaning. The productivity of interpretation is based on the hermeneutic situation where another meaning is both given and hidden in an immediate meaning. As for what concerns the interpretation of dreams, we could say that the main task of faith is to find an interpretation, a task which has clear existential repercussions, i.e., not the science of faith in the sense of a system, e.g., the “System of Catholicism.” with which, for instance, the young Heidegger broke. The task of interpretation is to explicate the ontological tensions inherent in human existence. It deciphers the ambiguity of belonging, through freedom of the will, to both the natural world and the world of action. To understand something that has been said to somebody about something means to engage different perspectives on ourselves, to formulate diverse approaches and methods in understanding ourselves by mapping out the intersections of the various irreducible horizons of our understanding of that which needs to be understood. Following Ricoeur, understanding ourselves means realizing what he calls our “fault lines,” the tensions that run through the very structure of the human being. Hermeneutics invites us to accept the discontinuity, raptures, and gaps in the discourse on human nature, which by intersecting in different ways give rise to many different and irreducible meanings. This instability is a creative power that gives meaning to our lives. Poetics, rather than philosophy, responds to the mysteries in human experience and the speculative aporias of time.

13

“The term Deutung does not mean science in a general way; it means interpretation in a precise way. The word is chosen by design, and its juxtaposition with the theme of dreams is itself quite meaningful. If dreams designate—pars pro toto—the entire region of doublemeaning expressions, the problem of interpretation in turn designates all understanding specifically concerned with the meaning of equivocal expressions. To interpret is to understand a double meaning.” Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 8.

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Thinking Imprisoned: A Captive Mind Tortured by the Demands of the Technological Age Hermeneutics is an invitation to dialogue in a common truth. It is a conversation in the spirit of generosity and intellectual integrity, charity, care for the different or even contradictory interpretations, and compassion for those who try their understanding for that which seeks to be understood. Hermeneutics is distinctly personal. The validity of interpretation is tested by life. It is not an expression of the thirst for power and profit but a search for a deeper understanding of the need for personal change in our life. As a symbol for difference, hermeneutics forecloses the viam brevem. Hermeneutics is the recognition of dignity in interpreting, respect for the interpretation, and courage to interpret, a protest against violence and calculation. Hermeneutics situates thinking in the horizon of unlimited possibilities of interpretation with the deep conviction that there is an intrinsic value in thinking and that every thought is worthy of being entertained. As such, hermeneutics places itself in the service of those voices that are suppressed and denied expression. Hermeneutic virtue is the courage to remain in the realm of the unknown and strange while pilgriming toward self-understanding. It is the welcoming gesture toward the uncomfortable and demanding realities of life that stand firm in a dialectic interplay of question and answer. Hermeneutics remains on the threshold of the promised land of understanding, permanently without the security of arriving at a satisfactory interpretation, yet without becoming a victim of arbitrariness. Hermeneutics is the struggle to situate life not in methodological security, but rather within the horizon of creative insecurity and incompleteness. Heidegger’s emphasis on language marked the hermeneutic turn in philosophy: To think a concept, it is necessary to think the history of the concept, and the history of the concept is implicit in the language which expresses it. Thus, there is no a-historical access to ideas; an idea is essentially a historical entity. Its historicity is a function of its being. Adopting the language of negative or mystical theology, and pushing language to its limits, Heidegger attempted to deconstruct onto-theological thinking. His later hostility toward the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages, following his early fascination with Scholastic speculative grammar, questions the very possibility of philosophical dialogue with medieval theology. The Gadamerian retrieval of verbum interius renews the young Heidegger’s project of a phenomenological and hermeneutic rehabilitation of medieval theology. Hermeneutics must never forget that Gadamer’s remembering of language was effected through the retrieval of a theological insight. In understanding philosophy and theology within the universality of hermeneutics, we emphasize the grammatical notion of the middle voice, which stresses the subordination of the subject to the verbal process. In the internal diathesis, the subject is inside the 387

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action of the verb. The primordial medial meaning of play shows, for Gadamer, its actual involvement in what is happening to us while we are playing. Play is a middle voice, and the being of the game is circumscribed by the unfolding event of the play. As a subject of understanding, the human being does not become passive but remains within the event of understanding. The middle voice situates the subject within a process. On hermeneutic grounds, I call into question Heidegger’s separation of philosophy from theology. Hermeneutically, both exclusions of theology from philosophy, for which Heidegger argues in An Introduction to Metaphysics, and of philosophy from theology, which he demands in Phenomenology and Theology are untenable. In fact, neither a simple methodological division between the disciplines nor their total separation is sustainable. However insistent philosophy and theology have been about maintaining the boundary between each other, their cross-fertilization is a fact of history. Janicaud’s question directed at recent French phenomenology, “has the boundary with theology not already been covertly transgressed, and if so should not this trespass be confessed and then theoretically relegitimized?”14 can be put to the whole history of philosophy. In the age of interpretation, one would have to regard the metaphysical approach to the belonging together of philosophy and theology with a certain amount of non-commitment. What is essential is that the hermeneutic argument can support the metaphysical claim, on hermeneutic, rather than metaphysical grounds. Hermeneutics calls for a re-thinking, at multiple levels, of the problematic relationship between philosophy and theology. As the science of negotiating the spaces between discourses, hermeneutics requires that such disputes be perennially re-interpreted, for the terms change with each generation. Philosophy and theology both suffer from a stagnant formalism, grounded in methodology, which supposedly guarantees the objectivity and acceptability of academic research. The space opened up between philosophy and theology, a space created by the incommensurability of the two is an invitation to hermeneutics. What happens in the no-man’s land between philosophy and theology is, and can only be, hermeneutics. In the work of Heidegger and Ricoeur, thinkers who in their distinctive ways thought the incommensurability of the two discourses, hermeneutics happens. My project exposes the hermeneutic advances and insights made by these thinkers as they endeavor to mediate this incommensurability. I do not decide on the proper relationship between philosophy and theology, but, instead, I endeavor to show that the privileged way of negotiating the space between them is the practice of doing hermeneutics. The incommensurability of philosophy and theology requires that hermeneutics should flourish, that a multiplicity of interpretations develop in the space in-between because they must. Neither philosophy nor theology can eliminate the 14

See Dominique Janicaud et al, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press 2000).

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interpretative space, which exists by virtue of the distance between them. Neither can forbid the other to interpret their relationship otherwise than they already do. The hermeneutic task is to describe and interpret what happens when a thinker addresses that which needs to be understood. This is the descriptive task, which aims at substantiating a particular possibility of interpretation, without pretending to be the one and only, i.e., the final interpretation. The hermeneutics happens between thinkers when they thematize the relationship between philosophy and theology, even where their claims are in opposition. All such thinkers inevitably draw on theology: Historically, it has been the context in which Western thinking happens. The main task for the investigation of the relationship between philosophy and theology consists, not primarily in a presentation of the relations between the two disciplines, as elaborated by individual thinkers throughout the history of the problem, but in an interpretative understanding of the relationship and of its implications for the way philosophy and theology can truly belong together while remaining radically different. I call this a hermeneutics of inclusiveness. I take as my guide Ricoeur’s quest for a general philosophy of the creative imagination, one that addresses the pressing need to truly hear the voice of the other without losing the possibility of selfhood in radical plurality, while still refusing to enclose otherness in the circle of the same, or to identify otherness with self-reference. The “belonging-together” of philosophy and theology refers to the historical belonging-together of the Western philosophical and theological traditions. Numerous examples support this factical belonging-together: the movement toward monotheism in Plato and Aristotle, completed by the Church Fathers under the inspiration of the Bible; the notion of “person” in the Christological debates, which becomes the foundation of Western liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the hermeneutic circle, first discovered in the context of canon law and biblical interpretation; the verbum interius in Trinitarian theology and the philosophical ‘discovery’ of the primacy of language; and the entire thrust of existentialism and the Hebraic conception of the human being as radically the chooser of his or her being. In all these cases, we see that movements that were regarded as philosophically autonomous were, in fact, impregnated with theological ideas. On the theological side, what would Christianity be without Greek metaphysics? Something completely different, perhaps unimaginably so different. Luther failed to retrieve early Christianity without metaphysics because, hermeneutically speaking, this is not an option for us. Hermeneutic philosophy must engage theology, which grounds and permeates the Western tradition. This is not just a historical consideration: The subject-matter of hermeneutics, die Sache selbst, is theological. Hermeneutics is not theology, but it must be open to theology if it is to be receptive to the voices that constitute the tradition that we are.

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The ancient Jews firmly believed that “without vision, the people perish.” The history of human thinking, and particularly the accomplishment of the Christian tradition as the continuation of the Jewish heritage, can be seen as an attempt to develop a hermeneutics of the “in-between,” of the human and divine. Such a hermeneutics requires the elaboration of a vision of the Trinitarian God, and a human being who, in committing him/herself to Christ, Incarnated and Crucified, follows human reason’s innate quest for understanding, which, in fact, is selfunderstanding, within the confines of our human condition as affected by original sin. Doing hermeneutics “between philosophy and theology” aims at a richness of voices that can address the drama of human existence with the urgency it deserves. In the hermeneutic age, philosophy has lost its pretension to speak from an absolute perspective (a fantasy of “pure reason”). Many of the arguments against incorporating theology into philosophy have been based on the assumption that philosophy can be freed from cultural situatedness, while theology is inextricably conditioned by history and culture. Now we recognize that Western philosophy is as much a cultural phenomenon as Western theology; it is a kind of creed of critical reasoning derived from Socrates, which was further refined during the Middle Ages, and springs forth fully developed during the Enlightenment. That this creed aspires to autonomy does not change the fact that it emerges from a culturally and theologically conditioned situation. Indeed, philosophy in the West is as much a form of life as is theology. If philosophy and theology are both forms of life, then neither could have an a priori privilege over the other; theology, of course, loses its customary privilege, but then, so does philosophy. On the other hand, we can speak of both a philosophical and a theological perspective on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Two forms of life speak to each other, but theology has something that philosophy does not, the authority of God (for faith), and philosophy has something that theology does not, i.e., skeptical freedom from authority. We need to distinguish as much as possible between theological and philosophical perspectives, recognizing in each the legitimacy of the other view. Theology and philosophy must be free to develop in dialogical independence from one another, liberated from idealization and appropriation by the other. Only in firmly grasping their differences can we preserve the ground for a conversation between them. Moreover, like every other hermeneutic conversation, this will be a recognition of mutual indebtedness that will undoubtedly have a transformative character. As the art of understanding, hermeneutics demands that inquiries, such as the one attempted here, integrate the theoretical dimension of the issue with the factical. Theology is not merely an academic discipline; it is a way of being-inthe-world. With certain qualifications, the same can be said of philosophy. Two alternative ways of being human eye each other with the suspicion that the other 390

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represents a challenge and a threat to its own fundamental beliefs. Hermeneutics forecloses on any easy solution to the problem, whether it be a liberal synthesis of the two discourses or a post-liberal entrenchment in the realities of opposition between them. Grateful for Gadamer’s guidance, we remember that “it would be a poor hermeneutician who thought he could have or had to have the last word.”15 Rather, we all feel invited to foster an ongoing dialogue without at the same time dreaming of its final conclusion.

15

Gadamer, Truth and Method, 579. In one of his last interviews, Gadamer elevated hope to being the principle of the world: “Man cannot live without hope. This is the only sentence I would defend without any restriction.” Since hope both precedes and follows disappointment and disconfirmation, Gadamer’s invitation to openness and dialogue has a truly transformative character. “Dass die Menschen nicht ohne Hoffnung leben können, das ist der einzige Satz, den ich ohne Einschränkung weiter verteidigen möchte.” “Prinzip Hoffnung: Hans-Georg Gadamer wird 102 Jahre alt,” Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, February 11, 2002. 391

3. Poetic Disclosure: Language as the Medium of the Hermeneutic Experience 3. 1. Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment When meditating on the world as abandoned by the gods, Martin Heidegger proclaims the age in which we live (Weltalter) to be one of declining enlightenment, one in which the darkness of night (Weltnacht) overcomes the world because of the gods’ failure to come to its aid. All that is available to us, in these needy times, is the saving power that lies dormant in poetry. Our age is profoundly affected, nay dominated, by calculative thinking, and we have thus lost our aptitude for an authentic way of awaiting the παρουσία.1 Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” addresses the question about the essential nature of poetry: “I do not know what to do or say in the meantime, and what is the use of poets in an impoverished age?” I am addressing this same question: “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” “What are poets for, in needy times?” Poetry finds itself within the horizon of the mystery of Being. In its origins, poetry emerges and meets the poet. Being a poet goes beyond the poet’s own attempts at synthesis between the external world and his or her inner life. Poetry opens the poet to phenomena that are concealed yet not entirely unknown. The poet is driven into processes that actualize poetry. Poetry calls the poet to language, to an existing dwelling wherein poetry resides: “Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde.”2 The Uniqueness and Irreplaceability of Poetry Poetry needs to reveal itself. It remains in the domain of pure possibility if it is not actualized in poems. The mystery of poetry is unveiled in and through poems. Only by emerging into existence, in the form of a poem, can poetry fulfill its intrinsic desire to pour itself out. A poet’s self-expression, in a particular poem, helps poetry reveal its meaning and to show itself: poems open up the understanding of poetry. Writing a poem is a positive response to the interrogatory power of poetry, the very power that questions the condition of the poet in the first place.

1 2

See Heidegger, GA5: 267, English, idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, 91. Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue”: “Ist unbekannt Gott? Ist er offenbar wie der Himmel? dieses glaub’ ich eher. Des Menschen Maaß ist’s. Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde. Doch reiner ist nicht der Schatten der Nacht mit den Sternen, wenn ich so sagen könnte, als der Mensch, der heißet ein Bild der Gottheit.” 393

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Through poems, the poet reaches toward poetry. Thus, writing a poem gives expression to having been touched by poetry itself (the passive side of being a poet). The resulting poem is the residue of an encounter between poetry and poet, a testimony to a unique relationship; poets rescue existence in and through language by their concentration and attentiveness. To open oneself to poetry is to prepare for the otherness in oneself, the unveiling of Being, the most original and distinctive expression of the self. Being thus responsive is a multidimensional experience: it involves a gift and also a person’s response to being gifted.3 The relationship between poetry, poet, and poem, expresses unity in difference, a communion of presence. Poetic perception, when articulated in poems, signifies poetry’s self-revelation. The poet is the medium through which poetry’s self-disclosure is made possible; the act of poetic expression is a response to that disclosure. Poetry and art are always symbolic, and the role of the symbol is to make whole our own fragmentary life. Art is more than a mere manifestation of meaning. According to Gadamer, art is the containment of sense, so that it does not run away or escape from us, but is secured and sheltered in the ordered composure of the creation… Heidegger… enabled us to perceive the ontological plenitude or the truth that addresses us in art through the twofold movement of revealing, unconcealing, and manifesting, on the one hand, and concealing and sheltering, on the other. He showed that the Greek concept of concealment (aletheia), only represented one side of man’s fundamental experience of the world. Alongside and inseparable from this unconcealing, there also stands the shrouding and concealing that belongs to our human finitude. This philosophical insight, which sets limits to any idealism claiming a total recovery of meaning, implies that there is more to the work of art than a meaning that is experienced only in an indeterminate way.4 To be a poet is to live a life of openness toward poetry, without being able to predict or to control when and where poetry will express itself. The poet’s life of openness happens as a participation in this twofold movement of revealing and concealing. The impact of poetry will always overwhelm the poet. The emphasis placed upon the relationship existing between poetry, the poet and the poem, does not diminish the importance of the role of the poet as a seer, as the memory and consciousness of the people. Yet, as the relationship goes beyond the confines of time and place, it manifests the ontological fore-structure of poetry itself.

On the reciprocity of Gabe and Aufgabe, see Andrzej Wierciński, Das Miteinander: Grundzüge einer Sorge um den Menschen in seinem Unterwegssein (Guernsey: Elan & Son, 1997). 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 34. 3

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Writing poetry is a way of bringing forth, ποίησις in its original sense, allowing truth to emerge into the splendor of its radiant appearance. Poetry (ποίησις, “making”) is, by itself, a paradigm of art, in the sense of bringing something into existence that did not exist before.5 Every activity which brings something into presence is conceptually close to the truth, ἀλήθεια, the way from concealment into unconcealment. Being actualized, poetry is itself the revelation of truth. There is no dichotomy between the being of the world and the being of a work of art. In either case, Being comes to presence. The ontological significance of poetry can be seen in the way it acts upon a human being. Poetry engages the person and opens up horizons, lifting the poet into the purity and simplicity of truth.6 Ἀλήθεια and the Work of Art Heidegger’s understanding of truth as ἀλήθεια goes beyond un-concealment (Unverborgenheit) or dis-closure (Entbergung).7 He elaborates the understanding of ἀλήθεια, using our experience of the work of art, in The Origin of the Work of “There is poetry, which, as you know, is complex; and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.” Plato, Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 205b-c. 6 Truth can be described as the unveiledness, uncoveredness, disclosedness, and unconcealment of Being. The Greek notion of truth as ἀλήθεια refers to what is unveiled and to whom it is unveiled. Truth is the proper mode of Being. For Heidegger’s fundamental-ontological understanding of truth as unconcealment of Being, see Martin Heidegger, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,” in idem, Wegmarken, GA9, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann 1976), 203-238. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer devotes Part One of his Truth and Method to the significance of the aesthetic experience for revealing truth. It is called “The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1-169. Gadamer asks many vital questions with reference to the disclosing power of art: “Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience (Erfahrung) of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge—but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth?” Ibid., 97-98 For Gadamer, ἀλήθεια is the event of revelation. He writes: “In einem ursprünglicheren Sinne ‘geschieht’ Unverborgenheit, und dieses Geschehen ist etwas, was überhaupt erst möglich macht, daß Seiendes unverborgen ist und richtig erkannt wird. Die Verborgenheit, die solcher ursprünglichen Unverborgenheit entspricht, ist nicht Irrtum, sondern gehört ursprünglich zum Sein selbst. Die Natur, die sich zu verbergen liebt (Heraklit) ist dadurch nicht nur hinsichtlich ihrer Erkennbarkeit charakterisiert, sondern ihrem Sein nach. Sie ist nicht nur das Aufgehen ins Lichte, sondern ebensosehr das Sichbergen ins Dunkle, die Entfaltung der Blüte der Sonne zu ebenso wie das Sichverwurzeln in der Erdtiefe.” Gadamer, GW3: 259. 5

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Art.8 Playing on our apparent familiarity with the things that surround us, he shows us our lack of real understanding for, and of, the work of art. To demonstrate his point, he analyzes a van Gogh painting depicting a pair of shoes, ordinary things in their ordinariness, a subject that has been painted by this painter a number of times.9 What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. The entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia. We say “truth” and think little enough in using this word. If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then here there is an occurring, a happening of truth at work.10 Instead of focusing on the formal aspects of this painting, Heidegger discusses what is disclosed by that painting: the thinghood of this particular pair of leather shoes, with all the traces of being worn out, and as a result, the thinghood of a thing. In the presence of the work of art, we can experience what things really are. For Heidegger, the world is a clearing or lighting, a space of illumination for beings that otherwise “refuse themselves to us” (Seiendes versagt sich uns).11 What is revealed to us in the way van Gogh’s painting speaks, is “what shoes are in truth.”12 Heidegger shows that when experiencing the work of art, we encounter the thing as a thing. We also access the world of a human being, as related to those shoes: Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.13 Martin Heidegger, “The Work of Art,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought. See Nicholson, “Experience of Truth in Heidegger and Gadamer,” 81-87. For a controversial reading of Heidegger, see Meyer Schapiro, “The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” and “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in idem, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: Braziller, 1994), 135-141 and 142-151 respectively. A sympathetic reading is offered by Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 9 “Everyone is acquainted with them.” “Everyone knows what shoes consist of.” Heidegger, “The Work of Art,” 32-33. 10 Ibid., 36. 11 Ibid., 53. 12 Ibid., 35. 13 Ibid., 34. 8

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The work of art makes “unconcealedness as such happen in regard to what is as such.”14 Moreover, beyond revealing the truth about the thing as a thing, the work of art discloses the event of disclosure:15 The happening of truth, das Geschehen der Wahrheit. “Light of this kind joins its shining to and into the work. This shining joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.”16 The truth that speaks in the work of art originates in that work. Truth happens only by establishing itself in the conflict and sphere opened up by itself… The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again… What is to be brought forth first clears the openness of the Open into which it comes forth… Truth establishes itself in the work. Truth is present only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth. Truth wills to be established in the work as the conflict of world and earth.17 This “such as never was before and will never come to be again” evokes a very strong reference to the virginity of art. Because art is the revelation of truth, there will never be a full re-velatio, but rather a playful correlation between concealing and revealing.18 The aspect of the novelty will always be part of the experience of art. The truth that is revealed guarantees the always new approach to reality: Every 14

Ibid., 56. The act of self-disclosing is analyzed in depth by Heidegger, in section 7 entitled “The Phenomenological Method of Investigation.” See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 49-63. When analyzing the work of art as revealing the truth, we can find vital similarities with Heidegger’s treatment of early Christianity in his 1920-1921 lecture course on the Phenomenology of Religion. See Heidegger, GA60, English, idem, Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004). For Heidegger, the παρουσία is an event (Ereignis). “The essence of the parousia lies not in a simple presence of the truth, but in a manifestation of the truth of awaiting the parousia. The timing of the second coming of Christ is transformed, in the life of the early Christians and hence Christianity, by the manner of awaiting it. The When is determined through the How of the self-comportment, which is determined through the enactment of factical life experience in each of its moments.” GA60: 105. 16 Heidegger, “The Work of Art,” 56. 17 Ibid., 62. 18 “The symbolic in general, and especially the symbolic in art, rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing. In its irreplaceability, the work of art is no mere bearer of meaning—as if the meaning could be transferred to another bearer. Rather the meaning of the work of art lies in the fact that it is there. In order therefore to avoid all false connotations, we should replace the word ‘work’ by the word ‘creation.’” Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 33. 15

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revelation happens as for the first time and each subsequent revelation belongs to reality in the effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of all revealing events. Among the arts, poetry, for Heidegger, holds a privileged place. It is in language that beings come to be and are.19 Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as. Projecting is the release of the throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such.20 Naming beings is a truly creative experience in the primordial sense of bringing something into existence. Writing poetry is more than giving names to things and conditions; it is the creation of an atmosphere in which emotions and thoughts are confirmed in and through language. Often the meanings (in poetry) are barely expressed, rather, merely suggested or indicated. The reader is led to further questions until the self itself becomes a question. A unique relationship between poem and reader has been created: The work issues a challenge which expects to be met. It requires an answer, an answer that can only be given by someone who accepted the challenge. And that answer must be his own and given actively.21 This does not come from the same stable as manipulation; it is not the same and represents the very nature of poetry, which is to awaken the self to the full complexity of human existence. Poems are often marked by deliberate ambiguity, initiating questions rather than closing these. They are endowed with hidden references and contextual implications and express the poet’s dialogue, which takes place on a variety of levels of poetic existence. Because of this dialogue, the poet is led to a more differentiated attunement to life.

19

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. James Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). 20 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 73. For a hermeneutic approach to language, see Gary B. Madison, “Being and Speaking,” in idem, Beyond the Symbol Model: Reflections on the Representational Nature of Language, ed. John Stewart (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996). See also Jacques Taminiaux, “The Origin of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’” in John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 392-404. 21 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 26. 398

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In The Relevance of the Beautiful, Hans-Georg Gadamer seeks to provide “a new legitimation for art.”22 He examines the “indeterminacy of reference” in art, the fact that “the symbolic in general, and especially in art, rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing.”23 Gadamer states that “alongside and inseparable from this unconcealing, there also stands the shrouding and concealing that belongs to our human finitude.”24 Following Heidegger and Gadamer, we refocus our attention upon experience. We are able to experience the world, time, truth, and Being. What matters the most is our readiness for experience, one “that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma.”25 Our attentiveness, or, as Gadamer calls it, our “readiness for experience,” is what distinguishes our historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Ricoeur would say that narrative is the kind of discourse that allows us to make sense of the temporality of our existence, of the hermeneutic understanding of our finitude. The experience of our finitude constitutes the experience of the work of art. What is at stake in the case of the structural identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal character of temporal experience. The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world… Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.26 The Ontological Status of the Word: “Making Things” and Not Only “Communicating Things”27 In the Biblical tradition, dabar is the Word of God. This actualizing Word is conveyed by the Prophets. Isaiah says: “I say that my plan shall stand, I accomplish my every purpose.” (Is 46: 10) The Word of God does not only communicate Ibid., 5. See also Robert Bernasconi, “The Greatness of the Work of Art,” in idem, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 99-116. 23 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 33. 24 Ibid., 34. 25 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 362. 26 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 27 John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. James O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). The French translation of this book, Quand dire, c’est faire, trans. Gilles Lane (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), expresses Austin’s thesis perfectly: to say it, means to make it. See also John L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. James O. Urmson and Geoffrey J. Warnock, 3d ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 22

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Jahweh’s will but also creates reality, thus exercising power to make things and bring them to life. The Word of God is εvέργεια, which possesses the potency to ‘put into action.’ The Word of God proclaims His eternal plan and realizes it in its historical manifestation. It is the Word that “happens,” that comes to convey, to interrogate, and to question. (Cf. Jer 1: 3. 11. 13) The Word of God is realizing energy: “For He spoke, and it came to be, commanded, and it stood in place.” (Ps 33: 9) The Biblical narrative begins with this potent expression of the power of the Word: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Gn 1: 3) In contrast to the Greek λόγος, which expresses the concept, the idea, the Hebrew dabar is not only a thought but an actualizing act. The Witness of Poetry For Heidegger, Hölderlin is “the poet of poets.” Heidegger thematizes the essence of poetry as an expression of the παρουσία, the absolute presence of Being. In the age of the world’s night, the poet is called upon to renounce having words under his or her control. Poetry reveals what is concealed and becomes a witness to Being. According to Hölderlin, poetry itself is mediation; it can be fully embraced only in Being.28 Here Miłosz’s understanding of poetry comes close to Hölderlin’s: poetry testifies to the realm of language. In The Witness of Poetry,29 Miłosz admits that language discloses only through representation or concealment of that which it would unconceal. What is important here is to differentiate between the poet as a witness and the witness of poetry. The poet, in his or her actual or imaginative witnessing, encounters several recurring dilemmas that are central to his or her being a poet and to our reading of poetry. The literature of witness gives voice to those who are unable to speak for themselves.30 On the journey, in all its aspects, to the origins of reality, which is also the origin of poetry, the poet strives to understand his or her condition in a more differentiated way. Poetic existence is about striving, a striving for understanding the essence of what it is to be human. See Paul de Man, “Hölderlin and the Romantic Tradition,” in idem, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 123136. 29 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). The Witness of Poetry was originally delivered as the “Charles Eliot Norton Lectures” at Harvard University, 1981-1982. 30 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” in idem, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 119-154. See also Françoise Mies, “L’herméneutique du témoignage en philosophie: Pour une anthropologie littéraire. Littérature, mythe littéraire et Bible,” Esphi 4 (1996): 1-23; idem, “L’herméneutique du témoignage en philosophie: Littérature, mythe et Bible,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81, no. 1 (1997): 3-20. 28

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In any encounter with art it is not the particular, but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience.31 The question about the condition of being a poet is also the question about human finitude and human freedom. The condition of the poet is characterized by the relationship to his or her own freedom and by the relationship of the resulting poetry to the freedom of the poet. For Miłosz, the poet fulfills his or her poetic vocation by witnessing to poetry. Poetry is a never-ending search for identity. Splitting and suspension are pertinent characteristics of the poet’s consciousness and self-awareness. This is not to be equated with a cheap indifference. The poet’s life plays itself out between being a pupil and being a teacher, a prophet, and a witness. With each poetic word, we see it reconfirmed that identity is something given. To search for one’s own identity means to live it, regardless of whether this happens clearly and easily, or obscurely and incomprehensibly. Living in this dramatic poetic condensation constitutes not only the sense of being a poet but also the sense of being human. In fact, poetry brings this dramatic condensation to a climax: The word of the poet does not simply continue this process of Einhausung, or “making ourselves at home.” Instead it stands over against this process like a mirror held up to it. But what appears in the mirror is not the world, nor this or that thing in the world, but rather this nearness or familiarity itself in which we stand for a while. This standing and this nearness find permanence in the language of literature and, most perfectly, in the poem. This is not a romantic theory, but a straightforward description of the fact that language gives all of us our access to a world in which certain special forms of human experience arise: the religious tidings that proclaim salvation, the legal judgment that tells us what is right and what is wrong in our society, the poetic word that by being there bears witness to our own being.32 To understand everything, to speak everything, is the telos of poetry. The most critical role in this didactical desire is played by poetry itself. Poetry liberates humans from their own confining patterns of thinking; it liberates us from ourselves. This is done by witnessing. Poetry is itself this witness. The hope of the poet, a hope that I defend, that I advance, is not enclosed by any date. If disintegration is a function of development, and development a function of disintegration, the race between them may very well end 31 32

Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 32-33. Ibid., 115. 401

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in the victory of disintegration. For a long time, but not forever… and here is where hope enters. It is neither chimerical nor foolish. On the contrary, every day one can see signs indicating that now, at the present moment, something new, and on a scale never witnessed before, is being born: humanity as an elemental force conscious of transcending Nature, for it lives by memory of itself, that is, in History.33 Here we touch upon the basic Christian understanding of hope as lived in patience. Patience, ὑπομονή, is yet another name for perseverance or endurance; it is indeed persistent patience that gives courageous witness to God’s faithfulness and presence in the life of His people. Hope creates a life of testimony, wherever and whenever people are challenged to stand up and bring forth a reason for their hope, unhesitatingly, yet in all humility and graciousness.34 On the Condition of the Poet The poet is more than a seeker of knowledge, trying to express an understanding of existence. Poetry embraces the profundity of being a human being.35 Consequently, and at a fundamentally existential level, both poet and reader must philosophize and theologize. Opening up toward poetry means opening up toward the complexity of being human and refusing to leave ultimate questions unaddressed. Such questions draw us into the domain of philosophical and theological thinking. Since the world and being-in-the-world are ultimately ineffable, we must speak of dwelling in an atmosphere of astonishment. Poetic life is one of the conditions for an authentic human existence that is attentive to the process of creation. According to Gadamer, this creation is not something that we can imagine being deliberately made by someone… Someone who has produced a work of art stands before the creation of his hands in just the same way that anyone else does. There is a leap between the planning and the executing on the one hand and the successful achievement on the other. The thing now “stands” and thereby is “there” once and for all, ready to be encountered by anyone who meets it and to be perceived in its own “quality.” This leap distinguishes the work of art in its uniqueness and irreplaceability.36 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 116. “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear.” 1 Pt 3: 15-16. 35 For Heidegger, “Being” is the inner light through which we become aware of beings. See Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? (New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1955). 36 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 33-34. 33 34

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Creative existence in the world is fidelity to a personal appropriation of one’s own history, including those dimensions that transcend the scope of the natural sciences. Both the poet and the reader need to acquire the receptivity and attentiveness which constitute a poetic way of life. Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics show that no single interpretation of a poem can ever be said to be definitive.37 The trajectory of interpretation does not depend on the poet’s original idea. The poet is only an other (or additional) interpreter of his or her poetry; once written, the poem always escapes the hand of the poet. The variety of insights created by imaginative readers widens the horizon of interpretation beyond anything the poet could have anticipated. The poem manifests a threefold distanciation from the poet, and the act of writing itself determines this. In being written, the poem acquires autonomy from the intention of the poet, the cultural and sociological context, and the original addressee. First, the world of the poem explodes the world of the poet. It embraces interpretations beyond the original idea that gave rise to the poem. Secondly, by being read, the poem decontextualizes itself from its original cultural and sociological conditions and recontextualizes itself into new situations. Thirdly, the poem is not limited to its original addressee but is always creating a new audience. The poem enjoys a full liberation: “the world is the set of references opened up by the texts.”38 All readers are called to apply analytic tools to the interpretation of the poem with sensitivity to its aesthetic content. The interpretation of poetry requires logical and linguistic analysis, multiple perspectives, and aesthetic awareness. We need to realize that we must first learn to decipher a work of art, and then to read it, and only then does it begin to speak. In the case of modern art, we have an effective warning against the idea that we can hear the language of ancient art without first deciphering it and learning how to read it.39 Interpretation draws upon a dialectic of being-opened by the poem and of openness toward the poem. The poem opens the reader to a new world, a new horizon. Indeed, the poem requires from the reader a prior readiness to be open. Reading poetry is not equivalent to the divining of the poet’s intention, hidden in the poem, but entering into a new world that opens up in front of one’s eyes, in front of the Gary B. Madison, “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in Richard Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century (London: Routledge, 1994). 38 “Le roi égyptien de Thèbes pouvait bien répondre au dieu Theuth que l’écriture était un faux remède en ce qu’elle remplaçait la vraie réminiscence par la conservation matérielle, la sagesse réelle par le simulacre de la connaissance. En dépit de ces périls, l’inscription constitue néanmoins la destination du discours.” Paul Ricoeur, “Le modèle du texte: l’action sensée considérée comme un texte,” in idem, Du texte à l’action. Essais d’herméneutique II (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1986), 185. 39 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 48, translation altered. 37

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poem.40 The relationship between the poet and the reader has been thematized by Gadamer in the context of art in general, emphasizing the fact that the desire to break down the distance that separates an audience or the public from a work of art has been significantly diminished: One only needs to look at the history of modern art. All works of art intend an effect on future audiences. Gadamer argues for the hermeneutic identity of the work of art: So it is the hermeneutic identity that establishes the unity of the work. To understand something, I must be able to identify it. For there was something there that I passed judgment upon and understood. I identify something as it was or as it is, and this identity alone constitutes the meaning of the work.41 An opening is mediated by the poem, and the reader is in this way exposed to new horizons by his own openness and creativity. This mutual mediation is a convergence of the multiple horizons inherent in both the poem and the varied and variable comportment of its readers. Interpretation is never constrained by a rule of direct correspondence to the work of art in question. On the contrary, a hermeneutic interpretation welcomes any unconcealment of the original work, any disclosure which might bring us closer to the world of the work of art itself. When we read a poem, it never occurs to us to ask who it is that wants to say something to us or why. Here we are wholly directed toward the word as it stands. We are not recipients of some form of communication that might reach us from this or that person. The poem does not stand before us as a thing that someone employs to tell us something. It stands there equally independent of both reader and poet. Detached from all intending, the word is complete in itself.42 Beyond that, a hermeneutic interpretation is based on the conviction that the work of art can show truth all by itself. An interpretation can only facilitate such a happening, which we know as the self-interpretation of the work of art, this unique inner power to disclose the truth. A hermeneutic interpretation enables the work of art to attest to the truth in its self-manifesting and self-interpreting. It influences

Ricoeur’s famous formula reads: “To understand, is to understand oneself in front of the text”: “comprendre, c’est se comprendre devant le texte.” Paul Ricoeur, “La fonction herméneutique de la distanciation,” in idem, Du texte à l’action, 115. 41 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 25. 42 Ibid., 107. 40

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the subject of aesthetic experience to participate in the happening of truth,43 communicating that the work of art encompasses more than a meaning that is being experienced.44 The work of art exists as this particular work and not as a utilitarian means for conveying meaning; it is “a unique manifestation of truth whose particularity cannot be surpassed.”45 Interpretation is always equivalent to conquest, on the part of the interpreter who attempts to understand.46 The fact that the interpretation of a poem detaches itself from the poet’s original idea is further emphasized by the experience of the interpretation of a given poem by the poet him or herself. Here the focus is not on the poet’s source of inspiration, but on the effect the poem has on the reader, even if the reader is the poet him/herself. Central to our aesthetic experience is not the poet, but the reader. Self-interpretation and the textual record will always tend to vary and to go off at tangents. Every time the poet gets a new hold on his or her poem, he or she reaches out to new experiences, and new perspectives of interpretation open up as a result. This infinite variance is a joyful invitation to what turns out to be an unending task of self-interpretation. Ars Poetica: The Nostalgia for More Ars poetica?47 I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Von der Wahrheit des Wortes,” in idem, GW8: 37-57. This essay goes back to Gadamer’s Toronto lectures “The Truth of the Word” in 1981. It has been translated into English by Richard E. Palmer as “On the Truth of the Word,” Symposium 6 no. 2 (2002): 115-134. 44 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 34. 45 Ibid., 37. 46 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 36. 47 Czesław Miłosz, “Ars Poetica,” trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lilian Vallee, from City Without a Name, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 240-241. 43

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That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion, though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel. It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience? It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony. There was a time when only wise books were read, helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity, thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. Berkeley, 1968 Ars poetica demonstrates poetic discipline.48 The poet mediates poetry’s individual and specific coming-toward language. It is by profound familiarity with poetry 48

Cf. Dante’s conception of poetic discipline. Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante’s “Paradiso” and the Limitations of Modern Criticism: A Study of Style and Poetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

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that the poet is able to mirror experience. To develop as a poet, by refining one’s own ars poetica, involves perfecting one’s relationship with poetry as such. Only a strong identification with poetry will give the poet the necessary means to reach a way of expressing this relationship. Everything that weakens that relationship, or the expression of it, weakens the inner growth of the poet. The poet is called to intensify his or her relationship with poetry, and to master possible ways of expressing this relationship. Ars poetica is also about helping to preserve the integrity of the poet. It is an astonishing poetic journey toward this poet’s silent integrity. The poet is well aware of how difficult it is “to remain just one person.”49 He has ushered in his own understanding of this difficulty by his sincere desire to “understand each other without exposing/the author or reader to sublime agonies.” How can we understand each other without scrutinizing others, or being scrutinized ourselves by the often brutal techniques of the contemporary interview? Our everyday experience teaches us that this kind of “understanding each other” does not have overmuch to do with a real inter-view, that is, with enriching our understanding by sharing the view of the Other without invading an other’s life in order to possess “more” information about him or her, in order to be able to dominate and manipulate him or her. A poet is certain that he or she has to make a choice between ars poetica, the dictates of poetic language, and fidelity to the real. This real, to which the poet wishes to be true, is what a poet experiences, is being faithful to real things, by arranging them hierarchically, as Miłosz would have said. Otherwise, poets will lose themselves in a myriad of broken images, with no reference to the hic et nunc, the historical situatedness of a human being in his or her being-in-the-world. Hierarchy and being faithful to the real refer to a sacred order, to something we do not fully understand but long for in our hearts. Poetry thus is a marvelous depiction of the discrepancy between reality and the desire of our hearts, our restless hearts: “inquietum est cor nostrum.”50 In their temporal and spatial situatedness, those hearts of ours mirror the restlessness of the world in which we live as homo viator.

49

Ricoeur distinguishes between two aspects of personal identity, sameness (mêmeté) and selfhood (ipséité). He advances the thesis that personal identity must primarily be conceived as narrative identity. “The genuine nature of narrative identity discloses itself, in my opinion, only in the dialectic of selfhood and sameness. In this sense, this dialectic represents the major contribution of the narrative theory to the constitution of the self.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 140. 50 “Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde: magna virtus tua, et sapientiae tuae non est numerus. Et laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae, et homo circumferens mortalitem suam, circumferens testimonium peccati sui et testimonium, quia superbis resistis: et tamen laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.” Augustine, Confessiones, 1, 1. 407

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Poetry represents an inquiry into the human condition, into how human beings exist in the world. Poems open questions, for the reader, regarding the concretization of the how of human existence in the world and are predominantly an examination of the efficacy of its history, its wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein. We are already shaped by the history we are attempting to thematize.51 The Subject of Poetic Language The voice of the poetic subject is in the center of a hermeneutic reading of poetry. The apparently disjointed parts of a poem elucidate the speaking persona and thus are a vital contribution to the understanding of the conditio humana. The images illumine each distinctive poetic subject without thereby reducing the poem’s subject (or subjects) to some superficial unity. Thus, poems depict the difficulty we have with consciously embracing and integrating our disordered world. Nevertheless, they reveal the truth about our self; the self emerges into unconcealment. The truth about the human being comes into the light of Being. Reading poems, an activity which testifies to the transformative power of poetry encourages us to be conscious of our own transformative moments, of bringing out into the light that which is hidden and withdrawn. Poetry is language in the most primordial sense. Poetic language receives its brightest radiance in the company of truth. At least since Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, the relationship between poetry and truth has been understood not as an antithesis but a mutual interdependence. Gadamer brings this relationship even closer: It seems incontrovertible to me that poetic language enjoys a particular and unique relationship to truth. First, this is shown by the fact that poetic language is not equally appropriate at all times to any content whatsoever, and second, by the fact that when such content is given poetic form in language, 51

Gadamer’s key notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein expresses effective-historical consciousness, which is affected by history and open to the effects of history. “If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always already affected by its history... Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300-301. See also Rod Coltman, The Language of Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Heidegger in Dialogue (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998), 2. Ricoeur defines wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein as “the massive and global fact whereby consciousness, even before its awakening as such, belongs to and depends on that which affects it.” Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 74. “History precedes me and outstrips my reflection; I belong to history before belonging to myself.” Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 72. See also Wierciński, “L’ermeneutica filosofica della tradizione,” 21-40.

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it thereby acquires a certain legitimation. It is the art of language that not only decides upon the success or failure of poetry but also upon its claim to truth.52 The human being is grounded in language.53 One is authentically actualized only in a conversation. Hölderlin says: “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander.”54 The ability to listen presupposes the ability to speak. They genuinely complement each other; they belong together. That “we are a conversation” means we can listen to each other.55 A conversation consists in the fact that by using words, we find ourselves and discover the community of people who are all listening to each other. This listening is not a passive attitude but an expression of authentic existence. Listening opens us up to the conversation, enabling us to give an answer to that which addresses us, and which requests an answer. In our hermeneutic endeavor, we participate in a conversation which revolves around our relationship to history and its texts, “the conversation that we are,”56 a dialogue in which we are “far less the leaders than the led.” If our conversation is genuinely hermeneutic, we will be transformed into a communion in which we will not remain what we were.57 The experience of poetry has a truly 52

Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 105. “I have in mind the linguality, as such, through which and out of which languages are first able to form themselves at all and out of which have been formed the multiplicity of languages, even including those that are not within our own circle of culture. And one point cannot be left out: the indissoluble connection between thinking and speaking which compels hermeneutics to become philosophy. One must always think in a language, even if one does not always have to think in the same language.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in Lewis Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 25, translation altered. On the primordial relationship between thinking and speaking, see Wierciński, “Die ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen,” 65-83. 54 Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedensfeier, in idem, Gedichte bis 1800, ed. Friedrich Beißner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946). 55 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Culture and the World,” in idem, Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. See James Risser, “Shared Life,” Symposium 6, no. 2 (2002): 177. 56 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 378. 57 In a conversation, “something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding in a dialogue is thus not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.” Ibid., 378-379. 53

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transformative character, and this is the power of truth transforming our life: “In the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience the convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: ‘This is true.’”58 The Event of Poetry: The Transforming Power of Poetry The poet, by making use of self-reflexive commentary, names his or her observations and recollections, thereby holding and preserving subjectively experienced reality. It happens in simple words, a process which brings the poet some consolation as well as an ongoing rediscovery of meaning. Nevertheless, such rediscoveries are, by their very nature of being re-discovered, not immutable, nor can they be. They are subject to possible maturation and change. The fragility and pain of existence, the inexorable demands of everyday life, the vulnerability (both accepted and hidden) that is part and parcel of our lives, all these experiences encourage us to search for redeeming values to rely upon in our lives. Despite the unrecoverable dimensions of the past, the supersession of circumstances at the time of writing, and the evolution (but also the loss) of, or addition to, our personal relationships, we can preserve something of the intrinsic value of our experiences. Indeed, we can call upon our experiences to ‘go away,’ so preventing our possible (or even our complete) destruction. Poems encompass, in concrete perceptions, what I call ‘the event of poetry’ in our poetic life; our perceptions emerge in tangible images that are possessed with internal rhythms of their own. They constitute the poet’s inner landscape and the history of one’s relationship with the poetic source. The sense of being part of nature and culture is fundamental to experiencing poetry. Bewildered by the existential estrangement suffered by so many human beings, a poet nonetheless preserves the hope that the power of poetic expression is the best counterweight that can be set before the leveling tendencies of our time. When depicting the detail of our everyday lives, poetry liberates us from ‘everydayness’ by representing the ordinary in extremis. It places us, as finite beings, within the horizon of truth.59 58 59

Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 15. The essence of language cannot be found in some abstraction from differentiation but is found in the totality of those differentiations. “Für die Sprachphilosophie bedeutet dies, daß sie auf das Bestreben, hinter der individuellen Mannigfaltigkeit und der historischen Zufälligkeit der Einzelsprachen die allgemeine Struktur einer Grund- und Ursprache zu entdecken, ein für allemal verzichten lernt, daß auch sie wahre Allgemeinheit des Wesens der Sprache nicht in der Abstraktion von den Besonderungen, sondern in der Totalität dieser Besonderungen sucht. In dieser Verbindung der Idee der organischen Form und der Idee der Totalität ist der Weg bezeichnet, auf welchem Wilhelm von Humboldt seine philosophische Weltansicht gewinnt, die zugleich eine neue Grundlage der Sprachphilosophie in sich schließt.” Ernst Cassirer: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 99.

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What is hidden and forgotten is transformed into what is true. The transformative power of art transforms us as human beings by requiring profound intellectual and spiritual activity on our part. Encountering the work of art means that we do not remain the same (as before the encounter). Gadamer observes: After going through a museum, we do not leave it with exactly the same feeling about life that we had when we went in. If we really have had a genuine experience of art, then the world has become both brighter and less burdensome.60 Poetry possesses the unique power of healing our separation from nature and enabling the self to regain its lost harmony. It is not about some cheap, manipulated emotional experience, like some that are used in “healing sessions” performed by some pseudo-spiritual gurus of our time. Pain remains pain, weakness remains weakness, yet in the genuine experience of art, we regain the courage to go on with our life. Having been brought up in a Judeo-Christian tradition, one cannot forget here the Biblical invitation to “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11: 28) Here, of course, we touch upon the transformative character of the incarnate Word, who was not only able to give the pain of human existence a name but also to heal it, in His encounter with the human being. The Responsibility of the Poet Writing poetry in a technological world that is predominantly occupied with controlling, making, and managing things is a difficult enterprise. Being a poet is in remarkable contrast to the ‘productive’ existence that is so valued by a market-driven culture. The poet is pressured into justifying his/her ‘unproductive’ way of life. Yet by participating in the contemporary world, but without being colonized by technology, the poet is not removed from, or indifferent to, his or her environment. On the contrary: feeling the pulse of the world, the poet experiences the joys and pains of human existence no less keenly than anyone else. The main differentiating characteristicum of a poet is to be a contemplative being.61 However difficult, the poetic life is not inaccessible; it is essentially human. The interdependence between poetry and poet creates, for the poet, a spiritual realm of personal poetic responsibility. Poetry must not be reduced to literary 60 61

Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 26. Heidegger, in Discourse on Thinking, contrasts calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) with contemplative thinking (besinnliches Nachdenken). See Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 46. 411

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mitigation of the ego’s entanglement with an alienating world. On the other hand, poetry is not confined to the sublime and the ethereal; it embraces the human being as a whole. The essence of being a poet is to allow poetry to speak. This voice has an invitational character. The poet must make a decision to be responsible for this voice (the original meaning of re-spondeo is to give an answer to a voice which has spoken). The gift of poetry brings with it the responsibility to dwell within the horizon of poetry.62 The Disorder of Reality: No Words Left Campo dei Fiori63 In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down. On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre 62

Here we can only indicate a different approach to the phenomenology of the gift than the approach favored by Jacques Derrida, for whom the only viable phenomenology of the gift requires him to reduce the gift to the giving. “The moment the gift, however generous it be, is infected with the slightest hint of calculation, the moment it takes account of knowledge or recognition, it falls within the ambit of an economy: it exchanges, in short it gives counterfeit money, since it gives in exchange for payment. Even if it gives ‘true’ money, the alteration of the gift into a form of calculation immediately destroys the value of the very thing that is given; it destroys it as if from the inside. The money may keep its value, but it is no longer given as such. Once it is tied to remuneration (merces), it is counterfeit because it is mercenary and mercantile; even if it is real. Whence the double ‘suppression of the object’… as soon as it is calculated (starting from the simple intention of giving as such, starting from sense, knowledge, and whatever takes recognition into account), the gift suppresses the object (of the gift). It denies it as such. In order to avoid this negation of destruction at all costs, one must proceed to another suppression of the object: that of keeping in the gift only the giving, the act of giving and intention to give, not the given which in the end doesn’t count. One must give without knowing, without knowledge or recognition, without thanks: without anything, or at least without any object.” Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 112. 63 Czesław Miłosz, “Campo dei Fiori,” trans. Louis Iribarne and David Broks, from Rescue, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 33-35. 412

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close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors’ shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by martyrs’ pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning. He could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on.

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Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet’s word. Warsaw, 1943 Miłosz’s poem, written in Warsaw in 1943, depicts the Campo dei Fiori, the Roman square, the “field of flowers,” where “they burned Giordano Bruno.” The colorful market is full of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, signs of life, while a forlorn Giordano Bruno waits for his death. In the poem, the picture of the Campo dei Fiori is associated with the Warsaw of 1943, “one clear spring evening,” attuned to a carnival atmosphere. In the background, we have the burning ghetto. Life goes on, and nothing seems to distract the jollifications. Those two pictures, distant in time and space, are strikingly similar to each other. Who cares about innocent people’s death, who mourns dying people? No words are left, to describe the human tragedy that is unfolding before our very eyes. The most dramatic aspect of the poem is the “loneliness of the dying.” Nothing seems to change in the course of human history. Socrates, Jesus, and Giordano Bruno: they all “could not find/in any human tongue/words for mankind.” And the Jews in the Ghetto. All of them, “the lonely/forgotten by the world.” “Our tongue becomes for them/the language of an ancient planet.” This language is the language of the unconditional promise God made to Abraham, that He would make his descendants a great nation and would bless all peoples through Israel. (Gn 12: 1-3, Ex 7: 5; 14: 18; Jos 2: 9-11; cf. the messianic prophecy, which will be fulfilled through Israel, Is 49: 6, Ps 2: 10-12; 117: 1). The poem ends with an expression of hope: Poetry will not allow the past to be forgotten. Poetry can victoriously face evil, even if many years must elapse 414

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before “on a new Campo dei Fiori/rage will kindle at a poet’s word.” Poetry is not about retaliation. It is not even a direct protest against injustice in the world. Rescue (i.e., the title of the volume in which “Campo dei Fiori” originally appeared), comes from believing in justice, regardless of the atrocities committed in our own age. The word of the poet can preserve memory. It is an act of remembering and mourning at the same time. Someone will at some time read “of the oblivion/born before the flames have died.” Meaning is not just revealed and made present in the symbol.64 It is withdrawn and also preserved. This is the source of an indeterminate reference as encountered in the symbol and in the poem itself. Interpreting a symbol and a poem does not mean that we provide an interpretation that would exhaust, and thereby determine its meaning. Such indeterminacy belongs to the very structure of symbolic representation, i.e., to the tension that exists within the “inner unity” of the symbol and the symbolized. Meaning exceeds its embodiment in the poem; there is always more to be embraced and expressed. The experience of the beautiful does not only belong to a world of gods and angels. Lost human harmony, the atrocities due to human beings striving for more possessions and greater domination over the other, all those factors cannot prevent beauty to shine forth clearly. It is the responsibility of philosophy and poetry to refer to the true world. The essence of the beautiful is not contrary to reality, even though the experience of reality, as in a poet’s word, can be devastating and filled with rage. Gadamer offers a very helpful reading of this important tension between beauty and reality: We learn that however unexpected our encounter with beauty may be, it gives us an assurance that the truth does not lie far off and inaccessible to us but can be encountered in the disorder of reality with all its imperfections, evils, errors, extremes, and fateful confusions. The ontological function of the beautiful is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and real.65 “The Poet Remembers” As Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’—says my pride and remains adamant. “At Ricoeur speaks of “the gift of meaning from the symbol.” “The symbol gives; but what it gives is occasion for thought, something to think about.” Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 348. Further see idem, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McGaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); idem, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University, 1976); idem, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 65 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 15. 64

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last—memory yields.”66 The poet is concerned with the duty of keeping his or her memory alive. The poet is asking oneself: What is the memory? What is involved in writing history? How should we deal with the lapses of memory in our historical conditio humana? Analyzing our obligations with respect to memory, the poet touches on the subject of forgiveness and its impact on our historical condition.67 You who wronged 68 You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight. Washington, D.C., 1950 We live in times when the political and ideological superpowers seem confused about what exactly their responsibility is. You can kill, but the poet will remember. In the end, two words will survive: Truth and Justice.69 The Just will live in God. 66

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Helen Zimmern, 4th ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), 68. 67 Paul Ricoeur addresses the relationship between memory and history, and the question of dealing with painful recollections of the past. He asks: “How can a memory be unworried if it is not a fair memory?... A society cannot grow angry with itself indeterminately.” Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 650-651. 68 Czesław Miłosz, “You Who Wronged,” trans. Richard Lourie, from Daylight, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 103. 69 In The Just, starting with a definition of the subject of rights, Ricoeur elaborates on the concept of responsibility. He further explores some aspects of the theory of law, the act of judging, the ideas of sanction, rehabilitation, pardon, and the status of conscience in relation to the demands of the law. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 416

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At the end of the seventh century B.C., the prophet Habakkuk complains about destruction and violence, “the law is benumbed, and judgment is never rendered.” (Hb 1: 4) He demands from God justice and protection for His people. God promises, yet without any time indication, that He will take care of those who believe in Him. “The rash man has no integrity; but the just man, because of his faith, shall live.” (Hb 2: 4) The righteous will live, for he follows God’s commands. The wicked, who disobeys the commandments, who perverts the course of justice, will perish. Even if it looks as though God does not listen to the cry that is raised, and does not intervene in the violence (Hb 1: 2), He is with His people and calls for unconditional trust in His promise that He will “give might to his people... and bless his people with peace.” (Ps 29: 11) Especially in times of trial, God expects His people to trust in His promise: “The one who is righteous by faith will live.” (Rom 1: 17, cf. Gal 3: 11) The poet reminds us: “Do not feel safe.” The memory of the poet is a testimony to the historic past.70 The poet’s word is a voice against complacency, against getting acquainted with and accustomed to the wrong. “Do not feel safe” is also an invitation to take responsibility for one’s actions. Miłosz writes: The twentieth century is a purgatory in which the imagination must manage without the relief that satisfied one of the essential needs of the human heart, the need for protection. Existence appears as ruled by necessity and chance, with no divine intervention; until recently, God’s hand used to bring help to pious rulers and to punish sinful rulers. But now even the idea of Progress, which was nothing else, but Providence secularized, no longer provides any guarantee.71 There is no safe heaven on earth. Life is a constant struggle aiming to live a meaningful life, “‘a good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”72

See Paul Ricoeur, “Memory, Forgetfulness, and History,” Iyyn: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 45 (July 1996): 237-248; idem, “Aesthetic Judgment and Political Judgment According to Hannah Arendt,” in idem, The Just, 94-108; idem, “Philosophies critiques de l’histoire: Recherche, explication, écriture,” in Guttorm Fløistad, ed., Philosophical Problems Today, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 139-201. 71 Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 53. 72 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 70

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The Unsatiability of the Poet In Warsaw73 What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins Of St John’s Cathedral this sunny Day in spring? What are you thinking here, where the wind Blowing from the Vistula scatters The red dust of the rubble? You swore never to be A ritual mourner. You swore never to touch The deep wounds of your nation So you would not make them holy With the accursed holiness that pursues Descendants for many centuries. But the lament of Antigone Searching for her brother Is indeed beyond the power Of endurance. And the heart Is a stone in which is enclosed, Like an insect, the dark love Of a most unhappy land. I did not want to love so. That was not my design. I did not want to pity so. That was not my design. My pen is lighter Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden Is too much for it to bear. How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin? I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot Write anything; five hands 73

Czesław Miłosz, “In Warsaw,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass, and Madeline Levine, from Rescue, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 75-76.

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Seize my pen and order me to write The story of their lives and deaths. Was I born to become a ritual mourner? I want to sing of festivities, The greenwood into which Shakespeare Often took me. Leave To poets a moment of happiness, Otherwise your world will perish. It’s madness to live without joy And to repeat to the dead Whose part was to be gladness Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts, Only the two salvaged words: Truth and justice. Warsaw, 1945 This poem reiterates an ancient conflict between life and art, between the consciousness of the poet and one’s human longing for happiness. It is the remembering of the well-known drama of human existence depicted by Qoheleth: Rejoice, O young man, while you are young and let your heart be glad in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart, the vision of your eyes; Yet understand that as regards all this God will bring you to judgment. (Eccl 11: 9) The poet examines his conscience. He confesses: “You swore never to be/A ritual mourner./... never to touch/The deep wounds of your nation.” He wants to write songs of joy, but instead can repeat “Only the two salvaged words:/Truth and justice.” And despite the fact that he pleads: “Leave/To poets a moment of happiness,/Otherwise your world will perish,” he cannot stop himself from repeating the words, which carry hope and salvation. This is a profound expression of poetic responsibility, which depicts the deepest meaning of the poet’s vocation. With similar resoluteness, the Apostle Paul states: “If I preach the Gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it!” (1 Cor 9: 16) Woe to me, where do I find, When winter prevails, the flowers, and where The shining of the sun, 419

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And the shadow of the earth? The walls stand Speechless and cold in the wind The flags are clinking.74 Hölderlin expresses here a sense of poetic despair by using a powerful picture of worrying about existential integrity. The moments of happiness, flowers, and the shining of the sun are the Sitz im Leben, the context in which the poet is struggling with living his authentic poetic existence. “This obligation has been imposed on him,” and woe to the poet if he or she should become satisfied with anything less. The Sacred Art of the Word Poetry enjoys a privileged position within the human sciences because of its power to reveal the truth. The word is true, because it reveals things as they are.75 Poetry seeks to uncover the truth (ἀλήθεια), to reveal truth through language and disclose the primordial meaning of Being. From such a perspective, poetry is truth. Facing its increasing irrelevance, poetry continues to tirelessly build bridges between cultures and peoples. It is animated by the hope of preservation: It remains faithful to manifesting difference while trusting in the unity that is never entirely made manifest. Identity, death, and transcendence through art—these are major concerns of recent poetry. By following things rather than ideas, poetry invites the poet to attempt to tell the story of the self, to idealize the self. Concrete images are the touchstone of truth and thus the very heart of poetry. Without faith in the possibility of truthful language, there can be no poetry. Regardless of personal idiosyncrasies, the poet aspires to embrace the whole. In its fascination with Friedrich Hölderlin, Hälfte des Lebens, in idem, Gedichte nach 1800, ed. Friedrich Beißner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946), 117: Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein, Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen. 75 The truth of the word and the lingual character of the truth are best expressed by the processual character of the Word as the mystery of the Trinity. “The mystery of the Trinity finds itself reflected in the wonder of language inasmuch as the word—that is true, because it says how things are—is nothing of itself and does not seek to be anything for itself: nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur. The inner mental word is just as consubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 421, translation altered. See also Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. 74

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the ordinary, poetry holds up a mirror to existence; it thus reaches into domains of meaning that are otherwise unattainable to theory. Poetry gestures to Being, without distorting it by trying to make it fit into a theoretical structure. Poetry is the freedom to let everything be itself. Poetry is an affirmation of hope that springs from insights in the soul, from self-awareness and the awareness of atrocities, which people are able to commit. Our newest history bitterly reminds us, once again, that pain and devastation are not only the scary attributes of the past. From a broad historical and literary perspective, we know that only by living an authentic existence can we avoid false ideological hopes for the future of humanity, false, that is, if they are based exclusively on our human endeavor and an exaggerated trust in Progress. What unites us all, poets and readers alike, is our search for hope, without quite knowing when and how any help (adiutorium, auxilium) might come. Who knows, it might happen “at the break of day,” as it was once promised: “Deus in medio eius non commovebitur adiuvabit eam Deus vultu suo.”76 Poetry is a witness. It attempts to bear witness to every human being’s individual history, to be aware of each and every particular event in the history of the world, to memorize every detail, all in some poem. Nothing is unworthy of poetic attention. Moreover, nothing can vanish without a trace, even if for the most part it will look that way, as if it disappeared forever, quite unnoticed. Thinking of this makes us tremble. There is something stronger than our pessimism, even our despair. Poetry, however futile it may seem, is absolutely necessary, as it allows us to transcend ourselves. Poetry challenges us to listen to it and to make its language our very own. We must give testimony to the witness of poetry, understanding that “there is no place which fails to see you. You must change your life.”77 This is the essence of our responsibility: being attentive to poetry to discover the truth that is otherwise inaccessible and lost to us.

“God is in its [God’s city’s] midst; it shall not be shaken; God will help it at break of day.” Ps 46: 6. 77 “Da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in idem, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 61. 76

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3. 2. Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement Czesław Miłosz’s Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement “Czesław Miłosz’s Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement” offers a hermeneutic reading of Miłosz’s poetry. His poetry is a constant dialogue with himself while searching for self-identity. Bearing witness to life in its amazing complexity, the poet faces the tension between the imperative of language and the imperative of reality. He is condemned to eternal insatiability because he wants his words to penetrate to the very core of reality. His need for order, for rhythm, and form, does not allow him to despair: He is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. In his fascinating intellectual and cross-cultural journey, the poet continually questions his poetic vocation and arrives at a great conclusion: The task of the poet is to glorify things because they are. Berkeley 1982 - Boston 1992 - Opole, anticipating 2012 I cannot say much about the Berkeley of 1982. The same house in 978 Grizzly Peak Boulevard. A window view over San Francisco Bay. And the eternal tension experienced by a tormented spirit. And my Berkeley, in 1992? That was after I had met the poet in Boston, in 1991? When Miłosz appeared at Harvard, I told him about my idea of a book about the condition of a poet; about an understanding of poetry through reflecting on the phenomenon of being a poet. Miłosz suggested we continue our conversation about poetry in Berkeley. The Same and Not the Same: I Do Not Cease To Feel Amazement 1913 I betook myself to Italy right after the harvest. That year 1913 the McCormick harvester For the first time moved across our fields Leaving behind stubble altogether unlike that Left by the sickle or the scythe of the reapers. On the same train, but in third class, My factotum Yosel rode to his kin in Grodno. I had my supper there, in the refreshment room, At a long table under rubber plants. 422

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I recollected the high bridge over the Niemen As the train wound out of an Alpine pass. And I woke up by the waters, grayish blue In the radiance of the pearly lagoon, In the city where a traveler forgets who he is. By the waters of Lethe I saw the future. Is this my century? Another continent, With Yosel’s grandson we sit together Talking of our poet friends. Incarnated, Young again, yet identical with my older self. What strange costumes, how strange the street is, And I myself unable to speak of what I know. No lesson for the living can be drawn from it. I closed my eyes and my face felt the sun, Here, now, drinking coffee in Piazza San Marco. Berkeley, 19821 The year 1913 is the time of tension that immediately preceded the outbreak of the First World War. The reality painstakingly built by tradition lay in ruins. A human being discovered, to his horror, the dynamically developing potential for destruction. He even saw that war was not only the drama of physical destruction but also, and perhaps above all, the destruction of the inner order.2 He understood that rebuilding the world after the war would not be a simple reconstruction of the past, the reconstruction of what had been devastated; but that it is an arduous building of a new life. A poet, one who poetically inhabits the earth (dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf der Erde), understands the fundamental sense implied in building (bauen) quite well. The change in the word order is in itself a signal that the deconstruction of the world is already taking place (Heidegger’s Abbau, Derrida’s De-construction). Nothing will be left the way it was. The McCormick harvester breaks (monstrously) into a familiar landscape. We will no longer recognize the traces of previous harvesters or haymakers. Now everything is so even and so smooth.3 Czesław Miłosz, “1913,” in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), trans. Czesław Miłosz (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 424. 2 The war drama was seen in a similar way by Stefan George, who warned his generation against an uncritical trust in the ideology of progress and faith in the omnipotence of science. That is why George was a guide to the young Gadamer. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft (1983),” in idem, Ästhetik und Poetik II: Hermeneutik im Vollzug, GW9 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 259ff. 3 “In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other—these forces, 1

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We are confronted with the phenomenon of chancing upon the borderline. Two completely different worlds, the pre-war and the post-war world, the destroyed one (Abbau), and that which has been rebuilt (Wiederherstellung), the world of nature and the world of technology, the world of sensitivity—belonging to a person of culture—and the soullessness of the machine. The ubiquity of industrialized life. The year 1913 is the border which appears here as the beginning of a civilization that is supposed to turn against the human being who creates it. Heidegger warned us that calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) is a more severe threat to humans than nuclear annihilation. It is not the vision of an atomic catastrophe, but the progress of technical civilization that threatens us with a complete loss of since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision. But this too is characteristic of the new world of technology, that its accomplishments come most speedily to be known and publicly admired…. Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age. No single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can halt or direct the progress of history in the atomic age. No merely human organization is capable of gaining dominion over it. Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be, if man today abandons any intention of pitting his/her meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But once meditative thinking awakens, it must be at work unceasingly and on every occasion, even the least notable—hence, also, here and now at this commemoration. For here we are considering what is threatened, especially in the atomic age: the autochthony of the works of man. Thus, we ask now: even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man’s nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age? What could the ground and foundation be for the new autochthony? Perhaps the answer we are looking for lies at hand so near to us that we all too easily overlook it. For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans. This way is the way of meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage with what at first sight does not go together at all….We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also leave them be, as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, leave them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no,’ by an old word, releasement toward things.” Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 51-52. 424

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what is the essence of human thinking, that is, the loss of the ability to think beyond, and to the detriment of, calculation, predictability, and manipulation.4 And a trip to Italy. After an emotionally moving farewell to the old world in Grodno. A lonely supper at a long table in the railway station. It feels like the Last Supper, the ending and the beginning, all in one go. A painful necessity of saying goodbye to the old world: à-dieu, ad deum, which is becoming a great ‘yes’ to the future, a Viaticum on the road in search of oneself. A sprawling, untidy rubber plant focuses our attention, with its leaves as if they had been waxed. A typical menu served in railway restaurants. And the nagging awareness of a supper that ends something important but is also a new beginning. The supper opens new horizon of existence. Everything is unknown. However, everything is possible. In the seventh paragraph in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger gave priority to possibility over reality: “Höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit.”5 Understanding oneself, having an insight into the meaning of one’s own life that just happens, that comes about through being illumined within the horizons of possibility; treating life as a possibility: We can speak here of a specific eschatological dimension of possibility. In the classical usage of this word, possibility was subordinated to actuality (ab esse ad posse valet, and posse ad esse non valet consequentia). However, in the spirit of Husserl and Heidegger one can leave behind an understanding of possibility as imperfection and emphasize its dynamics

“But for the time being—we do not know for how long—man finds himself in a perilous situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatens—precisely when the danger of a third world war has been removed. A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate. In what sense is the statement just made valid? This assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative thinking alive. Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking.” Ibid., 55-56. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Non-calculative Responsibility: Martin Heidegger’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Responsibility,” in Marcelino Agís Villaverde, Carlos Belińas Fernándes, Fernanda Henriques, and Jesús Ríos Vicente, ed., Herméneutica y responsibilidad: Homenaje a Paul Ricoeur (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, Servizo de Publicatión e Intercambio Científico, 2005), 413-432. 5 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), 38. 4

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(δύναμις): The perspective of existence, à venir.6 It is Heidegger’s “mögendes Vermögen” that allows one to grasp the depth of possibility, as against or beyond impossibility.7 And a journey, by taking the train. The Alpine pass, which separates not only the mountains from one another but also time and space. It is a phenomenon of transgression, a crossing of borders; the crossing of, and entering into, a different time, a different space. “And I woke up by the waters,” Milosz writes. The “awakening” takes place in the light of the sun. And the blazing sun, the blaze, is dazzling. It brightens but also blinds the traveler. Like Heidegger’s ἀλήθεια, concealing and unconcealing (Verbergung und Entbergung), like clouds at dawn, a return—according to their own rhythm—to the Black Forest valley. Delight, but also anxiety and fear. The awakening by the waters is an experience of the border, some kind of suspense and alienation.8 The source of fear is an awareness that there is this other, former side of the mountains, not available now. The side behind the pass. No going back. There is only the painful memory of it, in joining up with the uncertain now. The past cannot be changed. We can only understand that we are safe, after all. Being aware of the historical structure of understanding as such, we discover that our understanding of the world and of ourselves as rooted in the world is determined by the Cf. Richard Kearney, Poétique du possible: Phénoménologie herméneutique de la figuration (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984) as well as his The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001). 7 “To embrace a ‘thing’ or a ‘person’ in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way, such favoring [Mögen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence of enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the ‘strength’ of such enabling by favoring that something is properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly ‘possible’ [das Mögliche], whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoring, Being enables thinking. The former makes the latter possible. Being is the enabling-favoring, the ‘may be’ [das Mög-liche]. As the element, Being is the ‘quiet power’ of the favoring-enabling, that is, of the possible. Of course, our words möglich [possible] and Möglichkeit [possibility], under the dominance of ‘logic’ and ‘metaphysics,’ are thought solely in contrast to ‘actuality’; that is, they are thought on the basis of a definite—the metaphysical—interpretation of Being as actus and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak of the ‘quiet power of the possible’ I do not mean the possibile of a merely represented possibilitas, nor potentia as the essentia of an actus of existentia; rather, I mean Being itself, which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation to Being. To enable something here means to preserve it in its essence, to maintain it in its element.” Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in idem, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 220. 8 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Between Familiarity and Strangeness: Gadamerian and Derridian Hermeneutics of Friendship,” in Maria José Cantista, ed., Subjectividade e Racionalidade: Uma abordagem fenomenológico-hermenęutica (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), 269-295. 6

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existential structure of the historical situation in which we find ourselves. What demands our understanding becomes a question that is being asked in our constant dialogue with tradition.9 We are a conversation (Das Gespräch das wir sind).10 We can also, after Heidegger, repeat that the past remains the future, it is becoming the future: “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft.”11 And anxiety, that the pursuit of a glorious future will destroy the beauty of the past. After all, the poet is suddenly “In the city where a traveler forgets who he is.” It is poetry that is the source of knowledge about ourselves. It tells us who we are, what is happening to us. It becomes a place of meeting with each other and ourselves as the other, as Gadamer said: “Dichtung wird zur Stätte der Selbstbegegnung.”12 To live in poetry, to live poetically, is just to think of oneself (wir werden unser selbst eingedenk). Only in poetry is the world present as an experience of completeness. At the same time, poetry condenses the whole of our experience of the world.13 “By the waters of Lethe, I saw the future,” writes Miłosz. Lethe, the river of oblivion, flows around Hades, the land of death. The newcomers to Hades, who were forced to bathe in it, lost their memory. In this way, they said goodbye to the past. Hence the poet’s reflection whether their new existence will not be bought at too high a cost, being paid for by their oblivion, or even the renunciation of their previous existence? If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality. After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same time bread and wine. Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Ermeneutica filosofica della tradizione,” Ars Interpretandi: Annuario di ermeneutica giuridica 8 (2003): 21-40. 10 “Wir suchen von dem Gespräch aus, das wir sind, dem Dunkel der Sprache nahezukommen.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010), 383. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “The Primacy of Conversation in Philosophical Hermeneutics” in idem, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 1133. 11 Martin Heidegger, “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,” in idem, Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA12, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 91. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “‘Sprache ist Gespräch.’ Gadamer’s Understanding of Language as Conversation,” in idem, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 37-58. 12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Der Vers und das Ganze,” in idem, Ästhetik und Poetik II: Hermeneutik im Vollzug, GW9, 256. 13 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Nichts wird vergessen sein: Das Dichtersein und die Wege des Verstehens,” Heinrich-Seuse-Jahrbuch (2008): 121-135. 9

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“Capri”14 And how to deal with being reconciled and not being reconciled with the question of your own identity? Is life, as a journey, a constant process of dying and being born again? So where to seek the truth about a human being, about the world? Miłosz excellently creates a world in which questions are being asked again and again. In fact, one can talk here about the hermeneutic logic of question and answer.15 Poetry poses questions that arise from the rootedness in the heritage of tradition. The whole of understanding situates itself within the horizons of a question (Fragehorizont). This fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung—between that which wants to be understood and the interpreter) has a lingual character. Language makes it possible to understand: “With Yosel’s grandson we sit together/Talking of our poet friends.” Constellations are changing, but the basic questions remain. Anxieties and longings are lived in a different context: Like “strange clothes,” like a “strange street” “on different land.” Old friends are dead; they lost what their identity was about (and again Heideggerian Dekonstruktion appears). However, only in this way are they able to understand the truth about themselves. “I closed my eyes, and my face felt the sun/Here, now, drinking coffee in Piazza San Marco.” The journey is becoming a chance to widen the horizon of existence, but it is also a trap. The details of the past inevitably return, tormenting us, and forcing us to reflect constantly on the continuity of existence, on the identity of the human person: “The same and not quite the same.” “Magpiety”) 16 Discovering the truth about oneself is happening here and now, while drinking coffee in Piazza San Marco. The worlds collide: The original one, crumbling under the influence of historical catastrophes and changes happening within civilization as a whole. And this new world, which astonishes the poet, offering perspectives that are unknown to him so far, but which also induces anxiety, helplessness and a sense of being lost. Ultimately, the horizons merge, and in this new world everyone must recognize the tropes of one’s own identity. By its very nature, reflection on one’s own identity does take place; one can even say it happens

Czesław Miłosz, “Capri,” in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), trans. Czesław Miłosz, 588. 15 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Logik von Frage und Antwort,” in idem, Wahrheit und Methode, 384. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutic Legacy,” Phainomena 15, no. 55-56 (2006): 243-283. 16 Czesław Miłosz, “Magpiety,” in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, 156. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czeslaw Milosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity,” in Barbara Weber, Karlfriedrich Herb, Petra Schweitzer, Eva Marsal, and Takara Dobashi, ed., Cultural Politics and Identity: The Public Space of Recognition (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 147-174. 14

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(ereignet sich) in the horizon of ambiguity. Hermeneutics, however, is not a mindless pursuit of ambiguity, vagueness, or even of paying tribute to confusion and deception, just in order to celebrate versatility. Rather, it reminds us of the polyphony of understanding that places the human search for meaning within the horizon of fragmentation and incompleteness. It takes into account apparent contradictions such as spontaneity and rigor, at the same time remembering that the most important element in the process of reaching out to oneself is to try to understand what is happening to us, regardless of our plans, or even the most deliberate actions.17 Hermeneutics reminds us that human existence is essentially an understanding or interpreting existence (existentia interpretativa, homo interpretativus). Self-understanding happens in the confrontation with a lingual expression that reveals new possibilities of being. It becomes clear that self-understanding, which has a lingual nature, is a lifelong process which requires constant readiness to create the meaning of life again and again. Miłosz understands well that reaching out to oneself means to take to heart the historical facticity of human existence (die geschichtliche Faktizität der menschlichen Existenz). Poetry is very helpful here. It reveals the truth about a human being. Poetry is this very truth. Miłosz believes in such poetry, even when the poet’s life is then exposed to greater torment, daimonions’ whispers, and unrefined aspirations to an exclusive touching of the truth of Being (die Wahrheit des Seins). The poet, however, does not forget that his/her vocation is realized in the real world, and only by undertaking the hardships of living does s/he write a single poem throughout his/her whole life. Poetry (ars poetica) becomes life (ars vitae). Moreover, on this path, the poet becomes a human being, deepening his/her own confidence in the using of language.18 Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood. In a child’s nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth, In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast’s fangs and in the terror of dark rooms, In youthful infatuations where childhood delight finds completion. And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins? Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us? Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing, Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low, According to the nature of our bodies, of our language. 17 18

Cf. Wierciński, “Hermeneutics and the Indirect Path to Understanding,” 11-44. Cf. Wierciński, “Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment,” 173-204. 429

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The same could be said of beauty. It should not exist. There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against. Yet undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness. The voices of birds outside the window when they greet the morning And iridescent stripes of light blazing on the floor, Or the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the dark-blue mountain meet. Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green. All that, hasn’t it been invoked for centuries As mystery which, in one instant, will be suddenly revealed? And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand. One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower. And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong. Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being, It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly. And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil Only beauty will call to them and save them So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false. “One More Day”19 An attempt to self-define is for Miłosz a task every human being faces. And this is a lifelong task: Finding oneself in the world around one, discovering the truth about one’s rootedness in the richness of the earth and the tradition, in being stranded between the profane and the sacred. In this discovery of the truth about him or herself, the poet discerns the tension, the conflict of interpretation, the struggle for understanding him/herself: “I do not remember who I am and who I was.” (“On Trumpets and Zithers”20). He sees his difference, the actual one, of which he has been aware since childhood, but also the one that is being created and has been created: “I muse on the meaning of being this not that.” (“What Does it Mean”21) And he realizes perfectly that it is not easy to be the same human being all the time: “Trying in vain to become something/Completely different from what

Czesław Miłosz, “One More Day,” in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), trans. Czesław Miłosz, 418. 20 Czesław Miłosz, “On Trumpets and Zithers,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 226. 21 Czesław Miłosz, “What Does it Mean,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 164. 19

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I was.” (“In A Parish”22) This is why the poet’s memory is so important, faithful to what is a concrete reality, close to people and things. I would like everyone to know they are the king’s children And to be sure of their immortal souls, I.e., to believe that what is most their own is imperishable. “Elegy for Y. Z.”23 Poetry is a concern, not only for oneself. It is a humble struggle to make the impossible possible. Miłosz’s “I would like” is a confession of concern for a human being, but also a testimony to consent, that what is seemingly simple is, in fact, difficult to accept. 24 And it is even harder to believe that this is the case: “What did I really want to tell them? That I labored to transcend my/place and time, searching for the Real.” (“Unattainable Earth”25). We are not so badly off, if we can Admire Dutch painting. For that means We shrug off what we have been told For a hundred, two hundred years. Though we lost Much of our previous confidence. Now we agree That those trees outside the window, which probably exist, Only pretend to greenness and treeness And that the language loses when it tries to cope Czesław Miłosz, “In A Parish,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 741. Czesław Miłosz, “Elegy for Y. Z.,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 442. 24 In the Nobel Prize lecture, Miłosz writes about the poetic struggle with reality: “A poet who grew up in such a world should have been a seeker for reality through contemplation. A patriarchal order should have been dear to him, a sound of bells, an isolation from pressures and the persistent demands of his fellow men, the silence of a cloister cell. If books were to linger on a table, then they should be those which deal with the most incomprehensible quality of God-created things, namely being, the esse. But suddenly all this is negated by demoniac doings of History which acquires the traits of a bloodthirsty Deity. The Earth which the poet viewed in his flight calls with a cry, indeed, out of the abyss and doesn’t allow itself to be viewed from above. An insoluble contradiction appears, a terribly real one, giving no peace of mind either day or night, whatever we call it, it is the contradiction between being and action, or, on another level, a contradiction between art and solidarity with one’s fellow men. Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet, to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to a distance, only by soaring above it—but this in turn seems then a moral treason.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/lecture/. 25 Czesław Miłosz, “Unattainable Earth,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 412. 22 23

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With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here: A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon, Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last–and so strongly It is hard not to believe in their lastingness. “Realism”26 There is no simple recipe for how to live, how to testify to your own anxieties and dilemmas. The aged poet (“If There Is No God,”27) is still thinking about the art of Being: “If there is no God,/Not everything is permitted to man./He is still his brother’s keeper/And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,/By saying that there is no God.” What is most important is intangible. And all that has been understood must be interpreted again and again. Changeability and non-finality. Hence this dramatic experiencing of uncertainties and dilemmas, perhaps even more dramatic, since it is obscured by the too unambiguous affirmation of the world and a human being in it. What remains, therefore, is to be reconciled with the perceived problems or contradictions. The proposed solutions fail, they rather reveal the blurred thinking and the arrogance of human reason. However, even the greatest uncertainties and dilemmas do not absolve the poet from giving a testimony that one must live and seek: I could probably write only out of pride. But in all things was the prophetic thorn, as if it were the nest burning at night. The winds were blowing. On his own, a man miserable, and wine and cool, it is a pity to even wail with words. And that is all I was worthy of That once - I fell silent. “In Delirium” 193928 Poetry brings important intuitions which enrich an understanding of our capabilities and ourselves, clarifying the understanding of a human being as a fundamentally historical and lingual existence in time. It is in the journey toward the future that the human person discovers the richness of his/her existence and tries, in a continual interpretative effort, to reach self-understanding. Czesław Miłosz, “Realism,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), 606. 27 Czesław Miłosz, “If There Is No God,” trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass, in idem, Second Space: New Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 5. 28 Czesław Miłosz, “In Delirium,” my own translation. 26

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When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset. The true meaning, ready to be decoded. What never added up will add up, What was incomprehensible will be comprehended. - And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other? And on this earth there is nothing except this earth? - Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams. “Meaning”29 The poet believes in the word, hence his conviction about the saving power of poetry. It is a constant and new being-in-favor of life and meaning, and against death and nihilism. “My parents, my husband, my brother, my sister.” I am listening in a cafeteria at breakfast. The women’s voices rustle, fill themselves In the ritual no doubt necessary. I glance sidelong at their moving lips. And I delight in being here on earth For one more moment, with them, here on earth, To celebrate our tiny, tiny my-ness. “My-ness”30 To glorify life is the poet’s response to the voice of his vocation (in the sense of re-spondeo as being the tension between the word and the answer to the word, Wort-Ant-wort, hence responsibility). Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees, From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me. Czesław Miłosz, “Meaning,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in New and Collected Poems (19312001), 569. 30 Czesław Miłosz, “My-ness,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 448. 29

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Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals, So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness. “An Hour”31 This is how the poet imagines his poetic existence as that of a “tireless messenger” who “runs and runs.” You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard, Above landscapes the color of ripe gold Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun. “On Prayer”32 The primary mission of the poet is to save in words all that he has seen and learnt. This is a reference to an understanding of the word in the Judaic tradition, where the word of God, dabar Jahwe, describes reality but also creates it (Wort und Ereignis). The poet’s memory sustains reality, revives it, renews it. At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds, I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are. “Blacksmith Shop”33 Through poetry, philosophy, and theology, Miłosz moves on his way to the fullness and at the same time to the Source of reality.34 The search for the Source and its contemplation accompany his poetic path. Plato already writes about the triple way to the absolute: “It is especially good for someone who intends to travel to another world to think and to imagine how according to our assumptions this journey will look like.” Facing eschatological matters, a human being has three paths at his disposal, they are: “the way of imagination,” on which art is born, “ Czesław Miłosz, “An Hour,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 260. Czesław Miłosz, “On Prayer,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 435. 33 Czesław Miłosz, “Blacksmith Shop,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 503. 34 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein: Versuch einer philosophischtheologischen Deutung des Dichterseins am Beispiel von Czesław Miłosz (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1997). 31 32

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the way of reflection,” which is the domain of philosophy, and, finally, “the way of beliefs,” characteristic for the sphere of religion. In Plato, these three paths are complementary: “Because what else can a human being do in the time that is left until the sunset?” Socrates’ philosophical orientation is not a choice against poetic and religious reflection. Moreover, although Plato attributes to philosophy a superior role in relation to poetry and religion, he is not their enemy. To philosophy is attributed a critical role. It is a specific correctivum, cleansing religious and poetic imaginings.35 A reflection on the philosophical dimension of Miłosz’s poetry does not mean, as I understand it, tracing philosophical inspirations, or identifying quotations and borrowings. And there are many of them in the poet’s output. Rather, it is a reflection on the understanding of the author’s creative output, an attempt to articulate the musings on the human being’s fundamental questions through the medium of poetry. 1981 It is June 11, 1981. The second-year student of theology in the Auditorium of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin is among the witnesses of the doctor honoris causa promotion of Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel Prize winner. Poetry was for me ‘a way of being’ in those difficult times. But which historical experience of a human being is easy? As in “Campo dei Fiori,”36 we still beat against human indifference to suffering. The poet is sensitive to suffering: “A sensation of my neighbor’s misfortune pierces me, and I begin to/comprehend/In this dark age the bond of our common fate and compassion/more real than I was inclined to confess.” (“On a Beach”37) And in the loneliness of our own suffering in the face of ongoing life, we learn how to cope with the tragedy that is often not really seen, in everyday life. Poetry is, therefore, a school for one’s humanity. It reminds us that it is retained in everydayness. It speaks to a human being’s conscience so that it would not betray itself. Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. Cf. Alfred Marek Wierzbicki, “Antropologia Karola Wojtyły odczytana w jego poezji,” Ethos 19 (2006): 103-113. 36 Czesław Miłosz, “Campo dei Fiori,” trans. Louis Iribarne and David Brooks, in idem, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), 33. 37 Czesław Miłosz, “On a Beach,” trans. Czesław Miłosz in ibid., 561. 35

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It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, Giving us the estate of the world to manage. It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words. It says that everything is new under the sun, Opens the congealed fist of the past. Beautiful and very young is Philo-Sophia And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo. Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit. Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. “Incantation”38 “Incantation” worships human reason, beautiful and invincible. It is thanks to reason that we get to know the world and acquire moral capabilities. Poets are to write poems in honor of reason. However, even the very title “Incantation” suggests a magic formula, something unreal. Certainly, you need a sensitive reading in order not to succumb to the temptation of unambiguousness. “Incantation” is to delight in human nature, human subjectivity and scientific cognition, “so we write Truth and Justice/With capital letters, lie, and oppression with small” “Beautiful and very young is Philo-Sophia.”39 We would very much like the love of wisdom to be accompanied by sensations of a different order. It is not only an understanding of philosophy after Kant, for whom “Enlightenment is an exit of the human being from infancy.” It is a particular desire to understand oneself in the world that is an environment where we reach out for our understanding. Eternal torment, dilemma, and a pursuit of beauty: “Lord God, I liked strawberry jam/And the dark sweetness of the female body./And also frozen vodka, herrings in olive oil.” (“A Confession”40) And as in Plato, poetry is a value that enriches culture, integrating all spheres of individual and social life. Poetry (Dichtung) is the density of senses and meanings that allows for intuition (Einsicht, in-sight) to reach the mystery of a human being, including the mystery that a human being is to him or herself. Since the poet’s vocation is the contemplation of being, he/she zealously obeys this challenge. But it is difficult obedience. It is lacking in consent for agreement.

Czesław Miłosz, “Incantation,” trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky, in ibid., 239. Ibid. 40 Czesław Miłosz, “A Confession,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in ibid., 461. 38 39

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In the address at the ceremony when receiving his doctorate honoris causa, at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1981, Miłosz spoke about the contrast between the anxiety, ignorance, indecisiveness of youth and the seriousness of the gown and biretta which he was wearing: “Yet it still happens, and even it is the rule of living among people that the coat we wear shows us as other than we are in our own eyes. We get used to it gradually, but it is not that this real ‘I,’ felt from the inside, would not assume a peaceful protest dreaming about a garment less spacious but closer to his body and his smallness.” Poetry brings important intuitions enriching the understanding of our abilities and ourselves, clarifying our understanding of the human being as a fundamentally historical and lingual existence in time. It is on the journey toward the future where the human person discovers the richness of his existence and, in his constant interpretative effort, also tries to reach self-understanding.41 Then Miłosz said: “In my youth, I had some idea of what an old age is, vaguely sometime over fifty. It presented itself as the calmness of the completed work, fruition, gentle meditation on what one has experienced. Now, in a few days already seventy years old, I know how wrong these ideas were. Because old age turned out to be a bitter knowledge, but also anxiety, insatiability and greater than ever admiration for the miracle of life, as well as constant hope that I will train my hand and I will be similar to those Japanese painters who celebrating their ninetieth birthday said: ‘I just begin to paint,’ And as it is easy to guess, I am aware, at the same time, of how much illusion lies in it, since being liberated from what is for others me, myself will remain more my secret than a new form that would surpass that old one, as fastidiousness grows with age, and there is an increasing unwillingness to use the means of expression available to us.” When we got to know each other better, Miłosz was eighty and had a probably sharper metaphysical hearing than ever before. His heart was full of pain and fear, and a passion like that of a young fiancé. Poetic experience, the experience of a human being, dwells in what is the concrete reality: It is saturated with colors, flavors, and scents. It is saturated with everything that is human. The world is becoming important and mysterious. And the poet’s word is able to sustain this world in the richness it gives to individual beings forever. We can already enjoy the richness and versatility of creation, be amazed at its ingenuity, enjoy its exceptional hospitality. It is the hospitality of the world that allows us to discover it again and again as our world, the most hospitable library, an eternally open museum, a theatre within the theatre, the temple of a theologian and philosopher, and the poet’s favorite café. I will end with a fragment from The Land of Ulro: 41

Polish text http://www.bu.kul.pl/czeslaw-milosz-doktorat-honoris-causa-kul-czerwiec-1981r,art_11606.html. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “A Healing Journey toward Oneself: Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Turn in the Hermeneutics of Education,” Ethics in Progress Quarterly 1 (2010). 437

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When my guardian angel (who resides in an internalized external space) is triumphant, the earth looks precious to me and I live in ecstasy; I am perfectly at ease because I am surrounded by a divine protection, my health is good, I feel within me the rush of the mighty rhythm, my dreams are of magically rich landscapes, and I forget about death, because whether it comes in a month or five years it will be done as it was decreed, not by the God of the philosophers but by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When the devil triumphs, I am appalled when I look at trees in bloom as they blindly repeat every spring what has been willed by the law of natural selection; the sea evokes in me a battleground of monstrous, antediluvian crustaceans, I am oppressed by the randomness and absurdity of my individual existence, and I feel excluded from the world’s rhythm, cast up from it, a piece of detritus, and then the terror; my life is over, I won’t get another, only death now.42 Two faces of reality that everybody sees and experiences. To read the most in-depth record of Being, to reach the understanding of the mystery of the world and a human being in it is possible thanks to our trust in experience.43 This is done in the trust in one’s personal experience of the world, most fully in the experience of one’s self. Poetry accompanies these most intimate encounters, saving the unique experience of being in a concrete human being, protecting it from the oblivion that encroaches upon it by means of generalization. Hence the poet is “the enemy of despair, a friend of hope,” together with all the shades of the struggle as long as he/she is on the way.

42 43

Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 246. Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutic Education to Understanding: Self-Education and the Willingness to Risk Failure,” in Paul Fairfield, ed., Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics (New York: Continuum, 2010), 107-123.

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3. 3. Nothing Shall Be Forgotten: Poetry and Ways of Understanding I was impatient, and it irritated me to have to find time for trivialities, to which, as far as I was concerned, cleaning and cooking belonged too. Now I cut up onions, press out the lemon juice, prepare different kinds of sauces with (newfound) attention. Czesław Miłosz, The Poetic State1 Thematizing the relationship between poetry and reality, raises the question of how firmly poetry, in view of the aesthetic nature of its form,2 might be rooted in contemporary thinking. It often seems that modern man has no need for poetry and can do without poets. He just feels lonely and left to his own devices. This need-to-be-reliant-on-himself-only, which he/she understands him/herself to be subject and subjected to, often makes him/her feel quite lost. We cannot find easy words to put his/her perception on record in this age—the age of the media—as they are easily silenced by the obtrusive language of technology. Despite this, the spiritual needs of the modern human being surface in language and make themselves felt, again and again, and as his/her metaphysical consciousness is constantly re-awakened.3 The human being has to struggle for his own life, ever anew. This struggle is accompanied by his/her search for truth. The experience of reality today confronts us all with hidden questions that point to transcendence, that is, to the basis on which that transcendence can grow and open up. Therefore, we can understand poetry as being an awakening to reality. The evidence that is immanent in poetry is—in the primordiality of its origins—the vital criterion by which being a poet can be appreciated as such. Poetry, as opposed to versification as such, is a testimony to a specific kind of perception of reality, that is, to a life that hovers between being lived ascetically and just taking sensual pleasure in reality. This perception puts the world, as experienced by the poet, into words. The language of poetry is the house in which the poet has made his/her home; there is no better way of referring to the poet’s perception of reality.4 Poetry is a substantial Czesław Miłosz, “Der dichterische Zustand,” from the volume of poetry Hymn o perle (1982). Cf. Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein. 3 Cf. Derek A. Pearsall, William Langland, William Blake, and the Poetry of Hope (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2003). 4 Heidegger worked out the nature of language as being ‘the house where Being resides,’ as the place where Being shows itself—after having written Being and Time, in which he is still thinking in terms of energeia (the concept of language that Humboldt stuck to), and also in his later thinking, in which he distances himself from Humboldt toward Husserl. “In so far as our nature is joined to language in reality, we live in the ‘event’… The event joins the human being and Being into their natural togetherness… The nature of that which speaks as language is vibrantly present in ‘the event’; it was once called the house of Being.” Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1990), 26ff. 1 2

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and indispensable contribution toward making life, otherwise totally opaque and impossible to fathom, a little more transparent and more humane. By writing about his/her existential loneliness, giving us a glimpse into the struggle for his/her own identity (in various shades of suffering and fight for survival), the poet, who does not wish to lose track of diverse aspects of human existence nor of the existential dilemmas of individual human beings, testifies that he/she is moving and living quite near the limits of impenetrability. Often the poet dedicates himself to a fascinating search for an ethics that is purely based on the intellect. That is because he/she senses and understands— perhaps more than many of their contemporaries—the pain felt by the human being in being-under-way. Existentially sensitive, poets experience the modern alienation from the truth and search for rescue in secular humanism, or in theology, with which to face a world view that is quite obviously pessimistic.5 Yet despite all this pessimism, the poet tries, tirelessly, to prove his/her courage toward living (and his/her staying-power), and to encourage us to a creative and expansive search for the truth as it regards the human being. As a person used to metamorphosis, the poet sees in poetry a possibility to rescue both him/herself and their environment.6 Poetry itself provides the rescuing potential with which to face the lure of the ‘spirit of the times’ (Zeitgeist) and the inner fragmentation of modern man, who is a traumatized witness to the political and ideological problems and confusions of our time. Poetry and the Positing of Meanings: The Elucidation of the Existence of Strangeness Poetry focuses on life issues that surface outside the professional critique on offer in literary, philosophical and theological discourses, and thus offers people an opportunity to confront the fundamental questions of life, just as they encounter them. This opens the way to understanding the complexities of life, whether they be the poet’s or the reader’s life. Being a poet in addition to being a human being, grabs the poet where he/she is most unique, and refers uniquely to that aspect— in poetry—which most creates and sustains the community.7 However, the poetic 5

6

7

Cf. Edward Możejko, ed., Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988). The poetry of Seamus Heaney is similarly viewed as being a message of hope. See, for instance, Karen Marguerite Moloney, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope (Columbia, Miss.: University of Missouri Press, 2007). Cf. Peter Horst Neumann, Die Rettung der Poesie im Unsinn: Der Anarchist Günter Eich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). Gadamer is emphatic, in his hermeneutics, that the social life of human beings is a life of conversation-in-community. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Replik,” in Karl-Otto Aple et al., ed., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971), 289.

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identity is not something that is somehow added to human life, as if one could live just as well and as authentically as a human being without it.8 It is not the task of poetry to provide us with a theory of identity. The privileged position of poetry consists in motivating individuals toward internalizing all universal aspects of life by reflecting on his/her own identity. The person who lives in the center of poetic art also lives within the concrete horizon of experiencing Being. When he/she thinks within language, he/she discovers the horizons which are historically traced out for him or her.9 Poetry is a zealous search for a “magic formula” in which the whole truth about our existence could be accommodated and shine out brightly. The life of a poet is a struggle for the shaping of his/her poetic existence. It is a life of constant tension between loyalty and betrayal. The poet knows about the cost of being true to poetry. His/her poetic existence does not simply appear. It is a constant challenge to be ready to transgress, to go beyond the impediments that arise or materialize on a daily basis, and to sound a clear ‘no’ to one’s own pride; but not only that: Also, to existential despair. A poet is a person who is gifted with sufficient analytical power to be able to penetrate reality, and who is aware that, despite the intellectual rigor of his/her thinking, human life cannot be understood and represented as something that is entirely rational. Hence poetry gives testimony against the dictatorship of the intellect as well as against the dictatorship of emotionality—in particular the emotionality that is evident in its flattened-out view of Romantic Weltschmerz (the pain connected with being alive in the world ‘as is’)—both of which rather suggest alienation from the world or from existence altogether, instead of leading us to the poet as being someone who can bring nearness and familiarity with reality into play in his/her work. The poet makes a tenacious effort to leave evidence of truth (and of the richness that fills his/her life) in his/her own life. Detailed observation is a loyal friend of the poet. Gratitude for every difficult experience, especially the experiences of loneliness, of convolute entanglements due to feelings, but also of rejection and defeat, are all characteristic of the observant and sharp-eyed poet’s endeavor to give them attentive expression within a sustaining framework of high sensitivity toward current modernity and its multiple perspectives. Thus, poetry becomes and is ethical or moral participation in the events of an individual as well as of social history, which is always game to open itself to serious and ever-renewed critical analysis and, in this way, engages the reader of poetry with the present and reality. Cf. Alina Gause, “Wenn sie Dich wollen, schneiden sie Dich vom Galgen ab”: Narrative Interviews mit darstellenden Künstlern zur Identitätskonstitution im Spannungsfeld zwischen Beruf und Berufung (Freiburg i.Br.: Univ. Dipl.-Arb., 2007). 9 There is more on the relation between thinking and speaking in Wierciński, “Die ursprüngliche Zugehörigkeit von Denken und Sprechen,” 65-83. 8

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The Propria of Being a Poet, or What Makes a Poet a Poet Reflection on being a poet indicates how intangible the phenomenon of being a poet is, as such. We have one path of access, albeit a limited one, to find out what is the essence of being a poet: The testimony of poetry to itself. The hermeneutics of poetic statements illuminates the phenomenon of being a poet, yet without mastering the mystery that surrounds the poetic state. The hermeneutics moves near the authentic core of being a poet by understanding that the poetic existence is intimately in touch with its personal foundations in Being—by way of being a unity that springs from metaphysical thinking. Being at home in the dimensions of what is wrapped in mystery is in fact what frees us to think about being a poet, by alerting us to the limits of language as well as the poet’s own conditio humana. In this way, the search for what belongs to being a poet is referred to the anthropological dimension of poetry, which seeks to illumine the self-understanding of the poet as a human being with the help of his/her poetic output. Poetry understands ‘being a poet’ from the point of view of anthropology. Hermeneutic anthropology contributes to the impenetrability of being a poet and also the incomprehensibility of being a human being, both as modes of human being-in-the-world; it is not only linked to the inherent defectiveness in human expressivity and perceptivity but, rather, it results from the finiteness of human nature.10 The poet, conscious as he/she is of the facticity of finite existence, defends our right to infinity.11 Poetry can be understood as poetic anthropology of the ego or ‘I,’ when considered as the source of all knowledge about man and as “The limitedness of the human word is not so much a question of the inability to express that which is thought, but the primordial limitation of Dasein. It might be the case that language has no limitations, that it is as infinite as Being itself, esse ipsum; however, the human word always reflects the finitude of created being. We are left with the powerlessness of language, the powerlessness of our being, but this finitude conveys our openness to the ever-new. Dasein is constantly confronted with the inadequacy of its expression. It is not because of the powerlessness of language that Being cannot be expressed, but because Being does not allow itself to be definitively articulated. We are always on the way to Being and therefore on the way to language... The powerlessness of language calls us to think the phenomena of limitation. It is no more to be overcome than our finitude.” Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. Cf. also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Grenzen der Sprache,” in idem, Evolution und Sprache: Über Entstehung und Wesen der Sprache (Karlsruhe: Evangelische Akademie Baden, 1985), 97-98, and Joan Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992). 11 For Heidegger, our consciousness of finitude is characteristic for Dasein when enquiring after its limits: “An omnipotent nature does not need to ask: what can I do, that is, what can I not do? And not only that: it simply cannot posit this question—in accordance with its nature. This inability, however, is not a flaw, but a being untouched by any kind of flaw or nought/‘non.’ Therefore, whoever asks: what can I do?, declares a finiteness which is entirely activated by his innermost interests; he reveals a finiteness that resides in his innermost nature.” Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), 216. 10

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the vessel that contains all the experience that can be garnered about the human being. Yet the actual anthropological way of looking at poetry comprises the question of the origins of being a poet, as well as of how the creation and perception of poetry itself should be understood. As such, poetry can be described as a specific kind of ‘doing anthropology,’ a kind of access to all possible knowledge about man as such. The conjunction between poetry and anthropology manifests itself most openly in those poetic descriptions which have the exploration of the nature of man as their primary object, thus coinciding with the object of anthropology. One can, therefore, really speak of a certain anthropology of poetry. It follows, that a poetic anthropology situates the essential question about the constitution of man at the center of its reflection and delivers an anthropological message about poetry, thematizing the poet’s vocation, the self-fulfillment of being a poet, the relations that hold between poetry and poet, and the identity of the poet as homo poeticus. Here one can pass from general anthropology to a more deductive anthropology of being a poet. However, it would be much more appropriate for the illumination of Being and Dasein in relation to poetry, to follow the path from inductive anthropology (that is, from what is specific to being a poet, in which ‘being human’ is laid bare) to the comprehension of what being a poet means. Being a poet takes hold of a man or woman and challenges them; it requires him/her to approach themselves critically, hence also, to be critical in their appraisal of whether they are, or are not, poets. This confrontation of the poet with his ‘being a poet’ awakens his/her sense of responsibility, which he/she understands by exerting it; without promising him or herself any results that are quick in coming. Here, ‘responsibility’ is not to be understood in the moral sense, but in the existential sense, i.e., as a necessity to give an answer.12 This presupposes, once more, that the poet understands him or herself as being addressed. Reflecting on one’s own poetic vocation requires getting to grips with the question of the authenticity of one’s calling. The poet experiences an urgent need to communicate, to express the moving testimony of a rebirth as a poet as well as a human being, in order to give shape—as a unifying unity—to the relationship between the worlds of the poet and the human being. The eloquent descriptions that accompany this rebirth do often become a mirror that reproduces one’s own lyrical self. Being a poet can be understood as a life that is thoroughly committed to the word, as a creative response to the demanding and challenging power of poetry.13 In this, poetry becomes an insight into a world that changes the meaning of one’s Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Non-calculative Responsibility: Martin Heidegger’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Responsibility,” in Marcelino Agís Villaverde, Carlos Belińas Fernándes, Fernanda Henriques und Jesús Ríos Vicente, ed., Herméneutica y responsibilidad: Homenaje a Paul Ricoeur (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, Servizo de Publicatión e Intercambio Científico, 2005), 413-432. 13 Cf. William S. Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language After Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2007). 12

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way of experiencing the world. The poet bears witness to a truth that seems more essential and dramatic than the truth he/she could understand by him/herself or work out on his/her own. In that way, poetry can stir up the woundedness of man, in order to awaken him/her to being attentive in his/her existence.14 The task of poetry is to resolutely oppose the danger posed to it by writing poetry that is obviously only in the service of the world order of the moment. The poet is, just as obviously, not a functionary of society in general. By confronting everyday reality, he/she testifies to the fact that man is in need of salvation, in the sense of being liberated from any kind of dependence, which places what belongs intimately to poetry and represents its unifying power (as exerted by being a poet) at a disadvantage.15 That is the reason why the poet understands his poetic vocation as his/her existential challenge of having to put his/her life at the disposal of poetry, always and without any conditions.16 Often it is the very drama present in events that becomes the occasion for the poet to give lyrical expression to his existential concern and his inner state of mind. In poetry, it is the images that carry the paradigmatic sense that hovers right above them, thus mediating and conveying their sense to the reader. The poet not infrequently comes to know that he/she can only cease to talk, can only become quieter in his/her talk. There is tremendous power in this too, to rely solely on poetic inspiration and not to be at the beck and call of social and other expectations. The poet’s life work is an attempt to build bridges between different cultures. Thus, a decidedly tense dialectic between dependence on, and autonomy from, the world of culture that he/she is used to, arises and is strongly expressed. The poet searches for his/her own roots, with an attention that he/she should indeed apply, and which is in fact demanded of him/her. The origins of a poet often mark him/her for good. In life, he/she quite often attempts to make sense of his/her personal biographical details within the course of events that are played It is interesting, at this point, to direct one’s attention to how language and pain are interconnected. Man not only experiences, in pain, the linguistic illumination of his/her existence, but also a very special revelation of Being, in which all-that-is becomes visible to him/her as such. We can say with Heidegger, that “language [is] no mere tool, one of the many tools owned by man: language actually makes it possible to stand up within the openness worked by all-that-is.” Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung,” in idem, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963), 35. 15 Gadamer’s hermeneutics revolves around a creative understanding of what is essential in human existence, which “meets us as the ‘atopon,’ the strange, in all known human ways of adjusting to the world by way of orientation, and which cannot be accommodated in the usual categories of ‘what is expected in accordance with experience’.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik,” in idem, Kleine Schriften I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967), 118. 16 Cf. Stefan Heße, Berufung aus Liebe zur Liebe: Auf der Spurensuche nach einer Theologie der Berufung, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Beitrags von Hans Urs von Balthasar (St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 2001). 14

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out in world history.17 One can certainly read the poems of a poet as a specific autobiographical confession, as a certain, personally sincere confession of having been susceptible to the lure of evil in addition to the many indiscretions of his/her life. The life of the poet is not spared the experience of traumatic lessons for life, which—in the form of a multitude of poetic voices—bring about an aesthetic or an existential metamorphosis that may be significant or less significant. The completion and success of being a poet are more than disclosing a mere collection of experiences. The life of a poet is an ongoing effort to shed his/her illusions. The intellectual development of the poet, whom skeptical disillusionment will visit in any case, is accompanied by the revision of his/her life’s truths. He/she discovers the need to retain this skeptical attitude in order to be able to master the realities, which today are largely dictated by technology and are ever dominant and omnipresent. Although the poet may be gladly accepted, as one of the outstanding voices of his/her time—poetic or moral—he/she must not go wrong in the way they answer the call to being a poet, for instance by being more committed to the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist) than amenable to their poetic calling as such! Poetry as “locus theologicus” The anthropological dimension of poetry is like a seedbed for thinking deeply about being a poet; and then, like when turning the page in a book, the theological dimension of being a poet (which understands the poet in his/her relation to the God who reveals himself to him or her) will be what opens doors to the poet and his/her flourishing. The poet discovers, in these theological horizons, how the eschatological dimension of his/her poetic nature comes to the fore and can help disclose a way of living, a life-style that takes account of the ubiquitous history of salvation. Thus, poetry not only awakens the poet’s nose for, and sensibility to transcendence, but becomes a true locus theologicus, “a theological place,” a place of encounter with God.18 Poetry, as a work of art, can not only be understood as the mediation of the Christian message, but must rather be understood as the Christian message itself, in the sense of being the vehicle for experiencing the human and

17

For the role played by biography in a complex understanding of the human being, see Hermann Lang, “Zur Bedeutung der Biographie für die Psychotherapie,” in idem, Das Gespräch als Therapie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 35-59. 18 Cf. Jerzy Szymik, W poszukiwaniu teologicznej głębi literatury, 2nd ed. (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Księgarnia Św. Jacka, 2007); idem, Problem teologicznego wymiaru dzieła literackiego Czesława Miłosza: Teologia literatury (Katowice: Księgarnia Św. Jacka, 1996). 445

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sensual being-in-the-world with its built-in referral to transcendence (which actually is the Christian message).19 In this sense, poetry is a faint trace of the eschatological dimension, the belief in the coming change. The poet is aware of his/her human imperfection. Moreover, over and above that poets tell, in their poetry, of their conception of life, which is accompanied and influenced by their attention to the ‘word’ and the sense of the mysterious. Poetry is an image of life, an eschatological image, a breakthrough to infinity, which imposes a high price on the poet’s life but also enriches us all with its gifts. Poetry is, at the same time, the experience of the ‘impossible man,’ the homo impossibilis. By making poets and readers aware of the imponderable aspects of the human being, as well as of the limits of language, the dialectics of life and poetry gain even greater importance for the comprehension of existence, both human and poetic. The apex of being a poet lies in and testifies to, an unending search, yet it is not so much a search for “a beautiful shape” (as it would be for l’art pour l’art),20 but for discovering and describing the traces of transcendence. The theological dimension of being a poet implies that the poetic vocation makes it possible for us to understand that the fulfillment of the poetic vocation is the poet’s participation in the mediation of the revelation of God and the revelation of Being.21 The poet, who works in the service of poetry, devotes himself undividedly to this mediating mandate that calls him/her to be a privileged witness to the mystery of God and Being. His/Her poems, which are a sign of a poet’s abode within the horizon of mystery, show that the theological and the existentialmetaphysical dimensions of being a poet are not two separate modes of existence, but complement and enrich one another. The Call and the Poetic Calling The metaphysical question around the status of being a poet (or concerned with the primordial nature of the poetic existence), points to the special relationship that obtains between poetry and the poet.22 The reason for this relationship is the poetic vocation itself. This calling can be seen as an ultimate and compelling choosiness of a specific “I,” an invitation to a prophetic relationship with poetry Cf. Albrecht Schöne, Dichtung als verborgene Theologie: Versuch einer Exegese von Paul Celans “Einem, der vor der Tür stand” (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2000). 20 Cf. Roman Luckscheiter, ed., L’art pour l’art: Der Beginn der modernen Kunstdebatte in französischen Quellen der Jahre 1818 bis 1847 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis-Verlag, 2003). 21 Cf. Karl Rahner, “Das Wort der Dichtung und der Christ,” in idem, Schriften zur Theologie, Bd. IV, Neuere Schriften (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1962), 441-454. Siehe auch Rahners, “Priester und Dichter,” in idem, Schriften zur Theologie, Bd. III, Zur Theologie des geistlichen Lebens (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1962), 349. 22 Cf. Diana Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1984). 19

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as the wellspring of this vocation. The poet feels personally addressed and challenged.23 And it is precisely in this being addressed that he/she recognizes the absoluteness of his/her poetic calling, something neither of them can elude. Recognizing the poetic vocation is not so much a matter of analyzing one’s self, but rather, having an insight into what is mysterious in poetry, when it persists in its challenge for a human being to stick firmly to realizing his/her life’s work; and also recognizing that the true poetic vocation is inseparable from the poet’s examination of his/her own call to be a human being, full stop. In that sense, the two dimensions of this vocation cannot be separated from one another. Reflection on the personal aspects of the vocation is an essential part of the struggle for one’s own identity. The poet is the only one who can recognize his/her own identity. However, this is not about a realization that can just about happen on a purely epistemological basis. It is also not a one-time task, a task that could indeed be accomplished. Rather, it is a challenge to get working on one’s identity as a human being and a poet. In this sense, it is an attitude to life that puts the awakening and keeping awake of one’s true self at the center of one’s life. Living a life of poetic existence with due attention to what it is intimately bound up with, being aware of the poetic vocation and with fidelity to the source of this vocation, which transcends the poet: This is the challenge. The fulfillment of the poetic calling comprises both the existential and the poetic mode of being and cannot be understood as two different ways of living. The poet puts him/herself entirely at the service of poetry and, by doing just that, he/she discovers a certain normativity for his/her own life.24 The interiorization of the poetic call is to be understood as an answer of the poet to his/her vocation. This answer is given on all existential and professional levels simultaneously when the poet understands his/her poetic chance of existing as the very exercise of a profession and, indeed, within a close relationship between call, vocation, and profession. When this is actually the case, the poetic vocation has to be interpreted as an orientation, as a signpost within the present synchronic life context of the poet in question, since he/she is meant to recognize the call that is demanding his/her presence and challenging him/her to take it seriously and to follow it. By processing the call in his/her situation in life appropriately, the poet moves his/her life into reaching a new perspective, which often brings with it a fundamental change to the perspective he/she was hitherto used 23

At this point one can even speak of a similarity between the calling to the spiritual life and the calling to being a poet. Cf. Peter Klasvogt, Angesprochen und herausgefordert: Priester werden aus Berufung: Zugänge, Anforderungen, Perspektiven. With a Foreword by Karl Kardinal Lehmann (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2007) and Claudia Elena Dinu, Georges Bernanos: Vocation sacerdotale et vocation d’écrivain (Freiburg i.Br.): http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/5508/pdf/These_doctorat_Dinu_Claudia.pdf. 24 Vgl. Norbert Baumert, Normativität und persönliche Berufung (Würzburg: Echter, 2001). 447

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to. And, in turn, this existential change in his/her life brings with it a fundamental change in the poet’s sense of reality. The responsibility of the poet characterizes his/her condition as a human being and a poet. Such poets see their life as a challenge to give an answer to the gift with which they were bestowed. The gift becomes their task for making good use of this certain “more” that they and only they, and no one else, can (vicariously) recognize or realize on their behalf. By listening to the call, the connection between the poetic vocation and being a poet as such is revealed. Moreover, in the tension that is upheld between the call—which reaches the poet by way of ‘being a poet’—and the poet’s answer, the mysterious fulfillment of being a poet, is played out. In paraphrasing the words uttered by Klaus Hemmerle—“What comes from heaven has the urge to grow out of the soil”—we could, in fact, say that the apex of the poetic vocation is to be found, preferentially, close to reality and with love for detail and down-to-earthness. The poet is invited, not only to recognize his/her call to being a poet but to make it into his/her life’s mission to complete the task of being a poet. The propria of poetry show themselves in the self-fulfillment of the poetic vocation. The essence of the poetic vocation has to be considered and thematized by each individual that is touched by poetry in that way. The self-fulfillment of poetry does not exhaust itself in the production of individual poems, even though they are the only “tangible” elements where a poetic life is being actualized, i.e., actually being lived. The primordial nature of poetry does not lend itself to being ‘caught up with’ by various modes of poetic self-fulfillment.25 The autonomy and the freedom of the poet stand in creative tension with the poetic vocation and with the poet’s awareness of his/her responsibility toward poetry and its fulfillment, through his/her own poetic output. There is also a certain tension between the ‘good human being’ and the ‘good poet.’ The evaluation of man/woman and poet happens on levels that are both autonomous and dialectical in relation to each other. The greatness of ‘being a poet,’ or even a great poet, is not measured by the moral qualities of the poet. There too, we find something mysterious in being a poet. This even becomes evident when one asks questions about poetic inspiration. Words will sometimes flow by themselves, so not necessarily only in the quietness of a chapel, but precisely when in totally exposed situations, e.g., when being left alone in a crowd of people, say, in an inn or pub filled with clouds of smoke and host to an immense consumption of alcohol. There is no limit set to poetic inspiration from the outside. The hermeneutic reading of poetry is an excellent guide to the complexity of ‘being a poet,’ by drawing attention to the anthropological and theological dimension of the poetic life. The task of any interpretation consists of uncovering and exposing the possible meanings and connections which, in the intensification due to poetic language, express the poet’s conception of reality. It also requires a 25

Cf. Wierciński, “Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment,” 173-204.

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proper understanding of how to pick out the possible meanings of poetry, when one thinks about the essence of poetry. In this sense, the art of interpretation is rooted in the metaphysics of the work of art and reaches the reader by literally jumping out from the work of art (as if by magic).26 Only in this way can it hold its own before Rilke’s reservations and take into proper and adequate account the interpretation of poetry: With nothing can you touch a work of art so little as with critical words: it always results in more or less felicitous misapprehensions. Things are not (always) as comprehensible and capable of being articulated as one is usually wont to make us believe; most events are unnameable and take place in a space that has never been visited by a word, and the works of art, which exist in mystery and whose lives endure—when placed beside ours, which pass—are even less nameable than all the others.27 The poet—conscious, as he/she is, of the transience of human existence—concentrates on the meaning of being a poet and seeks to live in carefully lived authenticity concerning his/her own brush with being a poet. The form his/her poetry will take is firmly fixed to its subject matter and also to the very essence of being a poet; there can be no separation between them. Working on the best possible, comprehensive form for this poetry—of which the poet him/herself also feels called to be part—means much more than merely achieving the greatest increase in the refinement of his/her poetic artistry.28 It is a perpetual search for reproducing reality in poetic form, despite its attempts to escape from being held captive by words, while after all striving for linguistic expression all the time.29 How the poet makes use of language and how he/she refines his/her rhetorical working tools express the poet’s consciousness of being a creative partner in the manifestation of reality. He/she is also conscious of the poetic mission as such: Through their poetic word, poets can raise the level of participation in the process of calling-(something)-to-life to immense and significant heights. Thus, they write themselves into the history of the creation of the world, which latter they help to shape, co-creating it in a significant way through their words of recall and elaboration. By actualizing his/her vocation, the poet reaches the limits of his/her expressive possibilities as well as the limits of language itself. Becoming aware of 26

Cf. Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, with an Introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960). 27 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1929), 7. 28 Cf. Martin Stern, Wolfram Malte Fues, Wolfram Mauser, ed., Verbergendes enthüllen: Zu Theorie und Kunst des dichterischen Verkleidens (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). 29 Cf. Susanna Burghartz, ed., Mimesis, Alterität und Erinnerung (Köln: Böhlau, 2008). 449

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these boundaries can be understood as a new way of envisioning, a way that actually challenges the poet to get to grips with his/her own life. If the poet follows up on this challenge, a new horizon opens up before him/her. This opening up reveals itself to the poet as healing, namely as the making-present of how he/she has lived hitherto (which is where the healing lies), and as a situating of his/her life within the whole history of poetry. The poet realizes that he/she is one of the persons that are called and that they can never satisfy the call of poetry—never alone, that is, unless it be together with all other poets, despite any accompanying tensions. This healing and salvific power of poetry helps us to understand it, even more deeply than before, as the praxis of hermeneutics in action. The Metaphysics of Dasein, Hidden yet Present in Being a Poet Being a poet is only truly perceptible from inside thinking-in-terms-of-Being, that is to say, in relation to the relationship which the poet, as a human being, has with Being, as the reason and ground for his/her poetic existence. In the Heideggerian sense, the poet is the true shepherd of Being30 and the messenger who brings us the truth of Being.31 The poetic gift, i.e., that which reveals Being in its dialectical tension between concealment and unconcealment,32 is intimately attached to the task of standing in the service of the revelation-of-Being.33 The poet sees his poetic vocation in the spirit of his personal responsibility to live for the self-revelation of poetry. In this way, the poet stands in the service of poetry as a witness to what cannot be done without. The poet’s experience of According to Heidegger, man is “the shepherd of Being,” and thus responsible for the survival and the flourishing of all-that-exists. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” in idem, Wegmarken (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 162, 172. 31 Cf. Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001). See also Alessandro Giordani, Il problema della verità: Heidegger vs Aristotele (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2001) and Manfred Riedel, “Verwahrung und Wahrheit des Seins: Heideggers ursprüngliche Deutung der Alétheia,” in Stefan Majetschak und Thomas Sören Hoffmann (Eds.), Denken der Individualität (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 275-293. 32 Cf. Martin Brasser, Wahrheit und Verborgenheit: Interpretation zu Heideggers Wahrheitsverständnis von “Sein und Zeit” right up to “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1997); Heribert Boeder, “Heideggers Vermächtnis zur Unterscheidung der Alétheia,” in Richter Ewald, ed., Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 107-123. 33 Heidegger shows, in Being and Time, that the world is revealed to man prior to his reflection on it. But he also refers to the revelation of Being and the world through the human Dasein Hence man belongs constitutively to the event of the revelation of Being. Hence, the revelation of Being is a passio and an actio, an event, which is based upon a dialectical relationship between what needs to be revealed and what is in fact revealed. Cf. Markus Enders, Transdenzenz und Welt: Das Daseinshermeneutische Transzendenz- und Welt-Verständnis Martin Heideggers auf dem Hintergrund der neuzeitlichen Geschichte des Transzendenzbegriffs (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1999). 30

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reality and his/her tense concentration of standing in the service of poetry—a poetry that challenges him/her, overwhelms them, puts everything at risk—fully grasps the tension in which the poet lives out his/her poetic existence. It is a culturally constitutive tension between freedom and necessity, in which the poet understands, with enthusiasm and emotion, his/her dependence on the source and grounding of poetry as a gift and as the secret of his/her poetic mode of being.34 Reflection on the nature of poetry is accompanied by the thinking upon the essence of Being.35 Poetry is conceived, out of thinking-about-Being, as a testimony of the poet to Being, which wants to reveal itself and wants to be understood. The question of Being is the inspiration for the question of being a poet. The very essence of being a poet manifests itself in the poetic existence, borne aloft by the poet’s relationship to poetry. It is a testimony to the truthfulness of the poetic existence of an individual searching for sense in this endeavor. In the execution of being a poet, the poet indubitably puts him/herself at the service of poetry. Even as he/she bears witness to the transforming power of poetry in the process of actualizing his/her poetic potentiality, it is crucial to realize that it is poetry itself that bears witness to itself.36 While searching for an understanding of his/her poetic existence, the poet recognizes the metaphysical foundations of his/her calling and the fulfillment of his/her being a poet, as well as the ontological foundation of reality. Poetry is a struggle for the appreciation of everything that exists. It is an existential passion that makes the poet be interested in him/herself but also reality, with a view to searching for the truth with determination and perseverance. This search is a protest against anything that remains unnamed, and it inspires the poet to name things. It is also a decisive no to any kind of generalization. The true destiny of Cf. Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), especially when compared to David White, Heidegger and the Language of Poetry (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 35 For Gadamer, it is this “Being, which can be understood, is language.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, in idem, GW1: 478. Cf. also Gadamer’s comment about his understanding of language in his dispute with Jacques Derrida: “When I wrote the sentence ‘Being, which can be understood, is language,’ it also contained that that, which is, can never be fully understood. This is due to the fact that everything that is expressed in a language still refers beyond that which is being expressed. It remains as that which is meant to be understood, that which is expressed—but of course it will always be taken to mean something and appreciated as such. This is the hermeneutic dimension, in which Being “shows itself.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text und Interpretation,” in Jean Grondin, ed., Gadamer-Lesebuch (Tübingen: Mohr, 1997), 145. Cf. also Richard Rorty, “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache” and Gianni Vattimo, “Weltverstehen—Weltverändern,” in Rüdiger Bubner et al., ed., “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache”: Homage an Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001), 30-60. 36 Cf. Czesław Miłosz, Das Zeugnis der Poesie, trans. Peter Lachmann (München: Hanser, 1984). 34

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the individual has a habit of hiding behind the mask of the general.37 Poetry is ready to serve the individual. Nothing is unworthy of poetry when an attentive poet observes it and records it in an exciting way by deploying his or her artistry; this is especially true in detail when the poet finds meaningful answers to questions that belong to everyday life. The ordinariness and everydayness of human experience are at the center of poetic existence. Poetry intensifies the representation of reality, while the latter always withdraws from being captured by the simple totality of words. Within the horizon of poetry, it is about the sensory perception of the world, in which every detail of attentive observation and the accuracy of the description of one’s own experience of reality really counts, serving also to making one’s own experience of reality more intense. Poetry is no rendition of reality, which in any case is shy of being described even though it wishes, at the same time, to be put into words. However, since poetry lends its existence to reality, it provides reality with Being and meaning in the true sense of the word. Poetry as a Change of Perspective for Living and a Transformation of Reality The main distinguishing feature of poetic existence is the struggle for comprehending that the poet’s life and work belong together as one. In living his/her ‘being a poet,’ the poet experiences enormous attention being lavished on the world around him or her. Poetic truth is a hermeneutic truth, that is, a truth that wants to be understood.38 The poet lives his/her life toward this truth, by shaping his/her life within the tremendous tension that exists between poetic alienation and an almost mystical union with the wellspring of poetry. The discursive, mediating character of poetry highlights the responsibility of the poet who places his/her life in the service of poetry. By giving a poetic response to the voice of poetry, which challenges him or her, the poet testifies to his/her familiarity with the ground of Being that has called them to be a poet. This familiarity is a distinguishing sign for the poet’s freedom, with which his/her conscious yes has been given to the poetic calling. It is a testimony to his/her freedom to proceed to the abode of poetry and to write poetry.39 While working within the

Cf. Wierciński, “Inkarnation als die Ermächtigung des Differenzdenkens: Das Logosverständnis und die permanente Herausforderung zur Interpretation,” 162-204. 38 Cf. Gianni Vattimo, Poesia e ontologia, new augmented edition (Milano: Mursia, 1985). See also Jean Grondin, Hermeneutische Wahrheit? Zum Wahrheitsbegriff Hans-Georg Gadamers (Weinheim: Beltz, 1994) and Petra Kolmer, Wahrheit: Plädoyer für eine hermeneutische Wende in der Wahrheitstheorie (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 2005). 39 Here we have a case of needing to distinguish between a freedom from (a negative freedom) and a freedom to (a positive freedom). Cf. Thomas Meyer, ed., Positive und negative Freiheit 37

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parameters of poetic freedom, poets engage in making his/her wish to grasp reality by means of their language come true. He/she is aware that the way they handle language is not just a matter of poetic form, but a testimony to their poetic existence. Poetry thereby does not only convey an insight of what it means to be human, but also makes a significant contribution to the understanding of language as such, and to its significance – both in regard of its development and its impact history.

(Bochum: Projekt-Verlag, 2007) and Charles Taylor, Negative Freiheit?: Zur Kritik des neuzeitlichen Individualismus, trans. Hermann Kocyba with a postscript by Axel Honneth (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995). 453

3. 4. Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity In his last book, Parcours de la reconnaissance, Paul Ricoeur elaborates on the meaning of recognition. Recognition is a subject particularly dear to him from his encounter with Hegel (Anerkennung).1 By broadening the understanding of recognition (mutual recognition in all its forms) beyond the customary interpretation and articulation of social divisions and identities within the binaries of identity and difference in political philosophy, Ricoeur analyzes the identification of anything as the thing that it is and the recognition of oneself as a capable agent (l’homme capable). Recognition has something to do with bearing witness through gratitude; that one is indebted to someone for something or accepts someone as a person of certain quality. Human recognition of oneself as the “recognition-attestation” (reconnaissance-attestation) expressed by self-assertions of oneself and others is here of vital importance. Our ability to act presupposes that we are capable agents, recognizing ourselves as agents with various capacities: We are able to speak, to narrate, to act, and as such, are capable of taking responsibility. Ricoeur investigates how responsibility relates to personal and moral identity. However, he does not directly address the recognition of one’s personal identity, despite his persistent thematization of the dialectical relationship between idemidentity (identity as sameness) and ipse-identity (identity as selfhood).2 There is an implicit recognition of the self in recognizing images or memories. Moreover, there is something incredibly striking in understanding oneself, which does happen when we make promises: We commit ourselves to something despite knowing ourselves and being aware of the possible changes and transformations that might ensue. The asymmetry of the self and the other, however important, cannot blind us to the dissymmetries in the mutuality between the self and the other. The correlation between different forms of recognition, love, uni-

1

Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 2 Ricoeur writes: “Le problème de l’identité personnelle constitue à mes yeux le lieu privilégié de la confrontation entre les deux usages majeurs du concept d’identité que j’ai maintes fois évoqué sans jamais le thématiser véritablement. Je rappelle les termes de la confrontation: d’un côté, l’identité comme mêmeté (latin: idem; anglais: sameness; allemand: Gleichheit), de l’autre, l’identité comme ipséité (latin: ipse; anglais: selfhood; allemand: Selbstheit). L’ipséité, ai-je maintes fois affirmé, n’est pas la mêmeté. Et c’est parce que cette distinction majeure est méconnue que les solutions apportées au problème de l’identité personnelle ignorant la dimension narrative échouent.” Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1990), 140; English, Cf. Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 454

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versal respect, the institutionalized legal recognition of rights, and the social dimension of politics, Sittlichkeit, as well as the negative forms of disregard, all preoccupy Ricoeur’s consideration regarding the importance of individual qualities in the life of others in the existential and political economy of their struggle for esteem. With reference to the inspired greatness as experienced in Augustine’s city of inspiration, we can say that the recognition of others does not matter. However, living in the city of opinion, and thus being concerned with fame and reputation presents a human being with a significantly different task; to find oneself as a citizen of different worlds demonstrates a great challenge to the individual. Understanding a world other than one’s own is also a critical chance to understand something unique about oneself. What might be most illuminating is the discovery of gratitude (reconnaissance) as an adequate way of establishing mutuality in our human relationships, where a just distance integrates respect into intimacy. In fact, it is this inspired greatness, which allows us to make the most of everything that comes our way. The most significant task we are entrusted with, is to live our life to the fullest. Moreover, with or without recognition, it is our life-long task to find out what it means to be a human being. Finally, nobody and nothing can hinder us in our attempts to discover our own identity. (Is it really true?) In this hard, personal effort to work on ourselves, we recognize that the others who co-habit the world with us are themselves dealing with this enduring task. And they share their own experience with us, even if most of this seems to be incomprehensible to everyone: “I think that I am here, on this earth,/To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know./As if I were sent so that whatever takes place/Has meaning because it changes into memory.” (Czesław Miłosz, “Consciousness”3) For Czesław Miłosz, human life is not an existence of the disengaged, isolated, and solipsistic cogito, but an actively engaged being, dwelling with others (Mitsein) in a shared world.4 The affectionate evocation of the faces and names of Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass et al. (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 431. 4 For Heidegger, all human beings share the existential condition of being-in-the-world. Therefore, the other “does not mean everybody else but me” but those from whom the I distinguishes itself. They are, rather, those from “whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one is, too.” Martin Heidegger, “Being-in-the World as Being-with and Being a Self: The They,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, in idem, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (New York: Continuum, 2003), 157. As Heidegger reminds us, “the others who are encountered in the context of useful things in the surrounding world at hand are not somehow added on in thought to an initially merely objectively present thing, but these things are encountered from the world in which they are at hand for the others. This world is always already from the outset my own.” Ibid., 156. An encountered thing tells us in a primordial way that there is an other. Cf. Miłosz’s “Watering Can”: “Of a green color, standing in a shed alongside rakes and spades, it comes alive when it is filled with water from the pond, and an abundant shower pours from its nozzle, in an act, we feel it, of charity toward plants. It is not certain, however, that the watering can would have such a place in 3

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people, detailed recapitulation of fleeting moments, and the bringing to life of the smells, textures, and shapes of things, shows to us how this inspired greatness may transform our life. However, can this transformation really happen? Is art, and especially poetry, able to have any essential impact on human lives? With reference to Hölderlin’s famous question from his “Bread and Wine,” we can still ask: What is the use of poetry in our needy times?5 Czesław Miłosz, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, wrote most of his poetry in Polish, believing that poetry can only be written in the language one spoke in one’s childhood, even though the poet spent his time, for most of his adult life, outside of his native country.6 Since 1961, he had lived in the United States, teaching Slavic literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2004 he died in Kraków and is buried at St Peter’s and St Paul’s church (Skałka) in Kraków in the existing pantheon for Polish heroes. “The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation/That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets,/And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas.” (“The Fall” 7) This is definitely true about the poet’s own death! Miłosz’s concern for loss, destruction, and despair makes his voice into a powerful meditation on the human condition (conditio humana) in the world with a clear and strong emphasis on human hope which, at least partially, lives in the poet because of his religious convictions. His poetry is a constant dialogue with himself (soliloquium) and with his personal experience, which in the course of the poetic discourse becomes the conversation with human history. The poet is well aware that his work has been essentially shaped by the European cultural heritage and its history. His personal journey toward himself is also a kind of reawakening of the self to the cultural signs. Miłosz seems to share Ricoeur’s view that “the our memory, were it not for our training in noticing things. For, after all, we have been trained... Photography contributes to our paying attention to detail and the cinema taught us that objects, once they appear on the screen, would participate in the actions of the characters and therefore should be noticed... The watering can has thus a good chance of occupying a sizable place in our imagination, and, who knows, perhaps precisely in this, in our clinging to distinctly delineated shapes, does our hope reside, of salvation from the turbulent waters of nothingness and chaos.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 648. 5 Cf. Wierciński, “Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment,” 173-204. 6 “Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.” Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981). Cf. Miłosz’s “In Warsaw”: “How can I live in this country/Where the foot knocks against/The unburied bones of kin?/I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot/Write anything; five hands/Seize my pen and order me to write/The story of their lives and deaths./Was I born to become/a ritual mourner?/I want to sing of festivities,/The greenwood into which Shakespeare/Often took me. Leave/To poets a moment of happiness,/Otherwise your world will perish.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 75. 7 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 341. 456

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self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly by the detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which are articulated on the symbolic mediations which always already articulates actions, and, among them, the narratives of everyday life. Narrative mediation underlines this remarkable aspect of knowledge of the self as being an interpretation.”8 The search for self-identity was a central motif in Miłosz’s work. His oeuvre can be situated in the realm of the fundamental search for what it means to be a human being. In his poetry, he re-examines the perennial questions of religion, art, and politics. However, he does not do so in the sense of philosophia perennis. He makes inquiries into the nature of poetry, trying to understand the nature of being a poet. A critical question regarding the human capability for negotiating the tension between self-understanding and the understanding of, and responsibility toward, others involves re-narrating one’s own life story. And this re-narration is always poetic because it involves everything regarding the human story, which can find its expression in language. Therefore, re-figuring or re-inventing the self means always re-narrating one’s own life story in a way, which includes all tensions, pressures, and delights of struggling with one’s own destiny and the moral imperative to take the responsibility not just for one’s own life, but for the life of the other.9 Miłosz’s concern for poetry that confronts reality is an expression of his understanding of poetry as the unflagging pursuit of embracing everything that exists in order to help people to live their lives. The poet’s responsibility is to bear witness to life in its amazing complexity. From this witnessing of life, hope is born: Hope for beauty, love, and perseverance despite the existence of anxiety, anger, and rage. In the footnote to his poem, “Poet at Seventy,” Miłosz confesses his continued “un-named need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.”10 What Miłosz, as an unwearied researcher of the particularity of every human existence, is offering us in his writings is something of distinct value. He does not attempt to fit into any paradigm, neither sociological, nor psychological,

Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” Philosophy Today (Spring 1991): 80. “For Miłosz, ‘description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous, a revelation of reality known in Greek as epiphaneia... epiphaneia, epiphany, interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things.’” Czesław Miłosz, “Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” in idem, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czesław Miłosz, ed. and trans. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 383. 9 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall ed., Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002), 287. See also Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 290. 10 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 450. 8

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nor theological.11 Searching for a fundamental understanding of a human being and its place in the cosmos, Miłosz sets his theological trajectory clearly between protology and eschatology. He is deeply rooted in the experience of his origin; however illusive it might be. Yet, because his voice is so personal, it summons us to its true significance. The authority of a testimony is granted the primacy over and above any of even the most elaborate expertise based on academic research. Miłosz often becomes disenchanted with the socio-political realm on account of its failure to transform the ethical and political life.12 The Captive Mind, as a study of the totalitarian mentality, offers us an examination of the poet’s life under a communist regime and his subsequent reasons for defecting from Poland.13 Rejecting the new faith as reinforced by the communist regime, Miłosz decisively objected to their concealed forms of exercising power over the human mind. His personal life was a life of various transgressions on his way to understanding his own destiny as a human being. His penetrating search for self-understanding involves the unearthing of cultural, political, and religious presuppositions. Whenever necessary, Miłosz disobeys any authority, so as to let the tradition (in the Gadamerian sense of Überlieferung) speak to us. Thus, he passionately translates the Bible, enquires into Manichaeism and Thomas Aquinas; he reads his cousin, Oscar Miłosz and Swedenborg, Shestov and Dostoyevsky, Simone Weil and Thomas Merton, and zealously hunts for the most beautiful poems from around the world.14 His attempt to poetically retrieve the meaning of tradition includes an effort to disclose what is left unsaid in great literary works. Thus, he never rests in his exploration of historical debts. Cf. Miłosz, “Preparation”: “I still think too much about the mothers/And ask what is man born of woman./He curls himself up and protects his head/While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,/He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit./Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 429. 12 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Knopf, 1953). 13 Miłosz was definitely aware of his public image and often expressed his desire not to appear as other than he was. Contrary to the widespread heroic image of him, Miłosz declares: “And that image of me as a heroic figure, especially when I was in Poland in 1981—well, I just happened not to disgrace myself so badly because I was living abroad the whole time, actually from the end of ‘45 on. I was crafty; I stayed outside the country.... But, oh, would I have disgraced myself had I stayed in Poland! And then all of a sudden, in the Solidarity period, they made me into something of moral authority... I treat all that as a series of singular coincidences. It’s very embarrassing to be held up as an example of integrity.” Ewa Czarnecka and Alexander Fiut, ed., Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1987), 324-325. And Miłosz concludes the conversations saying that “everything we’ve been talking about may be reducible to my discomfort when my image is too noble... too noble or too simple. And I am neither noble nor simple.” Ibid., 329. 14 Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997), iv: “I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting, putting together canvases from 11

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In his search for self-understanding, Miłosz indefatigably wrestles with the gathering darkness through his passionate exercise of re-reading the great traditions in religion, philosophy, and literature. “When everything was fine/And the notion of sin had vanished/And the earth was ready/In universal peace/To consume and rejoice/Without creeds and utopias,/I, for unknown reasons,/Surrounded by the books/Of prophets and theologians,/Of philosophers, poets,/Searched for an answer,/Scowling, grimacing,/Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.” (“A Poem for the End of the Century”15) Having been brought up as a traditional Catholic, Miłosz was quite obsessed with the doctrines of omnipotence and omniscience that were drummed into his mind as a child. Despite being quite unorthodox throughout most of his adult life, and reading Manichaean scriptures, Swedenborg, Simone Weil, and Oscar Miłosz, the poet was tortured by the fear of eternal damnation and the sense of sin (especially regarding sexuality) and was somehow unable to liberate himself from the influence of his childhood that proved to be so toxic for him.16 By expressing the existential tension between familiarity and strangeness in poetic language, Miłosz puts himself in the service of Being.17 It is not the poet himself who gives witness to poetry: Poetry gives witness to itself. Therefore, a poet can speak meaningfully and profoundly about the witness of poetry.18 In The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz calls poetry a “passionate pursuit of the Real.”19 Earlier, in his Nobel Lecture, he asks: “What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.” It is hunting for reality in order to preserve in poetic language everything that manifests itself as the Being of beings. The poet faces the tension between the imperative of language and the imperative of reality and “is left with the bitter realization of the inadequacy of language,” since the objective world can be seen “with perfect impartiality only by God.”20 Being “in love with the world,” the poet is, at the same time, “condemned to eternal insatiability because he wants his words to penetrate to the very core of

various epochs to prove... that certain lines of development, different from those now universally accepted, can be traced.” 15 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 545. 16 Cf. Miłosz, “To Father Ch.” and “Father Ch., Many Years Later”: “I could not understand from whence came my stubbornness,/And my belief that the pulse of impatient blood/Fulfills the designs of a silent God.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 436. 17 Cf. Wierciński, “Nichts wird vergessen sein: Das Dichtersein und die Wege des Verstehens,” 121-135. 18 Cf. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 19 Ibid., 25, 56, 66, 75. 20 Ibid., 74. 459

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reality.”21 For Miłosz, “a poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words. That elementary contact, verifiable by the five senses, is more important than any mental construction.”22 Out of this existential tension between the wish to capture reality in words, which becomes the poetic imperative, and the ever so painful realization that even the most beautiful words are not reality, poetry is born. Moreover, in poetry, we are able to see: “Apple trees, a river, the bend of a road,/As if in a flash of summer lightning.” (“Preface,” from Treatise on Poetry.23 The human ability to see is accompanied by the persistent pain that “reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” (“Esse”) This continuous suffering is the necessary condition for a poet to remain sensitive to the never-ending search for the word which will not only be able to express everything, but in fact preserve everything. Therefore, a poet is on a journey toward the verbum entis, always listening to the voice of Being.24 Poetry wants to encompass the whole of human life. It comes from life and entails the essence of the human struggle with living life as expressed in details of individual personal history: “My memory/Does not want to leave me/And in it, live beings/Each with its own pain,/Each with its own dying,/Its own trepidation.” (“A Poem for the End of the Century”25) Poetic language cannot adhere to literary conventions, but needs to be saturated with all fabrics appertaining to reality: “Out of reluctant matter/What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at best./And so, cherry blossoms must suffice for us/And chrysanthemums and the full moon.” (“No More”26) Therefore, the task of the poet is to nurture his/her language: “Faithful mother tongue,/I have been serving you./Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors/so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch/as preserved in my memory./This lasted many years./You were my native land; I lacked any other...//But without you, who am I?/Only a scholar in a distant country,/a success, without fears and humiliations./Yes, who am I without you?/Just a philosopher, like everyone else.” (“My Faithful Mother Tongue”27) Miłosz lives out to the fullest the relationship between himself and language. For him, it is not only Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 74. For Miłosz, every poet is a servant of Eros. Quoting Plato’s Symposium, Miłosz recalls that, a poet “interprets between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way.” Ibid. 22 Ibid., 56. 23 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 109. 24 Wierciński, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” 1-23. 25 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 545. 26 Ibid., 158. 27 Ibid., 245. 21

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a question of trying to find new modes of poetic expression but the search for a poetic way of life.28 Poetry as the Search for Personal Identity and the Primordial Question: What Does it Mean to Be A Human Being Miłosz is willing to ask the primordial question of what it means to be a human being without ever arriving at a definitive answer. There is nothing new in asking the fundamental questions.29 “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” It is not the final answers that determine the way we live our lives, but the persistency of asking the questions regarding our relationship to the world and others: “If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?” (“Study of Loneliness”30) In asking these fundamental questions, we ponder on our own self-understanding. The fundamental questions hinge on how we live our life. This willingness to ask comes from recognizing a poet’s vocation. Poetry waits upon the mystery of being human instead of forcing a systematic understanding. The nature of poetry is to remain open for the mystery of Being (in Heidegger’s sense of the Offenheit für das Geheimnis des Seins). Meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) places a human being in the open horizon, which is the horizon of a dialectics of question and answer. The discovery of one’s personal identity is an interpretive process, which understands identity in its irreducibility to any defined notion that is conceptually elaborated and widely celebrated in the realm of calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken). The poet’s task is to be vigilant, in order to see that which wants to disclose itself and to reflect upon it in poetic language. Aspiring “to a more spacious form/that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose,” (“Ars Poetica?”31) Miłosz invites us to the laborious task of living a life of “silent integrity”: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us/how difficult it is to remain just one person,/for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,/and invisible guests come in and out at will.” (“Ars Poetica?”) The poet is well aware of the most terrifying experiences a human being can have, quite unable to find rest within the personal sphere or horizon. Miłosz comments: My poetry has been called polyphonic, which is to say that I have always been full of voices speaking; in a way I consider myself an instrument, a Wierciński, “‘Sprache ist Gespräch: Gadamer’s Understanding of Language as Conversation,” 37-58. 29 “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?/D’où Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Où Allons Nous” is the title of one of the most famous paintings by Paul Gauguin (1897). See Andrzej Wierciński, “A Healing Journey toward Oneself: Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Turn in the Hermeneutics of Education,” Ethics in Progress Quarterly 1 (2010). 30 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 339. 31 Ibid., 240. 28

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medium. My friend Jeanne Hersch, who introduced me to the existentialism of Karl Jaspers, used to say, “I have never seen a person so instrumental,” meaning that I was visited by voices. There is nothing extraterrestrial in this, but something within myself. Am I alone in this? I don’t think so. Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges. I have written about the difficulty of remaining the same person when such guests enter and go and take us for their instrument. But we must hope to be inspired by good spirits, not evil ones.32 The internal contradictions in the poet’s life are powerfully captured in “Two Poems” in Provinces: While the first poem celebrates life, the second poem, “A Poem for the End of the Century,” is an ironic yet painful recollection of the poet’s religious past. The profoundly religious underpinnings of Miłosz’s writings cannot be understood in error for being the testimony of an orthodox believer of any particular religious confession. What is fascinating is the fact that the mature poet wishes to read those two contrasting poems together, as if they did belong together. Moreover, he writes in a headnote: The two poems placed here together contradict each other. The first renounces any dealing with problems which for centuries have been tormenting the minds of theologians and philosophers; it chooses a moment and the beauty of the earth as observed on one of the Caribbean islands. The second, just the opposite, voices anger because people do not want to remember, and live as if nothing happened, as if horror were not hiding just beneath the surface of their social arrangements. I alone know that the assent to the world in the first poem masks much bitterness and that its serenity is perhaps more ironic that it seems. And the disagreement with the world in the second results from anger which is a stronger stimulus than an invitation to a philosophical dispute. But let it be, the two poems taken together testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.33 The complexity of Miłosz’s personality is rooted in his personal history. We can speak of different personalities within the poet. Miłosz calls for accepting both sides of him—in fact, all of his contradictions—since to highlight either side over the other would be an ultimate distortion of his personal identity. Miłosz encourages the play of paradoxes. He necessitates us to question the apparent opposition, Robert Faggen, “Czesław Miłosz, The Art of Poetry LXX,” The Paris Review 133 (Winter 1994/1995): 242-273. 33 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 542. 32

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which facilitates the possibility of multiple readings. What is definitely true about human life is the fact that it withholds any simple systematization. Poetic language allows many real anxieties and identity crises to be brought to the surface, although these are well hidden from the scrutinizing eye of a priest or a psychoanalyst, as regards the commonly held idea of a life well lived. Instead, what we are dealing with here, are the recurring question marks indicating the provisionality of life projects and their final incompleteness. In a diary published in 1994, A Year of the Hunter, Miłosz eloquently addresses the confusion of voices he is experiencing in his own life while searching for his personal identity. He writes: Critics have sought an answer to the question: What is the source of all those contradictions in my poetry? In my prose, too, for that matter. I could enlighten them by referring to the several personalities who reside in me simultaneously, whom I have tried to suppress, generally without success. I didn’t want to be so volatile, but what could I do? I hope that this diary... will be valued as one more attempt at demonstrating that I was conscious of the incompatibility of my various personalities.34 Miłosz reminds us that poetry does not allow for us to find refuge in the familiar. On the contrary, poetry is a constant reminder that what is at first strange, alien, and inaccessible, offers us unparalleled access to insights into the mystery of Being and the mystery of human Da-sein. The poet does not unravel the mystery; he presents the mysterious to us as the mysterious; the way it wants to be seen by us. Because poetry refuses to be mastered, it is also a clear protection against any human attempt at mastering others and exercising control by domesticating the power of language. Similar to Heidegger’s poetic imperative to purely speak, which is the essential qualification best suited to primordial speaking (ursprüngliches Sprechen), Miłosz invites us to reawaken our attentiveness to language, in which the unmistakable call of Being resounds. Since language speaks and, therefore, is neither an expression nor an activity of a human Dasein, the task of the poet is to nurture the language with everydayness.35 Czesław Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). 35 “Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth. The two span a realm in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling place for the life of man. To reflect on language means to reach the speaking of language in such a way that this speaking takes place as that which grants an abode for the being of mortals.” Martin Heidegger, “Language” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, 189190. “Language speaks. Its speaking bids the difference to come which expropriates world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy. Language speaks. Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing. It hears because it listens to the command of stillness. It is not a matter here of stating a new view of language. What is important 34

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Miłosz’s poetry wrestles with divinity (“Oeconomia divina”36), and yet it houses the essential tension in human life, and it stays there, saturated with all of life’s minute details, as in “A Confession”37: My Lord, I loved strawberry jam And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body. Also well-chilled vodka, herrings in olive oil, Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves. So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit Have visited such a man? Many others Were justly called, and trustworthy. Who would have trusted me? For they saw How I empty glasses, throw myself on food, And glance greedily at the waitress’ neck. Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness, Able to recognise greatness wherever it is, And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant, I knew what was left for smaller men like me: A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud, A tournament of hunchbacks, literature. Life is the poet’s dwelling place. The being of a poet is marked by excessive intimacy with Being. Out of this excess, artistic creativity is born. This creativity is not a matter of the artist’s own endeavor, but an expression of the gift of Being, which calls for the artist’s creativity to individually appropriate the state of being gifted. For Miłosz, the interpretive process in which we struggle for our personal identity is very often a solitary communion. The poet understands himself as a prophet, “but what kind of prophet?” Prophecy requires an audience: The voice of the poet needs to be heard. However, who wants to listen to the witness of poetry? Moreover, why should we listen to such a witness, one who is traumatized, painfully unsure of himself, distrustful of others, and also living a life that indulges in many kinds of vices?

is learning to live in the speaking of language. To do so, we need to examine constantly whether and to what extent we are capable of what genuinely belongs to responding: anticipation in reserve. For: Man speaks only as he responds to language. Language speaks. Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken.” Ibid., 207. 36 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 263. 37 Ibid., 461. 464

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Miłosz eloquently articulates the tragic plight of modern life.38 In his enduring effort to encounter the divine, the poet is well aware of the sense of dislocation and loss of personal identity of a modern man. A direct result of the decay of Christian civilization is the widespread confusion about who we are as human beings. Personal identity and the self-understanding of oneself in a relationship to God are not self-evident any more. On the contrary, the task for the human being is not to give up asking the perennial metaphysical questions regarding our authentic cultural and religious roots, despite Nietzsche’s famous proclamation “God is dead” and the advent of nihilism. What Miłosz suggests, is a bold journey into the world of the metaphysical to rediscover the true sources of culture and philosophy. The troubled relationship between a human being and God plays an integral role within Miłosz’s poetry. The religious struggle spans Miłosz’s entire life. Toward the end of his life, “approaching ninety, and still with a hope,” he writes: “Now You are closing down my five senses, slowly,/And I am an old man lying in darkness.../Liberate me from guilt, real and imagined./Give me certainty that I toiled for Your glory./In the hour of the agony of death, help me with Your suffering /Which cannot save the world from pain.” (“Prayer”39) In Facing the River,40 Miłosz returns to Vilnius, the city of his childhood, to recognize the streets well preserved in his memory and to fully take in that the people from his past were gone: “Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.” (“Yellow Bicycle”41) Miłosz’s return to Lithuania is a chance for him to rethink his life as a human being and as a poet. In “At a Certain Age,”42 Miłosz shares with us his troubling experience of being confronted with the brutality of life: We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers. White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind Was too busy visiting sea after sea. We did not succeed in interesting the animals. Dogs, disappointed, expected an order, A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep. “A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort.” Czesław Miłosz, “On Exile.” See also his “On Erosion,” in Clifton Fadiman, ed., Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 96-109. 39 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 742. 40 Czesław Miłosz, Facing the River: New Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1995). 41 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 415. 42 Ibid., 579. 38

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A person seemingly very close Did not care to hear of things long past. Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom. It would be humiliating to pay by the hour A man with a diploma, just for listening. Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what? That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble Yet later in our place an ugly toad Half-opens its thick eyelid And one sees clearly: “That’s me.” In his fascinating intellectual and cross-cultural journey, Miłosz returns to his streets and recognizes the many changes and losses. However, his return is first and foremost a bitter realization that this old man is the same one who considered himself once “handsome and noble.” The old poet returning to his native land observes his metamorphoses and wanders upon the mystery of his personal odyssey.43 Moreover, finding himself left behind by those near and dear to him, he asks himself, “What did you do with your life, what did you do?” (“Capri”44) This is a fairly dramatic examination of conscience, but the old poet recognizes that “Between the ages of seven and ten I lived in perfect happiness on the farm of my grandparents in Lithuania... I lived without yesterday or tomorrow, in the eternal present. This is, precisely, the definition of happiness. I ask myself whether I now mythologize that period of my like. We all build myths when speaking of the past, for a faithful reconstruction of fleeting moments is impossible. The question, however, remains: Why do some people speak of their childhoods as happy, others, as miserable? The extreme vividness and intensity of my experience forces me to believe in its authenticity. It was, I do not hesitate to say, an experience of enchantment with earth as a Paradise. I was a lone child in a magic kingdom that I explored from early morning till dusk... I was a little Adam, running all day in a garden under trees that seemed to me even bigger than they were in reality, with my perceptions and fantasies unhampered by the sarcastic jeer of a demon... I remained innocent, which means that I had not formed any judgment on the cruelty of the world. My happiness came, it seems, from—as William Blake would say—cleansing the gates of perception, in avidly seeing and hearing... Thus, as a child I was primarily a discoverer of the world, not as suffering but as beauty... Many years later, at the age of eighty, I returned to the place of my birth and childhood. The landscape had changed... I did not feel any regret, or anger, or even sadness. I was confronted not by the history of my century but by time itself. Granted the privilege of return, what was most important at the moment was the tangible element of flowing time... I tried to grasp and name my feelings... Then something happened... I was looking at a meadow. Suddenly the realization came that during my years of wandering I had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here and that I have been always yearning to return. Or, to be precise, I understood this after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be-bliss.” Czesław Miłosz, “Happiness,” in idem, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czesław Miłosz, 20-26. 44 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 585. 43

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there is nobody interested in hearing him. He definitely will not go to a psychoanalyst, as “it would be humiliating to pay by the hour/A man with a diploma, just for listening.” Moreover, he will not go to confess to a priest since he would need to know what to confess. Finally, he is left alone with his recollection of the past and faces the river in which he sees his old and present self: The same person, full of contradictions, but also blessed with the possibility to live his life. “You do not recognize me, but it’s me all the same,/The one who used to make my bows by cutting your brown/branches,/So straight and so swift in their reaching for the sun./You grew large, your shade is huge, you send up new shoots./It’s a pity I’m not a boy anymore./Now I could cut for myself only a stick, for, as you see, I walk with a cane.” (“To A Hazel Tree”45) What is happening during our search for personal identity is often a painful process of going through de-composing, transposing, and re-figuring the initial notions we have of ourselves. Similar to the hermeneutic reading of texts, poetry encourages us to distrust the connections that are falsely forged to make sense of one’s own life. The need to overlook the apparent in-consequences, defeats, and contradictions becomes a human being’s true enemy on the way to personal identity. With this newfound urgency, the old poet understands his poetic vocation. The power of poetry can bring the dead back to life, one by one. Poetry allows for the saving of each human being in its singularity. Miłosz’s poetry of witness finds its power in the rescuing of people and places, which causes endless suffering in the face of the impermanence of life, exposed to oblivion. Poetry permits (and even encourages) a child and an old man to dwell together in the same place, at the same time, looking together toward the future: “I am a child who receives First Communion in Wilno.../I am an old man who remembers...” (“Capri”) In this poetic world, the here and there, the now and then, the present, the past, and the future are dynamically connected and alive: “If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the/disguises of the lost Reality./After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the same/time bread and wine,//Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite the earthly law that/sentences memory to extinction.” (“Capri”) The question of personal identity cannot be answered by introspection only. The identity of the self cannot be discovered only by looking inward. Our hermeneutic task is to see the human Dasein in the correlation to Being. In a search for personal identity, we are accompanied by Miłosz with his high spiritual—or even religious—sensitivity to what we can call the cosmic dimension of salvation. Poetic language, which describes the intrinsic drama of human life, at the same time shows us that neither literature nor theology can dispense a human being from facing the existential truth of oneself. This truth needs to be rediscovered anew by each and every human being. Thus, Miłosz strongly believes that there is always 45

Ibid., 665. 467

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a good reason to be thankful “for good and ill”: “You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter./I give you thanks for good and ill./Eternal light in everything on earth./As now, so on the day after my death.” (“Thankfulness”)46 Miłosz’s thankfulness does not come from naiveté or any ideological or piously simplified religiosity. On the contrary, his thankfulness is a fundamental and substantiated trust in the mystery of Being; in understanding a human being not as the center of a self-created illusion of Being (Schein des Seins), but as an attentive listener to its mystery (Zuhörer des Seins). Following Heidegger’s understanding of ourselves as mortals that dwell on the earth below the mysteries of the sky, we can say that a human Dasein is a being that questions its own being as being-in-the-world. Our search for self-understanding happens while we are in the world. As human beings, we experience ourselves in time (temporality of existence) and painfully feel that we cannot find any satisfactory way to deal with our being-in-the-world. However, we discover that we are metaphysical beings, which means that we can only cope with reality on the metaphysical level as (spiritual) human beings able to understand ourselves in and through our faith in God, sub specie aeternitatis. Believing in God, we can realize that our meditative experience allows for us to simultaneously experience past, present, and future, and as such, this makes us God-like, who alone is timeless and omnipresent. It is much more than just a skillful play with words when Miłosz confesses: “They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.” (“Earth Again”)47 This incomprehensibility is not reserved just for the things out of this world. In fact, because the things of the world belong to the mystery of Being, they too will remain incomprehensible to us. Miłosz never stops asking questions about himself. They are full of guilt and grief, but also joy and thankfulness. In “An Alcoholic Enters the Gates of Heaven,”48 Miłosz holds a conversation with God: What kind of man I was to be you’ve known since the beginning, since the beginning of every creature. It must be horrible to be aware, simultaneously, of what is, what was, and what will be. I began my life confident and happy, certain that the Sun rose every day for me and that flowers opened for me every morning. 46

Ibid., 449. Czesław Miłosz, Unattainable Earth, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), 8. 48 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 734. 47

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I ran all day in an enchanted garden. Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes for another experiment altogether. As if there were not proof enough that free will is useless against destiny. Under your amused glance I suffered like a caterpillar impaled on the spike of a blackthorn. The terror of the world opened itself to me. Could I have avoided escape into illusion? Into a liquor which stopped the chattering of teeth and melted the burning ball in my breast and made me think I could live like others? I realized I was wandering from hope to hope and I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me. Is it a trial like Job’s, so that I call faith a phantom and say: You are not, nor do your verdicts exist, and the earth is ruled by accident? Who can contemplate simultaneous, a-billion-times-multiplied pain? It seems to me that people who cannot believe in you deserve our praise. But perhaps because you were overwhelmed by pity, you descended to the earth to experience the condition of mortal creatures. Bore the pain of crucifixion for a sin, but committed by whom? I pray to you, for I do not know how not to pray. Because my heart desires you, though I do not believe you would cure me. And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer, praising your name.

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Miłosz somehow believes unconditionally in God, even though his faith is definitely not free from painful quarreling with God, the Creator, and the Savior.49 Being brought up a Catholic, the poet lives under enormous tension, which finds its expression in a poetic form of irony about human fate.50 What kind of God he must be if he plants alcoholic genes in a human being? As the omniscient God, he knows everything from “the beginning of every creature.” In fact, it is much worse. This God has decided for all eternity, the exact order of every particular human life and all existing things. “It must be horrible,” admits the poet, “to be aware, simultaneously, of what is, what was, and what will be.” In planning the whole life of a human being, knowing all subsequent developments of an individual, and bearing witness to human pain, God must find himself in a horrible position. Moreover, as if this would not be enough, bearing witness to the pain of the individual is made much more unbearable for him by a simultaneous contemplation of “a billion-times-multiplied pain.” However, the poet confesses that he prays “to you, for I do not know how not to pray./Because my heart desires you.” This is a faith statement (professio fidei), which makes the poet believe against the horrible experience of the reality of life and the unfathomable desire of his heart to trust in God. This trust is not the faith of a child, hoping that God will make everything whole, but predominantly a faith against the hope that God can cure him. The poet, despite many devils’ temptations (suadente diabolo) never managed to outgrow the yearning for the absolute. Therefore, notwithstanding that he has not always been] comfortable with his religious inheritance, he struggles to investigate the sources and limits of his religious anxiety. There is something, then, which compels him never to abandon the religious conviction of his youth. He confesses: “Had I not been frail and half broken inside,/I wouldn’t think

Cf. Czesław Miłosz, “Veni Creator”: “I am only a man: I need visible signs./I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction./Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church/lift its hand, only once, just once, for me./But I understand that signs must be human,/therefore call one man, anyone on earth,/not me after all I have some decency/and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.” Ibid., 223. 50 Czesław Miłosz, “Distance”: “At a certain distance I followed behind you, ashamed to come closer./Though you have chosen me as a worker in your vineyard and I pressed the grapes of your wrath./To every one according to his nature: what is crippled should not always be healed./I do not even know whether one can be free, for I have toiled against my will./Taken by the neck like a boy who kicks and bites//Till they sit him at the desk and order him to make letters,/I wanted to be like others but was given the bitterness of separation,/Believed I would be an equal among equals but woke up a stranger./Looking at manners as if I arrived from a different time./Guilty of apostasy from the communal rite./There are so many who are good and just, those were rightly chosen/And wherever you walk the earth, they accompany you./Perhaps it is true that I loved you secretly/But without strong hope to be close to you as they are.” Ibid., 357. 49

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of them, who are like myself half broken inside./I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church/To get rid of my self-pity.” (“In a Parish”)51 What Miłosz is addressing in his conversation with the Creator is the profound question of the mystery of human life, which is not reducible to any biological or genetic accounts, however important they might seem for an understanding of the human organism. With the incredible growth of humanity’s potential to explain many previously unknown biological and physiological phenomena, the danger of a far-too-easy proclamation of some predetermined biological damnation to an irredeemably horrible life has also increased immensely. In our excluding and unaccommodating culture, we became self-proclaimed judges, claiming the right to decide whose life is worthy to be lived. This is by no means reserved for the debates on the right to life for the unborn (prenatal screening) and the right to die for the elderly (euthanasia). Even the most sophisticated genetic pre-screenings or enlightened social and medical standards cannot dispense us from asking the fundamental questions regarding human life. Miłosz has the courage to discuss with God the elements that go beyond his personal suffering and uneasiness in order to better accept who he himself is. The dramatic existential tension remains: A strong personal desire for God cannot delude the experienced human being into believing that any help will come from God. Therefore, Miłosz confesses: “I began my life confident and happy/I ran all day in an enchanted garden./Not suspecting that you had picked me from the Book of Genes/for another experiment altogether./As if there were not proof enough/that free will is useless against destiny.” This is an old theological question: that of predestination. Miłosz’s notion of fate seems, at least at first, to follow the Protestant/Calvinistic understanding that the life of a particular human being is entirely decided by God from the beginning of the world: The doctrine of election declares that God, before the foundation of the world, chose certain individuals to be the objects of His undeserved favor. These, and these only, He purposed to save. God could have chosen to save all men (for He had the power and authority to do so) or He could have chosen to save none (for He was under no obligation to show mercy to any), but He did neither. Instead, He chose to save some and to exclude others. His eternal choice of particular sinners unto salvation was not based upon any foreseen act or response on the part of those selected but was based solely on His own good pleasure and sovereign will. Thus, the election was not determined by, or conditioned upon, anything that men would do, but resulted entirely from God’s self-determined purpose.52

51 52

Ibid., 741. David N. Steele, Curtis C. Thomas, and S. Lance Quinn, The Five Points of Calvinism (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co, 2004), 30. 471

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This theological understanding—similarly as in Luther’s deliberation on predestination—is very much in line with the ancient understanding of fate in different religions, cultures, and is succinctly expressed by Virgil: Stat sua cuique dies (to each his day is given, or: fixed is the day of every man).53 Moreover, somewhere between Virgil’s belief that fata viam inveniet (the fates shall find their way) and Job’s quarreling with God: “I asked you, All Knowing, why you torture me,” Miłosz positions himself. He is convinced that fate can do more than all the devoted efforts of men, as in the case of the destruction of Troy, and in the rising up of the Roman Empire. And yet, the whole poem is a kind of strange theology of the poet’s way of thinking, for whom the fear, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and disgrace are mingled with the joy of life and adoration for its Creator. There is no place we can hide from ourselves.54 In his Road-side Dog, Miłosz addresses the issue of believing in God, not in spite of, but precisely because of the horrors he witnessed in his long life: An atheist should accept the world as it is. But then whence comes our protest, our scream: “No!” Precisely this excludes us from Nature, determines our incomprehensible oddity, makes us a lonely species. Here, in a moral protest against the order of the world, in our asking ourselves where this scream the defense of the peculiar place of man begins.55 The most fascinating thing about this poem is its wonderful humanity. There is no easy solution to the various hardships in life. Miłosz understands well enough that the prize for being sensitive to his poetic vocation is high. As an outsider, he intensely feels the tragic dimension of human existence; he is not rushing with any quick solutions and answers. He is not moralizing, but instead, allows himself to express everything, which bothers him. His interpretive imperative serves here as a potent reminder that we need to be attentive to the very inner logic of the poem and read it always as a whole, taking into account all the restrained poetic guidance. Already the poem’s title indicates a subtle irony: Does the poet consider himself an alcoholic? And does the alcoholic gain entry to heaven? Even if he is welcomed to paradise, is it because of his faith? Is it because of predestination? Or is it merely a great surprise; a pure gift of the omnipotent God who can pick and choose as he pleases? Maybe paradise is finally this heavenly state when we do not long for more drink, but our eternal life will be a permanent state of happy drunkenness. 53

Virgil, The Aeneid, X, 467. Cf. Miłosz, “Account”: “I was driven because I wanted to be like others./I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me./The history of my stupidity will not be written./For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 395. 55 Czesław Miłosz, The Road-side Dog, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 103. 54

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Miłosz asks questions relevant to every human being with the humility (humilitas–humus–earth56) of a man who has experienced personal and political tragedy and who believes in fate and destiny. It is a bizarre mixture: The stubborn optimism of his heart and the pessimism of his intellect. However, there is always hope, which is necessary to understand personal identity and to communicate something of vital existential importance to himself and the people around him.57 What is even more striking is the fact that the poet seems to be surprised at his being in the new world. His courageous effort to find a sense of homeland within his personal homelessness eloquently expresses the Heideggerian sense of beingin-the-world (in-der-Welt-Sein).58 For Miłosz, poetry is a great affirmation of life in the face of suffering. He knows very well how to risk delight. As in his “Gift”59: A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. In my body I felt no pain. When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails. “Gift” is one of Miłosz’s poems on ordinary life, in which the poet relishes the profound joy of life. The beauty of life can be experienced, if only we forget the evil we have suffered, free ourselves from disordered material security (dependence), and envy no one. Very often, we are overly focused and worried about possessing material things and somehow, deep in our hearts, believe that our personal identity depends on owning earthly things. Miłosz reminds us that happiness 56

Cf. Prov 11: 12, Ubi humilitas, ibi sapientia. In this sense we can say that humilitas veritas est, humility is truth. Humility is the virtue of knowing the truth of created order, which leads to knowing the truth about oneself. 57 Cf. Miłosz, “Meaning”: “When I die, I will see the lining of the world./The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset./The true meaning, ready to be decoded./What never added up will add up, What was incomprehensible will be comprehended./And if there is no lining to the world?/If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,/But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day/Make no sense following each other?/And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?/Even if that is so, there will remain/A word wakened by lips that perish, /A tireless messenger who runs and runs/Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,/And calls out, protests, screams.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 569. 58 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Between Homelessness (Heimlosigkeit) and Homecoming (Heimholung),” in idem, Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology: The Imperative to Think the Incommensurable (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2010), 225-234. 59 Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 277. 473

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is to be found in being, not in having.60 Wealth and possessions are often just substitutes for life. We are chasing life in its many appearances instead of celebrating life itself. Therefore, we fall often into greed, envy, vanity, insecurity, and anger. We are too attached to the way other people perceive us, and this behavior removes our peace. Far too often, we desire to impose our way of thinking on everyone around us and extinguish our own inner peace. Instead, Miłosz invites us to accept our past, to not be overly embarrassed by who we were, and not feel guilty that we still are who we were. This is not a simple abandonment of the past. On the contrary, accepting oneself we start to see the birds, “blue sea and sails.” Therefore, Miłosz calls this poem “a gift”; it is a precious gift to be a human being who celebrates life. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the second century, situates the happiness of man within the relationship with God: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio Dei. (The glory of God is the living human being; the glory of being human is the vision of God)61 For Miłosz, life is the gift. Accepting oneself and the world we live in, frees our vision, encourages our growth, and brings peace. It is the most successful counseling therapy we can go through in the search for true identity in ordinary life. We all can be only who we are, and this is a task for the whole of our life. This is the transformation, which comes from accepting life as a gift and thus turns it into a gift for others. It is important to learn how to welcome the other into our own existential horizon. The desire for variety and the desire for the comfort of the familiar will haunt every human being throughout their whole life. It is a life caught between feeling rooted in the customary and known, and searching for excitement and the living out of our existential curiosity. Given the fact that every individual horizon contains within itself certain limits, the meeting of different horizons permits an enrichment of each individual’s own reality. This unconditional openness requires the affirmation of the evident differences between the different horizons. However threatening those differences might be, the respectful merging of horizons offers the possibility of a deeper understanding of human existence. Such openness can serve as a personal enrichment in many ways: In helping to better understand the other; to better understand one’s own self by learning to listen to, as well as being questioned by the other; and to desire a discovery of the true self in a common endeavor to glean what needs to be understood. Miłosz prizes life in its entirety; thus, every moment is precious. He arrives at peace, not predominantly as a result of deliberation, but by exposing himself to

60

One of the seminal books on analyzing two modes of existence: The having mode, concentrating on material possessions, power, and aggression, and the being mode, based on love, is a work by Erich Fromm. Cf. Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Continuum, 2005). 61 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 4, 20. 474

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pain and suffering, as in Virgil’s superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est (every fortune is to be conquered by bearing it).62 Living life is a source of joy. Our personal identity is continuously at work in our lives, even if we are not consciously aware of who we are. However, it is our personal identity, which determines how we position ourselves in the world.63 Moreover, the matter of positioning ourselves in the world is not a subject of assessing and articulating our self-understanding, but the realization of the inescapability of living our life, even despite the difficulty or even impossibility of making sense of it. Poetry as the Revelation of Being Experiencing what it means to be a human being includes the realization of the nature of the relationship between a human being and the Being, as well as the nature of the relationship to the primordial source of existence altogether. A human being is situated in proximity to Being. In this proximity, a human being discovers its ex-static attributes. Different from Greek tragedy, a poetic way of life is characteristic to the human mode of being (and not just reserved for the elected).64 Heidegger helps us to understand a human being as the existence in-between the human and the divine, and the earth and the heavens (das Geviert). In the Ister lectures,65 he accentuates the uncanny nature of being a human being.

62

Virgil, The Aeneid, V, 710. “The very way we walk, move, gesture, speak is shaped from the earliest moments by our awareness that we appear before others, that we stand in public space, and that this space is potentially one of respect or contempt, of pride or shame. Our style of movement expresses how we see ourselves as enjoying respect or lacking it, as commanding it or failing to do so. Some people flit through public space as though avoiding it, others rush through as though hoping to sidestep the issue of how they appear in it by the very serious purpose with which they transit through it; others again saunter through with assurance, savouring their moment within it; still others swagger, confident of how their presence marks it: think of the carefully leisurely way the policeman gets out of his car, having stopped you for speeding, and the slow, swaying walk over as he comes to demand your licence.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15. 64 Cf. David Nichols, “Antigone’s Autochthonous Voice: Echoes in Sophocles, Hölderlin, and Heidegger,” in Sean Dempsey and David Nichols, ed., Time, Memory, and Cultural Change, vol. 25 (Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, 2009). 65 Heidegger makes us aware that poetizing is always the inauguration of something, which means that the poetic vocation is a call to always bring the self-disclosure of Being to language anew: “This distinctive significance of the ‘Now’ demands that in this word of time we also come to hear something distinctly significant and await a concealed fullness of poetic time and so its truth. The ‘Now come’ appears to speak from a present into the future. And yet, in the first instance, it speaks into what has already happened. ‘Now’ this tells us: 63

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We try to make ourselves at home, but we never succeed in domesticating the earth. We are never fully strangers, but neither are we fully familiar with the earth. What is unique about being a human being is this extraordinary tension between familiarity and strangeness.66 Heidegger plays here on the words unheimlich (uncanny) and unheimisch (not at home, unhomely). The fact that human beings search intently for their identities, as well as for what it means to be human, does not guarantee that they will find what they are looking for, that is: Their home. The heroism of being a human being consists in acknowledging the fundamental tension between familiarity and strangeness and living within this tension to the fullest, without even attempting to overcome it for the sheer temptation to domesticate the earth. It is poetry, which allows the uncanny to surface on its own and quite by itself. Miłosz’s poetry is fundamentally phenomenological in allowing Being to show itself in the pleroma of appearances. In fact, the poet struggles with the understanding of what it means to be a poet. Finally, the poet can only place himself at the service of Being.67 Poetry allows Being to emerge into an appearance in beings. Poetic language lets beings be. With reference to human beings, poetry calls for a search for the deeper meaning of being human, and subsequently for an inquiry into the meaning of one’s own personal identity. Poetry participates in the revelation of Being. The mode of poetic existence is the releasement (Gelassenheit), which lets the Being of beings (das Sein des Seienden) come into appearance in things. The vocation of a poet is “to glorify things just because they are.”68 I liked the bellows operated by rope. A hand or a foot pedal – I don’t remember. But that blowing and blazing of fire! something has already been decided. And precisely the appropriation that has already occurred alone sustains all relation to whatever is coming. The ‘Now’ names an appropriative event.” Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” GA 53, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996), 9. 66 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Between Familiarity and Strangeness: Gadamerian and Derridian Hermeneutics of Friendship,” in Maria José Cantista, ed., Subjectividade e Racionalidade: Uma abordagem fenomenológico-hermenêutica (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), 269-295. 67 Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, Der Dichter in seinem Dichtersein: Versuch einer philosophischtheologischen Deutung des Dichterseins am Beispiel von Czesław Miłosz (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1997). 68 “Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation which is to contemplate Being.” (Nobel Lecture). 476

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And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs, Red, softened, ready for the anvil, Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe, Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam. And horses hitched to be shod, Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair. At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds, I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are. “Blacksmith Shop”69 The task of the poet is to glorify things. Miłosz masterfully links his own childhood and the vocation of a poet. As human beings, we are gifted with the power of seeing. The whole of life is enclosed in our seeing. Moreover, poetry allows us to share, not predominantly what we see, but that and how we see it. “I stare and stare.” We need to take the time to stare; no rush. And it might happen that we exclaim: “O happiness! To see an iris.” (O!)70 The power of seeing is also something essential in our relationships to the past, and particularly to those who are no longer alive: “And now they had nothing, except his eyes./Stumbling, he walked and looked, instead of them,/On the light they had loved, on the lilacs again in bloom./His legs were, after all, more perfect/Than non-existent legs.” (“City of My Youth”)71 Miłosz’s Six Lectures in Verse72 condenses his understanding of poetry and of the vocation of a poet. In 1985, Miłosz encapsulates in poetic form, six lectures given by him in 1981-82 as a visiting professor at the famous Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard. Poetry gives one a chance to embrace reality in its complexity; this creates for the poet a very demanding task: “How to tell it all?” Is there any way we can communicate the world and ourselves to others? It seems that in any poet’s understanding, what can be done is to offer to others a testimony of everything he himself receives as the witness of poetry. Here, “witness” is understood as the witness the poet bears to poetry and others, but also as the witness poetry gives of itself. Poetry reveals itself; this revelation is simultaneously the self-manifestation of Being. By inviting a poet to participate in this celebration of witness, poetry necessitates the inquiry into the nature of being a human. All the existential doubts regarding human shortcomings cannot overshadow the mystery of human Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 503. Ibid., 683. 71 Ibid., 596. 72 Ibid., 491. 69 70

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existence. The insightful examination of the past discloses the inherent inadequacy of mastering one’s life. The poet stands before people and confesses that, like everybody else, he “didn’t see clearly.” The maturity of a human being consists not only in high intellectual accomplishments but also in the corresponding existential wisdom. There is no reason to rush concerning anything. Miłosz takes his time and goes per viam longam: Trying to see everything; everything. Everything], which itself wants to be seen. “Seeing more” does not mean summing up individual experiences but inquiring into the nature of what is seen and sharing one’s own subsequent understanding of this with others. And yet, the fundamental question remains: “How to tell it all?” Every poetic word is anchored in the full complexity of life and, as such, this is what enables sensitivity to life as uniquely lived by every human being to flourish. The power of language discloses the delusions people have of themselves. Poetry necessitates us to question our lives and the existential inadequacy of social and political norms and standards. We start with a simple endeavor to speak up and tell oneself and others about the unmasterable task of living our own life. This profound existential incapacity to cope with ourselves and other inhabitants of the world is, at first, a necessary step toward understanding the seriousness of one’s own condition (conditio humana) and within the factual existential situatedness (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) as a whole. For Miłosz, human life is happening in-between two worlds: The world of transcendence and the world of history. The poet lives the existence of a stranger in both worlds: Wherever he moves he finds himself familiar with uncertainty, ambivalence, and undivided attention to all aspects of human life, and, at the same time, unacquainted with joy, harmony, faith, and peace. In the end, the poet is convinced that understanding oneself is indeed a long life-long task.73 In a constant struggle to listen to his self, however dichotomized and broken, Miłosz asks ethical questions which seem to be especially indispensable in the age of nuclear atrocities. The collision with the brutality of recent history shows the indisputable insufficiency of traditional ethical discourse. We need to learn to think and speak differently. It is definitely not enough to stick to the conventional and remain convinced that codified ethics could save the world. The poet states: “I should have—I should have what?” (“Lecture I”) Instead of simple answers, we have heavily burdened questions. The world of culture and the world of institutionalized religion are not able to provide satisfactory answers. We are left without protection; that which a traditional structure was obviously offering to past generations. Instead of protection, we are left with unanswered questions in which we recognize all our existential contradictions of being, in which we

73

Cf. Andrzej Wierciński, “Hermeneutic Education to Understanding: Self-Education and the Willingness to Risk Failure,” in Paul Fairfield, ed., Education, Dialogue, and Hermeneutics (New York: Continuum, 2010), 107-123.

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recognize that we are situated in-between the transcendental and the historical dimension. Moreover, we are all at the service of culture, history, world, and religion. However, being engrossed by the world of culture and the world of history does not offer any substantial support. The poet somehow feels lost in the world—and therefore—all the more urgently does he search for his identity, in order to be able to cope with reality. Poetic sensitivity seems to be the best shield against allowing oneself to be or remain blind to the destructive power of history. What matters for the poet is to understand human life in all its epiphanies. He is convinced that the only way toward this understanding is to take seriously each and every life story in their uniqueness and concreteness. The poet takes on many roles as he struggles to understand human beings: The role of an outsider, as an observer, and someone who is personally entangled in their own individual human history. In reminding us of the existing order, poetry does not make our lives any easier. On the contrary, poetry sensitizes us toward experiencing existential pain, even if it is a pain that belongs to the poet’s imagination. In fact, our suffering is constitutive for compassion. Its task is to save the name, to preserve it from perishing. Poetry is an immense call for the particular. It helps us not to lose a single account of the singularity of any human being: “The true enemy of man is generalization./The true enemy of man, so-called History,/Attracts and terrifies with its plural number. Don’t believe it.” (“Lecture IV”) The image of the enemy of man is based on the fact that man is no longer understood in the dimension of transcendence, but only in the dimension of history, which neglects the idea of the person. History is reduced to the understanding of mere necessity. It becomes something really inhuman. Poetry, on the other hand, is filled with everything that is human. The language of poetry is the language of the earth and the world, filled with the rhythm of the body: “Heartbeat, pulse, sweating, menstrual flow, the gluiness of sperm, the squatting position at urinating, the movements of the intestines, together with the sublime needs of the spirit, and our duality will find its form in it, without renouncing one zone or the other.”74 To be a human being means to be an individuum, un-divided. This person wants to communicate with oneself (soliloqium) and with the other (con-versatio). There is nothing in a personal story which cannot engage the attentive other. History is interested in people and events that apparently shape the fate of humankind. Poetry, to the contrary, wishes to preserve everything that is individual, like Miss Jadwiga’s name, and to keep her remembered. In the heartbeats of poetry, every human life finds its eternal preservation. The poet’s confrontation with time and its withering effect is evident in his recognition of fidelity to detail.

74

Czesław Miłosz, Unattainable Earth, trans. by author and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1986). 479

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The flow of time can only be captured by focusing on the real, the individual; on what constitutes a being in its Beingness as the manifestation of Being. Poetry saves the fragility of human life and the transience of things in the world: In real life, things and people are destroyed. Human history shows that not only individual people but also entire cultures have been annihilated. Only in poetry can they survive: “Miss Jadwiga,/A little hunchback, librarian by profession,/Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house/That was considered safe but toppled down.” (“Lecture IV”) Poetry always fuses the story of an individual with a particular historical circumstance. Miłosz’s poetry sustains the drama of a human being toward the direction of a particular fate. Moreover, he muses that “perhaps some peculiar currents circulate between a literary work, its readers, and the posthumous lives of its characters.” (“Undressing Justine”)75 A poetic language, with its limitedness, reminds us that “probably a commentary is impossible, as, until now, no language has been invented comprehensible to both the living and the dead.” (“Undressing Justine”) The only true hope of man lies in understanding the indisputable greatness of any human being. Asking a question about personal identity brings the poet close to other human beings: “On Sunday I go to church and pray/with all the others./Who am I to think that I am different?/Enough that I don’t listen to what the/priests blabber in their sermons./Otherwise, I would have to concede/that I reject common sense.” (“Helene’s Religion”)76 In order not to surrender to the predominant tendency toward generalization, we need to cultivate a careful fidelity to detail. The “so-called history” is nothing more than theory and the product of human speculation. With its claim to be wholly objective, it decisively leads to the dehumanization and de-personalization of human history. Therefore, what attracts the attention of the poet is that which is fragile and transitory. The poetic account of reality matures on the path through the particularity of the world in all its phenomenal disclosures and stands in clear opposition to generalization, in the sense of the unlimited accumulation of abstract ideas. In the order of history, people are not loyal to the order of transcendence. They do not live consistently according to the truth that Christ embodies in himself. In the face of the privatization of religion and the loss of its social relevance, the poet must ask for the truth. Since there is a possibility of coexistence between the order of transcendence and the order of history, any true discovery means that “the impossible, what no one can bear,/Is again accepted and acknowledged.” (“Lecture VI”) And the poet, who finds himself in the role of the comforter, discovers that it is the truth which brings true comfort and admits that, while consoling himself also, he nevertheless remains “not very much consoled.” (“Lecture VI”) An under-

75 76

Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 619. Ibid., 652.

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standing of the human condition requires the acceptance of a variety of dimensions, which will remain unexplained. The destiny of human life rooted in reality continues to be a mystery: “This too is real. The din ceases./Memory closes down its dark waters./And those, as if behind a glass, stare out, silent.” (“Lecture VI”) Ultimately, knowledge is not equivalent to understanding. Trust in knowledge cannot really save people. Only poetry can offer serious help in dealing with reality since it encompasses the complexity of human life. The witness of poetry is a powerful reminder of the existential imperative to search for truth. Being at the service of poetry, the poet undertakes everything possible to understand the mystery of his poetic vocation. Within the task of telling everything, the vision of wholeness can save a human being by keeping them within the realm of Being. This is only possible as a result of a consciously experienced reality. What is particularly interesting in the testimony of a poet is the fact that he is the receiver and giver of a testimony. In the task of self-understanding as a poet, both aspects are essential in the act of being a teacher and student simultaneously with all the accompanying manifestations: Personal insecurity, uncertainty, humility, or even existential anxiety on the one hand, and on the other, the certainty of, and determination for, living the poetic vocation to the fullest. In fact, this inner tension aptly describes the condition of a poet and is expressed in the tension between understanding the task of the poet as “to tell it all,” and the uncertainty of it: “how to tell it all.” Between them, the poet’s mastery and his uncertainty both describe his identity with equal force. He is not only the wise master and teacher but also the humble servant of poetry and its guardian as well. He is always the same person, in whom it is proper to unite, in spirit, contrary yet complementary properties. “I confess to you, my young students,” (“Lecture I”) brings yet another dimension to the self-understanding of a poet: It is of essential importance to expose oneself to others and to admit to the inevitable inadequacy of fulfilling the task of the poet despite one’s honest determination to live the poetic vocation. Confessing the personal shortcomings is the best way of communicating wisdom to oneself and others and thus serves as an indisputable help toward maturing as the self. The poet is engaged in a dialogue which is happening on many levels. It is a dialogue with his self and with his deeply wounded ego. Because of the poet’s sensitivity, he is well aware of his own failures; in fact, he exposes them in poetic form, almost like St Paul, when he boasts of his weakness (2 Cor 12: 1-10).77 Here, suffering has a pedagogical purpose. On the one hand, it demonstrates the unambiguity of human frailty and limitation. On the other hand, it shows that the real greatness of the human being comes not from oneself. Similar to St Paul, for whom “the power of Christ” (2 77

Cf. Miłosz, “To Raja Rao”: “Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness/had to make our agony only more acute./We needed God loving us in our weakness/and not in the glory of beatitude.” Ibid., 254. 481

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Cor 12: 9) and “the all-surpassing power of God” (2 Cor 4: 7) works through him, Miłosz understands his poetic vocation as being merely an instrument in the service of Poetry: “I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing/That is dictated to me and a few others./Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth/Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle/Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed/Is not up to us to inquire, we won’t read it anyway.” (“Secretaries”78) Therefore, the poet must confess because he needs to understand the meaning of his own life and the meaning of Being. This is what poets are for. And there is no other way to fulfill this task but to move beyond literary conventions. Therefore, poetry is and must be a confession. Given the essential tension between the powerlessness and power of language and the human suffering of the poet as unable to deal with reality, the witness of poetry given by the poet is incommensurate with the witness of poetry given by poetry itself. On the Journey to Ourselves Among the many characteristics of human beings, like homo sapiens, ludens, faber, emptor, adorans, ridens, necans, homo quaerens, in particular, expresses that we are a truly searching, exploring, seeking, questing, investigating, and deliberating species. In our searches, we examine, differentiate, and choose. However, we also know that despite our most honorable and laborious efforts the truth of life will remain hidden; not because we are not working hard enough at disclosing it, but because we are humans and our understanding will always be provisionary and open to further interpretation. Poetry does not offer a simple and successful modus operandi in terms of reaching certain goals but promises us to be a witness and companion in our life-long search for our personal identity. Thinking about oneself always occurs wherever one is situated. From there, everything else begins and receives its particularity by being excavated from the universal human struggle for meaning. Poetry proves to be an indefatigable advocate for the dignity of every human being, and as such is an indispensable companion on the journey toward oneself, as it testifies to faith and hope even when overshadowed by darkness. It reminds us that the poetic voice cannot be silenced by any human authority: “You who have harmed a simple man/Laughing at his wrongs/Do not feel safe. The poet remembers./Though you may kill him—a new one /will be born.” (“You Who Have Wronged”)79 Poetry is a witness and a participant in the transformation which happens within the individual search for one’s own identity. What is essential for us is the 78 79

Ibid., 343. Ibid., 103.

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discovery of the truth about ourselves. However, even this discovery is not something permanent. On the contrary, the more we understand about ourselves, the more there is still to be discovered: “To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent./Enough labor for one human life.” (“Learning”)80 The poetic world is a world of unpredictability, insecurity, and even despair. It is often a radical uncertainty regarding who we are, which demonstrates itself as an acute form of disorientation in the world. At the same time, it is a world of hope, trust, and confidence.81 Reading Miłosz, we cannot help but remember that searching for our personal identity is an existential imperative. Already in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, he identified the indispensability of love for his self-understanding: It may be that we Eastern Europeans have been given the lead in this search. By choosing, we had to give up some values for the sake of others, which is the essence of tragedy. Yet only such an experience can whet our understanding so that we see old truth in a new light: when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor in spirit, rather than to choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love.82 Living in physical exile, however beautiful and affluent his surroundings, as in his house overlooking San Francisco Bay, Miłosz never forgets that being “an exiled writer—a stranger for whom the physical exile is really a reflection of a metaphysical, or even religious, spiritual exile” (Nobel Lecture), is not something reserved for his personal life story, but applies to humanity in general. It is a constant struggle to recognize what is foreign within, and what is proper in, one’s own self-understanding. The task for an individual is to re-think one’s own past in order to discover ever-new horizons of meaning.

Miłosz, The Road-side Dog, 60. “Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually.” Czesław Miłosz, “If Only This Could Be Said,” Cross Currents 2 (2002): 70. 82 Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 293. Cf. Miłosz’s poem, “Love”: “Love means to look at yourself/The way one looks at distant things/For you are only one thing among many./And whoever sees that way heals his heart,/Without knowing it, from various ills /A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.” Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, 50. 80 81

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There is something truly mysterious about commemorating past struggles. In the search for personal identity, this commemoration becomes an embodied transformation. Miłosz makes us aware of the imminent danger inherent in the powerful illusion of having full knowledge of oneself. Instead of asking questions, the illusion supplies definitive answers to all questions that arise unbiddenly. Unfortunately, most of those unequivocal and authoritarian answers remind us of running around in a circle and repeating a few pious formulas, as widely accepted by the given political, social, and religious Magisterium. On our way to achieving a more significant understanding of what it means to be a human being, we realize that we are essentially embedded in the world. The self can think only insofar as it thinks in the world. With reference to the poet’s vocation, Miłosz is tirelessly searching for the source of poetic inspiration. He wants to thematize what makes a human being a poet and links this search with the more primordial question of what makes us human beings, who we are. The poetic reflection on what it means to exist in the world offers some essential insights on what it means to be a human being. In a poetic world, there is an essential interdependence between imagination and reality. If we understand poetry as the revelation of Being and at the same time as a revelation of human Dasein, then the world we live in is open to infinite interpretations. The beauty of the imperfection that resides in the task of interpretation seems to be a most rewarding experience in living life as existentia hermeneutica. Each poem can be read and reinvented in as many ways as there are readers, and each act of reading is a participation in the creation of the meaning of Being. With untiring energy throughout his long and accomplished life, Miłosz presents poetry to us as our closest friend in the journey to ourselves. By making itself manifest in our life, its voice is never fixed. Rather, it invites us to ponder the meaning of everything, over and over. And as in a conversation, it encourages us to move, to reposition ourselves, to change (con-version), to see always anew, and to fall in love as for the first time.

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4. Hermeneutic Challenge: The Future of Hermeneutics Our research endeavors and strives to elaborate on the understanding of communication and the impact communication has on the factic life of individuals and society by exploring the ways in which we humans dwell in the world while communicating with ourselves (soliloquium) and others. Philosophical hermeneutics asks the question of what is happening to us when we communicate via verbal, textual, audio, and visual communication. This fundamental hermeneutic question concerns not only our conscious endeavors but also inquiries into what is happening to us in the process of communication beyond our wanting and doing. In other words, it is a reflection on the manifold meaning of communication. It further inspires us to analyze the profound influence communication has on the way a human being lives in the world (In-der-Welt-sein) while connecting and interacting with others (Mitsein). These dedicated, comprehensive, and incisive analyses of communication as the way in which we inhabit the earth are not an end in themselves; understanding communication assists and facilitates informed decision-making in our life. Therefore, the ethical dimension of communication is at the very forefront of the hermeneutics of communication: There is no community without communication and sharing, without an engaging con-versation that turns one’s face toward the face of the other. While the digital age of communication provides us with formerly unthought-of possibilities, it is essential to stress that language is not a tool, however sophisticated a tool for communication, ready and to hand for our use, but rather a medium through which Being discloses itself to human Dasein. Language is a container of and for infinity: We live in language, and by thinking we bring Being to language. The understanding of language as conversation points toward the centrality of the conversation in lingually oriented hermeneutics. Language comes to being in facilitating a process of communication between people. Understanding communication means to understand language, to be aware of the lingual character of human understanding. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” referred to and shared a common perception that the English language is in a poor state, and bemoaned the sheer impossibility of doing anything about it: It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: It is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same 485

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thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: So that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. For Orwell, the degeneration of the language expresses the general decadence of our times. Behind this diagnosis lies the conviction that language shares in the fate of society at large. We are left without any means to counter-run competently and efficiently against the manifold abuses of language. However, this powerlessness is rooted in a notion of language that does not consider it to be a tool for communication that is shaped by people who speak it, but as a complex system naturally growing with a particular society. For Orwell, what is the most evident characteristic of contemporary writing is the mixture of vagueness, sheer incompetence, and indifference to the meaning that is to be conveyed. This alarming decline of a language has economic and political causes. An individual writer cannot be blamed for it. Nevertheless, what is most striking here, is the relationship between an effect and a cause. Language becomes ugly and foolish because it expresses the ugliness and foolishness of the people who use it. Yet the reverse is also true. The general collapse of the language facilitates foolish thinking. It is, therefore, the essential task for the hermeneutics of communication to reawaken the conscious notion of ‘belonging together’ of thinking and speaking: “Thinking and speaking belong together, form an identity. This identity was testified to long ago, insofar as λόγος and λέγειν simultaneously signified talking and thinking.”1 The hermeneutics of communication emphasizes the complexity in the process of conveying meanings. It is not a question of following particular rules of ars poetica, however, as Oscar Wide reminds us: “one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.” And what follows is no less important: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” A special hermeneutic concern is reserved for the importance of the symbol and its indispensability in the difficult task of making tangible with the symbol the immense richness of past experience. Creative writing, which explores the infinite possibility of describing reality and its fullness, contributes to the embodiment of a common meaning by making present the experience of the past that we

1

Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William A. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59.

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share. Therefore, creative writing has an indisputable power, not only of awakening our sensibility to the tradition that we are (Gadamer), but insofar as it is also capable of transforming human consciousness. By participating in the ongoing dialogue (the conversation, which we are, “ein Gespräch, das wir sind,” Hölderlin), we are no longer the same. And it is the transformation that intimately connects us with other human beings on the way to understanding ourselves, as based on the presumption that understanding is primarily self-understanding. This selfunderstanding always occurs in terms of existential possibility, which is our capacity to be by projecting ourselves onto a possibility and thus onto the world. Our projection onto any given possibility happens within the horizon of the existential transformation of our whole being-in-the world. Communication as a conversation is the originator of a community. Bernard Lonergan, a Canadian philosopher, and theologian reminds us in his Method in Theology that “a community... is an achievement of common meaning.” Common meaning is potential when there is a common field of experience; and to withdraw from that common field is to get out of touch. Common meaning is formal when there is common understanding, and one withdraws from that common understanding by misunderstanding, by incomprehension, by mutual incomprehension. Common meaning is actual in as much as there are common judgments, areas in which all affirm or deny in the same manner: And one withdraws from that common judgment when one disagrees... Common meaning is realized by decisions and choices, especially by permanent dedication, in the love that makes families, in the loyalty that makes states, in the faith that makes religion.2 This common meaning must be understood and communicated to others, including future generations, as a clear message, which is a promise for the people and the world of today. Therefore, an important task of the hermeneutics of communication is the deliberation of various aspects of communicating meaning. To that end, we concentrate on the hermeneutic reflection on language. It is language, which constitutes and communicates meanings. Conveying meaning to others allows human beings to share a common field of human experience while discerning historically transmitted patterns of meaning. However, this discernment is not a question of a faithful reconstruction of past meanings, which build the complexity of human culture, but, and foremost, an understanding of the past in its Wirkungsgeschichte, thus involving our present by making explicit our situatedness. The hermeneutic reading is always one of many competing ways of understanding that, which needs to be understood. While freeing the world of the past to be explored by the reader, it substantially contributes to the reader’s enrichment in the process of reading. 2

Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 79. 487

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Meaning, which we share, binds us together as a community. Communication between the members of a community happens within the binaries of disclosure and concealment, clarification and confusion, enrichment, and impoverishment. It is of essential importance to us to contribute to successful communication. Moreover, successful communication means that it makes us aware of the polyphony of understanding: There are always many ways in which we understand what needs to be conveyed and what is transferred as a message to the other (also to oneself as an other). Therefore, the shared common field of human life is in constant need of interpretation. And this is also a field that can be productively explored by creative writing, elaborating on the rich and multiple meanings of human experience and thus appealing to impenetrable longings and desires of the human heart. When Richard of St Victor understands a human person as an existence that is incommunicable (“persona est intellectualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia,”3 and this essential incommunicability (Nichtmitteilbarkeit) und indispensability (Nichtverfügbarkeit) of an intellectual nature express the uniqueness (Einmaligkeit) of a human being, then it is not a closure to communication, but, in fact, an invitation to an ongoing conversation. There is always something, which can be understood of oneself and the other and communicated in a different way. Thus, in the deepest sense, communication leads to an increase, but not predominantly to an increase in information, rather, to an increase in Being (Gadamer). When communicating, we understand more who we are; we become more human. However, and it is Heidegger’s lasting contribution to our human culture, as human beings we have the tendency to flee from ourselves (Flucht des Daseins vor sich selbst) by allowing ourselves to be preoccupied with everything that could possibly distract us from radically confronting ourselves, from addressing the question we are to ourselves (quaestio mihi factus sum, (Augustine, Confessiones IV, 4.9). It is the way in which we exist in the world as Dasein, in the sense of the being-there of Being but also as the not-da-Sein (Wegsein). It is not so much a question of a personal indisposition toward or infidelity to the world, but, and predominantly, a certain unfaithfulness in Dasein’s unconditional devotion to the world. As being-in-the-world, we are always dispersed into definite ways of Being-in, concerned or even overwhelmed with the practicalities of life: “Having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining…. All these kind ways of Being-in have a concern (Besorgen) as their kind of Being.”4 The way in which we live in the world is governed by the rule of idle 3 4

Richard of St Victor, De Trin. IV 18, 181. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 57.

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talk (Gerede). And it should be our foremost concern to act against the dominance that idle talk has over communication in the age of media and information technology. Increasing and refining the techniques of successful communication alone will not lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. On the contrary, this will tempt us to hide behind the concealing potential of idle talk in order to find consolation in Dasein’s self-confidence, which discourages any new inquiry and prevents the genuine task of understanding. What Heidegger is suggesting is a notion of communication as confiteri, in a profound Augustinian way. It is a conversation that transcends the rule of idle talk and, in turn, expects from us that, instead of being disconcerted by the particular differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of our individual discourses, we face ourselves and others in the truth of our Being-in-the-world by living our life as a conversation. To enter into the circular structure of understanding is to recognize the essential temporality of interpretation, the historicity of the community of learning. The poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) provides a wonderful example of concern with the temporality of interpretation in its effort to interpret an object that speaks silently, from the past, as the “foster-child of Silence and slow Time” with a message for the future. Listen to his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

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She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ By interpreting the urn, Keats acknowledges the inaccessibility of the urn’s story to the speaker. Yet the urn speaks to him as it speaks to us. This is a phenomenon that is well known to us when we encounter the work of art. The truth we speak of is the truth that speaks in the work of art, the truth that originates in the work.

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As Gadamer observes: “We must realize that we must first decipher every work of art, and then learn to read it, only then does it begin to speak.” 5 In fact, Gadamer moves beyond Heidegger’s “spoken” claim on us of art toward the imperative relevance of the beautiful.6 While pursuing the interpretive paths, we realize that we follow the interpretive moves of the poet as he interprets the urn and discovers the distance between us and the poem, a distance that is temporal and spacial. Encountering the beautiful, we know that poetry can disclose to us a horizon inaccessible to different modes of human thinking. It can happen while reading Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” and the “Ode to a Nightingale,” where he is very self-conscious concerning his own interpretive practice. It can happen while reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archäischer Torso Apollons.” The poetic imperative: “denn da ist keine Stelle,/ die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern” became a synonym for the transforming power of art. “You must change your life” needs to be read within the horizon of a difficult and ultimately incomplete act of interpretation. It is an invitation to a passionate encounter with that which needs to be understood. Our reading is conditioned by the poem in front of us, and our interpretation is historically conditioned by our tradition. We can only be conscious of our hermeneutic situation when we are conscious of the interpretative character of our existence. When we talk of hermeneutics, we mean hermeneutic experience, which is first and foremost hermeneutic practice. In doing phenomenological hermeneutics, we need to become engaged with a poem, we need to look at a picture, which will open up a new horizon before us. That which needs to be understood (a poem, a picture, etc.) constitutes an immediate horizon for our hermeneutic experience. It is not the subjectivity of the recipient or the creator of art, which is the “subject” of the experience of art; it is the work of art itself. When we allow the work of art to speak to us, we acknowledge the inaccessibility of the artist’s original inspiration. What amazes us is the fact that the work of art speaks to us as much as it spoke to and speaks to its creator. The truth of the work of art enthrals us as recipient or creator; this is the genuine origin of the work of art.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Aktualität des Schönen: Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest,” in idem, Gesammelte Werke 8 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1993), 138: “Die moderne Kunst ist eine gute Warnung zu glauben, man könnte, ohne zu buchstabieren, ohne lesen zu lernen, die Sprache auch der alten Kunst zu hören.” 6 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17-81; Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Gadamer provided the introduction to the 1960 edition of Heidegger’s Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960). See also Robert Bernasconi, “The Greatness of the Work of Art,” in idem, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanties Press, 1993). 5

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The imperative relevance of the artwork is its transforming power. Art invites us to a conversation, which costs us everything. We cannot get partially involved in this conversation. While conversing, we discover the interpretative character of our existence. In art, we can contemplate the universal in images and see the whole of our life as the task which needs to be interpreted. We understand our existence as existentia interpretativa, existentia hermeneutica. The conversation confronts our habitual understanding of life, disclosing it to ourselves and to others in the way we live it. Degas’s notion of art as an exploration of what is happening to us, what is around us and alive, finds its echo in Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics as that which makes us aware of what is happening to us, without intention or reflection, whenever we understand. Phenomenological hermeneutics is concerned with Being, as the privileged way things show themselves as what they are. Doing phenomenological hermeneutics means becoming engaged with a text, a lived experience, or a work of art, as that which opens up a new horizon for us. The artwork makes a claim upon us; it demands of us that we become engaged in the conversation which engendered it. This imperative of the artwork is an experience we all know from encountering an Other, one who needs me to recognize him. I am commanded to carry the Other. Thus, hermeneutic phenomenology becomes ethics and is an important contribution to hermeneutic aesthetics, reminding us that the language of art is the language of the earth and the world, filled with the serial rhythms of the body, “heartbeat, pulse, sweating, menstrual flow, the gluiness of sperm, the squatting position at urinating, the movements of the intestines, together with the sublime needs of the spirit.”7 The seeming triviality of art in the age of mechanical reproduction reminds us that the aesthetic power of the modern and postmodern artwork is grounded in its repetitive nature. As Gadamer has argued, it is not always the task of art to conform to our expectations of beauty. The experience of art meets us, not where we are comfortable, but where are we most challenged. As the artwork confronts us with the familiar, we find ourselves drawn into otherness. Looking for the new prospects in hermeneutics, we are painfully aware of the challenges and possible directions facing philosophical and theological hermeneutics in the immediate future. Hermeneutics and critical theory need to be brought into a creative dialogue with the classical conceptions of systematic theology. Special focus needs to be applied to important new impulses for interpreting these traditions as they emerge from feminism and gender studies. Gadamer is called “the exemplary practitioner of the hermeneutic virtues, both intellectual and moral.”8 His critical development of Heidegger’s notion of Czesław Miłosz, Unattainable Earth, trans. by the author and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1986). 8 Alasdair MacIntyre, in his essay, “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer,” in Malpas, Arnswald, and Kertscher, ed., Gadamer’s Century, 157. 7

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Verstehen, the self-interpretation and projective nature of Dasein, “urbanized the Heideggerian province.”9 With his teacher’s attentiveness to der Ursprung, he advanced his own unique readings of Greek and Latin sources, complementing Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity with a very personal sensitivity to the dialogic and social nature of understanding. In his book, Die Lektion des Jahrhunderts: Ein philosophischer Dialog mit Riccardo Dottori,10 Gadamer emphasizes that dialogue between religions and cultures is humanity’s last chance to preserve itself from the self-destructive forces unleashed by the technological age. As we live always anew in a dialogue, hope becomes our modus existendi. Practicing an ever-deepening understanding of ourselves and the other, we will contribute to a civilization of tolerance and respect for alterity. Gadamer’s hermeneutic enterprise extends as far as a conscientious transformation of the world. The call to interpret is ontological, ethical, and transcendental, for it points to our roots in other worlds: It demands a personal response, not only to being-there but to beinggrateful to Being. Hermeneutics expresses different understandings of crucial philosophical issues. What is decisive for our survival and flourishing, is to address the matter that needs to be thought through in the most comprehensive horizon possible. The way different philosophical problems are addressed is dictated by the inner dynamics of the relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics: a hermeneutician attempts to thematize everything that presents itself to him/her as that which needs to be addressed. As with all our activities, thinking points toward creating a tangible place for our being-in-the-world, a place where we could unrestrainedly explore and realize its possibilities. We know that this place is tangible, yet we cannot adequately describe it. We will always attempt to depict and interpret everything. And we will always remain unsatisfied: not because we lack the means for a describing and descriptive interpretation, but because we are human. The reason for coming up to limits of any kind, when we deal with interpretation, is our human finitude. It is our destiny to learn always afresh to dwell on this earth within this limitation: between description and interpretation. Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s voices have accompanied us over the years. Now they join the chorus of tradition, inviting us to transmit and transform what we have received. We continue to listen for and to these voices. As Heidegger reminds us, absence is a mode of presence. An era has passed! We miss Hans-Georg See Robert Bernasconi, “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer,” Research in Phenomenology 16 (1986): 1-24. Referring to the now famous phrase used by Habermas when referring to Gadamer, “urbanizing [the] Heideggerian province,” Bernasconi interprets Gadamer as departing from Heidegger’s “history of Being” in favor of the Hegelian continuity of history. 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Die Lektion des Jahrhunderts: Ein philosophischer Dialog mit Riccardo Dottori (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002). 9

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Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur very much, yet in our fidelity to the Wirkungsgeschichte of their thinking, we will never be without them: It is our call to uphold the hermeneutic legacy.11

11

The entirety of the volume of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought, Symposium 6, no. 2 (Fall/Automne 2002) is devoted to Gadamer’s philosophical legacy. See also Guy Deniau and Jean-Claude Gens, ed., L’héritage de Hans-Georg Gadamer (Argenteuil: Association Le Cercle herméneutique-Société d'anthropologie phénoménologique et d'herméneutique générale; Paris: diff. SBORG, 2003); Juan Acero, ed., Materiales del Congreso Internacional sobre Hermenéutica Filosófica: El legado de Gadamer (Granada: Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Granada, 2003); Andrzej Przyłębski, ed., Das Erbe Gadamers (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang), 2006.

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Credits/Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ella J.G. Dunkley, MA, Dr. Dr. Małgorzata Hołda, Dr. Daniel Shuster, aDariusz Wiśniewski, S.J. for their invaluable assistance in preparing this book. My thanks also go to Prof. Dr. Maria Luísa Portocarrero F. Silva and Prof. Dr. Ramsey Eric Ramsey who kindly served as the external reviewers of the manuscript and recommended it for publication. The author gratefully acknowledges the kindness of the Publishing Houses in granting the permissions for using previously published materials in the present volume. Below is the detailed indication of the original publication: 1. 1. Doing Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as the Practice of Interpretation - “Hermeneutic Legacy,” Phainomena 15, no. 55-56 (2006): 243-283. Prefaces in: - Heidegger and Hermeneutics, Studia Philosophiae Christianae 1 (2014). - Heidegger and the Arts, Studia Philosophiae Christianae 4 (2013). 1. 2. Hermeneutic Existence as Phronetic Existence: The Radicality of Human Responsibility - “Egzystencja hermeneutyczna jako egzystencja fronetyczna: Radykalizm ludzkiej odpowiedzialności,” [Hermeneutic Existence as Phronetic Existence: Radicality of Human Responsibility], Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny 236, no. 2 (2015): 204-228. 2. Hermeneutic Discovery of a Theological Insight: Toward a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Religion - Hermeneutik und Metaphysik: Bildung im Gespräch zwischen Philosophie, Theologie und Dichtung (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2017), 9-14. 2. 1. The Ambiguities of Proximity: Between Philosophy and Theology 2. 1. 1. The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius - “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2002), 1- 23. 2. 1. 2. Incarnation as the Empowerment of Thinking the Difference: The Understanding of the Logos and the Permanent Task of Interpretation

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- “Inkarnation als die Ermächtigung des Differenzdenkens: Das Logosverständnis und die permanente Herausforderung zur Interpretation,” in Christian Schaller, Michael Schulz, and Rudolf Voderholzer, ed., Mittler und Befreier: Die christologische Dimension der Theologie (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2008), 162-204. 2. 1. 3. Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation - “Thinking Limits: Language and the Event of Incarnation,” Analecta Hermeneutica (2012). 2. 1. 4. The Inexhaustibility of Understanding: From the verbum interius to the verbum entis - “Niewyczerpalność rozumienia: Od verbum interius do verbum entis,” in Jacek Kempa and Marta Giglok, ed., “Słowo, doświadczenie, tajemnica,” (Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski, 2015), 15-28. 2. 2. Thinking Hermeneutically: Opening toward Transcendence as the Imperative of Self-Understanding 2. 2. 1. The Hermeneutics of the Gift: Mutual Interaction Between Philosophy and Theology in Hans Urs von Balthasar - “Hermeneutik der Gabe: Die Wechselwirkung von Philosophie und Theologie bei Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Walter Kasper, ed., Die Logik der Liebe Gottes: Hans-Urs von Balthasar im Dialog (Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 2006), 350-370. 2. 2. 2. Trinity and Understanding: Hermeneutic Insights - “Trinity and Understanding: Hermeneutic Insights,” in Giulio Maspero and Robert Wozniak, ed., Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (New York: Continuum, 2012), 289-307. 2. 2. 3. Gadamer and Theology: From a Work of Art to Faith or Distance with Respect - “Gadamer i teologia: Od dzieła sztuki do wiary albo dystans z respektem,” in Andrzej Przyłębski, ed., Świat, język, rozumienie: Szkice (nie tylko) hermeneutyczne (Włocławek: Expol, 2007), 141-159. 2. 2. 4. The Hermeneutic Understanding of the In-carnation and the Eucharist: Paul Celan’s Tenebrae and the Interpretive Character of Comm-union through Body, Blood, and Image - “Hermeneutyczne rozumienie In-karnacji/W-cielenia i Eucharystii: ‘Tenebrae’ Paul Celana i interpretacyjny charakter kom-unii poprzez ciało, krew i obraz,” Przestrzenie Teorii 21 (2014): 299-308. 496

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2. 2. 5. The Hermeneutics of Existential Attention: Faith is Conversation—Our Matter with God - “Hermeneutyka egzystencjalnego skupienia: Wiara jest rozmową, czyli nasza sprawa z Bogiem,” in Michał Staniszewski, ed., Miasto postępu (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Forum Naukowe, 2007), 187-211. 2. 3. Questioning the Absolute: Toward the New Beginning 2. 3.1. Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief - “Heidegger’s Atheology: The Possibility of Unbelief,” in Sean McGrath and Andrzej Wierciński, ed., A Companion to Heidegger’s “Phenomenology of Religious Life” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 151-180. 2. 3. 2. Infinity and the Challenge of Heideggerian Thinking: Bernhard Welte and the Question of God - “Infinity and the Challenge of Heideggerian Thinking: Bernhard Welte and the Question of God,” Analecta Hermeneutica (2010). 2. 3. 3. Martin Heidegger’s “Divine God” in the Thinking of Bernhard Welte and Gustav Siewerth - “Martin Heideggers ‘göttlicher Gott’ bei Bernhard Welte und Gustav Siewerth, in Markus Enders and Holger Zaborowski, ed., Phänomenologie der Religion: Zugänge und Grundfragen (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 2004), 525- 541. 2. 3. 4. The Destiny or Fate of Metaphysics: The Empowerment of Thinking and the Forgetfulness of Being - “Das Geschick oder Das Schicksal der Metaphysik: Die Ermächtigung des Denkens und die Seinsvergessenheit,” in Michael Schulz, ed., Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes (Freiburg i.Br.: Katholische Akademie, 2005), 75-109. 2. 4. Understanding as the Happening of Truth 2. 4. 1. The Lingual Mediation of Being and the Infinite Process of Understanding: Gadamer’s Radicalization of Heidegger’s Question of Being - “The Lingual Mediation of Being and the Infinite Process of Understanding: Gadamer’s Radicalization of Heidegger’s Question of Being,” Studia Philosophiae Christianae 50, no. 1 (2014): 249-275. 2. 4. 2. Phronesis as the Mediation between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility - “Phronesis as the Mediation between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility,” in The Hermeneutic Rationality/La rationalité herméneutique (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), 73-86. 2. 4. 3. The Truth of Hermeneutic Experience 497

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- “The Truth of Hermeneutic Experience,” Analecta Hermeneutica (2009). 2. 4. 4. The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher, and the Philosophizing Believer - “The Heterogeneity of Thinking: Paul Ricoeur, the Believing Philosopher and the Philosophizing Believer,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003), xv-xxxiv. 2. 4. 5. The Courage to Ask and the Humility to Listen: Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology - “The Courage to Ask and the Humility to Listen: Hermeneutics between Philosophy and Theology,” Analecta Hermeneutica (2010). 3. Poetic Disclosure: Language as the Medium of the Hermeneutic Experience 3. 1. Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment - “Poetry Between Concealment and Unconcealment,” Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 14, no. 27 (2005): 173-204. 3. 2. Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement “Czesława Miłosza granice granic: Życie jako zdumienie” [Czesław Miłosz’s Borders of the Borders: Life as Amazement], Kwartalnik Opolski 57, no. 4 (2011): 3-18. 3. 3. Nothing Shall Be Forgotten: Poetry and Ways of Understanding - “Nichts wird vergessen sein: Das Dichtersein und die Wege des Verstehens,” Heinrich-Seuse-Jahrbuch (2008): 121-135. 3. 4. Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity - “Confusion of Voices: The Crucial Dilemmas of Being a Human Being, Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry, and the Search for Personal Identity,” in Barbara Weber, Karlfriedrich Herb, Petra Schweitzer, Eva Marsal, and Takara Dobashi, ed., Cultural Politics and Identity: The Public Space of Recognition (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 147-174. 4. Hermeneutic Challenge: The Future of Hermeneutics - “Hermeneutic Legacy,” Phainomena 15, no. 55-56 (2006): 243-283. Prefaces in: - Jacek Dąbała, Mystery and Suspense in Creative Writing, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, vol. 7, ed., Andrzej Wierciński (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012). 498

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- Marcelino Agis Villaverde, Knowledge and Practical Reason: Paul Ricoeur’s Way of Thinking, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, vol. 5, ed., Andrzej Wierciński (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011). - Jennifer Dyer, Serial Images: The Modern Art of Iteration, International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, vol. 4, ed., Andrzej Wierciński (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011).

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Abbreviations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke GW1: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986). GW2: Hermeneutik II: Wahrheit und Methode: Ergänzungen. Register (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986). GW3: Neuere Philosophie, I: Hegel. Husserl. Heidegger (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987). GW4: Neuere Philosophie II: Probleme, Gestalten (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987). GW5: Griechische Philosophie I (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985). GW6: Griechische Philosophie II (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985). GW7: Griechische Philosophie III: Plato im Dialog (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991). GW8: Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993). GW9: Ästhetik und Poetik II: Hermeneutik im Vollzug (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993). GW10: Hermeneutik im Rückblick (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1995). Abbreviations of Heidegger’s Works BW. 1993. Basic Writings (ed. David Farrell Krell) (revised and expanded edition). New York: HarperCollins. CT. 1992. The Concept of Time / Der Begriff der Zeit (trans. William McNeill) (German-English edition). Oxford: Blackwell. ID. 1957. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Günther Neske. English: 1960. Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference (trans. Kurt F. Leidecker). New York: Philosophical Library Inc. GA1. 1978. Frühe Schriften. 1912-16 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 1). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. GA5. 1977. Holzwege. 1935-46 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 5). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2002. Off The Beaten Track (ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes). Cambridge University Press. 500

Credits/Acknowledgments

GA6.1. 1996. Nietzsche I. 1936-39 (ed. Brigitte Schillbach) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 6, Teil 1). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1979. Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art (trans. David F. Krell). New York: Harper & Row. GA6.2. 1984. Nietzsche II (ed. Brigitte Schillbach) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 6, Teil 2) Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1984. Nietzsche, vol. II: The Eternal Return of the Same (trans. David Farrell Krell). New York: Harper & Row. GA9. 1996. Wegmarken (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 9). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1998. Pathmarks (ed. William McNeill). Cambridge University Press. GA10. 1997. Der Satz vom Grund. 1955-56 (ed. Peter Jaeger) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 10). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1991. The Principle of Reason (trans. Reginald Lilly). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA12. 1950-59. Unterwegs zur Sprache. 1912-59 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 12). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1971. On the Way to Language (trans. Peter D. Herz). New York: Harper & Row. GA13. 1985. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. 1910-36 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 13). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. GA15. 1986. Seminare. 1951-73 (ed. Curd Ochwadt) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 15). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2003. Four Seminars (trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA16. 2000. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. 1910-1976 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 16). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. GA17. 1994. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. 1923-24 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 17). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. GA19. 1992. Platon: Sophistes. 1924/25 (ed. Ingeborg Schüßler) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 19). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1997. Plato’s Sophist (trans. Richard Rojcewicz). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA20. 1992. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. 1925 (ed. Peter Jaeger) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 20). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio 501

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Klostermann. English: 1992. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (trans. Theodore Kisiel). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA24. 1997. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 1927 (ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 24). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1982. Basic Problems of Phenomenology (trans. Albert Hofstadter). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA26. 1990. Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. 1928 (ed. Klaus Held) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 26). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (trans. Michael Heim). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA40. 1983. Einführung in die Metaphysik. 1935 (ed. Petra Jaeger) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 40). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2000. An Introduction to Metaphysics (trans. Ralph Manheim). New Haven: Yale University Press. GA56/57. 1999. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. 1919 (ed. Bernd Heimbüchel) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 56/57). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2000. Towards the Definition of Philosophy (trans. Ted Sadler). New York and London: Continuum. GA58. 1992. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 1919-20 (ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 58). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. GA60. 1995. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. 1917-21 (ed. Claudius Strube) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 60). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life (trans. Matthias Fritsche and Jennifer Anna Gosetti). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA61. 1994. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. 1921-22 (ed. Walter Bröcker und Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 61). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 2001. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. Initiation into Phenomenological Research (trans. Richard Rojcewicz). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA63. 1995. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität. 1923 (ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 63). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1999. Ontology and the Hermeneutics of Facticity (trans. John van Buren). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press.

502

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GA65. 1994. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). 1936-1938 (ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 65). Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. English: 1999. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. GA66. 1997. Besinnung. 1938/39 (ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 66). English: 2006. Mindfulness. (trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary). London: Athlone. GA77. 1995. Feldweg-Gespräche. 1944-45 (ed. Ingrid Schüßler) (Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 77). Frankfurt a.M..: Vittorio Klostermann. PIA. 1989. ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation’ in Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6: 228-69. English: 2002. ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle. An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation’ (trans. John van Buren) in S: 111-145. PSL. ‘Das Problem der Sünde bei Luther’ in Bernd Jaspert (ed.) Sachgemäße Exegese: Die Protokolle aus Rudolf Bultmanns Neutestamentlichen Seminaren 1921-51. Marburg: Elwert, 1996. 28-33. English: ‘The Problem of Sin in Luther’ (trans. John van Buren) in S: 105-110. S. 2002. Supplements. From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (ed. John van Buren). Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. SD. 1976. Zur Sache des Denkens (2nd edition). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. English: 1972. On Time and Being (trans. Joan Stambaugh). NewYork, N.Y.: Harper & Row. SZ. 1993. Sein und Zeit (17th edition). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. English: 1962. Being and Time (trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row. US. 1982. Unterwegs zur Sprache (7th edition). Pfullingen: Neske. Reprinted as GA12. VA. 1978. Vorträge und Aufsätze. 1954. Pfullingen: Günther Neske.

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