Interreligious Hermeneutics

Catherine Cornille, Christopher Conway, Cornille, Conway

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781608996698, 9781498212816
• eBook ISBN: 9781630874254
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Catherine Cornille, Boston College David Tracy, University of Chicago Divinity School Werner Jeanrond, University of Glasgow Marianne Moyaert, University of Leuven John Maraldo, University of North Florida Reza Shah-Kazemi, Institute of Ismaili Studies Malcolm David Eckel, Boston University Joseph S. O'Leary, Sophia University John P. Keenan, Middlebury College Hendrik Vroom, VU University Amsterdam Laurie Patton, Emory University

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Western Hermeneutics and Interreligious Dialogue

David Tracy

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to show how contemporary Western hermeneutics may clarify certain central aims of modern interreligious dialogues. The clarifications are fourfold in logically sequential order: first, how a hermeneutics understands what dialogue is and what it is not (section 1); second, how there is a need, at crucial times in dialogue, for the interruption of the dialogue by various hermeneutics of suspicion (section 2); third, what are basic limits to hermeneutical-dialogical understanding; fourth, how does experiencing a limit to dialogical-hermeneutical understanding also open dialogue to new nondialogical ways of thinking in the transcendent-immanent realm of the Infinite, the Incomprehensible, the Impassable, and even, in a relatively recent candidate for naming that realm opened at the limit, the Impossible (section 3)? The present paper is philosophical with a few theological moments. My hope is that these reflections on Western hermeneutics may serve as a modest heuristic guide for interreligious dialogues.

Hermeneutics: The Model of Conversation-Dialogue

In modern Western philosophy, the most persuasive model for interpretation-hermeneutics remains the Gadamerian hermeneutical model of conversation.1 This model remains basic but also in need of several qualifications, expansions, and even radical corrections or interruptions, especially for interreligious dialogue.

First, however, the model itself and several frequently overlooked points about its radicality and even strangeness. The basic model is this: the event of understanding happens to us through dialogue; i.e., we are taken over by the question of the dialogue through the logic of questioning. That logic is the logic of question and answer between dialogue partners (whether two conversation partners or a reader and a text, symbol, ritual, historical event, etc.).

Moreover, in this Gadamerian model, the logic of question and answer that constitutes a dialogue is ontologically a particular kind of game. As in any game (e.g., sports or drama), the conversation is not ruled by the consciousness of the players. Indeed, a self-conscious actor destroys the communal drama by a refusal or inability to enter a game other than his/her own ego drama. The player must abandon self-consciousness to the logic of the to-and-fro movement of the game (in conversation, the to-and-fro movement of the logic of question and answer in questioning). Then one experiences the ontological reality of being-played, as when we say in sports games that we are “in the zone.”

If the key to dialogue is the logic of question and answer, not self-consciousness or Schleiermacher’s self-conscious empathy,2 then the emphasis of dialogue must shift from the self to the other—the person, the text, the symbol, the event—that is driving all the questioning in the dialogue. Clearly, in this model, the self is not in control. Indeed, the self should be as fully attentive and as critically intelligent as possible but through the dialogue acknowledge itself as not in control of the dialogue, indeed never fully self-present or self-transparent. Rather the self-in-dialogue-with-the-other through the “game” of conversation is always a self interpreting, discovering, constituting (i.e., not inventing) an ever-changing self. That self—changing through conversation—manifests the self’s finitude and historicity. First, finitude: the self can never, contra Hegel, achieve self-transparency or full self-presence; that remains an infinite, never-completed task. Second, the self-in-dialogue always finds its self-reflective understanding exceeded by the event of dialogical understanding it experiences in the dialogical event of understanding the other. Dialogical understanding is an event that happens; it is a blow to ordinary self-reflective consciousness.

In sum, Gadamer emphasizes as much as Heidegger and Derrida (whom we shall examine in sections 2 and 3) the following four shared characteristics of modern Western hermeneutics:

(1) a strong acknowledgment of the finitude and historicality of all human understanding;

(2) the all-important fact that the focus of hermeneutical philosophy must be on the other as an alterity, not as a projected other of the self;

(3) the hermeneutical self experiences an excess to its ordinary self-understanding that it cannot control through conscious intentionality or through desire for the same. Therefore each self must “let go” to the dialogue itself;

(4) the dialogue works as a dialogue (and not an exercise in self-aggrandizement) only if the other is allowed—through the dynamic of the to-and-fro movement of questioning—to become in the dialogue itself a genuine other, not a projected other. A projected other is an unreal “other” projected upon some real other by the ego’s needs or desires to define itself. An example of nondialogue: the frightening history of Christian anti-Semitism began with the supersessional New Testament Christian antisynagogue refusal consciously or unconsciously to allow the religious Jew to be other than a projected other used to define what the Christian is not, viz., a Jew whom the Christian supersedes.

These four characteristics are shared by Gadamer and post-Gadamer hermeneutics despite the other important differences we shall analyze below among Gadamer and Ricoeur, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, and others. These four characteristics demonstrate that in this Western model of hermeneutics, a genuine dialogue focused on the other and on the logic of questioning as the peculiar game of dialogue must involve a willingness to put oneself and one’s tradition(s), or the fragments of a tradition, at risk. Then one either encounters the other (Gadamer-Buber) or exposes oneself to the other (Levinas-Derrida). This movement also implies that one enters a dialogue with one’s critical consciousness vigilant and with a knowledge and respect for one’s own traditions.

To risk oneself in dialogue does not mean to enter with either a lack of self-respect or a lack of knowledge of and affirmation of at least the most important fragments (or, better, frag-events) of one’s traditions. Gadamer’s now-classic model for genuine dialogue may well inform (although it is not identical with) the dialogical elements in interreligious traditional negotiations. In the latter honorable, even noble and necessary discussions in our new global situation, one need not demand the full risk of a full-fledged dialogue. Within what we label Islam and Christianity or Buddhism and all other major religious traditions, we must always remember that these names are practically useful for generalization and abstraction purposes but are not concretely accurate. Each general “tradition” is a general label for multiple traditions within the tradition. Every pluralism is sometimes considered a positive reality by participants but sometimes not, especially not by authorities within the tradition. Consider, for example, the more conflictual rather than welcoming assessment of mysticism in ethical monotheistic Judaism before Scholem’s scholarship on Kabbalah; the still-unresolved debate on Sufi mysticisms in Islam; and the major rethinking of the complexity of medieval Christianity since the extraordinary discoveries or reevaluations of the Dionysian apophatic and mystical traditions and especially in the rediscovered medieval women mystics.

There are other valuable exercises besides genuine dialogue as described above. For example, there are surely dialogical elements in most official interreligious dialogues even if they do not fully fit the full model of hermeneutical dialogue. Otherwise religious participants would not be involved at all in any attempt at dialogue. Fundamentalists in every tradition are almost never dialogically involved. Contemporary admirable, indeed necessary, official interreligious dialogues do not usually involve the participants in much risk of “conversion” to the other. Rather, they are perhaps better described as dialogical negotiations clarifying the genuine differences and similarities of the official dialogical partners. Official dialogues are usually guided by a common religious ideal become a common question. For example, is the religious ideal of “love of God and love of neighbor” a shared religious ideal between Christianity (in its several forms) and Islam (in its several forms)? Clearly there are genuinely dialogical moments involved in official dialogues in the attention to the other as both different but possibly sharing some common or similar religious and/or ethical ideals.

In Gadamer’s hermeneutical model there are four other less-central but important elements to be mentioned (and, in my judgment, affirmed) before moving on to certain problems and interruptions of the Gadamerian model of dialogue.

First, it is important to note that despite many misreadings of his position, Gadamer is not presenting a methodology for dialogue although there are, more than he admits, clear implications for a dialogical method. As Gadamer makes clear over and over again, he is presenting a philosophical not methodological analysis of dialogue as constituted by a peculiar questioning, to-and-fro movement. This claim is not primarily epistemological but ontological. His dialogical model focuses, therefore, on the ontological event of dialogical understanding that happens over and above our intentions, our desires, our needs.

Second, a major Gadamerian emphasis is his elaborate argument against historicism,3 the claim to reconstruct the past as it really was. In place of historicism Gadamer proposes a historically conscious (not historicist) hermeneutic. For example, there is Gadamer’s theory of Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein: i.e., there is always an excess of history as tradition (as consciously or unconsciously present) in all hermeneutical-dialogical understanding; for Gadamer, we can never escape this history of effects in the tradition any more than we can escape our own shadows. Moreover, we should be as aware, (i.e., historically conscious) of our own historical context as possible in a manner analogous to Michel Foucault’s call for a “history of the present” as a major part of all historical work.

Third, this Gadamerian emphasis (overemphasis?) on the inevitable reality of history as tradition and as a history of effects in all understanding leads to his emphasis on language. A linguistic emphasis is common to all modern hermeneutical thinkers; even Schleiermacher shares it with his intriguing notion of “grammar” as a counterpart to “empathy” and “divination.”4 In fact, all hermeneutical thinkers (whether self-described as hermeneutical or not) are oriented to language. Hermeneutics is part of the more general “linguistic turn” in both analytic and Continental philosophy. In hermeneutics the major contemporary influence is Heidegger and his very different trajectories on language: either in his Being and Time period where hermeneutical understanding is a basic existential of Dasein; or alternatively, in his later period where certain poetic and religious language evokes a call for a “new poetic or meditative” noncalculative thinking.5 Heidegger dropped his earlier emphasis on hermeneutics for reasons we shall see below. In addition, the “late Heidegger” trajectory for a new posthermeneutical way of thinking is the one that Derrida also attempts. But for Gadamer, his hermeneutical-dialogical model of understanding remains, contra Heidegger and Derrida, the philosophical key. Gadamer even claims a universality for his model as applied to all understanding, not only explicit dialogues. Gadamer plausibly insists that insofar as we understand, we understand through language and therefore hermeneutically; insofar as our understanding is always finite and historical, we necessarily understand differently than did the original author or the original audience of a text.

Gadamer is both a major contemporary philosopher (here his mentor was Heidegger) and a classical philologist (here his mentor was Friedlander). Gadamer’s most original philosophical work includes both his now-classic Truth and Method and his dialogical interpretations (contra Heidegger) of Plato and Neoplatonism.6 As both philosopher and philologist, Gadamer makes the intriguing suggestion that modern hermeneutics is basically a historically conscious (i.e., modern) expression of classical rhetoric.

Our historicality is carried by many social, cul...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Hermeneutics in Dialogue
• Chapter 1: Western Hermeneutics and Interreligious Dialogue
• Chapter 2: Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love
• Chapter 3: Absorption or Hospitality: Two Approaches to the Tension between Identity and Alterity
• Chapter 4: A Call for an Alternative Notion of Understanding in Interreligious Hermeneutics
• Chapter 5: Light Upon Light?The Quran and the Gospel of St. John
• Chapter 6: “Show Me Your Resurrection”: Preaching on the Boundary of Buddhism and Christianity
• Chapter 7: Skillful Means as a Hermeneutic Concept
• Chapter 8: The Promise and Peril of Interfaith Hermeneutics
• Chapter 9: Hermeneutics and Dialogue Applied in the Establishment of a Western Department of Islamic Theology
• Chapter 10: The Doorkeeper, the Choirboy, and the Singer of Psalms: Notes on Narratives of Pragmatic Pluralism in the Twenty-first Century
• Contributors