Hermeneutics and spirituality
26
Jun
The fundamental reason for hermeneutics is from the beginning to resolve the
question of the relationship between people and objects, whether they are real or immaterial (virtual is something else), and as these relate to our mental world, I say subjective by idealists, but linked to them.
If originally the idea of intersubjectivity arises, through dialogue and proximity to idealism, what contemporary philosophy will recover is being-for-Outrem, or Empathy, and here it is not a question of cordial or generous relations, but what comes of philosophical hermeneutics, such as the merging of horizons, and in this empathy can be put as having something “spiritual”.
Not by chance Edith Stein, one of Husserl’s disciples, who was even his secretary, had empathy before her religious life (she became a Carmelite sister, even though she was Jewish), but it is not difficult to make a connection between the two moments in Stein’s life.
Edith Stein will reflect that what she calls “the pure me” (or what I prefer the deepest of me) is in line with the Outrem, in three singular ways analyzed by the author: the experience in the field of pure investigation, which is always reports to the two poles of consciousness: subjective (noesis) and objective (noema), in the second it differentiates the phenomenological approach from the empathic act from other approaches made in the empirical field (genetic, psychological, moral, ethical, etc.) and the third despite ability to learn from the experience of others what constitutes the self.
The “I” always recognizes the flow of ipseidade (which is proper, correlated to hecceidade, principle of Duns Scotto) and this leads to otherness (differentiates it from the other). However, if this relationship is seen within the hermeneutic phenomenology, epoché (putting concepts in parentheses) differs from the Cartesian code because it is not about the ego, as it is intuitively possible to understand emphatically the experience of the Other, but not in an original way , and this means Identity.
We would have difficulties to affirm a unity of the Self, of its individuality, if the relations that are called “intersubjective” (I don’t like the name for its idealistic origin), because we cannot identify where the freedom and responsibility of each individual begins and ends.
To look at the other as conscience (which always has the intention directed towards something) means to become aware of me in that aspect towards which conscience is directed, unlike finding the “middle ground”, “the truth”, what happens later Heidegger and Gadamer called it a fusion of horizons, so the dialogue presupposes a philosophical hermeneutics, in the sense of diving into the horizon of others and rediscovering oneself, requiring an epoché.
It is interesting that in the biblical readings Jesus asks the disciples who he was for them*, and they gradually discover him and never fully, Jesus also looks and analyzes each one to form a community with them, some see a unilateral relationship, but it is dialogics.
*Mt 16, 13-14: Jesus asked his disciples: “Who do men say that I am the Son of Man?” They replied, “Some say it is John the Baptist; others that is Elias; still others, that is Jeremiah or one of the prophets”.
