James Risser's Contemporary Hermeneutics

Abstract

beautiful strangeness ( Seivov) of human lifethe beautiful strange power that is human lifeJust beneath the surface of James Risser's The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), haunting almost every paragraph and certainly every chapter-whose overt themes are understanding and language-lie two recurrent themes that the book is hardly able to contain. These are the theme of community and the theme of a beautiful strangeness. I will try to follow the thread of these themes and say something about how Risser weaves them together into a tapestry of words that push the limits of Gadamerian hermeneutics in new directions.In the last and most beautifully written chapter of this book, Risser discusses the of beauty. Something of the nature of beauty that l had not previously considered is struggling to come to the fore in this chapter. It becomes clear in his analysis that this flash of beauty cannot be appropriated into an appearance and is immune to dialectical absorption. Risser argues that this non-dialectical, sudden moment of upsurgence that belongs to beauty and thereby to all that radiates in the light of beauty, that is, all that appears, this sudden flash cannot itself be articulated because it is the origination of language. the origination of language, the flash of beauty takes place as the contraction of itself into a null point, befitting every ( 111 ). As the origin of language, this null point is the origination of connection and community. This inarticulable unity that gives itself without exhausting itself is the source of illumination in which things appear in their manifold shining and in their interconnectedness.An example of this inarticulable unity at the heart of language is exposed by Risser in his discussion of the poetic word. Risser discusses the poetic word as opening discourse in a way that preserves the unity and integrity of the creative word and yet hears in the singularity of word itself the generation of language. Risser says: In ordinary discourse we continually run ahead in thought searching for the meaning, letting 'the appearance of the words fall away as we listen and read for the meaning being conveyed,' while in poetic discourse each and every word has meaning in its sonority (105). I understand this to say that the unity of a poetic word resonates within itself the whole of language; and in this way, the word generates the text. How is it that the poetic word in its self-articulation and what Risser calls its self-authenticating power is able to repeat itself sonorously and be heard as language? Risser's answer is that we need to recover the vitality of language if we are once again to regain our capacity to hear in the unity of the poetic word its generative power as language, to hear how language generates itself out of the poetic word, how the one becomes many, how the apparent word becomes meaning. Risser suggests that this recovery of the poetic word occurs not through our own devices but by virtue of the beauty that belongs to the poetic word. The nature of to kciXov, the beautiful, is kciAeTv, to call (107). The beautiful is the call of being and this call has an appealing and enticing character. It is this calling us forth to be that is the origin of language. The voice of this call quickens those who hear the poetic word. And calls forth what is into shining appearance.It is important to notice here that beauty arises in the shining of things and belongs to this appearance and self-showing and yet is uncapturable in it; its shining always exceeds. The flash of beauty is Risser's term for this excessive moment of the beautiful that belongs to all things of beauty. It seems to me that Risser's hermeneutics is always in one way or another attempting to get at this ungraspable unity that belongs to the plurality of beings that appear. It is for Risser a question of participation: how is it that what appears participates in the illumination of beauty in a way that lets it appear alongside and with others without destroying its singularity; indeed how is it that the oneness of beauty constitutes this singularity as the very basis of community? …