Unlike speculative dialectics, hermeneutic practice of the kind also pursued throughout this book constitutes more of an ethos than a method. It pivots on our receptivity to phenomena as they give themselves in intuition, rather than being seized by conceptual means and extruded as a dialectical sequence of “reflexive determinations.” At its heart, hermeneutic practice acknowledges that, far from being self-evident and univocal, “the meaning of the determinate has to be interpreted.” Put differently, hermeneutics does not so much reject Hegel’s conception of Reason (Vernunft) as self-regulating, and of Being as speculatively self-determining, as it reminds us of the dialogic nature of all philosophical insight. Knowledge does not arise out of a play of mutually exclusive, monologic claims and incompatible standpoints. Rather, it presupposes an essential porousness and receptivity presupposed by the very notion of rational, specifically human agency, that is, a “willingness to let something communicate itself to us [sich etwas sagen lassen zu wollen].” As a practice that, to an extent, always contains an aleatory element, hermeneutics turns on the cultivation of epistemic humility, somewhat analogous to the “cloud of unknowing” into which medieval contemplatives seek to enter. On this model, the visible forms that give themselves in intuition mediate a reality that is only ever accessible per analogiam, and can never be claimed “in and for itself,” as Hegel would have it. Phenomenology and hermeneutics do not regard mediation as a matter of historical contingency, that is, as provisional scaffolding waiting to be disassembled once speculative reason, having parsed being and appearance, declares itself fully self-aware and pronounces the world as exhaustively “determined” (bestimmt). The drama of phenomenality, of manifestation as an irreducible event, reminds us is that we must not “identify intelligibility, indeed being at all, with determinacy” and that, appearance is an integral, not an accidental, feature of “the intimate strangeness of being.” Transposed into a theological language that will feature prominently throughout this book, this is to say that an apophatic account of divine self-concealment in the order of images and, more generally, appearances, far from constituting an obstacle to be remedied by dialectics, furnishes the very source that calls forth and guides all hermeneutic reflection. Hence, when understood as a necessary extension of phenomenological description, hermeneutics amounts to a “showing of its own kind; it is a showing-at … Speaking is connected fundamentally with perceptual manifesting, for speech after all points to things. Moreover, only if hermeneutic speech understands itself as responding to something antecedently given, as the recipient of a gift rather than claiming possession of an object, will it be able to give back what it has received from tradition in augmented form.
Finally, a word may be in order as regards this book’s somewhat fluid interdisciplinary approach. Prompting this book’s persistent back-and-forth movement between phenomenological description, literary and art-historical, as well as theological and philosophical reflection is the fact that the dynamism of images manifestly exceeds the scope of any one of these disciplinary formations. For one thing, wherever we inquire into intuitive or “pre-predicative” (Husserl) forms of experience, such as the call-and-response relationship between image and consciousness, soon confronts the fact that no single method is ever adequate to the task at hand. For by its very nature, method is a discursive construct, whereas visual cognition is always tinged with (though not reducible to) a pre- or extra-linguistic, intuitive dimension or what Patristic authors such as Gregory of Nyssa or pseudo-Dionysios call “spiritual senses.” To reject that pre-discursive aspect as a priori unreal, simply because it does not accommodate itself to the conceptual schemes and methodological protocols of Cartesian and post-Cartesian, rationality, would obviously to beg the question of the image on a grand scale. In fact, there always remains in humanistic inquiry, taking that phrase in its widest sense, an aleatory and improvisational element that shows the knowledge produced to be as much a function of discernment as of some particular method. Avoiding the equivocal Greek term technê, which straddles the boundaries between methodical “making” and inspired “creating,” Hans-Georg Gadamer had opted for the Latin subtilitas so as to distinguish between three distinct yet contiguous levels of hermeneutic practice: explication, interpretation, and application. Far from considering this state of affairs as a predicament, I regard it as an opportunity for hermeneutic discernment and creative reflection that is entirely apposite to this book’s topic and, more generally, as something to be embraced rather than resisted. Hence, too, this book does not purport to offer a systematic “theory of the image,” nor for that matter does it attempt to outline a Neoplatonist or theological account of beauty. Instead, theological and philosophical insights are meant to arise more organically from a series of focused hermeneutic studies of images and their unique power and efficacy.
