In this spiral of descent and ascent, meanings that arise are continuously undone. Alchemical hermeneutics is not about solutions but about dis-solutions; it is about “learning how to hold onto the meanings we make by letting go of them. They are provisional, always for the moment, and for the moment that has to be enough” (Romanyshyn & Goodchild, 2003, p. 34). Alchemical hermeneutics is also about anamnesis, the recollection of what has been left behind, neglected, marginalized and unfinished; its gaze is the gesture of the backwards glance, which returns to what still calls out to be done and remembers what has been forgotten for the sake of a new beginning.

Deepening Understanding

Now that we have the “lay of the land” of hermeneutics, we can proceed to explore a few of the concepts that will be central to my dissertation, for, as we shall see, hermeneutics and play are related and many of these concepts are interconnected. True to Hermes’s nature, they are not always straightforward but seem to intertwine and interpenetrate. As in the hermeneutic circle, there is a to and from movement between them, so I begin with the dialogical nature of hermeneutics, and examine the connections of experience and art, before moving on to the notions surrounding the fusion of horizons and then proceed with a discussion of the importance of application and play, and end by elucidating image, reverie and the autonomy of the soul.

Dialogic Nature

All of the functions of the word hermeneuin (to say, interpret, translate) spring from the oral tradition and remind us that hermeneutics seeks to open a dialog between the interpreter and the work. As Palmer (1969) reminds us: “Literary works are human voices out of the past that must somehow be brought to life. Dialogue, not dissection opens up the world of a literary work.” They are not objects of analysis calling for disinterested objectivity, but “humanly created texts that speak” (p. 7). What is needed to understand a literary work is “not a scientific kind of knowing which flees from existence into a world of concepts; it is an historical encounter which calls forth personal experience of being here in the world” (p. 10). Although Palmer is referring to literary works, his comments apply to all art. Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) counsel: “A work of art, or a dream, or an historical event require more than cause-effect analysis or reductive explanations. They require description and interpretation, which stays rooted within the human experience and the cultural-historical contexts of expression” (pp. 26- 27).

In dialogue, as in understanding and play, there is a back and forth movement, a questioning that takes place. According to Gadamer (1975): “To ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled . . . . The openness of the question is not boundless. It is limited by the horizon of the question.” (pp. 326-327) A question always has a certain direction and as Palmer (1969) notes, “the sense of the question already contains the direction in which the answer to that question must come” (p. 199).

Questioning is being open to the subject matter and what it has to say, as “questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of things” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 338). Gadamer discusses this back and forth reciprocal relationship using the metaphor of a conversation, revealing that it is “more than a metaphor, it is a memory of what originally was the case, to describe the work of hermeneutics as a conversation with the text” (p. 331). He further notes the autonomous nature of conversation: “no one knows what will ‘come out’ in a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like a process which happens to us.” Gadamer concludes that “All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language used in it bears its own truth within it—i.e. , that it reveals something which henceforth exists” (p. 345).

Experience and Art

Experience is the immediacy of life as we meet it, which exists before the subject/object split. The world and our experience of it are given together; experience is something you cannot step out of. Subject and object do not exist independently of each other, and this is what hermeneutics recognizes—the subjective involvement of the interpreter. From quantum physics we understand that the observer has an effect on the observed. The observed also has an effect of the observer. In hermeneutics, the text is allowed to speak on its own terms and has an effect on the reader or interpreter.

Jeffrey Miller (2001) reminds us that both depth psychology and hermeneutics call us to move beyond Cartesian dualism, the “either/or thinking of the empirical scientific method that reduces the world into opposites and splits the subject from the object, organizing the world into opposing camps: mind/body, spirit/matter, self/other, interior/exterior, idea/fact.” This dualism removes depth by forcing all reality into two dimensions, directing “our attention away from the limitlessness of the cosmos, the connections ‘between’ that create the fabric of ontology . . . . It also banishes liminality by demanding distance; liminality requires proximity and connection both of which are denied by Cartesian duality” (pp. 12-13). By including human nature in the interpretive process, hermeneutics challenges the distancing between subject and object that Cartesian philosophy constellated (Slater, 2001). Play, as we shall see, seeks connection and proximity, to bring back liminality and disappear, or at least, perforate the Cartesian slash.

Expression is what springs from and reflects experience, since experience is pre-reflexive consciousness (Palmer, 1969). Art is thus the embodiment of experience: “Artwork doesn’t point to the author at all, but to life itself . . . for this reason, artwork is the most reliable, enduring, and fruitful object of the human studies” (Palmer, pp. 113-4). Art is not only aesthetic, but a sharing of insights and discovery; through art one can come to understand oneself and the world. Artwork is a disclosure of being, or a window to the sacred realm. “A great work of art speaks and in doing so brings a world to stand. This speaking, like all true saying, simultaneously reveals and conceals truth” (Palmer, p. 159). Truth or aletheia, Palmer notes, is uncoveredness or disclosedness. “The essence of art lies, not in mere craftsmanship but in disclosure. To be a work of art means to open up a world. To interpret a work of art means to move into the open space which the work has brought to stand” (Palmer, pp. 160-1). This open space is important and in German the word for it is linked to play. Gallagher (1992) explicates:

The hermeneutical situation involves . . . what in German is called a spielraum, literally, “room to play,” or figuratively “freeplay.” Interpretation requires some clearance (Abstand) in which to play. Gadamer refers to this clearance as Zeitenabstand “temporal distance.” Interpretation, one might say, requires some room in which to move in its dialectic between the familiar and the unfamiliar. (p. 124)

Art performs a function that requires someone for whom and upon whom the function is performed; art isn’t a thing but a showing. As the work of art has a life of its own, beyond the intention of the author and beyond the conditions of its origination, it also has a life beyond its original audience. Since the text opens a new world of meaning to its audience, it follows that different audiences might not only see things differently, but might also see different things altogether which allows for a multiplicity of meanings. The interpreter is such an audience, who needs an attitude of openness to be addressed by the tradition, of expectancy, of waiting for something to happen. Palmer (1969) proposes that methodologically one must seek to

become the “servant” of the text; one doesn’t so much try and observe and see what is in the text but to follow, participate in and “hear” what is said by the text . . . . Hearing, Gadamer asserts, is a far greater power than seeing . . . . He is not so much a knower as an experiencer; the encounter is not a conceptual grasping of something but an event in which a world opens itself up to him. Insofar as each interpreter stands in a new horizon, the event that comes to language in the hermeneutical experience is something new that emerges, something that did not exist before. (pp. 208-209)

Horizons

To say that the work opens up a world brings us to the notion of horizon. The concept comes originally from Husserl who, in describing something akin to the hermeneutic circle, talked about the “horizon structure” of experience. Schleiermacher and Dilthey had previously discussed the text in terms of its objective historical context, but Husserl went further than this, and by “horizon structure” he meant that everything comes to be known within a context and that this context makes sense out of what is unknown. “We are always already actively understanding the world even before we attempt to grasp a thing in a thematic or cognitive fashion” (Gallagher, 1992, p. 60).

Heidegger recognized and explicated the significance of the horizon even further. For him, every experience has its own horizon which consists of something we have in advance, namely our preconceptions and biases, which are a result of our traditions and linguistic heritage. These biases are derived from traditions to which we have access through language: we not only have the language, the language has us. For this reason, we not only have access to traditions, but traditions have a certain power over us (Gallagher, 1992). Even sudden insights and inexplicable hunches or unconsciously motivated intuitions are based on prior knowledge. As Hocoy (2002, lecture) notes “you can’t escape your lens.” Our horizons can be thought of as a lens through which we view the world; they are colored by our own personal history, as well as our traditions, culture and language.

Depth psychology has given greater insights into different aspects of our horizons by disclosing their unconscious dimensions. Freud gives us the personal unconscious composed of repressed or forgotten biographical experiences. Jung expands the horizon with his contributions of the notion of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Hillman sees through the different gods or archetypes present not only in ourselves but also in the world, taking us out of the consulting room, and Casey highlights the idea of place or the physical landscape itself. Romanyshyn and Goodchild bring back the soul, the calling of our wounds and a metaphorical neither/nor consciousness, while Grof and Tarnas acknowledge the importance of the transpersonal dimension and of the cosmos itself. Gallagher (1992) relates:

Understanding even if it is in the form of sudden insight, does not develop out of nowhere, without basis; its ground is always prepared in a past which we carry around with us . . . . We always find ourselves with a past that simply does not follow behind, but goes in advance, defining the contexts by which we come to interpret the world. Despite the fact that traditions operate for the most part “behind our backs,” they are already there, ahead of us, conditioning our interpretations. (p. 90- 91)

So, we are always under the influence of history, situated in history, we cannot extricate ourselves from it, nor can it become completely objective to us.

Because we are in our own world or horizon, conditioned largely by unconscious forces, so likewise, whatever we hope to understand, whether a text or a work or another person, has its own horizon as well. Gadamer (1975) spoke of the “fusion of horizons,” by which he meant the convergence of the world horizons of the interpreter and the work. As an interpreter, one has to open oneself and one’s horizon to the horizon of the work.

Application and Play

Interpretation not only includes explaining what the text means in its own world but what it means in terms of our present moment. According to Gadamer (1975), for understanding to occur, “something like an application of the text to be understood to the present situation always takes place” (p. 274). Ricoeur sees this application as appropriation, that is, making one’s own that which was initially other or alien. For Ricoeur (1981), “Appropriation is also and primarily a letting go . . . . it is in allowing itself to be carried off toward the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself (p. 191). Appropriation is a reinterpretation of the self, which occurs when one encounters the text:

in opening up these new worlds for the reader to explore and appropriate, literature offers the reader as well an opportunity to consider alternative modes of human existence. As Ricoeur observes, “To understand is . . . to expose oneself to [the text]; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds which interpretation unfolds . . . [I]n reading, I ‘unrealized myself.’ Reading introduces me to imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world by play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego.” (Bontekoe, 1996, 170-171) citations omitted

Thus for Ricoeur (1981), understanding oneself “in front of a text is quite the contrary of projecting oneself and one’s own beliefs and prejudices; it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding which I have of myself” (p. 178).

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