Extra Methods Hermeneutics 3

The text proposes a way of being in the world and this proposed world of the text is what you appropriate. Appropriation is for Ricoeur a key part of hermeneutics. Krajewski (1992) notes that film is a good example of this sort of appropriation:

You must enter the world. To understand is to be let in on something, so you let yourself go in to the projected world, something like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass. Even if you are close, you are still an outsider, on our side of the looking glass, and the text remains an object, for there remains a distance between you and the text. (p. 9)

When you allow the text to speak to you, you make its meaning real for you, in Ricoeur’s eyes, you appropriate it, making it your own, or, as Gadamer would say, you apply it to the present. The text has something to say to you and you respond to it. This to and fro movement of appropriation is like that of play. Krajewski (1992) continues the metaphor showing how play and appropriation effect transformation:

When you read a text you are invited to undergo an imaginative variation of your ego. The Looking Glass beckons Alice to move, to enter. She is not to remain outside, staring at herself in the Looking Glass. Her task is to stop seeing only herself, to lose herself by stepping through the mirror. Ricoeur says, “as reader, I find myself only by losing myself.” Like Alice, after you are in the world of the text, you are no longer the same. Likewise, play is an experience which transforms those who participate in it. For instance. There is a curious lack of decisiveness in the playing consciousness, which makes it impossible to decide between belief and nonbelief. Gadamer says that “play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play.” Here, play is serious . . . . (p. 10-11)

Play and hermeneutics are intrinsically tied and structurally similar. Both Gadamer and Ricoeur, as previously noted, discuss play. Gadamer (1975) uses the notion of play extensively to de-center subjectivity, to show that it is not personal to the players. He likens play to the way of being of the work of art itself. A work of art, as we have seen, has it own autonomy. In this way, it is like play or a game, which exists independently of the players, with its own dynamics and goals. Krajewski (1992) quotes Gadamer and explains:

"The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences. The ‘subject’ of the work of art, that which remains and endures is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. This is the point at which the mode of being of play becomes significant. For play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play . . . . The players are not the subjects of play, instead play merely reaches its presentation through the players.” Similarly, a text can reach presentation only through a player, a participant, a reader, one who is willing to be hermeneutical. (p. 11)

Play not only transcends the subjectivity of the players, “play involves us in a transcendence towards the world, toward our own possibilities” (Gallagher, 1992, p. 120), a projection toward the not-yet-realized. Play involves venturing into the unknown, going beyond ourselves to experience the unfamiliar. Yet we begin from that which is known, in terms of the world, that which is most familiar to us. Our own possibilities, not alien or meaningless possibilities, are revealed in play, because they are found within a meaningful context projected by our own horizon. Play, insofar as it involves learning, involves and leads us to a transformation of meaning. Gallagher remarks:

Just as there is a transformation of the self in play, so also there is a transformation of meaning . . . . In play we do not simply move from one preconstituted world into another; rather, our existing world is transformed into a new one, one which was potentially there in our “undecided possibilities.” The transformation in(to) structure takes place when what is unfamiliar or meaningless is finally integrated into the meaningful. But this integration not only transforms the unfamiliar; it transforms the familiar. The world of meaning opened up by play “is in fact a wholly transformed world” (TM 113). (p. 121)

Gallagher (1992) in discussing hermeneutics in the education process suggests that we are constantly learning about ourselves in light of our experiences through play. Gallagher notes that play is the dialectical interchange of transcendence and appropriation. He remarks that “play is interpretational because it shares the same structure as interpretation. In the tradition of hermeneutics, this structure is called the ‘hermeneutical circle’ ” (p. 53). Thus, it seems we have come full circle on our tour of hermeneutics, yet a few last observations about play and interpretation are in order.

Play compels us to participate and transform. Jung alluded to this when speaking of the transformation that can occur during active imagination: “the piece that is being played does not want merely to be watched impartially, it wants to compel [our] participation (Jung 1963/1977, p. 496, para. 706). When we play, we suspend other purposive relations, and according to Gadamer (1975), “what is emerges. In it is produced and brought to light what was otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn” (p 101). Palmer (1969) connects our experience of art and brings in the notions of self-understanding and horizon into the picture:

As soon as we stop viewing a work as an object and see it as a world, when we see a world through it, then we realize that art is not sense perception but knowledge. When we meet art, the horizons of our own world and self-understanding are broadened so that we see the world in a new light as if for the first time . . . . when we understand a great work of art, we bring what we have experienced and who we are into play. Our whole self-understanding is placed in the balance, is risked. The understanding of a work of art does not come from cutting and dividing it as an object, or through separating form from content; it comes through openness to being and to hearing the question put to us by the work. Hence the work of art truly presents us with a world, which we are not to reduce to the measure of our own or to the measure of methodologies. Yet we only understand this new world because we are already participating in the structures of self-understanding which makes it truth for us . . . . The artist has the power to transform into an image or a form his experience of being. (pp. 167-169)

Image, Reverie, and Autonomy of the Soul

The image is a way of seeing, a notion that is attested to by phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Edward Casey, and by the psychologist James Hillman. For them, Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) state: “the image opens a world,” and “through the image we are given passport to those other realms of experience and knowledge that are not known through facts and reason” (p. 15). The events being researched are re-imagined, refigured, and deepened “into an image whose symbolic quality and imaginal depth move the soul in addition to instructing the mind” (p. 16).

Romanyshyn’s (1991) first attempt to elucidate the psychological gnosis that would eventually become alchemical hermeneutics was known as “complex knowing.” The title “Complex Knowing” was intended not only to challenge the Cartesian ideal of reducing complexities of thought into clear and distinct ideas, but also to suggest, as Romanyshyn (1991) explicates,

a domain of knowledge, a way of knowing, a kind of gnosis characterized by indirections and distortions, by twists and turnings, by allusions and displacement, which indicate that we know only through our complexes, and which betray, therefore, the complex character of our knowing. (p. 10)

The most significant point of this early formulation was the notion of the image quality in the mirror play between the text and reader, which Romanyshyn termed “complex reading”:

As mirror play, complex reading becomes a mutual field of transgression where the border of the mirror is a border crossing, the place of exchange where the reader not only is re-figured and deepened by the text and the text is re-figured and deepened by the reader, but also the place where each is transformed into an image. In this regard, neither the text nor the reader is just a fact with a history or content. Rather each has entered into this realm of the soul as an image . . . . The mirror play of complex knowing attends to the image quality of the work done in research. It asks, “what are the images at play in the facts and ideas one has about the topic?” the work, like the mirror image itself, is neither an empirical fact nor a conceptual idea.” (Romanyshyn & Goodchild, 2003, p. 14)

This imaginal realm, the mundus imaginalis, land of metaphor, the in-between, is privileged in alchemical hermeneutics—a place of neither facts nor ideas, that is neither empirical nor philosophical. This in-between space is also Hermes’s realm and the place of reverie. The state of reverie, Bachelard tells us, is a way of being that expands our lives “by letting us in on the secrets of the universe,” a kind of consciousness that understands that “the world wishes to see itself” (Romanyshyn & Goodchild, 2003, pp. 13-14). Alchemical hermeneutics holds a place where “the work wishes to see and say itself through us, where the work, like the world for one in reverie, shines through us but is not just about us” (p. 14).

In staying longer in the moment, being questioned by the “text,” we see how “our concepts—our ideas, thoughts, and questions about our research—are originally conceptions, about how the mind is inseminated by the soul” (Romanyshyn & Goodchild, 2003, p. 29). In the slower mode of reverie, “consciousness is able to let go of its busy intentions for and perhaps its impatience with the work to allow the voices of the soul of the work a place in the work” (p. 21). Romanyshyn and Goodchild talk about loitering, or lingering aimlessly. Trickster tales often begin with the trickster wandering aimlessly. Thus, when we linger aimlessly, we are inviting in this unpredictable creative energy. In this space of reverie, there is a kind of emptiness that has the qualities of patience and hospitality. It leaves the researcher continuously open to surprise, to the epiphany of the extraordinary within the ordinary. The researcher, “in having no plans simply invites the ‘text’—the guest—to tell its tale” (p. 30).

Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) thus acknowledge the autonomy of the soul. In research, taking the stance of a witness in reverie rather than a critic, we realize that meaning of the work arises from the presence of the soul of the work. It addresses us, calls to us before we start to “ address it, to focus our attention on it and impose our conscious intentions, plans and concerns” (p. 37). When we become a witness in reverie, we are able to

remain present to how the wholly and holy other is present in the complexes that haunt our concepts, in the myths that haunt our meanings, in the dreams that haunt our reasons, in the symptoms that haunt our symbols, in the fantasies that haunt our facts, in the fictions that haunt our ideas, and in the images that dwell in events. (p. 34)

Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) thus playfully speak of alchemical hermeneutics as “a hermeneutics for dummies, where the wholly, holy Other and the ancestors are the ventriloquist, where what we say in the work are the sacred and ancestral words of the soul of the work” (p. 37). They give a place in research to the primacy of the invisible—the imaginal domain, “the inter-world that is neither a matter of empirical facts nor rational concepts, the subtle presence of the invisible that haunts the visible, that no-where world that is always and also now-here” (pp. 46-47). By being open to and honoring of these subtle imaginal realms of reality and in a devotion to a direct initiatory experience of these unseen worlds, a place is made in research for revelations, epiphanies, moments of synchronicity, dreams and other anomalous experiences as authentic and reliable realms of knowledge.

Continued on page 4