Browsing by Author "Pretorius, Helgard Meyer"
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- ItemTheology at the limit? : an investigation of Richard Kearney’s philosophical hermeneutics in search of a responsible theological hermeneutic(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-01) Pretorius, Helgard Meyer; Smit, D. J.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Theology. Dept. of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Is theology at the limit possible? This study explores the question of the limits and possibilities of doing theology “at the limit” through the hermeneutic philosophy of Richard Kearney, author of the trilogy, “Philosophy at the Limit.” It tries to understand Kearney’s attempt to think at the limit through three focal points. Each focal point illuminates a different aspect of his thought and sheds light on the dialogical detours through which Kearney’s own position takes shape. Chapter One, Facing the Limit: Kearney’s phenomenological-existential heritage, investigates how Kearney’s phenomenological heritage, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed by Martin Heidegger, facilitates a decisive turn to “face the limit.” In doing so, it gives an account of how Kearney appropriates some of the tradition’s central insights in his own thought. These include: a high regard for human freedom and responsibility, a privileged appreciation for possibility over actuality, and a desire to situate philosophical reflection in the life world of human existence as a “being interpreted.” Following this, the discussion extends to Kearney’s phenomenological account of the persona to reveal how he extends a logic of relatedness, thus stretching phenomenology to confront its own limits. The result is a more personal, embodied and relational sense of what it means to “face” the limit. Chapter Two, Transfiguring at the Limit: Kearney’s hermeneutic imagination, shows how phenomenology undergoes a decisive transformation via the work of Paul Ricoeur to become a hermeneutic phenomenology. It explores how Ricoeur’s work informed Kearney’s “hermeneutic imagination” which can be understood as a proposal for rediscovering and reviving the creative potential of the human imagination – at the limit – as fragile, fallible, finite beings, “resolving to recover, in spite of the odds, the yes in the sorrow of the finite” (Kearney, 2003a: 231). This is done in three parts: the first of these (Transfiguring Imagination) offers a reflection of Kearney’s hermeneutic approach to human creativity at the linguistic level of symbol, metaphor and narrative, while the second (Transfiguring the Social Imaginary) situates this creative capacity, and its tendency to serve ideological interests, in the world of culture and politics. The third part (Transfiguring God) explores how Kearney’s hermeneutic imagination interprets the sacred by retracing his readings of a number of biblical texts (for e.g. Exodus 3; Luke 9; Mark 10). Chapter Three, The Limit as Threshold? The stranger and Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics, narrows the focus somewhat to consider how Kearney’s hermeneutic imagination deals with the challenges posed by alterity or strangeness and more specifically how this manifests in our dealings with strangers in interpersonal and broader political contexts. It reflects on Kearney’s engagement with other continental philosophical accounts of the stranger (Levinas, Derrida, Kristeva) and presents his own diacritical hermeneutic response as a way of becoming more hospitable to strangers and more capable of critical (self)discernment. Thus, Kearney steers a way between transcendent and immanent extremes to transfigure the limit into a threshold where strangers may be encountered. Finally, the concluding chapter sketches a number of hermeneutic lines, internally, between the various focal points and then externally, to the question of theology at the limit. It enters the dialogue about the basic options, conditions and tasks of a theology at the limit, by rephrasing the question in a more personal key: who is a theologian at the limit? Drawing from the preceding discussions a description of a “theologian at the limit” is then tendered in three complementary images: the theologian i) as a dialogical, yet critically involved interpreter, ii) as a translator serving authentic encounters at the threshold, and iii) as a poet who “gently shifts the potency” of God-talk “from the propositional to the imaginal” (Keller, 2004: 890) – serving greater nuance, mystery, freedom and responsibility, catholicity and “the other”.