Re-thinking allegoresis: A prototype of recovery, restoration, replenishment

• Main Author: Hammond, Marilyn Ann Dreher
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1996
• Subjects: Philosophy; Psychology; Science history
• ISBN: 9798209321354

For the last five hundred years, Western Culture, metaphorically speaking, has been painting itself into a smaller and smaller hermeneutic corner. This makes us susceptible to psychological projections and addictive disorders. Metaphoric discernment, widely experienced in medieval Europe with the allegorical interpretation of sacred texts, was abandoned in the sixteenth century when literalism, empiricism and Ramism converged to create a hermeneutic shift. It was then that experience began to collapse into experiment, so that by the 1960s, charges of "alienation" (from personal experience) were heard. However, what was abandoned in the sixteenth century seems to be returning today. One example is Alcoholics Anonymous, where the combined physical, psychological, moral and spiritual understanding and treatment of alcoholism parallels the discarded fourfold medieval exegesis. Numerous other examples in the dissertation indicate that our impoverished hermeneutic habits can be replenished by learning to interpret experiences exponentially. Exponential interpretation is then interfaced with pertinent ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo. Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion and restoration are compared as the uncovering of illusion contrasted with the uncovering of allusion in metaphoric discernment. Carl Jung's work is characterized as the discernment of allusion in contrast to Sigmund Freud's discernment of illusion. The conclusion is that university hermeneutics courses, which highlight phenomena rather than texts, can foster a more adequate cultural hermeneutic, and help replenish U.S. culture, which suffers from truncated hermeneutic understanding.