Chapter 4 - Phenomenology versus Hermeneutics (Debate with Harrison): Revelation as Mediation

Summary

The question of how much of our knowledge is owing to pure perception and how much is dependent on interpretive construction animates the ongoing debate between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Recently, phenomenology has taken a “theological turn” and concerned itself with what is imperceptibly lurking within the perceptible. The eternal may be found to be implicit, in this manner, within time. Indeed, Dante’s temporal experience is projected toward an eternity experienced already by Beatrice as beholding the face of God. Just as time can mediate the eternal, so mediation by poetic interpretation can be reversed into an immediacy of perception in Dante’s model of knowledge as revelation. This revelation is incarnate. Dante experiences it in the beauty of Beatrice, which takes him to the very limits of his beatitude. The inextricably lyrical mediation of this revelation does not deliver it over to rhetorical convention and condemn it to narcissistic self-enclosure. Lyric grounded in Dante’s personal life experience becomes a means of encountering a wholly other dimension of existence open without limit. Dante’s lyric epiphany opens him to the world, as crystalized in pilgrims in transit through Florence, as well as in a vertical, transcendent dimension reaching toward the infinite.