A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self

2. The Hermeneutics of the Self

2 The Hermeneutics of the Self In Book XI of his Confessions, Augustine records his perplexity over the nature of time. What is it? We talk about it all the time in our everyday conversations, as if we know what it is. “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”1 Something similar is true about the self: in late modern Western culture, we talk about selves—and “the self”—all the time. In the natural attitude the idea of the self seems fairly unproblematic, yet if we stop and ask what the self is, we find ourselves at a loss. What then is the self? What is it? The question at hand is ontological: what sort of being is the self? First, we must recognize that the notion of a self or the self has not always been part of the philosophical tradition. Charles Taylor observes that when ancient philosophers cited the Delphic admonition to “know thyself” (gnothi seauton ), they did not assume a robust conception of this self as an entity, as ho autos. By using reflexive pronouns and verbs we are able to designate selfreference in thoughts and actions, but it is another matter to speak of the self as a noun.2 That is a modern innovation,3 and there is no consensus that it is a sign of progress. The modern concept of the self has a strong chorus of critics , whose objections are familiar: the modern self is shaped by false ideals regarding knowledge and ethics; it purports to ground itself through its act of self-reflection; it reifies itself as a substantial thing, a subjectum that supposedly remains self-identical through time and its relations to exteriority. As a result , the modern picture of the self is an egocentric, isolated, ahistorical, disembodied , and disengaged thinking subject. These objections have been repeated many times, to the point that critique often verges on caricature, but there are nevertheless good philosophical and theological reasons to be suspicious of the modern concept of the self. This concept distorts our understanding of the human being and its relations—to God, other humans, the natural world, and itself . Critique is therefore necessary, and in subsequent chapters I will show how the cross provides a critique of—and in a certain sense even destroys—the self. However, the best way to correct the modern metaphysics of subjectivity is not to discard the notion of the self altogether, but to reorient our inquiry as a hermeneutics of the self. In order to provide some preliminary orientation for subsequent chapters, this chapter will sketch out the basic features of a hermeneutics of the self. Although we cannot conduct a full-length introduction to hermeneutics here, some preliminary discussion will help us locate ourselves. It will also provide 22 A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross us with a working definition of the self. This will not be a comprehensive inventory of attributes or faculties, but an outline of some contested features of the self, such as reflexivity and self-understanding, self-interpretation, responsibility , recognition, and human capability. I will focus on these themes because these are the features of the self that we will interrogate through the word of the cross. Reflexivity and the Hermeneutical Self What makes philosophical reflection on the self hermeneutical? Traditionally hermeneutics involved the interpretation of texts (particularly biblical and legal texts), but the hermeneutical turn in philosophy brought with it a greater awareness that interpretation pertains not only to written texts but to all meaningful phenomena, including the human self. According to Heidegger, hermeneutics is not first and foremost a doctrine or theory of interpretation, but the self-interpretation of concrete, factical existence. Hermeneutics is concerned with Dasein (the distinctly human way of being), which “has its being as something capable of interpretation and in need of interpretation and that to be in some state of having-been-interpreted belongs to its being.”4 Our being is such that we find ourselves already interpreted, in such a way that our being calls for further interpretation and greater self-understanding. Such is our task in working out the hermeneutics of the cruciform self: we are seeking to encounter , grasp, and express the self-understanding of the faithful self, to lay out the meanings that constitute this self in concrete, lived experience.5 Pursued in this way, the hermeneutics of the self is...