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God: The Possible/Impossible
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God: The Possible/Impossible D A V I D T R A C Y Interviewed by Christian Sheppard SHEPPARD: Before discussing this new book, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2001), please comment on Richard Kearney’s work up until this point. TRACY: He’s a remarkable philosopher. He reminds me of Blanchot and Sartre in that he has written on narrative and metaphor (and hermeneutics), and he has also written some very fine novels. He is also a remarkable interviewer. He asks questions in order to really understand what someone is thinking, and thus is able to draw them out and get them to say things that perhaps they wouldn’t otherwise . As a result, his interviews are very important, for example, the ones with Levinas, Derrida, and Ricoeur, among others. Having said that, in general, I remember I read what it turns out was his thesis, I believe, Poétique du Possible. A version of it appears in his different books, including the one we are discussing. I remember being quite struck that it was a very original taking of Ricoeur, who was his director, and Levinas, who was his examiner, I believe, and taking their work forward into what all along has been a major philosophical and, I would say, theological category, on the possible. He developed the category of the possible in ways that even they had not done, that no one had quite done. One of the most important things, I think, to watch in contemporary thinkers is what fragments of the past they appeal to. For Levi340 nas, famously, it is the fragment on being in Plato; and perhaps even more famously, ignoring the rest of Descartes’s meditations, only to take that one extraordinary moment when the very idea of the infinite breaks the categories, something Kant never would have allowed , something no one had quite noticed because we were all reading along in the argument about God. And I see Richard Kearney recovering important fragments, certain biblical passages—for example, the Transfiguration—and from Nicholas of Cusa, a figure who for a long time I have thought ought to be part of the present discussion but rarely is. Moreover, starting from this Poétique du Possible, his books have been very generous to others and, as his own critical mind is at always work, always fruitful: The Wake of the Imagination, The Poetics of Modernity, and edited books, such as the one on the Irish mind, a really great book, and now this new trilogy. I admit that On Stories didn’t surprise me. On metaphor and narrative , I had already learned from Ricoeur, as did he, and from Kearney ’s own hermeneutical work as well as from his own actual narratives. I was more taken by his last book, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, where he insists, in the context of current debates on the Other, ‘‘But it might be a monster!’’ and that not to face this possibility could be . . . deadly. He shows us the need for some kind of criteria , especially ethical criteria, for assessing what shows up, what shows itself. . . . SHEPPARD: Kearney approaches the question of the Other with perhaps more caution than other postmodern thinkers. . . . TRACY: Yes, he is more cautious, but he uses the word, correctly, ‘‘prudent.’’ I have tried to do something similar, as you may know, by revising William James’s very general criteria for the same purpose . So I am with Kearney in this. After the initial moment of encounter , there is a need for a hermeneutical moment (even if you agree with that initial moment), and therefore a focus on genres, symbols, narrative, metaphor, and so on. We need this more than Derrida, Marion, or Levinas admits. And then there is the need for some criteria, the need for what I prefer to call, with Gadamer, phronesis , rather than ‘‘prudence’’ with Thomas and Kearney (but it is the same virtue), and the same call for some general criteria of judgment, especially but not solely ethical judgment of what shows itself as Other. God: The Possible/Impossible 341 [34.230.66.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:22 GMT) Now the first hermeneutical moment, I already agreed to be important , so On Stories wasn’t so surprising to me. But in terms of the second critical moment, with his notion of the monster in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, especially as so sensitively and persuasively applied...