• Tag Archives exegesis

  • An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                           Bloodroot Moon

    In May some docent friends from the class of 2005, a rowdy class and proud of it, will go to
    Chicago for a time with the arts scene there.  Like my visit to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago this too will be an exercise in part in discovering how to keep the arts active and alive in my life.

    One of us has decided to offer a mini-tour on an object at the Chicago Art Institute.  I decided I would do one, too.  My plan is to focus on methods of analysis, including the praxis idea I wrote about yesterday.

    Ever since I got seriously interested in Ovid, my seminary education in biblical criticism has niggled at the back of my mind.  Why?  Well, biblical criticism, the higher criticism in particular, uses scholarly methodology for exegesis.  Exegesis tries first to get at the plain meaning of the text in its context.  It precedes the task of hermeneutics, that is, interpretation of the text for a contemporary audience.  What’s niggled at me is that neither exegesis nor hermeneutics is peculiar to the study of scripture.

    In fact, exegetical method can be applied to other texts, whether in a foreign language or not, just as hermeneutics can be applied to the resulting exegesis.  As this thought persisted I kept wanting to create a method for using exegetical tools designed for literature in the service of art history.

    Well, that day has arrived.  “Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself.” wikipedia article

    Not sure yet whether I’ll venture into the realm of hermeneutics.  That may, in art, best be left to the viewer.

    This also raises another profound idea I learned from the philosopher of religion, Paul Ricoeur, second naivete.  Ricoeur developed this idea to explain how a student of the higher criticism might use its critical methods on scripture, then return to the text later with a second naivete, one that includes the scholarly work, or incorporates it, while at the same time allowing the text to speak again as scripture.

    My sense is that the idea applies to analysis of art as well.  That is, we can engage formal analysis, praxis analysis, style and methodological analysis, school, content analysis, then step back from all that and return to the piece with a second naivete which allows that work to enrich our immediate engagement with the work.  Anyhow, this is on my mind right now.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Translating Metamorphoses 📎and tagged

  • Exegesis and Hermeneutics

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

    “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

    While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

    Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

    Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

    It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

    We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

    Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Literature Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Text, Reader, Learning

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

    Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

    Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

    Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

    Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Literature 📎and tagged