Amber Bowen

Project leader:

Dr Amber Bowen (Eastern University; formerly Redeemer University)
with Prof. Merold Westphal (Fordham University)

Title:

From Critique to Character

Description:

This project offers a transvaluation of the hermeneutics of suspicion through the development of a post-critical hermeneutics. While the hermeneutics of suspicion can and should be placed in service to faith, this project takes seriously the way that critique has become unlimited in the modern academy, the church, and in western society more generally. By valuing and promoting dispositions of detachment, ingrained wariness, hyper-suspicion, even paranoia, “criticality” limits the kinds of discourses we have, the pursuits we undertake, and it shapes the kind of people we become.

This project expands the hermeneutical horizon beyond mere critique to considerations of character by theologically and philosophically developing “virtue hermeneutics.” The aim of this project is not to jettison the hermeneutics of suspicion, but to reinscribing it within a broader theological trajectory of re-generation carried forward by the hermeneutical virtues of faith, hope, and love. Doing so allows suspicion, what Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of archaeology,” to be connected to a “hermeneutics of eschatology.” The aim is to cultivating more expansive and possibility-laden forms of interpretation that prevent suspicion from becoming an exclusive hermeneutic. Drawing upon Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship as a resource, especially his text Works of Love, this project identifies the dangers of “dogmatic suspicion,” or a pathological version of the hermeneutics of suspicion. It then proposes Kierkegaard-inspired practices of “hermeneutical rehabilitation” to dislodge the exclusiveness of the suspicious gaze and to help agents cultivate other dispositions toward the world. These dispositions reveal what a hardened gaze of suspicion conceals, and thus are better means of pursuing truth than suspicion alone. In a world replete with corruption and violence, hermeneutical virtues such as faith, hope, love seem like naïve Pollyannaism. In principle, most would praise such virtues, but in practice many would consider them a luxury they simply cannot afford in the real world, especially for those who take the call of justice seriously. However, this project investigates not just the possibility but the necessity of these virtues in order to live more fully and more faithfully in the real world.