The
Liminality of Hermes
and
the Meaning of Hermeneutics
by
"By
a playful thinking that is more persuasive than the rigor of science,"
Heidegger tells us, the Greek words for interpreting and interpretation—hermeneuein, hermeneia--can be traced back to the god
Hermes.1 However questionable the etymological connection between
Hermes and hermeneuein may be, hermeneutics, as the art of understanding
and of textual exegesis, does stand under the sign of Hermes. Hermes is
messenger who brings the word from Zeus (God); thus, the early modern use of
the term hermeneutics was in relation to methods of interpreting holy
scripture. An interpreter brought to mortals the message from God. Although the
usage was broadened in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to take in methods
of understanding and explicating both sacred and secular texts from
antiquity, the term "hermeneutics" continued to suggest an
interpretation which discloses something hidden from ordinary understanding and
mysterious. Ancient texts are, for moderns, doubly alien: they are ancient and
they are in another language. Their interpreter, poring over a
text in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, cannot fail to convey the impression that he
has access to a body of knowledge from elsewhere, is a bridge to somewhere else,
he is a mediator between a mysterious other world and the clean, well-lighted
intelligible world in which we live and move and 'have our being.
Hermes
is just such a mediator. He is the messenger between Zeus and mortals, also
between Zeus and the underworld and between the underworld and mortals. Hermes
crosses these ontological thresholds with ease. A notorious thief, according to
legend, he crosses the threshold of legality without a qualm. "Marshal of
dreams," he mediates between waking and dreaming, day and night. Wearer of
a cap of invisibility, he can become invisible or visible at will. Master of
night-tricks, he can cover himself with night. Master of sleep, he can wake the
sleeping or put the waking to sleep. Liminality or marginality is his very
essence.
"Liminality"
is a term given currency in twentieth century anthropology by Victor Turner of
the University of Chicago. Limen in Latin means threshold, and
anthropologists like Turner have become interested in a certain state
experienced by persons as they pass over the threshold from one stage of life
to another. For instance, Turner notes that the rite of passage at puberty has
three phases: separation from one's status as child in a household, then a liminal
stage, and finally reintegration into society as a full and independent
member with rights and responsibilities that the initiate did not have before.
During the liminal stage, the between stage, one's status becomes ambiguous;
one is "neither here nor there," one is "betwixt and between all
fixed points of classification,"2 and thus the form and rules of both his
earlier state and his state-to-come are suspended. For the moment, one is an
outsider; one is on the margins, in an indeterminate state. Turner is
fascinated by this marginality, this zone of indeterminacy. He argues that it
is from the standpoint of this marginal zone that the great artists, writers,
and social critics have been able to look past the social forms in order to see
society from the outside and to bring in a message from beyond it.
This
marginality is the realm of Hermes. In his recent book, The Meaning of
Aphrodite, Paul Friedrich remarks (in a brilliant appendix) on the multiple
liminality of Hermes and his links with Aphrodite.3 He notes that
1. Hermes
moves by night, the time of love, dreams, and theft;
2. he is the
master of cunning and deceit, the marginality of illusions and tricks;
3. he has
magical powers, the margin between the natural and the supernatural;
4. he is the
patron of all occupations that occupy margins or involve mediation: traders,
thieves, shepherds, and heralds;
5. his
mobility makes him a creature betwixt and between;
6. his
marginality is indicated by the location of his phallic herms not just anywhere
but on roads, at crossroads, and in groves;
7. even his
eroticism is not oriented to fertility or maintaining the family but is
basically Aphroditic--stealthy, sly, and amoral, a love gained by theft without
moral concern for consequences; and finally
8. Hermes is
a guide across boundaries, including the boundary between earth and Hades, that
is, life and death.4
Truly, one may say that Hermes is the Greeks'
"god of the gaps," although not in the sense in which this phrase is
used by Bonhoeffer (to refer to a religious attitude that does not turn to God
except to fill in the empty spots and question marks one encounters in life).5
Rather, he is one who seems to inhabit an in-between realm, what Carlos
Castaneda referred to as the "crack between the worlds."6
The meaning of hermeneutics, then, is closely tied
to the character of Hermes. We may see some further implications and dimensions
of this fact by considering briefly (1) Heidegger's discussion of Hermes and
hermeneutics in his famous conversation with a Japanese on the topic of
language in On the Way to Language, and (.2) Walter F. Otto's famous
chapter on Hermes in his The Homeric Gods.
For Heidegger, it is significant that Hermes is the
messenger of the gods and not just other humans; for the message brought by
Hermes is not just any message but "fateful tidings" (die Botschaft
des Geschickes).7 Interpretation in its highest form,
then, is to be able to understand these fateful tidings, indeed the fatefulness
of the tidings. To interpret is first to listen and then to become a messenger
of the gods oneself, just as the poets do, according to Plato's Ion.8
Indeed, part of the destiny of man is precisely to stand in a hermeneutical
relation to one's being here and now and to one's heritage. Human beings,
insofar as they are truly human beings, says Heidegger, "are used for
hearing the message . . . they are to listen and belong to it as human
beings."9
"From the source of the event of appearing
something comes toward man that holds the two-fold of presence and present
beings,"10 says Heidegger. .The human being stands in this gap,
this zone of disclosure. One does not so much act as respond, does not so much
speak as listen, does not so much interpret as understand the thing that is
unveiled. The primary movement here is understanding as an emergence of being. The
human being becomes Hermes, the message-bearer, only because one has first and
foremost opened oneself to a process of unconcealment: "The human being is
the message-bearer of the message which the two-fold's unconcealment utters to
it."11
What is interesting and important about this
description of interpretation is that it goes behind technique-oriented
conceptions to a moment more primordial, a moment before our present
thought-forms, in order to grasp something essential. Such interpretation enters
into a loving and fundamental dialogue with the greatest efforts of the past to
grasp the meaning of being. This primordial listening is hermeneutical in yet
another sense: it is a listening to texts. The "message" one
must interpret is really the doctrines and thinking of one's forbears as
embodied in great texts. To exist hermeneutically as a human being is to exist
intertextually. It is to participate in the endless chain of interpretation
that makes up the history of apprehending being. Says Heidegger, one enters
into dialogue with the doctrines of past thinkers, which were "in turn
learned by listening to the great thinkers' thinking."12 One
participates in the endless chain of listening that constitutes essential
thinking. "Each human being is in each instance in dialogue with its
forbears and perhaps even more and in a more hidden manner with those who will
come after it."13 Again, this suggests the Hermes-related trait
of bringing forth a hidden meaning. Heidegger would have the interpreter pore
over the text with the philologist's love of words: "Each word in each
case is given its full--most often hidden--weight."14
We can also understand Heidegger's choice of the
term hermeneutics over such alternatives as interpretation when we remember
that implicit in the Heideggerian project is the effort to regain a grasp of
being that has been lost in modern times and indeed since the time of Plato and
Aristotle. One seeks the "hidden weight" of ancient words precisely
in order to go behind what is self-evident in modern thinking. This
special and intense listening Heidegger calls for is necessary in order to
break away from the confines of the modern world view. Hermeneutics, it will be
remembered, is the discipline concerned with deciphering utterances from other
times, places, and languages--without imposing one's own categories on them
(the hermeneutic problem). It is significant that Heidegger attempts to sharpen
his reflection by a conversation with a person from a radically alien world--a
Japanese. The atmosphere of the conversation is an effort to understand the
most difficult and ineffable conceptions--beauty, utterance, language. A
Japanese tentativeness and delicacy pervades the dialogue, and one can
understand Heidegger's fascination with a people whose art strives for the
letting-be of what is.
But the use of a Japanese dialogical partner is not
the only indication of Heidegger's effort to transcend the westernized, modern
world view. Heidegger explicitly states that the careful listener will put in
question "the guiding notions which, under the names 'expression,'
'experience,' and 'consciousness,' determine modern thinking."15
If one thinks of these conceptions as constituting the make-up of one's
"world," then what Heidegger has in mind is that interpretation as
hermeneutics should be "world-shaking," a fateful message that shakes
the foundations of thought. Only an interpretation that goes outside the
prevailing conceptualities can move toward what Heidegger has in mind--"a
transformation of thinking."16 Unfortunately, the word
interpretation fails to suggest a mediation from something outside and alien,
but hermeneutics, since it customarily has reference to interpreting
ancient texts in another language, has precisely this sense of relating to
something essentially other yet capable of being understood.
The mediation Heidegger has in mind here is
ontologically significant. It would seem to be a kind of bridge to non-being.
The transcending of the already-given world is elsewhere in Heidegger even
called the "step back": a "step back" from presentational
thought as such.17 This "step back" is a movement back
from embeddedness in a set of fixed definitions of reality, in order to regain
access to a certain realm of "latency" which we might also call our
deeper sense of the meaning of being. In a recent paper on Heidegger and Lacan,
the eminent Heidegger scholar, William J. Richardson, notes that both Lacan and
Heidegger root their thinking in a latency lying below the level of manifest
consciousness.18 It is not nonbeing in the sense of a mere emptiness
but rather a source of being for which the word "latency" seems
rather apt. The mediation, in this case, is not between two well-lighted but
incommensurate realms of being but between the well-lighted daylight of
consciousness and something more like the mysterious night of what lies below
and above consciousness. Heidegger clarified in his well-known letter to
Richardson19 that this realm, as ontological nonbeing, is not the
transcendental in the sense of Kant's conditions for the possibility for
phenomena but a kind of creative foundation and source for our
being-in-the-world.
Again, one feels the parallel between this realm of
indeterminacy and what Turner calls liminality. Like the realm of liminality,
it is a realm "betwixt and between," not yet defined. Like
liminality, it is a source both of creativity and critique of the prevailing
forms of thought and being. A human being in the liminal stage or
state has the potentialities of a human being but is suspended
between stages or states so he or she is neither this nor that. He/she is in
the "crack between the worlds," to use a phrase of Castaneda cited
earlier.
When we turn to the chapter on Hermes in Walter F.
Otto's The Homeric Gods, we find these and other dimensions of the
liminality of Hermes. .Otto notes, for instance, that "It is Hermes'
nature not to belong to any locality and not to possess any permanent abode;
always he is on the road between here and there."20 When one is
on the road, one may encounter sudden good fortune or sudden misfortune. Hermes
is the god of the windfall, the quick, lucky chance. Thus, the traveller or
trader who suddenly comes on good fortune will thank Hermes, who as
cattle-thief knows how to get rich quick and how to make people poor quickly
also. Says Otto, "He is the god not only of sly calculation but also of
lucky chances. Everything lucky and without responsibility that befalls a human
being is a gift of Hermes."21 We may say that the Hermes of
sudden lucky breaks, of "deft guidance and sudden gain,"22
is an appropriate god of text interpretation in that the solution to a problem
or a burst of insight will come in a flash. And the amorality of Hermes
suggests the moral neutrality of understanding as a pure operation of the mind
in grasping the point of something. The truth or insight may be a pleasant
awakening or rob one of an illusion; the understanding itself is morally
neutral. The quicksilver flash of insight may make one rich or poor in an
instant.
This sudden almost magical flash of insight
suggests another dimension of Hermes, his association with magic. Otto asserts
that "his whole character and presence stand under the sign of
magic."23 He has a magical cap and a magical wand. With his
cap, the Cap of Hades, he can make himself invisible. With his wand, he can put
the waking to sleep or awaken the sleeping. He is thus the mediator belonging
to those liminal realms mentioned earlier: the magical realm and the realm of
ordinary, everyday reality: between waking and sleeping, day and night, world
and underworld, conscious and unconscious.
In a brilliant and memorable section of his chapter
on Hermes, Otto points to night--the experience of night--as the key to the
nature of Hermes. Again, night seems symbolically to possess the
characteristics of liminality. Otto refers to the mysterious realm of night as
follows:
A man who is awake in the open field at night, or
who wanders over silent paths, experiences the world differently than by day.
Nighness vanishes, and with it distance; everything is equally far and near,
close by us and yet mysteriously remote. Space loses its measures. There are
whispers and sounds and we do not know where or what they are. . . . There is
no longer a distinction between what is lifeless and living; everything is
animate and soulless, vigilant and asleep at once.24
This realm of "danger and protection, terror
and reassurance, certainty and straying,"25 is the realm of
Hermes. Hermes is the god who brings this realm of night into day: "This
mystery of night seen by day, this magic darkness in the bright sunlight is the
realm of Hermes, whom, in later ages, magic with good reason revered as its
master."26
We may ask: What is this realm of night in which
the nearness and far awayness of objects vanishes, where there is no objective
difference between the lifeless and the living, if not the realm of ideas, of
thought, of the mind itself? It is the realm of mind not as perennial moral
wisdom but as instant insight. For in the objective world of day things have
their finite measure, but in the mind, in imagination and dream, in the world
of ideas, distances vanish, relationships of time alter, and one senses himself
in a different world. As god of magic and mystery and sudden good luck, Hermes
is the god of sudden interpretive insights that come from an ability to
approach daytime reality with liminal freedom.
Small wonder it is advisable to have Hermes as a
guide. The guide-character of Hermes is central. Otto notes a parallel to the
Vedic guide-god Pushan who comes to the rescue of those who have gone astray. A
knower of roads (like Hermes), Pushan has a special way of helping men:
"his manner of giving treasure to men is that he permits men to find
it."27
Again, this has a parallel in hermeneutic methods,
in that they are designed to enable the text to yield its treasure, but the
interpreter only leads the reader to the treasure and then retires. As a guide,
the interpreter remains a liminal figure, an outsider, a facilitator.
Hermes, then, remains a god of roads, crossroads,
thresholds, boundaries. It is at these locations in ancient times that one
found altars to Hermes. He was considered the patron god of migrant skilled and
unskilled workers who, in going from place to place, became professional
"boundary-crossers.28 Hermes is the god who presides over all
transactions held at borders. Thus he is the god of translation and of all
transactions between realms. And it would seem to be the essence of
hermeneutics to be liminal, to mediate between realms of being, whether between
god and human beings, wakefulness and sleep, the conscious and unconscious,
life and afterlife, visible and invisible, day and night. The dimensions of the
mythic god Hermes suggest a central element in the meaning of hermeneutics:
that it is a mediation-between worlds. And in the strongest instances, Hermes'
message is "world-shaking": it brings, as Heidegger says, "a
transformation of thinking."29
Note 1: This essay was first published in Proceedings
of the Heraclitean Society: A Quarterly Report on Philosophy and Criticism of
the Arts and Sciences [published by the Western Michigan University
Department of Philosophy], vol. 5 (1980): 4-11. Permission from Quentin Smith
to republish this here on my Webpage is gratefully acknowledged.
Note 2: This essay expands some hints offered in
the final section of my paper, "What Are We Doing When We Interpret a
Text?" given May 2, 1980 at Western Michigan University and later
published in Eros: A Journal of Philosophy and the Literary Arts
[published by Purdue University Department of Philosophy], 7, 2 (June 1980):
1-47. The special issue of Eros was devoted to hermeneutics and
philosophical anthropology.
ENDNOTES
1. "A
Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer," in Martin
Heidegger, On the Way to Language, transl. Peter D. Hertz (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), p. 29. German original: "Aus einem Gespräch von
der Sprache: Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Frangenden," in Martin
Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 121.
Hereinafter abbreviated US.
2. Victor
Turner, "Passages, Margins, Poverty," in his Dramas, Fields, and
Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1974), p. 232.
3. Paul
Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), Appendix 8, p. 205.
4. Ibid.
5. Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, revised edition edited by
Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. -164. Letter dated 25 May 1944.
6. Carlos Castaneda,
The Teachings of Don Juan: The Yaqui Wav of Knowledge (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1968). Related is Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in
the Cosmic Egg: Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality (New York:
Julian Press, 1971).
7. Heidegger,
loc. cit. Botschaft des Geschickes is translated "message of
destiny" by Hertz in the edition cited. Also a good translation.
8. Ion 534e.
Cited by Heidegger, loc. cit.
9. ·Heidegger,
On the Way to Language, p. 40; US, p. 135.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p.
40; US, p. 136.
12. Ibid., p.
31; US, p. 123.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p.
31; US, p. 124
15. Ibid., p.
36; US, p. 130. Emphasis added.
16. Ibid., p.
42; US, p. 138.
17. "For
Hegel, the conversation with the earlier history of philosophy has the
character of Aufhebung, that is, of the mediating concept in the sense
of an absolute foundation. For us, the character of the conversation with the
history of thinking is no longer Aufhebung, but the step back."
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, with
German text (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 49 (English), p. 115
(German). See my article, "The Postmodernity of Heidegger," Boundary
2, 4 (Winter, 1976): 411-32, esp. 418; or reprinted in Martin Heidegger
and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics,
ed. William V. Spanos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 71-92,
esp. 78.
18. Presented
at the Heidegger Conference, Thirteenth Annual Meeting, May 1979, Duquesne
University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
19. Preface
to William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. viii-xxiii, esp. pp. xv, xix.
20. Walter F.
Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion,
trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Pantheon, 1954; paperback edition, New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 117.
21. Ibid.,
pp. 108-109.
22. Ibid., p.
111.
23. Ibid., p.
106.
24. Ibid.,
pp. 118-119.
25. Ibid., p.
120.
26. Ibid., p.
118
27. Ibid., p.
121.
28. Norman 0,
Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, (New York: Vintage,
1969), pp. 32, 51.
29. Heidegger,
On the Way to Language, p. 42; US, p. 138.
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