A Hermeneutics of Love with Brent Dean Robbins: Our Divining Moments

Introduction

Simply put, my relationship with Brent Robbins has been a hermeneutics of love. This requires a bit of a story. And so, let us travel back some 20 years.

I was the chairperson of our search committee for a new hire at Point Park University. Brent applied for a tenure-track position, and the decision to hire Brent was contentious. We were not a psychology department then; we were part of a department called Humanities and Human Sciences, and psychology was just a program. Other faculty members had their favored candidates, as often happens. While I did not know Brent well back then, he was my favored candidate. I first met him when I was in graduate school at Duquesne University’s Clinical Psychology program. He was known in the department as being a rising star, incredibly productive and insightful. I was a year or two behind Brent, doing my doctoral graduate work. In fact, Brent was a teaching assistant and read one of my papers. He introduced me at the annual Graduate Student Conference at Duquesne University in 1999. So, we knew each other but not well.

When Brent applied to our program, I pushed to hire him based on his reputation and academic work as I thought we needed someone with an early and impressive research agenda—someone energetic, enthusiastic, someone who would help create dynamic new courses in our burgeoning humanistic and existential psychology program. He was already an excellent teacher with teaching experience under his belt. Long story short, we hired him! And Brent did exactly as I hoped—he helped create our excellent programs (e.g., our MA in Community Psychology and the PsyD in Clinical-Community Psychology) and regularly took on the lion’s share of program development and administrative work. Brent then became our chairperson for the next several years.

Soon enough, we were both in tenure-track positions with our offices located right next to each other. In the early days, we would brainstorm ideas, share stories of classroom experiences and changes we were making in our teaching styles, as well as marvel at the theoretical synergy of our respective courses. There were administrative obstacles, but we felt like we were on a journey together, and as Brent would say, creating legacies.

Brent would come in to borrow a pen and off we would go talking and listening. Brent is steeped in the philosophical history of humanistic and existential developments, and he advanced, from a dream he had no less, an amazing cosmology that would both inform his work, and structure two of our seminal courses (Ancient to Modern and Modern to Postmodern in psychology). While I am also steeped in the humanistic-existential tradition, I tend to be more post-structural and interested in new ethical forms of engagement with others, especially within communities. If we pause to reflect upon these divergences, we will see how the bridging and critical tension of these ideas would very well create a fascinating overall curriculum of study. It was exciting, as we justly kept our humanistic-existential roots, and ventured off into critical community psychology. At times Brent and I would not discuss certain perspectives and yet astonishingly converge on trenchant ideas for our programs such as incorporating Lévinasian ethics (1961/1969), Girard’s (1986) scapegoating mechanism, and, as we shall soon see, a hermeneutics of love.

Hermeneutics and Our evening Vigils

Hermeneutics is a complex term, theory, and practice, with an involved and dynamic history (see Shapiro & Sica, 1988). We note that hermeneutics is not simply interpretation; it is the study of interpretation, the practice of interpretation and the ontological recognition of ourselves as interpreters. Caputo (1987) explains that the word hermeneutics, etymologically, comes from the mythological Greek god Hermes. Hermes, as the divine messenger, was privileged to understand the meaning of the gods, and, as a messenger, was sent to bring meaning to mortals. But as Caputo makes clear, we mortals are constrained by the structure of human understanding and can never fully understand a divine message as was presumably understood in the heavens. Hence, for Caputo, understanding is resigned to interpretation that must necessarily be delimited by our biases and presuppositions. This is, as my readers may know, contrary to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl (1913/1998), where the subject assumedly has privilege and presuppositionless access to self and world through the processes of the phenomenological reduction (s) and bracketing. Brent and I, with due respect and debt to Husserl, were more interested in Heideggerian (1927/1996) phenomenology and hermeneutics, as Sass (1988) explains, “Heidegger’s hermeneutic view of human existence is opposite to that of Husserlian phenomenology [. . .] and the humanistic psychologists who take for granted the essential self-transparency or intelligibility of consciousness” (p. 244). So, while Brent and I certainly share, as I will clarify below, the values and ethics of humanistic psychology, we sought in our department methodologies that remained critically reflexive and gave priority to the tensions between what can be known and how we come to know it. I believe we tried to emphasize in our humanistic psychology program a devotion to the Other, otherness, and community, rather than a humanistic psychology devoted to the self. ²

To be sure, we can easily see the circularity of hermeneutics. We have our prejudices, we use them heuristically, for better or worse, we learn from others and from our worldly endeavors, and we, hopefully in good faith, revise our beliefs and actions. Heidegger (1927/1996) describes human consciousness as a hermeneutic circle: “The ‘circle’ in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and this phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein, in interpretive understanding” (p. 143). My readers likely know that Dasein is a technical term used by Heidegger to shed light on the human kind of being as reflecting on one’s own existence and as there-being in our everydayness and practicality (i.e., there being content, there being joyful, there being bored, and so on).

The back-and-forth circular movement of human understanding is related to the circularity of interpretation itself; it is about how human beings are in their perception, thinking, and learning. This then is the ontology of hermeneutics—that we are, as a structure of our existence, interpreters. Following Heidegger, Dreyfus (1984) clarifies the hermeneutic circular movement and states:

(1) since we must begin our analysis from within the practices we seek to interpret our choice of phenomena is already guided by the shared understanding of being which has made us what we are; (2) since this understanding may well be a disguise and distortion, we cannot take our first interpretation at face value; so, (3) we must be prepared to revise radically our first account on the basis of the phenomena that it reveals. (p. 71)

Despite all our talks on philosophy and theory, our joke was that we would always end up talking about God. I do not think we could help ourselves. As our readers may know, Brent is a faithful and religious person. I suppose I would describe myself as a resolute and enchanted agnostic (Schneider, 2004). As Caputo (1997) says, “not . . .a knower’s unknowing [. . .] but a lover’s unknowing” (p. 103). And accordingly, like Brent, I do love to discuss religion, God, spirituality, and philosophy. Indeed, many of our talks were about all that is divine. Kearney (2001) explains:

There is a thin line, of course, between seeking to capture the other as divine (qua idol) and receiving the divine through the other (qua icon). But thin lines are no excuse for fusion or confusion. They call rather for acute hermeneutic vigilance. (p. 11)

Dare I say our talks were a bit of a vigil and with hermeneutic vigilance. Sometimes hours would go by, long past our office or classroom times, into the early evening, and with our partners wondering where we were. We would unpack our feelings and beliefs, with each of us gently interpreting back to the other—an ethical relationship beyond the totalization of the Other (Lévinas, 1961/1969). We would meet on a narrow ridge (Buber, 1947/1965), perhaps keeping in check our more obdurate views, or even seeing them as less important than our communing and friendship in conversation (see Gadamer, 1989b). This is critical, as Gadamer (1976) believes, it is the function of hermeneutics to engage incongruence because interpretations that appear the most disparate, probably contain the most inflexible prejudices and preconceptions. It is not that we did not have our prejudices, and indeed still do, but these prejudices were necessary for understanding even as they got revised or relinquished; they “constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 9). Bernstein (1983) tells us, “We are thrown into the world as beings who understand and interpret—so if we are to understand what it is to be human beings, we must seek to understand understanding itself, in its rich, full, and complex dimensions” (p. 113).

Therefore, when we talked, each of us spoke with the vigilance Kearney described and with carefulness as messengers and translators to each other; each of us interpreting the other’s existence (thoughts, feelings, beliefs) seeking understanding and with love.

Our Hermeneutic of Love

Finally, this brings us to the hermeneutics of love:

Bob McInerney and I were engaged in one of our reveries of extended dialogue in the break room of our department. Picture the two of us there waving our hands and raising our voices with exuberance as we lighted on new insights and shared enthusiasm for the unfolding project of developing the new program. (Robbins, 2016a, pp. 216–217)

I remember us being at dinner, but alas nowadays my memory is not so good. What I do recall, quite vividly, is the excitement Brent described and the meaningful connections we made to both community and humanistic psychology, generally.

For Brent:

This hermeneutic of love flows from a phenomenological epistemology, a metaphysics that recognizes the ontological dignity of the person, and an ethical call to preserve the dignity of (and therefore the transcendence of) the Other (who is beyond price). (Robbins, 2016b, p. 9)

Note that, following Lévinas, Brent shows us the ethics as first philosophy that is before hermeneutics as an epistemology, and this inaugurates a hermeneutics of love (Robbins, 2016c). For us, the expression hermeneutics of love for the community came about that day and within the context of our previous knowledge, our friendship, and our concerns about being ethical. We liked it. Brent said something like, “I think we’re onto something!” And we were on, very much alive with it and passionate about it at the onset. It felt like a point of departure as well as an ethos worthy of our attention and intentions. In part, we sought to move beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricœur, 1970). Brent puts forth that “In contrast to an attitude of suspicion, a hermeneutic of love interprets not through a mood of fear but through the attitudes of charity, empathy, and openness” (Robbins, 2016b, p. 9).

Certainly, we agreed on the necessity of critique and even a bit of suspicion (after all, we are not transparent to ourselves, and others may very well help shed light on our unconscious desires and motives); however, we valued love and empathy as interpretive stances, and we were concerned about the authoritative and reductive nature of a hermeneutic of suspicion (recalling our ethical concerns regarding being with others), especially when applied in a critical social or community psychology program. We sought what Brent calls charitable interpretations of others—interpretations that attested to the dignity of others, as well as their uniqueness, strengths, and their capacity to give and receive love. This attestation of dignity (Ricœur, 1992) has been of interest to me regarding community, and moments of communitas (see McInerney, 2016). ³

In our relationship, I believe we experienced this attestation of each other, if you will, with both humility and solicitude for each other. For Ricœur (1992), “Solicitude adds the dimension of value, whereby each person is irreplaceable in our affection and our esteem” (p. 193).

We knew too that we would have to be down to earth with our new program founded in a hermeneutics of love. We were keen on the idea of philosophers of the streets (Meagher, 2007; Young, 1990), and we acknowledged that with our philosophical outlook, we needed our students to be hands on and to have practical experience. While I think I helped with some ideas for the program (we also made a good video about it), Brent, as mentioned above, did the tedious work of comparing our program to others, curriculum development and sequence, and selling it to the administration. We both published on the hermeneutics of love in a special issue of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2016). We are a humanistic psychology department at our core, and how Brent describes our approach, is exactly right:

Humanistic psychology, in essence, is a human science guided by a hermeneutic of love within a phenomenological epistemology, which is grounded in the recognition of the ontological difference between human beings and things and, in turn, flows from the ethical recognition of human dignity put into action as an ethics of caring. (Robbins, 2016b, p. 10)

As I am sure my readers will appreciate, Brent and I are well-read on hermeneutics and have studied Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricœur, Lévinas, and many others. Here is Brent’s synthesis of ideas as related to humanistic psychology: “The disclosure of humanistic values, grounded in an appreciation of the ontological dignity of the person, is guided by a hermeneutics of love” (Robbins, 2016b, p. 8). Not surprisingly, Brent and I have had many talks about humanistic values and ethics. Brent describes humanistic values in relation to our ontological beliefs and epistemological stance:

The humanistic approach to psychology circles through this interpretive movement among an ethic of care, phenomenological description of the other as disclosed epistemologically through an attitude of love, and the ontological recognition by which the other is disclosed as intrinsically worthy of care by virtue of her or his personhood. (Robbins, 2016b, p. 3)

If there is a firm spot on the Buberian ridge for us to traverse, it is that we share very similar values and ethics even if, at times, we start from different philosophies or theories. Buber’s (1947/1965) image of a narrow ridge is to describe the tension encountered in any genuine relationship, noting that what we can be sure of is this tension as suspension, that is, to momentarily suspend certain beliefs in service to, and responsibility for, the other. Indeed, the narrow ridge as an intersubjective bridge to any other is suspended by tension, and to suspend belief, is to thoughtfully hold off interpretations, not to eliminate them. Buber beautifully describes this experience as follows:

. . .that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed. (p. 184)

It is precisely this suspension as balancing, on shaky ground, which allows genuine dialog. The ridge, or narrow bridge, to any other is to be endured if we have any hope of interpersonal understanding and ethics. I need Brent, as he needs me, to know ourselves in excess of our egoism. Now my readers might feel that Brent and I are friends, and alike, therefore our relationship is easy, as it is easy for us to get along. There is some truth to this. However, we do not merely get along, we are more along for the ride, alongside each other, long-suffering and long enduring. As Heidegger (1927/1996) says, “With and ‘also’ are to be understood existentially, not categorically” (p. 111). We talked with one another, not at one another, and we added ideas and practices to our vision of a hermeneutics of love. These additions were not offered with the idea that we were categorically progressing such as in positivism, nor did we wholly reject each other’s ideas. Lévinas (1961/1969) explains “The face in which the other– the absolute other— presents himself does not negate the same, does not do violence to it as do opinion or authority . . .” (p. 203). If our relationship was that of sameness and identity (idem), we would be confined to relate with various common identifications or categorizations (Ricœur, 1992). And yet, our discussions emerged beyond these identifications. When we talked, we had no idea where the conversation might go, as we did not have a conversation so much as the conversation had us (Gadamer, 1989b). Here is a lovely quote from Gadamer (1989b) in this regard: “. . .the conversation that we are is one that never ends. No word is the last word, just as there is not a first word. Every word is itself always an answer and gives rise always to a new question” (p. 95). And Lévinas (1961/1969) tells us, “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it” (p. 51).

For example, one day, while discussing God, Brent said to me something like this: “You know Bob, if you make God merely philosophical and abstract, it becomes difficult to see how God is in our lives.” I long-suffered this comment, thought about it for days, weeks, even years. This kind of suffering is not, as I am describing, the common notion of pain and woe. Instead, I want to describe suffering as sacrificial enduring; that is to say, we willingly endured each other, which is to say that we continued our dialog despite tensions (see Gantt, 2000). This particular interpersonal experience was for me an I-Thou moment, a genuine and loving dialogic relation and interpretation: “Only men [persons] who are capable of truly saying Thou to one another can truly say We with one another” as Buber (1947/1965) tells us (p. 176). Note then that we welcomed each other as persons with dignity, not simply gathering information from each other, or attempting to convince each other of some presumed truth; instead, the relation was, and is, marked by reciprocity and mutuality.

Our Divining Moments

These moments of reverie and dialog were, for me, divining moments. To divine means to understand, it means loveliness; most importantly, the term points to a trace of divine otherness, as Lévinas elucidates (1961/1969, 1963/1986). To divine, is agape love as Brent defines, “Agape love, a willing of the good of the other, is an interpretive stance by which the dignity of the other can be disclosed and understood” (Robbins, 2016b, p. 2). To interpersonally enact the divine, if you will allow me this presumptiveness, seems to be a hermeneutics of love. Our talks were, I believe, divine in all three connotations. Thus, I want to take a close look at our reverie, as Brent has depicted, by using the following intriguing quote from Emmanuel Lévinas:

The manifestation of the other is, to be sure, first produced with conformity with the way every signification is produced. The other is present in a cultural whole and is illuminated by this whole, like a text by its context. The manifestation of the whole ensures this presence and this present; they are illuminated by the light of the world. The comprehension of the other is thus a hermeneutics and an exegesis [. . .] But the epiphany of the other involves signifyingness of its own, independently of this signification received from the world. (1963/1986, p. 351)

We see that the beginning part of the quote highlights the inevitable structural part of any interpersonal relation. We signify to each other. Again, it is true that Brent and I not only speak the same language, and we use shared specialized terminology, which might be called Duquesnese as one of professors used to joke about. ⁴ This language, or significations (i.e., all signifiers, such as facial expressions, gestures, postures, and embodiment in general), is the manifestation that Lévinas points to. Lévinas continues to show that our significations are inseparable from the culture (s) we have been raised in, and which continues to be the medium in which we express ourselves. In this way, we use cultural signification to shed light on our thoughts and feelings. As I have described above, we must interpret each other, which is of course the hermeneutic approach Lévinas shows, and we must listen carefully, which is the exegesis or a close and thoughtful reading.

It is the last part of this quote that I find so utterly compelling: “But the epiphany of the other involves signifyingness of its own, independently of this signification received from the world.” The word epiphany can be used to depict a manifestation of the divine. Divining moments then transcend the usual signifying practices of our everydayness. They are unanticipated, and moments imbued with love. These divining moments, like the many moments I have had in dialog with Brent, are moments of being called upon, and indebted to, and they are passive (as we do not produce them or control them, see Gadamer, 1989a), and as fleeting as any moment must be. A divining moment respects, welcomes, and endures the transcendence of the Other (Lévinas, 1961/1969). In thinking of Lévinas’ (1961/1969) again, we see that the Other cannot be captured and totalized; that otherness, and the infinite remain, as the countenance of the face: “The epiphany of the face is ethical,” Lévinas says (p. 199). As for love, Lévinas relates, “But love goes beyond the beloved. This is why through the face filters the obscure light coming from beyond the face, from what is not yet. . .” (p. 254). Recall Brent’s description of our encounter with the hermeneutics of love, “. . .we lighted on new insights,” he wrote. Brent uses a term of illumination, an illumination that cannot be consciously conjured, I believe, as “The breach of totality is not an operation of thought” (Lévinas, 1961/1969, p. 40). We were swept up by the significations, as well as the words that describe and bring to light ideas and practices.

It will be no surprise to our readers that Brent and I are lovers of words. For example, the word “fecundity” used by Lévinas in Totality and Infinity was not only profound for us, but in some ways amusing. We would see each other in the hallway and just say “fecundity” as we walked by each other! Seriously though, Lévinas states that “In fecundity the I transcends the world of light—not to dissolve into the anonymity of the there is, but in order to go further than the light, to go elsewhere” (p. 268; emphasis in original). We lighted upon a promising mood and thought that would potentially form a loving practice within our program. As bell hooks (2000) recounts: “When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic” (p. 98). We saw the potential of a hermeneutics of love as a social movement, even if local and grassroots.

The Hermeneutic Circle as a Hermeneutic of Love

Here I want to think about the hermeneutic circle in relation to a hermeneutics of love; as a Derridean (1967/1976) supplement to the circle, which helps us to see the hermeneutic circle less as a cognitive act, or even an act of singular consciousness, but additionally as disclosing divining moments. ⁵ If the hermeneutics of love is a supplement to the hermeneutic circle, it deconstructs it (Derrida, 1967/1976); it makes the structure of the circle as a process permeable, and it reveals what resides beyond the circle (see also Faulconer, 2003). As Brent has made clear, the hermeneutics of love is about ethics, the ethics of loving the Other, and otherness itself. Therefore, the hermeneutics of love we imagined that day was in a way, driven by love and ethics, not by the self that knows itself and others. Love and ethics deconstruct the circle, opening the possibility of the otherness of the Other to change us in such a way that we can love, even if an aporia, even if it is both a possible and impossible obligation to the Other and all others (Caputo, 1993). As Caputo (1993) shares, “Here the love of difference is the love of the other and being held hostage by the other is not considered demeaning, degrading, ignoble but rather uplifting and challenging work” (p. 60; emphasis in original).

In following Caputo (1987), I put forth that a hermeneutics of love is a “lesson in humility” (p. 258). Our humility helps us to affirm that we are delimited by our human biases, and that if we have any hope of fleeting moments of transcending them, it is humility that will be the vehicle that carries us to what was previously ineffable and unimaginable. I feel that Brent and I intuitively understood this. Indeed, each philosophy in practice, hermeneutics and deconstruction, must be used with humility. Caputo (2018) suggests, “Without deconstruction, hermeneutics risks being naïve; without hermeneutics, deconstruction risks running of the rails” (p. 10). And Caputo warns, “So we must love the other without deploying love as a cunning way to love ourselves. That is not to say that we should not love ourselves or not love the other in ourselves” (p. 43).

Furthermore, Lévinas’ critique of the hermeneutics of Gadamer is relevant here; in that, while hermeneutics seems thoughtfully epistemological in our qualitative work with others, as well as in therapy (Orange, 2011), it may proceed with a potential reification of self-knowledge, and presumed knowledge of the other. While I do feel interpretations can be a form of epistemological violence (Teo, 2010), I also wonder how we can even know ourselves except by way of interpretations coming from others. Put another way, any apparent instantiation of a hermeneutics of love, I imagine, will not exhaust my responsibility as being called by any other, or more accurately put, the otherness of the Other (i.e., alterity and the countenance of the face). For Lévinas (1961/1969), “The same and the other cannot enter into a cognition that would encompass them” (p. 80). By being called, Lévinas indicates the call of the other that is a challenge, and command to be ethical, careful, and to be loving (see also Critchley, 1989). “For us, as Emmanuel Lévinas (1961/1969) taught us, ethics is our first philosophy—it is what calls us out to our metaphysical and epistemological stance—the stance that understands the ontological dignity of the person—the call of the Other” (Robbins, 2016b, p. 7). Regardless of our scholarship in hermeneutics, what is remarkable is that Brent and I embarked upon our relationship with a tacit understanding of responsibility to each other before we met each other.

I am not suggesting that we completely escape the circle, but that there is more to understanding, more to being-with-others, than the workings of, and structural closure of the hermeneutic circle: “‘Free’ speaking flows forward in forgetfulness of oneself and in self-surrender to the subject matter made present in the medium of language” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 87). For Gadamer (1989a), the hermeneutic circle could be a continual encircling of horizons (even as horizons delimit what we can know). ⁶ Furthermore, Lévinas (1999) worries about the closure of the hermeneutic approach in that it may totalize the Other, reducing the Other to the same. It is, for Lévinas (1961/1969), the saying in conversation that frees us from the self-same closure of the hermeneutic circle. The saying is highlighting in conversation what is possible, not closing possibility and thus strives to be ethical and welcoming; it is part and parcel of the hermeneutics of love. For it is “the said” that Lévinas would see as a closure of the hermeneutic circle, I believe, and where the Other is held in check by the identifications and conceptualizations of the said.

The “unsaying the said” then is an act of ethical and loving deconstruction (Critchley, 1989; Lévinas, 1999). The unsaying the said, cannot be negation or rejection of what has been said. What is said and left sedimented (perhaps even festering) and what has been said, while useful as Gadamer felt to interrogate in service to others and as part of his fusion of horizons, can be quite dangerous to difference and otherness.

Sure enough, saying and the said, are indubitably interconnected and it is the work of the hermeneutic circle (with love) to tease out the horizons of possibilities to love. And the saying of what has not been said, must be said, and with love. It is love, and in a way, the love of the avowal of transcendence, that disrupts the hermeneutic enclosure.

Our conversations were imbued with ethics, as I have said, and were divining moments or in Lévinasian terms, the trace of the divine. It is illeity, which is transcendence beyond that of the otherness of the other (that the other is indeed other than oneself and always more than oneself) and beyond the otherness that resides, if you will, in the self-sameness of the I via commonality, empathy, sympathy, and the like. In thinking about my conversations with Brent, I see illeity as divine and serendipitous moments we could only bear witness to. And so, I am fascinated by the conversations I have had with Brent in that we revealed something else, something wholly other, that neither of us could, nor would fully grasp. Therefore, like love itself, illeity disrupts any complete fusion of horizons or the totality of the I/Thou experience (Critchley, 1989).

Our Thinking and Thanking

The divining moments emerging within a hermeneutics of love is also a thinking-thanking, as Brent describes in his joyful and brilliant reading of Heidegger’s (1977) What is Called Thinking. As Brent shares:

Heidegger demonstrates for us how being-thoughtful is not a matter of performing a method of mental activity that is applied to get from point (a) to point (b). On the contrary, he shows us how being-thoughtful is an encounter with Being. (p. 16).

Our encounters with Being or the there-is-ness of existence can of course be cynical and met not with thankfulness and love, but with dread, spite, emptiness, and hate. Likewise, we can reify or concretize Being and God and lose our thankfulness and the playfulness of existence. I do feel that the divining moments we experienced together were playful and extemporaneous because: “The mysterious play of being cannot be accounted for in terms of an external cause or purpose; rather, the play of Being is the groundless ground of play which one arrives at through a leap into thought” (Robbins, 2014, p. 17).

I hope my readers now recognize that a hermeneutics of love is not simply an epistemological change in viewpoint, or the opposite of a hermeneutics of suspicion. It is a different kind of meditative attunement toward others (Heidegger, 1977), and indeed with the world. Yes, we created a curriculum and courses, but I think we were more interested in the welcoming culture of our programs and the way in which we would teach and advise our students. Truly, as the years went by, and we continued our talks, our teaching became a hermeneutics of love, a gift of love. John Caputo (2012) relates, “Absent the gift, the school would be an impossible place to be. The innumerable, invisible, ghostly gifts the teachers make are all gratuitous, extra, in excess of the economy, yet they are all absolutely necessary” (p. 115). And for Heidegger (1977), “. . .what teaching calls forth is this: to let learn. Indeed, the proper teacher lets nothing else be learned than—learning” (p. 380). It is the gift that Heidegger attends to, and Brent elucidates, which we hoped to give, and that was given to us in our divining moments:

Joyful thinking-thanking in being pleased with the gift of Being, acknowledges the favor of Being as grace. Thinking-thanking recognizes the gratuitousness of the gift of Being, given without why, unearned and without recompense, costing nothing, unwarranted, without cause or purpose (p. 20).

As Brent says, we pride ourselves on being charitable with our students. We have many students who come into our program with tumultuous backgrounds, trauma, and a relatively deprived early education. Many of our students are first generation into college. We find that our students discover themselves, so to speak, as worthy, creative, and insightful thinkers. It is, we feel, this cultivation and nourishment of love as a teaching practice that has helped our students find their own unique ways of learning and being-in-the-world.

I mentioned previously that my office is right next to Brent’s. How many times have I heard Brent’s delightful chuckle and laughter through the walls as he talked with students. It always brought a smile to my face. He clearly engages with students with loving interpretations, charitable offerings of knowledge, and a seemingly unlimited passion for fruitful conversations. Fecundity!

Faith and the Miraculous

In summation, I agree with Brent and believe a hermeneutics of love happens when we “give ourselves over to a thinking that calls to be thought, a thinking that is a thanking” and I am ever so thankful that Brent is in my life (p. 20). A hermeneutics of love seems to be, in part, a thankfulness to love itself. After all, are we not lovingly thankful for others whom we love, for meanings that sustain and nurture us and others. Are we not thankful for clarity, and wisdom, for a bountiful earth as our home and for the pleasures of all art and the possibility and presence of spirit?

In a recent conversation over dinner, we spoke of the miraculous and its ever-present possibility in existence. I believe Brent and I share a devotion and loyalty for, and to, what is to come as a loving possibility. I told Brent that I hoped for his miraculous recovery from the cancer diagnosis.

Later in the week, Brent spoke to our students about his diagnosis. He was forthright and bare in his description of his condition. Not surprisingly, he described feeling evermore alive and very much thankful for the life he has lived. He spoke of the interrelationship of our existential orientation, finitude, and that embracing life with love and thankfulness has always meant embracing one’s death and the death of others. In this way, I think, nothing changed in his life in that he always already lived this way. In fact, he told us he has been, in a way, preparing for this time his entire life.

Furthermore, when I think about what Brent has been through of late, and how he has lived his life, I must think about faith. Here again is a place where we meet on the narrow ridge, where my agnosticism and Brent’s theism commune. While I am agnostic, I have faith in miracles, not necessarily as contra naturam (van den Berg, 1961), but as existentially present and meaningful: “The miracle is not contra naturam; it is the nature of the contra naturam world which is contra miraculum” (p. 203). As van den Berg says, “Our belief is the condition of the miracle” (p. 204). Tillich (1952/2008), who explicated the potential interrelationships between existentialism and Christian theology, sees existentialism as maintaining divine and religious associations, found originally in Kierkegaard’s work.

Accordingly, the leap of faith, as Tillich relates, is that “[f]aith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience” (p.172). Here I turn to Caputo (1993) again, and suggest that:

Faith does not, however, extinguish the abyss but constitutes a certain reading of the abyss, a hermeneutics of the abyss. Faith is not a way of escaping what happens, but a way of interpreting it and coming to grips with it (p. 245)

“Accepting death with love,” as bell hooks (2000) relates, “. . .means we embrace the reality of the unexpected. . .love empowers us to surrender” (p. 204). Surely, we must take good medical advice and intervention, as Brent has. However, can we ultimately surrender to the abyss with a hermeneutics of love? I think so, and in a very real sense, Brent has faced the abyss with the courage to be . . . and this is quite miraculous!