PREFACE
The work of hermeneutics rightly began as interpreting sacred texts. These bear the properly transcendent message of God to humankind regarding His goals for creation and the ways to realize them in time. Each culture has been endowed with such knowledge which enlightens the mind and with values which move the heart. Some even have been recipients of explicitly dictated Sacred Texts.
In the past the focus of scientific knowledge was entirely upon objective knowledge to which the human appreciation of reality was restricted. In this light hermeneutics was concerned with how the text stated objective truth. In recent times human self-awareness has taken dramatic steps. This has made possible a greater appreciation of the reality of human subjectivity, its development through time, and indeed its character as the highest of God’s creation. In this light hermeneutics has tended to shift from the external referent of the text to the text itself, as bearing through history the creative work of human subjectivity.
Today we stand at a crossroad at which objectivity and sub-jectivity meet and generate new challenges and opportunities. This has led to important concerns, especially in relation to sacred texts. If human subjectivity enters the picture would it not be at the expense of what is truly divine and transcendent in a text; and if so must human interpretation be suppressed in the reading of the text. In that case, one is faced with the impossible choice of either re-jecting human historicity in order to be faithful to the sacred text, or needing to journey through time alone without divine guidance. The first path leads to fundamentalism, the second to secularism; both, in the words of Parmenides, are "all impossible ways".
In the face of this dilemma Professor Seyed Musa Dabadj, a professor at Qom in Iran, in this work, written at the Catholic Uni-versity of America in Washington, has accomplished something of the greatest moment for hermeneutics, both in general and, by implication, for Sacred texts in particular. He has entered upon the issue through the contemporary Betti-Gadamer debate over objecti-vity and subjectivity in the hermeneutics of legal texts. This enables him to identify the special role of subjectivity for the text, which, he shows, lives and speaks through time via the human reader.
But he has done something more, and of crucial importance to
the dilemma described above. With Heidegger, he has shown how Transcendent Being emerges in time precisely through the Dasein or the human as conscious. By tracing the text to these metaphysical roots he establishes the deeper truth of Kierkegaard’s insight that subjectivity is indeed objectivity. In the light Professor Dabadj is able both to protect the text from relativization by the reader and to show how, on the contrary, the reader gives voice to the meaning of the text in time. This enables the text to guide humankind in its many and ever changing circumstances.More the deeply insightful and comprehensive vision of this work has yet broader importance at this turn of millennia. For four centuries philosophy has focused on reducing all to human reason in a way that allowed for humanization only at the lost of the divine borne by cultural traditions of the many peoples. Seyed Musa Dabadj points out another, more hopeful route, namely, a humaniza-tion of our world which is authentic precisely because a new transcendence in the divine. His is a work which must be read.
George F. McLean