THE central concern of this work is the relation between ethics and the imagination. It is a concern that is widely shared at present: it is evident, for instance, in the pronounced ethical turn taken in the recent work of Derrida, and in the increased interest in the thinking of the late Emmanuel Levinas. At the centre of Kearney's latest book is not any philosopher, but - inevitably - the figure of the artist and especially the artist's relation to some form of ethical responsibility.
This is a difficult and dangerous intersection, whose implications go far beyond the realms of philosophy: the claim to imaginative freedom is one of the most fundamental human aspirations, yet equally insistent is the need to feel that the imagination is in some way answerable, that it responds to some kind of call coming from elsewhere, a call that gives it a dimension of human relevance without which it can be arid and empty.
The source of this call is one of the main preoccupations of Kearney's book; it is essential that it should not be too narrowly defined (e.g., in terms of state, religion, nationality, ideology). To do this is instantly to subject the imagination to external forces which, however obliquely, are out to dominate and control. This is why many of the philosophers with whom Kearney is concerned prefer the vague but suggestion term "the Other".
The alternative danger posed by this term, of course, is that of abstraction: it is far easier to be concerned about "alterity" or "the Other" than it is to be concerned about others in the concrete, particularly others who impinge on one's physical, emotional or imaginative space. This danger is to some extent overcome by Levinas's magnificent emphasis on "the face" as the source of otherness, an "image" which helps to render an abstraction concrete while retaining its virtue of generalisation.
There is much of value and interest here about how various philosophers, from Kant to Derrida, have dealt with this issue (one need hardly mention that the focus is exclusively continental European) and also how it emerges in the work of various artists, from Yeats to le Brocquy (the face again). In passing, Derrida receives a well deserved rap on the knuckles for the aggression and disdain with which he has up to recently pursued his own programme: it would seem to be evident that if you are going to make ethics one of your main concerns, your own discourse would need the ethical in every respect.
As often with Kearney's work, one feels at times that major issues are being merely glanced at and rapidly swept aside. Ideology, for instance, is an immense problematic and if, as Kearney does, you are going to argue that it contains positive aspects, more than a few pages are required; it is really a study in itself.
The conjunction of philosophers and artists in this work, while in many ways commendable, does involve dangers. Too often, artists are treated as if they are also philosophers, with a particular programme or agenda, a coherent body of thought, that they are out to fulfil. We are told, for instance, of Joyce's "belief that the dualistic opposition between myth and history can be overcome". It is important to stress that Joyce does not have "beliefs": as a writer he is not in the business of truth and falsehood. To speak of him in this way is to import and impose conceptions on him, a kind of swift and dangerous translation. It is to neglect a vital distinction, a genuine alterity, that needs to be respected.
Ultimately, Kearney does opt for a particular means by which ethics and poetics can be reconciled: a mode he calls the hermeneutic imagination, a phrase repeated like a mantra throughout the text. Unfortunately, Kearney devotes no one chapter or section to expounding this term; the book remains an uneasy amalgam of straight expositions of the thinking of a number of philosophers and an attempt to develop a philosophical theory of its own. So the reader has to infer the precise implications of the term from scattered references. (It is true that he has dealt with the issue more coherently in previous publications.)
"Hermeneutics", for Kearney, is a mode of interpretation that allows a constant interrogation between, say, reader and text, a constant openness to revision, a refusal to foreclose or negate the otherness of the interlocutor, even, as he puts it at one point, a propos Heidegger, a "being that is always interpreting itself in the light of its possibilities".
It is perhaps most easily grasped in the figure of the "hermeneutic circle", a total interpretative process in which the work itself, its author and its reader all cohere, moving from part to whole and back again. He distinguishes this hermeneutics, best exemplified in the work of its principal exponents, Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, from what he calls the 19th century "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Marx, Freud, Nietzche) and their modern successors (Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida). For him, therefore, the hermeneutic imagination is a positive force, according an ethical dimension to the imagination without in any sense controlling it.
There remains, however, a fundamental incompatibility between the two areas that this book fails to address fully. Kearney's stance is ultimately. a conservative one, anxious to recuperate such notions as myth, tradition and ideology. The hermeneutic project has certain horizons which may well not apply to the imagination and the arts. One of them concerns the possible relations of equality and inequality between those involved in the hermeneutic circle.
Another important horizon is aptly indicated in the title of Ricoeur's magnum opus: Time and Narrative. This hermeneutics is crucially dependent on looking before and after, on sequence, on the highly complex category of possibility, on eschatological story. (In this, it reflects hermeneutics' roots in Biblical exegesis.)
Our clement is time, but even time has a history, as Stephen Hawking has shown. This horizon may well constrain hermeneutics in its possible relations to art. And beyond this horizon there looms another, as I sought to indicate in my remarks on Joyce: the horizon of truth. But that, to put it mildly, is another day's work.