FUSION OF HERMENEUTIC HORIZONS IN THE DERVISH DANCE

Annotation

Two waves of reception of ecstatic Sufism in Western culture are examined: the romanticism of Wilhelm Hauff ’s fairy tales and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Hauff actualized the allegorical- symbolic method of Sufism, which goes back to the Neoplatonic view of time and eternity, by understanding identity not as a given but as a setting. Ecstasis, then, proves to be the rediscovery of the effects of language, which builds up the primal system of differences. Ricoeur has acted as a philosopher of language, for whom difference is immersed in a narrative that guides from contemplation to action. The mechanism of the ecstatic is then the mechanism of the quickened passage to action; the allegorical in Ricoeur’s system belongs to the character, and the symbolic to the relation to the Other. Then the ecstatic does not work with time at all, but with the distinction of past and future, which can be the key to the contemporary reception not only of Sufism, but also of Hesychasm and other mystical systems.

Keywords

Sufism, dervish, Hauff, Ricoeur, narrative, ecstatic, Neoplatonism, allegory, symbol, romanticism, hermeneutics

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