On the Border of Text and Experience - About Adrian Marino's Hermeneutics

The study deals with Adrian Marino's scientific activity developed in the domain of hermeneutics in the 1970s and considered to be trailblazing in the Romanian culture under the intellectual circumstances of that age. The paper is based on Marino's works written about Mircea Eliade's hermeneutics and about literary hermeneutics. It focuses on two main aspects of this hermeneutical achievement. On one hand it tries to investigate critically whether Marino's basic hypothesis can be verified. This hypothesis stated that, in Mircea Eliade's works written in the domains of history of religions, anthropology of religion, phenomenology of religion - works which explore the historical forms, cultural configurations and semantic contents of the universal religious mythology and symbol system - one can in fact discern the outlines of a universal hermeneutical conception that may be compared with Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. On the other hand our study makes an attempt to show all the deficiencies and limits of Marino's hermeneutical view which arose from his structuralist view and his epistemological-methodological approach. Having compared the essential points of the problems investigated by Marino with Eliade's statements as well as with Gadamer's and Ricoeur's relevant ideas, the present study concludes that Marino's characteristic misunderstandings related to the hermeneutical conception arose exactly from the hermeneutical situation which served as a medium for his investigations and, in fact, these misunderstandings have proved to be hermeneutically fertile.

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