Ricoeur's Transcendental Concern: A Hermeneutics of Discourse (original) (raw)
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Detour or Dialectic?: The Ineluctable Incarnation of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics
Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic turn is part of a grand dialectic of incarnational existence and linguistic mediation that spans his work. Yet, the recent proposals called “carnal hermeneutics” proceed on the assumption that Ricoeur’s philosophy is marked by a rift between the textual and the carnal. In particular, Richard Kearney’s language calls to mind Ricoeur’s well-known tendency to structure his reflections as “detour and return”: the text was a detour from from the body. The return trip appears, however, to have left textual hermeneutics in the rear view mirror. For carnal hermeneutics, the text is a different destination than the body. The detour metaphor leaves the body and the text at an essential distance from one another. Thus, we have difficulty asking what the body has to do with the text, for one always seems to be a “turning away” from the other. If, however, Ricoeur’s work exhibits not a detour but a dialectic, the tension between body and text may yet generate new insights, both carnal and textual. Given the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s “radical phenomenology of flesh” for carnal hermeneutics, this paper begins by briefly surveying the question of embodied expression raised by Merleau-Ponty. The inscription of embodied expression in the text is the phenomenon that poses the hermeneutical question sharply in terms of both body and text. Likewise, the presumed embodiment of both author and reader underlie Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Therefore, the paper’s primary concern is to sketch two indices that establish the existence of a body-text dialectic in Ricoeur’s philosophy. The first index is the dialectic relationship of Ricoeur’s well-known hermeneutical second naïveté with his original, incarnate second naïveté in Freedom and Nature. The second index is Ricoeur’s narrative mediation of incarnate intentionality in Oneself as Another. The progression of these two indices traces the emergence of the grand dialectic that constitutes the ineluctable incarnation of Ricoeur’s textual hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics as an Unfolding of Human Understanding: Ruminations of Paul Ricoeur's Linguistic Turn
Philosophical Society Annual Review, 2023
Language is the repository of meaning which emerges from human experience. From this ground of experience, presuppositions affecting how a person understands him- or herself, others, and the world around him, arise. For Ricoeur, the function of language must be examined to situate better the human person as having the capacity to say something. All meaning is realized and communicated in language as discourse. Whether written or oral, discourse always offers an opening of a new perspective to anyone who can read, listen, and communicate. For this reason, language is through and through hermeneutical because it is the medium through which sense and meaning are passed on, either through the event of speaking or of the written text.
Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon
Springer, 2016
It could be said that Ricoeur's thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return "to the things themselves". As Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology reminds us, these two movements are reconcilable. There is a hermeneutic component of phenomenology, just as there is a phenomenological component of hermeneutics. The chapters in this book reflect on this double movement that proceeds from the text to the phenomenon and from the phenomenon back to the text.
ADDIN
The hermeneutic study about discourse before the existence of Paul Ricoeur was around three points: romantic hermeneutics, onology hermeneutics, and dialectical hermeneutics. They have characteristics that other mainsteams do not have. Ricoeur’s thought style cannot be included in any of those three hermeneutic thoughts. In fact, his thought covers almost all contemporary philosophical topics. One of the points of Ricoeur’s contemporary hermeneutics is how to combine the phenomenology of Husserl’s metaphysical tendencies with Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. The text is essentially autonomous to carry out “de-contextualization” (the process of liberating oneself from context) and “re-contextualization” (the process of returning to context). Ricoeur’s thought patterns cannot be included in one of the three hermeneutic thought. In fact, his thought allegedly covers almost all contemporary philosophical topics. One of Ricoeur’s contemporary hermeneutics is how to combine the phen...
Enhancing further the Socratic dictum, Paul Ricoeur maintains that “an examined life is a life recounted”—a principle that interprets the human being with a detour to the text, narrative, work of art, and discourse. Ricoeur believes that any philosophical understanding of the self presupposes a “text.” Ricoeur’s notion of the capable human being, therefore, precisely took shape from this hermeneutical approach to philosophical anthropology. This paper aims to inquire into the complex itinerary of Ricoeurean “hermeneuticalphilosophical anthropology.” By hermeneutical-philosophical anthropology, we come to a full understanding of the philosophy of the human person by a textual or discursive interpretation (hermeneutics). The affirmation of the human person is reliant on how he understands himself through the works of literature and acts of language. Further, this paper attempts to elucidate Ricoeur’s emphasis on the important role of the self, specifically the personalities of those who participate both in written literature and acts of verbal language, e.g., the author, the reader, the speaker, human reference, etc.
VII Congresso Ibero-Americano sobre o pensamento de Paul Ricoeur, 2022
Throughout the 1970s, Paul Ricoeur wrote several papers related to hermeneutics. It is the case of La tâche de l'herméneutique, from 1973, but also many others such as La fonction herméneutique de la distanciation (1973), Phénoménologie et herméneutique (1975), and also La fonction narrative (1978). Those works aim at Ricoeur's core thinking on hermeneutics, but they also address some thoughts on the hermeneutical tradition since Schleiermacher. It is the case in the 1973 paper La tâche de l'herméneutique, which sets the foundations of Ricoeur's hermeneutical innovations in contrast with many philosophers, Martin Heidegger included. Ricoeur presents his hermeneutical issue as solving the disastrous opposition between explanation and understanding. He then suggests that Heidegger fails on the epistemological level, giving full attention to an unsurpassable ontological structure. This ontological structure would be, according to Ricoeur, the fundamental point of Heidegger's Analytic of Dasein. Besides, Ricoeur says that Heidegger fails again in posing the question concerning communication with others amid his ontological Analytic of Dasein. The point here is that Heidegger sees 'understanding' as means of placing 'myself' and 'my situation' within being. But is Ricoeur's interpretation of Heidegger's understanding of being and also his understanding of Dasein itself in accordance with Heideggerian Analytic of Dasein? Thus, it is necessary to undertake a critical analysis of the Ricoeurian interpretation of Heidegger's thought concerning hermeneutics.