Ricoeur's Transcendental Concern: A Hermeneutics of Discourse (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Riceour’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition.

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References (45)

  1. See Sluga, H. 1980. Gottlob Frege, 159. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. This reading is particu- larly important when applied to Ricoeur's adaptation of Frege to the task of clarifying Heidegger's notion of world. If Frege was never primarily interested in the question of the object's external existence, then the interpretation of world as reference does not have to be devoid of transcendental import.
  2. Ricoeur, P. 1977b. The rule of metaphor, 74. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  3. Ibid., pp. 199-200.
  4. Cf. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and time, 83-91. Albany: State University of New York Press. In contrasting his own concept of world to that of Descartes, Heidegger develops the basis for a phenomeno- logical hermeneutics that takes Dasein as the starting-point for an original inquiry into the meaning of being. Ricoeur's adaptation of the world-concept would be hermeneutical as well, but it would emphasize how the question of being allows the self to inhabit the world ontologically. Moreover, in the long run, Ricoeurian ontology is less concerned with the difference between being and beings, or with the way that being has been sent to us historically, than with the question of how human identity negotiates the interface between being and time.
  5. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation theory, 36. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
  6. Ibid., pp. 288-90.
  7. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From texts to action II, 107. London: Athlone Press.
  8. Ibid., pp. 120-21.
  9. Ricoeur, P. 1985. Time and narrative, vol. 3, 26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 20 Ibid., p. 27.
  10. Ibid., p. 31. 22 Ibid., p. 32.
  11. Ricoeur's reading of Heidegger's masterwork compares in some ways to that of Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time. In Margins of philosophy, 29-67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Both philosophers contend that Heidegger's attempt to isolate a "vulgar" conception of time from a more "authentic" conception is problematic both methodologi- cally and on the level of hermeneutical consistency. Derrida, however, argues that Heidegger reinstates presence after attempting to reduce Aristotle's time to the metaphysics of a punctual present, whereas Ricoeur contends that Heidegger's acceptance of conflicting conceptions of time is what prevents him from grasping the mediatory potential of narrative.
  12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, p. 91. 27 Ibid., p. 125.
  13. Ibid., p. 168. 30 Ibid., p. 179.
  14. Gadamer argues that historical consciousness, thoughtfully considered, is never a simple reflection occurring within the closed horizon of the present but that it is always already a listening that accepts the past on its own terms. Listening is the basis for tradition, properly conceived, which allows the past to be interpreted as a "text" that cannot be assimilated to the present any more than it can serve as a substitute for the past. The hermeneutical "fusion of horizons" is thus an accomplishment of historical consciousness that should not be confused with either Hegelian modes of dialectical assimilation or late nineteenth-century positivism. For details, see Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1991. Truth and method, 304-307. New York: Crossroad.
  15. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, p. 221. 34 Ibid., p. 221. 35 Ibid., p. 246.
  16. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of pure reason, 409. New York: St. Martin's Press. 37 Ibid., p. 414.
  17. Ricoeur, P. 1994. Oneself as another, 105. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 467.
  19. Riceour, Oneself as Another, p. 109. 41 Ibid., p. 111. 42 Ibid., p. 112. 43 Ibid., p. 142. 44 Ibid., p. 147.
  20. Ibid., pp. 180-194.
  21. Ibid., pp. 191-92.
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