The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur
Abstract
I The Cogito and Hermeneutics.- 1. Hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy.- 2. Critique of the subject and interpretation of the cogito. Heidegger and Ricoeur.- 3. Ricoeur. Phenomenology of the will and "unquietness" of the Subject.- 4. Paradox and mediation in Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology.- 5. Crisis of the Philosophie de l'esprit. Human sciences, "methodic" hermeneutics.- 6. The destruction of the illusions of consciousness. Psychoanalysis as language theory.- 7. The challenge of semiology and the phenomenology of language. The reinterpretation of phenomenology as language theory.- 8. Concrete reflexion and the intersubjectivity question. Towards a hermeneutics of the I am.- 9. "Originary Affirmation," philosophies of negativity, problematics of the subject. Nabert and Thevenaz.- 10. Ricoeur and Heidegger. The cogito and hermeneutics.- II Text, Metaphor, Narrative.- 1. The history of hermeneutics. Text theory.- 1 Hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Gadamer.- 2 Hermeneutics as text theory in Ricoeur.- 2. Hermeneutic phenomenology.- 1 The hermeneutic critique of phenomenological idealism.- 2 Towards a hermeneutic phenomenology.- 3. Living metaphor.- 4. Towards a poetics of freedom.- 1 The circle of temporality and narrativity. Distentio animi and mythos.- 2 Narrative discourse between history and fiction.- 3 The dialectics of threefold mimesis. Towards a poetics of freedom.- Afterword.- Time, sacrality, narrative: interview with Paul Ricoeur.- Abbreviations.- Notes.- Bibliographical note.- Index of names.- Index of subjects.
Chapters (15)
Philosophical hermeneutics has become one of the most vital trends in contemporary philosophy. Even beyond the schools which explicitly acknowledge their debt to it, there is a field of interest in hermeneutics in which various scholars and schools are to be found. All, however, agree in recognizing that the problem of interpretation became of central importance and, at the same time, of manifold complexity, during and following the “linguistic turn” in the history of philosophy, i.e. when philosophy realized that language—this shifting, ambiguous, polymorphic and ineffable embodiment of meaning—was its proper element.
We are quite convinced that a rethinking of hermeneutics requires coming to grips with Heidegger and are likewise sensible to the attractions of Vattimo’s proposal (we would be tempted to test it against the results reached by two scholars we are very fond of, both of them far from Heidegger’s philosophical style: Pierre Thévenaz’ “philosophie sans absolu”4 and the radical “assenzialismo” of Piovani’s later years5). However, we do not feel that the only way to radicalize hermeneutics is by going back to Heidegger, nor that having praxis as our theme necessarily leads to a sort of ontological extenuation of philosophical hermeneutics. Quite frankly, one wonders whether the conclusive philosophical gesture of proclaiming a “breach” to have been opened, a “bottomless pit constitution of existence,” might be no less turned in upon itself and ultimately barren than the assertion of any other absolute, the only difference being that one cannot even allow oneself the further possibility of transcending philosophy in favor of mysticism. The search for a “methodical” hermeneutics, such as to found and justify in a credible fashion a method or a plurality of methods of interpretation and demystification, corresponds to so deep and pressing a need for clarity, understanding and self-understanding in mankind today that the undertaking must at least be attempted, avoiding any hardening of the Gadamerian opposition between “truth” and “method.”
With this we have entered into the heart of the problem of our research. The choice of Ricoeur as our interlocutor is, of course, not casual, although it does not imply a—so to speak—all-embracing alternative with respect to other trends of contemporary hermeneutics inspired by Heidegger, the aim being rather to integrate their thought into a new synthesis.
In effect, Ricoeur sees human reality as characterized by a fundamental antinomy.23 The elaboration of a philosophical anthropology, with the concept of fallibility as its starting point, leads directly to the idea, developed in Homme faillible, first volume of Finitude et culpabilité (1960), of the “non-coincidence of man with himself,” the constitutive “disproportion” of the ego. The paradoxical ontology constituting man is that of a finite-infinite being, as theorized by Descartes in his Meditations, but reinterpreted so as to exclude any connection with faculty psychology and its theory of error (finite intellect, infinite will and, hence, possibility of error). One must rather turn to the beginning of the fourth Meditation, where man is seen as intermediary between the highest being and non-being, excluding, however, any spatial connotation from the notion of ‘intermediary’. “Man … is intermediate because he is a mixture, and a mixture because he brings about mediations. His ontological characteristic of being-intermediate consists precisely in that his act of existing is the very act of bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the levels of reality within him and outside of him. That is why we shall not explain Descartes by Descartes, but by Kant, Hegel and Husserl: the intermediacy of man can only be discovered via the detour of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, or by the dialectic between certainty and truth, or the dialectic of intention and intuition, of significance and presence, of the Verb and the Look”24
The two volumes of Finitude et culpabilité were published in 1960 in “Philosophie de l’Esprit,” the prestigious series edited by Aubier, founded by Louis Lavelle and René Le Senne. This was the same series in which Ricoeur’s Le volontaire et l’involontaire, the first part of the Philosophie de la Volonté, had appeared ten years earlier. Actually, the discontinuance of the series had already been announced in 1956, an editorial decision that might be seen as symbolic of the end of an epoch and of a cultural hegemony.28 In effect, the philosophie de Vesprit, heir to the most illustrious tradition of French philosophy, had prevailed over university studies since the end of the nineteenth century, the period which in manuals goes under the name of the “reaction against positivism.” Comparison with analogous movements, for instance with Italian spiritualismo, might be misleading. With us, spiritualism had a narrower compass, on the outskirts of an area dominated by neo-idealism, and was often explicitly clerical, whereas in France there were vigorous forms of laical and rationalistic spiritualism, alongside well-known figures of believing philosophers, some suspected of heterodoxy. At any event, it was during the second half of the 1950’s, in fact, yhat signs appeared of a crisis which had been ripening and had now reached the breaking point.
That Ricoeur should choose a methodic hermeneutics is, we feel, closely related to his conception of the subject and his on-going efforts to transform the philosophy of the Cogito into a hermeneutics of the I am. His decision to come to terms with the human sciences, making the most of their contributions and accepting the risks involved in the application of their various methodologies without any prior safeguards for the sanctuaries of the ego, consciousness or even faith, is ultimately motivated, we feel, less by evaluations relative to keeping pace with a cultural fashion than by a deep confidence in mankind and a sincere concern for human needs and sufferings, in sum, by a genuine “pietas erga homines.”
Ricoeur, following Hjelmslev’s systematic elaboration of Saussure’s lessons, holds that the “semiological model,” common to structuralism in its various forms, both in its narrow application to linguistics and its extension to the study of socio-cultural phenomena, rests on five basic premises. 1) Language is an object of empirical science, where ‘empirical’ implies not only that observation has a primary role but also that inductive operations are subordinate to deduction and calculation. The possibility of referring to language as an object of science presumes the well-known Saussurian distinction between langue and parole. 2) A distinction must be drawn between a science of states of system, viz. synchronic linguistics, and a science of changes, viz. diachronic linguistics. It is the system which is understood first; change is understood as the passage from one state of the system to another. 3) In a state of system there are no absolute terms but only relations of reciprocal dependence; language is a form, not a substance; in language only differences exist. 4) The collection of signs, in order to be subject to structural analysis, must be seen as a closed system; all relations are within the system. 5) In this context one must give up the naive idea that the sign stands for a thing. The sign is defined by its opposition to all the other signs on its same level and, in itself, as pure difference; the sign is both the difference between signs and, within each sign, the difference between expression and content.57
Psychoanalysis and structuralism challenge the philosophy of the subject from two different yet converging directions; the results Ricoeur obtains from this twofold contestation are complementary. It is not enough, though, to merely juxtapose the conclusions of the two encounters; they must interact, shedding light on each other.77
Perhaps it is time to take our bearings. The line of reasoning we have been following would seem to have some of the features of a Ricoeurian “long route,” with the attendant risk of going astray or losing sight of the goal. We started out by charting the present state of hermeneutics, rejecting the obligation of choosing between either “urbanizing” Heidegger’s ontological radicalness into a sort of conciliatory neo-humanism or proclaiming, in a neo-Heideggerian fashion, that thought is without a foundation. Behind the latter alternative we spied even subtler, more ingratiating risks than with the former. In order to hold our course through hermeneutics, we wondered whether it might not be decisive to have a conception of subjectivity to serve as a guide in steering among the various options. We countered Heidegger’s by now classical reading of the Cogito with another in which the primacy of representation is replaced with the primacy of the act of existing. An encounter between reflexion and interpretation, between phenomenology and hermeneutics, of which Paul Ricoeur’s thought is an illustrious and significant example, seemed and seems to us to be the long route which must be followed order to lay the premises for a hermeneutic philosophy that could take up the challenge and the contributions of the human sciences and allow itself to be guided by a concern for flesh-and-blood human beings, without falling either into a consolatory humanism or that narcissistic subjectivism which damns one forever to the charmed circle of one’s own subjectivity. Along the way, Ricoeur has been our guide, himself a fellow-voyager. At this point of the journey, the “hermeneutics of the I am” strikes us as the most satisfying and mature response to the needs we set out to meet.
As we move toward the close of this part, we have left for last the examination of the text wherein Ricoeur comes to grips directly with Heidegger’s interpretation of subjectivity. With this, our discussion comes round full circle to the theme whence we set out.
In the preface to a most penetrating monograph on Ricoeur’s thought by the American scholar Don Ihde, Ricoeur himself, in the early 1960’s, briefly took stock of his philosophical itinerary from the original descriptive (eidetic) phenomenology to the hermeneutic phenomenology of his more recent works, stressing both the substantial continuity of his basic tenets and evident changes in perspective. He himself attributed the latter mainly to changes in the philosophical landscape, determining a shifting of “fronts,” with different interlocutors and issues. His interlocutors during the early period of his research were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, when the problem at issue appeared to be that of updating the reflexive tradition of philosophy by introducing elements from phenomenology and suggestions from existentialism. At that time the encounter between philosophy and the human sciences took place on the terrain of psychology. But “today the philosophical landscape has changed: the semiological sciences have taken the place of the natural sciences in the confrontation of philosophy with its other.” Nor is it possible to recover the problematic of meaning without reckoning with the “end of metaphysics” proclaimed in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Today, according to Ricoeur, the issue is no longer the phenomenological essence of the will, the equivalent of the question in Merleau-Ponty’s works as to the essence of perception, but turns on the relation between speech and action, the search for a “new equilibrium between saying and doing,” which in Ricoeur comes to a head in a “poetics of the will” that will show how “meaning comes to the ego through the power of the word.”1
In 1974, in a writing which is at once a summing up and a plan for future research, Ricoeur came back to his favorite theme, the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology, setting out his project for a “hermeneutic phenomenology.”1
Paul Ricoeur’s work on metaphor1 is an illuminating example of how the sciences and philosophy of language can relate in a correct and productive way, without either field encroaching on the autonomy of the other or any breakdown in communication taking place among different disciplines. What emerges clearly in Ricoeur’s work is that the philosophical approach to language offers the specific possibility of traversing the whole domain of semiology in order to go beyond signs into the heart of the relation between language and reality, thus allowing the ancient philosophical problem of truth to be posed in new forms. But this result can only be obtained at the expense of a journey which is both semiological and philosophical, a long route, to use Ricoeur’s favorite expression, moving from rhetoric through semantics to hermeneutics.
At this point of our research, although the spirit of Ricoeur’s philosophical work, already productive of valid results but still in progress, is not such as to permit us to suggest its conclusions, we can fix the direction of his line of march, the itinerary he proposes as an example to all those who share his philosophical concerns and goals.
In 1984 Il cogito e l’ermeneutica concluded on the prospect of a hermeneutics which would be solidary with a transforming, freeing praxis and, while interpreting the ‘works’ of freedom against the opaque background of living, fraught with suffering, would itself come forward as an exercise in liberty and a freeing practice.1
... Phenomenology can be described simply as 'meaning making' . Given that art is a metaphorical depiction of lived experience, Ricoeur's notion of 'living metaphor' [71] extended this phenomenological analysis particularly in the aim to bridge the artist's lived experience through art and language with the scientific pursuit of taxonomy in understanding SE-AN. ...
Background
Severe and enduring anorexia nervosa (SE-AN), is a serious and persistent illness, despite ‘state of the art’ treatment. Criteria have been theoretically proposed, but not tested, and may not adequately capture illness complexity, which potentially inhibits treatment refinements. The clinical reality of death as an outcome for some people who experience SE-AN (1 in 20) and broadening access to voluntary assisted dying, further complicates the field, which is undeveloped regarding more fundamental concepts such as nosology, treatment, recovery definitions and alternative conceptualisations of SE-AN. The present paper is in response to this and aims to build upon qualitative literature to enhance phenomenological understandings of fatal SE-AN.
Method
A published book, being the legacy of a 32-year-old professional artist offers a rich account of a life lived with AN, for 18 years with continuous treatment. A polysemous narrative via the interrelationship between the languages of the artist’s words and visual art is translated via interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), offering rich insight into the SE-AN experience.
Findings
The process of analysis induced three superordinate themes (1) Disappearing Self (2) Dialectical Dilemma (3) Death and Dying: Finding Meaning. Two cross cutting themes traversed these themes: (a) Colour and (b) Shifting Hope, where the former produced a visual representation via the ‘SE-AN Kaleidoscope’. Collectively the themes produce a concept of SE-AN, grounded in the data and depicted visually through the artist’s paintings.
Conclusions
The picture of SE-AN revealed in the analysis extends upon conceptualisations of SE-AN, highlighting key processes which are thus far under explored. These factors are implicated in illness persistence eliciting opportunities for further research testing including diagnostic considerations and treatment directions. In SE-AN, distorted body image extends to a global distortion in the perception of self. Additional criteria for the severe and enduring stages of illness related to (1) self and identity processes (2) measures of ‘global impoverishment’ across life domains are proposed for consideration in the future testing of putative defining features of SE-AN.
... 97 Subjective interpretation is negative, that giving a text based on itself by explaining using the general elements of giving language, giving culture. 98 Typically, subjective interpretation is the use of 'meaning in the world'. 99 Subjective hermeneutics means that the interpretation of Qur'an is done by each individual without regard to the basis of Arabic grammar. ...
In modern reality, exist an intersection between hermeneutic applications based on the motivation of war and peace. The existence of subjective hermeneutics is identical as a breakdown in every difference but the fact that it raise chaos ignores the interpretation of synonymity change into regressive sophistic interpretation. The purpose of this research is to place subjective hermeneutics as a study of the free interpretation of sophia claims discipline (wise) with the assumption that it gives birth to renewable ethical polarization and also progressive. This research is a library that is used to answer specific problems directly that raises the perspective of truth claims of interpretation that is different from the old interpretations. The results showed that subjective hermeneutics should conciliate collaborations of narrative (haggadic interpretations), prescribed ways of life (halakhic rules) and (meaningholders of early texts (masoretic sources). But subjective hermeneutics propagates authoritative hermeneutics that distinguishes between original (competent) meanings and non-original (non-competent) meanings. Syaḥrûr through subjective hermeneutics uses perversion (taḥrîf method) from the word in Qur’an such as lawful ownership (milk yamîn), solemn convenant (mîthâq), adultery (zinâ) and illegal sexual intercouse (fawâḥiṡ) to initiate non-marital marriages.
... tr. 1984-88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published versions of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990( , Eng. tr. 1992Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. ...
‘Hermeneutics,’ the word, is derived from Greek ‘hermenus’, which means ‘an interpreter’. Historically, it comes from Greek mythology, which refers to the messenger, Hermes, who was an interpreter of Zeus’ messages. Hermeneutics, in general, is a method or a science of interpreting sacred texts. It covers both orders- the theory of understanding and the interpretation of linguistic and non- linguistic expressions
... Data were analysed and discussed as part of a narrative, as individual offerings and as detailed analyses of events and actions. This approach to the data, and to the study as a whole, is informed by the hermeneutical approaches as described by Ödman and Kendeman (1999), Brown & Heggs (2005) and Ricoeur (Jervolino, 1990;Kearney, 2004;Ricoeur, 1991). ...
When children compose music in an electronic environment they are able to approach music and composition in very different ways. Analysis of their compositions reveals that children have a remarkably different approach to music than what has been reported in the music education literature over the past three decades. This paper investigates the special relationship children have with the electronic environment and how that environment allows researchers to experience and analyse the compositions as they were written; not how we think they were.
... Both of these imply, Ricoeur claims, a singular and capable moral 'self' or 'will' who is other from all others. This complexity of Ricoeur's ethics, combined with the fact that it has developed over almost half a century of scattered and diverse articles and chapters, helps explain why it has been variously interpreted as either Kantian (Albano, 1987;Anderson, 1993;O'Neill, 1994;Schweiker, 1993), narrativist or communitarian (Dauenhauer, 1986;Jervolino, 1990;Kemp, 1989Kemp, , 1995Leeuwen, 1981;Sweeney, 1997), or somewhat deconstructionist (Bourgeois and Schalow, 1990;Lawlor, 1992). In his rather more recent theory of critical phronesis, however, this multifaceted moral perspective finds something, I would argue, of a novel culmination. ...
At least since Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom) and poetics (making or creating) have been understood as essentially different activities, one moral the other (in itself) non-moral. Today, if anything, this distinction is sharpened by a Romantic association of poetics with inner subjective expression. Recent revivals of Aristotelian ethics sometimes allow for poetic dimensions of ethics, but these are still separated from practical wisdom per se. Through a fresh reading of phronesis in the French hermeneutical phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, I argue that phronesis should be viewed as at least in part poetic at its very core. That is, phronesis deals with the fundamentally tragic human situation of moral incommensurability, and it responds to this by making or creating new moral meaning. Such a poetics of practical wisdom helps phronesis stand up to significant and important critiques made of it by a range of modernists and post-modernists, pointing a way forward for some important contemporary moral debates.
This chapter presents an autoethnographic and narrative study of a female English language educator, academic and leader in Vietnam in the context of the growing importance of English in higher education. The study focuses on a narrative created by Author 1 about her experiences of being a female tertiary English educator striving to find her place in the complexities that surround being female and having a family but also having strong career ambitions. The chapter offers an inductive analysis of the narrative, together with explorations based on key ideas from the French philosopher, Paul Ricœur, especially his notions of a changing and unfolding self, language realised in action and the potential of generative creative action. The study points to the growing importance of understanding the stories and lived experiences of English educators and illuminates, in the circumstances of change in Vietnam, the tensions around the role and ambitions of women.
Can finite humans grasp universal truth? Is it possible to think beyond the limits of reason? Are we doomed to failure because of our finitude? In this clear and accessible book, Barnabas Aspray presents Ricœur's response to these perennial philosophical questions through an analysis of human finitude at the intersection of philosophy and theology. Using unpublished and previously untranslated archival sources, he shows how Ricœur's groundbreaking concept of symbols leads to a view of creation, not as a theological doctrine, but as a mystery beyond the limits of thought that gives rise to philosophical insight. If finitude is created, then it can be distinguished from both the Creator and evil, leading to a view of human existence that, instead of the 'anguish of no' proclaims the 'joy of yes.'
This paper is an attempt to bring together the convergent elements in J.L. Austin's and Paul Ricoeur's philosophies of language. Though a number of studies have already claimed that Ricoeur has in some ways been influenced by Austin, to date, not a single study has been made that exclusively focuses on the interrelatedness between Austin's and Ricoeur's philosophies of language. Thus, in this paper, I will start with a general exposition of the philosophical connection between Austin and Ricoeur. I will then show how Austin and Ricoeur define and also understand the nature of words, the central component of every language. I will next explore the interplay of meaning and hermeneutics through a detailed discussion of the Speech Acts Theory (Austin) and the Hermeneutics of Symbols (Ricoeur). Afterward, I will argue that in Austin and Ricoeur, words, meaning, and hermeneutics constitute the art of making sense of things and of interpreting certain aspects and features of language.
The article moves from a synthetic overview of the multiple threads that feed Ricœur’s reflection on recognition from the 1950s, in order to shed light on the inner conceptual articulation between the three moments of the “broad theory of recognition” developed in his last published work Parcours de la reconnaissance – i.e., identification, self-attestation and mutual recognition – and to grasp the distinctive features of his notion of mutual recognition both with regard to Hegel and to Honneth.
Woolf’s maturing as a writer was deeply influenced by her traumatic experiences in childhood, the (in)capacitating states of mental instability, as well as her proto-feminist convictions. Long before Barthes, she toppled the traditional position of the author, and her literary enshrinement of “the other reality” reached unity with the world rather than individuality. This article ponders Woolf’s creative impulse and investigates her autobiographical writings to show the import of their impact on her fiction, which, as Woolfian scholarship suggests, can be viewed as autobiographical, too. I argue that philosophical hermeneutics sheds light on the self-portrait that emerges from Woolf’s autobiographical writings and offers a rewarding insight into her path of becoming an author. I assert that Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of subjectivity, and, in particular, his notion of narrative identity provide a route to examine how Woolf discovers her writing voice. In light of his hermeneutics of the self, the dispersed elements of the narrative of life can be seen as a possibility of self-encounter. Woolf’s writings bespeak her gradually evolving self-knowledge and self-understanding, which come from the configuration of those separate “stories” into a meaningful whole. The article also interprets Woolf’s autobiographical writings through the prism of Michel Foucault’s reflection on discourse and subjectivity, indicating that her texts instantiate his assertion of the subject’s constant disappearance.
Chapter 3 explores Ricoeur’s hermeneutic concept of technical practice. It firstly introduces Ricoeur’s work, presenting Ricoeur as an eminent philosopher of mediation and discussing how he deals with language, temporality, and the social. Secondly, the chapter problematises the everyday understanding of the concept of technical practice. It establishes its common structure, the enigma this poses of the “nesting of finalities”, and the answer provided to this enigma by an understanding of temporality through the notion of narrative. Thirdly, Ricoeur’s theory of practice is presented according to its three-stage structure borrowed from his narrative theory: from basic actions to practices, from practices to life plans, and from life plans to the narrative unity of life.
This chapter translates the narrative ethics of technical practice into a method for practising ethics in research and innovation settings. Recent years have seen a proliferation of methods for practising ethics in research and innovation, and our method responds to certain shortcomings in these approaches. It offers three phases and nine stages, which lead the reader from the description of technical practices to prescription. Throughout the chapter, the application of this method is illustrated by means of a discussion of technical practices involved in the use of automated border control systems. Firstly, the chapter offers a way to gather descriptions of narrative structures and interpret these structures according to the theory of narrative technologies. Secondly, it presents an analytic framework to evaluate technical practices according to the way they link to standards of excellence, life plans, and the narrative unity of life. Thirdly, it offers guidelines for the prescription of technical practices related to the good life, with and for others, and in just institutions.
This paper addresses the specific gaps in Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology. Ricoeur’s view is presented in three phases – subjectivity, language, and ethics. First, a critique of Ricoeur’s idea of fallibility is presented; secondly, it is pointed out that Ricoeur does not provide a general theory of interpretation; and thirdly, the reality of structural injustices is mentioned to expose what is missing in Ricoeur’s conception of justice. The paper, however, argues that to understand existence dialectically from the perspective of the subject as a unity remains to be a strong way of responding to the question of what makes man fully human. Such a view potentially benefits future investigations with respect to the way society must think through its most important problems and issues.
This paper is an attempt to explain the role of fictional 'configuration' in a specific philosophical approach. The possibility is opened by the topic of time, common to the later prose of Thomas Mann and the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur. After an introduction to The Magic Mountain, the problematic of temporality is delineated in terms of tenses and phenomenology of fictive reality (Steven Crowell). The ongoing focus is on the exchange of perspectives on the subject-matter, including Mann’s method of the ‘leitmotiv’ and Ricoeur’s project for ontology of fiction. The inquiry invites contributions from scholars in the fields of tropology (Harry Jansen) and analysis of literature (William Dowling). Most of all the hermeneutically upgraded narratology of Mark Currie offers a critical view on the themes of narrative consciousness and referentiality. As a result from the exposition, the entanglement of the concept of configuration with the problem of 'tales about time' (Ricoeur) is clarified.
Keywords: narrative temporality, horizon, prolepsis, semantics of action, threefold mimesis, metaphorical identification, ‘tales of time’
The purpose of this paper is to examine the special status which Paul Ricoeur attributes to Proustian writing. In the introduction particular features of the latter are mentioned along with basics of the long novel genre. The problematic of times and worlds within the theory of Ricoeur is presented, first, in terms of reading and living (Mark Currie), and second, in the context of philosophical anthropology (Marc de Leeuw). The following juxtaposition ‘games with time’ (Ricoeur) - ‘backwards time’ (Currie) continues to delineate the background theme of narrative temporality. Next step of the research involves a commentary on the phenomenology of body memory (Jeanne Gagnebin) and prepares for a tropological overview of heterogeneous time (Harry Jansen). In the final stage an analysis by Rhiannon Goldthorpe adds a new level of resonance to the method of Proust, thus leads beyond the metaphor of time lost-regained (Ricoeur). In another resume of consequences, Richard Rosengarten hints at a possible ultimate articulation of the resulting ‘route.’
Keywords: long modernist novel, threefold mimesis, involuntary memory, metaphorical identification, phenomenology of reading, narrated time
This article is divided into two parts. In the first one, we will ask what place Ricœur reserves for art works (particularly figurative) within his philosophical path. We will try to show how this issue is only apparently minor and unimportant. In fact, the language of figurative art, totally other than the conceptual/argumentative language of the logos, is that which more than any other experience can allow philosophy to reflect on otherness, and to discover ‘itself as another.’ In the second part, starting with this acquisition, we will ask ourselves what constitutes the singularity of artistic language and the particular communication specific to works of art. This will allow us to circle back to the initial question and ask ourselves, therefore, what figurative language can teach philosophical communication and what the arts can offer philosophy.
Realist and Marxist critiques of humanitarian intervention are distinctively materialistic in scope. The IR literature has already described this scepticism as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, a term associated with the work of Paul Ricoeur, which aims to unearth the intervenors’ material and geopolitical interests hypocritically hidden behind the pretext of humanitarianism. The article first notes the decontextualised misappropriations of the term as an iconic and omnipotent instrument of doubt, as well as the limitations of the social constructivist response on the matter. By contextualising Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as developed in his life work, the article then calls for an extension of critique from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of naïveté. Applied in the critique of the ideology of humanitarian intervention, the article thus calls for a shift of focus from the examination of the distorting (Marxism, realism) and legitimising (social constructivism) functions of this ideology to its integrating function that has allowed the evocation of humanitarian principles as international norms, and uncritically vindicates this arrangement. The article proposes that this hermeneutical detour could allow critique to proceed to a greater analytical depth, opening up a set of critical questions.
Based on ethnographic research within the extreme metal community, Unger offers a thought-provoking look at how symbols of authenticity and defilement fashion social experience in surprising ways. Exploring the many themes and ciphers that comprise this musical community, this book interprets aesthetic resonances as a way to understand contemporary identity, politics, and social relations. In the end, this book develops a unique argument: the internal composition of the community’s music and sound moulds symbols that shape, reflect, and constrain social patterns of identity, difference, and transgression. This book contributes to the sociology of sound and music, the study of religion in popular culture, and the role of aesthetics in everyday life. It will be of interest to upper level students, post-graduate students and scholars of religion, popular culture, and philosophy.
Paul Ricoeur was born in Valence in 1913. Having lost both parents (his mother died a few months after his birth, and in 1915 his father was killed in World War I), he was entrusted to the care of his paternal grandparents in Rennes, where he spent the first part of his youth. In secondary school, he developed an interest in philosophy under the guidance of Roland Dalbiez, a neo-Thomist scholar and the first French philosopher to write on Freud. Ricoeur received his first degree from the University of Rennes in 1933. He then obtained his maûrise in philosophy in 1934 with a thesis on Le problème de Dieu chez Lachelier et Lagneau.
A book review of El-Meligi's book: "Leading starts in the Mind" reflects on the ontology of the author's cross-cultural background and how it influenced his concept of leadership. El-Meligi provides empirical as well as existential evidence for his phenomenology of leadership.
It is certainly possible, and usually uncontroversial, to claim that art has values that transcend or reach beyond the so-called " autonomously " aesthetic. Making philosophical sense of what we may call, for brevity's sake, " aesthetic heteronomy " however entails grappling with both the nature of aesthetic autonomy itself and with the exact relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. In this paper I explore the conditions of aesthetic commitment 1 , in particular, by asking what aesthetic autonomy and its relation(s) to the socio-political sphere would have to be like for authentic political art to be possible at all. I submit that Paul Ricoeur's philosophical bequest has made " new adventures in thinking " (Ricoeur as quoted by Jervolino, 1990, p.134) on aesthetic commitment possible, and my exploration is placed within the framework of his philosophy of the imagination. My paper has three main parts: (1) first, I stipulate the theoretical impasse in which the debate on aesthetic commitment finds itself, after which I argue that the nature of, and role played, by the imagination is pivotal to conceptualizing aesthetic autonomy; (2) secondly, I explicate the main features of Ricoeur's philosophy of imagination; (3) and, finally, I elaborate those selected aspects of his account which can be used to flesh out a viable theory of aesthetic commitment. * candess.kostopoulos@gmail.com 1 Committed art can be defined as the selection, arrangement and foregrounding of certain elements from (largely socio-political) " reality " as perceived by the artist which can either illustrate how corrupt, unjust or immoral a specific political, social or economic system or community is, or portray an idealized version of an alternative system or community either by implication or by expressed opinion.
A yearlong project into the electronic compositions and compositional approaches of children led the author to investigate theoretical frameworks to support an analysis process that accommodated the capacity to re-live and reinterpret data through the same technologies that were used to create it. An exploration of the hermeneutical approach to text as presented by Ricoeur provided the opportunity for the author to apply such approaches to the re-experiencing of the data in a way made unique by the use of ICTs. This article presents data from that project and describes how and why the methodologies (and the technology) enabled the researcher to develop new ideas about the ways in which children think musically.
Reality is constructed by the sense of our experiences and not by the ontological structure of objects. Moral intentionality, our moral behavior, decisions and judgments are not generated in a vacuum without past experiences. Conscience becomes the central agency of the moral sense. Gabriel Garci aM arquez's play, Diatriba de amo rc ontra un hombr es entado (L ove Diatribe against a seated man) is a tragic-comic play that deals with the inherent conflict between our ordinary consciousness and the empiri- cal, the moral versus immoral forces that Kant discusses in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, between phronesis and ethos, and the conflict which leads moral consciousness astray, thereby enabling it to differentiate both aspects of its ethos. One must di ff fferentiate between the ff natural dialectic within practical reason and the watchful conscience that represents the mora ll ife. Fue algo que me hacia falta para aprovechar mejor lo que me habias ensen ˘ ado: que hay que desconfiar, por principio, de las cosas que nos hacen felices. Hay que aprender a reirse de ellas; si no, terminaran riendose de nosotros.1 (It was something that I was lacking to best be able to take advantage of what you had taught me: as principle, one has to distrust the things that make us happy. One has to learn to laugh at them, if not they will end up laughing at us) By presenting a monologue of a woman's complaint to her absent husband, the seated man in the title for whom this diatribe is intended, the reader is lead to believe that he is the sole receiver of the complaint. The text deals with the dialectic of experience, a female's experience, and its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness made possible by the experience itself. This brings forth a commentary on the ''play'' and ''game'',2 framing the contemporary hermeneuti cs itua- tion. The text displays the widespread disillusionment of a woman in her
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