Hermeneutics BY PAUL RICOEUR
French main representative of a philosophical, above all German - whose figures were in the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and the twentieth century, Heidegger and especially Gadamer - Paul Ricoeur has clearly given the task to the early 1960's legacy to fertilize hermeneutics in opening new horizons of thought: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy Anglo-Saxon language, in particular, such an opening it had to lead a thorough program herméneutique2.
It is this spirit of openness and dialogue with other major currents of contemporary thought, a spirit might say ecumenical underlying the effort in "Hermeneutics and critique of ideology" to rethink the question basic hermeneutics in a way that "would do justice to the critique of ideology, [...] which shows the need for the substance of its own requirements" (333). Task that requires first the removal of the mortgage romantic, according to Ricoeur, continues to weigh on the issue or the problem of modern hermeneutics.
It finds its origin, but also the deadlock in the questioning by the German romantic presuppositions of the Enlightenment, specifically in the denial of the "discredited prejudice by the Aufklärung," according Gadamer's words quoted by Ricoeur (339). However, this reaction to the romantic Aufklärung, if it is "a first foundation of the problem" hermeneutics, would at the same time its "fundamental failure" in the sense that the rehabilitation of prejudice, tradition and authority accomplished by the romantic hermeneutic, "has just overthrown without overthrowing the answer the question," has "made (by an argument that Gadamer finds in Ricoeur) a reversal against the pros or rather against the order, without managed to move the issue itself and to change the terrain of debate. " Because regardless of the merits "that we glorifies the muthos instead of celebrating the logos, which are calls for the former at the expense of New [...], for the mythical past against the future utopias rational" , etc.., when this plea is made "on the same ground, on the same ground of matter" as the enemy, without calling into question "the consciousness of self, mistress of herself and "the primacy of the trial in man's behavior towards the world" (338-340); anything obviously romantic hermeneutics and Dilthey himself, could not escape.
For Ricoeur, the whole "the question is whether Gadamer has really passed the point of romantic hermeneutics," if his hermeneutic traditions "outside the game of reversals in which it is locked philosophical romance, in the face of claims any critical philosophy "(339) and if, therefore," the modern conflict between ideologies critical of the Frankfurt School and hermeneutics by Gadamer mark any progress "(338) compared to sterile battle that since two centuries, the romance book against the Enlightenment.
Ricoeur's explanation is as follows. It is not as obsessed as Heidegger was the problem of the foundation, Gadamer was not aware "of the urgency of a dialectic down to the fundamental derivative of the ontology to epistemology, of belonging to history for its distance. What has prevented Gadamer to include a genuine critical in his hermeneutic, it is rather, says Ricoeur, "the hermeneutic experience itself", its "brand experience", namely "the scandal that is throughout the modern consciousness, the kind of distancing alienating - to Verfremdung - [...] which controls the attitude of objectifying human sciences ". The hermeneutic gadamérienne, "the place where the student's hermeneutic claim to universality" implies "refutation" of alienating distanciation own human sciences, and because, according to Gadamer, this attitude méthodologique "presupposes the destruction of the primordial relation of belonging - of ZugehËrigkert - otherwise there is no connection to history as such" (335, 364-365).
Without having to rephrase the basic question of hermeneutics, because it would have remained basically what he had, a prisoner of the initial location, romantic, of hermeneutics and the problem of tradition related, Gadamer, notwithstanding all its efforts to give a really positive significance to the problem of estrangement and alienation, failed to establish a proper hermeneutic criticism, ie a hermeneutic in which truth and method are not an alternative, but a dialectic "(368).
Now think that this interpretation of hermeneutics gadamérienne? One could certainly accuse him of not being very unselfish, to be commanded by a certain conception of "the task of herméneutique5" which Ricoeur outlines in the second part of his essay (366-370 ). In addition, to correct, "without (the) really contradict" the hermeneutics gadamérienne "in a decisive for the outcome of the debate with the critique of ideology", Ricoeur had he not first need to force some text Gadamer and interpret as an "initial situation and an alternative dichotomy" (365-366) which would, in fact, from Gadamer, that the assertion of a clear hierarchy? Is not this also what Ricoeur implicitly emphasizing that "criticism can never be first or last" (373),
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