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The World of the Work (Ricoeur:1991)

30/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"To begin with, appropriation is dialectically linked to the distanciation characteristic of writing. Distanciation is not abolished by appropriation but is rather the counterpart of it. Thanks to distanciation by writing, appropriation no longer has any trace of affective affinity with the intention of an author. Appropriation is quite the contrary of contemporaneousness and congeniality: it is understanding at and through distance.

In the second place, appropriation is dialectically linked to the objectification characteristic of the work. It is mediated by all the structural objectifications of the text; insofar as appropriation does not respond to the author, it responds to the sense. Perhaps it is at this level that the mediation effected by the text can be best understood. In contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works. What would we know of love and hate, of moral feelings, and, in general, of all that we call the self if these had not been brought to language and articulated by literature? Thus what seems the most contrary to subjectivity, and what structural analysis discloses as the texture of the text, is the very medium within which we can understand ourselves.

Above all, the vis-á-vis of appropriation is what Gadamer calls 'the matter of the text' and what I call here 'the world of the work.' Ultimately, what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our infinite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed. So understanding is quite different from a constitution of which the subject would possess the key. In this respect, it would be more correct to say that the self is constituted by the 'matter' of the text" (Ricoeur 1991:87-88).

Ricoeur, Paul
1991[1986] From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II (SPEP) at Amazon.com

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“Space is Not Something That Faces Man” (Heidegger 1971:7)

06/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations; their nature is grounded in things of the type of buildings. If we pay heed to these relations between locations and spaces, between spaces and space, we get a clue to help us in thinking of the relation of man and space.

When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space; for when I say ‘a man’, and in saying this word think of a being who exists in a human manner – that is, who dwells – then by the name ‘man’ I already name the stay within the fourfold among things. Even when we relate ourselves to those things that are not in our immediate reach, we are staying with the things themselves. We do not represent distant things merely in our mind – as the textbooks have it – so that only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things. If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg, this thinking toward that location is not a mere experience inside the persons present here; rather, it belongs to the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location. From this spot right here, we are there at the bridge – we are by no means at some representational content in our consciousness. From right here we may even be much nearer to that bridge and to what it makes room for than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing. Spaces, and with them space as such – ‘space’ – are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man. To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. And only because mortals pervade, persist through, spaces by their very nature are they able to go through spaces. But in going through spaces we do not give up our standing in them. Rather, we always go through spaces in such a way that we already experience them by staying constantly with near and remote locations and things. When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I go through it. Even when mortals turn ‘inward,’ taking stock of themselves, they do not leave behind their belonging to the fourfold. When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things. Indeed, the loss of rapport with things that occurs in states of depression would be wholly impossible if even such a state were not still what it is as a human state: that is, a staying with things. Only if this stay already characterizes human being can the things among which we are also fail to speak to us, fail to concern us any longer” (Heidegger 1971:7-8).

Heidegger, Martin
1971 Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books.

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Paul Ricoeur

04/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Philosophy, for Ricoeur, was hermeneutical to the extent that it read hidden meanings in the text of apparent meanings. And the task of hermeneutics was to show how existence arrives at expression and, later again, at reflection, through the perpetual exploration of the significations that emerge in the symbolic works of culture. More particularly, human existence only becomes a self by retrieving meanings that first reside “outside” of itself in the social institutions and cultural monuments in which the life of the spirit is objectified.

One of the first critical targets of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics was the idealist doctrine that the self is transparent to itself. In two of his earliest works-The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950) and The Symbolism of EnU (1960)-Ricoeur exploded the pretensions of the cogito to be self-founding and self-knowing. He insisted that the shortest route from self to self is through the other. Or to put it in Ricoeur’s felicitous formula: “to say self is not to say I”. Why? Because the hermeneutic self is much more than an autonomous subject. Challenging the reign of the transcendental ego, Ricoeur proposed the notion of oneself-as another in an influential work that carried this same tide (1990 in French; 1992 in English). Here he spoke of a soi that passes beyond the illusory confines of the moi and discovers its meaning in and through the linguistic mediations of signs and symbols, stories and ideologies, metaphors and myths. In the most positive hermeneutic scenario, outlined in his three-volume Time and Narrative in the eighties, the self returns to itself after numerous hermeneutic detours through the languages of others, to find itself enlarged and enriched by the odyssey. The Cartesian model of the cogito as “master and possessor” of meaning is henceforth radically subverted.

We thus find Ricoeur steering a medial course beyond the rationalism of Descartes and Kant, on the one hand, and the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and existentialists, on the other. (Ricoeur actually began a translation of Husserl’s Ideas during his captivity in a German prisoner-of-war camp in the early 1940s; the translation was published in 1950.) Where Husserl located meaning in the subject’s intuition of the “things themselves,” Ricoeur followed the hermeneutic dictum that intuition is always a matter of interpretation. This implied that things are always given to us indirectly through a detour of signs; but it did not entail an embrace of existentialist irrationalism. The interpretation (hameneia) of indirect or tacit meaning invites us to think more, not to abandon speculative thought altogether. And nowhere was this more evident than in the challenge posed by symbolic meaning (Ricoeur’s first explicitly hermeneutic work was entitled The Symbolism of EoU). By symbols Ricoeur understood all expressions of double meaning wherein a primary meaning referred beyond itself to a second meaning that is never given immediately. This ‘surplus meaning’ provokes interpretation. The symbol gives rise to thought, as Ricoeur put it in what was to be become his most celebrated and influential maxim.”

Kearney, R. (2005). In memoriam: Paul ricoeur (1913-2005). Research in Phenomenology, 35, 4. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/194877911?accountid=28180

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