The History of Hermeneutics, Text Theory

Abstract

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