“Originary Affirmation,” Philosophies of Negativity, Problematics of the Subject. Nabert and Thévenaz

Abstract

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.