Abstract
Ricoeur’s conception of history shows a permanent hesitation between two philosophies of interpretation: Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, hermeneutics as a philosophy and hermeneutics as a method. I provide an example of Biblical interpretation (Genesis 3) to show the consequences of this hesitation.
Understanding one thing and being mistaken about this very same thing are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Kafka, The Trial
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Notes
- 1.
This conference has recently become available to the public in French (“Autocompréhension et histoire”) thanks to the work done by the Fonds Ricœur.
- 2.
Ricœur wrote in a conference that took place in Budapest in March 2003, and published in a special edition of the review Esprit, March–April 2006, “La Pensée Ricœur”, p. 21. “Interpretation is not a stage separate from the whole historical process”.
- 3.
This is what Eric Vigne (2006: 27) opportunely noted in his excellent essay on “Agreements and Disagreements with Historians.”
- 4.
Alexandre Escudier clearly showed this in his paper, “The hermeneutics of the historical condition according to Paul Ricœur”, presented during a study day devoted to Time and Narrative organised at the École normale supérieure, on June 22, (published in Études philosophiques, 2008).
- 5.
For Bodin, sacred history, human history and the history of nature are distinct; the traditional eschatology is neutralised as the end of time is nothing more that a date in the cosmos, whereas human history, uncoupled from history, no longer has an ascribable goal; it is a domain for probabilities open to understanding and human action.
- 6.
We will leave aside the specific question of justifying the precedence of the Revelation in relation to being: as it is obviously impossible from a Heideggerian point of view.
- 7.
Although Böckh read Humboldt, it is difficult to assert, like B. Bravo (1968, 93), that he borrowed from him his conception of “the driving forces in history” or the “tasks of the historian”, as Humboldt maintains the Kantian distinction between the two “causalities”, and above all, asserts that the productions of the mind result from a synthesis that is always individual.
- 8.
Peter Szondi defended the opposite perspective by claiming that literary hermeneutics is not a specialised hermeneutics, but a “theory of interpretation that would reconcile philology and aesthetics” (1989: 18).
- 9.
Cf. Gen. 1, 22; 1, 28; but also, the succession of divine “words” (“God said…”), the succession of “days”, and the complex problematics of the seventh day, that is actual duration, but deprived of morning and evening. As for language, Gen. 2, 19, in particular, opens the whole sequence of events about the necessary relationship with others right up to the naming of isha.
- 10.
It is remarkable that this same “sin” committed by humanity in its early stages where we find men who consider themselves as “sons of God” and who choose women for themselves simply because they find them beautiful to look at (Gen. 6, 1–2); and it is the perversion of this tendency that triggers the deluge. Its rejection brings about a first universal “law” that is called Noachian.
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de Launay, M. (2016). The Conflict of Hermeneutics. In: Davidson, S., Vallée, MA. (eds) Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33426-4_11
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