The World of the Text and the World of Life: Two Contradictory Paradigms?

Abstract

This reflection is situated under the sign of two quotations which, though they might appear to be very distant from one another, actually point toward the same problem. The first quotation is never discussed by Ricoeur, to my knowledge, even though he was certainly familiar with it. This is the passage from the introduction to Being and Time where Heidegger raises the question concerning the point of departure of a phenomenological ontology and defines this starting point by granting Dasein a privilege with regard to the question of being. Heidegger asks “in which being can the meaning of being be read [An welchem Seienden soll der Sinn von Sein abgelesen warden]?” (Heidegger 1996: §2) Although Heidegger does not make the point explicit, his use of the metaphor of reading suggests that what is “sought” [Erfragte] is a meaning (the meaning of being) and that, therefore, what is asked about [Befragte] can be compared to a text. This metaphor displays the relationship between ontology, phenomenology and hermeneutics that is established in the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, precisely where Heidegger presents the methodological specifications of his investigation. For him, it is a question of showing that a hermeneutics in the narrow sense of a method of reading and interpreting texts can only exist because there is a hermeneutics in the broad sense of the term, which thematizes “understanding” as an ontological dimension, an existential, of Dasein. As a result, to say that Dasein is similar to a text through which the meaning of being can be deciphered would entail a renewed interrogation of the definition of the word “text”. There are not only, nor first and foremost, texts in the world that would exist as cultural objects encountered in experience. To the contrary, textuality should be understood as a characteristic of being-in-the-world itself. This is, as I will try to show, also a thesis that Paul Ricoeur will defend but by following another route.