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Frameworks for Experience

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Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self

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Abstract

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?1

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Notes

  1. James Joyce quoted in Galya Diment, The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness Goncharov, Wolf and Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).

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  15. The impetus for Ricoeur’s theories of language and subjectivity is derived in part from the work of Merleau-Ponty. Ricoeur regards Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to ‘return to the speaking subject’ as a flawed but inspirational project. With regard to language, Merleau-Ponty placed the phenomenological approach in direct opposition to the objective science of signs in his desire to progress more quickly to the ‘fecundity of expression’: the phenomenon of speech itself. Ricoeur regards this as a negative move, believing that in doing so Merleau-Ponty misses ‘the structural fact’ of language as an autonomous system. Ricoeur prefers instead to set the phenomenological and semiological discourses in dialogue. He sees his own approach to language as a reconsideration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech: ‘not a repetition but a renewal of the very movement of his reflection’ (Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Question of the Subject: the Challenge of Semiotics’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) 247.

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  27. For instance, Jonathan Shear notes the striking similarities between Descartes’ model of the self as selfsame consciousness, single, simple and continuing throughout one’s awareness, and the notions of selfhood found in Asian Buddhist and Vedanta thought. (Jonathan Shear, ‘Experiential Clarification of the Problem of Self’, Models of the Self, eds Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 1999) 408.

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Authors
  1. Fionola Meredith
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© 2005 Fionola Meredith

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Meredith, F. (2005). Frameworks for Experience. In: Experiencing the Postmetaphysical Self. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504332_5

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