Hermeneutics after Ricoeur

John Arthos examines the relations between Gadamer's and Ricoeur's hermeneutics from the point of view of Ricoeur's legacy, emphasizing Ricoeur's place as a hermeneutic scholar engaged with the intellectual currents of his time on a multidisciplinary level. For Arthos, hermeneutics represents a theoretical foundation for dialogic rhetoric. He considers hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation cultivating a reflective awareness of the effects of discourse and also of our responsibility for these effects. Consequently, Hermeneutics after Ricoeur approaches Ricoeur's hermeneutics from a political and practical standpoint beyond the limits of the academic disciplines. John Arthos declares in the introduction: “There is no doubt that Ricoeur made inestimable advances for hermeneutics in his sensitivity to its moral, political, institutional, and cultural responsibilities” (6). Nevertheless, he criticizes some aspects of Ricoeur's hermeneutics such as the importance it gives to professional and disciplinary expertise or the priority given to textuality.By outlining the project of a general hermeneutics, Arthos demonstrates concern for the status and the future of hermeneutics, not only as a scholarly field but also as an educational curriculum. As a result, he specifies the hermeneutic need for narrative understanding, for institution building, and for moral and political consciousness. In a broader sense, he focuses on the future of the liberal arts and of the humanities.As the author's purpose is to carry on Gadamer's views on dialogic consciousness in a general educational project (paideia) while integrating Ricoeur's hermeneutics legacy, he carefully studies the relations between the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur and outlines possibilities of synthesis in their applications to the extent that the title of the work could read Hermeneutics after Ricoeur and Gadamer.The dialogue between Gadamer and Ricoeur is the book's point of departure and the subject of the first chapter. The author follows Jean Grondin's (2008) article “From Gadamer to Ricoeur: Can one speak of a common understanding of hermeneutics?” and intends to use the differences underlined by Grondin as heuristics. In particular, it should be noted that Ricoeur's approach to hermeneutics is a method of textual interpretation concerning the question “How do we interpret?,” while Gadamer intends to move away from the methodological paradigm and enunciates the question, “What happens when we come to an understanding?” Following an analysis of several differences, the author describes their common ground, defining it as a prudential approach which, for Ricoeur, is indicated by the dialectic of explanation and understanding and, for Gadamer, by the product of dialogue.However, it is a problematic argument because Gadamer does not explore all kinds of prudence and his ethic of discourse is limited to communication situations characterized by openness, transparency, and also absence of hierarchy or balance of power. Conversely, Ricoeur thinks about principles adequate to the anthropology of contemporary societies and leads us to “the quest for just structures of communication” (20). This problem appears in fact a pre-hermeneutical one, but also expresses an attempt at a renewal of hermeneutics after Ricoeur.Subsequently, the author presents the context of French intellectual culture from Ricoeur's early period of hermeneutics, and how it reached a transdisciplinary level through a close dialogue with semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and sociology for the purpose of improving philosophical hermeneutics. As a result, Ricoeur introduces a hybrid of structuralism and hermeneutics as an alternative paradigm against structuralism's tendency to become a metadiscipline.Thus, Ricoeur's hermeneutics stands out as a multidisciplinary and paradigmatic methodology, considering the textual interpretation as a general model for interpretation in the field of human actions and, consequently, in human sciences. Arthos discusses Ricoeur's theory of action, according to which the text is a model for action, and he considers the textual metaphor to be anachronistic, as we have to take into account the newest forms of communication, mixing speech, image, and text. The textual metaphor was also central in Gadamer's hermeneutics, as it placed itself on a metaphorical level by moving from the text-reader relation to the discourse-world relation. Unlike for Gadamer, for Ricoeur the text is not the metaphor for understanding but the archetypal hermeneutic object.Arthos criticizes Ricoeur's conception of hermeneutics in a disciplinary perspective as a specialized field of knowledge. On a practical level, this conception is harnessed for the disciplinary regimes that nowadays support our society of expertise, while Gadamer's model of dialogic experience fits the general education. Thus, Ricoeur and Gadamer differ considerably in their understanding of general hermeneutics. Ricoeur defines it as a philosophy of language involving symbolic logic, science of exegesis, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, while Gadamer refers to an ethos, a sensibility, a practice, and an experience.In the last part of his book, the author outlines the political aspect of Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Ricoeur develops political hermeneutics by linking together ethics and discourse and by suggesting that the dialogical relation needs institutions which represent an intermediary between human persons and the political body.The political horizon of Ricoeur's hermeneutics is remarkably broadened in a practical perspective with this excellent work by John Arthos. Motivated by ethical, political, and educational concerns, his arguments are convincing. The main question appears henceforth to be how to generate a dialogue in our contemporary societies. At the time of his discussion with J.-P. Changeux, Ricoeur defined “tolerance” as the condition for dialogue in our society (Changeux and Ricoeur, 1998: 333). Moreover, Gadamer's analysis of prejudices should not be neglected on this topic, as it proved to have undeniable political implications, if we consider the historical, social, and cultural conditions of comprehension. To summarize, this work represents an excellent contribution to the political and practical applications of hermeneutics with a significant focus on educational issues

Dialogic · Epistemology · Hermeneutics · Phronesis · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices

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