Presentation

 

Creator of today's indispensable concepts, both on the philosophical level and in terms of interdisciplinary knowledge, Paul Ricœur(1913-2005) took upon himself the tireless task of dialoguing with numerous exponents of various fields of knowledge, with whom he contributed significantly to the composition of the cloth background of the production of thought in the 20th century.

That Ricœur has at the same time affirmed his identity as a man of the left, as a Christian, as a Western citizen, but without being philosophically satisfied with it, is already an illustration of his fundamental proposal for the interpretation of human existence: that it be a critical hermeneutics.

The expression, forged in order to arbitrate the controversy between Habermas and Gadamer, although it gave the title to one of the subchapters of the book From text to action, the famous “Towards a critical hermeneutics”, also emerged at the heart of a process of fascinating philosophical maturation : that of a project entirely guided by the refusal to produce a direct ontology that intends to be immune and deaf to the unavoidable achievements of ethics and human sciences, to which, according to Ricœur, we owe so many essential critical clarifications about the world in which we live.

For Ricœur, however, just as the vocation of philosophy is decidedly critical, its first step is to recognize the conflict.

The conflict in the search for the truth of meaning is already in the great book The Symbolic of Evil, where the very conflict between various symbols and myths of evil becomes productive for thought, giving food for thought. The conflict of interpretations will quickly become for Ricœur a matrix that produces dialectical thinking between the reductive interpretation of the meaning of symbols and the amplifying interpretation, that is, between the hermeneutics of suspicion (Freud, Marx and Nietzsche) and the hermeneutics of the recollection of sense.

In The Self as Other, it was also in terms of a conflict between the illusions of a Cartesian cogito, which founds itself, and those of a Nietzschean cogito, which does not even pose, that the critical subject ended up reaching its tragic condition. of hurt thoughts.

This is how Ricœur fully recognizes the moment of critical rationality at the center of the operation of existential interpretation, but refuses to recognize a foundational function in rationality, inviting Marxism and psychoanalysis to define themselves as hermeneutics. For the same reasons, to think about the cultural, textual and historical objectivations of the human subject, structuralist methods are no longer enough, since Ricœur envisions in the critical function of the subject a displacement of reason towards imagination. For him, it is necessary to reconcile the critical function and the creative function of the human subject, through concepts such as “ontological vehemence of the metaphor”, “narrative identity” and the various categories that give precedence to the practical existence of the human being.

Deployed in narratives that are also collective, the Ricoeurian subject discovered through critical hermeneutics is supportive of critical reflexivity that only achieves self-knowledge through a long process of mediation of cultural signs. In this way, the process of the necessary critique of ideologies is not the initiative of a rationality without ideology, since for Ricœur there is no reason without ideology, but has its origin elsewhere in the social imaginary. It is in utopia, whose essentially practical critical power is rooted in tools of rational deconstruction, in the style of the Frankfurt school, and yet is based on narratives of liberation and historical memory, with its list of past actions, cultural traditions, mythical and religious.

Seeking to take full advantage of Ricoeur's rich conception of identity, and more especially interested in the developments matured throughout the philosopher's work that make it possible to think of a collective identity, the recently created Associação Rede Brasil-Ricœur invites the national and international community of researchers to question Paul Ricœur's proposal of critical hermeneutics.

Taking into account the fact that Brazilian society is marked by the plurality of peoples and traditions, but also considering the fact that its history has gone through serious contradictions, which have recently become more serious and have led us to a crisis of national identity, we can say that in many ways the critical dynamic formed by the hermeneutics of symbols, texts, self and action can challenge us or even provoke us. As a method that is applied to numerous regions of knowledge, critical hermeneutics recommends not letting the collective identity retract and shrink in the form of substantialist mythification, as this makes it ideological, and inversely guides to passing the collective identity through the sieve of a critique – historiographical, sociological, anthropological, theoretical-literary, etc. Therefore, in this call, it is a question of nurturing it with the creative and utopian resources of a diverse belonging such as ours.

At the same time, if Ricoeur's critical hermeneutics invites us to constantly rectify memory through historiography, in order to limit the ideological power of a merely affective memory without self-criticism, would this not be the key to the critical distance so indispensable to clarifying our history, itself so necessary to our specific coexistence?

Finally, with the critique of the semiotic and rhetorical dimensions of the texts of our culture, whose naive reading must be limited, it is also necessary to explore the resources of Ricœur's critical hermeneutics from the point of view of the periphery and from the decolonial thought, like the work of Ernst Wolff.

In short, it is possible to bet that, not being critical hermeneutics a stripped and abstract reason, perhaps it facilitates access, through the long and difficult path of critical vigilance, to the proposals of meaning, construction and action collected among us. 

 

Coordinates:

• When: The Congress will be held in person, between August 14 and 16, 2023.
• Where: UNICAMP IEL (Unicamp Institute of Language Studies) - R. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, 571 - Cidade Universitária, Campinas - SP, 13083-859.
• Information: contato@redebrasilricoeur.org