Recovering Paul Ricoeurs Intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas Debate :: Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Recovering Paul Ricoeur's Intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas Debate ABSTRACT: In this paper I will examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the "science" of hermeneutics, along with some cross-cultural implications. I discuss Paul Ricoeur's intervention in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas concerning the proper task of hermeneutics as a mode of philosophical interrogation in the late 20th century. The confrontation between Gadamer and Habermas turns on the assessment of tradition and the place of language within it; the hermeneutical stance takes a positive stance, while ideologiekritik views tradition with a hooded-brow of suspicion, tantamount to "seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence." In his own rescue operation, Ricoeur combines the reanimation of traditional sources of communicative action with the re-awakening of political responsibility towards a creative renewal of cultural heritage. His fusion or consensus adverts to specific sym bols of Western eschatology, viz., liberation, salvation, and hope. What will result if we juxtaposed Buddhist, Daoist and Hindu symbols of Non-being, Nature as transcendence and Intelligence, respectively? Preamble In this paper I wish to examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the "science" of hermeneutics — "the art of rightly understanding the speech, chiefly in written form, of another" (Schleiermacher, 1977). The 20th century has witnessed, what elsewhere has been termed, "a profound radicalisation of the understanding of texts" in asmuch as hermeneutics — the programmatic of interpretation and all that it had hitherto supposed about the nature and relation of text and its meaning — is itself problematised. The site of the contestation has been language, understood in the broadest possible sense of the medium that functions to convey meaning, textual and otherwise. A variety of responses maturing into formidable intellectual movements have emerged, and continue to be articulated, especially in philosophy, literary studies and the social sciences. As is well-known, this virtual explosion of theories of textual meaning and vastly differing models of lin guistic understanding, or of the semiological processes, during the intellectual ferment known as Modernism, has had considerable impact in as areas as far afield as architecture, the arts, postmodernism, feminist studies, psychoanalysis, cross-cultural and post-colonial discourses, indigenist jurisprudence and even on geography and ecology or the geo-sciences. I will here confine my inquiry to a significant thinker rather than cover any particular movement or movements. I have chosen to discuss Paul Ricoeur's intervention in the debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jungen Habermas concerning the proper task or calling as it were of hermeneutics as a mode of philosophical interrogation in the late 20th century.