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

Re subdueing Paul Ricoeurs Intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas DebateABSTRACT In this paper I will examine a contemporary solvent to an important wall in the science of hermeneutics, along with some cross-cultural implications. I discuss Paul Ricoeurs intervention in the debate amid Gadamer and Habermas concerning the victorian task of hermeneutics as a personal manner of philosophical testing in the late 20th century. The confrontation between Gadamer and Habermas turns on the judgment of tradition and the place of language within it the hermeneutical stance takes a overconfident stance, while ideologiekritik views tradition with a hooded-brow of suspicion, tantamount to seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unsung conditions of violence. In his own rescue operation, Ricoeur combines the reanimation of traditional sources of communicative action with the re-awakening of policy-making responsibility towards a creative ren ewal of cultural heritage. His fusion or consensus adverts to specific symbols of Western eschatology, viz., liberation, salvation, and hope. What will result if we juxtaposed Buddhist, Daoist and Hindu symbols of Non-being, spirit as transcendence and Intelligence, respectively? PreambleIn 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 elsew present has been termed, a cloggy radicalisation of the understanding of texts in asmuch as hermeneutics the programmatic of interpretation and all that it had hitherto mantic about the nature and relation of text and its meaning is itself problematised. The site of the line 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 int o 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 flare-up of theories of textual meaning and vastly differing models of linguistic understanding, or of the semiological processes, during the intellectual plow 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 charge 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 Ricoeurs 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.