Thesis: Consciousness and narration. World, time and subject from Husserl's phenomenology to Ricoeur's hermeneutics.
Abstract:
Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology has never concealed its ontological vocation. Despite the breadth of its roots—ranging from Aristotle to Kant, from Husserl to Heidegger—hermeneutic ontology finds neither an organic nor a systematic development, and remains at a fragmentary stage. While it would be inaccurate to speak of an unrealized ontology, one cannot deny that it is an unfinished ontology—though not, for that reason, an impossible one. By retracing the philosophical sources on which Ricoeur draws, it is possible to reconstruct the trajectory of a long route toward ontology: a path that begins with the grafting of hermeneutics onto Husserl’s phenomenology; seeks in Kant’s thing-in-itself both the foundation and the limit of a phenomenological ontology; rediscovers in Aristotle the origin of the categorial polysemy of being and of the analogy governing the exchanges among its diverse regions; and, finally, retrieves from Heidegger the idea of truth as manifestation. At the end of this path, hermeneutic ontology frees itself from any derivative or secondary character associated with the ordinary description of the world, attempting instead to recover through poetic redescription a more originary gaze upon the world. This gaze does not conform to the categories of the logic of identity to which scientific description responds, but rather follows the lines of tension of the real, highlighted by a logic of resemblance, and expresses them through metaphor. It is a gaze capable of rediscovering, by means of a categorical transgression and a consequent poetic redescription of the world, the zero degree of being, thought, and discourse.
