2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

274
A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
of sense [intelligence herméneutique du transfer de sens], without that indirect
giving of meaning which founds the semantic field, which in turns provides
the ground upon which structural homologies can be discerned.
And conversely, there is no
hermeneutic comprehension without the support of an economy, of an order
in which the symbol signifies. Taken by themselves, symbols are threatened
by their oscillation between sinking into the imaginary and
evaporating in allegorism; their richness, their exuberance, their polysemy
expose naive symbolists to intemperance and complacency. (63/60)
Thus, according to Ricoeur’s analysis of what may perhaps be called the “formalist-syntac-
tic” inadequacy, Structuralism must rest content with a limited, although necessary role.
Syntactic analyses are an indispensable supplement to philosophical understanding but
cannot become autonomous because they miss a fundamental level of human practices. If
Ricoeur’s analysis is correct, the subalternity of the formal/syntactic disciplines will only
turn into full-blown supplementarity— in the sense explained above—as soon as the disci-
plines in question overstep their assigned boundaries and pretend to be taken as complete
“philosophies.” It cannot be otherwise, since they will be forced to presuppose nothing less
than that “indirect giving of meaning which founds the semantic field, which in turns pro-
vides the ground” upon which the syntactic transformation can be performed, be it a rule-
based AI-like move or a permutation of a group of relations. To put it a bit differently,
Ricoeur’s analysis leaves only two possibilities open to and all game-based approaches that
rely on the concept of closure of the semantic field: they can either abandon the non-philo-
sophical ambitions and accept a technical status, or they can raise their theoretical aim by
finding a way to recover the contents of the practices (the “semantics) while preserving clo-
sure.
Structuralism (or AI) are thus demoted, in a traditional metaphysical gesture, to the
role of helping disciplines that can provide useful “technical” insights on the “abstract” me-
chanical structure of the semantic question—but disciplines that cannot help leaving the
real philosophical issues for the philosophers to solve. Lévi-Strauss, however, is quite un-
comfortable with such a reductive interpretation of his work, and points out that the philo-