[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

is not a transcendental Ego that would be an absolute creator or dispenser of meaning; itis not a subject that is, as Descartes would say, maître de soi, but a speaking/listening,questioning, story-telling subject that is itself “given” to itself by means of a long drawnoutprocess of semiosis, a “reappropriated” subject that is both interpretive and interpreted.Being of a “mediated” nature, genuine self-understanding always involves a correctivecritique of misunderstanding and can only be envisaged as a kind of “distant horizon”: “Ahermeneutic philosophy is a philosophy which accepts all the demands of this long detourand which gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection wouldonce again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolutesubject.” (OI, 194)In his attempt to work out a hermeneutics of self-understanding, Ricoeur always hadto do battle on two fronts. On the one hand, and in the name of a phenomenology ofhuman finitude and “fallible man,” he had to resist the idealist tendencies in traditionalreflexive philosophy and in Husserl’s transcendentalism by, so to speak, “desubjectivizing”subjectivity (“phenomenology is always in danger of reducing itself to a transcendentalsubjectivism.” [HHS, 112]) “Subjectivity,” he said in this regard, “must be lost as radicalorigin if it is to be recovered in a more modest role.” (HHS, 113) On the other hand, andin order to defend the very notion of the subject, he had to contest all those disciplinesand intellectual trends of an objectivistic or naturalistic sort which would make ofsubjectivity an illusion pure and simple. Subjectivism and objectivism were alwaysRicoeur’s twin foes. Typical of his polemic with the latter was his dispute with thestructuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the stated goal of which (anticipatingthe “death of ‘man’” theme in French philosophy) was not to understand better that entitywe call “man” but, quite simply, to “dissolve” him, to reduce him to his “physicalchemicalconditions.” 118 Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reductionism (wanting to “study menas if they were ants”) extended even to the very notion of meaning. As he said to Ricoeurin the course of a famous debate:Meaning (le sens) is always the result of the combination of elements which are notmeaningful (signifiant) in themselves…. In my perspective, meaning is never a firstorderphenomenon; meaning is always reducible. In other words, behind all meaningthere is non-sense (un non-sens), and the contrary is not true. For me, meaning(signification) is always just a mere phenomenon (est toujours phénoménal).To remarks such as these Ricoeur repeatedly objected: “If meaning is not an element inself-understanding, I don’t know what it is.” (What in that case it is, as Ricoeur himselfsaid, is “the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse which says nothing at all[qui ne dit rien].”) 119As an existential-phenomenological hermeneutician, Ricoeur has always insisted thatthe point of all attempts at understanding the world around us (such as those evinced inLévi-Strauss’s own anthropological research) is, ultimately, to understand ourselves better,and what it means for us to be (the “human condition,” as Pascal called it). His mostpowerful insight in this regard is that self-understanding is never a given but always atask, and that, moreover, our own selves which we seek to understand, are, as it were,themselves products of our encounter with what is “outside” and what is “other.” A118See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 246-47.119See the text of the debate in Esprit 31, no. 322 (Novembre, 1963); Ricoeur’s frustration with thissort of objectivistic reductionism came to the fore when he said to Lévi-Strauss: “You despair of meaning,but you save yourself by thinking that if people have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that theirdiscourse can be subjected to a structuralist analysis.”35