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parency and a perfect coincidence of the self with itself in the form of immediate andindubitable knowledge (Ricoeur refers to this as “the narcissistic ego.” [HHS, 192]). Thedetour by way of methodic “distantiation” is the key to overcoming what William Jamescalled “vicious intellectualism” and is the means, as Ricoeur sees it, for achieving a lessdistorted self-understanding than the one we invariably start out with.Richard Rorty notwithstanding, the hermeneutic theory of Ricoeur and Gadamer hasproven, in the eyes of numerous practitioners of the human sciences, to be anything but“unfruitful.” Human scientists as diverse as ethnographers, historians, communicologists,psychologists, and nursing specialists have found in hermeneutic phenomenology animportant source of support in their struggle to overcome the stifling and dehumanizinglegacy of logical positivism in the human sciences. In this connection, hermeneutics couldbe said to constitute the most recent, the “third wave,” of influence and inspiration thatphenomenology has had or visited upon on the human sciences, the “second wave” havingcome several decades earlier, pursuant to the existential phenomenology of Heidegger andMerleau-Ponty, and the “first wave” having originated in Husserl’s own phenomenologyand the influences this exerted in the fields of psychology and sociology.By drawing out the methodological implications of Gadamer’s ontology of humanunderstanding, Ricoeur was able to extend the scope of hermeneutics from its traditionalbase in text-interpretation to the wider, overall realm of the social sciences, i.e., to thosesciences, such as sociology or economics, which are concerned primarily not with textsbut with human action. 128 (Heidegger’s preoccupation with “Being” -- his “ontologicalvehemence” -- and the quietist position he adopted in this regard [“Gelassenheit”] led himto ignore completely the notion of action [or practical thinking], which he tended toreduce to mere technological busy-ness [“calculative thinking”], while at the same timeasserting that the only “true” action [das Tun] is something that is not action at all, viz.,the “meditative thinking” of Being.) Ricoeur’s key thesis in regard to the issue of actionis that to the degree the social sciences seek, interpretively, to discern the meaning ofhuman action, action itself can be viewed “on the model of the text,” as a kind of “quasitext”or “text analogue.” The reason for this -- in terms of the hermeneutic theory of bothGadamer and Ricoeur -- is that, in the case of both text and action, meaning cannot bereduced to the psychological intentions of the author/actor; meaning must, so to speak,always be “desubjectivized.” This is obviously the case as regards human agency, sinceindividual action takes place in a cultural/institutional context and thus has an irreduciblysocial dimension to it. As Hannah Arendt, who, unlike her mentor, Heidegger, was greatlyconcerned with the issue of action (the vita activa) said, “no man can act alone, eventhough his motives for action may be certain designs, desires, passions, and goals of hisown.” 129To the degree that human action is social in nature, it cannot properly be understoodin terms of individual psychology alone (actors’s intentions), since in the social realm “ourdeeds escape us and have effects which we did not intend.” (HHS, 206) The meaning ofour deeds escapes us in the same way that, as Ricoeur has argued in his theory of textinterpretation,“the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author” and embodiesa meaning “that has broken its moorings to the psychology of the author.” (HHS,201) In going beyond the finite horizon of individual agents, human acting and doingopens up a public space in which its meaning or significance (its significative effects, asit were) gets “sedimented” or “inscribed,” this “place” being what we call “history.”128A key work of Ricoeur’s in this regard was his 1971 essay, “The Model of the Text: MeaningfulAction Considered As a Text” (reprinted in HHS).129Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978),2:180.39