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However great the difficulties of achieving a genuine understanding of things may be,the nature of the hermeneutic task as regards any historical/cultural community was nonethelessclearly stated by Merleau-Ponty. “It is a matter, in the case of each civilization,”he said, “of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physicomathematicaltype, discoverable by objective [objectivistic] thought, but that formulawhich sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, timeand death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable ofseizing upon and making his own.” (PP, xviii)Given the hermeneutic difficulties alluded to above, Ricoeur was assuredly right whenhe said that there is “nothing…more obscure than the present in which we live.” 142(BSS, 648) Because of the “effectivity” of history, “we are located so completely in it,” asGadamer says, “that we can in a certain sense always say, We don’t know what is happeningto us.” (RAS, 36) But this is precisely why something like Schütz’s “typification” isindispensable if we are to understand anything at all. And although Ricoeur was also right,when he remarked that “every periodization is problematic” (BSS, 665), periodization,though always a legitimate subject for debate, is nevertheless indispensable when we seekto provide a properly narrative (“emplotted,” as Ricoeur would say) account of the past.In the various spontaneous orders of human endeavor -- and to the degree that, as in thecase of the evolution of language or morals (moeurs), these orders are indeed spontaneousand not consciously designed and technocratically maintained -- an “invisible hand” orstructural logic is always at work and (for better or worse) produces its effects independentlyof actors’s intentions. 143 It is always a matter, as Merleau-Ponty said, of discovering“in this unrolling of facts a spontaneous order, a meaning, an intrinsic truth, an orientationof such a kind that the different events do not appear as a mere succession.” (PriP, 52)Despite Ricoeur’s aversion to terms like “modern” and “postmodern” (see BSS, 648,660-61, 690), these periodizing terms (whatever might be the personal reasons forRicoeur’s aversion to them) are highly useful ways of viewing cultural and intellectualhistory, i.e., historical and sociological processes, for, as Ricoeur does recognize, there are“certain trends in the history of philosophy.” (BSS, 665) It is the function of ideal-typeanalysis to identify these trends. Thus, although Ricoeur says that he doesn’t “know what‘modernity’ is” (BSS, 648), it is not really all that difficult to know what the term“modern philosophy” means, as I sought to indicate in the first part of this paper. Likewise,in sociology and developmental studies, “modernization” has a well-defined meaning;we also know perfectly well what we mean when, in regard to architecture, we speak of“modernist” and “postmodern.” The case is no different with regard to philosophy. If onedidn’t know that one of the essential characteristics of mainstream modern philosophy wasits preoccupation with, as Gadamer would say, the “epistemology problem,” one could neverappreciate the true significance of phenomenology (and Ricoeur’s own place within it).Indeed, to the degree that phenomenology effects a break with what Gadamer called themodern “era of epistemology,” phenomenology can, in this precise sense of the term,rightly be said to be “postmodern.”In opposition to the anti-theory movement in recent philosophy (and to the stance takenby Richard Rorty in this regard), hermeneutics staunchly defends the exercise of theory asdescribed above. 144 Human beings are, after all, “theoretical beings,” as Gadamer put it,142See also BSS, 690: “We do not know in what time we live. The darkness, the opaqueness of thepresent to itself seems to me completely fundamental.”143For a discussion of spontaneous orders and the “invisible hand,” from an hermeneutic point of view,see my The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 1998).144See in this regard my “The Practice of Theory/The Theory of Practice,” in Madison, The Politicsof Postmodernity.43