[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

ival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be interpreted: a unifiedontology is as inaccessible to our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every instanceeach hermeneutics discovers the aspect of existence which founds it as method.” 4 Thus,at the very outset, Ricoeur has challenged Heidegger’s view of care (Sorge) in afundamental ontology emerging from an existential analysis of Dasein properly graspedin fore-comprehension. In addition, his view of the fallenness of human existence, inavoiding the ontologization of fault by placing evil in the disproportionate existential synthesisbetween the infinite and the finite, militates against the quick move from the concreteexistence of man to conditions of possibility of that everyday existence.Thus, a great contrast is evinced in the differing passages from existence to ontology byRicoeur and by Heidegger. Heidegger does not share Ricoeur’s view of existence as fallen,nor does he dwell on the founding in ontic existence of the conflicting interpretations andquestions of method, which arise from that conflict. It is here that the Heideggerian wayneeds expansion to include human existence as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite,the ontic aspects of which are far more complex than what can be revealed in a mereanalysis of the everydayness of Dasein as the starting focus of the hermeneutics of Being.Such an exclusion challenges Heidegger’s fore-comprehension of the Being of Dasein ina unity that does not see the polemical synthesis of the infinite and finite on the cognitive,practical and affective levels. This is a synthesis rather than a unity. There is a difference,and the Heideggerian pre-comprehension must be instructed to see it. It is also clear thatRicoeur’s view is in need of a partial adjustment. The adjustment, however, is demandedby the exigencies of the fore-comprehension of concrete human existence reaching towardontological understanding. Yet a delay or detour is needed before reaching it. This pause isa necessary one, and not done merely for the sake of rendering two disparate philosophiescompatible. The consequence of these adjustments is that the respective passages to ontologyby Heidegger and Ricoeur become somewhat more compatible and reciprocally beneficial,and at once mitigate the distance between the hermeneutics of existence and hermeneuticontology. This discussion will turn now to Ricoeur’s view of human existence asfallen in order to provide an adjustment which removes, in part, an unnecessary limitationto existence and hence to its interpretation.Ricoeur’s philosophy recasts the Kantian view of the demand on the part of reason fortotality, as well as reason’s placing of a limit on experience, in terms of his own developmentof a view of the quasi transcending of this limit as boundary through indirect expressionssuch as symbols and metaphors. In addition, for Ricoeur, such a demand for totalityin a philosophy of boundary requires that ethics be extended beyond the Kantian formalethic of law and freedom to an ethics of the actualization of freedom in the act of existing.Such an extended ethics relocates the place of radical evil in existence, and freedom tothe synthesis between the infinite and the finite as the existential structural place for thepossibility of evil. It is from that view of evil in freedom and existence that the view ofhope emerges. It is likewise from that view that the necessity for speculative philosophyand its condition of possibility arises from the innovation of meaning engendered by theproductive imagination in affording schemata for the rules of understanding and theextension of this function.This broadened ethics is understood as a philosophy that leads from alienation tofreedom and beatitude, attempting to grasp the “effort to exist in its desire to be,” 5 andopposing any reduction of reflection to a simple critique or to a mere “justification ofscience and duty as a reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemology is only a part4Ibid.5Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1970), 45.74