P. Ricoeur: explanation of interdependence between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Abstract

This paper analyzes P. Ricoeur’s contributions to the phenomenology of action, focusing mainly on two works from 1950: his version of the translation of Ideas I, and the first volume of his Philosophy of the Will, in which he applies a critical understanding of phenomenology beyond the acts of consciousness to actions and the resulting works, not only incorporating eidetic description, but also exercising a certain hermeneutics of will that begins to put into practice a dialectics with the involuntary while simultaneously turning to explanatory methodologies.

A decade later, Ricoeur would delve more fully into the hermeneutics of symbols, which he inserted into philosophy, and even into the interpretation of the unconscious. In 1975, he described the circularity of the phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics as well as the hermeneutical presupposition of phenomenology. Later still, in the 1990s, he would make use of both of these elements to elucidate the one-self. In this article, we show that the possibility of his hermeneutical phenomenology consists in developing the interdependence between these two currents.