Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, Uni...

Author: Bengt Kristensson Uggla

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Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach The Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and Ricoeur, Declan Sheerin Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger on Language and Death, Joachim L. Oberst Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger, Work, and Being, Todd S. Mei Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Alison Scott-Bauman Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman


Bengt Kristensson Uggla

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Bengt Kristensson Uggla 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6430-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kristensson Uggla, Bengt Ricoeur, hermeneutics, and globalization / Bengt Kristensson Uggla. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. x). ISBN 978-1-4411-6430-8 1. Ricoeur, Paul. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Globalization. I. Title. B2430.R554U35 2009 194--dc22 09010916

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Hermeneutics 1 “As Books Should Be Read” Philosophy of Action and the Death of the Author: Paul Ricoeur

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2 Hermeneutics and Globalization What Is Hermeneutics Today?

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3 Who Is the Lifelong Learner? Globalization, Lifelong Learning, and Hermeneutics

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4 Memory Politics Philosophical Reflections on Memory and Forgetting in Finland and Sweden

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5 Nowhere Is Always Now and Here Tradition, Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Metamorphosis of Hermeneutics

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Notes References Index

118 130 137

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Acknowledgments

In order to integrate the different texts, which constitute the material content of this book, in a cohesive manner, I have been compelled to discard some paragraphs in order to avoid overlaps. However, the working process also inspired me to elaborate further on some issues as well as including additional material into the book. The language has also been corrected. The five chapters together with the introduction to the book originate from articles and presentations in the following settings: Chapter 1—“As Books Should be Read.” Philosophy of Action and the Death of the Author: Paul Ricoeur—was originally a presentation given as an invited speaker at a round table session on “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Identity” hosted by Morny Joy at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, Korea 2008. Chapter 2—Hermeneutics and Globalization. What Is Hermeneutics Today?—was originally presented at the XXIVth International Symposium of Eco-Ethica, in Copenhagen 2005, hosted by the Centre International pour l’Etude Comparé de Philosophie et d’Esthétique, Tokyo. It was later published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie Moderne, Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae, Volume 23, Eco-ethica in XXI Saeclo, 2005. (June 2007), 179–195. Published with kind permission of Professor Tomanubo Immamishi. Chapter 3—Who Is the Lifelong Learner? Globalization, Lifelong Learning, and Hermeneutics—was originally published online on November 10, 2007 and in Studies in Philosophy and Education 27 (Springer 2008), 211–226. Published with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 4—Memory Politics. Philosophical Reflections on Memory and Forgetting in Finland and Sweden—was originally presented at the XXIVth International Symposium of Eco-Ethica, in Copenhagen 2007. Chapter 5—Nowhere Is Always Now and Here. Tradition, Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Metamorphosis of Hermeneutics—is partially my presentation as an invited speaker at the XXII World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, Korea 2008 within the symposia “Tradition, Modernity, Post-modernity—Eastern and Western Perspectives,” together with Judith Butler, Kah Kyung Cho, and Elmar Holenstein.

Introduction Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Hermeneutics

When Paul Ricoeur died in May 2005, one of the most prolific and polyphonic voices of twentieth century philosophy was silenced. The French thinker, who from being deeply rooted in the profound tradition of philosophy gradually became a decisive expert in both German and English-speaking philosophy and ultimately developed a truly global scope and style, was without doubt one of the most distinguished thinkers of the century—the same century that experienced a remarkable philosophical renaissance. For decades—in fact for over half a century—Ricoeur’s voice was present at the forefront of philosophical development, he also interposed in numerous other disciplines, stretching from history and theology to linguistics and neurobiology, often delivering groundbreaking contributions. For these reasons, Ricoeur was, for an exceptionally long period, compatible with the contemporary scene of philosophy— and simultaneously starkly ignorant of intellectual fashion. It is no exaggeration to state that he was extremely influential, but that nevertheless his position and status remained somewhat enigmatic. Without being frequently involved in fierce arguments and stormy debates, and in spite of his essentially humble intellectual approach, Ricoeur, nonetheless, stands out as a highly controversial figure. The attempts to evaluate and assess his particular philosophical contribution usually result in extraordinary diverse judgments. According to some of the standard works, aimed at

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presenting an overview of the philosophical scene of the past century, Ricoeur is distinguished as one of the major leading figures, while in others he is overlooked and ignored. The inherent contradictions in this image are not only confirmed, but also reinforced when looking at the French intellectual scene. In this often comparatively polarized philosophical landscape, François Dosse revered Ricoeur as a hero in his evolving historical drama of development within the human and social sciences in France post World War II, culminating in a chain of biographical studies devoted to Ricoeur and others.1 Conversely, Vincent Descombes, when recapitulating on the philosophical battlefields in France during roughly the same period, completely ignores Ricoeur in his influential book Le même et l’autre, translated as Modern French Philosophy, and apparently disqualified him from having any major role in this philosophical drama.2 How can we understand the remarkable contrasts between these different images? How can we explain the fact that Ricoeur is evaluated in such conspicuously divergent ways? One part of the answer has to do with the extensive and inclusive character of his work, his nonpolemic and nonsensational style; the other is probably associated with his nonprogrammatic style of writing and his lack of any ambitions toward establishing a school. Ricoeur often admitted openly and frankly that he had no master plan behind his work; his explanation being that the determination of the agenda for a new book usually originated from something which had escaped a previous one: [E]ach work responds to a determinate challenge, and what connects it to its predecessors seems to me to be less the steady development of a unique project than the acknowledgement of a residue left over by the previous work, a residue which gives rise in turn to a new challenge.3 Considering the fact that this was his way of thinking, that is, a technique of unfolding without a clear preconceived plan,

Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Hermeneutics

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it may not come as a surprise that he never offered a unified and systematic presentation of his thoughts. Instead of abstract theories and general programs, each of his books approached a specific problem, which is used as a starting point for an investigation involving a wide range of the best intellectual resources available in this particular field of interest. Nevertheless, Ricoeur’s most important contributions are perhaps not first and foremost associated with the solutions he provided to a great number of challenging problems, but rather his capacity to reformulate questions in a balanced and modest way, thus opening up perspectives to go beyond the terrain of polarized extreme alternatives and giving the advantage to a fine tuned dialectic. However, the growing numbers of such investigations made his work seem increasingly encyclopedic. Taking all these circumstances into consideration seems to be an impossible task; however, an even more difficult undertaking is to try to determine a single specific profile in this philosophical project by isolating thoughts and refine a core of absolute originality. Ricoeur’s decisive contribution to the future course of philosophy is hardly possible to capture in a single phrase or philosophical one-liner. In order to deal with the particular kind of philosophizing elaborated by Ricoeur, it is essential to catch him at work and see his work in progress—in flux, on route— within the framework of an extensive network of references. Only seldom can Ricoeur be found alone; he seems constantly involved in communication. It would be inappropriate to deal with the problems associated with the task of determining Ricoeur’s philosophical profile without mentioning his strong links to hermeneutics, a tradition that has been equally influential and as difficult to determine theoretically. Significantly, Ricoeur did not enter into the field of hermeneutics by the path of abstract philosophical speculations; instead, it was his struggle with the specific problem of evil, and the need for mediation as a philosopher when drawing from the symbolic language of myth and symbols, which made it necessary for him to take interpretation theory into consideration.

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Throughout the twentieth century, hermeneutics gradually manifested itself as one of the predominant philosophical traditions and theoretical positions in the intellectual world. But the significance of interpretation theory for contemporary philosophy can be said to be even more important if we consider the broader philosophical scene of the past century. The three new driving forces in early twentieth-century philosophy were all striving to articulate a concrete philosophy, but in very different ways. First, logical positivism (or logical empiricism) aspired to establish a concrete philosophy by focusing on the “empirical concrete” (facts). Secondly, phenomenology started with the same intention, Husserl even declared himself to be the “true positivist,” but this kind of philosophy focused on “the concrete experience” (intentionality). Thirdly and finally, existential philosophy insisted on the importance of starting from something even more concrete, a philosophical reflection revolving around “the lived body” (corp vecú). All these “dreams of immediacy” emerged as reactions to the soaring metaphysical speculations of the preceding predominantly idealistic and rationalistic philosophies; nevertheless, each one of them soon became embroiled in serious problems philosophically. They were also gradually defeated in the course of time due to the growing awareness of the importance of language and the acknowledgment that everything is mediated. No matter whether we talk about empirical facts, intentional experiences, or lived bodies, they can never be attained as “pure” and immediate. It is this growing awareness of the always already present mediation— prior to all concrete pretensions of immediate access—which makes it appropriate to characterize the current philosophical landscape in general, as more or less “hermeneutical.” Some philosophers made such decisive contributions to a more profound and comprehensive understanding of interpretation during this period that subsequently it is appropriate to mention them as explicitly hermeneutical thinkers, as for example, Karl-Otto Apel, Richard Rorty, Georg Henrik von Wright, or Charles Taylor. However, many of the new philosophical initiatives elaborated


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during the century, such as feminist and postcolonial studies, also drew from this general consciousness of the growing importance of mediation. Although the tradition of hermeneutics, in the general sense of the word, may be traced back to the earliest phases of human culture—and had already been expanded upon as a philosophical theory by Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, who taught us, among other things, that before we interpret language, language itself is an interpretation—what we today refer to when mentioning hermeneutics is inevitably associated with the rise of German hermeneutics. When considering this “canonized” tradition of hermeneutics, reaching from Schleiermacher til Gadamer, we may not only acknowledge Ricoeur as one of the most prominent representatives of hermeneutics of our time, but also as a philosopher who challenged the very foundations of this tradition by redefining the meaning of hermeneutics in general; thus, inaugurating a redirection of hermeneutics in profound ways. Nevertheless, a common and incorrect tendency has been to integrate Ricoeur as a mere prolongation of this tradition of German hermeneutics. This assimilation not only neglects that the context in which Ricoeur elaborated on his hermeneutics is different in profound ways, but also that this has caused confusions and serious problems for the understanding of Ricoeur’s philosophical position and the particular cause of his way of thinking. Today, the context, focus, and task of hermeneutics seem to have changed dramatically, and this is due to external factors. As a combined outcome of fundamental transformations within the economy, and the possibility of instantaneous communication on a global scale, brought about by advancements in digital technology and fiber optics, the world and the fundamental conditions of human reflection and communication are being profoundly transformed. In this situation, there seems to be convincing arguments that we are living through a period of historical change, which seems to have no parallel in the whole history of humankind, when confronted with these transformation

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processes that may be brought together and submitted to the title globalization. The globalization process has brought about incomparable economic growth and increased standards of health in the world, but, in addition, it has simultaneously increased economic inequality and instability. Waves of economical turmoil have revealed the unstable conditions of this transformation process and underlined the urgent need to develop strategies to cope with this new unprecedented situation in ways that are both innovative and responsible. In order to counter-balance the one-sidedness of this globalizing world, in which the technological and economical dimensions are so well developed in comparison with the weak sociocultural and political infrastructures, I propose that we name this specific period as an age of hermeneutics. Since globalization has serious cognitive effects, the cultural dimension of globalization needs to be explored. One of governing principles in this book is that today, globalization seems to be the most profound locus for hermeneutics. However, when we deal with the challenges associated with the task of connecting hermeneutics with globalization, we need to remind ourselves that traditionally this kind of connection is essentially alien to the historical configurations of both hermeneutics and globalization. Furthermore, in order to cope with the prerequisites for the establishment of such a link, we need to consider the necessity of traveling the path between hermeneutics and globalization in both directions. On the one hand, globalization needs to be reconsidered according to sociocultural perspectives that explores how the current globalization may be recognized as the main factor behind the creation of a surplus of interpretations in our current world. While on the other, the future destiny of hermeneutics needs to be inescapably associated with the capability of this tradition to break out of the close reserve within a realm that is determined by finite horizons, and thus enter into a broader dialog on societal transformation processes beyond a phenomenological perspective. Everyone involved in this effort to accomplish a metamorphosis of hermeneutics needs to consider the contributions of Ricoeur.


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Without neglecting the (extraordinary and impressive) intellectual landscape Ricoeur embraced, my conviction is that Ricoeur’s contributions reach far beyond his own intentions and work. Consequently, this book not only aims to present some significant elements of Ricoeur’s philosophy, but also endeavors to clarify the specific profile and contribution of his thinking by bringing him into a wider conversation. Nonetheless, while still remaining consistent with Ricoeur’s philosophical project, I intend to go beyond the overall body of his work in order to wrestle with problems that appear in places where Ricoeur himself did not go. By his metamorphosis of hermeneutics, Ricoeur prepared the way for the future of interpretation theory in the twenty-first century although he did not himself travel all the intellectual routes he made available. Globalization is one of the themes that were never explored by Ricoeur even though he prepared the prerequisites for the undertaking. Furthermore, Ricoeur never linked the task of interpretation to the challenges of globalization; however, the transformation of the concept of interpretation, which he presented, offers exactly the specific intellectual resources needed to establish this particular kind of link. Therefore, we are compelled to go beyond Ricoeur’s own explicit intentions in order to obtain access to this kind of intellectual resource. To use Ricoeur’s own vocabulary, the aim can be articulated as an attempt not to seek something hidden “behind” his texts, but to explore the potentiality of his thinking in the world disclosed “in front of” these texts—however, in mentioning these concepts we have already entered into one of the crucial debates of contemporary hermeneutics. During one of my early Parisian conversations with Ricoeur, as a doctoral student in the late 1980s, he suddenly interrupted my stream of questions by saying frankly that instead of talking about his background and motivations he preferred to hear about what had come to my mind while reading his texts. For my doctoral work, this comment became a turning point and an epiphanic moment that liberated me from the author. Naturally, I continued my relationship with Ricoeur and our conversations,

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but after that occasion it was in a much more productive and interesting way. At the very heart of our hermeneutical enterprise, it often becomes necessary to remind ourselves of the importance of appropriating the dialectical approach to human beings; as productive and receptive human beings, we are also capable of losing ourselves in order to find ourselves—always differently. Ricoeur taught me how to read books in a manner that allowed me to enter into a much more exciting relationship with authors, and also in reference to myself as another author.

Chapter 1

“As Books Should Be Read” Philosophy of Action and the Death of the Author: Paul Ricoeur

Death of the Author: “As Books Should be Read” Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur (1913–2005) started his philosophical journey in the intellectual soil of French existential philosophy in the company of thinkers such as Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, all of whom have been deceased for some time now. Due to the extraordinary creative reception of the German phenomenology from Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, effectuated by what has come to be known as la génération des 3 H, this French existential philosophy unfolded not only in a more heterodox and existential mode, but due to its originality, it also achieved a significant status and quality on the public scene in France and elsewhere. As one of the few representatives of this former humanistic paradigm of concrete philosophy, Ricoeur surprised many contemporary colleagues by managing to successfully continue his philosophical journey in the 1960s, when the cognitive infrastructure in France was completely transformed by structuralism. Ricoeur, during this era, was suddenly confronted with a “transcendentalism without subject” developed by thinkers such as Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, and others who defended a theoretical antihumanism which eroded the foundations of both phenomenology and existentialism.

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Many of these masters of abstract structures were still present in the intellectual landscape post structuralism, during the last decades of the century, when Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Lévinas were at their most influential. The fact that Ricoeur was still alive, and still publishing, long after they had all passed away, made him to be considered, by many of us, in the last years of his life, as an exceptional Survivor of French philosophy. The first decades of Ricoeur’s philosophical undertakings in the 1930s and 1940s were mainly influenced by French and German traditions. After the 1970s, Ricoeur extended his sources dramatically by incorporating English-speaking authors, alien to many of his French colleagues, and developed a kind of “transatlantic” philosophy inspired by French and German writers as well as philosophers from the analytical philosophical context of his new university chair in Chicago. During the last three decades of the century, Ricoeur became part of the camp of European philosophers who “colonized” American universities; in France, he simultaneously contributed to the promotion of a more profound reception of English-speaking philosophy, though his French readership initially responded negatively to the growing list of Anglo-Saxon references in his books. In François Dosse’s unfolding narrative on the new intellectual landscape post-structuralism, he points out Ricoeur as the philosopher “who preceded everyone in the detour through America.”1 Nevertheless, this reaffirmed Ricoeur’s identity as a philosophical boundary-crosser, now constantly moving back and forth across the intellectual English Channel that for many years brutally separated Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophical territories. Combined with profound insights into Ancient philosophy, this made Ricoeur’s later works, generally speaking, appear increasingly as a crossroad for the contemporary philosophical schools and a growing encyclopedia where new references were constantly being added to his intellectual universe. Andreea Deciv Ritivoi has stated: “it is ultimately this cultural cross-fertilization that accounts for the unique blend of ideas, concepts, and expressions that defines his work.”2

“As Books Should Be Read”

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Due to the humility in Ricoeur’s intellectual approach, his work speaks the fullness of philosophy. His philosophical style was perhaps not considered as important and attractive as that of more “radical” philosophers at a time when “performative” philosophers were expected to deliver dramatic provocations and aspire to be utterly original. In this kind of intellectual climate, and in an era occupied by the fascination of strong philosophical schools, it is not surprising that philosophers such as Ricoeur were at risk of being disregarded and ignored. It was, in fact, only after the philosophical Berlin Wall had started to come down, and the necessity of crossing alien philosophical territories became unavoidable for everyone, that the full capacity and profile of his thinking began to be taken into consideration.3 His many cross-boundary philosophical investigations accomplished over three quarters of the century, due to his longevity, made him appear as a well-informed pathfinder and an attractive dialog partner for those who had to navigate in the new world order of complex diversity. Finally, in May 2005, the 92-year-old philosopher, who had been so intensively and extensively involved in dialogs during a significant part of the century, always writing, always reading, died and also disappeared as one of the readers in the world in front of his own texts. What does the death of the author mean to us? In order to understand this, it is necessary to go back half a century in time, and make a detour. Fifty-five years earlier, in 1950, Ricoeur abruptly found himself in a painful situation where he had to say farewell to a person who had been of extraordinary importance to him in many ways: Emmanuel Mounier, who died at only 45 years of age.4 The kind of personalism developed by Mounier was founded on a dialectical understanding of the personal and the societal, the spiritual and the structural, aiming to reach beyond both the individualism of liberalism and the materialism of Marxism. Ricoeur adopted personalism and became strongly influenced by Mounier’s philosophical anthropology aiming to transcend the predominant dualistic order to the advantage point of a “third” position.

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In an essay written for Mounier’s own journal Esprit, later published in his first collection of essays, History and Truth (1955/1965), Ricoeur reflects on the broader meaning of his friend’s death. In this emotional presentation, where he honored the memory of the great thinker of personalism, Ricoeur embraced many ideas that today seem to be surprisingly early expressions of thoughts that many commentators recognize as key issues and guidelines in his later philosophy. In his presentation, it is already possible to identify germs of hermeneutics of both the text and the self—and moreover, an elaboration on the links between text- and self-interpretation. He also commented, in this essay, on the particular hermeneutical conditions for coping with such situations as our own contemporary philosophical situation after Ricoeur himself has ceased to be. Consequently, when I now quote from Ricoeur’s text, in one sense it may sound like an enigmatic echo of a relationship with his later works, while at the same time it may also be appreciated as a message especially relevant in our own situation: Our friend Emmanuel Mounier will no longer answer our questions. One of the cruelties of death is to alter profoundly the meaning of a literary work in progress. Not only does the work no longer involve a continuation since it is finished in every sense of the word, but it is also torn away from the dialogue of questions and answers which situated its author among the living. It will forever remain a written work and that is all. The break with its author is final; hence forth it enters into the only history which is possible for it—that of its readers and the men whom it will inspire. In a sense, a work attains the truth of its literary existence when its author is dead: every publication and every edition begins the inexorable relationship of living men with the book of a man that is virtually dead. . . . I have not been able to reread Mounier’s books as books should be read, as the books of a dead person.5 What happens when we read—and reread—the books of a dead philosopher? Certainly, the death of the author means that the


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progress of his or her work is interrupted—“it is finished in every sense of the word”—and consequently the break with the author as a partner in a dialog—a person “among the living”—is final. Nevertheless, when Ricoeur himself as an author no longer is able to speak or to take his place within the community of readers—his texts separate us from him inevitably—no return message can ever be received and we are confronted with the remotest limit where all absolute knowledge becomes silent— and this is exactly where hermeneutics begins. Thus, the death of the author does not necessarily result in a situation where all communication ceases. The texts of Ricoeur still donne à penser (give rise to thoughts), to borrow a phrase from his own hermeneutics of symbols with its strong inspiration from Kantian aesthetics.6 However, the situation is not completely new; it is to be exact “as books should be read, as the books of a dead person.” In accordance with the view Ricoeur has expressed elsewhere, we enter into a situation of genuine openness where all kinds of communications are made possible: “In the Elysian Fields (Champs-Élysées) all philosophers are contemporaneous and all communications reversible: Plato may answer Descartes.”7 We may also listen to these words by Ricoeur himself, as a form of reverberation in the background, when we read his very first essay on text hermeneutics, published almost two decades later in 1970, where he states the following: [T]o read a book is to consider its author as already dead and the book as posthumous. For it is when the author is dead that the relation to the book becomes complete and, as it were, intact. The author can no longer respond; it only remains to read his work.8 Considering this, it seems as if books should always be read in situations where the authors can no longer respond. In the prolongation of the recently deceased philosopher’s thinking on “the hermeneutical function of distanciation in all communication,”9 John Durham Peters has poignantly pointed out that

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“[c]ommunication with the dead is the paradigm case of hermeneutics: the art of interpretation where no return message can be received.”10 What does the “death of the author” teach us about what it means to be human?

Hermeneutics of the Self: In the World “in Front of ” the Text It is not an exaggeration to state that the opinions concerning philosophical anthropology during the twentieth century were characterized by remarkably strong tensions. In consequence, the conflicting images of the human often oscillated between extreme approaches, which either defended a radical humanism, starting with the constitution of a self-conscious transcendental subject as a central point of orientation in the world, or a theoretical antihumanism where the subject appeared dissolved, swallowed up, or as radically decentered by a self-regulated web of anonymous, determinant structures. Thus the fact that the French philosophical scene at this time was almost a caricature of this contradictory landscape was not surprising, considering that many of the influences originated from French soil. After the twilight of radical humanism, elaborated on by existential philosophy in its victorious era of the 1930s, the situation became almost inverted due to the theoretical antihumanism of the 1960s, when structuralism—in alliance with either Marxism, psychoanalysis, or linguistic theories in general—was mobilized for a purpose that was no longer to understand but to dissolve man. Ricoeur’s magnificent investigations on metaphors—published in English as The Rule of Metaphore and later on mentioned as one of the two windows opened by Ricoeur toward the aporia of creativity upon which he expanded in publications from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s11—should not only be considered as parts of a critique of language perceived as anonymous, closed, and self-regulating system, but as integral parts of a passionate defense of a concept of creativity with truly human proportions.


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These investigations, which Ricoeur developed on American soil, were also part of a backward-looking, critical gaze at French structuralism, which he had been confronted with in the 1960s. Placed as he was in an intermediate position in an extremely polarized terrain, Ricoeur developed a philosophy of action, starting from the recognition of human capability, and integrating the predominant centering and decentering movements in a dialectical relationship within a framework of a philosophical anthropology of distinguishable communicative features. This fragile constitution of things human is configured as a balancing act where the human being is distinguished as homo capax, a concept originating initially from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who defined the capable person as a capacity constantly counterbalanced by the unavoidable tragic dimensions of suffering.12 It is obvious, from this background, that when Ricoeur mentioned the “death of the author,” it was never meant to be acknowledged as a theoretical antihumanism declaring the author’s death to be the death of the subject in general. The semantic autonomy of the text does not mean that the author’s intention is completely lost. The text still remains discourse, and as such a product of human action, written by someone on something about something and to someone. The decoupling of the mental intentions of the author (what the author meant) from the verbal meaning of the text (due to the recognition of the semantic autonomy of the text) takes us beyond both the intentional fallacy of the author (which held the authors original intentions as the prior criterion for any valid interpretation of the text) and the fallacy of the absolute text (hypostasizing the text as an authorless anonymous entity). However, after the death of the author, the former power of the almighty author as the source of all meaning cannot be easily transferred to the reader. The understanding of the distribution of power and influence in the process of interpretation of texts may rather be linked to the dialectic of distanciation and appropriation in the act of reading. The intentions of the author can never be considered as an external criterion determining the interpretation of

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a text. Acknowledged as an open work, available for anyone who can read, the appearance of the text means at the same time the universalization of the audience. Nonetheless, in the light of the fact that the text is conceived as a result of human action, the author’s intentions cannot be considered to have completely disappeared, instead they have to be perceived as an integral part of the text itself. Moreover, the opportunity for a multiple of readings, acknowledged as a dialectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text, does not lead to the “death of the subject” in general, instead it urges us to rethink the fundamental structures of philosophical anthropology. We may say that the death of the author does not necessarily imply the disappearance of the author as a person, but rather the death of the person as author. Thus, when a text is completed the person as author dies, but he or she does so only in order to allow the birth of the reader; not a (“dead”) author unable to respond, but instead a person capable of reading, that is, a cultivated act of reception as well as production in the world “in front of” the text. This transformation of the author into one among the readers of the text presupposes a self-understanding which actively includes—and welcomes—a decentering of the self, a self willing to lose itself in order to find itself, or to lose oneself in order to find oneself as another. Consequently, we are guided by an indirect approach to the question of identity. The new self-understanding attained by the subject brought forth in the world “in front of ” the text leads to a liberation of the narcissistic ego and the insight that it is only through critical distanciation that one may find oneself; to quote from Ricoeur: “Even the death of the author is a game that the author plays.”13 According to this herméneutique du soi (hermeneutics of the self), configured in terms of a dialectical and communicative understanding of the person as homo capax, the reader should not be considered as either almighty or powerless, but rather as a human being capable of action as well as suffering, production as well as reception, writing as well as reading. Thus the concept of interpretation originating from the situation “in front of” the text has notable anthropological implications:


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To understand is not to project oneself into the text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds which interpretation unfolds. In sum, it is the matter of the text which gives the reader his dimension of subjectivity . . . in reading, I “unrealise myself.” Reading introduces me to imaginative variations of the ego.14 In the light of a destabilized subject of imaginative variations, consistent with this dynamic hermeneutical theory, interpretation can neither be understood as a free, unlimited imagination, nor as a destiny totally determined by the text. Rather, the human act of reading may be understood in terms of a “bounded” creativity, an activity regulated by the relationship with the text, which itself receives its definition by this act of reading. Ricoeur has developed this mutual definition of text and interpretation in terms of an aesthetic of reading, where the emphasis in this relationship is placed on “the reader’s response to the strategems of the implied author.”15 If the fulfillment of writing is reading, this is conspicuous as being a dialectical act where receptivity meets productivity and where understanding is continuously being corrected and cultivated by a variety of explanations. Ricoeur captures the dialectical character of the act of reading by the resemblance with “a picnic where the author brings the words and the readers the meaning.”16 Thus, conceptualized in this way, hermeneutics appears as a philosophy of detours: to find oneself is to find oneself as another through long detours and to rediscover oneself as another by multiple appropriations of texts. Instead of a “narcissism of the reader,” where the subject is defined as the radical origin and ultimate source of meaning, the work of distanciation in every appropriation means that the text may only become my own if I disappropriate myself and enhance “distanciation at the very heart of the experience of belonging.”17 However, there is also a personal background to Ricoeur’s confidence in the transformative power of reading. In his early years as an orphan of the state—pupille de la nation—due to the tragic loss of both parents before he was even old enough to

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address them consciously, reading became his “life vest.” Raised by his grandparents, and later by his aunt, childhood games were replaced by books and he probably spent more time in the libraries than in the playgrounds, reading rather than socializing. However, his personal experience of the continual interplay between text and reader where the mutual correlation between modified expectations and transformed memories takes place was also a reality during his nearly 5 years of captivity during World War II. During these times, he mainly lived his life through books, due to the “university” in the prison camp, which he established together with other intellectuals, lifelong friends and colleagues such as Mikel Dufrenne and Emmanuel Lévinas.

What It Means to Be Human: “To Will Is Not to Create” As already mentioned, in the mid-1970s Ricoeur’s philosophical investigations revolved around the metaphor as a paradigmatic model to delineate human creativity. By defining metaphor not as a sheer ornament, but in terms of an interlinked semantic innovation and productive imagination, he defended the possibility of human capacity to achieve genuine surprise against both French semiotics and more analytical approaches. From this perspective, language is not something that springs from the inner life of the individual; instead, it needs to be reconsidered as a rule-governed collective structure regulated according to different codes. However, man is not conceived according to structuralism as a decentered subject completely determined by these anonymous, self-regulated structures. Language is not everything. The worthiness of a human being is not first and foremost linked to the capacity to learn and follow rules codifying language, but the capacity to break the rules in intelligent ways, thus generating metaphors. According to Ricoeur “metaphor is a planned category mistake.”18 The metaphorical logic, as a “bound” and “regulated” activity involving both centering and decentering


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moves concerning the subject, teaches us, on the one hand, that it is actually possible to break out of the closed system of language; and, on the other, that creativity can never be recognized as something identical with total freedom. Consequently, by defending a conception of creativity with a “human face,” Ricoeur distinguishes himself in relation to approaches inspired by both structuralism and humanism. Hence, The Rule of Metaphor (1975/1977) indicates a longer backward glance at presumptions in a communicative anthropology with a notable dialectical character already present in Ricoeur’s very first philosophical steps. It is not by coincidence that Ricoeur’s first book published together with his close friend from the years in the prison camp, Mikel Dufrenne, was devoted to Karl Jaspers, a philosopher whose paradoxical style of thinking came to determine so much of Ricoeur’s way of thinking. In his second book, published in 1948, only 3 years after he was released from his nearly 5 years of captivity during World War II, Ricoeur drew on two existential philosophers: Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. Many commentators overlook the fact that in Ricoeur’s presentation, these two thinkers are presented in very sharp contrast to each other, as two divergent and opposed ways of articulating the existential dimension of human life. Where Marcel takes his point of departure from “my body,” Jaspers is apt to begin with “my freedom.” In this confrontation, we may distinguish a profound conflict between an understanding of existence in terms of a “participation” in an “incarnational mystery”—and a paradoxical philosophy rooted in choice and limit situations.19 Here, we approach a reflective mode of thinking governed by the same dialectical procedures as Ricoeur’s project in its entirety: it is only by displaying a contradiction between two diametrically opposed ways of establishing an existential philosophy that a productive integration seems to be possible. In the first volume of his philosophy of will, Freedom and Nature: The voluntary and the involuntary (1950/1966), Ricoeur did not, in contrast to Sartre and others, define human freedom as a sheer

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negating act originating from pure spontaneity. Although strongly influenced by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who Ricoeur referred to as having passed through the blood and veins of his thinking, he argued, in contrast, on behalf of a “situated” and “incarnated” freedom wherein the body, perceived as both activity and passivity, cannot be reduced to an obstacle to freedom, but needs to be considered as a prerequisite for its realization. Ricoeur concludes the book by stating that freedom has to be considered as human, not divine, and closes with the following words: “To will is not to create.”—Voloire n’est pas créer.20 These final words of his doctoral dissertation disclose an obvious theological inspiration behind Ricoeur’s conception of the will. Throughout his lifetime, Ricoeur cultivated a profound interest in religion and theological matters. It is not by coincidence that his books belong to some of the most used and quoted philosophical references among theologians. This in spite of the fact that in modern times both theologians and philosophers have either tried to establish a clear separation between theology and philosophy, or to collapse them into each other; either way producing an unfair judgment on Ricoeur’s thought. Despite his committed interest in religion, Ricoeur himself always defended his identity as a philosopher. Nevertheless, Ricoeur extended the sources of philosophy in order to include religious sources, and strongly defended a methodological autonomy of philosophical reflection. In accordance with his skeptical— almost Kantian—attitude toward too much metaphysical speculation, Ricoeur’s favorite conversation partners among theologians have not been those grounded in systematic theology, but rather in biblical exegesis.21 In the concluding words of his dissertation from 1950, where an ‘only human freedom’ appears in terms of a fragile synthesis of freedom and nature, choice is defined as a paradox of initiative and receptivity, irruption and attention; words that acknowledge that selfhood is never perceived as something given, but rather as a task waiting to be performed. Later, in Fallible Man (1960/1965) and The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1969), a two-volume


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work forming the second part of his Philosophy of the Will, this vulnerable existence of acting and suffering is defined in Pascalian terms as an ontology of disproportion.22 Here, as elsewhere when referring to Ricoeur’s anthropology, we may also note an enduring, but mostly nonarticulated, influence from Martin Luther.23 Bearing in mind the Lutheran roots of expressions such as “the paradox of a captive free will—the paradox of a servile will ” and the statement by Ricoeur that “Evil is both something brought about now and something that is always already there; to begin is to continue” and finally in the conviction that evil cannot be as primordial as goodness24—this leaves us with a philosophy of will governed by “the grandeur and limitation of an ethical vision of the world.”25 According to Ricoeur’s “anthropology of disproportion,”26 and as a consequence of this noncoincidence of the human being with him- or herself, human fragility can be explained by the reference to inherent limitations and constitutive conflicts within the subject itself. Once again, we are confronted by an indirect way of determining the status of the self. Mediation seems inevitable. Moreover, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self urges us to leave ourselves in order to find ourselves: “the self could return home only at the end of a long journey. And it is ‘as another’ that the self returned.”27

A Philosophy of Action In 1970, when Ricoeur became involved in a contest with Michel Foucault concerning the vacant chair that the death of Jean Hyppolite had left open at the Collége du France, it was not by coincidence that he selected the title philosophie de l’action— philosophy of action—and considering the cognitive climate in those days, it is not surprising that his antagonist won the competition and gained the attractive position by focusing on the history of the systems of thoughts. Ricoeur frequently used notion ‘philosophy of action’ to name his philosophical cause

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must have seemed totally outmoded and unfashionable in those days. After being unsuccessful in obtaining the position at the Collége du France, and because of other setbacks, Ricoeur decided to move the center point of his intellectual work to the West—America. In order to cope with the challenges from the theoretical antihumanism of structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ricoeur turned his focus toward the dominating philosophical approach in his new professional context of the United States: analytical philosophy. From this tradition he incorporated two main, closely related, contributions, both absent in French structuralism: the understanding of language as action and the transcending dimension of language associated with its reference to a world external to itself. Even though the tension between a “philosophy of action” and “the death of the author” in the title of this chapter may seem strange, even aporetic and enigmatic, these two notions are nevertheless interrelated within a wider cohesion. These two notions constitute the formation of a philosophical anthropology where subjectivity does not appear as the first but as the final category. Today, it is obvious that Ricoeur is prominent as one of the major representatives of contemporary hermeneutics not only due to the fact that he reorganized the hermeneutical situation itself and redefined the concept of interpretation, but also due to the fact that his reflections on interpretation were, at the same time, integral parts of one of the most profound attempts in our time to reclaim an understanding of what it means to be human. The contribution from Ricoeur’s philosophy of action to a defense of human value and capacity in a post humanistic context, takes the form of a complex, slightly fragmentary, multidimensional argumentation, determined by a conviction that it is necessary to shift the focus from the question “what is man?” to “who is man?”28 On this point, Ricoeur became increasingly dissatisfied by the initial analytical basis of “what?” and “why?”—coupled with any inability to account for the “who?” of action—due to the fact


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that the analytical philosophy of action is based on an ontology of events. Even though the “who” can be said to be implied, for instance, in Donald Davidson’s analysis, the identity of this “who” is never explicitly articulated and clarified. Consequently, this tradition can, therefore, only to a minor extent, contribute to the development of ontology of person and self. Although the explicit necessity to consider “who” in a philosophy of action was not fully elaborated until his works in the 1990s and later, this conviction is already implied in Ricoeur’s text hermeneutics, where reading is identified as an activity, and therefore presumes a “who.” In text hermeneutics, the connection between the world of the text and the world of the reader is connected by the act of reading, which appears as the intermediary link between text and history. By responding to the invitation of the text, the reader does not only enter into a dialectic adventure, but in addition becomes a reader of him/herself. The hermeneutics of the text and the hermeneutics of the self coincide. During the extremely successful reception of his hermeneutical theories on texts, metaphors, or narratives in the 1970s and the 1980s, Ricoeur perhaps underestimated the importance of making his action-oriented philosophical anthropology explicit. However, in his later works Ricoeur returned to a more programmatic elaboration on action, also resulting in self-corrections. Let me just point out one significant example. In his frequent historiographical reflections, extending from 1955 to 1985 when they reached their culmination, Ricoeur preserved the simple hierarchical order of traces–documents–archives. This being the presumed method by which historians collect traces and gather documents into an archive. However, in his book on memory at the turn of the millennium, an extraordinary self-correction is made, and the order is reversed: the establishment of archives being noted as a product of human activity, and therefore as a defining act in relation to the documents in the archives. Because nothing as such is a document, and yet simultaneously anything may become a document, the interdependency among facts, documents, and questions constructs a hierarchical order in

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which the archive is placed on a more fundamental level than documents.29 The heart of these self-critical reflections, strongly influenced by Michel de Certeau, may be acknowledged as a series of chapters in a philosophical anthropology revolving around an understanding of the human being as homo capax, that is, a being perceived as capable of action as well as suffering. In Ricoeur’s early philosophy, human identity was already perceived as being constituted of a series of unstable heterogeneous syntheses; later this fragile conception is brilliantly executed and manifested in his complex conception of human time in the last volume of Time and Narrative, Volume 3 (1985/1988). In this three-volume work from the mid-1980s, the particular question of identity gradually emerges as a focal point of interest for his philosophical reflections. However, the explicit quest for a hermeneutics of identity was not systematically explored until Oneself as Another (1990/1992), where Ricoeur’s transatlantic philosophical conversation was brought to its most mature stage. Bernhard Dauenhauer mentions this work as “a full-fledged philosophical anthropology, a full fledged account of what it is to be a person.”30 In this work, four main determinations of human identity are presented in an extremely dense investigation of homo capax, revolving around the polysemi of the question who? Ricoeur outlines a four-dimensional determination of human capacity, in this book, concentrated on the following questions: Who can speak? Who can act? Who can recount? Who can impute actions to oneself and hold oneself responsible for his/her own actions? The fundamentally reflexive nature of Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, according to this hermeneutics of the self, where the linguistic, practical, narrative, and ethical investigations are conducted without any methodological break is emphasized by the fact that “oneself” functions as a universal reflexive pronoun in relation to all personal pronouns in this philosophy of language, action, narrative, and ethics.31 Ten years later, Ricoeur’s determination of homo capax was extended by a fifth determination originating from the question “who remembers?” According to Ricoeur’s philosophy of human


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memory, forgetting cannot be reduced to a defect, instead forgetting is acknowledged as an integral part of the human memory. Once more, the dialectical approach, so typical of Ricoeur’s philosophy, may be distinguished. Memory is neither total reflection nor arbitrary imagination, but motivated by truth claims rigorously developed in terms of an “alienated” phenomenology within the horizon determined by the historical conditions of human life.32 Thus, as an alternative to Descartes’ cogito, which does not need to communicate, and Nietzsche’s anti-cogito, which cannot communicate, Ricoeur posits a cogito blessé, a “wounded” cogito, which is neither an immediate given, nor something “dead” and nonexistent. To be more precise, cogito blessé requires a multitude of detours in order to find itself through communication. It is a hermeneutics of the self, mediated through a process whereby the subject is forced to leave itself in order to find itself, according to the principle of the self as oneself as another.33 The indirect constitution of the human within this dialectic of stabilizing and destabilizing processes, the dialectic of selfhood and sameness together with the correlation of selfhood and otherness, is founded in the complex interplay between productivity and receptivity, speaking and listening, writing and reading, configured as a vulnerable and fragile communication at the bursting point, where cogito, ergo sum is transformed into communico, ergo sum.34

Philosophizing without Absolute Knowledge As previously mentioned, few other thinkers have been involved in so many profound intellectual exchanges as Ricoeur. In these interactions, he was always prepared to listen carefully to the most convincing arguments of his interlocutors; therefore also ready to change his mind and put his own convictions into play. Ricoeur never adopted that kind of stylistic flourish that has often characterized French theory. Both in print and in person,

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Ricoeur was humble in his philosophical approach. His intellectual style was profoundly generous, never claiming to be either the first or the last philosopher in history. His reflections were attentive to the philosophical tradition and remained at the same time critical and self-critical in a profound way, which made his philosophy programmatically incomplete and open to critical revision.35 Ricoeur was also without any doubt one of the most encyclopedic thinkers of twentieth century philosophy. It is important to relate the history behind this capacity. When Ricoeur, in 1948, obtained his first academic chair at the university in Strasbourg, he assigned himself the task each year of reading, as extensively as possible, one philosophical author; from Greek philosophers and medieval to modern and contemporary philosophers. This effort resulted in an ever-growing library of references in the author’s publications, clearly manifested in the fact that his major works since 1975 have attained an encyclopedic style where every investigation starts from the ancient “beginning” and thereafter adds a careful reading of all the most profound contributions to the particular theme. This has made his later books seem almost overloaded and his argumentation, at times, difficult to follow.36 Nevertheless, in terms of methodology there is a striking continuity in his work in progress. As a general approach, initially Ricoeur makes a careful methodological division into distinctive levels, which may be recognized as a preparatory phase to his “dialecticalizations” with the purpose of dissolving false conflicts and avoiding impasses.37 After this process, the typical dialectical procedure begins, as a “rhythm” gradually dissolving the dichotomies of unresolved tensions in order to release a dynamic reflection, which may be recognized as the “rhythmic unity” of his philosophy.38 In this kind of mediation, where what is manifest in one position is disclosed as implicit in the opposite position, no harmonizations and “lazy mediations” are allowed: “eclecticism is always the enemy of dialectic.”39 Furthermore, this dialectic is extended in order to include nonphenomenological perspectives due to the fact that he frequently


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makes use of more objectivistic and empirical studies within a “diagnostic.” However, these dialectical mediations were formed by the same obsession with the desire for reconciliation, as they tried to resist any attempt to establish premature solutions. It is a fact that each time contemporary philosophers mention notions such as dialectics, difference, or negation, they simultaneously enter into the ruined landscape of the Hegelian system. For this reason, Ricoeur stresses that we have to raise Hegelian problems—and at the same time avoid Hegelian solutions. The openness and the hope (meaning here to strive for truth) is only one side of a philosophy where the reverse side deliberates on the limitation (of all final truth claims and absolute knowledge).40 Ricoeur describes his method as “a dialectic with a postponed synthesis,” he speaks about “the very delay of all syntheses,” “the postponement of the solution to all dialectics,” and une philosophie sans absolu.41 In this philosophical reflection, where resolution is always more hoped for than achieved, he uses the theological model of eschatology as the horizon for a particular way of thinking that tries to resist “the hubris of total reflection” and “the Hegelian temptation.”42 During his entire career, Ricoeur refused all false reconciliations. He was constantly involved in conversations, but did not use intellectual violence against his dialog partners or written sources. While the comprehensiveness of his production was encyclopedic, he never established any kind of authoritative canon. His striving was clearly universal, but Ricoeur never allowed his striving toward the extensive and total to become totalitarian. He rejected, at the same time, every attempt to present hermeneutics as a new relativism. He expressed the same aversions toward “the Hegelian temptation” of absolute knowledge, as he did in refusing every attempt to reduce interpretation theory to an arbitrary relativism according to “anything goes.”43 According to Ricoeur’s dialectical way of thinking, the last word in absence of both absolute knowledge and arbitrary relativism is the conflict of interpretations, a concept inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. However, in Ricoeur’s intellectual universe this concept is mainly

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configured in accordance with one of his most important influences, the philosopher whom Ricoeur named as “my silent interlocutor”—Karl Jaspers.44 In his very first work, written together with Mikel Dufrenne, Ricoeur was already making frequent use of Jasper’s communicational model of loving struggle—liebender Kampf, combat amoureux. The combination of “struggle” (as a guarantee of truth) and “love” (preventing the struggle from evolving into war) has an obvious parallel in the inherent logic of a conflict of interpretations. In order to establish communication in terms of a loving struggle, all people involved in a battle are also expected to surrender their weapons to their counterpart, in order to dispute both against the other and against oneself—for truth.45 The violent tendencies of a Nietzschean fascination with combat were transformed by his enthusiastic disciple Jaspers, who reconfigured combat into a role model for peaceful conflict resolutions. It seems to me that the enduring influence of Jaspers’ model is always present when Ricoeur mentions the conflict of interpretations. This is a philosophy of communication where there can be no advance hermeneutical positions of preference or privilege. The same logic is present in the typical dialectical way of Ricoeur’s thinking. Dialectic does not mean an easy eclecticism where different things are merely juxtaposed, but the conflict that guards the open atmosphere and struggle for truth against all false reconciliations in a joint falsehood. However, a prerequisite for the maintenance of this model of peaceful conflict resolution is a particular philosophical anthropology, where human beings are acknowledged as capable of action as well as suffering, hope as well as self-limitation. As a consequence, when Ricoeur teaches us “how books should be read,” this is done according to a philosophy attentive to a “philosophy of action” as well as the “death of the author.” As an author himself, Ricoeur also appropriated these dialectical preconditions when on the very first page of his philosophical autobiography he admitted that “the reconstruction of my intellectual


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development undertaken here is no more authoritative than one written by a biographer other than myself.”46 These words indicate how an author may learn something important about his task from the prerequisites of how books should be read.

Chapter 2

Hermeneutics and Globalization What Is Hermeneutics Today?

We are all into hermeneutics these days, but do we really know why? The immense “turn towards interpretation” in contemporary philosophy has brought about a situation where hermeneutics has come to be, as Gianni Vattimo mentioned, “a sort of postmodern koiné or common idiom of Western culture.”1 Because of its extraordinary success, hermeneutics is today at serious risk of losing much of its meaning, thus becoming both vague and unclear. Subsequently, hermeneutics in our time is not only acknowledged as a predominant—but simultaneously indistinct—methodological alternative in the academic world; the common atmosphere and overall intellectual climate in our societies have also evolved into a new perspectivistic sensibility and a generalized experience of the interpretative character of all our relationships with the world, which may also be noted as “hermeneutical.”2 Given this situation, we need to ask questions such as: What is hermeneutics today? What kind of significance can be ascribed to this theoretical tradition and in what direction is interpretation theory heading? Furthermore, we currently need to ask ourselves to what extent the dramatic internal changes within the hermeneutical tradition itself may contribute to the establishment of a link between hermeneutics and the main societal transformation in our time—globalization? The aim of my presentation in this chapter is to seriously consider the contemporary status of interpretation theory.

Hermeneutics and Globalization

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Starting with a brief history of hermeneutics, I delineate a historical odyssey of the “canonized” German tradition that has long been predominant in both textbooks and research departments. After this preliminary section, I explore the inherent limitations of this tradition of understanding and pre-understanding, as presented by Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and by arguing that these perspectives terminate in a philosophical blind alley.3 In order to prepare hermeneutics for the new century, I then draw on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in order to access philosophical resources that may explain why interpretation theory today needs to shift its focus and radically extend its interest. By broadening the scope of hermeneutics in this way, I hope to be able to demonstrate that hermeneutics has come to be much more than a methodological issue for academic seminars (in human sciences and elsewhere) or a separate rationality of a protected life world reality (Lebenswelt). In order to develop an alternative concept of interpretation, I turn particularly to the critical hermeneutics unfolded by Ricoeur, as this may also contribute to initiating routes by which the problematic of globalization might be discussed. According to this alternative approach, the alienating distanciation is acknowledged as a productive element within a process of interpretation, where moments of understanding and explanation are no longer separated, but mutually related in a common process called interpretation. In the final stages of our journey, we arrive in a new hermeneutical realm in which globalization is no longer considered an alien phenomena. Guided by Gianni Vattimo’s innovative interlinking of the hermeneutical meaning of nihilism and his acknowledgment of the consequences of the technological transformation of our post- or late-modern societies, we may discover the wider significance of interpretation in a world determined by globalization. Within this cohesion, hermeneutics may, at the present time, be associated with an unreflective, generalized experience embracing a plurality of perspectives, together with a proactive, critical,

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and reflective strategy aimed at coping with this plurality of perspectives in a responsible way. It seems to me that one of our greatest challenges in the current situation is to exploit the full potential of hermeneutics as a cognitive resource combining “horizontal” and “vertical” thinking; however, this would bring us to the threshold of Chapter 3, where the challenges of the present knowledge society are considered and debated.

Hermeneutics of Understanding One of the significant contributions from hermeneutics to contemporary philosophy is undoubtedly connected to the growing awareness of the value of historical understanding. Today, we may acknowledge that every effort to unfold an understanding or explanation has to consider the implications of the context. However, modern hermeneutics itself has also, to a large extent, developed in terms of an explicit discussion about history, including all the aspects associated with this multilayered concept. It is within this realm that Gianni Vattimo has claimed that hermeneutics “is not only a theory of the historicity (horizon) of truth; it is itself a radically historical truth.”4 Later, the wider meaning of this statement will be reassessed; here, it is simply used as an explanation of why I find it appropriate to present a discussion of interpretation within a wider historical framework. Since hermeneutics has always been concerned with issues related to texts, questions about the “nature” of the text, and what it means to read and interpret texts, have always been present in the history of hermeneutics. Some indications of the long prehistory of interpretation theory may be found when recalling the generalized use of texts in the history of humankind. Furthermore, if we include an extended definition of the text, and consider how the text may be used as a model to understand a number of other phenomena, the profound historical cohesion of this problematic will be even more compelling. Thus, although hermeneutics has presently come to include a much


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wider range of problems, it is inevitable that the interpretation of texts still occupies a paradigmatic role. Questions concerning how texts should be interpreted “correctly” became notably urgent as a result of the protestant Reformation, when a number of texts—the Scriptures—were located at the center of religious interest and ascribed a decisive role. Considering these circumstances, it is not surprising that different kinds of regional hermeneutics have long existed, particularly in contexts where the challenges of interpreting texts seem especially acute (i.e. theology, philology, and juridical interpretation). Two centuries ago Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) articulated a general theory of interpretation in which the dual forms of “grammatical” and “technical” interpretations existed side by side (also in the sense that they were never reconciled). By this deregionalization of hermeneutics, he transformed the different regional rules of interpretation into a general theory of interpretation, a Kunstlehre carrying the double mark of being both romantic and critical. The establishment of hermeneutics as a general philosophical theory of interpretation makes it appropriate to name Schleiermacher the “founder” of modern hermeneutics. Unfortunately, his contribution was never fully appreciated, as witnessed by the complicated reception history of Schleiermacher’s thoughts; however, later his significance was reconsidered.5 It was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and his German colleagues around the turn of the next century, who introduced hermeneutics into the discussion of scientific epistemology by claiming a fundamental discontinuity among all sciences. Compared with the epoch of Schleiermacher, the societal context of hermeneutics was now thoroughly different. This was because the philosophical scene had changed dramatically in nineteenth century Germany as a combined result of the political unification of Germany and the extraordinary success of the process of industrialization. In addition, the change was also brought about by the challenges of coping with the rising threat of the strong position

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of the natural sciences and the subsequent intellectual climate. All this resulted in a situation where both the methodological practice and the theoretical foundations of the human sciences were seriously threatened. The rise of positivism as a scientific program radicalized the long emerging conflict between the two competing scientific projects of modernity, emblematized by Aristotle and Galilee. In this situation, the human sciences perceived themselves compelled to develop a scientific method of comparable legitimacy as the ideal models of positivism: mathematics and physics. In order to establish an alternative to the positivistic argumentation for a methodological continuity among all scientific disciplines, according to the ideal of unified science, Dilthey declared the existence of two distinct kinds of science—natural science and human science—consistent with the dichotomy between two separated ontological domains: nature (Natur) and history (Geist). As an alternative to empirical explanations, mainly regulated by a causal logic, Dilthey defended the exceptional quality of historical knowledge by elaborating on a model of intelligibility that retained the psychological side of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. According to Dilthey’s interpretation of Schleiermacher, to interpret a text was considered identical to an Einfühlung focused on the original intentions of the author. This romantic approach to the understanding of meaning creation was rooted in an expressionistic understanding of language with strong psychological emphasis. Subsequently, within this context, hermeneutics became the methodological defense of the scientific status of human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and was subsumed to the epistemological approach of Verstehen (as an “understanding” of Geist) separated by a watertight distinction from Erklären (as a methodology “explaining” Natur) in natural sciences.6 It is hardly possible to overestimate the immense consequences for the future of hermeneutics caused by this concept of interpretation. Based on this, hermeneutics, in its very first steps into the epistemological domain, had already placed itself in the sharpest possible opposition toward the explanatory methods of


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natural sciences. It is astounding how many of the controversies and complications associated with hermeneutics originate from this epistemological dichotomy, according to which interpretation is identified as a central component in a psychologically oriented understanding (of culture)—in fierce opposition to the analytical distance permeating the explanation (of nature). The defensive wall erected by Dilthey’s claim of the existence of a separate cognitive realm regulated by the rationality of Verstehen certainly contributed to the establishment of a peaceful working climate among the human sciences for a while. However, the new conflicts that simultaneously emerged from this same epistemological break generated even more complicated problems. In the modern European history of science, this dualistic order has been manifested in the conflict between causal and teleological models of “explanations.” The causal model, stemming from Galilee and the seventeenth century scientific revolution, follows in the mechanistic tradition ruled by the logic of cause and effects. On the opposite side resides a tradition configured by intention and action, stemming from the Aristotelian model of teleology.7 However, the dichotomy of Verstehen and Erklären, manifested in Dilthey’s famous essay from 1900, is also inscribed in a longer history associated with ruinous consequences, emanating from a dualistic legacy in Western culture aimed at making a clear distinction between body and soul, nature and culture. In the century to come, solutions in accordance with this dualistic order would be revealed as both irrelevant and impossible to maintain.

Hermeneutics as Pre-understanding In the famous introduction to Being and Time (1927/1962), one of the most controversial philosophical publications of the past century, the author emphasizes the necessity for explicitly restating a question which, according to his view, had been forgotten due to the predominantly epistemological focus of interest

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within the preceding tradition from Descartes, and this is the question of Being, and the meaning of Being: Dasein.8 In Being and Time, which had an explosive effect on the contemporary intellectual scene, the author, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), distanced himself from the epistemologization of hermeneutics carried out by Dilthey as well as the transcendental phenomenology unfolded by his own teacher, Edmund Husserl, by stating that the ontological relationship of already “being there” (Dasein) always precedes the distanced perspective of an epistemological spectator. Heidegger’s articulation of the question of the meaning of Being results in an approach where the entire preoccupation with epistemology is subordinated to the more primordial ontological relationship of our being-in-the-world, indicated by the analysis of Dasein. Due to an existential and ontological focus of interest, which no longer revolved around the human being as subject but as possibility, the human being was defined as being always already thrown into and embedded in the world (In-derWelt-Sein), and involved in and occupied with practical concerns (care, Sorge); thus inhabiting the same world he/she is seeking to understand. Subsequently, the hermeneutic circle transcends its methodological limitations in advantage of a disclosure of the ontological ground of our being-in-the-world, that is, an ontological relationship that precedes our conscious orientations in the world as well as our epistemological enterprises. In accordance with Heidegger’s redirection of hermeneutics toward fundamental ontology, interpretation can no longer be perceived as an integral part of a methodological defense aimed at perfecting the epistemology of the human sciences. Heidegger, by changing the interpretative focus from theoretical to practical concerns, de-psychologized the concept of interpretation and shifted the perspective from understanding to pre-understanding, that is, the task to understand the mode of that being which exists through understanding. This preoccupation with the prerequisites for all human orientation in the world explains Heidegger’s repeated use of the vor-prefix in Being and Time, particularly in paragraph 32, where he assembles invented concepts


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such as Vor-habe, Vor-griff, Vor-meinung.9 These original semantic innovations may be apprehended as part of a philosophical strategy that seeks to transcend the dualism of understanding and explanation, including all epistemological expectations affiliated with it as two modalities of comprehension within epistemology. However, due to the fact that understanding, according to Heidegger, is mainly focused on Being (Dasein) and should therefore be considered as a part of the condition of inhabiting the world as a presence within a preexistent sphere— or better yet, a projection within a prior being-thrown—a new dualism emerges, but this time between ontology and epistemology. If epistemology may be understood according to the first Copernican revolution that turned the philosophical interest mainly toward knowledge theory, Heidegger’s ontological turn must be placed under the auspices of a second Copernican revolution. Thus, Dilthey’s epistemological question “How do we know?” is replaced by a new question introduced by Heidegger, and reconfiguring the entire field of hermeneutics in a profound way, namely “What is the mode of being of that being that exists only in understanding?” As a consequence of these philosophical undertakings, the concept of truth was no longer to be connected to questions of verification and falsification of different descriptions of the world. Instead, Heidegger identifies truth with the manifestation of Being; thus, a truth concept determined by the effort to reach a more primordial “disclosure,” or “opening,” of the world. According to this Heideggerian concept of interpretation—and its concept of truth—an original Zugehörigkeit (belonging) of an authentic being in the world eradicates every possibility to enhance critical distanciation and resume a dialog with contemporary epistemologies.10 Therefore, this kind of hermeneutics has given rise to repeated questioning concerning under what conditions it is possible to introduce a critical perspective in this realm mainly preoccupied with ontological concerns. However, by stating this, we have already invited Ricoeur’s critical objections to Heidegger’s ontological turn into the discussion.

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Following Ricoeur’s interpretation of Heidegger, we are always engaged in returning to the foundations—but at the same time we are left incapable of initiating a movement that would lead from the fundamental ontology back to the proper epistemological question of the status of the human sciences. Alternatively, to put Ricoeur’s objections into a question: how can a second Copernican revolution be prevented from being turned into a denial of the first Copernican revolution? Heidegger’s preoccupation with the ontological foundations upon which science can be constructed results in a philosophy that interrupts the involvement and dialog with modern sciences in general and epistemology in particular. These are the questions Heidegger’s disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), inherited when he reopened the topic concerning interpretation of texts in his great synthesis of German hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960/1975/1989). His magnum opus recapitulates a history where the layers of the struggles of Romanticism against Enlightenment, the struggle of hermeneutics against positivism, and the defense of Heideggers ontological turn against neo-Kantian epistemology seems to be present every where. The fundamental transition of interpretative focus, from the psychology of the author (“behind” the text) to the mutual transformation incarnated in the dialogical interaction between the text and the reader (in the world “in front of” the text), is manifested by the key concept fusion of horizons (Horizontversmeltzung). In this Gadamerian version of hermeneutics, we as readers appear as part of a history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte) from which we cannot extricate ourselves since history precedes both us and our ability to reflect upon our situation. Due to the circumstance that we always belong to history before we belong to ourselves, within this hermeneutics of tradition only a consciousness of the history of effects (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) may provide a foundation for the human sciences. Being simultaneously Heideggerian, Diltheyan, and Romantic, Gadamer’s milestone in the history of hermeneutics combines


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the inspiration from his teacher’s ontological turn with the effort to apply hermeneutics to the concrete epistemological challenges within the human sciences, and an appreciation of creativity stemming from the tradition of Romanticism. Subsequently, hermeneutics is defined within the spirit of Aristotle as a practical philosophy, where the dichotomy between theory and practice seems to be transcended: “Verstehen ist immer schon Anwenden.”11 Nevertheless, in Truth and Method the inherited conflict between the fundamental experience of participatory belonging and an alienating distanciation is present throughout the three parts of the book into which the hermeneutical experience is divided: the aesthetic sphere, the historical sphere, and the sphere of language.12 Although Gadamer’s intention was to return the hermeneutical enterprise to the practical field of operations in the human sciences, he only did so in terms of a Heideggerian ontology. Thus, in sharp contrast to the expectations inspired by the title of the book, Gadamer’s magnum opus does not provide us with a scientific methodology that enables us to attain truth. His investigation gives no hope at all for a pure methodological solution to the challenges of interpretation. Truth, in Gadamerian terms, is not possible to attain on the epistemological conditions of an alienating distanciation (Verfremdung) because it destroys the original relation of being as belonging (Zugehörigkeit). Truth (in ontological sense) and Method (in epistemological sense) are put in absolute opposition to each other. Because the universal claims behind Gadamer’s determination of the hermeneutical experience only seem to have aggravated the conflict with scientific work, Ricoeur found it more appropriate to understand the meaning of the title as Truth or Method rather than Truth and Method. Hermeneutical consciousness is preferred and defended rather than critical consciousness.13 Even if Gadamer’s hermeneutical project can be interpreted as an attempt to “urbanize the Heideggerian province” (Habermas)— and even if his conceptions of tradition, authority, and prejudice

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may implicate a kind of critical consciousness, in reality he did define hermeneutics in opposition to Enlightenment, scientific methodology, critical thinking, and the techno-scientific complex in our society associated with globalization.

A Philosophical Blind Alley? The reverberation from the German hermeneutics of understanding (and later pre-understanding) has been constantly present in every dialog on interpretation in the twentieth century; thus, it is no exaggeration to state that this tradition has held a defining power within the field of interpretation theory. Vattimo refer to this tradition as a philosophical koiné extending into the later decades of this century. Nevertheless, today it is hardly possible to overestimate the significance of the fact that hermeneutics from its very entry into the epistemological discussion established a radical dichotomy between understanding in the human sciences and explanation in natural sciences. However, it is also impossible to pass over the ontological turn of Heidegger and Gadamer, who put universal ambitions behind the defense of the finite horizons of a life world reality. From Ricoeur’s point of view, it seems both illegitimate and difficult, if not to say impossible, to introduce an element of critique and distanciation into this conception of hermeneutics, no matter if the effort is guided by a methodological or an ontological interest.14 If this were to be the last word from hermeneutics, the risk is overwhelming that this tradition will be isolated from the broader academic landscape as well as the discussions on the predominant transformation process in our societies today—globalization. What do we mean by globalization? The connotations associated with this highly controversial concept—as well as the efforts to identify the engines and driving forces behind this process of transformation—extend from a neoliberal conspiracy in connection with the Washington Consensus to a vague internationalism


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framed by mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. From my point of view, I find neither a supposed conspiracy nor an experience of a general interdependency around the globe to be sufficient as a foundation for a more profound understanding. I prefer the more specific definition of globalization, in accordance with Manuel Castells and others, which refer to the synergic and centrifugal effects of a deregulated world economy with increasing transnational features and the rise of a new networked, digital convergent information system operating in real time. A deregulated world economy is, of course, not something new in history—the world economy was even more liberal before World War I—but today, this transnational economy is operated by a new information system and it is this that makes a difference.15 Acknowledged together as mutually related driving forces, the economical and technological “engines” have created an extremely successful—and fragile—economic development, probably without comparison in the history of humankind. The economical crisis emerging in 2008–2009 has revealed the internal complexity of this process, the immaturity of the actors as well as the need for better regulations within this new world order. However, globalization has only existed as a reality in the last three decades, so it is perhaps not surprising that we do not know exactly how to cope with the situation. Today, for the first time in human history, we experience and conduct our lives according to a global simultaneity—with all its unpredictable consequences.16 Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon and its consequences extend not only to most sectors of our societies, but also to many of the intimate parts of our lives. Nevertheless, its epicenter and driving forces are mainly located within the domain where technology and economy converge. Taking this understanding of globalization into consideration, the traditional concept of hermeneutics does not seem compatible with this reality, and thus not capable of coping with this kind of transformation processes, mainly because they originate from what could be mentioned as the Other of hermeneutics. Consequently, the

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hermeneutical project seems to be confined in a philosophical blind alley, which it must overcome in order to be able to communicate with those areas from which it has been excluded, that is, the economic and technological transformation processes which are at the epicenter of the entire globalization process. Hermeneutics of understanding and pre-understanding does neither help us to cope with techno-science and complex knowledge organizations nor the challenges of interdependencies in association with financial systems and environmental issues as global warming. In order to prepare the way for a path to be established leading from hermeneutics to the problematic of globalization, the discussions have to turn to the manner in which Ricoeur coped with the specific limitations connected with his most important protagonist (and contributor as well) within German hermeneutics: Heidegger. Ricoeur’s lifelong encounter with Heidegger is scattered across several books and articles, and never brought together in a systematic conclusion. However, the most wide-ranging presentations are mainly to be found in some passages of The Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur 1969/1974), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Ricoeur 1981), the third volume of Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1985/1988) and in his millennium book Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur 2000/2004), where his critique reached its pinnacle and also its most dramatic point. The indications and traces from Ricoeur’s confrontation with Heidegger are found everywhere, even in his early works. His close affiliation with a particular French tradition of reflexive philosophy, the initial influence of Jaspers, as well as his early acquaintance, as a student of Roland Dalbiez at Rennes, with Freud, are of extraordinary significance when explaining why Ricoeur took a different route and distanced himself from Heidegger’s theoretical position. When Ricoeur was summarizing his concluding reflections on his intellectual experiences in Paris during the 1960s, his major strategy revolved around the question of how to “grasp” the


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hermeneutical problem into the phenomenological method in a proper way.17 Here, his constant fight against any kind of immediacy, giving the advantage to a philosophy of detours, compelled him to make a distinction between two different kinds of routes to ontology: a “short” route, represented by Heidegger; and a “long” route, represented by his own position. While the “short” route rejected all methodology and carries itself directly to the level of ontology of finite being, the “long” route carries reflection to the level of ontology by degrees following successive investigations and methodological considerations in accordance with “a more roundabout, more arduous path.”18 Ricoeur’s detour through epistemology on his way to ontology appears in brute contrast to Heidegger’s explication of the ontological ground, upon which the sciences can be constructed without any relation to contemporary epistemologies. One and a half decade later, in the third and last volume of his investigations on Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1985/1988), Ricoeur presents a fully fledged confrontation with Heidegger. For the author, this third volume is also part of a personal disappointment because he had to revise and correct his initial expectations in the preceding parts of the work, where he had hoped for a phenomenological “solution” to the quest for a time concept that is humane.19 After having revisited the tensions between the two predominant concepts of time in Western civilization—the time of the soul (Augustine) and the time of the world (Aristotle), as well as its later materialization in the tension between intuitive time (Husserl) and invisible time (Kant)—Ricoeur enters into a systematic confrontation with Heidegger. As a prerequisite for his discussion, Ricoeur argues that it is perfectly legitimate to treat Being and Time as a distinct work, as it actually was published, without necessarily falling into the indefensible anthropological interpretations presented by French existentialism. He captures the significant difference between the focus on the ontological structure of the thrown project and an existential recognition of free choice in a short remark: “One small word separates Heidegger from Sartre: already.”20 Ricoeur had

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not only assimilated Heidegger’s “anti-existentialist” approach in its elaborated form through the profound influence of MerleauPonty, but also through his affiliation with a different kind of “existentialism” unfolded by Marcel. Thus the disagreement is not about existentialism. The opposition is much more profound. With regard to the aporias of time in Agustinian and Husserlian thoughts, Heidegger has contributed, according to Ricoeur, three interrelated “admirable discoveries.” First, time is enveloped in the basic structure of care (Sorge); secondly, Heidegger elaborated on the unity of time as the mutual exteriorization of future, past, and present as three ecstasies; and finally, he presents a hierarchization of the levels of temporalization.21 Nevertheless, Ricoeur does not consider this as a “solution,” but rather as a radicalization of the initial aporias. The original difficulties are in reality only further multiplied when the analysis reaches the second and third level. According to Ricoeur’s view, human temporality can neither be constituted on the basis of a time concept considered as a series of “nows,” nor the opposite, to follow the path from temporality and Dasein to cosmic time, an autonomous concept of time. Thus the autonomy of time, manifested in cosmic time, constitutes the ultimate aporia for the phenomenology of time. Here we may also locate the critical point that determines the limitations of phenomenology. The crucial point in Ricoeur’s critical examination of Heidegger’s conception of time is the impossibility to write history by using these philosophical resources. Ricoeur promptly questions the attempts to ground historiography on historicality, which would have been the only way to convincingly justify the claim of an ontological priority of historicality over historiography. Due to the Heideggerian elimination of temporal distance, it seems as if the phenomenological conception of time avoids the problematic of the trace: “a physical ‘mark’ capable of guiding a return toward the past.”22 In Ricoeur’s initial plan, phenomenology was supposed to have the role of a privileged interlocutor in a three-way conversation realized together with historiography and literary narratology;


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however, he changed his mind due to the conclusions of his investigations and in the last volume of his work it is not the phenomenological path he travels. While special attention is still paid to the aporias of phenomenology, it is not because of the “solutions” delivered by Heidegger, but rather more associated with the fact that Heidegger’s analysis aggravates the conflict between the finitude of mortal time and the infinity of cosmic time. Subsequently, the merits of this analysis are mainly associated with the growing attention it has brought to the radical polarities and tensions within time consciousness. Because, only by this means can a road be opened toward the exploration of a “third” time, which is only possible to establish on the prerequisites of a preceding conflict. Contrary to Heidegger’s own intentions, this may prepare the way for a relocation of phenomenology within a greater cohesion of reflective and speculative thought—that which Ricoeur mentions as a “broader and more balanced” view.23 Subsequently, the most profound contribution from phenomenology is associated with the fact that the aporias disclosed by Heidegger increase in direct proportion to his own advancements. Considering these circumstances, it seems obvious that temporality cannot be spoken of in the direct discourse of phenomenology; instead, mediation is required. Thus, within his search for a coherent answer to the question “what is time?” Ricoeur starts to develop a dialectical solution, because “we cannot think about cosmological time (the instant) without surreptitiously appealing to phenomenological time and vice versa.”24 As already indicated, Ricoeur’s response to the aporias of the phenomenology of time consists in the elaboration on a third—historical— time, constituted as a mediation between lived time and cosmic time. However, this historical, and true human time is a fragile construction—it can only be a heterogeneous synthesis—essentially founded on a series of connecting procedures by which phenomenological experience of lived time is reinscribed on the necessity of cosmic (or, universal) time. The three most important connecting procedures are calendar time, the succession of generations

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(the realm connecting contemporaries, predecessors, and successors), and the hierarchical order of archives, documents, and traces. A paradigmatic decision was made by Ricoeur to join the “robust conviction” of historians who focus on the reality of the past. Whatever may be said about all the complications historians have to face—reaching from the inevitably selective aspect of the historians operations to the ideological implications and the mutual “loan” between history and fiction—the historians finally refer to something that really happened. Subsequently, Ricoeur strongly insists on the dividing line between history and fiction, because the constructions presented by historians—contrary to novelists—do aim at being reconstructions of the past. Ricoeur concludes: “Between the ‘reality of the past’ and the ‘unreality of fiction,’ the dissymmetry is total.”25 Thus, within this cohesion, the narrative approach as well as the phenomenological conception of time that Heidegger brought to its most mature stage has come to be the cause of the problem, and not the solution. Moreover, the way in which Ricoeur articulates his argumentation with Heidegger is also revealing to the understanding of Ricoeur’s philosophical methods. In his encounter with Heidegger, he manifests, in an exemplary way, how we may gain important insights from the same sources and thinkers that we seriously criticize. Consequently, it is only at the bursting point of Heidegger’s conception of time where it is possible for Ricoeur’s new concept of time to unfold. In addition, Ricoeur’s attempt to establish a dialectical relationship, starting from the conflict between the “inner” time concept elaborated by phenomenology, and the “objective” time which uncompromisingly evolves in the “external” world, has its immediate equivalent in a concept of interpretation that relates explanation and understanding to each other within an extended, critical concept of interpretation. Fifteen years after his investigation on time and narrative, in his millennium book on memory, Ricoeur returned to a revised


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discussion on historiographical operations, and thereby prolonged the confrontation with Heidegger’s deficit, that is, Heidegger’s understanding of history. Once again, in this book on memory, Ricoeur extends considerable effort in carefully demonstrating how history is inevitably linked to both memory and forgetting; he strongly defends the truth claims of both history and memory, due to the reference to something that really has happened. Then, he again returns to the critique against the impracticability of phenomenological time consciousness: “How indeed can history be made without calendar and clock?”26 When Ricoeur, within the same context, stresses that he “would like to draw the attention of the philosopher to the workshop of the historian,”27 his implied reference is naturally to Heidegger. Taking all this into consideration, and in order to enter into a dialog where hermeneutics may contribute to the attempts to cope with the challenges of globalization, mainly originating from the technological and economic transformation process in the world, hermeneutics is compelled to find a way out of the blind alley of the German hermeneutics of understanding (and pre-understanding). Hence, in the following pages, I will elaborate on an extended, critical concept of interpretation where a critical perspective is introduced at the very core of the original belonging (Zugehörigkeit).

The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation Taking his entire work into consideration, it seems clear that Ricoeur did not enter into an explicit elaboration on hermeneutics until his inventory of the symbolism of evil in 1960. This early preoccupation with the challenges of mediation, associated with how to integrate the thinking contained in symbols and myths into a philosophical discourse by the use of interpretation, was, later in the 1960s, extended and transformed when Ricoeur presented his famous hermeneutics of suspicion. The intellectual soil of De l’interprétation, later translated as Freud and

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Philosophy (P. Ricoeur 1965/1970), is far removed from German hermeneutics when Freud is brought together with other “masters of suspicion” such as Marx and Nietzsche. The organizing principle of the new perception of interpretation emerging in the early 1960s was perceived as a dialectic between “to listen” and “to suspect.” Due to the critical moment included in this concept of interpretation, it also prepared Ricoeur for the systematic confrontation with structuralism, which he had in his scope in the following decade. In 1970, we find the first article where Ricoeur deals explicitly with text hermeneutics presented in a programmatic essay entitled “What is a text?”28 However, at this early stage of the development of his text hermeneutics, we find some incongruities and “dangerous” elements from the legacy of structuralism due to its origin in an intellectual context almost completely determined by this stream of thought. Explanation, according to this version of critical hermeneutics, is for instance, completely identified with and limited to structural analysis; later, the realm of “explanation” was extended in order to accommodate a variety of methodological approaches. For these reasons, we need to remind ourselves as readers that the “mature” theory of interpretation that Ricoeur presented in essay collections in the middle of the 1980s include texts from a wide range of positions attesting to a complicated evolution process where his theoretical position only gradually emerged. Even though Ricoeur himself never belonged to the structuralistic camp, his confrontation with French structuralism during the 1960s was exceptionally important to him. His dialectical mode of thinking made this interchange possible. By taking these influences seriously into consideration, and without adopting structuralism as a philosophy including all its anthropological deficits, Ricoeur cultivated a concept of interpretation distinct from the hermeneutics of understanding and pre-understanding. Thus, enhancing not only a dialectic of event and meaning, but also the dialectic of appropriation and distanciation, his text hermeneutics transformed the hermeneutical experience by


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recognizing a critical instance at the very heart of interpretation. According to Ricoeur’s fundamentally critical—or diacritical— hermeneutics, the concept of interpretation is extended in order to embrace understanding as well as explanation. In so doing, Ricoeur has redirected the whole hermeneutical tradition so that it includes a variety of methodological approaches emanating from the domain of explanation, thereby including elements which originally were considered alien to the German tradition. Distanciation is, therefore, not only defined as being a part of, but also as the productive moment of, mediation itself. By developing ontology in this way, that is, with the help of epistemology (instead of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology) and truth through method (instead of Gadamer’s “truth or method”), Ricoeur has brought about a metamorphosis of the concept of interpretation, which paves the way for hermeneutics in the new century.29 It should be noted that Ricoeur’s critical hermeneutics introduces an experience of institutional alienation and critical distanciation into the very nucleus of the hermeneutical experience of the world, truth, and self. The internal structure of this configuration of the hermeneutical experience is also mentioned as a “broken” ontology. Nevertheless, within this cohesion, the critical dimension should not be seen as a threat but rather as the productive force in the meaning-creating processes of all kinds of communication. In the same way as the consciousness of effective history contains within itself an element of distance, appropriation is in reality an act which can only be accomplished through distanciation. Subsequently, when Ricoeur speaks of “the hermeneutical function of distanciation in all communication,”30 he is in actuality turning the traditional and predominant logic upside down. This act, however, liberates interpretation making it possible to transcend the borders that have isolated hermeneutics from a broader scientific discourse— and in its prolongation, a society where media and anonymous information systems are paramount. Interpretation has now come to mean understanding and explanation.31 Let me quote

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Ricoeur, when he states: “Interpretation, philosophically understood, is nothing else than an attempt to make estrangement and distanciation productive.”32 Here, we approach the real dividing line between Gadamer and Ricoeur; however, these differences also need to be handled carefully and within an atmosphere informed by hermeneutical consciousness. This is obvious when Gadamer makes metaphorical use of the concept play, as the mode of being for someone devoting him/herself to appropriation. According to Gadamer, play may not be considered as an act of a spectator or controlled by the subject; play is rather an experience that transforms those who participate in it. Those who play are not simply playing, but in a more fundamental sense being played.33 However, the multitude of meaning associated with the metaphor play may provide hermeneutics with insights reaching far beyond the limitations of Gadamer’s philosophy. As a metaphor configuring the process of appropriation, play may also support an alternative approach where a critical distance does not appear as a dangerous threat, but as a necessary prerequisite for the ability to participate in the act of playing. Apprehended in this way, the critical consciousness, which this interpretation has made visible, seems to be an integral part of the competence of playing. This presumes a shift in the initial locus of the hermeneutical interest so that a dialectic between the experience of belonging and alienating distanciation becomes what Ricoeur has named “the key to the inner life of hermeneutics.”34 Thus, we are confronted with dual interpretations. On the one hand, play may be understood as a homogenous structure of total involvement where critical distance is recognized as a threat. While, on the other hand, play may also be interpreted as a more complex and multidimensional experience including a critical distance, thus embracing both involvement and disinvolvement, belonging and distanciation, a decentered as well as a centered subject. Another way of explicating the differences between Gadamer and Ricoeur is to start from Gadamer’s version of the hermeneutical circle. Inspired by his teacher Heidegger, the hermeneutical circle, according to Gadamer, indicates an ontological


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relationship where understanding is determined by the horizon of both the text and the reader. In accordance with his Romantic legacy, within an interpretation that grows out of the fusion of horizons, to understand means always to understand differently. Ricoeur, on the contrary, exploded this circle in order to open it up into a “spiral.” Drawing from the dictum to explain is to understand better 35 Ricoeur stresses the ambition to not only interpret differently, but also to interpret better. In this context, the notion “better” includes a variety of meanings associated with different concepts of truth.36 By referring to Gadamer, Ricoeur writes: “It is because absolute knowledge is impossible that the conflict of interpretations is insurmountable and inescapable. Between absolute knowledge and hermeneutics, it is necessary to choose.”37 In order to resist misunderstanding, I find it extremely important to add that from a hermeneutical perspective it is necessary not only to make a demarcation with regard to objectivism, but also with regard to relativism. During the last century, hermeneutics was transformed from being either a methodology for the human sciences, or a philosophy regulated by a life world rationality to become an open space where most of the methodological traditions of the academic world can meet and confront each other in the framework of a productive conflict of interpretations. From this point of view, Ricoeur’s critical concept of interpretation can be characterized as an effort to rejoin and reconcile the conflicting streams of science and knowledge in today’s world. According to the methodological principle governing Ricoeur’s orientation, the foundations of every methodological approach is established through being limited by this conflict of interpretations.38 By so doing, Ricoeur develops an extensive concept of interpretation that incorporates an encompassing dialectic involving both listening and suspicion, understanding and explanation, the hermeneutics of tradition as well as a critique of ideologies. According to this theoretical framework, hermeneutical mediation does not occur in spite of distanciation, but rather through distanciation. In all fairness, one has to stress that by so doing, Ricoeur is not only integrating an alien world of distanciations,

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to which hermeneutics was expected to form a radical alternative, but he is also pointing out that explanation, as the productive part of the creative process of interpretation, can be seen as the hermeneutical function—because explanation generates new and better ways to understand. This text hermeneutics is later extended by being used as a generalized model for interpretation, which it is possible to apply on both action and history. Due to this parallelization of text, action, and history, in prolongation of his use of the text model, the theory of reading texts extends into a theory of the reading of world and life.39

The Dissolution of Reality into a Multitude of Interpretations As has been shown, Ricoeur’s metamorphosis of hermeneutics provides intellectual resources that make it possible to successfully transcend the limitations of the German hermeneutics of understanding. Although Ricoeur himself never entered into serious reflections on globalization, by his profound transformation of the concept of interpretation he has nevertheless opened a door that makes further steps possible. These steps can now lead toward an extension of hermeneutics in order to embrace the wider issues of globalization. We will now turn our interest toward the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936), who may help us take more steps, by his explicit efforts to connect hermeneutics and globalization. As a distinguished expert on Nietzsche and Heidegger, and also thoroughly informed by creative readings of philosophers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, Vattimo has presented an original interpretation of the nihilistic outcome of hermeneutics. Vattimo’s works include a diverse set of references, in this philosophical realm Nietzsche’s philosophical aphorisms on the erosion of the very principle of reality and Heidegger’s critique of Western Metaphysics reside together with reflections on the meaning of the profound technological and economic transformations in


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today’s world. If we recall the problems associated with the limitations of Heidegger’s analysis of time, we may ask ourselves how Heidegger may be included in this cohesion by Vattimo. First and foremost, Vattimo focuses on a “different” Heidegger: the philosopher post Being and Time who was occupied by the critique of Metaphysics. However, a prerequisite for the involvement of Heidegger in this fascinating mixture of references is a confrontation with his view on technology. Vattimo found, when trying to cope with this philosophical issue, an unexpected ally in the contemporary processes of transformation in our societies. Heidegger’s negative approach to technology was associated with an understanding of technology according to a pure instrumental and causal logic of the mechanical tradition; while in the contemporary world, technology has brought about a radical shift in its locus from mechanical motors to an electronic age of the new information and communications technologies. Vattimo points out how internal developments within science and technology, as demonstrated by the rise of the internet as a converging network of information and communication technologies, have prepared us for hermeneutics by generating conditions in which there are no longer any stable facts, only variable interpretations. Thus, in the new techno-scientific context of globalization, technology can no longer be considered as something alien and dangerous from the perspective of hermeneutics, instead it may be considered as one of the major driving forces behind the dissolution of reality into manifold of interpretations. Briefly, the contemporary technological realm presents a new hermeneutical path. The centerless and historically contingent character of the internet and World Wide Web, where everything is constantly changing as new links are added, discloses an ever-changing network where everything seems to be recontextualized and reinterpreted. These changes have brought our societies into a territory far removed from Platonic essentialism and the search for ultimate foundations.40 Thus, as an alternative to Heidegger’s rejection of technology (as well as other phenomena related to modernity, as for example, democracy),

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Vattimo presents a history of nihilism where the strong and violent thinking of Metaphysics is overcome by the technological development itself. This also means that the strong and violent thoughts of Metaphysics seem to be denied. We should, therefore, actually embrace this technological development, because the internal logic of this scientific and technological evolution paves the way for a situation where a multitude of interpretations are being released. Vattimo’s philosophy helps us to acknowledge why the growing awareness of the interpretative character of all our perceptions of reality, and the inevitable conflicts of interpretations caused by the rise of different perspectives in today’s world, are connected to the transformation of society associated with these technological issues and not generated from the life world or discussions in academic seminars. Today, it is first and foremost, the use of computer technologies and the reception of the many voices of mass media which result in a loss of Reality and in this situation of contrasting images constantly combatting each other we seem very far away from the understanding of hermeneutics in accordance with the German tradition. Vattimo’s understanding of nihilism as a process of weakening is directed mainly against the strong and violent thinking of the Western metaphysical tradition. Nowadays, the tendency to reduce reality to a play of interpretations is not only associated with the triumph of the transformation from mechanical to electronic technologies in late modernity, but also required as a prerequisite for this process in the current postcolonial situation. The changing geopolitical situation due to the shift toward a post-Eurocentric order of power, compels Vattimo to conclude: “the end of metaphysics is unthinkable without the end of colonialism and Euro-centrism.”41 Today, we need to be concerned about the consequences for the status of Western Metaphysics due to this disappearance of a stable center and hierarchy in the world in the aftermath of decolonialization. The intersection of a multiplicity of interpretations and reconstructions, competing with one another and circulated in the


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media and new information systems without any central coordination, together with a destabilization of Western Metaphysics due to profound geopolitical transformations, is understood by Vattimo as a process of nihilism, with a weakening of strong thoughts as a result.42 In contrast to Michel Foucault, who claimed that interpretation should be recognized as violence, Vattimo presents a completely different account of the conditions of interpretation. According to Vattimo’s view and his readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, violence can be seen to emanate more from the strong thoughts of Metaphysics, that is, opinions that do not confirm themselves as interpretations, but simultaneously reduce all other interpretations to sheer mistakes. Concurrently, Vattimo’s perception of hermeneutics as pensiero debole (weak thought) presumes a recognition of itself as interpretation, thereby internalizing a self-conscious and selfcritical perspective that diminishes violence. It is in this sense that hermeneutics, together with an emerging nihilism, has dissolved Reality into a multitude of interpretations among which there is, in the end, no right interpretation.43 Among the wide spectrum of references consulted by Vattimo in order to explore his understanding of hermeneutics as weak thought, the most important sources and inspirations seem to be theological. Not only does modern hermeneutics inherent a historical link to the religions of the Book, thus requiring a certain approach to interpretation, but hermeneutics is also associated with the Christian religion mainly because of its base in the idea of the incarnation of God as kenosis, which means weakening. Inspired by this concept, secularization may be interpreted as an unmasking of the sacredness of all claims to an absolute, ultimate truth. Within this original and creative framework, not only Nietzsche’s philosophical reflections on the erosion of the very principle of reality, but also Heidegger’s critique against the strong and violent thoughts of Metaphysics, together with the interpretation of nihilism as a process of weakening, may be possible to trace back to Nietzsche’s announcement “God is dead.” According to Vattimo’s exploration of Nietzsche’s

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philosophy, that has prevailed for decades, the significance of this statement cannot be reduced to a “happy atheism,” instead, it is the inspiration from kenosis, incarnation and crucifixion which gives hermeneutics its “nihilistic drift.”44 In Vattimo’s thoughts, Nietzsches announcement of “the death of God”— together with Heidegger’s declaration of the end of Metaphysics—bears witness to human conditions where we have to live without absolute knowledge and without a secure fundament. In this acknowledgment of nihilism as the dissolution of any ultimate foundation, strong connections may be disclosed to the nonfoundationalism unfolded by another hermeneutical thinker, Richard Rorty, who by no coincidence also contributed to this discussion with a preface to one of Vattimo’s books.45 Thus, hermeneutics conceived as weak thought, requires us to live in a world where reality is constantly moderated by an unlimited number of possible perspectives and variations, where our relations to the world are mediated (and theory-laden) and Reality dissipates into numerous conflicts of interpretations. And the driving force behind this development is to be found in societal transformation processes. But, in doing so, hermeneutics eliminates the innocent, objective and distancing gaze, not in order to enable a resigned pessimism or an unproblematic optimism but to offer instruments for better navigation in the infinite Unüberblickbarkeit (Habermas) of late modernity. Finding an appropriate articulation of hermeneutics in this context requires that we cope with the contradictions emerging from metaphysical claims where hermeneutics is defined as the final true description of the state-of-art of the world. Considering the “fact” that interpretation itself is a radically historical truth, we need to remind ourselves that hermeneutics is also an interpretation, and not a metaphysical description. In many ways, this distinct entry into hermeneutics guided by Vattimo actualizes the inherent links between hermeneutics and modernity, and thus we are compelled to contend with the entire complex of issues that arose during the Enlightenment. Freedom of interpretation presumes a human capacity to act and to be capable of interpreting, in accordance with Kant’s


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philosophy of Aufklärung. It was part of Kant’s originality that he placed both the capacity of freedom and the capacity to limit this freedom, of self-limitation, in one and the same being. Of necessity, therefore, freedom of interpretation also presupposes responsibility and accountability. The strong interdependencies between hermeneutics and Enlightenment make it appropriate to state that hermeneutics is simultaneously a result of and a driving force behind modernity. In addition, modernity may be recognized as both a consequence of hermeneutics and a contributory factor to its development. To affirm, a weakening of strong thinking forces us to live in an imperfect world without final truths, but at the same time, it challenges us to take full responsibility for our own interpretations.

Globalization and the Age of Hermeneutics The whole enterprise of hermeneutics has been transformed in profound ways by the widespread contemporary experiences in a society where everything seems to be possible to interpret and where we de facto, in our daily life, interpret the world we share together very differently. Today, the most important emerging conflicting interpretations neither originate from a separate life world nor from the methodological discussions in the academic seminars. The rising number of conflicting interpretations in today’s world are much more obviously abetted by the main economical and technological transformation of the world—the globalization process. However, globalization is not only characterized by the centrifugal effects of powerful changes within the realm of economy and technology, but also by the fact that through globalization we experience profound cultural and sociopolitical transformations. In order to counterbalance the one-sided economic and technological definition of our globalizing age, I propose that we name our time an age of hermeneutics,46 thus opening a path from globalization to hermeneutics. Globalization itself is currently generating a soil for interpretations configured as an unreflected, generalized experience of

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variations and the endless plurality of available perspectives. Nevertheless, hermeneutics may hopefully provide resources to develop more active, critically reflected strategies to cope with this experience in a responsible way. Before elaborating on the prerequisites for responsible interpretations, let me mention some of the logics of globalization that have recently created a new topsoil for interpretation: First, the rapid transition from a situation marked by a shortage of data and information to our present state of information overload stimulates interpretations and calls for hermeneutical competence. Vattimo has pointed out that the late- (or post-) modern experience of a daily increase in available information makes it difficult now to conceive of a single Reality. Today, we may say that this web of information is constantly giving rise to thoughts, to use a key concept from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols, but it is also evident that information does not think for itself. This is in view of the fact that interpretation has long been associated with the ability to cope with a surplus and multitude of meanings, according to a mutual definition of the concepts symbol and interpretation. In order to contend with this web of information, we are ourselves forced to select and judge actively, and there is a further need to combine and play with the data being produced to be able to accomplish a configuration of meaningful knowledge. Second, through the digitalized and global information system, the old and stable hierarchies of meaning, identity, and truth are being broken down and dissolving the traditional canons of art, values, and knowledge. Due to globalization, all information is increasingly ordered horizontally, which simultaneously releases a multitude of conflicts of interpretations. The new cognitive landscape is increasingly a “flat” world (T. Friedman) where horizontalization means standardization, according to the new flexible order of knowledge organization. This topic is elaborated on in Chapter 3. Third, the new information geography is organized mainly according to a glocal logics determined by the axis global-local.


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The new information geography tends to separate in two dominant locus: the global Net and the local Screen, global distribution and local reception—everyone in-between seems to experience problems. Today, a networked information system in real time is rapidly transforming our concepts of time and space; this “compression of time and space” (D. Harvey) has paradigmatic consequences for how we create, store, organize, and distribute knowledge—and for the concept of knowledge itself. In this situation, universalism and contextualism can no longer be considered as mutually exclusive concepts, instead the global and the local are interrelated and connected in one and the same glocal logic. All this “friction” generated by the permanent tension between the abstract global Net and the concrete Screen in the local community of reception results in an explosion of interpretations. As a consequence, meaning and identity creation are submitted to a continuous process of decontextualization and recontextualization as new links are added or removed in the network. From these few examples it becomes evident that globalization has contributed to the rise of a knowledge—or informational (Castells)—society in which it is not the ability to collect information, but the capacity to interpret the information that needs to be recognized as a key competence. Information and interpretations are all around us, but being handled by us more consciously or less consciously. In our world today, where we constantly have to confront people who think, act, and live in ways different from our way, we are facing a web of unsorted data organized according to a glocal logic in a “flat” world. Without a capacity to interpret, we are lost.

Horizontal or Vertical Thinking? As previously mentioned, one of the predominant logics of globalization is the horizontalization of all data, information, and knowledge. Increasingly, we inhabit a “flat” cognitive world.

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As a consequence of Vattimo’s interpretation of the history of nihilism, the weakening of strong thoughts results in an erosion of hierarchies of meaning; however, this is truly an ambiguous process. On the one hand, this may be seen as the twilight of culture, and on the other, it can be described as a democratization of our access to and coping with cultural sources. While this cognitive horizontalization has prepared the way for a flexible order of knowledge organization, nevertheless, we are compelled to ask ourselves if the meaning of hermeneutics may be reduced to an integral part of a “flat” cognitive order of horizontal thinking? (The reader will find a more detailed discussion in the next chapter.) The situation is certainly not unequivocal. When people face this arbitrary horizontal relativism, and the attitude that “anything-goes” in a “flat” world of globalization, the result is frequently a conservative cry for vertical thinking.47 As an attempt to resist horizontal thinking, people ask for the return of tradition and authority, truth and reason, for vertical dimensions “beneath” and “above” the “flat” world. I understand for instance the contemporary discussions on canons, as a sign indicating the need for a vertical dimension of qualitative differentiation; an effort to raise a cognitive order where not everything is considered “the same.” This implies to both a recognition of tradition and history and an effort to erect hierarchical orders of knowledge, including everything from canon discussions to a concept of interpretation that aims to interpret not only differently, but also better. While there is no such thing as traditions and truth claims in a “flat” world, in a “best case scenario,” this may be considered as a healthy reaction; in a “worst case scenario,” it might mean having to face fundamentalism, reactionary traditionalism and a dangerous backlash. Considering this conflict between horizontal and vertical logics, what does interpretation mean? Today, in the new millennium, it is evident that the meaning of hermeneutics has changed dramatically. As we have seen, the rise in the number of conflicting


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interpretations is presently, to a large extent, abetted by the economic and technological transformation of the world itself, the globalization process. Does this mean then that hermeneutics may be considered as just another “flattener”48 of the world, in harmony with the internal logics of globalization? It was previously stated that globalization currently paves the way for hermeneutics and generates the very soil for interpretation configured as an unreflected, generalized experience of variations and the endless plurality of available perspectives. However, due to the fact that hermeneutics also offers resources to develop a more active, critically reflected strategy to cope with this experience in a responsible way, interpretation cannot be reduced to just another kind of horizontal thinking. This means that it is not enough in this present time to define hermeneutics either as a horizontal thinking, opening the gates for a multitude of interpretations, or as a radical alternative consistent with a vertical thinking that attempts to erect fixed hierarchies of truth. Certainly, hermeneutical reflection is associated with some of the inevitable effects of horizontalization, such as opening up to a variety of perspectives; however, because hermeneutics combines this with a balancing act, erecting a vertical dimension of knowledge, connected to a tradition, it can be seen to strive for truth and better interpretations. In this way, the first act of contemporary hermeneutics is to make a plurality of interpretations legitimate according to a horizontal logic. However, this does not mean that all interpretations are equal. Hermeneutics combines this horizontal thinking with a second step, which is linked to vertical thinking, due to its truth claims as well as its consciousness of the tradition. Thus, hermeneutics may be defined as a mixed mode of thinking, combining horizontal and vertical thinking and characterized by a striving for truth. Hermeneutics, defined in this way, is configured as a conflict of interpretations where validity is guaranteed by different interpretations balancing and correcting each other by means of conflicts.49 By the dialectical interplay between

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horizontal and vertical thinking, the task of interpretation may not only be acknowledged as interpreting differently (along with Gadamer), but also to interpret better (in line with Ricoeur). The paradigmatic act of reading (in the “world in front of the text”) may be considered as a paradigmatic model for a determination of how horizontal and vertical thinking is interlinked according to a hermeneutical perspective. The text means freedom of interpretation—and the same text determines the limitations of all possible (and arbitrary) interpretations. Thus the act of reading itself poses the prerequisites for a hermeneutical reflection posited in the tension between horizontal and vertical thinking, creativity and contextuality. In this dialectical relationship, the limitations of all interpretations are also determined. According to this conceptualization of hermeneutics, interpretation cannot be understood as an unlimited, free imagination. Instead, text and interpretation are mutually related and defined. The complicated challenges emerging from textual interpretation are made obvious by our experience that the texts we share may be interpreted in so many different ways. In order to acknowledge this often confusing experience, we have to realize that the text has no essence, but should be regarded as a paradoxical source of meaning production. The aporetic structure of the text is caused by the fact that texts can be described as a resource of meaning, while at the same time it is obvious that texts actually have no meaning at all as long as they are not read. Subsequently, the act of reading may be defined not only as a reduction of meaning but also as an accomplishment and a fulfillment of the implicit lacuna of meaning in the text. Concurrently, the aporetic structure of the text has its counterpart in the dialectic of reduction and fulfillment, production and reception. The text is something that is alive as well as something that is dead; surplus and lack are interconnected in the same way as the understanding of the hermeneutical imagination as a heterogeneous structure associated with the tension of play between Identity (“is”) and Difference (“is not”). We may acknowledge this model from the intrinsic dialectic between production and


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reception in the act of reading. Within this framework, the text paves the way for creative possibilities while also determining the limits of all interpretations.50 The meaning of texts may be constructed in different ways—but not all interpretations are equal. It is always possible to criticize, confront, and argue for and against particular interpretations due to the fact that there is “a limited field of possible constructions.”51 Thus the metamorphosis of hermeneutics, as an interpretation of texts, may offer profound resources to counterbalance the dominant logic of horizontalization by a mixed strategy combining horizontal and vertical thinking. The following chapter explores what kind of contribution this conceptualization may offer as a means of coping with knowledge society.

Chapter 3

Who Is the Lifelong Learner? Globalization, Lifelong Learning, and Hermeneutics

Over the last few decades, lifelong learning has enjoyed a remarkable rise as one of the most significant strategic focuses for policy makers all over the world. Lifelong learning is not only presented as a mantra and the latest Big Idea, it has also been considered as the ultimate Solution to a great number of profound problems, far beyond the educational sector. However, this frequent use of the concept, with its strong instrumental tendency, has no real qualitative equivalent in a serious intellectual discussion of the wider significance of lifelong learning. The aim of this chapter is to briefly elaborate on the notion of lifelong learning, both from a broader societal context (i.e., a spectrum of transformation processes submitted to the notion globalization) and from a wider philosophical perspective (mainly inspired by contemporary hermeneutics). In the first sections, I explore how the fact that globalization is now recognized as the most significant contemporary horizon for understanding of lifelong learning may facilitate our efforts to bring globalization and hermeneutics together in a common discussion. In the following sections, the predominant configuration of lifelong learning, according to the logics of globalization, is demonstrated, and thereafter criticized from the perspective of hermeneutics. Finally, an alternative configuration of meaning and identity formation in connection with lifelong learning is

Who Is the Lifelong Learner?

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proposed by utilizing a reformulated theory of interpretation made possible by the recent metamorphosis inside the hermeneutical tradition, for which the credit must go to Paul Ricoeur.

The Global Consensus on Lifelong Learning During the second half of the twentieth century, major shifts took place inside industrial societies. Among the different headings that have been proposed to designate the new emerging society that is replacing industrialism, and which has gradually installed a 24/7 nonstop global world economy of just-in-time trading and finance, we find such concepts as post-industrial society (Bell), post-modern society (Lyotard), risk society (Beck), and informational society (Castells). One of the most successful of the proposed notions aiming to designate our present conditions, however, has been knowledge society, a concept also closely associated with the learning society. Moreover, in recent times, knowledge has appeared as a key factor with almost utopian expectations in a great variety of fields. Within the domains of politics and business, a new concern for education and research, as well as for traditional knowledge institutions such as schools and universities, may be distinguished. Sometimes the alarm signals related to the need to value knowledge are intimidating, as illustrated by the special edition of Newsweek on “The Knowledge Revolution: Why Victory Will Go to the Smartest Nations & Companies” (2006). In our era, this turn of phrase is not at all unusual. Most governments have appropriated the rhetoric. There have been many—confusing and contradicting— attempts to characterize the emerging knowledge society; nevertheless, lifelong learning appears as an inevitable element in all conceptualizations of this society. This concept means, first, a reallocate of the pedagogical focus from the instructor to the individual learner; and secondly, that learning is now identified as a life-wide as well as a life-long process, including the whole spectrum of formal, nonformal, and informal learning from

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preschool to postretirement, reaching far beyond all basic school establishments. Thus, opportunities for learning are to be found everywhere and at all times. According to this discourse, lifelong learning may be defined as a life-encompassing process revolving around the centrality of the learner, who is now expected to be fully responsible for his/her own learning. Furthermore, today, lifelong learning is proclaimed as the new Meta-narrative, a privileged narrative identity communicated and strongly supported by the OECD, the European Union, and the United Nation, together with almost all policy makers and governments. Even though the concept has a long prehistory, the major conceptual shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning occurred as late as in the 1970s.1 The real breakthrough coming in the mid-1990s, with the OECD report Lifelong Learning for All (1996) and the proclamation of the 1996 European Year of Lifelong Learning in the European Union. Subsequently, the narrative of lifelong learning is part of a more general trend, namely a society constructed as a learning society where everything is connected to knowledge. It is apt to state that the longheld ambition to accomplish “school as society” is now being reversed by the present intention to create “society as school.”2 It is no exaggeration to state that during the last decade a global policy consensus on lifelong learning has emerged. This new approach to knowledge and learning, manifested in the discourse on lifelong learning, is focused on “all learning activity undertaken throughout life, with the aim of improving knowledge, skills, and competence, within a personal, civic, social, and/or employment-related perspective.”3 When Manuel Castells highlights the most important challenges of the emerging network society, he points out the importance of taking into consideration the induction of an informationprocessing and knowledge-generating capacity in every one of us. The result of this process will, over time, call into question the entire education system: “There is no more fundamental restructuring.”4 Considering this, it is not difficult to understand why numerous voices are asking for heavy investments in science and


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education—the same cultural infrastructures that have previously experienced a long period of chronic neglect and underinvestment. Furthermore, the universities are simultaneously being hailed as key players—and yet still asked to transform themselves into something else. In fact, universities are facing one of their most critical periods, when compelled to cope with the serious challenges raised by knowledge society. In order to survive, universities will need to reinvent themselves.5

Lifelong Learning and Globalization: Flexibility As stated earlier, lifelong learning is today generally expected to be the Big Solution—but what kind of problem is it supposed to solve? Lifelong learning has also been indicated as the predominant narrative for identity formation—but where does this new life narrative come from? What has caused its emergence now and why is lifelong learning made to sound like a free offer— when in reality we are all forced to reconfigure our lives according to its logic? To answer this kind of questions, we are obliged to go far beyond the traditional arenas of education. In our current situation, we need to remind ourselves that originally lifelong learning was presented as a multidimensional concept stressing political, social, personal, as well as cultural and economic purposes alike. This is also the reason why lifelong learning has often been acknowledged as an integral part of, for example, a strong democratic commitment concerning the importance of equal opportunities. However, today, it is no embellishment to state that the driving force behind the massive implementation of the discourse on lifelong learning is no longer active citizenship, social inclusion, or personal fulfillment, as proclaimed in the official rhetoric. The focus now is almost entirely work related; lifelong learning is primarily motivated by the breathtaking pace of the current economic and social change. Since the turn of the millennium, lifelong learning has frankly come to be the most important strategy—the Solution—to cope with the

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challenges from the globalization process by supporting a rapid transition to a knowledge-based economy. After the movement started within the European Union, lifelong learning also rapidly became a strategy adaptable by other regions in the world. In the light of these strategic perspectives, the goal of lifelong learning is, presently, economic-related, having changed its center of gravity from educational to industrial departments in order to promote skills and competences, general capabilities, and specific performance in the work place as a source of competitive advantage in the hypercompetitive world of globalization. However, even though the global consensus on lifelong learning has been criticized,6 lifelong learning can be identified as a core element in the strategy set out by the Lisbon European Council in March 2000 intending to make Europe, over the following 10 years, “the most competitive and dynamic knowledgebased economy in the world.”7 The chances of reaching this goal were probably unrealistic from the very beginning; nevertheless, the agenda was that the implementation of lifelong learning would be a tool enabling Europeans to cope with the hypercompetition brought about by globalization. In order to cope with the scale of current economic change due to globalization and the rapid transition to a knowledgebased society, together with the demographical pressures resulting from an ageing population, lifelong learning has come to be considered as a key element in most strategies to make the labor force more flexible, and for the management of labor shortages and competence gaps at any point in the economic cycle. Thus, the expectations associated with lifelong learning are focused on its capacity to deal with uncertainty about the future, and to strengthen the capacity of the labor markets while permitting employers and individuals to adjust to change.8

The New Life Narrative In the new era of globalization, the concept of lifelong learning is being reconfigured according to the virtues of flexibility and


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presented as an integral part of the race for competitive advantages and the constant “creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter) in a successful economic development. Human life, reconfigured according to the new life narrative of lifelong learning, is constituted as a process of constant learning. Every person is expected to reconfigure his or her life in accordance with this narrative identity. According to the virtue of this new predominant life narrative, employability and adaptability stand out as corner stones in a new world order of flexibility where people are supposed to embrace change, insecurity, and risk. This new narrative identity stands in brute contrast to the traditional life narrative emanating from the industrial era and configured by the irreversible, linear sequence: education— working life—retirement. The fundamental prerequisite for this life narrative, and for industrialism itself, was the formation of a clear, watertight distinction between working and nonworking (with a special focus on the educational part of nonworking). When this distinction started to be eroded in the postindustrial era, it also meant that education and learning migrated into the entire lifespan.9 Nevertheless, lifelong learning does not only mean life-encompassing learning, it also means that learning involves and includes everyone. Several factors brought about this change, although the most important seems to be an increase of knowledge intense labor, which together with a new infrastructure of communication, considerably supported by a new information technology, reorganizing time and space in a ground breaking way. As a consequence, the distinction between private life and professional life has tended to diminish.10 From this point of view, globalization generates a micro-social challenge linked to the configuration of life narratives. Peter Alheit talks about a “biographicalization” of the social associated with an erosion of traditional life worlds, a breakdown of classical cohesions and the disappearance of a “‘normal’ life course script.” He also distinguishes three new, highly interesting biographical coping patterns—the pattern of biographical “networking,” “patchworking,” and “designing”—and the contradictory learning processes evolving from the tension between

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this “biographicalization” of the social and a general “postmodernization” of society.11 Anthony Giddens has stated that, while in earlier times we lived in a situation where people feared the Orwellian nightmare of a society with too much stability and predictability, we have now entered into a risk-society where everything seems to be out of control—a runaway world, due to the rapid change in a society embracing entrepreneurial risk.12 In this context, individuals are compelled to incorporate a life strategy making it possible to adapt to a situation of constant change, which presupposes what Andreas Fejes calls “a general educableness.” The goal for the individuals can be summarized as the need “to become autonomous, self-regulated actors responsible for their own futures.”13 Fejes speaks of “an autonomous and enterprising self,” “an autonomous, self-choosing and self-regulated self who should take responsibility for his/her own life by becoming a lifelong learner.” The imperative of this pedagogy of the self, where everyone should desire participation in this new life narrative can be formulated as such: “you are a learner, whose learning is never complete.”14 This reconfiguration of a new private self “capable of bearing the burdens of liberty” in societies governed by an advanced liberal rule has been analyzed by Nikolas Rose, who has obviously been an important inspiration to the analysis previously presented. The key concepts for the construction of this required new self may be identified as identity, choice, autonomy, and selffulfillment, and regulated by techniques of self-inspection and self-examination, within “a twin process of automatization plus responsibilization.”15 Within this framework, the entrepreneur stands out as the main role model for a life narrative in which the fundamental distinctions between private and public, education and work, have been eroded: “the individual is not to be emancipated from work . . . but to be fulfilled in work, now construed as an activity through which we produce, discover, and experience ourselves.”16 This is the broader societal background to the attempts to create “the flexible, employable European citizen.”17 However, the


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fact that the discourse on lifelong learning is mainly configured according to the virtues of flexibility, with the aim of making people employable, indicates that it is a narrative of interruption and destabilization for human beings forced to adapt constantly to the ever-new claims from the surrounding context. Richard Sennett has depicted this flexible man—the “Davos-man” à la Bill Gates—as someone who affirms fragmentalization, who has cut all links to the past so that he now appears unbound by sustainable efforts. He concludes, that this attitude means that moral values are being lost.18 This description may seem somewhat puzzling. Most people imagine lifelong learning as a free offer, as an invitation to a process of cultivation. However, the reality seems to be the contrary. The demand for flexibility is inevitable for those who still want to be employable in this new project-organized world order, mainly motivated by the race for global competitiveness. Considering all this, lifelong learning hardly appears as a free offer, an invitation to cultivate ourselves. Today, we are all forced to live and reconfigure our lives according to the logics of this narrative identity. This means that with the demise of organized capitalism, with its flexible mood of knowledge organization and unlimited ability for variations, we are all condemned to live in a constant process of change, to be flexible and adaptive. In an age of globalization, lifelong learning is mainly an integral part of the contemporary strategies that are being used for the purpose of coping with the global race for competitive advantages.

The New Spirit of Capitalism: Between Adaptation and Innovation In their work The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999/2005), Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello have detected a fundamental tension between, on the one hand, the development of capitalism itself and, on the other, the changing “spirit of capitalism” over time. From their point of view, clearly influenced by Max Weber,

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economy cannot be recognized as an autonomous sphere. This means that capitalism cannot survive by itself alone, it needs a “spirit”—or a “critique”—that can justify engagement in capitalism. In order to justify itself, and because it cannot find sufficient resources within itself, “capitalism therefore has to draw upon resources external to it.”19 In the investigation of the “spirit of capitalism” presented by Boltanski and Chiappello, substantial contributions can be found which may assist in a better understanding of the logic behind the new life narrative manifested in lifelong learning. Just as capitalism has a constant tendency to transform itself, people are obliged to do the same. People, in reality required to reconfigure their lives in accordance with this “new spirit of capitalism,” are being forced into a state of constant transformation and change—due to external pressures. In other words, lifelong learning appears as a constituent part of the “new spirit of capitalism” where “[t]he development of oneself and one’s employability . . . is the long-term personal project underlying all the others.”20 In order to manage the rapid changes and new insecurity in a project-organized world of networks, the contemporary flexible man has to become adaptable. In this context, adaptability can be pointed out as “a basic requirement for circulating in networks.”21 Boltanski and Chiappello, moreover, particularly point out the capacity of managing transitions between different projects. Personal fulfillment through a multitude of projects (in order to extend networks and increase employability) presupposes a new kind of competence to handle the discontinuous aspect of flexibility. In order to handle the transient and temporary character of projects and networks, it is necessary not only to be able to connect, but equally to disconnect. Our new flexible man can be said to be someone who “must be adaptable to fully engaging in a project, while remaining sufficiently available to integrate himself into a different project.”22 This is the mixed project competence required to deliver flexibility: to be able to connect and disconnect, to engage and to extricate, to release and free oneself in order to engage in a new relationship and


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a fresh project within superior networks. The dark, reverse side of the same logic is the exclusion of those who cannot be engaged—and those who prove to be incapable of disconnecting in order to change projects.23 In other words, we are challenged to cope with the balance between continuity and discontinuity in a nondestructive way. This challenge has been articulated by the authors of The New Spirit of Capitalism as striking a balance between “a self-constancy that always threatens to turn into inflexibility, and continual adaptation to the demand of the situation at the risk of total dissolution into the fabric of transient links.”24 We may identify a fundamental contradiction entrenched in the very heart of the knowledge agenda of our time, by the inherent opposition between two very different ideals: the call for adaptation respective innovation. Although in an age of globalization, adaptability is prerequisite for survival, it is, nevertheless, insufficient to realize a sustainable capacity for innovation. Nowotny et al., argue that the idea of innovation can be seen as the new religion of the late-modern risk-society where we are all supposed to become creative artists. This means that knowledge handled in a creative and nonreproductive way is of strategic importance: “To become a serious player in this game, it is not sufficient to be a consumer; one must also become a producer—a producer of knowledge.”25 However, the new class divide in the knowledge society is manifested as a cleavage between those creative individuals producing new knowledge and those who just reproduce and administrate already existing “old” knowledge (the “knowledge proletarians” of the postindustrial society). In this situation, it is comparatively easy to distinguish the emerging privileged group of professionals—the “creative class”—making successful careers by their capacity to combine this creative competence with the ability to connect it to successful value creating network constellations.26 There seems to exist an unresolved contradiction between the two opposed knowledge agendas shaping the two distinct sides of lifelong learning. The mostly unnoticed tension between

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adaptation and innovation actually seem to be inscribed in a dualistic order that today manifests itself in the inherent tension between the discourses on employability respective entrepreneurship. The inherent contradictions in these messages, generated by these two faces of the flexible order of knowledge organization, are being confused by policy makers, and this tends to create the frustration and disorientation in today’s knowledge society. But flexibility—both in its “passive” version allied to adaptation, and in its “proactive” version linked to the virtue of promoting innovation and creativity—is insufficient as a concept by which to reconfigure personal identity and self cultivation (Bildung). Flexibility presupposes a one-dimensional man without a memory and an intended future, unable to be accountable (“backwards”) or responsible (“forwards”). By rendering people incapable of acting and interpreting, they become sheer victims of exterior destabilizations and determinations. This means that the contemporary strategy of creating a dynamic Europe with the purpose of strengthening its global competitiveness has created an anthropological deficit. In order to cope with this situation, let us turn to hermeneutics.

Who Is the Lifelong Learner? The predominant virtue of flexibility in a society characterized by the transformative logic of globalization, tends today to go together with a vague perception of hermeneutics that reduces interpretation to horizontal thinking in accordance with a “flat” world order (T. Friedman) coined by a super-market-culture (G. Vattimo). The call for vertical thinking in order to stabilize identities and raise serious questions of truth, authority, tradition, and hierarchies of meaning, may initiate a dialog on canons and quality, but nowadays this cry for vertical thinking is at risk of being transformed into a cultural backlash, directed against both the globalization process and the open society itself. At worst, fundamentalism is cultivated by this cultural backlash.


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If we allow these two tendencies to proceed without any qualms, we are in danger of losing human values. Flexibility is necessary, both for economic reasons and to some extent as a prerequisite to be able to interact with people in social networks. But, flexibility is not enough. The necessity of constant change and interruption, due to the logic of flexibility and external pressure, undermines the prerequisites for cohesion in individual life stories. A reconfiguration of human life according to the narrative of lifelong learning presumes flexible human beings—and if it persists, an anthropoclasm. Hermeneutics expounds a third way beyond arbitrary relativism (as a result of horizontal thinking) and objectivistic fundamentalism as well as scientific foundationalism (as a result of vertical thinking), and our great challenge, as explorers on this “flat earth” is not to add hermeneutics as just another “flattener,” but to exploit it to its full potential as a resource for counterbalancing the predominant logic of flexibility by developing reflexivity at a time of flexibility. However, in order to be able to strengthen the cultural resources for cultivating meaning and identity within the framework of lifelong learning, hermeneutics needs to shift its focus and extend its interest in accordance with the perspectives mentioned previously. One of the fundamental problems of using flexibility as a role model for configuring lifelong learning is its anthropological deficit. This becomes obvious when altering the focal point in the question of what lifelong learning is to the question of who the lifelong learner is. Within the framework of a flexible mode of knowledge organization, it seems actually impossible to pose any questions concerning a “who?” In their work The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello distinguish a fundamental tension between what they recognize as two incompatible entities: “being adaptable” and “being someone.” Confronted with the question who, the flexible person of the new era is disclosed as a fundamental contradiction between adaptation and authenticity. Systems may be flexible, but human beings are not—not without losing human value and authenticity. But, people may be reflective. It is accepted that

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in order to make people capable of joining projects and able to circulate in networks, flexibility is required as a competence, together with a facility for adaptability. However, this very flexibility undermines the need to be someone, making it difficult to perceive a self-endowed person with specificity and presupposing a personality with a certain permanency in time.27 From the perspective of Boltanski and Chiapello, it is certainly relevant to ask if it is ever possible to combine “being someone” and “being flexible.” Personally, I would prefer a more dialectical solution. First and foremost, it is important to emphasize that the two role models for identity formation—flexibility and reflexivity— are not symmetric. In order to elaborate a dialectical mode of thinking—comparable with the defining act of understanding reflexivity from the dialectic of horizontal and vertical thinking, and not as sheer vertical thinking, which simply opposes horizontalization—we turn to the philosophical anthropology in Ricoeur’s later works. When Ricoeur, in the opening part of Oneself as Another (1990/1992), distinguishes between sameness (idem) and selfhood (ipse), and makes a plea for selfhood as the privileged starting point for a reflection on personal identity, he correspondingly stresses the importance of mediation: the necessity for selfhood (ipse) to make a detour through sameness (idem) and otherness in order to determine “oneself as another.” In this mode of thinking, analysis is not eliminated, but integrated as a part of the reflection. In an equivalent way, the radical reflective character of his conception of personal identity is elaborated by a variation of pronouns identifying oneself as being me, you, he/she/it in the framework of a universalization of the self. As an alternative to both a stable, unchangeable identity and a liquid, dissolved identity, reflexivity as a model opens a dynamic perspective of variations anchored in an existential self (“being someone”) mediated by sameness and otherness. From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, flexibility, as an endless creative variation or a capacity to “be adaptable,” can be identified as an abstract mode of thinking taking place


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nowhere—and everywhere. Reflexivity, on the contrary, presupposing that “being someone,” is a concrete reflection of limited variations always starting from an existential self (ipse) as someone (as distinct from “something”) situated now and here (as distinct from “nowhere”). Reflexivity presumes an understanding of the human being as someone capable of speaking, acting, narrating, and with the capacity of being both accountable and responsible, as well as a capacity for both memory and hope.28 In his last major work, Ricoeur summarizes this “reflexive philosophy” as both “a phenomenology of the capable human being” and “a hermeneutics of selfhood,” inspired by neo-Aristotelian as well as post-Kantian and post-Hegelian influences.29 As already mentioned, the fundamental dialectical character of this selfhood is manifested by the dialectical relationships between sameness and selfhood (ipseity), identity and otherness. The determinations, which were outlined 10 years earlier, relate selfhood to both sameness and otherness30—being able to verbalize, making things happen, being able to narrate oneself, and to be responsible— culminating in a theory of memory and promises, profoundly inspired by Hannah Arendt. Ricoeur summarizes: “In memory and promises, the problematic of self-recognition reaches two high points simultaneously. The one is turned toward the past, the other toward the future. But they need to be considered together within the living present of self-recognition.”31 A narrative identity reconfigured as lifelong learning, according to the principles of flexibility, depicts a human being as someone who has cut all links with the past. In contrast, the hermeneutically informed understanding of reflexivity is based on a dynamic perception of the human being as someone capable of being accountable for his/her actions and interpretations. The prerequisites for this capable human being can also be interpreted in accordance with Ulrich Beck’s definition of reflexivity, which stresses the importance of self-confrontation, that is, to be confronted with the effects of one’s owns actions.32 This indicates a human being with a memory, capable of an

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active and responsible relationship toward the past, and perspectives alien to the flexible order of knowledge organizing. Flexible man is also unable to bind his or her actions in accordance with promises directed toward the future. According to Ricoeur, the ability to make promises is the essence of that which forms the dynamics of his philosophical anthropology, it is said to be “the paradigm of an ipseity irreducible to sameness”33 making it possible to conceptualize the continuity of the self in a dynamic way. Nevertheless, promises also open up an opportunity to conceptualize an identity stabilized by reliability instead of security. Homo capax as someone (a “who”) capable of memory as well as an ability to promise emerges as a role model for a narrative identity of lifelong learning configured as reflexivity in a time of flexibility. However, this presumes an affirmation of a much more fragile, instable, incomplete, and imperfect concept of the self, which we may also retrace back to the earlier works of Ricoeur.34

Contributions from Hermeneutics: Flexibility or Reflexivity? This chapter has explored some contributions that can be made by hermeneutics toward a better understanding of the concept of lifelong learning in relation to the perspective of globalization. Due to its own metamorphosis, at this point in time, hermeneutics offers profound resources to counterbalance the dominant logic of flexibility by proposing reflexivity as an alternative model closely associated with self cultivation (Bildung). However, in order to cope with the challenges associated with lifelong learning today, we need to both consider a wider societal perspective (globalization) and draw from philosophical resources (hermeneutics), as discussed previously. In this chapter, an alternative conception of the new predominant life narrative has been outlined. In contrast to a configuration of lifelong learning, according to the virtues of flexibility,


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adaptation, and horizontal knowledge, a hermeneutically informed model of reflexivity is presented as a more complex strategy constituted by the dialectic between horizontal and vertical knowledge, cosmic and lived time, geometrical and lived place. This hermeneutical perspective makes a plurality of interpretations legitimate, but avoids arbitrary thinking by truth claims that still strive to establish preliminary hierarchies of vertical knowledge. Although this chapter, first and foremost, aims to expose a new arena for research, it is nevertheless possible to draw some preliminary conclusions: First, it is stated that globalization and lifelong learning are interlinked and that they should be acknowledged together as two sides of one and the same transformation process. While we need more research concerning the links and dynamics of this relationship, it is also necessary to build stronger future links between two distinct and seldom related areas of interest: studies and research in education and business studies. There is, for example, an urgent need to establish proper connections between educational management and knowledge management, two separate discourses hardly ever related today. Second, we have to recognize that the horizon of hermeneutics has changed dramatically and that this has profound consequences for the kind of contributions we may expect from this theoretical tradition. The traditional locus of hermeneutics, rooted in the methodological seminars among the human sciences, is insufficient and fails to notice the context where the challenges—and opportunities—of interpretation seem to be most urgent and promising. Today, hermeneutics has to widen its perspectives toward the social sciences and the economic and technological domains of our societies. Hermeneutics may also provide a contribution in order to explicate and further explore the cultural dimension of globalization, which have been vastly underestimated. Third, two main hermeneutical contributions are identified in association with the concept of interpretation (i.e., the knowledge

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theory of our time) being the initial one, which is constituted by a dialectic of horizontal and vertical thinking. The subsequent is a concept of identity connected to a more reflected philosophical anthropology in order to cope with the anthropological deficit of the contemporary discourse on lifelong learning. Moreover, this anthropological deficit is also present within the philosophical tradition that seems to suit extremely well an analysis of the emerging knowledge society, that is, post-structuralism. Even though post-structuralism has delivered impressive critical analysis of the knowledge society, we may remind ourselves about the anthropological deficit in this tradition, which can mainly be explained as a legacy emanating from structuralism. Fourth, there are ultimately no theoretical solutions to the challenges of hermeneutics; the solutions are compelled to include the practical world. Ricoeur, as well as Heidegger and Gadamer, has taught us that hermeneutics is mainly a practical philosophy. Yet again, the quote from Gadamer is applicable: “Verstehen ist schon Anwenden.”35 It is this practical approach that also gives us reasons for hope, rather than being pessimistic or fearful. In reality, we are already managing the challenges of flexibility by a series of paradigmatic institutions of interpretation where responsible interpretations are being executed: historiography, juridical processes, and democratic institutions. However, the question of the subject has also to be conceived in association with an understanding of the human being as homo capax, a capable human being within the dialectic between to construct and to be constructed. The two predominant knowledge paradigms that may be distinguished today—competence (associated with lifelong learning as the new life script) and evidence (manifested in the new focus on measurement, efficiency, accounting, and the “magic” of numbers)—seem to be conveyed in a dualistic order where practice and theory are separated in a dangerous dichotomy. Hermeneutics, as a practical philosophy resisting any arbitrary thinking, may function as a mediator in relation to this dichotomy. Furthermore, hermeneutics may contribute to the new emerging


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paradigm of innovation by a determination of creativity with a “human face”—beyond both the Romantic praise for creativity and the administrational attempts of an emerging creative industry. Finally, today in the era of flexible knowledge organization, we are also in urgent need of reinventing the institutions for the cultivation of ourselves, for Bildung. In this situation, hermeneutics makes available intellectual resources for rethinking lifelong learning by developing an understanding of Bildung as reflexivity in a time of flexibility, contextual truthfulness in a time of arbitrary relativism, and democratic normativity in a time of liberal pluralism.

Chapter 4

Memory Politics Philosophical Reflections on Memory and Forgetting in Finland and Sweden

Today, heavy burdens have been placed on people by the current transformation of the infrastructure of our societies and the circulation of commodities, services, as well as fragments of information, values and beliefs, due to techno-scientific and economical globalization. In addition to the “race towards the bottom” due to hypercompetition, the burden is most evident when people try to cope with their own and others identity. The rapid and turbulent globalization process often reinforces the need to maintain a native place, a homeland, and an individual identity—and this is difficult in a situation where collective identities also seem to be in constant flux due to the trans-national conditions determining the agenda for national memories. Today, the cultural (and political) dimensions of the globalization process are underestimated, as are the prerequisites to understanding the current technological and economical transformation of our world. Considering this situation, it is to be expected that this new world order of globalization would inevitably generate a cry for history and roots, thus tending to engender “memory wars.” Globalization needs to discover itself as an age of hermeneutics. Due to this new concern for identity and memory politics, culture and heritage have returned to the agenda, articulating questions about meaning and identity as counterparts to growth and competitiveness.

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The release of a multitude of interpretation in today’s world does not mean that people, convictions, identities, and traditions automatically coexist in a peaceful way. Moreover, from the perspective of political and religious fanatics and their claim for absolute truth, democracy often seems too relativistic. In a globalizing world, where we are all regularly conversant with others, who think differently and live differently from ourselves, Anthony Giddens has stated that: “[t]he battleground of the twenty-first century will put fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance.”1 The loudly articulated call for vertical thinking in our time does not merely refer to questions concerning truth and authority; these needs are always connected to history and tradition. However, Tradition always means traditions, History always means histories and Memory always includes forgetting. As we are at risk of facing more violence in our societies because different perspectives and worldviews are confronting each other in nonreconciled ways, we need to consider—and reconsider— memory, history, and forgetting. Ricoeur has developed a model for understanding how critically informed, historically rooted convictions can coexist. Starting from the paradigmatic act of writing history, he elaborates on a concept of testimony inspired by hermeneutics. The foundational act of a witness is associated with the statement “I was there!” This self-designation of the testifying subject is, according to Ricoeur, combined with a second step by which the witness also asks to be believed: “Believe me!” However, there are many different voices asking to be believed, so if we stop with these two first steps, we will find ourselves in a terrible situation with conflicting truth claims, fighting, and trying to eradicate each other. Therefore, we also need to convince the witness of the necessity of adding something indicating an exchange and setting up a dialogical situation for the testimony. In order to include a critical—and self-critical—perspective, the witness must also be persuaded to say: “If you don’t believe me, ask someone else!”2 By so doing, he/she simultaneously breaks down any monolithic thinking and avoids sheer arbitrary thinking in

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a true spirit of intellectual hospitality. However, this presumes a thorough hermeneutical consciousness. To prevent us from being trapped in a situation where conflicting interpretations are absolutely in combat with each other, and where there is a potential risk of an implacable war of memories and traditions, we need to strengthen the awareness of the interpretative character of our own relationship with the past. Today, it seems to me, that one major challenge is to transform the notion of a threatening clash of civilizations (S. Huntington) into a conflict of interpretations (P. Ricoeur), which means a peaceful model for conflict resolutions. In this situation, a particular area of interest, as well as source of inspiration, is our relationship with our past, and thus the quest for identity in a globalizing world of constant change. The aim of this chapter is to reflect briefly on what manner of contribution a philosophy of memory may provide in association with the anniversary in 2009, the bicentennial of the historic events, which resulted in the separation of Sweden and Finland. By making use of the concept of a “just allotment of memory,” inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s millennium book Memory, History, Forgetting (2000/2004), I intend to raise challenging questions concerning the difficulties of dealing with the past and the prerequisites for the execution of memory in this specific historical context consistent with two closely related countries in Northern Europe. I am not writing as an expert, but from the perspective of a well-placed observer—or let me say, a well-placed philosopher.

One City, Two Languages, Three Countries Let me start from a personal perspective. I carry out my daily life commuting between Sweden and Finland, two countries that were integral parts of one and the same kingdom two centuries ago. On my frequent journeys over the Gulf of Bothnia, I am constantly confronted with comparisons and traces of the past

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originating from a geography of change. You can hardly overestimate the importance of this historical cohesion. As a comparison, consider the small town about 100 kilometers north of Gothenburg on the Swedish West coast where I grew up, Lysekil; when I was born it had only been a part of Sweden for 300 years—Finland and Sweden were united for more than 600 years. Although Finland and Sweden are today two distinct countries, traces from an earlier historical geography can be found everywhere. It is, for instance, only possible to account for the strange circumstance that the eastern part of Sweden is called Westrobothnia and the western part of Finland Ostrobothnia, if you take into consideration that these provinces were, in the past, strongly interrelated in the framework of a historical state construction clustered around the Gulf of Bothnia. I also work in a city that has two different names: Åbo in Swedish and Turku in Finnish. There is no innocent way to name the city; both the names are associated with different historical configurations, divergent memory politics, and contrasting identity constructions. Two centuries ago, this city was an important part of the mainland of the Swedish Kingdom. One century ago, Åbo/Turku was a part of the Russian Empire, which after only a few years in power moved the capital to Helsinki, in those days only “a tiny, forlorn, and pathetic fisherman’s village” to quote one of Finland’s major authors, Kjell Westö.3 Today, Åbo/Turku is situated in Finland, a nation that has yet to celebrate its first centennial. Åbo Akademi is in fact the third oldest Swedish University—that Uppsala is the oldest is well known, but not that the second is to be found in Dorpat/Tartu, in Estonia.4 Åbo/Turku is part of Europe, a continent configured by a multitude of cultural identities amplified by an intricate geography of change. The history of Finland, as a frontier land situated on the border between east and west, has been determined by the old European dilemma of establishing a clear border for Europe in the east. Without this border, Europe risks being reduced to what Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as just an Asian

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peninsula. This also generates questions as to whether Finland should be recognized as the most Western country of Eastern Europe, or the most Eastern country of Western Europe. East or west? It all depends on the point of view being used. The cartographical paradox is inescapable: in order to present a true picture, a correct map has to tell white lies—and on this map, “naming is the dematerialized point into which all power is condensed.”5 As a result of the Finnish (“Russo-Swedish”) War (1808–1809), Finland was conquered by Russia and thus separated from Sweden. The reorganization of the geography of the Nordic countries was only a fragment in the larger reconstruction of Europe in connection with the Napoleonic wars in general, and with the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and Alexander in particular. When Russia, in the early eighteenth century, moved its capital to St. Petersburg, the gravity of the empire shifted heavily toward the west and this proximity to its eastern border prevented Sweden-Finland from any future with a sense of security. Consequently, Finland’s destiny was sealed by a combination of Sweden’s lack of any real ambition to protect its eastern territories and the loss of its position as a major power player in the region. Finland’s situation was made hopeless not only by the refusal to consider its defense as an end in itself, but also by the added dilemma of whether to erect defense establishments, such as Sveaborg (“The Castle of Sweden”), knowing that the Russians might subsequently regard a stronger defense as a hostile act. In addition, an independence movement under Göran Magnus Sprengtporten had started to nurture geopolitically motivated plans for the separation of Finland from Sweden. The “events” of 1809, which mark the divorce of the two countries around the Gulf of Bothnia, made Finland a Grand Duchy inside the Russian Empire and meant that Sweden lost one third of its size and one quarter of its inhabitants. Cohesions, which had been strong for more than half a millennium, were abruptly severed. Due to these changes, Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, which since medieval times had been located in the center of

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the Empire, was suddenly transformed into a fragile frontier city, much too close to the border of its most dangerous enemy to be safe. As a Grand Duchy, the administration of Finland continued to be conducted in Swedish, but behind the shelter of a Swedishspeaking administration, a Finnish nation grew strong during the nineteenth century. A preexistent state administration was thus gradually filled culturally and politically by a nation. This nation building was intensified, firstly by the fact that Tsarina Elizabeth cultivated friendly feelings among the Finns and promised to offer them independence (“under the protection of Russia”), and secondly, a little later, as a defense force against intensified Russification. One century later, despite the warnings of Sweden and other countries, Finland took the opportunity to declare independence at the same moment as the October Revolution in Russia. However, simultaneous with the acceptance by the new regime in St. Petersburg of this independence was Lenin’s request to the red sympathizers in Finland to commence revolutionary action. Thus, independence was followed by civil war, a terrible experiences of which the nation has never been fully reconciled. As a country, Finland would perhaps not have been united at all without the necessity two decades later of defending its existence against its powerful neighbor in the East during the Winter War and the Continuation War. Finland, post–World War II, under the “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance,” was compelled to manage a balancing act in order to survive—a situation invented by the necessity to name its most dangerous and fearful enemy its closest ally and friend. In the aftermath of communism, after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union imploded, Finland joined the European Union and thus once more joined forces with Sweden, but this time via a detour to Brussels. Just as Finland may not properly be understood without taking Sweden into consideration, the Swedish identity is impossible to acknowledge without Finland. The loss of Finland in 1809

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generated a traumatic identity crises in Sweden, which determined the general development of the country during the nineteenth century and also influenced the next century. Until then, Sweden had never before been Sweden without Finland. The new regent Bernadotte’s attempt to compensate Mini-Sweden by replacing Finland with Norway (1812–1905), could not ameliorate this substantial loss. However, if the nineteenth century forced the country to reinvent itself, the twentieth century perhaps made the country more fortunate in having been separated from its dangerous eastern neighbor by flanking it with a new country. The bad conscience for having almost neglected Finland, not only during the Finnish War, but during the entire previous century, was compiled by having acted cowardly during World War II. This was reinforced by Sweden’s close cooperation with Germany (Sweden had 90 percent of its foreign trade with one of the most brutal dictatorships in history, and allowed more than two million German soldiers to pass through its territory into a neighboring country, Norway, while also carrying 45,000 tons of iron ore every day to the German war industry), which probably saved the country from being involved in the war. After World War II, the country was able to gain all the industrial and economical advantages of not having been involved and developed a strong profile of internationalism, both in politics and as expressed by the numerous multinational corporations with their home base in the country. In 2009, two centuries after the separation, Finland and Sweden are facing the challenges of how to cope with their common historical past. How may this anniversary be commemorated? Should we remember and celebrate or instead regret, forget, and mourn the war which resulted in the separation of Sweden and Finland? What does 2009 mean? What is there to celebrate? Moreover, what kind of contribution may these two countries expect from science, historiography, and philosophy? We know, for certain, from the experiences of other countries that this is a complicated situation. The celebrations of anniversaries in USA (1976), in France (1989) and later in Australia,

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New Zealand, Israel, and so on, tell us to acknowledge that history constantly works as a source of heated controversies and violent conflicts. Once more, we are facing the conflicting expectations of a national leadership, eager to use an anniversary to strengthen identity. However, at the same time all the controversies are growing, such as those originating from historians claiming the rights of victims from the dark side of history, and accusations against acts committed by the people in power. In order to understand why anniversaries only seldom provide a stable founding principle for societies, and why instead, we may expect destabilizing affects in our societies due to effectuation of past events, we need to consider how memory actually works.

Memory Politics When, in one of his last major works, Ricoeur outlined a profound theory of the “just allotment of memory,” the setting for the 87-year-old author was an intense frustration with the state of affairs concerning how we cope with memories: “I continue to be troubled by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory—and of forgetting.”6 To politicians and other public representatives today, it might seem tempting to address historians and philosophers by asking for an uncomplicated history of facts, a pure scientific solution, which may well function as a safeguard against controversies by establishing a wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. However, in Ricoeur’s book published on the cusp of the Millennium, the philosopher stresses the importance of resisting “the hubris of total reflection.”7 The fact is that a memory without any kind of forgetting would not be a human memory at all. What makes this even worse is that so much research on memory has been kidnapped by the neurosciences and the metaphoric logic of computers. Most of us have received a message from the printer with the following content: “This job requires more memory than is available

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in this printer . . .”8 It is particularly confusing that the capacity of information technology to store information has come to be known as memory, together with the excessive desire “not to forget anything,” which flourishes in contexts associated with the Holocaust and other traumatic memories. These uses of metaphor all support the production of “the specter of a memory that would never forget anything.”9 In contrast to this concept, which understands memory as an absolute opposition to forgetting, human forgetting must be understood as an integral part of memory itself. Hence, a human perception of memory has to be developed in the absence of absolute knowledge—without falling into sheer arbitrary thinking, opening the gates for political manipulations. The overall perspective in Ricoeur’s book is formed by the conviction that the final referent of memory—in contrast to imagination, as a present representation of an absent thing (Plato)—is the past, in accordance with Aristotle’s dictum “All memory is of the past.” Consequently, the truth claim connected to the historical past guides Ricoeur’s reflection. Nonetheless, as already indicated by the title of this book, the epistemology of history is at this point “sandwiched” between, on the one hand, a phenomenology of memory, and on the other, the horizon of forgetting, configured by a hermeneutics of the historical conditions. To many historians, both memory and forgetting may be recognized as iniquitous company and a perilous setting for historiography. To Ricoeur, this constellation seems to be of paradigmatic importance for our relationship with the past, because it indicates that history cannot be grounded on absolute foundations. History must be determined by the horizon of true human conditions, which means that a close relationship between the effort to recall and to forget must be established.10 The first part of Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, containing a “sketch of a phenomenology of memory,” is determined by the defense of the reliability of memory in contrast to imagination. For this reason, Ricoeur elucidates that the history of memory has to be ascertained from Aristotle, and not Plato; because,

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while the former presents the first analytical description of a memory, recalling a past, the latter only deals with imagination, that is, present representations of absent things. Testimony forms this fragile transitional structure between memory and history; nevertheless, history acknowledges the evident transition from the oral culture of memory to the written culture of documentation. Distinct from the phenomenology of memory, the historian has to enter into the archives and confront something that is written, read, and consulted. However, history never starts in the archive; it is founded on human memories. History can be defined as an extended memory makes a substantial contribution to memory by “the capacity of historiography to enlarge, correct, and criticize memory.”11 Nonetheless, in a certain sense, history will always be controversial. This is so because first, history is of strategic importance for the configuration of our identities and second, because history is never easy to write, and is always a result of selection (almost everything has to be excluded and forgotten) and combination (the selected items have to be ordered according to a kind of narrative logic). Just as interpretation, according to Ricoeur, may be defined as a feature of the search for truth in the epistemology of history that traverses all three levels (documentation, understanding/ explanation, representation), the third constituent part of the book—forgetting—denotes a hermeneutical horizon for all our knowledge. Therefore, by entering into the territory of forgetting, we introduce a combined ontological and critical perspective connected to the finite horizon of our historically determined situation. To Ricoeur, forgetting (and, later in the Epilog, forgiveness) designates the horizon of memory and our relationships toward the past. Here, the word horizon indicates incompletion and a renunciation of the hubris of total reflection. The fact that forgetting is not in every aspect to be considered as an enemy of memory, but a constitutive part of a human memory, allows this perspective to become more a complicated dialectic of memory and forgetting, use and abuse. Altogether, the phenomenology

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of memory, the epistemology of history and the hermeneutics of the historical condition (a critical and ontological hermeneutics) form the prerequisites for an amplification of the idea of a politics of the just allotment of memory.12

Memories of War and the Forgetfulness of Peace Let us return to the two Nordic countries again and ask how the fundamental structures of their memory politics are being manifested and made explicit in the public celebrations associated with their national holidays.13 The contrasting symbolic observances on these days, connected to different historical experiences, identity constructions and national characters, can be seen as manifestations of two different “imagined communities.”14 The content and form of the celebrations during Independence Day in Finland is almost completely occupied by the commemoration of war. The impression of the seriousness of the people on this day is reinforced by the time of year when the celebrations take place: the 6th of December, when at these latitudes you can expect only a few hours of daylight. Finland is a country, which has had to fight, albeit successfully, in an exceptionally hard way in order to survive; in this young Nation-State, independence must always be guarded and can never be taken for granted. The particularly brutal experiences during the twentieth century have had a deep and enduring impact on the content and configuration of the celebrations. The presence of armed forces in the public celebrations, the gathering of the most prominent official representatives of the country in the Cathedral of Helsinki, the reception at the Presidential Palace, the massive commemorations that take place in the cemeteries all over the country, the processions of thousands of students with lit torches on their way to the assembly at the Senate Square in Helsinki (with the nation symbolically represented by the University, the Church, the State, and the City)— everything bearing witness to a strong culture of memory.15

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Finland lost 94,000 people in the three interlinked wars during World War II, and 400,000 refugees were evacuated from occupied areas such as Karelia and repatriated inside the country’s new borders. Added to this was the burden of an astronomical war debt, the difficulties of coping with a traumatized population, the experience of being forced to put their own leadership into court to be condemned as criminals—together with the painful memories of having received so little support from Sweden and other western countries, although so much was promised. From this background, it is not surprising that memories are focused on the war, the defensive triumphs and the glorious defeats that in fact saved the country. Independence Day in Finland is a day of patriotism and commemorations of a country that survived through an enormous amount of sufferings. Although Finland and Sweden have a long common history, the Swedish celebration during their National Holiday is completely different. For many years Sweden did not even have a National Holiday, surprisingly it was not introduced until 1983, and as a real holiday not until 2005. Within this context, it is perhaps significant that Sweden has a national hymn, the lyrics of which relate almost nothing about Sweden but more about the Nordic countries in general. Sweden has never been forced to confront its own history and during the National Holiday there is no commemoration of any founding events from its history, in fact there seems to be almost nothing that people remember during this day. Moreover, when people are asked, very few know of anything to celebrate at all. The impressions of the National Holiday are that the Swedes consider Sweden to be a country of “eternal peace.” None of the numerous wars in which the country has been involved are ever mentioned, so it is perhaps not so remarkable that the armed forces have no important role to play during the day. However, what is even more unexpected is that no strong nationalistic emotions are expressed during the National Holiday. Probably, almost any kind of patriotic act would be found suspicious by the population; instead, a vague internationalism is proclaimed.

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In Sweden, people mostly acknowledge themselves as being “normal” and “average” in the world—and often do not realize they are seen as being the odd man out in Europe. The symbolic contrast in the date of these two celebrations during opposite seasons of the year is very conspicuous; Sweden celebrates its National Day on 6 June, during a carefree summer month. To most people in Sweden, this day is just a day to rest and relax. Often people have a picnic which may include some small events and light entertainment, but mostly the very few official symbolic formal procedures on this day involve the Royal Family and especially their presence at a ceremony held at the outdoor theatre on Skansen. Hence, there is no connection with the armed forces (they are mainly on holiday) and, perhaps even more striking and surprising, there are extremely weak links between this day and the Nation. In Sweden, an individual is actually not expected to defend his country; instead, the country is expected to guarantee the autonomy and freedom of the individual.16 To conclude this section, the National Holiday in Sweden is not at all a day of memories; there is no effectuation of any historical past. Instead, there is a vague feeling of a timeless, eternal peace—forgetfulness. If Finland is occupied by war, Sweden seems to be occupied by peace. If the Finnish Independence Day is a day of memory, the National Day in Sweden seems to be a day of forgetting. It is perhaps possible to infer that if Finland’s national identity is wounded by its experiences of wars, the Swedish identity seems to be wounded by its experience of peace.

Blocked, Manipulated and Forced Memory . . . and Forgetting As previously mentioned, in the very title of Ricoeur’s work, history is already flanked by entities conditioning the historiographical operations: memory and forgetting. When examining

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our relationships with the past the concept of a “just allotment of memory” reveals a truly political perspective on memory. The meaning of the concept politics in this context is strongly informed by Hannah Arendt’s concept of politics which focuses on plurality, difference, and the task of living together in Polis with preserved differences.17 Politics in this sense has strong links to hermeneutics and the challenges of coping with conflicting interpretations. However, because memory is an exercise, it has to do with selection and both the uses and the abuses of memory. One cannot recall everything and one can always recount differently, due to the unavoidable selective nature of narrative and its connective functions. Selection means that seeing one thing means not seeing another. Recounting one drama means forgetting another. In Ricoeur’s politics of memory, a “loosely knit typology” is unfolded, but it is divided into two distinct sections of the book, separated at a great distance from one another. In sharp focus are the uses and abuses not only of memory, but also of forgetting: “Does not a measured use of memorization also imply a measured use of forgetting?”18 Thus the grand dialectic of memory and forgetting, together with its uses and abuses, constitutes the core of Ricoeur’s politics of memory. In order to make his memory politics functional, Ricoeur describes a typology, which divides the uses and abuses of natural memory into three levels: the pathological-therapeutical level, the practical level, and the ethico-political level. On these respective levels, memory is interpreted as a blocked memory, a manipulated memory, and a forced memory—together with their dialectical counterparts in the critical and ontological domain of forgetting. As a result of this complicated and dialectical conception, we are confronted by what Ricoeur mentioned as “the fundamental vulnerability of memory”19 and the consequence that according to this typology memory has not only to negotiate with forgetting, but also to negotiate with the conjoined practice of memory and forgetfulness, which are associated with both uses and abuses.

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On the first level, we face a “sick” memory associated with traumatism, wounds, and scarring. Here, psychoanalysis has been of paradigmatic importance in showing that interpretation is the path by which we recall and Durcharbeit traumatic memories. When the access to the treasures buried in memory is blocked, the patient—or community—repeats and reiterates instead of remembering (as a work). However, the past once experienced is indestructible and will return. On this pathological-therapeutical level the person—or institution—who repeats the repressed facts does not know that he is repeating it, hence it is not to be considered as a memory at all. Instead this repetition amounts to forgetting, preventing the traumatic event from becoming conscious by substitution. On the practical level, we are confronted with the fragility of identity due to the use and abuse of narrative in order to configure the past, which exposes memories to manipulation. The resources of manipulation provided by narratives we may experience in the contemporary frenzy of commemorations, parades, rites, and myths tied to naissance events. Although this grip on memory is not a specialty of totalitarian regimes alone, but is used by all those who aspire to glory; Ricoeur warns against the “unconditional praise of memory.”20 On the third, ethico-political level, we are confronted by something that is obligated: forced memory. When it comes to the duty of memory, a memory abusively summoned when commemoration rhymes with rememoration, the relationship to the critical gaze of the historian may be acute when the plea is being transformed into a claim on behalf of memory in opposition to history: “The injunction to remember risks being heard as an invitation addressed to memory to short-circuit the work of history.”21 It is within this framework, when someone commands “You will and must remember!” that Ricoeur refers to Pierre Nora’s reflections on “commemorative bulimia” and the “tyranny of memory” together with the warnings from Tvetan Todorov about people who place themselves in positions of victims, which places everyone else in the position of owing a debt.

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Controversial Elements in the Execution of Memory in Finland and Sweden There are certainly critical moments associated with historiographical operations when a politics of memory becomes controversial. By implementing the sketch of a three level typology of uses and abuses of memory and forgetting, as presented by Ricoeur in his millennium book, we may enrich our understanding of how memory politics is executed in Finland and Sweden. I have selected some critical elements in this field with the purpose of disclosing some general tendencies in these countries:22 (a) Independence Day in Finland is celebrated on 6 December, due to the Declaration of Independence being made on this very day in 1917, and its confirmation by the new Bolshevik regime in St. Petersburg after the October Revolution. However, although the date referred to is 1917, the day’s proceedings and the main focus of this national holiday are on events that took place more than two decades later: the Winter War and the Continuation War. The reason for this distinct displacement of focus is that 1917 seems to be too closely linked with the “events of 1918,” which still separate the Finnish people. In fact, the silenced memory of the traumatic experiences from the civil war has only recently started to be discussed in Finland. During the struggle for autonomy and independence, two private armies were formed in the country in opposition to each other: the Red army and the White army. A general strike and the occupation of strategic positions in the country preceded the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. Although the White troops were formally under the authority of the lawful government and the Red troops were technically illegal forces, the capital Helsinki was occupied by the Red troops and the main base of the White operations became Vasa/Vaasa in Ostrobothnia. However, the configuration of Independence Day by the victorious Whites within this violent history and under the leadership of the national hero Gustaf Mannerheim, cannot hide the fact that these events were extraordinarily traumatic to Finland, the

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newborn Nation-State, as can be seen from the challenges and difficulties presented by naming these events. Was it a “civil war,” a “hunger rebellion,” a “revolution,” a “war of independence,” or a “struggle for liberty?” Until World War II, 16 May, which marked the victory of the White forces over the Reds in Helsinki 1918, was celebrated as a kind of second Independence Day. The subsequent shift of perspective away from 1917 and 1918 may be understood in accordance with the needs to celebrate events capable of uniting the people. The blocked memory (on a pathological-therapeutical level) of the great numbers killed, the uprising of the Red troops against the legal democratic authorities, the great number of Red prisoners who died in the internments camps (the first “concentration camps” according to former prime minister Paavo Lipponnen) from starvation and epidemic diseases—these events still divide the Finnish people into friends and enemies. Consequently, associations with 1918 make 1917 complicated. By displacing the focus during Independence Day, the date is disentangled from its original historical setting and incorporated in a historical context more than two decades later, the subject matter activated during Independence Day is focused on events with the capacity to unite the whole people: the glorious Winter War when Finland succeeded in defending their little country from being annexed by a super power. This manipulated memory (on a practical level) is combined with the forced memory (on an ethico-political level) of the shared experience of a truly unifying event when Finland was fighting a common external enemy, as in the Winter War. However, it seems as if the application of Ricoeur’s typology acquires more of the form of a process, where three moments are interlinked, but not necessarily ordered hierarchical. (b) The National Holiday in Sweden gives the impression of a country whose history is formed by eternal peace. The absence of defense forces in the celebrations, the silence about the long history of warfare in Sweden, together with the neglect of almost every kind of commemoration during this day, give the National

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Holiday in this country a strange flavor. Why is this so? How can it be understood? Maybe, according to Ricoeur’s typology, is it possible to talk about this as a massive act of forgetfulness, a blocked memory (on a pathological-therapeutical level) concerning the humiliating and lingering experiences of a former major power? Can two centuries of peace, the loss of power position after the catastrophic military performances in the 1808–1809 war, together with a strong sense of having a bad conscience in connection with the country’s behavior during World War II, explain the lack of memory and patriotic expressions during the National Holiday? This blocked memory can be further acknowledged if placed in combination with a manipulation (on a practical level) of Swedish history written from a point of view established after the borders were determined in 1905, when Sweden and Norway were separated. The new configuration of Swedish national history had to exclude and forget a geographical component that belonged to the country for six centuries (and which is still, after two centuries of divorce, an extraordinary successful producer of Swedish culture and literature), while simultaneously including the unwilling southern parts of the country. Although the southern regions—which in 1809 had only been an integral part of the country for one and a half century—had been exposed to a violent process of “Swedification,” therefore in this region a Swedish identity was still problematic. After World War II, Sweden developed a strong image of internationalism, expressed, for example, in its staunch support of the United Nations. One reason for this internationalism could be that Sweden today is a much more heterogeneous society than Finland. Considering this background, it seems nevertheless strange and contradictory to recall that according to Swedish public opinion, Sweden stands out as the most negative member state inside the European Union. The strong repulsion against any association with the countries exceptionally violent heritage may also be explained by reference to the fact that it

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disturbs the image of being a “moral superpower” on the international scene. This raises questions concerning what we can expect to find under the surface of this strong internationalism. (c) The Anniversary, 2009: Sweden without Finland, Finland without Sweden. We have already mentioned the complications associated with the attempt to write the history of Sweden without taking Finland into consideration. The obvious “phantom pains” in Swedish historiography during the last two centuries may, to a large extent, be explained by the loss of Finland. It is only from this background that we may also acknowledge why Finland was erased from the history of Sweden and how a national history was erected and configured according to the borders established in 1905. From this background, it is perhaps not surprising that the National Holiday in Sweden has become a day without commemorations, in effect a day of forgetfulness. As this may be attributed to the wounded self-esteem of a former super power, it might be enlightening to compare memory and forgetting in these two countries, which recently were united in one single country. In Finland, memory and history have been more attractive. As a young country, Finland was confronted with questions concerning how to write a national history. Profoundly inspired by the romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, it became appealing to imagine a radical historical origin and to defend a common language as the invisible and mystical unifying factor of the spiritual boundaries of humankind. After the divorce from Sweden, the administration was still run in Swedish, although from being the majority language Swedish was suddenly transformed into a minority position. As a result of the nationalistic ideals inspired by Romanticism, many people concluded that in order to acquire the attributes of a true nation, the official language had to be Finnish. A strategy emerged to “Finnishize” the people and prepare the nation for an expected future Russification, which also arrived in the last decade of the century. Consequently, in the late nineteenth century the educated Finns were asked to adopt Finnish as their mother tongue—although the most enthusiastic arguments for the Finnish language, from

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Runeberg, Lönnrot, Snellman, and others, were all articulated in Swedish. As a response to this Fennomanian movement, a Svecomanian movement emerged; hence, the language conflict was perpetuated in the newly independent nation. Although the True Finnish movement demanded a monolingual Finland, and despite the predominant Romantic philosophy of that time, the country finally reached a bilingual compromise. However, it is never too late for any newborn Nation-State to acquire a memorable past and a happy history. Through the revival of the heroic epic Kaleva, the Finnish people attained an identity of being a people with a memorable past. In order to rehabilitate the Finnish-speaking people, and their history as a common origin of the nation, the access to the Swedish heritage was blocked and in the historiographical operations, nineteenth century nationalism was projected into the period before 1809. However, this projection is associated with serious complications. Finland and Sweden were in fact never “separated by a sea,” but for centuries united by this sea. In a similar way, it would be an error to state that Sweden “conquered” or “captured” Finland— as Finland was already an integral part of the mainland, when the Kingdom of Sweden was established. If the earlier problem was that the Finnish traditions were excluded and not taken seriously into consideration, then the latter tendencies in Finland seem to be an attempt to determine a distinct political and cultural Finnish subject before 1809, a fixed origin of timeless Finnishness, not taking into consideration that nationalism is a construct of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the blocked memory of the Swedish history in Finland seems to be combined with a manipulated history of Finland pre-1809. Hence, how should we name the anniversary in 2009? The birth of a nation, the subjugation of Finland by Russia, the separation or divorce of the two main regions of the old empire? Alternatively, the consequence of Sweden (read the elected prince Bernadotte) pledging Finland to Russia in return for Russia pledging Norway to Sweden? In reality, the events of 1809 meant for Finland that the emerging Nation-State received something, that is, a more autonomous and separate identity. While for Sweden—after

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public opinion had ceased to have any aspirations toward the reconquest of Finland—the separation meant a terrible loss of identity generating a profound identity crisis, from which it has perhaps never recovered. Perhaps the most interesting—and I would also venture to say controversial—part of this anniversary has to do with the often-neglected fact, that when Finland’s House of Estates met at Borgå/Porvoo in 1809 and the leadership of Finland took the oath of allegiance to the Russian Tsar—all the men present were still Swedish citizens. This raises questions concerning how to cope with traitorous acts and the prerequisites for commemorating a national autonomy that originates from treason. How will the celebrations in 2009 cope with this breach of faith in Borgå/ Porvo 1809, the fact that the proto-national ensemble of Finland committed treason, and thus became traitors to their own country? Under what circumstances can we avoid a serious controversy by just forgetting? Is some kind of reconciliation necessary? Is it possible? Alternatively, should we instead recognize the separation as a gift due to the fact that Russia, in reality, was able to deliver the shelter for the former eastern regions of Sweden— which Sweden itself never managed to erect against Russia, and thus, paved the way for peace for all the actors involved? The question returns: what kind of celebration is appropriate in 2009?

Epilog: Cosmopolitan Perspectives— Outside the Container For a long time the conventional concept of collective memory was firmly embedded within the container of the Nation-State. Today, it seems inevitable to place the discussion about memory politics and the interpretation of the historical cohesion between Finland and Sweden within a much broader framework. The current processes of a simultaneous globalization and Europeanization have had profound consequences for the parameters of how we organize our memories and how states may remember their pasts. This situation also means that we must

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raise questions concerning the enduring impact of national elements on emerging global concepts. The controversies and complications associated with the celebrations of events such as the Finnish (Russo-Swedish) War (1808–1809), may also remind us of the extensive presence of violence in human history. However, increasingly since the 1990s we are facing the return of the concept of world citizenship, after the dreadful historical experiences of suffering during the last centuries, which, in one way or another, were mostly connected to the fact that the Nation-State had been seen as the absolute foundation of world order. Within this new trans-national framework, the implied connection between memory and nationhood is being reconfigured and an emerging cosmopolitan consciousness has to be taken into consideration rupturing the national role as the organizing principle of memory. In this situation, we are confronted with two groups with particular tendencies. There are those people who want to renationalize memories as a desperate reaction to the decoupling of the Nation-State and memory, and those people who have already joined a “cosmopolitan Esperanto,” an abstract universalism founded on forgetfulness and blocked national memories. Being conscious of the historical conditions of world citizenship may promote consideration for the fact that writing history also means embracing an inevitable ethical dimension. Memory politics can teach us that by memory work we are inescapably confronted with the fragility of our own identities, originating from the inexorably selective character of our relationship with the past and the, often painful, confrontation with the Other. In his masterpiece from 2000, Ricoeur writes: It is a fact that there is no historical community that has not arisen out of what can be termed an original relation to war. What we celebrate under the heading of founding events are, essentially, violent acts legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right, acts legitimated, at the limit, by their very antiquity, by their age. The same events are thus found to signify glory for some, humiliation for others. To their celebration, on the one hand, corresponds their execration, on the other.

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It is in this way that real and symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of collective memory.23 Today, we are confronted by extraordinary challenges when we try to write history from a post- or trans-national perspective; a problem augmented by the fact that modern historiography actually originated within the Nation-State, which also financed and organized its activities. Here, Finland and Sweden may serve as configurations for two alternative paths to cosmopolitanism, with their respective and strongly divergent historical determinations: the Finnish path established through a strong patriotism and the memories of wars of glorious defeats; and the Swedish path denoted by a vague air of internationalism and peaceful forgetting. Which is the most appropriate way to world citizenship? Being confronted with this question in this context, we may once more hear an echo of Ricoeur being troubled by “the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory—and of forgetting.”24 Peter Kemp has, in his book on the Citizen of the World, strongly supported the idea that world citizenship does not mean a negation of national citizenship. Such an abolishment of the national aspect would only generate chaos in a world without differences. Even if the ultimate end of the cosmopolitan ideal must take precedence over the ends of a particular society, Kemp stresses that cosmopolitanism should not be interpreted as an idealistic concept founded on either an abstract universalism or a purely personal level, and consequently without political and cultural implications and institutional settings. According to Kemp, the world citizen is to be considered as a member of (at least) two communities: the national and the global.25 This means that world citizenship is articulated as a vision that can be formalized as an idea of rights and duties only within a context where it is materialized in a community. However, in this construction, the Nation-State may be understood as a concretization of the community of world citizens formed by hospitality, and not as an

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expansionistic concept of the Nation-State.26 This, in turn, would involve the predominant historical structures of our execution of memory, according to the principles of the Nation-State, being taken seriously when considering the cosmopolitan idea. Within this framework, the forgetfulness of the Swedish memory culture engenders questions such as: to what extend is it possible for the cosmopolitan world citizen to regard him/herself as member of a global community without simultaneously recognizing him/herself as a citizen of a specific nation, with all its historical ties and roots? For Swedes, it seems necessary to consider in what way a vague internationalism, with weak historical determinations concerning their identity, may be expected to be an appropriate preparation for the development of world citizenship? Does the statement that the concept of world citizenship may only be materialized and embedded in a concrete historical context made up by a nation, mean that Finland is placed in a more favorable position than Sweden? The experiences from more than a decade of membership in the European Union may support the idea that Finland seems to be better prepared to act beyond the national container.

Chapter 5

Nowhere Is Always Now and Here Tradition, Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Metamorphosis of Hermeneutics

The End of the World as We Know It More than four decades after we first listened to Bob Dylan telling us that “the times they are a-changing,” we seem, today, inevitably confronted with “[t]he end of the world as we know it.”1 The reasons for talking about paradigmatic transformations seem to be more convincing than ever, and in our current situation it has almost become a truism to say that we are living in a time of great change. These changes seem to be even more reinforced when reconsidering globalization from the perspective of the current global economic crisis—and the dramatic “change” (read Obama) that has come to America. Nevertheless, as always, when experiencing dramatic change, we need to resist “epochal hubris,” a tempting egocentrism which places us in an unfeasibly privileged position at the center of history and the world. There is a profound philosophical tradition, mainly stemming from Immanuel Kant, which has tried to cope with the task of determining the historical meaning of the present situation as a philosophical topic. Although as philosophers, we sometimes think we are “nowhere,” if truth be told—and if we listen carefully to the ontological philosophical tradition stemming from Heidegger and others—we recognize that we are always already

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embedded in the same world we are attempting to comprehend—“now” and “here.” For more than two centuries, this has been taken up as a serious philosophical task: from Kant’s attempt to answer the urgent question “Was ist Aufklärung?” and the historization of this question in Hegel’s Geist-philosophy, via Arendt, Foucault, de Beauvoir, and the later humanistic works of von Wright, and die neue Unüberblickbarkeit of Habermas, to more recent contributions from Hart and Negri, Nussbaum and Žižek. With time, the task has migrated, the perspectives have been extended and a new kind of socially distributed expertise has emerged, which has a transgressive, mixed, generalist-specialist team-based competence, mainly associated with the social sciences.2 Over the last few decades, we have also gradually been confronted with a web of new notions conceived in an attempt to cope with our turbulent world, and aimed at naming the present. In point of fact, the quest for orientation in an everchanging, runaway world structured on a race for competitive advantages has turned into a colossal business, and aligned with a variety of labels—business intelligence, scanning, geo-strategy, contemporary diagnostics—but most having in common the fact that they include unrealistic expectations of obtaining specific predications about the future. In this situation, the possible contributions from philosophy might become a pressing question. Possible contributions might include: a more comprehensive understanding of our present circumstances, stemming from a capacity to develop a bird’s-eye view in combination with more accurate concepts; a more thorough historical contextualization of the current transformations; a critical philosophical reflection, which turns the world upside down, thus further fostering the idea that “another world is possible.” Valid as these contributions might be, nonetheless, according to my opinion a more decisive contribution from philosophy would be finding a means of coping with the exceedingly vague theoretical status of these diagnostics of our contemporary situation. To which, I would also add the ability to deal with

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the serious hermeneutical deficit of these often allegedly objectivistic statements; to be precise, to determine the specific interpretative epistemological character of these attempts to name the present, as well as their ontological indications in terms of interventions in an emerging reality. However, first we need to contextualize our reflections according to the intellectual scene denoted by the three notions tradition, modernity, and postmodernity.

Post, Post, Post Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, a web of “post-concepts” emerged on the intellectual scene, causing enduring conflicts pertaining to the normative status of modernity in a variety of fields, the epicenter being in the postmodernism debates. Thus, when modernity was no longer able to be conceived as uncomplicated, questions were raised as to what extent modernity should be recognized as a problematic, unfulfilled or even more seriously a dangerous and failed project. Already controversial in themselves, if grouped together, the inherent complexity of notions such as Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity promptly increases. The paradoxical fact has to be considered that the recognition of a tradition, the authority of which is opposed by the modern quest for Mündigkeit, is in itself an innovation of modernity. Moreover, today, the same modernity is concurrently one of our most important traditions. Critical thinking is probably the most impressive contribution from this tradition.3 In point of fact, due to our embeddedness in the world and the inevitable selective character of our ways of coping with reality and the past, we are always already part of a tradition (due to more or less critically reflected agreements), and there will always already be some kind of canon governing our intellectual interests and preferences (we do not have the capacity to read everything, selection is inevitable).


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Considering the many strange debates associated with the notion postmodernism, and all the anger, self-contradictions and exaggerations it has caused, it is easy to become ironic. Nevertheless, one important outcome of the controversies about postmodernism is the inducing of a self-critical instance within modernity itself, also perceived as a kind of self-confrontation in accordance with the notion of a second age of modernity.4 The recognition, in the contribution of Cornel West and others, that the slaves in America were perhaps the first human beings who experienced what modernity really means, reveals a dark side of modernity and, a hidden agenda of racism, eurocentrism, US-centrism, androcentrism, and logocentrism—as well as the inherent barbarism that seems to dwell unconsciously in every civilization.5 It is a known fact that only an emperor in the early twentieth century had a comparable living standard with any ordinary man from a developed country at the end of the same century—and yet during this century more people were murdered than in our entire previous history.6 The contradictions of this century, also increased by taking into consideration the contrasting experiences and extraordinary progress of democracy and human rights, were in many ways anticipated by Nietzsche, the philosopher who died on its threshold, and yet who determined much of its postmodern philosophical agenda. However, sometimes, the notion “postmodern” has appeared as a buzzword meaning anything and referring to everything— hence signifying nothing. This has made it appropriate to ask if postmodernism is just a new kind of transcendental idealism or the return of a Hegelian specter, which once more haunts our orientation in history. Nevertheless, the philosophical reflections often presented under the title postmodernism must, in effect, be understood in association with some momentous and irreversible changes already transforming our world in profound ways. These include the dramatic geopolitical shift, which is modifying the former Eurocentric world order, in the aftermath of decolonialization, and the subsequent dominance of America,

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into an emerging three-polar world order, in consequence of the rise of the East Asian super powers Language is never to be seen as an innocent and pure instrument, thus the fact that modern philosophy has mainly been articulated in three languages of European origin—English, German, and French—might have had tremendous impact on our philosophical thinking, as to its form as well as matter, and on issues of access and influence. The fact that the XXII World Congress of Philosophy, 2008, was held in Seoul, South-Korea, is certainly a sign seriously urging us to rethink philosophy in fundamental ways. Today, philosophy—together with other disciplines—is compelled to confront and revise the actual particularity of many of its universal claims, as well as the fact that so many “discoveries” have turned out to be inventions, thus disclosing its actual prerequisites. However, it does not seem to be an appropriate solution to just erase these traditions, as if trying to start the philosophical reflection from zero, without any prerequisites, nor to develop that kind of self-contradictory philosophy, which is being manifested in such philosophical positions as “anti-Eurocentric eurocentrism.”7 Philosophy is solidly fabricated upon traditions, but traditions must always be handled and nurtured in a critically reflected way.

A New Agenda Determined by Globalization: the Age of Hermeneutics After the fierce debates on postmodernism and postmodernity on the cusp of the millennium, philosophy acquired such innovations as post-structuralism, post-phenomenology, post-colonial theory as well as post-analytical philosophy—the number of “postconcepts” has decreased, as has the intellectual energy in the controversies concerning modernity. Subsequently, the agenda has changed dramatically and a new predominant concept with epochal pretensions has emerged on the scene, challenging philosophy to cope with globalization.


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As has been argued earlier in this book, globalization is to be considered as a quite recent phenomenon, allied to some of the major transformation processes that have reorganized the world in the last three decades. Today, the centrifugal power of the transformation processes, which are brought together under the heading globalization, the epicenter being economy and technology, are determining a great deal of the current philosophical agenda. However, we also currently need to earnestly ask ourselves, not only what globalization means to philosophy, but also what kind of contribution philosophy might offer to the challenges raised by the globalization process. In this book, I have tried to identify some areas for philosophical contributions, among which I consider the emerging knowledge society to be one of the most important. Considering that this profound transformation of the world and ourselves originates from scientific advancements, we may be surprised that simultaneously, knowledge, together with its institutional settings, is nowadays changing in dramatic ways generating a crisis within the traditional institutions of knowledge. When the classical dichotomy, which for centuries separated theory and practice, was eroded away during the last century; the traditional separation between academy and society, as well as school and society, was also challenged. Novothy et al. have expressed this transformation in a dramatic opening of their important book Re-thinking science (2001): “Science has spoken, with growing urgency and conviction, to society for more than half a millennium . . . In the past half-century, society has begun to speak back to science.”8 In our time of globalizing societies, a global policy consensus now seems to have been established concerning the most appropriate strategy to successfully cope with the challenges of globalization, namely by supporting a rapid transition to a knowledge-based economy. Accordingly, in the new society, which is replacing industrialism, knowledge is increasingly identified as a key factor with utopian expectations; hence it is conceived as the most important engine now powering economical development. Rereading the postmodern “classics” The Postmodern

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Condition (1979/1984) within this current context, we may recognize Jean-François Lyotard’s foresight in his work on the strategic importance of knowledge and the emerging knowledge economy.9 Today, globalization and knowledge signify both sides of the same coin; every time we talk about globalization, knowledge is implicated as a central component; and in a similar way we might say, today, that every discussion on knowledge needs to be considered as an integral part of the discourse on globalization. Three major trends and paradigms of knowledge may be distinguished in the new cognitive capitalism: competence (mainly associated with lifelong learning as the new life script), evidence (mainly associated with the new focus on measurement, efficiency, and accounting) and innovation (mainly associated with the interest in the rise of creative industries). However, the predominant virtue of flexibility, in these new discourses concerning knowledge, also risks ruining the cultural prerequisites for a vibrant philosophical discourse. In addition, this flexible mode of knowledge organization does not seem to be at all sufficient to support the cultivation of meaning and identity. The result is, instead, a flexible man, a man without memory, conviction, accountability, and capability to be responsible. Today, as a combined outcome of the globalization process, an emerging knowledge economy, and profound geopolitical transformations, “reality” tends to disperse into a multitude of interpretations. However, it is obvious that the many different visions of the world today do not automatically coexist peacefully; on the contrary, we might say that we are challenged by the cultural aspects of an “armed globalization”10 when people, just by imposing their own perspectives on others, generate ever new “reality battles” and “knowledge massacres.” Strikingly many of these conflicts concerns globalization. Certainly, we need to remind ourselves that there are many different and divergent narratives about globalization extending from the “windows of opportunities” presented by popular management books in Airport shops, to critical explorations indicating a clandestine global conspiracy originating from a Washington Consensus.


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The acknowledgment that globalization may be interpreted in different ways is even more important today, if we consider the escalation of the financial problems which started in 2008–2009. The global economic crisis has revealed, in a shocking way, the unstable and fragile character of this powerful transformation process. Thus, these “hard facts” tell us that globalization also needs to be handled with hermeneutical consciousness, that is, apprehended as a multidimensional and multistabled phenomenon. We also need to acknowledge that globalization is a controversial phenomenon and in the interim we will need to cope with a clash of globalizations. However, as mentioned earlier, globalization is also at the moment generating a fertile soil in which interpretations are configured as an unreflected, generalized experience of variations and an endless plurality of available perspectives. This has changed the locus of every discussion on interpretation dramatically. These days, interpretation seems to emanate from the particular sphere which hermeneutics, according to its “classical” conception within the German tradition, was to oppose and provide an alternative. From a historical point of view, this is something new and unexpected. In this book, it has also been argued that hermeneutics, in order to be able to deal with globalization, needs to find a way out of the blind alley of the predominant German tradition. Therefore, I have elucidated on how recent transformations within the hermeneutical tradition—mostly associated with Ricoeur and Vattimo—have exposed new opportunities to link hermeneutics to globalization. Furthermore, instead of trying to bring all sciences and experiences back to a more primordial ontological Dasein-domain, or to limit hermeneutical experience exclusively to an epistemology of understanding or an aesthetic sphere, philosophers in the vein of Gianni Vattimo and others have pointed out how the internal development within contemporary science and technology themselves has prepared the way for hermeneutics; a situation in which there are no stable facts, only variable interpretations. From this perspective, the task of hermeneutics seems in a

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startling way to have squired an integral place in the discourse on globalization. For this reason, it has been stated that we live in an age of hermeneutics. Thoroughly conscious of the need to combine the act of taking a stand with the need to respect the legitimacy of other interpretations, hermeneutics, as such, is probably the most appropriate intellectual resource for a society framed by pluralism and democracy.11 Hermeneutics as well as democracy urges us to live together and act without absolute knowledge, to manage incomplete solutions, to endure fragility— and simultaneously to resist every effort to transform hermeneutics into an arbitrary relativism. Furthermore, hermeneutics may remind democracy, suffering from a “hermeneutical deficit,” about both the possibility and the necessity of a multitude of perspectives—while democracy may remind hermeneutics that all interpretations are inevitably controversial and inscribed in power-relations. Nevertheless, in order to be able to succeed in living together in polis with preserved differences (Hannah Arendt), constantly striving for better interpretations (Paul Ricoeur) and through processes framed by the preserved tension between the ideal and the real community of communication (Karl-Otto Apel), we sometimes need to remind our anxiety that as a matter of fact only a democratic society recognizes itself as not being democratic enough (Zygmunt Bauman). Democracy— as well as hermeneutics—is always in progress, unfinished and at the same time something remarkably serious.

Historical Time and Inhabited Space In an age of hermeneutics the most important knowledge question, formerly raised by Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, seems to be this: If everything is interpretation, what then is truth? In an earlier age this question instigated the opposition to objectivism; today, the same question is being raised in order to open up another front, opposed to relativism. In a globalizing world, the most important challenge to hermeneutics


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does not seem to be objectivism—the turbulent transformation of all and everything in today’s world means that all absolute knowledge is almost automatically eroded. However, as has been repeated in this book, this does not mean that it is enough to define hermeneutics as a new version of relativism. It is true to say that neither horizontal thinking, which is opening the gates for a multitude of interpretations, nor the radical and exclusive alternative of vertical thinking, dwelling on the opposite side of the same dualistic order, may be acceptable according to the concrete challenges we face in a globalizing world. We are asked today, when confronted with the task of defending the truth claims of interpretation, to account for a hermeneutical situation where the “fact” that everything is interpretation needs to be recognized as an interpretation itself and at the same time to renounce the hubris of absolute knowledge and total reflection. In consideration of this, it seems as if the concept of interpretation has the same amplitude of application as that of the concept of truth. Nonetheless, as Vattimo has taught us, it is not sufficient to define hermeneutics as an antifoundationalism in combination with a release of conflicting interpretations. Vattimo requested instead that we move forward a few steps and situate our philosophical reflections historically, thus defining hermeneutics as being the accomplished history of nihilism. What does this mean? And what kind of history is Vattimo referring to? Is a “philosophical” history, close to a Nietzschean and Heideggerian view on history, sufficient? In Ricoeur’s philosophical project we find a constant reflection over time with regard to history, and gradually the conviction emerges that history holds a paradigmatic function for the new cognitive landscape of hermeneutics. In view of this, it does not seem sufficient to achieve the transition from a vague “nowhere” to the necessary concrete determination of “now” and “here” by exclusively applying the phenomenological conceptions of time and space—thus, writing history using an approach to time that simultaneously neglect to consult a watch, a calendar, or an examination of the archives. Phenomenology alone can neither

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provide a reliable orientation in a world framed by economic and technological transformations on a global scale, nor help us to cope with the challenges from financial crises, democratic deficits and environmental issues. The theoretical and practical dilemmas of coping with a complex, highly institutionalized globalizing society are perhaps most obvious when confronted by the environmental challenges on its “back yard.” The reason why it is necessary to include objective parameters also in phenomenological investigations has been convincingly expressed by Don Ihde in his rhetoric question, “How many phenomenologists does it take to detect a ‘greenhouse effect’?”12 In order to present an alternative approach, we may turn to one of Ricoeur’s later works, Memory, History, Forgetting (2000/2004), where Ricoeur stated the problems connected with a phenomenological approach by asking the following question: “up to what point can a phenomenology of dating and localizing be constituted without borrowing from the objective knowledge of geometrical—let us say, Euclidian and Cartesian—space and from the knowledge of chronological time?”13 Considering these obvious problems, Ricoeur proposed an alternative, dialectical model, where temporality is not solely identified as a lived (experiential-phenomenological) time in opposition to cosmic (objective-chronological) time, but as a “third,” historical time, constituted by the fragile dialectical connections between lived and cosmic time. In a similar way, it is not sufficient to define spatiality solely as a lived space, in opposition to geometrical space, but rather as an inhabited space, constituted by the connections between these two conceptions of space.14 This parallel constitution of temporality and spatiality in terms of a hetereogeneous synthesis indicates a “mixed” mode of thinking, which incorporates objective as well as subjective approaches, making it possible not only to distinguish hermeneutics from absolute knowledge, but also from a relativism which risks transforming interpretation into arbitrary thinking. These issues on time and space are crucial for all our concepts of reality. By providing a dialectical solution to the challenges of


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dating and localizing, Ricoeur established a new foundation for epistemology in an age of hermeneutics. In opposition to the phenomenological bracketing of objectified time and space, an “alienated” phenomenology15 is explored by establishing a link to the objective knowledge of geometrical space and chronological time. The result is a kind of philosophy characterized by “mixed categories,” which joins together lived time and lived space to objective time and geometrical space: “To the dialectic of lived space, geometrical space, and inhabited space corresponds a similar dialectic of lived time, cosmic time, and historical time.”16 By learning more about the conditions for historiographical operations, we may learn more about the prerequisites for knowledge production in general. However, naming the present, situated and contextualized as historical time as well as inhabited space, not only influences broader epistemological perspectives, it also involves ontological implications, placing the whole problematic of our world orientations on the hermeneutical edge between discovery and invention. The interpretative character of our interventions in the world may be understood according to a mimesis-process where our configurations continuously reconfigure the world we try to understand.17 Consequently, instead of posing the question whether our knowledge and diagnostics—as well as language, science, history, and media—are discoveries or inventions, hermeneutics invites us to explore the terrain revealed by the distinction itself in terms of an emerging reality. This vanishing point, where invention and discovery can no longer be either separated or merged together, is exactly the place where interpretation today resides.

Notes

Introduction 1

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François Dosse “discovered” Ricoeur while exploring the intellectual landscape in France post structuralism, see F. Dosse (1991/1997). Within this context, Ricoeur appeared to him as “a philosopher who traversed the previous period in the shadows, precisely because he incarnated the philosophy of action and meaning” (F. Dosse 1995/1999, p. xx). After having dedicated Empire of Meaning. The Humanization of the Social Sciences to Ricoeur, he continued investigating how these philosophical resources also made it possible to transcend the limitations of the context, in the 770 pages long monograph on Ricoeur (1997). V. Descombes (1979/1980). P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 32.

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F. Dosse (1995/1999), p. 140. A.D. Ritivoi (2006), p. 46. Among other philosophical boundary-crossers, we may mention Karl-Otto Apel, Charles Taylor, Calvin O. Schrag, and Richard Rorty, even though the latter has been criticized for combining an extensive import of Continental philosophy with a complete ignorance of American philosophers influenced by the same Continental sources. Don Ihde has remarked that by practicing this philosophical “hygiene” other American boundary-crossers have remained invisible. D. Ihde (1986), pp. 1–26. Mounier’s influence on Ricoeur is profound and not at all limited to his early works: the philosophical style and the cross-disciplinary approach, which formed the milieu around the journal Esprit were also deeply rooted in an engagement inspired by a common faith. It is not by coincidence that Ricoeur, from the late 1950s until his very last day,

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lived in one of the houses in “Mounier’s garden” in Châtenay de Malabry outside the central parts of Paris together with other committed intellectuals. Besides several articles inspired by Mouniers, Ricoeur wrote many years later in 1985 an article commenting on the problematic history of personalism after Mounier’s death, explaining the decline of personalism by claiming—and regretting— that it had become just another “ism” with all its interrelated problems (P. Ricoeur 1985). P. Ricoeur (1955/1965), “Emmanuel Mounier: A Personalist Philosopher,” p. 133. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols, as it is manifested in Ricouer (1960/1969) is inspired by Imannuel Kant’s unfinished theory of symbols in Kritik der Urteilskraft (I. Kant 1790/1974): “unter einer ästetischen Idee aber verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denken veranlasst, ohne dass ihn doch irgend ein bestimmter Gedanke, d.i. Begriff adäquat sein kann, die folglich keine Sprache völlig erreicht und verständlich machen kann” (ibid., paragraph 49, A p. 190 / B pp. 192–193). In his later works on hermeneutics the concepts symbol-interpretation is replaced by textreading, and “semantic innovation-productive imagination. P. Ricoeur (1955/1965), p. 54. P. Ricoeur (1991), p. 45. P. Ricoeur “The hermeneutical function of distanciation” in P. Ricoeur (1981), pp. 131–144. J. Durham Peters (1999), p. 149. Even though Ricoeur, in 1983, states that the investigations on metaphors and narratives where “conceived together” (P. Ricoeur 1983/1984, p. ix), this must be acknowledged as a reconstruction after the event due to the fact that this broader cohesion is absent in the preface of P. Ricoeur (1975/1977). This fragile constitution of things human is previously outlined in Ricoeur (1950/1966), (1960/1965), (1960/1969) and from the mid-1980s Ricoeur consistently talks about human beings as “acting and suffering,” for example, in P. Ricoeur (1986a). From the 1980s, Ricoeur gradually discovered on the parallel path of thought developed by Hannah Arendt, who also developed a philosophical anthropology where the subject is defined as both acting and suffering, cf. H. Arendt (1958), p. 184 and 190. There are striking similarities between these two philosophers, and in Ricoeur’s text the inspiration from Arendt is manifested most evidently in the epilog of the millennium book, P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), which to a large extent may be considered as a paraphrase of Arendt.

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P. Ricoeur, “Appropriation” (1972), p. 93 in P. Ricoeur (1991) (originally published as an essay already in 1972). P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 94. P. Ricoeur (1985/1988), p. 166f. Ibid., p. 169. P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 116. Cf. ibid., p. 143. P. Ricoeur (1975/1977), p. 197. P. Ricoeur (1948). P. Ricoeur (1950/1966), p. 456. The theological reception of Ricoeur’s philosophy is impressive, and I have only been able to follow it in a systematic way until 1994, see B. Kristensson Uggla (1994), chapter 9. The most comprehensive presentations of his own interventions into the field of theology is probably P. Ricoeur (1995d). P. Ricoeur (1960/1965), p. xx and P. Ricoeur (1995a), p. 15. In one of his rare exceptions, Ricoeur declared that he had long admired Luther: “depuis longtemps, j’admirais le traité de Luther sur le serf-arbitre, De la liberté chrétienne” (P. Ricoeur 1995b, p. 47). Cf. also Ricoeur (1960/1969). P. Ricoeur (1960/1969), pp. 152, 155, 156. P. Ricoeur (1960/1965), p. xxvii. Ibid., p. 47. P. Ricoeur (1995a), p. 50. This is already present in his early books, but was made more explicit and systematic in P. Ricoeur (1990/1992). Here, as elsewhere, we find a strong affinity with Hannah Arendt. In a foot note, Hannah Arendt pointed out Augustine as the one credited with having been the first to raise the so-called anthropological question in philosophy, the question about “who,” even though his distinction between “Who am I?” and “What am I?” is mainly motivated by theological concerns. H. Arendt (1958), p. 10. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), pp. 176ff. B. Dauenhauer (1998), p. 109. P. Ricoeur “Approches de la personne” (1990), later published in Ricoeur (1992), pp. 203–221(originally published as an essay in 1990). P. Ricoeur (2000/2004). P. Ricoeur (1990/1992). This was the organizing principle of my doctoral dissertation, Communication at the Bursting Point. The Philosophical Project of Paul Ricoeur, published in Swedish as B. Kristensson Uggla (1994). Cf. the title of the best informed book on Ricoeur as a person: Paul Ricoeur. La critique et la conviction [Critique and Conviction], P. Ricoeur (1995b).

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There is a striking lack of references in Ricoeur’s work also when it comes to some of the thinkers who were among the most influential for him, for example, Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, Ricoeur only seldom refers explicitly to some of the philosophers who were traveling “parallel” routes and with many similar philosophical standpoints, for example, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty. Some examples of this three level structure need to be mentioned at this point: in the anthology from the mid-1950s Ricoeur identifies the three historical levels of abstract progress, existential ambiguity, and mysterious hope for his dialectical operations. In his investigations of the symbolism of evil (P. Ricoeur 1960/1969), he distinguishes between three levels: symbols, myths, and speculative myths. In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (P. Ricoeur 1986b) his sketch of a theory of social imagination elaborates on a model where three levels of ideological functions (distortion, legitimation, and identification) are related to three levels of utopian functions (the completely unachievable, critique established order, and the investigation of the possible). In addition, in the analysis of the historiographical operations in the mid-1980s, which continued after the turn of the millennium, we find strong resemblances between this three level typology of Ricoeur’s politics of memory. Ricoeur uses this metaphor in order to signify his own methodology in P. Ricoeur (1955/1965), p. 11. P. Ricoeur (1969/1974), p. 19. Ricoeur presented a philosophical reflection with universal claims. It might appear as a paradox, that although Ricoeur resisted any particular gender perspective, if we try to find a familiar philosophical position we find it among feminist philosophers. Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, as it was developed in his early philosophy of will, has strong resemblance to those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his thoughts, particularly during the last decades, were nurtured and significantly inspired by Hannah Arendt, who influenced his thoughts to such an extent that part of his works might be recognized as paraphrases. Two questions become apparent. First, how can we understand this paradox of a universalistic thinker concurrently resisting every gender differentiation—bearing striking resemblances to major feminist philosophers? Second, how should we cope with the fact that this truly universalistic project never explicitly raised the gender issue? P. Ricoeur (1955/1965), pp. 11, 28 and P. Ricoeur (1995c), p. 26. P. Ricoeur (2000/2005), p. 24 and P. Ricoeur (1986a), pp. 251ff. The background to these constant “dialecticalizations” is not only the reality of coping with the multiple philosophical worlds and

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disciplines involved in his reflection, but also the biographical reality of a life filled with tensions, starting with the “inner conflict” between the inspiration from Bergson and Barth in his youth and then continuing throughout his life and work: the tension between German and French sources, Jaspers and Marcel, Continental and Analytical philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism (and later neuro-biology). P. Ricoeur (1995a), p. 7. K. Jaspers (1932/1973), P. Ricoeur & M. Dufrenne (1947) and P. Ricoeur (1995b). P. Ricoeur (1995a), p. 3.

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G. Vattimo (1994/1997), p. 1. Ibid., p. xx. My configuration of this history is of course influenced by Ricoeur and his interpretation of this tradition, see P. Ricoeur (1981), (1986a). G. Vattimo (1994/1997), p. 6. Today, it is hardly possible to orient oneself within contemporary hermeneutics without an explicit relation to the “canonized” narrative of the German history of hermeneutics, where Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics was, for a long time, reduced to a more limited theory of Einfühlung within the framework of Verstehen. The picture of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as a “psychologizing” Einfühlung follows the path that Dilthey determined in his great work that “rediscovered” the romantic Schleiermacher after the industrialization and naturalization of the nineteenth century. This image, confirmed by Gadamer, was dominant for a long time, but through the works of Szondi, Frank, Ricoeur, and others, it has been strongly modified, thus benefiting the double strategy of “psychological” and “grammatical” interpretations (F. Schleiermacher 1977, P. Ricoeur 1986a). The inherent ambiguity in Schleiermacher’s formulation of understanding an author even better than he understood himself anticipates the possibility of divergent interpretations. One interpretation pointing in the direction of a radicalized “psychologization,” and the other indicating a movement which goes beyond the author, aimed at gaining an understanding of the author that also differs from his own self-understanding. W. Dilthey (1900/1924). Although his interpretative focus on “expressions of life” could have turned him into a concept of an

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indirect path to self-understanding, where man comes to himself by a detour of understanding; instead, within this specific historicist pact between history and hermeneutics, psychology was identified as the foundation and ultimate justification of the human sciences. G. H. von Wright (1971), S. Toulmin (1990). M. Heidegger (1927/1962), p. 21. Ibid., p. 142ff/182ff. P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 59. H-G. Gadamer (1960/1975), p. 292. Ibid. P. Ricoeur (1981), pp. 87–93. Ibid., p. 61. Here, it might clarify matters if a distinction is made between a world economy, which has existed for many centuries (as has been described by Immanuel Wallerstein and others), and global economy, dependent of prerequisites emerging in the last decades (according to Castells). M. Castells (1996/1997/1998). Some brief comments on the complications concerning the terminology need to be noted. Unlike Ulrich Beck and others, I am not making distinctions differentiating between globalism (as an ideology about market substituting politics), globality (as a state of affair of the world society we live in since long), and globalization (as the emergent, unrevised globality). Nonetheless, I would like to stress the importance in our current situation of speaking about globalization (as an ongoing process, a “globalizing” world) and not a (fully) globalized world (as a finalized process). P. Ricoeur (1969/1974), p. 3. Ibid., p. 6. It is important to note the dramatic reorganization of the book in contrast to how the book was originally planned, which Ricoeur indicated on the back cover of the first edition of volume one. Here, the reader is informed of “un second tome”—as the architecture of the final three volumes was not yet a reality. Unfortunately, this information is corrected on later translations and editions, thereby concealing significant information for the reader’s understanding concerning the ongoing metamorphosis of the work. P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 57. P. Ricoeur (1985/1988), p. 63. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 157. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 376.

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Ibid. This extremely influential essay is reprinted in several collections, for example, in P. Ricoeur (1981), (1986a), and (1991). The internal structure of this epistemological approach together with his “broken ontology,” separating him from German hermeneutics in a fundamental way, has implicitly been present in Ricoeur’s work for a long time. In fact, it may already be recognized in the methodological structure of his doctoral dissertation Freedom and Nature (P. Ricoeur 1950/1966), where a kind of “alienated phenomenology” or “implicit hermeneutics” can be found, and where an implicit critical hermeneutics is conducted in terms of “diagnostics.” This is brilliantly elaborated in D. Ihde (1974), pp. 26–58. P. Ricoeur (1981), pp. 131–144. P. Ricoeur (1985/1988), (1986a), (2000/2004). P. Ricoeur (1991), p. 337. Gadamer’s magnificent discussion on the meaning of play and playing is found in the first part (on aesthetics) within the framework of the three part structure of his work, H-G. Gadamer (1960/1975). Besides play, Gadamer also uses the model of dancing in the discussion, referring to dance as an activity that also carries away the dancer. P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 90. This dictum is frequently used in P. Ricoeur (1984/1985); however, later, in P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), Ricoeur seems to introduce some self-corrections in order to limit the pretensions connected to the explicative power of fiction. J. DiCenso (1990). P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 193. Cf. “The consciousness of the validity of a method is never separable from the consciousness of its limits.” P. Ricoeur (1969/1974), p. 30f. Cf. “The model of the text: meaningful action considered as a text,” pp. 197ff in P. Ricoeur (1981). G. Vattimo (1989/1992), (2003/2004). G. Vattimo (2003/2004), p. 35. G. Vattimo (2002). G. Vattimo (1985/1988), (1994/1997). G. Vattimo (1994/1997), p. 54. The genealogy from Nietzsche, through Hegel back to Luther and the Christian Creed has been brilliantly executed in E. Jüngel (1977/1983) and later by Mark C. Taylor (1984), (2007). “Foreword” in G. Vattimo (2003/2004), pp. ix–xx. Cf. J. Greich (1985), P. Ricoeur (1990/1992), G. Vattimo (1994/1997), and B. Kristensson Uggla (2002).

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Although I have been inspired by Edward De Bono to use the notions “horizontal thinking” and “vertical thinking,” according to my philosophical grammar they have a slightly different meaning. T. Friedman (2005). The experience and exploration of globalization is full of ambivalence and paradoxical phenomenon. The globalization process means both globalization and localization, connectedness and fragmentation, centralization and decentralization, and so on. In the framework of hermeneutics, these paradoxes are transformed into a dialectical approach. Consequently, the counterpart of the paradoxes of globalization is the internal dialectical structure in hermeneutics articulated as a heterogeneous synthesis, the dialectic between productivity and receptivity, sameness and difference, explanation and understanding, and the overarching concept spanning the conflict of interpretations. P. Ricoeur (1981), (1985), (1986a). P. Ricoeur (1981), p. 213.

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The idea of lifelong education was first fully articulated by Eduard Lindeman and Basil Yeaxlee in the late 1920s, both of whom were closely associated with John Dewey. In 1970, lifelong learning was taken up as a strategic focus for UNESCO; in 1972, the epochal book Learning to Be was published by Faure et al. K. Hultqvist & K. Petersson (2000). European Commission, 2001. M. Castells (2001), p. 278. B. Catasús & B. Kristensson Uggla (2007). Frank Coffield, among others, has argued that the powerful consensus of lifelong learning is “naïve, limited and apparent as well as being deficient, dangerous and diversionary.” (F. Coffield 2002, p. 174). Subsequently, if the theory is so poor, there must be several reasons why it is so popular. These reasons might be that it legitimates increased expenditure on education, it provides politicians with the pretext for action, it deflects attention from the need for economic and social reform, and it offers the comforting illusion that for every complex problem there is one simple solution (ibid.). European Commission, 2001. A. Tuijnnman (2002). B. Kristensson Uggla (2002), chapter 1. L. Boltanski & E. Chiapello (1999/2005), p. 155.

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P. Alheit (2002), p. 40f. A. Giddens (1999), p. 2f. A. Fejes (2006), p. 65. Ibid., p. 61, 73f. N. Rose (1989/1999), pp. xxiii. Ibid., p. 104 A. Fejes (2006), paper IV, p. 9ff. R. Sennett (1999). L. Boltanski & E. Chiappello (1999/2005), p. 20. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 461. Ibid., p. 462. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 462. H. Nowotny et al. (2001), p. 74. R. Normann (2001), R. Florida (2001). L. Boltanski & E. Chiapello (1999/2005), pp. 461ff. P. Ricoeur (1990/1992), (2000/2004). P. Ricoeur (2004/2005). P. Ricoeur (1990/1992). P. Ricoeur (2004/2005), p. 109. Here, as elsewhere, we recognize an inspiration from Hannah Arendt and her philosophy of action. Cf. her reflections on forgiving and promising founded on the human conditions of plurality, H. Arendt (1958), pp. 237–241. U. Beck (1986/1992). P. Ricoeur (2004/2005), p. 122. See Chapter 1 in this book. H-G. Gadamer (1960/1975), p. 295.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4

5 6

A. Giddens (1999), p. 4. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), pp. 163–166. K. Westö (2007), p. 23. I will not elaborate further on the controversies associated with the fact that the Russians moved the University to the new Capital in Helsinki during the nineteenth century; however, this was done without acknowledging the legacy of Åbo Akademi. After Independence, a Swedish-speaking university was founded in Åbo/Turku, and a few years later also a Finnish-speaking university, claiming the heritage. G. Olsson (2007), p. 17. M. Monmonier (1996). P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. xv.

Notes 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

127

Ibid., p. 24. Printer at Henriksgatan 7, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 213. The author himself presents the book as a return to a lacuna in the problematic of two earlier major works: Time and Narrative. Volume 1—3 (P. Ricoeur 1983/1984, 1984/1985, 1985/1988) and Oneself as Another (1990/1992), which I consider as preparatory works to the memory book Memory, History, Forgetting. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 147. The English translation of Ricoeur (2000/2004) uses the word “policy.” However, I find “politics” more appropriate. The material for the following section originates from a doctoral course on Memory politics in Sweden and Finland, which I conducted together with Professor Erling Bjurström in 2006. B. Anderson (1991/2006). Here, I find it appropriate to add some reflections on the distinct role played by the University and the students in forming a national identity in the two countries. It is a historical fact that it was within the faculties and the student organizations within the university, which now had been transferred to the new Capital of Helsinki, where the Finnish nation, heavily informed by Romanticism, was born. Student corporations were among the first official organizations to adopt the Finnish language for the recording of the minutes of their meetings; as a consequence of this, the University had a constituent role in the forming of Finland as a nation. Therefore, the students and faculties in Finland always initiate great nationalistic undertakings during Independence Day; while in Sweden, the University and the students do not, as they had no strategic role in the formation of the nation. For a long time, after the separation from Finland, there was no university at all in the Capital, the two remaining universities being located in the smaller cities of Uppsala and Lund. H. Berggren & L. Trägårdh (2006). H. Arendt (1958). P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 68. In my presentation I have linked together two distinct sections which are located at a great distance from each other in Ricoeur’s work: “The abuses of natural memory: blocked memory, manipulated memory, abusively controlled memory” (ibid., pp. 68–92) and “The forgetting of recollection: uses and abuses” (ibid., pp. 443–456). P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 57. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87.

128 22

23

24 25

26

Notes

In my selection of the focus and events, I have excluded the common German link. Both Sweden and Finland have not only strong historical connections with German history, but also problems coping with and incorporating their close relationship with Germany during World War II into their national history. However, this is a subject that has been more widely discussed and commented on in numerous publications in the last decade. An associated discussion is the question of the Russian link. The influences from Russia have changed over the decades, and the prerequisites for an evaluation of this link differ much over time. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. xx. Perhaps one should add that compared to other regions, the relationships between Finland and Sweden seems to be relatively untroubled. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. xv. P. Kemp (2005), this book will soon be available in an English translation: Citizen of the World. Political and Educational Philosophy for the 21st Century (P. Kemp, forthcoming in 2010 as The World Citizen). In this framework, Ulrich Beck has delivered important reflections from the perspective of a cosmopolitan European project.

Chapter 5 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

I. Wallerstein (1999). H. Nowotny et al. (2001), pp. 215–229. Among these new generalistspecialists we might identify such authors as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Saskia Sassen, David Held, and many others. Cf. how Ricoeur coped with the relationship between Gadamer and Ricoeur in his essay “Hermeneutics and critique of ideologies,” Ricoeur (1981), pp. 63–100. U. Beck (1986/1992), (2002/2004). C. West (1989), (1993). E. Hobsbawn (2007), p. 15. I. Wallerstein (1999) uses this notion. H. Nowotny et al. (2001), p. 1. J-F. Lyotard (1979/1984). M. Hardt & A. Negri (2005/2006), pp. 231–237. This is one of the main theses in G. Vattimo (1994/1997). D. Ihde (1998), p. 50. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 41.

Notes 14 15

16 17

129

Ibid., pp. 147–161. There is a clear structural continuity concerning this “alienated” phenomenology in Ricoeur’s entire philosophical project, from the early “diagnostic” operations in his doctoral dissertation in 1950 to the parallel constitution of time (1985) and place (2000) in his later works. P. Ricoeur (2000/2004), p. 153. P. Ricoeur (1983), pp. 85–129. Peter Kemp (2005) has elaborated on this threefold mimesis process as a process of cultivation. Cf. Bernt Gustavsson (2005).

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Index

1996 European Year of Lifelong Learning 66 Åbo/Turku (Finland) 85–6, 126n. 4 absolute knowledge 51, 114, 115 philosophizing without 25–9, 90 adaptability 69 lifelong learning and 72–7 aesthetic of reading 16–17 age of hermeneutics 6 globalization and 57–9, 82, 110–14 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia 86 Alheit, Peter 69–70 Althusser, Louis 9 anthropology of disproportion 20–1 Apel, Karl-Otto 4, 114 aporias 44–5 Arendt, Hannah 77, 95, 107, 114, 119n. 12, 120n. 28, 121n. 40 Aristotle 5, 34, 35, 39, 43, 90–1 Aufklärung 56–7, 107 Augustine, St. 43, 120n. 28 authenticity adaptability vs. 75–6 author, death of see death of the author Barthes, Roland 9 Bauman, Zygmunt 114

Beauvoir, Simone de 9, 107, 121n. 40 Beck, Ulrich 65, 77 being Heideggerean 35–7 Being and Time (Heidegger) 35–7, 43, 53 Bell, Daniel 65 Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste 88 biographicalization 69–70 blocked memory 95, 96, 103 Finland’s 98, 101 Sweden’s 99 Boltanski, Luc 71–2, 75, 76 Bonaparte, Napoleon 86 capitalism cognitive 112 spirit of 71–2 Castells, Manuel 41, 59, 65, 66 Certeau, Michel de 24 Chiappello, Eve 71–2, 75, 76 Christianity God as Kenosis 55, 56 cogito 25 cognitive capitalism 112 cognitive horizontalization 59–60 Collége du France 21, 22 competence 58, 80, 112 project 72–3 The Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur) 27–8, 42

138

Index

conflict resolution, peaceful 28 creativity 18–19, 80–1 aporia of 14 critical thinking 108 Dalbiez, Roland 42 Dasein 36, 113 time and 44 Dauenhauer, Bernhard 24 Davidson, Donald 23 death of the author literary works and 11–14, 15–16 philosophy of action and 22–3, 28–9 Deleuze, Gilles 10 De l’interprétation (Freud and Philosophy) (Ricoeur) 47–8 democracy 109, 114 Derrida, Jacques 10 Descartes, René 13, 36 cogito of 25 Descombes, Vincent 2 Dewey, John 125n. 1 Dilthey, Wilhelm 31, 33–5, 122n. 5, 122n. 6 distanciation 17, 31 hermeneutical function of 47–52 Dosse, François 2, 10, 118n. 1 Dufrenne, Mikel 18, 19, 28 Dylan, Bob 106 Elizabeth, Tsarina of Russia 87 Enlightenment 56–7 epistemology dualism between ontology and 37–8 introduction of hermeneutics into 33–8, 40, 43, 124n. 28 epochal hubris 106 Esprit (journal) 12, 118n. 4 Europe global competitiveness 68, 74

European Union 66, 68 Finland’s membership 87, 105 Sweden’s status in 99–100 evidence 80, 112 existentialism 4, 19 see also French existentialism explanation 49–50, 51 Fallible Man (Ricoeur) 20 Fejes, Andreas 70 fiction history vs. 46 Finland 85, 127n. 15, 128n. 22 identity and cartographical paradox of 85–6 independence celebrations 92–3, 94, 97–8 independence movement 86–7 memory politics 100–1, 104 see also Sweden-Finland separation flexibility lifelong learning and 67–9, 70–1, 72–4, 75–7, 78–80, 112 need 75 forced memory 95, 96 Finland’s 98 forgetting 24–5, 89–90, 95 history and 83, 91–2, 104 see also memory Foucault, Michel 9, 21, 55, 107 freedom human 19–20 Kantian 56–7 Freedom and Nature: The voluntary and the involuntary (Ricoeur) 19–20 French existentialism 9 French philosophy 14 French structuralism Ricoeur’s confirmation with 48

Index Freud and Philosophy (De l’interprétation) (Ricoeur) 47–8 Freud, Sigmund 42, 48 Friedman, Thomas 58, 74 fundamentalism 83 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 31, 38–40, 50, 80, 122n. 5 Ricoeur vs. 50–1 Galilee, Galileo 34, 35 Gates, Bill 71 Geist-philosophy 107 gender issue 121n. 40 German hermeneutics 5, 33–40, 113, 122n. 5 Giddens, Anthony 70, 83 globalization 6, 110–11, 123n. 16, 125n. 49 challenges of 82 concept of 40–1 contributions of philosophy to 111–14 hermeneutics and 6, 7, 41–2, 52–8, 113–14 lifelong learning and 67–74 Hardt, Michael 107 Harvey, David 59 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9 Heidegger, Martin 9, 31, 36–7, 40, 52, 55, 56, 80, 106 Ricoeur’s critique of 37–8, 42–7 hermeneutics 3–4, 7 current status of 30–2 Diltheyan 33–5, 122n. 5 Gadamerian 38–40, 50–1 globalization and 6, 7, 41–2, 52–8, 113–14 Heideggerian 36–7 history of 31–3

139

horizontal/vertical thinking and 60–3 lifelong learning and 74–8 practical approach 80–1 as pre-understanding 35–40, 42 Ricoeur’s metamorphosis of 5, 6–7, 22, 48–52, 113 Schleiermacher’s 33, 122n. 5 of the self 14–18 Vattimo (nihilistic) conception of 32, 52–7, 113, 115 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Ricoeur) 42 Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Ricoeur) 47 historical time 45, 115–17 historical understanding 32 history 115–16 fiction vs. 46 memory politics and 47, 90–1, 94–5, 102–5. see also Finland; Sweden History and Truth (Ricoeur) 12 human capacity (homo capax) 15, 16, 78, 80 four-dimensional determination of 24–5 human freedom 19–20 human sciences 34, 35, 36, 38–9, 79, 123n. 6 Huntington, Samuel 84 Husserl, Edmund 4, 9, 36, 43 Hyppolite, Jean 21 Ihde, Don 116 information geography of 58–9 horizontalization of 58, 59–60 informational society 59 see also knowledge society inhabited space 116–17 innovation 112 lifelong learning and 73–4

140

Index

internationalism 99–100, 104, 105 interpretation theory see hermeneutics Jaspers, Karl 19, 42 influence on Ricoeur 28 just allotment of memory 84, 89–92, 95–6 Kant, Immanuel 43, 56–7, 106, 119n. 6 Kemp, Peter 104–5 kenosis 55, 56 knowledge society 65 disorientation in 73–4 educational challenges in 66–7 globalization and 111–12 new class divide in 73 Lacan, Jacques 9 language philosophy and 110 learning, lifelong see lifelong learning learning society 65 Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (Ricoeur) 121n. 37 Le même et l’autre (Modern French Philosophy) (Descombes) 2 Lenin, Vladimir 87 Lévinas, Emmanuel 10, 18 lifelong education 66, 125n. 1 lifelong learning 125n. 6 between adaptation and innovation 71–4 global consensus on 65–7 globalization challenges and 67–9 philosophical perspective 74–8 societal perspective 65–6, 68–74 Lifelong Learning for All (OECD) 66

Linderman, Eduard 125n. 1 Lipponnen, Paavo 98 logical positivism 4 Lönnrot, Elias 101 Luther, Martin 21 Lyotard, Jean-François 10, 65, 112 manipulated memory 95, 96 Finland’s 98, 101 Sweden’s 99 Mannerheim, Gustaf 97 Marcel, Gabriel 9, 19, 44 Marx, Karl 48 mediation 76 growing importance of 4–5 memory 24–5, 83, 84, 90 public celebrations and 88–90, 92 Ricoeur’s typology 95–6, 97, 98, 99, 121n. 37 technology and 89–90 see also just allotment of memory Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur) 42, 46–7, 84, 89, 90–1, 116, 127n. 10 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9, 15, 20, 44, 121n. 36 metaphors 18–19 of play 50 Metaphysics 52–3, 54–5 modernity 108 second age of 109 Mounier, Emmanuel 11, 12 natural sciences 33–5 Negri, Antonio 107 The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiappello) 71–4, 75

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 48, 52, 109, 114 anti-cogito of 25 death of God 55–6 nihilism 52–7, 60, 115 consequences of the technological transformation and 31 nonfoundationalism 56 Nora, Pierre 96 Novothy, Helga 111 Nussbaum, Martha 107 Obama, Barack 106 OECD (Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development) 66 Oneself as Another (Ricoeur) 24, 76, 127n. 10 ontology dualism between epistemology and 37–8 Ricoeur’s 43 ontology of disproportion 20–1 peace forgetfulness of 93–4, 98–100 personal identity 76 personalism 11–12, 119n. 4 Peters, John Durham 13–14 phenomenology 4 limitations of 115–16 Ricoeur’s 44–5 of time 44–5, 46 philosophical anthropology 14, 15, 16–17, 76, 119n. 12, 121n. 40 action-oriented 21–5 philosophy contribution to globalization 111–14 language’s impact on 110 philosophy of action 15, 21–5

141

Plato 13, 90–1 play Gadamer’s concept of 50, 124n. 33 politics Arendt’s concept of 95 positivism rise of 34 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard) 111–12 postmodernism 109–10 present naming the 106–8, 117 public celebrations memory politics and 88–90, 92 radical humanism 14 reading 62–3 dialectical character of 17 link between text and history 23 transformative power of 17–18 reality dissolution of 52–7, 58, 112–13 reflexivity 76, 77–8 hermeneutically informed model of 78–81 Re-thinking Science (Novothy) 111 Ricoeur, Paul 80, 114, 118n. 1 contradictory images of 1–2 critique of Heidegger 42–7 cross-boundary philosophical investigations 10–11 Gadamer vs. 50–1 ideas on selfhood 76–7 intellectual style and methodology 25–7 Mounier’s influence on 11–12, 118n. 4 philosophical journey of 9–10 philosophical profile of 3 works of 2–3, 19–20

142

Index

risk society 65, 70, 73 Ritivoi, Andreea Deciv 10 Rorty, Richard 4, 56, 118n. 3, 121n. 36 Rose, Nikolas 70 The Rule of Metaphore (Ricoeur) 14, 19 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig 101 Russia 86, 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9, 19, 43 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 5, 33, 122n. 5 science 111 dualistic order of 34–5 secularization 55 self hermeneutics of 14–18 pedagogy of 70 self-confrontation 77 self cultivation (Bildung) 74, 78, 81 selfhood dialectical character of 76–7 Sennett, Richard 71 Snellman, Johan Vilhelm 101 society contemporary 65 informational 59 risk 65, 70, 73 see also knowledge society spatiality 116–17 Sprengtporten, Göran Magnus 86 Stockholm (Sweden) 86–7 structuralism 14, 15 Sweden 85, 104, 128n. 22 celebration of national holiday 93–4, 98–100 identity of 87–8 Sweden-Finland separation 84, 86–7, 101–2 memory politics 88, 92–4 The Symbolism of Evil (Ricoeur) 20

symbols and symbolism 13, 58, 119n. 6, 121n. 37 Taylor, Charles 4, 121n. 36 technology Heidegger’s rejection of 53 hermeneutics and 53–4 memory and 89–90 nihilism consequences of 31 testimony 83–4, 91 text aporetic structure 62 death of author and 11–13, 15–16 in front of 14–18 interpretation of 32–3 reader and 23 Ricoeur’s ideas of 48 semantic autonomy of 15 theoretical antihumanism 14, 15 time 116–17 Heideggerean 44–5, 53 Ricoeur’s idea of 43, 44, 45–7, 115–17 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 24, 42, 43, 127n. 10 Todorov, Tvetan 96 tolerance, cosmopolitan 83 traditions 83, 84, 108 traumatic memory 96 truth 27, 49, 83, 114–15 Gadamerian 39–40 Heideggerean 37 Vattimo’s idea of 32 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 38, 39 Turku see Åbo/Turku understanding Gadamer’s idea of 50–1 Heideggerean 36–7 hermeneutics of 32–5, 40, 42

Index universities challenges in knowledge society 67 national identity and 127n. 15 Uppsala (Sweden) 85 Vattimo, Gianni 30, 31, 32, 40, 52–7, 58, 60, 74, 113, 115 vertical thinking 60, 61–2, 74, 83 violence 55 von Wright, Georg Henrik 4, 107

143

war memories 92–3, 94, 104 Weber, Max 71 West, Cornel 109 Westö, Kjell 85–6 will 19–21 The World Citizen (Kemp) 104–5 world citizenship 103, 104–5 Yeaxlee, Basil 125n. 1 Žižek, Slavoj 107

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