Ricoeur's Hermeneutic as Appropriation

1

Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic as Appropriation: A Way of

Understanding Oneself In Front of the Text

Ruby S. Suazo, Ph.D.

Department of Philosophy

University of San Carlos

This paper will focus on Ricoeur’s project of understanding the self in

contemporary thought. Marsh observes that the later Ricoeur – the Ricoeur in Oneself As

Another generally claims “that selfhood… implies otherness and vice versa.”1

For

Ricoeur, the project of understanding the self culminates in his defining of the ethical

perspective as “aiming at the good life with and for others in just institutions.”2 Marsh

indicates that this definition has three components: “the self as oriented to the good,

solicitude as defining my life with others in community, and just institutions.”3

Furthermore, the meaning of the good life is “something that one wishes or hopes for. It

is something that someone is concerned about either for oneself or for another.”4 I argue,

therefore, that the expansion of the self from being concerned with oneself to being

concerned with another does not happen instantaneously. This expansion is a consequent

of the self’s life-long reflective activity.

Ricoeur claims that Jean Nabert’s reflexive philosophy influenced greatly his

philosophizing. Accordingly, reflexive5 philosophy

considers the most radical philosophical problems to those that concern

the possibility of self-understanding as the subject of the operation of

knowing, willing, evaluating, and so on. Reflexion is that act of turning

back upon itself by which a subject grasps, in a moment of intellectual

1 James L. Marsh, “The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics

Controversy” in Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity, edited by Richard A. Cohen and James L.

Marsh (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 224.

2 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press, 1992), 180 as cited by Marsh, 224.

3 Marsh, 224

4 Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Response to Rawls” in Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity,

edited by Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 210.

5 Kathleen Blamey narrates: “In French, the adjective reflexive incorporates two meanings that are

distinguished in English by reflective and reflexive. On the advice of the author (Paul Ricoeur) I have

chosen to retain the latter in order to emphasize that this philosophy is subject-oriented; it is reflexive in the

subject’s act of turning back upon itself. The other possible meaning should, however, also be kept in

mind.” Kathleen Blamey in the endnote of Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” From Text to Action: In

Hermeneutics, II, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Illinois: Northwestern University

Press, 1991), 339.

2

clarity and moral responsibility, the unifying principle of the operations

among which it is dispersed and forgets itself as subject.6

Ricoeur explains further, “The idea of reflexion carries with it the desire for absolute

transparence, a perfect coincidence of the self with itself, which would make

consciousness of self indubitable knowledge….”7 However; this desire for absolute

transparency is not intuitively possible. It is only disclosed “through the mirror of the

objects and acts, the symbols and signs.”8

Consequently, reflection becomes

interpretation.

Reflection as Interpretation

Ricoeur writes that all interpretation aims at overcoming the distance between the

past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself. To overcome

this distance, the interpreter appropriates the meaning of the text to himself. He makes

familiar a foreign text by making it his own. In so doing, there is a conscious effort on

the part of the interpreter to arrive at a complete understanding of oneself. This,

however, is only possible through his understanding of the other. Thus, hermeneutics is

surmised as “self-understanding by means of understanding others.”9 Self-understanding

by means of understanding others signifies reflection, which must not be qualified as a

blind intuition. For reflection not to be a blind intuition, it must be mediated by the

expressions in which life objectifies itself. As Ricoeur quoted Nabert, the latter says that

reflection is nothing other than the appropriation of our act of existing by

means of a critique applied to the works and the acts which are the signs

of this act of existing. Thus, reflection is a critique. . . in the sense that the

cogito can be recovered only by the detour of a decipherment of the

documents of its life. Reflection is the appropriation of our effort to exist

and of our desire to be by means of the works which testify to this effort

and this desire..10

Ricoeur understands that “the increase in subjectivity... goes hand in hand with an

increase in reflection and meaning. Subjectivity is granted us in and through the great

6 Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” From Text to Action: Essays In Hermeneutics, II, 12.

7 Ibid., pp. 12 – 13.

8 John B. Thompson, “Editor’s Introduction” in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, edited, translated, and introduced by John B.

Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 17. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy:

An Essay on Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 46.

9 Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in

Hermeneutics, edited by Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 16-17.

10

Ibid., 17-18.

3

variety of experiences that have shaped a cultural heritage.”11

The aim of reflexive

philosophy is “to appropriate in praxis an originary dynamism which grounds human

existence and with which the conscious, practical self does not coincide.”12

Through

reflection, the subject recaptures itself through the expressions of life that objectify it.

Nevertheless, Ricoeur recognizes the risk of the subject’s misinterpretation due to the

setting in of false consciousness. This is why he also emphasizes that reflection is a task –

“the task of equating my concrete experience with the affirmation: I am.”13

This does not,

however, dampen his spirit for he is positive that this is the reason why hermeneutics

becomes relevant. Hermeneutics exists due to misinterpretations.14

Reflexive philosophy becomes pertinent to Ricoeur’s project because it is neither

direct nor immediate. In fact, reflection needs to be doubly indirect for the reasons that

“existence is evinced only in documents of life [and that] because consciousness is first

of all false consciousness, and it is always necessary to rise by means of a corrective

critique from misunderstanding to understanding.”15

Nabert’s ethical philosophy seeks

to recapture the primordial source of human existence, a quest made indirectly possible

through the interpretation of the signs in which the “desire-to-be” is inscribed. This view

implies that there is at least a direct relationship between the understanding of the signs

of the “desire-to-be” and self-understanding. Henceforth, self-understanding passes

through the signs in which the self inscribes itself. Ricoeur believes that there exists a

relationship that is frequently disregarded, the relationship between the act of existence

and the signs in which this act is represented. For Ricoeur, the sign that mediates the

subject and its experience is inscribed in language. Language in turn is also inscribed in

the text.

The Text’s Proposed World

In Ricoeur’s theory of the text, there are two elements to be remembered. First,

Ricoeur wants to overcome the romantic notion of interpretation as understanding the

intentions of the author behind the text. To interpret is to grasp the world opened up in

front of the text. Secondly, Ricoeur develops a concept of the text as autonomous work,

which makes it possible to include a critical moment of explanation in the process of

interpretation.

In this sense, interpretation is put side by side with the moment of ‘understanding’

the situation of the reader apart from the writer. Interpretation thus becomes the

11

John Van den Hengel, The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of

Paul Ricoeur (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 15.

12

Ibid., 15-16.

13

Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflections: II,” The Conflict of

Interpretations, 329.

14

Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” The Conflict of Interpretations, 18.

15

Ibid.

4

projection of the ownmost possibilities that the reader can find in the situation. Ricoeur,

applying this to the theory of the text as autonomous, says that “what must be interpreted

in a text is a proposed world which I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my

ownmost possibilities.”16

Because the meaning of the text is autonomous, it escapes from the psychological

intention of the writer. The truth value of the text is now independent from the writer’s

original intention. The sense of the text as envisioned by the author may now have a

reference different from the situation of the reader. The open-endedness of the text may

vary from one interpreter to another inasmuch as they vary in the projection of their

ownmost possibilities. The re-appropriation of the text becomes variable.

He explains further that “insofar as the meaning of a text is rendered autonomous

with respect to the subjective intention of its author, the essential question is not to

recover, behind the text, the lost intention but to unfold, in front of the text, the ‘world’ it

opens up and discloses.”17

In front of the text, the subject, i.e., both that of the author and the reader,

becomes secondary.18

What is given primary importance is the matter of the text. By

freeing the text from the subjectivities of the author and the reader, the first task now of

hermeneutics, Ricoeur asserts, is “to seek in the text itself, on the one hand, the internal

dynamic that governs the structuring of the work and, on the other hand, the power that

the work possesses to project itself outside itself and to give birth to a world that would

truly be the ‘thing’ referred to by the text.”19

In short, the task of hermeneutics becomes

twofold: “to reconstruct the internal dynamic of the text and to restore to the work its

ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that [the reader]

could inhabit.”20

This internal dynamic and external projection constitutes what Ricoeur

calls the work of the text.

As a result, Ricoeur resists the dialectic of understanding and explanation which

is the consequent of the two one-sided attitudes of reducing understanding to empathy

and of reducing explanation to an abstract combinatory system.21

To do so, he elucidates

again the meaning of understanding and explanation as follows: “by understanding I

mean the ability to take up again within oneself the work of structuring that is performed

16

Ibid., 142.

17

Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” From Text to Action: Essays In

Hermeneutics, II, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 35.

18

Paul Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” From Text to Action: Essays In Hermeneutics, II, 17.

19

Ibid.

20

Ibid., 18. See also Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding”, From Text

to Action: Essays In Hermeneutics, II, 113.

21

Ibid., 19.

5

by the text, and by explanation, the second-order operation grafted onto this

understanding which consists in bringing to light the codes underlying this work of

structuring that is carried through in company with the reader.”22

He explains further that

such a resistance leads him to use the very dialectic of understanding and explanation at

the level of the “sense” immanent in the text to define interpretation. He then claims that

this would be his first contribution to the hermeneutical philosophy out of which he is

working.23

Distanciation and Appropriation

“The driving force behind the desire to know is the need to make the world over

in terms that are meaningful.”24

This is the polar force of the reader’s appropriation.

When the reader chooses to engage the otherness as constituted by a text, he nonetheless

enters into a struggle between appropriation and distanciation. This struggle occurs by

virtue of the productive engagement that happens between the text and the reader. This

productive engagement is seen as the process of redescribing the world, first, of the

reader himself and, second, that of others as inscribed in the text. Amdal considers this as

an interpretive process that “begins with the analytic power of explanation and is then

challenged by the unitary force of understanding.”25

The said engagement of explanation

and understanding is expected to produce the interpretation which in return responds to

the initial need to engage distanciation and appropriation.

Ricoeur employs the theory of the text26

because he finds it as a good guide for

showing that “the act of subjectivity is not so much what initiates understanding as what

terminates it. [Moreover, he takes] this terminal act [as] characteris[ing] appropriation.”27

To reiterate what has been said above, the rejoining of subjectivity is not the one that

supports the meaning of the text. It only responds to the matter of the text as proposed

meanings unfold in front of the text.

22

Ibid., 18 – 19.

23

Ibid., 19.

24

Geir Amdal. “Explanation and Understanding: The Hermeneutic Arc -- Paul Ricoeur’s Theory

of Interpretation”, Cand. Philol. Thesis, University of Oslo, May 2001 [thesis online]; available from

http://folk_uio_no/geira/thesis/thesis_pdf.pdf; 15 March 2007, 61.

25

Ibid.

26

Morrison comments that “a theory of texts is important in Ricoeur's hermeneutic as it offers the

interpreter space for the application of critical tools. True appropriation of a text's meaning is a reflexive

action realized at the intersection of ontological naiveté and critical distanciation.” Bradley T. Morrison. “A

Phenomenology of Marital Dynamics and Pastoral Care” [article online]; available from

http://www.xcelco.on.ca/~btmorrison/ricoeur/Ricoeur&Systems.html; 7 July 2006.

27

Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,

113.

6

Here, distanciation becomes very important. The introduction of distanciation,

first, establishes the autonomy of the text with respect to its author, its situation and its

original reader. Ricoeur also confirms the existence of a second distanciation “by which a

new being-in-the-world, projected, is freed from the false evidences of every reality.”28

He asserts that “distanciation implements all the strategies of suspicion, among which the

critique of ideology is a principal modality. Distanciation, in all its forms and figures,

constitutes par excellence the critical moment in understanding.”29

In other words,

distanciation is understood as more than a mere distance as it implies a creation of

distance, in order to permit a re-description of reality.

Distanciation as a methodology corresponds to what Ricoeur calls as the first way

of reading a text. Reading, first, “can prolong and reinforce the suspense which affects

the text’s reference to a surrounding world and to the audience of speaking subjects.”30

The first way of reading is referred to as an explanatory attitude. This first reading

confirms the first and second distanciation explained above. The real aim of reading,

however, is borne by the second way, which becomes the real aim because it “lift[s] the

suspense and fulfill[s] the text in present speech…. [It] reveals the true nature of the

suspense which intercepts the movement of the text towards meaning.”31

The text’s movement towards meaning may closely affirm possible imaginative

variation of the ego. With this possibility, a critique of the illusions of the subject is very

much needed. This only happens if and only if the second way of reading a text operates

like a premature appropriation that is directed against an alienating distanciation.

However, if distanciation is taken as a condition of a possible understanding of oneself in

front of the text, then it can aptly be taken as an avenue of the critique of ideology which

organically implies a critique of the illusions of the subject. From this, Ricoeur describes

distanciation as “[d]istanciation from oneself [that] demands that the appropriation of the

proposed worlds offered by the text passes through the disappropriation of the self.” 32

28


113.

29

Ibid.

30

Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences, 158.

31

Ibid.

32

Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences, 94. “[T]he concept of ‘appropriation’… demands an internal critique. For the metamorphosis of

the ego… implies a moment of distanciation in the relation of self to itself; hence understanding is as much

disappropriation as appropriation. A critique of the illusions of the subject… therefore can and must be

incorporated into self-understanding. The consequence for hermeneutics is important: we can no longer

oppose hermeneutics and the critique of ideology. The critique of ideology is the necessary detour which

self-understanding must take, if the latter is to be formed by the matter of the text and not by the prejudices

of the reader.” Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Hermeneutics and the

Human Sciences, 144.

7

Consequently, the critique on the illusions of the subject is a critique of false

consciousness that can become an integral part of hermeneutics.33

Distanciation abolishes in appropriation “any trace of affective affinity with the

intention of an author.”34

Appropriation connotes understanding at and through distance.

This makes the possibility of integrating appropriation into the theory of interpretation

without introducing again the primacy of subjectivity.35

Ricoeur ascertains this as he

says:

That appropriation does not imply the secret return of the sovereign

subject can be attested to in the following way: if it remains true that

hermeneutics terminates in self-understanding, then the subjectivism of

this proposition must be rectified by saying that to understand oneself is to

understand oneself in front of the text. Consequently, what is appropriation

from one point of view is disappropriation from another. To appropriate is

to make what was alien become one’s own. What is appropriated is indeed

the matter of the text. But the matter of the text becomes my own only if I

disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text be. So I

exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text.36

Thus, at the very heart of self-understanding, the dialectic of objectification and

understanding, which are first perceived at the level of the text with its structures, sense

and reference, is set in place.

Appropriation: A New Concept of Interpretation

The ultimate aim in reading a text remains the understanding of what it means to

the reader. To understand the text is to interpret it. And, by interpretation, it means “the

concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal.”37

Conjunction and renewal are necessary

elements for the reason that to read is “to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the

text. [Furthermore,] this conjunction of discourses reveals… an original capacity for

renewal which is its open character.”38

Thus, “an interpretation is not authentic unless it

33

Ibid., 95.

34

Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences, 143.

35


113.

36

Ibid. See also, Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography” in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The

Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Illinois: Open Court: 1995), 35.

37


Sciences, 158.

38

Ibid.

8

culminates in some form of appropriation (Aneignung), if by that term we understand the

process by which one makes one’s own (eigen) what was initially other or alien

(fremd).”39

As Ricoeur expounds:

By ‘appropriation’, I understand this: that the interpretation of a text

culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth

understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply

begins to understand himself. This culmination of the understanding of a

text in self-understanding is characteristic of the kind of reflective

philosophy which… I have called ‘concrete reflection’.40

Nonetheless, appropriation implies “a moment of dispossession of the egoistic and

narcissistic ego.”41

It is “the… making-one’s-own, of the ground of one’s existence, the

home of the subject.”42

Thus, the moment of appropriation marks the appearance of the

subjectivity of the reader.

It must be noted, however, that although appropriation marks the appearance of

the subjectivity of the reader,

[t]he act of appropriation does not seek to rejoin the original intentions of

the author, but rather to expand the conscious horizons of the reader by

actualizing the meaning of the text. Although interpretation thus

culminates in self-understanding, it cannot be equated with naïve

subjectivism. Ricoeur emphasizes that appropriation is not so much an act

of possession as an act of dispossession, in which the awareness of

immediate ego is replaced by a self-understanding mediated through the

text. Thus interpretation gives rise to reflection because appropriation is

bound to the revelatory power of the text, to its power to disclose a

possible world.43

39

Paul Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics,” Hermeneutics and the

Human Sciences, 178. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” Hermeneutics and the

Human Sciences, 113; Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” Hermeneutics and

the Human Sciences, 159; “Appropriation,” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 185.

40


Sciences, 158.

41

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and Surplus of Meaning (Texas: The Texas

University Press, 1976), 94.

42

Van den Hengel, The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur, 194.

43

John B. Thompson, “Editor’s Introduction” in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences, 18 – 19. Thompson further explains that “the culmination of interpretation in an act of

appropriation indicates that ontology forms the ultimate horizon of hermeneutics. In endorsing the quest for

ontology, Ricoeur reveals his distance from most Anglo-Saxon philosophies of language, as well as his

proximity to the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. Like the latter authors, Ricoeur considers hermeneutics

to be concerned with the understanding of being and the relations between beings. Nevertheless, Ricoeur

wishes to “resist the temptation to separate truth, characteristic of understanding, from the method put into

9

Even then, following the Husserlian phenomenology, subjectivity is not considered as

correlate of objectivity, that is, a subjectivity that constitutes objectivity. Subjectivity is

grounded on the ontological participation of being-in-the-world. The subject can provide

an epistemological justification and operate methodologically, only because of its

primordial grounding in participation. “The concept of participation breaks with any

vision of a self-constituting subjectivity. Participation implies that it is not the subject

who is the source of the unity of meaning, but something that precedes the subject.”44

Van den Hengel explains that “the sense of human experience is made through us but not

by us. We do not dominate the meaning, but meaning makes us at the same time that we

make it.”45

This assures that appropriation is never equivalent to the idea of an imperial

subject. This assurance, furthermore, is anchored on his insistence that appropriation is

dialectically linked to the objective characteristic of the text.

Ricoeur’s idea of understanding as self-understanding is not the same as the idea

of a self-conscious subject. The meaning of the consciousness is not derived from the

ego; it is derived from something outside itself. Ricoeur explains that

what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as

a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work

unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth, to understand is to understand

oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text

our finite capacity of understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text

and receiving from it enlarged self, which would be the proposed

existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.46

For Ricoeur, the appropriation of the subject, which is the completion of interpretation, is

accomplished through reading. The transformation of the objectivity and autonomy of the

text into an event of discourse for a reader further completes interpretation. This is

accomplished when reading transforms the otherness of the text into an event of

discourse which happens to be a new one for the subject. The transformation is new in

the sense that it is “not a repetition of the original event, but a creation produced at the

behest of the text.”47

The result of appropriation is the drifting away of the text from its

original addressees. In other words, the constitution of the reader’s self is not

operation by disciplines which have sprung from exegesis”. (See Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and

Hermeneutics,” The Conflict of Interpretations, 11.)

44 Van den Hengel, The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur, 107.

45 Ibid.

46 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences, 143.

47

Van den Hengel, The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur, 201.

10

contemporaneous with that of the original addressees but with the constitution of

meaning that the text projects.48

Even though the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics is to render one’s own what was

previously considered as alien, appropriation must not lose its existential force. This is to

be so because the aim of interpretation is to actualize the meaning of the text for the

present reader.49

Ricoeur confers that

[a]ppropriation remains the concept for the actualization of the meaning as

addressed to somebody. Potentially a text is addressed to anyone who can

read. Actually it is addressed to me, hic et nunc. Interpretation is

completed as appropriation when reading yields something like an event,

an event of discourse, which is an event in the present moment. As

appropriation, interpretation becomes an event.50

Ricoeur likens this to “the execution of a musical score; it marks the realization, the

enactment, of the semantic possibilities of the text.”51

In other words, appropriation as an

interpretation though commences from reading, it culminates in a concrete act like that of

speech in relation to discourse as its event and instance. Appropriation starts from

looking at the text as having a sense only. Even then, at the moment, a meaning is already

realized in the discourse of the reading of the subject.

Appropriating the meaning of the text implies that an insurmountable

responsibility is placed upon the subject as it might “constitute the primary category of a

theory of understanding.”52

Ricoeur assures all over time that appropriation does not

imply the surreptitious return of the sovereign subject. As he asserts, “[appropriation]

does not purport, as in Romantic hermeneutics, to rejoin the original subjectivity that

would support the meaning of the text. Rather it responds to the matter of the text, and

hence to the proposals of meaning the text unfolds.”53

Furthermore, appropriation loses

its arbitrariness insofar as it is the recovery of that which is at work, in labor, within the

text. What the interpreter says is a re-saying which activates what is said by the text.54

48


Sciences, 159.

49

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 91 – 92.

50

Ibid., 92.

51

Ibid.

52

Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography”, 35.

53

Paul Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” From Text to Action: Essays in

Hermeneutics, II, 37.

54


Sciences, 164.

11

Appropriating the text to one’s self-understanding must not be understood as the

culminating point of reading. It however anticipates the metamorphosis of the self. Thus,

reading should end with acting inasmuch as reading effects thought. As Ricoeur

remarkably points out in his intellectual autobiography, Mounier convinces him that “a

flexible connection between… thought and action, without separating them or mixing

them together”55

must always be effected. This conviction leads him later in life to

elaborate the answers for the two remaining points of his later three problematics. The

three problematics, Ricoeur says, are grouped together as “that of the text…, that of

action…, and that of history.”56

Ricoeur concludes it however by saying that “it was

action… that occupied the median position between the text and history”57

because “in a

philosophy that was increasingly seen as a practical philosophy, acting constitutes the

core of what … is called being-in-the-world or … the act of inhabiting.”58

References

Amdal, Geir. “Explanation and Understanding: The Hermeneutic Arc -- Paul Ricoeur’s

Theory of Interpretation.” Cand. Philol. Thesis, University of Oslo, May 2001.

Thesis online. Available from http://folk_uio_no/geira/thesis/thesis_pdf.pdf.

Accessed March 15, 2007.

Marsh, James L. “The Right and the Good: A Solution to the Communicative Ethics

Controversy” in Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity. Edited by Richard

A. Cohen and James L. Marsh. New York: SUNY Press, 2002.

Morrison, Bradley T. A Phenomenology of Marital Dynamics and Pastoral Care. Article

online. Available from

http://www.xcelco.on.ca/~btmorrison/ricoeur/Ricoeur&Systems.html. Accessed 7

July 2006.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don

Ihde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

_____. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

_____. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern

University Press, 1991.

55

Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography”, 9.

56

Ibid., 32.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid., 38.

12

_____. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and

Interpretation. Edited, Translated, and Introduced by John B. Thompson.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

_____. “Intellectual Autobiography” in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Paul

Ricoeur. Illinois: Open Court, 1995.

_____. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and Surplus of Meaning. Texas: Texas


_____. Oneself As Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1992.

Thompson, John B. “Editor’s Introduction” in Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the

Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Edited,

translated, and introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge


Van den Hengel, John W. The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of

Paul Ricoeur. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

Ricoeur's Hermeneutic as Appropriation

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