Ricoeur Paul - On Translation

Richard Kearney

Translation has been a central feature of Paul Ricoeurs philosophy, though it was not until his later years that he actually made it an explicit theme of his work. The three essays collected in this volume are three such instances.

Well before Ricoeur thematized the subject, the act of translation was something which this leading twentieth-century thinker actually performed in his philosophical practice. Ricoeur was an inveterate mediator, someone who navigated and negotiated transits between rival intellectual positions. He was unequalled as a diplomat of philosophical exchange, forever finding a point of commerce if not always resolution between ostensibly irreconcilable viewpoints. Between Continental and Anglo-Saxon thought at the most general level. Then, within the Continental tradition more specifically, between existentialism and structuralism; between hermeneutics and Critical Theory; between phenomenology and the human sciences; between Freudian psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics; between literary theory and the philosophy of religion; between historical understanding (Verstehen) and scientific explanation (Erklren); between psychology and neuroscience; between ethics and politics, and so on. What is remarkable in all these critical intercessions is that Ricoeur never ceased to respect both adversarial partners in the exchange, deftly transmuting conflict into conversation. And this without ever sacrificing depth of conviction or acuity of evaluation. In his philosophical role as translator, Ricoeur was, I believe, unrivalled in his time. In a sense, one could say that Ricoeurs thought represented both philosophy as translation and a philosophy of translation.

Before proceeding to a more detailed account of Ricoeurs thematic analysis of translation, however, I wish to offer a brief overview of Ricoeurs expansive intellectual itinerary from his youthful explorations of existential phenomenology to his final writings on narrative, memory and history.

Paul Ricoeur died in his sleep at the age of ninety-two at his home in Chtenay-Malabry (Hauts-de-Seine outside Paris) on 20 May 2005.

Ricoeur was one of the most challenging, hospitable and enduring thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Valence, France, in 1913, he taught as professor of philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris (IV and X) and Louvain and as John Niveen Chair at the University of Chicago. Ricoeur published over thirty major works during his lifetime, ranging from existentialism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis, politics, religion and the theory of language. But Ricoeur was much more than a brilliant intellectual mediator between competing schools of thought. He also, and most significantly, developed his own particular brand of philosophical hermeneutics. Determined to find a path between (1) the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Gadamer and (2) the more radical hermeneutics of deconstruction (Derrida, Caputo) and Critical Theory (Habermas), Ricoeur endeavoured to chart a middle way which combined both the empathy and conviction of the former and the suspicion and detachment of the latter. He himself never gave a name to this third path (he was wary of founding a new ideology or -ism). But I think we would not be far wrong in naming it dialogical or diacritical hermeneutics. There were not many major figures in contemporary thought Husserl, Freud, Rawls, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Lvi- Strauss, Saussure, Austen, Arendt, Jaspers, Marcel, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida with whom he did not engage in robust debate.

Taking his tune from such German hermeneutic thinkers as Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, Ricoeur elaborated a complex set of inquiries into what he called the enigma of semantic innovation. How does new meaning come to be? How do we reconfigure the meanings of the past? These basic hermeneutic questions were guided by the thesis that existence is itself a mode of interpretation (