Hermeneutical crisis as rethinking the humanities: the question of the trace – traces of the past, cortical traces

Abstract

In this article, I would like to highlight Ricoeur’s manner of rethinking the humanities, by focusing on a particular case, namely his hermeneutical reading of the question of trace. Taking into consideration two different contexts: historiography (as captured in Time and Narrative) and the cognitive sciences (as it appears throughout Ricoeur’s dialogue with the neurobiologist Changeux, in What Makes Us Think?), I will show that the very notion of trace is the limit-notion that induces a hermeneutical crisis at the core of the historiography as well as at the centre of the cognitive science.

Keywords:

• Ricoeur
• trace
• hermeneutical crisis
• historiography
• neurobiology
• Changeux

Notes

1. Ricoeur (1963) “Structuralisme et herméneutique”, 596–627.

2. Ricoeur’s article “Phénoménologie et herméneutique” appeared for the first time in French, in 1974, in Man and World 3: 223–253 and it would be republished later in the volume Du texte à l’action: essais d’herméneutique II. Paris: Seuil, 1986.

3. Ricoeur (1975) “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics”, 85–102.

4. Ibid., 100.

5. Furet (1971) “Histoire quantitative et construction du fait historique”, 63–75.

6. Ricoeur (1986) À l’école de la phénoménologie, 365.

7. Ibid., 372.

8. Ricoeur (1975) “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics”, 100.

9. Ricoeur (1988) Time and Narrative. Vol. 3: Narrated Time, 125.

10. Ibid., 120.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 123.

13. Derrida (1973) Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.

14. Ibid., 67. Derrida pursues this definition of trace in his distinctive manner: ‘Such a trace is – if we can employ this language without immediately contradicting it or crossing it out as we proceed – more “primordial” than what is phenomenologically primordial’ (Ibid.).

15. We refer here to the well-known quotation from Being and Time, § 73: ‘What is “past”? Nothing else than that world within which they [the “Things”] belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was formerly within-the-world with respect to that world is still present-at-hand.’ Heidegger (1962) Being and Time, 432 [380].

16. Ricoeur (1988) Time and Narrative. Vol. 3: Narrated Time, 225.

17. Ibid., 124. Ricoeur’s acknowledgment of his debt to Levinas should not be confounded with a total acceptance: at the end of his reflections on the phenomenon of trace, Ricoeur is keen to note: ‘Levinas’s perspective, therefore, is very different from my own as regards the trace.’ This difference comes from the fact that ‘[…] Levinas places the absent outside of any memory, assigning it to an immemorial past’ (Ibid., 125).

18. Ricoeur (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, 274–280.

19. ‘We shall give the name “standing-for” [représentance] (or “taking the place of” [lieutenance]) to the relations between the constructions of history and their vis-à-vis, that is, a past that is abolished yet preserved in its traces.’ Ricoeur (1988) Time and Narrative. Vol. 3: Narrated Time, 100.

20. Ricoeur (1991) Temps et récit 3. Le temps raconté, 262.

21. Ibid., 271.

22. Ibid., 282.

23. Ibid., 334.

24. Both ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ are derived from the Latin limen, which means ‘threshold.’ Liminality is, as its definition states, the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process.

25. Changeux (1999) “Définition de la mémoire biologique”, 17.

26. Ibid., 20–21.

27. Changeux and Ricoeur (2002) What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, 147.

28. Greisch (2001) Paul Ricoeur. L’itinérance du sens, 308.

29. Ricoeur (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, 420.

30. Ibid., 422.

31. Changeux and Ricoeur (2002) What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, 150.

32. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Marinescu

Paul Marinescu has a PhD at the University of Bucharest and the University Lyon 3, with a thesis on “The Universality of Hermeneutics”. He works as researcher at the Alexandru Dragomir — Institute for Philosophy, Romania. He was co-editor (along with Olivier Abel) of Studia Phaenomenologica, vol. XIII/2013: On the Proper Use of Phenomenology. Paul Ricoeur Centenary. Paul Marinescu published articles and held international conferences on the French and German Hermeneutics. His main areas of research are: Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Historiography.