The culture of recognition: Another reading of Paul Ricoeur's work

This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement. The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary. The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs - in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition - Paul Ricoeur's cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur's more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of "being able." I maintain that all anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that concerns human situatedness.;The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar "dramatic" modality of this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one's self through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one's culture. Put differently, the matter of this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaitre) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader's own reconfigurative process as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive reflection of a living, acting and struggling human subject - and is, therefore, not directly explainable - this reconfiguration can only be pointed at or suggested. In spite of its postcritical aim, therefore, the dissertation remains an academic work that functions at the level of critical explanation. The postcritical cultural hermeneutics has to be approached through the critical means that are exemplified by the scholarly analysis in this dissertation; our analysis stands for the critical and objectifying (academic) culture within which the reader reads this dissertation as a cultural and interpretive subject.;After having propaedeutically explained the critical scholarly course and the ultimate postcritical task of this dissertation in part one, part two then breaks open the realm of cultural hermeneutics in the work of Paul Ricoeur by "letting it appear" through the critical analysis of the different perceptions concerning his last major work The Course of Recognition . This is the moment of "re-" or re-membering again the cultural condition. Ricoeur's post-Hegelian notion of "cultural objectification" necessitates, however, examining the synthetic moment of "con." Part three analyzes this "con" by pointing out a trajectory of Ricoeur's "post-Hegelian Kantian" though in his early works that runs from the condition of objectivity to cultural objectivity, and furthermore to a poetically constituted hermeneutic of culture. In turn, part four contrasts Ricoeur's thought with that of Martin Heidegger, focusing on Ricoeur's later works that propose an etho-poetics of culture that is manifested in institution. Part four, which closes off the scholarly analysis of Ricoeur's cultural hermeneutics, thereby displays the moment of "naissance," or "having-been-born-as-an-ethico-political-subject." The last part of this dissertation, part five, distances itself from the academic or scholarly mode by revealing the underlying "dramatic" structure of this dissertation. As a re-reading of the reading of Ricoeur's work in parts two, three, and four, part five exposes a new dimension to the whole of this work; namely, an experiential one that concerns the current reader of the work and his or her cultural re-con-naissance.