Understanding a Lateral Truth: Paul Ricoeur’s Intercultural Hermeneutics

ABSTRACT

Starting from Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic pluralism and its relevance from the point of view of the current intercultural debate, the article aims to elaborate a pluralistic model in which we recognize the need for a hermeneutic virtue, the phronesis as a prerequisite for understanding that each person can only see parts of truth ‘sideways’ and that it is not possible to compare one’s beliefs with those of others by looking at them from the outside, from a sort of superior view from above. Intercultural dialogue can only start from an awareness of the inadequacy and historical-cultural determinacy of different perspectives, avoiding the twin pitfalls of absolutizing singular points of view and falling into naïve relativism. In this way, the article aims to discuss Ricoeur’s conception of a situated and ‘lateral’ truth and, therefore, his original application of a phronetic-hermeneutic model in the dialogue between cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Pluralism
• hermeneutics
• interculturality
• practical wisdom
• truth
• strangeness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Ricoeur, the Kantian categorical imperative ‘might be described in the following terms: ‘Act solely in accordance with the maxim by which you can wish at the same time that what ought not to be, namely evil, will indeed not exist’ (Ricoeur 1995: 218). For a broader comparison between Ricoeur and Kant, with particular attention to the theme of evil, cf. Ehni (2006) and Dispersyn (2014).

2 For Ricoeur it is, hence, a question of managing and making productive the ‘conflicts of interpretation’ that necessarily mark ethical experience. Cf. Lillebø (2016).

3 More generally, the concept of translation has been compared to the processes of democratic interaction, to its dynamics of intersubjective and international communication; like moral and political action, translating is, hence, characterized by the possibility of failure. Cf. Dauenhauer (2011).

4 On the idea of tolerance, which goes beyond the evil of violence and an exclusivist conception of truth, see also Küng and Ricoeur (1998).

5 On Ricoeur’s analysis of civilization, see also the essay, first published in 1946, Le Chrétien et la civilisation occidentale (Ricoeur 2003).

6 For an analytical reconstruction of Ricoeur’s critique of technical-economic rationality and the consequent political-social uniformity, cf. Monteil (2013: 103–123).

7 On the identity implications, as well as the political risks that can derive from the ambiguous moment of the founding violence, cf. Alvis (2019).

8 More generally, Ricoeur’s philosophy of identity presupposes a tension between the common condition of human beings and the multiple cultural forms in which they express themselves; all this is not a limit in terms of identity but a resource, as it expands the possibilities of manifestation and, therefore, of interpretation of the human, even from an intercultural perspective. Cf. Helenius (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edoardo Simonotti

Edoardo Simonotti is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa. His research focuses on phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, and interculturality.