Gadamer's Distance and Ricoeur's Belonging

Abstract

It is a commonplace that Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics emphasize, by way of contrast, a hermeneutics of belonging and a hermeneutics of difference.1 A corollary to this contrasting emphasis is the attribution of a conservative profile to Gadamer’s philosophy and its critical correction in Ricoeur.2 In this paper I want to explore how, in a fundamental way, the situation is in fact the reverse. I will defend my claim by looking at Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s explications of the hermeneutic structure of human time, which Gadamer construes as an eventful interruption that calls for transformation, and Ricoeur as a three-fold present that binds the finite to the infinite. The juxtaposition of the present as change (against what has been), and the threefold as the extracting of “a figure from a succession” (narrative identity), illustrates—in the logics of the two theories—a distinctive commitment to transformation (Gadamer) and a distinctive commitment to belonging (Ricoeur).