The main theme of my lecture is this: I would like to consider the totality of the social sciences from the point of view of the conflict of methods, the birthplace of which is the theory of the text, meaning by the text unified or structured forms of discourse (discours), fixed materially and transmitted through consecutive operations reading. Thus, the first part of my lecture will be devoted to the hermeneutics of the text, and the second to what I would call, for research purposes, hermeneutics. social action.

Text hermeneutics

I will begin with a definition of hermeneutics: by hermeneutics I mean the theory of the operations of understanding in relation to the interpretation of texts; the word "hermeneutics" means nothing more than the consistent implementation of interpretation. By sequence, I mean the following: if interpretation is a set of devices applied directly to certain texts, then hermeneutics will be a second-order discipline applied to general rules interpretations. Thus, it is necessary to establish the relationship between the concepts of interpretation and understanding. Our next definition will refer to understanding as such. By understanding, we mean the art of comprehending the meaning of signs transmitted by one consciousness and perceived by other consciousnesses through their external expression (gestures, postures and, of course, speech). The purpose of understanding is to make the transition from this expression to that which is the basic intention of the sign, and to go out through the expression. According to Dilthey, the most prominent theoretician of hermeneutics after Schleiermacher, the operation of understanding becomes possible thanks to the ability, which each consciousness is endowed with, to penetrate into another consciousness not directly, by "experiencing" (re-vivre), but indirectly, by reproducing the creative process proceeding from from an external expression; we note at once that it is precisely this mediation through signs and their external manifestation that leads in the future to a confrontation with the objective method natural sciences. As for the transition from understanding to interpretation, it is predetermined by the fact that signs have a material basis, the model of which is writing. Any trace or imprint, any document or monument, any archive can be recorded in writing and call for interpretation. It is important to be precise in terminology and fix the word "understanding" for the general phenomenon of penetration into another consciousness with the help of an external designation, and use the word "interpretation" in relation to understanding aimed at signs fixed in writing.

It is this discrepancy between understanding and interpretation that gives rise to the conflict of methods. The question is this: should not an understanding, in order to become an interpretation, include one or more stages of what is in broad sense can be called an objective, or objectifying, approach? This question immediately takes us from the limited realm of textual hermeneutics to the integral realm of practice in which the social sciences operate.

Interpretation remains a kind of periphery of understanding, and the established relationship between writing and reading promptly reminds of this: reading is reduced to mastering the meanings contained in the text by the reading subject; this mastery enables him to overcome the temporal and cultural distance that separates him from the text, in such a way that the reader acquires meanings that, due to the distance existing between him and the text, were alien to him. In this extremely broad sense, the "writing-reading" relationship can be represented as a special case of understanding, carried out by penetrating into another consciousness through expression.

This one-sided dependence of interpretation on understanding has long been the great temptation of hermeneutics. In this regard, Dilthey played a decisive role, terminologically fixing the well-known opposition of the words "understand" (comprendre) and "explain" (expliquer) (verstehen vs. erklaren). At first glance, we really are faced with an alternative: either one or the other. In fact, we are not talking about a conflict of methods here, since, strictly speaking, only explanation can be called methodological. Understanding may at best require techniques or procedures to be applied when the relation of the whole and the part or the meaning and its interpretation is involved; however, however far the technique of these devices may lead, the basis of understanding remains intuitive because of the original relationship between the interpreter and what is said in the text.

The conflict between understanding and explanation takes the form of a true dichotomy from the moment one begins to correlate two opposing positions with two different realms of reality: nature and spirit. Thus, the opposite expressed in words"understand-explain", restores the opposition of nature and spirit, as it is presented in the so-called sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature. This dichotomy can be summarized schematically as follows: the sciences of nature deal with observable facts, which, like nature, have been subjected to mathematization since the time of Galileo and Descartes; then come the verification procedures, which are determined in the basis of their falsifiability of hypotheses (Popper); finally, explanation is a generic term for three different procedures: genetic explanation based on a prior state; a material explanation based on an underlying system of lesser complexity; structural explanation through the synchronous arrangement of elements or constituent parts. Proceeding from these three characteristics of the sciences of nature, the sciences of the spirit could make the following term-by-term oppositions: to the facts open to observation, to oppose the signs proposed for understanding; falsifiability to oppose sympathy or intropathy; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, to contrast the three models of explanation (causal, genetic, structural) with a connection (Zusammenhang) through which isolated signs are connected into sign aggregates (narrative construction is the best example here).

It is this dichotomy that has been called into question since the birth of hermeneutics, which has always demanded, to one degree or another, to unite its own views and the position of its opponent into one whole. Thus, already Schleiermacher sought to combine the philological virtuosity characteristic of the Enlightenment with the genius of the Romantics. Similarly, a few decades later, Dilthey experienced difficulties, especially in his last works, written under the influence of Husserl: on the one hand, having learned the lesson of Husserl's Logical Investigations, he began to emphasize the objectivity of meanings in relation to the psychological processes that give rise to them; on the other hand, he was forced to admit that the interconnection of signs gives the fixed meanings an increased objectivity. And yet the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the mind has not been questioned.

Everything changed in the 20th century, when the semiological revolution took place and the intensive development of structuralism began. For convenience, one can proceed from the opposition justified by Saussure, which exists between language and speech; language should be understood as large phonological, lexical, syntactic and stylistic i sets that turn single signs into independent values ​​within complex systems, regardless of their embodiment in living speech. However, the opposition of language and speech led to a crisis within the hermeneutics of texts only because of the obvious transfer of the opposition established by Saussure to various categories of recorded speech. And yet it can be said that the "language-speech" pair refuted the main thesis of Dilthey's hermeneutics, according to which any explanatory procedure comes from the sciences of nature and can be extended to the sciences of the spirit only by mistake or negligence, and, therefore, any explanation c: the field of signs should be considered illegal and considered as an extrapolation dictated by naturalistic ideology. But semiology, applied to language, regardless of its functioning in speech, belongs precisely to one of the modalities of explanation discussed above - structural explanation.

However, the spread structural analysis on various categories of written discourse (discours ecrits) led to the final collapse of the opposition between the concepts of "explain" and "understand". In this regard, writing is a kind of significant frontier: thanks to written fixation, the set of signs achieves what can be called semantic autonomy, that is, it becomes independent of the narrator, of the listener, and finally, of the specific conditions of production. Having become an autonomous object, the text is located precisely at the junction of understanding and explanation, and not at the line of their demarcation.

But if the interpretation can no longer be understood without the stage of explanation, then the explanation cannot become the basis of understanding, which is the essence of the interpretation of texts. By this indispensable basis I mean the following: first of all, the formation of maximally autonomous meanings, born from the intention to designate, which is an act of the subject. Then

The existence of an absolutely irremovable structure of discourse as an act

by which one says something about something on the basis of codes of communication; on this structure of discourse depends the relation "denoting -

denoted - correlating "- in a word, everything that forms the basis of any sign. In addition, the presence of a symmetrical relationship between meaning and the narrator, namely the relationship of discourse and the subject that perceives it, that is, the interlocutor or reader. It is to this combination of various characteristics that what we call the multiplicity of interpretations, which is the essence of hermeneutics. In fact, the text is always more than a linear sequence of phrases; it is a structured whole that can always be formed in several different ways. In this sense, the multiplicity of interpretations and even the conflict of interpretations are not lack or defect, but the dignity of understanding, which forms the essence of interpretation; here one can speak of textual polysemy in the same way as one speaks of lexical polysemy.

Since understanding continues to constitute the indispensable basis of interpretation, it can be said that understanding does not cease to precede, accompany, and complete explanatory procedures. Understanding precedes explanation by approaching the subjective intention of the author of the text; it is created indirectly through the subject of this text, that is, the world that is the content of the text and which the reader can inhabit thanks to imagination and sympathy. Understanding accompanies explanation to the extent that the "writing-reading" pair continues to form the field of intersubjective communication and, as such, goes back to the dialogic model of question and answer described by Collingwood and Gadamer. Finally, understanding completes explanation to the extent that, as mentioned above, it overcomes the geographic, historical, or cultural distance that separates the text from its interpreter. In this sense, it should be noted about the understanding that can be called the final understanding, that it does not destroy the distance through some emotional fusion, but rather consists in a game of proximity and distance, a game in which the outsider is recognized as such even when kinship is acquired. with him.

In concluding this first part, I would like to say that understanding presupposes explanation to the extent that explanation develops understanding. This double ratio can be summed up with a motto I like to proclaim: explain more in order to understand better.

Paul Ricoeur

Hermeneutics and Method of the Social Sciences

The main theme of my lecture is as follows:

I would like to consider the totality of the social sciences from the point of view of the conflict of methods, the birthplace of which is the theory of the text, meaning by the text unified or structured forms of discourse (discours), fixed materially and transmitted through successive read operations. Thus, the first part of my lecture will be devoted to the hermeneutics of the text, and the second to what I would call, for research purposes, the hermeneutics of social action.

Text hermeneutics

I will begin with a definition of hermeneutics: by hermeneutics I mean the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts; the word "hermeneutics" means nothing more than the consistent implementation of interpretation. By consistency, I mean the following: if interpretation is a set of devices applied directly to certain texts, then hermeneutics will be a second-order discipline applied to general rules of interpretation. Thus, it is necessary to establish the relationship between the concepts of interpretation and understanding. Our next definition will refer to understanding as such. By understanding we will mean the art of comprehending the meaning of signs transmitted by one consciousness and perceived by other consciousnesses through their external expression (gestures, postures and, of course, speech). The purpose of understanding is to make the transition from this expression to what is the main intention of the sign, and go out through the expression. According to Dilthey, the most prominent theoretician of hermeneutics after Schleiermacher, the operation of understanding becomes possible thanks to the ability, which each consciousness is endowed with, to penetrate into another consciousness not directly, by “experiencing” (re-vivre), but indirectly, by reproducing the creative process based on external expression; we note at once that it is precisely this that, indirectly through the signs and their external manifestation, leads in the future to a confrontation with the objective method of the natural sciences. As for the transition from understanding to interpretation, it is predetermined by the fact that signs have a material basis, the model of which is writing. Any trace or imprint, any document or monument, any archive can be recorded in writing and call for interpretation. It is important to be precise in terminology and fix the word “understanding” for the general phenomenon of penetration into another consciousness with the help of an external designation, and use the word “interpretation” in relation to understanding directed at the signs fixed in writing.

It is this discrepancy between understanding and interpretation that gives rise to the conflict of methods. The question is this: should not an understanding, in order to become an interpretation, include one or more stages of what in a broad sense can be called an objective or objectivizing approach? This question immediately takes us from the limited field of the hermeneutics of the text to the integral sphere of practice in which the social sciences operate.

Interpretation remains a kind of periphery of understanding, and the established relationship between writing and reading promptly reminds of this: reading comes down to mastering the reading subject of the meanings contained in the text; this mastery allows him to overcome the temporal and cultural distance that separates him from the text, in such a way that the reader masters the meanings that, due to the distance existing between him and the text, were alien to him. In this extremely broad sense, the relation "writing-reading" can be presented as a special case of understanding, carried out by means of penetration into another consciousness through expression.

Such a one-sided dependence of interpretation on understanding has been the great temptation of hermeneutics for a long time. In this regard, Dilthey played a decisive role, terminologically fixing the well-known opposition of the words “understand” (comprendre) and “explain” (expliquer) (verstehen vs. erklaren). At first glance, we really are faced with an alternative: either one or the other. In fact, we are not talking about a conflict of methods here, since, strictly speaking, only explanation can be called methodological. Understanding may at best require techniques or procedures to be applied when the relation of the whole and the part or the meaning and its interpretation is involved; however, no matter how far the technique of these devices may lead, the basis of understanding remains intuitive due to the initial relationship between the interpreter and what is said in the text.

The conflict between understanding and explanation takes the form of a true dichotomy from the moment one begins to correlate two opposing positions with two different realms of reality: nature and spirit. Thus, the opposition, expressed by the words “understand-explain”, restores the opposition of nature and spirit, as it is presented in the so-called sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature. We can schematically state this dichotomy as follows: the sciences of nature deal with observable facts, which, like nature, have been mathematized since the time of Galileo and Descartes; then come the verification procedures, which are determined in the basis of their falsifiability of hypotheses (Popper); finally, explanation is a generic term for three distinct procedures: genetic explanation based on a prior state; a material explanation based on an underlying system of lesser complexity; structural explanation through the synchronous arrangement of elements or constituent parts. Based on these three characteristics of the sciences of nature, the sciences of the spirit could produce the following genuine oppositions: open to observation facts oppose signs, offered for understanding; falsifiability oppose sympathy or in-tropathy; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, to oppose the three models of explanation (causal, genetic, structural) with the connection (Zusammenhang) through which isolated signs are connected into sign aggregates (the best example here is the construction of a narrative).

It is this dichotomy that has been called into question since the birth of hermeneutics, which has always demanded, to one degree or another, to unite its own views and the position of its opponent into one whole. Thus, already Schleiermacher sought to combine the philological virtuosity characteristic of the Enlightenment with the genius of the Romantics. Similarly, a few decades later, Dilthey experienced difficulties, especially in his last works, written under the influence of Husserl: on the one hand, having learned the lesson of Husserl's Logical Investigations, he began to emphasize the objectivity of meanings in relation to psychological processes, giving birth to them; on the other hand, he was forced to admit that the interconnection of signs gives the fixed meanings an increased objectivity. And yet the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the mind has not been questioned.

Everything changed in the 20th century, when the semiological revolution took place and the intensive development of structuralism began. For convenience, one can proceed from the opposition, justified by Saussure, that exists between language and speech; language should be understood as large phonological, lexical, syntactic and stylistic aggregates that turn single signs into independent values ​​within complex systems, regardless of their embodiment in living speech. However, the opposition of language and speech led to a crisis within the hermeneutics of texts only because of the obvious transfer of the opposition established by Saussure to various categories of recorded speech. And yet it can be said that the “language-speech” pair refuted the main thesis of Dilthey’s hermeneutics, according to which any explanatory procedure comes from the sciences of nature and can be extended to the sciences of the spirit only by mistake or carelessness, and, therefore, any explanation in the realm of signs must be considered illegal and regarded as an Extrapolation dictated by a naturalistic ideology. But semiology, applied to language, regardless of its functioning in speech, belongs precisely to one of the modalities of explanation discussed above - structural explanation.

Nevertheless, the spread of structural analysis to various categories of written discourse (discours ecrits) led to the final collapse of the opposition between the concepts of “explain” and “understand”. In this regard, writing is a kind of significant frontier: thanks to written fixation, the set of signs achieves what can be called semantic autonomy, that is, it becomes independent of the narrator, the listener, and finally, from the specific conditions of production. Having become an autonomous object, the text is located precisely at the junction of understanding and explanation, and not at the line of their demarcation.

But if the interpretation can no longer be understood without the stage of explanation, then the explanation cannot become the basis of understanding, which is the essence of the interpretation of texts. By this indispensable basis I mean the following: first of all, the formation of maximally autonomous meanings, born from the intention to designate, which is an act of the subject. Then, the existence of an absolutely irremovable structure of discourse as an act by which someone says something about something on the basis of codes of communication; on this structure of discourse depends the relation “signifying-designated-correlating” with the word, everything that forms the basis of any sign. In addition, the presence of a symmetrical relationship between meaning and the narrator, namely the relationship of discourse and the subject that perceives it, that is, the interlocutor or reader. It is to this totality of different characteristics that what we call the diversity of interpretations, which is the essence of hermeneutics, is grafted. In fact, a text is always nothing more than a linear sequence of phrases; it is a structured whole that can always be formed in several different ways. In this sense, the plurality of interpretations and even the conflict of interpretations is not a defect or vice, but a virtue of the understanding that forms the essence of the interpretation; here one can speak of textual polysemy just as one speaks of lexical polysemy.

Since understanding continues to constitute the indispensable basis of interpretation, it can be said that understanding does not cease to precede, accompany, and complete explanatory procedures. Understanding precedes explanation by approaching the subjective intention of the author of the text, it is created indirectly through the subject of this text, that is, the world that is the content of the text and which the reader can inhabit thanks to imagination and sympathy. Understanding accompanies explanation to the extent that the “writing-reading” pair continues to form the field of intersubjective communication and, as such, goes back to the dialogue-logical model of question and answer described by Collingwood and Gadamer. Finally understanding completes an explanation to the extent that, as mentioned above, it overcomes the geographical, historical or cultural distance separating the text from its interpreter. In this sense, it should be noted about the understanding that can be called final understanding, that it does not destroy the distance through some emotional fusion, but rather consists in a game of proximity and distance, a game in which the outsider is recognized as such even when kinship is acquired with him.

In concluding this first part, I would like to say that understanding suggests explanation to the extent that the explanation develops understanding. This double ratio can be summed up with a motto I like to proclaim: explain more in order to understand better.

From the hermeneutics of the text to the hermeneutics of social action

I do not think that I will limit the content of my lecture if I consider the problems of the social sciences through the prism of practice. Indeed, if possible in in general terms to define the social sciences as the sciences of man and society and, therefore, to include in this group such diverse disciplines that are located between linguistics and sociology, including here the historical and legal sciences, then it will not be incompetent in relation to extending this general topic to the area of ​​practice that provides interaction between individual agents and collectives, as well as between what we call complexes, organizations, institutions that form a system.

First of all, I would like to point out what properties of action, taken as an axis in relations between the social sciences, require a precomprehension comparable to prior knowledge obtained as a result of the interpretation of texts. In the following, I will talk about the properties by which this pre-understanding turns to a dialectic comparable to the dialectic of understanding and explanation in the realm of the text.

Pre-understanding in the field of practice

I would like to single out two groups of phenomena, of which the first relates to the idea of ​​meaning, and the second to the idea of ​​intelligibility.

a) The first group will combine phenomena that allow us to say that the action can be read. An action bears an initial resemblance to the world of signs to the extent that it is formed with the help of signs, rules, norms, in short, meanings. Action is predominantly action talking person. It is possible to generalize the characteristics listed above, using, not without caution, the term "symbol" in the sense of the word, which is a cross between the concept of abbreviated designation (Leibniz) and the concept of double meaning (Eliade). It is in this intermediate sense, in which Cassirer already interpreted this concept in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, that one can speak of action as something invariably symbolically mediated (here I refer to Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Culture)*. These symbols, considered in their broadest sense, remain immanent in the action whose immediate meaning they constitute; but they can also constitute an autonomous sphere of cultural representations: they are therefore expressed quite definitely as rules, norms, etc. However, if they are immanent in action or if they form an autonomous sphere of cultural representations, then these symbols relate to anthropology and sociology to the extent that the social character of these meaning-bearing formations is emphasized: “Culture is social because meaning is such” (K. Geertz). It should be clarified: symbolism is not initially rooted in the minds, otherwise we run the risk of falling into psychologism, but it is, in fact, included in the action.

Another characteristic feature: symbolic systems, due to their ability to be structured in a set of meanings, have a structure comparable to the structure of a text. For example, it is impossible to understand the meaning of any rite without determining its place in the ritual as such, and the place of the ritual in the context of the cult and the place of this latter in the totality of agreements, beliefs and institutions that create the specific appearance of that or another culture. From this point of view, the most

* Geertz C. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, 1973. 11

broad and all-encompassing systems form the context of description for symbols belonging to a certain series, and beyond it for actions mediated symbolically; thus, one can interpret any gesture, such as a raised hand, now as a vote, now as a prayer, now as a desire to stop a taxi, etc. This “fitness-for” (valoir-pour) allows us to talk about that human activity, being symbolically mediated, before becoming accessible to external interpretation, is made up of internal interpretations of the action itself; in this sense, the interpretation itself constitutes the action.

Let's add the last salient feature: among the symbolic systems that mediate action, there are those that perform a certain normative function, and it should not be too hastily reduced to moral rules: action is always open in relation to prescriptions, which can be both technical and strategic, and aesthetic, and, finally, moral. It is in this sense that Peter Winch speaks of action as rule-governed behavior(regulated behavior). K. Geertz likes to compare these “social codes” with the genetic codes in the animal world, which exist only to the extent that they arise on their own ruins.

These are the properties that turn a readable action into a quasi-text. Next, we will talk about how the transition is made from the text-texture of action-to the text that is written by ethnologists and sociologists on the basis of categories, concepts that explain the principles that turn their discipline into a science. But first one must turn to the previous level, which can be called both experienced and meaningful; At this level, culture understands itself through the understanding of others. From this point of view, K. Girtz talks about conversation, trying to describe the connection that the observer establishes between his own sufficiently developed symbolic system and the system that is presented to him, presenting it as deeply embedded in the very process of action and interaction.

b) But before moving on to the mediating role of explanation, a few words must be said about the group of properties that make it possible to reason about the intelligibility of an action. It should be noted that the agents involved in social interactions have a descriptive competence in relation to themselves, and an external observer at first can only transmit and maintain this description; That an agent endowed with speech and reason can talk about his action testifies to his ability to competently use a common conceptual network that separates action structurally from mere physical movement and even from the behavior of an animal. To talk about an action - about one's own action or about the actions of others - means comparing such terms as goal (project), agent, motive, circumstances, obstacles, path traveled, rivalry, help, favorable occasion, opportunity, intervention or showing initiative, desirable or undesirable outcomes.

In this very extensive network, I will consider only four poles of meaning. First, the idea of ​​a project, understood as my striving to achieve some goal, a striving in which the future is present otherwise than in mere foresight, and in which what is expected does not depend on my intervention. Then the idea of ​​a motive, which in this case is at the same time that which sets in motion in a quasi-physical sense, and that which acts as the cause of the action; so the motive brings into play complex usage the words “because” as an answer to the question “why?”; Ultimately, the answers range from the reason in Hume's sense of the constant antecedent to the reason why something was done, as it happens in an instrumental, strategic, or moral action. Thirdly, one should consider an agent as one who is capable of performing actions, who actually performs them in such a way that actions can be attributed or imputed to him, since he is the subject of his own activity. The agent may perceive himself as the author of his actions, or be represented in this capacity by someone else, someone who, for example, brings charges against him or appeals to his sense of responsibility. And fourthly, I would like to finally note the category of intervention or initiative that is important; thus, a project may or may not be implemented, while an action becomes an intervention or an initiative only when the project is already inscribed in the course of things; intervention or initiative becomes a significant phenomenon insofar as it forces what the agent is able or able to do to coincide with the initial state of a closed physical system; thus it is necessary that, on the one hand, the agent has an innate or acquired ability which is the true “ability to do something” (pouvoir-faire), and that, on the other hand, this ability is destined to fit into the organization. physical systems, representing their initial and final states.

Whatever the case may be with the other elements that make up the conceptual network of action, the important thing is that they acquire meaning only as a whole, or rather that they add up to a system of inter-meanings whose agents acquire such a capacity when the ability to put into action any of the members of this network is at the same time the ability to put into action the totality of all the other members. This ability determines the practical understanding corresponding to the original intelligibility of the action.

From understanding to explanation in the social sciences

Now we can say a few words about the mediations, thanks to which the explanation in the social sciences runs parallel to the explanation that forms the structure of the hermeneutics of the text.

a) In fact, here there is the same danger of reproducing dichotomies in the field of practice and, what is especially important to emphasize, deadlocks, into which hermeneutics risks falling. In this regard, it is significant that these conflicts made themselves felt precisely in an area that is completely unrelated to the German tradition in hermeneutics. In fact, it turns out that the theory of language games, which was developed in the environment of post-Wittgensteinian thought, led to an epistemological situation similar to that faced by Dilthey. Thus, Elisabeth Ancombe, in her short work entitled “Intention”* (1957), aims to justify the inadmissibility of mixing those language games in which the concepts of motive or intention are resorted to and those in which Humean causality dominates. Motive, as this book argues, is logically built into action to the extent that every motive is a motive for something, and action is related to motive. And then the question “why?” requires two types of “because” for the answer: one expressed in terms of causality, and the other in the form of an explanation

* Anscombe G. E. M. Intention. Oxford, 1957.

motive. Other authors belonging to the same line of thought prefer to emphasize the difference between what happens and what causes what happened. Something happens, and this forms a neutral event, the statement about which may be true or false; but to bring about what has happened is the result of the act of the agent whose intervention determines the truth of the proposition about the corresponding act.

We see how this dichotomy between motive and cause turns out to be phenomenologically controversial and scientifically unfounded. The motivation of human action confronts us with a very complex set of phenomena located between two extremes: the cause in the sense of external coercion or internal urges and the basis of action in the strategic or instrumental sense. But the most interesting human phenomena for the theory of action lie between them, so that the character of desirability associated with a motive includes both power and meaning aspects, depending on which is predominant: the ability to set in motion or induce to it. or the need for justification. In this respect, psychoanalysis is par excellence the realm where, in drives, strength and meaning are mixed together.

b) The next argument that can be opposed to the epistemological dualism generated by the extension of the theory of language games to the realm of practice stems from the phenomenon of interference, which was mentioned above. We have already noted this when we said that an action differs from a simple manifestation of the will in that it is inscribed in the course of things. It is in this respect that von Wright's work Interpretation and Explanation* is, on

*Wright G.H. von. Explanation and Understanding. london,

in my opinion, a turning point in the post-Wittgensteinian discussion of activity. The initiative can only be understood as a fusion of two moments - intentional and systemic - since it puts into action, on the one hand, the chains of practical syllogisms, and on the other hand, the internal connections of physical systems, the choice of which is determined by is a phenomenon of interference. To act, in the precise sense of the word, means to set the system in motion from its initial state, by making the "capacity-to-do" (un pouvoir-faire) that the agent has at its disposal coincide with the possibility that the system that is closed in itself provides. From this point of view, one should stop presenting the world as a system of universal determinism and subject to analysis individual types of rationality that structure various physical systems, in the gaps between which human forces begin to act. Here a curious circle is revealed, which, from the standpoint of hermeneutics in its broadest sense, could be represented as follows: without an initial state there is no system, but without intervention there is no initial state; finally, there is no intervention without realizing the ability of an agent who can do it.

These are common features, in addition to those that can be borrowed from text theory, bringing together the field of text and the field of practice.

c) In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that this coincidence is not accidental. We talked about the possibility of a text being read, about a quasi-text, about the intelligibility of an action. One can go even further and single out in the very field of practice such features that make it necessary to combine explanation and understanding.

Simultaneously with the phenomenon of fixation through writing, we can talk about the inscribed action in the fabric of history, on which it leaves an imprint and in which it leaves its mark; in this sense, we can talk about the phenomena of archiving, registration (English record), which resemble a written fixation of an action in the world.

Simultaneously with the emergence of the semantic autonomy of the text in relation to the author, actions are separated from the subjects who perform them, and texts from their authors: actions have their own history, their own special purpose, and therefore some of them can cause undesirable results; hence the problem of the historical responsibility of the initiator of the action, carrying out his project. In addition, one could speak of the prospective significance of actions in contrast to their actual significance; thanks to the autonomization just discussed, actions directed at the world introduce long-term meanings into it, which undergo a series of decontextualizations and recontextualizations; it is through this cycle of switching on and off that some works, such as works of art and cultural creations in general, acquire the lasting value of great masterpieces. Finally - and this is especially significant - it can be said that actions, like books, are works open to a multitude of readers. As in the realm of writing, here the opportunity to be read wins, then obscurity and even the desire to confuse everything take over.

So, without in any way distorting the specifics of practice, we can apply the motto of the hermeneutics of the text to it: explain more in order to understand better.

Narrative identity

By "narrative identity" I mean the form of identity that a person can arrive at through narrative activity. However, before proceeding with the analysis, it is important to eliminate the significant semantic ambiguity that threatens the concept of identity. Consistently Latin words “idem” and "ipse" here two different meanings are superimposed on each other. According to the first of them, "idem", "identical" is a synonym for "in the highest degree similar", "similar". "The same"(“tete”), or “one and the same”, contains some form of immutability in time. Their opposite is the words “different”, “changing”. In the second sense, in the sense "ipse", the term “identical” is related to the concept "self"(ipseite), "oneself". The individual is identical to himself. The words “other”, “other” can serve as the opposite here. This second meaning contains only the definition continuity, stability, constancy over time(Beharrlichkeit in der Zeit), as Kant said. Rather, the task is to explore the many possibilities for making connections between permanence and change that correspond to identity in the sense of "selfhood".

In order to concretely approach the awareness of dialectics "the same" and "self", it will suffice to mention the well-known concept life-story- life history. So what form of identity, what combination "self" and "the same" contains the expression "life story"? At first glance, it may seem that by posing such a question, we go beyond the boundaries of language. We are tempted to rely on immediacy of feeling, intuition. However, this is not the case, because we we have the corresponding linguistic mediation-narrative discourse.

This detour through narrative mediation turns out to be not only effective, but also necessary: ​​if it were interrupted even for a moment, one could imagine the difficulties and even paradoxes that are faced by thinking that claims to immediacy and arguing about what we have just called "life history." The real difficulty lies in the modality of the connections in this story, and it is this difficulty that Wilhelm Dilthey had in mind when he spoke of the vital connection. (Lebenszusammenhang). The paradox lies in the fact that thinking deals with the concept of identity, in which two meanings are mixed: identity with oneself (self) and identity as the same. In the second sense, the word "identical" means what we have just mentioned: extremely similar, similar. But how could “itself” remain as similar as possible if it did not contain some unshakable basis, not subject to temporal changes? However, all human experience refutes the inviolability of this element that forms the personality. In inner experience everything is subject to change. The antinomy seems both inevitable and insoluble. Inevitable because the use of the same word to designate a person from birth to death presupposes the existence of such an unchanging basis. Yet the experience of physical and spiritual change is not consistent with the idea of ​​having such a self. This antinomy turns out to be not only inevitable, but equally insoluble because of the way it is formed, namely, because it uses categories that are incompatible with the concept of life connection. These categories were introduced by Kant, who called them "categories of relation". In the first place is the category of substance, the scheme of which is “the constancy of the real in time”, that is, according to Kant’s definition, the idea of ​​it as a substratum of the empirical definition of time in general, which, therefore, is preserved, while everything else changes ”*. In terms of a judgment corresponding to this category and this scheme, the first analogy of experience, which is the foundation of permanence, says: “In all phenomena of permanence there is the object itself, that is, the substance (phaenomenon), and everything that is replaced or can change refers only to the mode of existence of this substance or substances, and therefore only to their definition”**. However, the concept of vital connection shows the fallacy of this categorical definition, which is valid only in the field of the axiomatics of physical nature. Because it is not clear, relying on what rule one could think of a combination of constancy and impermanence, which, it would seem, should include a vital connection.

Nevertheless, we have some foresight of this rule to the extent that the concept of vital connection orients thinking towards a certain combination of signs of stability and signs of change. And it is here that the narrative offers its mediation. Now it remains to find out how this happens.

We will proceed as follows: starting with the identity storytelling, how it manifests itself in

* Kant I. Critique of pure reason.-Works in six volumes, vol. 3.M ., 1964, p. 225.

** Ibid., p. 254.

in the process of staging an intrigue, we will move on to identity characters of the story told, and then to the identity of the self that emerges in the act of reading.

The narrative identity of the intrigue

The idea of ​​the consistency of the story told with the intrigue and with the character was first formulated by Aristotle in Poetics. This coherence has been presented in this book so one-sidedly that it has taken the form of subordination. Throughout the story being told, with its inherent unity and integrity stemming from the setting up of intrigue, the character maintains an identity that is consistent with the identity of the story being told. The modern novel has not shaken this relationship; This is exactly what the axiom formulated by Frank Kermode confirms: in order to present the character of the novel in development, you need to tell more*.

That is why one should first look for a mediation between constancy and variability in the setting up of an intrigue and only then transfer it to the character.

I would like to return to the basic principles of storytelling theory, which I outlined in my book Time and Narrative. Based on the model of the tragic formulated by Aristotle, I

* Kermode F. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in Ihe Theory of Fiction. London, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1966 (Le sens du point final); The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1979.

defined this type of dynamic identity, classified by Aristotle in Poetics as tragic saying(muthos tragic) by combining the demand for consistency and the assumption of inconsistency that threatens identity in the process of storytelling. By coherence, I mean the principle of ordering that governs what Aristotel called "the arrangement of facts." Consistency is characterized by three features: completeness, integrity (all), earned value. Completeness should be understood as the compositional unity of the work, in which the interpretation of the parts is subordinate to the interpretation of the whole. The whole, according to Aristotle, “is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end”*. Of course, it is the poetic composition that determines the sequence of events: which of them will be the beginning, middle or end. In this sense, the closeness of the narrative, which gives rise to so many problems in the modern novel, is an essential element of the art of composition. The same goes for volume.

it is the intrigue that gives the action its outlines, boundaries, and hence volume. “That volume is sufficient, within which, with the continuous succession [of events], by probability or necessity, a change occurs from misfortune to happiness or from happiness to misfortune” **. Of course, this volume should be temporary: the implementation of a breakthrough takes time. However, we are talking here about the time of the work, and not about the time of the events in the world. After all, we do not ask what the hero did in the period between two appearances on the stage, distant from each other in real life and in contact

* Aristotle. Poetics.-Works in four volumes, vol. 4. M., 1984, pp. 653,1450 at 26.

** Ibid., p. 654, 1451 a 12-15.

in real history. The volume of exposition is regulated only by necessity and probability: it is limited in tragedy, expanded in epic, can be the most diverse in the modern novel.

And it is against the background of this requirement of coherence that an extreme inconsistency appears, at least in the tragic model, which takes the form of a “turn” or a twist of fate. Theatrical action, with its dual nature of chance and surprise, is typical example a break in a complex tragedy. Chance, that is, the possibility for a certain event to develop in a completely different way, acquires further harmony with necessity and probability, which characterizes the form of the narrative as a whole: what in life could be pure chance, not related to necessity or probability, in the process of narration contributes to the development of action. In a sense, chance is embedded in necessity or probability. As for the effect of surprise, which causes amazement in the audience, it also takes root in the intelligibility of the story told at the moment when it produces in the audience a certain purification of the senses under the influence of the presentation, called by Aristotle “ catharsis". In the model of the tragic, it is about the purification of feelings through anxiety and suffering. I have used the term "configuration" in relation to the art of composition, connecting concordance and inconsistency and regulating this mobile form, which Aristotle called "tale"(mufhos), a we translate as “setting up an intrigue” (mise en intrigue). I prefer the term "configuration" to the term "structure" because it highlights the dynamic nature of this intrigue. At the same time, the relationship between the concepts of “configuration” and “figure of the novel” (character) opens up the possibility of analyzing the character of the novel as figures of the self(figure de fipseite)*.

A few words should be added regarding the inconsistent coherence characteristic of narrative configuration. In the preceding analysis, we have constantly referred to the tragic model developed by Aristotle in Poetics. In Time and Narrative, Volume II, I have sought to generalize this model in order to apply it to contemporary art forms of composition, both in the field of the novel and in the field of dramaturgy. It is for this purpose that I have chosen to define, by means of the concept of heterogeneous synthesis, the inconsistent coherence inherent in narrative composition as a whole. I have tried to take into account the various mediations resulting from the setting up of intrigue: the mediation between the variety of events and the temporal unity of the story told; mediation between the disparate phenomena that make up history - intentions, arguments and accidents - and the connectedness of history; and, finally, the mediation between pure succession and the unity of a temporal form, the chronology of which can be broken or even destroyed under the appropriate set of circumstances. From my point of view, this complex dialectic explains the conflict that is invariably present in the tragic model between the breakdown of the narrative into separate episodes and the ability to restore unity, which, thanks to the process of configuration, acquires further development, which, in fact, is poetry.

* Ricoeur P. Temps et recit II. La configuration dans Ie recit de fiction. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1983.

Character identity

In order to analyze the type of identity that interests us at the present time, namely the identity of the character on which the intrigue itself rests, we must turn to the moment of tying up the intrigue, from which the identity of the narrative stems. We have already noted that Aristotle did not consider this problem, since it was important for him to subordinate the basis of action to action itself. However, this is exactly the subordination we are going to use. In other words, if it is possible to represent a complete story as a chain of transformations from the initial to the final situation, then the narrative identity of the characters can only be a certain style of subjective transformation in combination with objective transformations, according to the rule of completeness, integrity and unity - calls of intrigue. This is the meaning of the expression of W. Schapp, expressed by him in the work “In Geschichten verstrickt” (“Involvement in history”):

“History answers man”*. Narrative theory accepts this relation mainly on a formal level, which is higher than that achieved by Aristotle in the Poetics, while striving to build a model the art of composition. To this end, Propp ** began research on the development of a typology of narrative roles, together with a typology of the relationship between the functions of narration, that is, fragments of action that bears a repeated characterization.

*SchappW. In Geschichten verstrickt. Wiesbaden, W. Heymann-Verlag, 1976, p.l00.

** Propp V. J. Morphologic du conte. Paris, Editions du Seuil,

ter in the same narrative system. The way in which he establishes this relation deserves attention. He begins by subdividing the characters of Russian fairy tales into seven classes: offender, co-acting person (or sympathizer), assistant, sought-after person, confidant, hero, false hero. Of course, the relationship between a character and a fragment (or function) of an action is not immutable: each character has an area of ​​activity that involves several functions; and vice versa, several characters operate in the same sphere. As a result of establishing such a relationship between the constellation of characters in the narrative and the chain of functions, a rather complex combination is formed. happens in fairy tales and folklore, change in accordance with the rhythm of interactions and a diverse state of affairs. For example, in the so-called "experimental" novel and the "stream of consciousness" novel, character transformation is central to the narrative. The relationship between the setting up of an intrigue and its development turns out to be inverted: in contrast to the Aristotelian model, the setting up of an intrigue serves the development of the character. Thus, the character's identity is put to a real test. Modern theater and the modern novel have become veritable laboratories of thought experimentation, in which the narrative identity of the characters is subordinated to innumerable imaginary situations. All intermediate stages between the stable identity of the heroes of simple narratives and the loss of identity that has occurred in a number of modern novels have been considered. Thus, for example, according to Robert Musil, the possible is so far beyond reality that, as he claims, in the end Man without quality in a world full of qualities, but inhuman, cannot be identified. The presence of proper names becomes ridiculous and even useless. The unidentifiable becomes inexpressible. However, it must be noted that as the narrative becomes depersonalized, the novel itself, as I have already said, even if it is subjected to the most flexible and formal interpretation, also loses its narrative qualities. The loss of the character's identity is accompanied by the loss of the configuration of the narrative and, in particular, entails a crisis of narrative closure. Thus, we state the reverse effect of the character on the setting of intrigues. According to Frank Kermode*, this is the same dissonance, the same split that has survived the tradition of an identifiable hero (both a constant and a changeable figure), and a configuration with its dual nature of coherence and inconsistency. The destruction of the paradigm affects both the portrayal of the character and the configuration of intrigue. In Robert Musil, the disintegration of the narrative form, associated with the loss of the identity of the character, leads to the fact that the boundaries of the narrative are overcome and the literary work approaches the essay. And it is all the more no coincidence that in some modern autobiographies, such as those of Leiri**, the author deliberately moves away from the narrative form and passes to such a less definite literary genre as the essay.

*Kermode F., op. cit.

** Leiris M. L "^ge d" homme, precede de: De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie. Paris, Gallimard, 1939.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the meaning of this literary phenomenon, one should not confuse one with the other: even if one has to state that in the extreme case the identity of the hero is completely lost, then even then one should not abandon the problematic of the character as such. The non-subject, when compared with the category of the subject, is nothing. This remark will make sense when we transfer these reflections to a character operating in the realm of the self. In other words, we would not be interested in this drama of decay and we would not experience confusion if the non-subject were not also a representation of the subject, even if it is carried out in a negative way. Someone asks the question: "Who am I?" They answer him: "Nothing or almost nothing." And we are talking here precisely about the answer to the question, sharpened to the limit. "Who?".

Character Mastery: The Refigured Self

This preliminary question, once asked, boils down to this: what does the poetics of narrative contribute to the problematic of the self? Let us list here what the method of storytelling asserts about self theories that do not owe anything to the theory of storytelling.

First of all, this method confirms all the characteristic personality traits that were considered in the theory basic particulars(main features), in particular in Strausson's "Individuals"*, especially in the theory of action, which is the main topic of this book. The art of narration affirms mainly the leading role of the third person in

* Strosson P. F. Individuals. London, Methuen and Co.," 1959. 29

knowledge of man. A hero is someone who is talked about. In this sense, the confession or the autobiography that originates from it does not have any exclusive privileges and does not serve as source material for deduction. We have learned much more about human existence due to the fact that in poetics German language called Er-Erzahlung-third-person narration.

There is another aspect of the concept of personality that supports the concept of character: we can always say that we are talking about the body, because it interferes with the course of things and causes changes. In addition, it is the reliance on physical and mental predicates that makes it possible to describe modes of behavior and draw conclusions about the intentions and driving forces that induce them, based on actions. This is especially true for the physical events and states of the character, whether self-ascribable(self-description) or other-ascribable(description to others). Theatrical and literary characters excel at illustrating the balance of double reading through observation and introspection. It is thanks to this double reading that the already mentioned play of imagination contributes to the enrichment of our set of physical predicates: how do we know about the secret impulses of envy or the cunning of hatred and the various manifestations of desire, if not thanks to characters born poetic creativity(in this case it does not matter whether they were described in the first or third person)? The richness of mental states is largely the product of the exploration of the soul by storytellers and character creators. In addition, the character of the novel irrefutably confirms the hypothesis that he should be able to describe himself in the third person, on behalf of the presented character,

to apply to oneself the psychic predicates called self-ascribable (self-description), as it happens in reflexive actions associated with verbal acts and, in a broader sense, with the phenomenon of the word. Thanks to this inoculation of "self-image" to the identifying activity of the individual, it becomes possible to put statements made in the first person into the mouths of characters described in the third person. We use quotation marks to indicate this: X himself says, "I'm going to do A." The art of storytelling excels at this use of quotation marks to mark speech in the third person. This process takes place in different ways in a true narrative, where the narrator represents everything that happens to the characters, and in a drama, where, according to Aristotle, the characters themselves “create a drama” before the eyes of the audience. In the theater, the characters themselves conduct a dialogue: they say “I” to each other and "you". But for the narrator, these are transmitted words that have lost the quotes. The stage setting (opsis) with which Aristotle completes the last “part” of the tragedy signifies the elimination of quotation marks. The specificity of performing arts is to forget about quoting during the performance. It seems to the viewer that he hears real people. But when the curtain falls and the illusion is gone, the play will again take on the form stated fiction. This does not happen even in a story where the actions of the characters are presented in their entirety. However, there are also thoughts and discourses in the things told. A classic illustration of what has just been said is quoting in the first person using quotation marks. Dorrit Cohn calls it quoted monologue(quoted monologue)*. The character of the novel takes the floor and behaves like a dramatic character, speaking at the same time in the first person and using temporary forms that correspond to his thoughts at the moment. However, the modern novel also uses other techniques, among which the well-known style of free writing can be considered the most extraordinary. indirect speech, which Dorrit Cohn rightly described as narrative monologue(narrated monologue). This is a monologue in which the words in their content are the words of the character, but are presented by the narrator in a temporary form corresponding to the moment of the narration (that is, most often in the past tense), and from the position of the narrator, namely, in the third person. Unlike a quoted monologue, a narrative monologue performs the task of incorporating the thoughts and words of other persons into the narrative texture: the narrator's speech continues the speech of the narrator's character, while borrowing his voice and assimilating his manner of speaking. The modern novel offers more sophisticated solutions to this problem, alternating third-person narrative with first-person speech that has lost the quotation marks. Such a narration technique allows us to understand the effect of merging the narration from the third person, which transmits speech, and the narration from the first person, which performs the function of reflection. Narrative is the most adequate field for such a fusion.

However, the function of narrative is not limited to emphasizing the characteristic properties of the self, as was presented in the previous analysis. This function introduces

*Cohn D. Transparent Minds. Princeton (N.J.), Princeton University Press,

some specific element that gives a new direction to the analysis of the self.

This particular factor is associated with fictional the character of the character in literary narration, and this applies both to narration and to the act of narration. Based on the definition of setting up an intrigue, this character can be qualified as imitation(mimesis) action. But speaking of imitation, we are asserting at least two things: firstly, that the “plot” of the action (this is one of the common translations "tales"(muthos) in the context of setting up an intrigue) develops in the realm of the fictional. And secondly, that narration creatively imitates the real activity of people, interprets and presents it in a new way, or, as we showed in Volume III of Time and Narrative, performs reconfiguration(refiguration). Now we need to clarify this aspect of the problem. imitation, meaning not only the action, but also the true basis of the character's action.

Compared to the questions we have been discussing so far, we now face a problem of a completely different kind, namely the problem mastering by a real-life subject—in this case, the reader—meanings that connect fictitious characters with equally fictitious actions. What happens to the self as a result of such mastery through reading?

This question leads to a whole series of reflections. We will consider only a few of them.

First thought. Thanks to narration, refiguration demonstrates self-knowledge that goes far beyond the boundaries of the realm of narration: “himself” cognizes himself not directly, but exclusively indirectly, through a multitude of signs of culture. That is why above we came to the conclusion that the action is symbolically mediated. From this symbolic mediation buds the mediation produced by the narrative. Thus, narrative mediation shows that the interpretation of the self plays a significant role in self-knowledge. The reader's identification with the fictional character is the main vehicle for this interpretation. And thanks allegorical character (Ie caractere figure) character, “himself”, interpreted in terms of narration, turns into some equally allegorical “I”, into “I”, depicting himself as one or another person.

Second thought. How does the “I” that portrays itself as this or that become refigured"I"? Here we need to consider in more detail the procedures to which we have unnecessarily hastily given the name "mastery". The process of perception of the narrative by the reader, in which numerous properties are born, is called identification. So, we are faced with at least a peculiar situation: from the very beginning of our analysis, we ask ourselves the question of what it means to identify a person, to identify oneself, to be identical to oneself, and here, on the way to self-identification, identification occurs. with the other, which is carried out in a real way in a historical narrative and in an unreal way in a fictional narrative. It is in this that the experiential character of the thinking that we applied to the epic, the drama and the novel shows itself: to master the image of a character by identifying with it means to subject oneself to the play of changes created by the imagination, which become changes of the self created by the imagination. This game confirms the famous and by no means unambiguous expression of Rimbaud: I am another.

Nevertheless, such a game is, of course, not without ambiguity and is not safe. It is not without ambiguity because it opens up two opposite possibilities, the consequences of which will make themselves felt later. When, in particular, the actions leading to the image of the "self" are not distorted, the "self" turns into a construct, which some call the "I". However, the hermeneutics of distrust allows us to reject such a construction as a source of misunderstandings and even illusions. To live in imagination means to appear in a false form that allows you to hide. In the future, identification becomes a means of either self-deception or escape from oneself. In the realm of fiction, this is confirmed by the examples of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. There are several versions of this mistrust, from Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego to Lacan's self-mastery, in which the imaginary deceiver is diametrically opposed to the symbolic deceiver. There is no guarantee that even in Freud the instance of "I" as opposed to the principle ego analysis is not a potentially false construct. But the hermeneutics of mistrust, if it were not able to separate the inauthentic from the genuine, would lose all meaning. However, starting from a genuine form of identification, how could one speak of any model without immediately accepting the hypothesis that the image of the “I” through the “other” can become a genuine means for self-disclosure of the “I”, and to constitute oneself means, in essence, to become what one is? This is precisely the meaning of refiguration in the hermeneutics of the restoration of meaning. What applies to symbolism in general applies also to the symbolism of the fictitious model: it is a factor of discovery insofar as the latter is a factor of transformation. In this deep sense, discovery and transformation are inseparable from each other. It is also obvious that in modern culture the hermeneutics of mistrust has become an obligatory area of ​​research related to the consideration of personal identity.

Further, the use of imaginary situations in relation to the self is unsafe game, if we assume that the narrative significantly affects the refiguration of the self. The danger is caused by the fluctuations between competing ways of identification to which the power of the imagination is subject. Moreover, in the search for identity, the subject cannot help but go astray. It is the power of imagination that leads the subject to the fact that he is faced with the threat of loss of identity, the absence of "I", which were the cause of Musil's suffering and, at the same time, the source of the search for meaning, to which all his work was devoted. To the extent that the self identifies itself with a person without qualities, that is, without identity, it resists the assumption of its own worthlessness. Nevertheless, one must have a good idea of ​​the meaning of this hopeless path, this passage through “nothing”. As we have already noted, the hypothesis of subjectlessness is not the hypothesis of "nothing" about which there is nothing to say. This hypothesis, on the contrary, allows us to say a lot, as evidenced by the volume of such a work as “A Man Without Qualities”.

The statement 'I am nothing' must thus retain the form of a paradox: 'nothing' would really mean nothing if it were not attributed to 'I'. Who then is this "I" if the subject says that he is "nothing"? The expression “I am nothing”, which reduces a person to the zero level of constancy (Kant), perfectly demonstrates the discrepancy between the category of substance and its scheme-constancy in time-the problematics of “I”.

It is in this that the purifying power of thinking is rooted - first in a speculative perspective, and later in an existential perspective: perhaps the most dramatic transformations of personality must pass this test through the "nothing" of identity-permanence, as a result of which “nothing” in the process of transformation will appear as a “blank slate” in transformations so dear to Levi-Strauss. Some of the conclusions about the identity of the individual, sounded in our conversations, are like the gaping abyss of the night sky. In conditions of extreme emptiness, a negative answer to the question “Who am I?” testifies not so much to worthlessness as to the bareness of the question itself. Therefore, one can hope that the dialectic of coherence and inconsistency inherent in the setting up of an intrigue and subsequently transferred to the character, the support of the intrigue, and then to the self, will be, if not fruitful, then at least not devoid of reasonable meaning.

Morality, ethics and politics.

Was it advisable to propose for consideration the correlation of three terms: “morality”, “ethics” and “politics” instead of the classical double correlation “morality and politics” or equivalent to it “ethics and politics”? I think so. The distinction between ethics and morality is justified not only in personal terms, but also, as I will try to show it, in institutional terms, or rather, in terms of political institutions. I will readily agree that a certain arbitrariness in regard to words is inevitable here, since the first term came from Greek, and the second from Latin, and both belong to the common sphere of mores;

however, if the choice of words can be questioned, then their very distinction, as it seems to me, should not raise objections. It is necessary to find a word so that, following Spinoza, who called his main work "Ethics", the designation - to follow the holistic path of human existence, starting with an elementary desire to preserve one's life and ending with the fulfillment of what can be called, according to certain prevailing beliefs, desire, pleasure, satisfaction, happiness, bliss. For my own part, I borrowed from Aristotle the more neutral expression “life striving for the good” in order to designate this deep level of the moral life. When one speaks of striving, only desirability is brought to the fore, and not imperativeness. Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Naber held precisely this point of view. However, we also need some other term to denote the connection with the law or norm, with permission and prohibition. Law or norm implies two characteristics - universality and coercion - the essence of which is beautifully expressed by the term "must". Thus, I propose to use the term "ethics" in relation to the sphere of good and the term "morality" in relation to the sphere of duty.

I will not now dwell on the philosophical justification for the use of two kinds of predicates applied to actions and their agents: the good predicate and the ought predicate. I will confine myself to a single argument: even if the desire for a good life is more deeply rooted in us than, say, the prohibition of crime or lies, then ethics still cannot do without morality: desirability does not exempt from imperativeness for that reason. reason that there is violence that one agent can commit against another, turning the latter from potential victim real sacrifice. In a word, it is evil, as harm caused by one person to another, that leads to the fact that the intention to lead a good life cannot eliminate the need to reckon with the imperative of duty, which manifests itself either in a negative form in the form of a ban, or in a positive form. in the form of an obligation.

Further research will focus on the relationship between politics and ethics. At the same time, the critical orientation of the norm will not be ignored, without which politics would lose its most essential dimension.

The connection between politics and the ethics of the good life would be confirmed if it could be shown that a person is determined mainly by his abilities, which reach full realization only in the conditions of political existence, in other words, in the conditions of the social state (une cite). From this point of view, thinking about the problem mighty man constitutes, it seems to me, the anthropological introduction that political philosophy needs. Brief analysis of the structure of what can be called individual or personal identity, will allow you to understand it. This structure can be clarified by a series of responses to questions that include the interrogative-relative pronoun “who”: “Who exactly says?”, “Who did this or that action?”, “Who is this story about?”, “Who is responsible for this misconduct or damage caused? Answers to questions containing the word "who" form a pyramid, which is crowned by the ethical ability, which is the ability of the subject, and it is to him that actions qualified with the help of the predicates "good" or "bad" can be attributed.

The question "Who's talking?" is the simplest when compared with all other questions used in the world of language. Only he who is able to point to himself as the author of his own statements can answer this question. Theory speech-acts(speech actions) taught us to consider the world of language from this pragmatic point of view of discourse; moreover, it would be expedient that this theory should not be limited to the theory of propositions and extend to the speaker, who is able to call himself "I". The second stage of self-formation is introduced by the question: “Who is the author of this action?” The transition is made possible by simple fact that acts of discourse are themselves certain types of actions. When it comes to practice - about professional activities, about games, about art - neither the question "What?" nor the question "Why?", that is, neither description nor explanation, does not exhaust

study of the meaning of action; it is still necessary to determine the one who does something as an agent, to whom this action can be attributed and, on the basis of this, imputed to moral and legal responsibility. The connection between an action and its agent is not an observable fact; this is precisely the ability in the implementation of which the agent is completely sure. This reasoning will later turn out to be the cornerstone in the reconstruction of the concept of a political subject. A new stage in the formation of a powerful subject (un sujet capable) begins in the process of the formation of the narrative aspect of identity. The concept of narrative identity, which I have been working on for a long time, creates, it seems to me, the necessary link between the identity of the speaking subject and the identity of the ethical-legal subject. The main reason for this is that narrative identity takes into account a temporal dimension of existence that has not yet been considered. But only in one form or another of story-telling on the topic of everyday life, historical storytelling or storytelling connected with you-thought, does life acquire unity and can be told.

It is on this triple basis - linguistic, practical, narrative - that the ethical subject is constituted. If at first one speaks of action, of practice, that they are good or bad, then the ethical predicate is reflexively applied to someone who can call himself the author of his words, the performer of his actions, the character stories about him or told by him. By means of this reflexive movement, the subject himself places himself in the field of the idea of ​​the good and judges or makes it possible to judge his actions from the point of view of the good life to which they are directed. In a word, only a subject capable of evaluating his own actions, formulating his preferences associated with the predicates “good” or “bad”, and therefore capable of relying on a hierarchy of values ​​in the process of choosing possible actions, only such a subject can define yourself.

Now it should be shown that only in society, or rather, within the framework of just social institutions, does the subject of power become the subject of action, the existing subject, the historical subject. Since it is not difficult to show at each of the levels of the constitution of the “I” the contribution to it of another subject that is not this “I”, it will be more important for our analysis to establish within the very concept of “the other” the difference between the other, revealing itself through its appearance (and therefore capable of entering into interpersonal relationships, as exemplified by friendship), and the faceless "other" that constitutes the third element of the political bond. In fact, the critical moment for political philosophy comes when it touches a state in which the relationship with the other, bifurcating, gives way to mediation by institutions. You should not stop at the double ratio: “I” - “you”, you need to go further in the direction of the triple ratio: “I” - “you” - “third”, or “any”.

It will be more convenient to follow the path of step-by-step consideration of the formation of the identity of the “I” from the point of view of this triple relationship. The subject of discourse can self-identify and self-determine, first of all, in the process of conversation. The speaker in the first person corresponds to the hearer in the second person. The moral, legal, political aspects of this opposition are manifested to the extent that the roles of the speaker and the listener can change places, while the persons conducting the conversation remain unchanged. When I say 'you' I mean that 'you' are able to define yourself as 'I'. The art of mastering personal pronouns reaches perfection only when the rules for such an exchange are fully understood. And this full understanding, in turn, creates the elementary condition necessary for the emergence of a subject of law, a member of a political community. Just like the 'I', the other, when he speaks, can define himself as the 'I'. The expression "like me" already implies the recognition of the other as equal to me in terms of right and duty. However, verbal exchange, which it would be more appropriate to call the distribution of words, is possible only on the basis of the creation of a language as a set of rules for such an exchange and such a distribution. Each of the interlocutors assumes the existence of this set as social condition any speech act. Or rather, that in this way this totality turns into "you" "anyone", since the rules of our language unite countless people, while only a small part of these people can enter into a relationship of friendship. In this sense, writing leads to a rupture between the "you" as a member of the friendly exchange and the "third" potentially involved in limitless communication. Of course, language as a social institution is not political entity. However, it is clear that under bad political regime distortion of verbal communication may occur due to the systematic recourse to lies and flattery and the constant feeling of fear.

In turn, the action in the process of its implementation is a kind of trinity structure, which once again demonstrates the mediating nature of institutions. I have already spoken about the belief in myself that I can experience as an agent capable of acting. And this faith, this confidence is transferred from me to another, and through the other they return to me. I know that I can and I believe that you you can just like me. And it is you who, believing in me, counting on me, help me to remain a powerful subject (sujet capable). But this recognition of the same ability for other agents involved, like me, in various kinds of interactions, is not complete without mediating the rules of action, which can be observed in professional activities, art, games. These rules create the highest standards for assessing the degree of success in the implementation of individual activities. For example, these higher standards make it possible to characterize the profession of a doctor with the help of rules that qualify a “good” doctor. And just as writing establishes a gap between the “you” of friendship and the “third” of unrestricted communication, social systems of various orders are wedged between the individual actions of various agents throughout the entire process of their joint activity. It is possible, following Jean-Marc Ferry (see his book “The Capabilities of Experience”, Volume II) * to categorize the phenomena that he pointedly called “orders of recognition” (“ordres de la reconnaissance”), large organizations interacting with each other: technical system, monetary and tax systems, legal system, bureaucratic system, mediation system, pedagogical system, scientific system. And in the beginning, it is precisely as one of these systems that the democratic system fits into the sequence of “orders of recognition” (“des ordres de la reconnaissance”) (later we will return to this paradoxical problem). It is necessary that at-

* Ferry J.-M. Les puissances de 1 "experience.

knowledge has taken place in the organization, and this should be emphasized as opposed to a systemic abstraction, in which initiatives and interventions can be excluded from consideration, thanks to which individuals enter into mutual relations with systems. Conversely, the organization needs to social systems was an indispensable mediator of recognition, this must be confirmed contrary to the principle of generality, which seeks to present the political connection as an interpersonal connection, examples of which are friendship and love. It can be questioned that the identity of narrative has the same threefold structure as discourse and action. But that doesn't mean anything. Life stories are so intertwined that the story of our own life, which each of us writes or listens to, becomes part of other stories told by others. And then, thanks to the presence of narrative identity, one can consider nations, peoples, classes, various kinds of communities as entities mutually recognizing each other, recognizing everyone as identical to themselves and one to the other. It is in this sense that history itself, taken in the meaning of historiography, can be considered as an education designed to demonstrate and preserve the temporal dimension of the “orders of recognition” (“ordres de la reconnaissance”), which have just been discussed. .

We now turn to the proper ethical level of self-determination. We have already noted its role in the constitution of a powerful subject (un sujet capable), capable, in fact, of being sane in ethical and legal terms, that is, of bearing responsibility for his actions and their consequences, of correcting the damage caused, if his actions are incriminating. -rules to him from the standpoint of civil law, and to be punished if he deserves it according to criminal law. This ability determines responsibility in the ethical-legal sense (in what follows we will talk about a different use of the concept of responsibility in connection with the fragility of political institutions). And the intersubjective nature of responsibility in this sense is obvious. An example with a commitment will make this clear. The “other” is involved in this relationship in various capacities: as an interested person, as a witness, as a judge, and, in essence, as one who, counting on me, on my ability to keep my word, appeals to my sense of responsibility, de -barks me responsible. It is this system of trust that includes social ties based on contracts, various kinds of mutual obligations that give legal form to promises made to each other. The principle that obligations must be fulfilled constitutes rules of recognition that go beyond a promise made in confidence by one person to another. This rule applies to everyone who lives according to these laws, and when it comes to international or universal law, to humanity as a whole. In this case, the other participant in the relationship is no longer “you”, but “the third”, which can be expressed more accurately using the pronoun “any”. As we noted above, considering the linguistic world, the political deformation of public obligations leads to the violation of promises made in private, and destroys the original foundations of contracts in general.

We have come in our analysis to the point at which politics appears as a sphere of realization of the striving for a good life. That is why, at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduces political connection as the realization of predominantly ethical goals.

How does politics fulfill this teleological function in relation to ethical goals? We have just characterized politics in terms of the spatial image inherent in the sphere of its implementation. This metaphor is extremely revealing: it focuses on the idea of ​​the appearance of public space, which adhered to Han-na Arendt (Arendt). This expression continues the theme coming from the Enlightenment, the theme publicity in the sense of ordering, without coercion or concealment, the whole flow of loyal feelings, within which each human life carries out its brief history. This concept of public space expresses, first of all, the condition of pluralism, which is the result of the extension of interhuman ties to all those who are outside the relationship of “I” and “you” and act as a “third”. In turn, the idea of ​​pluralism characterizes desire to live together inherent in one or another historical community: people, nation, region, class, etc. - irreducible to interpersonal relations; it is to this desire to live together that political institutions give a structure different from all those systems that have been characterized above as "orders of recognition" ("ordres de la reconnaissance"). Following Hannah Arendt, we will name power the common power which is the result of the desire to live together and which exists only as long as this desire is active; the terrifying experience of destruction, in which bonds are severed, proves their significance in a negative way. Political power, together with all its levels that have been analyzed above, is, as the word itself indicates, an extension of the ability that characterizes a powerful person. In turn, it gives this edifice of power a perspective of continuity and stability and, more generally speaking, opens up the horizon of a social world understood as peace and order.

Now we can raise the question of what specific ethical value corresponds to this political level of organization of society and, in fact, constitutes politics as an institution. It can be answered without any hesitation that justice is such a value. “Justice,” as Rawls wrote at the beginning of his Theory of Justice*, “is the chief virtue of social institutions, just as truth is the chief virtue of systems of thought.” The use of the word “virtue” in this context emphasizes that political relations belong to the sphere of interactions that depend on ethical judgments. In my book I-Myself as Other,** I wanted to mark this common belonging with a formulation that extends to the level of politics the thirdness of myself and the other in relation to "anyone" as a third person; according to this formulation, the ethical goal is to strive for a good life (“I”) with the “other” and for the “other” (relationship face-to-face) in the conditions of fair social institutions (“third”, or "any"). It will perhaps be objected that justice is not the prerogative of politics insofar as it is the "chief virtue of social institutions," hence of all institutions in general. This is true. But justice is related to other institutions only to the extent that the latter are considered with precision.

*Rawls J. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

**Ricoeur P. Soi-meme comme un autre. Paris, 1990.

ki in terms of the distribution of roles, tasks, advantages or losses experienced by members of society under the condition that there is a desire to live together, which turns society into a single whole based on cooperation. And a society viewed from this angle is a political society. In this sense, justice, due to its distributive character, carries an element distinctions articulation, agreement, which is lacking in the concept of the desire to live together. Without this important adjustment, one may end up with a distortion of the relationship with the other, as evidenced by nationalism and other attempts to reduce the political connection to an ethnic connection. It is this aspect of distinction that comes to the fore along with the concept distribution, which, in philosophy from Aristotle and the Middle Ages to John Rawls, has been closely associated with the concept of justice. The very term "distribution" is extremely important: it expresses a different plane of the idea of ​​division; one plane is participation in social institutions, the other plane is the recognition for each person of the right of individual participation in the distribution system. The idea of ​​justice as distribution has a wide application. And this indicates that the latter concept in economic terms is not limited to what complements the sphere of production. Social agreements can be seen as a distribution of parts. And all these parts relate not only to the market sphere, but, for example, are associated with power and responsibility. As Aristotle already noted in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, the political community involves the distribution of “honours, property and everything else that can be divided among fellow citizens of a certain state system” *.

*Aristotle. Works in four volumes, v. 4 M., 1984

The fact that in the field of social institutions the demand for justice strengthens the desire for a good life and at the same time leads to a shift from the sphere of ethics to the sphere normative morality, is confirmed by the presence of a long-standing relationship between justice and equality. With on the one hand, equality is the political fulfillment of the desire for recognition, the path of which we have traced both in the linguistic plane of communication, and in the practical plane of interaction, and in the narrative plane of life stories, and in the ethical plane of self-determination; on the other hand, the demand for justice calls for rule justice, and this last - to principles justice. Such a transition could have been anticipated even earlier, when we spoke about “orders of recognition”, the systemic nature of which cannot be denied. Thus, the principle of equality, in which the "orders of recognition" reach the highest point of their development, poses numerous problems for the critical mind. The difference between arithmetic and proportional equality, known since the time of Aristotle, confirms that the problem of justice fits into moral norm measurement.

This experience of the operation of the norm affects the following elements of the triple relation, which serves as a pointer for us here: “I”, “other” (person-to-person relation) and “third” (mediated by social institutions). This means that we enter the realm of the moral problematic of justice only if we first take into account the requirement of universalization, thanks to which the “I” acquires autonomy and if the relationship to the “other” is based on universal dimension what makes me respect in the "other" it is his humanity. Justice, considered normatively, forms a succession of homogeneous terms, together with the autonomy of the "I" and respect for the human in my personality and in the personality of any other individual. Thus, the meaning of the concept of justice, again placed on a par with the concept of autonomy and respect, rises to the level law fairness, to use Perelman's expression, or principles fairness, to use Rawls' expression.

As for the principles of justice proper, it should be noted that it is precisely in contract theories they are connected with the desire to formalize the idea of ​​justice up to its purely procedural interpretation, as is the case with Rawls. We do not question the legitimacy of formalism here. In fact, this is not the question, and it arises only when the requirements of a purely procedural conception of justice are taken into account. Main question is to find out whether, when reduced to a procedure that Rawls's two principles of justice illustrate, a residue is not formed that will gain the right to exist only if we return to certain common and, in this sense, ethical roots of social connections. Raising such a question does not mean that we deny the legitimacy of formalized procedures, on the contrary, we carefully listen to the requirement arising from these procedures. Indeed, if society can legitimately be represented as a vast system of distribution, then how can one not take into account the real variety of distributed goods? And how, in particular, can one ignore existing difference between market goods (such as income, inheritance, services, etc.) and non-market goods (such as citizenship, security, charity, health care, education, public services, etc.)? The very notion of social goods adopted by Rawls raises this question. What makes these goods good? And what causes their difference? This question, which extends to the entire sphere of social interactions, gives the problem of political power a special significance insofar as the State appears as a regulatory force, which is required by competition, which is the result of clashes of claims associated with various goods. ; this problem becomes extremely relevant in liberal democratic societies, where it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between market and non-market goods. It turns out that the contractual and procedural formalism, in which the normative spirit of public morality triumphs, certainly refers us to thinking about the meaning of the comparative evaluation of competing social goods. This understanding itself can only be shared, and it can only be formed in the process of public discussion. And it inevitably leads to respect for the individual and, apart from this still formal respect, to self-respect and mutual recognition of the individual in each other.

Only the Hegelian philosophy of the State could force us to abandon this point of view. According to this philosophy, the arbitration exercised by the State between what Michael Walzer calls "spheres of justice" may not in itself be amenable to moral judgment and, ultimately, ethical evaluation. And if the State cannot perform such a function, then this comes from the fact that it itself, as authorities is a boon that depends on understanding and agreement among members of the political community. Prevent the assertion of this super-ethical position

only constant recourse to the paradoxes that affect the position of the State as power can.

Once, while thinking about “Budapest struck by the sword”, I noted what seemed to me, in essence, certain political paradox, namely the conflict between form and force, arising from the establishment of political power. If, following E. Weil, one defines the State as "organization" thanks to which “the historical community is able to accept solutions", then this property to decide will combine in itself alternately rational and irrational aspects. The first aspect is related to the characteristics that make the State legal: the organization of public power on the basis of constitutional texts; control over the constitutionality of laws; legal formalism, ensuring the equality of all before the law; non-corruptible state-administrative apparatus; the independence of judges; control of the government by the parliament, as well as universal education in the spirit of freedom through public debate. Taken together, these characteristics express the rational element of the life of the State. But it would be inappropriate to exclude from the concept of the State the potential presence of an irrational element of force. Max Weber did not hesitate to include in his definition of the State a "monopoly of legitimate violence." Of course, the adjective “legitimate” does not allow us to identify the force at the disposal of the State with violence. However, there is a connection between this power and the historical violence used by the founders of empires and unifiers of territories. The most rational form of government - the legal State - keeps traces of the violence committed by those whom Hegel called the great people of world history. Residual violence is present in that arbitrariness that inevitably continues to influence the decision taken, which, using the expression of Eric Weil, is ultimately someone's decision: an individual or several individuals representing supreme power people. A terrifying illustration of such arbitrariness can be considered the power of certain statesmen who kindle an atomic fire; in such a case, the power of the State is a power that leads to death.

However, the paradox of form and strength is not the only one, and probably not the most significant one. Along with it, and perhaps on its basis, there is a paradox that in its own way splits power itself, namely, the relationship between the vertical and hierarchical dimensions domination and horizontal and all supported measurements desire to live together. In the ethical part of this analysis, we would seem to have argued that power is generated only by the desire to live together. It certainly creates a conditio sine qua non of the existence of a political bond. But it is not a sufficient condition. Here again Max Weber can help. In any social interactions, the political connection is formed as a result of the division into managers and managed. On the one hand, such a split is a legacy of violence, the residual role of which even in the depths of rule of law has just been said. On the other hand, even more unusual is the fact that this connection retains, perhaps inextricably, the role of power in the sense of legitimacy inherited from the previous authorities, which is illustrated by the transformation of the symbol of Caesar's power into Caesar in political history West. At best, this power belongs to the ancient- auctoritas in senatu poteslas in populo,- at worst, her heirs-tyrants of old. For millennia, political theology has been reduced to justification in the divine transcendence of the vertical relationship of domination. The question is whether another "theological-political" principle is possible, which will create the horizontal dimension of power and subordinate to it the vertical dimension of domination. Spinoza's distinction between potentia and pofesfas, perhaps, it orients towards the restoration of this theological-political meaning. Be that as it may, the task that will probably remain unfulfilled is to correctly connect the vertical and horizontal dimensions, dominance and power. This task brings us back to ethical and moral thinking about the stability of power.

The third figure of the political paradox was revealed in the process contemporary criticism single and indivisible idea of ​​justice. Michael Walser in "Spheres of Justice" * divides the idea of ​​justice in accordance with the variety of social benefits, the distribution of which should be regulated by the law of justice. So, there are various spheres of civil rights, market goods, security, charity, education, etc., and, finally, the sphere of political power, in which the common good is defined as a public good. As a result of this dissection of the idea of ​​justice, the political sphere, in essence, appears as one of the spheres among others, to the extent that power is also a social good, distributed according to its own rules. However, me-

* Walzer M. Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York, 1983.

there is a paradox here, since the State, as the bearer of this power, appears simultaneously as one of the spheres among other spheres, and as something that covers these spheres, and on the basis of this plays the role of a regulatory authority designed to prevent violations rights of any of these spheres from another sphere. Luc Boltansky and Laurent Thevenot in their work “On Justification” *, starting from the problem of the diversity of principles of justification in a situation of dispute, come to a paradox of the same order. We use here the words "regions" and "worlds" in the same sense in which Walser spoke of "spheres of justice." Thus, the “sphere of political relations” appears as a certain sphere different from the “poetic sphere”, “the sphere of market relations”, “the sphere of rumor”, “the sphere of private life”, “the sphere of industrial production ". The critical moment here is the point of divergence between the sphere of market relations and the sphere of political relations, which do not obey the same criteria of development and stagnation. However, only the State, acting, according to Walzer, at the same time in the role of both part and whole, is able to regulate the establishment of mutual compromises, which can be reached on the border of these areas. The presence of this obvious antinomy, it seems to us, reveals the difficulties that are characteristic of the modern democratic State, which, with the elimination of the theological and political foundation, has lost its sacred purpose, which unambiguously placed it above the sphere of justice and all principles of justification. . The merit of both works, to which we have just referred, is that they help to realize the new

* Boltanski L., Thevenot L. De la justification.

a new situation, incomprehensible, in any case, in the categories of our republican-Jacobin tradition. At present, the State as a source of law is in a difficult position: it is called upon to act both as a whole and as a part; and as a comprehensive instance, and as a private instance. This paradox, in essence, affects the very concept of political power.

Why was it so important to devote this analysis to the problem of the relationship between political and ethical-moral dimensions? One reason can be regarded as negative, the other as positive. From a critical point of view, the analysis of the paradoxes of the political sphere, first of all, warns against appealing to any hypostases of politics, and the paradoxes examined testify to its fragility. Earlier we referred to the position of Hannah Arendt, which contrasts the power based on the desire to live together with the fragility of everything that is connected with a person subject to death. And now it should be said about the fragility of the policy itself, which is reflected, among other things, by the fragility of its principles (freedom, equality, fraternity...) and its language (the rhetoric of the struggle for power). This criticism, in turn, is only the reverse side of the responsibility of citizens for the fate of the fragile modern democracy entrusted to them, which is absolutely devoid of guarantees. As Hans Jonas argues in The Principle of Responsibility*, the object of responsibility is that which is not guaranteed to be sustainable under any circumstances, which is why, due to the fragility of politics, citizens are entrusted with the care of its preservation and maintenance.

* Jonas H. Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik fur die technologische Zivilisation. Francfort, 1980.

So, the circle of our reflections is closed. At the very beginning we raised the question of what kind of subject political philosophy deals with; we answered this question: with a person mighty(un homme capable),with a person determined by abilities that develop only in an institutionalized environment, culminating in the sphere of politics. Thus, political power appears as a condition for the realization of the abilities of a powerful person. Let's call this powerful person, born in the sphere of political relations, a citizen. The circle with which I would like to complete this analysis is as follows:

political power, whose fragility is evidenced by the paradoxes of power, must be "saved" solely by the vigilance of the citizens themselves, created in a certain sense by the social state (la cite).

What has occupied me for the last 30 years

In order to show the general meaning of the problems that have occupied me for the last thirty years, and the tradition with which my treatment of these problems is connected, it seems to me best to start with my recent work on the narrative function *, then show the relationship of this work to my previous work on metaphor**, symbol, psycho-analysis*** and other related problems, and then from these particular studies to turn to the premises, in equally theoretical and methodological, on which all my searches are based. This backward movement, along my own creativity, will allow me, at the end of my presentation, to present the premises of the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition with which I am associated, showing how my research is both continued and corrected, and sometimes question this tradition.

Narrative function

First, a few words about my work on the narrative function. They highlight the three main tasks that occupy me. The study of the act of narration primarily corresponds to the very general task that I set out in my time in

* Ricoeur P.Letempsetlerecit.P., 1983-1985.Vol 1-3.

** Idea. Metaphor Vive. P., 1975.

*** Idea. De 1 "interpretation. Essai sur Freud. P., 1965. 59

the first chapter of the book on Freud and philosophy *, - the preservation of amplitude, diversity and irreducibility to each other forms of use language. From the outset, therefore, it can be seen that I am close to those of the analytic philosophers who oppose reductionism, according to which "well-constructed languages" should serve as a measure of the meaningfulness and truth of all "illogical" uses of language. .

The second task complements and in some way moderates the first - this is the task identify similarities various forms and ways of narration. Indeed, in the course of the development of the culture we have inherited, the act of storytelling has continuously branched out into ever more specific literary genres. As a result, a significant difficulty arises for philosophers, since the narrative field is divided by a cardinal dichotomy: on the one hand, narratives that claim to be true, comparable to the truth of descriptive discourses in a scientific work (this is, say, history and close literary genres of biography and autobiographies), and, on the other hand, fictional narratives such as epic, drama, short story, novel, not to mention narrative forms that use means other than language: film, for example, sometimes painting, plastic arts. In spite of this endless fragmentation, I assume that there is functional unity between numerous narrative modes and genres. My main hypothesis is this: the common characteristic of human experience that is marked, articulated, clarified in all forms of storytelling is its temporary nature. Everything, that

* Ricoeur P. De 1 "interpretation. Essai sur Freud. P., 1965.

is told, happens and unfolds in time, takes some time - and what unfolds in time can be told. It may even be that any temporal process is recognized as such only to the extent that it lends itself to retelling in one way or another. This supposed relationship between narrativite and temporality is the theme of Time and Narrative. As limited as this problem may be in relation to the wide scope of actual and potential uses of language, it is, in fact, dimensionless. It combines problems that are usually treated separately: the epistemology of historical knowledge, literary criticism, the theory of time (in turn, distributed among cosmology, physics, biology, psychology, sociology). By interpreting the temporality of experience as the common ground of history and fiction, I combine fiction, history, and time into a single problem.

Here it is time to talk about the third task, which allows us to make more accessible the interpretation of the problems of temporality and narration: this is the task of testing the ability of the language itself to select and organize, when it is built into discursive unities, longer than phrases, you can name them texts. If in fact the narrative should mark out, articulate, clarify temporal experience (returning to the three verbs used above), then one must look for some unit of measurement in the use of language that would meet this need for differentiation, ordering and explication. That the linguistic unit sought is the text, and that it constitutes the required mediation between the temporally shaped lived experience and the narrative act, can be briefly outlined as follows. As a linguistic unit, the text is a diplomatic, diplomatic or ecclesiastical story that tells about battles, betrayals, splits and, in general, about changes in fate that push decisive individuals to action. I maintain that the connection between history and narration cannot be interrupted without history losing its specificity, which distinguishes it from other sciences. To begin with, I note that the fundamental mistake of those who oppose history to narration is to ignore the intelligible character of the narration communicated to it by intrigue, which was first emphasized by Aristotle. In the background of the criticism of the narrative nature of history, the naive notion of narrative as an incoherent sequence of events is always revealed. They notice only the episodic nature of the narrative, but forget about the configuration, the basis of its intelligibility. At the same time, the distance that the narrative establishes between itself and living experience is ignored. There is a gap between “living” and “telling”, no matter how small it may be. Life lived, story told.

Secondly, if the fundamental intelligibility of narrative is not recognized, it becomes incomprehensible how historical explanation can be attached to narrative understanding in such a way that the more it is explained, the better it is told. The incongruity lies not so much in the nature of the laws that the historian can borrow from other, most advanced social sciences - demography, political economy, linguistics, sociology, etc., but in how they function. In fact, the laws, as they take place in the previously established narrative organization, which has already qualified events as participating in the development of some kind of intrigue, are clothed with historical meaning.

Thirdly, moving away from event-driven, primarily political, history, historiography is not as significantly separated from narrative history as it seems to historians. Although history, becoming a social, economic, cultural history, becomes a history of great duration, it remains closely connected with time and describes the changes that connect some final situation with the initial one. The speed of change does not matter. While remaining connected to time and change, historiography remains connected to the deeds of people who, in Marx's words, make history in circumstances that they did not create. Directly or indirectly, history is the history of people, carriers, actors and victims of those forces, institutions, functions, structures in which they are included. Ultimately, the story cannot be completely separated from the narrative, because it cannot be separated from the action, where there are actors, goals, circumstances, interactions, and desired or undesired results. Intrigue, on the other hand, is a basic narrative unity that combines heterogeneous components into an intelligible whole.

The second circle of problems concerns the legitimacy of using the concept of intrigue in the analysis of fictional narratives from folk tale and epics to the modernist novel. This legitimacy is attacked from two opposite but complementary sides.

I will not dwell on the structuralists' objections to interpreting the narrative too much, from their point of view, to overestimate its apparent chronology. I have already argued earlier with the attempt to replace the "achronic" logic, empowered at the level of the deep grammar of the narrative text, with the dynamics of the upper layer, which belongs to the intrigue. I prefer to focus on objections from the other, opposite and complementary side of the first.

In contrast to structuralism, which has been successful in studies of folk tales and traditional stories, many literary critics turn to the evolution of the modern novel for arguments in order to discover in this manner of writing experimentation that rejects any norms and all paradigms perceived from tradition. , including those inherited from the 19th century novel. types of intrigue. The rejection of tradition here comes to the point where, it seems, in general, any concept of intrigue disappears, and it loses the meaning of something essential for describing the facts presented.

To this I reply that the relationship between the paradigm as such and the individual work is interpreted by criticism in error. We call paradigms the types of intrigue that emerge from the sedimentation of narrative practice itself. Here we touch on one of the fundamental phenomena-interrelation (1 "alternance) of sedimentation * and innovation; this is a phenomenon constitutive of what is called tradition, and it is directly contained in the historical character of narrative schematism. It is this reversal of innovation and sedimentation makes possible the deviation from the norm, which my opponents are talking about.However, it must be understood that the deviation itself is possible only on the basis of traditional culture, which creates in the reader those or other expectations that the artist on excites or dispels its taste.

* Sedimixation (literally: precipitation, settling) is a term that denotes in phenomenology the assimilation and consolidation as mastered new forms of consciousness and culture: meanings, styles, etc. (Note. per.)

this ironic attitude towards traditional norms could not have been established in an absolute paradigm void. The premises, which I will dwell on in due time in more detail, do not allow one to think of radical anomie, but only play by the rules. Only conceivable correct imagination.

The third problem I would like to mention concerns the general relation of history and fiction to the temporal basis of human experience. This is a significant difficulty. On the one hand, indeed, only history seems to be correlated with reality, albeit the past. Only she seems to pretend to be telling about the events that really happened. The writer of novels neglects the guarantee of material confirmation, the coercive force of the document and archives. It seems that an irreducible disproportion opposes historical reality and the unreality of fiction.

The question is not to destroy this incommensurability. On the contrary, it is necessary to lean on it in order to notice the intersection and chiasm of the two modes of reference* in fiction and in history. On the one hand, it cannot be said that fiction is not correlated with anything. On the other hand, one cannot say that history relates to the historical past in the same way that empirical descriptions relate to actual reality.

To recognize that fiction has a reference is to get away from a narrow understanding of reference that would leave fiction only an emotional role. One way or another, any system of symbols leads to configuration reality. In particular, the intrigues we invent help to change the

* Referential-message, correlation, correlation, referential connection As applied to language, sign-method of correlation with designated extralinguistic reality (referent). (.note. lane)

of our vague, unformed, and ultimately mute temporal experience. “What is time?” Augustine asks. “If no one asks me about it, I know if they ask, I can no longer answer.” The ability of fiction to give a configuration to this seemingly silent temporal experience is the referential function of intrigue. Here the connection between mythos and mimesis noted in Aristotle's Poetics is revealed. “The plot is, he says, the imitation of the action” (Poetica, 1450a2).

The plot imitates the action, since it builds its intelligible schemes with the help of fiction alone. The world of fiction is a laboratory of forms where we try out possible configurations of action in order to test their solidity and feasibility. This experimentation with paradigms is based on productive imagination. At this stage, the reference seems to be delayed: the imitated action only imitated, that is, artificially, composed. Fiction means fingere*, and fingere means creation. The world of fiction in this phase of retention is only the world of the text, the projection of the text as a world.

But the delay of reference can only be an intermediate moment between the pre-understanding of the world of action and the transfiguration of everyday reality under the influence of fiction. The world of the text, since it is a kind of world, inevitably collides with the real world in order to “remake” it, either to affirm it or to deny it. And even the most ironic connection between art and reality would be incomprehensible if art did not “de-arrange” and “rearrange” our relationship to the real. If the world of the text were out of visible relation to the real world, language would not be "dangerous" in

Creation, making, production and composition, fabrication, pretense (Latin gerund from fingo).

in the sense in which Hölderlin spoke about it before Nietzsche and W. Benjamin.

A parallel transition is found on the side of history. Just as narrative fiction is not devoid of reference, so the reference inherent in history is not devoid of kinship with the "productive" reference of fictional narrative. It cannot be said that the past is unreal, but the past reality is, strictly speaking, unconfirmed. Since it is no more, it is only planned indirectly, through historical discourse. This is where the relationship between history and fiction comes to light. The reconstruction of the past, as Collingwood so beautifully puts it, is a matter of the imagination. By virtue of the links between history and narrative mentioned above, the historian also builds intrigues that documents confirm or refute, but never contain. History in this sense combines narrative coherence and correspondence with documents. This complex combination characterizes the status of history as an interpretation. This opens the way for a positive exploration of the intersections of the modes of reference of fiction and history, asymmetrical but equally indirect or mediated. It is through this complex interplay between the mediated reference to the past and the productive reference of the fiction that human experience in its deep temporal dimension is continually rearranged.

Living metaphor

I will now bring the study of the narrative function into the broader framework of my previous work*, so that I can then illuminate those theoretical and epistemological premises that have been constantly strengthened and refined over time.

The connection between the problems concerning the narrative function and the problems that I discussed in Living Metaphor is not at first glance visible:

Whereas narrative must be classified under a number of literary genres, metaphor at first sight belongs to the class of tropes, that is, discursive figures;

While narrative, among its variations, includes such a significant subgenre as history, which can claim the status of a science or, at least, descriptions of real events of the past, metaphor, apparently, is characteristic only of the lyrical poetry whose descriptive claims seem weak, if they exist at all.

However, it is the search and discovery problems common to these two areas, despite their obvious differences, will lead us in the last part of this essay to more spacious philosophical horizons.

I will divide my remarks into two groups, according to the two difficulties which I have just outlined. The first concerns the structure or, better, the "meaning" immanent in the expressions (enonces) themselves, whether narrative or metaphorical. The second refers to the extra-linguistic "reference" of these and other expressions and thus to their claims to truth.

1. Let us first dwell on the section of “meaning”.

a) With regard to the commonality of meaning, the most elementary connection between the narrative "genre" and the metaphorical "trope" lies in their common

* Ricoeur P Melaphore vive P, 1975.

belonging to discourse, i.e., forms of language use that are equal to or exceed the phrase in dimension.

It seems to me that one of the first results achieved by modern studies of metaphor is the displacement of analysis from the realm of the words into the sphere phrases. According to the definitions of classical rhetoric, going back to Aristotle's Poetics, metaphor is the transfer of a common name from one thing to another because of their similarity. In order to understand the action that generates such a spread, one must go beyond the word and rise to the level of a phrase and speak rather than a metaphor-word, but about a metaphorical expression. Then it turns out that a metaphor is a work with a language, consisting in the assignment by a logical subject of predicates previously incompatible with it. In other words, before becoming a deviant name, a metaphor is an unusual predication that violates the stability and, as they say, the semantic space (pertinence) of the phrase in the form in which it is formed by common, i.e. - meanings, cash terms. If, therefore, it is accepted as a hypothesis that, first and foremost, metaphor is an unusual attribution, the essence of the transformation that words undergo in metaphorical expression becomes clear. This is the “meaning effect” caused by the need to preserve the semantic space of the phrase. Metaphor arises when we perceive through a new semantic space and in some way below it the resistance of words in their ordinary usage, hence their incompatibility at the level of the literal interpretation of the phrase. It is this rivalry between new metaphorical space and literal incompatibility that makes metaphorical expressions special among all uses of language at the level of phrase. b) An analysis of metaphor as a phrase rather than as a word, or more precisely as an unusual predication than as a deviant name, will allow us to proceed to a comparison of the theory of narrative and the theory of metaphor. Both deal essentially with the phenomenon semantic innovation. True, the narrative is immediately located on the stage of extended discourse, as a certain sequence of phrases, while the metaphorical operation, strictly speaking, affects only the basis of the functioning of the phrase - predication. But in real use, metaphorical phrases affect the entire context of the poem, linking the metaphors together. In this sense, we can say, agreeing with literary criticism, that every metaphor is a poem in miniature. The parallelism between narration and metaphor is thus established not only at the level of discourse-phrase, but also discourse-sequence.

Within the framework of this parallelism, the phenomenon semantic innovation. This is the most fundamental common problem of both metaphor and storytelling in terms of meaning. In both cases, something new appears in the language, something not yet said, not expressed: here- live metaphor, i.e. new predication space, there- composed intrigue, i.e. new combination in intrigue. But both there and there, the human ability to create becomes distinguishable and acquires the contours that make it accessible to analysis. Living metaphor and intrigue formation are, as it were, two windows open to the secret of creativity.

c) If we now ask ourselves the question of the foundations of this privilege of metaphor and intrigue, we must turn to the functioning productive imagination and that schematism, which is his intelligible

matrix. In both cases, in essence, the innovation is produced in the linguistic environment and partly reveals what the imagination can be, creating according to certain rules. In intrigue-building, this orderly productivity is expressed in a continuous transition from the invention of single intrigues to the formation-by-sedimentation-of-narrative typology. Between the observance of the norms inherent in any narrative typology, and deviations from them in the process of creating new intrigues, a peculiar dialectic is played out.

But the same kind of dialectic arises when a new semantic space is born in new metaphors. Aristotle said that “to form metaphors well is to discover likeness” (Poetica, 1459 a 4-8). However, what is “detect similar”? If the establishment of a new semantic space is that whereby the expression "makes sense" as a whole, the assimilation consists in rapprochement initially distant terms that suddenly turn out to be “close”. The assimilation, therefore, consists in changing the distance in the logical space. It is nothing but this sudden discovery of a new generic resemblance of heterogeneous ideas.

This is where productive imagination-as a schematization of this synthetic operation of approach comes into play. Imagination is the ability to create new logical species through predicative assimilation, the creation, despite and because of the fact that there is an initial differentiation of terms that prevents this assimilation.

However, intrigue also revealed to us something similar to this predicative assimilation: it also turned out to be something like a “taking in total” many events into a single history by a composition of rather heterogeneous factors-circumstances, characters with them projects and motives, interactions, including cooperation or hostility, help or opposition, and finally, accidents. Any intrigue is this type of synthesis of the heterogeneous.

d) If we now shift the focus to intel-ligable character inherent in semantic innovation, a new parallelism will emerge between the domains of narrative and metaphor. We have stated above that, in the study of history, a very peculiar aspect comes into play. understanding and in connection with this they spoke of the narrative faculty of understanding. We supported the thesis that historical explanation from through laws, regular causes, functions, structures, participates in this narrative understanding. So we could say that the more explained, the better told. We supported the same thesis with regard to structural explanations of fictional narratives:

the identification of narrative codes underlying, for example, the background of a folk tale, turned out to be a work of rationalization at the second level, applied to the understanding of the first level-visible grammar of the narrative.

The same relationship between understanding and explanation is observed in the field of poetry. The act of understanding, which in this area can be correlated with the ability to trace history, consists in comprehending that semantic dynamics, as a result of which, in a metaphorical expression, from the ruins of semantic incompatibility, striking when reading a phrase literally, a new se-mantic space. To “understand” therefore means to perform or redo the discursive operation underlying the semantic innovation. However, over this understanding, with the help of which the author or reader “creates” a metaphor, is a scientific explanation that does not proceed from the dynamism of the phrase and does not recognize the irreducibility of discursive unities to signs belonging to the system of language. Based on the principle of structural homology of all linguistic levels, from phoneme to text, the explanation of the metaphor fits into the general semiotics, which takes the sign as a reference unit. Here, as in the case of the narrative function, I argue that explanation is not primary but secondary to understanding. The explanation presented as a symbolic combination, i.e. as a kind of semiotics, is built on the basis of understanding the first level, based on discourse as an inseparable and capable of innovation act. Just as narrative structures revealed by explanation presuppose an understanding of the intriguing act of structuration, structures revealed by structural semiotics are built on that discursive structuration whose dynamism and capacity for innovation is revealed by metaphor.

The third part of the essay will discuss how this dual approach to the relationship between explanation and understanding contributes to the modern development of hermeneutics. And above all about how the theory of metaphor contributes to the theory of narrative in clarifying the problem of reference.

2. In the foregoing discussion, we deliberately considered separately the "meaning" of a metaphorical expression, i.e., its internal predicative structure, and its "reference", i.e., its claim to reach an extralinguistic reality and, consequently, to say the truth.

However, the study of the narrative function first confronted us with the problem of poetic reference when it came to the connection between mythos and mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Narrative fiction, we noted, “mimics” human action in that it facilitates the remodeling of structures and dimensions according to the imaginary configuration of the plot. Fiction has this ability to "remake" reality, or rather, within the framework of narrative fiction, practical reality, to the extent that the text intentionally outlines the horizon. new reality, which we co-found possible to call the world. It is this world of text that invades the world of action in order to change its configuration or, if you like, to effect its transfiguration.

The study of metaphor allows us to penetrate deeper into the mechanism of this operation of transfiguration and extend it to the totality of two constitutive moments of poetic reference that we denote by the general term “fiction”.

The first of these points is the easiest to single out. The tongue is clothed poetic function whenever attention shifts from the reference to the composition itself. In the words of Roman Jakobson, the poetic function emphasizes the composition for its own sake* to the detriment of the function of reference, which, on the contrary, dominates in descriptive language. It could be said that centripetal motion language towards itself displaces the centrifugal movement of the function of reference. Language honors itself in the play of sound and meaning. The first constitutive moment of poetic reference thus lies in this delay of direct correlation with reality already constituted, already described with the help of everyday or scientific language.

But the delay in the function of reference that accompanies the shift in emphasis to writing for its own

*for his own sake (English)

sake, is only the reverse side, or negative condition, of the more hidden referential function of discourse, liberated in a sense by this delay from the descriptive load of expressions. It is as a result of this that poetic discourse introduces into language aspects, qualities, meanings of reality that could not penetrate into directly descriptive language and that can only be expressed through a complex game of metaphorical expression and an ordered shift in the usual meanings of our words.

This ability of metaphorical "retelling" of reality is strictly parallel to the mimetic function that we noted above in narrative fiction. This fiction mainly concerns the field of action and its temporal meanings, while the metaphorical “retelling” reigns rather in the sphere of sensual, emotional, ethical and axiological meanings that make the world a world. inhabited.

The philosophical implications of the theory of indirect reference are just as remarkable as the corresponding implications of the dialectic of explanation and understanding. We will now move on to them consideration in the field of philosophical hermeneutics. Let us note in advance that the function of the transfiguration of the real, which we have recognized as poetic fiction, presupposes that we no longer identify reality with empirical reality, or, what is the same, we do not identify experience with empirical experience. The merit of poetic language lies in its ability to bring into language aspects of what Husserl called Lebenswelt* and Heidegger In-der-Welt-Sein**.

* Lifeworld (German).

** In-world-being (German).

Thus, poetic language also requires that we rework the conventional conception of truth, that is, stop limiting it to logical coherence and empirical verifiability in such a way as to take into account the claims to truth associated with the transfigurative action of fiction. It is impossible to speak further about reality, truth (and, of course, also about being) without first trying to clarify the philosophical premises of this whole enterprise.

Hermeneutical philosophy

What are the characteristic premises of the philosophical tradition to which, in my opinion, I belong? How do the studies that have just been done fit into this tradition?

1) With regard to the first question, I would characterize the philosophical tradition that I represent in three ways: it continues the line reflective philosophy, remains dependent on Husserlian phenomenology and develops hermeneutical version of this phenomenology.

By reflective philosophy I generally mean a way of thinking originating from the Cartesian Cogito and continued by Kant and little known abroad: French post-Kantianism, in which the most remarkable thinker, in my opinion, was Jean Naber. Philosophical problems, which reflective philosophy considers to be among the most fundamental, concern understanding one's self as the subject of operations of cognition, volition, evaluation, etc. Reflection is an act of returning to oneself, through which the subject anew comprehends with intellectual clarity and moral responsibility the unifying principle of those operations in which he disperses and forgets about oneself as a subject. "I think," says Kant, must be able to accompany all my ideas. By this formula all reflexive philosophies are recognizable. But how does "I think" know or recognize itself? It is here that phenomenology, and to an even greater extent hermeneutics, offer both the realization and a radical transformation of the very program of reflective philosophy at once. The idea of ​​reflection is essentially connected with the idea of ​​absolute transparency, the perfect coincidence of the I with itself, which should have made self-consciousness undoubted and in this sense more fundamental knowledge than all positive sciences. This fundamental requirement, as philosophy acquired the mental tools capable of satisfying it, first phenomenology, and then hermeneutics, was constantly relegated to an ever more distant horizon.

Thus, Husserl, in his theoretical texts, most marked by an idealism reminiscent of Fichte's idealism, understands phenomenology not only as a method of essentially describing the fundamental articulations of experience (perceptual, imaginative, intellectual, volitional, axiological, etc.), but also as a radical self-justification for complete intellectual clarity. At the same time, he sees in the reduction (or eroshe) applied to the natural attitude, the development of the realm of meaning, where any question concerning things in themselves is removed by bracketing. This realm of meaning, thus liberated from any question of factuality, constitutes the predominant field of phenomenological experience, the predominantly intuitive realm. Returning through Kant to Descartes, Husserl is of the opinion that any comprehension of the transcendent is doubtful, while that which is immanent for the ego is certain. This statement leaves phenomenology within the limits of reflective philosophy.

However, phenomenology, not in theorizing about itself and its ultimate claims, but in its actual movement, outlines rather than the realization, but a departure from the ideal of such a radical justification in the transparency of the subject for itself. A major discovery of phenomenology, under the indispensable condition of phenomenological reduction, remains intentionality, i.e., in the most technical sense, the primacy of consciousness about something over self-consciousness. But this definition of intentionality is still trivial. Strictly speaking, intentionality means that the intentional act is comprehended only by means of a repeatedly identifiable unity of what is meant. meaning: what Husserl calls "no-ema" or the intentional correlate of the "neo-ethical" act of positing. In addition, above this noema, in the overlying layers, is the result of synthetic acts, which Husserl calls "constituted" (constituted thing, space, time, etc.). But concrete phenomenological investigations, especially those concerning the constitution of the "thing", reveal in a regressive way more and more fundamental layers, where active syntheses point to more and more radical passive syntheses. Thus, phenomenology turns out to be enclosed in an endless movement of “questions in reverse order”, in the process of which her project of radical self-justification melts away. In the last works of Husserl, devoted to life world, this term signifies the horizon of a never-attainable immediacy: the Lebenswelt is always presupposed and never given. This is the lost paradise of phenomenology. In this sense, by trying to realize its guiding idea, phenomenology itself undermines it. This is what lends tragic grandeur to Husserl's cause.

Understanding this paradoxical result helps to understand how hermeneutics can merge with phenomenology and maintain with it the same dual relationship that phenomenology maintains with its Cartesian and Fichtean ideal. The premises of hermeneutics at first glance make it alien to the reflexive tradition and the phenomenological project. Hermeneutics was actually born (or rather revived) in the era of Schleiermacher from a fusion of biblical exegesis, classical philology and jurisprudence. This fusion of many disciplines helped bring about the Copernican revolution, which posed the question: what does it mean to understand? before the question of the meaning of this or that text or this or that category of texts (sacred or secular, poetic or legal). It was this study of Verstehen* that, a hundred years later, was to face the par- ticularly phenomenological question of the intentional meaning of noetic acts. True, hermeneutics retained theoretical tasks that were different from the interests of concrete phenomenology. Whereas phenomenology posed the question of meaning primarily in the cognitive and perceptual dimensions, hermeneutics, starting with Dilthey, posed it in the plane of history and human sciences. But it was on both sides the same fundamental question about the relationship between meaning and I(soi), between intelli-disastrous first and reflexivity second.

The phenomenological rootedness of hermeneutics is not limited to this very common relationship

* Understanding (German)

understanding of the text and the intentional relation of co-knowledge to the meaning presented to it. In post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, the Lebenswelt theme, raised by phenomenology, somewhat against its intentions, is of paramount importance. Only due to the fact that we are originally in the world and are inextricably involved in it, we can, by means of a secondary movement, oppose to ourselves the objects that we are trying to intellectually constitute and subordinate to our will. Verstehen*, according to Heidegger, has ontological significance. This is the answer of a being thrown into the world, who orients himself in it, projecting the possibilities most characteristic of him. Interpretation (in the technical sense of interpreting a text) is only a development, a clarification of the ontological understanding inherent in a being thrown into the world from the very beginning. Thus, the subject-object relation, on which Husserl remains dependent, is subject to an ontological connection more primordial than any relation of consciousness.

This hermeneutical undermining of phenomenology entails another: the famous “reduction” by which Husserl distinguishes the “meaning” of the existential foundation in which natural consciousness is originally rooted can no longer retain the status of an original philosophical act. Now it acquires an epistemologically derived meaning: it is a secondary act of establishing a distance (and in this sense, forgetting the primary rootedness of understanding), for the implementation of which all objectifying operations are required, which are characteristic of both ordinary and scientific knowledge. But this distancing presupposes that participation by which we are already in the world before we become subjects, opposing objects to ourselves in order to judge them and subject them to our intellectual and technical domination. Thus, if Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics inherit Husserl's phenomenology, then it ultimately both realizes and inverts it in equal measure.

The philosophical consequences of this revolution are significant. We will overlook them if we confine ourselves to ascertaining finiteness, which devalues ​​the ideal of transparency of the transcendental subject for itself. The idea of ​​finitude itself remains banal, even trivial. At best, it only formulates negative terms renunciation of all hybris* reflection, of all pretensions of the subject to find its foundation in itself. The discovery of the primacy of being-in-the-world in relation to every project of justification and every attempt at the ultimate establishment of truth reveals its full force when conclusions are drawn from it for the epistemology of a new ontology of understanding. Only by extracting these epistemological conclusions can I move from answering the first question to the second question posed at the beginning of the third part of the essay. I summarize this epistemological outcome with the following formula: there is no self-understanding, not mediated signs, symbols and texts: self-understanding ultimately coincides with the interpretation of these mediating terms. Passing from one to another, hermeneutics step by step gets rid of the idealism with which Husserl tried to identify phenomenology. Let us now trace the phases of this liberation.

mediation signs: this sets the initial linguistic any predisposition

* Arrogance, immeasurable claims.

human experience. Perception affects, desire affects. Hegel already showed this in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Freud drew another consequence from this: there is no such hidden, hidden or perverted desire that it cannot be clarified by language and, by entering the sphere of language, does not reveal its meaning. Psychoanalysis, as a talk-cure, has no other presupposition than this primordial closeness of desire and speech. And since speech is perceived rather than pronounced, the shortest way of the I to myself is the speech of the other, allowing me to slip through the open space of signs.

mediation symbols- by this term I mean expressions with a double meaning, in traditional cultures associated with the names of cosmic “elements” (fire, water, air, earth, etc.), their “dimensions” (height and depth and etc.) and “aspects” (light and darkness, etc.). These expressions are arranged in several tiers: symbols of the most universal character; symbols inherent in only one culture; finally, created by an individual and even found in only one work. In the latter case, the symbol coincides with a living metaphor. But, on the other hand, there is probably no symbol-creation that is not ultimately rooted in a universal symbolic foundation. I myself once sketched the "Symbolism of Evil"**, where the reflection of evil will was entirely based on the mediating role of certain expressions that have a double meaning, such as "spot", "fall", "deviation". At that time I even reduced hermeneutics to the interpretation of symbols, i.e. to the identification

* Logotherapy, word therapy (eng)

** RicoeurP Symbolique du mal.

leniation of the second, often hidden meaning of these ambiguous expressions.

Now this definition of hermeneutics in terms of the interpretation of symbols seems to me too narrow. There are two reasons for this, which make it necessary to move from mediation by symbols to mediation by text. First of all, I noticed that traditional, or particular, symbolism reveals its resources for multiplying meaning only in its own contexts, i.e., at the level full text such as poems. In addition, the same symbolism allows for competing and even polar opposite interpretations, depending on whether the interpretation is aimed at reducing the symbolism to its literal foundation, unconscious origins or social motivations, or at an expansionary interpretation. forging corresponding to its greatest capacity for ambiguity. In one case, hermeneutics is focused on the demythologization of symbolism, showing the unconscious forces hidden in it, in the other, on finding the richest, highest, spiritual meaning. However, this conflict of interpretations is equally evident at the textual level.

It follows from this that hermeneutics can no longer be defined simply through the interpretation of symbols. However, this definition must be preserved as a step between the general recognition of the linguistic character of experience and the more technical definition of hermeneutics through the interpretation of texts. In addition, it helps to dispel the illusion of intuitive knowledge of the Self, offering a detour to understanding the Self through a wealth of symbols transmitted through cultures in the bosom of which we find both existence and speech.

Finally, indirect texts. At first glance, this mediation seems more restrictive and abandons the dream of a perfect mediation, at the end of which reflection would again rise to the level of intellectual intuition.

2) Now I can try to answer the second question above. If these are the prerequisites characteristic of the tradition with which my work is connected, then how do I assess the place of my work in the development of this tradition?

To answer this question, it suffices for me to compare the just given definition of the tasks of hermeneutics with the conclusions of the second part.

As we have just said, the task of hermeneutics is twofold: to reconstruct the inner dynamics of the text and to recreate the ability of the work to project itself outwards as a representation of a world in which I could live.

It seems to me that all my research, aimed at studying the connection of understanding and explanation at the level of what I called the “meaning” of the work, is connected with the first task. In my analysis of narration, as well as in the analysis of metaphor, I fight on two fronts: on the one hand, I reject the irrationalism of direct understanding as the extension to the field of texts of that intropathy that allows the subject to penetrate into someone else's consciousness in conditions of intimate dialogue. This inadequate extra-trapolation maintains the romantic illusion of a direct connection of con-genius hidden in the work between two subjectivities - the author and the reader. But I also vigorously reject the rationalism of explanation, which applies to the text a structural analysis of sign systems that are characteristic not of the text, but of the language. This equally inadequate extrapolation gives rise to the positivist illusion of a textual objectivity closed in itself and independent of any subjectivity of the author or reader. To these two one-sided attitudes I oppose the dialectic of understanding and explanation. I interpret understanding as the ability to reproduce in oneself the work of structuring a text, and explanation as a second-level operation that grows together with understanding and consists in clarifying the codes underlying this work of structuring, in which the reader participates. This struggle on two fronts - against the reduction of understanding to intropathy and the reduction of explanation to abstract combinatorics - leads me to the definition of interpretation through the same dialectic of understanding and explanation at the level of the immanent "sense" of the text. This specific answer to the first of the problems facing hermeneutics has, in my opinion, the unmentioned advantage that it allows the preservation of a dialogue between philosophy and the sciences of man, a dialogue which, each in its own way, destroys the misconceptions of understanding and explanation. This could be considered my first contribution to hermeneutics, which I profess.

Above, I tried to shift my analysis of the "meaning" of metaphorical expressions and the "meaning" of narrative intrigues into the background of Verstehen theory, taken only in its epistemological application, in line with the tradition of Dilthey and Max Weber. The distinction between "meaning" and "reference" in relation to these expressions and these intrigues gives me the opportunity to dwell for the time being on that conquest of hermeneutic philosophy, which, it seems to me, was by no means discarded by the later development of this philosophy in Heidegger and Gadamer. : I mean the submission of epistemological theory to the ontological theory of Verstehen. I do not want to forget the epistemological phase with its focus on the dialogue between philosophy and the sciences of man, nor pass by the shift of the hermeneutic problematic, which now emphasizes being-in-the-world and participation, which precedes any relation that opposes the subject to the object. .

It is in the background of this new hermeneutical ontology that I would like to place my studies of the "reference" of metaphorical expressions and narrative intrigues. I readily admit that these investigations are constantly suggest the conviction that discourse never exists for its own sake, for its own sake, but in all its uses it seeks to transfer into language the experience, the mode of dwelling and being-in-the-world that precedes it and demands to be expressed. This belief in the primacy of being-to-proposition over proposition explains my persistence in trying to discover in poetic uses of language their inherent mode of reference, through which poetic discourse continues to pronounce being, even when it seems himself to honor himself. This stubborn desire to break the self-isolation of language I have inherited from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode*. But I still dare to think that the description of the reference of metaphorical expressions and narrative intrigues that I have proposed adds to this ontological striving an analytical precision that it lacks.

Indeed, I have tried to give an ontological meaning to the referential claims of metaphorical expressions from this ontological impulse: for example, I have ventured to assert that "to see something as..." means to reveal the "being-as" of a thing. I put "as" in the position of the exponent of the verb "to be" and made of "being-as" the final refer-

* Gadamer G. G. Truth and Method. M., 1988.

rent of a metaphorical expression. This thesis contains, no doubt, a borrowing from post-Heideggerian ontology. But, on the other hand, certification being-like, in my opinion, it could not be carried out without a detailed study of the referential modes of metaphorical discourse, and it requires a proper analytical interpretation of indirect reference based on the concept of speit reference* of Roman Jakobson. My study of the mimesis of the narrative work and the distinction between the three stages of mimesis of the action-world-prefiguration, configuration, transfiguration of works of action-expresses the same concern for supplementing ontological attestation with the precision of analysis.

Not limited...

The main theme of my lecture is this: I would like to consider the totality of the social sciences from the point of view of the conflict of methods, the birthplace of which is the theory of the text, meaning by the text unified or structured forms of discourse (discours), fixed materially and transmitted through successive reading operations. . Thus, the first part of my lecture will be devoted to the hermeneutics of the text, and the second to what I would call, for research purposes, the hermeneutics of social action.

Hermeneutics of the text. I will begin with a definition of hermeneutics: by hermeneutics I mean the theory of the operations of understanding in relation to the interpretation of texts; the word "hermeneutics" means nothing more than the consistent implementation of interpretation. By consistency I mean the following: if interpretation is a set of devices applied directly to specific texts, then hermeneutics will be a second-order discipline applied to general rules of interpretation. Thus, it is necessary to establish the relationship between the concepts of interpretation and understanding. Our next definition will refer to understanding as such. By understanding, we mean the art of comprehending the meaning of signs transmitted by one consciousness and perceived by other consciousnesses through their external expression (gestures, postures and, of course, speech). The purpose of understanding is to make the transition from this expression to that which is the basic intention of the sign, and to go out through the expression. According to Dilthey, the most prominent theoretician of hermeneutics after Schleiermacher, the operation of understanding becomes possible thanks to the ability that each consciousness is endowed with to penetrate into another consciousness not directly, by "experiencing" (re-vivre), but indirectly, by reproducing the creative process from external expression; Let us immediately note that it is precisely this mediation through signs and their external manifestation that leads in the future to a confrontation with the objective method of the natural sciences. As for the transition from understanding to interpretation, it is predetermined by the fact that signs have a material basis, the model of which is writing. Any trace or imprint, any document or monument, any archive can be recorded in writing and call for interpretation. It is important to be precise in terminology and fix the word "understanding" for the general phenomenon of penetration into another consciousness with the help of an external designation, and use the word "interpretation" in relation to understanding aimed at signs fixed in writing.

It is this discrepancy between understanding and interpretation that gives rise to the conflict of methods. The question is this: should not an understanding, in order to become an interpretation, involve one or more stages of what may be broadly called an objective or objectivizing approach? This question immediately takes us from the limited realm of textual hermeneutics to the integral realm of practice in which the social sciences operate.

Interpretation remains a kind of periphery of understanding, and the established relationship between writing and reading promptly reminds of this: reading is reduced to mastering the meanings contained in the text by the reading subject; this mastery enables him to overcome the temporal and cultural distance that separates him from the text, in such a way that the reader acquires meanings that, due to the distance existing between him and the text, were alien to him. In this extremely broad sense, the "writing-reading" relationship can be represented as a special case of understanding, carried out by penetrating into another consciousness through expression.

This one-sided dependence of interpretation on understanding has long been the great temptation of hermeneutics. In this regard, Dilthey played a decisive role, terminologically fixing the well-known opposition of the words "understand" (comprendre) and "explain" (expliquer) (verstehen vs. erklaren). At first glance, we really are faced with an alternative: either one or the other. In fact, we are not talking about a conflict of methods here, since, strictly speaking, only explanation can be called methodological. Understanding may at best require techniques or procedures to be applied when the relation of the whole and the part or the meaning and its interpretation is involved; however, however far the technique of these devices may lead, the basis of understanding remains intuitive because of the original relationship between the interpreter and what is said in the text.

The conflict between understanding and explanation takes the form of a true dichotomy from the moment one begins to correlate two opposing positions with two different realms of reality: nature and spirit. Thus, the opposition expressed by the words "understand - explain" restores the opposition of nature and spirit, as it is represented in the so-called sciences of the spirit and sciences of nature. This dichotomy can be summarized schematically as follows: the sciences of nature deal with observable facts, which, like nature, have been subjected to mathematization since the time of Galileo and Descartes; then come the verification procedures, which are determined in the basis of their falsifiability of hypotheses (Popper); finally, explanation is a generic term for three different procedures: genetic explanation based on a prior state; a material explanation based on an underlying system of lesser complexity; structural explanation through the synchronous arrangement of elements or constituent parts. Based on these three characteristics of the sciences of nature, the sciences of the spirit could make the following term-by-term oppositions: open to observation facts oppose signs, offered for understanding; falsifiability oppose sympathy or intropathy; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, to contrast the three models of explanation (causal, genetic, structural) with a connection (Zusammenhang) through which isolated signs are connected into sign aggregates (narrative construction is the best example here).

It is this dichotomy that has been called into question since the birth of hermeneutics, which has always demanded, to one degree or another, to unite its own views and the position of its opponent into one whole. Thus, already Schleiermacher sought to combine the philological virtuosity characteristic of the Enlightenment with the genius of the Romantics. Similarly, a few decades later, Dilthey experienced difficulties, especially in his last works, written under the influence of Husserl: on the one hand, having learned the lesson of Husserl's Logical Investigations, he began to emphasize the objectivity of meanings in relation to the psychological processes that give rise to them; on the other hand, he was forced to admit that the interconnection of signs gives the fixed meanings an increased objectivity. And yet the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the mind has not been questioned.

Everything changed in the 20th century, when the semiological revolution took place and the intensive development of structuralism began. For convenience, one can proceed from the opposition justified by Saussure, which exists between language and speech; language should be understood as large phonological, lexical, syntactic and stylistic aggregates that turn single signs into independent values ​​within complex systems, regardless of their embodiment in living speech. However, the opposition of language and speech led to a crisis within the hermeneutics of texts only because of the obvious transfer of the opposition established by Saussure to various categories of recorded speech. And yet it can be said that the pair "language - speech" refuted the main thesis of Dilthey's hermeneutics, according to which any explanatory procedure comes from the sciences of nature and can be extended to the sciences of the spirit only by mistake or negligence, and, therefore, any explanation in the field of signs should be considered illegal and considered as an extrapolation dictated by naturalistic ideology. But semiology, applied to language, regardless of its functioning in speech, belongs precisely to one of the modalities of explanation discussed above - structural explanation.

Nevertheless, the extension of structural analysis to various categories of written discourse (discours ecrits) led to the final collapse of the opposition between the concepts of "explain" and "understand". In this regard, writing is a kind of significant frontier: thanks to written fixation, the set of signs achieves what can be called semantic autonomy, that is, it becomes independent of the narrator, of the listener, and finally, of the specific conditions of production. Having become an autonomous object, the text is located precisely at the junction of understanding and explanation, and not at the line of their demarcation.

But if the interpretation can no longer be understood without the stage of explanation, then the explanation cannot become the basis of understanding, which is the essence of the interpretation of texts. By this indispensable basis I mean the following: first of all, the formation of maximally autonomous meanings, born from the intention to designate, which is an act of the subject. Then there is the existence of an absolutely irremovable structure of discourse as an act by which someone says something about something on the basis of codes of communication; this structure of discourse determines the relationship "signifying - signifying - correlating" - in a word, everything that forms the basis of any sign. In addition, the presence of a symmetrical relationship between meaning and the narrator, namely the relationship of discourse and the subject that perceives it, that is, the interlocutor or reader. It is to this totality of different characteristics that what we call the diversity of interpretations, which is the essence of hermeneutics, is grafted. In fact, a text is always more than a linear sequence of phrases; it is a structured entity that can always be formed in several different ways. In this sense, the multiplicity of interpretations and even the conflict of interpretations are not a defect or vice, but a virtue of the understanding that forms the essence of the interpretation; here one can speak of textual polysemy in exactly the same way as one speaks of lexical polysemy.

Since understanding continues to constitute the indispensable basis of interpretation, it can be said that understanding does not cease to precede, accompany, and complete explanatory procedures. Understanding precedes explanation by approaching the subjective intention of the author of the text, it is created indirectly through the subject of this text, that is, the world that is the content of the text and which the reader can inhabit thanks to imagination and sympathy. Understanding accompanies explanation to the extent that the "writing-reading" pair continues to form the field of intersubjective communication and, as such, goes back to the dialogic model of question and answer described by Collingwood and Gadamer. Finally understanding completes an explanation to the extent that, as mentioned above, it overcomes the geographical, historical or cultural distance separating the text from its interpreter. In this sense, it should be noted, but with regard to that understanding, which can be called final understanding, that it does not destroy the distance through some kind of emotional fusion, but rather consists in a game of proximity and distance, a game in which the stranger is recognized as such even when kinship is acquired. with him.

In concluding this first part, I would like to say that understanding suggests explanation to the extent that the explanation develops understanding. This double ratio can be summed up with a motto I like to proclaim: explain more in order to understand better.

• Biographical information can be found on p. 350.
• Ricoeur P. Hermeneutics and the method of social sciences // Ricoeur P. Hermeneutics. Ethics. Politics. Moscow lectures and interviews. Moscow: Academia, 1995, pp. 3–9. URL: http: // philosophy.ru/library/ricoeur/social.html

Hermeneutics and Method of the Social Sciences

The main theme of my lecture is this: I would like to consider the totality of the social sciences from the point of view of the conflict of methods, the birthplace of which is the theory of the text, meaning by the text unified or structured forms of discourse (discours), fixed materially and transmitted through successive reading operations. . Thus, the first part of my lecture will be devoted to the hermeneutics of the text, and the second to what I would call, for research purposes, the hermeneutics of social action. Text hermeneutics

I will begin with a definition of hermeneutics: by hermeneutics I mean the theory of the operations of understanding in relation to the interpretation of texts; the word "hermeneutics" means nothing more than the consistent implementation of interpretation. By consistency I mean the following: if interpretation is a set of devices applied directly to specific texts, then hermeneutics is a second-order discipline applied to general rules of interpretation. Thus, it is necessary to establish the relationship between the concepts of interpretation and understanding. Our next definition will refer to understanding as such. By understanding, we mean the art of comprehending the meaning of signs transmitted by one consciousness and perceived by other consciousnesses through their external expression (gestures, postures and, of course, speech). The purpose of understanding is to make the transition from this expression to that which is the basic intention of the sign, and to go out through the expression. According to Dilthey, the most prominent theoretician of hermeneutics after Schleiermacher, the operation of understanding becomes possible thanks to the ability, which each consciousness is endowed with, to penetrate into another consciousness not directly, by "experiencing" (re-vivre), but indirectly, by reproducing the creative process proceeding from from an external expression; Let us immediately note that it is precisely this mediation through signs and their external manifestation that leads in the future to a confrontation with the objective method of the natural sciences. As for the transition from understanding to interpretation, it is predetermined by the fact that signs have a material basis, the model of which is writing. Any trace or imprint, any document or monument, any archive can be recorded in writing and call for interpretation. It is important to be precise in terminology and fix the word "understanding" for the general phenomenon of penetration into another consciousness with the help of an external designation, and use the word "interpretation" in relation to understanding aimed at signs fixed in writing.

It is this discrepancy between understanding and interpretation that gives rise to the conflict of methods. The question is this: should not an understanding, in order to become an interpretation, involve one or more stages of what may be broadly called an objective or objectivizing approach? This question immediately takes us from the limited realm of textual hermeneutics to the integral realm of practice in which the social sciences operate.

Interpretation remains a kind of periphery of understanding, and the established relationship between writing and reading promptly reminds of this: reading is reduced to mastering the meanings contained in the text by the reading subject; this mastery enables him to overcome the temporal and cultural distance that separates him from the text, in such a way that the reader acquires meanings that, due to the distance existing between him and the text, were alien to him. In this extremely broad sense, the "writing-reading" relationship can be represented as a special case of understanding, carried out by penetrating into another consciousness through expression.

This one-sided dependence of interpretation on understanding has long been the great temptation of hermeneutics. In this regard, Dilthey played a decisive role, terminologically fixing the well-known opposition of the words "understand" (comprendre) and "explain" (expliquer) (verstehen vs. erklaren). At first glance, we really are faced with an alternative: either one or the other. In fact, we are not talking about a conflict of methods here, since, strictly speaking, only explanation can be called methodological. Understanding may at best require techniques or procedures to be applied when the relation of the whole and the part or the meaning and its interpretation is involved; however, however far the technique of these devices may lead, the basis of understanding remains intuitive because of the original relationship between the interpreter and what is said in the text.

The conflict between understanding and explanation takes the form of a true dichotomy from the moment one begins to correlate two opposing positions with two different realms of reality: nature and spirit. Thus, the opposition, expressed by the words "understand-explain", restores the opposition of nature and spirit, as it is presented in the so-called sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature. This dichotomy can be summarized schematically as follows: the sciences of nature deal with observable facts, which, like nature, have been subjected to mathematization since the time of Galileo and Descartes; then come the verification procedures, which are determined in the basis of their falsifiability of hypotheses (Popper); finally, explanation is a generic term for three different procedures: genetic explanation based on a prior state; a material explanation based on an underlying system of lesser complexity; structural explanation through the synchronous arrangement of elements or constituent parts. Proceeding from these three characteristics of the sciences of nature, the sciences of the spirit could make the following term-by-term oppositions: to the facts open to observation, to oppose the signs proposed for understanding; falsifiability to oppose sympathy or intropathy; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, to contrast the three models of explanation (causal, genetic, structural) with a connection (Zusammenhang) through which isolated signs are connected into sign aggregates (narrative construction is the best example here).

It is this dichotomy that has been called into question since the birth of hermeneutics, which has always demanded, to one degree or another, to unite its own views and the position of its opponent into one whole. Thus, already Schleiermacher sought to combine the philological virtuosity characteristic of the Enlightenment with the genius of the Romantics. Similarly, a few decades later, Dilthey experienced difficulties, especially in his last works, written under the influence of Husserl: on the one hand, having learned the lesson of Husserl's Logical Investigations, he began to emphasize the objectivity of meanings in relation to the psychological processes that give rise to them; on the other hand, he was forced to admit that the interconnection of signs gives the fixed meanings an increased objectivity. And yet the distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of the mind has not been questioned.

Everything changed in the 20th century, when the semiological revolution took place and the intensive development of structuralism began. For convenience, one can proceed from the opposition justified by Saussure, which exists between language and speech; language should be understood as large phonological, lexical, syntactic and stylistic i sets that turn single signs into independent values ​​within complex systems, regardless of their embodiment in living speech. However, the opposition of language and speech led to a crisis within the hermeneutics of texts only because of the obvious transfer of the opposition established by Saussure to various categories of recorded speech. And yet it can be said that the "language-speech" pair refuted the main thesis of Dilthey's hermeneutics, according to which any explanatory procedure comes from the sciences of nature and can be extended to the sciences of the spirit only by mistake or negligence, and, therefore, any explanation c: the field of signs should be considered illegal and considered as an extrapolation dictated by naturalistic ideology. But semiology, applied to language, regardless of its functioning in speech, belongs precisely to one of the modalities of explanation discussed above - structural explanation.

Nevertheless, the extension of structural analysis to various categories of written discourse (discours ecrits) led to the final collapse of the opposition between the concepts of "explain" and "understand". In this regard, writing is a kind of significant frontier: thanks to written fixation, the set of signs achieves what can be called semantic autonomy, that is, it becomes independent of the narrator, of the listener, and finally, of the specific conditions of production. Having become an autonomous object, the text is located precisely at the junction of understanding and explanation, and not at the line of their demarcation.

P. Ricoeur.

tries to figure out the meaning of the interpretive paradigm for the social sciences and humanities. P. Ricoeur considers the problem of the dialectics of explanation and understanding as the central problem of the universal methodology. “The most important consequence of our paradigm,” writes P. Ricoeur, “is that it opens up a new approach to the problem of the relationship between explanation and understanding in the humanities. Dilthey understood this relationship, as is known, as a dichotomy ... my hypothesis may give a more appropriate answer to the problem posed by Dilthey. This answer lies in the dialectical nature of the relationship between explanation and understanding, which is best revealed by reading.

P. Ricoeur tries to clarify the dialectic of understanding and explanation by analogy with the dialectic of comprehending the meaning of a text when reading it. Here understanding is used as a model. The reconstruction of the text as a whole has the character of a circle in the sense that knowledge of the whole presupposes knowledge of its parts and all possible connections between them. Moreover, the ambiguity of the whole is an additional motive for raising hermeneutic questions. Understanding appropriates the meaning obtained as a result of the explanation, therefore it always follows the explanation in time. The explanation is based on hypotheses that reconstruct the meaning of the text as a whole. The validity of such hypotheses is provided by probabilistic logic. The path from explanation to understanding is determined by the specifics of the text. When interpreting the text, great importance the correct method of formulating questions in relation to him. Questions should be extremely clear to facilitate the assimilation of the meaning of the text. P. Ricoeur transfers the question method of studying the text to philosophical knowledge, even suggests considering “questioning” as a philosophical method.

E. Betty.

should traditional understanding hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation retains the methodological significance of the category of understanding without accepting its ontological interpretation. Betty, in solving the problem of understanding, makes it her task to define the process of explanation in general. In his opinion, explanation only leads to understanding. At the same time, in order to understand the process of explanation in unity, it is necessary to turn to the phenomenon of “elementary understanding” as a linguistic phenomenon. The process of explanation is designed to solve the problem of understanding, which has many shades, has its own specifics. The result of this approach is Betty's definition of understanding as the recognition and reconstruction of the meaning of a text. The position of the interpreter always corresponds to such a state when the information objectified in the text created by another person is directed to him. In this case, the interpreter may not know the author of the text. This fact does not change much, because "there is a position of the spirit to which the message and impulse is directed in the objectification of another spirit, this spirit could be identified personally and individually, or it could be non-personal and supra-individual." The text acts as a necessary intermediary between the interpreter and the creator of the text. “The relationship between the one and the other spirit has a triadic character: the interpreting spirit has always turned to understand the consciously posited or objectively known meaning, that is, to enter into communication with the alien spirit through the medium of the meaning-containing form in which it is objectified. Communication between the two is never direct…” Understanding is a methodical operation, the result of which is the reconstruction of the meaning of the text, based on an interpretive hypothesis. The interpretation technique is based on four canons. Betty calls the first canon "the canon of immanence on a hermeneutic scale." In fact, this canon is the requirement that the hermeneutical reconstruction correspond to the point of view of the author. On the one hand, it does not contradict Schleiermacher's principle of getting used to it, but, on the other hand, it is directed against the principle of “better understanding”. The second canon refers to the object being interpreted and introduces the principle of the hermeneutic circle into the hermeneutical methodology. It is called by Betty “the canon of the totality and semantic coherence of hermeneutical research”. Its content lies in the fact that the unity of the whole is clarified through the individual parts, and the meaning of the individual parts is clarified through the unity of the whole. In order to reconstruct other people's thoughts, works of the past, in order to return other people's experiences to the real life reality, you need to correlate them with your own “spiritual horizon”. The fourth canon is closely related to the third, it is called the canon of the semantic adequacy of understanding, or the canon of hermeneutic semantic correspondence. It is directed at the interpreter and requires "one's own vital relevance to be coordinated with the impetus that comes from the object." Betty makes a suggestion that has had a great influence on subsequent researchers. Its meaning boils down to the fact that the real process (empirical course) of creating a text contains the general law of the method (= theory of interpretation). “If one is inclined to the view that each act of understanding proceeds along the reverse path of the act of speech and thinking ... then it is clear that from a return of this kind one can obtain a general law of semantic correspondence between the process of artwork and the process of interpreting it"