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In this dissertation, I explore the significance of remembering, especially in its communal form, and its relationship to narrative identity by examining the practices that make possible the formation and transmission of a heritage. To explore this issue I use Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, who have dedicated several of their major works to remembrance and forgetting. In comparing Heidegger and Ricoeur, I suggest that Ricoeur's formulation of the identity of a subject and a community offers an alternative to Heidegger's (...) account. For, if Heidegger's critique of subjectivity offers the possibility of a new relationship to history and community, it nevertheless overlooks the possibility of a humanism that is not tied to a metaphysical account of subjectivity. By contrast, the positive work of remembrance can recover heretofore concealed possibilities through our being faithful to the past, and saving it from the destructive forces of time. To show how the fragility of memory preserves the past against the destructive work of time and brings with it the hope of a better future, I emphasize one specific theme--namely, the debt we owe to the dead, which dissertations the possibility for ethical consideration of an historical community. In this regard, this dissertation pursues two goals. The first task is to elucidate how Heidegger's and Ricoeur's phenomenological projects understand the intimate connection between remembrance and the creation of a community. The second goal of this dissertation is to show how Ricoeur is able to respond to the problems that Heidegger's ontological account of memory raises. The completion of these two tasks will contribute to a phenomenological hermeneutics of memory and forgetting. (shrink) | |
Ricoeur defines attestation as the "assurance of being oneself acting and suffering" or as the "assurance - the credence and the trust - of existing in the mode of selfhood." In this dissertation I discuss the concept of attestation in Ricoeur's philosophy in relation to the main dimensions of the self: Capacities, personal identity, memory and otherness. I state that attestation is the key to the three dialectics of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self: The dialectic between reflection and analysis, the (...) dialectic between idem-identity and ipse-identity and the dialectic between oneself and other. In these three dialectics, attestation, as the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering, allows the self to appropriate its otherness: The otherness of its capacities, the otherness of its identity, the otherness of its body, of other people and of its conscience. In other words, the self gains the confidence of being a self through the confidence that the actions it performs and the words it says are its own actions and words; the confidence that the narratives it tells express its own identity; the confidence that the body is its own body; the confidence that the esteem of others mediates its own esteem and that the values that it embraces are its own values. This analysis is made in the first four chapters of this dissertation. In the fifth chapter I explore the relationship between attestation and recognition. Attestation is not only necessary to understand the self at a hermeneutical level, but at the same time attestation shows a main ontological trait of the self: The self is attestation in the sense that the self is the confidence of existing as a self, confidence that is gained by appropriating its otherness. Thus, the concept of attestation along with providing an understanding of the self through otherness shows us that to become a self we need to attest to our self by appropriating our otherness. Then, as a conclusion, we can state that attestation serves as a bridge between hermeneutics and ontology in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. (shrink) |
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