Ricoeur's Mediation of Marrative in the Aporetics of Time and the Hermeneutic Arc

Abstract

This investigation is primarily pursued within the tradition of phenomenology and hermeneutics. The main object of this project is to work out a hermeneutic phenomenology of time which aims at understanding the meaning of time. The guiding theme behind this hermeneutic phenomenology is the pioneering work of Martin Heidegger, his Being and Time, followed by Paul Ricoeur‟s magnum opus Time and Narrative inasmuch as the latter can admit a limited grafting of Gadamer‟s philosophical hermeneutics as expounded in his Truth and Method. In context of Heidegger‟s hermeneutic phenomenology of Being and Time, this project presents Heidegger‟s ontology of understanding as the most significant discovery which results from his reversal of perspective which raises anew the question of Being as the meaning of Being. But it is also argued that Heidegger‟s project of Being and Time has undermined epistemological considerations stemming from the practices of historical or human sciences as a result of which his hermeneutic phenomenology has made it difficult to incorporate methodological issues. This limitation is overcome by grafting epistemological considerations within the core of ontological structure of understanding originating from the practices of historical or human sciences, in particular, from the disciplines of regional hermeneutics. This grafting is made possible as a consequence of the hermeneutic phenomenology of time which this thesis aims to pursue. It reveals the meaning of time through a series of the meaning-structures correlated with each other to the extent that this correlation determines a unity. This unity finally reveals the meaning of time as a particular form of life which this investigation names the hermeneutical-life. This meaning of time delineates the possibility of identifying a modification of this form of life in an act of interpretation. This act of interpretation is explicated in terms of hermeneutic arc which is author‟s extension of Ricoeur‟s hermeneutical arc. This hermeneutic arc is an interpretive exposition of the meaning-structures derived during the stated investigation and is claimed to be the solution to the problem of method pertaining to the practice of hermeneutics.