McCall RTCH785c Ricoeur Appropriation Presentation:
Paul Ricoeur, “Appropriation,” in J. B. Thompson (Ed.), Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University, 1981), 182-193.
Historically, exegesis and appropriation have stood in opposition to each other. It has been thought that an epistemological hermeneutic (Schleiermacher) stands in natural opposition to a ontological hermeneutic (Heidegger). Ricoeur attempts bridge the gap between the two in his concept of a hermeneutic arc. Ricoeur accepts the necessity of exegesis as a grounding point for appropriation, which is “appropriate” [sic] because of the nature of text. Text differs from discourse in the sense that the fixation of text in a medium has endowed the text with a life that is separate from the author, other references, and its original audience. Thus, the text is an object for analysis. Second, it is not in acquiescence to some superiority of the natural sciences that calls for an epistemological starting point, but rather the nature of linguistics that provides text with a structural system that can be analyzed.
Barth’s employment of the classical three-phase movement of explicatio, meditatio, and applicatio (or “observation,” “reflection,” and “appropriation”) is paralleled by Ricoeur’s move from “naive understanding” through “objective explanation” to “appropriation.” Indeed, Ricoeur states that there are three stages in the interpretive process: explanation, understanding, and appropriation. Explanation entails the meaning of the words in a text. One of the key ideas here is the metaphoric process in which the meanings of words move from literal to figurative. Through metaphor, literal meanings collapse and connections to an imagined world of the text are established. For Ricoeur, the world of the text is “…the world constructed in the imagination…[when] the ensemble of references opened up by the power of language [suggests] images that are formed in response to the content…” (David E. Klemm, The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis [London: Associated University Press, 1983], 86). When one re-describes the world for oneself, one then reaches understanding, the second stage in the interpretive process. Finally, the last stage is appropriation. This means that you as the reader become part of the world of the text and come to new self-understanding. Here Ricoeur’s discourse focuses on being in the ontological sense. In this imagined world, you see your possible mode of being. And it is this recognition that incites you to change from the possible to actual.
This essay seeks to explain how a text is addressed to someone. The theory of appropriation that Riceour advocates in this essay is less an intersubjective relation of mutual understanding than a relation of apprehension that is applied to the world which is conveyed by the work itself (182). Riceour stipulates that appropriation is no longer to be understood in a subject-object distinction, nor it is to be understood as a projection of oneself onto the text; rather, it is to receive an enlarged ‘self’ from the apprehension of proposed worlds that are the genuine onject of interpretation (182-3). In this essay, Riceour does three things: he shows the necessity of appropriation, he explicates the relation of appropriation and revelation, and he identifies various illusions and errors that a conception of appropriation must address (183).
- Distanciation and Appropriation:
Distanciation and appropriation are complimentary of one another. Appropriation is the ontological grounding of interpretation in lived experience. In Ricoeur’s own words: “the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself” (182). For Ricoeur, appropriation means “to make one’s own what was initially alien” (185). Appropriation “actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader” (185).
- ‘Play’ as the Mode of Being of Appropriation:
Following the lead of Gadamer, Riceour shows that it is not only reality that is metamorphosed by the heuristic fiction, but also the author and the reader (186).
- The Illusions of Subject:
Within this section, Riceour refutes three fallacious views in relation to interpretation. First, he contends that appropriation does not imply and direct congeniality of one with another (191). Second, Riceour considers fallacious the notion that the hermeneutical task is governed by the original audience’s understanding of the text (192; note that I have reservations here, as I am steeped in HCM). Third, Riceour attempts to belie the view that the appropriation of the meaning of the text subsumes interpretation to the finite capacities of understanding of the current reader (Ibid.). In Ricoeurian language, there must be a critique of “false consciousness” and a death to the self: “Appropriation is also and primarily a ‘letting-go”. Reading is and appropriation-divestiture. . . It is in allowing itself to be carried off by towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself” (191). By proceeding from an epistemological grounding toward an ontological grounding, the rigor of various exegetical and hermeneutic methods are applied to the text that allow an appropriation to emerge that “follows the ‘arrow’ of meaning [within the text] and endeavors to ‘think in accordance with it'” (193).
At the moment that the text escapes the original author and his/her situation, it also escapes its original audience. While Ricoeur recognises that the reader will have an a priori understanding (by extension we could say that the writer would too), the process of appropriation is the key process of reading, during which “the revelation of new modes of being… gives the subject new capacities for knowing himself.” (Ricoeur, Paul “Appropriation”, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination Ed: Mario, J. Valdès Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991., 97) Rather than possessing the text, or claiming ownership to it, the reader moves beyond ego, “dispossesses” it. The event of interpretation requires that both distanciation and appropriation be in play. The text becomes atemporal, the writer a “split speaker” (Ricoeur, Paul “Appropriation”, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination Ed: Mario, J. Valdès Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991., 93), so that a non-authorial voice may be heard, another narrative caught. The writer is taken from the text, the text from time and historicity, and the reader from self – in other words the ball must leave the pitcher, be received by the catcher and put into play again to become something else. The reader, in the catching, releases something new, created by the play itself. The catcher must in a sense be a “split reader”, to appropriate what was alien and release the event, self as it is known cannot hold the ball. The self must become alien, or the ball alien to what is known otherwise the ball can only be caught but not played.
What I appreciate in Ricoeur’s text is the connectivity he makes between writer, reader and the act of reading. His theory of appropriation can apply to any form of writing, regardless of genre. His theory, the writing of it within the essay, and the content mirror each other and are connected. As I understand him, Ricoeur asserts that human liberation is achieved via the imaginative appropriation of alternative possibilities of being in the world as they are held forth by the text.