The conclusion of Paul Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning gave me goosebumps. After a very dense 90 or so pages that drops words like langue and ‘distanciation’ and a hundred other $100 words left and right, Ricoeur brings the whole thing to an existential climax.
Just a few quotes out of context won’t really mean anything, but this is a commonplace book– dropping these quotes in here naked is part of the beauty of the task. In that spirit, I am not going to interpret them for you, except to choose the quotes. You probably won’t find these words as beautiful as I do, but if you get a tinny echo of something like a vision of reading being a path to a new and better self, you have succeeded in getting the point.
To “make one’s own” what was previously “foreign” remains the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics. Interpretation at its last stage wants to equalize, to render contemporaneous, to assimilate in the sense of making similar. This goal is achieved insofar as interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader… What has to be appropriated is the meaning of the text itself, conceived in a dynamic way as the direction of thought opened up by the text… appropriation has nothing to do with any kind of person to person appeal. It is instead close to what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons (Horizonverschmelzung): the world horizon of the reader is fused with the world horizon of the writer. And the ideality of the text is the mediating link in this process of horizon fusing… If the reference of the text is the project of the world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself. Appropriation, in this way, ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of things; instead it implies a moment of dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego… In this self-understanding, I would oppose the self, which proceeds from the understanding of the text, to the ego, which claims to precede it. It is the text, with its universal power of world disclosure, which give a self to the ego (91-95).
(Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
