Abstract

One may indeed wonder why it is that after so many years arguing about the role of textuality, metaphor, and discourse in the transmission of meaning and truth from one tradition to the next, thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida are currently preoccupied with such vexed issues as the nature of European identity, the role of forgiveness in the contemporary milieu, and the refugee crisis currently bedevilling so many states today. I think the answer is quite simple: all of these thinkers are hermeneuts to a greater or lesser degree, in that each one is committed to the belief that we are, from the beginning, embedded in socio-linguistic frameworks, that we are, in other words, factically situated in a web of beliefs and practices not of our own making. As such, they consider interpretation as possessing a pivotal status in questions of identity and meaning. To understand oneself, that is, is not a matter of suspending or circumventing cultural and linguistic features of experience, but of wrestling with them in an effort to see how we can, from the point of view of our particular sociocultural provenance, build solidarity with those of differing perspectives and varying linguistic or interpretative backgrounds. The nature and function of “communication” is thus what most interests Ricoeur, Habermas, Gadamer, and Derrida.