Semantic autonomy and historical representation

Marco Sechi

Marco Sechi: Semantic autonomy and historical representation. In: Ostium, vol. 19, 2023, no. 1.

In this paper we will show how Paul Ricœur’s studies on semantics are introductive and propaedeutic to the Ricœurian inquiry into the epistemology of history, mostly developed in the last part of his philosophical research. In the mentioned studies on metaphor, we explain how semantics is not only a question of language and meaning, but also involves hermeneutics and phenomenology. Semantic autonomy is presented here as meaningful for the scientific research and related to the domains of the epistemology of the history. The point of arrival will be the figure of death in history, where the confrontation with the historians Aron and De Certeau leads Ricœur to explain how semantics autonomy can support the epistemological statue of the scientifical methodology in history, giving sense to the historical operation.

Keywords: semantics, metaphor, epistemology, history

In this essay we want understand how semantic autonomy is fundamental to Ricœurian philosophy and epistemology. We assume that Ricœur’s recent epistemological works build a new systemic philosophy, with a hermeneutic analysis that starts from the phenomenological interpretation of the main categories of the epistemology. What we are asserting here is and the capacity of science to refer to a “field of experience” that is not a mere starting point of scientific theory made up of axioms, but a constantly questionable and reinterpretable background[1]. Semantics is the starting point from which Ricœur discusses the main theoretical questions concerning truth, reality and representation. History and historiography are the chosen subjects through which the French philosopher confronts the main problem of representation, taken as a philosophical category: furthermore, this problem makes Ricœur’s epistemology so important for the development of the debate on the historical methodology. The connection between the mixed epistemological models and the French historical methodology leads Ricœur to deal with the figure of the “singular causal imputation”[2], which is close to the phenomenological problem of the linguistic reference. We think that the chapter dedicated to the historical intentionality[3] is the meeting point between Ricœur’s analysis and the debate on the semantic autonomy: phenomenology, the reference of language, the event in the text and in history, are all linked and compared in this important chapter of Ricœur’s bibliography. Ricœur’s identification function of language raises the question of the textual reference to the object, which the author dialectically pairs with the predicative function of language. In this dialectical approach we find an analogous difference and alternance between the singularity of the event and the function of objectification, emphasizing that historiography needs to represent the past as best it can. Ricœur notes that these epistemological proposals are not derived from historical methodology; on the contrary we can say that historical methodology is derived from the hermeneutic and phenomenological perspective of Ricœurian philosophy. In fact, the French philosopher can approach the question from the side of the philosophy of language thanks to the “narrative resources”, so much so that he posits a cognitive content of metaphor. We have another main explanation of this theme in the essay L’écriture de l’histoire, where the methodological and epistemological categories of the French historiography are used to explain this peculiar connection. It seems that an event can be considered in a scale of long, medium, and short duration, and the historical facts presented in this representation “are presumed to be appropriate to the nature of the phenomenon”; moreover, they can probably be assumed from a scientific point of view[4], thus also underlining the importance of the debate for scientific epistemology. Nevertheless, the structure of Time and Narrative is impressive because it covers all the itinerary of our research, confronting the relationship between the semantics of language and epistemology. Moreover, we believe that in the dialectic of the pair of past-historical representation we can find the premises of a new philosophical system that opens to view a renewed metaphysical debate. In this perspective, Ricœur sets out some guidelines for historical research and its autonomous capacity to create new objects of thought, new meanings and new social conventions: semantics leads us to these conclusions. No text is more useful than the first essay of Du text à l’action, entitled De l’interpretation, where the philosopher explains the phenomenological, logical and hermeneutic themes of the connection just mentioned. Here we find the concept of semantic autonomy in relation to the act of writing, which refers three times to the intentions of the same author, to the audience and finally to the external circumstances (initially economic, social and cultural) that condition its production[5]. This reflection anticipates the problem of the representation and the hermeneutic character of death that is raised in a famous essay by Ricœur, entitled “La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire” where the French philosopher talks about “familiarity and estrangement”, which strongly asserts the dyad distanciation-objectification. We think that the dialectic between the past and historical representation is the best case to explain the pair of distanciation and objectification: the past is what happened during real life experience, history is nothing but its representation; therefore the past does not fully belong to us, it is something that happened a long or short time ago, distant from us and from our reality; historical representation derives from the real life experience and it is immediately available to our perception, manageable[6]. Indeed, the French philosopher ascribes the same problem of semantic autonomy to the temporal distance between the past and the historian’s reality. Ricœur discussed the essay in Heildeberg on the occasion of the centenary of Gadamer’s birth: it is not by chance that the main theme is hermeneutics. Man is characterized by his will to live, his biological reproduction and his inevitable fate of death. Death is, in fact, the main event that all the human beings will experience and that no one can refuse. The connection with historiography is soon established: historiography means representation, representation means writing, texts, so semantics is implicitly involved. In literature, the act of writing is often compared to the act of building, and Ricœur seems to endorse this comparison in his works[7]. The confrontation between Ricœur and De Certeau explains more clearly the relationship between the main event of death, historiography and its readers. Death is in a way responsible for the absence of the historical agents, so De Certeau compares the act of writing to the practice of burial. Burial makes present someone who has physically disappeared, but whom we somehow want to keep alive forever. Furthermore, the philosopher rightly deploys the semantic meaning of writing history with the “symbolic function” of writing, which “allows society to sit in and give to itself a past through language”. Here, the act of writing makes death a source of meaning for living people in the present, as does the memorial function of burial[8]. The ontological power of the act of writing is attributed to historiography, which is not merely narrative but creates new objects of thought. In this way the historian has a place in the world to fill in, he assumes a performing task. This same task defines the historian’s identity in society, literally “providing him with a cultural shelter”. It is precisely in this performative and social role of Ricœur’s epistemology of history, shown here in its hermeneutic result, that we find the theme of semantic autonomy. This practical attitude can be found throughout Ricœur’s philosophical research.

1. Metaphor and semantics

Nevertheless, in most of Ricœur’s works we find a semantic analysis of the relationship between event and text, where the main theme is the metaphor. The philosopher introduces the analysis of the role of metaphor with a dialectical comparison between sense and language, and it is of singular importance for understanding the hermeneutic and phenomenological conception of the whole of Ricœur’s thought. The opposition between sign and meaning and the questions about the ontological nature of the language involve the capacity of historical representation to reveal the past, so that we can understand it despite its irrevocable state of pastness[9]. In the chapter dedicated to the “semantics of the discourse” Ricœur speaks of the “production of metaphorical sense”, and then assigns logicians and epistemologists the task of investigating the semantic and representational role of the metaphor. The author includes semantics in the analysis of the function of the metaphor, but this is not enough to explain the emergence of a new meaning, insofar as the discourse is conducted by way of epistemological questions, in which the same metaphorical game assumes an ontological and epistemological value[10]. The relationship between language and reality suggests the epistemological relevance of semantics, especially for the concept of the event, not only from a historical point of view, but also in relation to the phenomenological and semantic characters of the text. For this reason, we are dealing with a Ricœurian study of the hermeneutics of the text, starting with the sixth and the seventh Études of La métaphor vive, dedicated to the question of representation. We can also refer to the preparatory texts on metaphor, “La métaphore et le problème centrale de l’hérméneutique” and “The function of fiction in shaping reality”, which lead to the main work mentioned above. This research was fruitful enough for Ricœur to develop the dialogue that follows on the dialectic between narrative and time, i.e. between history and the representation of the past. In the preparatory essay on metaphor, Ricœur considers the relationship between the text and the representation of the object[11]. Text and metaphor seem to be characterised by the same function of reference: in Ricœur’s terms, we assume that a text differs from a metaphor because of its length. Undoubtedly, a text can be reduced to a single sentence, as an aphorism or a proverb, but we speak of texts when they are made up of several sentences that form paragraphs and chapters, then books. Texts can be distinguished by their maximum length. Metaphors, on the other hand, are distinguished by their minimum length, that of a single world. Ricœur’s aim is to explain how the context is essential for the definition of both the text and the metaphor: the two terms must refer to a meaningful context that has to be interpreted. Hermeneutics comes into play in two ways: 1) for what concerns the analysis of the text, where the text can be reduced to an aphorism, thus preserving its meaning and referring to the original contextual meaning; 2) on the other hand, the metaphor, when reduced to a single sentence or word, can exist if and only if it refers to a propositional articulated context. For the same reason, Ricœur uses the concept of “discourse” to link and justify the analogy between text and metaphor. Although language is a code, a system of symbols, every discourse is made as an event. Such a character renders discourse ontologically undefined, a kind of distinction that we can find in the difference between fact and event in historiography: something that appears and disappears. The historical fact is indeed the propositional structure that holds the meaning of the real event that happened in the past. At the same time, the discourse occurs as an event, but every discourse is also understood as meaning. The semantic character of the text makes it explicit, understandable, but at the same time, on the contrary, its meaning makes it both interpretable and reinterpretable, so “identified and reidentified”. In fact, meaning is assigned both when the text is represented by linguistic symbols and, at the same time, when it is recognised as itself, identified as an event: the difference is the same between the literal meaning of the word and its contextual meaning. Discourse as a proposition implies the polarity between sense and reference. In a certain way, what a sentence says is summarized by its meaning, and we can analyse the latter thanks to the atomic components of the sentence, i.e. the words. In fact, every text is made up of sentences that are also made up of words. Words have a literal meaning, which we can read in dictionaries, but this meaning can be enriched and expanded to encompass more nuances of the meaning of a word, what is known as the semantic field. Ricœur thinks that what connects text, proposition and word is a kind of metaphorical relation: in fact, if a word can only have a meaning in a propositional or textual context, the same is true for a sentence in relation to a text. Then, each context gives the word a different nuance of meaning, and the metaphor can’t just be the simple translation of one of the word’s assumed potential meanings, but the meaning emerges “as the sole and fleeting result of a particular contextual action”. For this reason, as far as the relationship between metaphorical utterance and text is concerned, the contextual changes of meaning are distinguished from the lexical changes of the language, which are in fact related to the symbolic and, in a certain sense, “ritual” of the language, understood as a code. Such an inference leads Ricœur to assume that event and sense are in the same relationship in a text, because “every discourse represents itself as an event”, as well as a linguistic structure that refers to something represented. The “event” (événement) is pointed out as the meaning produced by the contextual action: it’s seen as something singular, who exists hic et nunc. Here we distinguish the new significance of the metaphor, created by the enrichment of its already existing conventional meaning – a new significance that we can barely see in this episodic context. The emergent meaning, once recognised in itself, can be repeated until it loses its immediacy[12]. In the same direction, the concept of event is explained in several of Ricœur’s texts, from the analysis of the linguistic side of this issue to the historical concept of event, notably in the first volume of Time and Narrative, to which we will come back later. Indeed, the event in the text is nothing other than the process of creating a new significance, by enriching the semantic field of meaning, a new meaning that we discover in such a contextual singularity of emergence. Ricœur goes on to define the conception of the “living metaphor” and the hermeneutic process for which we identify an “increase of meaning”: when the meaning is often used in a new textual situation, it is no longer a singularity derived from the whole meaning of the text, but it is stratified in the usual linguistic recurrences; it becomes historical and traditional, and acquires the polysemic meaning that enriches the landscape of the lexical changes. Only authentic metaphors, the “living” ones, are both event and sense: in a similar way, the French philosopher will use the concept of «croissance d’être» (“increase of being”), borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s research on poetics and epistemology, according to the epistemological questions of representation in history and the concept of représentance. Here we can see how the same question takes on a semantic and hermeneutic value[13]. The concept of event is not only a question of semantics, but is in fact borrowed from the historian’s lexicon, probably not by chance. It seems that the dialectic between event and history can be compared with the dialectic between metaphor and text just mentioned. Both require analysis from an ontological and epistemological point of view, and the distinction between the question of meaning and the question of reference[14], which is related to the dialectic between explication and understanding. Metaphor is described as a “meaningful event”: here we find the two related moments of explication and creation. In fact, metaphor is not meant as a mere translation of meaning, but as a new “space-time” dimension in which a new meaning emerges, as well as the event in history. The semantic event of the metaphor is a process that we can only understand from the point of view of the author and the message he sends to the reader. Ricœur’s aim is to analyse the poetic and creative attitude of language, that the author uses to give the reader a certain content, a reader who is necessarily involved in the world of the text. As far as historiography is concerned, we can compare the event to a text for which we have to recreate the meaning: this meaning is nothing other than the link between the narrative and the real history. In this essay in particular, Ricœur writes that the process of understanding a text has the same method of making the meaning of the metaphor. So, there are no rules for achieving poetic creation, but the creation of meaning is given precisely by the probabilistic correspondence, “more or less” approximate, to a method that allows for it. We call for the constant verification of the facts with the documents and the evidence, the focal point between historiography and hermeneutics. In this case, therefore, the text is the historiographical representation, the sense is given by the method, which concerns the incessant confrontation between documentary proof and historical representation. The same suggestion is confirmed by Ricœur, where he asserts the criterion of falsifiability, typical of the natural sciences[15]. In the following lines, Ricœur speaks of the “congruence principle” paired with the “fullness principle”: the former is the process of making sense of the metaphor by means of the approximate correspondence criterion; the latter is related to the question of the interpretation. Even in the final chapters of La métaphore vive we find the results of the connection between semantics and epistemology. Metaphor is not only the transposition of a meaning from one term to another, but we could extend this process to the whole text and its referential power: thanks to this ontological increase of being, we create new objects, new symbols, new thinking[16]. Nevertheless, historical representation uses the tools of narration and its linguistic and rhetorical sources: this is the reason why the metaphorical process is fundamental to Ricœur’s discourse about epistemology, until the “increase of being” characterizes the function of the language and the representational attitude of the metaphor.

2. The ontological and epistemological conception of the event

In our opinion, we can maintain this assumption if we go deeper into the next analysis of the concept of event, which assumes a crucial role for semantics as well as for historiography: we claim here the theoretical and epistemological argument of the event in the central part of Time and Narrative, dedicated to “L’éclipse du récit” and related to the “dissolution of the object”[17]. It is not surprising that the author places this part at the beginning of the section devoted to the epistemology of the history. The three conceptions of the event that Ricœur presents in the central part of Time and Narrative, respectively from an ontological and epistemological point of view, are significant because they recall the main points of this article, and they make clear the connection between semantics, epistemology and ontology. The three ontological characteristics of the event are: (1) the absolute property of the past; (2) historical events are defined as what has been made or what has happened to “human agents”, so that the domain of historical inquiry is limited to human beings alone; (3) otherwise, we must also deal with the irreducible alterity of the past, which is related to the ability of language to refer to reality, even though the past is not fully available to our perception, so that we can’t really determine in its entirety what truly happened. Here, Ricœur asserts Habermas’s pragmatics of language, for which it is impossible to understand the Other if we are not aware of its irreducible alterity and diversity. These three ontological features of the event correspond to the three respective epistemological ones: (1) the absolute nature of the past is the result of the singularity and unrepeatability of the same event in the future, even with the support of the historical representation; (2) the absoluteness of past human action is coupled with the possibility of assuming that the facts could have happened differently. Indeed, the psycho-biological commonality between men of the past and men of the present is the reason why we can compare dialectically practical contingency with the logical necessity deployed in the actual construction of historical narration[18]. Here we can read the condition of pastness, peculiar to the definition of Ricœurian phenomenology-hermeneutics, with the ontological and epistemological difference between the representation of the past and its effective real experience. This difference is so far represented in the logical structure of language: semantic autonomy follows from this, in which we can also find the reason why the Ricœurian epistemology of history is so important for our debate, oscillating between ontology and epistemology[19]; (3) finally, the third feature of the epistemological conception of the event is the “deviation” between the reality of the past and its historical representation, according to the irreducible alterity of the reality of the past, which is not the same thing for the historical representation that signifies it. In this chapter Ricœur confronts the dialectic between the contingency of the past and the objectification of historical representation by way of Aron and Marrou’s French epistemology of history. Moreover, this issue is closely related to the problem of the singularity of the event and its linguistic representation, insofar as it involves questions of semantics and reference. In the next section, we will return to the hermeneutic problem of the concept of the death in history, making clearer its connection with semantics.

3. History and semantics

A few lines earlier, we showed how Ricœur and De Certeau compare the semantic value of the act of writing in historical representation with the social habit of burial; similarly, the absence of historical characters is supplied by the process of making history. It’s difficult to explain this pairing without a hermeneutic digression. Ricœur reads Heidegger’s concept of temporality and uses the hermeneutic features of “debt” and “repetition”. The question of debt is related to the concept of pastness, which we anticipated a few lines ago when we discussed the second and the third epistemological conceptions of the event. Moreover, the Heideggerian notion of debt[20] gives an additional ontological value to the historiographical operation, namely that “it was” and “it is no longer” at the same time. In this case Ricœur prefers to interpret debt not with a negative moral meaning, but with its obligatory attitude. The positive concept of debt is related to the positive linguistic definition of the past: in the historian’s present, the past is not available or manageable, it appears as something inauthentic and unrepeatable. However, if we consider the retrospective view of the past, seen as something that once was, we go back to the past while looking forward to the present of the historical character and its future expectation. Walking through the past means going back to the agents who were the cause of the trace. The trace reinforces the meaning of the cause of which it is the effect, but it does not oblige us to remember it. The concept of debt, indeed, obliges us to return to the past, because it pretends to assume the positive meaning of inheritance. The positive process of recovering the past of the hermeneutic character of the “being-in-debt” (“être-en-dette”) is closely linked to the concept of “repetition”, which is defined as “a transmitted possibility of existence”. In evoking the concept of existence: we see how the French philosopher is concerned to find an ontological statute for the historical operation and the process of writing history, insofar as “repetition completes and enriches the meditation previously offered under the sign of the Death in history”. Commenting on Collingwood, he combines this assumption with the concept of “reeffectuation”, where the historical operation seems to be a distanciation-identification respect to what happened in the past. Indeed, we can see how the process of objectification is a spurious process of identification, between the past and its representation. The identification between the historical past and its representation is possible precisely because the historical event springs into the present and then it survives in memory with the same act of thinking it. The metaphor of the spring is already introduced in the first part of “La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli”, where the author speaks of “jaillissement”[21], but we have just seen above how the linguistic character of the metaphor is meant as an emergence in the text. However, the identification between historical event and historical representation is spurious insofar as the idea of repetition takes into account the alterity of the represented object. Ricœur then wants to make clear that identification is based on the dissociation of the event between its occurrence and its signification. This is where the semantic autonomy of Ricœur’s historiographical operation comes into play: the difference between the occurrence of the event and its signification is thus in the condition of the pastness of the past. In fact, we can describe the past events in different ways, so that their meaning could change and the view of the past moral judgement, related to the concept of debt, could be strengthened or relieved[22]. With Ricœur, we rejoin here again Raymond Aron and the relation between contingency and necessity in the logical structure of the historical operation, with the above-mentioned structure of the “singular causal imputation”: « Here we mean by contingency both the possibility of conceiving the event as other and the impossibility of deducing the event from the whole preceding situation»[23]; up ahead, Aron explains that only the logical coherence lies in our mental conjectures, and not in how the events actually unfolded, because « the accidental is no longer the equivalent of the absolute singularity. «As for the probability that arises from the partial character of the historical analysis and the causal relations, this is in our mind and not in things (…) »[24]. Furthermore, Ricœur gives a global conception of the history as «the effort of resurrection, more precisely, of returning to the moment of the action, in order to be contemporary with the actor»[25]. In this case, the feature of the resurrection – “reenactment” – in the historical operation brings us back to the ontological value of the metaphor, applied to the whole text, or rather to the conceptions of the event within the text. Following the arguments of De Certeau and Aron, who relies on the logical structure of the historical operation, we can understand why the epistemology of Paul Ricœur maintains the semantic autonomy and its metaphysical effort. The act of repetition is not only an ontological justification of the historical operation, but also a chance to create new objects of thought, so that we retain metaphysics as a good interpretative key for this domain of Paul Ricœur’s philosophy[26].

B i b l i o g r a p h y

ARON, R: Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Gallimard: Paris, 1986.

BARASH, J. A.: Qu’est-ce que la “réalité” du passé historique ? Réflexions à partir de la théorie de l’histoire chez Paul Ricœur. In: Le Télémaque, Vol. 1, No. 51, 2017 pp. 89-106.

BORUTTI S.: Tempo e evento: modelli epistemologici della storia. In: Discipline filosofiche, Vol. 22, 2012, pp. 89-108.

BUSACCHI, V.: La capacità di ognuno. Conoscenza, rappresentazione e persona in Paul Ricœur. Carocci Editore: Roma, 2014.

BUSACCHI, V.: La realtà del passato. Studi filosofici sulla conoscenza storica. Guida Editori: Napoli, 2020.

DE CERTEAU, M.: L’absent de l’histoire. Mame: Paris, 1973.

DE CERTEAU, M.: L’Écriture de l’histoire. Gallimard: Paris, 1975.

DOSSE, F.: L’histoire sociale à « la française » à son apogee: Labrousse/Braudel. In: DELACROIX C., DOSSE F., GARCIA P. (ed.), “Les courants historique en France. Gallimard: Paris, 2014, pp. 296-391.

RICŒUR, P.: La méthaphore et le problème centrale de l’hérméneutique. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 5, 1972, pp. 93-112.

RICŒUR, P.: La Métaphore Vive. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1975.

RICŒUR, P.: The function of fiction in shaping reality. In: Man and World, An International Philosophical Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1979, pp. 123-141.

RICŒUR, P.: Temps et Récit 1. L’intrigue et le récit historique. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1983.

RICŒUR, P.: Du texte à l‘action. Essais d’herméneutique, II. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1986.

RICŒUR, P.: Histoire et réthorique. In: Diogène, No. 168, pp. 9-26.

RICŒUR, P.: La marque du passé. In: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, No. 1, 1998, pp. 7-31.

RICŒUR, P.: La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 2000.

RICŒUR, P.: L’écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du passé. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2000, pp. 731-747.

RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire. In: DELACROIX C., DOSSE F., GARCIA P. (ed.): Historicités. La Découverte, Paris, 2009, pp. 13-27.

VENDRA M. C.: Paul Ricœur et Maurice Halbwachs: Pour une analyse socio-phénoménologique de la mémoire collective et de sa spatialisation. In: Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Liège, 2023, pp. 105-128.

WEBER M.: Études critiques pour servir à la logique des sciences de la culture. In: FREUNDE J. (tr.), Essais sur la théorie de la science. Deuxième essai. Librairie Plon: Paris, 1965.

N o t e s

[1] RICŒUR, P.: Du texte à l‘action. Essais d’herméneutique, II. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1986, p. 41. See also BUSACCHI, V.: La realtà del passato. Studi filosofici sulla conoscenza storica. Guida Editori: Napoli, 2020, p. 75-76.

[2] Ricœur analyses the concept of « imputation causale singulière » several times, in RICŒUR, P.: Temps et Récit 1. L’intrigue et le récit historique. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1983, pp. 332-339, and in RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire. In: DELACROIX C., DOSSE F., GARCIA P. (ed.): Historicités. La Découverte, Paris, 2009, pp. 25 and following. For the notion of “mixed epistemological models”, we refers to BUSACCHI, V.: La realtà del passato. Studi filosofici sulla conoscenza storica, p. 139.

[3] RICŒUR, P.: Temps et récit, p. 311.

[4] For the cognitive content of the metaphor see RICŒUR, P.: La Métaphore Vive. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1975, p. 114. For the relation between epistemology and historical methodology we refers to RICŒUR, P.: L’écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du passé. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2000, pp; DOSSE, F.: L’histoire sociale à « la française » à son apogee: Labrousse/Braudel. In: DELACROIX C., DOSSE F., GARCIA P. (ed.), “Les courants historique en France. Gallimard: Paris, 2014, pp. 296-347; RICŒUR, P.: Temps et récit, p. 361-396.

[5] RICŒUR, P.: Du texte à l‘action, p. 30 : « Grâce à l’écriture, le discours acquiert une triple autonomie sémantique : par rapport à l’intention du locuteur, à la réception par l’auditoire primitif, aux circonstances économiques, sociales, culturelles de sa production ».

[6] DE CERTEAU, M.: L’Écriture de l’histoire. Gallimard: Paris, 1975, p. 19; RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, p. 13, p. 20; BUSACCHI V.: La realtà del passato, p. 122.

[7] VENDRA M. C.: Paul Ricœur et Maurice Halbwachs: Pour une analyse socio-phénoménologique de la mémoire collective et de sa spatialisation. In: Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Liège, 2023, pp. 123-127. Moreover, we find it in RICŒUR, P.: Du texte à l‘action, p. 31.

[8] « (…) permet à une société de se situer en se donnant dans le langage un passé », and further « là où la récherche effettuée est une critique des possibles présents, l’écriture construit un tombeau pour les mort… : «aussi peut-on dire qu’elle fait des morts pour qu’il y ait des vivants », RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, p. 21.

[9] RICŒUR, P.: La marque du passé. In: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, No. 1, 1998, pp. 8-9.

[10] RICŒUR, P.: La Métaphore Vive. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 1975, pp. 87-116.

[11] RICŒUR, P.: La méthaphore et le problème centrale de l’hérméneutique. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 5, 1972, pp. 93-112; RICŒUR, P.: The function of fiction in shaping reality. In: Man and World, An International Philosophical Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1979, pp. 123-141.

[12] We find an exhaustive explanation of the meaning of event in history and epistemology in BORUTTI S.: Tempo e evento: modelli epistemologici della storia. In: Discipline filosofiche, Vol. 22, 2012, pp. 101-102: “ciò che rende riconoscibile l’evento è allora il trasformarsi dell’evento in una struttura”, and further: “ Il problema del tempo storico è che il tempo non costituisce di per sé una semantica storica, non ha significato naturale: l’accadere è in sé opaco, è inaccessibile nel suo essere”. In the same direction goes Jeffrey Barash, in BARASH, J. A.: Qu’est-ce que la “réalité” du passé historique ? Réflexions à partir de la théorie de l’histoire chez Paul Ricœur. In: Le Télémaque, Vol. 1, No. 51, 2017 pp. 89-106.

[13] RICŒUR, P.: La Métaphore Vive, p. 272; RICŒUR, P.: La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Éditions du Seuil: Paris, 2000, p. 153.

[14] RICŒUR, P.: Temps et récit, pp. 167-169.

[15] « Dans les deux cas il s’agit de « faire sens », de produire la meilleure intelligibilité globale d’un divers en apparence discordant. Dans les deux cas la construction prend la form d’un pari » and following « Dans les deux cas, les procedures de validation ont plus de parenté avec une logique de la verification empirique », RICŒUR, P.: La méthaphore et le problème centrale de l’hérméneutique, p. 105.

[16] BUSACCHI V.: La realtà del passato, pp. 57-61 and 119.

[17] RICŒUR, P.: Temps et récit, pp. 173.

[18] We found an exhaustive explanation of this concept in BUSACCHI V.: La realtà del passato, p. 122. We insist on the connection between past and present human beings later: for the relation between historical logics and hermeneutics see RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, pp. 25-26.

[19] See also RICŒUR, P.: La Métaphore Vive, p. 89.

[20] RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, pp. 23-24; RICŒUR, P.: La marque du passé pp. 8-9; RICŒUR, P.: Histoire et réthorique. In: Diogène, No. 168, pp. 24-25. See also BARASH, J. A.: Qu’est-ce que la “réalité” du passé historique ? Réflexions à partir de la théorie de l’histoire chez Paul Ricœur, pp. 101-105.

[21] RICŒUR, P.: La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, pp. 134-135.

[22] « Savoir que les hommes du passé ont formulé des espérances, des previsions, des désirs, des craintes et des projects, c’est fracturer le déterminisme historique en réintroduisant rétrospectivement de la contingence dans l’histoire ».

[23] RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, p. 26 : « nous entendons ici par contingence à la fois la possibilité de concevoir l’événement autre, et l’impossibilité de déduire l’événement de l’ensemble de la situation antérieure». See also ARON, R: Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Gallimard: Paris, 1986, p. 223.

[24] RICŒUR, P.: Temps et récit, p. 176 : «(…) l’accidentel n’est pas non plus l’equivalent de la singularité absolue. « Quant à la probabilité qui nait du caractère partiel des analyses historiques et des relations causales, elle est dans notre esprit et non dans les choses ».

[25] RICŒUR, P.: La distance temporelle et la mort en histoire, p. 26 : « l’effort de résurrection, plus précisément pour se reporter au moment de l’action, pour se faire contemporain de l’acteur ». See also ARON, R: Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Gallimard: Paris, 1986, p. 234.

[26] BORUTTI S.: Tempo e evento: modelli epistemologici della storia, pp. 101-102: “ciò che rende riconoscibile l’evento è allora il trasformarsi dell’evento in una struttura. L’innovazione è la sua esistenza nella serie ripetuta, la sua inerzia, le modificazioni che subisce nella ripetizione, gli effetti sociali che provoca nel propagarsi”.

Marco Sechi

MA University of Cagliari

Via Is Mirrionis 1

loc. Sa Duchessa

09127 Cagliari

Italy

e-mail: mrseci0990@gmail.com