Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition

Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity has a two-fold task. While for the first time comprehensively presenting RicoeurΓÇÖs cultural theory in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognitionΓÇönecessary for RicoeurΓÇÖs well-known ΓÇ£phenomenology of being ableΓÇ¥ΓÇöthe work also addresses, in dialogue with Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, the question of attaining human self-consciousness and an understanding of the world. How is it that we have become the beings and persons we are? In order to clarify this culturally guided unceasing process, the work follows the clues that the French term ΓÇÿrecognition,ΓÇÖ or reconnaissance, provides. The term much used and also analyzed by Ricoeur includes the notions of ΓÇ£againΓÇ¥ (re-), and ΓÇ£through and with othersΓÇ¥ (-con-). Furthermore, self-consciousness can be thought of as a ΓÇ£birthΓÇ¥ (-naissance) of subjectivity as part of humanity at large. Re-con-naissance invites us to think that a human being truly becomes a human being, that is, finds him or herself as a human in relation to humanity expressed as culture.