From the Phenomenology of Reactivation to the Hermeneutics of Innovation

Abstract

Abstract While in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings, the concept of sedimentation was linked to that of reactivation, Ricœur replaced the juxtaposition of these two concepts with the collocation of sedimentation and innovation. The central goal of this paper is to clarify why Ricœur replaces the phenomenological concept of reactivation with the hermeneutical concept of innovation. After explicating how reactivation was understood in Husserlian phenomenology, I show why this concept is out of place in Ricœur’s phenomenological hermeneutics. I further identify four possible ways to understand the relation between Ricœur’s hermeneutics of innovation and Husserl’s phenomenology of reactivation. Afterwards, while offering a detailed analysis of the threefold mimesis—the central theme in Ricœur’s Time and Narrative—I show that Ricœur’s concept of innovation is tied to that of productive imagination. Ricœur’s productive imagination is therefore not any kind of creatio ex nihilo. Being rooted in cultural and historical worlds, productive imagination configures and reconfigures the world against the background of sedimented prefigurations. While Husserl had offered a vertical model to understand sedimentations, and while Merleau-Ponty had replaced this model with a horizontal one, Ricœur’s model can be qualified as circular: the dialectical play of sedimentations and innovations shapes the hermeneutical circle within which the human experience of the world unfolds. This means: just as productive imagination is grounded in sedimentations, so also, sedimentations spring from productive imagination.