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In his 1973 essay "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology," Paul Ricoeur articulates the demands of the human sciences by recalling what he referred to as "the fundamental gesture of philosophy":
Is this gesture an avowal of the historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed under the reign of finitude? Or rather is it, in the last analysis, an act of defiance, a critical gesture, relentlessly and indefinitely turned against "false consciousness," against the distortions of human communication which conceal the permanent exercise of domination and violence? . . . What is at stake can be expressed in terms of an alternative: either a hermeneutical consciousness or a critical consciousness. (63)
Ricoeur identifies the first attitude, "hermeneutical consciousness," with Gadamer, who conceived tradition, context, and "prejudices" (qua "pre-judgments," or Vorurteilen) as the basic coordinates of human understanding. Instead of trying to escape these conditions, hermeneutical theory offers an "avowal" of "the reign of finitude." Understanding the Other (a text, a culture, the past, etc.) only occurs because we interpret from within a historical moment, from the standpoint of a particular tradition with its own construction of authority and meaning, and the practice of interpretation unfolds in dialogical fashion, allowing a gradual accumulation of ever-adjustable truths. Misapprehensions, it should be said, are affirmed as part of this dialogical process as the interpreter "reintegrate [s] misunderstanding into understanding by the very movement of question and answer" (83).
In his essay Ricoeur associates the opposing view, the approach of "critical consciousness," with Habermas, though it surely evokes past modern masters of suspicions (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and, by extension, more recent theorists such as Gramsci, Benjamin, and Foucault According to Ricoeur, "critical consciousness" lodges a protest against the "reign of finitude," often in the cause of lifting the veil on "the permanent exercise of domination and violence." ' The "tradition" that dictates the expanse of our hermeneutical circle is in fact the product of underlying forces, like economic interest, sexual drive, or the will to power; criticism has the power to unmask these "ideologically frozen" dependencies (82), which is a crucial step in freeing ourselves from the repression, injustice, and exploitation that they often enforce. As a consequence, "critical consciousness" insists - in contrast with the...