Paul Ricœur: Horizons of Critical Philosophy of History

The article examines P. Ricœur’s approach to the task of creating a critical philosophy of history. Ну turned to this issue as he felt it necessary, to highlight the different aspects of hermeneutic reflection on the process of comprehending history. According to Ricœur, identifying the features of research procedures on various levels, from archiving historical sources, analyzing and explaining, in order to build a consistent narrative, should be complemented by deeper hermeneutic reflection, to enable an ontological basis for comprehending history and judging its integrity and meaning in a global perspective. Accepting M. Heidegger’s “metaphysics of finitude” as a basis for interpreting the historicity of Dasein, which in its final instance gives birth to the basic aporias of a narrative description of events occurring in time, Ricœur discovered the importance of meta-historical reflection, helping to understand the transformation of categorical foundations of viewing history as a universal process consisting of specific events and their strings, and constantly initiating the search for the renewal of its meaning. Thus, far from rejecting the results of the “critique of historical reason,” which led to the discrediting of the substantialist historiosophical schemes in the post-classical Western thought, he comes to a partial rehabilitation of speculative theorizing within the boundaries of critical assumptions. Borrowing from R. Aron the term “critical philosophy of history,” Ricœur interpreted it in the spirit of H.-G. Gadamer’s “effective history” platform and R.D. Collingwood’s strategy of thought, as well as R. Koselleck’s historical semantics. Ricrœr’s critical philosophy is based on reflexive understanding of the categorical possibilities (extant since the 18th century) for considering history as universal and produced by the creative efforts of man, who is capable to judge the events through the confluence of the horizons of the past and “our present.” This implies the philosophical assumption that history is characterized by an open horizon of meanings and gives historians a right to make judgment of past events in the cognitive and moral perspectives, “beyond time limits.”

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