Path to the hermeneutic field

In his 1965 work on Freud, Paul Ricoeur states and reasons that the hermeneutic field, as a space of interpretations, is constitutively fragmented and is, at the same time, a structure for hosting differ-ent interpretations formed in language, as a place where different human perspectives on the nature of reality converge. This justifica-tion emerges from epistemological and ontological conditions. On the one hand, it is based on the idea of a real that is always surplus, which makes it inaccessible to a total knowledge, and that the topics of evil and time are paradigmatic figures in Ricoeur’s thought. On the other hand, it emerges from the limited character of human reason, a theme that passes through all Ricoeurian philosophy – a post-Hegelian Kantianism, as he says and reiterates several times. In fact, the reason that operates in the French philosopher’s thought and work is a reason inherited from Kant, condemned to a transcenden-tal dialectic and constantly working under the threat of the ghosts of transcendental illusion and not Hegelian reason, able to create a final summary. The incommensurability between the nature of reality and human rationality establish that the human word is always a penulti-mate word and that its different expressions form imperfect media-tions, with poetics becoming, essentially, the final level of philosophi-cal practice.