Tempo e narrativa: um enxerto hermenêutico em Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

The hermeneutic project of Paul Ricoeur can be understood, ultimately, as a project concerned with the search for meaning, even though it is an infinitely open search, as stated by the author himself. The problem of the research is anchored in the work Time and Narrative: is it only through narrative that human experience of time becomes accessible? Does time only become human through narrative? In order to understand the central foundation of the argumentation, a kind of graft between the great classical theories in philosophy, which at first glance seem unrelated, is necessary: the text on Augustine's Confessions and Aristotle's Poetics. In the ancient period, Aristotle establishes a structure around the narrative of tragedies and highlights the mimetic nature of Greek plays in art. In the medieval period, Saint Augustine, in Book XI of the Confessions, establishes the concept of time as a distentio animi. The hermeneutic understanding that brings together these two theories is significant in Ricoeur's philosophy in several aspects: as a new way of approaching narrative, being a semantic tool that varies in its usage (literary and metaphorical); as a provider of a new interpretation of the long-standing problem of defining the concept of "time"; as a fundamental point for the construction of later works. In this text, we will seek to understand how the hermeneutic graft that forms the central thesis of the book Time and Narrative is possible.