Cholanyuk, V. R. About the Anthropological Meaning of the ‘Living Metaphor’ in Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics: Critical Analysis

Abstract: The present article is an introduction to Cholanyuk’s final thesis ‘Anthropological Meaning of the ‘Living Metaphor’ in Paul Ricoeur’s heritage’. The subject under research is the ‘living’ basis of a metaphor which anthropological meaning is being interpreted in terms of Paul Ricouer’s hermeneutics. Special attention is also paid to the provision of a general insight into the history of creation of the ‘living metaphor’ for which cause the polysemanticity of the anthropological knowledge has been substantiated and evaluated in the similarly named author’s work. Therefore, the researcher makes an attempt to describe the anthropological meaning of the living metaphor ‘in action’ by using a famous strategy of a discourse during which both communicative and transferring functions are perceived by a person who does the interpreting. Methodological and theoretical grounds of the research consist of the provisions of philosophical hermeneutics. Thus, the main research method is the hermeneutic method that involves a modern anthropological and philosophical interpretation of additional meanings of a text with reference to the ‘living metaphor’ described by Paul Ricoeur. The scientific novelty of the research and the main theoretical concept thereto are based on the following provisions: 1) the present research article is the first one in Russian philosophy to trace back the development of a diversified anthropological definition of the phenomenon of the ‘living metaphor’ in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics; 2) the researcher establishes to which degree the phenomenological concept of the metaphor interpretation relates to the traditional anthropological tradition and constitutes an original approach to understanding the human nature during the second half of the 20th century; 3) the researcher analyzes the theoretical basis of the philosophical and scientific popular literature that can be related to the ‘living metaphor’ from the point of view of modern anthropology; 4) the researcher also makes his own attempt to study the metaphor taking into account the anthropological meaning of the ‘living metaphor’; 5) the researcher provides philosophical grounds for the poetics of the metaphor and describes the role of the metaphor in human communication and mutual understanding. At the end of the article the researcher comes to the conclusion about the dialectic singularity of a metaphoric discourse that is performed by our imagination even if we realize that a reader or a listener may have quite different interpretations of what they read or hear. Paul Ricoeur expressively relates an interpretation of a metaphor to a ‘living basis’ of such a metaphor, thus giving to a reader or a listener an opportunity to ‘think more’ based on a metaphoric plot as a previous and future imitation of human activity. Critical anthropological evaluation of the living metaphor model assumes that its living nature isn’t the only condition for the heuristic hermeneutics of the metaphoric discourse. Being a mean of expression and distribution of an idea in general anthropological terms, the living metaphor contains the reference of its author just like any other metaphor in a typical metaphoric communication.

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