Crisis of the Philosophie de l’esprit, Human Sciences, “Methodic” Hermeneutics

Abstract

The two volumes of Finitude et culpabilité were published in 1960 in “Philosophie de l’Esprit,” the prestigious series edited by Aubier, founded by Louis Lavelle and René Le Senne. This was the same series in which Ricoeur’s Le volontaire et l’involontaire, the first part of the Philosophie de la Volonté, had appeared ten years earlier. Actually, the discontinuance of the series had already been announced in 1956, an editorial decision that might be seen as symbolic of the end of an epoch and of a cultural hegemony.²⁸ In effect, the philosophie de Vesprit, heir to the most illustrious tradition of French philosophy, had prevailed over university studies since the end of the nineteenth century, the period which in manuals goes under the name of the “reaction against positivism.” Comparison with analogous movements, for instance with Italian spiritualismo, might be misleading. With us, spiritualism had a narrower compass, on the outskirts of an area dominated by neo-idealism, and was often explicitly clerical, whereas in France there were vigorous forms of laical and rationalistic spiritualism, alongside well-known figures of believing philosophers, some suspected of heterodoxy. At any event, it was during the second half of the 1950’s, in fact, yhat signs appeared of a crisis which had been ripening and had now reached the breaking point.