ABSTRACT
One of the most pressing tasks facing our contemporary culture, suggests Ricoeur, is to ensure a creative relationship between tradition and the future. This chapter examines what precisely Ricoeur means by tradition and how tradition may be positively related to history through a critical hermeneutics of myth. Ricoeur insists that the linguistic character of historical meaning is central to the entire argument of Time and Narrative. The first relation of narrative to action (mimesis 1) discloses the primordial capacity of human action to be symbolically mediated. The second (mimesis 2), operating in the structural emplotment of fiction and historiography, reveals how imitated action functions in terms of a text. The third mode of mimesis, the effects that historical meaning has on our present acting and suffering, is shown to coincide in large part with the transmission of meaning via the textual mediations of the past. Hermeneutic understanding discriminates between positive and negative symbols.
