ABSTRACT
The problem of presence is a question of the phenomenological manifestation, in terms of language, of mediation through rational description, interrelated with linguistic expression of being-in-the-world, and the nature of this interrelatedness. The purpose of the brief outline of the significant influence of Husserl and Martin Heidegger upon Paul Ricoeur’s work is to introduce his theory of metaphor as the way into understanding the hermeneutical movement from suspicion to affirmation in terms of the creative relationship between the rational and poetic modes of discourse. Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor draws upon the long tradition beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, but particularly upon the semantic work of literary criticism in the interactive theories of metaphor, especially in the studies of I. A. Richards, Max Black and Monroe Beardsley. In examining the iconic moment of metaphor, it is important to be critically aware of its background in Ricoeur’s early work on symbols, and the prior development of his thought in existential philosophy.
