Key Arguments

• After expounding attestation’s lack of foundational guarantees and its fragility, Ricoeur nonetheless affirms it as ‘credence without any guarantee, but also as trust greater than any suspicion,’ integrating both its weakness and its strength in relation to suspicion.
• He explicitly draws the consequence that, in this twofold character, ‘the hermeneutics of the self can claim to hold itself at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit,’ thereby positioning his project between the foundationalist and the nihilist extremes.
• By inviting the reader to judge whether the subsequent investigations live up to this claim, he marks this equidistant positioning as a guiding normative ambition of the book rather than a merely descriptive remark.

Source Quotes

Conversely, at the center of the aporia, only the persistence of the question "who?"—in a way laid bare for lack of a response—will reveal itself to be the impregnable refuge of attestation. As credence without any guarantee, but also as trust greater than any suspicion, the hermeneutics of the self can claim to hold itself at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit. The reader will judge whether the investi gations that follow live up to this claim. * To my readers I owe an explanation why I decided not to include in the present work the twin lectures with which I concluded the Gifford Lec tures, delivered in Edinburgh in 1986.

As credence without any guarantee, but also as trust greater than any suspicion, the hermeneutics of the self can claim to hold itself at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit. The reader will judge whether the investi gations that follow live up to this claim. * To my readers I owe an explanation why I decided not to include in the present work the twin lectures with which I concluded the Gifford Lec tures, delivered in Edinburgh in 1986. These lectures belonged to the biblical hermeneutics whose project I outlined in From Text to Action.27 In the first, entitled "Le soi dans le miroir des Ecritures" (The self in the mirror of Scripture), I interrogate, as Northrup Frye does in The Great Code,28 the sort of teaching and summoning emanating from the symbolic network woven by Scripture, Jewish and Christian.

Key Concepts

• As credence without any guarantee, but also as trust greater than any suspicion, the hermeneutics of the self can claim to hold itself at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit.
• The reader will judge whether the investi gations that follow live up to this claim.

Context

Closing move of the theoretical discussion of attestation in this section, summing up its mediating role between Cartesian foundational certainty and Nietzschean dissolution of the self.