Abstract

Paul Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of tradition centered on a threefold conception of tradition which involves the notions of traditionality, traditions, and Tradition. These refer to form, content, and truth-claims within the framework of the hermeneutics of historical consciousness. This hermeneutics of tradition is treated in a panchronic and ternary way. Both methods operate at the levels of past, future and present, while the ternary method also consists in the rhetoric of truth-claims, the dialectic of remoteness vs. de-distanciation and that of question vs. answer. This article attempts to study three aspects of the panchronic and ternary approach: (1) a living and ternary tradition with an ongoing dialectic interweaving the ecstases of time; (2) tradition in relation to historical consciousness and the spatialization of historicity; (3) temporalizing history and historicizing schematism in threefold mimesis.