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(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

RICOEUR RECURRENT

In a comment, a reader asked UD what Paul Ricoeur was like. She answered. The reader suggested that she post her answer to her main page. Here it is:


He was modest, disheveled, trim, kind. Rather lost behind those archaic-looking academic European spectacles. Shy. Radiating INTENSE well-meaningness. Lost behind an intensely thick French accent which, coupled with high-level linguistic theory, had me pretty much lost. (It didn't help that his handwriting when he went to the blackboard was illegible to me.) Unfailingly intellectually serious. No thigh-slapping, I can tell you that. The funniest thing he said was a convoluted story he told about being in Greece and seeing all these trucks that had METAPHOR written on them (this was a seminar on metaphor). How could this be? Then he figured it out! They were moving vans -- metaphor is Greek for among other things, to carry! He laughed with wild abandon at this. (If I'm remembering this wrong, and if this is completely factually inaccurate, I apologize.) A complete, unself-conscious intellectual, in other words. A model of philosophical and moral rigor.


-------------------------------------------
Seven minutes later...

Oh goodie.

"Upon disembarking into the bustle of Piraeus," my friend who lacks a good clutch wrote after a trip to Greece, "we puzzled our way through sights and sounds of a new language and alphabet. Among the first words I sounded out from the Greek alphabet was METAPHOR, painted on various trucks and vans hurtling about the seaport. I chose to believe that these were moving trucks, transforming lives as they transported chattel. Carrying change! Bearing transformation! It was a moment of memorable resonance; I had discovered a literal metaphor."