Przewalczyć egzystencję słowem. Z Paulem Ricoeurem o skończoności

Abstract

To overcome the existence with a word. With Paul Ricoeur on finitude: The purpose this article is to present the main theses of Jarosław Jakubowski’s book entitled Skończoność egzystencjalna. Studium nad filozofią Paula Ricoeura [Existential finitude: A study on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur] (Jakubowski, 2017), and their critical assimilation. In spite of this, or perhaps because the book itself deserves the highest praise, it calls for the deconstruction of its basic assumptions. In Part I the article reconstructs the main theses of Jakubowski’s work. In Part II, it argues that Jakubowski’s work is founded on the incorrect interpretation of the idea of finitude as conceived of by Heidegger. Heidegger is understood here as a representative of existentialism. This results in the fact that in spite of Jakubowski’s attempts to present Ricoeur’s philosophy as a new concept of human subjectivity, which, according to Jakubowski, best describes the title category of finitude, it fails to transcend frameworks arising from the so-called “metaphysics of the presence”.