Detranscendentalizing
Subjectivity:
Paul Ricoeur’s Revelatory
Hermeneutics of Suspicion +
À Jean-Claude Piguet
(1924-2000)
in memoriam
(+) This paper was
originally read before the Graduate Faculty of Philosophy of Marquette
University,
Abstract:
This essay seeks to outline the
development of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics from a phenomenology
of the will towards a hermeneutics of revelation. It is shown how the radical
project of detranscendentalizing subjectivity, underlying the contemporary
French reception of a hermeneutics of suspicion, turns out to favor a
post-Hegelian return to Kant that recasts transcendental philosophy in a
historically, socially mediated correlation of language and subjectivity.
Key words: hermeneutics, language, revelation, subjectivity,
transcendental philosophy.
1. Introduction
In a highly polemical book on
the “French philosophy of the 1968 period,” Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut attacked
what they described as the French hyperbolic repetition of German thought,
especially in the supposedly radical antihumanism of Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida’s respective appropriations of
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Martin Heidegger.(1) The
authors identify the themes of the end of philosophy, the hermeneutic paradigm
of genealogy, the disintegration of the idea of truth, and the historicizing of
categories as tortuous paths ultimately leading to the annihilation of universals and, above all, to the oft-celebrated death of
the subject. Interestingly enough, Ferry and Renaut strategically decided to
spare other French thinkers who were also very influential in the sixties, such
as Emmanuel Levinas, Raymond Aron, Jean Beaufret, Jacques Bouveresse, Louis
Althusser, and Paul Ricoeur, precisely because they either did not succumb to
the politically irresponsible interpretations of May 1968 or did subscribe to
some form of humanism –that was especially the case of Jean-Paul Sartre. To be
sure, postmodernists and poststructuralists have also come under attack by
heralds of modernity on the other side of the
The name of French philosopher
Paul Ricoeur has been often associated with the existential phenomenology of
the 1950’s and with the hermeneutical philosophies of the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Ricoeur’s transition from transcendental phenomenology to philosophical
hermeneutics, in continual dialogue with a myriad of different disciplines such
as psychoanalysis, structural anthropology, history, theology, social sciences
and linguistics, has very often been regarded as an eclectic philosophizing. In
point of fact, Ricoeur’s répertoire
is very broad and his compositions very intricate and nuanced. His dialectical
way of reconciling both ancient and modern thinkers, analytical and continental
traditions, and the architectonic structure of his writings and lectures, as
Henri Blocher has put it, characterizes Ricoeur as “l’homme des nuances, dites
avec un charme discret,” the Jaspersian maestro of a veritable Symphilosophieren. (2) And yet Ricoeur
has been careful enough to repudiate constant charges of “eclecticism,” which
he dismisses as “la caricature de la dialectique.”(3) Whether his
dialectic can really account for the metaphilosophical itinerary of his
philosophy of language remains, however, an open question. In a broad sense,
this question has to do with Ricoeur’s work as a historian of philosophy and as a philosopher who questions
everything, but in particular the very meaning of questioning itself or
problematizing --“philosopher c’est
problématiser.”(4) Within an established Cartesian tradition, the Cogito
explores the world and the subject’s alienation from it. Following Husserl and
his maître à penser Gabriel Marcel,
Ricoeur questions the Cogito’s insertion within the world, at once as
consciousness of being-in-the-world and as finitude in her/his appropriation of
it, by intending, yet undergoing the experience of the world. The question of
transcendental subjectivity and the very meaning of positing the I-world
opposition, co-constitution and correlation arise thus at the heart of
Ricoeur’s phenomenological explorations. Now, in a more specific, existential
sense, the hermeneutical question arises out of religious symbolism: “Le
symbole donne à penser” (“the symbol sets us
thinking.”) Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and biblical hermeneutics lead
Ricoeur to think the religious anew, to reflect upon the nature of the language
of faith. The classic problematic of “faith and reason” acquires then a
decisive hermeneutical orientation, in that the Cogito doubts, suspects, and
believes. We can no longer take “consciousness” for granted --including our
innermost religious convictions and feelings--, since there is also a “false
consciousness,” as “consciousness, far from being transparent to itself, is at
the same time what reveals and what conceals,” and this very dialectic calls
for a hermeneutics.(5) The “ethical”
lies, therefore, at the bottom of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic, insofar as it seeks
“to distinguish the true sense from the apparent sense,” and as “a proper
manner of uncovering what was
covered, of unveiling what was
veiled, of removing the mask.”(6) Following Heidegger, Ricoeur seeks to think
the unveiling thrust of language prior to the experience of subjectivity and
consciousness, as language itself reveals the existential structure of human openness
to the world. Like Hegel and Heidegger, Ricoeur attempts at rethinking
“revelation” (Offenbarung) in the
very becoming of self-consciousness, so as to highlight the transcending of
coming into being. Unlike Hegel and Heidegger, however, Ricoeur does not
believe that the Judeo-Christian paradoxical conception of an eternal God who
intervenes in temporal history is in need of a totalizing metapysics or has
become an obsolete onto-theological paradigm. As we shall see, Ricoeur’s wager
is that the revelatory nature of metaphors, especially in mythical and poetical
accounts, can actually be very helpful to rescue the radicalness of a
hermeneutics of alterity, a hermeneutics that resists systemic closure and that
refers to the complex, existential situations of our human reality, including
natural languages, mythologies, literature, and the cultural products of
civilizations. Ricoeur’s poses thus the hermeneutic problem in
metaphilosophical terms, say, analogous to Tarski’s convention T: (T) “p” is true
in L, iff p, where “p” is the sentence stating a certain proposition in a
certain object language L and p is the translation of that sentence into the
metalanguage. In contrast with Tarski’s theory of truth, which deals with
languages that are not semantically closed, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology
follows Heidegger’s attempt to account also for non-propositional language so
that the hermeneutical transformation of
phenomenology is itself intertwined with methodological and conceptual
enlargements of signification that are reflected in the very conception of
metaphors and metaphoricity. Although I cannot pursue this further, I think
that Ricoeur has correctly spotted the hermeneutic transformation of
phenomenology in Husserl’s Logical
Investigations and his shift from Ideas
I to the generative phenomenology of the Lebenswelt and in the earlier Heidegger’s interest in a
phenomenology of formal indication (formale
Anzeige). I reformulate thus the
Ricoeurian problematic in the following terms: to what extent does Ricoeur’s
metaphilosophizing unveil some kind of revealing
language? And what is, after all, the nature of such a language of revelation?
What is the revealing function of the hermeneutical circle? These questions and
problems will underlie my hermeneutical investigation throughout this paper.
The main purpose of this modest study is to understand the place of Ricoeur’s
conception of “revelation” in his hermeneutical philosophy, especially in the
earlier writings leading to his own alternative variant of a post-Heideggerian
phenomenological hermeneutics. In order to situate Ricoeur’s conception of
revelation within the hermeneutical development of his philosophy, I shall
recapitulate his thinking along the chronological
order of publication of his main writings. Certainly, it is beyond the scope of
this exposé to examine all the subtle nuances of Ricoeur’s philosophy of
language and all the innumerable theological approaches to the problem of
revelation. I shall confine myself to outlining the evolution of Ricoeur’s
hermeneutic philosophy and its implicit language of revelation. In order to
better understand the place of religious language in Ricoeur’s thinking, I
shall examine his rnethodological shift from an existential, perceptualist
phenomenology towards a linguistic phenomenology, that is, how an implicit
hermeneutics of finitude gradually evolved into an explicit hermeneutics of
suspicion. This first part of the paper will cover three main stages in the
evolution of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical reflection (namely, l’eidétique, la symbolique et l’herméneutique). That will provide
the necessary background to articulate theological and philosophical
hermeneutics within the much broader framework of hermeneutics tout court, so that the particular
function of revelation calls for the interpretation
of texts and contexts.
2. The Phenomenology of the Will
As David Klemm has pointed out,
“only relatively lately has Ricoeur undertaken to write a comprehensive
hermeneutical theory based on a philosophy of language.”(7) However, as we
approach Ricoeur’s earlier writings within the broader perspective of his own
phenomenology, it seems that the hermeneutical question has prevailed along the
evolution of his thought, even before culminating in what has been saluted as a
“phénoménologie herméneutique.” Ricoeur confesses that he received “le choc
philosophique décisif” from his Socratic master Gabriel Marcel, but it was the
influence of the Husserlian method that guided his first attempt to construct a
phenomenological “philosophie de la volonté.” As he himself
would explain later in a famous collection of hermeneutical essays, Le conflit des interprétations (1969):
“My purpose here is to explore the paths opened to contemporary philosophy by
what could be called the graft of the hermeneutical problem onto the
phenomenological method.”(8) “La greffe du problème herméneutique sur la
méthode phénoménologique” --a programmatic formula to be retained—translates
indeed Ricoeur’s mediation between the Heideggerian, hermeneutical ontology of Existenz and the modern hermeneutical
theory which has been associated with Schleiermacher and Dilthey. The name of
Husserl should appear then in between, as what has been described by Ricoeur
himself as a “phenomenological detour.” Beyond the Cartesian Cogito (res cogitans) and the Kantian judging
consciousness (transcendental ego),
Husserl sought to relocate the thinking and living ego in its own correlative
milieu of consciousness, the Lebenswelt
(le monde vécu), so that the
transcendental Cogito remains “inserted and involved in the dense world of
human life,” which he calls the Welterfahrendesleben(“life-experiencing-the-world”).(9)
The ultimate meaning of such a transcendental ego is to be found not in the
material ego, Mensch, but in the ego
qua subject to the world, “exterior”
to the world yet “oriented” towards it. The objectivity of the world becomes
thus a “transcendental intersubjectivity,” in which the problem of the other
will always point to the transcendental ego, that is, in a descriptive analysis
which Husserl has called a “phenomenological reduction” (epoché), Einklammerung (“bracketing”). According
to Husserl, in this reduction both the transcendental ego and the
world-phenomenon intended by this consciousness (Intentionalität) reveal, as it were, the very meaning of their
relationship (ego-cogito-cogitatum).
Ricoeur’s phenomenology attempts thus to
articulate this signification in terms of being-in-the-world, however moving
away from every transcendental founding on the part of the Cogito and yet
always returning to a transcendental, reflexive attitude in its
self-understanding. Thus Ricoeur will not forgive the Platonism of the early
Husserl, although he will also regret that the later Husserl almost abandoned
his original “phenomenology of signification” on his way to an idealistic
“transcendental phenomenology.” Commenting on Husserl’s “analysis of
signification” in the second volume of his Investigations,
Ricoeur says:
It is important to notice that the first question of phenomenology
is: What does signifying signify? Whatever the importance subsequently taken on
by the description of perception, phenomenology begins not from what is most
silent in the operation of consciousness but from its relationship to things
mediated by signs as these are elaborated in a spoken culture. The first act of consciousness is designating or
meaning (Meinen). To distinguish
signification from signs, to separate it from the word, from the image, and to
elucidate the diverse ways in which an empty signification comes to be
fulfilled by an intuitive presence, whatever it may be, is to describe
signification phenomenologically.(10)
In part, the importance of these
remarks resides in the implicit critique Ricoeur was addressing against the
existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, in defense
of the eidetic description he had employed four years earlier to compose the
first volume of his “philosophie de la
volonté,” Le volontaire et
l’involontaire (1950). In the “Introduction” to his French translation of
Husserl’s Ideen I (1950), Ricoeur had already criticized Merleau-Ponty’s existential use of phenomenology to reconquer the “facticité”
of our “être-au-monde,” whose world has always already been out there.(11)
Since every consciousness is perceptual, Merleau-Ponty seems to assume too
hastily that the signifié has already
been appropriated as signifiant in
the experience of consciousness as corps
vécu, as though the finitude of the latter concurred with the cognition of
the former. Ricoeur thinks that Merleau-Ponty absorbed from the later Husserl
(notably Husserl’s Lebensphilosophie,
after the Krisis) an existential shift towards a “perceptual”
phenomenology (Phénoménologie de la perception,
1945) in which perception becomes “the prerequisite and genetic origin of all
thought processes”:
Reduction is no longer understood as the withdrawal of
consciousness from the world but as the revelation of the true sense of the
transcendence of the “thing” in relation to consciousness. Contrary to the
Platonic and subsequently Galilean tradition, which holds that true reality is
not what one perceives but what one measures and conceives, the thing perceived
recovers its presence, its sparkle, its marvellous
power of revelation. ...The transcendency of the thing is the relative
transcendency of a vis-à-vis in which consciousness goes beyond itself. Consciousness, defined by its
intentionality, bursts outwards, moves to where the things are.
Correspondingly, the world is “world-for-my-life,” the environment of the “living
ego,” and it has no sense apart from the “living present” in which the
commitment of the vivid now, in all its presence, is constantly renewed.(12)
Although Ricoeur would be
forever indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s holistic circularité between the “symbolism of the body” and “the play of
intersignification,” he thinks that Merleau-Ponty’s “return to the speaking
subject” does no justice to the co-constitutive character of language itself.
Although he often speaks of the impensé
in Husserl’s phenomenology, and despite his recognition of the excess of the
“signified” over the “signifying,” Merleau-Ponty seems indeed to maintain the
“sedimentation” and the “institution” of language as a corollary of his
perceptual phenomenology.(13) On the other hand, Ricoeur’s “phenomenology of
the will” attempted to respond to the Husserlian challenge of intentionally
representing (vorstellen) the
noetic-noematic structure of consciousness, posited in the Ideen. According to Husserl, affection and volition appear as
complex representations in the process of Fundierung.
In order to understand these “affective and volitive subjective processes,”
Ricoeur first applies the Husserlian method of description to the practical
functions of consciousness, before arriving at the “constitutive” power of
consciousness in Vorstellungen, and
he finally denounces “as naive the pretensions of the subject to set himself [sic] up as the primitive or primordial
being.”(14) The project of the Philosophie
de la volonté was originally conceived in three phases: in the first
volume, Le volontaire et
l’involontaire (ET: Freedom and
Nature), Ricoeur deals with the “eidetics of the will,” while the second
and third volumes would be respectively devoted to the “empirics” and the
“poetics” of the will. Only the second volume of his ambitious project was
published, in 1960, under the title Finitude
et culpabilité, in two separate parts: L’homme
faillible (ET: Fallible Man) and La symbolique du mal (ET: The Symbolism of Evil).
In the first volume, which he dedicated
to Marcel, Ricoeur sets out to articulate some kind of dialectical via media between the Sartrean
ontological dichotomy (être-pour-soi
subject / être-en-soi object) and the
“incarnation” (être-au-monde) of
Marcel’s existentialism. Without adhering to the Husserlian “Platonizing
interpretation of essences” and its “idealism of the transcendental ego,”
Ricoeur applies Husserl’s “eidetic reduction” to the domain of the will, which
is unveiled as consciousness (“vouloir
comme conscience”), as it diagnoses
the nature of the involuntary:
...The
initial situation revealed by description is the reciprocity of the involuntary
and the voluntary. ...The involuntary has no meaning of its own. Only the relation of the voluntary and the involuntary is intelligible.
Description is understanding in terms of this relation.(15)
This latent hermeneutic must dig up the meaning-structure which
underlies the prepredicative, prelinguistic “given,” in an explorative movement
that reminds of Husserl’s process of Rückfragen
(“backquestioning”), although Ricoeur also uses a Kantian delimitation to avoid
falling back into transcendentalism:
Pure description, understood as an elucidation of
meanings, has its limitations. The gushing reality of life can become shrouded
in essences. But while it may finally be necessary to transcend the eidetic
approach, we must first draw from it all that it can give us, especially
delimiting of our principal concepts. The words decision, project, value,
motive, and so on, have a meaning which we need to determine. Hence we shall
first proceed to such analysis of meanings.(16)
Just like Husserl, who had used
the term eidos to designate “the
immediately given structures of experience” (hence the German Wesenschau, “idea-perception”), Ricoeur
deploys an “eidétique de la volonté”
to effect his phenomenological analysis of the essential structures of human
being qua “être-au-monde.” Like
Husserl, Ricoeur takes the Cartesian Cogito as the starting point of his
phenomenology, proceeding from the “voluntary” to the “involuntary.” The
Husserlian notion of “intentionality” and his technique of “bracketing” inspire
Ricoeur’s “double abstraction” of the fault (“la faute”) and transcendence: the autonomous “je pense” is left alone to its own freedom, motivated by an
infinite drive, yet bound by a finite nature. Again, Kant’s limit-idea defines the paradoxical
character of Ricoeur’s phenomenology. Contrary to Husserl in his tendency to
reduce the world to the transcendental subject, Ricoeur thinks the dichotomy of
the subject and the object to be real, although metaphysically inconclusive. As
over against the objectifying empiricism of others, he maintains that, in order
“to understand the relations between the involuntary and the voluntary we must
constantly reconquer the Cogito grasped in the first person (le Cogito en première personne) from the
natural standpoint.”(17) Ricoeur affirms thus the “reciprocity of the voluntary
and the involuntary,” in the conciliation of nature (the “corps propre” which I am) with freedom (my appropriation of a
meaningful world through incarnation), as an alternative to the paradoxical
duality of the involuntary and the voluntary.(18) Of
course, although he goes beyond the psychological dualism of the subject and
the object, Ricoeur does not seek to overcome the duality of the involuntary
and the voluntary. For in the innermost center of the human will, Ricoeur
concludes, remains the existential paradox of the “chosen” and the “undergone”
(le paradoxe de l’existence choisie et de l’existence subie). Such is the Kierkegaardian
accent of Ricoeur’s dialectic of human freedom. Moreover, the human, rational
boundaries implied in the Ricoeurian phenomenology of the will reflect the
Lutheran heritage of his Kantian morality. After asserting that freedom is not
a pure act but activity and receptivity, Ricoeur sets up the “limit concepts”
of human freedom only to open its way to meaning and the Transcendence. The
last words in this volume remind us of the ontological regionality of the
human:
A genuine transcendence is more than a limit concept: it
is a presence which brings about a true revolution in the theory of
subjectivity. It introduces into it a radically new dimension, the poetic
dimension. At least such limit concepts complete the determination of a freedom
which is human and not divine, of a freedom which does not posit itself
absolutely because it is not Transcendence. To will is not to create.(19)
If Kant’s Kritik meant to bring about a Copernican revolution by restoring to
subjectivity its due (der Mensch qua
the transcendental “I” as the center of a gegenständlich
cosmos), Ricoeur seeks to perform “a second Copernican revolution which
displaces being from the center, without however returning to the rule of the
object.”(20) In this sense, the Ricoeurian dialectic compels us to postpone any
conclusive remarks about the nature-freedom paradox. In effect, Ricoeur
maintains from the outset that “a paradoxical ontology is possible only if it
is covertly reconciled.”(21) Such a
dialectical phenomenology is thus to be understood as “reconciliation,” as an
understanding reconcilement of the voluntary with the involuntary:
“...comprendre le mystère comme réconciliation, c’est-à-dire, cornme
restauration ...du pacte originel de la conscience confuse avec son corps et le
monde.(22) Even though his first major work does not contain an explicit
hermeneutic, it seems that Paul Ricoeur was already preparing the soil on which
he should construct his “empirique”
and “symbolique.” In point of fact,
as Blocher has remarked, the Ricoeurian “eidétique”
prefigured somehow his future philosophy of interpretation not only in its
“description” of the will, but also in the very phenomenological style --in
French, “caractère”-- of his writing.
For the occurrence of expressions such as “la
parabole de l’être,” “figure,” “métaphore,” and “analogie de la Transcendance,” serve to illustrate the hermeneutical
concern which permeates the Ricoeurian phenomenology of the will. But it was
only in the preface to the second volume, Finitude
et culpabilité,
that Paul Ricoeur employed the term “herméneutique”
for the first time, as an ensemble of deciphering rules applied to a world of
symbols. Of course this interpretive exegesis of the symbol is to be understood
against the mythico-symbolic background of the “symbolique du mal,” which constitutes the second part of Finitude et
culpabilité. If the eidetics of the will culminated in the “incarnate
freedom” of the human essentially understood, an “empirics of the will,” on the
other hand, should complete our understanding of the actual conditions of human
existence as reflected in consciousness and as we find them in non-reflected
expressions such as myth and symbol. Although L’homme fallible, the first
part of this volume, remains within the framework of a “descriptive
phenomenology,” i.e. a work of pure reflection, it has been aclaimed, along
with its sequel La symbolique du mal
as the “most perfect” book ever written by Ricoeur.(23) In its first part, the
problem of evil is thoroughly dealt with on the level of the “imaginaire,” as existentially reflected
in the human “conscience” (both
“consciousness” and “awareness”) of her/his finitude and fallibility, in
her/his “conscience de faute.”
Ricoeur’s perspective is that of an ethical world-view (“vision éthique du monde”), which presupposes the dialectical
interdependence between freedom and evil:
Tenter de comprendre le mal par la liberté est une décision grave; c’est la décision d’entrer dans le problème du mal par la porte étroite, en tenant dès l’abord le mal pour “humain trop humain.” Encore faut-il bien entendre le sens de cette décision, afin de ne pas en récuser prématurément la légitimité. Ce n’est aucunement une décision sur l’origine radicale du mal, mais seulement la description du lieu où le mal apparaît et d’où il peut être vu; il est très possible en effet que l’homme ne soit pas l’origine radicale du mal, qu’il ne soit pas le méchant absolu; mais même si le mal était contemporain de l’origine radicale des choses, il resterait que seule la manière dont il affecte l’existence humaine le rend manifeste. La décision d’entrer dans le problème du mal par la porte étroite de la réa1ité exprime donc seulement le choix d’un centre de perspective: même si le mal venait à l’homme à partir d’un autre foyer qui le contaminerait, cet autre foyer ne nous serait accessible que par son rapport à nous, que par l’état de tentation, d’égarement, d’aveuglement dont nous serions affectés; l’humanité de l’homme est, en toute hypothèse, l’espace de manifestation du mal.(24)
According to this ethical view, not
only is freedom the reason for evil but the “confession of evil” (“l’aveu du mal”) is also the condition
for the consciousness of freedom. Thus the ethical view of evil leads
inevitably to an interpretation of mythical significations, as in the “myth of
the Fall”: if it was the human being who has posited (posé) evil in the world, humans on the
other hand posited evil only because they succumbed to an adversary, alien
temptation. In other words, the positing of evil implies already the
victimizing of freedom by an Other: “en posant le mal,
la liberté est en proie à un Autre.”(25) Such an ambiguous structure of myth
requires an exegesis of the symbol, which inspires Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology.
3. Phenomenology of the Symbol
Commenting on Ricoeur’s transition
from his eidetic phenomenology of the will to his hermeneutic symbolism of
evil, Kohak evokes the Ricoeurian hermeneutical principle of pars pro toto symbolism (i.e. a two-layer
structure of meaning, growing from the partial to the total representation of
symbolic meaning) which, in De l’interprétation,
would be applied to the interpretation of dreams qua symbols and fully
developed into a veritable hermeneutics:
The task of hermeneutic phenomenology is precisely to
recognize the universal latent significance made manifest through the overt
meaning of myth and symbol. Thus a hermeneutics must combine the attitude of
trust with an attitude of suspicion, a willingness to listen to what is
revealed through the symbol and a suspicion which would protect it from being
misled by its overt meaning.(26)
The Ricoeurian project of
building up a phenomenology of the will had to undergo a radical methodological
change, in its transition from the eidetic analysis of L’homme faillible to the structural hermeneutic of La symbolique du mal. Ricoeur had already announced the boundaries of his
phenomenological method in Le volontaire et l’involontaire, when he was forced to “bracket” (mettre en parenthèses) both the fault
and the Transcendence in order to work out a “pure,” eidetic description of the
will. Now, as he moves from the “eidétique”
to the “empirique,” Ricoeur admits
that man’s transition from a state of “innocence” to a “faulty” condition
cannot be properly dealt with by any “empiric description” but requires what he
calls a “mythique concrète.” The
Ricoeurian project moves then in the direction of a philosophical reflection
upon the myth. The concept of fallibility opens up the way to the symbolic
language of the confession of faults, as humans are held in a dialectical
mediation between the finite and the infinite, caught up between their language
of analogies and their guilty conscience’s language of enigmas. The enigmatic
character of this “langage de l’homme faillible” requires, essentially and not
accidentally, an herméneutique
(i.e. “une exégèse du symbole qui appelle des règles de déchiffrement”). The
Kantian aphorism, “the symbol gives raise to think,” is then invoked to
translate the hermeneutical project of Ricoeur’s symbolism:
Cette herméneutique n’est pas homogène à la pensée
réflexive qui a conduit jusqu’au concept de faillibilité. On esquisse les
règles de transposition de la symbolique du mal dans un nouveau type de
discours philosophique dans le dernier chapitre de la seconde partie sous le
titre: “le symbole donne à penser”; ce texte est la plaque tournante de tout
l’ouvrage; il indique comment on peut à la fois respecter la spécificité du
monde symbolique d’expression et penser, non point “dernière” le symbole, mais
“à partir” du symbole.(27)
In his analysis of primary
symbols such as “souillure” (stain),
“péché” (sin), “culpabilité” (guilt), and of myths which systematize these symbols,
Ricoeur seeks to depict the unity of the paradoxical relation of man as agent
and patient, as act and fact, as voluntary and involuntary, as freedom and
nature. In dialogue with the phenomenology of religions (Mircea Eliade, G. van
der Leeuw et al.) and historical-critical theologies of our times (notably
Gerhard von Rad’s Überlieferungsgeschichtliche
Theologie), Ricoeur classifies the myths into four different types:
(i) those of the “original
chaos,” as in the Babylonian account of creation (“Le drame de la création et la vision ‘rituelle’ du monde”);
(ii) the “tragic myth,” and
those of the evil god (“Le dieu méchant
et la vision tragique de l’existence”);
(iii) the “adamic myth,” in
Genesis (“Le mythe ‘adamique’ et la
vision ‘eschatologique’ de l’histoire”);
(iv) the myth of the “exiled soul,”
as in the Orphic gnosis (“le mythe de
l’âme exilée et le salut par la connaissance”).(28)
The twofold conception of myth
as “parole” (as opposed to “langage”) and “récit” (“en lui le symbole prend la forme du récit”),
according to Ricoeur, implies a sequential relationship between symbols that
refer to time and to a concrete mode of existence:
Le mythe exerce sa fonction symbolique par le moyen
spécifique du récit parce que ce qu’il veut dire est déjà drame. C’est ce drame
originel qui ouvre et découvre le sens caché de l’expérience humaine; ce
faisant le mythe qui le raconte assume la fonction irremplaçable du récit.(29)
“Totalité du sens” and “drame
cosmique,” “genèse” and “structure,” the structural themes of the Beginning and
the End --these concepts characterize Ricoeur’s dialectical theology of
reconciliation, as he had already admitted vis-à-vis the mystery of the serfdom
of will, “l’énigme du serf-arbitre, c’est-à-dire d’un libre arbitre qui se lie
et se trouve toujours déjà lié, est le thème ultime que le symbole donne à
penser.”(30) Thus the phenomenology of La symbolique du mal grounds its hermeneutics upon the double
intentionality of myth and symbol: the Ricoeurian hermeneutics is then better
defined as the task of deciphering double-meaning symbolic expressions. Now, I
must recall that the Ricoeurian symbolism in question is not speculative but it
remains dependant on our human experience and its reflection upon the myth.
Ricoeur announces a third volume on the “philosophy of the fault” (in the
awaited Poétique de la voionté), where he would
deal with the so-called “symboles
spéculatifs.”(31) In his introduction to the Symbolism
of Evil he develops an entire “critériologie
du symbole” in order to arrive at some definition of the symbol in question. In
the first place, every authentic symbol comprises three dimensions: cosmic
(i.e. it always refers to a place or an aspsct of the universe), oneiric (it is
in the dream that one can bring out the passage from the cosmic function to a
psychic-function in a symbol) and poetic (“dans
la poésie le symbole est surpris au moment où il est un surgissement du langage”),
and these three forms are structurally intercommunicative. Ricoeur goes on then
to enumerate six approaches to what should be the essence of the symbol:
1. The
symbol is a sign: “ce sont des expressions qui communiquent un sens; ce sens
est déclaré dans une intention de signifier véhiculée par la parole.”
2. Symbols are opaque: “à l’opposé des signes techniques parfaitement transparents qui ne disent
que ce qu’ils veulent dire em posant le signifié, les signes symboliques sont
opaques, parce que le sens premier littéral, patent, vise lui-même
analogiquement un sens second qui n’est pas donné autrement qu’en lui... Cette opacité fait la profondeur même du symbole, inépuisable comme
on dira.”
3. The symbol is a primary intentionality which provides
analogically a secondary sens: “à la différence d’une comparaison que nous
considérons du dehors, le symbole est le mouvement du sens primaire qui nous
fait participer au sens latent et ainsi nous assimile au symbolisé sans que
nous puissions dominer intellectuellement la similitude.”
5. This “symbol” in question has nothimg to do with that
of the “symbolic logic,” but the former is the very opposite of the latter: “la
signification, par sa structure même (en même temps
fonctiom de l’absence et fonction de la présence), rend possible à la fois la
formalisation intégrale, c’est-à-dire la réduction du signe au
‘caractère’ (au sens leibnizien) et finalement à un élément de calcul, et la
restauration d’un langage plein, lourd d’intentionnalités impliquées et de
renvois analogiques à autre chose, qu’il donne en énigme.”
6. How shall one draw the line between “symbol” and
“myth”? “Je tiendrai le mythe pour une espèce de symbole, comme un symbole
développé em forme de récit, et articulé dans un temps et un espace non
coordonnables à ceux de l’histoire et de la géographie selon la méthode
critique; par exemple, l’exil est un symbole primaire de l’aliénation humaine,
mais l’histoire de l’expulsiom d’Adam et d’Eve du Paradis est um récit mythique
de second degré mettant em jeu des personages, des lieux, un temps, des
épisodes fabuleux...”(32)
In the conclusion of this
volume, Ricoeur inscribes himself within the hermemeutical circle sketched by
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and reproduced in different domains by Leenhardt,
Eliade and Bultmann. In effect, the Marburger theologian is evoked several
times by Ricoeur throughout his later writings. Although Ricoeur shares the
former’s demythologizing program on the whole, the French philosopher rejects
the Bultmannian confusion of “démythisation” with “démythologisation.”
According to Ricoeur, Bultmann has rightly articulated the hermeneutical circle
in terms of Verstehen and Glauben, in that one has to understand
in order to believe insofar as one has also to believe in order to understand.
Understanding and interpretation are certainly conditioned by our
presuppositions, by our preunderstanding and by that which is “aimed at” in our
approach (the Heideggerian Woraufhin).
Therefore, belief is only made possible, for the postcritical subjectivity of
“modernity,” through the mediation of one’s self-understanding. It is in this
sense that understanding, from a hermeneutical standpoint, is mediation rather
than reconstruction, revelation rather than objectification. Furthermore, I
agree with Gary Madison in that “Ricoeur’s reflexive philosophy is not a
philosophy of consciousness, and the hermeneutical subject is not a
metaphysical subject.”(33) Thus the intrinsic demythologizing character of
every critique effects the deconstructive thrust of Heidegger’s Abbau, as Bultmann’s Entmythologisierung
recasts the entformalisiert sense of
Dasein’s facticity: “Toute critique
‘démythologise’ en tant que critique: c’est-á-dire pousse toujours plus loin le
départage de l’historique (selon les règles de la méthode critique) et du
pseudo-historique.”(34) In particular, the “historisch-geschichtlich” rupture
implied in Bultmann’s neo-Kantian criticism has opened up the way for the
liberation of the logos enclosed in
the mythos. Nevertheless, such
demythologization in the very pursuit of objective truth does not suppress the
myth but rehabilitates it, in its symbolic dimension. As Ricoeur remarks,
...C’est précisément em accélérant le mouvement de
“démythologisation,” que l’herméneutique moderne met au jour la dimension du
symbole, en tant que signe originaire du sacré; c’est
ainsi qu’elle participe à la revivification de la philosophie au contact des
symboles; elle est une des voies de son rajeunissement. Ce paradoxe selon
lequel la “démythologisation” est aussi recharge de la pensée dans les symboles
n’est qu’un corollaire de ce que nous avons appelé le cercle du croire et du
comprendre dans l’herméneutique.(35)
Hence we can speak of the
Ricoeurian distinction between “démythisatiom” and “démythologisation” in the
following terms: whereas the former means the radical suppression of the myth,
the latter seeks to denounce the historical naiveté of the pre-critical belief
in the myth. Ricoeur rejects the former, while Bultmann apparently confuses the
two. In point of fact, the notion of “de-mythologization” as the “de-objectification”
of myth is better understood if we compare Bultmann’s definition of Mythos with that of Hans Jonas, whose
work on Gnosticism inspired the former’s demythologization project in the
1940’s. According to Bultmann,
The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective
picture of the world as it is (ein
objektives Weltbild), but to express man’s understanding of himself in the
world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but
anthropologically, or better still, existentially... The real purpose of myth
is to speak of a transcendent power which controls the world and man, but that
purpose is impeded and obscured by the terms in which it is experienced.(36)
Now, as we consider Jonas’s
identification between entmythologisiert
(“demythologized’) and entmythisiert
(“demythed”) to express the “logicized” language of human thought, as opposed
to the “hypostasized” language of myth, it becomes evident that such an
interpretation of mythology had to appeal to an existential terminology.
Because the kerygma should not be eliminated (Bultmann), the demythologization
should not be reduced to a mere suppression of mythology but consisted in the
interpretation of it (Jonas). In other words, Bultmann --just like Jonas-- does
not dispense with the mythological, but rather seeks to understand it in
existential, self-appropriating terms. The myth, on the other hand, has itself
to be sacrificed on the altar of reason so that the logos itself be
resurrected, at the very level of our human existence. This re-appropriation of
the logos by the understanding subject, vis-à-vis the symbolism of the myth,
was the kernel of Jonas’s approach to Gnostic mythology:
We first turn to an anthropological, ethical sphere of
concepts to show how the existential basic principle we have postulated, the
“gnostic” principle...is here in a quite distinctive way drawn back out of the
outward mythical objectification (der
äusseren mythischen Objektivation) and transposed into inner concepts of
Dasein (in innere Daseinsbegriffe)
and into ethical practice, i.e. it appears so to speak “resubjectivized.”(37)
It seems that Ricoeur’s
conception of “myth,” originated from his “dialogue” with Jaspers, Berdyaev,
Eliade, and Jung, is much broader and more adequate to be used in a philosophy
of language than the Bultmannian one. As Ricoeur would point it out in his
preface to the French edition of Bultmann’s Jesus
(1968), the “nonmythological” language of faith proposed by Bultmann does not
solve the hermeneutical problem of objectifying the meaning of the Dass (“this event of encounter”) which
follows on the Was (“on general
statements and on objectifying representations.”(38) Ricoeur is not
taking so much a stand against Bultmann as he wants to go further in a
linguistic direction overlooked by the latter. Accordirig to Ricoeur, “Bultmann
seems to believe that a language which is no longer ‘objectifying’ is innocent.
But in what sense is it still a language? And what does it signify?”(39) Like
the “new hermeneutic” movemerit which would emerge out of the post-Bultmannian
quest of the historical Jesus, Ricoeur re-invokes the object of this
hermeneutical inquiry in order to radicalize the demythologizing program. Yet,
unlike Ebeling and Fuchs, he critically avoids the Heideggerian identity
between an existential hermeneutics and an ontology of
understanding. In his search for a method which reconciles both the symbolic
use of myth and the signification of faith, Ricoeur concludes that, in the last
analysis, “kerygma can no longer be the origin of demythologization if it does
not initiate thought, if it develops no understanding of faith.” The question
that arises then is whether the kerygma can still be understood as both event
and meaning together, without falling into the “objectifying” aporia again:
This question is at the center of post-Bultmannian
hermeneutics. The opposition between explanation and understanding that came
from Dilthey and the opposition between the objective and the existential that
came from an overtly anthropological reading of Heidegger were very useful in a
first phase of the problem. But, once the intention is to grasp in its entirity
the problem of the understanding of faith and the language appropriate to it,
these oppositions prove to be ruinous. Doubtless it is necessary today to award
less importance to Verstehen
(“understanding”), which is too exclusively centered on existential decision,
and to consider the problem of language and interpretation in all its breadth.(40)
It would be imprecise, however,
to understand Ricoeur’s criticism of Bultmann as an attempt to avoid the
Heideggerian category of “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit;
in French, “historialité”). For Ricoeur agrees with Bultmann as to the
existential appropriation of meaning in the geschichtliche
decision; nevertheless, according to Ricoeur, this geschichtliche appropriation “is only the final stage, the last
threshold of an understanding which has first uprooted and moved into another
meaning.” Ricoeur criticizes Bultmann for leaping over “the moment of meaning,”
which is “objective” and “ideal” (in the Husserlian conception of Sinn, which does not hold any place in reality, not even in
psychic reality). Ricoeur wants thus to emphasize “the semantic moment” and
“the objectivity of the text, understood as content --bearer of meaning and
demand for meaning-- that begins the existential movement of
appropriation.”(41) This should bring us back to the hermeneutic phenomenology
developed in the Symbolism of Evil.
In its conclusion, Ricoeur evaluates the postcritical impasse suscitated by the
modern hermeneutical circle: on the one hand, the symbolic and mythic
expressions of being have been defied by the critique towards an objectifying
language, having human being as the center of meaning (transcendental Cogito);
on the other hand, the first naiveté, that of belief in a divine-ordered
cosmos, has been suppressed by demythologizing programs only to culminate in
the metaphysical forgottenness of Being. Just as Kant’s Kritiken mark the end of pre-modern approaches to the metaphysics
of representation and the beginning of anthropocentric conceptions of
subjectivity that articulate the rational and the empirical realms of whatever
becomes object of human cognition, Heidegger sought to rescue the fundamental
ontological dimension that was lacking in transcendental subjectivity.
Nevertheless, Heidegger’s hermeneutical clue to account for the meaning of Being out of Dasein’s factual existence is far from
conclusive, as its historicality and linguisticality allow for open-ended
interpretations. Hence Ricoeur goes on to confess:
Est-ce à dire que nous pourrions revenir à la
première naiveté? non point. De toute
manière quelque chose est perdu, irrémédiablement perdu: l’immédiateté de la
croyance. Mais si nous ne pouvons plus vivre, selon la croyance originaire, les
grandes symboliques du sacré, nous pouvons, nous modernes, dans et par la
critique, tendre vers une seconde naiveté. Bref, c’est en interprétant que nous
pouvons à nouveau entendre; ainsi est-ce dans l’herméneutique que se noue la
donation de sens par le symbol et l’initiative intelligible du déchiffrage.(42)
4. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
As we have seen, according to
Ricoeur, hermeneutics has emerged out of the pasage from a “pre-philosophical,”
mythical naiveté (“la première naiveté”) to a demythologizing, critical
understanding of our human existence (“la seconde naiveté”). In this sense,
Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the will is a propaedeutic to his philosophical
hermeneutics, and his philosophy can be properly called a “hermeneutic
phenomenology.”(43) For Ricoeur brings both ontology and epistemology together
onto the level of his hermeneutics of human being. Not only the classical
question “Qu’est-ce que l’être humain?,” but above all the hermeneutic question
“Qu’est-ce que l’être de l’être-humain?” runs through his explorations of
meaning, in a dialectical philosophical anthropology which reluctantly gives
way to an ontological hermeneutics vis-à-vis the problematic of speaking the
language of Being. In effect, it seems indeed that this “dialectique” makes
Ricoeur’s critique of metaphysics stand closer to Kant’s than to Heidegger’s,
in that its ethical dimension allows for the “symbolique” without any
transgression of the truth of Being, aligning Ricoeur’s “éthique” with
Levinas’s and Kierkegaard’s primacy of the Other over the thinking of the Being
of beings.(44) Furthermore, such an ursprüngliche ethical dimension constitutes the humanist character of Ricoeur’s
philosophical thought, which overtly assumes the Christian presuppositions of
his thinking in the form of a hermeneutic anthropology. Like Heidegger, Ricoeur
believes that language is the house of Being and human being its shepherd;
unlike the Messkirch philosopher, however, Ricoeur believes in a transcendental
“signifier” which refers to our human finitude and fallibility as much as it
does refer to our openness to the Other. Religion, according to Ricoeur and in
full agreement with his Kantian conception of morality, translates thus the
very hermeneutical circle which keeps us within the mystery of being, without
any warrant of finding our way out. For religion, as the ultimate expression of
a human desire to transcend oneself in encountering
the Other, makes no pretension to overcoming the hermeneutic circles that take
us from suspicion to belief. Religion reveals thus our human belonging together
with the language of being. Therefore, a critical religious attitude leads us
not to unbelief but to interpretation, even within the circle, so that our
understanding of ourselves and our spiritual vocation may be fulfilled in a
world where meaning comes into being. This is the “wager” (“le pari”) of
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, the phiiosophical wager that, following
“the indication of symbolic thought,” “I shall have a better understanding of
man and of the bond between the being of man and the being of all beings.”(45)
In this shift from a mythico-symbolic expression of human existence towards a
critical, philosophical hermeneutics of being, Ricoeur has stressed the
function of the consciousness of self which lies in the very transition from a
precritical to a postcritical subjectivity. The first stage of subjectivity
(the first naiveté) holds the primary symbol not as a “given” (“une donnée”) to
human being but as a telos (and Ursprung)
to be “aimed at” (visée) through
mythic expression. The second stage of subjectivity can be portrayed by the
Cartesian cogito but it was decisively won by the Kantian epistemological turn
in his critique of dogmatic metaphysics: “How do I know what appears to me as
it appears?” Such critical approach, in its destruction of the immediate,
symbolic meaning, constitutes the preamble to the “hermeneutics of suspicion”
which was practiced by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The structure of
selfhood is thus objectified in the conscious critique of subjectivity, and
subsequently suspected and unmasked in its “false-conscious” pretensions to a
full, self-transparent “consciousness.” Finally, the third stage of
subjectivity is attained with the emergence of a reflexive consciousness in a
“restorative” hermeneutic that mediates the content of symbolic consciousness
through the critical consciousness. Ricoeur employs here the Husserlian
phenomenological method to return to the Kantian epistemology: the subject is
no longer a transcendental ego, but a historical-existential “I” that
synthesizes direct self-world relations. As Klemm has summed it up, “the second
naiveté is grounded on the full appearance of reflexivity just because it
exists where the naive meaning is mediated through the critical
consciousness.”(46) The development of the Ricoeurian hermeneutical reflection
found its climactic point between 1965 and 1969, when were published,
respectively, De l’interprétation. Essai
sur Freud,
and Le conflit des interprétations. Essais
d’herméneutique. It is in Freud and Philosophy (ET, 1970) that
Ricoeur makes explicit the challenge of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” as
opposed to a primitive naiveté-based “hermeneutics of recollection” which tries
in vain to explain the symbolism of evil. First of all, in this book Ricoeur
announces the challenges imposed by the complexity and vastness of the realm of
language today:
Language is the common meeting ground of Wittgenstein’s
investigations, the English linguistic philosophy, the phenomenology that stems
from Husserl, Heidegger’s investigations, the works of the Bultmannian school
and other schools of New Testament exegesis, the works of comparative history
of religion and of anthropology concerning myth, ritual, and unbelief --and finally, psychoanalysis.(47)
“Le domaine
du langage,” says Ricoeur, “is an area today where all
philosophical investigations cut across one another.” In his penetrating
analysis of Freud’s hermeneutics of the sei?, Ricoeur marks off his own project
of interpretation of signs by taking a “longue route” that differs from the
“short cut” taken by Heidegger, in the latter’s definition of Dasein as the
being which has its being in understanding. Commenting on Heidegger’s
ontological hermeneutics, Ricoeur remarks that
One does not enter (Heidegger’s) ontology of understanding little by
little: one does not reach it by degrees, deepening the
methodological requirements of exegesis, history, or psychoanalysis: one is
transported there by a sudden reversal of the question.
Instead of asking: On what condition can a knowing subject understand a text or
history? one asks: What kind of being is it whose
being consists of understanding? The hermeneutic problem thus becomes a problem
of the Analytic of this being, Dasein, which exists through understanding.(48)
Nevertheless, it would be a gross mistake to simply
oppose Ricoeur’s reflective hermeneutics to Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutic
as though the former were not following the Denkweg
of the latter:
Je ne dis pas que la
théologie doit passer par Heidegger. Je dis que, si elle passe par Heidegger, c’est par-là
et jusque-là qu’elle doit le suivre. Ce chemin est le plus long. C’est le chemin de la patience et non de la hâte et de la précipitation. Sur ce chemin, le théologien ne doit pas être pressé de savoir
si l’être, selon Heidegger, c’est Dieu, selon la Bible. ...tout cela reste à
penser. Il n’y a pas de plus court chemin pour joindre
l’anthropologie existentiale neutre, selon la philosophie, et la décision
existentielle devant Dieu, selon la Bible. Mais il y a le long chemin de la
question de l’être et de l’appartenance du dire à l’être.(49)
This “longue route” typifies Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as
an “herméneutique du détour,” in that his philosophy
of the “sujet” meets “le long détour des signes” as it proceeds from the “je
suis” to the “je pense.” For Ricoeur, “la réflexion est l’effort
pour ressaisir l’Ego de l’Ego Cogito dans le miroir de ses objets, de
ses oeuvres et finalement de ses actes.”(50) The hermeneutical detour compels
the existing cogito to appropriate its own existential meaning not in a
reflection objectified, as it were, “thought” outside its being, but in the
very interpretation of those signs which anticipated its reflection upon
existence. According to Ricoeur,
The ultimate root of our problem lies in this primitive connection
between the act of existing and the signs we deploy in our works; reflection
must become interpretation because I cannot grasp the act of existing except in
signs scattered in the world. That is why a reflective philosophy must include
the results, methods, and presuppositions of all the sciences that try to
decipher and interpret the signs of man.(51)
That leads Ricoeur to concentrate his hermeneutical
project upon the textual approach: instead of reducing itself to an ontology of understanding, hermeneutics has to deal with
the object of interpretation par excellence, the text, and its subject matter (Sache). The “longue route du détour”
impels Ricoeur to immerse deeper and deeper into an existential-structural
understanding of the sense, more precisely of the “double sense”:
“l’interprétation c’est l’intelligence du double sens.”(52)
As he thoroughly explores the Freudian theory of interpretation, he precises
the “hermeneutical field” containing the psychoanalysis (interpretation of
dreams as symbols) but inscribed within the broader sphere of a general science
of signs:
Ainsi, dans la vaste sphère
du langage, le lieu de la psychanalyse se précise: c’est à la fois le lieu des
symboles ou du double sens et celui où s’affrontent les diverses manières d’interpréter. Cette circonscription plus vaste que la
psychanalyse, mais plus étroite que la théorie du langage total qui lui sert
d’horizon, nous l’appellerons désormais le “champ herméneutique”; nous
entendrons toujours par herméneutique la théorie des règles qui président à une exégèse, c’est-à-dire à l’interprétation d’un texte
singulier ou d’un ensemble de signes susceptible d’être considéré comme un texte...(53)
Hermeneutics is thus the process of deciphering which
goes from manifest content and meaning to latent or hidden meaning. The “text,”
object of interpretation, is to be taken here in a very broad sense: symbols as
in a dream, myths and symbols of society (as in religious, cultural, and social
contexts), literary texts, and so forth. Ricoeur goes on to assert, after
Cassirer’s conception of das Symbolische, that it is precisely because of the distinction between “les expressions univoques”
and “les expressions multivoques” that the symbolic function makes hermeneutics
possible and necessary. “Vouloir dire autre chose que ce que l’on dit, voilà la
fonction symbolique.”(54) In effect, the equivocal symbols (as opposed, say, to
the univocal symbols of symbolic logic) constitute the true focus of
hermeneutics. As he would define it in an article that has become a classic of
hermeneutic theory (“Existence et herméneutique,” 1965, reprinted in Le conflit des interprétations):
I define “symbol” as structure of signification in which a direct,
primary, literal meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is
indirect, secondary, and figurative and which can be apprehended only through
the first.
And he adds,
Interpretation, we will say, is the work of thought which consiste in
deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels
of meaning implied in the literal meaning. In this way, I retain the initial
reference to exegesis, that is, to the interpretation of hidden meanings.
Symbol and interpretation thus become correlative concepts; there is
interpretation wherever there is multiple meaning, and it is in interpretation
that the plurality of meanings is made manifest.(55)
It is revealing that the Ricoeurian detour of semantics appears to be a
hermeneutical, dialectical response to the Heideggerian ontological
concentration. Ricoeur’s epistemological concern here is to avoid the
temptation of separating “vérité” and “méthode”(56)--as ironically implicated
by Gadarner’s Wahrheit und Method (1960)-- in order to properly
articulate the existential, unveiling meaning of an ontological understanding:
A purely semantic elucidation remains suspended until one shows that the
understanding of multivocal or symbolic expressions is a moment of
self-understanding; the semantic approach thus entails a reflective approach.
But the subject that interprets himself while interpreting signs is no longer
the cogito: rather, he is placed in being before he places and possesses
himself. In this way, hermeneutics would discover a manner of existing which
would remain from start to finish a being-interpreted. Reflection alone, by
suppressing itself as reflection, can reach the ontological roots of understanding.
Yet this is what always happens in language, and it occurs through the movement
of reflection. Such is the arduous route we are going to follow.(57)
The Ricoeurian conception of symbol is, in the words
of Richard Palmer, that of “a semantic unity which has a fully coherent surface
meaning and at the same time a deeper significance.”(58)“Semantics”
is to be understood here as the linguistic study of the principles of discourse
(“la linguistique du discours” as opposed to “la linguistique de la langue,”
following de Saussure’s distinction between “speech” (parole) and “language” (langue).
The sentence, combining noun and verb, allows humans to say something about
something (ti kata tinos):
because it conveys a message, it can thus be considered the basic unity of the
discourse (“l’unité de base du discours”). On the other hand, if one holds the
sign (phonological or lexical) to be the basic unity of language (in the sense “langue”), one should speak instead of “semiotics” as opposed to
“semantics”. In point of fact, the noun-verb duality at the level of the
sentence has been eclipsed by the duality of levels of language.(59) Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has constituted itself a
thorough critique of the semiotic monopoly, which has largely determined the success
of structuralist and contemporary linguistic researches. What Ricoeur’s
critical hermeneutics seeks to unmask is any pretension to a “structural”
dissolution of sense (including certain nihilistic forms of “deconstruction”
and “dissemination”) on the basis of objectified explanations of semiological
mechanisms. Such is the role of “suspicion” reserved to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics:
like les maîtres du soupçon Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud, the continual task of the hermeneutist is to suspect any
given structure of “false consciousness,” and to unmask the “ideological”
pretensions to conclusive explanations of meaning.(60)
This hermeneutics of suspicion is in fact the effective, ongoing praxis of our demythologizing task to
continue progressing towards the second naiveté:
Thus hermeneutics, an acquisition of “modernity,” is one of the models
by which that “modernity” transcends itself, insofar as it is forgetfulness of
the sacred. I believe that being can still speak to me --no longer of
course, under the precritical form of immediate belief, but as the second
immediacy aimed at by hermeneutics. This second naiveté aims to be the
postcritical equivaient of the precritical hierophany.(61)
As I conclude this exposé on the development of
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, I cannot proceed without conceding that the Conflit des interprétations is but the
beginning of a new, fertile phase of Ricoeur’s writings on hermeneutical
theory. It would be misleading, however, to exaggerate
the opposition of this “later” Ricoeur to an “early” one, for his entire
philosophical work, since the “Philosophy of the Will,” should be regarded as
an “oeuvre de maturité.” The methodological shift should thus be understood as
an evolution towards a more precise, enlarged definition of the hermeneutical
field, as Ricoeur specifies the primacy of the text and, at the same time,
maintains the open-ended extension of its textuality, for instance, in the
hermeneutical dialogue with the social sciences (62).
5. Conclusion: The Hermeneutics of
Revelation
Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian interpretation of Kant is the
hermeneutic effect of a dialectical post-Hegelian retour à Kant, following the phenomenological detours of
Heidegger’s critique of the onto-theological. For the manifestation of the gift
of Being, according to Heidegger, is not so much Offenbarung (“revelation” of transcendence) as Offenbarkeit, the “impersonal” unveiling of the Open (das
Offene), as an un-concealing dimension of Being in the “es gibt” of
all that is. The ethical is therefore subordinated to the ontological, as the
unconditional primacy of Being over all other beings (including “God”) is given
in language itself, as the event of appropriation between Being and human
Dasein, in that language reveals
their belonging-together (“das Zusammengehören von Mensch und Sein”).(63) Ricoeur reappropriates this “belonging-distanciation
dialectic” in his hermeneutics of the idea of revelation, by means of yet
another detour, “le détour du texte.”
Before anything, Ricoeur shows that the détour of the text is indeed a veritable
retour to the text and its world. I
shall confine myself to presenting three brief overviews of three main writings
which will serve to highlight the main thesis of this paper, namely, that the
evolution of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion translates the revelatory
nature of his correlative conception of philosophical anthropology and
philosophy of language. The first one is the article “Qu’est-ce qu’un texte?
Expliquer et comprendre,” published in 1970 in the collection Hermeneutik und Dialektik: Aufsätze II,
edited by Bubner et al. (ET: “What is a Text? Explanation and Interpretation,”
in J. Thompson, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981). In
“What is a Text?” Ricoeur deals with the “two basic attitudes which one
can adopt in regard to a text,” namely that of an “explanation” (Erklärung) and that of an
“interpretation” (Verständnis),
following a Diltheyan terminology. Ricoeur believes that such dichotomy has
nevertheless become obsolete in our days: if the structuralists, on the one
hand, aim at “explanatory” methods (language as a system of signs which
displays an objective structure), the “interpretative” attitude on the other
hand (language as speech, whose sense signifies a referent) follows the sense
of a text carried by its own structure. By stressing the nuances of such
distinction, Ricoeur goes on to affirm that these attitudes are no longer in
polar opposition (“aux antipodes”) to each other, but they can still serve as a
clue to what should be a hermeneutic “mediation” between erklären and verstehen.(64)
In order to arrive at this mediation we have to
articulate both “explaining” and “interpreting” with that which a text is. For
Ricoeur believes that hermeneutics proper springs from the problem of the text
conceived as a work.(65) In this sense, Ricoeur
asserts that “interpretation, before being the act of the exegete, is the act
of the text.”(66) The Ricoeurian notion of “text” includes, in effect, the
multiple modes of “distanciation” associated not only with writings but with
“the production of discourse as a work.” In brief, Ricoeur assigns to the
notion of text the same basic characteristics of discourse (the event-meaning
dialectic and the sense-reference relationship): texts refer thus to an
intended “world of the text” (le monde du
texte) and to the self as well.(67) Surpassing Dilthey’s Romantic
conception of Verständnis as
“appropriation,” Ricoeur goes on to reconcile both the semantic, concrete level
of discourse with the semiotic, abstract level of formal language at the same
hermeneutical level of what has been called a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) —to use
Gadarner’s felicitous formula:
I shall therefore say: to explain is to bring about the structure, that
is, the internal relations of dependence which constitute the statics of the
text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route towards the
orient the text.(68)
Following this interpretation-explanation dialectic,
both the hermeneutical “belonging” (Zugehörigkeit)
and the critical, objectifying “distanciation” constitute together the
appropriation of the “world of the text”:
....Ultimately, what I appropriate is a proposed world. The latter is
not behind the text as a hidden
intention would be, but in front of
it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals.
Henceforth, to understand is to
understand oneself in front of the text. ...In this respect, it would be
more correct to say that the self is
constituted by the “matter” (Sache)
of the text.(69)
The second writing to be mentioned here, La métaphore vive (1975; ET: The Rule of Metaphor, 1977), as Ricoeur himself would
comment, “tackled the two problems of the emergence of new meanings in language
and of the referential claims raised by such nondescriptive language as poetic
discourse.”(70) These two problems were somehow already implicit in Ricoeur’s
early inquiry into the symbolic forms of discourse, which would be later
designated by “the complex problem of fiction and of productive
imagination.” The Ricoeurian conception of métaphore
is to be framed within the wider framework of the récit (the narrative) to which he attributes “the power of
reshaping human experience” more than any other “language games,” as the self
itself is mediated and constituted through first-person narratives in one’s
self-understanding. Because he maintains the distinction between the
philosophic-speculative and poetic-religious realms of discourse, Ricoeur
focuses on the latter in which figurative meaning outgrows literal meaning
(“the metaphoric process”):
Let us call any shift from literal to figurative sense a metaphor. If
the general sweep of this definition is to be preserved, it is necessary,
first, that the notion of change of meaning be not restricted to names, or even
to words, but extended to all signs. Furthermore, one must dissociate the
notion of literal meaning from that of proper meaning. Any lexical value
whatsoever is a literal meaning; thus, the metaphorical meaning is nonlexical: it
is a value created by the context ...An implicitly discursive trait follows,
which at the same time prepares for the entrance of resemblance: every
metaphorical meaning is mediate, in the sense that the word is ‘an immediate
sign of its literal senses and a mediate sign of its figurative sense’ (Michel
Le Guern, Sémantique de la métaphore et
de la métonymie, p.175). To speak by means of metaphor is to say something
different ‘through’ some literal meaning.(71)
Finally, Temps
et récit (3 vols., 1983-85) should be mentioned
here as one of the most recent magnificent attempts to reconcile praxis and poiesis in a single hermeneutics of the human subject. According to
Ricoeur, “the refiguring of time by narrative...is the joint work of historical
and fictional narrative.”(72) In Histoire
et vérité (1955), the problematic tension between subject and object
vis-à-vis the historical reality had already been submitted to the krisis of a “not-yet” Word: a
Judeo-Christian conception of history seemed to constrain the philosopher to go
beyond both existentialism and historicism, in an eschatological attitude of
hope.(73) Now, complementing his metaphoric theory, Ricoeur takes the defense
of “narrative time” against atemporal (and ahistorical), structuralist
narratives. With Aristotle, Ricoeur maintains that temporal narrative
represents human action in the world. Hence the term “récit” is to comprise
reader and text are kept in a dialogue which
culminates in the understanding of the text by the reader and the latter’s self-understanding
as being-in-the-world:
To understand these (narrative) texts is to interpolate among the
predicates of our situation all those sayings that, from a simple environment (Umwelt), makes world (Welt). Indeed we owe a large part of the
enlarging of our horizon of exlttenae to poetic works.(74)
It has become clear now that Ricoeur’s return to the
text reveals also an intriguing detour of ontology. In point of fact, Ricoeur’s
“reflective” philosophy opposes every “ontological” attempt to conclusively
appropriate the un-thought meaning-structure of being: “l’impensé reste
toujours à être entièrement pensé,” one will never exhaustively think the
totality of the unthought. Certainly, this character of finitude in Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics betrays not only an eschatological return to Kant’s “limiting
concept” but also a “proleptic” detour towards the transcendens. Such is again the Ricoeurian debt to Hegel’s
metacritique of Kant’s transcendental subjectivity. As Walter Lowe has
convincingly shown, the “regional ontology” of Ricoeur’s humanist “philosophy
of presence” is coherent with the Reformed dictum finitum non capax infiniti (“the finite is not capable of the
infinite”), so dear to Karl Barth and neo-Kantian theologians.(75)
Furthermore, it seems that Ricoeur’s mediating hermeneutics of metaphor seeks
to respond to Heidegger’s linguistic mysticism for the very insufficiency of
the latter’s appropriation of Luther’s finitum
capax. Thus, the elliptical shift from a “symbolique” towards a
“métaphorique” is quite revealing of Ricoeur’s ambitious dépassement of the later Heidegger, as we can infer from his
magisterial study on “Métaphore et discours philosophique” (last one in The Rule of Metaphor):
Le prix de cette prétention
(chez Heidegger) est l’ambiguité des dernières oeuvres, partagées entre la
logique de leur continuité avec la pensée spéculative, et la logique de leur
rupture avec la métaphysique. La première logique place l’Ereignis et le es gibt dans
la lignée d’une pensée sans cesse en voie de se rectifier
elle-même, sans cesse en quête d’un dire
plus approprié que le parler ordinaire,
d’un dire qui serait un montrer et un laisser-être, d’une pensée, enfin, qui jamais ne renonce au
discours. La seconde logique conduit à une suite
d’effacements et d’abolitions, qui précipitent la pensée dans le vide, la
ramènent à l’hermétisme et à la préciosité, et reconduisent les jeux
étymologiques à la mystification du “sens primitif.” ...Ce qui est caractérisé,
ici, c’est la dialectique même des modes de discours, dans leur proximité et
dans leur différence. D’une part, la poésie, en
elle-même et par elle-même, donne à penser l’esquisse
d’une conception “tensionnelle” de la vérité... Par ce
tour de l’énonciation, la poésie articule et préserve, en liaison avec d’autres
modes de discours, l’expérience d’appartenance
qui inclut l’homme dans le discours et le discours dans l’être.
D’autre part, la pensée spéculative appuie son travail sur la dynamique
de l’énonciation métaphorique et l’ordonne à son propre espace de sens. Sa réplique n’est possible
que parce que la distanciation, constitutive do l’instance critique, est
contemporaine de l’expérience d’appartenance, ouverte ou reconquise par le
discours poétique, et parce que le discours poétique, en tant que texte et oeuvre,
préfigure la distanciation que la pensée spéculative porte à son plus haut
degré de réflexion.(76)
It is, therefore, within the framework of a métaphorique that Ricoeur’s discours théologique seeks to respond to
Heidegger’s Destruktion der Onto-Theo-Logik:
“A travers métaphore et récit, la fonction symbolique
du langage ne cesse de produire du sens et de révéler de l’être.”(77) As
announced from the outset, I did not intend to explore Ricoeur’s “theological
hermeneutics” in this study but rather to articulate his “revelatory language”
in terms of his “hermeneutical reflection.” I shall conclude thus this paper
with Ricoeur’s own account of such an “herméneutique
de la révélation.”
In a lecture delivered for a “Symposium on the Idea of
Revelation” at the Faculté Universitaire St. Louis in
The intrinsic dialectic of deus revelatus / deus
absconditus accounts for the very idea of revelation, insofar as the Name
of Yahweh cannot be pronounced: ehyeh
asher ehyeh (literally, “I will be what I will be,” Exodus 3,14). Ricoeur
has rightly remarked that the Septuagint’s translation of God’s self-revelation
(“I am who I am”) “opened up an affirmative poetics of God’s absolute being
that could subsequently be transcribed into Neoplatonic and Augustinian
ontology and then into Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics,” including Arab
thought.(82) As over against this metaphysical, onto-theological
rationalization of biblical revelation, Ricoeur takes the Heideggerian “détour
ontologique” but, instead of focusing on the “différence” (Unterschied), Ricoeur prefers to “defer” the ontological once again
and appropriate the écriture through
its “distanciation,” in a revelatory, pragmatic process which he calls “la
manifestation du monde par le texte et l’écriture” --and which we may as well
call a “Gadamerian différance,” reminiscent of the linguistic correlation of Sprachlichkeit and Schriftlichkeit. Ricoeur constructs his analysis of “the revelatory
function of poetic discourse” upon three preparatory concepts: “l’autonomie par
l’écriture,” “l’extériorisation par l’oeuvre, and “la
référence à un monde.” The category of poetics (“la poétique”) designates the
totality of literary genres (introduced in the first part of his lecture), “as
they exercise a referential function that differs from the descriptive
referential function of ordinary language and above all of scientific discourse.”(83)
The Ricoeurian “poétique” will reveal, in effect, the interplay between the
“symbolique” and the “métaphorique” as an event of appropriation of meaning in
the text-world:
My deepest conviction is that poetic
language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to (appartenance) an order of things which
precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to
a subject. Hence the function of poetic discourse is to bring about this
emergence of a depth-structure of belonging-to (appartenance) and the ruins of descriptive discourse. ...Fiction and redescription, then, go hand in hand. Or,
to speak like Aristotle in his Poetics,
the mythos is the way to true poiesis, which is not slavish imitation,
or a copy, or mirror-image, but a transposition or metamorphosis --or as I
suggest, a redescription. This conjunction of fiction and redescription, of mythos and mimesis, constitutes the referential fiction by means of which I
would define the poetic dimension of language. In turn, this poetic function at
once is a dimenision of revelation where revelation is to be understood in a
nonreligious, nontheistic, and nonbiblical sense of the word --but one capable
of entering into resonance with one or the other of the aspects of biblical
revelation...(84)
Ricoeur articulates this “fonction révélante” (“révélante,” revelatory, is to be distinguished here from the
current adjective “révélatrice,”
revealing, and its theological homologue “révélationnelle,”
revelational) with the “fonction poétique,” which recapitulates in itself the
three preparatory concepts of the autonomy of the text, the externality of the
work, and the transcendence of the world of the text. Using a conception of
“manifestation” which he obviously borrowed from Heidegger’s binomial Offenbarkeit / a-letheia (“laisser-être ce
qui se montre”), Ricoeur places his nonmetaphysical “révélation” at Dasein’s
horizon of encounter with manifested truth, coextensive with the poetic
function of the Sprachereignis:
Ce qui se montre, c’est chaque fois une proposition de monde, d’un monde
tel que je puisse l’habiter pour y projeter un de mes possibles les plus
propres. C’est en ce sens de manifestation que le
langage, dans la fonction poétique, est le siège d’une révélation.(85)
Revelation should not, therefore, be ever reduced to
an authoritarian dogma or to a system of rationalized beliefs: “Revelation, in
short, is a feature of the biblical world proposed by the text.”(86) As over against the idea of an autonomous
reason, Ricoeur goes on to establish a hermeneutical mediation between his
philosophy of reflection and another “revelatory” correlate, the concept of
testimony, which he elaborates in function of three other preparatory concepts
--“réflexion médiate,” “l’appartenance,” and “l’appropriation.” “Mediated
reflection” refers to “the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire
to be” (Jean Nabert), in our interpretation of a universe of signs; the
Gadamerian “belonging-to” corresponds to the Marcelian “second-order reflection,”
in opposition to Husserl’s idealism, as the critical moment of “distanciation”
which confers a historical character
on this consciousness; and, finally, “appropriation” designates the act of
self-understanding before the text, as a prolongation of the
“appartenance-distanciation” dialectic. These preparatory concepts serve to
support the hermeneutical idea of “revelation” as opposed to that of a
self-constituted consciousness:
Where consciousness posits itself as the origin of meaning, hermeneutics
brings about the abandonment (dessaisissement)
of this pretension. This abandonment is the reverse of Feuerbach’s critique of
alienation.(87)
Testimony (témoignage)
to the revealed implies a reflexive act of divestment (dépouillement), in that self-consciousness has to divest itself (se dépouiller) of what seemed to be
“true” and “right,” and appropriate the revealed anew. This second-order
reflexivity is an important transcendental move that takes place after every
detranscendentalizing, decentering and displacing critique that unmasks all
pretensions to self-transparency and self-completion on the part of
subjectivity. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of testimony, like a “hermeneutics of
suspicion,” unmasks and renounces false consciousness in order to remain true
to itself. Certainly, witnesses have died for suspicious causes: martyrdom is
but a limit-situation. Nevertheless, “the witness of things seen,”
according to Ricoeur’s dialectic of revelation, “at the limit becomes a martyr
for truth.” Not only because of our obedience
to the voice of Being or even to the Word of God, but
for the sake of the poiesis of Life
itself that continually addresses our imagination:
...What
is the historical testimony that our reflection would like to internalize
addressed to if not to our imagination? If to understand oneself
is to understand oneself in front of the text, must we not say that the reader’s understanding is suspended, derealized, made
potential just as the world itself is metamorphosized by the poem? If this is
true, we must say that the imagination is that part of ourselves that respondes
to the text as a Poem, and that alone can encounter revelation no longer as an
unacceptable pretension, but a nonviolent appeal.(88)
ENDNOTES
1.
Luc
Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68:
Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris:Gallimard,
1985). The celebrated “masters of suspicion” (maîtres du soupçon) often refer to a 1964
paper read by Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche,
Freud, Marx,” which came out in the “Cahiers de Royaumont” on Nietzsche (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp.
183-200, and is regarded by many postmodernists as a solemn manifesto. Ricoeur
speaks also of the masters of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (herméneutique
du soupçon) in his 1965
book on Freud, De l’interprétation.
However, Ricoeur used both terms as early as
2.
H.
Blocher, “L’herméneutique selon Paul Ricoeur,” Hokhma 3 (1977): p. 12.
3.
P.
Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interprétations
(Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 119. Cf. also pp. 58, 176, 330, 450; Henry Duméry, “La
disgrace éclectique est-elle évitée?,” Regards sur la philosophie contemporaine
(Tournai-Paris: Castermann, 1957), p. 150.
4.
Jean-Claude
Piguet (1924-2000), from whom I learned this Marcelian-inspired principle and
to whom I dedicate this paper, upheld that philosophy deals with problems just
as theology deals with mysteries. Cf. his “Qu’est-ce
qu’un philosophe?,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 118 (1986): pp. 1-9. Ricoeur, Piguet, Jean Brun, Jacques Ellul, and
Pierre Thévanez were among the French-speaking Protestant thinkers who followed
Gabriel Marcel’s Christian approach to philosophy, in an attempt that sought to
rationally account for faith and the existential experience of the mystery of
Being, without reducing philosophy to theology, and vice versa. Cf. P. Ricoeur,
Gabriel Marcel et
Karl Jaspers: Philosophie du mystère et philosophie du paradoxe (Paris:
Seuil, 1948).
5.
“The
Critique of Religion,” in The Philosophy
of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, edited by C. Reagan and D.
Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), p. 215. My
emphasis.
6.
Ibid., p.
215.
7.
D.
Klemm, The Hermeneutical Theorv of Paul Ricoeur
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1983), p. 45.
8.
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics, trans. D. Ihde
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 3. Cf. Le Conflit des interprétations, p. 7.
9.
E.
Levinas, En découvrant l’existence avec
Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1949), pp.
11ff.
10.
P.
Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His
Phenomenology, trans. E. Ballard and
L. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp.
11.
Ibid., p.
33 n. 34.
12. P. Ricoeur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in
13. Cf. Ricoeur’s preface to Gary Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981).
14. P. Ricoeur, “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology
of the Will,” Husserl, p. 214. I have
left inclusive language whenever it occurs in the original.
15.
P.
Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The
Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. E. Kohak(Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1966), pp.
16. P. Ricoeur, Freedom
and Nature, p. 37.
17.
P.
Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. 9.
See also Ricoeur’s comparison between “Kant and Husserl,” Husserl, pp. 175 ff.
18. P. Ricoeur, Freedom
and Nature, p. 341.
19. Ibid., p. 486.
20.
Ibid., p.
32.
21.
Ibidem.
22. P. Ricoeur, Le
volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), p. 21.
23.
M.
Philibert, Paul Ricoeur ou la liberté
selon l’espérance (Paris: Seghers, 1971), p. 64.
24. P. Ricoeur, L’homme
faillible (Paris: Aubier, 1960), p. 14.
25. Ibid., p. 17.
26.
P.
Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p. xxxi.
27.
P.
Ricoeur, L’homme faillible, p. 12.
28. P. Ricoeur, La
symbolique du mal (Paris: Rubier, 1960), p. 153.
29.
Ibid., p.
161.
30.
P.
Ricoeur, L’homme faillible, p. 13.
31. P. Ricoeur, La
symbolique du mal, p. 17 n. 3.
32. Ibid., pp. 21-25.
33. G.B. Madison, “Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of the
Subject,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis
E. Hahn, “The Library of Living Philosophers” (Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1996), p. 80.
34. P. Ricoeur, La
symbolique du mal, p. 328.
35. Ibidem. Cf. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th. ed., §
36. R. Bultmann, Kerygma
and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by H.-W. Bartsch (New York: Harper
& RQW, 1961), vol. 1, pp.
37. H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp.
38. Cf. Le Conflit
des interprétations, p. 387.
39. P. Ricoeur, The Conflict of
Interpretations, p. 396. Le Conflit
des interprétations, p. 388.
40. Ibidem: “Ces questions je ne formule pas contre
Bultmann, mais afin de mieux penser ce qui reste impensé chez lui.”
41. P. Ricoeur, The
Conflict of Interpretations, p. 397; Le
Conflit des interprétations, p. 389. Ricoeur follows Husserl and Frege in
their distinction between sense/meaning and reference (“Sinn” and “Bedeutung”):
“...Il faut alors distinguer deux seuils de la compréhension: le seuil “du
sens” qui est ce qu’on vient de dire, et celui de la “signification” qui est le
moment de la reprise du sens par le lecteur, de son effectuation dans
l’existence. Le parcours entier de la
compréhension va du sens idéal à la signification existentielle.”
42. P. Ricoeur, La
symbolique du mal, p. 326.
43. Cf. Don Ihde, Hermeneutic
Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1971).
44. Cf., for example, Le Conflit des interprétations, pp. 338 ff.: “Je suivrai Kant deux
fois: d’abord dans sa définition de la fonction éthique de la religion, ensuite
dans sa définition du contenu représentatif
de la religion...”
45.
P.
Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 355.
46.
D.
Klemm, op. cit., p. 73.
47.
P.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay
on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), p. 3; De l’interprétation: Essai
sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), p. 13.
48.
P.
Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 6; Conflit, p. 10.
49.
P.
Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interprétations,
p. 392.
50.
P.
Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, p. 51: “Une philosophie réflexive est le contraire
d’une philosophie de l’immédiat...Nous pouvons dire, en un sens un peu
paradoxal, qu’une philosophie de la réflexion
n’est pas une philosophie de la conscience, si par conscience nous entendons la
conscience immédiate de soi-même ...La conscience, dirons-nous plus tard, est
une tâche, mais elle est une tâche parce qu’elle n’est pas une donnée...”
51.P. Ricoeur, Freud
and Philosophy, p. 46.
52.
P.
Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, p. 18. “Existential” translates here the French “existential” (German, existenzial)--as opposed to the French “existentiel” (existenziell)--, just as “structural,” in English, refers to the
French “structural,” as opposed to “structurel.” Ricoeur’s own conception of
the “existential” (“l’ontologique”) seeks to recuperate the
“existentiel” (thus, “l’ontique”) absorbed by Heidegger’s
“ontologization of the ontic” (“Ontologisierung
des Ontischen,” as Adorno has put it).
53.
P.
Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, p. 18.
54. Ibid., p. 21.
55.
P.
Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, pp.
56.
Cf. P.
Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. by J.B. Thompson (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 63-100.
57.
P.
Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 11; Conflit, p. 15.
58.
R.
Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation
Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston:
Northwestern, 1969), p. 43.
59.
Cf. P.
Ricoeur, “La structure, le mot, l’événement,” Le Conflit des interprétations, pp. 80-97.
60.
Cf.
the section “L’interprétation comme exercice du soupçon,” De l’interprétation, pp. 40-44.
61.
P.
Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 352; La symbolique du mal, p. 483.
62.
Cf. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, pp.
78 ff.
63. M. Heidegger, Basic
Writings, ed. J.G. Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 235. Cf. J.
Caputo, The Mystical Element in
Heidegger’s Thought (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978), pp. 254-257.
64. P. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics
and the Human Sciences, pp. 149 ff.
65. P. Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of
Distanciation,” in Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences, pp. 140 ff.
66. Ibid., p. 162.
67. Ibid., pp. 140-142, 145-149.
68. Ibid., pp. 161 f.
69. Ibid., pp. 143 f.
70. P. Ricoeur, Essays
on Biblical Interpretation, ed. L. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1980), p. 41.
71.
P.
Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor:
Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977),
p. 188.
72.
P.
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1,
trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), p. 80.
73.
P.
Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. C.
Kaibley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 11-14.
74.
P.
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1,
p. 80.
75.
W.
Lowe, “The Coherence of Paul Ricoeur,” Journal
of Religion 61 (1981): 384-402.
76.
P.
Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris:
Seuil, 1975), pp. 397-399.
77.
P.
Ricoeur, “Poétique et symbolique,” in B. Lauret and F. Refoulé (eds.), Initiation à la pratique da la théologie,
t. 1, Introduction (Paris: Cerf, 1982), p. 61. Cf. “Le récit interprétatif,” in Recherches des Sciences Religieuses 73/1 (1985): pp. 17-38; La métaphore vive, pp. 344-356.
78.
P. Ricoeur,
“Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” in Biblical Interpretation, p. 73. The French original presents some
slight variations: cf. “Herméneutique de l’idée de révélation,” in E. Levinas
et al., La révélation (Brussels:
Publications des Facultés Universitaires St.-Louis, 1977).
79.
Cf.,
inter alii, Claus Westermann (ed.), Essays
on Old Testamet Hermeneutics, trans. J.L. Mays, (Richmond, Va.: J. Knox
Press, 1963); Wolfhart Pannenberg (ed.), Revelation
as History, trans. D. Granskou (New York: Macmillan,
1968).
80.
“Hermeneutic
of Revelation,” Biblical Interpretation,
pp. 75-90.
81.
Ibid., p.
93.
82. Ibid., p. 94. Cf. in
Gary B. Madison (ed.), Sens et existence. En hommage à Paul Ricœur. Recueil (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975).
83.
Ibid.,
p. 100. Cf. “Poétique et Symbolique,” art. cit., p. 54
84.
P.
Ricoeur, “Hermeneutic of Revelation,” in Biblical
Interpretation, pp.
85.
P.
Ricoeur, La révélation, p. 41; Biblical Interpretation, p. 102.
86.
P.
Ricoeur, Biblical Interpretation, p.
104.
87.
Ibid.,
p. 109. See the article on “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” Biblical Interpretation, pp. 119-154.
88.
P.
Ricoeur, “Hermeneutic of Revelation,” in Biblical
Interpretation, p. 117.
