On Paul Ricoeur

The Owl of Minerva

Richard Kearney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Paul Ricoeur is one of the giants of contemporary continental philosophy and one of the most enduring and wide-ranging thinkers in the twentieth century, publishing major works ranging from existentialism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis, politics, religion and the theory of language. Richard Kearney offers a critical engagement with the work of Ricoeur, beginning with a general introduction to his hermeneutic philosophy. Part one explores some of the main themes in Ricouer's thought under six headings: phenomenology and hermeneutics; language and imagination; myth and tradition; ideology and utopia; evil and alterity; poetics and ethics. The second part comprises five dialogical exchanges which Kearney has conducted with Ricoeur over the last three decades (1977-2003), charting and explaining his intellectual itinerary. This book is aimed at a broad student readership as well as the general intelligent reader interested in knowing more about one of the most enduring major figures in contemporary continental philosophy.

Part One

Study 1
Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics*

In this study I propose to explore in more detail how Ricoeur reworked phenomenology in a new direction. Taking a lead from Heidegger and Gadamer, he moved beyond both the 'eidetic' phenomenology of Husserl and the 'existentialist' phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to embrace a 'hermeneutic' phenomenology in dialogue with the human sciences. Where Sartre tended to privilege the role of negating consciousness and Merleau-Ponty that of embodied perception, Ricoeur emphasized the primacy of a signifying intentionality. This new emphasis led him to advance a general hermeneutics where phenomenology confronts its own limits - that is, where the intuition of essences ends and the interpretation of symbols begins.

As noted in our Introduction, Ricoeur's international repute as a philosopher arose not only from his influential role as exegete and teacher of phenomenology, but more importantly from the singular character of his 'hermeneutic turn'. Redefining hermeneutics as a method of deciphering doubled or multiple meaning, Ricoeur's major hermeneutic works from the 1950s to the present day have been devoted to the interpretation of the 'mediations' of meaning through symbol, myth, dream, image, text, narrative and ideology.

In some of his early phenomenological studies of the will, for example Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), Ricoeur analysed certain limit situations where 'freedom' comes face to face with 'necessity'. Here the voluntary intentionality of our consciousness encounters involuntary or opaque experiences - such as birth, death, the unconscious, suffering, evil, or indeed transcendence. All these encounters, Ricoeur demonstrated, are irreducible to the subjective transparency of intuition (that is, Husserl's model of phenomenology). By describing how our finite and historically situated existence transgresses our subjective intentions, Ricoeur was able to affirm one of the guiding principles of his hermeneutic project: we do not begin with a pure reflective consciousness - this remains a task to be accomplished by means of a long detour through those significations of history and culture that reside outside our immediate consciousness. The human subject thus comes to realize that it can only interpret itself by interpreting the 'signs' of an external world not its own. The hermeneutic self is not a self-sufficient cogito but an incarnate being which discovers that it is placed in language before it possesses itself in consciousness.

Human being, for Ricoeur, is always, a being-interpreted. It cannot start from itself or simply invent meanings out of itself ex nihilo. Therefore, instead of proceeding according to the model of the Cartesian concept-a pure and distinct idea transparent to itself - hermeneutics is committed to the primacy of the symbol, where meaning emerges as oblique, mediated, enigmatic, layered and multiform. 'In contrast to philosophies concerned with starting points', Ricoeur explains, 'a meditation on symbols starts from the fullness of language and of meaning already there; it begins from within language which has already taken place and in which everything in a certain sense has already been said; it wants to be thought, not presuppositionless, but in and with all its presuppositions. Its first problem is not how to get started, but from the midst of speech to recollect itself.'¹

Ricoeur does not for all that renounce the ideal of rationality proposed by philosophical reflection. He simply points out that such an ideal must always presuppose the revealing and concealing powers of language. The ideal of rationality remains therefore a project rather than a possession, the end of philosophy rather than its beginning. Ricoeur argues furthermore that the hermeneutic meditation of symbols answers to the particular situation of philosophy in our modern culture. It corresponds to the recognition that there is no 'first truth', no 'absolute knowledge', no transcendental vantage point of consciousness where the dispersal into multiple meaning could be definitively overcome in one final synthesis.

Ricoeur's hermeneutics thus exposes phenomenology to a radical awareness of the limits and obstacles of consciousness. It opens reflection to the world of the unconscious and the supraconscious. And this hermeneutic detour through the hidden or suppressed meanings of symbolic signification - preceding and exceeding the immediacy of intuitive consciousness - is less an option than a necessity. We find Ricoeur's hermeneutic trajectory progressing consequently as a series of reflections upon the primary sources of cultural interpretation. These include:

1. the symbols of religion and myth (The Symbolism of Evil, 1960; Figuring the Sacred, 1995; Thinking Biblically, 1998);
2. the dream images of the unconscious (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Intei-pretation, 1965);
3. the signifying structures of language (The Conflict of Interpretations, 1969; The Rule of Metaphor, 1975; Interpretation Theory, 1976; Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981);
4. the social and political imaginary (History and Truth, 1965; Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 1986; From Text to Action, 1991, The Just, 1995);
5. the function of narrative time, identity and action (Time and Narrative, 3 vols, 1983-85; Oneself as Another, 1992);
6. the workings of remembrance and mourning (Memory, History, Forgetting, 2000).

All of these works share a common project - the retrieval of thought in symbolic mediation and the extension of symbolic mediation into thought. The overriding maxim of this general hermeneutics is Ricoeur's celebrated claim that the 'symbol invites thought' (le symbole donne à penser). As the author explains:

This maxim that I find so appealing says two things. The symbol invites: I do not posit the meaning, the symbol gives it; but what it gives is something for thought, something to think about. First the giving, then the positing; the phrase suggests, therefore, both that all has already been said in enigma and yet that it is necessary ever to begin and re-begin everything in the dimension of thought. It is this articulation of thought ... in the realm of symbols and of thought positing and thinking that I would like to intercept and understand.²

The Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology

Before proceeding to analyse Ricoeur's development of his hermeneutic project in more detail, we shall take a closer look at his decisive departure from Husserl's original formulation of phenomenology.

Ricoeur considers that the extension of phenomenology into hermeneutics requires a critique of Husserl's idealist model of consciousness (as advanced in such texts as The Cartesian Meditations or Ideas). He rejects Husserl's notion of an ultimate foundation of knowledge to be achieved by an 'absolute suspension of presuppositions'. Ricoeur responds that the call for a presuppositionless starting point in the self-immediacy of consciousness labours under the illusion that there exists an order of full intuition where the contingency of meaning could be reduced to the pure immanence of a transcendental subjectivity. In what Ricoeur refers to as his 'idealist phase', Husserl maintained that such a realm of pure immanence could be reached by means of a 'transcendental reduction' which would bracket out the temporal and historical context of our experience - that context which makes all knowledge inexact in so far as it evolves through successive horizons or profiles (Abschattungen). By removing consciousness from the contingency of the natural world, Husserl believed that he could attain a transcendental knowledge that would be self-grounding and thus certain of itself. This realm of transcendental immanence was granted an immunity against doubt by Husserl. Why? Because Husserl believed that 'it was not given by profiles and hence involved nothing presumptive, allowing only the coincidence of reflection with what has just been experienced'.³ Ricoeur concludes that Husserl, by proceeding in this manner, reduced phenomenology to an idealism wherein knowledge could be considered autonomous and self-positing, and therefore alone responsible for its own meanings.

Against this idealist reading of the early Husserl - and some might add the early Sartre - Ricoeur protests that phenomenology requires a surpassing of itself towards hermeneutics. Instead of issuing a refusal to history (understood in the broad sense of a transsubjective dispersal of meaning in the world), hermeneutics makes good the intention of phenomenology to return to our lived experience. And it does this by embracing history as its ultimate challenge. Here Ricoeur endorses the initiatives of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and also indeed of the later Husserl (for example of The Crisis). He confirms that the ideal of knowledge as an absolute self-justification encounters its limit in the phenomenological description of man's being-in-the-world. This description lays bare the radical finitude of consciousness, the fact that we exist in a historical horizon of language whose meanings precede our own subjective creations. As Heidegger's phenomenological ontology clearly showed, consciousness is bound by a relation of belonging to past sedimentations and future projects of meaning, a 'hermeneutic circle' wherein each subjectivity finds itself already included in an intersubjective world whose significations encompass it and escape it on every side. Consequently, it is not sufficient simply to describe meaning as it appears; we are also obliged to interpret it as it conceals itself. This leads us inevitably beyond a phenomenological idealism of pure reflection to a phenomenological hermeneutics of interpretation which acknowledges that meaning is never first and foremost for me.

'Interpretation', writes Ricoeur, 'is interpretation by language before it is interpretation of language.'⁴ We belong to a language that has been shaped and formed by others before we arrive on the existential scene. And this language can only be recovered for reflection by a long process of decipherment. Hermeneutics reveals how we are always bound to an ontology of prior signification (what Ricoeur calls the 'tradition of recollection'). It attests to the priority of ontological pre-understanding (based, as in Heidegger, on a description of our being-in-a-world-with-others) over the epistemological category of an autonomous subject which posits itself in some absolute present. Thus Ricoeur counters the Husserlian demand for a return to the immediacy of intuition with the claim that all understanding is of necessity mediated by meanings which are not constituted by the self alone. In his watershed essay of 1969, entitled 'Existence and Hermeneutics', Ricoeur settles his account with the master as follows:

It remains that the early Husserl only reconstituted a new idealism, close to the neo-Kantianism he fought: the reduction of the thesis of the world is actually a reduction of the question of Being to the question of the sense of being, the sense of being, in turn, is reduced to a simple correlate of the subjective modes of intention.⁵

Ricoeur does acknowledge, however, that the later Husserl came to see the inadequacies of his early idealism, particularly in The Crisis (written in the mid-1930s just before his death) where he began to sketch an ontology of the intersubjective life-world. But, as Ricoeur notes, if the final writings of Husserl 'point to this ontology, it is because his effort to reduce being failed and because, consequently, the ultimate result of phenomenology escaped the initial project'.⁶ It is really only in the wake of this escape that one can begin to speak of a phenomenological hermeneutics.

Philosophical Encounters

Ricoeur's critique of Husserlian idealism and his subsequent reformulation of phenomenology were influenced by a number of philosophical encounters. First, there was the lasting impact of his formative engagement with the 'concrete ontologies' of Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s and 1940s. It was in fact these non-phenomenological existentialists who initially impressed upon Ricoeur the radicality of the confrontation between freedom and finitude. Any philosophy of reflection, Ricoeur became convinced, would have to reckon with Marcel's analysis of 'incarnate existence' and Jaspers' notion of 'limit situations' (death, war, disease, crisis and so on). This seminal conviction resulted in the publication of Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers in 1947 and Karl Jaspers and the Philosophy of Existence (co-authored with Mikel Dufrenne) in the same year.

During the immediate postwar years, Ricoeur was working on his major critical comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Ricoeur's Philosophical Journey
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography of Works
• Index