Robert Piercey
Paul Ricoeur is clearly one of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet to call him a hermeneutical philosopher and leave it at that would give an incomplete picture of his work. Ricoeur never allied himself exclusively with any one movement, and he never wrote a hermeneutical magnum opus along the lines of Being and Time or Truth and Method. He spent his career working piecemeal on the problems that interested him, and while some of these problems are recognizably hermeneutical, some are not. But while hermeneutics is only a part of Ricoeur’s work, it is central to his most influential books. These books develop a subtle and original conception of hermeneutics, one that shares a starting point with Gadamer’s, but differs from it in several ways. It aspires to be more critical than Gadamer’s hermeneutics, as well as more synthetic, and more focused on the ethical dimension of interpretation. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is also distinguished by its far-reaching reappropriation of Kant’s doctrine of the productive imagination. It is a Kantianism for the linguistic turn.
Ricoeur came to hermeneutics relatively late. His first and most decisive influences were not hermeneutical thinkers, but figures from other traditions: Emmanuel Mounier, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, and Gabriel Marcel. His earliest writings reflect on politics and history from a Christian perspective. Even these earliest writings, however, contain something that characterizes all of Ricoeur’s work: a focus on what he calls the capable human being [l’homme capable]. This phrase denotes the human capacity to act and suffer. Ricoeur believed that most philosophers valorize the cognitive side of human beings at the expense of the practical, affective side, and throughout his entire career, he tried to correct this imbalance. His first systematic attempt to do so was his doctoral dissertation, Freedom and Nature. Originally envisioned as the first volume of a three-volume philosophy of the will, Freedom and Nature explores the interactions between our capacity to act freely and our location in a determined natural world. The book’s method is phenomenological: it describes our experiences of the voluntary and the involuntary, with an eye to identifying their essential structures. To that end, Ricoeur employs Husserl’s strategy of phenomenological reduction. He “brackets” the experiences in question, describing their meanings but putting aside all questions about their actual existence.
As Ricoeur continued his work in the philosophy of the will, he came to think that a less descriptive, more interpretive approach was necessary. Fallible Man, the sequel to Freedom and Nature, proposed to “remove the parentheses” (Ricoeur 1986b, xli) he had placed around experiences of willing. Rather than describing the essential structures common to all acts of willing, it turned to the possibility of willing wrongly. Such fallibility constitutes “a foreign body in the eidetics of man” and thus is “not accessible to any description, even an empirical one” (Ricoeur 1986b, xlii). Fallible Man was followed by The Symbolism of Evil, which turns from the possibility of evil to its actuality: fault and humanity’s attempts to come to terms with it. Ricoeur argues that the experience of fault is “never immediate” (Ricoeur 1967, 10), but takes place in language, particularly in myths of fall, sin, defilement, and so on. These myths are typically opaque and in need of interpretation. A philosophy of the will turns out to require a hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical shift continued in his other major work of the 1960s, Freud and Philosophy. Ricoeur was initially drawn to Freud because the psychoanalyst’s reflections on guilt dovetailed with his own interest in fallibility and fault. But he came to associate Freud with a more subtle sort of interpretation than the one he had employed in The Symbolism of Evil. Like Marx and Nietzsche, Freud teaches us to interpret signs whose meanings are radically different from their appearance. He teaches that “understanding is hermeneutics: to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning, but to decipher its expressions” (Ricoeur 1970, 33).
After Freud and Philosophy, the place of hermeneutics in Ricoeur’s thought changed. Up to that point, he had used hermeneutics, treating notions such as symbol and myth as tools for clarifying the nature of volition, or the experience of evil, or the status of the unconscious. Afterward, he became more and more a theoretician of hermeneutics: someone interested in interpretation and understanding for their own sakes. His major works of the 1970s and 1980s try to clarify the core concepts of hermeneutics, and to explore their implications for larger philosophical questions. In this stage of Ricoeur’s career, hermeneutics is not just a means to an end but, increasingly, the subject matter.
How, then, does Ricoeur understand hermeneutics? Prosaically, he defines it as “the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts” (Ricoeur 1991, 53). But this definition is less straightforward than it seems, since Ricoeur’s understandings of its key terms—interpretation, understanding, and text—are all subtle. He does not, for example, think that all texts are linguistic entities. Actions are texts (Ricoeur 1991, 150–156); so, in a sense, are selves (Ricoeur 1992, 140–168). Ricoeur even suggests that the natural phenomena studied by empirical science can be seen as texts (Ricoeur 1977, 243). So Ricoeur’s explicit pronouncements on hermeneutics take us only so far. A better way to clarify his conception of hermeneutics is to contrast it with his view of phenomenology. Ricoeur sees hermeneutics—at least its twentieth-century incarnation—as emerging from phenomenology. Phenomenology puts meaning at the center of philosophy, and is based on the conviction that “every question concerning any sort of ‘being’ [étant] is a question about the meaning of that ‘being’” (Ricoeur 1991, 38). Hermeneutics continues this shift, but with a special focus on “concealed meaning” (Ricoeur 1991, 38)—meanings that resist capture by straightforward phenomenological description. This concern with concealed meaning leads to five concrete differences between phenomenology and hermeneutics. First, whereas phenomenology is governed by an “ideal of scientificity” (Ricoeur 1991, 26), hermeneutics is suspicious of this ideal, and insists that “any enterprise of justification and foundation … is always preceded by a relation that supports it”—a relation that Ricoeur calls “finitude” (Ricoeur 1991, 29). Second, whereas phenomenology demands a “return to intuition,” hermeneutics counters that “all understanding [is] mediated by an interpretation” (Ricoeur 1991, 31). Third, while phenomenology treats subjectivity as a reliable starting point, hermeneutics views the cogito as “susceptible to the radical critique that phenomenology otherwise applies to all appearances” (Ricoeur 1991, 33). Fourth, hermeneutics insists that to interpret a text is not to discover “the subjective intention of its author” (Ricoeur 1991, 35), or any other conscious act. It is to look ahead to something the text opens up—something that Ricoeur calls the world of the text. Phenomenology is retrospective, but hermeneutics is prospective. Finally, hermeneutics maintains that interpretation is not complete until it has transformed the interpreter in the process that Gadamer calls appropriation [Zueignung]. The interpreting subject does not ground the meaning of the text, but rather responds to its proposals by acting in one way rather than another.
As this list makes clear, Ricoeur’s conception of hermeneutics is exceedingly general. It is therefore somewhat surprising that his contributions to it tend to be narrowly focused. They are chiefly concerned with the poetic dimension of human experience: our ability to use figurative language to bring new meanings into existence, to say things that have never been said before. We do not simply discover these meanings; they do not exist as such before figurative language brings them to light. But neither do we create them in the sense of inventing things that have no foundation in extra-linguistic reality. The relation between this not-quite-finding and not-quite-creating is captured in one of Ricoeur’s most famous maxims: “The symbol gives rise to thought” (Ricoeur 1967, 348). A symbol, or any other instance of figurative language, “gives: I do not posit the meaning, the symbol gives it” (Ricoeur 1974, 288). On the other hand, what the symbol gives is precisely “something for thought, something to think about” (Ricoeur 1974, 288). Figurative language purports to say something that was true before being said, but that genuinely comes to be only once it has spurred us to thought. Ricoeur never found a perfect way to characterize this process. His favorite strategy was to compare figurative language to the Kantian productive imagination. For Kant, the productive imagination is a nonempirical ability that makes objects of cognition possible by schematizing them: providing rules that direct us to interpret them in a certain way. Ricoeur attributes a similar schematizing power to language. He claims that this power operates on three distinct levels: that of the word, the sentence, and the complete text. Ricoeur explored each of these in turn and, as a result, his contributions to hermeneutics may be divided into three phases.
The first phase is concerned with the hermeneutics of symbols: individual words that disclose new meanings. We sometimes use extralinguistic things as symbols, but, according to Ricoeur, “it is still in the universe of discourse that these realities take on a symbolic dimension” (Ricoeur 1967, 14). Symbols are signs that stand for something else. However, not every sign is a symbol. Symbols signify in a complex way what Ricoeur calls “double intentionality” (Ricoeur 1967, 15). Words such as “stain” or “impure” stand for literal defilement, but “upon this first intentionality there is erected a second intentionality: a certain situation of man in the sacred” (Ricoeur 1967, 15), namely, spiritual or moral defilement. This second intentionality is not simply imposed on the first, but is anticipated or prefigured by it. Because of this double intentionality, symbols are fundamentally “opaque” (Ricoeur 1974, 290). They always have multiple meanings, and they always intend these meanings in multiple ways. “I cannot,” Ricoeur argues, “objectivize the analogical relation that binds the second meaning to the first” (Ricoeur 1974, 290). Symbols are also ubiquitous. We have “from the start a symbolic structure to our existence” (Ricoeur 1986a, 144). Human experience is symbolically mediated all the way down.
The second phase concerns the hermeneutics of metaphor. This phase, best represented by The Rule of Metaphor, involves a shift from individual words to complete sentences. The sentences that interest Ricoeur are those that allow new meanings to emerge through the “impertinent predication” (Ricoeur 1977, 4) that we call metaphor. When I say that time is a beggar or nature a temple with living pillars, I link two seemingly disparate things. By linking them, I “grasp the relatedness of terms that are far apart” (Ricoeur 1977, 199)—a relatedness that is real but that was invisible before my sentence brought it to light. The metaphor leads me to see one thing as something else. Ricoeur uses Kantian language to describe this process, calling metaphor a “schematism [that] turns imagination into the place where the figurative meaning emerges in the interplay of identity and difference” (Ricoeur 1977, 109). He also suggests that it presupposes an ontology, because the seeing-as brought about by metaphor is intelligible only if it is presumed to be grounded in a being-as. Language, therefore, “can be thought, although not known, as the being-said of reality” (Ricoeur 1977, 304).
The third phase consists of a hermeneutics of narrative. It studies the novelty that emerges at the level of entire texts: groups of sentences that are brought together to represent series of actions. Narrative was Ricoeur’s main concern in the 1980s, and he explores it in the three volumes of Time and Narrative. The book presents narrative as a way of humanizing time—that is, a way of responding to the aporias that arise when we try to understand what time is. Narratives make time intelligible by representing the actions that unfold in time, thereby giving them the new significance that comes from being episodes in a larger story. Ricoeur argues that this process unfolds on three levels, which he calls mimesis1, mimesis2, and mimesis3. Mimesis1, or prefiguration, refers to the implicit structure all actions have before being brought to language. Mimesis2, or configuration, denotes the construction of explicit plots. Mimesis3, or refiguration, is what Gadamer calls application—the process of appropriating a story by bringing it to bear on one’s existential situation. Time and Narrative advances a sophisticated and wide-ranging theory of narrative, intervening in debates in literary theory and the philosophy of history, as well as making highly original claims about the legacies of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger. Throughout its three volumes, Ricoeur emphasizes the similarities between the construction of narratives and the schematizing power of the productive imagination. He claims that “we ought not to hesitate in comparing the production of the configurational act to the work of the productive imagination,” since narrative “engenders a mixed intelligibility between what has been called the point, theme, or thought of a story, and the intuitive presentation of circumstances, characters, episodes, and changes of fortune that make up the denouement. In this way, we may speak of a schematism of the narrative function” (Ricoeur 1984, 68).
The best way to identify Ricoeur’s contribution to hermeneutics is to compare him to Gadamer. Like Gadamer, Ricoeur develops a post-phenomenological hermeneutics that owes a particular debt to Heidegger. It takes for granted the importance of finitude, tradition, and historicity, and, if Ricoeur sometimes laments the “ontological” (Ricoeur 1991, 54) turn in hermeneutics since Heidegger, he nevertheless insists that the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger is “the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics” (Ricoeur 1991, 26). On several topics, Ricoeur simply endorses Gadamer’s view: for example, he claims that Gadamer’s discussions of the fusion of horizons and of historically effective consciousness [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstein] say the last word about their subjects. But there are three important differences between Gadamer and Ricoeur. First, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics aspires to be more self-consciously critical than Gadamer’s. Ricoeur worries that Gadamer overstates the importance of belonging and continuity, and is thereby prevented “from really recognizing the critical instance” (Ricoeur 1991, 297): the ways in which receiving a cultural heritage can involve (or require) a break with it. Ricoeur drew this lesson from Gadamer’s debate with Habermas. While his own outlook was much closer to Gadamer than to Habermas, he believed that Gadamer should have done more to highlight the critical resources of hermeneutics. He thought the best way to do so was to emphasize the role of distanciation (Verfremdung) in interpretation. Gadamer, he claims, tends to see critical distance as an “ontological fall from grace”; Ricoeur sees it as a “positive component of being for the text” (Ricoeur 1991, 298). Ricoeur’s concern with critique is sometimes exaggerated—perhaps because his term “hermeneutics of suspicion” has been appropriated by many who know nothing else of his work. But as Alison Scott-Baumann has shown, Ricoeur never simply endorsed a hermeneutics of suspicion, and he spoke of it far less often than is sometimes assumed (Scott-Baumann 2009, 75). His goal was not to glorify critique, but to balance distanciation with belonging.
This leads to the second difference. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics strives to be more synthetic and more conciliatory than Gadamer’s. Ricoeur does not ignore the dualities in our thinking, but whenever possible, he tries to overcome them by thinking their poles together. Gadamer, he claimed, sometimes implies that relations of simple opposition hold between belonging and distanciation, explanation and understanding, truth and method. Ricoeur understood all these binaries, and many more, as dialectically interrelated. Explaining something need not be opposed to understanding it; to explain more is to understand better, and vice versa. To be sure, Ricoeur is not Hegel. His dialectics contain no Aufhebungen, and they are typically asymmetrical, in that they privilege one pole of an opposition over the other (Blundell 2010, 141). This is one of the reasons Ricoeur called himself a “post-Hegelian Kantian” (Ricoeur 1974, 412). But while Ricoeur does not think we can overcome every opposition, he thinks we must synthesize whenever we can.
Third, while Ricoeur appropriates Gadamer’s notion of application, he interprets it in specifically ethical terms. He agrees with Gadamer that I have not understood a text until I have applied it to my own situation. But he claims that applying it to my situation is primarily a practical matter, not a cognitive one. Literature, according to Ricoeur, is an “ethical laboratory” (Ricoeur 1984, 59). A text proposes various experiments in living, and to understand the text is to respond to these experiments by acting in one way rather than another. Interpretation is not a narrowly intellectual affair, but a matter for l’homme capable—the capable human being.