Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013
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Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics. Writings and Lectures, Volume 2. Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA, Polity Press, 2013. 185pp. ISBN 9780745661223. Hardback £55.00 Paperback £16.99
Reviewed by
City College, Norwich
It is a singular pleasure to have been asked to review the present volume. Ricoeur is the great teacher, and the great raconteur of philosophy. To read Ricoeur lets us in for a uniquely rich and rewarding experience, and we feel distinctly at home when we read him. His work is not merely the reconciliation of opposites and the identification of antinomies, but an indispensable explanation of culture itself. Whether or not we always agree with Ricoeur, there is always something of great value to be learned from encountering him – something that we did not know before. Moreover, Ricoeur is easy to return to – we are clearly informed on every point and able to store our experiences for further reference. Thus any new publication of part of Ricoeur’s philosophical legacy is greatly to be welcomed.
The present volume is David Pellauer’s English translation of Daniel Frey and Nicola Sticker’s selection of Ricoeur’s texts entitled Écrits et conférences 2. Herméneutique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010). Pellauer has contributed substantially over many years to the dissemination of Ricoeur’s work in English and his translation is careful, elegant and readable. A technical glossary would have been useful to readers new to Ricoeur, as Pellauer does not translate the French editors’ notes, which, as well as referring to French texts less accessible to the English-speaking reader, also contain explanations of technical terms. The volume occurs in five parts, three of which (1, 3, and 4) are substantial: Part 1, ‘The Problem of Hermeneutics’; Part 2, ‘Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics’; Part 3, ‘Hermeneutical Logic’; Part 4, ‘Hermeneutics of the Idea of Revelation’; Part 5, ‘Salvation Myths and Contemporary Reason’. To me the odd one out in the selection is Part 2, which is more specially focused on issues pertaining to the text, as opposed to the other essays and lectures, which divide roughly into a) ‘theological’ hermeneutics, and b) more general problems of hermeneutics.
In the first lecture of Part 1, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, Ricoeur is preoccupied with ‘the dialectic of explanation and understanding’ (la dialectique comprendre/expliquer). He defines interpretation as ‘the alternating of the phases of understanding and those of explanation along a unique “hermeneutical arc”.’ (p. 9). Explanation and understanding are not separated in Ricoeur’s work of hermeneutics, and a key way in which Ricoeur’s work might be extended by future scholars could be a detailed ‘spell[ing] out…[of] the particular style of alternation between explanation and understanding’ (ibid.), a quite mysterious-sounding task. While Ricoeur stresses that ‘the richer models of interpretation are the ones interweaving systematic and teleological segments within a complex phenomenon of intentional intervention in the course of the world’ (p. 10), it may not be clear if this precise level of interpretation is always necessary. What is important is the pre-givenness of understanding in relation to the potential of explanation to illuminate understanding analytically. The second lecture in Part 1 is a somewhat condensed guide to Ricoeur’s well-developed idea that a ‘world’ (or ‘reference’) is opened up ‘in front of’ the text. It seems to add little to Ricoeur’s other writings on the topic and here I merely note the objection that Ricoeur’s treatment of the ‘aporetics of time’ (pp. 17-18) does not say as much about the ‘world-of-the-text’ as Ricoeur apparently believes it can. In the third lecture Ricoeur is concerned with the ‘semantics of action’. This is an instructive (and quite analytical) rehearsal of the propositional framework of several key concepts, particularly ‘motivation’ and ‘ascription’. Ricoeur gives the following acute definition: ‘The intimate, logical connection characteristic of motivation is exclusive of the extrinsic, contingent connection of causality. The argument claims to be logical, not psychological, in the sense that it is the logical force of the motivational connection that excludes our classifying motives as causes. Motives are better interpreted as “reasons for”.’ (p. 22). Here, however, I think Ricoeur could have noticed more the immanence of the word ‘logical’, as it seems to me that he overlooks its metalinguistic potential. Where in the fourth lecture he teases out the ethical implications of action theory, Ricoeur is on pretty unassailable ground, and in the volume at hand this neatly prepares for the exceptionally cohesive and learned treatments in the theological sphere (of hermeneutics) in Parts 4 and 5. Taken as a whole, these four lectures deserve their given title, since they enumerate particularly well the problematic of hermeneutics according to Ricoeur.
In Part 2 Ricoeur makes much of the independence of the text from authorial intention, original setting and original readership. This chimes with his ‘world-of-the-text’. Of interest in this connection is his perhaps radical idea that ‘the apprehension of projected worlds’, as part of Ricoeur’s new hermeneutical circle, also gives rise to ‘the advance of self-understanding in the presence of these new worlds’ (p. 53). Ricoeur does not later in this essay come back to this idea of ‘self-understanding’ in this sense, so it remains a new and intriguing feature. Perhaps the relation refers to the reciprocal functions of text and metaphor as understanding each other, which he expounds in this essay. In his conclusion, Ricoeur asks why we should ‘draw new meanings from our language if we have nothing new to say, no new world to project’ (p. 64). But doesn’t a linkage between the drawing of new meanings in metaphor and the drawing out of a new world by a text exclude the possibility of metaphors being uniquely independent? Of a metaphor being a text in itself? Can a metaphor not be, as Ricoeur seems earlier to have taken into account, a surface texture, a meaning that emerges only to disappear, without establishing lasting reference? (See, for example, pp. 47-48.)
The centrepiece among the works selected for this book is, for me, Part 3. This is a sustained critical exploration of hermeneutics’ process of self-reflection in the wake of Heidegger and Gadamer. In general, this many-faceted essay is provocative where Ricoeur engages in (original) speculation, something, in his thinking, that he can only do by taking into account his philosophical peers and predecessors in a discourse comprising history of philosophy. So, as seen in his earlier work Histoire et vérité, Ricoeur believes that in explaining philosophy he is making it, but how is this? The answer appears to be found in his explanations themselves. The liaison between the apophantic and hermeneutic searches for truth, for example, which Ricoeur explains so well, is in turn descriptive – even constitutive - of his own philosophical method. For Ricoeur, ‘[w]hat is at stake…is the relation of philosophy to its own history’ (p. 107). Where Ricoeur is at his most interesting philosophically is in moments where he reformulates the hermeneutical task in the light of opposing currents, as in the ‘confrontation’ with analytical philosophy. Here, the hermeneutical task is ‘to preserve the difference between what is ready-to-hand and that in view of which things are ready-to-hand in general’ (p. 104). To do this, hermeneutics ‘appeals to a dimension of language that does not fall under propositional analysis and is instead the site where the prior assumption about the meaning of what is ready-to-hand and what not occurs. Projecting this dimension of language on the grammatical and logical planes does not exhaust its intention or its efficacity. This is why a discussion about the predicative use of the word “being” in no way exhausts the pre-propositional “meaning” of hermeneutic statements, following the already referred to distinction between an apophantic and hermeneutical logic’ (p. 105). These are central comments that deserve evaluation and reply by analytical philosophers, and provoke thought from those of all philosophical persuasions. They may even stray into the area of ‘readerly’ critique of philosophy, an interesting prospect in itself. Ultimately, ‘belonging to meaning precedes every logic of language. Which is why hermeneutics is finally a struggle against misunderstanding of what has already been understood’ (p. 103).
In Part 4 Ricoeur fittingly acknowledges the immensity of the concept of ‘revelation’. This essay brings into play several paradoxes for me. The main one is that, while Ricoeur is habitually accorded as the ‘diplomatic’ philosopher, he does not in this essay reflect on his own confessional outlook, which is Protestant (Ricoeur’s intellectual heritage stems from biblical and Hellenic pedigrees). It is therefore astonishing that Ricoeur engages in a confessional articulation of (for want of better words) the (hermeneutical) philosophy of religion, without explicitly charting (hermeneutically) the terms of that faith and (explicitly) contextualizing it in relation to various Christian traditions. In allowing this gap Ricoeur risks presenting his ideas dogmatically, something he is (through his emphasis on discussing the idea of revelation at the level of confession of faith, below the levels of dogma and orthodoxy) surely concerned to get away from. The question appears to be in some way answered for us in Part 5, where we see (p. 158) how Ricoeur places little emphasis on ‘tradition’, or fits it into a larger scheme. This could in some way account for his biblical stance being uniform and not declared within any particular tradition (Ricoeur does not in these two essays mention the Reformation, for example). Another apparent paradox in Part 4 is Ricoeur’s notion of ‘God’s trace in the event’ (p. 118). This appears to be privileged against what happens in the future. For Ricoeur, events themselves are not prophetic, they are historical unfoldings of divine originations. The ‘trace’ is like a hermeneutic (Heideggerian) pre-understanding. Is this also a reaction against epistemological thinking in that it (apparently) rejects teleology? There then appears to be no concept here of the predestinatory quality of revelation. It is ‘the structure of history’ (p. 119) that Ricoeur wants to protect. Perhaps most telling in this whole regard is his comment on p. 140 that ‘[r]evelation is a feature of the biblical world’: it is not a ‘purpose’. In Ricoeur’s discussion of wisdom literature there occurs a startling-sounding statement: ‘Wisdom intends every person in and through the Jew’ (p. 123). Perhaps this might be better modified to: ‘Wisdom attends every person’ (with no mention of a specific people). What also, to me, appears in this essay is an impersonal idea of God, the term ‘God’ itself being a ‘vanishing point’ (p. 132). And when Ricoeur speaks of ‘a truth capable of being spoken of in terms of manifestation rather than verification’ (ibid.), it seems to me that, in elevating ‘manifestation’ above ‘verification’, he misses out that verifying (and therefore the notion of truth) has a mystery about it that goes unacknowledged here (possibly due to a distrust of Cartesian metaphysics). One other point, among many, in this essay is that the section ‘The World of the Text and the New Being’ (pp. 134-140) is important to the scholar of hermeneutics as a general source for Ricoeur’s concept of the ‘world-of-the-text’.
Part 5 presents a frequent concern of Ricoeur’s: myth. As I have noticed in respect of the previous essay, Ricoeur places less emphasis on teleology and the future, and the symmetry he sees in the myths of origins and ends (p. 159) indicates his lack of preoccupation with futurity. Ricoeur does succeed in identifying and elucidating one of the central models for Christianity, that which conceives it as a ‘history centred on victims’ (p. 166). Still here, however, there appears to be a retreat from a personal God – there is no Trinitarian imagery, for example, and Christ figures as an event around which there occurs a largely negative symbology. In conclusion, Ricoeur points to a collaborative hope, which collaborates with the approaching Kingdom by means of a theology of victimization and defeat, a hope we do not fully understand. This not yet fully reasoned embrace of a hope that has the promise of settling our future perhaps sets the tone for Ricoeur’s hermeneutical project in general as evidenced by this commendable selection of essays. His path away from ‘misunderstanding what has already been understood’ is a careful one and, through this important and panoramic volume, articulates our hope also for hermeneutics.