Paul Ricoeur

Steven H. Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135855871
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This introductory study surveys the entire range of Ricoeur's work, placing it within the context of post-structuralism. Includes a discussion of Time and Narrative and shows how Ricoeur's work links European and American traditions.

1

Introduction

Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language to account for the multiple functions of the human act of signifying and for their interrelationships…. We have at our disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis, and, perhaps for the first time, we are able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unification of human discourse. The very progress of the aforementioned disciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismemberment of that discourse. Today the unity of human language poses a problem.

(FP: 3–4)

With characteristic modesty, Ricoeur immediately disclaims the title of ‘philosopher of integral language’ who might be able to achieve such a ‘comprehensive philosophy’. And yet his work possesses an acute and immediate relevance throughout the human sciences: concerning their epistemological value, on the problem of the subject, in the philosophy of language, and in all spheres of interpretation theory. Ricoeur is a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker, with distinguished and original contributions in a host of different areas – in addition to those listed above, hermeneutics, historiography, literary criticism, phenomenology, political theory, semiotics, structuralism, theology. And without ever giving the sense of some glutinous composite, always addressing himself attentively to the question in hand with a courteous rigour. This points to a central paradox. Ricoeur, the explorer of the volitional, of human fallibility, of the semantics of desire, never fails to conduct his investigations with a lucid conciseness and unfaltering commitment to ‘the tradition of rationality that has animated philosophy since the Greeks’ (CI: 6). Yet the reason for which he speaks is relative and constrained. Its authority is validated not through edict and proclamation but through disavowal and self-curtailment. There is ‘ascèse’ at the heart of his intellectual enterprise, a sustained exercise of humility.

The proclaimed rationalism and the overt theological commitment in Ricoeur’s thought would appear to distance him from the constellation of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault. So un-Parisian, one might say: so unchic, sober and collaborative, propelled by the internal momentum of his own preoccupations, an inconspicuous and almost humdrum figure. And yet the question may fairly be asked: on what major intellectual issues of the past forty years has Ricoeur not written with distinction?

Some biographical detail may here be helpful. Born in Valence in 1913, Ricoeur was educated in the 1930s in a general climate of existential and phenomenological thought. Captured early in the Second World War, he was allowed access to German philosophy; and over the next five years acquired a detailed familiarity with the works of Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers. The results of this immersion appeared in his work during the immediate post-war years: Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence, co-written with Mikel Dufrenne, was published in 1947; Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: philosophie du mystère etphilosophie duparadoxe in the following year; and in 1950, his translation of and authoritative commentary on Husserl’s Ideen (the first volume in Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Bibliothèque de philosophie) established him as a leading expert on phenomenology. Subsequent essays providing a scrupulous and comprehensive commentary of the German philosopher’s work have been collected together in Husserl (1967).

In 1948, he was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at Strasbourg: the sustained re-reading of the philosophical tradition that this entailed detached him from existential phenomenology. He now sought to develop a reflective philosophy concerned with establishing the ultimate grounds of authentic subjectivity; and in this to define human freedom in terms of a sustained negotiation with necessity rather than through the Sartrian moment of transcendent choice. This emphasis is apparent in Freedom and Nature (1950), an application of Husserl’s strict analytic method to the affective and volitional spheres of human life. Although dealing with themes of the body, situatedness, decision, the book is devoted to a recognition of the constraints within which consciousness operates, and the necessity of a detour through the data of the empirical sciences in an arduous and indirect progress towards self-understanding. A collection of essays, History and Truth, appeared in 1955, distinguished by an attempt to situate an ethic of social intervention, ‘praise of the word which reflects efficaciously and acts thoughtfully’ (HT: 5), within an eschatological fiction of the ‘Last Day’. His next major work, the two-volume Finitude and Guilt, appeared in 1960. The first volume, Fallible Man, approaches the issue of human fallibility through the resources of transcendental reflection; the second, The Symbolism of Evil, turns to the primary symbols of guilt as an alternative source of insight, and thus represents a crucial point of transition from a phenomenology of the will to a broader consideration of problems of language and interpretation.

Ricoeur’s work quickly took up the challenge presented by the newly-ascendent disciplines of the 1960s: structuralism and psychoanalysis, both in their way reactions against the subject-centred discourse of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. This admirably independent engagement produced such seminal essays as ‘Structure, word, event’, and what is still probably his best known book, Freud and Philosophy (1965). The hermeneutic theory enunciated in this text (more prominent in the French title, De l’interprétation) is more extensively developed in the 1969 collection of essays, The Conflict of Interpretations. Here it is argued, in an impressive variety of contexts, that the process of understanding involves a double movement of the recovery of meaning and of an exercise in demystification: opposing perspectives which complement each other in an open-ended and productive contest. Subsequently, there is a continued interest in the dynamics of metaphor and symbol (most notably in The Rule of Metaphor (1975)), which increasingly draws on Anglo-American linguistic analysis; but this is now situated within a broader engagement with the hermeneutic tradition, and more general problems of written language, text. The best brief summation comes in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976). The positions here expounded are, however, substantially reworked in subsequent essays, in particular their implications in the sphere of practical reason and what Ricoeur calls the social imaginary of ideology and utopia. His most recent work, the three-volume Time and Narrative, deals with the relation of narrative, both fictional and historio-graphic, to the fundamental temporality of human existence.

Ricoeur is still comparatively little known in Britain. Eagleton’s Literary Theory, for example, makes no direct reference to his work: Freud and Philosophy is listed, none too precisely, in the notes amongst ‘other works in the tradition of hermeneutical phenomenology’ (1983: 220), cited in the bibliography under psychoanalysis, and omitted from the index altogether. In the US, however, where he has held a part-time professorship at Chicago since 1973, his reputation as a theologian has been high since the early 1960s, and over the past ten years his influence has been rapidly spreading in literary thought. One indication of this can be seen in his omission from Frank Lentricchia’s influential survey, After the New Criticism (1980); and his inclusion, five years later, as an undisputed contemporary classic, in Hazard Adams’ Philosophy and the Literary Symbolic (1985).

I think Ricoeur should have greater currency, be more widely discussed and debated with. Not out of some absolute standard of fair play, giving merit its due, but because sustained consideration of his work clarifies and compels redefinition of the current state of literary theory. Ricoeur never picks a fight. One of the most impressive traits of his work is his respectful, almost grateful, assimilation of criticism: there is nothing in his work remotely comparable to Derrida’s altercation with Searle. At times we may lament the absence of ‘blistering refutations’ (RM: 6), but these would run counter to the values that Ricoeur’s whole intellectual enterprise seeks to promote: humility, mutual respect, the truth of charity. But the force of his quiet implicit retorts to his more vociferous contemporaries should not be underestimated. In the midst of their rhetorical bravura, Ricoeur’s calm and patient diligence appears almost stolid by comparison. He speaks as the professional, circumscribed, making no attempt to conceal or subvert his own situatedness, an emphasis present from the early existential writings. But there are currently enough prophets among us to make us appreciate this painstaking, vocationally unembarrassed, proponent of ‘thinking, that is to say elaborating concepts that comprehend, and make one comprehend, concepts woven together, if not in a closed system, at least in a systematic order’ (CI: 296). This might seem to imply closure, fixed vantages, dovetailed arguments yet it thrives on impasse and hiatus: the necessary detour, the acknowledged aporia, the secondariness of judgement to life, force, act. Ricoeur does not simply announce a commitment to openness. His is a rationality genuinely inclusive, kinetic, in constant internal evolution: the Socratic inheritence in its most positive form. Intellectual positions are never either finally formulated or completely abandoned: they are there to be reoccupied, reargued. (For example, recent essays on psychoanalysis such as ‘The question of proof in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings’ (HHS: 247–73; see also TN 1: 60–2) move away from his previous concern with the status of the oneiric symbol, and now treat the metapsychology as a subordinate phase of explanation, and stress the importance of the production of a successful personal narrative within the analytic situation.) And in this continuous self-criticism Ricoeur’s thought is more genuinely exploratory than many apparently more radical interventions.

Foucault implicitly denies the power of reference to discourse. Language is a self-sustaining system in which word bears no necessary relation to thing: hence, in The Order of Things, no kind of motivation is offered for the diachronic shifts between alternate states of the system or epistemes. His texts convey a pervasive illusion of coherence serenely oblivious to any external demand for verification. Lacan moves from Freud’s insight that the unconscious can only be known through language to the premise that the unconscious is ‘structured like’ a language. This permits the technical terms of infra-linguistic analysis to be elevated to governing laws of the human psyche: most notably in the equation of condensation to metaphor and displacement to metonymy. The justification of his own notoriously hermetic exegesis of Freud would appear to be that its fissures and striations allow these relations to emerge in a kind of surface tension of signifying chains (see, for example, Bowie, 1987: 105). (The argument is, of course, self-defeating. If Lacan’s style intentionally mimics the disruption of the unconscious, then it in fact represses its actual presence through a controlled simulacrum.) For Derrida, language is both vertiginous and yet ultimately closed. There are no boundaries to language because this would imply the violence of the inside/outside demarcation. But language cannot transcend itself, make new meaning: a circumscription that remains based on the premise of the closed synchronic system. Therefore the self, because it inheres in language, must endure a destiny of interminable deferral, always subject to the internal substitutions of morpheme, phoneme, and lexeme. In all three cases, what appears to be a subversive response remains conditioned by and to a large degree dependent on a series of restrictive and unstated premises derived from structuralism.

Ricoeur is post-structuralist in the sense of having heeded, absorbed, and utilised. He decisively states the major objections to a Saussurian linguistics: first, its idealist tendencies – a Kantianism without a transcendental subject; secondly, the reduction of history to the motiveless transitions between states of the system; thirdly, its exclusion of the referential and purposive aspects of language, the saying of something about something; and finally its absolutising of language without acknowledging its own methodological complicity in constructing it as an object. But there is also a generous appreciation of its achievements and an explicit incorporation of its techniques. In Ricoeur’s work in the 1970s, it is retained as a powerful component of the legitimate moment of formal explanation in the hermeneutic arc. And in so doing, it takes us beyond a sterile antimony between positivist reduction and rampant indeterminacy, and offers us new options on the far side of this debate.

For better or worse, the Anglo-American tradition has never been seduced by the structuralist combination of quasi-scientific procedure with a Platonising celebration of form within form. There has been an assimilation of the subsequent sceptical reaction without its ever having been suffered as an oppressive orthodoxy. And this cultural cross-pollination has acquired a self-perpetuating momentum of its own: the acclaimed Derridean free-play, jeu, chance, gamble, is transformed in trans-Atlantic crossing into an anarchic libertarianism, a comfortable disenfranchisement from value (though one should be wary of any too credulous acceptance of the myth of the fall of deconstruction into a host of parasitic imitators). Here it is worth quoting Jonathan Culler, caught off guard:

The more we know of critical theory the more interest we are likely to take in accurate discriminations, and the more we will smile with derision at those who, in reducing criticism to a simple moral scenario, abandon all pretence at discernment. The restaurateur who tells us he has two kinds of wine, red and white, does not impress us as a connoisseur.

(Culler, 1983: 19)

Is it ‘reducing’ criticism to see it as necessarily implying some form of cultural praxis, or is all morality inherently ‘simple’, some crassly staged ‘scenario’? Does this supposed emancipation entitle us to ‘smile with derision’ at the non-initiate? There is a symptomatic progression from the ‘interest’ in ‘accurate discrimination’ to a ‘discernment’ opposed to any kind of ethical or political commitment, which in turn shades into the sanctimonious detachment of the ‘connoisseur’: the critic as ‘restaurateur’, a vendor of commodities whose raison-d’être is now solely to ‘impress us’.

Such outright aestheticism would, I suppose, be harmless, if it were not allied to the powerful post-structuralist critique of the constraint and repression enforced by discipline boundaries. I would not wish to undervalue the achievement of deconstruction in validating the application of sophisticated rhetorical exegesis to texts previously consigned to other domains, and conversely exposing literary works to greatly increased conceptual scrutiny. To the extent that it has been able ‘to restore the complexities of reading to the dignity of a philosophical question’ (de Man, 1983: 110), it makes it impossible to speak of the merely literary, and for that we must be duly grateful. But does this suddenly render more traditional demarcations completely obsolete? Should critical theory be celebrated as a liberating mélange, exalted for its very absence of grounding?

I would stress the disproportionate influence in Derrida’s work of what Ricoeur calls ‘vengefulness’ (RM: 295). A theory of intertextual dependence that demands intimate cohabitation with past writings combines with ostentatious gestures of severance, a stylistic scorched-earth policy. If he cannot be the subject of his own discourse, he’ll still have the trickiest text in town: a baroque, apocalyptic prose seasoned with a mincing self-righteousness. Yet when reinserted into the context of critical philosophy, Derrida represents not rupture and abolition but vigorous renewal. Onto-theology, in the more restricted sense of rationalist theodicy, was refuted by Kant (1933; 2:3:7 A632:525); Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals delighted in the exposure of faked and duplicitous origins; Husserl’s Logical Investigations, far from positing a transparent self-presence, establish a complex dialectic between intuitive fulfilment and signification; and ‘The task of Destroying the history of Ontology’ is announced at the very beginning of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962: II, 6). It requires an ingenuous literalism to regard his proclamation of the death of philosophy as anything other than a profoundly orthodox generic trait. Here a particularly salutary comparison can be made with Ricoeur, ever respectful of the autonomy of different fields of thought, their modes of internal cohesion, their specifically appropriate expertise and methods of validation. This is genuinely cross-disciplinary thought, full of startling leaps, juxtapositions, rapprochements, but always proceeding with conciliation and respect. His work testifies to the continued possibility of constructive and relevant dialogue.

So if Derrida tends to merge back into the pack, distinguished only by his absence of generosity towards a past history of error, what of de Man? Certainly within the Anglo-American tradition, his work seems more targeted and hence more formidable. After all, it’s easy enough to feel profoundly unconcerned by the fate of metaphysics. But if you are in any way attached to the literary text as embodying a form of knowledge unavailable to positivist description, then it is impossible not to be shaken by de Man’s sinuous analyses. So neat a reversal to preserve the cognitive status of the text: its failure represents the higher honesty, the inevitability of disappointment. What is covert and undeclared in de Man is the absolute standard by which success is to be gauged. Language fails to give access to being: we listen but nothing is heard. And so the ontologist manqué must seek his consolation in the ruthless exposure of illusion: a negative transcendence in depriving the self of even a factitious stability. There seems no compromise possible between succumbing to this elegiac charisma or repudiating it wholesale as a trahison des clercs which can only culminate in a fatalistic quiescence.

Ricoeur offers an equally rigorous interrogation of any naive pretension to unmediated truth in language, and would, I think, be greatly sympathetic to de Man’s imperative of self-understanding. He offers a philosophy of reflection applicable to many fields, and yet may legitimately be deemed an exponent of the absent centre: his thought is immediately obliged to move away from the realm of ontology, subsist and define itself on some more verifiable terrain. Ricoeur introduces an element of indefinite postponement into a broadly Hegelian teleology. As in Fallible Man, happiness is defined as always about-to-be, final resolution is always to be worked towards. For Derrida, this would be the site of différance, the ‘absurd play of errant signifiers’ (HHS: 217); for de Man, a bleak revelation of time as purely erosive, blank anonymous duration. And there is no easy consolation in Ricoeur (when will he write on the symbolism of bliss?). One is struck by the flimsiness of the putative moment of appropriation, of return. There is no arrival at certitude, merely an endless resumption of the search for a beginning. Ricoeur at this point reinstates the themes of existential decision and struggle towards self-consciousness. Thought is a ‘task’ that must acknowledge its own situation of fall, exile, and alienation, and direct itself towards ‘reconstruction’. But the prefix is misleading. The excavation through the ‘sedimented’ levels of the concept does not allow t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The existential heritage
• 3 Finitude and guilt
• 4 Freud and philosophy
• 5 The Hermeneutic turn
• 6 The rule of metaphor
• 7 Time and narrative
• Bibliography
• Index