Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

John Arthos

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350080881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

There has been a renaissance of interest in the work and thought of Paul Ricoeur, one of the great hermeneutic scholars of the twentieth century. It is time to assess the future landscape for hermeneutics as a scholarly field and an educational curriculum after the momentous impact of Paul Ricoeur, who extended and deepened its trans-disciplinary reach, and pushed its profile substantially beyond its German legacy. There exists a misunderstanding that his thought is simply an extension or revision of Heidegger and Gadamer; Hermeneutics After Ricoeur ably sets out the differences and tensions, establishing the originality of Ricoeur's thought and its application beyond hermeneutic studies, with a thematic focus on education, the humanities, and the liberal arts.

1

The Seven Differences

Substantial retrospective assessments of Paul Ricoeur’s work were published prior to the prodigious output of the final years of his life.¹ The worldwide upsurge of interest since 2000 has taken up the new work, which in turn has reoriented us to the older work, and the retrospective task has returned. My interest is the impact of Ricoeur’s paradigm-shaking intervention in hermeneutic theory, particularly as it was shaped by the milieu of French intellectual culture and Ricoeur’s own cultural and historical predispositions on the soil of postwar France. The venerable art of hermeneutics had grown mostly on German soil since the Reformation, bearing deeply the impress of Germany’s culture and history, so Ricoeur’s scrupulous appropriation of its grounding principles from within his own quite distinct heritage has had a profound effect on its character and sense of direction.

Like its great sister art rhetoric, hermeneutics will outlast any of its avatars, even those as great as Ricoeur and Gadamer, carrying its traditions into the future as an inexhaustible treasure house of knowledge and practice, and my own commitment as a scholar is to help nurture and protect that larger heritage. So at this retrospective moment I want to ask how Ricoeur has changed hermeneutics, what it should retain from him, explore on his advice, and leave behind. That is the burden of this work.

Robert Piercey has said that the “best way to identify Ricoeur’s contribution to hermeneutics is to compare him to Gadamer.”² Although other great figures contributed fundamentally to philosophical hermeneutics (Derrida, Habermas, Apel, Vattimo, etc.), by the end of the past century, the center of hermeneutic gravity had resolved into the circling orbit of these two titanic intellectual forces. Gadamer died in 2002 and Ricoeur in 2005, both thinking and writing into their last days, and their paradigmatic disputes fairly represent the issues that churn at the living core of this tradition.

In search of a rapprochement, the great hermeneutic biographer and scholar Jean Grondin gave a speech to the Ricoeur Society at Montreal in 2010 that was based on a paper of the same title, “From Gadamer to Ricoeur: Can One Speak of a Common Understanding of Hermeneutics?”³ A careful reading shows that Grondin gave a negative answer to this question. He believes that the two thinkers came to hermeneutics separately along very different paths, and that they described two distinctly different approaches. Of the seven major differences that he outlines, some may not reconcile. To me, this is a bracing judgment, coming as it does in the wake of some ameliorist assessments that paint a picture of basic accord. To be sure, there have been more categorical assessments of the French/German split in hermeneutics. The Ricoeur scholar Jean Greisch proclaimed “the profoundness of the difference that separates the two conceptions of hermeneutic of phenomenology which, despite their accord on the ultimate finality of a hermeneutic philosophy, never cease to diverge on the means by which it is attained.”⁴ But the more common view seems to be of a somewhat tense familial accord. Gary Madison’s synoptic overview of the two hermeneuts argued that the two thinkers offer “differences not so much in substance, perhaps, as in what they choose to accentuate.”⁵ I will argue that such a harmonious view is a confusion that would be deleterious to hermeneutics going forward, because it would let serious issues go unaddressed, and I am heartened that Grondin does not make that mistake. Despite the graceful and diplomatic tone of his essay, he builds some constructive footholds for developing and clarifying serious issues of difference that need our attention. I am going to continue along his path of discrimination by doing two things; first, I will aggregate Grondin’s seven points into what I think are the two axiological differences between Gadamer and Ricoeur, and then I will elaborate on these two differences to show the challenge they pose for hermeneutics going forward. The tenor of Grondin’s call for dialogue between Ricoeurian and Gadamerian scholars is implicitly a plea to start thinking about what a common hermeneutics might look like, and to what extent it is possible.

First difference. Grondin starts by locating a difference in the angle of projection of the two projects at their origin, a subtle difference that will have profound consequences as the projects widen out on their respective trajectories. He frames this initial difference in terms of fundamental questions: Because Ricoeur approaches hermeneutics as an ontological radicalization of methods of textual interpretation, he believes its question is, “How do we interpret?” Such a query looks for the mechanisms of discursive identity that arise out of historical distance from the immediate purposes and context the inscription creates. Gadamer seeks in hermeneutics an explanation for the essentially linguistic (sprachliche) condition of human beings in the world (“notre rapport au monde”), and so his question is, “What happens when we come to an understanding?”⁶ This tack places the focus of hermeneutics on the Gestalt of grounded communicative interaction as it plays out—the relation of the speakers and listeners to the issue, to each other, and to the world in a constantly adjusting network of reciprocal interrelations. Historical distance is in effect the medium of belonging. By putting the matter in this way, Gadamer jumps up a metaphorical level from the text-reader relationship to the discourse-world relationship. Although Ricoeur certainly follows out the ontological consequences of textual distance, he does not make this metaphorical leap.

Because of the consequences that will flow from these starting points, it is important to ask why the two thinkers set out with these different orientations. As a French philosopher more directly in the line of the reflective tradition, Ricoeur’s question is rooted in the methodological preoccupations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars who sought rigorous principles for interpreting the objects of human creation as distinct from the objects of natural science. Their respect for the modern scientific spirit did not blind them to the difference of the living word, and so they engaged in a long period of experimentation, one still underway, to mediate this tension. In his time, Heidegger had become impatient with such an effort of conciliation, and, following in Hegel’s steps, overturned the problem of objectivity by pulling the observer into the middle of the process of observation. There could be no stable, discrete object of observation separate from the observer who was being formed by the very work of observation.⁷ Heidegger made the hermeneutic object the relational comportment itself. Ricoeur was not satisfied with this immediate nexus between comportment and object as the fundamental hermeneutic relation, and so he refocused the hermeneutic project on the mediation of the word at a distance. Because he wanted to modify rather than reject Heidegger’s transformation of the subject-object relation, there is a tension in his work between the distance of the text and the belonging of the reader.

Gadamer’s vision was trained on a kind of human solidarity conceived out of the materials of its own finitude. The reason he was intent on opposing both a society of technique and administrative regulation and also the Western obsession with the self was because both have isolating tendencies. He was drawn toward a radical ontological reimagination of human beings that fastened on their interdependencies through (in both senses of the word) histories, cultures, and language. Hermeneutics was for him a way of bringing out the inherently relational constitution of humanity in the Sache, in what matters to us as we wrest out some kind of abidingness in the face of our finitude. Text is therefore not just a metaphor for him, but an element or dimension of this being in between.

Second difference. Grondin’s second difference is that the two thinkers had different intellectual enemies. I think this difference is less an actual category difference than a way to work out the historical dimension of the first difference. To be sure, sorting out ‘enemies’ is a bit tricky because each of the two hermeneutic readings of the tradition is a tangled palimpsest of influences with overlapping, intermixing, and conflicted allegiances. Both Gadamer and Ricoeur were exceptional in the degree to which they generously welcomed contrasting points of view as a means to broaden, strengthen, and complicate the direction of their own thoughts. But what Grondin is after are the main impulses that drove the two readings, and each impulse had its principal nemesis. Ricoeur wanted to preserve the peculiar objectivity of textual inscription as a way to undermine dualism, so he needed to confront the movement of thought that saw language as a tool of deception. By the 1960s, he is in friendly combat with thinkers who have so subverted the reliability, transparency, and determinacy of the sign that it has been reduced to a mask. But he himself reimagines the prodigious ambiguity of discourse as a point of contestation in the social project rather than as merely a vehicle of deception. The fixity of textual inscription was its own still moment in the appropriative event of understanding, and it provided an opportunity, he thought, for reflection to have some effect on the slippage (glissement) of the sign.

By contrast, Gadamer’s great argument was against thinkers who wanted to redeem Plato’s “weakness of the logoi” with analytic systems. Such a systemic urge was a compulsion encouraged by the Enlightenment fetish of reason, so Gadamer had enemies from many sides, but he concentrated his polemic on the apotheosis of this rationalist impulse in technical scientific method, a formalism that, in Grondin’s words, “forgets that the meaning of what is understood has much more to do with what happens between the person coming into contact with what is at issue.”⁸ “Forgetting” here is a figure for the severance of methodical activity from the living situation, the thousand natural ties between judgment and what is at issue in any given circumstance.

So if we judge them by their enemies, Gadamer and Ricoeur would seem to be coming to the confounding problem of epistemic dualism from opposite sides. It is not a good idea to underplay this difference for hermeneutics. The fact that, following Heidegger’s lead, both thinkers gravitated toward the structure of the hermeneutic circle as the effective resolution to the paradox of a being whose being is an issue for itself does not get us out of the conundrum that objectivity is sought by one and shunned by the other. My contention is that this is one of the two great defining differences of hermeneutics, and it stands before us as a fork in the road. I am not of the persuasion that it is a choice of flavors, and I think hermeneutics itself will have to litigate this matter in determining its destiny.

Third difference. Grondin’s third difference addresses Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger for leap-frogging over history to fundamental ontological structure. Ricoeur asserts that this concentration on being neglects the various ways in which we construct ourselves through our relations with others, language systems, cultural institutions, and so on. The neglect of language was paradigmatic of this difference: “The philosophy of Heidegger—or at least that of Being and Time—is so little a philosophy of language that the question of language is introduced only after the questions of situation, understanding, and interpretation.”⁹ Ricoeur thought that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology short-circuited the passage of hermeneutic identity through linguistic culture by confining itself to an analysis of the experiential structures that make up our being-in-the-world. Ricoeur spoke of a “detour” and of an “indirect route” to being-in-the-world to emphasize the discursive mediation of direct experience. We have to turn around and look closely at that mediation to understand experience at all. Now, indirection is not rejection. Ricoeur distinguished his linguistic turn from the semiotic theory of his time by insisting on the embeddedness of semiotics in semantics. Instead of evacuating reference from the semiotic constitution of the world, signs are anchored in material contexts of meaning, and the question becomes how to understand that obscure collaboration. This divergence from his colleagues actually brought him back to Heidegger, who understood logos apophantikos as the self-showing of being.¹⁰

So the metaphor of detour/indirect/long route (“une voie d’accès indirecte, un détour”) is a theme we are going to have to examine closely.¹¹ It is a conceit that Ricoeur applied capaciously—to correct Kant, to correct Husserl, to correct Nabert,¹² and to correct Heidegger,¹³ but with this last correction he continued to struggle. In 1965, he tried to read a remnant of the Cogito (as Ego) across Richardson’s divide between “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II,”¹⁴ and then in 1968, he framed Heidegger’s later approach to language in a descent from rather than an ascent to spoken being as “perfectly legitimate in itself,” an approach which “I have not closed, if I have not explicitly opened.”¹⁵ In “The Task of Hermeneutics” (1973), he was once again quite categorical: “With Heidegger’s philosophy, we are . . . left incapable of beginning the movement of return” through the sciences, and as a result, “a philosophy that breaks the dialogue with the sciences is no longer addressed to anything but itself.”¹⁶ Not only did Ricoeur judge that “ontological hermeneutics seems incapable, for structural reasons, of developing the problematic of this return path,” but he also concluded categorically that it “is only along the return route” that “transcendence towards questions of foundation” is possible. But then Ricoeur tempered his earlier claim that Heidegger’s effort to join different existential functions “in a unitary figure” could be possible “only in a hermeneutics instructed by symbolic figures.”¹⁷ By 1968 he reproached Bultmann for not having taken Heidegger’s “long detour” but rather a “short cut” that neglects the existential structures that underlie a “complete ontology of language.”¹⁸ Heidegger’s path...