Hermeneutics After Ricoeur 135008087X, 9781350080874

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

Also available from Bloomsbury The Ethics of Time, John Panteleimon Manoussakis Gadamer and Ricoeur, edited by Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Cross-Cultural Encounters with India, Dorothy Figueira Philosophical Hermeneutics Reinterpreted, Paul Fairfield Relational Hermeneutics, edited by Paul Fairfield and Saulius Geniusas

Hermeneutics After Ricoeur John Arthos

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © John Arthos, 2019 John Arthos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p.viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8086-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8087-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-8088-1 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To the Society for Ricoeur Studies with appreciation

Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Critical Appropriation of Paul Ricoeur for a General Hermeneutics 1 The Seven Differences 2 “I Just Can’t Quit You” 3 The Problem with Ricoeur’s Analogy of the Text 4 Educators or Researchers? 5 Narrative Hermeneutics: A Friendly Amendment 6 Is Hermeneutics a Detour? 7 The Treacherous Path from Promise to Institution 8 Turning Hermeneutics toward Kant 9 Hermeneutics and the Political Conclusion: A General Hermeneutics after Ricoeur Notes Bibliography Index

viii ix

1 9 23 51 73 95 113 139 157 179 205 211 239 249

Acknowledgments An early version of Chapter 1 was published as “What Is Phronesis? The Seven Hermeneutic Differences in Gadamer and Ricoeur,” Philosophy Today 58, no. 1 (2014): 53–66. A section of Chapter 5 was published in “Refiguring Narrative Reception,” Storyworlds 6, no.  1 (2014):  1–20. A  version of Chapter  9 will be published in a Lexington Press anthology entitled Ideology and Utopia in the Twenty-First Century. I would also like to thank Catalina de Onis for proofing help on the manuscript.

Abbreviations BT

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

CdI

Paul Ricoeur. Le Conflit des Interprétations. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969.

CI

Paul Ricoeur. The Conflict of Interpretations, edited by Don Ihde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

FM

Paul Ricoeur. Fallible Man, translated by Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.

FP

Paul Ricoeur. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

FS

Paul Ricoeur. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

FTTA

Paul Ricoeur. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

HHS

Paul Ricoeur. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

HT

Paul Ricoeur. History and Truth, translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965.

L1, L2, L3

Paul Ricoeur. Lectures 1–3. Paris: Seuil, 1991–94.

LIU

Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

x

Abbreviations

MHF

Paul Ricoeur. Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004.

OA

Paul Ricoeur. Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

PV2

Paul Ricoeur. Philosophie de la Volonté II: Finitude et Culpabilité. Paris: Aubier, 1960.

RR

Paul Ricoeur. A Ricoeur Reader, edited by Mario J. Valdés. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

SE

Paul Ricoeur. Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerion Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

TM

Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, rev. translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Press, 1993.

TN1–3

Paul Ricoeur. Time and Narrative 1–3, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983–88.

Introduction: A Critical Appropriation of Paul Ricoeur for a General Hermeneutics

In an address entitled “The Idea of the University—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of the alienation of students from institutions of higher learning, “almost as if a new profession has been created for being a student,” an alienation fostered by bureaucratized systems disintegrating into disciplinary enclaves that socialize teachers and students into professionalized conformists.1 Hermeneutics, for him, was a strategy for repudiating this training in conformity, a practice of making oneself vulnerable to questions that “break open the smooth front of our presumptions.”2 Historically and culturally effected consciousness is the recognition bred from the disruption of normative complacency, and the transformations that such interruptions set in motion.3 From the beginning Gadamer pointed to education as the means for cultivating this habitus of vulnerability-recognition-transformation, and I need hardly say that the work of seeding this practice in educational institutions and curricula is more ahead of us than behind us. Hermeneutics in any of its variants is an ally against the proclivity of the university to become an uncritical adjunct to an unthinking corporate culture. Gadamer’s chief hermeneutic successor, Paul Ricoeur, carried, expanded, and deepened this aspect of the hermeneutic legacy. He thought of an educated habitus as “life’s ability to freely stand at a distance in respect to itself.”4 In fact, he saw the chief weakness of Gadamer’s expression of that ideal as an overemphasis on belonging, and sought to rectify that weakness in his own hermeneutic project. For him, distance is the constitutional gap that fires the invention of (semiotic, narrative, juridical, institutional) structures that stand against the very weakness that the German university exemplified at its weakest moment. In distinction to Gadamer, the hermeneutic interruption for Ricoeur was sparked less in the immediacy of social engagement than in the productive gap between person and institution, and Ricoeur’s rigorous development of what I would call

2

Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

hermeneutic structures (political, legal, ethical, figural) will likely be his most enduring contribution to this paradigm. However, in my view, Ricoeur’s attempt to “re-regionalize” hermeneutics (as opposed to Gadamer’s commitment to a hermeneutica generalis) works against that larger aim, against the impulse that has given hermeneutics its special relevance in an increasingly professionalized culture of expertise and technique.5 We need to discipline the universalist pretensions of hermeneutics, but not by reinscribing it within a disciplinary status. So the gain and loss announces my present task, which is to see what a hermeneutics would look like that continues Gadamer’s cultivation of a dialogic consciousness in a general paideia, but that begins to incorporate the wealth of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic legacy. In doing this work of critical appropriation, I hope to honor Ricoeur’s intention for others “to build on his work, not just to comment on it or seek to explicate it.”6 My project of critical application is not at all notional: my colleagues and I are building a hermeneutically inflected writing and speaking curriculum for a general education program at a major state university at a time when curricula are generally moving in the opposite direction, that is, toward the managerial, instrumentalized, careerist, commodified skills-based learning increasingly demanded by students, parents, administrators, business leaders, and politicians. The enlistment of education to this corporatist ethos epitomizes everything that Gadamer had feared, and so insinuating a hermeneutic sensibility in the core of our curriculum is something like a radical act of resistance. This is a perilous task aided by the generosity, hope, and integrity of Ricoeur as an intellectual guide. So, as an illustration, we take as the definition of public address in the basic course as the power of speech to promote “the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”7 The term “general hermeneutics” in the title of this chapter is meant to overlap with the concept of general education that still exists—tenuously—as a marker of the distinction still attributed to the ideals of a liberal education. Administrators and funders are still willing to give ostensible support to this ideal, and that provides a narrow practical space within which we can work. I  borrow the old concept of general hermeneutics from its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usage as a pedagogy for developing a heightened awareness of the finite human perspectives (scopus). This was the eighteenth-century humanist Chladenius’s explicit focus:  “The circumstances of our mind, body, and whole person that make or cause us to imagine something in this way rather than that, are what we call viewpoint.” I seek to cultivate Chladenius’s principle,

Introduction

3

which merges rhetoric and hermeneutics in a single formula, as a habitus at the core of a general education. I define this formation as the cultivation of a heightened awareness of the constraints and possibilities of human finitude, and of the habits of thought and feeling derived from it—social reasoning, dialogic openness, prudential judgment, and so on. Ricoeur is a powerful ally in this task of formation, but I need first to locate his relationship to the idea of a general hermeneutics, because it is not a simple one. Modern hermeneutics arose out of the confluence of the rhetorical education of Renaissance humanism with the Protestant school system under the ideal of a universal priesthood. The humanist Philip Melanchthon working under Martin Luther combined the ars bene dicendi with the ars bene legendi by teaching the principles of exegetical interpretation as the mirror of the rhetorical canons of production:  But only with Luther and, above all, Melanchthon was hermeneutics accorded a new function in relation to reading the Bible, a function they described in terms of the tools provided by Aristotelian rhetoric. With this step, hermeneutics [as the discipline of interpreting Scripture with the help of rhetorical principles] took its place alongside the explication of the law in the new jurisprudence of the time.8

This fusion of Verstehenkönnen and Redenkönnen is the composite form that, after hibernating for a while, blossomed in nineteenth-century hermeneutics, and then became the genetic imprint informing Gadamer’s conception of philosophical hermeneutics.9 For Friedrich Schleiermacher, listening and reading are to the principles of reception (hermeneutics) as speaking and writing are to the principles of production (rhetoric). This combined basic curriculum echoed the ancient enkyklios paideia and the Renaissance humaniora insofar as it put at the foundation of learning the principles of human judgment that cannot be replaced by system or method. Against the pretensions of positivist science it espoused the art of determining “the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now.”10 Since this kind of general hermeneutics is “not a theory of knowledge at all but a theory of teaching and learning,” it exists in tension with another strain of hermeneutics that goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when humanists felt obliged to develop a rational method of interpretation that could stand up under the growing authority of our “scientific knowledge of the world.”11 In important ways Ricoeur belongs to that second tradition, which itself claimed the title of hermeneutica generalis as “a universal science of interpretation.”12

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

In its incipient stages the two versions of hermeneutics were not clearly at odds, and there was a fluid interchange between scientia and ars. For biblical interpretation and jurisprudential canons, the “scholastic Cartesian” Johannes Clauberg (1622–65) wrote of the “necessity of having multiple arts of logic” (multiplex artis logice necessitas), which ranged from the logics of grammar, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to the stricter canons of posterior analytics. What Grondin called the “rationalist hermeneutics” of the seventeenth century had been living in convivial relation with the sciences until the Kantian watershed, which drove a wedge between the methodological sciences and the affective intuition nurtured in Romanticism.13 Ricoeur underscores this fateful moment:  “Perhaps hermeneutics is forever marked by this double filiation— Romantic and critical, critical and Romantic.”14 Heidegger and Gadamer later recruited Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s hermeneutics as a weapon against various strains of positivism that had seized the academy, so Ricoeur’s return to the critical-methodological school has once again complicated the hermeneutic trajectory. In contrast to Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s situation, Ricoeur discovered hermeneutics at the moment when French intellectuals began routing the old guard classical humanists from the Sorbonne with the cudgel of science (semiotics, psychoanalysis, etc.). In such a context, Ricoeur attempted a mediating operation to bridge analytic and hermeneutic disciplines across their sharp methodological differences, and in a complex justification, to give some methodological purchase back to hermeneutics. It is in the light of that effort that Ricoeur’s approach to the ontological turn in hermeneutics should be seen. Ricoeur objected to Heidegger’s direct approach to an ontology of finite being because he thought a slower indirect route that passes through an analysis of culture was an unavoidable detour for a correct understanding of finite being.15 To be sure, Ricoeur endorsed fundamentally the ontological nature of hermeneutics: “The ontology of understanding is implied in the methodology of interpretation, following the ineluctable ‘hermeneutic circle.’ ”16 But his prodigious contributions to hermeneutics follow from his commitment to the indirect path that he had mapped out; his granular analyses of the discursive structures of hermeneutic identity are not so much extensions of the structures revealed in the fundamental analytic of Being and Time as new forms built from its basic syntax. Coming as Ricoeur did from such a different cultural and historical environment from his German counterparts, a hermeneutics on French soil simultaneously expanded and contracted. Because of a deep consonance with

Introduction

5

its humanistic purposes, many of Ricoeur’s important advances and extensions strengthen the claim of hermeneutics as a general competence, but draw it back from its more radical challenges to the Enlightenment faith in reason. I want to encourage rather than dampen the insurgent power of hermeneutics against the cultural advances of the rationalist faith still on the march, so in this book I want to push against some of Ricoeur’s program. However, the distance from Germany had salutary effects. Ricoeur’s evolution toward hermeneutics never ceased to be enriched by other non-hermeneutic influences in critical theory, pragmatic and analytic philosophy. His investment in French reflective and existential philosophy (Marcel, Nabert, Mounier, etc.) was a brake against a too easy assimilation of the German model. The attachment of his thinking to a faith tradition, to the role of transcendence, to the return to Kant from Hegel, to the qualified Cartesian ambitions for a science rigoureuse, to his determination to engage in interdisciplinary work with the social sciences, these formative pulls on Ricoeur’s thinking from non-hermeneutic sources will be essential for a healthy general hermeneutics. Just as it would be a mistake to reduce Ricoeur’s “philosophy to his hermeneutics,” so we have to benefit from how his more capacious worldview influenced his hermeneutic sensibility.17 The complexity of Ricoeur’s appropriation also is tangled in biography and training. It is sometimes said that he had two hermeneutic turns, the first when he saw the need to bring a missing symbolic dimension to phenomenology in the 1950s, which presumably had no relation to Gadamer, and the second in the 1970s when he saw the shortcomings of a hermeneutics of the symbol and took inspiration from Gadamer’s Truth and Method. This double turn can be read in different ways. Jean Grondin referred to the hermeneutics of the two great thinkers as “parallel paths, but incomparable projects,” and asserted that Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics, issuing from the tradition of reflective philosophy and from a debate with the hermeneutics of suspicion, has from the get-go very little to do with Gadamer.”18 Likewise François Dosse in his biography of Ricoeur speaks of parallel evolutions. (“The evolution of Ricoeur and Gadamer should not be conceived in terms of influence, but more like two parallel evolutions that find themselves in positions of close proximity.”)19 Although Dosse reports the profound effect of Truth and Method on Ricoeur at its German publication in 1960, Dosse emphasizes that “Ricoeur’s engagement with the hermeneutics of symbols and Freudian hermeneutics had already begun.”20 Even before that, Ricoeur was theorizing the intrinsic relation between language and transcendence in the 1950s in ways that anticipate the ontological turn of language in Truth and Method.21

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

This hermetic parallelism should not be extended to Heidegger, because the studied distance from Heidegger of French philosophers in the 1950s was not for lack of awareness. Ricoeur remained always deeply suspicious of Heidegger ethically, politically, and philosophically, but he knew his work early and well. An anecdote about their first personal encounter can be taken as emblematic of this push and pull: Jean Beaufret and Kostas Axelos organized a meeting of European intellectuals with Heidegger in 1955 for nine or ten days when he was still barred from teaching in Germany, and it was a tense meeting. Beaufret characterized the exchange between Ricoeur and Heidegger as a “dialogue of the deaf.” Ricoeur confronted Heidegger directly with the question of why the Hebraic heritage was entirely absent from his work, and Heidegger’s response was peremptory.22 Ricoeur’s distance from German hermeneutics certainly created tensions with Gadamer. Jean Greisch asserted that Paul Ricoeur’s distance from Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology amounted to “a declaration of war,” while his relation to Gadamer’s hermeneutic perspective remained “rather evasive.”23 This opinion is controversial, and the issues surrounding it are still unresolved, but the future of hermeneutics will be decisively marked by the resolution of the issues that underlie its claim. There is no doubt that Ricoeur made inestimable advances for hermeneutics in his sensitivity to its moral, political, institutional, and cultural responsibilities. It explains why he is called by some “a witness of his time” and the “referee of an era.”24 Much of what Ricoeur constructed on top of the basic philosophical foundations that Heidegger and Gadamer laid inflects my understanding of a general hermeneutics as a paideia of civic culture. His mediating role between the hermeneutics of faith and suspicion does much of the orienting work for the educational scaffolding that a general hermeneutics is responsible to. He by no means pressed to the limits of its democratic possibilities or hegemonic perils, but he expanded its ethical and political vocabulary far beyond its frail outlines in German hermeneutics. Every step Ricoeur took away from or beyond the Gadamerian variant of hermeneutics becomes a useful crux for the question of what hermeneutics will be going forward, because the immense authority of his critical gaze and the care that he took to argue for these differences becomes a kind of canvas for speculation on the appropriate direction of the field. My approach in this book is to use these disagreements and differences as a heuristic. Gadamer and Ricoeur are close enough to each other for their frictions to be intelligible and far enough apart for their alternatives to be productive. The scrupulous care and authority of Ricoeur’s critical interventions give the touchpoints of this inquiry a weighty

Introduction

7

charge. We can think of Gadamer’s and Ricoeur respective appropriations of hermeneutics as the two branches of a dowsing rod (virguna divina) that merge into a single stem that points in the future direction of hermeneutics. The paradox of Ricoeur’s detours from German hermeneutics, I will argue, is that they strengthened and enriched the frame and substance of hermeneutic ontology while undermining its radical foundations. Ricoeur tried, in effect, to split the hermeneutic baby, and we are now in a position of having to build on his contributions while salvaging it from his more cautious ministrations. My critical appropriation of Ricoeur for a general hermeneutics helps delimit the scope of this study. I am not attempting a general assessment of Ricoeur as a thinker, but engaging in a careful appropriation that takes the dialogue between Gadamer and Ricoeur as a point of departure. This choice has several delimiting implications. The first has to do with the humanist orientation of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Taking what Schweiker called Ricoeur’s “neohumanism” as a starting point should not be taken as an anthropocentric privileging of the human, because Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in particular—and this is a superiority over Gadamer’s hermeneutics, although not a categorical break—attends so centrally to the human capacity for evil.25 A  hermeneutic approach is a cultivation in humility: “Man is man when he knows that he is only man.”26 A hermeneutic humanism is “grounded in and limited by the worth of the other,” which you and I can now take to mean the other in every sense.27 There is certainly merit in Fredric Jameson’s criticism of Ricoeur’s (and Gadamer’s) occidental bias, but the cultivation of discursive self-awareness is a reorientation of the learning subject, a cultivation that is propaideutic to any broadening of orientations.28 Similarly, the civic virtue frame as a starting point for a general hermeneutics is problematic for certain critical orientations, but the institutional location of the general education delimits the first obligation of the teacher whose audience comes so deeply imbued with instrumentalist, rationalist, competitive, consumerist values. I have come to see that cultivating a sense of responsibility to the other is a good first step toward critical consciousness. My orientation to the Gadamer–Ricoeur debate also allows me to reinforce the reciprocity of rhetoric and hermeneutics underlying all my work. I depart from Schleiermacher’s formula of a lateral symmetry between production (rhetoric) and reception (hermeneutics). In contrast, I see hermeneutics as the theoretical awareness that the more practical rhetorical arts need. This coupling limits and directs rhetoric so that it does not fall into its sophistic or managerial inclinations, and it keeps hermeneutics grounded in the practical realm of decision-making about matters that matter to a community.

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

The irony of Ricoeur’s relationship to the theme of education (Bildung, Fr. formation) is that, on the one hand, he is himself a model—in fact the epitome—of what a liberal education should produce:  the comportment of humility, openness, and generosity, the mental habit of fairness, sympathy, and anti-dogmatism, the personal discipline of rigor, precision, and industry, the capacity for initiative, resourcefulness, creative imagination, the unimpeachable devotion to duty and selflessness, and a boundless willingness to mentor, advise, and support; yet he neither had a philosophy of education nor left any major work dedicated to the theme.29 In an obvious sense, though, everything he wrote is dedicated to education, and he is and will be a leading force within the humaniora that we are trying to preserve and pass on. The shape of the argument of this book is a movement from critique to affirmation. I will move from a heavy emphasis on critique in the early chapters (the limitations of expertise, of the finished work, of textuality)—because I feel the need to clear these issues away first—to a more embracing appropriation in the later chapters (the hermeneutic need for narrative understanding, institution building, moral and political consciousness). Although I never stop the careful discriminations necessary among the complexities of Ricoeur’s own appropriations and innovations, the ratio of critique and appropriation flips somewhere in the middle of this book. Finally, this book, even with its narrowed focus, is formally indicative rather than comprehensive. Although the constraints and limitations I have imposed on myself keep this project manageable, its exposition should be seen more as a down payment on a task that is both strategic and vital: the fight to keep alive the liberal traditions that the great hermeneuts have so carefully tended for these centuries.

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

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

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”),

The Seven Differences

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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 sixteenthand 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 subjectobject 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

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

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

The Seven Differences

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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

14

Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

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 is “longer. It is the path of patience and not of haste and precipitation.”19 I have never felt that Ricoeur’s early quarrel led to a productive discrimination, since the absence of a sense of historicity and linguisticality is not one of Heidegger’s grave faults. Ricoeur’s struggles with Heidegger were carried over to Gadamer, but the difference here was also a tricky one. Gadamer’s own linguistic turn (“Being that can be understood, is language.”) was built on Heidegger’s later language theory (“Language is the house of being”).20 In Gadamer’s case, Ricoeur turned the trope of indirection onto a discrimination within linguistic being: How can there be a dialectic of cultural distance and belonging if method is replaced by dialogue: “How is it possible to introduce a critical instance into a consciousness of belonging that is expressly defined by the rejection of distantiation?” (Unless otherwise noted, all the other emphases are in the original.)21 This question will certainly be a more productive path of critical inquiry for hermeneutics. Fourth difference. Grondin’s fourth difference is his own quite wellknown distinction between phenomenological hermeneutics (Gadamer) and hermeneutic phenomenology (Ricoeur). While preserving the impulse to find the objective grounding of scientific method, nevertheless, Husserl’s particular approach to the reduction and the constitution that follows it are not impassible barriers to the evolution of a discursive hermeneutics. By contrast, Gadamer concludes with the greatest reluctance that Husserl never gave up the quest for an ultimate foundation in the transcendental ego, and only in the undeveloped potential resident in the idea of the Lebenswelt was there a possible opening onto hermeneutic praxis. French hermeneutics adopted the phenomenological approach, while German hermeneutics adopted some of its attributes. Ricoeur did a kind of phenomenology of discursive structures in the same way that Husserl revealed the perceptual structuration of time consciousness. Gadamer’s hermeneutics was phenomenological because Husserl sought truth in the immediacy of evidence rather than through secondary validation, recognized

The Seven Differences

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the constituting finitude of perspective as unsurpassable, and sought to unlock the processive-recursive nature of understanding. This varied appropriation of the phenomenological tradition strikes me as a deepening of Grondin’s first difference—the how of interpretation versus the discursivity of understanding—although what Grondin adds here is that flipping the attributives regards as well a difference of focus between Ricoeur’s commitment to the value of the person, and Gadamer’s of tradition (the fifth difference). Grondin permits himself the evaluative observation that Ricoeur never quite resolved the method question, and Grondin echoes a question that David Pellauer once raised about “Ricoeur’s own mode of argumentation,” which does not proceed along the lines of methodological validation:22  “His hermeneutics remains in the end more phenomenological than methodological, in any case less methodological than he himself would admit.”23 On Gadamer’s end, there is a cost to the demotion of methodological pluralism and the promotion of a prudential aptitude, since his heavy reliance on the model of the I-Thou relationship leaves much to be explained on the way not only to historical distance but to a global age of complex institutions.24 Fifth difference. Grondin’s fifth, sixth, and seventh differences I  group together as the other major fault-line between the two hermeneuts. These three differences approach the vexed question of agency. The fifth difference has to do with the agency of the person. Ricoeur spent much of his intellectual capital pushing back against the spirit of Gadamer’s assertion that “the self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life,” what Grondin speaks of as Gadamerian fatalism.25 In this pushback, Ricoeur sailed directly into the headwinds of mid-twentieth-century French intellectual culture as well, and he was effectively ostracized as a result. To be sure, dismantling the pretensions of subjective transparency, autonomy, and sovereignty needed a critical mass to press against its permeating ideological inertia, and Ricoeur’s meliorating posture was out of step. However, today the equilibrium he sought feels in some ways like a corrective to that earlier corrective. Personal agency needs a defense, and his careful registration of discursive identity accepts the diffusion and decentering of subjective agency without abandoning it. In the slow shift in emphasis over the course of his career from the theme of human frailty (l’homme faible) to the theme of human capability (l’homme capable), he wins back modest resources for a humanist recuperation of the social self. Discursive performativity takes over most of what had been allotted to an essential, integral nature, and so much of Ricoeur’s contribution lies in the articulation of these discursive structures of identity, initiative, and responsibility. Hermeneutics

16

Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

does not have the last word on identity,26 and there is the suspicion that Ricoeur harbored an unwarranted bias for its coherence and order, but he is in step with the feminist pushback against structural determinacy. It will no doubt be helpful to leave behind the ideology-laden language of the Subject, which Gadamer reminds us is a modern innovation not to be elided with individuality or personhood, but the question of agency is complicated in Gadamer. On the one hand, he is famous for his insistence, and his overall emphasis, on the stronger agency of tradition: “The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.”27 He is also deeply suspicious of the strong agency of planning, experimental control, and methodological mastery. Yet, he is equivocal on the concept of the individual, skeptical of the Hegelian tradition of the collective subject. Perhaps the best we can say is that he was closer to the Aristotelian tradition of the social animal and incredulous toward the strong sense of the autonomous self. Ricoeur is the opposite. His grounding in Cartesianism, his focus on the self, and his unapologetic emphasis on initiative, planning, and culpability mean that he is coming from the other direction. He attempted to recuperate a robust personal agency by both detailing its profound limitations and locating its fluid, adaptable, and non-essentialist mechanisms.28 Where Gadamer spoke disdainfully of the ethos of “making and planning,” Ricoeur was deeply invested in redeeming the future through acts, projects, and institutions. As this book unfolds, it will become clear how I think Gadamer’s mistrust must be tempered by Ricoeur’s pragmatic and ethical sense of an imperative to act and plan, and that a future hermeneutic outlook must be a considered mixture of these two impulses. Sixth difference. The sixth difference lies in the ethical realm as an adjunct to the possibility of personal agency, a realm that was never entirely comfortable for the German hermeneuts. The absence of substantive discussion of the problem of evil in a philosophy that encompasses the political is a vulnerability that Grondin notes gently when he references Ricoeur’s interest in the theme of initiative as something “inherent in a phrase Gadamer would never have written:  ‘I can change something.’ ”29 In the face of this incapacity, Ricoeur builds out the ethical structures of discursive finitude mostly by mediating Aristotle with Kant, but he does not stop there; much of the later work starting with the “little ethics” is an attempt to respond to this terrible absence. I have grown increasingly distant from Gadamer’s leaning into understanding as the counterbalance to finitude. Gadamer’s frequent invocations of Aristotelian syggnome, synesis, and philia involve an idealism belied by history. Ricoeur’s turn

The Seven Differences

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to Kantian moral theory may not be the right correction to this inclination, but it begins the corrections for hermeneutics. Seventh difference. Grondin’s seventh difference contrasts Gadamer’s focus on language as the manifestation of meaning in human life and Ricoeur’s focus on the capability of the person arising from linguisticality. In the first case, “language emerges as the presentation (Darstellung) of being,” while in the second case “it is the effort to exist which must find in the ontological categories of the self its own vocabulary.”30 This difference over the center of hermeneutic attention belongs in a sense to both of the aggregated differences I have named; putting the capable person at the center tends to instrumentalize language in a way that Gadamer would not be comfortable with, detracting from its ontological priority, whereas it also lends attention to the dignity and the violability of the human being, which Ricoeur argued did not get sufficient attention in the thrust of German hermeneutics toward solidarity.

From seven to two I have said that Grondin’s seven differences aggregate around two main differences, but it can further be observed that both main questions have something to do with prudence. In the first instance, Ricoeur’s dialectic of explanation and understanding weakens the commitment to prudential judgment as a guiding ethos and places an authority on expertise that we will have to interrogate. By contrast, Gadamer places specialized knowledge and method under the guidance of prudential judgment, which he understands in social terms as a product of dialogue. In the second instance, Gadamer’s prudential frame of reference is something too close to the Athenian polis, a model wholly inadequate to the relations of power, the weakness of solidarity as a motivating force, and the human propensity for evil in which we are now so well-rehearsed. By contrast, Ricoeur’s expansion of the hermeneutic franchise to articulated structures of ethical, political, and institutional discourse have some chance of mitigating the inadequacies of a prudential approach, even as they place too much faith in elite structures. The differences on each side both speak to the strength and weakness of phronesis as a cultural ideal in a complex modern society. The question they raise is this: Is there a way to be guided by the prudential judgment resident in the instruction of distance and belonging which both Gadamer and Ricoeur share that (a) does not place too much faith in procedure and (b) preserves the strength

18

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of moral initiative in the society of technique we have increasingly become? Let me refine this double question before setting out To Ricoeur. Ricoeur’s orientation of hermeneutics toward textual interpretation establishes a disciplinary profile that changes its relation to a general education, a hermeneutica generalis. This calls up the long-standing hermeneutic topos of the layperson and the expert. From a Gadamerian perspective, the educated person is only secondarily an expert, and expertise must be constantly in dialogue with, at a very granular level, being-human. But in Memory, History, Forgetting the problem of history becomes crystallized for Ricoeur in the person of the historian. Such a personification, such a concentration of focus—the disciplinary scholar now the designated focal point of historical interpretation— narrows the scope of the theme of history, since history is interpreted within history through so many different forms of authority, of which the historian is only one. History lives and breathes in us in our customs, it passes down in our proverbs and songs, it is embedded in our institutions. Certainly Ricoeur knows this, and there are major places in his oeuvre where he does real justice to this diversity, but in turning to the personified figure of the historian as the privileged filter to the past, he reopens an issue that Gadamer had attempted to settle for a hermeneutic orientation. Whereas Gadamer proclaims, “By God! Philosophy is not just for philosophers!” (“Bei Gott nicht! Philosophie ist doch überhaupt nicht nur für Philosophen”), Ricoeur affirms, “Cultivated people are better able than others within the order of language” (“les gens de culture sont plus capables dans l’ordres de langage que d’autres”).31 I believe that always in the background the presence of the expert haunts Ricoeur’s relationship to Gadamer. To Gadamer. At a war protest meeting in 1961, Ricoeur gave a speech in which he said: “We do not want to be like those German university professors during the Nazi period who remained silent because they were government employees and because they did not think it was their job to take outside of the university the principles they honored within the university.” This is not an indirect swipe at Gadamer, but it raises the suspicion that has circulated around his political theory. On this issue I find the range of differences among Gadamer scholars (Madison, Misgeld, Wilson, Marshall, etc.) more acutely illuminating than the broad-brush indictments coming from ideological opponents.32 The obscurities of context and motive in Gadamer’s personal history33 as it relates to the political responsibility of the scholar are difficult to penetrate, but his own assertion “that it is already a sufficient political act to be a thinker” is a sufficient admission to alert us to the consideration of hermeneutics as a political project.34 Because I  agree with Dennis Schmidt that hermeneutics is inherently ethical, likewise

The Seven Differences

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it cannot avoid being deeply political. Whatever the limitations of Gadamer’s personal response to National Socialism at the time or after, we can ask how robust his philosophy is for what we want to appropriate it. Schmidt feels the lack of a sufficient sense of what he calls the darker risks of finitude in Gadamer, an appreciation of its “monstrous possibilities,” and given the context in which Truth and Method was written, this deficiency has salience. If Misgeld was right that “the world [Gadamer] understood ended with the Weimar Republic,” then it is incumbent on us to reimagine a hermeneutics that will stand the test of the limit situations we will be facing.35 The issue I am interested in, therefore, is how to cope with the distance between Gadamer’s prudential theory of respectful contestation, and the Realpolitik of political culture. Can we adjust the sensus communis to a political scene that will pit environmental refugee populations against the security state apparatus of the 1 percent? If we want to know how hermeneutics might adapt to the conditions of limit situations, we have an instructive foil in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, which was born out of the experience in a prisoner-of-war camp and from the first moment attached itself to the problem of evil as it manifested itself in the great wars, the cruelties of colonial Europe, and the gross inequities of modern industrial society.36 Ricoeur’s “long route” was in part a search for discursive structures that might buttress the fragility of goodness.37 My position is this: I agree entirely with Dennis Schmidt’s reading of Gadamerian hermeneutics as a noble, ethical practice, one that I subscribe to and promote as a model for a number of social settings, especially in the microcommunities where we experiment with the better possibilities of community. But outside the magic circle of privilege, where status and security are secured, I assert that Gadamer’s phronesis is inadequate. All that Gadamer’s defenders say about a Gadamerian politics of negotiation applies to a good deal of political life around the edges and in specific moments at tipping points, but the massive levers of power that move governance—through state capture by finance, the permeating hold of the military-industrial complex, the inexorable exploitation of the environment, and the ghostly penetration of the security state—are not present to the citizenry for dialogic engagement. Even in the most conventional politics, policy decisions are moved by political pressure, alliances, money; this is the grammar of communication, and reasonable discourse is the window dressing. On the most intractable issues, where power is most profoundly embedded and policed, hegemony is beaten back by work stoppages, grassroots protest, acts of civil disobedience, money and organization, and cunning. This is a very different kind of prudence (prepon rather than decorum), which Gadamer does not explore. At the national and international level, discourse

20

Hermeneutics After Ricoeur

primarily serves the imperatives of political power, and the noble values of openness to the other and wanting the strongest case from your opponent are almost entirely irrelevant. Gadamer’s discourse ethics works beautifully where the communication situation favors or encourages openness, transparency, and nonhierarchical decision-structures, but Gadamer will not help us get to that place. Hegemony by its very nature sets out to construct the speech situation to defeat reasoned contestation, and a different set of tools is necessary to “speak” with it. Misgeld says something surprising here: “Those who argue that Gadamer has underestimated the place of power or coercion in social life and therefore has failed to address the phenomenon of domination as a social problem in modern societies are mistaken.”38 The problem is that Gadamer subsumes the power question under the specter of the scientific compulsion for a technical order, and the truth is that the will to hegemony operates even where this compulsion is absent. Does the charge of idealism not have some merit when the dialogic comportment is given so much authority? Listen here to Gadamer’s voice: “The word is communication, sharing in its purest form. It is not the voice of pain or pleasure that is extorted by nature, so to speak. It rests on free agreement, kata syntheken, as Aristotle has it.”39 If we go back to Gadamer’s orienting question for hermeneutics, “How do we understand?,” the fact that mixed modalities of discourse that include openness and strategy, collaboration and instrumentality, enter into the most intimate dialogic spaces means that hermeneutics cannot rid itself of the question of hegemony, even if it overthrows the ideology of planning. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is not adequate to this terrible dilemma either, but he begins to think about useful theoretical structures and principles that respond to human frailty and the will to power that make hermeneutics a more robust partner in the quest for just structures of communication. As we know from Grondin’s biography, Gadamer saw his theory of dialogic understanding as a legacy to be left to his students for the work that would have to take place after the madness. The Platonic-Aristotelian legacy filtered through Christian humanism would then be a goal to shoot for, and the West’s cultural legacy charges it to build a society that respects the power of the word. But if we accept this explanation, hermeneutics becomes confined to a considerably narrowed space. Instead of accepting this narrowing, I would prefer to ask to what extent its principles could be extended to the world where power will always operate, and this is where it makes sense to turn to Ricoeur, at least to begin with, because from The Symbolism of Evil to Memory, History, Forgetting, he was not building a discourse theory for the far country, but for the world in which he found himself. He did not leave himself exempt from charges of idealism of other kinds, as the

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attacks on his narrative theory show, but the depth of his engagement with the fragility of human finitude provides us with much to work.

Onward We can use the differences developed in this chapter as markers for the work that I will be doing in this book. The first, second, and fourth differences take us to the first section of my book, which has to do with the issues that derive from the origins of hermeneutics in the humanist curriculum: its functions in literacy training, its provision of resources for scholarly judgment, its attention to riddles of meaning and intention, its methodological principles of textual analysis, and its criteria for interpretive judgment. This universe of concerns emerged from the practical needs of civic, legal, and religious education and is still with us today when we think about the contributions a hermeneutic perspective and sensibility might make to the general education in a liberal arts environment. The perpetual rediscovery of prudential teachings that follows on the inevitable shortcomings of scientific technique is the expertise of hermeneutics, so I will address the topoi that arise with Ricoeur’s relation to these exigencies. I  will try to establish here that Ricoeur’s relationship to the humanistic tradition is a problematic area of Ricoeur’s effort. The first three chapters provide a sustained critique of his emphasis on professional expertise and disciplinary expertise for hermeneutics, and propose instead a recalibration back to the Gadamerian view of hermeneutics as a cultivated competence of the educated citizen, a hermeneutica generalis. I will show how this recalibration is already taking place among some Ricoeurian scholars. The third difference, Ricoeur’s famous detour through signs as a correction to Heidegger’s leap to being, helps frame the second section of my book. It is the strangeness of hermeneutics, which began as a method of interpreting strange texts, that makes it a philosophical resource for understanding our strangeness in the world. Ricoeur’s differences with Gadamer are in many ways extended engagements with these forms of strangeness, and what has come of those engagements takes us quite far along in discriminating the ontological and epistemic claims of hermeneutics. Although I  will reject “detour” as an apt metaphor for a humanist hermeneutics, I will show in this middle section how Ricoeur’s rich and complex hermeneutic sense of finite, wounded, broken, dispersed, interwoven, instituted human being does not depend on the metaphysics of detours. His portrait of humanity is far more detailed

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than Gadamer’s sketch, and filled with a richer sense of both its agency and its tragedy. Here is where Ricoeur’s focus on the person, owing to his deeper Christian orientation, fleshes out dimensions of human being that Gadamer’s orientation to sociality leaves unexpressed. The fifth difference is all in Ricoeur’s favor, yet it underwrites a work in progress for a political hermeneutics that we must now continue and improve. The place of agency in a hermeneutic world straddles the ontological and the political in ways that German hermeneutics remained shamefully ignorant. Ricoeur is leagues beyond Gadamer in pushing hermeneutics toward a political imaginary, even as his thought fell far behind and outside of the most vibrant discourse on the political, so the arc of the last three chapters is a kind of formal indication of the political directions hermeneutics will need to take. Thus, the last section refracts back toward the first set of concerns, insofar as the responsibilities of liberal education fit hand in glove with the responsibilities of citizenship. And this circulating relationship is exactly what hermeneutics needs to explore to regain its vitality in the humaniora moving forward.

2

“I Just Can’t Quit You”

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect. —William Wordsworth In a late interview, Paul Ricoeur spoke about the disorienting experience of seeing structuralism, a movement of thought that he had been in such close dialogue with in developing his own theory, seem to vanish almost without a trace:  People of my age, like Levinas, of the same generation, we have the impression of having survived so many changes that our own identity seems to be threatened by these rapid changes in the landscape. For example, structuralism more or less faded and existentialism belongs completely to the past. After working for thirty or forty years, it is difficult to speak about one’s own identity in this crisis.1

Ricoeur had engaged structuralism’s proponents so earnestly and diligently in critique and dialogue, building his own sense of the possibilities for a hermeneutics of the human sciences in counterpoint, that this fading must have felt as though a rug had been pulled out from under him. In a 1968 essay he laid out his own expectations for the structuralist contribution to the understanding of a text: I wish to show that the type of intelligibility that is expressed in structuralism prevails in every case in which one can: (a) work on a corpus already constituted, finished, closed, and in that sense, dead; (b)  establish inventories of elements and units; (c) place these elements or units in relations of opposition, preferably binary opposition; and (d) establish an algebra or combinatory system of these elements and opposed pairs.2

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Ricoeur’s endorsement of a certain sphere of “intelligibility” here is an indication that he accepts the discrete labor prescribed for structural analysis, labor separate from the eventful encounter with the text of any reader of tales. Ricoeur’s description of the structuralist’s “work” is a stark reminder of the sense of expertise ascribed to structural analysis. In this chapter I am going to be looking at a paradigmatic example of this work of expertise, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), a cadre of researchers working under Algirdas Julien Greimas dedicated to a systematic, empirical categorization of narrative inventories.3 Here I want to lay out Ricoeur’s surprising view of this institutional project, because it will provide a useful touchstone for thinking about the relation of explanation and understanding that divides Gadamer and Ricoeur.4 To be clear, Ricoeur believed that the relative relationship between hermeneutics and structuralism is not one of co-equality. Understanding is the privileged goal of all explanatory work:  “Understanding remains dominant. I think that this is the hermeneutic side, the hermeneutic approach.”5 And yet it is also clear over the long expanse of Ricoeur’s engagement with structuralism that he considered it a crucial dialectical partner of hermeneutics, one that he believed could provide the explanatory moment to what is too one-sidedly a process of understanding based on a kind of Heideggerian intuition. Ricoeur tried to salvage the structuralist enterprise per se long after it had ceased to be a vital movement in France or on the world stage, so I want to try to isolate what in particular remained significant in it for him. That Ricoeur chose the narrative semiotician Greimas as a lifelong conversation partner is a choice that is hard to resolve, because Greimas was such an extreme representative of the scientific ambitions of structuralism. The scholarly consensus is that Greimas was a hardened advocate for the scientific objectification of narrative. François Dosse characterizes him as “the grand master of the most scientific semiotics,” and describes his work as “hermetic in its increasingly rigorous, self-enclosed formalization, drawing its model more than ever from the hard sciences.”6 Manfred Frank rendered his judgment on the Greimasian strain of structuralism: “The structuralist dream would be death by refrigeration.”7 To be sure, Greimas’s “dynamic system” was no simple continuation of a Proppian narrative morphology, but a series of modifications and transformations that moved into a more radical schematizing theory beyond the folktale into a universal grammar. Greimas was a protean thinker always willing to modify and improve his own theoretical understanding. At the age of 70 he broke through to a radically new approach to semiotics that astonished his critics and admirers. But he was also steadfastly devoted to a belief in structuralism as a scientific pursuit of objective rules with predictive power.

“I Just Can’t Quit You”

25

It may seem strange that a professing hermeneut should become as involved with the most committedly objectivist wing of the structuralist movement as Ricoeur did, but the context has to be taken into consideration. The modern hermeneutics that took root in German soil began as an effort to rescue the humanities from the rationalist impulse to be turned into social sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften. Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s effort to prefer Aristotle’s practical philosophy as a foundation for human judgment over Enlightenmentinspired rationalist dreams found a more receptive soil in a country that had nurtured the Romantic revolt against the rationalist faith. The situation was very different in France at the time of Ricoeur’s turn to hermeneutics. It was in fact the dream of a rigorous scientific approach to the humanities that was instrumental in driving out the stale classicism of the tradition-bound Sorbonne in the 1950s and 1960s.8 A new generation of rebellious young bloods deployed the audacious novelty of social scientific approaches to literature and philosophy to pry an entrenched Mandarin class loose from their institutional hold on the university system.9 So at that time structuralism served as a subversive force, both in relation to traditional linguistic studies, and in respect to academic philosophy. The revolutionary activism of France during this period was the spirit, and structuralism the form, of this insurgency. The enormous energy of subversion necessary to undermine the hegemony of the academic status quo was carried by this idea of systematic science. Structuralism, semiotics, linguistics, and narratology were all forms of this blunt force object to attack and supplant the teetering belles lettres tradition. These currents grew and established themselves first in the less prestigious (the École Normale Supérieure, the École Pratique des Hautes Études) and the more regional institutions, and worked their way into the fortress of the Sorbonne. France was also the country of Descartes, less hospitable to the counter-Enlightenment, and Ricoeur clearly did not have as many antibodies to rationalism as his German counterparts. This is clear from his lifelong insistence on the need for scientific explanation to balance the art of interpretive understanding. The concrete way he did this in discourse studies, which was his professed area, was to turn to scientific structuralism as a conversation partner.

Intellectual partnership Ricoeur and Greimas had numerous conversations from the late 1960s to the early 1990s both privately and in public debates and discussions organized around their mutual interests and differing theories. Their relationship

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developed into a genuine friendship marked by respect and honest criticism, by one account “an extraordinary and improbable friendship,” by another, “a loving combat.”10 The public engagements were characterized at the time as debates between leading proponents of two schools of thought, hermeneutics and structuralism. The published records that we have of these encounters show Ricoeur to have been the suitor; it is he who took the initiative to approach Greimas with the issues that separated them, outlining his concerns in great depth, soliciting responses, making criticisms, and making explicit recommendations for where Greimas’s theory might develop in a hermeneutic direction. Greimas occupied the role of respondent in these encounters, and showed a genuine openness to Ricoeur’s critiques. He characterized his theorizing as a work in progress, and tried to give credence to the criticism where he could. In Paul Perron’s estimate Ricoeur’s 1980 critical paper “had a strong impact on” Greimas and was “instrumental in bringing about a reevaluation” of his theory.11 There was less of a reciprocal critique from Greimas to Ricoeur at least in the published statements, and one senses that the engagement had more to do with Ricoeur’s effort to come to terms with and make common cause with structuralism to the extent that he could. He saw the two movements of thought, hermeneutics and structuralism, as durable paradigmatic perspectives that corrected each other’s weaknesses. Ricoeur’s opening remarks to his 1984 debate with Greimas provides the nature of this relationship: “Coming from the disciplines of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I was first interested in the way semiotics responds to the aporias of hermeneutics, which is fundamentally based on the notion of preunderstanding that is necessary before scientific discourse on literature and more specifically on narrative can be elaborated.”12 In 1963 Ricoeur defined hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline, “thought recovering meaning suspended within a system of symbols,” and structuralist anthropology as a science that works “as its support” in examining at a distance what is to be appropriated.13 In 1989, he placed the two disciplines in a relationship of reciprocal support (although he reserves a status privilege for hermeneutics): “I would like to define hermeneutics as a type of distribution of explication and understanding, in the sense that explication is the path or route of and toward understanding [le chemin de la compréhension]. Thus there is a sort of mediatization of understanding by explication, but understanding remains the dominant.”14 He then defined “structural semiotics” as “another kind of putting-to-work of the same relationship between explication and understanding, but under the condition of a methodological reversal which gives primacy to explication and works to situate understanding on a map

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of surface effects” (196). Ricoeur was quite explicit that this “renversement méthologique” is not “a relationship of adversity, but an inverse relationship in ordering the methodological priorities” (196). So whereas Ricoeur privileges hermeneutics as the guiding praxis of discursive engagement, understanding is one moment or phase that takes the complement of explanation. Ricoeur offered a very concrete example of this passage that specifies the nature of the two “stages.” Since he was speaking of his friendship with Greimas in his talk, as well as the friendship described in the Maupassant short story that was the subject of Greimas’s book, Ricoeur continued with the human example of friendship to illustrate the difference between anecdotes and literature, and the consequent need for a methodological analysis: In introducing a friend, one begins by recounting where and when the friendship began, and the account is itself a part of the world of these acts. But literature rips the narrator from his life context in order to make a world-in-itself through this capacity of the literary to carve out its own space. Semiotics arrives at this break or interruption that literature creates in order to ratify it, to consolidate and structure it with operations that belong to its game with language. Thus it is this relationship in its fullest understanding to the comprehensive knowledge of plots of all the stories we have ever believed in our lives, and by which we have been formed and educated, and by which we have developed the shape of our narrative identity, which calls upon explication not as an adversary but as its complement and mediator.15

Natural human understanding “calls upon” explanation because textuality is introduced. To the extent that Ricoeur understood hermeneutics as a practice grounded in textual interpretation this is not an inconsistent move, but such a framing is not at all uncontroversial, and its adoption explains a great deal about Ricoeur’s rapport with structural semiotics. The operations of linguistic analysis that are deployed, to use his language, to ratify, consolidate, and structure the narrative that was intuitively organized and recounted are the complement and the mediator of the creative act of telling. Well, this was the case in an academic experiment that divided these tasks in just this way (EHESS), but does that experiment secure the nature of this relationship, or merely describe one method of approach? Might it not also be the case that a storyteller is intimately engaged in questions of structure while she or he is creating or performing a story, and audiences are weighing the plausibility of narrative moves as they take in the story, their willingness to be absorbed in the world of the storyteller depending on these assessments?

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When the popular media began noticing the structuralist movement in 1967 and 1968 as a hot commodity, “its foundations were being fissured, and the will to go beyond or radicalize the phenomenon was already in place.”16 The creations of new journals devoted to the movement occurred at the same time that “authors of the books being discussed became increasingly mistrustful of their transformation into part of a passing fashion” (77). The student protests of 1968 were both a political boon to the institutional investiture of structuralism and simultaneously the death knell of its theoretical ascendancy. Its hermetic pretensions to pure formalism began to unspool under the clear eye of real events in the streets. The discrediting of its totalizing ambitions led, in Dosse’s timeline, to the collapse of the structuralist paradigm by the mid-1970s:  “The idea fell apart, the cultivated narcissistic illusions were over; it was painful because some had devoted their lives to it.”17 If I may alter a standard formula slightly, structuralism became a victim of its own excess, a typically French exaggeration that served in its own time the necessary political function of shaking up the French academy and deposing an old regime that had passed its sell-by date, but whose own outsized ambitions could not be sustained for long. My substantive critique of Ricoeur’s appropriating gesture will match up with this historical judgment. The way in which Ricoeur wanted to conform structuralism and hermeneutics is untenable because of the self-defeating exaggeration that resides at the heart of structuralism. Ricoeur understood this exaggeration, and I want to try to get to the bottom of his desire to save structuralism from itself. This is why the figure of Greimas is so significant in this exercise. His “algorithmic” ambition was formed in childhood as a kind of prime directive, he announced with regularity that it was the orienting goal of his entire effort, and it resounds throughout his work and his mode of thought with such clarity that it makes of Ricoeur’s unflagging effort to convert him, at the very least, odd.18 At the same time, there were any number of structuralist strains that were far more congenial to a hermeneutic perspective, but these were the ones Ricoeur rejected out of hand.

Scientific structuralism and literature No amount of elaboration, qualification, or modification seems to have altered Greimas’s algorithmic ambitions, and we can see that despite Ricoeur’s direct pressure and a remarkable flexibility, Greimas always defaulted back, like an unpinned sapling, to his original intention. He was in search of an invariant

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narrative algebra that could explain even the richest and most complex works of literary art. In a 1974 interview he was as blunt as he could be: “[E]very scientific approach is reductionist by definition—and it cannot be otherwise . . . Scientific research is first of all a research for invariants . . . Linguists have never tried to fool anybody.”19 Perhaps the most telling illustration of Greimas’s bend-but-not-break instinct is the last part of the 1984 debate with Ricoeur. Greimas elaborates his surfacefigure/depth-meaning distinction by offering that the depth-surface relationship has different ratios. Ricoeur took this elaboration up: “But I wonder whether the initial model [of depth and surface] is not undermined by this expansion, and whether the price to pay for such an expansion is not a complete reformulation of the basic terms of depth and surface” (297). What Ricoeur wants is for Greimas to abandon categorial subsumption for a hermeneutic dialectic of the particular and the general. But this is equivalent to the prophet who demands, “Change yourself!” Greimas’s response is to retreat. After apologizing for “the extremely poor tools” the semiotician possesses “to speak about the secret of language,” he reasserted that operations “of transcoding are the only means we have to grasp signification,” and that when he approaches a narrative text, he is “obliged to try and translate it” (299). Greimas’s pursuit of what he called “scientific structuralism” involves the search for “the minimal conditions for the appearance, apprehension, and/ or production of meaning.”20 This search led him to what he called a “modal grammar,” the most elemental communicable constituents of story logic, which were something like the generative grammar that Chomsky theorized to be universal and invariant. For Greimas these structures exist prior to and behind language as conditions of possibility, “not a knowing-how but a causing to know” (542). What Greimas did in his close analysis of literary works, then, was to transcode the text back into this “basic syntactic form of the organization of the world” (543). Anthropomorphic concepts such as characters and actions are translated into syntactic functions such as actants, conjunctions, and transformations. Greimas thought he had succeeded in boiling this logic down to a very few communicative functions by which one human being or group sanctions or manipulates another, and that these basic functions are behind every move in an act of storytelling. As we will see, this transcoding takes on an almost fanatical density when his workshop applies it to the sentence-by-sentence analyses of actual literary works. No matter how many interfaces interposed between an algebra of functions and Shakespeare, the goal is always a reduction. The story is “a kind of funnel into

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which the narrative structures are poured drop by drop.”21 We are not aided in our appreciation of a remarkable literary expression by showing that it can be reduced to a series of functions, because what is valuable in the expression is precisely the uniqueness of its appropriation of narrative conventions. Let us take the two literary case studies Greimas chooses to see if this is not the case, or what it is precisely that Ricoeur sees in this project that aids the work of understanding.

“La Ficelle” Greimas’s original intention was to analyze all of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant in order to demonstrate how a standard narrative text, which he regarded as its surface structure, is organized according to deep structure combinations of basic narrative functions. He only started this project, and he began with two of the recognized masterpieces in the corpus. Now, Maupassant’s literary output was uneven, and these two stories show him at the apex of his powers. He wrote for a living, and many of his stories were experiments, some trivial, some failed. Often a story reads more like a sociological observation with little dramatic force, at other times a story will turn on a slight irony or a silly joke. He walked up some blind alleys, and indulged in some petty exercises. But in the process of experimentation a number of his efforts became works of such disquieting power and beauty that we recognize them to be what Gadamer called “eminent texts”—texts that we have to return to again and again for their inexhaustible capacity to speak to us. It is perfectly fair that Greimas treats all these stories, the masterpieces and the trivial experiments, with the same analytic knife, but we will want to ask if his method helps us appreciate the character of the achievement of his masterpieces. If hermeneutics is a paideia, it has something to do with interpretive understanding, and scientific projects are useful to it if they can connect up to the question of judgment and understanding somewhere along the way. My concern is that, as Greimas’s transcoding project unfolds, it is difficult not to think of Wordsworth’s phrase, “We murder to dissect.” Does transcoding hope to aid interpretive judgment or make it irrelevant? “La Ficelle” is a little tragicomedy about a peasant farmer who, after having been falsely accused of a petty crime, tries fecklessly to remove the social shame attached, the compulsive pursuit of which spirals into an obsession that takes over his life and ultimately destroys him. The unhappy convergence of misunderstanding, malice, weakness, and social inflexibility unfolds so irresistibly in the telling that it feels as though events were produced by a kind of

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fate, and the picture of the destiny that the story conjures lingers in our memory in its dreadful perfection. The tale opens with a panoramic description of market day in Normandy, the country folk drifting toward town in an anonymous sea of humanity, a description filling three pages, fully a third of the story. The narrative is clinical and unsparing—on the farmers dragging their produce to market, for instance: They were deformed from pushing the plough which makes the left-shoulder higher, and bends their figures side-ways; from reaping the grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on their feet. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as though varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little embroidered design and blown out around their bony bodies, looked very much like balloons about to soar, whence issued two arms and two feet.22

Matching the specific physical deformities on display with the corresponding agricultural labor suggests at first the pathos of social realism, but immediately the details of starched dress evoke the incongruous vanity of the peasant laborers in their Sunday best, and then as quickly a shift to farce with the whimsical image of human flotation. Such narrative condensation keeps rhythm with the sweeping movement of the crowd, a human comedy. But against this moving backdrop, a little man stops to pick up a little piece of string, and the little drama that ensues from out of this still image stands out all the more starkly: Maître Hauchecorne, of Bréauté, had just arrived at Goderville and was making his way toward the square when he perceived on the ground a little piece of string. Maître Hauchecorne, economical as are all true Normans, reflected that everything was worth picking up which could be of any use, and he stepped down, but painfully, because he suffered from rheumatism. He took the bit of thin string from the ground and was carefully preparing to roll it up when he saw Maître Malandain, the harness maker, on his doorstep starting at him. They had once had a quarrel about a halter, and they had borne each other malice ever since. Maître Hauchecorne was overcome with a sort of shame at being seen by his enemy picking up a bit of string in the road. He quickly hid it beneath his blouse and then slipped it into his breeches pocket, then pretended to be still looking for something on the ground which he did not discover and finally went off to the market-place, his head bent forward and his body almost doubled in two by rheumatic pains.23

The little scene of the string has, in retrospect, a beautifully modulated design as a structure for the circulation of dramatic irony. The motivational logic of Maître Hauchecorne’s actions, first to indulge an acquisitive urge which he

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rationalizes as thrift, then to be caught out in the act by a social competitor—his lifelong nemesis—and then to attempt out of vanity to conceal the trivial fact, displays a tiny human weakness that enters it into the register of the comic. But of course the consequences of this little pantomime will be quite the reverse in the measure of Maître Hauchecorne’s life, and we somehow sense something of this consequence. The calculated impact of the story has much to do with this tension between the slightness of the precipitating act and the eventual result, but the character of Hauchecorne’s inciting gesture is also interwoven in the character of his tragedy, the background of penury in which resentments and recriminations are the stuff of life. There is something poignant in the way Hauchecorne’s misfortunes stem from his little venality; the disproportion is at war with itself, the pettiness of the act and the destitution it begets. That his predicament spins out of control touches on something inaccessible about the relationship of fault and fate; that they are not related to each other in any measure of justice but rather in some indecipherable but implacable law. Greimas turns to “La Ficelle” as a test case to create “the most objective identification criteria possible” for a predictive model of story structure.24 He says quite openly that he is in search of “the deep organization of the text considered as a signifying whole” in service of a “model of predictability” for narrative practice (625, 617). The narrative structures Greimas discovers in his textual analyses, he assures us, will serve “as models enabling us to predict narrative unfolding” (615). The intent of the method is that “formal segmentation procedures progressively replace our intuitive comprehension of the text and its articulations” (615, emphasis added). Why would hermeneutics want to have anything to do with the replacement of comprehension? Greimas’s formal study of the short story focuses on its segmentation under the aspects of time (a circular pattern), knowledge (the confrontation of social knowledge and individual knowledge), grammar (descriptive vs. event sequences), and semantics (e.g., a quest structure embodying “the figurative manifestation of desire”).25 Each of these dimensions are given brief treatments except for the last—semantics—which takes up most of the analysis. In the semantics section, “La Ficelle” is conceived as a determinate product of narrative logic and cultural convention. Here, for instance, is how Greimas talks about the conclusion of the story:  “According to nineteenth-century conventions, bringing the descriptive part of the text to a close offers the writer the possibility of manifesting his ‘art’ by ending with a flourish” (623). This observation acknowledges the working of authorial agency, but only according to the

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affordances of narrative convention. Stipulating that this observation is correct, I  would rush to add that the conventional function does not foreclose many other ways the ending could be serving the narrative, although the method has foreclosed them. The polemical thrust of a philosophical hermeneutics was to resist the reductive tendencies of scientific method, and Greimas is going in exactly the opposite direction. Greimas does have one genuinely powerful critical insight about “La Ficelle,” but how this insight sits within his overall analysis is significant. Following the standard protocol of the scientific research paper, he includes a section at the end of his essay for noting potential weaknesses of the study, and he acknowledges that his “brief analysis . . . raises a certain number of problems.”26 One of these problems is that the meaning function of the descriptive section (of the town and the populace) and the narrative section (the account of events) are at odds with one another, and the result is “the tragic confrontation of two types of knowledge which are both true but nonetheless placed in contradiction” (626). This structural tension apparently does not help him in the effort to establish units of analysis that can be classified and stored for his “model of predictability.” But rather than probing this rich contradiction for insights, it sits in a codicil to the study where it can be safely shelved. For a hermeneut, this strategy would be critical malpractice. Such a tragic contradiction should serve as the generative ground for reflection, not an observation noted and forgotten on the way to the desideratum of a classificatory scheme. The problem that Greimas’s analysis presents for literary criticism is not simply that it seeks to bypass, but rather that it effectively erases the uniqueness of the text by translating into a generalizable unit of analysis. The question then becomes how Ricoeur can appropriate this practice into a hermeneutic frame. In the interests of fairness, I want to offer a subtler example of Greimas’s method before answering this question.

“Les Deux Amis” Maupassant:  The Semiotics of Text, Practical Exercises, which Ricoeur enthusiastically endorses as “Greimas’s wonderful book,” is explained by Greimas himself as “un échantillon d’exercises pratiques,” a specimen of the kind of classroom demonstration most often practiced in anatomy class, but which Greimas compares to the fieldwork of the ethnologist/ethnographer.27 This analogy is inspired by Vladimir Propp’s demonstration of the syntagmatic organization of childhood fairy-tales, which was a kind of ethnographic

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fieldwork. Greimas’s project was deeply informed by Propp’s approach, and the basic method of identification, extraction, and combination of functions, modularity, and unit interchangeability is the same. Following Propp, Greimas’s goal was “a certain way of approaching texts, with procedures of segmentation, with the identification of certain regularities and especially with models of predictability of narrative organization, models which can be applied, in principle, to all types of texts and even, by an extrapolation which appears justified, to more or less stereotyped sequences of human behavior.”28 This methodological description features most of the hallmarks of inductive empirical research—the establishment of models for universal application, the determination of stereotypical characteristics belonging to a generic group, and the search for regularities for the purpose of prediction. One wonders, given the forthright nature of the stated goal, which runs exactly counter to the hermeneutic aspiration to value the particular in its context and to understand the force of aesthetic truth as a unique expression, how Ricoeur will approach this kind of structuralism. Greimas’s stated goal for analyzing the work of art reads like a blueprint for Gadamer’s polemical target. This is at the very least a serious test for Ricoeur’s hybridizing project. When Greimas wrote Maupassant, he clearly meant it as a tour de force. From “an apparently simple narrative produced by a rather old-fashioned writer” of six pages in length he engages in an analysis that runs to almost three hundred pages of paragraph-by-paragraph, and in some sections, lineby-line close textual analysis.29 His choice of texts is dictated by his goal of generalizing out from a typical sample, and it is precisely for this reason, in the introduction to the work, that he attacks the then-current practice of French semioticians who were choosing peculiar, obscure, or avant-garde texts for their analysis. This is an important aspect of his work’s justification in light of its theoretical moment. Maupassant came out five years after Roland Barthes’ S/Z, an exemplar of the sort of work Greimas has in mind when he says that “some will insist on the uniqueness of every text, each in itself constituting a universe, and then will postulate the necessity of constructing an individual grammar for each such text.”30 Instead, Greimas feels that a semiotic grammar should “account for the production and the reading of a large number of texts” (xxv). Thus the new individual grammar approach is evidence that “the semiotic project has indeed been abandoned” (xxv). Barthes had signaled his apostasy from the dream of scientificity as early as 1970 when he confessed that his own early dream of a universal system of signs was a delusion: “[W]e shall . . . extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall

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make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to any one narrative; a task as exhausting (ninety-nine percent perspiration, as the saying goes) as it is ultimately undesirable, for the text thereby loses its difference.”31 Greimas’s fervent pursuit of a narrative algebra was written in the teeth of this objection. “Les Deux Amis” is the story of two old Parisian friends, a merchant and clock-maker, who meet by chance during the occupation and decide for old time’s sake to revive the habit of fishing together in a park on the outskirts of the city. It is a bit risky because the lake is in occupied territory, and indeed a Prussian officer with his armed guards descend upon them. The officer promises to let them go if they give him the password for getting through the advance posts, but they refuse and he has them executed. The power of the story lies in the two starkly different worlds that are brought together by this confrontation on the fishing spot; the idyll of a previous time in the lives of these two friends, the beauty of which Maupassant evokes with endearing touches, and the brutal nightmare of the occupation embodied in the officer’s concrete act of violence. The Prussian officer is a memorable character. He speaks in the language of fairy tales—“I will grant you one wish”—adopting the role of Destiny and laying a fateful choice before the friends. One senses that he has spent the occupation refining such performances, and that he genuinely enjoys them. The apex of Greimas’s analysis is his discovery of the dramatic irony of the sacrificial meal that ends the tale. This is because, symbolically, the two French loyalists whom the Prussian officer fed to the fish will now be fed to the officer when he “has them fried up for himself.”32 By transposing the various interactions between fish and man in the story—catching and eating fish, offering fish as gifts, being fed to the fish—Greimas notes a series of dramatic reversals that establish a symbolic valence against the ostensible sacrificial triumph of the two friends who refuse to give the Prussian officer the code-word he needs. Symbolically at least, the officer has the last word. In the course of his investigation, Greimas discovers that the narrative itself engages in a reframing that splits the interpretive locus of the story. The Prussian officer is the cause of this split when he himself shifts the framing. He has the two friends brought before him and explains to them his position: “For me you are two spies.” From this point on he directs the staging of the drama and provides a running commentary to guide the interpretation of the events. Of course, as Greimas notes, a narrative text by its very nature does not give the officer such an imperious control over the reader’s sightline, and other interpretive possibilities that have developed in the story continue to

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assert themselves. The result is a dramatic meaning that remains in tension, and, to be fair, Greimas does justice to this effect: But the event is always ambiguous, if only because it is made up of a meeting of two subjects and the confrontation of two contrary doings. And if the officer, sitting astride his chair and quietly smoking his pipe, is indeed the serene incarnation of sovereign power, we should not forget that he is also governed by a doing which surpasses him. The officer is the victim of the illusion that makes him the subject of wanting—the dish of fried fish for the moment is only a project and a promise, and he unsuspectingly expects to receive the gift of the fish. The reading is suspended, unable to decide and, consequently, is not the quest for what is “greater than death” simply an aberration?33

The contrast between the fishermen’s concrete victory and the officer’s symbolic victory creates an unresolved narrative tension that feeds the tragic resonance of the tale as food for thought. This fine critical insight that ends Greimas’s close textual analysis has the embarrassing distinction of undermining his argument in chief. His exhortation that “we should not forget” is the wise council of the critic who perceives an operative relationship in this particular text, one that distinguishes it. Are we to understand that a calculus of replicable combinations should lead us to this astute observation? In the “Final Remarks” that follow this closing critical observation Greimas reaffirms with remarkable bluntness that that is exactly what he is saying. The goal of his procedure is what he calls “automatic analysis,” a procedure that he describes as “auto-didactic.”34 In his view “the practice of the text can lead to theoretical considerations going beyond its singularity by transforming the ‘problematic’ into operational concepts and methodological parameters” (245). The automatic analysis of this “scientific structuralism” should result in a “simulacrum” of the text (246).35 Greimas reframes his final critical insight as a calculation produced by this auto-didactic process, and he repeats the insight by using the algebraic shorthand he has developed in the application of the semiotic square throughout the book:  S2’s NP could be read as a victory on the plane of seeming and as a failure on that of being and, inversely, S1’s NP ended in an apparent failure and a real victory . . . the contract binding the enunciator to the enunciate brings to the fore the changes and the modulations of the isotopies, preparing the passages from illusion to reality and from reality to an anagogical sur-reality. (246)

Is it truly the case that Greimas’s painstaking sectioning of the narrative text automatically produces a definitive interpretation? Is the insight that the

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story produces an unresolved meaning suspended between two interpretative frames a simulacrum? A  hermeneut would say, rather, that it is a dialogic response that may excite further conversation, further understanding or misunderstanding, and that instead of “going beyond its singularity,” such a conversation would rather affirm its singularity. “The Two Friends” is an eminent text precisely because it engenders a surplus of readings that remain open to new contexts. But more pertinent is to ask how Greimas’s interpretive insight relates to his own semiotic goal in writing Maupassant. His stated aim was to use these analyses of individual stories to find, test, and confirm the universal algebra of a pre-linguistic narrative competency. One could accept that the discovery of the dramatic irony of a symbolic inversion as the denouement of this moral tale through the analysis of a semiotic square helps Greimas test the efficacy of his functional relations. His painstaking transcoding demonstrates at least a plausible connection between Maupassant’s narrative moves and what he calls “deep structures.” But at the end of the day, even if this exercise helps in the work of confirmation, that would be merely a post facto assurance that the story’s elaborate symbolic meaning can be included in the algebra; it does not say that the algebra would produce such rich narrative tales. So in the best case what we would have is further evidence for the consistency of a transcoding system, and no addition to the theoretical apparatus of literary criticism.

Ricoeur’s critique of Greimasian structuralism Ricoeur’s passionate interest in Greimas’s project has less to do with narrative and narratology than it does with the relationship between the most rudimentary sense-making (explored in the French culture of his time as semiotics), the “basic grammar” of language (subject, predicate, reflexive pronoun, etc.), and its contributions to the constitution of personhood. It is because Greimas expends so much effort forging a logical relationship between pre-narrative schematic structures of sense, articulation, or utterance, and the wanting and doing of human agents that he provides a canvas for Ricoeur’s own effort to find these continuities. Greimas is in search of a universal semiotics that grounds the entire system, and so his solutions are shaped by his belief that discourse will or should be amenable to scientific description, explanation, and prediction. Ricoeur’s engagement is partly an effort to shake Greimas loose from this controlling desire (“the dream of making linguistics an algebra of language”), or at least some of

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its consequences, and Ricoeur makes some progress in this direction.36 Thus Ricoeur pushed Greimas successfully in the 1984 debate to outline a Kantian theory of regulative schemas that is more supple than a strict understanding of the famous “semiotic square.” And in his close analysis of the Greimasian system in 1980, Ricoeur attempted to salvage what is useful in the Greimasian system after he had attacked its most unhermeneutic assumptions. Ricoeur’s own project—to hybridize speech-act theory and hermeneutic phenomenology to come up with a working account of human identity and action that approaches the explanatory force of scientific description—is a creditable heuristic that succeeds in robbing the use of the term “human science” of some of its rigidity. The question is why he chose Greimas as his favored representative of French structuralism to test the potential for a rapprochement. Ricoeur defines the relationship of semiotic analysis to narrative understanding in the 1984 essay “On Narrativity.” Semiotics is, in his language, a “second-order intelligibility” or “second-order rationality” that follows after, but “without being subordinated to, the “first-order intelligibility” of the reader who simply follows a narrative.37 Now, semiotic analysis is the practice of semioticians, but we know that Ricoeur expected the insights of this kind of second-order analyses to somehow feed into the literary appreciation of works as they are experienced.38 So presumably literary semiotics would function as an aid to reading in the cultural reception of literary texts. But how would this happen if hermeneutics were to collaborate with Greimas’s researchers as EHESS? This is where I think the relation of orders or levels breaks down. The scientific analysis of ocean currents or malignant cell replication will have a direct impact on sea travel and personal health, but applied weather research and cruise vacations are not on the same level at all; one is instrumental and the other is experiential. A reading public that consumes literature might certainly benefit by exposure to professional criticism, but Greimasian analysis is not turned in this direction. He wants to discover the invariant principles of narrative types. How would semiotic research of this kind diffuse through education to an informed reading public? If the interaction of first-order intelligibility and second-order intelligibility is meant to operate instead simply on the level of research, how do the results of this research reach the lay reading public? It is quite clear in Ricoeur’s description that he, Ricoeur, is thinking about the general competence of reading literature when he claims that semiotics “increases the readability of texts which we have already understood to a certain extent without the help of semiotics.”39 Ricoeur introduces an analogy that may help:

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This can be compared to what happens in the field of history, where there is a sense of belonging, a tradition of having expectations of the future. Thus, there is a kind of inner intelligence, an intelligibility of the historicality that characterizes us. But when historians bring their rules of explanation to bear on a topic, an inquiry and a dialectic is introduced between first-order intelligibility, the intelligibility of being historical, and historiography, the writing of history.40

Academic historical research is made available to journalists, students of history, lay readers, and so on, and even where it is highly specialized it filters down through layers of experts eventually to historical explanation that helps shape a society’s own self-understanding. So we can see here a direct if mediated passage from expert to layperson. The historian might use highly refined methodologies and techniques that yield information not requiring such a level of expertise for comprehension but there is a direct line of descent. Does the analogy hold for Greimasian semiotics? Here is where we should pay close attention to what Greimas himself says. He distances himself from Ricoeur’s suggestions of a partnership with hermeneutics by pointing out that he is engaged in analysis at a wholly different level, and he explains this difference in terms of the category of deep structures: “The deeper level we try to establish is the level of abstract operations, that is to say, operations in which the operating subject is no longer a human subject but, just as science demands, a substitutable subject. This is what guarantees the transmissibility of scientific knowledge.”41 How does this align with the ongoing dialogue of first- and second-order history in Ricoeur? The results of Greimas’s semiotic research will be substitutable knowledge, that is, information about the literary text that is not meant either for public consumption of literary texts or for the educator who nurtures critical judgment, but rather for a scientific community who can produce truth claims about literature as a cultural product in the same way social theorists can produce knowledge about mating rituals or entomologists about the insect kingdom. It is important to understand the specific alteration to structural theory that Ricoeur wanted to persuade Greimas to undertake, because it might clarify how Ricoeur wants to use semiotics to improve philosophical hermeneutics. At least initially Greimas described a traditionally dualist model of narrative in which invariant deep structures were the basic syntax of the infinite variations of storytelling. The storyteller uses figurative language to “clothe” recurring structures in individual expressions.42 Ricoeur remonstrates that figures are not just garments, and that in fact figuration is transformative of the structures themselves. Hermeneutics borrows from Aristotle here by asserting that deep

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structures are only really “a virtual mode of existence,” and that what actually emerges is a dialect that is embodied in particular expressions.43 Ricoeur goes one step further and suggests exchanging the theological concept of typology for the concept of structure, which holds that new iterations of an original model actually work backwards to change the model itself, in the same way that Jesus both repeated, fulfilled, and transformed the archetypal role of God’s messenger in scripture. Thus Ricoeur reverses the order of privilege between deep and surface structure, making surface structure as the generative principle that continually transforms deep structure itself. In all of the three major engagements with Greimas that we have, Ricoeur pursues the same essential critical purpose. He wants Greimas to modify the structuralist view of inalterable, universal deep structures with regard to which the surface manifestations of speech, storytelling, and literature are merely expressions. Time and again Ricoeur pushes from the other direction, insisting that it is the inexhaustible invention of storytelling that modifies the generic structures. The circular movement from performance to schema and back again is the thread that runs through the whole of Ricoeur’s critical analysis. This is standard hermeneutics, and Ricoeur is unapologetic in pressing Greimas to look at the matter in this way. In “Structure, Word, Event” (1968), Ricoeur gives this general strategy some precision, setting “word” in between structure (system) and event (act) as the modulating term between these disparate “levels” of meaning.44 Word has a generative capacity in the middle space because of its “regulated polysemy,” that is, an entity that is “capable of acquiring new dimensions of meaning without losing the old ones” (93). The performative event of speech brings the structure into contact with contingent circumstance, and in that detonation of meaning a world is created, not before. In Ricoeur’s face-to-face appeal to Greimas in the 1984 exchange, Ricoeur uses the rhetorical concept of figuration to reverse the generative order that Greimas sets up from simple to complex units. Ricoeur describes figural invention as “a sort of series of successive explosions that produce a totality.”45 All of these appeals in the various settings are saying the same thing, and they are echoing the bedrock hermeneutic doctrine, borrowed from rhetoric, that social meaning is created out of the dialectical tension between convention and invention. The discursive imagination (heuresis) deploys all the tools of the rhetorical armament to help an audience make the leap from their conventional expectations to something new. This is all too much for Greimas, and although he concedes that the clothing metaphor was unfortunate, he always reverts back ultimately to discovering “operations of transcoding” that will help structural semiotics get closer to

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capturing a “totality of meaning.”46 This is quite hopeless, and the enigma is why Ricoeur didn’t sense this and instead invested so much effort in attempting to convince his intellectual partner of such a radically different purpose. It would seem that Ricoeur was a suitor in a relationship, who wants to change the person he is pursuing. Ricoeur wanted to tap into semiotics because it “increases the readability of texts,” a humanistic project that points away from the scientific ambition of universal knowledge production.47 Significant parts of a 1989 exchange between Ricoeur and Greimas were transcribed and published by Anne Hënault, and in this late encounter the same tendencies we have seen in the previous dialogues are expressed even more strongly. Ricoeur’s main effort in the meeting was to get Greimas to see that the move he was then undertaking to go from a “narrative semiotics” to a “semiotics of the passions” makes the crucial error of reducing felt experience into a scientific structure, and that the actual experience of an emotion is an irreducible feature of passion that cannot be translated into an objective formula. Greimas saw the relation between “états de choses—états d’âmes” as running in parallel.48 Again, the anachronistic character of this conversation is astonishing; it feels like a regression to logical positivism, the mind in the machine, and so on. And yet Greimas continues to speak about a “rational simulation” of “les êtats d’âmes,” states of mind or emotional states (202). Ricoeur’s praise of Maupassant is fulsome, and he says something about it that is simply remarkable: I attach a great deal of importance to the book Maupassant; for me it is a very great book. One could almost say that there is no word, no scansion in Maupassant’s short story which is not justified—and here I say, that as a result of this explication, I discover much that I would not have understood simply by reading it myself in an ordinary way, and in particular the famous fishing catch that is offered by the dead, or more precisely which the non-dead offers to its enemy. Is this not a miraculous catch? There is a sort of myth-icization which would not have been seen without the semiotic square. (200; my translation, emphasis added)

It is astonishing to me that Ricoeur claims that the critical insight in Greimas’s analysis of “Les Deux Amis” would not have been possible without the semiotic square. Literary criticism, frankly, would have no difficulty reaching this observation and many more about the text that are just as illuminating, and as I think you can see, Greimas’s algorithms are less responsible for the wonderful observation than the observant insight of the reader at that particular point in the analysis. The rigor of a close reading should not be confused with classification

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as an end in itself, and it is hard to see how to square the latter with rigorous judgment. But even more problematic is the clarity with which Ricoeur lays out what he regards as a paradigmatic balance between Greimasian semiotics and hermeneutic understanding.

The problem with semiotics as counterweight The hermeneutic correction Ricoeur proposed to Greimas was not something that Greimas ultimately embraced, even if his project underwent significant modifications as a result of Ricoeur’s critique. Nevertheless, Ricoeur maintained throughout that what Greimas was doing on the structural side had genuine value. Ricoeur saw a structuralist approach to explanation as a worthy counterweight to the hermeneutic focus on understanding, and his attempts to modify the Greimasian framework can be read as a partial validation of the structuralist enterprise. Because he positioned structuralism and hermeneutics as a kind of balancing pair in relation to the functions of explanation and understanding, he must have felt that its development of inventories and of narrative syntax complemented his own hermeneutic project. But his embrace of the extreme case—Greimas among all the flavors of structuralism that he could have chosen— worries me. Although he attacks the notion of a closed system vigorously, he sees the inventories of elements and their algebra Greimas’s researchers are busily constructing as productive work to be integrated into a hermeneutic enterprise. “To recognize the mixed nature of Greimas’s model is not at all to refute it: on the contrary, it is to clarify the conditions of its application and to explain to the reader of works stemming from this school why the semiotic square sometimes seems to have a true heurist value.”49 Ricoeur champions the rhetorical and hermeneutic insight that conventional discursive forms are always in a process of formation and destruction.50 From a methodological point of view, it would make no sense to segregate inventory work from treatment of the instability and generativity that give those inventories birth. That would be a wholly artificial separation that would distort a proper understanding of generic form. And yet this segregation is exactly what Lévi-Strauss and Greimas had in mind, and it was at the dead center of their programmatic efforts. So what draws Ricoeur to this project? When Ricoeur told Gadamer in a debate that codes of literature are amenable to explanatory methods of scientific classification, even though they must give way, in a second moment, to an interpretive decoding, Gadamer responded:

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“I have no doubt that one can elaborate and use many forms of explanation. There is not just structuralism; there are many other ways to interpret a text. I  certainly need a great deal of knowledge about language and historical conditions and cultural habits and so on, that is one thing.”51 But hermeneutics privileges the encounter with a single text rather than the chasing after some universal calculus, so that any explanation at the point of such an encounter subsides into the background. Even if Greimas could discover his mythical algebra, what could a reader do with it? It would be of very little use to the interpreter, as Gadamer says, who must “live through [the text’s] meaning in concrete fullness” (236). After responding to Ricoeur in the way that he did, Gadamer made the rather prophetic assessment that Ricoeur was attempting “a reintegration of a disintegrating system of special approaches,” an apt description of Ricoeur’s effort to salvage Greimasian semiotics (236). Ricoeur attempts a mediation between structuralism and hermeneutics by describing the circular nature of hermeneutic understanding in narrative effectively, but he likes the equipoise of the two projects. I think this gives too much authority to the second-order analysis that is pushing for an algebra— this urge seems inextinguishable (the enormous recent success of cognitivist approaches to literature, the study of figures, philosophy, etc. is only the latest instance of this irrepressibility)—so I want to encourage hermeneutics to look for a different sort of collaborator. Here I will show that such a collaborator was available to Ricoeur at the time, a structuralist who understood the secondorder role of the unit analysis in a more properly hermeneutic spirit, and one, ironically, whom Ricoeur treated only critically.

Genette’s option Ricoeur includes an eight-page critique of Genette’s structural analysis of Remembrance of Things Past in the second volume of Time and Narrative. It is in the main an attack on Genette’s narratology, which Ricoeur argues typifies the limitations of narratology in general. Genette’s ambition to document the “features that can be discerned, analyzed, and classified by an exact narrotological science,” writes Ricoeur, has the tendency “to reduce vision to style,” proposing a complex Proustian temporal syntax in which, by itself, “nothing was at stake.”52 Beyond the mere description of “a simple game with time,” Ricoeur thinks the meaning of a work such as the Remembrance is not reducible to narrative technique, but resides with “the intention that carries the text beyond itself,

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toward an experience” (87). Genette’s failure, according to Ricoeur, was to have left unconsidered or minimized the space between the experience of the characters “inside” the novel and the narrator’s relationship to the reader in the act of narration itself. Attention to this communicative dimension is something “that narratology, by decree and as a result of its strict methodology, sets out of bounds” (87). That Genette did not treat adequately the meaning relation between the outward turning narrative voice and the internal narrative structures is a fair point that creates a space for Ricoeur’s own project, but beyond this, I  wish to affirm that Ricoeur’s evaluation of Genette’s analysis is both inaccurate and incomplete. He projects incorrectly onto Genette the faults that he should have leveled against Greimas, and misses Genette’s crucial amendments to the structuralist enterprise that would be most useful to Ricoeur’s effort to integrate explanation and understanding. On the surface Genette’s grammar of narrative temporality attempts the same kind of systematic ambition that characterizes the structuralist directive— an exhaustive system of classification, an unapologetic totalizing ambition for a scientific syntax. The super-ordinant architecture is established under the values of order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice, a hybrid of phonetic and linguistic categories, but underneath these orders are a compendium of rhetorical figures such as analepses, prolepses, ellipses, anachronies, and so on, almost every permutation of the expression of temporality in narrative discourse. The classifications are so exhaustive that they suggest a veritable grammar of narrative temporality, and this would seem to fit right into the structuralist ambition for totalizing systems. But this would be a wrong conclusion. Genette is fully conscious of this propensity, and frames his project so as to steer clear of it. It is in fact the very first issue he tackles in the introduction to his study. He begins by apologizing for the discrepancy between his title and his subject:  “The specific subject of this book is the narrative in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu . . . Readers may already have observed that neither the title nor the subtitle of this book mentions what I  have just designated as its specific subject.”53 This discrepancy is actually Genette’s indirect way of asserting the danger of grand theory, and it provides him the opportunity to describe his alternative approach: “Proustian narrative will seem neglected in favor of more general considerations; or, as they say nowadays, criticism will seem pushed aside by ‘literary theory’ ” (22). His justification amounts to a classic statement of the

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hermeneutic relationship between the particular and the general as it applies to literary criticism: I could justify the ambiguous situation in two very different ways. I  could either—as others have done elsewhere—frankly put the specific subject at the service of the general aim, and critical analysis at the service of theory: in that case the Recherche would be only a pretext, a reservoir of examples, and a flow of illustration for a narrative poetics in which the specific features of the Recherche would vanish into the transcendence of “laws of the genre.” Or on the other hand, I could subordinate poetics to criticism and turn the concepts, classifications, and procedures proposed here into so many ad hoc instruments exclusively intended to allow a more precise description of Proustian narrative in its particularity, the “theoretical” detour being imposed each time by the requirements of methodological clarification. (22)

Genette asserts that he can’t choose between these two shoals, that the Proustian narrative is irreducible, but that it is not “undecomposable” (indécomposable).54 The meaning of the pair irréductible/indécomposable is clear enough in the context; a distinction between a work that its irreducible in the sense that its parts add up something unique, but that the breaking down of the parts shows something about the character of the whole. Genette describes his methodology as a participation in the ongoing reciprocity of the universal and the particular of the text. Despite a colorful series of analogies and metaphors for describing this middle way, the dynamic is essentially dialectical. Genette’s close analysis investigates the use of classical rhetorical techniques (analepses, prolepses, etc.) that manipulate temporal relations at the discursive level, and interrogates how these manipulations function in the narrative. Although he invokes a systematics of temporal figuration, he is fully aware of the dangers of “excess schematization,” noting at one point, for instance, that a certain kind of “schematization does not account for the ‘beauty’ of ” the page, and then goes on to say what he can say about that beauty.55 Most importantly, the structural analysis and the critical evaluation are not two separate activities, but rather give direction and delimit each other’s range of competence throughout. The analysis leads Genette to see how Proust achieves his readerly effects, how rhetorical figures and temporal relations interfuse, how Proustian temporality and Proustian sensibility co-constitute each other. I can illustrate this with a specific example of Genette’s melding of theory and criticism. He references Proust’s frequent use of “iterative prolepses,” that is, the denomination of a certain event as an original that will be repeated

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many times in similar or different forms. Swann kissing Oddette, Marcel coming upon the sea at Balbec, Marcel arriving at the Doncières hotel. The “repetition” of an event is of cardinal importance to the narrator’s theme of time and remembrance because it provides him the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of “the first time.” There are not only repetitions of the same (evenings at Balbec), but repetitions of the like (first occasions of a repeated act), literal repetitions being nested within generic ones. Thus dining with the Guermantes happens once and then many times, a series which in turn echoes dining with Mme. de Villeparisis, the Duchess, or the Princess, each with their own repetitions. That Genette denominates this theme as “iterative prolepsis” is a second-order observation of something that the narrator of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is already doing. The narrative novel in particular has this auto-interpretive power, and Marcel’s (or Proust’s) self-reflexive discourse is in some ways the point of his whole exercise. The narrator thematizes what he calls repetition as an opportunity to think about the relation of an inaugural event to its consequents. The narrative takes advantage of the common sense intuition that the first instance of a repetition will be distinct in power and effect from its sequels; Marcel references the nostalgia of the first experience, but repetition allows him to indulge in more complicated reflections on the nature of memory. Repetition alters the meaning of the first memory, despoils it, perverts it, or makes it inaccessible. Genette amplifies this observation: “[T]he fact that the first time, to the very extent to which one experiences its inaugural value intensely, is at the same time always (already) a last time—if only because it is forever the last to have been the first.”56 Genette’s syntactic analysis is not abstracted from the narrative to be turned toward other narratives. Instead, it adds a further layer of reflection to Marcel’s baroque elaboration of memory as something raised from the simple evocation of raw experience. In examining the narrator’s discursive tools, the critic’s work has distanced itself categorically from the narrative performance, and turned the prose itself into an object for reflection, but not so as to interpose between the reader and the work, as though there ever was a naïve innocence in its rhetorical performance. So the tangle of interpretative layers pass lightly through the break between critic and author as the reader continues to experience this work. It is a bit deceptive to offer just one example of Genette’s technique, because what becomes clear as his analysis unfolds is that it is in the full repertoire of rhetorical figures exposed by his mapping that the reader gains a clearer picture of the temporal matrix of Proustian narrative. This clearer picture, I would assert, can enhance pleasure in the narrative text. I am empowered

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to become a more reflective reader of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, to gain different knowledge and satisfactions from it. The critical knowledge Genette offers deepens appreciation for this text, rather than reifying a text as an example of narrative form for replicable description (Greimas, Maupassant). One critical activity is for readers, the other for a narrative science, whatever that is. This more organic relation I  have sketched out between the critical and creative act is what I miss not only in the Greimasian approach, but in Ricoeur’s descriptions of the function of explanation. The suspicion I  continue to entertain as I study Ricoeur’s effort to give structural analysis its own moment as a dialectical partner to hermeneutics is that he sees these two dimensions of textuality as distinct projects that feed each other but that occur as separate activities. After defining the terrain of hermeneutics in his 1989 debate with Greimas, Ricoeur draws the boundaries for structuralist semiotics: “And I will define structural semiotics as another engagement of the same relation between explanation and understanding, but under the condition of a methodological reversal which gives explanation primacy, and situates understanding on the plane of surface effects” (196; my translation). Structuralism has its own methodology, and Ricoeur emphasizes that this methodological variance between structuralism and hermeneutics is “non pas un rapport d’adversité, mais un rapport inverse” (196). He is always at pains to insist on the legitimacy of the structuralist approach as an approach, and his expressed admiration for the analytic projects that Greimas publishes suggests that he sees structural analysis as operating within its own protocols. So when I  see other structuralists moving away from this sequestration in an attempt to create a more integrated process, I  wonder why Ricoeur shows no interest. An example of this mutually interpenetrating process is Genette’s description of the varieties of anachrony that occur in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. A storytelling technique that Proust exploits to characteristic effect is the displacement and re-registration of the orders of time proper to the storyteller’s narrative enunciation and the actual chronological sequence of events. Genette is able to note as a result of his systemizations that an “inverse movement—a recall that is anticipated, a detour no longer by the past but by the future—occurs each time the narrator explains in advance how he will later, after the event, be informed of a present incident (or of its significance).”57 As these observations and insights mount, Genette is able to develop a sense for the function of anachrony in the novel, and it leads him to a sense of the author’s purpose in crafting this narrative technique to such a level:

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Hermeneutics After Ricoeur The importance of “anachronic” narrative in the Recherche du Temps Perdu is obviously connected to the retrospectively synthetic character of Proustian narrative, which is totally present in the narrator’s mind at every moment. Ever since the day when the narrator in a trance perceived the unifying significance of his story, he never ceases to hold all of its threads simultaneously, to apprehend simultaneously all of its places and all of its moments, to be capable of establishing a multitude of “telescopic” relationships amongst them. (78)

Genette is able to develop a critical sense of the nature of the fictional world the narrator inhabits by analyzing its techniques of temporal juxtaposition. The structure does not produce an inevitable meaning effect or an interpretive judgment, as it does in the Greimasian algorithm, but rather helps Genette (and us) see how the narrative technique relates to the temporal experience of the narrator, and by extension, readers, who, in reading the Recherche are busy all the while developing an enriched sense of the temporal complexity of their own lives. That rebounding-refracting process, which, to use Ricoeur’s terminology, is constantly feeding the movement between prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration, exhibits the organic relationship between structural explanation and interpretive understanding that I think lies behind the hermeneutic insight.

Conclusion Because this chapter has been largely critical, I  want to summarize the observations I  have made to get the balance right in what I  think are its implications for hermeneutics. First, Ricoeur’s overarching critical effort to bring Greimas closer to a hermeneutic point of view was grounded in the quintessential hermeneutic insight that underlying form and particular expression are reciprocally constituting. He brought this message to his friend in every engagement, and although it was advice that was not rejected out of hand, it was a bridge too far for a theorist whose dream of a science of meaning, born within in him as a young boy, had become a settled reflex. Greimas harbored the classic scientific worldview of the underlying truth as an invariant structure beneath the contingent world of appearances, and the way to get at this deep structure was to observe, analyze, and classify, a procedure that would allow scientific prediction and control. Second, Ricoeur was also relentless in trying to get Greimas to see that the explanatory power of science was only useful in the human studies if it could be reintegrated into the actual experience of feeling human beings. Greimas wanted instead to turn this very passional dimension

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of human being itself into a scientific object that could be explained. Third, Ricoeur insisted with clarity and consistency that the appropriative moment was to be privileged over the explanatory moment, since human understanding is the endpoint, rather than knowledge as some kind of packageable commodity. In all these ways, Ricoeur was championing the classic hermeneutic response to scientific overreach. Having said this, what is genuinely revealing about Ricoeur’s stance toward Greimas is how much he concedes to the scientific pretentions of Greimasian structuralism. There are two major problems that I have with the explanation/ understanding dialectic that Ricoeur develops, and the exchange with Greimas illustrates one of them. Ricoeur wants a “mixed grammar: semiotic-praxic” to resolve the divide between structuralism and hermeneutics.58 Why a dialectic here? Why a counterpoise? Explanation sits within hermeneutic experience as only one modality of our desire to know what is the right thing to think or do. Ricoeur’s passion for discovering dialectical relationships probably led him down the wrong path in this instance. To be clear, I  am also concerned that the hermeneutic correction of the objectivist bias can go too far in the other direction. Bernard Dannhauer, for instance, has shown convincingly how Ricoeur corrects Heidegger’s analysis of intra-temporality, the relation between “the time of nature and the time of man,” the cosmic and the existential.59 So it is important that Ricoeur’s magnified objectivism not cover over his genuine insights into what Günter Figal has aptly called hermeneutic objectivity.60 In the next two chapters I  will attempt to negotiate this balance with a careful examination of Ricoeur’s explanatory moment.

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The Problem with Ricoeur’s Analogy of the Text

The art of understanding is required not only with respect to texts but also in one’s intercourse with one’s fellow human beings. —Hans-Georg Gadamer A 1971 issue of Social Research published Paul Ricoeur’s essay “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” The essay is a hallmark statement of Ricoeur’s programmatic effort to mediate structuralism and hermeneutics. It was clearly an important text for Ricoeur himself because he republished it, after it had experienced what he called “a certain success in English,” as the seventh chapter of Du Text à l’Action (From Text to Action), a book which he regarded as the successor volume to The Conflict of Interpretations. The essay has a complex double structure that articulates the basic tenets of a structural-hermeneutic method, and indicates how that method might serve as a paradigm for the human sciences. Ricoeur hoped that hybridizing structuralism and hermeneutics could avoid the barren positivism and impressionistic subjectivism that characterized opposing tendencies and tensions of human studies in the French academy old and new. By marrying the virtues of objective analysis and interpretive judgment, he hoped to suggest a paradigm for work in the human sciences going forward. Ricoeur’s programmatic argument, I will argue, is a mixed success, in some ways not surviving its historical context, and in other ways a lasting achievement. Today commentators have little reticence questioning Ricoeur’s bold proposal of 1971 to apply a hermeneutic method to sociology and to the human sciences in general: “One might be surprised by the many ways in which Ricoeur attempted to make of structural analysis the model of explication for the human sciences . . . Could we envision, as was the desire of Ricoeur, founding the human sciences on these conditions, on another human science like structuralism as a kind of over-arching matrix of validation?”1 But it should be said that

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Ricoeur’s proposal was, in the context of French intellectual culture of the time, a liberalizing move away from the attempt of structuralism to colonize the human sciences as a universal meta-discipline. The institutional history of the rise of structuralism to the status of a general paradigm is related in detail in volume one of François Dosse’s History of Structuralism, where we can see that this ambition had more the instrumental function of uprooting and deposing the old entrenched system of the French humanities anchored in the Sorbonne, and when it had accomplished this purpose, it died very quickly of its own weight, even as its influence played out for some time outside of France.2 But in its heyday it would have felt to everyone, including Ricoeur, like an unassailable force, so his attempt at mediation would have been a cry from the margins, and a moderating proposal, as universalist as it seems to us now from a distance. There is a fine irony in the feature of this attack that most distinguished the French situation from the context out of which German hermeneutics grew. Heidegger had used the term “hermeneutics” as a weapon against the positivist tendencies of neo-Kantianism that then ruled academic philosophy, and Gadamer later picked the term up to subvert the scientific rationalism he saw spreading throughout the humanities. In France phenomenology and existentialism had not undermined the hegemony of the stodgy classicism that underpinned the institutional culture of the humanities. The broad impulse for revolutionary reform that had gripped France after the war was being felt at every level of society, and in the academy the ideal of science was the lever that could most effectively challenge the presumption of the status quo and undermine its institutional dominance. This positivist inclination was fed by gathering historical circumstances that had swept up French intellectual culture. The old guard of the Sorbonne had become so entrenched in the institutional culture of academic life and so dominated institutional culture that only a radical external force could dislodge it. After the Second World War, the tectonic shifts of industrial and technological revolution began to lay bare the inadequacies of the old regime, and the new social sciences coalesced and galvanized with a radical spirit to oust the old guard. Many of these efforts were quite intentional and strategic, but the impetus was all on the side of change, and soon the older hegemony was being routed and replaced by the new. Dosse details the history of the structuralist rise as a result of a number of converging dynamics—the need of the new social sciences to find legitimacy in the academy, the opportunity for something new to shake the old structures that had fallen behind the social changes that were rocking society,3 the utility of the

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scientific profile of structuralism as a wedge against the atrophied conventions of classicism, a period of intense socialization of the new social sciences in the institutional culture,4 the efforts of philosophers to coopt this new energy by assimilation and consolidation,5 and the strategic intention to storm the gates and overthrow the old guard. The struggle between the social sciences and philosophy resulted in a collaboration that benefited both:  Structuralist philosophers increased their virulent attacks on the scientistic pretensions of the social sciences: Lacan against psychology, Althusser against history, and Foucault against the methods of classification in the social sciences. A veritable barrage of fire was opened up against the ostensible imposture of the social sciences and their scientific certitudes . . . The social sciences, purified by the structuralist critique, sought their positivity in the models and concepts that philosophers had developed.6

But the upshot is that scientificity continued to have a high currency: “There is undeniably among the great representatives of structuralism a fascination for the ‘hard sciences,’ which translates typically into a posture of neutralization of the subjective life of the observer by the logic expressed in a mathematization of the system of signs (most notably in Lacan).”7 This coalescence under the banner of science “contributed to the weakening of disciplinary boundaries and structuralism appeared as the unifying project” (388). It is no exaggeration to say that “it seemed necessary, at the end of the 1960s, to consolidate the different attempts at renewing the human sciences into a single movement, if not even into a single discipline, one that would be better prepared to meet the theoretical needs of various human sciences in search of a formal base.”8 Barthes and Eco were among those “to propose a general semiology that could confederate the human sciences around the study of the sign.”9 By the end of the 1960s, the demand for the scientific as a mark of disciplinary legitimacy, not only in the newer social sciences but increasingly in the humanities, became a dominant institutional-cultural imperative of the academy. This imperative was fueled so urgently by its political utility for ousting the mandarin class and breaking up the institutional hegemony of classicism that the spirit of “out with the old, in with the new” made scientificity a banner of revolutionary change. Structural linguistics began to serve not only as a model but as a kind of lingua franca of the human sciences. It is striking to compare this situation to the university scene in southwest Germany that faced Heidegger and Gadamer in the 1910s and 1920s.10 The same revolutionary ardor was present, the same need to shake loose from a bankrupt and ossified

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intellectual paradigm that suffocated creative new thinking, but the imperative was in precisely the opposite direction. There is real irony, then, in the parallel efforts of Ricoeur and Gadamer to march under the banner of hermeneutics for such divergent purposes. But it also becomes more understandable why both scholars should press so insistently on opposite sides of Dilthey’s program. Given the context of what Dosse calls a “totalizing undertaking” prompted by a “multidisciplinary euphoria,” Ricoeur’s proposal of a unitary model for the human sciences is not at all surprising.11 His hypothesis that one might “consider the notion of text as a good paradigm for the so-called object of the social sciences,” and that one might “use the methodology of text-interpretation as a paradigm for interpretation in general in the field of the human sciences,” would not have sounded strange in the French academic climate of the early 1970s.12

The model of the text for action Ricoeur’s effort to show how the exegetical analogy would transpose to a theory of action starts by pointing to the fact “well known by all experts in the human sciences” that “the meaning of human actions, of historical events, and of social phenomena may be construed in several different ways.”13 He sets this plurivocity into a natural human dialogic exchange between explanation and understanding: “I understand what you intended to do, if you are able to explain to me why you did such-and-such an action” (213). This formulation pivots on the interrogative adverb “Why?” which is a request about the purpose or motive of an action, that is, that which distinguishes actions from mere physical movements. By setting the plurivocal meaning of actions into this simple exchange between the wish to understand and the need to explain, Ricoeur has created his own sense of the logical basis for a science of human action. The need to know why people do what they do is a social need that can avail itself of rigorous study and eventually disciplinary expertise. It is also, according to Ricoeur, the reason why explanation and understanding is aided by the analogy to textual analysis. Here is the crucial passage where he makes this transition. In a densely telescoped argument, Ricoeur explains how the natural dialogic situation he introduced with the “Why?” question contains an impulse that can lead to systematic classification and to explanatory/interpretive procedures: “[I]t is possible to argue about the meaning of an action, to argue for or against this or that interpretation. In this way, the account of motives already foreshadows a

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logic of argumentation procedures” (214). These activities in their turn lead to a textual methodology as the appropriate critical-analytic technique: And could we not say that the process of arguing linked to the explanation of action by its motives unfolds a kind of plurivocity which makes action similar to a text? What seems to legitimate this extension from guessing the meaning of a text to guessing the meaning of an action is that in arguing about the meaning of an action I put my wants and my beliefs at a distance and submit them to a concrete dialectic of confrontation with opposite points of view. This way of putting my action at a distance in order to make sense of my own motives paves the way for the kind of distantiation which occurs with what we called the social inscription of human action and to which we applied the metaphor of the “record”. The same actions which may be put into “records” and henceforth “recorded” may also be explained in different ways according to the multivocity of the arguments applied to their motivation background.14

The first thing to notice about this theory of action is the presupposition that the meaning of an action is accessible to a logic of argument. In the light of the twentyfirst century affective turn that has taken place in reaction to the rational emphasis of the twentieth-century linguistic turn, delivering meaning and understanding over to a logic of argumentation seems increasingly limiting. Ricoeur has all kinds of resources to address the many dimensions of affect—what he would address under the category of the register of the pathetic. Indeed one of the glories of his work is the depth of its attention to the philosophical dimensions of suffering and pathos. But the dialectic of explanation and understanding as the schema for a theory of action is what directs his understanding of hermeneutics, and the binary structure of the axiom expliquer plus c’est comprendre mieux prevails as a guiding schema even after he moves beyond the analogy of text and action. The second thing to note is how central the character of inscription is to the claim Ricoeur now makes about method. Inscription provides the distance that the researcher requires to test or validate the initial guesses that initiate an inquiry. Ricoeur will in the very next step identify this validation process with juridical procedures coming from the legal tradition as a substitute for causal experimentation, but the crucial first step that gets us to a research model is the association of the concept of inscription with the idea of a record. When Ricoeur speaks about “actions which may be put into ‘records’ ” that can become subject to interpretation,15 he means, in the context of getting us to a model for the human sciences, the records that history provides, the journalist who records “the course of events” (206), the archives of “memorialists” (207), the

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records kept by social institutions (207), the transcript of testimony by the court reporter, the field notes of the sociologist, the journals of the psychological patient, and so on. I want to note that in some of these cases the record is itself part of the original act, as in the case of the patient journal, but in other cases it is a representation once removed, as in the case of the ethnographer’s field notes or the journalist’s contemporaneous report. Here is the crucial point. In advocating a general model for the human sciences covering “all social phenomena” (218), he conflates action with the record of action, and much of his argument for the analogy of text and action relies on this conflation. This would have a particularly sharp consequence in the case of sociology, for instance, and all of the problems that ethnomethodology has brought to the fore are simply bypassed with this elision. How can a structural analysis of a record proceed— Ricoeur’s recommendation—before the interpretive nature of the record itself is adjudicated? When Ricoeur says that “the meaning of human action is also something which is addressed to an indefinite range of possible ‘readers,’ ” and that “the judges are not the contemporaries, but, as Hegel said, history itself,” he seems to be conflating an action (someone cutting down a tree) with the account of an action (Washington cutting down the cherry tree), or action as communication (Washington crossing the Delaware). Of course there are public actions intended to have social import with symbolic resonance beyond their context, but the analogy has severe limits. Ricoeur’s argument that actions have the structure of a propositional statement is also a claim to be tested. Language and action evolve and develop together as two sides (l’amont, l’aval) of the same human capacity, and to try to separate them so that they can be analogized to each other flies in the face of this insight. An example of the analogy that Ricoeur offers is “Brutus killed Caesar in the Curia.” The act of killing implies an “argument” that “has” a propositional form (a predicate, a copula, a complement), and this propositional argument becomes ambiguous as its meaning is interpreted by a larger and larger public.16 But Ricoeur does not dispel an obvious objection:  that, at least intuitively, actions—a kiss, a punch, a jaywalk, a dance move—are closer in their nature to the ephemeral speech-act than to writing. Brutus’s action had to have been suffused with ambiguity from the minute he conceived it, morphing in his head as he carried out, and splitting uncontrollably into parts the second it was done. Intention and significance were fraught, troubled, frayed from the beginning, and Brutus had all he had to do to hold them together at all. His subsequent actions and his subsequent life and words were consumed by the effort to make sense of what he had just done, so that the histories that began to be written

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afterward simply continued to grasp the potency of this terrible act, terrible conception. In any case, how is action an analogy with a text? Actions are always already suffused with linguistic meaning, and language is suffused with practical meaning. Would it not be better to speak of the textuality of culture rather than the textual object as the real? This would place an emphasis on a different aspect of textum—the weave that holds together the threads of a discursive history extending indefinitely in every direction. Any specific inscription is therefore both more and less than the isolated and bound inscription of a codex; less because it loses its relation to the skein of wool from which it is pulled, more because it is accessible through its unbroken connections, less because it is increasingly distant from its origins, more because it is immediately part of the entire woven fabric. There is one way to understand this transformation that plausibly suggests itself and that might redeem the durability thesis—the concept of ritual from the rituals of daily life to the formal rituals of cultural institutions. Personal rituals sometimes develop a social availability that is passed down through family, community, or cultural institution, such as the blessing before meals. Food rituals can develop broadly shared meanings that become associated with cultural practices and are given names, such as the English or continental breakfast. These phrases are associated with unwritten rules with a degree of interpretive flexibility, and they are taken up and elaborated in cultural practices in various ways. There are two problems with this exception, however. First, living rituals that could be analogized to writing with unwritten rules that are passed on, elaborated, and sedimented into tradition do not have the same kind of durability as the fixed text. Foucault, for instance, elaborates on a more supple gradation between different types of discourse within most societies discourse “uttered” in the course of the day and in casual meetings, and which disappears with the very act which gave rise to it; and those forms of discourse that lie at the origins of a certain number of new verbal acts, which are reiterated, transformed or discussed; in short, discourse which is spoken and remains spoken, indefinitely, beyond its formulation, and which remains to be spoken.17

What Ricoeur seizes upon for the objectivity of the hermeneutic phenomenon is the literal fixation in writing, an inscription that is continually interpreted and appropriated in different ways, but that can always go back to the letter as the court of last resort. Cultural texts can be modified over time, as with scriptures

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or catechisms, but institutional dissemination relies upon the official sanction of the codified text. A particularly rich example of this play of flexibility and fixity is the Jewish tradition of scriptures from its beginnings, when even an elaborate oral interpretive practice eventually had to give way to a manuscript tradition. When an institutional ritual is codified in writing, such as the formulary of the Catholic mass, it loses the adaptive fluidity of unwritten rituals, because it now has a fixed reference that becomes the place of durable effects. The second problem is that this is not the step that Ricoeur actually takes. His notion of what constitutes the durable effects of actions are actions that are marked as events after the fact by history, which is to say, are embedded in cultural narratives that themselves are passed down. And then we are back to the conflation of act and text, which seems like a circular argument. The other key question about Ricoeur’s methodological recommendation pertains to how one passes from explanation to understanding; that is, how scientific analysis is appropriated by “the reader.” Since Ricoeur typically remains at the level of generality expressed in the above quotation when he refers to the agency of research and public consumption, it is not easy to know. For instance, Ricoeur asserts that the interpreter moves from structural analysis (the objective moment) of a text to its readerly appropriation (the subjective moment). But how is the transition accomplished? At a casual glance, it might appear as though Ricoeur describes an organic and reciprocal relationship, because he says that explanation “requires” understanding, and characterizes explanation without understanding—that is, structural analysis by itself à la Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, and so on—as “a sterile game, a divisive algebra,” a “necrology.”18 A harsh description, yes, but Ricoeur negotiates the passage from explanation to understanding by placing an epoché between the two moments. Structural analysis, he says, “represses” the liaison while it determines the “algebra of constitutive units” (217). It is entirely legitimate, he says, “to prolong this suspension of the ostensive reference to the world and to transfer oneself into the ‘place’ where the text stands, within the ‘enclosure’ of this worldless place,” this “closed system of signs” (216). He is quite clear that the moments of the process are separate, and that we temporarily suppress reference in order “to abstract systems from processes and to relate these systems . . . to units which are merely defined by their opposition to other units of the same system” (216). Although he includes the Geneva, Prague, and Danish schools of structuralism in this practice, he sites only Lévi-Strauss as an example of this methodological procedure. This example points out the problem. There were numerous members of the structuralist school (Genette, Todorov, the later Barthes) who

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showed how structural analysis does not require an epoché—that the liaison between explanation and understanding is always alive, and the passage between them is a reciprocity from the outset. Francesco Gonzalez argues, from a more Gadamerian perspective, that the reciprocity “contains within itself both critical distancing and appropriation, both negative alienation and productive assimilation.”19 By contrast, Lévi-Strauss and Greimas, the two structuralists whom Ricoeur most often cited as exemplary of explanatory procedure, were dedicated precisely to the method of suspension, abstracting structure for pure analysis within the enclosure of its worldless space. In the end, Ricoeur places the two processes in different spheres as different practices: “Understanding is completely mediated [médiatisée] by the ensemble of explanatory procedures that it precedes and accompanies.”20 The other structuralists or quasi-structuralists I  have referred to (Barthes, Genette, etc.) discovered that they needed to turn the ship around and orient their thinking toward the individual work as, in effect, a conversation partner, which becomes by this way of thinking the gravitational center of any normative claims. The first page of S/Z (published in 1970) is for all intents and purposes a virtual manifesto for the imperative of such a turnaround: There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to any one narrative: a task as exhausting (ninety-nine percent perspiration, as the saying goes) as it is ultimately undesirable, for the text thereby loses its difference. This difference is not, obviously, some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation), it is not what designates the individuality of each text, what names, signs, finishes off each work with a Bourish; on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of languages, of systems: a difference of which each text is the return. A choice must then be made: either to place all texts in a demonstrative oscillation, equalizing them under the scrutiny of an indifferent science, forcing them to rejoin, inductively, the Copy from which we will then make them derive; or else to restore each text, not to its individuality, but to its function, making it cohere, even before we talk about it, by the infinite paradigm of difference, subjecting it from the outset to a basic typology, to an evaluation.21

Regardless of where Barthes himself took this appreciation for the particular, individual text as an occasion for engagement on its own, this theoretical

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assertion signals a counter-correction to the totalizing impulse of scientificity that had gripped structuralism. My question is then a methodological one. Ricoeur allowed that it was valuable to prolong the suspension of the messy contingent world that is always contaminating, fructifying, and transforming structure in order to analyze synchronic form. To be sure, a literary critic who examines a narrative work may want to excavate and lay bare the underlying plot elements, techniques of address, strategies of temporal juxtaposition, and so on. A sociologist may want to analyze transcriptions of conversational discourse to find manifestations of underlying ideological presuppositions, idiosyncratic idioms that locate communal values, performative rituals that enact roles and relationships. But in what sense is “suspension” involved in this process? If we subtract the universalizing and abstracting ambition of Lévi-Strauss or Greimas from the process, and accede to Ricoeur’s demand to place structure under the hermeneutic pressure of invention, how is an epoché enacted? Did not Barthes show the way to this methodological pathway when he made his own turn at the beginning of S/Z? To put it another way, did Ricoeur not take the wrong lesson from Husserl? The heart of Husserl’s relevance to hermeneutics was his elaboration of the theory of intentionality, not the methodological reduction of the epoché. But Ricoeur’s championing of the discipline of explanation seems to be an offspring of the practice of bracketing as the signature habitus of the phenomenological research in Husserl’s school. As far as Gadamer was concerned, Husserl’s unabated quest for a transcendental subject is exactly what divided Husserl and Heidegger, and the theory of the lifeworld served more as an impediment to this ambition. On Heidegger’s end, finitude was an inalterable barrier to a transcendental reduction, and language delimits the boundaries of human finitude within the standpoint of the lifeworld. However, Husserl’s “central assertion, that phenomenological research transcends in principle the opposition between object and subject,” as it is inscribed in the theory of intentionality, is the very syntax of the hermeneutics structures of Dasein.22 At the same time, hermeneutics does have to value explanation, explication, method, and so on; it is patent how crucial are the uses of measurement, evidence, verification, and testing for deliberation and judgment, and the hermeneutic critique was entirely too coarse in caricaturing the regime of experimental science and its progeny. The question is always how explanation is to be integrated into the hermeneutic paradigm. The epoché was a flawed attempt at an answer, and I am worried that Ricoeur’s version of an epoché suffers from a similar flaw.

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The nub of the problem Ricoeur’s essay hinges on the special qualities he attributes to texts as fixed inscriptions. He isolates four of these qualities, which he fleshes out in detail three successive times over the course of the essay: first to define their characteristic function in textuality per se as distinct from ephemeral speech, next as their enduring legibility can be analogized to human actions as a whole, and third as the articulated framework for a paradigmatic methodology of research in the human sciences. We have to recall that Ricoeur differentiated himself from Gadamer by giving primacy to textual inscription as the Ur-phenomenon of hermeneutic theory. This definition of hermeneutics was crucial to him, because the moment of objectification allowed for a form of distanced analysis, which Ricoeur believed was a needed supplement to the Gadamerian orientation to belonging (Gehörigkeit). The argument that is unique to “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” and a thesis that is pursued nowhere else in the same depth, is the strong homology of textual inscription to the human action that serves as the subject matter of the social or human sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, history, etc.), a homology which he needs to prove if textual analysis is to be the model for “the whole sphere of the human sciences.”23 The argument is fairly simple in its broad outline and can be expressed syllogistically. The major premise is that textual inscription provides a methodological advantage over ephemeral discourse (i.e., speech) for objective procedures of analysis. The minor premise is that human actions are similar to texts in their legibility. The conclusion is that a methodology of textual analysis is therefore suited to the entire field of human actions, and thus of the human sciences as a whole. The peculiarity of the essay, and a flaw lurking at its center, is that Ricoeur fails to address the all-too-obvious objection that human actions are at least as similar to ephemeral speech as they are to fixed texts. He introduces the notion of a “record” of actions and its synonyms (trace, archive, document, mark, registration) without specifying sufficiently how these would articulate out to the broad range of human sciences. His few examples are incommensurate— the history “intentionally written down by the memorialists,” and the routine gestures and behaviors of social interaction, such as reputation.24 In what sense are these equivalently “the place of durable effects” (206)? In the first case, how are they different from conventions of speech, and how are they like literary texts? In the second case, how are the ethnographic descriptions actions, rather than

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their representations of those actions, liable to their own interpretive problems? When Ricoeur finally gets to the concrete task of recommending how the hybrid model he is proposing might look as a method for the human sciences, we have to determine to what extent he had in mind the historical disciplines and the possibility of a sociology of action based upon the model of the text. Sergey Zenkin also notes the problem:  The word “history” appears many times in the text of his essay, whereas “sociology” is practically absent from it. It is history, not sociology, that constitutes an “archive” with events of the past and submits them to a retrospective interpretation. Yet  .  .  .  the word “history” is ambiguous. It can refer to the discourse telling and analyzing the events of the past (historia rerum gestarum), but it can refer as well to the events themselves (res gestae) . . . Ricoeur seems to privilege the second meaning when he is speaking of “this kind of practical interpretation through present praxis.”25

But if that is so, what is a philosophy of action, the theme of the essay? Zenkin’s observation that the paradigmatic role of the text “disappeared from Ricoeur’s argument” after this essay, that “the opposition ‘live speech/written text’ ceased,” may indicate Ricoeur’s own awareness of this problem (90). Indeed, by the time of History, Memory, and Forgetting, there is an unmistakable change in the methodological parameters of textual explanation. In history alone, “there is not one privileged mode of explanation,” and these “disparate modes of explanation alternate and sometimes combine in an unpredictable way.”26 By this time, Ricoeur also more clearly has narrowed his own focus to the historical sciences, and he is able to create some distance from social science approaches: “It is through the emphasis that history places on change and on the differences or intervals affecting such changes that it distinguishes itself from the other social sciences and principally from sociology” (183). There is really only a glimmer of this increased attention to action in history as something less tied to the mediation of the textual artifact, but this is where I think we have to push the hermeneutic project. Put simply, the hermeneutics that advances into the twenty-first century must not limit itself to the affordances of the text. This is both because multimodal means of communication are rapidly transforming the exchange between immediate and mediated, and because hermeneutics itself in its longer historical relation to rhetoric has criss-crossed these lines. Augustine located his hermeneutic instruction in the layered circulation between the pulpit and scripture. That is one way to approach the mediation/immediacy question. Some Ricoeurians have turned

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to ethnomethodology and other progressive approaches in sociology and anthropology to address this question, and this may be a promising way to get us out of the problematic analogy structure. Instead of regarding a discourse community as a field of investigation, the expertise of the field worker becomes a resource for the community. In this schema, the immediacy of relation between community and researcher fights against the reification of culture in texts that abscond from the scene.

Johann Michel and Louis Quéré In a major retrospective of Ricoeur’s published philosophy, Johann Michel points to the fruitfulness of Ricoeurian principles for a hermeneutic sociology, but he also targets the text-as-model hypothesis as a false step in that direction.27 Michel notes that microsociology and ethnomethodology have seriously problematized the objectification of the face-to-face social interaction:  “To establish a theory of action, it is not only history that is required, nor simply the inscription of the action, but careful sociological analysis that explains its eventful character such that it is done at all rather than simply that it had been done.”28 In addition to this contention, Michel notes also the problem a theoretical approach raises about the position of the researcher:  “To speak of ‘total institutions,’ we must understand that adaptation always involves ‘the invention of the quotidian’—to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase—which is why it is a problem to have recourse simply to ‘archives of action’ in order to understand action’s mechanisms; hence the reason for the presence of the observer in the field of interactions.”29 We have here the trap of the historian of social history who assumes s/he does not belong to the events studied, which leads directly to the assumption that one can “fix and objectify action” (236). He notes that Ricoeur’s model fails to acknowledge the fact that “social reality presents the auto-interpretive character” that, for instance, Clifford Geertz so effectively describes (243). In the end, Michel splits his judgment on what he takes to be Ricoeur’s preliminary foray into sociology. He faults Ricoeur’s initial attempt to wed sociological explanation to structuralism, but affirms in principal Ricoeur’s grant of interpretive license to sociological research disengaged from the latent, pre-predicative interpretations of practical reason.30 He asserts that by the mid-1980s, Ricoeur had discovered a new explanatory model inspired by Max Weber’s “singular causal imputation” (256). Thus, in Michel’s estimation,

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Ricoeur’s legitimate path toward a hermeneutic sociology carved out a responsible “middle way” between traditional sociology and the more radical ethnomethodologists (245). Michel stipulates that Ricoeur’s dialectical model of explanation and understanding “prefigures in an exemplary manner the hermeneutic turn of sociology, anthropology and history,” which would develop methodologies such as the participant observer, ethnomethodology, and so on in the attempt to address this problem.31 However, he cautions: “The vocabulary used by Ricoeur in this regard is not neutral. He speaks of ‘the inscription of action,’ of ‘documents of human life’ (vestiges, archives, etc.) to designate the sort of autonomization of action beyond the intentions of agents” (236). There is a reductionist danger here that microsociology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology have problematized. The American sociologist Goffman describes the process of ritualization in human behavior as anything but a documentary process. People’s behaviors are precisely what is uninscribable:  “Within the lifetime of each of us these acts in varying degrees acquire a specialized communicative role in the stream of our behavior, looked to and provided for in connection with the displaying of our alignment to current events.”32 Goffman’s meticulous studies of norms of social behavior, rules of conduct, situational proprieties, codes of interaction, and so on demonstrate a strong filiation with language, whether written or spoken, especially with regard to the ongoing interaction of normative convention and adaptive invention, but their structure and development have a parallel syntax that develop in communication with linguistic forms. To make them homologous would be to flatten them. Ricoeur’s attempt to extend the linguistic model as a tool of verifiable predication was probably one reduction too far. Another drawback Michel imputes to Ricoeur’s theory is that when it considers actions as the analog of signs in a system to be interpreted, it casts them as achievements (sens fixé) rather than processes, robbing them of their volatile, improvisatory, ambiguous, dialectical character. Action is experimentation, a kind of thinking out loud, and is composed of a reflective self-teaching selfcorrection that makes the imposition of an explication-understanding procedure over on top of it, after the fact, from afar a crude overlay. Michel believes that Ricoeur moved quietly away from the text/action thesis soon after the famous essay and developed another framing that carried through the later work, allowing Ricoeur to remove himself from the strong methodological bias of the textual analogy. Michel marks the beginning of this new path in a writing of 1981:  “One can confirm this new orientation in the

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fact that at no time in the article ‘Husserl and Hegel’ nor moving forward does Ricoeur mention structural analysis . . . nor is there anything of the explication and objectification of systems of action.”33 Ricoeur introduced a new conceptual frame (starting in Time and Narrative and continuing up through Memory, History, Forgetting) to redraw the function of explication: On the one hand, to avoid the pitfall of hypostasizing collective entities, Ricoeur appropriates the method of questioning back [Rückfrage] from Husserl. On the other hand, Ricoeur sets in place a new model of explication, equally as valid for historical knowledge as for the social sciences as a whole, a model which comes to replace the structuralist model of explanation. To accomplish this he borrows the concept of singular causal imputation from Weber. In contrast to an analysis in terms of differential relations, Ricoeur revives explication by defining it in the terms of causality—but causality enriched with the resources of narratology. In spite of the change of explanatory model to Weber, Ricoeur’s epistemology remains committed to a comprehensive explication. / The publication of La Mémoire, l’Historie, l’Oubli reinforces the withdrawal of structuralism from the Ricoeurian epistemology, but displays at the same time a movement toward post-structuralist influences in history and the social sciences.34

Let us test Michel’s narrative of adjustment “for the social sciences as a whole.” It is important to note that such a phrase is expressed in the context of the French academy, so its implications will have to be considered with appropriate contextual reference. I  am not sure that the essay “Husserl and Hegel” represents a turn so much as the exploration of another related issue or dimension of sociality. The thesis Ricoeur explores in this paper certainly does not position itself as a model of explication, but rather as the resolution of a key question in philosophy about the meaning of the social itself. Instead of a collective spirit in the Hegelian sense, there must be a collective or shared comprehension that participates in the subjective experience. Here Ricoeur is putting on the table his Enlightenment commitments, distinguishing his philosophy from the inclination to hypostasize a world spirit over the experience of the individual. This was an issue and a problem that I believe Gadamer never confronted squarely, even though it obviously troubled him, since he was pulled between Hegel and Kant, between Heidegger and the Greeks. It is to Ricoeur’s great credit that he confronted this question head on in “Husserl and Hegel,” and I  think he actually solves the problem for Gadamer. But with reference to Michel’s assessment, can we say the essay signals a systematic turn? Does Time and Narrative provide a “comprehensive” model for the social sciences as a whole?

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Memory, History, Forgetting is a different story, but here Ricoeur is perhaps less ambitious for his revision than Michel suggests. Ricoeur introduced the Weberian theory of singular causal imputation, which is a narrative methodology for the testing of historical truth, but he also regionalizes regarding the methodological situation for historical studies: “The great mass of historical works unfolds in a middle region where disparate modes of explanation alternate and sometimes combine in an unpredictable way.”35 “Disparate modes of explanation” is a clear renunciation of the earlier proposal of textual interpretation as “the” methodological paradigm for the human sciences. The ambition of a model for the human sciences seems to have been shelved. But this is not the end of the story. To present another view of Ricoeur’s attempt at a hermeneutic anthropology, Michel sites extensively another French sociologist, Louis Quéré, who also has recently tried to bring sociology and hermeneutics together, but who lines up more firmly with the ethnomethodologists: But this identification of action with the text has, to my eyes, an inconvenient feature:  it approaches action under the aspect of its achievement, which is to say, as a quasi-autonomous object available for comprehension by the interpreter, and thus it removes by analysis the accomplishment of this action by the collaborators who arrange its details conjointly in the framework of an interaction that they organize together on the basis of interpretation of their respective acts and words.36

Quéré’s book La Sociologie à l’Épreuve de l’Herméneutique begins by framing the question that motivates his entire study, a question that places his inquiry precisely in the sightline connecting French and German hermeneutics: To attempt to specify the place and the nature of interpretation in sociology inevitably raises the question of the discipline’s identity  .  .  .  It is, in effect, a “science” which, on the one hand, has as its object a reality which it itself interprets, and, on other hand, is not able to get to its object domain except by the mediation of understanding and interpretation  .  .  .  a discipline that practically speaking produces nothing but interpretations.37

On the one hand, this framing takes Heidegger’s orienting point for hermeneutics, which is the paradoxical circularity of interpretive understanding, and on the other hand, Quéré notes that this is a distinct problem for a discipline (sociology) that still struggles to replace the ideal of the neutral observer. He points to Gadamer as the source of the crisis, since it was Gadamer who posed

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the question to the human sciences, but Quéré then rejects the hermeneutic foundation of both Gadamer and Ricoeur in favor of a Habermasian metatheoretical framework. He does this because the influence of ethnomethodology and its insistence on the auto-interpretive competence of communities makes less essential the interpretive intervention of the sociologist, and that sociology consequently is in the business of explaining the interpretive process itself. My own view is that Michel has developed a more successful response than Quéré. The problem with Quéré’s solution is that it contains a flaw similar to that of Ricoeur’s proposal by bifurcating so completely the work of laypersons and experts. Ricoeur places reflective judgment in the hands of the specialist scholar while attributing a fore-understanding of practice to the lay public. This consignment of hermeneutic meta-theory to the expert leaves the autointerpretive community vulnerable to the relativist charge. The fascinating thing about Quéré’s misstep is that it could have been avoided if Quéré had started with Gadamer’s definition of hermeneutics rather than Ricoeur’s. Quéré rejects what he calls the hermeneutic paradigm for sociology because he regards hermeneutics as a theory of textual exegesis and cannot see sociology analogized to the text, which is an argument I  have supported.38 But a Gadamerian hermeneutics is both about and engaged in the dialogue that takes place in communities among laypersons and experts alike about the issues that matter to them. Such a model would accept that a community is auto-interpretive in the ethnomethodological sense, but also would place sociologists and citizens in conversation about the issues that concern them. Theory and practice would not be siloed in separate discourses. One only has to go back to the introduction of Aristotle’s lectures on rhetoric to see this framework articulated. Both rhetoric and dialectic “have to do with matters that are in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science,” but “the majority of people do this either at random or with a familiarity arising from habit,” so that a more systematic analysis could aid in the teaching and learning of the art.39 Aristotle’s theoretical analysis therefore remains within the dialogic loop between theoretical expertise and practical reasons. My question is whether a hermeneutic sociology could not also follow this path, because it would respond to all the central problems that we have brought forward here—objectivation, the problem with the textual model, the bifurcation of lay and expert, and moral relativism. I think ultimately ethnomethodology also would profit by considering this solution. Michel amplifies and evolves his view in Sociologie du Soi:  Essai d’Herméneutique Appliquée (2012), where he presents a full-fledged adaptation of Ricoeurian theory to sociology.40 Although Michel hews more

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closely to Ricoeurian principles of objectivity and expertise, in practice, he actually gets closer to Aristotelian prudential argument. Michel’s view is that Ricoeur’s relevance to sociology only was implicit in Ricoeur’s writings on the human sciences, and so remains “largely to be explored” (41). So Michel offers a theoretical outline for a “hermeneutic sociology” à la Ricoeur and a case study on second-generation French-Algerian immigrants to illustrate how the theory could be applied. His faithful but creative elaboration of Ricoeurian ideas of narrative identity and the hermeneutics of the self moves decisively away from the scholar/layperson schematism. The three planks upon which he erects a hermeneutic sociology are the processive (rather than essential) nature of subjectivity, the practices and technologies of the self, and the self as a work of interpretation.41 Combining Gadamer and Ricoeur, he illustrates the dialectic between self-construction as a work of reflective agency and its determination by “anonymous configurations and networks of signification that surpass the closed circuit of self-awareness” in the history of the immigrant community (41). The community’s role-bound habitus is “incorporated and reconfigured by interpretation and reflection, by negotiations and interactions, by differentiated exteriorizations according to the particular lived situation” (43). Michel’s approach departs from Ricoeur in two essential respects. First, reflecting the growing influence of ethnomethodology and its ethical challenges to scientific observation, he complicates and undermines the expert/layperson distinction in relation to himself as researcher and the community he is studying. Second, the emplacement of narrative identity in the community’s daily lived experience sidelines the model of the text as the basis for sociological explanation. The Ricoeurian commitment to the construction of personal and social identity from out of a close imbrication of cultural legacy, personal choice, and action becomes a hybrid project without prejudice.42 This last choice is an extremely important one, and it demands careful attention. Michel’s amendment is to say that the model of the text does not exhaust the possibilities for a hermeneutic approach to sociology.43 He had cautioned that the autonomization of the object of investigation in the moment of explanation runs head-on into the methodological critiques of ethnomethodology and sociophenomenology (32), but he argues that Ricoeur’s collaborative dialectic between the moments of explanation and understanding overcome this criticism. This is a tricky admission, because what I see in Michel’s own methodological adaptation of Ricoeur is actually a better response than Ricoeur’s own. There is a greater fluidity and flexibility and a more porous dialectic

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in Michel’s hermeneutic sociology, as he both explains and practices it, so that the explanatory function is integrated into a shared process of understanding that does not objectify so much as lend greater reflective distance. This becomes clear especially with the care that Michel takes to prevent a too-rigid division between the researcher and the community member, a point of contact that goes to the heart of the ethnomethodological challenge. The autonomization of the text is mitigated by Michel’s practice of putting the oral interpretation of community members and his own commentary into an active dialogue in the case study. The resistance of “ordinary individuals” to their own repression and domination by narrative acts of cultural intervention and determination is part and parcel of the reflective process into which the researcher enters (42). Life stories are “impregnated with attempts at explanation” (what Ricoeur would call latent), which Michel then works out more explicitly (43). A  rounding of the dialogic circle would mean engaging his observations with the community itself, and frankly I  do not see, given the responsiveness of Michel’s analysis to the situation, what should prevent that. Now, the distance of the researcher comes into play in the case study because of the traumatic nature of the past, which involves repression expressed as narrative gaps. For Michel the researcher cannot participate in the impasse of ideological and psychological compensations, but must use a technique of retelling (rather than a neutral sociological description) that both challenges the lacunae of self-interpretation but also avoids assuming an unassailable superiority. For Michel, this is the hermeneutic version of objective distance where the conflict of interpretations is placed on a “horizon régulateur méthodologique.”44 The researcher’s understanding is “an interpretation of the second degree” (45). This distantiation, originating in the gaps and limitations of the historical narratives in the interviews, is the key to Michel’s conclusions about the role of the expert, what he calls “the hermeneutic professional” (195–96). This distantiation is an interesting move vis-à-vis the hermeneutic principle of perspective. The “hermeneutic professional” has certain specific capacities to see beyond the blindness of the interviewee, which therefore does not violate the hermeneutic observation that the professional will herself have blindness. In other words, the specific advantages of perspective are identified. An irony of Michel’s presentation is that, as he builds this dialogic research project between what he calls the “professional hermeneut” and the immigrant storytellers as “co-authors,” he begins to put in place what is much more closely a Gadamerian version of hermeneutic reflexivity.45 The idea of an open narrative identity resistant to the objectification of the researcher and involved in a

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collaborative process with the subject sounds like a wonderful amalgamation of Ricoeur and Gadamer in practice. By giving such pride of place and textual real estate to the narrative voices of French-Algerian immigrants, perhaps under the pressure of the sociology that had made these things very live issues today, Michel’s case study gestures toward a more dialogic sensibility than is suggested by the language of scientificity. Nevertheless, in his conclusion, he harkens back to the Ricoeurian divisions of labor to which I have drawn attention. Despite the fact that indigenous narrators and the hermeneutic sociologist “participate in the ‘co-production of meaning,’ ” the latter has a “scientific aim, detached from the original interactions.”46 The conclusion I  am arriving at is that it is healthy and desirable to have differentiated techniques of inquiry interrogating social issues with differentiated degrees of distance and belonging. Negotiating the appropriate relation means being sensitive about the methods of engagement and distancing in any kind of hermeneutics, whether it is that of the researcher, the psychoanalyst, or the public intellectual. Should the double hermeneutic that Michel describes share its results with the community it has made the subject of its investigation? Are the gaps that he identifies in the consciousness of indigenous storytellers not gaps that the immigrant community itself should face? Would Michel’s “objectivity” here be a helpful contribution to the community’s own progress of historical and narrative identity? Hermeneutics’ more capacious self-understanding would call for this kind of negotiation. It is interesting and ironic that Ricoeur, in his last great opus, actually does, in a manner of speaking, bring forward this obligation. In these instances, it is the citizen, he says, who remains the court of last resort in the adjudication of historical truth. The historian works “under the gaze of the people,” judgment is submitted to “the critique of the enlightened public,” and “the citizen remains the ultimate arbiter.”47 His subject is History with a capital H, as he puts it, and he has in mind the representation of the vast defining movements of history that define communities, such as the history of the Third Reich or of the Algerian Revolution. He believes these histories must be written, and he contrasts this obligation with Lyotard’s disparagement of meta-narratives, and the narrow sanction of “local forms of agreement” and “little narratives” (314). But this concession only sharpens the difference to a finer point of clarity. The role of an enlightened public in Ricoeur’s construction of the people, citizen, or public is the relatively passive one of giving assent, similar to the role of the audience in the classical model of the great speaker. Why should local forms of agreement and little narratives be used as the foil for the writing of a collective

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history, as opposed to strands that constitute it? The danger here is that we begin to think that memory is something that communities have, while history is something that historians write. Let us then apply the conscientious negotiation of a more supple hermeneutic identity to the more varied intermediations that open up now as we move beyond the increasingly anachronistic entailments of the textual metaphor. Not just direct action and face-to-face dialogue, but the newer forms and economies of communication that confuse the boundaries of distance and belonging, researcher and public, speech, image, and text.

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Educators or Researchers?

Aristotle believed that rhetoric “is in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science.”1 Human beings have a natural communicative aptitude that can be improved by reflective consideration and invention. At the tail end of the Renaissance when the standard humanist education gave way under the pressure of the new sciences, Protestant hermeneutics developed in the gap between prudence and rhetorical education on the one side and rationalism and scientific method on the other.2 Some of the early German biblical and legal scholars treated hermeneutics as a counterpart to methodological knowledge, others as a method in itself. We see this duality play out in Ricoeur, and many of his richest contributions to hermeneutic understanding play in that tension. In this chapter I want to locate a place in his work where this tension reaches a kind of breaking point. This is when Ricoeur starts to think about narrative structure. In 1963, Ricoeur asked, “In what sense are structural considerations today a necessary stage of any hermeneutic comprehension?” and he concluded that the “understanding of structures is the necessary intermediary between symbolic naïveté and hermeneutic comprehension.”3 Again in 1982 he asserted positively that the structural analysis of a text was a necessary step to “help us to read the narrative” discourses that surround us.4 Let us set aside Ricoeur’s relation to the fate of structuralism per se and concentrate on this invocation of necessity. Because I believe that hermeneutic comprehension should be cultivated in the layperson, in the citizen, I want to puzzle at the “we” and the “us” in Ricoeur’s ascription of hermeneutic responsibility. Husserl had confronted this question of the “we” when he set up his phenomenological methodology of bracketing: “But did we not say just now ‘we’ disconnect, and can we as phenomenologists set ourselves out of action, we who still remain members of the natural world?”5 Every once in a rare while Ricoeur will disclaim a right of privilege: “This does not mean that the historian knows better, but that he knows otherwise, in another way.” But in general he wants to

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tie hermeneutics to a professional context: “[W]hat can we do with a philosophy of dialogue if it is not able to be reconnected with the discipline of the human sciences, if it is merely a face-to-face relationship, and if it cannot provide us with, it cannot structure, an epistemology?”6 Because I  am committed to the dialogic dimensions of hermeneutics, I  am concerned, among other things, about the class implications of this viewpoint. Sometimes Ricoeur is remarkably obtuse on this point: “Cultivated people are better able than others within the order of language.”7 I think we need to be as suspicious as possible of any hint that a priestly class stands in the cultural role of explanatory mediator, because I believe that hermeneutics, like rhetoric, is at the root of a general paideia that empowers citizens to come to terms with each other. I want to spend a little time here developing this point, because it is the crucial juncture point for bringing the paideia of hermeneutics and rhetoric together as a curriculum. As you will see, the venerable topos of expert and layperson has a direct connection with the hermeneutic debate about distance and immediacy that underlies a mainspring of tension between Ricoeur and Gadamer. Gadamer notes that Plato’s epistemology in the “Seventh Letter,” its so-called epistemological theory, “is not a theory of knowledge at all but a theory of teaching and learning.”8 Just as Socrates refuted the pretensions of intellectual professionalism, so Gadamer modeled philosophical hermeneutics on the rhetorical competencies of the vir bonus, the good citizen. The “passion for questioning” is “a natural human tendency.”9 Perhaps the most explicit statements about this Socratic allegiance occur in the essay “The Incompetence of the Philosopher.” Gadamer is disturbed by the assumption that there are, or perhaps should be, particular kinds of people who practice philosophy, which is not the case. Philosophy is practiced by everybody . . . Everywhere people are asking philosophical questions . . . to which no one is in a position to give answers . . . I am always amazed that the philosopher, in the academic sense of the word, is supposed to have a particular competence. (4–5)

It is in the context of these remarks that he echoes, by way of criticism, Ricoeur’s famous “conflict of interpretations”: “The conflict is not between the specialized knowledge of some experts and the social reality of practical life, it is in humanity itself, in its questioning and errors” (6). On the strength of this judgment, Gadamer concludes that “each and everyone of us experiences in himself or herself the responsibility which we all bear and which we conceal from ourselves” (11). Gadamer’s entire enterprise in Truth and Method is built on a belief in the general competence of the layperson “on whom the scholar depends.”10 He

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wondered with genuine dread how compounding global crises can be addressed while a proper awareness of these problems “remains confined to small intellectual circles.”11 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle asserts that ethical decisions “come under no science or professional tradition, but the agents themselves have to consider what is suited to the circumstances on each occasion.”12 The equable humanist spirit that breathes through all Gadamer’s writing finds its resonant measure in the Aristotelian disposition toward deliberating well (kalōs bouleusthai) and the resultant eupraxis that is “engrained in the fabric of our lives” (1105a). Against the entrenched ideology of expertise in technical rationalism, this ethos places confidence in the aptitude of the person simply by virtue of being a citizen in a community. Gadamer spoke directly to Ricoeur on this point of difference in their debate in Texas: “The conflict is not between the specialized knowledge of some experts and the social reality of practical life, it is in humanity itself, in its questioning and errors.”13 The priority of the judgment of the citizen over the expert is a leitmotif that runs through Gadamer’s work with unabated insistence. It is connected to his conviction that the immediate engagement of persons in face-to-face encounters, Miteinanderreden, is the model of hermeneutics14: Phronesis is something that proves itself only in the concrete situation and stands always already within a living network of common convictions, habits, and values—that is to say, within an ethos. This is where the hermeneutical problem, whose relation to practical philosophy . . . comes in. Determining what is rational in the specific, concrete situation in which you find yourself—which certainly can have many parallels to other situations yet remains the specific situation in which you stand—is something you must do for yourself . . . you have to determine for yourself what you are going to do . . . Hermeneutics is die Kunst der Verständigung— the art of reaching an understanding—of something or with someone.15

Here you see the bridge between lay judgment and ordinary conversation. Interpretation is a social act that pairs hermeneutics and rhetoric as a basic competence:  “What we are dealing with here is not some special task of philosophy. We are dealing here with a responsibility we all carry!”16

Three examples I do not wish to challenge Ricoeur’s assumption that academics are vested with a certain social responsibility over the domains of history, philosophy,

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and literature, or perhaps not even that “the judge, like the psychiatrist,” is the arbiter “of our moral incapacities,” but what I question is the very idea that the operations of hermeneutic understanding are the preserve of professionals.17 So let us look at how he does this first. In the case of literature, Ricoeur assumes a clear division of labor. The literary critic does the work of formal analysis before passing the text over to the reader, so that appreciation can progress “from naïve understanding to mature understanding.”18 For literary criticism “there is no sudden short circuit between the entirely objective analysis of narrative structures and the appropriation of meaning by subjects.”19 Narrotologists are those who “bring to light deep structures unknown to those who recount or follow stories, but which place narratology on the same level of rationality as linguistics” (23). In his 1973 lectures on interpretation theory, Ricoeur analogizes the linguistic analysis of the semiotician to the judgment of the literary critic: “On the basis of this abstraction, a new kind of explanatory attitude may be extended towards the literary object  .  .  .  It is henceforth possible to treat texts according to the explanatory rules that linguistics successfully applied to the elementary systems of signs which underlies the use of language . . . it is always possible to abstract systems from processes.”20 Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is applied to the Bible in the same way, a second-order analytic procedure. A philosophical hermeneutics “will provide certain specific methodological tools” for considering the literary genres or modes of discourse of religious language itself—chronicle, oracle, parable, sermon, gospel, psalm, and so on.21 What Ricoeur calls “modes of discourse” are “classificatory devices that help critics to orient themselves in the immense variety of individual works,” and the philosophical hermeneut in this context serves as a critic (38–39). The same is the case for history, but here we have a record of challenges to Ricoeur’s framing, and Ricoeur is quite conscious of the issue. In Memory, History, Forgetting, he rejects Clifford Geertz’s iconoclastic subversion of the methodological mindset. Where Geertz confined “himself to conceptualizing the outlines of self-understanding immanent to a culture,” the historian cannot inscribe memory accurately “without providing the analytic instrument that this spontaneous self-understanding lacks.”22 The images of the historian develop “in a brighter light than the self-understanding that social agents have of their own practice of representation” (232). A now-famous incident in Ricoeur’s life illustrates the contentiousness of this issue. As François Dosse and Catherine Goldenstein describe in a 2013 book on the subject, Ricoeur became embroiled in controversy sparked by a lecture

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he gave in 2000 to promote the publication of Memory, History, Forgetting in which he spoke about his own disquiet at “the politics of just memory” that he felt created an obligation to respond: “I remain troubled by the disquieting spectacle that grants an excess of memory here, an excess of forgetting there, to say nothing of the influence of the commemorations and abuses of memory— and of forgetting. The idea of a politics of just memory is in this regard one of my avowed civic themes.”23 The spectacle to which he referred included high profile debates in France over the previous decade that had swirled around the hateful cottage industry of Holocaust denial, the aggressive regime of legal proscriptions instituted in France as a response, and, in reaction, a swarm of responses from academia that further fueled the public controversy. As François Azouvi recounts, what pulled Ricoeur into this controversy was the speech he delivered at the Sorbonne on June 13, 2000, at the Marc-Bloch lecture sponsored by the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).24 It seems that Ricoeur, in approaching this nest of controversies, brought his usual inclination to attempt a reconciliation of extreme positions, but his plea for balance, given his eminent stature and that heated environment, set off alarm bells like a lit match in a fireworks factory. In the initial public response to the EHESS lecture, a well-known academic criticized Ricoeur precisely for the relationship he establishes between the expert historian and the layperson. Rochlitz Rainer wrote a widely read op-ed in Le Monde on July 26, 2000, in which he took issue with what he called Ricoeur’s “axiologique du savant” that places the neutral historian on one side of a social issue, and the adjudicating citizen (as tribunal of public opinion) and judge (as arbiter of punishment) on the other.25 The historian must work above the fray in a sublime disinterestedness, “not an accuser, not a partisan.” In a memorable phrase, Rochlitz described Ricoeur’s vision of the historian as someone who must act “comme une conscience solitaire en face de son objet ou de son texte.” Rochlitz critiqued this dichotomy by a careful exposition of the ways in which the historian cannot, through a claim to expertise, separate himself/ herself from the role of citizen as though history were “written in an ivory tower.” First, are there not times when an historian is useful as the spokesperson of a particular community, telling the story from an underrepresented point of view, particularly when a hegemonic view of history has become so pervasive as to be invisible? The exclusion of the Jew from the moral conscience of the West has had such “deep roots in Christianity and the ethnic nationalism of Europe” that the historian may need to serve as a counter-vailing force against an unconscious tendency. Rochlitz observed that in this instance the obligation does not bear so

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much the status of a moral obligation as of a professional ethic. And when the historian’s subject is specifically the history of the rationalizations, mitigations, and relativizations that have become the stock-in-trade of Holocaust denial, the results of which seep into the consciousness of the entire community, then the historian has a specific duty of correction. Rochlitz continued to come back to the image of the isolated scholar that he thought Ricoeur promotes; the duty of the historian in a community is not hypothetical: “He is not alone with the monstrous object, he is never completely shielded from the assaults of closeminded ignorance or desire,” he is not involved in a completely “discretionary and private exercise.” An historian always and inevitably speaks from a position, and the responsibility is not to deny this social location, but to be vigilantly reflective about the effects of this positionality. Rochlitz critiqued not only the imbalance of Ricoeur’s dichotomy of historian and citizen, he suggested what should take its place in view of the need to address questions of partisanship and partiality. This was, very simply, the debate among historians. Here we have a class of citizens who are able to give experience, time, and effort to a focused and systematic study, so that what they bring to the table is different from the lay citizen. But this difference is rebalanced by their participation in a community of diverse points of view that does not involve neutrality, but requires both their own reflective vigilance and the exposure of considered points of view to the multiplex disputandi of the discourse community. Wherever Rochlitz’s nuanced and sensitive awareness of the interrelationship of the historian to the community came from, his exposition was a neat articulation of the position that Gadamer argues in his efforts to undermine the dichotomy of layperson and expert. The educated person is only secondarily an expert, and expertise must be constantly in dialogue with, at a very granular level, being-human.26 The subtlety with which Rochlitz charted the various areas of overlap is a fair example of the dialogic aspect of the inescapably prudential negotiations of role and identity in the storytelling of the past. There was one instance where Ricoeur seemed to transcend his usual compartmentalization of the explanatory moment. Not surprisingly, it happens when he enters into the cultural history of Christian exegesis, a history which speaks pointedly to the relationship between explanation and understanding. The role of iconography and symbolism in the twelfth-century church was crucial for the expansion of the faith when the vast majorities of communities of the faith were still illiterate, drawn into the mysteries through oral teaching, ritual performance, and the symbolic imagery of the plastic arts. Research shows that

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worshippers were not at all confused by the symbolic imagery of an exceedingly complex twelfth-century theology, the typologies, orders, and economies of Trinitarian procession, the narrative exchanges and transformations of Old and New Testament, the polysemy of allegorical interpretation. Ricoeur explains the sophisticated familiarity of the parishioner by “an exegesis instituted within an ordered community,” and a teaching “exercised within the framework of the ecclesiastical” framework.27 The Protestant Revolution is key to this greater intimacy. The distribution of knowledge in the twelfth century was a function of the highly stratified social structures embodied in an institutionalized church bureaucracy that preserved the chasm between the literate and the illiterate, the clerisy and the masses. The Lutheran ideal of sola scriptura, in a calculated reaction to that hegemonic order, placed the laity more directly in contact with their faith tradition through Bible translation and literacy training, loosening the bonds of dependence on institutional hierarchy. Protestantism in its promotion of “the priesthood of all believers” was precisely a reaction against the privilege of expertise and specialization, and the idea of a general education received a principal impetus from the Protestant push toward civic control of schooling and compulsory education. The centering of the church in the individual and the community of faith rather than in the corporate structure was the seedbed for an ideal of Christian community knit together by the tradition of the Word that gave birth to German hermeneutics. So Ricoeur knew well of this tradition, but it did not serve as his model. To be clear, I am not maintaining that Ricoeur would extend the procedural compartmentalization of expertise rigidly, but only that this was the model from which he is operating in conceiving of hermeneutics within the research protocols of the human sciences. In the modern setting, he saw explanation transpiring within the academic sphere, “in the region between the explanatory sciences and hermeneutical disciplines,” and to the extent that it migrates out beyond the academy, it is via the mediation of scholarly expertise.28 He points to philosophy as an example of the need for what Gadamer calls “special approaches” to knowledge, and rejects a philosophy of dialogue “if it is merely a face-to-face relationship, and if it cannot provide us with, it cannot structure, an epistemology” (237). This is precisely not the position of a hermeneutic perspective for Gadamer, for whom hermeneutic understanding, hermeneutic experience, and a hermeneutic sensibility was to be cultivated as a general competence of citizens. He speaks at length of this capacity in a number of places, and devotes more

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than one essay to the topic.29 The habitus he wants to cultivate is not in general a passing from the expert analyst to the lay reader. When expertise was needed, it would be subsidiary and enlisted as necessary by the reader, and under the reader’s control. “Special approaches” to literature, such as structuralism, would be reintegrated, that is, subordinated to the reader’s experience, just as psychoanalysis would be a method subordinated to the person seeking their own mental health. Here Gadamer contrasts the professional relationship of the therapist with a nonexpert: The psychoanalyst leads the patient into the emancipatory reflection which goes behind the conscious superficial interpretations breaks through the masked selfunderstanding, and sees through the repressive function of social taboos. This belongs to the emancipatory reflection to which he leads his patient. But what happens when he uses the same kind of reflection in a situation in which he is not the doctor but a partner in a game? Then he will fall out of his social role! A  game partner who is always “seeing through” his game-partner, who does not take seriously what they are standing for, is a spoil-sport whom one shuns. The emancipatory power of reflection claimed by the psychoanalyst is a special rather than general function of reflection and must be given its boundaries through the societal context and consciousness, within which the analyst and also his patient are on even terms with everybody else . . . Where does the patientrelationship end and the social partnership in its unprofessional right begin?30

So we have not only a clear difference of perspective between the two great hermeneuts but a fundamental paradigm split. Gadamer did not elaborate the institutional implications of this difference, but others did, and it is to them we must now turn.

The challenge to hermeneutic expertise from the left Hermeneutic scholars often walk right up to the status problem in Ricoeur’s dialectical paradigm but still miss it. Francisco Gonzalez makes a genuine effort “to begin to unravel the complex tangle of similarities and differences between two versions of philosophical hermeneutics,” and he places at the center of his analysis Ricoeur’s separation of the text as an object that, by alienating itself from the immediate absorption of the face-to-face encounter, lends itself to distanced explanation.31 What Gonzalez wants to show is that the model of dialogue that Gadamer uses from the Socratic tradition already contains within itself a distantiating dimension, “a certain objectification that yet never leaves

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the concrete give-and-take of dialogue,” an objectification in situ that results from the severe tests of the interlocutor in bringing conversants’ claims under the white heat of dialectical testing (321). The challenge to the status privilege I am pointing out is implicit in Gonzalez’s description of Socratic dialogue as face-to-face encounter that preserves the balance “between objective analysis and subjective exchange” (322). He asks whether, if written discourse is “unable itself to speak or respond, it must await the external help of the interpreter” (322). He notes that Ricoeur defines “hermeneutics as ‘a philosophy of the detour’ where the detour is ‘the recourse to analysis.’ ”32 Because Gonzalez is only interested in defending the face-to-face as a mode of communication with internal resources equal to those of textual analysis, he does not question its structural ramifications. If “the copresence of subjects in dialogue ceases to be the model of all understanding,” as Ricoeur wants it, should we not ask who the subjects are who are not present but interceding with their judgments (320)? Against Ricoeur’s charge of anti-methodology, Gadamer responded that he did not want to delegitimize expertise, but rather to turn “the social engineer into the social partner.”33 Is this a naïve or idealistic hope? Perhaps we can at least think of this hope as a regulative ideal. Paolo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed provides the most radical application of such a partnership by turning Hegel’s theory of recognition toward a model of education predicated on the superior knowledge of the oppressed (who better understands the conditions of oppression?). The student must throw off the learned incapacity of the entrenched status quo in order to teach themselves and their oppressor what equity is. The teacher in this model becomes merely the midwife, liberating the critical insight of the learner from the topsy-turvy blindness inseminated through the forces of cultural hegemony. In the hegemonic context, the knowledge of the expert (because knowledge is power) is typically used to reinforce oppressive rationalizations through mystification. I want to bring one other interlocutor into this matter here, a French intellectual who put this point much more forcefully to Ricoeur than even Gadamer. Michel de Certeau made the role of the historian a principal subject of his work and clashed with Ricoeur publicly on the question. In a long essay, Ricoeur’s biographer François Dosse makes the case that Ricoeur and de Certeau were not really so far apart on this point: “L’hypothèse que je évelopperai ici est celle d’une proximité tout à fait exceptionnelle quant à leur conception respective de ce qu’est l’écriture de l’histoire.”34 Whether this is true in the broader scheme of things, on the point of the professional role of the historian, de Certeau strongly reinforces the critique that I have raised.35 In a well-known essay on the subject,

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de Certeau makes the professional role of the historian the central target of his attack: All historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production. It implies an area of elaboration that peculiar determinations circumscribe:  a liberal profession, a position as an observer or a professor, a group of learned people, and so forth. It is therefore ruled by constraints, bound to privileges, and rooted in a particular situation. It is in terms of this place that its methods are established, its topography of interests can be specified, its dossiers and its interrogation of documents are organized.36

This is the strong version of the sociological determinant of knowledge production: “The institution does more than give a doctrine a social position. It makes it possible and surreptitiously determines it.”37 Therefore it is “impossible to analyze historical discourse independently of the institution in relation to which it is organized into a science” (9). In this strong version of the institutional analysis, history “is entirely shaped by the system within which it is developed” (69). Even Foucault, de Certeau charges, “still takes for granted . . . the autonomy of the theoretical place where, in its ‘narrative,’ laws are developed according to which scientific discourses form and combine in global systems” (60). The definitive effects this positionality has on the narratives that are developed are, as all ideology critique has taught us, invisible and insidious: “It has been shown that all historical interpretation depends upon a system of reference; that this system remains as an implicitly particular ‘philosophy’; that, seeping into the work of analysis, it organizes the work surreptitiously by referring to an author’s ‘subjectivity’ ” (58). De Certeau is unsparing in naming the target of his attack: “the kingdom of intellectuals” (59). A form of hegemony operates here, “the ‘exempted’ power belonging to the knowledgeable” (59). The specificity, vigor, and forcefulness of this attack provide both a clear target and an unavoidable challenge for Ricoeur’s view that the historian bears a high duty to memory. And so Ricoeur engages head on with the challenge in the 1979 Zaharoff Lecture titled “The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History.” Ricoeur acknowledges that de Certeau throws a challenge to the historian “by asking the historian to problematize himself before conceptualizing his object.”38 Ricoeur agrees that doing this “is displacing the theoretical field into the practical field: doing history is producing something,” and the historian “finds himself, as an agent of historical activity, bound by the rules he imposes on his object when he submits it to the rigors of ideology critique” (62). So far Ricoeur is in agreement:  “What appears through this

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reflexive movement is above all else the social place of the historical operation. This place, this space, is, according to de Certeau, what remains undeclared in this production, which claims to spring spontaneously from nowhere” (62). The historian must indeed account for the transformation effected by the historian’s own work: What ideological critique puts into question is the reality of critical distantiation whenever this is alleged. The critical function of history calls for a metacritique to remind it that history transforms into another cultural product the primary information which is itself already a social production and that, more than simply casting a regard, history is a technique which transforms the available signs into signs that function differently.39

Ricoeur brings his characteristic depth and precision of analysis to this challenge, and makes a more than compelling case for the indispensability of the professional historian’s contributions, which he demonstrates with a systematic thoroughness. But this is precisely what misses the point, since there cannot be a legitimate debate (pace Certeau et al.) about the value of and the need for historical scholarship. The problem is that Ricoeur articulates the issue in binary terms, the professional historian over against the voice of “popular culture” or “everyday man,” between, in the case of the particular historical event that calls for public focus, “the historian’s thought and the commemoration (or execration) of the event.”40 The question is how the fact that a historian is also an “everyday man” affects the history, and what the precise relationship is between expert judgment and civic judgment. What Ricoeur’s “second order critique” of the historian’s work has to include is Gadamer’s model of dialogue, which, far from being a naïve prelude to such a discussion, is its stasis point.

Psychotherapy as analogy and model I noted at the outset that the main analogy for the privilege of levels in Ricoeur is psychotherapy, an analogy that he borrows from Habermas. Ironically, Habermas would later distance himself from this analogy, but Ricoeur never did: “Only properly explanatory procedures, once again comparable to those of psychoanalysis, are capable of leading to a reconstruction of what would be in the theory of ideologies the equivalent of the ‘primitive scene’ in psychoanalytic theory.”41 The key thing about that analogy that bears on my question is the nature of the relationship between the analyst and the patient. As Ricoeur

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explains it, the analyst sits in a privileged position vis-à-vis explanation. In the case of mental health, Ricoeur asserts that, although “the patient has to live with his own feelings and impulses in terms of what can be said of them, and said of them to somebody else—within the framework of a kind of narrative of his own experience”—nevertheless, it “is the fact that to give an account of this distortion we must introduce new theoretical terms which do not belong to the experience itself, terms such as libido, repression, cathexis, and so on.”42 The “we” in this case is the psychoanalyst, since the patient does not learn these theoretical terms. The most extended example of this analogical model is presented in Freud and Philosophy. For Ricoeur, Freud affirmed his intuition that human being must be understood through the detour of culture:  “Psychoanalysis conflicts with every other global interpretation of the phenomenon of man because it is an interpretation of culture.”43 In other words, human being rises out of language and culture before it can constitute it, and symbols are the manifestation of that cultural being:  “Thus it is not the dream-work that constructs the symbolic relation, but the work of culture. This means that the symbolic relation is formed within language” (500). Psychoanalysis is therefore a method of getting at these substrates of the person in the depositions of cultural history they bear. Ricoeur wanted to see whether the psychoanalyst’s methods of dream interpretation could transfer usefully over to non-pathological forms of textual interpretation. Ricoeur was attracted to Freud’s insight that interpretation needed to reach beyond the semiotic surface to the depths of life experience that symbols expressed. Just as analysis is a working through (Durcharbeiten) of the contradictions manifested in the symbolism of dreams, so the interpretation of cultural texts engages their obscure and buried histories through the ambiguity of the symbol: If dreams designate—pars pro toto—the entire region of double-meaning expressions, the problem of interpretation in turn designates all understanding specifically concerned with the meaning of equivocal expressions. To interpret is to understand a double meaning. In this way the place of psychoanalysis within the total sphere of language is specified:  it is the area of symbols or double meanings and the area in which the various manners of interpretation confront one another. From now on we shall call this special area, broader than psychoanalysis but narrower than the theory of language as a whole which is its horizon, the “hermeneutic field.” By hermeneutics we shall always understand the theory of the rules that preside over an exegesis—that is, over the interpretation of a particular text, or of a group of signs that may be viewed as a text.44

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Hermeneutics in this context is a “special area,” a practice or technique within a philosophy of language, and this brings us to the nub of the issue. Ricoeur is clear that this is his quarry as well (“I am interested here merely in recognizing the contour of the hermeneutic field.”), and his narrowing of the location of the field back to something closer to its seventeenth-century incarnation (“the theory of the rules that preside over an exegesis”) is precisely the opposite direction of movement from Heidegger and Gadamer.45 So let us look closely at this circumscription. Ricoeur ultimately does not erect a strong disciplinary barrier between Freud’s psychoanalysis of dreams and his own attempts to understand the broader role of symbolic interpretation for a cultural understanding of human being. He offers a three-level hierarchy of symbols: the fragmented dream symbols that express the unconscious, the conventionalized everyday symbols that serve as the material for anthropology, and the literary symbols that tease out the rich ambiguities of these sedimentations to imagine new dimensions of human being. For this third level, he actually turns to a Freudian example of literary interpretation (of Oedipus Rex) and tries to improve on Freud’s interpretation based on the criticisms he has developed. However, what is important for our investigation is that his literary interpretation of Oedipus Rex is an extension and correction of Freud’s interpretation. We are no longer within the realm of analogy, and Ricoeur sees a bridge between the two interpretive procedures:  “The same causes— life’s hardship, the triple suffering dealt the individual by nature, his body, and other men—give rise to similar responses—neurotic ceremonials and religious ceremonials, demand for consolation and appeal to Providence—and obtain comparable effects.”46 The symbolic levels exist on a continuum of expression: If dreams remain a private expression lost in the solitude of sleep, it is because they lack the mediation of the artisan’s work that embodies the fantasy in a solid material and communicates it to a public. This mediation of the artisan’s work and this communication accrue only to those dreams that at the same time carry values capable of advancing consciousness toward a new understanding of itself.47

As a result, Ricoeur is able to analyze Oedipus Rex as a text that continues to express elements of the unresolved meanings created by the pathologies of the society that produced Attic tragedy. This is a remarkable result, because it shows how close Ricoeur is willing to go toward the methodological presuppositions of a psychoanalytic procedure. As we will see shortly, Gadamer challenges him directly on this point.

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But before we do, I want to be very clear that I am not in any way questioning the legitimacy of a methodological approach to an investigation of symbols per se. Within its own sphere, a hermeneutica generalis could have no objection to this. The only question I am raising has to do with the import of this type of work for what Ricoeur openly calls “the contours of the hermeneutic field.”48

The great debate Gadamer’s attack. We are very lucky to have the transcript of a debate between the two principals that circles on the very issue I am pinpointing as the question of the domain of hermeneutics. To support my assertion that the battle over expertise is the cardinal division between a Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics, I  am going to show that it is the stasis point of their debate. Gadamer had suggested the general topic for this famous encounter in 1982 at the University of Texas, and he did so with a view to Ricoeur’s by-then wellknown framing of hermeneutics as a conflict of interpretations, which Ricoeur had articulated in his book on Freud and used as the title of his first major collection of hermeneutic essays. Gadamer had learned from Ricoeur before the conference what his prepared text would address on the topic, so it is not surprising that Gadamer’s opening remarks that begin the debate are a nearly perfect foil to Ricoeur’s presentation. Gadamer concurs with Ricoeur on the origin of the conflict of interpretations as a paradigm battle between Bacon and Nietzsche, who both described their work as interpretive. In the scope of modern European intellectual history, these were emblematic representatives of the extreme ends of the conflict— the personification of anti-method on one end and method on the other. But Gadamer then places human dialogue in the mediating position between the extremes, and asserts that this is the fundamental contribution of philosophical hermeneutics to the resolution of the conflict. This framing is a difficulty for Ricoeur, who will remark in the discussion period that his “contribution was not fundamentally different from that of Professor Gadamer,” when in fact his presentation, and his recalibration of hermeneutics in general, is precisely to make a disciplinary method the means for overcoming the weakness of “merely a face-to-face relationship,” the very thing which Gadamer has just placed in the center as the mediation of science and skepticism.49 Having set up this snare, Gadamer goes to the heart of his objection with Ricoeur, but via an indirect historical reference that I  would have to say hits

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a little below the belt. The great nineteenth-century thinkers who opened up the space for the innovations in hermeneutic ontology left a certain group behind:  “It was not the professors of philosophy that achieved this change. They were preoccupied with epistemology, i.e. the justification of the positive sciences.”50 The professors of philosophy. There is a very great deal behind this attribution that I will have to get at slowly. Gadamer identifies this theme as the very “problem I have been working on for a long time,” which is what he sees as the deformity of the intellectual project that has developed with the professionalization of education into a preserve of specialists. The power of Nietzsche’s iconoclasm was partly to call out the pretensions of this development and its attendant ideological entailments. The masters of suspicion were not just tearing away the delusive masks of the patient, but of the thin crust of an establishment culture’s new territorial reign. Gadamer pockets the change from this critical assault and then turns away from Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Like Ricoeur, he understands that when a system has become radically distorted, subversion is necessary but not sufficient: “And the whole question of course is: Is it possible for philosophy and critical reflection to accept two different and quite irreconcilable attitudes towards any given meaningful whole?”51 But Gadamer’s remedy to this false choice is the crucial dividing line between himself and Ricoeur. As the mediating alternative, he opts to turn the practical orientation of the humanistic tradition of prudence in an ontological direction, whereas Ricoeur wants to adapt the methodological instruments of disciplinary epistemologies for a stepwise approach to the guiding hermeneutic star of tragic finitude. There is a bit of a trick being played here, Gadamer thinks, because Ricoeur has adopted the Heideggerian insight into finite discursivity, our being-in-the-world, but without the hyphens, going back to the nineteenth-century efforts to preserve the realm of the objective as a space of neutral inquiry. This step is taken when Ricoeur singularizes the object of hermeneutics as the text as an artifact available to examination. To combat all of this, Gadamer invokes the religious principle of the kerygma as the model of hermeneutic experience in which understanding unfolds, in his beautiful formulation, not as an activity in the course of life, but as the form of human life. Just as this faith tradition preached the doctrine of the Word as an ongoing historical manifestation acted out in the faith community and each individual as the literal body of Christ, so Hegel understood truth to be an historical event carried out on the scale of history. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is an heir to this double legacy. Gadamer then establishes his point of departure

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from Hegel and his move to Heidegger, who appropriated the hermeneutic analogy from theology as a way to explain the performative nature of the truth of discursive being in the world. (Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer” is a clear exposition of this move. Here we see explicitly the transposition of the formal structure of Hegel’s performative theory of historical truth into a hermeneutically inflected theory of logos as Sprache.) Gadamer notes the twin origin of hermeneutics in legal theory and scriptural studies, and how this brought a prudential dimension to the hermeneutic paradigm. In the legal studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which needed to reconcile the “scientifically elaborated” law of the empire with “the traditional, uncodified legal customs of the people,” the split between the Baconian and Nietzschian currents of modern culture was mediated by a movement in the direction of case law, notions of precedent, and the reciprocal formation of particular legal judgments and the legal code itself.52 The pragmatic ethos of this approach to law kept the line open to the tradition of practical reasoning in classical humanism, an option that navigated between the shoals of scientific objectivity and the whirlpools of infinite regress. What Gadamer asserted in the end was deceptively simple, “a common human concern for mutual understanding,” a formula that is less a naïve appeal to the ideal speech community than a rejection of an appeal to some superior standpoint (218). Any single interpreter speaks from a finite position, and a training in humanist hermeneutics is about remaining conscious of this fact. Now, Gadamer is aware of the vulnerability of the humanist option, which is to confuse the wish for mutual understanding with its possibility. But a defense against the naïve hope for solidarity is built into the concept of facticity itself. The hermeneut’s self-conscious vigilance (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) is built on a recognition of the condition of thrownness being “absolutely opaque in relation to any form of interpretation.”53 But, and here is the rebound from Nietzsche, awareness of this opacity is in its own way a form of solidarity. How we react to our existential condition is a common endeavor, something shared. We have to give up the illusion of mastery and accept the basic modesty of our epistemic competence. Yet this is something. The reflective awareness of our insufficiency is a hedge against our colonizing desires, an awareness that “lays the constant charge upon our human living to break through the illusions of our self-sufficiency” (220). So what Gadamer proposes as the feasible middle ground between Bacon and Nietzsche is “the actual working-out of daily life, where communication as the

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exchange of words in use structures the whole of social reality.”54 This working out still remains despite the breakdown of communication or its subversion; there is no guarantee system that prevents these things and there is no retreat from their consequences. The attacks on Gadamer’s claim of universality have not measured the modesty of his practical expectation for hermeneutics, which is simply to “find some small ground of solidarity” (223). Ricoeur’s response. Ricoeur begins his formal statement to the meeting by linking to Gadamer’s final comments on the replacement of two extreme modes of hermeneutics (the romantic and the nihilist) with a dialogic approach. However, Ricoeur does not want to pose the initial “conflict of interpretations” as two unworkable extremes, but instead as two dimensions of a dialectic, what he described in his Freud book as an alternation between a “willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.”55 This move transforms the nature of the alternatives and removes the need for a third option. This difference of models—dialogue as a middle way between idealism and skepticism versus making the hermeneut an arbiter between solidarity and suspicion—will remain between the two philosophers after all is said and done. The muting or softening of radical skepticism in Ricoeur’s mind is simply the cultivated distance of the methodologically trained mind that seeks explanatory procedures of analysis in defined areas of disciplinary knowledge. The interpretive conflict pair suspicion/faith is simply transposed to the dialectic of explanation/ understanding. Thus, in literary studies he saw structuralism as an attempt to find some objective distance from questions of judgment and taste. He saw psychoanalysis as a method of deconstruction (in suspicion) and reconstruction (in good faith) of symbolic meanings. For ethics he saw the analogy of human action to textuality as a way to provide behavioral interpretation an objective artifact. He announces this transformation of the hermeneutic enterprise into what is essentially a “field theory” as his chosen method of approach behind his entire research program. This is a bit jarring in the context of Gadamer’s proposal, but it is not quite clear how their difference in the reading of the conflict will register until Ricoeur uses literary reception as his first example, and references structuralism as the mode of explanation for the literary text: “[I]f the objectification of discourse in text is a natural step in the development of our linguistic competence, explanatory devices applied to texts are not then as such doomed to pervert and eventually to destroy its objective comprehension. It is the very process of exteriorization which calls for the detour through explanatory devices.”56 Gadamer had based his entire presentation on the limited possibility of finding common ground in the

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act of communication, a hope that started from the awareness that communion of minds was a vain illusion but that there is always already some common ground in a common language, values, and culture. In the formula, “the actual working-out of daily life, where communication as the exchange of words in use structures the whole of social reality,” there is nothing that precludes the use of explanatory devices, but this happens within the context of conversation.57 When Ricoeur speaks of “the detour through explanatory devices,” the frame of reference has changed entirely. He is referring to the work of sociologists and literary theorists and anthropologists, trained observers at one remove from “the actual working-out of daily life.” The two projects might be reconcilable at some level, but in terms of framing hermeneutics they are apples and oranges. We see this, for instance, when Ricoeur tries to assimilate the Heideggerian principle of Aneignung (enowning) with his dialectic of explanation and understanding as a three-stage process in which an interpretive arc “proceeds from naïve understanding to mature understanding through learned explanation.”58 How and when does learned explanation occur, under what scenario, and who provides it? One can easily imagine analysis or explanation interposing in a conversation from within or from without—as Gadamer says to Ricoeur, “I certainly need a great deal of knowledge about language and historical conditions and cultural habits and so on,” but Ricoeur’s learned explanation is not this (236). His first example is history: The process of explanation tends then to be more and more separated from that of understanding . . . history is not a description of what past agents did in terms of their own motivation, but a prescription in terms of some consequences unknown to them  .  .  .  This does not mean that the historian knows better, but that he knows otherwise, in another way  .  .  .  the historians will bring in categories, principles, and rules which are unknown to the agents themselves.59

We are back in the preserve of the expert and the expert’s specialized training. Near the end of the colloquy, after Gadamer has contrasted his dialogic perspective with Ricoeur’s “system of special approaches,”60 Ricoeur finally confronts the difference of levels:  “[W]hat can we do with a philosophy of dialogue if it is not able to be reconnected with the discipline of the human sciences, if it is merely a face-to-face relationship and if it cannot provide us with, if it cannot structure, an epistemology?”61 But the main point of Gadamerian hermeneutics is to restructure the relationship between epistemology and ontology so that dialogue can make use of knowledge without being dominated by it.

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Did Ricoeur amend his position? At the end of Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur adds a new category of expertise that seems at first to challenge the lay-expert distinction I have been highlighting. It is the category of what he calls the enlightened public, which comes into play as a final arbiter of the decisions of the judge and the historian in the distance of time: Having set out to find an impartial yet not infallible third party, we end by adding a third partner to the pair formed by the historian and the judge, the citizen. The citizen emerges as a third party in the order of time with a gaze that is structured on the basis of personal experience, variously instructed by penal judgment and by published historical inquiry. On the other hand, the intervention of citizens is never completed, placing them more on the side of the historian. But the citizen is in search of an assured judgment, intended to be as definitive as that of the judge. In every respect, the citizen remains the ultimate arbiter. It is the citizen who militantly carries the “liberal” values of constitutional democracy. In the final analysis, the conviction of the citizen alone justified the fairness of the penal procedure in the courts and the intellectual honesty of the historian in the archives. And it is this same conviction that, ultimately, allows us to name the inhuman, retrospectively, as the absolute contrary of “liberal” values.62

This addition of the enlightened citizen to the forms of expertise looks possibly like a modification to or even transcendence of the bifurcation I have sketched out. The relation between expert and citizen here is very similar to what Gadamer had called the sensus communis. Citizen as ultimate judge sounds like prudence as the final arbiter. This is an important clarification, because I think it is a very real attribute; a tragic one, since it references the frequent incapacity of the majority to see in the present what they will see in the distance of time. Human beings are so predictably lodged in the passions of the moment, the limitations of perspective, and the instincts of self-interest to be blinded to what historical perspective will make so obvious. With time revolutionaries are canonized by the groups who had despised them, and great fashions shrink to insignificance. How far does Ricoeur’s category of the authority of the enlightened public remedy the problem of privilege? It is incontrovertible that effective forms of cooperation between expert and public are even more crucial as society becomes ever more complex. But then being a citizen means finding ways to move to and from graduated levels of specialized expertise, availing ourselves of it as necessary and cultivating it in ourselves to varying degrees, but also knowing

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when and how to do this effectively. This has become a big share of what it means to exist and survive in a complex society. It is precisely this engagement—figuring out how to avail myself of degrees of expertise, knowing when I need to rely on others and when I can cultivate a measure of it for myself, knowing how far to go and when to pull back in gathering experience, knowing how to gain access to or solicit help from others—this is itself the general competence that Gadamer places above expertise, and the judgment that belongs to phronesis. Ricoeur’s model of public as final arbiter does not reflect this more nuanced collaboration, and it still places the public in a relatively passive role in the process. In my view Ricoeur’s addition of the court of public opinion in the distance of time is too weak an amendment. Prudence is an active competence that anticipates what historical distance will prove; the verdict of history is too late if we do not learn from it to develop such anticipatory skills. Relying on the cooling action of time is, in the end, just another variant of distancing, and it does not substitute for the difficult path of democratic dialogue. If we want to mediate Ricoeur’s sensitivity to the structural role of institutions with Gadamer’s commitment to the human measure of communication, we need to see history as a dialogue of members of a community about identity, for which the expertise of historians is merely an aid. Gadamer chose the word “dialogue” because that is the word Plato chose, but its central attribute is clash, not agreement, and the ability to clash in a multiplex disputandi is what will give legitimacy to a hermeneutic perspective in the long run.

Conclusion I have raised two questions about Ricoeur’s position on the dialectic of explanation and understanding:  whether he does not give us an overly rigid bi-polar division of roles in the production of knowledge, and whether there is a social hierarchy in this division. The latter concern calls into question whether Ricoeur is even working on the same thematic level as Gadamer and, to this, I have answered no, that Ricoeur mostly imagines hermeneutics as a disciplinary perspective and not as a general model of dialogic experience, whereas Gadamer thinks of hermeneutics in the same way Aristotle thought of rhetoric, as a general capacity that can improve itself through reflection. Because of this difference, Gadamer and Ricoeur talk past each other about the role of explanation. When Ricoeur talks about explanation, he is referring either to specialized fields (history, psychology, literary theory, sociology, etc.) that theorize at a second

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remove about what is going on in the symbolic discourse of a lay public, or to the passage of this expert knowledge to a lay public, which, as the court of last resort, accept or reject it. The privilege of understanding in humanistic inquiry for Gadamer just means that inquiry remains attached to our being-in-the-worldwith-each-other, and that there are a whole variety of distancing, testing, and clarifying means to aid our understanding. Ricoeur has really won the argument in a practical sense, because acceptance of Gadamer’s model would mean that the general education would be privileged over the disciplinary regimes that support the society of expertise we are becoming. In closing, let me offer a real-world example of a typical encroachment of the cult of expertise onto an interpretive situation as a way to calibrate what I  think should be an appropriate hermeneutic response. Social psychology in the United States is a field that has often succumbed to the cult of expertise that Gadamer warned against. In 1998, the Claremont Symposium attempted a survey of approaches to applied social psychology in the United States in a study titled (tellingly) Addressing Community Problems: Psychological Research and Interventions. Even the projects it reported on that were located on the collaborative end of the spectrum displayed top-down, managerial attitudes toward the community they were attempting to serve. In a work-site health promotion project, for instance, a consortium of community agencies that included management consultants, local foundations, and treatment providers targeted employee lifestyle and other factors that affect health with employee training initiatives without employee input. Another project focused on dating violence prevention among adolescents. The “Safe Dates Program” featured the same kind of intervention, with a ten-session curriculum, a theater performance, and a poster contest for the purpose of “educating school and community members about the prevalence and negative consequences of dating violence.”63 Although the project “was not effective in promoting help seeking by victims or perpetrators,” it did “enhance services” (127). There is now a vast literature on such interventionist top-down approaches to uplift, which point out, not surprisingly, that they tend to help agencies and researchers more than the “target” communities. Expertise needs always to cultivate engagement—as teachers, as interlocutors, as midwives of practical reason. Laypersons from their end needs to become experts in finding, sorting, and weighing; as arbiters of knowledge, as the medium through which any expertise must find its utility. Even if Gadamer’s dialogic vision is hopelessly idealistic, it provides a criterion against which to measure our human relations and engagements and institutions. With this standard, explanation comes to the aid of understanding

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sometimes, and sometimes other things do. The exchange of explanation and understanding is only one modality of dialogue. Persons or communities attempting to communicate something to one another may explain, but they might also display, depict, describe, convey, move, invoke, transport, confront; the effort to share what is meaningful has many forms. The response to any of these modalities of communication can likewise take many forms, and the back and forth between conversation partners may spiral out in any number of directions. In the process, the very same conversation partner may enlist explanation, but also reflection or silence. What is important is that the level of hermeneutic experience is the human interchange of receiving and responding, much more basic than the particular modality of exchange. The consequence is that it is not correct to place hermeneutics and science on two ends of a bipolar axis. Hermeneutics describes the dynamic of human communication, and science is one of the tools in the basket of the conversation partners. To be sensitive to Ricoeur’s concern about an indiscriminate assertion of the prudential prerogative, and of this certainly Gadamer was guilty, it will be necessary to develop more nuanced and precise gradations and specifications for the dense interplay between specialist and nonspecialist. The interface between publics and the activity of specialists needs to be a space of rigorously examined negotiation. In the first place, this space is overloaded with the jeopardies of power and privilege that can choke off an orientation toward vibrant exchanges, so it is important to interrogate and cultivate the nature of the interactions. We need to think of the space between the realm of the expert and the realm of the layperson as a fungible membrane permeable in both directions. For it to be a filter opening out rather than a barrier closing off, there has to be a vigilant commitment to the project of exchange. This involves an inculcation of critical pedagogy rather than critical reason to counteract the hegemonic pull of expertise, cultivating reciprocity and reversing the order of privilege gravitating toward expertise.

5

Narrative Hermeneutics: A Friendly Amendment

Narrative is a topic that Gadamer left oddly undeveloped. Given its centrality to discourse, personal and communal identity, argument, and the very structure of our lived experience, that is a remarkable neglect.1 Fortunately, Ricoeur made up for that disregard and then some. In his massive three-volume Time and Narrative from the mid-1980s and a number of writings coming out of that period, he positioned narrative as the missing piece of hermeneutic phenomenology, and he concluded, rather momentously, that “narrative identity is the poetic resolution of the hermeneutic circle,” although he later clarified that it does not so much resolve the circle as put its aporias productively in play.2 In any case, we are indebted to the conceptual progress that he made and the theoretical scaffolding that he set up for the pivotal role of narrative in hermeneutic understanding. What Ricoeur offers is not strictly speaking a full-blown narrative theory, because it emerges adjacent to one or another of Ricoeur’s various philosophical preoccupations—the question of time or of the meaning of personal identity— while the additions and amendments that accrued to its theorization along the way makes it feel even now and in retrospect very much like a work in progress. For example, the concept of narrative identity was a last-minute addition to the theory of Time and Narrative. That posed difficulties for the theoretical schemas that Ricoeur had built up over the course of the work. Much of what I will be doing here is to work out those tensions. The problem that launches Time and Narrative is the problematic insularity of two discourses, the phenomenology of time consciousness, which works with the evidence of immediate conscious experience, and the poetics of poetic emplotment, which deploys narrative strategies to synthesize the heterogeneous orders of time. Ricoeur will attempt to introduce an Aristotelian poetics into a hermeneutic phenomenology because he believes a philosophical hermeneutics that is based on the temporality of human finitude requires a

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narrative dimension. He wants these unaligned discourses to work in dialectical complementarity, and by the end of the third volume of Time and Narrative he proposes their marriage, which is where he argues that narrative identity “is the poetic resolution of the hermeneutic circle.”3 Much of Ricoeur’s thought after Time and Narrative builds on this thesis, and constitutes one of Ricoeur’s major contributions to hermeneutics. Although I believe that this addition to hermeneutics is groundbreaking, it is troubled, in my view, by the privilege Ricoeur accords to textual inscription in the narrative operation. I freely acknowledge my sensitivity on this point as a teacher of public speaking, because I believe we have to rectify the privileging of writing and textuality, which is not only Ricoeur’s bias, but that of the academy in general, and for this fight I have Gadamer on my side. As I have developed in this book up to this point, Ricoeur tends to constrain hermeneutics by its original textual remit, and that move has created tensions with the ontological radicalization that Heidegger had set in motion. Ricoeur held the field-limitation of hermeneutics with textual interpretation as axiomatic: “The text, the notion of text has a broad scope but should not be equated to everything. So there is a kind of inner limitation to hermeneutics as an approach to the whole field of philosophy, including ethics and politics. This is simply the hermeneutical limitation to what is text.”4 Indeed, Ricoeur defines “hermeneutics” as “a theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts.”5 He affirmed a philosophical hermeneutics “only if it can concretely show how explanation gets intercalated between an initial form of behavior, close to what occurs in ordinary conversations, and a highly mediated kind of understanding that comes at the end.”6 When Heidegger appropriated the term “hermeneutics” for his ontology, textual hermeneutics dropped away entirely except as an analogy. The structures that a Heideggerian hermeneutics analyzed were structures of being-in-the-world (foreknowledge, etc.). In concert with this shift, Gadamer viewed hermeneutic understanding at the center of the practical life of experience, “for every single experience and decision in life.”7 On this choice of direct and indirect routes lies the difference between a regional and general hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s double allegiance—the older hermeneutic tradition of textual exegesis and its newer Heideggerian appropriation as ontology—is replicated in the structure of his narrative theory. Narrative understanding becomes an offshoot of hermeneutic understanding as a second-order process, as Ricoeur describes in volume 1 of Time and Narrative: “It is the task of hermeneutics,” he says, “to reconstruct the set of operations by which a work lifts itself above the

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opaque depths of living, acting, and suffering, to be given by an author to readers who receive it and thereby change their acting.”8 The extraordinary thing about this second-order task is that it has a primary ontological function: “I think that it is always through the mediation of structuring operations that one apprehends the fundamental meaning of existence.”9 It is the “always” here that is the problem. It is of course the case that there “is a permanence, a continuity, in the act of telling” when narrative is inscribed in works.10 Inscription creates a world of works distanced from the immediate presence of speaking and acting, and that distance allows for a reflection on that work. But this is not the only path of narrative. There is also an ephemeral telling (improvisational, impromptu, extempore genres) that accompanies or even articulates action in the world. The academic field of rhetoric split on this very difference when scholars wanted to study ephemeral speech as distinct from the enduring text.11 Ricoeur says something here that sounds discordantly to the ear of the rhetorician who studies speech. Humans have a world, says Ricoeur, only under the tutelage of textual works:  “For us, the world is the ensemble of references opened up by texts.”12 What is important are “the nonsituational references which outlive the effacement of [the situations for those who lived]” at a particular time and place (314). What I have to do in this chapter is to restore the balance between the situational and the non-situational, and indeed to insure that, if anything, the greater privilege attaches to the former. The theory trouble begins to be most visible right at the end of volume 3 of Time and Narrative, where instead of a standard conclusion, Ricoeur writes what he explains in a footnote is something more like a Postscript. It was the result of a request from his editor, François Wahl, who had likely seen the problem first.13 In his autobiography Ricoeur references the difficulty that developed at this point: “The writing of Time and Narrative was concluded in 1984 (I spent over a year drafting the conclusions, the tone of which became more problematic than the work itself).”14 He also added a retrospective introduction to the volume, and an introduction to the second section of the volume, all of which have the effect of complicating rather than clarifying its structure. The so-called Conclusions of the work suddenly introduce the brand new concept of “narrative identity,” an idea that he later realized was at the center of the project: “I conceptualized the notion only at the time of my rereading . . . It is most curious that the expression came to me only in a sort of reflection on the work already completed, whereas in reality it was already at the heart of the book.”15 What is happening at this point in the work, I  believe, is that Ricoeur is struggling to maintain the priority of the literary text as the exact center of

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the configuring operation, at the very same time that he has already started to move into the territory that he would increasingly occupy for the rest of his life, which was that of action, political judgment, justice, and ethics. His next great work would be Oneself as Another, which refashions narrative identity as its centerpiece, and indeed the center of gravity of narrative theory there has moved decisively away from the literary text and to the acting and suffering person. Ricoeur never renounced his basic schematism of the literary text as the configuring act par excellence, but what I  will say is that that orientation caused a tension within his work to the extent that he drew inspiration from the ontological bases of a Heideggerian hermeneutics. What I will do here, then, is to outline the tensions in Time and Narrative that the emergent concept of narrative identity as an absent presence creates, as a gravitational force pulling configuration away from its exclusive preserve in the literary text. I will argue that Ricoeur’s narrative theory is a rich and robust theoretical contribution at the center of a general hermeneutics, but with this adjustment: The central axis of the circulation of configuration, prefiguration, and refiguration should shift over to narrative identity rather than center in the literary text. Wholeness and completeness becomes one feature of narrative identity rather than its central feature, and there is no longer a hard distribution of responsibilities between representation and presentation. The great power of Ricoeur’s schematism, then and now, is its formalization of the constant cross-hatching of the storyteller’s plotting skill and the need and demand of life in its putting together of means and ends for some type of meaningful order. The former draws upon the latter in the same way that plant petals draw moisture from the air and light from the sky, and the plant returns the favor in the eternal cycle of nature. In the context of an Aristotelian poetics it is unproblematic that Ricoeur centers the textual emplotment of fiction and history in the textual work. Mimesis2 “draws its intelligibility from its faculty of mediation, which is to conduct us from the one side of the text to the other, transfiguring the one side into the other through its power of configuration.”16 The practice of reading, listening, or viewing soaks up personal experience on both sides, gathering the floating fragment of character, plot, and genre to give existential flesh to the bare referential outline of the narrator’s script, which the reader then assimilates, digests, and deposits back into the cultural compost to begin the cycle again. The trouble occurs when Ricoeur insists on maintaining the centrality of the textual work as he shifts the emphasis of triple mimesis to the conduct of a life. Although “self-constancy refers to a self instructed by the works of a culture that it has applied to itself,” that referential process is condemned to inadequacy

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in the face of the absence of a true ending, a controlling author, or an orderly design (“the art of narration exceeds itself to the point of exhaustion”).17 The only reparative response to this inadequacy is the turn to the emplotment of the work. It is to the mirror of order in the perfection of the great works handed down by culture that the incomplete person and community must always turn; that is, from performance to representation. As Ricoeur comes to this conclusion he takes the opportunity once again to remind us of the inadequacy of Heidegger’s direct route to being in thinking. Between the incommensurability of thrownness and fallenness, and mortality and universe, we found ourselves buffered back and forth between the resignation engendered by the collusion between these two forms of nonmastery and the grief that is ceaselessly reborn from the contrast between the fragility of life and the power of time that destroys. In this, and other ways, the lyricism of meditative thinking goes right to the fundamental without passing through the art of narrating.18

The gap between the text and the quasi-text leads to a “confession of the limits of narrative,” which then turns to a meditation on the art’s devices of representation, for “it is only within this search that the aporetics of time and the poetics of narrative correspond to each other in a sufficient way.”19 Only. I believe this is a fair summary of Ricoeur’s position, and I have now to say why I think this is both right and wrong. It is right insofar as our imperfection provokes our reflection—that is simply hermeneutic consciousness—and right insofar as part of that reflection turns properly on the narrative devices we use to stabilize and give order to our identity. It is wrong to the extent that it hypostasizes the finished work as somehow the arbiter, the court of last resort, the object of our reflection. My adjustment to Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics is to insist that that is only one modality, and not the center of gravity, of narrative identity, which exists more properly in the acting and suffering that articulates our lives as we go. There are two reasons why I believe Ricoeur gave person and work distinct phase-assignments in the mimetic process, rather than inseminating them together in the mixed forms of identity creation. First, he came to the concept of narrative identity late in the process, only at the very end of the third volume of Time and Narrative, and then he developed it fully in the fifth and sixth studies of Oneself as Another, a later work, in response to what Ricoeur called “a different problematic.” He initially labeled the innovation of narrative identity a “fragile offshoot,” and only much later realized its centrality. The second reason is that in a profound way, Ricoeur had a kind of ontological bias toward the text, living as he did in texts, and as a result he gave insufficient

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emphasis to the agency that resides in the mode of the present:  “I will say that, for me, the world is the whole set of references opened by every sort of descriptive or poetic text I have read, interpreted, and loved.”20 This is a personal attestation that reflects Ricoeur’s prioritization of the text over the immediacy of experience: “[H]ermeneutics is a kind of mourning of the immediate, and the recognition that we have only an indirect relationship to what is.”21 By contrast, the primary experience for Gadamerian hermeneutics is one of immediacy: We have language only in conversation. Language fulfills itself and has its proper fulfillment only in the give and take of speaking, in which one word yields another, and in which the language that we bring to one another and make familiar to one another comes alive. Every conception of language which detaches it from that immediate situation which is made understood in speaking and answering reduces it by an essential dimension.22

By this way of thinking, a text can be a partner in an encounter, but “the reality of history” exists “in the very experiencing of destiny.”23 A hermeneutics of the everyday should not be simply supplanted by the second-order investigation into the world of the text. While Ricoeur asserts that we “cannot be observers and agents at the same time,” and I  assert that we are always doing that.24 Our consciousness of history and our being in history are all wrapped up in each other. So how to untie this knot? I  believe the answer lies in understanding that narrative identity is another word for triple mimesis, and that the process of figuration is centered in the person or community and not the text. There is a sense in which Ricoeur moves toward this solution in the structure of Time and Narrative. Let me explain. The culminating chapter of Time and Narrative 3 is “Towards a Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness,” the chapter that precedes his rereading of the manuscript and addition of the conclusions. This chapter is a rich description of what might be called the “hermeneutic present.” A foreshadowing of narrative identity, this hermeneutic present gathers up the threads of memory and expectation in a weave of human time: Nothing says that the present reduces to presence. Why, in the transition from future to past, should the present not be the time of initiative—that is, the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible decision?25

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Narrative understanding starts out as a textual solution to a phenomenological problem, and then evolves toward a theory of the hermeneutic present. This transposition is consummated in the fifth study of Oneself as Another where the self ’s reconciliation of selfhood and sameness by “the actions organized into a narrative present” is itself a kind of narrative work.26 This is where I believe the logic of a hermeneutic present becomes fully narrativized as identity. The interweaving movement of the three mimeses is actualized in narrative identity. This actualization process hails back to what Husserl called “making present” (gegenwärtigen), and what Blamey and Pellauer translate as enpresenting.27 Gadamer calls this dynamic Vollzugswahrheit, “a truth that emerges through the performance.”28 The person or community is not a prefiguration or refiguration, but a configuration. To be sure, in several places Ricoeur speaks of the life of the person as a quasi-text, and the person as a quasicharacter, but I want to get rid of this qualifying language, because I think these categories are too interwoven. We are not imitations of narrative works, nor they of us. I agree that sometimes we “need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact,” but I think life is often caught up in or anticipating this organization in ways that do not divide so neatly.29 To grant the hermeneutic present its full authority, rather than always sending it back for retrospective organization, I have to suggest how narrative identity can perform the triple mimeses itself. Ricoeur in fact provides the language for doing this. A key term of Oneself as Another is enchêvetrement, which he uses to express the labile capacity of the social body to intertwine, crisscross, and become entangled (Verflechtung) in its own forming and unforming.30 This interweaving process is a kind of worlding (“mondanéisation”) that sutures identities into a whole, but that we might also use to express the stitching together of narrative and life.31 The on-thespot process of personal mimesis, borrowing its fragments from wherever it can find them, is messy and improvised; it operates simultaneously, at cross-purposes, in tandem, or in complex arrays as the welter of interest and contingencies bump up against the ordering desire of storytelling.32 The multiple repertoires of narrative are deployed in purposeful and strategic ways in the moment, or as an uncontrollable product of cultural currents that write its text beyond its willing and doing. The ordered whole of the configured text no longer serves as the axial center bounded on one end by the incipient resources of the prefiguring culture and on the other by the improvised borrowings of the fragmentary life, but is rather one instrumentality and resource. Hermeneutic presence is the narrative identity toward which human temporality aspires. It will consult the texts that model or enact such perfections, but in the end it is the gravitational center of hermeneutic understanding.

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The open and the closed Now I  must face some of the difficulties with this revisionary proposal. A defining difference between the emplotted text and the narrative identity of a person or community is that fabricated stories are, in Aristotle’s terms, whole and complete. This is the orienting difference for Ricoeur. We are in the middle of our lives, do not know our ends, and are exposed to accidents that can leave our stories anything but well-formed. The pleasure and instruction of a well-crafted story often derives from its clever emplotments, its sense of ending, and the meaningful order it brings in composing chance and accident. For Ricoeur, the contrast between the “open” contingency of life and the “closed” completeness of the work provides the justifications for the differentiated distribution of the three mimeses: Because of its wholeness, the text is a configuration. Because of its fragmentariness, personal or communal identity is only ever a prefiguration or a refiguration. Why does the completeness of the textual work serve as the justification for the work’s monopoly on configuration? In Time and Narrative 2, Ricoeur develops the function of narrative fiction as an answer to the human longing for wholeness and order. Poetic closure, he believes, is what “brings about a ‘sense of finality, stability, and integrity.”33 This kind of closure relates, in one sense, to what Frank Kermode dubbed the sense of an ending, an ending that works to “make the resolution itself appear as the final approbation that seals a good form.”34 Ricoeur was at an opportune moment to develop this argument because, at the time of the writing of Time and Narrative, the issue of narrative closure had reached a point of crisis in literary studies. With the ascendancy of the postmodern novel, which had set itself the task of disrupting and subverting this expectation, the more traditional view that closure is a structural necessity of the well-told story was very much in the offing. In the end Ricoeur asserts a kind of Hegelian negative to salvage his sense that the issue is still alive, and that narrative art one way or another will have to cope with the human need for the sense of an ending. If the contract with the reader’s expectation “is itself not to be a deception, the author, far from abolishing every law of composition, has to introduce new conventions that are more complex, more subtle, more concealed, and more cunning than those of the traditional novel.”35 Despite the best efforts of the most clever postmodernists, “the past remains a source of order, even when it is railed against and decried” (26). Ricoeur always had a strong inclination toward order: “I confess that I have always needed order.”36 This has to be a major reason for his pronounced privileging of the work—as a completed

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whole it is isolated from the contingency and fragmentariness of life. It was the power of mimesis “to make the intelligible spring from the accidental” that gives it the grant of “universality.”37 When Ricoeur says that “a work may be closed with respect to its configuration and open with respect to the breakthrough it is capable of effecting on the reader’s world,” he has established the basic polarity that guides his theoretical inquiry.38 The formula sets work and configuration on one side of a dialectic, and reader and world on the other. They feed each other, animate each other, but are nevertheless two sides of a polarity. The closed/open dialectic is based on the opposition of the ordered and complete emplotment and the untidy and incomplete life. Ricoeur relies on the distinction between narrator and author to cinch this privilege. That “we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life” means that we lack the control of destiny that the godlike author has.39 As a result, Ricoeur attributes to life merely “pre-narrative capacity,” “a virtual narrativity,” “a story in its nascent state” (27, 29). In fact, life is “an activity and a passion in search of a narrative,” while a narrative “remains the permanent object of our desire” (29, 32). This is an extraordinary claim, and it seems to lead to the conclusion that a life is consummated in a work. When Ricoeur says that narratives that “give us a unity” are “the narratives handed down in our literary tradition,” he is giving an extraordinary ontological privilege to a community’s tradition of great works (33). In 2010 Fredric Jameson published a review of Time and Narrative that took issue with Ricoeur’s characterization of the poetic work as an ordered whole, connecting that view to an outdated critical theory that has not stood the test of time. Jameson provides a useful catalog of narrative genres in the age of the postmodern fragment that do not obey this rule of order and wholeness.40 Even modernist novels, Jameson says, “constitute so many different and distinct forms of time, which can only be superimposed or surcharged on each other, but not fused together in one overarching form” (529). My own view is that the wholeness of a work, which does satisfy an important psychological need, does not give it an ontological priority, but just the opposite—our engagement with it makes that work an instrument of reflection for the ongoing construction of identity; it is the openness of life, which carries with it the agency to choose, that has the ontological priority. If the hermeneutic circle is the ongoing exchange of whole and part, life is the [whole] in constant exchange with written texts, and not the reverse. The un-narrativized aspects of a life are not necessarily pre-narrative material waiting to be taken up by a configuring act. As Annemie

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Halsema points out, there are parts of my life “that co-constitute me and of which I cannot tell everything.”41 But I am trying, and openness means that I actively take my encounters with stories into the world, learn from them and adapt them to my purposes, take them as warnings, mirrors, possibilities; and they become my own.42 If anything pre- and post- is the modality of the textual imaginary, we enter its safe boundaries as a preparation for entering more capably into the world of acting and suffering.

Immanence and transcendence In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s attempt to bridge the perfection of poetic emplotment with the narrative aspect of life contingency revolves around the distinction he makes between what he calls “transcendence within immanence” (the problem of reference within the reading experience) and “transcending immanence” (our life after we stop reading).43 The strange thing about this conceptual distinction, however, is that he uses it to mark the passage from the theme of literary fiction of the second volume of Time and Narrative to the theme of narrative history in the first half of the third volume. This arrangement keeps the discussion within the boundaries of the difference between two genres of writing, rather than between the retrospective act of representation and the conduct of a life, postponing this latter discussion until the last half of the third volume. “Refiguration,” despite Ricoeur’s avowal that mimesis3 is the terrain of acting and suffering, remains for the most part within the orbit of textual operations. Let us see how this breaks down. Volume 2 of Time and Narrative yokes the text-reader relationship to a traditional view of the constraints of interpretive freedom. Although opened out onto the world of the reader, the text itself remains the limiting reference point, and the imaginative variations of any reading are held within the close embrace of the reading experience itself: “[O]ur temporal ways of inhabiting the world remain imaginary to the extent that they exist only in and through the text.”44 The phrase Ricoeur coins to describe the interaction between text and reader is “transcendence within immanence.”45 Ricoeur uses a vivid metaphor to describe the way readerly transcendence works within textual immanence; it is “like a ‘window’ that cuts out a fleeting perspective of a landscape beyond.”46 The text is the domestic structure, the home space, and the ever-receding horizon shaped by the frame of the window is the reader’s own experience and life. The freedom of the reader in interpreting and bringing

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unique experience to the story does not change the fact that the focal point is the work itself, the landscape in view. But this is only a temporary stopping point, because “the transition from the problems of narrative configuration to the problems of the refiguration of time by narrative” involves “the capacity of the work of art to indicate and to transform human action.”47 Narrative does two things for the reader, revelation and transformation: “Revealing, in the sense that it brings features to light that were concealed and yet already sketched out at the heart of our experience, our praxis. Transforming, in the sense that a life examined in this way is a changed life, another life.”48 This threshold crossing, however, is forestalled to the extent that the world of human action lacks completeness, and must return to the configuring act of the textual design, in this case, the historical text. This brings us to the last half of the volume and its conclusion, which is where we would expect Ricoeur to say how the reader escapes from her immersion in the text to inhabit the world of initiative, decision, and action. But this is where things get confusing.

The strangeness of volume 3 of time and narrative A close examination of the structure of volume 3 shows why François Wahl was confused by its labyrinthine design, and why he asked for, and Ricoeur undertook, a “rereading.”49 Ricoeur’s whole exercise of thought seems increasingly confounded by the difficulties it discovers along the way: “The more we inquire into the differentiation that disperses, not just the three major figures of temporalization, but the three ecstases of time the more the site of historicality becomes problematical” (96). At one point Ricoeur would seem to promise to address the concern I  have expressed about the privileging of the completed work over the life: “From these intimate exchanges between the historicization of the fictional narrative and the fictionalization of the historical narrative is born what we call human time, which is nothing other than narrated time” (102). But this is not in fact the case. What he actually promises is to show how narrativity contributes substantially to resolving the enigmas of human time that have bedeviled Western thought. That is an original argument, and valuable in itself as a significant philosophical contribution. But Ricoeur’s major hypothesis, repeated in the first sentence of the third volume, that “the effort of thinking which is at work in every narrative configuration is completed in a refiguration of temporal experience,” casts the final phase of human time as a mimetic

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extension of the work perfected in its inscription, and that is where my concerns are raised. For my students, the textual work can provide a space of reflection, an aid, instrument, and model that they carry with them as they enter into “the actual world” (179), “everyday experience” (176), or “the time of initiative” (208). This narrative competence can complete the trajectory of transcending immanence in the lived life, not as a refiguration but as a configuration.50 There are resources within volume 3 that bring us to the verge of this possibility. This happens in chapter 10 and the conclusions that follow it. Chapter 10, the climactic chapter of Ricoeur’s opus, finally addresses what Ricoeur calls “the historical present,” that which the concept of transcending immanence promises by its very logic to fulfill in “the actual world” of “everyday experience.” Sadly for me, this theme is treated in all of six pages (207–209, 230–32), and the rest of the chapter is taken up with a description of what Ricoeur calls, after Gadamer, a hermeneutics of historical consciousness, but by which Ricoeur means a secondorder reflection on the aporias of narrative time. The section of the chapter that garners the subtitle of “The Historical Present” is in effect a three-page synopsis of Oneself as Another, the book he would later write that fleshes out the narrative identity of the acting and suffering being. But here already, under the theme of initiative, Ricoeur situates the historical present in “the lived body as the most original mediator between the course of lived experience and the order of the world.”51 Associating the lived body with the space of the historical present is very close to the fulfillment of the logic of transcending immanence. What is now “a time of judgment and a time of decision” moves initiative from the private acts of individual fidelity to the institutions of the collective as a dynamic narrative “unfolded in a public space.”52 The concession is key to my appropriation of Ricoeur’s second-order hermeneutics for a general hermeneutics. But this appropriation requires setting aside the priority of coherence, completeness, and order, and this shift is indeed a real, substantive disagreement. The maturity of a hermeneutic consciousness, I tend to think, is when we abandon the idealist desideratum of completeness, and make some other commitment to some other good. At some point in our lives when decay and disintegration beat down our fondest dreams of a perfect life, we take another tack—we decide we want to leave something, or take comfort in something, or make one last gesture, and so on. A complete experience (a work) becomes a foil against which we come to terms with our finitude, and that sets in motion not only reflection but effort—“if not resolving, at least making this aporia work for us.”53

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It is not just postmodern poetic genres that understand narratives as fragments. As Michael McGee noted in a famous article, “[W]e are constantly harassed by the necessity of understanding an ‘invisible text’ which is never quite finished but constantly in front of us.”54 The weaving together of fragments places our lives back in the center of the configurational act, precisely as an incomplete thing: that is, their hermeneutic energy. We are not in the business of shadowing whole works, but rather of fashioning an ongoing work that we have no hope of completing. Now I have hinted that Ricoeur may complete the work of transcending the immanence of the immersive textual work in Oneself as Another. He previews his narrative program for that work in Time and Narrative. There, his beautiful discovery of the temporal resource of “ipse” as a miniature narrative takes the reflexive form as a grammatical action that extends the subject through and across the predicate, which confers on the construction of a life the work of configuration! It would seem as though we have finally freed ourselves from what I have argued is an overdependence on the finished textual work. Yet even here Ricoeur continues to call the acting, suffering subject a “refiguration,” and he casts the work of narrative identity as “correction and rectification.”55 But I think he makes a sufficient break from the adjunct-relation of the acting person when he says that “identity rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative text.” At this point the finished text is simply a model, an analog. So I want to pocket this grant of writ, and appropriate it back into a hermeneutic paideia that is more than a second-order reflection on time.

From closed to open I myself would not say that “the story of a life comes to be constituted through a series of rectifications applied to previous narratives,” but rather that the story of life is the staging point of narrative materials and devices that float through the cultural ambience, whether of completed texts or narratives fragments or stories negotiated from out of the genres we find ourselves interpolated in (247). For a narrative hermeneutics, I would argue, there is a difference of levels between the wholeness of the work and the lack of wholeness of the protagonist’s experience. The audience carries both “experiences” into their lives; the pathei mathos of a flawed life and character, and the experience of a whole and completed action.

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We do not have to reconcile these two things; they are just two gifts that the drama gives them. This distinctness is key to my friendly amendment to Ricoeur’s theory. That the story needs to come to an end for us to judge it to be a story well or ill told is an internal function of the story experience itself—the art or craft of storytelling. We can come to terms with something when we have the whole of it. The sense of an ending also has a mimetic value as a whole and complete action. If I want to understand accomplishment or an accomplishment, eventfulness or an event, these enactments then become models. The two narrative functions I have just described are very different things operating on different levels; one regarding the artistry of a story, the other, the “lesson” it teaches, to use Ricoeur’s term. What I want to say about these difference functions is that they do not exist in a dialectical relationship. The imitation of wholeness is only one function among many mimetic functions, and this may be another case where a dialectic seems to be imposed where none is needed. If this is the case, then there is a false linearity between configuration and refiguration. The interweaving of story and life is not primarily the passage from configuration to refiguration. We use and borrow from stories in all kinds of different ways—modeling ourselves after characters, carrying a sense of the rhythm and style of a certain story aesthetic, taking parts of a story we like and leaving the rest—the list is infinite. Edward Said has a similar complaint about Ricoeur’s binarism here: According to Ricoeur, speech and circumstantial reality exist in a state of presence whereas writing and texts exist in a state of suspension—that is, outside circumstantial reality—until they are “actualized” and made present by the reader-critic. Ricoeur makes it seem as if the text and circumstantial reality, or what I shall call worldliness, play a game of musical chairs, one intercepting and replacing the other according to fairly crude signals. But this game takes place in the interpreter’s head, a locale presumably without worldliness or circumstantiality. This critic-interpreter has his position reduced to that of a central bourse on whose floor occurs the transaction by which the text is shown to be meaning x while saying y. And as for what Ricoeur calls “deferred reference,” what becomes of it during the interpretation? Quite simply, on the basis of a model of direct exchange, it comes back, made whole and actual by the critic’s reading.56

This criticism registers in its own fashion both concerns that I have expressed: the unnecessarily stark binary of world and text, and the compartmentalizing (and professionalizing) of the critical act of exchange.57 The boundary between closure

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and openness has to be loosened up. The contrast between transcendence and immanence has to be lessened somehow. Now, there is one possible way I can think of to do this. Is it possible, following Ricoeur’s sense of a desire for order, that the two are meant to be juxtaposed against each other, that it is precisely when we experience the order of a story well told—or in Aristotle’s language, of a full and complete whole of a certain magnitude—that the experience of wholeness is what allows us to step back and see things—see a life, see the consequences of an action, see what happens when a fateful contingency plays out—and that it is in the force of that experience rendered fully before us that we can measure out the trajectories of our own uncompleted lives, and see where they might be going. It is because we are in the middle that we are not in a great position to judge, not able to see the forest for the trees, and the hypothesis affords a kind of viewpoint for judgment. The codicil or disclaimer here is that it cannot be only the effect of the completed action that reveals. Narrative experiences are full of different types of revelation of infinite variety, and the subversions of the classical form provide not just a clever counter to or variation on order but rather a range of experiences that have little to do with order or wholeness. The fulfillment of order is only one kind of fulfillment. So the question in our time does not stall out with this binary choice, but all that we discover when we set aside the requirements of classical form. The teeming, prodigious, exquisite wealth of experiments of this kind— for example, in South Asian and Eastern European and Nordic cinema—make clear that revelations of the narrative form do not reduce to a pledge of order. There is a further way to think of closure—as a spatial configuration. The reader’s perception of “the work as a unified totality” provides a fictional illusion of completeness that invites the inhabitation.58 The work is closed in the sense that it is enclosed, that is, that I can enter it and feel protected (or frightened) by its solidity, fullness, believability. The illusion is not sustainable if its walls are flimsy, unreliable, see-through. It is like the invisible sphere of the enclosed world of science fiction. Such closure is not of the completed action, but of the fictional membrane. So these are two options that I would offer. But let us come back to Ricoeur’s account, because he finally centers on the theme of refiguration in the very last chapters of the third volume of Time and Narrative. Mimesis3 involves the transformative functions of narrative in the conduct of a life “at the heart of everyday experience.”59 In this area of transformational modality, we are “beyond reading, in effective action, instructed by the works handed down” (159). It is in this sense, we finally come to understand, that Ricoeur wants to

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draw upon resources of mimesis beyond reading fiction or history, that is, for “the world within which effective action is unfolded and itself unfolds its specific temporality” (159). The decisive break with “the constraining power” of the text imposed upon the reader (177) comes explicitly, finally, near the end of chapter 7, where texts are characterized as lessons:  “[R]eaders incorporate  .  .  .  into their vision of the world the lessons of their readings” (179). He seems to agree with my heterogeneity thesis at this point, although he still frames it in terms of the single act of reading: “This twofold status of reading makes the confrontation between the world of the text and the world of the reader at once a stasis and an impetus” (179). Reading is the term of equivocation here; placing the world of the text and the world of the reader under the umbrella of reading means that the valence of a life is still centered on the act of reception, and the life of action is secondary. There is more evidence of this prioritization in the “Conclusions,” where Ricoeur does acknowledge that the phenomenological experience of time requires “an individual consciousness,” what Augustine calls a soul, what Kant calls a Gemüt, and what Heidegger calls Dasein.60 It requires it because even “world time remains the time of some Dasein, individual in every case” (245). The necessary link between accounts of the past as history and possible futures as fiction is a consciousness that constitutes and is constituted by these opposite trajectories. But Ricoeur then characterizes this linkage as an “offshoot” of the dialectical interweaving of history and fiction—the two ways works configure mimetic representations of the world—an offshoot that he introduces as narrative identity: “The fragile offshoot issuing from the union of history and fiction is the assignment of an individual of a community of a specific identity that we can call their narrative identity” (246). Then Ricoeur explains this individual or community assignment as the product, rather than the work, of reconfiguration:  “As the literary analysis of autobiography confirms, the story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told”—as though our identifies waited upon our autobiographies (247)! Now I want to be clear that my own reversal of the valence of reading and identity is not meant to diminish the value of poetic works and their reception, the special and complex experience that involves them in particular, or their distinctiveness as an activity. What Ricoeur calls “reading,” which is of course metonymy for the various types of reception of narrative works, is indeed an activity normally separated from our being taken up in daily life, an escape

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carved out for the play of the imagination. What he describes happening there in that contemplative space is exactly right: The function of standing-for or of taking-the-place-of is paralleled in fiction by the function it possesses, with respect to everyday practice, of being undividedly revealing and transforming. Revealing, in the sense that it brings features to light that were concealed and yet  already sketched out at the heart of our experience, our praxis. Transforming, in the sense that a life examined in this way is a changed life, another life.61

The time that humans devote to standing apart in this way, the rituals they develop around it, and the attention they give to it are absolutely distinctive and vital, and I have no intention of minimizing this genre of human activity. Such practices of make-believe are indeed a way to judge, measure, imagine, rethink, compare, experiment that depend on being isolated and protected from our direct involvement, and we can affirm the two most exalted things Ricoeur says they do in consequence—reveal and transform. I do not mean to sideline this altogether critical work. My qualm, rather, is Ricoeur’s setting on equal footing of “reading” on the one hand, “living” on the other, and placing them in the coequal structure of a dialectic. There are too many situations in which what he calls “social reality” or “the actual world of readers” activates the very same processes of imaginative confrontation, distancing, and revelation, and that are the material of the active narrative configuration of our lives. This reflective discovery and transformation is not reserved for that sequestered space of imaginative play. It is merely one of the ways in which prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration are interwoven.

Conclusion To summarize my objections:  (a) the wholeness and completeness of textual mimesis is not the necessary object of narrative understanding, but merely one modality, device, or imaginative resource; (b) reading and living do not separate out and distil into their own separate spheres as Ricoeur describes them, but leak, intercalate, and fuse in a way that suggests they would otherwise be incomplete; and (c)  narrative identity is not an “offshoot” of the operations of narrative configuration, but rather the very thing itself. Otherwise I am able to imagine a narrative hermeneutics as integral to the curriculum of speaking, writing,

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listening, and reading that prepares my students for living, understanding, suffering in, and changing the world. Having worked through the problems and tensions of a narrative hermeneutics conceived through the lens of the literary text, my conclusion can now be simply and purely affirming. Once we have removed the exclusive assignment of narrative configuration to the literary text, the whole splendid theoretical store of Ricoeur’s narrative understanding of time and identity becomes available: distentio/intentio animi, interweaving reference, iconic augmentation, imaginative variations, narrative intelligibility, the synthesis of heterogeneous orders, and so on. We must append the prior innovations he developed in the field of metaphor theory:  ontological vehemence, iconic augmentation, metaphor as work in miniature, and so on. These will be keystones of any narrative hermeneutics going forward, and a narrative hermeneutics seems now inescapable for any general hermeneutics. Despite the reservations I have expressed about Ricoeur’s way of passage from work to world, the theoretical warrants he built to connect narrative emplotment with acting and suffering (the narrative identity of a life, narrative intelligibility, the shift from reference to figuration, emplotment as temporal schematism) and their conceptual resources (the dialectic of intention and distraction, the eliciting of a pattern from a succession, productive or split reference, the upstream and downstream of mimesis, the drawing of an end from a beginning, repetition as recapitulation) recommend themselves to a hermeneutic pedagogy as durable and productive heuristics.

6

Is Hermeneutics a Detour?

dé•tour: Tracé qui s’écarte du chemin direct; action de parcourir un chemin plus long que le chemin direct qui même au même point (Le Robert) dé•tour: Endroit d’une route qui forme une courbe, un angle (Larousse) Much more than Gadamer is Ricoeur anchored in an appreciation for the fragility of the human project, its tragic contradictions, and the pathos of human finitude. This greater sensitivity is attributable, as I have said, to Ricoeur’s rootedness in the Christian instruction in human fallibility. But there is one dimension of this Christian orientation that is in danger of escaping the structure of hermeneutic understanding as a continual process of expectation and revision, and that is the logic of the detour. In this chapter I want to suggest that Ricoeur’s attachment to the figure of the detour as a structuring logic needs to be carefully qualified. I  will suggest that there is an important difference between what he calls the long route and the detour, and that a general hermeneutics will have to stay within the figurative logic of the former. This discrimination will insure that hermeneutics can take the full measure of Ricoeur’s appreciation for the tragic finitude of hermeneutic understanding. As many Ricoeur scholars have noted, the figure that dominates Ricoeur’s thought more than any other is the figure of the detour, expressed variously as the long route, the indirect path, the roundabout, and so on.1 It certainly works heuristically as a tool of figural invention, but it does much more than this. It spans method, matter, and style elastically throughout Ricoeur’s writing career with such consistency that we can think of it as almost an elemental idiom of his imagination. Like Hegel’s Vorstellung, it figures the pattern of the concept, “the thoughtfulness of all the modes that generate it.”2 Ricoeur’s efforts of alliance with analytic modes of thought assumed a reciprocity analytic thinkers very rarely returned, but he performed this reciprocity in the hybrid of his own thought. The image of the detour is the figural center of this hybrid style.

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The variations in the interrelated tropes of the displaced itinerary have a conceptual looseness that suits its expansive role in the Ricoeurian corpus. Sometimes it names the methodological procedure of his own thought. Sometimes it describes the ontological condition. Sometimes it characterizes a cultural phenomenon.3 While acknowledging the religious inspiration of the trope, Colin cautions that it would be too easy to ascribe its use to this origin alone.4 It is applied promiscuously to procedures of research (Husserl, Freud, Heidegger, Nabert, Ricoeur), to the outline of the phenomenon under investigation, and to the fate of the inquirer. Ricoeur nested this metaphor within a metaphor: “Detour/return is the rhythm of my philosophical respiration.”5 The figure gains particular salience for this inquiry into hermeneutics proper when Ricoeur announces that “hermeneutics proves to be a philosophy of detours.”6 But the fact is that the language of indirections and detours is already pervasive in the writings of the 1950s and 1960s, before Ricoeur takes the turn toward the Heideggerian form of hermeneutics. It emerges in the interrogations of Nabert, Husserl, and Freud in the 1940s and 1950s as a basic syntax in Ricoeur’s critical appropriations. With all these thinkers, the turn to indirection has a common root in the fight against transparent reflection, between what is immediate, present, and directly intuited. Ricoeur’s interlocutors are all to one degree or another reacting to the strains of an older reflective philosophy that had posited clear and simple ideas, self-evident truths, and an unfiltered encounter with the mind. But my concern with the adoption of this particular figure as the style and substance of Ricoeur’s conception of hermeneutics is that it carries its own baggage, a particular response to Cartesianism that comes to hermeneutics only through Ricoeur. So I want to ask: What is the detour around? Why is the passage indirect? In what sense is a long route a mediation? In this chapter I will suggest that the metaphor of the long route should subsume that of the detour in order to help us stay on the hermeneutic path. We can start with Jean Greisch’s worry that Ricoeur’s effort to graft hermeneutics onto phenomenology had an almost insupportable flaw. The fact that in hermeneutics “there is no comprehension that is not mediated by interpretation,” while phenomenology asserts “the immanence of conscience” creates an “abyssal chasm between the two projects.”7 Is this concern warranted? Phenomenology, and therefore hermeneutic phenomenology, is a kind of weak cousin of the direct and transparent perception of the Cartesian Cogito, and it is against that phenomenological vulnerability that Ricoeur initially develops the trope of indirection. For a similar reason indirection is aimed squarely at Gadamer’s promulgation of the immediacy of understanding in the face-to-face

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encounter as it is laid out in the conclusion of Truth and Method. There Gadamer places understanding in a rhetorical context, in the classic sense of vivid speech that creates compelling and persuasive pictures that do not require supporting (hence indirect) empirical verification, but are evident in themselves. Beauty, for example, does not require external support; it testifies for itself. Gadamer’s appeal to rhetorical immediacy has an antecedent in Heidegger’s instruction in Being and Time that one cannot separate being from appearance. Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenon as having a kind of “self-evidence” relates to the fact that “that which shows itself in itself, the manifest,” is precisely not a semblance, but the Sichzeigende, the self-showing.8 The logos of discourse likewise “lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about” (56). The “inner relationship” between phenomenon and logos is a cooperation that lets “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ” (58). Given Heidegger’s championing of the constitutive force of language as a blow to epistemic dualism (“Where word breaks off no thing may be”), is it possible that Ricoeur is returning a vestigial or latent dualism to hermeneutics?9 Ricoeur’s principal amendment to the late ontological phase of hermeneutics— he does not regard his amendment as an alternative but as a necessary addition— is the reintroduction of epistemology as a supporting feature of its militant ontology. In the 1978 lecture “Logique Herméneutique” he calls Heidegger’s existential analytic a second-order analysis (une réflexion de second degré) that establishes categorical conditions of possibility for an understanding-being.10 The problem is that Heidegger fudges the first- and second-order relation even in Being and Time by developing the concept of Ek-stasis, the definitive characteristic of human being as the being whose being is an issue for itself. Against this, Ricoeur’s clean distinction between interpretation, which is “only” (n’est que) the development of comprehension out of pre-comprehension, and analytic as “a level more fundamental than discourse” (un niveau plus fondamental que le discours) gives a decisive interpretive inflection to Heidegger.11 I  see reflective awareness in Heidegger as a continuum embedded in the pathos of the encounter: “Dasein is assailed by itself.”12 The most famous example of the detour is in fact its deployment in the polemic against Heidegger and Gadamer’s ontological radicalization of hermeneutics. In the programmatic essay “Existence and Hermeneutics” of 1963 Ricoeur distinguishes an indirect (as distinct from direct) route to hermeneutics as the path that marks his own scholarly destiny: “There are two ways to ground hermeneutics in phenomenology. There is the short route, which I shall consider first and the long route, the one I propose to travel.”13 It is not

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just that the short route is an ontology and the long route an epistemology, because the long route “must be doubly indirect; first, because existence is evinced only in the documents of life, but also because consciousness is first of all false consciousness” (18). And since this second detour of unmasking is an unperfectible task of self-understanding, the direct route of Heidegger has to be recognized as “only a horizon, an aim rather than a given fact,” as such an aim that is “beyond our grasp” (19). Ontology “is the promised land” which can only be glimpsed “before dying” (24). Thus the direct route is visual, a path of sighting, while the indirect route of epistemology is a bodily journey, a toiling in the vineyards. This major role of the trope of indirection is, however, a repetition several times over. All three lines of tradition which constitute main threads of Ricoeur’s own perspective expose the weakness of a direct approach in different ways; Descartes’ bypassing of the perceived world, of Kant’s categorial idealism, Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s immediacy of the self-evident. So by 1963 it has become a general complaint for Ricoeur. The short-route critique of German hermeneutics in the 1963 text is a condensation of an argument that Ricoeur had been developing for more than fifteen years. It should be noted that the familial figures that I am thematizing—indirection, detour, long route, roundabout, pass-through—are not always exact similes.14 Sometimes the long route is just the necessary but inconvenient going-outof-one’s-way when the direct route is unavailable:  “Now these evils and these adverse goods are, precisely, goods to be shared, burdens to be shared. And this sharing cannot but help but pass through the institution.”15 Sometimes the long route is a journey of accretion, a structural response to the limitation of finitude. In the following remarkable figuration, the long route transforms the necessity of a detour into an overflowing surplus that “exceeds reflection”: [A]ll that one can say against the immediacy of this experience pleads in favor of its fullness. All of this potential, the ballast of the actual, gives breadth to the experience of the primordial and the owned. This endless coming to awareness of the “owned” penetrates a life whose wealth exceeds reflection. Thus, the reduction to the ownness sphere, far from impoverishing experience, leads it from the cogito to the sum and fulfills the promise . . . of an egology which would set up the ego as a monad. By way of an astonishing detour, the transcendental, once reduced, reveals being as superabundant.16

A detour and an indirect route are alike in being longer than a straight path, but detour does not necessarily have the rebounding feature of reflection so

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important in the operation of the Cogito. For the most part, though, Ricoeur attenuated these differences, treating the related figures as branching relations. Sometimes all the principal features of the figure are conflated into one. The studies of Oneself as Another are guided by “the basic rule of the detour of reflection by way of analysis,” and what analysis invariably uncovers are mediations of the self at the various levels of embodiment, so that the ethical and moral dimensions of the self are found to relate to the subject “as a new mediation along the return path toward the self.”17 Because the long route of the detour is a “detour of reflection,” it goes out and comes back to its starting point; whether it is a detour of curves or angles is not germane to Ricoeur’s idea. With this general introduction, I now want to pursue the implications of the figure as it winds its way through his hermeneutic appropriation, so I will follow it chronologically through Ricoeur’s work and register its shifting meanings in order to work out its substantive implications for hermeneutics. Because, as I have noted, the trope acts both to configure Ricoeur’s criticism of particular thinkers and to characterize his own emerging theory, my itinerary will follow these thematic and authorial paths in their chronological unfolding.

Ricoeur’s Nabert Ricoeur detected what one might call a proto-hermeneutic impulse in his mentor, a discursive philosophy in gestation, which he details in his essay “Nabert on Act and Sign,” which I will touch on here as it relates to the figure of the detour. Nabert’s proto-hermeneutic impulse comes out of a problem in the tradition of reflective philosophy to which Nabert belonged, but a problem that Nabert recognized and made significant progress with. The problem, as Ricoeur conceives it, is that thinking in the tradition of reflective philosophy “tries to subordinate the objectivity of idea, representation, understanding, or whatever to the founding act of consciousness.”18 In response to this subordination as a problem, Nabert began to focus on “the relationships between the act whereby consciousness posits and produces itself and the signs wherein consciousness represents to itself the meaning of its action,” and Ricoeur puts Nabert at the end of a line of efforts to move away from Descartes. Ricoeur catalogues the steps away from the conception of the founding act from Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche to Freud that gradually undermined faith in the “immediate self-possession” of the act of reflection. Their apostasy led to the conclusion that “we never produce the total that we gather up and project

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in the ideal of an absolute choice, we must endlessly appropriate what we are through the mediation of the multiple expressions of our desire to be” (222). Ricoeur labels this mediation of multiple expressions in place of “an intuition of the self by the self ” a “detour by way of the phenomenon,” a path that points toward the need for a hermeneutics (222). Related to this negotiation of consciousness and representation is the discursive identity of the self in Nabert. Ricoeur does follow Nabert in believing that the affirmation of the self is a meaningful assertion of identity, which makes them both heirs to the reflective tradition; neither wished to reduce the self to a cipher. Yet both Nabert and Ricoeur sensed that the self is a complex negotiation:  “But what does the Self signify? Do we know it any better than the words symbol and interpretation?”19 Ricoeur concludes that Nabert had not worked all this negotiation fully, and saw himself tasked to complete this incipient project. So he needed to know how self can attest, if it lacks identity, and is dependent on signs. Ricoeur found his answer in hermeneutic anticipation, representing being simply “the sketches, rough drafts, and initial stirrings of the act . . . a tracing of the act in the representation.”20 The representation is in effect part of the attestation itself, the desire to be. The power to posit oneself is not simply derivative of symbolic discourse but rather a motive that will always surpass the ability to be represented: “The conversion of motive into representation, spread out under the regard of the understanding, points up the unfulfilled character of the act whose motive is expression” (216). Our existence is something that “surpasses its consciousness” and its ability to be represented (219). And because of the tragedy of “the self in its difference from itself . . . we must endlessly appropriate what we are through the mediation of the multiple expressions of our desire to be” (222). Representation is not a neutral mirroring, but a creative construction influenced by motives, interests, desires, and values which distort as much as reveal. The phenomenal interpretation of self is therefore a detour because it must decipher the meaning of the affirmation through the accretion of representations that conceal as well as show. So Nabert’s proto-discursivity is an agency driven by its own lack, picking itself up along the way, so to speak, its inadequacy being the motive that drives it, and its delusions and blind alleys the arduous itinerary of its detours. Already we see that the figure of the detour means so much more than just the recuperation of methodology. It is built into the pathos of the self, its existential limitations, and its tragic ignorance.

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Ricoeur’s Husserl Despite its seminal role for Ricoeur, he understood even as he mastered the achievement of phenomenology that it was bound too closely to objective perception. Husserl’s barrier to a just appreciation of the discursivity of finitude, in Ricoeur’s view, was his circumvention of Hegel’s insight into “the fertility of the ‘negative,’ ” a circumvention that leads Husserl to treat constitution exclusively as an unfolding rather than also a constructing or creating.21 What interests Husserl in consciousness is not its genius, its power to invent in every sense of the term, but the stable, unified significations into which it moves and becomes established. The “transcendental guide” which must be followed through the labyrinth of intertwined intendings is always the object. If it is true that consciousness is an “I can” . . . then this is why the power of consciousness does not interest him insofar as it is liberating but rather interests him insofar as it is legislative. Phenomenology is a philosophy of “sense” more than a philosophy of freedom.22

Phenomenological description in Husserl, therefore, lacked the dialectical tension that historicizes finitude. But what Husserl did see was that perception is constituted through a series of adaptive operations, and that this perception is characterized by the very nature of the perceiving instruments. Phenomenology was the determination of the perceptual “mechanics” of finite being, how a being who is equipped with our particular limited temporal and spatial modes of perceptual understanding comes into contact with the world. The Husserlian principle of constitution is at the heart, perhaps the guiding idea, of Ricoeur’s way of understanding discursive identity. A continuous subjective consciousness is an achievement, not a given, and it is constructed on the basis of an economy of perceptual continuity, articulates structures of relation with the world. Consciousness shapes itself, is set up in the stream of experience in the very tension between the finite horizon and its transcendence. Such becoming is both processive and constructive, and the building up is never not happening. While noting the limits of Husserl’s perceptual orientation to this working out of constitutional structures,23 Ricoeur judged that the description of the forms of finite constitution itself did not have this limit inherently. So he set about placing phenomenology on a broader footing (a hermeneutic one), and extended the phenomenological tasks of description and analysis to discursive constitution in the manner fitting that reorientation. The hermeneut becomes an analyst of discursive constitution. A  hermeneutic phenomenology becomes in Ricoeur’s

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hands what we might call the mechanics of finitude. For Ricoeur “detour” in the Husserlian context means not a diversion from the real but rather the fact that what Descartes regarded as most radically pure, singular, and basic (“I”) is a complex accomplishment arrived at through the always already present strata of social reality. In traveling through the intuitive relation to the world (“nature”), the discovery of the “I” is a recognition of being in its totality as “superabundant” (122): “Sunk into the midst of this nature, I experience myself as a ‘member of ’ (Glied) of this totality of things ‘outside me’ ” (123). The discovery of the I is not a reduction to simplicity, but is rather that the “endless coming to awareness of the ‘owned’ penetrates a life whose wealth exceeds reflection” (122). Thus detour here means simply traveling through everything, and the I  that was the goal finds itself by losing itself, picking up everything else along the way in order to discover what it is. So understanding cannot ever truly arrive at the pure Ego, because, as in Zeno’s construction, the destiny is the journey. There is much less, in this case, of the rebound effect of an indirection. Perception is a slowly gathering accretion. As the perceiver moves around the object it builds up from all sides. Now, the changing perspectives of objective perception mean that something is also continually lost while aspects recede, and for Husserl this calls for the work of synthesis beyond immediate perception. Just as intuition anticipates the whole, memory sutures what has receded from view. Heidegger will radicalize this feature of loss into a withdrawal that has more serious ontological consequences for the nature of finitude. Although Ricoeur integrates Heideggerian withdrawal into his conception of tragic finitude, this does not fit so neatly into Ricoeur’s narrative of the detour or the long route, which by its very structure leans toward Husserl’s notion of synthesis. As for the relation of the figure of the detour to the rebound effect of reflection, Husserl is actually quite helpful to what is after all an artifact of the imprecision of figures. The phenomenological understanding of gathering perception of the world and self-understanding is comprehended by a subtle transformation in the idea of reflexivity itself: It is then to this world, the world in which I find myself and which is also my worldabout-me, that the complex forms of my manifold and shifting spontaneities of consciousness stand related . . . in the natural urge of life I live continually in this fundamental form of all ‘wakeful’ living, whether in addition I do or do not assert the cogito, and whether I am or am not “reflectively” concerned with the Ego and the cogitare  .  .  .  I  am present to myself continually as someone who perceives, represents, thinks, feels, desires, and so forth.24

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A kind of second-order reflection is present in, and in fact bodied forth by, what we rather simplistically think of as perception of the world. This is an insight that Merleau-Ponty will carry to its fullest conclusion.

The hermeneutic (re)turn At the heart of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic turn in the 1960s was precisely the enigma of the reflective act, now triangulated, and here we get the rebound effect full force, through the indirection of the symbol. The self gains substantiality only “in the mirror of its objects, its works, its acts.”25 The face of the Gorgon could only be spied on the glint in the shield. As François Dosse explains, Ricoeur was initially drawn into the larger movement of the linguistic turn initiated by LéviStrauss and others “to dig himself out of the hole he found himself in in trying to construct a global analytic of the symbolism of evil. The path through myth had simply returned him to the impossibility of systematicity, since the quest for origins always circled back to the impregnable indeterminacy of the symbolic.”26 At the conclusion of the second volume of the Philosophy of the Will, Ricoeur conceded that humanity has “forgotten the origin,” and that in order to catch sight of it “we must make a fresh start and enter upon a new type of reflection bearing on the avowal that consciousness makes of it and on the symbols of evil in which this avowal is expressed.”27 The capacity for evil is lodged in the constitutional frailty of human being, and the vocabulary of fault contained in our mythology “is itself already a hermeneutics . . . the preferred language of fault appears to be indirect and based on imagery.”28 It is important to note here that the impulse for Ricoeur’s linguistic and hermeneutic turn was moral and religious. But his search would not be satisfied by a final appeal to the holy, and this refusal explains the simultaneous influence of Bultmann, who so radically asserted the mythological and symbolic nature of the religious as the ground for the analysis of faith: “[T]he unity of humanity is realized nowhere else than in the movement of communication.”29 Indeed it is mythical narration that establishes “all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world.”30 What we will see in this adversion to the symbolic order as the indirect modality of religion is that the trope of the detour takes on a deeper dimension than the long route Ricoeur followed to Heidegger. It is in the introduction to the Symbolism of Evil that the theme of indirection receives perhaps its most sustained and rigorous exposition. The central feature

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of the symbol is to convey meaning that eludes direct perception or exposure to the light of reason. The structure of the symbol is designed to give access to this elusive reality by treating the directly perceivable as a kind of reflecting surface. Ricoeur describes this function in terms of the “double meaning” of the symbol, the literal meaning accessible to eidetic perception (le sens premier) which permits an analogical participation in another kind of meaning (le sens second), a meaning that Ricoeur hesitates to name exactly. What is the opposite of concrete and objective? Spiritual? Psychic? Mythic? Emotional? Imaginary? Ricoeur can remain nebulous about this answer by speaking the language of the various discourses that sit outside the philosophical—the language of cosmology, dreams, and myths. The indirect meaning is defined most accurately by its opposition to the literal, concrete, perceivable world of manipulable objects. As such it lends itself to the many metaphors of hidden depths:  meaning that is opaque, shadowy, enigmatic, hidden, and so on. He does not need to justify this ambiguity of reference at this point because he has spread the phenomenon out over its archaic and modern forms, from the primitive symbols of prehistoric cultures through the Freudian science of the unconscious, an undeniable phenomenon of anthropological observation. The symbol per se occupies the nebulous space between reason and belief: “It is no longer lived religion and not yet philosophy.”31 For convenience I  will refer to this space as the transcendent, by which I mean only the other of the immanently concrete and plainly visible. The symbol as the middle passage between worldly and transcendent meaning is a kind of processing center that translates without reducing, so that what is displayed or made available is still enigmatic. Ricoeur explains this function in some detail, which the English translator renders felicitously as “the condensation of an infinite discourse.”32 And although it does not reduce, it does gather meaning: It is a matrix, a dense knot of converging meanings (“c’est recueillir dans un noeud de présence une masse d’intentions significatives”).33 It has both a centrifugal and a centripetal movement, ramifying and coalescing meanings through the same figure (“le symbolisme . . . se charge de significations innombrables, intègre et unifie le plus grand nombre possible de secteurs de l’expérience”) shuttling back and forth between the visibility of the concrete and the irreducibility of the transcendent (174). It is the “zone of emergence” of the transcendent, being neither completely of one world or the other. But we should note that it in fact is an emergence, a qualified visibility, a point of contact, the means through which human beings can participate and are transformed by something transcending their immanence (173).

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This structure of the symbol serves to provide a discursive space within which to explore the terrain of meaning that does not respond to a philosophy of clear and distinct reasons, yet does not rely on expressions of faith. The symbol’s ambiguity (“équivoque, lourd de significations multiples”) is a generative feature that not only does not bar understanding from exploration, but continually gives of itself for exploration.34 Symbols are both opaque and suggestive, irreducible yet demanding of explication. Here is where philosophical “explanation” is given license, and yet restrained to the modesty of its competence: “In losing its explanatory pretensions, myth reveals its expansive exploratory capacities, which is to say it power to discover, to disclose the relation of man and the sacred.”35 Ricoeur now relates this conception of the symbol to the riddling problem of evil. He wagers that there are originary “experiences” (such as the primal loss of innocence with the choice of evil) which have defined or fixed the human condition, “establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world,” which, although lost to history can be deduced as the conditions of possibility for concepts that we hold now such as fault, sin, and evil.36 Thus, the concept of original sin “is not at the beginning but at the end of a cycle of living experience” (4). These events and their experience occurred before philosophical language and rational explanation existed, and we reduce them by trying to translate them completely, as though they were primitive experiences that we have advanced beyond. They are complex and layered experiences with a plurivocity of meanings, and it is precisely because of their complexity, interpreted first in religion and myth, that they need to be elaborated “a second time” (8). As “pre-speculative” we have indirect access to them first through the language of confession and then through the symbols and myths that first interpreted them.37 After mythical interpretation we developed different linguistic competencies that did not displace the first effort. These experiences are, Ricoeur’s words, what a human being “considers sacred” (son sacré).38 Explanatory reason is not impotent in the face of the sacred; our reasoning capacities did not develop to reject the sacred, as some advocates of Enlightenment professed, and can respond to the equivocity of the symbols of the sacred. The “most moving experience,” the effects of the primal events of the human condition, “carries with it the need to understand” (communique avec le besoin de comprendre) and the need to put into words.39 The key to Ricoeur’s understanding of the interplay of transcendence and immanence, and thus to the long route of reflection through symbols, is contained in the following

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assertion: “Speculation is not autonomous and myths themselves are secondary; but neither is there any immediate consciousness of fault that can do without the secondary and tertiary elaborations. It is in the whole circle, made up of confession, myth, and speculation, that we must understand.”40 The “we” in this formulation is significant. Myth is not confined to the primitive understanding, but is legitimated as a cultural carrier of meaning, and in this formulation is a necessary adjunct to rational speculation. Moreover the immediate does find a place in the interpretive structure of understanding. Immediate experience, symbolic expression, philosophical interpretation. The turn to symbol and myth expands the range of research considerably from the scope of the analytic of the will, pointing to the enlarged terrain Ricoeur will venture upon in the ensuing decades.

Ricoeur’s Freud If Symbolism of Evil explicates indirection in the existential terms of suffering and fragility, De l’Interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation) connects the function of indirection to the hiddenness of the Cogito to itself. Without apologies (“The purpose of a book is never entirely justified.”), Freud and Philosophy harvests psychoanalysis for a philosophy of language.41 This somewhat adventitious pairing is nevertheless invited by “a fluctuation in Freud’s writings between medical investigation and a theory of culture,” and by Freud’s belief that dreams are the consummate expression of unconscious desire (4). The latter relationship establishes the feature of the symbol that most interests Ricoeur, its intrinsic capacity for a surplus of meaning. In this respect Ricoeur shows his humanist hand, rebuffing the analytic reduction of the univocity of the symbol that was prevalent at the time. Certainly Ricoeurian analysis has the regulative ideal of (an always receding) univocity, but language has the fateful abundance of its equivocality. So, the psychoanalytic subject is no longer the stable and unified Cogito transparent to itself in its immediate self-evidence, but rather a fragmented and half-hidden self. The protean possibility of self as bare Ego remains “as abstract and empty as it is invincible . . . a certitude devoid of truth.”42 Ricoeur stipulates this possibility for the sake of explanation, although he grants it the status of an incipient feeling. And it is here that Ricoeur invokes the trope of indirection. The self cannot be perceived except through the mediation of symbols and myths, whether of dreams or cultural products. The self gains substantiality only “in the

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mirror of its objects, its works, its acts.”43 Reflection becomes indirect perception through signs. The access to vision is a rerouting, not as the image that Narcissus happens upon, but the golden shield as a strategy of vision. Nevertheless we are still here firmly in the region of the rebound effect. The reflection in the shield, to extend the metaphor, is a poor substitute, something more like the dark glass of Corinthians. The transparency of the soul to itself is replaced by “the indigence of reflection,” a compromise not unlike the shadow reflection before the prisoners in the cave.44 This dimness gives reflection to its hermeneutic character, since understanding must always now be interpretation. The runes and inscriptions that serve as the medium of reflection are fragmentary and ambiguous, “evidenced only by works whose meaning remains doubtful and revocable  .  .  .  opaque, contingent, and equivocal signs scattered in the cultures in which our language is rooted” (46–47). So it counts as a mixed blessing that the Ego is “baptized to the order of signs,” since what salvages it makes it vulnerable to tragedy, misunderstanding, and pathology. Here we see how the trope of the long route exceeds vastly the epistemological problem of reflection. The broken Cogito as it is mirrored in Freud is an existential crisis of identity. The detour is not so much a necessary circumnavigation of method now as the crisis of human identity itself, expressed in biblical idioms: I must recover something which has first been lost; I  make “proper to me” [propre] what has ceased being mine [mon propre]. I make “mine” what I am separated from by space or time, by distraction of “diversion” [divertissement], or because of some culpable forgetfulness. Appropriation signifies that the initial situation from which reflection proceeds is “forgetfulness.” [l’oubli] I am lost, “led astray” [égaré] among objects and separated from the center of my existence, just as I am separated from others and as an enemy is separated from all men. Whatever the secret of this “diaspora,” of this separation, it signifies that I do not at first possess what I am. The truth that Fichte called the thetic judgment posits itself in a desert wherein I am absent to myself.45

With this expression of the pathos of the broken self Ricoeur’s metaphor of the long route achieves a substantiality and complexity that is not present in “Existence and Hermeneutics,” not only contending with the loss of the self ’s unity in Freud but with the overlay of religious overtones expressing the cost of the crisis of identity for a Christian humanist. A danger of the trope of the long route becomes evident here as well. Ricoeur builds the entire edifice of his Freud study on the intermedial function of the symbol as a pass-key between the concrete manifestation of the apparent

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meaning and the hiddenness of the deeper meaning. Unlike metaphor, which trades on the tensional differences between a meaning networks at the horizontal level of discourse, symbol trades on the vertical relationship of the submerged world of the unconscious and the external world of concrete appearance: “For the phenomenology of religion, symbols are the manifestation in the sensible— in imagination, gestures, and feelings—of a further reality, the expression of a depth which both shows and hides itself.”46 This depth-surface interaction is elaborated later in the Interpretation Theory lectures at Texas:  “Symbols have roots. Symbols plunge us into the shadowy experience of power. Metaphors are just the linguistic surface of symbols.”47 Symbols connect the outer world to “the supernatural forces, which dwell in the depths of human existence” (58). For Ricoeur there is a clear analogy between the depth/surface structure of religious symbolism and the conscious/unconscious schema of psychoanalysis. The advantage of the psychoanalytic model is that it provides an interpretive method for registering the relations of depth and surface. But with this choice of models Ricoeur has carried us precipitously into a fraught conflictual terrain between an ontological hermeneutics and a psycholinguistic philosophy of language. The conflict erupts on at least three levels. A psychoanalytic theory of interpretation orients Ricoeur’s discussion toward a theory of the self by juxtaposing the conscious and the unconscious. It predisposes hermeneutics to a methodology by adopting the model of the psychoanalyst as interpreter. And it directs the hermeneutic project away from meaning as a play of difference toward meaning as an inner/outer relation. This takes us quite a distance from the hermeneutics that Heidegger conceived as the mode of understanding of Dasein. He was emphatic that the synthetic function of logos is not a psychical occurrence “as something inside” that agrees “with something physical outside,” so we have here at least an incipient conflict within hermeneutics (56). His understanding of phenomena as das Sichzeigende (self-showing) distances logos from the framework of the Cogito,48 shifts the locus of agency from the Subject-as-researcher to the word as cultural arbiter, and repurposes the showing/hiding phenomenon of language as an enigmatic embodiment.49 We must recall the distinction Heidegger makes between Erscheinen (mere appearance) and Scheinen (the appearing-out-ofitself). He elicits overtones of the doctrine of incarnation in his description of the phenomenon of logos with words like Offenbare (manifestation), Meldende (announcement), Ausstrahlung (emanation), Beleuchtung (illumination), Begegnisart (eventful encounter), and the Greek apophansis, because he wants to indicate that language is more even than embodiment. As a foil he describes

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Erscheinen (§7 52/29) close to the way Ricoeur relates to the Freudian symbol as symptom, “something which announces itself through something which does show itself ” in order to distinguish it from the more primordial phenomenon of logos (52). For Heidegger Scheinen is prior to Erscheinen in the same way that for Derrida writing is prior to speaking. With mere semblance, “the primordial signification (the phenomenon as the manifest) is already included as that upon which the second signification is founded” (51). By contrast the self-showing of logos is “that which shows itself in itself ” (das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende) (51). Logos for Heidegger as discourse is therefore a making manifest, in the performative or constitutive sense in which we now talk of articulation. What is spoken is something that did not exist before and does now. The dialectic of hiding and manifestation is not an inner/outer polarity for Heidegger, but rather a lateral relation of what is unreflectively at work (e.g., tradition, convention, structure) and then seen to be at work (through reflection). Thus it is in contrast to the Heideggerian frame that we must understand the danger of the metaphor of indirection in Ricoeur’s appropriation of Freud. With the difference between Heidegger’s Sichzeigende and Ricoeur’s symbol the figure of the detour becomes questionable. Not only the role of logos, but the role of the interpreter has shifted. So, finally, this difference may now be confronted head-on in Ricoeur’s programmatic 1963 statement regarding Heideggerian hermeneutics, “Existence and Hermeneutics.”

Ricoeur’s Heidegger Greisch characterizes Ricoeur’s Heidegger critique as “almost a declaration of war.”50 In contrast Bernard Dauenhauer asserts that there is “no fundamental gap between their positions.”51 I find Ricoeur’s 1963 argument to be a strangely conflicted statement. Diplomatic and conciliating at the outset, Ricoeur goes out of his way to deny that he is making a break, and that he is engaged in fundamentally the same work:  “I wish to give full credit to this ontology of understanding . . . I do not hold it to be a contrary solution; that is to say, his Analytic of Dasein is not an alternative which would force us to choose between an ontology of understanding and an epistemology of interpretation.”52 Despite this assurance, he throws at Heidegger’s method the classic philosophical rebuke of circularity: “[T]he understanding which is the result of the Analytic of Dasein is precisely the understanding through which and in which this being understands itself as being. Is it not once again within language itself that we

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must seek the indication that understanding is a mode of being?”53 With the language of necessity Ricoeur here marks an obligatory path to the grounding of hermeneutics in phenomenology—his own path. But in the same passage Ricoeur also characterizes his own path as a preference: “Is it not better, then, to begin with the derived forms of understanding and to show in them the signs of their derivation?” (10). Let us look more closely at the alternate choice of routes. Heidegger is scrupulously consistent in casting Dasein as a phenomenon of the world into which it has been thrown and out of which it emerges in response. The passive and middle voice are the grammar and idiom of Dasein, while agency comes mainly from the direction of the world, an agency that energizes Dasein’s involvement, the surplus of which creates a kind of reflective capacity. Ricoeur’s path is from the opposite direction, since his mission is to salvage the agency of the self by surveying the depths of its passivity and fragility—losing the self to save it. This is why Ricoeur inventories exhaustively the many external structures that complement the registers of the self ’s passivity—so that he may claim the modest bits of its remaining agency (attestation, promise-making, story-telling, imputation, culpability, etc.). Greisch justly identifies §32 of Being and Time as the crux of the conflict regarding epistemology. Here Heidegger does not display the suspicion of scientific method that seizes his protégé, but notes merely that “the rigour of a demonstration to provide grounds” is just “a derivative mode,” “a subspecies of understanding,” and is caught up necessarily in the circularity of its involvement in the world:  “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present at hand, we do not stick a value on it.”54 The conventions of research are subsumed in the process of becoming human. Moreover our assertions about anything are social acts, articulated for the purposes of “letting someone see with us” so that there can be “a widening of the range of that mutual sharing which sees” (197). This is, ironically, the humanist insistence on the responsibility not to reduce the meaning of what we encounter: “In every understanding of the world, existence is understood with it, and vice versa” (194). Ricoeur is quite right that this absorption of research practice into an existential framework places too great a burden on scientific praxis if it is always only to be understood in its attachment to the circularity of being. Heidegger’s thoroughgoing subordination acts more like a displacement: “Heidegger has not wanted to consider any particular problem concerning the understanding of this or that entity [etant].”55 However, Ricoeur’s characterization of the short route

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may have overstepped the mark. In a number of papers addressed precisely to this question, Gadamer has shown how a hermeneutic comportment can subordinate epistemology to the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein without consuming it.56 So that’s a first concern or question. “Existence and Hermeneutics” is followed shortly after by a statement that conciliates and modifies the criticism. With the 1966 lecture “Heidegger and the Subject” Ricoeur may have massaged Heidegger’s orientation too aggressively, but it was in service of recasting Heidegger’s project to bring out its epistemological dimensions.57 Both the analytic and the Dasein structure, in this exposition, are taking the long route, the hermeneutic hyphenation of world and other being read, in effect, as an objectification of being. The Heideggerian subject (Dasein) is itself a task that lies before the discursive being, “the task to ‘collect (legein) the self-disclosing in its disclosure and to save (sōzein) it, to catch it up and preserve it.’ ”58 Self and world are not only mutually constituting, but the work of constitution is aware of itself: “Where the world becomes a ‘view’ [Bild], the existent as a whole is posited as that with respect to which a man orients himself, which therefore, he wishes to bring and have before himself, and thus, in a decisive sense, re-present to himself ” (228). Epistemology is inherent in the hermeneutic commitment to structure: “[E]xistentiality is nothing other than the totality of the structures of an existent who exists only in the fulfillment or the lack of fulfillment of his own possibilities” (230). The analytic as a secondorder enumeration of these structures cannot escape its own epistemological fate. Despite the effort of reinterpretation, Ricoeur never let go of the fundamental criticism of German hermeneutics on the status of epistemology. In lectures given in 1988 in Florence he offered a more nuanced version of the polemic, adjusting the figure of the long detour to a more equable back-and-forth oscillation. The “particular style of alternation between explanation and understanding” is an “interweaving.”59 This oscillating figure allows him at some points to sound very much like the prudential Gadamerian: “We deliberate about our life ideals, whatever they may be, and the constitutive rules of this or that practice, following a back-and-forth movement” (32). But ultimately Ricoeur stands firm on the status of the epistemic, and he does this by going back to the epistemological character of Heidegger’s meta-analysis. What are we to make of this difference? We should assess the situation briefly here. Heidegger had faulted the Kantian effort to locate the conditions of possibility of “an epistemological subject that carries categories that govern the objectivity of any object,” but Ricoeur points out that Heidegger’s own analytic is a “second-degree reflection” that outlines “the conditions of possibility of

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hermeneutical discourse,” and thus is answerable, to one degree or another, to the demands of an epistemology.60 Ricoeur locates three aspects of this point of overlap. However different the hermeneutic logos is from the apophantic proposition, “whoever says phenomenology also says logos of what shows itself,” and thus “also makes a truth claim that has to be measured against the apophantic; that is, the propositional truth claim” (69). Second, Heidegger’s analysis plainly “proceeds by making distinction, determinations, and finding relationships” in the idioms of analysis, even if it results in what Ricoeur calls “quasi-categories” (69). Finally, hermeneutics never escapes its own origin in the Diltheyan enterprise of legitimizing the human sciences, since even as a negative reaction to scientificity it remains firmly within the framework of philosophical justification. Ricoeur makes a very sound point about structural analysis at the second degree, and it would take a considerable effort to sort out the issues at stake in this criticism. Gadamer himself is vulnerable to the same attack, since Truth and Method enunciates principles that serve as conditions of possibility for prudential dialogue. But even after this point is conceded, the sticking point in the debate will always be what Ricoeur himself calls “the particular style of alternation between explanation and understanding” (10). That is not resolved by pointing out that hermeneutic philosophy uses techniques of analysis and relies on categories. Gadamer’s later essays, such as “From Word to Concept,” describe an alternation between word and concept that accommodates the epistemic imperative without sacrificing the prudential privilege. Ricoeur’s call for the development of a taxonomy of symbolic forms, a criteriology of semantic devices, and a determination of the distinct approaches of specialized interpretive practices do not absolutely require a dialectic of equal parts. That is a proposition he never succeeded in proving.

The long route of the self ’s emergence Our last stop on the itinerary of the Ricoeurian detour is his long-standing interest in the constitution of selfhood. In his middle period, the Ricoeurian self, perhaps his pivotal category, is constituted by the idiom of the long route at increasing levels of discursive complexity: at the level of the sign, the sentence, the text, the other person, and the institution. Such a self is always threatening collapse, dispersed, fragmentary, hidden from itself, held together piecemeal out of convention, accident, desire, need.

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The path of the detour is the path of the wounded Cogito—the only path open to a creature of constitutional deficiencies. Ricoeur focused much of his intellectual energy on a divisive question for his own faith tradition about the inherent dignity or abject depravity of humans. The scholastics had tried to reconcile the contradiction of divinity and imperfection by a doctrine of similitude: “This likeness is not one of equality, for such an exemplar infinitely excels its copy.”61 Ricoeur approached the question through the Pauline figure of enigma, and his philosophy might well be construed as a gloss on the text from Corinthians, “Now we see through a glass darkly, then face to face” (1 13:2). Ricoeur’s developing answer is even more complex than the doctrine of similitude; he fastens the structure of the hermeneutic circle to the Spinozist theory of desire to assert an ever-evolving dependence between the a priori and the a posteriori. The a priori of human being is never simply the null point, but exists in anticipation and desire. Heidegger’s epithet is apt: The future is the origin. Despite this hermeneutic structure, there remains a strong remnant of the incorrigible relation to faith in “the summoned subject,” which leads Ricoeur to maintain the paradox that “the christomorphic self is both fully dependent and fully upstanding.”62 The question for a hermeneutic perspective is whether the bias toward an original whole implied in the figure of the broken is sustainable or necessary. Let us follow the stages of the Ricoeurian constitution of the self to answer this question. 1. Selfhood is constituted. This “constitution,” in the Husserlian sense, connotes already a long route, an a posteriori that in Ricoeur’s hands accretes the biblical tonalities of suffering, frailty, and bearing witness. Caught between finitude and infinity, human being grasps its own self “only at the end of a concrete dialectic that discloses the fragile synthesis of man as the becoming of an opposition: the opposition of originating affirmation and of existential difference.”63 Something is built up if only as a motley cloak; a creature of parts, broken and mended; on the one hand, diffused, fragmented, threatened with collapse; on the other hand, grasped together, instituted, interwoven. People are forever “forming a coherent project of their lives and . . . making their existence into a continuous whole” as a task, a task scarred by monstrous failures, tragic.64 Before this perspective the question for a hermeneutics becomes: What tilts constitution to the side of originating affirmation and grants failure the status of tragedy, rather than the comic or the absurd? The concept of the negative that Ricoeur developed on in the 1950s posits that being has “priority over the nothingness within the very core of man,” even though there has never been a privilege that was more hard won.65 Genuine and

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full presence is present in human beings from the beginning as a felt absence, and the transcendence of that lack, a constitutional lack, is characterized as a transgression. The will that seeks this transgression is an action upon the negative of our being, a constant and unfulfilled process of what he called denegation. Ricoeur traces this denegation through all the dimensions of finitude—perceptual, affective, experiential, ethical, and political—but at its root, linguistic. Drawing on Husserl of the Logical Investigations, Ricoeur invokes what Husserl calls the absurd signification, the inexplicable ability we have to leap beyond our finite, contingent, imperfect positionality in the conception: “I am a power of absurd significations.”66 This disproportionate capacity gives Ricoeur the motto that might as well serve for the whole of his philosophy, a formula that leads him to the theme of indirection: “I am not what I am. But I reach this radical expression of my transcendence only by an indirect, reflective route: it is on the thing itself that I perceive the negative in which my transcendence consists.”67 To be clear:  The “thing itself ” is “what I am not,” and the negative is “what I am.” That is why the absurd signification is indirect. We are “the obscure side of a total act whose illuminated side has not been disclosed” (328). Similar to Gadamer’s assertion of “the weakness of the logoi” is Ricoeur’s admission of “the weakness of attestation.”68 Attestation is precisely “a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation” (22). 2. Selfhood is constituted discursively. On the one hand, a human being has “the power to set forth the new being it proclaims.”69 But on the other hand, as distracted and fragmented souls, we lack a full and immediate self-possession. Because “we never produce the total act that we gather up and project in the ideal of an absolute choice, we must endlessly appropriate what we are through the mediation of the multiple expressions of our desire to be.”70 Communication is itself an unending act of attribution that earns the title of the figure of indirection: “If man interprets reality by saying something of something, it is because real meanings are indirect; I attain things only by attributing a meaning to a meaning.”71 Even when we intend a thing in common, we say different things about it, and our separate understandings interpose between ourselves and it. This plurivocity arises because we don’t use language in an airless chamber, but with different desires and needs in constantly varying contexts. If something means what you and I  mean about something, language yields meaning profusely; there is what I intend and what the thing means: “The break between signification and the thing has already occurred with nouns, and this intervening distance marks the locus of interpretation” (22). Such an indirection is simply the unavoidable distance of linguistic meaning which makes any effort of interpretation “too long” (20).

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Ontological indirection, as we learned from the earlier work, is itself a kind of detour, a passage through a medium, a reflection in the glass, a bending of light, a diffraction. “But reflection is not introspection; for reflection takes the roundabout way via the object; it is reflection upon the object. This is the way in which it is properly transcendental: it brings into view on the object that in the subject which makes the synthesis possible.”72 Perseus could only look upon the object of the gaze through the glint in his shield, and this in order to act. Ricoeur will use this figure of indirect reflection as the modality of access to the otherwise inaccessible Sache: “Hermeneutics is the very deciphering of life in the mirror of the text.”73 But in the context of Ricoeur’s linguistic turn, the question is how this second aspect of indirection (the indirect reflection) applies to the act of signifying. Ricoeur says that the capacity of the sign to objectify, “opens me to others insofar as it expresses, that is to say, displays the interior upon the exterior and becomes a sign for others, decipherable and offered to the reciprocity of consciousness” (19). Once I give a thing a name, it has an independent locus of meaning that I can reflect on; that is, it achieves the distance necessary for seeing. We see this whenever we feel the need to articulate something in order to understand it. In A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Theseus marks this power as a specification—“As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name” (V, i). Before it has a name it remains nebulous, and once it is embodied in the language of my understanding, it takes shape before me. Kant thought this meant that we never have genuine access to the thing itself, and are thus caught up in an infinite deferral. But the other way to look at this, the hermeneutic correction to Kantianism, is that language is not a second life, a clothing, but constitutes the thing for us in the first place, in which case the Sache selbst becomes a delusion of philosophy. To me the metaphor of the detour is troubling precisely here; the figure prompts us to ask what the detour is around, and why we need to take a detour in the first place, if the language is building the thing as it goes. 3. Selfhood is constituted narratively. With his narrative theory Ricoeur seems to me to steer back to safer ground, since narrative elaboration, at least in theory, is something that the teller of the story does, even if it is a long and winding road filled with detours and asides. In contrast to the founding Subject, Ricoeur’s self is more effect than cause, the accumulated result of experiences and choices, of acting and suffering, orchestrated and forged—“the self seeks its identity on the scale of an entire life.”74 To the degree that personal identity resembles the character in a plot, Ricoeur notes that character and plot are

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effectively reciprocal:  “The thesis supported here will be that the identity of the character is comprehensible through the transfer to the character of the operation of emplotment, first applied to the action recounted: characters, we will say, are themselves plots” (143). This convertibility of normally separate categories means that self overflows the boundaries not just of the individual in the direction of the other, but also of the life in the direction of the scene. The self is a fragmented constitution held together by discursive threads. “Who am I?” is not just a philosophical question, but an existential cry and a moral imperative. Personal identity is not a fixed category but a long developing and constantly modulating dialectic, expressed discursively and organized narratively. Ricoeur’s formula for the extentio of narrative identity is simply that “the self seeks its identity on the scale of an entire life.”75 Its strategies (constancy of character, keeping one’s word) are processes of unification and sedimentation against forces of fragmentation, contradiction, and loss. The distentio animi is a long journey whose route is in its very essence a distention, an encounter with contingency, complication, and conflict that wins whatever sense it can have of permanence in time by mimicking the immediate in the deployment of action of modes of narrative temporality. The fictive imaginary is a laboratory of imaginative variations which Ricoeur calls a “detour” (159). Ricoeur’s elevation of selfhood beyond the sign to the semantics of narrative constitution was his principal move beyond Derridean post-structuralism. 4. Selfhood is constituted socially. The seventh, eighth, and ninth studies of Oneself as Another, the last of the four sections of Ricoeur’s analysis of the self, recognizes the inherency of the social at the heart of the self; we have to be concerned, especially in the wake of Heidegger, whether this constitutive sociality is too much of an afterthought. Ricoeur asks “whether the mediation of the other is not required along the route from capacity to realization.”76 The important word in this rhetorical question is “required.” “The other” is integral to the basic ontological structure of Dasein. This is one of the cardinal points that Ricoeur works out in his writings on ethics. Heidegger may not have given sufficient attention to this obligation, and he did not fully articulate its modus operandi, but the principle is there in the fundamental ontology. We can see it in the 1924 summer lectures and even schematically in Being and Time. The double heritage of Ricoeur’s Christianity is his extraordinary and obvious devotion to loving community and his interest in the fate of each individual in judgment. Is this a tension that hermeneutics needs? We can hear the religious inflection in Ricoeur’s description of the self constituted by the other, an extension expressed in the language of detours: “[I]f one asks by what right

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the self is declared to be worthy of esteem, it must be answered that it is not principally by reason of its accomplishments but fundamentally by reason of its capacities . . . The question is then whether the mediation of the other is not required along the route from capacity to realization.”77 Ricoeur’s orientation to the theme of selfhood will always call forth this question of priority. 5. One of Ricoeur’s greatest contributions to hermeneutics, and this point requires no equivocation, is his elaborated mapping of the reciprocation between the order of the social and the order of the institution. Olivier Mongin thought that Ricoeur was “a man who had need of the institution, who sought to think the strong institution—not in the sense of non-democratic, but as that which is able to deal effectively with important issues.”78 This development takes over from Husserlian analysis, since Heidegger and Gadamer had left this thematic fallow. Ricoeur was intent on determining the precise nexus between society and community that followed from his philosophical commitments. He discerned that “sharing cannot help but pass through the institution,” and the passage from the other person to the institution is warranted by the fact that the inclusion of the third party “must not be limited to the instantaneous aspect of wanting to act together but must be spread out over a span of time” (199, 195). Institution is defined in terms of temporality, devised as a correction of the fleetingness of the face-to-face. But institution is itself an imperfection, since it lacks the pathos of the singular, so the sociality of the person and the institution are fragments that act in reciprocity to mediate their mutual deficiencies.

Conclusion This investigation has shown the burden Ricoeur placed on the figure of the detour. He had an almost reflexive recourse to it for tackling the animating problems of his intellectual project. It helped him work his way out of the nettle of reflective philosophy, a tradition from which he rebelled but could never entirely let go; it served in his commitment to method in his conflicted relationship to hermeneutics; it was instrumental in his distancing from foundationalism and dualism; it helped him configure the nested mediations of discursive identity, from the stirrings of selfhood in the reflexive pronoun to the social and institutional dimensions of personhood. So the first summative observation to make is that the figure of the detour has many tributaries in Ricoeur’s thought, not necessarily coherent or unified, and I want to ask if this diversity is always hermeneutic.

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My tracking of the figural pathways prompts me to ask two questions of Ricoeur. The first is metaphysical. To characterize the region of finitude in terms of a “detour” or a “derivation” provokes for me the question: Derivative of what?79 Detour around what? Does this usage take us to a region of first-order being? How literal was Ricoeur when he asked, concerning the death of a loved one in Living Up to Death: “[D]oes he still exist? and where? where else?”80 The idiom of the long route as an expression of the tragedy of finitude has deep roots in the Weltanschauung of Ricoeur’s Christianity—the veil of tears, the pilgrim’s progress, the way of the cross—so what is the relationship between the figural passage to a world that is discursive all the way down? As distinct from the long and short path, the relation of part to whole in German hermeneutics or its rhetorical foundation is never a surface/depth dialectic. It mines the constraints of finitude as the material of invention, ambiguity as the productive source of imagination, metaphorical rupture as the engine of meaning making. Does Ricoeur here take a step out of a hermeneutic conception? Is Ricoeur’s philosophy always only ever properly hermeneutic or even phenomenological? I have no intention of challenging faith in metaphysical transcendence. My question is rather whether this orientation sits within the boundaries of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic project. Hermeneutics as the discursive finitude of being has to stand on its own. Second, the figure works across different levels in Ricoeur, as a methodological intention, an habitual pattern of thought, and a fundamental attitude toward the nature of human finitude. We have seen that the looseness of usage in the movement within the family of associated figures is adaptive and mercurial. But is there an extra step in this profusion in pairing the detour of method with the long route of the hermeneutic circle? Method produces all kinds of useful information that can be integrated back into the lifeworld. But is this in fact always a separate moment from the hermeneutic work of figuring our way to a solution to the problems that confront us? Is not even the analyst subject to, as Gadamer puts it, “the tension and release that structure all understanding and understandability”?81 I think in the end that the inveterate rhetorical figure of the circle, which Ricoeur also made frequent use of, is a more reliable partner for hermeneutics, since it can overcome metaphysical suspicions, and live comfortably within the enigmas of discursivity. The fair response that Ricoeur could give to this option is that there is an undeniable truth in the detour as a figure of our tragic finitude. Our lives are repetitions, one way or another, of having to take the long route, of being lost in a dark wood, of learning the hard way, of only seeing ourselves for the first time through another’s eyes, and so on. So going forward I would like

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press once again for a greater heterogeneity. We certainly can find the movement of detours that circle in the constitution of our feeble understanding. But our paths, sometimes short, sometimes long, will sometimes be detours, sometimes way-stations, sometimes dead ends, and sometimes trajectories with only an inkling that we might be going the right way. Hermeneutic understanding takes place on what Joseph Dunne called the rough ground, and what Isaiah Berlin called the crooked timbre of humanity. Ricoeur says somewhere that hermeneutics should speak of a spiral instead of a circle, and that is fine, because the hermeneutic circle is never a perfect circle. We must acknowledge that there are detours along the way, and that there is never any permanent closing of the circle. From an educational perspective, the great value of hermeneutics is to help correct the prevailing Western prejudice of reductive linear logics, and when all the passing fads of continental theory have long gone, the power of this correction will survive as a touchstone for educators charged with teaching their students how the cultural ground underneath us has a stability that yields to our encounter with it. Ricoeur’s contribution to this insight is that that structural relationship charges us with a moral responsibility. And in my view that is not a detour.

7

The Treacherous Path from Promise to Institution

The idea of the promise is a quintessentially hermeneutic idea, because it embodies the constitutive work of discourse to build human relationship across temporal and other forms of difference. The great advance that Ricoeur made beyond Gadamer’s occasional remarks about the promise was to connect this personal speech act to its civic analog in what he referred to as institutions as a bridge between the personal and the political. If a promise is a commitment to another against the contingencies of time, an institution is a social arrangement that guarantees continuity beyond the contingencies of the personal. Ricoeur saw the chiasmic character of promise-making and institution-building as a reciprocity that allows each to supplement the weakness and strength of the other. The institution is intrinsic to the personal as the condition of possibility of citizenship, but subsidiary to the personal as an extension of human contact. As far it goes, this model of reciprocity feels descriptively accurate, although its practicality as a regulative ideal has at best a fragile purchase among the abiding idols of tribe and marketplace. Yet as an ethical component of a hermeneutic grammar it is one of those ethical impulses we have no right to abandon. To the extent that human institutions are the structural means we have to continuity and permanence, we have to see if there are ways to counterbalance their invidious tendency to inertial concentration and self-protection. Ricoeur’s institutional, ethical, and political amendments and additions to Gadamerian hermeneutics begin this process, and we have to figure out how far he has gotten.

The promise in Gadamer Gadamer made only a few incidental comments about the idea of the promise, and it is possible to present virtually their entire text here. Like Ricoeur,

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Gadamer grants the idea of a promise the highest moral status not as a speechact that evolved through commerce or social relations but as a precondition of human being: He who asserts that promises must be kept, for that is the moral precondition of our living together as human beings, and he who seeks to justify this assertion, must certainly present evidence concerning the order of human society, e.g., the mutual need that people have of one another, the necessity of planning ahead, of being able to rely on one another, and so on. In so doing it may also be possible to penetrate to the depths in which human obligation has its foundation and in respect to which all pragmatic concerns can be seen to be secondary.1

The pragmatic social functions Gadamer begins to list here suggest that the promise serves as the basic material of an edifice of coordinated relations of interdependence, communication, and temporal dispersion. But he emphasizes that the idea of the promise is a clue to the underlying reality of human being as such in which all the forms of finitude (historical, geographic, psychosocial) create the need for a mediating capacity. Gadamer used the etymological harmonics of German in the words pledge (Zusage), notification (Ansage), and statement (Aussage) to bring out the mediating nature of the promise: It is not the case that a statement that is not yet a pledge can only become a pledge when it is spoken to someone, for example as a consolation or a covenant. Rather, it is such a statement that it has in itself the character of a pledge and must be understood as a pledge. This means, however, that language steps beyond itself in the pledge. Whether in relation to an old or a new agreement, it does not complete itself in itself, as a poem completes itself. Therefore, the pledge, like a covenant, finds its completion in the acceptance of belief—as clearly every promise becomes binding only after it has been accepted. Similarly, a legal text that formulates a law or judgment is binding as soon as it is proclaimed; however, it completes itself as something proclaimed not in itself, but first in being carried out, i.e., in its execution [in seiner Ausfuhrung, bzw. Vollstreckung].2

Here we see the beginnings of a structural analysis of language’s mediating capacity. Although Gadamer does not underline the fact, the temporality created by the social dimension of the promise is clearly suggested. The word once expressed or inscribed has a latent power of actualization, and is only half itself until someone makes a claim upon it or honors it: We can always call upon something that has been pledged—as in the case of a promise that someone has made to us. When someone makes a promise, then he

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pledges something. I can call upon what is said and rely upon it. It is more than a communication: it is rather a binding word that presupposes mutual validity. It does not lie in my power along to promise something. It also depends upon the other who accepts my promise, and only then does it become a promise.3

Its temporal structure as an open account is flexible, depending on the terms pledged, but the expression of a promise has two outer points, one in the present of the past and one in the present of the future, with the action of the future present giving determinacy to the temporal span. The idea of a promise helps Gadamer elaborate his guiding temporal concept of Gleichzeitigkeit, a term that encapsulates the equivocal structure of human temporality; something short of full presence that nevertheless achieves an improvised permanence by the use of language to stretch intention between times. This practical improvisation is in nuce what Ricoeur would later elaborate with his meditations on Augustine’s concept of the distentio animi. Gadamer describes the temporal structure created by this act of attestation: A claim is something lasting. Its justification (or pretended justification) is the primary thing. Because a claim lasts, it can be enforced at any time. A claim exists against someone and must therefore be enforced against him; but the concept of a claim also implies that it is not itself a fixed demand, the fulfillment of which is agreed on by both sides, but is rather the ground for such [begründet]. A claim is the legal basis for an unspecified demand. If it is to be answered in such a way as to be settled, then to be enforced it must first take the form of a demand [Forderung]. It belongs to the permanence of a claim that it is concretized in a demand. / The application to Lutheran theology is that the claim of faith began with the proclamation of the gospel and is continually reinforced in preaching. The words of the sermon perform this total mediation, which otherwise is the work of the religious rite—of the mass, for example. We shall see that in other ways too the word is called on to mediate between past and present, and that it therefore comes to play a leading role in the problem of hermeneutics.4

The term “mediates” here means throwing a bridge, so Gadamer is saying that speech is the mediator both of an intention and its fulfillment. This double mediation transforms time by giving us the possibility of a new kind of presence, not the pinpoint immediacy of the moment but the discursive construction of a reality: “Contemporaneity” . . . means that in its presentation this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves full presence, however remote its origin may be. Thus contemporaneity is not a mode of givenness in consciousness, but a task for

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consciousness and an achievement that is demanded of it. It consists in holding on to the thing in such a way that it becomes “contemporaneous,” which is to say, however, that all mediation is superseded in total presence. / This concept of contemporaneity, we know, stems from Kierkegaard, who gave it a particular theological stamp. For Kierkegaard, “contemporaneity” does not mean “existing at the same time.” Rather it names the task that confronts the believer: to bring together two moments that are not concurrent, namely one’s own present and the redeeming act of Christ, and yet so totally to mediate them that the latter is experienced and taken seriously as present (and not as something in a distant past).5

In a secular context Gadamer’s totalizing language would be hyperbole, since hermeneutics testifies to the human pledge of constancy as an always imperfect aim. But placing such discursive constancy in a religious context emphasizes the fact that the temporal work is not merely a cognitive or even just social process, but also a moral one. The meeting of a promise is a task but also a demand. The double valence of the speech-act of the promise will be worked out to its fullest potential in Ricoeur’s later works, where the idea of institution becomes the societal corollary to the personal capacity for promise-making.

Ricoeur Promise as speech-act In contrast to Gadamer’s abbreviated treatment, the promise is a guiding leitmotif through the course of Ricoeur’s work. It is never the central theme of an essay or book, but finds itself at the heart of much of the mature work in which Ricoeur is bridging his discourse theory with his ethics. The promise is an exemplary case for this meeting point, because it is a complicated discursive structure formed out of a set of ethical imperatives. Ricoeur’s analysis of the structure of the promise does not differ measurably from Gadamer’s, but he carries it much further in developing the fundamental ontological relationship between discourse and ethics. The longest reflection on the idea occurs in Oneself as Another where Ricoeur wants to provide an example of Kant’s use of maxims as universals, and so he looks at the prohibition against false promises. The problem with universal rules of conduct is that they threaten to collapse under the pressure of exceptions. There is an internal contradiction in the principle of the Kantian and Hegelian promotion of autonomy as a value that

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leans in the direction of inviolable rights as distinct from the obligation to the other. The uniqueness of the person as an end (right) comes into competition with the mutuality inherent in the idea of humanity (duty). Ricoeur appeals to Aristotle’s prudential mediation of justice-with-equity to rebalance these competing impulses, and points out that implicit in the demand for equity is an ethics of relation that tempers the claim for individual freedom. The test of the Kantian maxim is a deductive test of reason that needs to be complemented with a second test, the prudential process of application, which involves the rule in a process of adjustment to the case. The false promise is a good test of the absolute rule. We think about the moral flexibility we use, for instance, in giving false assurances to small children for the sake of their comfort and protection. A  promise can be understood in terms of its value for personal integrity, which promotes strict adherence to the rule, but a promise is also a social gesture that emerges from the reliance of one person on another, and this second dimension, the social dimension, introduces a different set of moral valences, some of which may come in conflict with the self-directed imperative that dictates adherence to a rule. Ricoeur thinks through hard cases of false assurance and promise-making, such as discussions with the dying and the very young. Heterogeneous standards of harm (not speaking the truth versus causing unnecessary suffering) can come into conflict and render absolute rules inapplicable. In such cases, prudential wisdom “invents” a just response that fits itself to the situation “without the value of a universal principle.”6 So here the nobility of “the intention not to change my intention” is nested within a complicating social situation that carries a different moral valence.7 In the process of developing a discursive ethics, Ricoeur says a great deal about how the promise straddles the space between personal identity and social responsibility. The reciprocity contained in the Golden Rule, a dialogism that lies dormant within Kant’s moral imperative, provides Ricoeur the opportunity to press the social dimension of promising in the construction of discursive being. The Golden Rule establishes the other in the position of someone to whom an obligation is owed, someone who is counting on me and makings self-constancy a response to this expectation. To a large extent, it is not to disappoint or betray this expectation that I make maintaining my first intention the theme of a redoubled intention: the intention not to change my intention.8

Promise making and keeping bridges the integrity of the individual with the solicitude of the social being:

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“From you,” says the other, “I expect that you will keep your word”; to you, I reply: “You can count on me.” This counting on connects self-constancy, in its moral tenor, to the principle of reciprocity founded in solicitude. The principle of being faithful to one’s word as it is given is thus no more than the application of the rule of reciprocity to the class of actions in which language itself is involved as the institution governing all the forms of community. Not keeping one’s promise is betraying both the other’s expectation and the institution that mediates the mutual trust of speaking subjects.9

Ricoeur sees this double moral valence of the promise as evidence of the medial position of morality between the demands of the self and the demands of the other: “Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another.”10 Speech turns in both directions, toward the integrity of identity and the obligations of membership in a community:  “[C]ounting on someone is both relying on the stability of a character and expecting that the other will keep his or her word, regardless of the changes that may affect the lasting dispositions by which that person is recognized.”11 In anatomizing the ethical structure of a promise, Ricoeur asserts that there must already be a prior linguistic framework that makes promise-making possible, and that each act of promise-making reinforces:  “All speech acts, considered from the point of view of their illocutionary force, commit their speaker through a tacit pledge of sincerity by reason of which I actually mean what I say.”12 This self-constitution of the promise as a social institution imposes a second-order obligation on those who use speech:  “The properly ethical justification of the promise suffices of itself, a justification which can be derived from the obligation to safeguard the institution of language and to respond to the trust that the other places in my faithfulness.”13 Indeed the presence of obligation at the heart of discursivity itself is what defines human capability: “I would say that every initiative is an intention to do something and, as such, a commitment to do that thing, hence a promise that I make silently to myself and tacitly to another, to the extent that the other is, if not its beneficiary, at least its witness.”14 This connection of speech-acts in discourse theory to the subject of intentionality in ethical theory is at the heart of the ontological radicality of Ricoeur’s project. Ethics is not something superimposed on discourse, and discourse is not simply a mediating tool of ethical capacity, or its clothing. It is because we have language that we have the capacity to put ourselves in the position of the other, to create temporal structures beyond the immediacy of the

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passing feeling, and to build and modify our own character. You can see how the promise is in all of these capacities, and thus why it serves for Ricoeur as the exemplary discourse structure for the nexus of capability and speech.

From promise to institution Ricoeur moves well beyond Gadamer in connecting the personal speech-act of promise-making to its institutional analog, asking whether or to what extent anonymous public structures can carry over human commitments to broader and more permanent social forms. Greisch believed that between Ricoeur’s early and middle period there was “a change in the very conception of hermeneutics in which the emphasis is more and more shifted to the ‘world of the text’ in front of which we understand ourselves.”15 The agency that emerges from an articulation is “a blind light whose productivity needs to regain possession of itself.”16 Ricoeur saw something more systematic at work within this hermeneutic capacity than Gadamer, something more Heideggerian or Husserlian, and it seems to me that this structural or systematic or phenomenological side of hermeneutic identity is a necessary retrieval. Ricoeur always understood that “the reliability of human action, to which the promise responds,” was contingent on “the intermittencies of the heart,” so that society had to develop something like “reliable institutions of promising.”17 Of course the word “system” conjures the embarrassing specter of Hegel’s excess and the rationalist pathologies of technique, but all that Ricoeur ultimately wants from this idea is the relative durability that discourse fabricates against ephemera, against the leakage of finitude from our inconstancy and blindness. Ricoeur quotes from Hegel’s moral philosophy that “the system of right is freedom made actual,” which is a way of characterizing ethical systems as processive devices, as formal structures that actualize substance, not immune to the mutability of being, but subject to it (177). System, or better, institution, is what Ricoeur refers to, after Hegel, “as a second nature,” a quasi-nature as an artifice constituted nearly from scratch, temporally realized, and in need of constant repair (177). That institution and system are elaborations of the capacity for language to make attestations is Ricoeur’s intensification of the basic hermeneutic thesis that language allows us the distance to have a past and make a future. For Ricoeur “the will toward incarnation in an external work” is basically an extension of the capacity of language to move “from the verb to the substantive form.”18 While German hermeneutics substitutes the ongoing circulation of subject and predicate in place of the dominion of the fixed Subject, Ricoeur insists on the

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kernel of agency resident in the very ability to predicate, despite the fact that an initiative can never start from a zero point (ex nihilo). As I  have established in previous chapters, Ricoeur associates Gadamer to at least some degree with the “dream of immediacy, of face-to-face relations without the intermediary of a neutral term . . . the dream that dialogue should be the measure for every human relation.”19 To be sure, Ricoeur does not want to challenge the importance of the face-to-face, but rather to suggest that human commitments need institutions for constitutional reason:  “[E]ven the most intimate dialogical relation is possible only on the basis of institutions, the basis of an order which assures the tranquility of and which protects the intimacy of any face-to-face relation” (181). And it is no accident that at this point in his criticism, Ricoeur invokes Alfred Schutz, the sociologist who did so much careful work to bridge phenomenology and the institutional structure.20

Ricoeur’s innovation So, from Ricoeur’s point of view, the discursive structure of the promise is a proto-textual structure, and the discursive structure of the institution is a supertextual structure, both straddling the line between the ephemeral present of the face-to-face and the quasi-permanence of textual inscription. With formal structures such as contracts, protocols, policies, missions, and so on, and social practices such as committee work, conferencing, delegation, collaboration, the hybrid form of the institution bridges the space between textual inscription and living speech. Beyond what is owed to the first and second person, “what is lacking is exactly the third, the ‘it’ of ‘it is necessary.’ ”21 What is odd is not that Ricoeur should add this third leg of the moral foundation, but that Gadamer didn’t, or at least, in any depth. Gadamer was so intent on establishing the priority of practical judgment over rules that he failed to address the need of institutional structures for sustaining a practical ethics. Objectivity and objectification in this context is not the deadening thing that Gadamer fears, the mindless reduction of human judgment in a society of technique, but rather the necessary concession to anonymity introduced by the inescapable fact of society (Gesellschaft).22 Ricoeur does not like this distance any more than Gadamer, but he sees he has to struggle with its constitution to make it more responsible to the ideal of community. And of course this exposes him to all the problems of hegemony, legitimacy, ideology, and violence that have plagued modern political theory. What he ultimately concludes about the

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potential for the abuse of authority in alienating systems is that there has to remain a live, open circuit between systems structured by laws and the idea of freedom that animates them. All systems of authority that short-circuit or cut off this relation lose their legitimacy. And this is where he notes the vulnerability of Kant’s moral philosophy: “[W]hat I essentially reproach Kantianism for is to have concentrated the whole ethical problematic in this terminal moment which is simply formal, to have identified the whole ethical dynamism and its genesis of meaning with its ultimate stage, and, at the same time, to have erected as foundational what perhaps after all is only a didactic criterion.”23 What Ricoeur wants instead is the preservation of each link along the chain that instantiates freedom in the social order, from the self-assertion of autonomy to the extension of that right to all, the instantiation of such a value in institutions to protect the anonymous other, and from finding modes of validation that translate that value into law. Once law is cut off from a living relation to the freedom that legitimizes it, its authority is merely domination. (Well, that is a wonderful formula, but I wonder if even Ricoeur appreciates the enigma of the relation.) Kant’s categorical reasoning, at any rate, does not trace the path from freedom to law when it derives the maxims from a simple test of reason: I do not see how it is possible to engender anything that could be a value or a norm from one simple criterion; that is, from a simple proof-test. We do not draw any content, really, from such a formal criterion. This is why we must learn the content of the maxims in Kantian philosophy from our experience. At the same time, these contents are no longer in any way ethical. They come from our desire without having followed the process of mutual generation of one freedom by another, and without having passed through institutions.24

And yet Hegel’s reliance on cultural norms (Sittlichkeit) is not sufficient either; reflection that assures the responsiveness of normative laws to universal freedom points us back to Kant’s critical project. If the extension of the franchise for freedom leads to the establishment of lawful institutions, a lawful system remains legitimate only to the extent that it preserves its relation to that freedom. Living institutions are grounded in empirical tests of their responsiveness to communities. As anyone who has ever had an administrative commitment reneged with a change of administration knows, institutions and promises are not naturally related. Ricoeur attempts to bridge them, and he does so, not unsurprisingly, with a dialectic. The idea of the institution in Ricoeur corresponds on the level of society (Gesellschaft) to the promise on the level of the social (Gemeinschaft).

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Institution is the translation of the solicitude for the other in the face-to-face to the anonymous third party in a complex society whom we cannot know personally but know to be in a similar situation to that which kindles our solicitude. Despite this break with the face-to-face, Ricoeur establishes his iconoclastic invocation of the Kantian imperative by asserting that what “fundamentally characterizes the idea of institution is the bond of common mores and not that of constraining rules.”25 It will be in the eighth study of Oneself as Another that he lays out the justification for reading Kant in this way. He will spend most of his early effort in working out a justification for granting power to the institution to enforce rules. This power, which is constituted somehow out of “wanting to live and act together,” is vulnerable to abuse because of its necessary alienation from the face-to-face, its consequent position in the median between the reduplicative multiplicity of values, interests and needs of the anonymous other, and the inherent inflexibility of institutional structure itself (197). The enormity of the difficulties he faces as he sorts through the available theoretical models for his task reminds us that it is always much harder to propose a positive case than to tear one down: In the forms of promising sanctioned by law—oaths, contracts, and so on—the expectation of others who count on me becomes, for its part, a right to require something of me. We have then entered the field of legal norms, in which the relation between the norm and solicitude is, as it were, obliterated, erased. One must move back from these forms of promises sanctioned by the courts to those where the tie between the normative moment and the ethical intention is still perceptible.26

But perceive it he does, and he wants then to work out those specific features of its character.

Specifications of the bridge In The Just, Ricoeur charts an ascending scale from the primal institution of language to the ever more specialized systems to mediate the interrelation between I, you, he, she, it. He details the progressive development of what he calls the “order of recognition” to its apogee in “technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridical systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems.”27 These institutional structures are not pure systems abstracted from interpersonal relationships, but transferences of the

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obligations felt between I  and you to the anonymous level of the collective. Structured through the discourse of laws, contracts, directives, procedures, policies, and so on, such transferences involve the sharing of both responsibilities and opportunities. If the disadvantage of institution is the ineluctable pull toward the insouciance of the anonymous rule, its superior advantage is sustainability and reliability over time. Ricoeur does not see the relation between the personal speech-act and the public institution as just an organic development from the impromptu gesture to the formalized structure; his important hermeneutic insight is that the relationship is a genuinely ontological chiasm. Ricoeur shows how the institutional is already implied before “you” and “I” can exist in the interpersonal. This is so in two ways; on the front end, because it is the institution of language that permits the interpersonal designation:  “In truth, this fiduciary base is more than an interpersonal relation, it is the institutional condition for every interpersonal relation.”28 On the back end, it constitutes the means of fulfillment by which we are able to recognize, profess, and honor such a relationship in front of it:  “Without institutional mediation, individuals are only the initial drafts of human persons. Their belonging to a political body is necessary to their flourishing as human beings” (10). The chiasmatic relation between the personal gesture and the public institution is a central preoccupation for Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, because he wants to establish the full range of capability that links us to each other along an encompassing discursive terrain. Although his analyses reveal the formal structures that constitute the makeshift mechanisms of these artifices of presence, he departs sharply from his hermeneutic and structuralist peers in focusing his primary interest on the human agency resident in these discursive forms. We can see this especially clearly in his 1973 review of B.  F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, an important essay in its own right.29 Skinner serves as an easy foil for Ricoeur’s defense of autonomy and agency, and in the clarity of Ricoeur’s explanation we see the building blocks of a response to more complex shades of determinism, including Gadamer’s condemnation of the selfawareness of the individual as “a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.”30 At the same time, Ricoeur establishes the inescapability of the institution as the mediating structure for anchoring the social, one that needs a different conceptual framework from that required for behavior or action. It is important to note that institution is the antipode to “wild freedom” rather than to freedom, for which institution is the prerequisite. Institution is the intermediary between the personal and the political in a more radical sense than representative

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government as a mediator of democratic feeling, because institution, in an ontological sense, is constitutive of individual freedom; it constructs its grounds of possibility.31 That is the meaning of its chiasm. In the logic of troubled continuity that Ricoeur is working out, the hermeneutic theory of institution is grounded more originally in language, and more specifically on the discursive capacity for predication, that is, “that man may designate his actions as his intentions, justify them by the reasons for which he claims to perform them, and ascribe them to himself as the agent of his own doing.”32 Without the power of these discursive capacities, which behavioral determinism denies, one cannot ask “whether an intention is right, a reason legitimate, or an agent responsible” (58). But a theoretical understanding of the relationship between freedom and institutions requires a specific conceptual apparatus that goes beyond ordinary language theory. This is because a conceptual apparatus sufficient to ground a theory of action—intention, purpose, motive, agent, and so on—does not address the plurality of value systems or the social need to mediate between them. Ricoeur finds this conceptual framework in Kant’s moral theory. It is not in this essay but in From Text to Action and the later writings on justice that Ricoeur develops his complex reception of the structure of the Kantian imperative. Beyond all his reservations and mediations, Ricoeur keeps the Kantian commitment to rules, rules that social discourse institutes for the purpose of individual freedom. Ricoeur here is clearly drawing the line between himself and the disinhibited spirit of 1960s theory:  “Our contemporaries are increasingly tempted by the idea of an unfettered freedom, outside of institutions, while every institution appears to them to be essentially constraining and repressive” (203). But Ricoeur too is aware of the dangers involved in granting power to the institution: “One may wonder whether this hypostasis of mind, elevated in this way above individual consciousness and even above intersubjectivity, is not responsible for another hypostasis, that of the State itself. One cannot eliminate from the Hegelian corpus . . . the expressions depicting the State as a god among us.”33 Ricoeur ultimately rejects Hegel’s hypostatization of reason into an objective mind, and tries to strengthen Husserl’s alternative of weak intersubjectivity by adverting to Max Weber’s interpretive sociology, which involves each individual “adjusting the understanding he has of his own action based on the understanding of the action of others.”34 Ricoeur’s advance beyond Husserl is to posit the institution as an intentional creation that keeps a distance from the interests and desires of individuals in order to mediate them. Ricoeur inserts the conjunction “and” between the entity of the individual and the entity of the institution as

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the discursive-ontological dialectic that defines political life: “Practical reason, I shall say, is the set of measures taken by individuals and institutions to preserve and restore the reciprocal dialectic of freedom and institutions, outside of which there is no meaningful action” (205). Ricoeur’s hybrid solution is a recoil against the fanatical potential in Hegel’s absolute and echoes the modesty of the alternative that edges away from a preontological toward an intentional construction. An important note in this initial sketch of a response to Hegelianism is that it underlines the inadequacy of phronesis as a simple replacement for Kantian Moralität. Prudential wisdom is a response to the particular situation, and as such presumes a structure to deal with, modify, or oppose: “Practical reason, then, must not elevate its claims beyond the median zone that extends between the science of immutable and necessary things and arbitrary opinions, both of collectivities and of individuals.”35 Ricoeur ties this recalibration of institutional authority in the ancient idea of prudence to a critical dimension that had become the lingua franca of his peers: “The critical function of practical reason is here to unmask the hidden mechanisms of distortion through which the legitimate objectification of the communal bond becomes an intolerable alienation.”36 Oddly then, prudence is put in the position of guardian against the excesses of institutional necessity. From Ricoeur’s time to ours, prudence continues to have an attraction and repulsion for progressive democratic theory, identified with the bourgeois virtues, and yet appropriated by the radical left as a central practice.37 Ricoeur gives prudence the specific function of ameliorating the rigidity of law, but only as a softening agent—it needs law in order to make its ministrations. This is co-dependency that Gadamer had not articulated. Despite his orientation of the hermeneutic trajectory from the sightline of the text, Ricoeur nevertheless continued to work along the bias that Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s more generically discursive view of hermeneutics established. The essential continuity, despite their defining difference, between the hermeneutic function of the promise and the institution, is in fact a beautiful illustration of the equipoise between the two modes of Sprache that Ricoeur wanted to unsettle when he privileged text as the object of the hermeneutic analysis.38 In the sense that Ricoeur understands them, both promise and institution are equally performative. Institution necessarily takes the place of promise when the complexity of social life rises above the capacity of the immediate community to function on the strength of the moral imperative to keep one’s word. No doubt there have been sociological studies about the cultural mutation from social structures built on honor codes (“A man’s word is his bond”) to social

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structures built on contracts and systems of legal redress. But in either case the instantiation of an intention in language (whether as a vow or a contract) is a signal means human beings have availed themselves to overcome or at least compensate for the frailty of temporal finitude. If the institution is more reliable in the context of anonymity, the promise is the more human. To the extent that bureaucratic structures are required to make up for the increasing impersonalization of complex social systems, there is a genuine loss. But what institutional mechanisms (e.g., retirement funds, bank deposits, business contracts, etc.) do, in theory at least, is secure the continuity of intention across space and time, mortality, the displacement of populations, the substitutability of personnel, the flux of human destinies, the weakening of cultural memory, and so on. The “in theory” insertion into this formula cannot be overlooked. What is essentially common between the promise and the institution is that they are performative, and here is where their hermeneutic identity rises to the surface. Both are expressions of human intention that enact identity, and that create what they express. Their hermeneutic difference is mainly that the intention is distributed differently. The promise diffuses the constitution of character and relationship across the temporal field that it creates in its expression: With the verbal pronunciation, the intention expressed by the promise offers simultaneously the prospect of a character and a relationship, in the mindfulness and the fulfillment of a promise, the intention is sealed, the character proven, and the relationship affirmed. An institution expresses itself most fully in its inception, since the carrying out of its intention is more or less automatic by the mechanisms of bureaucratic technique, and the creation of the institution in the first place contains the means to fulfill the promise it offers. Thus, the creation of a government program may not always overcome the vicissitudes of its birthing and maintenance, but it creates both a momentum and an inertia that is difficult to reverse. The constitutive weight of the promise lies at the end, while that of the institution at the beginning. But both, despite their structure as initiative in compensation for temporal finitude, are formed by a circular identity with no absolute origin. The person who is in the habit of making and keeping promises is more likely to make and keep the next promise, which reinforces the habit, and institutions express the values that precede them while creating the seedbed for those values in the future. Formally the initiative of either is built on a capacity formed by the habit of initiation. What Ricoeur does in his analysis of the relationship between the promise and the institution is to show how the two expressions bridge their fundamental structural differences

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by their common purpose, and in doing this he underlines the ethical chiasm at the heart of the hermeneutic insight. Against the worst tendencies of every structuralism and romanticism, the hermeneutic Sprache unites the diachronic and the synchronic by expressing the eventfulness of being. In the end, Ricoeur gives pride of place to the more ephemeral (nontextual) act of the promise, because in comparison to love of neighbor, the social bond is never as profound or as comprehensive. It is never as profound because social mediations will never become the equivalent of encounter or immediate presence. It is never as comprehensive because the group only asserts itself against another group and shuts itself off from others. The neighbor fulfills the twofold requirement of nearness and distance. The ultimate meaning of institutions is the service which they render to persons.39

Beyond Ricoeur Ricoeur’s extension of the structure of the promise into societal idioms has the phenomenological feel of Heidegger’s fundamental analytic of care structures, as though Ricoeur were taking as his point of departure the short-circuit of human temporality in being-towards-death, another route to making humanity “accessible in its Being-a-whole.”40 Institutions do not so much remedy mortality or subjectivity as ameliorate them. Late in his career Ricoeur started to focus intensively on jurisprudence and the form of the court, a choice that reflected his growing preoccupation with questions of punishment and forgiveness. This preoccupation had both personal and political causes, but it also reflected at least indirectly a response to the rebellion against the very idea of the court in Foucault’s radical attack on the legitimacy of establishment structures, and Ricoeur’s taking up of this more reformist approach to critique has to be seen in the light of Foucault’s radical attack. The court serves as the structure of intercession in the toxic proximities of the personal. Institutions stand between the impossible act of forgiveness in the face of the unpardonable. The trial process “consists in establishing a just distance between the hideous crime that unleashes private and public anger, and the punishment inflicted by the judicial institution.”41 But more than this the trial has indissociable origins in human enmity: “Behind the trial process lies conflict, differences of opinion, quarrels, litigation—and behind conflict lies violence.”42 The limit-case for the capacity of judicial intercession is the imprescriptible, that

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crime which is so unpardonable that laws cannot adequately address it. In this case justice is sent back to the personal: “[F]orgiveness can find refuge only in gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions.”43 Ricoeur theorized the institution as a guardian of the rights of what he calls the “third party,” which exists only in relation and because of political institution. The “subject of rights” cannot exist within the relation of the personal, since the “face-to-face relation lacks the relation to a third party that seems just as primitive as the relation to an individual ‘you.’ ”44 The third party is both the other that cannot be subsumed by the you and I, and the judge who rules by its distance from the immediate relation. Ricoeur’s approach to this topic amounts to an unmarked rejoinder to Foucault, for whom the organizing concept of the court as a penal institution represents the maximum of suspicion as a foil for all the careful work Ricoeur did to give a measure of legitimacy to the state’s power of punishment. One can see the point of engagement as the question of legitimacy. Foucault proclaims at the beginning of Dits et Ecrits that “to carry on the concrete analysis of the relations of power, one must abandon the juridical model of the sovereign.”45 Because Ricoeur always starts with the vexing problem of the state’s implicit claim of monopoly over sanctioned violence: “[A] latent violence continues to affect the relation of all individuals with power. Political life remains unavoidably marked by the struggle to conquer, keep, and retake power.”46 He nevertheless grants to this stain a paradoxical right: “The right to exercise coercion, which constitutes an essential distinction between morality and legality, has no other origin.”47 The sanction of state violence amounts for Ricoeur to one of the great and troubling paradoxes, and he never ceased to pick at it, like a sore that could not scab over.48 But in the end, he took it as his task to find the justification for it, and traced a path from fault to admission to punishment as a rationalized process of social readjustment built on the polarity of fragility and responsibility. It was not only Foucault, but the general tide of critical suspicion among Ricoeur’s peers for whom the structure of institution is never innocent, and who took the judicial apparatus as an epitome of the tendency of power toward control. Although Ricoeur places institution within the context of “the political as the set of organized practices relating to the distribution of political power, better termed domination,” and understands political judgment to operate under the aspect of “the tragedy of action,” he conceptualizes the mediating function of institutions within the same moral ambit as the intention of the promise, which is to say, as an instrument of good faith that can be distorted.49 Can we adjudicate this fundamental disagreement?

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It should be noted that Foucault did not focus for the most part on the institution of the court per se, but to the prison and the court as the structuring metaphor for the social writ large. From his perspective, as for the line of theorists that ran through Deleuze and Guattari to Hardt and Negri, the apparatus of physical coercion disappears into the invisible texture of the social relation itself. This hypostasis, nevertheless, is a condemnation of the originating principle. A carceral society is illegitimate at its core. Even if we take Foucault’s perspective as a limit-position, as a hyperbole against which some form of pragmatism must prevail, the phenomenon he detailed stands as a monument to the propensity of the penal to become a self-feeding mechanism of hegemonic control. This is something that Ricoeur’s struggling balance, so fraught by its very delicacy with the potential for abuse, does not address. Now, we can just as easily turn this around at Foucault: His focus was so trained on the propensity of cultural systems to develop mechanisms of control that he skirted the responsibility of a political theory to bring together adjudication and representation, or what the opposite of servile dysfunction looks like in a pluralistic society. But the challenge he gives to the hermeneutic effort of reconstruction is unmet. The dialectic of the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion is yet to be worked out within the theoretical framework of a political hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s decision in his late stage to focus so much of his remaining energy on the constitutional legitimacy of the judicial has an important implication in the context of the overall arc of his career. His early thinking on the political had had a broader thematic scope as he struggled with the theory of governance itself, especially on the vexing problem of the state’s claim on legitimate violence (Weber) against the salience of the state abuse of power as the traumatic lived reality of Europeans of his generation. This pressure to reconcile his own inclination to grant a necessary legitimacy to hierarchical structures of representation created a healthy internal debate in which he never ceased to struggle. Because violence is always and everywhere, one has but to take notice of how empires rise and fall, how personal prestige is established, how religions tear one another to pieces, how the privileges of property and power are perpetuated and interchanged, or even how the authority of intellectuals is consolidated, how the cultural delights of the elite depend upon the massive workings and sufferings of the disinherited.50

This leads me to my claim, which is for this very reason not a criticism. To my mind Ricoeur left unattended aspects of a hermeneutic perspective that need to

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be more rigorously developed in response to the critical school if hermeneutics is to have a robust political profile. Ricoeur’s effort to reason out the legitimacy of institutional structures built on the tragic tension of the vertical and horizontal axes of political representation remains a viable heuristic for this work. One can think of Ernesto Laclau’s identification with “a subject antagonized by the general crime” as a constitutional predisposition to see harm in establishment power as its animating cause, or as the failure to recognize the extent of harm on the safe side of systemic inequity.51 Ricoeur could not have been accused of the latter; he demonstrated by his life a passion for justice and equity. The institution of the court contains the toxic tendencies Foucault was wary of, but it also contains by its very nature the bridge Ricoeur built between the promise and the institution. Another way to describe Ricoeur’s insufficiency is to say that he did not complete the thought of political mediation as fully as he reconciled the mediation of the Kantian rule with phronesis. The performative challenge that I noted above needed more attention. The question is not whether the form of the court is redeemable, but whether there can be adequate and workable countervailing social structures, dynamics, or incentives to keep it in balance. If the health of the juridical system ultimately rests on the virtue of phronesis, on the seasoned distance of the third party in the moment of decision, what are the contextual forces in play that guard against the cooptation of judgment? Because Ricoeur did not come back to his early focus on social and political movements, we are left to answer these questions ourselves.

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In 2008 Marc Lévy discovered some 1940–41 prison writings attributed to Ricoeur that opined favorably on the Pétain administration at Vichy and characterized Hitler’s oratory as “un langage d’une belle dureté—j’allais écrire d’une belle pureté” (a language of beautiful harshness—I would like to speak of a beautiful purity).1 This textual discovery and Lévy’s pointed critique prompted a considerable controversy. His exposé was suggestive, even insinuating, but the exhumation of the unfamiliar documents was startling nonetheless. Richard Wolin, who has launched many such critiques against hermeneutic thinkers, took the occasion to accuse hermeneutics itself of a fundamental ethical inadequacy: “Hermeneutics is avowedly biased toward the authority and prestige of ‘tradition.’ But how might we go about deciding which traditions to venerate and which to reject or play down?”2 Well, precisely that question animates much of hermeneutic thinking, and in any case, it would be important not to conflate Ricoeur and Gadamer here, since one of Ricoeur’s major efforts was to rebalance the relation of distance and belonging. Wolin’s facile accusation against Ricoeur of a “feckless lack of conviction” betrays ignorance of the work and the man, and his association of hermeneutics with vicious relativism is even more strange. But Wolin’s “how” question must be placed in the context he invokes, because that is one test of “the ethical adequacy of hermeneutics” that it cannot avoid taking as it goes forward.3 Ricoeur did not flinch from a searching self-examination when the prewar writings surfaced, nor should we, although our question is a more general one.4 Can Ricoeur’s balance between attestation and hermeneutic openness respond effectively to the context that Wolin calls “times of crisis”? Does his hermeneutics help us know how to distinguish the moment when it is necessary to move from deliberation to judgment, from openness to closure, from dialogue to decision? Certainly, Ricoeur was more readily equipped than Gadamer to explore this question:  “If one does away with the idea of a subject who is responsible for

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his or her words, we are no longer in a position to talk of the freedom or rights of man. To dispense with the classical notion of the subject as a transparent cogito does not mean that we have to dispense with all forms of subjectivity.”5 Given that hermeneutics is precisely an attempt to find a mediation between, or an alternative to, absolutist and relativist judgment, we still need to know if it provides an adequate means to do so. Ricoeur did not find a robust answer to this question in German hermeneutics, so he fashioned his own ethical and political elaborations of a hermeneutic standpoint. This motive and project is one reason why he stepped back from Hegel and sought firmer footing in a Kantian ethics. Did he succeed? Did he go far enough? In a first respect, Ricoeur was justified in rejecting Gadamer’s reliance on dialogic conversation as the sole model for a universal hermeneutics, particularly for extending the hermeneutic franchise to institutional life, to anonymous collectivities that constitute so much of what is now public life. Once we move into the realm of institutional life, guidelines, conventions, and precepts are not enough. Here we are not able to avoid a need for rules, codes, laws, and this need is partly what motivated Ricoeur to turn back to Kant. The other reason to turn to Kant is the unsettling thought that a hermeneutics constructed in the moral abyss of mid-twentieth-century Germany would rest itself on an ethics of friendship rooted in Aristotelian prudence. However, is the correction to this failure for a hermeneutics to be found in its religious symbology of evil? Does this not complicate or divert a response to Wolin’s challenge to hermeneutics? Before he came to philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur was absorbed in the relationship of human frailty to evil. At a certain point in his intellectual journey, he turned to hermeneutics to help him answer that question, because its more robust embrace of language, symbol, and myth seemed to be a key for that relationship. The graft was complicated in its performance, because to think about the frailty that occasions evil as a hermeneutic phenomenon, Ricoeur had to reconfigure the already complex amalgam that Heidegger had molded with Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Despite the complex and layered rapprochement that he pulls off, it is clear in the end that it is Kant who provides the magnetic pull for Ricoeur, but it is an idiosyncratic Kant who absorbs and reflects the other competing influences. But Ricoeur’s gambit was worthwhile precisely because of the question that Wolin raises about the moral strength of a hermeneutic orientation. In this chapter I trace and assess this attempt at a fusion, and what benefits or problems it brings to the ethical comportment of a general hermeneutics.

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Ethics versus morality Consider first the turn Ricoeur made from Aristotelian ethics, through Hegel, to a Kantian morality. In 1989 Gadamer published an essay titled “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics” to think through the relevance of Kant’s theory of morality for an Aristotelian ethics.6 Around the same time, Ricoeur presented “The Self and the Moral Norm,” the eighth study in Oneself as Another, to puzzle through the same theme.7 The two essays are remarkably similar in their focus and surprisingly close in their conclusions. Both see the path from the Nicomachean Ethics to the Second Critique as the central question of Western ethics; both attempt to reconcile Kantian duty with Aristotelian phronesis; and both are deeply compelled by Kant’s normative claim on the ethical. What is most striking about the proximity of the two essays is how closely their questions align on the meaning of social obligation. Ricoeur only can arrive at a rapprochement between the ancient and Enlightenment perspectives by the most assiduous weaving together of their respective claims (he actually has to do this fully over the course of the seventh, eighth, and ninth study of Oneself as Another), and Gadamer approaches deontological morality through a painstaking working through of the linguistic history of ethical terms. Both of these thinkers at this moment in their thinking felt the need to address a close decision on the relation of Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, and despite their proximity, the slight angle of difference will prove decisive for hermeneutics. Ricoeur approaches the problem by proposing a dialectic (quelle surprise!) between Aristotelian ethics and Kantian morality. He strengthens the bond between the teleological and the deontological by pairing the will (vouloir) with the agency of narrative identity, that is, “with the power of positing a beginning in the course of things, of determining oneself through reasons, a power which, as we stated, is the object of self-esteem.”8 In other words, the goal of happiness is arrived at by the construction of narrative means and ends, which are rational constructions subject to a Kantian oversight. In effect, Ricoeur is establishing a hermeneutic firewall, at least so he thinks, by asserting emphatically and more than once that an Aristotelian ethics based on the goal of eudaimonia is the privileged pole under which the moral rule is only a subsidiary instrumental test. So the dialectical axis of happiness and duty is set on its end vertically with happiness on top and duty underneath. But does this reordering really get at the problem at issue? How can “the step of submitting the maxims of action to the rule of universalization” sit within a hermeneutic perspective (207)? Does “the

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respect owed to persons . . . develop its implicit dialogic structure on the plane of obligation, of rules” (218)? From Gadamer’s perspective, a maxim is essentially a rhetorical proof, subject  to the force of convention and the testing of public argument. One can expose it to a hypothetical test, but not as a way to guarantee its rational inviolability, only to make a compelling case. Nevertheless, Gadamer is far from dispensing with imperative ethics, and he is almost militant in his defense of Kant’s categorical imperative! Like Ricoeur, Gadamer did not oppose Kant’s ethical conclusions but the narrowness of Kant’s approach, both its “legalistic” tenor and what Gadamer descried as “merely postulatory metaphysics.”9 The short route to reasoned universals by-passes the laboratory of experience where an ethical relation to the world is actually formed. In this regard, both Gadamer and Ricoeur follow Hegel’s critique. Gadamer’s support for the Kantian imperative ethics sits on three arguments. The first is that an imperative ethics is needed to correct the strong tendency of human nature to argue itself out of doing good by the suasion of its own private interests and inclinations. This is what universal means here—discounting narrow self-interest by granting the same weight to how others would be affected. Some kind of distancing test is needed to rise above the temptations of narrow self-interest, what Hegel calls “law-examining reason.”10 The second point is that the logical structure of the imperative is not a deductive operation, but a reasoning that moves, under the general sway of cultural understanding, within a particular situation: “A situation is not a case of something obeying a theoretical law and being determined by it; it is something that surrounds one and opens itself up only from a practical perspective; everything depends upon one’s coming to a decision in the particular formation of one’s own moral being” (74). This movement does not obviate the force of the general (“people always already subordinate their concrete decisions to general goals”11), since we are guided by a sense that is cultivated within us: “That which we consider right, which we affirm or reject, follows from our general ideas about what is good and right.”12 This sensus communis, the third leg, circles back around to the first insofar as an abiding community can be wrong and needs to be held to account. Finally, Gadamer sets Kant’s critique as a guide within nomos: “Thus in Kant, as in Aristotle, it is not a matter of grounding moral obligation conceptually through theoretical reflection.”13 Gadamer really pounds home this phronetic interpretation of duty as a discursive phenomenon. Kant’s “grounding of the ‘categorical imperative’ did not serve the purpose of opening up a new realm of sovereign self-governance for the autonomous subject. Quite the opposite,

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contrary to the presumption of a universal, scientifically grounded pragmatism in life, its purpose was to ground moral obligation on moral freedom” (150). This moral freedom is “not meant to ground the origin and validity of a moral law,” but rather to “guide in judging what is the case for me” (157). “The concept of duty basically describes the simple obviousness which those of solidly grounded character ascribe to the maxims of behavior they solidly maintain. It therefore plays no founding role, as the first section of Kant’s Foundation shows” (157).14 This is, admittedly, an idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant. Gadamer leaves out the proscriptive dimension of Kant’s ethics, pays less attention to the diseases of the soul in the Anthropology, or on the problem of evil in “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.” Instead, he turns to the Aristotelian ideal of friendship as the texture of the social fabric. In “Friendship and SelfKnowledge:  Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics,” Gadamer shows that, in friendship, the ethical response is “not experienced as a demand, but rather as a fulfillment.”15 Because of this attenuated focus, Gadamer makes few contributions to the project that preoccupied Ricoeur from the beginning, which was to build the conceptual ground within hermeneutics to support an institutional and legal framework for a world in which fault and radical evil are constitutive. It is hopefully not necessary to point out the troubling implication of this oversight given the history in which German philosophical hermeneutics was born, and it was an oversight that Ricoeur was acutely aware of.

Ricoeur’s Kantian qualification Ricoeur’s interpretation of Kantian ethics is not as iconoclastic as Gadamer’s, but it is bracingly unorthodox, a Kantianism Ricoeur acknowledges to be more “constructed than repeated.”16 Instead of reregistering Kant’s grounding of ethics to bring it closer in tenor to Aristotle’s prudential theory, Ricoeur finds affective dimensions in the language of the imperative (by discriminating between the first and second versions of the imperative appearing in the “Groundwork”) that raise the criterion of fellow feeling over the demands of formal logic.17 The prompt to act “only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” involves judgment in an adjudicatory process of autonomous reason that submits each particular case to the test of universalization, but Ricoeur wants to emphasize that it is an imaginative exercise prompted by actual moral quandaries. Such an exercise must derive in part from a social relation that involves other autonomous subjects, and from the sense of

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what it would be like to suffer the effects of conduct being tested by the maxim. This reflexivity relies on pathos as much as logos: “Is there not . . . concealed beneath the pride of the assertion of autonomy, the avowal of a certain receptivity, to the extent that the law, in determining freedom, affects it?”18 Ricoeur develops a vocabulary of sociality around the discovery of this affective dimension— respect, esteem, fellow-feeling, mutual recognition, pathos, philia, solicitude, “the organic bond between men and women” (255), and Kant’s philosophy of obligation becomes an ethic of fellow feeling and solidarity.19 Even with this accommodation, Ricoeur cannot fully go along with Kant’s rule-bound methodology. The irritant at the center of Kant’s logic of transparency is the concept of humanity invoked in the second Kantian imperative, which, as Ricoeur points out, contains an inconvenient plurivocity. The principle of universalization means precisely an act of application to others, others who fall under the same protection of irreplaceable singularity. The plurality of this shared dignity can prove “incompatible with the universality of the rules that underlie the idea of humanity.”20 This heteronomy at the core of the category renders the principle unstable in the moment of application. And here is where Ricoeur separates himself decisively from Kant, who constructed the logic of the test in the “single route” from the maxim to the rule, whereas Ricoeur sees that a practical reason needs to test the rule on its way back down to its application in each individual case (263). This “second test” of the rule in the contingencies and circumstances of application creates problems that a critical ethics needs to cope with, and so what Ricoeur tries to do is preserve the Kantian spirit of universalization by conforming its operation to a prudential standard (265). Here, again, it is the affective dimension that provides a means of passage between Kant and Aristotle. Ricoeur pushes back against the demand for transparency of the categorical imperative by asserting “the mysterious depths of motivations that no analysis of moral intention can plumb,” that “infinitely exceeds every directly didactic intention,” and that remains “an unanalyzable mixture of constraints of fate and deliberate choice.”21 Upon this opacity he then strives to erect a more modest critical apparatus that works not by the location of apodictic foundations, but rather by a process of discovering the point of conviction in a dialectic located from within what he calls “judgment in situation” (249). The term of reference for this moral judgment is not the autonomy of the individual will but rather “the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged,” thus reversing the order of privilege of the first and second versions of the imperative (251). Once he has established this prioritization of the social responsibility, Ricoeur begins to sketch out a reconstruction of moral theory based on

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dialogue, which is characterized as “everyday discussion,” or “deliberating and taking a position,”22 thus coming into the ambit once again of Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutics. But Ricoeur’s integration of Aristotle and Kant differs from Gadamer in a crucial respect. Gadamer’s strategy is to implement a kind of Annäherung, an imperceptible softening of the boundaries and weakening of the contrast between prudential and reason-testing judgment. Ricoeur keeps the teleological and deontological paradigms distinct as separate moments, and then puts them in active collaboration, asserting “the necessity for the ethical aim to pass through the sieve of the norm.”23 The distinction “of that which is considered to be good and of that which imposes itself as obligatory” demands different paradigms of judgment, because the first aim benefits oneself and one’s community and the second aim benefits the person or community who does not lie in the path of one’s aims (170). To rely only on an ethics of the good, therefore, would demand an expanding circle of interests to obviate the need for an ethics of obligation, and that possibility, as the pantheon of history demonstrates, is debarred by the fallible constitution of the human condition, the distance between our inherent limitations of perspective, on the one hand, and the variable capacity for selfreflection and sympathy, on the other. What Ricoeur says of anthropology is true of hermeneutics too. It “cannot be complete and perhaps not even coherent if it does not integrate the problem of culpability.”24 Now, Gadamer relies on the dialogic principle to expand the circle—limitations of perspective are corrected by the call of the other. This is the outer limit of Ricoeur’s agreement, because he feels the insufficiency of this reliance on prudence. But he comes to this break with Gadamer gradually, extending the structures of ethical community as far as he can by circumscribing it within the boundaries of narrative identity. The little ethics evolves out of the theory of narrative identity because the self speaks and acts in answering to the question “Who?” “The idea of the narrative unity of a life therefore serves to assure us that the subject of ethics is none other than the one to whom the narrative assigns a narrative identity.”25 But the reflexivity of selfesteem must pass through the social, the question “Who?” being a distributed function that includes the projects of life “with and for others.” Solicitude “is not something added on to self-esteem from outside but that it unfolds the dialogic dimension of self-esteem” (180). This keeps ethics within the orbit of teleological judgment, enfolding our sense of the good in an identification of identity with community. Social reflexivity will encounter its limits in the ruptures that open up in the distances of interest and perspective, but before it encounters those ruptures, Ricoeur maps out its anatomy in an ethics of solicitude (180–94). He

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even can extend the role institutions of equitable distribution play within these parameters by seeing cooperation as an extension of the franchise of dialectical reflexivity (194–201). Thus, sociality comes to Ricoeur by way of a correction to the French reflective tradition: “To say self is not to say myself.”26 We can already hear the Kantian moral apparatus coming to life ahead of this formula, because it intimates the constitutional problems and moral consequences of beings who cannot but struggle in the space between subjective isolation and constitutional sociality. Ricoeur raises constitution explicitly here in the way Aristotelian friendship (philia, philautia) expresses a form of temporal processivity: “If the good and happy man needs friends, it is because friendship is an ‘activity’ (energeia), which is obviously a ‘becoming’ and hence simply the incomplete actualization of a power” (186). In the end, sociality stands above freedom in Ricoeur’s little ethics. Love and solicitude is foundational. Love’s absence requires the mechanisms, the apparatus of moral obligation through “the summons to responsibility,” and this absence is fully constitutive, but not before relationship gives birth to humanity (192). Ricoeur’s refusal to let go of formalism and the universal rule completely is easier to understand in the context of Ricoeur’s situation during the period he was formulating his own mature hermeneutics. He has said that he was interested in the problem of evil and the human will from childhood. This interest may be attributed to a severe religious upbringing, the prisoner-of-war experience, and the impact of the postwar tragedies of Eastern Europe, the political convulsions that shook the French academy after May 1968, and the ascendancy of political consciousness in the intellectual milieu of the French academy. Given all this, it is not surprising that Ricoeur would bring a measure of critical suspicion to Gadamer’s theory of dialogic understanding. From Ricoeur’s perspective, persons must bind themselves to promises, and societies to rules, precisely because of the fragility of goodness. Law and obligation is simply the distance between respect for one’s neighbor and the interests and inclinations of the individual, which is why Kant wanted something like the categorical imperative. But there is a difference. The obligatory structures arising out of the social bond undo and redo Kant’s notion of autonomy. The distance between autonomy and heteronomy creates the categorical imperative—that is, the tension between being subject to no external rule or authority, and being responsible for one’s relation to the other. Kant’s idealized unitary field of justice is replaced by the constitutional finitude of the human condition, a condition in which distance and difference irrupts in the difficult cases of moral deliberation and judgment.

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Instead of one unitary field of justice, there are multiple complex conflicting spheres of justice that require mediation. For Ricoeur, human fault is not simply an absence remedied by strengthening the freedom of reason, because the ability to choose evil is partly what constitutes freedom in the first place. So while rejecting Kant’s reflexive stigmatization of affect as a threat to reason, Ricoeur nevertheless recognizes that the affective dimension is connected to the problem of evil through the perversion of selfesteem in self-absorption (Selbstliebe). The pathology of desire is actually woven into the structure of human finitude itself. It is literally an “opposition” rather than just a falling short.27 Evil sits within the constitutional nexus of free will (autonomy) as a bad desire (the penchant for evil, the propensity for evil). Kant had concluded that the poison of evil was a perversion of nature, first the garden and then the serpent, and Ricoeur follows this order. Evil acts, thus, as a secondorder predisposition. But this reference to the anteriority of the structure of the will can be deceptive, because in Kant’s schema, the will operates according to principles of reason, which means that despite our inability to know how it was formed, we can see how it works, and it works not by some force of instinct, but as a conscious rational process, that is to say, in the assertion of maxims and their testing. It is evil’s structural place in the economy of the will that requires a principle of moral reflection to supplement an ethics: Thus reason relies on our experience of evil. All of us have some hint of this experience and of the difference between evil and failure. We understand that failure is fundamentally technical, that is, merely concerns a contingent discrepancy between ends and means and as such could be avoided or repaired; that evil affects the origin of action and not only the technical disposition of means in relation to their ends; that there is something broken in the very heart of human action that prevents our partial experience of fulfilled achievements from being equated with the whole field of human action.28

Although Ricoeur’s commitment to Kantian formalism appears only to strengthen in the later work, he reinforces its discursive nature by schematizing it under the grammar of predication and subject attribution. Moral obligation is simply what a person or community predicates as meeting its own test of general applicability, and “requires nothing more than a subject capable of imputation,” which is “the capacity of a subject to designate itself, himself, or herself as the actual author of its, his, or her own acts.”29 What makes an ethical regime Kantian is the process of testing—the critical reflection that transforms common presuppositions of value into reasoned assent. This is where Kant’s

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notion of autonomy comes in. Ricoeur splits the term into two reciprocal halves. It is because the subject (the citizen) is capable of recognizing the general applicability of the justice they would want for themselves (the Golden Rule) that freedom flows in both directions. I freely submit to rules that I would want to protect me: autonomy. This form of recognition, to be clear, is based as much on the feeling of solicitude for another as it is on rational self-interest, but in a complex society such feeling has to be articulated into durable institutional forms. The transfer from Kantian “reason” to hermeneutic discursivity marks the shift from a priori to a posteriori grounds. Norms are constructed discursively through a capacity for attestation that founds its own standard, for example, when a woman proclaims that she should not be forced by the State to live with a man who burns her face with acid, and citizens freely submit to considered rules when they have the capacity for “entering into a practical symbolic order” (47).

The plot thickens In the middle of the eighth study of the little ethics, Ricoeur asserts that moral fault requires the Kantian moment for a practical ethics (“Because there is evil, the aim of the ‘good life’ has to be submitted to the test of moral obligation”), but the fact that this move is little more than a bare assertion in its context only can be explained by Ricoeur’s having devoted an entire decade to the bearing of moral fault in a three-volume study titled The Philosophy of the Will, before he had turned to a hermeneutic idiom.30 The strain of the multistranded synthesis Ricoeur is attempting starts to show. So here I want to go back to that earlier project to see how successful Ricoeur’s graft of Kantian morality with Aristotelian ethics is, how coherently it makes its way into the hermeneutic project, and how it impacts the less-than-sturdy competence of hermeneutics to address human evil. The 1952 essay “Méthode et Taches d’une Phénoménologie de la Volonté,” now published in English as “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will” in Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, serves as a prospectus for the future of phenomenological research beyond Husserl, and it is remarkable how closely the prospectus predicts the course of Ricoeur’s own research program in the following decades, anticipating most of the major thematic developments he will undertake—the voluntary and the involuntary, the freedom of the will, the capability of the subject, the nature of human finitude, the double capacity for acting and suffering, the existential fusion of temporal horizons, the indirect

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path of reflection through sign and myth, and the transition from transcendental phenomenology (Husserl) to ontological phenomenology (Heidegger). The last pages of the book outline the first thematic leg of this journey on the question of moral fault. First Ricoeur outlines the different kinds of fault native to human being, distinguishing between the faults that fall within the range of simple fallibility—the flaw (faille), the error (faute)—and then the kind of fault that extends into the moral territory of guilt (culpabilité). He relates this guilt explicitly to the event of the fall and the temptation of Adam, and in the same breath, he points this Christian mythology of original sin to the concentration camps, the only reference to a contemporary political issue in the entirety of the last chapter’s table-setting statement.31 Those concluding pages of the Husserl book are in effect continued with the introduction of the next book Freedom and Nature, the first volume of the selfnamed “Philosophy of the Will” project. Ricoeur devotes the introduction to justifying his decision to suspend the explanation of moral fault from this initial effort to grasp human nature phenomenologically. He asserts that moral evil is a “distortion,” an “aberrant principle,” an “internal decadence” alien to the original innocence of free will, that, although its possibility always was necessary to the structure of a free will, “the ravages wrought at the core of this essential nature” by evil obstruct the view of that nature’s proper functioning.32 He will come back to the question in the third volume, because “man, history and civilization” exist “under the sign of the fall” (25). The ambition of the proposed three-volume “Freedom of the Will” project can hardly be exaggerated. Ricoeur wanted to come to terms with human evil—the willing capacity to choose to do wrong—to grasp what that means fundamentally, and he knew that any partial approach would fail him; that a psychology of behavior or an exercise in self-reflection or an historical inquiry would be inadequate. So, he set up a plan that he thought would take him to the heart of the mystery and provide the closest thing to a responsible answer. The premise on which the whole project revolves is that the willing decision to do wrong is an actual flaw, a fault that was introduced into a prior innocence. Each of us, by this way of thinking, is a repetition of the story of original sin, of the corruption of perfect freedom prior to that choice. Ricoeur believed we come to hypothesize an original innocence in the experience of profound remorse about something we have done, because in remorse there comes a moment when, in trying to come to grips with our guilt, we imagine “a self which could and should be other.”33 Such a self is primordial not in the historical sense of an evolutionary stage, but in an archetypal sense in which each of us is simply repeating the

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original sin, violating our own innocence, and are from that moment formed by the stain that we chose. My question for Ricoeur’s freedom of the will project is how it effects what Ricoeur understands hermeneutics to be. The answer comes in the third movement of the project when Ricoeur is compelled to understand the symbolism of evil as an inescapable feature of the problem of evil. The symbolism of evil is not just one hermeneutic theme among others, but the inescapable, looming theme that springs from Ricoeur’s desire to salvage a viable Christian anthropology in the ashes of postwar Europe. The rationale of the methodological adjustment to the hermeneutic paradigm that Ricoeur took over from Heidegger and Gadamer is to be found here in this need to understand and explain fault. It is to find the cause of such unfathomable evil as he lived through that Ricoeur turns to the indirect mediation of the hermeneutic sign and the long route of hermeneutic interpretation. And so Ricoeur sets about painstakingly reconstructing the symbology of evil. We should remember that the explanation for Ricoeur’s inability to finish the projected third volume in the series lies in his need to discover what is at work in the deception of the sign, hence the next volume on Freud and the development of the paradigmatic opposition between hermeneutic suspicion and trust. Plato’s Gorgias is the benign proxy for the specter of propaganda under Hitler and Stalin. Having established the provenance of this strange fruit—what Ricoeur would call a graft in the botanical sense, but that looks much more like a full surgical transplant—we can assess the consequences for hermeneutics as a discipline for this mixture of the Kantian imperative, the Christological fall, and Aristotelian friendship—whether and how hermeneutics survives this transplantation in the shadows of totalitarianism. What allows and even encourages Ricoeur to engage in this uncanny mixture has to do with the protean power of logos to encompass even the monstrous historical development that hid underneath the philosophical project of German hermeneutics of the twentieth century. It is no small irony that Ricoeur, who would eventually consign the classical discipline of rhetoric to a secondary place in his disciplinary taxonomy, should, precisely when he turns toward hermeneutics to salvage philosophical anthropology, rest the symbolics of evil on the duplicity of the sign, and on Plato’s indictment of sophistry: Hence sin manifests itself in power, and power unveils the true nature of sin, which is not pleasure but the pride of domination, the evil of possession and holding sway. The Gorgias is certainly in accord with this. One can even say that

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the Socratic and Platonic philosophy springs in part from a reflection on the “tyrant,” that is to say on power without law and without consent on the part of subjects. How is the tyrant—the inverse of the philosopher—possible? This question cuts to the quick of philosophy, for tyranny is not possible without a falsification of the word, that is to say of this power, human par excellence, of expressing things and of communicating with men. The whole of Plato’s argument in the Gorgias is based upon the conjunction between the perversion of philosophy, represented by sophistry, and the perversion of politics, represented by tyranny. Tyranny and sophistry form a monstrous pair. Hence, Plato ferrets out one aspect of political evil, different from power but intimately linked to it.34

As far as he can help it, Ricoeur’s theory of evil does not rest on a foundation of religious faith. Colin notes quite reasonably: “It is simply the case that Ricoeur is not interested in the classic problems of rational theology . . . In his work, God appears essentially as a figure in the Bible who speaks to us . . . Nothing prevents reflective philosophy in principle from taking into account the experience of the mystics who give witness to our desire to exist.”35 Ricoeur believes that the relationship between ontology and symbolism can be understood strictly within the idiom of rhetoric:  “C’est donc finalement comme index de la situation de l’homme au coeur de l’être dans lequel il se meut, existe et veut que le symbole nous parle” (331) (It is therefore finally as a kind of index of the human situation at the heart of its moving, existing, and willing that the symbol speaks to us). The depth of the symbol is then simply what it is capable of containing from what we are capable of pouring into it, and as such, its depths are limitless. But does Ricoeur’s version of the imperative really stand without dependence on the religious meaning of the fall? The second of the three volumes of the philosophy of the will project is given over to working out the question of fault in a Kantian mode. The preface to the second volume of this series, Fallible Man (L’Homme Faillible), announces that it will pursue the question of fault as the experience of human evil that had been bracketed in The Voluntary and the Involuntary. To do this, Ricoeur needs to move from an Husserlian mode of description to a Kantian mode of synthetic deduction, since “the passage from innocence to fault is not accessible to any description.”36 Synthetic deduction is the technique Kant used to reason backward to an inaccessible structure, which accords with Ricoeur’s own view that the origin of evil is buried in the prehistory of the human condition. In The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur can at least do the explanatory work of hermeneutics on the mythological representations of the leap from innocence to fault. What is striking about this preface of Fallible Man is that it frames Ricoeur’s project in terms of the myth of the fall “as the central reference

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point” of his study.37 The book begins an allusion to the original innocence of the Garden of Eden and “the siege of the Adversary,” and it ends with an invocation of the temptation “by the figure of Eve” (xlix, 146). It could not be more explicit that Ricoeur’s foundational work in philosophy in the 1950s, as it was set out in his first four published books, was framed as a pursuit of the enigma of Fault at the origin of “man” and conceived in the symbolism of the Genesis story. It was Ricoeur’s plan to build a neo-Kantian synthesis on top of a phenomenology, a synthesis that pushes Kant’s reason toward discursive agency. Ricoeur went this route because he had found phenomenology to be a wonderfully sensitive depiction of the human being’s incipient understanding of being-in-the-world, which he then gave a synthetic and schematic agency via the capacity for speech. Such a mixture is what he later called post-Hegelian Kantianism, a synthesis of phenomenology, dialectic, critical reflection, and hermeneutics. The orchestration of these multiple influences in a kind of syncretic tour de force points to Fallible Man as the gravitational center and the architectonic cornerstone not only of the triptych but of Ricoeur’s entire theoretical orientation. The mixture is actually even more complex than Ricoeur’s own selfexplanation, because there is an additional layer in this composite of influences. Ricoeur’s understanding of evil and the fallibility that occasions it tries to accommodate the Aristotelian view of human nature as basically good, and its failures as always to be understood as a deviation from its natural direction. The practical teleology of the Nicomachean Ethics is so closely woven into the syntax of Ricoeur’s anthropology that it often overshadows other influences: “It is by means of a will which is nourished with motives and with projects and is projected that my affective life unfolds its spontaneous or reflective evaluations.”38 But to make this congruent with Kant’s emphasis on the pathology of desire will be hard to pull off. Ricoeur wants to describe the cause of human fallibility as an invitation to evil in the structural disproportion between human limitation and human desire. Following a hint from Descartes, he unifies this philosophical amalgamation in the definition of human being as “disproportion” (a Christian concept if there ever was one), that is, as a being caught in the middle between infinite longings and finite constitution. Discursivity is the capacitor for this movement from the latter to the former, and Kantian reflection, the critical element, is the overseer that shapes, guides, and checks this process. Ricoeur starts with a premise that he asserts is “wholly accessible to pure reflection,” which is that human beings are fallible.39 But fallibility is

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a characteristic that sits already within an entire network of concepts that constitute an ethical perspective of sorts. Fallibility is failure in relation to persons with goals, and to hypostasize the term into a characteristic of human being itself (“Human beings are fallible”) means that it is the goals that humans fall short of that are constitutive of human life. The term “fallibility,” therefore, sits within the teleological structure of a good life as a totality seen but not yet achieved, as a frustrated capability for achievement. The distance between self and other is only one dimension of the constitutional nature of human finitude. The disproportion between people’s actual lives and their projects of happiness, and the realization of finitude itself as constitutional of human life on earth, make human finitude a categorical term arrived at within the compass of reflection. Human beings are capable of error because they are finite. But Ricoeur immediately adds to this Aristotelian construct what I am suggesting is a Christian/Kantian dimension. The abstractions of person and life are conventionally attributed to individuals, yet Kant’s insertion of the human capacity for social reflection explodes this assumption, since individual happiness is inextricably tied up with that of the happiness of others, both for the positive reason that friendship is a constitutional part of individual happiness (Aristotle), but also because the condition of subjectivity creates unavoidable conflicts within a social context (Ricoeur’s affective reading of Kant). This is where the concept of finitude emerges as an intrinsic feature of the moral picture. An imperative response arises from the conflicts that emerge from the competing interests generated by the multiple projects of individual happiness. The disproportion between a creature’s desires and its capacities, “its excess in relation to its fulfillment,” is the Pascalian gap within the structure of finitude.40 This disproportion is what gives human beings the capacity to extend themselves so far beyond their environment, but also the inclination to covet more than they can achieve. That disproportion is what allows a spirit to curdle, its ambitions to molder and putrefy, its resentments to escalate and magnify, its misunderstandings to accumulate and multiply:  “The ‘disproportion’ between sense and perspective, between intending and looking, between the verb and the point of view, is as the melodic germ of all the variations and all the developments that culminate in the ‘disproportion’ between happiness and character” (64). Human fault is thus placed on an anthropological footing as the structural expression of human finitude. Ricoeur only returns to the explicit theme of his preface (the religious question) in the book’s conclusion, a dense thirteen pages that asks how the disproportion that constitutes human fallibility sketched out in the body of the

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book relates to the potential for moral evil.41 I am going to outline this argument in the next section, because this is the missing explanation that Ricoeur passed over in the little ethics. With it we will then have a full account of the neoKantianism—as a kind of Christian ethic manqué—that Ricoeur is asking us to consider as a framework for a practical ethics, and we can then consider how that dovetails with the hermeneutic project as a whole.

Turning a Kantian hermeneutics toward rhetoric Language, says Ricoeur, is the necessary condition for evil: “To say that man is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to a being who does not coincide with himself is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. And yet evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited.”42 Evil cannot be intended without transcendence, and transcendence cannot happen without language. The notion of “positing” here is not the narrow logical sense of placing a proposition forward for testing. Rather, it has the more basic sense of the Latin root, ponō, ponere—that someone places something there (German, da) in front of us to be contemplated and chosen. To posit the capacity for evil means simply, therefore, that language is capable of indicating this thing, that is, evil as evil: “[I]t is finite man himself who speaks of his own finitude . . . Thus it is of the nature of human finitude that it can experience itself only on the condition that there be a ‘view-on’ finitude, a dominating look which has already begun to transgress this finitude” (24). We are more than our finitude because we can desire the whole, and less than our desire because we are captive to our finitude. The ability to experience itself by naming itself is like the moment in psychotherapy when the patient can name their trauma. But this explanation of positing is incomplete. The distance between the finite noun (the name we give to things) and the infinite verb (the predication of meaning) creates a primordial disproportion, an imbalance. What positing does in the case of evil is analogous to what it does in perception. The problem of finite human perception exists “because of the object’s obvious property of always showing itself from only one side, then another.”43 But when I realize this limitation I have already in a sense outstripped it:  It is also upon the thing itself that I  transgress my perspective. In point of fact, I can express this onesidedness only by expressing all the other sides that I  do not currently see  .  .  .  I  do not come upon this limiting act directly but reflectively as I apprehend the perspectivity of perception through reflection on the onesidedness of the perceived object. (26)

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The reflexivity that expression occasions is a kind of second-sight:  “Thus I judge of the entire thing by going beyond its given side into the thing itself. This transgression is the intention to signify” (26). The ability to posit thus opens the gate to immortal longings. The human capacity for engaging in “imaginative variations” among contingent possibilities creates the space for choice and temptation. The connection between transcendence and language here is close to Gadamer’s famous pronouncement in Truth and Method: “Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all.”44 In a curious way, we are now back in the region of hermeneutic ontology. If we can accept Collin’s judgment of Ricoeur’s Christian anthropology (“In his work, God appears essentially as a figure in the Bible who speaks to us”), and can contain this speaking within the parameters of rhetoric (“It is therefore finally as a kind of index of the human situation at the heart of its moving, existing, and willing that the symbol speaks to us”), we have a programmatic convergence in the curriculum of a hermeneutic ethics. Ricoeur’s enlistment of Kant has turned hermeneutics toward its moral obligations, and his turn toward rhetoric has given hermeneutics the ground on which its ethical obligations will be carried out. A philosophical anthropology of human fragility, concludes Ricoeur, “has already arrived too late,” because that fragility is inscribed in the very conditions of possibility of human being (143). These conditions, Ricoeur concludes, are linguistic. Modeled on Kant’s schema of quality, Ricoeur asserts that the categories of human fallibility (originating affirmation, existential differentiation, and human mediation) are at base contaminated speech competencies.45 I will summarize each of these competencies in turn. The category of originating affirmation is the linguistic capacity of the human being to affirm life, to construct our lives through projects, and to fulfill our desires in those projects. Ricoeur had worked this out earlier: “In the form of the person, I intend a synthesis of a new kind: that of an end of my action which would be, at the same time, an existence  .  .  .  the intending of the person is a practical intention; it is not yet an experienced plenitude but an ‘is to be’; the person is an ‘is to be,’ and the only way to achieve it is to ‘make it be.’ ”46 This constructive capability may seem like a strange seedbed for evil, but it is in the very fact that life is something hoped for and built up, and it is in the crevices of this always fragile freedom of possibility that innocence finds temptation. The category of existential differentiation is intuitively what we would think of as constituting the structural finitude that limits Dasein—the fact that our

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immediate presence always only can ever occupy one place and one moment at a time (perspective), the historically and culturally situated character of each individual, and our pathetic constitution as led or driven by passion, fear, desire, and so on. The whole catalog of negative affectivities derives from our subjective isolation, our inadequacy in the space between need and contingency, and constitutionally in “the intermittent character of my effort to exist.”47 In these existential spaces of denial, anxiety, and interruption, temptation takes root. The category of human mediation lies in the tensional field between the first two categories, the ability to say yes to life and life’s ability to say no to us. We are, in Ricoeur’s words, “the becoming of an opposition,” the rift between affirmation and denial in the task of living out our lives (141). Evil enters into the points of least resistance in this chain link of life as project, the weak links or gaps between possibility and reality that constantly assail us. The power of language to operate in the freedom of possibilities for life projects opens up and tempts us to the capacity to deceive. Communication itself as a frail means of closing the space between subjects and times is rife with possibilities and opportunities for deception. Action is also a petri dish of possibility for moral harm, and since human beings are from the moment of their birth “bewildered and lost,” the possibility of not being exposed to temptation is already long odds. Because of the linguistic nature of these conditions of possibility, a philosophical anthropology of “the pathétique of misery” is no longer adequate, and “a new type of reflection” is called for.48 Invoking a phrase that Gadamer was using at almost exactly the same moment in the last pages of Truth and Method, Ricoeur says that “ethics arrives too late,” because evil arises from within the inventional resources of speech: “[B]ecause speech is his destination, the evils of idle talk, lying, and flattery are possible” (143).49 So here we have the Kantian search for the conditions of possibility of moral judgment married to the rhetorical potential for sophistry at the birth of human evil. This has two enormous consequences for our study. The first is that it connects Ricoeur’s fusion of Kantianism and discourse theory to the hermeneutics of suspicion, a topic onto which Ricoeur will then launch, and about which I have said remarkably little in this book. The second thing is that it puts the ethical implications of hermeneutics in the general education as an instruction in the Janus-face of rhetoric as a great power loosed. The two consequences are closely related, insofar as rhetoric’s constitutional ambiguity is, as Nietzsche famously taught, the propaedeutic to the critique that seized the imagination of continental theory from that point on.

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The implications for a general hermeneutics My assessment of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic Kantianism brings us back around to the question I  posed at the outset—How much ethical sturdiness does a hermeneutic approach have before the kind of limit situation Wolin brought forward, and what does this suggest for the competence that a hermeneutic paideia teaches? Let us first address this question in light of Ricoeur’s appropriation of Kant. Ricoeur’s qualifications to Kantianism are quite severe. He marks his reticence to adopt a rule-bound ethics openly: “I have not even used the word prescription before this sentence.”50 He characterizes his appropriation in contrarian terms as an accommodation to the Hegelian structure of dialectical self-realization and a resistance to the Kantian idea of law as a rational a priori (177). He deflates in the clearest of possible terms the legalist implications of an imperative ethics: “[I]f the idea of legislation is introduced too early into ethics it in a way aborts the ethical project, prematurely regulated by a simple borrowing from the concept of legislation, into epistemology and therefore into a process of objective understanding” (177). He rejects the categorical law as a synthetic a priori, which for Ricoeur would be “the contrary of freedom” (177). Ethics is a processive realization (“parcours”) in the space between the assertion of freedom and the establishment of law (177). Ricoeur’s ethics marries the ontological structure of Hegelian self-realization with the Kantian assertion of personal agency, “the desire to be in a desire to do” (177). In this context, Kant’s notion of testing introduced in his theory of maxims sits at the heart of this processivity, a recursive act of reflection that develops quasi-autonomous and remediable rules or principles based on the comparison (“proof-testing”) of the effect on others what each person would want for themselves. In his most important amendment to Kant, Ricoeur rebalances the role of pathos and logos. The universality of the rule cannot be tested without the other. Ricoeur borrows from Husserl the phrase “with each other and for each other.”51 However, Ricoeur warns against Sittlichkeit by highlighting the gap between communal being and individual desiring, since within that gap lies the entire tragic history of human efforts to construct systems of lawful conduct. Ricoeur needs the rule; he understands the peril of dialectic, dialogue, and conversation without it. And so he wishes to fashion an institutional mediation of the immediacy of our own prejudices, interests, and desires. This qualified turn back to a principle of institutional permanence and generality, as antithetical as it is to a hermeneutic orientation, is in principle

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a responsible move.52 For anything that rises to the level of society, the establishment of a scaffolding of rules, guides, laws, and so on that serve as a moveable ground underneath phronetic deliberation is inescapable. To pretend otherwise is naive. That this is, in the practical mechanics of the social order, a separate moment from dialogue also is patently obvious. Gadamer’s antipathy to calculative planning certainly gives way in Ricoeur, since Ricoeur regards the human as being “as a being of projects.”53 Ricoeur simply will not neglect the necessary passage from personal engagement to institutional reform. To be sure, practice improvises numerous ways to introduce, against the inevitable tendency toward ossifying rigidities of bureaucracy and system; the plasticity, adaptability, amelioration, and modification of systems of laws and procedures are necessary to make law amenable to phronesis, and much work has to be devoted to keeping these junctures subtle and responsive. Moreover, Ricoeur only began to theorize in schematic terms the ways in which such scaffolding becomes a magnet for manipulation and domination. The obligation to test that range of hermeneutics is why Wolin’s accusation is still relevant:  Can a hermeneutic model complement a robust political framework that guards against the seductions of the status quo? Can it in fact help us know how to distinguish the moment when it is necessary to move from deliberation to judgment, from openness to closure, from dialogue to decision? How are we not frozen in hesitation, how do we ground attestation, how do we step away from an unending openness to the claim of the other? How does this invocation of clouded cowardice and clear-sighted heroism not return us to the strong agency of the isolated individual? Whether it is personal propensity, cultural background, social context, hidden drives, or confused reasoning that expose us to grave errors of judgment at moments of maximum danger that we then look back on with terrible regret, we want to know if a hermeneutic perspective has resources robust enough to defend us from these pitfalls. Now, the very core of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is precisely to guard against and root out the bad prejudices that warp understanding. Wolin seems to have missed that the whole of the middle section of Truth and Method is devoted to this problem. Gadamer defines the experienced person as someone who has become acutely aware of both the effect of the prejudice of the time on their own judgment and the danger of thinking that experience provides insight into the future. Because of these dangers, Gadamer also wants to determine what it is that can be used to come to grips with what is always capable of being otherwise, and he develops a range of nontrivial resources for this purpose—a sense of direction (Richtungssinn), the ability of the question structure to narrow

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the range of feasible options, the cultivation of a sensitivity to the call of the other’s claim, the power of the dissoi logoi to meliorate finite perspectives: These resources do not provide an infallible answer, yet they are far from the relativist quagmire that Wolin suggests. But the hermeneutic charity of Gadamer’s humanist stance, and the civility of his dialogic predisposition, seem ill-suited to the hard choices that we come up against in such limit situations. So we ask if Ricoeur’s Kantian amendments to prudential judgment are the right solution. He turns Kant in an affective direction through his Christian sensitivity to the pathos of human finitude, and this emphasis, as I have indicated, is in direct response to the Holocaust and the Stalinist purge. Then he pours that pathos of finite existence into the boundless well of symbol and myth. This move is hard to overestimate, because it builds a pipeline between Ricoeur’s Hegelian Kantianism and the sea change in intellectual culture that Nietzsche and Freud inspired to illuminate the controlling role of unconscious human drives and unseen cultural and institutional power. I have shown that the turn to the constitutional role of speech for the question of evil brings Ricoeur to the brink of the hermeneutics of suspicion, but Wolin’s charge of hermeneutic relativism posed a different set of questions, which is, as I have argued, exploring the relation of rhetoric and sophistry as the propaedeutic to the work of critique. In sum and substance, Ricoeur’s oeuvre is, I hope I have proved, a deeply thought out response, avant la lettre, to the very concerns Wolin raised. It would be hard, after following the long Kantian trail I have traced, to think that Ricoeur had not wrestled with that aspect of the hermeneutic challenge profoundly. Yet even after Ricoeur, it feels as though there is a terrible weakness that haunts the current state of hermeneutics. Not only is the educational cultivation of historical consciousness an insufficient reply to the deep currents of tribalism or the monumental structures of hidden power that our histories continue to lay bare, but even Ricoeur’s prodigious expansions of hermeneutics into systems of justice, international diplomacy, human rights, collective memory, and so on seem inadequate to the profound fragility of the collective will for the common interest against the manifestations of pure, naked power and greed that we see every day. So in my last chapter, I want to turn to the question of the political to see if there is any way to connect the idea of a hermeneutic paideia to these intractable problems.

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The fundamental difference between the “dialogical” and the “agonistic” perspectives is that the aim of the latter is a profound transformation of the existing power relations and the establishment of a new hegemony. —Chantal Mouffe Philosophical hermeneutics in its German variants had by the most charitable interpretation an insufficiently developed, if not credulous, political identity, a weakness that Ricoeur attempted to correct by extending the hermeneutic franchise to a theory of the state, of just institutions, and of responsible citizen. For him the heart of the political question was the relationship of government to violence: “What is the meaning of this fact, manifest to whomever considers history and daily life, that man is political? . . . The political existence of man is watched over and guided by violence, the violence of the State which has the characteristics of legitimate violence.”1 He took the concept of “legitimate violence” (Weber) as a starting point for his political theory, which he conceptualized as a tension between the compulsion inherent to hierarchy and the democratic impulse for equality. Hierarchy and democracy constitute the double axis of a realistic description of the challenge for governance. In creating this heuristic, Ricoeur was attempting to engage the critique of power that was missing in Heidegger and Gadamer, who had theorized only one side of the tension, the legitimation of authority. But this engagement brought a host of vexing problems for Ricoeur, whose instinct for discursive mediation did not sit comfortably within the politics that developed in the mid-twentieth-century French intellectual culture of the left. If Gramsci was right that the historical process elaborates the intellectuals it needs, Ricoeur was out of place.2 The story I want to explore in this chapter is how Ricoeur attempted to reconcile himself to his place within a progressive politics and how this affects the profile of hermeneutics. The shift in Ricoeur’s political orientation from radical activist to

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liberal progressive over the course of his life, and the way his philosophy reflected this turn, is a clarifying test for the relationship of hermeneutics to power. Part of the story of this development is of course Ricoeur’s relationship to his famous intellectual peers on the left, the conversation partners with whom his developing views were always to one degree or another in tension. Ricoeur tended to sail against the winds of fashion, and it is to his great credit that he resisted the pull of the crowd, yet put up no dogmatic barriers to these currents either.3 We should not mistake him for an apologist of the liberal consensus. At times he could sound very much like Foucault: We can call this function of signification ideological to the degree that it tends to conceal the dysfunctions of our social life in the name of the preservation of the industrial system and its expansion . . . this functioning escapes the consciousness of individuals and groups and develops a whole set of repressive measures with regard to anything that might call into question, either theoretically or practically, the perpetuation of the system.4

In league with Habermas, critique obliged him to put his own political commitments to the test: “It is this interest in emancipation which introduces what I call ‘ethical distance’ in our relation to any heritage.” I want to emphasize that Ricoeur’s changing profile on the political landscape over the course of his life nevertheless worked within a generally progressive set of motivations. Johann Michel notes correctly that “the pregnance of a progressivist presupposition  .  .  .  never ceases to nourish his theory.”5 Ricoeur was an activist, he cultivated a public voice as a public intellectual, and when his activism turned more toward establishment politics, he retained his passion for the alleviation of suffering and social equity. The question does not regard Ricoeur’s passionate commitment to justice but how this commitment shaped the hermeneutics he has left us. Ricoeur made a remarkable programmatic statement in Fallible Man about the new hybrid phenomenology he had set out to develop, and what he called for in this statement to correct for the Husserlian overemphasis on perception is also what Gadamer’s hermeneutics lacks in its absence of a political dimension: [T]he feelings that gravitate around power, having, and worth  .  .  .  ought to manifest our attachment to things and to aspects of things that are no longer of a natural order but of a cultural one. A  reflection that would end the intersubjective constitution of the thing at the level of the mutuality of seeing would remain abstract. We must add the economic, political, and cultural dimensions to objectivity . . . Strictly speaking, the mutuality of seeing is a very

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poor intersubjective relation. The “difference” of a Self from others is constituted only in connection with things that themselves belong to the economic, political, and cultural dimensions. Consequently, we must specify and articulate the relationship of the Self to another Self by means of the objectivity that is built on the themes of having, power, and worth.6

Ricoeur is even more specific about the economic dimensions of this profile: A direct reflection on need cannot furnish the key to the economic sphere; on the contrary, it is the prior constitution of the economic object that can differentiate the truly human needs from animal needs. The structure of human desire is too plastic and too undefined to provide political economy with a solid structure  .  .  .  This radical transformation of the animal “environment” into a human “world” is obviously related to the fundamental fact of work . . . And because he works he establishes a new relation to things, the economic relation.7

This thought on economics leads Ricoeur to a synoptic reflection on the role of work and labor, which he attaches systematically to the State, but also to affect, culture, and institutions. This is the “reconstructive” voice of Ricoeur, prefiguring the political writing of the ensuing decades. Ricoeur would fill out these themes and expand into a granular consideration of legal justice in the last period, so the question I am asking is not whether Ricoeur responded to his own early programmatic demand but how, and how helpful the results of that effort are for a general hermeneutics that is responsive to the demand for a democratic politics. The search for reform within establishment institutions that preoccupied Ricoeur’s last work kept its distance from most then-current theories of radical democracy, and I want to know why.

Ricoeur’s early political thinking I am going to outline the path of Ricoeur’s political thought in parallel with his biography, because there is a strong impetus coming from the life he lived and the tenor and direction of his political writing. The trajectory moves from a more radical, encompassing, and future-oriented engagement with the political in his youth to a more reformist, backward-looking concern with the legitimacy of legal-ethical conventions and established juridical institutions in his last works. One of Ricoeur’s few late attempts to grasp the world-shaking phenomenon of globalization happening all around him in later life, as we will see, was only a mild effort. In the middle period, he gave a lecture course that represented

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his most sustained thinking on the subject of the political, but that he did not develop these lectures into one of his great monographs is both a great pity and an indication that his attentions had turned elsewhere. Dosse characterizes Ricoeur’s early political thinking as unabashedly radical:  “From his first post at Saint-Brieuc, in 1933–34, Ricoeur became a militant activist in the movement of socialist youth.”8 Along with the many young progressive intellectuals of his generation his commitments expressed “a general contestation of the dominant values” (33). He condemned capitalism as “a confrontation of egoism and interest, a jungle in which man is the enemy of man,”9 and was horrified by “the obsessive quest for economic profit that was taking humanity inexorably into a depersonalized existence.”10 His critique of the US consumer culture was vehement, and in a strong echo of Adorno and Horkheimer, he characterized “the American way of life” as “a sort of prefascism” (“Pour une coexistence pacifique des civilisations”).11 As a militant activist he was fearless and outspoken. By his early twenties he was publishing regularly in radical leftist revues and journals. The context for his writings was the traumatic period of the 1930s in France, Europe’s Great Depression in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash after the fateful results of Versailles had begun to settle in, and the portentous political climate of crisis leading to the Second World War. Despite his youthful naiveté, which he later acknowledged, his radicalism does not seem to be merely a passing experiment or even a unique response to a moment of crisis. His grounding in tenets of social justice and his passionate commitment to ending suffering and violence were commitments carried through to the end of his life. A sign of the character of Ricoeur’s early progressivism was his willingness to acknowledge a role for what he called in 1949 “progressivist violence.”12 While he had professed a strict pacifism informed by the death of his father in the First World War, his perspective altered under the pressure of circumstance before the unfolding spectacle of Hitler’s march. He struggled to find a legitimate philosophical position for warranting the violence of the state in the context of war and the anti-colonialist revolutions to follow.13 We can see this struggle in the style of his approach. His discursive strategy in introducing progressivist violence in the 1949 essay “Non-violent Man and History” is maximally elliptical, with the threat of violence serving as a kind of anti-gravity to counterbalance the embrace of nonviolent protest as the principal modality of political confrontation. Rather than speaking directly of the contours of this violence, the essay probes the limits of the efficacity of nonviolent protest for political change. The limitations of Gandhian strategy outside of a particular political

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context suggest a graduated continuum between material confrontation and the symbolic gesture. The limitations of nonviolence then suggest that progressivist violence—as expressed in limit cases such as the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the French Resistance, “the politics of national fronts,” and so on— need to serve as the reluctant but ever-present alternative looming behind the limits of its more visible partner.14 If nonviolence operates under “certain favorable circumstances, under the pressure of exceptional personalities,” it “ought to be the prophetic nucleus of strictly political movements, that is to say, movements centered on a technique of revolution, of reform or power.”15 Ricoeur’s strategy of ellipsis leaves a significant gap, however, because it identifies the tripwire that signals the passage to a justifiable progressive violence, but leaves out an explication of its mechanisms and modalities. We are left in no doubt that it should be tripped in limit conditions, but this is the only indication he provides. Does progressivist violence operate by a law of immanence that history dictates? What separates the justification for bloody or peaceful revolution? The 1960s would serve as a potent test of Ricoeur’s ellipsis. To be sure, even during this more radical phase, the signs of Ricoeur’s constitutional moderation were plainly in evidence. Despite his militant socialism, he abhorred dogma of any stripe, and was opposed “just as much to the collectivist materialism [of orthodox Marxism] as the individualist materialism” of capitalism.16 He attached himself to the Christian socialist movement inspired by Karl Barth, who spoke out against the rigidity of party Marxists on one side and the establishment complicity of the Catholic hierarchy on the other. With Mounier he cultivated “a strongly dialogic sensibility, a practice of thinkingalong-with” (35). What he would eventually call a “productive socialism” was informed by a belief in “human fallibility, the perfectability of man, the refusal to absolutize man’s deeds, and a recognition of the incompleteness and openness of human action” (48). He would place into dialectic the interaction between utopian dreams and the practical responsibilities of citizenship. His profound ambivalence toward political violence was expressed in response to the Spanish Civil War of 1937, when he affirmed a “double position in favor of the spiritual refusal of violence, and the acceptance of violence for saving the Spanish Republic” (55). The category of the tragic is always the descriptor under which Ricoeur places his most conflicted ambivalences. Perhaps the most revealing text to indicate Ricoeur’s early leftist radicalism is the 1960 retrospective essay on the work of his longtime mentor and friend Emmanuel Mounier. From his early twenties, Ricoeur followed Mounier’s passionate and uncompromising commitment to social justice, as well as his

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critique of the orthodox Marxism of the time. As a prominent public intellectual, Mounier battled the depersonalizing currents of Marxist politics within the frame of a progressive Christian activism. Ricoeur collaborated closely with Mounier on the famous movement journal Esprit that served as the banner for a personalist politics, a journal that did not eschew the language of revolution. Ricoeur’s retrospective essay is epideictic in tone, so it is sometimes difficult to discriminate the line between description and affirmation; nevertheless, it is possible to discern general lines of agreement and disagreement with Mounier.17 In a fascinating anticipation of his own thought, Ricoeur structures his overview in two parts to reflect what he calls a shift in Mounier’s general political orientation from a more practical “pedagogy concerning the communal life” of the 1932–35 prewar period to a more philosophical postwar orientation.18 Mounier’s earlier “working values” are formed by “assents which are lived and acted more than reflected upon” that amount to a reform agenda (137). A combatant in a political crisis is one “who discerns so as to act and who acts so as to discern” (146). Such a direct action orientation, as we know, is somewhat foreign to Ricoeur’s lifelong insistence on the necessary distance of reflection, but the strong link between intellectual life and public responsibility pulses with the same well of passion in both thinkers.19 Mounier’s push for a “personalist and communal Revolution” promoted “individual initiative and spontaneity in mutual relations” rather than a “juridical, contractual society,” because he feared the latter contributed to the “massive depersonalization” that he was most in in dread of in the unfolding new world of technical rationalism (137–39). This is a concern that will be carefully modulated in Ricoeur’s work. Although certainly at one with Mounier’s fear of modern depersonalization, the suspicion of the juridical is clearly to be adjusted in Ricoeur’s dialectic of person and institution, and in his late absorption in the structures of institutional justice. But perhaps most interesting and significant is Ricoeur’s characterization of “concrete ethics” in Mounier’s disagreement with Marxism. The following passage is worth quoting at length because of the degree of its identification with a revolutionary commitment. The main subject of the passage is the excess of the collectivist utopianism, but what I want to point out is the radical coloring of the discourse: [W]hat is in question is the meaning of revolutionary action. The real question is the following: what is ultimately the actual basis for the Marxist’s new man? The answer is that they base themselves on the future effect of economic and political changes, not on the attraction exercised here and now by personal values over revolutionary men. Only a material revolution enrooted in a personalist

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awakening would have meaning and chance for success. Marxism is not an education but a training. This explains why it is “an optimism of collective man covering a radical pessimism of the person.” Here is the core of the debate: the conviction of personalism is that one does not progress toward the person if the person is not in the beginning what demands, what presses on in the midst of the revolt of the famished and afflicted. The danger in a revolution which does not take its own end as its source and proper means is to debase man under the pretext of berating him, and merely to alter the form of his alienations.20

In this passage, Ricoeur is clearly thinking-along-with Mounier. Breaking up the dehumanizing machinery of mass society needs a revolutionary awakening. That revolution is required is taken for granted, and the only question is what kind. To lend his support to Mounier’s view, Ricoeur places the personalist alternative (material revolution and personalist awakening) into his own dual frame of suspicion and faith:  [I]t seems to me that the reason for our attachment to him is . . . the rare accord between two tonalities of thought and life; what he himself called strength [la force], following the ancient Christian moralists, or the virtue of confrontation, and generosity or abundance of heart, which rectifies the hardness of the virtue of strength by means of something forgiving and graceful.21

If we see here Ricoeur’s familiar commitment to the open possibility of the human, what is less familiar is the language of force and confrontation in the service of a revolutionary imperative. Ricoeur will step back in significant ways from the radical profile of the personalist movement. The tone of revolutionary passion is Mounier’s more than Ricoeur’s, so one has to wonder what kind of derivative is yielded when that fullness of passion is subtracted. In 1985 Ricoeur would criticize his own earlier radicalism as impractical: “The idea of putting Marx in place of Aristotle in a new theological summa seems to me absolutely a non-starter.”22 Nevertheless, his political orientation to the demands of “the famished and the afflicted” remained central, and the question is what form that depth of commitment would take. In the conclusion of his overview of Mounier, Ricoeur returned to the need for a greater reflective distance to balance Mounier’s earlier orientation to political action:  “The work which resulted from these extraordinary circumstances shows what the theoretical work of Mounier might have been had he not sacrificed it to the Esprit movement.”23 The phrase “extraordinary circumstances” is telling; it suggests that revolutionary fervor might have been

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appropriate to the moment. But beyond this concession Ricoeur worries that Mounier’s later shift around 1936 to a more philosophical intention did not fulfill its own promise: “At this point, the sketch of ‘freedom under conditions’ turns to a critique of the Utopian frame of mind which attempts to elaborate the plan for a society and rules for action based on principles, but without ever incorporating into its research the interpretation of events or the exegesis of historical forces” (146). Presumably Ricoeur would take on the task of that interpretation and exegesis. On the philosophical side, Ricoeur’s prodigious attempt to justify deontological “rules of action” as a way to correct for Hegelian idealism in Oneself as Another is an extension of Mounier’s incomplete project. On the political side, Mounier’s “freedom under conditions” is the germ of a concession to the need for the regulation of generosity and confrontation. It portends the dialectic of ideology and utopia that Ricoeur would flesh out in the 1970s in his political philosophy. In a telling development, the passage from the 1930s and 1940s to the 1950s involves a shift in Ricoeur’s thinking from revolutionary theory to a critical analysis of political power in established systems. One idea that he articulated in a famous 1957 Esprit essay became a kind of root theory that helped Ricoeur calibrate his conflicted relationship to political authority and violence from that point on. It is what he called in the 1950s the political paradox,24 the simultaneous desire for freedom and order that is embodied in the laws that protect citizens and the institutions that govern them, the respect for plurality and the need for unity. Ricoeur was highly sensitive to both the claims of individual freedom embodied in liberalism and the Marxist commitment to the material security that makes freedom meaningful.25 Here it seems to me some grounds for agreement might exist with both Mouffe and Laclau, who express in their later thought strong components of pragmatism.26 The necessity of hierarchical structures in the ordering of a complex society means that domination will creep in, since concentrated power will seek to dominate just as water seeks its level. But Ricoeur placed this danger in tension with another. The tendency of aggregation to insular control and its “monopoly of orthodoxy” is an imbalance rather than the propulsive direction of institutional life.27 The happiness that unity creates “is the occasion of the passions of power” (176), yet “an absolute pluralism is unthinkable” (175). On the one hand, each “time we sense deep affinities between realities, points of view, or disparate personages, we are happy” (176); on the other hand, “as soon as the exigency for a single truth enters into history as a goal of civilization, it is immediately affected with a mark

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of violence” (177). With the excesses of the French Revolution (and its modern echoes) in mind, Ricoeur was wary of the counterreaction to the hegemony of the establishment—“when freedom becomes mad” (181). Because of the double danger, Ricoeur came to the conclusion that the “ultimate meaning of man’s perilous adventures and the values which they unfold is condemned to remain ambiguous” (182). This equivocity allows him to affirm what Claude Lefort called “the revolutionary imaginary,” while seeking to preserve and bolster uncorrupted norms and structures. That freedoms are guaranteed by structures that require hierarchy is the paradox of the political condition. The embrace of a dialectical relation between freedom and order leads Ricoeur to a controversial cross-roads. Like Gadamer, he believed that authority is legitimated by the recognition of those who submit to it:  “[R]ecognizing superiority is the act of a disciple who accepts being taught by a master. And I  think that this relation of mastery is interesting to the very extent to which this is not the master/slave relation.”28 Ricoeur saw democratic systems as “regimes possessing hierarchical structures,” and that it is in “wishing to live together that one must look, rather toward the vertical structure” of hierarchical relation.29 In 1960 he wrote:  “Power establishes between men an unequal, non-reciprocal, hierarchical, and non-fraternal form of communication. And yet this relationship is fundamental and constitutes the very foundation of human history.”30 Ricoeur’s effort to understand the basis for a system of justice responsive to the hermeneutic recuperation of phronesis surpasses by orders of magnitude the minimal gestures of German hermeneutics to cope with the central dilemma of power. His theorization of democratic governance as a tension between the horizontal principle of democracy and vertical principle of hierarchy is a clarifying and perhaps even durable heuristic. However, his siding with Gadamer in his willingness to look at the positive as well as the negative dimensions of authority is not unproblematic. He accepted the “violence of the magistrate” as legitimate “within the limits of respect for the life and dignity of the guilty who are punished.”31 He held a Calvinist belief in the inherency of “murderous violence” as a necessity of the constitution of the State (246). He adopted too easily Arendt’s thesis that society constitutes a “desire to live together” (vouloir-vivre-ensemble) as an extension of an ethic of love. Theorizing the dialectic of violence and love in “The State and Violence,” he overlooked the refinements of order that confuse the distinction between coercion and persuasion. Ricoeur’s intellectual integrity forced him to stare the tragic dilemma of political violence in the face, but in his political thinking he may have been caught too much within the dialectical impulse.

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The 1960s Ricoeur’s appointment to the deanship at the University of Nanterre in 1969 and the subsequent events of his tenure are perhaps the perfect practical litmus test for his evolving political commitments. This work was no longer theory; this was how Ricoeur as a public intellectual chose to act. The “extraordinary circumstances” of the great wars had given way to another kind of crisis, the breakdown of social order in the 1960s that included the widespread questioning of the legitimacy of structures of authority, including those of Catholic and Protestant church hierarchies, state government at all levels, and the creaking university system centered around the Sorbonne. France was seized by radical explosions of unrest, the Algerian War and the Vietnam War being only the most salient irritants. Universities had become hotbeds of political agitation, with the occupation of buildings, physical destruction, and violence becoming commonplace modes of protest. Into this tinderbox stepped Ricoeur. He was in a peculiar position because he straddled so many of the divides that separated the protestors from the establishment. In his political posture he was still militantly progressive. He vociferously opposed the Vietnam War, fought against the government’s role in Algeria, was part of a delegation to China during the revolutionary period, and spoke out on the Israeli-Arab conflicts and on German rearmament. In short, he involved himself in the great major national and international political issues of his lifetime. To say that he was an engaged intellectual would be an understatement. His approach to these issues was usually two-pronged: fiercely progressive in orientation but mediating and discriminating in approach. (The rare exception to his progressivism was his remonstrance against the free sexual mores of the 1960s, and here his devout Christian roots were in evidence.) He was for many years the president of the progressive Christianisme social, but his relationship to the most radical incarnations of Protestant movement politics in France was conflicted; he was held in suspicion by many of the younger generation, and he often would separate himself from them either substantively or tactically. The general posture he took in the face of the contending claims on his commitment to justice—and this is really the telling point in understanding where Ricoeur’s politics come to rest—shaped itself in the form of a dialectical tension:  We have entered into a time in which we must be reformist and remain revolutionary [faire du réformisme et rester révolutionnaire].32 All the skills of the

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legislator in the ensuing period will be needed to put in place pliant, revocable, reparable institutions, open to an internal process of revision and to an external process of contestation.33

In other words, Ricoeur was trying to graft the revolutionary spirit of his youth as a radical progressive onto his commitment to the idea of just institutions. He wanted to take part “in changing the hierarchical relation in the industrial world, and in opening up a new world which could change life itself.”34 Within this double allegiance, Ricoeur became a defender of the traditional institution as a place of mediation. The university in particular, he thought, should serve the purpose of mediation between education and contestation. We are here worlds apart from the Foucauldian suspicion of governmentality and Bourdieu’s sociology of institutions. No doubt Ricoeur would have been regarded as a bourgeois meliorist or a credulous reformist by many of his progressive colleagues. Johann Michel attempts to mount the case that Ricoeur was substantively not so very far from Bourdieu’s “critical intellectual” or Foucault’s “specific intellectual” in a number of fundamental respects.35 Certainly, Ricoeur had more faith in political institutions. A rational polity “is not abolished but presupposed by a meditation on political evil.”36 “The state,” he says in another place, “is precisely what resists the domination of that technology that has no memory.”37 The heart of the division, in my view, is whether institutional reform at the level of the state is a doomed project inevitably devoured by greed and folly, or whether progress is a constant battle with ebbs and flows that periodically wins worthwhile concessions and meaningful respites. In the United States, for instance, was the Roosevelt era of institutional reforms an anomaly, a pause before the onslaught and return to normalcy? Or was it a step forward that can be built on after this period of hegemonic retrenchment? How much of all of this progress is historically contingent? Perhaps the best approach for those committed to the fight for progress is to grant the unknowability of this question, and to practice both resistance and vigilance where it applies. Here Ricoeur is decisive. For him, state violence “is not the whole of the political, but its dark side. It implies a constant threat of resurgence, but it is not, in my opinion, constitutive of the state.”38 The statements from Le Monde above appeared in an essay-length article appearing in three issues in June of 1968, written in the midst of the tumultuous student protests at the Sorbonne. It is an extraordinary document that somewhat served as a kind of job application to Ricoeur’s administrative adventure in 1969. Ricoeur himself felt stifled by the anachronistic and ossified system of teaching

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and promotion that the French university had become. The Sorbonne was the gravitational epicenter of a privilege system of spoils for professors referred to by Ricoeur as “a coopted oligarchy.”39 Students were an afterthought, a peonage class “whose transcriptions of the grand monologue of the master served as the criterion of their aptitude before a tribunal on the day of the exams” (383–84). In his role as administrator, Ricoeur made extraordinary efforts, unusual for an administrator, to engage his students in genuine dialogue, a desire that can be traced directly to his personalist commitments that had targeted the dehumanization of modern social systems, here in the form of mass education. From his point of view, the chickens had come home to roost. The form of Ricoeur’s argument in this essay is what he himself would later characterize as abrupt, because it does not take account of the history of what at the outset he proclaims as axiomatic for the institution of the university.40 His strong thesis is that the institution “from the beginning lay under a sort of tension between, on the one hand, a reformist project, regulated by the possible and the reasonable, and, on the other hand, a revolutionary project that was total and inexhaustible” (380). By definition, the revolutionary passions unleashed in May 1968 had no anchorage in the reality of the university system itself. The essay describes the “Université napoléonienne” as a sclerotic, top-down hierarchical system that revolutionary passions had now brought into question in a way that the establishment could no longer quash or ignore. It is only in the third installment of the article that the dialectic of reform and revolution is described as a local manifestation of a larger historical process: Its “creative agitation . . . will continue or will become a revolutionary ferment at the heart of global society” (397). The dialectic of reform and revolution must therefore be a natural product of a kind of Hegelian reaction. The thesis is remarkable in another way. At this critical juncture in Ricoeur’s life, it marks a kind of admission—an explicit acknowledgment of a moderation that was always intrinsic to his personality and reflexive in his being, but that is here transferred to a political program more pragmatic than the idealistic calls of his youthful political philosophy. The opening paragraph is fascinating rhetorically, because it reads as a kind of blazing manifesto that could have been written by Ricoeur as a young militant socialist, as though to foreclose the charge of timidity that, in the context, his moderating proposal might excite: The signs are now quite eloquent. The West has entered a period of cultural revolution which is really and truly its revolution, the revolution of advanced industrial societies, even if it echoes or borrows from the example of China. It

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is a cultural revolution because it rebukes the division of the world that creates a life that is inferior economically, politically, in the whole sphere of human relationships. This revolution attacks capitalism not simply because capitalism fails to achieve social justice, but also because it succeeds too well in seducing people by its inhuman project of quantitative well-being; the revolution attacks bureaucracy not simply because it is cumbersome and ineffective, but because it makes human slaves to the powers, structures and hierarchical relations they have become estranged from; finally, it attacks the nihilism of a society that, like a cancerous tissue, has no other goal but its own increase. In the face of a society of “non-sense,” it attempts to set us on the path toward the creation of good, of ideas and of values. The enterprise is gigantic; it will take years, decades, a century.41

The sanctioning of revolution and the denunciation of capitalism are together a potent combination. Yet the phrase “cultural revolution,” despite its Maoist overtones, also creates a distance from the more direct destructive modalities of political revolution (insurrection, political violence, etc.). Into this buffer Ricoeur then inserts the interplay of reformist action and revolutionary pressure, and for the university this means a system that insures a more egalitarian relationship between teacher and student: “The contract that ties the teacher and the learner carries an essential reciprocity which is the basis of a collaboration.”42 The bulk of Ricoeur’s essay is a meticulous outline of the kinds of structural adjustments to be made in the governance of the university that would facilitate the transformation of the system by “successive mutations” into a more humane institutional culture, and in this regard it is similar to an extensive and concrete proposal he had made in 1964 for a series of radical reforms to the state university system (397). The university would then exemplify an environment of equity, respect, and genuine learning. When Ricoeur accepted the deanship at Nanterre, he would test his own theory. His iconoclastic behavior as an administrator embodied the thesis that he proclaimed in 1968 was the basis for the transformation of the university:  “The contract that ties teaching and learning together involves an essential reciprocity, and this at its base is the principle of collaboration.”43 Campus unrest was a reaction to the system’s failure to express the necessary role of students as collaborators. The student revolts were forcing a necessary reconstruction of the teaching-learning relationship in the university system in what Ricoeur would call a reciprocity. The reconstruction did not mean dismantling the research function of the university but rather the recognition of the central place of student learning. The imperative to learn that students bring

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to the campus their “aptitudes and tastes, previous and parallel knowledge, and above all the project of personal accomplishment” is the engine of the campus compact in which the institution “is granted the occasion and permission to accomplish its own knowledge project (projet de connaissance et de savoir) (382). This meant that education was a two-way process. In the never-finished project of the accomplishment of teaching, the institution “continues to learn; it is truly taught by its students” (382). This “institutional learning” is what Ricoeur wanted to initiate at Nanterre, and so even at the most alarmingly threatening stage of the campus protests, he made himself available to students:  “The incursions into his office were all the more frequent, particularly as Ricoeur refused any protection in order to be able to discuss freely all contentious questions at any moment.”44 It was this availability that, ironically, was his downfall: “Despite the fact that student incursions into his office became increasingly frequent, Ricoeur refused any protection so as to provide the opportunity for free discussion on controversial questions at any moment” (477–78). His openness was what allowed the incident in the cafeteria in which a student in a flash mob dumped the contents of a garbage can on his head. It should be said that Ricoeur’s profile of moderation was a signal reason for his recruitment to the post at Nanterre, being engineered from above as “a simple manoeuver to marginalize avant-garde revolutionaries,” as some radical student groups suspected.45 He accepted the position with what seemed like reluctance, because he knew what he was in for, but he had laid out his reformist agenda for the university very publicly, and this was an opportunity to do as well as say. It is possible to argue that the system had selected him out for this role as a self-protective hegemonic move, since he was understood to be a moderating force, sympathetic to institutional prerogatives. But even if we allow this interpretation, there is space for considering Ricoeur’s actual conduct in the position. His attempt to practice dialogic openness in service of an idea of the university as a site of social conflict and mediation was a practical test of his own theory of the institution. Despite his extraordinary efforts as an administrator in open dialogue with the students, the more militant students regarded him simply as part of the establishment, and he too became an active target of their disruptive tactics of confrontation, subversion, and ridicule. The incident with the poubelle took on iconic significance, and made Ricoeur a figure of sympathy but also a national butt of jokes as the symbol of the impotence of university authority to address student concerns. He quietly resigned his position after the episode, and his experiment in university administration was seen as a failure. This

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was a contributing factor to the eclipse of his reputation in France as a leading intellectual for at least the next decade. It is possible Ricoeur might have been naïve in his assumptions about the possibility of dialogue in a time of massive social upheaval; nevertheless, as an administrator he always conducted himself according to his convictions—with generosity of spirit, dialogic openness, and passionate commitment to justice. His public failure as an administrator was due in large part to his integrity as a person. Now, the famous outcome of the Nanterre adventure—Ricoeur’s resignation after the humiliating encounter with student protestors—has a kind of prototypical hermeneutic indeterminacy. Some have argued that he would have survived the incident by just quietly persisting with the kind of Gandhian imperturbability that he had mastered.46 Ricoeur’s own delayed reaction to the episode lends itself to a multiplicity of social and psychological interpretations. The coarse public reaction to the scandal fed through the maw of a scandalhungry mass media might have ultimately rendered his mediation impotent or negligible, or his administration may simply have been swept up in currents that no well-meaning individual could have overcome. What is decisive about the episode for our purposes has already been reached, because it regards the choice to accept the appointment at Nanterre in the first place: In the face of a concrete call to action, in a radical moment that stopped short of nihilation, Ricoeur’s attempt to preserve institutional prerogatives, to make hierarchy open to contestation and serve as an alembic of conflict and mediation was a decisive choice vis-à-vis the philosophical positions that spring from suspicion and faith. In his lifetime, Ricoeur had faced the most extreme forms of social crisis in which the very existence of democratic institutions was at stake, and in this situation he saw the prerogative of state violence in a limit situation. With this less cataclysmic unraveling of the social fabric he stood with the establishment, trying to bring about its own change from within. That he made himself vulnerable to physical attack and laid his professional career on the line gives this choice an integrity, whether it was the right choice or not. The difference of response to these radical moments may serve as a benchmark for understanding Ricoeur’s orientation to the relation of dialogue and power. A prescient sentence that Ricoeur had written four years previously in describing what he thought was the task of the educator as citizen captures his political outlook and comportment as well as anything he had ever written. Because human beings “wish themselves to be the agent of their destiny,” then education “will never simply be a protestation, as though it had been this once or ought ever to be, in the face of injustice and inequality, in the face of age-old

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poverties and those created newly by industrial economies; it must also prepare humans for the responsibility of collective decision.”47 In other words, critique is not enough. We must critique the status quo from the outside, but also try to change it responsibly from within. His leadership role as a social critic on the left was not enough; he needed in concrete ways to help change the structures that reproduced privilege, poverty, and injustice. If Ricoeur opted for an establishment role in his experiment as administrator at Nanterre, he was trying to redefine his own activism by practicing suspicion and faith as an institutional actor. Whether he had the right balance then, or at other times, and I imagine will always be a matter of dispute, but he acted on the belief that one has a responsibility to construct as well as critique institutional life, and that seems to me to be an example worth emulating.

The 1970s and 1980s After these tempestuous times, Ricoeur retreated first to work in the Husserl Center in the Sorbonne, then in some seminar space on the rue Parmentier run by the CNRS. This quiet post-Nanterre interlude is characterized by Dosse as a period of obscurity brought on by the triple assault on Ricoeur’s reputation of the vitriolic attack of the Lacanians after his Freud book, the very public loss to Foucault in the competition for the post at the Collège de France, and the debacle as an administrator at Nanterre. From a period in the 1960s when he occupied “a central place in the French philosophical world,” this was “a period in which he was not recognized in France.”48 Ricoeur’s retreat from the public eye was, however, a period of intense research activity, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that the themes Ricoeur turned to during this time focused on the imaginary—theories of metaphor, narrative, fiction, and utopia. This period also signaled a subtle distancing from aspects of his earlier more radical political commitments. Although he remained “one of the rare elderly statesmen of the original group” at the journal Esprit, he “was somewhat removed from the political preoccupations” of the group. He was described by one of the younger members as “un pur esprit. Il n’est pas la révolution permanente, mais la pensée permanente.”49 Likewise, Ricoeur distanced himself from the Christian socialist movement that he had been so active in since 1958. His resignation of the presidency of the movement in 1970 was more than a symbolic gesture. Its youthful members were a significant part of the student movement that had brought about his mortifying exit from Nanterre. It seems likely that his harsh

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public experience consolidated, solidified, and informed the more establishment political orientation of his mature thinking. During this period, Ricoeur also began teaching regularly at the University of Chicago, an adventure his biographers also agree to have been consequent on his disaffection from the French scene. The lecture theme that Ricoeur gave at Chicago in 1975 was the dialectic of ideology and utopia, the crystallization of his instinct that the progressive impulse toward revolution was as susceptible to distortion as the ideologies of domination, and that the two were essentially related, acting as counterweights to hold each other in check. During this same period, Ricoeur wrote his well-known interventions in the Gadamer/ Habermas debates, and this thought was quite naturally intermixed with his theory of ideology and utopia. Ricoeur’s life as I have just related it had taught him the dangers of dogmatism on either side of political passions. The need for coming to terms with institutional authority acted as a constraining mechanism to discipline his idealistic commitments to the poor and disenfranchised, even as Ricoeur asserted the power of resistance against institutional and material hegemony.50 Since the “political paradox” posits the necessary role of institutional hierarchy, the question is only how its pathological tendencies are to be disciplined. Ricoeur did not theorize his way out of his youthful radicalism in any explicit apologia or course correction, but we see the usefulness of his mediating inclination for this new theoretical framework. He did not stop talking boldly about abuse of power and hegemonic violence, but this for him was only one form of abuse. The dialectic of ideology and utopia runs parallel to Ricoeur’s more famous and encompassing dialectic of suspicion and faith, and it is crucial to note that the structure of the lectures is an expression of the more basic dialectic. Ricoeur always described himself as a Christian socialist, the Christian dimension in a sense softening the hard edges of the socialist commitment, insofar as the Christian belief in the individual and in human frailty tempers the collectivist ideal of social equity, but the underlying footing of his political theory, as manifest in the first eight lectures on Marx and Althusser (of a total of eighteen), is a reading of socialist doctrine as it had evolved up to his time. What Ricoeur did by pulling this theory in the direction of Mannheim, Weber, Habermas, and Geertz was to attempt an amendment of Marxism that sailed against the more vehement antiauthoritarianism that the period had stirred.51 Ricoeur’s characteristic independence is expressed in his assertion that enthrallment to dogma must be avoided, whether it is “by Marxists or by anti-Marxists,” and this dictated his own method: “We take the good where we find it.”52

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Ricoeur’s alignment with an underlying class critique of power is manifest. He believed that ideologies prop up domination and “comfort the collective ego of these dominant groups.”53 He echoed Marx’s insight “that the ruling ideas of an epoch are the ideas of a ruling class” (181). He understood hegemony as the cultivation of illusion: “Ideology occurs in the gap between a system of authority’s claim to legitimacy and our response in terms of belief ” (183). The determination of social ideals “depends on who in society is speaking,” and in the end serves mainly as “the legitimation of a certain system of authority” (192). Ricoeur believed that ideology has led us to “a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed but which cannot be beaten” (300). He saw the media as an accessory and accomplice to hegemony: “To whatever extent that media inform us about the real nature of power in society, this knowledge is useless in itself because it has no impact on the distribution of power. The liberal system of information is neutralized by the real system of power” (241). From the distance of time, these standard issue planks of ideology critique resident in Ricoeur’s theory feel somewhat dated given the complex transmutations that political theory has wrought on the notion of power. A relevant hermeneutics will have to do quite a bit of catching up to speak to significantly more complex and layered discourses on political agency. Žižek’s effort to recuperate ideology critique, for instance, takes up the need to theorize repressed antagonisms and conflictual desires contaminating and traumatizing the impulse toward freedom.54 But the point of my summary exercise here is to establish how far Ricoeur got in carrying a political hermeneutics forward, and to know if that place is a viable foundation from which to build. Ricoeur was conscious of the dangers of idealizing reason in a Habermasian vein, since “the most rational system has an irrationality of its own.”55 Where in the world, he asks, can there be, as Habermas would propose, “communication free from domination”?56 Ricoeur never suffered any blindness to the inherence of power in institutional structures. The inflection point was how to intervene in these structures. One standard-issue hermeneutic principle allowed Ricoeur to remain current in an important respect. Being quite allergic to any assumption of a privileged position, he understood the vulnerability of leftist critique that did not interrogate in turn its own position. The suspicion of metanarratives should be “applied not to one specific group or class but to the entire theoretical frame of reference in a chain reaction that cannot be stopped.”57 Because “our speech is itself caught up in ideology,” we ourselves have to be conscious of the history of effect (160): “When we denounce something as ideological, we are ourselves

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caught in a certain process of power, a claim to power, a claim to be powerful” (161). This assessment led Ricoeur to a claim aimed directly at the left: “Virtually no one is cured by the process of ideology-critique. Many are wounded but very few are cured. Ideology-critique is part of a process of struggle and not one of recognition” (249). Ricoeur extended this criticism even to Habermas: “The critique of ideology always presupposes a reflective act that is itself not part of the ideological process.”58 For Ricoeur there is no “position outside this whirlwind” that allows us to look dispassionately at someone else’s ideology (172). It is because of the pervasive power of ideological illusion that Ricoeur turns for a solution to the hermeneutic circle: “This is my conviction: the only way to get out of the circularity in which ideologies engulf us it to assume a utopia, declare it and judge an ideology on this basis” (172). This solution is the hopeful turn in his analysis: “We cannot remove ourselves from the ideological circle, but we are also not entirely conditioned by our place in the circle” (313). But again this hope functions to temporize his embrace of critique: “Utopias are wholesome only to the extent that they contribute to the interiorization of changes” (314). The interplay between ideology and utopia operates for Ricoeur as “a significant pair of opposite terms” that can help us escape from the pretension of the “transcendent onlooker” (173). The two function as essentially motivational roles that modulate each other in contest. The preservation of status quo interest against an interest in a fairer distribution of power are different perspectives. Here, Ricoeur comes closer to Laclau and Mouffe respecting the concept of agonism than is generally recognized: “[W]e are always caught in the conflict not only between ideologies but also between rising and dominant groups” (178). Politics “is an art of orienting oneself among conflicting groups” (179). Ricoeur’s dialectic of ideology and utopia places the authority of the state in the balance:  “The judgment on an ideology is always the judgment from a utopia.”59 Just as hegemony will turn into domination as a kind of iron law of the human condition, so utopian idealism will become at a certain point irresponsible by virtue of its detachment from power. To be sure, the dialectic is not some kind of perfect homeostatic system that keeps each side in check, but a crude exchange prone to external contingencies, intransigent imbalances, and abrupt or violent corrections. Nevertheless, Ricoeur’s Kantian formula creates a balanced polarity: “Hermeneutics without a project of liberation is bind, but a project of emancipation without historical experience is empty” (237). Ricoeur attacked the anti-humanist tendency of left theory as he found it in thinkers such as Louis Althusser: “My question is whether Althusser’s orientation

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has not dreadful consequences for the theory of meaning, because what is meant in a field if it is meant by nobody?”60 Ricoeur did not disagree that “ideology is not something that is thought, but rather something within which we think,” but he believed it makes more sense to use the language of The German Ideology and say that a thinker is within circumstances, in a situation, which he or she does not master, which is not transparent for him or her. In other words, does not the concept of a field belong in a more useful and helpful way to a motivational rather than to a causal relation? (121)

The resolution of the struggle between ideology (the masking of interests to gain power) and utopia (the dogmatic pursuit of a perfect society) remained stalled before the unhappy alternatives of totalizing system or inescapable suspicion. The way out of this set of bad choices was for Ricoeur an attention to the hermeneutic structure of pre-understanding and consciousness of effect. He wanted to follow the lead of Heidegger and Gadamer in locating the path out of the vicious circle of critique on an ontological footing. Ricoeur was not sanguine that the hermeneutic response could accomplish the mediation unaided, and the contributions of Habermas allowed him to find the proper registration for his dialectical tension. What Habermas did at a meta-level was to subsume the various parties in the theory debates of the 1960s (and that includes critical theorists and hermeneuts) into the frame of a contest of interests. It was a powerful move, because, in a stroke, it linked every position in continental theory to a stake that carried its own presumption. So, for instance, hermeneutics is tied to a normative interest, and ideology theory to an interest in emancipation. (This shift of framing level is crucial in the debate.) Gadamer thought he had saved hermeneutics from the infinite regress of relativism by situating it in the social contest of voices, a civic dissoi logoi, but Habermas asserted that this perspective focused exclusively on the dimension of language to the neglect of the power relations behind it. Such interests were not inherently sinister, but they did not escape the need for some kind of distanced arbitration. We get here to the nut of the hermeneutic quandary. Is this the distance of another point of view, or of an instrument that mitigates point of view? Before he tackled this problem, Ricoeur underlined Habermas’s concession that ideology critique often made the error of exempting itself from the harsh light of criticism, as though it somehow could speak from an unquestioned position of moral superiority. Ricoeur was actually quite pointed about this weakness in the critical project, accusing Althusser of what he labeled “a ‘partisan’ science,”

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which commits the fallacy of the nonideological standpoint.61 He went so far as to call this position dogmatic. Ricoeur affirmed the “hierarchical principle” by which the interest in emancipation supersedes the interest in communication. A “system of preferences which, in turn, appeals to a discernment of the rank of values” is formed by a cultural acquisition of values that are tested by reason.62 We do not get out of the co-dependency of tradition and critique, but this co-dependency is not a vicious circle. This view would be compatible with Gadamer’s notion of dialogue, except that reason in Ricoeur’s formulation is not the priority of the question and the openness to the other, but rather a procedure of “desymbolization” and “resymbolization” that occupies “a particular critical moment” (159, 157). The concept of testing, like Ricoeur’s deference to the Kantian rule, carries within it an alliance to the social sciences via a hermeneutics of the text. Although there is an inherent distance in the hermeneutic concept of history of effect, it is an incipient distance that needed, according to Ricoeur, a full “objectification,” a wringing out of the sociocultural conditioning of the initial expression so that language achieves a full autonomy.63 Only when discourse is uprooted and effaced from “the intentions of those who pronounced and professed it” is it able to be reactualized before the claims of reason (161). Ricoeur conceded that this is necessarily a relative and unfinished process, the results of which are only ever improvements. But he thought this procedure avoids the danger of putting “abstract idealism back in business” (161). Thus, Ricoeur agreed with Habermas, at this crucial juncture, that the interpreter is powerless to recognize the distortions of ideology because those distortions are implanted at a deeper level than what conversation partners or combatants have access to. Ideology “is an effect of meaning for which the subject lacks the key.”64 The conclusion he drew was that this incapacity “decides the kind of strategy capable of being applied to it,” which is to say “properly explanatory procedures . . . capable of leading to a reconstruction of ” meaning, following a process of desymbolization (159). Ricoeur associated “the complementary character of these two orders” with two “sciences and the two modalities of interests which govern the corresponding methodologies” (163). Texts are the artifacts that render this procedure possible, because they are extricated from the situational interests that produced the original expression, and therefore susceptible to the transcendental work of analysis that can purify them of their distortions (161). The re-regionalization of hermeneutics accomplished by an objectifying process of desymbolization and resymbolization would then take advantage

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of the space of difference that inscription provides, a move about which I have already expressed reservations. More congenial to a hermeneutic perspective is the rhetorical principle of agonistic democracy that calls upon contention to continually lay bare the multiplicity of interests that operate in any situation. No method exempts the partners in a conversation from the responsibility of sorting out their various interests. Empirical and logical methods of all kinds are useful, but ultimately they are put to use, subordinated to the necessity of parties coming to terms with each other. The hierarchy of levels ultimately returns us (as citizens) to the level of dialogue and contestation, even if that dialogue is between the citizens in the square and the leader of a corrupt state. So the move Ricoeur makes here stalls at precisely the point at which I think hermeneutics must (and can) advance to participate in a robust democratic rhetoric of the political.

After the Chicago lectures George Taylor also finds enormous heuristic value in the prospects laid out by the Chicago lectures, and regrets Ricoeur’s not following through on the project: “As I have argued elsewhere, it appears that over time Ricoeur did not only redirect his attention away some of his more provocative theses regarding productive imagination—including the utopia—but retreated from them.”65 In particular, Ricoeur’s idea of the power of the utopian imagination to shatter normative complacency would have special value for current political theory, yet “there is much also that needs further refinement and discrimination” (47). The backward-looking orientation of Ricoeur’s work in the last stage of his thinking is quite noticeable. In the public realm, owing in part to a return to the topic of the Holocaust, Ricoeur thought and wrote a great deal about violence, punishment, judgment, and forgiveness on the one hand, and memory, history, conscience, responsibility, and forgetting on the other. His interest in public institutions focused on the forensic and judicial realm. His few brief forays into political institutions were occasional essays or interviews.66 His attention to the themes of history, memory, and forgetting, his focus on the courts and juridical theory, and his reflections on death, as splendid as they are, meant that the last decades of his life were not spent on deepening and expanding the thesis of ideology and utopia, and therefore not giving the imprimatur to that line of thinking that he might have done. We can see this turning happen in the textual record.67 It is in the ninth study of Oneself as Another, when he treats the problem of political representation.

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There he entertains the question of how non-utopian just institutions ought to function. Principles of legitimation are directly derived from and answerable to the polity’s rules of deliberation.68 Good deliberative practice, eubolia (a term used by the chorus in the Antigone), is understood by Ricoeur hermeneutically, which in this case means that it focuses on the issue at hand, the Sache, and the Sache is inherently plural (undecidable, contingent, particular), so that political judgment is always what Ricoeur dubs judgment-in-situation. (That this is actually first a rhetorical principle Ricoeur does not credit—judgmentin-situation is the essence of rhetorical reasoning, and hermeneutics learned this at the lap of rhetoric.) Where Ricoeur departs from—or rather advances beyond—Gadamer is to establish clearly that judgment-in-situation is very often what he terms “tragic judgment.” The surprising meditation on the Antigone in the middle of the ninth study is motivated by Ricoeur’s idea that a “critical” (as distinct from “naïve”) phronesis, having first rubbed up against the touchstones of Kantian universals, will give itself over to practical decision as a necessity of public life that can never square itself perfectly with the plurality of needs and interests in a democracy. Thus the act of decision, the locus of authority vested in judgment, is an acknowledgment of an unavoidable hierarchy that stalls the descent into anarchy, but that risks the ascent into domination. This middle position must maintain its tragic balance, leaving the parties unsatisfied (“the conflict of convictions”) but preserving the form of democratic practice (290): “It is the system that accepts its contradictions to the point of institutionalizing conflict” (260). Ricoeur, thus, is attempting to mediate the radical critique of progressive resistance, while placing it in tension with the inevitability of some kind of system, “defective owing to its universality” (262). At the end of the study, he gathers up the results of his reflection in a splendid synopsis of the zoon politikon in “the relations between responsibility and temporality in the three directions that temporality implies,” past, present, and future (294). But instead of turning this reflection in the direction of the Chicago lectures, he turns it toward the themes of one’s body, the face of the other, conscience, and personal ethics.

Conclusion Marc Crépon reads a consistency in Ricoeur’s political thought without any particular periodization, “a constant recurrence” that emerges throughout his philosophical itinerary.69 What I have tried to show in this chronology is that

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there was a significant shift of emphasis in the arc of his thinking, a kind of oblique turn, from early to late, moving away from the future tense of the political imaginary. I  have suggested that this was neither a sea change in Ricoeur’s outlook nor a situational response to political circumstance, but something more complicated. Brian Treanor and Henry Venema see a decline or loss in the later perspective which they attribute to the dropping away of Ricoeur’s early preoccupation with what he called the excess of the foundation:  “What has been missing, or left aside, from Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology is not the problem of human fallibility, but the ‘founding dialectic’ or disproportion that is constitutive of the ‘power to fail . . . that makes man capable of failing.’ ”70 This may be—I do not know—but it is important to mark the change and what it entails for hermeneutics. The first thing to say is that the last work should not fall under any indictment. The turn from the prospective to the retrospective exemplified by Ricoeur’s close interrogations of the themes of punishment, forgiveness, forgetting, juridical judgment, and the institutions of the court, and the compendium of rehabilitated political terms, such as responsibility, sanction, pardon, rehabilitation, initiative, and so on, will have to be a part of any theorization of the political. Progressive theorists now (Butler, Mouffe, Connelly, etc.) are struggling to imagine how radical democratic forms might gather, crystallize, and sustain themselves in the face of globalization and revolution, but we have to think on many fronts. I do, however, regret that Ricoeur had not refined the lectures on ideology and utopia into one of his great monographs of the period, for the selfish reason that such a contribution would have attracted and cultivated a larger energy of secondary scholarship to build on a principal work of political theory. An entire conclave of secondary scholarship developed around the narrative theory of Time and Narrative, the ethics of Oneself as Another, and we could use a similar passion of interest in hermeneutics devoted to the prospective theory of the political imaginary. As generative as his sketch of a dialectic of ideology and utopia may be, it does not have the density of a full-blown political theory. So how would we pick up from there? My overview has isolated two durable theoretical constructs that materialized over the course of Ricoeur’s career. The first was his early formulation of the political paradox as the simultaneous desire for freedom and order, a conception robust enough to assimilate his deep concerns about authority and violence in a framework of democratic practice. The second notable construct was the political dialectic from his Chicago lectures of 1975. Stepping back, these two dialectics are in fact closely related. The institutional excesses of authoritarianism and anarchy run parallel to the

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intellectual pathologies of entrenched interests and victimhood or conspiracy. Such symmetries may have been surpassed by our insights into radical heterogeneity and contingency, but that should be tested. The tension between the horizontal (democratic) impulse for equality and the vertical (hierarchical) need for organization in a complex society still identifies one of the most riddling cruces of the progressive impulse. Though I tend to be more dubious of the capacity to address the problematic of sovereignty than Ricoeur, his frank confrontation with the tragedy of authority is an important testimony. The exploding landscape of globalized terror, mass migrations, and ecological crisis may make current preoccupations with bourgeois justice seem like niceties. When systemic inequities reach the breaking point on a mass scale, the political is not only a project of procedure and mediation; it is a fight for the very legitimacy of institutions. We will have to have vocabularies of strategic calculation, mass organizing, and even revolution. The question is whether hermeneutics has the flexibility to comprehend a prudence operating within such registers. Is its openness to the challenge of the other relevant to the limit conditions we are now approaching? Ricoeur wrestled with these problems profoundly for a time, but he has left still much of the heavy lifting for us.

Conclusion: A General Hermeneutics after Ricoeur

Gadamer complained in conversation once that Ricoeur found dialectics everywhere. It is certainly true that, for Ricoeur, thinking dialectically was a habit of mind, something like an a priori Kantian schematism, one that acted as a key to unlock his comprehension of the world. My appropriation of Ricoeur for a general hermeneutics has been, in effect, a process of working through and sorting of his dialectics; discarding those that seem in the distance of time too strict or polarizing, and embracing those that remain richly productive as dialectics in practice. Some of his dialectics bring a bivalent symmetry and order to hermeneutic principles that thrive on much rougher ground, and we actually need hermeneutics for that rough ground.1 So before taking stock of Ricoeur’s contributions to what I have called a general hermeneutics, I want to make a concise summary of this sorting. Let me start with the discards. Explanation and understanding, text and speech, expert and layperson, method and judgment, freedom and punishment are, as I  have tried to show, not best understood as dialectical pairs but as modalities existing in a more heterogeneous and messy mix. First, Ricoeur’s decision to place analytic explanation and existential understanding on an equal footing as the dialectical poles of interpretation is so fundamental to his disagreement with the Germans, and so counter to Gadamer’s orienting insight, that we are forced to make a choice. That the weight Ricoeur gave to explanation shifts the relationship of hermeneutics to expertise and the realm of the expert does have an ontological bearing, because how a society produces knowledge and understands the relationship between theory and practice affects the kind of world it is. Second, Ricoeur’s assertion that the text is the hermeneutic object, not a flexible metaphor for hermeneutic understanding, can have limiting consequences for the contribution of hermeneutics. The radical genius of Heidegger’s and

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Gadamer’s appropriation was to read hermeneutics as a general competency, a reading that was nascent in the idea of a general hermeneutics from the beginning. Setting it back within a regional matrix of disciplinarity blunts its force as a weapon against the society of technique that we are becoming. In a related vein, Ricoeur saw hermeneutics not as a paradigm of education but as a paradigm of research.2 His demotion of prudence to a dialectical equality with methodology, the grouping of hermeneutics, rhetoric, and ideology critique into regional disciplines, and the circumscription of hermeneutics to an academic subject are all symptoms of this larger intention. He confined the cardinal working principle of hermeneutics as “a reflection on the ‘presuppositions’ of any understanding of the world,” to a scholarly activity, “a reflection on the non-epistemological conditions of (first-level) epistemology.”3 It is very important to note the location of this fault line, because it is not the distinction that Ricoeur thought separated himself from his German colleagues and that is generally recognized. When Ricoeur defined a “general hermeneutics” as “a grand philosophy of language” that integrates “a symbolic logic, a science of exegesis, an anthropology, and a psychoanalysis,” he attempted to secure its stature without the key ingredient (15–16). Gadamer sometimes vacillated on this point, but his central tendency was in the opposite direction.4 Hermeneutics is dependent for its life-blood on the direct circulation between the ontic and the ontologic, between the native capability for an art and the reflective awareness of its use. The “general” in a general hermeneutics refers to an ethos, a sensibility, a practice, in and outside of the walls of research institutions. Philosophical hermeneutics is not primarily a form of disciplinary oversight, but an art of reflective understanding. Prudential judgment stands over above method rather than side-by-side as its counterpart. Said thought that the dialectic of immanence and transcendence is messier than Ricoeur allowed.5 I am not sure whether this criticism is warranted. Ricoeur certainly separated the two moments for analytic purposes, but that should not undermine their essential complexity. Perhaps we just need to emphasize their mutual instability, that they are not only contaminating and eating into each other, but perpetually confusing each other’s identity. Ricoeur’s claim is that the dialectic of immanence and transcendence is productive precisely because it does not provide an Hegelian synthesis, and that is fine as far as it goes. A general hermeneutics should be perfectly at home with what we might call telos as rule-of-thumb, one that is ephemeral and contingent, subject to the vagaries of chance or annihilation, and from its inception historical, experimental, and improvisatory. Ricoeur advanced considerably beyond Gadamer in palpating

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the tragic dimensions of teleological fragility—the weakness of the logoi—and we just need to face this fragility as the condition of our existence, and respond to it as best we can. My précis of dissensions along the fault-line of a dialectical habit of mind verifies for me that Ricoeur, to use his own phrase, yields while resisting the development of a general hermeneutics:  he exerts both a counterpull on and propulsion to its trajectory, and the propulsive force is by far the greater energy. So in closing I want to ask: what are the affordances he created for this development? What are the productive tensions he contributed between the literal and the figural, character and self, person and institution, memory and history, justice and forgiveness, suffering and initiative, ideology and utopia, finitude and infinity, metaphor and narrative, narrative and life, memory and history, character and institution? This résumé will give me a chance to index some of the contributions I have passed over or only glanced up against owing to my concentration on the dialogue with Gadamer. A philosophical hermeneutics grounds itself on the principle of making oneself vulnerable to the claim of the other, but the corollary to this also has to be true: In making a claim upon us, the other is testifying, which means that we too, as the other of the other in a dialogue, are sometimes in the position of needing to do so. The critical goad behind the elevation of the other as claimant is the antipathy to hegemony embedded in ideologies of the self, but Ricoeur neutralizes this concern by conceiving of oneself as another. Making oneself reflexively vulnerable in every situation would be pathological; there are times when the self needs to assert its own consistency, or make a promise or value a promise. So Ricoeur becomes the great teacher of the hermeneutics of attestation.6 Of course, we then have to know how to judge when openness and attestation apply, and here hermeneutics would normally turn to the rhetorical standard of appropriateness, prepon, not as the personal insight of the phronimos but in the social process of contestation. Ricoeur prefers to look to a judicial model, which rings all kinds of alarm bells for me as another instantiation of the expert, but since we are not likely to dispense with institutional circuit breakers to weigh in on standards of appropriateness, his juridical theory opens paths for the prudential dimensions of a general hermeneutics.7 His institutional version of prepon is articulated in the formula “instaurer la juste distance.”8 This kind of distance has a complex range of meanings that includes the word-of-equivocation that creates space for agreement between parties to a dispute, and the tempering transformations that judicial verdicts work upon the imprescriptible crime.

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Ricoeur’s most important contribution to the concept of appropriateness is that its judgment is not assigned in a backwards look after the fact, but is an active construction vested in the solicitous role of the symbol. Thus he develops a whole vocabulary around the distantiating function of language:  “the figuration of obligation,” “the entry into the symbolic order,” “the institution of a just distance.”9 Élodie Boublil formulates this dialectic of distance and belonging at the heart of judgment as a productive paradox—“cette distance doit être instauré à l’intérieur même de l’espace commun.”10 There is a respect owed to difference that makes democratic practice possible, an eminently rhetorical view. I can see this formula at work in a general paideia, since the intimacy of distance and belonging at work here is something that would have to be cultivated as a liberal competence. Building out further onto these registers of hermeneutic agency, Ricoeur ascribes to the hermeneutic play of question and answer a duty of judgment that derives from the obligation to hold responsible, which he places under the concept of imputability.11 Such a concept reminds us that Ricoeur’s motive for turning to justice theory was in part a response to the heavy indictment hanging over Western political institutions in the wake of European-sponsored genocide.12 As Ricoeur fills in the moral vocabulary of the dialogic situation, we start to see how spare and frail is Gadamer’s hermeneutics of vulnerability. The unending task of coming to terms in what Ricoeur called a “culture of just memory” turned him more and more in his last period toward themes of attestation, punishment, memory, history, justice, and so on.13 He developed careful distinctions between, for instance, the ascription of responsibility to the fragility and tragedy of the human condition as they stand in relation to the irremediable.14 These supplements to a hermeneutic vocabulary all sit on an incline that is orthogonal to the hermeneutic impulse of listening and response. Ricoeur’s increasing turn to initiative and action in the later work would seem at first to run counter to Gadamer’s cautions against the privilege of making-and-doing, which finds its apotheosis in the modern fetish for rational planning. As Gadamer asserted, “[p]ractice, the object of practical philosophy, stands between the two extremes of knowing and doing . . . between the scientists’ self-consciousness and that of the doers, makers, engineers, technicians, artisans, etc.”15 Ricoeur’s investment in action sprang from the moral impulse that runs through all his work and that acts as a necessary ballast to Gadamer’s hermeneutic reticence. To be clear, this is not a contravention. When Ricardo Dottori protested to Gadamer that “ethics is something different from rhetoric,” Gadamer responded: “No, it is rhetoric—it is the rhetorical good.”16 Ricoeur’s option is not a transgression or subversion, but a development of an original orientation.

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Ricoeur’s expansion of the hermeneutic remit to instantiating action is paired with a far deeper exploration of the possible fallout from such action, which is to say, the existential profile of human fragility and fallibility. His variations on the active (initiative, attestation, promise, etc.) and passive (voice, affect, comportment, etc.) passed back and forth from the discursive constitution of human logos to its embodied seat in human suffering and tragedy, and his motive for this theme had undoubtedly much to do with the profound impact of the problem of evil in his life and times that made him feel so keenly the tension between human capability and incapability. His determination to develop a grammar of agency against the structuralist headwinds was balanced against the most precise appreciation for the features of human finitude, so that hermeneutics is the benefactor now of a rich and meticulous account of this conflict. Here I would say that what Wall calls Ricoeur’s dialectic of finitude and freedom is a non-reductive and generative dialectic that only serves to enrich hermeneutic pedagogy.17 It is from this perspective that I think we need to approach Ricoeur’s deep investment in the theme of the self as opposed to the Levinasian orientation to the radical otherness of the other. Ricoeur’s position should be considered as existing between a tension. On one side is his willingness to accept what Schweiker characterizes as “the tenacity of the effort to exist.”18 It is hard to ignore Ricoeur’s pronounced interest in the destiny of the individual soul. On the other side, Ricoeur came to believe that the self is constitutionally carried toward the other:  “Recognition is a structure of the self that reflects on the movement which carries self esteem towards solicitude and solicitude towards justice.”19 This is because self is both self and other, along axes of time, experience, representation, and reflection. Altieri sees Ricoeur working out this complex duality from the beginning, quoting from his work on Jasper in 1947, where he and Mikel Dufrenne write about “an irremediable tearing of being” between the autonomous truth of the individual and the transcendental imperative.20 In this regard, Ricoeur is only developing and specifying something already inherent in hermeneutics, since the dialectic of question and answer coming out of the civic tradition of controversia and the scholastic tradition of quaestio is not in its essence messianic or totalizing, but a matter of getting at the issue that lies between conversants. It may be credulous in its glancing treatment of the density of power that structures relationships, but it is in a good position to mediate what Jameson calls the valences of the dialectic.21 On the other side, the place of Christian love in Ricoeur’s account of the political is certainly at the outer boundaries of a specifically hermeneutic

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perspective. Yet human sympathy is inextricable with the reciprocity of the personal and the institutional, which is a necessary feature of a hermeneutic perspective. Ricoeur’s working out of this reciprocity is one of the glories of his work, and therefore of the hermeneutic canon.22 We can accept all the cautions that a hermeneutics of suspicion throws up against the good will, but Ricoeur is right that none of that excuses us from a hopeful wager. It is clear that Ricoeur advanced considerably beyond his German predecessors in developing a political hermeneutics, but I  showed that he entertained the radical tensions between the genuine dialectic of freedom and equality more openly in his earlier work. The later meditations on the role of the court were so focused on the expiation of guilt that Ricoeur did not pursue the dialectic of ideology and utopia, which might be a serviceable heuristic for tackling the distortions of hegemony and representation. I do not want to suggest that Ricoeur neglected or pushed back on the grounding hermeneutic principle of foreknowledge as developed by Heidegger and Gadamer—far from it. Ricoeur opened this principle up to a host of specifications inspired by his very different intellectual context, interpreting it in relation to Freud and the unconscious, to Marx and economic structures, to Saussure and semiotics. His openness to the force of critical theory is in fact one of our greatest debts to him, because the paths of open engagement he cut to the thresholds of those discourses might otherwise have been lost or blocked. I can stop this list of contributions only by making the general observation that Ricoeur took upon himself an extraordinary work of specification of the hermeneutics he took as his own, and that his appropriation and application of its principles seemed to have only gotten started. The greatest blessing that he gave to hermeneutics was that he turned to it at all. He was a thinker of the first rank by any standard, and his association with that tradition has carried its influence forward into the twenty-first century in a renaissance of interest. We can show our gratitude by continuing his work.

Notes Introduction: A Critical Appropriation of Paul Ricoeur for a General Hermeneutics 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Idea of the University—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” On Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 47–71. 2 Hermeneutic experience is pathei mathos, something from which “no one can be exempted.” Gadamer, TM, 356. Gadamer uses violent language (Aufbrechen, Einfall, vorstoßen, Einbruch, aufdrängen) to describe the breach in our complacent self-understanding by the true experience of the other. TM, 366; Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), 372. 3 Likely his own life decisions were not exemplary of this kind of renewal, but this only means that they can serve as another touchstone for weighing the value of the insight. 4 Ricoeur, CI, 9. 5 Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” HHS, 45. 6 David Pellauer, “Looking for the Just,” Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 132. 7 Ricoeur, OA, 172. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, trans. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 37. 9 My starting point in the mixed form of rhetoric and hermeneutics that was born at this moment explains why my approach is significantly different from Andreea Ritivoi’s fine effort to connect Ricoeur and the rhetorical traditions in Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (New Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006). She sees rich resonances between the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric that blossomed in the twentieth century as a discipline, particularly in the United States. I come out of this disciplinary tradition, but am focused on my responsibilities in the general education at the college level, and for this purpose, my starting point is really the hybrid heritage that crystallizes with Melanchthon. 10 TM, xxxviii. 11 Gadamer, On Education, Poetry, and History, 194. 12 Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 48.

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13 Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 56. 14 “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 46. 15 For a succinct summary of this position, see Sophie Vlacos, Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 117–18. 16 Ricoeur, CI, 19. 17 Olivier Abel, “The Unsurpassable Dissensus: The Ethics of Forgiveness in Paul Ricoeur’s Work,” From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-political Significance of Ricoeur’s Thinking, ed. Todd S. Mei and David Lewin (London: Continuum Press, 2012), 211. 18 That is, “des parcours parallèles, mais des corpus incomparables.” Jean Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur: Peut-on Parler d’une Conception Commune de l’Herméneutique?,” Paul Ricoeur: De l’Homme Faillible à l’Homme Capable (Paris: PUF, 2008), 38, 44. Grondin is even more emphatic in a 2013 essay that Ricoeur’s first turn to hermeneutics “was certainly not influenced by Gadamer.” Jean Grondin, L’Hermenéneutique Comme une Variante de la Phénoménologie?” Studia Phaenomenologica 13 (2013): 98. 19 François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2001), 396; my translation. 20 Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 394. 21 Ricoeur, FM, 26. 22 Dosse, Paul Ricoeur, 418–19, 424. 23 Jean Greisch, Le Cogito Herméneutique: L’Herméneutique Philosophique et l’Héritage Cartésian (Paris: J. Vrin, 2000), 63, 55. 24 Pol Vandervelde, editor of Paul Ricoeur, A Key to Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I, trans. Bond Harris and Jacqueline B. Spurlock (Madison, WI: Marquette University Press, 1996), 8. 25 William Schweiker, “Paul Ricoeur and the Prospects of a New Humanism,” Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (New Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 97. 26 Paul Ricoeur, “What Does Humanism Mean?,” Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 86. 27 Schweiker, “Paul Ricoeur and the Prospects of a New Humanism,” 94. 28 Frederic Jamieson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 484–545. 29 Alain Kerlan and Denis Simard, eds., Paul Ricoeur et la Question Éducative (Lyon: École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 2001), xii, 60.

1 The Seven Differences 1 There have been recent Ricoeur conferences in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Russia, Argentina, Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Belgium, Chile, Norway, and South Africa, and these are only the ones I am aware of.

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2 Robert Piercey, “Paul Ricoeur,” The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, 1st edn, ed. Niall Keane and Chris Lawn (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 415. 3 Jean Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur: Peut-on Parler d’une Conception Commune de l’Herméneutique?,” Paul Ricoeur: De l’Homme Faillible à l’Homme Capable, ed. Gaëlle Fiasse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), 37–62; “From Gadamer to Ricoeur: Can One Speak of a Common Understanding of Hermeneutics?,” keynote address to the Society for Ricoeur Studies Annual Meeting (Montréal, November 6, 2010). 4 Jean Greisch, Paul Ricoeur: L’Itinérance du Sens (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2001), 140. 5 Gary B. Madison, “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1994), 322. 6 Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 39. 7 There is another serious consequence of this difference between Ricoeur and Heidegger on the question of objectivity that I will bring out in the chapter on explanation and understanding. 8 Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 44; my translation. 9 This is a controversial reading. On this, see Ziarek: “Language is not simply one of the topics or issues in Heidegger’s vast work. Rather it is the issue of Heidegger’s work in the literal sense.” Krzysztof Ziarek, “Giving Its Word: Event (as) Language,” Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 102–18. 10 Jeffrey Powell, ed., Heidegger and Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 11 Ricoeur, CdI, 33. 12 Ricoeur reads an incipient hermeneutics in Nabert’s later work and suggests the essential correction needed to Nabert’s “Law of the sign” was a “detour by way of the phenomenon.” Ricoeur, “Nabert on Act and Sign,” CI, 222. Ricoeur even uses the short route/long route metaphor with Kant in “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” FS, 212. 13 In a harsher tone, Jean Greisch characterizes Ricoeur’s programmatic statement in “Existence and Hermeneutics” as “almost a declaration of war against the Heideggerian concept of hermeneutics,” and replaces Ricoeur’s “short route” metaphor with his own “court-circuit,” a word choice full of irony, given its use in Truth and Method. The charge Greisch makes that there is “an almost total absence of the concept of symbol in Heidegger’s work” seems to me misleading. At the beginning of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger confronts the very same structure of the symbol: “The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made. To bring together is, in Greek,

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14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Notes sumballein. The work is a symbol.” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 19–20. This double structure of showing and concealing then becomes the central focus of Heidegger’s interest. Jean Greisch, Le Cogito Herméneutique: L’Herméneutique Philosophique et l’Héritage Cartésien (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2000), 63–64. Ricoeur’s development of the structure of the symbol is less a rupture than a development of something incipient, not a change of direction but a deepening. Ricoeur’s programmatic essay “Existence and Hermeneutics” was first published in 1965 as “Existence et Herméneutique,” Dialogue 4, no. 1 (1965): 1–25. Paul Ricoeur, “Heidegger and the Question of the Subject,” CI, 223–66. This essay was based on lectures delivered in 1966. Don Ihde, the editor of this English translation of Le Conflit des Interprétations, commented that “the familiar designation of the early Heidegger as ‘Heidegger I’ and the later Heidegger as ‘Heidegger II’ ” was a distinction that Ricoeur disputed in favor of “a unitary interpretation of Heidegger.” Don Ihde, editorial note in Ricoeur, CI, 224. Ricoeur, CdI, 96. Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” HHS, 69. Ricoeur, CdI, 23. Ricoeur, CI, 399. Ricoeur, CI, 400. Gadamer, TM, 474. Ricoeur, FTTA, 73. David Pellauer, “Response to Professors Sweeney and Ingbretsen,” Hermeneutics and the Tradition, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 62 (1988): 91. Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 53. Gadamer did think seriously about prudence in relation to health and the health care system, and he produced occasional pieces on the university system, but he bounded himself within a philosophical discourse that served as a protective limitation. Gadamer, TM, 276. A thoughtful airing of potential problems in Ricoeur’s concept of agency is Eftichis Pirovolaki, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010). Gadamer, TM, 276. Domenico Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur, trans. Gordon Poole (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 58–65. Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 56; my translation. Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 59, 60; my translation. Significantly, this is the title of an interview Gadamer gave, “Suchende sind wir im Grunde alle: Farkas-Zoltän Hajdüs Gespräch mit dem Heidelberger Philosophen,” Aufklärung und Kritik 2 (2002): 141–49; Paul Ricoeur, “Memory, History,

Notes

32

33

34

35 36

37

38

39

215

Forgiveness: A Dialogue between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi,” Janus Head 8, no. 1 (2005): 14–25; “Mémoire, Histoire, Pardon: Un dialogue de Paul Ricoeur avec Sorin Antohi,” Pasts, Inc., E-Publication 1 (December 15, 2003). Holly L. Wilson, “Gadamer’s Alleged Conservatism,” Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, ed. Lenore Langsdorf and Stephen H. Watson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 145–58; Donald G. Marshall, “On Dialogue: To Its Cultured Despisers,” Gadamer’s Repercussions, ed. Bruce Krajewski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 123–44. To my reading, the poisonous exchange among Waite, Zuckert, and Orozco in Gadamer’s Repercussions (169–306) produces more sparks than light. To explore this question further, I would want to use Jaspers’s schema of culpability distinctions and Arendt’s discussion of “inward opposition,” and a broader template for questions of complicity, as criteria to discuss the personal issue. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Capricorn, 1947), 31–32; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, trans. Amos Elon (London: Penguin, 1963), 127; Theodore S. Hamerow, Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The 1920s, 1930s, and the Present,” On Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 153. Dieter Misgeld, “A Philosopher’s Journey from Hermeneutics to Emancipatory Politics,” Paideusis 19, no. 2 (2010): 90. Ricoeur has received criticism for some early writings. A good guide to this issue is the biography (Dosse) which uncovered the early documents and Kaplan’s rigorous response to Wolin’s accusatory overreach. He may have steered clear of the Kantian temptation of an a priori imperative, which would be very good news, but I am not sure he moved sufficiently beyond the Habermasian dependence on reason. Dieter Misgeld, “Poetry, Dialogue, and Negotiation: Liberal Culture and Conservative Politics in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Thought,” Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Work, ed. Kathleen Wright (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 171. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Praise of Theory, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 7.

2 “I Just Can’t Quit You” 1 Paul Ricoeur in Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 110. 2 Paul Ricoeur. “Structure, Word, Event,” CI, 79.

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3 Greimas, who worked for twenty-five years at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, had devoted students developing his algorithmic analysis of texts. 4 In Ricoeur, RR, 236. 5 Ricoeur in Anne Hénault, Le Pouvoir Comme Passion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 196. 6 François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 114, 193. 7 Manfred Frank, Qu’est-ce que le néo-structuralisme? (Paris: Cerf, 1989), 168–69. 8 Schrift asserts that the politics of the time, “the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, colonial unrest in Vietnam and Algeria—that left many politically active students dissatisfied with the relatively ahistorical and other-worldly reflections of the Sorbonne philosophers.” Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 41. 9 See François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 202–22. 10 Dosse details this intellectual friendship in some detail. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 365–71. 11 Paul Perron, “Introduction to ‘Greimassian Semiotics,’” New Literary History 20, no. 3 (1989): 531. 12 Ricoeur in Algirdas J. Greimas and Paul Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1989): 551. 13 Ricoeur, CI, 30. 14 Ricoeur in Le Pouvoir Comme Passion, 196; my translation. 15 Ricoeur in Le Pouvoir Comme Passion, 200; my translation. 16 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, 76. 17 Maurice Godelier in an interview with Dosse, which occurs in Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, 391. 18 In the 1989 debate with Ricoeur, Greimas recounts a formative experience of childhood: “When I was a boy of perhaps 14 or 15 I posed to myself the question of meaning, and as I began to tackle life as a quest for meaning, I saw René Thom on TV talking about his last book, Sémio-physique. It is the physique of meaning that I am searching for, and thus the being of meaning; or rather the kind of semiotics I practice is a search for the meaning of being.” Algirdas J. Greimas in Le Pouvoir Comme Passion, 201–202. 19 Quoted in Perron, “Introduction to ‘Greimassian Semiotics,’ ” New Literary History 20, no. 3 (1989): 535. Most of the sources I draw on in this section are from this special issue of New Literary History dedicated to Greimasian semiotics, which includes a translation of Greimas’s analytic essay on “La Ficelle,” a conversation

Notes

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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between Ricoeur and Greimas, and one of Ricoeur’s key essays on Greimassian semiotics. Hereafter I will refer to this issue of New Literary History as NLH. Algirdas J. Greimas, “On Meaning,” NLH, 539. Ricoeur in Ricoeur and Greimas, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 555. Guy de Maupassant, “The Piece of String,” NLH, 609. Maupassant, “The Piece of String,” NLH, 609–10. “Description and Narrativity: ‘The Piece of String,’ ” NLH, 615. Algirdas J. Greimas, “Description and Narrativity: ‘The Piece of String,’ ” NLH, 617. “Description and Narrativity,” 625. Perron suggests that it resembles “scientific demonstration, in physiology or in anatomy, for example.” Paul Perron, “Introduction to ‘Greimassian Semiotics,’” in Algirdas J. Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, trans. Paul Perron (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988), xv. The endorsement from Ricoeur can be found in Paul Ricoeur, “Debate with A.J. Greimas,” RR, 289. Greimas, Maupassant, xxiii. Greimas, Maupassant, xxvi. Greimas, Maupassant, xxv. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 3. Ricoeur, “Debate with A.J. Greimas,” RR, 289. Greimas, Maupassant, 244. Greimas, Maupassant, 245. Ricoeur seems to confirm without remonstrance that semiotic explanation is “une simulation rationnelle de ce que nous avons précompris,” which is to say, in some way, a mirror or reproduction (in Le Pouvoir Comme Passion, 199). He says again that semiotics is “une façon de réécrire en quelque sorte la compréhension culturelle” (199). Ricoeur, RR, 280. Ricoeur in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 552. See Ricoeur, FP, 315–20. Ricoeur in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 552. Ricoeur in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 552. Greimas in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 554. Greimas in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 556. Ricoeur in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 557. Ricoeur, “Structure, Word, Event,” CI, 80. Ricoeur in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 559. Greimas in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 562. Greimas in Greimas and Ricoeur, “On Narrativity,” NLH, 552.

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48 Anne Hénault, ed., Le Pouvoir Comme Passion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Fances, 1994), 196. 49 Ricoeur, RR, 280. “[T]he semiotic square exercises a heuristic function which I happily admit.” Ricoeur, RR, 273. 50 See, for instance, Gadamer, “From Word to Concept,” 108–20. 51 Gadamer in Ricoeur, “The Conflict of Interpretations,” RR, 236. 52 Ricoeur, TN2, 85, 87. 53 Gérard Gennett, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 22. 54 Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 68. 55 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 79, 137. 56 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 72. 57 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 81. 58 Ricoeur, RR, 267. 59 Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “History’s Sources: Reflections on Heidegger and Ricoeur,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 20, no. 3 (1989), 239. 60 “Objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit] is the principal matter of the hermeneutical approach to philosophy.” Günter Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy, trans. Theodore D. George (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 2.

3 The Problem with Ricoeur’s Analogy of the Text 1 Johann Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Human (Paris: Cerf, 2006), 153. 2 Structuralists saw the potential of linguistic theory to become a general language for the human sciences and used it as a cudgel to drive out the entrenched old guard classicism of the Sorbonne. Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 59–66 and passim. 3 “The economic situation, the end of the war in Algeria, the disengagement from political commitment, and a general disillusionment all contributed to the creation of a new style of intellectual” (Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 383). 4 These new social sciences were in search of their legitimacy, but they also needed to win over a growing intellectual audience of the fifties and sixties” (Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 380). 5 “Philosophers were shaken up by the competition from disciplines with more scientific and pragmatic ambitions . . . They reacted by appropriating the program in order to consolidate and strengthen their position on the intellectual playing field” (Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 382). 6 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 384–85.

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7 Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 153; my translation. 8 Thomas G. Pavel, The Feud of Language, trans. Linda Jordan and Thomas G. Pavel (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 38. 9 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 388. 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 3–5. 11 Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, 389. 12 Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” HHS, 197. 13 Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” HHS, 213. 14 Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” HHS, 214. 15 Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” HHS, 214. 16 Ricoeur, HHS, 204. 17 Michael Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 2010), 220. 18 Ricoeur, HHS, 217–18. 19 Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Dialectic and Dialogue in the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer,” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 334. 20 Du Texte à l’Action,” 211; my translation. 21 Barthes, S/Z, 3. 22 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 144. 23 Ricoeur, HHS, 210. 24 Ricoeur, HHS, 207. 25 Sergey Zenkin, “Social Action and Its Sense: Historical Hermeneutics after Ricoeur,” Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 90. 26 Ricoeur, HMF, 184–85. 27 Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain. 28 “Pour entreprendre cette théorisation de l’action, ce n’est pas l’histoire qui est nécessaire, ce n’est pas l’inscription de l’action qui est seule pertinent, mais de analyses sociologiques soucieuses de rendre compte du caractère événementiel de l’action, de l’action telle qu’elle se fait et non plus telle qu’elle a été faite” (Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 238). 29 “Il y a toujours une part d’adaptation (y compris dans les ‘institutions totales’), d’ ‘invention du quotidien’ pour parler comme Michel de Certeau. D’où finalement la difficulté d’avoir seulement recours à des “archives de l’action” pour comprendre ces mécanismes. D’où la justification de la présence même de l’observateur sur le terrain des interactions” (Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 238). 30 “Du côté de la ‘méthode’, il revendique la nécessité à la fois d’interpréter, en dégageant du sens latent à travers le sens manifeste des activités sociales, et

220

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

Notes d’expliquer, en suivant la démarche structural susnommée, les phénomènes sociaux comme un système de signes” (244). See also Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 245–46. Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 242. Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1981), 14. Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 256. Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 256. Ricoeur, MHF, 185. Louis Quéré, La Sociologie à l’Épreuve de l’Herméneutique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 26; my translation and emphasis. Quéré, La Sociologie à l’Épreuve de l’Herméneutique, 26. Quéré, La Sociologie à l’Épreuve de l’Herméneutique, 25–26. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 3 (354a). Johann Michel, Sociologie du Soi: Essai d’Herméneutique Appliquée (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012). Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 41. His negotiation of the particular origin and the culturally lasting significance of social actions is beautifully handled by the adoption of Ricoeur’s narrative theory to storytelling practice as it bridges the personal memory and social history of Algerian immigrants with their children, especially as it hinges on the inexpressible experience of trauma. His exposition of the reciprocal dynamism of the “typicalsingular case” in the cultural transmission of narrative shows a plausible path out of the impasse between the structuralist impulse for systemic categories and the plasticity of generic innovation. Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 34, 40. Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 45. Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 66. Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 195. Michel, Sociologie du Soi, 326, 320, 333.

4 Educators or Researchers? 1 Both rhetoric and dialectic “are in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science.” Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 3 (1354a). 2 See Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 45–59. 3 Ricoeur, CI, 54, 61. 4 Ricoeur, RR, 237.

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5 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 173. 6 Ricoeur, RR, 237. 7 Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Forgiveness,” 18. Grondin expresses the concern in a different way: “what can we then say about the comprehension of the self (by the self) and of those who live in extreme poverty and often illiterate and who do not spend their time as intellectuals reading the great works of culture?” (Grondin, “De Gadamer à Ricoeur,” 52). 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 98. 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy,” Diogenes 46, no. 182 (1998): 5. See Gadamer, TM, 20. 10 Gadamer, TM, 9–42. 11 Gadamer, “Notes on Planning for the Future,” 179. 12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 77 (1103a). 13 Gadamer, “On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy,” 6. 14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Gespräch (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 39. 15 Gadamer, Gadamer in Gespräch, 80. 16 Gadamer, Gadamer in Gespräch, 81. And he says also what this judgment is not: “But it is an error to think that‚ the experts . . . can take away from us our praxis in society and relieve us from decisions on matters we all have to deal with as political citizens working with each other” (83). 17 Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 87. 18 Ricoeur, RR, 226. 19 Ricoeur, FTTA, 131–2. 20 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 81–82. 21 Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 41. 22 Ricoeur, MHF, 229. 23 Ricoeur, MHF, 1. “Je reste troublé par l’inquiétant spectacle que donnent le trop de mémoire ici, le trop d’oubli ailleurs, pour ne rien dire de l’influence des commémorations et des abus de mémoire—et d’oubli. L’idée d’une politique de la juste mémoire est à cet égard un de mes thèmes civiques avoués.” 24 François Azouvi, “Le Thème de l’Extermination des Juifs dans la Réception de La Mémoire, l’Histoire, l’Oubli,” Paul Ricoeur: Penser le Mémoire, ed. François Dosse and Catherine Goldenstein (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 65–75.

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25 Rainer Rochlitz, “La Mémoire Privatisée,” Le Monde, June 26, 2000 : http://www. lemonde.fr/archives/article/2000/06/25/la-memoire-privatisee_3709368_1819218. html?xtmc=ricoeur&xtcr=1. 26 As I noted earlier, that way that phronesis and expertise should function in the kind of carefully modulated dialectic is often visible in Ricoeur’s own writing—a philosopher who ranged widely among interdisciplinary interests and as a professed amateur (in theology, neuroscience, etc.)—so there is a dichotomy between theory and practice in Ricoeur’s own work. 27 Ricoeur, CI, 58–59. 28 Ricoeur, “Debate with Hangs-Georg Gadamer,” RR, 235. 29 See, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Limitations of the Expert,” HansGeorg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 181–92. 30 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 95. 31 Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Dialectic and Dialogue in the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H. G. Gadamer,” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 313. 32 Gonzalez, “Dialectic and Dialogue in the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer,” 315. 33 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 167. 34 François Dosse, “Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau et l’Histoire: Entre le Dire et le Faire,” Conférence à l’École Nationale des Chartes, April 22, 2003. 35 Dosse does acknowledge that Ricoeur “exprime ses réticences vis-à-vis de ce qu’il considère comme une forme de sociologisme” (Dosse, “Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau et l’Histoire: Entre le Dire et le Faire”). 36 Michel de Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 58. 37 Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” 61. 38 Paul Ricoeur, “The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History,” The Annales School, ed. Stuart Clark (London: Routledge, 1999), 47–95; here 62. 39 Ricoeur, “The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History,” 63. 40 Ricoeur, “The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History,” 82, 83, 85. 41 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” Philosophy Today 17 (1973): 159. 42 Ricoeur, “Debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 231. 43 Ricoeur, FP, xii. 44 Ricoeur, FP, 8. 45 Ricoeur, FP, 9. 46 Ricoeur, FP, 533.

Notes 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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Ricoeur, FP, 521. Ricoeur, FP, 9. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 234, 237. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 216–17. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 217. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 217–18. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 219. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 221. Ricoeur, FP, 27. Ricoeur, RR, 225. Ricoeur, RR, 221. Ricoeur, RR, 226. Ricoeur, RR, 230. Gadamer in Ricoeur, RR, 236. Ricoeur, RR, 237. Ricoeur MHF, 333. Ximena B. Arriaga and Stuart Oskamp, eds, Addressing Community Problems: Psychological Research and Interventions (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 126.

5 Narrative Hermeneutics: A Friendly Amendment 1 Gadamer did provide an embryonic narrative theory in several places, especially wherever he writes about Dilthey’s humanistic psychology, and it is a rich trove for development. See especially TM, Part I, 2 (B) on the concept of Erlebnis. 2 TN3, 248. 3 TN3, 248. 4 Ricoeur in Reagan, Paul Ricoeur, 109. 5 HHS, 43. 6 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 94. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 4 (1970): 344. 8 TN1, 53. 9 Ricoeur in Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 132. 10 Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and Practice,” Philosophy Today 29, no. 3 (1985): 213. 11 Herbert A. Wichelns, “The Literary Criticisms of Oratory,” Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James A. Winans, ed. A. M. Drummond (New York: Century, 1925), 181–83. 12 RR, 314.

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13 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 88. 14 “Intellectual Biography,” The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court), 48. 15 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 89. 16 TN1, 53. 17 TN3, 247, 271. 18 TN3, 273. 19 TN3, 274. 20 TN1, 80. 21 Ricoeur in Reagan, Paul Ricoeur, 100. 22 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Continuity of History and the Existential Moment,” Philosophy Today 16, no. 3 (1972): 239. 23 Gadamer, “The Continuity of History and the Existential Moment,” 236. 24 TN3, 246, 211. 25 TN3, 208. 26 Ricoeur, OA, 115. 27 TN3, 81. 28 Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, 76. 29 OA, 162. 30 Soi-Même Comme un Autre, 130, 174, 182, 190, 192. 31 Soi-Même Comme un Autre, 384; OA, 333. 32 See, for example, Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen, “Narrative Tensions: Perilous and Productive,” Narrative 21, no. 2 (2011): 374–81. 33 TN2, 21. 34 TN2, 21. 35 TN2, 25. 36 Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 25. 37 TN1, 41. 38 TN1, 20. 39 Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” RR, 32. 40 Jamison, Valences of the Dialectic, 513–14. 41 Annemie Halsema, “‘The Accountable Ipse’: The Ethical Self in Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics and Butler’s Poststructuralism,” Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy, ed. Annemie Halsema and Fernanda Henriques (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 109. 42 Pol Vandevelde demonstrates how the three processes can circulate in the person— as the reader of their own life—without reference to the ordered whole of the work. In the case of Ricoeur’s own analogic example of psychoanalysis, a patient’s “story may even significantly change in the course of time while still being hers.” Pol Vandevelde, “The Challenge of the ‘Such as It Was,’” Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (New Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 152.

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43 “Transcendence within immanence” is not Ricoeur’s innovation. Husserl, for example, uses it to describe the relation between the pure Ego, our background mental awareness, and new experience. Husserl, Ideas, 157. 44 TN2, 6. 45 He invokes this phrase periodically in volumes 2 and 3. See, for instance, TN2, 6, 101; TN3, 158–59. 46 TN2, 100. 47 TN2, 160. 48 TN3, 158. 49 TN3, 242. 50 Even my formulation leaves aside the question of whether a text can be appropriated, or if a work is there to be appropriated. Should I agree with Ricoeur that the work’s independence, “although heterogeneous to interpretation, can always be dialectically overcome by the effort of a responsible reader and that, therefore, does not result in a radically autonomous text”? Eftichis Pirovolakis, “‘Donner à Lire’: Unreadable Narratives,” Literature Interpretation Theory 19 (2008): 107. 51 TN3, 230. 52 TN3, 235. 53 TN3, 4. 54 Michael C. McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Brian L. Ott and Greg Dickinson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 27. 55 TN3, 246, 247. 56 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 34. 57 A straightforward example where this complaint can be worked out is with Ricoeur’s own choice of novels about time as objects of critical inquiry in volume 2 of Time and Narrative. Precisely because these are novels about time, thoughtful readers, not just critics or theorists, are going to wrestle with the problem of time itself, as the works are asking them to do. The question is not whether second-order work takes place, but where and how. 58 TN3, 162. 59 TN3, 158. 60 TN3, 244. 61 TN3, 158.

6 Is Hermeneutics a Detour? 1 Boyd Blundell, “Refiguring Virtue,” A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham

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2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

Notes University Press, 2010), 158. Fred Dallmayr has serious reservations about the tactic of the detour as a fundamental method of thought, seeing it mainly as a process of argumentative circumlocution. So, for instance, the argument of the little ethics in Oneself as Another “tends to proceed in quasi-Hegelian fashion from one side to the opposite side, with practical wisdom finally brought onto the stage as deus ex machina.” Fred Dallmayr, “Ethics and Public Life: A Critical Tribute to Paul Ricoeur,” Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 225. In another study, Blundell describes detour and return as “the dominant pattern” of Ricoeur’s work: “The pattern is so pervasive that it shaped the trajectory of his entire career,” and Blundell detects the pattern operating at a thematic level as “detours from a hermeneutics of tradition.” Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. Paul Ricoeur, “The Status of Vorstellung in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” Meaning, Truth, and God, ed. Leroy S. Rounder (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 71–88; “le caractère pensable et pensé de tous les modes qui l’engendrent.” Paul Ricoeur, “Le Statut de la Vorstellung dans la Philosophie Hégélienne de la Religion,” Lectures 3 (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 60. “In many respects, punishment, especially if it preserves some aspect of the old idea of expiation, remains an attenuated, filtered, civilized form of vengeance. This persistence of violence as vengeance means that we only acceded to the sense of justice through the detour of the protest against injustice.” Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 131. Colin noted that Ricoeur “does not lack motives for justifying his choice of the long route,” but after surveying the philosophical reasons, Colin concludes that Ricoeur’s philosophical justifications “do not fully explain that which is implied” in his biblical language. Pierre Colin, “Herméneutique et Philosophie Réflexive,” Paul Ricoeur: Les Métamorphoses de la Raison Herméneutique, ed. Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 18. This is a comment to Charles Reagan recorded in Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work, 91. Ricoeur, OA, 17. Greisch, Paul Ricoeur: L’Itinérance du Sens, 20–21. Heidegger, BT, 51. The peak of Heidegger’s ruminations on the bond of language and reality is exemplified in his attachment to Hölderlin’s poetry. See Martin Heidegger, “Words,” On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 139–98. Paul Ricoeur, “Logique Herméneutique,” Écrits et Conférences 2: Herméneutique (Paris: Seuil, 2010), 128.

Notes 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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Ricoeur, “Logique Herméneutique,” 127. Heidegger, BT, 376. Ricoeur, CI, 6. Ricoeur also used the adjective boucle (loop), which the Larousse defines as “1. Renflement circulaire qui renforçait, au Moyen Âge, le centre de l’écu . . . 7. Fil ou lien quelconque fermé sur lui-même; 8. Itinéraire qui ramène au point de départ.” Louis Guilbert, ed., Grand Larousse de la Langue Française 1 (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971), 477. Ricoeur, OA, 199. Ricoeur, Husserl, 122. Ricoeur, OA, 169. Paul Ricoeur, “Nabert on Act and Sign,” CI, 211. Ricoeur, FP, 42–43. Ricoeur, “Nabert on Act and Sign,” 214. Ricoeur, Husserl, 3. Ricoeur, Husserl, 41. See also 9. Ricoeur, Husserl, 68–81. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 93–94. Ricoeur, FP, 43–44. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 312. Ricoeur, FM, 143. Ricoeur, SE, 9. Ricoeur, SE, 138. Ricoeur, SE, 5. “cette ‘repetition’ . . . n’est déjà plus religion vécue et . . . n’est pas encore philosophie.” Ricoeur, PV2, 168. SE, 11. Ricoeur, PV2, 174. Ricoeur, PV2, 171. Ricoeur, PV2, 169. Ricoeur, SE, 5. Ricoeur, PV2, 170. Ricoeur, SE, 5; PV2, 169. Ricoeur, PV2, 172. Ricoeur SE, 9. Ricoeur, FP, 3. Ricoeur, FP, 43–44. Ricoeur, FP, 43–44. Ricoeur, FP, 47.

228 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Notes Ricoeur, FP, 45; De l’Interprétation: Essai sur Freud, 55. Ricoeur, FP, 7. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 69. Ricoeur describes this intention as “the denial of the priority of the cogito” (le déni de priorité du Cogito). CI, 223; CdI, 222. Heidegger, BT, 51. Greisch, Le Cogito Herméneutique, 63. Dauenhauer, “History’s Sources: Reflections on Heidegger and Ricoeur,” 236. Ricoeur, CI, 6. Ricoeur, CI, 11. Heidegger, BT, 194, 191. Ricoeur, CI, 10; CdI, 14. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 72, 76, 92, 121, 130. Jervolino is of this opinion: “If there is something forced in [Ricoeur’s] interpretation, the force is truly tempered, in this case, with a caritas which seeks, on the basis of a textual reading neither arbitrary nor rash to bring together two positions that could otherwise readily have been frozen into opposition with no chance of mediation.” Domenico Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics, trans. Gordon Poole (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1984), 62. Ricoeur, CI, 229. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures 2, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 9, 10. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, 68. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First part, question 93, Art. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros. Ed, 1947). http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/aquinas-the-summa-theologica-of-st-thomasaquinas-part-i-qq-lxxv-_cii-vol-4-treatise-on-man. Ricoeur, FS, 262, 268. Ricoeur, FM, 141. Ricoeur, FS, 229. Ricoeur, HT, 305. Ricoeur, FM, 79. Ricoeur, HT, 311. Ricoeur, OA, 22. Ricoeur, FS, 65. Ricoeur, CI, 222. Ricoeur, FP, 23. Ricoeur, FM, 18. Ricoeur, CI, 385.

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Ricoeur, OA, 115. Ricoeur, TN3, 115. Ricoeur, OA, 181. Ricoeur, OA, 181. Olivier Mongin interviewed in Caroline Reussner, Paul Ricoeur: Philosophe de Tous les Dialogues (Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 2007), DVD, disc 2, approx. 50 minutes in. 79 “Is it not better, then, to begin with the derived forms of understanding and to show in them the signs of their derivation?” Ricoeur, CI, 10. 80 Ricoeur, Living up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8. 81 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 19. 74 75 76 77 78

7 The Treacherous Path from Promise to Institution 1 Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, 115–16. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Truth of the Word,” The Specter of Relativism, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 140–41; GW, 8:42. 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge University Press 1986), 109. 4 Gadamer, TM, 127. 5 Gadamer, TM, 126–27; WM, 131–32. 6 Ricoeur, OA, 273. Abel makes the same point about what he calls “the interpretive imagination” in Ricoeur’s theory of prudential judgment. Olivier Abel, Paul Ricoeur: La Promesse et la Règle (Paris: Michalon, 1996), 94–104. 7 Ricoeur, OA, 268. 8 Ricoeur, OA, 268. 9 Ricoeur, OA, 268. 10 Ricoeur, OA, 165. 11 Ricoeur, OA, 148. 12 Ricoeur, FTTA, 217. 13 Ricoeur, OA, 124. 14 Ricoeur, FTTA, 217. 15 Jean Greisch, Paul Ricoeur: Poetics and Religion (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2011), 15. 16 Paul Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 3 (1978): 176. 17 Ricoeur, MHF, 487–88.

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18 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 182. 19 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 181. 20 Alfred Schutz, “Indirect Social Relationships,” On Phenomenology and Social Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 218–35. 21 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 179. 22 “[T]he failure of every effort . . . to draw the social and the political from the immediate I-you relation . . . This dream of immediacy, of face-to-face relations without the intermediary of a neutral term . . . is the dream that dialogue should be the measure for every human relation. But we also know that even the most intimate dialogical relation is possible only on the basis of institutions, the basis of an order which assures the tranquility of and which protects the intimacy of any face-to-face relation” (Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 181). 23 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 187. 24 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 187. 25 Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation,” 194. 26 Ricoeur, OA, 268. 27 Ricoeur, OA, 7. 28 Ricoeur, The Just, 6. 29 Paul Ricoeur, “A Critique of B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 46–67. 30 Gadamer, TM, 276. 31 The apocryphal conversation between Washington and Jefferson on the need for a Senate: “Why,” said Washington, “did you just now pour that coffee into your saucer before drinking it?” “To cool it,” said Jefferson; “my throat is not made of brass.” “Even so,” said Washington, “we pour our legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it.” 32 Ricoeur, “A Critique of B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” 57. 33 Ricoeur, FTTA, 204. 34 Ricoeur, FTTA, 204. 35 Ricoeur, FTTA, 205. 36 Ricoeur, FTTA, 206. 37 So, for instance, the prudence of the trickster is a crucial element in de Certeau. Prudence has a kind of fluidity and range because of its fundamental unwillingness to harden into a dogmatism. 38 I will use the German word Sprache for this explication because along of the words we have for language, it does not sever its primal connection to living speech and does not objectify itself as a synchronic structure. This objectification has always been the problem with the English word “language” and its use as a translation of Sprache.

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39 Paul Ricoeur, “The Socius and the Neighbor,” History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 109. 40 Heidegger, BT, 279. 41 Ricoeur, The Just, 134. 42 Ricoeur, The Just, 130. 43 Ricoeur, MHF, 458. 44 Ricoeur, The Just, 5. Within Ricoeur’s construct even basic human rights do not exist outside the orbit of citizenship: “Only the relation to the third, situated in the background of the relation to the you, gives us a basis for the institutional mediation required by the constitution of a real subject of rights—in other words, of a citizen” (5). 45 “Pour mener l’analyse concrète des rapports de pouvoir, il faut abandonner le modèle juridique de la souveraineté.” Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 3, 1976–79, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard), 124. 46 Ricoeur, FTTA, 333. 47 Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 228. 48 It is one of the rare cases where the analysis remains largely unchanged from the beginning to the end of his career. Here is the same point in 1957: “In the last analysis, it is no longer the institution which justifies violence, it is violence which engenders the institution by redistributing power among States and classes.” Ricoeur, “State and Violence,” HT, 241. 49 Ricoeur, OA, 256, 257. 50 Ricoeur, HT, 225. 51 Ernesto Laclau, “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 10.

8 Turning Hermeneutics toward Kant 1 The key texts of this controversy are Robert Lévy, “Sur la Passade Pétainiste de Paul Ricoeur : Un Bref Épisode?,” Sens Public, March 26, 2008. https://www.senspublic.org/article537.html?lang=fr; Abel’s short response to Lévy’s accusation, Olivier Abel, “Réponse à Robert Lévy,” Sens Public, April. 2009. http://olivierabel. fr/ricoeur/reponse-a-robert-levy.php; François Dosse’s addendum to his Ricoeur biography, François Dose, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie (1913–2005), edition revue et augmentée (Paris: La Découverte Poche, 2008); Ricoeur’s own original comments about the writings, Paul Ricoeur, “Note sur des Paroles de Prisonniers,” l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, Fonds Ricoeur, October 17, 1994; and the archived writings themselves that appeared in l’Unité Française, Paul Ricoeur, attr., “Paroles de Prisonniers,” L’Unité Française, Spring 1941. The Fonds Ricoeur has a

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3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19

Notes link to key texts in this dispute: http://www.fondsricoeur.fr/fr/pages/inventaire-desarchives.html. Richard Wolin, “Paul Ricoeur as Another: How a Great Philosopher Wrestled With His Younger Self,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2005. https://www. chronicle.com/article/Paul-Ricoeur-as-Another-How-a/19018. Wolin, “Paul Ricoeur as Another,” Chronicle of Higher Education, unpaginated. I am indebted to Andreea Ritivoi for bringing this issue forward in a panel at the 2015 International Conference on Narrative in Chicago. Wolin notes this passage and concedes the point. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), 381–95. The Gifford Lectures on which the book was based were given in 1986, and the book was published in France in 1989. Since Gadamer attended some of Ricoeur’s Gifford lectures, it may be that his essay was a response to Ricoeur’s thesis. Ricoeur, OA, 206. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Ontological Problem of Value,” Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 62. Gadamer, “The Ontological Problem of Value,” 62. Gadamer, “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” 150. Gadamer, “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, 30. Gadamer, “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” 150. See also Gadamer, “The Ontological Problem of Value,” 72–73. See also Gadamer, “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy,” 115. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics,” Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, 139. On the subject of political friendship, a subject that has engaged many European thinkers since Carl Schmitt’s audacious thesis, Derrida has left a far more probing reflection that establishes, I think, a robust interrogation against which Gadamer’s statement should be tested. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). Paul Ricoeur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” CI, 412. Whether Ricoeur’s interpretations of Kant are what Gadamer referred to as “powerful misreadings” or creditable appropriations is for Kantian scholars to determine (Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, 59). Ricoeur, OA, 222. Ricoeur, OA, 213. Ricoeur’s effort to read pathos into the rational structure of Kant’s moral theory is outside the mainstream of current Kantian theory. There are exceptions. Peonidis argues for a place for sympathy as a moral emotion in Kant. Filimon Peonnidis, Autonomy and Sympathy: A Post-Kantian Moral Image (Lanham, MD: University

Notes

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

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Press, of America, 2005), 44–46. Uleman views the Kantian will as having “too many different parts and pieces, interacting in too many different ways” to be explained in terms of reason alone, and reads desire as an inextricable part of the moral intention. Jennifer K. Uleman, An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23–37. Guevara sees a conative as well as cognitive function in the motive structure of pure practical reason against the common view “that we can and must transcend all motivational influence, favorable or unfavorable to morality.” Daniel Guevara, Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 1. The late Kant/Ricoeur scholar Pamela Anderson reminded us of Ricoeur’s own famous recognition of the conflict of interpretations, asked without resolution whether Ricoeur followed “ ‘the transcendental Kant’ or ‘the Kant of practical reason,’ ” but also found a fundamental congruence with Kant’s political project “in which human beings may freely become responsible subjects.” Pamela S. Anderson, Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993), 128, 126. Ricoeur, OA, 262. Ricoeur, OA, 242. Ricoeur, OA, 257. Ricoeur, OA, 170. Paul Ricoeur, “Culpabilité Tragique et Culpabilité Biblique,” Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 33, no. 4 (1953): 285–307. Ricoeur, OA, 178. Ricoeur, OA, 180. Ricoeur, OA, 215. Paul Ricoeur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” FS, 211. Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 47. Ricoeur, OA, 218. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 230. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 21. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 28. Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” HT, 256–57. Pierre Colin, “Herméneutique et Philosophie Réflexive,” Paul Ricoeur: Les Métamorphoses de la Raison Herméneutique, ed. Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 34. FM, xlii. Ricoeur, FM, xlix. Ricoeur, FM, 51.

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39 Ricoeur, FM, 1. 40 Ricoeur, FM, 28. 41 Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la Volonté II: Finitude et Culpabiltié (Paris: Aubier, 1960), 149–62; FM, 133–46. 42 Ricoeur, FM, 146. 43 Ricoeur, FM, 26. 44 Gadamer, TM, 443. 45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman K. Smit (London: Macmillan, 1968), 184. 46 Ricoeur, FM, 71–72. 47 Ricoeur, FM, 139. 48 Ricoeur, FM, 134, 143. 49 Gadamer had submitted an outline of Truth and Method in 1956, and then published the full German text in 1960. Ricoeur published Fallible Man in 1960. 50 Paul Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 3 (1978): 175–92; here 176. 51 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), 107. 52 Foucault’s deep suspicion of any regulatory apparatus such as “the form of the court” led him to think justice needed to discover new forms “by discussion, by information,” remaining fluid and responsive to a kind of popular sovereignty. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowedge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 28–31. 53 Ricoeur, HT, 322.

9 Hermeneutics and the Political 1 Ricoeur, LIU, 234. 2 “Every social group . . . creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5. 3 His was a spirit of ecumenism; to approach one person’s “ideas with the same critical attention that we give any other thinker . . . We take the good where we find it” (Ricoeur, LIU, 198). 4 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” 165. 5 Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 265. 6 Ricoeur, FM, 112.

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7 Ricoeur, FM, 113. 8 Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sens d’une Vie, 42. 9 Paul Ricoeur, Être 4 (March 10, 1937): 4, qtd in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sens d’une Vie, 49. 10 Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sens d’une Vie, 36. 11 Paul Ricoeur, qtd in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sens d’une Vie, 194. 12 Ricoeur, HT, 231. 13 See Dosse, “Le Pacifisme et Ses Limites,” Paul Ricoeur: Les Sense d’une Vie, 58–67. See also Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 16. 14 Ricoeur, “Non-violent Man and History,” HT, 145. 15 HT, 229, 232. 16 Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sense d’une Vie, 33. 17 “If Mounier’s influence was very important for Ricoeur, one must nevertheless not regard him as a follower” (Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sens d’une Vie, 40). 18 Ricoeur, HT, 136. 19 Ricoeur will distance himself from Mounier’s commitment to the “combatant who . . . discerns so as to act and who acts so as to discern” (146). If the personalist promotes action “over the tendency to elucidate significations,” Ricoeur’s hermeneutic turn would be oriented to a second-order discourse on the role of signification itself (157). 20 Ricoeur, HT, 144. 21 Ricoeur, HT, 161. 22 Paul Ricoeur in the preface to Agnès Rochefort-Turquin, Socialistes parce que Chrétiens (Paris: Cerfs, 1986), qtd in Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Le Sense d’une Vie, 57. 23 Ricoeur, HT, 152. 24 “It is true that my subsequent reflections in political philosophy have stemmed from this initial text” (Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 95). 25 “Instead of thinking about liberty in terms of control the political philosophy of Marxism thinks about freedom in terms of power.” Paul Ricoeur “Le Paradoxe de la Liberté Politique,” La Liberté (Montreal: Institute Canadien des Affaires Publiques, 1959), 53. 26 Mouffe’s “agonism” project acknowledges that relations “of authority and power cannot completely disappear, and it is important to abandon the myth of a transparent society . . . A project of radical and plural democracy, on the contrary, requires the existence of multiplicity, of plurality, and of conflict, and sees in them the raison d’être of politics.” Chantal Mouffe, “Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?” trans. Paul Holdengräber, Social Text 21 (1989): 41. Laclau berates Žižek for authorizing “[o]nly a violent, head-on confrontation with the enemy as it is conceived as a legitimate action.” Ernesto Laclau, “Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 679.

236 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

Notes Ricoeur, HT, 184. Ricoeur, HT, 176; Critique and Conviction, 101. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 105. Ricoeur, HT, 116. Ricoeur, HT, 243. Paul Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” Le Monde, 9, June 9, 11, and 12, 1968; republished in Ricoeur, Lectures I (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 381. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 9, 11. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 397. Johann Michel, Ricoeur et Ses Contemporains (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 16, 117. Ricoeur, HT, 261. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 97. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 105. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 381. He will later characterize the introduction of this thesis as “abrupt,” and indeed it feels this way. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 394. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 380. Paul Ricoeur, “Faire l’Université,” Lectures I, 382. Ricoeur, “Réforme et Révolution dans l’Université,” 382. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 477–78. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 475. See Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work, 38. Ricoeur, “Tâches de l’Éducateur Politique,” Lectures I, 248–49. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 500, 517. Michel Winock, qtd by Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: La Sens d’une Vie, 519. Ricoeur develops a schematism to describe this homeostasis in “Ideology and Utopia” (Ricoeur, FTTA, 308–24). George Taylor discerns this balancing act in Ricoeur’s interpretation of Marx: “Ricoeur argues that Marx’s position is a challenge not only to the idealism of the Young Hegelians but also to another extreme prominent in later Marxism that sees anonymous structural forces—class, capital—as the active agents in history . . . a more comprehensive interpretation discerns that Marx mediates between objectivist and idealist perspectives. Marx’s great discovery in The German Ideology, says Ricoeur, is the complex notion of individuals in their material conditions” (Taylor in Ricoeur, LIU, xii). For a description of this environment, see Dosse, History of Structuralism 2, 107–40. Ricoeur, LIU, 198. Ricoeur, LIU, 273.

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54 For an account of the state of ideology critique, see Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner, “Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis? Zizek against Foucault? European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 2 (2007): 141–59. 55 LIU, 207. 56 Habermas from Knowledge and Human Interests, qtd in Ricoeur, LIU, 227. 57 Ricoeur, LIU, 162. 58 Ricoeur, LIU, 171. 59 Ricoeur, LIU, 172. 60 Ricoeur, LIU, 119. 61 Ricoeur, FTTA, 259. 62 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” 161. 63 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” 160. 64 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” 161. 65 George Taylor, “Delineating Ricoeur’s Concept of Utopia,” Social Imaginaries 3, no. 1 (2017): 59. 66 “Quel Éthos Nouveau Pour l’Europe?,” Imaginer l’Europe, ed. Peter Koslowski (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), 107–16; “Cultures, du Deuil à la Traduction,” Le Monde, May 24, 2004; Entretien, “Paul Ricoeur. Agir, Dit-Il,” Politis, October 7, 1988. 67 David Pellauer traces the emerging theme of justice through Ricoeur’s later work in “Looking for the Just,” Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 132–43. 68 Ricoeur, OA, 259. 69 “Dans l’oeuvre de Paul Ricoeur, les travaux qui relevant d’une réflexion politique n’appartiennent pas à une période déterminé de son parcours philosophique. Ils apparaissent bien advantage comme une constant récurrente de l’exercise de la pensée.” See also Marc Crépon “Du ‘Paradoxe Politique’ à la Question des Appartenances,” L’Herne Ricoeur (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2004), 307. 70 Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, “Introduction,” A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 5–6.

Conclusion: A General Hermeneutics after Ricoeur 1 I borrow this useful phrase from Joseph Dunne’s Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 2 I use the term “paradigm” here to mean a framework of normative presuppositions, ways of thinking, and worldview of a discursive community. 3 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures 2, 99.

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4 The concentrated set of essays and lectures on this thesis are collected in Part 3 of On Education, Poetry, and History. 5 Edward W. Said, “The Text, the World, the Critic,” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 8, no. 2 (1975), 3–5. 6 See Jean Greisch, “Testimony and Attestation,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1990), 81–98. 7 I am not thinking here so much of the rich critical literature on the form of the court inspired by Foucault, but rather of the speculations on the mechanisms of judgment in radical democracy by people like Mouffe and Butler. 8 Le Juste 1 (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 12, 195; The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), xiii, 134. 9 Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 86, 87, 31. 10 Élodie Boublil, “Instaurer le ‘Juste Distance’: Autonomie, Justice et Vulnérabilité dans la Pensée de Paul Ricoeur,” Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 21. 11 Ricoeur, The Just, 13–19. 12 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Sage, 2002), 279–80. 13 Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting,” Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. R. Kearney and M. Dooley (New York: Routledge, 1999), 11. 14 Paul Ricoeur, “Fragility and Responsibility,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, 15–16. 15 Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 57. 16 Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke (New York: Continuum, 2004), 58. 17 John Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27. 18 See William Schweiker on the self/other debate between Ricoeur and Levinas, “Paul Ricoeur and the Prospects of a New Humanism,” 97–98. 19 OA, 296. 20 Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur, Karl Jaspers et le Philosophie de l’Existence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1949), 378, quoted in Lorenzo Altieri, “Oneself as Another: Following the Thread of Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition,” Paul Ricoeur: Honoring and Continuing the Work, ed. Farhang Erfani (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 145. 21 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 49. 22 I recommend in particular his essay “Socius and Neighbor.”

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Index Abel, Olivier 229 n.6 agency 15–17, 22, 32–3, 68, 118, 127–8, 145–6, 150, 160, 170, 175–6, 208–9, 214 n.26 Althusser, Louis 197–8 Anderson, Pamela 233 n.19 anthropology 85, 122, 171 Christian anthropology 168, 173 hermeneutic anthropology 63–71, 170 philosophical anthropology 168, 173 structuralist anthropology 26 Antigone 201 Arendt, Hannah 187, 215 n.33 Aristotle 16, 20, 67 and ethics 25, 75, 143, 160–1, 163, 171 and metaphysics 39–40 and poetics 102, 109 and rhetoric 67, 73, 92, 220 n.1 Augustine of Hippo 62, 110, 141 Barth, Karl 183 Barthes, Roland 34, 53, 58–60 Bible, the see Scripture Blundell, Boyd 226 n.1 Bultmann, Rudolph 14, 121 Butler, Judith 202 Cartesianism 16, 114, 115, 118, 120, 170 Certeau, Michel de 65, 81–3, 219 n.37 Clairemont Symposium 93 Cluberg, Johannes 4 Colin, Pierre 114, 169, 226 n.4 criticism, literary 23–50, 76 Dallmayr, Fred 226 n.1 Derrida, Jacques 127, 232 n.15 detour 4, 13–14, 21, 81, 84, 89, 90, 113–38, 213 n.12, 226 n.1 dialogue 54, 94 and contestation 200, 207 democratic 92 as dialectic 54

dialogic circle 67, 69, 78, 163 dialogic comportment/openness 20, 37, 70, 177, 183, 192 dialogic consciousness 2–3, 19, 90 dialogic experience 92 dialogic situation 208 dialogic structure 160 dialogic understanding 164 dialogism 143 face-to-face 71, 81, 146, 190 Gadamerian 14, 17, 74, 79, 83, 86, 163, 199 history as 92 idealism 93, 146, 158, 176, 193, 230 n.22 prudential 89–90, 139 Socratic 80 Dilthey, Wilhelm 4, 54, 130, 223 n.1 disproportion 132, 170–2, 202 dissoi logoi 177, 198 agonism 197, 200 and belonging 11–12, 14, 17, 69, 70, 71, 74, 97, 153, 154, 156, 158, 184, 208 controversia 209 distance historical 69, 91, 92, 145, 196, 199 just 208 reflective 1, 10, 11, 14, 15, 26, 55, 83, 132, 133, 150, 163, 171, 180, 198 scientific 55, 61, 80, 89 distentio/intentio animi 112, 134, 141 Dosse, François 5, 54, 82, 182, 194, 215 n.36, 216 n.10 Dufrenne, Mikel 209 Dunne, Joseph 137 EHESS 24, 27, 38, 78 enchévetrement 101 evil 7, 16–19, 121, 123, 158, 161–77, 189, 209 explanation (explication) 17, 24–5, 27, 39, 42–9, 54–69, 78, 84, 89–94, 96, 123–5, 129, 130, 149, 205, 213 n.7, 217 n.35

250 Figal, Günter 49 Foucault, Michel 53, 57, 82, 153–6, 180, 189, 194, 234 n.52, 238 n.6 Frank, Manfred 24 Freire, Paolo 81 Freud, Sigmund 84–5, 86, 89, 122, 124–7, 168, 210 Geertz, Clifford 63, 76, 195 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft 147 general education (enkyklios paideia) 2–8, 18, 21–2, 79, 93, 174, 211 n.9 Genette, Gérard 43–8, 58–9 Goldenstein, Catherine 76–7 Gonzalez, Francesco 59, 80–1 Gramsci, Antonio 179, 234 n.2 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 23–49, 58–60, 216 n.3, 216 n.18, 216 n.19, 217 n.27 Greisch, Jean 6, 10, 114, 127–8, 145, 213–14 n.13 Grondin, Jean 4, 9–22, 212 n.18, 221 n.7 Habermas, Jürgen 9, 67, 83, 180, 195–9, 215 n.37 Hegel, Georg W. 5, 11, 16, 56, 65, 87–8, 113, 119 (the negative), 145–51, 158, 160, 175, 190, 236 Heidegger, Martin 127–30 and Aristotle 158 and care 153 and the direct route 4, 21, 99, 115–16, 127, 213 n.7 and enowning 90 and finitude 60, 87 and forehaving 115 and fundamental ontology 11, 13, 96 and the hermeneutics 12, 52, 66, 88, 96, 114 and language 213 n.7, 226 n.9 and the other 134 and the political 6 Ricoeur’s opposition to 6, 13–14 and self-showing 126–7 and time 49, 131 and withdrawal 120 Hënault, Anne 41 hermeneutica generalis 1–3, 18, 21, 74–86 hermeneutic circle 4, 12, 95, 96, 103, 131, 136, 137, 197 Holocaust 77–8, 177, 200

Index humanities, the 25, 52–3 humanism Christian 20 classical 88 neohumanism 7 Renaissance 3, 7 Husserl, Edmund 13, 14, 60, 65 gegenwärtigen 119–21, 132, 150, 166, 167, 175 Rückfrage 73, 81, 101 identity 38, 68, 78, 92, 144, 152 communal 95, 102 crisis of 103, 125 discursive 10, 15, 118–19 hermeneutic 4, 13, 71, 145, 152 narrative 27, 68–70, 95–102, 106, 110, 112, 134, 159, 163 personal 133–4, 143 ideology and utopia, dialectic of 186, 195– 7, 200, 202, 207, 210, 236 n.50 institution, the 58, 82, 92, 158, 166, 175, 192, 201, 203 cultural institutions 57 democratic institutions 193 as detour 130, 175 and evil 116 institutional actor 194 institutional authority 195 institutional hierarchy 79, 195, 202 institutional reform 181, 189 just institutions 2, 179, 186, 189, 207–10 and the law 200, 202 and the personal 1, 106, 135, 139–56, 184, 207 political institutions 189 total institution 63 invention (heuresis) 40, 60, 64, 74, 113, 136, 174 Jameson, Frederic 2, 7, 103, 209 Jasper, Karl 209, 215 n.33 Jervolino, Domenico 228 n.57 justice 32, 36, 98, 143, 154, 156, 177, 179–203, 207, 208, 209, 226 n.3, 234 n.52, 237 n.67 Kant, Immanuel and autonomy 142

Index and the categorical imperative 147–8, 199, 201, 215 n.37 and critique 4 and epistemology 129, 133 and justice 164–6 and moral theory 5, 16–17, 142–3, 147– 51, 157–77, 232 n.19, 232 n.19 and neo-Kantianism 52 and practical philosophy, and the schema 38, 205 Laclau, Ernesto/Mouffe, Chantal 156, 186, 197, 235 n.26 language 13–14, 17, 60, 127–8, 132–3, 140–1, 145–6, 148–52, 226 n.9, 230 n.38 and action 56 and deception 12 and evil 172 and the linguistic turn 17, 115 and norms 64, 84, 90 ordinary language 100 philosophy of language 124, 126, 206 and semiotics 29, 37 and transcendence 172–4, 199, 208, et passim Lévi-Strauss, Claude 42, 58, 59, 121 Lévy, Marc 158 Luther, Martin 3, 79, 141 Madison, Gary 10, 18 Maupassant, Guy de 27, 30–7 May 1968 164, 189–91 McGee, Michael C. 107 Melanchthon, Philip 3, 211 n.9 method 3–21, 73, 76, 80–92, 114, 118, 125, 126, 135, 136, 162, 168, 199, 200, 205, 206, 226 n.1 Genette 44–8 Greimas 26–43 scientific 4, 73, 128 textual 51–72 Michel, Johann 63–71 mimesis 98, 102, 103, 110, 112 refiguration (mimesis3) 104 representation 56, 70, 76, 98, 99, 104, 110, 117, 118, 155, 156, 209 representation, political 169, 200, 210 triple mimesis 98, 100 Misgeld, Dieter 19–20

251

Mounier, Emmanuel 5, 183–6, 235 n.17 myth 121–4, 167, 169 Nabert, Jean 5, 13, 114, 117–18 Nanterre 188, 192–4, 213 n.12 narrative 73–84 meta-narrative 70, 196 narrative acts 69 narrative condensation 31 narrative convention 32–3 narrative enunciation 47 narrative hermeneutics 95–112 narrative temporality 44, 134 narrative understanding 38, 96 narrative voice 44, 70 (see also Greimas, and identity) National Socialism 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich 86–9, 174, 177 norms, Sittlichkeit 59, 64, 147, 148, 159, 166, 187, 198, 237 n.2 Pellauer, David 15 perspective (scopus) 2, 15, 69, 91, 104, 120, 163, 171, 174, 177, 198 phenomenology 5, 14–15, 52, 96, 114–15, 119–21, 128, 130, 146, 167, 170, 180 Piercey, Robert 9 Pirovolaki, Eftichis 214 n.26 Plato 12, 13, 74, 92, 168 political, the 16–20, 91–2 and hermeneutics 19–20, 179–203 the personal and the political 139, 149 political hermeneutics 22 political judgment 98 the political paradox 186, 195, 202 political theory 146 promise, the 128, 139–56, 207 Propp, Vladimir 24, 33, 34 Protestantism 3, 74, 79, 188 Proust, Marcel 43–8 prudence 15, 17, 76, 88 psychoanalysis 80, 83–6, 89, 124, 126, 224 n.42 Quéré, Louis 63–71 radical democracy 181, 238 n.6 reference 13, 98, 104, 108, 112 representation see mimesis

252 rhetoric 3–4, 7, 10, 40, 44–6, 62, 67, 73–5, 92, 97, 115, 136, 168, 172–7, 201, 207–8, 212 n.9, 220 n.1 Rochlitz, Rainer 77–8 Saussure, Ferdinand de 210 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 3, 4, 7 Schutz, Alfred 146 Schweiker, William 7, 209 Scripture 3, 40, 58, 62, 76, 79, 131, 169, 173 self, selfhood 11–17, 46, 68, 98, 101, 118, 121, 124–9, 131–5, 144, 149, 163–7, 171, 181, 207, 209, 221 n.7 self-understanding 39, 70, 76, 116, 120, 212 n.2 semiotics 13, 23–49, 76, 84, 210, 216 n.18, 216 n.20 Skinner, B. F. 149 sociology 51, 56, 60–3, 63–71, 82, 90, 92, 150, 151, 189, 219 n.28, 222 n.35 structuralism 51–4, 58, 89 (see also Greimas and Genette) symbol 5, 26, 35–7, 84–5, 121–7, 168–70, 173, 199, 208, 213 n.13 Taylor, George 200, 236 n.50 temporality see narrative temporality text and action 51–71, 89 as configuration 98, 102 cultural texts 57, 84 as dialogue partner 100, 102 eminent text 30, 37, 97 fixed inscription 12, 27, 57, 61, 96, 146 Greimasian textual analysis 23–50, 62

Index historical text 105 intention (authorial) 43, 101 as life 107, 133 literary text 39, 61, 89, 97–8, 112 narrative text 30, 35, 46, 107 as object 54, 57, 62, 69, 80, 87, 199, 206 particular text 47, 59, 84 proto-text 146 quasi-text 99, 101 textual distance 11 textual interpretation/analysis 10, 18, 21, 34, 43, 66–8, 76, 84, 96 textual reception 38, 41, 76, 104, 110, 225 n.50 as whole 32–3, 43, 101–2, 107, 107–11 as work 98, 106 as world 58, 99–100, 108, 110, 145 transcendence/immanence 5, 14, 104–5, 109, 119, 123, 132, 136, 172, 173, 206, 225 n.43 university, the 1, 189–92, 192, 206 French 190 German 18, 53 system 25, 188, 191, 214 n.24 Vandevelde, Pol 224 n.42 violence 146, 153, 182–3, 188, 191, 195, 226 n.3 state violence 154–5, 179, 186–7, 189, 193, 200, 202, 231 n.48 Weber, Max 63, 65, 66, 150, 155, 179, 195 Wichelns, Herbert 97 Wolin, Richard 157–8, 175–7, 215 n.36