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ERMENEUTIC

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EGACY

The supposed opposition between sympathy and history began with Schleier-

macher’s notion of “divination,” the reader’s intuitive grasp of the mind of the

author. Dilthey attempted to historicize Schleiermacher’s psychologistic ap-

proach. Heidegger moved the hermeneutic problem from the epistemological

to the ontological level. Gadamer emphasized that the individual subject is

subordinated to the play within historical conversation. Historical conversation

is always more comprehensive than the individual horizons of the author, the

text, and the interpreter. Here Gadamer’s otherness of the conversational part-

ner meets Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, particularly as developed in One-

self as Another.

Ricoeur’s work has been at the cutting edge of phenomenology and philo-

sophical hermeneutics for a number of years. For him, phenomenology and

hermeneutics presuppose each other. Following Husserl’s eidetic phenomenol-

ogy, and particularly Gadamer’s lingually oriented hermeneutics, Ricoeur per-

ceives the ontological basis of understanding in language. His hermeneutic

theory of interpretation emphasizes pre-lingual experience and attempts to dis-

close the meaning of Dasein. As with Gadamer, preconceptions or prejudices

are not obstacles to understanding, but its very condition. Ricoeur argues that

there is no interpretation without preconceptions.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of selfhood thematizes personal identity as narrative

identity, addressing the issues of alterity and sameness. Here his semantics of

identity critically engages phenomenology. The hermeneutic philosophy em-

barked upon by him offers new ways of interpreting ourselves in terms of oth-

erness. Navigating a winding path between ontological and ethical categories

of otherness, his diacritical hermeneutics makes us more hospitable to others,

which represents a real transformation from text to action. His hermeneutics of

testimony situates him within the Christian tradition. Ricoeur’s original and

provocative contributions continue to be an inspiration to theology. His work

on the philosophical interpretation of the Bible has become indispensable to

the study of religion.

Ricoeur is critically open to sign, symbol, metaphor, and narrative and exhaus-

tively investigates the relationship between hermeneutics (interpretation) and

deconstruction (textual reading). The formation of new signification in meta-

phor relies on the human imaginative experience of being-in-the-world. Mod-

ern hermeneutics situates understanding in history. Classical physics had also

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started out from a strict division between subject and object, presupposing that

the physicist can separate himself from his experimental arrangements. Quan-

tum physics has exposed the fallacy in this assumption.

Ricoeur is also dedicated to the social sciences. Following Gadamer, Ricoeur’s

hermeneutics incorporates a critique of ideology. Critical theory is a necessary

complement to philosophical hermeneutics. When interpreting a text, we must

adopt a critical self-understanding, which mediates between the interpreter’s

immediate horizons and the emerging horizon: a dialectic between the hori-

zons of the text and the reader. A critical distanciation is a necessary require-

ment for understanding the text. The tension between the “is like” and “is not”

elements projects a whole world in front of the text. Our interaction with the

world in front of the text is a search for a metaphor-faith beyond demythologi-

zation, a second naivete beyond iconoclasm.

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 Ricoeur emphasizes the role of

language and historical critique, and the poetic performance of reference. He

redirects his critical hermeneutics toward poetic hermeneutics. The implicit

question to which the text responds is not the same question as the one opened

up by the text. The reading and interpreting subject has to lose one’s initial

naiveté through criticism. On that condition, poetic hermeneutics can propose

a second naiveté.

The hermeneutic task of assigning functional roles to words and symbols is

dedicated to uncovering the meanings and desires (particularly those with many

layers of meaning – polysemy) hidden behind symbols. Demythologization,

i.e., the recovery of hidden meanings from symbols, and demystification, i.e.,

the destruction of the symbols by revealing their illusionary character or false-

hood, are two major psycho-analytical venues visited by Ricoeur’s phenom-

enological hermeneutics. The critical question is, whether a hermeneutic re-

construction of psychoanalytic theory and therapy can offer us a bridge be-

tween the natural and the social sciences.

Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium is a

celebration of thinking. As is invariably the case, this volume addresses only

some aspects of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics; there is still much more that remains

to be covered in the main body of Ricoeur’s prolific and multi-faceted work.

Presenting a number of perspectives on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics we emphasize

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 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning,

trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

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