SIX

Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics
of the Subject

“Le symbole donne à penser; The symbol gives rise to thought,” Paul Ricoeur wrote in the conclusion to his book The Symbolism of Evil. The hermeneutical reflections that he has pursued now for several decades on the various cultural signs, symbols, and texts that reveal and constitute the meaning of human existence themselves give rise to thought, are thought-provoking. It is the purpose of this essay to explore some of the more notable aspects of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical attempt to elucidate the dimensions of human subjectivity.

To think, in the proper sense of the term, always means to think anew, to think afresh. One of Ricoeur’s chief contributions to philosophy in our time is the way in which he had enabled us to think afresh that age-old and central question of philosophy which is ourselves, the question as to what it means to be a thinking, reflective subject. The existing individual, the human subject, has always been the focal point of Ricoeur’s philosophical inquiries, coming as he does out of the tradition of French reflexive philosophy initiated by Descartes and represented in the twentieth century by his teacher, Jean Nabert. “When we say philosophy is reflection,” he writes, “we mean, assuredly, self-reflection.” Whence Ricoeur’s guiding question: “Therefore, what does Reflection signify? What does the Self of self-reflection signify?”¹ Ricoeur’s approach to subjectivity has been both phenomenological and hermeneutical—phenomenological, in that it seeks to clarify through reflective analysis that which is immediately and indubitably given to consciousness: the fact of the subject’s own existence, the “mineness” characteristic of existence; hermeneutical, in that this reflective analysis is not descriptive in an intuitive or introspective sort of way but is indirect and interpretive and is, moveover, motivated by the basic goal of all hermeneutics: a heightened self-understanding. As Ricoeur wrote in the early 1980s in an account he gave of his philosophizing:

The two basic notions in Ricoeur’s philosophizing could be said to be meaning and existence.³ The goal he set himself is the very goal of philosophy as he sees it: “to clarify existence itself by use of concepts.”⁴ The operant presupposition or “central intution”⁵ behind this endeavor is that existence is indeed meaningful, that, notwithstanding the very real existence of unmeaning, necessity (unfreedom), and evil, there is in existence a “super-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense.”⁶ It is because it is guided throughout by the concept of meaning that Ricoeur’s philosophy is in the most proper sense of the term phenomenological.

In light of the many penetrating criticisms that have been made in the last few decades of Husserlian phenomenology, one might well wonder, however, if Ricoeur’s commitment to meaning does not lead him into an uncritical acceptance of the traditional idealist and metaphysical presuppositions that are still present in Husserl’s thought. Falling into an “idealism of meaning” is perhaps the most serious danger which menaces any phenomenological philosophy. It is, nevertheless, one which Ricoeur is well aware of.

As was the case with French phenomenology in general, with Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas, for example, Ricoeur was distrustful from the outset of the “intellectualist” character of Husserl’s philosophy, which is why in his first major work, Le Volontaire et l’involontaire (1950), he sought to expand the phenomenological, eidetic method in such a way as to enable it to deal with such noncognitive aspects of human being as volition, motivation, emotion, the body, and action. “The act of the Cogito,” he said, “is not a pure act of self-positing; it lives on what it receives and in a dialouge with the conditions in which it is itself rooted.”⁷ But just as in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, “the greatest of French phenomenologists,” as Ricoeur once described him, did not go so far as to bring into question the method itself of “intentional analysis” (with all of the idealist overtones that are present in it), so also it was only subsequently, after he had begun to emphasize the hermeneutical dimension of his work, that Ricoeur began to grapple in a serious way with the threat of idealism.⁸

In an interesting essay entitled “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” dating from the mid-1970s, Ricoeur recognized that “phenomenology is always in danger of reducing itself to a transcendental subjectivism.”⁹ But is the situation any different in regard to hermeneutics? For, like phenomenology, hermeneutics, conceived of as the interpretive activity of a thinking subject which turns back and reflects on itself in the aim of achieving a heightened self-understanding, is guided by what could be called the “presupposition of meaning.” As Ricoeur formulated it:

Of course, as Ricoeur here recognized: “It is difficult, admittedly, to formulate this presupposition [of meaning] in a non-idealist language.”¹⁰

Many today would no doubt regard this as a gross understatement. In what could fittingly be labeled the post—Merleau-Pontyian situation in French philosophy, an increasing number of writers have insisted that any commitment to “meaning” and the “subject” is hopelessly idealistic. The work of Lévi-Strauss (structuralism), Foucault, and Derrida (deconstruction) embodies an all-out attack on the very notion of the subject and of lived experience as the ultimate source of meaning. Those influenced by this work would likely view Ricoeur’s hermeneutical inquiry into subjectivity as a remnant of the now discredited “metaphysics of presence” or of what they refer to as “humanism.” Their goal is not to understand “man”—the reflecting subject—but, as Lévi-Strauss said, to dissolve him.

The structuralist and poststructuralist criticism of metaphysics, the philosophy of consciousness, subjectivism, anthropocentrism, logocentrism, and so on, in the post—Merleau-Pontyian period is something that it would be neither possible nor desirable to reject out of hand. Indeed, the work I have alluded to represents a valuable contribution to the working out of a genuine postmodern, post-Cartesian, postmetaphysical mode of philosophizing. What would be an error would be to reject the very notion of the subject—and Ricoeur’s treatment of it—as being somehow “idealist” or “metaphysical.” It would be a mistake to throw out the baby (subjectivity) with the bathwater (metaphysics). Ricoeur’s vital contribution to current philosophy is to have shown that it is indeed possible to recover the former while at the same time to deconstruct the latter.

Ricoeur’s contribution is, in effect, to have “desubjectivized” subjectivity. While it is true that he operates within the tradition of reflexive philosophy, it is also true that in his hands the program of such a philosophy has undergone a radical transformation. Traditional reflexive philosophy viewed the subject as something foundational, and its goal was ultimate, absolute self-transparency. As Ricoeur points out: “the [traditional] idea of reflexion carries with it the desire for absolute transparence, a perfect coincidence of the self with itself, which would make consciousness of self indubitable knowledge and, as such, more fundamental than all forms of positive knowledge.”¹¹ It is precisely this foundational, metaphysical desire for ultimate transparency and certitude that Ricoeur has rejected, i.e, the Husserlian notion of “a thinking subject called ‘transcendental,’ a subject which is not bound up with the accidents of history, a kind of foundational subject which would be, in the awareness of itself, the source of all knowledge.”¹² In doing so, in recognizing that “there is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts,” he has effectively freed phenomenological hermeneutics from, as he himself says, “the idealism with which Husserl had tried to identify phenomenology.”¹³ Let us therefore attempt to explore in more detail Ricoeur’s hermeneutical deconstruction and recovery of the subject.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Ricoeur’s researches into the symbolism of evil was that meaning is not something constituted by a sovereign, transcendental Ego. Meaning does not originate in the conscious, reflecting subject but comes to it from the outside, from its encounter with certain throught-provoking symbols mediated by its culture. Meaning is the result, not of a work of constitution, but of an effort of appropriation. The thesis embodied in Le Symbolique du mal (1960) is that the conscious subject has access to itself and can know, achieve an understanding of itself, only by means of the mediation of symbols. As Ricoeur stated: “ . . . the task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to break out of the enchanted enclosure of consciousness of oneself, to end the prerogative of self-reflection.”¹⁴ The presence of the subject to itself, which is the very definition of subjectivity and self-consciousness, is an indirect, mediated presence. And thus were it not for its participation in the realm of culture, the subject would not exist as such. Moreover, the fact that the presence of the self to itself is irremediably indirect means that absolute knowledge (Hegel’s Wissenschaft) is forever impossible; the ineradicable non-coincidence of the self is nothing other than an expression of the inscrutable presence of “evil” in our lives.¹⁵

At the time of The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur tended to equate hermeneutics with the interpretation of symbols, by which he understood those basic cultural expressions which contain a double meaning, such as the various cosmic “elements”—fire, water, earth, and so on—or, more particularly in his case, those double-sense expressions such as stain, fall, deviation, wandering, and captivity. The purpose of hermeneutics, as he then conceived of it, was to interpret, to explicate, to lay out the nonliteral, “symbolic” (or “sacred”) meaning in these double-sense expressions. The subsequent development in his thought could perhaps best be described as a widening-out process whereby the focus of his interpretive concerns was extended from symbols to texts. He realized in effect that the phenomenon of multiple meaning is a characteristic, not of signs in themselves, but above all of the context in which they appear and are employed. His main concern became that of interpretation, textuality itself.

At the same time, Ricoeur realized that he had to take into serious account alternate interpretive strategies, particularly those which seek to reduce the second-level meaning of symbolic expressions to some hidden dimension totally foreign to the subject’s own interpretation and understanding, such as unconscious drives or social determinants which supposedly operate “behind the back” of the subject. For the net effect of what he aptly termed the hermeneutics of suspicion would be to render illusory the goal of his own restorative hermeneutics which aims not “at demystifying a symbolism by unmasking the unavowed forces that are concealed within it” but, rather, at “a re-collection of meaning in its richest, its most elevated, most spiritual diversity.”¹⁶ In the hands of the “masters of suspicion,” all consciousness tends to become mere false consciousness.

Ricoeur’s strategy in dealing with reductive, demasking hermeneutics was typical of his approach in general, which eschews all forms of methodological short cuts: He argued that genuine self-understanding is an arduous, never-to-be-completed task that can be accomplished only in a roundabout way and that it must, in addition, incorporate a critical moment. A reflexive philosophy must not allow itself to be a philosophy of immediate consciousness. The refleeting subject has meaningful access to its own existence only through the signs in which gets expressed its effort to exist and its desire to be. Ricoeur made this point quite clearly in the 1960s:

Reflection is a critique in another sense as well. Not only is consciousness not accessible to itself in immediate transparency such that it must seek to know itself through “a decipherment of the documents of its life,” in addition, immediate self-consciousness is more often than not a false consciousness, as Ricoeur concedes to the hermeneuts of suspicion. The message of Freudianism is that “the subject is never the subject one thinks it is.”¹⁸ “Thus,” as he says, “reflection 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, and it is always necessary to rise by means of a corrective critique from misunderstanding to understanding.”¹⁹ Yet while he fully recognizes the explanatory usefulness of the impersonal (or subpersonal) methodological, theoretical constructs of, for instance, Marxism, Ricoeur insists that these “abstractions” must not be taken for ultimate realities in such a way as to make us lose sight of concrete, individual subjects.²⁰ The fact remains that, for him, “the only reality, in the end, are individuals who do things.”²¹

Ricoeur’s reflexive philosophy is not a philosophy of consciousness, and the hermeneutical subject is not a metaphysical subject—neither a Cartesian соincidence of the self with itself in some inner retreat nor the soul-substance of traditional ontotheology. The subject qua metaphysical substrate or epistemological origin—this theoretical construct of traditional substantialistic and objectivistic philosophy—is in fact the great casualty of Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics. The hermeneutical subject is a speaking/spoken subject; it exists only as the self-affirming object of effort and desire, and to the degree that it exists self-understandingly it does so only as the result of the constitutive and critical play of signs, symbols, and texts; it is not a natural (or metaphysical) given but the result of a process of semiosis.²² There is, Ricoeur says, “no self-knowledge without some kind of detour through signs, symbols and cultural works, etc.”²³ Our own existence, he goes on to say,

Speaking of the result of emphasizing the semiotic makeup of self-identity, the mediating role of texts in the subject’s own self-constitution, Ricoeur says:

A “hermeneutical philosophy,” he says, is precisely one which accepts the mediated nature of subjectivity and which “gives up the dream of a total mediation, at the end of which reflection would once again amount to intellectual intuition in the transparence to itself of an absolute subject.”²⁶ Nothing could be further from Hegelianism and traditional metaphysics in general than this.

What Ricoeur has finally succeeded in doing, by means of his extensive researches into textuality and interpretation theory, is to have reformulated his long-standing presupposition of meaning in a nonidealist or nonmetaphysical language. The reflecting subject in search of meaning, self-understanding, is a linguistic subject, a subject which is given to and which knows itself by means of the language it inhabits. And language, when one goes beyond a merely structural approach and considers units of discourse of a sentence or longer in length, does not exist in a void. The characteristic of those autonomous linguistic entities called literary texts (whose meaning is not to be explained subjectivistically, in terms of authorial intention) is that they refer to a world, a world which they themselves project or bring into existence by means of their own literary devices. The task of interpretation or hermeneutics is to reconstruct the internal dynamic of a text so as to make manifest the world which it projects. This world is a possible world, one which I, as reader, could inhabit. In opening up worlds which express possibilities of being, literary texts generate meaning, allow for self-understanding. In revealing possibilities of being, texts further our self-understanding, for what we essentially are is what we can become, the being otherwise and being more that are the objects of effort and desire, the two basic characteristics of the act of existing.

Understanding, as Gadamer would say, is not so much an activity performed by a “subject” as it is the very being of the subject, something, therefore, which, as it were, the subject undergoes. Ricoeur makes much the same point when he says:

The antimetaphysical thrust of Ricoeur’s deconstruction and recovery of the subject is fully evident in his statement:

Given the hermeneutical, postmetaphysical way Ricoeur has redefined subjectivity, the “qualitative transformation of reflective consciousness”²⁹ he has instituted, it should be apparent that a poststructuralist criticism of Ricoeur’s work on the grounds that it is still “metaphysical” or “idealist” would be hard to defend. Indeed, it could be argued that Ricoeur more decisively overcomes traditional philosophy than do either Foucault or Derrida, in that Ricoeur’s overcoming of objectivism does not point in the direction of either relativism or nihilism.³⁰ A more pertinent criticism of Ricoeur has been made by Calvin O. Schrag, whose work greatly compliments that of Ricoeur.³¹ Objecting to “a widespread misdirection in contemporary philosophy” having “to do with an excessive and self-limiting preoccupation with discourse and discursive practices,” Schrag accuses Ricoeur of, if not reducing action to textuality (as he criticizes Derrida for doing), at least viewing it “through the metaphorics of textuality.”³²

This is an important criticism, for if “man,” the human subject, is, as the Greeks said, the “speaking animal,” it is equally true that he is the “acting animal,” animal agens. If language is, as Heidegger would say, an Existentiale, an essential characteristic of human being, so likewise is action. Action is соprimordial with language; human existence is inconceivable apart from it. This is precisely Schrag’s point; he wants to emphasize that action and discourse are equally primordial, “nonreducible twin halves of an undivided history.”³³ Although Schrag recognizes that Ricoeur has made “an aggressive move into the domain of action,” he feels that he has done so in such a way that action is subordinated to discourse, or considered simply from the point of discourse and textuality. While Ricoeur obviously does not maintain in a Derridian fashion that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” he does not, Schrag suggests, consider action sufficiently in its own right.

In Schrag’s defense, it must be admitted that when referring to action and history Ricoeur tends to speak of “quasi-texts.” Does this mean that he downgrades action or subordinates it to discourse? It seems to me that it is rather an attempt to suggest a way of dealing meaningfully with human action that we find in one of Ricoeur’s key articles (whose title is itself very revealing), “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” It is significant, I think, that this article has had a wide impact on the practitioners of the social sciences, i.e., those whose prime concern is action.

To view action on the model of the text is, admittedly, to deal with it in what is apparently a marginal way. Is there, however, any other way of dealing meaningfully with action? Acting beings may be what we are, but how, as beings which have an insatiable desire to understand what we are and do, can we understand what we are and do other than by speaking and writing about it? It would be hard to deny, I think, that it is only by considering action as a text that we can hope to come to some understanding of it, and thus of that being which essentially we are. When we seek to understand human events, which is to say, action, to account for them, the giving of an account invariably assumes the form of telling a story. To understand an experience or an event is to make sense of it in the form of a story. As Hannah Arendt remarked: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.”³⁴

One of the things we are concerned with when dealing with human action in an attempt to understand it is motive. How can motives, an essential ingredient of action, be understood? Ricoeur writes:

Emphasizing the inseparability of action from textuality, Ricoeur goes on to say:

Text and action are quite simply inseparable; they are, as Schrag so aptly says, “twin halves of an undivided history.” It is by means of literary-historical texts that we are able to understand what we are as acting beings, which is to say, as temporal beings. For time is the dimension of action, and is meaningful only in terms of action. A hermeneutical philosophy in search of the meaning of existence cannot avoid the methodological demand to reflect systematically on literary discourse and historical narrative and on their insuperable intertwining. It is thus understandable how Ricoeur should have come to be preoccupied with the dual theme: Time and Narrative.

Action and discourse are inseparable. One could in fact define action as that which naturally calls for, gives rise to, discourse as its teleological fulfillment. When all is said and done, action is nothing other than “un sujet de discours.” What links the two inseparably together is manifested in that thing called history. Significantly, the word history signifies (in both French and English) both a certain form of discourse about action and the action itself which is talked about. History means both a particular discursive discipline (“historiography”) and that which this discipline is about (“history,” i.e., the actual happenings). It is significant also that in French “une histoire” can mean either a supposedly factual account of past events and actions or a mere fanciful tale. There is, as Ricoeur has convincingly argued in his latest work, no intrinsic, structural, or formal difference between “history” and “literature.” In any event, it is significant that in his attempt to uncover the significance of human existence—which is both discourse and action—he should have been led into a thorough-going reflection on history.

And as he has shown, the central element in both history and fiction, which are simply two different forms of storytelling, is emplotment. The notion of plot is one which, he says, “I take as a guideline for my entire investigation, in the area of the history of historians (or historiography) as well as in that of fiction (from epics and folk tales to the modern novel).”³⁶ Emplotment, he says, consists mainly in the selection and arrangement of the events and the actions recounted, which make of the fable a story that is ‘complete and entire’ [Aristotle] with a beginning, middle and end.³⁷ No action, he goes on to say, “is a beginning except in a story that it inaugurates . . . no action constitutes a middle unless it instigates a change of fortune in the story told . . . no action, taken in itself, constitutes an end except insofar as it concludes a course of action in the story told.” Emplotment is thus nothing other than the combinatory activity of the storyteller which makes bare events into a story. And this means that an event, as such, is what it is only to the degree that “it contributes to the progress of a story.”³⁸ “An event is not only an occurrence, something that happens, but a narrative component.” Plot is what makes action intelligible (it is what “holds together circumstances, ends and means, initiatives and unwanted consequences”). It is, in short, what makes for understanding, meaning.

It does not seem to me that Ricoeur’s observations are in any way belied by the fact that some contemporary storytellers, such as the antinovelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, set out to compose stories in such a way as deliberately to frustrate the reader’s desire for “emplotment.” For the refusal of narrative emplotment and “closure” is understandable only in terms of that which it denies. A novel such as Jalousie does not, properly speaking, lack a plot (as if the writer were inept at his craft); it is the deliberate refusal of plot in the traditional sense. Moreover, it could be said that such a refusal of plot is actually meant as a means for better portraying the actual structure of lived experience. For it is a fact that in our actual lives there are no absolute beginings and endings, thus no absolutely decisive middles, either. Something is always beginning and something is always ending, and there is no single story line, but many overlapping and interlocking projects. The progression and unfolding of our lives is not continual and progressive but, so to speak, hesitant and episodic. And yet the fact remains that life itself has a teleological structure, which is simply confirmed and enriched in the narrator’s art.³⁹ We read stories not in order to escape from life but in the hope of understanding it better.

In any event, what is central to narrative is, as Ricoeur has stressed, its temporal character:

To express the matter in another way: Experience is meaningful, precisely because it can be recounted, and it can be recounted precisely because it has a temporal structure which is essentially teleological (“emplotted”). One of the “major presuppositions,” as Ricoeur says, of Time and Narrative is that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.”⁴¹ The act of understanding and making intelligible—storytelling—is not a free-floating, groundless sort of aimless play (a “bottomless chessboard”), as certain poststructuralists would maintain, but is itself rooted in experience, in the temporality of existence, which is what gets expressed and comes to light in the stories we compose about what we do.

Of course, this is a thesis which many a poststructuralist would criticize. Just as the antiphenomenological post—Merleau-Pontyians have sought to eliminate altogether the phenomenological notions of the “subject” and “meaning,” so also have they attacked as “metaphysical” the very notion of history. One of the dominant themes in recent philosophy has been the critique of the teleological notion of history, of history as having a “beginning” (archē) and an “end” (telos). What is proclaimed is the end of “the end of history.” Again, to the degree that these criticisms have undermined the traditional, metaphysical conception of history, they are both justified and valuable. But again, as a criticism of phenomenological hermeneutics as practiced by Ricoeur, they are quite groundless.

In the first place, it would be absurd to deny that human action (as opposed to purely natural processes or mere bodily, involuntary movements) has a teleological structure. People act to achieve certain ends, and the very definition of action is that it is purposive behavior. This is a phenomenal fact and is as undeniable as is the cogito, the fact of the reflective subject’s own existence. Just as “I-hood” is a necessary and undeniable fact of existence, just as, as Emile Benveniste has shown,⁴² there is no discourse which does not posit or implicate a speaking subject (le sujet du discours), so also is action quite simply unintelligible if it is not interpreted teleologically, with reference to purposeful subjects. Ricoeur quite rightly observes:

Of course, these phenomenal facts do not in any way justify or support a metaphysical construction of them. They do not justify one in asserting that history has an end, that it is going somewhere, or that in our lives meaning will ultimately prevail over unmeaning, non-sense—just as the fact of “I-hood” does not in any way justify one in positing a substantial self whose existence is somehow inscribed in and guaranteed by the nature of things. Poststructuralism is absolutely correct in deconstructing metaphysical mythmaking of this sort.

As we have seen, however, Ricoeur himself has decidedly forsworn traditional metaphysics. Moreover, his hermeneutical reading of action and temporality can appeal for support to the actual practice of the social sciences. This is emminently fitting, since, unlike Gadamer, Ricoeur has always been at pains to address himself to the methodological concerns of the various human disciplines and has energetically sought to maintain a dialogue with them. This dialogue has borne fruit. One of the areas in which it has most recently proven productive is economics.⁴⁴ Not only have economists begun to look to Ricoeur’s work for support in ridding their discipline of positivistic objectivism, but certain positions that they themselves have long maintained lend, as it were, support to Ricoeur’s own hermeneutical theses. A case in point is what is referred to as Austrian economics.

In his major treatise, Human Action, a systematic presentation of the economic theory which he labels “praxeology,” Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), an acute observer, as indeed most economists are, of human affairs, observed that the two basic, indeed, as he would say, aprioristic, characteristics of action are “to remove uneasiness” and to make ourselves “better off.” The very meaning of action is that it is purposeful; it is the deliberate attempt on the part of human beings to improve their position, to make their lives more livable, more meaningful. The nature of action is, as we have said, teleological. As Mises observed in another work:

The phenomenological hermeneutics of human existence cannot but agree. The phenomenological fact—confirmed by economic observation—is that existence is meaningful in that it is unintelligible except in terms of meaningful action. No discourse, therefore, is possible which rejects the “postulate of meaningfulness.” It is logically impossible to deny meaning, just as it is logically impossible to deny one’s own existence as a subject.⁴⁶

It must be remembered, however, that this assertion is phenomenological, and not metaphysical. Those who would seek to pass from phenomenological facts to metaphysical essences and spell out the “ultimate meaning of being” are engaged, as we now know after the death of metaphysics, in a hopeless pursuit. There is nothing to be regretted here, however, for the notion of “being in itself” is phenomenological non-sense anyway. The loss of illusions, consoling though they may be, is not something we should regret, as Ricoeur has been at ample pains to point out.⁴⁷

Thus the recognition that, phenomenologically or hermeneutically speaking, existence is meaningful is in no way a denial of contingency, ambiguity, uncertainty, unmeaning. The latter are equally undeniable facts of experience. But if, from the point of view of action, metaphysical gnosis—the presumption on the part of reason (as Merleau-Ponty would have said) to grasp the ultimate meaning of being—is without warrant, so likewise are all forms of fatalism or nihilism. Ricoeur’s wager for meaningfulness is itself fully warranted when it is extricated from all metaphysical contexts, as indeed it is when it is grounded in the hermeneutical implications of human action and narrative discursivity.

To conclude this examination of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the subject it might be instructive to contrast him with one of his earlier contemporaries, Albert Camus. The problem that Camus posed in his book Le Mythe de Sisyphe, subtitled “Essai sur l’absurde,” was essentially this: In the absence of any access on our part to transcendent values (or what today people might refer to as “transcendental signifieds”), what, if any, are our “grounds” for asserting the priority of meaning over meaninglessness? Camus, of course, concluded that there are none and proceeded accordingly to elaborate a philosophy of the absurd whose purpose was to banish hope as a form of escapism. This conclusion was logical and consistent, given Camus’s approach to the question of meaning; it was dictated by his method, which was basically that of a philosophy of consciousness.

In this book, Camus, in a quasi-Cartesian fashion, undertook to do an inventory of consciousness, asking in effect: What exactly do I know with certainty? That I am is certain, but who or what I am most certainly is not. All statements as to the “what” or “who” of existence, its meaning, are mere interpretations, and thus do not qualify as knowledge. Whence Camus’s conclusion: Existence is basically meaningless, absurd. The point to note, however, is this: Camus’s demand for epistemological and metaphysical certainty, knowledge, for a stable Archimedean point, was itself thoroughly foundationalist and rationalistic, thus quite unreasonable. Above all, it ignored that most basic characteristic of human existence: action. As we have seen, it is the very nature of action that it commits us to meaning, purposiveness. As acting subjects, we always go beyond what we know, and quite rightly so. Camus was never able to give a convincing rebuttal to the suicide option—which is what he wanted to do—because he considered human beings merely in their quality of knowing subjects and completely ignored the fact that they are also acting beings. Thus the conclusion that Ricoeur draws in regard to the question as to the meaningfulness of existence is actually much more in line with the phenomenological-hermeneutical facts of existence.

In the last analysis, we have no epistemological or metaphysical grounds for knowing that existence is meaningful; there is no possible way in which the “postulate of meaningfulness” could be “verified.” Yet the desire for meaning, the hope for the ultimate triumph of sense over non-sense in our lives, the triumph of reconciliation, as Arendt would say, over, as Merleau-Ponty so aptly called it, adversity, is not delusory. Reiterating a conviction he had stated in his early collection of essays, History and Truth, where he spoke of the “rational feeling of hope,”⁴⁸ Ricoeur says in his latest work: “For my part, I hold that the search for concordance is part of the unavoidable assumptions of discourse and of communication.”⁴⁹ His ontological commitment to meaning is firmly grounded in the phenomenological makeup of human existence, in undeniable facts of experience, which are, after all, the one and only ultimate grounding to which we, as acting beings, have access. The fact that we are inescapably acting and narrating beings is sufficient justification for what is no doubt the ultimate underlying category in Ricoeur’s philosophy: hope. In his hermeneutics of the subject, Paul Ricoeur has succeeded in outlining a true poétique du possible.

Notes

This essay was written for inclusion in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Library of Living Philosophers, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, forthcoming).

1. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 42-43.

2. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 188.

3. Sens et existence was the title which, on Ricoeur’s own suggestion, I gave to the anthology in Ricoeur’s honor that I published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975).

4. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 17.

5. See T. M. Van Leeuwen, The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1981), p. 1.

6. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 411.

7. Freedom and Nature, p. 18.

8. In Freud and Philosophy (French edition, 1965) Ricoeur says, speaking of his earlier Freedom and Nature: “A hermeneutic method, coupled with reflection, goes much farther than an eidetic method I was then practicing. . . . The rootedness of reflection in life is itself understood in reflective consciousness only in the form of a hermeneutic [deciphered, interpreted, not descriptive] truth” (p. 458).

9. Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 112.

10. Ibid., p. 115.

11. “On Interpretation,” p. 188.

12. “History as Narrative and Practice,” interview with Paul Ricoeur by Peter Kemp, Philosophy Today, Fall 1985, p. 219.

13. “On Interpretation,” p. 191.

14. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 356.

15. “All symbols give rise to thought, but the symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more in myths and symbols than in all of our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute knowledge. . . . Thus the symbols of evil attest to the unsurpassable character of all symbolism; while telling us of the failure of our existence and of our power of existing, they also declare the failure of systems of thought that would swallow up symbols in an absolute knowledge” (Freud and Philosophy, p. 527).

16. “On Interpretation,” pp. 192-93.

17. The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 17-18. See also Freud and Philosophy, pp. 42-47.

18. Freud and Philosophy, p. 420.

19. The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 18.

20. See “History as Narrative and Practice,” p. 217.

21. Ibid., p. 216.

22. “ . . . a philosophy of reflection is not a philosophy of consciousness, if by consciousness we mean immediate self-consciousness. Consciousness . . . is a task, but it is a task because it is not a given” (Freud and Philosophy, pp. 43-44).

23. “History as Narrative and Practice,” p. 213.

24. Ibid., p. 214.

25. “On Interpretation,” p. 193.

26. Ibid., p. 194.

27. Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. Thompson, p. 94.

28. “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” pp. 112-13.

29. The Symbolism of Evil, p. 356.

30. I am using the terms “objectivism” and “relativism” in the sense in which Richard Bernstein uses them in his book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

31. Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). That Schrag’s project is fully complementary to that of Ricoeur is evidenced by his remark: “The disassemblage of the classical substance-attribute categorial scheme and the modern empirico-transcendental doublet does not entail a displacement of the subject in every sense you please. We wish to show, quite to the contrary, that the proper charge of such a disassemblage is to provide a clearing for a restoration of the subject. It opens the path to a transvalued subjectivity within a new space, making it possible to speak of a new humanism at the end of philosophy” (Schrag, “Subjectivity and Praxis at the End of Philosophy,” in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. H. Silverman and D. Ihde [Albany: State University of New York Press 1985], p. 25).

32. Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, pp. 11, 170.

33. Ibid., pp. 170-71.

34. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), p. 104.

35. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, “The Conflict of Interpretations,” in Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges, ed. R. Bruzina and B. Wilshire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 308.

36. “On Interpretation,” p. 178.

37. Ibid., p. 177.

38. Ibid., p. 178.

39. For an excellent treatment of this issue, see David Carr, “Life and the Narrator’s Art,” in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Silverman and Ihde; as well as David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

40. “On Interpretation,” p. 170.

41. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 3.

42. See, for instance, Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971).

43. “On Interpretation,” p. 180.

44. In this regard, special reference should be made to the Society for Interpretive Economics, Department of Economics, George Mason University. Representative of the interest shown by this group in hermeneutics in general and Ricoeur in particular is the publication of Don Lavoie, The Interpretive Dimension of Economics: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxeology, Working Paper No. 15 (1985), Center for the Study of Market Processes, George Mason University.

45. Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (Kansas City: Sheed Andres and McMeel, 1978), p. 71.

46. Schrag makes the following pertinent remark: “One can doubt and think away the reality of everything save the reality that one is doubting, that one is thinking. Thus the strategy of systematic doubt allegedly delivers an indubitable cogito intuitively grasped in every performance of thought reflectively directed to itself. Thought presupposes a ‘who’ that is thinking; doubt presupposes a ‘who’ that is doubting.“There is, we suggest, a similar play operative in the strategy of deconstruction, yielding not the truth of Cartesian subjectivity, the ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but rather a deconstructionalist modification—‘I deconstruct, therefore I am.’ In dismantling subjectivity as a positional center and a zero-point consciousness, peeling away the sedimented layers of philosophical construction, some species of claim upon the subject remain in force. The very strategy of deconstruction serendipitously reinvents the subject and instructs us that no complete deconstruction is possible” (“Subjectivity and Praxis at the End of Philosophy,” p. 26; see also Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, pp. 10-11).

47. See, for instance, Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations.

48. See Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. C. A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 12.

49. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985) p. 28.