THE COGITO AND HERMENEUTICS:

THE QUESTION OF THE SUBJECT IN RICOEUR

 CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY

IN COOPERATION WITH THE CENTER

FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Volume 6

Editorial Board:

William R. McKenna, Miami University (Editor)

David Carr, University of Ottawa
Lester Embree, Duquesne University
Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfred Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

Scope

The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy

through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in
culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that
call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has
provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly
succesful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and
methodological innovations.
 The Cogito
and Hermeneutics:
The Question of
the Subject in Ricoeur

by

DOMENICO JERVOLINO

translated by

GORDON POOLE

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS

DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jervoltno. Domentco.
[Cogito e l·ermeneutica. English]
The cogtto and hermeneuttcs : the question of the subject tn
Rtcoeur / by Domentco Jervolino ; translated by Gordon Poole.
p. cm. -- (Contributions to phenomenology)
Translation of: 11 cogito e l'erlleneutica.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Ricmur. Paul--Contributions in hermeneutics. 2. Herlleneutics-

-History--20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
B2430.R554J4713 1990
194--dc20 90-38725

ISBN-13: 978-94-010-6774-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-0639-6

DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-0639-6

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,

P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates

the publishing programmes of
D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press.

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With kind permission from

Generoso Procaccini Editore, Napels: 1984.
Translated from the Italian II cogito e l' ermeneutica:
La questione del soggeto in Ricoeur

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
Softcoverreprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990
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In reverent memory
of Pietro Piovani,
exemplary master
in philosophical studies
and the philosophical life.
 CONTENTS

Translator's Note / ix
Foreword by Paul Ricoeur / xi
Foreword by Theodore F. Geraets / xv
Acknowledgments / xvi

Part I

The Cogito and Hermeneutics

1. Hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy / 1

2. Critique of the subject and interpretation of the cogito.
Heidegger and Ricoeur / 5
3. Ricoeur. Phenomenology of the will and "unquietness" of the
subject / 9
4. Paradox and mediation in Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology
/ 15
5. Crisis of the Philosophie de l'esprit. Human sciences, "methodic"
hermeneutics / 19
6. The destruction of the illusions of consciousness. Psychoanalysis
as language theory / 26
7. The challenge of semiology and the phenomenology of language.
The reinterpretation of phenomenology as language theory /
33
8. Concrete reflexion and the intersubjectivity question. Towards a
hermeneutics of the I am / 41
9. "Originary Affirmation," philosophies of negativity,
problematics of the subject. Nabert and Thevenaz / 49
10. Ricoeur and Heidegger. The cogito and hermeneutics / 58
VIl1

Part II

Text, Metaphor, Narrative

1. The history of hermeneutics. Text theory / 69

§1 Hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Gadamer / 69
§2 Hermeneutics as text theory in Ricoeur / 77
2. Hermeneutic phenomenology / 87
§1 The hermeneutic critique of phenomenological idealism / 87
§2 Towards a hermeneutic phenomenology / 94
3. Living metaphor / 103
4. Towards a poetics of freedom / 114
§1 The circle of temporality and narrativity. Distentio animi and
mythos / 114
§2 Narrative discourse between history and fiction / 121
§3 The dialectics of threefold mimesis. Towards a poetics of
freedom / 126

Afterword / 139
Time, sacrality, narrative: interview with Paul Ricoeur / 147

Abbreviations / 154
Notes / 155
Bibliographical note / 181
Index of names / 183
Index of subjects / 185
 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Throughout my translation I have tried to respect a somewhat con-

solidated convention regarding the rendering of Ricoeurian terms and
those of other cited philosophers, profiting from the criteria used by
earlier translators and scholars. Especially John B. Thompson offers
a useful guide in his "Notes on editing and translating," prefaced to
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. While Quotations from Ricoeur's
works and those of other authors, replacing the Italian translations used
by Jervolino, have regularly been drawn from existing English
translations, I have reserved the right to modify them tacitly in a few
cases. Where no translator is given for works Quoted, the translation
is my own. When the Italian ri/lessione and the French re/lexion are
used in a specifically philosophical meaning, I have rendered them as
'reflexion', reserving 'reflection' for the more common meaning of
'meditation', etc. My friend Domenico Jervolino has given research
assistance, clarifications and valuable advice throughout this effort,
especially enriching the notes for the benefit of an English language
readership. Of course, ultimate responsibility for the translation rests
with myself.

Gordon Poole

ix
 Foreword

by Paul Ricoeur

It is already a piece of good fortune to find oneself understood by a

reader who is at once demanding and benevolent. It is an even greater
fortune to be better understood by another than by one's own self. In
effect, when I look back, I am rather struck by the discontinuity
among my works, each of which takes on a specific problem and
apparently has little more in common with its predecessor than the fact
of having left an overflow of unanswered questions behind it as a
residue. On the contrary, Domenico Jervolino's interpretation of my
works, which extend over more than forty years, stresses their
coherence, in spite of the gap in time between my present, soon to be
issued work--Temps et Recit--and my first, Philosophie de la Volonte:
Ie Volontaire et l'lnvolontaire.
Our friend finds the principle of coherence first of all in the
recurrence of a problem: the destiny of the idea of subjectivity, caught
in the cross-fire between Nietzsche and Heidegger on one side and
semiology, psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology on the other.
He finds it likewise in the insistence on a method: the mediating role
played by interpretation, mainly of texts, with regard to reflexion on
self. More subtly, he finds it in the visee which insures a convergence
between reflexion and interpretation (a convergence stressed by the
well-chosen title of his work, The Cogito and Hermeneutics), namely
the elaboration of a hermeneutics of human praxis within the horizon
of a poetics of freedom.
I desire to express my gratitude here for a book which, out of
scattered works and numerous articles, read with care, makes a sole
work which I recognize--in every meaning of the term--and yet
which I feel utterly incapable of having written, given its fine,
rigorous orderliness.

xi
xu

I return to the three points I have emphasized.

I am grateful to the author for having grasped the continuity of the

critique of the Cogito, of its pretense to immediate certitude and
self -transparency, starting from when I replaced "I think" with "I will"
and, hence, the representative function with the practical function, up
to my most recent labor, wherein narrative is interpreted as the
creative imitation of action. I am especially beholden to him for having
grasped that this critique by no means meant that the whole question
of the subject had been simply done away with, but that the "I am" was
to be recaptured from the representative function which obscured it.
This is the "I am" which at the start of my work was at the core of the
philosophy of incarnation inherited from Gabriel Marcel and
Merleau-Ponty and which, in my most recent work, via the detour of
the theory of narrative, shows up once more as acting and suffering.
In this regard, my interpreter is doubtless right to seek in my
confrontation with a series of challenges (mentioned above) for the
link between my critique of the Cartesian Cog ito and the pre-
dominance of "I am" over "I think". The author has perceived with
the utmost clarity what is really at stake in all my attempts to
transform antagonisms into mediations.
Furthermore, as Domenico Jervolino has seen clearly and said well,
the unity of reflexion and interpretation expresses, on the level of
method, the same thematic continuity; my perspicacious interpreter has
naturally not failed to realize that my conception of interpretation has
grown in scope and, hence, changed in the course of time from, say,
La Symbolique du Mal or the Essai sur Freud, where I defined
interpretation as the explicitation of double-meaning expressions I
called symbols, to when I declare that the object of interpretation is
texts, to the degree in which, beyond their immanent structure, they
project a world where new possible ways of being are designed.
However, it is precisely this gap between the two definitions of
interpretation that has awakened this critic's interest in the inter-
mediary conceptions which link them. On the one hand, the symbols
of evil have a sense only within the horizon of a new world of de-
liverance and regeneration. There is no symbol which is not borne
along by some great narrative, and the latter, in turn, all derive from
some world of the text. On the other hand, the redescription of the
world and the refiguration of time, as defined in La Metaphore Vive
 XU1

and Temps et Recit, are based on the polivocality of the texts

interpreted, hence on a po lise my of language which prolongs that
which elsewhere I called the double meaning of the great symbols. I
am particularly indebted to my benign critic for having searched in
my often hard to read articles on method--Phenomenologie et
Hermeneutique, Heidegger et la Question du Sujet, La Tache de
I'Hermeneutique, La Fonction Hermeneutique et la Distanciation,
etc.--for the reasons for this methodological continuity. I have been
especially struck by his interest in the hazardous interpretation I
advance for Husserl's "phenomenological reduction", where I propose
to see the principle of all entry into the universe of signs and, hence,
the very source of the connection between interpretation and reflexion.
The interconnections I see between Husserlian phenomenology, not-
withstanding its deliberately idealistic orientation, and post-Heideg-
gerian hermeneutics, oriented towards poetics and praxis, continue to
perplex me a great deal while, at the same time, daring me to move
beyond all facile oppositions and inviting me to seek in the reciprocal
fecundation of doctrines for a perennial fountain wherein thought may
regain its youth. In this regard, my interpreter, thanks to the attention
and care he has devoted to a dozen or so scattered programmatic
articles, has discerned and, doubtless, reinforced the "epistemological
pivot" joining the two aspects of his own work: "The Cog ito and
Hermeneutics" (Part I) and "Text, Metaphor, Narrative" (Part II).
But what I found most precious in Domenico Jervolino's book is
how he deals with the visee in my works--a visee which, above, I
have summarily referred to speaking of a hermeneutics of praxis.
This is most precious, because he not only addresses the deepest-
lying motivations but even the unsaid, and moreover the as yet
unachieved in my work, namely its issuance in an ethical and politi-
cal reflection, capable of stimulating action towards liberation. It
remains true that I began with a philosophy of the "I will" and "I can",
that I have been concerned with a semantics of action, that I have
written on occasion on the ethical and practical aspects of intersubjec-
tivity, that I have permitted myself some sorties into the domain of the
social imaginary under the contrasting forms of ideology and utopia,
thus touching upon questions of power that lie at the heart of political
reflection. Still more significantly, in my proposed interpretation of
symbols, metaphors and fiction, I have joined the function of trans-
formation to the function of revelation. In my present work, in course
xiv

of publication, on the mimetic function of narrative, the stress is

placed precisely on the expansion of the practical and ethical sphere
of the reader through the mediation of the productive imagination.
Here, though, my interpreter has patiently and subtly gathered up all
these threads, expressing, in the final pages of his book an expectancy
which especially struck me. Domenico Jervolino is awaiting a further
development which would insure the transformation of the poetics
into a praxis. In sum, he is looking for an achievement that would at
the same time take up the challenge hurled by Marx in his Eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach, the challenge to move from interpreting the
world to changing it. Only such a culmination, he feels, could fulfill
the expectation created by the title of poetics of freedom. Would it be
indiscrete on my part to suggest to the reader that such a poetics of
freedom--which may have been the visee of my work--has already
become, thanks to his generous commentary and his other works, the
theme of Domenico Jervolino's own work?
 Foreword

by Theodore F. Geraets

I consider it a privilege and a true pleasure to present a book written

by a friend on the thought of another friend, above all since the book
in question has fully succeeded in its intent and is manifestly useful.
Domenico Jervolino's study is an attempt to trace the whole develop-
ment of Ricoeur's thought, focusing on its cohesion around a precise
philosophical knot, the question of the subject as "I am", as the act and
the desire of being, only to be won at the expense of a reflexion
integrated through interpretation. The subject accepts being called into
question in his narcissism, in order to find himself again as self, having
traversed the whole interpretative process as a reader instructed by lis-
tening to the text, in the broadest possible meaning of the term.
Jervolino then seeks to bring out the coherence of Ricoeur's thought,
even as it embraces an expansion of its problematics from the symbol,
as a double-meaning expression, to the entire universe of discourse,
with special regard to the narrative function both in historiography
and literature. The human subject, in the last analysis, is a life that
cannot be understood without narrative in its two distinct but
complementary forms, historical and fictional narrative.
Moreover, Domenico Jervolino rightly stresses the relation between
Ricoeur's hermeneutics and praxis, seen as a constant from the
"phenomenology of the will" of his youth down to the "poetics of
freedom". Indeed, Ricoeur's hermeneutics, in developing what
Jervolino calls "the alliance between poetics and practical reason,"
could well aid in a transformation of the world, thus responding to
Marx's Eleventh Thesis in critique of Feuerbach, precisely because
to interpret, in his hermeneutics, means also to see in things their
other possibilities, thanks to the power of the imagination as it is
revealed in discourse and in action. For this reason, the author is in
a position to wish, in his conclusion, that the poetics of freedom might

xv
XVI

be fulfilled in an ethics--and a politics, understood as a philosophical

discipline--of liberation.

This book, then, deserves to be read with care as an appropriate

introduction to the reading of Ricoeur's work, among the richest in
contemporary philosophy.

Acknowledgments

Once again I thank Paul Ricoeur for his generous Foreword and
Theodore F. Geraets for his kind one. I thank William R. McKenna
and the editorial board for having accepted the translation of this
book in Contributions to Phenomenology. My thanks to Gordon Poole
for his intelligent, patient labors of translation. Among those who, in
various ways, have favored the realization of this translation, I want
especially to remember Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves, who was the first
to call attention in America to my book, and Joseph Buttigieg, who has
followed this work with unflagging sympathy, affording invaluable
assistance especially in solving bibliographical problems.

My grateful acknowledgement to the editors of Religioni e Societil

for permission to translate and publish in these pages the interview
with Paul Ricoeur entitled "Time, Sacrality, Narrative," and to the
publisher of the original Italian version, Generoso Procaccini Editore,
for permission to publish this English translation.

Domenico Jervolino
Rome, January 1990
 Part I
The Cogito and Hermeneutics
 Chapter 1
Hermeneutics in Contemporary Philosophy

Philosophical hermeneutics has become one of the most vital trends in

contemporary philosophy. Even beyond the schools which explicitly
acknowledge their debt to it, there is a field of interest in hermeneu-
tics in which various scholars and schools are to be found. All,
however, agree in recognizing that the problem of interpretation
became of central importance and, at the same time, of manifold
complexity, during and following the "linguistic turn" in the history
of philosophy, i.e. when philosophy realized that language--this
shifting, ambiguous, polymorphic and ineffable embodiment of
meaning--was its proper element.
Most certainly there must have been deep reasons for language and
interpretation to have come to the surface from the depths of the
philosophically implicit, so to speak, and become explicit themes of
contemporary philosophy. Phenomena such as misunderstanding,
skewed or manipulated communication, the struggles among different
or rival interpretative styles, the erosion of self -knowledge (that solid
rock for earlier generations of philosophers) as well as the awareness,
on the other hand, of being conditioned and even overwhelmed by a
flood of signs and messages that can scarcely be dominated and
controlled--all the above help to explain why philosophy has taken
upon itself the obligation of interpretation, well aware that interpreta-
tion itself needs to be interpreted and is, hence, involved in the
hermeneutic conflict, with the risk of falling into some new version
of the Hegelian "bad infinity." On the other hand, interpretation would
seem, in some way, to fall short of any world-transforming praxis; it
would seem to be consigned to a state of basic powerlessness, as Marx
says in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Is it possible to have
interpretation which is sure of itself, such as to survive without any
2

loss, indeed with enrichment, the ambivalences of language and the

conflicts of hermeneutics, reemerging finally, not as a rival but as a
supporter of praxis and of its thrusts towards transformation and
liberation? Moreover, once the age-old certainties of the Cogito, the
idealistically transparent and narcissistically self-contemplative subject,
unchallenged master of self, of its actions and motivations, have been
dissolved, what subject will remain to engage in an interpretative
activity which must be acknowledged as finite and historically defined,
and yet neither resigned nor ineffective?
We offer no immediate answers to these questions, but they serve
to stake out the area of our questioning, defining our theoretical
interests. Whatever the difficulties it may be facing, hermeneutic
philosophy seems to us to be alone in offering a possible meeting place
for disciplines and cultural fields which have been out of touch for a
long time: between the venerable tradition of theological, juridical and
literary hermeneutics and modern humanities, linguistics and social
sciences; and--in terms of the geography of philosophy--between the
empiricist and analytical tendencies of the AnglO-American area and
those somewhat summarily defined as "Continental," concerned with
reflexive philosophy, phenomenological research, and existential
meditation. In the course of time, the validity of these oppositions
diminishes as they appear ever more approximate and schematic.
As Pietro Piovani wrote, with his typical acumen, some twenty years
ago, "The twentieth century, at least until its seventh decade, knew
(schematically speaking) two languages: one tending to be antipositivis-
tic and historicizing; the other neo-positivistic and mathematicizing. 1t1
At the risk of seeming over-optimistic, it is perhaps possible to
advance the hypothesis that by the end of the century it will be up to
hermeneutics to supply the world commonwealth of philosophical
culture with a new koine, a common, ecumenical language.
As Vattimo observes in his "Postilla 1983" to the second edition of
his fine Italian translation of Wahrheit und Methode, this undoubted
success of philosophical hermeneutics, especially in its more publi-
cized form, viz. Gadamer's mediation between Heideggerism and
philology, is accompanied by a sort of extenuation of Heidegger's
radical critique of Western metaphysics as a loss or forgetting of being.
Vattimo takes up Habermas's thesis, according to which Gadamer's
work stands as an "urbanizing" of Heidegger's philosophy.2 Gadamer's
hermeneutic ontology (especially the well-known formula which asserts
 3

the identity of being and language: "Sein, das verstanden werden kann,
ist Sprache"), "urbanizing" the sylvan philosophy of the thinker from
the Black Forest, makes its peace with the world of science and
technology, which had seemed to Heidegger the epitome of forgetful-
ness of being, and also with the world of the humanae litterae of the
philological disciplines, which never accepted the interpretative
violence of Heidegger's reading of the ancients, whereas it was quite
ready, on the other hand, to enter into dialog with the elegant
humanist from Heidelberg. The means toward this urbanizing of
Heidegger's fundamental ontology might be the self -understanding,
intensified in recent years, of hermeneutics as "practical philosophy,"
a humanism of wisdom and dialog; in itself, however, although perhaps
capable of softening the tough metaphysics of technology aimed at
total dominion over the world, it hardly allows for mounting a
comprehensive denunciation or projecting radical change.
Vattimo is persuasive when he maintains that Apel's attempt to
reformulate hermeneutics as a "theory of the unlimited community of
communication" on the basis of a "semiotical transformation of
Kantianism," rereading the Kantian "a priori" with the aid of Peirce's
semiotics, lies well within the confines of "humanism," as does
Habermas's "logic of the social sciences," in which the "critique of
ideology," thematizing the opacity and breakdown in communication,
breaks a trail for a new possibility for understanding "acts of
communication." For both, "the solution would seem to be to bring the
hermeneutic structure of experience once more to a Kantian 'con-
dition of possibility', which would found it, in the sense of making it
possible and also legitimizing it, supplying norms, measures and
criteria of judgment and action .... Indeed, once unlimited communica-
tion has been singled out as the norm, the way is free for recogniz-
ing the historical causes behind that opacity which prevents its full
realization." Seen thus, the ideas of Habermas and Apel would appear
to be based on two concepts which are incompatible with Heidegger's
hermeneutics: "the idea of an originary continuity and the idea of the
self-transparent subject. In these two are summed up the fundamental
dogmas of modern rationalism, in both its Cartesian (self -transpar-
ency) and Hegelian (continuity) versions. To pose the question as to
why an art of interpretation should be necessary and demand that the
origins of mankind's condition of misunderstanding be explained is to
presuppose that continuity, i.e. the condition of static-free communi-
4

cation, uninterrupted and non-problematic social integration, is the

normal state of existence."l
For Vattimo the right path is to recover the radical core of
Heideggerian hermeneutics expressed in the "hermeneutic circle."
Existence can be constituted as "text," "discourse," "hermeneutic
totality," only on the condition that its "being toward death" be
"anticipated," i.e. assuming its fundamental "finitude" and "historicity,"
its "unfoundedness" in response to the summons of the Abgrund, the
bottomless pit which is the lack of foundation. Any reference to the
"transcendental function" of language as a basis for hermeneutic
practice, understood as communication or as critique of ideology,
would mean a return to metaphysics, under some sort of "transfor-
mation," unless a "breach" be forced which allows the his-
torico-linguistic messages defining the "constellation of our historical
destiny" to be "suspended" in their pretense to being able to completely
cope with the sense of being, but also, as it were, to be embraced in
the freedom of unfounded being, accepted in their historicalness and
set within that "dialog" (Gespriich) which we, as ontically finite
"mortals," are ontologically, in Holderlin's words.
This, then, is for Vattimo the deep meaning of hermeneutics, lost
along the way in its "humanistic" versions, starting with Gadamer, who
nonetheless is a privileged link due to his having had Heidegger as his
immediate point of departure. It is this meaning which, thanks to
Gadamer's privileged relationship with the "remembering thought,"
hermeneutics may be able to recapture.
 Chapter 2
Critique of the Subject and
Interpretation of the Cogito.
Heidegger and Ricoeur

We are quite convinced that a rethinking of hermeneutics requires

coming to grips with Heidegger and are likewise sensible to the
attractions of Vattimo's proposal (we would be tempted to test it
against the results reached by two scholars we are very fond of, both
of them far from Heidegger's philosophical style: Pierre Thevenaz'
"philosophie sans absolu"4 and the radical "assenzialismo" of Piovani's
later years 5). However, we do not feel that the only way to radicalize
hermeneutics is by going back to Heidegger, nor that having praxis as
our theme necessarily leads to a sort of ontological extenuation of
philosophical hermeneutics. Quite frankly, one wonders whether the
conclusive philosophical gesture of proclaiming a "breach" to have been
opened, a "bottomless pit constitution of existence," might be no less
turned in upon itself and ultimately barren than the assertion of any
other absolute, the only difference being that one cannot even allow
oneself the further possibility of transcending philosophy in favor of
mysticism. The search for a "methodical" hermeneutics, such as to
found and justify in a credible fashion a method or a plurality of
methods of interpretation and demystification, corresponds to so deep
and pressing a need for clarity, understanding and self-understanding
in mankind today that the undertaking must at least be attempted,
avoiding any hardening of the Gadamerian opposition between "truth"
and "method."
Decisive seems to us the concept of "subjectivity" which is assumed
at the basis of anti-subjectivistic and anti-humanistic criticism.
Is Heidegger's interpretation of the Cogito, as contained, for
instance, in his well-known essay "The Age of the World Picture" in

5
6

Ho/zwege, the only one possible? Or is it not simply the only

interpretation which looks like a "winner" in modern and contem-
porary history from the standpoint of the technico-scientific dominion
of the world, neither coming to terms with the meaning of subjectivity
nor with that of modernity and unable to exclusively mark the limits
to the potentialities of either one? Is the modern subject, together
with his ambiguous "humanism," mere representation and will to
power, and is his "world" merely a showplace and an arena of dominion
and struggle for dominion? Are we offered no other possibilities
besides a return to an archaic past or the prefiguration of future
apocalypses? To cite a famous phrase of Mounier's, is it possible to
"refaire la Renaissance"?'
Heidegger himself taught us how positions which are apparently
"purely" theoretical may be important for their future historical, even
epoch-making consequences. It is in this sense that the interpretation
of the Cog ito as the representative foundation of certainty is to be
understood as decisive. "What is this something certain that fashions
and gives the foundation? The ego eogito (ergo) sum. The something
certain is a principle that declares that, simultaneously (conjointly and
lasting an equal length of time) with man's thinking, man himself is
indubitably co-present, which means now is given to himself. Thinking
is representing .... To represent means here: of oneself to set something
before oneself and to make secure what has been set in place, as
something set in place. This making secure must be a calculating ....
Every relation to something--willing, taking a point of view, sensing
(something)--is already representing; it is eogitans, which we translate
as 'thinking'. Therefore, Descartes can cover all the modes of voluntas
and of affeetus, all actiones and passiones, with a designation that is
at first surprising: eogitatio.... The subjeetum, the fundamental
certainty is being-represented-together-with--made secure at any
time--of representing man together with the entity represented,
whether something human or non-human, i.e., together with the
objective.,,7
To this interpretation of the Cogito, the genius and power of which
lies in its having encapsuled in one essential principle the way of being
of an entire epoch, we wish at once to oppose a different reading of
the tradition of reflexive philosophy headed by Descartes and of its
present-day problematics. In this reading the Cog ito is no longer seen
as an epistemological subject but as the affirmation of the I am in all
 7

its density.' The "positing of the self ... is at once the positing of a
being and of an act; the positing of an existence and of an operation
of thought: / am, / think; to exist, for me, is to think; 1 exist inasmuch
as 1 think. Since this truth cannot be verified like a fact, nor deduced
like a conclusion, it has to posit itself in reflexion; its self -positing is
reflexion; Fichte called this first truth the thetie judgement.'" For
Ricoeur, although this is the necessary philosophical starting point,
reflexive philosophy is not to be identified with the myth of an
absolute self -transparency of the subject; reflexion is not intuition, nor
is it even essentially critique of knowledge or the founding of a
morality. "The first truth--/ am, / think--remains as abstract and
empty as it is invincible .... Reflexion is not so much a justification of
science and duty as a reappropriation of our effort to exist; epistemol-
ogy is only a part of this broader task: we have to recover the act of
existing, the positing of the self, in all the density of its works .... The
truth that Fichte called the the tic judgement posits itself in a desert
wherein 1 am absent to myself. That is why reflexion is a task, an
Aufgabe--the task of making my concrete experience equal to the
positing of '1 am' .,,10 Paradoxically, it can be said that a philosophy of
reflexion is not a philosophy of consciousness, for consciousness is a
task rather than a given, and Malebranche, as against Descartes, is
right in maintaining that the immediate grasp of myself and my acts
is a sentiment, not an idea; although a certainty, it is without light or
vision. I have gone astray, lost myself among objects and I find myself
cut off from the center of my existence. My condition is one of
forgetfulness. It is the task of reflexion to recover what has been lost;
this ethical accentuation, inspired by Fichte and by him who was called
"the French Fichte," Jean Nabert, is to be understood in the Spinozian
sense of 'ethics': "Philosophy is ethical to the extent that it leads from
alienation to freedom and beatitude .... Philosophy is ethics, but ethics
is not simply morality ... reflexion is ethical before becoming a critique
of morality. Its goal is to grasp the Ego in its effort to exist, in its
desire to be. This is where a reflexive philosophy recovers and perhaps
also saves the Platonic notion that the source of knowledge is itself
Eros, desire, love, along with the Spinozistic notion that it is eonatus,
effort. Such effort is a desire, since it is never satisfied; but the desire
is an effort since it is the affirmative positing of a singular being and
not simply a lack of being. Effort and desire are the two sides of this
positing of the self in the first truth: / am."u Precisely because
8

reflexion is neither intuition nor self-transparency but an appropria-

tion of our effort to exist and our desire to be, it must become inter-
pretation, for it is not possible to grasp our act of being except in the
signs, opaque, contingent and ambiguous, in which it expresses itself
and, at the same time, lies hidden. Such is the root of the relation of
reciprocity between reflexion and interpretation, between the Cogito
and hermeneutics: language with its plurality of senses and the
multiplicity of hermeneutics appeals to reflexion, but reflexion, in its
turn, in the vacuity of '1 think' and the tension towards a reappropria-
tion of its own act of existing, turns to interpretation, opening out on
the universe of signs and cultures in which our language is rooted.
 Chapter 3
Ricoeur. Phenomenology of the Will
and "Unquietness" of the Subject

With this we have entered into the heart of the problem of our
research. The choice of Ricoeur as our interlocutor is, of course, not
casual, although it does not imply a--so to speak--all-embracing
alternative with respect to other trends of contemporary hermeneutics
inspired by Heidegger, the aim being rather to integrate their thought
into a new synthesis.
In the field of philosophical hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur deserves to
be added as fifth to the four "major theorists" to whom Palmer devotes
his well-known monograph. 12 Ricoeur, as a believing philosopher free
of confessional closures, a man of the Left free of sectarian blinders,
in the seventieth year of his life (he was born in Valence in 1913), is
exemplary as a committed, rigorous intellectual. His vast production,
slowed in his early years by imprisonment in Germany but then
constantly enriched and brought up to date, might convey the
impression, at first glance, of an ingens sylva one could readily get lost
in. Actually, it follows a coherent line of development which sinks its
roots into a soil that was rendered fertile by the French tradition of
reflexive philosophy and by more recent existentialistic unrest, finding
in phenomenology a source of intellectual refinement and enrichment.
Among Ricoeur's teachers we must name at least Nabert and Marcel,
and among his first authors Jaspers and Husserl, nor can mention be
omitted of the influence of his friend, Emmanuel Mounier, who
inspired the personalist movement. 13 A member of the Reformed
Church in France, Ricoeur's intellectual formation is deeply theological
and imbued with an ecumenical spirit. It would be a mistake, however,
to stress this aspect at the expense of the philosophical thrust of his
work. Out of this complex background arises Ricoeur's lifelong,

9
10

scholarly project of elaborating a "philosophy of the will," which in its

earlier phases took the form of a phenomenological description of the
eidetic structures of the voluntary and the involuntary. The develop-
ments of his work on the philosophy of the will eventually lead
Ricoeur from the eidetic phenomenology of his early period to
phenomenological hermeneutics. For that matter, it is clear that from
the outset the choice of the will as his theme marked a break with the
tradition of Husserlian phenomenology. In his essay Methode et taches
d'une phenomenologie de la volonte, which clearly points forward to
his future work, Ricoeur proposed, on the one hand, to demonstrate
the universality and fertility of intentional analysis, applying it to
"affective and volitive lived experiences," and, on the other, to use the
results won by this stretching of the phenomenological method to call
into question the "transcendental doctrine erected on the narrow base
of the analysis of 'representations', i.e. all the operations of conscious-
ness whose primary type is perception.,,14
In effect, the primacy Husserl assigns to "objectifying acts," i.e. to
consciousness conceived of as representational activity on which
affectivity and will are based, Ricoeur holds to be a mere "prejudice."
The "affective and volitive lived experiences" can and must of
themselves be the object of intentional analysis, without being first
passed through a "phenomenology of perception." Ricoeur's broad,
detailed research on Le volontaire et l'involontaire (1950) is an eloquent
example of this methodological choice. Will, understood as decision,
action and consensus, beams a ray of intelligibility on the involuntary
as well. The reciprocal relationship between the voluntary and the
involuntary allows the old problem of the relation between freedom
and nature, consciousness and bodiliness, to be posed anew. It allows
for a "reconquest" of the integral Cogito. "The reconquest of the Cogito
must be complete: we can only discover the body and the involuntary
which it sustains in the context of the Cogito itself. The Cogito's expe-
rience, taken as a whole, includes 'I desire', 'I can', 'I intend', and, in
a general way, my existence as a body. A common subjectivity is the
basis for the homogeneity of voluntary and involuntary structures."lS
The link between the voluntary and the involuntary means that to
the will, as a capacity to decide upon (and to enact) a project, to take
action, to consent to one's own being-in-a- situation, corresponds the
body as the source of motivations, concentrate of powers and also as
 11

necessary nature--that nature which I am. In short, the body as

subject.
The phenomenology of the will allows Ricoeur to recapture the
Cartesian Cog ito in all its original complexity, without the weakening
reductiveness of readings grounded in the primacy of representation.
Consciousness is whole in all its aspects, all its "modes," and none must
be favored at the expense of another: "Sed quid igitur sum? Res
cogitans. Quid est hoc? Nempe dubitans, intelligens, affirmans, negans,
volens, nolens, imaginans quoque et sentiens.,,16 Furthermore, choosing
the will as his phenomenological theme means challenging the idealistic
interpretation of phenomenology, even Husserl's. The reciprocity of
the voluntary and the involuntary, while resolving any ontological
dualism between mind and body, brings into relief a "duality of
existence" which marks human freedom as being at once activeness and
passiveness, "dependent independence" and "receptive initiative." In this
way a new approach is found to the problematics of Sinngebung:
constituting can in no wise mean creating in the idealistic sense. 17 Here
we still have the pre- hermeneutic phase of Ricoeur's philosophical
itinerary; yet, in this interpretation of the Cog ito and the search for
a phenomenological method which has broken free of idealistic
interpretations we find the first signs of that linkage of reflexion with
interpretation, phenomenology with hermeneutics, which are developed
subsequently.
In any case, even in this early stage Ricoeur's projected philosophy
of the will was moving beyond the confines of an eidetic of the
voluntary and the involuntary. A merely descriptive phenomenology
of the essential structures of the will cannot help but lose the drama
and pathos of the concrete human condition. It is possible only at the
expense of a twofold abstraction: abstraction from fault, where human
freedom is alienated and abstraction from transcendence, the assertion
of which is closely tied to the experience of guilt and its mythical
counterpart, the image of innocence and, above all, the idea of
redemption. Here one can see how deeply bound Ricoeur's philoso-
phy is with the theological anthropology of the servum arbitrium and
the regeneration of humankind through grace. This bond, however, not
only does not prevent but, indeed, demands the autonomy of phil-
osophical discourse. The task of eidetic research on the will is to show
that the arbitrium, albeit servum, is truly arbitrium, a freedom which,
while existentially the prisoner of the passions, is free in its essence,
12

hence capable of being freed. In any case, a gap remained between the
description of the essences, in the phenomenological sense, and the
concrete condition of humankind. For this gap to be spanned, reflexion
had to become concrete, thanks to an "empirics of the will" which, a
few years later in Finitude et culpabilite, was determined as a
symbolism, the symbolique du mal. Already in Le volontaire et
l'involontaire a third stage of the philosophy of the will, beyond eidet-
ics and empirics, was prefigured: we refer to that Poetique de la
Volonte which Ricoeur has continued to pursue throughout his works
and which provides the linguistic register suitable for speaking of
liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and
totality. Said differently, sin and salvation (or, to use still another
terminology, alienation and the "new man") can be spoken of only in
a mythico-symbolical language. Clearly, Ricoeur's thought is closely
tied not only to Protestant theology but also to the existential
meditations of certain of his teachers and authors, such as Gabriel
Marcel for the "ontological mystery," the "metaproblematic" aspect of
existence, and Karl Jaspers for "boundary situations" and the "cipher"
(Chiffre) as the language of Transcendence. However, even though the
use of a given language and certain cultural points of reference can
not be seen as a sort of cap one dons and doffs at one's pleasure, we
would stress that already in this "poetics" of the early Ricoeur there
is a certain conception of the Cogito which could, to a degree, be
extrapolated from its context. If the "constitutive" character of
consciousness is a victory with respect to the "natural," "mundane" atti-
tude, then the idealistic interpretation, according to which the
"constitutive" is taken as the "primitive," the absolute "original," is a
form of "second-level naivite," necessitating a further reflexion in
order to be unmasked. UI
The Cog ito is not self-sufficient, not capable on its own of positing
itself in being. Access to the ontology of the subject can be gained only
after a long journey through the vicissitudes of a freedom which
becomes alienated in the passions and through the privileged
experience of non-being. Only by purifying the ego, giving up the
vain belief that one is self-founded and self-founding, can the road
to poetics be laid open. Creation, which was a speculative impossibility
for the finite subject, becomes accessible under the poetic form. The
order of creation appears to the subject as death and resurrection: the
death of the self-sufficient Cogito and the resurrection of freedom,
 13

healed of its wounds and rents thanks to the "gift of being."llI If

reflexion stops short of a mythics and a poetics, this self-limiting of
the pretensions of the Cog ito allows the consciousness to be an 'I will',
capable of giving all the involuntary a human significance, that of a
finite freedom which is radically and solely human.20
Nevertheless, in this early phase of Ricoeur's thought, the gap
between the phenomenological search and that which is the other of
reflexion--empirics, mythics, poetics--persisted as a sort of wound in
the Cogito. It was the turn to hermeneutics--to which he devoted
studies of increasing depth and complexity in the following years,
transforming an eidetic phenomenology into a hermeneutic phenome-
nology--which furnished the needed philosophical middle ground
between the order of reflexion and the order of creation. The order
of creation is proper to poetry and to grace. Poetry, indeed, is a figure
of grace, and grace, creative gratuity, is the essence of poetry. The
order of creation and the poetics of the freed will are already mani-
fested indirectly in the symbolic language of guilt and the confession
of guilt, in the profound meaning expressed in the dictum of the
Reformers according to which man is "simul peccator et iustus." The
awareness of sin (one might say, of being cast adrift, alienated) holds
in itself the seeds of redemption (of liberty, of the "new man"). "Le
symbole donne a penser," this is the guiding thought of Finitude et
culpabilite. The symbol is not to be found merely at the end of the
voyage undertaken by philosophical reflexion. Thanks to the reciproci-
ty of the relationship between reflex ion and interpretation, the sym-
bol quickens, favors and nourishes reflexion. Now the Cogito, as "I
think," "I will," "I am," can move in the fullness and "grace" of
language. Zl Except that the domain of interpretation is no quiet estate
where sense is tamed, but a rough terrain, fraught with strife, where
meaning is challenged, seeming certainties are contested, illusions
unmasked and rival hermeneutics engage in endless struggle. The
theme of the conflict of interpretations is central to Ricoeur's
hermeneutics--a specific tension between diverse, often opposing
interpretative styles, hermeneutics as an exercise in suspicion and as
a meditation on meaning. Indeed, since from the outset the conception
of the interpreting subject is conflictive, tensional. This taut, unquiet,
dual subject must lose itself in order to find itself again, step forth
from itself, opening toward the other. Yet, it is forever tempted to shut
itself up inside, proclaim self-sufficiency. It is a will which is required
14

to take an involuntary into itself, appropriating it as its own,

acknowledging its own freedom as finite. Yet, it is forever threatened
by the vanity of the passions, succumbing to an involuntary seen as
absolute impossibility, rejection and ontological despair.
The hermeneutics of conflict holds within itself the secret of the
conflict among hermeneutics. Still again, the Cog ito in the fullness of
its significance would appear to be central, the hidden core of
Ricoeur's philosophical undertaking. In a recent conference on Ricoeur
held in Paris (June 16-19, 1983), speaking on the theme "Paul Ricoeur
et l'hermeneutique de l'historicite," we suggested as a general key to
the reading of Ricoeur's work the idea of "starting from the core," in
alternative to a reading limited to the chronological axis as well as to
a reading "ft rebours" such as the one proposed and ably conducted by
Pierre Thevenaz with regard to Husserl. 22 It is the vicissitudes of the
Cogito (as well as its transformations) which have seemed to us to be
central to Ricoeur's work.
 Chapter 4
Paradox and Mediation in
Ricoeur's Philosophical Anthropology

In effect, Ricoeur sees human reality as characterized by a fun-

damental antinomy.23 The elaboration of a philosophical anthropology,
with the concept of fallibility as its starting point, leads directly to the
idea, developed in Homme /aillible, first volume of Finitude et
culpabilite (1960), of the "non-coincidence of man with himself," the
constitutive "disproportion" of the ego. The paradoxical ontology
constituting man is that of a finite-infinite being, as theorized by
Descartes in his Meditations, but reinterpreted so as to exclude any
connection with faculty psychology and its theory of error (finite
intellect, infinite will and, hence, possibility of error). One must rather
turn to the beginning of the fourth Meditation, where man is seen as
intermediary between the highest being and non-being, excluding,
however, any spatial connotation from the notion of 'intermediary'.
"Man ... is intermediate because he is a mixture, and a mixture because
he brings about mediations. His ontological characteristic of being-
intermediate consists precisely in that his act of existing is the very act
of bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the
levels of reality within him and outside of him. That is why we shall
not explain Descartes by Descartes, but by Kant, Hegel and Husserl:
the intermediacy of man can only be discovered via the detour of the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination, or by the dialectic between
certainty and truth, or the dialectic of intention and intuition, of
significance and presence, of the Verb and the Look"24
Contemporary philosophies of finitude read the human paradox in
a one-sided fashion. Man is no less his infinitude of discourse than his
finite perspective, his need of totality than his limited condition, his
aspiration to beatitude than his concretely determined desire. But in
order for the human paradox to be understood philosophically,

15
16

reflexion must undertake a long march, starting from a pre-under-

standing nourished on that which is other than reflexion. "Philosophy
does not start anything independently: supported by the non-philoso-
phical, it derives its existence from the substance of what has already
been understood prior to reflexion. However, if philosophy is not a
radical beginning with regard to its sources, it may be one with regard
to its method."lS In this sense, to 'commence' in philosophy means to
'recommence'. The pre-understanding of fallible man and his
constitutive disproportion is to be found in the "pathetique of
misery"--the "excellent expressions" of myth or rhetoric, from the
Platonic myth of a composite soul down to Pascal's rhetoric of two
infinites and Kierkegaard's "concept of dread."
Philosophy, of course, cannot be content with this pre-compre-
hending pathos; its task is a reflexive reappropriation of the symbolic
and rhetorical wealth of pathetic language. Therefore, it must start
anew with a transcendental type of reflexion, i.e. with a reflexion that
does not start from myself but from the object that is before me, from
which it works its way back to its conditions of possibility. The object,
the "thing," is where one perceives the specific disproportion of
knowing--between knowing and determining--and the power of
synthesis, the "third term," the intermediary between the finitude of
perspective or point of view and the virtual infinitude of speech in
which the sense is uttered. But the synthesis of the imagination, just
because it is projected onto the thing, is consciousness, though not
consciousness of self. Yet, this transcendental reflexion opens the path
for further reflective investigations which bring the notions of
'perspective', 'sense' and 'synthesis' to bear on practical and affective
life.
In this phase of his research, Ricoeur made the most of the resources
offered by a Kantian sort of transcendental reflexion, freely enhanced
by themes from phenomenology and dialectics. His practical synthesis
uncovered a new dimension of human disproportion--in the contrast
between the limits to "character" and the boundlessness of
happiness--and a new mediation, the respect for moral law which
constitutes man as person. This is still an abstract synthesis, since the
moral person is the ideal humanity of mankind, his "thou shallt be,"
and not yet the self -aware act of being. In effect, the reflexion based
on the opposition between subject and object, theory and practice,
remains abstract and formal. In this we feel that Ricoeur proved
 17

coherently true to his critique of the primacy of "objectifying acts" and

his search for an "integral Cogito." Self-understanding moves from the
pathetique of pre-understanding to the conclusive synthesis of
affectivity. The constitutive disproportion of the I am becomes "for
itselr' in man's feeling, his spirit (the Platonic thymos, median function
par excellence), in his unquiet heart. This is not an irrationalistic brand
of "philosophy of feeling," for the "significance of feeling" appears in
the "reciprocal genesis of feeling and knowing;" feeling contains an
intentional moment which cannot be done away with since it indicates
qualities felt on things, persons and the world, while at the same time
revealing an intimacy and affection of the ego. Paradoxically, an in-
tention and an affection coincide in the same life-experience. Feeling
is not of itself "positional," for it posits no being; instead, it manifests
the way in which I am aroused to love and hate, although it does so
by projecting the loveableness or odiousness onto the thing, the person
or the world. Here the reciprocity of feeling and knowing becomes en-
lightening: "Knowing, because it exteriorizes and posits its object in
being, sets up a fundamental cleavage between the object and the
subject. It 'detaches' the object or 'opposes' it to the I. In short,
knowing constitutes the duality of subject and object. Feeling is
understood, by contrast, as the manifestation of a relation to the world
which constantly restores our complicity with it, our inherence and
belonging in it, something more profound than all polarity and
duality.,,26 To feel is not a merely subjective matter; since it is
reflective of the constitutive paradox of man, it engenders a double,
as does knowing, but in a different way from knowing, not according
to the subject-object polarity but according to the modalities of inner
conflict.
By definition, affectivity is fragile and the heart unquiet. Set
between the vital and the spiritual, thrown open to the passions of
acquisitiveness, power and status, the human spirit, human feeling,
reflects in itself the constitutive and constitutively precarious
affirmation of I am. "The universal function of feeling is to bind
together. It connects what knowledge divides .... But by interiorizing
all the connections of the self to the world, feeling gives rise to a new
cleavage, of the self from the self. It makes perceptible the duality of
reason and sensibility which found a resting-place in the object. It
stretches the self between two fundamental affective projects, that of
the organic life which reaches its term in the instantaneous perfection
18

of pleasure, and that of the spiritual life which aspires to totality, to

the perfection of happiness .... It seems, then, that conflict is a function
of man's most primordial constitution; the object is synthesis; the self
is conflict. The human duality outruns itself intentionally in the
synthesis of the object and interiorizes itself affectively in the conflict
of subjectivity.,,27 Thus Ricoeur can say, with Maine de Biran, "Homo
simplex in vitalitate, duplex in humanitate."
 Chapter 5
Crisis of the Philosophie de ['esprit,
Human Sciences, "Methodic" Hermeneutics

The two volumes of Finitude et culpabilite were published in 1960 in

"Philosophie de l'Esprit," the prestigious series edited by Aubier,
founded by Louis Lavelle and Rene Le Senne. This was the same series
in which Ricoeur's Le volontaire et l'involontaire, the first part of the
Philosophie de la Volonte, had appeared ten years earlier. Actually, the
discontinuance of the series had already been announced in 1956, an
editorial decision that might be seen as symbolic of the end of an
epoch and of a cultural hegemony.28 In effect, the philosophie de
['esprit, heir to the most illustrious tradition of French philosophy, had
prevailed over university studies since the end of the nineteenth
century, the period which in manuals goes under the name of the
"reaction against positivism." Comparison with analogous movements,
for instance with Italian spiritualismo, might be misleading. With us,
spiritualism had a narrower compass, on the outskirts of an area
dominated by neo-idealism, and was often explicitly clerical, whereas
in France there were vigorous forms of laical and rationalistic
spiritualism, alongside well-known figures of believing philosophers,
some suspected of heterodoxy. At any event, it was during the second
half of the 1950's, in fact, that signs appeared of a crisis which had
been ripening and had now reached the breaking point. Certain signif-
icant dates come to mind: in 1955 Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes
Tropiques and Gilles Gaston Granger's La Raison were published; in
1958, Levi-Strauss's Anthropologie structurale, the manifesto of the
new structuralist epistemology of the human sciences. 2' And in 1956
in Mounier's journal Esprit (he had died some years earlier in 1950),
where Ricoeur had stayed on as an illustrious member of the editorial

19
20

board, promoted a forum in its pages on the human sciences 30 and gave
voice to the restlessness of a rising generation of scholars, educated in
the atmosphere of the philosophie de ['esprit but openly critical of what
seemed by then to be nothing but barren, subjectivistic narcissism.
Among the materials published was an acute, concerned paper by Jean
Conilh. 31 In his unsparingly critical analysis, this young philosopher
attacked Marcel's religious thought, Brunschvieg's critical rationalism,
Alain's aestheticism and Le Senne's intimism as examples of empty,
incoherent subjective idealism. Sartre's existentialism was seen as
falling into the same philosophical mold; indeed, his radical conscien-
cialism would be the extreme compliment paid to the "philosophie
fran~aise de l'esprit." Sartre tells the latest adventure of the conscious-
ness as it proclaims itself free and alone, relying solely on the resources
of its original possibilities. In this sense he performs a demystification,
revealing consciousness in its nakedness, its obscene, slimy, meaning-
less nothingness. Thus, the Sartrean experience is the fulfillment and
liquidation of the philosophie de ['esprit. Conilh's article also expressed
the demand by a left-wing cultural area, educated in philosophical
spiritualism, for an end to what he defined as a "painful divorce
between our private consciousness and our gesture as citizens." "It will
be necessary in some way or another--and the times and events are
moving apace--for us to come to a reckoning with our consciousness
and with history, in the earnest hope of not sacrificing either one but
of reconciling them in a living synthesis."n
In the Sixties the French philosophical scene (and not only French)
underwent very rapid changes. The new human sciences came to the
forefront, and a new current of objectivism replaced traditional
subjectivism. Alongside the above-named Levi-Strauss, it suffices to
mention Foucault, Lacan, Althusser and Barthes.
Ricoeur's hermeneutic option, rendered explicit in his 1960 study,
most certainly represents a response to the crisis of the philosophie de
['esprit and the new hegemony of the human sciences. Ricoeur feels
a confrontation with the latter to be unavoidable, insofar as they
constitute a challenge and a provocation to the philosophy of the
Cogito. The Ricoeur of the Sixties, studying Freud and dialoguing with
Levi-Strauss, is most likely still today the Ricoeur who is best known.
It is precisely this phase of his thought which assures him interna-
tional renown and prestige now that he has reached his full maturity.
His hermeneutics is marked by a methodological concern that sets it
 21

apart from the anti-methodological cast of Gadamer's, who, in this,

shows himself to be a faithful disciple of Heidegger's. Ricoeur on
principle refuses to oppose hermeneutic comprehension to explanation,
proper to the human sciences. The journey of understanding is a "long
route" which integrates the various explicative moments into itself
along with the rest, but without absolutizing them. They are "objective
mediations," stages in an interpretative process which tends to
dialecticize its phases, proceeding by a succession of integrations, arbi-
trating between differentiated, opposed styles of interpretation in order
to arrive at a reappropriation of meaning which will be at the same
time a comprehension and reappropriation of self. Thus, methodic
hermeneutics, to which Ricoeur explicitly ascribes his position, is not
only charged with maintaining a dialog with modern human sciences
but is also given a role in demystification and human emancipation.
It accepts and valorizes a plurality of methods without ceasing to aspire
to the final attainment of ontological truth. A common ground is
shared by Ricoeur's methodic hermeneutics and Heidegger's and
Gadamer's ontological hermeneutics, namely the ground harrowed by
Husserl's painstaking questioning and delving: "Phenomenology remains
the insurpassable presupposition 0/ hermeneutics."M This holds even
though the problem of hermeneutics was framed long before the rise
of Husserlian phenomenology. The problem of interpretation
presupposes the problem of meaning and there can be no philosophy
of meaning today which does not lie within the movement of ideas
inaugurated by Husserl, albeit reinterpreting it to correct the ideal-
istically oriented self-interpretation of his phenomenological method.
This is a fundamental philosophical conviction of Ricoeur's (which the
present writer shares).
However, there are two ways to found the hermeneutics of phe-
nomenology. The first is what Ricoeur calls Heidegger's "short route."
This "ontology of understanding," having recourse to a philosophical
decision which breaks at once with the methodological exigencies of
exegesis, psychoanalysis or historiographical disciplines, replaces the
question, "On what condition can a knowing subject understand a text
or history?" with another question: "What kind of being is it whose
being consists of understanding?" In this way, hermeneutics becomes
a province of the Analytic of Dasein. While acknowledging that to
frame the question in this way has the great virtue of bringing into
sharp relief the ontological end point of hermeneutics, viz. the
22

manifesting of meaning, of the truth of being, and while declaring that

he, too, is motivated by the desire for an ontology of this sort, Ricoeur
proposes instead a "long route" which moves along the paths of both
semantics and reflexion. Semantics here is taken in a very broad sense
to include, for the study of the symbolic, both psychoanalysis and
structural analysis; while by reflexion is understood a renewed
philosophy of the Cogito in which "the subject that interprets himself
while interpreting signs" discovers himself, by means of the "exegesis
of his own life," as a being who "is placed in being before he places
and possesses himself," so that "reflexion alone, by suppressing itself
as reflexion, can reach the ontological roots of understanding,"
uncovering, in place of the epistemological subject or the idealistic sort
of self-consciousness, "a manner of existing which would remain from
start to finish a being-interpreted."lS To start with language and move
through the universe of signs means, as well, to take sides in what is
universally sensed to be the most controversial area of contemporary
philosophy. More than once Ricoeur gives utterance to the wish for
"a comprehensive philosophy of language" as the historical task of our
era, to which his own work is intended as a contribution, admittedly
partial. Let us recall the best-known formulation of this Ricoeurian
theme, in the beginning pages of his 1965 essay on Freud, De
/'interpretation: "Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy
of language to account for the multiple functions of the human act of
signifying and for their interrelationships. How can language be put
to such diverse uses as mathematics and myth, physics and art? It is
no accident that we ask ourselves this Question today. We have at our
disposal a symbolic logic, an exegetical science, an anthropology, and
a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time, we are able to
encompass in a single Question the problem of the unification of
human discourse .... Today the unity of human language poses a
problem.... The present study in no way pretends to offer the
comprehensive philosophy of language we are waiting for. I doubt
moreover that such a philosophy could be elaborated by anyone man.
A modern Leibniz with the ambition and capacity to achieve it would
have to be an accomplished mathematician, a universal exegete, a critic
versed in several of the arts, and a good psychoanalyst. While awaiting
that philosopher of integral language, perhaps it is possible for us to
explore some of the key connections between the disciplines concerned
with language."l(;
 23

Between the lines of Ricoeur's description of the "philosopher of

integral language" may lurk a subtle, perhaps involuntary irony. If so,
it is certainly a maieutic irony, the function of which is to prevent an
approach which is necessarily linguistic from turning into an un-
checked pan-linguistic enthusiasm. For language, in Ricoeur's view,
must not become still another absolute. Any hypostasis of language as
a "whole closed in on itselr' would repudiate the basic intention of
signs, which is holding "for," that is to say "transcending itself and sup-
pressing itself in what it intends.,,37 In fact, the task of reflexion is to
prevent the universe of signs from being closed off. Language must
not be turned into an absolute. The comprehension of signs must be
connected to the comprehension of self. The deepest wish of her-
meneutics is to overcome the distance which separates the interpreter
from the text to be interpreted. In conquering this remoteness from the
text, appropriating its meaning and making familiar that which was
foreign, the interpreter pursues a deeper understanding of himself by
means of his understanding of the other. However, the self which
guides this process of interpretation is also the self which finds itself
changed when the process is terminated. Earlier we dealt with some
pages from Ricoeur on the connection between reflexion and
interpretation. We would only add that not only must the self, by
means of the work of interpretation, fill the formal void left by the
pure positing of the ego in the Cogito, but it must at the same time
unmask the idols of consciousness, the false Cog ito which, as we have
learned mainly from Freud's thought, conceals the subject's real
countenance, preventing a true, realistic awareness.
If this is the prospect, then an "ontology of understanding ... can be,
for us who proceed indirectly and by degrees, only a horizon, an aim
rather than a given fact. A separate ontology is beyond our grasp: it
is only within the movement of interpretation that we apperceive the
being we interpret. The ontology of understanding is implied in the
methodology of interpretation, following the ineluctable 'hermeneutic
circle' which Heidegger himself taught us to delineate. Moreover, it
is only in a conflict of rival hermeneutics that we perceive something
of the being to be interpreted: a unified ontology is as inaccessible to
our method as a separate ontology. Rather, in every instance, each
hermeneutics discovers the aspect of existence which founds it as
method."lS
24

As is well known, Ricoeur interprets psychoanalysis as an "arche-

ology of the subject" which, struggling against narcissism, the Freudian
equivalent of the false Cogito, leads to the discovery that language has
its roots in desire. Ricoeur counters the archeology of the subject with
an interpretative style inferred from Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind,
where the meaning is not placed behind the subject but in front of it,
in its future; what we have is a "teleology of the subject." In its turn,
the phenomenology of religion (Otto, Leenhardt, Van der Leeuw,
Eliade), entrusting meaning to the "sacred," the absolutely other,
effects a still more radical decentering of the subject than those
hermeneutics which locate meaning in the arche or the telos. "Thus,
the most opposite hermeneutics point, each in its own way, to the
ontological roots of comprehension. Each in its own way affirms the
dependence of the self upon existence .... The ontology proposed here
is in no way separable from interpretation; it is caught inside the
circle formed by the conjunction of the work of interpretation and the
interpreted being. It is thus not a triumphant ontology at all ....
Nevertheless, in spite of its precariousness, this militant and truncated
ontology is qualified to affirm that rival hermeneutics are not mere
'language games'.... In the dialectic of archaeology, teleology and
eschatology an ontological structure is manifested, one capable of
reassembling the discordant interpretations on the linguistic level. But
this coherent figure of being which we ourselves are, in which rival
interpretations are implanted, is given nowhere but in this dialectic of
interpretations .... In this way, ontology is indeed the promised land for
a philosophy that begins with language and with reflexion; but, like
Moses, the speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse this land
before dying.,,39
This, then, is an ontology which never becomes positive knowing but
remains rather as a unifying intention, fulfilling a regulating rather
than a constitutive role with regard to the plurality of methods and
interpretative styles--a role which, in practice, unburdens them of any
pretense to absoluteness. This ontology founds philosophical discourse
as dialectics in a sense which is more Platonic and Kantian than
Hegelian. 40 The positiveness of an absolute knowing can only be spied
at a distance as that which transcends the speaking and reflecting
subject; hence, it can only be uttered indirectly, where language
becomes annunciation, prophecy, poetry, and can be thought
philosophically, dialectically, as a possibility, but not as a possession.
 25

Yet, for the space of this uttering and thinking, the subject can and
must recognize itself as act, existence, "I am. n
 Chapter 6
The Destruction of the Illusions of Consciousness.
Psychoanalysis as Language Theory

That Ricoeur should choose a methodic hermeneutics is, we feel,

closely related to his conception of the subject and his on-going efforts
to transform the philosophy of the Cogito into a hermeneutics of the
I am. His decision to come to terms with the human sciences, making
the most of their contributions and accepting the risks involved in the
application of their various methodologies without any prior safeguards
for the sanctuaries of the ego, consciousness or even faith, is ultimately
motivated, we feel, less by evaluations relative to keeping pace with
a cultural fashion than by a deep confidence in mankind and a sincere
concern for human needs and sufferings, in sum, by a genuine "pietas
erga homines."
The essay "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie," is at the
center, even literally, of Le con/lit des interpretations. Part of this
highly complex and elaborate text comes from an article written on the
occasion of a survey on the "future of philosophy.,,41 In this essay
Ricoeur makes the following observation: if, on the one hand, the
philosophy of the subject is threatened by the risk of disappearing
from the scene, on the other hand it has never ceased being contested
throughout history. In effect, the philosophy of the subject does not
exist; rather, in the course of time a series of reflexive styles have
followed one upon another, each in response to a contestation. From
Socrates to Augustine, from Descartes to Kant, from Fichte to HusserI,
one can speak of a chain of philosophical gestures, a succession of
expressions of the Cogito, each of which reinterprets the preceding
one, all going to make up the tradition of reflexive philosophy, a tra-
dition continually exposed to challenge, whether from Sophism,
empiricism, dogmatism in one or other of its forms, or the challenge

26
 27

of what Ricoeur calls "a truth without a subject" and, we would add,
the symmetric challenge of a subject without a truth. "By this
challenge, reflexive philosophy is invited, not to remain intact by
warding off enemy assaults, but rather to take support from its
adversary, to ally itself with that which most challenges it."41 Today's
challenge is twofold: psychoanalysis and structuralism; it can, however,
be unified under one head as the "challenge of semiology," given that
psychoanalysis and structuralism share a conception of the sign that
takes issue with any intention or pretense of preserving the reflec-
tion of the subject upon self and the self-positing of the subject as an
original act, fundamental and founding.
Freudian psychoanalysis moves its attack against the primacy of the
self -conscious subject on the very grounds where Descartes had located
the foundations of certainty. Psychoanalysis "undermines the effects
of meaning which constitute the field of consciousness and starkly
reveals the play of phantasies and illusions in which our desire is
masked." The psychoanalytic explanation establishes "places"--uncon-
scious, preconscious, conscious, which is to say a series of "systems"
or sets of representations and affects governed by specific laws and not
reducible to any phenomenological description of the "lived experien-
ces" of consciousness. Thus, psychoanalysis stands forth from the
outset as an "antiphenomenology which requires, not the reduction to
consciousness, but the reduction of consciousness." "The intelligibility
of the effects of meaning yielded by immediate conscious-
ness--dreams, symptoms, phantasies, folklore, myths, and idols--can-
not be grasped at the same level of discourse as these effects of
meaning. And this intelligibility is inaccessible to consciousness
because the latter is itself cut off from the level of the constitution of
meaning by the bar of repression.,,43 Consciousness itself is now become
only a "symptom" and no longer the master of itself and measure of all
things. To traverse the distance between it and authentic meaning
requires the work of analysis and its methodical technique of
interpretation.
In the course of the development of his hermeneutic methodics,
Freud was led to add a second "topography" to the first. Rather than
a set of "places," we find a series of "roles," a "personology": Id, Ego,
Super-Ego; the neutral or anonymous, the personal, the super-personal.
The unconscious is no longer simply the repressed, belonging to the
sphere of vitality and instincts; it is, as well, the order of injunctions,
28
the dimension of moral and social authority dependent upon the
sublimation of parent figures. Now is the hour of the Oedipal complex,
through the interpretation of which psychoanalysis becomes a
"genealogy of morality;" the Super-Ego is the "heir of the Oedipus
complex."
But with the new topography, the attack upon the primacy of the
consciousness is no less radical. The Ego is like a servant with three
masters: the Id, the Super-Ego and Reality. It is hard for him to win
a space for himself, bringing the various demands into some sort of
harmony. For Freud, as for Marx, man has a pre-history of which he
must free himself before he can become historical. With Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud we have passed from the Cartesian doubting of
the thing to doubting the consciousness. The significance of these three
"exegetes of modern man" in the movement of contemporary culture
must be grasped in context. "These three masters of suspicion,
however, are not three masters of skepticism. They are surely three
great 'destroyers', but even that should not distract us. Destruction, as
Heidegger says in Being and Time, is a moment in every new founda-
tion. The 'destruction' of hidden worlds (arriere-mondes) is a positive
task, and this includes the destruction of religion insofar as it is, as
Nietzsche says, 'a Platonism for the people'. Only after such a
'destruction' is the question posed of knowing what thought, reason,
and even faith still mean. 44
Faced with the challenge of psychoanalysis, the situation of the
contemporary philosopher is comparable to that of Plato in The Sophist
where "he begins as a follower of Parmenides and an advocate of the
immutability of being but is eventually compelled by the enigma of
error and false opinion not only to give nonbeing the rights to the city
as one of 'the most all-embracing of genera' but even to admit that 'the
question of being is just as obscure as that of non being' ." Thus, "what
appears to us, good phenomenologists, as the field, foundation, and
very origin of any meaning at all," viz. consciousness itself, "must
appear to us in a different sense as a prejudice," to the point where we
are forced to confess that "the question of consciousness is just as
obscure as that of the unconscious.,,45
What is decisive now, after Freud, is that "consciousness is not a
given but a task.,,46 Consciousness must be spoken of only in terms of
epigenesis, answering the question as to "how a man leaves his
childhood behind and becomes an adult?" A reflection on the
 29
epistemological statute of psychoanalysis aids us in freeing ourselves
from the dogmatic realism of the unconscious. The unconscious is not
something that thinks; the unconscious is constituted by the set of
hermeneutic processes by which it is deciphered. 47 It takes on its full
human significance only as a moment in the dialectical process of
becoming aware, the epigenesis of consciousness. Ricoeur opposes the
Freudian "archeology of the subject"--the expression is borrowed from
Merleau-Ponty48--with a "teleology of the mind" drawn on Hegelian
phenomenology, a process in which consciousness attains to its meaning
only at the end, advancing, according to an ascendant order of
"figures," through successive "recognitions" and "surpassings." This is
an opposition which aims at a dialectical unification, which, however,
can only come about if each point of view (the unconscious as
"destiny," the conscious as "history" and each of the two interpretative
styles (the one analytical and regressive, the other synthetic and
progressive) is pushed to its outermost and radicalized, not attenuated
as would happen in the event of an eclectic compromise. In this
fashion there emerges a duality in hermeneutics corresponding to a
duality of the symbols themselves. The single symbol "possesses two
vectors. On the one hand, it is a repetition (in all the temporal and
atemporal meanings of this term) of our childhood. On the other, it
explores our adult life. '0 my prophetic soul', as Hamlet says. In this
second form the symbol is an indirect discourse on our most radical
possibilities, and in relation to these possibilities it is prospective ('Le
symbole est prospectif'). Culture is nothing else than this epigenesis
or orthogenesis of the 'images' of man's becoming adult."49
This duality of two types of hermeneutics and two ways of
symbolizing repeats the duality of existence, the basic antinomy which
characterizes the Ricoeurian unquiet subject, as we saw above when
we stated that the secret of the conflict between hermeneutics lies in
the hermeneutics of conflict. Only if this duality is taken up in its
entirety along with the challenge it implies to all monological knowing,
can it be asserted ultimately that a phenomenology of the mind and an
archeology of the unconscious are not speaking about two halves of
man but speaking each of them of the whole man. "Do not both the
Phenomenology 0/ Spirit and analytical anamnesis finish with a return
to the immediate? Conversely, is not psychoanalysis' regression to the
archaic a new march to the future? Is not the therapeutic situation in
itself a prophecy of freedom?" "Finite consciousness is perhaps no
30

more than the way, open to a limited and mortal destiny, of living the
identity between spirit, considered in its essential figures, and the un-
conscious, grasped in its key meanings. When we understand this
identity between the progression of figures of the spirit and the
regression toward the key meanings of the unconscious, we will also
understand Freud's well-known saying "Wo es war, solI ich wer-
den.--Where id was, there ego shall be."se
One of the most suggestive and persuasive applications of Ricoeur's
approach is his proposal of a reading of the myth of Oedipus. For
Freud, as is well known, the tragedy of Oedipus is are-experiencing,
as if in a dream, of that childhood drama we in fact call 'Oedipal', the
drama of incest and parricide in which ancient, displaced desires
emerge, awakening horror and the demand for self-punishment.
Ricoeur's antithetical reading, working out of a Hegelian, phenomeno-
logical style of hermeneutics (but without claiming to go Hegel's same
route again, passing through the same "figures" and reaching the same
result, viz. "knowing absolutely"), sees in Sophocles' tale "the tragedy
of self -consciousness, of self -recognition." Oedipus's guilt is no longer
seen as the child's incestuous and parricidal desire but is "an adult
guilt, expressed in the hero's arrogance and anger. At the beginning
of the play Oedipus calls down curses upon the unknown person
responsible for the plague, but he excludes the possibility that that
person might in fact be himself. The entire drama consists in the
resistance and ultimate collapse of this presumption. Oedipus must be
broken in his pride through suffering; this presumption is no longer
the culpable desire of the child, but the pride of the king: the tragedy
is not the tragedy of Oedipus the child, but of Oedipus Rex. By means
of this impure passion with respect to the truth, his hubris rejoins that
of Prometheus: what leads him to disaster is the passion for nonknow-
ing. His guilt is no longer in the sphere of the libido, but in that of
self-consciousness: it is man's anger as the power of nontruth .... One
might illustrate this opposition between the two dramas and between
the two kinds of guilt by saying that the initial drama, which comes
within the province of psychoanalysis, has its antagonist in the sphinx,
which represents the enigma of birth--the source, according to Freud,
of all the strange events of childhood; whereas the second order drama
... has its antagonist in Tiresias the seer."Sl The figure of the seer,
whom Sophocles calls the "force of truth,,,S2 and whom Ricoeur
connects, on the basis of his dialectical function, to the fool in
 31

Elizabethan tragedy, represents the vision of totality which Oedipus

will only attain to by means of suffering. Thus, the "underlying link
between the anger of Oedipus and the power of truth is ... the core of
the veritable tragedy. This core is not the problem of sex, but the
problem of light. The seer is blind with respect to the eyes of the body,
but he sees the truth in the light of the mind. That is why Oedipus,
who sees the light of day but is blind with regard to himself, will
achieve self -consciousness only by becoming the blind seer."S3 But the
two readings of the myth are not merely opposed. In effect, the second
is articulated on the first; the tragedy of birth and paternity is
entwined with that of truth and power. 54 The symbolics of fatherhood,
defined by the Oedipal myth, marks the first stage, ineluctable, of a
hermeneutic reflection on fatherhood which culminates in the
Christian symbolism of the Cross, where it is announced that "God
himself is dead."ss
We will not move any further in the direction, only hinted at here,
of the exegesis of these latter symbols, richly suggestive and fascinat-
ing as they are, but will instead come back (although in reality we have
not strayed from it at all) to our main theme, the psychoanalytic
contestation of the philosophy of the subject, and to the text which
was our point of departure. The Freudian contribution moves into the
gap, which a Kantian or Husserlian sort of transcendental philosophy
is not aware of, between the apodicticity of the Cogito and the
adequacy of the self-knowledge that the consciousness effectively
possesses. The empirical nature of consciousness lends itself to the
same difficulties, mistakes and illusions as mundane perception. The
fact that I am is an apodictical certainty, indubitable; what I am is
instead problematic and, in principle, might be a question without any
answer. The transcendental philosophers and "good phenomenologists"
already knew all this abstractly, but it was psychoanalysis which shook
their certainties and good faith in a dramatic fashion, knocking apart
the illusions of the false Cogito and, therefore, opening the way for
its reinterpretation. "The anteriority, the archaism of desire, which
justifies our speaking of an archaeology of the subject, forces us to
subordinate consciousness, symbolic function, language, to the primary
position of desire. As we said above, Freud, like Aristotle, like Spinoza
and Leibniz, like Hegel, places the act of existing on the axis of desire.
Before the subject consciously and willingly posits himself, he has
already been posited in being at the instinctual level. That instinct is
32

anterior to awareness and volition signifies the anteriority of the ontic

level to the reflexive level, the priority 0/ the I am to the I think. What
we said earlier in regard to the relation of instinct to awareness must
now be said of the relation of instinct to language. The I am is more
fundamental than the I speak. The result is a less idealistic, more
ontological interpretation of the cogito.... The precondition for a
reappropriation of the true subject is the loss of the illusions of the
consciousness. This reappropriation ... is, to my eyes, the future task
of reflexive philosophy.,,54i
 Chapter 7
The Challenge of Semiology and the
Phenomenology of Language.
The Reinterpretation of Phenomenology
as Language Theory

Ricoeur, following Hjelmslev's systematic elaboration of Saussure's

lessons, holds that the "semiological model," common to structuralism
in its various forms, both in its narrow application to linguistics and
its extension to the study of socio-cultural phenomena, rests on five
basic premises. 1) Language is an object of empirical science, where
'empirical' implies not only that observation has a primary role but also
that inductive operations are subordinate to deduction and calculation.
The possibility of referring to language as an object of science
presumes the well-known Saussurian distinction between langue and
parole. 2) A distinction must be drawn between a science of states of
system, viz. synchronic linguistics, and a science of changes, viz.
diachronic linguistics. It is the system which is understood first; change
is understood as the passage from one state of the system to another.
3) In a state of system there are no absolute terms but only relations
of reciprocal dependence; language is a form, not a substance; in
language only differences exist. 4) The collection of signs, in order to
be subject to structural analysis, must be seen as a closed system; all
relations are within the system. 5) In this context one must give up the
naive idea that the sign stands for a thing. The sign is defined by its
opposition to all the other signs on its same level and, in itself, as pure
difference; the sign is both the difference between signs and, within
each sign, the difference between expression and content. 57
The assault upon the philosophy of the subject conducted by
structuralism in its various forms parallels that of psychoanalysis; once
again the conscious ego is decentered in favor of anonymous, mindless
forces. To the psychic unconscious a sort of social unconscious is
added. 58 Whereas Ricoeur had utilized a number of philosophical

33
34

references in his confrontation with psychoanalysis, in the case of

structuralism he immediately sets up an opposition between the
"semiological model" of structural analysis and the last great expression
of the philosophy of the Cogito, Husserl's phenomenology. The rea-
son for this choice, we feel, lies in the fact that phenomenology itself
can be seen as a theory of language. Hence, we are faced with a
conflict which develops from the outset on a common ground,
language. We cannot stress too much the importance of this interpreta-
tive approach to phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty was the first to move
in this direction and, indeed, Ricoeur, continuing further along the
same way, paid his homage to him as "the greatest of the French
phenomenologists," while at the same time making clear the divergen-
ces between Merleau-Ponty's position and his own. According to
Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty encountered a "partial failure" when, taking
a cue from Husserl's Lebenswelt, he was overhasty in building an
objective science of signs. Merleau-Ponty opposed the standpoint of
parole, the "return to the speaking subject," to that of langue, the
"sedimentations" of language; it is the latter which are the object of
scientific linguistics and, hence, the living speaker is lost sight of and
only "the language in the past" is grasped. 59 Faced with MerleauPonty's
problem, Ricoeur once again suggests a "long route" which involves
meeting the semiological "challenge" head-on, not obviating or, more
exactly, sidestepping it by simply hopping to another level of
discourse.
Ricoeur's argument starts from the three basic theses of phe-
nomenology: I) meaning is the most comprehensive category of
phenomenological description; 2) the subject is the bearer of meaning;
3) the reduction is the philosophical act that makes possible the birth
of a being for meaning. These three theses are indissoluble. They can
be taken in either of two orders: either chronologically, in the order
of their discovery, which coincides with the above order of presen-
tation, or according to the order of their founding, which is just the
opposite. In fact, the field of phenomenological descriptions is
instituted by the transcendental reduction, which changes every
question about being into a question about the meaning of being.
According to Ricoeur, this function of the reduction, which brings into
the open our relation to the world--what is manifested to us, having
a meaning we must make explicit--is independent of any idealistic
interpretation of the reduction itself and of the ego which results from
 35

it, including Husserl's own interpretation from Ideen I down to the

Cartesian Meditations. fA
The theory of the subject occupies a middle position between the
theory of meaning, to which it is connected from the descriptive
standpoint, and the theory of the reduction, on which it is based from
the transcendental standpoint. For this reason one can come to the
subject in phenomenological philosophy starting either from meaning
or from the reduction.
What becomes of this organic complex of philosophical theses when
it is faced with the "closed system" of the "semiological model," which
is to say a system whose basic premises include neither the subjectivity
of the speaker nor the opening onto reality as the intentional reference
of discourse?
At this point, coherently with his approach, Ricoeur seeks an
"objective mediation" in the conflict between the objectivity of the
semiological model of structural analysis and the living subjectivity of
the phenomenology of language. It is to be kept in mind that Ricoeur
considers the structural point of view a precious conquest of the human
sciences. "Structuralism is part of science, and I do not at present see
any more rigorous or more fruitful approach than the structuralist
method .... If hermeneutics is a phase of the appropriation of mean-
ing, a stage between abstract and concrete reflexion, if hermeneutics
is thought recovering meaning suspended within a system of symbols,
it can encounter the work of structural anthropology only as its support
and not as its contrast. One appropriates only what has first been held
at a distance and examined." Ricoeur never tires of urging that a
distinction be made between structural analysis and structuralism itself,
"structural analysis as a science of texts, structuralism as an ideology
of the text in itself."'l The objective mediation between structural
explanation and hermeneutic comprehension--objective in that it is
carried out as an objective, scientific study of language--is in the
passage from the plane of "linguistics of the language" to that of
"linguistics of discourse," from the semiological model to the semantic
point of view. The basic methodological hypothesis common to all
forms of structuralism is that all linguistic levels are structurally
homologous. Thus, for instance, Levi-Strauss, in his analysis of myth,
presupposes that the segments of discourse larger than the sentence are
organized in a way analogous to units smaller than the sentence
(phonemes, monemes, lexemes), which are the object of the linguistics
36

of langue; by analogy he calls the constituent elements of myth

"my themes," subject to combinatorial laws.
Ricoeur's basic idea is, instead, that the various levels of language
are not reducible. On the semiological level a language (langue) is a
"taxonomy, a closed inventory, and an already settled combination.,,62
Already on that level it is a complex system articulated on three planes:
phonological, lexical and syntactical. Moreover, as we have seen, it is
a closed system, where what counts are the inside relationships of
dependence between signs or components of signs. A change of level
takes place, however, when one moves from the unit of the language
to the unit of discourse, from the sign to the utterance, from semiology
to semantics. From the structure one passes to the function, to language
as speech, intentional acts directed toward that which is the other of
language. It is here that Benveniste's "linguistics of discourse" joins
with Frege's noted distinctions between Sinn and Bedeutung and
Husserl's between Bedeutung and Er!ullung. 63 Discourse is an act be-
longing to the order of events and implies a series of choices producing
new combinations through which a virtually infinite series of never
before spoken utterances is possible starting from a numerically finite
repertory of signs. Discourse has a referent, a subject, one or more
interlocutors; it implies reference to the world and, at the same time,
to an intersubjective community.
"Language reproduces reality. This is to be understood in the most
literal way: reality is produced anew by means of language. The
speaker recreates the event and his experience of the event by his
discourse. The hearer grasps the discourse first, and through this
discourse, the event which is being reproduced. Thus the situation
inherent in the practice of language, namely that of exchange and
dialogue, confers a double function on the act of discourse; for the
speaker it represents reality, for the hearer it recreates that reality.
This makes language the very instrument of intersubjective com-
munication."64 Once again it is Benveniste who offers the "objective
mediation" between linguistics and phenomenology with his studies on
personal pronouns and the relation of persons in the verb.
"The form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of
speaking in which it is uttered. There is thus a combined double
instance in this process: the instance of I as referent and the instance
of discourse containing I as the referee. The definition can now be
stated precisely as: I is 'the individual who utters the present instance
 37

of discourse containing the linguistic instance r. Consequently, by

introducing the situation of 'address', we obtain a symmetrical
definition for you as the 'individual spoken to in the present instance
of discourse containing the linguistic instance yoU.,,65 As we know, in
Benveniste the pair I/you is opposed to the third person, which is the
"non-person."" Besides the personal pronouns, other signs Benveniste
calls 'indicators' playa role, such as demonstratives and adverbs of
time and place, which do not connote a class of objects but designate
the present instance of discourse. So also "the 'verb form' is an
inextricable part of the individual instance of discourse: it is always
and necessarily actualized by the act of discourse and in dependence
on that act.,,67
Benveniste's "linguistics of discourse" allows us to grasp the
connection between langue and parole and furnishes an objective basis,
starting from which it is possible to conceive of the unity of that which
Saussurian linguistics had distinguished and sundered. Although the
linguist may be tempted to hold that the I is nothing more than a
creation of language, the phenomenologist can always retort that, if
it is true that "the postulate I and the expression I are contem-
poraneous," still "the expression I as little creates the postulate I as the
demonstrative pronoun this creates the spectacle of this world toward
which the deictic indicator points. The subject posits itself, just as the
world shows itself. Pronouns and demonstratives are in the service of
this positing and this showing .... Language is no more a foundation
than it is an object; it is mediation; it is the medium, the 'milieu', in
which and through which the subject posits himself and the world
shows itself. Phenomenology's task becomes more precise: this posit-
ing of the subject, which the entire tradition of the cogito invokes,
must henceforth be performed in language and not alongside it, under
pain of never transcending the antinomy of semiology and phenome-
nology. This positing must be made to appear in the occurrence of
discourse, that is, in the act by which the potential system of language
becomes the actual event of speech.""
The phalanx of theoretical allies Ricoeur musters in the course of
his challenging debate with structuralism includes not only Benveniste
but also Chomsky, whose generative grammar contains a new
conception of structure as a regulated dynamism, fated to supersede
early structuralism. And Guillaume, whose theory of morphological
systems reveals in the forms of discourse, such as the noun and the
38

verb, "the endeavor of language to apprehend reality under its spatial

and temporal aspects," by which means the sign is seen as "being
returned to the universe."" Both Chomsky and Guillaume encourage
going beyond a static conception of structure to a dynamic vision of
structuring operations. In this prospective Ricoeur sees the word (mot),
taken in all its semantic breadth, as the point of mediation and articu-
lation between "structure" and "event.,,70 Still another author whom
Ricoeur follows with particular interest is Greimas with his "structural
semantics," in which Ricoeur sees a fertile application of structural
analysis that does not prevent a correct relationship between science
and philosophy of language, especially in the discussion of the problem
of "double meaning.,,7l
Once again, interesting avenues of research open before us which,
however, might lead us adrift of our chosen theme. Let us come back,
then, to the reinterpretation of the basic theses of phenomenology
along the lines of the philosophy of language. The semantic viewpoint
has enabled the closed semiolological model to be broken open,
affording us the possibility of turning once more to the theory of
meaning and the theory of the subject. Once more there is a sense,
when dealing with discourse, to asking who is speaking and what is
talked about. However, the core of phenomenological theory is in the
third thesis regarding the transcendental reduction. What becomes of
the transcendental reduction in Ricoeur's reinterpretation of phenome-
nology? In effect, the reduction is central to all the idealistic versions
of phenomenological theory. "Forgoing the identification of the
reduction with the direct passage which, at once and in one step,
would make the phenomenological attitude spring from the natural
attitude and would snatch consciousness from being, we will take the
long detour of signs; and we will look for the reduction among the
necessary conditions of signifying relations, of symbolic function as
such. Thus carried to the level of a philosophy of language, the
reduction ceases to appear as a fantastic operation at the end of which
consciousness would be a remainder, a residue left by the abstraction
of being. The reduction appears rather as the 'transcendental' of
language, the possibility for man to be something other than a nature
among natures, the possibility for him to relate to the real by
designating it through signs."n
At this point Ricoeur quotes his major interlocutor in the debate
over structuralism, Levi-Strauss, gaining authoritative support for his
 39

thesis. In the Introduction il ['oeuvre de Marcel Mauss, Levi-Strauss

stresses the suddenness with which language must have sprung up:
"Language could only have come into being instantaneously .... This
radical change has no counterpart within the domain of knowledge,
for knowledge develops by degrees, slowly .... Hence, there is a
fundamental opposition in the history of the human mind between
symbolism, which is discontinuous, and knowledge, which is charac-
terized by continuity ...." "Mauss still believes it possible to elaborate
a sociological theory of symbolism, whereas it is quite clear that one
must instead look for a symbolic origin for society.'173
Thus, the reduction is the origin of signifying life, not in the
chronological but in the transcendental sense, the instituting act of the
symbolic function. Here a basic objection arises: the ideal genesis of
the sign requires only an ecart, a difference, not necessarily a
transcendental subject. Only thanks to this "subjectless difference"
would all the differences in the linguistic field be possible, viz.
difference between signs, and difference within signs between signifier
and signified. We are aware, of course, that a major current in
contemporary philosophy has taken this road and that the years
following the publication of Ricoeur's essay have seen something
tantamount to an inflation of "difference" in an anti-subjectivistic
tendency (which, frankly, has often seemed to us to disguise hyper-
subjectivistic views in which a trendy, mind-catching terminology
gives new life to the old-fashioned, refined narcissism of the
"philosophie fran~aise de l'esprit," to recall the above-cited Conilh).
In raising this objection to himself, perhaps even anticipating the times
to some extent, Ricoeur counters that, once again, it arises as the result
of the prevalence of a semiological point of view over a semantic
point of view. If the question of the subject is meaningless within the
semiological model, it is not so on the level of discourse. The "tran-
scendental production of difference" is simply a first dimension, a
negative one, corresponding to what Husserl called "suspension,"
"bracketing," "placing out of bounds." But "the differential principle
is only the other side of the referential principle" ("Ie principe
differential est seulement l'autre face du principe referentiel,,).74
Reference to the world, to the speaker, to intersubjective communica-
tion. Beneath its social form, symbolism implies a rule of recognition
between subjects. Here Ricoeur quotes Edmond Ortigues, who speaks
of a "symbolic function" in language resulting in just such a rule of
40
intersubjective recognition, a law that "compels every consciousness
to return to itself by way of its other .... Society exists only through this
process, which is internal to each subject.,,75 And Ricoeur concludes,
"Reduction, in its full sense, is this return to the self by way of its other
which makes the transcendental no longer a kind of sign but a kind of
signification .... The subject founded by reduction is nothing other than
the beginning of signifying life, the simultaneous birth of the spoken
being of the world and the speaking being of man."76
 Chapter 8
Concrete Reflexion and the Intersubjectivity
Question. Towards a Hermeneutics of the I Am

Psychoanalysis and structuralism challenge the philosophy of the

subject from two different yet converging directions; the results
Ricoeur obtains from this twofold contestation are complementary. It
is not enough, though, to merely juxtapose the conclusions of the two
encounters; they must interact, shedding light on each other. 77
The distinction between the apodicticity of the "I think" and the
adequation (actually the non-adequation) of the self -knowledge which
consciousness possesses--a distinction which, as we have seen above,
is one of the results of the psychoanalytical critique--takes on a more
precise meaning once the apodictic core of the Cogito is identified
with the notion, worked up in the context of a lively give-and-take
with the semiological model of structuralism, that the speaking subject
is the transcendental origin of the symbolic function.
Thanks to this identification, the psychoanalytical critique can be
won over to the universe of language. Psychoanalytical discourse is a
mixed discourse which conjoins the language of force to the force of
language ,78 entwining both desire and meaning in a semantics of desire.
Desire is both expressed and disguised in the symbol, where the sense
of utterance in language becomes ambivalent and puzzling, calling for,
not to say demanding, the work of interpretation in order to be
decoded and recaptured by the speaking subject." Here lies the
philosophical maturity of Ricoeur's thought, as we encountered it at
the outset of the present essay upon entering--so to speak--in medias
res: reflexion becomes concrete thanks to interpretation; there is an
appropriation of one's own desire for being, of one's effort to exist,
of the originating ontological affirmation which constitutes us. "Here,
I am defining as hermeneutics any discipline which proceeds by
interpretation, and I give to the word 'interpretation' its strong sense:

41
42

the discernment of a hidden meaning in an apparent meaning. The

semantics of desire stands out against the much vaster field of the
effects of double meaning: the very ones that a linguistic semantics
encounters under another name, which it calls transfer of meaning,
metaphor, allegory .... By passing through a hermeneutics, reflective
philosophy emerges from abstraction; the affirmation of being, the
desire and the effort of existing which constitute me, find in the
interpretation of signs the long road of awareness. The desire to be and
the sign are in the same relation as libido and symbol. This means two
things: on the one hand, understanding the world of signs is the means
of understanding oneself.... On the other hand, in the opposite
direction, this relation between desire to be and symbolism means that
the short path of the intuition of the self by the self is closed .... Only
the long path of interpretation of signs is open. Such is my working
hypothesis in philosophy. I call it concrete reflexion, that is, the cogito
mediated by the whole universe of signs.,,80
Although psychoanalysis lends itself to a semiological reinter-
pretation, it must not be forgotten, as against any temptation to reduce
everything to a matter of signs, that "I am" is more ancient, more
original than "I speak." Language utters and reveals being. Part of its
essence is to transcend itself towards that which is the other of itself,
even if it is only in language that we can utter the other. The relation
between being and language is circular, but, in the circle, language
recognizes that it is second to being, "a mode of the being of which it
speaks." Hence, it is necessary for philosophy to accept Heidegger's
injunction and and advance along "the way to language ,,,St even though
it is an advance which necessarily starts "from the heart of language,"
a plumbing of the depths of language, one might say, in order to bring
into evidence the essential relation with being. Clearly Ricoeur rejects
the mere identification of being with language. S!
The hermeneutics of I am transforms and renews the philosophy of
the Cogito, doing away with the illusions of the idealistic, subjec-
tivistic, solipsistic Cogito. It safeguards the thinking and speaking
subject's indestructible core of apodicticity by flanking the confident
assertion "I am" with the disquieting Question "Who am I?,,83 Between
that assertion and this Question an area is opened calling for a renewed
involvement on the part of a philosophy solidary with the anxieties and
hopes of humankind.
 43

The speaking subject, acknowledging itself as an "I am," as desire

and conatus, is necessarily both finite and plural, a community of
"monads," an "I" facing a "thou" and belonging to a "we." The idealistic,
narcissistic Cogito, on the contrary, is tempted and ultimately doomed
to turn solipsistic. In his studies on Husserl Ricoeur pays careful
attention to the aporias of phenomenological idealism at the point
where it takes up the theme of the alter ego. In his view, the theme of
intersubjectivity play the same role in the Cartesian Meditations as
divine truthfulness in Descartes's works, for any truth which goes
beyond the mere reflexion of the subject on itself is based on
intersubjectivity. This theme, implicit in the first four meditations,
reveals the full force of its paradoxical, problematic character in the
fifth meditation. There the appointed task is to start from self, the
unique, unrepeatable experience of the ego, and constitute a real,
unequivocal other. The task is to recognize among objects one which
is, instead, a subject. 84 Ricoeur, who, as we have seen above, con-
tests the primacy which Husserl attributes to "objectifying acts" and
proposes a reading of the Cogito in terms of a will standing in a
reciprocal relationship with the involuntary (which is to say, an
embodied will, corporal, radically and exclusively human) also asserts
clearly the impossibility of solving the puzzle of the alter ego without
breaking the "dictatorship of Vorstellung."as Indeed, he considers it
characteristic of a line of reasoning based on the "prejudice" of the
primacy of representation to attempt to solve the problem of the
recognition of the other, of personal reality, according to the
Dingskonstitution model, that is by seeking to constitute the "thing" as
a presumed unity of meaning in the flux of appearance." Instead,
Ricoeur, as a phenomenologist of the will, seeks the solution to the
problem of intersubjectivity in a practical, Kantian style of philoso-
phy, specifically in the "respect" which coordinates and merges the
Schelerian theme of "sympathy" with the Hegelian and Marxian theme
of "struggle."
In what is probably the most Kantian of his writings, Kant et
Husserl,m published in 1954-55, hence virtually at the same time as the
Etude sur les "Meditations Cartesiennes" de Husserl and Sympathie et
respect, Ricoeur, in a fashion which was becoming more and more
usual with him, conducted a sort of interleafed reading of Kant and
Husserl. Behind the former's epistemological concern to firmly ground
mathematical and scientific knowledge, Ricoeur discovered a kind of
44
"implicit phenomenology," a phenomenology in the embryonic state,
which shows up whenever Kant works back from the totality of
phenomena to the conditions in which they were constituted,
describing a full-fledged "field of transcendental experience," which
Ricoeur sees in Kant's notion of GemiU. This happens especially when
Kant speaks in his Critique about "receptivity," "spontaneity,"
"synthesis," "subsumption," "production" and "reproduction" or when
he harks back to the original experience of time, operative in reason
thanks to the schematism of the imagination, or when he attributes the
"I" with "an existence which is not yet a category."
Although Husserl brings to completion a phenomenology which in
Kant had remained at the embryonic level, in so doing he loses sight
of the ontological dimension present in Kant's critique of phenomena
as well as the "very possibility of a meditation on the limits and the
foundation of phenomenality.,,88 Hence, he attributes a phenomenolog-
ical primacy to intuition. In Kant the limits of intuition are set by
Denken; in HusserI, thinking itself requires its being filled by evidence.
Indeed, HusserI's problem is no longer to find an ontological founda-
tion for experience but to establish its authenticity. This critique of
authenticity leads him from one reduction to another in search of the
original evidence, to the point where the evidence itself is subjected
to reduction; once he has eliminated all sedimentation, he hopes to
reach the living present of consciousness. Down this slippery road he
slides nearer and nearer toward idealism and solipsism. In spite of the
"philosophical heroism" with which the father of phenomenology takes
up the challenge of solipsism and the genial solutions he puts forward
to solve the puzzle of how the transcendental subjectivity of an other
can be constituted in my subjectivity, his disontologizing of the object
cannot help but result in a misapprehension of the reality of the other.
According to Ricoeur, the only way in which the other can be
constituted as a personal reality is by moving from an epistemological
type of critique as well as from a phenomenological description of the
transcendental experience to the plane of practical philosophy. The
absolute reality of the other can be had only through the "respect" of
his moral personality, of man as an end. Respect is not simply a
subjective-empirical sentiment but a practical sentiment which limits
my faculty to act, acknowledging humanity as an objective end, an
absolute dignity. In this fashion, the plurality and communication of
consciousnesses, although it cannot be the object of empirical
 45

description and knowledge, is nevertheless that which founds the

coexistence of freedoms in a "realm of ends," transforming subjective
will into moral freedom. The limiting function of the "thing in itselr'
with respect to phenomena, a distinguishing feature of Kant's thought
and utterly lacking in HusserI's phenomenology, leads in a perfectly
coherent way to the constituting of the person. "The glory of phenome-
nology is, by means of reduction, to have elevated the investigation
of appearance to the level of a science. But the glory of Kantianism
is to have been able to coordinate the investigation of appearance with
the limiting function of the 'in se' and the practical determination of
the 'in se' as freedom and as the totality of persons. Husserl made
phenomenology but Kant limited and founded it."
According to Ricoeur, the intrinsically equivocal nature of
"sympathy," object of Scheler's memorable analysis,90 does not justify
its being privileged with respect to other intersubjective sentiments;
indeed, it must itself be founded on respect. It is respect which puts
the phenomenological distance between persons, introducing an
element of order in the affective confusion inherent in sympathy.
Thanks to respect, sympathy is not reduced to a mere mental contagion
or emotional fusion in which a certain self-centeredness would still
prevail, but becomes a capacity for partaking in another's joy or
sorrow, since that other is acknowledged and respected as such.
Respect bestows an ethical superiority on sympathy as active compas-
sion. Finally, when he ties Scheler's theme of sympathy in with Hegel's
and Marx's theme of struggle, Ricoeur notes that respect, seen as the
practical acknowledgement of otherness, has a founding role in
struggle as well. The opposition of consciousnesses among themselves
is not to be understood as the original manifestation of the plurality
of consciousnesses. In Hegelian terms, the historical consciousness
that human beings are equal is already presupposed in the dialectics
of the master-servant relationship, since the servant is not a mere
instrument but "an other in the process of being nullified and an
instrument in the process of being humanized." Struggle, then, is an
"impassioned dramaticization of the revelation of the alterity instituted
by respect." To subordinate struggle to respect and the opposition
among consciousnesses to the acknowledgement of otherness is to
refuse to idolize history, while acquiring an element of judgement
which will allow one to reject or accept what history produces through
violence and suffering. Respect alone "can hasten the end of struggle"
46
and "set a limit to violence." It "lets non-violence partake in history,
giving it a specific efficaciousness which frees it of its nobly derisory
role as the bad conscience of history. The concrete, current witness
that the non-violent bear to the possibility of friendship among human
beings fulfills in secret the ethical purpose of progressive violence. It
not only fulfills it but makes it manifest, anticipating it madly in an
inopportune, non-viable present time. Moreover, by revealing the
ethical purpose of violence, it offers violence a justification, to the
degree that the purpose can be carried out. When he not only acts along
the lines set out by the humanistic ends of history but also by means
of the disarmed force of those ends, the man of respect, as non-
violent, saves the core meaning of violence, which is none other than
its ever procrastinated hope.',91
Ricoeur's framing of these questions leads him logically to reject the
criticisms moved against the formalism of Kant's ethics: "Formalism's
poverty is its strength." No concrete ethics is purely formal, nor did
Kant pretend that ethics should remain formal. True, there must be
a formal moment; the question is that of knowing how to go on once
one has begun with Kant."n
The need to go beyond Kant already becomes concrete in the
philosophical anthropology of the first volume of Finitude et culpabilite
(1960) where Ricoeur affirms, as we have already mentioned above,
that the "practical synthesis" of consciousness yields only an ideal,
abstract conception of humankind. Consciousness becomes "for itself"
only in the eminently "fragile" moment of affectivity, viz. "feeling,"
which is still referred to with the Kantian term GemiU or the Platonic
term thymos. Feeling reveals "the identity of existence and reason in
the person." If one is to move beyond "simple formalism," one must say
that feeling attests that we are a part of being, a "primordial inesse."
"This fundamental feeling, this Eros through which we are in being,
is particularized in a diversity of feelings of belonging which are, as
it were, the schematization of it .... This schematization develops in two
directions, that of interhuman participation in the various forms of
'We', and that of participation in tasks of supra-personal works which
are 'Ideas'. In the first direction the fundamental feeling schematizes
itself in all the modalities of philia. The inesse takes the form of a
coesse."93 On the level of the coesse is developed the phenomenology
of the essentially interhuman passions of acquisitiveness (Habsucht),
power (Herrsucht) and status (Ehrsucht) which Ricoeur makes an effort
 47

to grasp in their eidetic dimension of innocent human "quests," not yet

the fallen forms of affectivity dealt with by Kant in his Anthropol-
ogy--quite legitimately, considering the "pragmatic point of view"
from which it is elaborated. "Just as Aristotle described the perfection
of pleasure beyond all 'intemperance', so, too, must we discover an
authentic Such en behind this triple Sucht, the 'quest' of humanity
behind the passional 'pursuit', the quest which is no longer mad and
in bondage but constitutive of human praxis and the human SelL .. The
feelings which gravitate around power, having and worth ought to be
correlative with a constitution of objectivity on a level other than that
of the merely perceived thing .... The theory of the object is by no
means completed in a theory of representation; the thing is not merely
what others look upon. A reflexion which would end the intersubjec-
tive 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; they make a human world out of
the mere nature they start with .... The 'difference' of a Self from
others is only constituted in connection with things which themselves
belong to the economic, political and cultural dimensions. Conse-
quently, we must specify and articulate the relationship of the Self to
another Self by means of the objectivity which is built on the themes
of having, power and worth.,,94
With this 1960 work, however, Ricoeur has already opted for
hermeneutics or, if one prefers, has made that choice explicit. The
anthropology of human disproportion and "fallibility" are the premise
for a reflexion based on the sensitivity toward and the interpretation
of symbols. It is in the theme of language and its interpretation that
he finds a new, powerful argument against the temptations of solipsism
and idealistic self-understanding on the part of reflexion.!IS Indeed,
language as living discourse, beyond the opposition between theory and
practice, affords the most convincing denial of the illusions of solip-
sism and an almost material testimony as to the plurality and reciproc-
ity of speaking subjects.
Discourse, as such, implies not only an opening out upon the world
and a reference to a speaking subject but also a "thou" to whom it is
directed. The genesis of the persons of discourse is by its very nature
plural. In the framework of the reinterpretation of phenomenology as
language theory, place can be found as well for a new understanding
of Russerl's aporias regarding the puzzle of intersubjectivity. What is
48

needed is to show how, within language as an essentially intersubjec-

tive phenomenon, the acknowledgement of the other coexists with the
irreducible consciousness that I am or that I speak--a consciousness
which can turn into the temptation to engage in monolog. Whether it
be explicitly thematized or not, the intersubjective community of
speakers is in any case operative in the advance of the philosophy of
the Cogito towards the "hermeneutics of the I am," up to the threshold
of the "poetics of freedom.""
 Chapter 9
"Originary Affirmation," Philosophies of Negativity,
Problematics of the Subject. Nabert and Thevenaz

Perhaps it is time to take our bearings. The line of reasoning we have

been following would seem to have some of the features of a
Ricoeurian "long route," with the attendant risk of going astray or
losing sight of the goal. We started out by charting the present state of
hermeneutics, rejecting the obligation of choosing between either
"urbanizing" Heidegger's ontological radicalness into a sort of
conciliatory neo-humanism or proclaiming, in a neo-Heideggerian
fashion, that thought is without a foundation. Behind the latter
alternative we spied even subtler, more ingratiating risks than with the
former. In order to hold our course through hermeneutics, we
wondered whether it might not be decisive to have a conception of
subjectivity to serve as a guide in steering among the various options.
We countered Heidegger's by now classical reading of the Cogito with
another in which the primacy of representation is replaced with the
primacy of the act of existing. An encounter between reflexion and
interpretation, between phenomenology and hermeneutics, of which
Paul Ricoeur's thought is an illustrious and significant example,
seemed and seems to us to be the long route which must be followed
order to lay the premises for a hermeneutic philosophy that could take
up the challenge and the contributions of the human sciences and allow
itself to be guided by a concern for flesh-and-blood human beings,
without falling either into a consolatory humanism or that narcissistic
subjectivism which damns one forever to the charmed circle of one's
own SUbjectivity. Along the way, Ricoeur has been our guide, himself
a fellow-voyager. At this point of the journey, the "hermeneutics of
the I am" strikes us as the most satisfying and mature response to the
needs we set out to meet.

49
50

In Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the I am one finds the thesis of

"originary affirmation," the final conclusion reached in a long process
of reflection, couched explicitly in the Cogito tradition and for which
Ricoeur acknowledges Nabert as an immediate precursor. Moreover,
one finds an interpretation of the "question of the subject" in
Heidegger which Ricoeur cites in proof of his claim that Heidegger's
ontology is not at all radically opposed to his own but rather a goal
which he, Ricoeur, sets out to reach via another and longer route."
In Jean Nabert Ricoeur finds a thinker who is capable of medi-
tating on a problem which is not Nabert's alone but belongs to "every
philosophy which tries to subordinate the objectivity of idea,
representation, understanding, or whatever is the founding act of
consciousness, regardless of whether this act is called will, appetite,
or action," a problem common to Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche and
Freud and which "has to do with the relationships between the act
whereby consciousness posits and produces itself and the signs wherein
consciousness represents to itself the meaning of its action."98 Without
recapitulating here Ricoeur's careful examination of the successive
phases of his teacher Nabert's philosophical development from
L'experience interieure de la liberte in 1923 down to Elements pour une
ethique in 1943 and beyond;99 we shall move right to his conclusion: one
must seek in the imagination if one hopes to find "the key to the
division ... between the pure production of acts and their concealment
in signs." The law of the imagination is "the self's effect on itself," and
this law is none other than time as it regulates a twofold rhythm:
creation, pouring out as a stream, and works, remaining inert in its
wake; manifestation and concealment; act and sign; in a word,
phenomenon. "Because we do not enjoy immediate self -possession and
always lack perfect self -identity, 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. The detour by way of the
phenomenon [through the mediation of signs], then, is based on the
very structure of originary affirmation as both difference and relation
between pure consciousness and real consciousness. The law of the
phenomenon is indivisibly a law of expression and a law of conceal-
ment. Thus we can understand that 'the entire sensible world and all
the beings with which we have dealings sometimes appear to us as a
text to be deciphered,."l°O
 51

Originary affirmation as an act of being which posits, expresses, and

conceals itself in signs, and which must always reappropriate or
recover itself, constitutes a philosophical and moral alternative to the
philosophies of negativity, especially Sartre's ontology of the 'in itself'
and the 'for itself', of being and nothingness. In his essay Negativite
et affirmation originaire, Ricoeur deals with this theme in depth,
anticipating the philosophical anthropology of L'homme faillible and,
above all, clarifying the ontological background of his whole philo-
sophical undertaking. In the 1956 text, although hermeneutics is not
yet mentioned, he expresses convictions that are and remain basic to
his thought constituting an implicit yet decisive motivation for the
later hermeneutics of the I am. Ricoeur begins by expressing the
"subjective motivation" behind his study, seeking to get to the bottom
of his reticence towards those philosophies which, from Hegel on,
consider negation to be the strength of reflexion. While convinced that
Hegel marks a break with all preceding philosophies, he nevertheless
feels it is possible and, indeed, necessary to recover a philosophy of
the primacy of being and existence that takes the philosophies of
negation into serious consideration. The basic issue could be formu-
lated as follows: has being priority over nothingness in the heart of
man--which is to say, of this being who manifests himself by virtue
of his singular power of negation? A choice must be made between a
philosophical style in which "yes" prevails and one in which "no"
prevails, between a philosophy of joy and one of anguish. lol
The starting point of Ricoeur's examination is human reality, the act
of reflexion. The task is to define the moments in which we become
aware of our finitude and, in so doing, overcome it. The experience
of finiteness is at once the experience of bounds and the transgression
of those bounds. This paradoxical, complex structure of human reality
is first revealed in the relationship I have with my body, which is
open to the world and, in this opening, is also a moment of finiteness,
limitation and passiveness. Thus, I am also a finite perspective, a point
of view, a being in a situation, but I can know this finitude of mine
only by transcending it, establishing a correlation between my point
of view and other possible points of view, and only if the relativity
and limitedness of any possible point of view is transcended in the
intentionality of utterance, of signifying something, a meaning which
on principle transcends any possible point of view and is objectively,
i.e. intersubjectively valid. When I speak, I speak about things,
52

including aspects not presently being perceived and even when the
things themselves are absent. Already on the level of perception, the
dialectical relationship between finiteness and its overcoming in the
acknowledgement of finiteness shows how every negation presupposes
an affirmation and how de negation is actually a negation of negation.
This same dialectics is to be encountered in other moments of bodily
mediation: wanting, being threatened, uttering, being able (in the sense
of possessing a set of capabilities for action). The notion of bounds,
as applied to human existence, has, therefore, a dual meaning. On the
one hand, it indicates my being there bounded, as a perceptual,
emotional and practical perspective. On the other hand, it indicates my
limiting act, as the intention to mean, to take an evaluating position,
to will to do. Hence, denegation is an essential moment of reflexion.
The only way I can utter the transcending of my finite situation is by
using the language of negation: I am not what I am. My constituting
is known to me only indirectly, starting from a reflection on the thing
insofar as it gives itself to me in finite perspectives and in a "void of
signification," following Husserl's phenomenological style in his early
Logical Investigations. Husserl's great work begins not with a
phenomenology of perception but with a phenomenology of sig-
nification, whose horizon is the absurd signification, that which on
principle is "without possible fulfillment." Hence, my intentionality is
twofold: I am a negating intentionality, an elan of signifying and
power of utterance in the absence of the this-here; and a fulfilled
intentionality, an openness to receiving and a power of seeing in the
presence of the this- here. 102 The scope of Husserl's analysis can be
grasped in depth only in the light of a Hegelian style of phenomenol-
ogy starting from the initial gap between certainty and truth. The
march toward the universal leads through negation, just as to live
ethically presumes the capacity for refusing, saying no. There is no
willing without nilling. The negative sign inheres to value no less than
to moral obligation (at this point it is possible to take up the Kantian
conception of practical reason as a limit to my power to desire). Thus
also the relationship to an other implies the same mark of negativity
thanks to which I transcend my finite perspective. The other is par
excellence the not-I just as the universal is the negation of the
this-here. These two negations are correlative and co-origina1. 103
At this point the problem becomes one of knowing if it is legitimate
to hypostatize such a language of negativity, making it the beginning
 53
of an ontology of nothingness, or if instead it must be maintained that
negation can only exist as an intentional reference to an affirmation,
that negation is what is grasped as such in a movement of reflexion
overcoming bounds and transcending toward an originary opening, that
denegation is the negation of negation, negation of my finiteness. The
philosophies of negativity stress what is but one dialectical aspect of
my ontological constitution. They turn what can legitimately be con-
sidered as simply a complex of "nullifying acts" into an hypostasis of
nothingness. According to Ricoeur, a negation can neither start from
itself nor end in itself; it is based on motives and fits into a project.
Sartre reduces being to a thing, but a non-thing is not necessarily
non-being. If one starts with a richer concept of being, one may not
have to think of freedom as a nothing. It is necessary "to carry our idea
of being beyond a phenomenology of the thing or a metaphysics of
essence up to this act of existing of which it may be equally said that
it is without essence or that all its essence is to exist."l04 But under what
conditions can this affirmation be considered both originary and
necessary? As a thinker Ricoeur is hardly the one to tarry in ontologi-
cal meditation. In his works ontology, being merely posited as the
terminal point of a long route, is mentioned but usually not dealt with
in detail. Hence, we find particularly precious those texts, like the ones
we are examining, wherein the question of being is faced explicitly.
Philosophy was born with the pre-Socratics, and it is to them that
Ricoeur returns in order to answer the question as to the necessity and
originariness of the affirmation of being as an act, starting from the
immense discovery that to think is to think being and to think being
is to think the arche, in its two senses of beginning and foundation.
Anaximander was the first to make this discovery, according to the
tradition of the doxographers. Two aspects are to be stressed in these
beginnings of philosophy, according to Ricoeur. Firstly, the arche or
principle is also order and justice, which is to say that it is "the
common source of the intelligibility of the physical, the ethical and the
political;" in order for ontology not to split into two branches, it must
be "the common root of being in the sense of the factual, and of being
in the sense of value." Secondly, in Anaximander the arc he is also
apeiron, i.e. "unlimited," "undetermined," "inessential" as Ricoeur
renders it; it is simple being, without a particular essence. The god, as
Xenophon said, is neither man nor bull; nor, Ricoeur adds, is he
essence or value. Thus, for the Greeks the affirmation of being founds
54

man's existence and puts an end to his "wandering," as Parmenides

called it. But could I not go on and on questioning myself as to the
origin of the origin, an endless interrogation? Already in Plotinus this
possibility is brought out if only to be denied as an illusory conception
of being in spatial terms; in effect, the idea of the First marks the ex-
tinction of the problem of the origin of the First. Kant's inestimable
merit lies in having confirmed that thought is thought of the Uncondi-
tioned, since it is the limit of every objectifying thought. Thus, Kant
harks back to Anaximander's intuition: being is primordially dialecti-
cal: determining and undetermined. This dialectical structure allows
it to both put an end to the possibility of questioning itself on its origin
and founds the possibility of posing all other questions. The originary
affirmation must, however, be retrieved through negativity. This
direction must be taken, since the meaning of my incarnation is
ambiguous; it holds in itself the temptation to dissemble its origin. One
can work back to the foundation by starting from negativity. The
philosophies of negativity have, so to speak, stopped half -way; they
are transitional philosophies, bearing witness to the "obscure side of
a total act whose illuminated side has not been disclosed." Their task
is to remind us that being must be thought of as an act, while the
classical philosophies, in varying degrees, were all philosophies of
form, whether they conceived of form as Idea, Substance or quiddity.
"The function of negation is to render the philosophy of being
difficult, as Plato was the first to have recognized in the Sophist:
'Being and non-being embarrass us equally'. Under the pressure of the
negative, of negative experiences, we must reachieve a notion of being
which is act rather than form, living affirmation, the power of existing
and of making exist."l05
Toward the beginning of this chapter we have referred to an author
who is not very well-known in Italy, Nabert, on whom Ricoeur draws
for his concept of "originary affirmation." We hope our reader will not
take it amiss if we again cite an author almost unknown in our
country, Pierre Thevenaz. But the fact is that anyone who happens to
have studied the thought of this philosopher, Ricoeur's friend and of
his same age, Protestant like himself and involved in Mounier's
personalist movement, prematurely deceased in 1955--the text by
Ricoeur we have been examining was first published in 1956--and who
happens to know that Thevenaz had meditated on the sense of the
Cogito, moving within the same tradition of reflexive philosophy
 55

carried on by Ricoeur and Nabert, can hardly fail to remember as well

the original, genial views of this French-speaking Swiss thinker who
countered the divine, cosmic reason of the Greeks with the radically
human reason of the moderns, heirs to the break effected by the
advent of Christianity which forced philosophical reason toward a
radical secularization and humanization, a "philosophy without
absolute," such that not only Descartes and Kant but also Nietzsche and
HusserI find their place in the wake of the turmoil that Golgotha
brought about in the cosmological vision of pagan philosophy.l06
Perhaps, compared to Thevenaz's philosophical radicalism, which we
earlier connected with modern theologies of secularization, Ricoeur's
position might appear to be a neoclassical continuance of the philo-
sophical inheritance left by the Greeks. Admittedly, he does not
completely share his friend's philosophical position; still, we feel the
latter will be of use to us in making explicit what is unsaid in the
above-examined text by Ricoeur. Whence does the need derive for the
thought of being to pass through the negative? Whence do the philo-
sophies of the negative, among which Hegel is singled out as the
prototype, derive the first impulse to differentiate themselves from the
serene, self -assured thought of the positivity of being? Ricoeur, in
the essay under discussion, speaks of an "incarnation" of the act of
being. Does not the word 'incarnation' offer a clue as to a certain
historical origin? In another text written some years later/07 Ricoeur
is more explicit: after having spoken of the Aristotelian conception of
being as act (energeia) and of a life in conformance with the act
(kat'energeian) as the only work (ergon) worthy of mankind, 108 Ricoeur
adds that we as modern readers of Aristotle cannot fail to be struck
by the discordances between his moral philosophy and his ontology.
At the last, the act par excellence excludes both movement and change.
It cannot be exemplified in human activity but can only be imitated
to a degree in the contemplative life as thought about thought. This
likewise explains how it is that no real concept of freedom is to be
found in Aristotle, at least in the sense of a unitary concept of the will,
beyond the descriptions of the voluntary and the involuntary, of
purpose and deliberation, contained in the third book of the Nichoma-
chean Ethics--descriptions thanks to which Ricoeur acknowledges
Aristotle as the illustrious ancestor of the phenomenology of the will.
The decisive fact is that we belong to another era of the history of
being, in which the will has been identified with being as subjectivity.
56

Between Aristotle and ourselves there is Christianity. Augustine's

vo!untas, Descartes's Cog ito and Hegel's Geist are three moments of this
history of being as subjectivity. The will must be grasped first of all
as an infinite power: this came about with Augustine, when evil was
seen as the terrifying power to negate being.
In Descartes the Cogito becomes an existential experience of
freedom, of free thought in the strongest sense of the term, facing a
world that has been reduced to a representation on the part of the
subject. With Hegel the Kantian antinomy between nature and freedom
is overcome (for this to come about, nature itself had first to be
unified under a sole legislation). Substance becomes subject. But Hegel
can be seen as the one who succeeded in overcoming the previous
contradictions of Western thought (in particular those between
substance philosophies and subjectivity philosophies), not only in the
sense that he assures the triumph of the principle of subjectivity but
also in the sense that in his dialectical synthesis he salvages and indeed
magnifies the heredity of classical philosophy as a philosophy of form
and essence. One is moved to think of Hegel as par excellence a
"Christian" philosopher or as the author of a new gnosis. In any case,
the critical point of Hegelian philosophy, according to Ricoeur, is the
relationship between truth and will; if every moment in the ascendant
movement of absolute knowledge finds its truth in the next one, then,
at the last, everything rests upon the philosopher's situation in history
and collapses along with it, so that absolute knowledge is revealed as
a mere pretense. In Nietzsche the truth becomes a function of the will;
however, if Hegel is ambiguous, the post-Hegelians are no less so. In
Nietzsche the completion of the modern philosophy of the will (and
the critique of the philosophy of form, essence, logos) stands side by
side with the surpassing of subjectivity by means of a cosmic
symbolics. The philosophy of subjectivity has reached a crisis, along
with philosophical language itself as it turns into interpretation, a
symptomatology.
Still, the crisis may be all to the good, says Ricoeur, and a way out
can perhaps be found by coordinating the various levels of the question
of the will: the phenomenologico-descriptive, the ethico-political and
the hermeneutico-ontological levels.10!1 This conclusion is a purpose-
fully modest, low-keyed one for such a bold, sweeping review of the
whole history of thought. But it leaves no doubt as to the central
importance in Ricoeur's philosophical hermeneutics of the "question
 57
of the subject," basically a Christian heredity, in which, however,
Ricoeur does not disdain to note traces left by more ancient philoso-
phies. l1O Less radical in this than Thevenaz, he is perhaps closer ideally
to Justinus, the ancient apologist, who found seeds of truth in the
Greek philosophers, the logoi spermatikoi, forerunners of the one and
only Logos.
In ending this chapter, we would not want to leave any misunder-
standings as to the sense of our discussion of the Christian origin of
subjectivity. Neither the present writer nor the authors under
examination (Thevenaz, Ricoeur) have the slightest intention of
furnishing an updated version of clerical philosophy. In stressing the
importance of the patrimony of Christianity, we wish to refer to
something which takes on universal significance. If only a few people,
perhaps a very few, can truly and rightfully call themselves Christians,
in another sense all of us are post-Christians, situated historically (and
philosophically) post Christum natum.
 Chapter 10
Ricoeur and Heidegger.
The Cogito and Hermeneutics

As we move toward the close of this part, we have left for last the
examination of the text wherein Ricoeur comes to grips directly with
Heidegger's interpretation of subjectivity. With this, our discussion
comes round full circle to the theme whence we set out.
"My intention here is to understand the scope of the well-known
critique of the subject-object relation which underlies the denial of
the priority of the Cogito. I stress the word 'scope' because I want to
show that this denial implies more than a mere rejection of a notion
of the ego or of the self --as if they lacked any meaning or were
necessarily infected by the basic misconception that governs the
philosophies generated by the Cartesian Cogito. On the contrary, the
kind of ontology developed by Heidegger gives ground to what I shall
call a hermeneutics 0/ the 'J am', which is a refutation of the Cogito
conceived of as a simple epistemological principle and at the same time
is an indication of a foundation of Being which is necessarily spoken
of as grounding the Cogito. In setting out to comprehend this complex
relation between the Cogito and this hermeneutics of the 'I am' , I shall
relate this problem to the destruction of the history of philosophy on
the one hand and, on the other, to the restatement or retrieval of the
ontological purpose which was in the Cogito and which has been
forgotten in the formulation of Descartes."ul
With these words, Ricoeur expresses his position with exemplary
clarity and synthesis. What his essay proposes to do is to bring out a
fundamental convergence between Heidegger and himself, using the
former's critique of subjectivity as a moment of purification, so to
speak, of a genuine philosophy of the subject, while at the same time
it unmasks the conception of subjectivity which has prevailed in

58
 59

modern times, impressing its seal on "modernism" itself. The task is to

discover a different possibility from what has been offered historically
by the modern subjectivism of representation and domination. Such
a possibility was already latent in the Cartesian Cogito as originally
formulated, before the interpretation which has since prevailed,
starting with Descartes himself. In a certain sense, Ricoeur uses
Heidegger here as one of his "masters of suspicion." Just as the
demystifying criticism of an idol aids in the discovery of the true
meaning of the Faith, so the critique of the subject-object relation in
representational thought constitutes the premise for the hermeneutics
of the I am.
In his study, Ricoeur takes as his starting point the introduction to
Being and Time with its well-known opening sally: "This question [of
Being] has today been forgotten." From the outset, Heidegger shifts the
emphasis from a philosophical style starting from the Cogito as the
first irrefutable certainty to another which starts from the problem of
being as a forgotten problem, left behind in the Cogito. Thus, the point
of departure becomes the question itself, the question as question,
ruled by what is questioned, by the thing with regard to which the
question is posed. This way of framing matters implies the loss of the
Cogito as a self-founding certainty, but also the recapture of the ego
as questioner. The ego is posited as the being for whom the question
regarding being gives itself, is posited as Dasein. "Thus, the opposition
to the Cog ito becomes more subtle, since the question of Dasein has
a certain priority in the question of Being. But this priority, which has
led to so many misunderstandings, and, above all, to anthropological
interpretations of Being and Time, is only, and remains, an ontic
priority, mixed or involved in the ontological priority of the question
of Being. And this relation is the origin of a new philosophy of the
ego."m What we have is a circular relationship between the understand-
ing of being and the determination of the sense of being, of Dasein.
Heidegger calls this relation "a remarkable 'relatedness backward or
forward' (Ruck- oder Vorbezogenheit) which what we are asking about
(viz. being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of being of an
entity."m It is here that the subject is born, Ricoeur asserts. This
relation is the guiding thread throughout our research. It constitutes
a contestation of the Cog ito but also the retrieval of an ontological
theme which Descartes not only did not ignore but was deeply
concerned with, his ultimate problem being not the 'I think' but the
60
'I am', as is proven by the fact that he starts out from the existence of
the ego in order to come to the existence of God and, finally, of the
world.
At this point, having recalled the reference to Descartes in section
6 of Being and Time, Ricoeur sums up the thesis expressed in the
well-known 1938 essay by Heidegger, Die Zeit des WeltbUdes (The Age
of the World Picture, cited above) in Holzwege. The Cog ito is held to
belong to an age of metaphysics in which truth is the truth of entities,
and is, as such, a forgetting of being. The philosophical soil from
which the Cog ito sprouted is one where thought objectifies an entity,
setting it before itself as that which can be represented, can become
an object of calculation and, hence, also be possessed and dominated.
The world has become "picture" (BUd). An entity is defined as an
objectivity of representation and truth as the certainty of representa-
tion. The position of the subject is the counterpart of this conception
of objectivity. Man, the subject, becomes the foundation of the world
as representation. Man places himself on the scene; he himself becomes
the scene in which entities are called upon to appear. Behind or
beneath the logical formulation of the Cogito, what is brought to light,
unmasked by Heidegger's logic, is the event which underlies the era
of metaphysics, which is likewise the era of science and technology,
and the technico-scientific dominion of the world. But has this critique
drained all the possible meaning from the Cog ito?
In order to answer this question, Ricoeur takes a step backward,
returning to Being and Time, where it is demonstrated that Dasein
understands itself in terms of existence, i.e. starting from its own
possibility of being itself or not. Here the circle of Dasein and being
takes on the form of a circle between existentiality and being. Dasein
is called upon to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity.
Ontically it is what is nearest to us, but ontologically it is what is
furthest from us. It is precisely because the 'I am' has been forgotten
that it must be recaptured by means of an interpretation which will
bring it from concealment. It is precisely because the 'I am', differ-
ently from the Cogito, does not imply any immediacy that it becomes
a theme of hermeneutics and not merely an intuitive description. In
Ricoeur's words, "Therefore, a retrieval of the Cog ito is possible only
as a regressive movement beginning with the whole phenomenon of
'being - in - the- world' and turned toward the question of the who of that
being-in-the-world."u4 In section 25 of Being and Time, a section
 61

Ricoeur feels should be compared in detail with Freudian psychoanaly-

sis, we read that the question of the 'who' must remain open. It is
patterned in the same way as the question of being. The 'who' is
neither a given nor a posit but an open question. In everyday life no
authentic 'who' exists yet, but only an anonymous 'one'. Only when
existential analysis has been traversed from beginning to end, and
themes such as everyday life, self knowledge, the problem of the
relationship to the other, and ultimately the theme of freedom for
death have been confronted, in other words, only in the recapitulation
of existence in the face of death can an answer be given to the
question of the 'who', the authentic Self. It is then that the existential
analytic becomes a hermeneutics of the I am culminating in the
"hermeneutics of the finite totalization in the face of death."
The passage from an existential analytic to the philosophy of
language, from Heidegger I to Heidegger II, as Ricoeur puts it, does
not do away with this hermeneutics of the I am. "The same problems
which have been linked to the self of Dasein now occur in the problem
of language; they are linked to the problem of the word, of speech ('du
mot', 'de la parole'). This is the problem of bringing Being into
language .... Naming (denomination) designates the place and role of
man in language. Here, Being is brought into language, and a finite,
speaking existent is born .... As Richardson says: 'Language takes its
origin, then, along with the irruption of "Being-there," for in this
irruption language is simply Being itself formed into word' .... This
emergence of the 'word', under the primacy of Being repeats exactly
the emergence of the 'There' in Sein und Zeit, as the one who inquires
into Being."llS
The position of man in language raises once more the problem of the
authenticity of existence. The inauthenticity of the existential analytic
has as its present counterpart man's pretense to considering himself
master, ruler and judge of his own speech. Authenticity becomes the
ability to listen to, obey and respond to the Urdichtung, the originary
utterance of language as revelation of being, to which thinkers and
poets bear witness. At this point, in the repetition of the sum, the
hermeneutics of the I am, which continues beyond the destruction of
the history of metaphysics and the deconstruction of the Cog ito as a
mere epistemological principle, the difference between the early and
the late Heidegger would be that the Urdichtung takes the place of
freedom for death as an answer to the problem of the 'who' and of the
62
authenticity of that 'who'. "Authentic Dasein is born from the response
to Being and, in responding, preserves the strength of Being by the
strength of the word .... The self no longer finds its authenticity in
freedom for death but in Gelassenheit which is the gift of a poetic
life."m
Thus, it would seem as if Ricoeur's militant ontology could rest
secure in a Heideggerian Gelassenheit. The subject which, like Moses,
can only see the promised land of ontology from afar before he dies ll7
seems to come to terms with the Greek idea that "an entity does not
become Being because man intuits it in the course of representation
understood as subjective perception; rather, it is man who is observed
by an entity, i.e. by the self-opening to the being-there contained
within it. Observed by an entity, understood and maintained in the
opening of the entity, sustained by it, involved in its contrasts and
marked by its conflicts: here you have the essence of Man in the era
of Greek grandeur."lls Perhaps at this point it would be necessary to
take up once again the question of the relation between classical Greek
culture and Christianity (i.e., the Judaeo-Christian heritage) we
referred to in the last chapter, where we compared Ricoeur with
Thevenaz. We shall only mention in passing that Ricoeur's interpreta-
tion of Heidegger can be considered not only benevolent but munifi-
cent, in the fullest meaning of these terms; he regales his interlocutor
with a position which he would have every right to claim as his own,
namely the hermeneutics of the I am. It is his ecumenical spirit that
brings him to this. If there is something forced in his interpretation,
the force is truly tempered, in this case, with a car it as 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. Here too, as we said at
the end of the last chapter, Ricoeur prefers Justinus's apologetic style
to that of Tertullian.
For now, let us put aside these reminiscences of the second century
after Christ (albeit perhaps more up-to-date than one might suppose)
and move at last to the conclusion of this part of our essay. Whatever
the validity of Heidegger's hermeneutics of the I am, in itself it is most
certainly a noteworthy philosophical proposal, well able to provide
hermeneutics with guidance and perspective in relating to contem-
porary man's complex situation. Elsewhere Ricoeur, threading the
twisting paths of accusation and consolation, assays his own personal
 63

Ho/zweg, in the Heideggerian sense of the term, when he seeks to

mark out a line of march from the critique of religion, drawn from the
atheism of Freud and Nietzsche, to faith, as could be proclaimed by
a new "prophetic preacher": "With regard to the problem of accusation,
this preaching would speak only in terms of freedom .... With respect
to the problem of consolation, this prophetic preaching would be heir
to the tragic faith of Job .... It would be a faith that moves forward
through the shadows in a new 'night of the soul'--to adopt the
language of the mystics--before a God who would not have the
attributes of 'Providence', a God who would not protect me but would
surrender me to the dangers of a life worthy of being called human.
Is not this God the Crucified One, the God who, as Bonhoeffer says,
only through his weakness is capable of helping me? The night of the
soul means above all the overcoming of desire as well as fear, the
overcoming of nostalgia for the protecting father figure."m But
Ricoeur adds explicitly that "the philosopher is not this prophetic
preacher." The philosopher "thinks in the intermediate time between
nihilism and purified faith." His task is to go beyond what Nietzsche
calls "the spirit of vengeance."l20 He has to rediscover the authentic
sense of utterance, beyond the illusions of language, and the authentic
sense of action, as a "dialectics of the human act of existing," beyond
the morality of law and punishment. As already in Spinoza, one can
call "ethics" "the total process through which man passes from slav-
ery to happiness and freedom." "This process is not governed by a
formal principle of obligation, nor by an intuition of ends and values,
but by the unfolding of effort, eonatus, which is determinate of our
existence as a finite mode of being. We are speaking here of effort, but
we must also mention desire, so as to establish at the source of the
ethical problem the identity between effort, in the Spinozistic sense
of eonatus, and desire in the Platonic and Freudian sense of eros."m
The philosophy of language and the philosophy of the will converge.
If we know how to see in language not an object at our disposal but
a living reality which reveals being to us and reveals us to ourselves
in our act of being, then "we are suggesting an underlying connection
between word and the active core of our existence. Word has the power
to change our understanding of ourselves .... Word reaches us on the
level of the symbolic structures of our existence, the dynamic schemes
that express the way in which we understand our situation and the way
in which we project ourselves into this situation."m Beyond the "spirit
64
of vengeance," even beyond Hamor fati," lies the union of consent and
poetry, where "we experience language as a gift, and we experience
thought as a recognition of this gift."
Citing a famous text by Heidegger, Ricoeur expresses his own
conception of poetics, with which he has been fascinated since his
youth: "Heidegger comments on HOlderlin's poem which contains the
line: 'dichterisch wohnet der Mensch' (,poetically ... dwells man on this
earth') .... In fact, HOlderlin says 'Full of merit, and yet poetically,
dwells man on this earth'. The poem suggests that man dwells on earth
insofar as a tension is maintained between his concern for the heavens,
for the divine, and for the rootedness of his own existence in the
earth .... Poetry is what roots the act of dwelling between heaven and
earth, under the sky but on the earth, within the domain of word .... "
This "mode of dwelling on earth that is governed by poetry and
thought ... is no longer 'the love of fate' but a love of creation. Such
a fact suggests a movement from atheism toward faith. The love of
creation is a form of consolation which depends on no external
compensation and which is equally remote from any form of ven-
geance. Love finds within itself its own compensation; it is itself
consolation" W
If we have purposefully limited our colloquy with Ricoeur to
pre-1970 texts, save for an occasional reference to later works, it is
perhaps partiy out of self-indulgence in the memory game; indeed, we
have followed and cherished this author since the 1960's. But there is
another, more serious reason, founded in re ipsa: the whole question
of the Cogito and hermeneutics is already fully developed and mature
in the Ricoeur of those years. Of course, his work does not stop at
that point, although his fundamental tenets do not undergo further
change. Still, it seems right to us for his later works to be dealt with
separately, and not simply for reasons of space or for extrinsically
chronological motives. In effect, at a certain point during the
hermeneutic phase of his work, in the very late 1960's and early
1970's, there is a shift of focus from the theme of the symbol, starting
with that particular region of the symbolic universe which is the
"symbolism of evil,"124 to the elaboration of a general theory of
interpretation starting from textual problematics. w
The hermeneutics of the I am is not abandoned but is taken up again
on a more general level, as self-understanding in the presence of a
text. Within a general hermeneutics the phenomenon of metaphor
 65

opens the path to the study of the productive or creative aspect of

discourse, the rediscovery--here too via a "long route"--of "poetics as
a descriptive discipline,,,m where poetics is no longer a mere postulate
but begins to be a concrete approximation. It is poetics--to which we
come at last--which, in the analysis of the "narrative function"
operative in both literary and historical narration,127 allows for
hermeneutical phenomenology to be still further fathomed, us affording
an inkling of a way of interpretation which would not stop at
contemplating the world but be a step forward towards transforming
it. On this level, the theme of the Cog ito will return once more to the
phenomenology of temporality and the hermeneutics of historicity,U9
which are both part of a sole movement of thought towards the "poetics
of freedom," a dream of Ricoeur's youth and, as well, a youthfulness
in the works of his full maturity. In a recent interview with Peter
Kemp, Ricoeur makes a precious confession when he remarks that his
"one problem," ever since he started reflecting, has been "creativity."
"I first grappled with it on the plane of individual psychology in my
early works on the will, then on the cultural plane with my study of
symbolisms. My present research on narration places me at the core of
this social, cultural creativity, for to narrate ... is society's most
long-lasting act. Cultures create themselves by narrating themselves.
Consequently, I am led to the core of the problem of creativity on the
collective, communal plane .... "13O Thus, the Cogito must rediscover itself
as 'I am' in its ethical tension, taught by the revealing and poetic power
of the word, in order that it may recognize itself finally as historical
temporality, a plural and creative subjectivity.
 Part II
Text, Metaphor, Narrative
 Chapter 1
The History of Hermeneutics, Text Theory

§ 1. Hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Gadamer

In the preface to a most penetrating monograph on Ricoeur's thought

by the American scholar Don Ihde, Ricoeur himself, in the early
1960's, briefly took stock of his philosophical itinerary from the
original descriptive (eidetic) phenomenology to the hermeneutic
phenomenology of his more recent works, stressing both the substantial
continuity of his basic tenets and evident changes in perspective. He
himself attributed the latter mainly to changes in the philosophical
landscape, determining a shifting of "fronts," with different inter-
locutors and issues. His interlocutors during the early period of his
research were Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, when the problem at issue
appeared to be that of updating the reflexive tradition of philosophy
by introducing elements from phenomenology and suggestions from
existentialism. At that time the encounter between philosophy and the
human sciences took place on the terrain of psychology. But "today the
philosophical landscape has changed: the semiological sciences have
taken the place of the natural sciences in the confrontation of
philosophy with its other." Nor is it possible to recover the problematic
of meaning without reckoning with the "end of metaphysics" pro-
claimed in the "hermeneutics of suspicion" of Marx, Nietzsche and
Freud. Today, according to Ricoeur, the issue is no longer the
phenomenological essence of the will, the equivalent of the question
in Merleau-Ponty's works as to the essence of perception, but turns
on the relation between speech and action, the search for a "new
equilibrium between saying and doing," which in Ricoeur comes to a
head in a "poetics of the will" that will show how "meaning comes to
the ego through the power of the word."l
Ricoeur stresses the passage, within his hermeneutic phase, from a
first moment in which symbols, taken as twofold signifiers, seemed to

69
70

be the sole object of interpretation, to a second moment in which,

without depriving symbols of their prime role as the locus in which
the force and superabundance of meaning in language is condensed,
his hermeneutics involved itself in the elaboration of a general theory
of texts. At that point, the notion of text became of central impor-
tance. The subject is placed before the text as before a world of signs
estranged in the objectivity of culture, challenging any pretensions on
the part of the traditional philosophical subject to immediate
transparency and self -mastery.2
Indeed, Ricoeur's working definition of hermeneutics is "the theory
of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpreta-
tion of texts.,,3
"Qu'est-ce qu'un texte?" is the query which appeared as the title of
the essay Ricoeur dedicated to Gadamer in 1970 in celebration of the
latter's seventieth birthday, followed by a subtitle indicating a theme
which frequently shows up in Ricoeur: "Expliquer et comprendre.,,4 In
the early 1970's, in a series of lectures held in various universities,
Ricoeur outlined a general theory of interpretation starting from the
problem of the text. s Occasionally the presentation was preceded by
an historical survey, which we shall do well to take note of here, if
only to have a better understanding of the Author's personal position.
For instance, in the essay "La tache de l'hermeneutique," the progress
of philosophical hermeneutics is seen as taking place in two main
stages: from various "regional" hermeneutics to a single "general"
hermeneutics and from hermeneutics seen as an epistemology of the
human sciences to ontological hermeneutics, wherein interpretation
manifests itself as a fundamental category of existence, and what
ultimately is at issue within interpretation is the meaning of being.
It is with Schleiermacher that the problem of interpretation first lost
the narrow, regional character it had maintained up until his time (the
exegesis of laws or literary and sacred texts), to become a general
philosophical problem. Schleiermacher's hermeneutic program is at
once Romantic and critical: "Romantic by its appeal to a living relation
with the process of creation, critical by its wish to elaborate the
universally valid rules of understanding. Perhaps hermeneutics is
forever marked by this double filiation - - Romantic and critical, critical
and Romantic.'" The intent of struggling against misunderstanding is
critical, the will to understand the author better than he understands
himself is Romantic. But Schleiermacher, in his effort to found
 71

hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline, a general theory of textual

comprehension, encountered an aporia, connected with his Romantic
and idealistic notion of subjectivity, which he passed on to his
successors. He distinguished two forms of interpretation. "Gramma-
tical" interpretation is subjective and negative; in a given text it
concerns itself only with what can be explained in terms of common
elements in a given language, a given culture. This interpretation
cannot grasp the once-only subjectivity of the author, the speaker's
creativeness, the genius who expresses himself in the text. All this can
be captured only by the second type of interpretation, what Schleier-
macher called "technical" or positive interpretation, in the last analysis
a sort of divination, a search for affinities between the subjectivity of
the interpreter and that of the author, a search which can only be
pursued through a comparison of differing individualities and, hence,
by reintroducing critical and discursive elements. Thus, romantic
hermeneutics appears to have been involved in an effort to repeat the
unrepeatable, to relive that which, strictly considered, can be lived
once and once only and in the first person singular. For Ricoeur the
issue became one of "shifting the interpretative emphasis from the
empathic investigation of hidden subjectivities towards the sense and
reference of the work itself.,,7
At the bottom, Dilthey's position rests on an ineluctably Romantic
basis; hermeneutics becomes a founding theory of historical knowl-
edge, a general epistemology of the human sciences, able to victori-
ously withstand the positivistic claims to primacy advanced by
scientific and naturalistic knowledge. History itself in its concatena-
tions is the text which is set as the object of interpretation. Historical
knowledge aspires to compete with the methodological rigor of the
sciences. Understanding the text requires understanding the historical
period, understanding the individual requires understanding the inter-
personal connectedness in which each single life is set. It is impossible
to grasp the mental life of another through its immediate expressions;
it must be reconstructed by interpreting the objectified signs by means
of an operation of reproduction based on rules. Not only all knowledge
of the life of another but even self-knowledge is mediated, passing
through signs and works.
In any case, at the heart of Dilthey's thought no less than Schleier-
macher's is the conception of understanding as a transposition into the
other, hence a psychological enterprise, albeit psychologism of a most
72

acute and refined sort. "The counterpart of a hermeneutical theory

founded on psychology is that psychology remains its ultimate
justification .... The question of objectivity thus persists in Dilthey's
work as a problem which is both ineluctable and insoluble.'" "Dilthey's
work, even more than Schleiermacher's, brings to light the central
aporia of a hermeneutics which subsumes the understanding of texts
to the law of understanding another person who expresses himself
therein. If the enterprise remains fundamentally psychological, it is
because it stipulates as the ultimate aim of interpretation, not what a
text says, but who says it. At the same time, the object of hermeneutics
is constantly shifted away from the text, from its sense and its
reference, towards the lived experience which is expressed therein."!}
Still, Ricoeur acknowledges that Dilthey, in turning hermeneutics
into a form of historical knowledge in which the life of the individual
is universalized in the memory of universal history, 10 prepared the way
for the later ontological turn taken by Heidegger and Gadamer, who
pushed beyond the epistemological search, beyond the methodological
founding of the human sciences, beyond any attempt to perfect the art
of interpretation technically and methodologically, and brought
philosophical investigation to center on the ontological conditions of
understanding and interpretation. "Instead of asking 'how do we
know?' it will be asked 'What is the mode of being of that being who
exists only in understanding,."n
In Heidegger's research, the problem of Auslegung (explication,
interpretation) is posed from the outset in its relation to the problem
of being and of the meaning of being. Instead of the idealistic and
Romantic subject, we find the being-there, Dasein, the place where
the question of being is manifested. We find man as the depository of
that original wonderment from which philosophy arises, depository of
the problematization of the meaning of being and, at the same time,
man as a possible way open toward an answer. This answer, however,
cannot come if the question is simply brushed aside but only if it is
radicalized. Hermeneutics as a methodological founding of the human
sciences is merely a secondary, derivative hermeneutics. The prime
task of hermeneutics is to explicate the ontological constitution of the
being who makes history and historical knowledge, and to bring light
to bear upon the historicity of existence as such.
If reflexion is to be centered not on the subject, idealistically
understood, but on existential analysis, one grasps the sense of what
 73

Ricoeur refers to as the second inversion effected by Heidegger, after

the change in perspective determined by the passage from epistemology
to ontology; the Question of comprehension is no longer bound to the
possibility of reaching the mind of another by means of a transposi-
tion, but to the structural worldliness of the being-there, being-in-the-
world. u Once the problem of understanding has been de-psycholo-
gized and made worldly, other features of Heidegger's analysis of
understanding can be brought into focus. The first function of under-
standing is to supply an orientation in a given situation. The purpose
of understanding is less that of grasping a fact than apprehending a
possibility of being. To understand is to project. However, there is no
projection without a given situation as a starting point (the projection
within a prior "being thrown"), just as there is no understanding
without pre-understanding. The "hermeneutical circle" (in its classical
formulation: the whole cannot be understood without the parts nor the
parts without the whole), taken outside an ontological framework, may
sound like a paradox, more or less elegant but certainly insoluble if it
is confronted in terms of a theory of knowledge based on the sub-
ject-object opposition, wherein the alternative between subjectivism
and objectivism would appear fatal. In Heidegger's perspective, the
circular character of understanding is the sign of its fundamental and
structural worldliness. It is the act of an existence which is already
projected and remains in projection in the world, in situations. From
the standpoint of the most rigorous analysis, there can be no knowing
without pre-understanding; hence the later rehabilitation by Gadamer
of "prejudices" as against their devaluation from the Enlightenment on.
The prejudice against prejudices is replaced here by a discernment,
conducted with Aristotelian sagacity,13 between presuppositions or
prejudices which enlighten and those which obscure the paths of
knowledge.
In wordliness, the world manifests itself in the situation of
understanding as a power-to-be. This is why the power to hear is more
radical than the power to say. The genuine root of saying is keeping
silent. The sciences of language move within the limits of speech
(sprechen), which is "mundane" in the worst sense of the term, viz.
dispersive, empirical, inessential. The plane of 'saying' (reden), the
creative, revealing dimension of language, can only be reached by
going to the very roots of the matter. Thus, Heidegger's reflexion,
which starts by going beyond the purely epistemological and methodo-
74

logical level of hermeneutics and, hence, of the opposition between

subject and object which on that level is a left-over from the
Romantic, idealistic concept of subjectivity, comes to a new, more
serious aporia, viz. the clear-cut opposition between ontology and
epistemology, between philosophy and the sciences of language. It is
this split which prevents Ricoeur from being a Heideggerian, as he
made readily evident in his essays from the 1960's, gathered up in Le
con/lit des interpretations.
In the piece which opens the collection, "Existence et hermeneu-
tique," Ricoeur asserts, as we have seen earlier, that there are two ways
for hermeneutics to be grafted onto phenomenology. There is the "short
route" of an ontology of understanding following Heidegger's model,
and there is a "long route," the one Ricoeur proposes to take. He relo-
cates onto this hard road towards a possible ontology all the methodol-
ogical, epistemological and critical problems that Heidegger's approach
tends rather to dissolve than to solve. 14 In other words, faced with a
text, a myth, an institution, a cultural or linguistic phenomenon to be
interpreted, Ricoeur's ultimate intention is always to seize upon its
ontological valence, the answers it can furnish to the question of the
meaning of being. However, he does not believe the possible contribu-
tions of various exegetic, semiological, semantic, etc. disciplines can
be overlooked, nor that the conflict between differing interpretative
methods and styles can be suspended in hopes of reaching the truth of
being in one swoop. In sum, Ricoeur's critique of Heidegger's ontology
calls to mind Hegel's critique of Schelling when he accused him of
seeking to reach the absolute with a "pistol shot," only to lose himself
in "a darkness in which all the cows look black."
Heidegger's great contribution to the critique of subjectivity clears
the path for a "hermeneutics of the I am," a new philosophy of the ego.
No longer an ego which is the totalizing subject and center of the
world but one which has been wittingly dec entered and rooted in
being. However, in order for such a philosophy to be developed, it is
indispensable to accept the "conflict among interpretations" and take
up the "semiological challenge." The question left open by Heideggerian
hermeneutics, then, is first of all that of how to reformulate the critical
and epistemological problem in an ontological perspective.
Seen from the standpoint chosen by Ricoeur in his outline of the
history of hermeneutics, Gadamer marks a new beginning in the move
from ontology back to epistemological problems. Whereas Heidegger
 75

"was able to elude the debate with the human sciences by a sovereign
movement of transcendence," Gadamer faces them head-on. Already
in its title his major work, Truth and Method, sets the Heideggerian
concept of truth in opposition to Dilthey's concept of method, to the
point where, according to Ricoeur, the work should have been called
"Truth OR Method."lS
In the three spheres--art, history and language--to each of which
a section of Truth and Method is devoted, Gadamer deals with the
antinomy between alienation (Verfremdung, which Ricoeur renders
"alienating distanciation") and the primordial relation of belonging-to
(Zugehiirigkeit). The former is a feature common to the human
sciences, all of which presume a detachment by the subject with
respect to the aesthetic, historical or linguistic object. The latter, as
Gadamer shows, is necessary for there to be any authentic aesthetic,
historical or linguistic experience, indeed, any hermeneutic experience
at all; yet, the human sciences, and the modern methodological and
epistemological awareness which is behind them all, conceal this
fundamental, founding relation. Gadamer's hermeneutics claims to no
less universality than that claimed by the human sciences, embracing
the whole range of cultural experience, anything that can be ex-
pressed in language. Indeed, "everyone speaks from some place, and
all claims to universality are raised from a privileged position.1Il6 The
privileged position whence Gadamer speaks is where V er f rem dung and
Zugehiirigkeit meet. This encounter is "inherent in the kind of initial
experience about which Gadamer raises questions, i.e., the experience
of belonging to a cultural tradition which precedes us, encompasses us,
and supports us, but which we can never grasp from without, place in
front of us, and judge.,,17
The critique of modern subjectivity leads Gadamer to take up
themes once again which belong to the polemic of the Romantics
against the Enlightenment, rehabilitating prejudice, authority and
tradition. The purpose of this deliberately provocative position is to
regain control over the historical dimension as against the "realm of
subjectivity and interiority." "History precedes us, in advance of our
reflexion. Even before belonging to ourselves, we belong to history."ls
The Gadamerian theory of historical consciousness culminates in the
concept of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein ("the consciousness of
the history of effects"), an awareness of being exposed to history and
its action which is not objectifiable in historiographic knowledge of
76

the positivistic variety, liege to the model of objectivity typical of the

positive sciences.
At this point Ricoeur brings his problem to the forefront: how to
introduce a critical and methodological instance (hence, create room
for an epistemological founding of the human sciences and a fertile
dialog between them and philosophy) in the context of an historical
and hermeneutical consciousness in which distanciation and objectiva-
tion are expressly rejected. In other words, Ricoeur, with a viewpoint
and manner of proceeding typical in his work, proposes the assump-
tion, rather than the repudiation, of the conflict between V erf remdung
and Zugehiirigkeit, science and philosophy, modern methodological
consciousness based on the subject-object relation and the hermeneuti-
cal approach based on manifestation, on listening to the "thing
itseIC'--in sum, between method and truth, in order to find a
mediation on some higher level.
Ricoeur's contribution to hermeneutics has a precise point of
departure, viz. textual problematics; within the objectivity of the text
an initial moment of distanciation is experienced from the "matter" of
interpretation with respect to the interpreting subject. Distanciation,
however, is not an insurmountable barrier but rather the condition
upon which understanding depends. Before moving on to outline his
theory of interpretation starting from textual problematics, Ricoeur
duly points out that already in Gadamer's work "historical distance"
plays a positive role in historical consciousness, as can be seen in the
fertile concept of the "fusion of horizons" (Horizontverschmelzung):
communication at a distance between two consciousnesses set in
different situations, for instance in two different historical periods,
takes place thanks to the blending of their horizons. In this way it is
emphasized that life is lived neither within a sole horizon nor within
closed horizons. Although absolute totalizing syntheses of the Hegelian
variety are rejected, historical knowledge and, more generally, human
communication implies a "tension between what is one's own and what
is alien, between the near and the far, and hence the play of difference
is included in the process of convergence.,,19
From the third part of Gadamer's work, devoted to language, comes
the clearest pointers in the direction of a dialectic between participa-
tion and alienating distanciation, which is to say in the direction in
which Ricoeur himself moves. The universal "linguality" (S prachlich-
keit) of human experience shows how our belonging to one or more
 77

traditions "passes through the interpretation of the signs, works and

texts in which cultural heritages are inscribed and offer themselves
to be deciphered." As against the reduction of the world of signs to
mere instruments to be wielded at pleasure, Gadamer furnishes "an
impassioned apology for the dialogue which we are and for the prior
understanding which supports us. But lingual experience exercises its
mediating function only because the interlocutors fade away in face
of the things said which, as it were, direct the dialogue. Now where
is the reign of the things said over the interlocutors more apparent, if
not where Sprachlichkeit becomes Schriftlichkeit, in other words,
where mediation by language becomes mediation by the text? What
enables us to communicate at a distance is thus the matter of the text,
which belongs neither to its author nor to its reader."20 But with the
expression "matter of the text" we have reached the substance of
Ricoeur's contribution to hermeneutic philosophy.

§2. Hermeneutics as Text Theory in Ricoeur

The reconstruction of the history of hermeneutics proposed by Ricoeur

might readily be debated, enriched and refined, even in the light of
later contributions by Ricoeur himself. 21 One recalls especially his
explicitly expressed interest in a less strict reading of Gadamer's
anti-methodologism. 22 In the present context, however, keeping a clear
opposition between the methodological requirement and hermeneutic
understanding serves to bring into relief the proprium of Ricoeur's
contribution to contemporary hermeneutics. Turning on the question
of text, his argument takes the text-versus-reader relation as the basic
hermeneutical situation rather than the face-to-face relationship of
conversers in a dialog. In so doing, his aim is to get beyond the
antithesis between truth and method, understanding and explanation,
hermeneutics and human sciences.
In the writings we are now considering, Ricoeur gives us the general
lines of a theory of interpretation starting from textual problematics.
The four themes he develops are the text as the relation of speech to
writing, the text as a structured work, the text as a world projection
and the text as a mediation of self-understanding. All four presume
the basic theme of language as discourse. 23
78
1) The notion of language as discourse is basic to the notion of text.
The text is above all a phenomenon of discourse. Ricoeur, as we
already know, relies especially on the work of Emile Benveniste.24 The
latter distinguishes a linguistics of language, having the sign as its basic
unit, from a linguistics of discourse, in which the basic unit is the
sentence. Linguistic signs refer only to other signs within the language
system, which is without a time, subject or world to refer to. Dis-
course, on the contrary, takes place within time; it involves a subject
who communicates with other subjects and refers to a world.
Discourse implies a dialectic of happenings and meanings. It is a
speech-act that utters an objective content. It is a willing to say, a
signifying intention which ends in a meaning. lS In the intentionality
of language, subjective saying transcends into the objectivity of that
which is said and which upholds and nourishes intersubjective
communication.
In this basic dialectic, which is prior with respect to the distinction
between oral and written discourse, Ricoeur finds a first effect of
distanciation which cannot be done away with. "All discourse is
produced as an event, but is understood as meaning."lS The dialectics
of happening and significance or, if one prefers, of meaning and event
in discourse, allows the phenomenology of language, with its central
discovery of intentionality, to be connected methodologically with the
theory of "speech-acts" developed in Austin and Searle's analytic
philosophy of language. 26
According to Austin and Searle three levels of speech-acts can be
distinguished: locutory or propositional acts (the act of saying);
illocutional acts or force (what we do in saying); perlocutional acts
(what we do by the fact that we speak). If I tell you to close the door,
I do three things. First, I relate the action predicate (to close) to two
variables (you and the door): this is the act of saying. Second, in telling
you this, I am giving an order, i.e. committing a given action: this is
the illocutional act. Finally, by speaking in a certain way, for instance
in a certain tone of voice, I can provoke certain consequences, such
as fear: this is the perlocutional act. The meaning of speech is not
merely the narrow sense of the propositional act, the ut-terance
(Aus-sage), but also the related illocutional force and even the
perlocutional action (in the above example, the imperative mode and
the sense of fear or trust which is communicated).
 79

Thus, following Ricoeur in his felicitous merging of diverse

methodologies of language analysis, one can assign the term 'meaning'
a broad semantic connotation that covers all the aspects and levels of
the intentional externalization which, phenomenologically speaking,
constitutes the primary sense of the phenomenon of language,
understood as a will to utter which only as discourse becomes real and
concrete in the lived experience of the speaking subject. This aspect
of ut-terance or distanciation, present on the level of the dialectic
between event and meaning, constitutive of discourse as such, is the
premise and condition for further moments of ut-terance of discourse
in written texts and structured works.
2) The passage from oral to written discourse introduces a decisive
element into the dialectic between belonging and distanciation,
unlinking the hermeneutic situation from the dialogical or face-to-face
model. On the one hand, writing the text makes it autonomous with
respect to the author's intentions; the meaning of the words within the
written text becomes independent of the mental, psychological meaning
in the mens auctoris. The text transcends the psychological and also
sociological conditions of its production. Only in this way can it be
open to an unlimited series of readings situated in different psycholog-
ical and socio-cultural contexts. On the other hand, along with the
freeing of the text from its author, there takes place an analogous
process of autonomization with respect to the reader. Whereas discourse
in a dialog is addressed to a concrete, particular interlocutor, the
written text is aimed at a readership including virtually anyone who
knows how to read. Finally, the thing which is spoken about no longer
belongs to the situation shared by the participants in a dialog but
becomes the "matter of the text" as it is manifested in the process of
interpretation. "The freeing of the written material with respect to the
dialogical condition of discourse is the most significant effect of
writing. It implies that the relationship between writing and reading
is no longer a particular case of the relationship between speaking and
hearing.,,27
3) Any work is characterized by three distinctive features. First, a
work is a sequence longer than a sentence, which is, as we have seen,
the basic unit of discourse. A work manifests a specific level of
composition such that discourse as a work becomes a totality, finite
and closed, to be comprehended as such. Secondly, a work, as
composition, undergoes a form of codification which locates it within
80

some literary genre, such as the poem, tale, essay, etc. Finally, a work
has a peculiar configuration which gives it an individual character, viz.
style. The term 'work' itself suggests categories such as production and
labor; discourse as a work becomes the object of a praxis and a techne.
This implies a very high level of externalization: "Man objectifies
himself through the works of his discourse, as he does through the
products of his craftsmanship, and his art."lS At this point the 'author'
enters the scene, understood by Ricoeur in a far different way from
how it is understood in the tradition of Romanticism.
"Since style is labour which individuates, that is, which produces an
individual, so it designates retroactively its author. Thus the word
'author' belongs to stylistics .... The author is the artisan of a work of
language .... The singular configuration of the work and the singular
configuration of the author are strictly correlative.'t29 "The writer, as
an author, is less even than a psychological entity. He can be only a
category of the interpretation, related to the interpretation by the work
itself."JO
To categorize discourse as work lays the basis for the possibility of
extending to discourse analysis those structural methods which, in
phonology and semantics, have been successfully brought to bear on
linguistic entities shorter than the sentence. At this point it is fitting
to recall the confrontation between hermeneutics and structuralism in
the first section of Ricoeur's Le con/lit des interpretations. 31 While
grounding the legitimacy of structural analysis in the phenomeno-
logico-hermeneutic constitution of discourse as a structured work, he
allows structural analysis to be no more than a single moment in the
interpretative process, checking any pretence to absolutism.
"Thus a new era of hermeneutics is necessarily opened by the success
of structural analysis. Today 'explanation' and 'comprehension' can no
longer be set in opposition. Explanation has become the unavoidable
road to understanding. This does not imply that explanation, in turn,
could make understanding expendable. Objectivation of discourse in
a structured work does not abolish the first and fundamental trait of
discourse, i.e., that it is a set of sentences in which somebody says
something to somebody else about something. Hermeneutics, I would
say, remains the art of identifying the discourse within the work.
However, it is true that this discourse is given nowhere else than in and
by the structure of the work.'032
 81

4) Indeed, it is because the text is discourse, given to us in the

dialectic of the relationship between word and writing and in the warp
and woof of the structured work, that it is not closed within itself but
has a world, the "world of the text," the "world of the work." The text
as discourse implies an essential opening, a primacy of the semantic
or referential dimension with respect to the semiological dimension.
In the case of a dialog, the referential aspect of discourse consists
in the capacity of each interlocutor to reveal a reality which is, so to
speak, right at hand. Even if the object being spoken of cannot be
shown directly, it can still be located in the single space-time complex
shared by the speakers. Reference is much more problematic in the
case of written texts, especially literary works. Indeed, it would seem
that the abolishing of reference is a typical feature of most of what is
usually classified as 'literature', particularly poetry. For instance,
Jacobson links the "poetic function" to what he sees as a characteristic
self -referentiality of poetic language, where what counts is the message
as such.33
Ricoeur's thesis is that it is simply a matter of detachment from
common, every-day reality. In the language of myth, literary prose or
poetry, one gives up the description of reality as it appears to the
empirical observer in favor of a description of its deeper essence. "The
suspension of a first-order reference, such as is achieved by fiction
and poetry, is the condition of the possibility for yielding a second-
order reference. This second-order reference no longer touches the
world at the level of manipulable objects, but at the deeper level which
Husserl designated by the term 'life-world' (Lebenswelt) and Heidegger
by that of 'being-in-the-world' (in der Welt-Sein) .... To interpret is
to explicate the kind of being-in-the-world displayed before the text.
What is then submitted to interpretation is the pro-position of a world
in which I could dwell, a world created by the projection of my own
utmost possibilities. For every unique text there is such a 'world of the
text' .,,34
The exemplary value of metaphor consists precisely in the fact that
by twisting language away from its usual, every-day meanings, a
miniature poem is constituted, triggering a second degree of reference
which furnishes a fresh view of reality.3S In this way the Aristotelian
doctrine of tragedy as the mimesis of reality can be taken up again and
understood anew. Actually tragedy imitates reality only in order to
recreate it by means of mythos, a narrative fiction, which reveals its
82
hidden essence. Ricoeur, no less than his great mentor Husserl,
considers the imagination to be the privileged place in which the eidos
is manifested.
5) To move from a hermeneutics which has the dialogic situation as
its starting point and understands the relationship with the works of
the past in terms of an ideal dialog with them and especially with the
worthy or genial subjectivity expressed within them, to the kind of
hermeneutics Ricoeur seeks, situated inside the problematics of the
text, requires that subjectivity be held in abeyance, so to speak. With
the threefold transcendence of discourse into the work, speech into
writing and the text into the "matter" or "world" of the text, we have
a multi-form movement of convergence in which subjectivity is
"disappropriated," the necessary condition for the text to become an
opening onto the world and for interpretation to be acknowledged in
its authentic role as a mode of being-in-the-world. Distanciation,
as Ricoeur conceives this function, preserves the phenomenological
ethos of the epoche as the askesis of subjectivity.
Of course, the setting aside of subjectivity takes place in the interest
of its final recovery, once it has been purged of any pretense to
absolutism. The narcissistic Cog ito of Romantic subjectivity is replaced
with a subject which does not pretend to know itself by an immediate
intuition nor to impose its own capacity for understanding onto the
text; instead, it understands itself in front of the text, exposing itself
to the text in order to gain an enlarged selfhood.
As the concluding step in his theory of interpretation, Ricoeur
retrieves from the classical hermeneutic tradition an aspect that both
Romantic hermeneutics and post-Romantic historiographic methodol-
ogy had overlooked, viz. the hermeneutic problem of application
(Anwendung). In this connection, Gadamer recalls a distinction between
subtilitas intelligendi, subtilitas explicandi and subtilitas applicandi
in the Institutiones Hermeneuticae Sacrae (1723) by the Pietist
Rambach. Gadamer stresses the fact that the term subtilitas is used for
all three of these constituent moments of the act of understanding. In-
deed, they are not to be thought of as tools at one's disposal but as a
talent requiring a keen ingenuity.36 According to Ricoeur, application
is where the subject makes his re-entry, engaged in an effort of
appropriation (Aneignung) of the lesson of the text, adapting it to his
own peculiar situation as reader. "Ultimately, what I appropriate is a
proposed world. The latter is not behind the text, as a hidden intention
 83

would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers,
reveals .... So understanding is quite different from a constitution of
which the subject would possess the key. In this respect, it would be
more correct to say that the self is constituted by the 'matter' of the
text."37
Just as the "world of the text" renders the deep essence of reality
only insofar as reference to the world in its empirico-pragmatic
immediacy is suspended, so also the reader's subjectivity can find itself
at a more essential, authentic level only by calling selfhood into
question by being willing to lose itself in front of the text. Which is
to say, selfhood must be renounced in order that it may be projected
into that space of possibilities or range of possible imaginative
variations of the ego which the text displays. Precisely this transcen-
dental space, where the ego can be other from itself thanks to the
creative power of the imagination, allows Ricoeur to graft onto his
conception of a "hermeneutics of the I am" the psychoanalytical and
Marxist critiques of the illusions about subjectivity.38 "Interpretation
is the process by which disclosure of new modes of being--or if you
prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new forms of life--gives to the
subject a new capacity for knowing himself.. .. I would oppose the self,
which proceeds from the understanding of the text, to the ego, which
claims to precede it. It is the text, with its universal power of world
disclosure, which gives a self to the ego."l'
Having outlined a general text theory, Ricoeur is especially pleased
to devote attention to the relationships between philosophical
hermeneutics and theological or Biblical hermeneutics. It is our
intention to deal only briefly with this theme here. Two points need
to be brought out. Firstly, Ricoeur attempts to get beyond the
contradiction between explaining and understanding, method and
truth, alienating distanciation and participation through belonging, in
order to seek out anew, positive relation between hermeneutics and
the human sciences. In so doing, he does something more than offer
a theoretical justification for the use of structural analysis in the
exegesis of the Bible, 'Scripture' par excellence, which, of itself,
constitutes a notable contribution to existential hermeneutics, allowing
for a demystifying reading of Biblical texts. Thanks to the frame-
work of a hermeneutics based on "the problematics of the text," the
reader and interpreter of the Bible is fully justified in recurring to
such theories as Propp's formalistic analysis of the folk-tale, Greimas'
84

syntax based on modeies actantiels, Barthes', Levi-Strauss's or--to

stick with Biblical studies--Marin's structural analysis of narrative. 40
However, as Ricoeur observes, "Structuralism ... becomes a dead end
from the very moment when it claims the right to treat any 'message'
as a mere 'quotation' of its underlying 'code'. This claim alone turns
structural method into structuralist prejudice. Structuralism as ideology
starts with the reversal of the relation between code and message,
where the code becomes essential and the message unessential. And it
is because this step is taken that the text is suppressed as message and
that no existential interpretation seems adequate for a message which
has been reduced to a pure epiphenomenon of the 'codes'. Only by
moving in the opposite direction, from the code to the message, can
justice be done to the message as such and, at the same time, the way
be paved for the move from structure to process which the under-
standing of the parables requires."
That the Bible should come to the fore, not at the start but at the
conclusion of a hermeneutic process borrowing freely upon various
semiological disciplines, is a pointer to Ricoeur's basic aims. This is
the second point we wanted to bring out. Since, according to Ricoeur,
the meaning of any text consists essentially in the "world of the work,"
i.e. in the way of being or form of living which it holds out or reveals,
Scripture is the most propitious and effective example of his theory.
Its meaning is to be sought in its power as revelation, the procla-
mation it contains, an annunciation of a new being or the advent of
God's kingdom. The recognition of the Bible as the word of God does
not rely on a psychologistic concept of inspiration, as if the writers
were repeating something that was being whispered at their ears;
instead, this recognition "is addressed to the quality of the new being
as it announces itself.,,42
The basic terms of Biblical discourse, such as 'God' and 'Christ',
enjoy a special semantic density. They designate a gravitational center
towards which several meanings converge while, at the same time,
unfolding a horizon which prevents that discourse from closing in upon
itself. 'God' is the God of the tales of Genesis and Exodus, the God
of the Fathers, of Moses and the Law, the God who leads Israel and
is invoked in exile, the God of the Prophets, the God beseeched in
psalms and exalted in hymns, the God of Jesus Christ; 'Christ' is Jesus
of Nazareth, the Rabbi, the Healer, and, finally, the symbol of sacri-
ficial love that saves me and that I acknowledge.
 85

For Ricoeur, Biblical discourse is, at one and the same time, a
particular case within general hermeneutics and a case which is unique,
to the point where philosophical hermeneutics might appear ultimately
almost like the organon of theological hermeneutics. "It is a particular
case of a more general enterprise because the new being of which the
Bible speaks is not to be sought anywhere but in the world of this text
which is a text among others. It is a unique case because all the partial
discourses refer to a Name which is the point of intersection and the
index of the incompleteness of all our discourses on God, and because
this Name has become bound up with the meaning-event preached as
Resurrection. ,,43
Faith, as man's "ultimate concern," transcends any and all linguistic
acts or hermeneutics. Indeed, it reveals the bounds of any hermeneutics
along with the non-hermeneutic origin of the fundamental question
of meaning whence the "ceaseless movement of interpretation"
originates. "But hermeneutics reminds us that biblical faith cannot be
separated from the movement of interpretation which elevates it into
language. 'Ultimate concern' would remain mute if it did not receive
the power of a word ceaselessly renewed by its interpretation in signs
and symbols which have, we might say, educated and formed this
concern over of the centuries.,,44
It is to be hoped that we have succeeded in outlining Ricoeur's
hermeneutic project up to the point where the relationship between
philosophical hermeneutics and Biblical Christian theological
hermeneutics is reversed. The former no longer appears as a general
theory of which the latter is a particular case, but rather the organon
of theological hermeneutics, offering an irreplaceable cultural
mediation for that "unique case" represented by faith, since faith as
such lies outside any possible generalization and, indeed, brings the
whole hermeneutic question back to its original non - hermeneutic roots.
The question of being is still more radical than that of herme-
neutics. Being and language are not identical in Ricoeur any more than
in Heidegger, although Ricoeur, differently from Heidegger, has
elected to follow the long route of understanding, rejecting any split
between ontological meditation and the contributions from anthropo-
logical and semiological disciplines. On the other hand, Ricoeur's
formulation of the relation between philosophical and theological
hermeneutics could be reversed. The "unique case" is also an absolutely
exemplary one. Christian hermeneutics can become the organon of
86
general, fundamental hermeneutics, furnishing a special occasion for
an approach to the question of the non-hermeneutic bases of herme-
neutics, allowing the emergence of an originary, founding relationship
between being and language, between saying and doing. The problem
of interpretation arises from a basic query as to the meaning of being.
This question keeps coming up; we meet with it in the symbolic
dimension, in the ambiguities of language and in the conflicts between
interpretations; but it harbors a prefiguration and an expectancy of an
answer, experienced as a "hope" and a "promise."
 Chapter 2
Hermeneutic Phenomenology

§1. The Hermeneutic Critique of Phenomenological Idealism

In 1974, in a writing which is at once a summing up and a plan for

future research, Ricoeur came back to his favorite theme, the relation
between hermeneutics and phenomenology, setting out his project for
a "hermeneutic phenomenology."l
It is made explicitly clear from the very beginning that the essay is
not intended as simply an exercise in comparative history dealing with
two streams of contemporary philosophy; what is at stake is the very
possibility for philosophy to exist, today, after Heidegger and
Gadamer, not to mention Husseri. Ricoeur advances two fundamental
theses for discussion. First, it is not phenomenology in itself which has
been invalidated by hermeneutics but only its idealistic interpretation,
which goes back to Husseri. It is this interpretation that is to be
subjected to a hermeneutic critique, which in this phase will appear
antithetical to the phenomenological approach. In spite of their
opposition, hermeneutics and phenomenology continue to share a
relationship of reciprocal pertinence or belonging which needs to be
brought out: "On the one hand, hermeneutics is erected on the basis
of phenomenology and thus preserves something of the philosophy
from which it nevertheless differs: phenomenology remains the
unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. On the other hand,
phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutical
presupposition. The hermeneutical condition of phenomenology is
linked to the role of Aus!egung [explication] in the fulfilment of its
philosophical project.,,2
Regarding the former thesis, Ricoeur enumerates five features of
phenomenological idealism, drawing mainly on Husserl's "Nachwort"

87
88
(1930) to the ldeen, along with the Cartesian Meditations, the first
draft of which is, of course, from 1929. 3 He counters these five points
with five of his own which he feels constitute a decisive critique of
the idealistic self -interpretation in Hussert's phenomenology. Let us
follow Ricoeur's reasoning step by step.
1) Husserlian phenomenology lays claim to an ideal, radical
scientificity which is not in continuity with the "mundane" sciences,
aspiring to be an absolute foundation, an ultimate justification, a
knowledge without presuppositions, a beginning beyond which it is
impossible to go, a Selbst-Begrundung.
2) This foundation, however, belongs to the order of intuition. To
found is to see. As against all speculative constructions, what is
decisive is vision. The paradox of phenomenology is that its first
principle is a "field of experience" (Er /ahrungs/eld). In the last
analysis, the critique of empiricism is not based on an appeal to the
existence of some other world but to a deeper experience of this world,
a faculty of sight which is free of the blinders of the natural, mundane
attitude, peculiarly inconducive to seeing, to seizing upon meaning.
3) This authentic seeing takes place in the immanence of con-
sciousness. In contrast, on principle, all transcendence is problematic
and susceptible of doubt, because intuition can grasp it only through
profiles, sketches, partial perspectives (Abschattungen), the conver-
gence of which can never be more than presumed and is such as to
allow the formulation of a hyperbolic hypothesis, typical of Husserlian
idealism, of the destruction of the world, its total disappearance in an
irreducible discordance of senseless appearances. The immanent
experience of consciousness, in its total and absolute giving of itself
in the self -transparency of reflexion, is a ground of indestructible
certainty.
4) Understood in this fashion, subjectivity, resulting from a process
of reduction, constitutes a field of transcendental experience, distinct
from empirical consciousness which is the concern of psychology.
Nevertheless, there is an analogy between empirical and transcendental
consciousness; the transcendental ego is not another ego with respect
to my empirical ego, nor does reduction consist in going beyond this
world. Phenomenological idealism is not acosmic; it rather implies a
change of viewpoint with regard to the natural attitude, a conversion
in which self and the world in their naively realistic validity, as they
are given to us in the mundaneness of belief, Seinsglaube--something
 89
taken for granted as unproblematic, unquestionable--are lost in favor
of a rediscovery of self and the world as moments in the noetico-noe-
matic intentional fabric of consciousness, as aspects of the transcen-
dental life of a subjectivity which questions, challenges and gives
meaning.
S) This act of awareness which sustains the work of reflexion has
a peculiar ethical value, a radical assumption of responsibility which
is consequent to and concomitant with the epistemological ideal of a
radical founding. In this sense two typical expressions of HusserI's can
be associated: aus letzter Begrundung and aus letzter Selbstverantwor-
tung. The self -assertiveness of the founding constitutes the philosophi-
cal subject as a self -responsible subject, since it is a necessarily self-
positing subject.
This then is phenomenological idealism's lovely dream, its gen-
erous Utopia. 'Phenomenology' and 'hermeneutics' are two terms each
of which represents the point of arrival of histories which criss-cross
the general history of ideas. Phenomenology is the ultimate embodi-
ment of philosophical idealism, heir to an aspiration which runs
through the whole history of philosophy, starting from its origins in
ancient Greece. Hermeneutics is the final stage of the art (techne)
whose name it bears, that of reading omens, interpreting signs and
announcing messages, which later became the art of the jurisconsults,
the exegetes of sacred books, the learned scholars of the classics, and
later still was the general theory of interpretation, an organon of
historical reason, until we finally come to fundamental, ontological
hermeneutics. Thus, the encounter between the two terms amounts to
an on-going dialog between two currents in contemporary philosophy
and, at the same time, a confrontation between long-standing
exigencies in the history of ideas which once more come to the fore.
On the one hand, we have the proud heroics of Reflexion, positing
itself as self-sufficien t, attempting Titan -like to consti tute the meaning
of the world starting from itself alone; on the other hand, the
ambiguous, polymorphous network of signs in which Thought finds
itself entangled, the carnal opaqueness of its having been thrown into
a situation ineluctably its own, at close quarters with the things of the
world and with others like itself.
Ricoeur opposes the five theses of phenomenological idealism point
by point with five of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics--a
hermeneutics which, as a matter of fact, has already been adopted into
90
the historical movement of phenomenological philosophy, where its
proposal is not the ruin of phenomenology but its reinterpretation as
an insuperable philosophy of meaning. 4
I) In HusserI's idealism the ideal of scientificity, construed as an
ultimate justification, finds its limit in the ontological condition of
understanding. This condition can be expressed with the term
'finitude' , carrying a negative tinge, or even more fully with the term
'belonging', indicating a positive relation which, in the last analysis,
is identifiable with hermeneutic experience itself. What is meant is that
the subject and the object belong to each other in an encompassing
situation containing both. This is the same thing Heidegger expresses
with the notion of being-in-the-worId. Actually, Husserlian phenome-
nology couches "its immense and unsurpassable discovery of in-
tentionality" in a reductive conceptuality of the opposition between
subject and object: from this conceptuality arises his need to found the
unity of meaning of the object in a constituting subjectivity. Instead,
the "belonging" relationship brings out the difference in level between
the epistemological justification, which remains within the objectifying
thought, and the ontological dimension of Dasein which we are and
which is essentially an opening and a projection towards the world.
2) To the primacy HusserI attributes to intuition hermeneutics
opposes the necessity for all understanding to be mediated by an
interpretation. As against the Husserlian ideal of an ultimate justifica-
tion in an absolute vision, the absoluteness of which somewhat recalls
the absoluteness of the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge,
interpretation always places us in medias res, rather than at the begin-
ning or end. In contrast to the direct, immediate nature of vision (even
when immediacy is the result of a succession of mediations) is the
irrevocably mediated and situated nature of understanding, of which
interpretation, in Heidegger, is the development. That which is
explicated through the work of interpretation has the structure of
"something as (als) something." "All seeing is already and always
understanding-interpreting .... The articulation of the understood, as
it takes place in the form of the approach that understands being in
the form of the 'as something', precedes any thematic statement about
that being."sInterpretation (or explication) has the same universal scope
as understanding, of which, indeed, it is a development. The structure
of explication, the Als, presumes understanding, a "structure of
anticipation," the Vor-, which dissolves any naive presumption as to
 91

the neutrality or detachment of objectifying knowledge in the ine-

luctably situational nature of the hermeneutic circle. Together, the Als
and the Vor- make up the twofold condition of meaning, taken not as
a concealed sense, hidden back behind phenomena, but as a possibility
inherent in the Being-there with its original opening and capacity to
project.
The universality of interpretation is attested to above all by the use
of natural languages, thanks to which the conversational relationship
between people is structured in a hermeneutically spontaneous fashion.
Conversation, according to Ricoeur, is only one instance of a "short
intersubjective relation" and must be coordinated with "long intersub-
jective relations" sustained by an historical tradition, where the
hermeneutic model of mediation by means of the text, to which
Ricoeur is especially partial, can be located. Here meaning becomes
autonomous with respect to the author's intentions, the initial situa-
tion of discourse and the original addressee. (; Once this notion of text
has been brought in, a dialectic between "belonging" and "dis-
tanciation" becomes possible as understanding, interpretation and
project interlock in radical opposition against both the primacy
assigned by idealistic phenomenology to intuition and the notion of
subjectivity which it implies.
3) In Husserlian idealism, since all transcendence is subject to doubt
and pure immanence alone enjoys the privilege of apodicticity,
grounding takes place ultimately in the transcendental subject, i.e. the
intuiting or meditating ego; with hermeneutics, instead, the Cogito,
too, is subjected to the same radical critique phenomenology applies
to all appearances.
When, in paragraph 25 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger challenges the
"who" of Dasein?,"7 the contestation he expresses is not only a need
existing within the phenomenological movement but is also a question
which arises from the core of the spiritual condition of our time. At
this point one need only call to mind what has been said, and what
Ricoeur himself said during the 1960's, with regard to the question of
the subject and the challenge of semiology, the twofold contestation
by psychoanalysis and structuralism of the hallowed certainties of the
Cogito. In the text under discussion, Ricoeur claims that the critique
of ideology, no less than and perhaps more than psychoanalysis itself,
offers the opportunity of enlarging Heidegger's critique of subjec-
tivity. "The critique of ideology and psychoanalysis provide us today
92

with the means to complement the critique of the object by a critique

of the subject. In Husserl's work, the critique of the object is
co-extensive with Dingkonstitution; it rests ... on the presumptive
character of schematic synthesis. But Husserl believed that self - knowl-
edge could be non-presumptive, because it does not proceed by
'sketches' or 'profiles'. Self-knowledge can, however, be presumptive
for other reasons. Insofar as self-knowledge is a dialogue of the soul
with itself, and insofar as the dialogue can be systematically distorted
by violence and by the intrusion of structures of domination into those
of communication, self -knowledge as internalised communication can
be as doubtful as knowledge of the object."s
The ego meditans of phenomenology does not escape the misunder-
standings and distortions which always threaten intersubjective
communication. Indeed, since intersubjectivity is the foundation for
the objectivity of nature and that of historical communities, "the
distortions of communication directly concern the constitution of the
intersubjective network in which a common nature and common
historical entities can be formed." Hence, "Egology must take the
fundamental distortions of communication into account, in the same
way as it considers the illusions of perception in the constitution of the
thing.'"
What emerges is the need for a hermeneutics of communication,
capable of integrating the critique of ideology into self -understand-
ing!O On the one hand, it must reveal the insurmountable character of
the ideological phenomenon, since no knowledge can ever be pure and
free of presuppositions. On the other hand, it must spell out the
conditions under which a fruitful critique can be made of prejudice
and ideology, even though such a critique can never be total, since the
subject of which it speaks is always situated historically, open to the
efficacy of history (a reference to Gadamer's notion of wirkungsge-
schichtliches Bewusstsein). This integration of the critique of ideology
into interpreting-understanding is made possible thanks to the
hermeneutic model based on a certain concept of text which, as we
know, implies an element of "distanciation" or "estrangement"
(Gadamer's Verfremdung) which cannot be gotten rid of. However, in
Ricoeur's work this element is not ultimately an alienating factor or
an obstacle to understanding but acts as a corrective and a dialectical
counterpart to one's belonging to an historical tradition, and hence is
 93

the condition for a truly creative interpretation. The text becomes a

basic mediation for "communication in and through distance."u
4) The strategical choice of taking the theory of the text as the
hermeneutic axis, the basic features of which we already know, allows
the idealistic primacy of subjectivity to be questioned in a radical way.
The text is the extraneous other that must be interpreted, independent
of the subjective intentions of the author. The problem of its
interpretation is not the recovery of a sort of psychic life hidden
behind it, but the capacity to seize upon what is said within it, the
"matter of the text." Phenomenology, with its idealistic self-interpreta-
tion, has lost sight of its own discovery of the universal character of
intentionality, viz. that the meaning of consciousness lies outside
intentionality, necessitating a transcendence towards the world. The
parallelism between phenomenology and psychology, in a context
presided over by the idealistic hypostasis of subjectivity, exposes
phenomenology to the constant risk of being shrunk to a sort of
transcendental subjectivism. Hermeneutics as a theory of the text is
called upon to effect a radical decentering from the subject to the
world, not the 'world' as a naive realism would understand the term,
but as the horizon of all the possibilities the text discloses, the "world
of the text." In effect, it is in literary works, those peculiar texts where
the ordinary referential function to everyday reality is done away with
and language is exalted as an end in itself, that a second order
referential function is released "where the world is manifested no
longer as the totality of manipulable objects but as the horizon of our
life and our project."u
5) In conclusion, the subject is no longer the ego bearing upon its
shoulders the ultimate responsibility for the world; it is no longer the
radical origin. Having been lost as origin, both theoretically and
ethically, subjectivity is recovered at the end of a hermeneutic process,
the moment of applicatio, in a dimension which is more convenient
for the ontological constitution of a finite, plural, historical subjec-
tivity. In the dialectics between belonging and distanciation, the
appropriation (Heidegger's Zueignung) of the textual meaning which
takes place in applicatio is the moment of synthesis; the subject
recovers and acknowledges itself in listening to the text. We would
stress the eminently practical nature of this synthetic moment. In the
final analysis, the alternative is between the ego, a deluded master of
the world, and the self as "disciple of the text"ll, attaining to self-
94

understanding only because it has been willing to stand away from

itself, losing itself in an opening onto the world, mediated by the text,
thanks to a style of response to the multiform possibilities, inedited,
sometimes upsetting, which the text reveals and projects into a possible
other way of being both of the world it speaks of and the people who
listen to it.

§2. Towards a Hermeneutic Phenomenology

We feel that all the critiques, challenges and questioning to which

Ricoeur has subjected the illusions of consciousness in the course of
his research come to a unified head in his idea of the text. To use a
Biblical metaphor, the text is the "narrow gate" through which
subjectivity must pass in order to be divested of its absolutist
pretensions. However, the most radical challenge contains, in nuce. a
creative. founding statement. Textuality. containing distanciation as
its intrinsic element. presupposes discourse as living language with its
immanent dialectic of meaning and event.
Once again it must be stressed that distanciation is the critical.
negative moment in a dialectic whose overall meaning is to affirm an
act which finds itself only by calling itself into question. estranging
itself. losing itself. Here the unquiet heart of Ricoeurian subjectivity
is behaving in its typical fashion. Thus, as the antithesis between
phenomenology and hermeneutics we have delineated comes to a
culmination. essential lines of solidarity between the two styles of
thought are discovered which lie beyond the oppositions that have
been noted above. Reflection must be mediated by interpretation if it
is to become concrete. But in turn. interpretation presumes a break,
intrinsic to reflexion, with any form of immediacy. Thus. reflexion.
in its historically mature form as phenomenological theory. furnishes
hermeneutics with its most basic presuppositions. At the same time,
reflexion itself must become the interpretation of the life of the ego
in order to carry out its program for the constitution of meaning.
Indeed. that phenomenology should undergo a hermeneutic transfor-
mation was logical enough once it had been read. as we have seen. in
terms of a general theory of language. The field of transcendental
subjectivity is that of a being for meaning in which are integrated "the
spoken being of the world" and the "speaking being of man.,,14 At this
 95

point the reference to language is brought to completion in a program

of organic reciprocity between phenomenology and hermeneutics, and
the idea of a hermeneutic phenomenology becomes conceivable.
The "choice in favor of meaning" is the first and most general
phenomenological presupposition of any philosophy of interpreta-
tion. iS Every question or problem about any entity is a question or
problem regarding the meaning of that entity. This basic clarification
is phenomenology's first contribution to hermeneutics, and is a
contribution the effectiveness of which is, so to speak, retroactive, in
the sense that it simply renders explicit a presupposition latent in any
interpretative undertaking. The interpretation of an obscure or
dissimulated meaning presupposes the affirmation of that meaning
through the mediation of the utterability of experience. Between the
obscure, distorted, dissimulated, hidden meaning and the meaning in
itself, so to speak, i.e. in its completed, indwelling meaningfulness, the
medium is language, to which both these conditions of meaning belong.
For this reason, a relationship exists between phenomenology, the
philosophy of language and hermeneutics; moreover and for the same
reason, phenomenology plays a founding role, even with respect to
historically older disciplines. In the latter case, phenomenology, ful-
filling a deep aspiration of Husserl's, truly functions as an expression
of a secret intention running throughout the history of philosophy.
But is a non-idealistic philosophy of meaning possible? This is
Ricoeur's question, and ours as well. His affirmative answer to this
question is, we feel, of decisive theoretical importance. It is a matter
of acknowledging the subject as a being for meaning in such a way
that meaning does not appear as simply a product of the subject. It is
to be noted that the accusation of being idealistic could not be escaped
if merely to affirm a sense or an ideal meaning and, hence, a being for
meaning were to be equated with idealism. For Ricoeur, however,
idealism consists in the claim by consciousness to be able to create
meaning, where "constitution" is taken as "creation" and "creation" as
"creation in the absolute sense." Thus, he finds a non-idealistic
conception of meaning, even in Husserl's Logical Investigations, where
the first formulation of the theory of intentionality tells us that no
consciousness is self -consciousness without first being consciousness
of something toward which it surpasses itself. Indeed, meaning is this
transcending towards, and, as universal intentionality, it is prior to the
merely logical notion of signification. Of course, the very fact that one
96
speaks, as does Ricoeur, of a choice in favor of meaning shows that
this choice cannot be taken for granted, even though phenomenology
claims to be based on absolute evidence alone. Meaning can be lost and
then found again, chosen and then denied or, at least, hidden from
view.
To elaborate a concept of rationality which is not based on the
primacy of seeing is certainly no easy matter nor free of risk.
Nevertheless, we feel it can be stated with assurance that the progress
towards such a concept of rationality coincides with the movement of
phenomenological reason as linked to the interpretation of the life of
the ego; indeed, the phenomenology Ricoeur theorizes must stand or
fall depending on its success or failure in this intent. It could also be
said that the preliminary choice in favor of meaning is a sort of
philosophical act of faith taking the place of the traditional "inner
light;" but only if, at the same time, it is pointed out that it is in fact
a philosophical faith, a new fides quaerens intellectum. The initial
presupposition of meaning is borne out and validated in the totality
of phenomenologico-hermeneutic procedures.
Among these procedures, the phenomenological epoche holds an
important place--"an epoche interpreted in a non-idealist sense as an
aspect of the intentional movement of consciousness towards mean-
ing."" The epoche is explicitly linked by Ricoeur to the moment of
distanciation, which, as we have already seen, plays a major role in the
theory of the text. In effect, a moment of distanciation, a standing
back from lived experience, is involved in any consciousness of
meaning. Phenomenology begins when, no longer satisfied to live or
relive, we interrupt lived experience in order to signify it. Thus, the
linguistic sign can stand for something only if it is not that thing.
Entering into the life of signification, engaging with the universe of
signs, requires a specific negation, an empty space, an absence.
The epoche, then, is the virtual event, "the imaginary act," which is
to say, an act carried out in the imagination which inaugurates the
game of exchanges--between things and signs, signs and signs,
reception and emission of signs--in which the life process of
signifying and communicating is realized. "Phenomenology is like the
explicit revival of this virtual ~vent which it raises to the dignity of
the act, the philosophical gesture. It renders thematic what was only
operative, and thereby makes meaning appear as meaning."l7
 97

Hermeneutics extends this philosophical gesture into the field of the

historical and human sciences. The lived experience of the phenome-
nologist is paralleled, in hermeneutics, by the belonging to a tradition,
an adherence to an historical experience. Also this belonging demands
a distancing; hermeneutics starts where we break off the relationship
of belonging in order to signify it. It is in this interruption that a space
is opened for a critical stance, a suspicion of tradition. In their primary
constitution, phenomenological reason and hermeneutical reason share
a matching dialectic of adherence and interruption. Actually, they are
not two reasons but a sole movement of human reason mediating
between presence and absence, a reason which possesses neither being
nor itself but rather desires and tends towards. It is because it is quick-
ened by this same movement of the reason that interpretation is a
rational, reasonable undertaking and not mere divination.
This parallel between phenomenological reason and hermeneutic
reason, which verges on an integration, becomes increasingly
significant in the light of the two considerations with which Ricoeur
proceeds. First of all, he states that hermeneutics shares with phenome-
nology the thesis that linguistic meaning is derivative. In fact, the level
of linguistic expression presumes, in any case, the existence of a
pre-predicative level, both in the various phases of Husserl's philos-
ophy--from the early formulation of the general theory of inten-
tionality and the later noetic-noematic analysis to the phenomenology
of the Lebenswelt--and in Heidegger's and Gadamer's hermeneutic
philosophies. In Heidegger's Analytic of Dasein, the level of the
assertion (Aussage) is seen explicitly as subordinate to the level of
discourse (Rede), which, in turn, is "equiprimordial" with state-of-
mind (Be/indlichkeit) and understanding (Verstehen).18 As for
Gadamer, although he asserts that all experience is linguistic in nature,
in Truth and Method the section on language is preceded by the
sections dealing with aesthetic experience and historical experience.
According to Ricoeur, this effectively subordinates the linguality
(Sprachlichkeit) of experience to experience tout court as expressed in
language. 1'The affinity between the phenomenological pre-predicative
and the hermeneutic pre-predicative appears all the greater once it is
observed--and this is the second annotation of Ricoeur's--that already
in Husserl the passage has been delineated from the phenomenology
of perception to the hermeneutics of historicity. This can be argued
both from his constant attention to the temporal implications of
98

perceptual experience and from the historical and cultural character

he attributes to the "life-world." The theme of the return to the
life-world can be seen as extending from Galileian and Newtonian
science down to the historical and social sciences, providing that the
life-world be understood, not as a sort of "ineffable immediacy," but
as "the reservoir of meaning, the surplus of sense in living experience"
which makes the objectifications and explanations of the sciences
possible.2O
Choice in favor of meaning, dialectic between belonging and
distanciation, primacy of the totality of experience with respect to its
expression in language, temporal and historical nature of living
experience: these, then, are the features of a phenomenological and
hermeneutic reason capable of countering phenomenological idealism's
model of rationality with a different form of rationality, suitable to
an historical, incarnate subjectivity. In effect, the "radicalness" of this
phenomenological undertaking can never be carried out by means of
a chain of intuitive leaps back toward a presumed "originary" evidence,
but only through an interpretative penetration into the life of the ego.
At this point, with the master hand of one who has a thorough
knowledge of Husserl's works, Ricoeur demonstrates that already in
the Logical Investigations the task of unambiguously and solidly
determining the content of objective reason, boundless on principle,
as a universe made up of ideal meanings required the undertaking of
interpretative work that would distinguish between the confusion of
lived experience and the determinateness of meanings, select the data
of sensation making perception possible and give perception its
representational character with regard to "objects" in general. 21
Starting with this first encounter between essential intuition and
interpretation, Ricoeur moves on to comment on a Husserlian text he
is especially fond of, the Cartesian Meditations, in order to show how
interpretation becomes necessary right at the culminating point of
phenomenological idealism, i.e. in the context of the problematics of
"constitution." This point is not only a culmination but also a most
critical moment, when every Seinsgeltung is completely enclosed in the
transcendental life of the ego; what exists for me (fur mich) derives
from myself (aus mir selbst) all its validity as being. On the one hand,
only the identification of phenomenology with egology can insure the
reduction of the world-meaning to my ego; on the other, the position
 99
of any alter ego becomes extremely problematic at this point, and,
consequently, the otherness of the world as well.
In fact, at the problematic culmination of the Cartesian Medita-
tions Husserl himself introduces the theme of Auslegung as explication
of the life of the monadic ego: "Since the monadically concrete ego
includes also the whole of actual and potential conscious life, it is clear
that the problem of explicating (Auslegung) this monadic ego
phenomenologically (the problem of his constitution for himself) must
include all constitutional problems without exception. Consequently, the
phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology
as a whole."zz The paradox whereby the other is constituted as other
in me and from me, latent throughout the first four meditations,
explodes in the fifth, where the other is no longer a thing but another
subject. At a first reading it would seem that all Husserl's subtle
analyses--from the "reduction" to the "sphere of ownness" and the
experience of otherness as "appresentation" to the notion of "pairing"
(Paarung) as a constitutive component of the experience of the
other--simply reaffirm and even exasperate the paradox of intersub-
jectivity. Indeed, this paradox is inescapably connected with the
equivocal co-presence of two conflicting philosophical projects: a
project of describing transcendence versus a project of constituting in
immanence. The role of interpretation is precisely to occupy a
midpoint between a speculative constructivist philosophy and a
philosophy of intuition such as Husserl's phenomenology apparently
insists on being. However, in a certain sense it is precisely Hussert's
fidelity to the descriptive ethos which allows the level of pure intuition
to be surpassed.
The original experience is not a pure given whence one can move
back to the givenness of the other I, but is, itself, the product of the
explication of the intentional movement of the life of the ego. It is
never given in a sort of virginal immediacy but is the end-point of a
questioning back (Ruck/rage) which retraces the genesis of the ego,
the alter ego and the world. What belongs to the ego can be revealed
only to the eyes of explicating experience; thus, it is only by means of
the work of explication that the other is constituted as other and as the
other in me. The other is not included in my existence in the sense that
the latter is a given in which the given ness of the other is to be found.
Rather, my existence implies an open, infinite "horizon" of "potential
meanings" which transcends me, the explication of which leads me to
100

the experience of the other as a development of the experience that

I have of myself. In other words, the experience of the other is no less
originary than the experience of the ego, provided that the term 'origi-
nary' be given a meaning which is no longer phenomenologico-
idealist but phenomenologico-hermeneutic. Here again, to constitute
is not to create but rather to interpret. Origination, then, can only be
transcendental; it is not a primordial givenness but a task, a telos. At
this point, a possibility is offered for an encounter between Husserl's
phenomenology and that of Hegel. 13
The concept of analogy is still another reference to philosophical
tradition. At the point where Husserlian idealism takes up the task of
founding a common world, a common history and common institutions
on an intersubjective basis, it finds itself faced with a choice between
univocity and equivocity, between a solus ipse and an unstructured
multitude of scattered egos. To get around this alternative, Husserl
reinvents the analogy of being as an analogy of the ego in the alter ego.
He can do so legitimately, as long as he replaces the mathematical
notion of analogy as proportionality with that of analogy as attribution,
transferred from a metaphysico-theological to an egological context.
In any case, it is a question of carrying out a hermeneutic operation
whereby meaning is transferred from an originary to a derivative
meaning, from the ego to the alter ego. "Thus, what is transferred is
the originary power of being and of saying '1',,24. The hermeneutics of
the I am is completed in the analogy of the I am. "This principle seems
to me to take the place of the Hegelian Geist. It signifies that the alter
ego is an ego like me and that this analogy is the ultimate and
unsurpassable principle of constitution."lS
The possibility of transcending the ego towards the acknowledge-
ment of the other is inscribed in a "horizonal structure" which belongs
to my own being, specifically in a potentiality of meaning which goes
beyond the mere gaze of reflexion and demands that reflexion become
an interpretation of egologicallife. "Husserl perceived the coincidence
of intuition and explication, although he failed to draw all its
consequences. All phenomenology is an explication of evidence and
an evidence of explication. An evidence which is explicated, an
explication which unfolds evidence: such is the phenomenological
experience. It is in this sense that phenomenology can be realized only
as hermeneutics. But the truth of this proposition can be grasped only
if, at the same time, the hermeneutic critique of Husserlian idealism
 101

is fully accepted. The second part of this essay thus refers back to the
first: phenomenology and hermeneutics presuppose one another only
if the idealism of Husserlian phenomenology succumbs to the critique
of hermeneutics."u;
Elsewhere Ricoeur stresses that the elements necessary for a
self-criticism of intuitionism and a re-examination of the very notion
of intuition are to be found even in the constitutive movement of
Husserl's phenomenology.27 On the one hand, the questioning back
(Zurii.ck/rage. questionnement il rebours), anticipated in his well-known
dictum "zuruck zu den Sachen selbst," is never allowed to repose in the
"lost paradise of a seeing which does not interrogate"; on the other
hand, the telos of intentionality cannot be satisfied by a "mute seeing."
Hence, intuition must take on a new meaning: it is where interrogating
takes place, the light by which it operates. In this connection, Ricoeur
aptly quotes one of Pascal's thoughts in order to clarify an aporia of
the philosophy of the Cogito, the modern Cartesianism of phenomenol-
ogy: "Une ville, une campagne, de loin est une ville et une campagne;
mais, a mesure qu'on s'approche, ce sont des maisons, des arbres, des
tuiles, des feuilles, des herbes, des fourmis, des jambes de fourmis, a
l'infini. Tout cela s'enveloppe sous Ie nom de campagne."lS Likewise,
for Ricoeur intuition is the vision of the whole, whereas its artic-
ulation in a potentially infinite series of details coincides with the
labor of constitution. Once it has been freed of the illusion of
becoming a final, definitive gaze, phenomenology can preserve
intuition, its cardinal concept, understood dynamically as a progress
in intuition, starting from intuition and moving towards intuition.
Hence, we do not agree with those who see Ricoeur's search for an
integration, or reciprocal fecundation, between phenomenology and
hermeneutics as a manifestation of an incurable penchant for
eclecticism, howbeit argued and developed with elegant analyses and
learned cultural references. 29 Instead, his projected "hermeneutic
phenomenology" seems to us to be a coherent development in a
philosophy which, ever since the early works, has striven to give
concreteness to reflexion, taking over the constitutive act of the Cogito
as a movement toward its other in which tension and conflict are
unified. It is quite true, of course, and Ricoeur himself explicitly
admits as much, that in the text we have been examining, hermeneutic
phenomenology is only heralded, not accomplished. However, this text
must not be isolated from the rest of Ricoeur's research. The link
102

between intuition and explication remains, in some sense, a mere affir-

mation until the creative power of imagination, "the art concealed in
the depths of the human soul," at work in discourse and action, is
brought to the forefront. The favored place for such a "manifestation,"
in the phenomenological sense of the term, is the semantic innovation
which takes place in living metaphor. It is only in poetics that
phenomenology, having become a hermeneutics in virtue of its thrust
toward the concreteness of pure reflexion, is at last in a position to ac-
knowledge its own truth, where phenomenological seeing and poet-
ic utterance are joined in unity. This unity, however, is never
sublimated in a definitive vision or word and, hence, never ceases to
contribute to the permanent task of interrogating and interpreting. 30
 Chapter 3
Living Metaphor

Paul Ricoeur's work on metaphor ' is an illuminating example of how

the sciences and philosophy of language can relate in a correct and
productive way, without either field encroaching on the autonomy of
the other or any breakdown in communication taking place among
different disciplines. What emerges clearly in Ricoeur's work is that
the philosophical approach to language offers the specific possibility
of traversing the whole domain of semiology in order to go beyond
signs into the heart of the relation between language and reality, thus
allowing the ancient philosophical problem of truth to be posed in new
forms. But this result can only be obtained at the expense of a journey
which is both semiological and philosophical, a long route, to use
Ricoeur's favorite expression, moving from rhetoric through semantics
to hermeneutics.
In this line of research, metaphor is the main concern, the guiding
thread leading straight into the central problem of hermeneutics. Z
Metaphor, which rhetorical tradition has always seen as a trope, a
figure having to do with naming, a shift or transposition of the
meaning of a name, is revealed instead to be a phenomenon in
discourse resulting from a tension that involves the total meaning of
a phrase, the interaction between the single term and the context of
the sentence, thanks to a metaphoric twist in response to the evident
absurdity or semantic incongruence of the literal interpretation.
According to Aristotle, there is a work of resemblance operating in
metaphor whereby hitherto unknown resemblances are drawn which
cut across different areas of experience. Metaphor is a semantic
innovation and an untranslatable invention--hence, 'living metaphor'.
It is metaphor which ultimately allows hermeneutics to unveil the
poetic, disclosive dimension of language; in the poetic dimension the

103
104

world of the work appears as the truth of language, and the naive,
immediately realistic relation between language and reality is replaced
by a second degree relationship where language effects a redescription
of reality, a poetic transfiguration which, however, contains a link to
the possibility of a practical transformation, a new creation.

If the problem of metaphor appears to us as paradoxical, this is due

to the way in which it was handed down by a discipline which expired
in the last century after a long parabola and which today, in some
sectors of contemporary culture, would almost seem capable of being
born again from its own ashes: rhetoric.
Traditional rhetoric, as we inherited it from late humanistic
academic teachings, besides being an extinct discipline, had already
suffered an amputation with respect to the breadth of its original
project. In fact, Aristotle's rhetoric 3 contained three parts: a theory of
argumentation, which constituted its main axis, providing a link with
logic; a theory of style (eloquium) and a theory of composition.
Aristotle's broad program simply gave systematic form to a discipline
which, at the moment of its birth in the era of the Sophists and
Hellenic democracy, covered the whole range of the uses of public
speech. As an art of persuasion, rhetoric was exposed to the risk of
becoming an instrument of mystification and intellectual violence.
Aristotle's treatise sought to strike a balance between the dangerous
power of eloquence and philosophical reason, tying rhetoric to logic
by means of the concept of verisimilitude. Thus, not only did Greek
rhetoric have a broader program but also a more complex and dramatic
problematic than the modern theory of figures of speech. Still, it did
not cover all the usages of discourse. In Aristotle himself, for instance,
the theory of metaphor was developed both in his Rhetoric and his
Poetics. Dealing with metaphor in two disciplines brought out a duality
in the use and the situation of discourse, a complexity of functions and
intentions; to persuade is not the same thing as to create poetically.
Instead, compared to ancient rhetoric, the discipline we are left with
at the end of its historical parabola (Ricoeur takes a nineteenth century
manual by Pierre Fontanier4 as his example) has been reduced to a
mere fragment, the theory of tropes, the taxonomy of rhetorical
 105

figures. Eloquence, no longer connoted as the risky, potential

antagonist of philosophical reason, has shrunk to a mere decorative
element of discourse with no more than an extrinsic relation to truth.
For this reason, today's new rhetoric aspires to recapture the original
space of rhetoric in all its breadth.
Actually, the idea that rhetoric can regain its original space, in the
absence of an historical and cultural context never again to be
recreated, seems quite doubtful, as Ricoeur does not fail to point out. s
For one thing, according to Ricoeur, even the contemporary supporters
of rhetoric fail to see the hidden error which has been present in the
theory of tropes since the beginning, more radical than the shrinking
of the field of rhetoric to which we have alluded. This error consists
in the primacy accorded to denomination in the theory of meaning,
where metaphor is conceived of as an accident of naming, a transposi-
tion of the meaning of words.
The rhetorical theory of metaphor, from Aristotle down to the
nineteenth century, can be summed up in the following propositions,
illustrated by Ricoeur in more than one place: I) metaphor is a trope,
i.e. a figure of speech having to do with denomination; 2) metaphor
is an extension of denomination by means of a deviation from the
literal meaning of words; 3) the 'reason' for this deviation in metaphor
is resemblance; 4) the function of resemblance is to justify the re-
placement of a word used in its literal meaning with a word used in
a figurative meaning; 5) the substituted word used in a figurative sense
provides no new meaning; hence, we can translate the metaphor by
restoring the replaced word, and the algebraic sum of the two
operations--substituting and restoring--equals zero; 6) since no
semantic innovation is involved, metaphor conveys no information on
reality but is simply ornamental and can be classified among the
emotional functions of discourse.
Aristotle can be considered the originator of this rhetorical model
founded on the primacy of denomination. Still, in his treatment of
metaphor, elements are to be found that do not fit the nominal theory
and that escape from its extreme consequences as to the complete
vacuity of metaphor from the standpoint of cognition. Metaphor is not
merely the transposition of an unusual name in the place of a usual
one; it involves a category transgression, a subversion of the normal
scheme of genera and species by means of an unusual attribution:
"Achilles is a lion." Metaphor upsets the habitual order of things, but
106

it does so in the interest of proposing the possibility of a different

order. Far from believing that it is without any cognitive value, as later
rhetoric did, Aristotle says that by means of metaphor the poet
"instructs us and transmits knowledge to us through the genus.'"
Metaphor, as a phenomenon of predication, does not determine a
painless replacement of a name with another name but creates a tension
between two terms; in order to be fully justified, it demands a
discourse theory of metaphor.
The stress Aristotle lays on the relation between metaphor and simile
and on the subordination of the latter to the former leads in the same
direction. Simile (or comparison) simply makes explicit a resemblance
metaphor institutes in a creative, synthetic fashion: "Achilles is as
brave as a lion"; "Achilles is a lion." "A good metaphor [literally: to
metaphorize well, eu metapherein] implies an intuitive perception of
the similarity ... in dissimilars."s But to see what is similar, to be able
to grasp the most arcane, novel resemblances, is a gift poets and
philosophers share, "metaphor's genius stroke that will conjoin poetics
and ontology.'"

The passage from a rhetorical to a semantic approach to metaphor is

linked to the choice of discourse as the proper ground for the
comprehension of the metaphoric as such. The definition of metaphor
as the transposition of a name is not a real definition but a purely
nominal one, in the sense that this distinction takes on in Leibniz, viz.
between a definition that seeks only to single out a given phenomenon
and one whose purpose is to show its genesis. Only a theory of
metaphorical utterance is able to explain how metaphorical meaning
is produced.
Here, at the crux of his research, Ricoeur engages the modern
sciences of language, both French and Anglo-American, at close
quarters, and succeeds, by the way, in effecting a propitious mediation
between cultural worlds which generally are out of touch with one
another. Philosophical semantics of the linguistic analysis school has
the merit of having given a new direction to the theory of metaphor,
breaking with an age-old tradition. A common characteristic of the
authors belonging to this current is that they do without any contribu-
 107

tion from linguistics, in the Saussurian sense of this discipline, relying

rather on logic or epistemology or, occasionally, on literary criticism
and the theory of literature. Authors like Ivor Armstrong Richards,
Max Black and Monroe BeardsleylO do not approach metaphor as a case
of deviant naming but as a phenomenon of non- pertinent predication
in the context of a sentence. In lieu of a substitution theory, what is
offered is a theory of a tension between two terms, the 'tenor' and
'vehicle', as Richards calls them, which together constitute the
metaphor. In this sense, one may no longer speak of words' being used
metaphorically but of metaphorical sentences. The strategy of discourse
by means of which the metaphoric sentence signifies its meaning is
absurdity. Interpreted literally it is absurd to say that Achilles is a lion.
For this reason, the sentence requires a metaphorical interpretation
which will do away with the literal interpretation and twist the word
so that it produces a new meaning. Thus, the metaphorical meaning
resulting from the interaction between the word and the context of the
sentence appears as a response to a semantic impertinence.
According to Ricoeur, the contribution of philosophical semantics
in the English language must be taken up in the framework of a
semantics of discourse nourished by borrowings from Saussurian
linguistics. At this point he elects Benveniste l l as his guide, assuming
the latter's distinction between a linguistics of language and a
linguistics of discourse. A linguistics of language, with the sign as its
basic unit and a universal science of signs, semiology, as its general
prospective, leads to a semantics of the word (mot) which would take
us right back to the point of view of the rhetorical theory of metaphor;
not unexpectedly, it ends in the elaboration of a new rhetoric,
structuralist in its inspiration, in which the rules of segmentation,
identification and combination which had been applied successfully
to phonological and lexical entities are extended to the study of the
figures of rhetoric. 12 Creating a conflict which typically contains the
possibility of a dialectical reconciliation, Ricoeur opposes the
linguistics of language with a linguistics of discourse, which has the
sentence as its basic unit and is open to the transcendence of reality
and the speaking subjects, beyond any closure of the universe of signs
and beyond the anonymous rules for the functioning of the linguistic
system.
The semiological approach is legitimate, but it is partial and abstract
with regard to the concrete totality of discourse. On the other hand,
108

it would be illusory to attempt to reach the subjectivity of speakers via

a short route, grounding the language-reality relation without any
concern for language structures, disregarding the help of the semi-
ological disciplines. The problem is to integrate the latter, with all
their capacity for contesting the narcissism of the subject, into a
proceeding which is first of all semantic, then reflexive (in the
meaning this term has in the philosophy of the Cog ito ), and finally
hermeneutic.
For the theory of metaphor, to frame the question in this way
implies that, in the last analysis, the opposition between the nominal
theory and the discursive theory is not absolute. In effect, metaphorical
meaning is produced by the sentence as a whole, but it is focalized on
the name. The name guarantees a semantic identity. The nominal
theory of metaphor, then, is partial but not absolutely erroneous; it
simply needs to be reframed against the background of the theory of
discourse.
At this point one may take up once again the theme of resemblance
which was already present in the Aristotelian conception of metaphor.
Ricoeur demonstrates that it is even more essential in the theory of
discourse. If metaphor does not consist essentially in dressing up an
idea in an image by replacing a usual with an unusual term but,
instead, arises from a tension, opportunely reduced through metaphori-
cal interpretation, between two terms or ideas which are incompatible
on the literal plane, then the work of resemblance consists precisely
in favoring the emergence of an affinity where ordinary intuition finds
none. Thus, metaphor acts in a similar fashion to what Ryle calls a
'category mistake'.13 Of course, it is a calculated mistake, by means of
which a meaningful relationship is established between two things
which are not matched, at least not according to ordinary classifica-
tions. Thanks to the play of resemblance, metaphor reveals a non-
verbal aspect, a bond with the image and the imaginary; it teaches us
to "see as," to use an expression of Wittgenstein's,14 to see Achilles as
if he were a lion. Metaphor institutes a resemblance, creates a new
meaning. This is what makes it a living metaphor, untranslatable on
principle, in contrast to how it is conceived of in rhetoric. Of course,
metaphor can always become banal and die as a result of repetition in
everyday language. In the opposition between live and dead metaphors
one catches a remote echo of Bergson, or at least of that part of
 109

Bergsonism that is compatible with the phenomenology of the

"life-world."

Thus, going beyond the limits of rhetorical theory, metaphor has to be

understood in a new way in the context of a conception of language
as discourse and thanks to a profound, rigorous encounter with the
contributions from the linguistic sciences; however, this is only the
premise for a hermeneutic reconsideration of the relationship between
metaphor and reality that will allow the poetic, disclosive dimension
of language to emerge.
Whereas in the traditional rhetorical view, the cognitive value of
metaphor is zero, since it conveys no information at all about reality,
the approach of semantics of discourse, in which philosophical
semantics in the English language and Benveniste's linguistics of
discourse converge, has already led us to a different conclusion,
allowing us to avoid the snares of a semantics of the single word or
name (semantique du mot) typical of semiology. In semiology, as a
general principle, all that exists are signs and the differences between
them within the immanence of the semiological system. Discourse, on
the contrary, is always discourse by somebody about something; it has
a subject and a reference. Here Benveniste coincides with Frege and
the latter's well-known distinction between Sinn (sense) and Bedeu-
tung (reference, denotationVS Discourse postulates a reference.
Matters become more complicated when one turns to the analysis of
the sentence--this being, in fact, the unit of measurement of
discourse--and of those more extended discursive entities, texts. In a
text, discourse is produced as a work (besides being sedimented in a
writing); the text as work, with its peculiar categories such as the work
of composition or disposition, its belonging to a genre, i.e. referring
to certain codices, its execution in a certain style, is the special object
of the labor of interpretation. l ' With text theory we cross the threshold
of hermeneutics.
Yet, there is one category of texts, viz. literary and poetic texts,
which would seem on principle to fall outside the postulate of
reference. They have nothing to say about the world, rather they
constitute a different world, the world of literature and poetry. For
110

Roman Jakobson, for instance, the poetic function of language consists

in an insistence upon the message in itself, at the expense of the
signifying function of common language. 17
Ricoeur's thesis is that poetic language suspends the referentiality
of ordinary language, offering a different, more enriched dimension
of reality. Jakobson himself stressed, in fact, that "the supremacy of
poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the
reference but makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message finds
correspondence in a split addresser, in a split addressee, and what is
more in a split reference, as is cogently exposed in the preambles to
fairy tales of various peoples, for instance, in the usual exordium of
the Majorca storytellers: 'Aixo era y no era' ('It was and it was not,).,,18
Ricoeur seizes eagerly upon this ambiguity or referential splitting as
suggesting or, may we say, hinting at a second degree reference,
wherein reality is not simply denoted but described anew, actually
remolded poetically.
Metaphor, as the precious link mediating this new conception of
reference, has been defined, felicitously, as "a poem in miniature."19
Just as the metaphorical meaning presumes the destruction of the
literal meaning and the constitution of a new semantic pertinence,
analogously, metaphorical reference presumes the suppression or
suspension, in the phenomenological sense, of a customary reference.
The metaphorical sense brings into proximity two distant, extraneous
meanings. From this proximity arises, as well, a new way of looking
at things, different from the usual way they are seen in the context of
everyday language. Hence, it is wrong to think that the language of art
is possessed of a purely emotional, connotative value, without any
cognitive elements. Actually, it redescribes reality through a reattribu-
tion of predicates, 'labels', as Nelson Goodman calls them.20 Fur-
thermore, metaphor can be likened to the heuristic models Max Black
and Mary B. Hesse speak of. 21 Here, too, the absolute opposition
positivism envisions between scientific and poetic language is no longer
applicable. The redescription and the heuristic function together
provide the possibility for a rereading of the Aristotelian conception
of poetry as a mimesis of human actions: it is a creative imitation
which is carried out by means of a mythos, the tale, whose heuristic
function resembles that of the model. The Aristotelian conception of
art as an imitation of nature has generally been misread, not only
because the creativity implied in the notion of imitation is lost but also
 111

because the meaning of 'nature', physis, is misunderstood. 22 We have

reached the point where the referential theory of poetic language and
of metaphor as a poem in miniature must yield to a philosophical
reflection on the concept of metaphorical truth and to a hermeneutics
of the ontology implied by this concept. Metaphorical truth means
that the theory of tension, used earlier in order to comprehend the
dynamics within sentences productive of metaphoric meanings (tension
between vehicle and tenor, to use Richards' terminology, and between
single term and context, between literal and metaphoric inter-
pretation, between identity and difference in the interplay of
resemblance) must be extended to the relation between sentence and
reality, must be grasped within the interpretation of the is of the
metaphoric sentence, which does not simply have a relational function
between subject and predicate but also stands as an ontological
statement: "Achilles is a lion," "Nature is a temple where living columns
..." The verb is also contains, dialectically an is not: "Aixo era y no era";
a to be like/as which arises from a conflict between a movement of
ontological vehemence, the affirming power of poetic language with
all its illocutional force, and a contrary movement of critique--in
Ricoeurian terms, suspicion--of the potentialities of metaphorical
language for illusion and mystification. Z3 As the privileged model of
poetic language, metaphor presents to us plastically the things of the
world and the actions of mankind in their constitutive power, in their
blossoming, following Heidegger's interpretation of physis. 24 It shows
us being as power and act, to use the classical Aristotelian terminology,
what Heidegger calls Ereignis. Furthermore, just as in Heidegger,
poetic discourse and philosophical discourse are found in a propinquity
which, nevertheless, implies an absolute distance. Speculative dis-
course is different from poetic discourse. Located half-way, so to
speak, between symbol and concept, metaphor cannot be identified
with either one. In fact, metaphor has the semantic structure of sym-
bol (signification founded upon a double meaning, a meaning that
signifies another meaning) but not the same density and existential
depth, from which standpoint it is closer to the speculative [ogos.'1.S On
the other hand, the latter cannot be reduced to any sort of product of
the imagination; the area of logic is governed by rules of identity,
completely unlike the variegated interplay of resemblances at work in
metaphorical discourse, in metaphorizing.
112

Ricoeur's research on metaphor culminates in a theory of the

plurality of and intersection between the forms of discourse. He
defends the originality of philosophical discourse as against any
attempt to see metaphysics as metaphorical. 26 Nevertheless, the
speculative logos, founded upon an inner necessity of the concept, does
not exist in ethereal abstraction but is nourished by the fullness and
grace of language, with all its wealth of symbolic, metaphorical and
poetic values. By means of the splitting of reference and the redescrib-
ing of reality, poetic discourse prefigures that distancing with respect
to reality which is a necessary condition for speculative discourse and
which is most adequately formulated in the phenomenological theme
of reduction. On the other hand, this distancing is articulated within
an experience of belonging, by which man is included in discourse and
discourse is included in being, an experience that is not an exclusive
prerogative of poetry but that poetry captures and preserves as a gift
for thought.%7
By choosing the theme of metaphor as our guiding thread, we have
reached the heart of the hermeneutic problem, in proximity to that
which is manifested in discourse as text and as work and can neither
be reduced romantically to an expression of the hidden subjectivity
of a genius nor positivistically to something that can be explained by
the general, anonymous laws regulating the universe of signs. 28 In
metaphor there is a constitutive tension of language toward that which
is the other from language, viz. the world as a unifying horizon of all
the signifying intentionalities of the manifold modalities of discourse.
Discourse not only belongs to the world but is projected toward it. The
world, in turn, is not that sum total of factors envisioned by naive
realism but that which is signified by the texts and works of discourse,
the so-called matter of the text or world of the work; never reducible
to a mere product of the subjectivity of the authors and users, it is that
by which subjectivity is sustained and nourished.
However, in the truth of the world as manifested in the texts and
works of discourse there is also the implicit reference to the possibility
for a practical transformation of the world, an effectual recreation of
the existent. That being which is uttered poetically and thought
speculatively is likewise the substance of a free and freeing praxis.
This practical consequence of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics appears as
if suspended at the conclusion of his research, not yet brought to
fulfillment. Perhaps it is due precisely to this prospect of a completion
 113

that beneath the crystal-clear surface of Ricoeur's Cartesian prose the

snare of some more radical and secret conflict lies hidden. What is to
be the relationship between truth and practice? What practice
corresponds to the labor of interpretation? Is there a meaning which
would unify the divers dimensions of action? And what relation exists
between the will which is free and the many forms of servitude and
alienation of willing?
Let us remember that Ricoeur's interest in hermeneutics arose at a
certain point in the development of a philosophy of the will with a
phenomenological framework as its starting point; later came the
confrontation with the thorny, existential problem of evil, the servum
arbitrium, in the final prospect--but present from the very first--of
a poetics of the will. Hermeneutics is certainly not a detour or
distraction for Ricoeur with respect to the main course of his
meditations but is his long route, the way that must be followed in
order to reach the goal he set for himself at the outset. In an essay
published in 1970 he distinguished three levels for a philosophical
approach to the problem of the will: phenomenological, limited to the
description of the essential structures of the project and option;
dialectical, according to which the degrees of reasonable action are
ordered rationally in the context of the ethico-political community;
hermeneutic, where it is sought to reconnect the will to the "depth
history of the modes of being in which being itself is both concealed
and disclosed."29 Ricoeur himself stresses the highly problematic
character of the hermeneutic approach to the will; it is a fragmented
approach, exposed to ambiguities, forced to come to grips with the
crisis of the subject and undergo the challenge of the critique against
metaphysics. Nonetheless, this approach, in our opinion, represents
Ricoeur's deepest intention, the desire that stimulates his research in
its every phase. In the labor of interpretation, or thing of interpreta-
tion, what is ultimately at stake is the affirmation of being as an act
within us, the realization of the free will--what is, in Aristotle's
language, the only work worthy of man, a life in conformity with the
proper activity of a rational creature 30--even though the realm of
freedom can only be foreshadowed as a Utopia by means of the
creating power of the imagination.
 Chapter 4
Towards a Poetics of Freedom

§l. The Circle of Temporality and Narrativity.

Distentio animi and Mythos

At this point of our research, although the spirit of Ricoeur's

philosophical work, already productive of valid results but still in
progress, is not such as to permit us to suggest its conclusions, we can
fix the direction of his line of march, the itinerary he proposes as an
example to all those who share his philosophical concerns and goals.
Although his road has shown itself to be a long, twisting one, filled
with obstacles, stages and halting-places, in its essential outlines it has
remained coherent with the original project formulated in Ricoeur's
youth at the time of his concern with the phenomenology of will. The
philosophy of the Cogito was taken up anew in response to a specula-
tive ambition to grasp the creativity which constitutes the originary
subject as subject. It is that creativity, which human speech preserves
without ever being its absolute master, that makes us creative subjects
even though we cannot identify ourselves with or as the creative
source.
We might say that Ricoeur's philosophical theme is the compre-
hension of the kind of creativity which belongs to us as finite subjects.
Poetics represents the level of philosophical discourse capable of
showing human creativity in the act; not some sort of meta-philosophi-
cal crown for phenomenological research, but the fruit that has come
to maturation in philosophical language itself, expressing a new, more
profound equilibrium between word and deed. In Ricoeur's recent
work, time and narrative have become the poles of his discourse, but
in this polarity we find the very same tension as that which joins and
contrasts reflexion and interpretation--the Cogito and hermeneu-

114
 115

tics--and which cuts across the field of hermeneutics as such. In fact,

time is the most radical, extreme reach of subjectivity, whereas
narrative, in its various forms (historiography or fictional narrative),
represents a sort of extension or generalization of the same capacity
for producing meaning and redescribing reality that we found
operative in metaphor, the poem in miniature and, par excellence, the
moment of semantic innovation. The Rule 0/ Metaphor and Time and
Narrative "form a pair: published one after the other, these works were
conceived together."l
The image we have of Ricoeur's work, at least here in Italy, is still
that of the major research of the Sixties, Freud and Philosophy and
The Conflict 0/ Interpretations; but, within a very few years, it is
likely that he will be mentioned above all as the philosopher of
metaphor and narrative, as the author of the Poetics 0/ the Will, found
at last. Poetics is, first of all, a "descriptive discipline" dealing
specifically with the "productive character" of certain modes of
discourse, regardless of whether they are prose or poetry.% It is impor-
tant to note that there are two sides to this productive capacity of
discourse: it is a production of meaning, which is to sayan "expan-
sion of language within language itself," but also a growth in the power
to discover hitherto unknown aspects of the world; it is both semantic
innovation and heuristic potency. Linguistics splits these two aspects
by drawing an "ascetic distinction" between immanent features of
language and extra-linguistic references. Poetics, operating on the
level of the units of discourse greater than or equal to the sentence
(clearly, Benveniste's lesson has not been forgotten), must merge that
which linguistics, for its own methodological exigencies, has sun-
dered. It must challenge the distinction between an inside and an
outside to language, in order to bring out language's most relevant
function, which is to be a mediation: "Mediation between man and the
world, mediation between man and man, mediation between man and
himself. The first mediation can be called 'reference', the second
'dialog', the third 'reflexion'. The heuristic strength of language is
wielded over the three registers of reference, dialog and reflexion.
Language changes all three, our vision of the world, our power to
communicate and our understanding of ourselves."J
If the creative nature of metaphor appears above all in the new
semantic pertinence it produces in place of customary or hackneyed
significations, narrative produces a similar impression of novelty and
116

creativeness through the invention of a plot, a synthesis of the

heterogeneous, that fuses a scattered, discordant multitude of facts,
circumstances, unexpected happenings, purposes, causes and effects
in the temporal unity of an action. In both cases, something is said
which was hitherto unknown; in both cases, reality is redescribed,
re-figured (Ricoeur uses the verb re- figurer and sometimes re-config-
urer). The mimetic function of narrative corresponds to the second-
order reference in metaphor. Except that, whereas metaphorical
reference has to do mainly with the sensorial, pathic, aesthetic and
axiological values that make the world into a world inhabitable by
mankind, the mimetic function of narrative operates preferably in the
field of action and its temporal values. Plot is the mimesis of action,
mimesis praxeos. 4 The main supposition of Time and Narrative is that
"what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural identity of the
narrative function as well as in that of the truth claim of every
narrative work, is the temporal character of human experience. The
world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world ....
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."s
Although it is only recently that the theme of temporality has come
to the forefront in Ricoeur's work, one realizes, upon reflection, that
it was already at the center of his philosophical research.' Actually, the
theme of temporality, at the root, is simply the question of the subject
under a different name, but it allows that question to be posed at the
level of a hermeneutics of historicity, where historicity is the
ontologico-hermeneutic presupposition for historical knowledge and
historical action. Working our way backward through Ricoeur's works,
we find the zero degree of this hermeneutics in his 1949 article on
"Husserl et Ie sense de l'histoire," where the problematic knot of the
relation between flesh-and-blood subjects and history is already
present; history must be saved from the risk of being absolutized and
made divine, as in Hegelianism, but, at the same time, the historical
character of culture and its authentic formative power must be taken
in earnest. Husserl "is the first to have conceived of an intentional
idealism, that is to say, an idealism which constitutes all other
being--even the other person--'in' the ego, but for which constitu-
tion is an intuitive intending, a passing beyond, a bursting forth [une
visee intuitive. un depassement. un eclatement]. This notion of intention-
 117

ality in the last resort permits the founding of man on history and
history on my consciousness. Its final claim is to justify a true
transcendence of history on the basis of a transcendental subjectivism.
One must wonder if constitution is an effective production and the
true solution to the problem of various transcendences, or if it is only
the name given to a difficulty whose enigma remains unaffected and
whose paradox still gapes. At least Husserl did mark out the shape of
the true problem: How can one escape from the solipsism of a
Descartes seen through Hume, in order to take seriously the historical
character of culture and its evident power to form man? Howat the
same time can one avoid the Hegelian trap of an absolute history
elevated to equal an external God, in order to remain faithful to the
disturbing discovery in Descartes's first two Meditations?"7
Thirty years later, in the first volume of Time and Narrative,
published in 1983, Ricoeur insisted that any "pure" phenomenology of
time, by which term he alluded to the pretense to being able to
intuitively grasp the structure of temporality, leads to a dead end. The
classical aporias of Augustine's conception of time, developed in Book
XI of the Confessions, are borne out in the aporias of Hussert's
Phiinomen%gie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. Time, as such, is
invisible; any attempt to make time, as such, appear is doomed to
failure. 8 Are we not face to face here with that same enigma with
which a long tradition of philosophical inquiry, from Aristotle down
to Husserl, has struggled, viz. the philosophy of the Cogito? And is not
just this aporia the one which forces reflex ion to turn for help to
interpretation, phenomenology to become hermeneutics?
Meditating on the Augustinian conception of time, Ricoeur stresses
how the descriptive and phenomenological element is inseparable from
the series of arguments with which Augustine meets one by one the
difficulties which spring up in the course of his theorizing. There is
no description without discussion. The so-called 'psychological
solution' to the problem of time, attributed to Augustine, is neither a
psychology that can be isolated from the rhetoric of argumentation nor
a solution that can once and for all be removed from the aporetical
domain.' In effect, the analysis of the experience of time is placed in
a context marked by ontological queries and difficulties. How can time
be measured? What, indeed, is time? The skeptics object that there is
no such thing as time: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, the
present flees instantly. Yet, we talk of time in positive terms, we speak
118

of a short time or a long time. The aporia of measurement is inscribed

in a more fundamental aporia of the being or non-being of time.
Language bears witness to the fact that we speak sensibly about time
and its measurement, but it fails to explain how we can do so. For that
matter, in its ability to talk about time, language itself is aware of its
own limit and embarrassment: "What, then, is time? I know well
enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked
what it is and try to explain, I am baffled."Lo
The theory of the threefold present furnishes a first answer to the
puzzle of time. Past, present and future are actually the present of the
past (memory), the present of the present (direct perception or
attentio), the present of the future (expectation). But this answer does
not do away with the paradox of time; rather, it generates new
difficulties due to the fact that the past and future things are spoken
of in a quasi-spatial language, whereas they are in the soul as images,
vestiges of past things or anticipatory signs of future things. Further-
more, we are right back with the unsolved, enigmatic problem of how
to measure time. In order to understand how time can be measured,
a sort of extension of temporality must somehow be thought of, beyond
the point-like present, devoid of extension; the cosmological con-
ception must be eliminated, which links time to the movement of the
heavenly bodies and to movement in general, in favor of the concep-
tion of a sort of extension of the soul, a distentio animi. Finally, the
distentio animi and the threefold present must be conceptualized
together. Here, at the crucial point of Augustine's conception of time,
once again the paradox of temporality is not annulled but rather
exalted. LL Indeed, the soul can be extended or distended because it
stretches within a sort of temporal space, in the expectation of the
future, the memory of the past, the attention toward what is present.
Only a soul stretched in different directions, between memory,
expectation and attention, can be distended. The distentio animi has
the intentio as its antagonist. Distentio is nothing but the contrast or
non-coincidence between three tensions of the soul in which the soul
acts (expects, pays attention, remembers) and, like any finite agent,
undergoes (is affected by the vestigial images of past things and the
sign-images of future things). In stretching, it lasts, and in lasting, it
measures its lasting. At this point, it is illuminating to contrast human
temporality, marked by discordance and tension, with divine eternity,
the eternal present, a present without past or future, something which
 119

is radically "other" with respect to time and which by contrast brings

temporality into relief as permeated by negativity, but which in
Augustine is also the divine Thou whom the soul invokes, the eternal
Word that is the inner master. ll
The dialectic between distentio and intentio reappears in its full
meaning in the confrontation between time and eternity. Whereas
distentio coincides with the existential state of being scattered and torn
asunder, intentio becomes the unifying direction that confers meaning
upon human life. In a sense, the meditation on time and eternity in
Book XI of the Confessions furnishes the general theory presupposed
by Augustine's narrative of his existential itinerary in the first nine
books of the work. Eternity is the dialectical opposite to temporality;
it strengthens and intensifies the experience of temporality, allowing
it to be analyzed more deeply; it allows various levels of temporaliza-
tion to be grasped that can be ordered hierarchically but are also such
as can define a new, subtler conflict between a life secundum
distentionem and a life secundum intentionem. 13
If Augustine is summoned to introduce the theme of temporality,
with his typical wealth of clues, suggestions, passages and foreshadow-
ings, into Time and Narrative, it is Aristotle, the Philosopher par
excellence, who is entrusted, in the wisely designed architecture of
Ricoeur's text, with the task of introducing the element of narrativity,
furnishing two notions which together make up a sort of "melodic
theme," viz. mythos and mimesis. 14 The concept of mythos, which
Ricoeur renders as "mis en intrigue" (emplotment) or "intrigue" alone,
modeled on the English term 'plot', is the antithesis of Augustine's
distentio animi. In narrative plots, concordance always prevails over
discordance, even if on an eminently verbal level, whereas distentio
animi indicates the lived experience of a discordance that is continually
reproposed, shattering the harmony of any purely ideal construction.
Instead, the concept of mimesis, understood as the dynamic process of
mimetic activity, offers the occasion for Ricoeur's most original
elaboration, his mediation between temporality and narrativity, going
well beyond Aristotle and profiting from the whole history of the
problematics of the subject.
For that matter, even in adopting mythos as the all-embracing
category for narrativity, Ricoeur is well aware that he is perpetrating
a certain amount of hermeneutic violence on the letter of Aristotle's
Poetics, where mythos is brought up in connection with tragedy and
120

where narrative activity is considered as a species, in opposition to

drama, in the context of a broader concept of poetic activity. Hence,
it will be necessary to distinguish between narration in the narrow
sense of the term and narrativity as inherent in all discursive activity
requiring emplotment, the development of a plot. Taken in this broader
meaning, mythos represents the "what," the noematic object of
imitative activity, of a mimesis which is not passive imitation of
things--Plato's imitation of an imitation in Book X of the Republic--
but a mimesis praxeos, just as mythos is likewise sustasis, the
composition of a series of acts or facts. is Thus, action ordered in a
coherent plot is the construct of that constructing which mimetic
activity consists in.
Hence, mythos--plot, story, the prime example being the tragic
mythos--represents a principle of order with respect to the manifold
variety of human circumstances, a timeless paradigm which, however,
considered in its formal structural principles, not only contains the
element of order and concordance, but also a subtler play of "discor-
dance internal to concordance."l6 On the one hand, mythos must
represent action in its entirety and completeness, ordering coherently
the single episodes in which the story is articulated, thus giving a
universal significance to the happenings which make up the narrated
tale and to the characters who represent them theatrically. On the other
hand, discordance is enclosed within concordance as the variety of
fearful or pitiable incidents, reversals, agnitions, suffering. All this
multitude of events must, in any case, be subjected to the rules of
verisimilitude and necessity which, in the Aristotelian model, govern
the plot of tragedy, making it the ancestor of modern narrative, thanks
to its insistence on formal coherence and the consequentiality of the
whole. The privileged position accorded to the tragic mythos radical-
izes the opposition between narrativity and temporality, compared to
other forms of narrative discourse, all of which must in any case come
to terms with the lived temporality of real happenings. It also
contributes to defining a model of poetic response to the existential
drama of the consciousness of time. An antithesis is delineated between
the fragmentation of a lived experience continually exposed to the risk
of incoherence and senselessness and, on the other hand, the ability to
invent coherent, sensible plots, albeit only on the magical level of
language, without any grip on reality. Consequently, the conflict
between time and narrative is heightened to an extreme, but the
 121

responsibility for this cannot fairly be attributed either to Augustine

or Aristotle; they were invoked, in the beginning of Time and
Narrative, in order to facilitate the introduction, along two indepen-
dent ways of access, not of an opposition between time and narrative
but rather a reciprocity, a virtuous circle. Still, at this point of our
argument, it is useful for the antithesis to be made as stark as possible,
because it enables us to understand what is the dialectical antagonist
to Ricoeur's conciliatory, intellectually ecumenical spirit. It is an
antagonist which, under the guise of a temptation, modern thought,
ever since its origins, has been familiar with in its great poets as well
as its philosophers, viz. the anguished doubt that human life might be
nothing but a dream, as in Calderon, or--as in Shakespeare's Macbeth,
"a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying noth-
ing." l7

§2. Narrative Discourse between History and Fiction

For the conflict between the Augustinian distentio animi and

Aristotle's tragic mythos to become fully meaningful, it must be
grasped not only as an opposition between time without narrative and
narrative without time--better said, between a time in search of
narrative and a narrative presented as a poetic solution to the tensions
experienced in time--but also as an introduction to a conflict existing
within the universe of narrative discourse between historiography and
fiction. The temptation to denarrativize historical knowledge is
mirrored by the temptation to dechronologize imaginative or literary
narrative. What is at stake, then, is to preserve a reciprocal relationship
between temporality and narrativity; either the relationship between
narrative discourse and the concrete actions of human beings is
maintained or it dissolves, leaving us with a positivistically conceived
science of history, on the one hand, and a logic of narrative as an
atemporal system of narrative functions, on the other.
The main body of Time and Narrative, i.e. Part II (published
together with Part I in Volume I) and Part III (forthcoming, as we
write: it will take up the whole of Volume II, which initially was
supposed to hold Part IV, the last, as well), is devoted to an analysis
in depth of the two modalities of narrative discourse, with a view
toward their reciprocal integration in the unity of narrative function.
122

One day, when we have the whole work at our disposal, we propose
to give this vast theme an adequate treatment. At the present stage of
our research, a few remarks will have to suffice, based on what has
been published up till now or has been communicated orally by
Ricoeur in various public occasions; our purpose is simply to allow our
reader to appreciate the full scope of Ricoeur's philosophical involve-
ment.
In his analysis of historiographic discourse, Ricoeur's discussion
mainly engages, on the one hand, the epistemology of the social
sciences in the English language and, on the other, the methodological
developments directly connected to historiographic practice in French
cultural environments, especially the school of the Annales. The
"eclipse of narrative,,18 in historiography has been determined in part
by the polemics in France against "histoire evenementielle" and in part
by Hempel's research on a nomological model to be applied to the
writing of history in order to turn it into a positive science founded
on general laws. As an Italian, I might mention in passing that if more
attention had been paid to the historiographic culture of historicism,
both Italian and German, excellent arguments could have been found
to use against positivism. In the tradition of historicism there is a full
awareness of the kinship between history and art, to the point where
it has occasionally been attempted to include history within the concept
of art, as in Croce's well-known early essay from 1893.i!)
In any event, it is to be noted that Ricoeur, except for a few
significant references,2o takes as his starting point the authors of the
analytic-linguistics current, from Danto and Gallie to Mink and White,
who have always held that historical knowledge is eminently narrative
in character. By so doing, Ricoeur serves as a mediator between the
continental European and Anglo-American cultural areas, and this is
certainly not the least of his merits. 21 Ricoeur's aim is not to make out
that the work of the historian and that of the narrator are identical;
indeed, the awareness that there is an ecart, an "epistemological break,"
between the two activities is the starting point of his analysis. This is
a new version of an antithesis between "expliquer" and "comprendre"
which Ricoeur's readers are well familiar with. However, via a
progressive series of approaches aimed at attenuating the contrast (to
narrate is, in some sense, already to explain), he reaches a dialectical
reversal of the concepts. Historiography is founded on the plane of
narrative understanding just as the natural sciences are founded on the
 123

Lebenswelt. In order for this hidden foundation to be brought to light,

Questioning must proceed backwards, "en retour," as in Husserl's later
works; "This method aims at accounting for the indirect character of
the filiation that connects history to our narrative understanding by
reactivating the phases of the derivation by which this filiation is
realized."n
In other words, it is the job of the phenomenologico-genetic analysis
of historical knowledge to grasp the specific intentionality that moves
this kind of knowledge, but this job is to be carried out through a
reflection on the methodology of the historical sciences that seeks in
their own procedures for the "relay stations" (relais) which allow an
operative connection to be made with the pre-categorical field of the
narrative comprehension of lived experience. In terms of analytico-
linguistic philosophy, one would say that a line of communication must
be opened between ordinary language and the specialized language of
the historian. The relay stations Ricoeur speaks of are three. The first
is the concept of "singular causal imputation," elaborated on the basis
of notions borrowed from Weber and Aron, which offers a Quasi-
causal model of explanation, mediating between a nomological
explanation based on general laws and an understanding realized on
the model of the plot of a story.13 It is the singularity of the causal
series, even when they are referred to a single individual, which makes
the difference between a singular causal imputation and a nomothetic
explanation; an example is the well-known connection between the
Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. An imputation of this sort,
rather than be justified in terms of presumed general historical laws,
can be compared analogically to a narrative; it is a Quasi-plot.
The second relay station is the concept of "first-order" or "first-level
entities." These are the collective subjects, Quasi-characters such as
peoples, nations, communities, civilizations, etc., which appear in
historiographic language as actors in historical events. In any case,
these entities, starting from which higher order entities, more and
more abstract, can be constructed as the object of special histories, are
founded on the intersubjectivity of the social world. Here Ricoeur
acknowledges a particular debt to SchUtz. Z4 These collective entities
mediate between the subjectivity of the characters of the narrative and
the objectivity of written history. Finally, the third relay station is the
notion of historical event, which is subjected to the test of the multiple
temporalities historiography deals with: the brief span of a single life,
124

but also and above all the long span of an epoch, an institution, a geo-
history (e.g., Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World
in the Age 0/ Philip II). Yet, there is something in the historical event
that welds it fast to the peripeteia of the tragedy; for all that the
dimension of the long duration in historical research and the critique
of the "histoire evenementielle" can be considered as accepted, and
for all that the historical event is conceptualized on the level of
economic, social and ideological structures, there remains an unsup-
pressible analogy between the historical event and the happenings of
everyday life, nor is a history without events conceivable.:!S Thus, the
historical event is a quasi-event, in the same sense in which we spoke
above of a quasi-plot and quasi-characters, where the 'quasi' is meant
to express precisely that relation of indirect filiation between the
narrative field and historiographic knowledge; the narrated world is
the ante-predicative terrain of an historical knowledge of the world.
If historical knowledge has a narrative or poetic basis, fictive
narrative cannot be deprived of its temporal elements nor of its
reference to reality. As yet we do not know how Ricoeur will develop
his analysis in the second volume of Time and Narrative, but from
certain oral statements he has made we do know that he tends to speak
of a dialectics of configuration and re-figuration in preference to the
expression "second degree reference." During the lectures he recently
held in Naples (January 9-13, 1984) we made note of his revealing
statement that reference, in the last analysis, means that beyond texts
there are men who act and suffer. In any case, we can presume that
Ricoeur's analysis of literary and imaginative narrative will mark a
conclusion to the long debate with structuralism and post-structuralism
that has concerned him so much and been so important in French cul-
ture during the last thirty years. Nor is it hard to imagine that his
interlocutors in this final phase of the debate will range from Propp
to Barthes, from Greimas to Bremond, from Todorov to Genette.
The following are the characteristics of the structuralist approach
to narrative. Its tendency is to explain the variety of narrative
expressions in terms of a descriptive model, constructed a priori, from
which various sub-classes are derived deductively. To build this model,
a finite number of basic units are used and combinatorial rules are
established which govern the relations between them. Among the
structural properties of the system configured in this fashion, the most
important is that it is organic, i.e. the whole has priority with respect
 125

to the parts, with a resulting hierarchy of levels. Approached in this

fashion, narrative tends to be dechronologized. Paradoxically, while
anti-narrativist epistemologists in the historical sciences are taking for
granted that narrative is chronological and sequential, the structuralist
critics tend to consider these characteristics as belonging to a
superficial plane of narration, whereas they reduce the deep structure
to a combinatorial system of categories and atemporal functions. u
It is along such lines, following Propp's Morphology 0/ the Folktale,
that Greimas, for example, elaborated his "syntax of actantial models"
and Bremond his "logic of possible narratives.'027 In regard to these
positions, Ricoeur is firm in his claim that narrative is irreducibly
temporal, and that this temporality cannot be tritely reduced to a mere
anecdotal sequence of happenings. Narrative, in fact, has both an
episodic aspect and a configurational aspect; it is, at once, sequence
and organization. Narrative implies the ability to construct significant
wholes, but these wholes consist in a succession ordered in time. The
dialectics between these two aspects forms the authentic fundamental
structure of narrative. 28 Moreover, the pretended apriority of
structuralist models is without effect. In all cases, they presume the
analysis of a certain body of narrative that we receive in the context
of a tradition. Our belonging to a tradition does not in the least
authorize us to attribute atemporality to this or that content, whereas
it may well permit us to seize upon models, patterns, archetypes and
invariants. This is a profitable activity, which does not put us outside
history but, quite the contrary, stresses and intensifies our relationship
with a given historical patrimony. Hence, in lieu of a logic of
narrative, we have a sort of schematism, to use Kant's term, founded
upon our familiarity with a narrative tradition that offers us the
intelligible forms of narrative, without the pretense of constructing,
a priori, the matrix for all possible stories. 29
Hence, historical knowledge is founded on narrative, and narra-
tive is irreducibly temporal and historical. There is a convergence
toward a conception of the structural unity of narrative discourse in
its several usages--in other words, the unity of the narrative function
as such. For other reasons, both historiographic narration and fiction
lay legitimate claims to truthfulness; they teach us something about
ourselves and the world. In particular, works of art, as has been
stressed more than once, suspend the first order reference of everyday
language in order to manifest a second order reference or, if one
126

prefers, a power of re-figuration of reality. Thus, one can legitimately

affirm that narrating is all a language game, to which corresponds a
certain form of life, to borrow Wittgenstein's terminology. Ricoeur's
thesis is that this form of life is nothing other than our historicity, with
all the fertile ambiguity the term 'history' has in the various Western
languages--an ambiguity that preserves Ita certain reciprocal belonging
between the act of telling (or writing) the story and the fact of being
within (hi)story.lt30 Once more we are led back to the virtuous circle
of narrativity versus temporality, but, in order to enter the circle, one
must surpass the level of the epistemology of historical knowledge and
the grammar of narrative discourse. One must take his position on
the level of ontology, albeit a phenomenologico-hermeneutic ontology.
It is precisely the phenomenologico-hermeneutic explication of the
concept of mimesis which offers a philosophical mediation of the
conflict between temporality and narrativity and an adequate
foundation for Ricoeur's poetics of freedom.

§3. The Dialectics of Threefold Mimesis.

Towards a Poetics of Freedom

In Aristotle's works Ricoeur finds some hints for his theory of a three-
fold mimesis where Aristotle makes some connections between ethics
and poetics; for instance, when he notes that characters can be
qualified as noble or base, or when he recurs to notions of happiness
or unhappiness, and, above all, in his theory of catharsis. 31 Ricoeur's
reconstruction of the concept of mimesis, though, must be justly
acknowledged as a highly original elaboration. He is well aware of the
novelty of his reinterpretation, and especially of his aspiration to
mediate the post-Aristotelian problematic of temporality within it.
Ricoeur distinguishes three moments of mimesis, which he, with
playful seriousness/z calls mimesist. mimesis z and mimesis3 • Only
mimesis z is identifiable with the mimetic activity at work in the
invention of literary works, narrative plots. Mimesis 1 and mimesis 3,
instead, represent what are, respectively, prior and posterior to a work;
the first consists in a certain pre-understanding of human actions, the
object of mimetic activity, whereas the other consists in the reception
of the work by the reader or spectator and its effects on praxis. Thus,
mimetic activity, understood as an active process of creative imitation,
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has a threefold relationship with praxis: it presupposes it, represents

it and renews it. But the relationship with praxis is the relationship
with the temporal human subject, not developed in Aristotle because
the treatment of time is reserved for Physics. On the other hand, in
Augustine there is no relationship between the analysis of time and
narrational activity; there is only the first, distinguished counter-check
of the aporeticity of a pure phenomenology of time. The latter turns
out to be an impossible, tortuous speculative undertaking even for
contemporary phenomenology. The itinerary Ricoeur proposes, based
on the full assumption of the temporality of narrative and the
consideration that human time is always and only narrated time, starts
with "a prefigured time that becomes a refigured time through the
mediation of a configured time,,,n in other words, from mimesis 1
through mimesis 2 to mimesis 3•
Indeed, the difference between a hermeneutic and a semiotic ap-
proach to literary texts lies in the fact that semiotics studies the text
in itself, in its autonomy, whereas hermeneutics takes on the task of
"reconstructing the set of operations by which a work lifts itself above
the opaque depths of living, acting, and suffering, to be given by an
author to readers who receive it and thereby change their acting. For
a semiotic theory, the only operative concept is that of the literary text.
Hermeneutics, instead, is concerned with reconstructing the whole arc
of operations by which practical experience provides itself with works,
authors, and readers.,,34
Mimesis 1 presumes a threefold competence. In the first place, the
ability to identify action in general on the basis of its structural
features, a practical understanding that consists in mastering the
conceptual network that distinguishes the domain of action structurally
from that of physical movement. This practical understanding is made
explicit thanks to a semantics of action, elaborated with contributions
from both the philosophy of linguistic analysis and the descriptive
phenomenology of the wil1. 35 On this initial level, a double relation can
be perceived between practical understanding and narrative under-
standing. The first is a relation of presupposition; in order to narrate
an action one must possess the general concepts which go to make up
its semantics, such as agent, motive, intention, circumstances, etc. The
second is a relation of transformation, insofar as the passage from
knowledge of the general structures of the action to its narration
128

implies the passage from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic, from

virtual, abstract notions to a coherent, determined sequence.
There is also a second competence which likewise is prior to the text
and hence, in Ricoeur's language, falls within the compass of mimesis b
it arises from the symbolic structure of action as such. In this context,
the term 'symbol' is to be taken in a middle sense somewhere between
the most general one of 'notation' (as in Leibniz' opposition between
intuitive and symbolic knowledge) and another sense, which Ricoeur
was especially fond of in the Sixties, of "double-meaning expres-
sions."J6 The symbol is to be understood as a function of cultural
mediation, somewhat as it was thought of by Cassirer and above all by
the representatives of comprehensive sociology, such as Clifford
Geertz.37 In other words, action can be narrated because it is already
articulated in signs, rules and norms on the socio-cultural level. It is
a structured symbolic system. a public one. which furnishes single
actions with a context and makes them, in a certain sense. readable.
On a level prior to texts about human actions. action itself can be
taken as a text. 38 Furthermore, through the mediation of the symbolic
systems proper to a given culture, the idea of 'rule' can be intro-
duced, in both the descriptive and prescriptive se,nses; thus, the way
is laid open for dealing with the complex problematics of the rela-
tion between art and ethics. While announcing his intention of coming
back to this question in the future. Ricoeur has also stated that not
even the hypothesis of the ethical neutrality of the artist as artist can
do away with the "original ethical quality of action on the prior side
of fiction," which is a corollary to the assertion that action "is always
symbolically mediated."»
The third feature of the preunderstanding of action presupposed by
mimetic activity. i.e. the third competence, is the capacity to recognize
the temporal dimension of action itself. the dimension which
constitutes a presupposition of the possibility to narrate it. Clearly. we
are being brought back to our main problem, viz. the circle of
narrativity and temporality. On this level. it is for the most part an
implicit relationship; yet, it shows up in everyday language whenever
we talk about the stories we are involved in. the stories of our lives.
At this point, Ricoeur takes up again Heidegger's existential analysis
of intra-temporality or "being-in-time" (Innerzeitigkeit) at the end of
the second section of Being and Time.4/) In Heidegger's work Ricoeur
especially appreciates how the human experience of time is seen as
 129

being articulated on a plurality of levels, starting from the original

form of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) that constitutes the meaning of
authentic care (Sorge), moving to a second level that derives directly
from the first, that of "historicity" (Geschichtlichkeit), up to in-
tra-temporality, which is the final dimension in the order of analy-
sis but is the level nearest to everyday experience and ordinary
language (hence, to the understanding of action which is charac-
teristic of mimesis l ). Thrown in the midst of things, we are preoc-
cupied with them, to the point of letting ourselves be dominated by
them. But our preoccupation with things is always attached to that Care
which constitutes the meaning of our being-there. It is our ontological
constitution that allows us to be preoccupied with things, to measure
time, to lose time or gain time. Even on the level of our everyday
experience, linear time, reified, is manifestly an abstract construct. The
break with linear time is the first step that allows us to connect the
temporality of our own existence to the narrative of our life. This
break takes place already on the level of intra-temporality, which is
thus the basis on which narrative configurations are erected along with
the more elaborate forms of temporality which correspond to them.41
Hence, the ultimate meaning of mimesis l is that in order to imitate or
represent action, it is necessary to pre-understand human acting in its
semantics, symbolics and temporality. Literature would be incom-
prehensible if its role were not that of configuring that which already
has its figure in human action. 4z
Mimesis z, the central moment of mimetic activity as such, is the
creative imitation of action through the ability to construct stories,
whether they belong to the fictive or the historical genre. This moment
is par excellence the moment of mediation--a mediation which is
carried out first of all in the textual field and, therefore, can be
effected also outside the textual field, between the pre-understanding
of mimesis l and the post-understanding of mimesis 3.
Mimetic activity, as we have already understood the term, an
all-embracing category for narrativity, the constructing of stories or
mythoi, mediates between individual happenings or incidents and a
story in its entirety. It makes a synthesis out of heterogeneous factors
(agents, ends, means, interactions, circumstances, unexpected
outcomes, etc.); finally, it mediates through its own temporal
characteristics, still another synthesizing. In fact, there exists a sort of
narrative time which results from the combination of the episodic
130

dimension of narrative--an ordered sequence of events--and the con-

figuring dimension, i.e. the capacity of the narrative to "grasp together"
the manifold of incidents and make them into a temporal whole. 42
Here, with his usual efficacy, Ricoeur makes good use of various
sources--the notion of the configuring act comes from Mink, the
"followability" of the story line is from Gallie, the "sense of an ending"
is Kermode's44--to stress the power of narrative to give an independent
temporal meaning to a multitude of facts and events, even inverting
the so-called natural order of time and reading the end of a tale in its
beginning, and vice versa.45
The configuring act, understood as the power of "grasping to-
gether," means more or less what 'judging' means in Kant, consisting
not so much in the ability to link a subject with a predicate as to bring
an intuitive manifold beneath the rule of a concept. The bond between
configuring act and judging seems all the stronger when we pass from
the determining judgement of the first Critique to the reflective
judgement of the third.46 The Kantian echoes are made clearer and
developed further in Ricoeur's work on the imagination, a theme he
has given a great deal of attention to in recent years, while pursuing
his studies on metaphor and narrative. The imagination is not to be
understood as a psychologizing faculty but as a transcendental one, not
the reproductive but the productive, creative imagination. Not only is
it governed by rules but, indeed, is the matrix of all rules. The
function of imagination is to mediate, with its transcendental
schematism, between understanding and intuition. According to
Ricoeur, one may speak also of a schematism of the narrative function,
given that the construction of a plot generates a sort of mixed intelligi-
bility between the theme or thought of the story and the intuitive
presentation of circumstances, characters, episodes, changes of fortune,
that make up the sequence of happenings. ~
To this schematism of narrative functions must also be referred the
paradigms (forms, literary genres, ideal types) handed down by
tradition. The reference to tradition enriches the relation of the
narrative plot to time with a new feature which derives from the
dialectical interplay between sedimentation and innovation. Narrative
schemes settle as sediment, giving rise to a tradition or, better said, to
the traditions we are heirs to. Every new work implies a deviation
with respect to tradition, but it does not arise from nothing; it
maintains a relationship, sometimes highly conflictive, with tradition
 131

and, in turn, can give rise to new traditions. As it is schematized into

a tradition, the productive imagination becomes history.48 Once again
we have come around to the reciprocal relation between time and
narrative.
Actually, the circle joining narrativity and temporality is continually
reborn from the circle formed by the three moments of mimesis. From
the pre-understanding of action which is prior to the text, a return to
action is accomplished with mimesis 3, which represents a sort of
post-understanding, posterior to the text, and corresponds to the
hermeneutic moment known as applicatio. The movement, then, is
from praxis to praxis--but it is not a futile movement; in the passage
there is a growth in meaningfulness and inner clarity. One might say
that life is in search of a narrative; it is a potential tale or a series of
tales asking to be narrated, and this telling is no artificial creation of
meaning to which life, for its part, would be extraneous; on the
contrary, it clarifies and strengthens a meaning which life in nuce
already possesses.
The act of reading effects the transition from mimesis z to mimesis 3
by completing the configuring act that unifies action by emplotment.
What has been said above about schematism and tradition can be
referred not only to the production of texts but also to their reception,
the act of reading no less than the act of writing. Here Ricoeur stresses
his interest in Hans Robert Jauss's aesthetics of reception and Wolfgang
Iser's theory of reading.'"
Mimesis 3 is "the intersection of the world of the text and the world
of the hearer or reader."so The problem of communication cannot be
sundered from the problem of reference; that which is communicated
by a work is the world it projects and which makes up its horizon. We
are quite close here to the Gadamerian notion of a "fusion of horizons;"
likewise, we can connect with what has been said in previous essays
about discourse and its relation to the world, about literary work and
second-order reference, about metaphor and metaphorical truth. Both
metaphor and narrative, in its various forms, have the power of
intensifying our relationship to reality by redescribing or refiguring
the world, showing it to us as the horizon of our most genuine
possibilities. Especially, however, "making a narrative [Ie /aire
narratif] resignifies the world in its temporal dimension, to the extent
that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the poem's
invitation."St In fact, in narrative works, the world is grasped from the
132

standpoint of human praxis rather than from that of cosmic pathos.

This implies, then, that what is resignified by the narrative has already
been pre-signified by human action, which can already be considered
a text. Narrative, from this point of view, simply augments the
readability which the action already possesses on its own. 52 However,
the difficulty with the theory of narrative discourse arises where it
splits into historical narrative and fictional narrative. Having unified
the two species of narration in a single narrative function gives rise
to the problem of the "interweaving" of two different reference modes,
the "reference by traces" of historiography and the "metaphorical
reference" of narrative fiction. Of course, the full development of this
theme can only come from the completion of Ricoeur's most recent
work in all its four parts as planned; still, it can be asserted even now
that the place where the references interweave is none other than
temporality.53 At the end of the work, the circle connecting the poetics
of narrative and the phenomenology of temporality will be revealed
in all its breadth, well beyond the question of the reinterpretation of
the concept of mimesis to which he limits his discussion in the first
part. 54 But for this to be accomplished, it will be necessary to develop
poetics beyond its Aristotelian nucleus and the phenomenology of time
beyond its Augustinian nucleus. We are due for a sort of three-
cornered conversation between historiography, narratology and
phenomenology.
On this foretaste of a "pleasure of the text" we anticipate from the
continuance of Ricoeur's work we could bring our book to a close.
Before doing so, however, we wish to stress certain points, even if they
are to be left suspended in the absence of a definite conclusion.
In the first place, we should like to emphasize Ricoeur's extreme
coherence, in spite of the complexity of his thought, with respect to
the unitary problematic he has developed, even though he has
progressed through a series of new questions. In our opinion, Ricoeur
has never ceased to be the philosopher of the Cogito, the finite,
unquiet subject, the subject as will, conatus and desire for being. This
subject does not possess self but is poised toward the appropriation of
the originary affirmation which constitutes self. It is a subject that is
not a creator but is creative; since its ontological constitution is
intermediate, it must engage in an active, dynamic process of synthe-
sis, traveling a long road leading through conflict and mediation.
Precisely because this subject has declined to constitute itself
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absolutely--neither the absolute of reflexion nor the absolute of

praxis--yet will not renounce the absolute as the dialectical counter-
pole or extreme horizon, utopian and eschatological, of its possibilities,
it cannot shut itself up within itself but is structurally open onto the
world; it constitutes itself in the plurality of subjects or, to use a
Ricoeurian formula, in the "analogy of the I am." Of course, Ricoeur
is a believing philosopher, but in him faith acts rather as a stimulus
to reflection than as an affirmation of doctrinal theses. His faith is
neither concealed nor dissembled, however it is discreetly respectful
of the convictions of the authors with whom he engages in dialog.
As we saw from the beginning, Ricoeur's conception of the sub-
ject is opposed to the theory of the primacy of representation, that of
a subject who reduces the world and others to a show and, at least
potentially, to an object of manipulation and dominion. The emphasis
Ricoeur accords to mimesis in his more recent writings allows the
subject to be conceptualized not according to the point of view of
objectifying thought, subjected to critique by Heidegger, but in a
different fashion, as what we might call 'mimetic thought'. Actually,
Ricoeur does not refer to 'thought' but to mimetic "activity" as the
central category of his poetics in its intrinsic relation to praxis.
However, he claims a certain truth-giving value for this activity.
Moreover, in an essay entitled, significantly, "Mimesis et representa-
tion," he ties the fate of representation, "the great culprit" of contem-
porary philosophy, indissolubly to that of mimesis.
The illusion of representation is first of all "the twofold illusion of
an entity that would accumulate the false appearances of interiority
and exteriority, viz. the interiority of a mental image in the conscious-
ness and the exteriority of the real which would govern from the
outside the play of the mental scene." This twofold illusion is linked
to a third illusion, "that of an adequation-truth which would cause the
interior presence and the exterior presence to be present to each other."
This third illusion is the hidden worm that gnaws at metaphysics in
general. ss Mimetic activity, with its capacity for transforming the
world of praxis, implies a "work for thought" that cannot be included
in the conception of truth as adequation. Actually, in mimetic activity
thought comes to a point where "invention and discovery can no longer
be separated." However, not even the truth as manifestation, in
Heidegger's sense, responds to what mimesis requires of our thought.
When we want to say that a work is successful, we speak of a product
134

that is right, suitable, appropriate. In order to qualify the truth of

mimesis we ought to have a "multivocal" concept of truth, that would
contain the concept of a right production as well. Mimesis remains "a
creditor with respect to our concepts of reference, the real and truth;
it thus engenders a need as yet unfulfilled to think more." In the course
of this re-thinking, also the concept of representation could acquire
a new meaning, recapturing "the polysemy and mobility that will make
it available for new adventures in thinking."St;
Rethinking the solidarity and the dialectics between the two
dimensions of praxis and poiesis may give rise to a richer conception
of truth, a richer awareness of the relation between mankind and the
world, perhaps a new "first philosophy." We do not find in Ricoeur any
explicitly formulated plans in this direction, but as his philosophical
itinerary advances, one notes that it draws nearer and nearer to the
themes of being, truth and eternity, although they rather stay in the
background like some sort of eschatology of reflexion. We recall that
on one occasion Ricoeur, speaking precisely of ontology, evoked the
figure of Moses, who was only allowed to see the promised land from
afar before dying. 57 In any case, Ricoeur is not the one to turn to for
the restoration of old cathedrals of ideas or ancient intellectual
hierarchies.
Open to the prospect of new adventures of thought, Ricoeur has
chosen, once and for all, the standpoint of a philosophy of the will in
order to reflect on the unquiet, challenged subjectivity of contem-
porary humanity; since his early phenomenology of the voluntary and
the involuntary, a poetics of freedom has been prefigured as his final
aim. We would stress, above all, that this choice is in harmony with a
basic fundamental trend in modern philosophy, indicated by Piovani
with his usual attentive sensitivity, whom we are pleased to quote at
the conclusion of our work as we did at the outset: "It cannot be
maintained that the crisis of objectivity and the revelation of the
fragility of the traditional deductivistic process constitute a deminutio
for moral philosophy. On the contrary, when it is called upon con-
tinually to prove whether it is right and justify its demands, ethics not
only acquires a more solid structural independence but becomes the
focus of theoretical debate, confessing, on the basis of evidence that
is plain to see, that it cannot be a mere system of corollaries. It is not
a question of applying to practice the principles of knowing and
judging, but of understanding with a new awareness that in praxis
 135

those very principles are born and are realized in a true unity of
thought and action."sa
Ricoeur's practical philosophy, central to his thought, contains some
original features: first, the connection between a reflection on the will
and a hermeneutics of mythico-symbolic language; the explicit project
for a hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology; finally, the
acquisition of the poetic dimension as the culmination of his philo-
sophical discourse on the will. In other words, Ricoeur's work is
characterized by a reciprocal integration between language, assumed
in all its richness and creativity, and will, grasped in its structural
dimensions, its existential peripeteia and, lastly, in its his-
torico-temporal dimension.
Now that poetics is no longer just Ricoeur's youthful dream,
conceived in the post World War II climate, full of painful memories
and impassioned intentions, clearly influenced by the great masters of
the philosophy of existence, Jaspers and Marcel, Ricoeur's first
authors; now that it has risen to the dignity of a fully displayed,
coherent, philosophical research thanks to the studies on metaphor and
narrative, it is to be expected that Ricoeur will enlarge upon the nature
of the connection he has affirmed exists between poetics and praxis,
thematizing praxis as liberty and liberation. According to what he
preannounced in an early work: "The completion of ontology can only
be a liberation."s,
From the poetics of freedom, an ethics and perhaps also a politics
of liberation (a politics as a philosophical discipline) can be expected.
An attempt might even be assayed to seek out the first sproutings and
foreshadowings of such an ethic and a politics in Ricoeur's writings.
Without any claim to laying a mortgage on the future, we wish to recall
a few of Ricoeur's theses we feel might offer some hint as to how his
work will develop in the future, mainly for the benefit of whoever
might be interested in responding to this line of thought.
First of all, he has stated clearly that the foundation of morality is
to be sought first in freedom, and only subsequently in the law or a
system of prohibitions. However, freedom, the "source of ethics," is
an act that cannot be possessed except in the works wherein it is
objectified. Hence, ethics is the "odyssey" of freedom, the "movement
between a naked and blind belief in a primordial 'I can' and the real
history where 1 attest to this 'I can' .,,60 Thus, freedom is the act of a
finite subject who recognizes himself as an historical existence and
136

recognizes the other subject as co-essential with himself, his similar,

the "freedom in the second person." Mediation between the different
freedoms of the I and the Thou requires a third moment, consisting
in "institutions," in the broadest possible meaning of this term. Ethics
must be completed in a politics. However, although sometimes inter-
subjectivity cannot help objectifying itself in the impersonality of the
institutional level, the collective entities of the political sphere must
never be hypostatized, allowing their intersubjective origin to be
concealed from view. 61 Starting from this conception of freedom, a
genetic analysis, in the phenomenological sense, may be attempted, that
would account for such notions as value, norms, the imperative, the
law.Q
We shall not go into the details of the articulation of this analysis,
which would require a separate essay; here, we will only transcribe a
highly significant statement of Ricoeur's: already in Kant, as far as the
supreme principle of morality is concerned, and still more markedly
in those who have followed him, practical reason has been allowed to
forget Aristotle's admonitions and to pretend itself able to transfer to
practical matters the cognitive rigorousness proper only to theoretical
disciplines. The presumption that one possesses an absolute knowledge
or, at any event, a "scientific" knowledge of praxis, inevitably sets off
lines of reasoning justifying domination and alienation. "Few ideas
today are so healthy and liberating as the idea that there exists a
practical reason but not a science of praxis." "If practical reason is the
totality of the measures taken in order to preserve or set into motion
the dialectics of liberty and the institutions, practical reason regains
its function of critique, shedding its theoretical pretensions to being
knowledge.,,63
It is important to bring out that practical reason, once it has given
up its claim to possessing a totalizing knowledge, regains its critical
role, thanks to a sort of alliance or, if one prefers, dialectics with the
poetics of the social imaginary, the complementary functions of which
are ideology and utopia. In this alliance between poetics and practical
reason, imagination furnishes praxis with the symbolic dimen-
sion--without which action itself would be patternless, incapable of
acquiring an identity--and with the space of the possible, without
which no reality can be projected other than the factual existent. At
the same time, practical reason fulfills an indispensable function of
discernment; for both ideology and utopia have a positive, constructive
 137

sense and another which is pathological, and it is up to practical

wisdom, in the last analysis, to decide concretely, becoming the organ
of the finite freedom of subjects communicating pluralistically and
acting responsibly.
However, just as reflexion is not given in the pure state as a
self -transparency of consciousness, so also we are not allowed the
possibility of a pure communicative intersubjectivity that is not
mediated by the imaginative practices of ideology and utopia, with
their twofold conflict, i.e. the conflict between ideology and utopia
and the conflict within each of the two. Ideology as a system of
collective representations has an indispensable role in social integrat-
ing, but just this representative character can cause it to become a
distorting, dissembling factor on the level of the relations between
work, power and language. Utopia functions in just the opposite way
to social integration; it has the subversive role of transgression,
projecting alternative possibilities of social organization and the
wielding of power into an alterity that does not exist in any place. It,
too, has its specific pathology, viz. flight from reality and fanatic
perfectionism. But who can draw a hard and fast line between the
normal and the pathological? Who can exclude that what seems normal
to us today, tomorrow will appear pathological, and vice versa? We are
aware that ideology and utopia are two complementary poles and that
within each there is a connection between normal and pathological
forms, but we must admit that we cannot lay hold on the creative
power of the imagination except by passing through a critical relation-
ship with the forms of false consciousness. It is as if, in order to be
healed of the folly of utopia, it were necessary to recur to the healthy
function of ideology, and in order to exercise the critique of ideology,
we must utilize the inventive capacities of utopian consciousness. 64
Once again we have been brought back to the critical function of
practical reason, since it alone, with its power of discernment, would
be able to mediate between the conflicts of the social imaginary,
transforming its tensions into fertile syntheses, appropriating the
dynamic thrust and creative strength of the poetic imagination. In fact,
freedom's own primordial power to be must be attested by historically
determined works of doing.
It is in this dialectics between practical reason and poietic activity,
between poetics and politics, that an answer may be found to the
question as to whether a hermeneutics is possible that does not oppose
138

but acknowledges its solidarity with the praxis of transformation and

liberation. It would be a hermeneutics which, in interpreting the works
of freedom, against the opaque background of living, fraught with
suffering, would constitute itself as an exercise in freedom and as
freeing practice.
 Afterword

(written especially for the English language

edition of The Cogito and Hermeneutics)

In 1984 II cogito e l'ermeneutica concluded on the prospect of a

hermeneutics which would be solidary with a transforming, freeing
praxis and, while interpreting the 'works' of freedom against the
opaque background of living, fraught with suffering, would itself
come forward as an exercise in liberty and a freeing practice. L
Ours was a philosophical conclusion, but at the same time an at-
tempt to offer an inclusive, unitary interpretation of Ricoeur's work,
while pointing to a task which meditation upon that work proposes to
all those who desire to partake in its dynamic movement. As a thought
upon Ricoeur, it tended to become an invitation to every reader to
think with Ricoeur.
Now, some years later, as the English translation of the book is being
published, we would reaffirm this interpretative approach and
philosophical orientation; they have been borne out by Ricoeur's
further production, whence they have received new stimulus and
enrichment. 2
To deal adequately with these contributions by Ricoeur, taken
together, would require a book in itself, and perhaps it will be written
one day. For the moment, may we express our admiration of Ricoeur's
philosophical fecundity? Neither his advanced age nor even a
legitimate satisfaction for all he has accomplished have arrested or
even slowed his work. This incessant activity, this perseverance in
questioning and researching, is not extrinsic to the content of Ricoeur's
work, but is the way he has incarnated in his life the "long route,"
the idea of an inexhaustible "search for meaning.") For this reason as
well, our admiration is not only a homage to the private person of the
thinker, whom we have known and come to love for his humanity, but

139
140

is an acknowledgement of a sort of debt or essential gratitude to his

thought.
This debt is at the foundation of our research on the development
of hermeneutics into a philosophy of human liberation. It is the debt
toward a thought which teaches us never to lose sight of the relation
of language to the truth of reality nor the responsibility of action in
the historical initiatives of subjects who act and suffer and, ac-
knowledging each other, interacting and sympathizing, seek to plot
their lives in a fabric that makes sense--a sense of history that is
open, finite, imperfect but perfectible.
Looking back, the magnificent trilogy of Temps et recit appears as
a grandiose, successful attempt to bring the light of thought to bear
upon the capacity of human beings to tell, in many forms, the stories
of their lives, acquiring in this fashion a "narrative identity" and
deepening their understanding of their temporal condition.
The key word in the later Ricoeurian hermeneutics is clearly 'mi-
mesis', in all the dialectical richness which our readers have had
occasion to appreciate and which presides over the complex architec-
ture of the trilogy: the power of language to prefigure action which
itself is legible as text and is inserted in the symbolic plot of a given
cultural universe; the power of language to configure the human,
temporal world of praxis in two different but converging modalities:
historical narrative and fiction; finally, the power of language to
re-figure, to utter a new praxis, molding it in a new way, preserving
and renewing the sense of human action and suffering.
Like the analysis of historical narrative, so the analysis of fictive
narrative, to which the second volume of Temps et recit is devoted, is
conducted in terms of mimesis 2, i.e. the configuration of time by
narrative. The intent is to demonstrate that throughout a varied
multitude of mediations and metamorphoses runs an enduring formal
principle of configuration, viz. emplotment as the synthesis of the
heterogeneous, even in the forms of composition of the novel
apparently least amenable to it, where the crisis of contemporary
literary consciousness has lead to the rejection of every paradigm, the
end of the art of narrating, the death of the narrative function itself.
The evocation of this possibility brings a tragic undercurrent into
the analyses of volume II of Temps et recit. Nevertheless, Ricoeur is
deeply convinced that "the search for concordance is part of the
unavoidable assumptions of discourse and of communication .... We
 141

have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer

knew what it meant to narrate things.',4 However, it is always on the
plane of historicity, never in a timeless structure, that the ongoing
validity of the narrative function must be verified; therefore,
verification is always fraught with uncertainty. This fundamental
conviction supports and nurtures Ricoeur's claim for the primacy of
narrative understanding, forged by our familiarity with the narratives
transmitted by our culture, in contrast to the rationalistic approach
championed by a science of narration which would allow logic to lord
it over narrative. Ricoeur's critique of rationalistic narratology is in
line with his rejection of a subject-object relation based on the logic
of domination and tempted by the phantom of absolute knowing.
The four chapters of volume II of Temps et recit are the stages of
an itinerary during which, by broadening, radicalizing, enriching and
opening up to the outside the notion of emplotment, the understanding
of the notion of temporality is progressively deepened. s
The concept of time underlies Ricoeur's reflection on the per-
sistence of a formal principle of emplotment throughout the "me-
tamorphoses of the plot'" narrative traditions have a history, and the
extreme eventuality, summoned up and exorcised, is the death of
narrative. The temporal nature of narrative is also asserted in the
critical examination of the "semiotic constraints on narrativity.',7 A
novel, richer aspect of narrative time emerges thanks to the privilege
fictional narrative possesses of being split into utterance (enonciation)
and statement (enonce), where time divides into the time of the act of
narrating and the time of the things narrated. In this way, fiction gives
rise to a multitude of games with time,S whereas time itself, by
duplicating, acquires a reflexive structure. In literary texts the games
with time are not an end in themselves but serve to articulate the
fictive experience of time.' With this notion of fictive experience, we
have reached the boundary between configuration and refiguration.
The text opens up to an outside that it projects before itself and offers
to critical appropriation by the reader. As yet the dividing line
between configuration and refiguration has not been crossed over. This
crossing takes place only when the world of the text is intersected with
the life-world of the reader. The world of the text constitutes what
Ricoeur calls "a transcendence immanent in the text." "A work can be
at one and same time closed upon itself with respect to its structure
and open onto a world, like a 'window' that cuts out a fleeting per-
142

spective of a landscape beyond. This opening consists in the pro-posi-

tion of a world capable of being inhabited. And in this regard, an
inhospitable world, such as that many modern works project, is so only
within the same problematic of an inhabitable space. What I am calling
here the fictive experience of time is the temporal aspect of this virtual
experience of being-in-the-world proposed by the text."tO
To illustrate the possibilities of such a fictional experience of time,
Ricoeur picks three works: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The
Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and A la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust. Whereas all fictional narratives are "tales of time,"
these three are "tales about time" which, proceeding by way of
imaginative variations, reveal hitherto unconsidered aspects of the
experience of time and its relation with eternity.
With the intersecting of "the world of the text" with "the world of
the reader" one passes from the espistemological problems of con-
figuration to the ontic problems of refiguration of time by narrative,
viz. mimesis 3, the capacity of discourse to utter the time of mankind,
narrated time, in the interweaving of history and fiction.
In the course of the great three-way debate between lived expe-
rience, historical time and fictional time, the poetics of narrative
provides an answer to the aporetics of temporality. The first aporia
philosophical speculation on time encounters is the conflict between
"the time of the soul" and "the time of the world," i.e. the lived time
experienced in the living presence of consciousness and the
present-less time of the cosmos. Ricoeur illustrates this aporia
historically in the first section of volume III of Temps et recit by
means of some oppositions that are suggestive and enlightening:
Augustine against Aristotle, Husserl against Kant, Heidegger against
the upholders of so-called "ordinary" time. These two opposing ways
of conceiving of time are reproposed and counterpoised throughout the
history of philosophy, each calling up the other, without a satisfying
speculative synthesis ever being reached, so that philosophy is forced
to joggle between the two. ll
Narrated time is a sort of third time, like a bridge set over the
breach between lived time and cosmic time. In the second section of
the third and final volume the threads of preceding analyses are
meticulously spliced, so that the gap between the two narrative modes,
historiography and fiction, is progressively reduced. From the
standpoint of historical practice, the calendar, the succession of
 143

generations, archives, documents and traces constitute the procedures

of connection that assure the reinscription of lived time on cosmic
time. U At first, the realistic claim of historical knowledge to be able
to grasp the past just as it really was is arrayed full force against the
boundless freedom of fiction. However, little by little, opposition
yields to convergence. Our access to the pastness of the past, eschewing
any naive realism, demands a knowledge through traces that never
ceases to be the knowledge of an absence. The trace fulfills the
function of a "taking the place or' (/ieutenance), a "standing for"
(representance), in regard to the past. Our knowledge of the past can
be a re-enactment of the past in the present only if we gain the sense
of the historical distance that separates us from it and the mediated
nature of our relating to it. Ricoeur associates the latter with the
"seeing-as" of metaphor, to which is correlated a "being-as" which is
at once being and non-being. In this way, the search for concrete
truth, "the facts as they really happened," as Ranke put it in a
well-known formula, turns to the creative imagination for help.
Through historical knowledge we payoff on our debt to the memory
of past human beings. 13
In turn, fiction imitates historical narrative, in some sense. To
narrate something means to tell it as if it had taken place in the past.
In accord with a tacit pact between author and reader, the events
narrated are taken as happening in the past of the "narrative voice."
Thus, to the fictionalization of history corresponds an historicization
of fiction. Thanks to its Quasi-historical character, fiction is able to
unveil concealed possibilities, buried in the historical past: "What
'might have been'--the possible in Aristotle's terms--includes both the
potentialities of the 'real' past and the 'unreal' possibilities of pure
fiction."14 Thus, the freedom of fiction, precisely because it is unbound
by the obligations of documentary proof, appears as a demanding
freedom, pledged to the enlightenment of the deep recesses of human
vicissitudes.
The encounter between the "world of the text" and the "world of the
reader" gives literary work its full significance. Reading can be
considered both an interruption in the course of action and a new
impetus to action. With Erasmus, Ricoeur affirms that "lectio transit
in mores,"lS reading becomes morality and nourishes our praxis. The
text transforms us; the works apparently farthest from reality are the
ones that influence it most deeply.
144

The subject who finds his identity in the narrative of the mani-
fold possibilities for living is not an "idem," stiffly unchangeable in his
jealous self -possession, but an "ipse," the self, shifting and tractable,
willing to be called into question and to open to others, saving his life
by accepting the risk of losing it. This notion of identity, open to
change and transformation, is the notable result of long research by
Ricoeur on the question of the subject both as the critique of
subjectivity and its reacquisition. In the 1986 Gifford lectures, which
Ricoeur is engaged in reworking as we write, this research is taken up
once more and further enriched in a dense confrontation with
semantics and the pragmatics of language, theory of action, ethics and
political philosophy.
Human time is the time of history, but history is not conceived of
as a totality, an absolute mediation, the full, perfect realization of
meaning. One must give up the Hegelian idea of history but not the
search for meaning in history in an "open-ended, incomplete,
imperfect mediation, namely, the network of interweaving perspectives
of the expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the
experience of the present, with no Aufhebung into a totality where
reason in history and its reality would coincide.IIl' This mediation
develops on a dialogical, practical plane as a response on the part of
subjects, who are themselves historical, finite, plural, to the aporia of
totality, i.e. the difficulty of thinking of history as both one and plural,
the difficulty of conceiving of time as a collective singular in its
oneness, in spite of the power of dispersion that undermines it, to wit
the dissociation among its three ecstases: the future, the past and the
present. Narrative furnishes this second aporia with a less adequate
answer than it gives to the first: "There is no plot of all plots capable
of equaling the idea of one humanity and one history."L7 The idea of
history as one (to think of which it is necessary to posit the equivalence
between three ideas: one time, one history, and one humanity) is a
limit-idea that is also a regulative one, in the Kantian sense.
The aporia of totality requires us to pass from the recounted to the
recountable. It is the potential field of the recountable that constitutes
an adequate correlate for the idea of one history and one humanity,
marking off the horizon of meaning in which our historical initiative
is exerted. The historical recountable is the enormous field wherein are
at once hidden and revealed the human possibilities for existence
which, during the course of events and in the succession of genera-
 145

tions, have been unfulfilled, oftentimes violated and destroyed, but

which nevertheless can be brought to life again, reproposed and
reactivated in present praxis.
While remaining anchored to the profane, secular exercise of a
philosophy without an absolute and a praxis without fanaticism, this
vision of history is certainly enlightened and quickened, in its
wellsprings, by a Christian memory, that "memoria passionis" that turns
into pity and solidarity for victims, urging an involvement in the
transformation of social structures and the freeing of persons, utilizing
all the theoretical and practical resources suitable for this end.
To develop this point in an adequate fashion would lead us beyond
the confines of the present context. Suffice it to say that we feel that
the prospect of research we have found in Ricoeur's teaching and in
which we are personally concerned is especially close to the movement
which mainly, though not solely, in Latin America has taken the name
of "philosophy of liberation," engaging in a fruitful dialog with the
"theology of liberation." This movement is engaged with such themes
as opening to others, emancipated communication and freeing praxis,
and has proposed a critical, creative re-reading of Marx's works which,
to our mind, constitutes a necessary step for any hermeneutics of
praxis. To put matters succinctly, what Ricoeur has done in an
exemplary way for Freud needs to be done for Marx.
"From text to action:" this is the motto of Ricoeur's more recent
hermeneutics, indicating an exciting, fertile line of development. 18
Without abandoning the domain of language, we find ourselves
increasingly obliged to reckon with the ethical and political respon-
sibilities implied by the fact that we are discursive beings and, hence,
concerned with the search for a meaningful life. Thus, a reflection on
meaningful action can lead to an understanding of the being that we
are, an ontology, which is at the same time an ethics (in the strongest
meaning of the term), of human freedom and its ransom from
servitude and barbarism.
Ricoeur's research advances along the road to this ontology. In the
conclusion to his imposing trilogy, he emphasizes the fact that time
remains mysterious and inscrutable: "Escaping any attempt to constitute
it, [time] reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order always
already presupposed by the work of constitution."l' The aporia of the
inscrutability of time by speculative thought--the third aporia
encountered by Ricoeur in his reflection, the hardest and deepest-
146

-is answered by the confession of an intrinsic limitation upon narrative

in its capacity to refigure the constitutive enigma of time. Upon
attaining to its fullness, mimesis--which, as our readers well know, is
not to be taken merely as 'imitation', since it implies an active, crea-
tive power to give form and figure (prefigure, configure, refigure) to
praxis--confronts that which overwhelms, without destroying, every
human possibility of figuration, while at the same time founding it;
this is to say that we are already in time, already set within being, that
originary passivity which is the counterweight to our effort toward
self -affirmation and self -realization and the impressed seal of our
finitude. But it is also the condition for the value of our existence as
mortal creatures, to whom the victory over death is given only under
the form of a hope and promise. Just as speculative thought must ad-
mit that it does not exert mastery over meaning, so also narrative must
recognize that it is merely time's guardian, not its master.
On our part, this means renouncing any kind of hubris, i.e. meta-
physical presumption or arrogance, but without giving up utterance,
thought or action. That which cannot be said in the forms of narrative
can be expressed with recourse to myth and lyric poetry, the language
of wisdom and prophecy. To meditate on what is inscrutable does not
block thought but nourishes it; recognizing our limits stimulates our
responsibility. "The mystery of time is not equivalent to a prohibition
directed against language. Rather it gives rise to the exigency to think
more and to speak differently .... The reaffirmation of the historical
consciousness within the limits of its validity requires in turn the
search, by individuals and by the communities to which they belong,
for their respective narrative identities. Here is the core of our whole
investigation, 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.,,20

Rome, August 1989

Domenico Jervolino
 Time, Sacrality, Narrative

Interview by Domenico Jervolino with Paul Ricoeur

(This interview was published in Italian in the pages of Religioni e

Societil, II, 3 (1987), pp.115-120. Here, with the kind permission of
the editor of that review, it is presented in English for the first time.)

J. "Le symbole donne a penser" was the keystone of your early

hermeneutics, the culmination of The Symbolism of Evil, prean-
nouncing a development of your thought in which the philosophy of
the Cog ito would have the depth and density of a concrete philo-
sophical anthropology. The symbol feeds and stimulates thought
without being dissolved into it. From the myth of origins, by means
of history and literature, you come to the mimetic capacity of the
imagination to mold human existence in accord with projected ends
which have been prefigured "poetically." At this point the theme of
time is taken up (ever secretly present in your thought, so it would
appear, even before the recent Time and Narrative): time of the soul
and time of the world, time as the guiding thread of your analysis of
existence and historicity.

R. In fact, the reflection on time connects in two ways with my

previous research on symbol, myth and the sacred. On the one hand,
there is the ambition to seek in narrativity for the way whereby time
comes to language. It is above all narrativity that offers the connection
with my previous research. Narrative has an extraordinary creativity,
as is proved by the variety of its manifestations in all cultures. This
creativity is expressed in the invention of plot forms and characters
which make narrative an immense laboratory where innumerable
combinations of possible story lines and character development are
tried out .... This creativity relates the art of narrating with the mythic
function. From this standpoint, myth itself is a sort of narrative, a nar-
rative of origins, to adopt Eliade's terminology. It is no mere chance
that Aristotle calls myth os the "fabula" (as certain theorists translate the

147
148

term) that gives a certain configuration to a narration. This, then, is

the first link of continuity between Time and Narrative and, for
instance, The Symbolism 0/ Evil, that you have recalled. In the latter
book, from over twenty-five years ago, I showed how the fundamental
symbols of evil (deviation, fall, stain, etc.) achieve meaning and force
only within exemplary narrations, stories of the origins, thus making
myth the most ancient form of narrative.
On the other hand, time itself, of which I claim narrative to be the
guardian, always retains inscrutable dimensions giving rise to mythical
rebirths, even in our everyday speech, rationalized and secularized.
Thus, we speak of time "flowing" or "fleeing," or the past "disappear-
ing" into obscurity. And we even find so rationalistic a philosopher as
Kant saying that time does not pass but rather that things change in
time. Such a time which changes not and within which things change
is like an ocean in which we are immersed; here we are back with the
ancient myth of Okeanos "surrounding" the inhabited world. So, from
the standpoint of narrative and from that of time itself, a link subsists
between the area of symbol and myth, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the area of the comprehension of time through narrative
configurations we consider intelligible. Narrative has emancipated
itself from myth, turning into epic poem, drama, history, novel; but
the mythical underside rises to the surface with the enigmas of time.
Indeed, I conceive of narrative activity as the effort to solve the
enigmas of time, but this effort touches the boundaries of the mystery
of the depth of time.

J. We feel we can say that the logic of this development leads clearly
to a reflection on the limits of the process of secularization, which
never fails to leave a 'residue', so to speak. Historical involvement in
the present cannot help but take place between two mythical focuses,
or, if one prefers, between a mythical past and a utopian future that
may take on a multitude of secular, rationalized variants but is in any
case a horizon of meaning for action. What is your opinion on the
time of the sacred and the time of the political which condition man
in the secularized, modern world?

R. I see no insurmountable contradiction among the multitude of

experiences and, above all, linguistic expressions regarding time. We
live simultaneously on several levels and have at our disposal a
 149

multitude of "language games" regarding time. In the course of my

present research on action, on praxis, essentially I am running into
structures of secular time, marked by the calendar that splits time up
into homogeneous units such as days, months, years. Calendar time
expresses the insertion of human time into astronomical time. Of all
narrative forms, historical narration is manifestly the one most bound
by the calendar, as well as by documentary proof, which is to say, by
the traces past events have left upon physical reality. In this sense,
calendar time expresses the reinscribing of the time lived by men, with
their expectations and memories, onto physical, cosmic, astronom-
ical time. Human action, whether individual or social in scope, is
regulated by this chronological, homogeneous, measurable time .... Yet,
inserting human time into cosmic time does not prevent it from mani-
festing Qualitative dimensions, such as fullness or emptiness, apparent
slowness or rapidity, concentration or dispersion, presence or lack of
direction. These are the aspects of time preserved in other forms of
discourse, by virtue of which they reach language: lyrical poetry,
tragedy, comedy, aphorism, irony, etc. Action itself is nourished by
these expressions which contain the non-linear aspects of human time.
Political action as well.
Thus, utopia--or, better said, "uchronia"--measures everyday time
against an "elsewhere," an "other time," that is expressed only in
metaphors or types of myth which are not narratives of the origins,
like the ones we spoke of before, but narratives of the end, an-
ticipatory narratives, if one may thus dare to turn narration of the past
toward the future. The legitimacy of this use of the imaginary on the
social and collective plane goes back to the very structure of action in
history and to the structure of historical time insofar as it is not
entirely expressed by the measurements of calendar time. Historical
time is conditioned by the tension between a "horizon of expectation"
and a "space of experience" (to use Koselleck's categories). We interpret
and reinterpret present experience along with the patrimony handed
down from a multitude of traditions, always in relation to the projec-
tion of a similar horizon. Many imaginary figures of historical time
interpret this tension .... The most recent, the one which today is most
subject to reconsideration, is the figure of progress through education
and knowledge, the figure of the acceleration of history and, more
generally, of the dominion of man over the course of history. Such an
interpretation may be called a myth, to convey that it operates in terms
150

of a meta-narrative that includes the beginning and the end. Indeed,

it is a secularized form of the relation between Genesis and Apocalypse
in the final composition of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible.
There is nothing to wonder or be scandalized at in the fact that one
should seek for an overall representation of history in the light of the
guiding idea according to which society produces itself. History turns
into a grand poem we decipher using various hermeneutic keys.
It may be impossible to act effectively without interpreting in some
way or another the relation between our ideals for the future, what is
handed down to us by tradition and our greater or lesser capacity for
initiative, or, in other words, our power to intervene in the course of
events in accord with our intentions, projects generated by our
thought. Thus, many levels of temporalization tend rather to overlap
than to exclude each other reciprocally, from the level of everyday
actions regulated by calendar time to that of the deep temporality of
history, seen as a sole drama stretching from a beginning to an end,
a Genesis and an Apocalypse.

J. At the conclusion of your recent magnum opus, but only there, in

the pages of the final retractatio, time is presented once more as an
enduring enigma, not solved even by the creative power of what has
been accumulated ....

R. In Time and Narrative I have adopted a particular strategy. Instead

of starting with mythic time in order to show how the times of epic
poetry, drama, the novel and history have broken away from it, I have
proceeded in a different fashion. I have sought to verify the working
hypothesis that non-mythic narrative, in the forms I have just listed,
confers upon the confused, obscure experience of time a specific
intelligibility: a narrative intelligence, this is what we have. It is in this
sense that historical narrative and fictive narrative not only confer
intelligibility but a narrative identity upon individuals and com-
munities, both of which understand themselves by understanding the
narratives they tell about themselves, in a happy mixture of fiction and
documentary history. Only after having completed this research on the
power of narrative to give an answer to the enigmas of time did I ask
question myself as to the limits of narrative, meaning non-mythic
narrative. And at this point, in a sort of final self-criticism, I reckoned
up the results that had been reached. It is in the course of this reckon-
 151

ing that what you fittingly call "the enduring enigma" of time comes
out. However, it is one thing for this enigmatic quality to be expressed
at the start of research, in the anteriority of myth, and quite another
for it to be acknowledged upon completion. What is expressed on this
level is not a lazy statement of something ineffable but the confession
of a docta ignorantia, an ignorance hardily won thanks to the effort
of pushing the search for intelligibility as far forward as possible. At
this point, and only at this point, can it be said that the acknowledge-
ment (decidedly Kantian) of limits tends analogically toward the
archaic wisdom of the myths our secularized culture thought it had
overcome. But it is reason which recognizes this, operating on its own
limits. The creative work of narrative thus reveals, to keep with your
expression, the persistent puzzle of time. May we then risk speaking
of a post-rational mythics, in alternative to pre-rational mythics?

***
At the start of our brief conversation with Paul Ricoeur for the present
issue of Religioni e Societil, we reminded him of a maxim from his
early hermeneutics, "Le symbole donne a penser." In an English
translation, the symbol was fittingly qualified as "food" for thought.
In his courteous answers to our questions, Paul Ricoeur confirms this
enduring bond, an appeal to the resources of the symbolic, that
continues to nourish his untiring march along the "long route" of
philosophical reflection, with its confrontation with the human
sciences, the universe of signs and rival hermeneutics.
However, his recourse to the symbolic, traces of which show up even
when his rationality is quite disenchanted and secular, never implies
an abdication by reason of its duty to clarify and to furnish practical
guidance. The symbol nourishes or "feeds" reflection without being
absorbed into it or absorbing it into itself. From the myth of origins,
by means of the multiplicity of narrative forms, one arrives--so we
suggest in a Ricoeurian fashion at the outset of the conversation--at
the creative capacity (mimesis) for the existence of individuals and
collectivities to be molded in accord with the projective potentiality
of a "poetically" prefigured end. It is narrative--so Ricoeur replies--
that confers identity upon individuals and collectivities, upon the
history of human kind, a history conceived of as a whole.
152

The logic of Ricoeur's development evidently leads to a reflection

on the limits of secularization. A total secularization is impossible.
Likewise, in other respects, Ricoeur's Cogito denies any total
self -transparency to consciousness such as would be given in an
absoluteness of knowing and a perfect, definitive mediation. However,
the discussion of such questions as the limits of secularization,
self -awareness and the rational never exceed the boundaries of a
rational process of development, a reflection on the inner limits of the
process, nor do they ever presuppose irrationalistic or anti-modern
positions. Hence, in Ricoeur's closing remarks in the above conversa-
tion, a post-rational mythics is hypothesized, the only mythics suitable
to man in a secular age, to an adult reason having the courage of
thought, expressed in the Kantian imperative, sapere aude. Thus, the
device of the Enlightenment, one of the summits of the modern spirit
in its self -awareness, is coupled with another device that was an-
nounced at the dawn of modern times, viz. doeta ignorantia, and each
is interpreted in the light of the other. Indeed, not only does reason
discover its limits within itself, but the awareness of these limits makes
it possible for reason's task to be carried out. To recall a contemporary
controversy, reason turns its weakness into a strength; by rejecting all
hybris, all overweening pride, it attends to its proper task.
With this style of thought, responsibly aware of its limits, Ricoeur
turns to the theme of time, present from the outset in his works, as it
is at the root of any phenomenological research, drawing its most
precious, intimate substance from subjectivity as such. We have spoken
of a time of the soul and a time of the world, a lived time intuited in
the search for a "pure" vision of experience and time as an invisible
form, a condition for any visible ness; in Temps et recit, Augustine and
Aristotle, HusserI and Kant are the major indices of the aporias of
philosophical reflection on time. Then, with Heidegger, the journey
of reflexion begins which, in Ricoeur, allows phenomenology to
become hermeneutics, leading through signs, narrative, texts. Time is
taken as the guiding thread of an analysis of existence and historici-
ty; time is articulated on a number of different levels, all the way up
to the confines of the time-eternity relation. In the magnificent pages
of the retraetatio with which Temps et reeit III closes (TR3, pp.349ff;
TN3, pp.241ff), time is once again seen as persistently enigmatic, as
a "mystery," we might say, using a term that calls to mind the heretage
Ricoeur received from one of his great masters, Gabriel Marcel, whose
 153

influence within Ricoeur's thought is ideally joined in a dialectical

fashion with the Husserlian patrimony of rationalism, a heroic faith
in reason.
If Ricoeur uses the literary genre of the retractatio, of which the an-
tecedents are in Augustine, a rare and difficult genre in philosophical
literature, it is certainly not with the intention of renouncing any part
of his accomplished progress; rather, it is to confirm it on a new level
of reflection. Time as a "mystery" does not cease to be "food" for
thought. The mystery is distinct but does not table the problem.
Phenomenology, having become a hermeneutics, brings to light the
legible features of a temporality extending from the beginning to the
end, from the Arche to the Telos. Ricoeur could well say, along with
Wittgenstein, that it is not the how the world is, its internal organiza-
tion, rationally explorable and explicable, which is "mystical," but that
it is. In the space lying between the beginning and the end, between
archaeology and teleology, is inserted time, and the condition
belonging to mankind. This is the time of passion and action; it is the
time of "initiative" nourished by memory and projective capacity, by
hope in a possible "kingdom," foreshadowed in Ricoeur's "poetics of
freedom"--an early expression that throughout leavens his work,
coherently directed, in an extraordinary variety of ever new themes,
one after the other, towards comprehending the condition of humanity,
which, although alienated and suffering, is in march toward the
promised land of freedom and liberation.
 Abbreviations

(Where footnotes have a double reference, the first is to the original text and the second
to its English translation. When more than one edition is indicated, references are always
to the most recent one cited. In the following table the texts are listed in the
chronological order of their first publication).

Original French Texts:

VI Philosophie de Ia volonte, 1. Le volontaire e l'involontaire. Paris: Aubier, 1950, 1967 2 •

HV Histoire et verite. Paris: Seuil, 1955, 19642, 3.... ed. s.d. (but 1967).
FC1 Philosophie de la volonte, II. Finitude et culpabilite. I: L'homme faillible. Paris:
Aubier, 1960.
FC2 Philosophie de la volonte, II. Finitude et culpabilite. II: La symbolique du mal. Paris:
Aubier, 1960.
DI De l'interpretation. Essai sur Freud. Paris: Seuil, 1965.
CdI Le conflit des interpretations. Essais d'hermfneutique. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
PH "Phenomenologie et hermeneutique", in Phiinomenologie heute. Grundlagen- und
Methodenprobleme (Ph!lnomenologischen Forschungen, Bd. I). Edited by E. W.
Orth. Freiburg / Miinchen: Karl Alber, 1975, pp.31-75.
MV Le metaphore vive. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
TR Temps et recit, 1. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

English translations:

HT History and Truth. Translated by C. A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1965.
FM Fallible Man. Translated by C. A. Kelbey. Chicago: Regnery Press, 1965, 1967 2 •
FN Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by E. V. Kohak.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966.
H Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology. Translated by E. G. Ballard and L. E.
Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
SE The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by E. Buchanan. New York / Evanston / London:
Harper and Row, 1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
FP Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by D. Savage. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970.
Col The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by D. Ihde. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1974.
RM The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language.
Translated by R. Czerny. Toronto / Buffalo / London: University of Toronto Press,
1975.
HHS Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation.
Edited, translated and introduced by J. B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de !'Homme, 1981,
1985.
TN Time QIld Narrative, 1. Translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

154
 Notes

Part One

1. Pietro Piovani, "I due linguaggi della f'i1osofiacontemporanea," in Conoscenza storica

e coscienza morale (Napoli: Morano, 1966, 19722), p.12.
2. Cf. Gianni Vattimo, "Postilla 1983," to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Verittl e metodo,
introduction and Italian translation by G. Vattimo (Milano: Bompiani, 19832),
pp.XXXI-XXXVIII; for the reference to Habermas, v. Jllrgen Habermas, "Urbanisierung
der Heideggerschen Provinz. Laudatio auf Hans-Georg Gadamer," in Gadamer -
Habermas, Das Erbe Hegels. Zwei Reden aus Anlass des Hegel-Preises (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1979), pp.11-31 (English translation by F. G. Lawrence, "Hans-Georg
Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province" in JUrgen Habermas, Philosophi-
cal-Political Profiles [Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983), pp.189-197).
3. Gianni Vattimo, "Esiti dell'ermeneutica," in Al di IlJ del soggetto. Nietzsche, Heidegger
e l'ermeneutica (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981), pp.77-78. Cf. also Karl-Otto Apel, Transfor-
mation tier Philosophie, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), esp. the introduction,
I, pp.9-76 (English translation by G. Adey and D. Frisby, Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a
TransfOnnation of Philosophy [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)); Jllrgen
Habermas, Zur Logik tier Sozialwissenscha/ten (Tllbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1967); idem, "Der
UniversalitlLtsanspruch der Hermeneutik," in KulJurundKritik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
1973), pp.120-159; idem, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1981) (English translation by T. McCarthy, Jllrgen Habermas, The Theory
of Communicative Action [Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)).
4. Cf. Pierre Thevenaz, L'homme et sa raison, 2 vols. (Neuchitel: La Baconni~re, 1956),
with a preface by Ricoeur, "Pierre Thevenaz, un philosophe protestant," I, pp.9-26. This
preface was republished as "Un philosophe protestant, Pierre Thevenaz" in Esprit, XXV
(January 1957), pp.40-5S. Some of the essays in L'homme et sa raison have been
translated in Thevenaz, Mat is Phenomenology? And Other Essays, edited by James M. Edie
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962). Besides the above-quoted volumes, v. also the
unfinished work, published posthumously with the title supplied by the editorial board,
La condition de La raison philosophique (Neuchitel: La Baconni~re, 1960). V. also Domenico
Jervolino, Pierre Thevenaz e La fi/osofia senza assoluto (Napoli: Athena, 1984); idem, "Pierre
Thevenaz et la condition humaine de la raison," Revue de theologie et de philosophie, XXV,
3 (1975), pp.176-184.
5. By Piovani, whose untimely death came in 1980, v. on this question the posthumous
work, Oggettivazione etica e assenzialismo, edited by F. Tessitore (Napoli: Morano, 1981);
the volume contains a Foreword by Tessitore, "Dialettica delle forme morali e anti-

155
156

ontologismo in Pietro Piovani," pp.7-41. V. also the acta of the conference in memory
of Pietro Piovani, Difettivita e fondamento, edited by A. Masullo (Napoli: Guida, 1984).
6. Refaire Ie Renaissance is the title of the so-called 'Font-Romeu Manifesto' (from the
name of the place where the movement and the review Esprit were founded in August
1932), published in an abridged version in the first issue of the review in October of the
same yearj v. Lucien Guissard, Emmanuel Mounier (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1962),
pp.37ff.
7. Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M: V.
Klostermann, 1950), p.100j English translation by W. Lovitt, Martin Heidegger, The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Colophon Books,
1977), pp.149-150.
8. Entretiens Paul Ricoeur - Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Aubier, 1968), pp.S9-40j English
translation by S. Jolin and P. McCormick in Gabriel Marcel, Tragic WISdom and Beyond
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press,197S), p.227. Here Ricoeur, addressing himself
to his teacher, Marcel, says that both the latter and Jaspers have read Descartes "in
Kantian terms," reducing the Cogito to "a pure function of watchfulness over a world
of pure mental objects," whereas "Descartes himself saw in the Cogito essentially the
affirmation 'I am'." In this sense Marcel's (and Jaspers') critique of the Cogito might be
said to have recovered "Descartes' forgotten intention by taking the 'I am' in all its
density." Marcel replies, "Yes, I believe that there was much more in Descartes's thought
than my critique of the Cogito might suggest. Indeed, I have often said that there is
infinitely more in Descartes than in Cartesianism."
9. DI, pp.50-51j FP, p.4S.
10. DI, pp.51-5Sj FP, pp.4S-45.
11. DI, p.5Sj FP, pp.45-46. On the relationship between hermeneutics and reflexion,
cf. also Ricoeur, "Hermeneutique des symboles et reflexion philosophique," I and II,
respectively in "II problema della demitizzazione," Archivio difilosofia, XXIX, 1-2 (1961),
pp.51-7S, and "Demitizzazione e immagine," Archivio di filosofia, XXX, 1-2 (1962),
pp.S5-41j both are now in CdI, pp.28S-S10 and Sll-S29j Col pp.287-S14 and S15-SS4.
The second of the two articles in the Archivio di filosofia has the abridged title
"Hermeneutique et reflexion."
12. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics. Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey,
Heideggerand Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Palmer's study
concludes with a "Hermeneutical Manifesto," pp.219-25S. Ricoeur himself adheres to
Palmer's canon of "four major theorists" in his essay on the history of hermeneutics, "La
tiche de l'hermeneutique," in Exegesis. Problbnes de 11Itthode et exercises de lecture (Gentse
22 et Luc 15), edited by F. Bovon and G. Rouiller (Neuchitel - Paris: Delachaux &
Niestle, 1975), pp.179-200. An English translation of this essay is "The Task of
Hermeneutics," Philosophy Today, XVII (Summer 1975), pp.112-128j and more recently
in HHS, pp.4S-62. A recent German publication numbers Ricoeur among the "classical
authors of hermeneutics": KJassiJrer tier Hermeneutik, edited by U. Nassen (Paderborn:
Schoeningh, 1982), wherein a chapter by Jarg Villwock is entitled "Paul Ricoeur: Symbol
und Existenz. Die Gewissenserfahrung als Sinnquelle des hermeneutischen Problems,"
pp.270-S00.
IS. Ricoeur's early works may be recalled at this point: Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de
I'existence (Paris: Seuil, 1947) (co-authored with Mikel Dufrenne) and Gabriel Marcel et
Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du myslae el philosophie du paradoxe (Paris: Temps present, 1948),
as well as the French translation, introduction and commentary to Husserl's ldeen I,Idees
directrices poUT une pMnomolOlogie (Paris: Gallimard, 1950). Husserl has continued to be
 157

a major point of reference for Ricoeur throughout the latter's scholarly career. Regarding
Jaspers and Marcel, after Ricoeur's basic early works, the following should be cited:
"Philosophie et religion chez Karl Jaspers," Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses,
XXXVII, 3 (1957), pp.207 -235 (English translation, "The Relation of Jaspers' Philosophy
to Religion," in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers: A Critical Analysis and Evaluation, edited by
P. A. Schilpp [New York: Tudor, 1957]. pp.611-642); the Entretiens Paul Ricoeur - Gabriel
Marcel (op. cit.), and, more recently, "Entre Gabriel Marcel et Jean Wahl," in Jean Wahl
et Gabriel Marcel, presented by J. Hersch (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), pp.57-87, and
"Gabriel Marcel et la phenomenologie," in Entretiens autour de Gabriel Marcel (Neuchatel:
La Baconniere, 1976), pp.51-74 (English translation, "Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenol-
ogy" , in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, edited by P. Schilpp and E. Hahn [La Salle:
Open Court, 1984]. pp.471-494). Ricoeur was one of the main participants in these latter
conversations, held in Cerisy-la-Salle, August 24-31, 1973. As far as the relationship
to Nabert, to which we will return later, is concerned, it suffices here to cite Ricoeur's
preface to Jean Nabert,Elementspouruneethique (Paris: Aubier,1962), pp.5-16 (v. infra,
note 99), and the essay "L'acte et Ie signe selon Jean Nabert," Les etudes philosophiques,
XVII,3 (1962), pp.339-349, now in CdI, pp.211- 221, and Col, pp.211-222. Finally, with
regard to Mounier, at least the essay must be mentioned which Ricoeur wrote in occasion
of his friend's death: "Emmanuel Mounier: une philosophe personnaliste," Esprit, XVIII
(December 1950), pp.860-887, now in HV, pp.135-163, and HT, pp.133-163, and his
recent article, "Meurt Ie personnalisme, revient la personne," Esprit, n.s. (January 1983),
pp.113-119, in the fifty-year commemoratory issue of the review.
14. "Methode et taches d'une phenomenologie de la volonte," in Problemes actuels de
la phenomenologie, edited by H. L. Van Breda (Bruges - Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1952),
p.114; v. the English translation in H, p.214. Due to an ambiguity in the original edi-
tion, this text by Ricoeur is often cited as "Methodes," the plural form.
15. VI, p. 13, and FN, p.9. V. also Ricoeur's communication, "L'unite du volontaire
et de l'involontaire," read at the French Society of Philosophy, and the ensuing
discussion, published in the Bulletin de la Societe franraise de Philosophie, XLV, 1 (1951),
pp.1-29; English translation, "The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary," in The
Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of his Work, edited by C. Reagan and D. Stewart
(Boston: Beacon Press; Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Ltd., 1978), pp.3-19. A
reciprocity between the voluntary and the involuntary implies as well an attempt to
integrate between the objective human sciences and philosophical reflexion. As will be
seen, this motif runs through Ricoeur's later work. Although the subject-body and the
body as object among the other objects of science constitute two incommensurable
universes of knowledge, they are one and the same body. They are not correlated as a
coincidence, but according to a type Ricoeur calls 'diagnostic'; this is to say that every
moment of the subject-body can be the indication of a moment of the object-body, and
vice versa. "This relation is not at all a priori, but is gradually formed in a sign-learning
process. Such analysis of symptoms, which we are here using with respect to the Cogito,
is used by a doctor in service of empirical knowledge .... This is why our method will be
most receptive with respect to scientific psychology, even though it will make only
diagnostic use of it" (VI, p.16; FN, p.13). This notion of 'diagnostic' may be seen as an
anticipation of the hermeneutic phase of Ricoeur's thought; cf. Don Ihde, Hermeneutic
Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1971), pp.26ff.
16. Meditationes de philosophia prima, II, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris:
Vrin, 1964-1974%), vol.VII, p.28. "But what am I then'? A thinking thing. What is a
158

thinking thing? It is one that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will,
and also imagines and feels."
17. M~thode (cit.), p.1SSj H, p.228.
18. M~thode (cit.), pp.1SS-1S4j H, p.228.
19. VI, pp.S2-SSj FN, pp.29-S0.
20. V. VI, pp.463-456j FN, pp.482-486. On Ricoeur's conception offreedom, v. Rosaire
Bergeron, La vocation de 10 libertt dans 10 philosophie de Paul Ricoeur (Montreal - Fribourg:
Bellarrnin - Ed. Universitaires, 1974), where Ricoeur's philosophy of the will is compared
with that of Aquinas.
21. Cf. esp. Fe2, pp.S2Sff.j SE, pp.S47ff.j and "Le symbole donne a penser," Esprit,
XXVII (July - August 1969), pp.60-76j English translation, "The Symbol ... Food for
Thought," Philosophy Today, IV (Fall 1960), pp.196-197.
22. Cf. Pierre Thevenaz, De Husserl tl Merleau-Ponty. Qu'est-ce que 10 phawmenologie?,
introduced by J. Brun (Neuchitel: La Baconni~re, 1966), pp.S7ff.j for the English
translation, v. supra note 4. This is a posthumous collection of articles which appeared
in the Revue de ~ologie et de philosophie, Lausanne, in the year 1962.
2S. Cf. "L'antinomie de la rblite humaine et Ie probl~me de l'anthropologie
philosophique," nPensiero, V, S (1960), pp.273- 280j English translation in The Philosophy
of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of hM Work (op. cit.), pp.20-36.
24. Fel, p.23j FM, p.6.
26. Fel, p.24j FM, pp.8-9.
26. Fel, p.101j FM, p.129. Ricoeur develops his phenomenological analysis ofsentiment
in the essay "Le sentiment," in Edmund Husser11859-l959, Recueil commemoratif publie
a l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff,
1959), pp.260-274.
27. Fel, pp.147-148j FM, pp.200-201.
28. In the same year, 1966, Jean Conilh made a like consideration his starting point
in the article "Les aventures de la philosophie de l'Esprit," Esprit, XXIV (July - August
1956), pp.20-S9, to which we shall come back shortly. On the same question v. also
Sergio Moravia, "Filosofia e scienze umane nella cultura francese contemporanea,"
Belfagor, XXIII (November 1968), pp.649- 681j Mariano Cristaldi, "Tempo e linguaggio
nella filosofia di Paul Ricoeur," in Paul Ricoeur, La sfida semiologica, edited by M.
Cristaldi (Roma: Armando, 1974), pp.90-9Sj Giuseppe Grampa, "Esistenza e verita. Per
un'interpretazione di vent'anni di filosofia in Francia," in G. Grampa, ed., Gli dei in
cucina. Vent'anni di filosofia in Francia, Italian translations by G. Grampa (Brescia:
Queriniana, 1979), pp.7-45, esp. pp.8-10.
29. Cf. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Pion, 1955) (English translation
by J. D. Weightman, Claude Levi-Strauss, Triftes Tropiques [London: Cape, 1973])i
Gilles-Gaston Granger,LaraMon (Paris: P .U.F .. 1955)i Claude Levi-Strauss,Anthropologie
structurale (Paris: Pion, 1958) (English translation by C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest
Schoepf, Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology [New York: Basic Books, 1965]).
SO. The forum was opened by an article by Jean Lacroix, significantly entitled "Eloge
du positivisme," in the March issue (pp.S7S-S89)j after a series of communications by
Georges Gurvitch, Henry Ey, Georges E. Lavau, Mikel Dufrenne and Gilles-Gaston
Granger, it ended in October with an article by Claude Levi-Strauss entitled "Les
mathemathiques de l'homme" (pp.625-538).
S1. Cf. Conilh (op. cit.).
32. Ibid., p.S4. Among its several grave responsibilities, Conilh held the philosophy
and culture he was criticizing accountable for having given a distorted image of spiritual
 159

values, furnishing a sort of justification for what he called "la grand peur de l'esprit des
intellectuels communistes"; he called for "une presence du spirituel dans Ie monde,"
which would be "une force et un aiguillon pour tous les hommes de bonne volonte, et
un scandale et une mise en demeure pour les autres" (p.33).
33. In this regard, v. the article entitled "Langage (Philosophique)" Ricoeur wrote for
the Encyclopaedia universalis, IX (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis France, 1971),
pp. 771-781.Dealingwith the "hermeneutical current" (pp. 779-780), Ricoeurdistinguishes
among the "founders" (Schleiermacher and Dilthey), the theorists of ontological
hermeneutics (Heidegger and Gadamer) and of "methodic" hermeneutics (Betti, Hirsch,
Ricoeur himself and the authors of the Frankfurt school, Adorno, Habermas, Apel, whose
research--in Ricoeur's words--"straddles the boundary between hermeneutics and the
critique of ideology"). It is further stressed that the antimethodological orientation of
ontological hermeneutics "opened a crisis within the hermeneutic movement; in correcting
Schleiermacher and Dilthey's 'psychologizing' tendency, ontological hermeneutics
sacrifices the concern with verification which, in the founders, acted as a counterweight
to the divinatory character of interpretation." Methodic hermeneutics, without giving
up the dialog with ontological hermeneutics, engages linguistic science, conceptual
analysis, structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis in debate.
34. PH, p.32; HHS, p.10!. This is one of Ricoeur's most important texts; originally it
was mimeographed by the Centre de Recerches Phenomenologiques, Paris, in 1974, then
published in Man and World, VII, 3 (1974), pp.223-253. We will come back to this text
in Part II.
35. Cf. "Existence et hermeneutique," in Interpretation do Welt, Festschrift fUr Romano
Guardini zum achtzigsten Geburtstag (Wilrzburg: Echter- Verlag, 1965), pp.32-5!. This
essay opens Cdl, pp.7-28 (v. esp. pp.1O-15); Col, pp.3-24 (esp. pp.6-11).
36. DI, pp.13-14; FP, pp.3-4
37. "Existence et hermeneutique," in Cdl, p.20; Col, p.16.
38. Ibid. (Cdl, p.23; Col, p.19).
39. Ibid. (Cdl, pp.27-28; Col, pp.22-24).
40. Cf. Gary B. Madison, "Ricoeur et la non-philosophie," Laval tMologique et
philosophique, XXIX, 1 (1973), pp.240-241: "One might wonder whether this approach,
this 'methodic' hermeneutics, would result in pushing the 'ontology of understanding'
to the infinite .... But even if Ricoeur's philosophy were truly incapable offulfilling itself,
i.e. of forgetting itself as method in order to become pure understanding, would this
constitute a defeat? Clearly, what is in question here is the role and function of philoso-
phy. Is an unfulfilled philosophy a non-philosophy or is it the very definition of
philosophy? The question, then, has to do with the statute of philosophical discourse.
Well, maybe the word which seems to me to best characterize the role of philosophy in
Ricoeur is 'dialectic'. By 'dialectic' I understand an intellectual activity that criticizes
and calls into question that which is normally taken for granted as consolidated know-
ledge .... Its function and reason for existing is to challenge the bounds science would
set upon what can be known in order to master it and herd it into the fold of a
self-sufficient logic. At the same time, this means that a realm of experience is being
invoked that science necessarily ignores and which is broader than scientific knowledge ....
Philosophico-dialectic discourse ... teaches us nothing new, but it does prevent us from
going astray in the midst of things .... The philosopher is neither poet nor prophet; he
is the one who, in the midst of things, scans the horizon, listens and awaits." To our
mind, Madison's views, although intriguing, are one-sided in their emphasis on the
"negative" side to Ricoeur's dialectics. Agreed, his dialectics is assuredly negative with
160

regard to any hypothesis of absolute knowledge, but it is no less positive with respect
to the affirmation of an act of being constituting an interpreted and interpreting
existence; which is to say that it is existentially, not pan-logistically, positive. Moreover,
it should not be forgotten that Ricoeur's relation to Hegel must be seen in the context
of the climate of renewal of Hegel studies in France by such authors as Wahl, Kojeve,
Hyppolite, Weil. Actually, according to Ricoeur the only legitimate area for dialectics
is human reality, meaning society and its praxis; cf. "Le 'lieu' de la dialectique," in
Dialectics - Dialectiques, edited by C. Perelman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975),
pp.92-108; translated into English as "What is dialectical?" in Freedom and Morality, The
Lindey Lectures delivered at the University of Kansas (University of Kansas Humanistic
Studies, XXXVI), edited by J. Bricke (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas, 1976),
pp.173-189. Regarding Hegel, by whom Ricoeur feels simultaneously attracted and
repelled, v. his lecture "Hegel aujourd'hui," published in Etudes th~ologiques et religieuses,
XLIX, 3 (1974), pp.335-354. This interesting lecture ends with the significant statement
that "the philosophy ofinterpretation is an unhappy Hegelian philosophy. It is ceaselessly
set in motion by Hegelian problems, by a meditation of Hegel's, but it has renounced
the Hegelian reconciliation. What comforts me in saying these things is that perhaps
Hegelianism itself was a philosophy of interpretation, disguised as a philosophy of
knowing. I find a clue to this in the fact that when Hegel speaks of absolute know-
ledge, he is fully aware that he is speaking in a given epoch and that it is the context
of that epoch that he himself interprets .... So maybe even Hegel's own philosophy is an
unhappy philosophy of interpretation."
41. In fact, this essay, published in Cdl, pp.233-262 (Col, pp.236-266), draws in part
on "Die Zukunft der Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Subjekt," in Die Zulamjt der
Philosophie (Olten u. Freiburg LB.: Walter-Verlag, 1968), pp.128-165, and on "New
Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phenomenology of Language," Social
Research, XXXIV, 1 (1967), pp.1-30. It subtends our discussion in the following par-
agraphs.
42. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, p.234; Col, p.237).
43. Ibid. (Cdl, pp.234-235; Col, p.239). The broad debate on Ricoeur's interpretation
of psychoanalysis is well documented in Alberto Gajano, "Psicanalisi e fenomenologia
nel pensiero di P. Ricoeur," Giomale critico della filosofia italiana, XLIX, 3 (1970),
pp.406-432. More recent studies include Walter Lowe, Mystery of the Unconscious: A Study
in the Thought of P. Ricoeur (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press - The American
Theological Association, 1977).
44. "La psychanalyse et Ie mouvement de la culture contemporaine," in Trait~ de
psychanalyse, edited by S. Nacht, voU (Paris: P.U.F., 1965); now inCdl, p.149; Col, p.148.
A precedent for Ricoeur's association of the three "masters of suspicion," a topical motif
in his works, is certainly to be identified in Mounier: "The spiritual crisis is that of
classical European man, born into the bourgeois world. He had believed that he was
realizing the ideal of the reasonable animal, that triumphant reason was successfully
domesticating the animal in him whilst well-being neutralized its passions. Three shocks
of warning were administered within a century to this civilization over-confident of its
stability. Marx revealed, underneath its economic progress, the merciless struggle of
profound social forces; Freud exposed, beneath its psychological complacencies, the
witches' cauldron of rebellious instincts; Nietzsche, finally, proclaimed the nihilism of
Europe .... " (Emmanuel Mounier, "Le personalisme," Oeuvres, vol.III [Paris: Seuil, 1962)'
p.510; English translation by P. Mairet, Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism [Notre Dame
- London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952] p.98). Ricoeur has described Mounier's
 161

little volume "an excellent, short vademecum to the philosophy of Personalism" (HV,
pp.135-136; HT, p.134).
45. Cf. "Le conscient et l'inconscient," in L'inconscient, edited by H. Ey (Paris: Desclee
de Brouwer, 1966); now in Cdl, p.101 (Col, p.99).
46. Ibid. (Cdl, p.109; Col, p.108).
47. Cf. ibid. (Cdl, pp.105-109; Col, pp.103-108); and also DI, ppA18-425; FP,
ppA30-439. "Freudism aims at being a realism of the unconscious .... This is the task of
a critique, in the Kantian sense of the word .... In the area of physics, Kant has taught
us to combine an empirical realism with a transcendental idealism .... Kant achieved this
combination for the sciences of nature; our task is to accomplish it for psychoanaly-
sis .... " (DI, ppA18-420; FP, ppA30-433).
48. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Preface" to A[ngeJ Hesnard, L'oeuvre de Freud et son
importance dans Ie monde modeme (Paris: Payot, 1960), pp.5-10. Ricoeur has declared his
agreement with most of what is formulated in that preface, along with its overall
direction (DI, ppA05-406, note; FP, 417-418, note).
49. "Le conscient et l'inconscient" (Cdl, p.1l8; Col, p.1l7).
50. Ibid. (Cdl, pp.120 and 121; Col, pp.1l9 and 120). Cf. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte
Werke (London: Imago, 1940-1952), vol.XV, p.86; idem, New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund
Freud, voI.XXII, edited and translated by J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964),
where the quoted dictum can be found on p.80.
51. DI, ppA96-497; PN, p.516. A modified formulation is to be found in "Le conscient
et l'inconscient" (Cdl, pp.1l5-ll8; Col, pp.1l5-ll7).
52. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, v.356.
53. DI, pA97; FN, p.517.
54. Cf. DI, ppA97-498; FN, pp.517-518.
55. Cf. Ricoeur, "La paternite: du fantasme au symbole," in L'analisi del linguaggio
teologico: if nome di Dio, Archivio di filosofia, XXXVII, 2-3 (1959), pp.221-246; now the
final essay in Cdl, ppA58-486 (Col, ppA68-497), which, not without cause, is dedicated
to Enrico Castelli, editor of the Archivio di filosofia and organizer of conferences in Rome
that have been the occasion for several Ricoeurian essays which, like the one cited, were
subsequently published in Cdl. On the father symbol, see also the concluding pages of
Ricoeur, "Le conflit des hermeneutiques: epistemologie des interpretations," Cahiers in-
ternationaux du symbolisme, I, 1 (1963), pp.183-184, as well as the studies, some of which
written as a response to Ricoeur's, in Jacques-Marie Pohier, Au nom du pere (Paris: Cerf,
1972). Pohier has continued his research on theology and psychoanalysis, publishing,
among other studies, Quand je dis Dieu (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which has given rise to lively
discussion and censure on the part of Vatican authorities.
56. "La question du sujet: Ie deride la semiologie" (Cdl, pp.240-241; Col, pp.265-266).
57. Cf. "La structure, Ie mot, l'evenement" (Cdl, pp.81-84; Col, pp.81-83) and Louis
Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, English translation by F. J. Whitfield
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1963). Ricoeur's essay, widely known,
appeared in Esprit, XXXV (May 1967), pp.801-821.
58. Cf. "Structure et hermeneutique" (Cdl, pp.36-37; Col, p.33): "Linguistic laws
designate an unconscious level and, in this sense, a nonreflective, nonhistorical level of
the mind. This unconscious is not the Freudian unconscious of instinctual, erotic drives
and its power of symbolization; it is more a Kantian than a Freudian unconscious, a
categorical, combinative unconscious. It is a finite order or the finitude of order, but such
that it is unaware of itself. I call it a Kantian unconscious, but only as regards its
162

organization, since we are here concerned with a categorical system which is fundamen-
tally antireflective, anti-idealist, and antiphenomenological. Moreover, this uncon-
scious mind can be said to be homologous to naturej perhaps it even is nature." In the
same essay, after having made a distinction between structural science and structuralist
philosophy, Ricoeur states that "an order posited as unconscious can never, to my mind,
be more than a stage abstractly separated from an understanding of the self by itselfj
order in itself is thought located outside itself" (Cdl, p.54j Col, p.51). "Structuralist
philosophy seems to me to be condemned to oscillate between several rough outlines of
philosophies. It could be called at times a Kantianism without a transcendental subject,
even an absolute formalism, which would found the very correlation between nature
and culture" (Cdl, p.55j Col, p.52). "Besides the outline of a transcendentalism without
a subject, we ... find in The Savage Mind the sketch of a philosophy in which structure
plays the role of mediator, placed 'between praxis and practices' .... This sequence: praxis
- structure - practices allows one to be a structuralist in ethnology and a Marxist in
philosophy. But what kind of Marxism is this? There is, in fact, in The Savage Mind the
sketch of a very different philosophy, where the order is the order of things and a thing
itself" (Cdl, pp.55-56j Col, p.53). It remains to be added that Levi-Strauss, in the debate
in Esprit, accepts the definition of structuralism as a "Kantianism without a transcen-
dental subject" and seeks, with scientific humility, to ward off the objections moved
against structuralism as a philosophy (Claude Levi-Strauss, P. Ricoeur, et. al., "Re-
ponse a quelques questions," Esprit, XXXI (November 1963), pp.628-653. Ricoeur's essay
(pp.596-627) opens the discussionj it corresponds almost exactly to the text given in Cdl.
Originally it was conceived as a report entitled "Symbolique et temporalite" in the Rome
conference on Ermeneutica e Tradizione (January 1963)j v. the volume by this name
published as an issue of the Archivio di filosofia, XXXI, 1-2 (1963), pp.5-31.
59. Cf. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, pp.243-244: Col,
pp.247-248) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), esp. pp.
105-122j English translation by R. McCleary, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp.84-97. With regard to Merleau - Ponty, Ricoeur,
in the essay mentioned, writes that "our relation to the greatest of French phe-
nomenologists has perhaps already become what his was to Husserl: not a repetition but
a renewal of the very movement of his reflection" (Cdl, p.243, notej Col, p.247, note).
60. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, pp.242-243j Col, pp.246-247).
In the introduction to the early work, Le volontaire et l'involontaire, Ricoeur declares, "Tout
nous eloigne de la fameuse et obscure reduction transcendent ale a laquelle fait echec,
selon nous, une comprehension veritable du corps propre" (V7, p.7)j "All our considera-
tions drive us away from the famous and obscure transcendental reduction which, we
believe, is an obstacle to genuine understanding of personal body" (FN, pAl. This
statement should be compared with the distinction which, not long after, he draws
between phenomenological method and its interpretationj what he rejects is not so
much the phenomenological reduction as a key to phenomenological investigation as its
interpretation in an idealistic and solipsistic vein. Thus, even with regard to the early
phase of Ricoeur's work, seen as an "existential phenomenology" rather than the ex-
plicit "hermeneutic phenomenology" of his later years, one can say that he "accepts ...
reduction as a method of foundation but wants to apply it to a particular theme, such
as the thematics of existence" (Francesca Guerrera Brezzi, Filosofia e interpretazione. Saggio
sull'enneneuuca restauratrice di Paul Ricoeur (Bologna: II Mulino, 1969), p.30. On the
originality of Ricoeur's position among the existential phenomenologists, v. Virgilio
Melchiorre, "II metodo fenomenologico di Ricoeur," introduction to the Italian edition
 163
of Finitude et culpabilite: Finitudine e colpa, Italian translation by M. Girardet Sbaffi
(Bologna: II Mulino, 1970), pp.7-51, esp. pp.8-17.
61. Cf. "Structure et hermeneutique" (Cdl, pp.48ff.; Col, pp.30ff.). With regard to
Levi-Strauss's works, it is especially in Le pensee sauvage (1962) that Ricoeur envisions
a shift from a prudent application of structural analysis to a bold generalization of
structuralism (Cdl, pp.43ff.; Col, pp.39ff.). V. also Ricoeur's contributions in Extgese et
hermeneutique, edited by X. Leon Dufour (Paris: Seuil, 1971), which contains the acta of
a conference held in Chantilly on September 3-7, 1969; v. esp. the introductory remarks
entitled "Du conflit a la convergence des methodes en exegese biblique," pp.35-53, the
"Esquisse de conclusion," pp.285-295, and the article "Contribution d'une reflexion sur
Ie langage a une tMologie de la parole," pp.301-319, published earlier in the Revue de
theologie et de philosophie, XVIII, 5-6 (1968), pp.333-348.
62. "La structure, Ie mot, l'evenement" (Cdl, p.86; Col, p.80).
63. Cf. Emile Benveniste, Problbnes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), esp.
pp.119-131, with regard to levels of linguistic analysis (English translation by M. E.
Meek, Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Miami Linguistics Series, no.8
[Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971], pp.101-111); also idem, "La forme et
Ie sens dans Ie langage," in Le Langage, Actes du XIII Congres des societes de philosophie
de langue fran~aise, Vol.1I (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1967), pp.29- 40; Gottlob Frege,
"tIber Sinn und Bedeutung," ZeitschriJt /iir Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, C (1892),
pp.25-50 (English translation, "On Sense and Reference," by P. Geach and M. Black in
Gottlob Frege, Philosophical Writings [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952], pp.56-78); Edmund
Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, in Husserliana, XVIII, edited by E. Holenstein (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); Husserliana, XIX, 1 and 2, edited by U. Panzer (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984) (English translation by J. N. Findlay, Edmund Husser!,
Logical Investigations, 2 vols. [New York: Humanities Press, 1970], esp. the sixth "Logical
Investigation") .
64. Emile Benveniste, Problbnes de linguistique generale (op. cit.), p.25; idem, Problems
in General Linguistics (op. cit.), p.22. Cf. idem, "La forme et Ie sens dans Ie lang age" (op.
cit.): "In contrast with the idea that the sentence can be a sign in Saussure's meaning
of the term or that one can, by simply adding to or extending the sign, pass to the
proposition and thence to the various types of syntactical construction, we feel that sign
and sentence are two separate worlds and demand separate descriptions .... For language
there are two ways of being language, in meaning and form. We have just described one
of them, viz. language as a semiotics; now a second one must be justified, which we call
language as a semantics" (pp.35-36). The semantic unit is the sentence; it expresses not
so much the signified of the sign as that which can be called its 'intended' (intente), "what
the speaker wants to say, the linguistic actualization of his thought" (p.36). "From the
semiotic to the semantic there is a radical change in perspective .... The semiotic is a
property of language; the semantic results from an activity by the speaker who puts
language into action. The semiotic sign exists in itself, founds the reality of language,
but does not imply particular applications; the sentence, an expression of the semantic,
is always particular. With the sign one reaches the intrinsic reality of language; with the
sentence one is linked to the things that exist outside of language. Furthermore, whereas
the sign has as its constitutive part an inherent signified, the sense of the sentence
implies reference to the instance of discourse and the attitude of the speaker" (p.36).
65. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale (op. cit.), pp.252-253; idem,
Problems in General Linguistics (op. cit.), p.218.
164

66. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistiquegbll!rale (op. cit.), p.256, also pp.225-236;
idem, Problems in General Linguistics (op. cit.), p.221, also pp.195-204.
67. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique gbzerale (op. cit.), p.255; idem, Problems
in General Linguistics (op. cit.), p.220.
68. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (CdI, p.252; Col, p.256).
69. Cf. "La structure, Ie mot, I'evenement" (CdI, pp.89-92; Col, pp.89-91). Cf. also
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (New York: Humanities Press, 1957); idem, Current
Issues in Linguistic Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1964); idem, Cartesian Linguis-
tics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Gustave Guillaume, Langage et sciences du langage
(Paris: Nizet, 1964).
70. "La structure, Ie mot, I'evenement" (CdI, pp.92-97j Col, pp.88-96). "Thus the word
is, as it were, a trader between the system and the act, between the structure and the
event. On the one hand, it relates to structure, as a differential value, but it is then only
a semantic potentiality; on the other hand, it relates to the act and to the event in the
fact that its semantic actuality is contemporaneous with the ephemeral actuality of the
utterance. But it is here also that the situation is reversed. The word, I have said, is less
than the sentence in that its actuality of meaning is subject to that of the sentence. But
it is more than the sentence from another point of view. The sentence, we have seen, is
an event; as such, its actuality is transitory, passing, ephemeral. But the word survives
the sentence. As a deplaceable entity, it survives the transitory instance of discourse and
holds itself available for new uses" (CdI, p.93; Col, p.92). "II y a des grands mots, des
mots puissants .... Ce sont les grands mots du poete, du penseur: ils montrent, ils laissent
etre ce qu'ils entourent de leur enclos .... Le surgissement du dire dans notre parler est
Ie mystere meme du langage; Ie dire, c'est ce que j'appelle I'ouverture, ou mieux
I'aperture du langage. Vous avez devine que I'aperture la plus extreme appartient au
langage en fete" (CdI, pp.96-97); "For there are great words, powerful words .... These
are the great words of the poet, of the thinker. They point out, they let be, that which
surrounds their enclosure .... The upsurge of saying into our speaking is the very mys-
tery of language. Saying is what I call the openness, or better, the opening-out, of
language. You have fathomed that the greatest opening-out belongs to language in
celebration" (Col, p.96.).
71. Cf. esp. the essay entitled "Le probleme du double sens comme probleme
hermeneutique et comme probleme semantique," Cahiers intemationaux du symbolisme, IV,
12 (1966), pp.59-71, and then in Myths and Symbols, Studies in honor of Mircea Eliade,
edited by J. M. Kitawaga and C. H. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1969,
pp.63-81, and in CdI, pp.64-79 (Col, pp.62- 78). V. also Algirdas Julien Greimas, La
semantique structurale: Recerche de methode (Paris: Larousse, 1966); English translation by
D. McDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An
Attempt at a Method (Lincoln - London: Nebraska University Press, 1983).
72. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (CdI, pp.253-254j Col, pp.257 -258).
73. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction a I'oeuvre de M. Mauss," in Marcel Mauss,
Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1950), pp.42 and 23.
74. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (CdI, p.256; Col, pp.259-260).
75. Edmond Ortigues, Le discourse et Ie symbole (Paris: Aubier, 1962), pp.198-199.
76. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (CdI, p.257; Col, p.261).
77. Cf. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (CdI, pp.257-262; Col,
pp.262-266).
78. Cf. Alphonse De Waelhens, "La force du langage et Ie langage de la force," review
of De l'interpT/!tation, Revue philosophique de Louvain, LXIII (November 1965), pp.591-612.
 165

The illustrious scholar from Louvain holds that "the philosophy, epistemology and
biology of a certain historian by the name of Freud are utterly at odds with the
dialectical treatment Ricoeur would impose upon Freudian hermeneutics"; hence, the
philosophical objectives Ricoeur pursues in "this remarkable work, in a certain sense the
most complete study ever given to Freud," would be reached more readily by referring
not to orthodox Freudianism but to contemporary neo-Freudianism. This partial
disagreement (within the family, as it were) between De Waelhens and Ricoeur is most
likely just the most recent installment in the age-old debate between "pure" (so to speak)
historiography and hermeneutics. It should be added that in this case the historiographer
was also an expert in psychoanalysis. By De Waelhens, deceased in 1981, v. the fol-
lowing works on the theme of phenomenology and psychoanalysis: Existence et signification
(Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1958), esp. pp.191-211; La philosophie et les experiences naturelles
(La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), esp. pp.86ff. and 122ff.;La psychose. Essai d'interpreta-
tion analytique et existentiale (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1972).
79. As is known, Ricoeur limits the notions of symbol and interpretation, each by
means of the other, thus staking out a "hermeneutic field." The definition of symbol as
a linguistic expression with a double meaning, requiring interpretative work, is loca-
ted between a too broad definition--Cassirer's definition of the "symbolic form" as a
general function of mediation--and one that is too narrow, identifying symbol with
analogy. In its turn, the conception of interpretation as the deciphering of symbols is
halfway between the too broad concept of henneneia as signification (in Aristotle's De
Interpretatione) and the too narrow concept of exegesis as the science of the Holy Scripture
(cf. Dl, pp.16-36; FP, pp.6-28).
80. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, p.260; Col, pp.264-265).
81. V. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, pp.260-262; Col,
pp.265-266). Cf. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959);
English translation by P. D. Hertz and J. Stambaugh, Martin Heidegger, On the Way to
Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). V. also the excellent presentation by
Alberto Caracciolo in Martin Heidegger, In cammino verso il linguaggio, Italian trans-
lation by A. Caracciolo and M. Caracciolo Perotti (Torino: Mursia, 1973), pp.5-23.
82. Vattimo stresses that Heidegger, differently from Gadamer, never goes so far as
to identify being and language (Gianni Vattimo, "Oltre la malattia storica. Ragione
ermeneutica e ragione dialettica," in La filosofia della storia della filosofia. I suoi nuovi
aspetti, Archivio di filosofia, XLII, 1 (1974), pp.205-225, now in Gianni Vattimo, Le
avventure della difJerenza (Milano: Garzanti, 1980), pp.15-43. From this standpoint Ricoeur
can be said to be closer to Heidegger than is Gadamer, the Heideggerian. Ricoeur:
"Language, if it is to be a mediation, cannot be the starting point. It comes in the course
of an existential process which precedes it and envelops it. What seems to me impor-
tant in the order followed by Heidegger himself in Sein und Zeit is the fact that he does
not lead off from language but has language as his point of arrival. Today I see in
Heidegger's thought a healthy remedy for this sort of malady of modern philosophy,
especially French philosophy, walled up in a world of signs. Heidegger compels us to
make a fundamental decision, to come out of the enchanted circle, in order to find in
the act of speaking itself a modality of being which itself presupposes a constitution of
being such that being can be uttered" ("Contribution d'une reflexion sur Ie langage
... ," in Exegese et henneneutique [Paris: Seuil, 1971], p.315).
83. "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie" (Cdl, p.262; Col, p.266).
84. V. esp. "Etude sur les Meditations Cartesiennes de Husserl," Revue philosophique de
Louvain, LII (February 1954), pp.75-109 (English translation in H, pp.82-114), and
166

"Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation," in Paul Ricoeur, H, pp.1l5-142. Inedited in

France at the time, the latter text was first published in English and only more recently
in French, in Ricoeur, A l'«ole de /a phenomenologie (Paris: Vrin, 1986), along with the
other main studies on Husserl by Ricoeur (v. the Bibliographical Note in the present
volume).
85. "Sympathie et Respect. Phenomenologie et ethique de la seconde personne," Revue
de Mttaphysique et de Moral, LIX, 4 (1954), p.381.
86. Ibid., p.386 note.
87. Cf. "Kant et Husserl," Kant-Studien, XLVI 1 (1954-1955), pp.44-67; English
translation in H, pp.175-201.
88. Ibid., p.57 (H, p.190).
89. Ibid., p.67 (H, p.201). In FCl, p.90, note (FM, p.lll, note), Ricoeur acknowledges
having made free use of Kantism in setting "respect" and "person" into a direct relation
of intentionality: "For Kant respect is respect for law, and the person is only one example
of it .... However, in betraying Kantian orthodoxy, I think I bring out the Kantian
philosophy of the person which is outlined in the Foundation and stifled in the Critique
of Practical Reason, the latter being wholly devoted to the elucidation of the synthesis of
will and law in autonomy."
90. Cf. Max Scheler, Wesen und Fonn tier Sympathie (Bonn: Friedr. Cohen, 1923), and
"Sympathie et Respect ..." (op. cit.), pp.380-397.
91. "Sympathie et Respect ..." (op. cit.), pp.395-396; cf. also "L'homme non-violent
et sa presence a l'histoire," Esprit, XVII (February 1949), pp.224-234, now in HV,
pp.235-245 (HT, pp.223-233), and in general section 2 of HV on "La question du pou-
voir" (pp.235-316; HT, pp.223-284). On the political aspects to Ricoeur's thought v.
Philibert Secretan, Vmtt et Pouvoir, L'Age d'Homme (Lausanne, 1970), pp.1l7-145.
92. Cf. "Sympathie et Respect ... " (op. cit.), pp.390 and 396. At the conclusion of this
essay there is a significant remark (p.397, note), according to which the problem of the
other could be framed in a completely different fashion starting with a philosophy of love;
yet the word 'love', purposely, is never articulated, since it designates an utterly new
dimension, beyond the reach of an ethico-phenomenological reflexion. Such a dimension,
that of the "Source" or of Poetry, would imply a meditation not on the limits Reason
imposes upon the pretensions of the empirical I but on creation and the gift. Thus, once
more, one notes in early Ricoeur the distant, beckoning horizon of a poetics, which his
meditations on language and the symbol will bring nearer.
93. FCl, pp.1l8-ll9; FM, p.156.
94. FCl, pp.127-129; FM, pp.169-171; cf. also Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in
pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), in Kants Gesammelte Schri[ten, vol.VII, edited by O. Kiilpe
(Berlin: Reimer, 1907) (English translation by M.J. Gregor, Immanuel Kant,Anthropolo~
from a Pragmatic Point of View [The Hague: Martinus Martinus Nijhoff, 1974]).
95. Already in Finitude et culpabilitt, the practical synthesis and the mediation of
sentiment are preceded by the transcendental synthesis between the finitude of the point
of view and the infinitude of the Word, according to a dialectic that had already been
outlined in 1956 in "Negativite et affirmationoriginaire," which appeared in the collective
volume Aspectr de la dialectique (Bruges - Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1956), pp.l01-124,
now in HV, pp.336-360 (HT, pp.305-328), to which we shall return shortly. V. also FC,
pp.35ff. (FM, pp.26ff.): "Now, through its signifying function, language conveys not my
perception's finite perspective but the sense which intentionally transgresses my per-
spective. Language transmits the intention, not the perception of what is seen .... The
word has the admirable property of making its sonority transparent, of fading away
 167

bodily in giving rise to the act which confers the sense. In short. the word becomes a
sign. In the sign dwells the transcendence of the logos of man: from the very first word
I designate the self -identity of the signified. the meaning-unity which another discourse
of mine will be able to recapture and that the discourse of another person will be able
to catch hold of in flight and return to me in a dialogue. However great 'misunder-
standings' might be, they dramatize an 'entente' which has always been in progress.
which no man inaugurates, and which everyone has been continuing since man first
began to speak" (pp.45-46; FM, pp.42-43). It is to be recalled that in more or less the
same years Levinas, too. was dealing with the relation between language and
intersubjectivity in his well-known work, Totalite et infini. Essai sur l'extmorite (La Haye:
Martinus Nijhoff. 1961. 19744, esp. pp.23ff., 66ff., 168ff. and 270ff.; English translation
by A. Lingis, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press; The Hague: Martinus Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pp.53ff., 93ff.,
194ff. and 294ff.
96. It is a pleasure to mention here that the theme of community and solicitude for
"flesh and blood" humanity have been a main focus in the phenomenological studies
inaugurated by Paolo Filiasi Carcano at the University of Naples and continued espec-
ially by Aldo Masullo and RaffaelePucci. Cf. Aldo Masullo, La comunita come fondwmento.
Fichte,Husser~ Sartre (Napoli: L.S.E., 1966); RaffaelePucci,Lafenomenologia contemporanea
e il problema dell'uomo (Napoli: L.S.E., 1963).
97. "L'acte et Ie signe selon Jean Nabert" (op. cit.) and "Heidegger et la question du
sujet" (CdI, pp.222-232; Col, pp.223-235); the latter had been published as "The Critique
of SUbjectivity and Cogito in the Philosophy of Heidegger," in Heidegger and the Quest
for Truth, edited by M. S. Frings (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), pp.62-75. Ricoeur's
works are always well structured, so it is no mere chance that the middle section of CdI.
entitled "Hermeneutique et phenomenologie." includes, in order, these two essays.
preceding "La question du sujet: Ie defi de la semiologie."
98. "L'acte et Ie signe selon Jean Nabert." (CdI, p.21l; Col, p.211).
99. Cf. Jean Nabert, L'expmence intmeure de la liberte (Paris: P.U.F .• 1923); idem,
Elements pour une ethique (Paris: P.U.F., 1943, 1962 2). with a preface by Ricoeur (English
translation by W. J. Petrek. Jean Nabert, Elements for an Ethic [Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1969]). V. supra note 13; Ricoeur's preface is on pp.xvii-xxviii. A
further important work by Nabert is Essai sur Ie mal (Paris: P.U.F., 1955); although
Ricoeur does not take it up in "L'acte et Ie signe ...• " its presence can be felt in Ricoeur's
reflections on the problem of evil; v. esp. his review entitled "L'Essai sur Ie mal de Jean
Nabert," Esprit. XXV (July - August 1957), pp.124-135.
100. "L'acte et Ie signe selon Jean Nabert" (CdI, pp.220-221; Col, pp.221-222); the
quotation is from Jean Nabert. Elements pour une ethique (op. cit.), p.98 (English
translation. [op. cit.], p.77).
101. "Negativite et affirmation originaire" (HV, p.336; HT, p.305).
102. V. ibid. (HV, p.343; HT, p.311). Also cf. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen,
in Husserliana, XVIII (op, cit.), pp.230-258; English translation by J. N. Findlay. Edmund
Husserl, Logical Investigations. 2 vols. (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp.225-47.
103. "Negativite et affirmation originaire" (HV. pp.343-345; HT. pp.311-313).
104. Ibid. (HV, p.357; HT. p.325).
105. Ibid. (HV, p.360; HT. p.328).
106. Cf. esp. Pierre Thevenaz. L'homme et sa raison (op. cit.), I. pp.239-325 and the
preceding note 4.
168
107. "The Problem of the Will and Philosophical Discourse," in Patterns of the
Life-World, Essays in Honor of John Wild, edited by J. M. Edie, F. H. Parker, C. O.
Schrag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp.273-289.
108. Cf. Nichomachean Ethics, 1097b 23 - 1098a 20.
109. "The Problem of the Will and Philosophical Discourse" (op. cit.), pp.288-289.
110. For instance, Ricoeur speaks of a Socratic Cogito (v. "La question du sujet: Ie
defi de la semiologie," Cdl, p.233; Col, p.236). Even in "The Problem of the Will and
Philosophical Discourse," examined above, where there is an explicit acknowledgement
of the gap between Aristotle and us, his modern readers, we find Ricoeur stating, with
regard to the concepts of freedom and sUbjectivity in Nietzsche, that the latter "situates
modern inquiry about the will between two times--the time of subjectivity which has
been the time of classical philosophy from Plato to Hegel, and the time [of the
"Obermensch] which he speaks about only in a kind of kerygmatic way" (p.288). It would
be an easy matter to skirt this difficulty by stating--quite truthfully--that Ricoeur here
is accurately reporting Nietzsche's idea of Christianity as Platonism for the people and
that his agreement goes no further than the degree to which it constitutes a critique of
a certain moralistic kind of Christianity. The fact remains that Ricoeur's attitude
toward the relation between Greek culture and Christianity is as we have described it.
The deepest, most stimulating developments of his attitude are to be found in volume
II of Finitude et culpabilit~ and sections 4 and 5 of CI ("La symbolique du mal interpretee"
and "Religion et foi"), where he goes to some lengths to compare Biblical myths with
Greek myths, the poetic wisdom of the ancient tragedians with the prophetic wisdom
of ancient Israel, the cosmic intuitions of archaic thought with Job's reflections on evil.
"The most extraordinary document of the ancient 'wisdom' of the Near East, concerning
the turn from ethical comprehension to tragic comprehension of God himself, is the book
of Job. And since the 'ethicization' of the divine had nowhere else been carried so far
as in Israel, the crisis of that vision of the world was nowhere else as radical. Only the
protestation of Prometheus Bound can perhaps be compared with that of Job; but the Zeus
that Prometheus calls in question is not the holy God of the Prophets. To recover the
hyperethical dimension of God, it was necessary that the alleged justice of the law of
retribution should be turned against God and that God should appear unjustifiable .... "
"The God who addresses Job out of the tempest shows him Behemoth and Leviathan,
the hippopotamus and the crocodile, vestiges of the chaos that has been overcome,
representing a brutality dominated and measured by the creative act. Through these
symbols he gives him to understand that all is order, measure, and beauty--inscru-
table order, measure beyond measure, terrible beauty. A way is marked out between
agnosticism and the penal view of history and life--the way of unverifiable faith. There
is nothing in that revelation that concerns him personally; but precisely because it is not
a question of himself, Job is challenged. The oriental poet, like Anaximander and
Heraclitus the Obscure, announces an order beyond order, a totality full of meaning,
within which the individual must lay down his recrimination. Suffering is not explained,
ethically or otherwise; but the contemplation of the whole initiates a movement which
must be completed practically by the surrender of a claim, by the sacrifice of the demand
that was at the beginning of the recrimination, namely, the claim to form by oneself a
little island of meaning in the universe, an empire within an empire" (FC2, pp.295, 298;
SE, pp.317, 321).
111. "Heidegger et la question du sujet" (Cdl, p.222; Col, p.223).
112. Ibid. (Cdl, p.225; Col, p.226).
 169

113. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927, 1972 U ) p.8;
English translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p.28.
114. "Heidegger et la question du sujet" (CdI, p.229; Col, p.231).
115. Ibid. (CdI, pp.231-232j Col, p.233).
116. Ibid. (CdI, p.232j Col, p.234). Cf. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1959)j English translation by J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund, Martin
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
117. Cf. "Existence et hermeneutique" (CdI, p.28j Col, p.24) and Manuel Maceiras
Fafifm, "Paul Ricoeur: una ontologia militante," Pensamiento, XXXII, 126 (1976),
pp.131-156.
118. Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," Ho/zwege (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann,
1950), pp.83-84j English translation by W. Lovitt, "The Age of the World Picture," in
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1977), p.131.
119. "Religion, atheisme, foi" (CdI, pp.449-450j Col, p.460). This essay was published
first in English as "Religion, Atheism and Faith: I. On Accusationj II. On Consolation,"
in The Religious Significance ofAtheism, edited by A. MacIntyre, C. Aladier and P. Ricoeur
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp.58-98.
120. "For that man be delivered from revenge is for me the bridge to the highest hope, a
rainbow after long storms" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fUr Aile
und Keinen, in Nietzsches Werke, edited by G. Colli and M. Montanari, VI, 1 [Berlin: W.
de Gruyter, 19681, p.124.
121. "Religion, atheisme, foi" (CdI, p.442j Col, p.452).
122. Ibid. (CdI, pA44; Col, pA54).
123. Ibid. (CdI, pA56j Col, ppA66-467); cf. also Martin Heidegger, " ... Dichterisch
wohnet der Mensch," Vortriige undAufsiitze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), pp.187 -204j English
translation by A. Hofstadter," ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ," in Martin Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp.211-229.
124. Besides FC2, v. the two essays "Hermeneutique des symboles et reflexion
philosophique," I and II, (op. cit.), now in CdI, pp.283-329; Col, pp.287-334.
125. Some of the studies on Ricoeur dealing with the period we have been examining
here note his turning in the direction of a general theory ofianguage: Don Ihde (op, cit.),
pp.13lff.j David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology:
A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1971), pp.1l3ff.A few years later, Patrick L. Bourgeois, Extension of Ricoeur's Hermeneutic
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), focused on the relation between eidetics and her-
meneutics, whereas the relation between hermeneutics and literary theory is the core of
Mary Gerhart's book, The Question of Belief in Literary Criticism: An Introduction to the
Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1979).
126. Cf. Ricoeur's major work, La m~taphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975) (English
translation by R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin and J. Costello, Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of
Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language [Toronto - Buffalo
- London: University of Toronto Press, 1975, 1987]), which awakened much discussion
upon its appearance. V. as well other works on the same subject, immediately preceding
or following, esp. the chapter by Ricoeur, "Poetique et symbolique," in a recent collec-
tive volume, Initiation a la pratique de la theologie, edited by B. Laurent and F. Refoule,
I (Paris: Cerf, 1982), pp.37-61, where he deals with "poetics as a descriptive discipline."
170

127. Cf. "La fonction narrative," Etudes theologiques et religieuse, LIV, 1 (1979),
pp.209-230 (English translation in HHS, pp.274-296)j Paul Ricoeur et aI., La narrativite,
edited by D. Tiffeneau (Paris: ed. du CNRS, 1980) and Ricoeur's most recent work,
Temps et recit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), of which, at the time of this writing, only the first
volume was available.
128. Cf. "Phenomenologie et hermeneutique," where not only is it stated that
"phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics" but also that
"phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutical presupposition" (PH,
pp.31-32j HHS, p.101).
129. We shall come back to these themes, with which Ricoeur has been concerned in
his latest work, in the concluding essay of the present volume.
130. "L'histoire comme recit et comme pratique. Entretien avec Paul Ricoeur," Esprit,
n.s. (June 1981), p.165.

Part Two, Chapter One

* This essay is a partly rewritten version of "Note sull'ermeneutica di Paul Ricoeur,"
I and II, II tetto, XVI, 96 (1979), pp.620-623, and XVII, 97 (1980), pp.16-29.
1. Paul Ricoeur, "Foreword" to Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy
of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp.xiii-xv.
2. Ibid., pp.xv-xvii.
3. "La tache de I'hermeneutique," in Exegesis. Problemes de methode et exercises de lecture
(Genese 22 et Luc 15), edited by F. Bovon and G. Rouiller (Neuchatel - Paris: Delachaux
& Niestle, 1975), p.179j HHS, p.43.
4. Paul Ricoeur, "Qu'est-ce qu'un texte? ExpJiquer et comprendre," Hermeneutik und
Dialektik, edited by R. Bubner and R. Wiehl (Tilbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1970), II,
pp.181-200j HHS, pp.145-164. Paul Ricoeur, "ExpJiquer et comprendre. Sur quelques
connexions remarquables entre la theorie du texte, la theorie de I'action et la theorie de
I'histoire," Revue philosophique de Louvain, LXXV (February 1977), pp.126-147j English
translation, "Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections among
the Theory of Text, Theory of Action and Theory of History," in Paul Ricoeur, The
Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, edited by C. E. Reagan and D.
Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp.149-166.
5. "La tache de I'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), followed by two other essays, "La fonction
hermeneutique de la distanciation," in Exegesis. Problemes de methode et exercises de lecture
(Genese 22 et Luc 15), edited by F. Bovon and G. Rouiller (Neuchatel- Paris: Delachaux,
1975), pp.201-215 (HHS, pp.131-144), and "Hermeneutiquephilosophique et hermeneuti-
que biblique," EYegesis ... (op. cit.), pp.216-228 (English translation by D. J. Miller,
"Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics," in Paul Ricoeur, Exegesis:
Problems of Method and Exercises in Reading [Genesis 22 and Luke 15J [Pittsburgh: Pickwick
Press, 1978], pp.321-339), together constitute Ricoeur's contribution to a series of lessons
organized at the theological faculties of Romanic Switzerland, viz. the Catholic faculty
at Fribourg (Freiburg) and the Protestant faculties in Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchatel.
The first two essays, before being published in French in 1975, were brought out in
English translation: "The Task of Hermeneutics" and "The Hermeneutical Function of
Distanciation," Philosophy Today, XVII (Summer 1973), pp.112-128 and 129-141,
respectively. They were subsequently translated in HHS. The "Cours sur I'her-
meneutique," Institut Superieur de Philosophie (Louvain), was produced in mimeoraph
 171

in 1971-1972; and in 1973 Ricoeur gave a series of lectures at the Texas Christian
University forthe centennial of this institution, published as Interpretation Theory: Discourse
and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: The Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
6. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.182; HHS, p.46. V. also Paul Ricoeur,
"Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics," The Monist, LX, 2 (1977), pp.181-197.
7. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.184; HHS, p.47.
8. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.187; HHS, p.51.
9. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), pp.188-189; HHS, p.52.
10. "Universal history thus becomes the field of hermeneutics. To understand myself
is to make the greatest detour, via memory, which retains what has become meaningful
for all mankind. Hermeneutics is the rise of the individual to the knowledge of universal
history, the universalisation of the individual" ("La tache de l'hermeneutique" lop. cit.],
p.188; HHS, p.52).
11. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.190; HHS, p.54.
12. At this point Ricoeur criticizes the existentialist and subjectivist interpretations
of Heidegger's thought for having led, as he quite rightly brings out, to grave
misunderstanding: "The analyses of care, anguish and being-towards-death were taken
in the sense of a refined existential psychology, applied to uncommon states of mind.
It was not sufficiently recognized that these analyses are part of a meditation on the
worldliness of the world, and that they seek essentially to shatter the pretension of the
knowing subject to set itself up as the measure of objectivity. What must be reaffirmed
in place of this pretension is the condition of inhabiting the world, a condition which
renders situation, understanding and interpretation possible. Hence the theory of
understanding must be preceded by the recognition of the relation of entrenchment,
which anchors the whole linguistic system, including books and texts, in something which
is not primordially a phenomenon of articulation in discourse" ("La tache de l'hermeneu-
tique" lop. cit.], p.192-193; HHS, p.56).
13. As is well known, there is an explicit appeal to the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis
in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Til bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960, 1975 4),
pp.17ff. and 295-307; English translation by G. Barden and J. Cumming, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1975), pp.22ff. and 278-289.
Also in idem, Le probleme de la conscience historique (Louvain - Paris: Publications de
l'Universite de Louvain - Nauwelaerts, 1963), pp.49-63. The rehabilitation of practical
knowledge, capable of attaining to concrete truths, allows us to compare Gadamerian
hermeneutics with ideas expressed in the last century by one of our favorite authors,
John Henry Newman, in Grammar of Assent (1870)--a comparison we shared with
Gadamer on the occasion of one of the latter's frequent visits to Naples. On this question,
v. Domenico Jervolino, "La critic a della logica verbale in Newman," Atti dell'Accademia
di Scienze Morali e Politiche della Societa Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere edArti in Napoli, LXXX
(Napoli: Libreria Scientifica Editrice, 1969), pp.279-330, and idem, "Coscienza morale
ed apologetic a in Newman," Asprenas, XVI, 4 (1969), pp.383-400. In this regard, we are
grateful to the venerated late Pietro Piovani, who both inspired and directed our degree
thesis, Moralita e storicita nella logica del concreto in Newman.
14. V. Cdl, pp.10-15; Col, pp.6-11.
15. Cf. "La tache de I'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.197-198; HHS, p.60.
16. Paul Ricoeur, Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Henneneutics: Ideology, Utopia,
and Faith (Berkeley: The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern
Culture, 1976), p.2. The portion entitled "Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological
Hermeneutics" was first published in Studies in Religion / Sciences Religeuses, V, 1 (1975),
pp.14-33. (Translator's note: our translation takes into account the Italian translation
172

used by Jervolino, based on a German translation of the original unpublished French

text).
17. Ibid.
18. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.198. (Translator's note: this passage
was not included in HHS and is furnished by the present translator).
19. "La tache de l'hermeneutique" (op. cit.), p.200; HHS, p.62.
20. Loc. cit.
21. V. esp. his reflections on the present state of hermeneutic philosophy in "'Logique
hermeneutique'?", Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, edited by G. FltPistad (The
Hague - Boston - London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), I, pp.179-223.
22. Ibid., pp.188-190.
23. In the versions we have before us there are some variants in the way the material
is presented. In the French text, "La fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation," Exegesis.
Problemes de m~thode et exercises de lecture (Genese 22 et Luc 15), edited by F. Bovon and
G. Rouiller (Neuchatel - Paris: Delachaux & Niestie, 1975), pp.201-215, the discussion
of the relation between word and writing comes after the discussion of the structured
work, differentiyfrom what is found in the English language version, "The Hermeneutical
Function of Distanciation," Philosophy Today, XVII (Summer 1973), pp.129-141.
24. V. supra, Part I, note 63.
25. Paul Ricoeur, "Evenement et sens," La teologia della storia. Rivelazione e storia,
Archivio eli filosofia, XXXIX, 2 (1971), p.17.
26. John L. Austin, How to Do 171ings with Words, edited by J. O. Urmson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962); John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
(Cambridge University Press, 1969). On the relation between phenomenology and
analytic philosophy, v. Paul Ricoeur, "Husserl and Wittgenstein on Language,"
Phenomenology and Existentialism, edited by E. N. Lee and M. Mandelbaum (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp.207 -217; idem, "Le discourse de l'action,"
in Paul Ricoeur et al., La swantique de [,action, edited by D. Tiffeneau (Paris: ed. du
CNRS, 1977), pp.113-132.
27. "La fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation" (op. cit.), p.210; HSS, p.139.
28. Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Henneneutics (op. cit.), p.8.
29. "La fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation" (op. cit.), p.298-209; HHS, p.138.
30. Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Hermeneutics (op. cit.), p.8.
31. CdI, pp.29-97; Col, pp.25-96.
32. Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Henneneutics (op. cit.), p.9.
33. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics," Style and Language,
edited by T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.l.T. Press, 1960), pp.350-377.
34. Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Henneneutics (op. cit.), p.12. Cf. "La
fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation" (op. cit.), pp.212-213; HHS, pp.142-143.
35. V. infra the essay on metaphor.
36. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (op. cit.), pp.290ff.i idem, Truth and
Method (op. cit.), pp.274ff.
37. "La fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation" (op. cit.), p.214; HSS, pp.143-144.
38. We shall come back to this point in the next essay, in connection with the
hermeneutics of communication.
39. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: The Texas
Christian University Press, 1976), pp.94-95.
40. On these points, v. Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia, An Experimental
Journal for Biblical Criticism, No.4 (1975), pp.27-148, esp. pp.39ff., 45ff. and 51ff.
41. Ibid., p.65.
 173

42. Philosophical Henneneutics and Theological Henneneutics (op. cit.), p.15.

43. Ibid., pp.15-16.
44. Ibid., p.19.

Part Two, Chapter Two

1. We refer to the above-cited "Phenomenologie et hermeneutique." As we have
already mentioned in Part I, note 34, Ricoeur attributed considerable importance to this
essay, presenting it several times between 1974 and 1975, and most recently in Paul
Ricoeur, Du texte b l'action (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp.39-73 (v. Bibliographical Note).
2. PH, pp.31-32j HHS, pp.101-128. There would seem to be a lacuna in the text, due
to a typing or printing error: "D 'une part ... /a pMnomenologie reste l'indtpassable presuppo-
sition de l'henneneutique. D'autre part, la phenomenologie ne peut se constituer elle-meme
sans une presupposition henneneutique. Cette [presup)position hermeneutique de la
phenomenologie tient a la place meme de I'Auslegung dans la mise en oeuvre de son projet
philosophique" (PH, p.32). The text has 'position' instead of 'presupposition'j in the
above-cited 1986 edition the last sentence was suppressed.
3. PH, pp.32-37j HHS, pp.102-105. Also Edmund Husserl, "Nachwort zu meinen
Ideen," Husserliana, V, edited by M. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952),
pp.138-162. Also idem, Catesianische Meditationen, in Husserliana, I, edited by S. Strasser
(Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff,1950)j English translation by D. Cairns, Edmund Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1960).
4. PH, pp.37-51j HHS, pp.105-114.
5. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1927, 1972 12), p.149j
English translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
(New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962), p.189.
6. PH, pA2j HHS, p.108.
7. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (op. cit.) pp.1l4-117j idem, Being and Time (op.
cit.), pp.150-153.
8. PH, ppA4-45j HHS, pp.109-110.
9. PH, ppA5-46j HHS, p.llO.
10. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutique et critique des ideologies," in Demitizzazione e
ide%gia, Archivio di fi/osofia, XLIV, 2-4 (1973), pp.25-61j English translation in HHS,
pp.63-100. On this subject v. Giuseppe Grampa, lde%gia e poetica. Marxismo e enneneutica
per iIlinguaggio religioso, preface by P. Ricoeur (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1979).
11. PH, pA7j HSS, pp.ll0-ll1.
12. PH, pA8j HHS, pp.111-112.
13. PH, p.51j HHS, p.1l3.
14. Cdl, p.257j Col, p.261. We have dealt with this point above in Part I, Chapter 7.
15. PH, pp.52-54j HHS, pp.114-116.
16. PH, p.55j HHS, p.1l6.
17. Ibidem.
18. PH, pp.57-58j HHS, p.112.
19. PH, pp.56-57j HHS, pp.1l7 -118. Regarding Gadamer, we have already noted above
that this master from Heidelberg identified being and language in his hermeneutic
ontology, as was pointed out by Gianni Vattimo, an expert student of his work (v. note
82 in Part I, above). Coherent with the structure of his discourse, Ricoeur here tends
174

to bring out a unifying tension rather than insist on the concrete divergences among the
thinkers dealt with, viz. Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer. The relationship linking being,
thought and language is extremely delicate, always skirting the risk of a crisis, where
the terms could either merge indistinguishably or, at the other extreme, fall out of
relationship.
20. PH, p.60j HHS, p.119.
21. PH, pp.61-67, and cf. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (op. cit.), esp. the
first Investigation.
22. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (op. cit.), pp.102-103j idem, Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (op. cit.), p.68.
23. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, "Hegel and Husserl on Intersubjectivity," in Reason, Action and
Experience, Essays in Honor of Raymond Klibansky, edited by H. Kohlenberger (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1979), pp.13-29.
24. Paul Ricoeur, "Analogie et intersubjectivite chez Husser! d'apres les inedits de la
periode 1905-1920," in Enige facetten over opvoeding en onderwijs, Opstellen aangeboden
aan Stephan Strasser, edited by A. Monshouwer (Den Bosch: Malberg, 1975), p.167.
25. "Hegel and Husserl on Intersubjectivity" (op. cit.), p.21.
26. PH, p.75j HHS, p.128.
27. Paul Ricoeur, "Conclusions," in Verite et verification. Wahrheit und Verification, Actes
du quatrieme Colloque International de Phenomenologie, Schwlibisch Hall, edited by H.
L. Van Breda (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp.208-209.
28. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, texte etabli par L. Brunschvicg, edited by D. Descotes
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1976), p.84 (ed. Brunschwicg, n.115j ed. Lafuma, n.65).
29. V. Carlo Sini, Semiotica e filosofia. Segno e linguaggio in Peirce, Nietzsche, Heidegger e
Foucault (Bologna: II Mulino, 1978), pp.228-243. The criticisms ofthis illustrious scholar,
although they come to grips with some of the crucial points in Ricoeur's research, would
have borne better fruit, in our opinion, and also led him to judge Ricoeur more
benevolently, if his attention had been extended to works, such as La metaphore vive (The
Rule of Metaphor), in the light of which he would certainly not have reprimanded Ricoeur
for having made use of an "obvious, simplistic and even naively 'naturalistic'" notion of
'event' (p.241) or a no less indeterminate notion of 'reality' (p.242). Cf.MV, pp.273-321,
and 374-399j RM, pp.216-256 and 295-313.
30. We take the liberty of quoting from our communication, "Paul Ricoeur et
l'hermeneutique de I'historicite" (cited above, Part I, note 22): "'Hermeneutic
phenomenology' and 'poetics of the will', interrelating, define the horizon of Ricoeur's
work. In the end, 'hermeneutic phenomenology' becomes the philosophical organon of the
'poetics of the will', and the latter will be the secret eros or ethos giving life to the
former."

Part Two, Chapter Three

* Published, in almost the same form, as "Ricoeur e la metafora," in the collective
volume Linguaggio: Scienza - Filosofia - Teologia (Padova: Gregoriana, 1981), pp.129-139,
the acta of the Padova conference held in September 1980. We are especially attached
to this essay, which contains in nuce the essential elements of our approach to Ricoeur.
At certain points there is some unavoidable repetition with respect to the previous
chapters.
1. MVj RM.
 175

2. Paul Ricoeur, "La metaphore et Ie probleme central de I'hermeneutique," Revue

philosophique de Louvain, LXX, (February 1972), pp.9S-112; HHS, pp.165-181.
S. V. MV, pp.13ff.;RM, pp.9ff.
4. Cf. Pierre Fontanier's 1830 treatise, Les figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968,
with an introduction by Gerard Genette entitled "La rhetorique des figures"). V. also
MV, pp.63ff.; RM, ppA4ff.
5. MV, p.64; RM, pA5.
6. V. Paul Ricoeur, "Stellung und Funktion der Metapher in der biblischen Sprache"
in P. Ricoeur and Eberhard JUngel, Metapher. Zur Henneneutik religioser Sprache (MUnchen:
Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1974), pA6; idem, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia, An Experimental
Journal for Biblical Criticism, NoA (1975), pp.76-77; idem, "Parole et symbole," Revue
des sciences religieuses, XLIX, 1-2 (1975), p.145; and more fully in MV, pp.64-66; RM,
ppA5-46.
7. Rhetoric, III, 10, 1410b 13.
8. Poetics, 1459a 4-8.
9. MV, pAO; RM, p.27.
10. V. Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy ofRhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press,
1936, 1971); Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962);
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958); idem, "The Metaphorical Twist," Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, XXII (March 1962), pp.293-307. Cf.MV, pp.100-128;RM,
pp.76-100.
11. V. the writings of Benveniste cited in Part I, note 63. Also v. MV, pp.88-100; RM,
pp.66-76. And v. CdI, pp.242-257; Col, 246- 261.
12. Cf. Groupe IJ, Rhetorique gena-ale (Paris: Larousse, 1970); Michel Le Guern,
Sanantique de la metaphore et de la metonymie (Paris: Larousse, 1973); MV, pp.173- 220; RM,
pp.134-172.
13. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 8.
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophische Untersuchungen, with English translation by G.
E. M. Anscombe,Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, 1967\ pp.193-229.
15. Gottlob Frege, "O'ber Sinn und Bedeutung," ZeitschriJt jUr Philosophie und
philosophische Kritik, C (1892), pp.25-50; English translation by M. Black and P. Geach,
Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference," Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1952) pp.56-78.
16. V. MV, pp.276-277; RM, pp.219-220.
17. V. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics," Style and
Language, edited by T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960) pp.350-377.
18. Ibid., p.371.
19. Cf. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958),
p.134. V. MV, p.121; RM, p.94.
20. Nelson Goodman, Languages ofArt: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
21. V. Max Black (op. cit.); Mary B. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970).
22. V. MV, pp.51-61 and 388ff; RM, pp.35-43 and 307f£.
23. Cf. Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1962, 19282); Collin M. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 19702). V. MV, pp.310-321; RM, pp.247-256.
176

24. Cf. Martin Heidegger, EinjUhrung in die Metaphysik (Tilbingen: M. Niemeyer, 1966),
pp.l0ff.; English translation by R. Mannheim, Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to
Metaphysics (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1961), pp.llff.
25. V. Paul Ricoeur, "Parole et symbole," Revuedessciencesreligieuses, XLIX, 1-2 (1975),
p.145ff.
26. V. esp. the pages in MV dealing with the plurality of the meanings of 'being' in
Aristotle (MV, pp.325-344; RM, pp.259- 272), the analogio ends (MV, pp.344-356; RM,
pp.272-280) and the relation between metaphoric and metaphysical in Heidegger and
Derrida (MV, pp.325-344; RM, pp.259-272). In each case Ricoeur confutes approaches
that seek to shrink speculative discourse to a mere projection of metaphorical discourse,
both in his interpretation of the classic metaphysical theses of Aristotle and Aquinas and
in his critique of the systematic "deconstruction" of metaphysical concepts pursued by
Derrida through a radicalizing of certain Heideggerian positions, especially in "La
mythologie blanche. La metaphore dans Ie texte philosophique," Poetique, No.5 (1971),
pp.I-51, now in Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: ed. de Minuit, 1972),
pp.247-324; English translation by F. C. T.Moore, Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology,"
New Literary History, VI, 1 (1974), pp.5-74. Derrida's book has been translated by A. Bass
as Margins ofPhilosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Brighton: Harvester Press,
1982).
27. MV, pp.398-399; RM, p.313. Cf. the essays in Part II, above.
28. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). Also idem, "Expliquer et comprendre.
Sur quelques connexions remarquables entre la theorie du texte, la theorie de l'action
et la theorie de l'histoire," Revue philosophique de Louvain, LXXV (February 1977),
pp.126-127; English translation, "Explication and Understanding: On Some Remarkable
Connections among the Theory of Text, Theory of Action and Theory of History," in
Paul Ricoeur, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of his Work, edited by C. F.
Reagan and D. Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp.149-166.
29. Paul Ricoeur, "The Problem of the Will and Philosophical Discourse," in Patterns
of the Life-World, Essays in Honor of John Wild, edited by J. M. Edie, F. H. Parker, C.
O. Schrag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp.273-289.
30. V. Nichomochean Ethics, 1097b 23 - 1098a 20.

Part Two, Chapter Four

1. TR, p.ll; TN, p.ix.
2. Paul Ricoeur, "Poetiqu'! et symbolique," in Initiation tl la pratique de la theologie,
edited by B. Laurent and F. Refoule (Paris: CerC, 1982), voU, p.39.
3. Ibid., pp.39-40.
4. Poetics, 1450b3.
5. TR, p.17; TN, p.3.
6. Cf. Nestor Garcia Canclini, "EI tiempo en Ricoeur: acontecimiento y estructura,"
Cuademos de filosofla, X, 13 (1970), pp.49-50: "The problem of time is at the center of
Ricoeur's philosophy .... Time does not allow itself to be known openly; it can only be
approached by the mediation of symbols .... Just as it requires an indirect approach in
order to be reached, so it leads by indirection to the principle problems of Ricoeur. It
could be said that, without being a central theme, it is located at the center of his
philosophy." At over ten years' distance, we cannot help but appreciate the intuition
 177

of this Latin-American scholar, adding only that time has since become a "central theme"
in the recent works of Ricoeur.
7. Paul Ricoeur, "Husser! et Ie sens de I'histoire," Revue de metaphysique et de morale,
LIV, 3-4 (1949), pp.315-316j H, p.174.
8. V. TR, pp.21, 125ffj TN, pp.6, 83ff. V. also Edmund Husserl, Zur Phiinomenologie
des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), Husserliana, X, edited by R. Boehm (Den Haag:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1966)j English translation by J. S. Churchill, Edmund Husserl, The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1964). V. also Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit: Nach unveroffentlichen Manuskripten Edmund
Husserls (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955).
9. TR, pp.20-21j TN, p.6.
10. Confessions, XI, 14, 17; quoted in TR and TN, loc. cit.
11. V. TR, pp.32ff.j TN, pp.15ff. The Augustinian formula 'distentio animi' is often
cited in the variant form 'distensio animi'.
12. V. TR, ppAI-53j TN, pp.22-30.
13. TR, p.53j TN, p.30. Cf. Confessions, XI, 29, 39.
14. TR, p.57j TN, p.32.
15. Poetics, 1450a5.
16. TR, p.65j TN, p.38.
17. Macbeth, III, V.
18. V. TR, pp.137-172j TN, pp.95-120. V. also by Paul Ricoeur the ZaharoffLecture
of 1979 on "The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History"
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). V. also the recently published collective volume edited
by P. Rossi, La teoria della storiograjia oggi (Milano: II Saggiatore, 1983), originating from
a conference in Turin held the year previous.
19. Benedetto Croce, "La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell'arte," now in
Primi saggi (Bari: Laterza, 1918), pp.3-41.
20. Croce's conception of the contemporaneousness of history is mentioned by Ricoeur
in Paul Ricoeur et al., La narrativite, edited by D. Tiffeneau (Paris: ed. du CNRS, 1980),
p.66. Also in a seminar conducted by Ricoeur in 1984 in Naples, a comparison with Croce
was attempted, especially by Raffaello Franchini, and also with Pietro Piovani, whose
care in conjoining morality and historicity was commented upon by the present author.
21. On the discussion following publication of Carl G. Hempel's well- known essay, "The
Function of General Laws in History ," The Journal of Philosophy, XXXIX (1942), pp.35-48
(now in P. Gardiner, ed., Theories of History [New York: The Free Press, 1959], pp.344-
356), v. La teoria della storiograjia oggi (op. cit.), esp. the introduction by Paolo Rossi
(pp.vii-xxii) and Arthur C. Danto, "Spiegazione storica, comprensione storica e scienze
umane" (pp.5-32). Danto's subsequent report on "La questione della narrazione nella
teoria contemporanea della storiografia" (pp.33-78) makes frequent reference to Ricoeur's
ideas (pp.68-75). Taken in its entirety, the volume furnishes a useful up-dating on
various themes dealt with in recent historiographic theory as well as an exhaustive bib-
liography, to which we refer our reader.
22. TR, p.318; TN, p.228.
23. TR, pp.256-269j TN, pp.182-192.
24. TR, pp.269-287, esp. pp.277-278j TN, pp.193-206, esp. pp. 199-200. Cf. Alfred
SchUtz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt (Wien: Springer-Verlag, 1960)j English
translation in Alfred SchUtz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, translated by G.
Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
25. TR, pp.287-313j TN, pp.206-225.
178

26. Paul Ricoeur et aL, La narrativite (op. cit.), p.28. The portions of this volume
written by Ricoeur are "Pour une theorie du discours narratif" (pp.3-68) and "Recit fictif
- recit historique" (pp.251-271)j the remainder consists of contributions by participants
in the seminar directed by Ricoeur at the Centre de Phenomenologie of the C.N.R.S.
27. V. Vladimir Propp, The Morph%gy of the Folk-Ta/e, English translation by L. Scott,
revised and edited by L. A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968 2)j v. the
remarks of C. Levi-Strauss and Propp's response in the Italian edition, Morfologia della
fiaba, edited and translated by G. L. Bravo (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), pp.163-227. V. also
Algirdas J. Greimas, Semantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966), esp. pp.207-267, and
by the same author, Du Sens. Essais sCmiotique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). As Gerard Genette
has remarked in his recent Nouveau discours du reeit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 'narratology',
to use the term launched by Todorov in 1969, has spread widely not only in France but
also in the United States, Israel and the Netherlands, claiming the role of "pilot science"
in literary studies (p. 7). Ricoeur's interest in this new trend is revealed by his frequent
participation in occasions for confrontation and discussion on structural analysis of
narrative, especially with regard to Biblical exegesis. To mention only one of these, he
partook in the 1969 conference in Chantilly, the acta of which were published in Exegese
et hermeneutique, edited by X. Leon Dufour (Paris: Seuil, 1971) (v. note 61 of Part I,
supra). In the same volume v. also Roland Barthes, "L'analyse structurale du recit. A
propos d'Actes X-XI," pp.181-204). For further considerations on narratology and
bibliography, v. the recent studies by Angelo Marchese, L'ofjicina del racconto. Semiotica
della narrativita (Milano: Mondadori, 1983) and Anne Henault, Narrat%gie. Semiotique
genera/e. Les enjeux de /a semiotique: 2, (Paris: P.U.F., 1983).
28. La narrativite (op. cit.), pp.38-41.
29. Ibid., pp.44-45. At this point Ricoeur refers to Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's
studies on narrative theory, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966) and to Northrop Frye's archetypal critique in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
30. La narrativite (op. cit.), pp.49-50.
31. V. TR, pp.76-84j TN, pp.45-51.
32. TR, p.86j TN, p.53.
33. TR, p.87j TN, p.54.
34. TR, p.86j TN, p.53.
35. V. TR, pp.87-91j TN, pp.54-57. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, "Le disc ours de Paction," in Paul
Ricoeur et aL La semantique de I 'action , edited by D. Tiffeneau (Paris: ed du CNRS, 1977),
pp.21-63.
36. TR, p.91j TN, p.57. For the concept of "double meaning expressions" v. DI,
pp.19-28j FP, pp.9-19.
37. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbo/ischen Fonnen, 3 vols. (Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer, 1923-1929)j English translation by R. Mannheim, Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy
of Symbolic Fonns (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1953). Cf. also Clifford
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
38. cr. Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a
Text," Socia/Research, XXXVIII, 3 (1971), pp.529-562j republished in New Literary History,
V, 1 (1973), pp.91-117.
39. TR, pp.93-94j TN, pp.58-59.
40. cr. Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927, 1972 12), pp.404-437j English
translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp.456-488.
41. TR, pp.96-100j TN, pp.60-64.
 179

42. TR, p.100; TN, p.64.

43. TR, pp.103-105; TN, pp.66-68.
44. Cf. Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History and Theory,
V,1 (1965), pp.24-47; W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York:
Schoken Books, 1964); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of
Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
45. TR, p.105; TN, pp.67-68.
46. TR, pp.103-104; TN, p.66.
47. TR, p.106; TN, p.68. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, "L'imagination dans Ie discours et dans
l'action," in Savoir, faire, esp&er: les limites de la raison, I (Bruxelles: Facultes Universitaires
Saint-Louis, 1976), pp.207-228; English translation, Paul Ricoeur, "Imagination in
Discourse and in Action," in The Human Being in Action: The Irreducible Element in Man.
Part II, Investigation at the Intersection of Philosophy and Psychiatry (Analecta Husserliana,
7), edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht - Boston - London: D. Reidel Publishing
Company, 1978), pp.3-22.
48. V. TR, pp.106-109; TN, pp.68-70.
49. TR, pp.116-117; TN, pp.76-77. Cf. also Hans Robert Jauss, Pour une esthetique de
la reception (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); English translation by T. Bahti, Hans Robert huss,
Toward anAesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). And,
by the same author, Asthetische Erfahrnng und literarische Henneneutik (MUnchen: W. Fink
Verlag, 1977); English translation by M. Shaw, Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience
and Literary Henneneutics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). V. also
Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens (MUnchen: W. Fink Verlag, 1976); English translation,
W ofgang Iser, The Act ofReading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978).
50. TR, p.109; TN, p.71.
51. TR, p.122; TN, p.81. Here Ricoeur cites the formula which constitutes the title of
the first chapter in Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1968), viz. "Reality Remade," stressing the appropriateness
of the formula for narrative works.
52. TR, pp.122-123; TN, p.81.
53. TR, p.124; TN, p.83.
54. TR, p.126; TN, p.84.
55. Paul Ricoeur, "Mimesis et representation," in Estetica e enneneutica, Scritti in onore
di Hans-Georg Gadamer, edited by R. Dottori and H. KUnkler (Napoli: Pironti, 1981),
pp.9-26; slightly modified English translation, Paul Ricoeur, "Mimesis and Representa-
tion," Annals of Scholarship, II, 3 (1981), pp.15-32.
56. "Mimesis et representation" (op. cit.), p.26; "Mimesis and Representation," p.31.
57. V. CdI, p.28; Col, p.24.
58. Pietro Piovani, Oggettivazione etica e assenzialismo, edited by F. Tessitore (Napoli:
Morano, 1981), p.46.
59. VI, p.32; FN, p.30.
60. Paul Ricoeur, "Le probleme du fondement de la morale," Sapienza, XXVIII, 3
(1975), p.316; an expanded English version of this essay is Paul Ricoeur, "The Problem
of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy," Philosophy Today, XXII (Fall 1978), pp.175-192
(v. p.177 for the passage quoted).
61. Ibid., pp.317-322; pp.178-182 of the English version.
62. Ibid., pp.322-333; pp.182-189 of the English version.
63. Paul Ricoeur, "La raison pratique," in Rationality Today. La rationalite aujourd'hui,
edited by T. F. Geraets (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1979), pp.235-240.
180

64. V. Paul Ricoeur, "L'imagination dans Ie discours et dans l'action" (op. cit.),
pp.221-228j also idem, "Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination," Philosophic
Exchange, II, 2 (1976), pp.17-28.

Afterword
1. V. supra, p.138.
2. V. Bibliographical Note, infra.
3. "A la recherche du sens - In Search of Meaning" is the title of the issue of the Revue
de l'Universite d'Ottawa / University o/Ottawa Quarterly, LV, 4 (1985), edited by Theodore
F. Geraets, devoted entirely to Ricoeur.
4. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et reeit, II (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pA8j English translation by K.
McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, II (Chicago - London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.28. These volumes are hereinafter indicated
as TR2 and TN2.
5. TR2, p.12j TN2, ppA-6.
6. TR2, pp.17-48j TN2, pp.7-28.
7. TR2, ppA9-91j TN2, pp.29-60.
8. TR2, pp.92-149j TN2, pp.61-99.
9. TR2, pp.150-225j TN2, pp.100-152.
10. TR2, pp.150-151j TN2, p.100.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et reeit, III (Paris: Seuil, 1985), pp.15-144j English translation
by K. Blarney and D. Pellauer, Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago - London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp.9-96. These volumes are hereinafter indicated as
TR3 and TN3.
12. TR3, pp.154ff., 160ff., 171ff.j IN3, pp.105ff., 109ff., 115ff.
13. TR3, pp.203ff., 226-227j TN3, pp.142ff.,155-156.
14. TR3, pp.275-279j TN3, 189-192.
15. TR3, p.258j TN3, p.176.
16. TR3, p.300j TN3, p.207.
17. TR3, p.372j TN3, p.259.
18. V. Paul Ricoeur, Du texte a l'action (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
19. TR3, p.375j TN3, p.261.
20. TR3, p.392j TN3, p.274.
 Bibliographical Note

Like the original Italian edition of this book, the present translation has not been
lengthened by a bibliography of Ricoeur's writings. Those cited or quoted from are fully
referenced in relative footnotes. For full bibliographical information the reader is referred
to Frans D. Vansina's excellent work, published in installments in the Revue philosophique
de Louvain: LX (August 1960), pp.394-413j LXVI (February 1968), pp.85-101j LXXII
(February 1974), pp.165-181j LXXX (November 1982), pp.579-619. Now this work,
together with a bibliography of secondary source material, is to be found in a
dual-language volume which is an indispensable tool for all Ricoeur scholars: Frans D.
Vansina, Paul Ricoeur: Bibliographie systematique de ses ~crits et des publications consacr~es a
sa pens~e (1935-84). A Primary and Secondary Systematic Bibliography (1935-1984) (Leuven:
Editions Peetersj Louvain-la-neuve: Editions de I'Institut superieur de philosophie).
Likewise by Vansina is the selective primary bibliography, "Bibliography of Paul
Ricoeur," in Studies in the Philosophy ofPaul Ricoeur, edited by C. E. Reagan (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1979), pp.179-194. The same volume also holds Francois H. Lapointe,
"Paul Ricoeur and His Critics: A Bibliographic Essay" (pp.164-177).

Also to be mentioned here are Ricoeurian works published after the Italian edition of
the present book:
The completion of Temps et r&it, with vols. II and III (Paris: Seuil, 1984 and 1985)j
English translation by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1985 and 1988).
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, edited by G. H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986).
A !'ecole de la phenomblOlogie (Paris: Vrin, 1986).
Du texte a ['action. Essais d'hermeneutique, II (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
Both the last two volumes listed contain several previously published essays which have
been taken into account in the present book.
The collection entitled A l'~cole de ta phenomenologie contains the following essays
(corresponding page references to H are furnished):
"Husserl (1859-1938)," pp.7-20j H, pp.3-12.
"Husser! et Ie sens de I'histoire," pp.21-57j H, pp.l43-174.
"Methode et taches d'une phenomenologie de la volonte," pp.59-86j H, pp.213-233.
"Analyses et problemes dans 'Ideen II' de Husserl," pp.87-140j H, pp.35-81.
"Sur la phenomenologie," pp.l41-159.
"Etude sur les 'Meditations Cartesiennes' de Husser!," pp.l61-195j H, pp.82-ll4.

181
182

"Edmund Husserl- La cinquieme 'Meditation Cartesienne'," pp.l97 -225; H, pp.1l5-142.

"Kant et Husserl," pp.227-250; H, pp.l75-201.
"Le sentiment," pp.251-265.
"Sympathie et respect. Phenomenologie et ethique de la seconde personne," pp.266-283.
"L'originaire et la question-en-retour dans la Krisis de Husserl," pp.285-295.

The collection entitled Du texte Ii I'action contains the following essays (corresponding
page references to HHS are furnished):
"De l'interpretation," pp.1l-35.
"Phenomenologie et hermeneutique: en venant de Husserl ... ," pp.39-73; HHS,
pp.lOl-128.
"La tache de l'hermeneutique: en venant de Schleiermacher et de Dilthey, pp.75-100;
HHS, pp.43-62.
"La fonction hermeneutique de la distanciation," pp.lOl-1l7; HHS, pp.l31-144.
"Hermeneutique philosophique et hermeneutique biblique," pp.1l9-133.
"Qu'est-ce qu'un texte?," pp.l37-159; HHS, pp.l45-164.
"Expliquer et comprendre. Sur quelques connexions remarquables entre la theorie du
texte, la theorie de l'action et la theorie de l'histoire," pp.l61-182.
"Le modele du texte: l'action sensee consideree comme un texte," pp.l83-211; HHS,
pp.l97 -221.
"L'imagination dans Ie discours et dans l'action," pp.213-236.
"La raison pratique," pp.237-259.
"L'initiative," pp.261-277.
"Hegel et Husserl sur l'intersubjectivite," pp.281-302.
"Science et ideologie," pp.303-331; HHS, pp.222-246. "Hermeneutique et critique des
ideologies," pp.333-377; HHS, pp.63-100.
"L'ideologie et l'utopie: deux expressions de l'imaginaire social," pp.379-392.
"Ethique et politique," pp.393-406.

It is to be noted that the two collections in English were published before (in the case
of H, long before) the partially corresponding editions in French. Further indications
regarding single essays are furnished in the notes to the present volume; however, we
do wish to mention to our readers that the opening essay of Du texte Ii ['action is an
abridged French version of Ricoeur's presentation of his philosophical itinerary written
for his English-language readership: Paul Ricoeur, "On Interpretation," translated by
K. McLaughin in Philosophy in France Today, edited by A. Montefiore (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.l75-197; republished in After Philosophy. End or
Transformation?, edited by K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.,
and London: The MIT Press, 1987), pp.357-380.
 Index of Names
by
Gordon Poole

(names occurring in the notes are included here only when the note contains Bome
discussion)

Alain, (Chartier, Emile-Auguste), 20 De Waelhens, Alphonse, 164165 n.78

Althusser, Louis, 20 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 71, 72, 75
Anaximander, 53, 54
Apel, Karl 0., 3 Eliade, Mircea, 24, 147
Aristotle, 31, 47, 55, 56, 73, 81, 103, Erasmus, Desiderius, 143
104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 113, 117,
119, 120, 121, 126, 127, 132, 142, Feuerbach, Ludwig, 1
143, 147, 152 Fichte, Johann G., 7, 26
Aron, Raymond, 123 Fontanier, Pierre, 104
Augustine, 26, 56, 117, 118, 119, 121, Foucault, Michel, 20
127, 132, 142, 152, 153 Frege, Friedrich L. G., 36
Austin, John L., 78 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30,
31, 50, 61, 63, 69, 145, 161 nA7
Barthes, Roland, 20, 84, 124
Beardsley, Monroe, 107 Gadamer, Hans-G., 2, 4, 5,21, 70, 72,
Benveniste, Emile, 36, 37, 78, 107, 109, 73,74,75,76,77,82,87,92,97,131
115, 163 n.64 Galileo, 98
Bergson, Henri, 109 Gallie, W. B., 122, 130
Biran, Maine de, 18 Geertz, Clifford, 128
Black, Max, 107, 110 Genette, Gerard, 124, 178 n.27
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 63 Goodman, Nelson, 110
Braudel, Ferdinand, 124 Granger, Gilles-Gaston, 19
Bremond, Claude, 124, 125 Greimas, Algirdas J., 38, 83, 124, 125
Brezzi, Francesca Guerriera, p.162 n.60 Guillaume, Gustave, 37, 38
Brunschvicg, Leon, 20
Habermas, JUrgen, 2, 3
Canclini, Nestor Garcia, 176 n.6 Hegel, Georg W. F., 1,3,15,24,29,30,
Cassirer, Ernst, 128 31, 43, 45, 51, 52, 56, 74, 90, 100,
Chartier, Emile-Auguste. See Alain 116, 117, 144, 160 nAO
Chomsky, Noam, 37, 38 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 21,
Conilh, Jean, 20, 39, 159 n.32 23,28,42,49,58,59,60,61,62,64,
Croce, Benedetto, 122 72,73,74,75,81,85,90,91,93,97,
Ill, 128, 133, 142, 152
Danto, Arthur C., 122 Hempel, Carl G., 122
Derrida, Jacques, 176-177 n.26 Hesse, Mary B., 11()~
Descartes, Rene, 3, 6, 7, 11, 15,26, 27, Hjelmslev, Louis T., 33
28, 43, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 101, 113, Holderlin, Friedrich, 4, 64
156 n.8 Hume, David, 117

183
184

Husserl, Edmund, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, Nietssche, Friedrich Wo, 28, 50, 55, 56,
26,31,34,35,36,39,43,44,45,47, 63,69
52,55,81,87,88,89,90,91,92,95,
97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 116, 117, 123, Orligues, Edmond, 39
142, 152, 153 Otto, Rudolf, 24

Ihde, Don, 69 Palmer, Richard Eo, 9, 156 no12

Iser, Wolfgang, 131 Parmenides, 28, 54
Pascal, Blaise, 16, 101
Jakobson, Roman, 110 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 3
Jaspers, Karl, 9, 12, 135, 156 n08 Piovani, Pietro, 2, 5
J auss, Hans Ro, 131 Plato, 16, 17, 24, 28, 54, 63
Justinus, 57, 62 Plotinus, 54
Propp, Vladimir Jo, 83, 124, 125
Kant, Immanuel, 3, 15, 16, 24, 26, 31, Proust, Marcel, 142
43,44,45,46,47,52,54,55,56,125,
130,136,142,144,148,151,152,161 Rambach, Johann Jo, 82
n047 Rank, Otto, 143
Kemp, Peter, 65 Richardson, William Jo, 61
Kermode,Frank,130 Ricoeur, Paul, passim
Kierkegaard, S/oren Ao, 16 Ryle, Gilberl, 108
Koselleck, Reinhardt, 149
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 53, 69
Lacan, Jacques, 20 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 33, 37, 107
Lavelle, Louis, 19 Scheler, Max, 43, 45
Leenhardt, Maurice, 24 Schelling, Friedrich W 0 J 0, 74
Leibniz, Gottfried Wo, 22, 31, 50, 106, Schleiermacher, Friedrich Do Eo, 70, 71
128 Schiltz, Alfred, 123
Le Senne, Rene, 19,20 Searle, John, 78
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 19,20,35,38,84, Sini, Carlo, 174 n029
162 n058 Socrates, 26
Spinoza, Baruch, 7, 31, 50,63
Madison, Gary Bo, 159-160 nAO
Malebranche, Nicolas, 7 Terlullian, 62
Mann, Thomas, 142 Thevenaz, Pierre, 5, 14, 49, 54, 55, 57,
Marcel, Gabriel, 9, 12, 20, 135, 152, 156 62
n08 Todorov, Tzvetan, 124
Marin, Louis, 84
Marx, Karl, I, 28, 43, 45, 69, 145 Van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 24
Mauss, Marcel, 38, 39 Vattimo, Gianni, 2, 3, 4, 5
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 29, 34, 69,
162 n059 Weber, Max, 123
Mink, Louis 00, 122, 130 White, Hayden, 122
Mounier, Emmanuel, 6, 9, 19, 54, 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 108, 126, 153
n.44 Woolf, Virginia, 142

Naberl,Jean, 7,9,49, 50, 54,55 Xenophon, 53

Newton, Isaac, 98
 Index of Subjects
by
D. Jervolino and G. Poole
Abstraction, from fault, 11; from tran-
scendence, 11
Accusation vs. consolation, 62-64
Action, 2, 10, 63, 69, 78, 113, 121,
126-129,136-138,140,145,148-149,
153. See also Ethics; Ideology; Liber-
ation; Praxis; Transformation; Uto-
pia; Violence and non-violence
Affectivity, 10, 17-18, 43-47
Affirmation, originary a. of I am, 6-8,
49-50,132, 156 n.8; and negativity,
51-54. See also Appropriation and
reappropriation; Hermeneutics of I
am
Analogy of I am, 100, 133. See also Her-
meneutics of I am; Intersubjectivity
Anthropology, philosophical, 15-18,
46-47; theological, 11, 13, 55-57. See
also Philosophy and Christian faith
Anti-humanism, 5
Application (Anwendung),2, 93,131.See
also Appropriation and reappropria-
tion
Appropriation and reappropriation, 8,
16,31-32,35,41-42,82-83,132.See
also Affirmation; Application
Archeology of the subject, 24, 29, 31;
vs. teleology, 24, 29, 153
Auslegung, 72, 87, 99
Being as act, 54, 55, 111, 113. See also
Affirmation; Hermeneutics of I am
Belonging (Zugehiirigkeit) , 75, 76, 79,
92-93, 97, 98, 112. See also Distan-
ciation (Verfremdung)
185
Christianity, 57, 62-63, 168 n.ll0
Code vs. message, 83
Cogito,passim; integral,10, 17; Heideg-
ger's interpretation of the, 6, 21-22,
49, 59-62, 72-73, 91. See also Affir-
mation; Hermeneutics of I am; Re-
flexion, concrete; Self; Subject
Communication, I, 3-4, 5, 36, 39, 44,
76,78,92-93, 131, 137, 141. See also
Dialog; Intersubjectivity
Comprehension vs. explanation, 21, 35,
70,77,80, 122. See also Hermeneu-
tics, ontological vs. methodological;
Social and human sciences
Conatus, 7,43, 63, 132
Conflict of hermeneutics, of interpreta-
tions, 1,2, 13-14,23-25,29,74, 86.
See also Hermeneutics of conflict
Creativity, 12-13, 65, 83,102,104,113,
114, 146. See also Fiction; Imagina-
tion; Metaphor; Mimesis; Mythos;
Narrative; Poetics
Critique, of ideology. See Ideology; of
metaphysics. See Metaphysics; of the
subject. See Subject
Desire, semantics of. See Semantics
Diagnostic, 157 n.15
Dialectics,ptmim; in Platonic and Kan-
tian sense, 24-25; in Hegelian and
existential sense, 29-30, 53, 63, 94,
159-160 n.40. See also Belonging
(Zugehiirigkeit); DiBtanciation; Com-
prehension VB. explanation; Meaning
186
and event; distentio animi; mythos;
Time, and eternity
Dialog, 3, 4, 77, 79, 82, 91, 115. See also
Communication; Intersubjectivity
Difference, 33, 39j of a self from others,
47
Discourse, 35-37, 77-83, 103, 105,
106-109, 112. See also Linguistics of
language vs. linguistics of discourse
Distanciation (Ve1:fremdung), 75, 76, 79,
82,91,92-93,94,96-97,98,l12.See
also Belonging (ZugehOrigkeit)
Distentio animi, 114, 118-119, 121
Duality of existence, 11, 15-18,29,47.
See also Subject, dual
EpocM, 82, 96. See also Reduction
Eschatology, 24j of reflexion, 134
Ethics, 7, 44-47, 50, 63, 65, 89, 93,
134-135, 135-136; and politics, 53,
135, 136, 145
Event, vs. structure, 38, 164 n.70j vs.
meaning, 78, 79, 85j dialectics of
meaning and e., 78, 94j and Ereignis,
in Heideggerian sense, 111j quasi-e.,
124
Fallibility, 15,47. See also Finitude vs.
infinitudej Guilt
Fiction, fictional narrative, 81, 121,
124-126, 128, 132, 139- 141, 143
Finitude vs. infinitude, 15-16, 51-52,
166 n.95
Freedom, 7, 11-14, 29, 45, 50, 55-57,
63, 113, 138, 139j poetics of, 12-13,
48, 65, 114, 126, 135-138, 139, 145,
153
Fusion of horizons, 76, 131
God, 31, 84, 85. 168 n.110
Grammar, generative, 37
Guilt, experience, confession, language
of,l1, 13,30. See also Accusation vs.
consolation; Fallibility
Hermeneutic circle, 4, 23, 60, 73, 91
Hermeneutic phenomenology. See Phe-
nomenology
Hermeneutics,passimj regional vs. gen-
eral, 70j romantic, 70-71, 80, 82;
biblical and theological, 2, 83-86; as
practical philosophy, 3, 161 n.13j
methodical, 5 ,26, 159 n.40j on-
tological, 2-3, 4, 70, 90, 165 n.82,
173-174 n.19; ontological vs. me-
thodical,5,21-25,72-77,91-93,159
n.33j of conflict, 14, 18,29; of suspi-
cion, 69j of I am, 25, 32, 41-42, 47,
49, 58-62, 64, 74, 83, 100. See also
Affirmation; Appropriation and
reappropriation; Cogito; Intersubjec-
tivity; Subject
Historiography, 121-126, 132, 142-43,
177 n.21
Historicism, 122, 177 n.20
Historicity, 2, 4, 14, 45, 65, 71-72,
75-77,90-92,97,116-117,129,141,
144, 145. See also Belonging (Zuge-
hOrigkeit); Distanciation
Hope, 86, 146
Horizontverschmelzung. See Fusion of
horizons
Human sciences. See Social and human
sciences
Humanism, 2-4, 6, 46, 49. See also
Anti-humanism
Identity, narrative i., 140, 144, 146
Ideology, critique of, 3-4, 91-93j and
utopia, 136, 137
Imagination, 15, 16, 46, 50, 82, 83, 96,
130. See also Creativity; Poetics
Intentionality, 90, 95, 97,123,166 n.95;
of language, 78,112
Interpretation,passimj grammatical vs.
technical, 71; reciprocity between
reflexion and interpretation, 8, 13,
22, 114; and praxis of transforma-
tion, 1-2, 137-138
Intersubjectivity, 36, 39-40, 43-48, 51,
65, 76, 78, 98-100, 123, 166-167

n.95. See also Communicationj Dia-
logj Subject, plural
Intuition, 88, 90, 101-102
Koini,2
Language, passimj mythico-symbolical,
12, 135j of negativity, 52j of philoso-
phy, 2, 56. See also Linguistics of 1.
vs.linguiBtics of diBcoursej Phenome-
nology as general theory of I.j Phi-
losophy of I.j Speech acts
Le~h,34,81,97, 123
Liberation, 2, 21, 112-113, 135, 138,
139, 145, 153j ethicB and politicB of,
135j philosophy of,145, 153. See also
Actionj Ethicsj Freedomj Ideologyj
Philosophy ofwillj Praxisj Transfor-
mationj Utopia
LinguiBtics of language vs. linguistics
of diBcourse, 35-37, 78, 107. See also
Semiological modelj Semiological vs.
Bemantic point of view
Long route, 21-22, 34, 49, 65, 74, 86,
103,139, 151j vs. Bhort route, 21-22,
74
Meaning, phenomenological theory of,
21, 34-35, 38, 95j double m., 38, 42j
superabundance of, 70j dialectics of
m. and event, 78, 94j non-idealistic
philosophy of, 95
mens auctoris, 79
Metaphysics, critique of, 5-6, 28, 59-
60, 112, 133-134, 176 n.26. See also
Cogito, Heidegger's interpretation of
thej Referencej Representationj
Truth
Metaphor, 42, 64-65, 81,99, 103-113,
115-116, 131
AI~u, 81, 110, 119, 126-132, 133-
134, 140, 146, 151
Myth, 16,27,35-36,81, 147-148, 151j
oedipal, 30-31j See also Mythicsj Lan-
guage, mythico-symbolical
187
Mythics, 13, 151, 152. See also Lan-
guage, mythico-symbolicalj Myth
Al~,81, 110,114,119-120,121,147
Narrative, narrativity, 65, 114-132,
140-146, 147-153, 178 n.27
Ontology, ontological, passimj militant
and truncated, 24
PersonaliBm (Mounier'B influence and
the movement), 6, 9, 19, 20, 54, 160
n.44
Phenomenology, Kant's implicit, 44-46j
Hegel'B, 24, 29-30, 45, 56, 100j eide-
tic, 10-13,69,82, 127j hermeneutic,
21, 65, 87-102, 135, 174 n.30j from
eidetic to hermeneutic, 10-13, 69j
idealistic interpretation of, 11, 21,
34-35, 87-94j basic theses of, 34j as
general theory of language, 38, 94-
95. See also Epochej IntentionalitYj
Intuitionj Reductionj Reflexionj
Philosophy, reflexive
Philosophie de I'esprit, 19-20, 39, 158
n.28, 159 n. 32
Philosophie sans absolu, philosophy with-
out absolute, 5, 55, 145
Philosophy, passimj of finitude, 15j of
negativity, 51-53j of joy vs. of an-
guish, 51j of language, I, 22-23,
34-35, 38, 63, 78, 95, 103, 122-123j
reflexive, 2, 6-8, 9, 13, 16, 26,27,32,
49, 55, 69j of will, 10-12, 55-56, 63,
113,127,134-135,167-168 n.110j of
liberation, 140, 145. See also Philoso-
phie de I'espritj Philosophie sans absolu
Philosophy and Christian faith, 9,
11-13, 55-57, 62-63, 145, 167-168
n.ll0
PoeticB, 12-13, 64-65, 102, 104, 106,
109-113,114-116,126,135-138,166
n.92j dialectic between p. and poli-
tics, 137. See also Actionj Ethicsj
Freedomj Liberationj Transformation
Prejudice, rehabilitation of, 73, 75
188
Psychoanalysis, 24, 27-32, 41-42, 83,
91, 161 n.47, 165-166 n.78
Reader, reading, 77, 79, 83, 131, 143-
144
Reduction, 27, 34-35, 38-40, 88, 96-97,
99, 110, 112, 162 n.60. See also Epo-
che
Reference, 36, 39, 81, 110, 112, 115-
116,124,125-126,131-132,134.See
also Mimesisj Truth
Refiexion, passimj as a task, 7j con-
sciousness as a task, 28j reciprocity
between r. and interpretation, 8, 13,
22, 41-42, 114j transcendental, 16j
concrete, 12, 35, 42j eschatology of,
134j nourished by the symbol, food
forthought, 151-152. See also Philos-
ophy, reflexive
Religion. See Christianityj Philosophy
and Christian faith
Representation, 6, 10, 43, 49, 50, 60,
133-134
Respect, 16, 44, 46, 166 n.89
Rhetoric, 16, 103, 104-106, 107
Schriftlichkeit, 77
Self, passimj positing of the, 7j dif-
ference of a s. from others, 47j con-
stituted by the 'matter of the text',
83j as disciple of the text, 93-94j ipse
vs. idem, 144. See also Affirmationj
Cogitoj Hermeneutics of I amj Iden-
tity, narrative Lj Subject
Semantics, 22, 35-36, 38-42, 103, 106-
109j structural, 38j of desire, 41-42j
of action, 127. See also Semiological
vs. semantic viewpoint
Semiology, challenge of, 33-40, 41, 74,
91
Semiological model, 33, 35, 41, 69
Semiological vs. semantic viewpoint,
38-39, 78, 81, 109, 163 n.64
Servum arbitrium, 11, 113
Speech acts, 78-79
Sprachlichkeit, linguality, 76,77, 97
Social and human sciences, 2-3, 19-20,
69,71,72,75,76,77,83,97
Structuralism, 19, 33-40, 41, 80, 84, 91,
124, 161-162n.58, 163n.61, 178n.27
Subject,passimj critique of self -contem-
plative, self -transparent, self -surri-
cient s., 2, 3, 5-8, 12-13,41-43,70,
72, 82, 89-94j dual, 13j plural, 65j
body as s., 10-11, 157 n.15. See also
AffirmationjCogitoj Hermeneutics of
I amj Intersubjectivity
Suspicion, masters of, 28, 59, 160 n.44j
hermeneutics of, 69
Symbol, 12, 13, 29, 31, 38-39, 41-42,
64-65,69-70,86,111,128,147-148,
151, 161 n.55, 165 n.79
Sympathy, 45-46
Text, 4, 23, 35, 64, 70-72, 77, 77-83,
84,93-94, 128, 131-132, 143-144
Time, temporality, 65, 114-132, 140-
146,153, 176-177 n.6j and eternity,
119
Tradition, 75, 91. See also Belonging
(ZugehOrigkeit)
Transformation, praxis of, 1-2, 112,
137-138, 139
Truth, philosophical problem of, 60,
103-104,110-112,133-134,174n.29j
force of, 30-31j vs. method, 5, 21, 75
Utopia, 113, 136-137, 148-149
Violence and non-violence, 45-46
Will, philosophy of. Sec Philosophy
wiTkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstscin, 75,
92
 Contributions to Phenomenology
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Editor: William R. McKenna, Miami University

Editorial Board:
David Carr (University of Ottawa), Lester Embree (Duquesne University), Jose
Huertas-Jourda (Wilfred Laurier University), Joseph J. Kockelmans (The Pennsyl-
vania State University), Algis Mickunas (Ohio University), J. N. Mohanty (Temple
University), Thomas M. Seebohm (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz),
Richard M. Zaner (Vanderbilt University).

Publications :
1. F. Kersten: Phenomenological Method. Theory and Practice. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0094-7
2. E. G. Ballard: Philosophy and the Liberal Arts. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0241-9
3. H. A. Durfee and D.F.T. Rodier (eds.): Phenomenology and Beyond. The Self
and Its Language. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0511-6
4. J. J. Drummond: Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism.
Noema and Object. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0651-1
5. A. Gurwitsch: Kants Theorie des Verstandes. Herausgegeben von T.M.
Seebohm. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0696-1
6. D. Jervolino: The Cogito and Hermeneutics. The Question of the Subject in
Ricoeur ISBN 0-7923-0824-7

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