Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur proposes two theses. The first is that what hermeneutics has ruined is not phenomenology, but one of its interpretations, namely its idealistic interpretation by Husserl himself. The second is that beyond a mere opposition, there exists between phenomenology and hermeneutics a mutual belonging which is important to explicate, namely, that on the one hand hermeneutics is built on the basis of phenomenology and thus preserves that from which it nevertheless differs: phenomenology remains the indispensable presupposition of hermeneutics. And on the other hand, phenomenology is not able to establish itself without a hermeneutical presupposition.

The schematic theses of Husserlian Idealism

1) The ideal of scientificity which phenomenology claims, is not in continuity with the sciences, with their axioms, with their fundamental enterprise. The ‘ultimate justification’ which constitutes phenomenology is of another order.

2) The principle foundation is on the order of intuition; to found is to see. The first truth is an ‘experience’. Every radical question is therefore decided at the level of vision.

3) The place of the fullest intuitivity is subjectivity. All transcendence is doubtful; only immanence is indubitable. This is the thesis of Husserlian Idealism. All transcendence is doubtful because it proceeds by ‘outlines’ and ‘profiles’ but, immanence is indubitable because is not given by ‘profiles’ and ‘outlines’ and therefore implies nothing presumptive, but alone permits the coincidence of reflection with what has just been experienced.

4) Subjectivity thus promoted to a transcendental role is not the empirical consciousness, the object of psychology. Reduction distinguishes and separates phenomenology from phenomenological psychology. The phenomenological is the psychological reduced.

5) The process of reflection develops its own ethical implications: in this way, reflection is the immediately self-responsible act.

Hermeneutics contra Husserlian Idealism

            Phenomenology is not exhausted as such by one of its interpretations, even that of Husserl himself. It is Husserlian Idealism, Ricoeur avers, that succumbs to the critique of Hermeneutical Philosophy. While it is possible, Ricoeur avers, to oppose hermeneutics, thesis to thesis, doubtlessly not to phenomenology as a whole as such, but to Husserlian Idealism. The contrasts are:

a) The ideal of Scientificity, understood by Husserlian Idealism as ultimate justification, encounters its fundamental limit in the ontological condition of comprehension.

b) The Husserlian exigency of the return to intuition is opposed by the necessity of all comprehension to be mediated by an interpretation. How? This is essentially based on the fact that all interpretation places the interpreter in medias res (into the middle of a narrative), and never at the beginning nor at the end.

c) That the ultimate foundation is subjectivity, that all transcendence is doubtful and immanence indubitable, is itself eminently doubtful, insofar as it appears that the Cogito could also be submitted to the radical critique that phenomenology applies otherwise to all appearance. Husserl believed that self-knowledge could not be presumptive because it proceeds neither from outlines or profiles. But, self-knowledge could also be presumptive in the measure to which self-knowledge is a dialogue of the soul with itself, and to which this dialogue could be systematically distorted by the violence and by all the intrusions of the structures of domination into those of communication, self-knowledge, as interiorized communication, can also be as doubtful as knowledge of the object, although for different reasons.

d) A radical way of questioning the primacy of subjectivity is to take as a guideline the theory of the text. In the measure to which the meaning of the text has become autonomous in relation to the subjective intention of its author, the essential question is not to recover, beneath the text, the lost intention, but to display before the text, the world which it opens and discloses. In other words, the hermeneutical task is to discern the ‘thing’ (the explication of the being-in-the-world shown by the text; the projection of a world which I could inhabit) of the text (Gadamer) and not the psychology of the author.

e) In opposition to the Idealistic thesis of the ultimate self-responsibility of the mediating subject, hermeneutics suggests subjectivity be made the last, and not the first, category of a theory of comprehension. Subjectivity must be lost as the radical origin if it is to be retained in a more modest role. Herein, to self-comprehend would be to self-comprehend before the text.

The above lies the thrust of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the contrast between Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and the Heidegger-Gadamer hermeneutical models.

Towards a Hermeneutical Phenomenology

The hermeneutical critique of Husserlian Idealism is only, as Ricoeur opines, the negative side of a more positively oriented research, which he calls by the programmatic and exploratory title of “Hermeneutical phenomenology.” Ricoeur establishes in five (5) ways that beyond the critique of Husserlian Idealism, phenomenology remains the indispensable presupposition of hermeneutics. He avers thus:

1) The most fundamental phenomenological presupposition of a philosophy of interpretation is that every question about any kind of ‘being’ is a question about the ‘meaning of being’. Presupposed in this is therefore the choice for the phenomenological attitude as opposed to the naturalistic-objectivistic attitude. The choice for meaning is therefore the most general presuppositions of all hermeneutics.

2) Hermeneutics is related in another way to phenomenology, namely, by its recourse to distantiation at the heart of the experience of belonging-to. Distantiation, according to Hermeneutics, is not without a rapport with the epoche according to phenomenology, but with an epoche interpreted in a non-idealistic sense, as an aspect of the intentional movement of consciousness towards meaning. This parallelism is of importance since it is true that hermeneutics must assume in itself the critical moment, the moment of suspicion, from which proceeds the critique of ideologies, psychoanalysis, etc.

3) Hermeneutics also shares with phenomenology the thesis of the derived character of merely linguistic meanings. Beginning with the most recent analysis, that of Gadamer, one can see how the very composition of Wahreit und Methode reflects this derived character of the problematic of language. Even if it is true that every experience has a linguistic dimension, and that this linguistic dimension permeates experience, hermeneutical philosophy must not begin with the linguistic dimension. It is first necessary to say what is brought to language. This is why philosophy begins with the experience of art, which is not necessarily linguistic. Hermeneutics, Ricoeur says, subordinates the linguistic plan to the pre-linguistic plan of noematic analysis. This subordination of linguistic experience to the whole of our aesthetic and historical experiences makes Hermeneutics continue at the level of the humanities, the movement started by Husserl at the level of perceptive experience.

4) This kinship between the ante-predicative of phenomenology and that of hermeneutics is all closer as Husserlian phenomenology has itself begun to spread the phenomenology of perception in the direction of a hermeneutic of historic experience. In Husserl’s developing of the properly temporal implications of perceptive experience, it became more and more evident that the presumptive, inadequate and unfinished character which results for perceptive experience of its temporal structure could be extended step by step to historical experience taken as a whole. A new model of truth then proceeded from the phenomenology of perception that could be easily transposed to the historico-hermeneutical sciences.

5) Phenomenology can only be the presupposition of hermeneutics in the measure to which it, in its turn, involves a hermeneutical presupposition. Hermeneutical presupposition implies here the necessity for phenomenology to conceive of its method as an exegesis, an explication, an interpretation. For Husserl, ontological explication consists of the unfolding of the layers of meaning which together constitute the “world as constituted meaning.” Phenomenological explication, Husserl says, “does nothing explicate the sense the world has for us all prior to any philosophizing…” Husserl’s anticipation is the coincidence of intuition and explication.

The above lies the thrust of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the relationship between Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and the Heidegger-Gadamer hermeneutical models.

             According to Ricoeur, all phenomenology is an explication in the evidence and an evidence of explication. An evidence which makes itself an explicit, an explication which deploys an evidence, such is phenomenological experience. It is in this sense that phenomenology finds actualization only as hermeneutics. But, this can be acknowledged only if one entirely assumes the critique of Husserlian Idealism by Hermeneutics. Phenomenology and Hermeneutics then, says Ricoeur, remain the presuppositions of each other to the extent that the idealism of Husserlian Phenomenology keeps submitted to the critique of Hermeneutics.