Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation

Cambridge Philosophy Classics

by Paul Ricœur, John B. Thompson (Translator)

Collected and translated by John B. Thompson, this collection of essays by Paul Ricoeur includes many that had never appeared in English before the volume's publication in 1981. As comprehensive as it is illuminating, this lucid introduction to Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory features his more recent writings on the history of hermeneutics, its central themes and issues, his own constructive position and its implications for sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Charles Taylor, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this classic work has been revived for a new generation of readers.

Genres: Philosophy, Language, Psychology, Nonfiction, Reference

315 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 31, 1981

About the author

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).

The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.

In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.

Reviews

[Natali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of the reviews for this book say that this is not an introductory text which it most definitely is not. I think this is what you should read before:

- A bit of Heidegger. Just the basics on the concept of being and phenomenology.
- Basic Husserl.
- Definitely get the major concepts from Gadamer. "Truth and Method" is a good place to start.
- Saussure's sign
- Austin's speech acts
- Searle's speech acts
- Lacan's "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious" (Literariness has a great summary just in case you don't get it on the first try. I didn't).
- Read up on Freud and psychoanalysis (the theory that's often illustrated as an iceberg, you'll find it quickly if you look it up like that)

I think that's it. He makes loads and loads of references to plenty of authors and philosophers. Unless you are extremely well versed in critical theory and philosophy, I honestly doubt you'll get every single one. The ones I mentioned are, however, very important in understanding some of the essays. You don't need to read every single text from the aforementioned authors, but it will be useful to at least understand what they said.

The book itself is divided into three parts.

Part 1. Here, Ricoeur makes a sort of summary of previous hermeneutical theories and compares them. If you didn't fully understand Heidegger, Husserl or Gadamer, here's where you will. Ricoeur makes an excellent point of making brief summaries of what these authors said before he gives you his opinions. It was incredibly useful, at least for me.

Part 2. This section is dedicated to more advanced texts on hermeneutics. Once we have our basic concepts down, we can start talking about explanation, understanding, interpretation, distanciaron and appropriation. These are the basic topics that are discussed.

Part 3. This will either be the most interesting or most boring part for you. It's a mix between critical theory and hermeneutics. We talk about what is a text, how to read it, how to analyze it and how ideology plays a role in it.

You can read the essays separately, but they do make some references to one another, so I recommend reading each part together. That does not mean, however, that you need to read all the parts or even read them in order. If you're a hermeneutics fanatic, you might as well skip the first part. If you don't really care for analyzing texts, the third part might not interest you. And so on.

One more thing I'd like to mention that is rather important is the internal structure of the essays. Whereas many philosophers ramble and you need to sort out their ideas, Ricoeur is supremely organized. Delightfully organized. The hardest part about reading him is understanding what he's referencing, but besides that, he explicitly states "This is my thesis. Here are my arguments: 1, 2, 3. That's why I think this". After Heidegger, I wanted to hug Ricoeur.

I recommend this book for every hermeneutics, philosophy or critical theory student. It would specially be useful if you're getting a degree in anything related to this.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

YIKES.

Some necessary background: I read this book for a class. I have almost zero familiarity with western philosophical thought after circa 1400 (Dont' judge! I'm a medievalist!), and honestly I was not entirely sure what hermeneutics entailed when I picked up this book. I thought it had something vaguely to do with words, or maybe the Bible? So I am very much not the target audience here, and I found a lot of it to be kind of impenetrable. If you don't have a background in the subject, I'd recommend a more introductory text, or a quick trip over to the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's a cool field.

But if you're the sort of brave soul that walks into a book store, sees this text, and thinks 'Wow, hermeneutics! I don't know what that is, but it sounds like fun!' there's still a whole lot you can get from it if you have some patience and a good dictionary.

Some vague thoughts on what (I think?) Ricoeur discussed:

- I like that he's is such a conciliatory sort of philosopher. A lot of the eleven essays presented in this book end with time pulling together disparate fields of thought and showing how they can support and amplify each other. It makes his work feel creative and production.

- One of Ricoeur's recurring themes is that textual interpretation shouldn't be aimed at discovering the the mindset of the author hidden behind the text, but at exploring the 'possible world' that the text projects in front of itself. It's such a cool idea, and allows him to connect hermeneutics to all sorts of other fields. There's a tension that runs through everything between the fact that we're 'belonging' to the world but also distanced from it that I found to be pretty compelling.

- His ideas about metaphor and narrative are lots of fun. But the last essay is my favorite. He essentially says that because history entails both historical events and the writing about historical events, history and fiction are very much intertwined. Both deal with a dialectic between the alien and familiar in an attempt to speak about the world. My favorite quote: "By opening to us what is different history opens us to the possible, whereas fiction, by opening us to the unreal, leads us to what is essential in reality." *mind blown*


Please correct me if any of this is nonsense, I'm a bit out of my element here. I'm sure it's a fascinating and stimulating text for students of hermeneutics or just 20th century philosophy in general. And if you're not, well, it's an adventure!

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a great introduction to Ricoeur but still a marvelous overview of his body of work. For a "textbook" its very good and thought provoking.

[Hendri Trinanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

clearly

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a good book and worth reading, if you are interested in the subject, but also a lot of work for the benefit gained. Ricoeur writes at a very high level, often inventing technical terms for things that already have simpler words to describe them. I realize the peril in criticizing the literary style of an author on hermeneutics, of all things, and some of the difficulty may stem from translation, though I find modern French thinkers seem to share this failing with some frequency.

Further, his obsession (like so many thinkers since Georg Hegel) with "dialectic" generally makes him do a number of probably unnecessary mental gymnastics. "Dialectic" has become an overused and almost meaningless term, but like most of the post-Hegelian world, Ricoeur seems to use it in the sense of paradox or contradiction. Ricoeur almost insists on finding such paradoxes and contradictions wherever he looks, and he doesn't stop looking until he does. That said, he actually does a nice job of synthesizing some heretofore opposing ideas, so this is not an entirely wasted effort, but does make for difficult and complicated reading even where it does not add value.

Ricoeur also has an all-too-typical focus on Karl Marx, with a rather uncritical acceptance of many of Marx's assumptions that many of us in the post-Cold War period are no longer willing to entertain. In this case, however, he at least takes Positivism more generally to task, so this fascination does not seriously undermine his work.

Many might even wonder what hermeneutics is or what it might be, if they haven't encountered it before. Frequently it is thought of as interpretation, or meaning, or even meta-meaning, the meaning of meaning, or as Ricoeur suggests, meta-critique. Ricoeur, too, leaves some ambiguity as to the real meaning and use of hermeneutics, but in one instance, he explains, "the object of hermeneutics is constantly shifted away from the text, from its sense and its reference, toward the lived experience which is expressed therein." (p 52) It is a "philosophy of interpretation." (p 114) In finer detail:

To interpret is to render near what is far (temporally, geographically, culturally, spiritually). In this respect, mediation by the text is a model of a distanciation which would not be simply alienating...but which would by genuinely creative. The text is, par excellence, the basis for communication in and through distance. (p 111)

Continuing this theme, "Experience can by said, it demands to be said. To bring it to language is not to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself." (p 115) But it must be remembered that "The linguistic sign can stand for something only if it is not the thing." (p 116) Ricoeur explores the differences between spoken words, usually delivered toward a specific audience, and written text, accessible to all (potentially) and therefore lacking the spoken word's directed nature.

Ricoeur was at his best when he got around to the concrete; some of the specific topics he explored were downright provocative. For instance, he explores the prejudice against prejudice during and after the Enlightenment: "Hence it is necessary to delve beneath the philosophy of judgment, beneath the problematic of subject and object, in order to effect a rehabilitation of prejudice which is not a simple negation of the spirit of the Enlightenment." (p 67) As an aside, perhaps you can see by Ricoeur's use of "problematic" instead of simply "problem" how he makes his work less accessible to readers by making his writing more complex than necessary. Ricoeur continues to explore the topic, "It is false to maintain that there are only unfounded prejudices, since there are, in the juridical sense, pre-judgments which may or may not be subsequently grounded, and even 'legitimate prejudices.' So even if prejudices by precipitation are more difficult to rehabilitate, prejudices by predisposition have a profound significance which is missed by analyses conducted from a purely critical standpoint." (p 71)

Ricoeur shows his mettle when he finds ways of critiquing all the previous points of view and trying to chart a new direction incorporating both the strengths and criticisms of alternative schools of thought, in these cases benefiting from his obsession with "dialectic": "This is a dialectical concept which results from the rejection of two alternatives: objectivism, whereby the objectification of the other is premised on the forgetting of oneself; and absolute knowledge, according to which universal history can be articulated within a single horizon. We exist neither in closed horizons, nor within an horizon that is unique." (p 75)

In this day and age of the overuse (and misuse) of the term and concept of "appropriation," Ricoeur does well to set us on much firmer ground:

What we make our own, what we appropriate for ourselves, is not an alien experience or a distant intention, but the horizon of a world towards which a work directs itself...If appropriation is the counterpart of disclosure, then the role of subjectivity must not be described in terms of projection. I should prefer to say that the reader understands himself in front of a text, in front of the world of the work. To understand oneself in front of a text is quite the contrary of projecting oneself and one's own beliefs and prejudices; it is to let the work and its world enlarge the horizons of the understanding which I have of myself...The circle is between my mode of being--beyond the knowledge which I may have of it--and the mode opened up and disclosed by the text as the world of the work. (p 178)

In his exploration of ideology, Ricoeur asserts that all research is governed by "the technical interest, the practical interest and the interest in emancipation; that these interests are anchored in the natural history of the human species, but that they mark the emergence of man out of nature, taking form in the spheres of labour, power and language." (p 95) He explains that the only difference between modern man and the ancient Greeks in terms of ideology versus the desire for emancipation, "there is still the need for an ideology to legitimate the authority that secures the functioning of the system; science and technology today assume this ideological role." (p 99)

Ricoeur revisits Aristotle in his exploration of ideology, "Aristotle tells us several things: that politics has to deal with variable and unstable matters, and that here reasoning begins from facts which are generally, but not always, true; that it is cultivated man and not the specialist who is judge in these matters; that it is therefore necessary to be content with showing the truth in a rough and approximate way...finally, that this is so because the problem is of a practical nature." (p 222)

Ricoeur explores the familiar theme of fiction or poetry being in a sense closer to reality than history, and does it well. He also looks at the writer both as author and, separately, as narrator, and therefore, as a kind of character as well.

While Ricoeur does not deliberately delve into politics as such (though his uncritical embrace of Marxist assumptions have economic and political ramifications), he comes close to embracing a very classically Liberal point of view when comparing literary criticism and social sciences to judicial proceedings: "Only in the tribunal is there a moment when the procedures of appeal are exhausted. But it is because the decision of the judge is implemented by the force of public power. Neither in literary criticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such a last word. Or, if there is any, we call that violence." (p 215)

Perhaps in an era when so many people seem to be suffering from trauma, particularly what is today referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it is beneficial to review Ricoeur's critique of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical method: "recovering traumatic events through the work of analysis reveals that at the time they were experiences that could not be fully integrated in a meaningful context. It is only the arrival of new events and new situations that precipitates the subsequent reworking of these earlier events." (p 254)

One might conclude with Ricoeur's own dramatic words: "It is because absolute knowledge is impossible that the conflict of interpretations is insurmountable and inescapable. Between absolute knowledge and hermeneutics, it is necessary to choose." (p 193)

Unquestionably, the work is of value; Ricoeur is an incredible thinker with a broad interest and numerous and varied explorations that bear fruit at least in provoking further thought, study, critique, and debate. But the work is not terribly accessible, so there is some real work getting through it. One can go sometimes through whole pages with little value added, while others are jam packed. So, to refer back to the hackneyed expression, the real question for the reader will be whether the juice is worth the squeeze. If one really does have an interest in hermeneutics, then this collection of essays seems a good place to start or to add to one's reading. If not, then other works may beckon more loudly to you.

[Adam Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Ricoeur's papers on hermeneutics (interpretative methodology) from the 1970s. This is a rather niche work and would only be 4 stars for those with an interest in the subject matter. For anyone else, this would be 2 stars at best. Otherwise, you just slog through Ricoeur juxtaposing the hermeneutics of Gadamer which looks to epistemological foundations for interpretation of texts and history with the hermeneutics of Habermas which led into metahermeneutics which self-referentially tried to analyze how hermeneutics was done as it questioned the dynamics of power and ethics when evaluating subject matter. If that means nothing to you: I suggest not reading this book, at least until you have read Gadamer and Habermas.

[Gary Hutto · Rating 2 out of 5]

A history professor inappropriately assigned this book to a graduate level historiography class I was taking. I found it incomprehensible and badly translated. A instructor should never assign a book of this complexity to graduate level history students who have no background in philosophy, linguistics, or hermeneutics. It is like throwing Kant at a ninth grader or asking me to do brain surgery with no training.

[Gabrielle Huston]

Read chapter 1 for HUMS4903 at Carleton University.

[Syifa Adiba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sudah nggak kuat baca ampe akhir. Sudah mulai hilang orientasi. Tapi, ada kalimat kesimpulan yg paling gue suka dari Paul Ricoeur ini.

Sejarah membantu kita membuka diri pada kemungkinan, sementara fiksi dengan membukakan diri kita pada yang tidak nyata, menuntun kita kepada esensi realitas.