Hermeneutic

I.

Phenollleno!ogy
The Philosophy
of Paul Ricoeur

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

EVANSTON 197 I
 Northwestern Universily
STU DIE SIN Phenomenology ~

Existential Philosophy

GENERAL EDITOR
John Wild
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
James M. Edie
CONSULTING EDITORS
Hubert L. Dreyfus
William Earle
Dagfinn F¢llesdal
Aron Gurwitsch
Emmanuel Levinds
Alphonso Lingis
Maurice Natanson
Paul Ricoeur
George Schrader
Calvin O. Schrag
Herbert Spiegelberg
Charles Taylor
Hermeneutic Phenomenology
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur
by Don Ihde
Paul Ricoeur has played an important role in the phenom-
enological movement both as an Interpreter and as a
highly original phenomenological thinker in his own right.
This book introduces the reader to the important themes
in Ricoeur's philosophy.
In contrast to Heidegger, who today may be considered
a hermeneutical philosopher, Ricoeur's development of
hermeneutic phenomenology employs a self-consciously
held and discussed methodology. The question of method
keeps Ricoeur's philosophy open to objectivist philoso-
phies in a way not often found in phenomenology. Professor
Ihde seeks to unravel this dialectic as it develops in
Ricoeur's thought. The detours and devices used by Ricoeur
to reach a "hermeneutic philosophy of existence" are de-
tailed and explained.
Although Ricoeur's phenomenology is "linguistic," it be-
gins at a point quite different from the dominant language
philosophies of today. The suggestive center of the her-
meneutic question, Ricoeur contends, lies in the languages
of symbols and myths. By seeking a "logic of equivoclty"
the fullness and richness of human language is held central.
Professor Ihde carefully outlines the route between reduc-
tive formalism and romantic effusiveness that is being de-
veloped in Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology and
shows some of the implications of this theory of language
for the future of phenomenology.
Don Ihde is associate professor of philosophy at the
State Univer~ity of New York at Stony Brook.

224 pp.
Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
 Don Ihde
or,

Foreword by Paul Ricoeur

 Copyright © 1971 by Northwestern University Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-138922
Printed in the UnIted States of America
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-8101-0347-8

Don Ihde is associate professor of philosophy at the

State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Material from the following books has been

quoted with the permission of the publishers:
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans.
Emerson Buchanan, Harper & Row, New York.
1967. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An
Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage.
Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1970.
For Carolyn
 Contents

Foreword by Paul Ricoeur / :xiii

'Preface / xix
List of Abbreviations / xxi
I / Introduction / 3
2 / Structural Phenomenology: The Latent Hermeneutics of
Freedom and Nature / 26
3 / Phenomenology withln "Kantian" Limits: Fallible
Man / 59
4 / From Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics / 81
5 / Phenomenological Hermeneutics: The Symbolism of
Evil / 95
6 / Toward the Philosopby of Language
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation / 131
7 / Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines: New
Counterfocl / 167
BibUography / 183
Index / 191

[xi]
 Foreword

IT IS WITH GRATITUDE that I have accepted the invita-

tion to write a short foreword for the work which Don Ihde has
devoted to my writings, for it gives me an opportunity to say how
highly I regard his presentation. He does not limit himself to
describing and summarizing works which appeared in the course
of more than twenty years; he tests the unity of my work and the
consistency of the methods I have used. In this undertaking he
proves himself both vigorously exacting and deeply sympathetic.
I feel even more indebted to him for the first of these qualities
than for the second.
It is indeed a formidable test for an author to be placed under
an inquiry of this type; each of his books has answered limited
questions and has responded to different situations and chal-
lenges. Suddenly they are placed under a single perspective
which encompasses them as a whole. A new question is ad-
dressed to them: What are they saying, not only separately, but
all together? Do they say something which is, if not unique, at
least consistent?
In this regard I am grateful to Don Ihde for having respected
both the evident change of perspective and the underlying con-
tinuity between, on the one hand, the eidetic or structural phe-
nomenology of Freedom and N arure and, on the other hand, the
hermeneutic phenomenology of my latest works.
The change of perspective is clear. To begin with, it is the
result of a difference of times and a shifting of philosophical
"fronts." Earlier I situated myself in relation to Sartre and Mer-
leau-Ponty, and I sought to integrate the influences of Gabriel
Marcel and of Jaspers to that of Husserl. I further had to face
[xiii]
 xiv / PREFACE
the human sciences, represented principally by psychology. I
next felt the need to root myself again in the soil of traditional
philosophy, principally the reflective tradition. That was the pe-
riod of Fallible Man, when I confronted classical philosophy
rather than the human sciences. Today the philosophical land-
scape has changed: the semiological sciences have taken the
place of the natural sciences in the confrontation of philosophy
with its other. What is more, the «end of metaphysics" is being
proclaimed by the thinkers of the Hegelian left and even more
by those inspired by Nietzsche. The task of recovering meaning
can no longer, then, be separated from that of evaluating the
hermeneutics of suspicion. So in an initial sense-still external,
to be sure-it is the difference in landscape which determines
the difference of problematics.
But more important internal reasons, perfectly perceived by
Don Ihde, also determine the shift in perspective. At first I was
absorbed by the question: What is will? I took it as equivalent
to the question undertaken by Merleau-Ponty: What is percep-
tion? It was thus that the relation voluntary-involuntary became
the center of gravity for all other questions. Today the relation-
ship between speech and action (or saying-doing) seems to me to
be more encompassing. The question of language is thus no
longer simply a milieu in which a discourse on action can be
articulated; it is a mode of being, a pole of existence as funda-
mental as action itself. A new eqUilibrium between saying and
doing must be sought, but it has not yet been found. It will give
the future "Poetics of the Will" an entirely different aspect from
the one which was initially foreseen.
It is through this displacement of problematics that Don Ihde
has sought a continuity once again combining generosity with a
suspicious vigilance.
He justifies this continuity first by all the anticipations of
hermeneutic phenomenology which he discovers in Freedom and
Nature and Fallible Man.
He finds an anticipation of hermeneutic method in the use
made, in Freedom and Nature, of the "diagnostic" relation be-
tween the human sciences on the one hand and phenomenology
on the other. I admit today that he is even more correct because,
reflecting on the conditions of a discourse on action, I have be-
come very attentive to the contribution of ordinary language
analysis, emanating from Wittgenstein, Austin, and Strawson,
for the philosophy of action. I would now be inclined to return
to the theme of the «diagnostic" of phenomenological experience
 Preface / xv
in relation to objective data with the resources of an analysis that
is both linguistic and phenomenological. The conjunction would
be as beneficial for linguistic analysis as for phenomenological
analysis: the latter would be guarded against the danger of im-
mediacy, the former from the absence of a transcendental justi-
fication. A single example will illustrate this: The debate between
cause and motive and its importance during recent years in the
linguistic analytic school is familiar. A better correlation between
the analysis of ordinary language, the description of lived experi-
ence [vecu], and the data of scientific observation would, without
a doubt, permit this problem to be pulled out of the impasse in
which it is imprisoned by a theory of language games lacking
sufficient phenomenological support.
Don Ihde sees a second index of continuity between the
structural phenomenology of the earlier works and the herme-
neutic phenomenology of recent writings in my permanent mis-
trust of the pretensions of the subject in posing itself as the
foundation of its own meaning. The reflective philosophy to
which I appeal is at the outset opposed to any philosophy of the
Cartesian type based on the transparency of the ego to itself, and
to all philosophy of the Fichtean type based on the self-positing
of that ego. Today this mistrust is reinforced by the conviction
that the understanding of the self is always Indirect and pro-
ceeds from the interpretation of signs given outside me in culture
and history and from the appropriation of the meaning of these
signs. I would now dare to say that, in the coming to understand-
ing of signs inscribed in texts, the meaning rules and gives me
a self. In short, the self of self-understanding is a gift of under-
standing itself and of the invitation from the meaning inscribed
in the text. Don Ihde has well seen that this dispossession of
immediacy, of which the extreme form is the reading of texts,
is already sketched in what I formerly called the transcendental
"naivete," which superseded the naturalistic "naivete." I called
for a second "Copernican revolution" which would deliver me
from the second "naivete." I understand better today that if this
second Copernican revolution must be the result of a "Poetics of
the Will," it must begin with the discovery that this poetics is first
of all an understood and appropriated mythic word and that
meaning comes to the ego through the power of the word.
Consequently, everything in my first writings which points to
an indirect interpretation, applied first to the indices of external
objectivities, anticipates the subsequent role of the text as the
place for the decentering and dispossession of immediacy. The
 xvi / PREFACE
idea of a reading of signs, as Don Ihde detect~ very early (for
example in the interpretation of birth in Freedom and Nature),
is found to be the most fundamental anticipation of a herme-
neutic rule for phenomenology.
I would even permit myself to note, in this context, that the
hermeneutics which is anticipated is latently broader than that
which was actually expressed in The Symbolism of Evil and
Freud and Philosophy, where the idea of interpretation is still
posed in a limited sense-too limited, I would say today-inso-
far as it is bound to the notion of symbol, of double meaning.
If one takes the widest notion of a text as a guide on the herme-
neutic level, instead of simply the notion of the signification of a
double meaning, then one can say that the "dialectic of the diag-
nostic" directly anticipates this hermeneutics of a text-which
is to say hermeneutics in the broad sense.
It is in relation to this strategy of the whole that Don Ihde
interprets Fallible Man. Certainly the extremely Kantian tone of
this work does not appear to be favorable for a hermeneutic re-
flection. Yet the place held by the idea of limit (and of limit
concept) has some relevance for the forging of a hermeneutic
phenomenology. First, the "disproportion" at the heart of human
reality and the avoidance of the "third term," both of which serve
as the leitmotiv for three chapters of this book, belong to the
same enterprise of self-criticism of Husserlian phenomenology as
does the end of Freedom and Nature. In both places I recognized
the impotence of the COgito to posit its own foundation and to be
self-contained. The deciphering of signs is the counterpart of
the limits of self-knowledge. In this sense I would say today that
all hermeneutics are Kantian to the degree that the powerlessness
of self-knowledge is the negative counterpart of the necessity to
decipher signs given in me and outside me. It is the limited
character of self-knowledge which imposes the indirect strategy
of interpretation.
In relation to this general thesis, the theory of symbol, and
the application made of it in The Symbolism of Evil, clearly ap-
pears to be a very partial realization of this project. It gives the
impression that there is only a hermeneutics of symbols. I readily
grant today that the interpretation of symbols is not the whole
of hermeneutics, but I continue to hold that it is the condensation
point and, if I may say so, the place of greatest density, because
it is in the symbol that language is revealed in its strongest force
and with its greatest fullness. It says something independently
of me, and it says more than I can understand. The symbol is
 Preface / xvii
surely the privileged place of the experience of the surplus of
meaning. That is why that which is gained from a limited ex-
ample--from symbols, or, more precisely, from the symbols of
evil-has direct universal value: First, the signs with which
hermeneutic phenomenology struggles are given by the entire
culture and not simply by the psychological nature of man. Sec-
ond, the symbols invite an interpretation, as can be seen in myth,
which is already a symbolism of the second degree with an ex-
plicative pretension. Finally, the "self'" which is the intended goal
of interpretation is not the narrow and narcissistic .,!" of im-
mediate consciousness but is the subject founded by understand-
ing itself.
It is thus that a general theory of text is anticipated which
will be at the heart of the "Poetics of the Will."
Lastly, Don Ihde has well demonstrated that the "conflict of
hermeneutics," illustrated by the battle between the hermeneu-
tics of suspicion of the Freudian type and the restoration of
symbols, is a possibility inscribed at the beginning of phenome-
nology insofar as it is always in conflict with another nalvete in
addition to its own naivete. A critical project is thus inevitably
bound to the poetic project.
I am grateful to Don Ihde for having given me the courage
to continue by indicating the vectors which call for further de-
velopment.

PAUL RrCOEUR
 Preface

Two PURPOSES are served in this book. The first is to

provide an overdue introduction to the philosophy of Paul
Ricoeur. The translation of his books and many of his articles
has stimulated interest in this philosopher who has already
achieved major stature in EUl'ope. But I wish to address myself
not so much to the content of Ricoeur's work as to the develop-
ment and intricacies of his methods, which are admittedly often
puzzling due to the indirect paths he takes toward his goals.
Secondly, in the light of the vast interest in the problems of
language in this country, and more recently in France, Ricoeur
evokes a special interest. His turn to the problems of language re-
sults in a distinctive hermeneutic phenomenology which gives
and promises to give new perspectives to the philosophy of lan-
guage. This linguistically oriented phenomenology arises not only
from the suite of problems posed by language but also from the
dialectical way in which Ricoeur addresses himself to often op-
posing methods. Ricoeur succeeds in keeping the door open to the
genuine knowledge often offered by "objectivist" sciences and the
philosophies often dismissed by other phenomenolOgical thinkers.
I realize that scholarly hazards are posed by taking up an in-
terpretation of a philosopher sq clearly in the middle of his ca-
reer. And the proliferation of books on Sartre and Heidegger of-
fers only mild encoUl'agement. But corrections or supplements to
this interpretation are warmly welcomed. It has been necessary
to underplay the current of religiOUS questions and concerns
which make Ricoeur important on the theological front as well
as in philosophy. I have focused on the main line of the develop-
ment of hermeneutic phenomenology. Hopefully, however, there
[xix]
 xx / PREFACE

will be compensation if the theme of method and language

emerges in brevity and clarity. .
There is one matter of procedure which will also be open to
question: the question of translations. Ricoeur, perhaps more
than others, has suffered the fate of multiple translators-there
have been, for example, a different translator and publisher for
each of the three parts of the Philosophy of the Willi Obviously
this means that terms will often be translated differently from
book to book and from article to article. Yet I have chosen to
utilize extant translations wherever possible rather than add to
the muddle already existing. I attempt in footnotes to settle the
largest particles to the bottom, and elsewhere the context should
make the issue clear.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the debts which have made
this book possible. To the Franco-American Commission (Ful-
bright) for a research fellowship and to Southern Illinois Univer-
sity for summer research grants which made possible a year in
France, 1967-68, I offer my thanks. To p'aul Ricoeur I am es-
pecially grateful for his gentlemanly, open, and hospitable help,
particularly for the supererogatory act which allowed me acces's
to his study. I am also indebted to Andre Schuwer for a long dis-
cussion on Ricoeur interpretation and to Denis Savage, Charles
Kelbley, James Edie, and Herbert Spiegelberg for criticisms and
clues. And to John Lavely and Erazim Kohak, who some years
ago guided me through my first study on Ricoeur, I give credit
for much of the present work. Finally, to my wife for her patience
and support I also owe a cheerful debt.

D. I.
 List of Abbreviations

Full citations for the following works by Ricoeur will be

found in the bibliography.

FM FaUible Man
FN Freedom and Nature
lIT History and Truth
INT Freud and Philosophy:
An Essa:y on Interpretation
SE The Symbolism of E'Vil
Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
1 / Introduction

INTERPRETERS OF PHENOMENOLOGY frequently distin-

guish between two related but distinct developments of that phi-
losophy. At its inception phenomenology may be seen to stand in
the long tradition of Continental thought which gives primacy to
questions concerning the thinking subject and which runs at
least from Descartes through Kant and Hegel. Edmund Husserfs
transcendental phenomenology in its most extreme form, "tran-
scendental idealism," continues this emphasis with a series of
concepts such as "egology," "intentionality," and "structures of
consciousness." The thinking subject retains centrality.
Later, and most particularly in France, Husserlian methods
were adapted by philosophers whose main interests were directed
to the whole of concrete human existence. The paradigmatic
problem of the body, seen in Gabriel Marcefs idea of "incarnate
existence" and extended in the highly developed theories of Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty's "lived body" (corps vecu), utilized in vary-
ing degrees a phenomenology become existential.
There remain with both Husserlian and existential versions
of phenomenology a unique emphasis upon the concrete experi-
ence of the subject and an ~pistemology closely linked to a
philosophy of perception.1 Husserl's demand that the philosopher
turn "to the things themselves" became in substance the elabora-
tion of a theory of evidence which weights perception over ab-
stract theory construction. Later, Merleau-Ponty's "primacy" of

I. I shall use the term perception in a broad sense. Ricoeur often

calls it a "theory of representation," which would include both per-
ceptual and imaginative functions.
 4 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

perception elaborated a phenomenological theory of perception

as the basis for the whole range of human actiVity. In this sense
both Husserlian and existential phenomenologies are "percep-
tualist" philosophies.
Today there has appeared upon the horizon yet another
French thinker who begins by calling into question some impor-
tant aspects of both extant versions of phenomenology and who
seeks to formulate a third direction, a hermeneutic phenomenol-
ogy.t Paul Ricoeur, by raising in a specific way the issue of lan-
guage, opens the way for a questioning of the perceptualist em-
phasis by moving phenomenology toward a linguistic focus.
Ricoeur's divergence may be located in a preliminary way
through his indirect criticisms of existential phenomenology and
his direct criticisms of Husserlian phenomenology.
While all phenomenologists give credit in varying degrees to
the pioneer work of Husser!, it was perhaps Merleau-Ponty's in-
terpretation of Husser! which served to set the pattern for the
existential version of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty it was
the "late" Husserl who was of most interest, particularly in the
elaboration of the notion of the Lebenswelt. In effect Merleau-
Ponty saw in this concept the possibility for elaborating a series
of existential Significations out of the world of perceptual ex-
perience itself. This interpretation made Husserl the anticipator
of an existential phenomenology.
Ricoeur, in contrast, argues that:

The fruitfulness of the noetico-noematic analysis of the period of

the Ideas has probably been underestimated by the generation of
phenomenologists which went immediately to the writings of the
period of the Crisis. That school of phenomenolOgists has sought
inspiration in a theory of the Lebenswelt for a deSCription which is

2. I am not unaware of the fact that Martin Heidegger formulated

what might be called a hermeneutic phenomenology even prior to
Ricoeur. In some ways Heidegger's hermeneutics may be more radi-
cal than Ricoeur's. But I believe the strength of Ricoeur's approach
lies in an area which is always indirect in the Heideggerian context.
Ricoeur confronts directly and more thoroughly the various counter-
methods of linguistics, linguistic analysis, and other forms of con-
temporary language theory. And if in this process Ricoeur finds
himself more openly influenced by the countermethod, he also is
able to express himself in a way which allows a debate, with some
mutual understanding, between Anglo-American and European phi-
losophies.
 Introduction I 5
too quickly synthetic for my liking. . . • In the early stages at
least, phenomenology must be structural.S
On the surface this might appear to be merely the assertion of
preference for the "middle" Husserl over the "late" Husserl. This
point is partly supportable if the lack of extensive references to
the Crisis in Ricoeur's own publications is noted.
But while it is true that Ricoeur emphasizes the transcenden-
tal aspects of Husserl's phenomenology and claims that insofar
as phenomenology is phenomenology at all it must be transcen-
dental,4 the argument is made on behalf of his own program
which develops in a different direction. This is evidenced in the
more direct attacks he makes upon the "transcendental idealism"
of HusserI. "Has the doctrine of transcendental idealism value
only within the limits of a theory of representation, of the specta-
tor consciousness?" 6
This .general question, answered affirmatively in Ricoeur's
concepts, raises a question for the general models of phenome-
nology. It ultimately can be directed at the perceptualist basis
which weights phenomenology in one direction. To this weight-
ing Ricoeur applies a series of limits-but within a retained pref-
erence for a phenomenolOgical starting point. On one side
Ricoeur wishes to extend or stretch phenomenology, "even in the
course of the blood stream." 6 But on the other side there is to be
a progreSSive application of limits, generally symbolized by what
Ricoeur characterizes as Kantian limit concepts. This means
from the beginning that phenomenology does not carry the sig-
nificance of universal method for Ricoeur that it did for Husserl.
If Ricoeur's phenomenology is to be bound by a set of limits
in which countermethods cannot be totally subsumed into a
monistic approach, the result is one of a dialectic of methods.
Out of a sympathetic and careful reading of counterpositions
there is to be found in Ricoeur's thought a constantly reappearing

3. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology,

trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 214-15. (Hereafter cited
as Husserl.) Whenever possible references are taken from existing
English translations of Ricoeur's writings.
4. Ibid., p. 203. Cf. "New Developments in Phenomenology in
France: The Phenomenology of Language," Social Research, XXXIV,
no. 1 (Spring, 1967),3.
5. Husserl, p. 221.
6. Ibid., p. 216.
 6 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOG.Y

inquiry into "naturalist" or objectivist methods. Missing are the

often stringently negative responses to empiricism or scien-
tifically oriented positions found in the critiques of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Ricoeur's reading, from behaviorism
to biology, displays an almost "Hegelian" appetite for that sugges-
tive idea which may inform the central direction of refl,ective
philosophy. In the encounter and re-evaluation of objectivist theo-
ries Ricoeur claims that "A good implicit phenomenology is of-
ten concealed in the most objectivistic sciences and sometimes
comes to the fore through the 'naturalistic' concepts of psy-
chology." 'f
If phenomenology is internally limited by its central model
and externally limited by other methods, it nevertheless remains
basic to Ricoeur's development. The "hermeneutic turn" remains
within the tradition which is concerned with the concrete human
subject of phenomenological inquiry. The "Socratic" question of
self-knowledge underlies Ricoeur's inquiries, and much of his
work to date is broadly a philosophical anthropology. The way in
which this "hermeneutic turn" emerges and reorients phenome-
nology toward language is a key to Ricoeur's development in a
"hermeneutic philosophy of existence" 8 and to wider implications
for phenomenology generally.
Hermeneutics, however, is not a well-defined field. In its
broadest sense hermeneutics means interpretation and generally
suggests the idea of a text as that which is interpreted-but there
is no unified or agreed upon criteria for interpretation. Even in
its historical uses the broadness of its meanings are suggestive.
Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias is "interpretation" as logic; Plato's
techne hermeneia is an art of making obscure expressions clear;
and classical biblical exegesiS was the elaboration of four levels
of meaning to be found in a sacred text. Ricoeur utilizes all these
meanings in varying ways, but the question of interpretation is
precisely that which must be worked out in an understanding of
Ricoeur's philosophy.
What can be said at the outset by way of generalization is that
Ricoeur's application of phenomenology to language or his trans-
formation of phenomenology into hermeneutics finds its justifica-
tion in a need to elaborate concepts indirectly and dialectically

7. Ibid., p. 2.1g.
8. "A Conversation," The Bulletin of Philosophy, I, no. 1 (Jan-
uary, 1966), 2.. This terminology begins to appear from about 19 65
on.
 Introduction / 7
rather than directly and univocally. Out of the whole range of
possible expressions and out of a wide range of linguistic
"sciences," Ricoeur chooses to address himself to a certain set of
symbolic expressions (and myths) by which man may better
understand himself. This indirect route via symbol and through
interpretation constitutes the opening to a hermeneutic phenom-
enology.
For Ricoeur it is impossible that man may know himself
directly or introspectively. It is only by a series of detours that he
learns about the fullness and complexity of his own being and of
his relationship to Being. This emphasis upon indirectness
pervades the whole of Ricoeur's methodology from the early struc-
tural phenomenology to the more recent hermeneutic phenome-
nology. In its structural form, phenomenology is indirect insofar
as it arrives at the eidetic structures of consciousness by a reflec-
tive procedure. Hermeneutics refocuses this indirectness by
developing a parallel set of reflections upon the expressions of
eqUivocal symbols. It is here that the major thesis which animates
this exposition may be entered: If existential phenomenology
broke the bounds of Husserrs transcendental idealism in its appli-
cation of phenomenological procedures to the problems of the
lived body, intersubjectivity, and human freedom, Ricoeurs
phenomenology opens the way for a second breaking of the
bounds under the sign of hermeneutics. Ricoeur begins the shift
from a perceptualist phenomenological model to a linguistic
phenomenology.
With the indirectness required in the "reading" of symbols, a
level of application for a phenomenologically based philosophy is
reached which has as its unique problem questions regarding the
philosophy of culture and history. In a sense this, too, is a return
to an aspect of the Lebenswelt insofar as that world is a world of
language-but it is a return which takes the indirect route of
interpretation.
Indirectness as a vehicle attempts to avoid some of the prob-
lems which a philosophy of subjectivity can easily fall into in the
temptation of consciousness to be self-deceived. The fascination
with subjective certainty can be as deceptive as the fascination
with the world of the object found in prephenomenological phi-
losophies. If, as Rlcoeur argues, the "first Copernican revolution"
in philosophy was the turn to the subject made by transcendental
philosophy, there is an equal need to create a "second Copernican
revolution" which breaks the bonds the subject makes with itself.
But the question is how to do this without returning to the naive
 8 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 L 0 G'Y

objectivism which transcendental philosophy. overthrows. It is

this path which Ricoeur attempts to follow.

BACKGROUND TO RrCOEUR'S PHILOSOPHY

IT IS EASY to become too involved in an intellectual

biography; thus a capsule survey of what Ricoeur admits in his
philosophical confession will serve to set the stage for the analy-
sis to follow.
1. Credit for one major influence on Ricoeur goes to Gabriel
Marcel, his professor from 1935 through the graduate years.
Ricoeur's first individually published book was Gabriel Marcel
and Karl Jaspers, and early articles openly reflect some of Mar-
cefs questions. Of these, three show Marcel's lasting influence on
Ricoeur's thought. With Marcel, Ricoeur holds a profound re-
spect for the mystery of being. Here a deep distrust for any
simple reductive explanation of man or culture remains constant.
Ricoeur's modification of this Marcellian theme is one which
complements the respect for mystery with an appreciation of the
complexity of method required to make any enigma comprehen-
sible.
Ricoeur early followed the Marcellian teaching concerning
incarnate existence-I am my body-but diverged from it to a
degree in that he considered it a premature solution to the philo-
sophical problem of the body. Freedom and Nature clearly reflects
the Marcellian uses of a body-subject and a body-object and is, in
a sense, a revised commentary upon incarnation.
Ricoeur accepted and still maintains the basic conviction
that philosophy is recuperative and unifying in its aim. There
are secret or hidden unities which lie at the base and which re-
main the source for philosophical struggle. The ultimate aim of
philosophy is a "reconciled ontology.·
The doctrinal element in Marcel's thought, however, is not
what Ricoeur cites as most important. Rather, it was the "So-
cratic· method of teaching discovered in the seminars held in
Marcefs apartment. The guiding rule was that all students were
to speak first from experience-prior to citing texts or making
commentaries. It was this turn to experience which provided the
basis for philosophizing. Readers of Marcel will here recognize
the style of the Metaphysical Diary and the concept of the "sec-
ond reflection," which attempts a retum to a unified and primitive
first-person experience of the world.
 Introduction I 9
Ricoeur's greatest divergence from Marcel, supported by
Ricoeur's Germanic persistence, was in a dissatisfaction with the
inexactness of Marcel's method. While studying with Marcel,
Ricoeur was working upon Husserl's philosophy. What was
needed, he felt, was more a systematic and rigorous approach
than a philosophical diary.
2. The time to study Husserl in detail was afforded Ricoeur
under rather trying circumstances. At the outset of World War II,
Ricoeur, an officer in the French army, was captured, sent to a
series of POW camps, met Mikel Dufrenne, and spent the war
reading German philosophy. With Dufrenne, Ricoeur later pub-
lished Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l'existence.
But it was Ricoeur's translation and commentary upon
Husserl's Ideen I which was the major work of this period. The
translation and exposition, still considered a major work on
Husserl, established Ricoeur as one of France's foremost Husser!
experts.1I It is conjecture, though not unevidenced, that it was
during this time that Ricoeur developed his strong respect for the
pre-Crisis Husserl. In the Ideas Ricoeur found the strictness of
method he had earlier sought and from which, he still maintains,
any phenomenology going beyond Husserl must begin.
3. The third influence is broad in contrast to the specific
nature of the impact on Ricoeur of Marcel and Husserl. Ricoeur
cites the ten years spent as a teacher of the history of philosophy
at the University of Strasbourg as important for his appreciation
of the whole philosophical tradition. In this context it is not
difficult to understand one of Ricoeur's earliest intellectual
shifts. While he began his career with an open and friendly
attitude toward the existentialist philosophies, during ten years of
teaching he found his general sympathies tempered by more
traditional emphases which eventually moved him further from
existentialism. .
A mixed attitude is apparent in 1949 in an article, ''Le Renou-
vellement du probleme de la philosophie chretienne par les
philosophies de l'existence." 10 In general Ricoeur is positive.
With the philosophies of existence Ricoeur rejects any "inexis-
tential" or "pure" philosophy as pretentious. There is no "timeless"
philosophy, not only because philosophy has its roots in the
9. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), II, 536.
10. Paul Ricoeur, "Le Renouvellement du probleme de la
pbilosophie chretienne par les philosophies de l'existence," Le
Probleme de la philo sophie chretienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1949).
 10 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

specific history of ancient Greece and in the work of a specific

tradition, but because the claim of timelessness hides a hubris.
With existentialism Ricoeur is ready to criticize "homo philoso-
phicus [who] has cut the umbilical cord which joins the existant
to his body, to his historical moment, to others .. ."11 With
existentialism Ricoeur is ready to say that the question of human
existence itself is raised by the question of freedom and all pre-
tended objectivities or neutralities are dissolved-even those
which hold a pretended neutrality by claiming to be merely
descriptive.u With existentialism Ricoeur wishes to join the
effort to formulate a concrete philosophy of human existence.
But in the midst of this evaluation Ricoeur brings forth a
respect for certain traditional problems in philosophy. For him
the inner telos of all philosophy is rationality. If "there is a
philosophia perennis it is not because a philosophical system has
the privilege of intemporality; it is because the concern to under-
stand rationally-even the irrational-is the permanent concern
of all philosophy-even the existential." 13 Thus, even if the
philosophies of existence do not recognize it, their main contri-
bution lies in the discovery of a new dimension of rational
universality. "A new universality [which is] more subtle than that
promoted by science . . . this is their hidden rationality that
can be recovered from the questions and problems of existential
philosophies." U This emphasis upon rationality is reaffirmed
much later (1962): "For my part, I do not in the least abandon
the tradition of rationality that has animated philosophy since
the Greeks." 15
It was also during this period that a second traditional prob-
lem-the problem of necessity-was being reappraised. Ricoeur
recounts that he became more and more impressed with necessity
as an aspect of existence through his reading of Spinoza. If the
existentialist turn to human freedom closed off certain preten-
sions concerning neutrality and timelessness, a second limitation
may be posed in relation to freedom itself. For Ricoeur the prob-
lem of freedom remains linked, as in earlier traditions, to neces-
sity. A plaUSible reading of Freedom and Nature may thus be

II. Ibid., p. 47.

12. Ibid., p. 49.
13. Ibid., p. 55.
14. Ibid., pp. 56-57.
15· Pa~l R!~oeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophi-
cal Reflection, trans. Denis Savage, International Philosophical
Quarterly, II, no. 2 (May, 1962), 200.
 Introduction / II

made in tenns of a friendly critique of existentialist theories of

freedom. In its final cycle, Freedom and Nature returns to the
reciprocity of freedom and necessity.

RICOEUR'S CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHICAL AIMS

THE GUIDING COMMITMENT, made in varying ways

throughout his career, is to what Ricoeur calls reflective philoso-
phy. In its broadest sense reflective philosophy stands in the
Socratic tradition of seeking to understand oneself in under-
standing man. In speaking of the philosophical use of history-
for which any discipline related to man as a subject could be
substituted-Ricoeur holds:

The philosopher has a specific way of fulfilling in himself the

historian's work. This consists in making his own "self-discovery"
coincide with a "recovery" of history.
I do not hide the fact that this reflection does not agree with all
conceptions of philosophy. Yet I think it applies to the whole group
of philosophies which we may broadly call reflective, whether they
take their starting point from Socrates, Descartes, Kant, or Husserl.
All these philosophies are in search of the authentic subjectivity,
of the authentic act of consciousness. 16

Philosophy is reflection upon existence and upon all those means

by which that existence is to be understood.
Such a concept of philosophy holds the possibility for a series
of encounters between philosophy and other disciplines concern-
ing man. The aim is a rational ontology of human existence. The
concept of reflective philosophy affinned by Ricoeur is one
which sees the inner telos of philosophy as a search for unity-a
unity which defines Reason itself.l1 In explicating his own under-
standing of the demands for a unified or "reconciled" ontology,
Ricoeur manifests a habitual practice of setting up a polar ten-
sion. Internally, philosophic rationality must balance itself be-
tween two needs, clarity and depth. There are "two requirements
of philosophical thought-clarity and depth, a sense for distinc-
tions and a sense for covert bonds-[which] must constantly con-
16. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), p. 32. (Here-
after cited as HT.)
17. HT, p. 10.
 12 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L (;) G Y

front each other." 18 A clarity without depth is empty so far as it

is capable of shedding any ultimate light upon the mystery of
human existence; but a suggestion of depth without rational
clarity is merely "effuse romanticism."
TIlls internal set of polarities is matched by an opposition
between philosophy and prephilosophy. A reflective philosophy
takes as its field of inquiry the prereflective. This introduces a
set of tensions between source and method. ". . . Philosophy
seems to be guarded against itself by nonphilosophy. . . . It
seems that in order to be independent in the elaboration of its
problems, methods, and statements, philosophy must be depend-
ent with respect to its sources and its profound motivation. This
act cannot fail to be disquieting." 19 TIlls situation implies that
from the outset there are always some limits to be recognized in
relation to philosophic autonomy.
The internal demands of clarity and depth and the external
demand for reflection to be thought directed upon the prephilo-
sophical meet in a summary interpretation:
[Philosophic interpretation] is not a question of giving in to some
kind of imaginative intuition, but rather of thinking, that is to say,
of elaborating concepts that comprehend and make one compre-
hend concepts woven together, if not in a closed system, at least
in a systematic order. But at the same time it is a question of
transmitting, by means of this rational elaboration, a richness of
signification that was already there, that has preceded rational
elaboration. 2o
This double set of tensions carries with it the question of the
very possibility of the philosophic enterprise and poses a set of
temptations for the thinker. If prephilosophic life always pre-
cedes and in a sense exceeds the powers of reflection, then philos-
ophy remains short of the "last word." Yet the venture is
undertaken, and this very shortcoming may be elaborated in a
limit concept. In a meditation upon philosophic unity (Reason)
Ricoeur introduces one of his earlier uses of a myth to suggest a
directive idea for philosophy.
The specific problem in which the myth of the "Last Day" is
inserted is a dilemma which arises over the history of philosophy.

18. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the
Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak (Evanston, m.: Northwestern
University Press, 1966), p. IS. (Hereafter cited as FN.)
19. HT, p. 14.
20. Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols," p. 200.
 Introduction I I3
Is there a sense in which all philosophies stand in the same
truth? Ricoeur defines the problem by noting extreme values
which oppose one another. At one extreme lies the demand of
philosophy itself for unity-this is its rationality, but hidden in
this demand is a possible dogmatism, the temptation to a philo-
sophical hubris. If one philosophy is "true," then all others must
be "false." On the other extreme lies the alternative of an irreduc-
ible plurality of warring philosophies with a temptation to skepti-
cism in which all unity is abandoned or merely imposed by fiat.
Ricoeur wishes to find a third way between these extremes in
the form of a limit idea. A philosophic hope is in effect the post-
poning of a synthesis by purposely limiting philosophy itself. In
its first form the idea of hope is spoken of as a guiding or directive
feeling concerning the continuity of truth in the history of philos-
ophy.
Within the bounds of truth: This relation of belonging, of inclu-
sion . . . is accessible only to a regulative feeling capable of
purifying historical skeptiCism, a feeling which is reason but not
knowledge-the feeling that all philosophies are ultimately within
the same truth of being. This feeling I call "hope". . .:1
But hope as a feeling needs further interpretation. It is at this
point that Ricoeur introduces what he admits is an "incurably
mythical" notion-the myth of the "Last Day." Philosophy may
"listen" to the non-philosophical myth even if there remains a
wide gap between myth and the philosophical consciousness of
truth. 22
In its own context the "Last Day" is a symbol of religious hope
for perfect justice. Since perfect justice does not occur in history,
the reference of the myth is always to the "not yet." But at the
same time the myth promises that justice will be rendered, and
signs in the present refer to a "from now on . • ." Ricoeur con-
verts the mythological notion into a limit idea for philosophy
itself:
From one point of view, the concept of "Last Day" works as a
limiting concept in the Kantian sense, that is, as an active limita-
tion of phenomenal history by a total meaning which is "thought"
but not known. . . . I am always short of the Last Judgment. By
setting up the limit of the Last Day, I thereby step down from my
seat as final judge. The last word therefore is not uttered any-

21. HT,p.G.
22. HT,p.7.
 14 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

where . . . the limiting concept of an end to history protects the

"discontinuity" of unique visions of the world. '. . .
But the philosophical impact of hope for the Last Day is not
limited to this dethronement of our rational supremacy. In the
very midst of this sort of agnosticism in the philosophy of history.
it is the source of affirmation. . . .
This recuperative reflection is certainly the philosophical im-
pact of hope, no longer merely in the category of the "not yet"
but in that of the "from now on." 23
The end result of taking the myth as a limit concept is to accept a
"living tension" for philosophy. The tension preserves a recogni-
tion of limits on one side and a desire, as hope, to probe as fully
as possible towards unity on the other. There is to be no prema-
ture synthesis, but the drive for unity is to remain the animating
telos. The limit idea of a postponed synthesis becomes a func-
tional rule designed to protect thought against both hubris and
skepticism.

PROBLEMS OF METHOD

THE GENERAL STRATEGY of opposing two sides of a

polarity leading to a limit concept becomes a major tactic of
Ricoeur's thought. This characteristic, dialectical in its outline,
is one which has three main features:
I. At its lowest level of operation Ricoeur's dialectic uses a
weighted focus, a favored method, against which all opposing or
counterfoci are to be played. In its weighting some version of
phenomenology as analysis is central. But llicoeur uses phenome-
nology in at least three recognizable senses. In its first and
strictest sense phenomenology is Husserlian. The use of an
intentional (noetico-noematic) deSCription stresses a systematic,
clear, and structural approach to the problem at hand. Structural
characteristics must precede existential significations and varia-
tions. Thus, in his main project to date, a philosophy of the will,
Ricoeur begins with what he calls an eidetic of the will. But even
so late as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation a
basically Husserlian analysis is used as a counter to psycho-
analysis. 24
23. HT, pp. 12-13.
24· Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpreta-
tion, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1970). (Hereafter cited as INT. The translation inverts the
 Introduction / 15
In a broader sense Ricoeur sees phenomenology as a histori-
cal development beginning, implicitly at least, in Kant and pro-
ceeding through Hegel to Husserl. Ricoeur does not hesitate to
apply "phenomenology" to each philosopher in a different way.
Although Kant is understood to have anticipated phenomenology
in the Critiques, his philosophy is oriented by specific epistemo-
logical questions and is weighted toward a "phenomenology" of
judgment rather than toward Husserlian representationalism.
Ricoeur seems to use a Kantian "phenomenology" to limit Husser-
lian phenomenology.
HegeYs phenomenology, too, plays an increasingly important
role in Ricoeur's thought. In a general way Ricoeur's dialectic of
opposing values moving toward a third term suggests the
Hegelian dialectic-but in a much more specific sense it is the
Hegelian development of a genetic or developmental phenome-
nology which is utilized by Ricoeur. Both the movement from
consciousness to self-consciousness and the notion that the
"truth" of one moment is revealed only in the moment which
follows are important in Ricoeur's broad understanding of phe-
nomenology.
Finally, in the widest sense reflective philosophy, as a part of
the transcendental tradition, is a type of "phenomenology" as
well. In this sense any philosophy which takes as its guiding
theme the existent subject and which begins under the sign of
the "first Copernican revolution" is open to "phenomenology."
The distinctive problematization of the given as the reflective
first move away from the naive, a demand used in various ways
by transcendental philosophies, plays a recurring role in Ricoeur's
method.
1bis series of centrally valued "phenomenologies" provides
the weighted focus for all subsequent movement of the dialectic.
What provokes that dialectic, however, are the limitations which
keep the "phenomenologies" from gaining an exclusive poSition.
In Ricoeur's working habits all methods are dialectically limited
and are founded through the discovery of limits. !here is a
chance that in discovering what limits a method one also dis-
covers what justifies and founds a method." liD And to discover
French title De l'interpretation: Essai sur Freud [Paris: Editions du
Seull, 1965J. I have chosen the abbreviation INT to reflect Ricoeur's
primary emphasis on interpretation.)
25. Paul Ricoeur, "Sympathie et respect: Phenomenologie et
ethique de la seconde personne," Revue de metaphysique et de morale,
LIX (1954), 380.
 16 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

the limit of a method also opens the possibility of exceeding that

method. .
2. The opposition of methods provides the second level of
operation in Ricoeur's dialectic. To recognize limits to a single
focus is to implicitly grant that a counterfocus is possible. In
principle such an operation remains within the spirit, if not the
letter, of Husserlian philosophy. Husser! called not only for the
development of a transcendental phenomenology but also for a
thoroughly philosophical criticism of that phenomenology.
Ricoeur substitutes a dialectical play of countermethods to locate
limits rather than an ascent to a higher-level interpretation of
phenomenological psychology.
In its first appearance Ricoeur's dialectic is double-focused,
suggesting the use of a geometrical metaphor. From two fixed
points at least two figures are possible. The first is a set of partly
overlapping circles; the second an ellipse. In the case of Freedom
and Nature one point or focus is clearly weighted centrally as an
eidetic phenomenology. But against this focus are played a series
of counterfoci all of which have in common a type of objectivism
(empirical psychology, psychoanalysis, and biology among
them).
In the play and counterplay of phenomenology and counter-
phenomenology Ricoeur seeks to isolate latent phenomenologies
from their objectivist contexts and to provide a critique which
destroys the naivete of the objectivist attitude toward the sub-
ject. But in the same play and counterplay a set of limits ulti-
mately shows that the countermethods may not be taken up into
a centrally weighted focus. The dialectic remains one of only
partly overlapped circles.
3. It is in and through the dialectic that Ricoeur evolves the
use of a third term which functions as an operational unity bind-
ing it together. Freedom and Nature does not explicitly evolve
such a term but is left with the recognition of two partly over-
lapped circles of theory. There is implicit in the very recognition
of limits for the countermethods and in the concept of the index
a beginning movement toward a third term. In Fallible Man the
third term is explicitly introduced as a limit idea. The dialectic of
oppositions, limited in a third term, remains a hallmark of
Ricoeur's method. The third term, the struggle with a postponed
synthesis, and the origin Of the problem of hermeneutics are all
one and the same problem.
If these problems were merely internal to Ricoeur's philoso-
phy, they might be less interesting as a way of posing questions
 Introduction / 17
concerning the development of phenomenological philosophy.
But the problems which are caught up in Ricoeur's philosophical
net are of lasting import for wider inquiry. One such problem is
the continuing confrontation between phenomenologically based
philosophies and the persistent advance made by objectivist
thought. On its side phenomenology as a theory is a series of
methods and concepts which take as their central value the
primacy of concrete experience.26 And in a narrower sense within
the whole range of experience the final weight is placed upon
immediacy. The Husserlian theory of evidence in which the aim
is "to the things themselves" always finds its verification only
when that which is under investigation is "bodily" present. In
this sense the so-called "subjectivism" of phenomenology is an
inversion of all objectivist positions which contrarily weight their
theories of evidence in a theory of explanation (positing that
which presumably lies behind experience).
If phenomenology has shown a new philosophical strength,
it is precisely in its ability to uncover and expose to thought just
those phenomena of experience which tend to be overlooked or
discounted by objectivism. It is with justifiable right that the
phenomenologist accuses empiricism of a naivete regarding hu-
man experience. But at this metatheoreticalleveI another ques-
tion must be raised, since it seems at least unlikely that a
phenomenological overthrow will be completed. Might there not
be a corresponding naivete within phenomenology itself? What
phenomena, for example, are overlooked or underrated in phe-
nomenology itself? A suggestive answer may be found in just
those phenomena which today go by the term "scientific fact" for
which there remain no clear correlate in human experience.
These "facts" include a whole series of phenomena quite famil-
iar to the sciences which deal with man. Or, put otherwise, is it
entirely accidental that we have today a phenomenolOgical psy-
chology but no phenomenological neurology?
There are, of course, some responses which may be given by
the defender of phenomenolOgy. Perhaps the most likely is that
phenomenology 1s itself prescierttific. Its task, at most, remains
to remind the sciences that they relate back to the lifeworld
whether or not they are aware of it. But this reduction of phe-
nomenology is in effect a limitation of its epistemology to one

26. I shall use experience in a broad sense, roughly synonymous

with what later phenomenolOgists call "subjectivity," rather than in
Husserl's sense of Erfahrung.
 18 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

area and in no way accounts for the obviously successful develop-

ment of objectivism in our day. '
Ricoeur's philosophy opens another possibility. He leads one
to suspect that phenomenology itself contains a naivete in rela-
tion to methods which function indirectly (and in spite of their
naivete) and which find their justification precisely in given
types of indirectness. The "third way" which Ricoeur seeks is not
to be a return to a prephenomenological objectivism-although
these methods are re-evaluated through Ricoeur's inquiries-it
is to be a radicalization of phenomenology itself, an uncovering
of the naivete of transcendentalism itself, a "second Copernican
revolution" :
The constitutive character of consciousness is a conquest of
criticism over naturalistic (or mundane) naivete. But the tran-
scendental level thus won conceals a second-level naIvete-the
naivete of criticism which consists in considering the "transcen-
dental," the "constitutive," as the absolutely irreducible. . . . It
is as if a second naivete were involved in it, a transcendental
naIvete which takes the place of the naturalistic one. The tran-
scendental reflection creates the illusion that philosophy could be a
reflection without a spiritual discipline (ascese), without a puri-
fication of its own seeing.2'7

In this way, within the dialectic, the re-evaluation of objectivism

leads to a second act, the reduction of the transcendental naivete
or of phenomenology itself.
The major movement of Ricoeur's series of "readings" of the
will becomes a progressive ."demythologization" of the two illu-
sions which correspond to transcendental and objectivist presup-
positions. Beginning with transcendental thought, the illusion
which is first to be excised is precisely that which lay open in a
"natural attitude," the possibility for the subject to be "lost" in the
world. The naivete of the natural attitude is presubjective.
Initially I am lost and forgotten in the world, lost in the things,
lost in the ideas, lost in the plants and the animals, lost in others,
lost in mathematics. Presence . . . is the occasion of temptation;
in seeing there is a trap, the trap of my alienation; there I am ex-
ternal, diverted. Now it is evident how naturalism is the lowest
stage of the natural attitude . . . For if I lose myself in the world,
I am then ready to treat myself as a thing of the world. The thesis
of the world is a sort of blindness in the very heart of seeing. What

27. Husserl, pp. 228, 232.

 Introduction / I9
I call living is hiding myself as naive consciousness within the ex-
istence of all things ..• [contrarily] phenomenology is a true
conversion of the sense of intentionality, which is first the for-
getting of consciousness, and then its discovery of itself as given. 28

Once the phenomenological turn, which reflexively reveals the

subject, is made, the illusion is no longer possible in its naive
sense, "the point of view of transcendental constitution
triumphls] over the naivete of natural man." 29
Subjectivity, now isolated and extricated from being an ob-
ject among objects, becomes a theme to be investigated for its
own sake. But in becoming a theme a second illusion occurs in
which the subject, "tends to posit itself. . . . The self becomes
detached and exiles itself into what the Stoics have already called
the circularity of the soul . . . the circle which I form with my-
self." 90 This second illusion, arising in transcendental thought
itself, is a naivete even more difficult to deal with than the first:

This naivete may be more difficult to overcome than that of

the "natural" attitude. If the ego loses itself easily in its world and
understands itself willingly in tenns of the things that surround it,
an even more tenacious illusion imprisons it in the very matrix of
its own subjectivity. . . • The "vanity" of the ego is stretched like
a veil over the very being of its own existeDce.:n

The question is how to dispel this second illusion WIthout return-

ing to the reign of the object and its naivete .
. Ricoeur's promise is to do this by a final reading of the will
in a poetics which would displace the subject from its self-made
circle. "In relation to this first Copernican revolution, the poetics
of the will ought to appear as a second Copernican revolution
which displaces being from the center, without however return-
ing to the rule of the object." 82 This poetics, hermeneutic in its
mode of indirectness, has not yet been formulated-but its de-
mands have been clarified in Freud and Philosophy and antici-
pated from the outset of Ricoeur's project.

The Ego must more radically renounce the covert claim of all con-
sciousness, must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can re-

2.8. Ibid., p. 2.0.

2.9. Ibid., p. 24·
30. FN, p. 14.
31. Husserl, p. 2.32.
32. FN, p. 32.
 20 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

ceive the nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the

sterile circle of the self's constant return to itself.s8
This new "reduction" is a reduction of transcendental thought
itself. It is the methodological goal implied in Ricoeurs attempt
to radicalize phenomenology.

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

THE DEVELOPMENT of Ricoeur's philosophy falls into

two broad divisions. The first division is a structural phenome-
nology developed primarily in Freedom and Nature and contin-
ued in Fallible Man. The leading questions concerning the
subject in the structural phase remain strictly limited to what
Ricoeur calls fundamental possibilities. These "structures" of the
will are open to rational philosophy without the necessity of sym-
bol or myth. Structural phenomenology, however, "brackets out"
what Ricoeur terms the Fault (la faute). Only when the realm of
experienced evil and suffering is reintroduced can there be a fully
existential development of philosophical anthropology.
The second phase of phenomenology is properly hermeneu-
tic, and its major outlines occur in The Symbolism of Evil and
Freud and Philosophy. Here the turn is made from the structures
of experience to the concrete expressions in symbol and myth
that man makes concerning his existence.
The major content of Ricoeur's philosophy revolves around
the will and the question of freedom. "With freedom, the existen-
tial and the ontological become synonymous. The being of man
consists in existing . . ." 114 But all freedom, all human exist-
ence, stands under the sign of the Fault. For Ricoeur man is a
faulted being.
The Fault suggests a double metaphor (in both French and
English). In a geological context a fault is a discontinuity in a
given layer or stratum of the earth's structure. Due to some dis-
turbance deep in the earth, a crack may occur in such a way that
a given layer becomes discontinuous (though not necessarily to-
tally) with itself. This metaphor, expressed with particular clar-
ity in Fallible Man, is used in Ricoeur's contention that man
carries a noncoincidence within himself. But the structural as-
pect of fault is not Fault in the full sense.
33. FN, p. 14.
34. Husserl, p. 210.
 Introduction / 21

The other sense of Fault is roughly moral; in ordinary usage

to say, "It is my (or his) fault," is to impute some type of blame
usually connected with a consciously undertaken act. Ricoeur
expands this usage to cover the whole dimension of evil suffered
and enacted. The imputation of guilt lies within this aspect of
Fault.
The discontinuity between the two metaphorical senses of the
Fault is purposely maintained. Ricoeur sees in the philosophical
treatment of Fault a tendency to treat all of existence structur-
ally.
Philosophy tends to reduce the event of guilt to a structure homo-
genous with other structures of the voluntary and the involuntary.
In this respect the philosophies of existence, which have done so
much to reintroduce error (faute) into philosophical reflection,
proceed no differently than Plotinus and Spinoza: for them also
finitude is the ultimate philosophical alibi for guilt . . .85
To the structural treatment of will must be added a hermeneutics
of Fault which must reveal both the dramatic aspect of guilt
which escapes a structural analysis and the limits which are in-
herent in philosophy in its structural guise.
The general division between a structural and a hermeneutic
phenomenology is further specified by a series of "readings" of
the will. Beginning from an analysis of consciousness in the will,
Ricoeur first performs what he calls an eidetic. Eidetic repeats
the Husserlian dictum that any factual science must first be pre-
ceded by an eidetic or essential science. Possibilities or ideal
limits precede the actual variations of the facts. Thus Ricoeur de-
mands "a description . . . capable of revealing man's structures
or fundamental possibilities . • . [an] abstraction . . . in some
respects akin to what Husserl calls eidetic reduction, that is,
bracketing of the fact and elaborating the idea or meaning. as to

Bracketed out are the questions of Fault, as the experience of

guilt, and Transcendence, as the ultimate source of the subject
itself. Only what is characterized as a neutral realm of pure pos-
sibilities is to be described. 'We sketched the neutral sphere of
man's most fundamental possibilities, or as it were, the undif-
ferentiated keyboard upon which the guilty as well as the inno-
cent man might play." 87
35. Ibid., p. 230.
36. FN, pp. 3-4·
37. Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago:
Henry Regnery Co., 1966), p. xvi. (Hereafter cited as FM.)
 22 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLO,GY

Eidetic is a first move away from the lifeworld of Fault, a de-

liberate attempt to remove the sense of immediacy found in pre-
reflective life in order to make that life thematizable. Such a
reduction restricts itself to a description which eschews all "ex-
planation" and remains short of the full range of actual experi-
ence.
The second "reading" of the will consists of a removal of
these brackets, a movement toward what Ricoeur calls an
empirics of the will. But the second reading stops short of the
existential and interprets the totality of the structures of the will
as fallible. At its utmost structural limits, the will is seen to be
open to the possibility, but not the necessity, of the experience
and enactment of evil.
The abstract atmosphere of Freedom and Nature and the re-
moval of brackets in FaUible Man yield to a third reading of the
will in what Ricoeur terms in The Symbolism of Evil a mythics.
Here is a partial methodological disconti~uity which parallels
the distinction between the structural and moral senses of Fault.
Ricoeur "leaps" to an examination of the concrete expressions of
man's experiences of evil and suffering in a move which is both
tactical and indirect.
The move from the structures of possible experience to the
facticity of actual expressions is the move from possibilities to
an already formulated language. Ricoeur chooses the religiOUS
confessions of evil as his field of inquiry and makes The Sym-
bolism of Evil a first exercise in explicit hermeneutics. Underly-
ing this shift of strategy is the presupposition that symbols and
myths have a certain power to reveal in and through indirect ex-
pressions. The mythics pose the problem of how philosophic
thought may be ''informed by" symbol and myth without either
falsely reducing the symbolic or being taken into the myth in un-
critical fashion. Employing "sympathetic imagination" in the
reading of texts, the first hermeneutic exercise seeks to recover
the donation of symbolic significance for thought.
The symbolic, however, hides and dissembles as well as re-
veals. Its indirectness is not only a wealth, but an opacity and
equivocity as well. Freud and Philosophy encounters another pos-
sibility in the development of hermeneutics. The sympathetic
imagination of a first reading is here chastized by a hermeneutics
which "suspects" the symbolic. In a decisive confrontation be-
tween phenomenology and psychoanalysis, between a hermeneu-
tics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur
reaches a critical point in the development of hermeneutic phe-
 Introduction / 23
nomenology, The question of language, beginning with the sym-
bolic, becomes the new center for such a phenomenology,

LANGUAGE AND 'WORD"

THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND symbolic expressions is the

theme for Ricoeur's entry into language in the "henneneutic
turn," But underlying this privilege of henneneutics are several.
broad motivating concerns.
I. Man is language, Ricoeur says today, and the problem of
language remains a problem of the human subject. But the prob-
lem which situates man as language revolves around what may
be tenned a crisis of language at a certain state of civilization, In
one of his first published papers Ricoeur claims, "1 belong to my
civilization 'as 1 am bound to my body. I am situated-in-civiliza-
tion and it no more depends upon me to have a different history
than to have a different body. I am implicated in a particular ad-
venture, in a particular complex history . . ." 38
That civilization, as Ricoeur understands it, is marked by the
rise of critical. thought. If it is through language that man ex-
presses his self-understanding, it is just those expressions which
mediate this understanding which are called into question by
critical thought. Historically, the language of symbol and myth
provided a means for understanding man's situation and possi-
bilities. But critical. thought destroys all "first naivete" concerning
belief in myth and successfully separates myth from empiri-
cal history. This is not to say that Ricoeur belongs to that group
of modern philosophers who would romantically and nostalgi-
cally hint at a return to some age of prephilosophical innocence.
For Ricoeur all myth is already "fallen" and no age of innocence
ever existed. Myth and symbol are imaginative variations which
intend without necessarily fulfilling an intention. But they are
also the means by which human possibilities are made concrete
in imaginative fonn. The crisis of critical thought is one which
again raises the question of the "fullness" of language.
The historical moment of the philosophy of symbol is both the mo-
ment of forgetting and the moment of restoring . . . In the very
age in which our language is becoming more precise, more uni-
vocal, more technical, better suited to those integral formaliza-
38. Paul Ricoeur, "Le Chretien et la civilisation OCCidentale,"
Christianisme social (October-December, 1946), p. 424.
 24 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 L O.G Y

tions that axe called precisely "symbolic" logic . . . -it is in this

age of discourse that we wish to rechaxge language. . . . But this
too is a gift from "modernity." For we modems are men of philoso-
phy, of exegesis, of the phenomenology of religion, of the psy-
choanalysis of language. The same age develops the possibility of
emptying language and the possibility of :filling it anew. It is
therefore no yearning for a sunken Atlantis that urges us on, but
the hope of a re-creation of language. Beyond the wastelands of
critical thought we seek to be challenged again. BS
Language, In the symbolic, the mythological, is a function of self-
understanding. It portrays a directive image of man through
which he portrays his possibilities. In the symbol is a "word."
2. The role of language as "word" which reveals, which
brings Into the open for reflection, is echoed in several ways in
Ricoeul's thought. Ricoeur understands himself as a man of
language: "What do I do when I teach? I speak. I have no
other means of livelihood and I have no other dignity; I have
no other means of transforming the world and no other influence
upon men. The word is my work; the word is my kingdom." 40
Later, in another statement of vocational role, Ricoeur again re-
lates "word" as the philosophical vocation:
As a university professor, I believe in the efficacity of instructive
speech; in teaching the history of philosophy, I believe in the en-
lightening power, even for a system of politics, of speaking de-
voted to elaborating our philosophical memory. As a member of
the team of Esprit, I believe in the efficaCity of speech which
thoughtfully elucidates the generating themes of an advancing
civilization. As a listener to the Christian message, I believe that
words may change the "heart," that is, the refulgent core of our
preferences and the positions which we embrace.41
3. Given a growing preoccupation with "word," with lan-
guage, and a project Ricoeur today terms the "hermeneutical
philosophy of human existence," the door gradually opens for
the philosophy of language itself. The way into this question is
one which sees the linguistic sciences and philosophies as them-
selves having a certain development.
Linguistics itself developed at first in terms of smaller unities of
language, phonology, lexical units, simple syntax, but all exegesis
39· Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols," pp. 192-93.
40. Paul Ricoeur, "La Paxole est mon royaume," Esprit, XXIII
(February, 1955),P. 192.
41. HT,p. 5.
 Introduction / 25
has to confront greater wholes of language-a myth, a dream .
We are still waiting to see what are all the consequences of trans-
forming linguistics into a hermeneutical science.42
But what Ricoeur does is to invert the history of linguistic sci-
ences and begin (phenomenologically) with the whole or the
most complex-with what he calls the fullness of language.
Ricoeur distinguishes between thinking in a language and
thinking about language. To begin with the fullness of language
is to begin with language at its most perplexing moment, from
the equivocity of the symbol. This is an attempt to rethink lan-
guage with and in its presuppositions. But there is also the need
to meet and understand the theories about language, and to these
Ricoeur increasingly turns.
I am especially interested in the problem of language-a cross-
roads, a confrontation of all the schools. Language is a problem
for phenomenology as well as for linguistic analysis. It has an im-
portant role to play in theological exegesis, psychoanalysis, and
other fields . . . In particular I would like to examine the passage
from thought, nourished by symbols, especially mythical symbols,
to speculation. I am very much interested in the transition from
symbols to reflection and that is why I am working on language. 4s
In language, in the symbol, cross all the concerns of method, of
the subject, and of the opening to a philosophy of culture which
motivate Ricoeur's thought.
42. Ricoeur, "A Conversation," p. I.
43. Ibid., p. 2.
2 / Structural Phenomenology:
The Latent Hermeneutics of
Freedom and Nature

AN EXPOSITION OF Freedom and Nature as an anticipa-

tion of hermeneutics places severe limits upon the range of rele-
vant material to be dealt with. In its ow context the eidetic
reading of the will is primarily an adaptation of Husserlian
phenomenology to the complex activities of the will. Moving
through three cycles of description beginning with decision, ex-
tending to action or bodily motion, and culminating in consent
to necessity. Ricoeur carefully employs the models of. transcen-
dental phenomenology.
An epoche or suspension of all beliefs regarding both ordinary
and causal theories of what may lie behind or "explain" the will
is imposed. "The first principle which guided our description is
the methodological contrast between description and explana-
tion" (FN, p. 4). The aim is to display experience to the limits
of phenomenological possibility. "The task of describing the vol-
untary and the involuntary is in effect one of becoming recep-
tive to [the] COgito's complete experience, including even its most
diffuse affective margins" (FN, p. 8).
Through epoche, willing-as-consciousness becomes thematic.
And although an important reservation must be added, it is the
voluntary aspect of willing which centralizes consciousness in its
first appearance. <'This descriptive study will always begin with
a description of the voluntary aspect, after which we shall Con-
sider what involuntary structures are needed to make that act
or that aspect of the will intelligible" (FN. p. 5).1 In each cycle

I. The same principle holds that one must begin with normal, as
against pathological, behaviors in relation to will.
[26]
 Structural Phenomenology I 27
the first task is to thematize consciousness-though with a dif-
ficulty, the difficulty of applying the perceptual model implicit
in phenomenology to nonrepresentational behavior.
The descriptions are further recognizable as intentional
(noematic-noetic) analyses. In Husserlian fashion this is to be-
gin with the "appearance" of the object-correlate of experience.
The formula "all consciousness is consciousness of .. ap-
plies to the will, and the deSCription begins when the blank is
filled in. The experienced precedes the understanding of experi-
encing. Thus in each cycle a description of the aim or reference
of the experience comes prior to the specific reflection upon the
subject. To decide has as its object the formation of a project in
the world; to act is to undertake a pragma in the world; and to
consent is to acquiesce to necessity against which the will is im-
potent in the world.
The subject becomes strictly thematic only reflectively or
noetically. It is this movement of intentional analysis which sepa-
rates it from ordinary introspection. The reflective turn finds one
of its justifications genetically. Self-awareness arises secondarily
in will as in other dimensions of experience. And in the case of
Freedom and Nature a special caveat may be entered-the re-
flective turn to the subject may, and often does, arise when the
first intentional moment is interrupted or broken in its aim (I.e.,
involuntarily). Again in each cycle the reflective turn thema-
tizes a field for description: reflectively the project is motivated;
the pragma is possible only by means of the organ of motion
which capacitates movement; and consent reaches an absolute
limit in the invincible.
It is in a speCial consideration within the reflective turn that
Ricoeur introduces an innovation which brings into play a "la-
tent" hermeneutics. This innovation arises in relation to what is
called the involuntary, and the latent hermeneutics is the concept
of the diagnostic. Basic to the entire notion of willing is what
Ricoeur takes as a primitive reciprocity: "The initial situation
revealed by description is the reciprocity of the involuntary and
the voluntary" (FN, p. 4). Voluritary willing meets and is limited
by capacities which are involuntary. It is the involuntary side of
this reciprocity which poses the need for a second type of indirect-
ness which is already latently hermeneutic.
In the beginning Ricoeur weights the voluntary side of the
reciprocity-a weighting which is both psychological and phe-
nomenolOgical :
 28 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L O.G Y

Not only does the involuntary have no meaning of its own, but
understanding proceeds from the top down, and not from the bot-
tom up. Far from the voluntary being derivable from the involun-
tary, it is, on the contrary, the understanding of the voluntary
which comes first in man. I understand myself in the :first place as
he who says, "I will." The involuntary refers to the will as that
which gives it its motives and capacities, its foundations and even
its limits (FN, p. 5).

The question becomes one of how to deal with the involuntary

which limits and founds the voluntary.
Were Ricoeur's approach an existential phenomenology in the
full sense, the involuntary would be dealt with in a fashion simi-
lar to that of the voluntary, strictly within the limits of experi-
ence. A converted noematic-noetic analysis of the involuntary
would turn first to the "appearance" of the involuntary in the
world and then reflect upon what is found within the subject. In
this case the first description might be one which opens the area
of "situated freedom" which contrasts facticity as the situation
in which the voluntary finds itself; reflectively the problem would
be to describe the limits of experience as those of bodily existence
in a "lived body."
Such a movement is not entirely foreign to Freedom and Na-
ture. The echoes of the Marcellian theme of incarnation and the
concept of a personal body (corps propre) II place much of Ri-
coeur's eidetic of the involuntary in sympathy with existential
thought. But two modifications prevent a direct movement to-
ward existential significations. The first appears symptomatically
in an emphasis upon the reflective side of puzzles concerning the
involuntary. The "external" limits of the world are recognized,
thus situating the will, but these limits are used throughout as
indicators for limits within the subject. It is precisely these limits
which are enigmatic for a reflective philosophy.
This symptomatic emphasis upon the reflective involuntary
is most apparent in the crucial discussion of consent. In that cy-
cle of the will Ricoeur specifically underplays a consideration of
absolute limits in the world and steps back from any cosmolOgi-
cal implications involved, concentrating instead almost exclu-
sively upon the limits of the subject as character, unconscious,

2. I shall use Ricoeur's corps propre variously as the personal

body (Kobak's translation) and as the I-body. This term in the general
literature is often translated as the "owned body" or the "lived body."
Ricoeur's use is close to that of Merleau-Ponty's corps 7Jecu.
 Structural Phenomenology / 29
and biologicallife. 8 The goal is to "[exhibit] the mutual rooted-
ness of freedom and nature up to the most unmistakable forms
of necessity, at the level of the indistinct awareness of being
alive" (Husserl, p. 225). The nature spoken of in this case is the
nature of the subject.
The second modification emerges as two different readings
of the involuntary. The first reading of the involuntary is func-
tionally parallel with existential phenomenology. In each in-
stance of dealing with the body-which will become in this
exposition the paradigmatic example to the exclusion of other im-
portant aspects of Freedom and Nature-Ricoeur undertakes a
first reading which discloses the body as the body of an experienc-
ing subject. But these descriptions do not stand alone.
Ricoeur recognizes a whole range of studies which also deal
with the involuntary. These studies, though in method the in-
verse of a phenomenolOgical thematization of the body, range
from behavioral psychology to genetic biology, sciences that also
deal with the body. Ricoeur, when he grants them a counter-
weighting with uncharacteristic phenomenological charity, goes
beyond the limits of a strictly eidetic reading of the will. In rela-
tion to the paradigmatic examples in question Ricoeur grants:
"The body is better known as an empirical object elaborated by
experimental sciences. We have a biology, endowed with an ob-
jectivity . . . for knowing the objectivity of facts within a na-
ture encompassed by laws of an inductive kind" (FN, p. 8). The
door is opened to a dialectic between phenomenolOgical and ob-
jective universes of discourse, and in the conflict of these separate
theories the latent hermeneutics of Freedom and Nature emerges.
The involuntary is "read" first phenomenologically, but then
diagnostically. The special role played by objectivist studies is
only indirectly used in the second diagnostic interpretation, how-
ever. Ricoeur is neither a scientist nor a psycholOgist and does
not pretend to be one. Objective studies are used as counterfoci
which limit phenomenology and which provide a series of indices
for a recovery of vague or likely~to-be-hidden areas of experience.
The expanded but to-be-limited phenomenology of Freedom and
Nature is in part made possible by objectivism.
The diagnostic of Ricoeur's invention relies upon a reversed
medical metaphor. The doctor in his training learns to relate the
subjective discourse of the patient to what he knows concerning

3. Here one glimpses an anticipation of what is to become the

problem of the "archeology of the subject."
 30 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

the objective characteristics of a disease. Ricoeur reverses this

process and proposes the diagnostic as a way 'to take objective
characteristics as signs for obscure or border experiences in rela-
tion to the involuntary. 'This relation is not at all apriori, but is
gradually formed in a sign-learning process. Such an analysis of
symptoms, which we are here using with respect to the Cogito,
is used by a doctor in the service of empirical knowledge, an ex-
perience indicating a functioning or a functional disorder of the
object body" (FN, p. 13). The task is to take the objective indi-
cator as a sign for an experience of the Cogito in order to locate
obscure areas within experience and to limit in more definite
fashion the borders of experience. But at the same time this in-
directness shifts the center of Ricoeur's method from a purely re-
flective examination of the COgito to a second order reading of
signs.
Philosophy of man appears to us as a living tension between an
objectivity elaborated by a phenomenology to do justice to the
Cogito (itself recovered from naturalism) and the sense of my in-
carnate existence. The latter constantly overflows the objectivity
which in appearance respects it most but which by its very nature
tends to eschew it. That is why the concepts we use . . . are indi-
cations of a living experience in which we are submerged more
than signs of mastery which our intelligence exercises over our hu-
man condition. But in tum it is the task of philosophy to clarify
existence by the use of concepts (FN, p. 17).

In dialectic between objectivism and phenomenology proper, the

mediation of the diagnostic functions as the second reading of
the involuntary.
A more detailed outline of the method in Freedom and Nature
is now possible: ( a) Beginning within the limits of a more
strictly Husserlian model, the first step is to describe the funda-
mental structure of the will. Within each cycle of decision,
action, and consent, an analysis of the world-directed aim of ex-
perience is analyzed. This first noematic movement, described
acutely and with respect for complexity, outlines each form of
transcending behavior in the will. (b) The reflective return to
the subject, again within the limits of a Husserlian pattern,
situates the references of experiences back into relation with the
life of the Cogito. The :final reflective terminus of the noetic
movement is the personal body (corps propre), the subject as in-
carnate. (c) But the body is precisely what is obscure for reflec-
tion itself. The "mystery" of incarnate existence is opaque even
 Structural Phenomenology I 31
for phenomenology. At these margins of experience, open only
in degree to a phenomenology as the discovery of an obscurity
area, a second reading of bodily existence (as involuntary) is in-
troduced by (d) the diagnostic. By detouring into the realm of
objective studies, Ricoeur proposes to extract from their universes
of discourse an "alienated phenomenology." In practice the diag-
nostic develops several of its own methodological steps. The first
use of the diagnostic is critical. By playing the findings of phe-
nomenology off against the counterweights of objective studies,
the diagnostic is a "demythologization" of the naturalism of those
sciences. The gain, indirectly, is a better understanding of the
movement from existence to objectivity in which the subject be-
comes alienated from the full sense of its experience. But since
the dialectic involved in the diagnostic occurs at the borders of
experience, in the vague and obscure, a second process involves
the locating and mapping of these borders. This serves to limit
the universes of discourse at borders which overlap only in an
ambivalence. Finally, the location of limits extends to a philoso-
phyof consciousness itself. Through the diagnostic a phenome-
nology of the will as consciousness is itself limited. Although in
Freedom and Nature these steps often tend to merge, the gain in
understanding the functioning of universes of discourse may be
shown by utilizing only a very restricted set of examples.
The use of the diagnostic is not without problematic effect.
Two complications arise out of this dialectical version of phe-
nomenology. Ricoeur poses as his main aim in the eidetic read-
ing of the will a display of the fundamental possibilities of the
will, the limits within which all possible willing occurs. These
ideal limits, however, manifest two quite different characteris-
tics, each of which corresponds to two different meanings of
limit. On one side the fundamental possibility is an ideality, the
highest possible notion of a will within the structural limits of
being human; on the other side the limit is that of a border in
which the reciprocity of the voluntary and involuntary is located
as a margin between subjective and objective universes of dis-
course. The first meaning, whiCh opens the way to overtly mytho-
logical themes as "dreams of innocence," stands in contrast to
the second, which relates to existential obscurity. The generation
of this problem is to be found in the double use of Husserlian and
diagnostic methods.
The second problem centers more directly in the use of the
diagnostic itself, which Ricoeur uses in both a weak and a strong
sense. In its weak sense, objective studies are used merely to pro-
 32 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM EN 0 LOG Y

vide indices which help uncover otherwise obscured experiences.

But in the strong sense Ricoeur claims that where no overlap or
equivalent between objective and subjective universes of dis-
course may be discovered one must revert to an interiorization of
the significance of objectivity. The untenability of the strong use
of the diagnostic results from the temptation of phenomenology
to employ a movement which falls into the same errors as its
counterpart, the movement from existence to objectivity, does
from the opposite direction.

THE BODY AS PARADIGMATIC PROBLEM

Two QUITE DIFFERENT WAYS of dealing with the body

have already been indicated. One, the "objective," deals with the
body as one object among others in a series. The other, the "sub-
jective," deals with the body as personal. The objective reading,
from the phenomenologist's point of view, allows experience to
be gradually excluded from its primacy. Empirical treatments of
the body are counter to all that is proper to phenomenology in
the reduction of experience to facts.
Conceiving of the body as an object . . . tends to divorce knowl-
edge of the involuntary from the COgito and bit by bit makes all
psychology fall on the side of the natural sciences . . . . In be-
coming a fact, the experience of consciousness becomes degraded
and loses its two distinctive characteristics: its intentionality and
its reference to an "I" which lives in its experience. . . . [This
alienation occursJ by contamination from the object-body which
alone has the privilege of being exposed among objects (FN, pp.
8-9).
The final result is the dissipation of the (conscious) voluntary
altogether in the subsequent reduction of the subject into object.
The involuntary "explains" the voluntary.
This counterphenomenological "reduction" is itself a total
reading of the body couched in suppositions quite different from
and contrary to those of phenomenology. And because empiri-
cism claims to be a total reading (as does Husserlian phenome-
nology) the superficial rendering of one reading as external, the
other as internal, is not what is at stake.
What in effect characterizes empirical psychology is not in the
first instance its preference for external knowledge, but its reduc-
tion of acts (with their intentionality and their reference to an
 Structural Phenomenology / 33
Ego) to facts. Could we say that acts are better known from the
"inside" and facts from the "outside"? That is only partly true. For
introspection can itself be degraded to a knowledge of facts if it
omits the mental as intentional act and as someone's act. . . . In-
trospection can be interpreted in a naturalistic sense if it trans-
lates acts into the language of anonymous facts, homogenous
with other natural facts, that "there are" sensations as "there are"
atoms. Empiricism is a discourse in the mode of "there is," In-
versely, knowledge of subjectivity cannot be reduced to introspec-
tion . • • Its essence is to respect the originality of the Cogito as
a cluster of the subject's intentional acts. But the subject is myself
and yourself (FN, p. 10).

These are two different '1anguages" concerning the subject. The

one "reads" the subject as homogenous with all anonymous facts;
the other "reads" all subjects as intending subjects. Thus are con-
stituted two different universes of discourse.
This is not the last word, however, because each universe of
discourse has a certain drift which situates it at one or the other
pole of the voluntary-involuntary reciprocity being described. The
reduction of experience to facts and its subsequent alienation
have a functional result-objectivity gains a privilege in relation
to the involuntary.
We cannot pretend that we are unaware of the fact that the in-
voluntary is often better known empirically, in its form, albeit de-
graded, of a natural event. . . .
It is too easy to say that the body appears twice, once as a sub-
ject, then as an object, or more exactly the first time as the body of
a subject, the second time as an anonymous empirical object. It
would be vain to suppose that we can elegantly resolve the prob-
lem of dualism by substituting a dualism of viewpoints for a dual-
ism of substances. The body of a subject and the body as anony-
mous empirical object do not coincide (FN, pp. II-12).

But the non-coincidence of the two universes of discourse is not

total. Between them lies what may be termed an ambivalence
border which allows the movement from existence to objectivity
to occur (and which allows Ricoeur to speak implicitly of a "sub-
jectivization" of empirical notions). Both refer to the body.
Does that mean that there is no relation between the body as
mine or yours and the body as an object among the objects of sci-
ence? There ought to be one, because it is the same body. But this
correlation is not one of coincidence but of a diagnostic . . . [in
which] any moment of the Cogito can serve as an indication of
 34 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

the object body . . . and each moment of the object body is an in-
dication of a moment of the body belonging to'a subject (FN. pp.
12-1 3).

At the borders of the two universes of discourse, non-coinci-

dental by their respective drifts to opposite poles of the voluntary
and involuntary, the diagnostic comes into play in both its weak
and strong senses. Its weak use is to recover the subjective
equivalent of what normally is dealt with objectively in a "trans-
lation" into the language of the COgito. But in its strong sense,
when no equivalence may be found, only a subjectivization is to
be used.
The two points of view are not cumulative; they are not even
parallel. The use of the deSCriptive method shows that the lessons
of biology or of empirical psychology are a normal path for dis-
covering the subjective equivalent which is often quite ambiguous.
. • . Description of the Cogito will frequently recover from em-
pirical psychology the vestiges of a phenomenology which it dis-
covers there in an objectified and in some way alienated form. But
with equal frequency a phenomenolOgical concept will be no more
than a subjectivization of a concept far better known along an em-
pirical path (FN. p. 13).
Within the limits of the development of the diagnostic as la-
tent hermeneutics, only one example of its use from each cycle
of the will (with speCial reference to consent as the most illumi-
nating case) need be followed. In each case the paradigmatic
problem of the body focuses the issues.

I. Decision: The Body as Source of Motives

The general movement of the three cycles of the will is one
which begins with the most obviously conscious aspects of the
will and moves through a series of adumbrations toward its less
representable aspects. DeciSion, in this context, is the aspect of
the will which begins from the center of conscious deliberations.
A general movement from "top" to "bottom" applies within the
cycle under consideration. Thus, in Ricoeur's definition of deci-
sion:
To decide means first of all to project a practical possibility of an
action which depends upon me, secondly to impute myself as the
aut?0r responsible for the project, and finally to motivate my
proJect by reasons and variables which "historialize" values capa-
ble of justifying them (FN, p. 84).
 Structural Phenomenology / 35
The movement of the definition repeats the basic eidetic pattern
of intentional analysis.
Consciousness is first a reference toward the world, a tran-
scending behavior. The project as the possibility of an action in
the world is the direction of decision. It is only reflectively that
the "I" is thematized. To decide is at one and the same time to
project a possibility and reflectively to "make up my mind." The
intricacies of the more obvious conscious will must yield here to
an exclusive consideration of the reflective terminus which finds
its center of interest in the third part of the definition, the moti-
vation of decision.
Implied in the projection of the possibility in the world under-
taken by a subject is a reflective reference to "reasons" for the de-
cision. The ultimate movement of reflection ends in the body
which constitutes a partial source of motives. "The circular rela-
tion of motive to project demands that I recognize my body as
body-for-my-willing and my willing as project-bas~-(in part)-
on my body. The involuntary is for the will, and the will is by
reason of the involuntary" (FN, pp. 85-86).
Although Ricoeur restricts the theme of the body in this cy-
cle to the relative involuntary, the body retains its enigmatic fea-
ture as ultimate reflex pole of the eidetic. As a source of motives
the body does not constitute the entire field, since it is possible
to decide a project "because of" some other set of values (motives
may be read as values), for example, cultural or aesthetic ones.
And in extreme cases one may even decide against one's body, as
in instances of self-sacrifice.
What gives the body its privileged position as a source of mo-
tives is the need to finally identify the body with the subject-
and this also poses the enigma for the diagnostic. "All other
values assume a serious, dramatic significance . . . through my
body. It is my body which introduces this existential note; it is
the initial existent, underivable, involuntary" (FN, p. 85).
But the body as source of motives is itself obscure. A double
reason for this obscurity may be given. In the first place the body,
in the process of decision, ordinarily remains unthematized. The
project is decided upon the world, not upon the body. This is true
even in the case of the direct bodily need of hunger, as example
will indicate. In an ordinary or normal decision the ''1'' who de-
cides does not even explicitly consider the body. To ''live'' one's
body is not yet to give it a clear conceptual meaning.
But if and when the reflective turn is made and the phenome-
nological theme of ''I am my body" is revealed, a second type of
 36 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

obscurity appears. The very experiencing of bodily existence is

opaque and obscure. Among the range of motives clearly supplied
within bodily existence, the area of needs indicates this obscurity.
"Now our needs are opaque not only to reasoning which would
deduce them from the ability to think, but even to the light of re-
flection. To experience is always more than to understand" (FN,
p.86).
Bodily needs (hunger, thirst, sexual urges, etc.) are expe-
rienced. To be understood, an eidetic must uncover these needs.
Needs further present themselves as possible motives for deci-
sion (I must eat, drink, make love, etc.), as involuntary "givens."
Needs are involuntary "givens" in which the double reading, first
strictly phenomenological, then diagnostic, may occur.
Description of need will be an excellent opportunity to test the
usual schemas and to substitute for them the diagnostic relation
between objective knowledge of the body and the living experience
of [the] incarnate Cogito . . . I do not know need from the out-
side, as a natural event, but from within, as a lived need and, when
needed, through empathy as yours; but I have an objective symp-
tom of it in the deterioration of blood and tissue, and in the nerv-
ous or glandular reaction to such deterioration (FN, p. 87).
Needs are first ''lived'' and thus constitute an aspect of first-
person experience. Ricoeur locates need as an aspect of thought
-necessary if the analysis is to be limited to the COgito-as "the
adherence of affectivity to thought itself" (FN, p. 88). Felt needs
are experienced, but the experience is obscure, at least in the
sense that a felt need is prerepresentational. The objectifying
aim (perception, imagination) which internally limits the basic
Husserlian model is made difficult here by the lack of objectifica-
tion in a felt need. The reflective movement toward bodily sig-
nifications presents a certain ambiguity. Ricoeur converts this
ambiguity into an indication of the ultimate reference of reflec-
tion. "To feel is still to think, though feeling no longer represents
objectivity, but rather reveals existence" (FN, p. 86).
The obscurity is not total, and the adherence of need to con-
sciousness opens it to a deScription of intentional type. The case
of appetite or hunger suffices to demonstrate the intentionality of
felt need.
Appetite presents itself as an indigence and an exigence, an
experienced lack of . . . and an impulse directed towards. . . .
. . . [There is an] other directedness which is an essential
aspect of need and which testifies that, as all acts of the Cogito. it
 Structural Phenomenology / 37
is a consciousness of • . . and an impetus towaxds. . . • Even
without an image of bread, my hunger would still carry me beyond
myself (FN, pp. 89,90).
In this sense even felt needs are transcending behaviors which
direct themselves toward the world in a definite pattern which is
intentional in its reference.
In this retrogreSSion towards purely organic functioning we
can sense a lack and an urge which are not yet a perceived,
imagined, or conceptualized intention. Yet it is not an indefinite
lack, an indefinite urge, but a specific lack, a directed urge. . . .
The lack from which I suffer, the lack I suffer, has a form (FN,
p.89)·
To a degree phenomenology may penetrate and conceptualize felt
need in its backward reference toward bodily functions.
But at the same time that the obscurity of need is recognized
the double reason for movement from existence to objectivity
may begin. The very reference of the vague experience of need
toward the world (I search for food, for drink) overreaches the
body. Simultaneously, the prerepresentational urge remains
ambiguous to the degree that the body becomes open to a double
possibility. It is here that the first encounter between a phenome-
nologically employed diagnostic and objectivity may enter. From
the obscurity of affectivity Ricoeur notes that there is "[an} in-
evitable objectification of the body [which] infects all experience
of the self. The central, primitive fact of incarnation is simulta-
neously the first hallmark of all existence and the first invitation
to treason" (FN, p. 87).
The ambiguity within existence is the border which opens
the way for the alienation of the self from its body. The experienc-
ing of need leads to its false objectification.
This opaqueness of affectivity leads us to seek the light which
the Cogito refuses to itself in the objectification of need and of
bodily existence. Everything invites us to treat involuntary organic
life as an object, in the same way as stones, plants, and animals.
The very fact that the will feels besieged by need and at times op-
poses it violently as if to eject it from consciousness places need
midway between consciousness and foreign objects (FN, pp.
86-87)·
The movement from existence to objectivity is begun. Need,
originally "felt" by the Cogito as opaque or even opposed to the
voluntary, becomes the occasion for its displacement to the bor-
 38 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

derline between consciousness and objects. At this border it

becomes possible to interpret felt need either dualistically (con-
sciousness versus body) or in such a way that the subject's own
understanding of himself as incarnate is alienated. Conscious-
ness, once separated from existence, may then be interpreted as
epiphenomenal or dispensed with altogether.
The movement from existence to objectivity establishes the
poSSibility for two theoretical approaches to the body. Ricoeur
continues to reject a metaphysical dualism but admits to a func-
tional dualism of the two universes of discourse:

. . . The problem presents itself not in terms of the relation of

two realities, consciousness and the body, but of the relation of two
universes of discourse, two points of view of the same body, con-
sidered alternately as a personal body inherent in its Cogito and
as object-body, presented among other objects. The diagnostic rela-
tion expresses this encounter of two universes of discourse.
This, then, is our task: to attempt to Clarify the experience
of the corporeal involuntary within the limits of eidetic analysis of
motivation and in tension with objective, empirical treatment of
the body (FN, p. 88).

The eidetic analysis has already been referred to in its function

of description of felt need as an intentional behavior. Its limits,
however, have not yet been established, nor has the tension be-
tween the objective treatment of the body and the eidetic been
clarified.
The tension between objective and phenomenological in-
Sights performs this double task of the denaturalizing of objec-
tivist models and the establishing of limits for eidetics. Put in its
briefest form, the eidetic first calls into question the models of
felt needs employed by objectivism. Needs are neither inner sen-
sations nor stimulus-response patterns. The objectification of the
body with its subsequent reduction of both external and internal
experience to facts in the mode of "there is" overlooks the inten-
tional pattern of even so vague an experience as bodily need.

. . . Need is not an inner sensation. First of all, the expression

"inner" does not account for the other-directedness which is an es-
sential aspect of need and which testifies that, as all acts of the
Cogito, it is a consciousness of. . . . It is because the impetus of
need is not an automatic reflex that it can become a motive which
inclines without compelling and that there are men who prefer to
die of hunger rather than betray their friends (FN, pp. 90-93).
 Structural Phenomenology / 39
The diagnostic attempts to "demythologize" any such mechanical
models which overlook the referential or transcending behavior
of conscious acts.
Yet bodily needs are involuntary. The transcending act bas a
lower limit which it cannot coerce and whicb in the end presents
a limit to consciousness itself. In the case of hunger, "while the
impetus can be mastered by the will, the lack always remains
uncoercible-I can refrain from eating, but I cannot help being
hungry" (FN, p. 91). Such lower limits vary from case to case,
and the efforts of the (conscious) voluntary are not in every case
masterable. In what Ricoeur classifies as a hindered reflex such
a limit to the voluntary is indicated:

The case of respiration is the most remarkable. Air is obviously an

object of an assimilatory need. Since there is air all around us, this
pseudo-need is continually being satisfied without a previous lack;
furthermore this assimilation is governed by a reflex which in the
last instance is not coercible (man can go on a hunger strike, but
not on a breathing strike). It is not a conduct governed at the same
time by perceived signs and by an organic lack. Yet inhibited respi-
ration presents itself as a need (FN, p. 1I3).

In both cases a lower limit is reached beyond whicb the volun-

tary may not go and which remains obscure to consciousness.
At this borderline the reciprocity of voluntary and involun-
tary is located and characterized by opacity. Only the relation of
a secondary indirectness, the index, can equate wbat is known
objectively with what is experienced. The language of "reflex,"
of "contractions," is symptomatically locatable from experience
but remains outside experience. All the use of objective language
remains, "the objective, empirical symptoms of an affective ex-
perience which belongs to thought, that is, to the Cogito itself"
(FN, p. 91).
The diagnostic, in this weak use, correlates but does not in-
ternalize these symptoms, and the language of the Cogito (as
phenomenology) only borders upon such symptoms.

A need of . . . does not reveal my body to me but through my

body reveals that which is not bere and which I lack. I do not sense
contractions and secretions-J am aware of the I-body as a whole
lacking. . . . Neither organic difficulties nor movement are that
of which J am aware; they are objective, empirical symptoms of an
affective experience which belongs to thought, that is, to COgito
itself. This affective experience, as all cogitatio, has an intentional
 40 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

object. The I-body is implicated in it only as the subject-pole

of the affect (FN, p. 91). .

The diagnostic sharpens, rather than dulls, the duality of points

of view but recognizes the ambiguity which makes the two read-
ings possible. .
A projection from this recognition of limits is possible regard-
ing the confusion of '1anguages" involved. In Ricoeur's terms, to
say "I feel secretions of gastric juices" would be to mix or con-
fuse universes of discourse. Nor is such a statement equatable
with "I am hungry." There are secretions of gastric juices, how-
ever, and through the sign learning process they may be regarded
as indices of "I am hungry." The location and description of the
area of confusion which may arise, however, has been achieved
through the location of an ambivalence border within experience.
The location and continued affirmation of the opacity of that
border of ambivalence constitutes the one meaning of limit
within the concept of fundamental possibilities of the will. Need
as a source of motivation in the paradigmatic problem presents
decision with an unresolvable obscurity at the lower limits of re-
flection. It is by contrast, one might almost say by reaction, that
the other meaning of limit arises. The "normal" case of moti-
vated will passes over the body, and if no difficulties are encoun-
tered the will is able to fulfill its needs with a certain SimpliCity.
All decision is motivated, but motivation has a top and bottom to
its limits. At the bottom motivation is opaque and confused; at
the top-particularly as an ideality-motivation is relatively
transparent. Out of this highest possibility arises the concept of
the wish for a will which is perfectly transparent. In contrast to
the possible confusions of motivation a "dream of innocence" is
born within the variations upon motivated will.

2. Action: The Body as Organ of Movement

The second cycle of the will is action. As an adumbration,
voluntary motion moves even closer to the body as a limit. The
body in relation to voluntary motion is considered as the organ
of the will. The theme of the body, however, remains a reflective
theme, second in the order of description. The will as action is
in its conscious aspects primarily directed toward the world.
The pragma (the action concept which corresponds to the proj-
ect in the cycle of decision) is an action undertaken in the world.
Consciousness is first directed toward what it wishes to accom-
 Structural Phenomenology / 41
plish, and the doing of something ordinarily "exhausts" the at-
tention.
Here again it is evident that the body remains unthematized
in normal action and is unreflectively passed over. "When I act
I am not concerned with my body. I say rather that the action
'traverses' my body" (FN, p. 210). This ordering of the role of
body in acting serves a negative conceptual role in warning
against any taking of the body as the tenninus of will. "[The
body] is not the terminus of action but rather a usually unnoticed
stage in my relation to things and to the world. It is in an ebbing
of attention that I notice my body and constitute its original
meaning: the body is not the object of action but its organ" (FN.
p.212).
The first reason for bodily obscurity in reflective thought is
complicated by the fact that a phenomenolOgical reflection, if it
is to be efficacious, must be able to describe action as a species of
"consciousness of. . . ." But the body, in the case of action as in
the case of need, presents itself non-representation ally. "It is a
non-representative consciousness, no longer even a practical
representation, as a project. It is a consciousness which is an
action, a consciousness which presents itself as matter, a change
in the world through a change in my body" (FN. p. 209). Never-
theless, Ricoeur applies the intentional mode to action. "Acting
seems to us for several reasons an aspect of intentional thought
in a broader sense. Thought as a whole, including bodily exist-
ence, is not only light, but also force. The power of producing
events in the world is a kind of intentional relation to things and
the world" (FN. p. 207). Action as a non-representational force
is a "lived" meaning, which is to say that it is an experience
which is immediate without a corresponding conceptual clarity.
"I experience-rather than know by a direct inspection of mean-
ing of words-what 'being able to' and 'moving' mean . • . . I
grasp it in a single example" (FN, p. 219).
The case of effort provides an instance for Ricoeur's subse-
quent double reading of the will. In this instance the generation
of the upper limit of a fundamental possibility may be noted
immediately. In ordinary cases of carrying out actions in the
world the conscious side of the will may not note effort to any
considerable degree. At the same time, so long as effort is mini-
mal, the body does not become a problem either. Action which
"traverses" the body with little effort has as its ideality the notion
of an effortless or at least graceful action. All acting is in terms
of its organ (body), but bodily docility and relative effortlessness
 42 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

are the normative possibility for .the acting human will. The
docility of body as the top limit of action capacitated by the body
becomes, for Ricoeur, the primary eidetic form from which all
subsequent variations may be understood.
Genuinely voluntary motion is one which passes unnoticed because
it expresses the docility of a yielding body. Docility is transparent,
resistance opaque. . . .
Yet it is the docility of the body, though most difficult to
describe, which enables us to understand the body as an organ of
willing. What is :first and initially intelligible is not the opposition
of effort and a reSistance, but the actual deployment of the im-
perium in the docile organ. Resistance is a crisis in the unity of
the self with itself (FN, pp. 309-10).
Here also, the ideality of this fundamental possibility rises from
eidetic description. The "dream of innocence" of a completely
graceful and effortless will in action becomes the mythical an-
ticipation for a later explicitly hermeneutic expansion.
Effort, however, complicates the ideality of the will as the
will meets a resistance. "Resistance can be understood only as a
complication of the very docility of the body, which, from an-
other viewpoint, corresponds to willing" (FN, p. 215). The com-
plication of a resistance interrupts the transcending behavior
which is first directed toward the doing of something in the
world. A type of shock opens the way to a reflective problemati-
zation of action.
Action as a whole encounters obstacles, resistances which cease-
lessly require a readjustment of movement. In a general way, it is
the body's resistance which makes me conscious of its mediating
function. This Situation, which is propitious to reflection on the
body, is what we ordinarily call effort. Effort is moving itself, made
more complex by an awareness of resistance (FN, p. 214).
Once the reflective turn is made the body as organ of willing
may be thematized.
In Ricoeur's double reading of this thematization the first
move is within the limits of the eidetic. Action is described as
the movement originating in the COgito and directing itself,
through a series of adjustments, to the world.
In effect voluntary motion as it is "acted" presents itself as an ap-
plication, as a continuous change of plans, as if willing grew from
a non-dimensional point to a volume lived as mine, a personal vol-
ume, having extension in the flesh in first person. Thus it would
 Structural Phenomenology I 43
move without interruption from a non-spatial simplicity to the level
of multiplicity and organization. Bodily application of the I will is
that by which I become actively extended and composed, by which
the "I become" is a lived interval which is my body (FN, p. 220).

Such <'lived" intentionalities retain a certain obscurity. The body

as organ remains opaque and becomes the theme which invites a
second reading.
Notions which are too close to the body actually lack a clarity of
their own. Concepts such as . . . moving serve more as indices,
as "signa" of a situation which the mind never perfectly masters .
. . . The "essences" here are extremely inexact and "indicate" a
mystery which understanding inevitably transposes into an insolu-
ble problem. . • . Phenomenology must go beyond an eidetics
which is all too clear, and go on to elaborate the "indices" of the
mystery of incarnation (FN, p. 219).

The eidetic reaches a lower limit in "lived meanings" which are

non-representative. This opacity provides the occasion for the
movement from existence to objectivity.
It is once again from a border of ambivalence that the temp-
tation to make the body solely an object emerges. Here a dualism
of pOints of view finds its justification. Returning to the prob-
lem of effort, the double movement is located at this obscure
border of reflective experience.

But while effort is what makes the organ-body available to reflec-

tion, it is at the same time effort which can falsify this reflection:
it tempts us to reduce the description of moving to one of its forms,
namely, to the relation between effort and organic resistance. Here
dualism finds further justification: we no longer see anything but
the opposition of body and willing (FN, p. 214).

The phenomenologically essential notion of a movement from

the COgito to the world "traversing" the body intersects with
action as it is interpreted objectively.
Beginning from the "non-sp·atial" Cogito, which becomes an
action in the world, effort "is the application of myself, who am
not an object, to my body which is still myself but which is also
an object" (FN, p. 217). But once it has become an object or
placed in a field of objects, "The <naturalization' of this voluntary
force seems inevitable because of the objective character of the
movement which this force produces and in some sense ex-poses
among objects" (FN, p. 209). The "subjective" and "objective"
 44 I HER MEN E UTI C PH EN 0 MEN 0 L O·G Y

universes border upon each other at precisely that point which is

most obscure from the phenomenological point of view.
The "hermeneutic" function of the diagnostic is brought into
play. And in the case of motion its use becomes more clearly that
of a mapping of the universes of discourse. The ambivalence at
the borders of these universes is recognized linguistically in the
double use which is possible for the word action:
This duplicity of the word "action" can be easily explained: hu-
man agent, considered as an object among objects, is the cause of
change. Empirical causality is the objective indicator of corporeal
motion. In virtue of the diagnostic relation which we have recog-
nized between personal body and the object-body, a certain cor-
respondence is established between voluntary action and objective
relations of causality. This correspondence . . . explains the ter-
minological ambivalence. But this ambivalence has become a con-
fusion. Words like action, efficaciousness, force, dynamism are
now also loaded with ambiguity. The realm of subjectivity and the
realm of objectivity infect each other. In this way physics becomes
loaded with anthropomorphisms and forces of nature are conceived
as types of human energy. At the same time psychology becomes
loaded with physics: corporeal force of willing is conceived as a
cause whose effect is movement (FN, pp. 207-8).

However, what underlies the linguistic confusion is the possi-

bility of reading action from two different directions. The move-
ment from voluntary to world may also be reversed. The series
is constituted from the eidetic description in the direction will-
organ-tool-work. The transcending behavior of consciousness
reads this series as follows:
In effect on the one hand the customary use of a tool in some sense
incorporates the tool into the organ: the worker acts at the end of
his tool as a blind man extends his touch to the end of his cane.
From the point of view of the man who acts, tool in hand, the ac-
tion passes through a single organic mediator. Attention is focused
primarily in the pragma, secondarily in the indivisible pair of or-
gan and tool seen as an extension of the organ (FN, p. 21 3).
But the direction of will to pragma, as that which is per-
formed in the world, borders on what objective discourse takes
as its field. The series may be read in a reverse direction.
In this respect the series will-organ-tool-work is rather ambigu-
ous because it can be read in two directions: starting with the will
-and thus from the point of view of phenomenology-or starting
 Structural Phenomenology I 45
with the work-and thus from the point of view of physics (FN,
p. 21 3)·
Once work is situated as an effect in the world it may become
part of the series which deals only with the thematization of
objective relations. The role of consciousness is absorbed. ''TIle
physical, industrial character of the relation of the tool to the
work [objective] absorbs the organic character of man to the tool
[phenomenological)" (FN, p. 213). Thus is completed the aliena-
tion of experience in the field of objects and their relations.
The possibility of the absorption of the will by rethematizing
it in the objective universe of discourse is the "externalizing" of
what begins in the "I." Ricoeur does not, however, note that the
confusion which alienates experience into objectivity has a
counterconfusion in the possibility of "internalizing" a set of
objective concepts. He remains content in this case with locating
the borders of the two universes of discourse and noting the non-
correspondence which allows only an indirect relation by means
of indices.
Now this mystery of the application of effort cannot be strictly
compared with knowledge of the object-body. While the personal
body presents itself as a body-moved-by-a-willing, that is, as the
terminus of a movement which comes down from the "I" to its
mass, the object-body is conceived as simply body, as first of all
and only space. . . . The idea which grows from the non-spatial
to spatiality has no objective meaning. This impossibility, which
clings to the constitution of the world of objects itself, is more
basic than the law of conservation of energy of which we can
always say that it only applies to the structure of a scientific uni-
verse and that it is a postulate limited in its applicability. Conse-
quently the application of effort has no objective correspondent
which would be exactly parallel to it (FN, p. 220).

The will as action, like the will as decision, is left with a certain
sense of irresolution. Only the reciprocity of the voluntary and
the involuntary is described, thus leaving intact the dualism of
points of view.

3. Consent: The Body as Invincible Limit

More careful attention is necessary in the examination of
the diagnostic in the cycle of consent. Consent not only com-
pletes the possible movements of the will but also raises a series
of problems which complicate a phenomenology of the will. Con-
 46 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

sent displays a certain asymmetry with the cycles of decision

and action. In the face of absolute necessity 'the question of a
voluntary correlate itself is problematic. The only movement of
the voluntary is that of acquiescence, but in what sense is such a
movement voluntary?
Ricoeur argues that "wise men have always construed the
recognition of necessity as a moment .of freedom" (FN, p. 344).
But how can phenomenology treat necessity as an element of
experience? An immediate application of an intentional analysis
would seem to call for the description of necessity in the world
against which the will finds an impossibility of movement. Yet
in Freedom and Nature the reflective turn is introduced almost
immediately, and discussion centers upon the noetic pole. This
reflective move proves the importance of the theme of the body
as the paradigmatic example for the elaboration of the involun-
tary. The "world" in this case is introduced in a reverse fashion:
"It is to the extent to which the entire world'is a vast extension of
our body as pure fact that it is itself the terminus of our consent"
(FN, p. 343). Bodily necessity as absolute limit is the dominant
theme of the will as consent. Experience here reaches its lowest
limit, and the encounters of the phenomenological and objective
universes of discourse become the most crucial for the diag-
nostic.
With bodily necessity in an invincible form, the involuntary
and the absolute conditions of will are identified. Here the final
obscurity of experience is reached, and with it the final set of
questions concerning the limits of an eidetic phenomenology of
(conscious) will are posed. Eidetically, the need is to find ab-
solute necessity within the experience of the Cogito.

Existence is imposed on us in different ways: only necessity

experienced within ourselves can be matched with the freedom of
consent, for only an internal experience can be partial with re-
spect to freedom and call forth an act of the will which it com-
pletes (FN, p. 351).

"Lived" necessity is the most opaque .of all the regions investi-
gated to this point. Its experiential correlates are of the vaguest
type:

Necessity seems to demand that the mind should place it out-

side of itself in order to consider it and reduce it through ex-
planation since it is unable to subdue it through action.
 Structural Phenomenology / 47
Man's condition, insofar as it is irrevocable, is principally knowa-
ble from without; intimate experience of what I call character, the
unconscious, and biological life is crude, fleeting, or even null (FN,
P·348 ).

The most concrete example of necessity is posed in relation

to the case of birth as the beginning of a subject. Birth, classified
under the most opaque stratum of experience, is correlated with
biological life. It is the case in which the use of the diagnostic is
seen as methodologically necessary.

The detour through objective knowledge is necessary; at its limit

we begin to sense necessity for us and in us. It is always a defi-
nite objective knowledge which lends its inadequate language to
Cogito's experience. We shall thus be led to retain the language of
causality as an index of that investment of freedom by necessity
subjectively experienced (FN, pp. 351-52).

The phenomenology of birth is the instance which is made

possible by the indices of objectivity. The detour by way of ob-
jective accounts and the "language of causality" is a reversal of
the usual order in which the eidetic description may precede the
diagnostic. In this case the opacity of experience, when com-
pared to the type of clarity and range of knowledge available
empirically, is almost impenetrable. "Unfortunately the reflec-
tion for which [birth] calls is almost impOSSible: the word birth
evokes a collection of confused ideas none of which correspond
to a subjective experience and which seem susceptible only to a
scientific elucidation" (FN, p. 433).
The detour by means of concepts originally foreign to a
phenomenology of birth begins from regions which are prima-
rily objective and which, by a series of approximations, approach
a place of contact with experience itself. Birth means: (a) to
inherit a capital of heredity-one's body is "inherited" from
others and the language of "caused by" seems inevitable; (b) to
have a parent (filiation) in such a way that the subject not only
comes from a source other than himself but is dependent upon
others; and (c) to have a beginning, but a beginning which is
closed to experience or which at least always precedes experi-
ence. In each case the language of causality seems inevitable in
relation to consciousness. In all cases the primacy of conscious-
ness, and with it the primacy of a phenomenological beginning,
is called into question.
The dialectic of the diagnostic consists first in a "demytholo-
 48 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

gizing" of objectivity so as to purge it of its tendency to absorb

and alienate the subject. Ricoeur asks, is there an objective
equivalent of my birth? Moving from genetic biology, the disci-
pline most distant from phenomenology, the enigma of objec-
tivity in relation to subjectivity is posed.
Biology as a strict empirical discipline begins with a point of
view inverse to the whole phenomenolOgical point of view. The
transcendental perspective of the subject is reversed, and the
explanatory perspective of an observer "outside" the series is pre-
supposed. "Biology only clarifies this feeling [of beginning with
myself as absolute perspective] by reversing the perspective: the
center of perspective is the ancestor; I explain my filiation not as
my ancestry, but as my ancestor's posterity" (FN, p. 435). The
other "explains" the subject in this universe of discourse.
In a yet stricter sense not only is the point of view of the
subject reversed, but the individual in a system of empirical laws
assumes secondary importance. "The individual no longer comes
into consideration except as the bearer of seed, itself coming
from a parental seed. Thus a new posture develops a consist-
ency, the posture of the species. Through it the individual is
basically servant of the species" (FN, p. 436). The ''my'' of my
birth is not only "explained" by the other but also is subsumed
under the generality of the species.
Finally, the movement of objectivity reduces the incident of
birth itself to a merely arbitrary occurrence of the series:
For biology . . . birth is only an incident between the intra-
uterine and external life of the same individual, while conception
is only a union of two cells which themselves continue the life of
germination. There is in no sense here a beginning in the radical
sense in which ''1'' begin to be (FN, p. 435).

The whole direction of objectivity is one which moves away from

consciousness and alienates any connection with experience in
the first person. There is no objective equivalent to my birth.
Yet the temptation to read the subject into even this most
alien form of objectivity seems impossible to resist. The overlap
or bordering of the object-body with the I-body poses an am-
biguity which allows the objective universe of discourse to be
read (wrongly) as a self-interpretation:
I appear to myself as an effect of chance. . . . I am fascinated by
the immense combination in which determinism takes the form of
statistical determinism, alien to me since it places me in a causal
 Structural Phenomenology I 49
sequence. . . . At the end of these considerations I myself shall
appear as a possible combination out of a considerable number of
combinations which did not come about. The spell of objectivity
has become the spell of combinations. . . . Absurdity follows me
into the very confines of genetic rigor. . . . This is the alienation
I inflict on myself in genetics (FN, pp. 435-36).
This confusion of universes of discourse which have no clear
equivalent presupposes a change in level and function. The "1"
is equated with the description of combination, and, without
recognizing this change of level and subjectivity, chance be-
comes "absorbed" into the interpretation proffered by objectiv-
ity.
The facile lyricism which follows from this is familiar enough: the
flow of the species rolls on beneath me and I am only its fleeting
manifestation on the surface. Yet such false pathos expresses well
enough the type of spell which this change of level brings about.
On this new level of necessity a self-sufficient reading of man be-
comes possible. It is possible to stay on this level once we have
chosen it and follow out a limitless explanation . . . " (FN, p.
436 ).
From the suppositions of the diagnostic such a mixing of levels
and universes of discourse should not be possible in a direct way.
There is no objective equivalent of my birth-but Ricoeur argues
that there must be some relation between objective and subjec-
tive universes of discourse.
This relation is that of the index. Genetics locates my birth
even if there is no experience of my birth. "Biology, without the
compensation of an apperception of the COgito, alienates me.
And yet the study of genetics must become a guide in my con-
sideration of myself . . . . I must at the same time break
through the nascent dogmatism which follows from genetics
and convert genetics philosophically into an index of my birth"
(FN, p. 437). In the case of heredity, experience would seem to
be null. There is no experience which can yield, "I feel my
genes." This confuses universes of discourse and mistakes ob-
jectivity for existence.
The use of an index, however, proposes a relation through an
indirect interpretation. From within the perspective of the Cogito
a conjunction is made with the idea of heredity as a capital given
to the subject:
The geneticist in me says that existence is capital received from
the other and that this capital is a collection of genetic properties
 50 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

inscribed in a chromosomic structure; thus this capital is a diver-

sity which, while possessing some functional unity, remains
fundamentally multiple. The philosopher in me translates this:
this multiple capital is the indivisible unity of my life, of my sheer
existence; this capital received from the other is not the burden of
an external nature, it is my self given to myself (FN, p. 438; italics
added).
The indivisible unity my life, the vague feeling of being alive, is
conjoined to genetic biological structure. But the diagnostiC
which originally sharpens and separates the universes of dis-
course cannot rejoin them. The index which "translates" biology
into phenomenology remains a very rough translation.
But left to itself the weak use of the diagnostic reading of
signs might retain a certain useful suggestiveness. However, the
strong use of the diagnostic, in perhaps its most obviously ques-
tionable instance, is employed in an attempt to reduce the dis-
tances between the two universes of discou,rse. Ricoeur calls for
an interiorization of the idea of heredity: "I have first of all to
conceive of heredity as in me, and I have to conceive of it as the
idea of my character. . . . 1 must constantly repeat that my
heredity is only my character externalized, that is, the finite
mode of my freedom alienated in the ancestor" (FN, p. 438).
This excess of the strong use of the diagnostic is in effect the
counterpart to the confusion which entices one to use a science
as a lyrical self-interpretation in a direct rather than hermeneu-
tic fashion. If the movement from existence to objectivity falsi-
fies experience, it should equally be the case that the movement
from objectivity back to existence is a falsification. What is lack-
ing at this point of the latent hermeneutics is a two-way limiting
of universes of discourse. The first movement of a critique or
"demythologization" of objective studies which portrays how and
why the subject is alienated in objectivity is not counterbalanced
by an equal "demythologization" of the favored phenomenolog-
ical focus.
The dialectic of the diagnostic is thus weighted, and the
whole direction of the reading is one which remains within the
general limits of transcendental or Husserlian thought.
If it remains impossible to reduce biology as an objective
discipline to the language of the COgito and if the conjunction
of biology and ''being alive" remains tenuous, a second possi-
bility for interpretation arises with birth as filiation. With filia-
tion the ancestor, who is another subject, is introduced into the
series. The ancestor as other subject opens the way between a
 Structural Phenomenology / 51
reflective discipline and an indirectness which allows for more
than the tenuous conjunction of experience and a system of em-
piricallaws.
Unfortunately, there remains an ambiguity within Ricoeur's
treatment of the ancestor which does not separate as clearly as
possible the differences between what may be called the "an-
cestor's account" of my birth and the account of birth given sci-
entifically in biology. The ambiguity, however, goes further back
than Ricoeur's use of the eidetic, which presupposes epoche. In
Husserlian phenomenology the suspension of the "natural atti-
tude" includes a suspension of both mundane and scientific
attitudes or presuppositions. When both universes of discourse
are placed in a single grouping, the distinctive differences be-
tween ordinary discourse and scientific discourse are blurred.
These differences have, particularly since Husserl's times, become
sharper with the development of science as a self-consciously
functional system.
What Ricoeur does recognize, from the Husserlian perspec-
tive which locates all sciences in relation to the originary life-
world, could probably be accepted by today's biolOgist as well:
"Even as geometry is born through the abstraction of the center
of perspective from the body, so genetics adopts a point of de-
parture and follows the series of growth by starting from what is
an arbitrary starting point" (FN. p. 439). This is to say that
with the maturation of contemporary epistemologies of science
a concept of objectification as a deliberate abstraction and even
as a deliberate counterbracketing and suspension is possible.
The overlapping of mundane and scientific accounts within
epoche can be repeated in relation to the ancestor and his "ac-
count." The ancestor as a human being may be "read" in two
ways, as an instance of an individual in an abstract series (em-
pirically) or as another experiencing subject (phenomenologi-
cally). In this case the conflict between the two universes of
discourse would lead to variations of the difficulties involved in
the accounts of consciousness. and objectivity but in terms of in-
directness.
But a second possibility arises with the ancestor as subject.
As another subject the ancestor is no longer merely a member
of a system of laws but belongs to the same intersubjective
world as the subject himself. This possibility introduces a subtle
change into the problem of "objectivity." The series ancestor-
progeny may be read in two ways, but in both cases the series is
one of experiencing subjects. From the point of view of the sub-
 52 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

ject the ancestor's "account" still displays the general structure

of the language of "caused by . . . ," but only in the general
sense of being indirect. The ancestor's account is a history which
belongs to the history of subjects, and thus from the point of
view of the subject the account may be reversed and read as
"coming from. . . ." The ancestor's account, from the point of
view of the subject, is a prehistory but nevertheless a history
which deals with human experience. "Thus it is that every his-
tory sums up a prehistory. But this prehistory is the very seat of
the Cogito, concealed from its apperception. Thus heredity adds
to the sense of my-life-in-me, the unease of the-life-behind-me-
clinging-to-me" (FN, p. 440). Ricoeur argues that in such a case
it is possible to locate within experience itself an ambivalent
sense of being suspended from the ancestor and that to all adult
experience there clings a vestige of the child consciousness.4
The language of "caused by . . ." as history, placed in conjunc-
tion with experience, serves as an inciex which helps one
. . . discover that this foggy consciousness of being suspended
from other beings and of owing my being to them, this conscious-
ness of my attachments is not entirely overcome by the act which
institutes the autonomy of consciousness. There sleeps within me
an umbilical consciousness which biology can reveal at the cost of
its own effacement and of the inversion of its rule of thought. It
is in my child-soul that I retain the mark of this dependence and
quasi-corporeal adherence (FN, p. 439).
Here, since there is an overlap between the ancestor's account
and the subject's experienced history, the index serves very well
to locate and correlate experience with the indirect account.
In this connection biology is invoked, but by the back door.
It can only be invoked by inverting its own "epoche," and sub-

4· In an interesting anticipation of his later exploration of the

fringes of experience as indicators of obscurity, Ricoeur adds con-
cerning the child-self: '
Freud is rather interesting in this respect when he shows, in our
dreams and in our attitudes as waking men, something like a de-
sire to return to the womb. This does not mean that the sleeping
man or the unconscious have a better memory or remain children
longer, but the unconscious, which bears the mark of the oldest
impression, gives matter to our thought so that the waking man
can free himself from its heavy unformed nostalgia only by formu-
lating, with the help of a decipherer of dreams, the idea of a return
to the womb (FN, p. 440).
 Structural Phenomenology I 53
sequently its "caused by . . ." becomes absorbed in the "ac-
count" of the ancestor, which is also a type of indirect recounting
of my birth. Ricoeur does not make precise the movement which
seems to be in operation at this point. In fact the original con-
fusion of an ordinary "history" and a scientific "explanation" is
continued in this transition.
It is with the meaning of birth as beginning that a connec-
tion is finally made with an experience specific enough to merit
an eidetic deSCription which locates absolute limits within ex-
perience. Birth as beginning is indicated and located indirectly.
but the indirect accounts point to the temporal and finally
structural limits within the COgito itself.
Two converging ways aim at this limit. It is indicated on the
one hand as the terminus of a half-successful effort to apply to
myself the objective event of my birth: it is the particular instance
of a biological law and object of my neighbor's remembrances. In
applying to myself the objective law and the memories of others-
neither of which are a testimony to the beginning of an '1" but sim-
ply a change in the state of my parent's life-my attention is
turned towards a point which is not an event for me, but which is
designated by a certain essential characteristic of my memory
(FN. p. 442).
Within memory and thus within consciousness itself a lower
limit is indicated. Although such a limit theoretically could be
found within the variations of consciousness without the indirect
accounts, it is unlikely that it would be clearly recognized as an
absolute limit. In the case of birth the indices of the diagnostic
pose and make possible the locations of the invincible involun-
tary. The eidetic account correlates with the objective account.
At first sight it seems that I have to give up hope of finding in
consciousness the least testimony to its birth. Even the most ob-
scure consciousness finds me already alive. And yet this flight from
my birth which escapes the hold of my memory is precisely the
most characteristic trait of my experience-if we can call this lack
of experience experience. . . . I notice in effect that the regres-
sion to the womb of my own memories is not endless. My past,
while not exactly delimited and not showing a precise beginning,
forces its way into a crepuscular consciousness or into the dark
memory and becomes extinguished: certainly my oldest memory
is still my childhood, but I have at least a feeling of losing my own
tracks (FN, pp. 441-42).
This phenomenological reading of a beginning within experi-
ence does not, of course, resolve the dualism of subjective and
 54 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

objective views. In fact, the lack of overlap here-memory does

not reach back to the "objective" event-is, if anything, more
strongly pointed up.
The weak use of the diagnostic, however, is justified insofar
as the beginning thus located is recognized as a limit. The vague
and obscure nature of the experience itself is used to indicate
this limit.
The silence of my memory at the end of more and more enig-
matic and intermittent memories is, undoubtedly, not the equiva-
lent of an experience of my birth. An absence of memory is not the
memory of a beginning; but this silence nonetheless has some-
thing specific about it. This silence beneath the shadows of earliest
childhood attests negatively that the flight of my origin is not end-
less. My birth is the terminus which I sense as limit by the spacing
of the last points of memory in its direction. . . . It remains the
case that my birth is never reached by my consciousness as an ex-
perienced event. However, this obstacle is not purely negative: it
reveals the lower limit of the Cogito (FN, p. 442).

This limit to the experience of the Cogito is then interpreted as

the experience of invincible necessity in a horizon for conscious-
ness itself.
My birth in the first person is not an experience but the necessary
presupposition of all experience. This necessity of being born in
order to exist remains a horizon of consciousness but it is de-
manded as a horizon by consciousness itself. The Cogito implies
the anteriority of its beginning apart from its own perception (FN,
P·437).

Unhappily, at the end of Ricoeur's analysis of birth as heredity,

filiation, and beginning, there is once again a use of the diagnos-
tic in its strong sense as interiorization. «A limit can only be
integrated into consciousness in consent" (FN, p. 442).
But in this last instance the integration into consciousness
by consent brings into playa new theme, which is the movement
of the will faced with invincible necessity. Consent is acquies-
cence to necessity-but acquiescence may take more than one
form and hence is a genuine movement of the will. These move-
ments, however, are all interpretative of the whole of the human
condition. Four such possibilites are described in Freedom and
Nature. Faced with absolute necessity, the will may refuse its
condition in rebellion; may seek to identify itself with its condi-
tion in a lyric romanticism; may divorce itself from its condition
 Structural Phenomenology I 55
in a dualism; or may consent with reservation to an "eschatol-
ogy." Each of these movements is, however, already hermeneutic
and mythological in the full sense. The strong use of the diag-
nostic in this case identifies the movement of the wiU in neces-
sity as an already hermeneutic movement. By this stroke the
universe of discourse proper to the pure eidetic is exceeded.
The methodological dialectic of the diagnostic which antici-
pates hermeneutics is only the first place in which hermeneutics
is anticipated in Freedom and Nature. The very concepts which
lie at the base of fundamental possibilities cross the specifically
hermeneutic field of myth and symbolic language. At both ex-
tremes of fundamental possibility, as ideality and as border
limit, variations become possible as mythological themes.

FUNDAMENTAL (STRUCTURAL) POSSIBILITms

THE STRUCTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY of Freedom and

Nature anticipates Ricoeur's subsequent hermeneutics in a two-
fold way. The diagnostic is the methodological anticipation of a
general dialectic which animates all of Ricoeur's thought. It is
the technique which after a series of transformations and re-
finements eventuates in a radicalizing of reflective philosophy.
But its use in Freedom and Nature is one which remains limited
to a clarifying role. At the end of the series of encounters between
phenomenology and objective studies the duality of points of
view remains:
I must give up harmonizing the subjective experience of willing
and the objective knowledge of structuring in a coherent knowl-
edge. I have to give up harmonizing in a single universe of dis-
course the concepts of the Cogito and those of biology which be-
long to two incommensurate universes of discourse (FN, pp.
4 2 0-21).
But the dualism of perspectives is also a crisis for the under-
standing of the subject. How is it possible that man may take
two such perspectives upon himself? This question contains
within it an implication for a second step in a structural phe-
nomenology, a step which must resolve both epistemological
and ontological issues.
The answer to the question, from the ontological side, is a
reaffirmation of Ricoeur's anthropology of man as faulted crea-
ture.
 56 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

Why is the dualism of soul and body the doctrine of understand-

ing? Why is this dualism, in the virulent fonn of dualism of
freedom and necessity, seemingly invincible? . . . Why? if not
because the rent lies not only in the weakness of the intellect in
grasping the mystery of the union of soul and body, but also up to
a certain point is a lesion in being itself (FN. p. 444).

The answer to the question, from the methodological side, is

found in a new formulation which raises the duality of perspec-
tives to a different level.
There is and has been under the whole dynamics of sub-
jectivity and objectivity a silent third question which may be
posed epistemologically in relation to Ricoeur: What perspective
does a study which deals with both subjectivity and objectivity
take? Ricoeur's aphorism concerning ontology-"A paradoxical
ontology is possible only if it is covertly reconciled" (FN. p. 19)
-applies to method as well. The answer becomes the leading
question of FaUible Man. It is possible for man to take two di-
vergent and non-reconcilable perspectives upon himself because
within man there is a non-coincidence which is that of the finite
and infinite.
The duality of the voluntary and the involuntary is brought back
into a much vaster dialectic dominated by the ideas of man's dis-
proportion, the polarity within him of the finite and the infinite,
and his activity of intermediation or mediation (FM. p. xx).

In summary, Ricoeur's conclusions in relation to the funda-

mental possibilities of the will are parallel to those of much exis-
tential phenomenology. All will is conditioned or situated-in
Ricoeur's somewhat stronger use, all will is bound. "Freedom is
not a pure act, it is, in each of its moments, activity and receptiv-
ity. It constitutes itself in receiving what it does not produce:
values, capacities, and sheer nature" (FM, p. 484). In terms of
the three cycles of the will (a) all decision is conditioned by
motives. All human freedom is motivated freedom. (b) The will
in action is always limited by the relative involuntary of capaci-
ties which are bodily. All human freedom receives capacities
for motion. And, finally, (c) a human freedom is one which is
absolutely limited by a nature of character. All human freedom
is bound by a nature.
Each of these limits, in Ricoeur's use, has an upper and a
lower meaning. Within the limits described an ideality is a pos-
sibility. Each cycle has a possible "dream of innocence": (a)
 Structural Phenomenology / 57
the "dream" for a motivated freedom which had a complete
transparency of motive would be a perfectly enlightened free-
dom; (b) the "dream" for a capacity of motion which has a body
completely docile and an effortlessness action is the wish for a
perfectly gracious freedom; and (c) the idea of a freedom in
which its nature was perfectly unlimited implies an unbound
freedom.
Each of these "dreams of innocence"-which have mytho-
logical equivalents-contrasts with the second meaning of limit
as obscure border. At its lower limit the fundamental possibility
is revealed as an existential opacity of motive, capacity, and
nature. At the lowest limit the movement of the will is consent
to necessity. But consent is a movement which holds only inter-
pretative pOSSibilities, and once again mythological equivalents
appear. A "Promethean" refusal, an "Orphic" identification of
freedom and nature, a "Stoic" duality, or an "eschatological"
hope are the themes which consent allows.
The conclusion of Freedom and Nature is a paradox: What
can human freedom mean when it is a freedom bound by na-
ture? The need for the paradox is revealed when the upper and
lower meanings of fundamental possibilities are exceeded. When
the "dreams of innocence" at the top and the refusal of condition
at the bottom exceed the paradox of bound freedom, the result is
not a human but a divine freedom, a limit of limits.
The idea of God as a Kantian idea is a limit degree of a freedom
which is not creative. Freedom is, so to speak, on the side of God
by its independence from objects, by its simultaneous character of
indetermination and self-determination. But we have in mind a
freedom which would be no longer receptive with respect to mo-
tives in general (of capacities and of a nature) . . . . such a free-
dom would no longer be a motivated freedom, in the human sense
of a freedom receptive to values and finally dependent on a body,
it would no longer be an incarnate freedom, it would no longer be
a contingent freedom (FM, p. 484).

To exceed this limit is to pass beyond the fundamental human

possibilities-it is the limit idea which limits the whole.
But, if these conclusions are not unsympathetic to existen-
tially derived conclusions, Ricoeur remains reluctant to claim
structural characteristics as a fundamental ontology. Only after
the Fault is fully explicated can an ontology be claimed. But,
"the fault is not an element of fundamental ontology homo-
geneous with other factors discovered by pure description . . .
 58 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOG.Y

fault remains an alien body in the essential structure of man"

(FM, p. 24). Fault can only be dealt with poetically, says Ri-
coeur, and this hermeneutic turn is both a turn to expression
and the movement which initiates the second Copernican revo-
lution away from the subject. "The passage from transcendental
phenomenology to ontological phenomenology is . . . a sort of
conversion which removes the ego from the center of ontological
concern" (Husserl, pp. 232-33).
3 / Phenomenology within
"Kantian" Limits:
Fallible Man

THE FUNDAMENTAL possmILITIES OF Freedom and

Nature were seen to have both upper and lower limits, the first
in an ideality and the second in a border of obscurity. But these
structural limits were given an interpretation "in a Kantian
sense." Fallible Man begins from this Kantian sense of limits as
it elevates the problem of structural phenomenology to a higher
level. Kant becomes the symbol for Ricoeur's self-imposed limita-
tion of phenomenology. This appeal to a Kantian idea as a limit
concept is symptomatic of Ricoeul's use of Kant to cut off tran-
scendental pretensions which Ricoeur holds are inherent to the
Husserlian version of phenomenology.
Fallible Man continues to employ the Husserlian meaning of
phenomenology for description and analysis-but throughout
this meaning is cast in a Kantian interpretative outline. Kant be-
comes the limit which is to prevent the COgito from making a
circle with itself, the limit which stops transcendental philoso-
phy from becoming fully "idealistic."
Ricoeur argues that in Husserl's use of phenomenological
reduction, "a methodological conversion and a metaphysical
decision cross each other." 1 The methodological conversion is
necessary and in varying ways· is common to all transcendental
reflection. It is the conversion which "causes the 'for me' of
every ontic poSition to arise." 2 But the metaphysical decision
which concludes that the COgito is accorded an absolute position

I. Paul Ricoeur, "Kant and Husserl," Philosophy Today, X

(I966), I48.
2. Ibid.

[59]
 60 I HER MEN E UTI C PH EN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

is precisely that which creates the second illusion Ricoeur wishes

to avoid. .
To stop short of this "idealism," Ricoeur inserts his version
of a Kantian limitation at the intersection of method and meta-
physics. All Husserlian phenomenology henceforth is to be
interpreted through a Kantian philosophy of limits. But this im-
position of limits is where Ricoeur makes his own decision
between methodological conversion and metaphysical commit-
ment.
It is the glory of phenomenology to have raised to the dignity of
science, by the "reduction," the investigation of appearance. But
the glory of Kantianism is to have known how to co-ordinate the
investigation of the appearance with the limiting function of the
in-itself and to the practical determination of the in-itself as free-
dom and all persons.
Husser! does phenomenology. But Kant limits and grounds it.s
The key to the Kantian foundation and limit is provided in
Ricoeur's case by a return to a distinction between intention and
intuition, which in the Kantian framework allows the in-itself to
surpass its appearances.
The key to the problem is the distinction, fundamental in Kant
but totally unknown in Husserl, between intention and intuition.
Kant radically dissociates the relation to something and
the vision of something. The Etwas = X is an intention without in-
tuition . . . It is because the relation to the object = X is an
intention without intuition that he returns to objectivity as unifi-
cation of a manifold.'
Translating this limitation back into Husserlian terms is to say
that an intention need not be fulfilled (empty intentions, for ex-
ample). Ricoeur's claim, however, is stronger and in effect
means that all intentions stop short of total fulfillment. G
This insertion of a Kantian distinction would seem to break
apart precisely what is united in Husserlian phenomenology.
Ricoeur recognizes that in the Husserlian context "the empty
act of signifying is nothing other than intentionality" (Husserl,

3. Ibid., p. 167.
4. Ibid., p. 158.
5· This claim is in keeping with most of Husserl's followers who
dissent from his presumed "idealism." Cf. Merleau-Ponty's claim in
his Phenomenology of Perception that the greatest lesson of the re-
duction is the impossibility of its completion.
 Phenomenology within «Kantian" Limits / 61
p. 6). Moreover, sense and presence are united in intentionality.
"Phenomenology itself is possible because intentionality goes to
the sense. This is the sense which determines presence, just as
much as presence fulfills the sense" (Husserl, p. 7). But, once
given the distinction between sense and presence, it is possible
to speak of intentionality as double. "Consciousness is doubly
intentional, in the first instance by virtue of being a signification
and in the second instance by virtue of being an intuitive fulfill-
ing. In short, in the first works, consciousness is at once speech
(la parole) and perception" (Husserl, p. 204).
The Kantian distinctions which separate two aspects of in-
tentionality make possible the dialectic which dominates Fallible
Man. To create a dialectic of finite and infinite as a dispropor-
tion within man, Ricoeur has to go behind Husserlian phenome-
nology. The idea of a paired or cointentional consciousness is a
reintroduction of the Kantian problem of understanding and
senSibility. Thus, in the transcendental synthesis which becomes
the paradigmatic case for each of the following areas of investi-
gation, the Kantian problem of understanding and sensibility
appears as the need to pair speech and perception.
One should not begin . . . with the simple, :for example, per-
ception, but with the couple, perception and word; not from the
limited but with the antinomy o:f limit and unlimited. From this
vantage point it becomes possible to detect something of the origi-
nally dialectical structure of human reality which is position, nega-
tion of finitude, limitation. 6
The finite focus of the dialectic becomes perspective and calls
for a phenomenology of perceptual perspective; the infinite
focus of the dialectic is potentially language and calls for a
phenomenology of signification. Both sides of the duality con-
verge in the object, and knowledge is both to perceive and to
judge.
This dialectic of signifying and perceiving. of saying and seeing,
indeed seems absolutely primal, and the project of a phenomenol-
ogy of perception wherein the moment of saying is postponed and
the reciprocity of saying and seeing destroyed is ultimately untena-
ble (FM, p. 10).

6. Paul Ricoeur, "The Antinomy of Human Reality and the Prob-

lem of Philosophical Anthropology," in Readings in Existential
Phenomenology, ed. N. Lawrence and D. O'Connor (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), p. 39 1 .
 62 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

But a dialectic of finite and infinite is also the separation of

the problem of a phenomenology of perception' from the problem
of a phenomenology of language. The use of Kant becomes an
anticipation of Ricoeur's movement toward the privileged posi-
tion of language as the transcendental pole of the dialectic.
It is to be expected that the phenomenology of Kant should be
primarily a phenomenology of judging. Such a phenomenology is
most apt to offer a propaedeutic to epistemology. On the other
hand, it is to be expected that Husserl's phenomenology should be,
preferably, a phenomenology of perception, for this is most apt to
illustrate a concern for evidence . . . and for presence . . •
(HusserZ, pp. 181-82).
By abutting these two "phenomenologies" Ricoeur not only re-
introduces the problem of understanding and sensibility meet-
ing in a "transcendental imagination" but begins the weighting
of his dialectic in favor of the "infinite" or transcendental side of
the dialectic.
This weighting becomes more evident when one notes that
Ricoeur imposes a categorial scheme throughout which is a re-
vision of the Kantian categories of quality. Transforming the
original triad of reality, negation, and limitation into originating
affirmation (infinitude), existential difference (finitude), and
human mediation (the "third" limited term), Ricoeur's dialectic
becomes one in which "The originating affirmation becomes man
only by going through the existential negation that we called
perspective, character, and vital feeling" (FM, p. 201).
Polemically, the use of this triad is directed against existen-
tialism's use of finitist interpretations of man. "I doubt that the
central concept of philosophical anthropology is finitude, it is
rather the triad ftnitude-infinitude-intermediary." 7 But func-
tionally the dialectic to be resolved in a "third term" is the "de-
duction" of a concept which opens a field for description as a
fragile synthesis. "Let us try to disengage those specific cate-
gories of human limitation by initiating a kind of <transcendental
deduction,' that is, a justification of concepts through their
power of making a certain domain of objectivity possible" (FM,
PP· 20 5-6 ).
What must be noted is that, although the order to be followed
in the text of Fallible Man always begins with the finite pole
prior to moving to an implied infinitude, the categorial schema

7. Ibid.
 Phenomenology within "Kantian" Limits / 63
itself is clearly weighted transcendentally. It is always the in-
finite focus of the dialectic which is privileged. The dialectic as
a "deduction" is the measured limitation of transcendence.
In its Husserlian context transcendence becomes "idealistic."
"In transcending the world 'a-regional' consciousness includes
it and all other regions as well" (Husserl, p. 27). But the Kantian
interpretation limits transcendence to an intentionality without
total fulfillment. This initial and general limitation now is ex-
ceeded by the second and dialectical limitation, which is the
placing of progressive limits upon the originating affirmation or
infinite focus of each of the regions of human activity to be
explored. The dialectic of infinite-finite is described as a dis-
proportion which makes man fragile or fallible. "This global
disproportion consists in a certain non-coincidence of man within
himself. . . . He is intermediate within himself, within his
selves" (FM, p. 4). Thus the non-coincidence of finite and infinite
limited in a third term is generated by the crossing of Husserlian
phenomenology with the Kantian philosophy of limits. It has as
its role the display of fallibility as the fragile totality of human
structural existence.
In the over-all plan fragility, fallibility, remains a structural
concept. It is the "possibility of evil: it indicates the region and
the structure of reality, which, through its point of least re-
sistance offers a 'locus' to evil" (FM, p. 2I9). But this phenome-
nology of fallibility stops short of the entry into the experiences
of evil and thus falls short of an explicit hermeneutic. Fallible
Man as a second reading of the will is transitional. It is desig-
nated as a removal of brackets of the initial abstractions placed
upon the eidetic-but it is not to be a study of existential signifi-
cations. "Now to take away the abstraction, or to remove the
parentheses, is not to draw the consequences or apply the con-
clusions of pure deScription. It is to disclose a new thematic
structure . . ." (FM, p. xvii). That new theme is the dialectic
of finite and infinite as a phenomenal fallibility. The process of
removing the brackets in such a way as to disclose human exist-
ence as fallible, without at the same time claiming that this
structural characterization is fully ontolOgical, is indicative of
Ricoeur's reluctance to do existential philosophy as a structural
philosophy.
And, again, a Kantian schema is imposed to limit the analy-
sis of Fallible Man to this preliminary role. The gradual re-
moval of brackets in preparation for the exposition of existential
significations occurs in a pattern adapted from the three en-
 64 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

tiques. The three cycles of knowing, willing, and feeling consti-

tute the successive areas in which fallibility is'to be located. But
it is important to note that each cycle is based upon the tran-
scendentalsynthesis. The Kantian schema is more than a mere
outline. Ricoeur deliberately uses the transcendental synthesis
as the model to which the subsequent synthesis of willing and
feeling is to be approximated.
The imposition of a Kantian schema poses a problem. It
would seem that by accepting an already established model for
the transcendental synthesis, that is, the Kantian schema of
understanding-sensibility-transcendental imagination, the ques-
tion as to whether Ricoeur is doing phenomenology at all might
be raised. This problem becomes more apparent when the sec-
ond step is taken. Once the analysis of objectifying conscious-
ness is performed, the following analyses of willing and feeling
are to be patterned upon the model established in the transcen-
dental synthesis. But, when these analyses are undertaken, dif-
ferences emerge which threaten to overthrow the original model
of a Kantian transcendental form. This becomes espeCially ap-
parent in the case of the affective syntheSis which appears
closer to an existential phenomenology than Ricoeur might de-
sire.
In spite of this problem, the essential strategy of Ricoeurs
use of Kant remains in keeping with his understanding of phe-
nomenology as a transcendental philosophy. Ricoeur holds that
phenomenology always must be first a move away from im-
mediacy.
All transcendental or reflective philosophy begins by "prob-
Iematizing" the immediate, claims Ricoeur. The "move away"
from immediacy, whether in the technical form of epochi! or,
as in Fallible Man, by the use of Kantian limits to phenomenol-
ogy, is the condition which makes philosophy reflective. "Phe-
nomenology becomes -strict when the status of the appearing of
things . . . becomes problematical. . . . In this strict sense
the question of being, the ontolOgical question, is excluded in
advance from phenomenology, either provisionally or defini-
tively" (Husserl, p. 202). In Fallible Man the move away is first
addressed to intentionality itself. The transcendental synthesis
"problematizes" phenomenology.
It is this motivation which lies behind the application of
Kantian limits to Husserlian phenomenology and to the subse-
quent use of approximations of the wholistic areas of will and
feeling to objectifying consciousness. The questions of will
 Phenomenology within "Kantian" Limits / 65
and feeling are already ontolOgical questions in relation to human
existence, and the use of a reduced transcendental (in the
Kantian sense) pattern to which these areas are to be approxi-
mated imposes a limit. To get at the totality of will as a fragile
synthesis, it must be first problematized and the immediacy of
the life world overcome.
The order of philosophy is not a recapitulation of life, existence,
or praxis, or however it might be stated. The totality that each of
us is and in which we live and act becomes a problem only for a
philosophy which has made itself aloof from it by asking another
question, by giving another foundation to subjectivity, that of the
"pure" things. . . . That is why transcendental reflection, though
coming late in the movement of totality, must come first in the
specifically philosophic order. For this reflection makes the ques-
tion of the totality philosophic by making it problematic (FM,
P·74).
Thus for another time llicoeur, at the very place that a move-
ment from transcendental to existential phenomenology might
be possible in a movement from transcendental consciousness
to will, draws back. The lifeworld is to be approached by degrees
and the brackets slowly withdrawn. "A philosophy which begins
in the transcendental mode not only shows the totality as a
problem but also shows it as a term of approximation; instead of
proceeding straightway toward the totality it approaches it by
degrees" (FM, p. 74).
llicoeur moves from the "abstract" synthesis of objectifying
consciousness toward the concrete totality of will and feeling as
an ideal limit. In his Kantian sense he claims that "the idea of
totality [is] a task, . . . a directive idea in the Kantian sense
. . . a demand for totalization" (FM, p. 75), but a demand
which is not to be fulfilled directly.
Will and affectivity are to be understood upon the base of
the transcendental synthesis interpreted through the Kantian
framework. The subsequent approximation of will and affectiv-
ity to knowledge is to follow the pattern of: the triadic dialectic
of an infinity or original affirmation which is negated or passed
through finitude or existential difference to the third limit term
understood as human mediation. But since the original "prob-
lematization" of objectifying consciousness is an admitted re-
duction of existence to knowing, the problem of approximations
becomes one of a gradual substitution of wholes for parts. This
procedure threatens to break the original pattern. The end result
 66 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

is to envision the lifeworld as a limit-idea and its understanding

as an intention which is never thoroughly fulfilled.
The aim of Fallible Man is to understand the structures of
the will as a totality, but its achievement is not to be taken as a
fundamental ontology. Fallible Man remains on the side of a
structural phenomenology, and its task is to do a "phenomenol-
ogy of fallibility" as the fundamental possibility of human will.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL SYNTHESIS

THE TRANSCENDENTAL SYNTHESIS is an analysis of

knowing taken as objectifying consciousness. The very fact that
this synthesis becomes the model to which the analyses of will
and affectivity are to be approximated gives it a privileged value.
But once the Kantian framework and interpretation of limits are
understood the more technical use of phenomenology returns
within these limits. Ricoeur joins a Husserlian description
(noematic-noetic) to the Kantian outline. Knowing or objectify-
ing consciousness is to be understood via the object as it appears.
<What is first displayed, what appears is things, living beings,
persons in the world" (FM, p. 29). Only in this case the dia-
lectical demands of the Kantian framework will call for two
separate analyses of that appearance, one as the finitude of
knowing and the other as the infinitude of knOwing.
The finite pole of the dialectic is revealed simply enough in
a description of perspective. A schematic outline of perspective
locates the finitude of objectifying knowledge in the recognition
that the object appears only in a series of profiles (noematically)
which reflectively establish the subject as a point of view (no-
etically).

In what does the finitude of receiving consist? It consists in the

perspectival limitation of perception. It causes every view of . . •
to be a pOint of view on. . . . But this characteristic of the point
of view, inherent in every viewing, is not directly noticed by me but
realized reflectively (FM, p. 32).

The reflective turn discovers perspective by "deducing" the origin

of the subject's point of view from or via the object's appear-
ances. "Thus by a regressive route whose starting point was the
characteristics of the percept, we elucidate the finitude proper to
receptivity. This peculiar finitude is identified with the notion of
 Phenomenology within «Kantian" Limits / 67
point of view of perspective" (FM, p. 35).8 Perspective as fini-
tude is understood progressively as (a) the subject's opening to
the world or field of objects, (b) the here or concrete position
from which the field is perceived, and (c) the originating motion
which allows objects to appear from different sides and which
points to the body as the condition for perspective. The dialectic
of finite and infinite now overlaps the previous dialectic of vol-
untary and involuntary.
The finitude of perspective is situated by bodily finitude, and
once again the body is at one terminus of the reflective move-
ment. "It is always upon the world and beginning from the
manifestation of the world as perceived . . . that I apprehend
the openness of my body, mediator of intentional consciousness"
(FM, p. 32).
Fallible Man here rejoins the unresolved problems of Free-
dom and Nature. The phenomenology of perspective, bound to
the body, makes explicit what was implicit in the distinctions be-
tween the subjective and objective universes of discourse. Not
only are there two possible readings of the field of objects (as
anonymous objects or as containing other conscious subjects)
which may be read from two directions (from the voluntary
across the body into the world and vice versa), but there are also
two distinct regions which both meet at the object.
Let us first notice that by beginning with the object and not the
body, by moving from the percept [the perceived] to the perceiv-
ing, we do not risk being referred from the thing in the world to
another thing in the world, which would be the body-object such
as psycho-physiology observes it from the outside and scientifically
knows it. This body-object is still a perceived. And it is necessary
to disengage it by a special procedure because its function of me-
diation causes it to pass over itself and lose itself in the perceived
there where the various operations of perceiving crash together,
so to speak, and become identified with what is perceived (FM,
P·33).
The two regions are established as distinct because they are con-
stituted differently. The object-to-object field is constituted by
being perceived. The reflection of the subject from the object as

8. Several translators have rendered per(}u as "the percept." In

my opinion this is unfortunate since percept has a technical meaning
within the context of sense-data theories and hence a possible con-
fusion is raised in relation to the phenomenological sense of the
perceived as a noematic correlate.
 68 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

a region is constituted by going from the perceived to the per-

ceiving. But the object (as perceived) is common to both regions.
The body which is both "object" and "subject" could have
been clarified at this point by noting how the subject may gain
alternating views of his body as object perceived ("1 see my
hand") while at the same time experiencing his body reflectively,
thus attempting to account for the alternation of object and
subject on the basis of perspective. But Ricoeur does not take
this direction to its conclusion. A perceptualist resolution over-
looks the "infinity" which all perspectives presuppose.
Ricoeur's answer to how man may take alternating views of
himself is to be found in the infinity which transcends all per-
spectives. If perspective is recognizable as finite, the ability to
apprehend this finitude already presupposes a different quality
of experience.
The very existence of a discourse on finitude should suffice to
establish that the idea of perspective may be the most abstract of
all the ideas about man and that it in no way attests the triumph
of a concrete philosophy over the so-called abstract views of criti-
cal reflection. The very act of declaring man finite discloses a fun-
damental feature of this finitude: it is finite man himself who
speaks of his own finitude. A statement on finitude testifies that
this finitude knows itself and expresses itself. Thus it is of the na-
ture of human finitude that it can experience itself only on the
condition that there be a "view on" finitude, a dominating look
which has already begun to transgress this finitude. (FM, pp.
37-38 ).9
This transcendence, originating affirmation and thus first in the
dialectiC, is only secondarily limited by bodily perspective.
But transcendence, too, must be reflected through the ap-
pearance of the object, and a second analysis is called for. Phe-
nomenolOgical accounts of perception indicate that while an
object is perceived from a side, and thus seen from a point of
view, all the other sides are meant or signified. The transcend-
ence of finite perspective is implicit from the object. The
(literally) unseen side is signified (intended) in what is seen. A
"judgment" or meaning is given for the thing itself. The thing-as-
signified has as its reflective pole the intenti·on to signify. "This
transgression is the intention to signify. Through it 1 bring my-
self before a sense which will never be perceived anywhere by
9· Ricoeur uses transgression in a way similar to the uses of
transcendence by other existential phenomenologists.
 Phenomenology within tCKantian" Limits I 69
anyone, which is not a superior point of view . . . but an in-
version into the universal of all point[s] of view" (FM, p. 41).
The "judgment" as the intention to signify recaptures the cross-
ing of the Kantian theme which guides the deduction.
The general (or empty) intention to signify is then further
located in the power of speech. "If I now note that to signify is
to intend, the transgression of the point of view is nothing else
than speech as the possibility of expressing, and of expressing
the point of view itself" (FM, p. 41). Human transcendence is
the intention to signify and is the power of speech. "I am not
merely a situated onlooker, but a being who intends and ex-
presses. . . . As soon as I speak I speak of things in their ab-
sence and in tenns of their non-perceived sides" (FM, p. 41).
This power of speech, taken first in its ability to express ab-
sence, is a stronger indication within Fallible Man of Ricoeur's
shift of phenomenology toward its subsequent affirmation that
"man is language." The Signification in absence is the sign and
"in the sign dwells the transcendence of the logos of man" (FM,
P·43)·
The weighting of transcendence over finitude as an originat-
ing infinity ultimately implies a weighting of language over per-
ception:
This transcendence of Signification over perception, of speaking
over perspective, is what makes the reflection on point of view as
such possible; I am not immersed in the world to such an extent
that I lose the aloofness of signifying, of intending, aloofness that
is the prinCiple of speech (FM, p. 48).

In the movement from infinity to limitation it must not be for-

gotten that finitude is the dialectical limitation to transcendence.
The intention to signify as the transcendence of man is the basic
intention which is not fulfilled.
Its essence lies in the limited intentionality of expressing
absence. To speak of things in their absence or to locate signifi-
cation in the non-present side of things is to view transcendence
as an intentionality without fulfillment. But it also gives a privi-
lege to that class of expressions which indicate this transcending
capacitY.
This transcendence of saying is attested by its excess in relation
to fulfillment. Without being paradoxical we may say that the
least fulfilled expressions are the most instructive in this connec-
tion and that the height of signification is that of the one which in
principle cannot be fulfilled, the absurd signification. I am the
 70 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

power of absurd significations. This single power attests that I do

not exhaust myself in an intentionality of fulfilled presence . . .
by its nature of being impossible to fulfill, the absurd signification
only reveals the property that all meaning has of exceeding every
present perceptive fulfillment: I say more than I see when I sig-
nify (FM, pp. 43-44).
Perspective, the limit of bodily existence, is the finitude of
knOWing. But the originating affirmation of knowing is the power
of signification. These co-intentionalities which meet in the ob-
ject are the finite and infinite disproportion of transcendental
consciousness. The identification of the first with perception
and the second with speech is Ricoeur's reintroduction of the
Kantian problem of understanding and sensibility.
In discovering the breach between the finite and infinite [our re-
flection] has also uncovered the "disproportion" between the verb
which gives expression to being and truth at the risk of falling into
error, and . . . the passive look which is 'riveted to appearance
and perspective. This "disproportion" is • . . the duality of the
understanding and senSibility in Kantian terms (FM, p. 57).
But the disproportion which is possible by reflectively problema-
tizing the appearance of the object cannot overcome the first
phenomenological fact that the object appears as a unitary
whole. Thus the "synthesis" which unites the limitation of per-
spective and the excess of Signification is given before it is prob-
lematized, and the synthesis in a transcendental imagination is
somewhat anticlimactic.
What is the thing? It is the unity which is already realized in
the correlate of speech and point of view: it is the synthesis as ef-
fected outside. That synthesis inasmuch as it is in a correlate,
bears the name of objectivity. Indeed, objectivity is nothing other
than the indivisible unity of an appearance and an ability to ex·
press; the thing shows itself and can be expressed (FM, p. 58).
The thing is a unitary appearance united reflectively in the "tran·
scendental imagination."
After going behind phenomenology, the Kantian detour re-
turns to what is first. Objectifying consciousness intends the
thing-this is the project of objectivity. It is exhausted in this
project. It is an intentionality by which consciousness is consti-
tuted (in Husserlian terms) but an intentionality which is with-
out fulfillment, since the thing always exceeds its appearances
( again in Kantian terms).
 Phenomenology within ICKantian" Limits I 71
The limitation of this reflection appears directly along with its
strength: the synthesis that it reveals and mspects will only be a
synthesis in the object . . . a synthesis which is merely inten-
tional. . . . Undoubtedly we will be able to call this power of
synthesis "consciousness" as Kant did, and speak of the synthesis
as "consciousness" (FM, p. 28).
It remains limited to an intention which projects objectivity, but
it remains short both of self-consciousness and of the totality
which is existence. "The synthesis . . . between understanding
and sensibility [or in our terminology, between meaning and ap-
pearance, between speaking and looking] is consciousness but
it is not self-consciousness" (FM, p. 70). Such a consciousness
is a reduced form, a pattern. <The <1' of I think is merely the form
of a world for anyone. It is consciousness in general, that is a
pure and simple project of the object" (FM, p. 70). This form,
however, sets the pattern to which are approximated the totali-
ties of will and affectivity.

THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS

THE KANTIAN PATTERN of knowing consciousness is

now considered established, and the task Ricoeur sets for him-
self is that of approximating will and affectivity to this pattern.
As a general strategy this task might well be seen as one which
continues the perceptualist model of phenomenology. The initial
form of intentionality was one which arose from the analysis of
the knowing subject's experience of things (the project of ob-
jectivity). But, as the variations which arise from the approxi-
mating process show, a basic problem also arises. The knowing
consciousness is but a part or a bare form of the existent person,
whereas will and affectivity, claims Ricoeur, are totalities. It is
questionable that by beginning with a partial form one can ever
thoroughly approximate a totality to it.
Nevertheless, the basic triadic pattern of the transcendental
synthesis is imposed upon the analysis of the will, and the
Kantian framework is paralleled to the form of knowing con-
sciousness. In this case the exposition will follow the final, rather
than the apparent, order of the dialectic: (a) The infinite field
of "word" is paralleled in the case of the will by the infinite
field of all possible human motivations. This field, termed hu-
manity by Ricoeur, is the infinite or transcending side of willing
in its general aim toward happiness.
 72 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

My field of motivation is open to the whole range of the human .

. . . "Nothing human is foreign to me." I am capable of every
virtue and every vice; no sign of the human is radically incompre-
hensible, no language radically untranslatable. . . . My human-
ity is my essential community with all that is human outside
myself; that community makes every man my like. (FM, p. 93).
One should note here that the use of infinity is ambiguous and
that in the cases of both "will" and "affectivity" infinity often is
equated with totality, whereas in the case of "word" it was used
to mean a general openness. Ricoeur admits that "the very word
infinite is more expressive than meaningful. It does not and
could not denote a concept of reason, for it is rather indefi-
nite . . ." (FM, p. 2I). In fact, were it not for the need to dia-
lectically pair finitude with infinity, it might be more accurate
to understand infinity as merely the indefinite. The indefinite
field of possible human motivations is the open field of possibili-
ties for the will. .
(b) But this totality of possibilities is merely intentional,
since its "infinity" is factually limited by the finitude of the will
which Ricoeur locates in the concept of character. "My char-
acter is not the opposite of that humanity; my character is that
humanity seen from somewhere. . . . Character is the narrow-
ness of the 'whole soul' whose humanity is openness" (FM, pp.
93-94). Character as a totality is paired with point of view, and
the limit of the will is approximated to the limit of perspective.
( c) The duality of infinite and finite is mediated in a project,
which in the case of the will is termed the idea of the person.
The project of the person approximates the project of objectivity.
Person, however, is an ideality stated in Ricoeurs Kantian
framework as a reassertion of the end-in-itself.
In the form of the person, I intend a synthesis of a new kind:
that of an end of my action which would be, at the same time, an
existence. An end, consequently a goal to which all the means and
calculations of means are subordinate; or in other words, an end
in itself . . . (FM, p. 109).
In this general form the apprOximations establish the basic Kant-
ian framework within which specific phenomenolOgical descrip-
tions occur. Once the approximations are noted a return to the
phenomenological analysis of experience can be made, again
from each side of the dialectic. At the infinite pole Ricoeur indi-
cates a phenomenology of desire. The will "intends" or desires
totality, which is revealed through the presence of the field, hu-
 Phenomenology within ICKantian" Limits / 73
manity. "The idea of a complete volition and the destination of
reason hollow an infinite depth in my desire . . . which dwells
in the human will and in this way becomes the source of the most
extreme 'disproportion': that which preys on human action and
strains it between the finitude of character and the infinitude of
happiness" (FM, p. 103).
The indication for such a totality of happiness is located in
what Ricoeur terms feelings of immensity and narrowness:
Just as I receive indications of my perceptual narrowness-if only
through being at variance with others-I also receive signs of my
destination to happiness. These are privileged experiences, pre-
cious moments in which I receive the assurance that I am on the
right path. Suddenly the horizon is clear, unlimited possibilities
open up before me the feeling of the "immense" then replies dia-
lectically to the feeling of the "narrow" (FM, p. 104).
The movement is one from the "infinity" of originating affirma-
tion which is limited by the narrowness of character. In relation
to humanity as total possibilities, the person is always a finite
actualization.
The parallelism, however, is not perfect, and the approxima-
tion of such existential functions as will to knowledge shows
variations which reintroduce the concept of absolute necessity.
Perceptually the finitude of bodily perspective is relative to mo-
tion, and the subject may change the position from which the
object is seen.
But if I can change my position, I cannot change my character.
There is no movement by which I could change the zero origin of
my total field of motivation. . . . In this way I attain the idea of
an immobile source, in the literal sense, perspective, in the sense
that I cannot "enter" it nor could I '1eave" it. It is in this sense that
my character is the radically non-chosen origin of all my choices
(FM, p. 95).
The themes of Freedom and Nature are again met with in the
finite focus of character. The non-chosen origin of character is
the absolute involuntary which is not the result of taking a posi-
tion. The location of character as a zero origin in an approxi-
mation to the "space" of perspective may also be extended
temporally as the non-chosen limit indicated in birth.
My birth designates the primary fact that my existence is itself
a fact. . . . My birth therefore is nothing other than my charac-
ter; to say that I was born is merely to point to my character as
 74 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 L Q G Y

that which I find. My birth betokens the "having been," the mark
of the past which clings to the state of existing. My birth is the
already-thereness of my character (FM, p. 96 ).
Necessity is not outside the self; it is the origin, the limitation
which is the finitude of the subject.
In this new dialectic the finitude and necessity implied in
character are the narrowing of a vaster totality. Character is the
limitation upon the infinite demand for happiness revealed in
the unrealizable field of possible motivations. Character as fini-
tude once and for all limits the intentionality of the will to a lack
of fulfillment. The "immensity" of the desire for happiness
passes through the "narrowness" of character, and this dispro-
portion is the dialectic which institutes human limitation. "Man
is the Joy of the Yes in the sadness of the finite" (FM, p. 21 5).
The synthesis or mediation of this disproportion is the con-
stitution of the person, the project of person.
This project is what I call humanity, not in the collective sense of
all men but the human qUality of man, not an exhaustive enumera-
tion of human beings but the comprehensive significance of the
human element which is capable of guiding and regulating an
enumeration of human beings.
Humanity is the person's personality, just as objectivity was
the thing's thingness; it is the mode on which every empirical ap-
pearance of what we call a human being should be patterned
(FM, p. 107).
It is not accidental that the term humanity reappears in Ri-
coeur's description of the project of the will. As a field term hu-
manity was the indefinite totality of possibilities; as the project
of a person humanity is an ideality seen as an ideal limit in the
fundamental possibilities. Ricoeur has repeated his understand-
ing of structure both as limited by a border of indefiniteness and
as expressed in an ideality. The totality of human possibilities
constitutes the field of the limit, but the highest possible realiza-
tion of that field constitutes the ideality. The idea of person is a
limit idea in that sense. It, too, finds its Kantian limitation in be-
ing an intention without fulfillment.
The person is still a projected synthesis which seizes itself in the
representation of a task, of an ideal of what the person should be.
The Self is aimed at rather than experiences. . . . This self is
still a projected self, as the thing was the project of we called
"consciousness." Self-consciousness is, like the consciousness of
the thing, an intentional consciousness (FM, pp. 106, 110).
 Phenomenology within "Kantian" Limits I 75
The person as unfulfilled intention remains a task rather than an
achievement, but this implies that the totality itself must remain
unachieved. The approximation of the will to knowing retains
this limitation.

THE AFFECTIVE SYNTHESIS

AFFECTIVITY poses a special problem in the series of

approximations to the primary transcendental pattern. Not only
is there no clearly structured parallelism, but in the analysis
Ricoeur comes closer to doing an orthodox phenomenology than
in the previous cycles. The phenomenology of affectivity threat-
ens the Kantian outline.
Ricoeur sees affectivity as the inverse side of objectifying
consciousness. It is that mode of human subjectivity which in-
teriorizes knOwing. ''Indeed, the significance of feeling appears
in the reciprocal genesis of knowing and feeling . . . feeling
and knowing 'explain each other'" (FM, p. 126). Affectivity,
traditionally a delicate problem for philosophy, is amenable to a
phenomenologically modeled deSCription as an intentional be-
havior. Ricoeur notes this and seeks to understand affectivity as
a type of consciousness of. . . .
But in the analysis Ricoeur notices immediately that there
is a dual reference implied by affectivity, a reference which
might be said to be immediately reflective.

But it is a very strange intentionality which on the one hand desig-

nates qualities felt on things, on persons, on the world and on the
other hand manifests and reveals the way in which the self is in-
wardly affected . . . an intention and an affection coincide in
the same experience, a transcending aim and the revelation of
inwardness (FM, p. 127).

In its noematic direction affectivity, like any form of intention-

ality, refers beyond itself toward the world.

Feeling, for instance love or hate, is without doubt intentional: it

is a feeling of "some thing"-the lovable, the hateful. . . . For it
is on the things elaborated by the work of objectification that
feeling projects its affective correlates, its felt qualities: the lovable
and the hateful, the desirable and the loathsome, the sad and the
joyous; thus it seems to play the game of the object (FM, pp. 126-
27,134)·
 76 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

However, this initial reference to an object displays char-

acteristics which Ricoeur designates as surplus and as lack. In
most epistemologies it is the lack apparent in affects which is
accounted for and emphasized. Affectivity lacks the autonomy
proper to objectivity. Affectivity is constituted upon or around
the perceptually (or imaginatively) constituted object in an "in-
tentional correlate but without autonomy. It is the perceived and
known object which endows [the object] with a center of sig-
nificance, a pole of objectivity and, one might say, the substan-
tive of reality" (FM, pp. 127-28). Ricoeur thus accepts a
basically Husserlian perspective in relation to the affections. The
perceptual object provides the core to which are "added" the
affective qualities.
At the same time, however, affectivity contains a certain
"surplus" in the experience of the object which the analysis must
account for. There is a reflexive reference to a state of the sub-
ject in affectivity. Not only does the subject indicate that "there
is an X which is . . . (lovable, hateable, etc. )," but at the same
time the subject feels that love, hate, etc., the affections, reveal
his own state of . . . (loving, hating, etc.). In Ricoeur's analy-
sis this dually referenced intentionality is linked with objectify-
ing consciousness itself.
Here the reciprocity of feeling and knowing is very illuminating.
Knowing, because it exteriorizes and poses its object in being, sets
up a fundamental cleavage between the object and the subject . . .
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 inher-
ence and belonging in it, something more profound than all
polarity and duality (FM, p. I29).
To recognize the dual reference of feeling as directed toward
objects and as revealing inwardness poses a particularly difficult
problem for philosophy. There is no clear and easy way to ex-
press this double-directed intentionality within the limits of the
usual philosophical models of subject and object. Ricoeur pushes
the blame further and indicates that at base these limits are to
be found in language.
We live in the subject-object duality which has structured our
language, this relation can only be reached indirectly. . . . Since
the whole of our language has been worked out in the dimension of
objectivity,. in which the subjec~ and object are distinct and op-
posed, feeling can only be descnbed paradoxically as the unity of
 Phenomenology within "Kantian" Limits / 77
an intention and an affection, of an intention toward the world
and an affection of the self (FM, p. 134).
If we remain within the limits of a directly structured subject-
object duality, we end up falsifying the experiential nature of the
dual reference of affectivity. There are two traditional errors
which may follow and which should be avoided:
(a) Not finding in feeling the mode of objectivity proper to the
thing, we say it is "subjective." In that case we miss its intentional
dimension and falsify the connection between the objectivity of
knowing and the intentionality peculiar to feeling (FM, p. 135).
(b) Conversely, out of a concern for doing justice to the specific
intentionality of feeling, we attribute the feeling objects or quasi-
objects which we shall call values . . . . [But] these false substan-
tives still only point to the intentional signs of our affections (FM,
pp. 135, 137).
Indirectly, however, these limitations may be overcome
through a display of the dual reference of feeling in a specific
case. The cases developed in Fallible Man are again under the
sign of a Kantian "phenomenology" of the passions (possession,
domination, and honor).
The first example, possession, is sufficient to establish the
phenomenological demonstration of the dual reference of the
affections. The general outline of llicoeur's approximations
move from (a) the basic model of objectifying or knowing
consciousness; to (b) a series of approximations toward the life-
world; and culminate in (c) the discovery of a limit idea re-
vealed by feeling. The "surplus" of affectivity is to be modeled
upon the object, and the question of the appearance of the thing
takes precedence.
If our theory of feeling is valid, the feelings which gravitate around
. . . having . . . 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 (FM, pp. 170-71).
Beginning with the appearance of the object, the question is one
of moving from a bare objectivity to the interiorization of the af-
fections in relation to the object. The analysis of affectivity is to
be approximated to objectifying consciousness.
The investigation of authentic human affectivity, therefore, must
be guided by the progress of objectivity. If feeling reveals my ad-
 78 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L O'G Y

herence to and my inherence in aspects of the world that I no

longer set over against myself as objects, it i~ necessary to show
the new aspects of objectivity which are interiorized in the feelings
of having. (FM, p. I7I).

Objects within the field of a subject's gaze are not normally

"neutral." In the case of possession the "economic object" is not
restricted to the appearance of a bare object of perception. Ob-
jects appear as desirable, undesirable, interesting, uninteresting,
valuable, and unvaluable. Out of the whole range of such possi-
bilities the "economic object" as an object to be possessed ap-
pears with a recognizable set of characteristics. The object in the
fully human and cultural world is "more than" a bare perceptual
object. Moreover, such economic objects relate at base to human
needs. Food (to be desired), clothing (to be desired), etc., are
objects which are referable to the interior feelings of the subject.

Whereas the simple need is only an oriented lack, the desire for the
economic object is relative to the object's availability for me.
Insofar as the thing is "available" it creates the whole cycle of
feelings relative to acqUisition, appropriation, possession and
preservation (FM, pp. I73-74).

The object viewed "economically," as available for a subject, is

more than the object in tenns of a bare or abstract perception.
The object is seen as to be possessed, as valuable. But by the
same stroke the dual reference is one which refers back to the
feelings of the subject.

That which is properly feeling here is the interiorization of the

relation to the economic thing, the reverberating of "having" in
the I in the form of the "mine." The I, then, is affected by having
which adheres to me and to which I adhere. Through this feeling I
experience hoth my control over having of which I can avail my-
self and my dependence with regard to that which is other than
myself and on which I make myself dependent (FM, p. I74).

To possess, within the interiorizing activity of affectivity, is

to view objects in a certain way and to constitute the subject in
a certain way. Possession establishes the "I." "Mine and yours,
by mutually excluding each other, differentiate the I and the you
through their spheres of belonging" (FM, p. 174). The feelings
of possession are the constituting dimensions in relation to the
subject which ultimately may be seen to reveal a dimension of
 Phenomenology within UKantian" Limits / 79
existence. A limit is reached which reveals a stuctural character-
istic. "Thus imaginative variation encounters a limit which bears
witness to the resistance of an essence: I cannot imagine the I
without the mine or man without baving" (FM, p. 176).
Possession is an essential structure of human existence
which is revealed through the dual intentionality of feeling. M-
fectivity reveals existence. It is both a transcending feature of
consciousness, referring beyond itself to the "economic object"
and an involvement of the self with the world through the "in-
ternalization" of the mine. In this sense feeling, affectivity,
breaks through the usual meaning of subject and object.
The universal function of feeling is to bind together. It connects
what knowledge divides; it binds me to things, to beings, to being.
Whereas the whole movement of objectification tends to set a
world over against me, feeling unites the intentionality, which
throws me out of myself, to the affection through which I feel my-
self existing. Consequently, it is always shy of or beyond the
duality of subject and object (FM, pp. 20o-20I).

It is in this analysis of affectivity that Ricoeur comes closest both

to a phenomenology of the existential type, which begins by
viewing man in a lifeworld, and to the final circle of his Kantian
approximations.
As a totality, affectivity in its role of revealing existence
serves to "interiorize" the previous disproportion of man. Falli-
bility is felt as conflict.
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. . . •
The disproportion of feeling gives rise to a new mediation, that of
the thumos, of the heart. . . . 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 (FM, p. 20I).

Conflict internalized is the personalization of all disproportion.

But the felt fragility of existence remains structural. It is the
weakest point of man's existence-but it remains short of ac-
counting for Fault itself. Although fallibility is the possibility
for the entrance of guilt and suffering, it is not a necessity that
man undergo Fault.
This conclusion to the structural phenomenology, always
limited by Ricoeur to a preliminary role, remains short of a de-
 80 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

duction of man's actual experiences of evil.and suffering. Ri-

coeur draws back from making any structural characteristics
into a fundamental ontology. He opts instead to begin from a
second basis and plunges into the realm of expressions of evil
under the sign of Fault.
4 / From Structural Phenomenology
to Hermeneutics

FROM AN OLYMPIAN PERSPECTIVE not concerned with

method, the appearance of The Symbolism of Evil seems to an-
nounce a dramatic shift of approach. The "abstract" quality of
both Freedom and Nature and Fallible Man and the concern
for conditions of possible experience in relation to the will are
suddenly abandoned. Instead, a "detour" into a mythics con-
cerned not with structures but with religious "confessions" of
experienced evil and suffering appears. The Symbolism of Evil
initiates a linguistic-historical inquiry into actual and concrete
symbols and myths of Western culture. Ricoeur begins to ex-
amine the "existential anguish" of men in history as they ex-
press themselves in metaphor and story.
In tenns of Ricoeurs philosophical anthropology, of course,
this is the movement from the possibility of Fault to its actuality
in the fullness of human experience. But Fault is never to be
approached head-on. Ricoeur continues to deny that it is a
structural characteristic of human existence which can be
merely described phenomenologically. Its actuality contains
more subtle implications than can be had from the model of a
"system." Instead, the meaning of Fault is to be observed from
the side, obliquely as it were, through its most pOignant expres-
sions.
These Ricoeur finds in the symbols and myths which express
and attempt to account for human evil and suffering. These
prephilosophical expressions contain a suggestive richness of
material which entices thought in its full critical form. The
Symbolism of Evil begins the turn to hermeneutics in the full
sense of interpretation and a concern for language-here sym-
[81]
 82 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

bolic and mythical language. The Symbolism .of Evil continues

Ricoeur's self-conscious concerns with method and begins to
elaborate more completely what is involved with a hermeneutic
phenomenology. This theory of symbol and myth is then applied
to the major types of symbolic and mythological understandings
of evil.
The disjunction between a structural phenomenology con-
cerned with structures of experience and a hermeneutic phe-
nomenology concerned with expression has been heightened in
this exposition by deliberately leaving the anticipations of ex-
plicit hermeneutics underdeveloped to this point. Now, how-
ever, the hermeneutic turn must be seen in its full impact. The
Symbolism of Evil announces a series of major exchanges in
this shift: (a) The whole realm of neutrality which imposed
brackets upon Fault is exchanged for the realm of human
existence under the dramatic signs of suffering and evil. (b)
The abstraction of the structural field of fundamental possi-
bilities is exchanged for the concrete field of expressions of the
religious confessions of evil. And (c) the method of transcen-
dental examinations within the limits of Ricoeur's versions of
epoche is exchanged for a hermeneutic examination of texts
and symbolic language. The Symbolism of Evil appears as a
methodological and thematic "leap" from abstract structural
phenomenology to an existential or concrete mythics.
There is a shift, a hermeneutic turn, which is deliberate.
But the shift may be understood in several ways. The shift in
both theme and method is the culmination of a movement to-
ward hermeneutic phenomenology which has been the implicit
developmental aim from the beginning. It becomes overt in
The Symbolism of Evil. But a first impression of abruptness is
useful in pointing up the separation of this hermeneutic "third
way" from Husserlian phenomenology.
To this point Ricoeur has been notably reluctant to enter
the realm of "existential significations" and thus enter into
what could be a philosophy of existence. But the inner logic of
all his structural phenomenology pointed to an ultimate need
for dealing with just those significations. Once the brackets in
the concept of fallibility were removed, further postponement
could not be further justified. Thus the shift from a structural
phenomenology to hermeneutics occurs at just the point at
which Ricoeur could have moved into an existential phenome-
nology.
Thi.s he does not do, although the hermeneutic turn is per-
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics I 83
haps confused with its existential parallel because the theme
of Ricoeur's hermeneutic is "existential" while the method is not.
The exchanges in The Symbolism of Evil are marked by an al-
most Kierkegaardian concern with guilt, anguish, and aliena-
tion. The realm of Fault takes as a theme the question of evil,
which always poses a major problem for philosophical compre-
hension. This theme serves as an extreme test case for the pow-
ers of philosophical reflection. The method in this reflection,
however, is to be one which interprets expressions rather than
turning to a direct analysis of experience.
Ricoeur's double criticism of existential phenomenology dis-
closes his reason for turning away from a structural model at
this point. On one side, continuing his reluctance to move too
quickly into a discussion of existence in its full sense, Ricoeur
argues:
In dealing with a problem, if we go straight to the "existential
project," to the "movement of existence" to which all authentically
human conduct leads, then we risk missing the speCial character of
the problem and blurring the outline of different functions within
a sort of indistinct existential monism . . . (Husserl, p. 215).
Furthermore, this too-quick move to totality retains a structural
model in its ''monism.'' The existential method of analysiS of
alienation, error, and the whole realm of Fault is thus led to
locate guilt ontologically in finitude: "Philosophy tends to re-
duce the event of guilt to a structure homogenous with other
structures of the voluntary and the involuntary . . . [this is] a
temptation which seems inherent in a philosophical treatment
of the notion of guilt" (Husserl, p. 230).
The reluctance to move directly into existential deductions
is clear enough. But the turn to a linguistiC model which may
develop these same themes in its own way remains to be ex-
plored. Hermeneutics presupposes that a "text" or an "expres-
sion" has something to say which in turn can be interpreted or
resaid in another way. This notion, which recalls two classical
meanings of hermeneutics, a "translating" technique for making
obscure expressions clearer and an exegesiS which exposes the
hidden meaning of a text, relies first upon its object, the text. In
this case hermeneutics is a "reading" or a "listening" to what is
said. Thus a new field of "inquiry is outlined, the field of expres-
sions, a "language."
Ricoeur's entry into this field is at first limited in The Sym-
bolism of Evil to the third reading of the will. Only a selected
 84 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

type of expression is to be investigated, that ;which is symbolic

or analogical; 1 and of this type Ricoeur interprets only one
group of examples, those which deal with the symbols and
myths of evil. The narrowness of examples in a potentially
broad field keeps the theme of The Symbolism of Evil in line
with the previous need to explicate existential signmcations-
through expressions. The symbolic language of the confessions
of evil is the field for understanding Fault as the existential situ-
ation of man.
This narrow door into hermeneutics does have some retard.
ing effect upon its fully theoretical development. But it alse.
opens to wider methodological considerations. In this light the
apparent initial abruptness of the hermeneutic turn serves to
obscure rather than clarify the movement of hermeneutics, par-
ticularly in its movement from a transcendental base. There is
also a more gradual transition from struc~ure to symbolic lan-
guage, which ameliorates the tum. The question of a mythics
is already a problem in the margins of Ricoeur's structural phe-
nomenology .
On the structural side, the "essences" of the will, the leading
concept of fundamental possibilities, were seen to have two
senses which might be understood as "top" and "bottom" limits.
At the "top" a fundamental possibility was an ideality which
portrayed the maximum possible realization of a will within its
human limits. At the "bottom" the fundamental possibility
shaded off into an obscure border open only to partial clarifica-
tion through phenomenological means. It is important to note
that the transition from structure to symbol occurS at both the
"top" and ''bottom'' fringes of the fundamental possibilities.
The final cycle of limit concepts in Freedom and Nature
displays this opening to the symbolic at both the "top" and the
''bottom'" of fundamental possibilities. For Ricoeur all will is
structurally a reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary.
It is both an initiation of activity and a reception of capacities
and limits. In the cycle of decision this reciprocity is taken to
mean that all decision is motivated. The "top" or ideality of such
a structure is the imagination of "a perfectly enlightened free-
dom," a wish to be "motivated in an exhaustive, transparent, ab-
solutely rational way" (FN, pp. 484-85). This is a dream of in-

I. Symbols and myths are closely related indirect expressions.

However, it is important to note that strictly speaking only symbols
are considered as primitive in The Symbolism of Evil.
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics I 85
nocence which occurs in the ideality margin of human possi-
bilities.
The same type of imagination can occur in relation to volun-
tary motion, which is always capacitated and limited by the
body-organ. The desire for the ideality of motion is for "an in-
carnate freedom as man's freedom, but one whose body would
be absolutely docile: a gracious freedom whose bodily spon-
taneity would be allied with the initiative which moves it with-
out resistance" (FN, p. 485). These dreams of innocence are
the imaginative variations which already border on both struc-
ture and myth.
But Ricoeur insists that "innocence is not accessible to any
description, even an empirical one, but rather to a concrete
mythical approach" (FN, pp. 25-26; italics added). The de-
scription is impossible only in the sense that the ideality is never
actually experienced-innocence is merely intended but not ful-
filled. Description is impossible only in the existential sense. All
actual decision undergoes some effort. The dream of innocence
which occurs at the "top" of a fundamental possibility is an
imaginative variation. It is thus within the limits of a transcen-
dental consideration, but not within the realm of an existential
phenomenology. "It might be said, in the style of the Husserlian
eidetics, that innocence is the imaginative variation that makes
the essence of the primordial constitution stand out, in making
it appear on another existential modality" (FM, p. 222). This
new intention without fulfillment sees in the imaginative varia-
tion a play which indirectly illuminates the very structures of
the will.
The indirectness of an imaginative variation occurs by pro-
viding an imaginary experience rather than an experience which
could be called "existential" or realizable in immediate experi-
ence.
Subjectively, the myth of innocence reveals a fundamental nature
which, however, is constituted solely by the force of the concepts
introduced. It is the courage of the possible. At the same time it
provides that imaginary experience {which] . . . in Husserlian
terms . . . serves as the springboard for the knowledge of human
structures (FN, p. 28).
In Ricoeur's terms this imaginative variation is clearly located
in the transcendental or infinite aspect of subjectivity.
This same idealization, possible at the "top" limit of funda-
mental possibilities, is also possible in relation to structures as
 86 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

a totality. The dream of innocence may occur-as the ideality of

fallibility:
The imagination of innocence is nothing but the representation of
a human life that would realize all its fundamental possibilities
without any discrepancy between its primordial destination and
its historical manifestation. Innocence would be fallibility without
fault (FM, p. 221).

This dream which occurs at the "top" of fundamental possibili-

ties is expressed in the imaginative form of symbol and myth,
and the structural limit has at least one common border with
the world of myth.
Innocence does not complete the countermapping of the
symbolic or imaginative expression and structural characteris-
tic, because at the "bottom" or obscurity border of fundamental
possibilities a second transition occurs. It is' the third and asym-
metrical limit of consent which introduces the reverse side of
all the dreams of innocence. The dream of consent intends "not
[to] have the particularity of a character . . . [but rather to]
reduce its contingence fully to its initiative. . . . We have in
mind a freedom which would be no longer receptive . . . a
freedom which would be itself by definition" (FN, pp. 484-85).
Such a freedom would no longer be human since it exceeds the
reciprocity, and thus the reverse side of the dream of innocence
is a refusal of a bound freedom, a refusal of necessity.
This "bottom" border of fundamental possibilities, always
inexact in the obscurity of bodily existence, does not present
the all too clear conceptual definition of an absolute necessity
which calls for an all too clear response: acquiescence. Nor is
there here any greater possibility for (an existential) description
than in the case of innocence. At the border of the opacity of
bodily existence a series of variations becomes possible. These
variations, which are all indirect recognitions of necessity, in-
terpret in quasi-mythical terms the situation of man faced with
this necessity.
The dream of innocence, at the obscurity border of consent,
has a reverse side in the refusal of necessity.

In effect what we refuse, is always, in the last analysis, the limita-

tion of character, the shadows of the unconscious, and the
contingence of life. I cannot tolerate being only that partial
consciousness limited by all its obscurity and discovering its brute
existence. . . . The initial movement of refusal is the wish for
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics / 87
totality in which I repudiate the constrictions of character (FN,
p. 4 63).
This interpretative movement of thought, intentional but im-
possible of fulfillment, is a movement which is installed in
philosophy itself as a speculative direction.
Must we go even farther and admit that all idealism is Promethean
and conceals a secret rejection of the human condition? . . . The
philosophical Prometheus wants to be free of shadow. This philo-
sophical titanism is not aware of itself as refusal: this is either
its lie or its illusion (FN, p. 464).

Refusal of condition, however, implies a recognition of that

which is refused, and each variation upon the limit of absolute
necessity points to some form of pre comprehension of neces-
sity (FN, p. 464).2
The variations which occur at this lower border of freedom
and necessity in principle are not limited to refusal. A mixed
consent which divides necessity into a part refusal and part
consent is also possible, and Ricoeur sees this possibility to be
that of Stoicism. Its refusal is a refusal of the body. "Stoicism
does not suspect that my body has precisely the unexpected sig-
nificance of being neither judgment nor thing, but life in me
without me: ignored as the flesh of the Cogito, it is pushed back
among indifferent things" (FN, p. 469). Nevertheless the Stoic
exile of the body into the world of objects is also a partial ac-
ceptance of necessity in its ideal of the contemplation of Logos.
"What saves Stoicism on every page is that on the other hand
it gives necessity the splendor which it initially deprecates .
. . . Contemplation, admiration are the detour of consent" (FN,
pp. 470, 47 2 ).
A third variation in a romantic identification of the self and
Nature is seen by Ricoeur in Orphism. Here the admiration of
the Stoics is pushed to a limit in the absorption of the self into
Nature:
Borne by the chant of Orpheus, consent to necessity annuls itself
as an act and becomes joined to its primitive opposite, the spell of
objectivity from which the power of refusal wresteci it. It is no
2. This precomprehension applies to the understanding of human
conflict and "misery" as well and is described by Ricoeur in Fallible
Man as a pathetique. I shall not deal here with precomprehension,
other than to indicate that it serves a role similar to that of precom-
prehension in the existential philosophies.
 88 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

accident that Orphism tends to a nature worship in which the

unique status of the Cogito evaporates in the cycle of the mineral
and the animal (FN, p. 476).
Finally, there is another form of partial consent which is
Ricoeur's own chosen variation-eschatological consent: "Who
can say yes to the end, without reservations? Suffering and evil,
respected in their own shocking mystery, protected against
degradation into a problem, lie in our way . . . perhaps no one
can follow consent to the end" (FN, pp. 479-80). The escha-
tological consent Ricoeur chooses seizes upon hope as a sym-
bolic but partial consent.
Hope says, the world is not the final home of freedom; I consent as
much as possible, but hope to be delivered of the terrible and at
the end of time to enjoy a new body and a new nature granted to
freedom . . . • A Franciscan knowledge of necessity: I am "with"
necessity "among" creatures (FN, pp. 480-81).

Each of these variations which occur at the borders of struc-

tural concepts is an imaginative projection which intersects
with the mythical. Apart from an initial anticipation of an in-
timacy between myth and speculative thought, the fact that
these variations are seated in an imagination which remains
short of fulfillment in no way implies a negative valuation of
myth. To the contrary, the imaginative variations are accorded
an important status in Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology
as the dramatic forms which precisely give man his understand-
ing of himself and his situation. The symbolic has an existential
function.
The imagination has a function of projection and exploration in
regard to that which is still possible to man. It is par exceUence
the institution and the constitution of the humanly possible. It is
in imagining his potentialities that man exercises prophecy with
respect to his own existence. . . . it is in the midst of dreams of
innocence and reconciliation that hope works the very dough of
thehuman. s

This imagination coalesces in the myth with its symbolic and

indirect language. The symbolic expression is a "work" which
arises in the imagination as the transcending activity of man.

3. Paul Ricoeur, "The Image of God and the Epic of Man," trans.
George Gringas, Cross Currents (Winter, 1961), p. 49.
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics I 89
Mythos means word; the imagination, insofar as it is a mythopoetic
function, is also the seat of a profound laboring which controls the
decisive changes in our vision of the world. Every real conversion
is first a revolution on the level of our directive images. By chang-
ing his imagination, man changes his existence."
Mythos, the imagination, the intention to signify is the point
at which Ricoeur's existential theme and henneneutic method
meet. It is the initial excursion into "language" in hermeneutic
phenomenology.
Henneneutics is the specific way in which Ricoeur opens
up the problem of a philosophy of language. The last broad
identification of language in its imaginative, and hence tran-
scending, function brings the understanding of hermeneutics
full circle to its broadest classical meaning. Recalling that the
second part of Aristotle's treatise on logic is titled Peri HeT-
meneias, which today would be On Interpretation or Hermeneu-
tics, Ricoeur points out, "I believe it is very important to see that
in classical Greece-and for Aristotle himself-not only is the
word well known, but that it has as its major signification this
total meaning: All language insofar as it says interprets. It is
an interpretation at one and the same time of a reality and of
the one who speaks about this reality." 5 Interpretation in its
broadest sense is the question of language itself.
The potential breadth of the henneneutic question makes
Ricoeur's narrow entry problematic by contrast. The taking up
of archaic symbols and myths, "confession" (l'aveu) or the
ritual-emotive recital of evil, seems too particular to create a
general phenomenological hermeneutics. Yet this entry into
expression, better understandable in relation to the question of
the will than of a theory of henneneutics, also poses the main
questions Ricoeur wishes to raise in the philosophy of lan-
guage.
The use of symbols and myths as the primitives of language
places Ricoeur's approach to. language in extreme contrast to
much of the contemporary philosophy of language. In the domi-
nant traditions of the Anglo-American philosophy of language
the first movement is usually one which seeks the simplest unit
of the language and works from the bottom upward. In this re-
spect the concerns with formalization, with the "logic" of sim-

4. Ibid.
5. Paul Ricoeur, "Foi et langage, Bultmann-Ebeling" Foi-Educa-
tion, XXXVII, no. 81 (October-December, 1967), p. 18.
 go / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

pIe statements, and even, in ordinary language philosophy, ~th

the complexities of ordinary utterances, stand at the OpposIte
pole of the language continuum. The choice of the already com-
plex and, moreover, opaque and equivocal expression as the
"primitives" of hermeneutics is a radically different choice.
But it is also a choice in keeping with the basic phenomeno-
logical strategy of Ricoeur's thought. To begin with the fuUness
of language, a phrase which serves several important functions
in Ricoeur's use, is to begin from the top downward. The first
aspect of a phenomenological hermeneutics presupposes the
phenomenological inversion of all linguistic formalism and
atomism. There is a polemic note in the announcement of such
a program:
In the very same age in which our language is becoming more
precise, more univocal, more technical, better suited to those
integral formalizations that are called precisely "symbolic" logic
. . . it is in this age of discourse that we wish to recharge lan-
guage, start again from the fullness of language. . . . The same
age develops the possibility of emptying language and the possibil-
ity of filling it anew. . . . Beyond the wastelands of critical
thought we seek to be challenged anew. S
The polemic by which Ricoeur affirms his own starting point in
contrast to that of Anglo-American language philosophy is also
used to distinguish his approach from certain aspects of Hus-
serlian thought. In a seeming repudiation of the Husserlian
search for a radical or presuppositionless point of departure,
Ricoeur again asserts the need to begin with the fullness of lan-
guage.
In contrast to philosophies concerned with starting pOints, a medi-
tation on symbols starts from the fullness of language and of
meaning already there; it begins from within language which
has already taken place and in which everything in a certain sense
has already been said; it wants to be thought, not presupposition-
less, but in and with all its presuppositions. Its first problem is not
how to get started, but, from the midst of speech, to recollect it-
self.T
This seeming rejection of the Husserlian starting point,
however, is not so much a rejection of a basic phenomenological
6. Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophi-
cal Reflection," trans. Denis Savage, International Philosophical
Quarterly, n, no. 2 (May, 1962), 192-93.
7. Ibid., p. 192.
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics / 91
pattern as it is a repetition of llicoeur's rejection of an idealistic
interpretation of that model. A presuppositionless philosophy
is but another of the many guises by which the subject "makes
circle with itself." This temptation must be limited. The turn
to language, llicoeur argues, already places a limiting function
upon the subject. Language is essentially non-private. To think
language with its presuppositions is to begin in an intersubjec-
tive world, since a main, if not the first, presupposition of
language is a world of speaking subjects. The symbol, that privi-
leged place within the whole of language which is to be Ricoeur's
starting point, "gives reason to think that the Cogito is within
being, and not vice versa." 8
But if the idealism is limited, the methodological direction
remains clearly dominated by phenomenology in its culminating
drive toward a lifeworld. That this is the case may be shown in
a preliminary way by paralleling the Husserlian and llicoeurian
directions. In the Husserlian sense phenomenology is to get
"back to the things themselves." The theory of evidence weights
only that which is given in intuition ("immediate" experience).
To secure this evidence the whole of the epoche and phenomeno-
logical reductions were developed to remove all factors which
obscured the fullness of experience. The aim was to arrive at
a pre theoretical experience of the world.
Without any basic distortion to the Husserlian aim, this
process may also be seen as a particular type of interpretation,
a regressive analysiS which removes layer by layer a series of
secondary presuppositions or beliefs. The suspension of the
natural attitude and of beliefs contained in the sciences regard-
ing existence is part of this removal of secondary or tertiary in-
terpretations. The function of the phenomenolOgical reduction
is then a type of "demythologization" which successively reveals
the naivetes and errors involved in the theoretical constructs
which cover over the fullness of experience. If one is to begin
anew with that fullness-in the final Husserlian case the full-
ness of the perceptual or representative world-such a reduc-
tion of presuppositions, but not of experience, is necessary.
In Ricoeur's adaptation of this regreSSive process the field
is changed. It is now language, expression, rather than the
realm of direct experience which becomes the field of inquiry.

8. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Bu-

chanan (New York: Harper & Row, I967), p. 356. (Hereafter cited
as SE.)
 92 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

The search for the fullness of language must. be seen to be the

Ricoeurian parallel to the Husserlian search for the fullness of
experience. The quest becomes one which seeks the "pretheo-
retical" equivalent in language for the pretheoretical perceptual
or representative experience. Once this set of substitutions is
made, the process repeats the regression to primitivity implied
in all phenomenological reductions.
This may be seen to be the pattern in Ricoeur's approach to
the symbol. The hermeneutics of symbols has as its aim the lo-
cation and description of the basic type(s) of expression, a
prephilosophical expression(s). Hermeneutics will be the suc-
cessive removal of the secondary and tertiary interpretations
which cover over the primitivity of the symbol. To uncover the
symbol in its primitive suggestiveness is to locate the fullness
of language. ''This recourse to the archaic, the nocturnal, and
the oneiric . . . is also an approach to the birthplace of lan-
guage" [italics added].&
The primacy of the symbol in language is equivalent to the
primacy of perception in immediate experience-hermeneutics
shifts its focus to the linguistic field, but it retains a basic phe-
nomenolOgical strategy. In its first sense hermeneutics is a vast
phenomenological reduction of the linguistic field. In this first
sense hermeneutics as phenomenology establishes the analytic
for the subsequent development of a theory of symbol and myth.
But an analytic in Ricoeurs use is always surpassed by a dia-
lectic which constitutes the second movement of the hermeneu-
tics.
The dialectic, now carried over into hermeneutics, continues
the play of weighted focus against which are counterpoised the
series of opposed foci. In The Symbolism of Evil and fn the de-
velopment of the cycle of myths a second set of substitutions
occurs which duplicates the dynamiCS of Ricoeurs structural
phenomenology. The substitution is the exchange of the realm
of nature or structures for the realm of evil (as expressed). The
Fault, viewed indirectly through its expressions in symbol and
myth, discloses a new set of contraries which parallel the uni-
verses of discourse that characterized Freedom and Nature.
The dynamics of the hermeneutic dialectic remain more
disguised than did the play of subjective and objective universes
of discourse-but Ricoeur's choice of myths and the explana-
tory basis within them arranges the new dialectic in a pattern
9· Ricoeur, "Hermeneutics of Symbols," p. I92.
 Structural Phenomenology to Hermeneutics I 93
which repeats the weighting of a "subjective" focus against
which the "objective" foci are to be played. In his typology of
myths, centered in The Symbolism of Evil upon the theme of
the "origin of evil," a "subjective" myth which understands the
origin of evil in the use of freedom is weighted over a series of
"objective" myths which explain evil by recourse to a non-human
origin.
This dynamics is animated by a deep-seated opposition: on one side
are the myths that take the origin of evil back to a catastrophe or
primordial conflict prior to man; on the other, the myths that take
the origin back to man. . . . The world of myths is thus polarized
between two tendencies: one takes evil back beyond the human;
the other concentrates it in an evil choice from which stems the
pain of being man.10
The choice Ricoeur makes weights the "subjective" focus.
This choice is to look at evil first from the perspective of
what Ricoeur variously calls "the ethical view of the world" and
the "anthropological" view. "To try to understand evil by freedom
is a grave decision. It is the decision to enter into the problem
of evil by the strait gate of human reality. • . . [it] expresses
the choice of a center of perspective . . . to understand
evil by freedom is itself an undertaking of freedom" (FM.
pp. xxiv-xxv). On the theoretical and methodological plane this
is clearly the reaffirmation of the transcendental perspective
which characterized all the previous weightings of Ricoeur's
dialectics.
It further follows in the hermeneutic dialectic that the origi-
nally weighted transcendental focus is limited by the counter-
foci. The two myth types, the "subjective" now termed reflective
in its tendency and the "objective" termed speculative in its
tendency, are mutually demythologized and limited in the play.
The reflective tendency is that direction which progreSSively
demythologizes and removes the exteriority of evil from the
speculative myths-but only to a point:
From one point of view this recovery of the symbolics of evil by
philosophical reflection indeed tends toward an ethical vision of
the world in the Hegelian sense of the term. But on the other hand,
the more clearly we perceive the requirements and implications
of that ethical vision of the world, the more inescapable seems the
impossibility of encompassing the whole problematic of man and

10. Ibid., pp. Ig8-gg.

 94 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

evil itself within an ethical vision of the world (FM, pp. :xxiii-
xxiv).

The limit it meets is a resistant and irreducible reminder in the

"objective" myths and in the speculative tendency which goes
with them. "Reflective thought, in its turn, is at battle with
speculative thought. Speculative thought wants to save what
an ethical vision of evil tends to eliminate. It not only wants
to save it, but to show its necessity." 11 The parallelism goes
further. In effect The Symbolism of Evil is the hermeneutic
counterpart of Freedom and Nature. One finds a new "diag-
nostic" arising in The Symbolism of Evil but its internal dialectic
also remains inconclusive. Only when henneneutics is limited
in a way similar to the "Kantian" limitation of structural phe-
nomenology will it be considered adequate.
II. Ibid., p. 205.
5 / Hermeneutic Phenomenology:
The Symbolism of Evil

THE FIRST thorough and explicit exercise in hermeneu-

tic phenomenology begins with The Symbolism of Evil. Experi-
ence is to be read through expression-in this case, through the
expressions of anguish found in the "confessions" of evil which
span the development of Western man's consciousness from
very archaic times to the present. Ricoeur's entrance into the
field of expression is one which begins with the complex and
equivocal analogies found in these confessions.
At base lie the symbols, primitive metaphors in which evil
is understood to be "like" a defilement, <1ike" a broken relation-
ship, "like" a self-induced punishment. Even these metaphors
have their structures, their implications, their latent "systems."
Higher on the scale, but still retaining the suggestive concrete-
ness of the symbols, are myths. Myths elaborate and expand the
possibilities of symbols. Ricoeur deals with four basic types of
myths which in some degree illustrate exhaustively the basic
possibilities of an interpretation of evil.
Nor is the matter left at the level of a "statics" of symbols
and myths, at the level of a typology. In a second step Ricoeur de-
velops the "dynamics" of symbols and myths. The tensions, trans-
formations, and transpositions of symbols and myths are shown
in such a way that a broad "logic" of myths begins to emerge. It
is thIough this exercise that the outline of a hermeneutic phe-
nomenology clearly shows its concern and applicability to the
philosophy of culture. But prior to dealing with the actual themes
announced in the mythies, a closer view of Ricoeur's method
and the implications of the shift from structural to hermeneutic
phenomenology is called for.
[951
 96 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

In the shift to a hermeneutics, there is a theoretical demand

which ultimately threatens to overthrow some of the basic pre-
suppositions of a structural phenomenology. This demand arises
in the exchange of fields of investigation. An understanding of
the subject remains the aim of Ricoeur's third reading of the
will. "I wager that I shall have a better understanding of man
and the bond between the being of man and the being of all
beings 1£ I follow the indication of symbolic thought" (SE, p.
355). The experience of the subject remains the focal point for
that understanding, but in this context it is the experience of
Fault. A hermeneutics creates a "first" and "second" order of in-
directness for the understanding of experience. The "first" or-
der of indirectness concerns the relation of experience to ex-
pression, and the "second" order of indirectness concerns the
possibility of interpreting expressions through hermeneutics.
Although in the usual technical sense h~rmeneutics only in-
volves a problem of the second order, in Ricoeur's case inter-
pretation refers back to the problem of experience from the
order of interpretation. But some preliminary problems of
method are posed at the first level.
At the first level the question of a relation between expres-
sion and prelinguistic experience arises. All structural phenome-
nology, whether in its Husserlian or existential guise, presup-
poses this nexus of prelinguistic experience. The first order of
indirectness is established when the field of expression is chosen.
Experience is to be understood through its expression. In this
situation language becomes a mediating function. The move-
ment, never thoroughly clarified, is from prelinguistic experience
to expression. In the selected context of the confessions of
suffering and evil the two poles of the experience-expression
relation are described as being counterparts.

This language of confession is the counterpart of the triple charac-

ter of the experience it brings to light: blindness, eqUivocalness,
scandalousness.
The experience . . . is a blind experience, still embedded in
the matrix of emotion, fear, anguish. It is this emotional note that
gives rise to objectiftcation in discourse; the confession expresses,
pushes to the outside, the emotion which without it would be shut
up in itself as an impression in the soul (SE, p. 7).

The relation of experience-expression as a counterpart func-

tions in the exchange of experiential structures for the linguistic
 The Symbolism of Evil / 97
field. In Ricoeur's structural phenomenology emotions, particu-
larly those which would reveal Fault, are always regarded as
obscure. Now, on the linguistic plane, what is felt or lived as ob-
scure is expressed as equivocal. "The preferred language of
the fault appears to be indirect and based on imagery . . . The
feeling involved is not only blind in virtue of being emotional;
it is also equivocal, laden with a multiplicity of meanings" (SE,
pp.8-g).
If the distinction between prelinguistic experience and ex-
pression is to be maintained, the result is that an isomorphism
must exist in the experience-expression counterpart. The sym-
bolic expression functions in the field of language as the emo-
tions function in the field of experience. This isomorphism is
thus an approximation to a natural theory of expressive lan-
guage. e'A characteristic of the symbol is never to be completely
arbitrary. It is not empty, there is always a rudiment of a natural
relation between the signifying and the signified . . ."]. The
isomorphism in effect establishes a first circle at the level of the
counterpart relation. The inquiry into the symbolic or opaque
expression is the linguistic equivalent of inquiry into blind ex-
perience.
In Ricoeur's use of this circle the ultimate significance in-
volves the constitution of the consciousness of self. "The con-
sciousness of self seems to constitute itself at its lowest level
by means of symbolism . . ." (SE, p. g). In principle this is to
hold that the constitution of the self may be read from the con-
stitution of language.
But if at the first level expression is the counterpart of ex-
perience which is "read through" it, then expression must al-
ready have occurred for a hermeneutics to be possible at all.
Language already given becomes necessary for hermeneutic
phenomenology. "Have we really reached, under the name of
experience, an immediate datum? Not at all. What is experi-
enced as defilement, as sin, as guilt, requires the mediation of
a specific language, the language of symbols. Without the help
of that language, the experience would remain mute, obscure,
and shut up in its implicit contradictions" (SE, p. 161). This
requirement continues Ricoeur's previous understanding of phe-
nomenology as a reflective discipline. All experience is arrived
at reflectively rather than directly. The linguistically implied

I. Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutique et refiexion," Archivio de

fi,losofi,a, XXXII, nos. I-~ (I96~), ~2.
 g8 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

model of hermeneutics merely substitutes a .field of expression

as the field which reflects experience.
The structural phenomenology reflects the subject by means
of what may now be called the object world. In the late Husser-
lian phenomenology and in existential phenomenology the object
world is primarily a "perceptual" one. Ricoeur's modifica-
tion, in which the "project" and the "pragma" are directed to-
ward the object world, continues this tradition by modeling
the reading of the will upon the pattern of objectifying con-
sciousness. But in a hermeneutic phenomenology the object
world is exchanged for a language world. The world of expres-
sion is now the "object" correlate which is used to reflect the
subject. This change of field presumably carries significations
not found in the previous use of an object world.
There are several notable characteristics of a language world
which immediately change some variables in the phenomeno-
logical context. In the first place expressions are the expressions
of a subject. A language world is already a subjective (an inter-
subjective) world. If experience is what is aimed at, now re-
flected through expressions, hermeneutic phenomenology must
begin where those experiences have already been expressed.
Secondly, although man is now presupposed at both poles of the
noematic and noetic correlates, he is to be understood in two
different ways. In expressed language the subject is presupposed
reflexively. But in an analysis of expressing, "to say" becomes
one aspect of total human intentionality. A phenomenology of
language and a phenomenology of speech do not have the same
project. Finally, the second order of indirectness which con-
stitutes the hermeneutic circle occurs entirely within the world
of language. The linguistically implied model of hermeneutics
hopes that the field of expressions may reflect subjectivity in
its cultural setting better than an object world. The second order
of indirectness is the order of culture and history in relation to
man's self-interpretations. A henneneutic phenomenology thus
has a philosophy of culture rather than the implied question of
nature or psychology which underlies structural phenomenology.
The first circle of experience-expression is surpassed by the
second circle, which constitutes the uniquely henneneutic prob-
lem. The second circle is the expreSSion-interpretation relation
within the confines of the language world. The movement from
the first to the second circle is by means of expression which
belongs to both regions. This movement from the experience-
expression relation to the expression-interpretation relation,
 The Symbolism of Evil / 99
however, retains its reference to the relation of experience-
expression, but it is to be read reflectively from the second order
of expression-interpretation. Experience, assumed now to have
already been brought into expression, allows the thematization
of expression as a study of man as language:
The enterprise should be a hopeless one if symbols were radically
alien to philosophical discourse. But symbols are already in the
element of speech. We have sufficiently said that they rescue feel-
ing and even fear from silence and confusion; in virtue of them,
man remains language through and through. That is not the most
important thing: there exists nowhere a symbolic language with-
out hermeneutics . . . what is already discourse, even if incoher-
ent, is brought into coherent discourse by hermeneutics (SE,
P·35 0 ).
The functional parallelism between Ricoeur's structural and
hermeneutic phenomenologies continues within the second cir-
cle. Incarnate existence, considered opaque at the reflective ex-
tremity of the body and in affectivity, has its counterpart opacity
in symbolic expressions. The opaque expression becomes the
paradigmatic case for inquiry which, in the linguistic circle, "is
why language is needed a second time to elucidate the subter-
ranean crisis of the consciousness of fault" (SE, p. 8). Once
experience is considered to be reflected in the expression and
thereby functionally established, the hermeneutic problem may
be stated more precisely. The "circle" at the second or hermeneu-
tic level is the expression-interpretation relation. "The knot
where the symbol gives and criticism interprets-appears in
hermeneutics as a circle. The circle can be stated bluntly: We
must understand in order to believe, but we must believe in or-
der to understand'" (SE, p. 351). The first movement of Ri-
coeur's hermeneutics proper is the inquiry into the field of
expression by means of interpretation. This inquiry remains
recognizably phenomenological in its outline.
In the first instance the field of symbolic language must be
investigated descriptively, rather than by means of explana-
tions which go behind the symbol. "I am convinced we must
think not behind the symbols, but starting from the symbols
according to the symbols." 2 This respect for the symbol's "ap-
pearance" is formulated in an aphorism derived from Kant:
2. Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical
Reflection," trans. Denis Savage, International Philosophical Quar-
terly, II, no. 2 (May, 1962), 203.
 100 / HE RM ENE U TI C PH EN 0 M E NO LO GY
the symbol invites or gives rise to thought (It: symbole donne a
penser). The symbol is to be repeated in an exercise of "sym-
pathetic imagination."
Ricoeur has stated the initial phenomenological respect for
the appearance or descriptive characteristics of the symbol in
terms of "belief." In the hermeneutic context this is to presup-
pose that the symbol or expression has something to say and
that what it has to say must first be heard or understood. This
first '1istening" or repetition of the symbol in belief is the first
application of a hermeneutic epoche. Belief inside the hermeneu-
tic circle is a phenomenological belief which has already sus-
pended the "first naivete" of immediacy. "We must believe in
order to understand; never, in fact, does the interpreter get
near to what his text says unless he lives in the aura of the
meaning he is inquiring after" (SE, p. 351). To live in the aura
of meaning is not the same thing as a natural belief at all. It
is to believe in the "reduced" sense of employing an imaginative
variation. Belief in its phenomenological context is an exercise
in reduction. "The philosopher adopts provisionally the motiva-
tions and intentions of the believing soul. He does not 'feel' them
in their first naivete; he ere-feels' them in a neutralized mode, in
the mode of 'as if.' It is in this sense that phenomenology is a
re-enactment in sympathetic imagination" (SE, p. 19). This is
to say that the starting point of Ricoeur's hermeneutics is criti-
cal in a phenomenological sense from the outset. The symbolic
field must be problematized so as to exclude immediacy. "In ev-
ery way, something has been lost, irremediably lost: immediacy
of belief" (SE, p. 351). Interpretation stands aloof from the pre-
reflective and prephilosophical immediate belief in the symbol.
As imaginative variation the hermeneutic belief is a "second
naivete." Its first step away from the immediacy of signification
has as its purpose the displaying and isolating of the inten-
tionality of the symbol. But the neutral or disengaged meaning
of interpretation as a second belief includes a second criticism.
The symbolic expressions Ricoeur proposes to examine are
archaic. This choice both complicates and facilitates the prob-
lem of hermeneutic reduction.
The complication arises in the need to recover the inten-
tionality of the expression which may be obscured by the his-
torical gap between its time and the present. The facilitation
lies in the problem of suspending a first naivete of belief. The
very archaic nature of the symbols and myths involved prevents
any literal immediacy of belief. The modern Weltanschauung
 The Symbolism of Evil / 101

has already separated myth and history; myth remains "mere"

myth. Both the complication and the facilitation employ a sec-
ond meaning for criticism. In a specific recollection of his earlier
use of the diagnostic Ricoeur accepts the basic insights-within
the descriptive limits of phenomenological hermeneutics-of
the modem tools of scientific and historical criticism. "What is
peculiar to modern hermeneutics is that it remains in line with
critical thought. But its critical function does not tum away
from its appropriative function: I would say, rather, that it
makes it more authentic and more perfect" (SE, p. 350).
In the revival of the diagnostic, which now uses historical and
scientific Criticism, the dialectical aspect is restricted. In effect,
the second or scientific criticism is taken into reduction itself.
"For us, moderns, a myth is only a myth because we can no
longer connect that time with the time of history as we write
it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical
places with our geographical space" (SE, p. 5). Within its phe-
nomenolOgically absorbed role this use of objective criticism
serves to demythologize the literal or explanatory role of myth.
The "science" and the "history" of the myth are exploded: "The
myth can no longer be an explanation; to exclude its etiological
function is the theme of all necessary demythologization" (SE,
P·5)·
The criticism of the historical sciences destroys the literal
dimension of myth. But the diagnostiC acceptance of such criti-
cism is in return a limiting of any remaining scientific natural-
ism. The implication of much objective criticism is that a
primitive explanation is all there is to myth. Such an interpreta-
tion confuses the etiological function of myth with the specifically
symbolic-or existential-function. "This 'crisis,' this decision,
after which myth and history are dissociated, may signify the
loss of the mythical dimension . . . we are tempted to give
ourselves up to the radical demythization of all our thinking"
eSE, pp. 161-62). A phenomenological hermeneutics stops
short of this rejection and takes a different and restorative di-
rection.
The initial suspension of the myth's literal function is nec-
essary; but with its rejection the myth may also be seen as an
imaginative expression which is its symbolic dimension.

. . . In losing its explanatory pretension the myth reveals its

exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding.
which we shall later call its symbolic function-that is to say, its
 102 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and

what he considers sacred. Paradoxical as it may seem, the myth,
when it is thus demythologized through contact with scientiftc
history, is elevated to the dignity of a symbol as a dimension of
modem thought eSE, p. 5).

To remove the explanatory function of myth is to remove its

implied "natural attitude" without devaluing myth as such. The
diagnostic acceptance of second criticism re-enforces Ricoeur's
use of phenomenological brackets. The removal of the literal
significance of myth is the beginning of the process of uncover-
ing the "thing itself," the symbolic "word."
This diagnostically re-enforced phenomenology involves a
series of reductions of interpretation layers (of which the naIve
literal histories and cosmologies are the first) which cover over
the symbolic significance of myth. "My working hypothesis is
that criticism of the pseudo-rational is fatal not to myth, but
to gnosis" (SE, P.164). The mythological dimension in its re-
duced sense is seen to be a concrete fantasy variation which
remains similar in its function to the Husserlian variations
used in a structural phenomenology. But in this case the aim is
existential exploration. The imaginative "word" which displays
aspects of existence in symbolic expressions opens up under-
standings which are not directly possible. The philosophical
hope of Ricoeur's hermeneutics is to "elevate the symbols to the
rank of existential concepts" (SE, p. 357).
But such an existential exploration in the realm of symbol
remains under the limits of Ricoeur's Kantian impositions. The
investigation is seen as a wager modeled upon a transcendental
deduction: "We shall propose a type of <interpretation' that is not
a <translation'; let us say, to be brief, that the very process of
the discovery of the field of experience opened up by the myth
can constitute an existential verification comparable to the
transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding"
(SE, p. 164 n). Under the Kantian limit the whole of sym-
bolic intentionality is seen as limited. The aim of the imagina-
tive symbol is an "intuition of a cosmic whole, from which man
is not separated, and this undivided plenitude, anterior to the
division into the supernatural and human . . . [is] not given,
but simply aimed at. It is only in intention that the myth re-
stores some wholeness" (SE, p. 167). The imaginative varia-
tions of symbols are intentions without fulfillments-that is
what gives them symbolic quality.
 The Symbolism of Evil I 103

Myth or symbol as an imaginative "word" is the place within

language from which Ricoeur seeks to understand man's self-
understanding. With symbolic language man understands and
is understood through his expressions. In this context man as
language is man interpreting and expressing himself and his
cultural history in myth and symbol. The "psychology" of struc-
tural phenomenology is surpassed by the "history" of hermeneu-
tic phenomenology.

SYMBOLIC ExPRESSION

ONCE THE HERMENEUTICAL STANDPOINT is established,

Ricoeur's theory of symbolic expression shows two basic and
complementary movements. The :first is analytic or eidetic in
its aim and outlines the formal dimensions and structure of the
symbol with its peculiar intentionality. The second is dynamiC
and places what may be called symbol systems into a pattern
which displays an evolution of meanings and relations of trans-
position and development.
Although for analytical as well as strategic reasons Ricoeur
differentiates between symbol as primitive and myth as a first
order spontaneous hermeneutics, it remains clear that both
symbol and myth share the basic structural intentionality of
symbolic expression. Primitive symbols stand at the base of this
philosophy of language. Ricoeur says: "I shall always under-
stand by symbol . . . in a . . . primitive sense, analogical
meanings which are spontaneously formed and immediately
significant, such as defilement, analogue of stain; sin, analogue
of deviation; guilt, analogue of accusation" (SE, p. 18). Although
myth adds a temporal and character dimension to a narrative, it
retains the analogical structure of symbols. "I shall regard myths
as a species of symbols, as symbols developed in the form of
narrations and articulated in a time and a space that cannot
be co-ordinated with the time and space of history and geog-
raphy according to the critical method" (SE, p. 18).
In both cases the structural characteristic which gives sym-
bolic expression its particular role in language is its analogical
or metaphorical double intentionality. The bottom and basic
level of this intentionality is literal and derived from ordinary
experience. ". . . The symbol of evil is constituted by starting
from something which has a first-level meaning and is bor-
rowed from the experience of nature-man's contact and orien-
 104 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

tation in space." 3 Its analogical or symbolic intentionality arises

in and from its literal base. "The literal and obvious meaning,
therefore, points beyond itself to something which is like stain,
like a deviation, like a burden" (SE, p. 194). It is the symbolic
intentionality which plays the existential role in an imaginative
representation of man and his relationship to what he considers
sacred.
In relation to the field of all possible expressions the choice
of analogical expressions serves a theoretical function as well.
The double-layered intentionality makes the symbol complex.
Ricoeur begins with the complex rather than the simple in ac-
cordance with the phenomenological demand that a whole may
only subsequently be analyzed into its parts. Ricoeur can later
claim that the symbol contains or includes simpler charac-
teristics. A symbol is also a sign. "They are expressions that
communicate a meaning; this meaning is ,declared in an inten-
tion of signifying which has speech for its vehicle" (SE, p. 14).
The conventionality which constitutes signs may stand within
the symbolic construction-but the symbol is qualified in that
it always remains short of total arbitrariness.
Double-intentionality, however, is both the structural source
of the symbol's power and its puzzle; it surpasses the conven-
tionally significant. "Symbolic signs are opaque, because the
first literal, obvious meaning itself points analogically to a sec-
ond meaning which is not given otherwise than in it. . . . This
opacity constitutes the depth of the symbol, which . . . is in-
exhaustible" (SE, p. IS).
The opacity occurs in a non-dorninatable relationship be-
tween the first and second levels of the analogy. The "spon-
taneity" of the symbol is its fullness:
Analogy is a nonconclusive reasoning that proceeds through a
fourth proportional term (A is to B as C is to D). But in symbol I
cannot objectivize the analogous relation that binds the second
meaning to the first. By living in the first meaning I am drawn by
it beyond itself: the symbolic meaning is constituted in and
through the literal meaning, which brings about the analogy by
giving the analogue. Unlike a comparison that we look at from the
outside, symbol is the very movement of the primary meaning that
makes us share in the latent meaning and thereby assimilates us
to the symbolized, without our being able intellectually to dominate
the similarity. This is the sense in which the symbol "gives"; it

3· Ibid., pp. I93-94.

 The Symbolism of Evil/lOS
gives because it is a primary intentionality that gives a second
meaning.'
This relationship, neither arbitrary, since it depends upon a
'1ikeness" between the two sides of the intentionality, nor re-
ducible without destroying the symbolic significance, is one jus-
tification for giving the symbol its place as an originary fullness
of language in Ricoeur's hermeneutics.
The multi-leveled meaning of the symbol gives it a linguistic
role "like" that of the multidimensioned aspects of the life world
in an existential phenomenology. The "birthplace of language"
is already the potential whole rather than the logically reduced.
This places the symbol, in Ricoeur's sense, at an inverse posi-
tion to the strictly formal:
Not only does it belong to a kind of thinking that is bound to its
contents, and therefore not formalized, but the intimate bond be-
tween its first and second intentions and the impossibility of pre-
senting the symbolic meaning to oneself otherwise than by the
actual operation of analogy make of the symbolic language a lan-
guage essentially bound, bound to its content and, through its
primary content, to its secondary content (SE, p. 17).
In addition to the structural characteristic of double inten-
tionality, the symbol, in Ricoeur's highly selected sense, must
carry a second characteristic. The symbol in its paradigmatic
sense is also undifferentiated in its prephilosophical dimen-
sions. Archaic or primitive symbols provide an "objective" un-
derstanding of evil. This is to say that the symbol locates and
"reads" its symbolic significance as having a location in the
totality of being. At the most archaic level in symbolic expres-
sion this is the cosmological dimension of the symbol. The sym-
bol also includes a "subjective" reference as a response to evil
recognizable in affects or feelings. This is the psychiC or oneiric
dimension of the symbol. Each symbol finally is an expression
which dramatizes these under.standings in an image. This is
the poetic dimension of the symbol. In its religiOUS setting these
expressions form a "system" of representing and ritually dealing
with evil.
These distinctions, drawn from the undifferentiated primi-
tive symbol, serve to initiate a phenomenological genesis in de-
scription of the symbol. In this movement evil is first read upon
the world:
4. Ibid., p. 194·
 106 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E NO LOG Y

Man first reads the sacred on the world, on,some elements or as··
peets of the world. • • , First of all, then, it is the sun, the moon,
the waters-that is to say, cosmic realities-that are symbols.
. , , For these realities to be a symbol is to gather together at one
point a mass of significations which, before giving rise to thought,
give rise to speech eSE, pp. la-II).

Phenomenologically, this is to say that, just as naive experience

is first directed toward the world, so in naive or prephilosophi-
cal language the significations are first read upon the world.
In the primitive symbol the cosmic aspect is accompanied
by its psychic response. In the prephilosophical state the symbol
remains undifferentiated in both the cosmic and psychiC mo-
ments. Thus, in its oneiric sense, the dream and the fantasy
may also signify the sacred. "To manifest the 'sacred' on the
'cosmos' and to manifest it in the 'psyche' are the same thing"
(SE, p. 12).
But in both cases it is the image which coalesces the ana-
logues of the symbol. The poetic is the intentionality of symbolic
expression itself. "Unlike the other two modalities of symbols,
hierophanic and oneiric, the poetic symbol shows us expressivity
in its nascent state" (SE, pp. 13-14). The poetic is the ''birth-
place of language" which gives the symbol its form and possi-
bility of development. Thus, by virtue of both its structural
complexity and its undifferentiated multiple dimensions, the
symbol provides the fullness of language which Rlcoeur uses as
the field and base for hermeneutics.
Once the type of symbol to be examined is thus defined, a
question of selection is implied. Rlcoeur chooses to examine
symbols which lie only within the broad history of the West. In
a self-conscious way he attempts to justify this choice. The justi-
fication serves to establish the point of view or perspective which
defines the relations between the symbols and the philosopher.
The choice is also an affirmation of a philosophical origin.

My field of investigation is oriented, and because· it is oriented it

is limited. By what is it oriented? Not only by my own situation in
the universe of symbols, but paradoxically, by the histOrical, geo-
graphical, cultural origin of the philosophical question itself.
Our philosophy is Greek by birth. Its intention and its preten-
sion of universality are "situated.". . . The fact that the Greek
question is situated at the beginning orients the human space of
religions which is open to philosophical investigation eSE, pp. 19-
20).
 The Symbolism of Evil / 107

The acceptance and recognition of a "point of view" from which

the field of symbols may be "viewed" allows a characterization
of intersymbol relations without pretension.
The situating of a point of view establishes a set of field rela-
tions concerning the myth and symbol themes. But the point
of view is in effect a double one. The vast multiplicity of cul-
tural symbols is related to what Ricoeur has called philosophical
consciousness, which in turn revolves around reflectivity. The
first set of relations, those of proximity and distance, are situ-
ated according to their relative distances from philosophical
consciousness. The whole field of myths is one which displays
only a partial distance from this consciousness, since only those
myths which are at the origins of Western thought are selected,
and of these the Hebrew and Greek myths remain closer than
the others. However, for reasons to be noted below, the doubling
of the point of view occurs in Ricoeur's identification of the
Adamic myth as the reflective myth. Depth relations are his-
tOrico-temporal and functionally are more important for the re-
gressive nature of Ricoeur's dynamiCS. At bottom Ricoeur seeks
the most archaic recoverable theme: "There are themes of the
religiOUS consciousness that appear to us today . . . in the
<thickness' and the transparency of our present motivations.
. . . It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the
stratified structure of the consciousness of the fault" (SE, p. 21).
Lateral relations are essentially crosscultural relations within
a given historical stratum. Hebrew-Assyrian or Greek-Egyptian
intercultural relations are examples. Retroactive relations refer
to renewals and discoveries in the past which add to the knowl-
edge of the symbol. In each of these historical-cultural relations
the diagnostic which utilizes the information of the historical,
archeological, and literary tools is necessary.
Once the situation and setting from which symbols are to
be interpreted is established, it becomes possible to expose the
structural and the dynamic characteristics at the same time. The
"deduction" of a symbol evolution in Ricoeur's use is both his-
torical and phenomenological. Two points, however, are essen-
tial to this exposition. First, the apparent order which traces the
movement of evil from exteriority to interiority or from "objec-
tivity" to "subjectivity" is possible only from the already func-
tionally assumed position of Ricoeur's phenomenology. The
movement is one which initiates what is to become the Hegelian
moment of that phenomenology. Second, the development of
the symbol from its archaic possibilities has already been noted
 108 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

to contain or to be isomorphic with the constitution of the self.

The historico-phenomenological evolution of symbol is also a
history of the subject. "Consciousness is not the first reality that
we can know, but the last. It is necessary for us to arrive at con-
sciousness, not to begin with it." D The structure and history of
consciousness is "like" the structure and history of the symbol.
Ricoeur classifies symbols from the past to the present ac-
cording to three broad types: symbols of defilement, symbols
of sin, symbols of guilt. Each has a recognizable intentionality
but is linked with the others by an implied historical movement.
I. The analogue of evil as defilement or stain is the most
archaic of the symbol systems. "Dread of the impure and rites of
purification are in the background of all our feelings and all our
behavior relating to fault" (SE, p. 25). It is a symbolism which
represents evil as "like" a stain. ''What resists reflection is the
idea of a quaSi-material something that infects as a sort of filth,
that harms by invisible properties, and that nevertheless works
in the manner of a force in the field of our undividedly psychic
and corporeal existence" (SE, pp. 25-26). This concept of evil,
nearly universal in the archaic cultures of man, is the most
distant to philosophical consciousness.
Its order of understanding is undifferentiated-in relation
to philosophical consciousness. "The ethical order of doing ill
has not been distinguished from the cosmo-biolOgical order of
faring ill . . . punishment falls on man in the guise of mis-
fortune and transforms all possible sufferings, all diseases, all
death, all failure into a sign of defilement" (SE, p. 27). In its
cosmological moment the analogues of defilement are repre-
sented as infectious contacts, touch, or proximity to a quasi-
material force. Its weighting is toward an externality of evil
which is incurred by proximity.
Its psychic moment is a pre-ethical or undifferentiated fear.
"Ethics is mingled with the physics of suffering, while suffering
is surCharged with ethical meanings" (SE, p. 31). Evil as the
quasi-material is to be feared and avoided. The actions of man
are those which flee the contact with stain. "If you wish to avoid
a painful . . . childbirth, to protect yourself against a calamity
. . . observe the practices for eliminating or exorcizing defile-
ment" (SE, p. 31).
The ritual performances which coalesce the means of deal-
ing with the evil stain are those which systematize the interdic-
5· Ricoeur, "Henneneutique et refiexion," p. 25.
 The Symbolism of Evil / log
tions (do not touch dead bodies, menstruating women, etc. ) and
magically use ritual purifications to ameliorate the forces of evil.
The poetic moment of defilement is already an expression in
word and ntual action. "It is the nte that exhibits the symbolism
of defilement; and just as the nte supresses symbolically, defile-
ment infects symbolically . . . hence, defilement, insofar as it
is the 'object' of this ritual suppression, is itself a symbol of evil"
(SE, p. 35). But at its own level the poetic moment is not at first
conscious of itself; rather, consciousness is constituted in the
symbol which gives it its quality. It is in its potentiality for be-
coming self-conscious that the symbolic expression leads to its
transformation into another type of symbol.
The symbolism of defilement, narrow in its intentionality of
the quaSi-material, is broad in its potential for transfomation.
The analogue is repeatable in ever varying elaborations. But in
being repeated the basic intentionality may also change.
2. The analogues of sin symbolism are the first order of
transformation from defilement to ethics. It is precisely in the
"objectification" of the expenence of evil, in its ritual-poetic ex-
pression, that Ricoeur sees the possibility for such a transforma-
tion. The symbol system is a system which defines the pure and
the impure. "Now it insinuates itself into the experience itself
as an instrument by which the defiled self becomes conscious
of itself. . . . Dread expressed in words is no longer simply a
cry, but an avowal. In short, it is by being refracted in words
that dread reveals an ethical rather than a physical aim" (SE,
pp. 41-42). In other words, the transcendental "infinity" of the
language intention, even though not self-conscious, already dis-
rupts any total immediacy between man and his situation of
suffering evil. The development and progressive coming to con-
sciousness of the possibilities of this symbolic transcendence
over evil are the "future" of the symbol.
In and through the expression and ritualization of defilement
the system of pure-impure becomes an order. In turn the order-
ing of expenence provides the opening for a set of expectations,
a balancing of pains in a vengeance system and a hope for the
absence or disappearance of fear. From this basis the symbols
of stain are open to an ethicization. The symbolism of sin trans-
forms the pure into the holy and purity into piety. The analogues
of sin are bipolar and revolve around the relational notion of
man-before-god. "Polarly opposed to the god before whom he
stands, the penitent becomes conscious of his sin as a dimension
of his existence and no longer only as a reality which haunts
 IIO I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 i. 0 G Y
him" (SE, p. 48). This begins the movemept toward reflection.
The analogues of sin begin the anthropologization of the ex-
perience of evil. The symbolic context is one which represents
"the fundamental situation of a man who finds himself impli-
cated in the initiative taken by someone who . . . is essentially
turned toward man; a god in the image of a man . . . but above
all a god concerned about man; a god who is anthrotropic . . .'"
(SE, p. 51). The before-god elevates the symbolism of evil into
an anthropomorphic rather than a quasi-materialistic context.
In the case of the Hebrew paradigm in The Symbolism of Evil
this bipolarity of sin symbolism revolves around the notion of a
contract, the Israelite covenant. The covenant or contract be-
tween God and his people is made and broken. Sin is the break-
ing of the contract; piety 1s the keeping of faith with the contract.
But even in the emergence of Hebrew monotheism a cer-
tain "realism" remains. The cosmic moment of sin symbolism
retains analogues of position. Man is for God or against Him;
God is present or absent. Evil is a visitation of the wrath of God,
a punishment for being against God.
The psychiC moment of sin is also an elevation and a trans-
formation of fear. "In rising from the consciousness of defilement
to the consciousness of sin, fear and anguish did not disap-
pear; rather, they changed their quality" (SE, p. 63). The psy-
chic response is now "fear of God" and is ethicized. Dread is the
dread of the wrath of God expressed in the images of presence
and absence, of God removing his face or showing it in anger.
Sin anthropomorphizes dread in a relational direction.
The ritual-imaginative notion of repentance retains the
language of positionality. To repent is to '"return," to again stand
in the presence of God. The contract is re-established by the
"position" of Israel. The Exile also provides a series of analogues
for the experience of evil under the sign of sin. The rupture of
being before-God is expressed as "wandering," being "lost," and
as "exiled."
In the ethical context of sin symbolism, however, the lan-
guage of defilement continues to appear. The psalmist and the
penitent continue to speak of being "cleansed" (of sin)-but
the whole sense of stain has been transformed. To be cleansed
now means that the subject's existence has been changed and
does not primarily refer to a means of escaping a quasi-physical
evil. The cleansing becomes a sign for the good faith of the
penitent. One incurs evil "because" one has broken faith with
the contract, not because of an evil force. The transformation
 The Symbolism of Evil / II I

of defilement-still viewed in and through sin symbols-re-

verses the positivity of evil. To incur evil is to ''break'' the con-
tract, to seek vanity in a false god, or to negate the covenant.
An iconoclastic relationship exists between the "higher"
symbolism of sin and the '10wer" defilement symbolism. Sin "de-
mythologizes" stain. The result of taking the language of defile-
ment into the symbolism of sin is that stain loses its original
meaning. Its basic realism is transferred into a purely symbolic
quality and stands for the now dominant analogue of a contract
which has been broken. The sinner is under the sign of evil not
because it has come upon him but because he has turned to an
evil way. Sin begins the subjectivization of the experience of
evil.
3· Guilt and its symbolism complete this subjectivization of
the experience of evil. The analogues of ''burden,'' "punishment,"
and "weight" of guilt become basically subjective. The meta-
phors have lost their basic positivity to the degree that it is the
feeling of guilt which is the distinguishing characteristic. With
guilt it is "1 who . . ." which assumes the central importance
in both the subjectivization and individualization of the experi-
ence of evil.
The transition from sin to guilt is observable in the move-
ment from the contract. The "law," and with it a whole series
of juridical analogues, creates the notion of guilt with its inter-
nalization of an accusation. The penitent is guilty before the
law of a god or before authority. But the guilt is guilt primarily
in relation to consciousness and individualization. "The second
conquest, contemporary with the individualization of fault, is the
idea that guilt has degrees. Whereas sin is a qualitative situa-
tion-it is or it is not-guilt designates an intensive quality,
capable of more and less" eSE, p. 107). The subject is guilty
in accordance with his conscious or "voluntary" activity. The '1
who . . ." is responSible for evil to the degree of his conscious
involvement.
To be freed of the ''burden'' or "sentence" of guilt is to be
"pardoned" or "forgiven." The internalization of the experience
of evil sees in the act of will the order and origin of evil. But
with this subjectivization there is a limit. The limit for the sym-
bol of guilt in its emphasis upon individual responsibility forms
the possibility for the notion of absolute condemnation. The
sense of alienation in which the individual may feel "damned"
is its most intense possibility. As such, guilt is the experience
limit for the cycle of primary symbols.
 I12 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

The final individualization and self-consciousness of the

experience of evil under the concept of guilt results in a para-
dox. With guilt the self becomes its own tribunal-it has au-
tonomy-but at the same time it is in a state of self-conscious
alienation to the highest degree. With guilt the full circle of the
self with itself is completed. Its autonomy may become aliena-
tion, of which the experience limit is despair. For despair is not
only the consciousness of being enslaved; it is the consciousness
of sin without promise.
The previous orders of symbolism are repeated in the sym-
bolism of guilt. Guilt may be expressed in an obsessional or
compulsive washing of hands-understood as neurotic or "psy-
chological." Guilt incurred through the offense of the other or an
infraction of the law of God may also occur in the guilt system.
But guilt "demythologizes" these symbols. The experience of
evil is now self-conscious. "The consciousness of guilt consti-
tutes a veritable revolution in the experience of evil: that which
is primary is no longer the reality of defilement . . . but the
evil use of liberty, felt as an internal diminution of the value of
the self' (SE, p. 102). With guilt the voluntary, the conscious,
becomes the focus for the experience of evil. "It is not by ac-
cident that in many languages the same word designates moral
consciousness (conscience morale), and psychological and re-
flective consciousness; guilt expresses above all the promotion of
'conscience' as supreme" (SE, p. 104).
At the end of the historico-phenomenological analysis of
symbols and their development it is clear that the movement has
been one which began by reading evil upon the world in a primi-
tive "realism," but which progreSSively interiorizes this under-
standing until at its other extreme evil is read in the subject in
terms of an ethical "idealism." In Ricoeur's understanding the
reflective direction of symbol history ends in subjectivity. The
progressive telos of symbol history repeats and absorbs the lower
forms of symbol systems into higher forms.

There is a circular relation among all the symbols: The last bring
out the meaning of the preceding ones, but the first lend to the
last all their power of symbolization.
It is possible to show this by going through the whole series in
the opposite direction. It is remarkable, indeed, that guilt turns to
its own account the symbolic language in which the experiences
of deillement and sin took shape (SE, p. 152).
 The Symbolism of Evil I II3
This Hegelian movement is both a problem and a gain for
Ricoeur's theory of symbols.
The gain occurs in understanding the "demythologization"
of the lower-level symbols within the context of a new system.
The iconoclasm of guilt towards stain and sin is a denaturaliza-
tion of the "realism" of those symbols. 1bis movement allows
the symbol to become a pure symbol. In phenomenological terms
the pure symbol is a reduced symbol.
In the reinterpretation of the symbols of defilement and sin
under the subjectivized symbol of guilt, something "like" a re-
duction occurs. It is at this point that a symbol gives rise to
thought. The subjectivization of symbols is what makes the
symbol available-indirectly-for philosophic reflection; it is
the counterpart of the first Copernican revolution of subjectiv-
ity. The primary symbol may only become pure when it has been
subjectivized. "I would even venture to say that defilement be-
comes a pure symbol when it no longer suggests a real stain at
all, but only signifies the servile will. The symbolic sense of
defilement is complete only at the end of all its repeated appear-
ances" (SE, pp. 154-55).
A pure symbol, in turn, is suggestive of a concept. "The con-
cept toward which the whole series of the primary symbols of
evil tends may be called the servile will." But as a concept this
final donation of the symbol results in a paradox. "But that
concept is not directly accessible; if one tries to give it an object,
the object destroys itself, for it short-circuits the idea of will"
( SE, p. 151). The notion of a bound will cannot be thought
directly. The power of the symbol is to have thought the concept
indirectly:
Guilt cannot, in fact, express itself except in the indirect language
of "captivity" and "infection," inherited from the two prior stages.
Thus both symbols are transposed "inward" to express a freedom
that enslaves itself, affects itself, and infects itself by its own
choice. . . . Why this recourse to the prior symbolism? Because
the paradox of a captive free will-the paradox of a servile will-
is insupportable for thought (SE, p. 152).
This indirectness, suggestive of the dialectic of Ricoeur's
structural phenomenology, is not only caused by the impossibil-
ity of giving an object to the concept of a servile will. It is also
based in the impossibility of a total reduction. The "self-en-
slaved" will of the paradox is the pure symbol's circle of the self
 114 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

with itself. The paradox becomes the task of escaping from the
"idealism" of the guilt symbols. A completely self-conscious ex-
perience of evil is impossible. This self-enclosed circle must be
limited.

The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to break

out of the enchanted enclosure of consciousness of oneself, to end
the prerogative of self-reflection. . . . The second naivete [of
hermeneutical philosophy] would be a second Copernican revolu-
tion: the being which posits itself in the Cogito has still to discover
that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does
not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol
(SE, p. 356).

The pure symbol is limited in its conceptualization, and the

paradox of servile will is a Kantian limit idea which "consists in
justifying a concept by showing that it makes possible the con-
struction of a domain of objectivity . . ." (SE, p. 355).
In Ricoeur's philosophy limits are derived dialectically. The
moment and movement of symbols are taken up into a larger
context in myths which situate and develop symbols in a drama
of evil. The ascent to a typology of myths expands the under-
standing of the world of symbolic expression. The analytic of
myths may be dealt with schematically, since it is the dialectic of
myths which responds to the problem of the symbol's "idealism."

THE DRAMA OF MYTH

THE PRIMARY SYMBOLS remain primitive in Ricoeur's

hermeneutics. Myths, he indicates, are already a first-order
spontaneous hermeneutics of symbols. However, this first order
of interpretation remains on the other side of philosophical
consciousness in the order of expressive and indirect language.
The myth is a ritual-dramatic form which portrays in imagery
and drama a situation of man before the sacred. To the basic
structural characteristics of symbols must be added the develop-
ment of a narrative which characterizes myth: (a) The myth
is set in a fantasy history which symbolically includes all man-
kind in a concrete universality of a primordial man. All individ-
uals are summed up in the hero, the titan, the first man, and
human experience is portrayed through this central figure or
figures. ". . . in the myth the human type is recapitulated . . ."
 The Symbolism of Evil / lIS
(SE, pp. 162-63). (b) The myth is a movement and is given a
temporal orientation in which the origin and destiny of experi-
ence is imaginatively portrayed. "The myth confers upon ex-
perience an orientation, a character, a tension. Experience is no
longer reduced to a present experience . . ." (SE, p. 163). (c)
The dynamic of the myth is considered by Ricoeur as an onto-
logical exploration, the portrayal of an imagined original state
across which (transparait) the current existential state of man
is viewed. The transition from original to actual is made in the
narrative of the myth.
The narrative form as a dramatic structure "is neither
secondary nor accidental, but primitive and essential" (SE, p.
170). The existential exploration occurs in and through the con-
crete images of the myth. "It is a narration precisely because
there is no deduction, no logical transition, between the funda-
mental reality of man and his present existence. . . . the myth
has a way of revealing things that is not reducible to any trans-
lation from a language in cipher to a clear language" (SE, p.
163),
In fact, by taking the notion of a narrative drama somewhat
more literally and rigidly than does Ricoeur, the typology which
he develops can be shown with some Simplicity. While this
device excludes the subtlety of Ricoeur's analysis and omits
discussion of many of the transitional myths, it can bring the
hermeneutic dialectic of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" into
clearer light. It is the ensemble of myths which finally estab-
lishes the limits for Ricoeur's understanding of Fault. The
characters in myth are gods and men, the sacred and the primor-
dial situation of man. The plot of the drama is a movement from
an original state which depicts an origin of evil and moves or
pOints to an elimination or amelioration of evil in a fantasy
history. Through the depiction of the character and the plot, the
understanding of man vis-a.-vis Fault is uncovered in a finite
series of myth types. In short, Ricoeur's understanding of myth
is that it is an expressive and existential portrayal of man's
understanding of himself.
Ricoeur divides Western myths into four basic types: (1)
the drrama of creation, most archaic of the myths, a theogony
which has its paradigm in the Babylonian mythology; (2) the
tragic myths, whose paradigm is to be found in Greek tragedy,
and which stand as the most extreme form of originating evil in
a wicked or blind god; (3) the "philosophical myth" of the exiled
soul, a myth which creates the only dualism of body and soul;
 II6 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

and (4) the eschatological or anthropological. myth of biblical

history, which is taken as a central myth.
The first three myth types belong to the broader classifica-
tion of speculative myths which locate the origin of evil in a
state or situation prior to man. Only the last or anthropological
myth originates evil with man through an act of conscious will.
The dialectic of myths reopens Ricoeur's play of "objective" or
external and "subjective" or conscious polarities.
Although between these main types there are a series of
transitional types which show with great fineness of analysis the
many historical transpositions that have occurred between times
and cultures, it is necessary to exclude them from discussion. By
applying the notions of character and plot the intentionality of
each myth may be portrayed.
I. The drama of creation begins without characters. The
primordial state is chaos; then the gods come into being. "The
first noteworthy trait exhibited by this creation-myth is that,
before recounting the genesis of the world, it recounts the gene-
sis of the divine; the birth of the present world order and the
appearance of man, such as he exists now, are the last act of a
drama that concerns the generation of the gods" (SE, pp. 175-
76). The undifferentiated and unordered state of chaos is prior
to the differentiation into good and evil and the order of the
cosmos. The opening act of the drama is the cOming-into-being
of order and the gods. "This first trait leads to a second: if the
divine came into being, then chaos is anterior to order and the
principle of evil is primordial, coextensive with the generation
of the divine" (SE, p. 177).
It is this characteristic of the anteriority of evil which places
the drama of creation among the speculative myths. "Man is not
the origin of evil; man finds evil and continues it . . . evil is as
old as the oldest of beings . . . evil is the past of being" (SE, p.
17 8 ). It is the creative act itself which forms the transition from
chaos to order. But the creative act is first an act of violence. In
the BabylOnian form (with echoes to be found in the Greek
myths of the Titans) the present order is brought into being
through the slaying of the oldest gods. "Thus the creative act,
which distinguishes, separates, measures, and puts in order, is
inseparable from the criminal act that puts an end to the life of
the oldest gods, inseparable from a deicide inherent in the di-
vine" (SEJ p. ISO).
In its ritual form of a New Year's festival the repetition of
the drama each year repeats and renews the creation of the
 The Symbolism of Evil / 117
cosmos in dramatized form. The drama of creation sees its fu-
ture, or better its renewal, in terms of the annual re-establish-
ment of order. Man must identify himself with the future of
being, with the gods who establish the order. The only hope for
the elimination of evil lies in the repetition of the creative act
itself. "There is no history of salvation distinct from the drama
of creation" (SE, p. 191). There is an essential ambiguity be-
tween good and evil in such a myth. Violence and creation, thus
destruction and creation, belong to the same actions.8
2. The ambiguity of good and evil is continued in more
radical form in the tragic myths. But its division has a direction
toward a theology which Ricoeur regards as "unthinkable." The
characters, already present as gods and men, stand in opposi-
tion to one another. At its height the drama arises in the idea of
a wicked god or a blind fate. "It may be said that the divine
malevolence has two poles, an impersonal one in moira and a
personal one in the will of Zeus" (SE, p. 217). Tragic theology
radicalizes the previous ambiguity of the myths of chaos by shift-
ing the ambiguity toward the diabolical. "The non-distinction
between the divine and the diabolical is the implicit theme of the
tragic theology and anthropology" (SE, p. 214). The gods intend
evil toward man, who is doomed by them. Thus, the tragic myth
also belongs to the speculative class of myths which originate
evil prior to man-man :finds himself doomed in an evil situa-
tion.
The plot of tragedy, in Ricoeur's terms, "does not appear until
the theme of predestination to evil-to call it by its name-
comes up against the theme of heroic greatness; fate must first
feel the resistance of freedom, rebound . . . from the hardness
of the hero, and finally crush him, before the pre-eminently
tragic emotion-cp&po~-can be born" (SE, p. 218). The drama
occurs in the opposition of freedom to fate or the will of the
gods, in the delay before inevitable doom.
The hero, primordial man, is victim but also is to be ad-
mired. r The implication is that man has an ambiguous inno-
cence before the gods. But this innocence is not complete, and
the tragic myths echo the ambiguity of the dramas of creation.
In the example of Prometheus Bound the central character, re-
6. Ricoeur sees this myth as an anticipation of themes worked
out in later German mysticism with its emphasis upon the becoming
and growth of divinity.
7. Ricoeur rejects the temptation to locate a sin for the hero in
the concept of hubris, a later moralizing tendency in Greek thought.
 IIB / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

garded as prefiguring primordial man rather than as a god equal

to Zeus, is a guilty-iIlllocent. The theft of fire is' a gift to man; the
same act is both crime and benefit. "Prometheus is the bene-
factor of mankind; he is the humanity of man; he suffers be-
cause he has loved the human race too much. Even if his
autonomy is also his fault . . ." (SE, p. 223).
The ambiguity of creation-violence is repeated in the tragic
myths, but the innocence of Prometheus is only retrospectively
related to his guilt. "The tragedy of Prometheus begins with un-
just suffering. Nevertheless, by a retrograde motion, it makes
contact with the original germ of the drama . . . the benefac-
tion was a theft. Prometheus was initially a guilty innocent" (SE,
p. 225). His suffering in the current existential state is given a
background-but his actual state is the resistance of freedom to
the divine doom. "The freedom of Prometheus is a freedom of
defiance and not of participation." (SE, p. 224). His grandeur
lies in his refusal of the blind or wicked decree.
The dramatic resolution of tragedy poses a difficult problem,
given its force in a predestination to doom. The "unthinkable"
theology of tragedy is hard to maintain. Thus, in the tragic tradi-
tion itself, there are several drifts away from the tragic. In the
first case there is a suggestion that even the gods may change
with time, "which wears out the claws and teeth of the wrath of
men and gods." (SE, p. 227). This implies a change in the tragiC
characterization of the gods which drives this myth type back
toward its archaic root. Zeus, in the end, is not wicked; the
tyrant becomes just-a god "becomes." But this is precisely the
theme found at the divine pole of the creation myth. 'Thus it is
that the 'epic' that saves 'tragedy' by delivering it from the
'tragic'; the 'wicked god' is reabsorbed in the suffering of the
divine . . . (SE, p. 228). Such a resolution pays the price of
destrOying the tragic dialectic itself.
Tragic deliverance in its authentic sense remains bound to
the spectacle. It is through pathos that tragedy attains an aes-
thetic deliverance. "The tragic vision, when it remains true to its
'type: excludes any other deliverance than 'sympathy: than
tragic 'pity'-that is to say, an impotent emotion of participation
in the misfortunes of the hero, a sort of weeping with him and
purifying the tears by the beauty of the song" (SE, p. 227).
Deliverance transforms the participant without changing his
doom. Tragedy opens "the law of suffering for the sake of
understanding" (SE, p. 229).
The spectacle of the drama is the poetic dramatization of the
 The Symbolism of Evil I II9
existential understanding of a culture. One source of Greek
humanism is to be found in the ritual drama of tragedy which
aesthetically establishes the tragic compassion for man.
3· The third myth also makes its appearance in Greek soil
but is marginal to both the previous two types and to the eschato-
logical myth discussed below. It is the myth of the exiled soul.
Its importance cannot be questioned-it is the most "philosophi-
cal" of the myth types, and when transposed into an amalgam
with the anthropological myth of the Bible', it plays an im-
portant role in Western man's understanding of himself.
What constitutes the uniqueness of this myth is its dualism
of body and soul, a dualism lacking in each of the other types.
It tells how the "soul," divine in its origin, became human-how
the "body," a stranger to the soul and bad in many ways, falls to
the lot of the soul-how the mixture of the soul and body is the
event that inaugurates the humanity of man and makes man the
place of forgetting, the place where the primordial difference be-
tween soul and body is abolished. Divine as to his soul, earthly as
to his body, man is the forgetting of the difference . . . (SE,
p.280).

In fact the myth itself must be largely reconstructed from phil-

osophical sources, thus accounting for a certain lack of concrete
features. Its roots lie in a pattern reminiscent of both Eastern
thought and the archaic theogonies in which life and death are
but two sides of an eternal circle. But its intentionality remains:
to develop the soul in order to eventually escape the imprison-
ment in the body which is doomed.
There is a theogonic origin to the Orphic myth. The Orphic
myth adopts a Greek version of the myths of creation. Through a
long series of geneses man is eventually produced as a mixture
of the divine (soul) and the earthly (body). In its derivation of
the source of suffering in the dark roots of a theogony prior to
man's present state, the myth of an exiled soul remains specu-
lative in its tendency.
But if the characters of this drama are not clear, its plot and
mode of deliverance are. Man is divided in his essential being.
In his present existence he forgets this essential state and thus
remains bound to the body. The drama moves first toward a "faU"
into the earthly, then toward a process of recovery; the soul is
both punished and educated. Trapped in the prison of bodily
existence, the soul is in conflict with the passions and seeks an
eternal repose united again with its divine origins.
 120 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

The philosophic modification of this myth is one which sys-

tematizes a deliverance through knowledge. '''Now the act in
which man perceives himself as soul, or, better, makes himself
the same as his soul and other than his body . • . this purify-
ing act par excellence is knowledge" (SE, p. 300 ).8 Know thyself
is a ritual word which "invents" the dualism and which roots all
knowledge in the direction of freeing the soul from its bodily
prison.
4. The Adamic or anthropological myth, according to Ri-
coeur's interpretation, belongs to a different type from the three
previous myths in its radical introduction of a new intentional-
ity. It situates the origin of evil not prior to man but in the bad
use of freedom by man himself. Ricoeur "reads" the Adamic myth
twice, however. In effect, the first reading of the Adamic
myth makes the typological intentionality clear; the second read-
ing is possible through Ricoeurs dialectic of myths.
The characterization of the dramatis personae of the anthro-
pological myth immediately separates it from the intentions of
the speculative myths. "The etiological myth of Adam is the most
extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of
the good; its intention is to set up a radical origin of evil distinct
from the more primordial origin of the goodness of things" (SE,
p. 233). The biblical God is holy and innocent, and biblical man
is finite and innocent. Creation begins as an essential good at
both the divine and human poles. Moreover, man, although he
is the "first man," "relates the origin of evil to an ancestor of the
human race as it is now whose condition is homogenous with
ours" (SE, p. 233). It is this characteristic which makes the
Adamic myth properly anthropological.
The plot is the movement from a primordial innocence to an
existential deviation. Man deviates from his originally good des-
tination through an act of will. "The Adamic myth is a myth of
'deviation,' or 'going astray,' rather than a myth of the 'faIr"
(SE, p. 233). The deviation occurs in the first reading of the
myth as the action of this first man. "It tends to concentrate all
the evil of history in a single man, in a single act-in short, in a
unique event" (SE, p. 243). Evil comes to be through man as a
radical and absurd event. By accepting a temptation Adam ini-

8. Note that the body of the ancients is not that of later "Carte-
sian" dualism but is the symbolization of certain types of desire or
passion which are felt. The body is not yet an "object."
 The Symbolism of Evil / 121

tiates evil, which then becomes the condition of all men through-
out actual history. Evil is historical, not structural.
The first reading of the Adamic myth announces what Ri-
coeur calls the ethical vision of the world in radical form. Evil
originates in an act of will-the subject is responsible for and
takes upon himself radical evil as bad wiU. God remains inno-
cent; man, through his deviation, corrupts the universe.
In its biblical setting, this myth sees evil as a historical end.
Deliverance is eschatological. Biblical history becomes the his-
tory of rectification and the hope for deliverance. And although
there are a series of modifications and variants, the «return" to
innocence is to be through a human figure. The People or the
Remnant are to be delivered through a Messiah or the Son of
Man. The myth sees deliverance as a restoration of condemned
freedom to its uncondemned state.
These four myth types form the basic units for a series of
cross relations which Ricoeur inserts into his version of dialectic.

MYTH AND THE DIALECTIC

THE DIALECTIC of hermeneutic phenomenology elevates

the problem of objectivity to a new level. The oppositions of the
myths are a repetition of the "subjective" and "objective" modes
of thought as means of accounting for the experience of evil.
The reflective myth begins with man and locates its account of
evil in an act of will; the speculative myths locate their accounts
of evil in a state of being and thus make of evil that which pre-
cedes man. This is the functional reciprocity of The Symbolism
of Evil.
The dialectical moment of the hermeneutics of myth com-
mences with an affirmation by which Ricoeur weights one myth
with a central role-the anthropological myth of Adam. An
eidetic of symbols and myths is surpassed in a dialectic.
The transition to philosophioal hermeneutics was begun when we
passed from the statics to the dynamics of the mythical symbols.
The world of symbols is not a tranquil and reconciled world; every
symbol is iconoclastic in comparison with some other symbol, just
as every symbol, left to itself, tends to thicken, to become solidified
in an idolatry. . . . I entered that circle as soon as I admitted that
I read the ensemble of the myths from a certain point of view, that
the mythical space was for me an oriented space, and that my
 122 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L Q G Y

perspective was the pre-eminence of the Jewish confession of

sins. . . . By that adoption of one myth, the appropriation of all
of them became possible, at least up to a certain point (SE. p.
354)·

This new weighting remains consistent with all of Ricoeur's

choices. In Ricoeur's interpretation the anthropological myth is
the "subjective" or reflective myth which begins radically with
the subject. The dialectic is a play of that central myth against
a set of counterfoci provided by the speculative myths which
begin evil "objectively" outside or prior to man. The new rec-
iprocity which underlies this dialectic is the reciprocity of evil
as act and state. The stakes of the dialectic are also consistent
with Ricoeur's previous choices. Can a reflective myth "absorb"
all speculation? The answer may be anticipated in a qualified
"no." The speculative myths limit the reflective myth througb
the dialectic. The implied "idealism" of the subjective myth is
limited by the inability to totally absorb the problem of evil prior
to man. It is the dynamiCS of the myths which effectually make
the second reading of the Adamic myth possible as a limiting of
the first and ethical vision of the world.
In each case the speculative myths originate evil in a source
anterior to man-in what may be called philosophically a cate-
gory of being. The Adamic myth reverses its radical first inten-
tionality by making evil primarily an event of history-the
dominant aim of ethical monotheism seeks to preserve the inno-
cence of God and the essential goodness of finitude. This aim of
the Adamic myth also corresponds to a functional aim of Ri-
coeur's hermeneutic phenomenology. Fault is not to be located in
structures of the will alone. The will seduces itself, and its cap-
tivity is a self-induced captivity-to a point. But the question
posed by the dialectic of myths is "to what point?". How is the im-
plied "idealism" of the reflective myth to be limited? Thus the
problem of objectivity as a dialectical limit reappears in her-
meneutics.
The dialectic of myths, by using the Adamic myth as a
weighted focus, establishes a set of limits to these two divergent
intentionalities. These limits are anticipated and clarified in
what Ricoeur calls the second reading of the Adamic myth, the
deviation as a transition. By placing the relations between the
myths in a correspondence with this second reading, the dialec-
tical limits are more easily shown. Thus again the four myth
types are related-now, however, in a dynamic reading.
 The Symbolism of Evil / I23

I. The myth of creation from chaos is, in its Babylonian

version, clearly close to the Adamic myth in time and culture,
though not necessarily in type. In its historical setting the crea-
tion story of Genesis is clearly iconoclastic toward its Baby-
lonian neighbor. In its polemical theological dimension the
Hebrew God is portrayed as a God of power who has no need to
struggle with chaos. He creates through his word-he speaks
and it is so-there is no violence involved in bringing the world
into its form. The scornfulness toward other gods in this asser-
tion of Yahweh's power is matched by his essential goodness,
which is carried over into the Creation itself. The world, finitude,
is originally good, and man is destined to a good, if finite, ful-
fillment.
The status of man in the innocent Creation also implies a
"superiority" of Adamic man over his Babylonian counterpart.
In the Babylonian myth of chaos man is a result of an act of
violence and is destined to be merely a servant of the gods whom
he is to feed. In the biblical Creation man has his own destiny
as the lord of this earth over which he is to have dominion. The
Hebrew "demythologization" of the myth of chaos contains an
intentionality radically counter to the intentionality of its earlier
forms. Its direction removes the origin of evil from a category
of being and places evil in a history. The ethical view of the
world makes evil the act of a subject.
The dialectic however, is concerned with the mutual situat-
ing and limiting of the cycle of myths. Can the reflection implied
in the Adamic myth be considered a complete conquest over the
darkness of speculative chaos? Can the status of evil be com-
pletely reduced to a deviation of will? Ricoeur's second reading
of the Adamic myth responds to this question negatively. The
Jewish anthropological myth itself contains a vestige of its Baby-
lonian antecedent. The serpent who tempts the primal pair is
reminiscent of the monsters of chaos. "The Yahwist appears to
have kept the serpent intentionally; the only monster who sur-
vived from the theogonic myths, the chthonic animal, has not
been demythologized" (SE, p: 255). It is the case, however, that
the serpent in the Genesis account is merely a creature and thus
finite rather than divine. The vestige remains secondary to the
primary intention of the myth as ethical.
In Ricoeur's second reading of the Adamic account the
instant of the Fall is retold as a transition. The serpent poses a
secondary problem for the Adamic initiation of evil. To the
initiation of evil in an act of will is added a discovery of evil
 124 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

already there, revealed through the serpent's seductivity. Evil

cannot be totally reduced to an act of will if another evil has
preceded it. There is a positivity to the evil discovered that ex-
ceeds its initiation. The curse which is visited upon Adam
outweighs the single act of disobedience. The "objectivity" or ex-
ternality of evil, though begun or yielded to in will, cannot be
reduced to mere will.
The underlying theme of all the speculative myths is that
evil already existed, prior to man, in a "category of being." As
the prefiguration of evil discovered in the non-human, the ser-
pent enigmatically creates a "subterranean liaison" between the
Adamic myth and the speculative myths.
2. But it is the tragic myths which bring out the logic of the
dialectic in relation to the irreducibility of non-human evil.
In terms of a typology the tragic myth stands as the polar
opposite to the ethical myth of Adam. The moralizing tendency
which is iconoclastic toward tragedy is no.t absent from Greek
thought (the gods must be moral, hence the fault of the hero is
hubris) but is clearly apparent in the biblical tradition. "The
Adamic myth is anti-tragic; that is clear. The fated aberration
of man, the indivisibility of the guilt of the hero and the guilt of
the wicked god are no longer thinkable after the twofold confes-
sion . . . of the holiness of God and the sin of man" (SE, p.
3 I I ).
The tragic sense of fate, a doom "exterior" to man, is an evil
which is prehuman. Again the serpent poses the enigma. In
Ricoeur's interpretation the serpent's temptation revolves around
the notion of finite limit. What is originally a finite limit as
orientation is called into question by the serpent in such a way
that the limitation appears as an interdiction, the limit becomes
"other' (SE, p. 253). The Fall of Adam is an alienation and
deviation from the originally good destiny of finitude.
The tragic myths begin with the notion that the very nature
of freedom implies a destiny, a fate. They are the "reverse side"
of the ethical confession of sin. To choose is to.be encompassed
by a destiny even if unknown; it is a narrowing of existence.
Finitude itself is the narrowness which is potentially tragic. To
begin an evil which is then discovered as "other" limits the
ultimate possibility of totalizing the subjective or ethical view of
evil:

Here . . . is a fault no. lenger in an ethical sense, in the sense ef

a transgressien of the moral law, but in an existential sense: to.
 The Symbolism of Evil / I25

become oneself is to fail to realize wholeness, which nevertheless

remains . . . the dream . . . which the Idea of happiness points
to. Because fate belongs to freedom as the non-chosen portion of
all our choices, it must be experienced as fault (SE, pp. 312-13).

The tragic myths, which limit the Adamic myth through the
figure of the serpent, preserve the opacity which characterizes
evil and which always signifies a limit function for Ricoeur.
"They leave intact the opacity of evil and the opacity of the world
'in which such a thing is possible'" (SE, p. 326).
The limit, however, remains secondary to Ricoeur's continued
affirmation of the subjective position. The representation of evil
as "other" and as non-human, as the "source of evil for which I
cannot assume responsibility, but for which I participate in every
time that through me evil enters into the world . . ." (SE, p.
3 14), is not allowed to dominate the ethical confession. "It might
be said that the avowal of evil as human calls forth a second-
degree avowal, that of evil as non-human. Only tragedy can ac-
cept and exhibit it in a spectacle, for no coherent discourse can
include that Other" eSE, p. 314).
The mutual limits of the dialectic "save" rather than destroy
the Adamic myth. In Ricoeur's sense, the tendency of the Adamic
myth, left to itself, is to a sterile moralism, a condemnation of
man. This idolatry of the ethical view of the world is limited by
the tragic view, which continues to reaffirm the fateful and un-
chosen dimension of freedom. Man cannot be responsible for the
unchosen and thus cannot be condemned in a total fashion. The
compassion for the tragic hero "saves" the moralism of Adamic
anthropology.
3. The myth of the exiled soul poses a special problem for
the dialectic. The dualism of body and soul in the myth of Adam
contrasts with the monism of all of the other myths which treat
man as a totality. Yet despite the typological difference, historical
transpositions brought the myth of Adam and the myth of the
exiled soul into an intermingled amalgam. Ricoeur sees the basis
for this transposition in the lise the two myths make of the ex-
ternality of evil as a seduction scheme.
In the Adamic myth the external figure is the serpent who
seduces the original pair first through Eve's frailty and then
through Adam's. In the myth of the exiled soul the intentionality
is quite different-it is the body which is understood as external
and the source of a seduction into evil. 'The Orphic myth de-
velops the aspect of the apparent externality of the seduction and
 126 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

tries to make it coincide with the 'body,' understood as the unique

root of all that is involuntary" (SE, p. 33 I). 111 the two cases the
nature of the external seduction is at first different: the serpent
of the Adamic myth is non-human; the exiled soul takes the ex-
ternality of the body into the mixture which is man.
At this level a countermovement of approximation is already
possible. In the OrphiC myth the conflict is internalized by mak-
ing the body a symbol-body. Experience is understood as an in-
ternal conflict between (bodily) desires and the aim of the soul
for repose. "For the body itself is not only the literal body, so to
speak, but also a symbolic .body. It is the seat of everything that
happens in me without my doing. Now seduction is also in me
without my doing; and so it is not so astonishing that the quasi-
externality of the involuntary motions of the body could serve as
a schema of externality (SE, p. 332).
From the Adarnic side a second movement originated even
prior to the Hebrew-Greek intercultural mixture of symbol sys-
tems. As sin symbolism began to develop in the direction of guilt,
a progressive internalization of deviation can be detected. The
suite of biblical expressions lays the basis in the biblical tradition
itself. The "exile" of Adam and Eve from the garden and the
historical Exodus as a "wandering in the wilderness" are poten-
tially capable of internalization as "inner exiles." Nor is biblical
language without a certain symbolism concerning the body. The
"heart of stone," the "lewdness of the adulterer like the rut of
beasts," (SE, p. 332). suggest the symbol-body even though in
the context of sin symbolism the metaphor is being used in a
reference which revolves around a change of will.
But by the time of the prophets the positional absoluteness
of sin against God is also understood in terms of feelings of guilt.
"Step by step. the Biblical theme of sin tends toward a quasi-
dualism, accredited by the inner experience of cleavage and al-
ienation" (SE, p. 333). Once experience is understood as inner
conflict the approximation of the conflict of the exiled soul to the
conflict of deviation is possible.
Finally, in the late Hebrew and early Christian era the in-
vasion of body-soul dualism makes its full appearance in biblical
language. In particular the Pauline treatment of sin and the law
in the language of "spirit" and "flesh" allows the amalgamation
to occur-in spite of the repeated Pauline emphasis on the "res-
urrection of the body" and the literalizing of Adam which seeks
to preserve the monism of the Hebraic concept of man. The
result is that the myth of Adam gains a different and a stronger
 The Symbolism of Evil I 127

significance in the Pauline account-Ricoeur notes that the

Adamic myth plays a much less important role in Old Testament
use than in the New Testament.

Adam will be less and less the symbol of the humanity of man; his
innocence will become a fantastic innocence, accompanied by
knowledge, bliss, and immortality, whether by nature or as super-
added gift; at the same time, his fault, instead of being a case of
"going astray" will become truly a "fall," an existential down-
grading, a descent from the height of a superior and actually
superhuman status; . . . consequently, Adam's fall will no
longer be very different from the fall of the souls in Plato's
Phaedrus, where the soul, already incarnate, falls into an earthly
body (SE, pp. 334-35).

Ricoeur notes that it is a two-way movement that eventuates

in the amalgamation. The philosophizing of the myth of the ex-
iled soul, particularly in the Platonic context, is one which drives
the Orphic myth closer to an ethical interpretation. The Platonic
unification of desire as two sides of a single aim of man in effect
demythologizes the stronger dualism of the early myth. The
Platonic use of the myth "represents an inflection of the sym-
bolism of the 'evil body' in the direction of the theme of 'evil
choice' " (SE, p. 344).
In later Western history the myth of Adam and the myth of
the exiled soul intertwine in a mixture of ethical and existential
themes concerning the experience of evil. The one who experi-
ences evil is seduced by that "other" which is already there (the
Devil), but the victim himself must initiate the act. Once initi-
ated, however, bad choice binds the subject to a fate which binds
the will itself.
Thus here, as in all the terminations of the myth cycle, the
paradox of a servile will is again resighted. The myths arrive at
a limit which was already recognized as a final irreducibility in
the primitive symbols. The will is act and state; evil is initiated
and discovered.

SYMBOL AND LIMITS

AT THE END of Ricoeur's analysis, myths are seen to be

variants upon the schemas of evil originally suggested by the
symbols. The symbols remain the enigmatic invariants which
 128 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

provide the basic intentionalities for subsequent interpretations.

The symbol is the invariant. .
The invariance of the symbol, however, serves more than one
purpose in this hermeneutics. In its first aspect the invariance
is that of the "fullness of language" which functions clearly at
the end as the whole from which all parts are derived.
Symptomatically, this may be seen from the very beginning
or bottom of the symbol series. "Several times we have alluded
to the symbolic richness of the oldest of the symbols of evil, the
symbol of defilement. Defilement is always more than a stain,
and so it can signify analogically all the degrees of the experience
of evil, even to the most elaborate concept of the servile wilr'
(SE, p. 336). The puzzle around which the whole multiple in-
tentionality of defilement revolves is the "objectivity" of evil. And
although as a pure symbol this "objectivity" has been phenome-
nologically reduced, the naive interpretation as a quasi-material
evil literally incurred through touch is demythologized. The in-
tentionality of an "objectivity" remains.
Ricoeur sees three aspects to the intentionality of defilement
as a pure and irreducible symbol: (a) Its "objectivity" is "the
schema of 'positiveness': evil is not nothing; it is not a simple
lack, a simple absence of order; it is the power of darkness; it is
posited; in this sense it is something to be 'taken away'" (SE,
p. ISS). (b) Positivity is also "externality." "Evil comes to a man
as the 'outside' of freedom, as the other than itself in which free-
dom is taken captive. . . . This is the schema of seduction; it
signifies that evil, although it is something that is brought about,
is already there, enticing" (SE, p. ISS). And (c) its "infection"
is that of the self-infected will. "The ultimate symbol of the ser-
vile will, of the bad choice that binds itself . . . signifies that
seduction from the outside is ultimately an affection of the self
by the self . . . by which the act of binding oneself is trans-
formed into the state of being bound" (SE, p. 156). Each of these
schemas revolves around the "objectivity" of evil in the sense
that it is never thoroughly reducible to a pure act of will. This is
the case with "infection" as much as with the schemas of "posi-
tiveness" and "externality," since a servile will is one which can-
not free itself.
But what may be seen in the stratification of the schemas is
that a two-way reading is possible. One may begin with positivity
and move toward a self-affection; or one may begin with a self-
affection and regress toward positivity. The speculative myths
move in the first direction: the reflective myth meets its limit in
 The Symbolism of Evil / 129
the second direction. Directions of reading, already anticipated
in the diagnostic of structural phenomenology, are given a
Hegelian tendency in Ricoeur's hermeneutics. The two directions
are progressive-regressive readings which reach a clearer de-
velopment only in Freud and Philosophy, which will be discussed
at length in the following chapter.
Secondly, the symbol as invariant makes all subsequent inter-
pretation a variant. Such is the case with myth as the first-order
spontaneous hermeneutics of symbol. Myth is already interpre-
tation.
The myth takes the schema and provides it with its orienta-
tion, its «explanation," but it also remains a second-order inter-
pretation. In the case of the exiled soul the external""seduction
schema is primitive; the identification of the externality with
body is secondary: "The body in its turn, can serve as a symbol
for a symbol; it . . . is on the border between the inner and the
outer . . . that is why <explanation' of evil by the body always
presupposes a degree of symbolic transposition of the body" (SE,
p. 336). It is the symbol which reveals originary experience.
The symbol is finally the third term which, on Ricoeur's
methodological grounds, is that which unites the double circles
of hermeneutic phenomenology. The symbol reveals experience
through expression; the myth interprets the expression which the
symbol gives. The hermeneutic problem at this level then be-
comes one of finding an interpretation which is adequate to the
invariance of the symbol. The experience of evil must be inter-
preted across the expression in such a way as to retain the pri-
mary intentionalities of the symbol.
A candidate for just such an interpretation is seen by Ricoeur
in the Augustinian concept of original sin-but bereft of its
gnostic tendencies. Original sin as a functional concept, a reflec-
tion upon myths and symbols, seeks to preserve the irreducible
paradox of the symbols. The "biologizing" tendency of the Augus-
tinian idea is an attempt to preserve the existential side of the
experience of evil as already ~ere, while the emphasis upon the
act of will seeks to preserve the subjectivity of the Adamic tra-
dition.

Hence the intention of the pseudo-concept of original sin is this: to

incorporate into the description of the bad will . . . the theme of a
quasi-nature of evil. The concept's irreplaceable function is there-
fore to integrate the schema of heritage with that of contingence.
. . . The quasi-nature is in the will itself; evil is a kind of involun-
 130 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L'O G Y

tary, no longer over against it, but in it-and there you have the
concept of the servile will,9 .
The previous reciprocity of voluntary and involuntary on the
level of Fault becomes the reciprocity of state and act. To ex-
perience evil is both to initiate and to receive evil. The limiting
of a reciprocity of evil between act and state allows the dialectic
between "subjectivity" and "objectivity" to stand. "The inscrutable
for us consists precisely in this, that evil, which always begins
by freedom, is already there for freedom: it is act and habit,
arising and antecedence" 10 The Symbolism of E-vil is a herme-
neutic repetition of the dialectic and the indirect method of Free-
dom and Nature. A field of structures is changed for a field of
expression.
9. Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutics of Symbols," p. 2II.
10. Ibid., p. 213.
6 / Toward the Philosophy
of Language
Freud and Philosophy:
An Essay on Interpretation

FIvE YEARS AFTER the publication of the first herme-

neutic exercise in The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur published a
long and involved study of Freud which "grew" out of the Terry
lectures at Yale. The Freud book seemed to have broken the con-
tinuity of the philosophy of will that Ricoeur had outlined and
promised in his previous books. But in fact, Freud and Philos-
ophy continues the investigation into the problems of method and
the question of hermeneutics which his earlier work had begun.
The Freud study further sharpens the hermeneutic tool.
In The Symbolism of Evil Ricoeur noted that the structure of
symbols was multilayered and that symbols, in their archaic
contexts, had at least three dimensions. The symbols of evil
read evil on the cosmos, in the psyche, and expressed their mean-
ing in terms of poesis, the creative word. Freud and Philosophy
continues the interrogation of symbolic meanings. In The Sym-
bolism of Evil the primary explication of the symbols and myths
of evil dealt with the "cosmic" aspects of symbolic discourse.
Ricoeur elaborated the prephilosophical world-view contained
in the various types of myths. The expressivity of myths was a
word structure through which the man of the myth understood
his relationship with Being. Ricoeur's seeming digreSSion into
Freud, however, raises to primacy the "psychic" side of symbol
structures. The wanting-to-say of desire, understood in Freud as
a pervasive sexuality, is addressed. How does the unconscious
become expressed? the unsaid become said? It is another side of
the function of symbols that is investigated here. This, of course,
leaves still a third level unaccounted for, the level of the third
[13 1}
 132 I HER MEN E UTI C PH EN 0 MEN 0 L Q G Y

term, poesis itself. That is the subject for a "poetics of the will,"
a step that remains Ricoeur's own yet-to-be-said.
But at the same time that Ricoeur continues his quest for
understanding the nature of symbolism, he reopens his dialec-
tical version of philosophy with yet another counterfocus-the
figure of Freud. Freud and Philosophy, however, is more than a
mere study of Freud.
In summary Freud and Philosophy has two basic aspects. The
first is a thorough, fastidious, and sometimes tedious philosophi-
cal reinterpretation of Freud and his intellectual journey. Ricoeur
traces the movement from Freud's earlier more mechanistic,
"scientific" psychology to the later and broader interests in culture
and creativity. In tracing and analyzing this development Ricoeur
begins to bring out certain relationships between language and
the theory of the unconscious.
It is this concern which underlies the second aspect of Freud
and Philosophy. The role and significance c;>f the unconscious is
tied to a problem of interpretation-psychoanalysis in its attempt
to deal with symbolic and indirect language is one type of inter-
pretation. Thus, before and after the "Analytic" upon Freud,
Ricoeur adds sections which deal directly with his concern for
hermeneutics. The introductory "Problematic" surveys the var-
ied field of hermeneutics and finds that psychoanalysis occupies
a particularly interesting position of opposition to phenome-
nology. This opposition is rooted in the Freudian "suspicion"
concerning consciousness.
Ricoeur never allows oppositions to remain merely that; thus
after rereading Freud he adds another long section, a "Dialectic,"
which attempts to show hidden relationships between the Freud-
ian form of interpretation and phenomenology as it is broadly
conceived. In fact, there are two figures in the dialectic with
Freud-Husserl and Hegel. It is in this movement that Ricoeur's
own concerns with the symbol and the subject return to full
form. In effect, Freud performs a limiting and radicalizing func-
tion in relation to phenomenology, a function which limits the
pretension of the "transcendental illusion" Ricoeur fears. But in
turn Freud is counterbalanced by a "new phenomenology" which
emerges under the sign of Hegel. Through a detour via Freud
Ricoeur claims an advance in the understanding of the enigmas
of symbolic language. The detour is one which expands Ricoeur's
own understanding of hermeneutic phenomenology.
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 133

THE PROBLEMATIC: THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGE

THE FRENCH TITLE, De L'Interpretation, alludes to Aris-

totle's treatise, and Ricoeur proposes a vaster exercise con-
cerning the philosophy of language than was shown in The
Symbolism of Evil. With Freud and Philosophy Ricoeur enters a
more theoretical phase of the concern with language.
Today we are in search of a comprehensive philosophy of language
to account for the multiple functions of the human act of signify-
ing 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, and exegetical science, an anthropol-
ogy, and a psychoanalysis and, perhaps for the first time, we are
able to encompass in a single question the problem of the unifica-
tion of human discourse. The very progress of the aforementioned
disparate diSciplines has both revealed and intensified the dismem-
berment of that discourse. Today the unity of human language
poses a problem (INT, pp. 3-4).
But the French subtitle, Essai sur Freud, indicates further that
the entry into language will be another of Ricoeur's detours.
The question of a philosophy of language is to be posed via
the Freudian psychoanalysis of language. This choice may appear
odd, particularly if Freud is taken on his own ground. It would
seem that Freud's naturalism-or more strongly his biologism-
and his discounting of the role of consciousness would not only
stand contrary to the pOSitions of phenomenology but would
have been one of the first positions to have fallen under a Hus-
serlian critique. But this is a mere seeming in Ricoeur's case,
because after an agonizing and intricate analysis of Freud the de-
tour is one which serves a basically non-Freudian purpose.
Ricoeur wishes to recover from Freud a hermeneutics which may
be posed as a radical counterfocus to a reflective and phenome-
nological procedure. His aim is ultimately a radicalized «new
phenomenology ."
Thus the "Analytic" of Freud and Philosophy repeats Ricoeur's
reflective "demythologizations" in order to see Freud's develop-
ment increasingly hermeneutical. It is Freud the hermeneut and
psychoanalysis as the set of rules for interpretation which re-
main the center of interest. Through this denaturalizing of Freud
Ricoeur concludes that the "analytic experience bears a much
 134 I HER MEN E UTI C PH EN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

greater resemblance to historical understanding than to natural

explanation" (INT, p. 374). .
This detour by way of Freud, however, reopens the same
questions which were dealt with in The Symbolism of Evil. The
double relations of experience-expression and expression-inter-
pretation which characterize Ricoeur's hermeneutics re-emerge.
From the beginning psychoanalysis as hermeneutics is seen to be
closer to phenomenology than an empirical science would be,
because psychoanalysis in its approach to language does not
totally discount experience. Unlike linguistics, which abstracts
from subjects and makes language an "object," psychoanalysis
retains a version of the experience-expression relation for con-
sideration. The Freudian analysis discounts only a particular or
immediate consciousness for a functional or therapeutic reason.
But in the end psychoanalysis as hermeneutics reaffirms con-
sciousness as that by which the hidden may become manifest in
the psychoanalytic cure. What interests Ricoeur is the different.
way in which psychoanalysis proposes to get its interpretations.
Further, psychoanalysis remains related to Ricoeur's con-
tinued concern with the symbol as the privileged expression field
from which he wishes to begin an inquiry within language. The
dream text of Freudian interest is already part of the oneiric or
psychic dimension of the symbol. In its Freudian context the
experience which gives rise to expression is that of (sexual) de-
sire. Ricoeur sees in Freud the development of a "semantics of de-
sire." Such a "semantics" announces that desire will appear in
terms of a structure of meanings which in turn arise at the junc-
ture of experience and expression, but which must be deciphered
to be understood. The dream is the place within experience where
expression begins to occur. "By making dreams not only the first
object of his investigation, but a model . . . of all disguised,
substitutive, and fictive expressions of human wishing or desire,
Freud invites us to look to dreams themselves for the various rela-
tions between desire and language" (INT, p. 5). The archaism of
the dream and its associated imagery and obscurity is a "birth-
place of language." It is where primitive experience comes to
expression.
But the text is not the dream itself. "It is not the dream as
dreamed that can be interpreted, but rather the text of the dream
account. . . . It is not desires as such that are placed at the
center of the analysis, but rather their language" (INT, pp. 5-6 ).
Again, as in The Symbolism of Evil, the need for hermeneutics
is where experience has already come to birth in expression and
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 135
where again the counterpart of primitive experience and obscure
expression is recognized. All the Freudian theorizing, including
the concepts of the unconscious, the barrier between the con-
scious and the unconscious, and the work involved in interpreta-
tion become a functional hermeneutics upon this text. The
symbol holds the puzzle for a philosophy of language. 'The issue
here is not the problem of evil, but the epistemology of symbol-
ism" (INT, p. I4).
The choice of the symbol which stands as the third term, be-
longing to the relations of both experience-expression and expres-
sion-interpretation, is to open the philosophy of language to what
Ricoeur calls the fullness of language. Ricoeur makes both a
weak and a strong justification for this choice. In its weak sense a
philosophy of language cannot be considered complete until it
is able to give account of indirect expressions and symbols.
As I see it the problem of the unity of language cannot validly be
posed until a fixed status has been assigned to a group of expres-
sions that share the peculiarity of designating an indirect meaning
in and through a direct meaning and thus call for something like a
deciphering, i.e., an interpretation, in the precise sense of the
word. To mean something other than what is said-this is the
symbolic function (INT, p. 12).

But the stronger claim is one which holds that "the problem of
symbolism is . . . coextensive with the problem of language"
(INT, p. I6). The problem of the symbol equals the problem of
language.
The reason the symbol equals language is to be found in the
concept of the fullness of language. Presumably, the symbol al-
ready holds this fullness within itself enigmatically. In reclaim-
ing the concept of the fullness of language, Ricoeur treats at least
two important aspects of this concept.
First, with the long traditions of Romanticism, Ricoeur con-
tinues to assert that the poetic is the "birthplace of language."
In The Symbolism of Evil that function was limited to an investi-
gation of the symbols of evil by which the self gave itself a lan-
guage to express the blind world of suffering experience. This
bringing of experience to expression reappears in Freud and
Philosophy as the bringing to expression of opaque desire. The
same indirectness and equivocity apply to the dream as applied
to the symbols of evil. The symbolic expression is the place within
language where primitive experience and primitive expression
meet.
 136 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

There is no symbolism prior to man who speaks, even though the

power of symbols is rooted more deeply, in ilie expressiveness of
the cosmos, in what desire wants to say, in the varied image-
contents that men have. But in each case it is in language that the
cosmos, desire, and the imaginary achieve speech. To be sure the
Psalm says: "The heavens tell the glory of God." But the heavens
do not speak; or rather they speak through the prophets, they
speak through hymns, they speak through liturgy. There must
always be a word to take up the world and tum it into hierophany.
Likewise the dreamer, in his private dream, is closed to all; he be-
gins to instruct us only when he recounts his dream. This narra-
tive is what presents the problem, just like the hymn of the
psalmist. Thus it is the poet who shows us the birth of the word,
in its hidden form in the enigmas of the cosmos and of the psyche.
The power of the poet is to show forth symbols at the moment
when "poetry places language in a state of emergence," to quote
Bachelard again, whereas ritual and myth :fix symbols in their
hieratic stability and dreams close them ill; upon the labyrinth of
desires where the dreamer loses the thread of his forbidden and
mutilated discourse (INT, p. 16).
The poetic word is the "first word" which emerges from experi-
ence. The primitives of experience and expression function iso-
morphically. Thus the poetic symbol holds a privilege in the
totality of the hermeneutic field.
But this "first word" is enigmatic, indirect, opaque and calls
for a "second word" of interpretation. (Thus a symbol is a double-
meaning linguistic expression that requires an interpretation,
and interpretation 1s a work of understanding that aims at de-
ciphering symbols" (INT, p. 9).
The second sense of the symbol's fullness is structural and
is located in what Ricoeur now terms the polysemic structure of
the symbol. The symbol is multi-intentioned and, from the start,
overdetermined with an excess of meanings. Its complexity of
structure already contains the problem of language in its multi~
dimensioned totality. To understand the symbol calls for an
understanding of a full architectonic of meaning.
What gives rise to this work is an intentional structure which con-
sists not in the relation of meaning to thing but in an architecture
of meaning, in a relation of meaning to meaning, of second mean-
ing to first meaning, regardless of whether that relation be one of
analogy or not, or whether the first meaning disguises or reveals
the second meaning (INT, p. 18).
The symbol "contains" the problem of language in both senses.
In relation to the first sense the problem of the subject may
 Taward the Philosophy of Language / I37
again be raised-how does the symbol reflect the subject? In
relation to the second sense the problem of a "logic" of the symbol
is raised-how does equivocity signify? Taken together the her-
meneutic problem of language may be seen as a renewal of tran-
scendentallogic. The detour by way of Freud thus also initiates
more openly the Hegelian moment of Ricoeur's philosophy:

The only radical way to justify hermeneutics is to seek in the very

nature of reflective thought the principle of a logic of double mean-
ing, a logic that is complex but not arbitrary, rigorous in its articu-
lations but irreducible to the linearity of symbolic logic. This logic
is no longer a formal logic, but a transcendental logic established
on the level of the conditions of possibility; not the conditions of
objectivity of nature, but the conditions of the appropriation of our
desire to be. Thus the logic of double meanings, which is proper to
hermeneutics, is of a transcendental order (INT, p. 48).

The movement toward a Hegelian moment in phenomenol-

ogy remains in a direct line of development from The Symbolism
of Evil in its affirmation of the primacy of the symbol. But in its
expansion of theoretical interests certain modifications of em-
phasis may also be detected. As in The Symbolism of Evil the
symbol remains bound to its metaphorical structural character-
istics.

Symbols are bound in a double sense: bound to and bound by. On

the one hand, the sacred is bound to its primary, literal, sensible
meanings; this is what constitutes the opacity of symbols. On the
other hand, the literal meaning is bound by the the symbolic mean-
ing that resides in it; this is what I have called the revealing power
of symbols, which gives them their force in spite of their opacity.
The revealing power of symbols opposes symbols to technical signs,
which merely signify what is posited in them and which, therefore,
can be emptied, formalized, and reduced to mere objects of a
calculus. Symbols alone give what they say (INT, p. 3I).

But the opacity and the necessary connection between a first and
literal meaning and a second and symbolical meaning are now
seen to be more complex than the analogues of The Symbolism
of Evil. "I would consider rather that analogy is but one of the
relations involved between a manifest and a latent meaning"
(INT, p. 17).
Again, as in The Symbolism of Evil, the equivocity of the
symbol is precisely that characteristic which makes it an invita-
 138 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 L'O G Y

tion to thought. "Enigma does not block understanding, but pro-

vokes it; there is something there to unfold to <dis-implicate' in
symbols. That which arouses understanding is precisely the
double meaning, the intending of the second meaning in and
through the first" (INT, p. 18). But now it is seen that the reveal-
ing power of the symbol may also be a severe dissembling, call-
ing for a hermeneutics of doubt-such as the Freudian model
may provide.
But if at its first level the very richness or overdetermination
of meanings poses the hermeneutic problem, at the level of inter-
pretation another problem exists. There are also multiple her-
meneutics, and the multiple meaning of symbols is open to a
series of differing interpretations. "The bond between symbol
and interpretation, in which we have seen the promise of an
organic connection between mythos and logos, furnishes a new
motive for suspicion. Any interpretation can be revoked; no
myths without exegesis, but no exegesis without contesting. The
deciphering of enigmas is not a science, either in the Platonic,
Hegelian, or modem sense of the word <science'" (INT, pp.
41-42). Instead, there exists a series of hermeneutics, "the her-
meneutic field, whose outer contours we have traced, is internally
at variance with itself' (INT, p. 27). At this level the question
is also one of an orientation among, and a confrontation be-
tween, the various types of hermeneutics. It is in this context that
Ricoeur again uses the dialectic of methods which characterizes
his own indirect approach.
Ricoeur notes that hermeneutics have been a problem from
classical times to the present. On one side stands the Aristotelian
logical model for hermeneutics which isolates a logic of uni-
vocity, but with a cost. The choice of concentration upon univocal
meaning results in "the logician {leaving} the other types of dis-
course to rhetoric and poetics and retaining only declarative
discourse, the first form of which is the affirmation that <says
something of something'" (INT, pp. 21-22). This choice has
dominated Western logiC to the present and has been radicalized
in recent times by the invention of symbolic and mathematical
logic. But formalization in this pattern remains too narrow for
Ricoeur's concern with indirect expressions. In fact, this choice
excludes from its range of interest the symbolic function which
says something other than it (literally) says. A formal logic must
either attempt to reduce all statements to its univocal operations
or abandon indirect discourse altogether.
A second traditional model of interpretation in Western his-
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / I39
tory is to be found in biblical exegesis. In this case multiple mean-
ings and indirect discourse were dealt with in classical form
through the development of four presumed levels of meaning
(literal, allegorical, analogical, and symbolic) found in biblical
texts. But the concern of exegesis with sacred texts was equally
restrictive in its range. However, for Ricoeur's purposes this tradi-
tion did make two contributions. First, it did appreciate and de-
velop the general theme of analogical meanings and was in
principle non-reductive in its methods. And, secondly, the idea of
a text of multiple significance is a worthwhile model. "The exe-
getical tradition affords a good starting point for our enterprise,
for the notion of a text can be taken in an analogous sense" (INT,
PP·24-2 5).
One set of oppositions, then, is between a strictly reductionist
view of meaning, that view of meaning which claims that the
starting point for investigation is with the Simplest and most
direct type of signification, and the view which sees the original
enigma of language as its multivocity. It is clear that Ricoeur,
by choosing to address himself to those theories of language
which hold to the latter, has limited his inquiry largely to those
philosophies of language which are dominant on the Continent.
He addresses himself to the class of hermeneutics which begins
with the enigmas of indirect and multivocal discourse.
In more recent times, and particularly in Continental
thought, the question of hermeneutics has retained a certain im-
portance. Both Schleiermacher and Dilthey in the nineteenth
century and Heidegger, Gadamer, and Bultmann today specifi-
cally deal with the problem of hermeneutics. But in a broader
sense Ricoeur sees a divergence of types which again fit into a
dialectical pattern. The hermeneutic field is approached at the
extremes by two major types of interpretation, Ricoeur argues.
A "hermeneutics of belief' is set against a "hermeneutics of sus-
picion."
Philosophically this latter classification is one which dialec-
tically poses the tradition of transcendentalist philosophies of the
general Cartesian orientation against the philosophies of false
consciousness which arise from the Hegelian left. The hermeneu-
tics of suspicion begins in a severe critique of consciousness in
its immediacy and posits some version of a false consciousness
which must be overcome through interpretation; it is part of the
whole range of iconoclastic interpretations that includes those of
Nietzsche, Marx, and above all, Freud. Freud and Philosophy
takes Freud as the paradigmatic case for dealing with a theory of
 140 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

false consciousness and becomes a concrete confrontation be-

tween a hermeneutics of belief and a henneneutics of suspicion.

DIALECTIC: THE WAR OF HERMENEUTICS

THE DETOUR into Freud as hermeneut in the emergent

classification of two polarly opposed sets of hermeneutics re-
establishes Ricoem's general dialectic in which some version of
"phenomenology" will have as its counterfocus some "anti-
phenomenology" through which a set of limits may be reached. In
Freud and Philosophy the dialectic is seen to have three distinct
moments which progressively revolve around the gradual change
of meanings Ricoeur gives to his own understanding of phenome-
nology.
These three moments of the dialectic are three progressive
encounters between a phenomenological and a non-phenomeno-
logical interpretation-but in the progression phenomenology
changes its meaning. The first moment is one of opposition. The
debate of a hermeneutics of belief with a counterhermeneutics of
suspicion is an opposition of motivation, and in this context the
model for the phenomenological pole is provided by the phenome-
nology of religion (including in principle the ''belief" of Ricoeur's
earlier study of symbols and myths in The Symbolism of Evil).
The second moment of the dialectic is one of approximation.
Ricoeur in this case uses a more specific understanding of Hus-
serl, who is approximated to Freud in the indirectness of his
method. It is this second moment which most typically reveals,
in a revival of diagnostic, a set of mutual limits to both Hus-
serlian phenomenology and psychoanalysis.
But there remains a residue from the second moment of ap-
proximation, and Ricoeur's favored phenomenological focus is
threatened by its counterfocus of Freudian thought. The threat,
however, is the issue of false consciousness which has been
equated throughout Ricoeur's philosophy with the pOSSibility of a
transcendental illusion, the "circle the self makes with itself."
Phenomenology must be limited to prevent this circle, and Freud
becomes the figure who symptomatically serves this function.
But at the same time the reductive strategy of Freud must not be
allowed to overcome the gains of transcendental philosophy.
Thus there appears a figure who has subtly been a background
figure in Ricoeurs understanding of phenomenology and who in-
creasingly assumes importance in relation to the issue of the
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I 141

symbol and the subject: Hegel. The third and final moment of
the dialectic is its Hegelian moment which in Ricoeur's use re-
stores a radicalized understanding of the symbol and the subject.

1. The Moment of Opposition: Belief versus Suspicion

The oppositional moment of the dialectic occurs at what may
be termed a "motivational" level. The phenomenological pole of
this first opposition is identified with the phenomenology which
has developed in the history of religions. The use of phenome-
nology in this field is one which Ricoeur sees as motivated by a
"belief." The "belief" is the aim to restore (lost) meaning. But it
is also clear that phenomenology in this sense was also employed
in The Symbolism of Evil, and the "belief" is Ricoeur's.
In its hermeneutical employment the phenomenology of this
moment consists first in the descriptive approach to the field of
symbols and myths. The epoche which excludes explanation in
order to concentrate upon the "appearance" of the object-field
also presupposes an exercise in the mode of "as if." To enter the
"aura" of the symbol's meaning, to "sympathetically repeat" the
symbol, is necessary in isolating its referential aim. But the pre-
supposition is that the symbol has this to offer-hermeneutics is
first a listening, a "belief." Second, this presupposition is one
which grants the symbol a certain "truth" from the beginning.
This "truth" may be merely that of the possibility of a signifying
intention which may then be classed among other types of inten-
tionality. But it is only through the willingness to ''believe" that
the symbolic dimension may be so deSCribed. The truth of the
symbol which it "gives" in its indirect discourse is discoverable
only in this way. Third, the "belief" that the symbol has some-
thing to say and that the philosopher may learn from the sym-
bol finally presupposes a degree of active participation on the part
of the philosopher which belies the presumed disinterestedness
of a transcendental consciousness. "The fully declared philo-
sophical decision animating the intentional analysis would be a
modern version of the ancient theme of reminiscence" (INT,
p. 3 I). Hermeneutics in this version of restoration of (lost)
meaning is motivated by the will-to-hear.
This reaffirmation of the basic stance of The Symbolism of
Evil is a claim that the symbol seen aright has revealing power, a
"word." But on the side of the observer this presupposition calls
for a willingness to believe. The qualification, however, remains
the same-the belief is already phenomenolOgical. All "second
 I42 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 ~ 0 G Y

naIvete" is already critical in the sense that a reduction is pre-

supposed.
The contrary of suspicion, I will say bluntly, is faith. What faith?
No longer, to be sure, the first faith of the simple soul, but rather
the second faith of one who has engaged in hermeneutics, faith
that has undergone criticism, postcritical faith. . . . It is a ra-
tional faith, for it interprets; but it is a faith because it seeks,
through interpretation of a second naivete. Phenomenology is its
instrument of hearing, of recollection, of restoration of meaning
(INT, p. 28).1
If this is, on one side, to make epoche a kind of "faith," on the
other side it is to leave open the door to an expansion of what
may count for criticism. Left to the one emphasis of "belief," the
revealing power of the symbol is appreciated. But the symbol is
opaque and harbors a possible dissemblance. For this possibility
another motivation is needed.
The countermotivations of a hermeneutics of suspicion are
those which begin from a demystification of the symbol. A her-
meneutics of suspicion takes as its aim the removal of illusions.
Its hypothesis is one which begins with the positing of a "false
consciousness" which is deceived (either by its situation or in
self-deception). This positing, recognized in Ricoeur's case as a
procedural decision, is equally a "motivation." It is a motivation
which opposes the decision to ''believe.'' The implied iconoclasm
of a "suspicious" hermeneutics is directed against the Carte-
sianism of the primacy of consciousness. Second, in function the
suspiCion is one which further posits some version of a barrier
between consciousness and its (intended) meanings. All im-
mediacy of meaning is questioned. The hermeneutics of suspi-
cion calls for a deciphering of what underlies the illusion or is
implied behind the barrier of false consciousness. The meaning
of symbolism is other than is first evident and other than that
which consciousness may "intend." But, third, the hermeneutics
of suspicion rests upon its own version of positivity. The need to
overcome illusion, to surpass false consciousness, is ultimately
an appeal to some principle of reality. Although not necessarily

I. Professor A. Schuwer has frequently argued that the relation

between faith and Ricoeur's use of reduction is a key to understand-
ing Ricoeur. I do not dispute that Ricoeur's philosophical concerns
are also ultimately religiOUS concerns. My interpretation here brutally
underplays these, however, for the sake of developing Ricoeur's
methodology and the emergent theme of language.
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I I43
apparent from the beginning, the reality principle (different in
the various instances) gives the interpretation its final coherence.
What may be surmised in the fust general encounter of a
phenomenological and non-phenomenological hermeneutics is
that the starting points of Ricoeur's interpretation are exactly
counter to one another. The methodological decision employed
in each version of interpretation carries consequences concern-
ing the outcome of understanding. Potentially the problem of the
two "Copernican revolutions" is included here as well as a con-
tinued argumentation between a reflective and a speculative
theory of interpretation. However, the hermeneutics of both be-
lief and suspicion are directed to the field of expression, and both
presuppose that the subject may be understood through or across
this field.
They differ in that the reflective or broadly phenomenological
hermeneutics of belief is largely descriptive or "ontological,"
while the hermeneutics of suspicion "believes" that there is a
hidden substratum which is the real hidden under a set of ap-
pearances. The hermeneutics of suspicion is "metaphysical."
Ricoeur is concerned here, as throughout his career, that the fust
approach is open to the naivete of a transcendental illusion which
too easily takes its deSCriptions as correct ontology while at the
same time not wanting to return to the objectivist naivete of past
metaphysics.
The ~'Problematic" poses this opposition as the background to
the study on Freud. The "Analytic" of the Freud book accom-
plishes that study, placing Freud as a primary figure in the class
of suspicious hermeneuts.

2.The Moment of Approximation: Phenomenology and

Psychoanalysis
The second moment of the dialectic of phenomenology with
the Freudian non-phenomenology begins the reversal of sheer
oppositions of "belief" and "suspicion." In a much more technical
discussion Ricoeur attempts to apprOximate the reductions and
perceptualist model of Husserlian phenomenology to psycho-
analysis. The issue is one which centers on the problem of in-
direct methods.
The issue of indirectness is specifically raised in the com-
parison of the functions of phenomenolOgical reductions as they
approximate a Freudian theory of the unconscious. It is impor-
tant to note that Ricoeur "demythologizes" the naturalism of
 144 I HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

Freudian models from the outset. The dialectic of phenomenol-

ogy and psychoanalysis presupposes the "Analytic" of Freud and
Philosophy which views the theory of the unconscious as a set
of interpretative rules. Ricoeur rejects any "realism" of the un-
conscious. Ricoeur's counterplay to denaturalize the counterfocus
provided by psychoanalysis follows a pattern already set by the
diagnostics of Freedom and Nature.
The first approximation of phenomenology to psychoanalysis
lies in the general indirectness of their respective procedures.
Neither is a basically introspective method in the ordinary sense.
Ricoeur had earlier noted that "An introspective psychology does
not hold up in the face of the Freudian or Jungian hermeneutics;
whereas a reflective approach by the detour of a henneneutics of
cultural symbols, not only holds up, but opens a true debate of
one hermeneutics with another." 2
The indirectness of phenomenology is to be found in reflec-
tion, which is implicitly a type of suspicion. This suspicion is the
systematized suspension of immediacy or naive consciousness,
the first goal of epoche. "This immediate consciousness is dis-
posed along with the natural attitude. Thus phenomenology be-
gins by a humiliation or wounding of the knowledge belonging
to immediate consciousness" (INT, p. 377). The reduction, un-
derstood as a hermeneutic rule, is a theory which begins to ap-
proximate the questioning of immediate consciousness which is
also the first principle of psychoanalysis.
But in the case of Husserlian phenomenology the model is
one which is directed by the question of appearances, which
Ricoeur argues are based on a representationalist or perceptual-
ist framework. Any approximation to an "unconscious" must first
be understood from the perceptualist model. Ricoeur argues that
this is possible in the understanding of the implicit or co-intended
aspect of a phenomenology of perception. An object, when in-
tentionally referred to, is always presented as having both a front
and a back-but the back or unseen side is co-intended or im-
plicit rather than given in the same fashion as the front. The im-
plicit is the first place in phenomenology where the "hiddenness"
of an "unconscious" could be apprOximated. "The first uncon-
sciousness or unawareness (inconscience) phenomenology re-
veals has to do with the implicit, the co-intended: for the model

2. Paul Ricoeur, "The Henneneutics of Symbols and Philosophi-

cal Reflection," trans. Denis Savage, International Philosophical
Quarterly, II, no. 2 (May, I962), I95.
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I I45
of this implicit-or better, this cO-implicit-one must look to a
phenomenology of perception" (INT, p. 378). In Ricoeur's case
this approximation of an "unconscious" to co-intention is height-
ened by the previous use of his Kantian interpretation of perspec-
tive and word. The Kantian distinctions more clearly break apart
the unity of the Husserlian understanding of intentionality than
otherwise would be the case.
But if phenomenology begins by questioning the naivete of
immediate consciousness, it retains consciousness as its central
theme. Phenomenology remains a transcendental philosophy and
presupposes a nexus of originary experience which becomes the
field for investigation.
The theme of this consciousness is intentionality. Ricoeur
sees a second approximation to psychoanalysis in the use phe-
nomenology makes of reflection in order to thematize intention-
ality. In his understanding of phenomenology the first tum to the
object (noema) acquires an irreducible primacy. The subject is
always thematized by a Te-flection from the object, and inten-
tionality becomes thematic only after or through the "mirror" of
the object world. In a statement which places Ricoeur closer to
existential phenomenology than his earlier critiques, he notes
the "impossibility of total reflection, hence the impossibility of
the Hegelian absolute knowledge, thus the finitude of reflection
. . . are written into this primacy of the unreflected over the re-
flected" (INT, pp. 378-79). Reflection is always partial, and this
is the source of the enigma and the opacity of bodily existence.
Flrst, then, in the perception of objects Ricoeur sees an ap-
proximation of pbenomenological description to a tbeory of the
"unconscious." But following bis practice of making a reflectiv'e
tum, the second area in wbicb phenomenology and psycboanaly-
sis are to be approximated must be in the subject. Here the
terminal pole of phenomenology centers upon tbe I-body. The post-
Husserlian pbenomenologies of bodily existence may be approxi-
mated to some aspects of tbe ·unconscious." The subject-body
becomes a second place at wbich a connection occurs.
When asked how it is possible for a meaning to exist without being
conscious, the phenomenologist replies: its mode of being is that
of the body, which is neither ego nor thing in the world. The
phenomenologist is not saying that the Freudian unconscious is
the body; he is simply saying that the mode of being of the body,
neither representation in me nor thing outside of me, is the antic
model for any conceivable unconscious. This status as model stems
not from the vital detennination of the body, but from the ambigu-
 146 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E N a MEN 0 L·a G Y

ity of its mode of being. A meaning that exists is a meaning caught

up within a body, a meaningful behavior (INT; p. 382.).

Thus, both at the object pole and the reflective terminus, phe-
nomenology is open to its own version of an "unconscious."
Ricoeur argues that there is more involved in a hermeneutic
turn than the mere extension of a perceptualist model to the
linguistic field, because when the language field is substituted
for the world of perceived objects, a reflection is possible which
is the discovery of the spirit. "It must be rediscovered with Hegel
that language is the being-there (Btre-la) of the mind [spirit]"
(INT, p. 384).
Freud and Philosophy begins to make clear more of the im-
plications of a linguistically oriented phenomenology. Ricoeur
has always held that there is a difference between a phenomenol-
ogy of speech and a phenomenology of language, and it is the
latter which holds a certain preferential status in Ricoeur's mind.
But the movement to a linguistic phenomenology cannot be made
too abruptly if it is to remain in line with its origins. The move-
ment from the perceptualist model must first be recognized. Un-
der a deSCription of what Ricoeur calls a dialectic of language,
the movement from the perceptualist basis indicates what is in-
volved with the correlated phenomenologies of speech and of lan-
guage. Beginning with perception, one may speak of a dialectic
of presence and absence in relation to the object which is either
present or absent (or present with implied but "literally" absent
aspects). In the substitution of expressions for objects the aspects
of this dialectic are changed. "Man's adoption of language is in
general a way of making himself absent to things by intending
them with 'empty' intentions and, correlatively, of making things
present through the very emptiness of signs" (INT, p. 384). This
is the essential transcendence of work over object, the origin of a
dialectic of signification.
The ascent to language, however, also changes what is no-
ticed regarding intentionality. A phenomenology of perception
rightly concentrates upon the appearance of the object-but this
very concentration is one which accepts a certain naivete con-
cerning language. It takes for granted that the object may be ex-
pressed ("We say the world"). The struggle with language, the
frequent use of metaphor or the coining of new terms, which
has so noticeably marked the existential phenomenologies, is a
partial functional result of this naivete. The struggle with ex-
perience takes language for granted. The hermeneutic turn pro-
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I 147
poses to create in reverse an awareness of the non-neutrality of
the language in use.
In a similar manner the now traditional emphasis of phe-
nomenologists upon the speech act displays a similar blind area.
The signifying intention which aims to "say something of some-
thing" makes vouloir-dire its theme. In the speech act language is
a mediation-the reference always points beyond the words
themselves. This attention, proper in its limits, tends to further
cover over the field of language as a theme for itself.
The hermeneutic substitution of the language field for the
world of objects involves a further step. By turning to the pres-
ence of the language field, the structure of that field may be
noted for its own dialectic. "Language has its own way of being
dialectical: each sign intends something of reality only by reason
of its position in the ensemble of Signs. No sign signifies through
a one-to-one relation with a corresponding thing; each sign is de-
fined by its difference from all the others . . ." (INT, p. 384).
So considered, the language field itself becomes the "object" to
be considered. And with this consideration Ricoeur opens himself
to a need for encountering the linguistic disCiplines.
Such an encounter is not yet to be undertaken in Freud and
Philosophy. But what does occur is the outline of method. The
language field has become the theme which serves as a reflective
surface from which the subject is to be viewed. The reflective
turn which correlates subjectivity with an object-correlate has
language as its "object."
But, if language is noted to have its own structural charac-
teristics which include the fact that meanings are derived both
from a transcending reference and from the ensemble of signs,
then the partiality of the bare speech act itself may be seen. To
speak is to engage far more than vouloir-dire. "In ordinary lan-
guage each sign contains an indefinite potential of meaning . . .
to speak is to set up a text that functions as the context for each
work" (INT, p. 384). Thus what is said carries a significance
which essentially exceeds any merely conscious intentionality.
The indefiniteness and open structure of language are such that
it surpasses in its very nature any simple immediacy of knowing
what is fully signified. To engage language in speech is already
more than the mastery of consciousness over its meanings. But
it is only reflectively that the limits of vouloir-dire can be discov-
ered as partial. Analogically, there remain various factors which
relate the perceptual base of phenomenology to the linguistic
field. The opacity of the body and the ambiguity of the thing
 148 I HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 L.O G Y

function in a fashion which is isometric with the opacity and

partial hiddenness of meaning in language.- In the movement
from perception to language, "the ambiguity of 'things' becomes
the model of all ambiguity of subjectivity in general and of all
the forms of intentionality..•• the question of consciousness
becomes as obscure as that of the unconscious" (INT, pp. 38 5-
86).8 Moreover, the illusion possible from a concentration upon
the primacy of the speech act-that consciousness may rule in
a transparent fashion over its meanings-parallels the illusion
that bodily existence could become perfectly transparent. "Un-
consciousness" is modeled not only on the ambiguity of the thing,
upon the opacity of the body, but upon the hiddenness of mean-
ing in language.
The turn to the circles of language is also a turn to intersub-
jectivity. In language, "all our relations with the world have an
intersubjective dimension" (INT, p. 386). The perceptualist ba-
sis of phenomenology only begins the opeping to intersubjectiv-
ity in its understanding of the constitution of objectivity. An
object is perceived by a subject limited to a positional perspective
-but the object is in principle open to inspection by other sub-
jects. Moreover, those aspects which presently may not be
displayed to one subject may be precisely those aspects present
to the others. The same may be said of meanings. "Every mean-
ing ultimately has intersubjective dimensions; all 'objectivity' is
intersubjective, insofar as the implicit is what another can make
explicit" (INT, p. 386).
The application to a theory of the "unconscious" is immedi-
ate. That which is hidden or only implicit to the immediate con-
sciousness of the operating subject may be apparent or made
explicit by another. The implication is one which relates to psy-
choanalytic techniques-here restricted to their hermeneutic
significance.40 Psychoanalysis begins with the intersubjectivity of
expression rather than arriving at it by way of a perceptual
constitution. In relation to the problem of expressed desire, psy-
choanalysis begins immediately with the problem of intersubjec-
tivity and implicit meaning. "The intersubjective structure of
desire is the profound truth of the Freudian libido theory" (INT,
3· Note the shift from the primacy of consciousness affirmed in
Freedom and Nature 1
4· Herbe~t Sl?iegelberg:s phenomenological workshop develops
yet another direction for thIS purpose. By group reporting, a compari-
son, crosschecking, and correction in the noting and describing of
phenomena are used.
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I I49
p. 387). A phenomenological hermeneutics and psychoanalysis
as hermeneutics approximate one another in the need to explicate
the implicit.
In Ricoeur's case the aim of such an exploration into the la-
tent and hidden meanings of language remains tied to the need
to understand the subject. To understand language is in one
sense to understand the subject. The subject remains the reflec-
tive terminus of the cycles of interpretation-expression and
expression-experience. But this understanding is to be arrived at
by detour through hermeneutics. Through the questioning of the
immediacy of experience a deeper understanding of that experi-
ence is to be had. In this sense phenomenology and psycho-
analysis eventually are approximate in aim:
Phenomenological reduction and Freudian analysis are homolo-
gous in that both aim at the same thing. The reduction is like an
analysis, for it does not aim at substituting another subject for the
subject of the natural attitude . . . the subject doing the reduc-
tion is not some subject other than the natural subject, but the
same; from being unrecognized it becomes recognized. In this
respect the reduction is the homologue of analysis, when the latter
states, "where id was, there shall ego be.". . . Both have the same
aim, "the return to true discourse" (INT, pp. 38g-g0).
A dialectic of apprOximation, however, has two sides, and
phenomenology and psychoanalysis remain only approximate. If
both methods are indirect, the basis of their indirectness remains
radically distinct. Ricoeur shows that the indirectness of each
theory is in effect constituted by different types of reductions.
The perceptual model of phenomenology remains based in a re-
flective procedure which thematizes consciousness; but the ana-
lytic procedure begins by a reduction of consciousness. Thus,
what is indirect in one theory is direct in the other by an inverse
set of rules.
But this initial homology between methods is understood only at
the end. Phenomenology attempts to approach the real history of
desire obliquely; starting from a perceptual model of the uncon-
scious, it gradually generalizes that model to embrace all lived or
embodied meanings, meanings that are at the same time enacted
in the element of language. Psychoanalysis plunges directly into
the history of desire, thanks to that history's partial expression in
the derealized field of transference (INT, pp. 389-90).
Phenomenology as a reflective discipline takes all its cues con-
cerning consciousness from the object-correlate-"the spectacle
 150 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L.O G Y

is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things"

{italics added] (INT, p. 379). What is essentj.al is to isolate the
meaning of this image in Husserlian terms. Freudianism,
however, while indirect in relation to consciousness is direct in re-
lation to its theory of meaning. "It is possible to give a direct defi-
nition of the psychism without appealing to self-consciousness"
[italics added] (INT, p. 379). It is this which marks Freudianism
as an indirect but non-reflective method. It "brackets" precisely
that which becomes the theme of the phenomenological ap-
proach. In this difference Ricoeur sees the possibility of consider-
ing psychoanalytic theory as a countermethod. In a diagnostic
use of Freudian theory Ricoeur proposes to limit the use of phe-
nomenology. Freud in the hermeneutic context, like Kant in the
structural context, counterposes the tendency to "idealism."
It is not accidental that one recognizes here a return to the
tactics of Ricoeur's diagnostic. But with Freud and Philosophy
there emerges a significant difference in its use. In its earlier
form the diagnostiC was a reading techniqu'e which also employed
a dialectic in relation to a countennethod of an "objectivist" type.
But its use remained narrowly limited and single-edged. Although
even in Freedom and Nature, Ricoeur admitted clearly that ob-
jectivism was not totally reducible to a phenomenological uni-
verse of discourse and retained a certain advantage in relation to
the border areas of experience, he never thoroughly indicated
what this irreducibility was.
Secondly, although the limits of a purely eidetic phenome-
nology were presumably established by encounter with an irre-
ducible countermethod, the movement remained focused upon
phenomenology. The diagnostic "de-naturalized" the objectivist
method by reducing it to a "reading" function-but any counter-
move which would inversely "demythologize" phenomenology re-
mained unperformed.
But with the moment of approximation this second move-
ment is made. The "excess" by which psychoanalysis enters into
areas either restricted or blind to phenomenology is interpreted
as an inverse epoche which "demythologizes" certain aspects of
the phenomenological subject. The Freudian hermeneutics of
suspicion becomes the limiting means by which the transcenden-
tal illusion is to be overcome.
This is not to say that Ricoeur abandons his previous prefer-
ence for phenomenology or reflective methods; it is to say that he
wishes these methods chastized. The issue is the transcendental
illusion of "idealism."
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 151

The "weakness" of phenomenology is not its so-called sub-

jectivism. In taking the concrete point of view of the subject-l-
am, phenomenology gains certain insights which lead to the
destruction of a simple objectivism. However, in taking this
point of departure and in gaining certain insights through this
point of view, a temptation occurs which may lead to the absa-
lutizing of the ego.
Phenomenology remains a thematization of consciousness
and thus is blind to any distortion which may occur at the very
origin of meaning. Phenomenology, in revealing the misconcep-
tions of the natural attitude, opens itself to a self-deception on its
own part. It is prepared to regressively push to the origins of
meaning from the world of perception-but it is unprepared to
understand the dissociation which occurs there and which the
genius of Freudianism has revealed. "But another technique is
required in order to understand the remoteness and division at
the basis of the distortion and substitution that make the text of
consciousness unrecognizable" (INT, p. 393).
To arrive at a semantics of desire which makes a distortion
at the origin of meaning understandable, Freudianism develops
a new «reduction," a reduction of phenomenology itself. If phe-
nomenology directly centers itself in the ego, then psychoanalysis
displaces this center in order to gain a different perspective upon
the subject. "What is in question is the very subject of immediate
apperception. . . . Here we have reached a sort of end point of
the reduction of consciousness and, one may say, of phenome-
nology as well" (INT, pp. 425-26).
In this sense psychoanalysis serves to decenter the ego and
"humiliate" it. But this "humiliation" is precisely what is needed
to correct or supplement the direct phenomenological insights
Freud adds to the phenomenolOgical field:
In te redi-the phrase is St. Augustine's; it is Husserl's, too, at the
end of the Cartesian Meditations; but what is peculiar to Freud is
that this instruction, this inSight, must involve a "humiliation,"
since it has encountered a hitherto masked enemy, which Freud
calls the "resistance of narcissism" (INT, p. 427).
From here, while it remains impossible to reduce psycho-
analysis to phenomenology, it is possible to integrate within de-
grees its insights into a reflective philosophy. Freud achieves his
perspective upon the ego by a detour around direct consciousness.
This detour follows (a) the development of the theory of the un-
conscious and (b) the development of therapeutic relations in
 152 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 L ,0 G Y

which one subject interprets for another. It is in this procedure

that Ricoeur sees Freudianism as the development of a herme-
neutics:
[Analysis} achieves a decentering of the home of significations, a
displacement of the birthplace of meaning. By this displacement,
immediate consciousness finds itself dispossessed to the advantage
of another agency of meaning-the transcendence of speech or the
emergence of desire. This dispossession, which the Freudian sys-
tematization requires of us in its own way, is to be achieved as a
kind of ascesis of reflection, the meaning and necessity of which
appear only afterward, as the recompense for an unjustified risk
(INT, p. 422).

The wager which Freud takes is initially not justified-but

once in operation it is precisely what yields the insight necessary
for the discovery of the distorted or hidden meanings within the
language of desire. 'We must really lose hold of consciousness
and its pretension of ruling over meaning, in order to save reflec-
tion and its indomitable assurance" (INT, p. 422). This wagered
detour which produces a gain in insight is hermeneutics. Freud-
ian theory functions as a rule of interpretation which justifies the
indirectness of the procedures. "It is in relation to hermeneutic
rules and for another person that a given consciousness 'bas' an
unconscious; but this relation becomes manifest only in the dis-
possession of the consciousness which has that unconscious"
(INT, p. 438).
The contribution of Freud to reflective philosophy is the de-
velopment of a hermeneutic technique which yields a key to the
semantics of desire. Freud donne a penser, and that which is
given is elaborated by means of hermeneutic rules.
Reread as rules of interpretation, the theory of the uncon-
scious relates back to the problem of the symbol. The barrier be-
tween the unconscious and consciousness which is the presumed
role of repression is the rule of suspicion which makes the field
of expression a theme apart from the immediate and individual
consciousness. As a hermeneutic rule this suspension of con-
scious immediacy also makes the field of expression understand-
able as a field of double meaning. Immediate meaning "hides"
another meaning. The symbol is a dissembling. " It is indeed an-
other text that psychoanalysis deciphers, beneath the text of con-
sciousness. Phenomenology shows that it is another text-but
not that this text is other" (INT, pp. 392-93). These rules, in
turn, treat the dream recital as a text. This text is of the particu-
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 153
lar indirect type Ricoeur takes as his theme for hermeneutics.
The distortion of meaning posited by the dream interpretation,
Ricoeur argues, calls for concepts such as those developed in the
energy metaphors of Freudian naturalism. "The function of the
energy metaphors is to account for the disjunction between
meaning and meaning" (INT, p. 394). 5 The reading of the hidden
meaning reveals a dimension of subjectivity which in Freudian
theory is termed the "unconscious." The unconscious is a latent
theory of language.
The dream text is interpreted via a theory of the unconscious.
But the theory of the unconscious, now seen through a hermeneu~
tics, is precisely the means which renders the dream text under~
standable as a metaphOrical text. Thus, for example, the concept
of repression, which in its properly Freudian context is part of the
theory of the unconscious, may also be seen as an interpretative
rule. Freudian «realism" functions hermeneutically. "The inter~
pretation of repression as metaphor shows that the unconscious
is related to the conscious as a particular kind of discourse to or~
dinary discourse" (INT, p. 403). The unconscious is like a lan-
guage, but always a difficult and metaphorical language.
But a second set of principles is hidden in the technique of
therapy itself. Here psychoanalysis finds its most distinct differ~
ence from phenomenology, exceeding it in the decentering of the
COgito. What makes psychoanalysis unique in this respect is
"treating the intersubjective relation as a technique" (INT, p.
406). This is to say that all interpretation in a Freudian herme~
neutics is an interpretation which begins with and exists only
within the confines of a restricted and controlled intersubjective
relation (between analyst and patient). It is through the inter-
preter that the one interpreted becomes aware of that which was
hidden.
In its properly Freudian setting this technique contains three
aspects: (a) the work of the analyst is to interpret the hidden
and dissembling language of the analysand. Here all the methods
of interpretation as an exercise in suspicion are employed, and
at this level the theory of the unconscious provides the set of
rules. The analyst begins directly by viewing the account of the
analysand as harboring a narrowed, resistant, and barred set of

5. Ricoeur thus independently confirms a thesis also developed

by Lacan. The relation of symbol to self, of course, precedes Ricoeur's
Freud and Philosophy. It occurs in The Symbolism of Evil in an
anticipatory fashion.
 154 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

meanings which the analyst "suspects" and must get through.

(b) At the same time there is work on the patt of the analysand
as he gradually brings forth that which is repressed. The tech-
nique in intersubjectivity presupposes a type of co-operation even
in the midst of struggle. (c) Finally, through this double work
of interpretation, the therapy or understanding is acted out. The
dramatic repetition and recital of the trauma which "causes" the
neurosis is finally brought forth and dealt with.
The theory of the unconscious (which functions as a rule
which in turn reveals the dissemblance of the text) and the tech-
nique of indirection in the therapeutic relation combine as the
"excess" of Freudianism which is not reducible to phenome-
nological reflection. Ricoeur seeks to use this "excess" to modify
phenomenology. The functional reason for such a modification
revolves around Ricoeur's concern with a second Copernican
revolution and the need to remove the transcendental illusion.
The rebound of Freudian "excess" is to,be the means to radi-
calize phenomenology by inverting the use of epoche. Thus, in
the progressive dialectic of moments, the moment of approxima-
tion takes the first step toward a "new phenomenology" (INT,
p. 462 n). The Freudian realism (objectivism) becomes the first
step in a radicalized epoche.
If one follows Ricoeur's understanding of a general phenome-
nological strategy, the first demand is that whatever area is to
be investigated must first be problematized, its claim to imme-
diacy or self-evidence called into question. The "excess" of Freud-
ian thought does precisely this for the transcendentalism of
phenomenology .
The modification is one which employs a version of the her-
meneutic rules which are used to decipher dissemblance. To
explore indirect discourse Ricoeur now holds that it is first neces-
sary to perform what amounts to a reduction upon the pretension
of consciousness over the origin of meaning. The approximation
of phenomenology to Freudianism thus brings together the needs
of decentering consciousness; a methodological way of getting at
the indirect; and a "humiliation" of reflective philosophy itself.
"To become concrete, reflection must lose its immediate preten-
sion to universality" (INT, p. 48).
But if the "excess" of Freudian indirectness may be used to
"humiliate" phenomenology'S transcendental illusion, does not
such an opposition change the very meaning of phenomenology?
Ricoeur wants to bring the Freudian "epoche," which first ap-
peared as an anti-phenomenology, back into a reflective proce-
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I 155
dure. "'This anti-phenomenology must now be seen by us as a
phase of reflection, the moment of the divestiture of reflection.
The topographical concept of the unconscious is the correlate of
this zero degree of reflection . . ." (INT, p. 424). The change,
therefore, is not one which rejects the primacy of a reflective
focus but one which radicalizes that focus. Reflective procedures
retain primacy, but they must be reinterpreted.

3. Inversion: A "New" Hegelian Phenomenology

Such a reinterpretation must transcend both the Husserlian
and Freudian oppositions. Such a new phenomenology, would no
longer be a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness but
would be instead a phenomenology of spirit. This terminology is
unmistakably Hegelian. The moment of opposition and the mo-
ment of approximation yield to a third moment which reinter-
prets Freudian thought for reflective philosophy. The "excess" of
psychoanalysis must be balanced by an equal "excess" from
within reflection-and the figure to provide this excess is Hegel.
Tactically, the way in which the Freudian form of analysis fs
to be brought back into a reflective, and thus still broadly phe-
nomenological, philosophy is by dialectically showing how Freud-
ianism is the inverse side of the Hegelian phenomenology of the
spirit. Inversion, however, implies that the two sides of the inver-
sion belong to the same phenomenon. At the same time this last
moment of the dialectic of phenomenology and counterphenom-
enology is one which can return to the double theme which un-
derlies Ricoeur's turn to language. The new phenomenology that
Ricoeur calls a phenomenology of the spirit is one which revolves
around the symbol and the subject. It is the phenomenology
which can increasingly be expressed as the understanding of the
cultural-historical constitution of the subject.
From Freud, Ricoeur claims, one learns that the subject is
never what one (first) takes it to be (INT, p. 420). But the same
lesson is already in Hegel. The respective ways toward this dis-
covery which threatens and challenges all immediacy of con-
sciousness proceed from two different directions. The first key to
understanding the dialectic of inversion is found in relation to
the problem of the subject and coming to (self) consciousness.
For Ricoeur both Freudian and Hegelian theories meet in the
movement of becoming (self) conscious. <"Whereas Hegel links
an explicit teleology of mind or spirit to an implicit archeology of
life and desire, Freud links a thematized archeology of the un-
 156 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN a MEN a L·a G Y

conscious to an unthematized teleology of the process of becom-

ing conscious" (INT, p. 46I). .
In the Freud-Hegel inversion Ricoeur claims that all the prob-
lems which appear in Freud have already appeared in Hegel, but
in an inverse order. Whereas Hegel takes the theme explicitly
and proceeds directly to unfold the movement towards conscious-
ness, Freud makes this implicit theme clear only at the end of
his career. "Where Id was, there ego must become." Freud, read
by way of Hegel, may be seen to "contain" the problem of be-
coming conscious. But Hegel has already provided the model.
"The Phenomenology of the Spirit is an explicit teleology of the
achieving of consciousness and as such contains the model of
every teleology of consciousness" (INT, p. 46I).
But contrariwise, Hegel read by way of Freud, is seen to have
developed a model which also de centers immediate consciousness
and which employs a detour through interpretation.
The phenomenology of mind [spirit} engenders a new hermeneutics
that shifts the center of meaning no less than psychoanalysis does.
The genesis of meaning does not proceed from consciousness;
rather, there dwells in consciousness a movement that mediates it
and raises its certitude to truth. Here too consciousness is intelli-
gible to itself only if it allows itself to be set off-center. Spirit or
Geist is this movement, this dialectic of figures, which makes
consciousness into "self-consciousness," into "reason," and which,
with the help of the circular movement of the dialectic, finally
reaffirms immediate consciousness, but in the light of the com-
plete process of mediation (INT, pp. 462-63).

So it 1s now Hegel, too, who is being read as a hermeneut. Hegel-

ian hermeneutics are inverse to those of Freud, but in the same
class.
The inversion is also present in the order and aim of the two
analyses. Freud, read by way of Hegel, displays a regressive her-
meneutics which culminates in what Ricoeur terms an arche-
ology of the subject. This Is, of course, transparent in the body of
Freudian theory with its drive toward the infantile and the
archaic. Ricoeur notes, "For my part, I regard Freudianism as a
revelation of the archaic, a manifestation of the ever prior" (INT,
p. 44 0 ). But such a regressive direction has a zero limit, which at
the bottom of the Freudian opus is found at the juncture of the
unconscious and the conscious. This juncture, in terms of her-
meneutics, is also the juncture between language and the pre-
linguistic.
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 157
This drive toward the prelinguistic limit where "language is
born" places Freud closer to the existential theories of language
than was seen to have been the case before. The juncture of de-
sire and its expression in language is also the juncture of the
non-said and the urge to say (voulair-dire).

The unconscious is not fundamentally language, but only a drive

toward language. The "quantitative" is the mute, the nonspoken
and the nonspeaking, the unnameable at the root of speech. But in
order to speak this muteness, psychoanalysis has only the . . .
metaphor. . . . That which, in the unconscious, is capable of
speaking, that which is able to be represented, refers back to a
substrate that cannot be symbolized: desire as desire (INT, pp.
453-54)·8

The Freudian theory meets a limit at the same obscurity base

which the existential phenomenologies find.
If desire is the unnameable, it is turned from the very outset
toward language; it wishes to be expressed; it is in potency to
speech. What makes desire the limit concept at the frontier be-
tween the organic and the psychical is the fact that desire is both
the nonspoken and the wish-to-speak, the unnameable and the
potency to speak (INT, p. 457).

But in another sense, left to themselves both such regressive her-

meneutics are dead ends. They arrive only at a limit. With char-
acteristic sympathy to existentialist conclusions, but with the
proviso that such limits be reCOgnized as obscure, Ricoeur points
outtbat
This reduction of the act of knowing as such attests to the non-
autonomy of knowledge, its rootedness in existence, the latter
being understood as desire and effort. Thereby is discovered not
only the unsurpassable nature of life, but the interference of desire
with intentionality, upon which desire inflicts an invincible ob-
scurity, an ineluctable partiality. Thereby, finally, is con1irmed
truth's character of being a task: truth remains an Idea, an infinite
Idea, for a being who originates as desire and effort, or, to use
Freud's language, as invincibly narcissistic libido (INT, p. 458).

6. In this context it is interesting to note that Freud appears

closer in similarity to existential theories of language than to Hegel.
The return to a "birthplace of language," to the juncture where mean-
ing comes into being, is regressive in both Freudian and existentialist
theories
 158 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOL-OGY

The inverse direction from regressive analysis with its arche-

ology of the subject is a progressive analysis With its unfolding of
a teleology of the subject. That is the role Hegel plays for Ricoeur
in redressing the Freudian "excess." Here the dialectic begins to
outline once more the two limits of reflection, the limit of "bot-
tom obscurity" and the limit of "top ideality."
The understanding of archeology and teleology, of regressive
and progressive interpretations as inversions of one another,
brings Freudian and Hegelian hermeneutics into the same
sphere. The step of approximation is surpassed, and the way of
reclaiming a Freudian interpretation for reflective philosophy is
opened by means of Hegelian phenomenology. Furthermore both
theories are held to be theories which approach consciousness by
means of a detour. Freud detours by way of the unconscious;
Hegel detours by way of the spirit. It is less important here to
trace out the intricacies by which Ricoeur establishes all the in-
verse parrallelism than to indicate the results for the hermeneu-
tic phenomenology he seeks himself. Ricoeur's dialectic is always
a technique by which one theory is read by way of another. This
dialectic, already potentially Hegelian, now adapts themes from
Hegel which begin a certain closure in relation to the symbol and
the subject.
It is instructive to take note of precisely what Ricoeur accepts
of the Hegelian style; it is this acceptance which also begins to
re-establish the weighted focus of his own method.
What is progressive about Hegelian interpretations may be
seen in the march of the figures of the spirit.
In the Hegelian phenomenology, each form or figure receives its
meaning from the subsequent one. Thus, the truth of the recogni-
tion of the master-slave relationship is stoicism; but the truth of
the stoic position is skepticism, which views the difference between
master and slave as unessential and annihilates all such distinc-
tions. The truth of a given moment lies in the subsequent moment;
meaning always proceeds retrogressively (INT, p. 464).

Phenomenology in this sense, unlike both the Freudian and

Husserlian analyses, is genetic. A progressive phenomenology in
the Hegelian style is one which sees a "logic" of movement from
one stage to the next.
But by the same token, since the truth of any present moment
can never be known until it is already surpassed, a Hegelian
phenomenology cannot be considered a phenomenology of im-
mediacy. Its own version of decentering consciousness is a de-
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 159
centering through the understanding of spirit. In the inverted
forms of Hegelian and Freudian analyses there is here the agree-
ment that the subject is never what one (first) takes it to be.
In Freud the unfolding of the spirit, the coming to self-
consciousness, is the progressive counterpart to the regressive
unfolding of the psyche. Hegel inverts Freud, and Ricoeur ulti-
mately sides with Hegel. A progressive analysis of symbols and
the self will have the last word in this redress of the Freudian
"excess."
With this inversion it once more becomes clear that Ricoeur
opts to weight the phenomenolOgical focus more heavily. In the
last analysis the self is constituted primarily in terms of progres-
sion: "The positing or emergence of the self is inseparable from
its production through a progreSSive synthesis" (INT, p. 464).
Thus at the end of this set of dialectical exercises the weighted
focus of phenomenology-now in Hegelian guise-is restored.
If the conclusion of the dialectic of methods is that Freudian
hermeneutics is not ultimately incompatible with reflective phi-
losophy, it must be recalled that the opening question concerning
Freud and Philosophy was one which had to do with a field of
warring interpretations. Once the methodological detour is
brought to a closure in the use of inversion, a return to this ques-
tion may be made. The methodological dialectic already antici-
pates a partial answer to this question. Any two sides of an in-
version meet in the phenomenon itself, and in hermeneutics that
primary phenomenon is the symbol.
In Ricoeur's application of his own dialectic the hermeneutic
process is :first one of a detour in which one decenters (immedi-
ate) consciousness in order to get at the places of the origin of
meaning. Freudian hermeneutics provides a model for this re-
gressive aim by using a theory of the unconscious as the set of
rules which provides the decentering. Its gain suggests an "arche-
ology of reflection." But it is also necessary to recognize an an-
tithesis to an archeology, an inverse side which is a progressive
genesis of meaning through successive figures, each of which is
understood from the one which follows. This model is provided
by Hegelian hermeneutics which supplements the regreSSive di-
rection with its own progressive and teleolOgical direction. But
since these directions are two sides of a single inversion, each is
implied in the other.
These interpretations meet in a "third term," which is the
symbol itself. The symbol "contains" the multiplicity. "It remains
to find the concrete 'mixed texture' in which we see the archeol-
 160 I HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOL.OGY

ogy and teleology. This concrete mixed texture is symbol" (INT,

p. 494). The overdetermination of the symbol, already known by
Freud, contains even more than he anticipated. But only by way
of the dialectical inversion is this overdetermination of meanings
seen to carry multiple vectors.
Symbols carry two vectors. On the one hand, symbols repeat our
childhood in all the senses, chronological and nonchronological, of
that childhood. On the other hand, they explore our adult life .
. . . These two functions are not external to one another; they
constitute the overdetennination of authentic symbols. By probing
infancy and making it live again in the oneiric mode, symbols
represent the projection of our human possibilities onto the area
of imagination. These authentic symbols are truly regressive-
progressive; remembrance gives rise to anticipation; archaism
gives rise to prophecy (INT, pp. 496-97).
The symbol is multiple not only in its dimensions but also in
its way of revealing those dimensions. It 1s both a disguise and
an unveiling.
True symbols are at the crossroads of the two functions which we
have by turns opposed to and grounded in one another. Such
symbols both disguise and reveal. While they conceal the aims of
our instincts, they disclose the process of self-consciousness. Dis-
guise, reveal; conceal, show; these two functions are no longer
external to one another; they express the two sides of a single
symbolic function (INT, p. 497).
The symbol, as a phenomenon for investigation, displays a com-
plex and multidimensioned presence. But it also displays a
structure which Ricoeur proposes to characterize in terms of a
hierarchical model:
I suggest that we distinguish various levels of creativity of sym-
bols . . . . At the lowest level we come upon sedimented symbol-
ism: here we find various stereotyped and fragmented remains of
symbols, symbols so commonplace and worn with use that they
have nothing but a past. This is the level of dream-symbolism, and
also of fairy tales and legends; here the work of symbolization is
no longer operative. At the second level we come upon the symbols
that function in everyday life; these are the symbols that are use-
ful and are actually utilized, that have a past and a present, and
that in the clockwork of a given SOCiety serve as a token for the
nexus of social pacts; structural anthropology operates at this
level. At a higher level come the prospective symbols; these are
creations of meaning that take up the traditional symbols with
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 161

their multiple significations and serve as the vehicles of new

meanings. This creation of meaning reflects the living substrate
of symbolism, a substrate that is not the result of social sedimen-
tation (INT, p. 504-5).

If the detour of the dialectic reveals both the crossing of vec-

tors and the multiplicity of levels to be found in symbols, it also
returns to a more basic constituent of phenomenological model-
ing. At the end of a detour a Husserlian description emerges once
again. For phenomenologists the phenomenon is almost always
found to be richer than was first thought, multiple and complex
in its structure, and irreducible to any simple form which would
falsify its appearance. Essential as one key to a descriptive
method is the eschewing of "explanation" in the sense of the re-
duction of complexity to either a single dimension or in the sense
of going "behind" the phenomena. In relation to the symbol this
is the usual temptation of philosophy. "The danger for the philos-
opher . . . is to arrive too quickly, to lose the tension, to become
dissipated in the symbolic richness, in the abundance of mean-
ing" (INT, p. 495). In hermeneutic terms "explanation" sees in
symbols only primitive attempts at science or epiphenomenal ex-
pressions of certain abstract "drives" of human beings. Such a
move "demythizes" symbols.
For Ricoeur the symbol is the concrete expression which has
more than a single function. From the phenomenologist's point
of view this is to say that the phenomenon displays multiple
dimensions and aspects. Thus the hermeneutic model of multiple
readings at which Ricoeur arrives is also thoroughly phenomeno-
logical in the best Husserlian sense. The symbol in its concrete
imaginative appearance is not less than, but more than, that
which is open to a merely explanatory or linear approach. Its
"logic" is not univocal but has its own form. "Thus the ambiguity
of symbolism is not a lack of univocity, it is rather the possibility
of carrying and engendering opposed interpretations, each of
which is self-consistent" (INT, p. 496).
The non-reducibility of the symbol is reaffirmed, but the
detour taken to reach this point has shown how one may get at
the various vectors which may be reflected from the symbol.
Ricoeur also allows his Husserlianism to re-emerge in relation to
an over-all understanding of interpretation. The relation of
expression-interpretation is the relation of "word" to reflection.
But reflection is essentially a type of epoche. The symbol, for
Ricoeur, is the concrete moment of the dialectic, but it is not
 I62 I HE RMEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOGY

immediately known. To <'bear" the word of the symbol one must

first go through the detour of thought. This is the necessity of the
hermeneutic circle. Ricoeur rejects all "first naIvete," and affirms
a "second naivete" of listening only after and only through criti-
cism. The learning which occurs under epoche is a learning
which suspends literality from the start. It is an aesthetic ap-
proach to symbols. Just as one may learn to better appreciate art
through criticism, so does the philosopher of culture learn to ap-
preciate the symbol through reflection. Without the first "word"
of the symbol, no wealth; without the second word of interpreta-
tion, no understanding. The hermeneutic circle of belief and
understanding remains the dual focus underlying Ricoeur's use
of expression-interpretation.

In its return to the spoken word, reflection continues to be reflec-

tion, that is, the understanding of meaning; reflection becomes
hermeneutic; this is the only way in which it can become concrete
and still remain reflection. The second naivete is not the first
naivete; it is postcritical and not precritical; it is an informed
naivete (INT, p. 496).

This "second naIvete" functions as a phenomenolOgical attitude.

The method of a dialectical detour is a guarantee that the listen-
ing be informed in its reflection.
Ricoeur's hermeneutics is phenomenolOgical in its form and
in its aim. Just as Husserl before him fought to create a philoso-
phy which avoided the problems of both realism and idealism in
relation to more traditional epistemology and metaphysics, so
Ricoeur seeks to create a philosophy of language which avoids
today's major alternatives of romanticism and formalism.
Against all attempts to reduce language to a univocal calculus
and against all attempts to revert to prelinguistic silence, Ricoeur
sees in the philosophy of the symbol a different pOSSibility. And
although this possibility is yet to be fulfilled in its totality-
Ricoeur promises a poetiCS of the will and indicates that Freud
and Philosophy is but a propaedeutic to a larger work on language
-the emergent outline is already available in what here may be
seen as the hermeneutic turn.
The hermeneutic turn is that direction which attempts to go
between formalism and romanticism and to formulate a phenom-
enology of language which exceeds both the Husserlian and
existential versions of phenomenology. The clue to this "new
phenomenology" is located in the fullness of language which
 Toward the Philosophy of Language I 163
Ricoeur sees in the symbol-the problem of the symbol equals
the problem of language.

In order to think in accord with symbols one must subject them to

a dialectic; only then is it possible to set the dialectic within
interpretation itself and come back to living speech. . . . This
return to the immediate is not a return to silence, but rather to the
spoken word, to the fullness of language. Nor is it a return to the
dense enigma of initial, immediate speech, but to speech that has
been instructed by the whole process of meaning. Hence this con-
crete reflection does not imply any concession to irrationality or
effusiveness (INT, p. 495).
The fullness of language is not to be found in the romanticism
which surrounds the drive toward prelinguistic silence. This is
a limit to which both Freudian theory and the existential theories
of language return. Only upon arrival at a "birthplace of lan-
guage" is a limit reached.
Nor is the fullness of language to be found by reducing the
symbol to sterile univocity. The whole thrust of Ricoeur's latent
philosophy of language rejects this possibility. His "logic" of
symbols is a multivocal or phenomenological "logic" which has as
its task the unification of the multiple vectors symbols allow.
It is at this pOint that what is unsaid in the hermeneutic tum
may be said. The way between romanticism and formalism is in
aim the same as the way of Ricoeur's earlier structural phenome-
nology. The fullness of language is a fundamental pOSSibility
inscribed in and upon the authentic symbols of historical cul-
tures. Hermeneutics substitutes the natural world of the body
and the thing for the cultural world of the symbol and the subject,
a language world. The symbols as the "living words" of culture
are the historical basis from which man understands himself.
The language world is the cultural lifeworld. "1 propose there-
fore that cultural phenomena should be interpreted as the
objective media in which the great enterprise of sublimation with
its double value of disguise and disclosure becomes sedimented"
(INT, p. 523).
At this point Ricoeur makes contact with his over-all aim to
establish a hermeneutic philosophy of existence. Hermeneuti-
cally the symbol becomes the focus, the primitive, for philosophi-
cal interest. The philosopher, deliberately engaged in the battle
of the various hermeneutics, seeks both to respect and under-
stand the "word" of these symbols and to think according to their
disguising-revealing richness-the symbol invites thought-but
 1 64 I HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

on the other hand he must maintain his insistence upon rational-

ity and critical intelligence. " 'Symbols give rise to thought,' they
are also the birth of idols. That is why the critique of idols remains
the condition of the conquest of symbols" (INT, p. 543)·
What emerges in this struggle to attain a philosophy of
existence neither divorced from the "living word" of man's con-
crete existence nor devoid of the rigor of rational clarity, the two
themes which Ricoeur has used to characterize philosophizing, is
this shift in method and emphasis. Ricoeur hopes that by making
the symbol the focus of interest indirect insight will be yielded in
relation to the structures of human existence. This stands in
contrast to the relative directness of most phenomenological in-
vestigations into the structures of consciousness. Hermeneutic
phenomenology stands at least one remove from both Husserlian
and existential phenomenologies.
This way between limits is formally.parallel with structural
phenomenology. In a fundamental pattern of Ricoeurs thought
the third way utilizes the recognition of limits which are estab-
lished dialectically. In structural phenomenology a fundamental
possibility was seen to have both a "top" or ideality limit and a
"bottom" or obscurity limit. The same use of founded limitations
occurs in Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology. The dialectical
detour demarked those limits. Freudian regressive hermeneutics
establishes the "bottom" or obscurity limit; Hegelian progressive
hermeneutics begins to show an ideality limit in the concept of
the creative or poetic use of archaic figures. "From now on
regression and progression do not represent two truly opposed
processes; they are rather the abstract terms employed to desig-
nate the two end limits of a single scale of symbolization" (INT,
p·5 22 ).
The tactic of inversion established the pOSSibility of placing
these limits upon the same scale. The structure of symbols, from
the archaic residue which lies at the bottom obscurity border of
language, ascends from its base toward its ideal pOSSibility, the
creation (poesis) of human possibilities.
It thus becomes possible to locate the oneiric and the poetic on the
same symbolic scale. The production of dreams and the creation of
works of art represent the two ends of the scale, according to
whether the predominant emphasis in the symbolism is disguise or
disclosure, distortion or revelation. By this formula I attempt to
account both for the functional unity existing between dreams and
creativity and for the difference in value that separates a mere
product of our dreams from the lasting works that become a part
 Toward the Philosophy of Language / 165
of the cultural heritage of mankind. Between dreams and artistic
creativity there is a functional continuity, in the sense that disguise
and disclosure are operative in both of them, but in an inverse
proportion (INT, p. 520).

The <<Word" of the symbol is not the last, but the first word of
Freud and Philosophy. It is the starting point, as it was in The
Symbolism of Evil, for Ricoeur's hermeneutic endeavor. But after
symbol comes myth, which Ricoeur has characterized as a first
spontaneous hermeneutics of symbols. The next word must be
the word of the great cultural myths. But in one respect this next
word lies beyond the limits of a strictly philosophical herme-
neutics.
In a concluding meditation Ricoeur ponders upon the rela-
tion of hermeneutics, the "second naivete," and his earlier per-
sistent problem of belief, which is in a sense stronger than
phenomenological belief.
To this point Ricoeur had remained within the bounds and
direction of The Symbolism of Evil. But now he risks more.
Where formerly the philosopher has studied the myth as a wager,
Ricoeur is now ready to proclaim that myths, in particular the
myths of the origin of evil, are privileged. Such "words" are not
mere fables or fantasies but explorations in a symbolic and imagi-
native mode of man's very relation to Being. It is because myth
condenses a richness of significations which exceeds philosophy
that hermeneutics becomes a necessary task. Freud's rediscovery
of mythical themes is taken as a partial confirmation of this im-
portance of myth for man's self-understanding.
Ultimately, and at the highest level, the imagination of myth
may be seen as a word addressed to man.

If there is an authentic problematic of faith, it pertains to a new

dimension which I have previously deSCribed, in a different philo-
sophical context, as a "Poetics of the Will," because it concerns the
radical origin of the I will, i.e., the source of effectiveness of the
act of willing. In the context of the present work, I describe this
new dimension as a call, a kerygma, a word addressed to me (INT.
pp. 5 2 4-2 5).

We approach here the limits of an exposition devoted to the

elaboration of the essentially philosophic implications of
Ricoeur's hermeneutics. But even if one notes that the claim that
the myth is a word is addressed to man in terms of the problem of
 166 / HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

faith, a philosophical problem remains. Any call (interpellation)

needs interpretation. Rationality and faith' converge in an
"Anselmian" fashion:
An Anselmian type of procedure, i.e., the movement from faith to
understanding, necessarily encounters a dialectic of reflection,
which it attempts to use as the instrument of its expression. . . .
The "hermeneutic circle" is born: to believe is to listen to the call,
but to hear the call we must interpret the message. Thus we must
believe in order to understand and understand in order to believe
(INT. p. 525).
Ricoeur's hermeneutics must eventually turn to the elaboration
of the poesis, the creative activity of mythological language
which displays possibilities for human existence in history. A
poetics of the will must be another chapter in hermeneutic phe-
nomenology.
Through these questions the Freudian hermeneutics can be related
to another hermeneutics, a hermeneutics that deals with the
my tho-poetic function and regards myths not as fables, i.e., as
stories that are false, unreal, illusory, but rather as the symbolic
exploration of our relationship to beings and to Being. What car-
ries this my tho-poetic function is another power of language, a
power that is no longer the demand of desire, demand for protec-
tion, demand for providence. but a call in which I leave off all
demands and listen (INT. p. 55!).
7 / Hermeneutics and the
Linguistic Disciplines:
New Counterfoci

AT THIS STAGE of Ricoeur's development the final out-

come of a phenomenologically based philosophy of language re-
mains sketchy. But its outline nevertheless begins to emerge with
more and more distinctness. The Symbolism of Evil and Freud
and Philosophy were the first two direct exercises in hermeneutic
phenomenology in which the enigmas of symbolic, polysemic
expressions were held to be the key to the problems of language.
Today the equation evoked in Freud and Philosophy-the
problem of the symbol equals the problem of language-may be
restated. Ricoeur now sees that the essence of this equation lies
much more broadly within language than was understood in the
studies of the symbols of evil and the detour by way of Freud.
This is largely the case because a new set of counterfoci has ap-
peared in Ricoeur's confrontation with a wide series of linguistic
disciplines. These counterfoci to a central phenomenological
focus include structural linguistics, Chomskyan generative lin-
guistics, and the linguistic philosophies of the Anglo-Americans.
Unfortunately, to date only the encounter with structural lin-
guistics has taken clear shape in terms of published materials.1
In the largest sense the setting of an operating position re-
mains constant with Ricoeur's earlier stances. He initiates the
latest set of dialectical debates from a reaffirmation of certain
basic Husserlian insights; progresses, now much more openly, to

I. In the Parisian environment, the prestige of Claude Levi-

Strauss is very high. In fact, one may easily generalize that much
philosophical interest today centers broadly upon structuralism
and the philosophy of language.

[1671
 168 I HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

a critique of earlier existential phenomenol?gy; and plunges

into a new set of interrogations with the linguistic disciplines. It
is possible to briefly summarize the outline of this latest step
toward a philosophy of language and to expose at the same time
some of the contributions the linguistic disciplines have made to
Ricoeur's thought.

A HUSSERLIAN MODEL OF LANGUAGE

THERE ARE two related directive concepts found in

Ricoeur's interpretation of Husserl's view of language which are
centrally employed in Ricoeur's own view of language. The first
is that language is essentially a mediation, a third term, situated
between two limits or borders. In a recent comparative study of
Husser! and Wittgenstein, Ricoeur repeatedly claims:

Language is therefore an intermediary between two levels. The

first one, as we said, constitutes its ideal of logicity, its teZos: all
meanings must be able to be converted into the logos of rationality;
the second one no longer constitutes an ideal, but a ground, a soil,
an origin, an Ursprung. Language may be reached 'from above,'
from its logical limit, or 'from below,' from its limit in mute and
elemental experience. In itself it is a medium, a mediation, an ex-
change between Telos and Ursprung. 2

This understanding of Husserl's view of language, accepted by

Ricoeur, is clearly the sarne understanding of a third term which
has guided Ricoeur's method throughout. The mediation between
an ideality, aimed at but never reached, and an obscurity border
has characterized each stage of Ricoeur's development. Today he
locates this base within the Husserlian understanding of lan-
guage.
As a mediation in terms of the broader philosophy of lan-
guage, this concept means that language proceeds in two direc-
tions at the same time. "For [speaker and listener] language aims
at something, or more exactly it has a double direction: an ideal
direction (to say something) and a real reference (to say about
something). In this movement, language leaps across two
thresholds: the threshold of ideality of sense and, beyond this

2. Paul Ricoeur, "Husser! and Wittgenstein on Language," in

Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. E. N. Lee and M. Mandel-
baum (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, I967), p. 209.
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines I I69
sense, the threshold of reference." S The combination of a mean-
ing system with directional aim, intentionality, cannot be missed.
One may invert the usual formula and say that the intentional
structure is a linguistic structure.
The first guiding concept relates intimately to a second, also
derived from Ricoeur's understanding of Husserl. Language it-
self is a type of "phenomenological reduction"-although it may
be better said that the phenomenolOgical reduction is patterned
upon a certain understanding of language. The way between
limits attributes both a certain immanence and a certain tran-
scendence to language; a located or situated distance is inherent
in the power of language. Language can be neither a pure
ideality (here lies the basis of Ricoeur's critiques of the lin";
guistic disciplines) nor a simple deSCription of the generation of
meaning from prelinguistic experience (here lies the basis for
Ricoeur's critiques of existential phenomenology). All language
is already instituted as a breaking of any unity with natural sur-
roundings:
But this relation between language and prelinguistic experience is
not a simple one. It implies in its turn a new polarity between two
trends: the first one, symbolized by the "reduction," implies a
suspension, which does not necessarily mean a retreat within an
ego secluded from reality, but the kind of break with natural sur-
roundings which is implied in the birth of language as such [italics
added]; there is no symbolic function without the sort of mutation
that affects my relation to reality without substituting a signifying
relation for a natural involvement. Reduction, we might say, means
the birth of a speaking subject.'

But one must add that, while language itself is already a tran-
scending or located distance from the natural surroundings, to
be a reduction in a philosophical sense implies that this distance
be made as reflective as possible. The birth of language is al-
ready a potentially theoretical awareness.
We are forever separated from life by the very function of the sign;
we no longer live life but simply designate it. We signify life and
are thus indefinitely withdrawn from it, in the process of interpret-
ing it in a multitude of ways.

3. Paul Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," trans. Robert D.

Sweeny, Philosophy Today, XII, nos. 2-4 (Summer, 1968), lI8.
(Originally "La Structure-Ie mot-l'evenement," Esprit [May, 1967].)
4. Ricoeul', "Husserl and Wittgenstein," p. 212.
 170 / HER MEN E UTI C P HEN 0 MEN 0 LOG Y

And, above all, if language is only a mediation, an intermediary

between several levels, between Logos anet Bios, a critique of
ordinary language is itself possible. . . . We are no longer en-
gaged in a practical activity, but in a theoretical inquiry . . . phi-
losophy itself is made possible by the act of reduction, which is
also the birth of language. 6
Once defined, this Husserlian stance provides the platform
from which Ricoeur distinguishes his own method from that of
existential phenomenology and the linguistic sciences. In spite
of the fact that once engaged in the new dialectic with the lin-
guistic disciplines Ricoeur repeats with his own emphasis some
of the criticisms offered by earlier phenomenology, he wishes
carefully to draw up the sides of the debate in such a way as to
include rather than exclude the dominant objectivism. But to
begin too soon with the subject's immersion in prelinguistic ex-
perience, as the existential theories of language are tempted to
do, is equally to risk a bad subjectivism. "The prepredicative and
prelinguistic structures are not given; we cannot start from them.
We have rather to be brought back to them by means of a process
that Husserl calls Riickfragen ('backquestioning')." 8
The lifeworld is a limit toward which a previously perceptual-
ist phenomenology aims-but for Ricoeur it remains a limit and
never a given. "This so-called lived experience, for men who were
born among words, will never be the naked presence of an
absolute, but will remain that toward which this regressive
questioning points." T The existential phenomenolOgies, correct
in reraising the question of the subject and his experience, also
come perilously close to taking subjectivity for a direct ontology.
To do so is to exclude from the beginning a consideration of the
merits of objectivist gains.
In a specific criticism of Merleau-Ponty Ricoeur claims (and
indeed Merleau-Ponty would agree) that his theory of language
was ill formulated. The reason is that the question arises, "in a
form which excludes any connection with modern linguistics and
the semiological disciplines which have been established on a
linguistic model." 8 Merleau-Ponty, by proposing too exclusively a
return to the speaking subject, places "the phenomenolOgical
5. Ibid., p. 217.
6. Ibid., p. 213.
7. Ibid.
8. Paul Ricoeur, "New Developments in Phenomenology in
France: The Phenomenology of Language," trans. P. G. Goodman,
Social Research, XXXIV, no. 1 (Spring, 1967), II.
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines / 171

attitude . . . in opposition to the objective attitude . . . the

scientist is given little place in the dialogue-indeed, he is given
none at all." 8 In this case a subjectivism is set up against an
objectivism. "The danger here is to set up a phenomenology of
speech in opposition to a science of language, at the risk of
falling again into psychologism or mentalism, from which struc-
turallinguistics has rescued us." 10
Ricoeur's sympathies with Heidegger are a bit stronger. In a
sense it may now be said that Heidegger is perhaps the only
phenomenologically oriented philosopher to have developed a
hermeneutic phenomenology prior to Ricoeur. The "ontology of
language" which becomes Ricoeur's aim is also Heidegger's. But
again Ricoeur wishes to differentiate his own method from
Heidegger's on the basis of its indirectness and its dialectic with,
rather than an exclusion from, the linguistic disciplines. In an
article, <'Existence et hermeneutique," Ricoeur states the problem
as one of grafting the hermeneutical problem to a phenomenol-
ogy. But Heidegger's way is the short way toward what Ricoeur
calls a "direct ontology of comprehension," breaking all methodo-
logical debates and driving directly toward an ontology. In
Heidegger's case, <To comprehend is no longer a mode of knowl-
edge, but a mode of being, the mode of that being who exists in
comprehending." n
It is true that Ricoeur enters a reservation concerning closing
off the route of Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology. "For
perhaps we are always on the way toward language, although
language itself may be the way. I will not take this Heideggerian
way toward language, but let me say in conclusion that I have
not closed it, even if I have not explicitly opened it." 12 The long
way Ricoeur wishes to open in a confrontation with the linguistic
disciplines is one which follows their methods from the bottom
up. "Heidegger does not proceed according to the ascending order
that we have followed, which is a progressive order of elements
within structures, then of structures within process." 18
Thus Heidegger, in spite of his prior graft of hermeneutics to
phenomenology, remains within the limitation of the strategy of
existential phenomenology, either to avoid encounter or to oppose
g. Ibid.
10. Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," p. IIg.
I I. Paul Ricoeur, "Existence et hermeneutique," Dialogue, IV,
no. 1(1965),7. (Mytranslation-D.I.)
12. Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," p. 128.
13. Ibid.
 172 / HE RM ENE U TI C P HE NOM E N 0 L'OGY

objectivism. "How, we ask, do we get an organon for exegesis,

that is to say, an intelligibility to texts? How do we found the
historical sciences faced with the natural sciences? These prob-
lems are not properly considered in a fundamental hermeneutic;
and that by design: that hermeneutic is not determined to resolve
them, but to dissolve them." 1.
Agrunst this short way, cautiously or "conservatively," Ricoeur
wishes a hermeneutic phenomenology which continues the de-
bates with the sciences in the search for models and methods
which are adequate to the subject matter. Relating Husserl's aim
in the Krisis to the graft of phenomenology and hermeneutics,
Ricoeur notes:
Its relation to hermeneutics is double: on the one side it is in the
last phase of phenomenology that the critique of "objectivism" is
opened to its final consequences. This critique of objectivism con-
cerns the hermeneutic problem not only indirectly because it
challenges the epistemological pretension of the natural sciences
to furnish the human sciences with a single valuable method. But
it also relates directly because it calls ~e Diltheyan enterprise into
question for furnishing to the cultural sciences a method which is
as objective as those of the sciences of nature.l.lI
The methodological battle is not yet closed.
Ricoeur returns to his own dialectical and indirect way. "The
return to the spoken or living language has perhaps prevented
the encounter with the linguistic fact: this confrontation requires
that the return should be less direct and make a detour via the
science of language." 16

NEW COUNTERFOCI:
THE LINGUISTIC DISCIPLINES

RICOEUR'S DETOURS, by now, should be well recognized.

They will enter a series of debates with linguistics and linguistic
analYSis before issuing in even the most cautious ontology of
language. In outline they will employ in ever more subtle form
the diagnostics whereby Ricoeur seeks to be informed by objec-
tivism, but never reduced to its methods. A general outline of the
new dialectic has already been provided most systematically in
14· Ricoeur, "Existence et hermeneutique," p. 9.
IS· Ibid., p. 7.
16. Ricoeur, "New Developments," pp. 13-I 4.
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines / I73
"Existence et hermeneutique," which Ricoeur calls his most
orderly treatment to date. Three levels of progress are envisioned:
First, at a semantic level, the encounter with the linguistic
disciplines must be entered. This stage is already underway,
particularly in the case of structural linguistics, and to some
degree with both Chomskyan generative grammar and the work
of linguistic analysis. Under this heading Ricoeur calls for the
enumeration of the possible symbolic forms and, interestingly,
sees the work of linguistic analysis performing some of this task.
Once the possible forms are catalogued, he requests a criteriology
of types through a revisitation of the classes of metaphors, analo-
gies, similes, etc. He then asks for a study of the varied types of
interpretations. In another sense, particularly in Freud and Phi-
losophy, Ricoeur has begun this process himself. Here the recog-
nition of the methodological construction of "filters" in interpre-
tation must be understood because each single hermeneutics
(psychoanalytic, phenomenology of religion, Marxian, etc.) em-
ploys its own set of rules which creates its "reduction."
At the higher and more philosophical level which Ricoeur
calls the reflexive level, the new dialectic begins its move toward
ontology. Here the question is one which has formed a major
thrust throughout Ricoeurs work: In what way does the compre-
hension of signs relate to the comprehension of self? This is a
hermeneutic question at the philosophical level. "In proposing to
re-bind symbolic language to the comprehension of self I think
the most profound view of hermeneutics may be satisfied." 11
At this level, too, the rigor of a transcendental or hermeneutic
logic is called for to deal with equivocal expressions. "This logic
is thus no longer a formal lOgiC, but a transcendental logic : it is
established at the level of the conditions of possibility: not the
conditions of the objectivity of nature, but the conditions of the
appropriation of our desire to be." 18
But finally, reflection must be exceeded at the existential or
ontological level, where the movement toward an ontology of
language parallels Heidegger. "I would dare to say in a word: the
sole philosophical interest in symbolism is that it reveals, by its
structure of double-meaning, the equivocity of being. <Being is
said in multiple ways: .. 19 The symbol shows being, and language
17. Ricoeur, "Existence et hermeneutique," p. 17.
18. Ibid., p. 19.
19. Paul Ricoeur, "Le Probleme du <double' sens comme probleme
hermeneutique et comme probleme semantique," Cahiers interna-
tioneaux de symbolisme (1967), p. 63. (My translation-D.I.)
 174 I HER MEN E UTI C PH E NOM E N 0 LOG Y

is openness to being. But at the same time Ricoeur retains a

reluctance. "So, ontology is the promised land for a philosophy
which begins by language and reflection. But, like Moses, the
speaking and reflecting subject can only glimpse it before dy-
ing." 20
While it is premature to predict the outcome of this latest
dialectic and its ambitious program, a preliminary critique of the
linguistic sciences and several potentially momentous shifts of
emphasis due directly to the linguistic sciences have already
appeared. Through the re-employment of the techniques of a
diagnostic, Ricoeur has commenced a criticism of structuralism.
A phenomenologically grounded demystification remains in line
with all Ricoeur's critiques of objectivism in which the mystique
of the "object" is broken. The major effect in this case is to show
how the "new empiricism" is functionally a "new idealism."
Structural linguistics, perhaps the leading method being em-
ployed by a wide range of the social sciences, has produced a
workable "empirical" model which Ricoeur sees in need of a phe-
nomenolOgical challenge. The first step in this challenge is to
break the mystique which often surrounds the initial successes
of objectivist procedures. But the "new empiricism" no longer
falls under the same degree of naivete which overlapped with the
common-sense aspects of a "natural attitude." Instead, the intro-
duction of deliberate modeling processes in the sciences, recog-
nized in part by the Husserl of the Krisis, makes for a thoroughly
theoretical constitution of an object of study. An empirical "re-
duction" is a theoretical device which carefully reduces its field
of study to the level of "object."
The tactic, in brief, is clear with structural linguistics: By
first distinguishing between speech, the use of language by
actual speakers in actual situations, and language proper, the
institution of a given language as a system, structuralism begins
by removing "subjective" variations from its study. The subject
is "bracketed out." By further distinguishing language in a given
state, synchronies, from the genetic process of change, dy-
chronics, and by further weighting the stable structure over the
process, a new linguistic "object" is made to stand still before the
eyes of the investigator. Then, by considering this public object
apart from any real references, that is, by considering it only in
its systemic aspects, the object is effectively constituted as closed.
Language considered as a closed system of signs and apart from

20. Ricoeur, "Existence et hermeneutique," p. 25.

 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines / I75
the uses of any concrete users removes any simply nalve subjec-
tive concerns from appearing. At least those subjective concerns
which remain at the level of thinking that the sign is to be simply
paired with a thing become impossible. 21
"By constituting the linguistic object as an autonomous ob-
ject, linguistics constitutes itself as a science. But at what
cost?" 22 The cost can be seen in philosophic terms. The constitu-
tion of a closed, finite system of signs lacking external reference
inside a semiological system is the creation of an abstract object
with only internal relations. It is an ideal object, and since it was
constituted through rigorous theoretical means the resultant
precision is gained at the cost of mimicking a "new idealism."
Arguments entering objections or reservations concerning such
an idealized linguistic object will thus find themselves returned
to an insistence upon some type of "realism." And to a degree this
is the case with Ricoeurs opening phenomenolOgical criticisms.
It is strange that, given the long traditions of "empiricism" and
"idealism," the transcendental philosophies now find themselves
on the "realist" side.
It is not that Ricoeur objects to the methods of the linguistic
sciences as such. As semiological disciplines they are valid and
effect a heretofore unknown precision within limits. But those
limits have to be established. At first and externally it appears
that Ricoeur's objections return to the phenomenolOgical insist-
ence upon the primacy of the speaking subject. The problem with
all scientifically constituted or idealized objects is that in certain
ways they belie experience.

Now the experience which the speaker and listener have of lan-
guage come along to limit the claim to absolutize this object. The
experience we have of language reveals something of its mode of
being which resists this reduction. For us who speak, language is
not an object but a mediation. Language is that through which, by
means of which, we express ourselves and express things. To
speak is the act by which the speaker overcomes the closures of
the universe of signs, in the intention of saying something about
something to someone; to speak is the act by which language
moves beyond itself as sign toward its reference and toward its
opposite. Language seeks to disappear; it seeks to die as an ob-
ject.-

21. Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," pp. 116-18.

Ibid., p. II8.
:2.2.
23. Ibid., p. IIg.
 176 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

But this objection left to itself is insufficient apd remains on the

level of a sheer opposition of a phenomenology of speech to a
science of language.
A strong attack which would at one time situate semiology
within its valid limits and open the way toward phenomeno-
logically aided additions would be more internally directed. But
to enter into such an attack means that Ricoeur must also accept
certain presuppositions and certain terms of the counterfocus.
Previously he has proved to be adept at this. To be informed by,
but not reduced to, those methods is the diagnostic task. In terms
of the long-range strategy announced in the beginning of this
chapter, the insertion must first occur at the semantic level. This
Ricoeur has done by pointing up an antinomy within the linguis-
tic disciplines as such. The various disciplines deal, step by step,
with ever larger units of language (phoneme to lexical to syntac-
tical to sentential units). But at a certain step, which Ricoeur
now designates as the step between semiotics and semantics
proper, the question of speech can no longer be postponed.u This
step is the sentence. ""Ibis is no longer the unit of a language, but
of speech or of discourse. By changing the unit, one also changes
function, or rather, one passes from structure to function." 25
Here the saying of language, the ultimate problems of real refer-
ence, and the extralinguistic concrete context make their entry.
Ricoeur poses the antinomy within the linguistic disciplines
as one between structure and event: Discourse, in which the
sentence occurs, is an act, transitory and time-linked. System, at
the semiological level, is atemporal. Discourse entails choices of
some meanings and exclusion of others. Systemic traits are cOIi-
straints. Choices produce new combinations infinite in number.
Structures include large but finite, numbers of units and are
closed. Discourse has a reference, breaks the closure of sign,
articulates a signifying intention. System regards relations as
internal differences and regards only the sign within the system.
Discourse also designates the subject (who speaks?) of the dis-
course. The subject is included in the discourse situation. Struc-
tural considerations exclude the question of the speaker.-
24· Ricoeur has varied somewhat in the use of the tenn seman-
tics. For a time he has used it broadly to cover the linguistic sciences
but of late he has differentiated these into two levels, semiotic and
semantic, for reasons one can see in this chapter.
25· Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," p. 120.
26. Ibid., pp. 120-21. Ricoeur apparently believes that the
generative grammar work of Chomsky will help mediate the antinomy
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines I I77
It is not difficult to see how the properly semantic event-
situation allows Ricoeur to return to the already emphasized
concepts concerning the speaking subject, real reference, and
intentionality within language. But at the same time this in-
ternal antinomy within the linguistic disciplines permits a de-
mythologization of any semiotic hubris. The philosophy of lan-
guage is not limited to the current state of semiotics.
A philosophy of language need not be limited to the conditions of
possibility of a semiology: to account for the absence of the sign
from things, the reduction of relations of nature and their muta-
tion into signifying relations suffices. It is necessary in addition to
satisfy conditions of possibility of discourse insofar as it is an
endeavor renewed ceaselessly to express integrally the thinkable
and the sayable in our experience. Reduction-or any act com-
parable to it by reason of its negativity-no longer suffices. Reduc-
tion is only the inverse, the negative facet, of a wanting-to-say
[vouloir dire] which aspires to become a wanting-to-show. 21
A diagnostic opens with a critique of each counterfocus. But
in tum the dialectic is to inform the central focus. Such has al-
ready been the case in the encounter with linguistics. Semiotics,
although even in the most rigorous structuralist sense the most
distant from the phenomenologically oriented position, has al-
ready produced one change in Ricoeul's apprehension of the
problems of language. It is a change which relates immediately
to the central problem of the symbol.
The equation «the problem of the symbol equals the problem
of language" was at first raised in the narrow hermeneutic con-
text of the interpretation of extJressions with multiple meanings.
Polysemy remains the central linguistic problem for Ricoeur, but
at the same time the findings of linguistics give polysemy a
different value than previously noted.
The semiotic diSCiplines, at both the structural and lexical
levels, have shown polysemy to be a fundamental characteristic
of all language. Synchronically, each word has several meanings;
diachronically, multiple meanings change and transfer meanings
in time. Furthermore, this multiplicity of meanings is ruled by
the extremes of "overload" (a word which is made to carry too
many meanings ends by meaning nothing) and ''limitation''
between structure and process left by the structuralists. But it re-
mains unclear what contribution Chomsky will make to Ricoeul's
thought.
27. Ibid., p. us·
 I78 / HE RME N E U TIC P HEN OM ENOL 0 GY

(words "mean" by oppositions to other meanings). Linguistics

reveals more and more precisely the mechanisms of language
which govern the multiple, but finite, meanings any word may
have within a given system. The description, discovery, and rules
of performance are the proper domain of linguistics and can only
be accepted (within their limits) by the phenomenologist.
The result, in Ricoeur's case, is perhaps the strongest example
to date of a counterdemystification. The problem of the symbol,
in contact with the linguistic sciences, has been itself demysti-
fied: "In this respect symbolism has nothing remarkable about it.
All the words of an ordinary language have more than one
signification." 28 Here falls the last vestige of a romantic view of
language (often remaining behind existentialist theories of lan-
guage). No single set of words is privileged to reveal the problem
of language, not even primary symbols in the sense of The
Symbolism of Evil-at least not at the structural level. Polysemy
continues to contain the secrets of language, its enigmatic full-
ness; but all words possess symbolic power. The romantics may
have been right-but for the wrong reasons. The symbol is
privileged not because it is poetic, spontaneous, or of a particular
type, but because words of that type reveal something about all
language. The problem of the symbol remains equal to the prob-
lem of language, but now it is because the problem of polysemy is
a universal problem of language.
In receiving a determined linguistic law, the process considered
receives a functional value. Polysemy is neither a patholOgical
phenomenon in itself, nor is symbolism an ornament of language.
Polysemy and symbolism belong to the constitution and function-
ing of all language. 2s
What is lost by demystification is gained in universalization over
the narrower view of primary symbols.
This contribution to Ricoeur's view of language, anticipated
in the inversion of multivocal over univocal views of meaning,
makes univocity rather than polysemy a special problem. At the
semantic level of discourse, univocity is located through the
contextual situation which carefully restricts the ordinary or
normative polysemy of language.
We then understand what happens when the word returns to the
discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being
28. Ricoeur, "Le Probleme du 'double,' .. p. 70.
29. Ibid., p. 66.
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines I 179
polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our dis-
course is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the
case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates
only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic
richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greimas calls
an isotopie, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical
topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a
geometrical "theme," the word volume will be interpreted as a
body in space; if the theme CQncems the library, the word volume
will be interpreted as designating a book).30

In this view the fullness of language always precedes its reduc-

tion to the isotopies of univocal discourse.
The opposite extreme, already dealt with in part by the new-
born hermeneutic phenomenology, is the type of discourse which
preserves a multiplicity of meanings, often by a "calculated
ambiguity."
If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the
same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language,
which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting
out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass,
indeed consolidates several of them, which run together in the
manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy
of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the se-
mantic values to be mutually reinforced. 51

Poetic expression is a special case of polysemy, a case which

elevates the problem to the purposefully doubled meanings of
symbolic language proper. 82 Hermeneutics becomes at one level
the special discipline which deals with the rules and principles of
interpretation for this hypermultivocallanguage.
The contact with structural linguistics has already provided
Ricoeur with some concepts necessary to pursue the poetics of
language he spoke of earlier. The structural demystification of
polysemy, however, does not mean that the mystery of language
has now disappeared. Rather, its power to show reappears
through the ordinary mechanisms of language.

30. Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," p. 127.

31. Ibid.
32. The introduction of "calculated ambiguity" and purposeful
polysemy raises the question of symbol construction in contrast to
the spontaneity of primary symbols. This shift in emphasis has al-
ready appeared in some of Ricoeur's latest studies in symbol history.
Cf. "The Father Image," Criterion, VIII, no. 1 (19 68-69),1-7.
 180 / HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOL.OGY

It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes the

marvel of language. . . . There is no mystery in language. The
most poetic, most "sacred" language operates with the same sernie
variables as the most banal word of the dictionary. But there is a
mystery of language. It is that language says, ~ays something, says
something of being. If there is an enigma of symbolism it resides
entirely at the level of manifestation where the equivocity of being
becomes said in discourse. 83
Language which wants to say (vouloir-dire) and to reveal meets
Ricoeur's concerns beyond the confines of linguistic mechanism.
But with the tools provided by the linguistic sciences the problem
of the symbol now is related to the problem of the word.
The word, which is broader than the symbol in the technically
strict sense earlier employed by Ricoeur, is that instance of lan-
guage which mediates between structure and event. The struc-
turalists have shown that the word in itself says nothing-there
is no word apart from its position as a variable in the system of
signs (and in the strictest sense one may even say that as an
internal difference within a system one is below the full concept
of a word). At the semantic level the word gains its meaning by
its position within the sentence. But from another perspective,
Ricoeur points out, the word is also more than the sentence. The
word survives the event of the sentence. "Thus the word is, as it
were, a trader between the system and the act, between the
structure and the event." 84 The word in this mediating pOSition,
as a third term, is like the symbol. The mystery of language in
wanting to say and wanting to show also lies at this basic level.
Other results of the encounter with the new counterfoci will
doubtless emerge as the movement of Ricoeur's thought more and
more thoroughly enters the question of language. It may be noted
here that the concern with the linguistic diSciplines is not com-
plete. Although several articles comparing HusserI and Wittgen-
stein have appeared and although Ricoeur has frequently referred
to the works of Austin and Strawson in his teaching, the contact
and struggle with linguistic analysis is still germinal at best.35
It may also be noted that, in terms of the program Ricoeur
has set for himself, only the semiotic and semantic levels have
33· Ricoeur, "Le Probleme du 'double,''' p. 71.
34. Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event," p. 126.
35· During the 1967-68 academic year Ricoeur offered seminars
which included work on Strawson, Frege, Austin, and Wittgenstein
in addition to linguists. For a summary of this recent course work
see the Cahiers de philosophie, nos. 2-3 (February, 1966), pp. 27-42 .
 Hermeneutics and the Linguistic Disciplines / lSI

received enough treatment for Ricoeur's direction to become

clear. The "ontology of language," if "man is language," remains
unsaid. And perhaps, given the open-ended direction of Ricoeur's
dialectic, it may remain unsaid in any direct manner.38
But apart from the specifics which will emerge in the dialecti-
cal development of a linguistically oriented phenomenology, the
grand plan unfolds. The convergence of this broadly "Hegelian"
enterprise upon the poetic symbol persists. The Symbolism of
Evil, the first direct henneneutic exercise, dealt with the cosmic
symbols-the sacred is first read upon the cosmos. And there we
were promised a "poetics of the will." Freud and Philosophy, a
second direct hermeneutic exercise, dealt in part with the psy-
chic, oneiric symbols and promised to be a prolegomena to a
broader philosophy of language. But what is first read on the
cosmos and then in the subjectivity of the psyche is mediated
and made manifest in the poetic symbol, the poetic word. The
poetics of the will and the broad philosophy of language thus
cross in the question of an ontology of language.
Hermeneutic phenomenology has not ceased but has just
begun to ripen to full form. With Ricoeur one may, in a way
radically different from the Anglo-Americans, speak of a lin-
guistic tum. And through henneneutic phenomenology one may
say: Whether or not with God, at least with man, in the beginning
is the word.
36. Since the completion of this book a new collection of essays
by Ricoeur has appeared in France, Le Conflit des interpretations:
Essais tlhermeneutique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, I969). However,
most of the essays included in this volume, many of which are re-
ferred to in this chapter, have been available in other forms.
 Bibliography

THE PUBLICATION of Paul Ricoeur's work, which began

when he was twenty-three, has, to date, resulted in a complete
bibliography of some forty pages. Fortunately for Ricoeur bib-
liophiles, extensive work has been done by Dirk Vansina (whose
1962 dissertation, De Filozofie van Paul RicoeUT, Louvain, was
the :first written about Ricoeur-my 1964 dissertation was, so
far as I know, the second).
The first published compilation, "Bibliographie de Paul Ri-
coeur," appeared in the Revue philosophique de Louvain, vol. LX
(August, 1962). And although this bibliography already £lIed
nineteen pages, Vansina later supplemented it with a second
bibliography in the Revue, vol. LXVI, February, 1968. The
supplement picked up missing entries dating back to 1936 and
continued the bibliography up to the end of 1967. I have been
able to find very few references overlooked by Vansina, and
most of those I have found are very minor.
Upon close examination, the complete Ricoeur bibliography
tums out to contain numerous multiple entries for single arti-
cles published in different magazines and in different transla-
tions, reviews, commentaries,. prefaces, and the like. Most of
these items would be of little interest save to the most devoted
researchers. I would point, however, to one strain of publications
not listed below which is worthy of serious examination. Ricoeur
has been associated with a leftist Christian group, under the
influence of Emmanuel Mounier, which publishes Esprit. In
Esprit, and also in Christianisme social and Foi-Education, Ri-
coeur has written a large number of commentaries, articles, and
 184 / BI,BLIOGRAPHY

discussions of contemporary social issues. These articles include

studies not only of the problem of the state ol Christianity in the
present world, but also of the role of Marxism, university re-
form, political terror, and a wide variety of topics relevant for
social philosophy. Ricoeur's methodologically oriented and aca-
demic philosophy is balanced by concerns about the con tempo-
raryworld.
For those not able to go to France to scout out the obscure
references, the important writings are almost entirely available
in book form. Histoire et vente, first published in I955 and then
republished in I964 with extensive additions, contains a variety
of the most important studies up to the sixties. Ricoeur's most
important Hussed scholarship has now appeared in English in
Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, published in the
Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Exis-
tential Philosophy. And very recently almost all the important
work on hermeneutics and language has' appeared in the I969
publication of 486 pages of articles, Le Conflit des interpreta-
tions. Thus Part I of the bibliography would be sufficient for
those primarily interested in the philosophical work of Ricoeur.
I list the published books and their extant English translations,
but I do not list as separate entries those articles contained in
the collections. Because Le Conflit appeared after the comple-
tion of my manuscript, chapter footnotes often refer to articles
now included in Le Conflit.
In Part II of the bibliography I list a series of selected publi-
cations. Section A includes a sample representation of early
miscellaneous materials not included in any of the published
collections. Section B contains articles bearing on the questions
of language and hermeneutics that are not included in the newly
published Le Conflit des interpretations. In some cases these
entries do not appear in the Vansina bibliography, either because
they were published after I967 or because they were missed. It
will be evident that the number of publications on language and
hermeneutics begins to increase in the sixties and continues to
grow. Finally, I have listed in Section C English translations of
various Ricoeur materials. I cannot claim anything like full
coverage in this category, particularly because new translations
continue to appear regularly. Note that the earlier translations
were largely those concerned with religious and theological mat-
ters-the first audience that Ricoeur had in the English-speak-
ing world was largely concerned with theology.
 Bibliography / 185
Part III of the bibliography lists dissertations in English and
secondary articles about Ricoeur in both French and English.

PART I: BOOKS

Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l'existence. Paris: Editions du

Seuil, 1947. With Mikel Dufrenne.
Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers. Philosophie du mystere et
philosophie du paradoxe. Paris: Temps Present, 1948.
Idees directrices pour une phenomenologie. Paris: Gallimard,
1950. Translation of E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen
Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, with
commentary by Ricoeur.
Philosophie de la voZonte. I: Le Volontaire et l'involontaire.
Paris: Aubier, 1950. (English translation by Erazim Kohak.
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary.
Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966.)
Histoire et verite. Paris: Editions du Seull, 1955. Revised
with added articles, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964. (English
translation by Charles Kelbley. History and Truth. Evans-
ton, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965.)
Philosophie de la volonte. Finitude et culpabilite. I: L'Homme
faillible. Paris: Aubier, 1960. (English translation by
Charles Kelbley. Fallible Man. Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1965.) II: La Symbolique du mal. Paris: Aubier, 1960.
(English translation by Emerson Buchanan. The Symbolism
of Evil. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.)
De L'interpretation. Essai sur Freud. Paris: Editions du
Seull, 1965. (English translation by Denis Savage. Freud
and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven,
Conn. : Yale University Press, 1970.)
Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Translated by
Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1967. A compilation of Ri-
coeur's important articles on Husser! and phenomenology.
Entretiens, Paul Ricoeur et Gabriel Marcel. Paris: Aubier-
Montaigne, 1968. Merely an interview of Marcel conducted
by his best-known student, Paul Ricoeur.
Le Confiit des interpretations. Essais d'hermeneutique. Paris:
Editions de Seull, 1969.
 186 / BIB L lOG RAP H Y

PART II! ARTICLES

~. t Early and Miscellaneous Articles

"Responsabilite de la pensee." Etre, I, no. I (1936-37),4-5·
"Le Risque." Etre, I, no. 2 (1936-37),9-11.
"Soclalisme et christianisme." Etre, I, no. 4 (1936-37),3-4.
"NecessitedeKarIMarx." Etre, II, no. 5 (1936-37),3-4.
"L'Attention. Etude phenomenologique de l'attention et ses con-
nexions philosophiques." Bulletin du cercle philosophique de
rouest, IV (January-March, 1940),1-28.
"Le Renouvellement du probleme de la philosophie chretienne
par les philosophies de l'existence." In Le Probleme de la
philosophie chretienne, pp. 43-67. Paris: P.U.F., 1949.
"La Question de l'humanisme chretien." ·Foi et vie, IL (1951),
3 2 3-3 0 •
"Sur la phenomeno!ogie." Esprit, XXI (December, 1953), 821-
29·
"Sympathie et respect: Phenomenologie et ethique de la sec-
onde personne." Revue de metaphysique et de morale, LIX
(1954),380-97.
"La Parole est mon royaume." Esprit, XXIII (February, 1955),
1921-2.05·
"Negativite et affirmation originaire." In Aspects de la dialec-
tique, pp. 101-24. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1956.
"Renouveau de l'ontologie." In Encyclopedie fran~aise, vol. XIX,
secs. 16-15 to 18-3. Paris: Larousse, 1957.
"Place de l'oeuvre d'art dans notre culture." Foi-Education,
XXVII (January-March, 1957), 5-II.
"Le Sentiment." In Edmund Husserl 1859-1959, Phenomeno-
logicaIV, pp. 260-74. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959.
"nu marxisme au communisme contemporain." Christianisme
social, LXVII (1959), 151-59.
"La Place des 'humanites' dans la civilisation industrielle."
Paris-Lettres, vol. III (August-October, 1959).
"La Sexualite: La Merveille, l'errance, l'enigme." Esprit,
XXVIII (November, 1960), 1665-67.
"L'Humanite de l'homme." Studium generale, XV (1962), 3 09-
23·
"Freud et Ie mouvement de la culture moderne." In Traite de
psychoanalyse, edited byS. Nacht. Paris: P.U.F., 1965.
 Bibliography I 1 87

"La Philosophie: Sens et limites." In Cahiers paraboles. Week-

end de philo sophie (February, 1965).
"Le Conscient et rinconscient." In L'Inconscient, pp. 4°9-22.
Bibliotheque Neuro-Psychiatrique de Langue Fran!;aise.
Paris: Desch~e de Brouwer, 1966.
"La Recherche philosophique peut-eUe s'achever?" Orienta-
tions, special number (1966), pp. 31-44.
"La Philosophie a r~ge des sciences humaines." Cahiers de
philosophie. no. I (1966 ), pp. 93-99.

B. Entries concerning Language and Hermeneutics

"The Image of God and the Epic of Man." Translated by George
Gringas. Cross Currents, XI (Winter, 1961 ), pp. 3~49.
"The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection."
Translated by Denis Savage. International Philosophical
Quarterly. II, no. 2 (May, 1962), 191-218.
"Introduction au probleme des signes et du langage." Cahiers
de philosophie, no. 8 (1962-63), pp. 1-76.
"Symbolique et temporalite." Archivio de filosofia. XXXIII, nos.
1-2 (1963), 5-41.
"Le Conflit des herrneneutiques: Epistemologie des interpreta-
tions." Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, I, no. 1
(1963),152-84.
"Reponses" (to Levi-Strauss, etc.). Esprit, XXXI (November,
1963), 628-53·
"Le Symbole et Ie mythe." Le Semeur, LXI, no. 2 (1963),47-
53·
"Le Symbolisrne et rexplication structurale." Cahiers interna-
tionaux de symbolisme. II, no. 4 (1964),81-96.
"Le Langage de la foi." Bulletin du centre protestant d'etudes,
XVI, nos. 4-5 (1964),17-3 1 •
"Les Problemes du langage." Cahiers de phiZosophie, nos. 2-3
(1966 ), pp. 27-41.
"Problemes du langage, Cours de M. Ricoeur." Cahiers de
philosophie. no. 4 (1966 ), pp. 65-73·
"Violence et langage." Recherches et debats: La Violence, XVI,
no. 59 (1967),86-94.
"Demythologization et herrneneutique." Centre Europeen, Uni-
versite de Nancy, Dif. 81, no. 30 (1967).
"Husserl and Wittgenstein on Language." In Phenomenology
and Existentialism. edited by E. N. Lee and M. Mandelbaum,
 188 / BIB L lOG RAP H Y

pp. 207-17. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1967- .
"New Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phe-
nomenology of Language." Translated by P. G. Goodman.
Social Research, XXXIV, no. I (Spring, 1967),1-30.
"Foi et langage, Bultmann-Ebeling." Foi-Education, XXXVII.
no. Bl (October-December. 1967), I-56.
"The Critique of Subjectivity and Cogito in the Philosophy of
Heidegger." In Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, edited by
M. Frings, pp. 62-75. Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 196B .
"Structure, Word, Event." Translated by Robert D. Sweeny.
Philosophy Today, XII, nos. 2-4 (Summer, 1968).
"The Father Image: From Phantasy to SymboL" Criterion,
VIII, no. I (Autumn, I 96B-69 ), I - I ! .
"Religion, Atheism and Faith: 1. On Accusation, II. On Consola-
tion." In The Religious Significance of Atheism. Vol. XVIII,
Pp.57-9B. Bampton Lectures. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1969.

C. Various English Translations

"Christianity and the Meaning of History: Progress, Am-
biguity, Hope." The Journal of Religion, XXI (1952), 242-
53·
"Mass and Person" (with J. M. Domenach). Cross Currents,
II (Winter, 1952), 59-66.
"Sartre's Lucifer and the Lord." Yale French Studies, no. 14
(I954-55),Pp·B5-93·
"French Protestantism Today." The Christian Century, LXXII
(1955), 1236--3B.
"Associate and Neighbor." In Lcrve of Our Neighbor, no. B, pp.
149-61 . London: Blackfriars Publications, 1955.
"Morality without Sin or Sin without Moralism." Cross CUT-
Tents, V (Fall, 1955),339-52.
"'The Relation of Jasper's Philosophy to Religion." In The
Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, edited by P. Schilpp, pp. 611-42 •
Library of Living Philosophers, 1957.
"Faith and Culture." The Student World, L (1957),246-51.
"Ye Are the Salt of the Earth." The Ecumertical Review, X
(1958), 264-76.
"'Faith and Action." Criterion, vol. III (Summer, 19 63).
"The Dimensions of Sexuality." Cross Currents, XIV (196 4),
133-41.
 Bibliography / 18g
"The Atheism of Freudian Psychoanalysis." Concilium, II, no.
16 (I966), 59-72.
"A Conversation." The Bulletin of Philosophy, I, no. I (Janu-
ary, 1966 ), 1-7.
"Philosophy of Will and Action." In The Second Lexington
Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, pp. 7-33.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967.
"The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limiting
Idea." In Readings in Existential Phenomenology, edited by
N. Lawrence and D. O'Connor, pp. 93-1I2. Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, I967.
"The Antinomy of Human Reality and the Problem of Philo-
sophical Anthropology." In Readings in Existential Phenom-
enology. edited by N. Lawrence and D. O'Connor, pp. 390-402.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice~Hall. 1967.

PART III: SECONDARY SOURCES

A. Dissertations in English
Ihde, Don. "Paul Ricoeur's PhenomenolOgical Methodology and
Philosophical Anthropology." Ph.D. dissertation, Boston Uni-
versity,19 64'
Rasmussen, David M. "A Correlation Between Religious Lan-
guage and an Understanding of Man: A Constructive Interpre-
tation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur." Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago, 1968.
Reagan, Charles E. "Freedom and Determinism: A Critical
Study of Certain Aspects of this problem in the Light of the
Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur." Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Kansas, 1967.
Stewart, David. ''Paul Ricoeur's Phenomenology of Evil." Ph.D.
dissertation, Rice University, 1965.

B. Selected Articles in French and English

Czarneck, J. "L'Histoire et la vente selon Paul Ricoeul'." Foi et
vie, un (I955), 548-55·
de Waelhens, A. ''Pensee mythique et philosophie du mal," Re-
vue philosophique de Louvain. LIX (1961), 171-72.
- - . "La Force du langage et Ie langage de la force." Revue
philosophique de Louvain, (LXIII) 1965,591-612.
 190 / BIB L lOG RAP H Y

Hartmann, K. "Phenomenology, Ontology.. and Metaphysics."

The Review of Metaphysics, XXII, no. I (September, 1968 ),
85-112.
Ihde, D. "Rationality and Myth." The Journal of Thought, II,
no. I (January, 1967), 10-18.
- - . "The Secular City and the Existentialists." The An-
dover Newton Quarterly, VII, no. 4 (March, 1967), 188-89·
- - . "Some Parallels between Analysis and Phenomenol-
ogy." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXVII,
nO.4 (June, 1967),577-86.
- - . "From Phenomenology to Hermeneutic," The Journal
of Existentialism, VII, no. 30 (Winter, 1967-68), I I 1-32.
Jacob, A. ''Paul Ricoeur, un philosophie pratique d'inspiration
phenomenologique." Critique, V (lg61), 360-71.
Rasmussen, D. "Ricoeur: The Anthropological Necessity of a
Special Language." Continuum, VII, no. I (Winter-Spring,
1969),120-30. .
- - . "Myth, Structure and Interpretation." In The Origin
of Cosmos and Man, edited by M. Dhavenony. Rome: Grego-
rian University Press, 1969.
Sarano, J. "La Reciprocite du patie et de l'agis." Etudes Philos-
ophie, X (1955),726-29.
Stewart, D. "Paul Ricoeur and the Phenomenological Move-
ment." Philosophy Today (Winter, 1968), pp. 227-35.
- . "Paul Ricoeur's Phenomenology of Evil." Interna-
tional Philosophical Quarterly, IX, no. 4 (December, Ig6g),
572t-8g.
Tilliette, X. "Re£iexion et symbole: L'Enterprise phUosopbique
de Paul Ricoeur." Archives philosophie, XXIV (lg61), 574-
88.
Vansina, D. "Equisse, orientation et Signification de I'enterprise
philosophique de Paul Ricoeur." Revue de metaphysique et
de morale, LXIX (1964),179-208.
 Index

Adazn, 120, 121, 125. 126, 127 Eidetic(s), 14, 28, 29, 38,42,43.
Ambivalence border, 33, 40, 43 55,103, 121
Anti-phenomenology, 155 Empirics, 22
~totle, 6,89, 133 Epoche, 26, 51, 52, 91, 100, 141,
Asc~se (spiritual discipline), 18 142. 144. 150, 154, 161, 162
Augustine, 151 Etre-la, 146
Austin, John, 180 Eve, 125. 126
Aveu (confession), 89 Existential phenomenology, 4, 7.
28, 65, 82, 105. 145, 146, 157,
Bachelard, Gaston, 136 164,168,170
Bios, 170 Existential verification, 102
Body: corps PTopTe, 28, 30; corps
vecu. 3,28 Fault, 20, 21, 57, 58, 80, 81,83,
Bultmann, Rudolph, 139 84, lIS
Frege,Gottlob,180
Chomsky, Noam. 176 Freud, Sigmund, 52 n, 131, 132,
Conscience mOTale. 112 133,134,137,139.140.143.150,
Copernican revolution, second, 7, 151,152,156,158,165
IS, 18, 19, 58, 113. 143, 154 Fundamental possibility, 20, 21.
Counterfocus, 16, 140, 144, 176• 31,55,56,59.66,84,85.86,163
177, :l80
Countermethod, 4. ISO Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 139
Geist, 156
~ystification, 142, 174 Genesis, 123
Demytholigization, 18. 3 1 • 39, 50,
91.93.101,112,113,143,150
Descartes, Rene, 3. II Hegel, Georg, 3, IS, 139, ISS, 156,
Diagnostic, 27, 29, 30, 33, 37, 44, 158, 159
45,47,49,50,54.101, ISO, 176 Heideggex, Martin. 4 n, 139, 171,
Dialectic: of the diagnostic, 47, 50; 173
of methods,S. 138, 159; of Hermeneutic tum, 6, 82, 146, 162.
myths, 120, 122 163
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 139 Hubris, II7 n, 177

[191]
 192 / INDEX

Husserl. Edmund. 3. 4. 5. 9. II. PoesiB, 132, 164, 166

IS, 21, 59, 62, 151, 162, 168, Pragnla,27. 40, 44
170, 172, 174, 180 Project, 35
Prometheus, I I 8
Idea: directive, 12, 65; limit, 14, 16 Pure symbol, Il3, 128
Innocence. dream of, 40, 42, 56,
57, 85 Riickfragen (backquestioning),
170
Lacan, Jacques. 153 n
Lebenswelt (lifeworld), 4. 7, 51, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6
79 Schleiermacber, Friedrich, 139
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 167 n Schuwer, Andre, :1:42 n
Limit concept, 5, 12, 13. 84 Seanotics, 176, 177
Limit idea. See Idea, limit Socrates, I I
Linguistics (linguistic sciences), Spiegelberg, Herbert, 148 n
24. 25, 1340 168, 170. 174, 175, Spinoza, 10
176, 178, x80; linguistic Stoics, 19, 57
analysis, 4 n. 180 Strawson, P. F .• 180
Logos, 138, 170
Structuralism, X74
Symbol~body, x26
Marcel. Gabriel, 3,8,9
Marx. Karl, 139 Sympathetic imagination, 22, 100
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 6, 60 n,
170 Telos, 10, II, 112, 168
Messiah, 121 Third term, IS, 16,62. 159. 168
Moses, 174 Titans, lI6
Mythics, 22, 82. 84, 95
MythOB, 89, 138 Ursprung, 168

Natural attitude. 18. 51. 174 Vouloir-dire, 147, 157, xSo

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 139
Wager, 102. 152. x65
Obscurity border, 86. :1:64 Weltanschauung, 100
Orphism. 87, Il9
Yahweh,I23
Peri Hermeneias, 6. 89
Plato. 6, 127 Zeus, 117