Paul Ricoeur and the re(con)figuration of the humanities in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Ricoeur speaks to the unfolding ‘post-crisis’ period of the academic humanities through his dialectic between the hermeneutics of faith and suspicion, a construct that carries forward the critical impulse which academic bureaucracies want to repress in answer to their corporate masters, while at the same recognizing the value of reformist impulses that will generate strategic alignments and substantive benefits. This article identifies the tensions of the double hermeneutic, where it is successful and unsuccessful, and maps Ricoeur’s view of ethical responsibility in the academic politics of the 1960s onto the academic politics of today. The article concludes that Ricoeur’s particular value on this subject lies in the courage with which he dared to place unfashionable reformist possibilities in an honest and productive dialogue with the radical suspicion of hegemonic structures.

Keywords:

• Ricoeur
• humanities
• crisis

Notes

1. Bousquet, “The Moral Panic in Literary Studies.”

2. Franck, “Crisis at Columbia: English Department Is in Receivership.”

3. Woodford, “Humanities Face Identity Crisis”.

4. A classic defense of the humanities as preserver of cultural tradition in the American university is chapter two of Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature. The language of distance and belonging is hermeneutic shorthand for the interplay between the self-critique of a tradition that supports us.

5. Wellek, “Destroying Literary Studies.”

6. Hahendahl, “The Future of the Research University and the Fate of the Humanities,” 5–6.

7. A typical example of this discourse is Chace, “The Decline of the English Department.”

8. This phase of the ideological history receives exhaustive, if partisan, critical analysis in Patai and Corral, Theory’s Empire.

9. An example of a particularly painful debate of this kind can be found in Weinsheimer and Sousa, The Humanities in Dispute.

10. Ricoeur, Lectures I, 381.

11. Ibid., 384.

12. In a later interview Ricoeur compares the two systems of university education along precisely these lines. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 45–60.

13. Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les Sens d’une Vie, 439–488.

14. For an excellent survey of this history, see Dosse, History of Structuralism. Vol. 1.

15. Scott-Baumann points out that the suspicion/faith dialectic is a frame largely confined to the decade of 1965–75, and that Ricoeur distanced himself from the hermeneutics of suspicion afterwards in the direction of a “hermeneutics of recovery.” Indeed Ricoeur moderated his political radicalism and shifted his philosophical focus in corresponding ways. If he drew away from the impulses of suspicion toward a more committed hope for incremental reform, I would argue that the trope of faith and suspicion remains a useful construct. Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 153.

16. Ricoeur himself made the humanism/humanities connection explicit in the 1956 essay “What Does Humanism Mean?,” tying the titular question to the “politics of culture,” which starts with “the framework of the school and the university.” He insisted that what humanism is cannot be divorced from the educational curriculum of the humanities: “The question of humanism coincides with that of the humanities.” Ricoeur, “What Does Humanism Mean?,” 68.

17. Anderson, “Ricoeur and Women’s Studies,” 142–164.

18. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures. Vol. 2, 31–32.

19. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy.

20. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 71.

21. White, The Content of the Form, 4.

22. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 218.

23. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 173.

24. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 79.

25. Wood, “Introduction,” 7.

26. Ibid., 8.

27. Ihde, “Text and the New Hermeneutics,” 125–139.

28. The concept of benevolent spontaneity emerges in Oneself as Another: ‘[O]ur wager is that it is possible to dig down under the level of obligation and to discover an ethical sense not so completely buried under norms that it cannot be invoked when these norms themselves are silent, in the case of undecidable matters of conscience. This is why it is so important to us to give solicitude a more fundamental status than obedience to duty. Its status is that of benevolent spontaneity.’ Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 190. As Richard Cohen points out, the building of an ethical system on the foundation of ‘an already morally inclined solicitude’ should sound warning bells ‘not only from a Lévinasian point of view.’ Lévinas, of course, started from the other direction: ‘No one is good voluntarily.’ Cohen, “Moral Selfhood,” 132.

29. There is also the persistent question of religious interest and basis of Ricoeur’s social theory, but this is implicit in the deontological issue. However, this concern may be subsumed for the purposes of the present inquiry into the suspicion of an a priori.

30. Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur.

31. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 67.

32. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 169.

33. Michel, Paul Ricoeur: Une Philosophie de l’Agir Humain, 471.

34. A useful summary of the various strands of agonistic and radical democracy theory is Wenman, Agonistic Democracy.

35. Mouffe, “An Agonistic Approach to the Future of Europe”. Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe.”

36. Shadd, “Chasing Ricoeur: In Pursuit of the Translational Paradigm”.

37. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 4.

38. ‘Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of self establishes form the outset and at its most basic level of semantic analysis the primordiality of the correlation between self-identity and that of the other. However, since this simultaneity of reference designates “each one” and “everyone,” it lacks the referential adequacy to designate anything more than universal self-sameness or idem identity.’ Venema, Identifying Selfhood, 133. Even my short summary of the conclusion to Oneself as Another below will indicate something of the searching complexity of Ricoeur’s interrogation of the enigma of the other in comparison to this reductive and inaccurate description.

39. Kemp, “Ricoeur between Heidegger and Lévinas”, 54.

40. Kemp, 56; Cohen, “Moral Selfhood,” 147.

41. Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity, 105.

42. True enough, in explaining evil as sin he shows an ultimate preference for the Adamic myth over the explanatory force of other world mythologies, but by the time he makes this evaluative claim at the end of The Symbolism of Evil, his analysis is so rigorously rooted in the narrative function that the preference is not critical to the theory. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 232–278.

43. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 40.

44. Bourgeois, 118.

45. Cohen notes that Ricoeur ‘misunderstands the level of significance of the alterity of the other in Lévinas,’ and ‘in addition, the passivity of the self that responds to alterity. The Lévinasian self is not so separate as to be inviolate, simply passive, or, as Ricoeur would have it, the (im)possible object of violence and war. Rather, it is, as Lévinas writes, “more passive than any receptivity,” “more passive than any passivity”. … What this means, concretely, is that the moral reserves of the self are in principle inextinguishable. Beyond giving or attempting to give food, shelter, clothing, employment, etc., that is, beyond giving things, and beyond the kind word … or even silent company, that is to say, beyond any giving of the self, the responsibility of the self exceeds the very limits of finitude … one can die for another – such is the ultimate structure of morality.’ Cohen, “Moral Selfhood,” 134.

46. This dilemma of choice is the reason for the ‘interlude’ on Antigone in the little ethics (241–249).

47. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 335.

48. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 333. Ricoeur, Soi-Même Comme an Autre, 384.

49. Ibid., 332/383.

50. Ricoeur, “What Does Humanism Mean?,” 68–87.

51. Some of this history and Ricoeur’s role in it is recounted in Dosse, History of Structuralism. Vol. 1, 380-392, and Vol. 2, 217, 285–286, 350–351.

52. Readings, The University in Ruins.

53. Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 21.

54. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 258.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Arthos

John Arthos is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University Bloomington, where he teaches rhetoric. He is the author of three books on Hans-Georg Gadamer. He is currently writing a book on Paul Ricoeur.