On the way to attestation: trust and suspicion in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics

Abstract

In this article, I will explore the archeology of the concept of attestation in Ricoeur’s work. In a brief discussion of his early reflections on Husserl’s concept of the ego (as an example of reflexive philosophy), I show how the dialectic of trust and suspicion enters Ricoeur’s hermeneutic concerns. I argue that this dialectics remains present in his account of attestation. By a brief confrontation with Heidegger’s notion of attestation as developed in Being and Time, I show that the uniqueness of Ricoeur’s account of attestation is to be found in this dialectic of trust and suspicion that he reinterprets in his later work in light of the concept of attestation.

Keywords:

• hermeneutics
• Paul Ricoeur
• attestation
• trust
• suspicion

Notes

1. Ricoeur, Réflexion faite. Hereafter, as well as for other books in which the English translation is quoted, references will be made as #1/#2, where #1 refers to the page number in the French edition and #2 to the English translation.

2. Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 187.

3. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre.

4. For the connection of attestation and testimony in the philosophy of history, cf. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. For the contemporary reflection on the importance of this issue, cf. e.g. the special issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of History 8 (2014), which is partly devoted to this problem as well as recent studies such as Gardner, Hermeneutics, History and Memory.

5. Cf. also Greisch, “Testimony and Attestation.”

6. Ricoeur, Autobiographie intellectuelle, 30/16.

7. Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 366–406/375–418.

8. A striking and thorough analysis of the role of Freud in this regard can be found in Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida & Ricoeur, 25–42.

9. Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 368/377.

10. Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, § 6.

11. Ibid., 62/23.

12. Ricoeur, Conflit, 240/239.

13. Husserl, Die Krisis 170/167–168.

14. Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action, 31/14.

15. Ricoeur, Conflit, 240.

16. For the description of the two modes of hermeneutics that are described below, cf. e.g., Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 29–44. This is also discussed in the literature under the heading of a teleological and archeological mode of interpretation, cf. Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 131–166.

17. Ricoeur, Philosophie de volonté.

18. Beyond Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, also Derrida’s reading of Husserl in La voix et le phénomène in which language displaces and disrupts the possibility of such a living experience, can be counted as a typical example of a hermeneutics of suspicion. For a confrontation with Ricoeur’s reading of Husserl, cf. chapter 1 and 2 of Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida & Ricoeur.

19. Ricoeur, De l’interprétation, 35/26–27.

20. Ricoeur, Conflit, 23.

21. Ricoeur, Soi-même, 34/22.

22. Ricoeur, Conflit, 28.

23. Ibid., 7–28.

24. Greisch, Paul Ricoeur, 140–141.

25. Ricoeur, Du texte à l’action, 127.

26. This Faktum is Heidegger’s point of departure in Sein und Zeit, 5

27. Other ways of accounting for the difference between Ricoeur and Heidegger can be found in Kemp, “Ricoeur between Heidegger and Lévinas”; and in van der Heiden, “Announcement, Attestation, and Equivocity”.

28. Ricoeur, Soi-même, 22/11.

29. Ibid., 33/21.

30. Ibid..

31. Ibid., 34/22. I have added the italics to the translation since it is also in the French original.

32. Ibid., 350–351/302.

33. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 54. For Ricoeur’s remark, see also Soi-même, 347, 358, 401. For an explicit distance between understanding and knowing in Heidegger’s phenomenon of attestation, cf. 403.

34. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 269/314.

35. Ibid., 277.

36. Ricoeur, Soi-même, seventh study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gert-Jan van der Heiden

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Full Professor of Metaphysics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He is working mainly on hermeneutics and contemporary French thought. He recently published Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy (2014).