Twentieth-century French philosophy continues to inflame the passions of American readers in the 21st. While Anglo-American philosophy can seem impossibly dry and technical, the great French masters still speak to our most urgent concerns. What they say is another matter. Many people still accuse Foucault, Derrida, and company of ruining higher education and possibly Western civilization itself. Yet many others continue to read “French Theory” with pleasure and fascination, both inside and outside the academy. On a recent visit to Barnes and Noble, I wound up having a conversation with a bookseller who was eager to talk about Lacan and Deleuze.
Compared to his infamous contemporaries, Paul Ricoeur, who died in 2005, seems like a rather benign figure. He was an encyclopedic thinker with a vast range of interests who wrote about everything from religion to history, ethics, literature, and linguistics. His books, readily available in English, provoke neither passionate praise nor denunciation. But Ricoeur still has much to teach us, especially at a moment when both declining religious affiliation and the rediscovery of religious faith are visible trends. While churches continue to lose members, we have also seen dramatic resurgence of religious belief, even among previously outspoken atheists. From the perspective Ricoeur offers, this paradoxical coincidence of faith and doubt is no accident.
Born in 1913, Ricoeur was the inheritor of the French tradition of philosophy that goes back to René Descartes, who sought to reestablish the basis of knowledge through a procedure of “systematic doubt” that identified and eliminated sources of error. In the early 20th century, Descartes’s method was revived by Edmund Husserl’s school of phenomenology. Husserl believed that by painstakingly describing the contents of consciousness he could provide a firm foundation for all knowledge. Yet phenomenology failed on its own terms. After decades of effort, Husserl found that no ultimate clarification was possible; meaning remained ambiguous.
Ricoeur, who studied Husserl in depth and translated him into French, had different ambitions. From the start, he accepted that ambiguity would always be part of the human condition. He taught himself the rigor and discipline of phenomenology, but used these tools for purposes different from those for which they were originally intended. Rather than seek a new basis for science, Ricoeur turned to more ancient questions: “Who am I?” and “How should I live?”
“For Ricoeur, philosophy is therefore always an ethical act.”
The two questions are related. By gaining self-knowledge, I also learn how to live. For Ricoeur, philosophy is therefore always an ethical act. To be clear, Ricoeur wasn’t interested in laying down rules and prohibitions. He even thought Immanuel Kant had made a disastrous error by equating ethical philosophy with moral obligation. For Ricoeur, ethics refers to our desire and effort to be, over and against the nothingness that haunts our finite existence. In this quest, Ricoeur would eventually come to think Husserl’s method was insufficient. I don’t come to know myself merely through self-reflection, but must learn to interpret the symbols of my culture. To use Ricoeur’s language, it is necessary to develop a hermeneutics of the subject.
Hermeneutics refers to the discipline of interpreting texts. Ricoeur was a Christian, a member of France’s small Protestant minority. As such, he was an heir not only to Descartes but also to Martin Luther and the deep study of scripture initiated by the Reformation. Ricoeur had a formidable knowledge of both philosophical thought and religious traditions, yet he never seemed to be tempted by nostalgia. He did not turn to the past as a refuge from the present. Rather, he understood hermeneutics as a distinctly modern enterprise.
In an early book, Ricoeur wrote, “It is not an accident that unity of inspiration animates the great medieval cosmologies—it is a unique desire which starts with God and returns to God through all degrees of nature.” In the modern era, such intellectual unity is no longer possible. The growth of knowledge has also meant its fragmentation. In a sense, we know too much and the things we know don’t fit together easily in a single system. Yet this process of becoming modern also contains within it the possibility for a renewal of meaning.
Ricoeur’s 1960 book Symbolism of Evil is the first full statement of his hermeneutical philosophy as well as his most overtly Christian work. It is simultaneously a meticulous work of scholarship and an astonishing meditation on what it means to be human. The great Catholic philosopher of violence René Girard singled out the book for praise and said that Ricoeur was the only one of his contemporaries who shared his perspective on Christianity and other religions. Like Girard, Ricoeur engaged with a wide variety of different religious traditions, but while he took each of them seriously as a mode of thought, he avoided the facile relativism that would declare that all religions are equally true.
In the first part of the book, Ricoeur charts a spiritual journey through the elementary symbols of defilement, sin, and guilt. The first of these is the superstitious fear of contamination. Sin is transgression before God. In its final stage, guilt represents the internalization and individualization of evil. Guilt is the convoluted hell in which freedom comes to enslave itself. The guilty conscience is one enamored by degrees of wickedness. The fact that I am aware of God’s commandments means that I can’t help but fall short of them—that I know that no matter what I do, I could always do more.
Ricoeur pays respect to the legalistic tradition of the Pharisees, yet he finds the endless enumeration of laws could have the opposite of its desired effect. This is where he locates the spiritual rupture of Christianity. St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, finds a way out of the impasse of guilt through a critique of the Law. The road to salvation is long, and the Law makes it even longer by increasing the rules one must follow while multiplying temptation through prohibition. This resembles Nietzsche’s argument in Genealogy of Morals, later elaborated on by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. Thus the most radical critique of Christianity turns out to be a revival of its own foundation.
“For Ricoeur, Christianity is an inherently hermeneutical religion.”
Yet Ricoeur wasn’t naïve enough to think that we can bring about justice by simply getting rid of laws. As long as the world hasn’t ended, humans will need institutions to ensure continuity over time. For Ricoeur, Christianity is an inherently hermeneutical religion. The coming of Jesus Christ does not abolish history. The early church might have chosen to simply cut the Old Testament, but chose instead to interpret it in the new light of the Christian kerygma.
In the second part of Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur offers interpretations of various Greek and Biblical myths. For Ricoeur, a myth isn’t merely a fanciful story but a way of narrating an aspect of our existence that defies rational thought. For instance, innocence must exist as a state prior to all value judgment, but our language is already so laden with normativity that we can’t say what that state would be. The story of Adam allows us to approach this unspeakable innocence.
As children of modernity, we shouldn’t regret the fact that we can’t take myths literally anymore. By debunking their claims to historical truth, modern scholarship allows myths to live again as symbols. But, Ricoeur finds, scripture also contains its own interpretation. Here again St. Paul is his key interlocutor. In Paul’s eschatological vision, Adam comes to represent an innocence that may yet be restored again in salvation.
Ricoeur believed that every myth was a reinterpretation of earlier myths. In his next major book, he turned from the myths at the foundation of Western civilization to a modern mythmaker. Ricoeur first published Freud and Philosophy in French in 1965. More than 500 pages long, it is his magnum opus. More than just a reading of Freud, it is the fullest statement of Ricoeur’s philosophy, as well as a grand tour of the history of Western thought.
Ricoeur wrote the book during a period when Freudian orthodoxy had an enormous influence over French intellectual life. In that sense, the book bears comparison to the era’s other great philosophical polemic against psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, although Ricoeur is the stylistic opposite of his younger contemporaries. While Deleuze and Guattari are deliberately outrageous, Ricoeur is so respectful that his book’s polemical dimension only reveals itself gradually.
Freud and Philosophy introduced Ricoeur’s most famous concept: the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which is often deployed by people who have never read Ricoeur. In his account, Freud along with Marx and Nietzsche, sought to do Descartes one better by showing that consciousness itself could be doubted. We think we know our own mind, but in fact what we are conscious of is merely a layer of illusion that masks deeper forces. All three of Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion” were atheists who aimed to explain away religious belief as a social and psychological phenomenon. Thus for Marx, religion was an ideological construct the ruling class imposed on the masses as false consciousness; for Nietzsche, it was part of a power-struggle of the weak against the strong; for Freud, a means of repressing dangerous sexual desires.
Of the three, Freud went the farthest in elaborating the ways our minds lie to us. His theory of the unconscious calls into question the very possibility of rational thought. If the mind constantly deceives itself, might not the solitary philosopher be the most deceived of all? Ricoeur takes this challenge seriously and stages confrontations between Freud and figures from the history of philosophy.
The encounter with Hegel is particularly memorable. Freud was always oriented towards childhood and the body’s lower functions, exposing the most sophisticated aspects of our adult life as products of a repressed primordial drama. By contrast, the Hegelian dialectic aims ever upwards as Spirit ascends to higher and higher planes. In the concept of sublimation, however, Ricoeur finds a bridge between the two thinkers. Sublimation is repression viewed in a positive light. Freud did not think it was ever possible to realize our deepest desires. Part of the significance of the Oedipus Complex is that it can never be directly enacted. In a sense we are condemned to impotently repeat the same fantasies in our head our whole life. Yet though the fantasy itself may never change, its endless repetition allows us to make creative new uses of it. Thus an artist might transform an obscene longing into a great work of poetry.
Ricoeur also brings Freud into contact with religion. From the start, Ricoeur contrasts the hermeneutics of suspicion with a specifically religious hermeneutic. By the latter he means hermeneutics as a recovery of meaning. He describes a never-ending dialectic between idol and symbol. For Ricoeur, the symbol is a kind of infinite gift. It can never be absorbed completely but continually gives rise to thought. At the same time, because the symbol can never be possessed in its entirety, it is always at risk of hardening into an idol. It is here that Freud’s atheism might serve a religious purpose by purifying the faith of dead orthodoxies. In Ricoeur’s words, “the idols must die—so that symbols may live.”
Yet while naïve religious belief can’t survive its encounter with Freud, neither can Freudian orthodoxy survive the faith of the believer. Ricoeur is at his most quietly devastating when discussing Freud’s scientism. Starting with a foundation in 19th-century materialism, Freud developed psychoanalysis first to treat individual neurosis and then expanded it into a total theory of civilization, but never wavered in his claim that it was a strictly scientific theory. Here a paradox arises. Freud believed that science was the one legitimate way of knowing the world and that religion must be crushed, but this did not stop him from developing his own peculiar myths. For instance, to explain the foundation of civilization (in Totem and Taboo), he simply invented a story of a primal killing. Later on, Freud would speak of culture as an eternal battle between two mythical entities: Eros and Thanatos.
Freud could never have accepted this description of himself as a mythmaker. He claimed he was completing the work of Copernicus and Darwin. Just as they had shown that man was not the center of the universe and had no privileged position among species, psychoanalysis showed that man was not even the master of his own mind. Yet in the end even the most ruthless man of science can only debunk old myths with new ones. The hermeneutics of suspicion seems to cut both ways. Religion exposes the spiritual impulses in the heart of the staunchest non-believer. We might try to deny it but we are constituted by myths and symbols all the way down.
Where does this leave faith? Ricoeur never attempts a systematic case for theism or engages in Christian apologetics in the usual sense. For all his rigor as a philosopher, his Christianity remained somewhat mystical. He speaks of faith as “the second naivete of which we have merely a frontier or threshold knowledge.” For Ricoeur, the sacred may draw near but it can never be grasped completely.
Freudian orthodoxy isn’t nearly as powerful today as it was in France in the middle of last century. So what relevance does Ricoeur have for our own time? In the 21st century, the most famous “masters of suspicion” and sworn enemies of religion have been the New Atheists. Generally, they don’t cite Freud or Marx, but they do look to Darwin for authority. In the hands of authors like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, neo-Darwinism becomes a theory of everything, uniting the discourse of the physical sciences with the discourse of human culture. It also often plays the role of a hermeneutics of suspicion by positing, via evolutionary psychology, that we can’t trust our own minds. Even the most seemingly innocent and transparent emotion has a secret history. For example, we might think we love our family members as ends in themselves, but really this love is a means our genes devised for replicating themselves.
Here it is worth recalling Ricoeur’s lesson that our religious nature reasserts itself precisely at the moment religion is being most mercilessly debunked. Science has frequently come to assume a religious function in our society. We see this in the exhortations for the public to follow or believe “the science.” But this religious tendency is not limited to naïve slogans for laypeople. It is also apparent in some of the more fantastic mythological creations of scientists themselves.
For example, many leading figures in cosmology have come to endorse the idea that ours is just one of an infinite number of universes. Leading physicists like Leonard Susskind and the late Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg have explicitly endorsed the multiverse on the grounds that it fills the role once played by God. Maybe so, but given that it is untestable in principle, doesn’t that make it more a religious than a scientific idea? Aren’t they attacking one myth in the name of another? When a complete philosophical interpretation of the scientism of our time is written, the author would do well to take Freud and Philosophy as a model.
Today there are signs our culture is shifting. Many of the fiercest critics of religion from a generation ago have come to soften their stance. To give one dramatic example, the famed Muslim apostate and atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently announced that she had converted to Christianity. In a widely read essay, Ali said her conversion was partly motivated by politics but also spoke of more fundamental spiritual matters. While Ricoeur wouldn’t necessarily share her political views, he could relate to her spiritual confession. In Ali’s telling, atheists had fatally underestimated the human need for meaning. They thought they could destroy religion without putting anything in its place. She herself once took part in this debunking but found that the void that ensued was too much to bear. In this dearth of meaning the symbols of Christianity began to speak. Ali here is describing the same cycle that so engrossed Ricoeur. The hermeneutics of suspicion eventually clears the way for a rebirth of meaning.
Ricoeur also has much to teach us about how to live. By offering a moving account of faith in an age of scientific and technological progress, Ricoeur shows the possibility of recovering the sacred without turning one’s back on reason. His biblical exegeses make an ancient, familiar text speak with unexpected poignancy. Of course, not everyone will share his mystical temperament. Nonetheless, even a secular person can draw fortitude from his call to hermeneutics as an ethical act. Through interpretation, I gain self-knowledge and become who I am. This task feels at once urgent and untimely as we start to slip into a post-literate society. Language itself is in danger of being reduced to an algorithm for producing bureaucratic clichés. Against this threat of nothingness, Ricoeur remains a guide for finding meaning in the 21st century.