Table Of ContentEXTENSION OF RICOEUR'S HERMENEUTIC
Dedicated to
My Mary
EXTENSION OF RICOEUR'S
HERMENEUTIC
by
PATRICK L. BOURGEOIS
•
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1975
© 1975 by Martinus NijhofJ, The Hague, Nether1ands
Softcover reprint oft he hardcover 1st edition 1975
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1719-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1661-2
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-1661-2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VII
INTRODUCTION IX
I. Statement of the Problem I
II. Eidetics and its Limits 10
III. Existential Structures of Disproportion 28
IV. Eidetics, Existence, and Experience 57
V. Symbol, Hermeneutic, and Conflict of Interpretation 69
VI. Philosophical Reflection as Hermeneutics 97
VII. Phenomenology and the Sciences of Language: Further
Extensions 113
VIII. Conclusions 128
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 148
INDEX 153
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Eugene O. Bourgeois Sr., my father, for his expert
help with the French and German languages and the texts used in this
manuscript. However, all responsibility for any inaccuracies in translation
are my responsibility.
I am indebted to Loyola University of New Orleans for a grant given
by the Academic Grants Committee to defray expenses of preparing the
final manuscript.
I express my gratitude to Mrs. Eugenie Klopf Cronan for the tedious
task of typing the final manuscript.
I would like to express my appreciation to the editor and director of
Research in Phenomenology for allowing me to republish the following
article: "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Language," vol. I, pp. 119-
136.
I would also like to express my appreciation to the editor of Philosophy
Today for allowing me to republish the following article: "Hermeneutics
of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: Paul Ricreur," Winter 1971, pp.
231-241.
October 10, 1974
P. L. B.
INTRODUCTION
The path Husserl entered upon at the beginning of his philosophical writ
ings turned out to be the beginning of a long, tedious way. Throughout his
life he constantly comes to grips with the fundamental problems which set
him upon this path. Beginning with the logical level of meaning, laboring
through the idealism of the transcendental phenomenology of the period
between Ideas I to the Meditations, in search for the ever more originary,
he finally arrived at the level of the Lebenswelt. It was this later focus
on the ever more originary, the source, the foundation of meaning which
led him finally to the horizon of meaning and the genesis of meaning in the
Lebenswelt period. This later period allows for a quasi wedding of his
phenomenology with some adaptation of existentialism. But this union
called for an adaptation of Husserl's logistic prejudice.
The period of the Lebenswelt allows many of the later phenomenologists
to speak of the failure of the brackets in their extreme exclusion and to
allow for a link between man and his world in the Lebenswelt. This link
is at the source of the ontological investigations and theories which arise
from the phenomenological movement. However, there is the possibility
of many tensions in such an endeavor since the study of being can be most
abstract and most concrete. This treatise purports to investigate one of
those manners of access to ontology, that of the French philosopher, Paul
Ricreur. Ricreur considers the access to ontology a difficult one. Man's
link to being is not easily gained without loosing many important aspects
of that bond.
Husserl had begun his long, steady trek at the logical level and through
out his life worked toward the more originary, the source, the Ursprung.
In the period of the Lebenswelt, it can be made clear that this origin is
not immediately accessible and must therefore be reached indirectly by
questioning back, what has become known as the Riickjrage. Ricreur still
holds fast to this necessity of a Ruck/rage to arrive at the originary, at the
x
INTRODUCTION
Ursprung. Therefore, when he takes up the problem of the will, he considers
it necessary to begin with the eidetic level and work back to the Ursprung,
to continuously get closer and closer to the origin in its concrete fullness.
His direction is therefore from the eidetic to the empirical, which, even
from the beginning of his philosophy of the will, he considered accessible
from a treatment of a mythics. But Ricreur is hesitant to move too quickly
through this mythical level to an explicitly ontological level. He constantly
takes detours before arriving at this final stage. The first general obvious
detour which he considers necessary is the detour through the symbolics,
the detour through the hermeneutics of symbols.
This treatise will attempt to take up some of the problems emerging
from the development of Ricreur's philosophy. He has begun his philosophy
of the will with a treatment of the structures of willing using an eidetic
method of description. When he works out some of the problems of in
terpretation, reflection, and hermeneutics, he learns that all reflection is
interpretation. Thus the question emerges as to whether the first level of
treatment of the philosophy of the will is also to some extent hermeneutical.
In order to render a treatment of this question, it is necessary first to
present the manner of Ricreur's initial undertaking on this eidetic level of
the will. Then an account of his development to his new position must be
rendered. Does he really change his initial position or is it simply a matter
of something which he only grasped implicitly becoming more explicit? In
other words, can we say that his first treatment on the level of pure re
flection is implicitly hermeneutical? And if it is not, should it be?
Chapter one of this treatment will present a lengthy statement of these
problems. Chapter two will attempt to explicate the eidetic phase of
Ricreur's method, the eidetic treatment of the structures of the will. Chap
ter three will thoroughly investigate his too often neglected pure reflection
on the existential structures of disproportion of fallible man making possi
ble the fault and underlying the empirics of man. And Chapter four at
tempts to make the transition from the level of pure reflection to Ricreur's
confrontation with hermeneutics. Chapter five will treat his basic theory of
symbols and hermeneutics, and the conflict of interpretation within the
field of interpretation. Chapters six and seven will attempt to deal with
some of the detours, deepenings, and extensions he has had to make. This
treatment of these encounters will make it clear to some extent how Ricreur
has had to extend his initial views, and lead to a concluding chapter. This
concluding chapter will attempt to confront further these problems of ex
tensions and return to the first stages of his philosophy of will, and thus
answer the questions posed in the first chapter. Since the first chapter
presents a lengthy statement of these problems with the aim of this study,
it is not necessary to deal with them any further in this introduction.
CHAPTER I
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
RECENT EXPANSION
Few thinkers take their initial ideas or insights through different stages of
development without some deepening, change or extension. The unfolding
of the initial insight is not clearly foreseen at the beginning. This is especial
ly true for philosophical thinking which wants to work back toward its
starting point. The tendency is to continually renew the initial insight in
the light of further development. This tendency to renewal in the starting
point can easily lead superficial readers to stand detached and at a distance
from the thinker's development and accuse him of a radical change in
relation to his insight and starting point. A victim on the contemporary
philosophical scene of this accusation of radical change is Martin Heideg
ger. Some would see a radical change in his philosophy from the early
stage of Sein und Zeit 1 to his later writings, instead of seeing how he
entered upon his path, continued to make headway along that path, and
focused more explicitly on his initial question of the meaning of Being.
The concern of this study is of such a philosopher, Paul Ricreur. In the
first stage of his Philosophy of the Will he could see in general his project
in its entirety, as is clear from the introduction of Le volontaire et l'involon
taire.2 However, once he began the long trek down that path, the specific
direction to be travelled and problems to be met became clearer. Conse
quently he encountered some problems which he did not fully and ex
plicitly grasp at the outset. Questions therefore at the later stage of his
philosophy of the will might well be asked concerning the changes which
the later stages necessitate in the first stage. Some of the themes and ex
tensions which have explicitly emerged can be seen implicitly in the initial
stages. And in the new light of their having become explicit, one might
1 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tiibingen, 1963).
! Paul Rica:ur, Philosophie de la volonte, Vol. I. Le volontaire et rinvolontaire.
English ed., trans. by Erazim V. Kohak. References to this work will be in VI.
2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
consider the possibility of a need for a radical revision of the initial stage
of his philosophy of the will.
One such implicit orientation in Ricreur's first stage, the eidetic stage of
his philosophy of the will, is the tum to a hermeneutic phenomenological
method in order to reach a concrete reflection. Ricreur in the introduction
to Le volontaire et l'involontaire (VI, 27) does even at the outset see the
need to tum to such an hermeneutical method. In fact, even then he
considered the eidetic stage as the necessary prolegomenon to the empirics
and the poetics.3 (VI, 36) Only later does the conflict within the her
meneutical field emerge and become problematic. The questions to which
this hermeneutical stage gives rise concerning the initial stages of his phi
losophy of the will cannot be avoided.
The first question of this treatise flows from this last and more recent
stage of Ricreur's work, the hermeneutic stage. His philosophy of the will
has reached the level of concrete reflection. At this stage reflection be
comes interpretation. However, at this stage it also becomes clear to him
that all reflection is interpretation. The further question therefore emerges:
is this a radical about-face? Does this view mean a complete change from
the first phase which is eidetic and therefore a pure reflection which tries to
arrive at the structures of willing? To what extent does Ricreur in coming to
grips with the hermeneutical problems with its conflicts, in resolving the
conflict the way in which he does it, find it necessary to alter his initial
study? Or is it the case that in making explicit some of the initial orien
tations, a return can be made to the eidetic stage in such a way as to
understand and shake loose certain impulses and hidden aspects which are
only accessible now after the further development and deepening to con
crete reflection? In other words, to what extent does the development call
for a change in the return to the initial stage? It is clear that Ricreur has
changed in his view of the nature of philosophy as reflection, and has found
it necessary to extend his views of symbols, of language and of interpre
tation.
Thus this treatise is a Ruck/rage in the sense of a questioning back from
the later hermeneutical stage of his philosophy of the will to the initial
stage. The questioning back is intended to bring to light and make explicit
Ricreur's development as consistent and as continuous in spite of some
3 In the use of such substantives as empirics, eidetics, symbolics, mythics, poetics,
we are attempting to render Ricreur's use of the same words as substantives: ['em
pirique, l'eidetique, la symbolique, Ie mythique, la poetique. In such usage we are
following Charles Kelbley in his translation of Ricreur's Philosophie de la volonte,
Vol. II. Finitude et culpabilite, Part I: L'homme faillible. This work shall be referred
to as HF. See his footnote concerning this usage in Fallible Man, p. X.
