(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Ricoeur was a French philosopher.
There is a distance between us and a text caused by language and time: a “cultural estrangement” (Ricoeur 1976, 43). If we’re reading a text in translation, we’re interpreting some third party’s interpretation of it; even if the text was originally written in a tongue with which we speak, the older it is, the more this language differs in subtle ways from ours. Time in general is distancing because the original audience shared many implicit assumptions with the author, which we either don’t, or aren’t aware that we don’t.
Yet we also belong to the same world by means of traditions and writings (Kaplan 2008, 189). We share assumptions and allusions and a basic human nature that allow us to relate and find common ground. Recognising this should make us more willing to approach older texts or those from alien cultures: however distant they are from us, they also share a part of our experience and so can be fruitful and approachable. These concerns are most visible when considering classical texts, but are no means limited to them. Even contemporary authors writing in our native language and sharing many of our assumptions are distant from us purely because they are different people to us. Indeed, the familiarity we feel toward them may obscure important differences.
So there is a “hermeneutic circle” that constitutes our understanding from which we cannot escape (p. 190). We belong to the world we interpret, yet are always at a distance. We must be “hermeneutically modest” that we are in this inescapable position (p. 189). To be arrogant in this respect is to impose our own worldview and the assumptions of our culture on the author, judge them on this basis, and ignore or minimise our differences; to look at an older author as less civilised and refined as us, naïve in understanding what is obvious to us. Reading well requires that we understand our place in this configuration, and the nature of this tension between distance (“distanciation”) and our personal belonging in meaning.
This distance makes the text an autonomous object. The text is autonomous of the author, its original socio-cultural context, and its original audience (Ricoeur 1976, 37). We do not know the intentions of its author, and even if we did they aren’t necessarily helpful. This is quite a subtle point because it can seem non-intuitive. It partly explains how classic texts are timeless, each subsequent generation interpreting them anew according to their own concerns; how a modern Westerner can understand a text from an ancient Chinese sage; and why remarkable works can originate from contemptible authors, or be used in ways that the author couldn’t have anticipated. The author isn’t the arbiter of the text’s truth. The text escapes its origin.
Distanciation can never be overcome, but nor should it be (Kaplan 2008, 200). It has a positive character in being “the soul of every critical philosophy”: by making possible the distancing of ourselves from our traditions we are better able to evaluate the text critically (ibid. (quoted in)). It’s easier to see our flawed assumptions and the practices we take for granted when they’re presented in a radically different context.
The counterpart to distanciation is “appropriation”: the act of interpretation (p. 199). This is our effort to make the world of the text, as opposed to the text itself, more familiar to us (Ricoeur 1976, 37). So, we don’t aim to posess the text, but instead give the text room to reveal its world. In this way we expand our knowledge and consciousness of both the text and ourselves. Appropriation allows us to see things differently—experience, understanding, and self-understanding are all linked (Kaplan 2008, 200–1).
To understand a text we must see it as a response to the implicit question it was meant to answer, the same question that we belong to because we belong to the same world (p. 188). Its autonomy means that there is an inescapable conflict of interpretations for a single text. Ricoeur explained (1976, 77–8):
The text as a whole and as a singular whole may be compared to an object, which may be viewed from several sides, but never from all sides at once. Therefore the reconstruction of the whole has a perspectival aspect similar to that of a perceived object. It is always possible to relate the same sentence in different ways to this or that other sentence considered as the cornerstone of the text. A specific kind of onesidedness is implied in the act of reading. This onesidedness grounds the guess character of interpretation.
We guess by finding clues contained within the text, which either permit an interpretation or inhibit it (pp. 76–8). There “are no rules for making good guesses”, but “there are methods for validating those guesses” (p. 76). One interpretation seems more probable than another if it accounts better for how the clues converge (pp. 78–9). So, there’s no one true meaning of a text, and we can’t defer to an imagined author to prove our interpretation. Yet this is not a situation of senselessness where anything goes; Ricoeur isn’t advocating a reckless relativism.
The text “presents a limited field of possible constructions”: there are always multiple possible interpretations, but they are unequal (p. 79). We validate our guesses with an “argumentative disclipline comparable to juridical procedures used in legal interpretation, a logic of uncertainty and of qualitative probability” (p. 78). We aim to “show that an interpretation is more probable in the light of what we know”, as opposed to verifying that it’s “true” (ibid.). Our interpretation must “not only be probable, but more probable than another interpretation” (p. 79).
This logic “allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and scepticism” (ibid.):
It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our immediate reach
An implication is that if we find ourselves dogmatic or sceptical about an interpretation, it’s a sign that we don’t understand what we have read. An antidote is considering and debating alternatives. We interpret a text by imagining the world it reveals then playing with it in our imagination, “just as a musician performs a score or a preacher interprets a biblical text” (Kaplan 2008, 191). For Ricoeur, “What is to be interpreted in the text is a proposed world which I could inhabit and in which I could project my ownmost possibilities” (p. 192 (quoted in)). The text’s meaning comes “after it, in the world made by it, and the world of its reception” (p. 191). Its autononomy allows it to open up new worlds (Ricoeur 1976, 87–8). Exploring the possible worlds proposed by the text unfolds meanings to which we must respond (Kaplan 2008, 193).
Ricoeur is perhaps best known for his hermeneutics of suspicion, an approach to interpretation “geared to unmasking and removing the illusions of symbols, which not only reveal but also conceal meaning” (p. 198). This is a “frequently misunderstood” transitional stage in his thought, that continues to be used in arguments resembling “trends of a pessimistic tenor, which he himself rejected” (Scott-Baumann 2009, 1). He also referred to an “exercise of suspicion”: “intentional, controlled and proportional”, which “can function more fruitfully as a condition of possibility than as a limiting condition”, as a Ricoeur scholar summarises (pp. 174, 76):
Suspicion should be part of critical exegesis, ‘the act of dispute exactly proportional to the expressions of false consciousness’, with the requirement for rigorous back questioning to identify false consciousness and other obscured areas. Suspicion is a rich and radical enough condition of possibility without being partnered with hermeneutics, which has very similar characteristics to suspicion; ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘suspicion’ prove too potent when put together
One of the ways it is rich is that, because we play an active part in interpreting autonomous texts, suspicion invites us to “personalize concepts” (p. 184):
No longer can we pretend that laws, books, works of art and opinions based on racial stereotyping or cultural habits are impersonal representations of natural justice and beauty and nothing to do with us—Ricoeur urged us to challenge them as products of our own, personal human action and therefore open to suspicion.