Introduction
This essay will examine the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, specifically their scriptural and religious application and discourse with theology. I will begin by examining Ricoeur, whose work more closely aligns with theological concerns and couches his hermeneutics in biblical underpinnings. I will then turn to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which forgoes explicit religious discussion save for his critique of Rudolf Bultmann, as a point of comparison to shed light on the uniqueness of Ricoeur’s work. Ricoeur has earned his reputation in critical and hermeneutical studies as a mediator par excellence. Biographically, this disposition to negotiate between philosophers, ideologies, and finding the perceived strengths in each and positing an ethics within hermeneutics stressing pardon has been related to his experiences in a World War II prisoner camp. Dominating his mediating interest is Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose hermeneutics of tradition expands upon Heidegger’s explanation of returning to the cultural past in interest of uncovering more precise lines of question and availing new possibilities.
Paul Ricoeur’s Mediation of Gadamer and Habermas
Ricoeur’s mode of negotiating through Gadamer and Habermas’ projects is reflective of his methodology and comportment. Instead of constructing a larger frame which would try to unify or conflate the two positions, for this would detract from the credit due to either’s strengths, Ricoeur proceeded by a path that pronounced the most advantageous claims from both. In terms of his work in Oneself as Another, where the other constitutes selfhood and identifying alterity forms self identity, Ricoeur opens a sight into either’s work which reveals that “the role of the other tradition is shown to lie within its own version of the interpretative dynamic.”[1]
Briefly, the debate between Habermas and Gadamer that Ricoeur sought to mediate was created around Gadamer’s claim that hermeneutics reached the entire breadth of language and that language’s scope was universal in culture and meaning. Language discloses a world in human culture, meaning, and one’s being. Habermas refused to allow hermeneutics to encapsulate criticism, especially a hermeneutics of tradition which is obliged to the prejudices of one’s context. Habermas asserted that there is a meta-reflection he called ‘depth hermeneutics’ that was not bound to tradition and freed criticism. Ricoeur’s attempt then is to mediate tradition and Habermas’ Ideologiekritik first by stating that the interpreter both recovers tradition while also critically stands outside it. He writes that there has been a false dichotomy setting tradition as prior understanding and criticism as an ‘eschatology of freedom’ as oppositional.[2] Rather, he writes evoking biblical imagery, that an eschatological critical freedom is reliant on the continued recitation of the traditions of the past such as the Exodus and Jesus’ resurrection.
Ricoeur’s ‘Strong’ Hermeneutics of Scripture
Within Ricoeur’s large body of philosophical work he also wrote extensively on biblical hermeneutics, yet maintained that the distinction between theological hermeneutics and philosophy must be intact. Against Schleiermacher’s notion that biblical hermeneutics fall under the rubric of general hermeneutics, Ricoeur argued that not only is philosophy removed from theology, but so are biblical studies. The Bible stands the subject of not theology or philosophy, but a biblical hermeneutics which seeks to approach the Bible as a text on its own grounds. However, as we will examine further below, the scripture’s uniqueness requires a precise and specific hermeneutical evaluation with wider consequences than his sequestering of biblical hermeneutics may at first imply.
Ricoeur is located in what Nicholas H. Smith and others have called ‘strong hermeneutics’, a hermeneutical position that Smith finds Ricoeur sharing with Gadamer and having an affirmation of the possibility of interpretation. Principally, strong hermeneutics acts as a reaction against what Smith calls ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’ which is constituted by the domination of the principles of scientifically repeatable and ‘objective’ validation. The precepts of Enlightenment fundamentalism assert that “beliefs merit rational acceptability to the degree to which they transcend their culture-specific content.”[3] It is here where Ricoeur and Gadamer will protest that culturally situated interpretation is the basis for, and only starting point for understanding. Ricoeur states that any evaluative framework begins in and operates within a subjective and biased point of view. Strong hermeneutics has the effect of deviating of the ‘objective’ and neutral parameters of reason towards establishing rationality within a negotiable and pluralist gradation of clarity within culturally afforded language habits and revealing truth as disclosure of an articulated world between interpretive subjects rather than a correspondence theory of subject to object.[4]
Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory
Ricoeur separates the hermeneutical function towards text and spoken discourse by stating that the fundamental difference is a matter of written versus conscious acts; that is, the text’s meaning is met independently from the author’s intent. In spoken discourse, the common situation creates the opportunity for the referent to be clear. In text, however, the author’s intent and the meaning of the text deviate, reference becomes independent of the situation in which it originated and interpretation is undertaken without return or appeal to the author’s psychology. The object of appropriation is the world projected by the text rather than the interior life of the author as Schleiermacher and others may suggest. The two themes of anti-intentionalism and appropriating an immediate world by actional interpretation into one’s world, Ricoeur relates to directly to Heidegger’s work and finds them unavoidably coextensive. Ricoeur writes, “Heidegger rightly says…that what we understand first in a discourse is not another person, but a project…Only writing, in freeing itself, not only from its author, but from the narrowness of the dialogical situation, reveals this destination of discourse as projecting a world.”[5]
Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation brings to hermeneutics not just an understanding of the text, but also an explanation. He distinguishes two elements in the process of engaging a text where first one establishes an interpretation and then must defend and set an argument for validity against conflicting interpretations. Although the author’s intention is opaque to the interpreter, one may make guesses that must be argued as warranted and more than arbitrary ventures of folly. While Ricoeur calls his method a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, and makes clear the difficulty of interpretation, he yet remains hopeful for the process. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory acts to navigate a path through suspicion and conflict that creates an interpretation avoidant of the dogmaticism that that would threaten to dehumanize the human sciences and yet steering from skepticism or dominance of critical doubt that would result in a quagmire of relativism that would question progress and hamper justice. While conclusions are drawn, the defense of one’s interpretational guess is one that remains open to narrative flexibility, the report and interpretation of others and qualifies as validation rather than verification. This bipartite process of ‘good guesses’ and validation allows for a balance between dogmatism and skepticism, Enlightenment Fundamentalism and relativism.
Engaging a text is an invitation through it to a world of possibilities. While the possibilities laid forth remain subject to the process of validation and negotiated argument, the potential in any given text is vast. Given that any text is approached by a subject, the possibilities comprise a world where that individual might live and speak to the subject’s ‘most intimate possibilities’. Texts have the inherent power, says Ricoeur of speaking with an ‘ontological vehemence’ that transcends itself and points to a possible world that is foreign and challenging to the interpreter and their world. There is in text a ‘Being-demanding-to-be-said’ that exposes the interpreter to a knowledge and understanding resultant in an enlarged and transformed self through exposure to a world that they may ‘inhabit’ or create.
The Principle of Poetics as the Foundation to Scriptural Analysis
Integral to Ricoeur’s formation of hermeneutics and specifically its biblical application is his discussion of poetic language. The poetic and fictive nomenclature of text utilizes referents which act on two levels, the first being a literal sense which yet opens up to the second sense of inventive and creational metaphor. This second metaphorical level transcends the ordinary objects and environments of daily life and opens the way to a new life in a possible world. This world includes not only environs and objects that fill it, but more importantly, a new mode of human existence. For Ricoeur, religious language is poetic in that it is adept at proposals of new modes of human being that is brought upon by a dialectical interaction with the metaphorical level. This process is summarized in a tripartite movement of recognition of the meaning on its statement of ‘is’ which dialogically effects an ‘is not’ with synthesize into the poetic ‘is like’.
Religious texts are thoroughly poetic, and in Ricoeur’s scope of interest, ‘religious text’ refers specifically to biblical text. The role biblical text plays in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is unique-and through two distinctive elements, revelation and the naming of God, it shares the former characteristic with other poetic/metaphorical texts though he articulates its nature in religious terms. The poetic form is used in the general sense of Aristotelian poiesis meaning creational in general, but specifically in its revelatory function within the interpreter which bears new identity formation and being. The poetic when leveled at the individual forms a non-violent appeal in the ‘Being-demanding-to-be-said’ and directs the attention of the reader through the non-ostensive language their existence as ‘subjects’ as opposed to ‘objects’. The ‘is not’ of poetic metaphor is initially met as foreign and outside of one’s self an inapplicable to the interpreter’s life-world but in an act of revelation the text-world leaps in a confrontation with the reader creating an “awareness of authentic existence as what I “should be” but in actuality am not the mode of being concretely presented through the literal text and its metaphoric dimension signifies the ‘I’ in its authenticity.”[6] Ricoeur’s description of meaning, interpretation, and application in terms of revelation as a non-violent movement with what is not immediately within the self-identity critiques the Enlightenment fundamentalist depiction of reason as self-supporting and transparent unto itself. The central biblical example of this projection-ahead is in the naming of God; of which Ricoeur writes precedes an individual’s capacity and encroaches on the world of the possible.
In Ricoeur’s evaluation of biblical texts, he states that it is the bible’s diverse collected texts’ act of naming God that makes unique religious text from other poetic forms of literature. The biblical texts present themselves as unique and as a problematic interpretational task due to the multiple genres in the canon including apocalyptic and wisdom literatures, hymns, legal codes, gospels, and narrative. Any privileging of a biblical text that would exclude other genres would short-circuit the polyphony intact in the whole. The polysemy of the God names in the biblical text are needed for Ricoeur writes that to one genre would radically narrow the revelatory potential of God through the text since God appears varyingly as either compassionate savior or wrathful; immanent and personal or transcendent and removed.
In contradistinction to Levinas, Ricoeur will deny both that God speaks clearly through the text and that the canon bears a unity. Ricoeur’s biblical polyphony/semy has the effects of guarding the text against universalized or monolithic histories and theologies; and given the plurality of narratives creates a tension residing between “a double confession that only hope can hold together.”[7] This hope inhered in polyphony stands in opposition to the ‘demythologizing’ effort as identified by Ricoeur in Bultmann. The hope and vulnerability to the poetic movement of scripture undertakes the “task…to submit oneself to what the text says, to what it intends, and to what it means.”[8] The hopeful submission to text’s meaning labors in the two thresholds of “meaning” and then “signification”. Bultmann, Ricoeur writes, develops a plan whose exegetical decision moves too fast towards the theological and existential without properly addressing critically the text’s meaning. The critical engagement of the text in its ‘objective’ meaning offers a response to the perceived fideism in Bultmann and emphasizes the challenge and possibility within the scriptures. Ricoeur sides with the Fregian and Husserlian designation of meaning as ‘ideal’, that is occurring in the ‘non-world’ and outside the expectations or psychic reality of the interpreter.
A specific characteristic of narrative plurality that the biblical texts expose is a form of dialectic that concedes the inability to resolve all instances of contradiction. Ricoeur’s ‘broken dialectics’ is a practice of processing contradictory narratives without recourse to a resolution of systematic or universal settlement of interpretation. Despite Western thought being founded in logic and non-contradiction, life experiences present situations where paradox is unavoidable. Biblical texts exemplify this through the subject of theodicy. The problem of evil rather than being a subject of indifference by the irreconcilable structure of broken dialectics becomes the subject of continued struggle through charity and Ricoeur’s ethical frame of interpretation which is discussed in detail below.
Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Theory in Context
Ricoeur negotiates a line between two hermeneutical approaches, one of which he associates with suspicion including Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and the hermeneutics of affirmation wherein he locates Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer. Gadamer, whose academic formation was largely under Heidegger’s shadow in both Freiburg and Marburg, can be seen in large extent to elucidate on Heidegger’s themes of cultural situatedness and retrieval of cultural inheritances from the past; Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit and Wiederholung respectively. The hermeneutical appropriation of written texts is intimately involved in historical consciousness and the dialoging with text of another, past, temporal situation. Gadamer himself summarizes his project in this way: “to let what is alienated by the character of the written word of by the character of being distantiated by cultural or historical distances speak again.”[9] Though marked by a number of pivotal differentiated characteristics in approach, as already stated above, the hermeneutical variances and similarities of Ricoeur and Gadamer can create illuminating and resonating insights.
Hermeneutics, by Gadamer’s view, is located in the reciprocal and necessarily bound relationship between thinking and speaking; thought and language. All understanding comes through, is availed and realized only through the Medium of language. Our understanding is not metalinguistic by which we may approach a ‘storeroom’ of language to then appropriate our concepts and constructions. More specifically, Gadamer states, the interpreter’s understanding participates in their particular language-field; presumably their language of origin or dominant language milieu. Thus an individual’s understanding and conceptual and interpretational stance is conditioned by their linguistic habits and world. Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, “No text and no book speaks if it does not speak the language that reaches the other person…Being that can be understood is language.”[10]
Gadamer by his own reflection owes his hermeneutical starting place in part to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Plato, yet he approaches each with nuance and negotiation. To Humboldt, he grants the pivotal hermeneutical insight that language is not an ancillary function or attribute for humanity to bring to their world, but one’s world is entirely contingent on the primacy of one’s language. While adhering to this, Gadamer will allow for language’s allowance for human freedom within that world; for along with Wittgenstein, Gadamer acknowledges the flexibility, organic growth, and fluidity over time. In Gadamer’s discussion of Plato’s Cratylus, he may appear at first to be dismissing both Hermogenes’ and Cratylus’ arguments; representing language as conventional and natural respectively. More succinctly, Gadamer negotiates between the two by granting that language is cultural convention, however it is handed down in a language-world via tradition that comes replete with concepts, habits, and is foundational to a common world. Thus, language is not available to arbitrary change and in terms of the common-use of language its elements of natural meaning and sustained conceptual schemes are upon which sociable worlds may be rendered.
In forming his analysis of hermeneutics, Gadamer leveled a critique primarily upon the previous works of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Despite there being ongoing debate as to the degree that Gadamer properly understood the full range of Schleiermacher’s work, Gadamer’s critique gives insight to his project’s scope and intent. Schleiermacher’s assertion that the hermeneutical undertaking is completed by the ‘divinatory method’ by which the interpreter places themselves into the mind of the author is dismissed outright by Gadamer. To Schleiermacher’s high ideal of gaining an immediate comprehension of the author to the degree that the interpreter may understand the author better than they understand themselves, Gadamer will respond that the interpretive task “is not a matter of penetrating the spiritual activities of the author; it is simply a question of grasping the meaning, significance, and aim of what is transmitted to us”[11] while noting Schleiermacher’s insight towards the conclusion that a text indeed must retain its relation to the author’s life context.
Dilthey, speaking to the interest of history in the social sciences and hermeneutics advanced that beyond the particularities and contexts of history, there was an underlying, universal, and coherent history that undergirded the coherence of the text. To interpret is to step into the unified stream of history that is interwoven also with a historically connected psychic life. This highly psychologized frame is also reductionistic in that there is a presupposed monolithic stream of life and history that he asserts the interpreter may step into. Gadamer repudiates Dilthey’s idealistic suggestion that history is thoroughly intelligible to the individual in a monochromatic and universalized mode. Gadamer charges that stripping history of its multiplicity of voices hails to the Enlightenment ideal of uprooting uncertainty and diversity.
Scriptural and Theological Appropriations of HGG
Although Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights situate him among the foremost works on the subject, there has existed at times a perception that his influence has not by and large been applied within the sphere of biblical analysis. Richard S. Briggs suggests that this perception in part has occurred as Gadamer was so well digested in Thiselton’s The Two Horizons that his influence can be obscured or through the backdoor of specialized theological midwives. That Gadamer’s work would find a natural inclination for religious application is suggested by Gadamer himself when he stated that hermeneutics’ preferred texts were those of literary criticism, law, and theology. Along with Thiselton, Klaus Berger, Walter Wink, and Peter Stuhlmacher have given Gadamerian treatments to New Testamental scholarship. So too have David Tracy and Wolfhart Pannenberg applied Gadamer’s insights towards theology.
Gadamer makes use of theological hermeneutics to aid him in his construction which fused hermeneutics and praxis. That application [Anwendung] was necessarily joined to understanding [Verstehen] acts as a foundational tenet in Gadamer and Richard J. Bernstein states that it is the focal tenet which draws his themes of tradition’s appropriation, temporal distancing, and the fusion of horizons. The application or appropriation of Anwendung is explicated by Gadamer as being the mediation between horizons and forms the allowing of something to be said to the interpreter which forms the understanding of the other held in dialogue. To support the woven relationship between understanding and application, Gadamer turns to theological hermeneutics. He finds that just as a legal injunction is not abstractly understood as residing in the past but is made valid only through its power to be exerted into the present via application, so too are religious pronouncements understood whereby their ‘saving effect’ is appropriated into the horizon of the interpreter.
Gadamer also personally fielded theological hermeneutics by his engagement of Rudolf Bultmann’s hermeneutics, which Gadamer critiqued primarily on grounds that Bultmann was invalidated by its predication of the question of God. This ‘question of God’ Gadamer regarded as an overly static ‘right’ question of God that may stubbornly fail to recognize itself as a inappropriate or mis-stated question. Also, though he claimed that biblical text was to be met with the same hermeneutical criteria as any other, Bultmann neglected that he was in fact approaching texts from the interpretive context of an avowed Christian. However, Gadamer and Bultmann do have points of contact in their hermeneutics and can to an extent be traced to the Heideggerian elements they integrated. The continuity both had adopted is related to Heidegger’s fore-structure of human being [Dasein] that keeps an existential openness to the being-with of culture and the availability to retrieve new possibilities from the past. Gadamer spoke in agreement with what he saw as Bultmann’s “openness to the horizon of inquiry…by the encounter with the word of God.”[12] To his detractors that would emphasize a caricature of Bultmann as he being overly monological or stubborn Bultmann in fact echoes Gadamer’s sense of Anwendung. Bultmann establishes this concisely when he writes that the hermeneutical focus is demonstrating the text as valid and powerful ‘word of address.’ It is apparent also that Gadamer’s reading of Bultmann is selective as to be negative when he obfuscates Bultmann’s own adherence to the same questioning dialectic championed by Gadamer when Bultmann writes, interpretation’s goal is “not to observe and confirm [the text], but as truly questioning it, as willing to learn from it.”[13] Gadamer, despite his critiques, finds overlapping congruence with Bultmann through their Heideggerian openness to change within the limits of a culturally shared world and by Bultmann’s sketches of the principles of dialogue and questioning the text which Gadamer would flesh out.
Gadamer’s Theory as Dialectic
Unlike Ricoeur, Gadamer speaks of the hermeneutical mode as being dialectic. Unlike Schleiermacher and Dilthey however, the dialogue does not include the author, but rather a dialectic of question and answer with the text; whereby questions are posed to both the text by the interpreter and vice versa. From the starting point of the interpreter’s prejudices [Vorurteile], the location that one is situated in by the fact of language, tradition, and handed down concepts, one begins a dialogue with the past through the text. Gadamer’s hermeneutic therefore is a dialogue [Gesprach] rather than a unidirectional interpretation of text. This development exposes the controlling attitude of Enlightenment constructions of historical events as objects which may be approached as though the interpreter is removed from history themselves. The situatedness of the individual in any context is first colored by the past’s effects and impacts upon the very situation the hermeneutical search begins from. Thus the text cannot be ‘dropped in’ upon, but rather must meet in a dialogical relationship where the inherent dynamics are recognized and neither the past nor present may be isolated or abstracted.
Gadamer’s Gesprach reveals that the traditions and agreed norms of the shared world act as their own partners of communication which may be likened unto the same relation that an interpreter may have with any given event or person. To facilitate the description of proper interaction and relationship with the text, Gadamer first denies it the mode of relation he views as the myth of objectivist or positivist methodology. This is a flattening out of history to abstract flashes of events where an I may approach a Thou of knowable objects. This Gadamer associates with the eighteenth century’s version of the scientific method, with the social sciences, and with David Hume. Gadamer also refuses the ‘I-Thou’ relation he associates the Schleiermacher where psychologism may answer any claim with a counter-claim; perpetuating conflicting interpretations that inculcate their arguments through a form of “self relatedness”. The interpreter, by placing themselves in a position to better know the author than they know themselves, act within an oppressive frame where the other “is co-opted and pre-empted”[14] which can culminate with the complete domination of the I over the other person or text. The resolution to avoiding these first two I-Thou relations is Gadamer’s mediation of past and present that without imposition on the other, reflects on the traditional prejudices [Vorurtuile] with a vulnerability that acknowledges that the ‘I’ must “accept things that are against myself.”[15] Moreoever, the I-Thou relationship is couched in terms of ethical responsibility rather than a rigid subject/object dichotomy.
The dialectic of reciprocal inquiry results in a new content which transforms the tradition and the interpreter’s understanding of their world. This advent where the novel emerges [herauskommt] in a continual process of mutual querying is akin to the Socratic model. Truth is exposed through a refining of questions, but also through the narrowing of interrogative fields and the renegotiation of new more appropriate and productive paths of questioning. The process of Socratic dialogue is more fruitful to the uncovering of truth than the act of conclusively drawing assertions and by its perpetuity, plumbs that which the text has left unsaid-theoretically an infinite source of truth. Gadamer critiques Hegel for having a high esteem for the efficiency of statements. A statement [Aussage], by Gadamer’s estimation, delimits meaning to the said and distorts meaning through an attempt at concretized exactness. What emerges through the what the text says and does not say is a truth whose circumference is larger than the text itself and is in fact the entire language tradition, meaning the interpreter and their world. That Gadamer appears to be deferring conclusive and determinative conclusions has in turn received a number of critiquing assessments.
Gadamer’s Horizons
The Gadamerian use of ‘horizon’ and ‘fusion of horizons’ in his hermeneutical discourse can be easily misunderstood, yet when clarified presents a useful inroad to understanding his project. Horizon in his sense is the larger context of meaning in which a particular presentation is set. The horizon is a never completed situated awareness that has a limited range of vision at any given time. The interpreter in the horizon of the present and the text in the horizon of the past relate in a hermeneutical circle which can be wrongly thought to be a circular track of question and answer where the horizons are discrete poles. Rather, the hermeneutical circle which describes the horizons relationship is “a contextually fulfilled circle, which joins the interpreter into a unity within a processual whole.”[16] Thus the horizons are always and intimately bound, and the dialogue occurs also in the sphere of shared context. Thus the horizons and the dialogue are comprised in a closed circuit of shared influence where the past which situates the present is changed when queried and in turn transforms again the context of the present. Neither horizon can be imagined as static or independent of the other. Bounded by the chain of tradition, the ‘fusion’ is cannot be mistaken for bringing together two dislocated phenomena, but is the correction and revision of the two horizons as related through dialogue. ‘Fusion’ stands as a process of adaptation and application, and not an overtaking, conflating or diminishment of either horizon. Rather, fusion stands as an alternative to objectivism and absolute knowledge.
The hermeneutical circle also does not place priority with the interpreter. The dynamic influence and capacity to impact the other horizon retains a balance of control. The interpreter indeed must want something to be said that includes the foreign, the novel, the challenging, and further “allow oneself to be conducted by the [text].”[17] The text, as the past horizon, is not a neutral entity but speaks and questions the interpreter in an address that results in a shift in prejudices, understanding and a return to the text with what Gadamer calls the ‘reconstituted question’. The circularity of questioning means also that the present horizon is never fixed, but fluid in light of the address of each new interaction with the text.
A Brief Comparison of Ricoeur and Gadamer as a Concluding Remark
Both state that application in one’s life context is integral and inerasable in the hermeneutical movement towards understanding. Unlike New Critics who would reign meaning to the world of the text, both agree that one must enact understanding in an application in their immediate context. Gadamer speaks of this as the joint need for application [Anwendung] and understanding [Verstehen]. Ricoeur will emphasize this in the process of self-expansion that celebrates the individual’s freedom as a subject. How this application differs, however, with Gadamer’s reciprocated interrogation of the text being mediated through tradition, whereas Ricoeur will say that the fusion of horizons remains in the text itself and projects understanding ahead of the interpreter who then ‘catches up’ through a change of self.
Ricoeur complexifies Gadamer’s conception of present and past horizons. He does this by describing the three ‘worlds’ of the narrative and also how the horizons may be fused. Ricoeur states that there is a world ‘behind’ the text which means the world context of historical reference. Also there is the world ‘in’ the text, including its genre and literary structure. Lastly, there is the world ‘in front’ of the text which is the offering of possible worlds available to the interpreter.
Gadamer’s critique of Schleiermacher’s imagining that one may know the author’s intent, motivation, and meaning better than the author themselves, and Dilthey’s corralling of historical voices under the umbrella Lebensphilosophie, which Gadamer claimed to be overly reductionistic and positivistic, represent Gadamer’s distancing himself from the psychologizing trends in some hermeneutics. The questioning dialogue with text that does not presuppose knowledge of the author’s inner life, motivation, and intent can be seen as roughly analogous to Ricoeur’s rejection of author intent being intelligible. So also in Gadamer’s critiques, does he participate in the stance shared by Ricoeur where conflicts of interpretation will continue, and multiplicities remain.
Ricoeur and Gadamer share in an availability of their hermeneutics to ethical descriptions and applications. In Ricoeur’s “Reflections on a new Ethos for Europe”, he details five ethical actions of his hermeneutics, four of which have congruence with Gadamer’s project. The first is the ‘ethic of hospitality’ in which the interpreter nurtures a responsive demeanor in sympathy for others’ life narratives which is correlated to and descriptive of the attitude one brings to the second ethic of ‘narrative flexibility’. Narrative flexibility to Ricoeur means that there exists the possibility and need for intercultural translatability. The plurality of cultural narratives necessitates a de-emphasis of one’s own cultural narrative as being universal or able to imperialistically displace another’s. Richard Kearney writes that the overlap rather than diminishment or neglect of plural narratives recalls Gadamer’s fusion of horizons in that multiple consciousnesses may find common ground in a shared dynamic of greater meaning and reciprocate narratives that challenge each other.[18] The fluidity and mutual exchange of horizons is amenable to Ricoeur’s account of cultures as being recounted stories rather than being comprised of unchanging essences. Gadamer and Ricoeur agree that multiple cultures will always have access and diverging relations to the same past horizon in question. For Ricoeur it is ethically imperative that, in light of oppression and domination, there be a refusal to accept endless interpretive indeterminacy. Gadamer, like Ricoeur’s ethical determination of resolving conflicting interpretations agrees that in the multiplicity of these narratives interpretations are yet saved from slipping into abject relativism. Gadamer writes that while assimilations of the past horizon will be diverse, it “does not mean that every one represents only an imperfect understanding.”[19] Rather than a resolve to remain in cultural-historical relativism, Gadamer presents various cultures’ horizons as equally speculative and valid in that each is questioning the past laden with their own traditions and prejudices. Cultures can proceed to qualify their prejudices together through their own fusion of horizons.
Narrative flexibility leads to Ricoeur’s third ethical implication of ‘narrative plurality’ which is the openness to recounting differently a particular event or text. Gadamer’s appeal to ‘bring the distant near’ is spoken to in Ricoeur description of plural cultures bringing before an individual narratives which are foreign and opaque. This plurality Ricoeur celebrates in his ethics may aid in a Gadamerian inquest of a text’s ‘unsaid’. The marginalized and erased voices of the oppressed may never appear in one’s horizon without being availed the horizons of additional cultures thus fulfilling Ricoeur’s insight that the “ability to recount the founding events of our history in different ways is reinforced by the exchange of cultural memories…[as well as founding events] of their ethnic minorities and their minority religious denominations.”[20]
The fourth ethic of translation is ‘transfiguring the past’. Fundamentalism of any ideology, the opposing ideology of this ethic, is a kowtowing to prescribed and approved historiographies that has a tendency to move rigid retrievals of the past. The fundamentalism he evokes has a peculiar tendency to elide the unfulfilled past promises which requires the “crossing of memories and the exchange of narratives”[21] to recuperate the outstanding injustices to the dead and marginalized. Gadamer too, though critiqued by Ricoeur as being a traditionalist of the Romantic bent, decried the stagnancy or static condition of the present horizon. Without allegiance to tradition, Gadamer instead revealed that it was only through tradition that present transformation occurred and regarded there being a critical requirement to return to the past and revitalize and transform tradition.
The fifth and last ethic of ‘pardon’ does not have a rough equivalent, analogous statement, or agreeable application in Gadamer and sets Ricoeur in a unique ethical field. His ethic of pardon does not exempt justice, grant amnesty, or make allowances for easy forgetting but instead meets and fuses with justice. The ethic of justice converges with the abundance of charity that does not substitute for justice, but is the motivating drive to continue interpretation propelled by the previous four ethical implications. The ‘poetics of pardon’ are an ongoing and inexhaustible interpretive mode that does not flee from mourning yet does not entertain vengeance. It is the ethic which instills the interpreter with the ability to remain in hermeneutical task. It is perhaps here that Ricoeur’s uniqueness is best brought to light; by duty and responsibility to justice meeting the surplus of sympathy, compassion, and forgiveness speaking loudly to the biblical themes that punctuate his ethical hermeneutics of translation.
[1] Richard S. Briggs. “What Does Hermeneutics Have To Do With Biblical Interpretation?”
Heythrop Journal, Jan2006, Vol. 47 Issue 1, p55-74, 20p; DOI: 10.1111/j.1468- 2265.2006.00279.x; (
AN 19215789), p. 64.
[2] Paul Ricoeur “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology” The Hermeneutic Tradition from Ast to Ricoeur Gayle L. Ormiston, Alan D. Schrift eds. (New York: SUNY Press. 1990), p. 332.
[3] Nicolas H. Smith Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity (London: Routledge. 1997), p. 19.
[4] Nicolas H. Smith Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity (London: Routledge. 1997), p. 21-22.
[5] Paul Ricoeur “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation John B. Thompson ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981), p. 202.
[6] David E Klemm The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur (East Brunswick: Associated University Press. 1983), p. 128.
[7] Paul Ricoeur “Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation” Harvard Theological Review 70, nos. 1- 2 (1977), p. 7.
[8] Paul Ricoeur Conflict of Interpretations ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1974), p. 397.
[9] Hans-Georg Gadamer “Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Sciences” Research in Phenomenology, Vol.9, p. 74-85.
[10] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 398, 470.
[11] Hans-Georg Gadamer “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” Interpretive Social Science: A Reader Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979), p. 147.
[12] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 522.
[13] Rudolf Bultmann Faith and Understanding L.P. Smith trans. (London: SCM Press. 1969), p. 155.
[14] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 353.
[15] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 355.
[16] Hans-Georg Gadamer “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” Interpretive Social Science: A Reader Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979), p. 108.
[17] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 360.
[18] Richard Kearney “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation” Research in Phenomenology, 2007, Vol. 37, p147-159, 13p; DOI: 10.1163/156916407X185610; (AN 25425603), p. 155.
[19] Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method (Harrisburg: Continuum. 2004), p. 468.
[20] Paul Ricoeur “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe” Paul Ricoeur The Hermeneutics of Action Richard Kearney ed. (London: Sage. 1996), p. 9.
[21] Paul Ricoeur “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe” Paul Ricoeur The Hermeneutics of Action Richard Kearney ed. (London: Sage. 1996), p. 9.
