Explanation and
Understanding:
The Hermeneutic Arc
Paul Ricœur’s Theory of Interpretation
Geir Amdal
Cand. Philol. Thesis
May 2001
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
Department of Philosophy
Acknowledgements
This thesis is submitted to the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Oslo in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Cantidatus
philologiae (cand. philol.).
I would first and foremost like to thank professor Bjørn Ramberg, my
supervisor, who through his friendly guidance and support, expert knowledge
and willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me improve
my thesis, has been a major contributing factor to its completion.
Thanks are also due to Annette Nordheim, for her encouragement, proofreading and support. I have chosen to write this thesis in English, primarily as
a challenge to myself, and much of the credit for that having been a successful
decision is due to Annette.
I would also like to thank the Student Association at the Department of
Informatics for being allowed to use their office to write the thesis at all hours,
and to my family and friends for putting up with me through rough days and
stress-ridden nights.
Finally, I wish to express my indebtedness and gratitude to my parents,
Astrid and Guttorm, for having always supported me and for encouraging
me to choose for myself which path to follow. They have thus given me the
possibility to get where I am today through providing me with a foundation
upon which it was possible to build my academic work.
Geir Amdal
May, 2001
Contents
Acknowledgements
iii
Contents
v
1 Introduction
The Hermeneutic Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Openness of Interpretation . . . . . . . . .
Expanding the Hermeneutic Circle . . . .
A Philosophy of Integration . . . . . . . . . . .
The Methodology of Reciprocal Reinforcement
Interpreting Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . .
Strategic Deliberations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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2 The Model of the Text
Language-system and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Semiology and Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distanciation—When Discourse Becomes Text . . . . . .
Semantic Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Loss of Reference Through Emancipation . . . . . .
Method of Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Structuralist Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Phenomenological Understanding — Appropriation
From Circle To Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Epi-reading and Graphi-reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Room For Objectivity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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3 The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
Ricœur’s Theories of Metaphor . . . . . . . .
Metaphor and Semantic Innovation . .
Metaphor and Explanation . . . . . . . . . . .
Polysemy and Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . .
Detouring through Language . . . . . .
Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Traditional Conception of Metaphor . . .
Productive Tension . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making Sense: Linguistic Impertinence
Metaphor and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . .
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vi
Contents
Metaphor and Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Split Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Ontology of Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4 The Validity of Interpretations
The Hermeneutic Dialectic . . . . . . . . . . .
Against the Intentional Fallacy . . . . .
Interpretative Construal as Guessing . . . . .
Validation of Guesses . . . . . . . . . . .
Making Sense—The Function of Explanation
Monotative and Multitative Meaning . .
Construal as Constriction . . . . . . . .
From Sense to Understanding . . . . . .
The Role of Literary Criticism . . . . . . . . .
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6 Conclusion
Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ramifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Challenge of Ricœur’s Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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A Formal Thesis Curriculum
Texts by Ricœur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Secondary Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Bibliography
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5 Reference and Meaning
Reversing the Arc . . . . . . . . . . .
Metaphoric Reference . . . . . . . . .
Split Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The World of the Work . . . . . . . .
Appropriation . . . . . . . . . .
The Disciplines of Meaning . . . . .
Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Redefining Subjectivity . . . . . . . .
Configuration and Refiguration
The Twofold Function of the Sign . .
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Chapter
1
Introduction
The Hermeneutic Arc
Ricœur’s theory of interpretation seeks a dialectical integration of Dilthey’s
dichotomy of erklären and verstehen, while at the same time clearing ground
for an objective methodology of interpretation without displacing the text’s
authenticity—a consolidation of sorts, of the Gadamerian split between distanciation and belonging. He envisions a model of the text freed with respects
to its author, yet still able to reach beyond pure textuality and retain its relation
to a world.
Ricœur sets off by distinguishing the fundamentally different interpretive
paradigms for text and spoken discourse. The former differs from the latter in
being, through the act of inscription, detached from the original circumstances
which produced it. The intentions of the author are distant, the addressee is
general rather than specific and ostensive references are rendered void.
Openness of Interpretation
A key idea in Ricœur’s view is that once the discourse has become an artefact,
and is released from the subjective intentions of the author, multiple acceptable
2
Introduction
interpretations become possible. Thus meaning is no longer construed just
according to the author or agent’s world-view, but according to its significance
in the reader’s world-view. The text is transformed from a mere meaningcarrying vessel to an autonomous party actively contributing to the result of
the interpretative effort.
Expanding the Hermeneutic Circle
Ricœur’s hermeneutic arc combines two distinct hermeneutics: one that
moves from existential understanding to explanation and another that moves
from explanation to existential understanding. In the first hermeneutic, subjective guessing is objectively validated. Here, understanding corresponds to a
process of hypothesis formation, based on analogy, metaphor and other mechanisms for divination. Hypothesis formation must not only propose senses for
terms and readings for texts, but also assign importance to parts and invoke
hierarchical classificatory procedures.
The wide range of hypothesis formation means that possible interpretations may be reached along many paths. Following Hirsch (cf. Hirsch, 1967),
explanation becomes a process of validating informed guesses. Validation proceeds through rational argument and debate, based on a model of judicial
procedures in legal reasoning. It is therefore distinguished from verification,
which relies on logical proof. As Hirsch notes, this model may lead into a dilemma of self-confirmability when non-validatable hypotheses are proposed.
Ricœur escapes this dilemma by incorporating Popper’s (Popper, 1992) notion
of falsifiability into his methods for validation, which he applies to the internal
coherence of an interpretation and the relative plausibility of competing interpretations.
In the second hermeneutic, which moves from explanation to understanding, Ricœur distinguishes two stances regarding the referential function of the
text: a subjective approach and a structuralist alternative. The subjective approach incrementally constructs the world that lies behind the text but must
rely on the world-view of the interpreter for its pre-understanding. Although
A Philosophy of Integration
the constructed world-view may gradually approximate the author’s as more
text is interpreted, the interpreter’s subjectivity cannot be fully overcome. In
contrast, Ricœur sees the structuralist approach as suspending reference to the
world behind the text and focusing on a behavioral inventory of the interconnections of parts within the text.
The structural interpretation brings out both a surface and a depth interpretation. The depth semantics is not determined by what what the author
intended to communicate, but by what the text is about—the non-ostensive
reference of the text. Understanding requires an affinity between the reader
and this aboutness of the text, that is, the kind of world opened up by the depth
semantics of the text. Instead of imposing any fixed interpretation, the depth
semantics channels thought in a certain direction. By suspending meaning
and focusing on the formal algebra of the genres reflected in the text at various levels, the structural method gives rise to objectivity while capturing the
subjectivity of both the author and the reader.
Ricœur’s transmutation of the hermeneutic circle to a hermeneutic arc can
be seen as a bootstrapping1 process, grounded in a hermeneutic phenomenology. The greatest contribution being the incorporation of an internal referential model of the text constructed by the interpreter through a structural
analysis—a model exhibiting a sufficient set of objective or intersubjectively
comparable criteria and elements to ground a methodology of interpretation.
A Philosophy of Integration
The philosophy of Paul Ricœur is known as one of reconciliation. As a thinker,
he is always open to new insights. When his ideas are challenged, he does
not attempt to defend them from the assault, so as to keep them intact. On the
contrary, he usually does his utmost to assimilate the objection in his continued
1
Bootstrapping is a concept more commonly used in Computer Science, where it refers to
a self-initiating process. In this context, however, what is intended is the process of initiating
hermeneutic movement between interpreter and text. For there to be grounds for an interplay
between a literary work and its readers, it must already be constituted as work. Yet this
constitution is something the text cannot bring about on its own, but is itself necessarily a
product of an act of interpretation. The hermeneutic movement must in other words bring
itself into being, lifting itself by its own bootstraps.
3
4
Introduction
deliberations. This applies not only to contemporary philosophers, but indeed
also to the thinkers of the past, whose philosophies continue to represent
valuable corrections and contributions to the development of Ricœur’s own
philosophy.
Ricœur has been called a philosophical arbitrator, as he tends to try to incorporate arguments from both sides in an ongoing philosophical debate. As
a result, he often ends up in a mediary position, like he did in the GadamerHabermas debate. This mediating position has earned him the title of ’bridgebuilder’ between traditions, yet I shall attempt to demonstrate that such a label
can give the false impression that Ricœur tries to close a gap across a methodological distance by presenting a common vocabulary or model. Rather, he
is an integrating philosopher, focusing on assimilating the competing models
to the degree they deserve it. In other words, the distance is not bridged, but
abolished, as the models are integrated and assimilated, often through a methodological grafting of the one onto the other, or through the subordination of
the one under the other in a dynamic tension, where both models contribute
effectively to the other while operating on different levels.
His philosophy takes on a ’synthetic’ quality, not by being a collage of
other philosophies, but rather through unifying them as far as possible, and
contributing arguments which are non-exclusive.
At the bottom of this endeavour lies, naturally, Ricœur’s fundamentally
hermeneutical point of origin, his search for meaning. A fundamental belief in
the possibility of always locating meaning in the expressions of man leads him
to never reject an opponent’s arguments until after having considered them
thoroughly and having adopted and integrated into his own analysis those
that merited it.
The Methodology of Reciprocal Reinforcement
As Hallvard H. Ystad points out in the afterword of Eksistens og hermeneutikk
(Ricœur, 1999), topics treated with the thoroughness employed in Ricœur’s
works make great demands to stringency. And despite the terminological
Interpreting Interpretation
and conceptual precision and exactness necessary to maintain a logical consequence and methodical rigour, Ystad remarks on the noticeable compactness
of his articles. A quality derived, he claims, from a tendency to seek reciprocal
aspects in the terms he employs in his different fields of study.
Whether or not Ricœur actively seeks terms especially to obtain the effects
of methodological reinforcement through reciprocal concepts is not as vital as
the fact that his philosophy has a remarkable tendency of constantly growing or constructing itself through such structures. This ’reciprocal methodology’ has the somewhat problematic consequence that the different parts of his
philosophy collaborate in constructing his methodological and philosophical
foundation. It is thus no straightforward undertaking to analyze or systematically structure his individual arguments—they are always a necessary element
in a greater whole, dependent on other arguments or models for completion
and argumentative strength.
In what follows, an effort has therefore been made to prioritize thoroughness of study rather than immediate structure where necessary, so as to make
the final resulting image more complete and accurate.
Interpreting Interpretation
The main goal of this document is to deliver a problem-oriented presentation
of the interpretation theory of Paul Ricœur, performed as a contextual exploration of the elements and aspects it involves. Furthermore, it is hoped that
enough light is shed on the constituent elements and models that the patterns
or structures I perceive as both methodologically vital to and reciprocally reinforcing in Ricœur’s conception of textual interpretation, are able to emerge as
reiterations of a single common theme in three different spheres: the semiotic
sphere of langue, the semantic sphere of discourse, and the hermeneutic sphere
of the literary work.
Using the thematic exposition as a backdrop, this will enable a structuring
overview, (hopefully) shedding some new light on the interconnected dynamics of Ricœur’s hermeneutic theory.
5
6
Introduction
I also wish to determine whether Ricœur is successful in making room for
an objective methodology or science of literary criticism; not by displacing the
Gadamerian notion of the hermeneutic circle, but by further developing the
model and integrating elements of structuralist methodology into phenomenological hermeneutics.
Strategic Deliberations
The investigation starts where it must; with the object of interpretation. In
chapter 2, while examining Ricœur’s model of the text, I will necessarily
recourse to the structuralist concept of language, in order to develop a model
of discourse. In the exploration of the symptoms of textual inscription in the
transformation of discourse to text, Ricœur’s central model of distanciation is
presented and subjected to discussion.
On the basis of a model of the text, a brief overview of the dialectic of the
Hermeneutic Arc is attempted, before we are forced again to backtrack and
study the tensional conception of metaphor in chapter 3.
Armed with the terminology of Ricœur’s theory of metaphor, we are
prepared to embark on the study of interpretation proper, and chapter 4
is dedicated to the function of explanation—the structural analysis Ricœur
wishes to graft on phenomenological hermeneutics. The hermeneutical issue
of existential understanding is the theme of chapter 5, before I attempt to grasp
the structure of the theory rather than its thematic content in chapter 6, as
promised.
Chapter
2
The Model of the Text
To the extent that hermeneutics is text-oriented interpretation, and
inasmuch as texts are, among other things, instances of written
language, no interpretation theory is possible that does not come
to grips with the problem of writing.
— (Ricœur, 1976, p. 25)
Language-system and Discourse
A modern grasp of the phenomenon of language derives from the distinction,
introduced in the works of de Saussure, between langue and parole. The former
is the system of signs, rules and virtual meanings that constitutes language, the
latter is language as it is actually spoken. A structural approach to language
implies the choice for the langue. All questions concerning the meaning of
speech as it is bound to a specific subject and situation are bracketed. The focus
of attention is the common vocabulary that is used in all concrete performances
of language.
In order to describe this vocabulary, the structural model of language prefers
a synchronic approach of language to a diachronic one. It focuses on the state
of the system at a given moment. ’Systems are more intelligible than changes’
(Ricœur, 1976, p. 6). Within the system the relationships between the distinct
8
The Model of the Text
terms or signs are brought to light. Every sign only has a meaning in so far
as it is opposed to other signs. Finally—and this is for Ricœur the postulate
that ’summarizes and commands all the others’ (Ricœur, 1974a, pp. 250-1)—
the structural model isolates the ’langue’ as a closed universe of signs. Language
constitutes a world of its own without any outside reference, ’a self-sufficient
system of inner relations’ (Ricœur, 1976, p. 6).
This last postulate—that of the ’closure’ (clôture) of the object of analysis—
constitutes for Ricœur both the strength of the structural approach and its
weakness. The undeniable strength is that the restriction to a finished, complete object brings out the aspect of organization without which there would
be no meaningful language at all. This methodological reduction makes a scientific exploration of objective structures possible. However, such a structural
description remains abstract. With the ’parole’ all those aspects which according to ordinary experience primarily characterize language are left out—i.e.
that it is spoken by someone about something to someone. “The more linguistics are purified and reduced to a science of language,” explains Ricœur “the
more it expels from its field everything concerning the relationship of language
to anything else but itself.”
In fact the reduction of language to its structural aspects implies a twofold
“forgetting of structures which are prior to language itself”. In the first place
it leaves aside the question of man who expresses himself through language.
What can be understood by means of a structural model is an anonymous
system of signs and codes. Furthermore, limitation to the ’clôture des signes’
implies that being is forgotten. The fact that language refers to any nonlinguistic reality is lost from sight.
It is these forgotten elements, so intimately connected with the presuppositions of structuralism, that cause Ricœur’s vigorous opposition to all efforts
to found some structuralist philosophy on the postulates of the structural method
(cf. Ricœur, 1974a, pp. 27-61, especially p. 51). Such philosophies—as they
have been advocated by such different thinkers as Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and
Lacan, among others—tend to hypostatize the ’codes’, the networks of signs.
Language is not seen as a medium by means of which man expresses himself,
Language-system and Discourse
gives meaning to his world, and transfers a ’message’. It is, rather, suggested
that the anonymous structures of his language govern man’s consciousness
of the world and of himself. Thus the individual capacity for thinking and
being creative tends to be denied in favour of the power of codes. To understand man is to understand the structures that constitute his language, the
networks of myths and texts that constitute his culture, the social structures
that constitute his society. Structuralist philosophy tends to be “an absolute
formalism” (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 52). Therefore, Ricœur is eager to disconnect
structural method from structuralist ideology. Boundaries should be drawn up
within which the structural model retains its value as a scientific instrument
with claims to objectivity, but beyond which it falls into error.
In regard to language the structural model is valid, since a structure of
merely interdependent signs or terms can be isolated. But, ultimately, are
not the relations between man and language, language and the world, of more
importance that relationships within the language-structure? Is not language
primarily the way through which man communicates, expresses emotions,
gives meaning to his world? That is why Ricœur opposes a second approach to
the structural one. The model of the immanence of the langue is complemented
by a model of the transcendence of speech: the “transcendence of what is
designated (or more precisely, what is referred to)”, and the “transcendence
of the speaking subjects”. In this way, he enters the field of what may be called
a phenomenolgy of language. The presuppositions are those of phenomenology:
language expresses the meaning of the world and of being; the subject is the
bearer of this meaning. Man is the one who, by means of language, brings
meaning to his world.
It is essential that the phenomenology of language is complementary—not
alternative. The phenomenological-hermeneutic approach in which meaning
is the central category, has to be based on a pre-hermeneutical, linguistic one,
or be cut off from an essential relation with modern science. “Phenomenology
must,” claims Ricœur, “be structural—at least in its primary stages.” “It is
through and by means of a linguistics of language that a phenomenology of
speech is possible today” (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 251).
9
10
The Model of the Text
De Saussure’s idea was that only the ’langue’ is a proper object for science:
’parole’ must be bracketed so as to demarcate a field for objective inquiry.
Ricœur exchanges this distinction for another, that of semiology and semantics
(cf. Ricœur, 1974a, p. 93), (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 66-76) and (Ricœur, 1976, pp. 6-8).
Semiology and Semantics
Semiology is the structural-linguistic science which looks at closed sets of
signs. The presupposition of semantics is that there is also a scientific approach
to discourse, language as it is spoken. Semiology tries to make sense of the
differences between the signs in the system, whereas semantics investigates
what happens when the words come together in a sentence and thus generate
a meaning. “The first articulates the sign at the level of potential systems
available for the performance of discourse, the second is cotemporaneous
with the accomplishment of the discourse” (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 252). These
semiologic and semantic levels of language cannot be understood properly
if not in function of each other. Understanding the anonymous patterns
of signs and rules only makes sense in view of their actual functioning in
spoken language. “Outside the semantic function in which they are actualized,
semiological systems lose all intelligibility” (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 253). Reversely,
the meaning of discourse cannot be analysed apart from an understanding of
the potential of meaning that is contained by the signs in the system.
Attention is now focused on the moment of transition between the two
levels of structure and speech. This moment is that of speaking, or—with
an expression that Ricœur borrows from Emile Benvéniste—the instance of
discourse, “l’instance de discours” (cf. Ricœur, 1976, 1994) or “occurence of
discourse” (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 254). In a series of illuminating oppositions
Ricœur shows how the potentiality of the system is actualized so that language
emerges on a new level, that of a genuine and unique meaning (Ricœur, 1974a,
pp. 86-88), (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 70-75) and (Ricœur, 1976, pp. 9-12).
Discourse
Discourse
Discourse is the event in which language takes on a temporal aspect. From
the point of view of semiotics this is a weakness: the sentences of discourse
arise and vanish, but the system remains. However, Ricœur advocates “the
ontological priority of discourse” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 9). The ’langue’ is merely
potential and a-temporal; its elements only become actual through discourse.
This opposition of system and event has important consequences. Whereas
the system is a finite and fixed set of phonetic and lexical signs, discourse is
in the order of creation and innovation. It offers the possibility of conbining
words so that new constellations of meaning emerge. It is an “infinite use of
finite means” (von Humboldt, cited in Ricœur, 1974b, p. 97), (Ricœur, 1994, p.
63). Whereas the system is a matter of constraint and rules, discourse is choice,
freedom.
The acts, events and choices of discourse imply another, decisive, trait: discourse has a subject (cf. Ricœur, 1974a, p. 88). In the anonymous system the
question “who is speaking?” is senseless. “Language (langue) has no subject”,
objects Ricœur, while “discourse refers back from itself to its own speaker
thanks to a complex interplay of indicators such as personal pronouns.” Discourse is auto-referential. What is within the system an empty sign—’I’—
becomes a living word within discourse. By saying it the subject appropriates language. I make it ’my’ language and I anchor discourse in the here and
now of my situation. (cf. Ricœur, 1974a, pp. 254-6), (Ricœur, 1976, p. 13) and
(Ricœur, 1994, p. 75).
Discourse refers away from itself. It is always about something. It refers to a
world “which it pretends to describe, to express, to represent” (Ricœur, quoted
in van Leeuwen, 1981). Words turn from the pseudoworld of the system to the
actual world. This is what Ricœur calls ’reference’ in its strict sense: the claim
of expressing a view on the world, of affirming something about reality.
The triad of transcending movements of discourse is completed by the
element of allocution. The ’I’ of discourse (self-reference) speaks about the
11
12
The Model of the Text
world (reference) to a hearer. “The subjectivity of the act of speech is from
the beginning the intersubjectivity of allocution” (Ricœur, 1974a, p.
88).
The terminology of J. L. Austin is useful in grasping this structure. Each
illocutionary act (act of discourse by which some wish, command, question
etc. is expressed) is an interlocutionary act, to which a reaction (obedience,
answer, etc.) is expected. Thus dialogue is the basic form of discourse. “Even
soliloquy—solitary discourse—is dialogue with oneself” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 15).
On all these traits the openness of “language as discourse” is evident. As
event, choice, innovation discourse is an open and, in principle, unlimited
process of creation of meaning. Its triple reference makes it open towards the
speaker, a hearer and the world (I, you, it).
On the level of discourse language leaps, as Ricœur says, across two
thresholds (Ricœur, 1974a, p. 84). In the first place, the words arise from their
phantomatic state of being dead signs and attain a living meaning: discourse
says something, it has a sense (the threshold of sense). Secondly, it says
something about something, it has a reference (the threshold of reference).
Herein lies precisely the mystery of language; discourse does not only have
an ideal sense, a meaningful content, it also has a real reference. It is capable
of representing reality with the help of words. This concept of discourse as the
event of meaning, of sense and reference, is the nucleus of Ricœur’s further
investigations. These go in the direction of both a theory of the written text
and its interpretation, and a theory of the word: its polysemic, metaphorical
and symbolic qualities. Finally, also the core issue to this inquiry—the specific
problems of interpreting poetic and symbolic texts.
The sentence is, as has been said, the characteristic unit of discourse. “It
is the sentence which has a speaking subject; it is the sentence which has a
reference; it is the sentence which is addressed to the other.” Inquiry thus goes
toward the level of unities larger than the sentence, texts, and to that of unities
smaller than the sentence, words. When reading the following paragraphs,
dealing with the theories of text and word, it should be kept in mind that
interpretation always has to do with the interplay of these distinct levels. The
meaning of a word cannot be understood apart from the sentence in which it
Distanciation—When Discourse Becomes Text
13
is used, as this sentence has to be understood in the context of the text. The
text cannot be explained except by envisaging the interplay of its parts and the
specific strategies by which words are used in it.
Distanciation—When Discourse Becomes Text
Writing is the full manifestation of discourse.
— (Ricœur, 1976, pp. 25-6)
Ricœur conceives of written language as the first ’place’ or ’locality’ for
hermeneutics (Ricœur, 1995d, p. 44). Hermeneutics finds a starting point in
the problems posed by the text. What is a text? What happens when discourse
becomes fixed by writing? What precisely is it we intend to understand when
reading a text? How does interpretation proceed and how are the moments
of analysis and appropriation of meaning, explanation and understanding
related?
Two elements of Ricœur’s theory of the text will be reviewed.
1. It aims at overcoming the romantic, psychologizing prejudice that dominated hermeneutics since Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and which reduced true understanding to an understanding of the intentions of the
author, the “life” behind the text. For Ricœur, to understand is to grasp
the world opened up in front of the text. In this respect his hermeneutic is
in line with Heidegger, who related understanding to projects (Entwürfe)
of In-der-Welt-sein, with Bultmann, who sees hermeneutics as governed
by what is at issue in the text itself (its message), and with Gadamer, who
relates understanding to the Sache on which the text pronounces.
2. Ricœur develops a concept of the text as an autonomous work, which
makes it possible to include a critical moment of explanation in the process of interpretation. He thus tries to overcome not only Dilthey’s romantic hermeneutics that sharply opposed Verstehen as the method of
the Geisteswissenschaften to Erklären as the method of natural sciences,
but he also aims at correcting the three philosophers just mentioned.
14
The Model of the Text
Heidegger’s ontologization of understanding leaves no room for a critical theory concerning interpretation. Bultmann’s hermeneutics centers
interpretation too exclusively on existential decisions, assigning too little
importance to the text’s objectivity. Gadamer’s hermeneutics disregards
the ’textuality’ of the text by regarding writing only as an alienation that
should be overcome in a new act of dialogue.
It should be noted that Ricœur contends that to understand any discourse
(be it spoken or written) is to understand the event of discourse as such. In
hearing another person speak, what we try to understand is not the speechevent but the meaning—the ’issue’ of his speech. We want to grasp what is
said and what it refers to (Gadamer’s ‘die Sache’). The axiom of Ricœur’s
interpretation theory is therefore that “if all discourse is actualized as an event,
all discourse is understood as meaning” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 12) and (Ricœur,
1994, p. 70). Understanding aims at the content of discourse. The event is
surpressed in and surpassed by the meaning.
This applies specifically to written discourse. “It only accomplished a trait
which is virtual in all discourse: the distanciation of meaning and event”
(Ricœur, 1975, p. 67). Is it not the intention of writing that the meaning should
survive the vanishing event of discourse? What is inscribed is not the event as
event, but what is said. That the event is surpassed by a meaning thus applies
all the more to the text. From the moment of its inscription it starts, so to speak,
a career of its own. It becomes autonomous, leaving behind the moment of its
creation.
What happens in writing is the full manifestation of something
that is in a virtual state, something nascent and inchoate, in living
speech, namely the detachment of meaning from the event.
— (Ricœur, 1976, p. 25)
Semantic Autonomy
In his essay What is a Text?
Ricœur gives a more precise description of
this “birth of a text” as an autonomous work. The text is not a graphic
Distanciation—When Discourse Becomes Text
reproduction of what was first pronounced orally. Writing is not secondary
to the parole. Instead of describing it as the petrification or suppression of
living speech, Ricœur presents the text as a “direct inscription” of what could
have been said orally. Writing is as original as the spoken word. In this way
Ricœur breaks away from a long tradition in which the written word is seen
as only a derivative of “living” speech. A recent example of this view is
found in Ingarden’s study on the literary work of art (Ingarden, 1968, p.
13), which speaks of “die reine Sprachlautigkeit” that suffers “eine gewisse
Verunreinigung” when fixed by writing, although the tradition can be traced
back to Plato and Rousseau (cf. Ricœur, 1976, pp. 38-40). (It is also one
of the main suppositions of the romanic view on literature that speech is
language’s primary and defining form, whereas writing is secondary and
derived.) Writing here becomes a merely physical vehicle and even a deceiving
disguise of the living word. Its indispensable function is neglected. Against
this Ricœur states that writing is not reproduction, and even less reduction, but
“a direct inscription of [an] intention, even if, historically and psychologically,
writing began with the graphic transcription of the signs of speech” (Ricœur,
1995e, pp. 147).
With the help of his concept of textual autonomy, Ricœur wants to illuminate the specific claim of truth of the text. The autonomous character of the
text is explained by what happens to the referential characteristics of discourse
when, instead of being spoken, it is written down in the ’instance de discours’.
Language refers to a speaker, a hearer, and the world. What happens to these
references in writing?
Loss of Reference Through Emancipation
In a dialogue understanding the intention of discourse coincides with understanding the intention of its speaker. Several non-linguistic aspects (gestures
and facial expressions), facilitate understanding. The speaker can be questioned about his intentions. In written language these direct indications of the
writer’s intentions are absent. There is no longer a direct relation between
15
16
The Model of the Text
the said of the text and the psychology of its author. The reader has to do with
what the text expresses and this may transcend the author’s view to a considerable degree. Therefore, the author is not the best interpreter of his own works,
neither does the queary about original intentions offer the right cue for interpretation. “To read a book is to consider its author as already dead” (Ricœur,
1995e, p. 137). In fact, as Beerling remarks, most texts would not lose their
value if they were anonymous. “Authorship is accidental, be it essentially accidental”: it is essential that someone wrote this text; it is accidental who did so
(Beerling, 1972, p. 209). Ricœur’s view should be distinguished from a structuralist one which denies authorship stating that texts are interwoven in and
produced by the network of meanings and texts of a culture. Ricœur maintains that the text is a discourse produced by an author. But to envisage its
autonomy is to “bracket” authorship.1
As the text is emancipated from its author, so it is liberated from the restriction of a particular audience (cf. Schleiermacher’s “ursprüngliche Leser”).
Speech is directed to a specific “you”. A text is addressed “potentially to
whomever knows how to read” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 31). Texts offer their meaning
“to an indefinite number of readers and, therefore, of interpretations” (ibid.).
They become a part of the collective memory of mankind. Their importance
is determined not so much by the response of the first readers, as by the degree to which they are capable of evoking new interpretations. Important texts
produce a tradition. An essential part of their meaning lies in what Gadamer
calls a “Wirkungsgeschichte” (Gadamer, 1990, pp. 285ff). To interpret is not
to erase this history (in an effort to transport oneself into the position of its
first readers), but to promote it. (Gadamer states the first two elements of the
autonomy of the text in the same way (Gadamer, 1990, pp. 369-70).)
So “hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 32).
Interpretation is not the repetition of some original encounter of writer and
readers, but a new event: a confrontation with what the text says. About what,
then, is written discourse?
1
The question may be raised if biographical data concerning the author are in all cases as
irrelevant for the interpretation of texts as Ricœur suggests. At least as regards clues for possible
constructions in explanation.
Distanciation—When Discourse Becomes Text
The question of reference, in the strict sense, leads to the heart of Ricœur’s
theory. All discourse refers to something. But again written discourse differs
widely from oral discourse. The latter is performed within a situation common
to the members of the dialogue. Its references are toward a reality that is
present to speaker and hearer and they rely on the possibility of pointing to
this commonly perceived reality. The text does not refer to a situation that is
present here and now to both reader and writer (Ricœur, 1995e, pp. 138-9).2
In this regard the text is ’worldless’. But precisely this abolition of a direct
reference to the given world frees the text to project a world of its own. As
the meaning of the text is beyond the author’s intention and beyond what the
reader of any specific time grasps, so its reference is beyond what the ordinary
world offers. The text brings about a “distantiation of the real from itself”
(Ricœur, 1995a, p. 142). In reading it, man is invited to explore dimensions
of reality beyond the limitations of his situation. So interpretation should not
seeek for intentions behind the text but explain the sort of being-in-the-world
unfolded in front of it. The text opens up a horizon.
It should be stressed how crucial the role thus assigned by Ricœur is
to writing. It is thanks to writing that “man and only man has a world
and not just a situation” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 36). In Ricœur’s concept speech
remains anchored in the narrow spatio-temporal network determined by what
in Fallible Man was called man’s “perspectivity”. That discourse also has the
more existential function of exploring the truth of being and the possibilities
of existence, is pre-eminently revealed in that type of discourse which steps
aside from the “perspectivities” of this performer, this audience, and from the
narrowness of this situation. It is precisely this remoteness which constitutes
a text . By reading texts man escapes from his situatedness in the here and
now. The Umwelt of what is available and visible expands into a Welt formed
by values, expectations and imaginations. So Ricœur comes to call “world”
2
Ricœur seems to use a rather narrow notion of ’situation’ here. Is it true that in a dialogue
the participants have one situation? Can ’situation’ be defined only referring to the external
world? Are the members of a dialogue not often speaking from different situations, cultural
backgrounds, interests etc.?
In relation to this the question arises whether or not certain texts are determined by a specific
cultural situation to such an extent that the work of interpretation cannot abstain completely
from projecting this ’world’ behind the text.
17
18
The Model of the Text
“the ensemble of references” opened by all texts “that I have read, understood
and loved” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 37). To have a world is to live within a horizon
constituted by the signs, works, texts of mankind.
Obviously, in this concept of “world” Ricœur’s hermeneutics remains true
to major themes of phenomenology. The idea of the world as the horizon of life
indissoluble from human significations, is a variation on the Husserlian theme
of the Lebenswelt. The definition of understanding as grasping possibilities of
being-in-the-world comes close to Heidegger. Did not Sein und Zeit reveal that
the most fundamental function of Verstehen, far from being the comprehension
of other persons, is the understanding of one’s relation to the world? Dasein
is an In-der-Welt-sein, and man always lives out of a primordial understanding
of this In-der-Welt-sein, an understanding which he tries to elucidate through
interpretation (Heidegger, 1993, §31).3 When Ricœur states that the world of
the text is the offer made by the text to the reader of new possibilities of beingin-the-world, he joins up with this Heideggerian theme.
On the other hand, it is crucial for Ricœur that he relates this idea of the
’world’ to the concept of the text. This enables him to introduce a critical,
methodical moment into the work of interpretation, a moment that is missing
in Heidegger and his followers Bultmann and Gadamer. When Heidegger
conceives of “das Dasein als Verstehen” (Heidegger, 1993, §§ 31-32), i.e. as
the mode of being that exists through understanding being, he introduces
a reversal of the hermeneutical problematic. From being epistemological,
understanding becomes an ontological category. Every act of explanation of the
world (Auslegung) is preceded by pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) of our
being-in-the-world. But how can interpretation account for such an awareness
that always precedes? How can it criticize, modify or renew it? “[H]ow can
a question of critique in general be accounted for within the framework of a
fundamental hermeneutics?”4 (Ricœur, 1995d, p. 59)
3
Ricœur points to the parallels with Husserl and Heidegger in The Hermeneutical Function of
Distanciation, p. 140 (see also Ricœur, 1976, p. 37).
4
“[W]ith Heidegger [...] any return from ontology to the eistemological question about the
status of the human sciences is impossible”. Existence and Hermeneutics (in Ricœur, 1974a)
contains Ricœur’s fundamental criticism of the “short route” along which Heidegger related
understanding and being (Ricœur, 1974a, pp. 6-8).
Method of Interpretation
19
Bultmann elaborated Heidegger’s idea of Vorverständnis in a model for
reading biblical texts from existential presuppositions. The statement of the
text is interpreted in terms of self-understanding. Again a critical moment
seems to be missing. Is the ’world’ which the text opens only centered on
’my’ subjectivity, ’my’ personal authenticity? Does not the text interrupt my
prejudiced reading and open up broader dimensions than these personal ones?
(Preface to Bultmann in Ricœur, 1974a, esp. 394ff)
Vorverständnis, prejudice, circularity of understanding are, again, themes
in Gadamer.
The basis of understanding is a ’Zugehörigkeit’ to traditions
(Gadamer, 1990, pp. 279ff, 434ff): all understanding is determined by the
historicity of man which, in turn, is determined by traditions. The texts which
we try to comprehend are part of these same traditions. In fact, the tradition
is effectuated by the text through its Wirkungsgeschichte.
So man already
’belongs’ to the text which he wants to understand. There is, in Gadamer’s
view, nothing scandalous about this. On the contrary, this belonging makes it
possible to overcome the alienating gap between us and the text. Man can start
his search for what lies behind the text from a certain expectation concerning
the answer which the text may give to him. Again Ricœur questions whether
a methodical moment can be introduced into the work of interpretation which
breaks through the circularity of understanding and Zugehörigkeit. Can we
reach a distance from the texts of our tradition so that it is more probable that
our prejudices may be corrected, our questions exceeded? (Ricœur, 1995d, pp.
60ff)
Ricœur seeks to overcome the aporias of these one-sided ontological or
existential conceptions by re-formulating interpretation as a dialectic of the
two attitudes which Dilthey so strictly opposed: explanation and understanding.
The interplay of both can be demonstrated most clearly on the autonomous text.
Method of Interpretation
The ’autonomy’ of the text and its ’world’ are key concepts in Ricœur’s
theory. Autonomy implies that a text should not be understood from anything
20
The Model of the Text
lying behind it, reconstructed psychologically (i.e. the author’s intention) or
sociologically (e.g. the original context of reception), but from what itself
expresses. The idea that texts can not be understood from what their words
say but must be interpreted from something behind them is, as Japp says, based
on a mistrust of “literature” itself (Japp, 1977, p. 94).
Thus the conception of the text as an “authorless and worldless” entity
invites a first reading which approaches it as a system existing in itself,
that can be explained.
On the other hand, its autonomy gives the text a
capacity of projecting a world of its own. In a second reading, the reader is
invited to follow the reference towards a project of being-in-the-world and to
understand this project as a possibility for him. One of Ricœur’s contributions
to hermeneutics is that it is the same function of autonomization which ’closes’ the
text as an object that can be explained and which ’opens’ it towards a specific
world that calls for hermeneutic understanding (cf. Ricœur, 1975, p. 73).
These two characteristics—the text’s occlusion and ’ouverture’—remind
one of the functions which Heidegger in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes attributes to a work of art: ’das Verschliessen’ on the one hand and ’das Welt-Eröffnen’,
’die Aufstellung einer Welt’ on the other (cf. Heidegger, 1994)(Holzwege). However, Heidegger’s analysis does not use the idea of ’das Dinghafte’, ’das Insichstehen’ of the work as a starting point for introducing a method of explanation.
This is precisely what Ricœur wants to do.
Structuralist Analysis
The suppression of the direct relation of the text to an author, a world, a time
of creation, makes it possible to analyse it as a closed universe of words and
functions, in the same way in which the langue is analysed as a ’closed universe
of signs’. Indeed, the text is discourse and with regard to the langue it has
a position which is analogous to that of speech. That is to say, it cannot be
conceived as only a structural composition like the language system. On the
other hand, it is something essentially different from spoken discourse. The
text is the type of discourse which can be analysed in a similar way as the
Structuralist Analysis
21
langue. It can be taken as a self-sufficient system of oppositions, combinations,
codes. “The unities of higher order than the sentence, are organized in a
way similar to that of the small unities of language, that is, the unities of an
order lower than the sentence, those precisely which belong to the domain of
linguistics” (Ricœur, 1995e, pp. 140,142) (Ricœur, 1975, p. 52) (Ricœur, 1976,
pp. 82-3).
It is beyond the scope of the current chapter to present in any detail the
models of structural analysis Ricœur proposes to fill this function. In fact, he
does not attempt to develop any new model. What he is attempting is to prove
that texts can be explained with the help of models which are “borrowed from
a science, linguistics belonging to the [...] field of human sciences” (Ricœur,
1995e, p. 144) and that, therefore, explanation is not, as Dilthey thought, an
effort which is alien to the specific object of these sciences. Explanation and
understanding can dispute with each other “on the same ground” (Ricœur,
1995e, p. 44). Within one process of interpretation explanation of structures
may be connected to hermeneutical understanding. The former can correct or
adjust the historicizing, psychologizing, and existential prejudices which often
characterize the latter.
Considering the present state of linguistic science, Ricœur seems to find
it superfluous to give further proof of the fact that structural analysis can be
extended to the level of texts. Evidence for this lies, he claims, especially in
Lévi-Strauss, Propp, Barthès and Greimas. Lévi-Strauss applies the structural
model to myths. He describes the different “paquets de relations” between
the units which constitute the myth, ordering these ’paquets’ in categories
such as kinship, economics, etc.
A matrix of contradictions, oppositions
and relations is thus produced which brings to light the underlying codes
of the myth and their inner logic. Propp analysed the structure of folk-tales
with the help of an index of 31 narrative functions (absence, prehibitions,
violation etc.) and 7 elementary roles (villain, helper, hero etc.). The plot of
the narrative is explained from the sequences of functions, the interaction of
roles. Barthès developed this model further by classifying the units of the
narration at three levels, those of functions (meeting, promising, eceiving
22
The Model of the Text
etc), actions (connected to their actors), and of narration itself (considered
as an act of communication). From Greimas Ricœur takes the important
notion of the depth-structure which analysis brings to light.
There is not
only a level of actions and of thematic roles or functions (the narration’s
surfacestructure); from beneath the dramatic, narrative surface, an a-chronic,
anonymous structure can be unearthed which is at work in the depth of the
text.
What is mainly of interest here is Ricœur’s proposal to incorporate this sort
of structural explanation in the hermeneutic endeavour. Through it, he hopes to
be able to produce an objectivity he finds missing in traditional hermeneutics.
This objectivity is vital if one seeks to make the message of the text reachable
from without the hermeneutic circle confining it to the existential needs of
the reader or his prejudiced questions—an objectivity necessary for literary
criticism to be justifiable at all.
When Ricœur speaks of the text as a work (Ricœur, 1995a, p. 136-40), this
implies, on the one hand, that it can be taken as a finite object; it is ’dinghaft’
and can be explained with the help of objective procedures. On the other hand,
it is precisely in this way that a process of meaning that is at work in the text may
come to light. The text ’works’, it produces certain meanings. Its codes are
the vehicles of a certain message.5 To say this is to suggest that the structural
reading which holds to the purely immanent character of the text should be
transcended by a second reading which tries to understand its message.
Fiercely opposed to the “fallacy of the absolute text”6 , according to which
it has no outward relation at all, and to the “structuralist ideology” (Ricœur,
1995e, pp. 148,150), which takes texts only as syntactic arrangements of
5
Ricœur emphasizes this point in discussions on Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. When LéviStrauss holds that myths are logical models which suggest certain solutions for the contradictions of life, this implies that they have a meaningful intention. They give conjectures concerning
elementary enigmas. Structural analysis postpones the question of meaning by focusing on the
inner logic of myth, but it cannot eliminate it. Such an elimination would be the reduction of the
theory of myth “to a necrology of the meaningless discourses of mankind” (Ricœur, 1995e, p.
147).
6
Barthès writes: “A narrative does not show anything, it does not imitate (. . . ) what happens
in narratives is from the referential standpoint actually NOTHING. What happens is language
alone, the adventure of language” (cited in Ricœur, 1975, p. 51). Cf. (Ricœur, 1976, p. 30),
where Ricœur contrarily comments: “Discourse cannot fail to be about something. (. . . ) I am
denying the ideology of absolute texts.”
Structuralist Analysis
opposed terms, Ricœur returns to his presupposition: the text is discourse. Its
autonomy “cannot abolish the dimension of discourse” (Ricœur, 1975, p. 67).
That is to say, it is impossible to cancel out the fact that the text is made by
someone and intended to convey a message about something to someone. This
message calls for understanding by the one who, here and now, reads the text.
Phenomenological Understanding — Appropriation
The ultimate aim of hermeneutics remains the understanding of what the text
means to me. One has “to ’make one’s own’ what was previsously foreign”
(Ricœur, 1976, p. 91). Thus Ricœur eventually takes up a hermeneutical
concept which has been stamped by the romantic tradition: appropriation,
Aneignung (Ricœur, 1976, pp. 91-4). However, this concept is understood in
a new way. What I “make my own” is not something that lies behind the
text, but the world toward which it opens up. In the act of understanding the
horizon of the text and the horizon of my self-understanding merge into each
other—Gadamer’s Horizontverschmelzung. This “appropriation” is not just a
taking hold of the text by the reader. The text and its project of a world
take hold of the reader as well. The “apropriation” is a “désappropriation”
of the reader: he is distanciated from himself. “Appropriation [. . . ] implies a
moment of dispossession from the egoistic and narcissistic ego” (Ricœur, 1976,
pp. 94). The text breaks through the categories of man’s self-understanding
and his understanding of the world. In this way the world of the reader and
his self-understanding may be enlarged.
From Circle To Arc
Thus interpretation proceeds in the model of a hermeneutic arc, instead of being
contained within a hermeneutic circle. One pillar of this arc is the discourse
of the text, its act of projecting a world; this act of the text can be elucidated
by explanation. The other pillar is that of the act of understanding, the aim of
interpretation proper.
23
24
The Model of the Text
In short, through texts the reader understands himself within a world of
immanence and hope, of matters of fact and new possibilities, of good and
evil, and texts may offer him ever new perspectives of possible ways of beingin-the-world.
Epi-reading and Graphi-reading
Attempting to account for the ethical function of literature and literary criticism, Robert Eaglestone revitalises Denis Donoghue’s distinction between
’epi-reading’ and ’graphi-reading’, reflecting the intrinsic or extrinsic study of
literature. Epi-reading is “predicated on the desire to hear (. . . ) the absent
person” (Eaglestone, 1997, p. 3). The epi-reader “moves swiftly from print
and language to speech and voice and the present person” (ibid.). Under this
paradigm, reading functions as a translation from words to acts. “Epi-reading
transposes the written words on the page into a somehow corresponding situation of persons, voices, characters, conflicts, conciliations” (ibid.). Language
is rendered transparent, a window through which the world of actors, actions
and events is seen, and the function of literature is reduced to that of a viewport into a world behind it.
Graphi-reading has the opposite orientation, prioritizing language, text
and reading over “a nostalgia for the human” and seeks to engage with texts
“in their virtuality” (Eaglestone, 1997, p. 4). The graphi-reader reads the words
and refuses to pass beyond, or create a world behind, them. All deconstructive
criticism is graphi-reading, claim Eaglestone and Donoghue, and go on to
place Derrida, de Man, Barthes and Mallarmé among those who experience
“the eclipse of voice by text.”
Their placing of Ricœur as an epi-reader seems based on his insistence
upon the primacy of textual reference—its aboutness. Portraying him as
having a view of texts as a window through which a world is made accessible,
however, is clearly mistaken.
Even though Donoghue does not develop the distinction on the basis of
any strict definitions, but rather on the basis of heuristic analyses, is seems
A Room For Objectivity?
possible that the attribution both he and Eaglestone make is incorrect. It is
quite possible, in fact, that Ricœur’s theory intergrates both models of reading,
and provides a synthesis of both of them.
A Room For Objectivity?
A set of questions arise. In the first place: is this true of all kinds of texts or is
Ricœur aiming at a specific type of texts? Certainly the latter is the case. His
thesis that the text is a disclosure of a world is not as equally valid for various
kinds of trivial texts7 as it is for what may be called the ’great texts’ of the past.
A natural science text does not open up new dimensions of the world in the
same way as poetic discourse does either. It is in this last type of discourse that
Ricœur’s interest lies, taking ’poetic’ in a broad sense, as applying to all those
types of literary discourse which in their referential function differ from the
descriptive function of ordinary, everyday language and in particular scientific
discourse.
Secondly: As becomes clear through the model of Ricœur’s theory of interpretation as a hermeneutic arc, the object of interpretation—the text itself—
has a parallel role to that of the ’langue’ in Ricœur’s theory of language. It
represents a potential for understanding, a repository of meaning, which can
be actualized, unlocked, through a structuring act of explanation.
Ricœur sharpens this image further. The same processes are in effect in
overcoming the polysemic nature of language in communication as in the act
of making sense of a text (the function of the structural explanation). To what
extent does this guarantee a space for objective criteria and methods in textual
interpretation, and thus for the field of literary criticism as a whole?
A final question: it has been said above that the theory of the text only
represents a starting point for Ricœur’s hermeneutics. It is in connection
with the problem of the text that more general questions about the function
of language can be brought to light. What is it that gives discourse this capacity
7
Though these can be argued as opening up visions of the world as well, albeit rather
superficial, conventional ones.
25
26
The Model of the Text
of creation, of opening new dimensions of meaning? How can the creative
function of language be understood?
These questions lead to the need to envisage another level of discourse,
not of texts but of the words and their capacity of evoking different meanings
and creating new meaning. In going into Ricœur’s theory of the metaphorical
function of language we will have to go back to a point that was reached before
we entered into the theory of the text, namely where the signs of the language
system come to life in actual discourse.
Chapter
3
The Tensional Conception of
Metaphor
Having removed any privileged venues of interpretation of texts through the
distancing effects of inscription, and shown that no text, language or discourse
is reducable to any closed linguistic system, Ricœur needs both a methodology
and a theoretical bridgehead to bootstrap his hermeneutic arc into existence.
In the essay Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics, Ricœur
(1995c) claims to link up the problems raised in hermeneutics by the interpretation of texts and the problems raised in rhetoric, semantics, stylistics—or
whatever the discipline concerned may be—by metaphor. Finding a common
ground for the theory of the text and the theory of metaphor in the dynamics
of discourse, he seeks to find the key to unlocking the problematic of interpretation of autonomic texts in ’semantic innovation’, a term deeply entwined in his
theory of metaphor.
Due to textual distanciation and autonomy, the referential potential of the
text is realized in a way parallel to the function of the metaphor. Thus to be able
to account for meaning in discourse from the perspective of epistemology and
not linguistics or philosophy of language, it is natural to choose the relation
between text and metaphor as a starting point. At this point, however, the
28
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
problematic of metaphoric truth is supplanted in favour of a study of the
function of metaphor and everyday language.
Ricœur presents metaphor as the touchstone of the cognitive value of literary works in Interpretation Theory (Ricœur, 1976, p. 45): “If we can incorporate
the surplus of meaning of metaphors into the domain of semantics,” he muses,
“then we will be able to give the theory of verbal signification its greatest possible extension.” In The Symbolism of Evil (Ricœur, 1967) and Freud and Philosophy (Ricœur, 1970), he directly defines hermeneutics through the symbol, an
object he found both as broad and as precise as possible. He defines the symbol in turn through its semantic structure of having a double meaning. In later
works, Interpretation Theory in particular, he distances himself from his earlier
path, choosing instead a less direct route that takes linguistics into account. If
the theory of metaphor can serve as a preparatory analysis leading up to the
theory of the symbol, however, the theory of the symbol will in return allow
an expansion of the theory of signification by including non-verbal doublemeaning as well as metaphoric or poetic content.
Our working hypothesis thus invites us to proceed from metaphor
to text at the level of ’sense’ and the explanation of ’sense’, then
from text to metaphor at the level of the reference of a work to a
world and to a self, that is, at the level of interpretation proper.
— (Ricœur, 1995c, p. 171)
Ricœur’s Theories of Metaphor
Ricœur’s semantics of discourse reserves a privileged place for metaphors and
symbols, whose complex structures shed light on the richness and creativity
of language. According to the traditional view, metaphor is regarded as a
type of trope, that is, as a rhetorical device whereby a figurative word is
substituted for a literal one on the basis of an apparent resemblance. However,
Ricœur maintains that this account is incapable of explaining the process by
which a novel metaphor is produced; and he claims that this difficulty can
be overcome only if one accepts the view that the primary metaphorical unit
is not the word but the sentence. Metaphor presupposes the establishment
Ricœur’s Theories of Metaphor
29
of a tension between two terms in the sentence through a violation of the
linguistic code. The metaphorical utterance then appears as a reduction of
this tension by means of a creative semantic innovation or reconfiguration,
within the sentence as a whole. In thereby resolving a paradigmatic tension
by means of a syntagmatic innovation, the metaphorical process situates itself
at the point of articulation between system and discourse. As Ricœur explains,
metaphorical meaning is an effect of the entire statement, but it is
focused on one word, which can be called the metaphorical word.
This is why one must say that metaphor is a semantic innovation
that belongs at once to the predicative order (new pertinence) and
the lexical order (paradigmatic deviation).
— (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 156-7)
Metaphor and Semantic Innovation
In situating itself at this point of articulation, the metaphorical process draws
upon the phenomenon of regulated polysemy. However, the former cannot be
reduced to the latter, for metaphor is the very process by which the polysemy
of words is expanded and transformed. This transformative capacity is attributable to the referential dimension of the metaphorical statement, that is, to
its power to redescribe reality. In the last analysis, the function of metaphor
is to shatter and increase our sense of reality by shattering and increasing our
language.
Ricœur wishes to distance his own theory from the substitution theory
of metaphor, which claims that the metaphor is a condensation of meaning
which is paraphraseable without necessarily using more words and sentences.
In drafting his position on metaphor, Ricœur savagely criticises the other
theoreticians of metaphor. In their treatment of metaphor, he claims, they do
not make room for any dynamic of metaphor. Through an indifferent use of
dead metaphors in their expositions, they fail at the outset of their attempts to
account for the unique characteristics of metaphor. Ricœur writes:
These aspects are features of the explanatory process which could
not appear so long as trivial examples of metaphor were con-
30
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
sidered, such as man is a wolf, a fox, a lion (...) With these examples, we elude the major difficulty, that of identifying a meaning
which is new.
— (Ricœur, 1995c, pp. 171-2)
According to Ricœur’s theory of metaphor, it represents an abuse of language. It is an anomaly—an unatoned incompatibility in the expression—and
does not come into its right qua metaphor until the interpreter from this inconsistent proposition of a literal reading draws a meaningful utterance in a reinterpretation through a displacement of the linguistic norm, granting the metaphor new semantic explanation in the moment of interpretation. The central
point being that the attribute of the metaphor which makes it unique is that
it is new, emergent, and obtained from nowhere. At least not from language
itself.
To say that a metaphor is not drawn from anywhere is to recognise
it for what it is: namely, a momentary creation of language, a semantic innovation which does not yet have a status in the language
as something already established, whether as a designation or as a
connotation.
— (Ricœur, 1995c, p. 174)
Metaphor and Explanation
The explanatory function for metaphors consists not in a substitution of the
metaphorical expression, but in a construction.
The decisive moment of
explanation arises when the interpreter has constructed a web of connections
in and through the context constituting it as actual and unique. The semantic
event takes place in the crossing between the semantic fields the interpreter
has drawn upon in his structural efforts. Through this construction, being the
means through which the words together make sense, the metaphorical twist
becomes an event and at the same time a meaning—a meaningful event and
emergent meaning in language.
This constructive element is the fundamental feature of explanation which
makes metaphor paradigmatic for the explanation of a literary work. We con-
Polysemy and Metaphor
31
struct the meaning of a text in a way similar to the one that grants meaning to
the terms of a metaphorical expression through creating a network of possibilities based on guesswork and assumptions, until a revealing breakthrough
allows the different pieces, which in the meantime have seemed incompatible,
to fall into place.
The presupposition of construction in understanding textual meaning derives mainly from the written form. In the asymmetrical relationship between
text and interpreter, one of the parties has to speak for them both. Thus construction is necessary to bring the text to language—lend it a voice. The text
represents an autonomous space of meaning which is no longer kept alive
through the authorial intention, and, bereft of this necessary support, the text
in its autonomy delivers itself mute to the reader’s lonely interpretation.
Polysemy and Metaphor
This connection between metaphor and discourse requires a special justification, precisely because the definition of metaphor as a
transposition affecting names or words seems to place it in a category of entities smaller than the sentence. But the semantics of
the word demonstrates very clearly that words acquire an actual
meaning only in a sentence and that lexical entities—the words of
the dictionary—have merely potential meanings in virtue of their
potential uses in typical contexts. In this respect, the theory of polysemy is a good preparation for the theory of metaphor.
— (Ricœur, 1995b, p. 169)
In studying the metaphor, we are led to the need to envisage another level
of discourse; not of texts, but of words, and their capacity of evoking different
meanings and especially creating new meaning. In further pursuing Ricœur’s
theory of the metaphorical function of language we will have to backtrack to
a point reached before the entry into the theory of the text—where the signs of
the language system come to life in actual discourse.
32
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
Detouring through Language
The title of one of Ricœur’s essays gives a concise resumé of its contents:
Structure, Word, Event (Ricœur, 1974b).
The essay points to the word as
“the place in language where the exchange between structure and event is
constantly produced.”
The word is “at the intersection of language and
speech, of synchrony and diachrony, of system and process”. Ricœur is clearly
inspired by Benvéniste’s linguistic that attributes to the word ’an intermediary
functional position’ that arises from a duplicity in its nature. Within the
’language’1 there are only empty signs,2 but within the sentence these become
real words. Words are “signs in speech position” (Ricœur, 1974b, p. 92).
Ricœur places the word as the point of articulation “between semiology and
semantics, in every speech event.” This means that the word is at the same
time much less and much more than the sentence. It is less because of the fact
that only in the sentence does the word comes to life. From another point of
view the word is more than the sentence. The latter is a transitory event, but
the word is a part of the lasting order of language. “The word survives the
sentence”—it “returns to the system” after it has been used (Ricœur, 1974b,
pp. 92-3). This fact is of eminent importance. One of the characteristics of
the ’instance of discourse’ (Ricœur, 1974b, p. 92) is clearly that it is an order
of innovation. Even the simplest sentence is ’new’ in sofar as it brings words
together in a new order and is spoken in a unique situation by this speaker to
this listener. As a consequence, every speech act adds to the word, so that it
returns from discourse to system “heavy with a new use-value—as minute as
this may be” (Ricœur, 1974b, pp. 92-93). Thus signs have an ’accumulative
intention’. Returning to the system, these instanciations of the words give
language a history.
Whenever they are used, words aquire new meanings or nuances of meaning without losing their old ones. This tendency towards expansion is the ori1
langue
In the structural system of language Ricœur adopts and modifies, symbols and tokens are
only defined internally through difference in value. The chain of definition recurs indefinately
within language, but need never in the original structuralist conception break outside of
language to find meaning.
2
Polysemy and Metaphor
33
gin of one of the most crucial phenomena of language: polysemy.3 It is from
polysemy that such central problems arise as metaphor and symbol on the one
hand, and ambiguity and misunderstanding on the other.
All our words are polysemic. Their accumulative character means that they
receive a differentiated meaning from previous use and are still made capable
of acquiring more meaning from future use. Thus a dimension of history is
brought into the synchrony of the system. It is primarily within the system
that words have more than one possible meaning, but they have acquired this
potential in speech, and there they will gather more meaning. To understand
language is therefore to understand it under two aspects, as structure and
process, system and innovation. This dual character prevents it from becoming
pathological. On the one hand, the process of innovation and the polysemy
that results from it safeguard the system. Without polysemy the need to express
every possible nuance would require an infinite number of signs. “A language
witout polysemy would violate the principle of economy” (Ricœur, 1994, p.
115). On the other hand it is the system which guards the word from becoming
overloaded. Without the disciplining function of the system the process of
accumulation of meaning would cause a surcharge of meaning, rendering the
words meaningless. Certain words, “because they signify too many things,
cease to signify anything” (Ricœur, 1974b, p. 69). The system has a regulative
function. It fixes a certain core meaning by preserving the distinctions between
the signs. Words have a certain ’literal’ meaning, a specific value within the
system which advocates a way of using them.
The word itself is consequently a tensive entity.
It is governed by a
system that wants to restrict it to a limited range of possible meanings, and
it is involved in a process of innovation and transgression of its possibilities.
Based on this understanding of the universal character of words Ricœur tries
to comprehend the more specific phenomenons, metaphor and symbol. Both
are cases of polysemy. An attempt to understand them from the criteria of
the normal functioning of words prevents an over-hasty rejection of them as
3
The capacity of a word (or other discursive token) to have more than one meaning. Selfevident as it might seem in retrospect, this insight has profound implications.
34
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
abnormalities of speech. The metaphorical process is the most purely linguistic
of the two and has to be considered first.
Within the system signs have multiple possible meanings. In discourse
a part of this potential is realized. Here analogous dimensions of wordmeanings reinforce each other, and other meanings are repressed. The context
of the sentence and the context of speech exclude them. “The word receives
from the context the determination that reduces its imprecision” (Ricœur, 1994,
p. 130).4 This process of sifting out unwanted meanings is normally sufficient
to make communication possible. Most of the inappropriate meanings of
words in a given context do not even cross our mind. “But the rest of the
semantic possibilities are not canceled; they float around the words as not
completely eliminated possibilities” (Ricœur, 1974b, p. 71). Ordinary speech
does not completely suppress ambiguity.
Consequences
Ricœur sketches two possible reactions to this situation. It gives rise to the
striving for a completely unambiguous language. This is the ideal of all
technical languages. In each sentence all the possible meanings of its words
should be erased minus one. The poetic strategy is exactly the opposite to this.
The equivocity of discourse is not considered as blameworthy confusion, but
rather as a possibility of ’surcroît de sens’, a surplus of meaning. Ambiguity is
not combated but utilized. Of this ’creative use of polysemy’ (Ricœur, 1974b,
p. 105), the metaphor is the most important example.
What is a metaphor? In short, there are sentences in which the clash
between the ’normal meanings’ of the words is so vigorous that these sentences remain absurd as long as one holds to the accepted meaning of their
words. The only way of rescueing such a sentence is “to retain all the acceptations allowed plus one” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 131).5 The old connotations of the
4
It is precisely this reduction in polysemy that is the function and aim of hermeneutic
explanation in Ricœur’s theory.
5
“In the case of metaphor, none of the alread codified acceptations is suitable; it is necessary,
therefore, to retain all the acceptations allowed plus one.”
The Traditional Conception of Metaphor
words should be retained but from the tension between them originates a novel
dimension of meaning. Thus a hitherto unknown relation of meaning and a
new dimension of truth are discovered.
Two points in this characterization require more attention: First of all,
metaphor is not a specific to the word but to the sentence; secondly, Ricœur’s
theory of metaphor insists that the metaphor opens up new dimensions of
truth.
In the first of the eight studies that make up The Rule of Metaphor (Ricœur,
1994), Ricœur sketches two lines of thought that are to be found in the works
of Aristotle. Firstly, Aristotle’s choice of the word as the ’locus’ of metaphor is
the seed of the rhetorical tradition Ricœur opposes, that regards metaphor as a
mere ornament of language. On the other hand, Aristotle developed a theory
of poetics as a way of redescribing the reality of man by means of mythical
mimesis, and gave a place to metaphor in this mythic-poetical discourse. It
is from this model of poetic function the new concept of metaphorical truth
germinates.
The Rule of Metaphor may be read as, in the first place, an effort to overcome
the word-focused conception of metaphor in the rhetorical tradition, and,
secondly, as an elaboration of the aristotelian idea of a poetic redescription
of reality. In the terms of the two points formulated above, the linguistic part
of Aristotle’s theory which tied metaphor to the word is rejected, whereas the
idea of a poetical reference to new dimensions of truth is expanded.
The first decisive step in Ricœur’s theory moves from the rhetorical tradition to an understanding of metaphor within a semantics of discourse. It is the
step from a ’substitution theory’ of metaphor to an ’interaction theory’ or ’theory
of tension’.
The Traditional Conception of Metaphor
Inspired by Aristotle a long rhetorical tradition focused on the word as the
place where metaphor occurs. According to Aristotle’s definition, metaphor is
the transposition of one world for another (epiphora). Thing A is referred to
35
36
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
with the unexpected word B’ instead of with its proper name A’. As everything
has its proper name (A is called A1 ), and every word has its literal meaning
(A1 belongs to A, B 1 to B), the word B 1 is used improperly—figuratively. The
metaphor is thus primarily a case of denomination, of substituting a figuratively
used word for a literally used one. The ’raison’ of this substitution is resemblance: there is something in B 1 that has affinity to something in A. In fact,
instead of B 1 the proper name for this ’something’ might as well have been
used. As a consequence the rhetorical theory holds that a metaphor is understood as soon as man has found ’the proper term for which an improper term
has been substituted’. The metaphor can be translated, for the proper name
can be restored.6 J.J.A. Mooij expands on this theme: “According to the substitution view [...] it is always possible to devise an expression which would
be literal and equivalent to the metaphorical expression when put in its place”
(Mooij, 1976, p. 87). In fact metaphor, thus conceived, only functions as an
embellishment. It has to decorate discourse, to make it more vivid, expressive
or persuasive.
In the rhetorical view, metaphor does not provide any new or special
information. It only says what it says in a special way. This denial of any
revelatory power is the weakest point of this view. According to Ricœur the
basic mistake is that the meaning of a word is defined as a lexicographical
fact, as if a word only has one literal meaning and becomes a metaphor when
used in another way. In reality meaning is, as has been said before, a fact of
discourse, of language in action.7 Metaphorical meaning is not an “accident in
denomination” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 49), but should be understood as a result of
the “interanimation of words in the living utterance” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 79).
Productive Tension
Study three of The Rule of Metaphor: Metaphor and the semantics of discourse, develops this central thesis. Ricœur here links up with I.A. Richards, Max Black
6
7
“[S]ubstitution plus restitution equals zero” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 49).
Cf. Wittgenstein’s assertion in PU, §43: ’[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language’.
The Traditional Conception of Metaphor
and Monroe Beardsley. In their view, metaphor originates from the interaction
of the different semantic fields to which words of the sentence belong. In one
utterance ’two thoughts of different things’ are, as Richards says, ’active together’, and the meaning of the utterance ’is the resultant of their interaction’.
This means that the metaphor “holds together within one simple meaning two
different missing parts of different contexts of meaning.” Richards called these
parts of the metaphor the tenor (its specific theme or underlying idea) and the
vehicle (the image used to ’carry’ this tenor). Both suggest a context of associations of their own. The tension of these contexts engenders the metaphor.
This prevents one from “talking about tenor apart from the figure, and from
treating the vehicle as an added ornament”. Metaphor results from the clash
of two incompatible lines of thought.
When Ricœur thus takes his starting-point in a semantics of discourse, a
question arises. Is he correct in stating that metaphors stem from a tension
within a sentence? This is apparently true in, for instance, Black’s example
’the chairman plowed through the discussion’. The context suggested by
’chairman’ and ’discussion’ clashes with that suggested by ’plowing’. The
general idea of the sentence (the tenor) is to say something about the way in
which a person leads a meeting; this is expressed by means of a word from
another category, ’to plow’ (the vehicle). In Black’s terms the tension is one
between the frame of the sentence (which speaks about leadership) and the
focus (plowing, which expresses the character of this lead; it is on this word that
the metaphorical process focuses). There is a tension here between semantic
fields. But are there not sentences in which there is no apparent tension and
which are nevertheless metaphorical? In ’the shepherd watches over his flock’
there is no conflict between the common meanings of the words. But it is easy
to imagine a context in which there is no question of a real shepherd or flock. Is
it not right to call the sentence metaphorical in such an instanciation? Are there
not sentences in which the metaphorical process does not focus on the tension
between one word and the rest, but in which “all the suitable descriptive
words are metaphorical” (Mooij, 1976, p. 24)? It does not seem right to
understand metaphor only from the opposition of words within a sentence.
37
38
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
Is this to say that we should understand metaphor after all primarily as a
case of denomination, of substitution of improper names for the proper ones?
Could we not rather say with van Es: “a metaphor is a case of ’nominating’
[...]. A metaphor is not necessarily an unusual combination of words, but an
unusual use of a word” (van Leeuwen, 1981, p. 97, fn. 91). However, Ricœur
seems to be right in taking the tension of tenor and vehicle within a sentence
as the paradigm of the metaphorical process. In a later stage this functioning
of tension will be recognized in units of speech larger than the sentence. The
sentence about the shepherd is then recognized as metaphorical because of the
tension between the semantic fields of its words and the context of discourse.
Making Sense: Linguistic Impertinence
Metaphor is “a semantic event that takes place at the point where several semantic fields intersect”. The metaphorical utterance is characterized by “semantic impertinance”.8 When its words are taken according to their currently
accepted meanings the sentence is paradoxical. It will remain nonsensical unless it is interpreted in a new, metaphorical way. ’A metaphor does not exist
in itself, but in and through an interpretation’ (Ricœur, 1976, p. 50). Metaphor, conceived as a dissonance between words, cannot be dissociated from
an interpretation that intends to reduce dissonance, and which transforms the
sentence from an absurd contradiction into a “meaningful self-contradiction”.
The work of interpretation is then to find that sphere of meaning in which the
hitherto incompatible words generate a new sense so that this unusual network of interactions becomes meaningful. This search for a a new dimension
of meaning may be compared to the resolution of an enigma (Ricœur, 1976, p.
52), (Ricœur, 1991, p. 107). This turns the metaphor into “the central problem
of hermeneutics”:9 it offers the paradigm for the work of interpretation as an
’interplay’ of ’guess’ and ’validation’.
A real ’live’ metaphor requires interpretation. This becomes all the more
8
9
J. Cohen, cf. (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 131-2)
Cf. the article of that name.
The Traditional Conception of Metaphor
apparent from a comparison with a third type of metaphors in which Ricœur
distinguishes between the live and dead metaphors.10 This third type is that
of the trivial metaphors (Ricœur, 1991, p. 107). These are not novel and do
not require special interpretation, but they carry some informative value all
the same. In Black’s example: ’man is a wolf’, ’wolf’ evokes qualities which
are without difficulty associated with qualities of man. One does not really
need to question what qualities respectively a wolf and a man have an in which
surprising way they may have been compared. However this metaphor is not
a dead one, for it is not common speech to call man a wolf. It is not exactly
a live one either, because it functions by means of what Black calls a ’system
of associated commonplaces’ (Black, 1962). What is meant is easily grasped,
and yet this trivial metaphor gives some information that is not expressed by
completely common combinations of words.
As contrasted with trivial metaphors, novel metaphors need interpretation. They are not easily understood from common associations. One has to
question what new association has been made. The real metaphor initiates a
’leap’ into a new dimension of meaning.
The crucial question now is: from where does this dimension of meaning
come? According to the rhetorical tradition, the basis of metaphor is resemblance: a word can be used metaphorically because of a resemblance between
one of its established connotations and some aspect of the designated thing.
As a consequence the metaphorical word can be replaced by a literal one once
the point of resemblance is found. As an advocate of an interaction-theory
Ricœur rejects this concept of resemblance. Metaphor as an instantaneous semantic event cannot be understood from the established connotations of the
words used. This is not to say that Ricœur rejects resemblance completely as
a clue for understanding metaphors. But the work of resemblance11 has to be
redefined.
In Ricœur’s view a metaphorical statement indicates resemblance between
categories that were hitherto distinct. Things that until that moment were "far
10
Dead metaphors are those which have been repeated so frequently that they became part
of the standard language of a linguistic community, i.e. part of the polysemy of a word.
11
Used as title of the sixth study of The Rule of Metaphor
39
40
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
apart" suddenly appear as "closely related". A kinship is brought to light that
was neither seen nor expressed before. So Ricœur agrees with Aristotle that
to ’metaphorize’ implies the “perception of the similarities in dissimilarities”.
But he stresses that this similarity was not already implied in the words but
is disclosed in the sentence. “Good metaphors are those which institute a
resemblance more than those which simply register them” (Ricœur, 1975, p.
79).
Metaphors are, to quote Jüngel, “ausgesprochene Entdeckungen” (Jüngel,
1974, p. 104). The expression is ambiguous. Metaphors are real discoveries
and their discovery is bound to specific moments of speech. As a consequence
a metaphor, contrary to what rhetorics supposes, is untranslatable. It refuses
to be paraphrased minutely, while its discovery is bound to a certain tense
construction of discourse.
So the metaphor exists in a dialectics of difference and identity, incompatibility and sameness. The newly discovered resemblance does not rule out the
initial absurdity, but is bound to it in a paradoxical way. The “similar” is perceived despite difference, in spite of contradiction. The tension is not only one
between conflicting semantic fields, or between a literal and a metaphorical
interpretation, but it is eventually one between an apparent incongruity and a
newly discovered likeness. Such is the logical structure of metaphor.12
Metaphor and Discourse
Ricœur contends that the semantics of discourse must acknowledge a distinction between the sense of an expression and its reference. Thus, following this
Fregean distinction in a Strawsonian or Wittgensteinian direction, Ricœur proposes that an expression has reference only in its use. Whether an expression
succeeds or fails to refer depends upon the particular circumstances in which
the act of discourse is performed, and not upon some aspect of the propositional content alone. If the referent of an expression or narrative is sought as
a denotation in a strict sense, Ricœur’s theory dictates that all reference must
12
Cf. (Ricœur, 1994, p. 247) for these three applications of the theory of tension.
Metaphor and Reference
41
neccessarily fail.
The metaphor, which Ricœur posits on the level of the sentence, is
not a unit of substitution, a placeholder for another denotation. Rather it
represents—through a tension in the sentence—a linguistic collapse which
renders a meaningful construction impossible.
The metaphoric potential
present can be realized through a constructing explanation, where new meaning is created through actual linguistic innovation. A metaphor is thus characterized by Ricœur as a potential—not a unit—and it is realized only in and
through the constructing interpretation.
Indeed, semantic innovation is the tool Ricœur employs to separate structural method from its ideology and subsequently graft it onto a phenomenological hermeneutic.
The figure of speech which we classify as metaphor would be at
the origin of all semantic fields, since to contemplate the similar or
the same—and we know now that the similar is also the same—is
to grasp the genus, but not yet as genus; to grasp the same in the
difference, and not yet as above or beside the difference. To grasp
the kinship in any semantic field is the work of the metaphoric
process at large.
— (Ricœur, 1991)
Metaphor and Reference
Theoretical interest in recent years has focused on where to locate
these thoughts, ideas, images, and so forth, that a good metaphor
brings to mind. That is where the parallel with literature, and
literary understanding, arises again, particularly in debates about
the status (objectivity, etc.) of interpretation.
— Paul Ricœur
Thus far metaphor has been described as an event within language. What
information does it provide about the world? What dimension of our beingin-the-world is opened up by this paradox in discourse? What is its truthclaim? After the transition from a rhetorical to a tensional theory of metaphor,
the transition from the question of the immanent sense to that of the outward
reference is the second decisive step in (Ricœur, 1994). This step is taken in the
42
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
seventh study, Metaphor and Reference. It should be noted that, whereas the
semantics of metaphor focused on the sentence, the question of reference leads
the attention back to the larger units of discourse. A singular sentence does
not ”open up a world”. “If the metaphorical statement is to have a reference,
it is through the mediation of the ’poem’ as an ordered, generic, and singular
totality” (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 221-2).
Here we find the relation between Ricœur’s theories of metaphor and text.
The theory of the text revealed the existential-phenomenological function
of language, namely that of projecting a world. Metaphor is the preferred
strategy of a specific type of texts, the poetic ones. “It is the poetic work as
a whole, the poem, that projects a world” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 243). The poem
does so with the help of metaphors. The theory of metaphor is a theory of the
poetic work. In fact, this theory of poetics is intended to bring to light a more
general function. As ’writing’ served as a paradigm to the existential function
of language, so the poem is the paradigm of its poetic function. The tendency of
the theory of the text is thus reinforced by that of metaphor.
Split Reference
According to Ricœur, the poem suppresses direct reference to the world. In a
certain sense it “abolishes reality” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 222). But this abolishment
may be compared to the Husserlian project of destroying the world: it is a
destruction which intends to establish a new way of relating to the world.13
Ricœur’s thesis is that “the suspension of reference in the sense defined by the
norms of descriptive discourses is the negative condition of the appearance
of a more fundamental mode of reference, whose explication is the task of
interpretation” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 229). It is true that metaphorical-poetic
language does not have a reference that can be compared to that discourse
which describes the world objectively. But the reduction (or destruction) of
the world-as-it-is, is the condition for a new approach. The ordinary referential
power of discourse is suspended in order to allow a “second-order-reference”
13
Cf. (Ricœur, 1976, p. 59)
Metaphor and Reference
43
to come into force.14
When we receive a metaphorical statement as meaningful, we perceive both the literal meaning which is bound by the semantic incongruity, and the new meaning which makes sense in the present
context. Metaphor is a clear case where polysemy is preserved instead of being screened. Two lines of interpretation are opened at
the same time and several readings are allowed together and put
into tension.
— (Ricœur, 1991, p. 83)
Ricœur’s thesis applies his understanding of metaphorical meaning as a
tension between a literal, absurd meaning and a new, metaphorical one, to
metaphorical reference. Behind its first reference which ’abolishes’ the normal
world, metaphor hides a second reference which is informative in a new way.
It is not only a ’provocation’ as regards the literal meaning of words, but also
as regards our common vision on reality. Wallace Stevens is cited by Hawkes
(1972) as saying: “Reality is a cliché we escape by metaphor”.
Ricœur (1994) compares this work of metaphorical redescription with the
functioning of art in general and with that of the scientific model. With Nelson
Goodman he says that art reorganizes, remakes reality. A painting does not only
express emotions. It also reveals qualities of the world; it projects a world on
a level beyond objectivity. A grey painting invites us to look at the depicted
thing—which, in fact, may not be grey at all—from a specific angle and to see
its grey quality. This quality is not just emotional: it is an aspect of this thing
(Ricœur, 1994, pp. 234-5). In the same way metaphor re-describes reality. It
applies labels and schemas to things that, by the standard of ordinary speech,
do not fit each other. The grey picture is said to be ’sad’. This is logically
absurd—a picture cannot be sad, nor a landscape cheerful. Yet it expresses
something that is no less real than the visible greyness. Like art, metaphor
does not merely ’copy’ reality, nor does it only express an emotion. It has an
explorative, heuristic function, in that it discovers new qualities of reality.
A second comparison is made between metaphors and scientific models,
following the argument of Black (1962). The model is a heuristic instrument
14
Cf. (Ricœur, 1976, pp. 67-8)
44
The Tensional Conception of Metaphor
describing certain better known structures of reality, in order to make their
description a source for new hypothesses on what is lesser known. “Scientific
imagination consists in seeing new connections via the detour of the thing
that is ’described”’ (Ricœur, 1994, pp. 241-2). An imaginary device helps to
uncover new interpretations of reality. This power of discovery is, again, the
point of comparison with the metaphor. Like a model a metaphor uses images
which are well-known from one domain and transfers them to another in
order to explore unknown relations of meaning. “Metaphor and model reveal
new relationships” (Black, 1962, p. 238).
Ricœur’s reflection on the referential power of metaphor finally takes
him to the Aristotelean idea of poetics as a redescription of reality.
Poetics
is an imitation—mimèsis—of human reality by means of tragedies, stories
(Ricœur, 1994, pp. 244-5). It does not describe reality in an ordinary way,
it is fiction; mythos. But this very fiction brings to light structures of life
that are more essential than those revealed by ordinary discourse. Poetry
redescribes life at “a higher level”, by means of the tension which is created
between ordinary life and fiction. This tension between poetry and reality
is, on a larger scale, what the tension between the poetic metaphor and
reality is “in miniature”. Ricœur writes: “[Metaphor] takes part in the double
tension that characterizes this imitation: submission to reality and fabulous
invention, unaltering representation and ennobling elevation. This double
tension constitutes the referential function of metaphor in poetry” (Ricœur,
1994, p. 40). Metaphor instructs and enables man to look at his reality in a new
way so that he detects deeper structures and higher possibilities of life.
The Ontology of Metaphor
Ricœur (1994) draws far-reaching conclusions from his key concept of tension.
At the level of ’meaning’ the tension is one between an incompatibility of
meanings and a newly discovered identity. This tension is found in the
referential function of metaphor as well. It cannot be verified objectively that a
thing ’is’ as metaphor says it to be, but in spite of the ’is not’ metaphor reveals
Metaphor and Reference
qualities of reality that ’are’ for the one who looks at reality in a new way. Thus,
Ricœur posits, “the ’place’ of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode,
is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the
verb to be” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 7).
The ’is’ does not only bring incompatible words into a new relation of
meaning. The function of the copula is ontological: the expression claims to
say something on what nature is. But in this ’is’, the tension of identity and
difference remains. Thus Ricœur reaches a concept of metaphorical truth which
“preserves the ’is now’ within the ’is”’ (Ricœur, 1994, p. 249), a truth which
includes “the critical incision of the (literal) ’is not’ within the ontological
vehemence of the (metaphorical) ’is”’ (Ricœur, 1994, p. 255). Making the
literal ’is not’ absolute, however, would cause the claim that metaphor refers
to reality to be forgotten. Then scientific language would be the only one
that really explores the structures of the real world, turning the world of
poetry into a fictive, unreal one. A second naïveté acknowledges the claim of
metaphor to re-describe in its own, secondary way ’what is’ beyond the critical
demythologization of the literal ’is’ (cf. Ricœur, 1994, 253).
45
Chapter
4
The Validity of Interpretations
For the sake of a didactic exposition of the dialectic of explanation and understanding, as phases of a unique process, I propose
to describe this dialectic first as a move from understanding to explaining and then as a move from explanation to comprehension.
The first time, understanding will be a naïve grasping of the meaning of the text as a whole. The second time, comprehension will
be a sophisticated mode of understanding, supported by explanatory procedures. In the beginning, understanding is a guess. At the
end, it satisfies the concept of appropriation, which was described
[. . . ] as the rejoinder to the kind of distanciation linked to the full
objectification of the text. Explanation, then, will appear as the mediation between two stages of understanding. If isolated from this
concrete process, it is a mere abstraction, an artifact of methodology.
— (Ricœur, 1976, p. 74)
Ricœur’s points of departure in his treatises on hermeneutics are the
two distinctions of classical hermeneutical history, namely Dilthey’s division
between the explaining nature of the natural sciences and the understanding
nature of the social and humanistic sciences, and the Gadamerian dichotomy
of alienating distanciation and belonging. His theory seeks to integrate explanation and understanding in a constructive dialectic which is rooted in the
properties of the text.
48
The Validity of Interpretations
Departing forcefully from the Romanticist hermeneutical tradition’s search
for the authorial intention, Ricœur explores a very different concept of understanding, more resonant with the Gadamerian and Heideggerian existensiale,
where understanding is a mode of being rather than an activity possible to
make explicit object of an inquiry.
Leave the problematic of existensial understanding and its importance for
the next chapter, I shall join Ricœur in an attempt at showing the possibility of
having a methodology of interpretation without giving up claims of reference
to a world, and in this showing how distanciation in the Gadamerian sense
of Verfremdung is constitutive to the interpretative process. The aspect of
reference is rendered problematic by this, however, and is the proper place
for the treatment of understanding in the next chapter.
As a result, the present exposition of the constructing process of explanation will be flawed, since understanding is both a prerequisite for the constructing process itself, and that the understanding process of appropriation
requires an explained whole to be active. I shall attempt to show in these
two chapters how Ricœur operates with two very different concepts of understanding, while still demonstrating a reciprocal codependency between the
processes of explanation and understanding, and I shall attempt to place them
both within the realm demarcated by Gadamer as the locus of the hermeneutic
circle.
However, the treatment of explanation per se will be lacking as a result
until the concepts of reference and existential understanding are covered, so
only in the concluding chapter will a true representation of the hermeneutic
arc emerge. Both the objectivity resulting from it, and the room it carves out
for the activity of literary criticism, can then be evaluated.
The tensional theory of metaphor has a pivotal role in both chapters, as
will become clear. The case of the metaphor parallels the constructing process
of explanation in the resolution of metaphorical meaning, and its tensional
character also shows how the sense arrived at through explanation releases
an excess of signification that unfolds a secondary signification by way of the
primary signification it represents. The paradoxical point that it manages this
The Hermeneutic Dialectic
49
excess of meaning through being constrained through explanation is also a
point most easily grasped through the theory of metaphor.
The Hermeneutic Dialectic
One of the central problems inherited from classical hermeneutics is the alleged irreducible differences between the natural and the human sciences. The
traditional dichotomy between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften
has been on both the epistemological and ontological levels On the epistemological level, the dichotomy is between explanation—in the sense of causal
explanation characteristic of the natural sciences—and understanding, which,
for Dilthey, meant understanding the psychic life of another person through
its manifestations in texts. The epistemological dichotomy is supported by
the ontological claim that the objects of these ways of knowing, Natur and
Geist, are irreducibly different. Another way of stating the dichotomy is to say
that ’explanation’ stands for the claim that there is no epistemological break
between the natural sciences and the human sciences, while ’understanding’
is the flag of the camp which claims that the social sciences are irreducible to
the natural sciences.
How is this important to hermeneutics?
Hermeneutics was taken by
Dilthey to be the method of the social sciences, while explanation was the
method of the natural sciences. For him, any form of explanation was taken
from the domain of the natural sciences and so its use in the social sciences was
illegitimate. Ricœur, in his characteristic way, wants to mediate this dichotomy
and turn it into a dialectic.
His main contention with the Romantic hermeneutics seems to be that the
problem of interpretation is derived not from the incommunicability of the
psychic experience of the author, but because of the very nature of the verbal
intention of the text. The surpassing of this intention by the textual meaning
signifies that understanding takes place in a nonpsychological and properly
semantical space, which “the text has carved out by severing itself from the
mental intention of its author” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 76).
50
The Validity of Interpretations
Against the Intentional Fallacy
The first move Ricœur therefore makes is to reemphasize, against classical hermeneutics, that to understand a text is not to rejoin the author or immediately
grasp his subjective intentions. This means that the text can be construed in
various ways and the author’s intention does not determine ’the correct interpretation’. The fact is that the author can no longer “rescue” his work. His
intention is often unknown to us, sometimes redundant, sometimes useless,
and sometimes even detrimental with regard the interpretation of the verbal
meaning of his work. In the cases where circumstances demand that information about the author be taken into account, effort should be made to incorporate this information “in light of the text itself” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 76).
This is the locus of Ricœur’s branching of erklären and verstehen. If the
objective meaning is something other than the subjective intention of the
author, it may be construed in various ways. When one no longer has a
fixed point of gravitation, so to speak, misunderstanding is possible and
even unavoidable. The problem of the correct understanding can no longer
be solved by a simple return to the perceived or alleged authorial situation.
Hence, even “[t]o construe the meaning as the verbal meaning of the text is to
make a guess” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 76). Verstehen, or understanding, is what E. D.
Hirsch calls the “guess” or the attempt to construe the meaning of the text as
a totality (cf. Hirsch, 1967).
Interpretative Construal as Guessing
The necessity of guessing the meaning of a text is related to the semantic
autonomy ascribed by Ricœur to all textual meaning. In the case of writing,
the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with its mental meaning or
intention. This intention is both fulfilled and abolished by the text, which is no
longer the voice of someone present. The text is mute, and the interpretative
situation thus represents an asymmetric relation between a text and its reader,
wherein one of the partners speaks for the both of them.
Interpretative Construal as Guessing
51
“The text,” Ricœur claims, “is like a musical score and the reader like an
orchestra conductor who obeys the instructions of the notation. Consequently,
to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is
to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has
been objectified.”
In other words, we have to guess at the meaning of the text because the author’s intention is beyond our reach. In fact, as we have already seen, not only
is the author’s intention distanced, but transcended in the act of inscription.
And the resulting semantic autonomy is what enables the subsequent process
of interpretation. Hermeneutics presupposes distanciation.
Transcription is therefore not merely duplication (or reduplication), but a
complete metamorphosis of the message.
Why do we have to construe texts? Not only because of symbols and other
multiple-meaning expressions which the text contains, but also because of the
’plurivocity’ of the text which opens up to several reading or constructions. If,
in this figure of the dialectic, understanding is the ’guess’ or initial attempt to
grasp the text as a whole, erklären, or explanation, is the attempt to validate an
interpretation.
The act of understanding is at first a genial (or a mistaken) guess
and there are no methods for making guesses, no rules for generating insights. The methodological activity of interpretation commences when we begin to test and criticize our guesses.
— (Hirsch, 1967, p. 203)
Validation of Guesses
Validation does not mean, of course, verification. Rather it refers to a process
of falsification and probable reasoning which aims at establishing one interpretation as more probable than another. That a text allows for more than
one interpretation does not mean that all interpretations are equal. ’The logic of validation,’ says Ricœur,’allows us to move between the two limits of
dogmatism and skepticism. It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek
52
The Validity of Interpretations
for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach (Ricœur,
1995b, p. 213).
The elimination of inferior interpretations is not an empirical matter of
verification and proof, but a rational process of argumentation and debate.
Ricœur uses the example of H. L. A. Hart’s account of juridical reasoning
to provide a link between validation in literary criticism and in the social
sciences. The key is the polemical character of validation. Ricœur says:
In front of the court, the plurivocity common to texts and to actions
is exhibited in the form of a conflict of interpretations, and the
final interpretation appears as a verdict to which it is possible to
make appeal. Like legal utterances, all interpretations in the field
of literary cricitism and in the social sciences may be challenged,
and the question ’what can defeat a claim?’ is common to all
argumentative situations. Only in the tribunal is there a moment
when the procedures of appeal are exhausted. But it is because the
decision of the judge is implemented by the force of public power.
Neither in literary criticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such
last word. Or, if there is any, we call that violence.
— (Ricœur, 1995b, p. 215)
The acceptability of an interpretation resides first in the arguments and
evidence that support it, and ultimately in the consensus of those who are
knowledgeable in the area and participate in the debate. This is the rhetorical
element in hermeneutics.
In principle, every interpretation is defeasible (to use Hart’s term), and the
interpretitive results of the regional hermeneutics are not only the rules for
producing an interpretations; they are also the rules for refuting an interpretation. The example of judicial reasoning is especially fitting because the courts
are one of the main intersections of text and action, of words and deeds.
But the dialectic needs to be read inversely, from explanation to understanding. In literary cricitism, the pole of erklären is the structuralist interpretation of the text as a subjectless, closed system with no reference to anything
outside the text. As we have seen, Ricœur grants this kind of structural explanation a very limited legitimacy.
Ricœur’s position is rather that explanation in both the social sciences and
Interpretative Construal as Guessing
in literary criticism serves understanding. Thus empirical and causal explanations are not eliminated from the social sciences any more than structural analyses are eliminated from literary criticism. Both play a limited role within
the dialectic of explanation and understanding. His thesis is that the analogy between text and action calls for a hermeneutic model in the social sciences within which the empirical methods borrowed from the natural sciences
would play a subordinate role.
In his article, “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable
Connections Among the Theory of the Text, Theory of Action, and Theory
of History,” the dialectic of explanation and understanding is more fully developed. He says that in all three fields, a blunt opposition between explanation and understanding developed. He argues for a dialectic. ’By dialectic, I
understand the view that explanation and understanding would not constitute
mutually exclusive poles, but rather relative moments in a complex process
called interpretation.’ (Ricœur, 1978a, p. 150). Ricœur begins with the theory of text because semiotic explanation remains within the domain of signs
within which Dilthey made his plea for Verstehen. Thus it is not the case of an
explanatory method borrowed from the natural sciences.
With respect to the text, a dichotomy is uncovered. On one side stand those
who take the text to be a closed system with only internal relations. Analysis
of the text would exlude any “psychologizing” about the intentions of the
author or the message as received by the reader. For Romantic hermeneutics,
on the other hand, understanding a text means to recreate the intentions of
the author and to reestablish between the author and the reader the kind of
communication which occurs in a face-to-face dialogue.
In place of this dichotomy, Ricœur argues for a dialectic which calls for a
movement from understanding to explanation whenever the dialogical situation no longer occurs. As he has already claimed, the text is always independent from its author, its original references, its situations of production,
and, finally, its original audience. ’Literature,’ Ricœur says, ’in the etymological sense of the word, infinitely exploits this gap and creates a totally different situation from that of dialogical understanding. Reading is not simply a
53
54
The Validity of Interpretations
kind of listening’ (Ricœur, 1978a, p. 153). Thus, explanation is not an alternative to understanding, but is a necessary step in achieving it. Ricœur grants
that structural analysis is perhaps the most developed form of explanation in
literary criticism.
Making Sense—The Function of Explanation
Despite the need for construction of a new sense and a holistic construal of
meaning, the text possesses an inherent plurivocity that allows it to be construed in more ways than one. At the lowest level, that of semiology, this
plurality of possible interpretations has two main sources, namely the polysemy of language, even as an immanent system, and the historical character
of language, whereby the terms that constitute it are able to vary in meaning
over time.
Monotative and Multitative Meaning
In his article “On Different Kinds of Meaning and Discourse” (Pedersen, 1999),
Arild Pedersen attempts a characterization of two different kinds of meaning
on the basis of their properties as given. He proposes a phenomenological
description of different types of meaning, one of multiplicity, and the other one
of constraint of polysemy.
He claims that his strategy is both descriptive and normative. Descriptive
in the sense that it explains (or describes) the phenomological characteristics of
the two modes as givens in a situation of actualization (though only one of the
two modes displays the characteristics of an ’event’), whereas the analysis is
normative in the sense that it describes how such different objects (meaningtransmitting objects) should (could?) be accurately interpreted, according to
their different natures.
As we shall see, if the conceptual pair is remapped onto Ricœur’s interpretational theory, a slightly different topography emerges (but nonetheless
one which seems to be true to the underlying idea behind the dichotomy),
Making Sense—The Function of Explanation
granting a valuable pair of conceptual tools for use in an analysis and critique
of Ricœur’s project. As shall be demonstrated, they especially help to shed
some light on the theme of explanation.
We should already be familiar with the concepts of denotative and connotative meaning(s). Pedersen passes beyond this schism by pointing out that
even denotative meaning is an ideal structure, achieved though “abstraction
or suppression of connotative meanings”. A view more in tune with Ricœur’s
theory of polysemy, then, is the conception of ’monotative meaning’, wherein
restraints appear in the dynamic multiplicity of a sign, constraining the polysemy and allowing “mastery of a single meaning over subordinate connotative
meanings (. . . ) to such an extent that they become virtually invisible”.
A further adjustment opens monotative meaning further, claiming its dominant meaning need not be denotative, but can also be “emotive”. Though the
concept of emotive meaning in this context may prove a freshly opened can
of worms, the widening of focus beyond purely denotative meaning is necessary to be able to account for literary meaning through this model on a general
basis.
“What makes meaning monotative,” says Pedersen, “is that there is one
such mono-meaning dominating over other meanings.”
In the opposite concept, “multitative meaning”, no single meaning rules
predominantly over other, suppressed meanings. The abstract, hierarchical
suppression of meanings is relaxed, allowing the multiplicity of connoted
meanings to stand forth simultaneously.
Some meanings may still play a central role within this internal multiplicity
of meanings. The main shift is in the internal relationship within the meaningcarrying constituents or aspects of the symbol, which shifts from one of
mastery and constraint to one of contact or communion and synergy (network
effects).
The “individual” meanings are allowed room to be individually identified,
or, as in Pedersens words, they are “on an equal level, giving room to each
other,” so they may “appear as themselves within this multitude.”
The presentation of this multitudous meaning thus allows for an accur-
55
56
The Validity of Interpretations
ate presentation of polysemic tokens or signs in language, where synergistical
effects keeps them dynamic through a continual potential interplay, as Pedersen puts it, “interplay in a counter point-like way so as to make new qualities
emerge”.
Here the remapping of the terminology must depart from Pedersen’s conception of these two kinds of meaning, for it is clear that he intends both kinds
to be actualized meanings, rather than a potential and an actualized form.
In Ricœur’s interpretational theory, language as polysemy is language as
virtuality, the well from whence meaning is poured back into reality. As language is clothed in the guise of discourse, and is realized as event, the multiplicity of meaning is constricted, and thus in actualization, this time through
the shaping of the speaker’s intention and other circumstances, constricts the
potentiality for meaning, and leaves discourse in a mode of meaning which
can only be monotative.
When discourse becomes writing, however, these constraints are weakened
through the effects of distanciation up to the point where it loses its grip on the
written discourse.
It follows, then, that the text—written discourse—is a very special case
with regard to meaning. Its meaning is shaped through structure, but has lost
its constraint, and is thus returned to an actualized yet multitative meaning,
which has lost its character as event, and gained that of artefact. Thus it is
necessarily subject to interpretation.
Unlike Pedersen, I choose to conceive of multitative and monotative meaning as modes of meaning, rather than as kinds.
Two different tasks of interpretation are then demanded from the structural
analysis or process of explanation (construal); first, to make sense of the text
as a whole through the constraining of polysemy of its parts, the process
of establishing monotative meaning on the basis of a presented multitative
meaning. Through this process of explanation, the/a structure of the work
is uncovered, rendering a structural explanation and inferring or implying a
depth semantics of the text.
Secondly, the analysis must account for the poetic language of the text,
Making Sense—The Function of Explanation
57
which presents itself as linguistic impertinences defying explanation withing
the existing configuration of language. It necessitates, therefore, a linguistic innovation and a contributing to the constrained monotative meaning a multitative addition which refuses subsumption into the existing monotativity whilst
not crumbling the existing structure, since the meaning is new and a result of
the structure rather than a threat to it.
Construal as Constriction
The function of explanation in the case of metaphors does not consist in
a substitution of the metaphorical expression, but in a construction.
The
decisive moment in the process of explaining arises when the interpreter has
constructed a web of connections within the reading context, constituting it as
actual and unique, and restoring to it a character of event. This semantic event
takes place in the intersection between the semantic fields upon which the
interpreter has drawn. Through this construction, being the means whereby
the words as a whole make sense, the metaphorical twist becomes an event
and simultaneously a meaning, a meaningful event and an emergent meaning
in language.
This constituting element is the fundamental feature of explanation which
makes the metaphor paradigmatic to the explanation of a literary work. We
construct the meaning of a text in a way similar to that of giving meaning to
all the terms in a metaphorical expression—through building a web of possibilities on the basis of guesses and assumptions, until a releasing breakthrough
lets the different pieces, having until now seemed incompatible, fall into place.
In a semiotic sense, the web has the function of constraint on the operative
symbols or terms of the text, forcing them to act upon each other and at the
same time constrain each others’ potentiality for polysemy and mesh into a
richer web of meaning.
Ricœur points out the text’s status as a work, a singular whole, as an
element necessitating the process of construction. Qua whole, the literary work
is not reducible to sentences which are individually understandable. It consists
58
The Validity of Interpretations
rather of an architecture of themes and purposes which lend themselves to
different ways of construction, where the relationship between the whole and
the part necessarlily is circular. The interpretative movement of the work as a
whole presupposes the dis-covering of a given construction of parts. And it is
by constructing the details—i.e. the metaphors—that we construct the whole.
Understanding of a text at its expression of Sinn, sense, is to Ricœur
strictly homogenous with the understanding of metaphorical expressions.
In both cases there is a making-sense-of, a question of producing as great a
comprehensibility as possible from a multiplicity seemingly full of internal
opposition or inconsistency. Construction rests, in both cases, on the threads
contained in the text itself.
These lead the further construction in given
directions, and at the same time closes off other venues as no longer valid.
The seemingly problematic aspect of the constructionist model of explanation consists in one of the points already mentioned, namely the possibility
for several different and mutually exclusive explanatory construnctions based
on the same text. Ricœur replies that it is possible to discern between the
probability of different constructions, but not to say that one of them is more
true than the others. The most likely construction is the one which on the one
side accounts for the largest number of facts presented by the text, including
its potential connotations, and on the other hand offers a qualitatively better
match between the features it brings into account. The consideration of such
constructions will have the form of a debate or argumentation, not one of empirical verification and display of evidence.
Thus is the movement from understanding to explanation brought to
fulfilment.
From Sense to Understanding
But the movement must also go in the other direction, from explanation to
understanding. For why would we be interested in an explanation—any kind
of information of a text including structural analysis—if it were not to lead
back to understanding the text? The texts we explain belong to a tradition
The Role of Literary Criticism
59
which defines a cultural community. We come to understand ourselves and
our community by understanding the definitive texts which constitute that
community. But, Ricœur is quick to add, this does not mean that we fall back
in the trap of psychologism. It is not the psychic life of the author lying behind
the text that we seek to understand. It is the world of the text, the possible
wrld projected by the text, a world which is “redescribed and refashioned” by
the text.
What a reader receives is not just the sense of the work, but,
through its sense, its reference, that is, the experience it brings to
language and, in the last analysis, the world and the temporality it
unfolds in the face of this experience.
— (Ricœur, 1988, pp. 78-9)
In this quote from Time and Narrative, Ricœur makes explicit in the mode
of reception a split between sense and reference also with regard to meaning.
The Role of Literary Criticism
To interpret. . . is to appropriate here and now the intention of the
text. . . the intended meaning of the text is not essentially the presumed intention of the author, the lived experience of the writer,
but rather what the text means for whoever complies with its injuction. The text seeks to place us in its meaning, that is—according
to another conception of the word sens—in the same direction. So
if the intention is that of the text and if this intention is the direction which it opens up for thought, the depth semantics must be
understood in a fundamentally dynamic way. I shall therefore say:
to explain is to bring out the structure, that is the internal relations
of dependence which constitute the statics of the text; to interpret
is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route towards the orient of the text.
— (Ricœur, 1995e, pp. 161-62)
Literary criticism is left not only with a goal in Ricœur’s theory, it also has a
general methodological road to follow. The initial dialectical situation between
text and reader is the one of the conflict between the forces of distanciation
proper to the text and those of appropriation belonging to the reader. Out of
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The Validity of Interpretations
this conflict the creative gain in metaphorical meaning is produced. Literary
criticism is not accidental, it is neither a subjective intuition of the poem nor a
search for the historical clue to the true meaning of the text.
The stress here is rather on configuration, that is, the second classification
of mimesis of the threefold mimesis Ricœur presents in Time and Narrative.
Configuration is the realm of the world of the work itself. It is an inquiry
into the mode of organization, of composition of that world that looms as the
necessary task. In other words, it is the analysis of the very principle of internal
order that gives the work its unity and identity and that is, of course, the object
of all formal inquiry. The only notable difference between this mode of inquiry
and the many valuable formalist approaches of narratology, is that in this case,
this is one phase in the process of interpretation that will not attain its final goal
until the refiguration of the reader is considered in Ricœur’s third definition
of mimesis. The examination of textual configuration proceeds through a
dialectic of inquiry. The two levels of inquiry are the organizational structure
of the work and the world-making which emerges from the work. This is not
a mere recasting of the form-content bifurcation of traditional criticism, for
Ricœur is arguing for interaction, not for separation. With structure the critic
moves from the parts toward a total organization, and with world-making
from a unitary understanding toward an illumination of the parts.
Rather than a transposition of meaning from author to reader’s reader
to reader, literary criticism becomes a process, a movement back and forth
between text and critic for the benefit of the critic and all those who share in the
textual commentary. There can be no completion to the interpretive process,
but only a temporary pause necessary to allow another player to enter the
court. This does not mean that there is no sense of truth or of knowledge in the
interpretive process, for the very goal of interpretation must be to share one’s
insights with others. But what this theory does mean is that there can be no
valid claim to definitive meaning of the text, for this claim would kill the text,
would remove it from the process and render it consumed and empty. Nor
can a critic substitute the reconstituted historicity of the text for the text itself.
The historical context of the text must be inserted into the dialectic process
The Role of Literary Criticism
61
of interpretation as part of the thrust of explanation. Similarly the formal
considerations of a text are not the text itself, but only one factor among many
that are needed to move the analytic structure of the text into an engagement
with the intentional unity of the text as the essential feature of understanding.
The driving force behind the desire to know is the need to make the world
over in terms that are meaningful. This is the polar force of the reader’s appropriation. On the other side the thought of another when separated from that
other by writing and thus forced to stand alone comes to me as otherness, as
an alien and disturbing view of the world. If I choose to engage the otherness
as constituted by a text I have entered into the struggle between appropriation and distanciation. The theory of phenomenological hermeneutics is the
theory of the productive engagement between text and reader as a process of
redescribing the world, my world first, and the worlds of others subsequently.
This interpretive process begins with the analytic power of explanation and
is then challenged by the unitary force of understanding. The engagement of
explanation and understanding will thus produce the interpretation which in
return responds to the initial need to engage distanciation and appropriation.
Literature is consequently the corpus of texts that have the capacity to promote
the redescription of the world in their readers.
Interpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of
being—or if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new forms of
life—gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself. If the
reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader
who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his
capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from
the text itself.
— (Ricœur, 1976, 94)
Chapter
5
Reference and Meaning
Reversing the Arc
The interpretation of a text cannot rest with a structural study no matter
how well done. On the contrary, the structural analysis is only the starting
point. At this stage, the interpretation has yet to reach past the level of
textuality, and strive towards what the text is about—the realm of hermeneutic
understanding proper, on the level of appropriation. Yet in order to apply his
semantic theory of imagination beyond the realm of discourse, Ricœur must
show how even in a metaphorical utterance we refer, by and beyond words, to
the ’reality’ of the ’world’.
Metaphor has thus far been described as an event within language. What
information does it provide about the world? What dimensions of our beingin-the-world is opened up by this paradox in discourse? What is its truthclaim? After the transition from a rhetorical to a tensional theory of metaphor,
the transition from the question of a text’s immanent sense to that of its
outward reference requires consideration. Does the dynamic and semantically
productive new model of metaphor have ramifications for literary reference?
This study is attempted by Ricœur in the seventh study of The Rule of Metaphor,
entitled Metaphor and Reference.
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Reference and Meaning
Metaphoric Reference
It should be noted that, whereas the semantics of metaphor focused on the
sentence, the question of reference leads attention back to the larger units of
discourse. A singular sentence does not by itself have the potential to break
free from the restraints of textuality and burst forth into the world of the
interpreter. The possibility for a direct, literal reference retreats as a result of
distanciation. If the metaphorical statement is to have a reference, it is through
the mediation of the literary work or poem as an ordered, generic and singular
totality.
We find here the relation in Ricœur’s theories between the levels of metaphor and text. The theory of the text reveals an existential function of language,
namely that of projecting a world. Metaphor is the preferred stategy of a specific type of texts, namely the poetic ones. ’It is the poetic work as a whole, the
poem, that projects a world’ (Ricœur, 1994, p. 243). The poem does so with
the help of metaphors. The theory of metaphor is on this level a theory of poetic language as actualized in the poetic work. In fact, this theory of poetics
is intended to bring to light a more general function. As ’writing’ served as
a paradigm of the ’spiritual’ or existential function of language, so the poem
is the paradigm of its poetic function. The tendency of the theory of the text is
thus reinforced by that of metaphor.
The step across the threshold of reference is a decisive one. It is not too
much to speak of a decision, for it is not self-evident that metaphorical-poetic
language should have a reference. Ricœur has to deal with objections raised
by a current in contemporary literary criticism. According to it the poem has
only an inner constitution. It constitutes a closed world in itself, without any
outward reference. Language is used as a material worked on for its own
sake. The critics Ricœur has in mind are not in the first place structuralists,
but æstheticians who conceive the poem as ’a prolonged oscillation between
between sense and sound’, going nowhere like a dance. The informative power
of poetry is reduced to zero in favour of its evocative power. It expresses—
Metaphoric Reference
according to Northrop Frye—a mood, and evokes a mood. Its movement is
not outward towards a world, but inward towards a state of the soul.
Ricœur argues that the presupposition of this conception is in fact a positivistic one: all language that is not descriptive, in the sense of giving information
about facts, must be emotional. The choice for poetry as a language of pure interiority is the reverse of the positivistic rejection of all non-objective language.
According to Ricœur the poem does, indeed, supress direct reference to
the world. In a certain sense it ’abolishes’ reality. But this abolishment may be
compared with the Husserlian project of destroying the world: it is a destruction
which intends to establish a new way of relating to the world. Ricœur’s thesis
is that ’the suspension of reference in the sense defined by the norms of
descriptive discourse is the negative condition of the appearance of a more
fundamental mode of reference, whose explication is the task of interpretation.
It is true that metaphorical-poetic language does not have a reference that
can be compared to that discourse which describes the world objectively. But
the reduction (destruction) of the world-as-it-is, is the condition for a new
approach. The ordinary referential power of discourse is suspended in order
to allow a ’second-order-referance’ to come into force.
Ricœur’s thesis consists in the application of his understanding of metaphorical meaning—as a tension between a literal, absurd meaning and a new,
metaphorical one—to metaphorical reference. As the primary, direct reference
fails to counteract distanciation, the normal world is ’abolished’. But behind
the literal reference, metaphor hides a secondary, indirect reference, whose
potential is of an altogether different nature. Thanks to the receding of the
primary reference, the second is disclosed. It is not only a ’provocation’In the
words of Lacan. as regards that literal meaning of words, but also as regards our
common vision on reality. Reality is a cliché which we escape by metaphor.
My contention now is that one of the functions of imagination is
to give a concrete dimension to the suspension proper to split reference. Imagination does not merely schematize the predicative assimilation between terms by its synthetic insight into similarities;
nor does it merely picture the sense thanks to the display of images
aroused and controlled by the cognitive process. Rather, it contrib-
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Reference and Meaning
utes to the suspension of ordinary reference and to the projection of
new possibilities of redescribing the world. . . . Image as absence is
the negative side of image as fiction. . . . Fiction addresses itself to
deeply rooted potentialities of reality to the extent that they are absent from the actualities with which we deal in everyday life under
the mode of empirical control and manipulation.
— (Ricœur, 1978b, pp. 154-55)
Split Reference
Ricœur suggests that the expression ’split reference’ adequately conveys the
full understanding of the referential function of metaphor. Poetic language
is no less about reality than any other use of language but refers to it by the
means of a complex strategy. This strategy implies a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.
This suspension, however, is only the negative condition of a second-order
reference, an indirect reference built on the ruins of the direct reference. But
this second-order reference appears as such only with respect to the primacy
of reference of ordinary language, which obeys our interest for control, manipulation, pragmatic activities. This ’second-order reference’ is actually our
fundamental, first-order reference, and expresses our ontological belonging to
life, to beings, to the world, to Being.
The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does
not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous. The doublesensed message finds correspondence in a split addresser, in a split
addressee, and what is more, in a split reference, as is cogently
exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of various people, for
instance, in the usual exortation of the Majorca story tellers: it was
and it was not.
— (Ricœur, 1978b, p. 152)
This referential concept must take into account the eclipse of a first level of
reference and the emergence of a second level of reference, that is, the concept
of split reference. The task of interpretation demands an understanding of
poetic meaning grounded in the eclipsed literal meaning. Ricœur is saying that
the referential power of poetic discourse is linked to the eclipse of ordinary
The World of the Work
meaning, to the creation of a heuristic fiction, and finally to the redescribed
reality brought to the reader.
The concluding chapter of The Rule of Metaphor brings this argument to fruitition, and indicates the future course of Ricœur’s development in his philosophy of language. The gain in meaning in poetic discourse is inseparable
from the tension not just between the terms of a metaphorical statement, but
also between two levels of interpretation: the literal level, which is restricted to
the established value of words in the lexicon, and a metaphorical level resulting from innovation thrust upon these words in order to make sense of them
in terms of the whole work. The resulting gain in meaning is not yet the conceptual gain of interpretation; it is a kind of semantic shock that produces the
need for interpretation. Because the gain in meaning is caught in the conflict of
’same’ and ’different,’ it is unstable and volatile. This tensional situation of the
split reference is lodged within the copula of the utterance. The ontological
ramifications are fascinating: “Being as (. . . ) means being and not being. In
this way, the dynamism of meaning allowed access to the dynamic vision of
reality which is the implicit ontology of the metaphorical utterance” (Ricœur,
1994, p. 297, my emphasis).
The World of the Work
In order to develop the referential potential of metaphor, Ricœur underlines
the mediating role of the suspension (epoché). This role in the functioning of
the reference in metaphor is in agreement with the interpretation he gives to
the functioning of sense. ’In the same way as the metaphorical sense not only
abolishes but preserves the literal sense, the metaphorical reference maintains
the ordinary vision with the new one it suggests.’(Ricœur, 1978b, p. 154)
All transitions from discourse to praxis are rooted in the outwards redirection of poetic language to redescribe the world, to remake reality, according to
’iconographic augmentation,’ a phrase Ricœur borrows from the french philosopher François Dagognet.(Dagognet, 1973) Every icon is a graph that remodels reality at a higher level of realism. To nullify perception is the condition to
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Reference and Meaning
increase our vision.
Taking the notion of depth semantics as his guideline, Ricœur returns to the
problem of the reference of the text, and is this time able to give a name to the
non-ostensive reference. It is, he explains, “the kind of world opened up by the
depth semantics of the text, a discovery, which haas immense consequences
regarding what is usually called the sense of the text” (Ricœur, 1976, p. 87).
The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is not something
hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial
situation of discourse, but what points towards a possible world, thanks to
the non-ostensive reference of the text. Understanding passes by the author
and his situation and seeks to grasp the world-proposition opened up by the
reference of the text. To understand a text under this mode, is to follow its
movements from sense to reference; from what it says to what it talks about.
In this process, the mediating role played by the structural analysis constitutes
both the justification of the objective approach and the rectification of of the
subjective approach to the text.
This is the reference borne by by the depth semantics. The text speaks
of a possible world and of a possible way of orientating oneself within it.
The abolition or suspension of a first order reference, an abolition effected by
fiction and poetry, “is the condition of possibility for the freeing of a second
order reference, which reaches the world not only at the level of manipulable
objects, but at the level that Husserl designated by the expression Lebenswelt
and Heidegger by the expression ’being-in-the-world”’ (Ricœur, 1995a, 141).
Yet if we can no longer define hermeneutics in terms of the search for the
psychological intentions of another person which are concealed behind the text,
and if we do not want to reduce interpretation to the dismantling of structures,
then what remains to be interpreted? “I shall say: to interpret is to explicate
the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text” (ibid.).
The World of the Work
69
Appropriation
Ricœur presents the reader’s subjectivity as an extention of the fundamental
aspect of discourse he claims addressing is.
But contrary to the case of
dialogue, no vis-à-vis is given in the written situation. The relation is, so to
speak, created by the work itself. A work opens up its readers, and thus creates
its own subjective vis-à-vis. As the work involves the interpreter and opens
itself up to him, a dialogue is initiated in an existential sense—non-linguistic,
but through having the interpreter risk his own being and open himself up to
being influenced by what he reads.
Ricœur admits that the theme is well known in traditional hermeneutics;
it is the problem of the reader’s access to the text, understood as its use in
the present situation of the reader. In his treatment of the theme, however, he
wishes to underline how a transformation takes place by the points he raises
through his theory.
Appropriation is dialectically linked to distancing in written discourse.
This distance is not dissolved through appropriation, but is rather its opposite.
Thanks to the distancing of the text, appropriation no longer bears the mark
of affective connection to the author’s intention, and lacks all contemporaneousness with the creative process or agreement with an original intention.
Appropriation represents understanding over distance.
Appropriation is at the same time dialectically linked to the objectifying
features of the work. It is communicated through all the structural objectifications displayed by the work, since Ricœur claims that to the degree appropriation is not directed towards the author, it is directed towards the meaning of
the work, represented by the Fregean Sinn.
Above all, the vis-à-vis of appropriation is what Gadamer calls the matter
of the text, and what Ricœur calls the world of the work.
Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text.
It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity of
understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving
from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence
corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.
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Reference and Meaning
— (Ricœur, 1995a, 143)
Understanding is then, to Ricœur something quite other than a reconstructing constitution that the subject possesses a privileged key to. It would
be more correct to say that the self is constituted by the world of the text.
The Disciplines of Meaning
The significance of Ricœur’s philosophy of language for a major rethinking
of literary criticism becomes clear in “Metaphor and Reference”. Ricœur
introduces his commentary with clear awareness of the consequences for
literary criticism: “The postulate of reference requires a separate discussion
when it touches on those particular entities of discourse called texts, that is,
more complex compositions than the sentence. The question henceforth arises
in the context of hermeneutics rather than semantics. For which the sentence
is at first and the last entity” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 219). The disciplines of meaning
have been matched to their corresponding problematics; semiotics to the word,
semantics to the sentence, and hermeneutics to the text. Ricœur continues:
“The question of reference is posed here in terms that are singularly more
complex; for certain texts, called literary, seem to constitute an exception to the
reference requirement expressed by the preceding postulate” (Ricœur, 1994, p.
219). The challenge of highly structured, figurative language texts is taken up.
The point of departure is yet again Ricœur’s concept of the text—written
discourse that has been produced as a work, as a totality irreducible to a simple
sum of sentences. Fourthermore, a work is organized not as language but as
discourse with clearly codified perimeters, and finally it has an identifiable
character that makes it an individual among the other individuals with which
it cannot be merged or confused.
The more complex nature of the literary text demands a more elaborate
concept of reference. Although the literary text suspends the descriptive
reference that is common to didactic texts, there can be no doubt that, if all
reference to the world of action had been eliminated, literary discourse would
Understanding
have been locked into a closed circle with no possibility of communication.
Ricœur puts it this way: “The literary work through the structure proper to
it displays a world only under the condition that the reference of descriptive
discourse is suspended. Or to put it another way, discourse in the literary
work sets out its denotation as a second-level denotation, by means of the
suspension of the first-level denotation of discourse” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 221).
The immediate question of how an absence of denotation can have a contributive function is resolved through recourse to the metaphoric model as
paradigmatic for interpretation and semantic creativity. “Just as the metaphorical statement captures its sense as metaphorical amidst the ruins of the literal
sense, it also achieves its reference upon the ruins of what might be called (...)
its literal reference” (Ricœur, 1994, p. 221).
As the image Ricœur is attempting to show us is gradually sharpened, it
grows clear that the emergence of this double reference, or split reference, of
literary texts is not to be located at the semantic level of the sentence, but rather
at the hermeneutic level of the work. The primacy of the poetic function over
the referential function does not eliminate reference, only makes it ambiguous.
Thus literature has a double-sensed message that is in dynamic tension and, as
Ricœur shall point out, is the basis of creativity. A theory of literary criticism
is now in view, for it is within the very analysis of metaphor as paradigm that
the referential nature of poetic language is revealed.
Understanding
Ricœur’s concept of understanding is an existential one, which he has chosen
to reserve for the development of a work’s reference, and which is wholly
shaped by its object. Through a conception of the nature of reference in literary
works as a meaning which is not to be found behind the text, but in front of it,
the foundation is already in place for a strong displacement with regard to the
Romantic hermeneutic conception of interpretation.
The meaning sought by the interpreter is no longer something hidden,
which the reader must make an effort to locate, but something disclosed.
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Reference and Meaning
What makes understanding possible, is according to Ricœur that which points
towards a possible world, through the non-ostensive references of the text.
Texts addresses the interpreter about possible worlds, and about ways of
orienting in these worlds. In this way Ricœur claims to find a parallel in the
disclosure of the text to the role ostensive reference plays in discourse.
Understanding is following the dynamics of the work, he claims—following
its movement from what the work says to what it says something about. Beyond his situation as a reader, and beyond the role of the author, the interpreter
offers himself up to the possible modes for being-in-the-world the text opens
up and discloses for him. This is how Ricœur understands Gadamer’s concept
of fusion of horizons.
As is made evident through the presentation of Ricœur’s concept of reference, the activity in exegesis consists in its explication through an interpretation in a self-understanding being’s meeting with the world disclosed by the
text, and the resulting redefinition of its being-in-the-world. Reference has
the function of rewriting the interpreter’s reality in the confrontation with the
work through a disclosure of new possibilities for being. Interpretation is thus
not completed through the readers insight into the meaning of the work, but in
his insight into his own being which is placed in new light, a new perspective
through the reference of the work. The function of reference is thus fulfilled
through the interpreter’s appropriation of what is disclosed by the work—not
as defining for the work, but for the interpreter himself.
This movement, which only is understandable on the basis of the existentialphenomenological exposition of the concept of reference Ricœur here uses as
a foundation, he calls the understanding appropriation of the text.
Redefining Subjectivity
Ricœur criticizes the cogito tradition for the claim that the subject has a possibility to grasp itself in an immediate intuition. We only understand ourselves,
he claims, through the long detour through the signs of humanity as recorded in the works of culture. This is what causes his break with Heideggerian
Redefining Subjectivity
thought, by accusing Heidegger of taking an ontological shortcut to Dasein’s
perception of its own being, whilst he ought to have taken the road through a
self-defining process through Dasein’s meeting with itself in written discourse.
This is what is the real task of appropriation, claims Ricœur.
What would we know about morality and, in general, all we know of as
the self, if these had not been brought to language and articulated by literature?
What is most visible in opposition to subjectivity, which structural analysis uncovers as the pattern of the text, is the very medium wherein we can understand
ourselves.
Configuration and Refiguration
In Time and Narrative Ricœur introduces two guiding concepts—those of ’configuration’ and ’refiguration’—as a better way to approach the questions we
have examined in The Rule of Metaphor under the title of ’metaphorical reference’. In both cases, but especially in ’Study 7’ in the latter, he is concerned
with the problem posed by the capacity diplayed by language to reorder the
experience of the reader.
When language is reorganized in a creative way by metaphor, a breakthrough is made in experience, that is to say, we are invited to read our own
experience in accordance with the new modalities of language. But there was
a link missing in this analysis when it is kept at the level of metaphor: the role
of the reader.
This problem is Ricœur’s reason for revisiting trodden ground, which he
claims to avoid unless it is necessary. In Time and Narrative two entire distinct
sections are devoted to the problematic: one concerned with configuration,
namely the narrative operations at work within language, in the form of
emplotment of actions and characters; the other concerned with refiguration,
namely the transformation of one’s own experience under the effect of the
narrative.
In tackling the problem of the question of fictional narrative, Ricœur runs
up against the problem of the permanence of great narrative structures; and in
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Reference and Meaning
a constructive manner he goes to battle with structuralism in the arena where
it has always operated best - the narrative. But it is the third volume which is
of interest to us at present, the volume devoted to the problem of refiguration.
How does a language restructured by emplotment lead to a rereading
of our own experience in accordance with the main lines of the narrative?
Ricœur returns to a thesis present already in The Rule of Metaphor, as a sort
of grand postulate of language, namely that the relation between language
and reality, experience or the world, whatever term you like, is a dialectical
one: given that the sign is not the thing, that the sign is in retreat in relation to
it, language is constituted mariginally, in a sense, in relation to experience and
becomes for itself a spoken universe. Whence the legitimacy of the discourse
of linguists who exclude the extralinguistic from their field and resolutely
confine themselves to language; this is the strength of the Saussurean school—
considering that it is from sign to sign, then from book to book, in a vast
relation of intertextuality, that the universe of language is constituted.
Unlike Saussure, who constructed his theory on the sign and on the differential relations between signs, -Benveniste began with the sentence, which he
called ’the instance of discourse.’ It is the sentence—not the lexical sign—that
posesses not only a signified but also an intended, that is to say, it aims at reality.
Ricœur’s thesis is that language’s power of refiguration is proportional to
its power of distanciation in the moment of its self-constitution in the universe
of the signifier. Language, in his opinion, means the world because it has first
left the world; in this way it initiates a movement of reconquest of the reality
lost by the prior conquest of meaning in itself and for itself.
The Twofold Function of the Sign
Ricœur sets the function of the sign particularly appropriate to the narrative,
in distinguishing configuration, which is the capacity of language to provide
a configuration of itself in its own space, and refiguration, which expresses
the capacity of the work to restructure the world of the reader in unsettling,
challenging, remodeling the reader’s expectations.
The Twofold Function of the Sign
He defines this function of refiguration as mimetic. But it is extremely
important not to be mistaken as to its nature: it does not consist in reproducing
reality but in restructuring the world of the reader in confronting him or her
with the world of the work; and it is in this that the creativity of art consists
according to Ricœur, penetrating the world of everyday experience in order to
rework it from inside.
The third volume of Time and Narrative is devoted to the problem of
refiguration. How does a language restructured by emplotment lead to a
rereading of our own experience in accordance with the main lines of the
narrative? Ricœur returns here, in a more plausible and better argued fashion,
to a thesis present in The Rule of Metaphor as a sort of grand postulate of
lanugage, namely that the relation between language and reality, experience
or the world, is a dialectical one. Given that the sign is not the thing, but the
sign is rather in retreat in relation to it, language is constituted marginally, in
a sense, in relation to experience and becomes for itself a spoken universe.
As a foundational platform for legitimacy of discourse, Ricœur finds this
to be the strength of the Saussurean school—considering that it is from sign
to sign, then from book to book, in a vast relation of intertextuality that the
universe of language is constituted. This is perfectly legitimate, he claims,
“as a first stage—the moment of exile—of the operation of language” (Ricœur,
1998, p. 86).
The counterpart to this exile is the moment when, following Benveniste’s
expression, language is “poured back into the universe” (Ricœur, 1998, p. 173).
75
Chapter
6
Conclusion
In the preceding chapters, I have explored the contributions of the philosophy
of Paul Ricœur to the field of literary interpretation in general and the philosophy of phenomenological hermeneutics in particular.
The problem-oriented exegetical analysis is invited and motivated both by
its field of study, interpretation, which has presented itself as a most diverse
and unstructured tradition, and by Ricœur’s tendencies as a philosopher,
as mentioned in the introduction, towards mutually reinforcing structures
and an ideal of integration. These two aspects of Ricœur’s philosophical
orientation make a structured and accurate representation of his ideas difficult
if combined with an attempt at closure and completeness.
What has been presented, therefore, is the dynamics of Ricœur’s theory,
and the processes interacting to constitute both the phenomenona we know
as literature and understanding. The present commentary, then, should not
attempt to draw out this aspect of what has been presented, or it will suffer a
reiteration of what has already been said.
The challenge is rather to deliver the element of the whole of Ricœur’s theory which is still missing, namely that of a coherent and consistent structure,
enabling us to view the dynamic again, only this time from a distance, focusing instead on the interplay of parts that results from Ricœur’s integration and
78
Conclusion
assimilation of such different strains of philosophy as semiotics, structuralism,
hermeneutics and fundamental ontology.
Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc
The immediate outline of the structures put in play are implied in Joseph Margolis’ first piece of advice to anybody working with a theory of interpretation:
“[I]t is impossible to disjoin the account of the nature or logic of interpretation
from one’ theory of the nature of what it is that may or must be submitted to
interpretation” (Joseph Margolis, cited in Pedersen, 1999, p. 10).
The basic elements, of course, are defined in Ricœur’s treatment of language. The three units of language he presents; word, sentence and text,
all correspond to a level of designation. The word properly belongs in the
’langue’, or language-system, the sentence in discourse and the text properly
constitutes a work. As Ricœur puts the model to use, however, interconnections start to appear, and the internal structure of the three levels grows more
complex.
On all three levels there are recurring patterns. Between each of the adjacent ones, a dynamic of interrelation appears. The word, for instance, coexists
in discourse and langue, and thus has both a character as virtual multitativity
and actualized monotative denotation. In the extension of this, we can see that
it is the constriction of the polysemy of word that enables metaphoric use of
the same in the event of discourse. The result is an introduction of tension,
and a subsequent surplus of meaning, as the new polysemic content returns
to enrich the language-system at the same time as the metaphoric reference
bursts out of the textuality of the sentence or text and contributes to the world
of the work.
The pattern repeats on the next level, albeit with a slight permutation.
Here, the sentence is subjected to a construal through structuralist construction
(explanation) effectively constraining its potential at the same time as a structure of interconnections and tensions are erected in the work as a whole. As
the structure gains stability through increased constriction, a depth semantics
Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc
comes to the fore, being an actualization through constriction of possibility.
This resultant structure, being at the same time a template for appropriation and an actualized and intersubjectively (or objectively) interchangeable
interpretation, is only one of a potentially infinate set of configurations.
Ramifications
The implications of the uncovered structures are quite subtle, but far-reaching
nonetheless. Firstly, the daring move on Ricœur’s part of opening a text up
to an indefinite number of valid interpretations does not have the result of
making its resulting depth structure more subjective—rather the other way
around. The process of distanciation is effectively the guarantee that the
arrived at construction is intersubjectively interchangeable.
Secondly, the process of construction is shown to be dependant upon
language, which in turn is shown to be in constant drift. The implication of this
is that what counts as a valid interpretation of a text will necessarily change
over time, and (conversely) the interpretation of poetic texts contribute to the
drift of language, perpetuating the process.
This means, in turn, that there is room for a concept of tradition or
’Wirkungsgeschichte’ in Ricœur’s theory, and that the control of this tradition
in turn is shown to be (at least to some extent) influenced by the degree of
language competency, since Ricœur posits that not all linguistic innovations
are adopted into the langue, but that the development is guided by those with
high esteem for language competency.
Last, but not least of the features deducible from the structure laid out by
Ricœur, is the modification of the hermeneutic circle. What has happened
to it is not so much a displacement, as the grafting on it of a structural
bootstrapping procedure. To engage in a self-understanding exchange with
the work presupposes a constricting construction of structural interrelations in
the sense-potential of the text, and this in turn creates the room for an objective
methodology within or in connection with the hermeneutic spiral movement.
79
80
Conclusion
The Challenge of Ricœur’s Theory
Ricœur suggests that his dialectic of explanation and understanding only
may provide an answer to the extent that it constitutes the epistemological
dimension of the existential dialectic. On the basis of this dialectic, productive
distance means methodological distanciation (Ricœur, 1976, p. 89).
The existential concept of appropriation is enriched by the hermeneutic
dialectic. To “make one’s own” what was previously “foreign”, remains the
ultimate aim for Ricœur in all hermeneutics (Ricœur, 1976, p. 91).
Yet the appropriation of the meaning of a text by an actual reader places
the interpretation under the empire of the finite capacities of understanding
by this reader. And if we must believe in order to understand, then there is no
difference between pre-understanding and mere projection of our prejudices.
Clearly this cannot be a goal for Ricœur’s dialectic. The function of appropriation thus conceived, must be erroneous.
And so it is. Far from saying that a subject already mastering his own
way of being in the world projects the a priori of his self-understanding of the
text and reads it into the text, Ricœur presents interpretation as the process of
disclosure of new modes of being giving the subject new capacity for knowing
himself (Ricœur, 1976, p. 94).
If the reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the
reader who primarily projects himself. The interpreter is rather enlarged in
his capacity for self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text
itself.
Appropriation conceived in this mode ceases to appear as a kind of posession. Instead it implies a moment of disposession of the egoistic and narcissistic
ego through the universality and atemporality implied by explanatory procedures. Only the interpretation that complies with the injunction of the text, initiates new self-understanding. In this self-understanding, Ricœur opposes the
self, which proceeds from understanding of the text, to the ego, which claims
to precede it. It is the text, in other words, with its universal power of world
The Challenge of Ricœur’s Theory
disclosure, which gives a self to the ego.
81
Appendix
A
Formal Thesis Curriculum
Texts by Ricœur
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning
➤ Complete text.
(100 pages)
A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination
➤ Word, Polysemy, Metaphor: Creativity in Language
(65-85)
➤ Writing as a Problem for Literary Criticism and Philosophical
Hermeneutics
(320-337)
➤ Between the Text and Its Readers
(390-414)
Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
➤ The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation
(131-144)
➤ What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding
(145-164)
➤ Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics
(165-181)
➤ Appropriation
(182-193)
➤ The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text
(197-221)
84
Formal Thesis Curriculum
Semeia 4, 1975
➤ Biblical Hermeneutics
(115 pages)
The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics
➤ Existence and Hermeneutics
(3-24)
➤ Strucure, Word, Event
(79-96)
➤ Structure and Hermeneutics
(27-61)
➤ The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneneutic Problem
and as Semantic Problem
(62-78)
The Rule of Metaphor
➤ Study 7: Metaphor and Reference
(216-256)
Total by Ricœur: 500 pages
Secondary Literature
Secondary Literature
John B. Thompson: Critical Hermeneutics
➤ Part I, Section 2: Paul Ricœur and Hermeneutic Phenomenology
(36-70)
➤ Part II: Constructive Critique
(113-213)
John C. Mallery, Roger Hurwitz and Gavan Duffy: Hermeneutics: From
Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?
➤ Complete text. (32 pages)
Published in The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, Stuart. C. Shapiro
(ed.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987.
Available for download at
ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871.ps.Z
and for browsing at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871/memo.html
Charles E. Reagan (ed.): Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricœur
➤ Patrick L. Bourgeois: From Hermeneutics of Symbols to the Interpretation of
Texts
(83-95)
➤ David Pellauer: The Significance of the Text in Paul Ricœur’s Hermeneutical
Theory
(97-114)
Richard Kearney (ed.): Paul Ricœur: The Hermeneutics of Action
➤ Domenico Jervolino: Gadamer and Ricœur on the Hermeneutics of Praxis
(63-79)
Jeanne Evans: Paul Ricœur’s Hermeneutics of the Imagination
➤ Chapter III: Ricœur’s Turn to Hermeneutics
(47-85)
➤ Chapter IV: Ricœur’s Rule of Metaphor and the Philosophy of the Imagination
(87-149)
Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.): The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur
➤ Don Ihde: Paul Ricœur’s Place in the Hermeneutic Tradition
(59-70)
➤ Mario J. Valdéz: Paul Ricœur and Literary Theory
(87-149)
85
86
Formal Thesis Curriculum
David Wood (ed.): On Paul Ricœur: Narrative and Interpretation
➤ J. M. Bernstein: Grand Narratives
(102-123)
➤ Don Ihde: Text and the New Hernemeutics
(124-139)
Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode
➤ Zweiter Teil, II: Grundzüge einer Theorie der hermeneutischen Erfahrung
(270-384)
Opuscula 2, 1999
➤ Arild Pedersen: On Different Kinds of Meaning and Discourse
(10-23)
➤ Arild Pedersen: On the Distinction Between Understanding and Interpretation
(24-36)
Total Secondary Literature: 509 pages
Total Pages: 1009
Curriculum approved by Bjørn T. Ramberg
April 2nd, 2001
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