Paul Ricoeur

Two different traditions in the study of language and philosophy come together
magisterially in Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) study The Rule of Metaphor (1975;
trans. 1977), with Anglo-American and ‘French’ approaches thereby brought into
dialogue. While there is much talk of transdisciplinary research in the humanities
today, authentic examples are few and far between: with the work of Paul Ricoeur,
one of the most wide-ranging transdisciplinary encounters between ‘code’ (theory)
and ‘meaning’ (hermeneutics) takes place.
Interned for five years during the Second World War, Ricoeur credits his reading
of Karl Jaspers, especially the three-volume Philosophy (1932), ‘for having placed
my admiration for German thinking outside the reach of all the negative aspects of our
surroundings and of the “terror of history” ’. During this period, Ricoeur also worked
on a translation of Husserl’s Ideen I. What are the early indicators of Ricoeur’s
importance to the study of literature? He suggests that his interest in Jaspers’
existential philosophy brought together the two poles of metaphysical transcendence
and poetics, just as later, with the work for his study The Symbolism of Evil (1960),
he argues that he had to move away from a Husserlian immediacy of the thinking
subject, to one that only knows ‘itself’ indirectly through signs and narrative. The
Symbolism of Evil presents the reader with Ricoeur’s first definition of hermeneutics,
where ‘the symbol sets us thinking’. By this point in his career, Ricoeur had worked
as Professor of the History of Philosophy at The University of Strasbourg (1948–
1956), and then as Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he continued until
1967, co-teaching along the way a seminar in phenomenology with Jacques Derrida.
A number of events and new movements in France began to affect Ricoeur much as
they did all of the major thinkers of this period: the student uprisings in 1968 and the
shift in intellectual thought to structuralist methodologies. All of the ‘philosophies of
the subject’ including existentialism now came under attack, and there was a major
shift within French theory in the reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Ricoeur had
already moved in 1967 to the site of the initial student uprising – Nanterre – where he
became Dean of the School of Letters. Ironically, this change of location was brought
about by Ricoeur’s worries concerning the unbridled expansion of French higher
education, and he attributes the militant student leaders with targeting Nanterre in
1968 as a ‘weak link’ in the chain of Paris universities.
Ricoeur began his own shift away from phenomenology and
towards hermeneutics with his study of Freud, published in translation as Freud and
Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965; trans. 1970). Ricoeur describes the
‘idealist’ version of phenomenology, which claimed a radical position of ultimate
foundation, based upon an intellectual intuition immanent to consciousness . . . At the
same time, this final justification contained a fundamentally ethical situation,
inasmuch as the fundamental theoretical act expressed the ultimate self-responsibility
of the philosophical subject.
Ricoeur’s shift to a poststructuralist hermeneutics implies a desire to maintain
ethical responsibility, while being aware of the mediated  relationships between text
and reader. To put this another way, the structuralist notion of the autonomously
functioning differential sign had to be overcome. Moving on from the books that
encompassed and explored philosophies of the will – namely Freedom and Nature:
The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil – as well
as the study of complex indirect consciousness in the works of Freud, Ricoeur focused
more intensely on language and literature, especially with the essential rejection of the
differential sign in favour of the unit of the sentence; this focus found its most
profound expression in The Rule of Metaphor and the three-volume study Time and
Narrative. In his ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, Ricoeur sketches out the structuralist
background to his rejection of the differential sign, mentioning Saussure, Barthes,
Greimas, Genette and Lévi-Strauss, as being the main players in this confining of
energies to the text, or, ‘objectifying abstraction’ of semiotics, whereby ‘language was
reduced to the functioning of a system of signs without any anchor in a subject’. In
other words, Ricoeur rejects the Saussurian notion of signification being generated
internally to the system or text in favour of signification being generated through
relations to other objects and subjects. The key conceptual move is made via
Benveniste’s observation that ‘the primary unit of meaning in actual language is not
the lexical sign, but the sentence, which he called the “instance of discourse” ’.
Ricoeur thus opposes semiotics and semantics, where the latter implies
intersubjectivity and a communicative model of meaning.
In chapter seven of The Rule of Metaphor, ‘Metaphor and Reference’, Ricoeur
expands significantly on the semiotics/semantics opposition, using the terminology
from the philosopher Frege of ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ (Bedeutung): ‘The sense is what
the proposition states; the reference or denotation is that about which the sense is
stated.’ This is an opposition that deconstructionists will pull apart, but which its
defenders suggest is functional in an imperfect language world, where the
correspondence between sense and reference is often out of joint. From the latter
perspective, it is the internal machinations of a semiotic system divorced from human
beings that reaches ‘purity’. ‘Reference’, to use a term from the early Wittgenstein,
can be thought of as the ‘state of affairs’, but when the literary text enters this
discussion, a work that produces its own world, then the sense/reference binary
appears to be suspended without the help of deconstruction. Ricoeur explains that the
text is a more ‘complex entity of discourse whose characteristics do not reduce to
those of the unit of discourse, or the sentence’. The connotative forces a re-reading of
Frege’s opposition and takes Ricoeur back to metaphor. Metaphor, to use Mario J.
Valdes’ phrase, is ‘a paradigm’, in The Rule of Metaphor, ‘for all creativity through
language’. Critics such as Valdes regard the philosophy of language developed by
Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor, as offering a sophisticated alternative
to poststructuralist theories of the text. How can this be the case, given that metaphor
is a rhetorical device? In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur surveys the history and
philosophy of metaphor in Western thought, rejecting the notion that metaphor is mere
rhetorical ornament that produces nothing new, and the notion that metaphor is a
transference of meaning. By introducing the notion of an ‘extra linguistic reality’ as
seen above, Ricoeur argues that metaphor actually redescribes reality. The shift to
a hermeneutic point of view reveals that metaphor is a ‘strategy of discourse’, as
Ricoeur puts it, one which preserves and develops ‘the creative power of language,
preserves and develops the heuristic power wielded by fiction’. Three main
components of this theory are those of discourse, tension and mediation, where
discourse is a large linguistic unit that involves a speaker, a hearer and a world,
tension is at the heart of all of the theories of how metaphors work or function, and
mediation is in effect what metaphor does as it produces new meaning. As Masako K.
Hiraga puts it:
Ricoeur claims that metaphorical discourse itself has a reference under the
condition of the suspension (epoché) of a literal reference. This metaphorical
reference is the intentional direction toward the world and the reflective direction
toward self. In other words, metaphorical discourse speaks of a possible world and a
possible way of orienting oneself in this world, and thereby mediates man [sic] and
the world, man [sic] and self, in a novel manner.
Ricoeur develops his hermeneutical approach in Time and Narrative, one of the
key twentieth-century studies of narrative and philosophy. Literary theorists have
focused most carefully on the third part of Ricoeur’s study (which begins in the
second volume of the English translation) where he explores the ‘fictive experience of
time’ and the text’s ‘transcendence within immanence’.
 Ricoeur’s fundamental thesis that time cannot be directly spoken of, but must be
instead mediated by the indirect discourse of narration (see his concluding remarks),
is given full expression through close analysis of literary authors such as Mann,
Proust and Woolf. In three corresponding literary works, Ricoeur reveals the ways in
which they refigure time ‘itself’ in the experience of reading them, and as such go
beyond Husserl‘s Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness and Heidegger’s Being
and Time, the two works that pervade the overall study.
Ricoeur’s oeuvre can barely be contained in short summary form: across his
lifetime he has explored phenomenology, ethics, evil, theology, the linguistic turn in
contemporary philosophy and theory, analytical philosophy, semiotics and semantics,
metaphor, narrative and temporality, and many aspects of existentialist thought not
touched upon here. Ricoeur’s impact upon literary-critical thought has been immense,
yet there are many aspects of his work that have fallen out of favour given the
ongoing dominance of poststructuralist thought. Nonetheless, Ricoeur continues to
offer a ‘semantic’ alternative to ‘semiotic’ thought, one that may eventually be
perceived to be of more relevance as the ‘post-theory’ era develops.