Review

Reviewed Work(s): Reason in the Age of Science. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Frederick
G. Lawrence; Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on language, action, and
interpretation. by Paul Ricoeur and John B. Thompson
Review by: W. G. Regier
Source: MLN, Vol. 98, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1983), pp. 1312-1315
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906078
Accessed: 21-03-2017 20:46 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to MLN

This content downloaded from 143.54.2.240 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:46:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 1312 REVIEWS

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Rea

Lawrence

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. xxxvi + 179 pages

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on language,
tion, and interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. viii + 3
pages

These eight essays by Gadamer (b. 1900) and eleven by Ricoeur (b. 1913)
address different audiences from the standpoint of hermeneutics. In
1979, Jurgen Habermas complimented Gadamer for his bridge-building
between disciplines. Ricoeur is no less an engineer: his essays connect
hermeneutics to psychoanalysis, critical theory, history, narratology, phe-
nomenology, and several other forms of philosophy. Both Ricoeur and
Gadamer present hermeneutics as an essential medium if the discrete
disciplines are to understand themselves or speak to one another. Their
appeal to students of comparative literature has attracted comparatists like
Hans-Robert Jauss and Gerald Bruns. What are their attractions?
First, fine examples of good old hermeneutic epidictic, including over-
tures to students of the arts. "Hermeneutic philosophy begins with the
experience of art," says Ricoeur (HHS 117). Gadamer says more:
It is no exaggeration to say that we find the great novels of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, together with the other kinds of art works from this epoch
of bourgeois culture, closer [than modern philosophy] to the old tasks of phi-
losophy and look upon them as the custodians of philosophy's great heritage.
(RAS 146; cf. Hegel's Dialectic (U. of California Press, 1976), 100.)

Second, frequent doses of Heidegger, Dilthey, Hegel, Kant, Aristotle,

Plato and other patriarchs.
Third, a long list of comparisons. Ricoeur's essays regularly defer to
Gadamer. Ricoeur adopts, translates, and uses for his own purposes
themes and notions from Gadamer. Ricoeur's opening essay, "The Task
of Hermeneutics" (1973), gives a short history of the discipline indebted
to and culminating with Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode (1960). E. Sacre
and Ricoeur translated this outstanding book into French in 1976. Ri-
coeur mediates Gadamer's 1970 debate with Habermas in "Hermeneutics
and the Critique of Ideology" (1973). Ricoeur's proximity to Gadamer has
never been clearer than in this collection.
But when Ricoeur's "Task" is compared to Gadamer's "Hermeneutics
as a Theoretical and Practical Task," temporary divergences appear. Ri-
coeur's current task is to reflect upon textuality and exegesis; Gadamer's
is to link hermeneutics to politics and ethics.
Textuality, says Ricoeur, is the key concept of hermeneutics: herme-
neutics is "the theory of the operations of the understanding in their
relation to the interpretation of texts" (HHS 43). By concentrating on texts
as complexity, as products of labor, and as testimony, Ricoeur hopes to

This content downloaded from 143.54.2.240 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:46:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 M L N 1313

show how "the notio

to phenomena not s
(HHS 37). The next
is to escape semiotic
he must cross the fr
where rhetoric wars forced order.
The first step in this direction is "The Model of the Text: Meaningful
Action Considered as a Text" (1971), a rapprochement between herme-
neutics and speech act philosophy, mediated through structuralism. Ri-
coeur stops short of considering any act other than reading, writing, lis-
tening, or speech. Written in the heyday of structuralism, this essay con-
sidered speech a sufficient paradigm.
The structuralism had begun to fade when Ricoeur wrote "Science and
Ideology" (1974), a pointed confrontation with Marx and Marxism. "What
we need today is a thought which would have the audacity and the capacity
to cross Marx, without either following or fighting him. Merleau-Ponty, I
think, speaks somewhere of an a-Marxist thought; that is also what I seek
to practice" (HHS 223).1 Ricoeur crosses Marx on ideology and religion,
but limits Marx's texts to The German Ideology and the title-page of Capital.
Marx's longer and more notorious statements about religion-it is an
opium of the people, it should be abolished-occur in his Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right, a text Ricoeur mercifully ignores. For Marx, Ricoeur
says against him, religion "is not an example of ideology by ideology par
excellence" (HHS 229). Ricoeur argues that Marx twice confused ideology
and religion: first, though religion is ideological, it is not on that account
at fault; ideologies can be salutary and genuine-second, though used by
oppressors and exploiters to disguise their tricks, religion is not on that
account false; what scoundrel has not hidden behind high truth? Ricoeur,
master of metaphor,2 also detects flaws in Marx's figures of speech:
Marxist critique is combative, when it might be tranquil and conciliatory;
Marx's metaphors were lifted from the very ideologies he attacks (HHS
235, 237). Marx made a contribution to social analysis, Ricoeur notes, but
Marxism has become "the most extraordinary exemplification of his own
conception of ideology," that is, a picture of the world that obscures reality
(HHS 236). Marxism's critical function "can be liberated and manifested
only if the use of Marx's work is completely dissociated from the exercise
of power and authority and from judgments of orthodoxy" (HHS 236).
In short, Marxism must deactivate. The critical function, too, ought to be
forsaken for hermeneutics: "nothing is more necessary today than to re-
nounce the arrogance of critique and to carry on with patience the endless
work of distancing and renewing our historical substance" (HHS 246).
Sometimes theory is the only action one should practice.
Except for the textual interlude, Ricoeur and Gadamer agree about the
hermeneutic task. Gadamer calls Marxism a "short-circuited application
of Hegel" (RAS 56), and pays no attention to its competing traditions. Like

This content downloaded from 143.54.2.240 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:46:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 1314 REVIEWS

Ricoeur, he prefers Hegel

which might bear close ex
bring to our reflective aw
together" (RAS 135). Wha
ological drives? spiritua
unity. What might that b
Neither the principle of self
fication and self-grounding
the system of philosophy. N
inexorable. (RAS 19).

"Philosophic reason still f

into a whole" (RAS 158). T
a self-understanding of th
knowledge alone is capabl
all the rulers but much
issue from everything we
unity is exigent, the need
urgent, and freedom is t
history an academic pursu
has with Gadamer become
In a remarkable twist of
humanity has jeopardized
leged status," losing the c
"Ever fewer people are m
the apparatus" (RAS 73-7
The closed work place of the
are still a far cry from a co
of everyone on this earth an
as if a senseless attack with
one knows how much time w

This note of alarm is new

been implicit in his herm
limits, or what Ricoeur c
accidents of history or th
pending doom, the human
be human.

University of Nebraska W. G. REGIER

NOTES

1 What standard for scholarship would we set if we settled for "som

Ricoeur perhaps remembers Merleau-Ponty's description of the need f
communist Marxism in Adventures of the Dialectic.

This content downloaded from 143.54.2.240 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:46:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 M L N 1315

2 See Ricoeur's La met

Kathleen McLaughlin
ciplinary studies of the
Looking with Ricoeur
they used to be. Rico
score," and later, "Re
regulated by the writ
explanatory than "Rea
3 Gadamer paraphrases
name active in the su
formance in the real
1325b, shortly before

Hayden White and M

lected Papers from
Baltimore: The Joh

"The Resistance to K
chapter in the histo
chapter could even
dominant critical di
resistance to Burke,
and continuing to
Counter-Statement w
prophetic, capsulizin
cupy throughout hi
This resistance is am
Burke. In the openin
Wasserstrom places t
work against the b
those and subsequen
that Wasserstrom ev
Burke's critical met
prompt and spirited
cember 1937 and Ja
strategy spotlights
the difficult challen
lazily slight him as "
ilarly resist Burke b
him as sui generis: "
Webster's or Hyma
of invention. In re
critical procedures f
Inference, and Proo
these efforts, this t
quip in his respon
Knowing" (Critical

This content downloaded from 143.54.2.240 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:46:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms