Abstract
At the heart of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of religion one discovers a commitment to the diversity of religious expression. This commitment is grounded in his understanding of the linguistic and temporal conditions of religious phenomena. By exploring his contribution to the debate concerning the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology in relation to his studies of translation, this essay explores Ricoeur’s understanding of religious phenomenality where meaning is experienced as the simultaneous advance and withdrawal of an originary event in the traces of its interpretations. With such an understanding of religious phenomenality, the way is opened for philosophy of religion to advance a more robust consideration of religious diversity and, therefore, to reconsider notions of universality better suited to the things themselves.
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Notes
The terms of the debate itself arose when Dominique Janicaud published his Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Janicaud 1991), aimed at what he perceived to be a “theological turn” away from orthodox Husserlian phenomenology in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, in particular. In response, a number of seminars were held and a collection of essays was published containing essays by Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Paul Ricoeur under the title Phénoménologie et théologie (Marion et al. 1992). Both texts were subsequently published together in English translation as Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (Janicaud et al. 2000).
Of the “main players”, the work of Jean-Luc Marion is crucial. Not only was his work one of the main objects of Janicaud’s initial criticism but, in subsequent work, Marion has taken up and responded to Janicaud’s argument. Of particular importance to these issues, see Marion (2002a, b, 2008). For new developments in a more specifically theological direction see Marion (2016).
While the volume was originally published in French in 2004, the first two essays were presented in 1997 and 1998. For an excellent treatment of the place of “translation” in Ricoeur’s work as a whole, see Alison Scott-Baumann’s ‘Ricoeur’s Translation Model as a Mutual Labour of Understanding’ (Scott-Bauman 2010).
The idea that Ricoeur replaces phenomenology with hermeneutics is found already in Jeffrey Kosky’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the English translation of Courtine’s volume. Kosky argues that, ‘for Ricoeur, the description of religion calls not so much for a phenomenology as for a hermeneutic that can interpret the texts and practices of different particular religions’ (Kosky 2000, p. 118). As a result, he continues, the task of the phenomenologist is to describe a ‘possible religion’ while those who would describe ‘actual religion…would follow Ricoeur and have recourse to a textual hermeneutic’ (Kosky 2000, pp. 118–119). This argument is repeated more recently by Michael Staudigl who modifies it only enough to suggest that Ricoeur is inconsistently hermeneutical. He argues that while Ricoeur remains tied to affective structures of phenomenality he ultimately surrenders them to an overreaching hermeneutic. See Staudigl (2016). However, if Ricoeur’s strategy here is consistent with his work elsewhere, it makes more sense that he is staging a hermeneutic intervention within phenomenology. See Ricoeur (1974a, 1991a).
For an excellent treatment of these issues in reference to Ricoeur’s relationship to the work of Jacques Derrida, see B. Keith Putt’s ‘Traduire C’est Trahir—Peut-être: Ricoeur and Derrida on the (In)Fidelity of Translation’ (Putt 2015).
In a larger work on Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of religion (in progress) I explore these issues in relation to his many other essays on religious phenomenality. Among these I draw the reader’s attention, first of all, to the essays collected in Ricoeur (1995a, 2016) and, specifically, his ‘Preface to Bultmann’ (Ricoeur 1974b) and his ‘Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics’(Ricoeur 1991b). Finally, a complete discussion of these issues would have to address his later work with André LaCocque. See Ricoeur and LaCocque (1998).
Arguably, this dialectic can be seen to organize all of Ricoeur’s writings from his “poetics of the will” (organized around the polarity of objective structure and dramatic mystery) to his writings on selfhood (organized around the categories of “what?” and “who?”). He uses the terms specifically, however, in his essays on structuralism where he seeks to bring to light what structural analysis occludes: the living event of speech in relation to the structures of sedimented language. See Ricoeur (1974c).
The concept of the “trace” is important in Ricoeur’s thought as a whole and this provides a good indication that his so-called “religious writings” are integrally related to his philosophy in general. See, for example, the extended discussion of the trace in Ricoeur (2004), particularly as this takes shape in relation to the memory trace, the historical archive, and the erasure of traces in forgetting.
Though he doesn’t name it here, Ricoeur’s thought is very close to that of Hans-Georg Gadamer for whom the ‘transformation into structure’ is a key element of meaning. See Gadamer (2004, pp. 110–119).
Like the notion of the trace, the notion of testimony plays an important role in Ricoeur’s writings on religion and his philosophy in general. See Ricoeur (1980, 1995b). Furthermore, his notion of testimony assumes a crucial place in his hermeneutics of selfhood when it is connected to his notion of attestation. See Ricoeur (1992).
Along the lines of enquiry opened up by these questions we see further questions—and questions that motivate further work—in an important late essay entitled ‘Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious’ (Ricoeur 2010).
For a very helpful discussion of how Ricoeur’s work on translation points toward constructive interdisciplinary discourse, see Mark Godin, ‘Translation and the Unspeakable: Ricoeur, Otherness, and Interdisciplinarity’ (Godin 2013).
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Dahl, D.E. The origin in traces: diversity and universality in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of religion. Int J Philos Relig 86, 99–110 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09714-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09714-1