11/29/2023 – Hermeneutics of Religion Ricoeur-style

What is hermeneutics? What is hermeneutics of religion? What is hermeneutics of religion Ricoeur-style? You want answers to these questions and more? Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcripts are available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted about every two weeks, around noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.

Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher who wrote many essays and books, not only about hermeneutics and religion, but other subjects as well such as structuralism and narrative theory. Many of his early works written at the Sorbonne in Paris became very popular. Today we’re going to talk about hermeneutics and different types of discourse and do it Ricoeur-style. A lot of the information in this episode came from Brian Gregor’s 2019 book, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion. Let’s get started.

Hermeneutics studies the art of interpretation, and the hermeneutics of religion is an attempt to understand religion, in particular, the way religious texts, traditions, and practices shape human self-understanding. But there is no generic state of religious consciousness independent of specific religious confessions. It is always “coded” in a sense. The inquiry into religion must therefore take a hermeneutical turn, following a detour through symbols, myths, narratives, and other linguistic forms in which religious adherents have made their confessions of faith. But…how do we do that? The simplest way to explain what religion means for Ricoeur is the regeneration of our fundamental capabilities as human beings. Capacity always exists in relation to incapacity and the two main human incapacities Ricoeur highlighted was human finitude and human fault. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of religion focuses on understanding the symbols and myths that articulate the experience of fault and then healing or restoring our fundamental capacity for goodness. How’s that for an easy-to-understand introduction? That’s how we roll here on TenOnReligion. Yeah baby…I…uh… But anywho…

Let’s get into some of the nuts and bolts of this. Ordinary descriptive discourse refers to perceptible objects and familiar things, as well as the objects of scientific inquiry, verification, and measurement. Ricoeur calls this first-order reference. And then there’s another type of language Ricoeur calls poetic discourse. Poetic discourse does not refer to objects. It concerns our participation in and belonging to being, which is ontologically more foundational than our objective relation to things. Poetic discourse involves a second-order reference, suspending the first-order descriptive function and referring to our being in the world. Poetic discourse includes things like symbols, metaphors, and narratives.

I’ve delved into religious symbols a lot on this channel, especially in the episodes on Panikkar, Tillich, and Neville, so let’s talk about metaphor and narrative for a minute. Metaphorical discourse is a work of the productive imagination. If one says “nature is a temple,” it forces one to see life as architecture and architecture as life. The saying-as of metaphor facilitates a new mode of seeing-as. Metaphor suspends the first-order reference and initiates the second-order reference. We think in terms of the metaphor in the way the metaphor depicts reality, not in the way reality is depicted through other means. Do you get the difference? Because it’s an important one for understanding religion. Like metaphor, narrative is also the work of the productive imagination and involves language innovation, that is, the creation of new meaning. The difference is that metaphor achieves this at the level of the sentence while narrative achieves this at the level of the plot, as in the characters, motives, intentions, and causes woven together into a coherent story. Narration also brings the flux of experience into a temporal unity, allowing us to understand and appreciate the past, and likewise to form a cohesive personal identity. We start to identify with the story. The narrative configuration ultimately leads towards a third moment which is the refiguration of our understanding of ourselves and our world. Through the power of narrative to refigure reality, we encounter a world brought to life with new possibilities of meaning and action. Figurative ways of communicating, called discourse, include symbols, metaphors, and narratives. These allow people to perform imaginative variations on the “I can,” referring to human capability. The process goes from text to action.

Now how does this really relate to human capacity or capability? Ricoeur holds the view that we need a hermeneutics of symbols to understand how religion regenerates human capability. You see, Ricoeur was really sort of riffing off of another philosopher named Immanuel Kant who wrote a lot about moral detail what he meant by moral duty, but this is where Ricoeur is coming from. For Ricoeur, the religious symbol does not merely give us an example of how to fulfill our moral duty regardless of the outcome. It gives us the means to hope for the ultimate triumph of the highest good, in which goodness and happiness reside. There is a little bit of a debate in the academic field of religion about what religion really is. Okay, it’s not a little debate, it’s a big debate. But Ricoeur is in the camp that says there is no pure “Religion,” only a plurality of concrete existing religions. Just like there is no such thing as “Language,” only concrete existing languages. [Side note – sorry for all of you “analytical” philosophers out there, this is a “continental” show.] So, the aim of religious discourse, then, is to regenerate our “being-able.” It’s not just merely to fulfill our moral duties, but to employ all of our capacities in new ways. Religious discourse liberates and transforms the fundamental capacities of the self in speech, action, narration, and perhaps most importantly, being capable of assuming responsibility.

Now here’s where things get interesting. Ricoeur was also influenced by Bultmann, who was famous for his view that the New Testament documents needed to be demythologized to be properly interpreted and understood. But note that demythologization is not demythicization, a straight up rejection of myth, but rather a “decoding” of the existential significance of the myth so it can continue to address us today. Ricoeur thought that Bultmann understood the hermeneutical circle of Heidegger better than Karl Barth did. For Bultmann, the symbolic language of myths tended to obscure the original existential understanding the myths express. However, Ricoeur concluded that Bultmann went down the wrong path to the self-understanding of the author rather than the path of Heidegger to an analytic of Dasein, or being-in-the-world. And…here’s the key…understanding existence is closely related to our communication. You see, in speech there is usually a close fit between meaning and intent. We can understand the speaker’s intent with references to our shared context as well as cues like vocal tone and body language, and if we still don’t understand, we can clarify by asking questions and getting a prompt reply. But the same understanding becomes more complicated with the transition from speech to writing. Writing does not preserve the event itself, but the meaning of the event which gives the text a “semantic autonomy.” This is hermeneutically important because the meaning of the text is no longer bound to the original speech event, nor to the intention of the speaker. The text takes on a life of its own estranged from the original author. Ricoeur calls this estrangement distanciation – that is, the distance between subjective consciousness and meaning.

The ultimate aim of hermeneutics is the existential appropriation of the meaning of the text. In religion, this always occurs within the wider context of a community over time. The community recognizes textual authority as it collects, assembles, and selects particular texts. Textual authority is also constituted as the community becomes the locus of mediation in the conflict of interpretations between different traditions of reading and interpretation. The community is instituted as an interpretive authority, and the individual reader is instituted as recipient of the tradition passed on by the community. The structures of the religious community therefore develop alongside the authority of the textual canon, with a kind of hermeneutical circularity between the text that founds the identity of the community and the community that reads and interprets these texts. For example, this is why it is possible for philosophers to recognize that the Islamic account of the Qur’an is a perfect copy of the heavenly Qur’an, dictated by the angel Gabriel, without deciding whether this is true or not for themselves. The trick, though, and this applies to all religions, is to avoid the situation of authority becoming authoritarian. This occurs and becomes a danger when a member in a community claims to speak with divine authority and leaves the community behind. The goal should not be “I” but “we” when it comes to issues of authority in religion. Remember the discussion earlier about the difference between first-order reference of perceptible objects and second-order reference of poetic discourse? When these two get confused or inverted that’s often when authoritarian leaders emerge, claiming the second-order reference is the first-order reference. But it’s usually just an excuse to claim power for themselves. “God told me so…” According to Ricoeur, we need to existentially appropriate the text through an attempt to properly interpret the symbols, myths and narratives as poetic discourse.

So, what do you think about the hermeneutics of religion Ricoeur-style? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

Bibliography - Brian Gregor, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.