Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970sAuthor(s): Sanford SchwartzReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 290-300Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1203039 .

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Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s

Sanford Schwartz / University of Chicago

During the last two decades, the writings of Paul Ricoeur have exerted a growing influence in this country, especially in divinity schools and seminaries. Amid the confusing array of contemporary methodologies that vie for our allegiance, Ricoeur has fostered greater understanding of the assumptions and limits of our various options and demonstrated the advantages of dialectical exchange between theories that appear irreconcilably opposed. Throughout his career, Ricoeur has mediated between a reflective philosophy that proceeds from the subject's search for self-understanding and the objectively constituted sciences which bypass reflective consciousness or question the authority of its testi- mony. In his first major work, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), Ricoeur extended his phenomenological description of the will by using the objectifying stance of biology and psychology to reveal aspects of subjective experience overlooked in purely phenome- nological studies. His "hermeneutics of recollection" in the 1960s, which aimed at the recovery of meaning in religious symbolism, matured through its dialogue with the "hermeneutics of suspicion" encouraged by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.2 In a similar manner, Ricoeur's more recent work on the theory of interpretation, which turns from the problematics of double meaning in the symbol to textual discourse in general, modifies Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics by consider-

1 Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. E. V. Kohak (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966). On Ricoeur's practice of confronting phenomenology and hermeneutics with the so-called counterdisciplines throughout the 1950s and 1960s, see Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971).

2 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. C. Kelbley (1960; Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1965) marks the transition from Ricoeur's early phenomenology of the will to the hermeneutic approach of The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan (1960; New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967). See also Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage (1965; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970); and The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (1969; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Ricoeur discusses the various turns in his career in "From Existentialism to the Philosophy of Language" (1971), reprinted as an appendix to The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello, S.J. (1975; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 315-22. In addition see "My Relation to the History of Philosophy," IliffReview 35, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 5-12. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart have edited The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), an anthology which traces his development from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s.

c 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/83/6303-0006$01.00

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ing the counterclaims of structuralism and of Habermas's "critique of ideologies."3 Out of this latest dialectical encounter Ricoeur emerges with a description of textual discourse, as well as a theory of interpreta- tion, which has theoretical significance of its own and provides a foun- dation for his studies of the productive function of the imagination in literary and biblical texts.4

Ricoeur's approach to textuality may be divided into four interrelated phases that follow the destiny of the text from the initial event of writing to the reader's act of appropriation. Each of these moments- distanciation by writing, objectification by structure, reference to a world, and self-understanding by reading-is modeled on a specific feature of language itself and corresponds to a particular mode of textual interpretation. Considering in succession theories that locate the meaning of a text in authorial intention, the formal design of the work, the world to which it refers, and the reader's response, Ricoeur establishes a framework for examining the merits of each alternative by constructing a comprehensive "hermeneutical arc" that includes and qualifies them all. At the risk of schematizing Ricoeur's dialectical thinking excessively, we will review briefly each phase of the herme-

3 Ricoeur's dialogue with structuralism pervades his work of the late 1960s and 1970s and will be discussed at length in this review. On Ricoeur's attempt to mediate between Gadamer and Habermas, see "Ethics and Culture," in Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart'and Joseph Bien (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 243-70; and "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology," in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 63-100. According to Ricoeur, while hermeneutics emphasizes our participation in a tradition and seeks to preserve our cultural heritage, the critique of ideologies is the offspring of the Enlightenment pretension to liberate the mind from the fetters of traditional prejudices and pursue a future unconstrained by the ideological distortions of the past. Ricoeur acknowledges that the hermeneutic tradition, which arose out of the romartic hostility to the objectifying stance of the physical sciences and a longing to recover a threatened heritage, too easily yields to the forms of the past from which it ought to maintain a critical distance. While affirming the main tendencies of modern hermeneutics, Ricoeur once again attempts to enhance reflective philosophy through a dialogue with an objectively constituted science which exposes its weaknesses.

4 Despite the appearance of several collections of his essays, many of Ricoeur's writings of the last decade are scattered in a variety of journals. Fortunately, some of his most important pieces on philosophical hermeneutics are now collected in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, which supplements the valuable but highly compressed series of lectures, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). While The Rule of Metaphor contains most of Ricoeur's extensive research on the theory of figurative language, there is no equivalent volume for his still evolving work on narrative (see n. 10 below for journal references). But the most serious deficiency lies in the area of biblical hermeneutics. With the exception of one small collection, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Phila- delphia: Fortress Press, 1980), most of Ricoeur's significant contribution to biblical hermeneutics is dispersed in periodicals and conference proceedings (see nn. 15-18 below for journal references). A bibliography of Ricoeur's writings through the mid-1970s appears in Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), pp. 180-94. I am indebted to Kenner Swain for bringing to my attention a number of Ricoeur's less publicized essays of the last ten years.

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neutical arc and analyze the strategic position of the third phase -the central domain of hermeneutics -in Ricoeur's theory of interpretation.5

Like the structuralists, Ricoeur draws on modern linguistics for his characterization of textuality. But instead of employing the semiologi- cal model based on Saussure's approach to language as systematic code (langue), Ricoeur turns to Emile Benveniste's account of the distinctive features of actual discourse (Saussure's parole).6 According to Benveniste, while the linguistic code is virtual and outside of time, spoken discourse is realized temporally and in the present. Second, while the basic unit of the linguistic system is the sign, the basic unit of

living speech is the sentence with its subject-predicate form. Ricoeur focuses on the peculiar relationship between these first two features of discourse: as the temporal realization of propositional statements, dis- course occurs as a transient event but takes the form of proposition that can be identified repeatedly as the same. However, when we turn from spoken to written communication, this event/form relationship is altered by the introduction of writing, which distances the statement from the initial act of articulation. Ricoeur maintains that writing pre- serves not the ephemeral event itself but the enduring meaning of the event which is inscribed in the proposition. It also accentuates the noncoincidence between the author's subjective intentions and the immanent sense of the statement, between "utterer's meaning" and "utterance meaning," which is minimal by comparison in a spoken dialogue. For Ricoeur, the distanciation that writing establishes between subjective intention and objective meaning legitimates the study of the written text as an autonomous entity without reconstruct- ing the author's mental life or his historical milieu.

The first moment of the hermeneutical arc is the province of critical theories concerned primarily with the relationship between author and text. It is the phase of textuality which characterized the "Romantic hermeneutics" of the nineteenth century and remains the focus of certain theorists today.7 According to Ricoeur, the great nineteenth- century founders of modern hermeneutics, Schleiermacher and Dilthey, sought to bridge the cultural distance between past and present by recovering through extant signs the psychic life of the author in his original milieu. However, Ricoeur attaches significance to

5 Ricoeur's use of this quadrapartite scheme is apparent at many points in the essays in Thompson's collection and in "Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 5, no. 1 (1975) 14-33.

6 See esp. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (n. 3 above), pp. 197-203. 7 The most celebrated modern defense of this position is E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), which uses Husserl to construct an updated hermeneutics aimed at the recovery of authorial intention.

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Dilthey's increasing emphasis on the immanent meaning of the text, especially after the publication of Husserl's Logical Investigations.8 Husserl identified meaning not with subjective processes or ideas in the mind of the individual, but with ideal objects that can be isolated and analyzed independently of the subject's psychological state. For Ricoeur, Husserl's liberation of logic from psychology, his recognition that the meaning of a conscious act is lodged in the object it intends, manifests a significant shift at the turn of the century not only in philosophy but also in textual theory. The turn in philosophy from the psychological to the logical corresponds to a change from psychic identification with the author's subjectivity to the study of the text itself as an autonomous entity, or what Eliot called the "objective correlative" of the author's subjective life. Signs of this transformation appear not only in Dilthey's later writings and in Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry, which anticipated the New Criticism, but also in Russian formalism, which is the early twentieth-century antecedent to contem- porary structuralism.

The second moment of the interpretive arc belongs to theories which construe the text as an entity open to objective investigation of its structure and meaning. From this perspective, the author is considered not the psychological subject with whom we seek to identify, but the artisan who imposes form on matter and submits impersonally to the rules that govern production in a given literary genre. His individuality is not eliminated, but analyzed in its objectified form as his "style." According to Ricoeur, the formal and rule-governed nature of textual composition warrants the kind of objective analysis of the codifying process that has been the hallmark of structuralism. At first Ricoeur's acknowledgment of the validity of the semiological approach seems to betray his commitment to actual discourse rather than the language code as the model for textuality. Unlike the Saussurean langue employed by the structuralists, discourse is tied by means of various indicators, such as the first-person pronoun, to an actual speaker. Nonetheless, Ricoeur claims that the written text not only distances the immanent meaning of the text from the author's subjective intention, but also breaks the immediacy of self-reference characteristic of spoken discourse. Hence, there is justification, at least in this phase of the hermeneutical arc, for examining the text as an autonomous entity without direct appeal to the subjective life of the author, or, as we shall see, that of the reader.

Ricoeur maintains that the development of semiology as a genuine science of the text poses a challenge to modern hermeneutics. The

8 See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).

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success of semiology compels us to question Dilthey's distinction, which is perpetuated in a certain respect by Gadamer, between the objectively constituted explanations (Erklirung) appropriate to the natural sciences and the distinctively hermeneutic process of understanding (Verstehen) reserved for the human sciences. For Ricoeur, structuralism has demonstrated that the objectifying methodology of the sciences can no longer be excluded from hermeneutics, and that the semiological explanation of the text is a necessary step toward hermeneutic under- standing of its meaning. It is undeniable that Ricoeur's acceptance of structuralist analysis as a legitimate moment of interpretation seems at times a willful attempt to mediate between the irreconcilable aims and assumptions of two rival traditions. However, what at first appears to be a merely diplomatic gesture is actually part of a strategy which becomes apparent in the passage from the second to the third moment of the interpretive arc: the recognition on the ascending curve of the arc that the text possesses a determinate structure irreducible to the author's subjectivity prepares the way on the descending curve for the acceptance of the text as referring objectively to a "world" irreducible to the subjectivity of the reader. In other words, the objectifying proce- dures of structuralism enable hermeneutics to identify the text with a determinate and stable meaning which transcends the finite horizon of both the author who wrote it. and the various readers who seek to appropriate it.

As he moves into the third phase of the hermeneutical arc, Ricoeur turns once again to Benveniste and raises the issue of the referential dimension of the text, which tends to be ignored or denied by theories that dwell on its intrinsic structure. While Saussure's langue contains signs which refer differentially only to other signs within the system, Benveniste argues that discourse is directed to something beyond itself. Borrowing from Frege's terminology, Ricoeur states that discourse has not only an immanent "sense," but also a "reference" to a world outside itself with which it establishes some connection. It is true that the intro- duction of writing modifies the referential character of discourse, just as it affects the event/form relationship of spoken dialogue and its direct tie to a speaking subject: writing deprives discourse of the shared situa- tion of the interlocutors that exists in a spoken dialogue, and loses what Ricoeur describes as the "ostensive" referential relationship between discourse and situation that prevails in live conversation. Nonetheless, Ricoeur rejects those critics who dissociate the text from external reference entirely by choosing as the paradigm for textuality a handful of avant-garde texts--the poems of Mallarme or Joyce's Finnegans Wake-in which signifiers appear to have broken loose from the signi-

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fied.9 Instead, Ricoeur maintains that the loss of immediate ostensive or situational reference in the written text is the negative condition for

establishing a second-order reference to reality. The literary text

suspends the referential function of language at one level and reconsti- tutes it at another by referring to a world distinct from the ordinary reality to which we are accustomed. While romantic hermeneutics

sought the author's subjectivity behind the text, contemporary herme- neutics belongs instead to the third phase of the interpretive arc in its emphasis upon the imaginative world displayed in front of the text.

Through the power of a narrative to project a world at once different from and similar to our own, or the capacity of lyric to embody a new mode of feeling, we explore previously unimagined possibilities that

may eventually influence our habitual patterns of thought, action, and

feeling. In the last phase of the hermeneutical arc, Ricoeur examines the

relationship between the world to which the text refers and the reader who attempts to appropriate it for his own time and place. Once more Ricoeur proceeds from the example of discourse and then emphasizes the difference between spoken and written communication. Unlike the

language code, discourse possesses an auditor to whom a message is addressed. However, a written text is not confined to its original audience; it is available to any reader who has access to it. Recent theorists have grown increasingly preoccupied with the reader's partici- pation in the interpretive process, and some have claimed that the meaning of a text is inseparable from the subjective response, the historical circumstances, or the interpretive conventions of those who read it. 10 The fascination with reader-response criticism, the emphasis upon the historicity of interpretation, the exploration of the varying norms through which readers categorize and interpret texts -all grant a priority to the reader similar to that which the nineteenth century bestowed upon the author. But just as he wishes to avoid the inten- tional fallacy at one pole of the hermeneutic arc, Ricoeur also desires to

9 On the triumph of the signifier in recent French criticism, see Roland Barthes, "Theory of the Text," in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 31-47.

10 See, for instance, Jane P. Thompkins, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post- Structuralism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981); Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), pp. 3-15; and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Insofar as he emphasizes the inescapable historicity of interpretation, Gadamer's theory of the text may rest uneasily in this group. While Ricoeur is aware of Gadamer's careful attempts to avoid interpretive relativism, his own theory may be seen as an effort to overcome the shadow of relativism that still surrounds Gadamer's position by incorporating into hermeneutics the formalist notion of objective and stable meaning in the text.

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forestall the affective fallacy at the other pole. Parallel to his distinction between subjective intention and objective meaning on the ascending curve, he discriminates between the objective reference of the text to a world and the subjective appropriation of the text on the descending curve. Although it is the aim of hermeneutics to overcome the estrange- ment between past and present forms of expression, we must recognize that the world of the text is different not only from the author's finite horizon but from the reader's as well. Subjective appropriation of a text

ought to involve not the reduction of the text to the reader's own world, but rather the self-examination made possible by exposing oneself as a reader to a textual world distinct from one's contingent circumstances. Ricoeur envisions interpretation as the dialectical interaction between the understanding of the world projected by the text and the self-

understanding which takes place as the reader enters a reality different from his own. For Ricoeur, the act of appropriating a text should be a

process of disappropriating one's habitual identity as it is transformed

imaginatively and noncoercively by its participation in the world of the text.

Ricoeur's approach to metaphor is closely tied to this account of the

literary text as a world which transforms reality as we ordinarily know it. In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur extends the pioneering efforts of I. A. Richards, Max Black, Monroe Beardsley, and their successors, by developing the so-called tensional or interaction theory of metaphor which has appeared in the twentieth century. Just as he rejects the sign in favor of the sentence in his theory of the text, Ricoeur shifts the

theory of metaphor from the individual word to the sentence.

According to Ricoeur, a metaphor should be understood not as the decorative substitution of one term for another, but as the act of

predicating one thing of another that reveals an aspect of the subject or of both terms which we have not noticed before. In the traditional "substitution" theory of pre-twentieth-century rhetoricians such as Fontanier, the metaphorical term served primarily to embellish an absent proper term; in the modern tensional theory, a new metaphor is a genuine semantic innovation that constitutes a relation between ideas

formerly kept apart by existing categories of thought. Like the literary text, metaphor has the referential function of redescribing reality by proposing connections that call into question the existing order of our semantic fields. The creative metaphor may be likened to Aristotle's poetic mythos, which functions as a heuristic fiction, or a model, to present us with new possibilities that challenge our habitual modes of thought. Metaphor has on a small scale the mimetic capacity of the fictional text, which does not reproduce the existing form of reality, but produces a new form which redescribes the ordinary world and invites

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us to consider in imagination the new set of relationships that appears before us.1l

While Ricoeur disavows the attempt by Nietzsche and Derrida to

collapse the fundamental distinction between metaphor and concept, he affirms that metaphor issues from the same unifying capacity which

engenders an abstract idea, and he regards metaphorical creation as the chrysalis for conceptual innovation.'2 But, unlike the generic concept, metaphor establishes a new identity without erasing the difference between the terms it relates: "A family resemblance first

brings individuals together before the rule of a logical class dominates them. Metaphor, a figure of speech, presents in an open fashion, by means of a conflict between identity and difference, the process that, in a covert manner, generates semantic grids by fusion of differences into

identity."'3 In other words, by displaying the identity established by a

generic concept, without canceling the differences between the terms related, metaphor presents as possibility what the concept renders as fact. Just as the fictional text challenges the order of our conventional

experience by projecting new possibilities, "the strategy of language at work in metaphor consists in obliterating the logical and established frontiers of language, in order to bring to light new resemblances that previous classification kept us from seeing."14

Ricoeur's reassertion of the referential function of metaphor and fiction appears initially to run counter to the main tendencies of twentieth-century art and critical theory. In the first two decades of this century, artists declared their independence from the fetters which bound their works to external reality. While avant-garde painters abandoned the traditional ideal of representation and sought to disrupt the sense of continuity between the world depicted on the canvas and the world of ordinary perception, experimental novelists relinquished

1 In addition to The Rule of Metaphor (n. 2 above), see Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 143-59. Ricoeur's most extensive treatment of the parallel between metaphor and the Aristotelian mythos and mimesis appears in the first chapter of The Rule of Metaphor. For a restatement of his theory of metaphor and fiction that also attempts to revamp traditional philosophical accounts of the imagination, see "The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality," Man and World 12 (1979): 123-41. Ricoeur's published studies of the function of narrative itself include "The Human Experience of Time and Narrative," Research in Phenomenology 9 (1979): 17-34, and "Narrative Time," Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 169-90. A brisk but informative summary of Ricoeur's approach to language in general and the redescriptive role of metaphor and fiction appears in "Creativity in Language: Word, Polysemy, Metaphor," Philosophy Today 17 (1973): 97-111.

12 Ricoeur discusses Derrida's radicalization of Heidegger in The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 280-95. 13 Ibid., p. 198. Ricoeur regards this capacity of metaphor "to display relations in a depicting

mode" as the basis of the sense of pictorial concreteness we generally associate with the figure. On the "iconic" dimension of metaphor, see esp. "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling" and "The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality" (n. 10 above).

14 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, p. 197.

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the linear time sequences, reliable authorial perspective, and consis-

tency of representational mode through which the nineteenth-century "realistic" novel created a seemingly accurate reproduction of the social world. The emergence of a new art which stressed the discontinuity between the text and ordinary experience also fostered critical theories which depreciated the referential function of imaginative works and focused primarily on their intrinsic structures. For instance, the

example of early twentieth-century experimental literature inspired the Russian formalists to dissociate the text not only from the personality of the author but also from the historical milieu it depicts. Formalist critics have been remarkably successful in demonstrating that individ- ual works of art, both traditional and modern, are not reducible to the social world they portray; they have also shown that the history of art

proceeds through the interaction and transformation of generic con- ventions that transcend individual authors, and that the course of its

development does not always coincide with the course of external events.

Ricoeur does not reject the formalist turn from the author's subjec- tivity to the intrinsic structure of the text, but does attempt to revive the notion of reference which fell into disrepute at the same time. Most critics who still argue for the descriptive function of art revert to a naive

copy theory of representation, and usually remain hostile to the technical innovations of modern art and to the formalist approaches that appeared simultaneously. However, Ricoeur's theory of reference deliberately takes account of the formalist recognition of the discon- tinuity between the text and the everyday world around us. For Ricoeur, the explication of the referential dimension of the text is not opposed to, but rather proceeds from, the formal analysis of its struc- tural features. While the text loses its reference to the world as we ordinarily know it, it establishes a second-order reference to presenting us with a world whose unusual characteristics may lead us to further understanding of ourselves and our possibilities. In this respect, Ricoeur's theory affirms the stance of certain Modernists, such as Eliot and Brecht, who justified the discontinuity between art and life by claiming that art should not merely reflect existing patterns of thought, action, and feeling, but project a world with a peculiar logic of its own, which in turn "illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it."'5 In terms of his own hermeneutical arc, Ricoeur's theory of the text mediates between formalist theories that carry an awareness of the "otherness" of the text to the point of dissociating it from life entirely, and those reader-

15 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920; London: Methuen, 1950), p. 117.

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oriented theories which are so eager to "own" the text that they lose sight of its peculiar logic. For Ricoeur, textual interpretation is a process of dialectical movement between "distanciation" and "appropri- ation," between the objectifying stance that enables us to identify the otherness of the text and the self-examination which takes place as we struggle to relate the text to our own situation.

The dialectic of distanciation and appropriation has special relevance to the problem of modern biblical interpretation. Even in the late twentieth century the battle still goes on between those who maintain unquestioned fidelity to the outlook of the Bible's original authors, whose authority is sanctioned by divine inspiration, and those who see the necessity of reinterpreting the text in a way that speaks to the drastically altered conditions of modernity. In his theory of the text, Ricoeur attempts to avoid both the intentional and the affective fallacy and, similarly, in his approach to biblical texts, he steers a course between conflicting extremes. 16 Capitalizing on recent trends in biblical scholarship, Ricoeur examines the various literary forms through which faith is expressed, and locates the meaning of a biblical text beyond the temporal horizon of both authors and readers in the world displayed by the particular form. Ricoeur's account of the power of metaphor and fiction to redescribe reality is especially well suited to the parable, which shows us what the Kingdom of God "is like" by present- ing us with a narrative of a world whose values invert the logic of ordinary existence.17 However, Ricoeur is aware of the danger of making any one genre the norm for religious understanding. The Old Testament alone contains a variety of literary forms-narrative, prophecy, prescriptive discourse, wisdom literature, and hymns among others--each of which exhibits a distinctive understanding of God's relationship to his people. Although they name God as their common referent, each of these partial discourses limits and conditions the others, and no one of them provides the exclusive key to the meaning of the Scriptures today. Ricoeur explores the meaning of each of these modes of discourse and their mutual interactions while maintaining that the one God to whom they point can be reduced to no one form of expression or to a philosophical system that encompasses them all.18 By

16 For an analysis of biblical hermeneutics that passes through the four phases of the interpretive arc, see "Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics" (n. 5 above). 17 See Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia 4 (1975): 29-148. Ricoeur makes some interesting advances in his treatment of parabolic discourse in "The Bible and the Imagination," in The Bible as a Document of the University, ed. Hans Dieter Betz (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 49-75.

18 See Paul Ricoeur, "Philosophy and Religious Language," Journal of Religion 54 (1974): 71-85; "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation" in Mudge's collection (n. 4 above); and "Naming God," Union Theological Seminary Quarterly Review 34, no. 4 (1979): 215-27.

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emphasizing the variety of literary forms and the multidimensionality of Scripture, Ricoeur takes a step toward mediating the conflict between opposing theological tendencies. He asks liberals to take account of the cosmological as well as the existential dimension of the text, and conservatives to acknowledge that part of the text which

justifies the drive for social justice in this world as well as that which

encourages hope for personal deliverance beyond it. The recognition that the biblical world is both singular and plural should make us pause before we grant an exclusive privilege to any one literary genre or interpretive stance.19

Ricoeur's reluctance to search for a conceptual formulation which embraces the diverse expressions of faith in the Scriptures reveals a characteristic tendency of his thought. Although his dialectical reason- ing and his comprehensive sweep are reminiscent of Hegelian philos- ophy, Ricoeur stops short of constructing a synthesis which integrates all partial views into a systematic totality. While his dialectical

exchanges between competing disciplines extend our understanding, Ricoeur's thinking always operates with a Kantian awareness of the limits of human knowledge. Like his description of metaphor, which establishes connections without eliminating the differences between its constituent terms, Ricoeur engages the seemingly antithetical stances of contemporary methodologies in a dialectical encounter which com- prehends their opposing claims not by constructing a synthesis that resolves their differences but rather by making productive use of the tensions between them.

19 On other aspects of Ricoeur's writings on biblical interpretation and theology in the 1970s, see the essays in Mudge (n. 4 above); in pt. 5 of the anthology edited by Reagan and Stewart (n. 2 above); and "Manifestation and Proclamation," Journal of the Blaisdell Institute, vol. 12 (Winter 1978), an intriguing attempt at a dialectical exchange between Eliade and Bultmann, or more important, between religious traditions that emphasize the presence of the divine in nature and sacrament, and those which stress the primacy of the Word and the task of interpretation.

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