Abstract
Paul Ricœur’s understanding of tradition is usually associated with his intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas debate in an important work entitled “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology” (1973). This chapter focuses on his earlier writings on tradition, specifically his critical engagement with French structuralism and philosophy of language during the 1960s through the early 1970s, which inform his later more well-known reflections. Instead of pursuing the now familiar themes of critique and ideology, distanciation and belonging, then, the themes of word or speech [parole] and writing [écriture] will be examined. I argue that Ricœur offers a critique of a dead and static notion of tradition, conceived as an abstract, fixed structure and meaningless deposit. And he presents a constructive alternative for a living and dynamic sense of tradition, which is first an eventful address of speech to a listening individual or community and which is meaningfully mediated by writing through the phenomenon of the ‘written voice’ and the ‘listening reader’. By attending to and parsing the meanings of parole and écriture, this chapter unfolds a philosophically rigorous and linguistically informed concept of tradition that is, at once, conservative and innovative.
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Notes
- 1.
Ricœur and Gadamer first met in Louvain, Belgium in November 1957 when Gadamer was invited to give a talk on the problem of historical consciousness (Dosse 1997: 395).
- 2.
Indeed, their correspondence from February 1964 through October 2000 largely centered on the translation of Wahrheit und Methode (Grondin 2013).
- 3.
The early 1970s, for Ricœur, marked a turn to Gadamer’s works. In 1971, Ricœur offered a seminar devoted to Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (Ricœur 1971d), and in 1972–1973, he conducted a seminar entitled “Herméneutique et critique des ideologies,” which would be the basis for his now well-known article on Gadamer and Habermas (Ricœur 1973b, 1981a). To my knowledge, the first time he cites Gadamer is in two articles, which were published in 1971 (Ricœur 1971a, c).
- 4.
- 5.
Ricœur recalls that “Nineteen sixty-one was the year when…I felt compelled to shift my interest from the original problem of the structure of the will to the problem of language as such, which had remained even at the time when I was studying the strange structures of the symbolism of myths” (Ricœur 1971b: 14, 15).
- 6.
Ricœur’s later discussions of Gadamer do touch upon the issues of speech [Sprachlichkeit] and writing [Schriftlichkeit] (Ricœur 1991b: 73), but they recede into the background in comparison to the more dominant themes of critique and ideology, distanciation and belonging.
- 7.
The French term parole can be translated as ‘word’ or ‘speech’ and écriture can be translated as ‘writing’ or ‘scripture’. Context will dictate the English translation.
- 8.
For instance, Ricœur writes, “That language is an object goes without saying, so long as we maintain the critical awareness that this object is entirely defined by the procedures, methods, presuppositions, and finally the structure of the theory, which governs its constitution. But if we lose sight of this subordination of object to method and to theory, we take for an absolute what is only a phenomenon” (Ricœur 1974b).
- 9.
My chapter is devoted to Ricœur’s understanding of tradition through his engagement with philosophy of language, particularly around the notion of parole and écriture during the 1960s and early 1970s. It is noteworthy, however, that he also offered theological reflections later in his career precisely on the understanding and relationship between the Word of God [Parole de Dieu] and Holy Scripture [Écriture sainte]. On the one hand, he acknowledges the difference between profane words and writings and theological words and writings. He writes, “It appears to me, indeed, that a seemingly insurmountable gap is widening between, on the one hand, the use of the terms ‘paroles’ and ‘écriture’ in the profane context of ordinary language and, on the other hand, the use of the same terms adorned in capital letters that we encounter in dogmatic statements from high theology on the relationship between the Word of God [Parole de Dieu] and Holy Scripture [Écritures saintes].” On the other hand, the circular relation between word and writing where the word is the lexical unit of all writing while writing is the place for meaning of the word is re-articulated such that the Word is a ‘foundation’ for Scripture and yet Scripture is the place for the manifestation of the Word (Ricœur 1994: 307–308).
- 10.
As noted above, écriture can be translated as ‘writing’ or ‘scripture’. In other places, Ricœur examines the relationship between the Word of God [Parole de Dieu] and Scripture [Ecriture], which inform his interest in and understanding of parole and écriture.
- 11.
My chapter is devoted to Ricœur’s understanding of tradition through his engagement with philosophy of language, particularly during the 1960s and early 1970s. It is noteworthy, however, that during this same period, he was also reading and writing on Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology: The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions. It was first published in 1957 in the original German, but Ricœur’s copy in his personal library seems to indicate that he read the English translation that was published in 1962, the same year that Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage was released. For the note that Ricœur was reading von Rad’s Old Testament Theology at the same time as Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage, see Ricœur (1974c: 45). What Ricœur finds significant in von Rad’s work is that it “suggests an inverse relationship between diachrony and synchrony and raises more urgently the problem of the relationship between structural comprehension and hermeneutic comprehension.” The Old Testament is understood by von Rad not as nomenclature or classification of the religion of Israel in the abstract, but of founding historical events. To submit the content of the Old Testament to an ordered schema of doctrines (eg doctrine of God, doctrine of man) is inadequate to a faith that is tied to divine acts of salvation within history. It is the surplus of meaning in founding events that motivates the formation of tradition and interpretation. The task of biblical criticism, then, is not a reconstruction of actual historical events behind the major source documents; rather one must understand that each seemingly simple narrative unit is, in fact, the final stage of a long process of transmission and interpretation of varied traditions. Scripture [Écriture] itself gathered diverse traditions belonging to diverse sources transmitted by different groups, tribes, or clans. Tradition, then, is not supplemental to Scripture, but constitutes it. Such units, in turn, would themselves become part of a history of interpretation and reinterpretation, constituting and developing the tradition (Ricœur 1974c: 45). Ricœur never made explicit the connection between structuralism and biblical criticism, but we can see parallels and overlap between the two that form an outline of a concept of tradition.
- 12.
This is a point that Ricœur also makes with respect to Scripture [Écriture]. The confessions of faith in biblical writings are inseparable from the forms or genres of biblical discourse – narrative, prophets, parables, hymns, etc. He writes, “These documents of faith do not primarily contain theological statements, in the sense of metaphysical speculative theology, but expressions embedded in such modes of discourse as narratives, prophecies, legislative texts, proverbs and wisdom sayings, hymns, prayers, and liturgical formulas. The first task of any hermeneutic is to identify these originary modes of discourse through which the religious faith of a community comes to language” (Ricœur 1974a: 73).
- 13.
Here, Ricœur is influenced by the work of G.G. Granger and his concept of style, see Granger (1968).
- 14.
The relationship between writing and tradition has deep historical and religious roots regarding the debate over what relation, if any, there is between Scripture and tradition.
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Sohn, M. (2016). Word, Writing, Tradition. In: Davidson, S., Vallée, MA. (eds) Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33426-4_7
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