Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Religion by Brian Gregor

Author:Brian Gregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498584746
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Chapter 6

The Summoned Subject

The Call and the Capable Self

In chapter 5 we saw how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics shifted away from the interpersonal, I-Thou encounter with his detour through structuralism. The distanciation of the text means that it acquires a semantic autonomy, taking on a life of its own beyond the author. In the context of biblical hermeneutics, this shift leads to questions about how the Bible is the Word of God—that is, how God addresses us in and through the biblical texts.

We see something of a return to the dialogical in Ricoeur’s work from the late 1980s and 1990s, when he starts to frame the hermeneutics of religion in terms of the call and response. This chapter will explore this call and response structure in Ricoeur’s work, showing how the believing self is constituted by the divine call, and how the response to this call presupposes certain capacities like reason, conscience, and desire. This is a continuation of Ricoeur’s efforts to maintain both alterity and ipseity in his hermeneutics of religion. However, this also creates a tension regarding the idea of justification by faith, which is central to Ricoeur’s Protestant framework. Luther’s reading of Paul is the basis for an ontology that informs Kierkegaard, Barth, Heidegger, and the post-Heideggerian Lutheran theologians who are so formative for Ricoeur. This is an ontology in which eschatological possibility is prior to any human act, activity, or actuality. It is unclear how exactly Ricoeur’s philosophical approximation of the theology of the Word and its ontology of justification by faith fits with his ontology of the capable self.

A Capacity to Hear the Call of the Other?

One of the central debates in Ricoeur’s later work on religion is the relation between self and other, ipseity and alterity. Ricoeur offers a model of intersubjectivity as a relation of mutuality, reciprocity, giving and receiving. The mutuality between self and other is always a fragile balance, Ricoeur admits (OA 188), but he still insists this fragile relation is a genuine good that does take place.

This position sets Ricoeur in opposition to views that intersubjectivity is founded unilaterally. In that case, there is no genuine relation, no symmetry, only asymmetry or even dissymmetry. Ricoeur sees this one-sided non relation in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which locates the origin of intersubjectivity in the constituting act of the subject, who understands the other by analogy to itself. In this model, alterity is derived from the ego. Ricoeur also cites the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as an instance of asymmetry—though Levinas inverts the Husserlian account so that intersubjectivity originates entirely with the initiative of the other. For Levinas, “the word of the other comes to be placed at the origin of my acts” (OA 336). However, the other is so separate and exterior to the self that “this initiative establishes no relation at all” (OA 188). For Levinas, this encounter with the Other is not modeled on the I-Thou encounter in which there is a dialogical exchange. Instead, there is a sort of non-encounter in which I am summoned to responsibility, prior to my own initiative or ability.

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