The debate which is evoked by this title goes well beyond the limits of a discussion about the foundations of the social sciences. It raises the question of what I shall call the fundamental gesture of philosophy. Is this gesture an avowal of the historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed under the reign of finitude? Or rather is it, in the last analysis, an act of defiance, a critical gesture, relentlessly repeated and indefinitely turned against ‘false consciousness’, against the distortions of human communication which conceal the permanent exercise of domination and violence? Such is the philosophical stake of a debate which at first seems tied to the epistemological plane of the human sciences. What is at stake can be expressed in terms of an alternative: either a hermeneutical consciousness or a critical consciousness. But is it really so? Is it not the alternative itself which must be challenged? Is it possible to formulate a hermeneutics which would render justice to the critique of ideology, which would show the necessity of the latter at the very heart of its own concerns? Clearly the stake is considerable. We are not going to risk everything by beginning with terms which are too general and an attitude which is too ambitious. We shall, instead, focus on a contemporary discussion which presents the problem in the form of an alternative. Even if ultimately this alternative must be surpassed, we shall not be in ignorance of the difficulties to be overcome.

The principal protagonists in the debate are, on the side of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer; and on the side of critique, Jürgen Habermas. The dossier of their polemic is now public, partially reproduced in the little volume entitled Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. It is from this dossier that I shall extract the lines of force which characterise the conflict between hermeneutics and the critical theory of ideology. I shall take the assessment of tradition by each of these philosophies as the touchstone of the debate. In contrast to the positive assessment by hermeneutics, the theory of ideology adopts a suspicious approach, seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence. The choice of this touchstone has the advantage of bringing to the fore a confrontation which bears upon the ‘claim to universality’ of hermeneutics.

It will be assumed here that the central problem of hermeneutics is that of interpretation. Not interpretation in any sense of the word, but interpretation determined in two ways: the first concerning its field of application, the second its epistemological specificity. As regards the first point, I shall say that there is a problem of interpretation because there are texts, written texts, the autonomy of which creates specific difficulties. By ‘autonomy’ I understand the independence of the text with respect to the intention of the author, the situation of the work and the original reader. The relevant problems are resolved in oral discourse by the kind of exchange or intercourse which we call dialogue or conversation. With written texts, discourse must speak by itself. Let us say, therefore, that there are problems of interpretation because the writing–reading relation is not a particular case of the speaking–hearing relation which we experience in the dialogical situation. Such is the most general feature of interpretation as regards its field of application.

Second, the concept of interpretation seems, at the epistemological level, to be opposed to the concept of explanation. Taken together, these concepts form a contrasting pair which has given rise to a great many disputes since the time of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. According to the tradition to which the latter authors belong, interpretation has certain subjective connotations, such as the implication of the reader in the processes of understanding and the reciprocity between interpretation of the text and self-interpretation. This reciprocity is known by the name of the hermeneutical circle; it entails a sharp opposition to the sort of objectivity and non-implication which is supposed to characterise the scientific explanation of things. Later I shall say to what extent we may be able to amend, indeed to reconstruct on a new basis, the opposition between interpretation and explanation. Whatever the outcome of the subsequent discussion may be, this schematic description of the concept of interpretation suffices for a provisional circumscription of the central problem of hermeneutics: the status of written texts versus spoken language, the status of interpretation versus explanation.

Now for the metaphor! The aim of this essay is to link up the problems raised in hermeneutics by the interpretation of texts and the problems raised in rhetoric, semantics, stylistics – or whatever the discipline concerned may be – by metaphor.

This essay seeks to describe the state of the hermeneutical problem, such as I receive and perceive it, before offering my own contribution to the debate. In this preliminary discussion, I shall restrict myself to identifying not only the elements of a conviction, but the terms of an unresolved problem. For I wish to lead hermeneutical reflection to the point where it calls, by an internal aporia, for an important reorientation which will enable it to enter seriously into discussion with the sciences of the text, from semiology to exegesis.

I shall adopt the following working definition of hermeneutics: hermeneutics is the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts. So the key idea will be the realisation of discourse as a text; and the elaboration of the categories of the text will be the concern of a subsequent study. The way will thereby be prepared for an attempt to resolve the central problem of hermeneutics presented at the end of this essay: namely the opposition, disastrous in my view, between explanation and understanding. The search for a complementarity between these two attitudes, which Romantic hermeneutics tends to dissociate, will thus express on the epistemological plane the hermeneutical reorientation demanded by the notion of the text.

From regional hermeneutics to general hermeneutics

The appraisal of hermeneutics which I propose converges towards the formulation of an aporia, which is the very aporia that has instigated my own research. The presentation which follows is therefore not neutral, in the sense of being free from presuppositions. Indeed, hermeneutics itself puts us on guard against the illusion or pretension of neutrality.

I see the recent history of hermeneutics dominated by two preoccupations. The first tends progressively to enlarge the aim of hermeneutics, in such a way that all regional hermeneutics are incorporated into one general hermeneutics. But this movement of deregionalisation cannot be pressed to the end unless at the same time the properly epistemological concerns of hermeneutics – its efforts to achieve a scientific status – are subordinated to ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to being.

The aim of this essay is to sketch a general theory of narrative discourse which encompasses both the ‘true’ narrative of the historians and the ‘fictional’ narratives of storytellers, playwrights and novelists. What is at stake is the possibility of delimiting the act of narrating which is common to these two narrative types. To use Wittgenstein's vocabulary, if narrating is a unique ‘language-game’, and if a language-game ‘is part of an activity or a form of life’, then we must ask to which form of life narrative discourse as a whole is bound. That is what I call ‘to inquire into the narrative function’.

The inquiry may be pursued at two different but interconnected levels: the level of sense and the level of reference. At the first level, the problem is whether history and fiction have a common structure, that is, a common way of ordering sentences on the properly discursive plane. This first analysis has and must retain a formal character. At the second level, the problem is whether, in spite of the evident differences in the way that history and fiction are related to ‘reality’ – in whatever sense of the word – they refer nonetheless, each in its own way, to the same fundamental feature of our individual and social existence. This feature is characterised in very different philosophies by the term ‘historicity’, which signifies the fundamental and radical fact that we make history, that we are immersed in history, that we are historical beings. The ultimate problem is thus to show in what way history and fiction contribute, in virtue of their common narrative structure, to the description and redescription of our historical condition. In a word, what is ultimately at stake in our inquiry is the correlation, or better the mutual belonging, between narrativity and historicity.

The structural unity of historical and fictional narratives

It should not be assumed that the structural unity of historical and fictional narratives is easier to establish than their common reference or, as I shall say later, than their reference crossing upon our historicity.

Allow me to honour the memory of the Angelic Doctor [St Thomas Aquinas] by placing the present study under the patronage of what he called the Philosopher. In the prologue to the Nicomachean Ethics, we read this:

Why did I quote this text? Not for the luxury of epigraph and exordium, but for the very discipline of reasoning itself. For I propose to show that, if the properly Aristotelian thesis of the plurality of levels of scientificity is maintained, then the phenomenon of ideology is susceptible of a relatively positive assessment. Aristotle tells us several things: that politics has to deal with variable and unstable matters, and that here reasoning begins from facts which are generally, but not always, true; that it is the cultivated man and not the specialist who is judge in these matters; that it is therefore necessary to be content with showing the truth in a rough and approximate way (or, according to the above translation, ‘roughly and in outline’); finally, that this is so because the problem is of a practical nature.

The text has cautionary value at the threshold of our inquiry.

The question of proof in psychoanalysis is as old as psychoanalysis itself. The 1895 ‘Project’ aims at being a project of scientific psychology. The Interpretation of Dreams purports to be a science and not a fantastic construction, a ‘fine fairy tale’, to use Krafft-Ebing's remark, hurled at Freud at the close of one public presentation. Each of Freud's didactic works – the Introductory Lectures, the New Introductory Lectures, and the Outline – represents a new effort to communicate to the layman the conviction that psychoanalysis is genuinely related to what is intelligible and what claims to be true. And yet, psychoanalysis has never quite succeeded in stating how its assertions are justified, how its interpretations are authenticated, how its theory is verified. This relative failure of psychoanalysis to be recognised as a science results, I think, from a failure to ask certain preliminary questions to which I devote the first two parts of my essay; the third part is an attempt to reply directly to the original question.

The criteria for ‘facts’ in psychoanalysis

The first question concerns what is relevant as a fact in psychoanalysis. We may begin by noting that traditional discussions about the epistemological status of analytic theory take it for granted that theories consist of propositions whose role is to systematise, explain, and predict phenomena comparable to those which verify or falsify theories in the natural sciences or in human sciences which, like academic psychology, themselves adopt the epistemology of the natural sciences. Even when we are not dealing with a narrow empiricism which does not require a theory to be directly validated by observables, we nevertheless continue to ask the same questions we would put to an observational science. In this way, we ask by what specific procedures psychoanalysis connects this or that theoretical notion to definite and unambiguous facts. However indirect the verification process may be, definitions must become operational, that is, they must be shown to generate procedures for verification and falsification. And this is precisely what is in question: what in psychoanalysis merits being considered as a verifiable fact?

My thesis is that psychoanalytic theory – in a certain sense which will be described in the second part of this essay – is the codification of what takes place in the analytic situation and, more precisely, in the analytic relationship.

This essay will be devoted primarily to the debate between two fundamental attitudes which may be adopted in regard to a text. These two attitudes were summed up, in the period of Wilhelm Dilthey at the end of the last century, by the two words ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’. For Dilthey, ‘explanation’ referred to the model of intelligibility borrowed from the natural sciences and applied to the historical disciplines by positivist schools; ‘interpretation’, on the other hand, was a derivative form of understanding, which Dilthey regarded as the fundamental attitude of the human sciences and as that which could alone preserve the fundamental difference between these sciences and the sciences of nature. Here I propose to examine the fate of this opposition in the light of conflicts between contemporary schools. For the notion of explanation has since been displaced, so that it derives no longer from the natural sciences but from properly linguistic models. As regards the concept of interpretation, it has undergone profound transformations which distance it from the psychological notion of understanding, in Dilthey's sense of the word. It is this new position of the problem, perhaps less contradictory and more fecund, which I should like to explore. But before unfolding the new concepts of explanation and understanding, I should like to pause at a preliminary question which in fact dominates the whole of our investigation. The question is this: what is a text?

What is a text?

Let us say that a text is any discourse fixed by writing. According to this definition, fixation by writing is constitutive of the text itself. But what is fixed by writing? We have said: any discourse. Is this to say that discourse had to be pronounced initially in a physical or mental form? that all writing was initially, at least in a potential way, speaking? In short, what is the relation of the text to speech?

To begin with, we are tempted to say that all writing is added to some anterior speech. For if by speech [parole] we understand, with Ferdinand de Saussure, the realisation of language [langue] in an event of discourse, the production of an individual utterance by an individual speaker, then each text is in the same position as speech with respect to language.

The nature of language and meaning, of action, interpretation and subjectivity, are issues of increasing concern to a wide range of contemporary disciplines. For philosophers, linguists, literary critics and social scientists, the clarification of such issues has become an urgent and inescapable task. In the English-speaking world, however, the pursuit of this task remains hindered by both an institutionalised respect for disciplinary boundaries and a long-standing insularity with regard to Continental traditions of thought. There can be no doubt that the growing familiarity with the work of Paul Ricoeur will help enormously to overcome these obstacles. As one of the leading philosophers in postwar France, Ricoeur has written with originality and authority on an astonishing variety of topics. During the last few years, he has turned his attention more directly to problems of language, entering into a sustained dialogue with the tradition of hermeneutics. The dialogue with this tradition, whose members have focused for centuries on the process of interpretation, forms the backcloth for the contributions contained in this volume.

In order to appreciate fully the significance of Ricoeur's current work, it is necessary to have some perspective on his writings as a whole. My aim in this introduction is to provide such an overall view. I shall begin with a brief synopsis of Ricoeur's career. In the second part, I shall trace the evolution of Ricoeur's thought, from his early project for a philosophy of the will, through his encounters with psychoanalysis and structuralism, to his recent preoccupation with the theory of the text. In the third part, I shall sketch the central themes of Ricoeur's current work. Finally, in the fourth part, I shall summarise some of the main arguments of the essays which appear in this volume. It should be said at the outset that no attempt will be made to give a comprehensive survey of Ricoeur's work. Certain contributions will be emphasised at the expense of others and some of his writings, for example those dealing with educational and theological issues, will largely be left aside. It should also be said that, however important Ricoeur's ideas may be, I do not believe that they are without difficulties; but this is not the place to express my reservations, which I have developed in detail elsewhere.

The move of the term ‘hermeneutics’ from its original home in textual (at first Biblical) interpretation to its new application to history and human science owes a great deal to two outstanding twentieth-century philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.

The move can be understood in the light of two crucial insights. The first is that ‘understanding’ can have a quite different sense applied to human affairs from that which it has in natural science or technology. Understanding why you made that surprising move involves something rather different from understanding why my car broke down. Thus we often say things like (1) ‘I can't understand him. He seems to be sabotaging, undermining his most cherished goal’; or (2) ‘That reaction seems totally over the top, uncalled for’; or (3) ‘He seems to be deliberately provoking opposition’; or (4) ‘Why did she put her demand in those terms, which almost guaranteed refusal?’ In all these cases, the actor is (provisionally) opaque to us; we cannot understand him or her.

We explain properly, we make sense of the action/response, when we add to or complexify the range of meanings or motivations actually operating here. It was Dilthey who made this point most forcefully, and he influenced some important twentieth-century sociologists, like Max Weber.

The second point is that there are important features in common between making sense of human beings and understanding texts. In particular, a certain kind of circularity attaches to both types of account. The aim, in the original context of Bible interpretation, was often to clarify a particular passage which was uncertain or enigmatic. But the reading offered of this passage or verse had to make sense within the presumed overall meaning of the entire chapter, book, and ultimately, of the whole Bible. One could thus use the sense of the whole to make sense of the part. But a question can always be raised: do we understand fully the meaning of the whole?

There is a circle here, but not a vicious one. It doesn't involve the notorious ‘circular argument’, where one assumes the conclusion among the premises. On the contrary, the attempt is to bring the arguments in both directions into an equilibrium in which one makes maximum sense of the text. But a similar circularity applies to making sense of action.

This study does not aim to be a contribution to the history of phenomenology, to its archaeology, but rather an inquiry into the destiny of phenomenology today. And if I have chosen the general theory of interpretation or hermeneutics as a touchstone, that does not mean either that I would replace an historical monograph by a chapter on the comparative history of modern philosophy. For with hermeneutics as well, I do not wish to proceed as an historian, even as an historian of the present day. Whatever may be the dependence of the following meditation on Heidegger and above all on Gadamer, what is at stake is the possibility of continuing to do philosophy with them and after them – without forgetting Husserl. Thus my essay will seek to be a debate about the ways in which philosophy can still be pursued.

I propose the following two theses for discussion. First thesis: what hermeneutics has ruined is not phenomenology but one of its interpretations, namely its idealistic interpretation by Husserl himself; accordingly, I shall speak henceforth of Husserlian idealism. I shall take the ‘Nachwort’ to the Ideen as a reference and a guide, submitting its principal theses to the hermeneutical critique. The first part of the essay will thus be purely and simply antithetical.

Second thesis: beyond the simple opposition there exists, between phenomenology and hermeneutics, a mutual belonging which it is important to make explicit. This belonging can be recognised from either position. On the one hand, hermeneutics is erected on the basis of phenomenology and thus preserves something of the philosophy from which it nevertheless differs: phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. On the other hand, phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutical presupposition. The hermeneutical condition of phenomenology is linked to the role of Auslegung [explication] in the fulfilment of its philosophical project.

The hermeneutical critique of Husserlian idealism

The first part of this essay seeks to disclose the gap, if not the gulf, which separates the project of hermeneutics from all idealistic expressions of phenomenology. The antithetical position of the two philosophical projects will alone be developed. We shall nevertheless reserve the possibility that phenomenology as such is not wholly exhausted by one of its interpretations, even that of Husserl himself. It is, in my view, Husserlian idealism which succumbs to the hermeneutical critique.

I should like, in this brief foreword, to express my gratitude to John Thompson for the considerable work which the translation of my essays represents. I am in complete agreement with his choice of terms for rendering French or German expressions that have no equivalents, either in the British philosophical tradition or even in the English language. Of course, there is always a point at which a translation becomes an interpretation; but Thompson has ensured continuity and coherence in his choices. He has thus provided an English translation of my essays which is as readable as it is exact.

I should also like to express my interest in the analysis which he offers, in his substantial introduction, of the development of my work from 1947 until the earliest articles in this collection, none of which date from before 1970. The perspective which he proposes corrects the inverse impression, to which I have a tendency to succumb: that of a certain lack of continuity in my writings. For each work responds to a determinate challenge, and what connects it to its predecessors seems to me to be less the steady development of a unique project than the acknowledgement of a residue left over by the previous work, a residue which gives rise in turn to a new challenge.

The first challenge was that represented by the apparent incapacity of Husserlian phenomenology to deal with volitional experience, since the privilege of theoretical consciousness and perception seemed so much to dominate, to the point of saturating, the descriptive field opened up by the analysis of intentionality; had not Merleau-Ponty as well written a phenomenology of perception? Could one write a phenomenology of the will without abandoning the method of describing the essential structures of consciousness? Freedom and Nature attempted to respond to this challenge.

However, the residue left by the analysis was considerable. On the one hand, a gap appeared between the intended meaning of freedom of the will and the various limitations attested to by the involuntary – a disproportion which seemed to have no parallel in the sphere of theoretical consciousness, even if one emphasised, more than Merleau-Ponty had done, the gap between the conceptual meaning of language and the corporeal condition of perception.

In previous studies, I have described the background against which I shall try to elaborate the hermeneutical problem in a way that will be significant for the dialogue between hermeneutics and the semiological and exegetical disciplines. The description has led us to an antinomy which seems to me to be the mainspring of Gadamer's work, namely the opposition between alienating distanciation and belonging. This opposition is an antinomy because it establishes an untenable alternative: on the one hand, alienating distanciation is the attitude that renders possible the objectification which reigns in the human sciences; but on the other hand, this distanciation, which is the condition of the scientific status of the sciences, is at the same time the fall that destroys the fundamental and primordial relation whereby we belong to and participate in the historical reality which we claim to construct as an object. Whence the alternative underlying the very title of Gadamer's work Truth and Method: either we adopt the methodological attitude and lose the ontological density of the reality we study, or we adopt the attitude of truth and must then renounce the objectivity of the human sciences.

My own reflection stems from a rejection of this alternative and an attempt to overcome it. The first expression of this attempt consists in the choice of a dominant problematic which seems to me to escape from the alternative between alienating distanciation and participatory belonging. The dominant problematic is that of the text, which reintroduces a positive and, if I may say so, productive notion of distanciation. In my view, the text is much more than a particular case of intersubjective communication: it is the paradigm of distanciation in communication. As such, it displays a fundamental characteristic of the very historicity of human experience, namely that it is communication in and through distance.

In what follows, I shall elaborate the notion of the text in view of that to which it testifies, the positive and productive function of distanciation at the heart of the historicity of human experience.