Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was the greatest French philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century and the thinker who most sustained and most rigorously maintained the dialogue between philosophy and biblical interpretation over a long intellectual career. His achievement was to take with equal seriousness the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' - the unmasking of ideology, illusion, and self-deception in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - and the biblical texts' own claim to disclose genuine truth about human existence. His concept of the 'second naivete' - a post-critical return to the texts' testimony after it has been subjected to rigorous suspicion - provided a philosophical account of how biblical faith can survive and be enriched by modern criticism. His influence on theology (through David Tracy, Walter Brueggemann, Kevin Vanhoozer) has been as significant as his influence on philosophy.
The Thinker and His Work
Ricoeur came from a Protestant family in Valence, France, and grew up in the Reformed tradition that shaped his sensitivity to the biblical text as a distinct voice requiring careful listening. He was a prisoner of war in Germany from 1940 to 1945, during which time he read Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Marcel extensively. His early work was in phenomenology and the philosophy of the will (The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 1950; Freedom and Nature, 1966). His engagement with the problem of evil led him to the symbolism of fault and confession in The Symbolism of Evil (1960), his first sustained engagement with biblical and religious texts. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965) introduced the concept of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and marked his turn toward the philosophy of interpretation. The Rule of Metaphor (1975), Time and Narrative (3 vols., 1984-88), and Oneself as Another (1990) developed the hermeneutical philosophy for which he became internationally known. His later biblical essays - collected in Figuring the Sacred (1995) and Essays on Biblical Interpretation - represent his most direct engagement with Scripture.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Job 3:1 - the opening of Job's lament - is for Ricoeur the paradigmatic text of the 'second naivete' in the biblical tradition itself. Job's complaint against God moves through and beyond a naive trust in divine justice to a troubled, post-innocent faith that is more honest and philosophically deeper than the faith that precedes it. The book of Job models the movement that Ricoeur describes philosophically: genuine engagement with the suffering and injustice that challenge faith, followed not by resolution of the tension but by a transformed relationship to God that has passed through the darkness rather than around it.
Psalm 22:1 - 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' - is another model of lament as a form of faith. The psalms of lament, which Ricoeur reads closely, show that biblical faith includes the right and the necessity to challenge God - to voice the experience of abandonment, injustice, and suffering as a form of address to God rather than as the refusal of God. This 'accusatory prayer' is, for Ricoeur, philosophically more honest than the piety that never confronts the problem of evil.
Romans 7:15 - 'I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate' - is the Pauline text that Ricoeur reads in the context of the philosophy of the will and the problem of evil. Paul's account of the divided self - willing the good and doing the bad - is, for Ricoeur, one of the most penetrating psychological and philosophical descriptions in Western literature, anticipating Freud's account of the unconscious and Augustine's account of original sin as the disorder of the will.
Core Argument
Ricoeur's hermeneutical philosophy has several key concepts. The 'hermeneutics of suspicion' (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) uncovers the hidden interests, resentments, and repressions that distort human consciousness and produce ideological illusions. To take these masters of suspicion seriously is to acknowledge that naive first-order faith - faith that has never confronted its own potential for self-deception - is philosophically inadequate. But the conclusion that suspicion draws - that religious belief is nothing but ideology, resentment, or neurosis - is itself an unargued dogma.
The 'second naivete' is the recovery of the texts' testimony after it has been subjected to rigorous interpretation. Just as a poem requires both critical analysis (attention to formal features, historical context, literary conventions) and something that exceeds pure analysis - a willingness to be addressed by the poem, to receive its world - so biblical texts require both historical-critical scrutiny and a second hermeneutical openness to what they disclose. This second openness is not regression to pre-critical innocence but the appropriation of the text's possible world by a reader who has been both formed and challenged by the tradition.
The concept of the 'world of the text' is central: literary texts, including biblical texts, do not primarily mirror the world behind them (the historical circumstances of their composition) or express the author's intention, but project a possible way of being in the world. Biblical texts project specific possibilities of human existence - the life of trust before God, the vocation of justice, the experience of grace - that claim the reader's appropriation. Interpretation is the act of understanding oneself in front of the text's projected world.
Intellectual Context
Ricoeur worked in dialogue with Husserl (phenomenology), Heidegger (interpretation as the fundamental structure of human existence), Gadamer (the fusion of horizons in textual understanding), Freud (the hermeneutics of suspicion and the unconscious), Levi-Strauss (structuralism and the analysis of myth), and the tradition of French phenomenology (Marcel, Merleau-Ponty). His conversation with Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language (through Frege, Strawson, Austin, Searle) made him unusual among continental philosophers in taking seriously both traditions.
Reception and Critique
David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination (1981) and Blessed Rage for Order (1975) developed Ricoeur's hermeneutics into a systematic theological method, arguing that classic religious texts have a power of disclosure that exceeds their historical origins and that theology is fundamentally the interpretation of these classics. Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination (1978) and his extensive work on the Psalms draws heavily on Ricoeur's account of the biblical text as counter-cultural imagination against the 'royal consciousness' of dominant culture. Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? (1998) engaged Ricoeur's hermeneutics from a Reformed evangelical perspective, developing a 'speech act' hermeneutics indebted to Ricoeur and to Austin.
Legacy
Ricoeur provided the philosophical vocabulary for a generation of theologians and biblical scholars who needed to take seriously both critical scholarship and the Bible's theological claim. His concept of the 'second naivete' has been the most widely used philosophical concept in mainline Protestant and Catholic biblical scholarship of the last four decades, providing an account of how the faithful reader of Scripture can be historically informed without being historically imprisoned - can hear the text's word in a new situation without pretending that the centuries of critical scholarship have not occurred.
Key Passages
'Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.' (The Symbolism of Evil, Conclusion, trans. Buchanan)
'The function of the narrative is to transfigure the experience of temporality. Narrative is not a copy of temporal experience; it is a reconfiguration of it.' (Time and Narrative, trans. McLaughlin and Pellauer)
Contemporary Relevance
Ricoeur's hermeneutics addresses the central challenge faced by contemporary religious communities: how to read ancient texts as genuinely authoritative without ignoring the historical distance that separates ancient and modern worlds, and without collapsing into either fundamentalist literalism (which denies the distance) or liberal historicism (which collapses the text into its historical context and denies its address to the present reader). His account of the text as projecting a possible world that claims the reader's appropriation is the most philosophically sophisticated available account of how Scripture can be simultaneously a historical document and a living word.