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Ricoeur on Truth in Religious Discourse: A Reclamation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2019
Abstract
The fields of comparative theology and interreligious dialogue have largely presupposed the possibility of interreligious learning, but there have been few attempts to provide a philosophical framework for such learning. Utilizing the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, I argue that evaluations of religious truth should be understood holistically and contextually. In interreligious engagements, tensions are created in and questions are raised for one's own worldview. If one proceeds to imaginatively enter into another's worldview and finds resources there that enable one to alleviate those tensions and answer those questions, as well as make sense of one's reality in a broad way, then one may properly deem such beliefs to be true. Interreligious learning is thus construed as the recognition of truth that enables one to productively orient oneself to reality. The result is a provisional philosophical framework for understanding religious truth and interreligious learning.
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References
1 See, for example, Clooney, Francis X., “Comparative Theology and Inter-Religious Dialogue,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Cornille, Catherine (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 51–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the context of this essay, I will use “interreligious dialogue” in the broad sense of engagement with the religious other, whether through texts or directly through conversation.
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24 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 44.
25 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 50.
26 Ricoeur citing Aristotle's Poetics in The Rule of Metaphor, 32.
27 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 6.
28 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 52.
29 Ibid., 50.
30 Ibid., 50, emphasis added.
31 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 94. Ricoeur is citing Monroe Beardsley.
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34 Ibid.
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36 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 52–53.
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46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
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49 Ibid., 247–248, emphases in original.
50 Ibid., 240.
51 Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 223.
52 van der Heiden, Gert-Jan, The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 85Google Scholar, quoted by Moyaert in In Response to the Religious Other, 176.
53 The term “epoché” in this sense comes from the work of Edmund Husserl, where it was used to indicate a “bracketing” or a “putting aside” of the natural attitude (common, everyday existence) in order to let the transcendental structures of experience (which are ordinarily transparent) appear. In Ricoeur it takes on the nuance of bracketing the real in order to let “the possible” be.
54 Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” 128.
55 Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 232.
56 Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 35.
57 There is an important question to be asked here about whether Ricoeur is equivocating in his use of the word “truth.” Is this remark an innocuous one, or is he subtly attempting to pull the wool over our eyes? I think Ricoeur is merely indicating a likeness between religious discourse and poetic discourse as avenues of revealing the “way things are” (cf. Heidegger's employment of aletheia in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 262. Ricoeur may have in mind here the interpretation of Heidegger, which leads to a plurality of “beings,” that is, scientific, artistic, and so on. It seems to me, however, that these are various avenues of disclosing being—each with its own sphere, terminology, methods, certainly, but each nonetheless expresses various modes of specifically human being, which underlies each specific “branch.”
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60 I think there is an important sense in which Ricoeur's employment of manifestation in relation to discourse is echoing Heidegger's: “Discourse ‘lets something be seen’ … : that is, it lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about. In discourse … , so far as it is genuine, what is said is drawn from what the talk is about, so that discursive communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about, and thus makes this accessible to the other party. This is the structure of the [logos] as [discourse]. This mode of making manifest in the sense of letting something be seen by pointing it out, does not go with all kinds of ‘discourse’” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 56). It is because discourse is a “letting-something-be-seen” by pointing it out that it can be true or false (Heidegger, Being and Time, 56).
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62 Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 41.
63 Ibid., 45; see also Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 227–28.
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65 Ibid., 61.
66 Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 229.
67 Ricoeur, Paul, “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 281Google Scholar. Cf. Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 244.
68 See “Naming God” and “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” in Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred on pages 229 and 282, respectively, as well as “The Hermeneutics of Symbols,” in Ricoeur, Paul, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Reagan, Charles E. and Stewart, David (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 57Google Scholar.
69 I am certainly not implying that Jesus’ view of the neighbor was novel to all Jewish thinkers of the time. But it likely would have been novel to those he is seeking to instruct—in other words, to those who need to learn the lesson.
70 Without the continuity between the old and the new and the grounding of one's adoption of the new on what one already knows or believes, the rationality of such an adoption would be undermined. In other words, one's current knowledge or beliefs serve as the basis for evaluation of new ideas.
71 The word is Ricoeur's. He writes that conversion “means much more than making a new choice, but which implies a shift in the direction of the look, a reversal in the vision, in the imagination, in the heart, before all kinds of good intentions and all kinds of good decisions and good actions” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241). In multiple places Ricoeur claims that extreme sayings like parables are directed more to the reorientation of the imagination than the will (see “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” 281 and “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 245). The reorientation of the imagination first opens one to new possibilities; acting on the basis of the new vision comes second.
72 Frequently in interreligious dialogue, the Event is an encounter with the discourse of the other whether through text or speech. But Ricoeur is clear that it may be any number of things. Linking the Event to the moment of “finding something” in Jesus’ parables, Ricoeur comments that this simple phrase “encompasses all the kinds of encounters which make of our life the contrary of an acquisition by skill or by violence, by work or by cunning. Encounter of people, encounter of death, encounter of tragic situations, encounter of joyful events” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 240). In all of these cases, “[s]omething happens. Let us be prepared for the newness of what is new” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241).
73 Ricoeur uses the labels “Event,” “Reversal,” and “Decision” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241). The reader may note that there are two levels that mirror one another: Ricoeur offers these labels as naming three paradigmatic moments in the plots of parables themselves, but the thrust of the parable is to accomplish a similar transformation in the hearer.
74 Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241.
75 One might link what I'm referring to as confessional discourse to Ricoeur's notion of “attestation,” which, as he says, “belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe-in.’” See Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 21Google Scholar.
76 Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 167–68. See too Moyaert's recent remark: “In a way, the text, or better still, the world projected by the text, is powerful and speaks to the reader and potentially challenges her” (Moyaert, “Ricoeur and the Wager of Interreligious Ritual Participation,” 180).
77 Taylor, James, “Hospitality as Translation,” in Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, eds. Kearney, Richard and Taylor, James (New York: Continuum, 2011), 18Google Scholar.
78 Ibid., 19.
79 At this point, the reader may wonder whether it is truly possible for an outsider to enter into and understand another's worldview. Unfortunately, because I don't have the space to defend it here, I can only briefly assert my own position. I reject the skeptical contention that entering into another's worldview (even partially) is impossible for an outsider. While I think that there may be a depth of understanding that is only possible for the believer (i.e., someone on the “inside”) and is therefore inaccessible immediately to an outside learner, I don't think that this precludes provisionally or partially entering into another's worldview, which can then be made progressively more complete through time, empathy, careful study, practice, and imagination. Entering into another's way of thinking from the outside is not an all or nothing affair—one moves “little by little by approximations” as Ricoeur says. See Ricoeur, Paul, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 169Google Scholar.
80 Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 47.
81 See Smith, Jonathan Z., Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 290–91Google ScholarPubMed.
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83 Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 240.
84 Ricoeur, “The Language of Faith,” 237.
85 Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 44. Cf. also see Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 221.
86 Ricoeur, “Manifestation and Proclamation,” 66, italics in original.
87 Ibid., 51.
88 Ricoeur, Paul, “The Bible and the Imagination,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 146Google Scholar.
89 Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Meaning of Revelation (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 50Google Scholar. Niebuhr is citing Alfred North Whitehead.
90 Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 59.
91 One might also note a point of connection here between this conception of revelation and Ricoeur's writings on narrative. The work of narrative is, according to Ricoeur, to create order and intelligibility from a mere succession of events. In creating a narrative, it is the plot that “transforms the events into a story” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 66). Ricoeur writes that he “cannot overemphasize” (ibid.) the kinship between the activity of emplotment and Kant's notion of judgment wherein an intuitive manifold is brought together under a concept. As Leovino Ma. Garcia puts it, “The activity of emplotment (mise-en-intrigue) is a work or composition which takes together a series of events in order to form an organized unity. Emplotment brings about a synthesis of the heterogeneous.” See Garcia, Leovino Ma., “On Paul Ricoeur and the Translation–Interpretation of Cultures,” Thesis Eleven, no. 94 (2008): 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 Schwartz, Sanford, “Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s,” The Journal of Religion 63, no. 3 (1983): 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Schwartz is citing T. S. Eliot.
93 Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 21, emphasis added.
94 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 364–65Google Scholar.
95 Cf. MacIntyre's remark: “Upon encountering a coherent presentation of one particular tradition of rational enquiry, either in its seminal texts or in some later, perhaps contemporary, restatement of its positions, such a person will often experience a shock of recognition: this is not only, so such a person may say, what I now take to be true but in some measure what I have always taken to be true. What such a person has been presented with is a scheme of overall belief within which many, if not all, of his or her particular established beliefs fall into place, a set of modes of action and of interpretative canons for action which exhibit his or her mode of reasoning about action as intelligible and justifiable in a way or to a degree which has not previously been the case, and the history of a tradition of which the narrated and enacted history of his or her life so forms an intelligible part.” See MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 394; italics in the original.
96 Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” 33.
97 Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 217.
98 Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 74.
99 Kearney, Anatheism, 182.
100 Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 163.
101 Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 351Google Scholar.
102 Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols,” 45–46.
103 Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 355.
104 Ibid.
105 Ricoeur, Paul, “Whoever Loses Their Life for My Sake Will Find It,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 288Google Scholar. Ricoeur is invoking Eberhard Jüngel.
106 Ricoeur, Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. Taylor, George H. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 312Google Scholar, emphasis added.
107 As a philosopher, I tend to speak primarily in terms of beliefs. However, the problem that leads to learning from another faith need not be a cognitive issue—it could be rooted in any kind of existential concern. Yet the point remains that one doesn't learn—that is, judge the adoption of another's beliefs or practices to be better than what one currently has and adopt them—from a position of neutrality. One engages with the religious other not as a detached mind, but as a whole person with particular questions, problems, interests, and so on.
108 Knitter, Paul F., Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017), 54Google Scholar, emphasis in original.
109 Ibid., 61.
110 Ibid., 15, emphasis in original.
111 Ibid., 71.
112 See Kearney, Richard, The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 25–29Google Scholar.
113 Ibid., 25.
114 Ibid., 1.
115 Ibid., 108.
116 Kearney, Anatheism, 181. One might note that Kearney is here picking up on the paradox in Christianity that Ricoeur was so fond of: namely, that he who will save his life will lose it while he who is willing to lose his life will save it. See, for example, Ricoeur, Paul, Living Up to Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 45, 49–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
117 Interestingly, Ricoeur, who defined his Christianity as “A chance transformed into destiny by a continuous choice” (see Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, 62, and Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 145), and who talks readily about adherence and commitment, also seemed, toward the end of his life, to be reaching out to other faiths for resources for dealing with beliefs in his own tradition that he finds problematic (like the commitment to individual survival of death and the “juridicizing” view of Jesus’ redemption as sacrifice of one for another before a vengeful God [Living Up to Death, 71]). He comments, “I want to seek in extrabiblical traditions encouragement for another way of speaking” (Living Up to Death, 72). For him, responsible learning from the religious other means “study and a transformation in the depth of the contents of belief” (Living Up to Death, 67). One can only speculate about what fruit Ricoeur's search would have produced had it been able to continue, but there are some inklings in his Living Up to Death. There Ricoeur says he wants to explore the “the implications of confidence in God” (42) while preparing for death, especially in light of his desire to dismantle “the make-believe of survival” (41) and suggests that perhaps Buddhism can help answer this question and serve as a corrective to his views on identity (49). Renouncing a desire for continued existence is, he suggests, part of the preparation for death. Ricoeur was looking for a way to hold together “detachment” as regards his own death with “confidence in God's care” (49). Yet, when he seems able to practice detachment from a desire to continue to exist and simultaneously give himself up to trusting in the care of God, “a hope other than the desire to continue existing arises” (44). And this is tied into the paradox of losing one's life in order to save it (see 45, 49–50).
118 Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 50.