Chapter 10

Ricoeur and Heidegger.

The Cogito and Hermeneutics

As we move toward the close of this part, we have left for last the
examination of the text wherein Ricoeur comes to grips directly with
Heidegger's interpretation of subjectivity. With this, our discussion
comes round full circle to the theme whence we set out.
"My intention here is to understand the scope of the well-known
critique of the subject-object relation which underlies the denial of
the priority of the Cogito. I stress the word 'scope' because I want to
show that this denial implies more than a mere rejection of a notion
of the ego or of the self --as if they lacked any meaning or were
necessarily infected by the basic misconception that governs the
philosophies generated by the Cartesian Cogito. On the contrary, the
kind of ontology developed by Heidegger gives ground to what I shall
call a hermeneutics 0/ the 'J am', which is a refutation of the Cogito
conceived of as a simple epistemological principle and at the same time
is an indication of a foundation of Being which is necessarily spoken
of as grounding the Cogito. In setting out to comprehend this complex
relation between the Cogito and this hermeneutics of the 'I am' , I shall
relate this problem to the destruction of the history of philosophy on
the one hand and, on the other, to the restatement or retrieval of the
ontological purpose which was in the Cogito and which has been
forgotten in the formulation of Descartes."ul
With these words, Ricoeur expresses his position with exemplary
clarity and synthesis. What his essay proposes to do is to bring out a
fundamental convergence between Heidegger and himself, using the
former's critique of subjectivity as a moment of purification, so to
speak, of a genuine philosophy of the subject, while at the same time
it unmasks the conception of subjectivity which has prevailed in

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D. Jervolino, The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur
© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990
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modern times, impressing its seal on "modernism" itself. The task is to

discover a different possibility from what has been offered historically
by the modern subjectivism of representation and domination. Such
a possibility was already latent in the Cartesian Cogito as originally
formulated, before the interpretation which has since prevailed,
starting with Descartes himself. In a certain sense, Ricoeur uses
Heidegger here as one of his "masters of suspicion." Just as the
demystifying criticism of an idol aids in the discovery of the true
meaning of the Faith, so the critique of the subject-object relation in
representational thought constitutes the premise for the hermeneutics
of the I am.
In his study, Ricoeur takes as his starting point the introduction to
Being and Time with its well-known opening sally: "This question [of
Being] has today been forgotten." From the outset, Heidegger shifts the
emphasis from a philosophical style starting from the Cogito as the
first irrefutable certainty to another which starts from the problem of
being as a forgotten problem, left behind in the Cogito. Thus, the point
of departure becomes the question itself, the question as question,
ruled by what is questioned, by the thing with regard to which the
question is posed. This way of framing matters implies the loss of the
Cogito as a self-founding certainty, but also the recapture of the ego
as questioner. The ego is posited as the being for whom the question
regarding being gives itself, is posited as Dasein. "Thus, the opposition
to the Cog ito becomes more subtle, since the question of Dasein has
a certain priority in the question of Being. But this priority, which has
led to so many misunderstandings, and, above all, to anthropological
interpretations of Being and Time, is only, and remains, an ontic
priority, mixed or involved in the ontological priority of the question
of Being. And this relation is the origin of a new philosophy of the
ego."m What we have is a circular relationship between the understand-
ing of being and the determination of the sense of being, of Dasein.
Heidegger calls this relation "a remarkable 'relatedness backward or
forward' (Ruck- oder Vorbezogenheit) which what we are asking about
(viz. being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of being of an
entity."m It is here that the subject is born, Ricoeur asserts. This
relation is the guiding thread throughout our research. It constitutes
a contestation of the Cog ito but also the retrieval of an ontological
theme which Descartes not only did not ignore but was deeply
concerned with, his ultimate problem being not the 'I think' but the
60
'I am', as is proven by the fact that he starts out from the existence of
the ego in order to come to the existence of God and, finally, of the
world.
At this point, having recalled the reference to Descartes in section
6 of Being and Time, Ricoeur sums up the thesis expressed in the
well-known 1938 essay by Heidegger, Die Zeit des WeltbUdes (The Age
of the World Picture, cited above) in Holzwege. The Cog ito is held to
belong to an age of metaphysics in which truth is the truth of entities,
and is, as such, a forgetting of being. The philosophical soil from
which the Cog ito sprouted is one where thought objectifies an entity,
setting it before itself as that which can be represented, can become
an object of calculation and, hence, also be possessed and dominated.
The world has become "picture" (BUd). An entity is defined as an
objectivity of representation and truth as the certainty of representa-
tion. The position of the subject is the counterpart of this conception
of objectivity. Man, the subject, becomes the foundation of the world
as representation. Man places himself on the scene; he himself becomes
the scene in which entities are called upon to appear. Behind or
beneath the logical formulation of the Cogito, what is brought to light,
unmasked by Heidegger's logic, is the event which underlies the era
of metaphysics, which is likewise the era of science and technology,
and the technico-scientific dominion of the world. But has this critique
drained all the possible meaning from the Cog ito?
In order to answer this question, Ricoeur takes a step backward,
returning to Being and Time, where it is demonstrated that Dasein
understands itself in terms of existence, i.e. starting from its own
possibility of being itself or not. Here the circle of Dasein and being
takes on the form of a circle between existentiality and being. Dasein
is called upon to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity.
Ontically it is what is nearest to us, but ontologically it is what is
furthest from us. It is precisely because the 'I am' has been forgotten
that it must be recaptured by means of an interpretation which will
bring it from concealment. It is precisely because the 'I am', differ-
ently from the Cogito, does not imply any immediacy that it becomes
a theme of hermeneutics and not merely an intuitive description. In
Ricoeur's words, "Therefore, a retrieval of the Cog ito is possible only
as a regressive movement beginning with the whole phenomenon of
'being - in - the- world' and turned toward the question of the who of that
being-in-the-world."u4 In section 25 of Being and Time, a section
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Ricoeur feels should be compared in detail with Freudian psychoanaly-

sis, we read that the question of the 'who' must remain open. It is
patterned in the same way as the question of being. The 'who' is
neither a given nor a posit but an open question. In everyday life no
authentic 'who' exists yet, but only an anonymous 'one'. Only when
existential analysis has been traversed from beginning to end, and
themes such as everyday life, self knowledge, the problem of the
relationship to the other, and ultimately the theme of freedom for
death have been confronted, in other words, only in the recapitulation
of existence in the face of death can an answer be given to the
question of the 'who', the authentic Self. It is then that the existential
analytic becomes a hermeneutics of the I am culminating in the
"hermeneutics of the finite totalization in the face of death."
The passage from an existential analytic to the philosophy of
language, from Heidegger I to Heidegger II, as Ricoeur puts it, does
not do away with this hermeneutics of the I am. "The same problems
which have been linked to the self of Dasein now occur in the problem
of language; they are linked to the problem of the word, of speech ('du
mot', 'de la parole'). This is the problem of bringing Being into
language .... Naming (denomination) designates the place and role of
man in language. Here, Being is brought into language, and a finite,
speaking existent is born .... As Richardson says: 'Language takes its
origin, then, along with the irruption of "Being-there," for in this
irruption language is simply Being itself formed into word' .... This
emergence of the 'word', under the primacy of Being repeats exactly
the emergence of the 'There' in Sein und Zeit, as the one who inquires
into Being."llS
The position of man in language raises once more the problem of the
authenticity of existence. The inauthenticity of the existential analytic
has as its present counterpart man's pretense to considering himself
master, ruler and judge of his own speech. Authenticity becomes the
ability to listen to, obey and respond to the Urdichtung, the originary
utterance of language as revelation of being, to which thinkers and
poets bear witness. At this point, in the repetition of the sum, the
hermeneutics of the I am, which continues beyond the destruction of
the history of metaphysics and the deconstruction of the Cog ito as a
mere epistemological principle, the difference between the early and
the late Heidegger would be that the Urdichtung takes the place of
freedom for death as an answer to the problem of the 'who' and of the
62
authenticity of that 'who'. "Authentic Dasein is born from the response
to Being and, in responding, preserves the strength of Being by the
strength of the word .... The self no longer finds its authenticity in
freedom for death but in Gelassenheit which is the gift of a poetic
life."m
Thus, it would seem as if Ricoeur's militant ontology could rest
secure in a Heideggerian Gelassenheit. The subject which, like Moses,
can only see the promised land of ontology from afar before he dies ll7
seems to come to terms with the Greek idea that "an entity does not
become Being because man intuits it in the course of representation
understood as subjective perception; rather, it is man who is observed
by an entity, i.e. by the self-opening to the being-there contained
within it. Observed by an entity, understood and maintained in the
opening of the entity, sustained by it, involved in its contrasts and
marked by its conflicts: here you have the essence of Man in the era
of Greek grandeur."lls Perhaps at this point it would be necessary to
take up once again the question of the relation between classical Greek
culture and Christianity (i.e., the Judaeo-Christian heritage) we
referred to in the last chapter, where we compared Ricoeur with
Thevenaz. We shall only mention in passing that Ricoeur's interpreta-
tion of Heidegger can be considered not only benevolent but munifi-
cent, in the fullest meaning of these terms; he regales his interlocutor
with a position which he would have every right to claim as his own,
namely the hermeneutics of the I am. It is his ecumenical spirit that
brings him to this. If there is something forced in his interpretation,
the force is truly tempered, in this case, with a car it as which seeks,
on the basis of a textual reading neither arbitrary nor rash to bring
together two positions that could otherwise readily have been frozen
into opposition with no chance of mediation. Here too, as we said at
the end of the last chapter, Ricoeur prefers Justinus's apologetic style
to that of Tertullian.
For now, let us put aside these reminiscences of the second century
after Christ (albeit perhaps more up-to-date than one might suppose)
and move at last to the conclusion of this part of our essay. Whatever
the validity of Heidegger's hermeneutics of the I am, in itself it is most
certainly a noteworthy philosophical proposal, well able to provide
hermeneutics with guidance and perspective in relating to contem-
porary man's complex situation. Elsewhere Ricoeur, threading the
twisting paths of accusation and consolation, assays his own personal
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Ho/zweg, in the Heideggerian sense of the term, when he seeks to

mark out a line of march from the critique of religion, drawn from the
atheism of Freud and Nietzsche, to faith, as could be proclaimed by
a new "prophetic preacher": "With regard to the problem of accusation,
this preaching would speak only in terms of freedom .... With respect
to the problem of consolation, this prophetic preaching would be heir
to the tragic faith of Job .... It would be a faith that moves forward
through the shadows in a new 'night of the soul'--to adopt the
language of the mystics--before a God who would not have the
attributes of 'Providence', a God who would not protect me but would
surrender me to the dangers of a life worthy of being called human.
Is not this God the Crucified One, the God who, as Bonhoeffer says,
only through his weakness is capable of helping me? The night of the
soul means above all the overcoming of desire as well as fear, the
overcoming of nostalgia for the protecting father figure."m But
Ricoeur adds explicitly that "the philosopher is not this prophetic
preacher." The philosopher "thinks in the intermediate time between
nihilism and purified faith." His task is to go beyond what Nietzsche
calls "the spirit of vengeance."l20 He has to rediscover the authentic
sense of utterance, beyond the illusions of language, and the authentic
sense of action, as a "dialectics of the human act of existing," beyond
the morality of law and punishment. As already in Spinoza, one can
call "ethics" "the total process through which man passes from slav-
ery to happiness and freedom." "This process is not governed by a
formal principle of obligation, nor by an intuition of ends and values,
but by the unfolding of effort, eonatus, which is determinate of our
existence as a finite mode of being. We are speaking here of effort, but
we must also mention desire, so as to establish at the source of the
ethical problem the identity between effort, in the Spinozistic sense
of eonatus, and desire in the Platonic and Freudian sense of eros."m
The philosophy of language and the philosophy of the will converge.
If we know how to see in language not an object at our disposal but
a living reality which reveals being to us and reveals us to ourselves
in our act of being, then "we are suggesting an underlying connection
between word and the active core of our existence. Word has the power
to change our understanding of ourselves .... Word reaches us on the
level of the symbolic structures of our existence, the dynamic schemes
that express the way in which we understand our situation and the way
in which we project ourselves into this situation."m Beyond the "spirit
64
of vengeance," even beyond Hamor fati," lies the union of consent and
poetry, where "we experience language as a gift, and we experience
thought as a recognition of this gift."
Citing a famous text by Heidegger, Ricoeur expresses his own
conception of poetics, with which he has been fascinated since his
youth: "Heidegger comments on HOlderlin's poem which contains the
line: 'dichterisch wohnet der Mensch' (,poetically ... dwells man on this
earth') .... In fact, HOlderlin says 'Full of merit, and yet poetically,
dwells man on this earth'. The poem suggests that man dwells on earth
insofar as a tension is maintained between his concern for the heavens,
for the divine, and for the rootedness of his own existence in the
earth .... Poetry is what roots the act of dwelling between heaven and
earth, under the sky but on the earth, within the domain of word .... "
This "mode of dwelling on earth that is governed by poetry and
thought ... is no longer 'the love of fate' but a love of creation. Such
a fact suggests a movement from atheism toward faith. The love of
creation is a form of consolation which depends on no external
compensation and which is equally remote from any form of ven-
geance. Love finds within itself its own compensation; it is itself
consolation" W
If we have purposefully limited our colloquy with Ricoeur to
pre-1970 texts, save for an occasional reference to later works, it is
perhaps partiy out of self-indulgence in the memory game; indeed, we
have followed and cherished this author since the 1960's. But there is
another, more serious reason, founded in re ipsa: the whole question
of the Cogito and hermeneutics is already fully developed and mature
in the Ricoeur of those years. Of course, his work does not stop at
that point, although his fundamental tenets do not undergo further
change. Still, it seems right to us for his later works to be dealt with
separately, and not simply for reasons of space or for extrinsically
chronological motives. In effect, at a certain point during the
hermeneutic phase of his work, in the very late 1960's and early
1970's, there is a shift of focus from the theme of the symbol, starting
with that particular region of the symbolic universe which is the
"symbolism of evil,"124 to the elaboration of a general theory of
interpretation starting from textual problematics. w
The hermeneutics of the I am is not abandoned but is taken up again
on a more general level, as self-understanding in the presence of a
text. Within a general hermeneutics the phenomenon of metaphor
 65

opens the path to the study of the productive or creative aspect of

discourse, the rediscovery--here too via a "long route"--of "poetics as
a descriptive discipline,,,m where poetics is no longer a mere postulate
but begins to be a concrete approximation. It is poetics--to which we
come at last--which, in the analysis of the "narrative function"
operative in both literary and historical narration,127 allows for
hermeneutical phenomenology to be still further fathomed, us affording
an inkling of a way of interpretation which would not stop at
contemplating the world but be a step forward towards transforming
it. On this level, the theme of the Cog ito will return once more to the
phenomenology of temporality and the hermeneutics of historicity,U9
which are both part of a sole movement of thought towards the "poetics
of freedom," a dream of Ricoeur's youth and, as well, a youthfulness
in the works of his full maturity. In a recent interview with Peter
Kemp, Ricoeur makes a precious confession when he remarks that his
"one problem," ever since he started reflecting, has been "creativity."
"I first grappled with it on the plane of individual psychology in my
early works on the will, then on the cultural plane with my study of
symbolisms. My present research on narration places me at the core of
this social, cultural creativity, for to narrate ... is society's most
long-lasting act. Cultures create themselves by narrating themselves.
Consequently, I am led to the core of the problem of creativity on the
collective, communal plane .... "13O Thus, the Cogito must rediscover itself
as 'I am' in its ethical tension, taught by the revealing and poetic power
of the word, in order that it may recognize itself finally as historical
temporality, a plural and creative subjectivity.