Paul Ricoeur

When the subject of "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation" is broached, the ghost of Paul Ricoeur inevitably enters the room. And rightly so: Ricoeur's concluding chapter to The Symbolism of Evil famously proposed the concept of a "second naivete" in an attempt to provide aid and comfort to those beleaguered moderns who, despite their embrace of science and the modern critique of religious belief, still cling to the possibility that religion has more to offer than what one former pastor friend of mine likes to call "pop psychology with organ music."

Unfortunately, as is often the case with successful coinages, Ricoeur's use of the phrase "second naivete" has taken on a life of its own--one that has put some distance between itself and the technical sense in which he employed it. Contrary to its more popular usage, the "second naivete" is not naivete at all: it is (emphatically) not a return to pre-critical religious belief--Ricoeur was adamant about that point. It is, instead, a mode of attentiveness to language and the semantic fecundity of symbols. At least, that is the most lucid meaning to be made from Ricoeur's term.

Ricoeur himself seemed to want more than this from his own coinage; at the same time, however, he knew better than to assert directly what he wanted. Instead, he insisted (rightly) that there are no free-floating philosophies without presuppositions. He insisted further (and, again, rightly) that, as a consequence, philosophers need to be honest: they need to make their "presuppositions explicit, state them as beliefs, wager on the beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding" (SE, 357). To this point, I can find no fault with Ricoeur's procedure. I only wish that he had been more rigorous in following his own recommendation of candor.

One must read and re-read Ricoeur's conclusion to The Symbolism of Evil, paying close attention to what are, in essence, code words, in order to grasp his presuppositions precisely. I do not intend to suggest by this that he was attempting to be deceptive: I sense that, like the rest of us, Ricoeur's presuppositions were so intimately intertwined in his thinking that they were no more obvious to him than the nose on his face. We must therefore look for his self-portrait in the palimpsest. If we do, here is what we find: repeated references to "the sacred" (and an acknowledgment of Mircea Eliade's use of that phrase) and to "being" (used, without acknowledgment, but in a recognizably Heideggerian manner).

In other words, there is, at the base of Ricoeur's musings on language and the symbol, a neo-Romantic/Modernist mysticism.

I do not begrudge him this: we all embrace presuppositions. This kind of mysticism is, however, problematic insofar as it asserts the existence of something that cannot be proved or disproved. By making such an assertion, Ricoeur abandons the "methodological atheism" (or agnosticism) that is the distinguishing characteristic of the modern (i.e., critical) historian. What Ricoeur gave the reader with his right hand (the assurance that one cannot "go home again" to pre-critical religiosity), he appears to have subtly taken back with his left. It is disturbing, this sort of failure of nerve--but perfectly understandable: what William James called the "will-to-believe" is a powerful force within us all; for many, including Paul Ricoeur, it is tantamount to the will-to-live.

My own recommendation--something that I have proposed repeatedly in this blog and its sibloglings--is a more sober (and, perhaps, sobering) alternative: the notion that religion is "spilled poetry," that we must abandon ontological certainties and, instead, learn to content ourselves with "mere" beauty and the hope for better things to come. Both of these possibilities are within our power, as intelligent beings, to effect and realize within the circumstances of our own lives--if we dare to dedicate ourselves to their realization. Pragmatic but utopian futuristics, the Alfarabian turn away from ontological speculation towards rhetoric: in short, the Prophetic tradition that identifies itself with Abrahamic peregrination--the itinerant spirit of the "wandering Aramean."

Ricoeur would probably assent to such a description of religious identity in terms of Abrahamic pilgrimage and strangerhood: but deep down he longed for roots, for stasis, and the prerogatives of certainty--"mellow" (to echo Ernst Troeltsch) as, in his hands, they may have been.