Critical Theory And Hermeneutics Research Paper

Such a procedure did not seek to engender confusion or to render truth and meaning inaccessible. For Dannhauer, on the contrary, hermeneutics amounted to a ‘universal science’ which enables us to appraise the truthfulness of any discipline by clearing away prejudice and falsehood. As such, getting at meaning or truth requires an approach which is never content simply to take things at face value. The master of suspicion will see meaning as something to be disclosed through a recovery of an author’s intention, and not as something which can be grasped intuitively.

Dannhauer’s universal science of hermeneutic inquiry was a rudimentary attempt to come to terms with the uncertainties regarding the status of truth, knowledge, and meaning occasioned by the dawn of the Renaissance. By giving interpretation a central epistemic role, he anticipated what was to become a major philosophical school of thought.

2. Romantic Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher And Dilthey

Although Dannhauer’s significance ought not to be underestimated in the history of hermeneutic thought, much of what comes under the headings of ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘critical theory’ today has its direct antecedents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is to scholars of the Romantic period, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, that one must look in order to gain an understanding of the many contemporary movements which are classified as being largely hermeneutic in origin and ethos.

2.1 Friedrich Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher and Dilthey are usually credited with having made hermeneutic inquiry a central philosophical preoccupation. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) sought to advance Dannhauer’s attempt at a universal hermeneutics by trying to identify what was common to the technical operations and apparatuses of both the philologist and classical exegete. Consequently, he disregarded subject matter—whether classical document or scripture—in an effort to pinpoint the fundamental and universal techniques or methodology of the interpretative process.

Schleiermacher concluded that any act of interpretation involved both a ‘grammatical’ and a ‘technical’ form: while grammatical interpretation tries to understand a document by studying the broader linguistic milieu from which it derives, technical (stemming from ‘techne’—meaning artistic creativity or making) interpretation, on the other hand, looks to the author and the author’s personality and unique genius as a means of understanding the text in question. While both types of interpretation are significant for Schleiermacher, he nevertheless insists that they cannot be carried out concomitantly. For to interpret grammatically is to focus attention on language stricto sensu, and not on the individual speaker as such; conversely, technical interpretation demands that the reader look to the peculiarities of a particular author, to the author’s style and use of expression. In the latter case, the general language used by the author is overlooked in favor of the way in which the author uses it.

For Schleiermacher, the ultimate task of the hermeneutic project is served best by this technical approach to questions of meaning and understanding. Truly to understand a text, the readers must strive to reappropriate its subjective dimension. They must endeavor, that is, to extrapolate from the document the individual author’s ‘psychological’ intentions and motives. In so doing, the readers seek to come to terms with the text’s central purpose and aims. Technical interpretation allows us to tap into the soul of the work in question.

As stated above, Schleiermacher considered his way of dealing with the complexity of texts as more than simply a means of alleviating the difficulties confronted by biblical exegetes and classical philologists. He followed Dannhauer’s lead in trying to identify a hermeneutic methodology (Kunstlehre), which would govern not only specialized interpretative procedures, but all forms of understanding. In so doing, Schleiermacher insisted that we must always begin by presupposing misunderstanding, that misunderstanding is not something which may bedevil our reading at some future point, but that which bedevils us at every stage of the interpretative process. Hence, in the words of Jean Grondin, Schleiermacher ‘universalizes misunderstanding as the situation and occasion of interpretation’ (Grondin 1994, p. 70). The prospect of their not having fully understood a work, in other words, is what persuades the readers to read and reread the subject matter, to assess and reassess their findings. Furthermore, to presuppose misunderstanding sharpens the interpreters’ acuity, in that such an approach ensures that they will not take anything for granted; that the readers will always admit to the possibility of being disproved.

This is why technical interpretation is, for Schleiermacher, to be preferred over and above grammatical interpretation. For if misunderstanding is to be surmounted, there ought to be as complete a reconstruction of the authorial intention as it is possible to undertake. It is only by trying to stand in the shoes of the author that we can best understand the meaning and raison d’etre of the text. Indeed, he goes further by suggesting that we ought not only understand as well as the author, but that we must, if we are really to reconstruct a foreign viewpoint, cultivate an even more profound understanding of the work than that possessed by its author. Such is the ultimate objective of all hermeneutic inquiry for Schleiermacher.

To understand a text more thoroughly than its author seems a strange ideal for someone who emphasizes so emphatically the fundamental role of misunderstanding. It should be read, however, as simply that—an ideal. Due to the fact that one can never assume that all misunderstanding has been eradicated, it is the duty of the reader to purvey ever more valid and fruitful interpretations of a work. Such an ideal provokes the reader to overturn previously held interpretations in favor of more plausible alternatives. The desire to know the author and the author’s world better than the author is what prevents, in Schleiermacher’s opinion, hermeneutic complacency. It is what drives and inspires the inquisitive reader who cannot settle for the commonly held interpretation.

Such attempts to penetrate behind the mind of an author through a technical interpretation of that author’s work caused many to charge Schleiermacher with psychologism. While such a criticism is valid to the extent that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics did evince a tendency to reconstruct a psychological profile of the author, or to highlight the thought processes which led certain authors to write as they did, it could be argued alternatively that such a procedure was a nascent attempt to crystallize what was to become the bedrock of all subsequent hermeneutics—the recreation of an imaginary dialog with those of our past in an effort to make sense of who we are today. Given that Schleiermacher did not have at his disposal the insights of Freud and other subsequent theorists of the ‘self,’ his tentative steps toward a universal hermeneutic methodology founded on a dialogical conception of identity should be seen as a brave attempt to give the role of interpretation a philosophical credibility which it hitherto lacked.

2.2 Wilhelm Dilthey

While Schleiermacher’s contribution to hermeneutic inquiry was not insubstantial, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was a thinker whose work, and its subsequent appropriations and applications on the part of leading philosophers, has had a most profound impact on the formation of twentieth-century hermeneutics. For it was Dilthey who argued that if hermeneutics is to be genuinely universal, it must have as its object all of reality. The text of reality is history itself, as that which interconnects the multifarious and disparate strands of human endeavor. History, on this reading, is mankind’s document—its grand narrative. As all texts have a place in this document, it behooves the inquirer to try to understand how history coheres before trying to understand how individual texts cohere. In problematizing history thus, Dilthey dramatically rendered more complex the job of the interpreter.

Dilthey’s methodological approach was determined in large measure by the advent of positivism—a school of thought which insisted on the primacy of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) as a model for understanding the world and our relation to it. For it was his conviction that if the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) were to fend off the challenge coming from the natural sciences, they would have to adopt analogous methodological procedures as their natural counterparts. Only in so doing could one come up with an adequate defense for the efficacy of historical knowledge as encapsulated in the various human sciences. Dilthey is, therefore, faced with the problem of how to rescue the laws of history from the laws of science, or of how to distinguish scientific explanation from historical understanding (Verstehen).

In his quest to pinpoint what it is that marks understanding off from explanation, Dilthey argues that a human being is not known solely as a physical object amongst others; it cannot, that is, be reduced to the level of scientifically observable phenomena. In contradistinction to scientific data, the human being has a mind which exceeds the purview of the natural scientist or the positivist, a mind which attests to its being. Consequently, a person may be understood by other people who are free to interpret and decode that person’s intentions and expressions, desires and volitions. It is the mental faculty of human beings, in other words, which permits them to be understood and not merely explained. Thus, for Dilthey it is psychology, as the science of the human as historical and sociological agent, which ought to act as the bedrock of the human sciences. In this, he remains faithful to Schleiermacher’s privileging of interpretative psychology as the most efficacious means of understanding the intentions of another.

Unlike our knowledge of the external world, which requires the mediation of the senses, knowledge of the inner world of psychological life is free from temporal vicissitudes. As such, it forms the basis of a universally fixed mental structure which may be accessed immediately. But the quandary which Dilthey faced in advancing such a theory was quite considerable. For example, in order to legitimate his claims he had to put forward incontrovertible proof that there were in fact complex mental structures which were indeed self-evident, and which could be accessed in a neutral way by any thinking subject. Given that there has never been agreement among the practitioners of psychology as to the precise nature of such structures, let alone proof of their existence, it is hardly plausible to assert that they are universally self-evident.

In an effort to counter such dilemmas, Dilthey elects to prioritize hermeneutics as that which has the best chance of permitting access to the inner life of the mind, by way of external media such as signs and texts. For it is through such documents that the mental life of one different to the self is made manifest for analysis by the human scientist. The inner life of another, in other words, is objectified in and through the traces which he or she leaves behind. Consequently, the interpreter has the capacity to reconstruct the life of the other by recovering what the other has deposited in textual form. The text, therefore, is that which bears witness, in external form, to the inner mental life of one who was formerly alien to the self. It is that by way of which the interpreter, or the human scientist, can arrive at a credible understanding of a life. The ultimate aim of the hermeneutic enterprise is to reproduce the life that one is endeavoring to understand. If this could be achieved, the objective validity of the human sciences would no longer be in any doubt. It would also serve to avert the pending crisis, which historicism and relativism threatened to engender.

3. Phenomenological Hermeneutics: Heidegger And Gadamer

3.1 Martin Heidegger

Dilthey’s legacy was far-reaching and extensive. In the domain of philosophy, it was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a German student of the eminent phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, who would do most to build upon and advance Dilthey’s hermeneutic insights. While Dilthey emphasized the role of hermeneutics in the human sciences, Heidegger was to go one step further by inquiring into the ontological conditions of such sciences. In other words, Heidegger considered the human sciences to be a branch of epistemology (Greek: episteme) or the theory of knowledge. As such, they ought not to be the focus of genuinely fundamental philosophical analysis. Rather, the task of the hermeneutic phenomenologist was to inquire into the actual being of such sciences, their ontological (Greek: on) status. Indeed, this move towards being, and away from knowledge, was Heidegger’s most significant contribution, not only to phenomenology and hermeneutics, but to the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

Central to Heidegger’s thought was the belief that the dualism between subject (the self ) and object (the world beyond the self—the ‘external’ world) was misguided and mistaken. Although such dualisms are a regular feature in the history of philosophy, they are nowhere more apparent than in the thought of the seventeenth-century French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Descartes’s contention that the thinking self (Cogito) could doubt away its environment in an effort to establish its own certainty, was primarily responsible for concretizing the subject–object divide. Even Heidegger’s philosophical master, Husserl, structured his thought around this dualism; his emphasis on the role of intentional consciousness in the formation of the self’s constitution was seen by Heidegger to be yet another unfortunate consequence of the Cartesian legacy, even if Husserl’s original aim was to surmount the subject–object divide by leading us back to an originary experience of the world. If Husserl emphasizes consciousness as that upon which our primordial experience of the world is founded, Heidegger, in an effort to reconcile both subject and object, interprets this originary experience as a being-in-the-world. In so doing, Heidegger replaces the question common to Descartes, Kant, Dilthey, and Husserl—‘What does it mean to know?,’ with the question, ‘What does it mean to be?’ For Heidegger, there is no way the subject can, or should, try to extricate itself from the world in which it finds itself—from its natural environment. For it is through our basic interaction with the world that we come to a genuine and fundamental understanding of the ‘who’ of being.

The question of being, the question which first stimulated the early Greek metaphysicians, is thus what Heidegger intends to retrieve. He does so by underscoring our being-there (Dasein), our temporal situatedness in the world, as distinct from our consciousness of the world. Due to the fact that a human being is the only being capable of asking the question: ‘What does it mean to be?,’ any examination of being must therefore proceed by way of an inquiry into the human self as a being-there (Dasein), as a being who is concretely submerged in the practical affairs of the everyday world. This helps to explain the title of Heidegger’s magnum opus of 1927, Being and Time (1962).

One such way Heidegger approaches the question of the being of Dasein, is through an analysis of the category of ‘understanding.’ For Heidegger, ‘understanding’ does not denote conscious awareness or assimilation, but rather those ‘moods’ (Stimmungen) which characterize our basic lived experience. These moods take the form of concern, anguish, fear, guilt, excitement, etc., and are determined by Heidegger as ontological acts of preunderstanding (Vor-Verstandnis), or the means by which we come to grips with the world prior to the process of making the world an object for thought. In other words, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis strives to bring the moods of Dasein’s preunderstanding to the level of a reflective self-awareness. Like his nineteenth-century predecessor, Soren Kierkegaard, Heidegger turns Descartes’s dictum—‘I think, therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo sum), on its head. For both Kierkegarad and Heidegger, we exist before we are objectively aware that we exist; our existence is preunderstanding, in the sense that we prereflectively interpret the world as a project of possibilities for our existence, before coming reflectively to understand it as such.

Heidegger’s philosophical hermeneutics, unlike the methodological hermeneutics of Dilthey, will not, therefore, reflect upon the human sciences, but will attempt an examination and explication of the very foundations of those sciences. Moreover, for Dilthey, understanding has always to do with the understanding of another psyche or mind. For Heidegger, however, the problem of other minds is replaced with Dasein’s preunderstanding of the world into which it is ‘thrown.’ Understanding the world, thus, and not an other mind, is the fundamental goal of Heideggerian hermeneutics. To understand is not to understand facts, but to understand what possibilities are open to us in the situation in which we find ourselves. As such, human existence constitutes what Heidegger famously terms ‘a hermeneutic circle,’ in that it implicitly interprets itself in terms of its everyday moods and projects before it raises this interpretation to the level of philosophical speculation.

For Heidegger, it is by way of language that we interpret a thing as something which is intimately related to our project of being-in-the-world. Language should not be thought of in this context as mere assertion, but as interpretative of hermeneutic discourse. For on Heidegger’s reading, the world never shows up for Dasein in some raw manifestation, but is always disclosed in and through the projects which Dasein sets itself. For example, Heideggerian discourse does not simply assert that an object possesses a series of objective characteristics such as weight, color, and width. More essentially, it interprets the object as something which is useful and meaningful for its existence. Hence, the object is described, interpreted, or defined, in its relation to my specific projects. A rock is thus seen as a weapon or a sculpting stone, depending on the use I make of it. If objective assertion treats things as objects present-at-hand ( orhanden), hermeneutic discourse recognizes them as instruments ready-to-hand (zuhanden)—or as things which aid us in our attempts to fulfill our everyday projects. Hermeneutic discourse, that is, reveals things in terms of their possible serviceability for me, and it does so by releasing them from the abstraction of a timeless present into the temporal horizons of my concrete historical concerns—retrieving the meaningfulness of these entities from my past experience or projecting such meaningfulness into my future possible experiences.

Heidegger’s great contribution to the history of hermeneutics was his insistence that the world discloses itself through interpretative discourse. He failed, however, to explain what repercussions and ramifications this might have for the human sciences and for culture as a whole. It would be left to his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, to fulfill this task.

3.2 Hans-Georg Gadamer

In Gadamer (1900–), we see a movement away from Heidegger’s preoccupation with the question of being, back toward more epistemological concerns. His magnum opus, Truth and Method (1975), is dedicated to asking how the Heideggerian question of truth, as developed through a hermeneutic framework, can accommodate Dilthey’s methodological hermeneutics of the human sciences. According to Gadamer, it was not essential for the human sciences to develop an exact method if they were to compete with the natural sciences. For while the natural sciences proceeded by way of logical induction, the human sciences had no such starting point or method. The human scientist, in other words, used insight and tact as tools rather than the laws of induction. Gadamer places the blame for the decline of the human sciences at the feet of those who, like Kant and his successors, considered the natural sciences as being eminently more objective than their subjective and aesthetic humanistic counterparts.

In his attempt to resuscitate the human sciences, Gadamer relies heavily on Heidegger’s contention that we come to understand ourselves through our projects and possibilities. Preunderstanding, thus, is the condition of self-awareness. As such, and this is what it means to be caught in the hermeneutic circle, we come to an understanding of ourselves and our world by virtue of the prejudices of our specific time and place; that is, because Dasein is always already temporally situated, its preunderstanding will be conditioned and prejudiced by the world into which a person has been born. For instance, the reason why I interpret a rock as a weapon is because those who have preceded me in my tradition interpreted it as such. Interpretation, we will recall, is never neutral.

The question which Gadamer prioritizes, however, concerns the veracity of such interpretation; in an effort to avoid a crude form of relativism, Gadamer asks what we must do in order to avoid being duped by fallacious preunderstandings. As a devout hermeneut, he does not, of course, subscribe to the belief that misunderstanding can be fully eradicated. Interpretation, by its very nature, involves misreading and misconstrual. What we need to guard against, however, is the general propensity to take our prejudices at face value. While we cannot escape the prejudices of our preunderstandings, we can nevertheless subject those prejudices and biases to critical scrutiny. Gadamer is aware that the interpreters have no vantage point outside their time and place to evaluate neutrally the efficacy of their preconceptions and prejudices. They rely, therefore, on what he terms ‘temporal distance’; with the insight of hindsight, we can discern what interpretations have positively withstood the test of time. While he is cognizant of the fact that temporal distance is by no means fail-safe or fully reliable, Gadamer nevertheless acknowledges that it is perhaps the best available strategy for critically discerning between rival interpretations. The task for the individual is to try to develop a dialectical accommodation between the self that the individual has become by being on the receiving end of a tradition, and the indivdual’s capacity to assume a critical disposition in relation to that tradition. Becoming aware that one is historically conditioned, and that one’s beliefs derive not from a divine source, but from one’s predecessors, is the first step towards such an accommodation.

It is through the process of responding to the claims which my tradition makes upon me that I come to understand the self that I am. Self-understanding, for Gadamer, involves dialoging with all those whose voices speak through me. I come to an understanding of who I am by reading and responding to those into whose heritage and legacy I have been situated. Hence, I am always already engaged in conversation with others who have gone before. The self is, in other words, dialogical through and through.

The problem with method, according to Gadamer, is that it never takes sufficient account of dialog, of the ongoing dialog within and beyond tradition. The form such dialog takes is that of a dialectic between question and answer. This ensures that no position can ever assume that it is beyond critical appraisal. The answer in such a dialectic will always beg yet another question. By standing back from one’s tradition, not outside it, one can ask the relevant questions of it from one’s particular vantage point, thus paving the way for our successors to ask vital questions of our own position. If there were no such dialog, tradition would simply freeze over. It is precisely by virtue of the fact that we endeavor to understand ourselves through a critical dialog of this type, that we can talk of historical progress.

Temporal distanciation is, therefore, that which allows me to observe a world which, although related in many respects to my own, is in many other senses different from the one I inhabit. The dialogue which pertains between the two worlds—my own and that of my forebear—is realized in what Gadamer calls a ‘fusion of horizons.’ This suggests that no tradition, horizon, or world is totally closed in upon itself, that it is indeed porous and open-ended. It demonstrates also that tradition cannot innoculate itself against the tensions which emerge in the course of a critical dialog with its successor traditions. Such is the way we are ‘affected’ by history (Wirkungsgeschichtlichkeit).

4. Critical Theory And Critical Hermeneutics: Habermas And Ricoeur

4.1 Jurgen Habermas And Critical Theory

One way of appraising the Heidegger–Gadamer tradition of hermeneutic thought is to observe the way in which it interacts with what is known as the ‘critical theory’ school, the main protagonists of which are Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas. Primarily, critical theory appropriates the dialectical methods of Hegel and Marx, so as to develop a distinctive brand of socially committed analysis. The ultimate meaning of our world, they contend, cannot be divorced from its historical and political context. Benjamin and Habermas each developed the dialectical method of humanist Marxism in its dual capacity as critique of ideology and a project of emancipation. As such, they owed their greatest debt to Marx’s original recognition that it was only by combining our practical and reflective activities that we might effectively surmount prevailing forces of domination and control.

It is within the context of Habermas’s critique of ideology that the main differences between hermeneutics and critical theory emerge most clearly. For Habermas (1929–), what blocks the way to genuine social relations are the dominant illusions that inhibit fair and equal communication between social beings. The way to achieve such a goal is to keep in focus the utopia of, what he calls, an ‘ideal speech situation.’ This amounts to a democratic system of communication in which all social agents would have the chance to speak and make themselves heard in an undistorted fashion. It would be made possible when all participants in discourse possess an equal opportunity to initiate communication and become transparent by their words and actions. Hitherto, communication has been distorted by unequal distribution of dialog opportunities which sustain privileged positions.

In articulating the demands of the ideal speech situation, Habermas utilizes the psychoanalytic technique of identifying the forces which systematically distort communication. This model of Sprachanalyse (‘the analysis of speech’) amounts to a ‘metahermeneutic’ which endeavors to disclose the subject’s quest for self-understanding through a process of desymbolization and resymbolization. Such a technique goes beyond, in Habermas’s view, both the romantic and phenomenological deployment of hermeneutics which are founded upon a spontaneous recovery of intersubjective agreement. Where Gadamer sought to surmount misunderstanding by way of a question and answer retrieval of some original dialogical understanding, Habermas opts for the more arduous route through a critique of ideology leading to the possibility of genuine language. The notion of unrestrained communication remains for Habermas, therefore, a utopian ideal.

Romantic and phenomenological hermeneutics are, according to Habermas, hindered by their refusal to think through sufficiently the sociopolitical dimension of understanding. He believes that Gadamer’s ontological and poetic approach to the question of language is naive, to the extent that it is predicated upon the erroneous assumption that a consensus of dialogical communication could be achieved by recovering our traditional ‘belongingness’ to being. For Habermas, the construction of genuine consensus cannot dispense with a project of historical action. Hence, where the romantic hermeneutic spoke of a retrieval of lost meaning, Habermas speaks of an anticipation of possible meaning. In contrast to Gadamer’s view that misunderstanding presupposes a prior or preunderstanding, Habermas insists that where there is misunderstanding there may exist a posterior understanding if and only if we first undertake a critique of those ideological distortions which reside at the origin of misunderstanding. What is given is always already deformed communication. Habermas, that is, wishes to show how the ideal of communicative competence is not an ontological precondition of understanding but a historical possibility yet to be achieved. Only in this manner can we reconcile the philosophers who interpret the world and the social agents who change it.

4.2 Paul Ricoeur And Critical Hermeneutics

If Habermas criticizes romantic and phenomenological hermeneutics for being too focused on the past, and not sufficiently attentive to its ideological deformations, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–) tries to find a mid-passage between the metahermeneutics advanced by Habermas, and the hermeneutics of tradition evoked by Gadamer. In so doing, he develops a ‘critical hermeneutics’ which dissents from the romantic idea that we understand the past by reproducing in the present some original production of meaning, as if the temporal distanciation of meaning could be in some way erased. A critical hermeneutics of tradition insists on the necessity to discriminate between true and false interpretations of history. This, of course, raises the crucial question of legitimation. To resolve this problem, Habermas appealed to an ahistorical ideal of undistorted communication. For Ricoeur, however, such a criterion of legitimacy may be deferred to an indefinite future without any grounds in history. He recommends, accordingly, that we interpret tradition’s claim to truth in a nonabsolutist sense of a presumption of truth. This suggests that we accept the truth claims of tradition until such a time as a better argument prevails. The presumption of truth refers to our basic attitude of credit or trust in the propositions of meaning legacied by the past—a primary response which precedes the critical moment of distanciation and reminds us that we are not the originators of truth but that we always already belong to a context of what he terms, ‘presumed truth.’ Ricoeur believes that such a model bridges the divide between the finitude of hermeneutic imagination (Heidegger and Gadamer) and the validity of the ideal undistorted communication (Habermas).

Ricoeur inserts Habermas’s critique of ideology into the heart of the hermeneutics of tradition. This is born of his conviction that such a project demands a fundamental respect for tradition if it is to safeguard itself against arbitrary or ahistorical voluntarism— that is, a future project completely divorced from the historical heritage of the past. Where Gadamer invokes the notion of a common understanding which precedes us, the critical consciousness of Habermas reinterprets it in terms of the ideal of unrestricted and unconstrained communication. This antithesis is, however, broken down if one espouses a critical hermeneutics that realizes that critical theory cannot take up a view from nowhere, but must stick to its professed principles by presupposing some form of historical memory. For critical theory, a historical memory would not be that of romanticism (as it was for Gadamer) but rather of the Enlightenment, understood as a project of emancipation.

Tradition, Ricoeur concludes, must be understood in the dynamic perspective of our being-affected-by-the-past, which in turn is related to our historical horizon of expectancy. In this larger dialectic between tradition and expectation, we rediscover suppressed potentialites of past meaning which give substance to the ideal of undistorted communication. Indeed, it is only in terms of such an interplay between memory and anticipation that the ideal image of a reconciled humanity can be invested with an effective history. A critical hermeneutics has thus the ethical duty of ensuring that the expectancies for the future are brought nearer to the present by being sensitive to the concrete actions which need to be undertaken so as to bring to a realization what is ‘desirable and reasonable.’ Second, it must continually strive to liberate the still untapped potentialities of inherited meaning.

In this way, Ricoeur’s particular brand of hermeneutics provides an essential link between romantic hermeneutics and critical theory. His incisive analysis of myth throughout his multifarious writings shows precisely how such a critical hermeneutics can be deployed in the service of concrete sociopolitical objectives. The modern project of unmasking myth frequently takes its cue from the investigative methods developed by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—the ‘three masters of suspicion’ as Ricoeur likes to call them. Once a hermeneutics of suspicion has unmasked the alienating role of myth as an agency of ideological conformism, there remains, for Ricoeur, the task of a positive interpretation. Hermeneutics, that is, has the double task of suspecting and listening. Having demythologized the ideologies of false consciousness it labors to disclose the utopian symbols of liberating consciousness. It thereby seeks to rescue mythic symbols from reactionary domination, and to show that once the mystifying function has been dispelled we may recover genuinely utopian anticipations of ‘possible worlds’ of liberty and justice. A positive hermeneutics of this sort offers an opportunity to rescue myths from the ideological abuses of doctrinal prejudice, nationalism, class oppression, or totalitarian conformism; and it does so in the name of a universal project of freedom—a project from which no creed, nation, class, or individual is excluded. The utopian content of myth differs from the ideological in that it is inclusive. It opens up human consciousness to a common goal of liberation instead of closing it off in inherited securities. That is, having eliminated the ideological abuse of myth as a false explanation of how things are, we are now free to appreciate the properly symbolic role of myth as an exploration of how things might be.

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