morny joyHeidegger in his early forays into hermenenutics, he was also extremely
hesitant to identify the Being of Greek philosophy with the God of the
Christian tradition,^2 and thus was “mistrustful of ontotheology.”^3 He
refrained from theological statements of any variety, referring to his
own writings on the scriptures, both Hebrew and Christian, as those
of “an amateur of enlightened exegesis.”^4 He even confined his re-
flections on these religiously inspired writings to modes of commentary
on what he termed the polyphonic voices that he appreciated as
conveying multiple modes of witness. Ricoeur is quite discerning in
his approach to scripture, where he describes himself as taking a
theological hermeneutic approach:
The naming of God, in the originary expressions of faith, is not simple
but multiple. It is not a simple tone, but polyphonic. The originary ex-
pressions of faith are complex forms of discourse as diverse as narratives,
prophecies, laws, proverbs, prayers, hymns, liturgical formulas, and
wisdom writings. As a whole, these forms name God. But they do so in
various ways.^5Ricoeur also worried about the tendency of philosophy and theology
to homogenize this vibrant plurality into uniform concepts. He
acknowledged that hermeneutic phenomenology had abandoned the
dream of total mediation. In this connection, he also observed: “If we
are not Hegelian, we are not in the regime of totalization.”^6 In his
- Yvanka Raynova, “All that Give Us to Think: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur,”
in Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, ed. A.
Wiercinski, Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003, 686f. - Ricoeur in François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, Critique and Conviction: Paul
Ricoeur, trans. Kathleen Blamey, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 150. - Ricoeur in Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Peru, Ill.: Open
Court, 1995, 448. - Ricoeur, “Naming God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagina-
tion, trans. David Pellauer; ed. Mark Wallace, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995,
- Ricoeur in Raynova, “All that Give Us to Think,” 686. See also Ricoeur in
Hahn, Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 567: “My repeated critique of all the facts of to-
talization, on the practical, ethical, political and ecclesiastical plane, as well as on
the plane of theory, can be constructively placed under the auspices of the Kantian
idea of the limit that reason itself exerts with respect to the claims of understand-