Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

Paul Ricoeur,

Solicitude, Love, and the Gift

morny joy

Introduction

Throughout his life Paul Ricoeur strove to keep his work on philosophy
strictly separate from religious allegiance. Nonetheless, religion has
always featured as a backdrop, even in its putative absence. Of
Protestant Huguenot background, he acknowledged that the principal
influence on his philosophical orientation towards religion was
Immanuel Kant. Ricoeur often referred to Kant as his guide — quoting
often the distinction between thinking [Denken] and knowing
[Erkennen]. For Ricoeur, Denken refers to thought of the unconditioned,
whereas Erkennen refers to empirical knowledge of objects. In this way
Ricoeur posits that religion cannot claim to have knowledge of the
unconditioned.
In an interview with Charles Reagan he remarked:

I am well aware that this creates a problem of duality — if I can say

this — by a set of writings and by the interpretation that follows from

these writings, and choosing them.... I prefer the difficulties created

by this duality than the confusion born of inter-mixing. I prefer the risk

of schizophrenia to the bad faith of pseudo-argument.^1

Ricoeur feared arguments from authority — such as proofs for the
existence of God — as being dogmatic in intent and not open to the
type of dialogical exchange that he considered to be the hallmark of
his preferred approach of hermeneutic phenomenology. Influenced by

1. Paul Ricoeur in Charles Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work, Chicago: Uni-
   versity of Chicago Press, 1996, 126.