Since Paul Ricoeur does not simply identify phenomenology with philosophy, he poses a
somewhat different question: What is the relation of “purely descriptive phenomenology
that permits the believing soul to speak” to the religious experience that it “is no longer”
and to the philosophy that it “is not yet” (1967, 19, 4). The question about philosophy's
relation to religion now involves a triadic rather than a dyadic relation.
In its relation to religion, this descriptive phenomenology involves a hermeneutical
distanciation from the “primitive naïveté” or “immediacy of belief” that marks the
believing soul (1967, 351). “The philosopher adopts provisionally the motivations and
intentions of the believing soul. He does not feel' them in their first naïveté; here-feels'
them in a neutralized mode, in the mode of as if.' It is in this sense that phenomenology is a re-enactment in sympathetic imagination” (19). Happily, for purposes of comparison with Heidegger, Ricoeur is also interested in sin and guilt and seeks, in The Symbolism of Evil, to reenact the believing soul's confession of fault. More interested in faithfulness than in the science of faith, to use Heidegger's language, he turns not to the theologian but to the believing soul as such and thus to the language of symbol and myth in which confession takes place prior to second-order theological reflection. But what is the relation of this project to philosophy, which it “is not yet”? Ricoeur understands philosophy as reflection in a double sense: pausing to think things over, and thinking about oneself in the search for self-understanding. But he believes the Cartesian cogito has been shattered in a variety of ways. For example, the Husserlian transcendental ego has been deconstructed by Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as always already constituted by preunderstandings within the hermeneutical circle. We never stand at the origin of meaning but always in medias res, and this has an important methodological consequence. “In contrast to the tradition of the cogito and to the pretension of the subject to know itself by immediate intuition, it must be said that we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity posited in cultural works” (Ricoeur 1981, 143; compare 158 and 1970, 42). Descriptive phenomenology is this detour. But it is only a detour and not the destination. We must pass “from a simplere-
enactment' without belief to autonomous `thought.' ” This involves the need to pose the
question of truth (Do I believe that?) that is “unceasingly eluded” in
end p.476
the comparative phenomenology of which Éliade (and, to be sure, Ricoeur himself) is
such a good example (1967, 353). But philosophy is not content merely to pose the
question of truth. It seeks to be “pure reflection” that “makes no appeal to any myth or
symbol; in this sense it is a direct exercise of rationality” (347). But, given the shattering
of the cogito and the necessity of the hermeneutical detour, are these notions of
“autonomous thought,” “pure reflection,” and “direct rationality” anything more than
pipe dreams? Are they even legitimate as regulative ideals?
Surprisingly, Ricoeur thinks the question is a difficult one. He has abundantly made it
impossible to answer, Yes, reflection can be autonomous, pure, and direct, but he is
reluctant to give up on these traditional ideals. So his slogan, “The symbol gives rise to