circle in which it began. But can one assume that the rationality of one's foundation or
starting point will be perceivable independently of the reader's own starting point without
an overdose of wishful thinking and self-deception?
Ricoeur acknowledges that the question of how to get from descriptive phenomenology
to “reflection in the full sense” is not fully answered in The Symbolism of Evil and the
work that precedes it, Fallible Man (1965). He promises a solution in “the third part of
this work” (1967, 19). But when he turns in Freud and Philosophy to “take up again the
problem left unresolved at the end of my Symbolism and Evil, namely the relation
between a hermeneutics of symbols and a philosophy of concrete reflection” (1970, xii),
he does not so much clarify the unresolved tensions of the earlier work as introduce
another necessary detour for reflection: suspicion. What the phenomenology of religion
learns from the masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, is that the believing
soul must not only be allowed to speak but also subjected to hostile cross-examination as
well. Symbols do not disappear, since for Freud both dreams and obsessive neurosis, his
models for religious belief and practice, respectively, are highly symbolic. But now one
interprets symbols not as traces of the truth that sets us free but as disguises of the self-
deceptions that keep us in bondage. Because Freudian theory is an especially dramatic
shattering of the Cartesian/Kantian/Husserlian cogito, Ricoeur speaks of it as an
antiphenomenology that is an essential corrective to any phenomenology that clings to
the rationalism or idealism of those projects (1970, 117–22, 424–28). Behind the back of
the cogito and keeping it from being a pure origin of meaning are not only its
embeddedness in cultural contingency but also its internally generated self-deceptions.
Beyond a simple reading of The Future of an Illusion (1958), Ricoeur shows how the
entire Freudian corpus presents a hermeneutics of suspicion that is of major importance
for the phenomenology of religion. Moreover, he clearly recognizes that Freud (and, by
implication, Marx and Nietzsche) overreach them
end p.478
selves when they claim that the story they tell us is the whole story of religion, that it is
nothing but wish fulfillment, ideology, or the will to power. His hypothesis is “that
psychoanalysis is necessarily iconoclastic, regardless of the faith or nonfaith of the
psychoanalyst, and that this `destruction' of religion can be the counterpart of a faith
purified of all idolatry. Psychoanalysis as such cannot go beyond the necessity of
iconoclasm. This necessity is open to a double possibility, that of faith and that of
nonfaith, but the decision about these two possibilities does not rest with
psychoanalysisThe question remains open for every man whether the destruction of idols
is without remainder; this question no longer falls within the competency of
psychoanalysis” (1970, 230, 235).
Ricoeur does not develop the link between suspicion and “a faith purified of all idolatry.”
Implicit in this latter notion is the idea that the believing soul, and not just the modern
atheist, as in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, has powerful motives for engaging in the
hermeneutics of suspicion, not just of “them,” whether “they” are the irreligious or the
differently religious, but of oneself and one's own religious community. Moreover, this
notion reminds us of important historical antecedents to the suspicion that has played
such a key role in modern atheism. The prophetic dimension of biblical religion, both in