The Core Assumption
Meaning lives in the world the text projects before the reader, reached by a long route through symbol, explanation, and suspicion toward a second naïveté.
The Four Assumptions
- Where meaning lives
- Meaning lives in front of the text, in the world the text projects, as much as behind it in the author's intention, so interpretation aims at the mode of being the text opens up.
- What the text is
- The text is an autonomous work, distanced from its author and original audience, whose symbols and metaphors carry a surplus of meaning that no single reading exhausts.
- Who may interpret
- The authorized interpreter is the reader willing to travel the full arc: explanation by critical methods, suspicion toward idols, and finally appropriation in a chastened, second naïveté.
- What counts as a good reading
- A reading is adequate when it passes through explanation and suspicion without stopping there, and arrives at an appropriation that enlarges the reader's capacity to be.
Genealogy
This method arose in the 20th c period (Developed from The Symbolism of Evil in 1960 through the narrative works of the 1980s).
Key proponents: Paul Ricoeur, David Tracy, Kevin J. Vanhoozer.
Key texts: The Symbolism of Evil by Paul Ricoeur; Interpretation Theory by Paul Ricoeur; Time and Narrative by Paul Ricoeur.
The Procedure
These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.
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Begin with the symbol
Identify the text's governing symbols and metaphors and state the surplus of meaning each one carries beyond any literal paraphrase.
Why this step matters: For Ricoeur, the symbol gives rise to thought: interpretation begins where language is most layered, not where it is most plain.
How to do it: Trace each symbol's roots in experience and its history in the tradition before proposing what it discloses.
What goes wrong here: Flattening symbols into allegorical codes with one fixed meaning each.
You record: The text's symbols and their surplus. Done well when: Each symbol is given more than one layer of meaning, with evidence for each layer.
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Take the detour through explanation
Submit the text to structural, historical, and critical analysis, letting explanation discipline the reading.
Why this step matters: Ricoeur refuses the shortcut of immediate understanding; explanation is the necessary detour that keeps interpretation honest.
How to do it: Use the relevant critical methods on the text's structure and setting, and record what they establish and what they leave open.
What goes wrong here: Treating explanation as the enemy of faith rather than as its tutor.
You record: A critical explanation of the text. Done well when: The explanation names at least one finding that complicates the reader's first understanding.
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Practice suspicion, then listen again
Apply the masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the text and to your reading, then ask what the text still says after suspicion has done its work.
Why this step matters: Ricoeur holds suspicion and retrieval in one movement: idols must fall so that symbols can speak again.
How to do it: Write the strongest suspicious reading you can, and then write, with equal care, what survives it.
What goes wrong here: Using suspicion only against opponents' readings and never against one's own.
You record: A suspicion-tested reading. Done well when: Both the suspicious critique and the surviving claim are stated in full strength.
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Appropriate the projected world
Describe the world the text projects and what it would mean to inhabit it, as an act of second naïveté rather than first.
Why this step matters: Appropriation is the goal: the reader understands himself or herself in front of the text, changed by the world it opens.
How to do it: State the new possibilities for being that the text proposes, and the cost of accepting them.
What goes wrong here: Confusing second naïveté with a return to uncritical belief, when it is belief that has passed through critique.
You record: The projected world and its appropriation. Done well when: The appropriation shows the marks of the critique it has passed through.
Inputs Required
- A text rich in symbol, metaphor, or narrative
- Competence in at least one explanatory critical method
- Familiarity with the masters of suspicion and their characteristic questions
Outputs Produced
- An analysis of the text's symbols and their surplus of meaning
- A reading that has passed through both explanation and suspicion
- An appropriation of the world the text projects, in the mode of second naïveté
Quality Criteria
Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:
- Explanation genuinely precedes appropriation; no shortcut to edification
- Suspicion is applied symmetrically, to the reader's own tradition as well as to others
- The projected world described is the text's, not the reader's wishes restated
Common Errors
- Stopping at suspicion and calling the demolition an interpretation
- Claiming second naïveté as a shortcut around criticism rather than a road through it
- Treating the surplus of meaning as a blank check for arbitrary readings
Strengths
- It integrates critical scholarship and religious reading in one disciplined arc instead of choosing between them
- Its account of metaphor and narrative reshaped literary theory as well as theology
- It gives religious language a defensible status after the critiques of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
Weaknesses and Critics
- The full arc is demanding, and few actual readings complete all its stages rigorously
- The criterion for a successful appropriation remains largely the reader's testimony of enlarged being
- Its handling of historical questions about biblical events can seem evasive to both critics and conservatives
Jacques Derrida: In their famous encounter over metaphor, Derrida objected that Ricoeur's account of living metaphor still depends on the metaphysics of presence it hopes to escape, since it assumes meaning can be gathered and carried across into a new, stable understanding. (The debate opened by Derrida's White Mythology (1971) and the 1981 Paris encounter between Derrida and Ricoeur)
Dan O. Via: Via pressed Ricoeur from the side of New Testament scholarship, arguing that his narrative and parabolic theory underplays the realism of the parables' reference and leaves the relation between the projected world and actual history unresolved. (The Parables: Their Literary and Existential Dimension (1967) and Via's subsequent engagements with Ricoeur on parable)
Internal Schools
Symbol and evil school: This school centers on Ricoeur's early work on the symbolism of evil, confession, and myth, and reads his later work as an extension of that project.
Narrative identity school: This school centers on Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another, developing Ricoeur's account of identity as narratively mediated, with wide use in ethics and pastoral theology.
Exemplar Readings
The Symbolism of Evil and the Confession of Sin (The Symbolism of Evil, on defilement, sin, and guilt): Ricoeur's own exemplar traces the symbols by which evil was first confessed, shows how the symbols generate philosophical reflection, and demonstrates that the detour through symbol reaches depths that direct description of the will cannot.
Parables as Metaphorical Narratives (The parables of Jesus in Ricoeur's essays on biblical hermeneutics): The reading treats each parable as a narrative metaphor whose extravagance disorients the hearer and projects a world, the kingdom, that can be entered only by letting the story redescribe the reader's own reality.
What This Method Cannot Do
This method cannot certify the historical truth of the events a text narrates, because its machinery concerns how texts project worlds and remake readers, a question it deliberately separates from historical verification. It also cannot guarantee that suspicion and retrieval will balance; in practice, a reader's temperament often decides which of the two movements dominates.
Site Stance
The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.
Run This Method in the Workshop
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Across the Site
This method belongs to the Philosophical Hermeneutics family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.
Primary Sources
- Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning by Paul Ricoeur (1976)
- Time and Narrative by Paul Ricoeur (1984-1988)
Secondary Sources
- Ricoeur's Hermeneutics by Richard E. Palmer, in The Legacy of Ricoeur edited by Karl Simms (2002)
- Paul Ricoeur by Karl Simms (2003)