Paul Ricoeur, The Model of Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text

 Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, What Is Literature? (Autumn, 1973), p. 91-117.

In his famous novel The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco mentions in passing a story of two mediaeval scholars who “for fifteen days and fifteen nights… argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”[1] This episode demonstrates two characteristic features of hermeneutics as a scholarly discipline. While it is centered on the text—hermeneutics was born as a theory and practice of the interpretation of the biblical text—it is also preoccupied with the question of the truth, because, after all, the biblical text was regarded as the absolute truth, and hermeneutics aimed to achieve it through interpretations. Eco’s scholars started to fight, because for them a linguistic dispute was the dispute about the Truth. There is little surprise, therefore, that while most other theories of the text in the twentieth century attacked the positivist model of humanities and social sciences with their desire for objectivity and search for truth, the modern and post-modern hermeneutics remained committed to find a middle ground between the positivist and post-modernist extremes. Admitting that the human perception of reality is text-based, hermeneutics still promised a method that would retain for humanities and social sciences the status of “sciences” as opposed to literary fiction. At least, this is what is at stake in Paul Ricoeur’s article “The Model of Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text:”

How can the social sciences be scientific at all? Our task… will be to show to what extent the paradigm of reading, which is the counterpart of the paradigm of writing, provides a solution for the methodological paradox of social sciences.[2]

The methodological paradox of social sciences, to which Ricoeur refers in the quotation above, can be formulated in the following way: in order to explain any phenomenon in the domain of social sciences or humanities, one needs to understand—at least, to a certain extent—this phenomenon before he or she starts to study (and, thus, better understand) it. But how can understanding before understanding be possible? Moreover, how can understanding before explanation be possible? Does not it make the foundation of social sciences and humanities too shaky? For if one comes to, say, a historical research without dropping his or her own personal experience and uses it to develop strategies of explanation and understanding, then the resulting picture can be too personal to be considered reliable.

To these questions, Ricoeur answers that certain methods of textual interpretation which are centered on the comprehension of the text (“reading”), rather than on its creation (“writing”)—what he calls “paradigm of reading” in the quotation above—can provide a methodological pathway to a truly reliable, i.e. scientific, research. In his article, he aims to demonstrate how principles created by hermeneutics for interpretation of the text can be applied to the subject of social sciences—i.e., human activities (“meaningful action”). In this process, his argument evolves through the following stages:

1. Introduction of the concept of discourse (p. 91—97);
2. Argumentation that human activities can be studied through a metaphor of text (p. 97—103);
3. Explanation of how methods of interpretation developed in hermeneutics can be applied to analysis of human activities in social sciences, which is the core part of this article (p. 103—117).

Ricoeur starts by introducing the concept of discourse. Drawing on the theory of Emile Benveniste, Ricoeur outlines four main principles of discourse analysis which he later applies to the analysis of social phenomena. First, discourse should be treated as a temporal phenomenon: both its writing and reading take place in a certain historical moment and social environment. Secondly, discourse is a form of subjectivity—but its subjectivity is not only its author’s, because numerous other agents and forces stand behind the production of discourses. Thirdly, discourse is produced to describe, or change, the world around us—it “is always about something.”[3] Finally, discourse is a communicative act—one’s utterance is always part of some larger dialogue and has an audience.

Drawing on the speech act theory, Ricoeur also notes that in any utterance, three functions are realized.[4] The first function is locutionary: a phrase is a message which aims to transfer information between the speaker and the audience. The second function is illocutionary: our words are actions themselves. Each time we say “I swear,” illocutionary force is invoked: by this act of saying, we create a new social reality where out interlocutor expects from us certain physical actions (or non-actions, in case we promise not to do something). The third function is perlocutionary: our words are acts themselves. William Shakespeare knew that better than many others, so there is no wonder that in Henry VI, Part 2, Richard and Edward, the sons of the Duke of York, refer to words and weapons as objects of nearly the same value:

QUEEN MARGARET

    He <the Duke of York> is arrested, but will not obey;

    His sons, he says, shall give their words for him.

YORK

    Will you not, sons?

EDWARD

    Ay, noble father, if our words will serve.

RICHARD

    And if words will not, then our weapons shall.[5]

Ricoeur then makes an important differentiation between oral speech and written text. This differentiation is between the event and the meaning: while an oral enunciation (“event”), according to Ricoeur, produces short-term effects and is restricted in terms of its audience and scope (is “ostensible”), the meaning of the written text is much more powerful. Its duration and audience are significantly larger, and its comprehension is principally different in comparison to oral speech. Oral speech is restricted in interpretations by the very environment in which it is produced—the author, in particular, can to a considerable degree control or frame the comprehension of his or her text. The situation is very different with writing: here, the author loses control and it is the reader who determines the meaning of the text:

With written discourse, the author's intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide <…> The text's career escapes the finite horizon of its author. What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say.[6]

The locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary functions of the text are also completely changed when it escapes from oral speech into the domain of writing. Outside of its specific context, any utterance loses its initial illocutionary force, and perlocutionary acts also become irrelevant. The fact that by their utterances the junior members of the House of York demonstrate loyalty to their father (illocutionary force) and increase the political tension at the royal court (perlocutionary force) is not important to us—and, consequently, to the academic discipline of history which we represent. It is, perhaps, their long-term effects, that we are interested in. And here comes the key point of Ricoeur’s argument: procedures of reading, rather than a scrutiny of writing, should become the new methodological focus of social sciences. Any text is important because we read it and not because somebody wrote it some time ago, no matter how insignificant “we” are and how prominent that “somebody” is. This is resonant to what another French philosopher, Roland Barthes, wrote in his famous essay Death of the Author. The quotation below illuminates Ricoeur’s argument from a different angle:

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… To give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.[7]

Or, as one of my former colleagues once put it, it was not the writing of Mein Kampf that made it such a wicked and criminal book, but its reading in Germany in the 1930s.

By appointing the reader as the ultimate authority who alone can interpret the meaning of the text, Ricoeur also offers a solution to one of the major challenges posed by postmodernism to social sciences and especially history: if we accept that historical sources are not “transparent”—i.e., are not a direct reflection of past events—then it automatically discredits the historical writing as a specific academic genre, since historians can no longer pretend that they have a direct access to the object of the study. How, then, is history as a scholarly discipline possible? To this, Ricoeur answers that writing, or, in our specific case, historical sources, still can illuminate and improve our understanding of the world. It is just not the physical world which is in any case given to us only in practical and temporal situations, but the conceptual world which frames our understanding of reality:

For us, the world is the ensemble of references opened up by the texts. Thus we speak about the "world" of Greece, not to designate any more what were the situations for those who lived them, but to designate the nonsituational references which outlive the effacement of the first and which henceforth are offered as possible modes of being, as symbolic dimensions of our being-in-the-world.[8]

Ricoeur then argues that human activities, or “meaningful actions,” work in the same way as utterances in discourse. He claims that if this analogy is possible, then “action itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science.”[9] Ricoeur consistently applies four principles which underlie his model of discourse analysis to human activities in order to demonstrate that meaningful actions are, in a way, similar to utterances. People’s actions can and should be read, he concludes (p. 103), which allows hermeneutic method to enter the domain of social sciences.

Ricoeur then moves on to explain how methodology of hermeneutics can be used in practical research in social sciences. The most important part of his conception is the dialectic of “Erklärung” (explanation) and “Verständnis” (understanding, comprehension). In the hermeneutic tradition of his intellectual predecessor, Wilhelm Dilthey, explanatory models in social sciences and humanities are borrowed from natural sciences, while the understanding of social, cultural or political processes has a hermeneutic, i.e., literary, nature. In other words, it is the understanding not in terms of cause and effect relationship, but through a movement in a hermeneutic circle: from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Ricoeur pointed out this logical gap between explanation and understanding in Dilthey’s model and offered instead that explanatory models in social sciences should draw on contemporary theories of the text (speech act theory, communicative theory, structuralism, etc.). Consequently, both explanation and understanding of social phenomena can be examined through hermeneutical operations applied to the “reading” of these events—hence, the metaphor of “a meaningful action as text.” In this respect, explanation and understanding themselves become parts of the hermeneutic circle—in order to explain a social phenomenon, we need to have a certain understanding of it, but in order to understand it, we need it explained (Ricoeur calls it the dialectic of comprehension and explanation—see pages 105—106). Once we manage to enter this hermeneutic circle, our knowledge of the material we work with will greatly increase.

But how should we enter the hermeneutic circle? Ricoeur’s answer is: by making an initial, usually wrong or very incomplete, guess. He points out that text is open to several interpretations: “This plurivocity is typical of the text considered as a whole, open to several readings and to several constructions.”[10] Therefore, in order to engage a text—or a social phenomenon, if we accept Ricoeur’s metaphor, — we should offer an interpretation (a “guess”), which might be a priori inadequate. But this first step is necessary, because our next step in understanding (and explaining) of the text will be validation of our guess. The function of validation is to show to what extent our initial interpretation is probable. Validation as an “argumentative discipline” based on the “logic of uncertainty and of qualitative probability” is what makes this approach “scientific”:

Such is the balance between the genius of guessing and the scientific character of validation which constitutes the modern complement of the dialectic between verstehen and erklären. At the same time, we are prepared to give an acceptable meaning to the famous concept of a hermeneutic circle. Guess and validation are in a sense circularly related as subjective and objective approaches to the text.[11]

In other words, we move from an initial guess (interpretation) to rational validation which, perhaps, falsifies our guess, but on the basis of our analysis we are now able to make another, a better, guess. The hermeneutic circle closes up: we apply operations of validation to our second guess, probably falsify it once again, make a third, even better guess, and so forth, until we are satisfied by the resulting knowledge (of course, we can be satisfied already on the second or even the first stage. Most people are, after all). Validation is built on the model of a juridical procedure: each part of the argument is checked for logical consistency and probability (p. 107). Rational operations of validation become, thus, an antidote to a commonplace relativist claim that all interpretations are equal. Ricoeur’s counterargument is that “the text is a limited field of possible constructions” (p. 108), therefore, some interpretations are better (“more probable,” in his terms) than others, while some are a fortiori false. The purpose of hermeneutics is to provide instruments which will identify best possible interpretations of texts—or, in our case, of social, political and cultural phenomena.

The movement from understanding to explanation described above is not the only way to enter a hermeneutic circle. Ricoeur also offers another point of entry—from explanation to understanding. It is based on the structuralist approach, which examines social phenomena in order to identify their internal sign structures. Once emerged, these structures function according to their own (semiotic) laws, while their link to reality is somewhat complicated, if not non-existent at all. According to Ricoeur, this objective, nearly scientific explanatory model, borrowed from de-Saussurian theory of the language, should also work in partnership (or in a dialectic relationship) with the subjectivity of understanding. Structural analysis can facilitate a better understanding of a social phenomenon (what Ricoeur himself calls “depth-interpretation”), but it is useless per se. Only when objective results retrieved through the use of structural methods are placed within a larger framework of one’s professional expertise—in other words, when scientific objectivity is projected on the subjective knowledge of an expert—can we speak of “deep interpretations.”[12]

And here once again, the main figure of understanding is the reader. In order to understand the text, according to Ricoeur, we should not concentrate on the author’s intentions: “The depth-semantic of the text is not what the author intended to say.”[13] Understanding comes when we as readers appropriate the text, to make its meanings “our own”. A quotation from Roland Barthes, again, can illuminate Ricoeur’s argument better: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost.” [14]

Ricoeur’s essay unfortunately provides no examples of how his method works if applied to specific problems in social sciences and humanities, although he could have found quite many practical studies which resonate with his ideas. For example, in the 1970s, Yuri Lotman, a prominent Soviet literary critic and the founder of the Soviet semiotic school, published several articles in which he examined such cultural phenomena of the Russian pre-revolutionary nobility as duels, flirting, ostentatious acts of bravery during warfare, etc. as text. His articles, published approximately at the same time as Ricoeur’s The Model of Text involved nearly all those analytical tools of which Ricoeur spoke: structural analysis, operations of validation, appropriation of the text in reading, rather than a focus on its writing, with the main difference that it was conceptualized within the semiotic, rather than hermeneutic tradition.[15] The resemblance of Ricoeur’s and Lotman’s approaches which developed independently of each other demonstrates that the model of text as applied to the analysis of social phenomena is a timely addition to the repertoire of the contemporary scholarship, as it provides effective and reliable tools of scholarly research.

Criticism of Ricoeur’s conception of human activities as text inevitably involves the question of criteria against which we should “measure” which interpretations are more probable than other.[16] Although he asserts that it is validation which serves as the instrument of “objective” analysis of the text, he does not offer formal criteria upon which we could decide what is a good and what is a bad interpretation. After all, it is the overall erudition of a scholar and good old careful reading of texts that creates good interpretations. Ricoeur’s metaphor of validation as a judicial act is useful as long as scholars two discuss a certain phenomenon stand on one, or at least on adjacent ideological and political platforms: one can hardly doubt that any Holocaust denier or neo-Nazi sees the whole judicial argumentation of the Nuremberg Trials is a chain of faulty deductions drawn from wrongly interpreted evidence. In our case, the same is with historical research: nearly all arguments seen as probable and logical by liberal historians can be challenged by those standing on extreme right—or extreme left—positions. As Ricoeur puts it himself:

<…> The plurivocity common to texts and to actions in exhibited in the form of a conflict of interpretations, and the final interpretation appears as a verdict to which it is possible to make appeal. Like legal utterances, all interpretations in the field of literary criticism and in the social sciences may be challenged, and the questions “What can defeat the claim?” is common to all argumentative situations.[17]

Yet Ricoeur’s theory has a lot to offer to historians. A metaphor of human activities as text is productive and has been successfully used in many distinguished historical studies,[18] and in this respect his works can donate effective research techniques and approaches to academic history. What, in my opinion, is more important is that his conception of hermeneutic circle gives a clue about how to combine post-modernist views that it is impossible to get to the truth with the necessity to search for the truth, which is imposed on us as professional historians, at least institutionally, if not by ourselves. The truth is achieved through interpretations—in the twenty-first century, just as it was in the Middle Ages.

I’d like to conclude this essay with an excerpt from an old English nursery rhyme Three Jovial Welshmen:

There were three jovial Welshmen,
As I have heard men say,
And they would go a-hunting
Upon St. David's Day. <…>

And all the night they hunted

And nothing could they find,

But a hedgehog in a bramble bush,

And that they left behind.

The first said it was a hedgehog,

The second he said, Nay;

The third said it was a pincushion,

And the pins stuck in wrong way.

In this account of a hunting expedition, we deal with three (actually, two) different interpretations of one episode. Some might say that both interpretations are equally valid and should be considered in the writing of this history of this expedition, and some other—that we should not test either of the claims, but rather address the conditions in which this hunting narrative was created, what figures of emplotment were used and what was at stake—politically, socially, culturally—with the creation of this text. But we know, through a spontaneous and, perhaps, unconscious hermeneutic analysis: it was the interpretation of the first hunter that was the truth. And if somebody asks: “Or do we?” (and somebody will certainly ask), I will be wholeheartedly on Ricoeur’s side on his quest for unreachable truth, for otherwise we would be forced to accept: there is no difference between a good and a bad interpretation, as there is no difference between a pincushion and a hedgehog.

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[1] Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995), 312.

[2] Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, What Is Literature? (Autumn, 1973), p. 104.

[3] Ibid, p. 92.

[4] Ibid, p. 93—94.

[5] William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 5, Scene 1.

[6] Paul Ricoeur, Op. cit., p. 95.

[7] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” available at: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm, accessed October 23, 2011.

[8] Paul Ricoeur, ibid, p. 96.

[9] Ibid, p. 98. It is symptomatic that Ricoeur himself wrote his text in a typically scientific manner, which one is more likely to meet in mathematics or physics: he opens his article with an explicitly stated hypothesis and then follows rather formal steps to prove it. In a way, it can be regarded as an attempt to avoid the narrative explanatory model.

[10] Ibid, p. 107.

[11] Ibid, p. 107.

[12] Ibid, p. 113.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” available at: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm, accessed October 23, 2011.

[15] Some of Lotman’s articles on this subject were published in: Lotman Jurij M., Uspenskij Boris A. The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Edited by Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1984), xiv+341 p., especially: Lotman J. M. “The decembrist in everyday life,” Ibidem, 71—123, and Lotman J. M. “The poetics of everyday behaviour in Russian eighteenth-century culture,” Ibidem, 231—256.

[16] See, e.g., Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1987), in which he extensively discusses Ricoeur’s concepts as applied to analysis of historical narratives.

[17] Paul Ricoeur, ibid., p. 110.

[18] In 2006, the Society for Ricoeur Studies was established to enhance and popularize his legacy. See the website of the Society at: http://ricoeursociety.org/ (accessed 7 November 2011). Also, the latest issue of the journal Discourse Studies was devoted to the discussion of Ricoeur’s ideas, see, in particular: Philip Gardner, “Hermeneutics and history,” Discourse Studies 13 (2011), 575-581.