Rhetoric - Poetics - Hermeneutics

## Citation

Ricoeur, Paul. "Rhetoric - Poetics - Hermeneutics." *Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader*, edited by Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 60-72.

## Summary

In this essay, Ricoeur traces and elaborates the differences between rhetoric, poetics, and hermeneutics, to show how none are master over the other or reducible to the others, arguing for the maintenance of clear boundaries between each field while also acknowledging their intersections.

### Rhetoric

"The art of arguing with a view to persuading an audience that one opinion is preferable to its rival." (71) Associated verb - arguing

"What is called ideology is a form of rhetoric. But it must be said of ideology what is said of rhetoric: it is the best and the worst. The best: the whole set of symbols, beliefs, and representations which, by way of acknowledged ideas, ensures the identity of a group (nation, people, party, etc.). In this sense, ideology is the discourse itself of the imaginary constitution of society." (63)

Ricoeur reads Perelman as subsuming philosophy into rhetoric, but also notes that philosophy is disinterested - even though actual philosophers may not be able to put aside their interests, philosophy ultimately aims not at persuading its audience, but in proving universal truths that cannot be denied. (Philosophy doesn't need rhetoric, since it hopes to show self-evident truth)

### Poetics

"The art of constructing plots with a view to broadening the individual and collective imaginary." (71) Associated verb - fashioning

Poetics starts in *mimesis*, the production of fable. On mimesis - "not a copy but rather a reconstruction through creative imagination." (65) Poetics aims at catharsis, the medical purging and religious purification of emotion. This is in opposition to persuasion, Ricoeur says, because "Contrary to all seduction or flattery, it consists in the imaginative reconstruction of the two basic emotions by which we participate in any great deed: fear and pity. Fear and pity are in turn metaphorized, in a way, by this imaginative reconstruction in which, thanks to *muthos* (the fable-plot), the creative imitation of human action consists." (66) Poetics deals with the imaginary.

### Hermeneutics

"The art of interpreting texts within a context distinct from that of the author and from that of the texts' original audience with a view to discovering new dimensions to reality. (71) Associated verb - redescribing

Any time a text does not have its author present to engage and speak for it, we must resort to hermeneutics. This can happen in the religious tradition, as well as the legal tradition of jurisprudence, and even in translation.

Ricoeur points to the example of the Church Fathers who decided to allow four gospels that, at times, contradict each other, rather than authorize only a single canonical text. "Faced with this hermeneutical freedom, one could say that **the task of an art of interpretation**, compared to one of argumentation, **is less to win acceptance for one opinion over another than to allow a text to signify as much as it *can*: not to signify one thing rather than another but to 'signify more' and thus to make us 'think more' [...] In this respect, hermeneutics seems to me closer to poetics than to rhetoric. It too calls upon the productive imagination in its demand for a surplus of *meaning*.**" (69)

Hermeneutics as a way of seeing more and differently - similar, in a way, to the "source-as-lens" work of W131?

Additionally, "The function of interpretation is not only to have a text signify something else or even signify everything it can and signify always something more [...] but **its function is to unfold what i now call the world of the text**." (69)