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  • Testimony beyond the LimitsPaul Ricoeur in Dialogue with Trauma Theory, Shoah Studies, and Theology
  • Jacob D. Myers (bio)

Transcending Testimony, Transcending Truth

Inasmuch as testimony balances on the fulcrum between confidence and suspicion, it inaugurates a particular relationship with truth. If truth is understood, following Kant, as a correspondence between intuitive apperceptions of reality and contingent, empirical events, then how might we speak of ideas that transcend empirical verifiability?1 In other words, by what measure and by which terms may we speak of truth beyond being? This has long been the question for philosophy, as well as theology, Shoah studies, and trauma studies.2 Following Heidegger’s critical reflections on truth in relation to disclosure (Erschlossenheit) or givenness (Gegebenheit), and in keeping with Levinas’s engagement with truth beyond the horizon of conception, this essay interrogates the tenuous relationship between a particular mode of speech (viz., testimony) and truth, particularly a truth beyond being.3

In his highly influential 1972 essay “The Hermeneutics of Testimony,” the philosopher Paul Ricoeur moves toward an answer to this important question, advancing a philosophy of testimony beyond a simple adequation between word and truth. Ricoeur’s reflections transcend the multi-century philosophical (and theological) debate by which thinkers attempt to square truth claims with sense data in search of a scientific or empirical proof that might render testimony unassailable. Ricoeur is searching for the conditions for possibility of bearing witness to the absolute—“a philosophy [End Page 99] which seeks to join an experience of the absolute to the idea of the absolute.”4 Here Ricoeur’s invocation of the word “absolute” arises in the sense articulated by Ricoeur’s intellectual mentor, the reflexive philosopher Jean Nabert, to signify the Divine, God. In “The Hermeneutics of Testimony” the absolute is another name for (the idea of) God; however, in Ricoeur’s later work, which engages the writings of other “thinkers of testimony,” namely, Heidegger and Levinas, the semantic precision of “the absolute” grows murky, swelling to include Heidegger’s notion of the “call of conscience” (Gewissensruf) and Levinas’s “glory of the Infinite.”5

For Ricoeur, following Nabert, only absolute testimony is capable of transcending the mundane, concrete singularities governed by truth, without which its authority remains in suspense. In Ricoeur’s philosophy, a particular relationship is forged between internal and external occurrences that can be validated neither scientifically nor psychologically. The paradox that a hermeneutics of testimony seeks to resolve is the seeming impossibility of conjoining the interiority of a primary affirmation and the exteriority of acts in the world.

In spite of the many benefits of Ricoeur’s philosophy of testimony, it is not without its problems, as theologians, traumatologists, and Shoah scholars will likely notice. Particularly for theologians seeking to bear witness to the God who reveals Godself in God’s radical alterity and for trauma scholars who handle testimonies arising out of the cognitive dissonance produced by psychic wounds, we must interrogate such complicating factors in Ricoeur’s oeuvre.6 Taking as our test cases experiences that approximate absolute testimony of the absolute, garnered from trauma theory and the experiences of survivors of the Shoah, in this article we will interrogate the limits of testimonial discourse in Ricoeur to assess its philosophical utility therein.

A Fresh Starting Point

One of the most commented upon aspects of Ricoeur’s philosophy in general is the manner in which he goes about setting up his arguments. Ricoeur himself described his project as a return to Kant through Hegel.7 David Tracy, who served as Ricoeur’s colleague for many years at the University of Chicago Divinity School, notes that despite his “almost labyrinthine detours,” Ricoeur’s methodological self-description is accurate and [End Page 100] illuminating.8 Ricoeur, like Kant, was a thinker of limits, and, like Kant, rarely does Ricoeur blur the boundaries of his philosophy. He knows precisely where, for example, phenomenology ends and hermeneutics begins. More notably, he is aware of the limits of philosophy, and even if he acknowledges a shared border with theology, he is careful not to cross it.9 Ricoeur’s (Kantian) preoccupation with limits and his wariness for transcending them becomes clear when...

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