THE HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION: A CASE STUDY FROM HINDUISM

Abstract

The “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has emerged in recent times as a lens for examining historical texts, is a hermeneutic which involves a fundamental philosophical reorientation. See Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969); Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (ed. Don Ihde; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (translation edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming; New York: Seabury Press, 1975). Consciousness, which was once considered to be perceptually transparent in a Cartesian manner and linguistically transparent in a Wittgensteinian way, is now considered to consist primarily of the relationship between the hidden and the shown, between what is concealed and what is revealed. Rowan Williams, “The Suspicion of Suspicion: Wittgenstein and Bonhoeffer,” The Grammar of the Heart (ed. Richard H. Bell; San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988) 36–53. Consciousness therefore needs decoding, and so also the texts which embody it. This understanding of consciousness is the fundamental assumption underlying the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as it was espoused by Paul Ricoeur, who referred repeatedly to the three “masters of suspicion”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. Denis Savage; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970) 32. While these three might appear “seemingly mutually exclusive,” Ibid. for all three “the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation of hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested.” Ibid., 33–34. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Michel Foucault and Edward Said should now be incuded in this list. The case for Rene Descartes is less clear. See Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought (trans. Jane Marie Todd; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998) 79–81. The basic hermeneutical implication of their thought points in the same direction—a text may not be taken at its face value, indeed the face of a text may be no more than a mask which conceals underlying socio-economic, political, and psychological realities in such a way as to obscure them, or render them more palatable, if not more acceptable.