This is my note from my look at
ad hominem in Mikel Dufrenne:[before expanding this post I am going to go through the deplorable 1957 article on Karl Jaspers by Paul Ricoeur as published in translation in the Schilpp collection "The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers" pp 611-642 when Ricoeur was at U. Strasbourg - it contains some nasty bits right from the first paragraph (it promises "personal questions" but presents "Critical Remarks" as an alternative to a futile opposition of "argument ... opposed to argument" - Ricoeur had not yet become 'hermeneutical' in his approach. This is not some adolescent rant excused as the errors of the young as we might over-look his stay in Munich or his pamphleteering in the camp: this is at his second university appointment and only one step from the new Nanterre venture - this is the young philosopher attacking Jaspers: the verb "to flee" needs to be checked against the original as Jaspers had not "fled" to Basel and the whole compared to Ricoeur 1947, 1948 and 1954. The Ricoeur paper in Schilpp is entitled "The Relation of Jaspers' Philosophy to Religion" but the title should be "... to Evangelical Protestantism" or, at the most generous, "... to Christian Religion". The 1981 reprint exposes Jaspers on Heidegger in an expanded section interposed between pages 75 and 76 as an extended insert.]
A close look at the article also led me to a closer look at other articles in that 2nd edition, especially the remarks of
Kurt Kolle on eugenics - that paragraph gives you some idea of
what Germany was up against in the decade after WW II and how France sometimes failed just as did Uni. Marburg and Uni. Muenchen. I think it helps to understand the decade when you start to look at the manoeuvring required to get ahead in French academe (for a reminder, the
WP article on the academic career of a far-right politician in France or the case of Michel Tournier - or the reminders of the faux doctorats of former and current leaders in Eastern Europe, startng with the Ukraine today.)
In hind-sight, the Ricoeur article is scurrilous from the choice of title through the opening paragraph to the closing section and it is this that I want to detail by looking at what he actually says (his advocates, apologists and commentators both critical and inspired like to say that he got started in Jaspers or that he has this dialog with Jaspers - it is nothing of the kind.) So I would like to look at some of the key paragraphs in that 1957 paper and then my own translation of his 1954 paper.
I will not want to argue that Jaspers is a philosopher who must be read: I want to argue that Ricoeur is a philosopher who must be read much more closely starting with the period before his hermeneutic style (rhetorical style in Ricoeur seems to me to be the vehicle for his theism - not argument, but style.)
[Jaspers is the first philosopher on whom I ever presented outside a classroom (1973?) and I moved very quickly from him to Ricoeur: but this is not just remorse, but more a reflection on trends and reactions of the time (~1969 - ~2009), for within a year of that first talk I had also embraced Charles Taylor (following a talk on Roderick Chisholm on intentionality in 'perceiving' - if my memory serves.)]
While philosophers sometimes lament Locke's style or Heidegger's style or Spinoza's "geometrical" preoccupations or Husserl's dense nest of idiosyncratic terminology, a lamentable style in Ricoeur is very different from, say, the style adopted by Dufrenne in his "Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience". Usually we want to say that argument matters, not style; being explicit about assumptions matters, not allusions - but in section IV of his 1957 on Jaspers, Ricoeur opts for the confrontation of interpretations, not arguments.