The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

Abstract

Abstract Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud “the school of suspicion”,1 by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one’s desires (“I really want to be rich!”), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit (“an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!”). “Beneath” or “behind” the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don’t really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do, and so on.

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