The Masters of Suspicion. On Ricœur and the Philosophy of Permanent Unmasking

"This is what polarization looks like when it has philosophical roots rather than merely partisan ones. The inability of citizens to conduct reasoned argument across difference is a symptom of something deeper: the widespread adoption, often unconscious, of a hermeneutical posture that treats trust as naïveté, tradition as oppression, and the willingness to take your interlocutor at his word as a form of complicity. The masters of suspicion taught us to read beneath the surface. Their institutional descendants taught us that there is nothing but the beneath." Concordia Discors Magazine

In the summer of 1940, a twenty-seven-year-old French philosophy teacher named Paul Ricœur was captured by the German army as his unit retreated through the Marne. He would spend the next five years in Oflag II-D, a prisoner-of-war camp in Pomerania, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, separated from his wife and children, with no certainty that he would survive. What he chose to do with those years tells you nearly everything about the philosopher he became. He obtained, through the Red Cross, a copy of Edmund Husserl's Ideas I, and began translating it into French by hand, hiding the manuscript pages. He organized clandestine lectures and seminars with other imprisoned intellectuals. The camp's improvised university became rigorous enough that the Vichy government accredited its courses. While the most powerful ideological system in modern history was dismembering Europe in the name of a theory about race and destiny, Ricœur sat in a Pomeranian barracks.

He could have become a cynic. He had every reason. The civilization that had produced Kant and Goethe had also produced the Wehrmacht.

He could have become a cynic. He had every reason. The civilization that had produced Kant and Goethe had also produced the Wehrmacht. The Enlightenment's promise of rational progress was burning in the fields around him. But Ricœur drew a different conclusion from the catastrophe, one that would take him decades to articulate fully: the problem was not that people had thought too carefully about their world. The problem was that certain ways of thinking had sealed themselves against correction, had become so total in their explanatory ambition that they could absorb any counterevidence and convert it into further confirmation. A philosophy that explains everything explains nothing. A hermeneutics that can only unmask will eventually unmask itself.

He identified Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the maîtres du soupçon, the "masters of suspicion." What they shared, despite their enormous differences, was a conviction that consciousness deceives.

Twenty-five years later, in Freud and Philosophy (1965), Ricœur gave this problem a name. He identified Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the maîtres du soupçon, the "masters of suspicion." What they shared, despite their enormous differences, was a conviction that consciousness deceives. What the mind presents to itself as its own motives, beliefs, and moral commitments is, on this view, a surface concealing something uglier and more interesting underneath. For Freud, the hidden mover was repressed desire. For Marx, it was class interest. For Nietzsche, it was the will to power. In each case the work of thinking meant getting behind the facade, performing what Ricœur called a "demystification" that would distinguish the manifest from the latent, the official story from the real one.

Ricœur meant this somewhat as praise. After Freud, no one could take their stated motives entirely at face value. A person might believe he works sixty-hour weeks out of dedication; Freud suggests he might be fleeing something he cannot face at home. After Marx, no one could ignore the material interests that shelter behind the language of universal values. A ruling class does not announce that it rules; it announces principles that happen to serve its position. After Nietzsche, no one could pretend that the will to power plays no role in shaping what a culture calls goodness, beauty, or truth. "The slave revolt in morality begins," Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), "when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values" (Essay I, §10). The powerless, unable to dominate through strength, invert the moral order so that their weakness becomes virtue and the strength of their masters becomes sin. This is a genuinely unsettling insight, and the honest reader cannot entirely dismiss it.

But Ricœur also drew a line that his inheritors would spend the next half-century erasing. Suspicion, he insisted, was a method. [...] It was not a destination.

But Ricœur also drew a line that his inheritors would spend the next half-century erasing. Suspicion, he insisted, was a method. It was a discipline of reading, indispensable and genuinely useful, a passage the serious thinker had to make. It was not a destination. Ricœur's larger philosophical project moved through suspicion toward what he called a "second naïveté": a restored capacity for trust and meaning, arrived at not by ignoring criticism but by surviving it. To read a text, an institution, or a moral claim at face value was naive. To read it only with suspicion, forever, was something worse. Ricœur had learned this in the camp. The man who spent five years translating Husserl under armed guard understood, in a way that armchair radicals never would, that the capacity to affirm meaning in the face of its systematic destruction is not naïveté. It is the hardest intellectual work there is.

[...] the capacity to affirm meaning in the face of its systematic destruction is not naïveté. It is the hardest intellectual work there is.

Raymond Aron saw what was coming before most. In 1955, he published The Opium of the Intellectuals, whose title inverted Marx's famous dictum that religion is the opium of the people. The inversion came from Simone Weil, who had observed with characteristic precision that "Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word" (quoted in Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955). What Aron spent four hundred pages documenting was that the intellectuals who professed to liberate humanity from false consciousness had succumbed to a false consciousness of their own. They were, he wrote, "merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines" (Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955). The sentence described Jean-Paul Sartre's Paris. It describes a great deal more today.

What happened between Ricœur's careful distinction and our present condition is a story of philosophical radicalization that deserves to be told precisely, because its contemporary inheritors prefer to skip the genealogy and present their conclusions as self-evident moral truths.

Marx had provided the foundational move. His injunction in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" carried within it a fateful conflation: the merger of interpretation with political action, of understanding with power. Everything that was not revolution, law, religion, art, philosophy, constituted what Marx called the "superstructure," a vast ideological shell whose purpose was to protect the economic base from scrutiny. Once this framework is accepted, every cultural artifact becomes a candidate for unmasking, and the act of unmasking becomes the supreme intellectual virtue.

The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School asked why the revolution Marx had predicted never arrived. Their answer was that the ruling class maintained dominance through the colonization of consciousness itself. Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man (1964), relocated the site of revolution from the factory to the university and argued that the working class, seduced by consumer capitalism, could no longer be trusted to liberate itself. Liberation would have to be administered by those who could see through the illusion: the critically conscious, the theoretically awakened, the intellectuals themselves. The elitism of this move was breathtaking, and Aron had diagnosed it a decade in advance.

The elitism of this move was breathtaking, and Aron had diagnosed it a decade in advance.

Michel Foucault completed the mutation. His historical studies of madness, punishment, and sexuality sought to demonstrate that what any society calls "knowledge" is the instrument by which dominant groups maintain control. Power, in Foucault's analysis, was not exercised from above by identifiable agents; it was the medium in which all social relations swim, and there was no outside from which to critique it. Every claim to objectivity was itself a power move. Every appeal to universal values was a disguised assertion of particular interests. Foucault was interesting, and his analyses of how institutions discipline bodies and regulate speech remain genuinely illuminating. But the totalizing move produced a philosophical system that could critique everything and affirm nothing. The hermeneutics of suspicion with the exits sealed shut.

Foucault was interesting, [...] but the totalizing move produced a philosophical system that could critique everything and affirm nothing. The hermeneutics of suspicion with the exits sealed shut.

The passage from Foucault to the present is shorter than it appears. The contemporary orthodoxies that have colonized our reality did not materialize from the social-media ether in 2020. They are the institutional residue of a philosophical tradition running from Marx's superstructure through Marcuse's administered liberation to Foucault's total critique, and they carry that tradition's deepest structural flaw: the conviction that every inherited value, every traditional institution, every claim to disinterested judgment is a mask for domination.

When a statement requires applicants to demonstrate their commitment to "dismantling systems of oppression," it is speaking Marcuse's language, whether it knows it or not. When a journalistic style guide declares something as a tool of white supremacy, it is drawing on Foucault's epistemology, however crudely. When political disagreement becomes impossible because one side has been designated as complicit in structural violence rather than merely wrong, the debate has already been foreclosed by a philosophical framework that treats all disagreement as evidence of hidden domination.

When political disagreement becomes impossible because one side has been designated as complicit in structural violence rather than merely wrong, the debate has already been foreclosed by a philosophical framework that treats all disagreement as evidence of hidden domination.

This is what polarization looks like when it has philosophical roots rather than merely partisan ones. The inability of citizens to conduct reasoned argument across difference is a symptom of something deeper: the widespread adoption, often unconscious, of a hermeneutical posture that treats trust as naïveté, tradition as oppression, and the willingness to take your interlocutor at his word as a form of complicity. The masters of suspicion taught us to read beneath the surface. Their institutional descendants taught us that there is nothing but the beneath.

Leszek Kołakowski traced the logic to its terminus with an authority few could match. Having been an orthodox Marxist in his youth in Poland, he spent decades examining the tradition from the inside before concluding, in Main Currents of Marxism (1976–78), that Marxism was "the greatest fantasy of our century," one that "began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism" (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 1978). The judgment came from the inside. It was the verdict of a man who had believed, who had watched his belief weaponized, and who had the honesty to say so. Hannah Arendt identified what makes such systems so durable. "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule," she wrote, "is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist" (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951).

When a philosophy declares that the standards of evidence and reason are themselves instruments of domination, it has produced exactly the subject Arendt describes: a person for whom the distinction between true and false has been philosophically dissolved, and who is therefore available for any project that presents itself with sufficient moral urgency.

When a philosophy declares that the standards of evidence and reason are themselves instruments of domination, it has produced exactly the subject Arendt describes: a person for whom the distinction between true and false has been philosophically dissolved, and who is therefore available for any project that presents itself with sufficient moral urgency.

Ricœur spent his life refusing this outcome. His concept of "attestation," developed in Oneself as Another (1990), names the act of bearing witness to one's own ethical commitments: a trust in one's capacity to speak, to act, to keep promises, and to be held accountable. Attestation is what remains possible after suspicion has done its work, the moment when, having passed through doubt and demystification, a person says here I am and means it. "Beyond the desert of criticism," he wrote, "we wish to be called again" (Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, 1960). The second naïveté. Innocence earned by passing through the fire, rather than innocence preserved by never having faced it.

The critical theorists built a permanent civilization in that desert. They mistook the passage for the destination. And the civilization they built there, [...] can identify oppression everywhere but recognize goodness almost nowhere.

The critical theorists built a permanent civilization in that desert. They mistook the passage for the destination. And the civilization they built there, a civilization of perpetual suspicion, of institutional distrust, of the professional unmasking of every motive and every tradition, is the one we now inhabit. It can critique but cannot build. It can dismantle but cannot affirm. It can identify oppression everywhere but recognize goodness almost nowhere.

Elsewhere, Ricœur insisted that "it is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach" (Paul Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981). That sentence presupposes an interlocutor who has not already decided that you are an oppressor. It presupposes a shared world in which reasons can be exchanged rather than identities performed. It presupposes, in a word, pluralism, and pluralism is precisely what the hermeneutics of suspicion, taken to its logical conclusion, destroys.

[...] pluralism is precisely what the hermeneutics of suspicion, taken to its logical conclusion, destroys.

Ricœur knew this in his bones, because he had lived it. A man who spent five years in a prison camp, who watched ideology consume a continent, who had every reason to conclude that meaning was a lie the powerful tell the powerless, chose instead to translate Husserl, sentence by sentence, in a barracks in Pomerania.

He chose to believe that careful reading could yield something true. He chose to affirm. That choice was not naive. It was the most rigorous thing he ever did, and the most consequential.

The desert of criticism has been productive. But a civilization that can only unmask is a civilization living on inherited capital it no longer knows how to replenish.

The question for those of us who still believe that liberty requires the capacity to affirm, that conscience demands trust as well as vigilance, and that pluralism depends on granting your opponent the dignity of being wrong rather than the stigma of being complicit, is whether we are prepared to do what Ricœur did: pass through the desert, and build something on the other side. ◳

The question for those of us who still believe that liberty requires the capacity to affirm, that conscience demands trust as well as vigilance, and that pluralism depends on granting your opponent the dignity of being wrong rather than the stigma of being complicit, is whether we are prepared to do what Ricœur did: pass through the desert, and build something on the other side.