From The Hermeneutics of Suspicion to the Sociology of Suspiciousness: Between Paul Ricœur And Niklas Luhmann

The article explores the significance of suspicion for conceptual work in sociological theory. The key question is what the relationship is between the transcendental suspicion of the researcher and the mutual suspicion among social agents? Can we say that the suspicion of a sociologist is only a special case of the universal fundamental suspicion of social agents? Or instead that the suspicion of sociologists forces them to attribute the property of suspicion to the suspects themselves? Paul Ricœur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” does not allow an answer to this question because Ricœur makes three reductive maneuvers: he makes suspicion a condition for distinguishing between consciousness and the unconscious, eliminates the symmetry of suspicion, and reduces suspicion of motives to suspicion of consciousness. Ricœur’s concept of suspicion therefore is triply encumbered: it is excluded from the world, disconnected from intersubjectivity, and alienated from action. Niklas Luhmann explicates suspicion precisely in the mode of “suspicion of motives,” for which Marxist social criticism or, in other words, exposing hypocrisy is the paradigm. However, Luhmann is faced as Marx was with the problem of distinguishing between mutual social suspicion and the privileged transcendental suspicion of the researcher. Focusing on motives locates unity in the difference between transcendental and social suspicion and allows us to distinguish two specific forms of suspicion: the paranoid form aimed at detecting a “double bottom” in human actions; and the schizoid form which finds a “double bottom” in surrounding reality itself, which makes schizoid suspicion a much more fundamental stance. It is based on ontological doubt — a refusal to recognize the visible as valid. That doubt fostered the metaphysics of multiple worlds (only one of which is social) that has become an unproblematic axiomatic assumption of sociology.