Michael Reisman's Jurisprudence of Suspicion

Abstract

In Freud and Philosophy, Paul Ricoeur presents Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the "three masters of suspicion." What was common to all three, writes Ricoeur, was their assumption that consciousness was primarily "'false' consciousness," the domain of "illusions and lies" The common problematic therefore that occupied all three was that of the relation between the "hidden" and the "shown," the "simulated" and the "manifested.", Their effort of "demystification '' not only established a new relation between "the patent and the latent," writes Ricoeur; they also extended the boundaries of consciousness and "clear[ed] the horizon ... for a new reign of Truth."