Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation: Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Imagination 9780367898786, 9781003022541

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Aesthetic Experience and the Wager of Imagination
The Poetics of the Will and a Philosophical Anthropology of the Capable Human Being
Summary Outline
1 Philosophical Anthropology, Poetics, and the Philosophy of the Will
Poetics and the Philosophy of the Will
Intermediacy, Fallibility, Fault
Finitude and Infinitude
Transcendental Reflection
Metaphor and Metaphysics
2 The Practical Synthesis: Character, Happiness, and Respect
Practical Synthesis
Practical Finitude
Happiness
Respect
3 Affective Fragility, Vulnerability, and the Capable Human Being
The Restless Heart
Reason and Happiness
Fragility and Fallibility: Having, Power, Worth
4 The Wager of Imagination
Ideology, Violence, and Power
An Eschatology of Nonviolence
Negative Dialectics and the Principle of Hope
The Temporalization of History
The Force of the Present and the Horizon of the Process of Freedom’s Actualization
5 Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality
Aesthetic Experience
Mimesis and Truth
Singularity, Exemplarity, Communicability
Reason, Judgment, and Imagination
6 Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation
The Idea of Humanity and the Aporia of the Oneness of Time
Exemplarity and the Hermeneutics of Testimony
The Imperative of Justice
7 Conclusions
Conviction and Belief
Is Freedom Possible?
Hospitality and Justice
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice’s federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. Roger W. H. Savage is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. He is the author of Hermeneutics and Music Criticism and Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity. He has also edited two books on the work of Paul Ricoeur: Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique and Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body.

Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Imagination Roger W. H. Savage

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Roger W. H. Savage to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-89878-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02254-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Pat

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction Aesthetic Experience and the Wager of Imagination  2 The Poetics of the Will and a Philosophical Anthropology of the Capable Human Being  6 Summary Outline  9 1 Philosophical Anthropology, Poetics, and the Philosophy of the Will Poetics and the Philosophy of the Will  16 Intermediacy, Fallibility, Fault  18 Finitude and Infinitude  23 Transcendental Reflection  25 Metaphor and Metaphysics  29 2 The Practical Synthesis: Character, Happiness, and Respect Practical Synthesis  43 Practical Finitude  45 Happiness 53 Respect 57 3 Affective Fragility, Vulnerability, and the Capable Human Being The Restless Heart  67 Reason and Happiness  70 Fragility and Fallibility: Having, Power, Worth  74

1

15

42

66

viii  Contents 4 The Wager of Imagination Ideology, Violence, and Power  90 An Eschatology of Nonviolence  94 Negative Dialectics and the Principle of Hope  97 The Temporalization of History  101 The Force of the Present and the Horizon of the Process of Freedom’s Actualization  103

89

5 Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality Aesthetic Experience  114 Mimesis and Truth  117 Singularity, Exemplarity, Communicability  121 Reason, Judgment, and Imagination  126

114

6 Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation The Idea of Humanity and the Aporia of the Oneness of Time  137 Exemplarity and the Hermeneutics of Testimony  142 The Imperative of Justice  149

136

7 Conclusions Conviction and Belief  163 Is Freedom Possible?  168 Hospitality and Justice  173

160

Bibliography185 Index193

Acknowledgments

As I think is often the case, I became more fully aware of how ideas that began to take shape elsewhere found their ways into this project only in retrospect. Some of the themes that figure prominently in this book were part of the discussions I had with Michael Poellet and Wayne Turner in our reading group in Saskatoon. Other themes emerged from papers, articles, and book chapters that I was invited to contribute to conferences and publications. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Stephanie Arel, Alejandra Bertucci, Anna Borisenkova, Chiara Chinello, Arthur Cools, Scott Davidson, Marc de Leeuw, Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Andrew Edgar, María Ferrari, Leovino Ma. Garcia, Saulius Geniusas, Annemie Halsema, Cristal Huang, Paul Marinescu, Marianne Moyaert, Claudia Pedone, Alberto Romele, Silvia Solas, Dan Stiver, Azadeh ThiriezArjangi, and Andrzej Wierciński for the opportunities they provided to explore ideas that eventually found their way into this book. Paul Ricoeur’s poetics of the will, which was left incomplete and which is part of a philosophy of the will that he tells us belongs to the future, provided an important touchstone in drawing out the connection between a hermeneutics of liberation and Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. I want to thank Morny Joy and George Taylor for their wisdom, comments, and insights into aspects of Ricoeur’s thought that proved to be critical to my own undertaking. Morny’s presentations on human fragility, the problem of evil and suffering, and Hannah Arendt’s influences on Ricoeur’s work played an important role in the development of my own thought. I am also grateful to Morny for her remarks in our communications on the subtle tutelage that Ricoeur maintains Immanuel Kant’s First Critique exerts over the Second. George’s research into Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination was equally instructive in advancing my own understanding of the place of imagination in a hermeneutics for which the power for surpassing the given order of existence through works, words, deeds, and acts is decisive. I owe a special word of thanks to my research assistant, Mehrenegar Rostami. As with previous books, Negar’s meticulous attention to

x  Acknowledgments formatting requirements, references, bibliographical information, and indexing has been invaluable in preparing the manuscript for publication. As always, I  am forever grateful for my wife Pat, whose love and support are constant, my daughters Laura and Kristen and son-in-law Michael, our grandchildren, and my sister, Joanie, who continues to be an indefatigable sounding board for ideas and thoughts.

Introduction

The idea that imagination is vital to reforming or revolutionizing praxis gives rise to a field of inquiry populated by questions regarding our moral, social, and political life. One question in particular stands out: How, as agents of change, do we act, conduct our lives, and intervene in the world’s affairs in ways that might be said to further the course of freedom when the goals on which we set our sights are informed by values, convictions, and beliefs rooted in different cultural traditions? This question immediately draws us onto the conflicted terrain of diverse expectations and demands of communities and groups each of which lays claim to the right to its own identity and destiny. The aspiration to this right is indicative of the authority, autonomy, and power to which individuals, groups, and historical communities legitimately lay claim when, in drawing upon the wealth of their cultural inheritances, each sets in motion projects aimed at fulfilling as yet unrealized expectations and demands. We might wonder whether the good, the right, and the just that these projects are intended to bring about and from which they draw their raison d’être are ones that in principle hold true for all. Hence, we could ask whether the alleged universality of ideas concerning the good, the right, and the just rooted in diverse cultural traditions is the perennial source of strife and conflict for which no rule of justice suffices. The vision of a reconciled humanity that in Paul Ricoeur’s nascent philosophy of the will is the intended object of a poetics places in relief the question of whether, under the aegis of our common humanity, the rule of justice can prevail in the face of struggles, conflict, and the evil of violence. Set against the pathétique of human wretchedness, this vision is the staging ground for a vast field of inquiry that takes as its starting point a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. This philosophical anthropology’s distress at being unable to redeem the pathos of the human condition gives rise to a series of reflections in which the idea of our common humanity figures. The Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility and the destruction of “grand” historical narratives poses a formidable challenge in this regard. Motivated in part by the sense of incompletion inhering in a philosophical anthropology

2  Introduction that has its non-philosophical source in the pathétique of human misery, Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian return to Kant opens the way for a hermeneutical consideration of the capacity we have to reply to the demands of the situation in which we find ourselves in creatively productive ways. The wager that I propose to credit to the imagination’s operative role in exemplary works and acts that renew the real through surpassing it from within stands as testament to the reach of this return to a style of thinking that renounces the temptation of a mode of thought that dares to elevate itself to the level of the absolute. The conjunction of reason and imagination, which I will argue is vital to moral and political judgments in which practical reason figures, thus proves to be indispensable to the challenges with which we are confronted in the absence of a metahistorical plot that would do justice to the claims and aspirations of every community and group. By setting the federating force of the idea of justice against the plurality of these aspirations and demands, which are inspired by and rooted in diverse groups and historical communities’ values, convictions, and beliefs, I  intend to regard the imperative of respect as a critical touchstone. Apart from this imperative, the idea of humanity that gives the intention to make freedom a reality within history its meaning and force is an empty construct. The eschatology of nonviolence that for Ricoeur takes the place of the critique of ideologies in its confrontation with an ontology that privileges the experience of belonging to history is thus the gateway to a broader consideration of this imperative’s significance in light of the notion that every expectation regarding our rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. When, in the final chapter I indicate how the model of linguistic hospitality that Ricoeur identifies with the work of translation is the necessary supplement to the rule of justice, I will stress that the difference between the universal capacity for language and the diversity of languages spoken and written has no exact equivalent in the field of action owing to the asymmetrical power relations among individuals, groups, and nations. For a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being, the protest against violence, injustice, and unmerited suffering, I will therefore say, is the spring of the emancipatory impulse that vests practical reason with its properly ethical and political dimensions.

Aesthetic Experience and the Wager of Imagination The reflections that I undertake in this book aim in part at drawing out aesthetic experience’s heuristic value with regard to the way that imagination is operative in moral and political judgments. A work’s power to refashion the real in accordance with the world projected by it provides a model that opens new avenues for thinking about truth, thereby giving

Introduction  3 the paradox of aesthetic experience an exemplary value. This paradox springs from the fact that the experience occasioned by a work for a reader, listener, or spectator is in each case singularly unique. As such, the paradox of aesthetic experience brings to the fore the enigma at the heart of a work’s claim to truth. On the one hand, this claim stems from the artist’s powers of invention, when in response to a question or problem as she apprehends it, she brings an experience that would otherwise remain incommunicable to expression. On the other hand, the impact a work has on our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting also depends upon the reader, listener, or spectator to draw a meaning from the way in which the work takes shape. The work’s ontological vehemence, by which I mean the significance a work has when, by subverting congealed conventions and established habits of thought, it sets out a manner of inhering in the world that only it expresses, is the mark of the work’s worlding power. Borne by the force a work has through refashioning outlooks, dispositions, and aspirations, the truth to which the work lays claim augments the field of our everyday experiences by proffering imaginative alternatives in the realm of the as if. The notion that the experience occasioned by a work is also the spring of a claim the singular value of which is bound up with this experience’s communicability stands at the threshold of a broader consideration of reflective judgment’s critically productive import. By giving a figure and a body to the world expressed by it, the work bears out how, in reflective judgment, the individual case summons its rule. The reader, listener, or spectator’s apprehension of the fit of the work is indicative of how the work expresses moods, feelings, thoughts, and ideas by exemplifying them. The communicability of the work, which depends in part on the reader, listener, or spectator’s capacity for grasping the manner in which the work’s constitutive elements cohere, can therefore hardly be separated from the force of the claim arising from the work’s projection of its world. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics thus opens the door to a more extensive line of inquiry into the place of reflective judgment in the exercise of prudential wisdom, or phronesis. The paradox of productive reference is instructive in this regard. The solution to this paradox bears out how the meaning expressed by a work is drawn from the reader, listener, or spectator’s apprehension of the fit of the work’s heterogenous elements. This meaning is as much a discovery as an invention. That the suspension or epoché of the real is the condition of the work’s worlding power underscores how the work’s proposal of meaning and the force of its claim to truth takes hold in the work’s power to refigure the practical field of our experiences. Ricoeur tells us that “[i]magination at work—in a work—produces itself as a world.”1 The imagination’s operative power therefore reveals itself only in works and acts in which this power is at work. Far from reproducing something

4  Introduction of the real, works in which the powers of invention are in play augment our ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and hence of inscribing our lives in the web of social and political relations. The meaning rendered communicable by the experience afforded by the work refashions the real from within only through subverting ideologically frozen conventions, practices, and habits of thought. The real’s metaphorical redescription in the light of a heuristic fiction, as when a semantic innovation produces a new meaning from the literal ruins of a poetic statement, or its mimetic refiguration by literary fictions, musical compositions and extemporaneous performances, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, and multimedia performance art are therefore more generally indicative of the internal connection between the imagination’s operative role in surpassing the real from within and how, in reflective judgment, the individual case summons its rule in response to a question, problem, or crisis to which the work or the act replies.2 The role reflective judgment plays in founding the kinship between aesthetic experience and ethics and politics proves to be decisive when it comes to the wager that supplants the hubris of absolute knowledge. This wager sets the power of imagination against every system of thought that purports to master the field of action.3 The freedom and spontaneity of the initiatives we take in response to questions, challenges, and crises arising within this field countermand the effort to grasp this field in its entirety in advance. Critiques that claim to be absolutely radical consequently are perennially at risk of succumbing to the temptation that they ostensibly renounce. Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectical strategy, for example, is ensnared in a performative contradiction in which a totalizing critique scarcely leaves any way out.4 Conversely, Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope obviates the force of the present by swallowing it up in the militancy of this principle’s chiliastic Marxism.5 The failure of radical critiques of social structures, systems, and relations to account for their authors’ engagement in the field they scrutinize provides a check on the attempt to place the whole of the field of praxis under the aegis of a totalizing reflection. Setting the wager of imagination in place of these radical critiques’ theoretical and practical impossibility thus anchors the emancipatory impulse of a hermeneutics of liberation in the capacity for surpassing or transcending existing conditions, structures, and systems of relations from within. From this vantage point, the eschatology of nonviolence that Ricoeur maintains constitutes the ultimate philosophical horizon of the critique of ideologies is the privileged point of access to practical reason’s reliance upon the imagination’s operative power, which following aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition, is manifest on the ethical and political planes in exemplary deeds and acts. The exemplary significance of deeds and acts that we admire is consequently the touchstone for the line of inquiry I pursue to bring to light the imagination’s role in forging the conjunction of reason and truth. The

Introduction  5 sense of fittingness evinced by a work or act is the mark of the work or act’s singular value vis-à-vis the demands of the situation calling for it. In the case of the work, the world expressed by it constitutes the solution to the question, problem, or crisis for which the work is the answer. In the case of the act, the suitability of the act in response to demands and exigencies is the sign of the act’s reasonable character. The kinship between the work and the act rests on how, in this interplay of singularity and exemplarity, reflective judgment is operative in the way that the case summons its rule. By attributing the force of the initiatives taken by agents to the power manifest in individual acts to refashion the real, I intend to set the conjunction of reason and truth to which exemplary acts attest by virtue of the sense of rightness for which they are the demonstration and proof against the temptation to place reason within the ambitus of a totalizing reflection. The scission separating the way we affect ourselves and others through the intended and unintended consequences of the history we make from the ambition to master the reality of which we are a part places the wish for absolute freedom beyond our reach. By setting reason and truth under the aegis of the process that in his philosophy of history represents the fulfillment of freedom’s actualization, G. W. F. Hegel raises a unique challenge for a critique of history’s temporalization that attributes the force of the present to the initiatives we take. To the extent that our hopes, aspirations, and demands are the springs of the personal, social, and political projects we pursue, the adequation of the rational and the real that we discern in those instances when the actions we take bring about some partial realization of the good, the right, and the just we seek is proof, so to speak, of the capacity and power we have to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs. When in the penultimate chapter I  relate the federating force of the idea of justice to the ethical and political dimensions of the specifically human task of making freedom a reality, I will ask whether the multiplicity of values, convictions, and beliefs that fuel these hopes, aspirations, and demands confounds the notion that every expectation regarding the good, the right, and the just must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The universal ambition of the metahistorical categories that for Ricoeur places history’s temporalization under the auspices of practical reason underscores the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations. The unity of the problematic of these transhistorical categories (“space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”) with respect to the thought of history and the problematic of politics vis-à-vis the question of authority, the paradox of a legitimate violence, and the search for a just sharing of power defines practical reason’s field of application. The model of linguistic hospitality that Ricoeur identifies with the work of translation, I will argue, constitutes the supplement to the imperative that sets the duty of memory within the ambitus of the idea of justice’s federating force. Far from

6  Introduction dispensing with the requirement of justice, this model of the operations of transference and welcome at work in the act of translation constitutes the limit idea of a just distance in the absence of an impartial third party capable of instituting this distance in order to restore the social peace.

The Poetics of the Will and a Philosophical Anthropology of the Capable Human Being Philosophical anthropology’s recovery of the pathos of human wretchedness in a discourse for which the vocabulary of our abilities is indicative of the capacities inscribed in the human condition is the staging ground for my preceding remarks on the wager of imagination, the imperative of justice, and the virulence of the aporia unleashed by critiques that lay waste to the conceits of “grand” historical narratives. The capacity to speak, to act together with others, to recount the stories of our lives, and to hold ourselves accountable for our acts bespeak the sense of autonomy that Ricoeur maintains is the prerogative of subjects of rights. Conversely, the vocabulary of lesser abilities or inabilities attests to our fragility and vulnerabilities. For a philosophical anthropology that aims to raise the pathétique of misery to the level of a rigorous discourse, the dialectical structure of human reality is the source of the disproportion that affects human being at its root. Accordingly, the human heart (θυμός [thumos]) bears the stamp of our affective fragility as the innermost sign of the intermediary being that we are. The series of analyses for which this discourse calls follows the itinerary of the dialectic of feeling and knowing. Prior to its articulation in a philosophy of the intermediary being that we are, the theme of “the disproportion within human being, understood as a being who . . . is fragile and fallible,”6 makes itself felt in mythic expressions of human wretchedness. To catch sight of the “originarily dialectical structure of human reality,”7 Ricoeur takes the triad finitude—infinitude—intermediary as decisive. Philosophical anthropology’s thematic rediscovery of the disproportion of the “self within itself . . . attests to the originary fragility of human reality in recovering the pathos of our mortal condition in a theory of praxis and feeling.”8 This philosophical anthropology’s distress at “not being able to redeem both the depth of pathos and the coherence of the logos”9 is at the same time the spring of an inaugural gesture for which the poetics of the will is the demonstrative sign. For a theory of praxis and feeling for which the fragility of our intermediary condition is the key, the power to refashion the real from within is the mark of our singular capacity as human beings to affect ourselves and others through the initiatives we take. The vision of a reconciled humanity that is the object of the poetics of the will attests more generally to the place of poetics in a philosophical anthropology for which the power to act figures among the abilities of the capable human being. For such a

Introduction  7 philosophical anthropology, this poetics marks out the horizon of the task of realizing our common humanity that, in view of the evil of violence and systemic injustices, has its historical handhold in the process of freedom’s actualization. The “conflict” that Ricoeur places at the center of philosophical anthropology accordingly sets in motion a reflection on the types of syntheses that vest the intermediary condition of capable yet fragile human beings with its meaning and significance. At each stage of the analysis Ricoeur undertakes, he identifies an intermediary term that bridges between the poles of finitude and infinitude. At each of these three stages, this intermediary term brings about the synthesis answering to the disproportion inhering in the originarily dialectical structure of human reality. At the first stage of analysis, a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing brings to the fore the imagination’s synthetic role as the medial term between intuition and understanding. At the second stage, the idea of respect constitutes the medial term that vests the idea of the person with its practical dimensions. Set between the poles of one’s character—which for Ricoeur is the sum of the different aspects of finitude attributable to our unique perspectives owing to our incarnation as this flesh—and happiness, the imperative of respect is the watchword of our common humanity. The role respect plays on the moral plane is consequently analogous to that of the transcendental imagination with regard to the power of knowing. Respect, Ricoeur accordingly tells us, reconciles the “finitude of desire and the infinitude of reason and happiness ‘in’ me and ‘in’ others . . . by making possible the very idea of a human being that is like the ideal mediation of practical reason and sensibility,”10 thereby setting the imperative regarding the humanity in each of us within the framework of the task of making freedom a reality for all within the history of humankind. That feeling is the ultimate testament to the “conflict” that is the source of our affective fragility makes the heart (θυμός) the principle par excellence of the intermediary being that we are.11 Feeling, Ricoeur tells us, is the “privileged middle zone, the transition zone, between mere vitality and pure intellect.”12 Where pleasure places its seal of perfection on our bodily experiences, happiness transcends the finite perfection of partial pleasures in aiming at the “most excellent form of pleasure itself.”13 In the third stage of his analysis, Ricoeur accordingly identifies the difference between the satisfaction of finite pleasures and the fulfillment of the wish for happiness as the origin of the self’s noncoincidence with itself. The nuance of the threat that he stresses inheres in every endless pursuit is the spring of an insatiable demand for which no sense of self-esteem, no degree of reciprocity, and no experience of being-recognized suffices. Naming the fragility of human feeling conflict thus completes the trajectory of a series of analyses leading from the most abstract level of the I of I think to the innermost, affective level of the disproportion that ties

8  Introduction the intermediary being that we are to the originarily dialectical structure of our human reality. Thanks to this intermediary being, the abilities that a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being identifies as inhering in the human condition give flesh and body to the notion of being as power and act. The idea of the person that Ricoeur tells us makes the unity of one’s character and the perfection of all finite pleasures in happiness a task is the spring of the designs, life plans, and projects that each of us pursues. Why, he asks, should we say Yes to a life on which the absence of aseity places its seal? Insisting that the consent we give by adopting the life given to us as our own has its “ ‘poetic’ root in hope, as [does] decision in love and effort in the gift of power”14 places the capacities that we exercise in speaking, acting in concert with others, recounting our life stories in a manner that is acceptable to us, and holding ourselves to account for our actions in the service of this task. Through reformulating the problem of finitude, the concept of which he questions is the central one for a philosophical anthropology, Ricoeur thus sets the intermediacy of human being against the dream of absolute mastery and freedom. The intermediacy of human being as power and act thus stands out against the “pathos of wretchedness[, which] is the non-philosophical origin, the poetic womb of philosophical anthropology”15 as our distinctive manner of inserting ourselves in the world and of inscribing our lives in the web of relations forged and transformed through the histories of which we are a part. In view of the disproportion that places its stamp on the intermediary being that we are, we might wonder whether Transcendence—which as a limit concept sets in relief an incarnate, contingent, “motivated freedom  .  .  . receptive to [vital, cultural, and spiritual] values”16 rooted in one’s experiences of one’s own body and one’s cultural inheritances—is indispensable for a philosophical anthropology that renounces the hubris of the subject’s self-foundational claim. A “genuine Transcendence,” Ricoeur writes, is “more than a limit concept: it is a presence which brings about a true revolution in the theory of subjectivity”17 through introducing a radically new, poetic dimension. Limit concepts of an incarnate, contingent, motivated freedom are the signatures of a freedom that is “human and not divine, . . . a freedom that does not posit itself absolutely because it is not Transcendence.”18 Hence, if as Ricoeur maintains, “To will is not to create,”19 only the possibility of transcending or surpassing the real from within remains. By taking this possibility as the touchstone for my own reflections on the wager of imagination, the exemplary value of works and acts, and the imperative of justice, I  intend to draw out how the radically new dimension that Ricoeur identifies with the poetics of a philosophy of the will figures in a hermeneutics of liberation. For this hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology is the inaugural gesture that spans the chasm separating the pathétique of human misery from a

Introduction  9 thematic articulation of the task and the challenge inhering in the idea of the capable human being.

Summary Outline The reflections that I pursue reverse the course of the trajectory of the themes and issues that I have just sketched out. In Chapter 1, I set out to explore the degree to which the vision of a reconciled humanity, which is the intended object of a poetics of the will, figures in a philosophical anthropology that raises the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse. Philosophical anthropology’s inability to subsume the pathos that places its stamp on the intermediary being that we are opens the door to a field of inquiry that takes human being, understood as power and act, as its starting point. Following some remarks on the poetics of the will (which we must recall Ricoeur left incomplete and as I will explain is a feature of a philosophy of the will that he subsequently insists belongs to the future), the antinomical structure of the inner disproportion within human being, and our affective fragility, I  rehearse Ricoeur’s transcendental reflection on the power of knowing, which constitutes the first stage of his analysis of the disproportion inhering in the originarily dialectical structure of human reality. Ricoeur’s recovery of Kant’s theory of the transcendental imagination places the imagination’s significance as the intermediary term between sensibility and the understanding on stage. At this first step of analysis, the synthesis projected on the object reveals the imagination’s schematizing power. The fault line between one’s own perspective and the signifying intention that makes language the privileged site of the transgression of every point of view counterpoints the dialectical relation between the finitude of each individual perspective and the truth at which discourse in general, and poetic discourse in particular, aims. Accordingly, in Chapter 1 I draw out the significance of the imagination’s medial role with regard to the signifying intention in poetic discourse to surpass the real from within in anticipation of my subsequent discussion in Chapter 5 of the singular value of exemplary works and acts. By taking the imperative of respect as the touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation in which the project of humanity inscribes itself, I situate Ricoeur’s analysis of our practical finitude within the broader field of a reflection on the imagination’s efficacy with regard to our power to act. Through rehearsing the passage from a critique of the power of knowing to a consideration of the practical and affective features of human reality, in Chapter 2 I draw out the connection between the practical synthesis that Ricoeur identifies with the idea of the person and the quest on the part of historical communities and groups to realize their hopes and aspirations. By reconciling the finitude of desire with the infinitude of happiness as the sign of the totality demanded by reason,

10  Introduction the imperative of respect gives rise to the requirement that turns the idea of the humanity in each of us into a project. For an ontology of the flesh, which expressly thematizes our mode of incarnation in the world, one’s body is the organ and support of the initiatives one takes. Consequently, the ownness of the flesh is the emblem of our practical finitude with regard to our power to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs. The practical synthesis that in the second stage of his analysis Ricoeur attributes to our effort to lead a life that is acceptable to us is critical to my subsequent reflections on the connection between the imperative of respect and competing and conflicting aspirations and demands borne from the diversity of values drawn from different cultural traditions. The subtle tutelage that Ricoeur maintains Kant’s first Critique exercises over the second Critique obviates this teleological dimension, in which some highest or supreme good governs the ultimate aim of the life of an individual, group, community, or nation. Setting the imperative of respect at the heart of the emancipatory impulse for which this imperative is also a critical check is thus the first step toward considering how a multiplicity of values, convictions, and beliefs complicates the ethical and political challenges of realizing our common humanity in the absence of any “grand” historical narrative. The idea that feeling manifests our relation to the world through restoring our complicity with it opens the door to a series of reflections in which feelings of self-esteem and self-worth figure. In the course of reprising the third stage of Ricoeur’s analysis in Chapter 3, I relate our affective fragility to struggles for recognition. Philosophical anthropology’s thematic exploration of the fragility of the human heart (θυμός) completes the trajectory of a line of inquiry that begins with a transcendental critique of the power of knowing. For Ricoeur, the correlation between knowing and feeling that this philosophical anthropology brings to light thus unites the structure of consciousness with the manner in which we make the part that we have in being our own. This correlation brings to the fore feeling’s role in revealing the élans of our being. From this vantage point, feelings of self-worth are indices of the confidence we have in our own inestimable value under the sign of the other’s respect. As qualities felt on things, feelings reveal the self’s inward affection in its relation to itself, others, and the world. Accordingly, feeling is the transitional zone between vital and spiritual desires. Happiness places its seal of perfection on the work that each of us undertakes with regard to the totality of our lives in accordance with the good that we seek to be. The representation of the person as an end in herself thus acquires its affective specificity in the feeling of esteem. This representation of the person has a corollary counterpart in the quest on the part of a group, community, or nation to pursue its own destiny in accordance with its cultural heritages, aspirations, and beliefs. The cultural testimonies through which groups, communities, or nations lay claim to their own identities are therefore

Introduction  11 sources of the values that confer on members of these groups and communities feelings of their own self-worth. The impossibility of advancing a critique that would address the ensuing political and ethical challenges in a totalizing reflection that would encompass the whole of the field of human action brings to the fore the imagination’s operative role. In Chapter  4, I  argue that the wager that makes an eschatology of nonviolence the ultimate philosophical horizon of the critique of ideologies anchors the vision of a reconciled humanity in the capacity we have to affect ourselves and others through the initiatives we take. In response to the performative contradiction that haunts Adorno’s negative dialectics and the Marxist millennialism of Bloch’s principle of hope, I relate this vision’s practical correlates to its handholds in the field of action. Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian return to Kant rests in part on the way that the Hegelian philosophy of history obviates the impulse that gives rise to action. By daring to elevate thought about time to the level of the absolute, the Hegelian system precludes the dimension of unfulfilled demands, which Ricoeur sets against that of fulfilled accomplishments. The force of the present, which inheres in initiatives taken in response to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves, acquires its practical—that is, ethical and political—significance through the ways that we and others preserve the tension between the horizon of a past that has already been surpassed and the horizon of unfulfilled demands and expectations. Placing practical reason under the aegis of the imperative of respect vests the horizon of the process of freedom’s actualization with its historical specificity. Set against the backdrop of the virulence of the aporia unleashed by the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility, my reflections on the place of the wager of imagination in an eschatology of nonviolence thus marks a critical turning point in my search for the practical features of a hermeneutics of liberation. The aporia of the oneness of time, together with the requirement to preserve the tension between the space of one’s experiences and the horizon of one’s expectations, thus sets in relief the challenge that seemingly confounds the task of making freedom a reality in the face of multiple values, convictions, and beliefs that fuel different groups, communities, and nations’ diverse aspirations. The notion that the work of art models how, in reflective judgment, the individual case summons its rule offers a unique point of access to the singular value of exemplary moral and political acts. By taking aesthetic experience as my guide, in Chapter  5 I  explain how the fittingness of exemplary moral or political acts is indicative of the conjunction of reason and imagination in answer to the demands of the situations calling for them. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics brings to the fore the kinship between the claim to truth originating from the work’s proposal of a meaning and the moral or political injunctions issuing from acts that we admire. Like works

12  Introduction that subvert ideologically frozen mores, attitudes, and habits of thought, exemplary acts offer models for ways of conducting our lives that we can follow. Ricoeur’s claim that mimesis demands more of our thinking about truth than either the classical concept of truth or Martin Heidegger’s notion of truth as manifestation opens the door to a broader consideration of how the injunction issuing from an individual act has its source in the way that, in reflective judgment, the individual case summons its rule. To the degree that like works, exemplary acts are promissory signs that draw on the imagination’s operative power, claims to universality transcend the contingencies of individual acts. Moreover, through vesting the force of the present with its moral and political significance and weight, the adequacy of the act vis-à-vis the demands of the situation calling for it is the emblem of our power to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs in accordance with our convictions and beliefs. The hermeneutics of liberation that I sketch out in Chapter 6 places the imperative that turns the duty of memory toward the idea of justice’s federating force at the heart of the project inhering in a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. Projected onto the work of memory’s and the work of mourning’s intersection, the duty of memory acquires a force that Ricoeur explains is missing in the notion of work. The imperative of justice inscribes itself in a liberatory project for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. In turn, the federating force of the idea of justice acquires its historical handholds in accordance with memory’s truthful and pragmatic aims. The hermeneutics of testimony, which Ricoeur maintains is tantamount to a project of liberation in anticipation of the rule of the absolute, proves to be a critical touchstone in this regard. For him, the religious meaning of the term “testimony” opens up a new dimension within the semantic complex of this term. At the same time, the juridical character of the hermeneutics of testimony inscribes the requirement of justice in the task of practical reason in answer to the evil of violence. By placing the imperative of justice at the heart of the respect owed to all, I therefore hope to show that the hermeneutics of liberation anchors itself in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is the sign of the wound of the intermediary being that we are. In the final chapter, I ask whether the model of hospitality that Ricoeur credits to the work of translation provides the required supplement to the imperative that vests the idea of justice with its federating force. The axiological diversity of values rooted in different cultural traditions seems at first to confound the possibility of freedom’s actualization through placing the idea of humanity as a collective singular radically into doubt. Drawing on the corrective that Ricoeur locates in the dialectic of love and justice, I argue that the welcome extended to the other in the absence of an impartial third party has a special significance when it comes to the

Introduction  13 demand for justice. For Ricoeur, the imperative to love sets the economy of the gift against justice’s law of equivalence. Love does not dispense with the requirement of justice but rather provides the necessary corrective that prevents the rule of justice from becoming utilitarian. The work of translation refuses the temptation to seek an exact equivalent between one’s own language and the foreign language of the original text. The model of hospitality drawn from the act of translation therefore does not abolish the imperative that turns the duty of memory toward the federating force of the idea of justice but instead is the limit idea of a just distance that, in the absence of a third party, marks out the further horizon of the work of humanity’s reconciliation. By inquiring into the role of the State in advancing the course of freedom, I highlight how the rule of law contributes to the development of the State’s reasonable form. At the same time, I stress how the test of one’s own convictions regarding the good, the right, and the just ties the appeal to conscience, together with the feeling of being-enjoined, to the task and challenge that I maintain throughout this book is the inspiriting force of a philosophical anthropology drawn from the poetic womb of the pathétique of human misery.

Notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 123. 2. See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello S. J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 3. Hannah Arendt has alerted us to the danger lurking in Marx’s adoption of the Hegelian dialectic as the law of history’s advance in this regard. See Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005); Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018). 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 119. 5. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 6. Paul Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology: Writings and Lectures, Volume 3, ed. Johann Michel and Jérôme Porée, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 3. 7. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 3. 8. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 19; see Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 99. 9. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 19. 10. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 14.

14  Introduction 11. See Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 18; see also Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 81. 12. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 16. 13. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 99. 14. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 467. 15. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 3; see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 176. 16. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 484. 17. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 486. 18. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 486. According to Ricoeur, “the idea of God as a Kantian idea is a limit degree of a freedom which is not creative” (484). Consequently, the freedom that he identifies with the human condition is “an image of the absolute in its indetermination, [inasmuch as it is] identical with its power of self-determination, but other than the absolute in its receptivity” (484) to the condition in which this freedom is exercised. The limit concepts that Ricoeur identifies are indicative of the distinctions to be drawn from the way that this limit degree of freedom separates us from the ideal of freedom perfectly enlightened in its power to create the good that we desire to be. These four limiting concepts highlight the distinction between an incarnate freedom and a freedom that would be absolute. First, human freedom is not a pure act but is receptive to values and dependent upon one’s incarnation as flesh. Second, since values always take the form of an apparent good, a motivated freedom is not perfectly enlightened. A “gracious freedom whose bodily spontaneity would be allied with the initiative which moves it without resistance” (485), as for instance, in the case of a dancer or athlete, is a third limit concept of freedom that is human and not divine. The fourth limit concept marks out the horizon of a creative freedom the motives for which would be fully transparent. These limit concepts, Ricoeur explains, “have no other function than to help us understand, by contrast, the condition of a will which is reciprocal with an involuntary” (486). 19. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 486.

1 Philosophical Anthropology, Poetics, and the Philosophy of the Will

The distress philosophical anthropology encounters in raising the pathétique of human misery to the level of discourse gives rise to a sustained meditation on how our fragility and vulnerability affect our power to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs. By taking the pathétique of misery as its non-philosophical source, this philosophical anthropology discovers its own limits in probing the depths of human wretchedness. Unable to redeem the pathos of our mortal condition, the discourse on the intermediacy of the being that we are sets the quest to realize our potential as capable human beings against the evil of violence and injustice. As such, philosophical anthropology is the staging ground for a prolonged inquiry into the challenges that mark out the ethical, political, and juridical terrain of the task for which the idea of our common humanity is the sign. By taking the inability of philosophical discourse to subsume the pathos of our mortal limitations as my guide, I  propose to draw out the connection between the capacities inscribed in the human condition and the aspiration for freedom that vests the task of realizing our common humanity with its moral, ethical, and political force. This aspiration acquires its concrete expressions in the ways that we reply to the violence and injustices that mar the course of historical events. The power we have to surpass conditions and circumstances in which we find ourselves owes its force to our ability to respond to crises, challenges, and exigencies in singularly appropriate ways. The aspiration that first takes hold in the ability we have to move our bodies thus gains its broader extension when, constrained by or subservient to the heteronomous rule of another, we seek to realize our own destinies in accordance with our heritages, convictions, and beliefs. The demand for autonomy, which as the prerogative of the subject of rights binds practical reason to the task of making freedom a reality for all, thus finds its initial anchorage in a philosophical anthropology for which the powers we exercise stand out against the backdrop of the pathétique of human misery. Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will provides a critical touchstone in this regard. Through calling into question the claim on the part of the subject

16  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics to proclaim itself to be the master of meaning, the revolution in the theory of subjectivity in which this philosophy plays a part marks a decisive moment in the advent of hermeneutical reason. By centering the world of objects on the Cogito, the first Copernican revolution marks the beginning of philosophy; the second Copernican revolution displaces the subject from the center that the subject professes to occupy as the foundation of the certitude of knowledge and truth. Inasmuch as the “object is for the subject, the involuntary is for the voluntary, motives are for choice, capacities [are] for effort, [and] necessity [is] for consent,”1 this second revolution marks out the limit and horizon of the philosophy of the will. Under the sign of the first Copernican revolution, the reversal of perspective that Ricoeur maintains renders the involuntary intelligible sets the relation between the voluntary and the involuntary in relief.2 Under the sign of the second Copernican revolution, the “deepening of subjectivity  .  .  . displaces the center of reference [of being] from subjectivity to Transcendence.”3 This decentering of subjectivity thus introduces a poetic dimension into the philosophy of the will by bringing to the fore an incarnate freedom that is specifically human and not divine.

Poetics and the Philosophy of the Will My interest in Ricoeur’s remarks on the poetics of the will stems as much from the fact that, for him, the philosophy of the will belongs to the future as it does from the way that the vision of a reconciled humanity, which was the intended object of this poetics, figures in a philosophy the anticipated third part of which was left incomplete.4 By bracketing Transcendence, which in the opening pages of the first volume of his projected three-part philosophy of the will he maintains “hides within it[self] the ultimate origin of subjectivity,”5 Ricoeur opens the door to an expansive inquiry into and meditation on the challenges of making this vision a reality. The sense of incompletion owing to the fact that the philosophy to which this poetics belongs has yet to be written counterpoints the one from which philosophical anthropology suffers in the face of its inability to redeem the pathos inhering in the pathétique of human misery. To the degree that the relation between freedom’s actualization and Transcendence resists its systematization, the project outlined by the poetics of the will delineates the horizon of philosophical anthropology’s thematic impulse to “reveal the ground of being as act, as energy, as power and not just as form, essence, logos.”6 For a philosophy of the will as much as for philosophical anthropology, the notion of “being as power and act”7 is the corollary counterpart of a meditation on the intermediary being that we are. Any final decision concerning Transcendence, which Ricoeur stresses a “doctrine of conciliation”8 between the voluntary and the involuntary necessarily entails, is therefore at once bound up with a commitment to philosophy’s

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  17 deliverance from the hubris of the subject’s claim to posit itself, from the Cogito’s debasement, and from a style of thinking that dares to elevate itself to the level of the absolute. If, as Ricoeur maintains, refusing the necessity of the involuntary as that which is given to us is tantamount to defying the irruption of the “not yet” and the “much more,” the decision regarding Transcendence is in the first instance neither religious nor theological but instead follows the path that is the way of consent. How, Ricoeur asks, can we justify saying yes to an existence that is given to us apart from “passing a value judgment on the totality of the universe. . . [by] evaluating its ultimate suitability for freedom?”9 Consenting to a life on which the absence of aseity places its stamp is therefore meaningful only because, “in spite of appearances, the world is a possible stage for freedom.”10 If, as Ricoeur tells us, our incarnation as flesh delivers the will from its defiance of the givenness—the gift—of existence as expressed by the wish for absolute freedom, the fundamental choice of philosophy, “either God or I,”11 takes on its specifically philosophical tenor in the acknowledgment of the difference between Being and beings. This difference delineates the scission separating the capacity we have to surpass the real from within, which in the course of my reflections I will attribute to the power of imagination, from a freedom that would be divine. Richard Kearney suggests that Ricoeur’s “probing of a poetic hermeneutic of imagination represents  .  .  . the ultimate, if discreet, agenda of his entire philosophical project.”12 For Kearney, “Ricoeur’s ultimate wager is [that for] a hermeneutics of creative imagination . . . creativity is ever-active and never-ending.”13 Drawing on the way that exemplary works and acts break new paths into the heart of the real, I  mean in part to explore what role imagination plays in the task for which the vision of a reconciled humanity is a cipher. Our power to affect the world’s course, I will therefore say, draws its force from the capacity for surpassing or transcending the real from within. Transcendence, Ricoeur tells us, “liberates freedom from the fault,”14 the experience of which first takes hold in mythic expressions of sin and evil. Yet, if we live this Transcendence only insofar as freedom is itself liberated from the belief in a sovereign will, Transcendence as a genuine presence acquires a historically concrete dimension only through those works, words, deeds, and acts that give a figure and a body to the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be. Between myths of innocence and eschatological myths, problems and crises demanding a response lay bare those moments of decision when, following a process of deliberation, our actions bring about the “miracle” that Arendt reminds us inheres in every initiative that brings something new into the world.15 The philosophical itinerary that sets the project of freedom’s realization within the limits of an anthropology of the capable human being thus acquires its historical specificity only by reason of the capacities and

18  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics powers that we exercise in response to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves. By asking whether the capacity to surpass the real from within evinced by works and acts that renew our manner of inhering in the world already has a place in a poetics for which the philosophy of the will is a critical touchstone, I intend to oppose the power we exercise in initiating a new course of action to the temptation to master time through elevating thought about history’s temporalization to the level of the absolute. As I will explain at length in a subsequent chapter, this power draws on the imagination’s operative role when, in answer to a difficulty, problem, or crisis, the fittingness of the response places its seal on a work or act’s exemplary value. The paths of freedom’s actualization acquire their ethical and political contours through the mediations that we bring about between the past and the future. When it comes to the task of making freedom a historical reality for humankind, the event in thinking that Ricoeur attributes to the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility opens the horizon of a critique worthy of a style of thought that acknowledges the limits of our knowledge, capacities, and powers. If, by insisting that the process of freedom’s actualization acquires its concrete expressions in words, deeds, and acts attesting to the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be I emphasize the link between the notion of being as power and act and the vision of a reconciled humanity, it is in part in order to highlight the bond between the abilities that for a philosophical anthropology of capable human beings are inscribed in the human condition and the plurality of claims, demands, and aspirations of diverse historical communities and groups. Philosophical anthropology’s thematic explorations of the intermediary being that we are and the liberatory impulse inhering in the effort to raise the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse mark out the field of an inquiry into the task with which we are charged in light of the idea of the humanity in each of us. It may be that the vision of a reconciled humanity constitutes the limit horizon of this liberatory impulse. The aporia to which the destruction of all “grand” historical narratives gives rise accordingly proves to be the gateway to an enduring meditation on the challenges and possibilities stemming from the absence of any metahistorical plot that would be capable of equaling the idea of humanity considered as a collective singular.

Intermediacy, Fallibility, Fault The existential fault line running through the unity of the person provides an initial point of access to a broader engagement with the significance of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility for emancipatory projects aimed at the liberation of humanity as a whole. To the degree that this fault line is the emblem of the intermediary being that we are,

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  19 the task of reconciling competing and conflicting desires, aspirations, and demands first runs up against the challenges, difficulties, and crises that each of us encounters in the course of making the life that is given to us our own. The “primacy of conciliation over paradox”16 that for Ricoeur is borne out by the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary places its seal on the difference between a freedom incarnate in works, words, deeds, and acts that reply to the exigencies of a situation and any creatio ex nihilo.17 Far from founding the self as an accomplished fact, this conciliation is consequently instead the condition and ground of the projects that for each of us—as for the historical communities of which we are a part—constitute the designs of our lives through shaping our histories, identities, and destinies. If, for philosophical anthropology, being as power and act opens the way to a meditation on the relation between the experience of fault and moral evil on the phenomenological plane, the disproportion inhering in the structure of human reality gives rise to a reflection on the intermediary being that we are. By looking to the pathétique of human misery for the mythic precomprehension of human fallibility, Ricoeur identifies the pathos of misery as the “matrix of any philosophy that makes disproportion and intermediacy the ontic characteristic of man.”18 Accordingly, he stresses that we always find ourselves “in a corporeal, historical situation, because. . . [we] stand . . . neither at the beginning nor at the end but always in the middle, in media[s] res.”19 If, as Arendt points out Dante says, “everything that is desires its own being,”20 the projects through which we realize this life as our own stand as testament to the capacities and powers we exercise in our efforts to exist. Although these capacities become apparent only on the margins of the acts in which our powers reveal themselves to us, they nevertheless are the springs of the potential we have as capable human beings.21 The power exercised by one individual, group, or nation over another brings about a decrease of the powers on which this effort to exist depends, thereby marking the incursion of evil into the world. The evil of violence consequently is the perverse underside of the recognition of the right of each person to exercise the capacities inscribed in the human condition as her own.22 A reflection on the human heart (θυμός) is accordingly a touchstone for a broader inquiry into the ethical and political resonances of freedom’s actualization in light of, and in response to, moral evil. Torn between the pursuit of pleasures and the desire for happiness, the heart, Ricoeur tells us, is always restless. The vital demands of the body, which the creation of social needs and desires augments and multiplies, end in finite pleasures and the cessation of pain. Conversely, spiritual or intellectual demands terminate in happiness. Pleasure places its stamp of perfection on our bodily experiences; happiness transcends the finite perfection of partial pleasures in aiming at the “most excellent form of pleasure

20  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics itself.”23 As signs of happiness, spiritual feelings are a promise of an as yet unfulfilled order realized in the love (ϕιλία [philia]) of others and the devotion to exemplary ideals.24 Between the finitude of pleasure and the infinitude of happiness, the heart introduces the nuance of the threat that inheres in every endless pursuit, namely, the insatiability of demands and desires arising from experiences of absence and lack. Setting the restless heart between the poles of finitude and infinitude brings to the fore the antinomical structure that is indicative of the inner disproportion within human being. This inner disproportion, which reaches its apogee in the fragility of the human heart, is the emblem par excellence of the intermediary being that we are. As such, the theme of disproportion constitutes the axis of the three stages of an analysis that begins with the power of knowing, draws out the connection between the idea of the person and the imperative of respect, and leads in fine to a meditation on our affective fragility. This theme, which has the question of the kind of being that we are as its focal point, announces the problem that Ricoeur places at the center of his study in Fallible Man. For him, all descriptions of finitude are abstract if they forgo accounting for the transgression that makes possible a discourse on finitude. Consequently, the “complete discourse on finitude is a discourse on the finitude and the infinitude of man.”25 Raising the problem of human being as intermediary between the poles of finitude and infinitude thus wards off the temptation of theodicies to justify evil by making comprehensible the interconnectedness of fallibility, fragility, and fault via a reflection on the disproportion for which the conflict within the human heart is the innermost sign. The passage from the pathétique of misery to philosophical discourse marks out the trajectory of an anthropological inquiry into the constitutional weakness of human fallibility. This weakness accounts for the possibility of evil as a result of human conduct without pretending to penetrate evil’s ultimately inscrutable character. Ricoeur’s decision to tie an ethical vision of the world to the effort to understand freedom and evil in terms of each other places philosophical anthropology under the guidance of the concept of fallibility in this regard.26 Ricoeur concedes that it is “possible that man is not the radical source of evil, that he is not the absolute evil-doer.”27 Yet, “evil is manifest only in the way it affects human existence.”28 The grandeur of this ethical vision of the world, by which Ricoeur means the persistent effort to understand freedom and evil in terms of each other, brings to the fore the “delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, [and] of non-being and pure action in the very core of freedom.”29 From this standpoint, “freedom is the ground of evil, but the avowal of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom.”30 A freedom that is responsible for evil is accordingly a freedom for which humanity’s liberation from violence and systemic injustices has its anchorages in the intermediacy of human

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  21 being as between finitude’s transcendence and this bespoken infinitude’s restricted nature.31 The notion that human fragility makes evil possible finds its initial support in the myth of the soul’s intermediary character. The symbolism of Plato’s representation of the “soul’s oscillation between corruptible things and incorruptible ideas”32 offers a fecund opportunity for distinguishing between fragility as an originary limitation and fault as the consequence of a catastrophic fall. Ricoeur points out that in the Phaedrus, the misfortune seemingly assigned to human beings’ origin by the soul’s fall into an earthly body is preceded, as it were, by a myth of mixture. According to this myth, prior to the fall, the soul is already composed in such a way that, like a team of horses some of which are beautiful and good and some of which are disheveled and disorderly, it conceals a point of discord hidden within itself. Just as the team of horses in this celestial procession founders and the “Wing which gives rise to the [chariot’s] soaring climb crumbles and falls[,] . . . the soul is dimmed by its forgetfulness of Truth,”33 so that only opinion remains. On Ricoeur’s reading, this mixture “already harbors an originary disgrace.”34 Accordingly, the theme of the soul as intermediary is linked “to the symbolic and mythical expression of a ‘mixture’ . . . [at the same time that it is] tributary to the confusion, to the primitive non-division of an originary limitation and moral evil.”35 By explaining how the myths in Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic comprehend the “misery” that philosophical anthropology takes as its non-philosophical source, Ricoeur sets the problem of the intermediacy of human being within the orbit of a reflection on human fallibility, fragility, and fault. Inasmuch as the soul is neither the Idea nor perishable like the body, the soul is “the intermediate being par excellence.”36 The myth of the soul divided in itself is accordingly the cipher of the “misery of philosophy.”37 But then, in speaking of human being and not the Idea, philosophy is also the “philosophy of ‘misery.’ ”38 The fundamental gesture of philosophical anthropology in raising the pathétique of misery to the level of a rigorous discourse preserves this mythic insight into our intermediary condition. Ricoeur accordingly stresses that the recovery of the pathétique of misery in pure reflection can never rise to the level of the latter’s total comprehension. This total comprehension can never in fact be attained, since “in man’s precomprehension of himself there is a wealth of meaning”39 that can never be equaled by philosophical reflection. The anabasis of the soul, which rises toward being through its movement toward order and unity, symbolizes the aspiration for being that in the soul’s quest for the “Good” shines forth as the emblem of the will, desire, and effort to exist.40 The soul’s attraction to reason is here the spring of the “movement from the sensible toward the intelligible.”41 This attraction of reason, however, is complicated by that of desire. Between reason and desire, an enigmatic third term that Ricoeur

22  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics explains Plato calls θυμός appears as “an ambiguous power undergoing the double attraction”42 between them. Accordingly, θυμός, “the heart, is the unstable and fragile function par excellence”43 that, as the “living transition from βίος [bios] (life) to λόγος [logos],”44 unites and separates sensuous desires from reason, “whose specific desire is ἔρως [Eros].”45 A second myth of mixture—that of the birth of Eros—intersects the first. The offspring of Poros and Penia, Eros is born of a principle of abundance from the womb of impoverishment.46 The “hybrid of Richness and Poverty,”47 Eros, Ricoeur tells us, is the representation par excellence of the philosophizing soul that desires the good sought by the philosopher because “he is not in himself the Good.”48 Accordingly, Eros “carries in himself that original wound which is the emblem of his mother, Penia.”49 We might wonder whether, as the mark of the ontic poverty that distinguishes the philosophizing soul from the good it seeks, the indigence represented by Penia is indicative of the deficiency that places its stamp on the intermediary being that we are. Accordingly, we could ask whether the aspiration for being acquires its concrete existential and historical foothold in answer to the absence of aseity for which the ontological difference between being and the part we have in it is the sign. By setting the will, desire, and effort to exist against the ontic indigence symbolized by the wound Eros bears within himself, I  intend to relate the aspiration for being for which the anabasis of the philosophizing soul is the emblematic sign to the demand for freedom via their common anchorage in the capacity we have to respond in fitting ways to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves. In my subsequent explorations into the ways imagination is operative in exemplary works and acts that proffer alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, I will ask to what extent an ethical vision of the world such as Ricoeur espouses figures in a hermeneutics of liberation that replies to the challenge posed by the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility. Inasmuch as this hermeneutics takes root in the soil of a philosophical anthropology for which freedom and evil must be thought together, a project of liberation in which the idea of humanity figures countermands the senselessness of wanton forces of destruction. The excess of sense over nonsense that Ricoeur attributes to the logic of hope thus has a practical correlate in the role imagination plays in subverting ideologically congealed representations of social and political life. The capacity to act in anticipation of the reign of the good, the right, and the just is the spring of the power we have to pursue the course of freedom’s actualization within the historical field in which the drama of acting and suffering is played out. The possibility of freedom’s actualization, I will therefore say, turns on the initiatives that vest our responses to the evil of violence and systemic social, economic, and political inequalities and injustices with their ethical and political weight. Accordingly, the struggle between freedom and evil takes place on the same field on which the connection

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  23 between past and future, and between the self and its acts, is the staging ground for the exercise of prudential wisdom (phronesis) in service of the cause of the good, the right, and the just for all.

Finitude and Infinitude By insisting that the process of freedom’s actualization rests on the temporalizing force of the initiatives we take in answer to problems and crises, I  mean to highlight how philosophical anthropology’s thematic focus on the intermediacy of human being as power and act foregrounds the imagination’s operative power. Thanks to this power, our capacity to respond to exigencies and demands that arise in the course of our engagement with moral, social, and political problems, challenges, and crises is at the same time the spring of the force that exemplary works and acts have in shattering congealed practices and habits of thought. This power, which I will say later is at work in exemplary acts and works that renew the real in accordance with the alternatives they hold out, is also at work in moral and political judgments calling for prudential wisdom (phronesis). From this standpoint, the conjunction of practical reason’s task as regards the ethical and political implications of the challenges stemming from the loss of credibility of “grand” historical narratives—and especially that of the Hegelian philosophy of history—and the problematic that leads philosophical anthropology to understand freedom and evil in terms of each other therefore places the power of imagination on stage. Ricoeur’s claim that all “creation, all ποίησις [poíisis], is an effect of Eros”50 evinces how a mythic precomprehension of the creative impulse inhering in the aspiration symbolized by the philosophizing soul’s anabasis prefigures a philosophical reflection on the imagination’s incomparable significance with regard both to a work’s worlding power and to moral and political acts that reply to the situations calling for them in exemplary ways. If, as he writes citing Plato, “the cause of anything whatever that emerges from non-being into being is always an act of creation,”51 this creation—the source of which in the case of the Kantian concept of productive imagination remains hidden in the soul—brings about an increase in being. Later, I will attribute this increase in being to the ontological vehemence of a literary text, musical composition, or work of art. From this vantage point, Eros inheres in every work that, born of desire, iconically augments the practical field of our experiences. Every desire, Ricoeur reminds us, is “both rich and poor.”52 As the “law of every work that is Richness of meaning and poverty of brute Appearance,”53 Eros—the symbol of the philosophizing soul—stands at the gateway to the imagination’s schematizing power. That the Platonic hybrid that is Eros bespeaks the transcendental imagination’s medial role is accordingly the initial ground for a theory of the imagination’s inscription in a philosophical anthropology for which the

24  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics pathétique of human misery is the inexhaustible source. This Platonic hybrid, Ricoeur remarks, foreshadows the transcendental imagination “in that it includes every generation by the body and the mind, what the Philebus calls, in a less ‘mythical’ and more ‘dialectical’ language, the ‘coming into existence,’ the γέυεσιϛ εἰϛ οὐσίαν, which is, moreover, a ‘generated essence.’ ”54 This generated essence owes its existence to the power that brings it to light. Ricoeur emphasizes that, for René Descartes and especially for Kant, “the understanding without intuition is empty, [just as] the intuition without concepts is blind.”55 The Platonic hybrid that is Eros is therefore the mythic harbinger of the transcendental imagination’s medial role in effecting the synthesis on which our consciousness of the world and the things in it depends. The ontic poverty that is the mark of the original wound borne by Eros sets philosophical anthropology on the path toward a description of the intermediary condition of human being. By placing the theme of disproportion indicative of the self’s noncoincidence with itself at the center of his philosophical anthropology, the global perspective that Ricoeur adopts enables us to catch sight of the “originarily dialectical structure of human reality.”56 In contrast to the human sciences’ dispersal among disparate disciplines, sciences that Ricoeur remarks “literally do not know what they are talking about,”57 this global perspective resists making finitude philosophical anthropology’s defining concept. As such, the poverty and plenitude that inheres in every desire is the sign of the disproportion that for philosophical anthropology places its seal on the intermediacy of the being that we are. Rather than treat human reality as an ontological region situated between being and nothingness, Ricoeur accordingly pursues a movement of thought that attempts to equal the “richness of the pathetic comprehension of misery.”58 Raised to the level of a rigorous reflection, the principle of disproportion that in the Platonic myths of mixture speak to the discord in the composition of the soul takes the form of the ontological characteristic of the intermediacy of human being. This characteristic consists in the fact that for each of us, the act of existing is the “act of bringing about the mediations between all the modalities and all the levels of reality.”59 From the outset, the question “[W]ho is this being for whom being is in question?”60 thus admits a place for the capacity to surpass the real from within. For how, as intermediary beings, could we otherwise bring about these mediations through the projects that we undertake if not for the way that works and acts in which the power of imagination is operative open new paths in response to difficulties, problems, questions, and demands? For a philosophical anthropology for which the principle of disproportion is the guiding theme, the self’s noncoincidence with itself is both the source of the fragility that makes evil possible and the condition of a specifically human freedom incarnate in words, works, deeds, and acts.

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  25 From the global perspective that Ricoeur adopts, this noncoincidence of the self with itself is borne out by the fact that human being is intermediary between the poles of finitude and infinitude. None of the philosophers for whom finitude figures prominently, Ricoeur remarks, has a non-dialectical concept of it. On the contrary, “all of them speak in one sense or another of the transcendence of man.”61 By taking the “whole of man”62 as its starting point, philosophical anthropology begins with the composite relation of finitude and infinitude. From this vantage point, the condition of finitude is indicative of the restricted nature of the perspective that each of us is by virtue of our incarnation as flesh. Infinitude is then the “sign of the transcending of finitude.”63 Ricoeur stresses that we are “no less destined to unlimited rationality, to totality, to beatitude than. . . [we are] limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire.”64 The dialectic of finitude and infinitude is thus the entry point for a philosophical anthropology for which the fragility of the intermediacy of human being borne of the pathétique of misery and wretchedness proves to be the touchstone for a broader consideration of how the evil of violence affects the freedom inhering in our capacity to act at its root.

Transcendental Reflection The transcendental reflection that, following the eidetic analysis Ricoeur undertakes in Freedom and Nature, inaugurates the empirics of the will constitutes the first stage of a strategy aimed at raising the precomprehension of human misery to the level of a rigorous philosophical discourse.65 By taking the power of knowing as his starting point, Ricoeur brings the first disproportion susceptible to philosophical inquiry into view. The initial decision to subject the fundamental categories of anthropology to the critical test of the power of knowing marks the point of departure for inquiring into the unity of the human being. At this first stage of analysis, this unity, Ricoeur stresses, “is solely intentional.”66 By projecting “itself beyond itself, using the structure of objectivity that the transcendental imagination makes possible,”67 the unity inhering in the power of knowing thus manifests itself by way of the object. The rediscovery—or perhaps better, recovery—of Kant’s theory of the transcendental imagination at this first stage of analysis illuminates how imagination is intermediary between sensibility and understanding. The fault line between sensibility and understanding is one that reflection introduces by separating our intuition of the presence of things from the determination of their meaning. Our receptivity to the presence of things when, by giving ourselves over to them we intuit their existence is one thing; our power to connect them and set them in order is another. For Ricoeur, the disproportion “between the word that speaks of being and truth, and the gaze tethered to appearance and perspective”68 evinces the scission between understanding and sensibility. At the same time, the

26  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics force of the affirmation borne out by the world’s signification as existing surpasses the mere signification of things by naming them. This “intention or pretention [sic] of truth,”69 which Ricoeur remarks inheres in the act of saying something, accordingly rests on the synthesis projected upon the thing. This synthesis, which constitutes the thing qua thing, is central to the structure of objectivity in which the medial term, namely the transcendental imagination, is never given in itself. Where for Kant the pure, transcendental imagination is an “art concealed in the depth of the human soul,”70 for Ricoeur the imagination’s intermediary function is indicative of the intentional structure of the synthesis inhering in the power of knowing. This intentional structure is borne out by the reflexive relation between the objectivity of a thing, which Ricoeur maintains is nothing other than the unity of its appearance and the word that brings it to language, and the speaking subject. The power of synthesis that Ricoeur, like Kant, attributes to the transcendental imagination is accordingly the seat of consciousness. In turn, the field of consciousness—that is, the field composed of the unity of appearances and meanings—is coextensive with the intentional correlates constituting the representations comprising this field. That the form of the world as it appears to us owes its distinctive character to this constituting consciousness, however, far from vests this consciousness with a sovereign power. First, the transcendental unity of consciousness arises from—and hence is dependent upon—both our receptivity to the presence of things and a discourse that differentiates among them by naming and relating them. This receptivity to the presence of entities, Ricoeur stresses, is one thing; determining their meaning is another: “[t]o receive is to give oneself over intuitively to their existence; to think is to dominate this presence in a discourse”71 that both discriminates among things through a process of denomination and that connects them in an articulate fashion. By separating the passive moment of reception from the active moment of discriminating thought, reflection lays bare the fault line between the zero point of one’s own perspective and the signifying intention that makes language the privileged site of the transgression of every point of view. By penetrating the object’s sensory appearances, language vests individual perceptions or sequences of perceptions with a unity of meaning that is independent of any particular perspective. A new form of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite that Descartes draws from an ontology of created beings and the divine emerges from the breach between the perspective originating from one’s own body and the transcending intention of the word that speaks of being, goodness, and truth.72 For philosophical anthropology, one’s own body is accordingly the zero point of a finite perspective that at the same time opens us to the world. Ricoeur’s analysis of the finitude of one’s point of view is instructive in this regard. The initial narrowness of one’s openness stems from the

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  27 fact that one’s perspective is inseparable from the position of one’s own body. The dissociation of the notion of existence from that of substance frees the lived body from objectifying representations, so that our bodies become the organ and support of the initiatives we take. Our incarnation as flesh opens us to the world at the same time that it makes us dependent upon others and things, the lack or absence of which is the motor of our desires. When the belief in the reality of the appearance of something is called into question and the confidence in one’s own perspective is shaken, “finitude becomes a problem”73 inasmuch as we become aware of our perspectival limitations. The ensuing shift in attention “from what appears . . . [to] to whom it appears”74 bears out how one’s own body is “an originating mediator ‘between’ myself and the world.”75 The body, Ricoeur accordingly explains, opens us to the world even while it isolates us and encloses us in our suffering. The “solitude of suffering[, which] is still haunted by the threats of the world,”76 and the ciphers of others revealed through words and deeds are indices of our finite perspectives. At the same time, one’s own body opens one to the world through “everything . . . [that the body] is able to do.”77 Ricoeur stresses that Kant was right to identify finitude with our receptivity to the things that appear in the world.78 As the zero origin of one’s finite orientation, the body distinguishes the absolute “here” of this zero origin from that of all others in relation to objects that are silhouetted by the changing positions the subject is free to take. The primal finitude that Ricoeur tells us consists in the perspective or point of view affecting our basic relation to the world is accordingly a principle of narrowness owing to a “closing within the openness”79 of our receptivity to the world and things in it. The scission that a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing introduces between our receptivity to things and the signifying intention of the word that transcends the finite perspective of each of our points of view consequently is indicative of the disproportion inhering in the structure of human being. For philosophical anthropology, this transcendental reflection, we will recall, is the first stage of an analysis in which the possibility of evil owing to human fallibility is at stake. This first stage of analysis, Ricoeur stresses, is necessary but insufficient inasmuch as the synthesis of sensibility and the understanding is projected onto the object.80 The structure of objectivity predicated on the transcendental imagination’s function as the third term between the understanding and sensibility is the condition only of the unity achieved by a human being through projecting herself beyond herself. Since this unity is corollary with the unity of the object, it is “merely intentional, [and hence] merely formal.”81 A  transcendental style of reflection consequently falls short when it comes to the relation between the transcendental imagination’s intermediary function and a human being as intermediary for herself or himself. Whatever significance Kant’s concept of the productive imagination proves to have with respect to the way that we effect the mediations

28  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics attesting to our desire and effort to exist, a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing is only the first step of a more expansive inquiry into the disproportion within human being that gives rise to the restlessness of the human heart. By asking how the productive imagination as Kant conceives it figures in and is even a condition of our capacity to bring about the mediations in which we in turn discern the signs of our desire and effort to exist, I want to emphasize how philosophical anthropology reserves a place for this capacity with regard to the power we have to transcend the real from within. The triadic relation of finitude-infinitude-intermediary that for Ricoeur is the proper focus of philosophical anthropology admits a place for this power inasmuch as the medial term is indicative of the modality of the being that we are. Within the context of a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing, finitude inheres in the principle of narrowness with respect to the body’s position as the zero degree of each person’s perspective. Hence, finitude finds its basic expression in our respective points of view. Conversely, we become aware of these points of view only through a movement that transgresses the limitations of our finite perspectives. When in subsequent chapters I credit the exemplary value of works and acts that we admire to their capacity to refashion our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, I will attribute this transgressive movement to the work’s or act’s subversive force. This subversive force is indicative of the imagination’s productive power. The irruption of the new, I will say then, transcends congealed outlooks, systems, practices, and habits of thought by reason of the power of imagination at work in works and acts that in each case renew the real by refashioning it in accordance with the rule exemplified by the work or act. The transcending intention brought to light by an analysis of the structure of objectivity concomitant with the power of knowing consequently provides a first indication of the ontological vehemence that I indicated previously I will credit to a literary fiction, musical work, or work of art’s expressive force. This force, on which the work’s power to renew our manner of inhering in the world places its stamp, is the wellspring of the work’s claim to truth. As such, a work’s power to augment the practical field of our everyday experiences is the poetic counterpart of the word’s transcending aim. In the case of the work, the rule exemplified by it is the source of this worlding power; in the case of language, the signifying intention that transgresses every point of view bespeaks the conjunction of meaning, truth, and being. The word then becomes the sign in which the “transcendence of the λόγοϛ of man”82 dwells. In contrast to poetic discourse, which by celebrating language for its own sake increases the latter’s polysemic density, the “word has the admirable property of making its sonority transparent, of fading away bodily in giving rise to the act that confers the sense”83 of things on them. The surplus of meaning that in a work has its source in the solution constituted by the work in

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  29 response to a question, problem, or crisis has its counterpart in the excess to which the “transcendence of saying”84 attests vis-à-vis its relation to the fulfillment of this signifying intention. We could therefore say, with Ricoeur, that the “height of signification is that of the one that in principle cannot be fulfilled.”85 By referring reflexively to the intermediary being that we are, the “power of signification”86 that each of us is consequently evinces how, at the first stage of this analysis, the transgression of one’s own perspective occurs by way of acts of denomination and signification that transcend the particular appearances of objects that are named and spoken about. The absurd signification, namely, the one that in principle cannot be fulfilled, is proof, so to speak, that one does not exhaust oneself in “an intentionality of fulfilled presence.”87 Rather, the one who speaks is “a two-fold intentionality.”88 The scission between “an intentionality signifying emptily, as a power to speak in the absence of the this-here. . .  [, and] a fulfilled intentionality, an openness to receiving, and a power of seeing in the presence of the this-here”89 opens the space for the excess of meaning inhering in the word’s transcending aim. Ricoeur stresses that, because it is “impossible to fulfill, by its nature, the absurd signification only reveals the property that all meaning has of exceeding every present perceptive fulfillment.”90 Consequently, if “I say more than I see when I  signify,”91 the excess that supersedes all finite perspectives in the act of bringing our receptivity to things to language is at the same time the inexhaustible source of the surplus of meaning inhering in all signifying intentions that transcend the mere presence of things.

Metaphor and Metaphysics The question to which I  now want to turn concerns the status of the word vis-à-vis its transcending aim. If, as I  have indicated, the excess that Ricoeur identifies with the over-signification of a present intention to name a thing gives rise to a surplus of meaning, we could ask whether the truth-intention that he attributes to the signifying word operates under the aegis of the power that at this first stage of analysis we glimpse when, in response to the disproportion between sensibility and understanding, we catch sight of the imagination’s schematizing role. The analysis of the disproportion between one’s perspective and the word (λόγοϛ) that transcends the finitude of each one’s point of view reveals how the imagination is intermediary between our receptivity to things and their objectivity. That language—that is, discourse—surpasses individual perceptions or sequences of perceptions by conferring a unity of meaning on them thus draws the question of the meaning and being of truth into the orbit of a philosophical enterprise for which the question of truth is inseparable from that of the meaning of the intermediary being that we are.

30  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics By setting the power to speak in the absence of a person or thing to which one refers against some supposedly proper meaning adhering to acts of denomination, I am clearly emphasizing the implications of the twofold intentionality of acts of signification. That all meaning exceeds its fulfillment by present perspectives opens the door to the prospect of a future fulfillment that the intended meaning holds in readiness. If later, when I sketch out a hermeneutics of liberation I emphasize the imagination’s operative significance, it will be in order to relate the capacity for surpassing the real from within to the vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur is the object of the poetics of the will. The transcending intention of the word accordingly provides an initial point of access to a consideration of how the wager of imagination that I  will argue supplants critiques claiming to be absolutely radical first answers to the impossibility of a metaphysics that allegedly makes an interior mental image and some real, exterior thing present to each other. As the accomplice of the representative illusion that installs itself within this metaphysics of presence, the concept of language espoused by representative thought “when it treats language as Ausdruck, ‘expression’—that is, as the exteriorization of the interior”92 opens itself to its deconstruction. The différance that Jacques Derrida insists haunts philosophy’s founding opposition between the sensible and the intelligible radically disrupts the order of objectivity according to which an interior mental image and an exterior thing would be united in a single representation. By unseating this founding opposition’s privileged status, the play of difference that Derrida stresses, as Ferdinand de Saussure reminds us, “is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign,”93 calls into question the truth of this representation as the reduplication and representation of presence. Hence, this différance, which is irreducible to any ontological or theological appropriation, opens “the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history,  .  .  . inscribing it and exceeding it without return.”94 The “wandering of the semantic”95 unleashed by metaphor ostensibly postpones if not destroys the truth-intention of the likeness or resemblance that the metaphorical statement “sets before the eyes” in the thickness of the imagining scene. Signification, Derrida tells us, will then be “in a kind of state of availability, between the nonmeaning preceding language (which has a meaning) and the truth of language which would say the thing such as it is in itself, in act, properly.”96 By destabilizing this truth, the power of metaphorical displacement deployed in the act of signifying thus makes this truth questionable, uncertain, and subject to doubt. Heidegger’s contention that the “metaphorical exists only within the bounds of the metaphysical”97 lays the ground for destructuring metaphysical analogies that found the metaphorical equivalences between the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the nonsensible, and perception and intellection. According to Ricoeur, for Heidegger, the transference of

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  31 the sensible to the nonsensible governs the system of Western metaphysical thought, just as the metaphorical transfer of literal meanings to figurative ones provides the standard for the concept of language espoused by representative thought.98 Ricoeur asks whether a style of thought more subversive than that of Heidegger’s would “support the universal suspicion of Western metaphysics with a more heightened suspicion directed at what in metaphor itself is left unsaid.”99 For him, Derrida’s stroke of genius was to enter the “domain of metaphor not by way of its birth but . . . by way of its death”100 in order to expose how the dissimulation of metaphysics’ alleged metaphorical origin effects the drift toward idealization that puts into play all the metaphysical oppositions between nature and freedom, history and spirit, the sensible and the spiritual or intelligible, as well as between the sensible and sense or meaning.101 The complicity between the wearing-away of metaphor, where the primary philosophemes such as eidos, logos, and theoria that define the field of metaphysical thought assume their “proper” meaning, and the raising up of metaphysics brings to the fore the metaphoricity of the concepts that we employ. Far from relegating speculative discourse to the production of concepts that erase the traces of their origins, a critique of the un-stated metaphoricity operating behind our backs draws out the difference between philosophical discourse and poetic discourse. If, as Ricoeur maintains, the “effectiveness of dead metaphor can be inflated . . . only in semiotic conceptions that impose the primacy of denomination, and hence of [the] substitution of meaning,”102 the tension between a principle and a secondary subject, between a literal and a figurative meaning, and within the logical force of the copula vis-à-vis the verb to be are decisive for a theory of metaphor that has a different aim. By affecting the copula in its relational function—as for example when the verb to be connects the predicate “temple” to the subject “nature” in the poetic statement “nature is a temple where living columns. . .”103—this threefold tension also affects the copula with respect to its existential function. The tension within the logical force of the copula is accordingly the spring of poetic discourse’s metaphorical truth. Between the “is” of the metaphorical or mimetic as if and the critical incision of the literal “is not,” the tension operative in metaphorical statements is indicative more generally of the ontological vehemence that in poetic discourse brings about an increase in being through augmenting our manner of inhering in the world. An ontology responsive to the semantic intention of poetic discourse therefore differentiates itself from a metaphysics of the sensible and the nonsensible in some crucial respects. When, in Chapter 5, I draw on the conjunction of a work’s singularity and exemplarity to account for literary fictions, poetry, musical works, and works of art’s subversive force, I  will attribute the real’s derealization to the productive imagination’s schematizing power. This derealization places the practical order of our everyday experiences in suspense. As such, the unreal order of the as if

32  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics is the condition of the impact a work has on our ways of inhering in the world. To the degree that poetry could be said to intend being, the epoché of the real is irreducible to the semblance of the presence of a person, object, or thing. Governed by the mode of givenness, the alleged re-presentation of an absent person, object, or thing holds the power of imagination hostage to the representative illusion. In contrast, the power operative in exemplary works and moral and political acts is the spring of a wager for which the vision of a reconciled humanity marks out a limit horizon that counterpoints the experience of fault as a cipher of the pathétique of human misery. The preceding considerations of metaphor, metaphysics, and the semantic aim of poetic discourse broadly conceived clearly exceed the reach of the first stage of an analysis aimed at uncovering the intermediacy of the being that we are. At the same time this analysis, through which we first catch sight of the originarily dialectical structure of human reality, brings to the fore the relation between the word (λόγοϛ) that transcends the finitude of each individual’s perspective and the world’s signification. By adopting the postulate that language is the “being-said of reality,”104 philosophical discourse distinguishes itself from poetic discourse. In order to think this “relation between being and being-said,”105 the philosophy of language—which for Ricoeur is philosophy itself—takes advantage of language’s capacity to designate itself while also designating its other. Far from locking language up within itself, this remarkable capacity of language to reverse the relationship between itself and its usual referents gives rise to that reflective consciousness that Ricoeur stresses “is the very consciousness of its [language’s] openness.”106 The accusation that all discourse is metaphorical, so that every attempt to decipher the ineluctable metaphoricity of philosophical texts is selfdefeating, obliges us to admit that there is no discourse on metaphor that is not already metaphorical.107 However, nothing compels us to concede that the transcendence of signification over finite perspectives and points of view is complicit with the illusory claim on which the metaphysics of presence founds itself. Unlike poetic discourse, which “brings to language a pre-objective world in which we find ourselves already rooted, but in which we also project our innermost possibilities,”108 speculative discourse reactivates the metaphorical resonances of the concepts it employs within its own sphere of meaning. The openness of language, which for Ricoeur is concomitant with the referential postulates of a discourse that recognizes how saying something about something brings it to expression, is the vis-à-vis of the transgression that at the first stage of analysis surpasses the finitude of perspective through the word’s transcending aim. A sentence or metaphorical statement, Ricoeur tells us moreover, “finds at once its unity of signification and its capacity for truth and error”109 in the twofold intention of the verb. The copula in the statement “Socrates is walking,” for example, couples the assertion of existence as regards

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  33 the act to the act’s predicative attribution to the subject. The power of volition that inheres in “saying. . . yes or no”110 founds the correlation between the will and the understanding with respect to this referential function. Accordingly, the freedom that I will attribute to the capacity to respond in fitting ways to the demands and exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves—a freedom that manifests itself in works and acts attesting to our effort and desire to be—has its first anchorage in this affirmation of the power that, in the case of exemplary works and acts, operates under the aegis of reflective judgment. This passing reference to reflective judgment, which in later chapters will take on its fuller significance in the context of my explorations into exemplary works and acts’ claims to truth, leads once again to a consideration of the third term that a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing sets between sensible intuition and the understanding. The thematic articulation of the disproportion between the word (λόγοϛ) that gives voice to being and truth at the risk of error and the “passive look that is riveted to appearance and perspective”111 places the enigma of this intermediary term, which Ricoeur calls “pure imagination,” on stage. For a transcendental reflection, this term does not appear in itself but is given only via the object in which the synthesis of intuition and understanding can be read. For the object “is the already realized unity of speech and point of view.”112 By relating itself to that which stands over against it— namely, the objectivity of the thing—consciousness makes itself intermediary between the finitude of point of view and the infinitude of speech. The synthesis brought about by this mean between one’s finite perspective and the transcending word is accordingly one of appearance and meaning rather than of the sensible and the intelligible. Ricoeur stresses that he differs from Kant on this point. For where Kant reduces the objectivity of the object to an epistemological domain, Ricoeur dismantles the reign of the object by crediting the real a priori synthesis to the thing’s objectival character, which is given to a particular point of view to be communicated to others. For Ricoeur, every philosophy that refuses either to reduce the receptivity of perception to discourse (absolute idealism) or to reduce thought to this receptivity (radical empiricism) rediscovers for itself the Kantian problem of the transcendental imagination. Kant discovered that the duality of sensibility and understanding is overcome in the object without revealing the principle of their unity. Accordingly, Kant’s formulation of the transcendental schema is itself the locus of the enigma of the medial operation that remains hidden within itself.113 That this medial operation is secreted away, so to speak, proves to be the obverse side of the fecundity of the imagination’s schematizing power. Everything that can be said regarding the transcendental imagination remains obscure. Naming it “the transcendence of finitude, human openness,”114 as Heidegger does, thematizes the difficulty stemming from the fact that this mediating term is unintelligible in itself. The synthesis

34  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics of intellectual determinations and sensible perceptions constitutes a unity for consciousness. This consciousness, however, is not self-consciousness. Moreover, the formal unity of consciousness that for Kant inheres in the “synthesis of the manifold of representations”115 is the condition of the possibility only for the objectival synthesis of meaning and perceptions. This unity of objectival consciousness falls short of the unity that Ricoeur insists constitutes a person in and for herself. Accordingly, the “I of I think . . . is simply the form of a world, that is, the projection of objectivity, as the synthesis of the sayable and the perceptible.”116 This I, which consists entirely in the projection of the object, consequently marks the limit of the first stage of an analysis of the intermediary condition of human being. Before proceeding to a consideration in the next two chapters of the second and third stages of Ricoeur’s analysis of the disproportion that places its stamp on the originarily dialectical structure of human reality, I  would like to indicate how the enigma of imagination relates to my broader concern with the liberatory impulse that I intend to show inheres in a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. We catch sight of this impulse in the vision of a reconciled humanity that constitutes the intentional object of the poetics of the will. Earlier, I suggested that the fault line running through the unity of the person provides access to a major difficulty when this vision is brought face-to-face with the event in thinking precipitated by the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility. The wager of imagination that in Chapter 4 I will argue is the riposte to the impossible claim of an emancipatory critique that purports to be absolutely radical consequently provides the context in which I intend to put to the test the idea that, in a way that still needs to be explained, reason draws its force from the imagination’s schematizing power. A transcendental reflection on the “pure imagination” brings to the fore the blindness and obscurity of a power that at this stage reveals itself only through the synthesis of meaning and perception projected on the object. At the same time, there is more in the experience of fault and in the hope of an end to the evil of violence than the I of the I think can comprehend. In moving from the stage of a transcendental reflection to that of the practical synthesis of the unity of a life, I therefore also want to keep in view how reason’s demand for totality runs up against the disproportion between one’s own character and the quest for happiness, for which the medial term is respect.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 471. 2. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 5. The eidetic analysis that Ricoeur pursues in the first part of his philosophy of the will begins with a description of the voluntary before considering “what involuntary structures are needed to

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  35 make that act or that aspect of the will [previously described] intelligible” (5). Ricoeur accordingly explains that the “axis of the method [of his study of the voluntary and the involuntary] is a description of the intentional, practical, and affective structures of the Cogito in a Husserlian manner” (19). 3. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 472; see 32. Ricoeur accordingly stresses that “I am not this center and I can only invoke it and admire it in the ciphers which are its scattered symbols. This decentering, which demands a radically new method, enters into a philosophy of subjectivity in ways which can only be paradoxical. . . . I am not the center of being. I myself am only one being among beings. The whole which includes me is the parabola of being which I  am not. I  come from all to myself as from Transcendence to existence” (472). 4. Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 210. I discuss the place of this poetics in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will at greater length in Chapter 5. 5. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 3. 6. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 85. 7. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 463. Ricoeur tell us that “I  have written very little on Spinoza, although he is always to be found in my meditation and my teaching. I share with Sylvain Zac the conviction that ‘all Spinozist themes can be centered around the notion of life.’ But to say life is also to say power, as the Ethics confirms, through and through. . . . Welcome indeed the thinker who would be able to carry the ‘Spinozist’ reappropriation of Aristotelian energeia to a level comparable to that now held by the ‘Heideggerian’ reappropriations of Aristotelian ontology. For if Heidegger was able to join together the self and being-in-the-world, Spinoza—himself of Jewish more than Greek origin—is the only one to have been able to articulate the conatus against the backdrop of being, at once actual and powerful, which he calls essentia actuosa” (315–17). See Jean Greisch, “Testimony and Attestation,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996), 96; Richard Kearney, “Introduction,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996), 1–2. Kearney comments that Ricoeur resolutely refuses the “idealist temptation  .  .  . to reduce being to being-for consciousness” (1). In a related vein, Ricoeur remarks that the inquiry inaugurated by Friedrich Nietzsche “expresses what the philosophy of the will has always sought to do: to reveal the ground of being as act, as energy, as power and not just as form, essence, logos. Something of Aristotle’s philosophy is not just preserved but [also] magnified, something of the philosophy of Spirit has been in a way devitalized, emptied of its force—I mean the priority of act over form, of energy over essence, of power over logos” (Philosophical Anthropology, 85). 8. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 467. 9. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 467. 10. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 467. Ricoeur accordingly insists that “[t]o refuse necessity from below is to defy Transcendence. . . . Either philosophy begins with the fundamental contrast between the Cogito and being in itself, or it begins with the self-position of consciousness whose corollary is scorn of empirical being” (477). 11. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 477; see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. Ricoeur explains that “[o]ntologically, the flesh precedes the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary. . . . The flesh is the place of all the passive

36  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics syntheses on which the active syntheses are constructed. . . . In short, it is the origin of all ‘alteration of ownness.’ [Consequently,] . . . selfhood implies its own ‘proper’ otherness, so to speak, for which the flesh is the support” (324). 12. Richard Kearney, “Exploring Imagination with Paul Ricoeur,” in Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics, ed. Saulius Geniusas (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 187. In Kearney’s view, “Ricoeur’s hermeneutic discussion of the imaginative function . . . represents the most powerful reorientation of a phenomenology of imagining toward a hermeneutics of imagining” (187). 13. Kearney, “Exploring Imagination with Paul Ricoeur,” 203. 14. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 29. For Ricoeur, “men live Transcendence, as purification and deliverance of their freedom, as salvation.  .  .  . Transcendence . . . is a sign of our rediscovered integrity” (29). Hence, the paradox of freedom and Transcendence “can be sustained only as a mystery” (33). 15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177–78. 16. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 341. 17. For an insight into Ricoeur’s reasons for rejecting the idea that human freedom resides in an act that is a creatio ex nihilo, see Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, “Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary,” in Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, ed. Suzi Adams, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 3–20. 18. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 5. 19. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 174. Risk, Ricoeur therefore emphasizes, is “a human rather than a divine form of freedom” (174). 20. Dante, cited by Arendt, The Human Condition, 175; see Dante, Monarchy, ed. and trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22. See also Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). Ricoeur stresses that “effort is a desire, since it is never satisfied; but the desire is an effort since it is the affirmative positing of a singular being and not simply a lack of being. Effort and desire are the two sides of this positing of the self in the first truth: I am” (46). Moreover, for him, desire is “the living being, the being of desire” (Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer [Chicago: Chicago University Press 2004], 358). 21. See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature. Capacities, Ricoeur stresses, are therefore “at the same time residues of action and promises of action. They become apparent only in reflection and on the margin of action, before or after the act” (215). 22. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). By highlighting the plight of women in developing nations, Nussbaum brings disparities between human capacities and the opportunities to exercise them sharply into focus. The lives of two women in India stand as testament to the adverse effects of their social and political disadvantages. On Nussbaum’s account, Vasanti’s life has largely been scripted by the men on whom she depends. After spending the household money, her husband—a gambler and alcoholic— accepted the cash incentive to have a vasectomy provided by the local government before abandoning Vasanti, leaving her childless and without ­support. Vasanti was also a victim of domestic violence, losing, in Nussbaum’s words, “her emotional equanimity to fear, and being cut off from meaningful forms of affiliation, familial, friendly, and civic” (106). Hence according to Nussbaum, Vasanti “did not really have the conception of herself as a free and

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  37 dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others” (106). Vasanti is now a member of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the “textile mill city where Mahatma Gandhi organized labor in accordance with his principles of nonviolent resistance” (15). In contrast, Jayamma had no male relatives on which to depend. She worked as a laborer at a brick kiln for approximately 45  years, where she carried 500 to 700 bricks a day balanced on her head. Unlike many men in the brick industry, she was never promoted to the better paying, more skilled, and less arduous jobs. Now retired in her midsixties, she has few resources on which to fall back. In Nussbaum’s view, her pride in keeping her family together and improving its social standing “is uneasily combined with the conviction that she cannot expect from life the things other more privileged people will easily get” (108). 23. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 99. 24. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. 25. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 25. Ricoeur credits Descartes with placing the relation of the finite and the infinite at the center of philosophical anthropology. See Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). Ricoeur emphasizes that finitude designates in negative terms the positive condition of belonging (29), which in turn is the condition of the possibility of transcending from within. Hence, for him, “[u]nderstanding too must be described initially, not in terms of discourse, but in terms of the ‘power to be’ ” (66). 26. Ricoeur stresses that the decision to attempt to understand evil by freedom is a grave one. At the same time, this decision therefore “is by no means a decision concerning the root origin of evil, but [it] is merely the description of the place where evil appears and from where it can be seen” (Fallible Man, xlvi). 27. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlvi. 28. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlvi. For Ricoeur, “even if evil came to man from another source which contaminates him, this other source would still be accessible to us only through its relation to us, only through the state of temptation, aberration, or blindness whereby we would be affected” (xlvi). 29. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlvi. 30. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xlvi. 31. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 25–26. 32. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 4. 33. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 11. 34. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 4. 35. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 4. 36. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 7. 37. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 7. 38. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 7. 39. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 6. 40. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. Ricoeur remarks that the myth of the fall of the soul into an earthly body binds the origin of human beings to the soul’s misfortune. Accordingly, unlike the primordial incarnation of the gods in their bodies, the “body of the non-divine souls contains an inherent principle of heaviness and obstinacy” (11). 41. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 7. 42. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 8. 43. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 8–9. 44. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 81–82.

38  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics 5. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 92. 4 46. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 4; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man. Ricoeur remarks that “[o]ntic indigence, represented by Penia in the Symposium, begins to divide into two mythical moments” (10) that in the Phaedrus take the form of a myth of fragility and a myth of the downfall of the soul. 47. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 48. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 49. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. This wound is the emblem of the ontological difference between being and beings. Accordingly, the “Platonic Eros who suffers from and rejoices over his relationship with the metaempirical world” (77), which Ricoeur cites as an example of desire’s disposition for rationality, symbolizes the transcending intention by reason of which we have a part in being (see Chapter 3). 50. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 51. Plato, cited in Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10; see Plato, “Symposium,” in The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Michael Joyce (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 557. 52. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 53. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 54. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 55. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 10. 56. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 3; see Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994). For Arendt, “while our standards for scientific accuracy have constantly grown and are higher today than at any previous time, our standards and criteria for true understanding seem to have no less constantly declined. With the introduction of completely alien and frequently nonsensical categories of evaluation into the social sciences, they have reached an all-time low. Scientific accuracy does not permit any understanding which goes beyond the narrow limits of sheer factuality, and it has paid a heavy price for this arrogance. . . . Today the need to understand has grown desperate and plays havoc with the standards not only of understanding, but of pure scientific accuracy and intellectual honesty as well” (339). 57. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 3; cf. Philip Walsh, Arendt Contra Sociology: Theory, Society and Its Science (London: Routledge, 2015). 58. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 6. 59. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 3. 60. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 1; cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 61. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 3. 62. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 4. 63. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 3. 64. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 3–4; see Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology. Ricoeur explains that “from the angle of the problem of disproportionality and the intermediary, a reformulation of the problem of finitude becomes ­possible. . . . I doubt that the concept of finitude is the central concept for philosophical anthropology—but rather the triad: finitude-infinitude-­ intermediary. We must start therefore . . . not from what is limited, but from the antinomy of the limited and the unlimited. In this way, it becomes possible to catch sight of something of the originarily dialectical structure of human reality” (Philosophical Anthropology, 2–3).

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  39 65. Ricoeur remarks that the type of description he undertakes in Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan [Boston: Beacon Press, 1967]), which together comprise the second part of his philosophy of the will, “could not proceed by means of an eidetics, which is an essential description, because of the opaque and absurd nature of fault” (Ricoeur, Fallible Man, xli–xlii; see Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 3ff.). 66. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 6. 67. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 6. Ricoeur stresses that the transcendental style of reflection employed at this stage of analysis falls short of answering the question as to “how a human being [i]s . . . intermediary for him- or herself” (6). This style of reflection “remains purely objective, in the sense that this unity of the self to itself remains merely intended, that is, figured in terms of something that stands over against itself” (6). This transcendental reflection on the power of knowing is accordingly only the first step of a philosophy of fallibility for which the intermediacy of human being is both the staging ground of the capacity we have for surpassing the real from within and the condition that makes evil’s incursion into human affairs possible. 68. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 7; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 18ff. 69. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 7. This intention is the spring of the “existential signification” (7) that constitutes the semantic aim of discourse. Inasmuch as discourse “refers to a world which it claims to describe, to express, or to represent” (Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 198), discourse actualizes language’s symbolic function and resources by inscribing the intended meaning within itself. 70. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 183. See Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology. Ricoeur emphasizes that at this stage of analysis, this third term “is given not in itself but in the thing, on the thing” (7). See also Günter Zöller, “The Productive Power of Imagination: Kant on the Schematism of the Understanding and the Symbolism of Reason,” in Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics, ed. Saulius Geniusas (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 1–22; George H. Taylor, “The Deeper Significance of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Productive Imagination: The Role of Figuration,” in Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance, ed. Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 157–81. Taylor remarks that, for Ricoeur, “Kant has ‘constructed two ghosts, the intuition as pure manifold and the understanding as a categorical system, and then he fights desperately for a middle term’ ([‘Lectures on Imagination,’] 9.19). By contrast, Ricoeur understands Wittgenstein to start from the experience where we are already located in the third term (‘seeing as’), and Ricoeur himself wants to speak to the third term or the common root. He wants to build on the insight that every object and every situation are already structured ([‘Lectures on Imagination,’] 18.8)” (161). Taylor here cites the unpublished manuscript of Ricoeur’s “Lectures on Imagination” by “lecture and page number” (175n2). 71. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. 72. According to Ricoeur, Descartes, “having announced an ontology of the finite-infinite, continues to call the created being of man finite with respect to the divine infinitude” (Fallible Man, 3). 73. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19.

40  Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics 4. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. 7 75. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. 76. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. 77. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 19. Consequently, the body “is implicated as a power in the instrumentality of the world, in the practicable aspects of this world that my action furrows through, [and] in the products of work and art. It is always upon the world and beginning from the manifestation of the world as perceived, threatening, and accessible that I apprehend the openness of my body, mediator of the intentional consciousness” (19–20). 78. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man. Ricoeur explains that according to Kant, the “finite is a rational being that does not create the objects of its representations but receives them” (20). 79. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 24. 80. See Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 6. 81. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 10. 82. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 83. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 27–28. 84. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 85. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 86. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 87. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 88. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 89. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 90. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 91. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 28. 92. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 284. 93. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5; see Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1983). 94. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 6. In Derrida’s view, “[i]f there is a certain w ­ andering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end” (7). 95. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 241; see Nancy Worman, Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 59ff. According to Worman, “[m]etaphor is the difference and the detour: again, in Derrida’s terms, it opens the ‘wandering of the semantic,’ the movement of which nevertheless rests upon a trust in likeness and connects it directly to mimesis” (60). 96. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 241. 97. Martin Heidegger, cited in Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 282; see Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1975), 89. See also Morny Joy, “Derrida and Ricoeur: A Case of Mistaken Identity (And Difference),” The Journal of Religion 68, no. 4 (1988): 508–26. 98. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor. Ricoeur explains that it “is in this twofold context that the equivalence of the two transfers is asserted: metaphysical transfer of the sensible to the nonsensible, metaphorical transfer of the literal to the figurative. The first transfer is determinative . . . for Western thought, the second ‘gives the standard for our representation of the nature of language’ ” (281–82). 99. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 284.

Philosophical Anthropology and Poetics  41 100. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 285. For Ricoeur, “[n]ow the non-stated in metaphor is used, worn-out metaphor. Metaphoricity functions here in spite of us, behind our backs so to speak. The claim to keep semantic analysis within a metaphysically neutral area only expresses ignorance of the simultaneous play of unacknowledged metaphysics and worn-out metaphors” (284). Accordingly, the “final product of this effectiveness of worn-out metaphor, which is thus replaced by the production of a concept that erases its trace, is that discourse on metaphor is itself infected by the universal metaphoricity of philosophical discourse. In this regard, one can speak of a paradox of the auto-implication of metaphor” (286). 101. For Ricoeur, “Heideggerian deconstruction must now take on Nietzschean genealogy, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Marxist critique of ideology, that is, the weapons of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Armed in this way, the critique is capable of unmasking the unthought conjunction of hidden metaphysics and worn-out metaphor” (Rule of Metaphor, 285). 102. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 290; see 247–48. 103. Charles Baudelaire, cited in Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 247; see Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences,” in Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. 104. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 304. 105. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 304. 106. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 304. 107. See Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor. Ricoeur stresses that “there is no discourse on metaphor that is not stated within a metaphorically engendered conceptual network. There is no non-metaphorical standpoint from which to perceive the order and the demarcation of the metaphorical field. Metaphor is metaphorically stated. . . . The theory of metaphor returns in a circular manner to the metaphor of theory, which determines the truth of being in terms of presence. . . . The effort to decipher figures in philosophical texts is self-defeating; one is forced instead to ‘recognize the conditions which make it in principle impossible to carry out such a project’ ” (287). 108. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 306. 109. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 32. 110. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 32. Hence, the “soul of the verb is affirmation” (32). Ricoeur therefore stresses that “our freedom of affirming—insofar as it is tied to the verb—is rooted in the soil of noun-meanings” (36). The verb binds the affirmation of being to the relational and existential truth-­ intention of discourse. Accordingly, freedom and truth constitute the noeticnoematic pair at the heart of the affirmation of an existence marked by the absence of aseity. 111. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 37. 112. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 7; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 37. 113. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man. Ricoeur explains that the transcendental imagination remains an enigma because the common root of what we understand receiving and being affected to mean and to determine an object intellectually is hidden from us, so that the “mediating term has no intelligibility of its own” (41). See also Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 8. 114. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 9; see Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). 115. Kant, cited by Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 45; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 155–58. 116. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 10.

2 The Practical Synthesis Character, Happiness, and Respect

The deficiency of the I of I think as regards the practical and affective dimension of human reality calls for a further inquiry into the originarily dialectical structure of our intermediary condition. For a philosophical anthropology that seeks to raise the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse, a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing constitutes only the initial step in a series of analyses in which the medial terms of the notion of being as power and act figure. At the first stage of this analysis, the unity of consciousness is accessible to reflection only by way of the synthesis of sensibility and understanding that the third term, the transcendental imagination, brings about. The power of imagination here reveals itself only on the thing with respect to its objectival character as the condition of possibility for the unity of perception and meaning. The decision to subject anthropology’s fundamental categories to the test of a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing consequently places the subject’s synthetic powers on stage. Projected onto the object, this synthetic power of knowing is that of consciousness. As such, consciousness makes possible the structure of objectivity that is correlative with the power of knowing. Knowing, however, is no more feeling than consciousness is selfconsciousness. By falling short of the sense of unity that, under the aegis of the idea of the person, charges each of us with the task of making the life that is given to us our own, the transcendental unity of consciousness calls for a reflection on the practical synthesis that the idea of the person as for herself entails. At this second stage of analysis, the idea of the person—and by extension, that of humanity as a whole—supersedes consciousness’s objectival structure. Ricoeur stresses that, in speaking of humanity, we speak not only of a species but we also speak of “a task, since humanity is given nowhere”1 but in those exemplary instances when we catch sight of the right, the good, and the just that we desire as much for others as for ourselves. Through assuming the moral tenor of the feeling that Kant calls respect, the synthesis of reason and existence places the process of freedom’s actualization under the aegis of the idea of respect’s ethical, political, and juridical dimensions. Positing the

The Practical Synthesis  43 person as an end in herself accordingly sets the polarities of the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness in relief. By reconciling the perspectival orientation of one’s own desires with the sense of fulfillment and completion for which the plenitude of happiness is the sign, respect becomes the watchword of the idea of the humanity in each of us. Inasmuch as the condition of plurality that Arendt tells us is at the root of all political life is the staging ground of the guarantee of equality that she maintains we extend to one another despite our differences, our inimitable singularity has the moral requirement of respect as its vis-à-vis.2 In the course of this and the following chapters, I therefore want to keep sight of how the practical synthesis that for Ricoeur inheres in the idea of the person gives rise to the demand that tasks us with making freedom a reality for all within the historical reality of humankind in order, in part, to set in relief the emancipatory impulse of a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non-philosophical source.

Practical Synthesis The practical synthesis that for Ricoeur supersedes a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing places the idea of the person on stage. Where at the first step of analysis the unity of consciousness is predicated on the synthesis of meaning and perception, at this second step the unity of the person is founded on the fragile synthesis of one’s character and the quest, which I will explain, is also a demand that guides and in a sense rules over the totality of one’s life. Our narrative identities, which are drawn from the stories we recount of episodes, incidents, and events that contribute to shaping the course of our lives, have their antecedents in the practical and affective dimensions of our desires.3 Every desire is indicative of a lack that at the same time motivates the impulse to fulfill that desire. Desire is thus both motive and motor, animating the drive toward some intended good. Moved by desire, the body “is the fullness and flesh of anticipation itself.”4 Desire, Ricoeur therefore tells us, “belongs to the body in terms of visceral intensity and muscular alerting which orchestrate, often most covertly, the most subtle movement of the soul.”5 That the range of possibilities open to us through desire stands out against the totality of human reality adumbrated by myths of beginnings in a time in illo tempore, myths of the fall, and eschatological myths provides a first indication of the disproportion that at the second stage of analysis marks the passage from a theoretical reflection on the power of knowing to one on the practical dimension of human being. Where at the theoretical level the unity of consciousness rests on the objectival character of the world, at the practical level the world is replete with values according to which we rank our reasons for acting based on the ordering of our desires. The evaluative texture of the stories and histories that we read, tell, and recount bears out this conjunction of preferential

44  The Practical Synthesis judgments regarding the good we desire, the evil we flee, motives, life plans, and the ensemble of practices that we adopt. Narrative explorations never stop borrowing from the network of values that inhere in all cultural systems in this regard. That wisdom and moral instruction proceed only by example attests to the exemplary significance of stories of courage, friendship, and justice that provide models we can follow.6 Evaluations of the actions and suffering of protagonists and antagonists in stories, myths, and legends recounted and told consequently also bear on the hopes and aspirations that fuel the diverse ambitions of different individuals, communities, and groups. Why, then, does the method adopted by Ricoeur at this stage of analysis consist in “taking the idea of totality as a task, as a directive idea in the Kantian sense, as a demand for totalization”?7 Nothing, he points out, proves to be more deceptive than the idea of totality. The violence that ensues when this idea is enlisted in the service of the human sciences or philosophies of history for which dialectics is the supreme law finds one of its most virulent political expressions in the systemic rearrangement of the factual fabric of reality into which deceptions and lies seamlessly fit, which as Arendt tells us is a tactic totalitarian regimes “consciously adopted . . . as the first step to murder.”8 The accusation leveled by JeanFrançois Lyotard against the Enlightenment is directed as much against the violence of philosophies and political ideologies that turn the dialectic drawn from a Hegelian philosophy of history into an irrevocable law as it is against modern art’s alleged nostalgia for reconciliation and redemption.9 For a critique worthy of the challenge posed by Hegel, the demand for totalization, which as I will explain is bound up with the destination of reason as regards the process of freedom’s actualization, cannot succumb to the temptation of a mode of thinking that dares to elevate itself to the level of the absolute. When, in Chapter 4, I draw out the relation between the practical task of preserving the tension between the spaces of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations and the structure of action, I will set the wager of imagination against the theoretical and practical impossibility of emancipatory critiques that claim to be absolutely radical. Arendt’s analysis of the reversal that marks the end of our tradition of political thought brings to the fore the danger of handing over the freedom and spontaneity that inheres in our power to begin something new to forces and processes to which we are ostensibly subject. We could even ask whether the rise of the social that Arendt attributes to the victory of the animal laborans in the modern age calls for the riposte of a philosophical anthropology for which the dignity and respect owed to all is the spring of the project and task of making our common humanity a historical reality. The passage from a critique of the power of knowing to a theory of the will brings to the fore the practical features of the disproportion that places its stamp on our intermediary condition. By attending to the

The Practical Synthesis  45 affective and practical aspects of human being, which a transcendental reflection on the condition of possibility of the objectivity of things leaves behind, a theory of the “I will,” together with its “whole cycle of specific determinations”10 such as “I desire,” “I can,” and the like, uncovers the inner connection between the synthesis on the practical plane of the poles of finitude and infinitude and the idea of the person. A transcendental reflection for which the unity of consciousness takes the form of the synthesis of meaning and perception opens the properly philosophical dimension of an anthropology by breaking with the pathétique of human misery. At this second stage of analysis, the person and not the thing is the “object” that is the guide. Accordingly, it is only on this “object” that the practical mediation of the notions of character and happiness can be read.

Practical Finitude By setting the finitude of character against the infinitude of happiness, Ricoeur extends the focus of the first stage of analysis to the practical features of the intermediary being that we are. Resisting the temptation of naturalism to treat the body as an object, which strips our experiences of our own bodies of their personal traits, is accordingly requisite for a thematic account of the affective as well as the practical features of our intermediary condition. Whereas the body’s inevitable objectification “infects all experience of the self,”11 affectivity, which Ricoeur tells us is a mode of thought in the broadest sense, is the manifest sign of our inherence in the world. To feel, he stresses, “is still to think though feeling no longer represents objectivity”12 but instead reveals our manner of existing as incarnate in the flesh. Consequently, the “central primitive fact of incarnation is simultaneously the first hallmark of all existence and the first invitation to treason”13 by an objectifying attitude. The Copernican revolution that in the theory of subjectivity sets right the relation between “objective knowledge of the body and the living experience of incarnate Cogito”14 unseats the notion that one’s body is merely an object among objects. From this vantage point, a “personal body belongs to the subjectivity of the Cogito”15 through feeling. By restoring the affective aspect of the practical finitude of each of our perspectives, the notion of character sets the factual narrowness of our openness to the full range of human possibilities against the infinitude of happiness in accordance with the demand for totality aimed at the perfection of all partial pleasures through the achievement of some “highest good.” The affective perspective that Ricoeur counterposes to the neutralized perspective of point of view brings this affective perspective’s narrowness into focus. Persons and things present themselves as interesting to us within this perspective. We grasp the “loveable, the attractive, the hateful, the repulsive”16 as it appears on the person or thing. Hence,

46  The Practical Synthesis feeling is always a feeling of “something,” designating qualities that are motivating features with regard to the practical disposition of the will. The spontaneous and reflective evaluations that shape our affective lives unfold “by means of a will. . . [that,] nourished with motives,”17 runs ahead of itself. Emotion differs from feeling in this respect. Emotion culminates in desire; feeling registers the affective nuances of things. Placing emotion among the “means or organs”18 of willing marks out its vital function. Ricoeur explains that the kinship between the words “emotion” and “motion” is indicative of the connection between the body’s visceral disturbances and the will’s inclination to act. Motives in essence propose ends. Consequently, emotion does not contribute any ends that do not already make themselves felt in needs and quasi-needs. Rather, emotion “presupposes a more or less implicit motivation which precedes and sustains it.”19 At the same time, emotion gives “the ends that are already present before consciousness a certain physical prestige whose efficacy is partly of the order of nascent movement.”20 Emotion accordingly belongs to the order of the involuntary, welling up, as it were, with the will’s besiegement by need. Feeling, on the other hand, is related reciprocally to the act of knowing. Knowing separates the subject from the object by exteriorizing the latter in order to possess it. The power of knowing constitutes this duality based on the fundamental cleavage it sets up, which for a transcendental critique is the condition of the world’s objectival character. Conversely, feeling manifests a relation to the world through restoring our complicity with it. Hence, feeling is the privileged mode for revealing the “élans of our being and . . . its pre- and hyper-objective connections”21 with the world, things, and persons in it. The loveable and the hateful are accordingly anticipatory tonalities of the projects we undertake inasmuch as we are given over entirely to what we are doing and what is still to be done in pursuing the good we seek or avoiding the evil we eschew. That actions have motives as their reasons brings to the fore desire’s practical receptivity as regards needs and wants. As I noted previously, desire, Ricoeur explains, is both motive and motor aimed at fulfilling the want or need for an intended good. Desire as such is “properly a strong inclination to act which arises from the whole body,”22 redoubling our motivations and giving the values that we espouse “the aura of a nascent or suspended movement. . . [that] keeps fresh the schemes of action.”23 Thanks to the prodding of desire, which as a “type of spirit of adventure”24 arises from the body, willing has both force and direction. Every project motivated by desire bears the stamp of a human freedom borne from the capacity to be receptive to and to respond to the call of the loveable felt on persons, things, and the world, for instance. The practical receptivity of desire, which for Ricoeur is commensurate with a project motivated by it, is thus indicative of the perspectival aspect of our openness to the world.

The Practical Synthesis  47 Our affective finitude is consequently the first of the aspects that Ricoeur places under the notion of character. In Fallible Man, he regards character as the “most radical and primordial aspect of the idea of perspectival origin.”25 As the zero origin of one’s total field of motivation, character designates the originary ground of one’s fundamental openness and receptivity to values, customs, and mores that orient and guide one’s life by informing one’s plans, projects, and designs. Every point of view originates from this radically non-chosen origin, which bears the stamp of the absence of aseity that places its seal on the fact of one’s birth.26 Set against this absence of aseity, the demand for autonomy that counterposes itself to the heteronomous rule of another and the violence that ensues when one person resorts to the use of force to impose her or his will lays bare the practical requirement of the synthesis that is constitutive of the idea of the person. The idea of the person who is no longer a thing as regards the power of knowing but is instead a being tasked with the project of fulfilling the meaning of a life that is given to her is accordingly the emblem of the humanity in each of us, which in each case is expressed and apprehended in a singularly individual way. The condition of plurality that Arendt insists is both the conditio sine qua non and the conditio per quam of all political life is indicative of the fact that values that are in principle accessible to everyone are accessible only in ways that are distinctive to each.27 Later, when I take up the question of the axiological diversity of claims, convictions, and beliefs that fuel different communities and groups’ demands and aspirations, I  will ask whether the idea of the humanity of the person provides a critical touchstone for inscribing the imperative of respect within the idea of justice’s federating force. If, as Ricoeur tells us, one’s character, together with one’s humanity, makes freedom an unlimited possibility at the same time that it constitutes this freedom in its singular partiality, transposing the idea of the person onto the political terrain opens the door to a broader consideration of the place of justice in promoting the course of freedom’s actualization. That the body in which one is incarnate in the flesh is one’s own is indicative of the second aspect of finitude that Ricoeur places under the notion of character. When, in Oneself as Another, he puts to the test the thesis that one’s personal identity requires the support of two senses of permanence in time, he relates the body as one’s own to an ontology of the flesh. Ricoeur admits that in returning to the notion of character in the context of a reflection on the paradoxes of personal identity, he is pursuing another direction of the investigations he undertakes in Freedom and Nature and Fallible Man. He points out how, in Freedom and Nature, he stresses what he saw as the immutable nature of one’s character, which he regarded then as an “unchosen perspective through which we accede to values and to the use of our powers,”28 and hence to which we consent. Moreover, when in Fallible Man, he took up the theme of

48  The Practical Synthesis character in relation to the “Pascalian theme of ‘disproportion’ ”29 in the context of his investigations into the noncoincidence of the finite and the infinite, he regarded character as one’s “manner of existing in accordance with a finite perspective affecting. . . [one’s] opening to the world of things, ideas, values, and persons.”30 In Oneself as Another, he maintains that character “designates the set of lasting dispositions by which a person is recognized.”31 By attributing these lasting dispositions to the quality of “sameness” indicative of one sense of permanence of time, Ricoeur sets in relief the temporal features of the practical requirement that transforms the formal idea of the person into a project and a task. The split in the concept of identity that he attributes to the equivocal notion of permanence in time highlights the difference between idem identity and ipse identity. By reserving the term “idem identity” for sameness, Ricoeur brings to the fore how ipse identity or ipseity (selfhood) rests on the capacity of an individual to keep faith with herself and others through maintaining who she is. Arendt reminds us that “nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things.”32 On the contrary, for her, only a god could know what human nature is. Hence, all modes of human cognition fail when it comes to the question: Who are we? Differentiating between idem identity as sameness and ipse identity as selfhood in order to relate them dialectically has the advantage of distinguishing the narrative dimension of the notion of character from its alleged immutability, to which, in his earlier work, Ricoeur insisted one consent in acceding to the givenness of existence. When, in a story, the plot reveals lasting dispositions of the protagonist, the stable pole of character serves as a model of sameness as regards the requirement of identity arising from the problem of permanence in time. “[K]eeping one’s word in faithfulness to the word that has been given”33 is another. Ricoeur stresses that “keeping one’s word expresses a self-constancy”34 that can be inscribed only within the dimension of the “who.” Narrative throws a bridge across the split in the concept of identity owing to the two senses of permanence in time through drawing together incidents and events. As such, the narrative identities of heroes, villains, victors, and victims are constructed by the plots of the stories we tell. The “interval of sense”35 opened by the noncoincidence of one’s lasting dispositions and the way that keeping one’s word stands as a challenge to the vagaries of time foregrounds the properly temporal features that in the narrative construction of one’s identity gives the project with which each of us is tasked as selves its prospective and retrospective dimensions. Ricoeur reminds us that the narrative emplotment of incidents and events engenders an evaluative texture that never stops borrowing from ethics.36 By the same token, the idea of the person acquires its moral and ethical contours from the way that narrative bridges between the two poles that together mark out the limit thresholds of the two senses of permanence

The Practical Synthesis  49 in time. The ethical foundation of the act of promising in the “obligation to safeguard the institution of language”37 and to respond to another’s trust by remaining steadfast however much one’s opinions and proclivities might change lays bare the dimension of selfhood that counterpoints the relative fixity of one’s dispositions and inclinations. The interval of sense opened by the noncoincidence of inclinations owing to one’s character that constrain one’s perspective on and openness to the world and one’s self-constancy in keeping one’s word is therefore at the same time the first locus of the power we exercise as capable human beings who, always finding ourselves in medias res by reason of our incarnation as flesh, discern the signs of our efforts to exist in our works, words, deeds, and acts. The capacity to tell one’s own story not only sets in relief the reciprocal relation between our power to act and our ability to impute actions to ourselves who, like others, can be held to account as the authors of these acts, but it also brings into view the connection between the demand for autonomy and the idea of the person. The ability to tell one’s own life story in a way that is acceptable to oneself is one if not the principal hallmark of the subject’s autonomy. It is difficult to imagine how a conception of being as power and act would bear on philosophical anthropology apart from the conjunction of ascription and imputation in the idea of the person. An “ontology of power and act”38 that gives the semantic aim of poetic discourse its fullest extension reserves a place for the narrative art’s evaluative force as well as its refigurative power. Situated within the interval of sense opened by the noncoincidence of idem identity and ipseity, the narrative emplotment of events deploys the resources available to us for reevaluating the significance of our achievements, setbacks, missteps, and misfortunes. The evaluative textures of the stories we tell enable us to assess or reassess our life practices and plans by illuminating the ideals that serve as guides to our accomplishments and aspirations. The semantic aim of poetic discourse amplifies the notion that to “exist is to act”39 through magnifying the impact of the stories we tell on our outlooks and plans. Fiction, Ricoeur accordingly reminds us, is an ethical laboratory that frees us to experiment with ways of acting and conducting our lives.40 The ability to respond to the demands and exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves in fitting ways that, following Arendt and Ricoeur, in Chapter 5 I will attribute to our power to begin something new, thus has its corollary counterpart in the capacities to remember, to recount, and to draw together events that figure in the stories we tell about ourselves, others, and the histories of which we are a part. By emphasizing how the practical aspect of finitude that Ricoeur relates to the “powers that serve the will”41 has its root in an ontology of the flesh, I propose to draw out the relation between being as power and act, the assurance that the self has with regard to works and acts testifying to

50  The Practical Synthesis the will, desire, and effort to exist, and narrative identity. For an ontology of the flesh, the dissociation of the notion of existence from that of substance frees the lived body from objectifying representations, so that one’s own body becomes the organ and support of the initiatives we take. The dialectic of praxis (action) and pathos (affect), from which all the figures of passivity and alterity spring, takes root in this fundamental register. The certainty of the self in acting and its complementary contrary, corporeal passivity, unfold this dialectic. Our mode of incarnation, which is the “first figure of passivity-otherness”42 singled out by Ricoeur, refers a phenomenology of the power to act to an ontology of the flesh. In contrast to P. F. Strawson’s analysis of the person as a basic particular, Ricoeur stresses that “persons are also bodies . . . to the extent that each person is for himself his own body.”43 Only the ontological constitution of that entity called person accounts for the presupposition that bodies adhere both to the domain of objects and to that of the self. Accordingly, human action can constitute an “event in the world . . . and at the same time designate its author in a self-referential manner”44 only because the author of these acts belongs to the world through inserting herself in it. By asking whether the author of the act for which she holds herself accountable belongs to the world “in a mode in which the self is constitutive of the very sense of this belonging,”45 Ricoeur brings to the fore the connection between the idea of the person and the constitution of the self. From this vantage point, moral imputation is the sign of the self’s adhesion to itself. Thanks to the fact that “[o]ne’s own body is the very place—in the strong sense of the term—of this belonging . . . the self can place its mark on those events that are its actions.”46 Tying the “corporeal and mental criteria of identity—continuity of d ­ evelopment, ­permanence of character, habitus, roles, and identifications—to the c­onstancy of a self that finds its anchor in its own body”47 founds the notion of personal identity on the fact that one’s body is one’s own. The quest for one’s own identity, to which I alluded earlier when I indicated how the demand for autonomy stands out against the absence of aseity vis-à-vis the ­givenness of existence, thus binds the will, desire, and effort to exist to this ­primitive fact. The discovery that one’s own body is the primal mediator between self and world brings the sense of practical finitude inhering in philosophical anthropology’s thematic understanding of human being as power and act sharply into focus. Ricoeur reminds us that, by opening up the field of investigation in which the lived body is the distinctive phenomenon, Maine de Biran dissociates the “notion of existence from that of substance, and by relating the former to the notion of act”48 gives his phenomenological discovery its proper ontological dimension. The “strong tie . . . between being as act”49 and the self’s apprehension of its existence in desiring, moving, and carrying out its projects that Ricoeur tells us Maine de Biran recognizes evinces the bond between the intermediacy

The Practical Synthesis  51 of human being and our practical finitude. The tension—the conflict— between the powers that serve our wills and the resistances that we run up against in exercising them is proof, so to speak, of our intermediary condition. By mediating between the world in which we insert ourselves through works, words, deeds, and acts and the intimacy of the self as incarnate in the flesh, one’s own body is the hallmark of the finitude that places its seal on the intermediary being that we are.50 For a philosophical anthropology for which this intermediary condition marks out the field of possibilities for surpassing the real from within, one’s own body is therefore not the “terminus of action, the πράγμα [pragma], but the ̓όργανον [organ]”51 of our effort to exist. The body thus constitutes the center of gravity for a vast inquiry into the variety of experiences of passivity attesting to the centers of alterity that for speculative discourse comprise the metacategory of otherness. If, as Ricoeur explains, practical finitude takes the form of the self’s perseverance with regard to one’s own perspective and self-dilection in opposition to the inertia that sets in when heteronomous orders of frozen systems of habits of thought prevail, the power to persevere has its initial anchorage in the fact that one’s own body is both the organ of desire and the support of that freedom of movement through which we intervene in the course of the world’s affairs. Fredric Jameson is rightly suspicious of the “proliferation of theories of the body . . . and the valorization of the body and its experience as the only authentic form of materialism,”52 which he regards as symptomatic of the reduction of the temporalhistorical present to the body’s material features. He consequently ­criticizes “the materialist emphasis on the body today as being fully as ideological as [the] timid spiritualism”53 that he identifies with the present’s metaphysical backing. Conversely, we catch sight of the way that action traverses the body, for example, in the ease and grace in dance performances and athletic exhibitions of bodies in motion.54 In sum, one’s experience of one’s own body includes both the certainty of the powers evidenced first by one’s capacity to move one’s own body and of the resistance that gives way to the effort one makes. As the “organ of desire. . . [and] the support of free movement,”55 the otherness of the flesh with regard to the initiatives we take therefore precedes ontologically the distinction that in Freedom and Nature Ricoeur draws between the voluntary and the involuntary. Otherness, Ricoeur points out, “signifies primordiality with respect to any design.”56 Just as the will presupposes the involuntary and the involuntary is only meaningful because of the will, the “I can” from which our powers proceed is the ground of the “I want” in which our projects take root. The otherness of the flesh, which as our mode of incarnation in the world is the emblem of the givenness of existence as regards the absence of aseity in a life that we each adopt as our own, thus anchors the capacities inscribed in the human condition—capacities articulated by philosophical anthropology’s

52  The Practical Synthesis recourse to a vocabulary of the abilities of the capable human being—in the primordiality of one’s own body with respect to every design we have and every task or project that we undertake. The centers of alterity that Ricoeur identifies with the otherness of the flesh, of others, and the voice of conscience consequently mark out the trajectory of a mode of discourse for which experiences of passivity attest to the otherness of the other on various registers. First, the i­nclusion of one’s own body in the apprehension—distinct from all objectifying ­representations—of the “certainty of the acting self and its contrary, which is also its complement, corporeal passivity”57 registers different degrees of passivity. The resistance denoted by the body attests to a degree of passivity calling for the effort to move. Furthermore, the effects of capricious humors evince a degree of passivity in that these humors are foreign and hostile with respect to their visceral discharges. Ricoeur identifies yet another degree of passivity with the resistance offered by external objects and things. Through the act of touching, we are assured of the certainty of our own existence as much as that of the external world and the people and things in it.58 Confrontations with others evince a second center of otherness distinct from, and at the same time related to, the otherness of the flesh. Just as one’s own body is the zero origin of one’s openness to the world, individuals and groups are receptive to values, mores, customs, and the like from different vantage points. When later I  attribute conflicts between groups and communities to the right of each to pursue its own destiny in accordance with its own convictions and beliefs, I will recall how this receptivity to values rooted in diverse cultural traditions is constrained by the finite perspective of each. Every group, Ricoeur emphasizes, “displays traits of orthodoxy, [and hence] of intolerance to marginality.”59 Perhaps, he even suggests, “a radically pluralist, radically permissive society is not possible.”60 At the same time, the “no” of morality from which moral and legal injunctions proceed provides a critical check when it comes to the role the law plays in advancing the course of freedom through redressing systemic injustices. The impotence that Ricoeur identifies as the inverse side of power with respect to our practical finitude has as its negative corollary the suffering inflicted on one human being by another in this regard. The reign of suffering, he therefore stresses, commences “[w]ith the decrease of the power of acting, experienced as a decrease of the effort of existing.”61 This decrease of the power to act is the hallmark of the evil that makes the victim the object of another’s hatred, disregard, or disesteem. For an ontology of being as power and act, the other’s victimization is therefore the negative underside of the dialectic of praxis (acting) and pathos (undergoing or being-affected) that prevents the self from occupying the place of its ultimate foundation. The third center of alterity is that of the otherness of conscience. As the voice of the Other, conscience bears witness to the obligation that places

The Practical Synthesis  53 one in another’s debt. The address to conscience, which in the metaphor of the silent, interior voice appeals to our ownmost convictions, stands as testament to the vertical dimension of this call. In heeding this call, we follow the command or the injunction addressed to us. As such, listening to the voice of conscience signifies the act of “being-enjoined by the Other”62 that, in contrast to the alternatives proposed by Heidegger and Emmanuel Lévinas, Ricoeur maintains constitutes the structure of selfhood.63 The practical aspects of finitude that Ricoeur places under the notion of character consequently reveal their affinity with philosophical anthropology’s thematic concern with human being as power and act when, set against the backdrop of the demand for autonomy, the phenomenon of being-enjoined marks the apogee of the experiences of passivity attesting to the alterity of the flesh, the alterity of others, and the alterity of conscience. When, in Chapter 6, I relate the vertical dimension of the call to conscience to the feeling of height, I will draw out how the demand for justification that Ricoeur sets against the unjustifiability of evil has its vis-à-vis in exemplary moral and political acts. The feeling of absolute dependence that in religious experience gives rise to a feeling of height provides an important touchstone in this regard. For this feeling attests in its own way to a center of alterity corresponding to the radical dimension of the element of passivity that inheres in the givenness of existence. Set against the assertion of radical autonomy, this feeling of absolute dependence, Ricoeur tells us, “is perhaps the only possible truth of religion, [calling as it does for] . . . an avowal that in some ways I receive existence.”64 The demand for autonomy, which previously I opposed dialectically to the absence of aseity, I will therefore maintain, has as its intermediary the act of being-enjoined. Being-enjoined is consequently the corollary counterpart of being as power and act inasmuch as the structure of selfhood itself constitutes the ground of the demand for totality that sets the practical finitude of character against the infinitude of happiness.

Happiness By suggesting that the practical representation that, at the second stage of Ricoeur’s analysis, founds the idea of the person on the fragile synthesis of one’s character and the quest that rules over the totality of one’s life is requisite to the capacity to gather together incidents, episodes, and events in telling one’s story, I propose in the course of the following discussion to elaborate on how this practical synthesis is at the same time both the ground of and the justification for the notion of being as power and act. Stories, Arendt reminds us, reveal the agent who is not the author of the tale but is instead “its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer.”65 Set within the web of human affairs, action produces events that figure in these stories, in which both agents and patients

54  The Practical Synthesis are caught up. For Arendt, the stories that eventually can be told of every individual life as stretching between birth and death are enacted by protagonists who are their heroes. As such, these enacted stories in each case confer on the idea of the person the specifically singular meaning of each individual’s life.66 The features of equality and distinction that for Arendt are the hallmarks of the condition of human plurality owe their moral, ethical, and political attributes to the capacity to respond to the task with which each of us as a person is in principle charged. If, as Ricoeur remarks, “I irrupt as myself”67 in projecting myself in acts that are the results of my decisions and choices, my insertion in the world through words and deeds bears the marks and traces of the work I carry out in making this life my own. The capacity to recount one’s story in a manner that is acceptable to oneself, which Ricoeur numbers among the capacities inscribed in the human condition, sets the self’s availability with regard to the range of values concomitant with the field of human experiences in relief. All values, Ricoeur insists, are in principle accessible to everyone, so that each of us is capable of every virtue and every vice. These values, however, are accessible to us only in a way that is peculiar to each of our fields of motivation. Inasmuch as one’s character designates the “factual givenness of. . . [one’s] free openness to the full range of the possibilities of the being man,”68 the finite totality of one’s existence can be adumbrated only in terms of the values for which each of us makes ourselves available. One’s character, he therefore maintains, is one’s “essential community with all that is human”69 outside oneself as seen from the place where each of us stands. Set against the infinitude of happiness, which he explains has the same breadth as reason, the finitude of one’s character is the emblem of our common humanity as seen, felt, and experienced from the place in the world given to us through our mode of incarnation as flesh. Setting the infinitude of happiness against the finitude of character, which as a limitation rooted in the medial function of one’s own body is the originary source of the primary narrowness of one’s openness with regard to one’s total field of motivation, brings the place of reason in the “perfection of the total work of man”70 sharply into focus. Ricoeur explains that, for Aristotle, the “function of man”71 inheres in the undivided totality of a life governed by the good at which, for Aristotle, all actions aim. Conversely, for Ricoeur, the two terminuses or destinations of pleasure and happiness are the source of the disproportion that places Aristotle’s view into question. According to Ricoeur, the “polarity of ἐπιθυμία [épithumía] and ἔρωϛ [eros]”72 internally divides the perfection of partial pleasures from the plenitude of happiness. Finite pleasures aim at a good rooted first in the wants of the body and then in material social and cultural needs; happiness transcends the finite perfection of these partial pleasures. The infinitude of happiness is thus the sign of the

The Practical Synthesis  55 transcendence of all finite pleasures.73 As I will examine at greater length in the next chapter, pleasure ends in the perfection of finite processes and acts. Conversely, happiness culminates in the “termination of a destiny, of a destination or an existential project.”74 Feeling, Ricoeur accordingly tells us, manifests the implicit intention of tensions and drives fueled by needs and desires. As such, feeling announces the meaning of wanting, attaining, and enjoying something by revealing the affective state or stage of the movement toward the satisfaction of needs, wants, and desires. We might wonder whether setting the terminus of pleasure against that of happiness irrevocably splinters the Aristotelian idea of the “human ἔργον [ergon], that is, man’s existential project considered as an indivisible whole.”75 Ricoeur stresses that, when it comes to this existential project, happiness is no longer an empty idea opposed to that of character but instead inheres in the fullness of the affective terminus that he names beatitude. Inasmuch as we are destined to mediate between the demand for happiness and the contingency of our characters in living up to the death that ultimately overtakes us, the demand for totality that is the sign of reason’s supreme decree supersedes the Aristotelian notion of an existential project governed, as it were, by the good at which all actions ostensibly aim. By insisting that the idea of totality that is the source of the disproportion between the infinitude of happiness and the finitude of character resides in the human will, Ricoeur accentuates how the totality demanded by reason is the vis-à-vis of the infinitude of happiness’s transcending aim. Consequently, we can read the signs of this demand only in events, works, words, deeds, and acts that fulfill, however partially, our hopes and expectations of the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be. Reason, Ricoeur therefore maintains, “is that in me which demands totality”76 inasmuch as the desire for happiness has as its object the destiny according to which I continue to pursue my ownmost existential project. As such, the supreme good that confers its meaning on this project as a whole rules over the work we undertake in quest of our own identities. By suggesting that the totality demanded by reason provides a first indication of a hermeneutical response to the aporia to which the loss of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility gives rise, I want to highlight how Ricoeur’s reflections on reason and happiness prepare the ground for a broader consideration of the role imagination plays with regard to the adequation of the rational and the real. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics (which I  will take up in Chapter 5) reveals how acts that we admire reply to the demands and exigencies of the situations calling for them in singularly appropriate ways. The suitability of the act is borne out by the “rightness” of the course of action set in motion. As such, the fittingness of the act is the emblem of its exemplary value. The two dimensions of the structure of action that Ricoeur attributes respectively to realized accomplishments

56  The Practical Synthesis and unfulfilled demands are first expressed by the intention according to which we continue to pursue our ownmost existential projects. Inasmuch as reason has the same breadth as happiness, the supreme good from which this intention draws its meaning and force places its seal of perfection on a life lived in accordance with it. The imperfect mediation that Ricoeur opposes to the Hegelian temptation to totalize time brings to the fore the ethical and political imperatives inhering in the task of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind (Chapter 4). Just as the perfection of all partial pleasures is the sign of reason’s decree, the seal of perfection that the good, the right, and the just place on the work we undertake in response to questions, problems, and crises arising out of the history of which we are a part roots itself in the fittingness of the initiatives we take in answer to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves. We therefore first catch sight of the challenge posed by the aporia to which the idea of our common humanity gives rise in the wake of the destruction of all “grand” historical narratives in our perspectival orientations to the range of human values that counterpoints the finitude of our characters. By crediting one’s availability for values to this perspectival orientation, Ricoeur emphasizes how the humanity that Arendt attributes to the two essential features of plurality—equality and ­distinctiveness—inheres in one’s character. Like Ricoeur, Arendt regards each person as irreplaceable and hence as singularly unique. For her, “[j]ust as there exists no human being as such, but only men and women who in their absolute distinctiveness are the same, that is, human, so this shared human sameness is the equality that in turn manifests itself only in the absolute distinction of one equal from another.”77 One’s character, Ricoeur tells us, is that humanity that, predicated on one’s essential community with all that is human beyond one’s field of experiences, is seen and apprehended from the vantage point of one’s own view.78 Limitations owing to one’s character, history, tradition, customs, and mores are consequently hallmarks of the plurality of claims, aspirations, and demands that for Arendt and Ricoeur are indicative of the distinctiveness of each of us both as individuals and as members of the groups and communities to which we belong. By excluding happiness from the search for a principle of morality, Kant, Ricoeur points out, relegates happiness to the power of desire by identifying happiness with self-love. The subtle tutelage that Ricoeur maintains Kant’s first Critique exercises over the second Critique obviates the enigma that arises by reason of the fact that the good, the right, and the just commend themselves to us only through exemplary expressions testifying to them.79 We cannot overlook how the narrowness of our perspectival orientations limits our availability to the range of human values to which exemplary works, deeds, acts, and lives attest. Moreover, one’s attachment to oneself, which “is the bass note of every affective desire,”80

The Practical Synthesis  57 transforms the zero origin of one’s field of motivations into the center of the self’s adhesion to itself. Egoism finds its occasion and its temptation in this preference for oneself. At the same time, this adhesion to oneself is the “unitive bond of all affective aims”81 illuminated by preferential desires that enter this field of motivations as images of wants and needs. As such, each person is an exigency requiring that the reconciliation of his or her own character and happiness be brought about in a way that is singularly unique. Understood as life’s lasting agreeableness, this “ἐποχή [season] of happiness”82 thus places itself under the aegis of the supreme good for which happiness is the affective sign. Spiritual—that is, non-vital—feelings evoked by representations of the good, the right, and the just consequently are promissory tonalities of an as yet unfulfilled order realized through the love of others and the devotion to exemplary ideals. The infinitude of happiness adumbrated in experiences in which we receive the assurance of the rightness of this love and devotion turns the dilection of the self toward others. The reclamation of the idea of happiness thus ties the totality demanded by reason to an eschatology of freedom for which the vision of a reconciled humanity that is the object of a poetics of the will serves as a guide. When, in Chapter  4, I  address the impossibility of emancipatory critiques that claim to be absolutely radical, I therefore propose to show how the wager of imagination that I will say is the spring of the power to surpass the real from within replies to the aporia that haunts the effort to place the good, the right, and the just under some formal rule.

Respect In view of the plurality of mores, aspirations, convictions, and beliefs populating the field of human experiences, we could ask if respect might be the remedy for conflicts among individuals, communities, and social, ethnic, and religious groups. Like the transcendental imagination, which in the first stage of an analysis aimed at raising the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous philosophical discourse is the medial term between sensibility and understanding, at this second stage of analysis, respect constitutes the third term between the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness. Whereas the synthesis of sensibility and understanding is projected on the object, the synthesis of character and happiness “has to become for itself,”83 inasmuch as the unity of the “object” at which this synthesis aims is the person. Unlike Arendt, who insists that the notion of an “end in itself” is the paradoxical consequence of the coordination of means and ends in the experience of homo faber,84 Ricoeur opposes the idea of the person as the “object” on which this synthesis is projected both to the deficiency of the I of I think and to the instrumentality of the means-ends relation. The synthesis of understanding and sensibility is the condition of the objectival character of

58  The Practical Synthesis consciousness; the synthesis of the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness is the condition of the objectivity that, formally speaking, founds the esteem owed to all on the absolute worth of each, and to which, Ricoeur tells us, Kant gives the name, humanity. The notion of being as power and act, which as I  have indicated is the thematic touchstone of a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being, acquires a critical handhold in the idea of respect. Insofar as respect makes the practical representation of human being possible, the synthesis of character and happiness tasks the idea of the person with safeguarding each person’s meaning and worth. At the same time, since no one coincides with this practical representation, each must treat herself and others “as an end.”85 Inasmuch as humanity is the mode of being in which our ontological constitution is anchored, only by treating ourselves and others as an end and not a means can we take a stand against the violence that defaces and mutilates the integrity of the person. The fragile suture of sensibility and morality throws a bridge across the existential fault line running between the “feeling . . . of being ‘wounded’ by the duty that requires the sacrifice of my sensibility and of being ‘raised’ to the rank of a rational being.”86 Insofar as the idea of the person takes hold in the representation of the projected synthesis of character and happiness, the supreme good, the right, and the just to which we aspire raises us to the rank of a being for whom the adequation of the rational and the real is our ownmost vocation. Ricoeur’s decision to embrace an ethical vision of the world in which freedom and evil would be understood in terms of each other is subsequently the cornerstone of a philosophical itinerary where the idea of humanity founded on the imperative of respect inscribes itself in a sustained meditation on and inquiry into the task of making freedom a reality for all. How, we could ask, could the idea of justice acquire its federating force apart from the idea that the synthesis of character and happiness that Ricoeur insists inheres in the practical representation of the person is one that in principle is the prerogative of all? Must we then at the same time renounce the idea of our common humanity in defense of the right of individuals, groups, communities, and nations to pursue their destinies in accordance with their own heritages, aspirations, convictions, and beliefs? By anchoring the imperative of respect in the fragile suture of character and happiness, Ricoeur opens the door to a series of reflections leading from the analysis of the disproportion that places its stamp on the intermediacy of human being to a hermeneutics of liberation, which draws out the political and ethical implications of the necessity of preserving the tension between the spaces of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations in the wake of the destruction of “grand” historical narratives and the discreditation of narrative justifications of the victors’ claims to the right to rule. For a philosophical itinerary that follows the path of these reflections, the fragile synthesis that

The Practical Synthesis  59 makes the practical representation of human beings as persons possible is the sign of the humanity of each. As such, this humanity inheres in the capacity to take up the projects that for each of us, as for the groups and communities of which we are a part and to which we belong, are the emblems of the freedom we exercise in quest of realizing the promise of our ownmost possibilities. Adopting a moral philosophy that moves in the direction of a Kantianism that countenances the duality of good and evil therefore would be fatal for a philosophical anthropology for which the concept of fallibility opens the way to an expansive inquiry into a freedom incarnate in words, deeds, acts, and works. By taking a fallen sensibility as a starting point, a philosophy that countenances this duality espouses an ethical vision of the world in which the passions of glory, power, and greed are already disfigured (Chapter 3). The obfuscation of the enigma of respect by the subtle tutelage Kant’s first Critique exercises over the second voids the principle of reason of its practical character as regards finite rational beings. Hence, the a priori incentive that for Kant inheres in the feeling of respect for Ricoeur touches the heart of our freedom in the choices we make only if the duty prescribed by the law moves our wills. The “disposition of desire for rationality”87 thus remains the spring of the demand in which the feeling of respect takes root. Accordingly, the aspiration for freedom concretized by exemplary expressions of the good, the right, and the just marks out the horizon of the totality for which these exemplary expressions are promissory signs. The disproportion that at the second stage of Ricoeur’s analysis of the intermediacy of human being makes respect the third term between the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness is in fine indicative of the task and the challenge to which the imperative of respect gives rise. Like the transcendental imagination, which remains secreted away in the soul, we catch sight of instances of respect only in the humanity of historical human beings in which the good, the right, and the just prevail. It may be that the idea of respect makes the idea of human being possible insofar as it delineates the ideal mediation of sensibility and practical reason. At the same time, to the degree that this ideal mediation acquires its practical—that is, real—handholds in customs, mores, and values rooted in our histories and traditions, the fragile synthesis of reason and desire is at the same time the source of conflict and strife. In view of the virulence of the aporia unleashed by the destruction of “grand” historical narratives, we might wonder whether the plurality of aspirations and demands stemming from different axiological systems of values shipwrecks the task that for Ricoeur inheres in the idea of humanity. When, in the next chapter, I rehearse his analysis of our affective fragility, I propose to set this task against the conflict within the human heart. For, torn between vital and spiritual desires, the heart (θυμός) proves to be the principle par excellence of the intermediary being that we are.

60  The Practical Synthesis

Notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 253. 2. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 61–62, 94; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 61. 3. For a discussion of the configurating operation that gathers together incidents and events into narrative wholes, see Ricoeur’s account of mimesis in Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 64–76. For an account of narrative identity, see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 140–68. 4. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 257. 5. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 264. 6. Narrative’s mimetic refiguration of the practical field of our experiences bears out the fact that poetics never stops borrowing from ethics with respect to the traditional narratives or the storyteller’s invention of a plot. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 59; see also Richard Kearney, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2004), 112–14; Keith H. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1996), 53–90. Basso’s ethnography of the Apache world highlights the significance that local stories and legends have for the sense of a place. The stories he recounts of Old Man Owl (Mú hastiin), for example, inscribe the meaning of the toponym “Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills” (Gizhyaa’itié) on the physiognomy of the local landscape. According to Basso’s Apache friends and teachers, these stories were told by the ancestors at a time when humans and animals conversed with each other without difficulty. One story tells how two beautiful sisters tricked Old Man Owl, who was always thinking about women. One of the girls went to the top of one of the hills, and called out “Old Man Owl, come here! I want you to rub me between my legs!” (2) After Old Man Owl had climbed half-way up the hill, the other sister called out in like fashion. More excited still, Old Man Owl walked down the first hill and began to climb the other one. When he was half-way up, the first girl called out again. Old Man Owl “went back and forth, back and forth, climbing up and down those hills. Then those beautiful girls just laughed at him” (63). The inscription of an ancestral wisdom on the landscape transforms the physical topography of a place into a configuration of sites where memories, stories, and legends endure. Place-names—which for the uninitiated might be nicely descriptive toponyms—thus constitute a part of the geography of systems of thought constructed through native accounts of places and events that give a rhythm and contour to the memorial time of a people’s history. 7. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 49. 8. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 252; see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). 9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78 ff.; cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135; Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 50. 10. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 47. 11. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 87. 12. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 86.

The Practical Synthesis  61 3. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 87. 1 14. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 87. 15. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 86. 16. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 51. 17. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 51. 18. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 250. 19. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 251. According to Ricoeur, emotion is a corporeal disturbance related to a value judgment regarding the good or evil, or the pleasure or pain to be pursued or avoided. Just as the involuntary is the origin of needs originating with our bodies as the mode of our incarnation in the world, emotion “consists not only in affective, but also in motive anticipation of goods and evils” (256) that valorize the ends to be pursued. Emotion is therefore rarely cerebral. Rather, its corporeal disturbances overcome the will’s inertia through inciting desire. Desire, Ricoeur explains moreover, is also an emotion, the realm of which “is as broad as the field of human values which are not only vital, but also social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual” (264). 20. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 251. Ricoeur explains that “[a]ffectivity uncovers my bodily existence as the other pole of all the dense and heavy existence of the world. . . . [T]hrough feeling a personal body belongs to the subjectivity of the Cogito. But how can we reach feeling in its purity? . . . This opaqueness of affectivity leads us to seek the light which the Cogito refuses to itself in the objectification of need and of bodily existence” (86). 21. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 86. 22. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 265; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man. According to Ricoeur, “[i]nclination is the specific ‘passion’ of the will. Only an inclined, aroused will can also determine itself. Its activity is imbued with this specific passivity” (52). 23. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 265. 24. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 265. 25. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 62. 26. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 63; see also Arendt, The Human Condition, 176ff. 27. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 61. 28. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 119. 29. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 120; see Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 3ff. 30. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 120. 31. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 121. 32. Arendt, The Human Condition, 10. 33. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 123. Character constitutes a limit point at which idem identity and ipse identity appear to be indistinguishable. Conversely, the temporal character of these lasting dispositions ties the notion of character to the narrativization of one’s personal identity. 34. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 123. 35. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 124; original in italics. Ricoeur points out that whereas in Freedom and Nature, he was not especially concerned with the problem of mediation as regards the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary, in Fallible Man, the theme of disproportion set the question of the third, intermediary term between the poles of finitude and infinitude (124n11). 36. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 59; see also Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Essentializing representations of marginalized and execrated groups draw on the way that the slippage from ipse identity to idem identity clothes the identities projected on these groups and their members with their seeming immutability by removing the bite of time. The grip on memory of

62  The Practical Synthesis commemorative acts, Ricoeur reminds us, is the “apanage of all those enamored of glory” (85–86) who take refuge in the celebrated accomplishments of a group or nation at the expense of the victims of a founding violence. The legitimation of the victors’ claims to the right to rule thus comes at the price of the denigration and humiliation of subjugated, colonialized populations. See also my “Crisis, Conflict, and the Struggle for Recognition,” Philosophy Today 57, no. 1 (2013): 72–83. 37. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 124. 38. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 307. 39. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 334; see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 327. 40. See, for example, Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 59; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 164. Ricoeur stresses that we would misunderstand aesthetics if we were to insist that literary narratives exchange all ethical determinations for aesthetic ones. 41. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 56. 42. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319. 43. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319. Ricoeur asks how “mental and physical predicates [could] be ascribed to one and the same entity, if the human body is not at once a body among others and my body” (319). For him, in order to account for this presupposition, we must “base our language on the ontological constitution of those entities called persons” (319). 44. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319; see Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 45. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319. Donald Davidson’s thesis regarding an “ontology of the impersonal event” (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 74; original in italics) leads Ricoeur to draw out this connection between the enigmatic phenomenon of one’s own body and the sense of belonging concomitant with the self’s insertion in the world. While Davidson initially stresses action’s teleological character, this descriptive feature of Davidson’s theory for Ricoeur “is quickly subordinated to a causal conception of explanation” (74), thereby eclipsing the bond between the self and its acts. 46. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319. By assigning two types of criteria, one mental and the other corporeal, to the same entity, Derek Parfit problematizes the question of personal identity as it relates to the phenomenon of one’s own body. Since Parfit overlooks the distinction between ipse identity and idem identity, his only recourse is to “consider the phenomenon of mineness in relation to the factual character of the event” (132) as superfluous. Ricoeur accordingly stresses that reducing one’s own body to one among others impersonalizes it. As such, this impersonal body is no longer mine. 47. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 319. 48. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 321. 49. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 321. 50. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 324. 51. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 56. 52. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 713. Jameson underscores the impossibility of escaping the present’s situatedness between the past and the future. 53. Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 173; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 56. 54. See, for example, my “Effort, Play and Sport,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 10, no. 4 (2016): 392–402. 55. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 324. 56. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 324. Ricoeur explains that the radical opposition of flesh and body that in Husserl’s “self-proclaimed egology” (323) stems from its strategic position opens the door to an ontology of the flesh.

The Practical Synthesis  63 By distinguishing between the flesh and the body, Husserl formulates the idea of ownness that sets flesh and body apart. From this vantage point, the flesh through which we are incarnate in the world is “most originally mine and of all things that which is closest” (324). 57. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 321. 58. See, for example, Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 15–56. 59. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 251. 60. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 251; see Paul Ricoeur, “Obstacles and Limits to Tolerance,” Diogenes 44, no. 176 (1996): 161–62. 61. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 320. Ricoeur adds that “[m]ost of these sufferings are inflicted on human beings by other human beings. Here, the passivity belonging to the metacategory of one’s own body overlaps with the passivity belonging to the category of other people; the passivity of the suffering self becomes indistinguishable from the passivity of being the victim of the other (than) self. Victimization appears then as passivity’s underside, casting a gloom over the ‘glory’ of action” (320). 62. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 351. 63. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 354; see Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–90. According to Ricoeur, “[i]f no ontology is available in that field, then Emmanuel Levinas is completely right, ethics has to be completed without any ontology. But then we lose . . . the root in a philosophical anthropology, because we are not allowed to use the term capability, imputability; and the whole set of ideas around the ‘I can’ ” (284). 64. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 32; see Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature. Ricoeur stresses that “I do not posit myself in existence: I have nothing out of which to produce my presence in the world, my Dasein; consciousness is not creative, to will is not the same as to create. Thus my enigmatic, unengenderable presence, this brute existence which I  find outside of me, secretes the most radical negation—the absence of aseity” (455). 65. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184. The theme of agents and patients appears throughout Ricoeur’s oeuvre. See, for, example, Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, xxxi; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 55; Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 320; Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 207. 66. See Paul Ricoeur, “The Human Being as the Subject Matter of Philosophy,” in The Narrative Path: The Later Works of Paul Ricoeur, ed. T. Peter Kemp and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 89–101; Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 425–40. Like Arendt, lives for Ricoeur merit narrating. The narrative art’s anchorages in the practical field of our experiences accordingly bear out the pre-narrative quality of a life story that demands to be told. 67. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 172. 68. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 64. 69. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 61. The kinship between this essential community and the cosmopolitan view that for Arendt frees individuals from their private perspectives attests to the condition of plurality inhering in the idea of humanity. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), especially 70–72.

64  The Practical Synthesis 0. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 93. 7 71. Aristotle, cited by Ricoeur in Fallible Man, 64; see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 14–19. 72. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 93. 73. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 65. Ricoeur points out an inquiry into human desire that foregoes the stage of a transcendental analysis is incapable of distinguishing between the sum of partial pleasures and the “highest good” or the “unique desirable” that Ricoeur reminds us remains intermixed with them. 74. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 93. 75. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 66. 76. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 66. Ricoeur explains that since the feeling of happiness anticipates its realization more than it provides the latter, this feeling offers the assurance that the thing toward which we are directed is also that which reason demands. Hence, according to him, while reason “opens up the dimension of totality, . . . the consciousness of direction, experienced in the feeling of happiness, assures me that this reason . . . coincides with my destiny, that it is interior to it and, as it were, coeval with it” (68–69). 77. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 61–62. 78. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 61. It is worth noting that Ricoeur’s analysis of character has a counterpart in Arendt’s understanding of how the inter-esse of the public space liberates each of us from our private perspectives. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 22–78; Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 128–32. 79. See Chapters 5 and 6. See also Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred. Ricoeur credits Jean Nabert with effecting the break that releases the ethical sphere from the “subtle tutelage that the transcendental procedure of Kant’s first Critique exercises on the second Critique” (114). Accordingly, Ricoeur stresses that “the entry into the ethical problematic occurs in experiences of passivity, gathered by feeling, before being taken up in reflection: fault, failure, solitude. . . .  [I]t is in the protest against the ‘unjustifiable’ . . . that empirical consciousness takes the unmeasurable measure of the height of absolute consciousness. The unjustifiable is what cannot be measured by the mere violation of those norms to which moral conscience equates itself” (114). For Ricoeur, the Critique of Practical Reason’s elucidation of the “synthesis of will and law in autonomy” (Fallible Man, 73; see Pamela Sue Anderson, “Ricoeur’s Reclamation of Autonomy: Unity, Plurality and Totality,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall [New York: Routledge, 2002], 15–31) stifles the Kantian philosophy of the person outlined in the Foundations (Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964]). Ricoeur’s admitted betrayal of Kantian orthodoxy thus situates the idea of the person within a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. See Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Biography,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 15−16. I am grateful to Morny Joy for her comments on Ricoeur’s critique of the subtle tutelage exercised by Kant’s First Critique over the Second. 80. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 11; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man. Ricoeur remarks that “we could say that self-love and the customary form that my existence ‘contracts’ constitute the affective and practical perspective of my existence” (58).

The Practical Synthesis  65 1. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 55. 8 82. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 66. Ricoeur stresses that the totality of meaning demanded by finite human beings directs this intermediary being’s desire “toward happiness as a totality of meaning and contentment” (71). 83. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 14. The “unity of happiness and character is a task, and the task is what we call the idea of the person” (13–14). 84. Arendt, The Human Condition, 155–56. 85. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 14. 86. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 14. 87. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 77. This receptivity to a moral interest, which Ricoeur attributes to the property of the Kantian notion of Gemüt, constitutes desire’s positive relation to the moral law. For Ricoeur, the “Gemüt is that region in which reason, the representation of duty, has an immediate ‘force’ and is capable by itself of taking ‘preference’ ” (77). Admiration and awe, which in the feeling of the sublime is the emblem of the disproportion between an object’s unboundedness or its incomparable magnitude and the imagination’s power to provide an adequate representation of it, stand as testament to sensibility’s affinity for the unconditioned demanded by reason. Similarly, wonder “expresses the irruption of the ‘other’ into consciousness” (Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 260). Only by means of a certain subreption does respect for the object in nature replace the idea of the humanity in us. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 114. For Kant, the sublime can only “be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness either [as] (sic) in the object or because the object prompts us to present it” (98) in its illimitable boundlessness. Kant emphasizes that the feeling of the sublime is initially contra-purposive with respect to the imagination’s power to provide an adequate representation of the object that evokes this feeling in us. The feeling of respect elicited by an incomparable magnitude of something that is infinitely large or expansive (the mathematical sublime) or by the admiration aroused by nature’s unbridled power (the dynamical sublime) accordingly springs from the way that the object of our liking awakens us to our supersensible vocation. Through attuning us to the thought of the unconditioned, the sublime not only harmonizes imagination with reason’s ideas. This mental attunement also conforms to the feeling produced by ideas for which the absolute whole is the determinate measure of reason’s autonomous law. Hence, the feeling of respect is the moral sentiment that crowns the experience of the sublime. No object of the senses can therefore truly be called sublime, insofar as “reason demands absolute totality as a real idea” (106). The violence done to the imagination in striving to provide a sensible intuition of the object of our liking is the proof of the idea of our humanity, since sublimity can only be found in the mind.

3 Affective Fragility, Vulnerability, and the Capable Human Being

The idea that feeling reveals how we are related to the world through restoring our affective relation with it marks a further step in Ricoeur’s analysis of the disproportion that makes human being intermediary between the poles of finitude and infinitude. At the first stage of this analysis, a transcendental reflection on the power of knowing reveals how imagination is the medial term between one’s perspectival orientation and the transcending word. At the same time, the deficiency of the I of I think with regard to the idea of the person calls for an inquiry into the practical dimension of the intermediary being that we are. The moral imperative to treat oneself and others as an end and not as a means brings to the fore the task inhering in the idea of humanity. At this second stage of analysis, the respect owed to all by reason of the humanity of each places its seal on the practical dimension of human being as intermediary between the finitude of character and the infinitude of happiness. That respect is felt only on the “object” constituted by the synthesis of character and happiness in the person vests the idea of respect with the force of a directive idea inasmuch as this synthesis is one that each of us is tasked with bringing about. Founding the autonomy of the subject on the idea of respect thus brings to the fore the internal relation between a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being and the idea of humanity that sets the imperative of justice at the heart of the process of freedom’s actualization. The “originary fragility of human reality”1 that Ricoeur attributes to the conflict within the human heart invites a broader consideration of the place of feeling in convictions and beliefs that fuel our aspirations and demands. Feelings that give convictions and beliefs regarding the good, the right, and the just their affective color and depth touch the innermost regions of our being in this regard. In the course of the following discussion, I propose to outline how the intentions that Ricoeur maintains are constitutive of the passions for having, power, and glory take hold first in feelings anchored in experiences of one’s own flesh, then in the feeling of being capable, and finally in the feeling of one’s own self-worth. Taken together, the quests to which these intentions give rise—the quest for

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  67 founding the self on what is most intimately one’s own, the quest for the self’s actualization through exercising one’s capacities and powers, and the quest for the recognition by others of one’s inestimable worth—are hallmarks of the idea of respect’s motivating force. For a philosophical anthropology for which the notion of being as power and act is the ­vis-à-vis of the capacities inscribed in the human condition, the feeling of disproportion borne of the pathos inhering in the pathétique of human misery is the innermost sign of the intermediary being that we are.

The Restless Heart The conflict to which Ricoeur attributes our affective fragility is the source of the drama within the human heart. When, in Chapter 1, I rehearsed the global perspective adopted by Ricoeur in opposition to the human sciences’ dispersal among disparate disciplines, I  indicated how, by placing the problem of disproportion at the center of his philosophical anthropology, Ricoeur attributes the originarily dialectical structure of human reality to the interplay between human finitude, the transcending intention corollary with the pole of infinitude, and the third terms that bridge between them. In the same way that the synthesis of sensibility and understanding evinces the work of the transcendental imagination, the synthesis of character and happiness is borne out by the work (ergon) we undertake as capable human beings who are responsible for our words, works, deeds, and acts. Through uniting the structure of consciousness with our manner of inhering in the world, the correlation between knowing and feeling brings to the fore feeling’s role in revealing the élans of our being. The reciprocal genesis of feeling and knowing, which eludes both a transcendental critique of the power of knowing and a meditation on the idea of the person, thus leads to a reflection on the way that, torn within itself, the heart (θυμός) constitutes the fragile moment par excellence of our intermediary condition. Drawing on Plato’s insight that the heart itself brings about the dynamic transition between life (βίος) and the word that speaks and that is addressed to us (λόγος), Ricoeur attributes this fragile moment to the internal conflict between “vital affectivity or desire (ἐπιθυμία [épithumía]) and the spiritual affectivity that the Symposium calls ἔρωϛ [eros].”2 Where vital demands terminate in pleasure, intellectual or spiritual demands end in happiness. Sometimes, Ricoeur explains, the heart sides with reason, as in the case where one summons one’s energy and courage in defense of one’s ideals; sometimes it places itself in the service of desire as an enterprising power inciting anger or irritation. Feelings more than just register the tensions and drives that animate the pursuit of finite pleasures and the quest for happiness in this regard. By revealing the implicit intention of these tensions and drives, feeling also manifests their directive aims. Feeling therefore not only “ ‘serves’ the tendency by ‘expressing’

68  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability it  .  .  .  [through] projecting valences on the very appearance of the world,”3 but it also provides objective signals by means of which action can regulate itself. Qualities felt on persons or things reveal the state or phase of the inclination that orients and guides desires first expressed as wanting something, then as moving toward their fulfillment, and finally as satisfied or frustrated. These qualities, Ricoeur stresses, are intentional expressions of “an undivided bond with the world.”4 By projecting their affective correlates on the good for which we strive or the evil we seek to avoid, the “affective tones meant on things”5 consequently reveal our moral dispositions manifest in the actions we undertake in response to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves. The intentional structure of feeling, Ricoeur explains, is therefore extraordinary inasmuch as feeling “designates qualities felt on things, on persons, on the world”6 at the same time that it manifests the way in which we are inwardly affected by them. The correlates of feeling, he emphasizes, are hardly objects. Rather, these intentional correlates are qualities founded on the objects on which they appear. These correlates “cannot be separated from the representative moments”7 of the thing. On the contrary, the reciprocal genesis of knowing and feeling means that, as correlates without autonomy, they are floating qualifiers. Thanks to feeling, the loveable and the hateful, for instance, enter regions of our experiences through our interactions with people and things that affect us. Unlike perception, which anchors the natural belief in the existence of a thing in an object’s sensorial properties, feeling consequently “does not posit any ‘being.’ ”8 Rather, feeling manifests the way in which we are affected by qualities felt on things, persons, and the world. Moreover, these qualities reveal and express the “inwardness of an I.”9 Accordingly, for Ricoeur, the reciprocity of knowing and feeling precedes, as it were, the fundamental cleavage between subject and object. In contrast to the duality constituted by the objectification and exteriorization of things, which inheres in the power of knowing and the intentional structure of consciousness, feeling manifests “a relation to the world that constantly restores our complicity with it.”10 For a philosophy of feeling for which human fallibility is a thematic concern, the interiorization through feeling of the world that the power of knowing otherwise sets over against us unites an “intention directed toward the world with an affection of the self.”11 We feel ourselves existing in and through our, and others’, words, works, deeds, and acts thanks to the ways that they affect us. The interiorization of the world through feeling thus remedies the scission between self and world instituted by the power of knowing. Our inherence in the world is more profound than all duality and all polarity in this regard. The ante-predicative, hyper-objective relation to the world that music, poetry, and fiction augment iconically through raising everyday feelings above themselves (as I will explain in Chapter 5) therefore acquires its

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  69 fullest significance in light of the way that qualities felt on things redress the objectification of the world and things and persons in it. Philosophical anthropology’s culmination in a philosophy of feeling marks out how the disproportion between sensible perceptions and intellectual determinations in the case of the transcendental critique of the power of knowing, and between character and happiness with regard to the idea of the person is internalized within the human heart (θυμός). As the transitional zone between vital and spiritual desires, feeling manifests the inner conflict that Ricoeur maintains is a function of our most primordial constitution at the point where this conflict is most acute. Torn between pleasures answering to the needs of the body and social and cultural needs, and the devotion to ideas exemplified in moral and political acts that we admire, the heart suffers the primordial discord of these two fundamental affective projects. The conflict that sets the finitude of pleasure against the infinitude of happiness accordingly places its stamp on the affective fragility of the intermediary being that we are. Pleasure, Ricoeur explains, “completes and perfects isolated, partial, finite acts, or processes.”12 Pleasure is accordingly a finite perfection that, while it places its seal on our bodily life, dwells only in the instant. Through magnifying the preferential love for the life we cherish as our own, pleasure ratifies the rootedness of the “center of perspective”13 that each of us is. Through binding us to this life, the perfection of pleasure reveals that living is the existential condition of all the activities in which we engage. Conversely, happiness perfects all partial pleasures in perfecting the work that each of us undertakes in adopting the life that is given to us as our own. By emphasizing that the word “ ‘life’ designates the person as a whole,”14 Ricoeur stresses that this work is constitutive of the totality at which one’s life as a whole—that is, the whole of one’s life—aims. For him, the word “life” taken as a singular term acquires the “appreciative, evaluative dimension of ergon”15 when, following Aristotle, the work or the task assigned to us with regard to the practices and skills we adopt and develop as musicians, doctors, or architects, for example, qualifies this life. If, as Ricoeur maintains, this ergon stands in the same relation to life as standards of excellence do to particular practices, the seal of perfection that happiness places on this work draws its force from the “good” to which we aspire. The term “life,” he accordingly explains, “denotes both the biological rootedness of life and the unity of the person as a whole.”16 The choices we make as regards the practices that we embrace and the ideals we espouse are indicative of the complex relation between standards of excellence, the goods internal to them, and these goods’ integration into our life plans. Under the sign of happiness, the idea of the “good life” establishes a connection between phronesis and phronimos, a connection that Ricoeur tells us “becomes meaningful only if the man of wise judgment determines at the same time the

70  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability rule and the case, by grasping the situation [calling for a response] in its singularity.”17 The conjunction of the singularity of the case and the rule summoned by it, which in the case of the phronimos stems from this judgment’s fittingness in answer to the demands of the situation calling for it, is the touchstone for a broader consideration of the imagination’s role within the field of action. Phronesis, which according to Aristotle is a virtue that cannot be taught, has its corollary analogue in the power of invention evinced by the suitability of a work in answer to a problem, question, or crisis as apprehended by the author, composer, or artist, as I will explain more fully in Chapter  5. Works and acts that renew the field of intersubjective relations and experiences stand as proof of how the rule summoned by the case owes its force to this capacity to respond in singularly appropriate ways to exigencies and demands arising from a history in which we are caught up. The testimonies given by exemplary acts and lives to the good, the right, and the just are ciphers of the seal of perfection that happiness places on the work (ergon) we undertake in response to the injunction to follow these examples of goodness, mercy, and justice. As the “most excellent form of pleasure itself,”18 happiness sanctions the plenitude of the good, the right, and the just for which exemplary words, deeds, and acts stand surety as promissory signs.

Reason and Happiness By suggesting that the polarity of the perfections that rule over the tendencies and aims of vital and intellectual or spiritual desires sets the conjunction of exemplary acts and the infinitude of happiness in relief, I want to highlight how the seal of perfection that happiness places on the work of human being as regards the existential project that we each take up calls for an inquiry into the place of reason in the process of freedom’s actualization. Happiness, which according to Aristotle is the “desirable in itself,”19 perfects this human work (ἔργον) under the aegis of its transcending aim. If, as Søren Kierkegaard has said, “purity of the heart is to will one thing,”20 the note of sanction that happiness places on the destination of this work is the sign of the heart’s innermost desire. When, in the course of my reflections on the process of freedom’s actualization I relate the role reason plays in bringing about the adequation of the rational and the real to the exemplary value of moral and political acts, I will emphasize how the plurality of claims and aspirations rooted in different cultural traditions sets the demand for totality against the hubris of a style of thinking that dares to elevate itself to the level of the absolute. We must not lose sight of the fact that aspirations for the good, the right, and the just rooted in different cultural traditions and systems of values give rise to diverse claims, convictions, practices, and ideals that as often as not are the source of conflict and strife. The destruction

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  71 of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility, I will therefore say, is the staging ground for a hermeneutics of liberation in which the note of sanction that happiness places on the work of human being marks out the further horizon of the idea of justice’s federating force. How, then, might reason be an invitation to happiness? If, as Ricoeur maintains, we can apprehend the idea of happiness only through forming some conception of a destination as regards the work we undertake in adopting this life as our own, the totality of meaning at which the whole of this life aims is one that only reason can demand. Reason, Ricoeur therefore tells us, inheres in the existence of the person, if by existence we understand the work (ergon) that each of us undertakes as our own life project. The “identity of existence and reason in the person”21 accordingly takes shape through those words, works, deeds, and acts through which we insert ourselves in the world. Through interiorizing reason, feeling reveals that reason, which Ricoeur stresses has the same breadth as happiness, is one’s own. Thanks to feeling, which is “the very belonging of existence to the being whose thinking is reason,”22 our consciousness of the directions of our lives, which we experience in the feeling of happiness, offers the assurance that this reason is both coeval with and internal to the destinies that we each pursue. Our capacity for happiness is thus reason’s vis-à-vis. For human beings, the totality demanded by reason is never given in advance. Hence, only this demand can reveal the meaning of the “Aristotelian ̓εϕίεσθαι (pursuit, tendency, quest).”23 As the portent of happiness, only this demand can mark out a path for perfecting the work we undertake in pursuing the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be in accordance with a freedom that is human and not divine. We must therefore not confuse the demand for totality that, under the aegis of the quest for the good, the right, and the just, constitutes the reason for continuing this work with totalizing pretensions. Ricoeur stresses how elevating the historical present to the “absolute established as an observation point, even a tribunal, for all the formations, and especially cultural formations, that have preceded it”24 is a sign of the hubris of such totalizing ambitions. Treating “history as a collective singular erected as its own subject—History—is the most obvious expression”25 of the claim of self-knowledge. At the same time, this claim harbors a second one that is opposed symmetrically to it. From this other vantage point, in place of the whole of History, the present constitutes the singular historical moment on which the claim to absolute reflection raises itself. Privileging this historical moment underscores how, as the “epoch of the triumph of reason,”26 modernity is at once both self-referential and self-valorizing. Modernity’s adequation of reason, history, and truth thus places its seal on the interpretation of the present even when this interpretation speaks in favor of its ironic inversion.27 The trap laid by these two inversely related claims obviates how initiatives rooted in axiologically diverse

72  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability mores, customs, and values fuel the multiplicity of styles and manners of temporalizing history. By reducing the plurality of destinies to which individuals, communities, and groups lay claim to a matter of difference, which as Ricoeur reminds us in the case of the notion of culture taken in a sense removed from that of formation and instruction ends up only with “an apology of difference for the sake of difference, which, finally, makes all differences indifferent, to the extent that it makes all discussion useless,”28 these two claims together place the conjunction of reason’s demand for totality with the infinitude of happiness under erasure. That the terminus of happiness rather than that of pleasure inscribes reason’s demand for totality within the field of action brings to the fore the connection between the value of projects sanctioned by ideas of the good, the right, and the just and feelings that attest to the part we have in being. These ideas are the justificatory grounds of the initiatives we take. The reasons we have for undertaking these projects thus have as their correlates feelings that affirm the value of the courses of action that we pursue. The love of the good, the right, and the just places reason’s demand for totality under the aegis of the seal of the good, the right, and the just’s perfection of the work we undertake as capable human beings. As signs of the self’s devotion to these ideals, reason acquires its practical character in answer to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves in accordance with our convictions and beliefs. In the next chapter, I  will argue that, in contrast to the conceit of some supposedly sovereign consciousness, a motivated freedom draws its force from the capacity to reply to these exigencies in singularly appropriate ways. Inspired by a belief in the good, the right, and the just, the will to redress disparities in the distribution of material goods, opportunities, social advantages, lack of food security, and the refusal of the right of residency and basic protections for refugee and migrant communities, for instance, sets the love of others, the pursuit of justice, and the welcome extended to the stranger above all other reasons for intervening in the course of the world’s affairs. Could we then say that the desire, aspiration, and even demand to redress the harm stemming from the disregard for and violence toward others lies at the root of a liberatory impulse that aims at the emancipation of all? In view of systemic injustices that disproportionately disadvantage already marginalized individuals and groups, and in light of the legacy of the violence of historical conquests across the globe, this liberatory impulse is the express sign of the idea of humanity that, under the aegis of the idea of respect, makes freedom’s realization a task. Given the diversity of values, convictions, and beliefs that fuel different communities and groups’ aspirations and demands, we might wonder whether any common rational order toward which the disposition of desire is ostensibly aimed is forever out of reach. Earlier, I asked if we must renounce the idea of our common humanity in defense of the right

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  73 of individuals, communities, and groups to be different. This right in no way countermands the hope of an order in which the good, the just, and the right would prevail. On the contrary, by recognizing the legitimacy of the desire on the part of different individuals, communities, and groups to pursue their own claims and aspirations, this right sets the liberatory impulse that animates the quest for the totality that reason demands against the hegemony of one community, group, or nation. Why, then, might we be receptive to this demand? By suggesting that this demand touches us through feelings that assure us that we have a part in being through the life-work (ergon) we undertake, I mean to highlight how, as Jean-Luc Nancy tells us, touch “sets something in motion.”29 The schematization of the fundamental feeling that Ricoeur names Eros, thanks to which we seek the plenitude that is the promise of the part we have in being, takes the form of a diversity of feelings in which this fundamental feeling is particularized. These feelings, which Ricoeur tells us are called spiritual by virtue of the ideals that constitute their objects, are indicative of the reach of our affective lives. As such, these spiritual feelings adumbrate the diverse sources of happiness together with their transcending aims. Our participation in various forms of interpersonal relations and in “tasks of supra-personal works that are ‘Ideas’ ”30 schematize this fundamental feeling in the modalities of ϕιλία [philia]. For Ricoeur, “no organized, historical community, no economy, no politic, no human culture can exhaust this demand for a totalization of persons, [and] of a Kingdom”31 to which we already belong insofar as we pursue the good, the just, and the right. On the contrary, the devotion to “Ideas” from which this friendship springs bespeaks how the height of feelings born from our participation in these “Ideas” binds reason’s demand for totality to the whole of our affective existence. Only an “Idea,” Ricoeur stresses, can provide a horizon of meaning for interhuman participation in it. Hence, only by “taking part in a creative theme that gives the general drift of its meaning to the community and thus endows it with a bond and a goal”32 can we participate in the realm of interhuman affairs. The schematization of feeling that Ricoeur suggests accounts for feelings that have an ontological bearing consequently sets reason’s demand for the unconditioned in relief. According to Ricoeur, the unconditioned, “which is thought but not known by means of objective determinations, is experienced in a modality of feeling”33 that is essentially formless. Not all feelings, he explains, are formless. At the same time, atmospheric feelings, moods, or Stimmungen, which he tells us are counterparts to the schematization from which a typology of happiness springs, are correlates of the transcending intention of our openness to being. If, with Ricoeur we maintain that “being is ‘beyond essence,’ if it is horizon,  .  .  . feelings that most radically interiorize the supreme intention of reason”34 might be said to be beyond form. Hence, for him, “ ‘moods’ alone can manifest the coincidence of the

74  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability transcendent, in accordance with intellectual determinations, and the inward, in accordance with the order of existential movement.”35 The height of the feeling of belonging to being, which Ricoeur emphasizes ought to become “the heart of our heart,”36 is the affective sign of the ultimate or highest good to which we aspire. In light of the disproportion that is the source of our affective fragility, and in view of the anguish we experience owing to the lack we have in being, Joy is therefore the “only ‘affective’ mood  .  .  . worthy of being called ontological,”37 since only joy attests to the fullness of the part we have in being in answer to the pathétique of human misery.

Fragility and Fallibility: Having, Power, Worth The stages of analysis that Ricoeur undertakes with regard to the power of knowing, the idea of the person, and our affective fragility mark out the progressive enrichment of the originating affirmation that is crowned by joy. At each stage, the transcending intention sets the finitude of perspective, of character, and of vital desires against the existential truthintention of discourse, the practical totality adumbrated by the idea of the person, and happiness as the totality of contentment within the human heart. First, with regard to the power of knowing, the “vehemence of the Yes”38 constitutes the transcendental moment of the originating affirmation inhering in the truth-intention of discourse. Second, by treating ourselves and others as an end and not as a means, we affirm the transcending intention inhering in our essential openness to and availability for the work (ἔργον) that grounds each of us in the practical order of existence by reason of our humanity. This humanity, which Ricoeur stresses we should understand as a totality that has yet “to-be-made-tobe,”39 is the condition of possibility for the practical synthesis that he tells us places the idea of the person under the aegis of that of respect. Finally, thanks to the transcending intention that sets the infinitude of happiness against finite pleasures, the originating affirmation of the Yes experienced as joy places its seal on the human heart. No negation, Ricoeur tells us, is felt more intensively than this affirmation’s existential negation. Through interiorizing itself “in the sadness of the finite,”40 this existential negation is the soil in which the complaisance of acedia takes root. Nourished by feelings of loss, regret, dread, and the corrosive power of time, this complaisance toward sadness expresses itself in these negative terms. This sadness, Ricoeur remarks, is the “specific ‘mood’ of finitude rendered conscious of itself.”41 Anguish is accordingly the “feeling par excellence of [the] ontological difference”42 that separates us as intermediary beings from being. In response, the “Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite”43 is hope’s answer to the pretense of a sovereign consciousness, to the fear that Arendt attributes to the will to power born of impotence, and to the despair of all amor fati.44

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  75 For a philosophical anthropology for which the originarily dialectical structure of human reality gives rise to a meditation on the disproportion that makes human being intermediary between the poles of finitude and infinitude, the capacities inscribed in the human condition anchor the transcending intention that gives the notion of being as power and act its meaning and force in the field of human experiences. Drawing on the vocabulary of abilities, Ricoeur attributes the power to speak, to act in concert with others, to remember, to recount one’s own life story, and to hold oneself accountable for one’s actions to these capacities.45 Conversely, the vocabulary of inabilities or lesser abilities attests to our vulnerabilities as fragile human beings. These inabilities or lesser abilities, which are due to the infirmities of old age and illness as well as to the dissymmetrical power relations that adversely affect disadvantaged individuals and groups, are the negative underside of the capacities we exercise as capable human beings. The “possibility of moral evil”46 that inheres in our fragile constitution gains an insidious foothold in vulnerabilities owing to the ways that systemic inequities in the distribution of social goods such as education and employment opportunities, for example, magnify these inabilities or lesser abilities. In view of this possibility of moral evil, the originating affirmation that in the analysis of the disproportion inhering in the dialectical structure of human reality founds its transcending intention on the capacities that we exercise as persons consequently gives rise to the paradox that, since “as a hypothesis human beings are autonomous, they must become so.”47 Asking “What kind of being is a human being that he or she can give rise to the problematic of autonomy?”48 highlights how the liberatory impulse of a philosophical anthropology for which the theory of the process of freedom’s actualization runs like a recurring theme replies to the fragility and vulnerability of our intermediary condition. As the prerogative of subjects of rights, the autonomy of capable human beings, Ricoeur tells us, is a condition of the possibility of the task that juridical practice adopts as its own. The fragility of our intermediary condition would be entirely pathological if not for the fact that we are “called on to become autonomous”49 because in some way we already are so. Thanks to the capacities we have by virtue of our incarnation as flesh, the transcending intention inhering in the power of knowing, the practical totality of the idea of the person, and the joy of yes at the heart of our hearts founds the quest for meaning, value, and worth on our will, desire, and power to be. The effort to think evil and freedom together, which I  noted previously entails an ethical vision of the world in which freedom is incarnate in works, words, deeds, and acts that are the signs of our humanity, consequently seeks to discover the features of a genuine quest masked, as it were, by passional pursuits that for Kant are already “fallen forms of human affectivity.”50 According to Ricoeur, we only know the quests

76  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability through which the self seeks the assurance of its integrity in their disfigured forms. For him, greed, the lust for power, and vainglorious pursuits are departures or deviations from the fundamental quests for what is one’s own, for the power to live one’s own life, and for the esteem won through the recognition of others. The “aspects of objectivity that are interiorized in the feelings of having, power, and worth”51 accordingly bring to the fore the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of the intersubjective relations that constitute the bonds between ourselves, others, and the world. Through revealing our adherence to the “goods” we value, these feelings bear out how our manner of inhering in the world owes its vitality to the primordial quests for which the passions of having, domination, and vanity are the “fallen” signs. By shattering the prestige of the perverse effects of the passional pursuits of possession, domination, and glory, the “imagination of innocence”52 that for Ricoeur enables us to catch sight of these passions’ essential character redeems, so to speak, the respective modalities of human desire from these “fallen” states. If, as he tells us, the relation between the self and others “is constituted only in connection with things”53 belonging to the cultural, political, and economic spheres, the perversion of these passional pursuits by the avarice for things, power, and vainglory distorts and disfigures the social, economic, political, cultural, and historical bonds that constitute the web of interhuman affairs. The imagination of an order or a kingdom in which the quests marred by the perversion of these passional pursuits appear as if in a state of innocence is manifest in words, deeds, and acts attesting to the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be. Thanks to exemplary words, deeds, and acts that augment the rule of the good, the right, and the just through proffering models that we can follow, we can understand passional pursuits as “fallen” by the ways that they infect interhuman relations through the contagions they spread. The genuine quest that Ricoeur identifies with the passion for having consequently is one where the “I” first founds itself on the experience of one’s body as one’s own. In the previous chapter, I  rehearsed how, for an ontology of the flesh, dissociating the notion of substance from existence frees the lived body from objectifying representations. As the organ and support of the initiatives we take, one’s own body mediates between self and world. The flesh is accordingly “most originally mine and of all things that which is closest.”54 The ownness of the flesh is the primordial condition of the practical synthesis that the idea of the person places under the rule of the normative expectation of respect. Prohibitions that in positive law safeguard the integrity of the person are legal expressions of this expectation.55 Regard for the integrity of the person thus has its root in the ownness of the flesh, the violation of which extends from the willful disregard of the rights of others to exercise their capacities and powers to torture and murder.

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  77 It is therefore possible to draw a line between “unjust having and a just possession”56 that would distinguish among individuals without excluding any from their rightful place within the sphere of interhuman affairs. From this vantage point, the perversion of the passion for possession rests on the quest that, together with the passion for exercising one’s ownmost capacities and powers and the passion for esteem, is constitutive both of the self and of human praxis. The power exercised by one individual or group over another, and the disregard and systemic abuses that are signs of another’s disrespect and disesteem, are sources of the malignancies hollowing out social and political structures that sanction this power-over. The annexation of the apparatus of economic-technical processes and systems objectified through the institution of this power privileges the relation to things that one can possess and over which one can exercise control. The pervasive alienation that Karl Marx attributes to the appropriation of the surplus value extracted from the labor process is symptomatic of the perversion of the pursuit of possession in the guise of the will to dominate. This relation to economic objects or goods, the constitution of which extends the range of human needs beyond the vital wants of the body, sets in motion the cycle of feelings relative to the acquisition, possession, and preservation of things that are available to us. Accordingly, Ricoeur tells us that we experience both the control we have in taking possession of things of which we can avail ourselves and our dependence on those things in the feeling in which having something as one’s own reverberates in the self’s adhesion to people, goods, and objects.57 While the second passional pursuit, namely, the passion for the pursuit of power, is irreducible to the first, it is at the same time related to it. This second passion, which Ricoeur emphasizes animates the quest for selfaffirmation in conjunction with the first and the third, has its corrosive, inverse corollary in the quest that I related above to the will to dominate. The passion for possession seizes on the institutional organization of hierarchically ordered systems of relations in the interest of accumulating goods; the will to power-over capitalizes on the rational organization of the productive forces of labor, for example, in order to amass the means to dominate others. The allegedly rational organization of the productive forces deployed to preserve and reproduce the species-being of humanity in the struggle against nature constitutes the material context for inequitable distributions of goods, opportunities, and even rights, including the right of citizens to participate fully and freely in the process of public will formation as, for instance, when gerrymandering, voter, and voterregistration suppression expressly target minority communities in order to deprive their members of this right. As I  will explain more fully in the next chapter, every socioeconomic regime inscribes these relations of power and domination within the institutions sanctioned by some political authority. The objectification of the hierarchical organization of

78  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability relations of power and these relations’ asymmetrical distribution through the social and political systems in which power circulates accordingly fuel feelings of indignation and outrage that manifest how we and others internalize and are affected by structural inequities and inequalities that ignite the demands for redress and reparations in the name of social, economic, and political justice.58 The power one individual or group exercises over another and its inscription and institution within a hierarchical order that holds social and political actors hostage to the system of asymmetrical relations to which they are subject is the face of the violence of the will to dominate. This power, Ricoeur stresses, is the “occasion par excellence of the evil of violence.”59 This violence is accordingly “equivalent to the diminution or the destruction of the power-to-do by others.”60 The reign of suffering that he maintains commences with the “decrease of the power of acting, experienced as a decrease of the effort of existing,”61 distinguishes the pathological deformation and even ruin of the integrity of both authors and victims of this violence from the more fundamental power that a phenomenology of the “I can” identifies with the power-to-do. The “no of morality”62 is the emphatic riposte to all the figures of evil in the intersubjective realm. This no to the violation of the integrity of persons and all that is properly their own safeguards the power we have to intervene in the multiple domains of human affairs. The assurance that, in the course of pursuing our life-plans and goals, it is we, ourselves, who act and suffer is the sign of the confidence that the power inhering in our abilities is our own. This power “declares itself”63 both in the various ways in which we insert ourselves in the world through words, works, deeds, and acts and in our belief in it. To believe, Ricoeur therefore stresses, is already to be capable, just as a lack of confidence in one’s own abilities is already to be deprived of one’s powers. A third modality of power interposes itself between power-over, which for Arendt is the anti-political principle leading to the destruction of the political condition of plurality, and the power-to-do. For Arendt, the “human ability not just to act but to act in concert”64 is the source of all political power. Inasmuch as this power originates with human beings who, in acting together found a new body politic, as in the founding of Rome or the French or American Revolutions, politics guarantees the equality of every individual despite the absolute distinctiveness of each. At the same time, questions concerning the rightful distribution of power acquire their specific contours against the backdrop of the hierarchical structure of social life. Political power, Ricoeur reminds us, is a good like others at the same time that it regulates the distribution of material and social goods such as education, health care, food security, and employment opportunities. Hence, while political power constitutes a framework for distributive justice, it also raises the problem of its self-constitution, its self-limitation, and ultimately, its authority.65 The

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  79 possibility of a nonviolent power and an authority that “would propose to educate the individual to freedom”66 inheres in the condition of plurality that for Arendt is the conditio sine qua non and the conditio per quam of all political life. This possibility, Ricoeur tells us, endows history with a meaning inasmuch as the imagination of a nonviolent power governs “all efforts to transform power into an education for freedom.”67 Reinhart Koselleck highlights the internal connection between this education and the concept of Bildung’s anthropological presuppositions. As foremost a “political metaconcept,”68 Bildung binds the autonomy of subjects of rights to the process of self-formation that Koselleck insists is requisite for conducting oneself in a responsible way. For him, ideology critiques and social diagnoses of the seemingly “outmoded-sounding Persönlichkeitsbildung (‘building of character’),”69 which at one time vested the concept of Bildung with its cultural, political, and even moral force, paradoxically denounce the process that is the condition for reforming or revolutionizing praxis, thereby signaling the critic’s self-surrender at the same time these critiques and diagnoses of contemporary social ills place their emancipatory objectives at an infinite remove. The passion for glory is the third passion that Ricoeur singles out as the disfigured double of the passions of the trilogy of possession, domination, and honor. Like the passions for possession and domination, the passion for glory dissembles its constituting intention. However difficult it might be, Ricoeur insists that it is nowhere more necessary to distinguish the perverse form of this passion from its constituting intention than in the quest for esteem. The refusal to recognize the worth of another gives rise to the moral harm that Axel Honneth attributes to the violation of the normative expectation of respect. In much social theory, he explains, “motives for rebellion, protest, and resistance have generally been transformed into categories of ‘interest’ ”70 based on material inequalities in the distribution of social opportunities and goods. Conversely, models of conflict that take as their starting point “collective feelings of having been unjustly treated”71 highlight how negative moral experiences of the refusal to acknowledge the rights, capacities, and integrity of members of different groups on multiple planes—personal, social, institutional, and juridical—motivate struggles to expand the intersubjective field of relations of recognition. Honneth emphasizes that such struggles can only be characterized as social when their objectives and aims provide the bases for collective individuals’ solidarity. Hurt feelings can “become the motivational basis for collective resistance only if subjects are able to articulate them within an intersubjective framework of interpretation that they can show to be typical for an entire group.”72 Victims of systemic inequities and injustices aim collectively at transforming debilitating conditions through engaging in political action, broadening our understanding of the greater community of which we are a part and influencing our outlooks. Experiences of disrespect and disesteem are thus the moral drivers

80  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability of normative expectations of collective movements for which struggles for recognition are the staging ground for the reclamation of a group’s integrity, identity, and feeling of self-worth. Ricoeur, too, remarks on how feelings of indignation are indicative of a normative expectation regarding the social relation forged through the moral bond of a mutual esteem. The concept of social esteem, he points out, varies with the “interpretive conditions corresponding to the symbolic character”73 of the mediations from which social bonds are formed. Orders of recognition based on the socioeconomic complex and the sociopolitical complex, and the economies of standing where claims to the idea of justice rest on diverse evaluative criteria, are concrete, empirical manifestations of the symbolic orders on which these complexes and economies of standing rest. Ricoeur cautions that the “aim of constructing a common humanity, too quickly characterized by solidarity, is in no way incompatible with this pluralization of different criteria of standing.”74 The phenomenon of hospitality for which the act of translation provides a model is indicative of the capacity we have for comparing the incomparable, which Ricoeur insists provides a privileged path of access to the common good insofar as we avail ourselves of values that differ from our own.75 For him, the “collapse of social hierarchies that placed honor at the apex of values of esteem and . . . the promotion of the modern notion of dignity, along with . . . the egalitarian form of recognition”76 fuel the distinctive pathos that, couched in the contemporary vocabulary of authenticity, animates the collective dimension of the demand for the recognition of the identity to which each group lays claim. Insofar as the symbolic order serves as the guardian of identity, the authority of this order therefore constitutes the “site of the strongest connection between the self and the norm and the very principle of its fragility”77 both in struggles for recognition and in the quest for esteem. The normative expectation of the “favor of another’s recognition”78 points up the requirement of mutuality concentrated, as it were, in this quest. Inasmuch as one’s self-esteem depends upon the recognition of another, one’s feeling of one’s own self-worth remains precariously dependent upon others’ opinions. Ricoeur stresses that the idea of human being in oneself as in another is “the proper object of esteem,”79 to which Kant gives the name humanity. The formal objectivity of the concept of esteem accordingly brings to the fore the affective character of the relation of mutuality on which the feeling of esteem depends. The “quid of esteem, . . . [namely, that which] I esteem in others and for which I expect confirmation from others in myself,”80 is the emblem of our inestimable worth. Accordingly, the feeling for which the idea of the humanity in each of us is the formal object is founded on the relation of this mutual regard. One’s belief in one’s own worth, which Ricoeur reminds us is “neither seen nor known,”81 consequently becomes one’s own by way of the respect and approbation of another. This mediate relation of the self

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  81 to itself compounds the sense of fragility owing to the fact that esteem is merely opinion. This insight into the interiorization of the self’s relation to itself in the feeling of self-worth thus crowns the series of analyses that, by raising the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse, sets the moral significance of the concept of esteem at the apex of a meditation on the intermediary being that we are. The impetus that in the concept of esteem inscribes the formal objectivity of the idea of humanity in the quest for mutuality is at the same time the source of a moral predicament stemming from the normative expectation that fuels struggles for recognition. How, we could ask, could one regard words, works, deeds, and acts of others that conflict with, and even pose a threat to, one’s own convictions, way of living, and beliefs as expressions of the humanity that is also one’s own? The “opining nature of esteem[, which] keeps the search for recognition within the mean zone of affectivity,”82 multiplies the difficulties that prohibit us from invoking or imposing some common accord under the aegis of a universal history that gives one cultural tradition, nation, or comity of nations pride of place. We therefore cannot lose sight of how the aporia unleashed by the destruction of “grand” historical narratives intensifies the challenge posed by the idea of humanity in the absence of any metahistorical plot capable of equaling this idea. But neither can we renounce reason without renouncing the worth of persons safeguarded by the imperative of respect. As an “anthropologically derivable mission of self-determination, undertaken in accordance with reason and with ethically, socially, or politically redeemable norms,”83 the Enlightenment and its project, Koselleck reminds us, transcend their epochal definition. The “capacity to undergo the influence of the moral incentive”84 to treat others as an end and not a means thus places the constituting intentions of the passions for having, power, and esteem in service of a liberatory impulse for which the feeling of one’s own self-worth is a sign. Reason, Ricoeur accordingly remarks, would not move us to action if it were not an incentive but only a principle. Born from the heart of the difference that makes human being intermediary between the poles of finitude and infinitude, self-esteem is the apogee of the feeling of one’s own inestimable value and worth. The sense of mutuality that in struggles for recognition surpasses the kind of reciprocity that operates under the law of equivalences exceeds the formal representation of the person as an end to be realized as existing for herself in this regard. Ricoeur remarks that this “representation has a status of objectivity [only] insofar as the worth of this end is not merely for us, but in itself.”85 Moreover, the other in whose eyes one’s existence has value and worth is in fine oneself. This affection of the self by the other is the “highest point to which self-consciousness can be raised in θνμόϛ.”86 As such, the elevation of human desire in accordance with reason’s demand for totality is the inspiriting force of the task for which humanity is the express object of

82  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability the process of freedom’s actualization in answer to the fragility of the intermediary being that we are. The preceding reflections and commentary on the three stages of analysis that for a philosophy of human fallibility mark out the itinerary of the effort to raise the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse draw my own undertaking to the threshold of another series of analyses in which the liberatory impulse of this philosophical anthropology figures. Apart from the capacities articulated by the vocabulary of our abilities, the possibility that inheres in the task that has the idea of humanity as its object—that is, the task of making freedom a reality for all within the history of humankind—would be an empty construct. The hermeneutics of liberation that I intend to sketch out calls for a further series of reflections in order to draw out the connection between the imagination’s operative role in surpassing the real from within, prudential wisdom (phronesis), and the idea of justice’s federating force. Ricoeur’s conviction that, unlike exemplary expressions of the good, the right, and the just, manifestations of evil are incapable of giving rise to a summons inscribes the logic of hope within an ethical vision of the world that dares to think freedom and evil together.87 It remains to be seen whether this logic and that of the superabundance of meaning on which it is founded has a practical correlate in the capacity to refashion the given order of existence through words, works, deeds, and acts that renew our manner of inhering in the world. We therefore cannot lose sight of how the plenitude that in the myth of Eros overflows the poverty that is Penia is indicative of how, as signs of humanity, these words, works, deeds, and acts augment being. If, as Ricoeur stresses, the “Eros that goes toward being is also that which recalls being as its Origin,”88 the desire for reason that is Eros inheres in every act of creation that brings forth something new. Feelings that gravitate around the passions for having, power, and worth fall short when it comes to the quest for the good, the right, and the just to which exemplary instances of courage, wisdom, charity, and justice attest. For not even the “mutual constitution of men in mutual esteem, as long as it remains opinion”89 rises to the level of that creation that causes something to emerge that previously did not exist. This mutual esteem, Ricoeur suggests, is Eros’s best ally inasmuch as it “schematizes itself in a common task that is both inhabited by an Idea and creative of a We.”90 But then, in taking the side of reason, “θυμός, . . . overspills itself in an ardent quest for recognition by means of another esteem”91 from which the vision of a reconciled humanity that is the object of the poetics of the will draws its inspiration. The possibility of this vision’s realization, however, remains tied to the material reality of the cultural traditions that, like one’s character, are both the limit and the horizon of a group or historical community’s openness to others’ values. Threats—real or imagined—of others’

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  83 ways of living bear out the factual narrowness of our availability to the entire range of human possibilities. At the same time, the humanity that inheres in all cultural traditions lends itself to the welcome that in the concluding chapter I will say is the necessary supplement to the rule of justice. We cannot overlook how feelings of worth ultimately refer back to convictions and beliefs for which cultural traditions are the ground and support. Convictions and beliefs are accordingly part and parcel of the evaluative texture of every cultural system. A cultural system confers a meaning on a ritual act, for example, by providing the descriptive context that sets the act within the symbolic framework of practices, conventions, and institutions according to which this act’s meaning can be read. Every proposal of meaning by a cultural work therefore gives rise at the same time to a claim to truth. Works of art, literature, and more generally “works of mind, insofar as they not merely mirror an environment and an epoch but search out man’s possibilities, are the true ‘objects’ that manifest the abstract universality of the idea of humanity through their concrete universality.”92 As such, claims to truth augment the field of human experiences in accordance with the worlds to which cultural works give a figure and a body. Only cultural testimonies, Ricoeur reminds us, endow the relation between oneself, another, and others with its material density. Mediated by cultural signs and works, these “material” relations are inseparable from the evaluative textures of the cultural traditions to which we, like others, belong. The content of the belief in one’s value and worth thereby is bound over to a history in which the quest for identity and struggles for recognition are the proving ground of our common humanity. This quest and these struggles are the hallmarks of the efforts of groups and communities as much as of individuals to exist. The concrete universality of cultural works in which the idea of humanity finds its diverse expressions consequently is the source of the enigma that in the next chapters I will explain gives both the wager of imagination and the conjunction of a work’s singularity and exemplarity their hermeneutical significance and ontological force.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 19. 2. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 82; see Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 16; see also Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 265. 3. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 87. 4. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 89. Ricoeur explains that the intentional analysis of feeling provides the justification of behaviorist psychology, since feeling’s “manifestation of the intention of tensions . . . save[s] the psychical metaphor as a psychic metaphor” (87) as regards the regulative role that behaviorist psychology credits to feeling. 5. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 86. 6. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 84. 7. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 84.

84  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability 8. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 85. Ricoeur emphasizes that “[f]eeling is not positional in this sense; it does not believe in the being of what it aims at. . . . [Rather,] it is because . . . [feeling] does not posit any ‘being’ that it manifests the way in which I am affected” (85). 9. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 85. 10. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 85. 11. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 89. 12. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 93. Ricoeur points out that pleasure is as “total as is happiness; it represents happiness in the instant; but it is precisely this compression of happiness into the instant that threatens to arrest the dynamism of acting in the celebration of Living” (94). 13. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 94. 14. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 177. 15. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 177; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 94. 16. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 178. 17. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 175. 18. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 99. 19. Aristotle, cited by Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 96; see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 14–19. 20. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper and Row, 1948). 21. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. 22. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. For Ricoeur, the “ἐποχή [epochí] of happiness, understood as the lasting agreeableness of life, restores the authentic problem of happiness, now considered as a totality of completion” (66). 23. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 66. Ricoeur remarks that reason, for Kant, “demands the absolute totality of conditions for a given conditional thing” (Kant, cited by Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 102; see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis Whit Beck [New York: Macmillan, 1956], 111; see also Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 316). 24. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 305. 25. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 305. 26. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 309. For Ricoeur, “[o]n the metahistorical plane, the praise of the modern fuses together the presumed total reflection of history upon itself and the reflection of the privileged historical moment. What matters is that the projection of the future is, henceforth, of a piece with the retrospection on past times” (307). 27. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur remarks that the term “postmodern,” which he says is “frequently employed by English-language authors as a synonym for modernity,  .  .  . implies, in its negative form the denial of any acceptable meaning of modern and modernity” (313). For him, “[t]o the extent that the still recent use of the concept of modernity contains a degree of legitimation not only regarding its difference but also concerning its preference for itself, the rejection of any normative thesis unavoidably strips the position that claims to be postmodern of any plausible or probable justification” (313). 28. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 286; see Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 71. 29. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Rethinking Corpus,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, eds. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 85; see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 322. Ricoeur explains that through touch, we are assured of the certainty of our own existence as much as that of the external world, people, and things in it. Accordingly, touch reveals

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  85 the flesh’s characteristic aptitude for feeling, thereby indicating how the flesh designates the capacity for being affected. See also Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 15–56. The chiasma of the flesh, which according to Kearney we should understand “as an ontological ‘element’ in which we already find ourselves—sensing and sensed, speaking and spoken at once” (38), marks out the contours of the crossings between the act of reaching out, touching, and embracing others and the world and one’s ownmost intimate (self-)affection. For Kearney, touching things and people in the world and being touched by them is the distinctive feature of the reciprocal relation between the act directed toward an object or person and the way in which the self is inwardly affected. 30. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. 31. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. 32. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 103. Ricoeur notes that here, the heart and its fundamental availability as regards the inter- and supra-personal schemata of beingwith and being-for is the opposite of care (104). Elsewhere, Ricoeur relates the bonds and goals that vest this creative theme with its social, cultural, and historical contours to the way that the productive imagination mediates between the poles delineated by the ideological phenomenon’s temporal noncongruence with its utopian counterpart. See, for example, Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia; Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. 33. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 105. 34. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 105. 35. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106. 36. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106. 37. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106. 38. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 136. 39. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 136. 40. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 138. 41. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 76. 42. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106; see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). By shattering the conceit that compels our thought to proclaim itself the master of meaning, the enigma of time’s ultimate inscrutability reveals how this difference points to a phenomenon that is inaccessible to hermeneutic phenomenology as such. Ricoeur points out that, when in Heidegger’s analysis the distinction between temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and temporalbeing (Temporalität) is “separated from the idea of the Good,” (269) only the element of the passage beyond remains. The deficiency that, following Augustine’s meditation on the being and the nonbeing of time, Ricoeur maintains strikes at the heart of our experiences of time is the sign of this ontological difference (see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 23–24). 43. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 140. 44. See Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 69. 45. Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 74ff. 46. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 133. Ricoeur emphasizes that “the concept of fallibility includes the possibility of evil in a still more positive sense: man’s disproportion is a power to fail, in the sense that it makes man capable of failing” (145). 47. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 72. 48. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 74. 49. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 73.

86  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability 50. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 111; see Gaëlle Fiasse, “Passions, Imagination, and Ethical Consideration of the Other,” in Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2020), 17–39. 51. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 112; see Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 123ff. 52. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 112. 53. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 113. According to Ricoeur, by dissimulating the “ontological destination of human desire” (100), descriptions of feeling’s regulative function as an adaptive schema simplify the human situation to the point where cultural values appear to mimic vital ones. 54. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 324. 55. Transposed onto the juridical plane, the idea of respect thus sets the autonomy of the subject of rights against the violence that stems from the power one individual, group, or nation wields over another. Accordingly, in later chapters I will ask what place the federating force of the idea of justice has with regard to the rule of law. 56. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 115. 57. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 114. 58. See, for example, Susanne Buckley-Zistel et al., eds., Transitional Theories of Justice (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014). 59. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 220. 60. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 220. 61. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 320. 62. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 221. 63. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 75. Ricoeur explains that this connection between affirmation and power “governs all the reflexive forms by which a subject can designate him- or herself as the one who can. But this simple, direct affirmation of a power to act already presents a noteworthy epistemological feature that cannot be proven, demonstrated, but can only be attested” (75). 64. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 44. 65. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 89; see Ricoeur Reflections on the Just, 105. 66. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 120; see Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 122. See also Paul Ricoeur, Political and Social Essays, ed. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974), 289–91. 67. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 120. 68. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 187. Koselleck explains that, “[w]ith respect to all concrete exemplifications in its life-world . . . Bildung is a metaconcept that constantly adapts to the empirical conditions of its own possibility” (184). Hence, no one cultural heritage suffices to define Bildung. According to Koselleck, if this metaconcept has any “ideal-typical essential features, they are contained in that conduct of life which is always moving on the path of self-discovery” (184). See Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Rabinow notes that “one reason that the term has fallen into disuse is that the term has been laden with the legacy of Goethe’s Romantic heroes struggling with the fate of their souls amidst a cultural philistine world of the rising bourgeoisie” (55). See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 215. Arendt’s conviction that a world fit for human habitation requires a mind trained to

Affective Fragility and Vulnerability  87 take care of it (cultura animi) resonates with the concept of Bildung’s metapolitical significance (212). 69. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 207. According to Koselleck, the “basic anthropological pattern of Bildung aimed at the entire human being” (181). Consequently, the “constantly reflected relationship between reason and sensibility” (181) that Koselleck maintains is vital to the formation of the self is also critical to the exercise of political judgment. 70. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 161. 71. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 165. Honneth points out that not all struggles spring from experiences of moral injury. On the contrary, in many historical cases massive protests and revolts were motivated by an interest in securing the conditions of collective individuals’ economic survival. Accordingly, models of conflict based on the competition for scarce goods highlight the place of interests with respect to the “attempts on the part of social groups to obtain or enlarge control over certain opportunities for their reproduction” (165). 72. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 163. 73. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 202. 74. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 205. Ricoeur also remarks that the esteem accorded a person depends upon the kind of mediation that constitutes the social bond. 75. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 209. 76. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 214. 77. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 85. 78. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 120. 79. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 123. 80. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 122. For Ricoeur, the mutual constitution of selves through the opinions of others marks the “true passage from consciousness to self-consciousness” (121). 81. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 124. 82. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 121. 83. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 179. 84. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 77. 85. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 122. 86. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 124. 87. See Paul Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 184; see also Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 145. 88. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 102. The aspiration for being symbolized by the anabasis of the philosophizing soul has its mythic expression in this anamnesis of the originary wellspring of being. The ontotheological nuance of the desire for being that recalls this Origin consequently encounters its own limit in a philosophical anthropology for which the intermediacy of human being is the context and condition of desire. Myths of innocence and eschatological myths are the boundary posts of the expression of the thirst for being drawn toward the plenitude born from the principle of plenitude that is Poros in the midst of the ontic indignance borne of the poverty that is Penia in this regard. The original wound that Eros carries within himself is therefore at the same time the emblem of the condition of our incarnate freedom. See Chapter 1. 89. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 121. 90. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 121.

88  Affective Fragility and Vulnerability 1. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 122. 9 92. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 123; see Ricoeur, History and Truth, 118–19; see also Timo Helenius, Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Timo Helenius, “Culture as the Necessary Extension of Human Being,” in Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 127–51. Helenius emphasizes how, for Ricoeur, the institution of the idea of humanity in cultural phenomena is the requisite condition for the constitution of an ethical-political subject.

4 The Wager of Imagination

Works, words, deeds, and acts that shatter ideologically frozen practices and habits of thought place the power of imagination on stage. When, in the previous chapters, I  rehearsed how the disproportion to which Ricoeur attributes the fragility of the intermediary being that we are figures in an ethical vision of the world that dares to think freedom and evil together, I sought to keep sight of our capacity to surpass the real from within. At each of the respective stages of his analysis, Ricoeur opposes the transcending intention of discourse, of the practical totality adumbrated by the idea of the person, and finally of happiness to the finitude of perspective, character, and vital desires. This transcending intention is the preeminent feature of a philosophical anthropology for which the potentiality for being is actualized through the power to act. The attempt to think freedom and evil together, which I noted previously for Ricoeur ties an ethical vision of the world to a meditation on an incarnate freedom that is human and not divine, sets the capacity to reply to demands and exigencies—social, ethical, and political—in fitting ways at the heart of our intermediary condition. A reflection on the power to surpass or transcend the real from within through works, words, deeds, and acts that reply to the demands of the situations calling for them thus brings to the fore the place of imagination in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is the inexhaustible source. The scission separating experiences of fault from the realization of the vision of a reconciled humanity (which, as I have noted before, is the object of a poetics of the will) is indicative of the challenge facing the effort to think freedom and evil together following the delegitimation of “grand” historical narratives, the loss of credibility of the subject’s claim to posit itself, and the discreditation of the wish for absolute freedom. In the course of the reflections that follow, I propose first to draw out how the wager that inheres in setting the power of imagination against totalizing pretensions has a privileged place in a critique of critiques that claim to be absolutely radical. The practical and theoretical impossibility of a critique predicated on a totalizing reflection lays bare the necessity of preserving the tension between a past that has already been surpassed

90  The Wager of Imagination and a horizon against which our hopes, expectations, and aspirations stand out. The event in thinking stemming from the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility proves to be especially instructive in this regard. In light of this event, and in answer to the temptation on the part of the subject to proclaim itself to be the master of meaning, the initiatives we take in response to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves vest reason with its historical, juridical, and political specificity.

Ideology, Violence, and Power As a first approximation, the liberatory impulse that for a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being inheres in the originarily dialectical structure of our intermediary condition has its epistemic counterpart in the effort to unmask systemic distortions that perpetuate social, political, economic, and moral injustices. These systemic distortions are the hallmarks of forces of oppression institutionalized in practices that circulate and distribute power within the hierarchical orders of social, economic, and political life. Critiques of the ways that these forces distort and pervert intersubjective relations lay bare social and economic disadvantages, inequalities, and political and juridical disparities based on race, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender, for example. Through exposing structural injustices, every such critique is at the same time the expression of an emancipatory interest for which the disposition inhering in the feeling of respect is the anthropological root. If we stand neither at the beginning nor at the end of history or time but are always in medias res, how, we could ask, can we critique the situations in which we find ourselves without succumbing to the temptation to place ourselves at an infinite remove? The intermediacy of human being is the first indication of the impossibility of distancing ourselves absolutely from all social, cultural, political, and historical contingencies. We could legitimately ask whether a critique that purports to be absolutely radical founds itself on this impossibility, which I will explain in due course places the temporalizing force of the present under erasure. Inasmuch as the initiatives we take in answer to difficulties, problems, or crises calling for a response preserve the tension between the horizon of a past that has already been surpassed and a horizon of as yet unfulfilled aspirations, expectations, and hopes, the present draws its force from the ways that these initiatives contribute to shaping the history of which we and others are a part. Ricoeur reminds us that, in making history in circumstances that we did not choose, the consequences of what we do affects us in ways that we cannot fully foresee.1 In the absence of a metahistorical plot where every action and every initiative falls under the spell of this narrative plot’s allegedly universal logic, reason plays a role in shaping the course of human affairs only inasmuch as it inheres in the

The Wager of Imagination  91 initiatives we take. The ethical and political imperative that tasks reason with making freedom a reality for all thus acquires its practical foothold in the wager for which the power to act is the spring of the present’s temporalizing force. The concept of universality is itself decidedly plurivocal. First, as regards the ethics of discourse, the universality of formal rules of argumentation constitute the prescriptive requirement to which everyone must adhere in order to fulfill their obligation to others and to the institutions governed by these rules. Second, claims regarding rights rooted in the cultural history of one tradition, that of the Enlightenment for example, can have a universalizing ambition. The suspicion that this universalizing ambition masks the hegemony of one historical community or group of nations is indicative of the risk or threat posed by claims to human rights, for example, that purportedly transcend the particular cultural tradition out of which they arise. This second concept of universality both converges and conflicts with the third. For, in a way that still needs to be elaborated, the “kind of eschatological universalism”2 that Ricoeur identifies with the project of humanity acquires its historical handholds through individual works and acts that, as I will explain at length in the next chapter, sanction the possibilities that each holds out. The failure of general social theory to fulfill the requirements of providing a satisfactory explanation of phenomena that hitherto were unintelligible and successfully resisting at the same time systematically rigorous attempts to falsify it places the wager that I will maintain is the riposte to critiques that claim to be absolutely radical on stage. Ricoeur points out that such a theory may have a convincing explanatory power but be weakly supported by such falsifying attempts. This epistemological weakness prevents social theory from attaining the status of scientificity that would authorize distancing itself completely from the ideological phenomenon it denounces. Hence, no social theory can attain a nonideological status according to its own criteria. Ricoeur cautions against replacing an explanation based on social agents’ subjective motivations with an explanation of structural totalities, which leads inevitably to an epistemological trap. Eliminating historical agents’ subjectivity in no way guarantees that the sociologist has risen to the level of a subjectless discourse. Rather, “[b]y a semantic confusion, which is a veritable sophism, explanation in terms of structures rather than subjectivities is construed as a discourse which would be conducted by no specific subject.”3 Ricoeur’s analysis of the phenomenon of ideology accounts for how a combatant social science that denounces systemic distortions in the field of human praxis can fall prey to the pathological condition that it condemns. By asking how a social interest can be expressed in “a thought, an image, or a concept of life,”4 Ricoeur initiates the regressive analysis through which he uncovers the ideological phenomenon’s most basic function, onto which the social pathology identified by Marx is grafted.

92  The Wager of Imagination By importing the model drawn from Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, the concept of ideology that Marx first employs is based on the paradigm of the reversal that inverts the relation between reality and images of it. The “Feuerbachian paradigm of inversion . . . results in the substitution of a divine subject having human predicates for a human subject.”5 By transferring the problem that takes hold in projecting human attributes onto the divine (to which they subsequently become subject) from the sphere of representation to the sphere of production, Marx sets the ideological phenomenon’s dissimulating function against material conditions that are said to order the field of human praxis. The network of symbolic mediations that furnish the structured character of a cultural system with its evaluative texture therefore is more fundamental than are dissembling distortions. On Ricoeur’s analysis, representations and interpretations of social life can be distorted only because this network of symbolic mediations first provides the descriptive context in which the meaning of a ritual act, for example, can be situated “within a cultic system, and by degrees within the whole set of conventions, beliefs, and institutions, that make up the symbolic framework of a culture.”6 No group, Ricoeur accordingly maintains, could provide an image of itself apart from a system of symbolic mediations by means of which social interests can be expressed in thoughts, representations, and concepts of life. Marxist and non-Marxist sociologies offer incisive diagnoses of social ills. However, the decisive question for Ricoeur as for Clifford Geertz is, How does the illness work?7 Apart from the ideological phenomenon’s constitutive role in comprising a system of symbolic mediations, we would be bereft of all resources to articulate our experiences, to inscribe our lives in the web of social and political life, and to formulate life plans and projects in which the meaningfulness of our individual and collective styles and manners of inhering in the world might continue to take shape. Threats posed by others’ ways of living are indicative of the fragility of our identities for which the networks of symbolic mediations comprising our respective cultural systems is both the guardian and the root. The plurality of cultural traditions to which we and others belong is proof of the multiplicity of symbolic systems from which values, convictions, and beliefs spring. The ideological phenomenon’s integrative function, which in each case is constitutive of a cultural system, is consequently the insuperable condition of a group or historical community’s disposition, orientation, and openness to the field of human values.8 The ideological phenomenon’s justificatory function, which for Ricoeur occupies a medial position between this phenomenon’s integrative and dissimulating ones, makes intelligible specific instances where one group dominates another. Ideological thinking assumes its privileged place in the context of the request or demand on the part of a ruling authority for the recognition of its legitimacy by those subject to its rule. By providing

The Wager of Imagination  93 the supplement of belief that fills the gap between the claim to authority and the credit extended to it by the citizenry, the ideological phenomenon extracts the surplus value necessary to maintaining this belief in the ruling authority’s legitimacy from the reserve of cultural meanings that contribute to the cohesion of a social group.9 This surplus value, Ricoeur insists, is intrinsic to all structures of power. According to him, by “overestimating the role of the modes of production in the evolution of society,”10 Marxism fails to grant politics either a genuinely distinct finality or a specific pathology. The lack of interest of Marxist thinkers in problems rooted in the exercise of power—problems that Ricoeur emphasizes are eminently political—stems from reducing the political origins of the surplus value to the economic sphere, where “[a]ll the evil of life in society can only result from surplus value, itself interpreted as the exploitation of labor from the perspective of profit alone.”11 Just as religion stands accused of justifying the power of a dominant group, Marxism itself becomes ideological when it “functions as a system of justification for the power of the party as the avant-garde of the working class and for the power of the ruling group within the party.”12 At the same time, projecting the legality of the proletariat’s economic exploitation by the ruling class as a juridical fiction, Ricoeur points out, is “first the condition of the real existence of the State.”13 Hence, only the autonomy of a body politic constituted through the power that Arendt tells us arises when a plurality of individuals act in concert could account for the hypocritical legality of the system that justifies this economic exploitation as a matter of course. The specific pathology of politics that Ricoeur claims Marxism overlooks takes hold in the conversion of the request or demand for legitimation into an instrument of violence. Through masking the discrepancy between claims regarding the legitimacy of the exercise of power and beliefs in them, the specific instances in which one group dominates another advance its interests at another’s expense. The dissembling illusion of trickle-down economics trades on the way that policies favoring an already economically advantaged segment of the population’s further accumulation of wealth allegedly benefit all members of society. This social ruse actively contributes to the further entrenchment of economic disparities that adversely affect already disadvantaged individuals and groups’ access to educational and vocational opportunities, food security, housing, and health care. More generally, the ideological phenomenon’s dissimulating function draws its force from the way that specific instances of domination trade on the belief in the legitimacy of policies, practices, and institutions that serve the interests of some at the cost of the well-being of others. The conversion of the supplement of belief into the instrument of domination thus gives rise to the systemic violence that, for his part, Marx attributes to the appropriation of labor’s surplus value and that for Ricoeur has its originary source in the structure of power.

94  The Wager of Imagination The paradox of a legitimate violence, which in Chapter 7 I will relate to the place of the rule of law in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization, consequently highlights the role politics plays with regard to the question of power. We must not confuse the privilege of the legitimate violence granted to the State to enforce the rule of law with the evil occasioned by the exercise of one will over another.14 Moreover, for Ricoeur as for Arendt, power is irreducible to violence. How, then, can we define violence in terms of power and at the same time distinguish political power from the uses of force that violate the rights of individuals and groups to associate freely with one another, to voice their opinions and to be heard, and to pursue their own destinies in accordance with their own heritages, convictions, and beliefs? The twin tyrannies of corruption and deception that it has been suggested have replaced sheer violence as the modus operandi of authoritarianism in the world today, and that we might say are stripping away the thin veneer of civilization, supplant the rational need for legitimation by promoting the quasi-religious fervor of nationalist and patriotic sentiments fueled by mythologies of exceptionalism that justify ideologically one group’s domination of others by reason of their alleged religious, cultural, or racial superiority.15 No authority, however, rules only by force. The supplement of belief provided by an ideological system marks a critical threshold separating the legitimacy of the State’s use of force from the violence of various forms of domination in this regard. By summoning our cooperation and consent, this supplement of belief proves to be necessary to the functioning of the State and its civil institutions only to the point that this cooperation and consent are not coerced by the anti-political tenets of fear and terror that for Arendt are the instruments of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

An Eschatology of Nonviolence The theoretical and practical impossibility of assuming a critical vantage point from which to survey the totality of forces in play in the situations in which we are caught up highlights the fact that the ideological phenomenon is the unsurpassable condition of both thought and action. No social theorist can extricate herself entirely from the material conditions and circumstances that are the object of her critique. Like all social actors, the theorist articulates her position through drawing on the network of symbolic mediations that constitute the shared milieu in which agents’ actions are meaningfully oriented toward one another. For the critic, there is therefore no nonideological place from which to speak. A sociology free of value consequently has a deceptive allure. Karl Mannheim sought to avoid the pitfall of a sociology that would lead to the radical relativization of all values at the price of an impossible demand, namely, “to situate all partial ideologies within a total vision”16 that would assign each a meaning and significance in relation to all others.

The Wager of Imagination  95 However, no one is capable either of comprehending social reality in its totality or of providing an exhaustive description of it. How, then, can we condemn the violence that gives rise to the misrecognition and ideological deformation of the social bond when we cannot place ourselves at an infinite remove from the conditions that we claim to critique? How, in other words, can we denounce the violence and injustice that is the cause of so many social ills without succumbing to the temptation of a form of absolute knowledge that Ricoeur stresses is all the more impossible for the fact that it is no longer speculative, as with Hegel, but empirical? The paradox that there is no nonideological place from which to account for the ills endemic to the hierarchical organization of social life is the staging ground of the wager that gives an eschatology of nonviolence such as Ricoeur espouses its meaning and force. By setting the ideological phenomenon and its utopian counterpart within the same motivational framework, Ricoeur highlights the productive role imagination plays in setting existing conditions in a new light. As a force of attrition, ideologically congealed systems of practices and habits of thought lag behind experiences of needs and lacks that are the springs of as yet unfulfilled demands and expectations. Unfulfilled demands and expectations thus run ahead of the field of experiences out of which they arise. Ideology’s and utopia’s noncongruence with the real is the hallmark of the temporal interval in which the power of imagination is in play.17 By maintaining that the wager of imagination inheres in initiatives taken in answer to problems, difficulties, and crises demanding a response, I therefore propose to draw out how the imagination’s operative power figures in a hermeneutics for which an eschatology of nonviolence constitutes the critique of ideology’s ultimate philosophical horizon.18 By taking the place of the critique of ideology in its relation to experiences of belonging that for Ricoeur, as for Hans-Georg Gadamer, precede our efforts to account for the historical circumstances and conditions in which we are caught up, an eschatology of nonviolence sets out the horizonal structure of the project that earlier I said inscribes the imperative of respect in the task of making freedom a reality for all. Reality, Gadamer emphasizes, “always stands in a horizon of desired or feared or, at any rate, still undecided future possibilities.”19 For him, “our finite historical being is marked by the fact that the authority of what has been handed down to us . . . always has a power”20 over our understandings, outlooks, the issues that we consider to be significant, and the questions that we ask. History, Gadamer therefore tells us, “does not belong to us, we belong to it.”21 An “ontology of lingual understanding”22 such as Gadamer espouses finds support in the fact that, in view of our historical condition, every situation in which we find ourselves has its horizon. Illuminated by as yet undecided possibilities, this horizon sets the practical order of existence— that is, reality itself—in relief. If, as Ricoeur tells us, “there is no overview

96  The Wager of Imagination that would enable us to grasp in a single glance the totality of effects”23 of the history of which we are a part, critiques that uncover the causes of the suffering of disaffected individuals and groups invariably are caught up in the social conditions they denounce. From where, Ricoeur therefore asks, does the critique of ideology speak in appealing to self-reflection if not “from the place denounced as a nonplace, the nonplace of the transcendental subject?”24 Opposing a tradition of emancipation to a tradition of recollection far from abrogates how critiques targeting the pathologies that distort the field of human interactions draw their authority from a history and tradition for which the interest in emancipation is paramount. Moreover, severing the practical bond between an interest in emancipation and an alternative that presently exists nowhere in reality frees diagnoses of social ills from the conditions they denounce at the price of consigning critiques that purport to be absolutely radical to the desert in which they lose themselves.25 The wager that inheres in an eschatology for which the process of freedom’s actualization is the express figure of philosophical anthropology’s liberatory impulse accordingly has its practical anchorages in the capacity to surpass the real from within. For a philosophical anthropology for which human being is always in medias res, this capacity rests on the productive imagination’s subversive power. When, in the next chapter I rehearse how aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics brings to the fore the conjunction of a work’s singularity and its claim to universality, I will attribute this subversive power to the way that a work shatters congealed outlooks and habits of thought through renewing the real in accordance with the world projected by it. This subversion of the real is therefore only the negative condition of the work’s power to refashion our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Since for human beings there is no creatio ex nihilo, every work and act in which the power of imagination is at work emerges from a history and tradition of which authors, composers, artists, moral agents, and political actors are a part. This transcendence of the real through works and acts that open new paths is the cipher of a distinctly human freedom. For an eschatology of nonviolence, the liberatory impulse that in the vision of a reconciled humanity is incarnate in a freedom emancipated from the belief in a sovereign will is therefore the spring of the wager that places the power of imagination at the center of a hermeneutics of the intermediary being that we are. Nowhere is the significance of this wager more decisive than when, set against the loss of the credibility of totalizing pretensions, it supplants the sovereign claim of the subject to posit itself as the master of meaning. In the absence of a metahistorical plot equal to the challenge of accounting for the plurality of hopes, aspirations, and demands of diverse groups and peoples, and in light of the virulence of the aporia unleashed by the disenchantment of a speculative style of philosophizing that raises thought

The Wager of Imagination  97 about history and time to the level of the absolute, this wager stands as testament to the freedom inhering in the power to begin something new. The power to surpass or transcend the real from within through words, works, deeds, and acts that break open new paths for thinking, feeling, and acting countermands the presumptive force of some allegedly necessary reason. The relation of belonging that Ricoeur insists precedes every effort to place the real at a distance in order to explain and critique systemic deformations in the field of intersubjective interactions is consequently also the insuperable condition of every initiative we take. Every critique that knows itself to be motivated eschews the temptation of a totalizing reflection that would purportedly free critique from this prior relation of belonging. In response to the destruction of “grand” historical narratives and in answer to the impossibility of critiques that claim to be absolutely radical, an eschatology that takes the place of the critique of ideologies in relation to an ontology of prior belonging thus sets out the philosophical horizon of an incarnate freedom that is subject to limits and constraints.

Negative Dialectics and the Principle of Hope In a marked departure from totalizing pretensions, an eschatology such as Ricoeur espouses ties the wager that I will continue to insist inheres in the capacity to surpass the real from within to the power of imagination. By wresting our capacity to respond to exigencies and demands in creative and innovative ways both from a style of thinking that proclaims to master meaning and from critiques that are supposedly absolutely radical, this wager brings to the fore the freedom and spontaneity that figures in our capacity to begin something new. The impulse to insert ourselves in the world through words and deeds, which Arendt tells us “springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new,”26 anchors the intermediacy of human being as power and act in the ability we have to set in motion a new course of action in the midst of the histories in which we are caught up. Everything new, Arendt emphasizes, “always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability.”27 Developments and sometimes infinitely improbable innovations in the field of artistic and scientific inventions as well as in the field of praxis thus appear in the likeness of a miracle. Ricoeur moreover stresses that through inserting ourselves in the world through the initiatives we take, we make reality “incapable of being totalized.”28 As agents, he explains, “we produce something, which, properly speaking, we do not see.”29 Hence, we can no more master reality through some sovereign act of consciousness than can we comprehend the entire sweep of history from the vantage point of some eternal present. By setting in motion processes the ends of which escape our best-laid plans, we affect ourselves and

98  The Wager of Imagination others in unexpected ways. Consequently, we can extrapolate from our conceptions of closed systems or from our partial determinations of goaloriented segments of our projects to the whole field of action only at the cost of excluding ourselves from this field. In sum, “if the world is the totality of what is the case, doing cannot be included in this totality,”30 since every event produced by an act introduces something new into the realm of human affairs. By asking whether critiques of social pathologies that claim to be absolutely radical eclipse the freedom and spontaneity inhering in the power to act, I want to draw out how the wager of imagination figures in the task that Ricoeur attributes to the necessity of preserving the tension between the spaces of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations. Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics and Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope are two, inversely related stances that paradoxically attest to this necessity through their respective failures to maintain a practical handhold in the process of history’s temporalization. Adorno’s negative dialectic, Ricoeur remarks, recognizes the evil of violence perfectly well. Moreover, the eschatology of nonviolence that for him constitutes the critique of ideologies’ ultimate philosophical horizon is close to the one that Bloch embraces as the dawning light of a still as yet unrealized possibility of human freedom. And yet, negative dialectics gives itself over to its relentless strategy of ad hoc negation, while Bloch’s militant, millennialist Marxism projects the principle of hope “into a utopia with no historical handhold,”31 so that in each case the practical requirement for the freedom and spontaneity inhering in the power to begin something new is placed under erasure. Adorno’s conviction that the “whole is the false”32 consequently ensnares his critical strategy in a performative contradiction that seemingly leaves no way out. By reversing the Hegelian claim that the “True is the whole,”33 this radical critique liberates itself from the idea of freedom that the Hegelian system equates with its system of thought. Since for Hegel the “whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development,”34 only the whole reveals how Spirit is at work in fulfilling its rationally necessary plan. Ricoeur reminds us that, for the speculative philosopher, the authority of this philosophical act of faith is consubstantial with the authority of the system’s self-presentation (Selbstdarstellung). The cunning with which reason guides historical actors’ intentions without their knowing it is the “apologetic doublet”35 of this philosophical credo. The Hegelian thesis regarding the cunning of reason takes the place that “theodicy assigns to evil when it protests that evil is not in vain.”36 The idea of freedom’s adequation with that of reason thus becomes hostage to a style of thinking that dares to “elevate itself to grasping history as the totalization of time in the eternal present.”37 A critical strategy that loses itself in its relentless negativity scarcely holds out any hope for humanity’s redemptive reconciliation that is this

The Wager of Imagination  99 strategy’s sole raison d’être. David Held remarks that for Adorno, as for Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas, the process of liberation is one of “self-emancipation and self-creation.”38 Hence, according to Held, neither Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, nor Habermas set out a set of rigid political demands. Marcel Hénaff cautions against presuming that the emancipated world to which this process of selfliberation ostensibly leads dispenses with the question of social justice, which for Hénaff “involves the continuous process of adjustment of personal rights to the transformations of the economic system.”39 Moreover, this process of adjustment can only be carried out in concrete historical instances in which social actors engage in struggles for rights and recognition. Negative dialectics in effect severs the temporalizing link between past and future on which any such process depends by placing the utopia that it supposedly safeguards against all ideological deformations at an infinite remove. Modern art’s melancholic condition is indicative of how the performative contradiction that haunts this radical critique seemingly leaves no way out. Confined to “the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history,”40 modern art projects the semblance of the true—that is, of the reconciliation that in reality remains out of reach so long as material antagonisms perdure—at the cost of its power to remake reality. Since, according to Adorno, utopia consists “essentially in the determined negation . . . of that which merely is,”41 the recollection in art of a condition of freedom that does not yet, and might never, exist is at the same time the vanishing point of art’s social truth. Hence for art, “utopia—the yet-to-exist—is draped in black.”42 The “consistent sense of nonidentity in identity”43 that for Adorno is the watchword of the truth of the pervasive corruption and corrosion of all spheres of life sets the radicality of a critique of all that is against the adequation of freedom and reason that a Hegelian style of thinking attributes to the accomplishment of the work of Spirit. As the negative inverse of this style of thinking, Adorno’s critical stance is symptomatic of the “bad infinity” of a negative ontotheology that casts the present into the abyss of an instant sempiternally frozen between the horizon of a past that has been surpassed and that of a future that draws away from us more quickly than we can approach it.44 In contrast, the affinity between an eschatology of nonviolence and Bloch’s principle of hope reaches its limit at the point at which this principle abandons its historical handholds through a chiliastic leap. According to Bloch, the distant island that in Thomas More’s Utopia represents a place to which we might travel is “not something like nonsense or absolute fancy . . . [but] rather is not yet in the sense of a possibility.”45 The transposition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias from their geographical locations to the “wishland”46 of the future locates the journey toward utopia in a history that is yet to be made. For Bloch, the “island utopia arises out of the sea of the possible”47 as the sure guide for

100  The Wager of Imagination venturing forth to humanity’s ultimate homeland. Only Marxism, he tells us however, has given humanity a theoretical and practical program for a better world, not “in order to forget the existing world, as was common in most abstract social utopias, but in order to change it economically and dialectically.”48 For Bloch, the Marxist science of the future is therefore the ground and support of the utopian spirit of this venturing beyond. Just as in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Leonora’s act in freeing Florestan from his chains signals the rising “star of fulfilled hope in the Now and Here”49 heralded by the trumpet and the “Christ-likeness of the Day of Resurrection which follows it,”50 every storming of the Bastille that overthrows the tyranny of violence and exploitation illumines the dawn of humanity’s “morning red, militant-religious”51 day in accordance with this science. The millennialist militancy of the principle that for Bloch inheres in this Marxist science consequently binds the principle that otherwise draws its force from the capacity to surpass the real from within through venturing beyond it in imaginative ways to a historical program governed by the logic of this presumed science’s guiding premise. By turning this alleged science into yet another ideology, the logic ruling over the Marxist program that for Bloch is history’s true guiding star supplants the wager that inheres in every initiative we take in answer to problems, challenges, and crises. The advent of this logic is symptomatic of the reversal that Arendt insists inverts the historical relation between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, which for her brings the occidental tradition of political thought to its end. According to Arendt, by attributing a productivity to labor that “it never possesses,”52 Marx gives labor pride of place within the hierarchy of human activities, which also includes the preeminent political activities of speech and action as well as that of fabrication, which as the preeminent phenomenon of work produces the human artifice. By elevating labor, which in the traditional schema of the vita activa was subject to the requirements of needs and wants necessary for sustaining the life process, Marx for her identifies the logic of this process as the dominant force at work in history. Through formalizing “Hegel’s dialectic of the absolute in history as  .  .  . a selfpropelled process,”53 Marx capitalizes on the reversal that subordinates thought to the instrumentality of coordinating means and ends, the significance of which Arendt points out owes its meaning to the experience of fabrication with regard to the production of things of use and works of art. In her view, Marx consequently voids the Hegelian dialectic of its ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) by turning it into a method.54 For Arendt, Hegel’s recourse to the cunning of reason and Kant’s reference to the ruse of nature lay bare the gap between the vagaries of human action and the “modern problem of a history that—despite men’s contradictory actions, which on the whole always result in something other than what each individual intends—is uniformly comprehensible, and thus apparently ‘rational.’ ”55 Converting the philosopher’s faith in the speculative system

The Wager of Imagination  101 through which reason and freedom become a historical reality into history’s governing law thus prepares the ground for the kind of reasoning on which totalitarian ideologies seize by perverting ideas into premises from which all historical consequences must follow.56 Revolutionary action for Marx, Arendt insists, renders Hegel’s cunning of reason superfluous since all such action would now coincide with some fundamental, historical law. In contrast to a critique that recognizes evil at the cost of losing itself in its incessant negativity, and in opposition to a chiliastic principle that, despite abandoning its historical handhold, opposes as yet unrealized possibilities to ideologically frozen practices and habits of thought, this iron law neutralizes, dissembles, and even obliterates the power to act and the freedom and spontaneity inhering in it.

The Temporalization of History The impossibility of advancing a critique that would be absolutely radical places the conjunction of reason and action on stage. When, in the previous chapters I rehearsed Ricoeur’s analysis of the intermediacy of human being, I  emphasized how for philosophical anthropology the notion of being as power and act has its vis-à-vis in the capacity to begin something new. By setting the wager of imagination against totalizing pretensions, I mean now to highlight how this capacity figures in initiatives that answer to difficulties, problems, and challenges demanding a response. These initiatives bear out how our adherence to different systems of values inscribes itself in revolutionary and rearguard actions that punctuate the historical course of human affairs. The conjunction of reason and action consequently manifests itself in the signs of freedom incarnate in works, words, deeds, and acts through which we insert ourselves in the world. If, as Bloch maintains, “[r]eason cannot blossom without hope, [and] hope cannot speak without reason,”57 this hope and this reason take root only in those concrete contexts and situations where works, words, deeds, and acts shatter congealed systems of habits and practices. Through surpassing systemically frozen representations of the real, the initiatives we take put into play the temporal relation that for Arendt, as for Ricoeur, is operative within the “odd, in-between period”58 between past and future and that for all historical actors marks the point at which they stand. The interval that for Arendt delineates the gap between past and future provides a privileged point of access to a philosophical consideration of the force that the present has with regard to the aporia of the oneness of time that accompanies our incredulity of “grand” historical narratives. This aporia springs from the dissociation of the three temporal ecstasies (future, past, and present), which throws our conception of time as a collective singular into confusion. Ricoeur explains that by rescinding its other, namely, cosmological time, the phenomenology of time multiplies

102  The Wager of Imagination the aporias to which it gives rise. At the limit, Heidegger’s hierarchization of temporality, historicity, and within-time-ness points to a phenomenon that Ricoeur stresses is inaccessible to hermeneutic phenomenology as such.59 Unlike the speculative philosopher, for whom time’s totalization in an eternal present is the logical consequence of Spirit’s self-fulfilling movement, for historical actors time is broken in the middle, to draw on Arendt’s metaphor. Apart from this break, initiatives taken by historical agents would be bereft of their temporalizing force. Equating the rational with the real within a speculative system where reason is an “infinite force . . . that produces the circumstances for its own realization”60 obviates the force the present has as regards history’s temporalization by ratifying the thesis that the oneness of time coincides with this system as such. Through concluding the “reconciliation already at work in the successive phases of the philosophical process between certitude and truth,”61 Absolute knowledge thus becomes the thought of thought that “sustains the history of thought”62 in the eternal present. In view of the philosophical process that brings this system of thought’s reconciliation of certitude and truth to conclusion, the means with which freedom furnishes itself are indistinguishable from this philosophical process’s adequation of the rational and the real. Hegel’s philosophy of history, Ricoeur explains, seems at first “to consecrate the irreducibly temporal character of Reason itself”63 by assigning the work of the negative to the process of freedom’s actualization. Ricoeur attributes Hegel’s originality to the role assigned to the negative with regard to the dialectical process through which Spirit succeeds in its historical conquest of all that is alien to itself. Yet, this philosophy of history’s declaration that freedom’s self-realization is Reason’s ultimate end subordinates the work of the negative to the system of mediations that completes this work in accordance with Spirit’s allegedly necessary plan.64 The “correspondence between historical time and the work of the negative”65 consequently culminates in the return of the transitory stages of Spirit’s manifestation to the eternal, which the thought of the whole apprehends through reprising the successive stages of its development. In light of how this system of thought equates freedom’s actualization with its philosophical recapitulation of these successive stages, we could legitimately ask what significance our initiatives have in the wake of our renunciation of “grand” historical narratives. If, as Ricoeur tells us, the “concept of the Stufengang der Entwicklung des Prinzips [the successive stage(s) in the development of that principle] is truly the temporal equivalent of the cunning of reason,”66 how might these initiatives bear on the course of events in the absence of some sovereign process that allegedly rules over history and truth? Ricoeur points out that, for Hegel, “moral conviction is nothing without the total and unreserved motivation of an idea mobilized by passion.”67 Yet, by satisfying the requirement of the philosopher who “has thought through the conditions that make

The Wager of Imagination  103 freedom both rational and real,”68 the cunning of reason subordinates the particular values, convictions, and beliefs to which different cultural traditions adhere to the process of Spirit’s self-actualization. This subordination of particular cultural realities to the successive stages of this process abolishes the contingencies that Arendt remarks are at the root of the philosopher’s traditional disdain for action. To the degree that action’s unpredictability as regards both the miracle that Arendt attributes to the capacity to begin something new and the chain of consequences that she tells us action sets in motion represents the undoing of reason, the cunning of reason turns the otherwise unpredictability of the consequences of great historical events to Spirit’s own ends.69 Must we then denounce reason in renouncing the idea that we aid the work of Spirit unknowingly through the unintended consequences of our actions that, escaping our intentions, develop their own logic in accordance with some allegedly rational system? If, as Ricoeur tells us, Hegel raises the problem of history and truth, we can refuse to acknowledge the temporalizing operation through which reason acquires its meaning and force only at the price of abandoning the task in which the demand for freedom and justice prevails. Inasmuch as the force of the present inheres in the initiatives we take, our responses to the exigencies of the situations in which we find ourselves form the contours of the relation between history and truth by drawing together a past that has already been surpassed and a future that is presently taking shape. As such, these initiatives traverse the gap between the past and the future through preserving the tension between them. Ricoeur reminds us that history’s temporalization does not exhaust itself in Reason’s historicization as the result of the process in which history and truth coincide with the alleged reality of Spirit’s absolute presence. On the contrary, the force of the present takes shape only in answer to problems or crises demanding a response, so that the time of the initiatives we take is other than the “time of the cunning of reason”70 inasmuch as the acts producing the events that temporalize history owe their significance to the reasons we have for inserting ourselves in the world’s affairs.

The Force of the Present and the Horizon of the Process of Freedom’s Actualization The event in thinking precipitated by the Hegelian philosophy of history’s discreditation calls for a renewed reflection on philosophical anthropology’s thematic concern with the intermediacy of human being as power and act. Any critique worthy of the challenge posed by Hegel must measure itself against Hegel’s conviction that the philosopher can decipher the signs of history’s ultimate end. Ricoeur warns against allowing our incredulity as regards Hegel’s major proposition that the “only thought that philosophy brings with it is the simple idea of reason—the

104  The Wager of Imagination idea that reason governs the world, and that world history is therefore a rational process”71—to compel us to consign the event in thinking to which this system of thought’s loss of credibility gives rise to oblivion. If, in renouncing the hubris of a speculative mode of thinking that purports to decipher the sovereign plot of freedom we are led to read the signs of freedom’s actualization in exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts, it is only because, due to this event, the thought of history sets the force of the present against all totalizing pretensions. Far from disavowing the significance of the aporia of the oneness of time, this event in thinking brings to the fore the challenge and the task of preserving the tension between the spaces of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations. The enduring ethical and political implications of the metacategories, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” consequently supplant Hegel’s speculative solution. These metacategories of historical thought, Ricoeur explains, are “genuine transcendentals belonging to historical reflection.”72 Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s semantic analysis, Ricoeur emphasizes how this space, which we can traverse in multiple ways following different itineraries, stands between two horizons, namely, that of a past that has already been surpassed and that of a future that has not yet been made. Correlatively, expectations regarding our liberties, opportunities, material well-being, and respect and esteem mark out the horizons of as yet unfulfilled aspirations and demands. Koselleck stresses that there are no “expectations without experiences . . . [and] no experience without expectation.”73 If, with Ricoeur, we also admit that “there is no history that is not constituted by the experiences and expectations of those who act and suffer,”74 then must we not acknowledge that, by spanning the gap separating our experiences and our aspirations, the projects we set in motion in answer to exigencies and demands arising from a history of which we are a part themselves constitute the practical riposte to all speculative solutions to the aporia of the oneness of time? By opposing the imperfect mediations that he attributes to the multiple ways that historical actors preserve the tension between a space of experience and a horizon of expectation to Hegel’s speculative solution, Ricoeur highlights how these metacategories (“space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”) aid thought about history by placing the process of history’s temporalization in relief. While these metacategories owe their initial instantiation to the topoi of modernity articulated by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, these metahistorical categories more generally account for variations in styles and manners of history’s temporalization owing to the diverse ways in which groups and communities renew their cultural heritages in accordance with changing expectations and demands. The thought of the Enlightenment has a privileged place only insofar as the three topoi of modernity—1. the belief in a future without precedent, 2. the belief in accelerated changes for the better, and 3. the belief in our capacity to master our destiny through our ability to direct

The Wager of Imagination  105 the course of history—bring to light the tension on which history’s temporalization depends. Ricoeur cautions that the idea of new times without precedent is suspect, that the “dawn of progress” celebrated by the Enlightenment has been cast into doubt, and that the theme of mastering history perpetuates a basic misunderstanding of how the “tie between historical action and a received past, which we did not make, . . . preserves the dialectical relation between our horizon of expectation and our space of experiences.”75 At the same time, he emphasizes that, placed in the service of thought about history, these metahistorical categories’ difference from the philosophy in which these topoi figure constitutes a major historical event. By asking whether Hegel “destroyed the spring of action,”76 Ricoeur consequently sets the force of the present in relief. This force, which the initiatives we take put into play, bears the stamp of our capacity for surpassing the real from within. Reserving a place for this capacity within the structure of action draws thought about history and time into the orbit of a reflection on the evil that affects our capacity to act at its root. For Ricoeur, the discourse of rational action therefore culminates in a political theory for which freedom is irreducible to its speculative ideal. This discourse draws support from the fact that action makes sense only because, in some instances, the fit between the act and the problem or crisis calling for it exemplifies the rule to which the act singularly attests, as I will explain at greater length in the next chapter. Moreover, human beings “have concrete duties, [and] concrete virtues, only when they are capable of situating themselves within historical communities, in which they recognize the meaning of their existence.”77 Hence, human action “makes sense [only] because we can discern in some places [an] adequation between rationality and reality.”78 In these instances, “the Hegelian axiom is true: what is rational is real, [and] what is real is rational.”79 The reality of evil, however, prevents us from equating “our partial experiences of fulfilled achievements . . . with the whole field of human action.”80 Accordingly, a horizon of unfulfilled claims is as much a part of the structure of the field of freedom’s actualization as are fulfilled accomplishments, which for a Hegelian style of thinking extends to the whole of this field as such. What then, Ricoeur asks, constitutes the horizon of the process of freedom’s actualization in light of the reality of evil? Here, he notes, the philosophy of the will inspired by Hegel has yet to be written, since this philosophy “does not belong to the past but to the future.”81 The theory of the process of freedom’s actualization, which Ricoeur tells us falls to the task of such a philosophy, consequently places the vision of a reconciled humanity that is the object of the poetics of the will within the practical order of a meditation on the historical reality of the intermediary being that we are. The concept of freedom’s actualization consequently has two dimensions. On the one hand, fulfilled achievements

106  The Wager of Imagination bear the stamp of a history of accomplishments that are signs of the adequation of the rational and the real in accordance with a community or group’s aspirations. On the other hand, unfulfilled demands and claims fuel the struggles both for better material conditions and for recognition in answer to violations of normative moral expectations of respect, esteem, and a just share of social goods. To the extent that Hegel’s philosophy addresses the failure of Kant’s, the Hegelian dialectic bears out how the conquest of the negative advances the process of freedom’s actualization. Hegel’s style of philosophizing thus sets the stage for a discourse concerning the possibility of a “rational mediation between individual power, what we call free choice or will, and political power, which we call sovereignty.”82 And yet, for a philosophy for which the owl of Minerva is the totem, only reminiscence and recapitulation rather than prophecy remains. Ricoeur’s post-Heideggerian return to Kant through Hegel is attributable in part to the loss of credibility of a system of thought for which reminiscence alone suffices. Conversely, the wager that I indicated earlier is the riposte to critiques that claim to be absolutely radical has a place in a hermeneutical style of thinking that espouses a Kantian philosophy of limits. When, in Chapter 7, I rehearse how the task projected in accordance with reason’s demand for totality is for Ricoeur the most adequate philosophical approximation of the concept of the actualization of freedom, I will draw out how the wager of imagination marks out the contours of hope’s practical and existential necessity. We catch sight of the further import of this wager in the way that Kant renders the project of a critique of practical reason incomprehensible. Ricoeur explains that by “[u]sing a method of isolation and abstraction, Kant dissociated the lived experience of the will in relation to the law and the notion of the will according to the law that corresponds to it.”83 The fragments of the practical synthesis with which Kant leaves us separate the objective will, which is “solely determined by the law,”84 from the subjective will, which is “torn between itself and desire.”85 This separation of a will determined by the law from one that is torn within itself seemingly shipwrecks the intention of the critique of practical reason to account for reality’s production in accordance with its tenet of freedom. Conversely, the freedom incarnate in the imagination’s operative power anchors reason in the singular instances where works, words, deeds, and acts reply to exigencies and demands in exemplary ways. This incarnate freedom appears as a dialectic stretching between an “infinite demand, which reflects its power of self-affirmation, and the task of [one’s] self-­ realization in a finite reality.”86 Ricoeur reminds us that there is no project apart from the test of reality and the judgments of others. Since an agent can be held to account for her acts but not for all that follows from them, the responsibility we have to act in accordance with the project with which we are tasked by the idea of the humanity in each of us is thus

The Wager of Imagination  107 the requisite condition of, and the moral and political proving ground for, the obligation of making freedom a reality for all. In view of the virulence of the aporia unleashed by the destruction of all “grand” historical narratives, and in light of how critiques that claim to be absolutely radical place the temporalizing force of the present under erasure, we might wonder if the wager that sets an eschatology of nonviolence in the place of the critique of ideologies also risks subordinating reason, history, and truth to the caprices of a capacity that for Kant remains secreted away in the soul. In the next chapter, I intend to show how the power of imagination operative in literary works, musical compositions, and works of art, for example, is also operative in acts of prudential wisdom, or phronesis. The power to reply to demands and exigencies in singularly fitting ways lies at the heart of those imperfect mediations that Ricoeur opposes to the Hegelian system of thought. This power, which I will maintain is the spring of our capacity to surpass the real from within, is therefore also at work in the practical exercise of reason. The aporia that accompanies the event in thinking arising from the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility bears out the fact that there is “no plot of all plots capable of equaling the idea of one humanity and one history.”87 If, as Ricoeur maintains, every expectation regarding our rights, liberties, freedoms, and opportunities is one that must be a hope for humanity as a whole, humanity can be regarded as one species only “insofar as it has one history, and, reciprocally, that for there to be such a history, humanity as a whole must be its subject as a collective singular.”88 This aporia haunts the poetics of the will. For a philosophy of the will that belongs to the future, the wager of imagination installs itself at the heart of the process in which works, words, deeds, and acts are promissory signs of the reign of freedom and justice in those singular instances in which these works, words, deeds, and acts attest to the good, the right, and the just that we desire to be.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 213. 2. Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue 3: Universality and the Power of Difference,” in On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, ed. Richard Kearney (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2004), 150; see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 216. 3. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 233. Ricoeur adds that “[w]e are reinforced in this epistemological naivety by the conviction that in transferring explanation from the place of conscious rationalisations to that of unconscious reality we have reduced the element of subjectivity in explanation” (233). Of the diverse tactics employed to conceal this position’s epistemological weakness, he identifies two: “On the one hand, reinforcement of the formal apparatus is sought as a compensation for the lack of empirical verifications.  .  .  . On the other hand, a mutual reinforcement of several critical disciplines is sought as a compensation for the epistemological

108  The Wager of Imagination inadequacies of each; we thus witness a kind of crossing between the social theory of ideology and psychoanalysis” (233–34). 4. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10. 5. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 4; see 22ff. 6. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 58; see Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193–233. 7. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ricoeur remarks that the “deciphering of whatever strange alchemy there may be in the transformation of an interest into an idea is for Geertz, then, the problem evaded or overlooked by Marxists and non-Marxists alike” (10); see Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System.” 8. See Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ricoeur explains that, inasmuch as the notion of Ordnung “does not mean compulsory order but an ordering that gives a shape, a gestalt, to a pattern or a group” (199), a group’s belief in the necessity of its existence and way of life takes hold in the representation (Vorstellung) it gives itself. See also Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 225. 9. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). According to Weber, claims to legitimacy based on rational grounds, traditional grounds, and charismatic grounds rest respectively on: 1. “a belief in the legality of patterns of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority)” (215); 2. “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them (traditional authority)” (215); and 3. a belief “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him (charismatic authority)” (215); cited by Ricoeur in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 202–3. Ricoeur adds that, with regard to legal authority, members of the group “do not owe obedience to authorities as individuals but as representatives of the impersonal order” (204). Furthermore, this legal type of authority can scarcely operate independently of the other two types of authority, with which it remains entwined. 10. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 327; see Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 72–78. 11. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 327. Ricoeur explains that if “one can show that this exploitation is tied to the private appropriation of the means of production, then any political regime is legitimate that proposes to suppress economic alienation resulting from the private appropriation of the means of production and finally, the expropriation of labor by the extortion of surplus value” (327). See Arendt, The Promise of Politics. Arendt’s critique of the victory in the modern age of labor’s preeminence with respect to the individual’s social condition thus ratifies how, for orthodox Marxism, political alienation is a reflection of an exploitative economic system. 12. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 236. 13. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 253. 14. See Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 332; Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just. The power to command not only structures the hierarchical dissymmetry that separates those who obey from those who lead, but it also indicates that the claim to legitimacy implied in this power is supported to some degree by

The Wager of Imagination  109 a belief in the right to exercise it. Ricoeur explains that authority borders “on violence as the power to impose obedience, that is, as domination. But what distinguishes it from violence is precisely the credibility attached to its character of legitimacy. . . . The recognition of superiority . . . therefore . . . tempers domination by distinguishing it [not only] from violence, but also persuasion” (93). The political paradox—that is, the paradox of a legitimate violence—is accordingly the staging ground both for one group’s or class’s domination of another and for the struggles on the part of marginalized and execrated communities and groups to contest, subvert, and delegitimize social and political structures and systems that perpetuate their domination and exclusion. 15. This strategy is emblematic of colonialist justifications of imperialist powers’ claim to the right to rule. See my “Colonialist Ruinations and the Logic of Hope,” in Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy, ed. Greg S. Johnson and Dan R. Stiver (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 201–20. 16. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 241; see Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 194. 17. Imagination plays a constitutive role as regards both the network of mediations comprising a cultural system and imaginative alternatives that augment the practical field of our everyday experiences. At the same time, imagination is also bewitching in two ways: first, the fascination with dreams of fulfilled desires loses its anchorages in the practical order of everyday life; second, dissimulating images mask the systemic deformation of relations among human beings. Utopia’s interrelated functions thus counterpoint the ideological phenomenon’s integrative, legitimating, and dissimulating ones. Where symbolic systems tend to congeal, fictive explorations of possible ways of thinking, feeling, and conducting our lives contest and subvert ideologically frozen outlooks, habits, and practices. Similarly, experimenting with alternative ways of sharing power challenges the legitimacy of existing systems of rule. Finally, correlative to ideologically dissimulating representations, fanciful flights from reality are a pathological form of escape. 18. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 87. 19. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 112. 20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 280. 21. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276; see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 220–21. 22. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 87; see 63–100. 23. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 281. 24. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 306; see Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ricoeur accordingly stresses that the “ontological condition of pre-understanding excludes the total reflection which would put us in the advantageous position of non-ideological knowledge” (243). 25. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ricoeur accordingly stresses that the “task of the critical social sciences is to discern beneath the regularities observed by the empirical social sciences those ‘ideologically frozen’ relations of dependence that can be transformed only through critique” (82). Moreover, for him, the interest in emancipation that for Habermas inheres in the regulative requirement of the ideal speech situation would be formally abstract if this interest was not situated on the same plane as that of communicative action (97; see Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 249–50). 26. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.

110  The Wager of Imagination 7. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178. 2 28. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 216. 29. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 231. 30. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 231. 31. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 226. 32. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50. Adorno here inverts Hegel’s thesis. 33. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11. 34. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 11; see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). According to Taylor, Spirit’s embodiment in history “is not only the fulfillment of his rationally necessary plan, the Idea, but also the paradigm expression of what that purpose is” (469). 35. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 202. 36. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 198. 37. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 193. 38. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 25–26. 39. Marcel Hénaff, “Labor, Social Justice, and Recognition: Around Paul Ricoeur,” in Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis and Critique, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 21. According to Hénaff, Habermas, at least in his early writings, “appears to keep to the level of principles: the theoretical abilities implied by praxis. For him as for Marx  the emancipated society does not consider the question of social justice” (24). Moreover, Hénaff emphasizes that, from a Marxist perspective, the “emancipated world is the true world, and, as such, the just world. Human action should derive from it. It is as if the socioeconomic analysis of the reasons for action made the formulation of a normative theory of social justice unnecessary. That tradition appears to ignore the very idea of normativity” (26). 40. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135. Attributing this distancing relation to the principle of aesthetic autonomy rooted in nineteenth-century constructs ensnares Adorno’s efforts to assign a critical function to art’s truth in the performative contradiction that is a hallmark of his negative dialectical strategy. 41. Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Horst Krüger, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 12. According to Adorno, “by concretizing itself as something false, it [utopia] always points at the same time to what should be” (12). Hence for him, “[w]hatever utopia is, whatever can be imagined as utopia, this is the transformation of the totality” (3); see Adorno, Minima Moralia, 70. 42. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135. 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Hence, Adorno concludes: “Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity” (5). 44. See, for example, my discussion of Schoenberg’s Erwartung in my Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 114–19; see also my Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010). Adorno’s claim that art’s social truth is bound up with art’s dialectic of mimesis and construction falls prey to his anthropogenic concept of mimesis, which sets the subject’s identification with nature against the recollection in art of this condition of freedom. By attributing art’s social truth to the concept of aesthetic

The Wager of Imagination  111 autonomy won through art’s social emancipation, Adorno overlooks how the distance works take from the real by placing the real in suspense owes its force to the imagination’s operative power. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 45. Adorno et al., “Something’s Missing,” 3. 46. Adorno et al., “Something’s Missing,” 3. 47. Adorno et al., “Something’s Missing,” 3; see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. According to Bloch, the “final will is to be truly present. So that the lived moment belongs to us and we to it. . . . Man wants at last to enter into the Here and Now as himself, wants to enter his full life without postponement and distance” (16). 48. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1370. 49. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1103. 50. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1375. 51. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1103. 52. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 80. 53. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 75. 54. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 74. Arendt explains that “[w]hat has occurred in modern thought, via Marx on the one hand and Nietzsche on the other, is the adoption of the framework of tradition with a concurrent rejection of its authority. This is the real significance of the inversion of Hegel in Marx and the reversal of Plato in Nietzsche. All operations of this sort, however, in which thinking proceeds within traditional concepts while ‘merely’ rejecting tradition’s substantial authority contain the same devastating contradiction that inevitably lies in all the many discussions of the secularization of religious ideas” (73). 55. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 76. According to Arendt, “Marx rejects the idea that action in and of itself, and absent the cunning of Providence, cannot reveal truth or indeed produce it. He thereby breaks with all traditional evaluations within political philosophy, according to which thinking ranks higher than action, and politics exists solely to make possible and safeguard the bios theōrētikos—the contemplative life of philosophers or the contemplation of God by Christians removed from the world” (76). 56. See Arendt, Promise of Politics, 74ff.; see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 249; 349–51, for example. 57. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1367; see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276. 58. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 9. For Arendt, this odd, in-between period turned the minds of historical actors back toward thought in the twentieth century. 59. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 270. 60. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 194. Ricoeur explains that “it seems as though the process of temporalization gets sublimated into the idea of a ‘return upon itself’ (Rückkehr in sich [selbst] . . .) . . . of the Spirit and its concept, by means of which its reality is identical to its presence” (199). The temporalization of history attributed to this infinite force, however, “does not exhaust itself in the historicization of Reason which seems to be the result of this process” (199). On the contrary, crediting history’s temporalization to the mediation of the rational and the real perfected by this force gives rise to a secular religion, the birth of which bears the stamp of this equation of reason and history. This passage from “original and reflective history to

112  The Wager of Imagination philosophical history” (199) consequently abolishes any thought of the narrative features of history. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur accordingly maintains the “main task of critical philosophy applied to history is . . . to reflect upon the limits that a self-knowledge of history, taking itself to be absolute, would attempt to transgress” (305). 61. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 208. 62. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 208. 63. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 199. 64. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 195. Ricoeur emphasizes that philosophy, “it must be said, ‘is concerned with what is present and real [dem Gegenwärtigen, Wirklichken]’ ” (199). However, for Hegel, the “ultimate end has found its ‘means,’ one which is not external to it, inasmuch as it is to satisfy their particular ends that these elect of the Spirit accomplish goals that transcend them, and inasmuch as the sacrifice of particularity, which is the price to be paid, is justified by the office of reason that this sacrifice fills” (198). For Ricoeur, “something important is glimpsed through the accusation of idealism, namely, that existence, human practice, this will as power, are inscribed, today, outside the enclosure outlined by the act of recapitulation into Geist  .  .  .  . What appears exorbitant today is the claim to reduce the appearance of freedom to discourse. If, after Hegel, this claim seems untenable, this is because the ‘crisis’ that has occurred at the level of a deeper-lying history affects the very relation of freedom and truth” (Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 147). See also Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability.” Ricoeur therefore explains that “[w]e have to be Hegelian too, because it is only Hegel, in a sense, who has a complete philosophy of action, which is maybe a lacking component in Kant, who has something about desire and law but not about action. We have, then, the first use of the term ethics: there is, on the one hand, the grounding level of the whole moral philosophy, and, on the other hand, the field of applications” (286). 65. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 200; see Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967). Ricoeur remarks that “Hegel introduced into the field of phenomenological analysis the ‘negative’ experiences of disappearance, contradiction, struggle, and frustration which impart the tragic tone to his phenomenology” (206). See also Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). According to Eliade, Hegel assumes a Judeo-Christian ideology in applying it to universal history so that “the whole of history becomes a theophany; everything in history had to happen as it did, because the universal spirit willed it so” (112). 66. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 200; see Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 371. 67. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 196. 68. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 194. 69. According to Arendt, the philosopher’s disdain for action stands at the beginning of our tradition of political thought. See, for example, Arendt, The Human Condition, 14–16; Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 5–6. 70. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 200. 71. Hegel, cited by Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 202; see 201–3; see also Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur cautions against allowing the “birth of a secular religion from the equation between history and truth” (300) to pass under cover of the Hegelian philosophy.

The Wager of Imagination  113 72. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 220; see Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 296–300. 73. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 270. 74. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 221. 75. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 213; see Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 220. The conceit of this theme of mastering history dissembles the fact that we are affected by history and that we also affect ourselves by the history we make. 76. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210; see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 215. 77. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 141. 78. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210. 79. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210. 80. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 211. 81. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210. 82. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 81. 83. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 138. 84. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 138. 85. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 138. 86. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 140. 87. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 259. 88. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 215.

5 Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality

The wager that supplants the hubris of some allegedly sovereign consciousness either to grasp the time of history in its totality or to mount a critique that would be absolutely radical brings to the fore how the power of imagination at work in works, words, deeds, and acts is the condition of our capacity to surpass the real from within. Through subverting established orders, conventions, systems, and practices, such works, words, deeds, and acts forge new paths for thinking, feeling, acting, and inscribing our lives in the historical webs of human affairs. Our ability to reply to problems, difficulties, and crises in uniquely appropriate ways is consequently the hallmark of the freedom inhering in the power to transcend the given order of existence from within. By taking experiences afforded by narrative fictions, poetry, music, and the like as my starting point, I  propose in this chapter to explore how imagination is at work in the initiatives we take. In the next chapter, when I take up again the question of how the wager of imagination figures in history’s temporalization, I will draw upon my present investigations into the connection between the truth to which individual works of fiction, poetry, and music lay claim, the exemplary value of acts that we admire, and practical reason. This truth has its source in the way that the meaning proposed by a work bears on our manner of inhering in the world. The work’s ontological vehemence, by which I mean the impact the work has on our ways of thinking, feeling, and conducting our lives, I will therefore say, has its source in the rule summoned by the work. This rule, which I will explain springs from the manner in which a work’s constitutive elements cohere, is one that the work expresses by exemplifying it. The role that reflective judgment plays in our apprehension of the fit of the work consequently authorizes transposing aesthetic experience laterally onto the domains of ethics and politics, where exemplary acts bear out the imagination’s operative role in judgments that merit the term “phronesis.”

Aesthetic Experience Experiences in which our encounters with fictive tales, musical compositions and extemporizations, theatrical and dance performances, and

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  115 performance art presentations impress upon us the availability of other ways of thinking, feeling, and acting provide a first indication of the power of imagination at work in contesting and subverting routinized practices and habits of thought. Alternative ways of seeing the world and of encountering it portrayed in fictive accounts of characters and events and modalities of feeling evoked by music, poetry, fiction, and dance’s affective tonalities call into question normalized conventions. The “superfluidity of expectations”1 that Gadamer points out underlines the future’s as yet undecided character is indicative of the temporal lag separating congealed representations of the real from emerging possibilities already taking shape. Ricoeur remarks that we ratify the positivist prejudice we otherwise struggle against when, in acceding to the notion that the real is given as an empirical datum that can be described scientifically and verified empirically, we refuse to recognize the heuristic value of fiction, works of art, and music. By instructing us in new ways sanctioned by them of seeing the world and being attuned to it, of acting and suffering, and of inscribing our lives in the intersubjective webs of life with others, works in which the power of imagination is in play augment the practical order of our everyday field of experiences in accordance with the worlds they unfold. Taking the experience occasioned by a work as my guide provides a unique point of access to the imagination’s operative power. Gadamer has alerted us to how, in the nineteenth century, the concept of Erlebniskunst fueled nineteenth-century aesthetic dispositions and conceits. Originally, he points out, Erlebniskunst “meant that art comes from experience”2 and is an expression of it. However, in a derivative sense, Erlebniskunst came to be applied to art that is intended to be experienced aesthetically. The notion that genius in understanding corresponds to genius in creation lent support to the bourgeois cult of Bildung and its symbolic capital.3 The seemingly self-evident fact that an inspired genius who, with “the assuredness of a somnambulist, creates the work of art, which then becomes an experience for the person exposed to it”4 thus became a vital component of a Romantic edifice in which art’s aesthetic differentiation from the practical sphere of everyday life marked out a higher region where the human spirit ostensibly could only truly be at home. Placing the concept of genius at the center of aesthetics, however, paradoxically masks the imagination’s productive force. Efforts in the twentieth century to rehabilitate a view of aesthetics schooled in sociological suspicions of literature, music, and art’s deleterious ideological function sought to recover their emancipatory potential. Terry Eagleton, for example, maintains that the mystifying “escape from or sublimation of unpalatable necessity”5 that insinuates itself behind the cultural separation of processes of fantasy and pleasure from the fulfillment of material wants is only one of the functions of the aesthetic. For him, the “imaginative reconstruction of our current practices”6 of denouncing literature, music, and art’s complicity in preserving existing systems, structures,

116  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality and relations of power is indispensable to avoiding the amalgam of disillusionment and sterile utopianisms that afflicts Frankfurt school critical theorists. Richard Kearney, moreover, warns against acquiescing to a postmodern fascination with the disappearance of man, the death of imagination, and the dissolution of every philosophy of truth. He accordingly asks whether we can speak of imagination at all if “postmodernism subverts the very opposition between the imaginary and the real, to the point where each dissolves into an empty imitation of the other.”7 The question Kearney poses, “Does imagination itself not threaten to disappear with the disappearance of man?,”8 underscores the extent to which literature, music, and art’s subversion of entrenched habits of feeling and thought proves to be indispensable to imaginative explorations that augment the range of values of which we can avail ourselves. Ricoeur reminds us that “[f]iction and poetry intend being, . . . not through the modality of givenness, but rather through the modality of possibility.”9 To the degree that poetic inventions broadly conceived enlarge the field of possibilities available to us through subverting sedimented systems, habits, and practices, this subversion of the real is the condition of an emancipatory potential that in each case is actualized when, by placing the real in suspense, the worlds projected by individual works give a figure and a body to imaginative alternatives that we can adopt as our own. Attributing this emancipatory potential to music, literature, and art’s relegation to a separate social sphere is indicative of the trap in which the attempt to credit a productive significance to conditions that otherwise are rightly regarded as masking art’s ideological complicity with maintaining the status quo is paradoxically ensnared. Elsewhere, I have argued that efforts to attribute this liberatory potential to art’s social emancipation are caught in an intractable contradiction.10 The sterile utopianism and disillusionment that for Eagleton haunts Frankfurt school critical theorists is indicative of the impossibility of deriving art’s creatively productive value from the sense of autonomy won through its social institution as an aesthetically separate domain. Adorno’s indictment of art’s melancholic condition paradoxically owes its force to the distancing relation that Gadamer maintains alienates us from the experience occasioned by a work.11 By insisting that art’s twofold character as “autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy,”12 Adorno consequently locates art’s distance from reality, which he rightly argues is the condition of its truth, within the confines of the performative contradiction of his negative dialectic. Since for him “[t]otal contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification,”13 modern music and art remonstrate against the real at the price of renouncing their ontological vehemence. Hence, as I  indicated earlier, the uncompromising refusal to provide any indication of the “right” reality for fear of betraying the utopia for which art scarcely holds out any hope is the vanishing point of its critical, social truth.

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  117 By crediting a work’s subversive force to its retreat from the real, which I noted Gadamer stresses always stands between two horizons, I mean to highlight how the distance that Adorno attributes to art’s social emancipation is properly attributable to the imagination’s operative power. How, we could ask, could an experience occasioned by a work contest and subvert sedimented mores, practices, and habits of thought apart from its expression of a world that stands over against some already established order? The epoché of the real is the condition of the work’s power to come bursting into our midst. Hence, stories recounted, poems recited, and music and dance performed exemplify modalities of thought, feeling, and action that each work alone expresses only by placing the real in suspense. This transcendence of the real within the immanence of the work, apart from which fiction in its broadest sense would be completely innocuous, bears the stamp of the work’s worlding power. As I will explain in the discussion that follows, the truth to which a work lays claim consequently owes its force to the imagination’s schematizing power, which in the final analysis renders the experiences occasioned by different works communicable.

Mimesis and Truth The idea that the retreat from the real is the condition of a work’s productive force leads me to ask whether it is possible to do justice to aesthetic experience without at the same time calling into question the sufficiency of the classical concept of truth. According to this concept, truth is defined by the unity of the alleged interiority of a private mental scene with the representation of something real. The exteriority of something real is then said to govern the play of this mental scene from the outside via the representation that makes an interior presence and an exterior presence present to each other. Ricoeur stresses that the “process of adequation that would define the truth of the representation”14 invariably succumbs to the representative illusion, the critique of which calls for deconstructing the metaphysics of presence. Accordingly, he asks whether we can still speak of truth when it comes to the fittingness of poetic productions, the meanings of which are drawn from the manner in which each work’s constitutive elements cohere. Ricoeur’s claim that mimesis demands more when it comes to the way that we think about truth than does either the classical concept of truth or Heidegger’s notion of truth as manifestation sets the imagination’s role in relief. We catch sight of the vehemence of the productive imagination’s schematizing power in Ricoeur’s account of the metaphorical process. The tensive theory that he sets out differs from tropological theories for which a metaphorical word replaces a literal one without semantic gain or loss. According to this tensive theory, the predicative assimilation of semantically incongruent terms produces a new meaning that emerges

118  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality from the literal ruins of some initial semantic clash. When, for example, we see a ceasefire agreement as if it were demolished by the storm of the warring factions’ violations, the predicative assimilation of nonliteral attributes produces a new meaning that supplants the initial semantic impertinence. Ricoeur points out that we resolve the enigma of iconic presentation each time we grasp the intended meaning as displayed in the thickness of the imagining scene.15 The icon of the image presented is accordingly the matrix of the new predicative pertinence drawn from the initial predicative impertinence. Analogous to a plot, which “functions as the narrative matrix”16 of the stories we tell, the icon is thus the “schematization of metaphorical attribution.”17 The sudden insight acquired through this schematization of an emergent meaning pushes back the veil behind which these meanings previously seemed to be hidden, so that we can no longer decide whether this new meaning was invented or discovered. The force of reality’s redescription in the light of a heuristic fiction in the case of metaphor, or of the practical field’s mimetic refiguration in the case of narrative (as I will explain), thus bears out how, as the engine of reality’s metaphorical redescription or its mimetic refiguration, the productive imagination’s schematizing operation is the spring both of a work’s ontological vehemence and of its claim to truth. Every proposal of meaning in which the power of imagination is at work at the same time raises a claim to truth. Ricoeur points out that beliefs, convictions, and persuasions that we receive from the past are in effect ways of “holding-for-true” the meaning of the content transmitted by tradition. Questions concerning the meaning of this transmitted content can be separated from those of its truth only by means of the latter’s abstraction. Only in relation to the claims to truth within diverse traditions—claims “included in the holding-for-true of every proposal of meaning”18—can the concepts of prejudice, authority, and tradition through which Gadamer introduces the problematic of “consciousness exposed to the efficacity of history [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein]”19 be properly understood. The ontology of lingual understanding that Ricoeur counterposes to an eschatology of nonviolence as the critique of ideology’s ultimate philosophical horizon (Chapter 4) places Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the concept of prejudice and the authority of tradition on their proper footing by accentuating the significance of our prior experiences of belonging. The authority of tradition, Ricoeur points out, thus acquires a status that is close to the one Hegel assigns to Sittlichkeit. As for this authority, the “increase that the claim to truth adds to mere meaning, in the context of ‘holding-for-true,’ ”20 acquires its ideological purchase through prolonging the energy of some founding event. By tracing the density of the enigma of authority back to the “immediate political experience”21 of the Romans, for whom the founding of the Eternal City was sacred, Ricoeur highlights how the tradition of authority takes hold in the “experience of the energy of a founding,

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  119 which in ways authorizes itself and its great age.”22 At the same time, founding events commemorating the birth of a nation are essentially acts of violence “legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right.”23 Hence the paradox of authority, which Ricoeur explains could equally be regarded as an enigma or an aporia: an enigma, because even following the analysis of the phenomenon of authority the idea of authority harbors something that remains opaque; an aporia, “because there is a kind of unresolved contradiction tied to the difficulty, even the impossibility, of legitimating authority in the final instance.”24 Claims to truth concomitant with proposals of meaning are consequently subject not only to a receptivity to values inhering in the contents transmitted through the preservation of cultural inheritances, but they also give rise to disagreements, conflicts, and disputations, as when, for example, the legitimacy of a group, community, or nation’s (self-)representation is called into question by competing and conflicting interpretations.25 Holding-for-true entails a judgment that commits historical agents to the meanings and values of customs and mores preserved and handed down as tradition.26 The transmission of cultural inheritances is therefore irreducible to the mere reproduction of routinized customs and practices. How, we could ask moreover, could the transmission of the contents of a cultural heritage have a history apart from interpretations and innovations that preserve a link with the past while forging one with the future? The dialectic of tradition, which for Ricoeur sets the pole of innovation against that of sedimentation and even servile repetition, draws its force from the ability we have for discovering or inventing solutions to problems, questions, and crises that arise from the history of which we are a part.27 Accordingly, holding-for-true acquires its prospective dimension not only through the act of transmission that renews our cultural inheritances but also through works, words, deeds, and acts that forge new paths by providing models that we can follow. This renewal of the real in response to exigencies and demands to which works reply is the mark of the truth to which they lay claim. Similar to the metaphorical redescription of reality, the mimetic refiguration of the field of our experiences thus augments the range of possibilities for thinking, feeling, and acting that works make available to us through their expressions of their worlds.28 The paradox that the work’s epoché of the real is the condition of its power to augment our manner of inhering in the world by proposing a meaning that we can hold for true brings the notion that mimesis demands more when it comes to the way that we think about truth sharply into focus. Far from reproducing something of the real, mimesis, Ricoeur explains, is a creative rendering of it. By reconstructing the set of operations that in the case of the narrative art sets the poetics of narrativity against the aporetics of temporality, Ricoeur accounts for the way that the stories we tell raise experiences of human action and suffering

120  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality from their opaque depths to pour back these experiences’ meanings into the world. Language, he accordingly maintains, never exists for its own sake. On the contrary, “[e]ven when it seems to withdraw into itself, it still celebrates what it lifts above its confines.”29 The work’s retreat from the real, which he emphasizes marks the entry into the kingdom of the as if, thus owes its defamiliarizing force to the configurating operation that in the case of narrative draws a story as a whole from sequences of episodes and events, thereby activating the entire arc of operations that mediate between narrative’s anchorages in the practical field of our experiences (which Ricoeur describes as mimesis1 or prefiguration), its temporal configuration (mimesis2), and the real’s refiguration (mimesis3).30 A work’s power to penetrate “the world of everyday experience in order to rework it from inside”31 is indicative of the ontological vehemence that this operative understanding of mimesis expressly thematizes. When, with the dissolution of representational elements, nonfigurative painting no longer refers to reality in any readily recognizable way, the mood or feeling emanating from a work predominates. Music goes even further in this regard. Deprived, so to speak, of all external marks, as when it is not placed in the service of a text, music, Ricoeur opines, “is no longer anything but this tone, this mood, this color of the soul.”32 For him, music acquires its full regenerative power only when all external references have disappeared, so that music opens “in us a region where absolutely new feelings can be shaped.”33 Accordingly, he emphasizes that, like a work of music, the mood created by a poem is “exactly coextensive with the internal order of symbols articulated by its language.”34 By directing itself to a poem’s interior makeup, “which is nothing other than the mood structured and expressed by a poem,”35 poetic language inverts the direction of reference of ordinary language, thereby effecting the retreat from the real that is the condition of the work’s worlding power. Defining the real’s refiguration as mimetic underscores how mimesis “does not consist in reproducing reality but in restructuring the world of the reader[, listener, or spectator] in confronting him or her with the world of the work.”36 The impact a work has owes its force to the power of invention that, in answer to a question or problem as the author, composer, or artist apprehends it, places its seal on the work’s ontological vehemence. The force the work has by opening the world to us and us to the world anew thus bears the stamp of the truth to which the work lays claim. The enigma of artistic creation counterpoints the power the work has when, through augmenting the practical order of our lives, the meaning proffered by it renews our manner of inhering in the world. This enigma stems from the fact that the artist’s naked experience is itself incommunicable. The work renders something of this experience communicable by standing as the solution to a question, problem, or challenge as the artist apprehended it (as I will explain further later). Why, we could ask for

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  121 example, would Claude Monet take as a subject the façade of the Rouen Cathedral in different seasons and at different times of the day if not for the inimitable problem and challenge of capturing, so to speak, the impression created by the textural play of color and light on the cathedral’s stone surfaces? Each canvas, we might say, is a faithful rendering of this impression as conveyed by Monet’s painting. But should we then not also ask how the painting conveys an impression to which the artist does justice by rendering it in precisely this way? The classical concept of beauty, according to which nothing can be added to or taken away from a work without damaging the ideal of perfection intrinsic to its success provides an unexpected but welcome insight.37 For, the faithful rendering to which we credit the painting’s truth is evidenced not by the quality of the painting’s likeness or verisimilitude to the original of which it is no mere copy but by the painting’s suitability or its fittingness vis-à-vis the feeling, mood, or atmosphere that it evokes. If we can speak of the truth of a work only in terms of its regenerative powers, as Ricoeur suggests, it is because the work’s expression of feelings, moods, thoughts, and ideas to which the work alone gives voice is the spring of its worlding force. By suggesting that the truth to which a work lays claim counterpoints the enigma of the real’s iconic augmentation, I propose to lay the ground for a consideration of how aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics illumines the broader significance of reflective judgment. A work’s power to augment the real, which earlier I  attributed to its ontological vehemence, in each case draws its force from the experience occasioned by it for a reader, spectator, or listener. The enigma on the side of artistic creation thus has a counterpart in the work’s iconic augmentation of the real, which in each case depends upon the reader, spectator, or listener’s apprehension of the meaning intended by the work.38 The reader, listener, or spectator’s apprehension of the fit of a work renders the experience afforded by the work meaningful each time she grasps the way in which the work’s constitutive elements cohere. The communicability of the experience occasioned by a work, I  will therefore say, constitutes the condition in which the solution exemplified by the work is at the same time the originary source of the work’s regenerative power and thus of the truth to which the work alone lays claim.

Singularity, Exemplarity, Communicability The paradox that the experience occasioned by a work involves an individual reader, listener, or spectator brings to the fore the operation to which the work owes its communicability. How could a work be said to express some truth to which it attests when in each case the experience of it is unique? Readers, listeners, and spectators bring different understandings and expectations to the recitation of a poem, the reading of a novel, or the performance of a dance, play, or musical composition.

122  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality Furthermore, the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which these encounters take place are as far-ranging and diverse as are the historical epochs and cultural traditions from which these expressions of human values arise. The difficulties that the singular character of aesthetic experience presents for reflections on literature, music, and art are due in no small part to the power that the work has to speak anew in circumstances and contexts that differ from those of its creation and first reception. The work’s threefold autonomy with respect to its creator’s intentions; the conditions, contexts, and circumstances of its production; and its first readership or audience’s reception gives rise to the work’s independent afterlife. The work’s semantic or hermeneutical autonomy, which we must not confuse with the concept of aesthetic autonomy rooted in the subjectivization of aesthetics and enlisted in support of art’s alleged social emancipation, consequently has as its corollary counterpart the communicability of the experience that in each case the work occasions. The paradox that Gadamer identifies with the aesthetics’ timelessness is indicative of how the work’s autonomy with regard to its author’s intentions, the conditions of its creation, and its first reception is the condition of its power to speak anew. Attributing the aesthetics’ timelessness to the fact that a work bears its meaning within itself places the accent on the work’s worlding power. A work accordingly presents each reader, listener, or spectator with the challenge and task of understanding what the work says. The work’s contemporaneity, which Gadamer counterposes to the aesthetics’ timelessness, is an achievement won through the experience to which the work gives voice.39 The truth to which the work lays claim, we could therefore say, manifests itself through the experience of the work, which the work itself renders communicable each time a reader, listener, or spectator apprehends the meaning intended by it. The artist’s audacity in creating a work to which this experience owes its meaning and force stands at the heart of the enigma of the work’s truth. Ricoeur remarks on how the pride and modesty of the artist, which he regards as amounting to the same thing, resides in her power to make the gesture that everyone should make when confronted with the question, difficulty, or challenge for which the work constitutes the solution. By rendering justice to what in the artist’s experience demands to be said, the work “refers to itself in an emotion”40 that has disappeared as regards the artist’s lived experience, which remains closed in on itself. Feeling’s elevation to fiction is here the condition of its mimetic deployment.41 The mood evoked by a work, which Ricoeur tells us can be painted, composed musically, or constructed narratively, can be problematized, so to speak, in terms of the artist’s prereflexive, ante-predicative relation to a unique situation in the world. By giving a figure to the mood founded on this singular relation, as in Monet’s renderings of the Rouen Cathedral or in Arnold Schoenberg’s monodrama, Erwartung, the work produced by the artist renders it communicable. Transposed “in the form of a singular

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  123 problem to be resolved by pictorial or other means,”42 which in the case of music more than any other art is an exploration into dimensions of our being-affected in its purest state, the artist’s naked experience gives rise to a question or challenge for which the work alone constitutes the answer. Driven by the “urgency of an unpaid debt with respect to something singular that had to be said in a singular manner,”43 the artist invents as much as discovers the required solution. The fit of the work to which this poetic resolution of the problem or question at hand gives a figure and a body arises from the manner in which a work’s component elements cohere. A melody or a tune is more than the aggregate of successive tones in this regard, since we only grasp the tune’s character by drawing a figure from the tones as they sound in succession. The fit of the work, we could therefore say, is the demonstration and proof of the adequacy of the response to the exigencies of the situation calling for it. The exemplary value of this demonstration and proof owes its meaning and significance to the way that a work summons the rule to which it singularly attests. Ricoeur reminds us that by differentiating between aesthetic judgment and determinative judgment, Kant allows for a “split within the idea of subsumption.”44 In aesthetic judgment, the act in which a case is placed under a rule in a determinative judgment is reversed. Hence, in aesthetic judgment, “one ‘seeks’ the appropriate rule under which to place the singular experience.”45 This judgment, Ricoeur stresses, is “ ‘merely’ reflective because the transcendental subject does not determine any universally valid objectivity, but instead only takes into account the procedure the mind follows in the operation of subsumption, proceeding in a way from below to above.”46 One could therefore say that, in Kantian terms, only the play between understanding and imagination as incarnate in this work is communicable. Ricoeur emphasizes that the communicability of a work or act lies not in “applying a rule to a case but in the fact that . . . the case . . . summons its rule.”47 In the absence of determinative judgment’s objective universality, the case therefore evinces the rule only by exemplifying it. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics poses a formidable challenge in this regard. Within the domain of aesthetic experience, the truth to which a work lays claim has its origin in the response constituted by the work to a problem or question as the artist apprehended it. In view of the fact that the solution exemplified by the work is as much an invention as a discovery, this claim founds itself on the “irrational moment”48 of the creative impulse from which the work’s truth springs when, in answer to a question or problem, the work comes to stand as the singularly fitting response. The inscription of the work’s meaning in its materials—language, sound, color, and the like— vests this irrational moment with its sensible character. The work’s power to refashion the real in accordance with the world expressed by it thus has as its condition the freedom and spontaneity of the creative act that,

124  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality through raising the artist’s visceral experience above itself, is the source of the work’s capacity to surpass the real from within. The work’s exemplification of the solution it constitutes has an analogue in moral and political acts that we admire. The reciprocal instruction that revolves around the theme of singularity highlights the kinship between aesthetics and ethics in this regard. Like works, persons are also “singular conjunctions”49 that cannot be substituted for one another like things. For Ricoeur, a reflection on aesthetic experience’s transposition into lateral domains therefore would have to account for the conjunction of singularity and communicability “with the particular form of ­universality”50 that in aesthetic experience takes hold in our pre- or hyper-­predicative apprehension of the fit of a work. To what extent, we could therefore ask, do the “products of genius” that Kant insists “must be exemplary”51 provide a guide when it comes to the initiatives taken by historical actors in response to the demands of the situations in which they find themselves? For Kant, “[g]enius is the talent . . . that gives the rule to art.”52 Does phronesis, which according to Aristotle is a virtue that cannot be taught, thus have a corollary analogue in the power of invention evidenced by the fittingness of the work’s singular solution to a problem, question, or crisis as apprehended by the artist, which according to Ricoeur merits the term “style”?53 This last question leads me to wonder whether the idea that mimesis demands more of the way that we think about truth than does either the classical concept of truth as adequation or Heidegger’s adoption of the Greek term, aletheia, is central to Ricoeur’s claim that the conjunction of the singularity and communicability of a work of art might serve as a model when it comes to the notion of testimony. When, in the next chapter, I relate my reflections on the imagination’s operative role in constituting the work’s response to a problem or crisis to the hermeneutics of testimony, the question as to how the exemplary value of moral and political acts that we admire figures in a hermeneutics that espouses a project of liberation in the name of the absolute will assert itself with redoubled force. Ricoeur, I will explain then, insists that the term “testimony” “should be applied to words, works, actions, and to lives which attest to an intention, an inspiration, an idea at the heart of experience and history which nonetheless transcend experience and history.”54 This intention, this aspiration, I will suggest, inheres in a poetics that takes as its object the vision of a reconciled humanity. Accordingly, we catch sight of this intention and this aspiration only in those works and acts that provide handholds for hope. By setting the notion of a fitting production in the margins of our concept of truth, Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis opens the door to a broader consideration of the imagination’s role in works and acts attesting to the good, the right, and the just to which we aspire and that we desire to be. Literary fictions, poetry, musical compositions and extemporizations, visual arts, and dance and theater far from

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  125 exhaust the fields and registers in which imagination is at work. For acts that reply to the demands of the situations calling for them in exemplary ways also forge new paths that we can follow through surpassing the real from within. The model drawn from the conjunction of the work’s singularity, exemplarity, and communicability consequently gives my claim concerning the wager of imagination its fullest amplitude. As I explained in the previous chapter, this wager is the riposte to emancipatory critiques that claim to be absolutely radical. The process of freedom’s actualization admits a place for this wager by setting the dimension of fulfilled accomplishments against that of unfulfilled claims. When, in response to aspirations and demands, we take the initiative to act, the force the present has is indicative of the freedom and spontaneity that inheres in our capacity for surpassing congealed systems of representations and habits of thought. In what sense, then, could we say that an exemplary moral or political act is comparable to a work that “lifts itself above the opaque depths of living, acting, and suffering, to be given by an author to readers who receive it and thereby change their action”?55 Ricoeur points out that by opposing genius and taste, Kant distinguishes between a creative function and a discriminating one. The exemplarity of great works is accordingly the “contrary of servile and repetitive imitation.”56 Similarly, the opposition between “following” and “imitating,” which for Ricoeur takes on its full meaning in light of the creative function assigned to genius, highlights the conjunction on the planes of ethics and politics of an exemplary act’s singularity and communicability. The act’s singularity vis-à-vis the demands of the situation calling for it, and its communicability as regards our apprehension of the act’s suitability, belong to the order of Nachfolge. Nachfolge, Ricoeur explains, draws its force from the “capacity to follow after.”57 For him, the “effect of being drawn to follow” the example set by the act is “the equivalent of the communicability of the work of art.”58 This effect takes hold when, in apprehending the act’s fittingness in answer to the situation calling for it, we respond to the injunction articulated by the act by changing our conduct accordingly. How, then, can a work or act engender its normativity when in each case the work or act responds in a singular way to a question, problem, or crisis as the author, composer, artist, or moral or political agent apprehends it? Ricoeur admits that the “exemplarity of the singularity [of a work or act] poses a problem.”59 For, within the sphere of reflective judgment, where on the planes of ethics and politics singularity and exemplarity are also in play, “communicability does not lie in applying a rule to a case but in the fact that it is the case that summons its rule.”60 St. Francis’s command to Assisi’s wealthy young bourgeois, “Sell all you have and come,”61 passes from one individual to another through the example testifying to the selflessness and humility of a life devoted to the service of others. The communicability of this individual act rests on

126  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality a prereflexive apprehension of the act’s suitability in response to every situation calling for the self’s liberation from the idolatry of worldly possessions. The singular character of the rule summoned by the act is the wellspring of the claim to universality that gives the wager of imagination its full significance and weight. This wager, which in the next chapter I will say is intrinsic to a hermeneutics of liberation, inheres in every initiative or creative endeavor that stands as testament to the courage and wisdom to begin something new.

Reason, Judgment, and Imagination The conjunction of the work’s singularity and communicability authorizing aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics poses an additional difficulty to the one that Ricoeur attributes to the paradox of aesthetic experience. As I indicated previously, this paradox stems from the fact that every encounter with a work involves an individual reader, listener, or spectator whose experience is unique. The singular character of this experience counterpoints the singularity of the work, which in each case stands as a response to a problem or challenge as apprehended by the artist. Moreover, the communicability of this experience rests on the reader, listener, or spectator’s grasp of the fit of the work through drawing together the work’s constitutive components. In view of this singular relation between the work and its reader, listener, or spectator, what sense can we then make of the claim to universality of the truth of a work or act when the work or act resolves the problem, challenge, or crisis for which it stands as the answer in a poetic or practical rather than a theoretical or speculative mode? Arendt’s wager that a theory of taste is more profitable for developing a concept of political judgment than is a theory of teleological judgment draws on the exemplary value of singular historical events in redressing the limitations of a philosophy of history that would obviate the freedom and spontaneity inhering in the power to act. Ricoeur notes that the political philosophy attributed to Kant by Arendt is in large part a reconstruction, “even if it remains inchoate, even virtual.”62 Furthermore, he remarks that Arendt’s wager is a large one, since in Kant’s work “the ties between the philosophy of history and the teleological judgment are more immediately perceptible.”63 In an effort to free political judgment from the grip of a tradition of political thought that she regards as beginning with the death of Socrates and which she argues culminates in the reversal of the traditional relation between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa sealed, as it were, by the victory of the animal laborans, Arendt repudiates the theory she attributes to Marx, that “revolutionary politics is action that makes history coincide with the fundamental law of all historical change.”64 By voiding the Hegelian dialectic of its substantive content through turning it into a method,

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  127 Marx for her unleashes the kind of process-thinking that she maintains totalitarian ideologies seize upon when, by perverting ideas into historical premises, these ideologies authorize constructing apparatuses and technologies of violence that are not subject to any constraints. Marx’s greatest achievement in placing labor at the center of history, she therefore insists, was to give preeminence to the category of human activity that corresponds to the condition of life itself and its necessities, from which “all political philosophy, once it no longer dared to justify slavery, had averted its gaze.”65 Ricoeur offers three reasons for maintaining some connection between a philosophy of political judgment such as Arendt proposes and a philosophy of history. First, by limiting itself “to articulating the political task assigned to the human species as regards natural finality, that is, as regards the innermost dispositions of this species,”66 Kant’s 1784 essay, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan View, meant to set in place a political philosophy. In Ricoeur’s view, this essay can be placed advantageously “under the sign of reflective judgment,”67 despite the fact that it predates the Critique of Judgment by almost ten years. Hence, he asks whether “the concept of a ‘perfect civil constitution,’ to which the seventh thesis [of this essay] is devoted, [is] projected as an Idea under which the empirical signs of a promising development of the human species can be subsumed.”68 Second, only a novel of history, he tells us Kant says, could be written in accordance with such an Idea “of how the course of the world must be if it is to lead to certain rational ends.”69 This directive Idea, which serves as a guide to a cosmopolitan point of view nourished only by indications of it in historically specific instances, is therefore no transcendental imperative but instead draws its force from the way that in each such instance, the case exemplifies its rule, as in reflective judgment. Finally, the note of hope with which Kant’s essay concludes is not alien to political judgment. Rather, this note of hope, Ricoeur stresses, is consubstantial with the exercise of political judgment insofar as “political judgment cannot be limited to retrospection but includes a prospective, even prophetic dimension.”70 If hope “appears as a bridge between the regard of the witness and the expectation of the prophet,”71 as Ricoeur says it does for Kant, could we say that works, words, deeds, acts, and lives that we admire provide handholds for as yet unfulfilled aspirations and demands by breaking new paths that we can follow? The hinge point of Kant’s expression, “a cosmopolitan point of view,” is indicative of how, like that of works of art, the exemplary value of historical events broadens our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world by inviting us to think more.72 Ricoeur cautions that an excessive disjunction between teleological judgment’s prospective dimension and the spectator’s retrospective judgment severs the regard directed toward the past from expectations directed toward the future. Hence, “[j]ust as taste would have nothing to judge without

128  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality the creative genius, the spectator of the [French] Revolution would have nothing to admire without the audacity of the revolutionary.”73 Likening the audacity of the revolutionary to that of the artist highlights how the capacity to begin something new draws its force from the power at work when, in answer to the demands of a situation, historical actors contest and subvert the sedimented field of practices by setting in motion a new course of events. This capacity, Arendt reminds us, is inscribed in the human condition by reason of our birth. Action, she therefore maintains, “is the actualization of the human condition of natality, . . . [just as] speech[, which] corresponds to the fact of distinctiveness[,] . . . is the actualization of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”74 The capacity for initiating a new course of action is possible only by virtue of the “already-there-ness of my character,”75 which Ricoeur similarly reminds us is given through one’s birth. This capacity to begin something new is accordingly both the mark of our inherence in the world and the condition of the possibility that binds the intermediacy of the being that we are to the power to act. This power lies at the heart of our capacity to surpass the real from within. As for the power of imagination, exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts are manifest indices of the claim to universality of the rule exemplified by each in answer to the exigencies and demands calling for it. By insisting that the fittingness of the act is the demonstration and proof of the act’s reasonable character, I am clearly drawing on the kinship between how, in the case of the work of art genius gives the rule, as Kant says, and the exemplary value of acts that proffer models that we can follow after (Nachfolge). In contrast to Kant’s formalism, practical wisdom, Ricoeur stresses, consists “in inventing just behavior situated to the singular nature of the case.”76 Could we then not say that the universal that Aristotle says poetry teaches has its analogue in exemplary acts? To the degree that practical wisdom proceeds by examples, moral and political instruction rests on individual exemplars of courage, friendship, and justice that demonstrate virtues that we can emulate. The rule that in each instance is summoned by the case consequently offers a measure of excellence for conducting our lives. The prospective or prophetic dimension that in reflective judgment turns our regard for exemplary words, deeds, and acts toward the future consequently has its vis-à-vis in our capacity and power to respond to exigencies and demands in singularly fitting ways. We can no more overlook how, in tragic situations, we find ourselves having to decide between bad and worse than we can ignore how the evil of violence prevents us from equating the whole field of action with some rationally ordained program that would serve as guarantor of our common humanity. Thanks to the regenerative power of individual acts, the sensible idea that in the case of the work is the spring of the work’s worlding power in the case of the act is the promissory sign of the real’s adequation with the good, the right, and the just in

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  129 accordance with the act’s manifest demonstration of its prospective and even prophetic aim. By taking the act’s fittingness as the emblem of its reasonable character, I readily admit that the process of freedom’s actualization as regards the adequation of the rational and the real is itself dependent upon the cultural tradition or traditions in and for which the exemplary value of individual acts holds true. The priority given by Kant to aesthetic judgment in relation to teleological judgment, which Ricoeur stresses “we cannot pass over in silence,”77 acquires its concrete specificity only in those historical contexts in which, faced with a difficulty, problem, or crisis demanding a response, we undertake various projects in accordance with values, convictions, and beliefs that we owe in part to the cultural traditions to which we belong. The axiological diversity of these values calls into question the normative claim of the rule summoned by a case where beliefs, convictions, and conventions of holding-for-true fundamentally differ. By forging a bridge between the initiative taken by an agent and our apprehension of the act’s fittingness, the singularity and communicability of the rule summoned by the case are indices of the act’s soundness as regards the available choices. As such, the acknowledged exemplarity of the act is the sign that the act is the right—that is, prudent, reasonable, or judicious—response given both the circumstances of the situation and the interpretive context in which convictions, commitments, aspirations, and beliefs to which the act attests figure. When, at the end of a course of deliberation in which the agent weighs the possible alternatives, the action she takes in a situation for which no solution and no answer is given in advance has only this fittingness as its justification and rationale. Hence, just as in the domain of aesthetic experience the fit of the work is the source of its worlding power, in the domains of ethics and politics, the act’s exemplarity renders incarnate the conjunction of reason and the power of imagination in advancing the reign of the good, the right, and the just. Any normative value that we might attribute to acts that we admire consequently nourishes our aspirations and hopes only to the degree that these acts exemplify ideals of the good, the right, and the just that we espouse. Ricoeur remarks that the directive Idea that for Kant serves as a guide in the passage from a “planless conglomeration of human actions”78 to a cosmopolitan view of history has only signs and symptoms of a perfect civil constitution as its support. He points out that for Kant, “while it is nature that ‘disposes’ humanity toward a cosmopolitan order, it is up to human beings to carry this task out to a satisfactory completion.”79 In view of the diversity of cultural traditions from which competing and conflicting claims, aspirations, and demands arise, we might wonder whether the rule summoned by an act of goodness, mercy, or justice that we admire holds true for all. Ricoeur reminds us that the discourse of rational action culminates in a political theory only because

130  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality we can situate ourselves within the respective historical communities to which we belong and in which we can recognize the virtues, duties, rewards, and the like that place their seals on the meaningfulness of our existence. If, as he tells us, the accusation leveled against idealism reveals that “existence, human practice, this will as power, are inscribed, today, outside the enclosure outlined by the act of recapitulation into Geist,”80 the appearance of freedom in history can no longer be reduced to some speculative discourse. This speculative discourse is untenable after Hegel, since the “ ‘crisis’ that has occurred at the level of a deeper-lying history affects the very relation of freedom and truth.”81 Not only does the reality of evil prevent us from equating our accomplishments with the entire field of action in which others bring their convictions, beliefs, and aspirations to bear on the course of human affairs; a stubborn blindness to the multiplicity of claims rooted in diverse cultural heritages that animate the quests on the part of different groups and historical communities for their identities is also a source of the disregard, disrespect, and disesteem that fuels struggles for recognition. Acts of generosity, courage, justice, and devotion to the service of others stand as ripostes to the violence and injustice that stem the course of the process of freedom’s actualization. In each case, the truth to which these acts lay claim by exemplifying the ideals to which they attest and for which they stand are indicative of the range of human values rooted in the diversity of cultural traditions in which convictions and beliefs are also hallmarks of the will, desire, and effort to exist. Drawing on aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics to foreground the kinship between the artist’s power of invention and the capacity of historical actors to begin something new in the end sets this capacity against Hegel’s speculative solution to the enigma of the oneness of time. Opposing the force of the present to the Hegelian temptation thus admits a place for the diversity of imperfect mediations that preserve the tension between the diverse spaces of different groups and communities’ experiences and multiple horizons of expectations. Are we then left with no answer to the question as to whether acts that some hold for true might also hold true for all? Ricoeur reminds us that aesthetic judgment’s priority in relation to teleological judgment “results from the fact that the natural order thought in terms of the idea of finality itself has an aesthetic dimension in virtue of its very relation to the subject and not to the object.”82 It therefore remains to be seen whether the truth to which individual acts lay claim transcends the contingencies of historical events as testimony to the absolute. If, as Ricoeur reminds us, order affects us insofar as it pleases us, teleological judgment calls for aesthetic judgment insofar as reflective judgment is the condition for the possibility of apprehending the universal following the example given by the individual case. Consequently, there is no practical judgment in which reason figures that does not set the power of imagination

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  131 to work. In the next chapter, I  will therefore ask how the wager that supplants social critiques claiming to be absolutely radical figures in a hermeneutics of liberation. For this hermeneutics, exemplary acts are anticipatory signs of an order of goodness, justice, and love that sanctions the hope of a reconciled humanity, the vision of which constitutes the object of a poetics that has its place in a philosophy of the will that belongs to the future.

Notes 1. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 112. 2. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 70. 3. See Gadamer, Truth and Method. As products of genius, works of art, and perhaps especially music consecrated the gnostic function inscribed within the modern concept of the symbol, the metaphysical background of which, Gadamer explains, constitutes the basis for leading “beyond the sensible to the divine” (73). The bourgeois cult of art-religion seized upon this consecration of the somnambulistic powers of genius as the sign of a realm of freedom in which the human spirit would be truly at home (see Arendt, Between Past and Future, 202). Contrariwise, from a critical sociological standpoint, elevating oneself to this higher region through an education to art only masks the struggle for position and power that is the privilege of a life of ease. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). For Bourdieu, as “the most radical and most absolute form of the negation of the world, and especially the social world” (19), music’s supposedly metaphysical transcendence of the material order of everyday life is also the mark of its value as a form of symbolic capital. 4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 71. Gadamer remarks that “the call for a return to Kant which arose in opposition to . . . a [reaction to the Hegelian school’s dogmatic schematism] could not  .  .  . be a real return and recovery of the horizon of Kant’s critiques. Rather, the phenomenon of art and the concept of genius remained at the center of aesthetics. . . . [I]n the nineteenth century the concept of genius rose to the status of a universal concept of value and— together with the concept of the creative—achieved a true apotheosis” (59). 5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 411. 6. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 407; see George Levine, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1–28. 7. Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture (London: Hutchison, 1988), 359. 8. Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 359. 9. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 43; see Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 254–56. 10. See my Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, 131–36; see also my Music, Time, and Its Other, 192ff. 11. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 115–18. 12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 5. According to Adorno, “the aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production—all that in which

132  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality the productive force is embedded and in which it is active—are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production” (5). Consequently, he suggests that the “mediation of music and society is apt to be taking place in the substructure of the labor process underlying both realms” (Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1976], 206); see also Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1977), 177–95. Adorno maintains that works of art countermand the forces of society’s instrumentalization through their internal construction. At the same time, he emphasizes that, by denying the relation to the empirical order of everyday life that for him is the “polemical a priori of the very attempt to make art autonomous from the real” (178), the principle of art for art’s sake won through art’s emancipation from cultic and social functions voids works of music, literature, and art of their efficacy and truth. 13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6. 14. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 137. 15. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 214; see Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 148–51. 16. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 105. 17. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 126. 18. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 223. 19. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 223; see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 341–79. 20. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 223. 21. Arendt, cited by Ricoeur in Reflections on the Just, 98; see Arendt, Between Past and Future, 119. 22. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 99. Ricoeur asks whether the entire history of sovereignty rests on the triadic relation of authority, tradition, and religion. This history, he suggests, evinces the root of all political authority. He explains that the word “auctoritas in Latin  .  .  . carries within its etymology something of the aura of this founding, for the verb augere means ‘to augment’ ” (99). For him, the “singular, unique holiness” (99) of Rome celebrated by Virgil and Titus Livy rested on the connection of this Eternal City’s foundation to its past, which these authors called religio. Hence, “[w]hat has the power to augment is the energy of such a founding.  .  .  . By this term, ‘senate,’ the Romans meant the transmitters of this founding energy. The auctoritas majorum, the authority of the ancients, gives the present condition of ordinary people its weight, its gravitas” (99). The function fulfilled by the role ideology plays in perpetuating and promoting the energy of some founding event binds the claim to legitimacy of those in authority or of a system of rule to an ideal image of a group, community, or nation. The paradox of authority is indicative of the strange power that rests on the right of a ruling authority to command. As a species of power, this power to command structures the hierarchical dissymmetry that separates those who obey from those who lead at the same time that the claim to legitimacy implied by it is supported to some degree by a belief in the right to exercise this power. By summoning our cooperation and consent, the ideological system provides the supplement of belief necessary to the functioning of the state and its civil institutions. A group’s patriot belief in its just and necessary existence resonates with the tradition of authority rooted in the Roman experience of the sacred character of the founding of Rome. The experience of this founding

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  133 energy manifests itself in the way that ideology exercises its second-order foundational power through perpetuating this energy via the idealized image of a group or nation. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 226. 23. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79. 24. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 91. 25. Controversies over the legitimate representation of a community or group are the driving forces of cultural politics, where claims over the legitimacy and authority of different (self-)representations of a group give rise to conflict and strife. 26. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 280; see also, for example, Henry Glassie, “Tradition,” The Journal of American Folklore 108, no. 430 (1995): 395–412; Henry Glassie, Irish Folk History: Tales from the North (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Glassie remarks that “[a]t home and in the public house, in their place of small hills and holy warfare, the people of Fermanagh construct their past, telling the simultaneous story of their community and their nation” (17), thereby reclaiming their future as their own. 27. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 222–24. 28. On the work’s expression of its world, see Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 29. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 152. 30. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 52–87. 31. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 173. 32. Ricoeur et  al., Critique and Conviction, 174; see my “Feeling, Interiority, and the Musical Body,” in Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 83–108; see also my “Is Music Mimetic? Ricoeur and the Limits of Narrative,” Journal of French Philosophy 16, no. 1–2 (2006): 122–33. 33. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 174. These feelings are far from those that a Romantic sensibility attributes to the composer and charges the performer and the listener with reexperiencing in accordance with the Werktreue ideal. This hermeneutical insight overturns the Romantic conceit that genius in understanding corresponds to the genius of artistic creation. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 56; see also Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Ricoeur similarly stresses that “understanding has nothing to do with an immediate grasp of a foreign psychic life or with an emotional identification with a mental intention” (220). On the contrary, feelings evoked by music extend our emotional space by virtue of their mimetic transposition in individual works. 34. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 59. Ricoeur points out that, to the extent that literary criticism has been influenced by a positivist current, the transposition of the “distinction between cognitive and emotive language into the vocabulary of denotation and connotation” (46) obfuscates how affective tonalities articulated by poetry modulate our manner of inhering in the world. Since only denotation is regarded as cognitive and “of a semantic order[,] . . . connotation is extra-semantic because it consists of the weaving together of emotive evocations, which lack cognitive value” (46). 35. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 59. 36. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 173.

134  Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality 37. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13–26. 38. This second enigma shipwrecks the idea that the poet, author, composer, playwright, etc., occupies an authoritative position as regards the interpretation of her work. The only privilege accorded to her is as the first interpreter of her work. 39. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 121–29; see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 101–3. 40. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 179. 41. See Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 245. 42. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 179. 43. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 179. 44. Ricoeur, The Just, 95. 45. Ricoeur, The Just, 95. 46. Ricoeur, The Just, 95. 47. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 183; see Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister. For Arendt, Kant’s discovery of the imagination’s role “for our cognitive faculties” (389) is perhaps the greatest one he made in his Critique of Pure Reason. 48. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 81. 49. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 182; see Chapter 2. 50. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 182. 51. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 175. 52. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 174. 53. Ricoeur Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 162; see Ricoeur, From Text to Action. Ricoeur explains that a “style is the promotion of a particular standpoint in a work that, by its singularity, illustrates and exalts the eventful character of discourse: but this event is not to be sought anywhere else than in the form of the work. If the individual work cannot be grasped theoretically, it can be recognized as the singularity of a process, a construction, in response to a determinate situation” (137). 54. Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis Seymour Mudge (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 78. 55. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 53. 56. Ricoeur, The Just, 100. 57. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 183. 58. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 182–83. 59. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 183. 60. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 183. The difficulty raised by transposing aesthetic experience laterally onto the planes of ethics and politics brings to the fore the paradox of the claim to universality of the rule exemplified by the work. Since this rule seeks its normativity through communicating itself in principle to everyone, each reader, listener, or spectator resolves this paradox only by availing herself of the meaning proposed by the work. Consequently, the work’s claim to universality founds itself on the way that, in answer to the question or problem for which it is the solution, the work refigures the real in accordance with the world projected by it. 61. Mark 10:22, cited by Ricoeur et  al. in Critique and Conviction, 183. This command is the one Jesus addresses to the man who asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?” (Mark 10:17. Good News

Singularity, Exemplarity, Universality  135 Bible: The Bible in Today’s English Version [Toronto: Canadian Bible Society, 1976]). 62. Ricoeur, The Just, 101. Ricoeur also reminds us that we should not forget that Arendt’s volume of Judging was not finished. 63. Ricoeur, The Just, 101. 64. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 76. For Arendt, “Marx could claim that it was from the tradition (which for him had come to its conclusion in Hegel) that he had taken the dialectical method. In other words, what he took from the tradition was an apparently purely formal component to be used in whatever way he chose” (73–74). 65. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 80; see Arendt, The Human Condition. For Arendt, “[l]abor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor” (7). 66. Ricoeur, The Just, 101; see Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan View,” in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck, trans. Lewis White Beck et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 11–26. 67. Ricoeur, The Just, 102. 68. Ricoeur, The Just, 102. 69. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 24; cited by Ricoeur in The Just, 102. 70. Ricoeur, The Just, 103. 71. Ricoeur, The Just, 106. 72. See Ricoeur, The Just, 106. Ricoeur remarks that the “broadening [of aesthetic judgment] projects the critical project beyond sociological proximity and turns it toward other possible judgments, once the imagination invites us to ‘think from the standpoint of everyone else.’ ” (105). 73. Ricoeur, The Just, 107. 74. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178. 75. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 63. My birth, Ricoeur adds, “speaks to me in another way of my existence as received: not only found here but given through others” (63). 76. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 269. 77. Ricoeur, The Just, 95. 78. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 24; cited in Ricoeur, The Just, 102. 79. Ricoeur, The Just, 101. 80. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 147. 81. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 147. 82. Ricoeur, The Just, 95.

6 Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation

Exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts that sanction the good, the right, and the just to which we aspire provide footholds for the transcending intention that for philosophical anthropology is the emblem of the intermediary being that we are. For a philosophical anthropology for which the power to surpass the real from within inheres in the originarily dialectical structure of human reality, the fittingness of works, words, deeds, and acts stands as proof of our capacity to respond to exigencies and demands in creatively productive ways. Works, words, deeds, and acts that we admire mark out the horizonal contours of the reign of the good, the right, and the just as promissory signs. It is as though, in answer to a problem, difficulty, or crisis arising from a history in which we also are caught up, the truth to which these works, words, deeds, and acts lay claim rises above the contingencies and exigencies of the situations calling for them. In view of the delegitimation of “grand” historical narratives and the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility, we should rightly be suspicious of references to the absolute. The absence and even impossibility of advancing a metahistorical plot capable of equaling the idea of humanity militates against the universalizing ambition of aspirations arising from any one tradition. The idea of the unity of a destination that could be understood only through the plurality of destinies to which religious, cultural, and ethnic groups lay claim stands as a bulwark against the hegemony of this universalizing ambition, which too often serves as a foil for advancing the interests of one nation or comity of nations. At the same time, with Ricoeur, we might wonder whether not only “the idea of truth, but also the ideas of the good and the just can be radically historicized without disappearing.”1 We might even wonder if the radical historicization of the values to which works, words, deeds, and acts attest spells the end of the task that for Ricoeur inheres in the idea of humanity. Setting the dimension of unfulfilled demands against that of fulfilled accomplishments accentuates the historical contingencies of the process on which the possibility of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind depends. We could therefore ask if privileging the right

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  137 on the part of different communities and groups to pursue their own destinies in accordance with cultural mores, practices, convictions, and beliefs shipwrecks the normative intent of the moral expectation that ties struggles for recognition to the demand for freedom and justice for all.

The Idea of Humanity and the Aporia of the Oneness of Time By setting the expectation of freedom safeguarded in principle by the demand for the rule of justice against singular demonstrations of the good, the right, and the just, I  mean to dramatize the aporia that sets philosophical anthropology on the path toward a hermeneutics of liberation. This aporia stems from the fact that no single expression of the good, the right, and the just is independent of the contingencies and circumstances of its particular exemplification. At the same time, what would we know of the good, the right, and the just apart from those instances in which they shine forth? If moral instruction proceeds by example, as Kearney for one remarks, the acknowledged exemplarity of moral and political acts binds this instruction to the injunctions issuing from them.2 On several occasions, I asked if we must renounce the idea of humanity considered as a whole in defense of the right of individuals, groups, communities, and nations to pursue their destinies in accordance with their own heritages, aspirations, convictions, and beliefs. The aporia unleashed by the destruction of “grand” historical narratives consequently sets the hermeneutics of liberation against the temptation either to master history and time speculatively or to socially contextualize and radically historicize all values for the sake of an apology that in the end makes all differences indifferent to the humanity of each person and that of the historical communities to which they belong. By setting the idea of humanity against the aporia of the oneness of time, I want also to accentuate how a critique worthy of the challenge posed by Hegel proves to be the gateway to a reflection on the place of justice in advancing the course of freedom. Earlier, I rehearsed how for Ricoeur, Hegel’s historicization of Reason destroys the spring of action.3 By elevating thought about time to the level of the absolute, the Hegelian system equates the rational with the real by bringing to its conclusion the reconciliation at work in the successive phases of Spirit’s self-­actualization. The originality of Hegel’s thought in identifying the work of the negative with history’s temporalization is therefore at the same time the source of the philosophical conceit of a style of thinking for which the successive stages of the development leading to this reconciliation is the cunning of reason’s temporal equivalent.4 By taking the place assigned to evil by theodicies that maintain that evil is not in vain, the cunning of reason is the apologetic doublet of a philosophical credo for which the idea of freedom’s actualization is hostage to time’s totalization

138  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation in the eternal present. By destroying the spring of action, this philosophical thought, which Ricoeur likens to the “divine thought that Aristotle called noēsis noēseths,”5 consequently calls for a critique for which the aporia of the oneness of time is the touchstone for the ethical and political implications of the metahistorical categories, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation.” The permanent ethical and political implications of these transcendental categories of historical thought acquire their full significance when, set against the aporia to which the discreditation of a history of the world written from the end to the beginning gives rise, history’s temporalization is cast back on the force of the present. In Chapter 4, I noted how the present acquires its force when, in response to problems, challenges, and crises, historical actors take the initiative to begin something new. Setting a new course of events in motion in the midst of a history in which agents are caught up consequently reinvigorates the tension between the horizon of a past that has already been surpassed and the horizon of as yet unfulfilled expectations. With Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, Ricoeur affirms the underlying unity of the problematic of history’s temporalization with that of politics while resisting the slippage between them. Reducing the problematic stemming from the plurality of ways various communities and groups pursue their own destinies to the political problematic in which the requirement of justice figures risks eclipsing the diversity of experiences and demands that fuel different groups’ aspirations. Conversely, reducing the political problematic, where the expression of the will to live together runs up against inequitable distributions of the sharing of power, to the problematic of preserving the tension between a space of experience and a horizon of expectation obfuscates the place of the idea of justice in the process of freedom’s actualization. For Ricoeur, the unity of these two problematics defines practical reason as such. If the “universal ambition of the metahistorical categories of historical thought can be affirmed”6 only under the aegis of practical reason, then must we not also admit that, at first, the diversity of ways of preserving the tension between the space of our and others’ experiences and the multiple horizons of our and others’ expectations seemingly confounds the idea that humanity can be considered as a collective singular only insofar as it has one history for which it is the subject? My purpose in asking this question is twofold. By placing the accent on the diversity of aspirations, claims, and demands that ignite the passion for the possible, I want first to highlight how the multiple ways and styles of temporalizing history raise the unity of the two problematics that Ricoeur tells us constitutes practical reason’s proper task to an extreme degree of aporia. Placing the universal ambition of the metahistorical categories that enable us to think about history’s temporalization under the aegis of practical reason constitutes a compelling response to the challenge posed by the loss of credibility of a style of thinking sustained by

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  139 the “eternal present of thought.”7 By the same token, if as I have argued, exemplary acts and lives are manifest signs of the good, the right, and the just, their fittingness as regards the exigencies of the situations calling for them also owes its practical force to the impact it has on values, convictions, and beliefs drawn from and operative within a particular cultural tradition or traditions. Ricoeur stresses that when the “affirmation of an allegedly universal human potential [stands accused of being] . . . the expression of some hegemonic culture”8—that of the Enlightenment, for example—the conflict between the classical version of liberalism rooted in the idea of rational agents and the politics of recognition reaches its apogee. Moreover, he cautions that “it is not even certain that freedom in the sense of the establishment of a civil society and of a state of law is the sole hope or even the major expectation of a great part of humanity.”9 The axiological diversity of values rooted in the symbolic constitutions of different cultural groups constitutes more than just a challenge to the alleged universality of rights rooted in the cultural history of one tradition in this regard. As springs of the demand to the right of every community and group to pursue their own destinies, these values, together with a plurality of signs of the good, the right, and the just, also give rise to the multiplicity of ways of preserving the tension between a space of experience and a horizon of expectations. In view of the diverse ways in which different communities and groups maintain their historical continuity, placing the unity of the two problematics of history’s temporalization and politics under the aegis of practical reason therefore redoubles the aporia of the idea of humanity considered as a collective singular in the absence of a metahistorical plot capable of equaling this idea. My second reason for asking whether the variety of ways of temporalizing history only intensifies the aporia that gives rise to the event in thinking brought about by the loss of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility complements the first. Ricoeur points out that from the vantage point from which Hegel speaks, “the idea capable of conferring a unity of history—[namely,] the idea of freedom—is understood by someone who has traversed the whole philosophy of the Spirit . . . [and] who has thought through the conditions that make freedom both rational and real in the spirit’s process of self-realization.”10 Set against the backdrop of the aporia of time’s ultimate inscrutability, an aporia that is even more radical than that of the oneness of time, the disavowal of the hubris that “impels our thinking to posit itself as the master of meaning”11 accompanies the renunciation of the claim of a sovereign consciousness to absolute freedom. Ricoeur stresses that it is not thinking that fails “in any acceptation of this term”12 but rather the impulse that drives thought about history and time to elevate itself to the level where freedom itself appears as a self-actualizing process. By cautioning against the ruinous alternative either of submitting to the narrowing of the space of our experiences or of despairing of all action by succumbing to the allure of

140  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation purely utopian expectations, he accentuates the necessity of preserving the tension between them if there is to be any history at all. From the vantage point of a hermeneutics of historical consciousness for which the force of the present is the spring of history’s temporalization, the multiple ways of carrying out the imperfect mediations between diverse cultural inheritances and the plurality of destinies to which communities and groups lay claim is indicative of how placing the unity of the problematic of history’s temporalization and the problematic of politics under the aegis of practical reason situates the question of freedom’s actualization firmly within the limits of a philosophical anthropology of the intermediary being that we are. Setting the perspectival opening that in the second stage of his analysis of the intermediacy of human being Ricoeur attributes to the finitude of character against the insurmountable impossibility of gaining some absolute standpoint has the distinct advantage of emphasizing the mutual implication of the idea of humanity inhering in the person and the diversity of cultural expressions that constitute the work of humankind. Respect, which Ricoeur tells us “makes possible the practical representation of human beings as persons who have value and are filled with meaning,”13 places the freedom incarnate in the manner in which we insert ourselves in the world under the aegis of the task we adopt in consenting to this life as our own. Moreover, the finitude of character, which as the zero origin of one’s perspectival orientation also opens each of us to the entire range of human values, has its analogical corollary in diverse cultural expressions each of which is a sign of our humanity. The concrete universality of the idea of humanity manifest in cultural works extends and augments the range of human values through these works’ imaginative explorations of ways of inhering in the world. Hence, the potency of the freedom to renew the real in accordance with the worlds projected by cultural works in each instance inheres in the cultural traditions out of which these works arise. Ricoeur’s claim that our humanity draws us into community with all that is human exterior to, or outside, ourselves counterpoints the fact that the entire range of human values is accessible to us only in a way that is particular to each. The communicability of cultural phenomena that for Ricoeur is indicative of the “fundamental unity of the λόγος . . . relative to the difference of λέγειυ [légeif; you say]”14 consequently is the touchstone for the act of translation and the linguistic hospitality that in my conclusions I will maintain is the requisite supplement to the rule of justice and its law of equivalence. Practical reason’s inscription in history through the latter’s temporalization by acts authored by agents that produce historical events consequently stands as the riposte both to the Hegelian temptation and to the totalitarian threat that for Arendt arises whenever the specifically human capacity to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs is held hostage to the allegedly immutable laws of nature or history.

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  141 For her, the “Hegelian definition of Freedom as insight into and conforming to ‘necessity’ . . . found a new and terrifying realization”15 in totalitarian dictators who, in contrast to tyrants, believed themselves to be executing these laws. Through fabricating “the oneness of all men by abolishing the boundaries of law which provide the living space for the freedom of each individual,”16 the terror of totalitarian movements destroys the condition of human plurality for the sake of the process that enslaves all who are subject to its rule. By binding “together completely isolated individuals and . . . by . . . isolat[ing] these individuals even further,”17 totalitarian terror extinguishes the perspectival orientation that is the zero origin of each individual’s and each cultural tradition’s openness to specifically human values. In place of the challenge posed by the loss of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility, the terror of totalitarian movements eliminates in advance the twofold problematic of history’s temporalization and politics by eradicating even the possibility of practical reason’s inscription in history via actions that begin something new. In view of Arendt’s diagnosis of how the Hegelian dialectic’s conversion into the presumptive law of all historical processes expunges the freedom manifest in works, words, deeds, and acts that surpass the real from within, the significance of exemplary cases that break open new paths asserts itself with redoubled force. As I said before, we might wonder whether the good, the right, and the just espoused by one group, community, or comity of nations holds true for all. Hence, we could ask to what extent the acknowledged exemplarity of words, works, deeds, and acts figures in the formation of that essential community that Ricoeur insists is the emblem of the humanity of each with all. For him, characterizing the intention to construct a common humanity in terms of its solidarity passes over too quickly the plurality of various evaluative criteria that in the context of his reflections on different orders of standing link struggles for recognition with the pursuit of esteem. As I noted previously, orders of recognition based on the socioeconomic complex and the sociopolitical complex, and their respective economies of standing differ. Awakening actors belonging to one order to that of another reveals a “new dimension of personhood”18 that Ricoeur attributes to a capacity comparable to that involved in developing a practical competency in a foreign language, “to the point of being able to appreciate one’s own language as one among many.”19 The perspectival opening that at the second stage of his analysis of the originary dialectical structure of human reality he attributes to the finitude of character consequently has a reflexive counterpart in this capacity to make incompatible values comparable and to seek an equivalence without submitting the differences between orders of standing and, by extension, differences between cultural traditions, to the rigidifying rule of some forcibly exacted commonality.

142  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation

Exemplarity and the Hermeneutics of Testimony Attributing reason’s inscription in history to initiatives taken in answer to the exigencies and demands of the situations in which historical actors find themselves stands as a riposte both to the hubris of a style of thinking that dares to elevate thought about history and time to the level of the absolute and to the conversion of the Hegelian effort to write history from the end to the beginning into some allegedly inexorable historical law. By the same token, crediting history’s temporalization to the force the present has with regard to the multiple ways in which individuals, communities, and groups maintain themselves in changing circumstances and conditions brings to the fore the diversity of competing and conflicting claims that counterpoint the plurality of cultural traditions and inheritances in which exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts have their place. If, as Ricoeur suggests, diversity can be celebrated only through the “recourse to an indefinable present,”20 we can no more ignore how reason’s inscription in history rests on the manners and styles in which different communities and groups pursue their own dreams and aspirations than can we overlook the violence that prevents us from equating freedom’s actualization with the fulfillment of one group, nation, or comity of nations expectations and demands. For an ethical vision of the world that dares to think freedom and evil together, the prospect of a reconciled humanity has its root in the transcending intention that, as the dialectical counterpart to the zero origin of our perspectival openings onto the expanse of human values, places its seal on the intermediary beings that we are. A philosophy of the will that belongs to the future consequently reserves a place for a poetics for which this vision of a reconciled humanity moves in counterpoint with the process of freedom’s actualization in accordance with the wealth of exemplary expressions of the good, the right, and the just. The hermeneutics of testimony that Ricoeur maintains is tantamount to a project of liberation under the name of the absolute crosses this interweaving of a philosophy belonging to the future and the force that the present has as the time of initiative. Testimony, Ricoeur tells us, “should be applied to words, works, actions, and to lives which attest to an intention, an inspiration, an idea at the heart of experience and history which nonetheless transcend experience and history.”21 For him, the irruption of the religious meaning of the term “testimony” opens up an absolutely new dimension within this term’s semantic complex. The quasi-empirical meaning of the act of testifying takes on a new significance in a theology of testimony that preserves a “certain narrative kernel . . . in strict union with the confession of faith.”22 The trials to which historical actors are subject, where the testimony given and weighed in answer to a difficulty, challenge, or crisis takes the form of an exemplary act or life, thus acquire a new dimension within the context of the great trial in which

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  143 the “kingdom and its justice is the stake of an immense contest between God and the Prince of the world.”23 Here, as in the profane order, the “disciple is martyr because he is a witness, not the inverse.”24 When, in a limit situation the “test of conviction becomes the price of a life,”25 the sacrificial act is the testimony of conscience given in devotion to a cause. The faithful witness is accordingly the one whose life and death manifests the light according to which the world is to be judged. The new dimension opened up by the religious meaning of the term “testimony” therefore brings to the fore how a life given in devotion to a cause promotes the call to conscience by the absolute. First, the witness who gives testimony is now not only someone but is “the one who is sent in order to testify.”26 Second, the report of this witness concerns the “radical, global meaning of human experience.”27 Third, her testimony takes the form of a proclamation that is intended for all. Finally, “this profession implies a total engagement not only of words but of acts and, in the extreme, in the sacrifice of a life.”28 Accordingly, this testimony no longer belongs to the witness. Rather, it “proceeds from an absolute initiative as to its origin and its content”29 that surpasses the exigencies and contingencies of the report given in evidence of the witness’s claim. The narrative kernel that in a theology of testimony preserves its bond with the confession of faith conjoins the historical moment, as in the history of liberation recounted in Exodus, with a prophetic one. In turn, this conjunction of confession and narration brings to the fore the juridical character of testimony, where the contrary and conflicting testimony of different witnesses is weighed. The theology of testimony is nowhere more clearly bound over to the “great trial” than in the figure of the Paraclete who, as the Counselor in the last Judgment, “will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.”30 From this vantage point, a philosophy that “seeks to join an experience of the absolute to the idea of the absolute”31 separates itself entirely from a philosophy of a Hegelian style by asking how the prophetic and kerygmatic sense of testimony figures in a hermeneutics for which the purely interior act of primary affirmation and the exteriority of exemplary works, acts, deeds, and lives are conjoined. This originating affirmation, Ricoeur explains, “becomes man only by going through the existential negation”32 attributable to the finitude of perspective, character, and vital feeling. For him, the “true relation to the power of affirmation that constitutes us”33 has been lost in the course of the victorious march of philosophies of negation. Disavowing this originating affirmation—“or, as Spinoza says, . . . the effort to exist”34—comes from overvaluing the nothingness of nihilating acts. This originating affirmation reverberates with the freedom born from the joy of “yes” when, in answer to the pathétique of human misery, we insert ourselves in the world through works, words, deeds, and acts. This freedom has as its condition the intermediacy of human being as power and act. As signs of the freedom that we desire to

144  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation be, the power of affirmation to which such works, words, deeds, and acts attest is the cipher of a liberatory project for which humanity’s redemption and reconciliation is the pole star. In view of the theological dimension of a confession of faith that joins a historical moment to a prophetic one, must we consign the notion of testimony as testimony to the absolute to the domain of religious belief? To the degree that “moral conscience is first of all the protest against the unjustifiable,”35 the voice of conscience is the emblem of the feeling of height that in religious experience counterpoints the feeling of absolute dependence. At the same time, the height of moral conscience, Ricoeur tells us, “lies in the demand for justification apart from which evil cannot be taken as unjustifiable.”36 Inasmuch as moral conscience equates itself with established norms, it cannot take the measure of the unjustifiable by setting it against these norms’ mere violation. On the contrary, “empirical consciousness takes the unmeasurable measure of the height of absolute consciousness”37 only through protesting against that which cannot, and must not, be justified. The test of moral obligation—“Act solely in accordance with the maxim by which you wish at the same time that what ought not to be, namely evil, will indeed not exist”38—provides a critical check that sets normative expectations of respect and recognition against particular expressions of the good, the right, and the just. At the same time, only the “testimony of certain acts, certain lives, that, despite their radical contingency, their plain historicity, speak in the name of the absolute”39 can divest one’s conscience of the ego’s self-interest and self-absorption. Ricoeur stresses that the “hermeneutics of testimony can no more be separated from the problematic of the unjustifiable and of justification than this problematic can be unfolded outside of a hermeneutics of testimony.”40 Consequently, this problematic is the watchword of every interpretation for which the itinerary of freedom’s actualization is the key. By asking whether the hermeneutics of testimony promotes the rule of justice, I want in part to draw out how the ethical vision of the world that dares to think freedom and evil together acquires its practical handholds in the testimony given by exemplary acts and lives. When, in the previous chapter I  attributed the singular value of works, words, acts, and deeds that we admire to their fittingness as regards the exigencies and demands of the situations calling for them, I  emphasized how, in each case, the work or the act summons the rule exemplified by it. The political courage to which the life of Nelson Mandela bears witness stands as testament to the resilience and hope that inspired a nation in its struggle against the apartheid system. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics, I noted, brings to the fore the kinship between the communicability of the work of art and the injunction issuing from an exemplary act. In both instances, reflective judgment is operative in apprehending the rule that in each case the work or act

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  145 summons by expressing it. For a philosophy of reflection such as Ricoeur espouses, originary affirmation, which he says is a purely interior act, does not figure among our experiences. What significance should we then attribute to the singular value of exemplary deeds, acts, and lives in light of the call to conscience that, for a hermeneutics of testimony, places its seal on our convictions and beliefs? The notion that works of art might provide a model for thinking about testimony offers a unique entry point into the problematic around which the hermeneutics of testimony gravitates. In the previous chapter, I remarked how, for Ricoeur, the term “testimony” is properly applicable to works, words, deeds, acts, and lives attesting to a conviction, an intention, or an idea or inspiration that transcends the history and the experience out of which it arises. Ricoeur’s suggestion that mimesis demands more of the way we think about truth than does either the classical concept of truth as adequation or Heidegger’s notion of truth as manifestation (aletheia) complements his reflections on the conjunction in aesthetic experience of the work of art’s singularity and communicability in this regard. The conjunction of the work’s singularity and communicability, as I  said before, is the condition of its power to refashion the real in accordance with the world projected by it. The claim to truth, which I attributed to the work’s proposal of a meaning, consequently acquires its ontological vehemence by reason of the work’s worlding power. This power to surpass the real from within is the touchstone for a model of testimony for which the work’s singularity and exemplarity are the keys. For, in response to a question, challenge, or problem as the artist apprehended it, the truth to which the work lays claim transcends its plain historicity and radical contingency in reworking the real from within. By founding the “appearance of a sensible idea, a concrete universal”41 on the expression of a meaning that the work alone brings to a stand, the work’s exemplification of the idea, thought, feeling, or mood to which it gives a figure and a body has its corollary analogue in exemplary deeds, acts, and lives that attest to an idea, inspiration, or conviction through laying claim to the universality of the rule summoned by each. Like the fit of the work, the communicability of this rule rests on our capacity to apprehend the “rightness” of the act or the life attesting to the good that we desire to be. Just as the artist’s audacity has its counterpart in that of the revolutionary, without which historical spectators would have nothing to judge, the testimony given by words, acts, and lives stands as proof of the strength of conviction that in each case marks the place that we also stand. Similar to the truth to which a work lays claim, the injunction issuing from an exemplary moral or political act gives rise to a summons or call. As such, the testimony of works, deeds, acts, and lives that transcend their plain historicity through the models they hold out is the cornerstone of a hermeneutics of liberation for which the task of making freedom a reality is the vis-à-vis of the recognition of the humanity of all.

146  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation Could we then say that the self’s renunciation of its claim to sovereign mastery in accordance with the testimony proffered by works, words, deeds, and acts is tantamount to the originary affirmation that Ricoeur, following Nabert, identifies with a criteriology of the divine? For Ricoeur, opposing this originary affirmation to the hubris of absolute knowledge opens the way to the reciprocal relation between the “promotion of consciousness and the recognition of the absolute in its signs.”42 Since a “finite consciousness can appropriate the affirmation which constitutes it . . . only . . . in a critical act,”43 the self’s divestment of its self-­foundational claim necessarily passes by way of the predicates through which the greatest divestment of which consciousness is capable is brought about. The criteriology of the divine consequently corresponds to this divestment of the self in affirming an order liberated from the “limitations from which no human existence can deliver itself.”44 Accordingly, this criteriology counterpoints a poetics for which Transcendence is the hallmark of the radically new dimension that its presence introduces into the theory of subjectivity. By conferring the sanction of reality on the ideas to which deeds, acts, and lives attest, the testimony that for Ricoeur transcends its pure historicity as testimony to the absolute draws the criteriology of the divine into the orbit of a hermeneutical reflection on the juridical character of the act of testifying. If, in identifying the predicates of the divine with an idea of goodness or justice manifest in certain acts and lives, we recognize the true witness while discrediting false ones, our judgment of the eminence of the act or life conforms itself to the testimony for which the act or life stands as proof. In believing the witness, we therefore also believe in her testimony. The process of sifting and sorting among the predicates of the divine therefore can never be complete. By taking the form of a trial, this process joins the “act of a self-consciousness which divests (se depouille) itself and tries to understand itself . . . [to] the act of testifying by which the absolute is revealed in its signs and its works.”45 If, for Ricoeur, the “ ‘exemplarity’ of the example does not constitute a manifestation of original affirmation,”46 it is because the norm evinced by the example is already a featured object of consciousness. Hence, in contrast to the rule that in each instance the work or act summons in answer to the question, problem, or crisis for which it constitutes the solution, the norm for which the example is a representative illustration only increases its hold over consciousness through the norm’s self-authorizing recurrence or repetition. The sanction of reality conferred on ideas, ideals, and modes of being by works, words, deeds, and acts sets in relief the kinship between testimony as testimony to the absolute and these works, words, deeds, and acts’ prospective and even prophetic dimension. The divestment that for Ricoeur is the vis-à-vis of an originary affirmation that liberates us from the hubris of a sovereign consciousness has a corollary analogue in the

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  147 power of works and acts to remake reality. This divestment of the limitations that affect each of our destinies, Ricoeur maintains, has something “indefinitely inaugural”47 about it. At the same time, the “acknowledged exemplarity of works of art, like that of great historical events . . . constitute[s] a pledge of hope”48 only because of the truth to which each lays claim. This truth, I  indicated on several previous occasions, bears the stamp of the rule to which the work or act alone attests. The originary affirmation that liberates the thought of the unconditioned from all metaphysical support consequently has its most proximate analogue in the effect of being drawn to follow (Nachfolge) the example set by the act.49 The order that St. Francis addresses to his followers passes by way of the injunction to emulate the life of one single individual who inspires others by instructing them by example. Accordingly for Ricoeur, the “testimony given by exemplary lives . . . attest[s] by a sort of short-circuit to the absolute, to the fundamental, without there being any need for them to pass through the interminable degrees of our laborious ascensions.”50 Can we then say that the sanction of reality conferred on ideas that are expressions of the freedom that we desire to be places our reflections on the singularity, exemplarity, and communicability of works and acts in proximity to the hermeneutics of testimony? For a hermeneutics of testimony, the difference between hermeneutic philosophy and a philosophy of absolute knowledge cannot be overcome. Just as the reflexive act through which consciousness divests itself of its sovereign claim leads us to renounce the hubris of totalizing conceits, promissory signs of the good, the right, and the just in works, words, deeds, and acts that we admire renew our inherence in the world in a manner that is akin to the way that, for the hermeneutics of testimony, the project of liberation operates under the aegis of the ciphers of the absolute. If to believe is to trust in the sense of holding-for-true, the testimony given by works, words, deeds, and acts sanctions our confidence in the goodness, righteousness, and justice manifest in them. Ricoeur reminds us that attestation first presents itself “as a kind of belief.”51 Attestation consequently takes the form of an assurance that, “without being a doxic certitude, . . . [is] always bound to acts”52 in which the force of our convictions is borne out. Asking whether it is a prejudice to believe that only “the good gathers together,”53 while expressions of evil fragment themselves, effectively anchors the project of liberation inhering in the hermeneutics of testimony in the power of exemplary works and acts to augment the practical field of our experiences. By resisting the idea that manifestations of evil could give rise to a summons, Ricoeur refutes the notion that a system of evil could supplant our capacity to apprehend the relation of agreement between the act and the situation calling for it, and to respond to the invitation or injunction to follow after (Nachfolge). For him, there is no equivalent to expressions of the beautiful and the

148  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation good in the order of evil. Hence, we can conceive of the transmission of evil only in biological terms of infection, contamination, and epidemic. Nothing in the order of evil, Ricoeur stresses, operates on the order of the communicability of an idea, ideal, or mode of belonging to which works, words, deeds, and acts give voice. Consequently for him, as “radical as evil may be, it will never be more originary than goodness, which is the Ursprung in the field of ethics . . . [that founds] the orientation to the good as being rooted in the ontological structure”54 of the intermediary being that we are. The enigma of evil—namely, that the origin of the evil that commences with each evil act remains inscrutable—runs throughout the effort to think evil and freedom together. Free choice, Ricoeur points out, “appears to carry with it an original wound that affects its capacity for determining itself for or against the law.”55 For him, the “enigma that affects the actual exercise of freedom”56 thus reflects that of evil’s origin. The power exercised by one will over another, he reminds us, occasions the violence that human beings bring into the world. Claims to the good, the right, and the just must therefore be subjected to the test of moral obligation, which is predicated on the respect owed to all by reason of the humanity of each. By taking on the deontological features of morality, ethics submits these claims to this test at the same time that it reserves a place for diverse expressions of the good, the right, and the just arising from different cultural traditions. By suggesting that the project of liberation inhering in the hermeneutics of testimony provides a critical touchstone for philosophical reflection, I propose in fine to reiterate how the divestment of consciousness of its sovereign claim opens the way to a renewed engagement with the challenge with which we are faced in the wake of the destruction and delegitimation of “grand” historical narratives. On several previous occasions, I have asked whether we must renounce the task of making freedom a reality for all in defense of the right of individuals, groups, and communities to pursue their own destinies in accordance with their convictions, cultural heritages, and beliefs. Must we then go so far as to say that the evil that for an ethical vision of the world can only be thought in counterpoint to an incarnate freedom cannot be subject to the rule of a moral norm, since every such norm is in the end the fruit of some axiological system? Far from licensing a notion of freedom that would authorize the right to be different at the cost of unleashing the contagion of violence, the hermeneutics of testimony draws competing and conflicting claims regarding the good, the right, and the just onto their properly juridical terrain. Attestation and suspicion, the threat of which, Ricoeur reminds us, is a perennial source of the vulnerability we experience as intermediary beings, have their counterpart in the adversarial structure of a trial. Consequently, the imperative of justice interposes itself at the point where the truth to which exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  149 lay claim and the twofold problematic of history’s temporalization and politics intersect.

The Imperative of Justice By drawing out the imperative inhering in a project of liberation that for the hermeneutics of testimony places itself under the name of the absolute, I  propose now to explore the extent to which the federating force of the idea of justice figures in a philosophy of the will that has as its object the theory of the process of freedom’s actualization within the history of humankind. This philosophy, I noted before, is not one of retrospection and reminiscence but instead belongs to the future. As such, the horizon of the process of freedom’s actualization stands out against a plurality of avenues and pathways signposted by multiple demands, claims, and aspirations. The challenges of realizing these diverse aspirations and demands within the same institutional setting, not to mention some global, supranational framework, gives rise to a politics of recognition, where struggles over the right to be different come face-to-face with constraints imposed in the name of the rule of law. To the degree one’s “identity is partially shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others,”57 as Charles Taylor points out, these struggles for recognition take place under the aegis of the idea of justice’s federating force. The narratives of First Nations women in Canada that Morny Joy stresses testify to continuing injustices rooted in the “ongoing failure by the settler community . . . and its descendants”58 are indicative of the legacy of the refusal to recognize the rights of indigenous groups. The enigma of our “plural and collective unity”59 in which, according to Ricoeur, humanity’s destination and the differences of our particular destinies can be understood only through each other has its political counterpart in the juridical problematic of safeguarding the integrity of individuals and groups while protecting the rights of all. The idea of justice’s federating force is thus the requisite condition of the process through which the destinies to which individual groups and communities aspire and humanity’s destination as regards the liberties, opportunities, security, and well-being of all mutually constitute the horizon of freedom’s actualization in answer to the violence that distorts and disfigures relations among us. By asking “what gives the idea of justice its federating force with regard to the truthful and pragmatic aims of memory as well as to the work of memory and the work of mourning,”60 Ricoeur marks the place where a hermeneutical consideration of our historical condition and the twofold problematic of history’s temporalization and politics meet. Drawing on Freud, he notes how the analysand’s resistance to recalling suppressed memories of past traumas fuels the compulsion to repeat, as when, for example, members of groups who are the victims of social disregard and

150  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation disrespect internalize denigrating images as a form of self-deprecation.61 Memory, Ricoeur stresses moreover, “does not only bear on time: it also requires time—a time of mourning.”62 In answer to the abuses of memory that he identifies with the narrative manipulation of a selective strategy of remembering and forgetting, the work of remembering aids and finds support in the work of mourning. This strategy of selective remembering and forgetting turns “official” narratives into the privileged instrument for legitimating the victors’ claims to the right to rule.63 Heroes and foes, agents and patients, and protagonists and antagonists are all in effect constructed in accordance with the evaluative texture of a narrative plot. To tell the story is therefore to judge the history of which we are a part. Weaponizing “official” narratives to celebrate the victories that found nations through conquest, war, or revolution, for instance, consequently places these histories of violence under erasure in order to forget.64 The specific pathology stemming from the ideological manipulation of collective memories insinuates itself in the traces of the material, physical, and psychic traumas inflicted on subjugated populations by colonialist powers. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, for instance, underscores how imperialist regimes ultimately triumph only when they prevent these traumas “from being expressed as  .  .  .  [they] need be—in anger and in forgiveness— so that it remains impacted into the psyche of the colonized.”65 For her, facing the “deep level of collective amnesia about who we [as Irish] are and where we come from”66 is vital to overcoming an existence that she regards as highly fragmented at best, and at worst pathogenic. Accordingly, possessing the land “emotionally and imaginatively without any particular sense of, or need for, titular ownership”67 through dinnseanchas (traditional place-lore) is a therapeutic response to the Famine experience. Pairing memory’s truthful and pragmatic dimensions with the work of remembering and the work of mourning augments the field of the duty of memory’s application. Projected as the third term onto the work of memory and the work of mourning at the point where they intersect, the duty of memory acquires the force of an imperative that Ricoeur explains is missing in the notion of work. Absent the “twofold aspect of duty, as imposing itself on desire from outside and as exerting a constraint experienced subjectively as obligation,”68 the pair, work of memory and work of mourning, lack these two aforementioned features, which are expressly found together in a form that is least subject to dispute, that is, in the form of the idea of justice. The exemplary value of traumatic memories provides a privileged site of the imperative that Ricoeur insists turns memory into a project. Under the aegis of the imperative of justice, the duty of memory thus constitutes the medial term between the work of remembering and the work of mourning. In return, this imperative “receives from the work of memory and the work of mourning the impetus that integrates it into an economy of

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  151 drives”69 in which memory’s concern for truth and its use run ahead of consciousness. What, then, vests the idea of justice with its federating force? Ricoeur sets out three elements of a response with regard both to memory’s truthful and pragmatic aims and to the work of memory and the work of mourning. First, “among all the virtues, the virtue of justice is the one that, par excellence and by its very constitution is turned toward others.”70 Justice wrests the self from the closed-circuit of the self’s relation to itself by reason of the component of otherness that inheres in all the virtues touched by justice. Accordingly, the “duty of memory is the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self.”71 Second, the duty of memory brings to the fore the notion of a debt. This debt, Ricoeur emphasizes, cannot be limited to the notion of guilt but rather extends to the feeling of being obligated to those who came before. At the same time, he stresses that we must not only pay the debt, but we must also “inventory the heritage”72 that weighs upon us. Third, we must not forget that “among those to whom we are indebted, the moral priority belongs to the victims”73 who are other than ourselves. The concern for truth, which for Ricoeur operates “under the aegis of the epistemic fidelity of memories with respect to what actually took place,”74 binds the duty to remember to the duty to do justice to the past. Memory’s epistemic fidelity, to say nothing of the historian’s concern to be faithful to the memory of the victims of persecutions, violence, and genocides, and the suffering, oppression, and exploitation of subaltern and marginalized groups, counterpoints the assignment of responsibility that, by reason of the virtue of justice, turns the duty of memory toward future expectations and demands. Ricoeur stresses that criminal responsibility and political responsibility here differ in an important regard. Criminal responsibility, he explains, always implies individual persons; political responsibility is incurred by the state by reason of the fact that the state, and not an individual person, is held to account for its acts. When asked about François Mitterrand’s argument that there was no need for the French state to seek forgiveness for the crimes of the Vichy government, Ricoeur remarks that the “fact that there was an institutional break does not mean that there was not a continuity of the nation as a historical community, incarnated in the vast network of the institutions of civil society that are framed by the state.”75 The difference between criminal responsibility and political responsibility does not absolve the state of the duty to make reparations. On the contrary, the state’s role as the decision-making organ of the body politic makes the state responsible both for the good and for the harm committed in its name. What place, then, does the imperative of justice have with regard to the obligation to weigh the inventory of the past and to pay the debt owed to others? Justice, Ricoeur maintains, turns memory into a project through

152  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation drawing out the exemplary value of traumatic experiences stored in the archives of individual and collective memories. Accordingly, this “same project of justice . . . gives the form of the future and of the imperative to the duty of memory.”76 We must therefore not only keep in view that memory is “always the memory of someone who has projects,”77 but we must keep sight of the fact that the project of justice is also the fruit of demands and expectations borne from diverse values, convictions, and beliefs. Ricoeur cautions that we must guard against “an appeal to conscience that proclaims itself to be speaking for the victims’ demand for justice,”78 since such an appeal can lead to abuses of memory similar to those stemming from memory’s ideologization. For him, the discourse substituted for that of the other is anti-mimetic: “it does not exist, it produces the hidden: it says what these others might say.”79 Accordingly, “[i]nveigling the silent world of the victims”80 turns the uses of memory into the abuses that pervert the course of the project inhering in the duty to remember to promote the dignity, respect, material support, and feeling of self-worth of all those afflicted by violence, injustice, and lack of opportunity, housing, and food security. In view of the ways that memory’s ideologization multiplies the forces that economically, socially, and historically privileged groups, communities, and nations continue to turn to their advantage, we might doubt whether the universal ambition of the metacategories of historical thought, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” safeguards the project that draws the duty of memory into the orbit of the federating force of the idea of justice. Placing the universal ambition of these metahistorical categories of thought under the aegis of practical reason highlights the imperative at the heart of our historical condition. This imperative—to preserve the tension between our experiences and our expectations as the condition of the possibility of inserting ourselves in the world—is the riposte to the Hegelian temptation. At the same time, we cannot overlook how the virulence of the aporia unleashed by the denunciation of totalizing pretensions puts into play the multiplicity of experiences, aspirations, and demands that fuel the struggles of different communities and groups.81 Reason’s inscription in history through initiatives taken in answer to exigencies and demands amplifies the ethical and political resonances of the idea of humanity ruling over the process of freedom’s actualization. The unity of the problematic posed by the transcendental categories, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” and the problematic of a project requiring the kind of “legitimating argumentation that stems from the kind of truth claimed by practice in general and politics in particular”82 thus marks the place where the idea of justice’s federating force and the liberatory impulse that enlists reason in the cause of advancing the course of freedom meet. Could we then say that the idea of justice gives rise to the demand for totality that Ricoeur maintains is a directive idea aimed at the achievement

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  153 of some highest good? Inasmuch as justice is the one virtue where principles of fairness and equality apply equally to oneself and others, this directive idea acquires its federating force against the backdrop of the diversity of aspirations that are at once both the source of competing and conflicting demands and indices of the scope of human values. If, as Ricoeur maintains, we recognize the value of the virtues and duties that confer a meaning on our lives only when we are capable of situating ourselves within the historical communities to which we belong, political theory is the terminus of the discourse of rational action insofar as this discourse admits a place for the plurality of expectations and demands that inspire and motivate different cultural groups. The anthropological presuppositions that Ricoeur insists preside over the “entry into ethics”83 lend support to the idea that the process of self-formation that is the right, task, and obligation of every human being has its collective counterpart on the level of the body politic. This process of self-formation has as its vis-à-vis the capacity to receive the injunction to which exemplary acts and lives attest. Holding human beings capable of receiving this injunction sets in relief the question as to what human beings “have to be if they are to be a subject open to a moral, juridical or political problematic.”84 The effort to construct one’s own identity consequently takes place against the backdrop both of heteronomous social pressures and of the capacity to receive the injunction that passes by way of this instruction in the ways of the good, the right, and the just. This injunction is in fine the cornerstone in the moral, juridical, and political spheres of the respect owed to each by reason of the humanity of all. The question, “What kind of being is a human being that he or she can give rise to the problematic of autonomy?,”85 consequently marks a critical turning point in a philosophical anthropology borne from the effort to raise the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse. By conferring on each person the dignity of a subject who must treat herself and others as an end and not a means, the imperative that for Ricoeur binds the duty of memory to the project of making freedom a reality in answer to the evil of violence and injustice sets the juridical task of the body politic in relief. Apart from the ability to think for oneself, to judge what the situation in which we find ourselves requires, and to determine a course of action that we regard as appropriate, the capacities inscribed in the human condition—the capacity to remember, to speak, to intervene in the course of the world’s affairs, to recount our stories in a manner that is acceptable to us, to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, and to receive the injunction that commends itself to us by way of our instruction in the ways of the good, the right, and the just—would be empty constructs. The autonomy of the subject, Ricoeur therefore says, is the “prerogative of the subject of rights.”86 Inasmuch as the autonomy of this subject is the condition of a possibility that he maintains judicial practice turns into a task, the “quid of esteem”87 founds this task on

154  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation each person’s inestimable worth. The “privilege of legitimate violence”88 granted to the State safeguards this autonomy in the name of the rule of law. By the same token, this privilege of legitimate violence is proof, so to speak, of the fact that the dream of some absolutely rational system in which the claim to legitimacy on the part of a ruling authority and the credit extended to it on the part of the citizenry are in perfect accord is an ideological chimera. So long as the rule of law aims at promoting the autonomy of subjects of rights, every system of governance predicated on the ethical intention inhering in the will to live together places the respect owed to all by virtue of the humanity of each at the heart of the process of freedom’s actualization. Convictions and beliefs run like filaments between the past and the future, permeating the evaluative networks of our cultural inheritances. To the degree that moral and political instruction proceeds by example, the models of courage, wisdom, friendship, love, and justice from which injunctions spring reflect the range of human values borne from diverse cultural expressions, traditions, and heritages. As a “kind of prereflective apprehension of some value”89 expressed in the form of a good, the affective imagination inscribes the moral, ethical, and political predicates of ideas of the good, the right, and the just at the heart of the feeling of being-enjoined. The plurality of destinies to which individuals, cultural and religious groups, and historical communities lay claim is thus the proving ground of the federating force of the idea that turns the duty of memory into an emancipatory project aimed at the liberation of all. In view of the multiplicity of heritages, traditions, aspirations, and demands that mark out the fields of motivations from which reasons for acting draw their force, what place could we then reserve for the institution of a just distance, which in the case of the State and its rule of law restores the social peace? To what third party could we appeal in the face of the aporia stemming from the loss of credibility of any absolutely rational system that owes its justification to a style of thinking that purports to master history and time? The model that Ricoeur draws from the phenomenon of linguistic hospitality supplements the rule of justice in this regard. In place of the hatred and fear that fuel the desire for justice for oneself, this phenomenon serves as “a model for all instances of understanding in which the absence of what we might call a third-person overview brings into play the same operations of transference and of welcome whose models can be found in the act of translation.”90 By embracing the virtue of the welcome extended to the stranger, the hermeneutics of liberation places the diversity of cultural traditions and values in which ideas of the just, the good, and the right are rooted at the heart of the process of freedom’s actualization. For this hermeneutics, the conjunction of the imperative of respect, the duty of memory, and the federating force of the idea of justice are

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  155 the fruit of a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery places its stamp on the intermediary being that we are.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 304. 2. Kearney, The Owl of Minerva, 114. 3. See Chapter 4. 4. See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 200. 5. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 208. 6. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 215. 7. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 208. 8. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 215. 9. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 220. 10. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 194. Ricoeur adds that the traversal of this philosophy of the Spirit is presented in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, ed. Ernst Behler, trans. Arnold V. Miller, Steven A. Taubeneck, and Diana Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990). 11. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 261. Ricoeur explains that the aporia of time’s inscrutability “springs forth at the moment when time, escaping any attempt to constitute it, reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed by the work of constitution” (261). 12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 261. 13. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 14; see Chapter 2. 14. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 138. 15. Arendt, Essays on Understanding, 346. Arendt stresses that the “very term ‘law’ has changed in meaning; from denoting the framework of stability within which human actions were supposed to, and were permitted to, take place, it has become the very expression of these motions themselves” (341). See Dana R. Villa, “Hannah Arendt: From Philosophy to Politics,” in Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Catherine H. Zuckert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 116; Tama Weisman, Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx: On Totalitarianism and the Traditions of Western Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 146. 16. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 342. Arendt explains that “[t]error, in the sense we were speaking of it, is not so much something which people may fear, but a way of life which takes the utter impotence of the individual for granted and provides for him either victory or death, a career or an end in a concentration camp, completely independent of his own actions or merits” (357). 17. Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” 356. For Arendt, “[o]nly isolated individuals can be dominated totally” (356). 18. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 209. 19. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 209. Ricoeur notes that the “disputes in question are not violent, but argumentative, something that political philosophies which place the principal emphasis on power, domination, or force tend to underestimate” (205). 20. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 311. 21. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 78. 22. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 133. 23. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 141. 24. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 132.

156  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation 5. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 129. 2 26. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 85. 27. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 86. 28. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 86. 29. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 86. 30. John 16:8, cited in Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 92. The Good News Bible version of the passage reads: “he will prove to the people of the world that they are wrong about sin and about what is right and about God’s judgment.” 31. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 78. 32. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 137; see Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation. According to Ricoeur, this affirmation has “all the characteristics of an absolute affirmation of the absolute” (78). 33. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 137; see Paul Ricoeur, “Negativity and Primary Affirmation,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 305ff. 34. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 137. 35. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 118. 36. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 118. 37. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 114. 38. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 218. 39. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 116. 40. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 118. According to Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of testimony is reciprocally related to a criteriology of the divine. From the standpoint of this criteriology, exteriority and height are inseparable to the extent that the divine, which is “implicated in the founding act of consciousness,  .  .  . makes itself the judge of the ideas human beings make of God” (116). Ricoeur points out that, unlike Lévinas, height for Nabert remains on the side of a reflection for which the spiritual act of an empirical consciousness that avows the “superiority of an originary affirmation” (113) defines the itinerary for freedom’s liberation. Conversely, exteriority adheres to the side of testimony, which in a trial-like situation is given by the witnesses to the events in question. Unlike Lévinas, for Nabert, exteriority and height therefore “do not coincide in one and the same instance, that is, in others” (116). Hence, for Ricoeur, the “greatest proximity between Nabert and Levinas is expressed in this conjunction of ethics and the hermeneutics of testimony” (118). See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 341ff. 41. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 81; see Chapter 5. 42. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 99. 43. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 96; see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. Ricoeur remarks that in the second of his Gifford lectures that he did not include in Oneself as Another, he “explored the features by which the understanding of oneself best responded to the teaching and through the summons which solicit the self in the manner of a call, imposing no constraints” (23). See Paul Ricoeur, “The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis, IL: Fortress Press, 1995), 162–75. 44. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 96. Ricoeur explains that “[t]here is no unitary intuition, no absolute knowledge, in which consciousness would grasp both consciousness of the absolute and consciousness of itself. The moment of awareness can only be broken up and dispersed in the predicates of the divine. These predicates are not characteristics or qualities of a being

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  157 in itself; they are multiple and diverse expressions of a Pure Act which can only be spoken of by being invested with these qualities” (96). The affirmation of an “order freed from the limitations from which no human existence can deliver itself” (Nabert, cited by Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 96) is consequently the vis-à-vis of the presence of a genuine Transcendence, which for Ricoeur introduces a revolution in the theory of subjectivity. See Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 486; see also Greisch, “Testimony and Attestation.” According to Greisch, the “paradoxical affirmation of an ipseity at the heart of passivity” (84), which marks out the path from Lévinas to Nabert and from Nabert to Lévinas, lies at the heart of a hermeneutics of testimony that fulfills at least in part Ricoeur’s project of a poetics of the will. 45. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 98. 46. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 79. 47. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 71. 48. Ricoeur, The Just, 106. 49. See Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 79. 50. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 182. 51. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 21. 52. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 117. 53. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 184. 54. Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability,” 284. Ricoeur adds that, in biblical terms, this orientation is rooted in the ontological structure of creation and createdness. See Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 156. 55. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 218. 56. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 218. 57. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. 58. Morny Joy, “Paul Ricoeur and the Duty to Remember,” in Paul Ricoeur: Honoring and Continuing the Work, ed. Farhang Erfani (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 168. 59. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 138. 60. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89. 61. See Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 213–14. 62. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 74. 63. The history of imperialist rule bears out how the compact between remembering and forgetting forged by a selective strategy justifies the victor’s claim to the right to rule. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 78ff. See also my “Colonialist Ruinations and the Logic of Hope.” 64. See, for example, Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 304–10. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Anderson points out the obligatory role played by a selective strategy of forgetting in reshaping the memory of religious and national conflicts and wars. According to him, the systematic historiographical campaign deployed in France principally through the state’s school system, for example, reminds “every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which are now inscribed as ‘family history’ ” (201). 65. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “A  Ghostly Alhambra,” in Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine, ed. Tom Hayden (Boulder, CO: Roberts Reinhart, 1998), 69; see Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire, Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Williams and Ó Laoire point out that the “Famine, until the

158  Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation 150-year commemoration in 1997, was not a part of the Irish history or folklore prominent in public discussion in Ireland. Indeed, an air of shame and denial characterized popular memory” (73). See also Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219. 66. Ní Dhomhnaill, “A Ghostly Alhambra,” 69. 67. Ní Dhomhnaill, “A  Ghostly Alhambra,” 77. Dinnseanchas inscribes the memory of this collective trauma on the landscape through the “pointing out of the graves and its delineation of certain spots as ‘hungry grass,’ where famine victims died, and where if you walk on them, you will be overcome by a sudden and overpowering hunger and weakness that might even be lethal” (Ní Dhomhnaill, 77). 68. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 88. 69. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 88. According to Ricoeur, “[t]his united force of the duty of justice can then extend beyond the memory and mourning pair to the pair formed by the truthful and pragmatic dimensions of memory; indeed, our own discourse on memory has been conducted up to now along two parallel lines, the line of memory’s concern for truth, under the aegis of the epistemic fidelity of memories with respect to what actually took place, and the line of memory use, considered as a practice, even as the technique of memorization. . . . It is as though the duty of memory was projected ahead of consciousness as a point of convergence between the truth perspective and the pragmatic perspective of memory” (88–89). The divestment of the self that for a hermeneutics of testimony operates under the aegis of signs of the absolute thus has a counterpart in the way that this concern for truth runs ahead of consciousness. 70. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89. 71. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89. 72. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89. 73. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 89. 74. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 88. 75. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 122. 76. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 88. 77. Ricoeur et al., Critique and Conviction, 124. 78. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 90. 79. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 342. The challenge, then, is “knowing whether the masses have found, in their own age, an appropriate discourse, between legend and scholarly discourse” (342). 80. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 90. Ricoeur remarks that “[w]e should not be surprised to find again on this somewhat higher level of obligated memory the same signs of abuse recognized . . . principally in the form of the frenzy of commemoration” (90). 81. See, for example, my “Fragile Identities, Capable Selves,” Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 64–78. 82. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 214. 83. Ricoeur, The Just, 11; see Marc De Leeuw, “The Anthropological Presupposition: Paul Ricoeur’s Search for the Just,” in Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 35–47. 84. Ricoeur, The Just, 64. The capacity to follow exemplary models of courage, wisdom, and justice is accordingly a vital feature of the process that gives the concept of Bildung its moral and political force (see Chapter 4). 85. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 74; see Chapter 3.

Toward a Hermeneutics of Liberation  159 6. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 72. 8 87. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 122; see Chapter 3. 88. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 332; original emphasis; see Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 247–70; Paul Ricoeur, “Dialogue 5: On Life Stories,” in On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva, ed. Richard Kearney (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2004), 161–65. 89. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 63. 90. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 246.

7 Conclusions

The hermeneutics of liberation’s embrace of the imperative that joins the duty of memory to the idea of justice’s federating force sets the challenge of making freedom a reality in the absence of a metahistorical plot in relief. In view of the diversity of values and beliefs that fuel different communities and groups’ aspirations, initiatives that preserve the tensions between various historical actors’ heritages and unfulfilled expectations and demands might seem to confound the hope of some common destination for humanity. Scattered among the different destinies to which individual communities and groups lay claim, the vision of a reconciled humanity thus appears at first to have been cast radically into doubt. We have to admit that the virtues of moral and political acts that we esteem are bound up with the ethical mores of the cultural traditions to which we, like others, belong. Hence, even exemplary representations of the good, the right, and the just can be, and often are, subject to dispute. At the same time, to the degree that these ciphers of the good, the right, and the just are promissory signs of the liberation of all, exemplary acts are the proving ground of our common humanity. In each case, expressions of the good, the right, and the just raise their respective claims to universality by exemplifying them. For a hermeneutics of liberation instructed both by the obligation inhering in the idea of respect and by the exemplary value of works and acts that forge new paths, diverse claims rooted in multiple systems of values, convictions, and beliefs constitute the real historical anchorages of the project of humanity inhering in a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. The hermeneutics of testimony proves to be a critical touchstone in this regard. The testimony of words, deeds, acts, and lives that transcend their naked contingency and sheer historicity marks out the insuperable difference between these words, deeds, acts, and lives’ singular value and the hubris of absolute knowledge. As I indicated in the previous chapter, the idea of the absolute that the hermeneutics of testimony seeks to join to an “experience of the absolute”1 promotes the self’s divestment of its claim to found itself. The originary affirmation that, in taking the form of consent to an existence given to us, deposes both the claim to absolute

Conclusions  161 knowledge and the wish for absolute freedom countermands the impulse that drives thought to posit itself as the master of meaning. This same impulse, and its negative contrary, lead either to setting the Cogito in the place of ultimate foundation or to its debasement. Consenting to a life that is given to us and making the task inhering in the idea of the person one’s own takes on its specificity under the sign of the intermediary being that we are. Philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur accordingly emphasizes, belongs to the hermeneutical age of reason inasmuch as it protects itself against the hubris of setting itself up as the “heir to the philosophies of the cogito and as continuing their self-foundational claim.”2 When, in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur proposes to think eternity and death together, he marks out the place of the aporia of the Other, which, he tells us, brings philosophical discourse to an end.3 Set against the intermediacy of human being, the process of temporality’s hierarchization points to the difference between Being and beings through indicating the passage beyond. What, Ricoeur therefore asks, do we “understand when we say that the ‘most original temporalizing of temporality as such is Temporality’?”4 Nothing, he tells us, unless we are “in a position to be able to link the distinction between temporal and temporalizing to the ontological difference”5 between beings and Being. For him, apart from its function in pointing to this ontological difference, this distinction succeeds only “in indicating the inscrutable character of temporality understood as the wholeness of Dasein.”6 By itself, Ricoeur adds, “the distinction between temporal-being and temporality no longer designates a phenomenon accessible to hermeneutic phenomenology as such.”7 The self’s divestment of its claim to found itself counterpoints the aporia of the Other in this regard. The radical divestment of the ego by acts, words, deeds, and lives attesting to the absolute opens the way to the injunction coming from the Other. Earlier, I  noted how the appeal to conscience reverberates in the feeling of being-enjoined. Being-enjoined thus constitutes the “moment of otherness proper to the phenomenon of conscience, in accordance with the metaphor of the voice.”8 Pairing the phenomenon of injunction with that of attestation brings to the fore the notion of the debt’s rightful place, which according to Ricoeur Heidegger ontologizes too hastily at the expense of the ethical dimension of being in debt.9 If, as Ricoeur maintains, we must pursue the course of the trajectory of ethics beyond the point where the imperative of the law is the source of injunction-prohibitions, as in the case of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” to the moral choices we make in different situations, we must also follow the path of the injunction that, coming from the Other, instills itself at the heart of our convictions. Like the feeling of being-enjoined, convictions borne from the injunction coming from the Other have a place among the variety of experiences of passivity that constitute the “phenomenological respondent to the metacategory of otherness.”10 To the degree that the convictions we hold reply to this

162  Conclusions feeling of being-enjoined, listening to the voice of conscience is indicative of the situation in which being-enjoined by the Other draws the hermeneutics of liberation to the threshold of a consideration of the status of the Other’s ultimate equivocalness as the source of this injunction’s exteriority, anteriority, and height. The question to which I, therefore, first want to turn in reprising my discussion of the place of a hermeneutics of liberation in a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being concerns the way that convictions and beliefs rooted in axiologically diverse cultural inheritances give rise to competing and even conflicting aspirations and demands. In Music, Time, and Its Other, I argue that music refigures time’s ultimate inscrutability in response to the ontological deficiency that strikes at the heart of our experiences of time. By staking out the borderlines between time and eternity, experiences in music in which time is surpassed by its other take the measure of the meaning of time. Postmodern simulacra of a mythic return to a time in illo tempore aesthetically prefigure the end of history’s temporalization and the dissimulation of reason’s demand for totality in a sempiternally frozen nunc stans. Accordingly, I said then that we catch sight of the aporia of the oneness of time in the multiple ways that music revalues time in response to the deficiency born from the difference between time and its other. We can hear resonances of a similar theme in Ricoeur’s remark that “[p]erhaps the philosopher as philosopher has to admit that one does not know and one cannot say whether the Other, the source of the injunction, is another person whom I  can look in the face.  .  ., or my ancestors for whom there is no representation, or God—living God, absent God, or absent place.”11 The diversity of convictions and beliefs borne from the injunction coming from the Other redoubles the force of the enigma of a reconciled humanity in the absence of any “grand” historical narrative capable of gathering together different groups, communities, and nations’ histories, aspirations, and demands without remainder. The vision of a reconciled humanity that counterpoints the experience of fault rooted in the pathétique of human wretchedness thus acquires a difficult practical handhold in convictions and beliefs on which the feeling of being-enjoined by the Other places its seal. A second, related line of inquiry follows from the first. The diversity of experiences in which the testimony of words, deeds, acts, and lives divests the ego of its self-foundational claim gives rise to a multiplicity of horizons founded on moral injunctions issuing from a wealth of exemplary models. Like a work of art, the singular value of which I attributed to the fittingness of the solution constituted by it, an act or a life that we admire exemplifies the rule to which it attests. The fit of the work, which I  explained in Chapter  5 the reader, listener, or spectator apprehends through grasping how the work’s component elements cohere, provides a fecund point of access to the way that imagination is operative in acts

Conclusions  163 that respond to the exigencies and demands of the situations calling for them. When, in answer to a difficulty or problem, a work founds the sensible appearance of the mood, thought, or idea expressed by it on its manner or style of presentation, it renders something of the artist’s visceral experience communicable. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics highlights the kinship between the mimetic operations through which the narrative art, for example, lifts experiences of acting and suffering above their opaque depths and the way that imagination is at work in acts that reply to the demands of the situations calling for them. For a hermeneutics attentive to the power of imagination at work, reason’s inscription in history thus has its corollary analogue in reality’s refiguration in accordance with the worlds projected by individual works. The capacity that for philosophical anthropology sets the transcending intention of discourse, the idea of the person, and happiness against the finitude of perspective, character, and vital desires thus inheres as much in acts from which moral injunctions proceed as it does in works that renew our ways of inhering in the world. This capacity is one for which the freedom incarnate in works, words, deeds, and acts is the manifest sign. Like every new beginning, every adventure confounds both the hubris of the subject’s self-foundational claim and all amor fati. Thanks to this freedom inhering in the capacity to begin something new, convictions and beliefs that we embrace in accordance with the vision of the right, the good, and the just that we espouse place their seal on our designs, projects, and life plans.

Conviction and Belief If in the first line of inquiry previously outlined the voice of conscience is the arbiter of convictions and beliefs, the second line of inquiry expressly thematizes the political features of a hermeneutics of liberation in which convictions and beliefs rooted in diverse cultural traditions are the uncompromising vis-à-vis of the aporia of our common humanity. This aporia, which for a philosophy of the will that belongs to the future sets the theory of the process of freedom’s actualization against the destruction of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility, gives rise to the ethical and political challenges that accompany the work of remembering and the work of mourning. As the third term projected onto the intersection of the work of memory and the work of mourning, the duty of memory assumes the force of the imperative that vests the idea of justice with its federating force. The federating force of the idea of justice accordingly stands as the riposte to the difficulty posed when I asked if the multiple foundations of demands and aspirations of diverse communities and groups shipwreck the task of making freedom a reality for all. In light of the absence of some third party capable of arbitrating impartially between competing and conflicting claims and demands,

164  Conclusions the question I raised at the end of the preceding chapter concerning the required supplement modeled on the phenomenon of hospitality returns with redoubled force. For how, in the absence of a third party capable of instituting a just distance among diverse communities and groups, could we otherwise hope to realize our common humanity after having renounced the temptation to proclaim ourselves to be the masters of meaning? The renunciation of the hubris on the part of the subject to posit itself as the master of meaning places the significance of our convictions and beliefs at the forefront of a philosophical anthropology instructed by the revolution in the theory of subjectivity that strips consciousness of its sovereign power. We might wonder why, following the discreditation of “master” narratives that sanction the violence of “official” histories at the expense of these histories’ victims, we have not only failed to bring this violence to an end but we are witnessing its resurgence in the explosion of the numbers of migrant and stateless individuals, the rise of nationalist tribalism, and the spread of authoritarian rule. We must admit that renouncing the dream of absolute knowledge revitalizes the possibilities for inscribing reason in history through deeds, works, and acts at the risk of imperiling the project that, under the aegis of the idea of humanity, aims at the liberation of all. Ricoeur stresses that intellectual honesty demands we confess that “we do not know if . . . [the event in thinking precipitated by the loss of the Hegelian philosophy of history’s credibility] is indicative of a catastrophe that still is crippling us or a deliverance whose glory we dare not celebrate.”12 At the same time, if as he maintains attestation is principally attestation of the self as acting and suffering, being as power and act—the idea of which is the touchstone of a philosophical anthropology of homme capable—is the ground of the process of freedom’s actualization. For a philosophical anthropology that refuses to accede either to the Cartesian elevation of the ego or its Nietzschean debasement, the intermediary being that we are attains its apogee in the self-constancy (ipseity) of one who is capable of keeping her word. The renunciation of the subject’s self-foundational claim thus draws the self’s constitution in relation to others into its properly ethical and political domains. Through forging a bond between the self and the symbolic constitution of the communities to which members of a group belong, convictions and beliefs place their seals on the quests in which claims to each one’s own identity and destiny figure in the process of reason’s inscription in history.13 By shipwrecking the dream of a normative conception of reason that would fulfill the role of a regulative ideal, this process thus becomes the proving ground of the imperative that sets the idea of justice’s federating force against the resurgence of historical violence. I cannot emphasize enough the kinship between the event in thinking for which the aporia of the oneness of time provides the critical impetus

Conclusions  165 and the idea of the person that, in response to the deficiency of the I of I think in a transcendental analysis of the power of knowing, situates the feeling of respect at the heart of the task that we assume in adopting the life that is given to us as our own. This feeling, for which the idea of the humanity in each of us is the object, is the wellspring of the moral expectation of another’s esteem. Placed under the rule of law, respect gives rise to the mutual constitution of subjects of rights. By developing the dialogical structure of autonomy “on the plane of obligation,”14 the requirement of respect founds the feeling of one’s own self-worth on another’s regard for one’s person for which the ability to think for oneself, to judge what the situation requires, to subject one’s beliefs to the test of those of others, and to act with conviction are manifest indices. We therefore cannot pass over in silence how the basic misunderstanding on which the theme of mastering history rests, namely, “that we are affected by history and that we affect ourselves by the history we make”15 also obscures how the evil of violence adversely affects others by depriving them of their power to act. Hence, we cannot overlook how the “theory of history and the theory of action never coincide, due to the perverse effects issuing from our best conceived projects.”16 The permanent ethical and political implications of the metahistorical categories, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” are the vis-à-vis of the task inhering in the idea of our humanity in this regard. Just as the practical representation of the idea of the person becomes body and flesh through our insertion in the world in accordance with our projects, plans, and designs, the permanent ethical and political implications of these metahistorical categories of thought safeguard the right of different communities and groups to their claims and demands in holding as true their heritages, convictions, aspirations, and beliefs. A second consideration follows from and complements the first. It would be difficult to make sense of the moral harm that ignites struggles for recognition apart from the violence that ensues when the conduct of one group, community, nation, or comity of nations infringes upon or violates the rights and aspirations of another. Like us, others have their ways of living rooted in symbolic systems that structure the webs of relations in which they inscribe their lives. Ricoeur reminds us that responses to the question “Who am I?” or “Who are we? construct a precarious bulwark against the risks and threats to whom we believe and proclaim ourselves to be. The slippage from ipse identity to idem identity opens the way to our identities’ ideological deformation through the abuses of memory stemming from selective strategies of remembering and forgetting. Vesting a historical community’s identity with the prestige of its immutability, as when “ideologists try to  .  .  . remove  .  .  . the bite of time”17 by reducing the equivocal notion of permanence in time to the pole of sameness, has its corollary underside in essentializing representations that denigrate individuals and groups subject to another’s rule.

166  Conclusions The “lack of approbation, sanction, confidence, and aid”18 accorded to others, together with the refusal of recognition that for Honneth gives rise to feelings of moral indignation, is both the instrument for undermining others’ confidence in their own self-worth and the principle of their exclusion. If believing that one is able to act in accordance with one’s powers, convictions, and beliefs is to be capable, this refusal of recognition and this principle of others’ exclusion redoubles the moral and material harm stemming from the power that one group or comity of groups exercises over another. A third feature of the kinship between the critical impetus of the event in thinking that sets the aporia of the oneness of time against the totality of absolute knowledge and the practical task founded on the idea of the person concerns the place of convictions and beliefs when it comes to the way that we affect ourselves and others through the projects that we undertake. We cannot ignore how beliefs inscribe themselves in the initiatives that vest the present with its historical force and weight. Moreover, we cannot disregard the fact that the “strong” evaluative character of an individual or group’s convictions is the spring of the moral impulse regarding the kind of life that is considered to be worth living, an impulse that in turn can pose a threat—perceived or real—to one’s own identity and way of life. Amartya Sen remarks that “the apparent cogency of parochial values often turns on the lack of knowledge of what has proved feasible in the experiences of other peoples.”19 We, therefore, have to admit that the good, the right, and the just exemplified by acts that we or others admire are indices of the axiological perspectives accompanying the moral and political impulses that animate different expressions of the will to live together. Earlier, I attributed the kinship between works of art and exemplary acts to the fittingness of the response to a problem, question, or crisis as apprehended by the artist in the case of the work or the agent in the case of the act. This kinship, I said then, rests on the power of imagination at work. Phronesis, I also noted, is a virtue that Aristotle tells us cannot be taught. The “mean” that for him constitutes the just or prudent solution in a given situation, we could now say, draws its force from the way that this solution stands as the fitting response. For the tie that Aristotle establishes between phronesis and phronimos (“the man of phronesis”20) is meaningful only if this “man of wise judgment determines at the same time the rule and the case, by grasping the situation in its singularity.”21 Ricoeur explains that for Aristotle, practical wisdom seems to have two limits, an upper limit, which is that of happiness, and a lower limit, which is that of the singular decision. Aristotle, he adds moreover, “does not hesitate to compare this singular nature of choice in accordance with phronēsis to perception (aisthēsis) in the theoretical dimension.”22 The way that the phronimos determines the rule in arriving at a decision regarding the case in question displays a marked affinity with the Kantian concept of reflective judgment. Could we not then say

Conclusions  167 that the ethical aim that Ricoeur counterposes dialectically to the moral norm in situations calling for singular judgments has as its vis-à-vis the demand for totality that in the second stage of the analysis of the intermediary being that we are sets the finitude of one’s own perspective and point of view against the infinitude of happiness, which for Ricoeur has the same breadth as reason? By suggesting that the diversity of aims, ends, and “highest goods” that figure in the expectations, demands, and aspirations of different historical communities and groups supplants the hubris of absolute knowledge, I want to emphasize once more the extent to which convictions and beliefs rooted in different cultural traditions seemingly pose a challenge to the project that Ricoeur, following Kant, identifies with the task of realizing our common humanity. The anthropological presuppositions that for Ricoeur rule over the gateway to morality are indicative of our ability to deliberate over ends and goods, to decide in favor of the best, a better, or in some instances the least worse alternative, and to take the initiative to respond to a moral, juridical, or political difficulty or crisis in a singularly appropriate way. Anthropological presuppositions regarding the “mode of being of a subject supposedly accessible to a moral, juridical, or political problematic”23 are the ground, so to speak, of these abilities to bring the force of the present to bear on the duties and obligations we feel we have and the challenges and tasks to which we believe we are called. By reintroducing the teleological dimension of the unique, highest, or supreme good that moral formalism sets aside, the imperative that one must treat oneself and others as an end and not as a means consequently at the same time sanctions the right to claims to the good, the right, and the just by different communities and groups in accordance with the considered convictions and beliefs of each. The imperative that turns the duty of memory into a project has an antecedent in the idea of the person in this regard. Under the aegis of the imperative of justice, the duty of memory liberates us from the grip of the passions for possession, power, and vainglory that hold narrative justifications of “official” histories hostage to the past. Under the aegis of the imperative of respect, the autonomy of homme capable makes the idea of the person the condition of the possibility of the moral, juridical, and political realization of liberties, opportunities, and securities, which now are the privilege only of some, the right of all. By opposing the autonomy of homme capable, which as the first principle of morality juridical practice sets against the vulnerability of fragile human beings, to the claim on the part of the subject to posit itself as the master of meaning, I want finally to indicate how the liberatory impulse of a philosophical anthropology borne from the effort to raise the pathétique of human misery to the level of a rigorous discourse is the touchstone for a renewed engagement with the threats, real or imagined, posed by others’ convictions, beliefs, and ways of life. To safeguard the

168  Conclusions dignity and worth of each person, juridical practice adopts the autonomy of homme capable, which Ricoeur maintains is the prerogative of subjects of rights, as the condition of the possibility of its task. In view of the revolution in the theory of subjectivity brought about through introducing a poetic dimension into the philosophy of the will, we might wonder if, at the limit, the ultimate equivocalness of the Other as the source of the summons that divests the ego of its self-foundational claim throws even the notion of a subject of rights into a state of confusion. By the same token, apart from the privilege granted to the State to enforce the rule of law, rules and norms established by juridical precedence, legal tradition, and the religious or secular authority on which they rest would be stripped of all meaning, significance, and value. We might reasonably question whether the feeling of absolute dependence that Ricoeur maintains is possibly the only truth of religion confounds the hubris of absolute knowledge at the price of unleashing the kind of violence that pits one religious group against another. As the emblem of the “avowal of an element of passivity in my existence, an avowal that in some ways”24 our existence is given to us, this feeling sets itself at the heart of the phenomenon of being-enjoined. We, therefore, “speak of religious experience to characterize attitudes toward the divine as different as a feeling of absolute dependence, the experience of a boundless trust, the thrust of ultimate concern, and the consciousness of belonging to an economy of the gift that precedes every human movement of charity.”25 As such, the divestment of the ego that for a hermeneutics of testimony is tantamount to a project of liberation in the name of the absolute is also the ground and source of those deepest convictions and beliefs for which the virtue of justice is among the first of the “highest goods” at which we ought to aim.

Is Freedom Possible? Throughout the preceding reflections, I have tried to keep in view how the diversity of demands and aspirations that contribute to shaping the destinies of different communities and groups are both a source of conflict and a reason for hope. Demands and aspirations fueled by convictions regarding the good, right, just, and true mark out the horizons of multiple fields of expectations. From this vantage point, the role reflective judgment plays in founding the kinship between the communicability of a work (the fittingness of which we apprehend in drawing a configuration from the work’s component elements) and the followability of the act (the rightness of which we emulate through modeling our acts and lives on it) places the force of our convictions in relief. As I indicated previously, the work’s ontological vehemence has its analogical counterpart in reason’s inscription in history, the force of which I attributed to acts that break new paths through subverting congealed systems of practices and

Conclusions  169 habits of thought. Just as the work’s proposal of meaning is the source of its claim to truth, exemplary acts are the springs of moral injunctions and political ideals that ignite the passion for the possible. The claim to truth evinced by the work’s worlding power, which for Gadamer as for Heidegger invites us to tarry awhile, stands as the riposte to the question, difficulty, or problem as the artist apprehended it.26 The force of the work’s claim to truth thus bears out the power of imagination at work in exploring new dimensions of our experiences. The freedom exercised by the artist in producing a work that renders something of her vital experience communicable is emblematic of the freedom and spontaneity inhering in the power to act. Only this freedom and spontaneity are commensurate with the testimony given as much by works, words, deeds, and acts as by the faithful witness who in taking a stand, gives her or his life in devotion to a cause. As I explained at some length, aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics brings to the fore the kinship between a work’s power to refashion the real and exemplary acts in which the capacity to reply to exigencies and demands in singularly fitting ways is the condition of reason’s inscription in the course of human affairs. The achievement of the fit that in the case of the work as in the case of the act is a promissory sign countermands the conceit of totalizing pretensions that would guarantee freedom’s actualization based on some allegedly rational plot. Promoting the right of groups and communities to their own hopes, aspirations, and dreams in the name of safeguarding the integrity of each consequently redoubles the force of the aporia unleashed by the destruction of “grand” historical narratives. Does safeguarding the right to be different ultimately vacate the idea of humanity that for philosophical anthropology places the task of making freedom a reality for all under the aegis of the imperative of respect? Reserving a place for diverse aspirations, convictions, and beliefs rooted in different symbolic orders and axiological systems admittedly seems at first to place in question Ricoeur’s conviction that, as I noted previously, for him, as for Kant, “humanity is not one species except insofar as it has one history, and, reciprocally, that for there to be such a history, humanity as a whole must be its subject as a collective singular.”27 Yet, if in renouncing a style of thought that dares to elevate itself to the level of the absolute we also refuse to recognize the signs of humanity in our and others’ efforts to exist, do we not then also lose sight of how humanity’s destination and the different destinies to which individual communities and groups lay claim can be understood only through each other? How, then, could we defend the right of individuals, groups, and historical communities to be different in the absence of the range of values to which works of culture, broadly conceived, attest? It is difficult to imagine why others’ ways of living would pose a threat to one’s own in the absence of a field in which religious beliefs and moral convictions, for example, clash. For what threat would another’s way of living and system of belief constitute

170  Conclusions if this field of values was not the proving ground of the humanity in which we share through our respective experiences of belonging to a history and tradition of which we are a part? The adequation of the rational and the real to which Ricoeur attributes the partial fulfillment of aspirations and demands and to which I related reason’s inscription in history through deeds and acts that preserve the tension between the spaces of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations occurs only within this field. The idea of justice’s federating force accordingly asserts itself as the requisite condition of the process through which the destinies to which individual groups and communities aspire and humanity’s destination as regards the rights, liberties, opportunities, security, and well-being of all mutually constitute the horizon of freedom’s actualization. The imperative that every expectation must be a hope for humanity as a whole thus leads back to Kant from Hegel in that “Post-Hegelian Kantian style”28 that Ricoeur tells us he favors. Ricoeur’s post-Heideggerian return to Kant through Hegel expressly thematizes the opening within a philosophy of limits for reclaiming the idea of humanity in light of the demand to the right of different communities and groups to their own beliefs, aspirations, and destinies. We could not fail to recognize how, for a philosophical anthropology of the capable human being, this return to a philosophy of limits sets the finitude of our axiological perspectives against the transcending intention that is the thematic guide for the notion of being as power and act. A philosophy of limits, Ricoeur explains, destroys the transcendental illusion that “occupies the place of the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge”29 by breaking the claim of objective knowledge to close philosophical discourse at the level of the knowledge of spatiotemporal objects. For theoretical reason, the “act of renunciation by which speculative reason gives up its claim to fulfill the thought of the unconditioned along the line of the knowledge of empirical objects”30 is therefore the final word. Kant’s ethics of duty for Ricoeur is accordingly the dead part of his system. Isolating “duty from desire, coherence from life, universality from history, legality from effectiveness, [and] rationality from reality”31 makes duty and formal morality the most abstract segment of the historical process of freedom’s realization. From the vantage point of the Hegelian concept of right, which by definition consists in freedom’s actualization, the “history of contract and that of penal law and the kind of rationality at work in economic and political life are more significant than any morals of mere intentions, deprived of all impact on individual desires or on collective institutions.”32 Conversely, from the vantage point of a philosophical anthropology for which the intermediacy of human being is the vis-à-vis of the notion of being as power and act, a philosophy of the will that would set out “the theory of the actualization of freedom within the historical reality of humankind”33 has yet to be written. The transcending intentions, which at the three stages of his analysis of the disproportion

Conclusions  171 inhering in the originary dialectal structure of human reality Ricoeur sets against the finitude of perspective, character, and vital desires, acquire their concrete expressions only in works, words, deeds, and acts that are ciphers of the freedom that we desire to be. For a philosophy of the will for which these transcending intentions are indices, the ethical and political dimensions of the problematic of freedom’s realization clothe a poetics in the practical requirement of the idea of humanity. Striking the “desire for God from objective cosmology in order to rediscover its true, uncharacterizable, unobjectifiable, metaproblematic dimension”34 places the task of overcoming the evils of injustice and violence within the historical field of human praxis. The ethical vision of the world in which freedom and evil both figure thus moves in counterpoint with the directive idea of humanity founded on the imperative of respect. The practical synthesis that makes the unity of character and happiness a task under the aegis of the idea of the person thus has its collective counterpart in the ethical, political, and juridical spheres, where the problematic of freedom’s actualization in light of a plurality of systems of values, beliefs, and aspirations is most acute. By vesting the classical concept of the supreme good with a new meaning, the Kantian dialectic of practical reason opens the door to “a kind of unconditioned totality that is not fulfilled by the concept of duty or of moral law but only by the synthesis of virtue and happiness.”35 The antinomy between the integral character of the object of practical reason and the purity of moral life, Ricoeur stresses, “prevents us from introducing some kind of interest in the name of happiness.”36 If, as “Kant teaches us[,] . . . the reconciliation between purity of motives and the requirement of happiness is not at our disposal,”37 the connection between them can only “remain a transcendental synthesis between the work of humanity and the fulfillment of the desire that constitutes human existence.”38 But then the connection between the purity of motives that preclude some interest in the guise of happiness and the totality demanded by reason can also remain only a condition of the possibility of the synthesis accomplished by the work we undertake under the aegis of the imperative of respect. The intellectus spei that Ricoeur identifies with a philosophy of limits here inscribes itself at the heart of the maxim to live in a way that the evil that ought not to exist will not be.39 The function assumed by reason as horizon as regards the twofold constitution of knowledge and action consequently raises the aporia with which we have been wrestling, namely, the aporia of freedom’s actualization within the historical field of struggles for rights, recognition, respect, and esteem, to a higher degree of virulence. With regard to the field of knowledge, reason is the requirement of a totality of meaning as regards the understanding (Verstand); with regard to the field of action, the “impossibility and even the prohibition of achieving any given totality . . . [means that reason (Vernunft) inheres in] the projection of a task that is the philosophical equivalent of

172  Conclusions hope and the most adequate philosophical approximation of freedom.”40 The eschatology of nonviolence that takes the place of the critique of ideologies in relation to an ontology of prior belonging assumes its broader amplitude in light of the way that the logic of the excess of sense over non-sense sets itself against the logic of equivalence ruling over the variety of exchanges dominated by relations of power. The kind of dialectic that Ricoeur insists “rules over the relation between freedom and its full realization”41 is accordingly the philosophical equivalent of hope and its law of superabundance. Inscribing hope’s existential and practical necessity within the structure of action thus makes the totality demanded by reason the limit condition of the process of freedom’s actualization under the sign of the humanity of the intermediary being that we are. Clothing the problematic of freedom’s actualization in a poetics the object of which is the liberation of all marks out the contours of an eschatology of nonviolence that for Ricoeur constitutes the ultimate philosophical horizon of the critique of ideologies. For such an eschatology, the plurality of destinies owing to axiological perspectives rooted in the cultural traditions of different communities and groups crowns philosophical anthropology’s thematic articulation of the capacities inhering in the human condition. The capacity to speak, to act together with others, to remember, to recount one’s life story in an acceptable fashion, to hold oneself to account for one’s actions, and to be receptive to the summons the sources of which ultimately remain equivocal are requisite to the humanity that each claims as her own by right of the “miracle” of her birth. The sursum—the leap—we take in overcoming suspicions, misgivings, and doubts is the sign of the confidence, belief in, and faith we have in the right, the good, and the just that rule over the totality of the work we undertake through our practices, designs, projects, and life-plans. The ethical break with moral formalism that Ricoeur maintains Nabert brings about by affirming that the focal points of reflection on the good, the right, and the just are irreducible to one another is indicative of how the sources of the plurality of systems of values to which we and others adhere remain secreted away within each cultural tradition’s mythopoetic core. Far from shipwrecking the universal ambition of the metahistorical categories, “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” the right of every historical community and group to its cultural heritages, systems of belief, aspirations, and demands constitutes the riposte to the aporia arising from the destruction of the metaphysical pretenses of all “grand” historical narratives. We therefore need not conclude that the aporia of the oneness of time, for which we must say there is no speculative or theoretical solution, voids the ethical and political implications of a critique for which the liberatory project announced by a poetics of the will supersedes the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility. The thought that prevents us from succumbing to the anthropological illusion, which “puts humankind at the center and transforms it into a new absolute,”42

Conclusions  173 founds this project on the transcending intention for which the vision of a reconciled humanity is both cipher and sign. The “repudiation by reason of its absolute claim”43 thus marks out the path of a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology of capable human beings.

Hospitality and Justice The question to which I want in fine to turn concerns the place of the federating force of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics of liberation for which an eschatology of nonviolence is the touchstone. As the ultimate philosophical horizon of the critique of ideologies, this eschatology inscribes the intellectus spei of a philosophy of limits within an anthropology of human being as power and act. If, as Ricoeur says, the “problem of hope, as compared to that of faith is less the problem of a specific object than that of the finality of philosophical and theological discourse,”44 the question of freedom’s actualization within history crowns the series of reflections and analyses for which the mythic precomprehension of the pathétique of misery gives rise to a sustained meditation on the intermediary being that we are. Hence, if as he also maintains, humanity inheres in the plurality of traditions in which we each have a share, what place does the idea of justice’s federating force have in a hermeneutics for which the project of humanity aims at the liberation of all? The reach of this question is admittedly far-ranging. Not only does it set the requirement of justice against the causes of the fragility of identity attributable to the vagaries of time, threats posed by others, and a founding violence that is legitimated after the fact, but it also calls for a sustained analysis of the place of a State of law in struggles for recognition. To the degree that the rule of law aims at (re)establishing a state of peace, the paradox of a legitimate violence gives rise to a problematic on which I touched at the end of the preceding chapter. I asked then how the federating force of the imperative that turns the duty of memory into a project preserves the right to be different conferred on individuals, communities, and groups by the idea of the humanity of each. By promoting the autonomy of subjects of rights, every system of governance in which the rule of law prevails sets the ethical intention inhering in the will to live together at the heart of the process of fulfilling expectations of liberties, opportunities, and access to social goods such as health care, education, food security, and housing. In view of the axiological perspectives owing to the plurality of cultural heritages, systems of values, and aspirations, which as Arendt reminds us is due to the fact that human beings are singularly unique and not simply substitutable representations of the species, to what third party could we appeal in the absence of some public confiscation of the power to judge and to impose the appropriate sentence in enforcing this rule of law?45 I  therefore proposed that the model Ricoeur draws from the phenomenon of linguistic hospitality has

174  Conclusions a place in a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology borne from the effort to raise the pathétique of misery to the level of a rigorous discourse. Hence we should now ask: What place does the phenomenon of hospitality have as supplement to the rule of law in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization? By setting this question against the backdrop of an ethical vision of the world for which the incarnate freedom of fragile human beings can also be the occasion of the evil of violence, I  mean to oppose the welcome extended to the stranger to the will to power over another. This welcome, I would venture to say, is the reward for renouncing the justificatory function of “official” narratives that, as we know, too often serve to authorize one group, nation, or comity of nations’ prestige and power. We could ask whether states of peace achieved in moments of mutual recognition, as in gift exchanges, are promissory signs of a reconciliation that, as the limit condition of freedom’s actualization, reserves a place for this welcome.46 If so, might this welcome mark out the further horizon of the work of remembering and the work of mourning, where the divestment of the ego by the testimony of words, deeds, acts, and lives frees us for the o(O)ther in defiance of the allure of the dream of absolute mastery? The phenomenon of linguistic hospitality that Ricoeur identifies with the act of translation offers a model of the welcome that loosens the rule of justice from its law of equivalence. This welcome redresses the violence that in the religious domain takes root when, in an effort to give expression to the object of ultimate concern at the heart of the feeling of absolute dependence, we forget that every such expression is constrained by the language, symbolism, history, practices, and cultural tradition out of which it arises and in which it is meaningful. By responding “to an initiative that always precedes me,”47 this feeling countermands every ontotheological pretension to found absolute knowledge. One’s ultimate concern thus “speaks of the laying hold of the necessary and unique thing from whose basis I orient myself in all my choices.”48 Feelings that in religious experience have this unique thing as their object internalize this laying hold of its necessary character. At the same time, each religious tradition has its own customs, practices, and mores that inform the ways in which the members of a religious community experience the world. That no one has access to the illimitable except through one’s own religious tradition therefore is both the sign of the finitude of every perspectival opening and an invitation to violence.49 Marianne Moyaert remarks on how the attempt to domesticate the vanishing point of religious experience—namely the illimitable condition of a foundation that is without foundation—by containing it within one religious language, tradition, or system of practices is indicative of a post-Babel order where conflicts persist due to the human condition of plurality.50 Consequently, as Kearney suggests, if every “attempt to retrieve a prelapsarian paradise of timeless signs is futile,”51 the hospitality extended to another for which

Conclusions  175 the act of translation provides a model is a supplementary riposte to the aporia that after Babel shatters the illusion of some ontotheological discourse capable of constructing a metahistorical plot encompassing the multiplicity of histories, traditions, aspirations, and demands of diverse historical communities and religious and social groups. Can we then dispense with the imperative that vests the idea of justice with its federating force? By turning the duty of memory into a project, this imperative places the imperfect mediations that supplant the Hegelian system under the aegis of the permanent ethical and political implications of the metacategories of historical thought. Defining practical reason in terms of the problematic posed by these transhistorical categories and the problematic of politics lays bare the bond between the unity of a destination that can be understood only in terms of the destinies of individual communities and groups, reason’s inscription in history through exemplary works, words, deeds, and acts, and the imperative of justice. The value of exemplary acts, which I credited to the role of reflective judgment in summoning the rule to which the individual case attests, exceeds these acts’ naked historical contingency through revaluing and transvaluing the historical field of struggles. The fittingness of the act, which on several occasions I  indicated is the emblem of the act’s adequacy vis-à-vis the demands of the situation calling for it, differs from the adequacy at which the work of translation aims in this regard. Abandoning the dream of some perfect translation brings to the fore the absence of a “third text” that would provide the criterion against which the adequacy of this supposedly perfect translation could be checked. A good translation, Ricoeur therefore says, “can only aim at a supposed equivalence that is not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning.”52 Hence, this “equivalence without identity .  .  . can only be sought, worked at, supposed.”53 This equivalence without identity is the reward for renouncing the ideal of a perfect translation. As such, this reward crowns the work of mourning for an absolute that would be at our disposal with the happiness that Ricoeur identifies with linguistic hospitality, “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.”54 By asking whether this equivalence without identity has a counterpart on the historical and juridical planes, I mean to draw out the significance of the act of translation for a liberatory project for which the human condition of plurality acquires its concrete cultural and historical specificity in the myriad expressions of perspectives and orientations unique to individual groups. The work of translation, which Ricoeur tells us is “won on the battlefield of a secret resistance motivated by fear, indeed by hatred of the foreign, perceived as a threat against our own linguistic identity,”55 bespeaks the difference between a universal competence with regard to our linguistic abilities and the diverse languages and cultural

176  Conclusions systems in and through which we and others give voice to our experiences, desires, fears, and hopes. The insuperable difference between some supposedly perfect universal language and natural languages is proof of the infinite diversity of expressions for which the linguistic heritages of living languages are the ground and support. Human plurality, together with the “double enigma of incommunicability between idioms [that border on the untranslatable] and translation in spite of everything,”56 thus gives rise to the test of the foreign, which in the act of translation, an act for which language’s capacity to safeguard the secret of the unsayable is the inverse counterpart, puts into play the search for an equivalent that consummates the exchange between one’s own linguistic world and that of another. Does this equivalent have a counterpart on the plane on which the imperative of justice figures in freedom’s actualization within the political sphere? When at the end of the previous chapter I  suggested that the model of linguistic hospitality provides the required supplement to the role of the federating force of the idea of justice in answer to the challenge raised by the Hegelian philosophy of history’s loss of credibility, I meant to highlight a limit situation where no impartial third party could arbitrate between competing claims and demands. For a critique attentive to aspirations rooted in different cultural heritages, this challenge gives rise to a reflection on the tension between the right of individuals, groups, and communities to exercise their capacities and powers, and conflicts stemming from reason’s inscription in history through a range of works, words, deeds, and acts. The difference between humanity’s competence with regard to its universal capacity for language and the diversity of linguistic practices and heritages through which various groups bring their experiences to expression is indicative of a situation in which there is no independent measure of the equivalent sought through the work of translation. However, in the field of action, this difference between universal competencies that a philosophical anthropology of homme capable identifies as inscribed in the human condition and the ability to exercise them has no exact analogue due to the violence inhering in asymmetrical relations of power. Similar to the dialectic of love and justice, in which the imperative to love sets the economy of the gift against justice’s law of equivalence, linguistic hospitality provides the model of the kind of welcome that surpasses situations of conflict and dispute calling for a third party as an impartial arbiter. Yet, in the same way that love does not dispense with the requirement of justice but instead provides the necessary corrective that prevents the rule of justice from falling into a “subtle form of utilitarianism  .  .  .  [due] to its secret kinship with the commandment to love,”57 the imperative that turns the duty of memory toward the federating force of the idea of justice adopts the welcome modeled by the phenomenon of linguistic hospitality as the limit idea of a just

Conclusions  177 distance instituted by a third party in adversarial situations in order to restore the social peace. That the privilege granted to the State to uphold the rule of law by force is requisite for the institution of a just distance sets in relief the limit of the welcome for which the phenomenon of linguistic hospitality provides a model. This privilege of a legitimate violence seemingly voids the welcome that, following the model of linguistic hospitality, promotes feelings of mutual solicitude, respect, and esteem. To the extent that the passion for translation takes hold in the desire for broadening the horizon of one’s own linguistic world, the test of the foreign leads back to the discovery of the richness and fecundity of one’s own language and of linguistic resources that have fallen fallow. This broadening of one’s own horizons contributes to the process of the self’s formation that Koselleck highlights in his analysis of Bildung and that Ricoeur identifies both with configuration and education.58 Inviting the word of the other into one’s own home constitutes a form of reciprocity that in the work of translation seeks an equivalence without exacting an absolute identity of meaning. The institution of a just distance that in the case of the sentence brings the trial to a close by placing “the accused and the victim in distinct places”59 only approximates the sense of this reciprocity between linguistic worlds. The recognition of self and other that, following the model of linguistic hospitality, aims at a mutually solicitous understanding therefore has no equivalent on the juridical plane. Consequently, the welcome modeled by the act of translation is both only the proximate limit of and the supplement to a State of right’s promotion of a reciprocal recognition in reestablishing the social peace, as when someone who has won her case can still say: “my adversary, the one who lost, remains like me a subject of right,”60 and the one who has been found guilty is also able “to declare that the sentence that condemns him was not an act of violence but rather one of recognition”61 thanks to the rule of law. What, then, does the exercise of a legitimate violence in the name of the rule of law contribute to advancing the course of freedom’s actualization? The paradox that the constitutional rule of law, which characterizes the State’s reasonable form, requires and even demands this use of force brings the enigma of the authority claimed by the State sharply into focus. The surplus value inhering in all structures of power remains the site of a major challenge in this regard. Power, I have noted on other occasions, is irreducible to violence. Hierarchically structured systems of relations therefore are always at risk due to the deficit of belief that marks the difference between those who are in positions of privilege and those who are subject to another’s rule. In view of the fact that the idea of authority harbors something that remains opaque, no system of rule, no claim to truth, and no institution could be said to be absolutely rational in the final analysis. Reason’s inscription in history through works and acts in which we catch sight of the good, the right, and the just from the

178  Conclusions vantage point from which each of us stands is thus the only response that raises a philosophy of human fragility to the rank of a hermeneutics of our historical condition. By asking what role the law plays in advancing the course of freedom, I  am clearly forefronting the idea that the rule of law adheres to the imperative of justice, which Arendt’s analysis of the lawlessness of totalitarian systems ratifies. The recourse to a legitimate violence underscores the tension between the State’s rational form and its use of force in this regard. Two directions taken by different styles of political philosophy accordingly place the accent either on one or the other. A reflection on force leads straightway to the enigma engendered by the phenomenon of power. Conversely, a reflection on form, which Ricoeur remarks is “better suited to the concrete rational function of the state, leads to an emphasis on the constitutional aspect characteristic of a State of law.”62 From this vantage point, the state fulfills its rational function through reconciling the techno-economic rationality governing the social order with the reasonable character of mores, customs, practices, and laws as accumulated within, and constitutive of, a concrete historical community.63 Violence alone cannot define the state. On the contrary, the state’s finality “as helping the historical community to make its history”64 vests the state with the power of decision centered in it that transforms a historical community into a political reality. The place that the rule of law has with regard to the State’s rational form as established by its constitution outlines the field for freedom’s actualization within the context of the political reality for which this rule of law constitutes the basis of a historical community’s existence. To the degree that the administration of the law aims at upholding the State’s reasonable character, the credit extended to the judiciary rests in part on the citizenry’s confidence in the fiduciary relation established by the judiciary’s institution as a third party. In turn, the strength of this fiduciary relation depends to a large degree on the public recognition of the fairness of the application of the law to individual cases for which members of the citizenry demand credible—that is, fitting—­ resolutions. That justice must not only be done but also be seen to be done attests to the burden of credibility placed on the response by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, jurors, and judges to an alleged crime. To the extent that the appropriateness of this response with regard to the public trust stands as proof of the judiciary’s legitimacy and authority, the fittingness of the way that the investigation is conducted, the crime prosecuted, and the verdict handed down strengthens this bond of trust. Miscarriages of justice—perceived or real—undermine the public confidence in the institutions that are meant to serve it. Accordingly, appropriate solutions that in the juridical order meet the demand for justice take their place among the signs of the State’s reasonable character.

Conclusions  179 How, then, does the law contribute to the development of the State’s reasonable form? To the extent that the reasonable form of the State actualizes the ethical intention inhering in the will to live together in the political sphere, the rule of law bears out this intention within the juridical domain. Justice, Ricoeur reminds us, is “opposed not just to violence per se, or even to [subtly] concealed [forms of] violence. . ., but [also] to the simulation of justice constituted by vengeance, the act of procuring justice by oneself.”65 The public confiscation of the power to judge and to pronounce and impose the sentence encapsulates the force of the rule of law. Accordingly, the administration of justice rests on the fundamental act whereby a society elevates each individual to the level of a subject of rights. As I outlined previously, the horizon of the State’s reasonable form as regards the juridical sphere thus takes shape in accordance with the way that the institution of a just distance promotes the reciprocal recognition of the plaintiff and the accused in a trial. The establishment of the rule of law does not thereby exhaust the law as a political enterprise. If, with Ricoeur, we recognize that the task of political philosophy is to attend to “what, in political life, is the bearer of meaningful action in history,”66 we must also recognize that a State of right’s historical character with regard to the spheres of activity, institutions, and various roles and functions comprising a historical community’s system of organization is the State’s own distinctive expression of the will to live together. Moreover, if action makes sense only in those instances in which we can discern some fit between accomplished objectives and a historical project the path of which is illuminated by a vision of the good, the right, and the just, the role of the State in the process of freedom’s actualization turns in large part on the establishment of a rule of law and on the accommodation of new cases within the system of rules in which legal precedents figure. The rule of law is therefore both the guardian of a State of law’s reasonable form and a check on its use of force. The historicity of this rule of law, in which stare decisis is the fruit of a continuing search for appropriate juridical solutions to problems and difficulties arising from changing circumstances and conditions, bears out the exemplary value of the rule or norm established by juridical precedents. By satisfying the criterion of recognition that undergirds the fiduciary relation between the judiciary and the citizenry as regards the legitimacy of a decision where the punishment fits the crime, the rule summoned by the individual case in instituting a just distance between the victim and the author of the harm fulfills the aim of the rule of law in promoting the cause of justice.67 Does the rule of law that characterizes the State’s reasonable form therefore constitute the grounds of a practical rejoinder to the aporia of our common humanity that, in the absence of any “grand” historical narrative and in light of the violence that we have witnessed in recent as well as more distant historical events, lies at the heart of the challenge

180  Conclusions of making freedom a reality for all? The recognition of human rights— the right to life, the right to one’s own body, and the right to one’s own beliefs, for example—is kin to the recognition of the fittingness of the sentence that in singular cases in jurisprudence puts reflective judgment into play. However much such rights may be rooted in the ideals of one cultural tradition, the right to one’s own person acquires a transhistorical significance in the quest for freedom. The dream of a state of perpetual peace today seems to be sempiternally confounded by the wanton corruption of the will to live together, the alarming resurgence of populism and nationalist tribalism, unprecedented increases in the numbers of forcibly displaced and stateless individuals, the renunciation of reason and its demand for totality, and the relegation of the imagination’s schematizing power to the recesses of an allegedly post-human, post-truth order. This state of peace is only a formal construct absent the power we exercise when we commit ourselves to intervening in the world’s affairs. Only by taking a stand can we hope to bring about the world’s transformation. Like promissory signs that in works and acts provide handholds for renewing the real from within, a rule of law instructed by the welcome modeled on the phenomenon of linguistic hospitality marks out the further horizon of the project of humanity. However much judgments regarding the suitability of a rule—legal, moral, or political—adhere to mores, values, and customs from which they draw support, the fittingness of the rule summoned by an individual case is also the spring of a claim that outstrips this rule’s sheer historical contingency. The model that in the work of translation enhances one’s own understanding of oneself and the world sets the recognition of the fittingness of the rule in accordance with one’s own cultural heritages, convictions, and beliefs against the test of the foreign. The test of one’s own convictions regarding the good, the right, and the just in the absence of a third party promotes the adequation of the rational and the real through tying the appeal to conscience and with it, the feeling of being-enjoined, to the task to which we are called. For a hermeneutics that embraces the vision of an end to violence and suffering as its inspiriting ideal, the project of liberation thematized by a philosophical anthropology that takes the pathétique of human misery as its non-philosophical source marks out the itinerary of our ethical, political, and juridical vocation.

Notes 1. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, 78. 2. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 25. 3. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 87; see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 335. 4. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 270. 5. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 270. 6. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 270.

Conclusions  181 7. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 270. By carrying over the Augustinian problem of the threefold present, the temporalization of temporality reintroduces the enigma of the distentio animi via the unification and diversification of the three temporal ecstases. Ricoeur maintains that Heidegger’s quest for authenticity “cannot be carried out without a constant appeal to the testimony of the existentiell” (65) since the analysis of temporality leads to historicality’s derivation, just as the structure of within-time-ness completes that of the historicity from which it is also derived. Ricoeur accordingly asks whether it is “not within a categorical analysis, heavily influenced by the recoil-effect of the existentiell on the existential, that death is held to be our utmost possibility, even our ownmost potentiality, inherent in the essential structure of Care” (67). 8. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 351; see Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 262ff. 9. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 351. 10. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318. Ricoeur emphasizes that “[i]n return, conscience projects after the fact its force of attestation on all the experiences of passivity placed before it, inasmuch as conscience is also through and through, attestation” (318–19). See Chapter 2. 11. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 355. 12. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 202. 13. See Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just. By stressing that the “authority of the symbolic order is both the very site of the strongest connection between the self and the norm and the very principle of its fragility” (85), Ricoeur outlines the place of a broader inquiry into how convictions and beliefs play a constitutive role as a function of this symbolic order. See also Todd Mei, “Convictions and Justifications,” in Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique, ed. Roger W. H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 99–121. Mei argues that in order to understand another’s perspectives and outlooks, we must understand that convictions are deeply held “beliefs informing social being by virtue of their [a community or group’s] commitment to existential meaning[s] and what it means to live well” (102). See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 14. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 218. 15. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 213. 16. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 213. 17. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 79. 18. Ricoeur, The Just, 77. Ricoeur reminds us that a confidence in one’s powers and capacities is indispensable when it comes to exercising them. Conversely, the refusal of recognition multiplies the effects of internalizing denigrating images that undermine one’s belief in one’s own self-worth. 19. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 407. 20. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 174. 21. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 175. 22. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 175. 23. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 11. 24. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 32. Ricoeur stresses that promoting the “Promethean dimension of autonomy” (32) by placing it at the top of a philosophical system makes human being “the measure of all things” (31). Due to “Feuerbach’s promotion of autonomy, heteronomy becomes evil by construction. Consequently, everything which is not autonomy is alienation” (32).

182  Conclusions 25. Paul Ricoeur, “Lamentation as Prayer,” in Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 212. 26. See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); see also Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. 27. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 215; see Chapter 4. 28. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 215. 29. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 212. 30. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 212–13. 31. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 209. 32. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210. Ricoeur remarks that the Hegelian concept of right is “defined as the actualization of freedom” (209). 33. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 210. 34. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 191. According to Ricoeur, this dimension would “constitute the object of the ‘Poetics’ of the will. . . . The ‘Poetics’ of the will can hereafter rediscover the desire for God only thanks to a second revolution which breaks through the limits of subjectivity as the latter has been broken through the limits of natural objectivity” (191). See Michael Sohn, “The Influence of Aquinas’s Psychology and Cosmology on Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature,” in A Companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature, ed. Scott Davidson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 59–75. 35. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 213. 36. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 213; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 117–24. 37. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 213–14. 38. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 214. 39. See Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 209. One could only fully develop the implications of this intellectus spei in light of a poetics that figures in a philosophy of the will belonging to the future. 40. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 209. 41. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 216. 42. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 213. 43. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 213. 44. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 215. 45. See, for example, Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. Arendt accordingly maintains that the life of our species asserted itself as the preeminent concern in the rise of society that she relates to the reversal within the vita activa of the traditional hierarchy of action, work, and labor (321). 46. On gift-giving and mutual recognition, see Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 219ff. 47. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 47. 48. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 47; see 65. 49. See Paul Ricoeur, “Religion and Symbolic Violence,” trans. James Williams, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 6, no. 1 (1999): 1–11; Paul Ricoeur, “Religious Belief: The Difficult Path of the Religious,” in A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry I. Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 27–40. See also Marianne Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 46–48. 50. Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 78ff.; see Marianne Moyaert, “From Religious Violence to Interreligious Hospitality,” in Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis, and Critique, ed. Roger W.

Conclusions  183 H. Savage (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 165; Marianne Moyaert, “A ‘Babelish’ World (Genesis 11:1–9) and Its Challenge to Cultural-Linguistic Theory,” Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society 36, no. 2 (2009): 215–34. Moyaert stresses that “[e]ven if religions employ the same categories, such as God, love, peace, or justice, these words mean something different precisely because they derive their meaning from the particular religion in which they function” (219). 51. Richard Kearney, “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation,” in On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (London: Routledge, 2006), xvii; see Richard Kearney, “Double Hospitality: Between Word and Touch,” Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1, no. 1 (2019): 72ff. 52. Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (London: Routledge, 2006), 22; see Paul Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996), 3–13. Ricoeur remarks that, in contrast to St. Augustine’s model regarding the “remains of the Egyptians,” the preferred model is the one proposed by Alexander von Humboldt, “i.e., of raising the distinctive spirit of his [the translator’s] own language to the level of that of the foreign language” (5). 53. Ricoeur, On Translation, 22. 54. Ricoeur, On Translation, 10; see Kearney, “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation,” xvi. Cf. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 55. Ricoeur, On Translation, 23. 56. Ricoeur, On Translation, 29. Ricoeur emphasizes that “[e]very language’s struggle with the secret, the hidden, the mystery, the inexpressible is above all else the most entrenched incommunicable, initial untranslatable” (33). 57. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 328–29. 58. See Ricoeur, On Translation, 21; Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 170–207. 59. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 36. 60. Ricoeur, The Just, 131. 61. Ricoeur, The Just, 131–32. 62. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 331. For Ricoeur, “[r]ationalist philosophies, such as all those of the eighteenth century as well as those of Arendt and [Eric] Weil, tend to place their main emphasis on form rather than force, while Marxists and thinkers who focus on totalitarianism stress force” (331). 63. See Ricoeur, From Text to Action. Ricoeur explains that the “modern State exists, one can assert, wherever there is a society in which labor is organized with the aim of a methodical struggle of man against nature. Modern society is the society for which this struggle joined to the primacy accorded to calculation and efficiency, tends to become the new form of the sacred, if it does not abolish purely and simply the difference between the sacred and the profane” (327). 64. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 330. By defining the State as the “decisionmaking organ of a historical community” (330), Ricoeur emphasizes how the community’s organization with respect to its institutions, the different functions and social roles adopted by its members, and the spheres of activity in which they participate constitutes the concrete expression of the will to live together. For him, the State’s organization and its articulation of this diversity of institutions, functions, roles, and the like “make human action reasonable action” (330). Ricoeur emphasizes that “this decision [centered in the

184  Conclusions State] . . . can be summed up in one word: the survival, the lasting existence, of the historical community in the face of all threats, whether from inside or outside” (330–31). Hence the task of political philosophy is to attend to “what, in political life, is the bearer of meaningful action in history” (330). Accordingly, for Ricoeur, a “historical community becomes a political reality only when it becomes capable of decision” (Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 229). 65. Ricoeur, The Just, 130–31. 66. Ricoeur, From Text to Action, 330; see Ricoeur, The Just, 114. 67. That the reasonable form of a State of law has a decidedly historical character evinces one, if not the principal staging ground for the interplay between reflective judgment and the rule of practical reason. See my “Juridical Precedencies, Exemplary Acts, and Reflective Judgment,” in Reading Ricoeur Through Law, ed. Marc De Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming).

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Index

action(s) 5, 8, 11, 17 – 18, 20, 36n21, 40n77, 44, 46, 49 – 51, 53 – 5, 62n45, 63n61, 68, 72, 75, 79, 81, 90, 94, 97, 100 – 1, 103, 105, 109n25, 110n39, 111n55, 112n64, 112n69, 117, 119, 124 – 6, 128 – 9, 137 – 9, 141 – 2, 153, 155n15, 155n16, 165, 171 – 2, 179, 182n45, 183n64; field of 2, 4, 11, 70, 72, 98, 105, 128, 130, 171, 176; structure of 44, 55, 105, 172; see also praxis Adorno, Theodor W. 4, 11, 98 – 9, 110n32, 110n40, 110n41, 110n43, 110n44, 116 – 17, 131 – 2n12 aesthetics 62n40, 115, 122, 124, 131n4 aletheia 124, 145; see also truth alterity 50 – 3 Anderson, Benedict 157n64 apartheid 144 Apel, Karl-Otto 138 Arendt, Hannah 13n3, 17, 19, 38n56, 43 – 4, 47 – 9, 53 – 4, 56 – 7, 63n66, 63n69, 64n78, 74, 78 – 9, 86n68, 93 – 4, 97, 100 – 3, 108n11, 111n54, 111n55, 111n58, 112n69, 126 – 8, 134n47, 135n62, 135n64, 135n65, 140, 141, 155n15, 155n16, 155n17, 173, 178, 182n45, 183n62 Aristotle 35n7, 54, 69 – 70, 124, 128, 138, 166 aseity: absence of 8, 17, 22, 41n110, 47, 50 – 1, 53, 63n64 authority(ies) 1, 5, 77 – 80, 92 – 6, 98, 108n9, 109n14, 111n54, 118, 119, 132n22, 133n25, 154, 168, 177 – 8, 181n13 autonomy 1, 6, 15, 47, 49, 50, 53, 64n79, 66, 68, 75, 79, 86n55, 93,

110n40, 111n44, 116, 122, 153 – 4, 165, 167 – 8, 173, 181n24 Basso, Keith H. 60n6 Beethoven, Ludwig van 100 belief(s) 1 – 2, 5, 10 – 12, 15, 17, 27, 47, 52, 57 – 8, 66, 68, 72, 78, 80 – 1, 83, 92 – 4, 96, 103 – 4, 108n8, 108n9, 109n14, 118, 129 – 30, 132n22, 137, 139, 144 – 5, 147 – 8, 152, 154, 160, 162 – 77, 180, 181n13, 181n18, 182n49; see also conviction(s) Bildung 79, 86 – 7n68, 87n69, 115, 158n84, 177 Bloch, Ernst 4, 11, 98, 99, 100 – 1, 110n41, 111n47 body(ies) 3, 8, 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26 – 8, 37n40, 40n77, 43, 45 – 7, 50 – 2, 54, 61n19, 61n20, 62n43, 62n45, 62n46, 62n56, 63n61, 69, 76, 77, 83, 116, 123, 135n65, 145, 165, 180; lived 27, 50, 76; politic 78, 93, 151, 153 Bourdieu, Pierre 131n3 character(s) 7 – 8, 20 – 1, 26, 34, 43, 45, 47 – 50, 53 – 7, 59, 61n33, 62n45, 62n46, 64n78, 65n83, 69, 72, 74, 76, 80, 82, 92, 115 – 16, 123, 128, 132n22, 134n53, 143, 161, 166, 171, 174; “building of” 79; exemplary 108n9; finitude of 43, 45, 53 – 5, 57 – 9, 66, 74, 89, 140 – 1, 163; historical 179, 184n67; juridical 12, 143, 146; of legitimacy 109n14; objectival 33, 42 – 3, 46, 57; reasonable 5, 128 – 9, 178; singular 122, 126; symbolic 80; synthesis of 57 – 8, 66 – 7; temporal 61n33, 102

194 Index communicability 3, 121 – 6, 129, 140, 144 – 5, 147 – 8, 168 conscience 13, 52 – 3, 143 – 5, 152, 161, 180, 181n10; alterity of 53; moral 64n79, 144; testimony of 143; voice of 52 – 3, 144, 162 – 3 conviction(s) 1 – 2, 5, 10 – 13, 15, 35n7, 37n22, 47, 52 – 3, 57 – 8, 66, 70, 72, 81 – 3, 86n68, 92, 94, 98, 102 – 3, 107n3, 118, 129 – 30, 137, 139, 143, 145, 147 – 8, 152, 154, 160 – 9, 180, 181n13; see also belief(s) Davidson, Donald 62n45 de Biran, Maine 50 deconstruction 30, 41n101 de Saussure, Ferdinand 30 Descartes, René 24, 26, 37n25, 39n72 desire(s) 14n18, 17 – 25, 27 – 8, 33, 36n20, 38n49, 42 – 6, 50 – 1, 55 – 7, 59, 61n19, 64n73, 65n82, 65n87, 67 – 8, 70 – 3, 75 – 6, 81 – 2, 86n53, 87n88, 106 – 7, 109n17, 112n64, 124, 130, 143, 145, 147, 150, 154, 170 – 1, 176 – 7, 182n34; finitude of 7, 9; power of 53, 56; spiritual 10, 59, 69, 70; vital 74, 89, 163, 171 différance 30, 40n94 dinnseanchas 150, 158n67 diversity 2, 73, 129 – 30, 138, 140, 142, 153 – 4, 162, 167 – 8, 176, 183n64; axiological 47, 129; see also value(s), diverse/diversity of domination 76 – 7, 79, 93 – 4, 109n14, 155n19 Eagleton, Terry 115, 116 economic(s) 22, 76 – 8, 87n71, 90, 93, 99, 108n11, 170; techno- 178; trickle-down 93 Eliade, Mircea 112n65 emplotment 48, 49 Enlightenment 44, 81, 91, 104, 105, 139 Eros 22 – 4, 38n49, 82, 87n88; eros 54, 67, 73 eschatology 96 – 7; of freedom 57; of nonviolence 2, 4, 11, 95 – 6, 98 – 9, 107, 118, 172 – 3 ethics 48, 60n6, 63n63, 112n64, 124, 148, 153, 156n40, 161; of discourse 91; of duty 170; Ethics 35n7; and politics 3 – 4, 11, 55, 96, 114, 121, 123, 125 – 6, 129 – 30, 134n60, 144, 163, 169

evil 2, 17, 19 – 20, 22 – 4, 27, 37n26, 37n28, 39n67, 44, 46, 52 – 3, 58 – 9, 61n19, 68, 75, 78, 82, 85n46, 89, 93 – 4, 98, 101, 105, 130, 137, 142, 144, 147 – 8, 171, 181n24; moral 19, 21, 75; see also violence, evil of exemplarity 5, 31, 83, 125, 129, 137, 141, 145 – 7 expectation(s) 1, 2, 5, 11 – 12, 44, 55, 90, 95, 104, 106 – 7, 115, 121, 127, 137 – 8, 139 – 40, 142, 151 – 3, 160, 165, 167, 170, 173; fields of 168; horizon(s) of 5, 58, 98, 104, 105, 130, 138, 139, 152, 165, 170, 172; normative 76, 79, 80, 81, 144 experience(s) 2 – 4, 7 – 8, 17, 19 – 20, 31, 39n70, 45, 51, 53 – 4, 57, 65n87, 66 – 8, 70 – 1, 74, 76 – 7, 79, 85n42, 87n71, 92, 95, 100, 104 – 6, 109n17, 112n65, 114 – 24, 126, 130, 132n22, 138, 142 – 3, 145, 148, 150, 152, 160, 162 – 3, 166, 169 – 70, 176; aesthetic 3 – 4, 11, 55, 96, 114, 117, 121 – 4, 126, 129 – 30, 134n60, 144 – 5, 163, 169; of fault 19, 32, 34, 89; field of 23, 28, 54, 56 – 7, 147, 60n6, 63n66, 75, 83, 95, 115, 119 – 20, 147; moral 79; of passivity 51 – 3, 64n79, 161, 181n10; political 118; religious 53, 144, 168, 174; space(s) of 5, 11, 44, 58, 98, 104 – 5, 138 – 9, 152, 165, 170, 172 expression(s) 3, 15, 18, 28, 30, 32, 44, 68, 71, 76, 81, 83, 87n88, 90, 110n34, 115, 117, 119, 121 – 2, 133n28, 137 – 9, 144 – 5, 147 – 8, 155n15, 157n44, 160, 166, 171, 174 – 6, 179, 183n64; cultural 140, 154; exemplary 56, 59, 82, 142; mythic 6, 17, 21, 87n88 fallibility 19 – 21, 27, 39n67, 59, 68, 82, 85n46 feeling 3 – 4, 6 – 7, 10 – 11, 20, 22, 28, 42, 45 – 6, 53, 55, 57 – 8, 61n20, 64n76, 64n79, 65n87, 66 – 9, 71 – 4, 76, 77 – 83, 83n4, 84n8, 85n29, 86n53, 96 – 7, 109n17, 114 – 17, 119 – 22, 133n33, 143, 145, 151 – 2, 165 – 6, 174, 177; of absolute dependence 53, 144, 168, 174; of being-enjoined 13, 154, 161 – 2, 180; fundamental 73; of height 53, 144; modality(ies) of

Index  195 73, 115; of respect 59, 65n87, 90, 165; schematization of 73; see also mood(s); respect, feeling of Feuerbach, Ludwig 92, 181n24 fiction 49 finitude 6 – 9, 24, 25 – 9, 33, 37n25, 38n64, 45, 47, 51, 61n35, 66 – 7, 74 – 5, 81, 174; of perspective 32, 74, 89, 143, 163, 167, 170 – 1; practical 9 – 10, 45, 50 – 3; see also character(s), finitude of; pleasure(s), finitude of First Nations 149 flesh 7 – 8, 10, 14n18, 17, 25, 27, 35 – 6n11, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 62 – 3n56, 66, 75, 76, 85n29, 165; ontology of 10, 47, 49, 50, 62n56, 76; otherness of 51 – 2 forgetting 150, 157n63, 157n64, 165 forgiveness 150 – 1 fragility 6 – 7, 10, 15, 20 – 1, 24 – 5, 38n46, 75, 80 – 1, 89, 92, 178, 181n13; affective 6 – 7, 9 – 10, 20, 59, 67, 69, 74; of identity 173; originary 6, 66 freedom 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 11 – 13, 14n18, 15, 16 – 20, 22 – 3, 25, 31, 33, 36n14, 36n17, 36n19, 37n26, 41n110, 43 – 4, 46 – 7, 51 – 2, 56, 58 – 9, 66, 70 – 2, 75, 79, 82, 89, 91, 94 – 9, 101 – 7, 110n44, 112n64, 114, 123, 125 – 6, 129 – 30, 131n3, 136 – 45, 147 – 9, 152 – 4, 156, 160, 163 – 4, 169 – 74, 176 – 80, 182n32; absolute 5, 17, 89, 139, 161; consciousness of 20; creative 14n18; gracious 14n18; incarnate16, 87n88, 89, 97, 106, 148, 174; motivated 8, 72; see also eschatology, of freedom Freud, Sigmund 149 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 95, 115 – 18, 122, 131n4, 169 Geertz, Clifford 92, 108n7 Glassie, Henry 133n26 Greisch, Jean 157n44 Habermas, Jürgen 99, 109n25, 110n39, 138 happiness 7 – 8, 10, 19 – 20, 34, 43, 45, 54 – 8, 64n76, 65n82, 65n83, 66 – 7, 69 – 74, 84n12, 84n22, 89, 163, 166, 171, 175; infinitude of 9, 20, 43, 45, 53 – 5, 57 – 9, 66, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 167

heart (θυμός) 6 – 7, 10, 19 – 20, 22, 28, 59, 66 – 7, 69 – 70, 74 – 5, 85n32 Hegel, G. W. F. 5, 44, 95, 98, 100, 101 – 7, 110n32, 111n54, 112n64, 112n65, 118, 130, 135n64, 137, 139, 170 Heidegger, Martin 12, 30 – 1, 33, 35n7, 53, 85n42, 102, 117, 124, 145, 161, 169, 181n7 Held, David 99 Helenius, Timo 88n92 Hénaff, Marcel 99, 110n39 hermeneutics 36n12, 95 – 6, 124, 143, 161, 163, 173, 178, 180; of creative imagination 17; of historical consciousness 140; of suspicion 41n101; see also liberation, hermeneutics of; testimony, hermeneutics of Honneth, Axel 79, 87n71, 166 Horkheimer, Max 99 hospitality 12 – 13, 80, 164, 174; linguistic 2, 5, 140, 154, 173 – 7, 180 Husserl, Edmund 62 – 3n56 identity 1, 48, 50, 71, 80, 83, 99, 110n43, 149, 153, 164 – 6, 173, 175, 177; idem 48, 49, 61n33, 61n36, 62n46, 165; ipse 48, 61n33, 61n36, 62n46, 165; narrative 50, 60n3; personal 47, 50, 61n33, 62n46 ideology(ies) 44, 79, 91, 92, 94 – 5, 100 – 1, 108n3, 112n65, 127, 132 – 3n22; critique of 2, 4, 11, 41n101, 95, 96, 97, 98, 107, 118, 172, 173 imagination 1 – 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 17 – 18, 22 – 3, 25 – 6, 29 – 30, 33 – 4, 55, 65n87, 66, 70, 76, 79, 82, 89, 95, 109n17, 114 – 17, 123 – 5, 134n47, 135n72, 154, 162 – 3, 180; hermeneutic of 17; power of 3 – 4, 12, 17, 23 – 4, 28, 32, 42, 65n87, 89, 95 – 7, 106 – 7, 111n44, 114 – 15, 118, 128 – 30, 163, 166, 169; productive 23, 27 – 8, 31, 85n32, 96, 117 – 18; transcendental 9, 23 – 7, 33, 41n113, 42, 57, 59, 67; wager of 4, 6, 8, 11, 30, 34, 44, 57, 83, 95, 98, 101, 106 – 7, 114, 125 – 6 infinitude 6 – 7, 20 – 1, 25, 28, 33, 38n64, 39n72, 45, 61n35, 66 – 7, 75, 81; see also happiness, infinitude of

196 Index Jameson, Frederic 51, 62n52 Joy, Morny 64n79, 149 judgment(s) 44, 69, 70, 106, 114, 119, 127, 135n72, 143, 146, 156n30, 166 – 7, 180; aesthetic 123, 129 – 30, 135n72; determinative 123; political 2, 23, 87n69, 126 – 7; practical 130; reflective 3 – 5, 11 – 12, 33, 114, 121, 125, 127 – 8, 130, 144, 166, 168, 175, 180, 184n67; teleological 126 – 7, 129 – 30; value 17, 61n19; see also phronesis justice 2, 6, 12 – 13, 44, 47, 58, 70, 72, 78, 80, 82, 86n55, 103, 107, 117, 121 – 2, 128 – 31, 137 – 8, 143, 146 – 7, 149 – 54, 158n84, 173, 175 – 6, 178 – 9, 183n50; duty of 158n69; federating force of the idea of 2, 5, 12 – 13, 47, 71, 82, 86n55, 149, 152, 154, 160, 163 – 4, 170, 173, 175 – 6; imperative of 6, 8, 12, 66, 148 – 51, 167, 175 – 6, 178; rule of 1 – 2, 13, 83, 137, 140, 144, 154, 174, 176; social 99, 110n39; virtue of 151, 168 Kant, Immanuel 2, 9 – 11, 24 – 8, 33 – 4, 39n70, 40n78, 42, 56, 58 – 9, 64n79, 65n87, 75, 80, 84n23, 100, 106 – 7, 112, 123 – 9, 131n4, 134n47, 167, 169 – 71 Kearney, Richard 17, 35n7, 36n12, 85n29, 116, 137, 174 Kierkegaard, Søren 70 Koselleck, Reinhardt 79, 81, 86n68, 87n69, 104, 177 language(s) 2, 9, 13, 24, 26, 28 – 30, 32, 39n69, 40n98, 62n43, 120, 123, 133n34, 141, 174 – 7, 183n52, 183n56; capacity for 2, 176; concept of 30, 31; foreign 13, 141, 183n52; institution of 49; poetic 120; religious 174; see also logos law 13n3, 23, 44, 52, 59, 64n79, 65n87, 76, 101, 106, 112n64, 126, 139, 140 – 2, 148, 155n15, 161, 170 – 2, 178 – 9; of equivalence(s) 13, 81, 140, 174, 176; rule of 13, 86n55, 94, 149, 154, 165, 168, 173 – 4, 177 – 80; State of 173, 178 – 9, 184n67 Lévinas, Emmanuel 53, 63n63, 156n40, 157n44 liberation 12, 18, 20, 22, 99, 124, 126, 142 – 3, 147 – 9, 154, 156n40,

160, 164, 168, 172 – 3, 180; hermeneutics of 2, 4, 8 – 9, 11 – 12, 22, 30, 58, 71, 82, 126, 131, 137, 145, 154, 160, 162 – 3, 173 – 4 logos 6, 16, 22, 31, 35n7; see also language(s) Lyotard, Jean-François 44 Mandela, Nelson 144 Mannheim, Karl 94 Marcuse, Herbert 99 Marx, Karl 13n3, 77, 91 – 3, 100 – 1, 110n39, 111n54, 111n55, 126 – 7, 135n64 Mei, Todd 181n13 memory 12, 61n36, 149, 150 – 2, 157n64, 158n65, 158n67, 158n69, 158n80, 165; duty of 5, 12 – 13, 150 – 4, 158n69, 160, 167, 173, 175 – 6; work of 12, 149 – 51, 163 metaphor 30 – 2, 41n100, 41n101, 41n107, 53, 83n4, 118, 161; discourse on 32, 41n100, 41n107 metaphysics 30 – 2, 41n100, 41n101; of presence 30, 32, 117 Mitterrand, François 151 modernity 71, 84n27, 104 Monet, Claude 121 – 2 mood(s) 3, 73 – 4, 120 – 2, 145, 163; see also feeling Moyaert, Marianne 174, 183n50 music 68, 114 – 17, 120, 122 – 3, 131n3, 132n12, 133n33, 162 Nabert, Jean 64n79, 146, 156n40, 157n44, 172 Nachfolge 125, 128, 147 Nancy, Jean-Luc 73 narrative(s) 44, 48 – 9, 58, 60n3, 60n6, 62n40, 63n66, 90, 112n60, 114, 118 – 20, 142 – 3, 149 – 50, 163, 167; “grand” historical 1, 6, 10, 18, 23, 56, 58 – 9, 81, 89, 97, 101 – 2, 107, 136 – 7, 148, 162, 169, 172, 179; “master” 164; “official” 150, 174; see also identity, narrative Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35n7, 111n54 Nussbaum, Martha 36 – 7n22 Ó Laoire, Lillis 157n65 ontology 2, 26, 31, 35n7, 39n72, 62n45, 63n63, 95, 97, 118, 172; of power and act 49, 52; see also flesh, ontology of

Index  197 Parfit, Derek 62n46 passivity 50 – 3, 61n22, 63n61, 157n44, 168 pathétique 1 – 2, 6 – 9, 12 – 13, 15 – 16, 18 – 21, 24 – 5, 32, 42 – 3, 45, 57, 67, 74, 81 – 2, 89, 143, 153, 155, 162, 167, 173 – 4, 180 pathos 1, 6, 8 – 9, 15 – 16, 19, 50, 52, 67, 80 peace 6, 154, 173 – 4, 177, 180, 183n50 Penia 22, 38n46, 82, 87n88 person(s) 10, 18 – 19, 28, 30, 32, 34, 43, 45 – 8, 50, 54, 56 – 9, 62n43, 64n79, 66, 68 – 9, 71, 73, 75 – 6, 78, 81, 85n29, 87n74, 115, 124, 137, 140, 151, 153 – 4, 162, 165, 168, 180; idea of 7 – 9, 20, 42 – 3, 45, 47 – 50, 53 – 4, 57 – 8, 64n79, 65n83, 66 – 7, 69, 74 – 6, 89, 161, 163, 165 – 7, 171 phenomenology 36n12, 50, 78, 101, 112n65; hermeneutic 85n42, 102, 161 philosophical anthropology 1 – 2, 6 – 10, 12 – 13, 15 – 16, 18 – 28, 34, 37n25, 38n64, 42 – 4, 49 – 51, 53, 58 – 9, 63n63, 64n79, 66 – 7, 69, 75, 82, 87n88, 89 – 90, 96, 101, 103, 136 – 7, 140, 153, 155, 160, 162 – 4, 167, 169 – 70, 172 – 4, 176, 180 phronesis 3, 23, 69 – 70, 82, 107, 114, 124, 166; see also judgment(s); reason, practical Plato 21 – 3, 67, 111n54 pleasure(s) 7 – 8, 19, 45, 54 – 6, 61n19, 64n73, 67, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 84n12, 115, 175; finitude of 20, 69 poetics 1, 6 – 8, 18, 35n4, 60n6, 119, 124, 131, 142, 146, 171 – 2, 182n39; see also will, poetics of poetry 31 – 2, 68, 114 – 16, 124, 128, 133n34 politics 3 – 5, 11, 55, 78, 93 – 4, 96, 111n55, 114, 121, 123, 125 – 6, 129 – 30, 134n60, 138 – 9, 140 – 1, 144, 149, 152, 163, 169, 175; cultural 133n25; of recognition 139, 149; revolutionary 126 Poros 22, 87n88 power(s) 1 – 3, 5 – 6, 8, 10, 12, 14n18, 15 – 19, 22 – 5, 28 – 30, 32 – 4, 35n7, 40n77, 44, 47, 49, 51 – 2, 57, 59, 65n87, 66 – 7, 75 – 9, 81 – 2, 86n55, 86n63, 89 – 90, 93 – 9, 106 – 7, 108 – 9n14, 109n17, 112n64, 114,

117, 119 – 23, 128, 130, 131n3, 132 – 3n22, 136, 138, 145, 147 – 8, 155n19, 166 – 7, 169, 174, 176 – 8, 180, 181n18; to act 6, 9, 49 – 50, 52, 86n63, 89, 91, 98, 101, 126, 128, 165, 169; of affirmation 143 – 4; to be 37n25, 75; being as . . . and act 8 – 9, 16, 18 – 19, 23, 42, 49 – 50, 52 – 3, 58, 67, 75, 97, 101, 103, 143, 164, 170, 173; colonialist 150; of decision 178; -to-do 78; explanatory 91; to fail 85n46; imperialist 109n15; of invention 3 – 4, 70, 120, 124, 130; to judge 173, 179; of knowing 7, 9 – 10, 20, 25 – 8, 33, 39n67, 42 – 4, 46 – 7, 66 – 9, 74 – 5, 165; lust for 76; of metaphorical displacement 30; nonviolent 79; -over 77 – 8; political 78, 94, 106; regenerative 120 – 1, 128; relations 2, 75, 77; relations of 78, 116, 172, 176; schematizing 9, 23, 31, 33 – 4, 117, 180; of selfaffirmation 106; of signification 29; somnambulistic 131n3; sovereign 26, 164; structures of 93, 177; subversive 96; of synthesis 26; of time 74; of volition 33; will to 74, 77, 174; worlding 3, 23, 28, 117, 120, 122, 128 – 9, 145, 169; see also desire(s), power of; imagination, power of praxis 1, 4, 6, 50, 52, 77, 79, 91 – 2, 97, 100n39, 171; see also action(s) presence 8, 17, 25 – 6, 29 – 30, 41n107, 63n64, 103, 111n60, 117, 146, 157n44; semblance of 32; see also metaphysics, of presence present 30, 46, 51, 62n52, 71, 91, 99, 101 – 2, 111n47, 112n64, 117, 125, 138, 142, 166, 181n7; condition 132n22; eternal 97 – 8, 102, 138 – 9; force of the 4 – 5, 11 – 12, 90, 103 – 5, 107, 130, 138, 140, 167; intention 29; perceptive fulfillment 29; perspective(s) 30 Rabinow, Paul 86n68 reason 2, 4 – 5, 9, 11, 21 – 2, 34, 42, 44, 54 – 7, 59, 64n76, 65n87, 67, 70 – 3, 81 – 2, 84n23, 87n69, 90 – 1, 97 – 9, 101 – 4, 106 – 7, 111n60, 112n64, 129 – 30, 142, 152, 162 – 4, 167 – 72, 175 – 7, 180; for acting 43, 154; cunning of 98,

198 Index 100 – 3, 137; hermeneutical 16; hermeneutical age of 161; infinitude of 7; normative conception of 164; practical 2, 4 – 5, 7, 11 – 12, 15, 23, 59, 106, 114, 138 – 41, 152, 171, 175, 184n67; Reason 102 – 3, 111n60, 137; speculative 170; theoretical 170; see also phronesis recognition 19, 67, 76, 79 – 82, 92, 99, 109n14, 139, 141, 144 – 6, 149, 171, 177 – 80; mutual 174, 182n45; reciprocal 177, 179; refusal of 166, 181n18; struggles for 10, 80 – 1, 83, 106, 130, 137, 141, 149, 165, 173 religion 53, 90 – 3, 111n60, 112n71, 132n22, 168, 183n50; art- 131 remembering 157n63; strategy(ies) of 150, 165; work of 150, 163, 174 respect 7, 10, 12, 34, 42 – 4, 57 – 9, 65n87, 66, 80, 104, 106, 140, 148, 152 – 4, 165, 171, 177; enigma of 59; feeling of 59, 65n87, 90, 165; idea of 7, 42, 58 – 9, 66 – 7, 72, 74, 86n55, 160; imperative of 2, 7, 9 – 11, 20, 47, 58 – 9, 81, 95, 154, 167, 169, 171; normative expectation(s) of 76, 79, 144 Ricoeur, Paul (works): Fallible Man 20, 39n65, 47; Freedom and Nature 25, 47, 51; Oneself as Another 47 – 8, 156n43; Symbolism of Evil 39n65; Time and Narrative 161 Schoenberg, Arnold 110n44, 122 Sen, Amartya 166 Spinoza, Baruch 35n7, 143 stare decisis 179 Strawson, P. F. 50 Taylor, Charles 110n34, 149 Taylor, George H. 39n70 testimony 12, 124, 130, 142 – 7, 156n40, 160, 162, 169, 174, 181n7; hermeneutics of 12, 124, 142, 144 – 5, 147 – 9, 156n40, 157n44, 158n69, 160, 168; theology of 142, 143; see also conscience, testimony of translation 175 – 6; act of 6, 13, 80, 140, 154, 174 – 7; passion for 177; work of 2, 5, 12 – 13, 175 – 7, 180 truth 2 – 5, 9, 12, 16, 21, 25 – 6, 28 – 30, 32 – 3, 36n20, 41n107, 41n110, 53, 71, 99, 102 – 3, 107, 110n40, 111n55, 112n64, 112n71,

114, 116 – 24, 126, 130, 132n12, 136, 145, 147 – 8, 151 – 2, 158n69, 168; claim(s) to 3, 11, 28, 33, 83, 118, 119, 145, 169, 177; -intention 29 – 30, 74; metaphorical 31; post180; social 99, 110n44, 116; see also aletheia value(s) 1, 2, 8, 11, 14n18, 43, 46 – 8, 54, 56, 59, 61n19, 72, 75 – 6, 80, 82 – 3, 92, 94, 103, 116, 119, 122, 129, 130, 131n3, 131n4, 136 – 7, 139 – 42, 153 – 4, 166 – 70, 175, 180; cognitive 133n34; cultural 86n53; diverse/diversity of 10, 12, 72, 139, 152, 160; exemplary 3, 8, 18, 28, 55, 70, 114, 123 – 4, 126 – 9, 150, 152, 160, 179; heuristic 2, 115; inestimable 10, 81; judgment 17; multiple/multiplicity of 5, 10, 11; network of 44; receptivity to 47, 52, 119; singular 3, 5, 9, 11, 144 – 5, 160, 162; surplus 77, 93, 108n11, 177; systems of 59, 70, 101, 160, 171 – 3 violence 2, 15, 20, 44, 47, 58, 65n87, 72, 78, 86n55, 94 – 5, 100, 109n14, 119, 130, 142, 148 – 52, 164 – 5, 168, 171, 174, 176 – 80; contagion of 148; domestic 36n22; evil of 1, 7, 12, 15, 19, 22, 25, 34, 78, 98, 128, 153, 165, 174; founding 62n36, 173; instrument of 93; legitimate 5, 94, 154, 173, 177 – 8; systemic 93; technologies of 127 von Humboldt, Alexander 183n52 Weber, Max 108n9 Werktreue 133n33 will 8, 14n18, 17, 21 – 2, 33, 35n2, 46 – 7, 49 – 51, 55, 61n19, 61n22, 63n64, 64n79, 70, 72, 75, 94, 106, 111n47, 112n64, 124, 130, 148; to dominate 77 – 8; empirics of 25; to live together 138, 154, 166, 173, 179 – 80, 183n64; philosophy of 1, 8 – 9, 15 – 16, 18, 34n2, 35n4, 35n7, 39n65, 105, 107, 131, 142, 149, 163, 168, 170 – 1, 182n39; poetics of 6, 9, 16, 30, 34, 57, 82, 89, 105, 107, 157n44, 172, 182n34; to power(-over) 74, 77, 174; public . . . formation 77; sovereign 17, 96; theory of (“I”) 44, 45 Williams, Sean 157n6