Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed 9781472547422, 9780826485137, 9780826485144

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ABBREVIATIONS

C&C CI CR FM FN FP FTA HHS HT IT J LLP MHF OAA RJ RM SE T&N

Critique and Conviction The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics The Course of Recognition Fallible Man Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences History and Truth Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning The Just The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Library of Living Philosophers, 22 Memory, History, Forgetting Oneself as Another Reflections on the Just The Rule of Metaphor The Symbolism of Evil Time and Narrative

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CHAPTER 1

READING RICOEUR

Students may well feel perplexed encountering the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur for the first time. There is so much of it, if one is just counting the number of books and essays. Moreover, if they look at his books in chronological order they will find that Ricoeur keeps adding new topics. He even makes adjustments in how he does philosophy as he finds new problems and new challenges to what he is doing. Since many contemporary philosophers confine themselves to a single question or problem the new reader may wonder whether he really has a significant philosophical lesson to teach us. In fact, there is an overall unity to his work and a common problem or at least set of problems that runs through it. This has become clear since his death in 2005, which closed the canon, so to speak. There will not be another book, on another apparently new topic, even if he was considering one when his health began to fail for the last time.1 That almost all of his major published work is now available in English translation means that we can look at his work as a whole and trace themes through it, knowing where it ends. When we do that, we see not only that he had many significant things to say on a wide range of topics, but that his many books and essays do hold together as a single philosophical project, even if this project was left incomplete in the end. But he also said that such incompleteness is not necessarily a bad thing. Philosophy, he maintained, applies itself to something it cannot exhaust, so philosophical questions can always be reopened and refined. His death, in this sense, leaves us with work to do ourselves based on what he was able to accomplish. To do that, however, we must first begin to grasp what he was about as a philosopher. This book is written to help students get started on that task. It is an introduction to the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur for those who 1

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may not know much, if anything, about it, but who do have some commitment to philosophical inquiry. It can also serve as a contribution to understanding and better appropriating his thought for those who are already familiar with it to some degree. Because there is so much material to consider, my perspective is not critical but rather expository. One could call it a philosophical narrative, given Ricoeur’s own contributions to the theory of narrative discourse. As such, it proceeds in a basically chronological fashion to present an overview of his major writings in terms of a few central themes that run through them and tie them together. Of course, any exposition must reflect a perspective and some interpretive choices. Mine reflect decisions about what is centrally important to understanding his thought and its contribution to philosophy. Such an approach must also inevitably leave things out. Ricoeur, for example, was very knowledgeable about the writings of the major figures in history of philosophy and returned to these figures again and again both in his teaching and in his writing. But I have chosen to ignore his detailed discussions of other philosophers except insofar as they contribute to seeing how his work unfolds over time. I realize that this means there really is not sufficient discussion here of how and why the history of philosophy was important to Ricoeur – and how this contributed to his own understanding of what he is about as a philosopher. This is a question, therefore, that any serious reader of Ricoeur who decides to pursue his work further will consider. I believe what I have said about it here will be sufficient to show why this is so, but also that it was not necessary to do so in greater detail here. Ricoeur was a philosopher who was involved in the world beyond professional philosophy to a unique degree. Scholars outside the philosophy guild across a wide variety of disciplines have perceived his work as important. Besides philosophers, it has been discussed by historians, literary critics, legal theorists and jurists, biblical exegetes and theologians, who see in it resources that can help them in their own efforts. They see that he often addresses challenges to their work that call for a response on their part, while, at the same time, they recognize how seriously he takes their fields and has incorporated them into his own project. I have not had the space to pursue these influences here or to discuss how Ricoeur is read by scholars in other fields. I do hope, however, that those coming at Ricoeur from other disciplines will find the account of his work presented 2

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here helpful to their understanding and appropriation of what is valuable in his work. Ricoeur also had a public influence beyond that of most university professors of philosophy. Anyone who looks at his complete bibliography and his biography will see this. He spoke often to groups of influential people in the churches, society and politics. He wrote regularly for French newspaper opinion pages and well-known journals, such as Esprit, with which he was associated for many years. Interviews with him that were published and those broadcast on radio and television would fill a large book, maybe two. He knew many leading figures and politicians. The Pope invited him to dinner. Václav Havel wanted him to speak at his inauguration as president of Czechoslovakia following the fall of communist rule.2 This is also material I have ignored in this volume. The bibliography listed at the end of this book will point the way for those who wish to explore his public side further. Ricoeur did present accounts of his intellectual biography several times over the years. Because all this material is available in English, I have chosen not to dwell on it here.3 Charles Reagan has written a convenient short biography of Ricoeur that also includes a more personal memoir of their friendship for those who wish to know more about Ricoeur’s life and experiences (see Reagan 1996). He was raised by his grandparents, following the death of his mother shortly after his birth and that of his father in World War I. He lost a dear sister to tuberculosis in his youth. He himself spent five years as a prisoner of war of the Germans during World War II. During this time, with a colleague, Mikel Dufrenne, he taught philosophy to other prisoners in the camp – and did it so well that the French government agreed to grant degrees to his students following their release at war’s end. His life was threatened during the Algerian War because of the stand he took against it. He was actually assaulted by a student who dumped a waste basket on his head in the aftermath of the student riots in Paris in 1968. He endured a number of vicious verbal attacks by French intellectuals who did not like what he was saying. He lost a son to suicide and saw his beloved wife die before him. In a word, he knew life can have a tragic dimension because he experienced the ups and the downs of the twentieth century. He did not seek to avoid allowing this to influence what he was about as a philosopher, even while he committed himself to its autonomy and goal of speaking truth to everyone. The many translations of his 3

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work, in later years into more than twenty different languages, as well as the prizes and honorary degrees he received, show that he found a large audience already during his lifetime.4 Yet he always maintained that he would rather that people discuss his work rather than talk about him. Through this book I hope the reader will find encouragement to enter into that conversation. That would be one gift I could return to Professor Ricoeur in gratitude for all he taught me and for his friendship over the years.

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CHAPTER 2

FREEDOM AND NATURE

Freedom and Nature was Ricoeur’s doctoral dissertation. It was meant to be the opening volume of a projected three-volume philosophy of the will. In it Ricoeur presents ‘something like’ an eidetic phenomenology of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary in human existence. That is, his goal is to grasp these two central notions, which make freedom meaningful, in terms of something like their essence, or as conceptually as possible, beginning from a pure phenomenological description. He acknowledges that there are inherent limits to such an approach, however, because human existence is an embodied existence. This raises the problem of motivation as influencing any act said to be freely chosen. What is more, human existence is temporal. But the eidetic approach of phenomenology in seeking an intuition of essences abstracts from the unfolding of action over time, by dividing it into atemporal stages. The question arises therefore how we are to make sense of the overall unity in time of these separate stages. Finally, there is the sheer event aspect of any act of choice to consider. Something happens when we act, but a free act is not just another natural event. It is a new beginning, one that we will, that we chose. So what makes it a voluntary act for which we are responsible and not just another predetermined occurrence in the sequence of natural events? This is the underlying issue of human freedom that Ricoeur wants to address in his philosophy. WHY DOES HE START WITH THIS QUESTION?

A major assumption of Ricoeur’s thought is that while philosophy has its autonomy, it is always dependent on something that precedes 5

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it, which it never fully absorbs or exhausts. Philosophy does have its autonomy in that it chooses its starting point, the question from which it begins. But this question already is situated and motivated by something problematic outside of – and prior to – all philosophy: the non-philosophical or perhaps life, being, or reality. Philosophy arises therefore in response to this non-philosophical reality that precedes it, seeking to make it intelligible in ways that are adequate to what is at issue concerning our experience of it. This idea of an autonomy without independence for philosophy runs throughout Ricoeur’s work, setting limits to what philosophy can achieve without ever denigrating or denying its achievements. Ricoeur’s is an understanding of philosophy, therefore, that implies that philosophical questions are always capable of being reopened, and also that there may be unrealized resources in earlier philosophers’ works that can be taken up and developed further. This is one reason why he will reject all talk about an end of philosophy in the sense of philosophy having exhausted itself. It also accounts for the tension between continuity and discontinuity that runs through his later constructive formulations, particularly his theory of narrative discourse but also his ‘little ethics’ and his philosophical anthropology of the capable human being. We need also to note that there are a number of assumptions and influences operative in the way Ricoeur poses his initial philosophical question and project. These can be taken as sources of his thought without taking away from the originality of his starting point. First, drawing on the philosophies of Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur sees that the subject–object model that has characterized philosophical thinking since Descartes is problematic. It does not finally make sense of our experience of ourselves, others, or the world we live and act in. This subject–object model presents itself as a theory of knowledge, but Ricoeur sees that it is based on what really is a metaphysical model in which a subject is related to an object through being conscious of that object and representing this object to itself as subject. This model is metaphysical because it presupposes that the subject and the object in question, or the two of them in relation to each other, are and must be real. Descartes’ famous discovery of the cogito – our lived experience of our inability to deny our own existence – thus involves both epistemological and metaphysical aspects. The epistemological aspect is seen in that fact that in the cogito I know something for certain, that I exist, hence 6

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some knowledge is possible and therefore, according to Descartes, we can establish a basis for recognizing what else can count as knowledge: anything equivalent to the self-evidence of the cogito or derivable from it.1 Furthermore, since we experience our existence as real, this experience presents an initial example of what reality must mean for us. But because Descartes first formulated this as the discovery of an epistemological model, he did not really develop its metaphysical side. His philosophy sought to account for the very possibility of knowledge, over against the threat of scepticism, by ‘showing’ us such knowledge. When something is known in this way, because it cannot be doubted, and hence is certain, then it can rightly be said to be the object of knowledge and hence known ‘objectively’. Yet at the same time, this known object is always an object for a knowing subject, the one who performs and experiences the cogito. In this sense, for the Cartesian model there is no objectivity without subjectivity, no objective knowledge without subjectivity, without some knowing subject to whom it is known. Correspondingly, there is apparently no objectivity without subjectivity, a point that Ricoeur will take very seriously in formulating his own philosophical method. However, he also sees that this subject is as yet no one in particular; it is any one at all insofar as that person is a knower.2 Paradoxically, because it is no one, it can also be everyone; hence it is both everyone and no one, at a price that has to be considered. Two further problems set the framework for Ricoeur’s initial philosophical question. The Cartesian subject knows itself; at least it knows itself as existing, because as long as it thinks, it cannot doubt its own existence. But if what a subject knows is always an object, there is a problem about its knowledge of itself. Does it know itself as an object, and hence no longer as a subject? Or is there another kind of knowing, which we might call subjective knowing, which is also a kind of knowledge, but not objective knowledge? Secondly, there is a question of how one subject knows another subject. When he discovered the cogito, Descartes already puzzled over this question. How can we recognize another human mind, since all we see are objects standing over against us however intelligent their behaviour may seem to us? These problems raised by this Cartesian model continued to be a major topic for Ricoeur, to the point that in the end he came to see the model as ‘broken’ and in need of reformulation as the problem of selfhood, the selfhood of a capable human being. 7

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Another factor influencing Ricoeur to pose his initial question as he does was Kierkegaard and what we label as existentialism. As Kierkegaard forcefully argued, given Descartes’ model, the subject is not and can never be an object, for the very subject–object model divides the two into separate categories at the same time that it relates them through what Descartes called consciousness, particularly that specific form of consciousness we call knowing. For Kierkegaard, and for existentialism in general, this leads to a major problem. The model calls for a subject, but the subject as already stated is no one in particular. It is me only in the abstract sense that I can be, am a knower. But this seems to leave something important out, whatever it is that makes me, me – and you, you – and not someone else. Yet, at the same time, without such subjectivity, can I really say that I am me, that I exist? This is another reason why, in the long run, Ricoeur will propose that what is at issue is the nature of the self, where this self is more an agent than a knower, but an agent who has a specific identity and who is responsible for his or her actions. I will label this emphasis on the uniqueness, the singularity of individual existence – what Ricoeur will subsequently call our selfhood – the existential thread in Ricoeur’s philosophy. The three twentieth-century thinkers already mentioned, Marcel, Heidegger and Jaspers, all influence how he takes up this existential critique of Descartes and questions the subject–object model. For Marcel, the subject, the existing individual, is always incarnate. But this leads to the puzzle that we say both that I have a body and that I am a body. How are we to account for the unity of the I and its lived body? Marcel tried to make sense of this through a practice of concrete reflection, which he sought to illustrate dramatically through writing plays as well as philosophy. For Ricoeur, this unity of the incarnate subject is most evident in human action, hence his concern for the question of freedom. For Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, Dasein, which names the existence each one of us is, has to be understood as existing as being-in-the-world rather than as a subject who objectifies over against itself what the world contains from a position itself not located inside this world. Hence Dasein has to be described in terms of a model or structure of finite, worldly existence rather than simply as some form of purely subjective existence that stands over against the world and even outside it. Heidegger’s critique was also 8

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directed against those versions of philosophical idealism where all objects and even the world itself, understood as another object, exist somehow only ‘within’ the subject or as constituted by the subject, as in neo-Kantianism. But he also held that neither can Dasein be explained as ultimately something objective, as merely one more thing among many, with subjectivity playing no part, for how then could this be known since there is no knower? Therefore Heidegger held that both subjectivity and objectivity themselves have to be understood hermeneutically through an interpretation derived from this more fundamental being-in-the-world. It is this version of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein that Ricoeur most valued and holds onto throughout his own work. Ricoeur’s first published book, written with Mikel Dufrenne, was on Jaspers, whose work Marcel had encouraged him to consider. Jaspers’ philosophy of Existenz, another way of naming human existence, still makes use of the subject–object model, yet at the same time tries to get beyond it through a method he calls ‘transcending thinking’. That is, if we apply the subject–object model to what Jaspers calls limit situations such as death, suffering and guilt, his claim is that these experiences somehow point beyond or transcend themselves, or at least they suggest a kind of lived experience that goes beyond the subject–object model. This experience is revelatory of the limits of the subject–object model and yet itself is never adequate to what lies beyond it and encompasses it. Jaspers names this encompassing other Transcendence, a term Ricoeur appropriates from him. In fact, the most important thing Ricoeur does take from Jaspers is the question how it might be possible to think such Transcendence, although Ricoeur is more willing than was Jaspers to relate it to the idea of God as found in Judaism and Christianity. We can say therefore that in his early work, and even all through its subsequent development, Ricoeur is looking for a philosophical approach to such Transcendence starting from its relation to human freedom and action. One of his fundamental philosophical goals, as with Jaspers, is to make sense of Transcendence without turning it into an object or a subject in a way that collapses us back into the subject–object model. Another influence on Ricoeur’s early project of a philosophy of the will is Immanuel Kant’s presentation of the antinomy of freedom and causality, or as we might say today, of freedom and determinism. According to Kant, if we are truly free, we must be able 9

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to act in such a way as to spontaneously initiate a course of events; we must be able to do something for the first time that would not otherwise have occurred. But science says that in nature every thing has a cause, hence there seems to be no room for such freedom. Ricoeur refuses to understand this antinomy as a strict either/or, where one thesis must be true and the other false. In his own interpretation of Kant, Ricoeur will hold that Kant draws on two different languages in the way he formulates this antinomy, one that speaks of our lived experience of ourselves as free, the other which corresponds to a scientific language that presupposes an understanding of causality that leaves no room for freedom. We are unable to reduce these two languages to just one of them. To do so would be again to limit ourselves to talk either of subjectivity or objectivity, as though either could exist independently. Neither, however, do we have a way simply to leap beyond these two ways of speaking, not even given the progress being made today in what is now called cognitive science.3 We can see from all this why Ricoeur called his initial project Freedom and Nature, echoing the Kantian problem. Ricoeur’s innovation in dealing with it is that rather than phrasing the basic problem in terms of freedom and determinism, he does so in terms of what he will characterize as the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary sides of our lived experience. This brings us to the final figure we need to take notice of in listing some of the major influences on Ricoeur’s approach to a philosophy of the will. This is Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy. Ricoeur had translated one of Husserl’s most important texts into French while a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. Husserl, who was originally educated to be a mathematician, was a systematic thinker, a very systematic thinker. When he turned to philosophy, he claimed to have discovered in phenomenology a method for doing philosophy in such a way as to resolve all its questions. Husserl’s emphasis on the importance of method in philosophy was what first attracted Ricoeur to his work, as a way of moving beyond Marcel’s less systematic, more impressionistic way of taking up philosophical problems. Ricoeur also recognized that Husserl had been able to modify Descartes’ subject–object model in an important way by seeing that it really presupposes three, not just two, terms. Our consciousness is always consciousness of something; hence it is necessary to attend to how our consciousness ‘intends’ its object. In effect, Descartes’ 10

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model should really be seen as a ‘subject intends an object’. Husserl added that, given this revised model, the phenomenologist’s task is to describe things as they appear within it, without taking into account any assumption about whether these appearances – or phenomena – actually exist or not. Just describe the phenomena as they appear to our awareness of them. To make this rigorously descriptive approach possible, Husserl introduced the idea of a reduction or bracketing of the question of actual existence. This reduction – or actually a series of reductions – was meant to leave us finally with only the essence of the phenomena in question. Simply describe things as they appear was Husserl’s watchword, but also realize that how they appear (in the sense of how they are intended) can vary and also needs description. An example can be helpful here. A visually perceived object appears differently from thought about an ideal, mathematical one. We never see more than three sides of a cube at one time, but we can think it as a six-sided object. In both instances we have a cube, once as a perceived cube, once as a conceptualized one. Thus, as in this example, for phenomenology both the intended object and the intention directed toward it can be identified and described. More importantly, they always appear in relation to one another, so while phenomenologists may concentrate on one or the other component of intentional consciousness, in the end they have to acknowledge their mutual dependence and include it in their accounts. Many of Husserl’s own phenomenological descriptions were devoted to examples drawn from visual perception, given his interest in resolving what he took to be the pressing questions in the theory of knowledge. However, there is also the question of the status of the subject pole in his model, at least in the sense of whether it too is something that can be described. Husserl himself took it as a transcendental subject, something more like a point source from which intentional consciousness radiates, leading him to characterize his phenomenology as a form of transcendental idealism. Ricoeur was unwilling to accept this interpretation of phenomenology given his own commitment to understanding human existence as embodied existence in the world. What he does take from Husserl therefore is the understanding of phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy based on a descriptive method, one that seeks to begin by not making assumptions about whether the things described really exist or not, even though for Ricoeur it is beyond 11

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question that there is always a sense of a larger, more complex reality operative at the limits of what is described, what we have called nonphilosophical Transcendence beyond the subject–object model. RICOEUR’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY

In his own proposed systematic project, Ricoeur seeks to apply this descriptive approach to human action rather than to perception, Husserl’s major concern. This is the phenomenology that he presents in Freedom and Nature, which he wrote as his doctoral dissertation. What such a revised phenomenology discovers, he claims, are meanings or the basic principles governing the intelligibility of our lived experience, meanings that allow us to make sense of human action in terms of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary in our lived experience. The voluntary and the involuntary have to be considered as reciprocal because otherwise neither phenomenon is really intelligible. In a purely objective world, one without freedom, there would be nothing to understand, because there would be no one to understand it, no subjectivity. But pure subjectivity without objectivity is also unintelligible if we consider human action, because this subjectivity would not exist in a world beyond itself or be able to act at all since the voluntary can reveal itself only by means of and in relation to the involuntary. This is why we have to consider them together. Beyond their reciprocity, Ricoeur further holds that philosophy has to weight the voluntary over the involuntary, again for a reason that traces back at least to Descartes if not to Augustine before him. One of the striking things about Descartes’ cogito argument is that the subject is aware of itself; it knows that it knows, that it thinks. Ricoeur, too, stands in this reflexive tradition that emphasizes selfawareness and with it our self-knowledge besides our knowledge of the world, even while admitting that such self-knowledge is always dependent on our knowledge of the world. He will modify this reflexive tradition, however, by holding that we never have direct or immediate knowledge of ourselves. We know ourselves only indirectly in terms of the objective world and our actions in it. Why does Ricoeur say that he will begin from an attempt at pure description of the phenomena in question? Because his goal is understanding more than explanation. It is the meaning of the phenomena 12

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relating to the voluntary and the involuntary and their implications for human self-understanding and responsible action that he is seeking. In keeping with the Cartesian and the phenomenological model, such meaning is always meaning for someone, for a subject. This is why Ricoeur’s own phenomenological descriptions will always give the most weight to the voluntary aspect of the voluntary– involuntary pair. The very idea of the involuntary, it will turn out, is dependent upon its being considered in relation to voluntary action. Otherwise we end up trying to conceive of something beyond our experience that is unnamable. If we can in fact call it the involuntary, it is because we already presuppose our lived experience of what Ricoeur calls the voluntary. As he puts it, ‘If the so-called elements of mental life are not intelligible in themselves, we can find no meaning in a purported primitive automatic behavior from which voluntary spontaneity could be derived by secondary complication, flexibility or correction’ (FN, 5–6). Pure description of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary also requires setting out of play any pathological forms of the phenomena in question. This is why Ricoeur will leave the question of evil, in the sense of a misuse of our freedom, for a projected second volume of his project. Similarly, whatever it is that responds to the problem of evil, what, following Jaspers, Ricoeur calls Transcendence, has to be left for a proposed third volume, one that was meant to follow the introduction of the problem of evil into the discussion of the general problem of freedom and nature. But, as we shall see, this volume was never written. Finally, Ricoeur already notes that such attempted pure description will leave something out, ‘a residuum’, whose consequences will have to be considered. In a way, this residuum is also what the empirical sciences deal with. This is why Ricoeur’s attempted phenomenology is attentive to empirical psychology as he knew it at the time. His claim is that ‘vestiges of a phenomenology’ (FN, 13) can be found in it through what he will call a diagnostic approach to its data. In the end, what he discovers is that all attempts to articulate fully the relation between the voluntary and involuntary become ‘stymied in an invincible confusion’ (FN, 13) that we can call a mystery (following Marcel) or a paradox (following Jaspers). Indeed, ‘there is no system of nature and freedom’ (FN, 19, original emphasis). This is important because philosophies based on the cogito tend to think of 13

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it as positing itself, but according to Ricoeur this means ignoring the lived body by treating it as one object among others, and not as something given as soon as we begin to think. Therefore something more than phenomenological description will be required to make sense of the relation of freedom and nature; in fact, to deal with this, something more than a simple change of method will be required. As Ricoeur can already put it here: ‘the Ego must more radically renounce the covert claim of all consciousness, must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the self’s constant return to itself’ (FN, 14).4 This critique of the self-positing ego will be a thread that runs throughout Ricoeur’s subsequent philosophy. A final point that needs to be noted here is what Ricoeur says about the limits of philosophy as a pure conceptual system, another thread that runs through his work, and leads to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy as tempting but ultimately not acceptable. As he can already put it in this early work: concepts ‘are indications of a lived experience in which we are submerged more than signs of mastery which our intelligence exercises over our human condition’ (FN, 17, original emphasis). Yet at the same time, he will hold that ‘it is the task of philosophy to clarify existence itself by use of concepts’ (ibid.). This is what he is proposing to do in this first volume of this proposed three-volume study. MAKING SENSE OF HUMAN ACTION

Ricoeur’s first step is to consider deciding in distinction from voluntary motion. What separates them is not a temporal but a conceptual interval. What we decide upon is a project, although this project also needs to be put to the test of whether it can be or is carried out. In this sense, deciding is a capacity, a notion that will play a much wider role in Ricoeur’s late work where he will move beyond the question of freedom to consider the self as the capable human being in a much broader sense, albeit one still closely linked to the question of action. For what makes an action voluntary and characterizes any decision, is that it includes an intention ‘that could be affirmed after the fact as a potential project of a postponed action’ (FN, 41). What is fundamentally at stake here therefore is the claim that the project might not be carried out, but in any case it ‘appears to be within the power of its author’. As such, a decision can be 14

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conceived of as both a thought (of what is to be done) and a judgement (to do it). A decision, therefore, is like an event in the sense that it comes down to taking a position – so be it! It is not a whim or a command, but is the act of someone, hence a personal act. ‘Hence its existential import is considerable: it is I who project and do something in projecting or doing something’ (FN, 48). Next, a decision looks to, projects a future. This means that it is characterized by a certain expectation, not so much of the yet to come as of the future perfect, of what will have come. As such the future – and time in general – is a condition of action, even though our attempt to describe the voluntary slices it into different, timeless moments. Finally, as already stated, a decision is a capability. Here Ricoeur adopts the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argument that our most basic lived experience is that of a lived conviction that ‘I can’. This way of speaking not only expresses this capability; it links it to something more basic than itself. Even at this most basic level, though, Ricoeur notes that there is a reflexive aspect to every decision: I make up my own mind to do something.5 This is not something I observe, but something I do, hence it stands at the limit of the subject–object model, although it carries within itself ‘a vague awareness of the subject pole’ (FN, 60), which is why we can reflect upon it. One way we do this is through language. We can think and say, ‘it is I who . . .’ At the same time, we can also see that not all decisions need to be explicitly reflected upon or brought to language, although we may do that after the fact when we realize what we have done.6 This phenomenology of deciding leads next to the question of motivation. ‘There are no decisions without motives’ (FN, 66). The obvious question is whether such motives are causes. Ricoeur holds that in terms of their basic meaning they are not. Causes can be known and understood prior to their effects. This is not true for motives. That is, a motive only makes sense, only has a meaning in relation to a decision. We cannot even begin to talk about a motive apart from some decision, and any decision makes possible questions about its possible motives. Hence their relation is reciprocal. As Ricoeur puts it, a motive ‘determines the will only as the will determines itself’ (FN, 67). Motives, therefore, operate more on the level of meaning than of natural causes. They can thus be said to provide a basis for, a way to justify, to legitimate decisions. Ricoeur’s conclusion is that all that we can say if the question is ‘are motives at all like causes?’ is that they incline without compelling. 15

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A second aspect of the phenomenology of motives has to do with their relation to values. That is, there is an implicit sense of evaluation in any motive. One conclusion Ricoeur draws here is that values first appear to us as possible motives for decisions. This suggests that there is an ethical dimension always implicit in or bordering on human action, although Ricoeur does not develop this point in depth at this time. Instead, he moves on to say that the major point here is that willing as deciding is never a pure act on our part: ‘I do my acts to the extent to which I accept reasons for them’ (FN, 78). Hence, there is always also a receptive moment in all voluntary action, something we often express through metaphors: we open ourselves to or close ourselves off from; we turn toward, adopt, adhere to. Again, these are all things we can think and talk about, particularly when they are marked by a feeling of responsibility, something emphasized whenever we say that something is my act.7 Ricoeur is now ready to introduce the involuntary in terms of my body as ‘the most basic source’ of my motives and as revealing ‘a primordial stratum of motives: the organic values’ (FN, 85). His claim is that the involuntary is ‘for the will’ and the will ‘is by reason of the involuntary’. What he means is that while the higher cannot be explained by the lower, there is also always something opaque about the bodily involuntary that will resist pure description and even language because experience always involves more than cognitive understanding. The best we can do is to wager that we can make sense of what is at issue here through use of the already mentioned diagnostic relation between objective knowledge of the body and our lived experience. The first way Ricoeur seeks to do this is through a discussion of need and pleasure. In the most abstract sense need relates to a living organism’s need to appropriate and assimilate things, say food, in order to exist. Thus needs should not be reduced to just an inner sensation. They refer to something other than myself, and thus have a kind of intentional relation to something other than themselves, at the same time that they are experienced as referring to something that I lack. This experienced lack is also characterized by an impetus, a drive to remove it. This is why some needs can be experienced as painful and why any need can overlap with the question of motives for action. But as such, needs are also something I can resist or even reject. ‘Though I am not the master of need in the sense of lack, I can reject it as a reason for action’ (FN, 93). To cite an 16

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example, I can choose whether to eat if food is available; I do not choose whether to be hungry. Needs thus are not just one motive among others; they especially connect us to our embodied existence. What is noteworthy here, especially for later developments in Ricoeur’s philosophy, is that when needs connect with possible motives, we can represent them to ourselves in terms of particular objects. This raises the question of the role of the imagination. This topic occurs again and again in Ricoeur’s philosophy, although he never published a specific work dealing with it.8 Here, though, we can say that imagination provides another link to time in that through our imagination we can anticipate something that might be ‘as something currently absent at the basis of the world’ (FN, 97). Imagination thus links up with the affective dimension connected with the basic idea of a project, and many if not all of our projects carry an affective overtone of some concern. At the same time, a door is opened to the possible limit case of becoming fascinated with our concern to the point of being ensnared by it, something that will become important when the question of evil comes on the scene.9 Here, however, the discussion of imagination stays closer to the level of something like pure knowledge. Pleasure as something we both can anticipate and imagine is also worth considering, if only because it indicates something about the nature of desire beyond the level of basic needs. ‘Desire is the present experience of need as a lack and as urge, extended by the representation of the absent object and by anticipation of pleasure’ (FN, 101). What is interesting here is again the reference to the future. The pleasure I experience is as much something I anticipate as something I currently feel. This is because pleasure is tied to the idea of value. ‘To anticipate a pleasure means to be ready to say, “this is good” ’ (FN, 102). But here again we may deceive ourselves, yielding to the temptation or fascination that goes beyond or misconstrues our actual needs or good. But to pursue this at this point would be to go beyond the brackets imposed by the attempt at pure description. All Ricoeur can say at this point is that pleasure in relation to the imagination may be an invitation to the fault. Instead of pursuing this possibility, however, he next offers some more general comments on how motives and values relate to the organic level of our lives. For example, pain is not the opposite of pleasure, but something heterogeneous with it. Similarly, what is difficult, and thus not always pleasurable, may have a positive value in the way that it relates to a freely 17

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chosen action. Finally, we must say that what we find in relation to organic life is a plurality of values, some of which are discordant with others. Hence there is something ambiguous about organic life that will resist all our attempts to make complete sense of it – for example, by trying to organize such discordant values into a single hierarchy. One important conclusion here is that as affectivity ‘bodily existence transcends the intelligibility claimed by the essences of the cogito’ (FN, 120). Therefore any attempt to think of a simple will to live as ultimately constitutive of our lives will always run into difficulties, if only because even the organic values we consider are themselves subject to change over time and place. ‘Life, at least on the human level, is a complex, unresolved situation, an unresolved problem whose terms are neither clear nor consistent’ (ibid.). In other words, what the phenomenology of the voluntary and involuntary tells us is why we have to make choices not how we make them. We make them because we are both subject and object, without being able to reconcile these two ways of being completely. Beyond this, we also have to recognize that such choices are situated with regard to time and place and will have to be understood in ways that acknowledge this. Returning to the side of the voluntary, and in order to deepen this description of decisions, Ricoeur turns next to what he calls the history of decision making as a movement from hesitation to actual choice. There is something dramatic about this history. ‘Existence moves forward only through the double movement of corporeal spontaneity and voluntary control. This process has two aspects: it is both undergone and carried out’ (FN, 136). Here is where we find the tension between continuity and discontinuity already referred to above. The ‘let it be so’ of choice introduces a discontinuity into this history, where our hesitation had already suggested a capacity for such a choice, and where the choice made cuts off the hesitation at the same time that it fulfils it. Many factors are at play here: the kind of confusion that comes from bodily existence, the values that may be in play, the realization of our finitude indicated by our mortality, the attention we may pay to all these factors. Ricoeur’s working hypothesis is that ‘the power of stopping the debate is none other than the power of conducting it and that this control over the succession’ is what we mean by our ability to pay attention to it and determine it as some outcome (FN, 149). Again, imagination may 18

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play a role here, and there is no reason to think that this is necessarily a completely rational process, although the process may involve deliberation. Its conclusion in any case is a decision, even when it is one not to decide. Decisions can be a source of novelty. ‘The event of choice always permits two readings: on the one hand, it is tied to the preceding examination whose end or, more exactly, resolution it is; on the other hand, it genuinely inaugurates the project as a simple intention of future action’ (FN, 164). Paradoxically, it is our attending to the process of reaching a decision that resolves this process by identifying it. This is why we can never fully reconcile the two readings just referred to. We can see this once we recognize that, on the one side, hesitation plays with different possibilities and reasons for acting, yet these reasons only become operative once our choice is made, without that choice being able to be conceived of as completely unmotivated. Therefore there is good reason to introduce a certain indetermination into our definition of freedom, although this should not be thought of as an indetermination of indifference. The problem is how we are to make sense of the claim that to decide and to choose and to be undetermined are one and the same thing. This is where the eidetic tips over into the existential and calls for a different approach, one that Ricoeur announced at the time as a poetics of the will which could only come after passing through the problem of the fault, of evil. All he will say about it at this point is that if something like an ontology, a theory of the nature of ultimate reality, is operative here, it is a regional one, not one that can claim to be universally exhaustive. Decisions, then, do not make up the whole of voluntary action; they are just one aspect of them. They have to be put to the test of being carried out if the power of decision is itself a capacity to set things in motion. Again, Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach will try to isolate this phenomenon as much as possible in order to capture something like its essence. Most acts are done as soon as we think of them, but action can also be delayed. But if a project is never attempted there is something mistaken about calling it action. In this sense, there is a basic value operative in action in that willed acts refer to something that ought-to-be. But as stated, ‘moving and deciding can . . . be distinguished only in abstraction: the project anticipates the action and the action tests the project’ (FN, 202). A basic insight here is that this level again brings the body into play, 19

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along with perhaps the imagination, but it is the body as an organ of action more than itself being the end of action that is in question. What is at stake is something like what we can call effort, both as regards trying to carry through on our decision by means of our body, and even in representing this to ourselves as something desirable: ‘I cannot represent the content of the value to myself unless I master the movement of the body and the movement of the idea. The first function takes place in the register of practical representation, the second constitutes the original relation of willing to reality which is acting strictly speaking’ (FN, 204, original emphasis). This is obviously not easy to describe and Ricoeur considers a number of different phenomena in trying to explicate it. Many of them present themselves as obstacles to description as much as they advance its progress. For example, that actions are events tends to emphasize the present moment of their occurrence as much as the process that is the setting into motion of our decisions. There is a mixture of happening and doing at play here. Secondly, there is the question of whether we can make sense of the object of acting in terms of the phenomenological idea of intentionality. That is, what is at issue is not just that I intend to do something in the sense of willing it, but also in the sense that in willing it, I refer to something, my project or act, which we can identify and name. This intended ‘object’ is not always clearly given; certainly it does not appear in the same way as does an object of perception or even of knowledge; in fact, it comes close to evoking something like a non-representative consciousness, one that Ricoeur tries to capture by calling this intended object the ‘pragma’ of acting. That this term is not very satisfactory is evident from the fact that it disappears from his later work, but the problem is a real one and is connected to the notion of consciousness as somehow involving representations, a problem that will continue to show up in Ricoeur’s later work, until he finally concludes that it is not a helpful way to approach things after all and simply needs to be abandoned.10 The body is the organ of our acting more than it is its object. How, then, do we make sense of our experience of moving our body? This must be, first of all, a capacity we possess, hence something potential. But it is also a capacity we come to recognize through using it. In this sense, ‘capacities are at the same time residues of action and promises of action’ (FN, 215). A striking case here is that these capacities are not something we have to think of in order to use 20

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them, although we can reflect upon them. To put it another way, they are not things that we observe, unlike objects of perception. Here, Ricoeur again sees something that resists any reduction to disembodied consciousness. ‘Cartesian dualism cannot be overcome as long as we assign thought (project, idea, motive, image, etc.) to subjectivity and movement to objectivity.’ The question therefore is how to reintroduce the body into the cogito ‘as a whole and to recover the fundamental certitude of being incarnate, of being in a corporeal situation’ (FN, 217). This is a question that will involve language, a language where thought and movement would be homogeneous categories. Here the idea of a diagnostic approach comes into play. Applying it to both Gestalt and Behaviourist psychology, Ricoeur argues that they both end up trying to objectify the ego in just the way he is arguing finally cannot be done. Yet they do suggest a helpful way of thinking about voluntary motion and embodiment as a ‘dramatic’ relationship in that they show that ‘every voluntary hold on the body repossesses the body’s involuntary usage’ (FN, 227). By this, Ricoeur means that voluntary motion is not simply given; it is something we learn to do through something like a dialogue with our body. He seeks to confirm this by considering three relevant examples: preformed skills, emotions and habits. Preformed skills (such as our ability to stand upright) refer to something prior to reflexes but neither are they instincts. Rather they refer to ‘a primitive pattern of behavior of our body in relation to perceived objects’ (FN, 232). They regulate movement but do not produce it. Next, emotions presuppose a more or less implicit motivation that precedes and sustains them. As such they give an added physical aspect to already conscious ends, one that points to a nascent movement. Hence they are more basic than acquired habits. Ricoeur further suggests that we can identify what he calls basic emotional attitudes such as wonder or shock, or joy and sorrow, which can be elaborated by our affective imagination and culminate in desire, thereby ‘echoing and amplifying in the body a rapid, implicit value judgment’ (FN, 256). As such, the phenomenology of emotions suggests that ‘for the idea of a spontaneity of consciousness . . . we have to substitute the idea of a “passion” of the soul from the fact of the body’ (FN, 275) wherever there is a possible action. This, in turn, implies that ‘willing only moves on the condition of being moved’ (FN, 276). Consciousness, therefore, can already be seen to have the 21

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capability to bind itself, in the sense of making itself the prisoner of imaginary evils, or even of what is really nothing at all, something we call vanity. At the same time, emotions are not mere reflexes; they are partly subject to our giving them meaning and responding to them, which is already a kind of wisdom. Habits like emotions represent an alteration of our intentions. They have been learned or acquired and relate to how we act. As learned, they build on our preformed skills, not our reflexes, and have use-values. Furthermore, they have a specific kind of spontaneity associated with them indicated by our familiar gestures and even customary thoughts. We can say that they give a form to our sources of action, but they are not precisely willed, although we can make an effort to change them. At one extreme, they become automatic, tending to reduce our willing to zero; at the other, they enable action in that they give it a form or pattern through which to express itself. Combined with preformed skills and emotions, habits help us make sense of what it means to put our decisions into motion, something we again see takes effort. Effort, first of all, has a sensory aspect, although we only really become aware of this through reflection. Ordinary actions are things we just do, but sometimes we encounter resistance either from our body or from the world that we can focus our consciousness on. In such cases the body is no longer a docile organ of action and we no longer experience ourselves as a simple unity, an experience that in extreme cases can turn into something like vertigo. Yet we can encounter resistance to our projects only because we can say yes to them. This is why there is a kind of joy in acting when it succeeds, when our voluntary initiative carries over into what we can call a motor intentionality that connects our lived body and our acts as put into motion. This motor intentionality is transitive; it does not terminate in the body but reaches out to the world in a way that differs from seeing or hearing. In both cases, though, the world is experienced as there for us. This ‘there for us’ of the world Ricoeur says is a mystery in the sense intended by Gabriel Marcel, who distinguishes between a problem, which is something to be solved and that can be solved, and a mystery which is something that can only be acknowledged and marvelled at. This is why Ricoeur will always maintain that something is given to us and that the problem of the truth of reality cannot be answered solely through a consideration of our will or our reflective consciousness. 22

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Once we reach the stage of movement a new factor emerges that Ricoeur calls consent: ‘consenting is the act of the will which acquiesces to a necessity’ (FN, 341). He considers it in term of three forms of the involuntary that move us from something like a relative to an absolute involuntary: character, the unconscious, and life itself. As such, consent is not just a judgement; it is a constitutive part of human freedom given the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary. It involves a form of patience before what we cannot change, but also puts the stamp of effectiveness on what we can do, thereby legitimating our choices. In a striking phrase, Ricoeur says that ‘consent is the asymptotic progress of freedom towards necessity’ (FN, 346), reuniting us with nature. This is not easy to make sense of given the subject–object model. How can these two terms be reunited? How can we finally say that there is no incompatibility between them? Or that all forms of freedom finally agree with one another? This is what a philosophy of the voluntary and involuntary seeks to resolve, even if it itself does so only asymptotically. That is, this philosophy can get closer and closer to such a resolution, but Ricoeur does not think it can ever attain it given our finite, embodied human existence in a world we did not make. This is why conciliation will always be incomplete, if only because there is an inherent ambiguity in the idea of necessity, one that points to both a condition of our existence and its limit. Still, Ricoeur maintains, ‘the yes of consent is always won from the no’ and this cannot be denied by attempts to objectify everything (FN, 354). This, however, is a victory for reflection, but not yet one for existence. More needs to be said about the negative moment through which freedom and necessity negate each other. Unlike Sartre, Ricoeur refuses to consider freedom to be the sole source of negation ‘as if freedom were brought about by nothingness, by the very act in which it breaks away from the blind innocence of life’ (FN, 445).11 Rather negation has to be seen as both positive and negative. It is injurious in that it appears as an active negation of freedom, positive in that it is freedom’s response to the ‘no’ of necessity. After all, ‘freedom is the possibility of not accepting myself’ (ibid.) and philosophy has also to make sense of this. This question of determining who I am, my self, will become a constant theme of Ricoeur’s philosophy, in the sense that negation is something we can hope to overcome. To fill out this claim, Ricoeur here considers our experience of necessity in terms of three moments. The first such moment is what he calls ‘the sorrow 23

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of finitude’. We suffer from our finitude when we realize that we represent only one perspective on the world and values. Similarly, we can suffer from having to make choices, which not only emphasize our particularity but also remove us from other possibilities. With this comes the second moment, the ‘sorrow of formlessness’. There is something about us that we do not choose yet that affects us, something we can try to give form to by calling it the unconscious, ‘the spontaneous power of unrecognized tendencies’ in us (FN, 449).12 Finally, there is the ‘sorrow of contingency’. I did not choose to come into existence, to live. As Heidegger says, we are ‘thrown’ into existence and into the world, and with it into a space and time that extends between birth and death. But, unlike Heidegger, Ricoeur does not define existence in terms of its being toward death. Yes, death represents ‘an irrecusable necessity’, but ‘this necessity cannot be deduced from any characteristic of existence. Contingency tells me only that I am not a necessary being whose contradiction would imply a self-contradiction; it allows me to conclude at most that I can notbe one day, that I can die – for what must begin can end – but not that I must die’ (FN, 458, original emphasis). Once the idea that I will die is gained, however, the sorrow, and perhaps also the anticipation, increases. Yet freedom responds to this ‘no’ of our existential condition with the ‘no’ of refusal. This is most clearly seen in its most exaggerated forms: a wish for totality, for complete self-transparency, and in our desire to say that we in fact posit ourselves in positing our consciousness. But ‘any ideal derivation of consciousness is a refusal of its concrete condition’ (FN, 465, original emphasis) – freedom’s no, in other words, can turn into a form of vanity. Ricoeur’s conclusion is that consent is not a way of refusing necessity but rather of transcending it, particularly as regards evil, through a poetic response rooted in hope. Ricoeur considers two opposed, imperfect forms of alleged consent here to give some content to this idea of hope: one is Stoicism, which is an effort at detachment rather than conciliation; the other Ricoeur calls Orphism or the hyperbolic consent represented by Nietzsche and much of Rilke’s poetry, a kind of dancing over the abyss. Hope lies between these polar extremes of exile and confusion and sustains us in that it allows us to hope that we at least are on the way to conciliation. Ricoeur’s conclusion to this first of his projected three volumes therefore is that there is ultimately something radically paradoxical 24

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about human freedom: ‘in reality each moment of freedom – deciding, moving, consenting – unites action and passion, initiative and receptivity, according to a different intentional mode’ (FN, 483). The paradox lies not between these moments but between the forms of initiative and receptivity that characterize each of them. What it reveals is that our freedom is ‘only human’ and that we can understand it only in terms of certain limit concepts that function like regulative, not constitutive ideas. First of all, our freedom is not creative like divine freedom; we are not God. Secondly, ours is a motivated freedom but not in an exhaustive, transparent, absolutely rational way. Thirdly, it is an incarnate freedom, albeit one capable of graceful acts. Finally, there is the idea of a fully human freedom, one that would not be limited by the idea of a given fixed character, hence of a particular finite form. ‘These limit concepts have no other function here than to help us to understand . . . the condition of a will which is reciprocal with an involuntary’ (FN, 486); as such they still belong to the level of an attempted description of lived subjectivity. What they teach us is that human freedom is not divine; it does not posit itself because it is not Transcendence: ‘to will is not to create’. INTRODUCING THE FAULT

A decade was to pass between the time Ricoeur published Freedom and Nature and the appearance of the next of his proposed three volumes on this topic. Whereas the initial volume was presented as drawing on something like a pure description of the reciprocal relations between the voluntary and the involuntary, this next step was to be more empirical in that it would take into account the existence of evil – what Ricoeur labelled the Fault – as something actually existing but not required by the essential structures approximated in the first volume. But when this next part appeared, it was obvious that something had changed in Ricoeur’s thinking regarding what he had earlier called his ‘empirics’ of the will. Two books, not just one, appeared. Ricoeur had come to realize that introducing the Fault called not only for a new method but also for a new working hypothesis. He now realized that the passage from the innocence of the essential structures that characterized the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary to the actual existence of evil could not be directly accounted for phenomenologically or even empirically. If the existence of evil is in fact irrational, the usual rational methods 25

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will be inadequate to account for it. Another approach is required, one that will approach the transition to the actual existence of the fault from two sides, so to speak, through what he now called a ‘concrete mythics’. This is the way to proceed because myths are how people, in fact, do speak of the beginning and end of evil. Therefore philosophy has to find a way to take this use of language up into its rational discourse. What Ricoeur now proposed was that this return to philosophical discourse would itself require three books, which then would be followed by his proposed poetics of the will. But only two of these three books actually appeared: Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil (which could have been translated as The Symbolics of Evil in order to capture the sense of an organized structure rather than the suggestion that what we find there is simply a consideration of isolated symbols). The first of these books comes at the existence of the Fault from the side of its possibility, which is not the same thing as either its necessity or reality; the second begins from how people in fact do talk about it as already existing. They were to have been followed by a third book that would address the question how philosophy could advance starting from the symbolic language that characterizes the symbols and myths dealing with the origin and end of evil. This projected volume would address areas within what the French call the human sciences, as well as take up the question of speculative thought and a possible ethical worldview on that basis. More specifically, Ricoeur envisaged discussing psychoanalysis, criminology and contemporary penal theory, and political philosophy, including the problem of alienation, on the basis of the two books we are about to consider in order to find a speculative equivalent of the mythical themes discovered in The Symbolism of Evil. He never explained why this particular volume was not written, although he would go on to write a big book on Freud and all the other topics do appear in his later work. What we do have in the two volumes that were published, however, is quite fascinating and sets the question that will determine much of his subsequent work: how do we take seriously symbols and myths – or, as we shall see, figurative uses of language? THE POSSIBILITY OF THE FAULT

Fallible Man sets out to make rationally plausible the possibility of the fault through the concept of fallibility. It does so by seeking to 26

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show that this concept ‘designates a characteristic of man’s existence’ (FM, 2). Something important happens here as regards Ricoeur’s overall philosophy, although it may not have been clear to the first readers of this work. His philosophical problem is beginning to expand beyond the problem of human freedom in relation to nature toward a philosophical anthropology, a philosophical account of what it is to be human, albeit one that still keeps its focus on human agency more than on cognition. This philosophical anthropology will later become the question of what Ricoeur will call the capable human being who is a social being and lives in a world organized by social institutions. Here, though, this anthropological understanding of the human condition gets expressed in terms of what Ricoeur calls the ‘pathétique de misère’ that characterizes the human condition as one in which a human being does not completely coincide with him- or herself. This formula is not easy to translate into English. By ‘pathétique’ Ricoeur means that what is at issue is something we undergo as much as we bring it about, something we suffer, if you will, where the ‘que’ ending again conveys something like a structural condition beyond the more feelingoriented tone of simply saying ‘pathos’. ‘Misère’ in turn could as well have been translated as impoverishment, destitution or wretchedness rather than calqued as ‘misery’, for Ricoeur’s argument will be that there is a kind of disproportion to human existence, a disproportion that can best be expressed by the tension between our particularity and our ability to transcend our particular points of view. In Cartesian terms, it is a tension between the finite and the infinite as expressed by the particularity of our perception and the apparent universality of what we label as knowledge. Ricoeur’s case depends on showing that human beings exist as ‘bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the levels of reality’ within themselves and outside themselves (FM, 3), where this can best be demonstrated by drawing not on Descartes but on Kant, Hegel and Husserl to make use of what they respectively offer as the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the dialectic between certainty and truth, and the dialectic of intention and intuition. In choosing this approach, Ricoeur takes a certain distance from other philosophers of that day whom he sees as focusing only on the finite aspect of human existence. His question instead is whether the kind of transcendence humans can accomplish is limited to transcendence of their finitude in reaching things 27

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outside them in the world or whether it might not also relate to what he meant to present as the Transcendence that was to answer the problem of the Fault in the never published third volume of his Freedom and Nature project. All he will propose at this point, though, is the suggestion that the infinitude that humans can reach in their everyday lives may not exhaust the idea of the infinite as it relates to this other sense of transcendence. If we were to characterize Fallible Man in relation to the history of philosophy, it stands closest to the kind of transcendental style of reflection associated with Kant. That is, what is at issue is finding the conditions of possibility that make the Fault possible – the possible (and apparently inevitable) misuse of human freedom for wrong or destructive ends. But Fallible Man is not merely an example of transcendental reflection in a Kantian mode, for Ricoeur sees that he will also need to fill in the gap between the lived pathos of actual existence and the more abstract transcendental concept of the idea of fallibility. It is a question, in other words, of attempting to reconcile our feeling (or what Kant calls ‘sensibility’) and our thought, a limit that is never quite reached but that Ricoeur seeks to make intelligible. An important aspect in how he proceeds to do this will characterize much of his subsequent work. This is that he begins by drawing on the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Pascal, in order to justify his own reference to the destitution of the human condition rather than simply asserting or assuming it. By showing that this basic starting point is already implicit in the history of philosophy and continuous with it, he means to justify taking up the challenge of understanding fallibility through the kind of pure reflection that characterizes philosophy, where such reflection will at least be able to move beyond the vagueness of the idea of ‘impoverishment’ to identify its distinctive forms. Such reflection has to begin from the side of the things we experience, not from introspection. It leads to insight into the specific disproportion that characterizes our knowledge of our lived condition. What it discovers is that our awareness of this is the product of a synthesis of our finite perspective on the world and ‘the infinitude characteristic of determining, of saying, and intending’ (FM, 19). Ricoeur means by this that while we see things only from a certain point of view, we think them from what Thomas Nagel has more recently called a ‘view from nowhere’. The known object is an object for anyone at any place at any time. But as already stated, this anyone 28

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who is the knower is no one in particular, so the question will be how to move from this cognitive synthetic consciousness to the question of the self-consciousness of any actually existing individual. As Ricoeur says, my ‘point of view is the ineluctable initial narrowness of my openness to the world’ (FM, 23), such that this opening on things is always at the same time a closure within openness, something that can even be experienced as a form of fate. We get beyond any one point of view first by our embodied ability to move about, to change perspective, but this only brings us to another perspective. We get beyond these different perspectives, in turn, by recognizing and naming them as perspectives, hence by bringing them to language. Paradoxically, in recognizing and referring to ourselves as a finite perspective on things, we transcend our finitude because the meaning of what is identified or spoken of as an object goes beyond any perspective on it.13 Language, we can thus say, gives perception meaning through a kind of dialectical relation to it. That is, we know perspective because we can name and communicate about it, but we have something to name and communicate about only because of our perception from some perspective. It is the moment of affirmation or judgement about the object in question that indicates the move from perception to signification: ‘that is what it is!’ For Ricoeur, such an affirmation or judgement already involves a nascent reflection, for it is always someone who affirms something as what it is, something other than him- or herself, pointing to the subsequent question: who is it who does this? This dialectic of finite and infinite perspective therefore depends on a more fundamental dialectic of speaking as doing and perceiving as receiving, which again brings into play the ideas of the will that affirms and the consent to the ways things are or can be known to be. Obviously, the question of the relation of truth to language is implicit and unavoidable here, although not taken up in detail. Ricoeur’s question, rather, is about the third, middle term that lies between the poles of these two dialectics, that of the finite and infinite, and that of receiving and doing. He says that this middle term is not something that is ever given in itself but rather is an awareness that is only reachable in referring to the thing affirmed: ‘here consciousness is nothing else than that which stipulates that a thing is a thing only if it is in accordance with this synthetic constitution, if it can appear and be expressed, if it can affect me in my finitude and lend itself to the discourse of any rational being’ (FM, 38). 29

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His next question is whether we can discover what makes this synthesis ‘on the thing’ possible, a question that introduces the properly transcendental moment of reflection aimed at conditions of possibility. Following Kant, he begins by saying that this synthesis depends on a ‘representation’ where this representation is the result of what Kant called the transcendental schema through which our imagination gives an image to our concepts. Ricoeur agrees with Kant that this schematism is ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze’.14 The idea of a transcendental synthesis, therefore, is not fully adequate to explain what is at stake in the disproportion constitutive of the human condition. It gives us only consciousness in general as a possibility, but as such, ‘it remains deficient with respect to the substantial richness of which myth and rhetoric give a pathetic understanding’ (FM, 46). This is why, still in a Kantian vein, Ricoeur turns next to the question of a practical synthesis. This is a synthesis that goes beyond the abstractness of the transcendental synthesis because it is motivated by a concern for totality, that is, for an existence that will also include the affective and practical dimensions of our existence. This soughtfor totality is once again not something given but rather a task to be realized. At this new level, what was finite perspective on the first level is now taken up as character and what was infinite in terms of meaning falls under the heading of happiness. But once again, disproportion characterizes the relationship between them. Character brings into consideration the affective aspect of perspective, something that motivates our practical dispositions to act. Happiness, in turn, introduces a new sense of receptivity, one that indicates that our projects do not arise from nowhere or ex nihilo. They add the thrust of desire to our representations of the things before us, although there is always something opaque about this affective relation to things. It is not perfectly clear, for example, why we prefer some things and not others. Furthermore, we recognize an experience of otherness through this affective desire that distinguishes us from the things of our desire and that in our attitudes toward them we cannot completely account for, but which may be said to introduce to our point of view the notion of a self-preference or even, at the limit, a self-love. Character, we can say, therefore is ‘the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole’ (FM, 58). Yet, because it is open to the world, it is open to what goes beyond itself, 30

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including the values of others, leading finally to the idea of humanity as something that we embody, albeit as seen from just one point of view. Our character, too, then is something never fully seen in itself. It is something that we ‘read’ and refer to indirectly, partly by relating it to that feeling of otherness that makes us experience ourselves as different from everyone else. Our character therefore is experienced both as something given, again as something like fate, but also as something liberating in that it moves us to act. At the limit, it refers to the very fact that we exist and thus is not the result of something we do, a fact that we grasp through our interaction with others. Happiness is the contrary term of the dialectic operative here. It refers to the final aim of our concern for totality, for being a whole person. As such, it serves as the horizon of our every point of view and our every act. It is not just the sum of our acts, however; it is intended to be a whole that is more than merely the sum of its parts. The question is whether such happiness is or can be ever achieved, reintroducing the question of disproportion, which is indicated by the fact that our character always keeps us from realizing the entire range of human possibility: ‘Everything human – ideas, beliefs, values, signs, works, tools, institutions – is within my reach only in accordance with the finite perspective of an absolutely individual form of life’ (FM, 67). Happiness, therefore, is our aim, and sometimes, maybe often, we feel we are on our way to it, but it is not certain that we ever get beyond this feeling of being oriented to it. What then can bring about the synthesis of character and happiness? Ricoeur answers, again following Kant, that it is the self that is aimed at through this synthesis, a self that is not necessarily the self we experience. This self is the person that we represent to ourselves as a project to be realized, one whose actions would be congruent with its existence. And it is on the basis of the idea of this person that we can derive the idea of respect, both for ourselves and for others, but this is a fragile synthesis in that it is difficult to carry out in practice. In part, this is due to the fact that recognizing the idea of us as persons worthy of respect rightly leads to self-esteem, but self-esteem when combined with desire can overreach itself and destroy the synthesis of character and happiness it is intended to unite. Furthermore, there is always the possibility of discord within the affective synthesis that seeks to reconcile character and happiness, a discord whose possibility has to be sought in the tension between our disposition toward 31

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and aspiration for wholeness, without giving into what Kant called a theory of radical evil as something constitutive of the human condition. This understanding of evil was something Kant himself rejected, but it left him having to say that reason could only recognize the origin of evil as inscrutable. Ricoeur’s next question is to consider just when the disproportion of human existence becomes ‘pathetic’, the moment when the concept of fallibility links up with the lived experience of an impoverished or wretched existence that does not actually fulfil its promise. As a first approximation to this moment, he returns to the connection between knowing and feeling as it involves degrees of feeling, where feeling itself, like knowledge, is intentional in that it refers to something other than itself. Whereas knowledge sets up a cleavage between the knowing subject and the known object, feeling ‘restores our complicity with the world, our inherence in and belonging to it, something more profound than all polarity and duality’ (FM, 87). Philosophical reflection can talk about this, but never quite really capture it experientially or ‘know’ it except indirectly, leading many philosophers mistakenly to reduce feeling to something merely subjective or at best having to do with ‘values’ that themselves are subjective and not objective. Feeling, instead, is like knowing, but also different from it, pointing to something like an inner conflict within ourselves. Here is where degrees of feeling come into play, running from love of the world through need to desire and introducing the possible mistake of confusing pleasure with happiness. But pleasure is always finite, whereas the perfection of happiness is infinite because it is meant to be all encompassing. But that we can mistake pleasure for happiness, prefer it, already points to the possibility of a bad choice and through it to evil. Indeed, while it may look as though the origin of evil may lie more on the affective than on the cognitive level, it is intimately intertwined with both of them. Still it is feeling that best reveals fragility as always potentially conflictual in that ‘with feeling, the polemical duality of subjectivity replies to the solid synthesis of objectivity’ (FM, 107). This conflict takes place between subjectivity and objectivity in what Ricoeur calls the self ‘constituted as different from natural beings and other selves’ (ibid.), where this difference is more fundamental and prior to any self-preference that may make the self wicked. He therefore seeks to characterize the boundary region that lies between this primordial innocent state and actual existence in terms of the classical 32

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discussion of the passions, as found, for example, in Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, and even Kant. Drawing again especially on Kant, he suggests seeing the passions themselves as encompassing an original morally neutral sense and possible distortions linked to certain ways of representing objectivity. In particular, he points to the passions associated with having, power, and worth (avoir, pouvoir, valoir in French) as being particularly revelatory in this regard insofar as they apply to our relations both to ourselves and to other persons and things. In their distorted forms, having seeks to ground itself on what is ‘mine’, power on the ability to command others, and worth through esteem overly dependent on the opinion of others rather than derived from relations of mutual recognition and respect. The problem of correctly determining whether it is a distorted passion or combination of passions at work in any given situation only adds to the difficulty. Ricoeur’s conclusion is that there is something inherently conflictual about being a self, a topic that will return again in Oneself as Another. Here, though, his emphasis is on the concept of fallibility as indicative of the possibility of evil as something inherent to the human condition. It is not that human beings are finite and hence always limited in some ways, but rather the fact that they do not coincide with themselves is the problem: ‘Between self-esteem and vainglory there is the whole distance that separates the possibility of evil and its advent’ (FM, 125). All we can say is that this possibility is inherent in the human condition. Yet we need also to acknowledge that we can as much say yes to existence as make a hash of it. Beyond this double affirmation, rational reflection cannot go. THE REALITY OF THE FAULT

The reality of the fault therefore does not follow from its possibility. Yet no one would deny that it exists. To account for this fact Ricoeur again has to introduce another shift in method in his next book in his Freedom and Nature project: The Symbolism of Evil. This change in method will have a profound influence and a lasting effect on his subsequent work. Initially, it will provide a way for him to take up the problem of the fault starting from those myths and symbols by which people speak of it through an effort to surprise the transition to its existence ‘in the act by “re-enacting” in ourselves the confession that the religious consciousness makes of it’ (SE, 3). This new 33

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method, therefore, is not the product of a fully worked-out theory of interpretation, although Ricoeur already speaks of it as a hermeneutic approach, but it will lead him to recognize that he needs to consider the possibility of such a theory when he goes on to attempt to build on the results of this volume. Nor is this new approach yet anything we might call a philosophy of the fault; it is rather the means to such an end. But neither is it a method that will begin from something like the doctrine of original sin as it appears in Christianity. Instead, Ricoeur argues we have to move back from such reflective expressions to the more spontaneous ones that underlie all such speculation and any such formulation.15 We do remain at the level of a use of language, however, although since it is a use characterized by myths and symbols, so extended initial reflection on how to construe these categories is called for. Myth as Ricoeur understands it is not simply to be defined as a false story nor is it an explanation in the sense of modern science, although it does contribute to our understanding through the explanatory significance of its ‘symbolic function’ which uncovers and even can be said to reveal how people have understood themselves to be bound to what they consider to be sacred. Neither is every myth in question in this work, but only those that deal with the existence of evil and something like the experience of a confession of sins. Moreover, Ricoeur acknowledges that he must confine himself to the cultural experience that arises out of the Greek and Hebrew worlds, since he lacks competence beyond these limits. At the same time, he adds, this perspective is a necessary starting point today for anyone in the West who wants to move beyond these limits, for even philosophers must start from somewhere. Hence, what is at issue is the attempt to grasp or ‘re-enact’ in thought an ‘experience made explicit by the myth’ (SE, 7). This is an experience marked strongly by an affective dimension, one that will finally be expressed as a sense of guilt and through the confession of a guilty conscience. But any such confession is itself based on more archaic understandings of the fault. These are ones that express themselves through the symbolic forms of defilement or stain and sin before becoming anything like a reference to a guilty conscience. It is the movement from these more archaic forms to the more reflective lived experience of the fault that will be unfolded in The Symbolism of Evil. And as Ricoeur notes in passing, it begins to look as though what we call the self turns out to depend on such symbolism and constitutes itself 34

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through something like a spontaneous interpretation of it, a point that anticipates his later return to the question of selfhood. Here, however, his emphasis will still be on the fault on the way to thinking about Transcendence. As regards his understanding of symbols as operative in this project, it is again not a question of taking up every symbol but rather of finding criteria that will allow us to grasp what is at stake in all of them. One such criterion is that symbols, insofar as they are operative at the limits of consciousness, occur on three levels: the cosmic aspect of hierophanies or appearances of the sacred; the oneiric level of dreams; and the poetic level of the imagination. There is a directedness implicit in this list. We first read symbols on the world, then inside ourselves, and finally through our poetic imagination. At each of these levels there is something ultimately inexhaustible and ineradicable about the symbols involved. All the philosopher can say at this point is that this is because symbols are closely bound to and dependent on life itself. More can be said about the structure of symbols, however. When experienced, they are already signs, in the sense that they signify something beyond themselves. What distinguishes them as signs is that they do not signify just one thing but have a kind of double intentionality; they always signify more than one thing at a time even though there is always a primary or literal meaning to every symbol. This double intentionality means that in some way symbols are always opaque, if only because they are irreducible to univocal terms. Ricoeur will subsequently emphasize that this means that formal logic, which presupposes such univocity, and philosophical techniques based on formal logic, will be inadequate to deal exhaustively with what is operative in symbolic language. But here his focus is on the tie between the primary and secondary meaning(s) of symbols. We can approximate this tie by saying it is analogical but not allegorical, where allegory already presupposes an interpretation of the symbolic meaning, which in its way is immediately significant. Myths, we shall see, are how people use language to talk about such symbols, so we can add that myths too for Ricoeur are not allegories. One result of these initial reflections is that Ricoeur sees that if philosophy is to take the existence of the fault seriously, it will have to recognize something that he already calls the ‘fullness’ of language because symbolic language is found in every natural language. 35

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This, too, will have important consequences for his later work when he turns from symbols per se to a more general reflection on language and its implications for his philosophical anthropology in that this implies limits to any philosophical approach that confines itself to considering language only in terms of what can be expressed as abstract univocal logical propositions. The symbolics of stain, sin and guilt repeats the movement from the outside of the cosmic level to the more inward oneiric and imaginative levels of symbols associated with the Fault. For example, we can say that defilement is more like something that happens to people than something they deliberately bring about, which is why it resists reflection regarding why it occurs: ‘What resists reflection is the idea of a quasi-material something that infects as a sort of filth, that harms by invisible properties, and that nevertheless works in the manner of a force in the field of our undividedly psychic and corporeal existence’ (SE, 25–26). Defilement therefore represents a stage in which no clear demarcation has yet been drawn between evil and misfortune, but it does lead to a feeling of terror or dread associated with the questions why did this happen and what, if anything, can be done about it? If there is any felt sense of responsibility, it is more closely tied to the sense of being somehow the victim of an act of vengeance than the perpetrator of a misdeed. We can even think of this as implying a lesser sense of moral worthiness on the victim’s part than will characterize a more developed guilty conscience. This is why symbols of defilement are most often associated with purification rituals and the symbolism of cleansing or washing, lustration, and a vocabulary of purity and impurity. Yet we can also see the beginnings of a move to confession at this level, a shift marked by the suspicion that one must have done something to bring about such defilement. In turn, this inchoate confession leads to the demand for a just punishment, perhaps through something approximating a law, even if it is still one of retribution. What is at stake here is a demand for restoration to a prior integrity that has been violated by the defilement, something that already points to the possible hope that such integrity can be restored. ‘Stain’ in this sense is the first schema of evil. With sin we move from the ideas of the pure and the impure to those of piety and justice in that the symbolics of sin conveys the idea of breaking a rule or law and doing so ‘before God’. This is still a religious transgression more than an ethical one; ‘it is not the 36

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transgression of an abstract rule – of a value – but the violation of a personal bond’ (SE, 53). It is this transgression that the prophet condemns and prophesies against, revealing something like a hyperethical dimension to the consciousness of evil in that he presents the demand that God addresses to human beings as an infinite one. ‘It is this infinite demand that creates an unfathomable distance and distress between God and man’ (SE, 55), but also a tension between attempting to obey specific, finite commandments and this infinite demand, thereby intensifying the consciousness of sin. What the law teaches is how one is a sinner, not that he or she is already one. This introduces a new feeling tone, one of anxiety rather than sheer terror, a feeling that can come to characterize all our relations with God as long as we remain at this level. This sense of anxiety is further intensified when combined with the symbol of a day of judgement, but this new symbol also points in another direction, namely, that God is the lord of history, opening the door to the possibility of a promised salvation beyond any threatened catastrophe. The symbolics of sin thus takes on more complex forms than what appeared at the level of defilement: the sacred as both distant and nearby; the loss of a personal or communal relationship; the possibility of redemption transcending that of restoration of a prior state. But also, subjectively, the sense of a power that lays hold of one, plus the symbolism of rebellion and going astray, even of abandonment countered by the idea of pardon and return. Sin, therefore, is not simply negative but also in an important sense positive because it is experienced as something real. This is why it is something for which people can repent. And as such, it leads not only to a heightened sense of self-awareness but also to a demand to know oneself better. This brings us to the level of the guilty conscience, which will take still different forms. It can lead, for example, to an ethical or juridical reflection on the relation between penalty and responsibility, or to a more religious emphasis on the need for a scrupulous consciousness, or to a psychological or even theological reflection on the lived experience of an accused and condemned conscience. What is most important is that this new level points to the paradox within the symbolics of the fault of someone who is both responsible for evil and captive to it, leading to the concept of the bondage of the will or a servile will. Beyond this, guilt is experienced retrospectively as already contemporaneous with defilement: it must be our fault 37

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that this happened. Thus the emphasis on a wrong use of our freedom, subjectively experienced, takes over from the more objective emphasis of defilement or the breaking of a rule, and this is experienced as a sense of self-diminishment. This new burden may once again lead to a demand for perfection, but it can also be seen as revelatory of the very depths of our possible existence in that the ‘thou’ who is condemned becomes the ‘I’ who condemns him- or herself. Conscience then becomes the judge of guilt, but it is now a guilt that has degrees and therefore extremes, where its poles are the ‘wicked’ and the ‘just’. ‘The significance of guilt, then, is the possibility of the primacy of “man the measure” over the “sight of God”; the division between individual fault and the sin of the people; the opposition between a graduated imputation and an all-inclusive accusation’ (SE, 108). The metaphor of the tribunal now enters into play. This is reinforced by the Greek experience of the city as a people governed by ethical rules, but also as subject to tragedy. What the Pharisees contribute is an intensification of the idea of a delicate and scrupulous conscience as well as serious reflection on the law as applied to difficult cases that resist any final rationalization. Complicating all this is the fact that this law is understood as a freely accepted heteronomy because it comes as revelation. This tension between observing the law and its infinite demand is finally what leads to what St Paul calls its curse, an experience of our powerlessness to satisfy all its demands accompanied by the experience of a thoroughly guilty conscience. This limit experience, Ricoeur holds, ‘makes intelligible all that precedes it insofar as it itself goes beyond the whole history of guilt; on the other hand, it cannot itself be understood except insofar as one gets beyond it’ (SE, 143). This will call for a new symbolism, that of justification, something that comes once again from the outside, indicating how all three levels of the symbolism of the Fault are interconnected. To this point, Ricoeur’s emphasis has been on how the symbols of the fault are tied to experience. His next step is to consider how this experience is mediated through language, specifically through the language of myths concerning the origin and end of evil. He admits that modern people no longer think in ways in which myths and history are intertwined, but he holds that we can still seek to understand myths as just that, as myth: ‘To understand the myth as a myth is to understand what the myth, with its time, its space, its events, its 38

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characters, its drama, adds to the revelatory function of the primary symbols worked out above’ (SE, 162). In fact, he suggests myths do three things. They embrace humanity in one ideal history; they narrate a movement from beginning to end that adds an orientation, character and tension to our experience; and they try to get at the enigma of human existence, ‘namely, the discordance between the fundamental reality – state of innocence, status of a creature, essential being – and the actual modality of man, as defiled, sinful, guilty’ (SE, 165). In a word, myth has an ontological bearing in that it points to a connection between our essential reality and our actual historical existence in terms of something like a concrete temporal universal truth whose narrative form cannot be reduced to a concept. In this sense, myths are revelatory without being explanatory in an etiological or scientific sense. They are disclosive in that they signify the human condition we all participate in and as such can have a transformative effect on those who attend to them, even if no myth is ever fully adequate to what it signifies.16 This is why there are so many myths and the question will arise whether we can evaluate and rank them as to their adequacy in saying something about the fault. Ricoeur’s discussion again proceeds in terms of a typology of myths that speak of the beginning and end of evil. The first of these types speaks of the drama of creation and speaks of evil as coextensive with the origin of things. It tells of a god who struggles with the chaos that precedes creation, which is already a kind of salvation. The second type speaks of the fault in terms of a fall that takes place in an already existing creation. Here salvation has to be a new turn in the narrative that constitutes the myth. Between these two stands a variety of myth that finds its full expression in Greek tragedy. Here ‘the fault appears to be indistinguishable from the very existence of the tragic hero’ (SE, 173), who is guilty even if he does not commit the fault. Salvation in this type makes freedom coincide with understood necessity. Finally, there is a myth of the exiled soul. This one makes a soul–body distinction and focuses on how the preexisting soul which has somehow fallen into the body can return to its original home. In discussing these types of myths Ricoeur wants to do more than classify them; he also seeks to discover their internal dynamics and how, in the end, they all relate to one another because they all speak of the same thing, the fault. His preference in the end is for one 39

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version of the second type, which he sees as the anthropological myth par excellence, to organize this cycle of myths. This is the Adamic myth from the Bible, which is, according to Ricoeur’s reading, more a myth of deviation or going astray than strictly one of a fall. Its central meaning is that according to this myth every individual finds evil already there, but yet must understand himself or herself to be somehow responsible for it. No one begins evil absolutely. It is this myth, understood retrospectively, that best allows philosophers to make sense of what all the myths together have to teach us if they are willing to wager belief in it and put it to the test of self-understanding; that is, if they are willing to consider whether it not only increases or enhances self-understanding but also whether it can reaffirm the essential truths of the other myths as well. This is not to turn philosophy into theology, however. It all turns rather on the question whether there is something revelatory about myth as confirmed by what it claims to reveal. Determining this will depend on a kind of thinking common to both the philosopher and the theologian in the sense that they both presuppose and draw upon what myth reveals, but this kind of thinking has yet to be determined. This thinking will be neither exhaustive nor able to unify everything completely: ‘the universe of myths remains a broken universe’ (SE, 345). What remains is the possibility of a personal appropriation that can take two different forms: confession and reflection, where these never completely coincide and always run the risk of falling into allegory. Ricoeur’s proposal for avoiding this impasse is to propose that what is called for is a creative interpretation based on the symbols and the myths. This leads him to claim that both philosophy and theology have to learn starting from what he expresses through his well-known motto that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’. There is a double claim here: first, the symbol gives us something, it has a gift-like character. Second, this gift calls for thought, which means we have to find a way to begin starting not from zero but from the symbols and the myths. He finds justification for this claim in his own conviction that there is no philosophy without presuppositions. But he is not calling simply for a philosophy based on symbols. Something has begun to change in his thought in that by the end of this book he comes to see that philosophy must today start again from the fullness of language. I flag this point because it suggests one reason why Ricoeur never completed 40

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the final volume of his Freedom and Nature project, the one that was going to deal with Transcendence as the answer to the Fault. He had come to see that more work had to be done before he could undertake such a work, much more work, as we shall see. Here, though, he confines himself to noting that in the modern world we face the threat of emptying language of all meaning either by radically formalizing it into a purely abstract combinatory system or by submitting it to such radical criticism that nothing can any more be said to mean anything at all. Beyond this desert of criticism, he maintains, ‘we wish to be called again’ (SE, 349) and this, he argues, calls for an approach ‘that respects the original enigma of the symbols, that lets itself be taught by them, but that, beginning from them, promotes the meaning, forms the meaning in the full responsibility of autonomous thought’ (SE, 349–50). This will be possible because these symbols are already part of language and hence not radically alien to philosophical thought. What is more, all symbolic language already includes an element of interpretation, hence something like an incipient hermeneutical theory, one that is capable of exercising a critical function yet that still recognizes the myth as myth and the symbol as symbol. Our immediacy of belief has been lost, but we can hope to hear what they have to say again through interpretation and thereby aim at a second naiveté in and through the very process of reflection and criticism.17 To do this, however, will call for the development of a philosophical hermeneutics – and we can already see where Ricoeur’s subsequent works will come from. For the moment, though, this appears as a wager on his part, a wager that in this way we can obtain a better understanding of human existence and of the bond between human being and the being of all beings if we follow the indications of symbolic thought. This will not be exactly equivalent to a Kantian transcendental deduction of the symbol as making possible a domain of objectivity nor will it be a confirmation of the Cartesian cogito. In fact, it will lead Ricoeur to call for a second Copernican revolution back to the object and beyond it, following Kant’s own turn to the subject, in that it will show that the cogito is within being, and not vice versa. The task will be to elaborate existential concepts, ‘that is to say, not only structures of reflection but structures of existence’ (SE, 356–57) that pay off in increased understanding.

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CHAPTER 3

RICOEUR’S TURN TO HERMENEUTICS

Ricoeur nowhere explains why he set aside his initial three-volume project of a philosophy of the will, other than to say that he had been imprudent when he had initially laid out its contours.1 He did begin the encounter with psychoanalysis his preface to Fallible Man said could not be bypassed on the way to a philosophy based on the creative interpretation of symbols and myths. We can see this from the big book he produced on Freud and philosophy (FP) and the essays associated with it, which find their origin in lectures he first gave in 1961. But apart from this work it is obvious that his plan to pursue ‘thought that starts from the symbol’ (FM, xliv) now enters into his famous (or some might say, infamous) detours. Ricoeur himself will say that these detours are just a way of picking up on questions he perceived at the end of a previous work or in the process of pursuing it. Sometimes, too, as in Oneself as Another, a detour will turn out to be a way to get at a problem in a helpful way where the discussion as he found it in the work of other philosophers was blocked or had fallen into a dilemma or unresolvable dichotomy. We can also speculate that a number of other unanticipated factors contributed to this shift in his thinking. First, and most obviously, Ricoeur found the problem he was trying to deal with was more complex than he had anticipated, and hence required new considerations. Secondly, and perhaps as important, new challenges appeared on the scene, specifically in the form of structuralism, which came to dominate French thought in the sixties and early seventies. Thirdly, there was the fact that by the end of the 1960s Ricoeur had begun to teach regularly outside France, largely in reaction to ongoing turmoil at the University of Paris at Nanterre, following the student riots in 1968. These had actually begun at the new 42

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suburban campus in Nanterre, not at the Sorbonne on the left bank of Paris. The following year Ricoeur was elected dean at Nanterre because he was widely known to have argued for reforms within the French university system and because he had voluntarily left the Sorbonne for this new suburban campus and the opportunities it seemed to offer for such reforms. But he soon found himself caught between pressure coming from both the left and the right, including a physical assault against his person, such that he felt that he had to resign his position. One significant consequence of this for understanding his philosophy is that through his teaching outside France, particularly in North America, he came to know and study analytic philosophy, which he sought to take seriously without abandoning his earlier commitments to phenomenology and the tradition of reflexive philosophy. He was able to learn much that was helpful from the analytic way of taking up philosophical questions. He also recognized limits to its overall approach, ones that prevented it from being able to take up questions he considered important because it was incapable of dealing with them given the constraints imposed by its narrow focus on propositions and the logical form of arguments, a criticism that has been more ignored than taken seriously by analytic philosophers, much I would say to their detriment. Ricoeur’s work in the immediate period following the publication of The Symbolism of Evil, apart from the Freud book, is found in his many essays from this period.2 We can systematize it by considering this work under four headings: Freud and psychoanalysis, structuralism, hermeneutics or the question of a theory of interpretation, and Ricoeur’s own linguistic turn. All these, as Ricoeur himself recognizes, at times overlap, intersect, and even interweave, so what follows is merely one way of trying to present them in a systematic fashion. However, it does give us a way to see how this work led to his later books and essays, which are based on and develop these topics. It is also a way to give some initial indication of the groundwork he laid in terms of each of them as calling for further development by his successors. Hermeneutics with its close relation to language forms the central core of these developments, although in retrospect we can see all these topics already foreshadowed in his earlier work. The symbols and myths dealt with in The Symbolism of Evil, for example, were already at the level of language and already required an interpretive approach. And even his phenomenology of the polarity of the 43

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voluntary and the involuntary had assumed a workable language for describing these phenomena. What the challenge posed by structuralism adds is the necessity to spell out this understanding of language in greater detail, a need reinforced by the fact that structuralism itself depends on a certain theory of language. Structuralism also raises the question of subjectivity in relation to objectivity in an important way, if only because in its more extreme formulations it calls into question the very existence of subjectivity, or at least reduces it to an ultimately illusory product of some prior independent reality. Freud enters into consideration in a slightly different way. There were French thinkers who did give structuralist interpretations of Freud, Jacques Lacan being the best-known name among them. Ricoeur, however, chooses to focus solely on Freud’s own work as another challenge to his own phenomenological and reflective approach, particularly insofar as it offers a more developed theory of the unconscious and its importance than Ricoeur was able to acknowledge in referring to the unconscious as one form of the involuntary in Freedom and Nature. Hence we shall begin with this work, even while recognizing that it already overlaps the other themes enumerated above, as can be seen from the order of the original French title of this book which is ‘On Interpretation: An Essay on Freud’. RICOEUR’S ENCOUNTER WITH FREUD

Ricoeur’s concern is with Freud, he announces, not psychoanalysis or even later interpretations of Freud. Moreover, as a philosopher he can only appeal to Freud’s texts, which are there for anyone to read, not to the practice of the analytic approach as experienced either by an analyst or a patient. What is most important is that Freud himself poses a philosophical problem in that ‘psychoanalysis conflicts with every other global interpretation of the nature of man because it is itself an interpretation of culture’ (FP, xii), so already Ricoeur’s focus has moved beyond his initial question of the status of the involuntary. The method Ricoeur proposes using to consider Freud as a philosophical problem is threefold. It will focus on ‘the texture or structure of Freudian discourse’ (ibid.), approaching it first as posing an epistemological problem (the nature of interpretation in psychoanalysis), then as a problem for reflective philosophy (concerning the new self-understanding that follows 44

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from this interpretation), and finally as a dialectical problem (namely, does Freudian interpretation exclude all others?). In this way, this book picks up on the problem left unresolved at the end of The Symbolism of Evil: the relationship between a hermeneutics of symbols and a philosophy of concrete reflection. This new approach is said to be justified because Ricoeur now realizes that ‘there is an area today where all philosophical investigations cut across one another – the area of language’ (FP, 3). What Freud brings to this question is a ‘semantics of desire’ in that dreams and other symptoms for the analyst are held to aim at something meaningful, something that can only be reached through a kind of interpretation, psychoanalytic interpretation. This interpretive approach is necessary because desires tend to express themselves in distorted forms of language. Because of this, the language used to express desire means more than it first appears to say; hence it can be said to be marked by a double meaning similar to that of the symbols of evil. Can this hidden meaning in the case of psychoanalysis be uncovered or does it always conceal itself ? The first lesson Ricoeur draws here is that his idea of a symbol needs to be reconsidered. ‘Symbol’ can be conceived either too broadly, so that everything is a symbol, or too narrowly, so that the symbol only stands for itself as in formal combinatory systems like the most abstract forms of symbolic logic, or such that the relation between the two levels of meaning is held to be merely analogical. What Ricoeur now says is that analogy, in fact, is only one of the possible relations between the manifest and latent meaning in any symbol. Therefore what really needs to be explored is the fact that there is a signifying function to any symbol, whatever form it may take. The Symbolism of Evil had already recognized the existence of this signifying function and the fact that it functions in terms of language about the sacred, dreams, or the poetic imagination. This allows Ricoeur to see that what Freud does in regard to this question of a symbolic function is first to limit the symbolic field to just one of these options, the oneiric one. Ricoeur also sees that his own question is whether the symbolic function in general can ever express an ‘innocent’ relation or if it must always be a kind of cunning distortion. A further important development for Ricoeur’s philosophy is that he now sees that the kind of interpretation proposed in The Symbolism of Evil not only stood too uncritically in the tradition of biblical exegesis, it was too ad hoc in its method. What is required if 45

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we are to talk about interpretation critically is a theory of interpretation. But what Freud shows is that this theory is internally at variance with itself, depending on whether the interpreter approaches the object of interpretation from a perspective of trust that something meaningful is already expressed there or from one of suspicion that the meaning, if there is one, lies elsewhere and is only available through a kind of unmasking approach. ‘According to the one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation, or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion’ (FP, 27). What Ricoeur begins to do therefore is to formulate a theory of interpretation that will be able to incorporate both these approaches even while admitting the tension between them. This is why he proposes that his own theory will have to take up a double motivation, one that can be characterized as a willingness to suspect, but also as a willingness to listen. He says this because, as he had already indicated in The Symbolism of Evil, he is convinced that symbolic language is ultimately rooted in life and is not simply empty or meaningless language. Freud, Ricoeur sees, stands closer to the pole of suspicion. Indeed, Freud can be classed with the other two great ‘masters of suspicion’: Marx and Nietzsche. All three, Ricoeur suggests, can be read as saying things do not mean what they appear to mean and that this is a lesson we have to learn if we are to get beyond every form of false consciousness. What is more, their emphasis on recognizing necessity, once false consciousness is removed, assuming it can be removed, poses a crisis for reflective philosophy. They all challenge Descartes’ cogito argument in that they call into question the status of the subject pole within it, by finally reducing subjectivity itself to being nothing more than a myth or the product of some more basic reality. Ricoeur, on the contrary, thinks that Descartes was correct in positing the question of the self as the starting point of modern philosophy – but notice how his language has already begun to shift from ‘subject’ to ‘self’; we are on the way to Oneself as Another. Ricoeur adds, however, that this self is not the object of an intuition. It is reachable only through reflection, but reflection that is now itself a process of interpretation, a process of interpretation that begins from the object, not from the subject. This is why he says, ‘The first truth – I am, I think – remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible; it has 46

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to be “mediated” by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that objectify it’ (FP, 43). Because of this, reflection cannot be simply a question for an epistemological theory meant to justify science or even, with Kant, duty. It has to be understood as a reappropriation of our very effort to exist, hence as a way beyond ‘forgetfulness’ – and we are pointed toward Ricoeur’s late work, Memory, History, Forgetting. Such reflection does have an ethical aspect in that it leads from alienation to freedom, but the ethics here involves more than morality considered as a set of normative rules – as Ricoeur will argue in greater detail in Oneself as Another and in The Just and Reflections on the Just. One more problem has to be acknowledged in light of this commitment to reflection. It is the question whether such a philosophy, with its commitment to the goal of universality, like all philosophy, can proceed on the basis of contingent cultural productions and the kind of equivocal meanings found in symbols, especially when such an undertaking brings into play the conflict between the plurality of rival interpretations found in the modern world. The price to pay for such a hermeneutic philosophy, Ricoeur sees, will be that we have to give up any immediate claim to universality in favour of the fusion of contingency and universality to be found in the movement of interpretation. He also recognizes that the question whether the conflict of interpretations can finally be settled remains an open one. A critical question in evaluating his contributions to a hermeneutic philosophy, therefore, will be whether we must conclude that the conflict of intepretations must always remain unsettled. Or does he give us the tools to deal with this question? One suggestion is already present: reflection, Ricoeur holds, finally does not argue, particularly when it comes to choosing its starting point. Rather, like Kantian transcendental philosophy, it seeks to state the conditions of possibility whereby empirical consciousness can seek to approximate, if not be made equal to, univocal conceptual thought. But for Ricoeur this effort is always based on something closer to testimony and conviction than to some presupposed standard of logical validity. Testimony to one’s basic convictions bears witness to a source of meaning beyond oneself, where this self is not the immediate subject of reflection discovered in the cogito. This fundamental conviction is what holds together the hermeneutics of suspicion and that of a willingness to listen, to trust meaning as given. Both ask: ‘Can the dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of 47

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meaning be understood as an act of reflection, as the first gesture of reappropriation?’ (SE, 55). The possibility of such concrete reflection therefore is the question Ricoeur brings to his interpretation of Freud. A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF FREUD

Ricoeur begins with a series of readings of Freud’s works. Each new reading is meant to complete and correct the previous one by broadening the horizon that situates his interpretation, by including more of Freud’s work subsequent to what was considered in the previous interpretation. What justifies this expansion is that while the Freudian system applies to the individual subject, it does so in terms of situations and relations that are intersubjective. This can be seen in the development of Freud’s own thought from what Ricoeur calls an ‘energetics’ to a hermeneutics, from an explanation in terms of psychic forces to an interpretive understanding of an apparent meaning, where the proposed interpretation has to be able to integrate the economy of these psychic forces. The first energetic stage reveals the unsurpassable character of desire for Freud. But Freud, it turns out, did not stop with this discovery. He went on to apply it to culture and finally to a theory of instincts governed by death, something that Ricoeur sees as in its own way a return to myth and hence to hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s problem at this first level, therefore, is to consider how Freud deals with the question of knowledge at the intersection of his energetics and his hermeneutics. ‘As I see it’, he says, ‘the whole problem of Freudian epistemology may be centralized in a single question: how can the economic explanation be involved in an interpretation dealing with meaning; and conversely, how can interpretation be an aspect of the economic explanation?’ (FP, 66). To put it another way, is language capable of completely integrating force, the force of desire, within itself ? To deal with this question Ricoeur works his way through Freud’s writings, from the early ‘Project’ from 1895, through the Interpretation of Dreams, where the subordination of explanation to interpretation first becomes evident, to the ‘Papers on Metapsychology’, where the question of the representation of instincts comes to the fore, without ever really resolving the force–meaning relation. What these later works do instead is to shift the point of coincidence back into the 48

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unconscious itself without finally being able to set aside the affects or feelings that accompany the ideas or representations that seek to express these hidden forces. That ‘psychoanalysis never confronts one with bare forces, but always with forces in search of meaning’ (FP, 151), Ricoeur concludes, means that instinct turns out to be something like a limit concept meant to make possible the intelligibility of Freud’s theory of the intersection of the economic and the hermeneutic in the psyche, a conjunction that the Freudian metapsychology cannot give up without ceasing to be psychoanalysis. Ricoeur turns next to Freud’s discussions of culture, art, morality and religion, which he sees as being based on an analogical extension of the interpretation of dreams and neuroses. Hence the validity of these interpretations depends not so much on the cultural objects considered as on the point of view adopted and the operative concepts used. Yet the application of the metapsychological model to these new objects does transform Freud’s basic model in that it makes possible the transition to the topography of the ego, id and superego, which introduces a new economy. Rather than considering everything in relation to the libido alone, ‘here the libido is subject to something other than itself, to a demand for renunciation that creates a new economic situation’ (FP, 156), one that no longer is solipsistic but rather interpersonal. And this, in turn, calls for a radical recasting of the theory of instincts. One clear example of this is the fact that even Freud himself acknowledges that works of art do not simply look back to infancy. There is a prospective aspect to them, to the point that they can also be considered as the symbols of a personal synthesis by the artist rather than as a regressive symbol of unresolved conflicts. If such is the case, Ricoeur asks, ‘could it be the true meaning of sublimation is to promote new meanings by mobilizing old energies initially invested in archaic figures?’ (FP, 175). If so, the limits of psychoanalysis are not fixed. And if these limits can be transgressed indefinitely, then it will only be what Freud himself thinks justifies psychoanalysis that limits it, namely, his ‘decision to recognize in the phenomena of culture only what falls under an economics of desire and resistances’ (FP, 176). But, at the same time, the door is open to other readings of culture than this purely reductive one, readings whose task will be ‘not so much to unmask the repressed and the agency of repression to show what lies behind the masks, as to set free the interplay of references between signs’ (FP, 177). 49

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In fact, Ricoeur argues this possibility can already be seen in Freud’s own discussion of sublimation in relation to the id, ego, superego topography in that sublimation points to the way in which people relate their desires to an ideal, a form of the sublime. This in turn has a rebound effect on the earlier work in that it brings into play genetic explanations whose ‘purpose is to coordinate an ontogenesis and a phylogenesis within one fundamental history, which could be called the history of desire and authority’ (FP, 179). These new genetic explanations complicate the tension between the pleasure–unpleasure principle and the reality principle, with consequences that are not at first easy to specify. Certainly one consequence is that emphasis shifts from what is repressed to the agent of repression, which is more a role than a place in the id–ego–superego topography. What is new is that external dangers now play a role along with internal ones. Yet the genetic explanation is not exhaustive, so Freud must fall back on an economic one in terms of the superego, which again calls for further explanation of not only how it works, but why – and why as well its solutions should, as in the case of religion for Freud, turn out to be illusions. One answer Freud gives is that these illusions are meant to protect the individual against the superior power of nature. Another is that they are a way of dealing with not only the inevitability of death, but also with the death instinct that Freud now sees active in the psyche and which he presents as a struggle between eros and thanatos. Ricoeur interprets Freud’s discussion of this struggle ‘between giants’ as a shift from a more scientific to a more romantic viewpoint, one that affects in turn Freud’s understanding of the idea of reality to the point of itself becoming a possible cipher of wisdom (FP, 262) through a recognition of necessity that lies beyond illusion and consolation.3 Ricoeur’s own judgement is critical here. He says, ‘nothing indicates that Freud finally harmonized the theme of the reality principle with the theme of Eros – the first being an essentially critical theme directed against archaic objects and illusions, the second an essentially lyrical theme of the love of life and thus a theme directed against the death instinct’ (FP, 337). Therefore Ricoeur proposes his own answer, his philosophical interpretation of Freud. Two major goals are at stake in it: (1) to arbitrate the conflict between two opposed hermeneutics, that of distrust or suspicion and that of trust or confidence; and (2) to find a way to integrate ‘philosophical reflection’ into 50

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the process of interpretation. Ricoeur now realizes that it is not enough to say that symbols already carry these possibilities within themselves. It will be necessary to ‘attain the level of thought at which this synthesis can be understood’ (FP, 341). To get there, Ricoeur proposes three steps. The first one returns to the epistemological question of the place of explanation in psychoanalysis and its limits. This step will show the place of psychoanalysis between scientific psychology, on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the other. Next, Ricoeur will propose that Freudian theory can be understood as an ‘archeology of the subject’, one that concrete reflection will have to learn to incorporate into itself. Finally, thinking of Hegelian phenomenology, Ricoeur will ask whether this archeology does not remain abstract and not concrete so long as it is not completed by a ‘teleology, with a progressive synthesizing of figures and categories, where the meaning of each is clarified by the meaning of further figures or categories’ (FP, 342). If this is so, then regression and progression can be understood as two possible directions of interpretation, opposed to each other yet also complementary – answering the first question mentioned above. These two directions it will further turn out can be united, Ricoeur argues, through a dialectic that locates their unity in the very origin of our ability to speak, to use language in meaningful ways. It will only remain then to consider what consequences this might have for a general theory of interpretation. In seeking the place of psychoanalysis, Ricoeur holds that the answer to this question depends on the hybrid character of psychoanalysis owing to the fact that ‘it arrives at its energy concepts solely by the way of interpretation’ (FP, 347). This means that psychoanalysis is not an observational science dealing with facts of behaviour. It is ‘an exegetical science dealing with relationships of meaning between substitute objects and the primordial (and lost) instinctual objects’ (FP, 359). Yet what it says falls neither within the discourse of the natural sciences nor within that of phenomenology. Psychoanalysis speaks of motives rather than causes, but its explanations resemble those of causal explanations without being identical with them. This is why Ricoeur characterizes Freud’s work as a semantics of desire: ‘it is a mixed discourse that falls outside the motive-cause alternative’ (FP, 363). But because analysis takes place through language, the problem is how to get to a discourse that can speak the truth of what these desires demand. This will be a discourse that resembles something like a rational mythology since the 51

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symbols psychoanalysis deals with arise at the crossroads where these demands get articulated. In interpreting them, psychoanalysis tries to formulate something like the conditions of possibility for this semantics of desire. This new kind of discourse cannot simply be absorbed into phenomenology without loss, although there is an affinity between them in that both of them aim at a true discourse. But psychoanalysis is not reflective, whereas phenomenology is. In turn, there is no parallel to the technique of psychoanalytic archeology in phenomenology, which can only deal with the unconscious as what psychoanalysis calls the pre-conscious. Nor can phenomenology really incorporate Freud’s energy discourse, which as we have seen lies at the intersection of desire and language.4 This is why Freud’s notion of transference in the relation between the patient and the psychoanalyst poses so many problems for phenomenology, which knows no such relation in its own discussions of intersubjectivity. In the end, Ricoeur therefore concludes, psychoanalysis has to be understood as ‘unique and irreducible form of praxis’, one that puts its finger on something phenomenology never perfectly attains: our relation to our origins and to what psychoanalysis knows as the id and the superego (FP, 418). But as already indicated, Ricoeur does think that philosophical reflection can take up these conclusions by integrating them into a dialectic of an archeology and teleology of the subject. This leads to the question ‘what subject?’This question is not meant to carry us back to the Cartesian subject, for what Freud teaches us is that the subject is never the subject one first thinks it is. In this sense, we may even think of Freud as presenting something like an anti-phenomenology in that we have to displace or decentre this first subject through a process of interpretation. This means reversing the point of view of the cogito and overcoming what turns out to be its pseudo evidence and even its narcissism. ‘To raise this discovery to the reflective level is to make the dispossession of the subject of consciousness coequal with the dispossession already achieved, of the intended object’ (FP, 425). Furthermore, ‘everything we can say with – and eventually against – Freud must henceforth bear the mark of this “wounding” of our selflove’ (FP, 428). In other words, the question of consciousness turns out to be as obscure as that of the unconscious. But, Ricoeur is willing to wager, this relinquishing of the cogito can in fact turn out to be the beginning of a reappropriation of meaning if we can accept that what Freud calls the psychical representations of instincts aim in fact at a 52

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meaning beyond themselves, one constituted through a work of interpretation. Consciousness, it turns out, must become hermeneutic consciousness. It does so when the archeological moment of reflection turns into a teleological one. At the same time, the opposition between these two kinds of hermeneutics can be resolved if we can show that this archeology and teleology stand in a necessary dialectical relationship. Ricoeur seeks to show that this is the case by invoking Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. It is not a question of simply juxtaposing Freud and Hegel or of some easy eclecticism, but of an ‘exegesis of consciousness’ that ‘would consist in a progression through all the spheres of meaning that a given consciousness must encounter and appropriate in order to reflect itself as a self, a human, adult, conscious self’ (FP, 463). This is a self that does not figure in the Freudian or any other topography of the psyche, nor does it appear among the vicissitudes of instincts that constitute the theme of Freud’s economics. It is the outcome of a genesis from lower to higher that goes beyond this economic level. Still, to link Freud to Hegel Ricoeur must also argue that there is an element of Freud in Hegel and vice versa. He does so by arguing that they share a common problematic. ‘The teleology of self-consciousness does not reveal simply that life is surpassed by self-consciousness; it also reveals that life and desire, as initial positing, primal affirmation, immediate expansion, are forever unsurpassable. At the very heart of self-consciousness, life is that obscure density that selfconsciousness, in its advance, reveals behind itself as the source of the very first differentiation of the self’ (FP, 469). This genesis reveals itself in the dialectic of recognition, first of oneself, then of other selves. In this dialectic, desire is mediated, but not eradicated. Next, Ricoeur argues that such a teleology is already present in Freud, that his psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from this corresponding synthesis. This can be seen in the operative concepts Freud makes use of (such as identification) as well as in those he thematizes (such as object loss), as well as in certain unresolved problems such as the idea of sublimation. In a word, Freud’s own theory is already dialectical in that analysis does not always lead to a regression to a more primitive stage but is ultimately meant to lead to something like an education of desire, as when Freud famously says, ‘Where id was, there shall ego be.’ Ricoeur locates this intersection between Freud’s archeology and teleology in the mixed texture of 53

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the discourse used by psychoanalysis. This gets expressed concretely through a use of symbols characterized by an over-determination of meaning, what Ricoeur will subsequently call a surplus of meaning. What is at issue therefore once more is how to think in terms of these symbols. A first step toward doing so is to recognize that the ambiguity of these symbols is not necessarily something to be judged negatively: ‘the ambiguity of symbolism is not a lack of univocity but is rather the possibility of carrying and engendering opposed interpretations, each of which is self-consistent’ (FP, 496). Symbols therefore can meaningfully be said both to conceal and to reveal something. They represent in a concrete unity what reflection splits into opposed interpretations: the opposed hermeneutics disjoin and decompose what concrete reflection seeks to recompose and return to a speech that is simply heard and understood, in what Ricoeur had already called a kind of second naiveté. He does not go on here to develop the theory of interpretation that is obviously called for, choosing instead to use the model of interpretation he had laid out in The Symbolism of Evil to see whether we can discern a hierarchy in Freud’s symbols, one that points to something like a non-libidinal emancipation and realm of human meaning, particularly through works of art – for example, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in relation to Freud’s Oedipus complex. ‘Between dreams and artistic creativity there is a functional continuity, in the sense that disguise and disclosure are operative in both of them, but in an inverse proportion’ (FP, 520). The question is whether Freud’s economics can really account for this. More specifically, can it account for the qualitative difference that renders instincts dialectical and disclosive of something beyond themselves? Ricoeur thinks not, even while he acknowledges Freud’s accomplishments. He uses the question of the status of religion and religious faith to indicate where he differs. Rather than seeing faith and religion as merely an illusion, Ricoeur says that while reflection cannot give us the origin of religious symbols, it can consider them as something like a call addressed to us. The question then is what the existence of such a call might mean for a theory of interpretation. His answer requires introducing the idea of a hermeneutic circle: ‘to believe is to listen to the call, but to hear the call we must interpret the message. Thus we must believe in order to understand and understand in order to believe’ (FP, 525). But the existence of 54

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evil prevents the reflection that works within this circle from ever turning into absolute knowledge. Recalling what he had said about the relationship between symbols and thought in The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur now says, ‘All symbols give rise to thought, but the symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more in myths and symbols than in all of our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute knowledge’ (FP, 527). This is why the Hegelian framework he is drawing on must be tempered by a return to Kant, ‘that is to say, from a dissolution of the problem of evil in dialectic to the recognition of the emergence of evil as something inscrutable’ (ibid.). But the symbolism of evil overcome is also one of reconciliation in a sense that transcends the consolation offered by psychoanalysis. It speaks of an ‘in spite of’ that makes room for hope for something more than just consolation, ‘thanks to’ the transcendent other grasped in faith. It is important to see that Ricoeur offers something more than a mere apology for religious faith here. If faith is thinkable, it must be a faith that can undergo the process of demystification of false consciousness called for by Freud’s reductive hermeneutics.5 Idols must die so that symbols can live. THROUGH STRUCTURALISM TO HERMENEUTICS

Freud was not the only challenge confronting Ricoeur’s effort to develop a philosophy that could learn to think starting from the symbolic language people use to talk about evil. Another new challenger had come on the scene: structuralism. Structuralism was a dominant voice in French intellectual circles throughout the 1960s well into the 70s, before giving way to what was at first called post-structuralism, then deconstruction or post-modernism. It also caught the attention of many literary critics in North America for a time. Structuralism in its heyday meant different things to different people, but our emphasis will be on what Ricoeur made of it.6 Its origins lay in the work of a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who in the early years of the twentieth century had lectured on what he presented as an introduction to general linguistics, that is, to linguistics as a science. He never published these lectures as a book, but his students put together a volume based on his and a few of his students’ lecture notes that was to have a major impact in later years.7 55

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Saussure’s work was important in that it was taken as demonstrating how linguistics as a discipline, which to that point had largely been a historical study of different languages and their development over time, could become ‘scientific’. It could do so by focusing on an atemporal ‘object’ of inquiry that not only would account for the existence of language but would also permit objective investigation of its constitutive structures. This is why the label structuralism came to be applied by those who sought to build on Saussure’s work. What they did was to try to extend Saussure’s structuralism to other disciplines, especially in the social sciences. In a word, they thought that if Saussure had shown that linguistics could become a genuine science by adopting a structural approach, this could also be a way for the other social sciences to attain such status. Basically, what Saussure argued was that language should be considered in terms of its basic structure, which he called langue, ignoring its use in speech, which he labelled parole. Langue was to be considered synchronically, that is, by bracketing any reference to time in order to isolate the structure making up langue as a ‘sign system’. What was particularly innovative about what Saussure had to say about such a system was that it is the differences between the signs within the system that are fundamental, not the signs themselves. In other words, the signs have no meaning except in relation to all the other signs through their differences from them. These signs themselves are then further analysable into an internal structure combining a signifier and a signified, a distinction that would have important consequences for the post-structuralist movements in that it did not require the idea of an external reference beyond the sign system. Saussure’s ideas seemed to be confirmed by subsequent work in linguistics applied to the distinctive sounds that make up any language. For any given language, these phonemes were shown to be limited in number and they could be arranged in terms of oppositions (such as voiced vs. unvoiced), strengthening the idea of a structure that could be defined in terms of its relations, not its elements. This work came to the attention of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had been trained in philosophy but turned to anthropology when he moved to Brazil to teach. He spent the period of the Second World War in New York where he encountered the Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson who introduced him to these new developments. Lévi-Strauss was subsequently to apply 56

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this new notion of structure to the study of kinship networks in tribal societies like those he had studied in Brazil, demonstrating in this way the possibility of applying structural methods within the broader social sciences.8 Ricoeur comes into the discussion because Lévi-Strauss went on to argue that such methods can also be applied to the study of myths, a project he developed at great length.9 Early on, therefore, it was Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, along with his claims for structuralism as a scientific method, that Ricoeur had to confront. Later on, it was attempts by others to extend structuralism to narratives in general (recall that Ricoeur had already identified myths as types of narrative in The Symbolism of Evil) that would draw his attention. What Ricoeur first criticizes about such an approach is its setting aside any consideration of time, thereby ignoring the question of understanding traditions that may change yet continue to exist over time as well as the social forms based upon such traditions, ones that recognize themselves as living in history. Linked to this concern was his question of how to deal with changes in meaning, and beyond this, the possibility of new meaning. Yet, at the same time, Ricoeur does seek to find a way to acknowledge the value of a structural approach insofar as it does discover something that can help us to recognize the forms it considers. What he rejects, however, is the subordination of diachrony, development over time, to synchrony, an atemporal slice of the system considered. This he thinks eliminates any possibility of changes in meaning since the structures discovered are held to be not only atemporal but also universal. Ricoeur’s own emphasis is rather on what he was coming to call hermeneutic understanding, which he believed had to put the emphasis in just the opposite way; that is, for a hermeneutic philosophy diachrony is more important than synchrony. Without this presupposition there is no way to acknowledge the historicity of symbols – and of their meanings. Next, Ricoeur questions whether structuralism’s emphasis on the alleged objective status of the structures it discovers does not leave out their relation to subjectivity, at the same time that it claims to know something. Ricoeur even suggests that structuralism, because it looks for basic conditions of possibility in constitutive structures, might be thought of as a ‘Kantianism without a transcendental subject’ (CI, 52), when it does not end up becoming simply a purely abstract formalism. Anticipating his own later work on selfhood, 57

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Ricoeur asks: ‘who says this is the structure of language (or of any semiotic system)?’ In a way that anticipates his own subsequent work on the philosophy of language, what Ricoeur reiterates here is his basic presupposition that philosophy must always begin from something beyond itself that precedes it. What he now can add is that this non-philosophical starting point is in some way something that we already understand, albeit not through an understanding that necessarily has been criticized or even reflected upon, in our use of language, a use that is itself already meaningful, otherwise no questions can be asked.10 He therefore also sees that it is necessary to question Saussure’s original distinction between langue and parole, where only the former can be dealt with scientifically, implying that parole is ultimately beyond rational consideration. He finds a way to do this through the work of another linguist, the Sanskrit scholar Emile Benveniste, who had argued that it is also possible to have a linguistics not only of parole but also of what Benveniste called ‘discourse’, where discourse is the use of langue to say something. Hence discourse is not just speech, but already meaningful speech. We can summarize the way Ricoeur spells out this possibility as follows. At one extreme, semiotic structures are purely formal closed systems. They are not even yet anything we can call a language. To become a language, first at the level of langue, the elements of such a system, even when defined differentially, have to be considered as a lexicon, as meaningful words. Construing signs as words, however, means bringing an already existing interpretation to the structure considered. It already presupposes the fullness of language as spoken and understood. Later Ricoeur will see that this point leads to a general critical point that can be directed against later forms of structuralism when they came to hold that the structures they discovered were ‘deep’ or underlying structures that generated the ‘surface’ phenomena we ordinarily take for granted. This, for Ricoeur, is another version of the hermeneutics of suspicion in that it claims that nothing really is what it first appears to be. It is only the surface manifestation of an underlying prior reality. But Ricoeur argues that all these appeals to deep structures always presuppose what they are supposed to generate, something that can be demonstrated by showing that there is something on the surface they really can not account for but presuppose, namely, change. Deep structures cannot account for this because static structures only can be transformed into more static structures, and then only if the function that brings 58

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about the transformation is imported from elsewhere. In fact, Ricoeur argues, we recognize the need for such a transformation because we already understand the end result. This critical point will play a large role in Ricoeur’s later analysis of structuralism as applied not just to myths but to all forms of narrative discourse. But to return to his early discussion of structuralism, and the introduction of the idea of discourse, we can say that what Ricoeur sees is that like the words in a dictionary, words at the level of langue are polysemous. They have more than one meaning, depending on the relations between them within the structure considered. Because of this polysemy at the level of langue the words do not yet ‘say’ anything nor do they refer to anything beyond themselves, given the closed nature of their constitutive structure. They are simply signs, and as such, they are necessary but not yet sufficient conditions for discourse, which is the level where something actually is said. For something meaningful to be said a syntax or grammar that can yield a sentence is also required. With this comes the problem of predication, a point that will have important consequences when Ricoeur turns his attention to the question of metaphorical discourse. The minimal unit of discourse, therefore, is the sentence, which serves to limit the polysemy of its words through its syntax, without necessarily eliminating it completely. Sentences are not usually univocal in their meanings but rather plurivocal. They can mean more than one thing. Consider, for example, the command to ‘go jump in the lake!’ Does it mean to jump into the lake from the shore or to enter the water and jump up and down? Most times therefore individual sentences also require some reference to their context in order to be understood. As he develops his hermeneutic theory, Ricoeur will continue to elaborate the question of what counts as context and how it affects the meaning of discourse. Already here, though, Ricoeur can draw on Benveniste in order more precisely to define discourse as instances in which somebody says something to somebody about something. What we can see from this is that it is at the level of discourse that subjectivity comes into play, and that it does so potentially in terms of more than one subject, a speaker and his or her audience (one can also talk to oneself, of course, which is exactly what Plato called thinking). In conveying a message, discourse also raises the question of what this message says and what it is about. This introduces the questions of sense and reference in a way not applicable at the level of langue, 59

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where polysemy reigns and there is nothing beyond the internal relations of the sign system to consider. Discourse, moreover, can be reflective because it can be used to talk about the language used to talk about anything whatsoever, just as it can also be used to talk about things other than itself. Hence new ways of considering meaning are required at this level, ones not found in structuralism when it limits itself to semiotic systems. Discourse, finally, always occurs as a real event in time, unlike the atemporal abstract structures discovered by structuralism. These structures do somehow endure at least in the sense that they can be identified at any time (and if they do change, they do so only slowly over time) but events of discourse pass away. They can even be said to vanish. Ricoeur’s key claim here is that although an event of discourse disappears, if only by becoming past, its meaning may endure. This is what hermeneutic theory has to make sense of, for if meanings do endure when the event has passed away, these meanings can be ‘taken up’ – appropriated will become the applicable technical term – by new subjects in new times and new contexts. This possibility of meaning so enduring, Ricoeur proposes, can be confirmed if we shift our attention from spoken to written (or what Ricoeur calls inscribed) discourse. For while the event of speaking vanishes, texts remain and can be read by anyone who knows how to read. Reading, to be sure, is not always easy, as can be seen in the case of texts from antiquity, whether from the Bible or from Greece and Rome, where not only is the language one that is no longer spoken, but the cultural context that produced the text in question no longer exists in its original form. In fact, the need to overcome such historical distance was one of the motivating factors that led to the development of modern hermeneutic theory that Ricoeur is drawing on as a resource here. He already sees, for example, that the need to learn a second language and sometimes as well the need to produce translations as requirements for overcoming such historical distance is something that suggests that today this hermeneutic theory can be extended to respond to cultural as well as temporal distance. This is a point his developing hermeneutical theory will come more and more to acknowledge. At the end of his life, he saw that it also required thinking more about the role translation plays in achieving such understanding of what is foreign to us.11 But to stay here with the idea of a text as an instance of inscribed discourse, we can say that Ricoeur was able to make a number of 60

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important discoveries. As already stated, the original event of discourse that produces a text disappears, as eventually does its author and the original audience, and its cultural setting. Yet Ricoeur’s argument is that the discourse a text transmits remains potentially meaningful if it can still be read. His claim is first of all that such reading is possible because what the text says has both sense and reference. It both says something meaningful and is about something beyond itself. Furthermore, we discover this sense and reference, on the one hand, by recognizing the text’s genre, something that we begin by assuming, then confirm, modify or disconfirm through the process of reading. On the other hand, since any text as an instance of some genre is also unique as being just this text, we gain further insight into the text’s sense and reference in relation to this uniqueness, something Ricoeur places under the question of grasping its style. This is another factor that a theory of reading must also be able to recognize and incorporate. But, most importantly, as intelligible, a text (and by analogy any instance of discourse) is meaningful in that it combines this sense and reference. This broader meaning is not to be identified with something allegedly in the author’s mind or even with the author’s intention in producing the text. Nor is it what the original audience took the text to mean, although it is possible to try to rediscover what a text might have meant to its first audience or to attempt to write a history of reception of the text’s meaning as a second-order undertaking. No, what makes the text meaningful in the first place, giving it both sense and reference, is what Ricoeur calls the world of the text. This is something the text, so to speak, projects not behind but in front of itself. Discourse we have said is always about something. What texts are ultimately about is this ‘world’ where it is a world that readers can imagine themselves inhabiting. Hence to understand a text (or any instance of discourse), for Ricoeur, depends on grasping the world of a text (or of what is said) as one that I or we can imagine myself or ourselves inhabiting. But since the ‘I’ (or we) in question differ over time, so too the meaning of the text as appropriated will differ in some way from time to time and place to place, without for all that becoming meaningless. Using an image that Ricoeur takes from Hans-Georg Gadamer, we can say that these horizons of meaning overlap or even ‘fuse’ in the act of understanding what is said, hence they are not beyond comparison with one another. A text becomes meaningless only when it can no longer be understood. Note this 61

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does not mean that one has to accept this meaning or that it is not open to critique. The only thing claimed is that criticism always begins from such a first-order hermeneutical understanding, which itself requires a capacity to understand and to use language. This is why we can speak of Ricoeur as taking a deliberate linguistic turn on the basis of his hermeneutical theory, one that brings questions about language to the fore. There is one other important point to note about Ricoeur’s move to consideration of language as discourse. Discourse we have said first occurs at the level of the sentence. It is not, however, confined to this level. Instances of discourse can be longer than a single sentence. In such cases they are what Ricoeur calls instances of extended discourse. The questions of meaning and truth take on new dimensions at this level if we take seriously the fullness of language. That is, we cannot simply say or assume that the meaning and truth of extended discourse is simply a conjunction of the meaning and truth of its individual sentences. This is a basic assumption of analytic philosophy when it seeks to apply models taken from formal logic to ordinary language. But because such a method does not acknowledge extended discourse as posing a new problem, like structuralism it is forced to attempt to generate such discourse from its constitutive elements, its sentences. Ricoeur wants instead to consider the possibility that the meaning and truth of extended discourse is not reducible to that of its individual sentences. Rather these take on new values at the level of extended discourse, if only because they are parts of a larger, structured whole, which is not simply the sum of its individual parts. Therefore extended discourse calls for new methods of interpretation in order to be understood. It is insight into these new methods of interpretation and the understanding that they provide that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the fullness of language will seek to provide. Another important consequence of Ricoeur’s linguistic turn worth noting is that the notion of symbol will play a lesser role in his subsequent work, without ever disappearing completely. What will take its place as central to his reflections will be figurative discourse – uses of language that cannot be captured by the model of the logical proposition. One can see this shift occurring in the essays ‘The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection’ and ‘The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem’ in The Conflict of Interpretations. Ricoeur’s point 62

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is that something of the double meaning effect found in symbols also can be found in language, especially if we attend to the fullness of language and not limit our attention to apparently univocal sentences on the basis of a comparison to logical propositions, ones that are always either true or false and whose meaning does not change as they recur within an argument. Natural languages contain many meaningful sentences that do not fall under this heading. The example of a command to jump in the lake given above is a good example. Similarly, the order to ‘close the door’ is not true or false; nor is the request: ‘close the door, please’. What Ricoeur will be most interested in therefore are those instances of discourse and extended discourse that, like symbols, mean more than one thing at a time – poetic images, example. This will lead him to look closely at the case of metaphor, as we shall see in the next chapter. Metaphors are like symbols in that they contain a surplus of meaning, one that makes use of ambiguity in a productive manner.12 Hence, if we can better understand metaphors, we may in return be able better to understand symbols, the problem Ricoeur had posed at the end of The Symbolism of Evil.

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CHAPTER 4

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During the same period that Ricoeur was coming to terms with structuralism and beginning to work out the contours of a workable hermeneutic theory, he was also looking again at phenomenology, which had provided the framework for his earlier work. What he now saw was that phenomenology, too, had to be understood in terms of hermeneutics and, somewhat more surprisingly, hermeneutics could be shown to have a phenomenological dimension. This insight led him to what he would now call a hermeneutic phenomenology. His argument for this shift in his thinking is found in the essay titled ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ (FTA, 25–52). His strategy there is worth noting. For the sake of clarity, he sets out the contrast between Husserl’s project of a transcendental phenomenology and his own program of a hermeneutic phenomenology in terms of an antithetical comparison and contrast. That is, he sums up both versions of phenomenology in terms of a set of mutually opposing theses where one side ultimately carries the day. Then, having laid out the basic parameters that characterize a hermeneutic phenomenology, he turns to Husserl’s own texts to show that such a modification of Husserl’s phenomenology is justified because it is already implicit in them. Early on, in his notes to his translation of Husserl’s Ideas, Ricoeur had already been critical of Husserl’s proposal for an idealistic version of transcendental phenomenology as a way to refute the possibility of radical scepticism. For Ricoeur, this solution turned out to be still enmeshed in the subject–object model in that it made everything depend on the subject pole. What Husserl claimed to discover was a method that was able to take philosophy to a transcendental field where things appeared to a transcendental subject and 64

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where they could be known as what they really are. But Ricoeur saw that this transcendental subject again was no one because it was any one as a pure knower. Worse, Husserl’s method provided no way to get back to the world of ordinary lived experience and lived subjectivity. This was because his radical method was said to work so by setting aside every appeal to our everyday natural attitude through a reduction that would bracket it and its assumptions about the way the world really is, opening the way to eventual insight into the true essence of any phenomena. But following Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur rejected this claim in that he denied the possibility of a complete reduction, what today we would call a leap to a ‘view from nowhere’. In effect, Ricoeur held that while we can question our experience we never completely escape the everyday lifeworld from which we always begin. However, this does not mean completely rejecting phenomenology as a useful descriptive approach that seeks to describe things as they appear to consciousness or the ways in which we might be conscious of them. It does mean rejecting any claim that we can prove conclusively that such an approach provides an exhaustive account of lived experience, since as we have already seen from his critique of structuralism and his longstanding claim about the nonindependence of philosophy, Ricoeur believes that there is always more to lived experience as temporal than any theory can capture, even while any such theory always presupposes the surplus of available meaning and the encompassing reality it refers to in attempting to make sense of our lived experience. Phenomenological descriptions for Ricoeur therefore now turn out themselves to be instances of interpretation that presuppose the fullness of language and the finitude of understanding. As such, they also presuppose a dialogical rather than monological understanding of language because our language is something we first learn from others, however reflective or critical we may become of it later on. A workable theory of knowledge or of reality therefore will not be one that begins from the idea of an isolated ego or subject. This means that selfconsciousness must turn out to be a result rather than the starting point of philosophy. Ricoeur further develops this move to a hermeneutical model of understanding through a consideration of the history of hermeneutics in light of his analysis of the model of the text considered in the previous chapter. He does so without ever developing what could be called a complete hermeneutic theory, at least not in the sense of a 65

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manual for interpretation. This is not to say that he is unable to make significant contributions to such a theory. His own examination of the history of hermeneutics convinces him, for example, that the dichotomy between explanation and understanding, inherited from Wilhelm Dilthey in the nineteenth century, was a false dichotomy. For hermeneutics, understanding is a presupposition of any explanatory scheme, as well as its goal. That is, interpretation always moves from some pre-comprehension or understanding toward the idea of increased understanding. Explanation is a means to enhance such understanding in that it introduces a critical objective moment. The relation between understanding and explanation, in other words, has to be conceived of as dialectical with explanation as the mediating term between two poles of understanding. This is an insight that was to have large consequences for not only Ricoeur’s critique of structuralism and all other disciplines claiming to yield objective knowledge, but also for his own reflections on language and those disciplines such as history where the question of the objective status of the knowledge they produced was taken to be an open question, especially when compared to the alleged objective status of the knowledge produced by the natural sciences. For our purposes, it is important to see how Ricoeur uses this developing hermeneutic theory in pursuing his own basic question of how to do philosophy starting from the fullness of language. What is unique about his approach to language following his own hermeneutic and linguistic turn is that he proceeds not by concentrating on language that can be translated into forms amenable to analysis using the model of symbolic logic, but by concentrating instead on those uses of language, like symbolic discourse, which are resistant to such analysis. The main focus of his investigations, in other words, is now on what he now recognized as modes of figurative discourse. Such uses of language carry with them something like the double-meaning structure of symbols, but they are not bound to life as strictly as symbols are. In both cases, though, we ultimately run into a limit to philosophical reflection with the question whether the meaning found should be said to be something we invent or something we discover. In fact, what is clear in the case of figurative discourse – and what makes it worth considering – is that it can be considered as language that says something for the first time. Figurative discourse, therefore, can be a source of new meaning or of what Ricoeur will call semantic innovation. This is something he 66

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did not find taken up either by structuralism or by the analytic philosophy of language that focused on those uses of language translatable into logical propositions or assertions, where the meaning is taken to be not only fixed over time but also already known – or at least already there ready to be discovered. Ricoeur instead focuses his attention on those cases of discourse where this assumption can be said not to apply, to instances of live metaphor, for example, but also beyond such live metaphors, to those forms of extended discourse like history, literature and the Bible that not only can be interpreted as saying something novel but also as making a meaningful claim to truth. METAPHOR AS A PRIME CASE OF FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE

Ricoeur begins his discussion of metaphor by returning to Aristotle, who had already discussed metaphor in his Poetics and his book on rhetoric. Aristotle considered rhetoric and poetic discourse – even given their use of metaphor and other figurative forms – to overlap logic because of the appeal to some form of argumentation they both include. This emphasis on argument is important because rhetorical argument introduces the idea of creativity (in the sense of finding a persuasive argument) as well as drawing on an idea of proof. Poetry, too, is creative, but unlike logic ‘does not seek to prove anything at all: its project is mimetic; its aim . . . is to compose an essential representation of human actions’ (RM, 13).1 Metaphor, as a form of semantic innovation, plays a role both in rhetoric, considered as a theory of argumentation, and in poetry and drama like the Greek tragedies, which Aristotle held are actually truer than history because they show us not so much how things are but how they must be. In both uses of language, metaphor works with already existing language into which it introduces a ‘twist’ or deviation that makes it say something new; hence the semantic innovation in metaphor itself depends on the use of language, on discourse as Ricoeur defines it. This transgressive or transformative aspect of metaphor is what makes it capable of creating new meaning by disturbing the existing logical order at the same time that it begets it in a new form. It does so, as Aristotle had already recognized, because it makes us ‘see’ things differently, not by imitating them in the sense of producing a copy but by redescribing them. This is why metaphor has a referential and ultimately an ontological as well as a creative function. 67

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The later rhetorical tradition reduced Aristotle’s theory to a theory of tropes (or figures of speech) understood as the deviant use of a word. Metaphors here were considered to be either a decorative substitution for what could be said straightforwardly or as a more or less concealed form of comparison: my love is like a rose. But if this is the case, then all metaphors can be translated into already existing literal assertions. They really do not say anything new; they only say something already known in a different way. Ricoeur holds this is why rhetoric finally lost its position among the core disciplines. It turned into a system of nomenclature for all the different tropes it identified, but then it could do nothing more than list them when they occurred. Ricoeur’s own account of metaphor argues that it is a mistake to conceive of metaphor as merely a deviant use of words. Metaphor belongs to the level of discourse, hence minimally to the level of the sentence. This means that it has to be understood in terms of predication, not simply in terms of one term being substituted for another. Moreover, live metaphors involve an odd kind of predication. They say both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ at the same time! This is why they cannot be translated into logical propositions or directly understood using techniques applicable to such assertions which assume that a statement says either something is or is not the case. In a live metaphor it is as if there is a tension between the subject and predicate of the metaphor. This insight leads to an interaction theory for which neither an appeal to substitution nor an explanation in terms of some form of comparison is adequate to explain fully this tension. When a metaphor is a live metaphor, not a dead one (for example, the ‘leg of a chair’), what the metaphor says cannot be immediately translated into already existing concepts. It requires an adjustment in our understanding and our already existing language that makes us, as Aristotle had already said, ‘see’ things differently. Here is an example of such a still live metaphorical discourse from Shakespeare cited by Ricoeur that nicely illustrates this point: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitude. Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured As fast as they are made, forgot as soon as done. Troilus and Cressida, II, 3, 11.145–50 (cited in IT, 98 n.6) 68

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We can say that this passage is about ‘time as a beggar’ or as an alldevouring monster, but obviously that only begins to capture what is said here – and time in the end is not simply a beggar or a monster. Later the semantic innovation of some live metaphors will be absorbed into the dictionary (as with the example of the chair’s leg), but at first while we can paraphrase the metaphor, we cannot simply translate it without remainder into already existing words. This is why live metaphors are a source of semantic innovations, ones that can be identified and reidentified as meaningful. Such metaphors also have a referential dimension. They say something new about reality. The kind of resemblance they bear to reality is not simply comparative, however. Using another metaphor – all theories of metaphor, Ricoeur sees, eventually make use of metaphor – Ricoeur says that what is at issue here is a kind of ‘iconic augmentation’ that is not reducible simply to being an image. The augmentation that occurs is more like what happened with the invention of oil paints and the effect they had on the history of art or with the phonetic alphabet and its consequences for writing. Oil paintings were still pictures, but in a fundamentally different manner than what had preceded them. As Ricoeur says, using still another metaphor, ‘the metaphorical meaning is not the semantic clash’ within the metaphorical predication ‘but the new pertinence that answers its challenge. . . . The metaphor is what forms a meaningful self-contradictory statement from a self-destructive selfcontradictory statement’ (RM, 194). The ontological resemblance, therefore, occurs on the semantic plane in such a way that sameness and difference are operative there at the same time. This resemblance involves a verbal aspect but also goes beyond it by fusing sound, sense, the sensible, and even feeling.2 An image, it turns out, is the end of the metaphorical process, not its beginning. In this way, live metaphor suspends our ordinary way of referring to reality in favour of a second-order reference that redescribes reality. But this redescription is itself always another interpretation of the way things really are. There is a sense of truth at work here that is itself metaphorical. It operates as a kind of manifestation rather than as a simple relation of correspondence or coherence. As a heuristic fiction that can lead to new understanding, such metaphorical truth may even be said to be the ground for truth as correspondence or coherence. Ricoeur’s philosophy of metaphor skirts paradox when it concludes that ‘there is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal) 69

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“is not” within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) “is” ’ (RM, 255). It will be up to speculative discourse, that is, to philosophy as conceptual discourse, to try to make sense of this by moving beyond figurative discourse to a new level of language. Such philosophical discourse will draw on hermeneutic phenomenology in its work. When it comes to ontology, though, it will always run up against the fact that there is more than one way to talk of being. We can put this more clearly by saying that while philosophy cannot avoid ontology, any ontology it proposes will itself always be an interpretation of being that maps onto a grid defined by two orthogonal axes: the one running between the particular and the general, the other between the abstract and concrete. Ricoeur does not develop this claim about a possible hermeneutic ontology at length. What he does say is that something like Aristotle’s theory of the analogy of being can be helpful in making sense of this idea of a hermeneutic ontology because of the way such an analogy mediates between, on one side, sheer equivocity and what, at the other extreme, aims to be purely univocal, essential predication. He concludes, however, that ‘the conceptual unity capable of encompassing the ordered diversity of the meanings of being remains to be thought’ (RM, 277). Getting to such conceptual thought clearly requires going beyond the theory of metaphor. In saying this, Ricoeur holds against Nietzsche and deconstructive theories of metaphor like that of Jacques Derrida that concepts are not just dead metaphors. This is why his next step will be to say that philosophy that tries to think starting from myth and figurative or poetic discourse must also recognize and incorporate the fact that there are other kinds of discourse with their own semantic aims. If it does this, it can then begin to consider not only these different forms of discourse but also the ways in which they intersect and interact with one another. It will do so by drawing on our ability to use language to reflect on itself as well as on what we seek to bring to language, human action and the world in which it occurs. This brings us to Ricoeur’s next contribution toward a philosophy that takes seriously the fullness of language, his theory of narrative discourse. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE

Ricoeur’s theory of narrative is one of his more developed and influential contributions to knowledge. It extends over the three volumes 70

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of Time and Narrative along with a number of essays that address portions of this topic or serve to work out the groundwork for these volumes. Narrative is initially of interest to Ricoeur not only as a form of extended discourse but also because, as we have already seen, myth is a form of narrative, so the passage through narrative is one way that may be able to help us learn to think starting from the symbols of the Fault and of Transcendence that get expressed in myths about them. Beyond this, however, Ricoeur now further argues that it is necessary for a philosophy based on the fullness of language to consider narrative discourse for itself because this use of language is closely related to questions about time and history, questions that he had argued structuralism could not really deal with. His own thesis he tells us will be that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience’ (T&N 1:3). He states this thesis on the first page of Time and Narrative indicating that he does not mean this work to be read as a long argument leading up to the discovery of a conclusion. Because they state their basic thesis on the first page, these volumes are to be read instead as a plea for this thesis, a plea that like pleadings in a law court calls for a judgement for or against it on the reader’s part. This form of argumentation is necessary because, as Ricoeur will argue in volume three of this work, all philosophical attempts to make sense of time finally pay the price of new aporias, new questions, for any gains they make. Hence there can be no final theoretical answer to the meaning of time, only practical ones like those that make use of narrative to tell the story of human action, and of the world in which it occurs. Ricoeur begins his plea for narrative by setting the problem through readings drawn from Augustine and Aristotle. These show that historically there have been two fundamental ways of conceiving of time, one subjective (Augustine) and one objective (Aristotle). Yet neither thinker is really able to connect these two ideas of time, although there are hints of the other’s theory to be found in each of them. It will turn out to be the job of historical time to connect these two ideas of time through that of a human time, a historical time that is the time of our existence and our experience, but also a time that encompasses and overflows them. To make this claim convincing, though, Ricoeur needs first to consider the nature of narrative in the most abstract sense more closely because his case will be that the way 71

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we express such historical time is fundamentally through narrative considered in terms of both its primary forms: history and fiction. What distinguishes narrative as a form of discourse is that it always has a plot. This plot does something; it combines the episodes and the overall story told into a meaningful whole. It does so through the plot’s capacity to reconfigure into narrative what was already configured in language prior to narrative through the conceptual network that allows us already to speak meaningfully about human action. This conceptual network is a very heterogeneous one. It includes concepts such as reason for, cause, motive, action and passion, work, agent, patient, goal, and so on. These concepts can already be combined into action sentences that are open-ended. We can say, for example, that ‘Brutus stabbed Caesar in the forum on the Ides of March with a knife in order to . . .’. In this way, these concepts give us a nomenclature (murder, assassination) that already names different actions or their possible components, where such names are always tied to specific languages and cultures. This is why ordinary language can already refer to and talk of action at this level. What narrative does is that it takes such discourse, which is already mimetic in that it signifies or ‘figures’ action in language, and adds new discursive features to it that give it a new meaning by turning it into the story of ‘doing something’. At the same time, narrative provides the possibility of extended discourse about action, discourse that goes beyond the level of individual action sentences to talk about things happening not only in time but also over time, including their possible long-term and even previously unseen consequences. Narrative does this by telling a story about human action and its meaning. This story, in turn, can be heard or read, and when understood contributes to refiguring our understanding of human action and its possibilities. This new form of semantic innovation occurs because narrative grafts new temporal elements to the prenarrative figurations of action and through them to our understanding of both human action and time itself. It will be the task of a hermeneutics of narrative discourse to reconstruct and thereby make intelligible this whole sequence from lived experience to narrative back to lived experience again. One way in which narrative contributes to a new understanding of time is that it brings together the ‘dialectic of coming to be, having been, and making present’ (T&N, 1:61). In this way, time is entirely desubstantialized in favour of an understanding of time, not as one 72

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thing among others, but as that within which we exist. This time can be partially understood because it is both a datable and a public time. As Heidegger had already said in Being and Time, it is on this basis that we learn to reckon with time. Narrative works here by introducing mediations between the individual events, incidents or episodes in the plot and the story taken as a whole. In so doing, it makes use of a wide range of heterogeneous elements including agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, reversals, and even unexpected results. In other words, the plot constitutive of narrative combines a chronological and a non-chronological dimension into one meaningful whole by extracting a configuration from a followable succession of events. This configured succession leads finally to what Frank Kermode has called the sense of an ending where a new quality of time emerges, a meaningful time that encompasses both cosmic and lived time in a human time marked by something like a discordant concordance. There is discordance because what narrative says as such never reduces to simply an atemporal idea, but there is concordance because this temporal discord is not ultimately chaotic. In narrative discourse, therefore, we may find a refigured time that in the best of cases helps us make better sense of the ordinary everyday time of our lives as well as of its limit situations. These enhanced understandings of time and human action may themselves subsequently give rise to new forms of narrative configurations. What is more, such enhanced understanding may in turn give rise to better understanding of reality itself as temporal. As Ricoeur puts it, ‘making a narrative re-signifies the world in its temporal dimension, to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the poem’s invitation’ (T&N, 1:81), where this world and the action referred to was already signified by language about our actions at the pre-narrative level. Hence, even if time itself is never directly observed, it can be narrated, and in being narrated it can be understood in a practical way. Having said this about narrative in general, Ricoeur next turns to consideration of its two major branches: history and fiction, to show that both are included within this more general understanding of narrative. He also wants to show how they contribute in their own way to the configuration and refiguration of time that is at issue in Time and Narrative. He makes a number of distinct yet related points in his consideration of history. One such claim is that history in the sense of what the 73

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historian produces – a history book – depends on and is aimed at our narrative understanding, our ability to produce and understand narratives. This is an important point because behind it lies the question whether there can be such a thing as a non-narrative history. Ricoeur situates this discussion in relation to the French Annales group of historians who aimed their investigations at what they called the total historical fact and, in practice, at those aspects of history that changed only slowly over time or that repeated themselves, in contrast to what they saw as less significant, more momentary historical events on the political plane. Their perspective brought them close to structuralism, although they never were willing to give up completely the claim that history always makes some reference to time. For them this time was always a long time span. This focus on long time spans allowed them in turn to deny that they were producing what they called a history of events. Ricoeur’s argument in relation to this kind of history, therefore, takes two major paths. First, he argues that all history in the sense of the history text a historian produces is ultimately narrative, and hence derived from some understanding of time and human action, even when at the limit it makes use of something more like a quasi-plot or even quasi-characters or historical actors. This is the case, for example, with Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II where the Mediterranean Sea itself functions as the main ‘character’. This is because even a history of social institutions and trade routes derives from a concern with human beings as agents and with their actions. Secondly, the Annales historians’ attack on the concept of event, taken necessarily (and uncritically) to be something short term and even ephemeral, leads Ricoeur to see that a philosophical consideration of narrative points to another still more important idea regarding what constitutes an event, an idea that stands in contrast to the events considered by the natural sciences. This is the idea of a narrative event, an event that occurs in a narrative and contributes to its unfolding. It is an event, on whatever time scale it may require, that can be recognized and understood as an event only in relation to its being part of some narrative. Ricoeur adds that there is a dialectical relation at work here: the event only exists in relation to the narrative and the narrative depends for its existence on the event, which need not be short term or long term but rather is specified by its marking either a beginning or a change of course or an ending within the narrative. As such, unlike a scientific event, which is usually abstract and 74

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general (water freezes at a certain temperature), the narrative event is both concrete (something specific happens) and also exemplary or generalizable (as when we say that Caesar crossed the Rubicon . . . and mean that a political entity, Republican Rome, was doomed to fall), albeit without ever being completely reducible to being the consequence of some universal law. Because historians deal with specific occurrences, not universal ones, Ricoeur is also led to consider the role of explanation in history. This had been the subject of a long philosophical discussion following attempts to define scientific explanation in terms of a deductive model by logical positivism. But even these philosophers saw that historians did not really appeal to such a model. However, they then worried that this meant that history could not really be considered a science or give us truth equivalent to that provided by the natural sciences. Ricoeur enters this debate from the perspective of the question in what ways do historians in fact claim to explain what happened in the past. He agrees with those who seek to defend history as explanatory, in that ordinary language gives us many ways to say ‘because’ – for example, in terms of reasons and motives as in the philosophy of action, but also in terms of singular casual or quasi-causal explanations, or even in terms of subsequent events through teleological explanations. In fact, narrative itself always conveys an explanatory sense in that the story it tells is followable and holds together at the end. When we get to the end, we can look back and see that this story does lead to this ending. We can see what is at issue here more clearly if we consider the difference between a chronicle, which simply lists things that happened, and a narrative, which implies a connection between them. That is, we may find in a medieval chronicle an entry that says the king died and another on a later page that says the queen died. But something else happens when we have a text that says, ‘The king died and shortly thereafter the queen died of grief.’ It is as though the one thing after another turns into one thing because of another. Time enters into play here in that one event cited is prior to another. In fact, as Arthur Danto has shown, historians often make use of an even more sophisticated narrative sentence form when they say things like ‘in 1717 the author of Rameau’s Nephew was born’. No one in 1717 could say or know this. And beyond this, the narrative voice that speaks this sentence itself postdates the appearance of Diderot’s book. It is as though a present voice speaks of a past event 75

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(a ‘now’, in the sense of a point on the time line) in terms of a future event (another ‘now’, as another point on the time line that comes after the first one) that itself lies in the past of the narrative voice speaking from its own ‘now’ (which presents itself as a lived present of an instance of discourse, as well as being itself a point in time). An important implication here for any philosophy of time is that the possible relations among past, present and future are not simply the same as that between ‘before’ and ‘after’. Another important implication is that history in the sense of what historians do itself depends on some knowledge of subsequent events. This is why there is no history of the present. Indeed, since time continues to pass, so too new subsequent events continue to occur and the work of historical explanation is constantly reopened. Because of this, we must say that historical knowledge itself is always revisable and extensible. Narrative with its plot itself therefore is explanatory in important ways. Ricoeur argues against Hayden White that this does not mean that history turns out to be a kind of fiction. Historians are dependent on their appeal to historical documents and to remaining traces of the past that actually happened. This is a point that Ricoeur will expand upon further in his Memory, History, Forgetting. But neither is history as recounted a story that simply tells itself. It has a poetic dimension because the history text is something made. This is why Ricoeur will conclude that when the narrative being told breaks down or begins to spin its wheels is when historians introduce more explicit forms of explanation, including appeals to general rules, in order to keep the story going. But, in so doing, we must recognize that they always aim at the truth of what can be known about the past. In the language of phenomenology, they always intend to tell us what can be known about what actually happened, but consistent with a hermeneutical perspective this will always be an interpretation of the past subject to possible critique and revision. In effect, the historian seeks to explain more in order to understand better, another hermeneutical claim. Ricoeur concludes that he has shown that history does belong to the narrative field as defined by its configuring operation. But it is not sufficient simply to equate history with the genus ‘story’: ‘the specifically historical property of history is preserved by the ties, however tenuous and well-hidden they may be, which continue to connect historical explanation to our narrative understanding, despite the epistemological break separating the first from the second’ (T&N, 1:228). 76

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We can even say that historical narrative shows us new possibilities for narrative understanding in that it can push the basic model to the use of things like a quasi-plot and quasi-characters when we write not directly of human action but of things like the Mediterranean world during a certain long period of time. Fiction, as the other great species of narrative, gives us further insight into how narrative configures and ultimately refigures time. Ricoeur takes up a number of different points in considering fiction, but in each case they are meant to add support for his basic thesis about the relation of time and narrative. First of all, he looks at the specific question of time in fictional narrative by noting that the list of possible narrative genres is not closed. This is demonstrated by the discovery (or invention) of the novel as a new way of writing fiction. The novel is noteworthy for its variety when it comes to actual instances, but more generally Ricoeur notes that in comparison to earlier forms, including drama as in Greek tragedy, the novel extends the social sphere in which its action unfolds by paying attention to ordinary people. It also introduces a greater emphasis on characters as individuals whom we might think of as real people rather than simple ideal or mythical types like the hero or the villain. With this comes an increasing emphasis on social and psychological complexity, combined with new ways of conveying inwardness, culminating in the twentieth century with the stream of consciousness novel. ‘Yet nothing in these successive expansions of character at the expense of the plot escapes the formal principle of configuration and therefore the concept of emplotment’ (T&N 2:10). What is even more significant about the novel, however, is that it leads to new developments in narrative technique in that this is a genre of narrative that constantly struggles against being reduced to a fixed set of conventions at the same time it confronts readers with the question: are we faced with illusion or resemblance to reality in fiction? Ricoeur’s reply to this question leads him to shift from his earlier use of the idea of ‘redescription’ to characterize what happens with live metaphor to the idea of ‘reconfiguration’ in order to make sense of what happens through narrative when it is heard or read and understood. This is because like all narrative, fiction presents us with a world of the text in which the story is understood to unfold, and this is a world we can imagine ourselves as inhabiting. Hence, on this basis, narrative fiction is a way of seeing the world differently, but also in ways that may be true of the world as it actually is or might 77

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be. For this reason, any theory of narrative, like the theory of metaphor, has at some point to confront the question of truth. Ricoeur suggests, provocatively, the possibility that just as there is a truth of history as narrated, so too there can be a truth of fiction where this is a truth that operates at the level of extended discourse, not at that of the sentence. This is a truth that is not reducible to the logical conjunction of the truth values of its individual sentences, which is why a hermeneutics of the text is required to make sense of it. To see this further, however, we have to move beyond fiction to the point where it rejoins history under the larger heading of narrative discourse. First, though, Ricoeur has more to say about fiction and its possibilities. He considers, for example, the question whether we might think that the developments in narrative technique can ever be exhausted, a question that arises as soon as we recognize they can change. His reply is that we have no way of conceiving such a thing, since it would leave us with no coherent way to make further sense of time. Indeed, ‘we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things’ (T&N 2:28). Next he turns to newer developments in structuralism where, under the heading of narratology, it seeks to account for every particular narrative as the surface manifestation of an underlying deep structure that can be shown to generate this surface structure. This was a new development in that the goal of structural analysis is no longer simply to identify structures, but also to relate them in terms of a basic structure and other ones derived from it. This is again a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion to Ricoeur’s eyes. That is, for narratology, the narrative we first read or hear is not really what we have to understand if we are to make sense of the story told. That is rather the deep structure that gives rise to – explains – this story. Apparently, at the limit, if only we can dig deep enough, there is a basic structure that generates every narrative as a surface manifestation of this deeper reality. Ricoeur’s basic argument against the leading attempts to develop such a narratology is that at some point they all invoke or presuppose the surface structure they seek to generate. That is, by starting from the narrative told it may be possible to postulate underlying structures that help us better understand this narrative, but we cannot finally make the move in the other direction, starting solely from these deep structures up to the narrative. This is because all such structures are static. They are unable to 78

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account for the temporal dimension of narrative that is essential to its plot, which depends on change. This is why Ricoeur formulates his critique by saying that ‘somewhere the logic must be inadequate to the creativity proper to narrative’ (T&N 2:59). This brings him to the key point he wants to make about fiction as a form of narrative: it allows us to play games with time, to think of time, to understand it in new and different ways. One way to see this is to consider the use of verb tenses in narrative. In a typical historical narrative we find, for example, the form we call the historical present, narration written in the present tense that reads as though it were in the past (‘our hero draws his sword’). Fiction allows us to do much more than this, however. In reading a novel or short story we are not surprised to find a sentence that says ‘tomorrow was Christmas’. This is because, as with the example of the historical narrative sentence form cited earlier, we take for granted that there is a narrative voice here speaking from a present about a past future in relation to a passed past. A literary critic might even point out here that a good contemporary writer can use such free indirect discourse or narrated monologue to make this narrative voice itself seem to be that of a character in the past rather than in the narrative present. But what most interests Ricoeur is how these games with tenses do not completely break with the use of verb tenses in ordinary language yet do reveal new possible meaningful uses of them and, through them, new ways of making sense of human action thanks to the variations they work on such key notions as point of view and narrative voice. They do so in part by varying the relations between a first- and third-person perspective and between the narrator and his or her characters. As the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, it is even possible to write a polyphonic novel in which it is impossible to distinguish one overall narrator, one where each character seems to speak for him- or herself. In all these ways, fiction becomes a way of articulating new experiences of time, fictive experiences that have a world of the text as their horizon, a world that helps us in the best cases better to understand our own world. Ricoeur demonstrates this by considering three novels that can themselves be considered tales about time: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In the first of these great novels we find, for example, a clash between mortal time and monumental time, the time of everyday occurrences 79

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and that of great political events and power. In the second, the distance between the time of narration and the time narrated is stretched so that we get a glimpse of an eternal time, that of the magic mountain which stands above everyday events, but not quite completely since the story ends with the beginning of what the reader recognizes as the outbreak of World War I and the hero’s descent from the mountain. Finally, in Proust, we find a story that is itself a narrative of coming to terms with time by recognizing finally how to turn it into a story, one that moves from lost and misunderstood time to regained, understood time, from lived to narrated experience. In none of these cases, however, are the general features of fiction, and through them of narrative, completely abolished. ‘This is why the novel has only made infinitely more complex the problems of emplotment’ (T&N, 2:155). Saying is still a form of doing, ‘even when the saying takes refuge in the voiceless discourse of a silent thought, which the novelist does not hesitate to narrate’ (T&N, 2:156). Fiction and history next need to be brought together in a theory that will give equal rights to both forms, something that Ricoeur seeks to do in the third volume of Time and Narrative. However, fictional narrative is usually richer in the information it gives us about time than is historical narrative, which itself always also conveys some such understanding. These fictive understandings of time, found in both fiction and history, can in turn be related to ways of being in the world and to human action because they start from already constituted understandings of the world and action, as these are found in existing ordinary languages. But, at least in the best cases, they also go beyond such understanding to the possibility of new understanding and new meaning not only regarding the world and human action, but also about time itself without ever exhausting its mystery. This is why Ricoeur begins his third volume on narrative by looking at leading philosophical theories of time, in order to show that in each case they leave something unresolved or give rise to new problems. It is to these failures of speculative thought that narrative can provide at least a practical solution. It does so when it succeeds in talking meaningfully about time, without accounting for it fully. Narrative does this by taking time as human time, a time that stems from the interweaving of acting and suffering in the story told. In the case of history, this human time can be related to historical time, a 80

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time that mediates between lived and cosmic time by reinscribing lived time on cosmic time. What fiction contributes are imaginative variations on these historical and human times, variations that may generate new narrative techniques that historians in turn will learn to incorporate into their narratives. Historical time also draws on an already existing understanding of what we can call mythic time, which is a form of discourse about time that says something like ‘once . . . in the beginning . . . in those days’. But historical time goes beyond this undated and undatable time by drawing on three conditions of possibility. The first of these is the calendar. A calendar makes possible an overall scansion of time by referring different dates to a common zero point or axis – usually some important founding event – and by allowing different periods of time to be ordered in relation to this origin either in terms of their duration, or as cycles, or as recurring biological or social rhythms. The calendar therefore is what allows us to say not only that one event came before or after another event, but also to relate the narrative present of the voice saying this to both these events in terms of a common time. This ‘now point’ of speaking about things in time, however, is not just any point on the time line; it is a lived present or the representation of such a lived present, which is why historical time combines both cosmic and lived time. This lived present, in turn, may be thought of as a new beginning. As Ricoeur says, ‘If we did not have the phenomenological notion of the present, as the “today” in terms of which there is a “tomorrow” and a “yesterday,” we would not be able to make any sense of the idea of a new event that breaks with a previous era, inaugurating a course of events wholly different from what preceded it’ (T&N, 3:107). The second condition of possibility of historical time is the ideas of a generation and of a succession of generations. A generation is what sorts people into contemporaries, predecessors and successors, while joining them together, adding a note of biological and mortal time to that of the public time of the calendar, at the same time that it enriches the possible senses of tradition and innovation already operative at the level of the calendar. Finally, the idea of historical time requires the combined notions of archives, documents and traces, which provide an evidentiary basis for talking about what has happened in historical time. Archives are deposits of historical documents of every kind that historians make use of in their research, where these documents are the ultimate means of proof for what 81

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historians discover and say. ‘They nourish its claim to be based on facts’ (T&N, 3:117). They do so because documents, whatever form they may take, are traces of the past, where the idea of a trace carries a double sense associated with its being a physical sign of the past. That is, a trace is something in the present from the past that signifies the past and something that happened in the past; hence it combines both a material and an ideational aspect as a sign-effect. What happened in the past has passed away, but it left a trace, a trace that remains in the present and that can be read as referring to the past event that created or left this trace. When we combine these three conditions of possibility of historical time we can explore this time and the connections among things in it both backwards and forwards, and narrate these movements in the history text. Fiction also makes use of this idea of historical time without necessarily being bound to one version of it, for fiction can create its own imaginative historical time just as it can create its own imaginative world. It does so by neutralizing historical time and playing with its possibilities. It may even try to work with more than one time at a time, so that fictive temporal experiments cannot be totalized. There always seem to be new possibilities to explore, including those aporias philosophies of time run into. Yet as with the historians’ time, Ricoeur holds that the time of fiction always ‘stands for’ something that is ultimately both real and human, something it helps us make sense of and understand. Fiction can even try to explore the boundaries of our experience of time and of any idea of time, including time’s other, eternity. In so doing, it helps us make sense of the boundary between literature or history and myth. This is why it can speak of time the artist with Proust or time the monster who devours everything with Shakespeare. History and fiction we can thus say actually interweave in that they draw upon each other within the larger field of narrative discourse. And they do so in ways that have both epistemological and ontological implications and resonances. Ricoeur recognizes one important implication at this point that will be important for his subsequent work. This is the idea of a narrative identity in the sense of a personal or communal identity expressed and even constituted through the narratives that speak of it. He will return to it in his concluding remarks to Time and Narrative and then take it up in depth in his next major work, Oneself as Another, which we shall consider in our next chapter. Before that, however, he needs to complete his 82

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consideration of narrative discourse by adding to it a theory of reading. To this point he has tried to focus his attention on structures internal to all narrative; we might even say his focus is on the objective structures of any narrative. But he needs also to show how we appropriate such objective structures. This happens, he claims, when the world of the text is taken up in the reader’s imagination through reading, a process that has been discussed extensively by literary critics, but one that is also open to phenomenological description. One point especially worth mentioning here is that this process is facilitated by the fact that narratives can be shown to contain an implicit reader among their rhetorical devices and aesthetic aims. Sometimes this is very evident as when a narrator directly addresses his or her ‘gentle reader’; other times it is done more subtly. In either case, however, this suggests that a text can shape its reader and help contribute to a possible narrative identity in the sense just referred to. Consideration of reading also shows why it is possible to write a history of reception of a text and why this history may be said to be part of the meaning of that text insofar as that history affects a contemporary reading. Finally, any theory of reading must address the fact that we also like to reread some texts or to hear a story again, even when we already know the outcome. In a word, this is again because reading appeals to our imagination, and through our imagination we find pleasure in exploring the world of the text understood as one we might or should inhabit. It is on this basis that Ricoeur ends Time and Narrative with a discussion of its implications for a hermeneutics of historical consciousness, a hermeneutics that takes seriously not only that we live in time but that we ourselves are temporal. This will not lead to something similar to what Hegel called absolute knowledge. In this respect, Ricoeur sets aside his earlier appeal to Hegel in his interpretation of Freud, even while he holds on to something of Freud, in that he says that giving up this dream of absolute knowledge itself requires a work of mourning. What a hermeneutics of historical consciousness shows instead is that while we always are affected by the past, we are not completely determined by it. Through our narrative understanding we can think about time and be critical of what we do know of it, as well as of what happens in it. This does not call for utopian fantasies or existential dread, but rather for historical hope, an insight that points back to the beginnings of Ricoeur’s philosophizing and forward to his concern for ethics and a just society. 83

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Before leaving the question of narrative discourse, Ricoeur himself looks back on what he has accomplished. We remember that he had begun with a thesis that he sought to make intelligible and acceptable. Now he sees that aporias still remain, even when we say that ‘there can be no thought about time without narrated time’ (T&N, 3:341). The first of these aporias has to do with the just mentioned idea of a narrative identity. Subjects recognize themselves in the stories they tell about themselves. This is an inevitably circular relation it would seem, but it may also be one that points to the limits on the answer narration brings to the questions posed by temporality. For narrative identity is not seamless or completely stable, nor does it, Ricoeur now acknowledges, exhaust the question of what it is to be a subject, either as someone who can maintain him- or herself as a self over and through time or as the possible plural subject of action of a group or community or political entity. In fact, such narrative identity usually appeals more to the imagination than to the will, which is why the question of ethics will have to be addressed further. Next, narrative never is able to totalize time completely. It always works in terms of beginnings and endings, even when the beginning comes at the end. Thus while historical consciousness can be said to hold together an awareness of past, present and future, as just stated it never reduces them to something like Hegel’s atemporal absolute knowledge. Historical consciousness always is starting over again because it itself is fundamentally a temporal form of understanding and self-understanding. Finally, we must say that time itself is inscrutable. Every attempt to escape time or to constitute it ‘reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed by the work of constitution’ (T&N, 3:261); it itself always takes place within time. The sense of being ‘in’ time at issue here remains problematic, more like a mystery than anything like a problem that can one day be resolved. It is as if we were inside a gigantic windowless room that we had never been outside of, of which we have no idea that there is an outside, or if we do have some such idea, the very effort to think of it as ‘outside’ inevitably must lead us back to myth or some form of poetic language in order to express this. Yet these limits are also ones that narrative itself tries to explore from the inside, so to speak. It does so by trying to speak of time’s other in forms that may range from songs of praise to lamentation. It does so, paradoxically, by confessing its own limitations. 84

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OTHER FORMS OF DISCOURSE

Ricoeur does not try to expand these reflections on narrative discourse to anything like a general theory of possible types of discourse. Still, we may want to ask, for example, given this theory of language, how many kinds of discourse can we identify? And what are their specific characteristics? Ricoeur does, however, say some things about certain other leading forms of discourse that are worth noting. We have already noted his few comments on philosophical discourse, which aims to be conceptual, hence univocal discourse, language used to say exactly what it intends to say. This would be a form of discourse that somehow escapes the polysemy of words in the dictionary, the fact that most words there have more than one meaning. It would also eliminate the plurivocity of discourse at the level of the sentence and beyond, the fact that it can be read in more than one way since the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion is always a part of the hermeneutical field. But since such philosophical discourse is also the discourse we use to formulate our theory of discourse, any attempt to theorize about it further will rapidly run into questions of circularity or of an all-encompassing totality, one that paradoxically would include itself, something like Hegel’s philosophy of absolute knowledge which Ricoeur rejects. We must say therefore that philosophical discourse for Ricoeur is always incomplete. At best, we can wager that it is on the way to an ideal it can specify but never quite reach. This may explain why he has so little to say about it, other than to seek to protect it from attempts to reduce philosophy to something other than itself while at the same time not allowing it to overreach itself. He does say more about two other kinds of discourse. These are religious discourse and political discourse. Ricoeur admits that he hears something important and meaningful in the Christian gospel even while he denies that he is doing anything like Christian philosophy. In part, he draws this line separating his lived faith from philosophy because Christian philosophy had a specific meaning in France during his youth that he wishes to avoid. In part, this line of separation reflects his concern to acknowledge and remain within the bounds of the autonomy of philosophical thinking. As regards the former point, Christian philosophy in France in the first half of the twentieth century meant the neo-Thomism associated with the names of such leading Roman Catholic philosophers as Jacques 85

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Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Ricoeur himself, however, was raised a Protestant and he remained within that tradition in his personal life. Thus we must be careful in reading his comments on religion to respect the line he means to draw, even if we decide in the end that he has not been able to maintain as strict a line of separation as he says he intends to do. There are, for example, a few texts, sermons for the most part, where he does speak more directly out of his faith to an audience that shares it but also to anyone who will listen or who knows how to read.3 Elsewhere, though, he should be read as a philosopher speaking as a philosopher about religious discourse as part of the fullness of language considered from a philosophical point of view. Furthermore, his own comments on this use of religious language draw on the presupposition that it is possible to distinguish ‘originary’ uses of such language from subsequent reflection on it such as we find in dogmatic pronouncements or systematic theologies. It is such originary uses of religious discourse that Ricoeur the philosopher seeks to consider insofar as they can be discovered in the text that is the Bible. What Ricoeur has to say about religious discourse, therefore, should be read as a hermeneutic exercise applied to a particular text or collection of texts, the Bible, because this text along with the Greek philosophical tradition forms the basic source of the traditions and culture that have formed him. When asked whether what he says about these texts might be applied more broadly to work in the history of religions, he confesses that he does not know enough about other world religions really to speak about them in this way. He leaves it up to others to consider whether his philosophy of religious language can be appropriated for theological reflection or work in religious studies. Ricoeur’s comments on the biblical text can be grouped under three headings. Under the first one, he takes up the parables and eschatological sayings of Jesus in light of his work on metaphor and narrative. Jesus’ parables are narratives, but narratives marked by a certain ‘extravagance’ in that in speaking of the kingdom of God they mix the extraordinary with the ordinary.4 They have a metaphorical, redescriptive aspect in that they are more than similes. It was the later tradition that read them that way and sometimes embedded them in the gospels along with interpretations that reduced them to directly descriptive or allegorical language. What is more, the element of the extraordinary in the ordinary in these texts, 86

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which biblical scholars see as capturing something of the historical Jesus’ actual preaching, can be read to reflect what Ricoeur calls a logic of superabundance, a proclamation of a ‘how much more’ still to come as found in Paul’s letters. This logic of superabundance stands over against every logic of equivalence; ones, for example, where any reward is minutely equated with actual deeds and offers nothing beyond this. Such a logic of superabundance suggests the possibility of considering ‘hope’ as a philosophical term that converges on but never quite equals what Christianity calls faith. Ricoeur also takes up the question of originary religious discourse in relation to the Old Testament. He sees that it includes many different forms of discourse, including narratives, legislation, hymns, prophecy, and wisdom literature, and even sometimes blends them together as in the narrative of the giving of the law at Sinai. His striking claim here is that each of these forms of discourse can be read as ‘naming’ God, but in each case in a different way. Narratives, for example, speak of God as an actor in history or above history; hymns like the psalms and lamentations address God in the second person as a familiar other; and prophecy speaks in the name of another other, one who speaks through the prophet’s voice. Furthermore, when placed together in a single book, the Bible, these different ways of naming God can be said to interact. In this sense, the Bible as a whole can be read as a polyphony of ways of naming God, although Ricoeur stops short as a philosopher of saying just what this name finally is. That belongs to faith, not to philosophy. It seems clear, though, that Ricoeur’s philosophy of religious discourse as a kind of poetic discourse that names God leaves room for a reasonable pluralism of ways to think and speak of God within what we gather under the single heading, Christianity, as well as in relation to it and to other religious traditions. As Ricoeur himself points out, turning to the New Testament, there are four different gospels to be found there. Finally, with regard to religious discourse, we should note some late essays by Ricoeur written for the collection he published with an Old Testament exegete, André LaCocque, under the title Thinking Biblically. There his emphasis shifts from a focus on the texts for themselves to how such religious discourse gets taken up and reused in different settings. This is a shift that reflects the influence of Ricoeur’s narrative theory and the question of appropriation of narrative through reading. As he points out as regards the Song of 87

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Songs, for example, this book of what looks originally to have been a collection of erotic poetry that somehow was included in the biblical canon has been read again and again by individual believers and mystics as speaking of the relation of the soul to God as well as being used in communal worship to speak of the relation of the community to God and of God to the community of faith. In terms of his hermeneutic theory Ricoeur’s essays in this volume show how such a theory must also be able to incorporate what literary critics and historians call a theory of reception. Such a theory fits well with the question of narrative identity that Ricoeur discovers at the end of Time and Narrative in that religious communities – for Ricoeur, at least Christianity and Judaism; one could add Islam – define their identity in relation to the foundational texts they privilege, texts that they read and reread because these texts tell them who they are by instructing them to read these very texts, another version of a hermeneutical circle. A similar point might be made about foundational political documents like the Magna Carta or the American Declaration of Independence or national constitutions in the way political societies use and reuse them. They are read as founding the community that reads them as having just this foundational function. Ricoeur stops well short, however, of simply equating political and religious discourse. This is because political discourse for him is always internally open to contestation in ways that originary religious discourse is not. This is why, in an important lecture, he speaks of the ‘fragility’ of political language (Ricoeur 1987). Political language is fragile first of all because it is more a species of the rhetorical use of language than of poetic language. As such, it aims at persuasion, even in those cases where it may say that it claims certainty, persuasion intended to link politics to the plane of human action in general. To succeed it needs a public space of appearance which itself is not always assured. Furthermore, there need to be rules that govern discussion in this arena, rules that themselves are always open to challenge, if not to misuse. Political discourse also brings into play the question of authority, at least in the sense of a distinction between those able to command and those required to obey, always leaving open the difficult question what is it that legitimates this authority. Ricoeur’s class lectures on ideology and utopia are directly relevant here.5 Ideology has a positive function beyond its negative connotations in that it serves to fill the gap between any claimed authority 88

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or legitimacy and its actual basis in any given society. The idea of utopia is linked to it dialectically in that utopian visions and texts come from a use of the imagination that pictures a better society when ideology goes beyond this legitimating function and makes claims to power for which it has no basis. But political discourse as a form of rhetorical argumentation is always fragile for other reasons as well, even when all these conditions are met. There is an insurmountable plurality to politics that differs from the possible accepted plurality of interpretations that may characterize religious traditions. In the first place, there are always arguments about good government at the level of particular policies or laws and how to implement them. There are also arguments possible about the very idea of what constitutes good government – a large or small state, centralized or decentralized authority, an emphasis on social conformity or individual freedoms. Beyond all this, there can even be arguments about the very idea of government itself, arguments, according to Ricoeur, that usually come down to differences over the idea of what finally constitutes a good life. Hence, for political discourse conflict is inevitable and cannot be removed once and for all because the possible conceptions of government themselves are many and finally not reconcilable under one overarching concept. And, in the end, all political discourse is a use of language always open to sophistic misuse, a point that makes plausible Ricoeur’s subsequent concern for the idea of ‘the just’ as a way of extending his own ethical position beyond individuals and small intimate groups to the level of society itself. Before considering that, however, he first turns to the question of narrative identity he had discovered in his work on narrative. In particular, he takes it up in relation to the idea of selfhood as a way of getting beyond the aporias of subjectivity in the subject–object model.

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CHAPTER 5

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Oneself as Another is, as its title indicates, a book about selfhood. In this sense, it stands in continuity with the question of personal identity and narrative identity introduced in the conclusion to Time and Narrative. That is, the question of personal or narrative identity leads to the question of what it means to be a self, although this question does not exhaust all the possibilities of narrative identity, which can also apply to plural subjects such as religious and political communities. Ricoeur now sees, however, that such identities have to be understood in relation to selfhood. The main thesis of this new work, based on the Gifford Lectures he had given in 1986 at the University of Edinburgh, is that selfhood is a complex phenomenon that involves two kinds of identity, which do not reduce to a single idea of sameness. Indeed, what Ricoeur now calls ipse identity ‘implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of personality’ (OAA, 2). This is why it can relate to a narrative identity that unfolds or changes over time. But this book is also important because in it Ricoeur begins to lay out what he calls his ‘little ethics’ in relation to what he has to say about selfhood. He does so because the self in question is an agent capable of action and responsible for its actions, hence the ethical question has to arise. To make his case regarding both selfhood and ethics, Ricoeur once again takes up the question of philosophies of the subject stemming from the Cartesian model. He argues that the philosophical quarrel over the cogito today has been superseded by the question of selfhood he is considering. His critique of such philosophies is twofold. In the first place, all such philosophies are formulated in terms of the first person, but as we shall see, the self can be spoken of in terms of all three grammatical persons and cannot be understood apart from 90

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taking all of them into consideration. Secondly, discussions of the philosophy of the subject over time have fallen into two opposed positions: either they present an apology for the cogito as presenting a first truth that philosophy can build on, or they see it as an illusion – possibilities that Ricoeur suggests were both already present in Descartes’ own presentation of the cogito in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Nietzsche represents an exemplary instance of those who see the cogito as needing to be overthrown, leading to a position Ricoeur calls the ‘shattered cogito’, where the very question that gave rise to the cogito argument, that of possible certainty in the face of scepticism, has itself to be denied in favour of seeing everything as an interpretation, if not as a fiction. As Ricoeur quickly notes, a major problem for such an argument is whether it does not succumb to its own blows. His own approach will be to develop what he now calls a hermeneutics of the self. This approach is not meant to exhaust every question that might be raised about selfhood, say regarding its physiological basis as studied by the natural sciences. His hermeneutics of the self is rather to be based on a kind of philosophical discourse, one that Ricoeur seeks to establish through a three-step argument. This argument will begin with a reflection on what analytic philosophy has to offer to this topic; next it will take up the dialectic of selfhood and sameness implied by this first step; then finally it will turn to the dialectic of selfhood and otherness insofar as this provides further insight into the constituting of the self as a capable human being, someone who has an identity, but also someone who can act in the world with and for others. It is the question ‘who?’ that ties these stages together. Briefly, we can say that they unfold as follows. The first step is to see that the question ‘who?’ involves something other than a thing in general, a person. This is someone who can designate him- or herself in speaking and acting. It is someone who has a personal identity and who stands and acts in relation to others, leading to consideration of the ethical and moral determinations of such action in relation to this ‘who’ which answers the question ‘who did this?’ In the end, the question of ontology arises again. It involves the questions of what it means to be an agent and to be historical, but also that of the unity of this historical agent. Ricoeur is somewhat hesitant here; as usual, he proceeds very cautiously in taking up ontology. What he will suggest, however, is that through a kind of overstatement we can 91

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speak of a kind of analogical unity to convey the reality of the agential self. This use of language will not refer to some substance, but rather draw upon the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality, although Ricoeur does not pursue what this might mean in any detail. Instead, he will conclude by returning to the question of the possibility of certainty that lay behind Descartes’ original argument. His suggestion will be that what we see at the end of these reflections on selfhood is that another sense of certainty is entailed here, one that he will call attestation. This, he will say, is a form of non-doxic belief; that is, it is not a weak form of scientific knowledge. Rather it links up with the notion of testimony in the sense that selves attest to their identity and their responsibility through their testimony about themselves. Obviously, this kind of certainty is always fragile in some ways, not in the sense that attestation can be shown to be false, but because it is always threatened by suspicion. We can say to others and even to ourselves, ‘I don’t believe you or I don’t trust you.’ But this is the price to pay for a discourse aware of its own lack of foundation and, implicitly, the price to pay for being a self. Ricoeur begins by drawing on analytic philosophy and its discussion of identifying reference, which he understands as stemming from a semantic approach to the use of ordinary language. Identifying reference is one such use of language. It designates individuals rather than classifying them in terms of a concept or predicating a property to them, although it also presupposes both these other uses of language. Analytic philosophers have identified three such procedures: definite descriptions, proper names, and various kinds of indicators that pick out individual things. A definite description is a phrase like ‘the first man to land on the moon’. Such a way of referring to an individual already depends on a minimal sense of otherness in that it isolates this individual as a member of some class or set. Proper names are different in that they assign a permanent designation to an individual, one that is open to all kinds of predication, including negative cases as well as positive ones. Here we find otherness as designating a single individual in opposition to all the other members of a class or set. Finally, ordinary language includes such indicators as the personal pronouns, deictic terms (‘this’, ‘that’), adverbs of time and place, and the verb tenses that can be used in each case to designate a specific thing. What it is important to note is that the reference here is relative to some act of discourse taken as a fixed point and as a real event in the world. 92

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Such indicators may vary from language to language, but in terms of their function in cases of identifying reference, they all stand on the same level. It is their common function of picking out an individual that provides the only unity among these different kinds of semantic procedures. Ricoeur’s next move is to focus on the notion of an individual in order to move from the general idea of an individual to the individual that each of us is. Here he draws on Peter Strawson’s Individuals with its idea of the ‘basic particulars’ that function in cases of identifying reference. The key distinction here is between physical bodies and ‘persons’, where the idea of a person does not yet include the ability of this person to designate him- or herself by speaking. A person is still only one of the things in the world that can be identified and referred to by language in general. But this already suggests that when self-identification occurs, it takes place in situations of interlocution where persons speak to one another, and also that it will draw on the use of demonstratives such as the personal pronouns and possessive adjectives to express itself. But what matters here are the kinds of predicates that can be applied to such basic particulars. A person is a thing, but not only a thing like things in general. Persons have bodies, but ‘the concept of person is no less a primitive concept than that of the body’ (OAA, 33). The point is that both physical and mental predicates apply in the case of persons, so the question of embodiment, which was already present in Ricoeur’s early work, comes back in force. What he sees now is that there are two major questions here: how a person is a body about which we speak and how a person can be a subject who designates him- or herself in the first person while addressing a second person or other persons. There is also the further difficulty of understanding how a third person can be someone who can designate him- or herself in the first person. Following Strawson, Ricoeur says that this notion of a person can be made more specific in terms of the kinds of predicates we ascribe to it. At a first level, ascription is simply one form of attribution, but one that does not yet recognize the ability of persons to designate themselves by attributing predicates to themselves. Next, there is a sense in which the person in question is always the ‘same’ thing to which physical and mental predicates are applied. But this already poses the question what we may mean by ‘sameness’ here. Certainly, in predicating mental or physical predicates to persons, we mean 93

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these predicates to retain the same sense in each case, but this seems to be because the person in question is still anonymous at this stage. It is no one in particular, especially not in the sense of someone who can also say me and ascribe these predicates to him- or herself. Ricoeur holds that an appeal to the ideas of oneself as a person and another as also a person does not resolve what is at issue here because ascribing consciousness to oneself is something felt, whereas ascribing it to others is something observed. So two problems are posed: how to ‘include in the notion of something self-ascribable the selfdesignation of a subject’ (OAA, 38) and, at the same time, how to preserve the otherness of the other at the same time that we ascribe this same power of self-designation to him or her (or them). A related question is whether we can unite these two questions through an understanding of them as standing in reciprocity with each other. To do so will require more attention to ‘a reflexive theory of utterance’, one that does not fall into ‘the aporias of solipsism and the impasses of private experience’ (OAA, 39). This calls for a change in perspective from a semantic to a pragmatic approach, one that shifts the focus from what is said to the saying or utterance and thereby brings the ‘I’ and ‘you’ on stage in cases of interlocution. ‘The question will be finally to determine how the “I–you” of interlocution can be externalized in a “him” or “her” without losing its capacity to designate itself, and how the “he/she” of identifying reference can be internalized in a speaking subject who designates himself or herself as an I’ (OAA, 41). The theory of speech acts, as developed by J.L. Austin and John Searle, has shown that sometimes saying can be doing, as in cases like ‘I promise (you) that I will . . . ’. Here the speaker, in the first person singular, confronts the hearer or hearers in the second person. The question is what is the relationship of this speaker to his or her speech act? It depends on what linguistic theory calls a shifter – that is, an indicator (such as ‘I’, or ‘here’ or ‘there’) that applies to different speakers or different situations in different cases. Such shifters link the speaker to the utterance, especially in that the ‘I’ functions as the central pole around which the other shifters are organized. This ‘I’ is not something that can be replaced by a designation such as ‘the person currently speaking’ for there is a logical gap between the ‘I’ here and the idea of an entity that can be identified by the semantics of reference. Still, while the reflexivity involved here does not simply reduce to a function of what is said, it is a reflexivity without selfhood in the 94

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strong sense that Ricoeur is looking for. What is at issue, to put it another way, is the question how this ‘I’ is both concretely anchored in the situation of interlocution, as speech-act theory indicates, and yet not reducible to it in that this I does not completely belong to the objects of which it speaks, if only because it can talk about them. What kind of being this might be already anticipates that the ontological question will have to arise at some point. Ricoeur’s next move is to shift his attention to the idea that speech acts are kinds of action and to extend this insight to a more general consideration of action in general, again by beginning from the semantics of action. What is at stake here is a network of concepts, which applies to both agents and their actions, and that ‘shares the same transcendental status as the conceptual framework of basic particulars’ (OAA, 58). Within this network, meaning stems from the answers it can provide to questions such as: ‘who?’ ‘what?’ ‘where?’ ‘how?’ ‘when?’ and so forth, all of which are cross-signifying. Yet the semantic theory of action tends to underplay the importance of the tie to the question ‘who?’ with its apparent link to something like a self in favour of a focus on the questions ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ tending thereby once again to suggest that the self should be thought of as a causally determined thing or event, and as such something anonymous, even while this theory of action recognizes that the ‘who?’ question can be answered in a variety of different ways, including in terms of the personal pronouns. Ricoeur argues that the major problem is that too strong a dichotomy is assumed in such an approach between motives as reasons-for and as causes, so that once we have discovered an answer to what an action is, we think we have also accounted for why it occurs. Instead he proposes a phenomenological account that makes room for more mixed forms of discourse regarding action, ones where the notions of reason and cause overlap, even to the point of coinciding in the idea of an efficient cause that calls for a teleological explanation. This is a possibility that he thinks has been overlooked by the analytic approach. The dichotomous approach he criticizes can be seen both in works like Anscombe’s Intention, which Ricoeur calls a kind of conceptual impressionism, and in Donald Davidson’s essays, which represent a more cubist approach. Ricoeur’s real critique, however, is that it is the loss or suppression of any reference to an agent that makes possible this dichotomy. He further notes that both kinds of predicates – reasons and causes – can be applied to one 95

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and the same thing, an agent. This is why actions are both a certain physical configuration and ‘an accomplishment capable of being interpreted in terms of reasons for acting which explain it’ (OAA, 66). It is also why bringing the question of the agent into consideration adds the question of veracity to that of truth. There is not only a question of whether something is a correct description of an action in terms of what happens, but also one of whether we accept or not the agent’s claim to have done it. It is this idea of veracity that will subsequently provide the link to that of attestation for Ricoeur. Ricoeur holds that his phenomenological approach does allow for an explanatory approach to action, but that there is always more in the phenomenological description even than in any proposed teleological explanation. This something more is ‘the conscious orientation of an agent capable of recognizing herself as the subject of her acts’ (OAA, 79). Thus the idea of an intention-to, an intention to do something, is broader than what is conveyed by applying the adverb ‘intentionally’ to the description of actions as observable events in the world and is not derivative from such descriptions. As evidence of this, Ricoeur notes that analytic approaches tend not to attend to the verb tenses we use to speak of action; in particular they ignore the importance of reference to the future, not just as something yet to come but in the sense expressed by the future perfect tense, as when we refer to an act that will have been done but has not yet occurred. This latter example shows that intending to do something can involve anticipating a passage of time in which the act will unfold, in contrast to any focus on the act as a point-like event.1 This, in turn, suggests that there may be a question about the very idea of sameness operative in action theory. Perhaps this idea, which is that of something always the same in the sense that it never changes, is not the sameness that needs to be applied to the identity of a self. Another question will be whether this focus on a limited idea of what constitutes an event hinders the understanding of action as something that can be imputed to an agent-self. If so, a different – or at least an expanded – ontology is required, one that would ‘introduce the question of the mode of being of the agent on some other basis than that of the analysis of the logical form of action sentences, without in any way denying the validity of this approach’ (OAA, 86). Anticipating where he wants to take this, Ricoeur suggests that this would be an ontology of a ‘being in the making, possessing de jure the problematic of selfhood’ (ibid.). And to begin to 96

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move in that direction he proposes to take a closer look at the notion of ascription of action to an agent and the epistemological role this entails for attestation by drawing on the pragmatics rather than the semantics of action. What is important about the idea of ascription is that it applies to persons as a kind of basic particular, whether this be oneself or another. These persons are unique in the sense that they are the only such basic particulars to which both mental and physical predicates apply, so there is no need to presuppose a mind–body dualism as we continue to examine the idea of selfhood; selves are embodied minds. As Aristotle had already noted, action depends on the agent. The question is how to make sense of this dependence. One basic point here, again one already seen by Aristotle, is that we distinguish between actions done freely by the agent and those done in spite of himself, where both kinds of acts may include or depend on others that are themselves the result of prior deliberation. This distinction allows us to refine the notion of ascription in terms of the related idea of attribution: we ascribe acts to an agent that are voluntary or involuntary but which in some sense depend on the agent as indicated by the fact that such ascription-attribution allows us to answer the question ‘who?’ without having to invoke a claim that the act was done voluntarily or even to invoke any ethical evaluation of what was done.2 Modern action theory goes beyond this sense of ascription as attribution in that it emphasizes the uniqueness of every act as a particular occurrence. This opens the door to a greater emphasis on the idea of a capacity to act and a capacity to designate oneself as the agent to whom acts are ascribed. And this capacity links up nicely to the theory of speech acts insofar as this theory brings into play the personal pronouns, including the impersonal ‘one’, in relation to the question ‘who?’ In the case of the first-person use, ascription points to the reappropriation by the agent of his or her own acts and, beyond this, to deliberation. One point worth noting here is that naming the author of an act cuts off the investigation into the question ‘who?’ whereas searching for the motives of any act is an openended process, even though these two questions are capable of being related. They are not mutually exclusive. Yet there is more at issue in this investigation of ascription than can be accounted for by speech-act theory in that ‘designating oneself as agent means something more than designating oneself as the 97

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speaker’ (OAA, 96) of what is said. For one thing, the ascription here is not just to a thing in general; it is to oneself or to another self inasmuch as the answer to the question ‘who?’ refers to something other than just some ‘what’. This is indicated by the role mental predicates like thinking, willing, feeling, can play here.3 Furthermore, ascription to a ‘who’ can run a gamut that runs from a completely anonymous ‘one’ (someone did this) to a sense of ‘someone’ in the sense of anyone (someone will have to clean up), to, finally, a particular someone, which suggests that we need to get beyond the perspective of identifying reference if we are to make sense of how an agent can designate him- or herself in such a way that there is a genuine other to whom the same attribution can be made. The related idea of prescribing is helpful here in that it helps us to move beyond the purely logical idea of ascription by suggesting both that actions are rule-governed and that agents can be held responsible for what they do. Ricoeur therefore suggests that we use the term imputation to refer to those cases where we ascribe an action to an agent who is held responsible for his or her acts and where these actions are themselves considered to be permissible or not.4 These acts – for example, those taken up by criminal courts – tend to be more complex than those taken as examples when considering the grammar and logic of action sentences. They also introduce the related idea of a verdict when we consider them as permissible or not, as praiseworthy or blameworthy. But, more importantly, they emphasize in a sense a still-to-be-determined causal tie between the agent and his or her act in that we presuppose that such acts are within an agent’s power. The idea of an efficient causality returns to the fore here, but it does so, Ricoeur emphasizes, as the result of a labour of thinking, not simply as an assumption. Now, is this a causality that we can attribute to an agent? Ricoeur thinks the answer is yes, if we see that what this implies is a power to act in the world, but not to create that world, so there will be some limits on an agent’s responsibility. What these limits may be is not a factual question, however, because discovering them will also require taking into account the idea of a decision being made, a point that will have large consequences when Ricoeur takes up the question of justice on the basis of the little ethics he begins to lay out at the end of Oneself as Another. In terms of the question of selfhood, however, the more immediate problem is how to make sense of the central idea that agents do intervene in the course of the 98

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world, and, moreover, sometimes they do it on the basis of thought. Ascription by itself is not capable of explaining this. A fuller account will also require taking seriously the attestation by means of which agents take responsibility for their actions. The transition to this new question begins by noting that what the philosophy of action tends to overlook is the temporal dimension both of the self and of action. The person about whom we speak and the agent on whom action depends both have a history. This is significant, says Ricoeur, because it relates to the question of personal identity, a question that can be considered only by taking into account the temporal dimension of human existence. One way to do this is to return to the idea of narrative identity, not so much in terms of how it relates to history and fiction as at the end of Time and Narrative but in terms of the very idea of identity. On this basis, we can see how such narrative identity can play a mediating role between a more descriptive point of view regarding action and the prescriptive one that Ricoeur intends to develop on the basis of a claim that the practical field that can enter into narrative is broader than what can be articulated through an analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of action sentences. To see this we need only to recognize that a narrative can apply to an entire lifetime, not to say an even longer historical span, and this is something that we have to take into account if we are to speak about ethics. It is now that Ricoeur begins to take up the details of his major distinction between selfhood as ipse-identity and sameness as what he calls idem-identity. He does so in relation to the question of how these apply to the idea of permanence over time by first noting that ‘sameness’ can take different senses. It can mean numerical identity in the cases where we identify two different occurrences as being of one and the same thing. Or it can be used to speak of qualitative sameness in the sense of the close resemblance of two different things. Or it can be linked to the idea of continuity over time. Ricoeur’s question is whether we must necessarily link this continuity in every case to something like an underlying substrate or substance that does not change, yet can still preserve the idea of a permanence over time that may apply to selfhood. Two examples are important here. The first is the idea of character, something that has both descriptive and emblematic value.5 Character, we can say, refers to the ‘set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same’ (OAA, 119), for example, 99

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through habits or recognizable dispositions to act in certain ways or say certain things or cling to certain values. Character in this sense might be called the ‘what’ of the ‘who’. It assures numerical and qualitative identity and makes possible the permanence in time that defines a certain kind of sameness. The second example is that of keeping one’s word, which stands over against the sense of identity tied to character. ‘Keeping one’s word expresses a self-constancy which cannot be inscribed, as character was, within the dimension of something in general but solely within the dimension of “who?”’ (OAA, 123). This kind of self-constancy can be seen to be at work both with reference to friendship and to the idea of a promise made and kept, but what Ricoeur wants especially to emphasize is the idea that narrative identity is something that unfolds between these two poles. To see this, we have first to consider those theories of personal identity that ignore the distinction between idem-identity and ipseidentity; in particular, the theories of Locke and Hume, and the dead ends and paradoxes they run into. Locke, for example, held that identity was the result of a comparison that showed something to be identical with itself, hence as coinciding with itself in either an instant or over time. But to get the possibility of sameness enduring over time he then had to link this comparison to memory, opening the door to questions not only about what might happen if memory were lost but also regarding what criteria make possible this comparison, leading eventually to the thought experiment of puzzling cases where identity would not be decidable. Hume, on the contrary, kept a strong concept of sameness but was willing to entertain the idea of degrees in assigning identity, leaving open the question how and when we do assign it and whether this is merely a belief on our part. But as Ricoeur notes, the self returns as soon as we ask who does this, who makes the comparison or holds the belief ? This same question governs his discussion of Derek Parfit who develops the puzzling cases made possible by Locke and who holds that ‘personal identity is not what matters’.6 Again, Ricoeur counters, who asks whether this is so – and has the question of mineness simply been ruled out of court by fiat? His own position is that the idea of narrative identity needs to be considered here as a better alternative to these theories. The central point in his case for narrative identity will be that the relation between selfhood and sameness needs to be understood 100

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dialectically; that is, we need to see that each term depends on the other for its meaning and that narrative identity lies somewhere between them. What narrative adds here is the ability to explore this middle range, up to and including those puzzling cases considered by Parfit. Furthermore, the practical field revealed in this way is one that links action theory and moral theory because narrative is never morally neutral. In this sense, narrative can provide the first laboratory for moral judgement. Narrative can do this because it is constituted through a plot that, as Time and Narrative had already shown, configures the episodic and the told story into a tensive temporal whole, one that makes sense of the idea of a permanence over time as a dynamic identity like the one that applies to the characters in the story. They may change as a result of the turning points in the plot, but they also remain identifiable as being the same characters.7 In fact, we can go further and say that characters are themselves plots. They too are constituted by an internal dialectic ‘which is the exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordance developed by the emplotment of action’ in the sense that the character draws his or her singular identity ‘from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished from all others’ (OAA, 147). This, again, is a dialectic of selfhood and sameness over time that narrative can explore up to the point where in an example such as Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities identity is finally lost because the dialectic breaks down (and the novel was never completed). The dialectic breaks down because it reaches a point where selfhood no longer is supported by sameness and we are returned to Parfit’s puzzling cases where the self is merely the brain or something in the brain that can be moved – or at least imagined as being moved about – like any other object in the world. But this only confirms that such examples are drawn from imaginative variations focused on idem-sameness, not on selfhood in the sense of ipse-identity. For Ricoeur, this kind of reduction is based on a denial of the ontological condition of persons as embodied, worldly acting and suffering beings in that it simply removes any possibility of ipse-identity and selfhood on the assumption that the category of event does include objectively observable events but not narrative ones. But Ricoeur is not yet ready to propose an alternative ontology because he sees that he needs first to explore further the practical field revealed through narrative in order to show how it can be said 101

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to connect description and prescription. The key goal here is to discover a tie between ascription and imputation where ascription assigns an act to an agent and imputation applies in those cases where the agent has some obligation to act. As already stated, narrative extends the practical field because of the complex forms of action it can relate. These complex forms can themselves be arranged in hierarchies of ‘units of praxis’ where each unit has its principle of organization and integrates a variety of logical connections and where these units in turn can be combined in many different ways up to the level of overall life plans. Two factors now bring the ethical dimension into view. One is that there is also a question of self-constancy on these higher, long-term levels. Does a character at these higher levels not have to remain the same self over time? Does he or she not have some felt or even logical obligation to do so, indicated perhaps by the example of keeping one’s promises as a way of keeping one’s word? Second, that a character’s actions can take on intersubjective forms brings into play situations both where the self can efface itself in the face of other and the fact that suffering, one’s own or that or another, can be the consequence of such acts. This gives still more impetus to the question of responsibility already implicit in the question of self-constancy. It also opens the way to consideration of philosophers like Jean Nabert, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas, who in different ways all hold that there is an ethical primacy of the other over the self.8 This lays the groundwork for adding the question ‘who is the subject of moral imputation?’ to those of who is acting, speaking or narrating, at the same time that it undercuts the idea of a sharp break between description and prescription. It does so, Ricoeur argues, because reflection on the analysis of action shows that ‘it is part of the very idea of action that it be accessible to precepts’ (OAA, 169, original italics), where moral rules can be shown to be inscribed within this broader concept of precepts. This insight, in turn, leads Ricoeur to begin to spell out his own ‘little ethics’ as a way of providing an overall structure to these moral rules. This is a theory that without any particular concern for orthodoxy regarding interpretations of Aristotle’s and Kant’s moral theories will seek to combine the two traditions.9 It will do so by formulating its theory in terms of three stages running from a teleological to a deontological to a practical level. In this theory, ‘ethics’ will apply to the first stage as characterizing the aim of a good life and ‘morality’ will be used to 102

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describe how this aim gets articulated in terms of norms that function both as universal rules and a kind of constraint on action. The final stage will fall under the heading of phronesis, or what Aristotle called practical wisdom. It has to do with the application of both the ethical intention and its norms in concrete situations.10 The question of selfhood runs across these three stages in terms of the ideas of self-esteem and self-respect, but self-respect will always be more fundamental than self-esteem. The first ethical, and teleological, stage can be summed up by the ethical intention expressed in the maxim: aiming at the good life with and for others, in just institutions. Self-esteem draws on this notion of a good life but really is empty apart from the interaction with others and incomplete apart from the broader domain of just institutions. In this sense, ethics for Ricoeur depends on unfolding the whole structure of this ethical intention through someone’s putting it into practice through concrete acts, where as we have seen such fragmented acts come together in the idea of a whole life that can be recounted. Here it is the idea of a narrative unity that will draw together and hold together the subject of ethics by assigning him or her a narrative identity, and self-esteem will first appear as the result of one’s self-interpretation of this narrative identity. This narrative identity will be always open to reinterpretation if the narrative changes and not subject to verification like truth claims based on scientific observation. At the next level of the ethical intention, the ideal relation to others can be summed up as solicitude for the other, which introduces the question both of whether the self is worthy of such selfesteem and whether such self-esteem does not require the mediation of the other to realize itself. Ricoeur wants to link both these questions to the self’s capacity to act and, in this work, he uses the example of friendship to illustrate its best case. However, he also notes in passing that there may be a deeper issue here in that we can distinguish between reciprocal and mutual recognition, a topic he will return to in his Course of Recognition. But here, in the best case, he holds that friendship already borders on justice without itself turning into justice, something he sees as appearing only at the level of institutions, thereby giving continuity to the discontinuity in his preferred ethical intention. Friendship borders on justice because it is based on giving and receiving, but also because it goes beyond such exchanges to raise the possibility of benevolent spontaneity 103

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and even the possibility of sharing others’ suffering. In this way, a new element of self-reflection can be introduced into the aim of a good life with others, and we can say that self-esteem is again the possible product of this reflexive moment. At the same time, the relation to others that gives rise to this reflexive possibility shows that to say ‘self’ is not the same thing as saying ‘myself’. And this leads to the further insight that I cannot esteem myself unless I can also esteem others as themselves selves, themselves myselves, other selves. Institutions come into play when we are no longer dealing with a face-to-face relation to the other. A new determination of the self then comes into play, one where we must speak of ‘each’ self. And with it comes a new requirement, that of equality at least in regard to historical communities of people who choose to live and act together.11 Institutions also introduce the idea of the self, oneself or another, as a potential third party, someone who can serve as a neutral arbiter in disputes that may arise at the level not only of face-to-face encounters, but within institutions themselves, a topic Ricoeur will pursue in his essays on the just. At the limit, the door is open to the question of whether such just institutions can extend to encompass all of humanity. This ethical aim needs, however, to be subject to the test of the norm, of obligation. This is where self-respect comes into play. If we again consider the idea of a good life with and for others, in just institutions, the first thing to say is that the very idea of a good life recalls that the self is not simply the ‘I’ in the sense of an isolated ego. There is already an element of universality operative in the very idea of a good life and the way we find it valuable. Moreover, this idea of universality already introduces the correlative ideas of duty and constraint as applicable to achieving such a life. These, in turn, suggest how sometimes this aim can miscarry and be used for evil, not good ends, which is why a test of moral obligation arises. With regard to oneself this is already a question of self-respect. With regard to others, this idea of self-respect gets expanded to include the question of respect for others through an application of the Golden Rule, which introduces another sense of reciprocity, one that mediates between the idea of the other as in some abstract sense a person yet also a concrete individual. Both the Golden Rule and the respect owed to the other person in turn help establish reciprocity where there is a lack of reciprocity, in a way that confirms both the autonomy of each person and the possibility of solicitude between 104

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them. Finally comes the level of institutions and with it the question of principles of justice and respect for every other that can apply beyond the face-to-face relation of solicitude. Because of its rootedness in the ethical idea of a good life, Ricoeur argues that at this level the idea of a just solution must go beyond what can be captured by purely procedural formulations of justice as well as beyond strictly utilitarian solutions. Furthermore, there is a place for autonomy at each level that needs to be acknowledged, even if it is true that such personal autonomy is something that can only be attested to, not founded on something outside itself. Finally comes the stage of applying the ethical intention and the normative obligation it entails to concrete situations. ‘This passage from general maxims of action to moral judgment in situation’, Ricoeur says, ‘requires, in our opinion, simply the reawakening of the resources of singularity inherent in the aim of the true life’ (OAA, 240), which again will ultimately have to appeal to a conviction that one can testify to but not prove in some other, final way. That this level may involve conflict requires, Ricoeur adds, a sense of the tragic dimension of action. This may cause us to doubt ourselves or to become disillusioned, or it may, as Greek tragedy suggests, lead to knowledge and catharsis that enable us to go on, albeit not on the basis of a direct and univocal teaching, but rather on the basis of moral judgements made in specific situations. It is, furthermore, one more aspect of what is involved in our attaining self-recognition. The question still remains, however: if conflicts are inevitable, why is this so? And what solution is Ricoeur’s little ethics with its commitment to practical wisdom capable of bringing to them? An answer to the first question is that beyond rules of procedure lies a diverse range of ideas regarding any good to be distributed and even of ways to do this. There is no one institutional solution to this diversity. This is why politics is always a struggle in some ways – for instance, in order to prevent someone or some party from snatching a monopoly of power. But there can also be conflicts on how to order the goods a group may in fact agree upon as being desirable. Finally, there is always the question how we legitimate the institutions assigned to deal with these questions, to the point of asking whether they should even exist. As for the second question, that about how to resolve conflicts, Ricoeur holds that the Kantian test of universalization is not sufficient, if only because, unlike Kant, he finds that these rules, even 105

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when presumed to be universal, can collide when it comes to actual cases and with the demands of otherness already inherent in solicitude. Kant, he believes, already ran into this problem in trying to reconcile respect for rules and respect of persons in his threefold formulation of the categorical imperative. This is why ‘practical wisdom consists in inventing conduct that will best satisfy the exception required by solicitude by betraying the rule to the smallest extent possible’ (OAA, 269). In the most difficult cases, say those applying to the beginning and ending of life, this comes down to drawing a line between what is permissible and what is not, a solution that rarely results in a clear dichotomy. This is why, Ricoeur concludes, it is necessary to ‘completely revise Kantian formalism’ (OAA, 274), first by calling into question the emphasis it places on autonomy over respect for the other person, then by broadening the test of universalization to look like something more like legal reasoning (which itself is an instance of a judgement made in a particular case), where the intended outcome will be not so much to preserve coherence as to construct it. Finally, such a revision requires something close to what has been called an ethics of communication, one that will build on a dialogical rather than a monological understanding of practical reason. From this will follow a revised notion of what counts as a moral argument. It will be a form of argument that will include a place for an appeal to convictions, that is, to what is expressed through attestation. The result will be a moral philosophy that is itself characterized by the kind of fragility that constitutes selfhood. If we accept this, we can then say that imputability ‘is the ascription of action to its agent, under the condition of ethical and moral predicates, which characterize the action as good, just, conforming to duty, done out of duty, and finally, as being the wisest in the case of conflictual situations’ (OAA, 292, original italics). To whom, then, is such action imputable? To the self, where the self is capable of passing through the whole course of ethical and moral determinations of action, so that at the end self-esteem becomes the expression of a basic conviction, but one always checked by self-respect. This will be a conviction that makes possible the responsible self – one who ought to be recognized as such. Ricoeur can finally take up the ontological question what kind of self this is, in the sense of what mode of being belongs to it. His answer comes from the way he characterizes everything that has 106

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gone before as amounting to a hermeneutics of selfhood. This hermeneutics is one based on reflection that begins from analysis to consider the contrast between selfhood and sameness, then turns to the dialectical relation to the other, culminating in self-understanding that is obviously a form of self-interpretation. More importantly, this hermeneutic of selfhood leads to more than one answer, even on the ontological level. In the first place, what we can say is that the self is something that attests to itself as existing in the sense of ipseity, of a dynamic continuity over time. This attestation makes a truth claim that is based on the mediation of reflection by linguistic analysis, but also goes beyond simply being a claim about language usage. It presupposes that this use of language is about something beyond itself; in this case, the self in its very being. The contrary of this truth claim is not falsity, but suspicion. Indeed, suspicion is not simply the contrary of this truth claim, it is also the path to such attestation insofar as the self questions itself about its being and can be questioned by others. From an epistemological point of view, the resulting attestation will be characterized by belief as a kind of credence or trust in what is said. Ontologically, such attestation will turn on the idea of an underlying unity to human action, one that can be more or less adequately expressed by the distinction between a power to act and actual action, where this unity is better thought of as analogical than as simply univocal. It is what makes possible the self’s lived experience of being able to say ‘I can’, because it relates this experience to what the self in fact can ascribe to its own initiative and impute to its own responsibility. In this sense, the self is not simply something attested to; it is also a power-to-act in the world. Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as being in the world is helpful here, but Ricoeur worries that it may not be able to avoid a metaphysics of presence in trying to account for the fundamental nexus between being oneself and being-in-the-world. Instead, he expresses a preference for Spinoza’s suggestion that this connection should be thought of in terms of conatus as an effort to persevere in being, one that has priority over any focus on consciousness. What the dialectic with otherness contributes here is first of all acknowledgement of the polysemy of otherness. Otherness does not only refer to the otherness of another person, it also includes the otherness at the heart of selfhood found in the tension between its idem-identity and ipse-identity. Attestation bears witness to this tension when it acknowledges the self’s passivity, something that 107

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prevents our identifying the self with some absolute foundation as in many misreadings of the cogito. This passivity is experienced in many ways, including the experience of our own body as something we do not fully control, and similarly in our relation to the other person, but most deeply in our experience of ourselves in relation to conscience – which is not yet Cartesian consciousness and is one of the sources of what above was spoken of as suspicion. Philosophy cannot fully account for the source of this experienced otherness. This is one reason Ricoeur must be content with a hermeneutics of selfhood, but like his approach to ontology in general, it is a hermeneutics that finds that selfhood can be said in many ways – just like being.

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CHAPTER 6

MEMORY, RECOGNITION, PRACTICAL WISDOM

Ricoeur’s last published major works take up themes and topics anticipated in the works we considered in the preceding chapters. In these new books, he both continues to develop these earlier topics and introduces new concerns. These new ideas come from questions discovered through this earlier work or in response to challenges coming from work done by others, including both philosophers and historians. The large book he published in 2000 on memory, history and forgetting (MHF) provides a clear example. It picks up the discussion from Time and Narrative about history as a form of narrative discourse along with its conditions of possibility. In fact, the questions in this new book are traceable all the way back to Ricoeur’s early reflections on the place of subjectivity and truth in history in the essays collected in History and Truth.1 Something new is added, however, with the turn to memory and forgetting, which reflects new issues that had drawn Ricoeur’s attention. The philosophical anthropology that had always been present in his work is now more clearly articulated as one of what he calls ‘the capable human being’.2 This is not only somebody with a unique personal identity. It is someone who lives in a world with others and in institutions of various kinds. It is within this framework that every capable human being acts and is responsible for his or her actions. In this sense all these last books can be considered as contributions to the unfolding of this anthropology in relation to Ricoeur’s ethics of a good life with and for others in just institutions. They also stand on their own as significant philosophical contributions.

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REMEMBERING, FORGETTING, FORGIVING

Memory, History, Forgetting begins by taking up memory as a topic in its own right. The problem of continuity and discontinuity again plays a central role in that one of the questions for Ricoeur is to what extent historians are dependent on memory and to what extent they go beyond it. Is it not the case that historians, with their critical perspective on the past, finally must move beyond memory? This question is strengthened if we acknowledge that historians today are able to write a history of memory, in the sense of a history of what people have said about memory or how people have used it to commemorate significant past events. This latter use of commemorative memory, along with its possible abuse, will lead to Ricoeur’s concluding reflections on forgetting. Ricoeur begins by distinguishing memory from imagination. It is easy to confound the two in that they both appeal to the idea of an image, to an image of the past in the case of what we remember or what historians produce. But if memory and history are simply reducible to a use of our imagination, this leaves open the possibility that any ‘image’ of the past we remember or that historians may produce is simply a fiction. What would be called for, then, would be a hermeneutics of suspicion in the strong sense of a Freud, Marx or Nietzsche. To show why this is not so, Ricoeur again uses a phenomenological approach. Memory and imagination are distinguishable in terms of both their operative intentionality and the object they intend. In both cases their object is something absent, but in the case of memory it is not absent in the sense of being unreal or feigned, but rather as ‘having been’. The intended object of memory, in other words, is, as Aristotle had already said, ‘of the past’. This question of the pastness of the past interests Ricoeur more than any question about how the brain records or stores memory. Why is it, he asks, that what we remember, we remember as past? Must we not even go further and say that without memory we would have no idea or experience of the past as past, hence no idea of time as lived? Furthermore, this remembered past once was real and still may be said to be real in its own way if our ontology can include and make sense of this reality status of ‘having been’. Next, if what memory gives us is an image of the past, the question arises how ‘faithful’ this image is to what it represents. Ricoeur’s proposed answer is that the kind of truth involved here depends as 110

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much on the idea of veracity as on that of a correspondence between what is remembered and what actually happened in the past. In the end it takes an appeal to and acceptance of a different memory in order to disprove a remembered memory. To show this, Ricoeur appeals to the fact that there is a distinction between memories that just come to us involuntarily and those which are actively sought out; he refers to these latter instances as examples of ‘recollection’. Here is an example of what he means: typically, I do not have to do any work or make an effort to remember my name, which was given to me in the past. But ask me what happened on such and such day in my past, and some effort will be required in order to remember, and I may not succeed in doing so. Recollection, therefore, depends on a specific capacity to remember, one of the constitutive capacities of the capable human being, one that we must add to those of being able to speak, to narrate, and to understand narratives. Secondly, Ricoeur notes that we distinguish between memory and habit in that habits are active in an ongoing way in the present in ways that memory, particularly as recollection, is not. It is only in an odd sense that we might say that I have to ‘remember’ how to ride a bicycle in order to do so. Thirdly, there is the still more striking case that we can remember having forgotten something. Finally, there is the ‘small miracle’ (MHF, 39) of recognizing that we do remember something. This has two sides: we remember what it is that we remember and we recognize that we do remember it. This gives yet another example of reflexivity both in our lived experience and in the language we use to express this experience. As for the memory image, when there is one, we have to ask what sort of image this is. Like all images it ‘presents’ something to us. The difficulty is to make sense of the fact that what is presented is something absent in that it is already past – in the present, something is presented ‘as’ past. Memory therefore is a special case of a more general phenomenon of presentation or what phenomenology calls ‘presentification’. But memory is differentiated from this more general phenomenon in that it both recalls and repeats what it presents: it re-presents it. Why do we trust this moment of putting this past something into an image – and when do we not or should we not do so? Before taking up these questions, Ricoeur discusses some well-known examples of how people have sought to train their memory and increase their skill at remembering. This allows him to construct a typology of uses of memory that can be set in parallel 111

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with and illuminate their contrary forms, abuses of memory. These negative examples include blocked memories, manipulated ones, and abusive uses of commemoration. Blocked memories call for something like a therapeutic approach; manipulated ones are a problem in that they threaten our narrative identities; and obligatory or imposed ones refer to those cases ‘where commemoration rhymes with rememoration’ (MHF, 57). ‘The temptation then is great to transform this plea [for commemoration] into a claim on behalf of memory in opposition to history’ (MHF, 87). Ricoeur’s initial conclusion is that recognizing these possible abuses of memory indicates that there is a fundamental vulnerability to memory even while we are dependent upon it for the very idea of the past. Next, he introduces the idea of a possible collective memory, arising out of work in sociology. The idea of such a memory renews the emphasis on the question ‘who?’ in Time and Narrative in that we can always ask whose memory it is. We know from Oneself as Another that we can use any of the personal pronouns to answer this question. It is my memory, your memory, her memory, our memory, their memory. So if we limit memory to individuals we run the risk of isolating recalled memories by making them depend on specific egos, but if we allow for collective memory we run the risk of losing an answer to the question ‘who remembers?’ in a collective, anonymous ‘who’ that can turn into what Heidegger called the ‘they’. This is the ‘they’ of ‘they say’, which really is no one at all. Ricoeur holds therefore that these two forms of memory should not be set in simple opposition to each other, but rather allotted to different universes of discourse, ones that perhaps have today become alienated from each other. But for him, the priority will always fall on the side of individual memory. One reason individual memory is so important is that it is closely linked with the inwardness associated with selfhood and personal experience: these are my memories, this was my experience, I remember I was there. Such a sense of the mineness of lived selfhood again raises the question of the continuity over time of this ‘me’ – just as we may say that collective memory in its way is associated with the endurance over time of a group or community, whether we speak of it in the first, second or third person. However, there is danger if we make this continuity depend solely on memory, as John Locke does for the case of individual identity. If memory is lost, blocked or denied, our selfhood and with it personal identity too will apparently 112

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be lost or denied. Yet we need also to acknowledge that as time passes, the things we remember or can remember do fall away, so to speak; a kind of split gets introduced between what and who we were and who and what we are today. Should we say, then, that a communal or collective memory is what ensures the continuity of both individual and communal identity? Ricoeur argues that while collective or communal memory does play a part, we must not attribute all responsibility for individual selfhood and memory to it, if only because the relation between individual and collective memory is one of analogy, not of strict identity. We cannot simply derive one form of memory from the other, although we can recognize those uses of language in which these forms of memory intersect. Our use of possessive forms in speaking of memory indicate one such point of intersection. Memory and memories always ‘belong to’ someone or some people. As such, then, memory is something we ascribe to its possessor, thereby imputing responsibility for it to this individual or group. But, Ricoeur adds, there is a difference between ascribing something to oneself and ascribing it to individual others, even to a collective other, that must not be overlooked. It is not that such ascription to others is superimposed on ascription to oneself, but rather that they are coextensive as is indicated by the very way we speak of memory and remembering. The real question arises rather when we ask how our remembering is fulfilled or confirmed. This is why Ricoeur’s argument eventually will turn to history and how historians’ work provides a clear example of the critique of memories. There are also intermediate levels of forms of memory that need to be considered; for example, the shared memories of people who are close to one another differs phenomenologically from those shared by large numbers of people who may never encounter one another face to face. The distinction introduced here between self, close or intimate others, and distant others will play a large role in this book. It also figures prominently in Ricoeur’s ongoing reflections on justice and how the just figures in his ethics with its quest for a good life with and for others in just institutions. From this, we can see that he has moved beyond his initial formulation of how the teleological principle of his ethics unfolds by acknowledging that the term ‘others’ is more complex than he had originally thought. Therefore, in this new book, not only is there the ontological dimension of the otherness of the past to consider, which is not the otherness of the other person, but 113

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also the fact that other selves themselves occupy a spectrum that ranges from those close and well known to me, to large numbers of distant others, to everybody. This spectrum is one reason Ricoeur emphasizes the importance of the play of scales found in the histories recounted by historians. Thus, Ricoeur finds new questions that have to do with the epistemology of historical research and writing. One of these questions is the extent to which historians must be said to be dependent upon memory and to what extent they go beyond it. Another concerns what we can call the transhistorical dimension of memory, memory that goes beyond any one individual’s life time and that may extend over very long time spans, at the limit, over time itself. These two questions meet when we ask how the truth of the historian’s written history stands in relation to the veracity of an individual or group’s reported memories. To respond to this question, Ricoeur returns to what we can learn from the ways historians do history, from their research to their writing up their results. Using a label borrowed from Michel de Certeau, he sums up this process as the ‘historiographical operation’. Newer developments in the writing of history that had appeared after the publication of Time and Narrative also influence his thinking about this historiographical operation. Beyond the emphasis of the Annales historians on the long time span and social facts that changed slowly or repeated over time, many European historians had returned to a focus on individuals and events, particularly those individuals low down the social scale, whose experience had to be teased from the remaining historical documentation and traces. This change of focus can be placed under the headings of microhistory and the history of mentalities, where the emphasis is largely on how individuals, especially those of the lower classes, conceive of and negotiate their day-to-day lives in a society they may not fully comprehend or control. There also was an ongoing debate about how historians should or could deal with the destructive events of the Second World War, specifically the death camps and the trauma of those who experienced them. In speaking of the historiographical operation, Ricoeur first wants to deemphasize the idea that the historian works in discrete stages: first gathering documents, then examining and criticizing them, then writing up the history text that results. We make such distinctions to see how historians work, but in fact these stages overlap 114

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in such a way that we cannot understand any of them apart from the others. As Ricoeur puts it, ‘Each of the three operations of the historiographical operation stands as a base for the other two, inasmuch as they serve successively as referents for the other two’ (MHF, 137). It is the project of writing of history that runs through all of them. This is why his main question is why can we be confident about what historians say about the past? Here the question of the historian’s relation to memory returns in force. Ricoeur introduces his discussion by returning to Plato’s famous attack on writing in the Phaedrus. Is writing a remedy for the weakness of memory or does it poison memory? Better, when is it one or the other of these possibilities? In other words, when does history serve memory by reactivating and in some sense preserving the past? When does history abuse or harm memory? The first requirement for answering these questions is to acknowledge the importance of historians’ work in the archives. This is where they find the documentary evidence that serves as a warrant for what they say and write. But the materials found in archives are themselves, Ricoeur emphasizes, derived from the testimony of individual memories: ‘we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person, and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies’ (MHF, 147). Yet historians do more than accept such testimony, for in recounting what happened, they expand the sense of space and time beyond what either the documents or the testimonies they contain actually say. For example, the original reference to the lived experience of a lived here and now is expanded thanks to the use of the calendar and historical periodization, as already signalled in Time and Narrative. A more geometric space is also introduced, one that can be plotted on a map, where no place is necessarily more privileged than any other. Another addition occurs through the reference to the encompassing historical time whose own system of dating is finally extrinsic to the events recounted: ‘the present moment with its absolute “now” becomes a particular date among all the ones whose exact calculation is allowed by the calendar. . . . As concerns the time of memory in particular, the “another time” of the remembered past is henceforth inscribed within the “before that” of the dated past’ (MHF, 155). This is a time that is neither cyclic nor linear, but rather dependent on the history recounted.3 115

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Testimony, too, is affected by the historians’ research in the archive in that ‘it reappears at the end of the epistemological inquiry at the level of the representation of the past through narrative, rhetorical devices, and images’ (MHF, 161). As Ricoeur’s argument unfolds, it is the status of this concept of ‘representation’, of the historian’s representation of the past, that moves to centre stage as most problematic. But even at the stage of testimony itself, before it is deposited in archives, the question can arise whether it can be trusted, so the historians’ criticism is not something simply imported from the outside. We see this once we recognize that any testimony about the past brings three factors into play: a first-person reference to the person giving the testimony, a use of past-tense verbs, and a claim relating to a specific time and place. In effect, such testimony finally says ‘I was there.’ This applies analogously even to material traces of the past which bear witness to it. While the historian finally can criticize such testimony by confronting it with other testimony, the original witness can only say ‘I was there, I remember . . .’. Therefore a social dimension or an appeal to a social bond enters into play at every level of such suspicion about testimony in that confidence in the word of another is ultimately what is at issue, as is the capacity of human beings to exchange confidences. This is why the evidence for what historians say must always be traceable back to some form of documentation. But these documents become evidence only because the historian approaches them with a question, where this question already begins to distance the document as possible evidence from the original testimony it bears.4 In this sense, a historical document, whatever form it may take, is already more than just a trace of the past. It is a means to discover facts about the past. Yet, Ricoeur cautions, ‘A vigilant epistemology will guard here against the illusion that what we call a fact coincides with what really happened, or with the living memory of eyewitness, as if the facts lay sleeping in the documents until the historians extracted them’ (MHF, 178). The historical fact is not the past event but a means to represent this event, which is why we can raise the question of the truth status of any historical fact. Obviously, this is a truth that depends on the historian’s method and can only be refuted by taking this into account. Ultimately, though, we are driven back to the question of the trustworthiness of the spontaneous testimony that is the basis for any historical document. We can question this testimony, but eventually we must concede that we 116

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cannot question everything without turning critique itself into a form of conviction, a point Ricoeur had already emphasized in Critique and Conviction. What is at issue therefore is to establish how the historiographical operation can legitimately be said to support such testimony through a measured exercise of questioning it. This brings us back to the question of the relation between explanation and understanding, so central to hermeneutics, and already considered in Time and Narrative in regard to history. Ricoeur adds to that discussion a new emphasis on how the explanation– understanding relation – which he now ties even more closely together by writing it as explanation/understanding – is closely tied to the way documented facts are interconnected in both historical research and writing. Imagination plays an important role in bringing this about through the way it distinguishes and apportions the objects referred to by considering them in relation to human reality as a social fact. Two factors are especially important here. One is the constitution of the social bond, as what allows people to live together. The other is the problem of identity attached to our social existence. Interpretation comes into play in the way historians make sense of the interplay of such social existence and identity at all three levels of the historiographical operation because what they aim at is a representation of the past, a representation that is not simply a fiction. In order to give more content to his discussion of how the historiographical operation functions, Ricoeur turns next to the history of mentalities, where a mentality is taken to be something constitutive of the social bond but also expressive of it, although in the end he does not find this is the best way to label what is at issue.5 He draws further evidence from the fact that histories are written on different scales, from that which is applied to one obscure individual in a small village only reachable through others’ testimony to those that speak of the large-scale social patterns of long time span history or of broad geographical areas. What most draws his attention, however, is how the interplay of these different scales shows us something about how the historiographical operation works in practice, even when all the different scales that may be used cannot simply be related to each other in terms of a single temporal coordinate system or map. From this play of scales and their possible interaction, however, comes the historical representation, said to be a faithful representation of the past. 117

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A further question, therefore, is how more precisely to characterize this representation, which is always the result of an interpretation, because interpretation is operative at all three levels of the historiographical operation. It is an ‘image’ of the past, Ricoeur agrees, but not in the sense of an exact copy, if only because of the role played by the scale chosen, which can vary and in varying will bring out different details. Not a copy, the historian’s representation of the past is more like an icon, something we ‘see through’ to what really is at issue.6 To express this, Ricoeur returns to a notion introduced in Time and Narrative, but not really developed in detail there.7 Using a neologism, he calls it représentance and means by this that the historian’s representation of the past can be said to ‘stand for’ (in an active sense) the past. As such, this ‘standing for’ is not a matter of simply putting into words something that was already there, for the historian’s use of narrative contributes not only to what is said but how it is said, but neither is représentance completely a matter of invention. What the historian produces stands at the boundary where invention and discovery no longer can be distinguished. The privileged form this takes is, of course, narration, and with it an emplotment of the recounted events or other phenomena. ‘Representation in its narrative aspect . . . does not add something coming from the outside to the documentary and explanatory phases, but rather accompanies and supports them’ (MHF, 238). One way it does so is by introducing the idea of narrative coherence among events and regarding identities over time. Another way is by bringing to bear, explicitly or implicitly, some moral evaluation. Here is the tie to the question whether the historian’s representation can really come to terms with horrific events, ones that we must condemn as morally unacceptable – and that we may suspect are finally unrepresentable. An important factor here is that the plot imposed on the past by any narrative form both integrates what is recounted and takes a distance on it, opening the way to what one hopes will be a just judgement. This is not always assured, of course, since historical narrative also makes use of rhetorical devices in its account and can therefore itself be criticized. Ricoeur’s point, however, is that it is the necessary use of documentary proof and forms of causal and teleological explanation that finally serves as a check against simply presenting a fiction claiming to be a history, even when it may take another historian’s history or the testimony of survivors to show this. 118

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Still, Ricoeur concedes, we can raise the question whether there is an unavoidable limit to historical representation, whatever forms it may take. There are two possibilities to consider: have the available cultural forms of representation become so exhausted they no longer work? Are there events that by their very nature resist representation, even while they cry out for it? The central example here is the death camps. As so often, Ricoeur responds to this challenge by opposing the two possibilities just listed as extreme cases, ones where thought breaks down, but where we can examine the conceptual space opened between them taken as limit ideas. This leads him to say that a good part of what is at issue in raising the question of the limits of historical representation has to do with a capacity for reception on our part. Can we bear to know this history, to remember it? He suggests that what is at issue in pondering how to represent what seems unrepresentable stems from therapeutic as well as epistemological concerns. The demand for truth in such extreme cases should be seen as closely tied to what Freud called a work of mourning, along with the work of overcoming resistances to this process. Recalling, without citing, his own reading of Freud, Ricoeur further suggests that there may in fact be a gain from such a process, a kind of surplus of meaning owing to the work of reflection involved in writing such histories. If we are still suspicious of the result, he points out, this is a suspicion that affects not only historians’ representations of the past, but the explanation/understanding, documentation and archival stages as well, and even their appeal finally to memory. We overcome such suspicion only by respecting the historiographical operation in all its dimensions. We can do so because, as we have seen, ‘the seed of criticism’ was already planted in the original testimony that stands behind and supports the historiographical operation,8 hence it is not something simply added from the outside. The possibility of criticism is always already there in that all testimony is open to the retort, ‘I/we don’t believe you.’ But this does not disprove it, and as we also have seen, Ricoeur thinks in the end we must appeal to the conviction expressed by some testimony, including that of our own memory, if we are to say anything at all. What we must keep in mind, however, is that any question arising in regard to the historical product of this critical process finally is itself a question about the past. The historical representation of the past gives us an image in the present of an absent thing, ‘but the absent 119

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thing itself gets split into disappearance into and existence in the past’ (MHF, 280); it is a representation of the past as ‘having been’, and here epistemology borders on ontology, on the ontology of our historical condition as beings that exist in the world. It is left to hermeneutical philosophy to explore the conditions of possibility of this ontology, where such conditions are existential in that they shape our understanding of our existence as intelligible and meaningful. They do so because they structure our existence as worldly temporal agents. Ricoeur admits that what hermeneutics can give here does not amount to a logical proof; rather is something that we appropriate and take up into our own lives by incorporating it into our self-understanding and action. At its limit, then, this philosophy leads us to the question of forgetting, not only as an enemy of memory, but as necessary for such existential appropriation. Beyond this question of forgetting we will also encounter that of forgiveness. TO FORGIVE IS NOT TO FORGET

If we look back at Ricoeur’s earlier work from this point, we may recognize that the idea of a philosophical anthropology and its ontology runs through all of his work, and it gains in depth and complexity over time. He had begun with the question of human agency in relation to the question of freedom and its limits, added the acknowledgement that such freedom can be misused, anticipating thereby his later discussion of ethics and a just form of social existence, then recognized more and more that we have to take seriously the temporality and historicity of such existence along with their implications for action in the present. A new question here is whether this anthropology must also incorporate the possibility that our existence is not only historical, but that this historicity can in some ways be a burden for us, if only because, following Nietzsche, we must ask in what ways history may limit our freedom and action in the present. To answer such a question requires considering in greater depth our own existence as historical beings and the ways in which we make sense of history. An echo of Ricoeur’s concern about our possibly over-estimating the Cartesian cogito returns here. The search for objective historical knowledge may itself turn into an unjustified claim to absolute knowledge. Ricoeur had already criticized such a possibility in the 120

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third volume of Time and Narrative in rejecting Hegel’s philosophy of history. Here his argument turns more on the necessity to appeal to some non-historical categories in order even to conceive of history and to do history. One such category – and a controversial one – is the idea of ‘modernity’ as indicating something radically new in history, something that represents a radical break with everything that had gone before. Another is the very idea of ‘history’ in the singular as opposed to ‘histories’ in the plural. What allows us to speak of ‘history’ as a collective singular term embracing all of time? Lastly, there is the idea of historical time itself. We have already noted that in Time and Narrative Ricoeur sees historical time as something constructed on the basis of two other ideas of time, cosmic time and lived, existential time. Might it not be that such an idea also requires the idea of something other than time, hence something not historical? Might it not also be therefore that the very ideas that allow us to unify history are also ones that require us to think beyond history in some yet to be determined way? Here, we return to the question of Transcendence posed in Ricoeur’s earliest work for the very claim that we are historical beings, summed up in the idea of a fundamental historicity, is itself a historical claim, one that goes beyond history from within it. A core question, therefore, will be whether the circularity involved here is a vicious circle or not. Central to Ricoeur’s examination of these questions is the analogy between the historian and the judge. Both aim at truth and justice. Both ultimately depend on the testimony of the parties involved. And both claim to reach a fair conclusion from a position of impartiality. Yet from the perspective of contemporary history and historical consciousness, no one can claim to be an absolutely neutral third party. What is at issue therefore in comparing them has both an epistemic and a moral dimension. And here the analogy between the judge and historian begins to break down in that the trial process is determined by more specific rules and even by a more specific setting than the historian’s research. Furthermore, the judge’s verdict is more definitive in that the judge has to decide, whereas historians can prevaricate or introduce qualifying terms, or even call for and expect further research, because they recognize that ‘the writing of history is a perpetual rewriting’ (MHF, 320). But this analogy cannot be ignored today, Ricoeur believes, because historians find themselves called upon to deal with what are perceived to be crimes and evils on a hitherto unknown scale, horrific 121

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crimes against whole peoples, even against humanity. Can they write this history? Ricoeur answers that they are incapable of writing one all-inclusive history that would ‘include the history of the perpetrators, the history of the victims, and the history of the witnesses’ (HHS, 325). They must instead aim at and can arrive at a partial consensus on the basis of the histories they do write, histories meant for an audience that includes not just the ideal types of the historian and the judge, but also that of another third party, the citizen who is called upon to appropriate this history into his or her understanding and future action. The price to pay, however, is that historians need always to be ready to start over again if they are adequately to deal with such matters as time continues to pass. Another test case for the possible limits on history’s interpretation of itself as ‘history’ is the role interpretation plays throughout the historiographical operation. Interpretation in this sense has to do with a second-order discourse that reflects on the whole operation rather than with the practice of interpretation at each of its stages. What it points to at this higher level is the conclusion that historical facts can always be interpreted in another way. Hence there is an inevitable degree of controversy involved in their representation, especially since there always remains ‘an impenetrable, opaque, inexhaustible ground of personal and cultural motivations’ (MHF, 337) that historians bring to their work. This is reflected in the role ‘selection’ plays in the historiographical operation, not only through the question the historian initially brings to the archive, but in the very choice of documents to be kept there, as well as in the formulation of any documentary proof and the choice of how to emplot the result. A subtle interplay of personal and public reasoning is at work here. All these points, Ricoeur concludes, show why hermeneutics cannot allow history to claim to totalize itself, even while it can claim validity for what it does achieve. Another consideration regarding our historical condition follows from this discussion. It has to do with the existential categories that characterize the human condition as not only historical but as expressed through the structures of what Heidegger had spoken of as ‘being-in-the world’, then further explicated in terms of the notion of ‘care’. Ricoeur proposes a correction to this analysis in that Heidegger ignores the question of human embodiment, especially as this involves what Merleau-Ponty called our ‘flesh’, which is both subjective and objective. Secondly, Ricoeur questions 122

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whether an ontology solely based on temporality is really able to make possible the representation of the past by history, and before that by memory. Thirdly, he argues that we can make sense of, understand the past as past only by pairing it with ‘the future quality of the future and the present quality of the present’ (MHF, 346), an insight that will count against any tendency to confine our historical knowledge to merely a retrospective perspective on the past or as a form of nostalgia. Finally, therefore, any hermeneutics of our historical existence will have to be able to show how to derive history and our ability to make history (in both senses of this phrase, by acting and by recounting) from its existential categories, something he thinks Heidegger was unable really to do.9 This leads Ricoeur finally to the question of death, not so much as a question of our own mortality but rather as a question of what debt, if any, we owe to the dead of the past. Ricoeur argues that it is history that finally allows us to offer them an appropriate burial. Contrary to Heidegger, who saw death as our utmost possibility, Ricoeur argues that it is something that cuts off life, but that nevertheless can be appropriated and internalized as a part of life, even while remaining heterogeneous to our desire to live. In other words, human beings are capable of accepting their ‘having-to-die’. ‘At the limit, at the horizon, loving death like a sister, after the manner of the poverello of Assisi, remains a gift that depends on an economy inaccessible even to an existentiell experience as singular as the apparent stoicism of a Heidegger, the economy placed by the New Testament under the term agape’ (MHF, 358). To see this, however, we must also face the reality of mourning, and do so in such a way that it includes even those others who are not our close relations, whose deaths can teach us a lesson we cannot learn either from our own mortality or from that of those closest to us. This is a lesson about the debt we owe to such others, to all such others. It is a debt that comes down to what Ricoeur calls ‘the act of sepulcher’ (MHF, 365), the obligation to give them a proper burial. This is something more than the act of burial, however. Through what Freud calls the work of mourning it transforms the physical absence of these past people, including the many victims of past acts, into an inner presence that accompanies us today. Historians contribute to our recognition of this debt through their ability not just to write the history of these past individuals, but even to write something like a history of death, one that expands 123

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our understanding of this phenomenon. In this way, they add to Ricoeur’s own effort to transform Heidegger’s ontology of beingtoward-death into one of being-in-the-face-of-death, of existing-inthe-face-of-death. We embody this in part through our ability to reckon with time while existing in time, in part through our actions, and in part through how we take responsibility for our actions and those of others. Obviously, memory and history have a major role to play here, but neither are they sufficient by themselves to provide an answer how to do this, since such existence also must be expressed in action in the present through what, drawing on his little ethics, Ricoeur calls practical wisdom, something that may require a break with past history. Here the question of forgetting arises. It lies on the horizon of memory since it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of forgetting if there is no memory or remembering. Forgetting has to be considered, however, because it ‘is experienced as an attack on the reliability of memory’ (MHF, 413). Forgetting has different forms. Most obviously, there is forgetting that is caused by the erasure or destruction of the traces of the past that make memory possible. This may be the case, for example, in instances where our brain is damaged, but it also applies to those other material traces historians draw upon to discover what happened in the past. Ricoeur is not directly concerned here with what science can tell us about the anatomical basis of memory. (He does discuss this in his dialogue with the neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, reported in What Makes Us Think?) But this approach to memory and forgetting is that of an outside observer. Ricoeur’s interest here is rather on our lived experience, so his approach is again phenomenological, driven by the question whether we might have a duty to forget parallel to the duty to remember implied by our debt to the past. This is a question exacerbated by the recent emphasis on commemoration as a response to the horrors of the recent and even the long-term past. His answer will be negative: ‘one absolutely cannot speak of a duty of forgetting’ (MHF, 418). This is not to say that we can or must remember everything. Between that which is forgotten and beyond recovery and that which we can remember there is a place for many uses of memory and forgetting; for example, there is room for what Ricoeur calls forgetting held in reserve, things not currently called to mind, but available to memory and hence not lost forever. We can even speak of this kind of forgetting as forgetting that founds memory. To see this more 124

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clearly, we need to consider the abuses as well as the uses of forgetting. Ricoeur lists three types of such imposed forgetting, based on the three possible abuses of memory listed earlier. These are, we recall, blocked memories, manipulated memories and obligated memories. Blocked memories call for some kind of therapeutic approach that will allow their recovery. Manipulated memories require instead a critique of ideology that can reveal the distortion at work on this level, as in their way do obligated memories. Ricoeur is particularly concerned here with the practice of amnesty, especially when it says not only that no one will be prosecuted for past deeds, but also that these cannot even be spoken of, and at limit even recalled or remembered. This, he holds, is too much like a magical solution to the memory of past discord or suffering and its consequences in the present. This is why, finally, the question of forgiveness arises. Forgiveness constitutes the horizon of both memory and forgetting. ‘It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterprise’ (MHF, 457) in that it cannot completely make up for the unpardonable nature of moral evil, either in the past or the present. This is why forgiveness is difficult and not something accomplished in a single step. That it is possible we can see if we compare it to the act of promise making. Whereas promising binds the agent to his act, forgiving releases him from it. But we must also recognize an important difference between them because on the political plane there is no genuine possibility of a completely successful institutional expression of forgiveness. This is shown by the failure of amnesties to achieve their stated purposes, although Ricoeur does see some hope in the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions, as in South Africa, although even in these cases many participants have admitted these bodies did not accomplish everything people hoped they would. Forgiveness is also difficult because there is a gap between any act and its agent, so to forgive the one may not be to forgive the other. Moreover, on the side of the agent, we are again faced with the question of ‘why such evil?’ This is once again the question of the fault, which when pursued goes beyond any individual agent, however evil he may be or have been. The limit we run up against, or the region where thought about forgiveness begins to break down, is that evil is ultimately not justifiable. It is not rational. Hence it may need to be answered in another way than through forgiveness, through the use 125

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of the myths and symbols that speak of overcoming evil. This introduces a vertical dimension into the horizontal one between victims and their aggressors, one that in the best case recalls (or promises) that there is forgiveness in such a way as to make forgiveness actually possible on the human plane. It also changes our discourse in that it brings into play the language of love, a love that does not keep score, a love that might best be thought of as an unconditional gift. But this is not to create impunity on the legal or political level. Here again our language has to change to take up the questions of pardon and guilt, justice and punishment, a question we shall return to below. Ricoeur concludes his reflections on forgiveness by noting that it is difficult to forgive where it has not been sought or when there is no sign of repentance. This is a problem for history in that the victims and the perpetrators of past wrongs may no longer be alive either to ask for forgiveness or to give or receive it. Hope therefore comes into play, hope that one day things will all come together and forgiveness will be achieved, but this is something that cannot be fully expressed in the transcendental or speculative language of philosophy. It depends instead on what Ricoeur calls an optative use of language and thought. This language would give expression to a supreme form of forgetting, one characterized by ‘a disposition and a way of being in the world which would be insouciance, carefreeness’ (MHF, 505). Until that moment, he reminds us that to forgive is not to forget, but as his own reading of Song of Songs reminds us, love is as strong as death.10 OUR CAPACITY FOR MUTUAL RECOGNITION

That Ricoeur, at the end of his life, should choose to take up the concept of recognition is not surprising given the emphasis he has given to the question of personal and communal identity, beginning with Time and Narrative and pursued in Oneself as Another. His emphasis on our relations to others, so central to his little ethics, would point him in this direction, as would the contemporary discussion of the ‘politics of identity’. Beyond these concerns, however, Ricoeur has a larger target in mind. For one thing, as he points out at the very beginning of The Course of Recognition, it is striking to discover that there is no established great philosophy of recognition in the same way philosophers can name leading works in epistemology 126

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or metaphysics or ethics. Beyond this, Ricoeur’s reflections lead him to a distinction he argues has not really been emphasized sufficiently in the available discussions of recognition. This is the distinction between reciprocal and mutual recognition. In fact, insofar as there is a worked-out philosophy of recognition to be found either in the history of Western philosophy or in current discussions of the politics of identity, the core thematic idea turns out at best to be that of a reciprocal rather than mutual recognition, at least in the sense Ricoeur wants to understand this phenomenon; that is, as something that goes beyond reciprocal recognition and is not reducible to it. That there is no ‘widely recognized philosophical work of high reputation’ (CR, 1) on recognition to be found in the philosophical tradition also means that Ricoeur has to adopt a starting point novel for him. This is to begin not from the history of philosophy but by looking at dictionaries to see what they have to say about the term ‘recognition’. What he finds is that there is an obvious polysemy given in any good dictionary as to possible meanings of this term. Indeed in French the range of possible meanings is wider than for the corresponding term in English. Reconnaissance and its verbal forms in French includes a much stronger sense of gratitude than does the word ‘recognition’ in English – to say je suis reconnaissant is to say ‘I am grateful.’ Ricoeur sees that this may provide some opening to his concern for the specific case of mutual recognition. His initial question is what connects the various lexical senses of this term as we find them in a good dictionary; more specifically, can we say what generates the order of the series of meanings we find there? Ricoeur finds a clue in the fact that these meanings shift from an active to a passive voice, from ‘recognizing’ to ‘being recognized’. He further sees that this shift carries with it an increasing emphasis on persons as it takes place, adding to his hypothesis that it may tell us something that can get us closer to the idea of mutual recognition. The definitions given of ‘recognition’ move from recognizing a thing to recognizing oneself, to recognizing others, to, finally, being recognized as oneself by others. Therefore, he asks whether we can ‘pass from the realm of the rule-governed polysemy of words from natural language to the formation of philosophical concepts worthy of figuring in a theory of recognition?’ (CR, 16). Here an appeal to what little has been said about recognition in the history of philosophy can serve as a stepping stone. The key moments in that history – or those leading instances of what Ricoeur calls ‘events in thinking’ that lead 127

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to new insight into this topic – all can be read as aiming at formulating an adequate concept of what is at issue in recognition. In that history, we find a trajectory similar to the one in the dictionary from the active to the passive voice. So this trajectory can be interpreted as indicating what ultimately is at stake in the idea of recognition, mutual recognition. In the end, this history shows that there is a demand for recognition that can only be satisfied by mutual recognition, ‘where this mutual recognition either remains an unfulfilled dream or requires procedures and institutions that elevate recognition to the political plane’ (CR, 19). Another noteworthy aspect of this historical trajectory is that there is a noticeable shift from an emphasis on recognition as knowledge – in the sense of identifying X and identifying X as Y – to a sense that goes beyond knowing to something closer to questions that apply to what we can call ‘life together’. And tied to this, the idea of identity plays a role at each station along the way, but it too shifts its meaning as the course of recognition unfolds, reaching a culmination in the idea of a genuine identity, ‘the one that makes us who we are, that demands to be recognized’ (CR, 21). The course of recognition, therefore, ‘not only detaches itself from knowledge but opens the way to it’ (ibid.). At first, the emphasis is on knowledge in the sense of being able to identify something. This occurs prior to raising any question of truth or falsity. We identify things by distinguishing them, a trait that will carry through to the end stage of mutual recognition in that this is what people seek in asking for, even in demanding, recognition from others. At the next stage, this distinguishing turns into the question of distinguishing truth from falsity, a stage Ricoeur associates with Descartes, where for Descartes this question of truth is clearly subsequent to some initial act of identification. Kant adds the idea of recognizing things in time. This is a significant step in that it allows us to consider not only the time involved in any act of recognition, but also the important question of recognition of the same things over time; for example, the question of recognizing something again as the same thing. This experience suggests that time must be thought of not simply as succession but as somehow accumulative in that it allows us to retain the idea of something as enduring as the same thing as time passes. The idea of a limit test case also arises here, that of something unrecognizable, either for itself or as it appears and reappears in time. This is a possibility that 128

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forces us to think further about what allows us to recognize something in the sense of being able to identify it. Ricoeur considers two key examples here. The first one is the case of something we recognize, that then goes away for a while before coming back again, when we then recognize it again as the same thing, perhaps after some hesitation. The second, more striking case, drawn from Proust, adds more complexity to this example in that it acknowledges that things can change over time. Here the thing (or person) that goes away and returns has changed its appearance in the meantime (say, by growing older), but somehow can still finally be recognized as being the same thing or person we had known in the past. This example clearly resonates with the question of self-identity over time. To get to further insight into this phenomenon Ricoeur sees that we have to move beyond the recognition of things as things to recognizing ourselves and other selves as selves. One striking feature here is that we recognize ourselves as different from others. In this sense, there is a ‘persistent dissymmetry’ (CR, 69) in our relations to others that Ricoeur emphasizes more strongly than he had done in previous works.11 Such self-recognition is closely tied to our capacity to impute responsibility to ourselves and to others, a theme Ricoeur sums up under the heading ‘recognizing responsibility’. Examples of this kind of recognition can be found in history as early as in The Odyssey with the return of Ulysses to his homeland and in Sophocles’ story of King Oedipus’ final recognition and acceptance of himself when he arrives at Colonus at the end of his life. As Aristotle already recognized on the basis of examples like these, this topic also introduces the question of possible deliberation about our actions prior to doing them, returning us again to the question of the voluntary and the involuntary, where deliberate action turns out to be something in the power of the agent, a capacity of the capable human being. Examining the phenomenology of this capable human being in greater detail, Ricoeur concludes that our capacity to act involves attestation as well as recognition, where a fundamental difference remains between these two notions. In terms of our use of language, attestation belongs to the discourse of testimony, whereas recognition is linked more to the processes of identification and self-identification. Yet these two intersect in the certitude and assurance we express when we say ‘I can’. Beyond this, we also say and experience that we can impute our action to our self and take responsibility for it. Moreover, 129

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because we distinguish ourselves from others in saying ‘I’, the question of recognition by others who impute my actions to me already arises. This can turn into the question of mutual recognition when we ask to what extent our self-recognition requires and even depends upon this recognition by others. Such recognition by others, Ricoeur holds, is necessary for attaining a full sense of ourselves as responsible selves, even if it is not always given, and sometimes is even deliberately withheld or denied. Ricoeur again finds an important guideline in our ability to make and keep promises. Promises not only involve our ability to commit ourselves using language; they also bring into play our relation to others as the possible beneficiaries of our promises. It is also necessary to reverse this emphasis and recognize that we ourselves are able to make promises only on the basis of having ourselves already been the beneficiary of the promises and actions of others. In this way, the idea of the debt we owe to others comes to the fore, as does an increased acknowledgement that any phenomenology of the capable human being must also consider the social capacities that make all this possible. Ricoeur takes this latter notion up in terms of a discussion of social practices and collective representations, where these enable our social capacities to actualize themselves. Here the idea of symbolic mediations comes clearly into play, even if we allow that a symbolic function was already operative in language at the level of saying ‘I can’. What now becomes more obvious, however, if we had overlooked it earlier, is that language itself is a social phenomenon, thereby justifying the reversal from an emphasis on the individual self to a more explicitly intersubjective, albeit dialectical, model. The question of how social practices and collective representations enable the social bond is complex. They allow us to act and to make history, but they do not exclude the possibility of conflict in that they also affect our capacity to make choices. Our capacities, therefore, are not ethically neutral, and in examining them, the distinction between description and prescription ultimately breaks down. Returning to examples drawn from the history of philosophy, Ricoeur takes up the young Hegel’s debate with Thomas Hobbes over the source of recognition in the constituting of the social bond. Hobbes claimed to eliminate any moral basis for the social bond, reducing it to a purely naturalistic outcome based solely on our fear of a violent death. Hegel’s rejoinder to Hobbes was that in fact we 130

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desire recognition, where this desire is not something added to who we are but is already constitutive of our existence. Yet Hegel was never able to develop this insight beyond the possibility of reciprocal recognition and therefore, Ricoeur concludes, he never really could show why the possibility of misrecognition in the sense of a deliberate refusal of recognition is immoral. The same critique applies, Ricoeur believes, to contemporary discussions of the politics of identity, which draw on Hegel’s idea of a desire, even a struggle for recognition, while setting aside his metaphysics of identity. The strength of these positions is that they do reflect the shift from the active to the passive voice, to the importance of wanting to be recognized for any theory of recognition. But, like Hegel, these recent theories of recognition do not really get beyond the idea of reciprocal recognition, which can all too easily be limited to narrow contexts, such as commercial exchanges. In these narrow cases, the selves involved are simply those required for participating in the exchange; nothing more about them needs to be known or acknowledged. Beyond this reduction to what he sees as a diminished self, Ricoeur wants to argue that mutual recognition goes beyond every explanation in terms of a struggle for recognition present in Hegel and his successors. Mutual recognition depends more on ‘states of peace’ than on those of struggle and conflict. To show this, Ricoeur considers cases where recognition is given without the necessity of conflict and struggle. They occur on three levels, an affective, a judicial, and a social level. On the affective level, others who love us and give us approbation recognize us and we recognize them in return. A good example here is what Ricoeur calls recognition in terms of a lineage. I recognize myself because my parents and family recognize me as one of them. Without this recognition by others whom I love and trust, and who love and trust me, I would not be who I am. At this level, therefore, the result of mutual recognition is self-confidence and misrecognition will threaten, if not undercut, this self-confidence. On the judicial level, relations of respect replace the emphasis on trust given and returned, both as regards the application of norms held to be universal and as regards my own person as free and equal to every other person. So at this level, what is at stake through mutual recognition are forms of selfrespect. This enlarges and enriches our sense of selfhood, because the ideas of personal rights and responsibilities on a large scale come into play. We can clarify this further by applying a division into civil, 131

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political and social rights, because doing so allows us to identify new forms of misrecognition in terms of the possible kinds of exclusion, alienation and oppression that can occur at this level. At the limit, the question of human rights will arise, and with it that of human dignity. Finally, beyond any question of respect, there is the level of social esteem, which ‘functions to sum up all the modes of mutual recognition that exceed the mere recognition of the quality of rights among free subjects’ (CR, 202). Shared values, which may vary over time and from place to place, provide the context for such social esteem. When disagreements do arise, they point to the possibility of understanding lifeworlds other than our own, ‘a capacity we can compare to that of learning a foreign language to the point of being able to appreciate one’s own language as one among many’ (CR, 209).12 Issues regarding authority arise on each of these levels, particularly regarding hierarchies not just of status, but of command and obedience. This latter is something Ricoeur thinks necessary for any enduring form of social life, so he does not see mutual recognition as abolishing all forms of either hierarchy or authority.13 In the end, it is the possibility of social esteem signalled by mutual recognition that is constitutive of the social bond that makes possible our life together at all three levels. As a further argument against any attempt to reduce all such forms of mutual recognition to the outcome of a struggle, Ricoeur points out that such an account will always run the risk of turning the quest for recognition into an interminable, even an insatiable, one – what Hegel called a bad infinity. This is not to say that experiences of peaceful recognition by themselves allow us to resolve all the issues involved in the very concept of a struggle, much less all actual instances of conflict. ‘The certitude that accompanies states of peace offers instead a confirmation that the moral motivation for struggles of recognition is not illusory’ (CR, 218). This leaves the question in what way are such peaceful experiences of mutual recognition themselves based upon symbolic mediations? A problem arises if we attempt to think of mutual recognition as a gift we give to one another. The problem here is whether all gift giving turns into a logic of reciprocity in that a gift in return will be expected, making possible new conflicts. Ricoeur answers that we have to think instead of the gift of mutual recognition in terms of agape, love that does not demand something in return, a love that does not calculate and that is even characterized by insouciance, a love that goes beyond 132

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the demands of justice. Moreover, there is usually something ceremonial about such gift giving when it occurs. More specifically, what breaks the cycle of reciprocity in such cases is that the gift given in the case of mutual recognition is priceless, so generous that it does not call for restitution but rather the response of a ‘second first gift’ (CR, 242), a gift that we can give to other others. Here the close connection between recognition and gratitude so evident in French comes into play. ‘Gratitude lightens the weight of obligation to give in return and reorients this toward a generosity equal to the one that led to the first gift’ (CR, 243). It does so by opening a gap between the first giving and receiving and the second giving when having received. This affects both the evaluation of the value of what is given and received, and the time it may take to complete this process. It is one reason there is usually something festive about such symbolic exchanges. They take us outside the everyday world of reciprocal exchanges and introduce a note of hope expressed more in an optative voice than in a descriptive or normative one, freeing us from the lust for power or the threat and fascination of violence. If there is an element of struggle in mutual recognition, it is as a struggle ‘against the misrecognition of others at the same time that it is a struggle for recognition of oneself by others’ (CR, 258). Such misrecognition – which runs the spectrum from disregard to disrespect, to contempt and even denial of the other’s humanity – is always possible because of the fundamental dissymmetry between oneself and others. In order to integrate mutuality into this dissymmetry, Ricoeur says that we must return to forgetting. If we can ‘forget’ the dissymmetry, we may then be able to recognize the ‘in between’ of our mutual relatedness. For what we exchange though this space are gifts, not places, and this ‘protects mutuality against the pitfalls of a fusional union, whether in love, friendship, or fraternity on a communal or cosmopolitan level’ (CR, 263). Mutual recognition, in other words, establishes a just distance between us and, with it, a surplus of meaning in which otherness is affirmed twice over: ‘other is the one who gives and the one who receives; other is the one who receives and the one who gives in return’ (CR, 263). THE JUST

The idea of a just distance brings us to Ricoeur’s last essays published under the general heading of ‘the just’. The Just and Reflections on 133

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the Just are collections of lectures and essays rather than books written to present one overall argument. A number of the essays are devoted to other thinkers – Rawls, Weber, Kant, Arendt, Walzer among them – and show us Ricoeur working out his own position in relation to them. These essays are worth reading for their own sake, as examples of how Ricoeur reads others’ works and seeks to think with them, rather than against them. From our perspective, however, it is important to consider the two themes that tie these essays together: the idea of justice and, beyond it, that of the just. When we do that, we see that we can situate his reflections between two poles. On the one side stands political philosophy in a broad sense, and more specifically a concern for questions having to do with law and its application through the courts. On the other side we find a broader philosophical reflection, one that seeks a way to do justice to justice through an examination of the broader category of the just. The question of the just itself, of course, was already implicated in Ricoeur’s ethics aimed at a life lived with others in just institutions. Ricoeur’s essays addressing the status of law and the role of the legal system stem largely from his participation in seminars and conferences with judges, legal theorists and historians in the last decade of his life. The central issue in these essays is how the idea of justice relates to the legal system and the rule of law. Something beyond a strictly defined notion of legal justice is at stake here, for, as Ricoeur notes, Aristotle had already seen that the law always deals with cases in their universal aspect, not in terms of their uniqueness. The just extends beyond the problem of legal justice, even while incorporating it. This broader idea of the just arises when we take an adjective – a just solution – and turn it into an abstract noun, concerning which we then try to grasp the concept this might express. But this is a concept that still carries the connotation of applying to concrete and particular cases. It is this double sense of the just as both abstract and concrete that Ricoeur seeks to make sense of. One reason he turns to this more general idea of the just is that political philosophy gets caught up in the question of how to legitimate government or the rule of law, without addressing the problem of evil by asking ‘why evil?’ Hence it does not really help us to deal with the problem of the fault. Still, looking at the questions of the status of the law and the idea of rights in modern society does give us a handhold. It allows us to see how these questions work out in practice in the courtroom in relation to specific instances of conflicts 134

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and crimes. In the short run, the trial process puts an end to a specific conflict when the judge pronounces a verdict and, where required, imposes a penalty. Ideally, this sets the parties involved at a just distance, without necessarily bringing about full mutual recognition or reconciliation between them. Still, in the long run, this process does contribute to the social peace that makes mutual recognition possible. It does so by strengthening the social bond that allows us to live together. Ricoeur acknowledges that this is an ideal picture and that there are many concrete problems with which the legal system today must struggle; for example, how to assign responsibility in conflicts that arise at the level of institutions. The law wants to assign responsibility to some individual, but who this might be is not always clear in the case of actions stemming from decisions taken in large bureaucracies. In this regard, Ricoeur willingly involved himself in arguments over who if anyone was to blame – and how to assign responsibility – in the public outcry that arose (exacerbated by the media) regarding HIV-tainted blood transfusions in the early years of the AIDS crisis in France. This eventually led to a trial of former government officials who were accused of being responsible. Ricoeur believed that in this case the close association the law assumes between responsibility and guilt breaks down. A government official may have been in charge, but how and where a ‘decision’ was or was not made remains obscure. His own position is that what is at issue should be seen more as a political question than a legal one, and therefore a just solution is more likely to be found in the political forum rather than the law courts.14 Related to this example he also asks whether contemporary society mistakenly tries to deal with such problems by shifting the focus from individual behaviour to the concept of risk and attempts to eliminate it, or at least to compensate victims for disasters when they occur. Clearly, one danger here is the idea that a society can eliminate all risk from life, and that it therefore has the obligation to impose regulations that prevent people from doing things that might injure them. Again, who makes these decisions? Another worry is that if we agree that all risk cannot be eliminated, then does it follow that society must compensate any and all victims for their suffering in a way that restores them to health or to what they had before, or to what they should have in light of their current situation? Ricoeur is suspicious of the utopian aspect here insofar as the utopian ideal 135

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no longer functions as a critical perspective but as a state actually to be realized. His own emphasis on the plurality of forms politics may take and their inherent fragility is one factor influencing his thinking here, as is his belief that the best we can achieve in these matters is what he calls a just distance among those involved. One other topic related to the legal system that concerns Ricoeur has to do with punishment, particularly when it involves imprisonment. He does not speak about this at length but clearly he is concerned that contemporary society has found no way of rehabilitating and reintegrating convicted criminals back into society, restoring the just distance that makes life together possible. This is a question that overlaps those of amnesty and pardon, but in the end Ricoeur has no concrete solutions to propose to these questions. He can only try to make clear why they are pressing issues. At this point we can read his reflections as shifting toward the broader ideas of justice and the just beyond such specific examples. Two threads tie these two ideas. The first one comes from Ricoeur’s continuing reflections on the ‘little’ ethics he had presented in Oneself as Another; the other stems from a more direct focus on what we mean by the just. If we follow the first thread, the question of the just arises, as already mentioned, as we examine the movement from the ethical aim to its application in concrete cases at the level of practical wisdom, particularly where this involves the question of institutions. If we connect the idea of the just that arises here closely to that of justice, this leads to placing the emphasis on those cases where many others are involved, for Ricoeur agrees with Rawls that justice is a virtue of social institutions and relations, not something that applies to isolated individuals.15 From another angle, however, the idea of the just runs through all three stages of this ethics, from its teleological aim through the level of norms to that of practical wisdom and back again.16 For both these readings, the idea of the just as characterizing the idea of a just distance is central. This brings us to the second thread, the more explicit question of the nature of the just. The question of the just first arises with the indignant cry that something is not just, not fair, whether it be an unfair distribution of some good, an unkept promise, or a disproportionate punishment. Ricoeur sees in this indignation the origin of the demand for a just distance, one that sets the antagonists back into a workable, if not ideal, relationship. A major obstacle here is the desire for vengeance 136

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and the belief that it is up to each individual or group to obtain it themselves. Beyond the fact that such vengeance almost always takes the form of violence, there is the danger that the quest for vengeance will turn into the vendetta, an unending cycle of parties trying to make up for harm perceived to have been done to them. This is why the idea of a rule of law is so important. It introduces a neutral third party to arbitrate between the opposed parties as well as a setting circumscribed by careful rules that turn the conflict into one of words, not physical violence. This is not to say that force completely disappears. Ricoeur agrees with Max Weber that the modern state holds the monopoly on the use of violence through its police powers and penal system, where these are governed by a system of laws that apply equally to everyone. Another important idea at this level is the idea of impartiality, incarnated in a third party, the judge. This development helps us overcome the spirit of vengeance. Finally, Ricoeur’s earlier work, particularly regarding how the self is constituted through its dialogical relations with others, helps us to make sense of the just. He adds to this horizontal relation between selves an emphasis on a vertical dimension that may also be at work where the just solution prevails. This vertical first dimension appears in the role that hierarchy plays in human relations, whether through the recognition of superior authority or through the division of roles that means some give orders and some obey. If we apply these notions to the basic contours of his little ethics, we see that they apply not so much to the face-to-face encounter with the other, particularly one who knows us well, such as a family member or friend, as at the more anonymous level of our relations with others. This is why Ricoeur agrees with John Rawls that justice really is a question about social relations, not individual or intimate ones (without completely accepting Rawls’s argument for a purely procedural theory of justice). As he says, ‘the other for friendship is the “you”; the other of justice is “anyone”, as is indicated by the Latin adage suum cucique tribuere (to each his own)’ (J, xiii). This shift of focus to the social plane allows Ricoeur to think more deeply about the stage that he called practical wisdom in his little ethics, the application of the aim of the good life and the norms that express it to singular situations. One conclusion he reaches is that reducing everything to a question of law, as already stated, is problematic because the law always seeks to address the general features of a case, not its singularity. The ‘you’ in question is ‘anyone’ recognized in relation to a 137

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legal institution, as the criminal or the victim, the accused or the accuser. Therefore we must ask when do justice and the just meet in the application of the law and the meting out of punishment? Can they? In a just society, we want them to do so. We also know that they do not always do so. Death cut off any further answer that Ricoeur might have added here. It – and he – leaves us ‘food for thought’.

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1. READING RICOEUR

1 Ricoeur spoke to me in the year before he died about a new book on what memory could learn from history, to follow his discussion of what history learns from memory in Memory, History, Forgetting. He told others about another project to be titled The Capable Human Being. 2 They had met while Ricoeur was in Prague as part of the unofficial underground university assisted by western European philosophers, who met privately with Czech philosophers and students. For an account of this movement, see Day (1999). 3 See ‘From existentialism to the philosophy of language’ in RM, 315–22; ‘Intellectual autobiography’ in LLP, 3–53; C&C. 4 Ricoeur’s last public lecture, given when he received the Kluge Prize in 2004, is available at www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/prize/winners.html as both a webcast and a transcript. 2. FREEDOM AND NATURE

1 Descartes himself will add that this needs to be further grounded on the certainty of a demonstration that God exists and that God is not a deceiver, a point later philosophy often tends to ignore. 2 Today we might question whether a machine might be able to fulfil this role. Descartes himself would have denied this. 3 It is embodied, lived experience that is the meeting place of these two forms of discourse (FN, 9–10). See Ricoeur’s own later discussion with a leading French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, in What Makes Us Think, for a more recent version of his position on this question. 4 ‘The act of the Cogito is not a pure act of self-positing: it lives on what it receives and in a dialogue with the conditions in which it itself is rooted. The act of myself is at the same time participation’ (FN, 18). 5 The French language with its use of reflexive verb forms is more explicit here: je me decide. Later Ricoeur will develop more fully another notion 139

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8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

that already appears here. In deciding, I impute an action to myself. This idea of imputation will become a crucial component of his anthropology of the capable human being and his ethics. There may be a possible source of anxiety here as well that anticipates the problem of evil: ‘I didn’t realize I . . . , what I really meant to do was to. . .’. As Ricoeur acknowledges at the end of this discussion, his method has already been forced to move beyond pure description: ‘All our analyses – whether they proceed from direct elucidation of concepts, from exegesis of revealing metaphors, or from the effort to clarify certain basic experiences – focus on the same definition of the essence to deciding’ (FN, 84). But see here the essay ‘True and False Anguish’ in HT, 287–304. In light of discussions in French philosophy in the years after the appearance of this work by Ricoeur about how to think about the presence of the other in its otherness, it is worth noting that Ricoeur can already say here in passing that this initial encounter with the question of imagination already points to the question of the possible pure representation of absence (FN, 98–99). See CR, 55–61. An important later essay will return to this theme. See ‘Negativity and Primary Affirmation’ in HT, 305–28. Ricoeur will return to the question of the unconscious in his later book on Freud. The same thing may be said about naming a perspective as a perspective; this already takes us beyond perspective on this first level. Kant 1961: A141. Ricoeur goes on to discuss how Kant relates his idea of the schematism to the question of time, concluding that Kant was unable finally to show ‘a radical genesis of the concept of understanding and intuition beginning with the transcendental determination of time’ (FM, 43). He will return to this argument in his last work, The Course of Recognition, and there conclude, as already noted, that it calls into question the whole approach in terms of ‘representation’. Ricoeur explicitly discusses and criticizes the development of this doctrine in ‘ “Original Sin”: A Study in Meaning’, in CI, 269–86. Ricoeur bases this claim on his interpretation of Husserl, but also on a wider ontological interpretation that language is never fully adequate to being, which can be said in many different ways. ‘This second naiveté aims to be the post-critical equivalent of the precritical hierophany’ (SE, 353). 3. RICOEUR’S TURN TO HERMENEUTICS

1 In one of his replies to an essay in the volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series dedicated to his work, Ricoeur states that his original project could not be completed as originally conceived following 140

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4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

something like a Jasperian philosophy of Transcendence, but instead was subsequently divided between a philosophical poetics and Ricoeur’s own attempts at biblical exegesis ‘expressly maintained at the frontiers of philosophy’ (Reply to Charles E. Reagan’, LLP, 347; see also ‘Reply to Domenico Jervolino’, LLP, 544). The relevant texts here are CI, IT, HHS and FTA. In the third volume of Time and Narrative Ricoeur will turn this idea of reconciliation without consolation into a critique of Hegel, whom he still draws on here in pursuing his own philosophical interpretation of Freud. This is one reason Ricoeur will be critical of attempts by later psychoanalytic theorists to reinterpret Freud and psychoanalytic therapeutic practice solely in terms of a linguistic model. See, e.g., ‘Image and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1978). See, for example, Ricoeur’s ‘Fatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol’ in CI, 468–97. For a broader history of structuralism, see Dosse (1997). A first version, edited by C. Bally and A. Sechehay, appeared in 1916. There are two translations of this work into English: Saussure (1969; 1986). See Lévi-Strauss (1969). Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, in 1963: 206–31; 1969–1981. That we start from a language that is already meaningful to some extent does not mean that such language may not also contain systematic distortions regarding what it can say. Here is a tie to Ricoeur’s own discussions of ideology and the critique of ideology. For an example of how he relates this project of a critique of ideology to hermeneutics, see Ricoeur (1973). See Pellauer (2007). The lecture ‘Metaphor and Symbol’ (IT, 45–69) is a good place to begin here. 4. THE FULLNESS OF LANGUAGE AND FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE

1 ‘Poetry’ here means more than rhymed verse. It potentially includes anything made using language as opposed to those things that occur by nature. 2 See ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’ (Ricoeur 1978c) for this latter development. 3 See, for example, ‘The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God’ and ‘ “Whoever Loses their Life for my Sake will Find it” ’ in Figuring the Sacred. Even in these sermons Ricoeur does not claim to speak with religious authority but as a philosopher who tries to hear what the text has to say. 4 See, for example, his lectures on the parables in ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’ (Ricoeur 1975). 5 See Ricoeur (1986b). 141

NOTES

5. SELFHOOD AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

1 A further question here, therefore, is whether the ontology of events found in most action theory really is adequate to making sense of human action. 2 In passing, Ricoeur also notes here that we tend to talk about this dependence of acts on their agents in terms of metaphors such as fatherhood and political mastery. He will return to the question in his later works to consider whether this lingering metaphoricity, which runs through the whole history of philosophy after Aristotle, and which really only adds the further metaphors of one being the ‘owner’ or ‘author’ of one’s acts to the list, does not point to an important unresolved question insofar as a philosophy of action seeks to be conceptual rather than metaphorical in what it says. 3 These predicates are meaningful outside the particular case of ascription in that they are part of the vocabulary of a culture and their possible list seems to be one that can expand or contract depending on the culture in question. It is the semantic autonomy of such mental predicates in relation to particular acts of ascription, Ricoeur says, that accounts for the shift in focus from the agent to the questions ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ 4 This is where the metaphor of ownership comes into play in relation to a theory of action. 5 Ricoeur notes that this is a different sense of character than the one he had drawn on in his earlier book, The Voluntary and Involuntary. 6 Parfit (1987: 255). 7 A key factor here, again from Time and Narrative, is that the events of the story that mark such turning points are narrative events, ones linked to and only identifiable through the configuring of the overall plot. 8 Ricoeur will always argue for a more interactive theory, one where neither the ego nor the other takes precedence, but also where there is something singular about the self that is not reducible to intersubjective relations. See, for example, his discussion of Husserl and Levinas at the conclusion of Oneself as Another (322–26 and 331–41) and his more explicit version in The Course of Recognition (157–61, 260–62). 9 Ricoeur will continue to refine and revise this ethics in his later works. The introduction to Reflections on the Just gives his final statement on this topic. 10 In the introduction to Reflections on the Just Ricoeur says that if he could start over he would present this theory starting from the middle term, the idea of moral obligation. 11 Ricoeur will continue to work on this idea of being willing to live together in his later work, particularly in regard to its implications for political and legal philosophy.

142

NOTES

6. MEMORY, RECOGNITION, PRACTICAL WISDOM

1 See, for example, MHF, 333, for an indication of this connection. 2 This does not exclude consideration of diminished capacity owing to handicaps or disease. See ‘The difference between the normal and the pathological as a source of respect’ (RJ, 187–97). 3 Ricoeur notes but leaves unexplored here that there is also a question how memory takes up this historical time and reintegrates it into its symbolic universe (see MHF, 161). 4 Historians may, of course, revise or refine their questions on the basis of the documents they find in the archive. 5 His critique here draws on Lloyd (1990). 6 In this sense, it stands in continuity with his discussion of the iconic augmentation brought about by metaphor and other forms of figurative discourse, while having its own specificity that distinguishes it from them. 7 See, for example, T&N, 3:100. 8 See here, also, MHF, 278. 9 He had already begun to lay out this critique of this aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy in the third volume of Time and Narrative (see T&N, 3:60–96). 10 See ‘The Nuptial Metaphor’ (in LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998: 265–303). 11 There are earlier indications of this emphasis, however, in Oneself as Another (see OAA, 340–41). These pages show us how Ricoeur situates his own position in relation to both Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas. They come at the question of our relation to others from opposite directions, Husserl beginning from the ego, Levinas from the other. Ricoeur wants to accept Levinas’s emphasis on the importance of the encounter with the other, while also acknowledging that there is something fundamental about my experience of myself that is not knowable to the others and not constituted by them. 12 In On Translation (2006), his collection of three short essays on this topic, Ricoeur expands this idea to call for what he designates as ‘linguistic hospitality’, echoing Kant’s requirement of hospitality in his essay on perpetual peace. 13 For Ricoeur’s position on the question of the nature and status of authority today, see ‘The Paradox of Authority’ (RJ, 91–105). 14 His own testimony to the court that finally considered this case appears as an epilogue to Reflections on the Just (249–56). 15 He disagrees with Rawls that a theory of justice can be formulated as simply a question of distribution and procedures governing this, with no attention needing to be paid to the question of what goods are to be distributed. 16 The essays on medical ethics in Reflections on the Just are striking examples of how Ricoeur’s ethics can begin from a decision applied in some concrete situation and work back from it to the development of norms 143

NOTES

and the identification of an organizing teleological principle. In this volume, he acknowledges the importance today of starting from such ‘regional ethics’ (which also include business ethics and environmental ethics) for moral philosophy. This idea was not present in his earlier work.

144

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

Ricoeur’s own bibliography is extensive, as is the amount of secondary material, which continues to grow. Here are the books and a few of the articles by Ricoeur available in English, along with some of the more useful secondary material for those just coming to his thought. For a more detailed listing of his works and an extensive listing of secondary literature through 2000, see the bibliography in Hahn (1995) and Vansina (2000). An important website for future work on Ricoeur is the Ricoeur archive in Paris: www.fondsricoeur.fr WORKS BY RICOEUR

History and Truth (1965), trans. Charles Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966), trans. Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. The Symbolism of Evil (1967a), trans. Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper and Row. Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967b), trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970), trans. Denis Savage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ‘Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue’ (1973). Philosophy Today 17, pp. 153–65. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1974a). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Political and Social Essays (1974b), ed. David Steward and Joseph Bien. Athens: Ohio University Press. ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’ (1975). Semeia 4, pp. 27–148. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976). Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (1977), trans. Robert Czerny et al. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 145

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work (1978a), ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart. Boston: Beacon Press. ‘Image and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1978b), in Psychoanalysis and Language, ed. Joseph H. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 293–324. ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’ (1978c). Critical Inquiry 5, pp. 143–59. Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980a), ed. Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History (1980b), The Zaharoff Lecture for 1978–9. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. The Reality of the Historical Past (1984), The Aquinas Lecture, 1984. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Time and Narrative (1984–88), 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Fallible Man (1986a), trans. Charles Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986b), ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. ‘The Fragility of Political Language’ (1987), trans. David Pellauer. Philosophy Today 31, pp. 35–44. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay (1988), trans. Kathleen Blamey. New York: Columbia University Press. Reflection and Imagination: A Ricoeur Reader (1991a), ed. Mario J. Valdés. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (1991b), trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Oneself as Another (1993), trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. A Key to Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I (1996), trans. Bond Harris et al. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1997), ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. The Just (2000), trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. The Course of Recognition (2005), trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. On Translation (2006), trans. Eileen Brennan. London: Routledge. Reflections on the Just (2007), trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur (2000), What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 146

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur (1998), Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. SECONDARY SOURCES AND AUTHORS CITED

Anderson, Pamela (1993), Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957), Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benveniste, Emile (1977), Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Bourgeois, Patrick L. (1975), Extension of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Bourgeois, Patrick L., and Frank Schalow (1990), Traces of Understanding: A Profile of Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics. Atlanta: Rodopi. Braudel, Fernand (1972–74), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row. Clark, S.H. (1990), Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge. Cohen, Richard A., and James I. Marsh, eds. (2002), Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Danto, Arthur (1985), Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Dauenhauer, Bernard P. (1998), Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics. 20th Century Political Thinkers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Davidson, Donald (1980), Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Day, Barbara (1999), The Velvet Philosophers. London: The Claridge Press. Dosse, François (1997), History of Structuralism, 2 vols., trans. Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, Jeanne (1995), Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Imagination. New York: Peter Lang. Fodor, James (1995), Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur and the Refiguring of Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1991), Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad. Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. (1995), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, The Library of Living Philosophers, 22. Chicago: Open Court. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Ihde, Don (1971) Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Joy, Morny, ed. (1997), Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. 147

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

Junker-Kenny, Maureen, and Peter Kenny, eds. (2004), Memory, Narrativity, Self and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Münster: Lit. Kant, Immanuel (1961), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kaplan, David (2003), Ricoeur’s Critical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kearney, Richard (2004), On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Kearney, Richard, ed. (1996), Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action. London: Sage. Kermode, Frank (1967), The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Klemm, David E. (1983), The Hermeneutical Theory of Paul Ricoeur: A Constructive Analysis. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Klemm, David E., and William Schweiker, eds. (1993), Meanings in Texts and Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Lawlor, Leonard (1992), Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoeph. New York: Basic Books. —— (1969), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press. —— (1969–1981), Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4 vols., trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. (1990), Demystifying Mentalities. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Walter James (1977), Mystery and the Unconscious: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Mann, Thomas (1927), The Magic Mountain. trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McCarthy, John, ed. (1997), The Whole and Divided Self: The Bible and Theological Anthropology. New York: Crossroad. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Muldoon, Mark (2002), On Ricoeur. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. —— (2006), Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self and Meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Musil, Robert (1995), The Man Without Qualities, 2 vols., trans. Sophie Wilkens. New York: Knopf. Nagel, Thomas (1986), The View from Nowhere and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Opdebeeck, Hendrick J., ed. (2000), The Foundation and Application of Moral Philosophy: Ricoeur’s Ethical Order. Leuven: Peeters. 148

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

Parfit, Derek (1987), Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pellauer, David (2007), review of Paul Ricoeur, On Translation. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id⫽8783 (accessed 14 February 2007). Proust, Marcel (1981), Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols., trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor. New York: Random House. Rasmussen, David M. (1971), Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology: A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rawls, John (1999), A Theory of Justice, revised edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reagan, Charles E. (1996), Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Reagan, Charles E., ed. (1979), Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu (2006), Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1969), Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. —— (1986), Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court. Simms, Karl (2003), Paul Ricoeur. London and New York: Routledge. Stiver, Dan R. (2001), Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Strawson, P.F. (1959), Individuals. London: Methuen. Thompson, John B. (1991), Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Van den Hengel, John W., S.C.J. (1982), The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. (1990), Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Van Leeuwen, T.M. (1981), The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Vansina, F.D. (2000), Paul Ricoeur: Bibliography 1935–2000. Leuven: Peeters. Venema, Henry (2000), Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wall, John (2005), Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wall, John, William Schweiker and W. David Hall, eds. (2002), Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. London and New York: Routledge. Wallace, Mark I. (1990), The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. 149

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING

White, Hayden (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiercinski, Andrezej, ed. (2003), Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press. Wood, David, ed. (1991), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. London and New York: Routledge. Woolf, Virginia (1924), Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

150

INDEX

death 9, 24, 48, 50, 123–4, 126, 130, 138 Derrida, Jacques 70 Descartes, René 6–8, 10, 12, 27, 33, 46, 91–2, 128 Dilthey, Wilhelm 66 discourse 51–2, 54, 58–67, 70, 85, 92, 95, 112, 122, 126, 129 conceptual 70 event 61 extended 62–3, 67, 71, 72, 78 figurative 62, 64, 66, 70 Freudian 44, 52 inscribed 60 metaphorical 59, 68 narrative 2, 6, 59, 70–3, 78, 82–5, 109 philosophical 70, 85, 91 poetic 67, 70, 87 political 85, 88–9 rational 26, 29, 70 religious 85–8 speculative 70 symbolic 66 Dufrenne, Mikel 3, 9

Anscombe, G. E. M. Aquinas, Thomas 33 Aristotle 67–8, 70, 71, 97, 102–3, 110, 129, 134 ascription 93, 97–9, 102, 106, 113, 142n. 3 attestation 92, 96–7, 99, 105–7, 115, 129 Augustine 12, 71 Austin, J. L. 94 Bakhtin, Mikhail 79 Benveniste, Emile 58–9 Body, embodiment 5, 8, 14, 16, 19–22, 31, 39, 93, 97, 108, 124 Braudel, Fernand 74 capable human being 6, 7, 14, 27, 90, 91, 96, 106, 109, 111, 129, 130 cogito 6–7, 12, 13, 18, 21, 41, 46, 47, 52, 90–1, 108, 120 see also subject-object model shattered 91 conviction 15, 47, 105–6, 117, 119

ethics 6, 47, 83–4, 90, 98, 99, 102–3, 105–6, 109, 113, 120, 124, 126–7, 134, 136–7

Danto, Arthur 75 Davidson, Donald 95 151

INDEX

Havel, Václav 3 Hegel, G. W. F. 14, 27, 51, 53, 55, 83, 84, 85, 121, 130–2 Heidegger, Martin 6, 8–9, 24, 73, 107, 112, 122–4 hermeneutics 9, 32, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48, 50–1 59–60, 62, 64, 66, 83 85, 88, 117, 120, 122 circle 54, 88 consciousness 51 historical existence 123 Freud 48–9, 55 historical consciousness 83 language 62 ontology 70 phenomenology 64, 70 philosophy 41, 47, 50–1, 57, 120 self 91, 107 suspicion 46, 47, 53, 58, 78, 85, 110 symbols 45, 62 text 78 understanding 57, 62, 65, 66 historiographical operation 114–15, 117–19, 122 history 38, 39, 50, 57, 66, 67, 71, 72–8, 80, 82, 99, 109–10, 112–15, 117–24, 126, 130 distance 60 explanation 76 fact 116, 122 hermeneutics 65–6 hope 83 mentalities 114, 117 microhistory 114 narrative 77, 79–80, 118 reception 61, 83 representation 118–19 text 76, 82, 83, 114 time 71–2, 80–2, 115, 121 truth 78 Hobbes, Thomas 130 hope 23–4, 83, 87, 126, 133

Event 10, 60, 74–6, 81–2, 92, 95–6, 101, 115–16 action 20 decision 5, 15, 19 discourse 60–1, 92 founding 81 historical 74, 110 mythic 38 narrative 73–5, 101, 118–19, 142n. 7 natural 5 ontology 142 n. 1 political 80 thinking 127 evil 13, 17, 19, 22, 24–6. 32–4, 36–40, 45, 55, 104, 121, 125–6, 134 see also fault moral 125 radical 32 existentialism 8, 15, 19, 24, 39, 41, 83, 120–3 explanation 12, 16, 34, 48, 50–1, 66, 68, 75–6, 78, 95, 96, 117, 118, 119, 131 fallibility 26, 28, 32–3 fault 17, 19, 25–6, 28, 33–9, 41, 71, 125, 135 feeling 16, 27, 28, 31, 32, 36–7, 49, 69, 98 fiction 69, 72, 73, 75, 77–82, 92, 99, 110, 117–18 forgetting 47, 109, 110, 120, 124–6, 133 forgiveness 120, 125–6 Freud, Sigmund 26, 42–55, 83, 110, 119, 123 friendship 100, 103, 133, 137 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 61 gift 40, 123, 126, 132–3 Gilson, Etienne 90

152

INDEX

poetic 84, 88 political 88–9 philosophical 126 religious 86 symbolic 26, 35, 41, 46, 55 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 56–7 Levinas, Emmanuel 102, 142 n. 8, 143 n. 11 Locke, John 100 logic action sentence 98 equivalence 87 formal 35, 62 reciprocity 132 superabundance 87 symbolic 45, 66–7 love 30, 32, 50, 52, 126, 131–3

Hume, David 100 Husserl, Edmund 10–12, 27, 64–5 identity 99–100, 113, 117, 128 communal 82, 88, 113, 126 idem 99, 100, 107 ipse 90, 99, 100, 101, 107 narrative 82–4 88–90, 99–101, 103 personal 8, 90, 91, 96, 99, 100, 109, 112, 126, 129 politics of 126–7, 131 ideology 88–9, 125, 141n. 10 imagination 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 30, 35, 83–4, 89, 110, 117 poetic 35, 45 imputation 38, 96, 98, 102, 107, 129–30, 140n. 5

Mann, Thomas 79 Marcel, Gabriel 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 22, 102 Maritain, Jacques 85 Marx, Karl 46, 110 memory 100, 109–16, 119–20, 123–7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 65, 122 metaphor 16, 38, 59, 63, 67–70, 77, 78, 86, 140n. 7, 142n. 2, 142n. 4 Musil, Robert 101 myth 26, 30, 33–5, 38–43, 46, 48, 51, 55, 57, 59, 70–1, 82, 84, 126 time 81

Jacobson, Roman 56 Jaspers, Karl 6, 8, 9, 13 just, justice 36, 38, 83, 89, 96, 98, 103–6, 109, 113, 118, 120, 121, 126, 133 distance 133, 135, 136–8 Kant, Immanuel 9, 10, 27, 28, 30, 31–2, 33, 41, 47, 55, 57, 101, 105–6, 128, 134 Kermode, Frank 73 Kierkegaard, Søren 8 Lacan, Jacques 44 language 10, 15, 16, 21, 26, 29, 34, 35–6, 38, 41, 43–6, 48, 51, 52, 55–6, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66–7, 70, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 85, 92–3, 107, 111, 113, 126–7, 130 see also discourse figurative 26, 62, 70 fullness 35, 40, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 71, 86 myth 35, 38 optative 126

Nabert, Jean 102 narrative 2, 6, 39, 57, 59, 70–88, 99, 101–2, 116, 118 discourse 2, 6, 59, 70–3, 78, 82–5, 109 identity 82–4 88–90, 99–101, 103 narratology 78

153

INDEX

narrative (cont.) point of view 79 understanding 83, 111 voice 75, 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 46, 70, 91, 110, 120

self 105, 129, 130 struggle 131–2 responsibility 5, 8, 13, 16, 36–7, 40, 41, 90, 92, 98–9, 102, 106, 107, 109, 113, 124, 129, 130, 135

ontology 19, 70, 91, 96, 101, 108, 110, 120, 123–4, 142n. 1 otherness 30–1, 91–2, 94, 106–8, 113, 133, 140n. 9

sameness 99–100 Saussure, Ferdinand de 55–6, 58 Searle, John 94 self, selfhood 7, 8, 14, 23, 31–4, 35, 46–7, 53, 84, 57, 89, 90–2, 95, 98–108, 112–13, 129, 131, 137 constancy 100, 102 esteem 103–4, 106 hermeneutics of 91 identity 96, 129 recognition 105, 129–30 respect 103–4, 106 responsible 106, 129 understanding 40, 44, 84, 107, 120 semantic innovation 66–7, 69, 72 Shakespeare, William 68, 82 solicitude 103–6 Sophocles 129 Spinoza, Baruch 107 Strawson, P. F. 93 structuralism 43, 44, 55–61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 74, 78 subject–object model 6–12, 15, 18, 21, 23, 32, 46, 47, 52, 57, 64–5, 84, 89–91, 93, 94, 102, 103 see also cogito surplus of meaning 54, 63, 65, 119, 133 symbol 26, 33–43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 62, 63 66, 71, 126, 130, 132–3

Parfit, Derek 100–1 Pascal, Blaise 28 Paul, Saint. 38 Plato 28, 33, 59, 115 phenomenology 5, 10–11, 13, 16, 18, 21, 43, 51–3, 64–5, 70, 76, 111, 129–30 philosophy analytic 43, 62, 67, 91, 92 autonomy 3, 5–6, 65 Christian 85 hermeneutic 47, 57, 120 limits 14, 65, 85, 108 non-philosophical 1, 6, 58, 85, 108 political 134 presuppositions 40, 58 reflective 43–6 phronesis 103 see also wisdom promise 20, 94, 100 , 102, 125, 130, 136 Proust, Marcel 79, 80, 82, 129 Rawls, John 134, 136–7 reading 60–1, 79, 83, 87 recognition 50, 53, 123, 126–33 demand for 128 gift 132 mutual 33, 103, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 reciprocal 103, 127, 131

testimony 47, 92, 105, 115–19, 121, 129

154

INDEX

understanding 12, 16, 38, 41, 48, 54, 58, 61, 66, 73, 76, 117, 119 finite 65 hermeneutic 57, 62, 65 narrative 74, 76–7, 83, 111 utopia 88–9

text 60–1, 65, 83 foundational 88 genre 61 hermeneutics 78 history 75–6, 82, 114 style 61 world of 61, 77, 79, 83 time 5, 15, 18, 24, 38, 56–7, 60, 67, 68–9, 71–84, 90, 92, 96, 99–102, 107, 110, 112–15, 118, 120–2, 124, 128–9, 132 historical 71–2, 80–2, 115, 121 human 71, 73, 80–1 mythic 81 tragedy 3, 38, 39, 77, 105 Transcendence 9, 12, 13, 25, 28, 35, 41, 71, 121, 141n. 1

veracity 96, 111, 114 Weber, Max 134, 137 White, Hayden 76 wisdom 22, 50, 87 practical 103, 105–6, 124, 136–7 Woolf, Virginia 79

155