The Good of Recognition : Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Levinas and Ricoeur [1 ed.] 9781481300643, 9781481300629

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The Good of Recognition

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The Good of Recognition Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur

Michael Sohn

Baylor University Press

© 2014 by Baylor University Press Waco, Texas 76798-7363 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press. Cover design by Dean Bornstein Earlier versions of portions of chapters 2 and 3 were previously published in Michael Sohn, “The Concept of Recognition in Lévinas’ Thought,” Philosophy Today 55, no. 3 (2011): 298–306; and “Emmanuel Lévinas and the New Science of Judaism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 41, no. 4 (2013): 626–42. I thank the editors and the journals for granting permission to use that material here. eISBN: 978-1-4813-0064-3 (ePDF) This E-book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who encounter any issues with formatting, text, linking, or readability are encouraged to notify the publisher at [email protected]. Some font characters may not display on all e-readers. To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sohn, Michael, 1978– The good of recognition : phenomenology, ethics, and religion in the thought of Lévinas and Ricœur / Michael Sohn. 172 pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4813-0062-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Recognition (Philosophy) 2. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 3. Ricœur, Paul. I. Title. B105.R23S64 2014 194—dc23 2013048777

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix 1 Situating the Concept of Recognition

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2 Emmanuel Lévinas Recognition as Pure Sensation

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3 Emmanuel Lévinas A Jewish Perspective on Recognition

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4 Paul Ricœur Recognition as Pure and Empirical Will

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5 Paul Ricœur A Christian Perspective on Recognition

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6 The Good of Recognition

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Bibliography 139 Index 155

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Acknowledgments

Given that this work addresses interpersonal and institutional forms of recognition, it is appropriate and with great pleasure that I acknowledge the people and institutions that have supported this project. At the University of Chicago, I was extremely fortunate to study under not only distinguished scholars but also remarkable teachers and mentors. I owe a tremendous debt to William Schweiker who saw this project from its inception through to its final completion. He carefully read through and commented on multiple drafts, and he provided unwavering support at every stage in the process. I am also extremely grateful to Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jean-Luc Marion, who read through the manuscript and provided insightful comments and helpful suggestions. One of the privileges of my time at Chicago was to enjoy the company of so many bright and generous colleagues, who read and discussed certain chapters of the work. I would like to thank Elizabeth Sweeny Block, Joe Blosser, Mandy Burton, Kristel Clayville, Sandra Sullivan Dunbar, Rick Elgendy, Courtney Fitzsimmons, Michelle Harrington, Lubomir Ondrasek, Nathan Philips, Santiago Pinon, Bruce Rittenhouse, Garry Sparks, MyungSahm Suh, Michael Turner, Joshua Vigil, and Alain Epp Weaver. Sections of the book were presented at Société internationale recherche Emmanuel Lévinas, the Society for Ricœur Studies, the Society of Christian Ethics, the University of Chicago Religion and Ethics Workshop, and the University of vii

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acknowledgments

Chicago Theology Workshop. I thank the people who attended the presentations and provided critical and constructive feedback. I would also like to acknowledge David Pellauer and Martin Kavka for their comments and feedback on earlier portions of the work. This project would not have been possible without the generous financial support from the University of Chicago Divinity School. My selection as a Martin Marty Junior Fellow enabled me to finish my project in a timely manner, and the François Furet Travel Grant afforded me the opportunity to travel to France over two summers to gather and collect research materials. My postdoctoral research fellowship in Paris as recipient of la Bourse Oratoire-Ricœur, sponsored by l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales and funded by l’Institut protestant de théologie and la Fondation de l’Oratoire du Louvre, provided ideal conditions and resources to revise and edit my manuscript into the form presented here. Olivier Abel, Nicola Stricker, and Catherine Goldenstein were wonderful and generous in hosting me at the Fonds Ricœur. I thank Carey Newman for his belief and efforts on behalf of this project; Jordan Rowan Fannin, Carrie Watterson, and Jenny Hunt for their editorial work; and the rest of the Baylor University Press team for bringing this manuscript to production. Finally, and above all, I would like to thank my family—my father, Young, mother, Seung-Hee, and brother, Dong-il Sohn. This work was researched and written during a period of significant challenge. Their presence, support, and love sustained me throughout, and for this I am most fortunate and blessed. This book is dedicated to them.

Preface

This work analyzes the polysemy of the concept of recognition operative in the thought of two contemporary French thinkers, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). Recognition is most often associated with the works of G. W. F. Hegel, not Lévinas or Ricœur. While many scholars acknowledge that these two philosophers are indebted to and critical of Hegelianism, there is no sustained study regarding their treatment of the Hegelian concept of recognition (Anerkennung). This volume shows that recognition appears prominently throughout their works and argues that it plays an important role in their thought at the intersection of phenomenology, ethics, politics, and religion. Part of the purpose of this project, then, is to bring to light the importance of recognition for Lévinas and Ricœur by situating their thought within the sociopolitical context of their day, excavating the philosophical and religious sources that undergird their use of the concept, and contextualizing that understanding within the broader themes of their thought. This work employs not only a historical approach, however, but also a constructive approach: it is interested in more than simply situating Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought and subjecting it to critical analyses. It also puts their insights into critical conversation with contemporary social and political theory. By thinking with and through Lévinas and Ricœur, the phenomenological, ethical, and religious dimensions of recognition, which are all too absent ix

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in political and social theory, are explored. In contemporary political theory, the concept of recognition is at the center of debates over multiculturalism and identity politics—whether political demands for recognition by ethnocultural groups is amenable to modern liberal democratic principles.1 Bracketing the issue of what “cultural” or “group identity” means, there is little discussion of the meaning of “recognition” itself and why a group desires it in the first place.2 No one has done more to decode the logic or “moral grammar” underlying struggles for recognition than German social theorist Axel Honneth.3 He emphasizes, however, the various spheres where recognition takes place for the purposes of structuring and emancipating social and institutional life to the extent that he overlooks the phenomenon of recognition in its multiple modes in everyday life. If contemporary political theory on recognition is driven to a socially differentiated account of the moral grammar of struggles for recognition, then contemporary social theory is driven to a phenomenologically differentiated account of the distinct modalities and attitudes of recognition. Whatever discussions exist in political and social theory on the issue of recognition require a clarification of its meaning, and it is this more basic fundamental task that is the broader constructive purpose of the project. Through a critical comparison of the thought of Lévinas and Ricœur, a concept of recognition is developed for 1 The literature that is critical of multicultural policies is extensive. See, for instance, Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93–119; and David Miller, “Group Identities, National Identities and Democratic Politics,” in Citizenship and National Identity (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 62–80. The literature that defends multiculturalism is equally extensive. Defenders within the liberal tradition argue for group rights as constitutive of individual rights. See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Defenders from a more communitarian liberal perspective emphasize group rights, where group identity is not simply the aggregate of its individual members but rather has a distinct existence and identity with its own right to self-preservation. See Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” Social Research 61, no. 3 (1994): 491–510; and Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Prince‑ ton University Press, 1992), 40–41n16. 2 Charles Taylor’s essay “The Politics of Recognition” catalyzed this interest in the concept within political theory. But, as Heikki Ikäheimo succinctly puts it, “Interestingly, Taylor’s ‘The Politics of Recognition’ has been an important and influential contribution, even though it is far from self-evident what exactly it is about.” See Heikki Ikäheimo, “Taylor on Something Called ‘Recognition,’ ” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor, ed. Arto Laitinen and Nicholas H. Smith, vol. 71 of Acta philosophica fennica (Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica, 2002), 108. 3 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).



PREFACE xi

the purposes of clarifying its importance for a conception of good in ethics and for providing an adequate basis and grounding for politics. The historical and constructive task is pursued as follows. Chapter 1 situates Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s reflections on recognition within both the sociopolitical and intellectual contexts of their day. They offered a philosophical response to the forces of anonymity and estrangement within modern mass society as well as vicious forms of identification based on ethnic, racial, and religious categories articulated amid the resurrection of Hegel studies and the emergence of existentialism and phenomenology in France in the 1930s and 1940s. The confluence of these major philosophical movements is the historical context to properly understand Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct ethical and political appropriation of Hegel’s concept of Anerkennung. The chapter also situates their ethics and politics of recognition within a theological context where both thinkers witnessed the failures of modern liberal theology and sought to revive and rearticulate their religious traditions—Judaism and Christianity, respectively—in the aftermath of the Second World War. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Lévinas and Ricœur argue for the continued relevance of religion for modern life, and that relevance is evident in the distinct contribution that religion makes to their ethics and politics of recognition. Chapters 2 and 3 proceed to detail and reconstruct the precise nature and understanding of Lévinas’ concept of recognition by considering in turn his philosophical and Jewish writings. While Lévinas endeavors to distinguish philosophy and Judaism, even sending his writings to different publishing companies, his concerns often parallel and intersect with each other. Theological concepts and biblical references can frequently be uncovered in his philosophical writings, and likewise philosophical concepts and references are often found in his Jewish writings. Perhaps nowhere is this dialectic of separation and relation more clearly evident than in his account of recognition. Chapter 2 follows his critique of narrow epistemological accounts of cognition presupposed in naturalism, which was the dominant method for the human and natural sciences (Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften) up until the twentieth century. It also considers his critique of phenomenology, which is Edmund Husserl’s alternative proposal for a rigorous scientific method. Lévinas’ distinct concept of recognition can be seen as an attempt to pursue more faithfully what Husserl had initiated—a rigorous science that accesses our most concrete existence. What he uncovers are relations to others not as mere objects of knowledge but as persons worthy of ethical recognition. In a parallel fashion, chapter 3 follows his critique of narrow epistemological accounts of cognition at the basis of modern historical sciences of Judaism, especially in the movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums.

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Lévinas’ concept of recognition, then, emerges as an attempt to articulate and revive Jewish identity for a postwar period by retrieving classical sources that modern Judaism had neglected while enlarging its relevance beyond a historical community by employing a general phenomenology. He thereby draws from the textual sources and traditions of Judaism to reinterpret certain key Jewish doctrines within the horizon of the new science of phenomenology, but he also reinterprets the phenomenon of recognition in specifically Jewish terms. These chapters, then, form a pair as they both focus on Lévinas’ concept of recognition at the intersection of his phenomenology, ethics, and religion. Chapters 4 and 5 detail and reconstruct the precise nature and understanding of Ricœur’s concept of recognition by considering in turn his philosophical and Christian writings. While Ricœur, like Lévinas, sought to separate his philosophical writings from his theological writings, certain concepts and methods often parallel and intersect with each other. Chapter 4 traces and analyzes his concept of recognition from his early works in existential phenomenology through his later ethical and political reflections. Chapter 5 engages in the constructive task of relating his writings on Christian theology, evinced in Gerhard Ebeling’s notion of the “process of the Word,” to the church’s role in institutionalizing the phenomenological, ethical, and political dimensions of recognition. His reflections on the nature and task of theology, in my judgment, present a complex and sophisticated approach that retrieves a post-Enlightenment appreciation of the Christian tradition, on the one hand, and yet insists on the ongoing creative appropriation and interpretation of Christian symbols, narratives, and texts for the purposes of personal, moral, social, and institutional transformation, on the other. The sixth and final chapter concludes with some reflections on phenomenology, ethics, and religion for the purpose of putting Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s insights on recognition in critical conversation with contemporary social and political theory. The primordial concrete existential-phenomenological dimension of recognition, a parsing out of the multiple ethical modalities of recognition, and the distinct contribution that religion can make to an ethics and politics of recognition are all absent in current debates within social and political theory. By concluding with reflections in phenomenology, ethics, and religion as they relate to the “good of recognition,” this work not only shows how Lévinas and Ricœur articulated a response to the pervasive problems of nonrecognition and misrecognition in their day but it also suggests how their thought can contribute to a better understanding of our contemporary situation.

Chapter One

Situating the Concept of Recognition

Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur belonged to a generation that experienced acute feelings of both nonrecognition and misrecognition. They perceptively detected the tragic irony that as technological progress in modern society brought people closer together, it left them more distant and remote from each other.1 Yet, even as they decried the malaise of anonymity that afflicted isolated individuals in modern mass society, they also witnessed and experienced invidious forms of social discrimination and political persecution. The Dreyfus affair that scandalized French society at the turn of the century remained part of their generation’s cultural collective memory, and Lévinas and Ricœur themselves were both confined in prisoner of war camps in Nazi-occupied France. They articulated a response to these social and political forces by drawing from the intellectual sources available to them. Their thought and works, particularly on recognition, can only be properly understood by situating them within the philosophical and theological context of the day. The concept of recognition, which was scarcely noted in French philosophy, only emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with the resurrection of Hegel 1 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le pacte: Traité ‘Sota,’ ” in L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1982), 88. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Pact (Tractate Sotah 37a–37b),” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Continuum, 2007), 68. 1

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The Good of Recognition

studies. And Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct appropriations of the Hegelian term Anerkennung could only take the form that they did with the emergence of existentialism and phenomenology. The confluence of these two major philosophical trends in French thought is the sine qua non for their use and understanding of recognition. During the same period in which France enjoyed these developments in philosophy, important movements in theology emerged. Thinkers such as Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, and Marc Cohn sought a Jewish cultural renaissance that returned to concrete religious life by retrieving the classical texts and sources of Judaism. Lévinas’ work as director of l’École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO)—an organization dedicated to training teachers to preserve and cultivate Jewish identity through the study of Talmudic texts in the Mediterranean basin—attests to his own commitment to this movement.2 Ricœur, too, belonged to a generation in French Protestant thought, initiated by the work of Pierre Maury and W. A. Visser ’t Hooft and pursued by people like Roger Mehl, characterized by disenchantment with modern liberal theology, which sought to renew Christian faith and existence. The overarching intellectual context will be outlined to properly situate and understand Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought. Philosophical Sources The French Reception of Hegel: The Emergence of Recognition as an Issue The question of recognition emerged as an issue out of a broader social and political context of a generation experiencing acute feelings of anonymity and witnessing invidious forms of identification and discrimination. Lévinas and Ricœur found resources for formulating a philosophical response to these historical forces within Hegelian thought or, more precisely, in Hegelian thought as it was received by French intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. The purpose of this section is to account for the emergence of Hegelianism in general and the Hegelian concept of recognition in particular as an issue within France, which in turn made it possible for Lévinas and Ricœur to creatively appropriate it as an issue central to their thought. For Hegelianism in general was not always viewed favorably in France, and the concept of recognition in particular, Hegel scholars today concede, is less prominent in his later thought and has an important but relatively small 2 On Lévinas’ description of the nature and purpose of ENIO, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le rôle de l’École Normale Israélite Orientale,” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 91 (1955): 32–38.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 3

role, in his early works.3 It should be noted that although this generation of thinkers belonged to the same geographical locale and historical period, there are important differences between them. Those differences notwithstanding, the points of commonality, in broad terms, will set the scene and situate the main thinkers and their arguments. Alexandre Koyré reported in 1930 that the state of Hegel studies in France was “relatively meager and poor, compared to Germany, England, and Italy.”4 The latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century witnessed a reaction against Hegelianism, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. Perceived as applying an absurd dialectic for the aims of abstract theory, Hegel was so thoroughly dismissed that Léon Brunschvicg, a major proponent of neo-Kantianism—the dominant philosophical school at the time—proclaimed that the verdict of history was that Hegelianism had suffered the worst disgrace.5 This state of affairs, however, began to change during the 1930s. The positive revival of Hegelian studies is located for some in Jean Wahl’s Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929)6 or Koyré’s translations and commentaries on Hegel’s early texts.7 Others attribute this revival to Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on Hegel at l’École pratique des hautes études from 1933 to 1939,8 attended by students who would become the seminal thinkers in the next generation of French thought.9 It is clear, in any case, that the 3

See especially Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Alexandre Koyré, “Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 205. 5 Léon Brunschvicg, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), 398. 6 Jean Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1929). Koyré, for instance, attributes the revival of Hegelianism in France to Wahl. See Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 137. 7 Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” 135–73. 8 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur la “Phénoménologie de l’Esprit” (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969). For a reading that highlights the importance of Kojève’s place in French philosophy, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 9 Some doubt exists as to who actually attended Kojève’s seminar because there was no strict requirement to register. There are many who have been reported to attend, such as Lévinas, who do not appear on the official register of students. The full class rosters from 1933 to 1939 can be found in Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 225–27, app.

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The Good of Recognition

dominance of neo-Kantianism began to wane and Hegelianism was on its ascendency in France. The revival of Hegel studies signified not a wholesale appreciation of his thought but a certain interpretation of Hegel, one that turned not to his logic or his system but rather to his phenomenology or consciousness—that is, the human elements within his thought found especially in his earlier works. Without denying its idealist impulses and logical structures, Jean Wahl, for instance, discovered the concreteness of experience and history in Hegel’s thought. According to Wahl, the philosophy of Hegel, particularly in his early works, is not reducible to logical formulas and theoretical issues; rather, it is fundamentally grounded in practical concerns. His interpretation of Hegel finds an existential dimension highlighted in the figure of “unhappy consciousness” and traces through motifs of division, sin, and torment, which indicate that human development is a product of alienation and reconciliation. For Wahl, the Hegelian dialectic, before being a method, is the experience of a divided consciousness striving for unity. During that same period, Alexandre Koyré discovered a “humanized” Hegel while translating his early works from Frankfurt and Jena. Koyré retrieves Hegel’s early thought to argue that, at its most profound level, it is concerned with the essential structures of the human spirit.10 Reversing the priority of logic over human existence, for Koyré, Hegel’s system is fundamentally grounded in anthropology. Perhaps most well known are Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which present a stunning and dramatic interpretation that made the master-slave relationship and the theme of recognition the centerpiece of Hegel’s thought. Kojève’s account clearly focuses on Hegel’s Phenomenology in isolation from the rest of his corpus. Moreover, his concept of recognition narrowly centers on the master-slave dialectic and the oppositional struggle therein rather than the final mode of mutual recognition. In other words, Kojève sees the struggle for recognition as the final, not the transitional, configuration of intersubjectivity. Whatever distortions or narrow interpretations that Kojève may have introduced, his thought would be influential for the French reception of Hegel, leading one commentator on contemporary French philosophy to observe that, since Kojève, “the Master-Slave relationship has been a constant in French thought.”11 By 1950 the appreciative reception of Hegel was so complete that Koyré, who had only two decades prior reported the relative meagerness and impoverishment of Hegel studies, could now declare: 10 11

Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” 166. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 138.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 5 Since the publication of this report [1930], the situation of Hegel in the world of European philosophy and in particular French philosophy, has changed entirely: Hegelian philosophy has witnessed a veritable renaissance, or better, a resurrection.12

Wahl’s monumental Le malheur de la conscience, Koyré’s translations and readings of Hegel’s Jena years, Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology, and Jean Hyppolite’s masterful translation of and commentary on the Phenomenology all contributed to the resurrection of Hegel’s thought in France. To be sure, their interpretations of Hegel had significant differences among them, focusing on one or another aspect of his thought, whether it was the figure of unhappy consciousness for Wahl, the dramatic figure of the masterslave dialectic for Kojève, or the concept of time for Koyré. Despite these differences, it is important to note that, in their retrieval of Hegel, it is the earlier works—his early theological writings, his tentative formulations at Frankfurt and Jena, and finally his Phenomenology—that are studied. From these texts, Hegel’s philosophy reemerged in a way that, without denying his absolute idealism, nevertheless turned “towards the concrete,” to borrow a term employed by Wahl.13 This turn to the concrete in the reinterpretation and retrieval of Hegel’s thought marked a shift that enabled the term “recognition,” which had played a relatively minor role within Hegel’s works and his French reception, to emerge as a central concept. The French Appropriation of Recognition through Existentialism and Phenomenology Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur received their formative education amid this movement to renew and resurrect Hegel studies in France, and indeed their early intellectual biographies intersect with these towering figures in French thought. Lévinas’ first published work, a French translation of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationes, was overseen by Koyré.14 He attended Kojève’s seminars on Hegel and met with him personally throughout the 1930s.15 For Lévinas, however, it was Jean Wahl, under 12

See Koyré, “Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France,” 228. Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932). 14 See Edmund Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: J. Vrin, 1953), vii. 15 For this biographical reference regarding Lévinas’ presence at Kojève’s famous seminars, see Adriaan T. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 2; Simon Critchley, “Emmanuel Lévinas: A Disparate Inventory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Simon Critchley and 13

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whom he would pursue his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne and to whom he would later dedicate his groundbreaking work, Totalité et infini, who would exert the most influence with respect to his understanding of Hegel. Lévinas credits the renewal of Hegel studies in France with Wahl’s publication of Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel in 1930: “The commentary reveals concrete experiences behind the rigorous formalism of Hegel’s system. The mature Hegel no longer seems to have forgotten the anxieties of his youth.”16 Lévinas was not interested in expositing Hegel’s work per se but rather sought to appropriate his thought in light of contemporary philosophical trends, particularly with the emergence of Husserlian phenomenology. When Lévinas migrated to France to pursue his education at Strasbourg in 1923, the university was uniquely positioned by virtue of its proximity to Germany and German culture to transmit the emerging developments in existentialism and phenomenology. Only four years prior, it had been called in fact Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität and was only renamed the Université de Strasbourg with the cession of Alsace-Lorraine back to France in the aftermath of the First World War.17 It was particularly fortuitous, then, that Lévinas studied there at a time when Husserlian phenomenology was just beginning to emerge in France. In 1927 Lévinas first encountered Husserl’s ideas on the recommendation of his friend Gabrielle Peiffer. Jean Hering, a professor in the Faculty of Protestant Theology and a member of Husserl’s original circle of disciples at Göttingen, later introduced him to the master himself.18 On Hering’s recommendation, Lévinas proceeded Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xviii. Also, according to Kojève’s biographer, they met together from time to time at Kojève’s residence. See Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: La philosophie, l’état, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990), 261. 16 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Jean Wahl: Sans avoir ni être,” in Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, ed. Jeanne Hersch (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), 16, cf. 21. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Jean Wahl: Neither Having nor Being,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 69, cf. 74. 17 I am indebted to Samuel Moyn for this historical note. Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Lévinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 38. 18 To my knowledge, Lévinas cites Jean Hering only in his first book review, published in 1931/1932, on H. E. Eisenhuth’s Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem, a work that sought to determine the essence of religion through the methodological approach of Heideggerian phenomenology. In a footnote to that review, Lévinas favorably cites Jean Hering’s Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse (1928). See Emmanuel Lévinas, review of Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem, by H. E. Eisenhuth, Recherches philosophiques 1 (1931–1932): 385n1. When he later reminisces about his early studies on



Situating the Concept of Recognition 7

to attend Husserl’s seminars at Freiburg in the summer of 1928 and winter of 1929 on phenomenological psychology and the constitution of intersubjectivity. Together, Peiffer and Lévinas would translate Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen—lectures he gave at Strasbourg and then at the Sorbonne in 1929—into French.19 Significantly, it was Lévinas who was primarily responsible for the lengthy and important fifth meditation on intersubjectivity. A year later he came out with his Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, which made him among the first to introduce Husserl’s thought to France.20 That work was, in fact, much indebted to the thought of another important professor of his at Strasbourg, Maurice Pradines. Lévinas cites Pradines’ La philosophie de la sensation (1928) as “one of the first in France in which some of Husserl’s theses are explicitly mentioned and discussed.” Moreover, while there were other French thinkers who focused on Husserl’s logicism, Pradines was credited as the first to focus on Husserl’s notion of intentionality.21 Lévinas’ first major work, then, was a meditation on Pradines’ insight regarding the centrality of intuition and sensation in Husserlian phenomenology of intentionality. What was so attractive about Pradines’ concept of sensation and Husserl’s phenomenology, for Lévinas, were that they pursued the general turn to the concrete that characterized the generation of the French philosophy to which he belonged. Thus he can state, “The whole current of ideas that Jean Wahl has characterized as going ‘toward the concrete,’ this sense also sustains Husserl’s meditations.”22 Lévinas brings together two major movements in French philosophy—the turn to the concrete in Hegel and the emergence of Husserlian phenomenology—to appropriate and reinterpret the meaning of the concept of recognition. For Ricœur as well, the origins of the other and the issue of recognition are traceable to the French reception of Hegel in the 1930s and 1940s. As Husserl, he acknowledges the important role that Hering played, especially during his time at Strasbourg. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “Séjour de jeunesse auprès de Husserl 1928–1929,” in Positivité et transcendance: Suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie, ed. Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 3–4. 19 Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes. 20 Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan, 1930). Emmanuel Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 21 Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 135n100; Lévinas, Theory of Intuition, 90n100. 22 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’œuvre d’Edmund Husserl,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1949), 9. Previously published in Revue Philosophique de France et de l’étranger 129, nos. 1–2 (1940): 35. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Work of Edmund Husserl,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, , trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 48.

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The Good of Recognition

Ricœur states, “The problem of the other appears in history as a discovery and acquisition of modern philosophy. We can basically fix the advent to Hegel.”23 Like Lévinas, Ricœur’s early intellectual biography intersects with the key figures who contributed to the revival of Hegel studies in France.24 Ricœur himself never attended Kojève’s seminars, but he credits him with “an anti-theological and even anti-speculative interpretation of Hegelian phenomenology and thus opened the way for all the anthropological applications of dialectics which were incorporated into French phenomenology.”25 And in a preface that he wrote for Adrien Peperzak’s Le jeune Hegel et la vision morale du monde,26 Ricœur credits Jean Wahl with first opening the field of Hegel studies in France with his Ecrits théologiques de jeunesse de Hegel at the beginning of the century.27 It is clear that Ricœur himself will follow the “turn to the concrete” of Hegel’s early works that was initiated by Wahl, Koyré, and Kojève and pursued by Lévinas. In a sweeping article that surveys different strands of French philosophy after the war, Ricœur notes that above all it is Hegel who dominated the philosophical scene. “It is not just a return to Hegel,” he adds, “but a return to the Hegel of The Phenomenology of Spirit more than the Hegel of the Logic, which contributed to French philosophy.”28 As with Lévinas, Ricœur does not try to uncover what Hegel “really said” on intersubjectivity and recognition. Rather, Ricœur brings the insights of recent Hegel studies in critical conversation with the emerging movements in existentialism and phenomenology, particularly in the thought of Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. Since Jean Wahl’s introduction of Karl Jaspers’

23 Paul Ricœur and Mikel Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947), 153. 24 Paul Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 74 (1990): 87–91. Indeed, Paul Ricœur’s personal library, which is now available at le Fonds Ricœur, contains a copy of Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s La phénoménologie de l’esprit, Genèse et structure de la “Phénoménologie de l’esprit” de Hegel, Logique et existence, Figures de la pensée philosophique, and Wahl’s Vers le concret, La malheur de la conscience, and Les philosophies de l’existence, among other works. 25 Paul Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phenomenology of Language,” trans. P. G. Goodman, Social Research 34, no. 1 (1967): 4. 26 Paul Ricœur, preface to Le jeune Hegel et la vision morale du monde, by Adrien T. B. Peperzak (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), v. 27 Paul Ricœur, “L’humanité de l’homme: Contribution de la philosophie française contemporaine,” Studium generale 15, no. 5 (1962): v. 28 Ricœur, “L’humanité de l’homme,” 310. See also Paul Ricœur, “Hegel aujourd’hui,” Études théologiques et religieuses 49, no. 3 (1974): 350.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 9

Existenz philosophy to France,29 existentialism became an influential intellectual movement, particularly for Ricœur, in the postwar period.30 Indeed, Ricœur’s first two major works, both published in 1947, which would themselves become influential in disseminating the German thinker’s work to a French audience, carefully exposited, critically analyzed, and reconstructed Jaspers’ thought.31 What Ricœur found so attractive in Jaspers and his interpretation of Hegel was a turn to the concrete that was characteristic of French Hegelianism during the period.32 Ricœur was an important figure not only for introducing Karl Jaspers’ existentialist thought to France but also for disseminating the new insights of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In both method and content, Ricœur finds similarities between Jaspers’ existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology.33 His introduction to Husserl was, as he acknowledges, through the work of Lévinas himself. He reminisces that in his student days “we were reading the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl in the Lévinas-Pfeiffer translation.”34 And in 1948, as a young professor at the Université de Strasbourg, he first read Lévinas’ own original work, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl.35 Speaking almost forty years after his first encounter with that book, Ricœur states,

29 See for instance, Jean Wahl, “Jaspers et Kierkegaard,” in Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), 477–509; and Jean Wahl, “Le problème du choix, l’existence et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers,” in Études Kierkegaardiennes, 510–51. 30 Ricœur notes that it was originally his mentor, Gabriel Marcel, who introduced him to Jaspers’ work. See Paul Ricœur, “J’attends la Renaissance,” Autrement, no. 102 (1988): 175. 31 Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence; and Paul Ricœur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophe du mystère et philosophe du paradoxe (Paris: Éditions du temps présent, 1947). Indeed, his works on Jaspers elicited a critical review from Wahl himself. See Jean Wahl, “Karl Jaspers en France,” Critique 4, no. 25 (1948): 523–30. 32 Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence, 31. 33 Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France,” 3. 34 Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France,” 3. In a peculiar twist of intellectual history, Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations was first published in French in 1930 and was to be published in his native land of Germany only in 1950. This is because, as Ricœur notes, toward the end of 1930, Husserl became engrossed with recasting the Cartesian Meditations. See Paul Ricœur, “Analyses et problèmes des ‘Ideen II ’ de Husserl,” in A l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), 87. Originally published in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 4 (1951): 357. Paul Ricœur, “Husserl’s Ideas II: Analyses and Problems,” in Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 35. 35 Paul Ricœur, “Soirée d’hommage à Emmanuel Lévinas,” Sens: Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde aujourd’hui, no. 211 (1996): 356.

10

The Good of Recognition I cannot forget my first deep encounter with Husserl. It was by reading Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl by Emmanuel Lévinas. This book quite simply founded Husserlian studies in France.36

It should be noted that this statement is perhaps more a tribute to Ricœur’s deep appreciation of Lévinas’ work and less a testimony of historical veracity, for there were others, such as Jean Hering and Maurice Pradines, who first introduced Husserl’s thought. In any case, Ricœur himself proved to be a key figure in transmitting the works and thought of Husserl to France by translating his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie and Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie into French in 195037 and by devoting a number of early articles to the task of expositing his thought.38 Ricœur found in Husserl’s phenomenology a return to an analysis of concrete human existence that Hegel initiated without the slide toward speculative logic. Indeed, Ricœur cites Hegel as an example and a prefiguration of Husserlian phenomenology when he writes, “Hegel’s concern to let human experience appear and speak for itself in its integrity is quite comparable to Husserl’s precept: ‘Back to the things themselves.’ ”39 And he makes the direct connection between Hegel’s concept of recognition and Husserlian phenomenology when he state, The works on desire for desire, on the struggle for recognition in the dialectic of master and slave, on unhappy consciousness, were read in France as the best way of meeting Husserl’s injunction to go back to things themselves, to the extent that Hegelian phenomenology allowed the whole human experience to appear and be considered as a simple “phenomenon.”40 36 Paul Ricœur, “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans le Krisis de Husserl,” in A l’école de la phénoménologie, 285. 37 Edmund Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, trans. Paul Ricœur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); and Edmund Husserl, “La crise de l’humanité européene et la philosophie,” trans. Paul Ricœur, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 55, no. 3 (1950): 225–58. 38 See, for instance, Paul Ricœur, “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 54 (1949): 280–316; Ricœur, “Introduction à Idéen I de E. Husserl,” in Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie, xi–xxxix; Paul Ricœur, “Analyses et problèmes dans Ideen II de Husserl,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 4 (1951): 357–94; Paul Ricœur, “Sur la phénoménologie,” Esprit, no. 209 (1953): 821–39; and Paul Ricœur, “Kant et Husserl,” Kant Studien 46 (1954–1955): 44–67. An English translation of these articles is available in Ricœur, Husserl. 39 Paul Ricœur, “Phénoménologie existentielle,” Encyclopédie française, vol. 19, Philosophie/ Religion (Paris: Société Nouvelle de l’Encyclopédie française, 1957), 10.9; Ricœur, “Existential Phenomenology,” in Husserl, 205–6; cf. Ricœur, “L’humanité de l’homme,” 310–11. 40 Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France,” 4.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 11

Like Lévinas, then, Ricœur creatively brought the two major movements in French philosophy together in a way that rearticulated and reinterpreted Hegel’s concept of Anerkennung. Both Lévinas and Ricœur belonged to a generation in French philosophy that enjoyed the resurrection of Hegel studies, but they also argued that a simple return to Hegel would not suffice. Rather they both reinterpret the Hegelian concept of recognition, mediated through the methodological prism of existentialism and phenomenology, vis-à-vis the emergence of Jaspers and Husserl in France. Theological Sources Despite the seemingly clear separation between their philosophical and theological writings, the issue is a great deal more muddled. As borders are created to both separate and cross over, so too the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and theology within their thought simultaneously distinguish and yet overlap. Theological concepts and biblical references are found throughout Lévinas’ philosophical writings, and philosophical concepts and references are found throughout his Jewish writings. Ricœur guarded the separation more closely, but for each turn in his philosophical thought from existentialism and phenomenology through hermeneutics to ethics and politics, there is a parallel move made in his theology. If the issue of religion and theology is intimately linked to their respective philosophies, this is especially evident in their understandings of phenomenology and the ethics of recognition. To that end, as the previous section situated Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s use and understanding of the concept of recognition within the philosophical movements of the day, this section focuses on contextualizing their theological and religious situation. Emmanuel Lévinas and the Cultural Renaissance of Jewish Tradition There is already a vast literature that has contextualized Lévinas’ writings either by demonstrating the premodern Jewish sources of his thought41 or by elucidating his indebtedness to modern and contemporary Jewish 41 For instance, see Oona Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Lévinas’ Postmodernism (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2001); and Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Lévinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). See also Samuel Moyn, “Emmanuel Lévinas’s Talmudic Readings: Between Tradition and Invention,” Prooftexts 23, no. 3 (2003): 338–64; and Martin Kavka, “Is There a Warrant for Lévinas’s Talmudic Readings?” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14, nos.1–2 (2006): 153–73.

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The Good of Recognition

philosophers.42 In a recent work, one scholar nuances these accounts by arguing for the important contribution that Christian thinkers, such as Rudolf Otto, Karl Barth, and especially Søren Kierkegaard, made to the development of his thought during the interwar period.43 Instead of simply repeating this material, the emphasis here is on situating Lévinas’ thought within a certain social and political history of Jewish life in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it is this context that is most important to understanding the stakes for his reconceptualization of recognition. The literature on French Jewry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is likewise vast, and, given the limits of the present work, it is neither possible nor desirable to rehearse that history. Instead, the focus is primarily on how that social and political history informed and shaped Lévinas’ life and thought. The French Revolution of 1789 and the ensuing emancipation ushered in a new century and a new spirit of optimism and confidence in the ideals of the “rights of man.” The dreams of universality and equality led many Jews to hold onto ideals of political and cultural integration. Perhaps this aspiration is nowhere more evident than in the desire to elevate a proper “science of Judaism” to a level of scholarly rank and respectability at the university. Following the methods and aims of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany that emerged in the early nineteenth century, scholars like Salomon Munk and Adolphe Franck sought to teach the next generation of Jewish leaders in France the insights of the new science of Judaism. The aspiration to situate rigorous Jewish studies within the broader context of the modern university rather than the confinements of the synagogue and the shift in training rabbis from the yeshiva to the Jewish seminary were both part of the effort of modernization, cultural reform, and articulation of a new conception of Judaism within the overarching trends and optimism of nineteenth century France. When Lévinas began to work at l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in 1930, he was joining an organization whose ideals originated from the 42

For his relationship to Franz Rosenzweig, see Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Lévinas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Lévinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For his relationship to Hermann Cohen, see Edith Wyschogrod, “The Moral Self: Emmanuel Lévinas and Hermann Cohen,” Daat: Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 4 (1980): 35–58; and Dana Hollander, “Is the Other My Neighbor? Reading Lévinas alongside Hermann Cohen,” in The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Lévinas between Jews and Christians, ed. Kevin Hart and Michael A. Signer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 90–107. 43 Moyn, Origins of the Other.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 13

nineteenth century and that was committed to promoting the values of the 1848 revolutions and the rights of man.44 Michael Graetz, who has written perhaps the definitive history of modern French Jewry, bookends the nineteenth century with the French Revolution of 1789 and the founding of AIU in 1860.45 From its inception, AIU sought to defend the rights of Jews throughout the world, particularly in countries where they were not recognized as citizens.46 Sensitive to “the dangers of civilization,” especially where Jews were not legally or politically recognized, AIU was nevertheless founded in a period of optimism when “all problems would resolve themselves in the light of Knowledge and the conflicts of all particularisms based on the universality of Reason.”47 The hope for assimilation that characterized modern Jewry, however, was put into question by the Dreyfus affair, which initiated a movement of Jewish separation and identity that led to not only political Zionism but also cultural Judaism.48 It was to the latter—what Lévinas called “the Jewish cultural renaissance”—that he would devote much of his life and work. In an essay by that same name, he uses Jewish life in France as the paradigm for broader spiritual, intellectual, and institutional phenomena developing on the continent.49 Joining the work of Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Marc Cohn, Andre Spire, Jules Braunschvig, André Neher, and Éliane Amado Levy-Valensi, Lévinas seeks a revival of ritualism and practice of the Torah. The future of Judaism, Lévinas argues, hinges not so much 44 For a good overview of the history of AIU, see André Chouraqui, L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine (1860–1960) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 45 Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). While Graetz takes a more long-term view of the causes that founded AIU beginning with the French Revolution, he does note its more proximate or immediate causes of it in the Mortara affair. In 1858 a Jewish child was abducted in Bologne, placed in a convent, and forcefully baptized. No political institution recognized and addressed the injustice and Pope Pius IX refused to command the return of the child. Thus, AIU was conceived as a worldwide Jewish organization to promote Jewish rights as constitutive of the rights of man. 46 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Entretiens Emmanuel Lévinas—François Poirié,” in Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous? ed. Francois Poirié (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 84. 47 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Evolution et fidélité,” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 182 (1972): 25. 48 Emmanuel Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” in Le renouveau de la culture juive, ed. Emmanuel Lévinas, Moshe Davis, Shaul Esh, and Max Gottschalk (Brussels: Éditions de l’Institut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1968), 22. 49 Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” 21–34.

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The Good of Recognition

on the struggle for political existence but primarily on the cultivation of this cultural Judaism. From 1946 until the mid-1960s, he would serve as acting director of ENIO, which recruited and trained teachers to preserve and cultivate Jewish identity through the study and exegesis of Talmudic texts and to teach modern ideas to Jewish communities in the Mediterranean basin.50 His life and writings express this dedication to educating and thinking about Jewish identity within a sociohistorical location that was committed to modern ideals. These tensions play out as he retrieves textual sources and traditions that modern Judaism had neglected while at the same time enlarging its relevance beyond a historical community by employing a general phenomenology. Paul Ricœur and the Revival of Christian Tradition While Lévinas’ Jewish writings are easily accessible and well known, Ricœur’s Christian writings are only now being discovered. So, while a number of historical studies in Lévinas scholarship contextualize his thought within the Jewish tradition, few historical studies in Ricœur scholarship properly situate his thought within the Protestant Christian tradition. The studies that do attend to Ricœur’s import for theology focus on his specifically philosophical contribution. This is due to a limited acquaintance with Ricœur’s works, which renders a restricted view of his thought. It is clear, however, that Ricœur also wrote explicitly and extensively in theology. This section then tries to situate Ricœur’s Christian writings within the theological trends of his day. Ricœur, orphaned as a child during the First World War, grew up with his grandparents in Rennes, a notable Catholic stronghold. He notes that French Protestants, like French Jewry, occupied a pariah status in larger French social and political life, and perhaps for that reason, he strongly identified with and sought to revive the tradition.51 In an interview he gave late in life, he recalled his sense of exclusion and alienation: 50 ENIO reopened after the war on November 3, 1946, and Lévinas served as director. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La réouverture de l’école Normale Israélite Orientale,” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 11 (1946–1947): 2–3. As the acting director of ENIO and as representative of AIU, he regularly attended and participated in colloquia at Section Française du Congrès Juif Mondial that gathered French Jewish intellectuals to discuss various issues on Jewish identity. 51 The number of students that enrolled in Protestant studies at Strasbourg after the war until roughly 1960 was low. Only 86 students enrolled in 1946–1947, but 290 students enrolled by 1969–1970. See Marc Lienhard, “Les protestants,” in Catholiques, protestants, juifs en Alsace, ed. François-Georges Dreyfus, René Epp, Marc Lienhard, and Freddy Raphael (Paris: Alsatia, 1992), 150.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 15 In Rennes, Protestants were perceived as belonging to a minority and they lived without any close ties to the Catholic sphere of the vast-majority—a situation perhaps comparable to that of Jews in a Christian milieu. .­ . . I found only limited freedom there, and there was little point in hoping that it would recognize me fully.52

Even when Ricœur moved from the provincial periphery, as it were, to the center of Paris, he remained acutely aware of his Protestant identity within the Catholic majority of France. When he was appointed to teach at the Sorbonne in 1957, he also held classes at l’Institut protestant de théologie. As Olivier Abel—Ricœur’s friend, founder of le Fonds Ricœur, and current professor of the chair that Ricœur once held at the institute—states, Protestants are a minority in France like Jews and Muslims while still belonging to the majority Christian tradition like Catholics, and what further complicates things is that they fought at the forefront to construct the secular republic.53

As French Jewry, particularly through AIU, sought to promote the ideals of the 1848 revolutions and the extension of the rights of man, so too French Protestantism had a stake in and was at the forefront of the extension of legal and political recognition. We will see later that Ricœur, like Lévinas, holds a strong commitment to universal political and legal recognition while at the same time cultivating and renewing particular religious identity. It was at Strasbourg, as a young professor after the war, that Ricœur came into contact with not only many of the emerging philosophical movements from Germany but also the newest theological trends. Indeed, Strasbourg was exceptional, for it possessed the only faculty of Protestant theology. As one historian of the region notes, The Faculty of Theology at Strasbourg participated simultaneously in German culture and French culture. The courses and publications of professors were made into two languages.54

There at Strasbourg, Ricœur himself notes that the “1930s to 1960s were massively dominated by Barth.”55 Through the work of Pierre Maury, in particular, and his disciples such as Roger Mehl, Karl Barth’s theology emerged 52

Paul Ricœur, La critique et la conviction: Entretien avec François Azouvi et Marc de Launay (Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 19. Paul Ricœur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8. 53 Olivier Abel, “Un intermediare hésitant: L’intellectuel protestant,” Esprit 3–4 (2000): 71–84. 54 Lienhard, “Les protestants,” 127. 55 Paul Ricœur, “L’écart,” Le christianisme au XXème siècle, no. 37 (October 14, 1985): 8.

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The Good of Recognition

at the center of attempts to renew the life of the Confessing Church in France. Lévinas’ critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums was recapitulated in a different form with Ricœur’s critique of liberal historical theology through the insights of Barth. Yet to this he adds, Myself, I belonged to this generation which made a real theological conversion from Barth. Then we integrated opposite elements, at least as disparate as Bultmann, for a very important reason—a certain lack of interest, if not in Barth then in Barthians, regarding the question of language.56

The neglect of language in Barthian theology is important because his reflections on the relationship between theology and language dovetail at a time in his career when he was beginning to think through parallel issues in philosophy. In the 1960s, precisely at a time when he was reflecting on and formulating his philosophical hermeneutics, he devoted a number of articles to theology and theological hermeneutics. Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, but also Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Ebeling, and Jürgen Moltmann are frequently cited in his writings during this period of intellectual ferment. By consulting the entire range of Ricœur’s corpus, which includes many untranslated and less well-known articles, the aim is to give a more balanced and well-rounded appraisal of Ricœur’s contribution to theology. Just as Lévinas attempted to do with his religious tradition, Ricœur sought to revive French Protestant Christianity for a postwar generation. Lévinas and Ricœur as Sources for Each Other Philosophical and theological trends that were important during Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s formative years have been highlighted to gain background and perspective on their use and understanding of the concept of recognition. Before turning to their own distinct appropriations of that concept, a few concluding words about Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s personal and professional relationship may be of further interest and aid in setting the broader historical context. For not only did they belong to the same generation, live through the same major historical events, and inherit the same philosophical tradition, but they also enjoyed a warm personal friendship and mutual admiration for each other’s work. Lévinas’ appreciation for Ricœur’s works was more private in nature. While Ricœur cites Lévinas throughout many of his works and even devotes an entire manuscript to his thought, Lévinas scarcely references Ricœur in his works and never penned an article, let alone a book-length manuscript, 56

Ricœur, “L’écart,” 8.



Situating the Concept of Recognition 17

on his work. It is not entirely clear why Lévinas was so conspicuously silent with respect to his friend and colleague’s works, particularly since he clearly read them with great interest. On the publication of Soi-même comme un autre (1990), Lévinas wrote in a private letter to Ricœur, dated May 28, 1990, “Will you permit my admiration since your early works the elevation and depth of your thought and the precision and finesse of your phenomenology?”57 Ricœur was much more effusive in his praise of Lévinas, calling him “my colleague, my friend, and our master.”58 As mentioned earlier, Ricœur initially encountered Lévinas through his works, first as a student reading his translation of Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen and later as a young professor at the Université de Strasbourg reading his Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. They would meet in person for the first time at a conference organized by Jean Wahl in Paris in 1946, and indeed Ricœur would later sit on Lévinas’ thesis committee along with Wahl, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Marcel.59 But it was with the publication of Totalité et infini (1961) that Lévinas warranted a new level of respect and attention in Ricœur’s eyes. He states, “Since that time, I have not ceased to support the development, creation, and writing of this work.”60 His works made such an impression that when Ricœur moved from the Sorbonne to Nanterre in 1964, he recruited Lévinas, who to that point was still relatively unknown and without his agrégation, to join him in the department of philosophy.61 Lévinas’ reputation and standing was cemented with his second major work, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974), which was of such quality that it merited an extended, admiring response from Ricœur.62 Ricœur’s appreciation of Lévinas’ thought applies specifically to his understanding and reconceptualization of recognition. He notes that Lévinas “wishes to underline that the recognition of the face of the other constitutes a real departure, a beginning entirely original in the way of ethics.”63 57

Lévinas to Ricœur, May 28, 1990, in Paul Ricœur with Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’unicité humaine du pronom je,” in Éthique et responsabilité, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeshlimann (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1994), 36. 58 Paul Ricœur, “Catastrophes naturelles et crimes de l’homme: Le scandale du mal,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 85 (1986): 6. 59 Ricœur, “Soirée d’hommage à Emmanuel Lévinas,” 356. 60 Ricœur, “Soirée d’hommage à Emmanuel Lévinas,” 357. 61 Ricœur, Critique et la conviction, 59; Ricœur, Critique and Conviction, 35. 62 Paul Ricœur, Autrement: Lecture d’autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 63 Paul Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, nos. 49–50 (1983): 34.

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The Good of Recognition

How Lévinas’ ethics of recognition can be seen as a starting point will be followed in more detail in the next chapter. It does bear noting at this point, however, that while Ricœur is deeply appreciative of Lévinas’ insights, he will differentiate and distance his own position from Lévinas’ project. Ricœur is perhaps clearest in this delineation when he states in a series of interviews conducted during the winter of 1986–1987: This place of others, in my opinion, is not only defined by the report of the master to the disciple that was in the philosophy of Lévinas. There are also reports of reciprocity. The correlation between two people is a reciprocal and not, as Lévinas says, an asymmetry. .­ . . But if I want a very strong base, it is in Hegel that I find, with its theme of Anerkennung as shown particularly in the philosophy of Jena. I find in the philosophy of Jena considerable resources to ethical thinking. I do not deny at all that the initial situation report with others is an asymmetrical relationship, but you then say that it is an asymmetric double as others, as Lévinas says, can be my teacher or my victim.64

A significant part of this work will be devoted not only to exploring the historical and intellectual sources of Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s respective ethics of recognition but also to reconstructing how Lévinas provides a fundamental starting point that is complemented by the “strong base” that Ricœur’s ethics of recognition provides. Conclusion Lévinas and Ricœur responded to sociopolitical forces of nonrecognition and misrecognition through the intellectual sources available to them. Some of the basic philosophical and theological trends that were emerging in French intellectual life and that were important for their use and understanding of recognition have been highlighted in this chapter. It remains to pursue in more detail precisely how Lévinas and Ricœur appropriate from the resurrected Hegelian concept of recognition in light of emerging trends in existentialism and phenomenology and how such a concept was brought into critical conversation within their respective religious traditions.

64 Paul Ricœur, “De la volonté à l’acte: Un entretien de Paul Ricœur avec Carlos Oliveira,” in “Temps et recit” de Paul Ricœur en debat, ed. Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 25. See also, Paul Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur sur l’effondrement du système communiste en Europe centrale et de l’Est,” in Éthique et responsabilité, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeshlimann (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1994), 24.

Chapter two

Emmanuel Lévinas

Recognition as Pure Sensation

The recent publication of Lévinas’ notes and writings from the Second World War indicate that he was reflecting on recognition (la reconnaissance) from his early years, and his mature works attest to the central role it came to play in his later years.1 In his first major mature work, Totalité et infini (1961), he uses it variously and prominently—in the Hegelian formulation of a “struggle for recognition” and in his own distinct sense of ethical recognition;2 as symmetrical relation with the other and as an asymmetrical 1 For his wartime notes on recognition, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Carnets de captivité (1940–1945),” in Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas, vol. 1, Carnets de captivité suivi de Écrits sur la captivité et Notes philosophiques divers, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2009), 69, 121. For his notes on recognition in the years following shortly after the war, see, “Notes philosophiques diverses,” in Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas, 1:284, 313, 333–34. To my knowledge, the first time he uses “recognition” in his published corpus is in De l’existence à l’existant, which was written during his internment in the Second World War. See Emmanuel Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Revue Fontaine, 1947; repr., Paris: J. Vrin, 1990), 99. Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 56. 2 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essais sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961; repr. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), 58, 73. Citations are to the Livre de Poche edition. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 64, 75. 19

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giving relation;3 and in reference to political or legal recognition and to the personal face-to-face encounter.4 The aim and purpose here is to highlight the centrality of the concept of recognition in Lévinas’ philosophy by situating it within the intellectual context of the day, tracing the development of his understanding of the concept, and reconstructing the different uses and dimensions of the term. The importance of the concept of recognition for understanding Lévinas’ philosophical works can be grasped when it is situated within a broader historical context. His was a generation that held acute and deep feelings of anonymity within the malaise of modern society and yet also witnessed and suffered invidious forms of recognition based on racial, national, and particularly religious identity. The question of recognition emerges as an issue out of a broader political and social historical context, but he finds resources for formulating a philosophical response within a particular intellectual context. To focus on recognition firmly situates Lévinas’ ethics of the other in critical conversation with Hegel, with whom that concept is most associated. But he also appropriates and reinterprets its meaning through the insights and oversights of Husserlian phenomenology. The course of the argument here proceeds by considering the critique of naturalistic theories of cognition by Husserl as well as the critique of the Husserlian phenomenological theory of cognition by Lévinas before finally turning to Lévinas’ own distinct theory of ethical recognition. Each approach presents a distinct methodological principle as the starting point for investigation, yet, as we pass through each successive stage, there is a move toward a deeper, more concrete and primordial understanding of the phenomenon of (re)cognition.5 In this respect, it is appropriate and fitting to begin an analysis of the meanings of recognition by considering Lévinas’ thought, for, as Ricœur notes, he “wishes to underline that the recognition of the face of the other constitutes a real departure, a beginning entirely original in the way of ethics.”6 It will be shown below how exactly Lévinas uncovers a deeper dimension than the 3

Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 58, 73; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 64, 75. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 58, 27; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 64, 38. 5 To approach Lévinas’ thought as a series of reductions leading to his distinct concept of recognition follows more general interpretive patterns in contemporary French phenomenology, most notably in what Jean-Luc Marion has called the “third reduction” in Reduction and Givenness. Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998). See also Michel Henry, “Quatre principes de la phénoménologie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (1991): 3–26. 6 Paul Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, nos. 49–50 (1983): 34. 4



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 21

naturalistic cognition of mere facts and the phenomenological cognition of things by presenting the “real departure” and “original beginning” for an ethics of recognition of the person. The multiple modes of cognition and recognition will be reconstructed as they relate to the multiple modes of being and sensation operative within Lévinas’ thought.7 Being, sensation, and recognition are such basic and interrelated concepts that raising any one implicates the other two. To highlight the concept of recognition, then, necessarily involves and triangulates with the concepts of being and sensation. Moreover, the constellation of these concepts lies at the very center of the configuration of naturalism, phenomenology, and Lévinasian ethics. The task is (1) to situate and trace the development of Lévinas’ concept of recognition in relation to the broader themes in his own thought and in relation to the wider intellectual movements of the day, (2) to assemble and reconstruct the distinct meanings of recognition for Lévinas vis-à-vis the concepts of being and sensation, and (3) to indicate the social and political implications of such an understanding of the meaning of recognition. The Critique of the Meaning of Recognition The Naturalistic Approach to Cognition When Emmanuel Lévinas entered the Université de Strasbourg in 1923 as a student at eighteen years of age, it was a time of much intellectual ferment, for the regnant dominance of naturalism as a methodological approach for the sciences was being called into question. Maurice Pradines, one of his professors at Strasbourg, later reflected on this period as one that constituted a “number of revolutions” from various disciplines over the very meaning and approach to the sciences.8 Within this intellectual milieu, Lévinas studied 7

While there are some studies on the concepts of being and sensation, to my knowledge there is no sustained attention on the roles of cognition and recognition. On being, see Adriaan Peperzak, “From Phenomenology through Ontology to Metaphysics: Lévinas’ Perspective on Husserl and Heidegger from 1927 to 1950,” in Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 38–52. On sensation, see John E. Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Lévinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 67–82, 129–51; and Didier Franck, “Sensibilité sans intentionnalité,” in L’un-pour l’autre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 55–68. 8 Pradines names, in addition to Husserl, the philosophical work of Henri Bergson in France and the work on tactile sensation by Maximilian von Frey in Germany and Henry Head in England, who all contributed to critiquing an empiricist and naturalistic understanding of sensation in the sciences. Maurice Pradines, “L’évolution du problème de la sensation au XXe siècle,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 47–51 (1954): 43.

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under a number of emerging and creative scholars who were probing into new methods for scientific research. Lévinas names Charles Blondel, Henri Carteron, and Maurice Halbwachs as important teachers, but it was especially Jean Hering and Maurice Pradines who were formative, for they introduced to him the innovative insights of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a rigorous scientific method, as an alternative to the model employed by the naturalistic sciences. It was Jean Hering who first introduced Lévinas to Husserl and encouraged him to go study with the master in Freiburg in 1928–1929, and it was Pradines’ work in La philosophie de la sensation (1928) to which Lévinas would respond in his first major work, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930).9 In analyzing the different modalities of recognition in Lévinas’ thought, then, consideration will be given first to naturalistic theories, particularly Husserl’s understanding of them, for Lévinas found Husserl’s critique of naturalism to be so thorough and persuasive that he devoted sustained attention to it only in Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, but he would arrive at conclusions that would be taken for granted and assumed throughout the remainder of his works.10 Following Husserl, what Lévinas calls “naturalistic theories of being” are theories of existence that have as its starting point a “fact,” that is, the perspectival perception of a material object given in multiple, changing subjective phenomena. Cognition, construed within naturalistic theories of being, is therefore the passive impression and sensation of external things on internal consciousness. What is perceived are the distinct qualities of an object, such as color, odor, taste, and sound. What undergirds naturalism, however, is that while it begins with this or that particular being of the physical world, it abstracts from it universal and general laws of reality and being. This leads to two fundamental problems in Lévinas’ reading of Husserl’s reading of naturalism. The first is what may be called the problem of logical contradiction. Lévinas states it thus: 9 Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan, 1930; repr. Paris: J. Vrin, 1963), 135n100. Citations are to the Vrin edition. Emmanuel Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 90n100. 10 For his chapter on naturalistic theories of being, see Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 20–38; Lévinas, Theory of Intuition, 3–16. Husserl’s analysis and critique of naturalistic theories of being, grounded in “facts,” can be found in part 1, chapter 1, entitled “Matter of Fact and Essence,” and chapter 2, entitled “Naturalistic Misinterpretations.” See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, book 1, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 5–48.



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 23 By interpreting the ideal world which is discovered by science on the basis of the changing and elusive world of perception as absolute being, of which the perceptible world would be only a subjective appearance, naturalism betrays the internal meaning of perceptual experience.11

In other words, naturalism is erroneous because it takes the multiple and changing world of perception as absolute being and thereby contradicts the very definition and meaning of perception. The second problem, linked to the first, is what may be called the problem of abstraction. In naturalistic theories of being, the specific being of nature imposes the search, in the midst of a multiple and changing reality, for a causality which is behind it. .­ . . The movement of science is not so much the passage from the particular to the general as it is the passage from the concrete sensible to the hypothetical superstructure which claims to realize what is intimated in the subjective phenomena.12

What is immediate, then, becomes only the apparent, and the “real” is to be discovered beyond the immediate.13 For Lévinas, naturalism is right to seek to move to the concrete and the immediate, but its drive to discover the universal general laws behind it ends in abstraction. The theory of cognition within a naturalistic theory of being is problematic, for it involves not only a logical contradiction between its aims and ends but, more seriously, it reneges on the very movement toward the concrete and immediate that it propounds by searching for the abstract and universal. Although naturalism remained the dominant method for approaching the human and natural sciences (Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften) until the turn of the twentieth century, it could not serve as the methodological basis for all forms of knowledge because it reduces the scope of being to the qualities of mere facts and narrows the range of cognition to the impression and sensation of external things on internal consciousness. If naturalism did not offer a comprehensive account of the scope of possible cognition or knowledge, what was required for an alternative method to the sciences was a reconceptualization of the meaning of cognition. Husserl does this, according to Lévinas, by shifting our understanding of being and sensation. 11

Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 30; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 10. Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 37; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 15 (emphasis in original). See also Emmanuel Lévinas, “Fribourg, Husserl et la phénoménologie,” in Les imprévus de l’histoire (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 98. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” in Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 60. 13 Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 37; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 16. 12

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The Phenomenological Approach to Cognition Given the contradictions and abstractions of naturalistic theories of being and cognition, Husserl finds it necessary, in Lévinas’ words, “to dig deeper.”14 Husserl’s fundamental insight through this excavation, according to Lévinas, is that naturalism does not exhaust the realm of being and thus does not circumscribe the modes of cognition. Husserl’s point is not a wholesale rejection of the being of naturalism in favor of the being of consciousness. Rather, it upholds the position that both consciousness and the external world exist, but existence has two different modes. To be more precise, the being of naturalism presupposes the being of consciousness, where consciousness, for Husserl, is the primordial domain that renders possible any comprehension of naturalistic beings. In effect, what Husserl proposes is a regressive move back from the falsities of naturalistic presuppositions regarding the nature of being toward the internal realm of consciousness. By bracketing naturalistic being, it is not so much that one loses the world but that one all the more regains it in an intimate, more primordial relationship qua consciousness. The distinct contribution of Husserlian phenomenology for Lévinas, therefore, is that it shows that what primordially exists is not a reality hidden behind the apparent phenomenon but the phenomenon itself as it appears in consciousness. Unlike the abstractions made in naturalism and empiricism, which move from the concrete to general laws of the world, Husserl believed he discovered a rigorous scientific method that presents our genuine self and our truly concrete life. Husserl not only broadens, deepens, and concretizes the proper understanding of being, he also broadens, deepens, and concretizes the proper understanding of cognition. As Lévinas notes, “In Husserl, this reduction is expressed, to the end, as a passage from one knowledge to a better knowledge” (comme passage d’une connaissance à une connaissance meilleure).15 Cognition, in this “better,” more concrete sense of the term, is not grounded in the passive sensation of impressions on the mind, as the naturalists or empiricists had argued, but rather it is an active, constituting act of consciousness. Lévinas recapitulates the statement made famous by Husserl that consciousness is always “consciousness of.” In every cognitive act, consciousness aims or directs itself toward something. In short, intentionality is the very essence of consciousness and, indeed, of cognition. 14

Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 40; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 18. Emmanuel Lévinas, “De la conscience à la veille à partir de Husserl,” in De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), 55. Emmanuel Lévinas, “From Consciousness to Wakefulness: Starting from Husserl,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 29. 15



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 25

Despite the insights he found in Husserl’s critique of naturalism, Lévinas does raise some criticisms regarding Husserl’s own phenomenology. For the purposes here, two objections will be discussed. The first is the continued problem of abstraction in Husserl’s own theory of being. While it is more primordial than in naturalistic theories of being, it still remains too abstract, in Lévinas’ judgment, because its emphasis on the constituting act of intentional consciousness neglects immediate, given sensation. He writes, The idea of intentionality has compromised the idea of sensation by removing the character of being a concrete datum from this allegedly purely qualitative and subjective state, foreign to all objectification.16

Within Husserl’s phenomenology, the notion of the sensible or the immediate, “given prior to any positive act of the mind,”17 are decidedly under­ examined and unexplored. This has the effect of not only being an abstraction; it also provides an overly theoretical and intellectualistic account of cognition. Our primary and fundamental attitude facing reality, Lévinas insists, is not of disinterested contemplation; rather, it is primarily axiological and practical.18 The second issue may be called the problem of solipsism. Despite the general spirit of Husserl’s writings, which holds that the world is correlated to a consciousness that is always consciousness of something, Lévinas notes that Husserl’s texts do suggest, at times, that the reduction is a return to consciousness without a world, such that it collapses into pure immanence. Husserl’s phenomenology may suggest, according to Lévinas, that consciousness is closed upon itself; concrete being exists only insofar as it exists for consciousness. Lévinas writes, “This solipsism does not deny the existence of others, but it does describe an existence that in principle can be considered as if it were alone.”19 Husserl’s theory of being and cognition, then, leads to a solipsistic condition that has no access of transcendence to the other. Lévinas draws on the insights and seeks to overcome the oversights of Husserl’s theory of cognition. The phenomenological cognition of things or objects presents an alternative starting point that accesses a more primordial 16

Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 203; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 187. Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 106; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 69. 18 Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 174; Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition, 119. 19 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’œuvre d’Edmund Husserl,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1949), 48. Previously published in Revue Philosophique de France et de l’étranger 129, nos. 1–2 (1940): 80. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Work of Edmund Husserl,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 83. 17

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dimension of human life than the naturalistic cognition of mere facts. He found Husserl’s criticism of naturalism so convincing that his insights and conclusions would be taken for granted, and instead, after Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, his works turned to reforming Husserl’s oversights. For Lévinas, Husserl’s abstract, intellectualistic, and theoretical emphasis on a theory of knowledge and cognition of mere objects or things overlooked a more concrete, practical, axiological, and indeed ethical orientation. And the strands of solipsism in his thought failed to attend properly to the intersubjective dimension of human existence. In light of these criticisms, Lévinas set out to uncover a more primordial, ethical encounter wherein one is radically individuated, chosen, and called to responsibility by the other as a person, rather than simply treated as a fact or object among other facts or objects. This, in turn, required a “ ‘knowledge’ of a new structure” (une “connaissance” d’une structure nouvelle) and a reconceptualization of the meanings of “being” and “sensation.”20 Husserlian Phenomenology and the Hegelian Struggle for Recognition Before turning to Lévinas’ own constructive proposal, an elaboration on how he came to connect the emergence of Husserlian phenomenology with the resurrection of Hegel studies in France is required. In the years following the publication of Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, Lévinas’ writings are, for the most part, confined to book reviews and occasional pieces. In 1933, however, Hitler’s rise to political power in Germany not only provoked a response in the form of an article entitled “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme,”21 but it seems to have led Lévinas to reflect on the relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and the “turn to the concrete” in Hegel studies led by Wahl, Kojève, and Koyré in the 1930s and 1940s. For it is during the interwar and wartime period that Lévinas first begins to make notes that associate the theories of cognition in naturalism and phenomenology to the more dramatic formula of the struggle for recognition. After the war, Lévinas found a forum to pursue these themes more explicitly and extensively at Jean Wahl’s Collège philosophique, which provided a forum for creative and syncretistic research, such as Lévinas’ works, to emerge.22 20

Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 223; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 204. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme,” Esprit 2, no. 26 (1934): 199–208. 22 In this section, I focus on two papers that Lévinas delivered at Wahl’s Collège philosophique in 1947 and 1948: Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le temps et l’autre,” in Le choix, le 21



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 27

The association between theories of cognition and the struggle for recognition is drawn by a direct link that Lévinas makes between being and power. In his presentation at the Collège delivered in 1948, for instance, he proclaims, “An ontology which designates a place for power itself in the general economy of being—that is the goal that we are proposing.”23 Within the general economy of being and power, Lévinas proceeds to situate the functions of the knowing subject. In other words, it is not a question of existing or being in general but an existent or a being in subject.24 In this event, the existent takes on the mastery of existing; Lévinas describes this as “a first freedom .­ . . the freedom of beginning.”25 Insofar as a being is subsumed into this general economy of being, its modalities, which include cognition and knowing, are rendered into a relation of mastery and power. He notes, moreover, that there is not only a departure from self—that is, freedom in beginning—but also a return to the existent. “A beginning is, but in addition it possesses itself in a movement back upon itself.”26 Within Lévinas’ general economy of being, beings are then bound to this solipsistic cycle of departure and return.27 This ontological analysis is not only solipsistic, for Lévinas, but it is also egoistic. Being is the foundation of doing, and ontology is the foundation of egoism such that “an action is an inscription in being.”28 As being is the foundation of doing, a being does not “leave the other as being” (laisser l’être), but is always “for me” (à moi). If doing and action are inscribed within a general economy of being, action more broadly construed so as to include understanding and cognition is bound to being. Brought to its logical conclusion, cognition entails not only ontological solipsism but also an egoism that leads to violence. Only now can we make better sense of Lévinas’ claim:

monde, l’existence, ed. Jean Wahl (Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947), 125–96. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Time and the Other,” in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 39–94. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Paroles et Silence,” in Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas, vol. 2, Paroles et silence et autres conférences inédites au Collège philosophique, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2009), 65–104. 23 Lévinas, “Paroles et Silence,” 2:78. 24 Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 125; Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 71. 25 Lévinas, “Le temps et l’autre,” 144; Emmanuel Lévinas, “Time and the Other,” 54. See also Lévinas, “Paroles et Silence,” 2:79. 26 Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 35–36; Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 14–15. 27 Lévinas, “Le temps et l’autre,” 160; Lévinas, “Time and the Other,” 67. 28 Lévinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 37; Lévinas, Existence and Existents, 15.

28

The Good of Recognition Violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act. .­ . . Nearly every causality is in this sense violent: the fabrication of a thing, the satisfaction of a need, the desire, and even the knowledge of an object.29

It is striking that such disparate acts, including the identification of another as an object of knowledge, fall under the broad umbrella of violence. Surely there are some distinctions that can be made between immoral or invidious forms of recognition and amoral or neutral forms of recognizing another as possessing certain qualities. Still, what Lévinas seems to be addressing is the fundamental attitudinal disposition of naturalistic and phenomenological theories of cognition that posits one’s relation to the object through a position of mastery and power by virtue of being circumscribed within this more general economy of being. Whether the other is conceived as a matter of fact reducible to its qualities or an object grasped by intentional consciousness, the act of cognition is constituted by a fundamental relation to the other, so goes the argument, which serves as the grounds for “struggles for recognition.” The encounter with the being of another—the encounter between two solipsistic and egoistic beings—leads to a clash and conflict with each party engaged in violent acts of cognition. The sciences, whether they employ the methodology of naturalism or that of phenomenology, do not give a total account of the scope of human knowing and cognition. From his early years, Lévinas sought a deeper and more primordial dimension where the other would be reduced to the identification of neither a qualitative fact nor simply an object or thing grasped by intentional consciousness. During the interwar and wartime period of the 1930s and 1940s, it was suggested above that Lévinas came to connect such cognitive attitudes of the consciousness of an object or a thing in more dramatic terms as an attitude that involved “mastery,” which led to the Hegelian struggle for recognition. Recognition, even when it is construed as Husserlian cognition, remained abstract, theoretical, solipsistic, and ultimately egoistic, and, to amend these oversights, Lévinas offers an alternative understanding that is concrete, practical—indeed, ethical—and open to the other. What was required was a broader understanding of cognition apart from naturalism and Husserlian phenomenology, and recognition is the key term to express this irreducible ethical dimension beyond ontology.

29 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Ethique et Esprit,” in Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1963), 18. Originally published in Evidences 27 (1952): 1–4. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Ethics and Spirit,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 6 (emphasis added).



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 29

Ethical Recognition as “Sensation of the Infinite” Lévinas rejects the view that the subject is only a function of being or, put differently, that social and political life is reduced to perpetual struggles for recognition and war. The issue then becomes how to uncover a form of “recognition without prior cognition” (reconnaissance sans préalable connaissance), to distinguish it from theories of cognition, whether these take naturalistic or Husserlian phenomenological forms.30 This section reconstructs Lévinas’ ethical understanding of the recognition of the other apart from the recognition of mere facts in the world or the recognition of things or objects within intentional consciousness. For heuristic purposes, the issue of what he means by the ethical recognition of the other will be elucidated by considering the “objective” and “subjective” aspects of the phenomenon, even as it should be noted that he wishes to reject strict dualisms and instead describes a unitary phenomenon. On the one hand, Lévinas describes a form of recognition that can be seen as objective, an encounter with the other that is not reduced to a finite object or being. In his earlier writings, he speaks of recognition of the other as laisser-être.31 In his later works, he goes further in distancing his thought from ontology by preferring to speak in terms of “otherwise than being” or beyond being. With respect to the purposes of this section, it will be helpful to clarify Lévinas’ notion of the infinite in relation to the phenomenon of recognition beyond being, for it is an event that holds an exceptional place amid our finitude, overturning and interrupting the very essence of consciousness in intentionality. On the other hand, recognition is subjective in a certain sense, though by this Lévinas clearly departs from more narrow understandings of subjectivity expressed from Descartes to Husserl, or, rather more precisely put, he departs from narrow interpretations of their thought. For he does not reject subjectivity as such but broadens its conception by grounding it in a particular notion of sensation. If recognition from the “object” side is “of the infinite,” and if recognition from the “subject” side is a broadened view grounded in “sensation,” recognition, in its precise sense, is best captured by the phrase, “sensation of the infinite (beyond being).” Once again, the concept of recognition 30 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Socialité et argent,” in Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1991), 107. 31 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 1 (1951): 93. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6; cf. Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 14; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 29.

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triangulates with the concepts of being and sensation. But as we shall see, the meaning of recognition will shift again and be taken up anew with the shifts in meaning of the other two concepts. Gaining more precision regarding being and sensation—the objective and subjective sides of the phenomenon of recognition—will then open up an analysis into the nature and meaning of recognition as Lévinas wants to reconceptualize that term. The Objective Side of Recognition: The Infinite beyond Being While the importance of the idea of the infinite to Lévinas’ thought was established long ago,32 particularly in reference to his important article entitled “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini” (1957), the recent publication of the presentations that he delivered at Wahl’s Collège philosophique indicate that his reflections began much earlier.33 It is hard to pinpoint with certainty the sources and influences of his interpretation, given that there are no citations, but Lévinas surely has to be drawing from the work of the great Descartes scholar Ferdinand Alquié, particularly from his Le désir de l’éternité (1943).34 Lévinas indicates his indebtedness to Alquié’s thought by dedicating a short essay entitled “Sur l’idée en nous” (1983) in his honor.35 The central insight that Alquié seems to offer Lévinas is the penetrating analysis of Descartes’ idea of the infinite in the Third Meditation, which he indicates is neither an object in itself nor an idea for oneself.36 The infinite is not an object or reality in itself, firstly, because it goes beyond the realm of possible objects of thought and cognition. In Lévinas’ words, the notion of 32 See Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Lévinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 89–94, 213–16; and Adriaan Peperzak, “A Commentary on “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,’ ” in To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993), 38–72. Lévinas devotes a number of essays on the theme of the infinite. See Emmanuel Lévinas, “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 62, no. 3 (1957): 241–53. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” in Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 47–60. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Sur l’idée de l’infini en nous,” in La passion de la raison: Hommage à Ferdinand Alquié, ed. Jean-Luc Marion and Jean Deprun (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 49–52. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Idea of the Infinite in Us,” in Entre Nous, 219–22. 33 Lévinas, “Pouvoirs et origine,” in Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas, 2:123–32. 34 For Alquié’s reflections on Descartes’ idea of the infinite, see Ferdinand Alquié, “Sagesse de Descartes,” in Le désir de l’éternité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1943), 138–44. 35 Lévinas, “Sur l’idée de l’infini en nous,” 49–52; Lévinas, “Idea of the Infinite in Us,” 219–22. 36 Alquié, Le désir de l’éternité, vii, 140.



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 31

the infinite allowed for “the expansion of the notion of knowledge .­ . . by our going beyond known objects” (l’élargissement de la notion de connaissance .­ . . par le dépassement des objets connus).37 Insofar as the infinite is, as Lévinas puts it, “a thought beyond thought,” it remains beyond the impression of external sensations of objects in the world as well as beyond the active grasp of cognitive understanding and mental representation.38 Recognition as a sensation of the infinite is reducible neither to the material beings in the world, as naturalists argued, nor to the being of intentional consciousness, as Husserl argues. The infinite is also not an object or reality in itself because whatever we “know” about the infinite is known always in relation to us. In other words, to say that the idea of the infinite is “a thought beyond thought” is to nonetheless insist that it is a thought. But the infinite is not actively grasped and mastered as an object of cognition; rather, it is revealed to us in a deeper and passive dimension of thought.39 The title of a collection of essays, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (1983), only encapsulates numerous instances and passages where he makes the same point. It is a matter of the infinite or God “coming” to mind, rather than our mind going out to God. Whether Lévinas employs the language of the infinite “put” in me or of God “coming” to mind, in any case, its anteriority to activity discloses our fundamental finitude and the passive dimension of thought. Lévinas’ third way is not therefore one that navigates between the “being-in-itself ” of the world and the “being-for-itself ” of consciousness; rather, it is a dimension beneath and more primordial than these two alternatives. The Subjective Side of Recognition: The Priority of Sensation If the previous section focused on the objective side of the phenomena of recognition with respect to the idea of the infinite, this section considers the subjective side of the phenomena of recognition by turning to an exposition 37 Lévinas, “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” 94; Lévinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” 6. See also, Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 223; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 204. 38 He uses this formulation a number of times throughout his texts. See, for instance, Lévinas, “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini,” 247; Lévinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” 54 (emphasis in original); cf. Lévinas, “Sur l’idée de l’infini en nous,” 51; Lévinas, “The Idea of the Infinite in Us,” 219. 39 Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 56; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 62; cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la mort, et le temps, ed. Jacques Rolland (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993), 163. Emmanuel Lévinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 146. Lévinas, “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini,” 247; Lévinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” 54. Emmanuel Lévinas, “La pensée de l’être et la question de l’autre,” Critique 34, no. 369 (1978): 195. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, 119.

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of the theme of sensation.40 His reflections on sensation can be traced as far back to his encounter with Pradines, his professor at Université de Strasbourg in the mid to late 1920s.41 It was Pradines’ La philosophie de la sensation (1928) that Lévinas notes was not only among the first to discuss Husserl’s thought in France but also among the first to focus on his doctrine of intentionality rather than his theory of logic. Lévinas’ first major work, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, then, is a meditation on Pradines’ insight regarding the centrality of intuition and sensation in Husserlian phenomenology of intentionality. The publication of his notes during the Second World War suggests that he continued to reflect on the nature of sensation along Pradines’ lines.42 Long before he devoted articles in his mature writings that explicitly addressed the concept of sensation, he was clearly rethinking the meaning of the concept from his early years. The concept of sensation, Lévinas avers, is central to the history of phenomenology. “It is characteristic of phenomenology’s procedure,” he declares, “to accord a primary place in constitution to sensibility.”43 Sensation is so important to phenomenology because it lies at the very center of its critique of empiricism and naturalism. Phenomenology, he notes, provides a “new sort of empiricism”44 that retrieves and rehabilitates the concept of sensation, but it departs from any traditional empiricist or naturalist meaning of the term, for, he declares, “sensibility does not simply record facts.”45 Lévinas’ criticism of the naturalistic or empiricist concept of sensation, 40

The importance of the concept of sensation in Lévinas’ thought, particularly his later mature writings, has long been established by scholars. John Drabinski, for instance, finds that Lévinas begins to explore the “forgotten horizon” of sensibility in Husserl’s phenomenology in 1959, particularly with the publication of “The Ruin of Representation.” See Drabinski, Sensibility and Singularity. 41 As Samuel Moyn writes, among his professors at Strasbourg, “it is difficult to locate any great impact on or significance for Lévinas’ philosophical evolution in these teachers, except for Pradines, whose emphasis on sensation anticipated the role of sensibility in Lévinas’ mature thought.” Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Lévinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 31. 42 See, for instance, Lévinas, “Carnets de captivité (1940–1945),” 1:131, 142, 194. 43 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Réflexions sur la ‘technique’ phénoménologique,” in L’œuvre et la pensée de Husserl, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie 3 (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1959), 102. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reflections on Phenomenological ‘Technique,’ ” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, 97. 44 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Jean Wahl et le sentiment,” in Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), 131. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Jean Wahl and Feeling,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 110. 45 Lévinas, “Réflexions sur la ‘technique’ phénoménologique,” 102; Lévinas, “Reflections on Phenomenological ‘Technique,’ ” 98; cf. Lévinas, “Jean Wahl et le sentiment,” 131; Lévinas, “Jean Wahl and Feeling,” 110.



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 33

understood as sensation of facts, recapitulates the criticism he made against its theories of being and cognition for being too abstract. Of the empiricists, he writes, “Though they were right in seeing the individual, the immediate, the concrete, as the very atmosphere of comprehension .­ . . [,] they were wrong in believing that the thing-sensation is this individual, this immediate, this concrete.”46 Lévinas’ reconceptualization of the meaning of sensation can be seen as an attempt to fulfill what the empiricists had attempted, that is, to access the immediate and concrete. If sensation is not the impression of objects on the minds of subjects, as the empiricists had argued, then neither is it implicated in the constitution of objects in the mind, as certain strands of Husserl’s thought may suggest. If it is to be retrieved using the resources of phenomenology, it has to remain somehow anterior to intentional consciousness. Despite moving beyond subject-object relations, whether it is conceived passively in the object’s impression on the subject or actively in the subject’s a priori constitution of the object, Lévinas wants to argue for an understanding of sensation that is subjectivity, in its fullest and deepest sense.47 This understanding of sensation or sensibility is distinguished from naturalist understandings of subject-object relations to facts and the Husserlian understanding of subject-object constitution of experience, but it retains a dimension of the subject that is precisely the subject of the subject. To gain a clearer understanding of the meaning of sensation according to Lévinas requires working through Husserl, Kant, and Descartes on the subject, as he himself does, so as to clarify what recognition, construed as “sensation of the infinite” precisely means. The treatment of each thinker will be necessarily brief and deserves more sustained attention, but hopefully the general lines of argument will be sufficient for the purposes here. Despite his criticisms of Husserl’s abstract, contemplative, and ultimately solipsistic philosophical enterprise, Lévinas also suggests that an underexamined aspect of his thought addresses these issues internally. While intentionality is essential to consciousness such that consciousness is impossible without it, Husserl also suggests, Lévinas argues, that not all elements within consciousness can be reduced to intentionality, at least in the strict sense of that term. These elements are what he calls “given-sensations” (les données-sensations).48 Lévinas writes, “Husserl .­ . . pursues—and this is one 46

Lévinas, “Fribourg, Husserl et la phénoménologie,” 98; Lévinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” 60 (emphasis in original). 47 Lévinas, “Réflexions sur la ‘technique’ phénoménologique,” 103; Lévinas, “Reflections on Phenomenological ‘Technique,’ ” 98. 48 Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 66; Lévinas, Theory of Intuition, 38.

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The Good of Recognition

of the (perhaps fertile) ambiguities of his philosophy—its intellectualism: he accounts for significations by a return to the given.”49 The return to the “given” that is more primordial than intentional consciousness reconceptualizes the meaning of sensation. This renewed understanding of sensation has the effect of not only indicating a primordial dimension to consciousness prior to subject-object intentionality or experience but also presenting an enlarged view of subjectivity.50 Thus, Lévinas thinks with Husserl by questioning back from naturalistic presuppositions regarding the nature of experience of the world toward the internal realm of consciousness and thinks beyond Husserl by arriving at the primordiality of sensation as the locus of subjectivity par excellence. The concept of sensation, for both Husserl and Lévinas, draws on insights from Kant. Lévinas’ indebtedness to Kant is made explicit when he states, “The rehabilitation of sensibility I just mentioned goes back ultimately to Kant. Pure sensibility—that was his discovery.”51 Kant’s “discovery” emerges in the analysis of the transcendental aesthetic. To recall, for Kant, the transcendental aesthetic concerns the rules of sensibility, whereas the transcendental logic concerns the rules of understanding. Objects are given to us by sensibility, and they alone yield intuition. Intuitions, then, are circumscribed within sensibility alone. Concepts, in contrast, are not given but are thought through the understanding. For Kant, it is the synthesizing activity of the transcendental apperception that brings to unity given sensations and concepts of understanding, which make experience possible. But Lévinas isolates the notion of “pure sensation” and draws from it a notion of passivity prior to the passive/active synthesis of the transcendental apperception. The last, but perhaps most important, key resource for Lévinas’ conceptualization of sensation is Descartes. Descartes’ discovery and formulation of the ego cogito is well known, but for Lévinas, its modalities have been too narrowly restricted to active thought and cognition. That Lévinas was well aware of a much broader construal of the ego cogito—and thus a much broader understanding of subjectivity and cognition—is evident in his first major work on Husserl’s theory of intuition, where he quotes Husserl as stating,

49

Emmanuel Lévinas, “La signification et le sens,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 69, no. 2 (1965): 126. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 10 (emphasis in original). 50 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Intentionalité et sensation,” Revue internationale de philosophie 19, nos. 71–72 (1965): 47. 51 Lévinas, “Jean Wahl et le sentiment,” 132; Lévinas, “Jean Wahl and Feeling,” 110–11.



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 35 We are taking as a starting point “consciousness” in the pregnant sense of the term, in the sense which first comes to mind and which can be most easily expressed as the Cartesian cogito, as “I think.” As we know, Descartes understood the cogito in a wide sense, in such a way as to include any state such as: I perceive, I remember, I imagine, I judge, I desire, I want and, similarly, all analogous states (Icherlebnisse) in their innumerable successive formations.52

Although Descartes discovered an ego with multiple modalities, such as perceiving, imagining, judging, doubting, and wanting, Kant’s transcendental subject conflates all these into an “I think.” Lévinas, however, wants to hold onto Husserl’s insight regarding a broadened understanding of Descartes’ ego. In an essay published late in his career, he restates: Descartes’ cogito .­ .  . covers all the modalities of thought. Let us recall the text expanding on the cogito in the Second Méditation Métaphysique: “A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, that also imagines and feels.” We can presume that to feel here means both sensation and sentiment.53

Within this broadened interpretation of the ego cogito and its multiple modalities, including will, perception, memory, imagination, and judgment, Lévinas highlights the place of sensation.54 Not only is sensation merely one among many modes of the ego cogito but, on his reading of Descartes, it is also the most primordial and fundamental.55 For Lévinas, the issue is not a meditation on a decentered self that moves beyond Descartes but rather a rethinking of the subject beyond traditional interpretations that in fact remains faithful to the thought of Descartes. Whether it is Husserl’s notion of intentional consciousness, Kant’s transcendental ego, or Descartes’ ego cogito, Lévinas discovers a primordial notion of subjectivity that was neglected in many interpretations of their thought. Whatever else recognition means, according to Lévinas, it is felt at this primordial dimension of a radically individuated sense of human subjectivity. The centrality of sensation within Lévinas’ understanding of the meaning of recognition will serve as an important point of comparison when considering the thought of Ricœur, who employs his own method of reduction, but to the modality of the will. 52

Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition, 51; Lévinas, Theory of Intuition, 26; cf. Husserl, Ideas, 68. Lévinas, “De l’un à l’autre: Transcendance et temps,” in Entre nous, 157n1; Lévinas, “From the One to the Other: Transcendence and Time,” in Entre Nous, 137n8 (emphasis in original). 54 See Emmanuel Lévinas, “De la sensibilité,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 46, no. 3 (1984): 410. 55 Lévinas, Totalité et infini, 143; Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 135. 53

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The Meaning of Recognition as Sensation of the Infinite To bring together the concept of the infinite with the concept of sensation and to understand recognition as the “sensation of the infinite” is to affirm and embrace apparent contradictions. It is paradoxical to understand the concept of recognition without a subject who actively recognizes or to understand recognition without an object that is recognized. In short, it is perplexing to understand recognition beyond re-cognition. Yet Lévinas insists on the paradoxical truth of “recognition without prior cognition” (reconnaissance sans préalable connaissance),for it penetrates to a richer, more concrete and immediate dimension of human experience.56 Beginning from naturalism through Husserlian phenomenology and finally concluding with Lévinas’ own position, there is a bracketing that arrives at a deeper, more concrete analysis of the phenomenon of recognition. In rejecting naturalism and moving toward Husserlian phenomenology, the naturalistic theory of being and sensation is bracketed, and so with it the cognition of facts in the world. In rejecting Husserlian phenomenology and moving toward Lévinas’ thought, the phenomenological theory of being and sensation is bracketed, and so with it the cognition of objects within intentional consciousness. Through these successive brackets of epistemological models, there is a reduction that exposes, Lévinas insists, a primordial ethical relation. The recognition of the other is not recognition merely of one object or thing among others, nor is it the identification of a fact according to its qualities. Rather, it is the radical encounter wherein one’s primordial subjectivity is individuated into a call for responsibility. Clearly the idea of the infinite and the concept of sensation are both indebted to a certain interpretation of Descartes, but interestingly Lévinas also notes, “The place of the Idea of the Infinite within the finite, surpassing its capacity, as taught by Descartes, is one of the most remarkable expressions of transcendence. It is the search for recognition by the other man in Hegel, himself ” (la reconnaissance par l’autre homme chez Hegel luimême).57 What is at stake here is not merely the broadening and reinterpretation of the concepts of being, sensation, and cognition. More importantly, through these reconceptualizations, Lévinas proposes a concept of recognition that has a primordial ethical force anterior to struggles for recognition.58

56

Lévinas, “Socialité et argent,” 107. Lévinas, “Pensée de l’être et la question de l’autre,” 195; Lévinas, “Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other,” 119 (emphasis original). 58 Lévinas, “Le temps et l’autre,” 188; Lévinas, “Time and the Other,” 88. 57



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 37

The Politics of Recognition With a fuller understanding of Lévinas’ phenomenological and ethical concept of recognition in hand, we can now consider the political implications of his thought. That the analysis of the concept of recognition in Lévinas’ thought is restricted to ethics thus far coheres with his commitment to doing pure phenomenology, which brackets the question of politics. It is true that political concerns always loom in the background of his philosophical writings.59 The two works for which he is most well known, Totalité et infini (1961) and Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974), both involve and refer to the political context and motivations for his writings. Reflecting on the first work, he confides to an interviewer, “My critique of totality follows in effect from a political experience that we have still not forgotten.”60 And the dedication in the second work reads: “To the memory of those who were closest among the six millions assassinated by the National Socialists.” But although politics hovers at the edge and in the background of his philosophical writings, there is little written explicitly on the subject matter. What will be presented here regarding the relationship between recognition and politics must necessarily be limited then, and his political theory will be fleshed out in more detail in the next chapter, which considers his Jewish writings. Lévinas notes that the ethical recognition of the other is akin to an understanding of the “state of nature.”61 The state of nature, of course, is used by many modern political theorists to demarcate a prepolitical situation that highlights the primordial human condition and serves as a grounding and criterion for legitimate and illegitimate forms of government. Lévinas follows this tradition in modern political theory, for as he notes, “It is in terms of the relation to the Face or of me before the other that we can speak of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state.”62 By grounding the legitimacy of the state in the primordial ethical recognition of the other, he in effect reverses Hegel’s dialectic. To argue that ethics is the normative good and end of politics distinguishes it from mere moral conventionalism. In an interview given in 1984, he states,

59

For a fuller discussion, see especially Howard Caygill, Lévinas and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2002). 60 Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982). 61 Emmanuel Lévinas, “La proximité,” Archives de Philosophie 34 (1971): 375. 62 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophie, justice et amour: Entretien avec Emmanuel Lévinas,” Esprit 80–81, nos. 8–9 (1983): 10; Lévinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Entre Nous, 105.

38

The Good of Recognition By morality I mean a series of rules relating to social behavior and civic duty. But while morality thus operates in the socio-political order of organizing and improving our human survival, it is ultimately founded on an ethical responsibility toward the other. Morality is what governs the world of political “interestedness” the social interchanges between citizens in a society. Ethics, as the extreme exposure and sensitivity of one subjectivity to another, becomes morality and hardens its skin as soon as we move into the political world of the impersonal “third”—the world of government, institutions, tribunals, prisons, schools, committees, etc. But the norms which must continue to inspire and direct the moral order is the ethical norm of the interhuman.63

On this account, morals, which are grounded in the principle of interest and will to power, are bound by the historical relativity of values, whereas ethics, which is grounded in the principle of recognition and sensation of the other, remains outside of—or rather brackets—the relativities of history and reason. Through his phenomenological method, Lévinas maintains a space for ethics, distinguished from morals, which serve as the norm that critiques historical political communities and underpins all legitimate forms of government.64 Even as morals adjudicate and distribute recognition impersonally through institutions, their legitimacy is preserved only by being funded through a return to the primordiality of the ethical recognition of each person. If ethical recognition is both the ground and norm of politics, it serves as a criterion to discriminate legitimate from illegitimate forms of governance. The defining characteristic of illegitimate political orders is the effacement of the recognition of the face of the other. Such is the nature of a totalitarian state, which is, as Lévinas writes, “a state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible.”65 And again, “If the moral-political order 63 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 80. It should be noted that Lévinas elsewhere uses the terms “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably. See, for instance, Emmanuel Lévinas, “Vieux comme le monde? Texte du traité ‘Sanhédrin,’ ” in Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1968), 174. Emmanuel Lévinas, “ ‘As Old as the World?’ ” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 82. Nevertheless, the distinction that Lévinas makes between ethics and morality here, I think, is helpful to understanding that ethics is the ground and norm of morality. 64 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Idéologie et idéalisme,” in Démythisation et idéologie, ed. Enrico Castelli, Actes du colloque organisées par Le centre international d’études humanistes et par l’Institut d’études philosophiques de Rome (Paris: Aubier, 1973): 135–36; Emmanuel Lévinas, “Ideology and Idealism,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, 3. 65 Lévinas, “Philosophie, justice et amour,” 10; Lévinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 105.



Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation 39

totally relinquishes its ethical foundation, it must accept all forms of society, including the fascist or totalitarian, for it can no longer evaluate or discriminate between them.”66 While Lévinas strongly denounces the illegitimacy of totalitarian governments, he also distinguishes his position from a classically liberal form of politics. Political and legal recognition does not take the form of an abstract universalism but rather properly occurs through concrete individuation and singularity. The role of the state, he proposes, is “to find a universality which can encompass and satisfy subjectivity. In other words, I would like to promote justice for the political law of the State, which recognizes the unique person.”67 The difficulty and, indeed, impossibility of a politics that can recognize each person in his concrete individuation points to both the limited function and infinite task of politics. It is limited because true authentic recognition is “momentary”; it cannot be reified, stabilized, and institutionalized.68 Authentic particular and individuated recognition escapes the forms of justice. Against Hegel, who saw the encounter with another as merely a moment in the unfolding, totalizing development of Spirit that culminates in politics, Lévinas argues for a kind of limited politics, which is at best derivative and an imperfect realization of ethical recognition. The politics of recognition therefore never exists but is an infinite task and responsibility subject to a continual process of creation. The good of ethical recognition of the other—the particular other—can only be imperfectly approximated as the good in universal moral recognition through political laws and institutions. Conclusion The sociopolitical forces of what may be called nonrecognition, or the acute feelings of anonymity within modern mass society, as well as misrecognition, or the invidious forms of identification, were prevalent for Lévinas’ generation. Lévinas articulates a philosophical response that took its form with the emergence of Husserlian phenomenology and the resurrection of Hegel studies in France. His understanding and use of cognition is traced and developed through the methodological approaches of naturalism and phenomenology as they related to the key concepts of being and sensation.

66

Lévinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” 80. Lévinas, “Les enseignements,” in Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas, 2:183. 68 Emmanuel Lévinas, “La proximité éthique,” Spirales: Journal de culture internationale no. 18 (1982): 55. 67

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At each successive turn in thought, there is a turn to a yet deeper and more primordial dimension to the phenomenon and meaning of recognition. Lévinas’ phenomenology and ethics of recognition present a method that accesses and describes a form of cognition more primordial and intimate than naturalistic cognition of others as mere facts or things as well as Husserlian phenomenological consciousness of objects. This has the effect of describing a form of ethical recognition of the individuated other that escapes both the neutral anonymity of treating the other as merely one among many other things without sliding into a (mis)recognition of the other based on one’s own qualities or identity. Lévinas’ phenomenology and ethics of recognition provides, to quote Ricœur, “a real departure, a beginning entirely original in the way of ethics.”69 Whatever else ethical recognition involves, surely it must “begin” with the primordial passive dimension of being called to responsibility for the other before proceeding to any active and willed account. But Lévinas’ drive toward a point of pure sensation that is absolutely freed from all empirics of the desire for recognition diminishes the subject’s full worth by demanding infinite and asymmetrical recognition of the other. Lévinas collapses and reduces all forms of the desire for recognition into a nonethical ontology or unethical egoism that leads to struggle and violence. Without denying invidious forms of recognition, surely there must be some account of proper and indeed ethical desires for recognition. Furthermore, his commitment to doing pure phenomenology renders questions regarding the place of politics and institutions in ethical life to be, quite literally, of peripheral interest. While the ethics of recognition enjoys a positive role with respect to politics insofar as it serves as its norm and criterion, it remains unclear what positive role, if any, politics can serve in ethical relations, particularly given its limited function and Lévinas’ understandable fear of totalitarian politics. Before proceeding to the thought of Ricœur, one must first acknowledge the place of Lévinas’ Jewish writings with respect to the concept of recognition. For recognition, construed as “sensation of the infinite,” while analyzed within strictly philosophical terms and works, has religious resonances. The primordial feeling of passivity, the individuated call of responsibility, and the phenomenological brackets put to politics and history intersect with the specifically Jewish notions of suffering, election, and prophetic exile in Lévinas’ Jewish writings. The next chapter turns to these writings and his more explicitly religious reflections.

69

Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” 34.

Chapter three

Emmanuel Lévinas

A Jewish Perspective on Recognition

Thus far, the concept of recognition appears as a general and universal category within the strict limits of pure phenomenology. This restricts the analysis of the concept to Lévinas’ critical conversations with predecessors to or thinkers within the phenomenological movement. Yet, within his philosophical writings, he employs not only terms such as “the infinite” that are firmly situated within a general program of a philosophy of religion but also terms such as “creation,” “revelation,” “redemption,” and “prophetic eschatology” that suggest his situatedness within a deep Jewish tradition.1 Moreover, his philosophical texts are scattered with biblical allusions and references. Chapter 5 of Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) alone contains at least twelve biblical references, such that it forms what one scholar has called a “subtext of midrash.”2 Attention to his Jewish writings, then, reveals that his phenomenology of recognition is interpreted in specifically Jewish terms and that key doctrines within the Jewish tradition are interpreted in light of his phenomenology. 1 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essais sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961; repr. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), 6, 7, 11. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 22, 23, 25. 2 Oona Ajzenstat, Driven Back to the Text: The Premodern Sources of Lévinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 86. 41

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The centrality of the concept of recognition with respect to Lévinas’ Jewish writings can only be fully appreciated by first understanding their historical context. In 1930, after completing his studies at Strasbourg, Lévinas began to teach at l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), an organization that was committed to the political recognition and social integration of Jews. Founded in 1860 and conceived in a period of optimism regarding integration, AIU sought to promote the values of the 1848 revolutions and reaffirm the universal rights of man. Insofar as Lévinas was committed to a certain ideal of universalism, he can be seen as a child of nineteenth-century modern French Jewry even if he sees full assimilation to be neither possible nor desirable. If the hope for assimilation characterized modern Jewry, it was put into question with the Dreyfus affair.3 The Dreyfus affair initiated a movement of Jewish separation and identity that led to not only political Zionism but also cultural Judaism.4 It is particularly to the latter—what he calls “the Jewish cultural renaissance”—that Lévinas would devote much of his life and work after the war. From 1946 until the mid-1960s, he served as acting director of l’École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), an organization that recruited and trained teachers to preserve and cultivate Jewish identity through the study of Talmudic texts and to teach modern ideas to Jewish communities in the Mediterranean basin.5 Joining the work of Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Marc Cohn, and many others, Lévinas attempts to retrieve the rich textual resources of the Jewish tradition for contemporary life. The future of Judaism, Lévinas argues, hinges not so much on the struggle for political existence but primarily on the cultivation of this cultural Judaism. Lévinas’ life and writings express this dedication to educating and thinking about Jewish identity within a sociohistorical location that was committed to modern ideals. Within the tensions between affirming both Enlightenment universalism and Jewish identity, Lévinas strives to articulate 3

Emmanuel Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” in Le renouveau de la culture juive, ed. Emmanuel Lévinas, Moshe Davis, Shaul Esh, and Max Gottschalk (Brussels: Éditions de l’Institut de Sociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1968), 22. 4 Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” 22. 5 ENIO reopened after the war on November 3, 1946, and Lévinas served as director. On Lévinas’ description of the nature and purpose of ENIO, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le rôle de l’École Normale Israélite Orientale,” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 91 (1955): 32–38. See also Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale: Perspectives d’avenir,” in Les droits de l’homme et l’éducation: Actes du Congrès Centenaire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 73.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 43

the proper nature and task of a science of Judaism and thereby redefine and renew Judaism for the contemporary situation. As he himself poses the question, “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?”6 As Lévinas sees it, the problem common to both premodern and modern sciences of Judaism was that they employed methods grounded in an overly restricted application and narrow conception of cognition that overreached what human reason and understanding can grasp. And the solution to the problem, he argues, is found in a deeper, broader, and indeed ethical rearticulation of the meaning of cognition, that is, Lévinas’ particular construal of recognition. If his proposal for a new science of Judaism is best understood as an ethics of recognition, it parallels his philosophical writings regarding his proposal for an ethics of recognition as an alternative to the sciences of naturalism and phenomenology. Put differently, the concept of recognition situates his thought not only as a response to the French reception of Husserl and Hegel over the proper nature and task of the sciences but also in the thick of the theological controversies of his day regarding the proper nature and task of a science of Judaism. There will be three parts in the analysis of Lévinas’ understanding of the relationship between (re)cognition and the science of Judaism. First, attention is given to his understanding and criticisms of the “modern” science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth-century school of thought Wissenschaft des Judentums. The criticisms that he levels at modern understandings of the science of Judaism are tied to its overly restricted interpretation of the meaning of cognition. Next, consideration is given to Lévinas’ own distinct constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism” by integrating the insights and overcoming the oversights of its modern forms.7 He sought to retrieve classical textual sources that modern Judaism had neglected while at the same time enlarging their relevance beyond a historical community by employing a general phenomenology that would open up toward a certain kind of moral universalism through an ethics and politics of recognition. What emerges from this analysis is that Lévinas seeks to appropriate and reinterpret doctrines within the Jewish tradition in critical conversation with phenomenology, and he endeavors to describe the phenomenon of 6 Lévinas, “Dans quel sens il nous faut une haute science juive?” in Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1963), 317–20. Originally published in Information Juive 65, no. 3 (1955): 1, 4. 7 Lévinas, “Réflexions sur l’éducation juive,” in Difficile liberté, 300. Originally published in Les cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 12 (1951); Lévinas, “Reflections on Jewish Education,” in Difficult Freedom, 267–68.

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recognition in specifically Jewish terms. Finally, some of the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for a postwar period will be addressed. The Critique of the Modern Science of Judaism In his encyclopedia entry on the subject, Lévinas duly notes that “Judaism” encompasses a vast field of multiple and contested meanings.8 This first section addresses what Lévinas considers to be improper or inadequate forms of a science of Judaism. It will structurally parallel the exposition and analysis of Lévinas’ philosophical writings that investigated recognition first by considering what it is not, given his critiques of naturalism and Husserlian phenomenology. We first examine what a science of Judaism is not and why Lévinas rejects the place of cognition within such theories and approaches before turning to what a proper science of Judaism is and to its relationship to recognition. Modern Science of Judaism ( Wissenschaft des Judentums) Grasping the broader implications of Lévinas’ complex relationship to the modern science of Judaism first requires a proper contextualization of the spirit of confidence and optimism held by many Jews in the nineteenth century toward social and political integration and the collapse of such hope in the twentieth century. The French Revolution and the 1848 revolutions, the universal declaration of rights, and the emancipation spelled for modern Jewry what seemed to be the irreversible march of progress toward greater integration and universal humanity. Many Jewish intellectuals seeking to integrate into the broader society followed many of their Christian counterparts by throwing off the perceived shackles of institutional religion. Lévinas describes the situation of Judaism during this period as follows: Jewish intelligence shone ever more brightly at the Bar, at university, in the arts and humanity, in Parliament, in constituent bodies, in industry and commerce; intrepid in arms, and daring in power. The influence of the synagogue and the community was gradually lost. .­ . . Practices were forgotten, and Jews, in increasingly small numbers, entered the temple like cold and abstract beings.9

The success that a number of prominent Jews enjoyed in academic, artistic, legal, economic, and political life engendered a general spirit of confidence 8 Lévinas, “Judaïsme,” in Difficile liberté, 42. Originally published in Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis France, 1971), 2:520–21; Lévinas, “Judaism,” in Difficult Freedom, 24. 9 Lévinas, “Judaïsme,” 267–68; Lévinas, “Judaism,” 245.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 45

in the achievements of reason in history. Lévinas sums up well the pervading optimism of the nineteenth century when he declares, We were thus a Judaism that believed in an interconfessional society, that experienced and perhaps overestimated all universality, the critical and free spirit of rationalist Europe. We were a Judaism that only conserved a distant memory of its own cultural sources, but which liberal Europe appeared as the culmination.10

Nowhere was this faith in Enlightenment reason more apparent than in the emergence of the so-called science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). The term, coined by Leopold Zunz in 1822 in the journal Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, became pervasive in nineteenth-century Germany and spread quickly to France, most notably in the publication Revue des études juives.11 It was to become a polyglot movement wherein the very meaning of Wissenschaft was contested and the end or purposes for which it was to be used differed radically among thinkers.12 The complex and variegated constitution of Wissenschaft des Judentums need not be addressed, since the aims and interests here are restricted to Lévinas’ treatment and view on it. For Lévinas, it transformed the study of Scripture by expanding beyond the horizon of Judeo-centric learning and by exploring the connections between Jewish and non-Jewish phenomena through a rapprochement 10

Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” 21. The French translated Wissenschaft des Judentums as “études juives,” employing the term used in other disciplines and fields of studies, such as études grecques or études historiques. For Lévinas’ note on the French reception of Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Les cordes et le bois: Sur la lecture juive de la Bible,” in Hors sujet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987), 175. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Strings and the Wood: On the Jewish Reading of the Bible,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 128. 12 For some such as Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider, Wissenschaft des Judentums was conceived as a purely scholarly discipline that contributed to the totality of human knowledge, whereas others such as Abraham Geiger saw it as a tool to reforming traditional Judaism, and finally still others such as Heinrich Graetz and Zecharias Frankel found in it a resource for defending traditional Judaism. Central to these debates was the extent to which Wissenschaft des Judentums was an apologetic assimilationist movement and to what degree it sought to elevate and establish Judaism as the universal religion and as the expression of Aufklarung par excellence. Gershom Scholem’s classical text emphasizes the apologetic and assimilationist role Wissenschaft des Judentums played in the political struggle for equal rights. See Gershom Scholem, “The Science of Judaism—Then and Now,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 304–13. More recently, Susannah Heschel challenges this traditional interpretation by arguing that Wissenschaft des Judentums inverted Christian claims and offered a counterhistory that placed Judaism and not Christianity at its center. See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 11

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with modern methods of the sciences employed in sociology, history, and especially philology.13 Through such broadened studies, it was believed that the study of Judaism would be properly elevated and esteemed to the status of a “modern science.” The unworldly one-sidedness and dogmatic confinements of Judaism, so went the argument, would be overcome; the study of Judaism would be raised to the rank and respectability of a scholarly discipline. What were previously considered sacred texts were now treated as historical documents, thereby freeing the critical historian from the shackles of doctrinal belief. But studying religion in general and Judaism in particular by employing modern scientific methods, according to Lévinas, deadens its true nature. He writes, The freedom of philology that approaches the text as a document carries a terrible ransom. Philology, which submits the text to historical critique, approaches it as outdated. For a moment, one with critical spirit is more intelligent than its object. .­ . . It remains as an archeologist who discovers a Neolithic tool.14

To study Jewish texts with critical distance as historical artifacts relegates them, Lévinas thinks, to a distant past that has no import for present Jewish life. The effect of the rise of Wissenschaft des Judentums, then, is that it separated Jewish identity from the deep sources and resources within the rabbinic tradition. The wissenschaftlich argument that the “essence of Judaism” could be crystallized out of traditional belief shifted the study of Judaism from the study of Torah and Talmud taking place in the study house (betmidrash) toward “academic Judaism” situated within the broader “scientific” protocols of the university.15 In short, the study of Torah was released from dogmatic bias and instead suffused with critical scholarship. At its most fundamental level, therefore, Lévinas’ critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums is grounded in his concerns that it detracts from the distinctive character—and therefore vitality—of Judaism. Lévinas writes of such a science of Judaism: Objective science, such as sociology, history or philology, tries to reduce the exception to the rule. .­ . . At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, the founders of the famous “science of Judaism” [Wissenschaft des Judentums] transformed the Holy Scriptures into pure documents. The paradoxes of an unequalled destiny and an absolute teaching slot easily into the scientific categories created 13

Lévinas, “Judaïsme,” 43; Lévinas, “Judaism,” 25. Lévinas, “Dix ans d’enseignement,” in Difficile liberté, 305. Originally published in Revue de Fonds Social Juif Unifié (F.S.J.U.) 3 (1954): 23–24. 15 Lévinas, “Comment le judaïsme est-il possible?” in Difficile liberté, 273; Lévinas, “How Is Judaism Possible?” in Difficult Freedom, 249. 14



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 47 for every spiritual reality and all other idiosyncrasies. Everything can be explained by its causes; and by methodically tracking down and logging every influence, many original features dissolve. We may nonetheless ask whether the scientific categorization of a spiritual movement can ever reveal its real contribution and significance.16

The distinctiveness of Judaism was lost when its texts became treated merely as one object among many to be classified, compared, and measured against other objects of investigation. To try to determine an essence of Judaism through historical critical studies, Lévinas argues, satisfies neither the desires of modern assimilationists who want to rid Judaism of difference all together nor the spiritual desires of believing and practicing Jews, for its approach remains too abstract. If Judaism were to remain relevant and vital for a postwar generation, Lévinas argues that it must continue to embrace the broader aims of modernity and engage the larger sociopolitical world. But, whereas the modern science of Judaism reduced Jewish life to the critical examination and analyses of texts that integrated it into an abstract universalism, Lévinas strives to broaden or enlarge the scope of the meaning of “science” for contemporary Jewish life: On the contrary, we must enlarge the science of Judaism and, fundamentally, raise it only to the level of a science. But let this be clearly understood: to raise Judaism to the level of a science does not involve submitting its sources to philology. For 150 years we have done nothing else. The nineteenth century wore itself out with the philology of Judaism. Fifty centuries were catalogued—an immense Jewish epigraph, a collusion of epigraphs—for which historical accounts were important and which had to be placed at the crossroad of different influences. What a graveyard! A grave for 150 generations. The philologist who subjects text to a critical apparatus may feel some tenderness for all this touching folklore, but for a moment he, the critical spirit, is more intelligent than his object. He risks eternalizing the moment. Only the handling of a card index scans the work of thought. To raise Judaism into a science, to think Judaism, is to turn these texts back into teaching texts.17

What is required, then, is a reorientation and redefinition of the proper methodological approach of a “science of Judaism.” Before proceeding to this “higher science” and more elevated formulation of the essence of Judaism, the next section will first excavate the fundamental ethical problem, as Lévinas sees it, in modern historical sciences of Judaism. 16

Lévinas, “Judaïsme,” 43; Lévinas, “Judaism,” 25. Lévinas, “Réflexions sur l’éducation juive,” 300; Lévinas, “Reflections on Jewish Education,” 267–68. 17

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The Problem of Cognition in the Modern Sciences of Judaism Whatever differences may exist between naturalism and phenomenology, they both present, in Lévinas’ account, scientific approaches that remained abstract, theoretical, solipsistic, and ultimately egoistic through an overly restricted and narrow understanding of cognition. To amend the inadequacies of these approaches, Lévinas uncovers an alternative, broader understanding that was concrete, practical, and indeed ethical. His critique of the nature and understanding of cognition within his philosophical writings is reformulated and recapitulated within his Jewish writings. Lévinas first attended a colloquium of French Jewish intellectuals in 1957 and then participated and delivered Talmudic readings almost every year for the next thirty years. In a colloquium held in December 1964, the theme was provocatively entitled “The Temptation of Judaism.” There, Lévinas argues that cognition, or knowledge, is what he calls “the temptation of all temptations.” He writes, “The temptation of temptation is not the attractive pull exerted by this or that pleasure, to which the tempted one risks giving himself over body and soul. .­ . . The temptation of temptation is thus the temptation of knowledge.”18 The temptation for this or that object is grounded first in the temptation of knowledge or cognition. This fundamental temptation, as it relates to Judaism, is problematic for Lévinas because it claims mastery and possession of religion as an object of cognition. It renders the ego disengaged from the primordial experience of the other and thereby neglects its ethico-religious core. In Lévinas’ words, “It will no longer leave the other in its otherness. .­ . . From this stems the inability to recognize the other person as other person, as outside all calculation, as neighbor, as first come.”19 Cognition, understood in these narrow terms, is what may be understood by Lévinas as the temptation of Judaisms, for he is wary of the multiple ways in which this temptation has manifested itself throughout history. Whether it takes the form of an exclusionary premodern Jewish particularism or an equally exclusionary modern Jewish universalism, they both commit the same error by claiming mastery and possession of religion as an object of cognition. Dogmatic theology propounds to grasp the essence 18 Emmanuel Lévinas, “La tentation de la tentation: Texte du traité ‘Chabat,’ ” in Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 74. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Temptation of Temptation,” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 33–34. 19 Lévinas, “Tentation de la tentation,” 75; Lévinas, “Temptation of Temptation,” 35.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 49

of Judaism through certainty of knowledge in a particular doctrine, and historical theology masters texts as artifacts and believes itself to distill and abstract the essence of Judaism from the flux of historical relativity. In the former, cognition of the essence of Judaism is circumscribed within a community of believers, and in the latter it is circumscribed within a select elite that is able to purvey history and distill its essential core from the inessential husk. Such presumed possession of truth and mastery over the form of religion is, Lévinas suggests, the grounds for struggles between the religions. He writes, “One can, of course, separate out of this or isolate from it the idea of God. .­ . . Religions and theologies thrive on this abstraction just as mystics do on this isolation. But so do wars of religion.”20 Beyond the multiple grasps for power in all its theological forms, there is a true science of Judaism that avoids the temptation of cognition, or, rather more precisely, it uncovers a broader, deeper and ethical dimension of cognition. Lévinas and the New Science of Judaism Although Lévinas rejects modern formulations of the science of Judaism, he draws from their insights and oversights to offer a more adequate articulation of the proper nature and task of a science of Judaism. He retrieves classical textual sources that modern Judaism neglects while, at the same time, he embraces the aims of modernity by enlarging the relevance of Judaism beyond a historical community with a general phenomenology that opens up toward a certain kind of moral universalism through an ethics and politics of recognition. This section details and reconstructs Lévinas’ new science of Judaism, showing how he appropriates key concepts and doctrines within Jewish sources and tradition against the horizon of phenomenology and how he describes the phenomenon and ethics of recognition in specifically Jewish terms. The Return to Jewish Sources and Texts One of the deleterious effects of modern scientific approaches to Judaism is that they separated Jewish identity and life from the rich sources within the rabbinic tradition. The distinctive resources that sacred texts brought to bear on human life became lost amid the methodological approaches of historical criticism. Lévinas strives to reclaim from premodern Judaism what modern

20 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 115.

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Judaism neglects, that is, to return to what he calls the “talmudic sciences,” drawing from the mine of wisdom found in Jewish sources and texts.21 For all, Judaism—and once again, it is that new trait and distinct contribution of the Jewish youth of France—Judaism is the Bible read through the Talmud. .­ . . It is a matter of gathering a miraculous harvest in the abandoned fields of rabbinic literature, but sowed more than fifteen centuries ago by the doctors of the Talmud.22

In this respect, Lévinas participates in a larger revival and movement within Judaism to return to the Bible and Talmud not as sources of knowledge of a dead past, but as sources of a spiritual knowledge relevant in the present. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in Germany and Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Marc Cohn, André Spire, Jules Braunschvig, Éliane Amado Levy-Valensi, and André Neher in France initiated a movement of return to the cultural past of Judaism.23 While the study of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, of course, was not new, what was new was the proliferation and development of study houses patterned after the classical battei ha-midrash, which cultivated the study of rabbinic literature. It is within this context that despite his repeated admissions that he was not an expert in the Talmud, calling himself an “amateur Talmudist,” Lévinas consistently turns time and again to reading and commenting on the Talmud.24 It is important to note that he emphasizes both the Bible and the Talmud because it indicates that the call to exegesis is always already set within and shaped by the weight of a history of interpretation and tradition. As he states, “The text is stretched on the amplification of the tradition, like strings on the violin wood.”25 The future of Judaism, Lévinas insists, hinges on the cultivation of this Jewish cultural renaissance, but this rebirth does not mean a simple nostalgic return to a premodern period that circumscribed Jewish life within a particular 21

Lévinas, introduction to Nine Talmudic Readings, 6. Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” 26. See also Lévinas, “Pièces d’identité,” in Difficile liberté, 76; Lévinas, “Means of Identification,” in Difficult Freedom, 53. 23 Lévinas, “La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale,” 22. 24 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le nom de Dieu d’après quelques textes,” in L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982), 144. Originally published in L’analyse du langage théologique: Le nom de Dieu, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris: Aubier, 1969), 155–67. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Name of God according to a Few Talmudic Texts,” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Continuum, 2007), 116. 25 Emmanuel Lévinas, “La Révélation dans la tradition juive,” in La Révélation (Brussels: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1984), 63. 22



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 51

historical community. Rather, Lévinas seeks to integrate the insights of the modern period by insisting on a form of universalism that is open to and accessible by all through a certain ethico-religious experience. The Sources of Jewish History and Tradition Jewish particularism is informed but not circumscribed by textual sources. Jewish identity is not simply read off of the pages of its classical sources; rather, certain key concepts and themes are selectively chosen and highlighted. Paradoxically, Lévinas wants to maintain on the one hand that the structure of biblical revelation is a call to exegesis not subject to mastery or control but, on the other hand, that its content is determinate. At a conference on revelation, on a rare occasion where Lévinas and Ricœur engaged each other on the matter of religious discourse, he agreed with Ricœur on the diverse literary genres of the Bible: prophetic, narrative, prescriptive, sapiential, and hymnal. But he added that across the different genres, there is a specifically Jewish reading that privileges the prescriptive dimension.26 Indeed, Lévinas proceeded to argue that the weight of Jewish history and tradition unifies the different texts and suggests such an understanding.27 The return to Jewish textual sources is not wholesale, therefore, but given a particular interpretation in light of Jewish historical experience and tradition, one that came to see its essence, according to Lévinas, as ethical, distinct from the violence that characterized a Hegelian view of universal world history. For Hegel, a people only partake of eternity within history when their national spirit identifies itself with universal Spirit. On this account, Jewish history is simply a passing stage in the march of universal world history, which witnesses the appearance and disappearance of entire peoples. According to Lévinas, Jewish people can be eternal only insofar as they do not participate in this process but remain outside of world history. In short, Lévinas offers a counterhistory against the Hegelian view. For the purposes of this section, three characteristics of Lévinas’ interpretation of Jewish history are identified that underline this point: the concept of election, the experiences of suffering and persecution, and the role of prophetic exile in relation to politics. These three elements are highlighted not only because they are important within Lévinas’ interpretation of Jewish history and tradition but because they upsurge into his understanding of distinctive Jewish ethico-religious experience that relates and links in interesting ways to his phenomenology and ethics of recognition within his philosophical writings. 26 27

Lévinas, “La Révélation dans la tradition juive,” 58. Lévinas, “La Révélation dans la tradition juive,” 63.

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Lévinas finds that the concept of election, that is, the notion of being chosen apart from other nations, is prominent in both Jewish texts and Jewish history.28 Whereas Lévinas characterizes Israel to be fundamentally concerned with responsibility to the other, the nations (which he names in one article as Egypt, Cush, and Rome) are characterized by violence and imperialism.29 Jewish election, then, is primordially an ethico-religious concept, separated from any historical or national notion. The classical textual sources are reaffirmed by Jewish collective experience, for the election of Israel and its position outside nations, Lévinas says, is evidenced by the diasporic character of Jewish history.30 Even with the founding of the state of Israel, Lévinas is careful to underline that Jewish election determines that Israel is not to be simply reduced to one nation among others but rather is a nation distinctly founded on a religion that lives up to its ethical responsibility.31 By highlighting the notion of election within Jewish text and tradition, Lévinas once again reclaims the distinctive and exceptional character of Judaism that was covered up by modern desires for integration and assimilation. The nature and character of Israel’s election and chosenness—Jewish exceptionalism—is tied, for Lévinas, not to pride in its activity and contributions as a nation within world history but to the passivity and suffering of Jews outside of world history. Such an interpretation of Jewish identity would have struck an odd chord in the nineteenth century, in an age where modern assimilationists admired prominent Jewish leaders for their achievements and contributions within larger society and politics. The crisis of the Second World War and the failures of social and political institutions, however, recalled Jews to their authentic identity.32 It is not merely that Jewish identity commemorates past suffering or that it is clarified in moments of suffering. Lévinas puts the point much more strongly and provocatively: it is suffering. He writes, Perhaps the ultimate essence of Israel, its carnal essence prior to the freedom that will mark its history, this manifestly universal history .­ .  . perhaps the ultimate 28

Lévinas, “Une religion d’adultes,” in Difficile liberté, 39. Originally published as “L’homme à éduquer d’après la sagesse juive,” Tioumliline 1 (1957): 25–39; Lévinas, “A Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom, 22. 29 Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Nations and the Presence of Israel,” in In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 97–102. 30 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’inspiration religieuse de l’alliance,” Paix et droit 15, no. 8 (1935): 4. 31 Emmanuel Lévinas, “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,” in Difficult Freedom, 217–18. 32 Lévinas, “Judaïsme,” 43–44; Lévinas, “Judaism,” 25.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 53 essence of Israel, derives from its innate predisposition to involuntary sacrifice, its exposure to persecution.33

The provocative claim that Israel’s identity is passivity and suffering can only be understood in the context of Lévinas’ view that Jewish history attests to the persecution of Jews who were guilty without having committed a crime. In other words, there is a fundamentally passive dimension to Jewish identity prior to freedom that belies Jewish election, which is traced into a phenomenological description of the primordial passive dimension within ethical experience. Precisely because the Jew throughout history has been abandoned by institutions as a guarantor of morality, it is also distinct within Jewish identity to have special access to the ethical. “Morality begins in us,” Lévinas claims, “and not in institutions which are not always able to protect it. It demands that human honor know how to exist without a flag. The Jew is perhaps the one who—because of the inhuman history he has undergone— understands the suprahuman demand of morality.”34 This leads to the third major characteristic, which marks off Jewish identity from the world—prophetic exile. If the advance of universal world history culminating in the state is dominated by violence, Jewish identity is modeled in the figure of the prophet who remains external to political institutions.35 Israel is not one nation among other nations; rather, it is “eternal” to the extent that it is absent from “the political world,” living “in exile.” But to say that the Jewish people live outside of or beyond world history and the state does not mean that the community is deprived of participation in it. Israel’s status as a holy people is not a refuge against a changing and violent world; instead, it serves as a witness and calls for responsibility to critique and change it. Therefore, the Jew paradoxically lives both within history and outside of history. Lévinas thereby offers a counterhistory to the Hegelian universal world history, one grounded in the sources of Jewish texts and attested by Jewish history. He tempers a certain historical realism with an idealist vision of the Jewish people. Universal world history is dominated by violence; therefore, a holy people can only live outside history. In the aftermath of the 33 Lévinas, “De la montée du nihilisme au juif charnel,” in Difficile liberté, 290; Lévinas, “From the Rise of Nihilism to the Carnal Jew,” in Difficult Freedom, 225. 34 In his Jewish writings, the terms “morality” and “ethics” are often interchangeable, whereas in his philosophical writings, as we saw in the previous chapter, their meanings are differentiated. Lévinas, “Vieux comme le monde? Texte du traité ‘Sanhédrin,’ ” in Quatre lectures talmudiques, 174. Lévinas, “ ‘As Old as the World?’ ” in Nine Talmudic Readings, 82. 35 Lévinas, “Judaïsme et temps présent,” 237–38; Lévinas, “Judaism and the Present,” 213.

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catastrophe of the Second World War and the loss of optimism in modern Enlightenment universalism, Lévinas claims that Jewish identity is distinctively positioned to serve as a moral resource for the world precisely because it is outside of it. Far from flouting the figure of the Jew as a vestige of premodern particularism that was disfigured during the Enlightenment, to the contrary, he reconfigures and revalorizes the figural Jew precisely because of its particularity.36 His insistence on the particularism of Judaism raises the question of whether it is amenable to enlightened modern universalism. Can Jewish election, for instance, be adequately defended, or is it an antiquated pre-Enlightenment doctrine? His answer to that question holds on to two seemingly irreconcilable positions. On the one hand, he wants to hold on to a premodern form of Judaism that valorizes its textual tradition and historical doctrines; on the other hand, he holds aspirations for a modern form of Judaism that would be accessible to all. This paradoxical position is perhaps best captured in Lévinas’ expression, “Jewish humanism.”37 He tries to reconcile these two poles of Judaism by integrating Jewish particularism with the new insights of a general phenomenological method within a description of ethico-religious experience. Ethico-Religious Experience and the Science of Judaism The reclamation of the rich resources within Jewish texts and tradition is crucial for Lévinas because they uncover, awaken, and cultivate primordial ethico-religious experience for contemporary life. Beyond all the varieties of Judaisms that have existed throughout history, they have all shared this ideal. Lévinas writes, What does Jewish thinking concern itself with? A whole host of things no doubt, which we are not going to list. But its basic message consists in bringing the meaning of each and everyday experience back to the ethical relation between men, in appealing to man’s personal responsibility—in which he feels chosen and irreplaceable—in order to bring about a human society in which men are treated as men.38

This section argues that what Lévinas calls the “new science of Judaism” links the basic ethical message found in the sources of historical Judaism with the 36 The unstable and changing figure of the Jew is the subject of an excellent recent book by Sarah Hammerschlag. See Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 37 Lévinas, “Pour un humanisme hébraïque,” in Difficile liberté, 313. Originally published in Les cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 103, no. 11 (1956): 1–3; Lévinas, “For a Jewish Humanism,” in Difficult Freedom, 273. 38 Lévinas, “La pensée juive aujourd’hui,” in Difficile liberté, 187; Lévinas, “Jewish Thought Today,” in Difficult Freedom, 159.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 55

description of the primordial ethical relation—what he names “religion”— within his phenomenology. In so doing, he rearticulates Jewish identity in a way that privileges the distinct textual and historical resources of Judaism while providing a phenomenological account that remains open to all. Early in his career, Lévinas demonstrated an interest in bringing phenomenology and Judaism together. It was noted earlier that he entered Université de Strasbourg in 1923 as a young student during a time of much intellectual ferment, when the very meaning and approach to the sciences was contested. Jean Hering, a professor of Protestant theology at Strasbourg, is especially important because his work, most notably Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse: Étude sur la théorie de la connaissance religieuse (1926), is not only among the first to introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to France, but it also attempts to bring the insights of the new science of phenomenology in conversation with religion.39 With chapters entitled “La philosophie religieuse et le principe intuitionniste” and “L’épistémologie intentionnaliste et la théorie de la connaissance religieuse,” Hering evidently provides material and a pathway for Lévinas to think about issues at the intersection of phenomenology and religion. What is so attractive about phenomenology to Lévinas is that it proposes a rigorous scientific method that is concerned with concrete life as an alternative to both the regnant dominance of naturalism and scientism in philosophy as well as the abstractions of modern scientific approaches in the study of religion.40 Indeed, following Hering’s lead, many of Lévinas’ early writings are devoted to investigating the import of phenomenology for philosophy of religion. His first book review in 1931– 1932 is on H. E. Eisenhuth’s Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem, a work that attempts to determine the essence of religion through the methodological approach of Heideggerian phenomenology.41 In a footnote to the review, Lévinas favorably cites Hering’s work.42 And in a review published in 1937 that otherwise offers a scathing criticism of the book, the sole redeeming quality that Lévinas can find in it is that it opens up the

39

Jean Hering, Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse: Étude sur la théorie de la connaissance religieuse (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1926). 40 Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is the new rigorous science is one that can be found throughout many of his works. See especially Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71–147. 41 Emmanuel Lévinas, review of Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem, by H. E. Eisenhuth, Recherches philosophiques 1 (1931–1932): 385. 42 Lévinas, review of Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches Problem, 385n1.

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possibility of a religious philosophy in Heidegger.43 From these early years, Lévinas probes the new insights of phenomenology as it intersected with religion. Indeed, as he later develops his own account of phenomenology that uncovers a primordial ethical relation, he names this experience “religion.” For instance, in his important essay “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” (1951), he writes, “The relation with the other is not ontology .­ . . we call it religion.”44 And to cite just one more example, he names the encounter with the face of the other “the religious situation.”45 What Lévinas identifies as “religion” within his phenomenology correlates to what he calls the basic ethical message or content of Judaism. When he speaks of the new “science of Judaism,” therefore, he seeks to bring together the new science of phenomenology together with Judaism so as to articulate and describe concrete ethico-religious experience. Within this nexus, the doctrines and concepts of election, suffering, and prophetic exile that are found in textual sources and interpreted throughout Jewish history are traced into and infuse his phenomenological analysis of ethico-religious experience. In so doing, he reconfigures the very meaning and task of the science of Judaism, shifting from a Jewish particularism grounded in its sources—textual and historical—toward a certain universalism. In Lévinas’ new science of Judaism, the doctrine of election is not understood in a historical or nationalistic sense; rather, it becomes reinterpreted within the ethico-religious experience as the sense of being chosen. As he claims in his philosophical writings that the idea of the infinite cannot be reduced to an object of human cognitive mastery and possession but rather the infinite is “put in us,” so too, in his Jewish writings, God is not an object grasped by modern historical sciences but rather God comes to us. The sense that God elects us is inextricably bound to the sense of being radically chosen by the other in the call of ethical responsibility.46 Whatever else Jewish exceptionalism means, it is primordially the ethico-religious recognition of the other, according to Lévinas. He thereby draws from the textual 43 Emmanuel Lévinas, review of Das Phänomen des Glaubens dargestellt in Hinblick auf das Problem seines metaphysischen Gehalts, by Hans Reiner, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 124, nos. 11–12 (1937): 259–60. 44 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 1 (1951): 95; Emmanuel Lévinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7 (emphasis in original). 45 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Transcendance et hauteur,” in Liberté et commandement (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994), 95. 46 Lévinas, “Une religion d’adultes,” 38; Lévinas, “A Religion for Adults,” 21.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 57

sources and traditions of Judaism not only to reinterpret the Jewish doctrine of election within the horizon of phenomenology but also to reinterpret the phenomenon of individuation in the call to responsibility in specifically Jewish terms. The sense of being chosen and elected by the other implies a radically passive dimension within ethico-religious experience. The primordiality of sensation and passivity within Lévinas’ pure phenomenology that is so prominent in his philosophical writings becomes reinterpreted against the backdrop of Jewish persecution and suffering. And, conversely, the notion that the persecution of Jews throughout history, who were guilty without having committed any crime—that is, without and prior to free action— can be seen as upsurging into a phenomenological analysis of the passivity of ethico-religious experience. In a way that mirrors his reinterpretation of the doctrine of election, for Lévinas, the distinct suffering of Israel experienced throughout history thereby becomes interpreted as a moral and religious category within a phenomenological analysis of human experience. If the themes of election and suffering redescribe Jewish texts and history within a phenomenological experience, this comes to a head in configuring Jewish identity in terms of prophecy.47 Earlier it was argued that Lévinas’ commitment to pure phenomenology uncovered a primordial ethical dimension of human life that bracketed the world. What is primordial is neither a naturalistic view of the world nor even a Husserlian phenomenogical consciousness of the world but a primordial ethical claim by the other. “The interhuman is thus an interface,” Lévinas writes, “a double axis where what is ‘of the world’ qua phenomenological intelligibility is juxtaposed with what is ‘not of the world’ qua ethical responsibility.”48 His Jewish writings, in a parallel fashion, reduce the essence of Judaism to an ethico-religious encounter with the other such that the Jew “brackets” the world, as it were, and lives outside of politics. The primordial dimension of ethical responsibility that brackets the world becomes reinterpreted within the terms of Jewish prophecy, and, likewise, the Jewish prophetic tradition is renewed by integrating its themes within a phenomenological analysis. The focus has been on Lévinas’ response to his own question, “In what sense do we need a new science of Judaism?” He articulates a new science 47 Lévinas, “Une religion d’adultes,” 36; Lévinas, “A Religion for Adults,” 19–20. See also Emmanuel Lévinas, “La laïcité et la pensée d’israël,” in La laïcité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 50. 48 Lévinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 72 (emphasis in original).

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of Judaism that returns to classical Jewish texts and history, and he believes that such reading practices reconfigured deeply ingrained doctrines within historical Judaism within a redescription and analysis of the phenomenology of recognition and would educate and cultivate an ethico-religious phenomenological experience. He broadens the science of Judaism by moving beyond the boundedness of a historical community, uncovering an ethical and religious dimension that is accessible universally, even as the figure of the Jew holds privileged access to this phenomenon. Familiar themes within his philosophical writings, such as the primordial feeling of passivity, the individuated call of responsibility, and the phenomenological brackets put to politics and history, become redescribed in the language of specifically Jewish notions of suffering, election, and prophetic exile. Conversely, historical and traditional doctrines such as election and prophecy become reinterpreted within an ethico-religious experience that is available to all. Lévinas thereby offers a Jewish humanism that links the resources and basic message of particular, historical Judaism with what may be called an essence of religion in the face-to-face ethical encounter described in his phenomenology. He deepens the nature and understanding of a science of Judaism by uncovering a primordial experience that is prior to any theology. The modern historical theologies are rejected for their overly narrow and abstract conception of faith as knowledge or cognition—that “temptation of all temptations” that brings about injustice and struggle. Instead, Lévinas’ new science of Judaism uncovers a primordial, concrete, ethical dimension that cultivates the recognition of God and the other. In so doing, he proposes his own constructive position, which he thinks will revive and rejuvenate Jewish life and identity in a postwar era. There is, however, another way to understand the question, by considering who are the “we” to whom Lévinas refers. On the one hand, the “we” could refer to a Jewish audience, as Lévinas did when he wrote that particular essay. But in another real sense, the “we” may also refer to the modern West in general. The catastrophe of the Second World War clearly marked the failure of modernity and, with it, collapsed hopes in the movement toward a universal world history. In its aftermath, Lévinas argues that “Judaism,” properly understood and separated from this view of history dominated by violence, brought distinct resources to bear for a shattered world. It would inject received history and culture with new possibility and thereby serve as a model for a world that had lost its moral compass and needed resources around which it could reorient itself once again.



Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective 59

Jewish Ethics and the Politics of Recognition Lévinas’ philosophical writings bracket the issue of politics to prioritize the primordial dimension of our encounters with others through phenomenological reduction. For this reason, the treatment of his political theory with respect to the theme of recognition is necessarily limited, even if social and political concerns may loom in the background of his work. His Jewish writings, however, provide more insight, for he thought that Judaism could make a distinct contribution to world history and politics. The concept of messianism is the lynchpin that ties together and transitions from his ethics to his politics in his Jewish writings. The exposition of his concept of messianism merits much more attention and examination than can be offered here, but it is broached as a means to elucidate the concept of recognition. What the term precisely means must be distinguished first from competing or alternative understandings. Lévinas’ rejection of a doctrine of election that is tied to historical nations is inextricably linked to his rejection of historical forms of messianism.49 If a historical or nationalistic figure is not what Lévinas intends by the term, a consideration of what he does mean by it is in order. In addresses delivered at the World Jewish Congress in 1960 and 1961, collected under the title “Messianic Texts,” he proceeds to list four types of messianism.50 Lévinas begins by noting three schools of thought that correspond to the ideas of peace, justice, and favor, respectively. All these forms, however, concern a collectivity where the idea is universally extended and upheld by a rational law. It is, then, to a fourth and final type that he directs his attention and the term “recognition” emerges. He writes, Menahem, the fourth presumed name of the Messiah, where these names define messianism, characterizes the messianic era as an age in which the individual accedes to a personal recognition beyond the recognition he receives from belonging to humanity and the State. It is not within his rights that he is recognized but within his person, his strict individuality. Persons do not disappear within the general nature of an entity.”51

The fourth school of thought of Menahem teaches of a messianic time when there is universal recognition of each person. Clearly, the meaning of recognition is to be distinguished from impersonal legal forms of recognition by 49

Lévinas, “Textes messianiques,” in Difficile liberté, 83; Lévinas, “Messianic Texts,” in Difficult Freedom, 59. 50 Lévinas, “Textes messianiques,” 83–129; Lévinas, “Messianic Texts,” 59–96. 51 Lévinas, “Textes messianiques,” 119; Lévinas, “Messianic Texts,” 87.

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the state, for in those forms they recognize vis-à-vis the common genus and universality of humanity. Lévinas does not reject the universal as such, only the universal that violates or overlooks the individual. To distinguish messianism from the historical, legal order is to recapitulate that, for Lévinas, Jewish identity is elected to fundamentally live apart from the world in diasporic community. The question that remains, however, is how the messianic order is conceived as an alternative community. Drawing once again from the Torah and Talmud, he argues that, through a covenantal pact, the society of Israel is instituted. He writes, “A veritable pact is thus concluded, and in the presence of the people as a whole, of a society—as I keep emphasizing—in which everyone looks at everyone else.”52 Through the notion of a pact or covenant, a modern society constituted by individuals who remain anonymous to and alienated from each other is transformed into the community of Israel,53 where “all are recognized” (tous se reconnaissent).54 Even as “Israel” is drawn from textual and historical sources, like other concepts such as election and prophecy, it is not strictly a historical category. Rather, it is primarily used as an ethical and religious category such that Lévinas’ ethics of recognition has a universalizing impulse within politics. He writes, Right from the beginning, the society which aspires to intimacy between twelve tribes looking at one another, this society of a community, is already present to the whole of humanity, or opens onto the whole of humanity.55

From the particular social community of two persons, extending to the community of Israel, and finally to humanity at large, the messianic ushers in a time wherein each recognizes the radically individuated other. Given the covenantal basis of political community, there is a close relationship between religion and politics under conditions of purity. Under these ideal conditions, the messianic is not beyond politics but is precisely its essence.56 Beyond the contingency and historicity of human and positive laws and institutions, it is the origin and ideal that continuously interrupts 52 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le pacte: Traité ‘Sota,’ ” in L’au-delà du verset, 92; Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Pact (Tractate Sotah 37a–37b),” in Beyond the Verse, 71. 53 Lévinas, “Le pacte,” 106; Lévinas, “The Pact,” 84. 54 Lévinas, “Le pacte,” 97; Lévinas, “The Pact,” 76. 55 Lévinas, “Le pacte,” 95; Lévinas, “The Pact,” 74. 56 Emmanuel Lévinas, “L’état de César et l’état de David,” in L’au-delà du verset, 212. Originally published in La théologie de l’histoire herméneutique et eschatologie, ed. Enrico Castelli. Actes du colloque organisé par Le centre international d’études humanistes et par l’Institut d’études philosophiques de Rome (Paris: Aubier, 1971), 71–80. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The State of Caesar and the State of David,” in Beyond the Verse, 174.



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politics in history. Yet insofar as politics never exists under pure conditions but always within history, Lévinas distinguishes the political from the religious. For, whereas the latter involves ethical responsibility to the other, the former is imperialist, totalitarian, and oppressive.57 In this regard, he proposes a limited politics where the ultimate state is futural. Lévinas’ political theory, therefore, seeks to navigate between two extremes. On the one hand, it avoids an extreme idealism that thinks that the religious ethical encounter can be universalized within politics unconditionally. On the other hand, it avoids an extreme pessimism and realism that does not offer any conception of good for which politics can and ought to aim. Because of the ethical foundations of politics, there is both a norm that politics ought to approximate and an aim toward which it should constantly strive, even as it is acknowledged that politics cannot be a substitute for ethics. Conclusion The new science of Judaism sought to revive and renew Jewish life and identity in the postwar period by integrating the insights and overcoming the oversights of both premodern and modern forms. He retrieved classical textual sources that modern Judaism neglected while at the same time broadening their relevance beyond a historical community by employing a general phenomenology. While drawing from Jewish textual sources and tradition, he reconfigured specifically Jewish categories and concepts within a phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition. Conversely, what appears as Lévinas’ pure phenomenology within his philosophical writings is reinterpreted into specifically Jewish categories and concepts. Central philosophical concepts and themes—the passivity of sensation, individuation in the call to responsibility, and the primordiality of ethics that brackets politics and history—are interpreted anew within Jewish notions of suffering and persecution, election, prophecy, and messianism. By emphasizing a return to classical Jewish texts and the distinctiveness of Jewish history and tradition, Lévinas reaffirms a form of Jewish particularism and identity, but, by emphasizing that the education and cultivation of Jewish identity appears primordially in the phenomenological and ethical encounter with the other, he opens up Jewish identity to a form of universalism. The mutual interrelation between philosophy and Judaism is perhaps best exemplified in his rearticulation of the narrow epistemological concept of cognition into the ethical concept of recognition. This and the previous 57

Lévinas, “État de César et l’état de David,” 216; Lévinas, “State of Caesar and the State of David,” 178.

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chapter, therefore, form a pair that explores the centrality of recognition at the intersection of philosophy and Judaism. Lévinas’ notion of recognition in his philosophical thought was a critique of an overly narrow, abstract, and intellectualistic understanding of cognition in naturalism and Husserlian phenomenology. The logic that undergirded such conceptions involved an ontology that was solipsistic and egoistic, which Lévinas linked to the Hegelian formulation of the “struggle for recognition.” Against the naturalistic and phenomenological understandings of cognition, Lévinas uncovered a broader, deeper, concrete, and, indeed, ethical dimension to recognition. In a parallel fashion to his philosophical thought, he offered a critique of an overly narrow, abstract, and intellectualistic understanding of cognition in modern forms of the “science of Judaism.” Such understandings of cognition engender attitudes of mastery over the subject matter of religion, which, in Lévinas’ view, is the root of religious struggles and violence. Rather, he strives to articulate a “new science of Judaism” that uncovered and described a more primordial ethico-religious dimension. Lévinas’ concept of recognition provides an essential first moment— in Ricœur’s words, “a real departure, a beginning entirely original”58—in describing an ethics of recognition. His philosophical writings uncover the dimension with which any ethics of recognition must begin, that is, the primordial passive sense of the fundamental obligations for the other and the radically individuated call to responsibility. In parallel fashion, his Jewish writings uncover the concrete ethico-religious experiences and demands that were concealed by the methodologies of modern sciences of Judaism. Whatever else Judaism is, it involves and begins with the ethico-religious encounter with God and the other. But if Lévinas’ concept of recognition offers a “real departure,” it does not provide a comprehensive account, for his notion of recognition in his philosophical writings does not offer a thorough analysis of a system of moral rules and institutions. Similarly, his interpretation of Jewish texts and history wherein the Jew suffers in powerless exile awaiting a messianic time seems inadequate to the needs and capacities of both the individual and the state. Even as Lévinas insists that the full worth of the Jew is precisely located in the sensation or feeling of being chosen and irreplaceable within the ethico-religious encounter, he also risks diminishing that worth by the demands of infinite and asymmetrical recognition of the other. This risk is particularly acute given the economy of being and the pervasive temptation 58

Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, nos. 49–50 (1983): 34.



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to mastery, power, and the struggle for recognition. All desires for recognition, however, are dismissed by Lévinas in his philosophical writings as nonethical ontology or unethical egoism leading to struggle and violence and are deemed in his Jewish writings to be inessential to Jewish life and identity. Furthermore, his understanding of messianic politics does not account for the real, even if limited, effect that political laws and institutions can serve to shape the moral life. To quote the words of Gershom Scholem, who has written perhaps the classic text on the idea of messianism: The magnitude of the Messianic idea corresponds to the endless powerlessness in Jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history. .­ . . There is something grand about living in hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it. It diminishes the singular worth of the individual, and he can never fulfill himself, because the incompleteness of his endeavors eliminates precisely what constitutes its highest value. This in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment in which nothing can be done definitively. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given up itself totally to Messianism.59

Religious life must give a fuller account of readiness of action in the present as well as the role of institutions in shaping that life. It is with these critiques in mind that we turn to the thought of Paul Ricœur, who provides a necessary corollary to Lévinas’ ethics and politics of recognition, one that considers a fuller account of the individual through an emphasis on self-worth and self-esteem of the individual as well as a more rigorous account of the role of political institutions in actualizing the ethics and good of recognition that Lévinas begins.

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Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 35.

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Chapter four

Paul Ricœur

Recognition as Pure and Empirical Will

Emmanuel Lévinas exerted considerable influence on Paul Ricœur. It was Lévinas who introduced him to the new insights of phenomenology, first as a young student who read his translation of Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen and later as a young professor at the Université de Strasbourg who pored over his Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. The publication of Lévinas’ Totalité et infini (1961) created a new level of respect and admiration for, as Ricœur acknowledges, “since that time, I have not ceased to support the development, creation, and writing of this work.”1 In many ways Ricœur pursued what Lévinas initiated. Both Lévinas and Ricœur belonged to the generation that enjoyed the resurrection of Hegel studies in France in the 1930s and 1940s by people like Kojève, Wahl, and Hyppolite. Like Lévinas, Ricœur discerns that “a return to Hegel is not enough; one must write a new logic of being that develops categories revealed since Hegel.”2 Ricœur seeks to bring the insights of recent Hegel studies in critical conversation with the emerging movements in existentialism and 1

Paul Ricœur, “Soirée d’hommage à Emmanuel Lévinas,” Sens: Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde aujourd’hui, no. 211 (1996): 357. 2 Paul Ricœur, “Philosophie et ontologie I: Retour à Hegel,” Esprit, no. 229 (1955): 1390. Paul Ricœur, “Retour à Hegel,” in Lectures 2: La contrée des philosophes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 186. 65

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phenomenology, particularly in the thought of Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. Ricœur notes that Jaspers interprets Hegel in line with the “turn to the concrete” that characterized contemporary French thought.3 And perhaps with Lévinas’ appropriation of the concept of Anerkennung in mind, Ricœur observes that Hegel’s works on the struggle for recognition “were read in France as the best way of meeting Husserl’s injunction to go back to things themselves.”4 As in many other respects, Ricœur follows Lévinas in appropriating the Hegelian concept of recognition through the insights of contemporary existentialism and phenomenology. Lévinas and Ricœur, however, are not without their philosophical differences. On the one hand, Ricœur appreciates Lévinas’ attempt to go back to the things themselves by exposing a primordial dimension for a phenomenology and ethics of recognition. In a quote that was cited earlier but bears repeating here, Ricœur notes that Lévinas “wishes to underline that the recognition of the face of the other constitutes a real departure, a beginning entirely original in the way of ethics.”5 Whatever else a phenomenology and ethics of recognition means, it originates from the radically individuated feeling of being chosen and called to responsibility in and through the encounter with the other. But while Lévinas presents an origin and starting point for a phenomenology and ethics of recognition, it remains incomplete without a full account of human capability and fallibility. Ricœur pursues an alternative phenomenology that is grounded in what he calls a “strong base” in ethical subjectivity that is both capable of recognizing the inestimable value of the other and yet remains fallible to and conflicted with competing values.6 In other words, Ricœur is sensitive, in a way that Lévinas’ ethics of infinite responsibility does not allow, to the issue of moral motivation in the face of multiple and contested values. Ricœur’s analysis and understanding of the concept of recognition is most often associated with his late work, Parcours de la reconnaissance 3

Paul Ricœur and Mikel Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947), 31. 4 Paul Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France: The Phenomenology of Language,” trans. P. G. Goodman, Social Research 34, no. 1 (1967): 4. 5 Paul Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, nos. 49–50 (1983): 34. 6 Paul Ricœur, “De la volonté à l’acte: Un entretien de Paul Ricœur avec Carlos Oliveira,” in “Temps et recit” de Paul Ricœur en debat, ed. Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 25; cf. Paul Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur sur l’effondrement du système communiste en Europe centrale et de l’Est,” in Ethique et responsabilité, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeshlimann (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1994), 24.



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(2004), which at first glance seems to be an occasional piece within the overall arc of his corpus. This view is supported when one considers that Ricœur’s reflections on recognition are in large part provoked through his readings of contemporaries, such as Bernard Williams, Axel Honneth, JeanMarc Ferry, and Marcel Hénaff. Furthermore, the work appeared at a time when multiculturalism and the politics of recognition emerged as an important and contested issue in political philosophy.7 Given the contemporary relevance of recognition to social and political issues, Ricœur scholarship has rightly focused on this important late work.8 But Ricœur’s late reflections on recognition had their origins in and developed out of his early works. Proceeding in a chronological fashion unfolds a certain internal logic to Ricœur’s thought on recognition. His early works, from roughly the late 1940s to the 1960s, on what he later calls “existential phenomenology”9 are crucial to understanding the philosophical roots of his later ethics of recognition, as he appropriates the Hegelian concept of Anerkennung through the new approaches and insights in the existentialism of Karl Jaspers and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. His existential phenomenology, he suggests, “calls forth” and “prepares” ethical reflection, and, despite the many and important detours he took, his later reflections on ethics remain continuous with and develop out of his earlier thought. Key concepts and themes from his existential phenomenology, then, are traced into his later, more well-known reflections on recognition in his ethics. Finally, we conclude by attending to Ricœur’s politics of recognition found in many occasional essays and papers toward the end of his career. A threefold logic and structure is employed here, which follows the historical trajectory and development of his thought: existential phenomenology of recognition, ethics of recognition, and politics of recognition. This chapter also employs a constructive approach, for it attempts to bring coherence and systematicity to Ricœur’s thought on recognition in a way that he himself never explicitly 7

Paul Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance: Trois études (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 331– 36. Paul Ricœur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 212–16. 8 See the collections of essays in Études ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 2, no. 1 (2011). 9 This term referred to his early works on Jaspers, Marcel, and Husserl but was coined later because he did not want to feel burdened by the work of Husserl. See Paul Ricœur, “Appendix: From Existentialism to the Philosophy of Language,” in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. David Pellauer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 316. Originally published in Criterion 10, no. 3 (1971): 315–22. To my knowledge, the first time he used the term was in 1957. Paul Ricœur, “Phénoménologie existentielle,” in Encyclopédie française, vol. 19, Philosophie/ Religion (Paris: Société Nouvelle de l’encyclopédie française, 1957), 10.9.

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made.10 Even as the structure of the argument proceeds chronologically and logically in a way that marks shifts and detours in his thought, there are common structures and themes that link his late works on the ethics and politics of recognition to his early works on the existential phenomenology of recognition, notably his “philosophy of the will.” By tracing his reflections on recognition in all its dimensions—existential, ethical, political— back to his philosophy of the will, an analysis of Ricœur’s works contributes constructively to the larger aims of this work that offer a critical comparison with Lévinas on the concept of recognition. Existential Phenomenology of Recognition Ricœur’s existential phenomenology held both a chronological and logical priority in his thought. Despite his multiple detours throughout his long intellectual journey, Ricœur remained consistent in his defense of and argument for the primordiality of existential phenomenology. It grounds and presupposes all of his remaining work, whether in hermeneutics, linguistic analysis, ethics, or politics. In an essay published late in his career, appropriately entitled “Ipséité. Altérité. Socialité,” he succinctly summarizes the logic and course of his thought and works: “at first subjectivity, then intersubjectivity, finally sociality.”11 This section considers Ricœur’s early reflections on Jaspers’ existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology as he began to think about the essential and existential structures of human subjectivity.12 Karl Jaspers: Existentialism and the “Loving Struggle for Recognition” Since Jean Wahl’s introduction of Karl Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie to France,13 existentialism became an influential intellectual movement, particularly for 10 Ricœur professes that he was always drawn forward in wrestling with a new problem rather than seeking to look backward to offer greater coherence to his thought. See Paul Ricœur, “Reply to Lewis S. Mudge,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 11 Paul Ricœur, “Ipséité. Altérité. Socialité,” Archivio di filosofia: Intersoggettivita Socialita Religione, nos. 1–3 (1986): 18. 12 In his early years, Ricœur also gave significant attention to the thought of his mentor, Gabriel Marcel. Indeed, it was Marcel who first recommended that Ricœur read Jaspers. Because he offers no extended discussion of the concept of recognition, however, I do not attend to Marcel’s thought here. 13 See Jean Wahl, “Jaspers et Kierkegaard,” in Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938), 477–509; “Le problème du choix, l’existence et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers,” in Études Kierkegaardiennes, 510–51.



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Ricœur, during the wartime and postwar period. Ricœur’s first two major works—Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence and Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophe du mystère et philosophe du paradoxe—which were both written during the war and published in 1947, were devoted to the task of expositing, analyzing, and reconstructing Jaspers’ thought.14 They would themselves prove to be influential in disseminating the German thinker’s work to a French audience, attested by the fact that it elicited a response and critical review from Wahl himself.15 Ricœur finds in Jaspers a mine of resources for thinking about and through basic questions regarding the nature of freedom and its relationship to recognition.16 To understand the use of recognition that Ricœur finds in Jaspers, it first will be helpful to gain the broader context of his thought, both in its negative critique of the sciences and his positive constructive alternative for philosophy. The term “existentialism” is notoriously ambiguous, but, whatever else it means, Ricœur agrees with Emmanuel Mounier’s assessment that it is “the same ‘reaction of the philosophy of man against the excess of the philosophy of ideas and the philosophy of things.’ ”17 This reaction against the “philosophy of things” and the “philosophy of ideas” mirrors Jaspers’ own opposition to what he called the “sciences of nature” and the “sciences of spirit.” On Ricœur’s reading of Jaspers, the task of the sciences of nature (Naturwissenschaften) “is to determine facts .­ . . ideas are only the instruments destined 14

Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence; and Paul Ricœur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophe du mystère et philosophe du paradoxe (Paris: Éditions du temps présent, 1947). 15 See Jean Wahl, “Karl Jaspers en France,” Critique 4, no. 25 (1948): 523–30. 16 Ricœur’s indebtedness to Jaspers’ thought in general has been overlooked. Jérôme Porée and Jean-Marc Ferry are notable exceptions. Jérôme Porée, “Karl Jaspers et Paul Ricœur: Le déchiffrement de l’existence,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 86, no. 1 (2006): 7–40; and Jean-Marc Ferry, “Paul Ricœur et la philosophie de l’existence: L’influence première de Karl Jaspers,” in L’homme capable: Autour de Paul Ricœur, ed. Bruno Clément (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 27–38. Jean-Luc Amalric has devoted significant attention to Ricœur’s early reflections but traces the influence of Jean Nabert’s notion of originary affirmation from Fallible Man through Oneself as Another to The Course of Recognition. The section here begins with Ricœur’s earliest works and uses Fallible Man as the end point, and not the starting point, of analysis. Furthermore, Amalric’s primary concern is to relate Ricœur to Nabert, particularly on the notion of originary affirmation, while this chapter focuses more specifically on recognition. See Jean-Luc Amalric, “Affirmation originaire, attestation, et reconnaissance: Le cheminement de l’anthropologie philosophique ricœurienne,” in Études ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 12–34. 17 Paul Ricœur, “Le renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne par les philosophies de l’existence,” in Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 45.

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to put the facts in place according to an intelligible order.”18 For Jaspers, the sciences of nature are concerned with empirical facts of the world and reduce reality to a rendering of the facts within an intelligible order of universal ahistorical laws. In a short essay entitled “L’homme de science et l’homme de foi,” which Ricœur published soon after his works on Jaspers, he writes that a science of nature “determines a field of ‘objects,’ insofar as it has determined itself to be objective, where it suppresses in prohibited subjectivity love and hatred, desire and fear, all evaluations.”19 Being is objective being such that the subject then is treated merely as one object among other objects to be quantified and measured. Human existence is overlooked when a science of nature subsumes subjects as “things” submitted to universal laws of nature. The sciences of spirit, however, emphasize the subject and thought rather than the object and fact. If positivism is grounded in objective being, idealism is grounded in the being of spirit. It should be noted that there is a distinction made between the soul and spirit. Ricœur writes, “The soul belongs to the isolated individual, the spirit to the integrated individual in society and history.”20 As spirit itself is historical, so too the science of spirit is historical. Yet the sciences of the spirit subsume the individual into universal history, thereby neglecting the isolated individual, what Ricœur calls “the soul.” On Ricœur’s account, Jaspers rejects both the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit—positivism and idealism—in their attempts to arrive at a single unifying account of reality. “For all their feuding,” Jaspers duly notes, “positivism and idealism are on the same level. The world orientation of both becomes conclusive, and making it absolute is their idea of philosophy.”21 Whatever differences they may hold, both the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit share the common goal of arriving at an account of reality in its entirety and universality such that the universal is construed as better and individuals are only stages or cases. What general laws of nature and history both overlook, then—and this was the fundamental insight of existentialism, for Ricœur—is the irreducible concreteness and freedom of human existence, the “soul.” “The great beneficial effect of existentialism,” Ricœur notes, “is of having learned to pose to us the problem of the human from freedom.”22 If freedom is at the center of Jaspers’ philosophy Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence, 90. Paul Ricœur, “L’homme de science et l’homme de foi,” Recherches et débats: Semaine des intellectuels catholiques 3–4 (1953): 81 (emphasis in original). 20 Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence, 77. 21 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 1:227. 22 Paul Ricœur, “Dimensions d’une recherche commune,” Esprit no. 12 (1948): 839; cf. Ricœur and Dufrenne, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence, 111. 18 19



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of Existenz, it is neither a fact that can be objectively and empirically proven nor a concept that can be subjectively conceived and realized. Rather, it is, in Jaspers’ language, a sign of existential elucidation. It is the distinction between empirical existence and Existenz that figures so prominently in Ricœur’s analysis of Jaspers’ short, ambiguous, but also rich and suggestive section entitled “The Loving Struggle for Existenz” (Kampf in der Liebe um Existenz).23 In that section, the significance of the leap from the empirical to the existential is clarified by turning to the concept of recognition. Jaspers marks that distinction as “an original difference between the meaning of recognition and the meaning of that existential contact in solidarity—a contact that will be weakened, rather, if those visible phenomena are stressed.”24 The meaning of recognition in the empirical sense of the term “refers to objectivities, to rights, achievements, successes, to qualities and character; it satisfies the need for prestige in a social self ’s sense of being.”25 Ricœur follows Jaspers by acknowledging the need for some empirical, “objective” forms of recognition analogous to organic and biological needs. To reduce the meaning and desire for recognition to this empirical mode, however, ineluctably leads to struggles for power and superiority and neglects a deeper dimension within human existence, for, Jaspers continues, “My Existenz is threatened with confusion if I mistake the search for its assurance of being for a claim to the kind of recognition and affirmation entailed by social intercourse.”26 Jaspers suggests that undue emphasis on empirical or objective forms of recognition diminishes existential contact or what might be called “existential recognition,” that is, where both existences dare to show themselves without reserve and allow themselves to be thrown into question. Jaspers refers to this mutual existential recognition as a fight or struggle for manifestation to be assured of one’s own being as well as a loving solidarity. In short, it is a “loving struggle for Existenz.” It is unclear what he means by “fight” or “struggle” (other than that it is somehow nonviolent) and what he means by “loving solidarity.” Nonetheless, it is important to note that existential recognition is articulated in a way that is related to, but also distinct from, empirical struggles for recognition. “This means practically that ‘true communication’ is,” as Jean-Marc Ferry notes, “a practice of entente which hovers serenely above the violence and the struggle of the clash of wills. It is not by accident that the exemplary figure of communicative situations is the 23

Jaspers, Philosophy, 2:212–15. Jaspers, Philosophy, 2:213. 25 Jaspers, Philosophy, 2:213. 26 Jaspers, Philosophy, 2:213–14. 24

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struggle to death for recognition.”27 While there are clear echoes of Hegel’s formula of the “struggle for recognition,” Jaspers also wishes to move away from an impoverished understanding of social life constituted by perpetual conflict and violent struggle. From Jaspers’ brief analysis of the subject, Ricœur devotes an entire subsection of commentary.28 Ricœur demonstrates the importance of “loving struggle for Existenz” by devoting a subsection to this and not to other limit situations, and by situating it in a discussion on communication, which is necessary for Existenz to be realized. What Ricœur seems to find particularly salient is that the “loving struggle for existence” is embedded in paradox and is not reducible to an intelligible order constituted by laws of nature or history. There is the paradox, for instance, that despite Jaspers’ emphasis on freedom in Existenz, Existenz is realized through communication. Furthermore, given that one reveals oneself, it seems that what is revealed is within one’s being, and yet it proceeds from nothingness because one is not existentially real until one opens up oneself to the other. The depth of this paradox is perhaps best captured in the very phrase the “loving struggle for Existenz.” It is both a creative struggle and amorous love at once. The paradoxical nature of the “loving struggle,” then, underlines the mysterious character of Existenz that is distinguished from the certainties of positivism and idealism. From Ricœur’s early works on Jaspers, one can already detect an interest in exploring a concept of recognition that is more primordial to naturalistic or empirical understandings. This deeper understanding of recognition moves beyond objectivities in empirical existence and the reduction of life to struggle for recognition, and instead it is centrally tied to the concept of freedom in Existenz and notions of mutual elucidation. Existenz, in all its fundamental possibilities, is actualized in and through mutual recognition. Ricœur finds in Jaspers a mine of resources and suggestions: broadly with regard to the critique of the regnant sciences of the day and the methodology of existential philosophy and more narrowly with regard to existential mutual recognition, a theme that he pursues throughout his early years and to which he returns later in his career. It is important to note at this point that Jaspers’ magisterial three-volume work entitled simply Philosophy, which is the main source for Ricœur’s early reflections on Jaspers’ thought, only briefly alludes to the notion of the will and the question of voluntary and involuntary acts.29 Ricœur develops the issue of the will and 27

Ferry, “Paul Ricœur et la philosophie de l’existence,” 35. Ricœur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, 201–6. 29 Jaspers, Philosophy, 2:133–35, 138–40. 28



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significantly complicates Jaspers’ notion of freedom through the insights of phenomenology. Husserlian Phenomenology: The Value of the Other and the Desire for Recognition Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire (1950)

In both method and content, Ricœur finds similarities between Jaspers’ existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology. “From the beginning,” Ricœur later notes, “the phenomenological wave and the existential wave intermingled.”30 The place for philosophy over and against the sciences and the emphasis on concrete human existence enable Ricœur to synthesize Jaspers’ existential philosophy with Husserl’s phenomenology into what he later calls “existential phenomenology.” Ricœur’s introduction to Husserl, as noted earlier, was through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. Ricœur reminisced on a night to honor the work of Lévinas, “I cannot forget my first deep encounter with Husserl. It was by reading Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl by Emmanuel Lévinas. This book quite simply founded Husserlian studies in France.”31 The insight of Husserlian phenomenology that Lévinas first detected was what attracted Ricœur to it, for they both found in phenomenology a method that sought to counter the sciences of fact. Echoing Husserl, Ricœur writes in criticism of naturalism: These “facts” which, on the plane of objective, mundane, and naturalistic cognition, give an account of the voluntary and involuntary life of man and which are integrated into a science of man, do not belong to the subjective life of consciousness. But, if they retained nothing of conscious subjective life, in no way would they concern man and his consciousness; they would not signify man at all.32

Like Jaspers, Husserl believes there is something deeply amiss about submitting human existence to the sciences and its aim of grasping general laws of nature. The distinct contribution that Husserlian phenomenology makes to Jaspers’ existentialism is its integration of the voluntary and the involuntary, 30

Ricœur, “New Developments in Phenomenology in France,” 3. Paul Ricœur, “L’originaire et la question-en-retour dans le Krisis de Husserl,” in A l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), 285. 32 Paul Ricœur, “Méthode et tache d’une phénoménologie de la volonté,” in A l’école de la phénoménologie, 68. Originally published in Problème actuels de la phénoménologie, ed. H. L. Van Breda (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), 110–40. Paul Ricœur, “Methods and Tasks of a Phenomenology of the Will,” in Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 219. 31

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the active and passive dimensions of concrete human existence. It is not a matter of freedom or nature, as Jaspers suggests, but freedom and nature, which Ricœur approaches through a phenomenological analysis of the will. Whereas the sciences offer explanations that gave priority to the involuntary and whereas Jaspers’ existentialism posits the priority of the voluntary, phenomenology presents a method that uncovers the reciprocal relation between the voluntary and the involuntary. Ricœur’s phenomenological approach follows Jaspers by reestablishing the priority of the voluntary in concrete human existence even as he wishes to complicate the concept of freedom by arguing for the “regulative idea” of the unity of the voluntary and involuntary.33 His early systematic work on The Philosophy of the Will begins with an eidetics of the will, which investigates the essential structures of human being in the world as “incarnate freedom.” Ricœur analyzes the reciprocity and dialectic between the voluntary and the involuntary in the phenomenology of the will by looking at three moments: decision, movement, and consent. Each of these moments are described and exposited in painstaking detail in Ricœur’s work, but, given the purposes here, the analysis will be restricted to the most salient aspects that will properly contextualize and situate his description and understanding of respect and recognition. In the first moment, Ricœur uncovers that it is I who decides, who is able to act.34 The basic affirmation and fixing of decision to an I who is able to act is, as we will see, an important feature that Ricœur retains throughout his career. To will oneself does not happen in a void, however, but has an intention and project. The notion of a project not only implies possibility and thus potency to act, but it also implies an object of decision such that to decide is to turn myself toward the project, to be outside myself in the project. I only affirm myself as the subject precisely in the object of my willing. Thus, this decision to act, which is on the side of the voluntary, also implies a second moment on the side of the involuntary, for “je me decide à . . .” (I decide this because . . .).35 Decision implies motivation. Motive is distinguished from cause by Ricœur, as phenomenology is distinguished from empiricism: 33 Paul Ricœur, “L’unité du volontaire et de l’involontaire comme idée-limite,” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, nos.1–2 (1951): 3. 34 Ricœur, “L’unité du volontaire et de l’involontaire comme idée-limite,” 6. 35 Paul Ricœur, Philosophe de la volonté, vol. 1, Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 57. Paul Ricœur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 58. See also Ricœur, “L’unité du volontaire et de l’involontaire comme idée-limite,” 6.



Paul Ricœur: Recognition as Pure and Empirical Will 75 Motivation expresses well in this first moment of my decision one of the hinges of the voluntary and the involuntary. However, cause—by contrast in motif—the cause belongs to the objective sphere and relates to the naturalist explication of things.36

Because of Ricœur’s fundamental affirmation of the voluntary through decision, he introduces the concept of motivation to distinguish his phenomenology of human action from naturalistic theories of causation. The reciprocal relation between decision and motive is the basis for the reciprocal relation between freedom and value, for one encounters value only in the course of motivation and there is no motive outside of a nascent decision. Importantly, Ricœur proceeds to describe different and competing sources of motivations and value, but, given our concerns, the focus will be on the affectivity and value of the other as an experience of both attraction and obligation. On the one hand, obligation to the other is grounded in the value of the other. In a manner that bears a striking resemblance to Lévinas’ sense of ethical responsibility to the other, Ricœur argues that “obligation shows that the decentering of perspective which the other inaugurates is an asymmetry of value.”37 While obligation is derived from the value of the other—a position that aligns with Lévinas’ stance— Ricœur adds that it also motivates freedom. Ricœur’s argument that the other is both a source of value and motivation is a critique against Kantian formalism. For Kant, value is grounded in a “pure will,” independent of all empirical conditions, that is, affective motivations. That there is a conflict between duty and happiness, however, presupposes that both have sources of motivation. Kant’s thought, Ricœur insists, must allow for not only sensibility as a motive for action but also rational principles that “must be capable of ‘touching’ me in a manner analogous to that of sensible goods.”38 Indeed, Ricœur notes that, for Kant, respect is a kind of “feeling,” albeit peculiar and separated from the sensibility. When Kant states, “All respect for a person is properly nothing other than respect for the law of which that person presents an instance,” Ricœur interprets that to mean that the formal principle of universalization borrows from the “material” value of the other that motivates moral respect.39 Ricœur attempts thereby to give coherence to Kantianism by applying a consistent theory of motivations with respect to nature and morality. 36

Ricœur, “L’unité du volontaire et de l’involontaire comme idée-limite,” 7. Ricœur, Le volontaire et l’involontaire, 121; Ricœur, Freedom and Nature, 126. 38 Ricœur, Le volontaire et l’involontaire, 125; Ricœur, Freedom and Nature, 131. 39 Ricœur, Le volontaire et l’involontaire, 126; Ricœur, Freedom and Nature, 132. 37

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The eidetic analysis of the will—that is, the pure description of the voluntary and the involuntary—is limited to the field of abstract possibility. The primary and essential analysis of the will is restricted to the fundamental reciprocal relations between decision and motive, freedom and value. The other appears only in a secondary and nonessential role as simply one possible motive among many that are the basis for my decision and one possible source of value among many that affects my freedom.40 The exploration and description of abstract possibilities of the will, therefore, has distinct limitations and restrictions, for it calls forth and prepares ethics but does not permit a sustained consideration of it. We admit readily that the problem of the other is not really raised here since the other becomes truly “thou” when he is no longer a motive or an obstacle for my decision but when he begets me in my very decision, inspires me in the heart of my freedom, and exercises on me an effect which is in some way seminal, akin to creative action. A study of encounters—which are not always misunderstandings—will serve us still later to initiate the poetics of freedom. But that is no longer the province of analysis of motives, capacities, and limits of the will such as we have been suggesting.41

Later in his career, he acknowledges that his phenomenology corresponds to “an ethics that was implicit and as yet unexplored.”42 Yet he does not take up the issue of ethics here, for it goes beyond the limits of his phenomenology of the voluntary and involuntary. These restrictions due to method notwithstanding, Ricœur clearly gestures toward his understanding of ethical encounter with the other, specifically the concept of recognition. L’Homme Faillible (1960)

L’homme faillible continues what Le volontaire et l’involontaire started, that is, a phenomenological analysis of the will that describes the reciprocal relation between the voluntary and the involuntary. But whereas the first volume of The Philosophy of the Will focuses on an eidetic analysis into the most essential structures of the will, this second volume considers the empirics of the will considered under the conditions of actual human existence and thus the conditions that permit fault to arise (i.e., fallibility). The reciprocal and dialectical relation of the voluntary and involuntary, freedom and nature, described in the essential structures of the will, then, is taken up under 40

Ricœur, Le volontaire et l’involontaire, 34; Ricœur, Freedom and Nature, 31–32. Ricœur, Le volontaire et l’involontaire, 34; Ricœur, Freedom and Nature, 31–32. 42 Paul Ricœur, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 12. 41



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actual existential conditions of the will by considering in turn (1) theoretical knowledge of things, constituted by the reciprocal relation between finite perspective (involuntary nature) and infinite verb (voluntary freedom) synthesized by the “pure imagination” (unity of the voluntary and involuntary); (2) practical knowledge of persons, constituted by the reciprocal relation between character (involuntary nature) and happiness (voluntary freedom) synthesized by “respect” (unity of the voluntary and involuntary); and (3) the affective dimension, constituted by the reciprocal relation between the passions (involuntary nature) and human desires (voluntary freedom) synthesized by the feelings of having, power, and worth (unity of the voluntary and involuntary). Once again, the central line of argument in this work will be rehearsed so as to contextualize and situate Ricœur’s use of recognition within it. Ricœur argues that there is a disproportion within the human constituted by the antinomy between the infinite pole and the finite pole. His philosophical analysis of fallibility begins with reflection on the transcendental synthesis in theoretical knowledge. Theoretical knowledge of objects is fragile, for the human is constituted by both “finite perspective” (i.e., one never perceives more than one side of an object at any given time) and “infinite discourse” (i.e., one can transcend finite perspective evidenced through language, for perception is significative).43 The “disproportion” or “breach” between the finite perspective and the infinite verb is synthesized by the pure imagination. Transcendental reflection, then, starts from the thing and explores the conditions of possibility of the objectivity of the thing. The transcendental stage of theoretical knowledge, Ricœur writes, is “the necessary, although inadequate stage of philosophical transposition.”44 It is necessary because it opens up in broadest terms the properly philosophical dimension of anthropology. But it is inadequate because it remains confined to the realm of things and therefore lacks the affective and practical dimensions of philosophical anthropology. The turn to philosophical anthropology, therefore, requires a move from theoretical knowledge to the practical will, a turn from the study of things to the study of persons. There is a structural analogy between the theoretical and the practical. The correlate of finite perspective when applied to the practical dimension of the will is character; the correlate of infinite discourse is happiness. Respect is the synthesis of infinite directedness toward happiness with given, 43 Paul Ricœur, Philosophie de la volonté: Finitude et culpabilité, vol. 1, L’homme faillible (Paris: Aubier, 1960), 42. Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 37–38. 44 Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 35; Ricœur, Fallible Man, 26.

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natural, finite character in which the form of the person is constituted.45 Whereas theoretical knowledge is concerned with the constitution of objects or things in the world, practical knowledge is concerned with the constitution of persons. Respect for the humanity of the person, however, remains a fragile synthesis between the disproportion of finite character and infinite happiness, just as the pure imagination maintained a fragile synthesis between finite point of view and infinite discourse with respect to knowledge of things. Finally, he turns from the theoretical and practical to the affective. By attending to feeling, his analysis of philosophical anthropology turns increasingly deeper, more inward, and more concrete. There is, according to Ricœur, a close relationship between feeling and knowing, even as knowing sets a cleavage between the object and subject whereas feeling relates to the world and restores our complicity with it. Feeling and knowing “explain each other.” On the one hand, the power of knowing by hierarchizing itself, truly engenders the degrees of feeling and pulls it out of its essential confusion. On the other hand, feeling indeed generates the intention of knowing on all its levels. The unity of sentir, of Fühlen, of feeling, is constituted in this mutual genesis. .­ . . Feeling can be defined only by this very contrast between the movement by means of which we “detach” over against us and “objectify” things and beings, and the movement by means of which we somehow “appropriate” and interiorize them.46

Feelings manifest what life aims at and reveal the orientation of our tendencies, but they manifest its meaning only by contrast with the work of objectification proper to knowing. By turning to feeling, Ricœur’s analysis of philosophical anthropology not only becomes deeper but exposes more fragility. Thus far, fragility was seen first as transcendental imagination, which transcends itself intentionally in its correlate in the thing, and then as respect, which transcends intentionally in the representation of the person. At the level of feeling, human existence lies at the intersection of desires, which are constitutive of humanity itself, and passions, which are perversions and deviations. Interestingly, Ricœur first considers the “fallen” forms of human affectivity— the passions—because what is empirically evident in human existence are 45

Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 87–93; Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man, 107–12. Ricœur’s understanding of respect as a synthesis of character and happiness loosely draws from Kant’s understanding of respect as the synthesis of reason and existence. But whereas, for Kant, respect is for the law wherein the person is only one instance, for Ricœur, respect is primarily of the person. 46 Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 95, 126; Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man, 104, 134.



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these perverted and distorted affections. By turning to these fallen passions, Ricœur thinks that he can indirectly glean the properly human desires and the proper objects of desire that are “sought.”47 Drawing from Kant’s Anthropology, Ricœur enumerates the fallen passions—possession (Habsucht), domination (Herrsucht), and honor (Ersucht)—and relates them to the economic, political, and cultural dimensions respectively. Insofar as the affections constitute the most primordial and interior dimension of the self, selfhood is then constituted by the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of existence. Even as these dimensions are interrelated, we will forgo analysis of the economic dimension of possession as well as the political dimension of domination and instead turn directly to the interpersonal dimension and the issue of honor and worth. The process in which humans achieve consciousness is reduced neither to economic relations of possession and exchange nor to political relations of dominance and obedience; rather, it is realized in intersubjective relations of recognition. Ricœur writes, “For it is not enough to shore up the I with the mine, it is not enough to dominate in order to exist; I want to be recognized, too.”48 The quest for reciprocity and the desire for mutual recognition is satisfied not in economic relations of mutual exclusion nor in political spheres of asymmetrical, hierarchical relations but in the realm of interpersonal relations. There is a deeper dimension of objectivity wherein the person is not to be cognized and used as a means like a thing, deeper even than the abstract universality of the idea of humanity in respect, and rather given concrete universality through the feeling and affections for recognition.49 The term “recognition” is not found in Kant’s original text from which Ricœur draws for his reflections on the fallen passions and human desires, but clearly Kant himself distinguishes among different forms of honor. Kant writes, for instance, “Mania for honor is not love of honor, an esteem that the human being is permitted to expect from others because of his inner (moral) worth; rather it is striving after the reputation of honor, where semblance suffices.”50 Behind the perverted passion of the mania for honor, there is a more primordial quest or search for honor and worth in the eyes of the other, the quest for esteem.51

47

Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 127–28; Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man 170. Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 138; Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man; 186. 49 Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 139; Paul Ricœur, Fallible Man, 187. 50 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172 (emphasis in original). 51 Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 136; Ricœur, Fallible Man, 183. 48

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What Kant names as the love of honor or quest for esteem is what Ricœur understands as the desire for recognition. The quest for recognition is fragile, however, for it can descend, on the one hand, to the passion for honor, glory, and vanity, or ascend, on the other hand, to the desire for esteem and worth constitutive of selfhood. The fragility of desire for recognition is exacerbated because it depends on the opinion of others. He writes, for instance, “The possibility of being no more than the word of another, the dependence on fragile opinion, these are precisely the occasion of the passions of glory which graft their vanity onto the fragility of esteem as opinion.”52 Moreover, the desire for recognition is tenuous because it is fundamentally grounded in a belief or an attestation in oneself that one is being recognized. Ricœur notes, An esteem experienced in a belief is what can err more than anything: because it is believed, the worth of the self may be sham, feigned or alleged; it may also be neglected, contested, disputed, as well as scorned, belittled, choked back and humiliated. And when rightly or wrongly, it is neglected, the lack of esteem may be offset by a self-overestimation or by a depreciation of others and their values: in this case aggressiveness, reprisals, resentment and revenge are the deficient measures used against non-recognition, which itself can be understood only through the search for recognition. .­ . . Nothing is more fragile, nothing is easier to wound than an existence which is at the mercy of a belief.”53

That recognition depends both on the opinion of others and the belief in oneself indicates the profound fragility of affective feeling. When Ricœur speaks of “fallible man,” the possibility of fallibility inherent in the constitution of human beings goes all the way down, as it were, for nowhere is this more vulnerable than within the depths of the perverse passion for recognition. This first section has focused on Ricœur’s early works in existential phenomenology and traced certain key themes and lines of argument that would be the seeds for his later works on the ethics and politics of recognition. Through his early reflections on Jaspers’ existentialism, he discovers a philosophical method that elucidates concrete human existence apart from the general laws of history and nature presupposed in the regnant sciences of the day. In so doing, he uncovers a deeper and more concrete understanding of recognition tied to the concept of existential freedom distinct from, but related to, “natural” or biological needs for recognition satisfied in the objectivities of empirical existence. The relationship between freedom 52 53

Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 137; Ricœur, Fallible Man, 184. Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 141; Ricœur, Fallible Man, 189–90.



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and nature is nuanced and complicated through Ricœur’s appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology and its application to the will. Rather than putting them in simple opposition to one another, phenomenology allows for an appreciation of both the voluntary and involuntary constitution of the essential structure of the will, which Ricœur holds to be in a reciprocal and dialectical relation. Within this broader framework, the encounter with the other appeared as one among many possible sources of value and obligation (the involuntary) and simultaneously one among many possible sources of freedom and motivation (the voluntary). Under conditions of actual human existence, however, Ricœur uncovers a disproportion between the infinite and finite dimensions of human existence that accounts for human fallibility. The breach that inheres within human existence constitutes the theoretical and practical dimensions of the will but manifests itself most deeply and acutely through the tensive and fragile relation between the inordinate passions and human desires for recognition at the affective dimension of the will. These investigations into the deeper structures of essential and existential willing are limited to descriptive phenomenology and yet call forth prescriptive ethics. The other appears in a secondary and derivative way as only one among many sources of value and motivation within the essential structure of the will and appears derivative of an analysis first of the theoretical cognition of things in general within the empirics of the will. Through his reflections on Jaspers’ existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenology, Ricœur already works to uncover a notion of recognition related to, but distinguished from, “scientific,” empirical, and naturalistic modalities and moves toward a deeper understanding grounded in notions of freedom and the voluntary will. As there is both a distinction and relation between struggles for recognition and the loving struggle for Existenz in Jaspers’ thought, so too, in Ricœur’s phenomenology of the will, there is a distinction and relation between theoretical knowledge of objects and the affective recognition of persons, between knowing and feeling. As he states, “Is it by chance that recognition derives from cognition? Only beings capable of cognition are beings capable of recognition.”54 Uncovering this primordial understanding of recognition, however, does not leave him inattentive to perversions or neglectful of the complexity of struggles for recognition. Still, he thinks that somehow states of mutual recognition, irreducible to the political sphere of domination or to the economic sphere of possession and exchange, could be imagined and approximated. Ricœur’s early reflections on the nature of freedom and its relationship to nature serve as the basic 54

Ricœur, L’homme faillible, 138; Ricœur, Fallible Man, 186.

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“primordial ground” for his ethics. Even as he takes many detours throughout his career, the basic lines of his arguments follow from what he launched in his early thought. Ethics of Recognition Early Reflections on the Ethics of Recognition If Ricœur’s phenomenology of the will calls forth and prepares an ethics, he begins to make the first tentative steps to formulating it as early as 1954 in an article entitled “Sympathie et respect: Phénoménologie et éthique de la second personne.”55 It is worth attending to the main lines of the argument in this essay because not only does it provide his most sustained reflections on ethics from his early years but it also foreshadows many themes that reemerge in his later ethics. He continues some themes that have already been noted—the distinction between cognition of an other as a thing and as a person, the relationship between freedom and value—but he also opens up and pursues new lines of thought. There is a twofold structure to the article: he first moves regressively from a phenomenology of sympathy found in the writings of Husserl and Scheler toward an ethics of respect formulated by Kant, and then he moves progressively, arguing that an ethics of respect is the proper grounding for a Husserlian phenomenology of sympathy and a Hegelian phenomenology of struggles for recognition. His reflections on the phenomenology of the other begin with Edmund Husserl, specifically the Husserl of the famous Fifth Meditation. Husserl’s argument there is well known, and Ricœur gives only a brief overview of it for the purposes of critique. On the one hand, Husserl’s thought subsumes the other, like any other object or thing, into my consciousness. On the other hand, he wants to maintain that the other is “an other than me, as an other I, who has its world, who perceives me, addresses herself to me.”56 Husserl brings these two points together—the subsumption of the other to one’s own sphere and the otherness of the other—by arguing for the “analogical relation” of the other body and one’s own through Einfühlung (empathy). Ricœur notes, however, that it is not clear how Husserl attaches ontical value to the appresentation of the other so that one is conscious of not merely a thing but of a person. Max Scheler, in Ricœur’s estimation, provides the necessary corrective to Husserlian phenomenology. Scheler’s concept of sympathy (Mitfühlung) 55

Paul Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect: Phénoménologie et éthique de la seconde personne,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 59, no. 4 (1954): 380–97. 56 Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect,” 382.



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draws from Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality; sympathy directs feeling toward the other’s joy or suffering and is distinct from mere involuntary “emotional infection.” But he departs from Husserl by distinguishing Mitfühlung from Einfühlung, for experiences of pity (Mitleid ) and joy (Mitfreude) are always additional to the mere analogical grasping of the other as an object or thing. While Scheler uncovers a specifically moral dimension to the consciousness of the other that Husserl’s phenomenology overlooks, Ricœur observes that Scheler does not explore and explain why he privileges sympathy among intersubjective sentiments.57 Scheler, in other words, only partially addresses the issue of value, for he narrowly focuses on the concept of sympathy and neglects moments of negativity in intersubjective life. Ricœur argues that a coherent phenomenology of sympathy presupposes an ethics of respect. Through the retrieval of the Kantian ethical concept of respect, he argues that the other becomes an absolute value, which in turn justifies and funds Schelerian sympathy. Sympathy is privileged over other intersubjective affections because it is based on an ethic of respect. “It is by respect,” Ricœur writes, “that I sympathize with the joy and suffering of the other as hers and not as mine.”58 It is also respect that founds the Hegelian struggle for recognition. Thus there is an ethical structure, or what Axel Honneth much later calls a “moral grammar,” to struggles for recognition.59 For Ricœur it is not a choice between respect as a formal principle and the material ethics of sympathy or struggle but rather respect is a priori apprehension of the value of another as such. At its core, the essay is concerned with how to account for the difference between “the manner in which a person announces herself and the manner in which a thing shows itself.”60 Without respect, Ricœur argues that phenomenology passes through the problem of the constitution of only things and not the person. This early essay in Ricœur’s corpus indicates his first tentative steps toward articulating an ethics. The movement in this essay from treating the other as an object or a thing toward treating the other as a person through his reflections on Husserl, Scheler, and finally Kant is mirrored, as we have already seen, in the course he takes in L’homme faillible from the theoretical cognition of objects in general toward practical respect for the other as a person. When he turns to the problem of evil, however, it reveals to him the limits of existential phenomenology, which requires him 57

Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect,” 387. Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect,” 391. 59 Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect,” 394. 60 Ricœur, “Sympathie et respect,” 381. 58

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to make a “hermeneutical turn” in his thought.61 Thus, while ethics is a subject that is called forth from his existential phenomenology, he is not able to give the subject the sustained attention it requires until later in his career.62 In a series of interviews that he gave later in his life, he acknowledges, “I must confess that in my published works, an ethics has not really been well articulated. .­ . . I feel myself provoked to give precision to my thought on ethics.”63 His Gifford Lectures delivered in 1986 and later revised under the title Soi-même comme un autre provided the occasion to give more sustained attention to ethics. .

Later Reflections on the Ethics of Recognition This section pursues Ricœur’s later ethics of recognition as it developed out of his early existential phenomenology. Attention will focus mostly on the lectures Ricœur gave at the Institut für die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Vienna and the Husserl Archives in Freiburg and the substantially revised form of those lectures that were published later as Parcours de la reconnaissance—Ricœur’s most sustained and well-known work on recognition— with the aim of highlighting the continuities and developments out of his earlier works. This analysis will also be supported and strengthened by alluding to other works in his late period, most notably his “little ethics” in Soimême comme un autre. For it is with this work that Ricœur turns in earnest to the issue of the other; the other no longer appears as simply one among many sources of value and motivation as in his early works in existential phenomenology but becomes implicated in and constitutive of selfhood. The general purpose of Parcours de la reconnaissance is to give philosophical analysis to the rule-governed polysemy of the concept of recognition in everyday life. The “course” of recognition then begins with “ordinary language” by turning to the dictionary definition of the term, before turning to the history of philosophy for deeper, more rigorous reflection on its meaning.64 This mirrors the moves Ricœur makes in his early thought when 61

Paul Ricœur, “From Existentialism to the Philosophy of Language,” Criterion 10 (1971): 14–15. 62 Ricœur did write a few occasional essays on ethics prior to his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another. See Paul Ricœur, “Le problème du fondement de la morale,” Sapienza: Rivista internazionale di filosofia e di teologia 28, no. 1 (1975): 313–37; Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique”; and Paul Ricœur, “Éthique et politique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest nos. 49–50 (1983): 44–59. 63 Ricœur, “De la volonté à l’acte,” 24. 64 This approach is used by Ricœur also with respect to punishment, belief, tolerance, and imputation.



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he draws from Jaspers by beginning with “empirical” understandings of recognition before turning to more primordial, concrete existential recognition and when he employs Husserl’s phenomenological approach that begins by looking at “naturalistic” modes of cognition and knowledge before turning to more primordial phenomenological modes. Ricœur, thereby, continues a method or approach of investigation by beginning with the most “ordinary,” “naturalistic,” or “empirical” understanding and proceeds to uncover a deeper, more primordial and concrete meaning. It is noteworthy that both the dictionary definition and philosophical analyses give priority to the naturalistic understanding of the term. Ricœur writes, “What meaning is taken to come first? The one that appears to be the most ‘natural,’ namely, the one that derives recognition (reconnaître) from connaître, by means of the prefix re-.”65 In this initial level of analysis, it is significant that Ricœur associates recognition (reconnaissance) with cognition (connaissance). The implication is that recognition is here construed as the identification of “an object” or “thing” in general. At this stage, the human is identified or recognized not as a person but merely as a thing distinguished from other things. Individuals are merely physical referents that are identifiable and reidentifiable as being the same. Parcours de la reconnaissance pursues the notion of recognition as identifying reference by turning to Descartes and Kant as conversation partners. It is not necessary to rehearse the details of Ricœur’s analyses there, except to note that for both Descartes and Kant, on Ricœur’s reading, recognition is the active process of the mind’s initiative to know things. He finds in Descartes’ theory of judgment a notion of recognition that distinguishes the true from the false. In Kant, he finds not only the first appearance of the lexicon of recognition (Rekognition) in the history of philosophy but also the introduction of a novel approach to recognition that unified the mind’s initiative and the capacity to receive.66 Whether it is Descartes’ concept of knowledge as an act that distinguishes true from false or Kant’s notion of recognition as a synthesizing act that unifies the manifold into one act of knowing, Ricœur finds in their thought paradigmatic examples of the “naturalistic” meaning of recognition. The naturalistic understanding of recognition as identification remains integral throughout the course of Ricœur’s analyses of the polysemy of recognition. Even as there is the discordance between the act of recognition as a thing and being recognized as a person, there remains the concordance of distinguishing and identifying. In 65 66

Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 21; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 5. Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 57, 67; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 30, 37.

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a way that echoes his early work, particularly in L’homme faillible, where the affective dimension of recognition was distinct from but also developed out of his analysis of theoretical cognition of things and practical respect of persons, there is a similar tension between the distinction and relation of recognition as identification and mutual recognition. What is implied in the naturalistic construal of recognition as identification is the presupposition of human capacities, that is, the recognition of oneself as a capable human person. As Ricœur notes, “To recognize oneself is always to recognize oneself as capable of.”67 Up to this point in the course of his studies, his analysis of recognition was restricted to theoretical anthropology and remained morally neutral, but the recognition of oneself as a capable human person is the hinge on which he turns toward his ethics. In his original Vienna Lectures, Ricœur states, “If recognition means more than cognition, acknowledgment more than knowledge, it’s to the extent that recognition takes time, requires scrutiny, and energy.”68 The recognition of oneself as a capable human person is the bridge between the notion of recognition as identification and mutual recognition, between the treatment of another as a thing and as a person. By turning to human capability, Ricœur in effect returns to a theme that preoccupied him from his early thought. In a response given at a conference held in his honor at the University of Chicago, Ricœur states that human capability is the “overarching problematics” throughout his works.69 Throughout his methodological shifts in existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ethics, he remains concerned about the problematics regarding human capabilities. Even as he develops a more complex and robust hermeneutics of the self, the main thrust of his argument remains rooted in the philosophy of the will.70 Where freedom was a sign of existential elucidation that was neither empirically proven nor ideally conceived and where the will was a “limit idea” that unified the voluntary and the involuntary, Ricœur maintains that capacities are “attested”—there is 67 Paul Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur,” Les livres lus et conseillés par les librairies, no. 87 (2004): 32 (emphasis in original). 68 Paul Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 1, p. 12, Archives du Fonds Ricœur, Paris. 69 Paul Ricœur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in Paul Ricœur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280. 70 For his use of the language of the voluntary and involuntary in his later works, see, for instance, Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 111–16. Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 90–94; and Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 149; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 89.



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a trust or practical conviction of its existence without objective proof or demonstration. The concept of recognition, which Ricœur grounds at various stages in his career in freedom, the will, and the capacities, is throughout these different iterations viewed as conflicted. In his early works on Jaspers, he describes recognition paradoxically as a “loving struggle”; in his philosophy of the will, Ricœur distinguishes between the desire for recognition in the pure will and the passion for honor and vanity in a fallible empirics of the will. When he turns to the concept of mutual recognition in his later works, then, he returns once again to the Augustinian theme of a conflicted self, capable of recognition in positive, affirming “states of peace” but also fallible to struggles for recognition. Ricœur is acutely sensitive to the pernicious desires for recognition that lead to struggle. In his Vienna Lectures, he asks rhetorically, “Is not that recognition at its lower stage, namely, to put it in coarse terms, partnership in hate?”71 Ricœur’s understanding of Hegel’s formulation of the “struggle for recognition” is mediated, as it was for Lévinas, by Husserlian phenomenology. Ricœur recapitulates Lévinas’ position that Husserl’s phenomenology ends in solipsism and egoism. It is solipsistic, for, as Ricœur notes, it ends in “the reduction of the ego to the point of the ‘sphere of ownness’ or the ‘sphere of belonging,’ centered on my lived body, with no reference to another person external to this sphere.”72 Ricœur, like Lévinas, finds parallels between the solipsism of Husserlian phenomenology and the atomistic egoistic state of nature described so poignantly by Thomas Hobbes. Ricœur writes, “It is precisely from this extreme version of reduction to a sphere of belonging—which, like solipsism, has the value of a philosophical fable, as Hobbes’s description of the state of nature will have further on.”73 This Hobbesian strand of solipsism and egoism was, Ricœur argues, the basis for the Hegelian formulation of the struggle for recognition. In an interview given shortly after the publication of Parcours de la reconnaissance, Ricœur states, “In Western philosophy, the theme of the struggle for recognition comes from Hegel and more originally from Hobbes. The idea of struggle of each against all introduced this conflictual and violent element of recognition with the goal of being recognized.”74 While the theme of the “struggle for recognition” appears almost as an unbroken line from Hobbes to Hegel, Ricœur finds in Hegel’s early works 71

Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 1. Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 247; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 155. 73 Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 247–48; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 155. 74 Paul Ricœur, “La reconnaissance, entre don et réciprocité,” Réforme, no. 3063 (2004): 7. 72

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at Jena a moral rejoinder to Hobbes’ challenge of an amoral, atomistic, and egoistic state of nature. By emphasizing the moral motive of the desire to be recognized as underlying social life together in general and struggles for recognition in particular, Ricœur detects in Hegel’s early works a resource to think about the fundamental basis of social and political life. The argument for the moral basis of struggles for recognition is an argument that Ricœur presented, as we have seen, in his early essay on sympathy and respect. But it was almost forty years later that he found in German social theorist Axel Honneth an attempt to excavate the moral grammar of social conflict within the resources of Hegel himself.75 What he finds attractive in Honneth’s interpretation of Hegel’s early thought is his insistence that the human condition is not reducible to egoistic, negative motives in struggles for recognition, but there is also a positive moral grammar undergirding them. The logic and force underpinning and decoded in social conflict, for Honneth, is not amoral self-preservation but moral recognition, or more precisely and primordially immoral disrespect (Mißachtung). Even as Ricœur proposes an alternative to the struggle for recognition, he remains sympathetic to Honneth’s nuanced understanding of morally justified struggles. Whether it is undergirded by negative motives (Hobbes) or positive motives (early Hegel and Honneth), however, the very conception of recognition as struggle remains problematic for Ricœur. Here a distinction that he makes in his original Vienna Lectures between the positive need for recognition and the negative claims for recognition is helpful.76 The problem of modern humans, as Ricœur sees it, is not a lack of desire to be recognized but inordinate and insatiable claims for recognition. As Ricœur states in an interview, “One can say effectively that in modern society, one is never recognized enough! There is a sort of bad infinity that is insatiable.”77 His concern here is that the struggle for recognition, even when it is grounded in a moral grammar, may end up in a kind of “bad infinity” and “unhappy consciousness,” leading to “either an incurable sense of victimization or the indefatigable postulation of unattainable ideals.”78 75

Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 293; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 186. Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 8. 77 Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur,” 33 (emphasis in original). 78 Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 339; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 218. See also Paul Ricœur, “Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition,” in A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricœur, ed. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 25. The inordinate desire to be recognized is the reason that Ricœur reserves his analysis of the passive, Hegelian form of recognition for the third and final section of the work. 76



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Ricœur’s alternative to the idea of struggles for recognition is found in his proposal for peaceful experiences of mutual recognition. Here he turns to the discourse on the gift, which serves as a symbolic mediation that offers insight into the phenomenon of recognition. Ricœur’s understanding of the gift mediates between two extreme positions. On the one hand, he rejects a logic of reciprocity leading to an autonomous circularity that effaces intersubjectivity. On Ricœur’s reading, such is the position marked out by sociologist Marcel Mauss, who argues that the gift is an archaic form of commercial exchange. Mauss’ analysis of the gift repeats, in Ricœur’s estimation, the same mistake that structuralism makes: it places the locus of gift exchange above social agents and instead embeds it within the structure of a community.79 On the other hand, he rejects a “pure” form of gift giving motivated solely by generosity that neither requires nor expects a gift in return.80 This is the position also taken by Lévinas, who, as we saw, advocated giving or sacrificing “for the other” in infinite responsibility without hope, expectation, or need for return. Between the two extremes of a pure phenomenology of generosity and a sociology of reciprocal obligation, Ricœur demarcates a broad spectrum that holds together the creative tension between generosity and obligation.81 Through an analysis of the ceremonial character of the gift, it gleans the complexity of the phenomenon of mutual recognition. The gift is embedded in issues of the voluntary and the involuntary: a capable human person who is embedded in social structures and interpersonal obligations and who is able to exercise the capability for mutual recognition or what may be called “good gifts” but who also demonstrates fallibility in misrecognition and negative struggles for recognition or “bad gifts.” Ricœur’s ethics of recognition emerged and developed out of his existential phenomenology. Within the broader framework of the voluntary and the involuntary, the analysis of the other emerges dialectically as one among many possible sources of both freedom and value, attraction and obligation. 79

Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 359; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 232. Ricœur, Parcours de la reconnaissance, 343–50; Ricœur, Course of Recognition, 220–25; cf. Luc Boltanski, L’amour et la justice comme compétences: Trois essais de sociologie de l’action (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1990), 170–79, 223–52. 81 Here, Ricœur appreciates the complexity and multiple forms of actual gift giving and receiving. He notes that the historical work of Natalie Zemon Davis on the gift in sixteenthcentury France draws out the plurality of basic beliefs about the inner “spirit of gift giving,” the multiple relations that they engendered with varying degrees of symmetry and reciprocity, and the various outward forms that they take. Importantly, she also raises the issue of gifts gone wrong and thus the question of how to tell a good gift from a bad one. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 80

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Under conditions of actual human existence and the disproportion between the infinite and finite, the other emerges as a fragile synthesis as a practical object of respect and an affective object of recognition, constituted by both the fallen passion for honor and the capable desire for recognition. Ricœur’s turn to ethics hones in on the constitutive understanding of selfhood as another. While freedom, the voluntary, and the infinite are central to his understanding of philosophical anthropology, his later reflections emphasize the notion of human capability. This fundamental affirmation does not delimit the field to “struggles for recognition” but rather creates the space for the capacity for positive and affirming peaceful mutual recognition. Ricœur’s attestation of the pure will and capable man is upheld in spite of his sensitivity to the empirics of the will and fallible man. As he puts it, “In the insatiable struggle for recognition, the mutual gift represents at most a clearing, a detente, a respite, a truce if you will.”82 By grounding social life in the attestation of human capabilities and the promise of mutual recognition, Ricœur offers an argument for the possibility to actualize human potential and desire to live together in community over and against the inextirpable fragmenting forces of Hobbesian egoism. The Politics of Recognition Parcours de la reconnaissance remains an incomplete work, as it neglects the role of political and juridical recognition. In the original Vienna Lectures, Ricœur gestures toward the institutionalization of Anerkennung and the “orders of recognition,” but he does not extensively pursue the issue.83 Perhaps what underlies the conspicuous absence of the institutional role in recognition is the problem that he finds with Honneth’s work—what Ricœur calls the “threat of overemphasis of institutional channeling of the so-called other directedness.”84 Indeed, one of the reasons he selected the symbolic character of the gift to mediate the phenomenon of mutual recognition was “to express the non-institutional source of life together.”85 Nonetheless, it can be gleaned through suggestions from his lectures and writings and through sections of his occasional essays that Ricœur sees the necessary mediation of institutional forms in the course of recognition. This section assembles his reflections on the nature, role, and purpose of institutions and seeks to construct what might be called his “politics of recognition.” 82

Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur,” 33. Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 3. 84 Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 8. 85 Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 11. 83



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As the ethical is called forth by existential phenomenology and realizes it, so too the political can be said to be called forth by the ethical and realizes it. To say that politics is called forth or institutionalizes ethics raises the question about the ends of politics. On the one hand, Ricœur argues that the state holds a necessary, negative, and minimalistic function with regard to its proper ends. The necessity of politics follows from his philosophical anthropology, which views humans as constituted by a disproportion between the finite and the infinite, fallible and indeed fallen. Because of the always already possibility of human violence and the perverse use of human capability and power, politics is a legitimate and necessary institution that serves a penal function.86 Given the realism of Ricœur’s view of human nature, the estimation of what politics can achieve is likewise limited. Against what he calls the “ancient model” of political theory, which believes that human individuals realize and perfect themselves fully through participation in the political, for Ricœur, the fallen human condition limits the capacity and extent of human self-realization and restricts it to the ethical and ultimately the eschatological realm.87 On the other hand, the political order is not reduced to a Hobbesian minimalist account of “security” construed negatively as the mere absence of war and conflict; instead, Ricœur gives a fuller Augustinian and Calvinist understanding that includes a positive, even pedagogical, function of politics.88 “The task of the State,” he writes, “is to conceive, to inquire, to direct.”89 And again, “the State guards a permanent function, that is to assure order by justice, to apply its force in the service of the good which is the flourishing of the human person.”90 Human life together then is reinforced and guided by political and juridical institutions that create an order grounded not in mutual fear but in mutual trust. Mutual trust, in turn, is 86

Paul Ricœur, “État et violence,” in Histoire et vérité, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955), 246. Paul Ricœur, “State and Violence,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 234. 87 Ricœur, “Le paradoxe politique,” in Histoire et vérité, 264; Ricœur, “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth, 251. Aristotle’s Politics exemplifies this position. 88 Augustinianism and its relationship to politics is a large, important, and contested question. Ricœur’s Augustinianism is broader and fuller than a narrow realist interpretation. For different strands of Augustinian interpretations, see Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 89 Paul Ricœur, “Propagande et culture,” L’unité française: Cahiers d’études de la Fédération des Cercles Jeunes France, no. 1 (1941): 54 (emphasis added). 90 Paul Ricœur, “La crise de la démocratie et de la conscience chrétienne,” Le christianisme social, no. 4 (1947): 330.

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engendered through a fundamental attitudinal stance toward the other of mutual recognition so that the end or purpose of social and political life is directed toward the fulfillment of ethics—“the State in which each would be recognized by all.”91 Because Ricœur finds an ethical purpose and end for the state, he links the form of mutual recognition in ethics to politics. The discourse on the gift in Ricœur’s ethics of mutual recognition, then, is raised to the level of the political and the juridical by tying it to the phenomenon of the pardon. The language of the gift (le don) and the pardon (le pardon) is not merely a coy play on words but holds a deeper philosophical significance about the interrelationship between the ethical and political dimensions of recognition. Insofar as the political and juridical serve a narrow penal function, the pardon (le pardon) does not technically belong to the order of justice. Justice, however, ought to allow for extenuating circumstances, exemptions from punishments, and amnesties, but the form in which it arrives—the pardon—is never owed. Rather, like the gift, it always comes unexpectedly.92 The pardon and the gift are tied together for they both describe the phenomenon of mutual recognition at the political and ethical dimension. Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology—constituted by both the voluntary and involuntary, fallible and capable, free and responsible to the other—presupposes the origins and ends of politics. Politics serves both a negative and necessary function that constrains human fallibility and moderates the inextirpable passions for honor and vanity, on the one hand, but also maintains a positive, pedagogical function that aims to cultivate selfesteem through mutual recognition, on the other. By extending Ricœur’s analysis of the political and juridical dimensions, political acts and legislative promulgations ought to strive for greater and more extensive recognition of persons. As he puts it, “Love presses justice to enlarge the circle of mutual recognition.”93 While politics alone cannot and does not actualize ethics, institutional mediations serve an important source of value and motivation to directing the person to realizing his or her capacities and potential in spite of the inescapable and abiding condition of human fallibility. 91 Paul Ricœur, “Ethics and Politics,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 335. 92 Paul Ricœur, “Une obéissance aimante,” in Penser la Bible, André LaCocque and Paul Ricœur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 182. Paul Ricœur, “ ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’: A Loving Obedience,” in Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricœur, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127. 93 Ricœur, “Une obéissance aimante,” 186; Ricœur, “ ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ ” 130.



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Conclusion Recognition is a central, connecting thread throughout Ricœur’s works from his early writings on descriptive existential phenomenology of recognition through his later prescriptive ethics of recognition and what might be called his “politics of recognition.” While this chapter worked prospectively through Ricœur’s writings both chronologically and logically, it is instructive to work regressively from the political to the ethical and finally to the existential dimension to provide a point of comparison with and differentiation from Lévinas’ concept of recognition. The origins and ends, the limits and extent of the political is based in and presupposed by the ethics of mutual recognition. The ethics of mutual recognition, in turn, is inextricably linked to the issue of the constitution of selfhood and the overarching problematic of capacities and human freedom. At its base, Ricœur’s phenomenological reduction of the philosophy of the will, conceived as the unity of the voluntary and the involuntary, sets it apart from Lévinas’ reduction to pure sensation. For Ricœur ethics is not first philosophy, as it is for Lévinas where ethics finds its origins in the other qua other. Rather, as John Wall notes, for Ricœur, “the command from the other could not be ethical were it not on the same level a command requiring my own primordially free and creative response.”94 Lévinas’ phenomenological description of the recognition of the other as a primordial sense of being chosen and individuated in the call to responsibility may serve as the “real departure” and beginning, but Ricœur’s phenomenological account offers a “strong base” rooted in a capable ethical subject who creatively responds to a discernible recognized other. Ricœur thereby not only proposes an alternative phenomenology but also offers a more robust ethics and politics that takes into fuller consideration the extent and limits of human action in the world and the role of institutions in human life. The dual base of a pure and empirics of the will, human capability and fallibility, is the ground on which he affirms “states of peace” in mutual recognition as well as morally justified struggles for recognition in spite of the always already predisposition to fall into perverse or violent struggles for recognition. The spark of human capability, in turn, opens up the space for institutions to serve a much more pedagogical function in forming and shaping an ethics of mutual recognition. With this in mind, attention will now be given to how Ricœur’s understanding of the nature and task of theology provides the basis for the church’s positive pedagogical role in institutionalizing and cultivating the phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition. 94

John Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricœur and the Poetics of Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 127 (emphasis in original).

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Chapter five

Paul Ricœur

A Christian Perspective on Recognition

Having focused on the origins and development of Ricœur’s philosophical understanding of recognition from his early phenomenology to his later ethics and politics, we now consider the issue of hermeneutics through the lens of his religious writings and the contribution of theological hermeneutics to his phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition. In the 1960s, precisely at a time when he was reflecting on and formulating his more well-known philosophical hermeneutics, he devoted a number of articles to theology and theological hermeneutics. Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, but also Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard Ebeling, and Jürgen Moltmann, are frequently cited in his writings during this period of intellectual ferment. By consulting the entire range of Ricœur’s corpus, which includes many untranslated and less well-known articles, Ricœur’s contribution to theology will be reappraised. His understanding of the nature and task of theology follows what Gerhard Ebeling called Wortgeschehen, or, as Ricœur interestingly translates into French, le procès de la parole.1 Despite Ebeling’s considerable reputation in Germany, Ricœur notes that he was not well known in the French context.

1

Paul Ricœur, “Contribution d’une réflexion sur le langage à une théologie de la parole,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 18 (1968): 334. 95

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Ricœur, however, devoted two major articles to his thought.2 The “process of the Word” affirms the priority of the Word of God, acknowledges its embeddedness in language and narrative, recognizes the necessity for hermeneutics in interpreting Christian symbols and narratives, and reinterprets them in light of Christian ethics. Insofar as Christian theology presupposes the community of a church that strives to understand the Word of God and as the church requires theology for critical self-reflection on its nature and purposes, this chapter considers how Ricœur’s understanding of theology, evinced in the process of the Word, is committed to the church’s role of institutionalizing the phenomenological, ethical, and political dimensions of recognition. The concept of recognition does not appear explicitly in Ricœur’s religious writings. Nevertheless, there is a parallel structure and complex intersection between Ricœur’s philosophy and his distinctly Christian theology. At each turn in Ricœur’s philosophical thought—from existentialism and phenomenology through hermeneutics to ethics and politics—he makes a parallel move in his theology from his analysis of Karl Barth on the proclamation of the Word of God to his work on Rudolf Bultmann and post-Bultmannians such as Gerhard Ebeling on language and narrative to Augustine and Kant on the problem of free will and moral evil. As it was evident in the complex interactions between Lévinas’ phenomenology and Jewish tradition, where the phenomenology and ethics of recognition were interpreted in specifically Jewish terms and traditional Jewish doctrines were interpreted in light of phenomenology, similarly Ricœur’s ethics of recognition can be interpreted in light of the symbolic, mythic, and narrative sources of the Christian tradition, and conversely he appropriates traditional Christian doctrines in a way that coheres with and redescribes concrete human existence. Before turning to Ricœur’s understanding of recognition from a Christian perspective, however, it is first necessary to consider his theological method and his basic understanding of the nature and task of Christian theology. With this understanding in hand, only then can one fully appreciate the distinctly Christian contribution made to the existential phenomenological, ethical, and political dimensions of recognition. 2 Paul Ricœur, “Ebeling,” Foi et éducation, no. 78 (1967): 36–57; and Paul Ricœur, “L’événement de la parole chez Ebeling,” Cahier du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest (1968): 23–31. Ricœur’s personal library contains a heavily annotated copy of Ebeling’s Word and Faith. Ebeling’s considerable influence on Ricœur is indicated by the fact that annotated comments are reserved for works with significant impact on his thought, such as Augustine’s Confessions, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Anthropology, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Gadamer’s Truth and Method.



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Theology’s Appropriation of Ricœur’s Thought The appropriation of Ricœur’s philosophical hermeneutics for the task of theology by David Tracy, his colleague at Chicago, sparked a vigorous debate in theology between the Chicago school and Yale school, which colored the reception of Ricœur’s thought in North America. The central point of contention was the priority that Ricœur seemed to give to a fundamental philosophical anthropology and a general hermeneutics with respect to the interpretation of biblical text.3 The theological implication of Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics was that biblical hermeneutics became simply a regional instance or a particular case of a general hermeneutics. Hans Frei, for instance, cites Ricœur as exemplary of the position whereby “biblical narrative becomes a ‘regional’ instance of the universally valid pattern of interpretation,” and Tracy’s fundamental theology, Frei adds, offers a “precise regional application of Ricœur’s general hermeneutic,” such that Jesus becomes merely an “allegory” of universal meaningfulness.4 George Lindbeck, Frei’s colleague at Yale, associates Ricœur’s hermeneutics with the “experiential-expressive” model aligned with a tradition of “liberal” theology from Friedrich Schleiermacher through Rudolf Otto and not the “cultural-linguistic” model that Lindbeck endorses.5 The Yale school, led by Frei, Lindbeck, and others, sought to render the Bible intelligible on its own terms without situating it in a general theory about the religious dimension of human experience. In recent years, there have been attempts to revise this reception history by suggesting that Tracy’s interest in academic relevance outweighed the integrity of theological identity and thereby theologians of both schools misinterpreted Ricœur. These more recent readings of Ricœur align him more closely with Barth and therefore view him as more friendly to the cultural-linguistic model of religion and postliberal theology that has come to be associated with the Yale school. These scholarly works, however, particularly in the English literature, have a narrow acquaintance with Ricœur’s writings, and the picture they present is therefore one-sided, focused for the most part on his 3 For an extended analysis of the debates between the Chicago school and the Yale school, see Kevin Vanhoozer, “A Literal Gospel?” in Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricœur: A Study in Hermeneutics and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 148–89. 4 Hans Frei, “The ‘Literal’ Reading of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44, 47. 5 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 136n5.

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philosophical contribution to theology. The early interpretation and appropriation of Ricœur by theologians in America focused especially on The Symbolism of Evil. When Langdon Gilkey draws on Ricœur, he cites The Symbolism of Evil, and he correctly reminds the reader that it is part of a larger project that begins from the essential eidetic structure of the will and moves toward concrete actual human experience through a hermeneutics of religious symbols.6 Tracy himself cites Ricœur’s The Symbolism of Evil and Gilkey’s Naming the Whirlwind as representative of “the dominant criteriological concerns of an investigation of various symbol-systems .­ . . [that] show the relative experiential adequacy of one symbol-system (e.g., the Christian) both to the meaning and truth of religious theism and to the meaningfulness of this particular symbol-system for the human situation.”7 Tracy demonstrates a much broader acquaintance with Ricœur’s works, but it remains tied to his earlier thought and confined to articles and works in the English language. An alternative reading of Ricœur’s relevance to theology is offered here to those made by both the Chicago theologians who first introduced him and the Yale theologians who critiqued them. For it is imprecise to categorize and reduce Tracy (and therefore Ricœur), as Lindbeck does, to the “experiential-expressivist” model of religion. And while Ricœur scholars such as Mark Wallace rightly assess that he can be seen more in line with a postliberal theology from Barth through to the Yale school, that analysis can be complicated and expanded. Instead of rehashing these past theological debates, a fresh look at Ricœur’s contribution to theology is required by attending to his lesser-known and untranslated theological writings. What emerges, then, is a theology situated neither within a general anthropology and a general hermeneutics nor reducible to the proclamation of the Word but mediating between the two options.8

6 See Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 279n20; also 249n1, 269nn9–10, 274n13, 281n23, 290n35, 391n16, 422–23n4, 431n8, 434n12. It is noteworthy that Gilkey’s book concludes with two chapters entitled, respectively, “The Dimension of Ultimacy in Secular Experience” and “Christian Discourse about God.” 7 David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 80. 8 To argue that Ricœur presents a mediating theology follows the insights of some recent work. See David Klemm, “Philosophy and Kerygma: Ricœur as Reader of the Bible,” in Reading Ricœur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 47–68; and William Schweiker, “Ricœur and Theology: Act and Affirmation,” in Ricœur across the Disciplines, ed. Scott Davidson (Continuum: New York, 2010), 44–64.



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Ricœur on the Nature and Task of Christian Theology It is often noted that Ricœur sought to separate his philosophical writings from his theological writings throughout his career. Nowhere is this dual program more explicitly enunciated than in Soi-même comme un autre, which in his words pursues an “autonomous philosophical discourse.”9 It is well known that the original Gifford Lectures delivered in 1985–1986 include two studies on biblical hermeneutics entitled “Le soi dans le miroir des Écritures” and “Le sujet mandaté: O my prophetic soul!” to remain faithful to the founder’s will for the lectures to be on “natural theology.”10 They, however, were removed from Soi-même comme un autre to remain faithful to the separation of philosophy and theology that Ricœur had maintained throughout his life. He writes in Soi-même comme un autre: The ten studies that make up this work assume the bracketing, conscious and resolute, of the convictions that bind me to biblical faith. I do not claim that at the deep level of motivations these convictions remain without any effect on the interest that I take in this or that problem, even in the overall problematic of the self. But I think I have presented to my readers arguments alone, which do not assume any commitment from the reader to reject, accept, or suspend anything with regard to biblical faith. It will be observed that this asceticism of the argument, which marks, I believe, all my philosophical work, leads to a type of philosophy from which the actual mention of God is absent and in which the question of God, as a philosophical question, itself remains in a suspension that could be called agnostic, as the final lines of the tenth study will attest.11

This move guards his philosophical writings from a cryptotheology such that philosophy retains its own autonomous validity claims, but, equally important, it guards biblical faith from a cryptophilosophy.12 Although it is well known that Ricœur sought to distinguish his philosophical reflections and writings from his religious or theological thought and works, Ricœur’s deeper theological motivations are less explored. The 9 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 36. Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24. 10 Both lectures can be found in Paul Ricœur, Amour et justice (Paris: Éditions Points, 2008). 11 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 36; Ricœur, Oneself as Another, 24. 12 Even though Ricœur assumed the Paul Tillich chair as John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago—a position that was devoted to philosophical theology—he found the title bizarre as it contradicted his view of the separation between philosophy and theology. See Paul Ricœur, La critique et la conviction: Entretien avec François Azouvi et Marc de Launay (Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 80. Paul Ricœur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49.

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distinction between philosophy and theology is grounded in Ricœur’s Reformed tradition and critical retrieval of Barthian theology in particular. “The 1930s to 1960s,” Ricœur acknowledges, “were massively dominated by Barth.”13 The emergence of Barthian theology within French Protestant thought was due in large part to the work of Pierre Maury, who spread the new insights of his thought to the French context by publishing his articles14 and translating his writings.15 Though Maury is rarely cited by Ricœur, it is important to note the authority and manner in which he is. In a presentation before l’Assemblée générale du protestantisme français delivered on October 21, 1949, entitled, “La question de l’humanisme chrétien,” Ricœur argues that Christian humanism does not begin with an abstract doctrine of man to which Christianity is added, but rather Christan humanism is radically Christocentric, beginning with the Word of God in Jesus Christ. He then proceeds to state, “Pastor Maury develops his own reflections on this perspective and I have nothing to add. The Christian philosopher here is one who listens to the Word like the other faithful and wants to put it in practice.”16 Indeed, Maury reared the next generation in French Protestant thought, including André Philip, Roger Mehl, Pierre Burgelin, Jean Bosc, and Jacques Maury, many of whom were Ricœur’s teachers and colleagues. But that generation, led by Mehl, sought to enlarge the role of philosophy with respect to Christian faith. Ricœur notes in an extended review of Mehl’s La condition du philosophe chrétien (1947) that it was “the first great book in French where the new Reformed theology confronts the vocation of philosophy” and that “the main interest of this book resides in that it attempts to move beyond the phase of crisis and rupture that was of the first generation of Barthians and towards a positive attitude regarding philosophy and culture precisely from a radically Christocentric theology.”17 Theology, Mehl observes, necessarily develops in contact with contemporary culture and borrows its concepts. If theology is necessarily philosophical, the point then is that it needs to be critical and reflective of the role it plays in theological elaboration. Mehl’s great contribution to French Barthianism 13

Paul Ricœur, “L’écart,” Le christianisme au XXème siècle, no. 37 (October 14, 1985): 8. As early as 1928, Maury proposed to translate and publish Barth’s essays into French in Foi et vie, where he was assistant editor and later became editor in chief in 1930. See Karl Barth and Pierre Maury, Nous qui pouvons encore parler .­ . . Correspondance 1928–1956, ed. Bernard Reymond (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1985), 19. 15 Karl Barth, Parole de Dieu et parole humaine, trans. Pierre Maury and Auguste Lavanchy (Paris: Société Commerciale d’Édition et de Librairie, 1933). 16 Paul Ricœur, “La question de l’humanisme chrétien,” Foi et vie no. 4 (1951): 326. 17 Paul Ricœur, “La condition du philosophe chrétien,” in Lectures 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), 235. 14



Paul Ricœur: A Christian Perspective 101

is an explicit acknowledgment of the important role that philosophy plays in theology and an initial investigation into its extent and limits.18 While Ricœur is much indebted to the insights of Barth and the first generation of French Barthians, he fully belongs to this second generation of Barthians, who probe the boundaries of philosophy from a Christocentric theology. What Ricœur shares with Barth and the first generation of Barthians in France is a rejection of the liberal theology that preceded it from Schleiermacher onward, which argues for the appropriateness of Christianity to the modern age by seeking a rapprochement with wider culture by employing modern methods in historical studies, culture, philosophy, and biblical criticism. If liberal theology builds up and builds in presuppositions of historical understanding and research that could serve as a basis for theology as a universal science, Ricœur in agreement with Barth argues for the priority of “listening to the Word of God.”19 Ricœur writes, echoing Barth, “If the believer speaks of God, it is because he speaks first of the Word of God.”20 And again, “I am in accord with the way in which Karl Barth poses the theological problem. The origin of faith lies in the solicitation of man by the object of faith.”21 In other words, the central task of theology is neither an answer to the anthropological or epistemological question “How is human knowledge of revelation possible in general?” nor is it a historical-critical approach that commits the intentional fallacy of searching for the authorial intent of the historical writers of the text. Rather it is the response to the Word of God spoken to this or that person. Theology, for Barth and Ricœur, presupposes the community of the church and strives to understand the Word of God that is revealed in Christ and mediated by Scripture. It is in this respect that scholars who interpret Ricœur closer in line with Barth and the Yale school of theology are correct. Like Barth, Ricœur holds that theology is a function of the church, 18 For Roger Mehl’s discussion of the relationship between philosophy and theology, see Roger Mehl, La condition du philosophe chrétien (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1947), 183–99; also Roger Mehl, La théologie protestante (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 82–89. 19 Paul Ricœur, “Le philosophe en face de la confession des péchés,” La confiance, nos. 1–2 (1957): 25. See also Ricœur, “La question de l’humanisme chrétien,” 326. Importantly, Barth begins his Church Dogmatics with a section entitled “The Doctrine of the Word of God.” 20 Paul Ricœur, “La critique de la religion,” Bulletin du Centre Protestant d’Études, nos. 4–5 (1964): 5. 21 Paul Ricœur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965), 504. Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 523.

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which criticizes and revises language about God not by foreign or external principles but by a principle peculiar to the church. Moreover, the “world of the biblical text”—the written Word of God—is the basic theological source for the Christian community. As George Lindbeck writes, “Intratextual theology redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extratextual categories.”22 And Mark Wallace, the first scholar to observe Ricœur’s close affinity to Barth, states, “For both thinkers, the world of the text is primarily not the Bible’s Sitz im Leben uncovered by historical criticism, but its Sitz im Wort that confronts the listener as the reliable Word of God.”23 Their common concern was that extrabiblical material—Platonism, Aristotelianism, historicism, existentialism, phenomenology, general hermeneutics—would be inserted into the biblical world and become the basic framework for interpretation. Rather, both Ricœur and Barth aim to let the text speak for itself without external impositions and presuppositions. But this understanding of theology does not preclude the possible import of and contact with philosophy. Indeed, Ricœur offers a much more expansive and elevated view of philosophy than Barth, even if he simultaneously insists with Barth on the priority of the Word of God. The very language and meaning of the Word of God (Parole de Dieu), for instance, is clarified through contemporary linguistics. Within the field of structural linguistics, Ricœur appropriates the now well-known distinction between langue and parole. Langue refers to the social institution and rules of the game of language that function by themselves such that the place of both a subject who speaks and an external referent about which something is spoken are eliminated.24 Parole, in contrast, refers to the individual performance of language that is addressed to someone by someone about something.25 Parole, then, is a deeper and more concrete dimension of linguistic analysis than langue. The word (le mot) is no longer simply a difference in a dictionary but a moment in an act of parole—the word takes life. With this distinction in hand, Ricœur suggests that theology seems to be on the side of the word (parole), while structural linguistics chose the side of language

22

Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 118. Mark I. Wallace, “The World of the Text: Theological Hermeneutics in the Thought of Karl Barth and Paul Ricœur,” Union Seminary Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1986): 7. 24 Ricœur, “Contribution d’une réflexion sur le langage à une théologie de la parole,” 337. 25 Ricœur, “Contribution d’une réflexion sur le langage à une théologie de la parole,” 342. 23



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(langue).26 The concept of parole in contemporary linguistics, then, is helpful in elucidating the affirmation that the Word of God fundamentally speaks or addresses someone. By appropriating the concepts of parole and langue from contemporary linguistics, Ricœur does not so much provide a philosophical basis for a theology of the word as he clarifies its meaning and priority. Even as Ricœur grants philosophy a more extensive role than does Barth, he agrees that theology must always return to and begin with the priority of the Word of God. Ricœur on the Nature and Task of Biblical Hermeneutics Biblical Hermeneutics as a Moment in the Process of the Word The Word of God, for Barth, is first and immediately revealed in Jesus Christ and mediated by the form of the written Scripture and the form of proclamation through church preaching and sacraments. Scripture attests to the revealed Word of Jesus Christ. Even as contemporary Christians no longer have direct access to the historical Jesus, they still have access to Christ through Scripture and proclamation. Ricœur follows Barth, for he too emphasizes the necessary mediation of the Word by Scripture to the human community. Here, as well, philosophy and especially philosophical hermeneutics shed light on the nature and task of biblical hermeneutics. On the one hand, Ricœurian hermeneutics proceeds from the philosophical to the biblical pole; biblical hermeneutics is merely an application of general hermeneutics insofar as it is an instance of the figures of speech and writing. As Ricœur writes, “In one sense theological hermeneutics appears as a particular case of philosophical hermeneutics, to the extent that it contains the major categories of the latter: discourse, writing, explanation, interpretation, distantiation, appropriation, etc.”27 Fundamental concepts in general hermeneutics are applied to biblical hermeneutics such that it appears subordinate and derivative of philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, in both Ricœur’s general and special hermeneutics, there is an “objectivity” of the new being projected by the text such that the reality of the world is not presented immediately through psychological intentions but mediately through the structures of the work. The reader encounters the Bible, like any other text, as it unfolds the world of being of the text and discloses the possible, which 26

337.

27

Ricœur, “Contribution d’une réflexion sur le langage à une théologie de la parole,”

Paul Ricœur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics,” Studies in Religion: Sciences Religieuses 5, no. 1 (1975): 14.

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thereby transforms the reader. On the other hand, “theological hermeneutics presents features that are so original that the relation is gradually inverted, and theological hermeneutics finally subordinates philosophical hermeneutics to itself as its own organon. .­ . . Nothing can better illustrate the ‘excentric’ character of theology than the very effort to ‘apply’ to it the general categories of hermeneutics.”28 The application of general hermeneutics, particularly the notion of the new Being and Thing of the text, to the Bible discloses that its referents are distinctly theological and revealed. As Wallace states, “Ricœur makes clear that he uses general hermeneutical categories only insofar as they are dialectically related to, and not in control of, actual exegetical practice. .­ . . Hermeneutical theory guides our understanding of the text while the text’s unique referents of ultimacy (i.e. God, Jesus, Kingdom of God, and so on) govern our understanding of the Bible’s meaning.”29 Thus, what begins with the application of concepts and categories from general hermeneutics to biblical hermeneutics reverses such that the priority becomes the revelation of the Word of God mediated through text to which human control and mastery are suspended. With respect to the referents of the text, philosophy thereby begins to appear subordinate to theology. Ricœur’s emphasis on hermeneutics is intended to counter claims to unmediated revelation or religious experience. In an essay appropriately entitled “From Proclamation to Narrative,” Ricœur argues for “the necessity of developing the Christian kerygma in a narrative form” and for “a requirement of narration internal to the proclamation itself.”30 Christian kerygma, whatever else it is, is necessarily mediated through language, through symbols and narratives. If the objective side of revelation is always embedded in narrative, so too the subjective side of religious experience is mediated by language. The relationship between experience and language is precisely at the center of Lindbeck’s famous distinction between the experiential-expressive model, understood as the external expression of a common core of inner experience, and the cultural-linguistic model, understood as a framework that structures and shapes inner human experience and understanding.31 28

Paul Ricœur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 90. Originally published as “Herméneutique philosophique et herméneutique biblique,” in Exégèses: Problèmes de méthode et exercices de lectures (Paris: Delachaux et Niestle, 1975). 29 Mark I. Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricœur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1990), 42 (emphasis in original). 30 Paul Ricœur, “From Proclamation to Narrative,” Journal of Religion 64, no. 5 (1984): 501, 511. 31 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 31–41.



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Lindbeck’s association of Ricœur’s hermeneutics with the experientialexpressivist model not only neglects the complexities of Ricœur’s thought but also misrepresents it. Ricœur leaves unanswered the question of whether religious experience is prior to linguistic expression, except to say that it is inextricably tied to language without being reducible to it. He writes, for instance, “Religious experience is not reduced certainly to religious language. .­ . . An experience that is not brought to language remains blind, confused, and incommunicable. All is thus not language in religious experience, but religious experience is not without language.”32 Elsewhere he puts the point on the inextricability of experience and language more emphatically: “for a philosophical hermeneutic, faith never appears as an immediate experience, but always as an experience articulated in a language.”33 Ricœur is clearly hesitant to elaborate on the nature of religious experience and instead prefers to speak of the “textuality of faith.”34 The religious faith of a community as well as the faith of the individual is necessarily bound up with its language and text. The Task of Biblical Hermeneutics: From Demystification and Demythologization to Reinterpretation The task of biblical hermeneutics is not simply to naïvely accept the teachings of the text; otherwise, one lapses into false consciousness or an uncritical belief in a premodern mythological view of the world. There needs to be a movement from negative critique toward positive reinterpretation and appropriation from biblical sources for contemporary life. Ricœur most systematically addresses these issues in “La critique de la religion” and “Le langage de la foi,”35 both published in Bulletin du Centre Protestant d’Études in June 1964, which are intended to form a dialectic involving two moments within the task of biblical hermeneutics. The two moments parallel the dialectic of distanciation and appropriation for which he is more well known in his writings on philosophical hermeneutics. Biblical interpretation requires, on Ricœur’s account, both a movement of critical destruction or distanciation from one’s 32 Paul Ricœur, “Politique et symbolique,” in Initiation à la pratique de la théologie, vol. 1, Introduction (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994), 37 (emphasis in original); cf. Paul Ricœur, “Naming God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 218. 33 Paul Ricœur, “La philosophie et la spécificité du langage religieux,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 55, no. 1 (1975): 25. 34 Ricœur, “Naming God,” 218. 35 Ricœur, “La critique de la religion,” 5–16; and Paul Ricœur, “Le langage de la foi,” Bulletin du Centre Protestant d’Études, no. 4–5 (1964): 17–31.

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religious tradition and history, lest it lapse into false consciousness and ideology, as well as a movement of positive reinterpretation and appropriation from the resources of that tradition for contemporary life. The first moment of the critique of religion involves two aspects: demystification and demythologization. Demystification is necessary because Christian kerygma is always a discourse “addressed to.” Drawing on the insights of those he calls the three “masters of suspicion”—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud—Ricœur is sensitive to the problem of self-alienation and false consciousness with religious discourse. “Consciousness, far from being transparent to itself,” Ricœur observes, “is at once what shows itself and what hides itself.”36 The alienation from oneself implies a false consciousness, and therefore textual interpretation requires a hermeneutics of suspicion that “unmasks” consciousness. The second moment of the critique of religion is demythologization. If demystification offers an external critique of the origins of religious discourse, demythologization offers an internal critique. Here Ricœur follows the lead of Bultmann. Bultmann was fundamentally interested in the hermeneutical problem of how to relate and interpret the New Testament to twentieth-century person, and he sought to do this not by demystification in destroying the mythical symbol but by viewing it as accessing the sacred. What distinguishes Bultmann from Barth is his greater appreciation of the historical distance between us and the attestation of the Word in Scripture. Ricœur notes that “while Barth had the tendency to take the text as it is and to think that one could preach it directly, Bultmann is much more sensitive to the cultural distance that separates us from these texts.”37 Even as Ricœur and Bultmann accept with Barth the revealed Word of God as the foundation of Christian theology, they also both argue against him that the encounter with the Word of God necessarily involves interpreting it within one’s concrete situation. Here Bultmann’s distinction between myth and kerygma is critical for Ricœur. Myth can be seen as a prescientific representation that has been rebuked by the scientific view of the world. In this respect, myth no longer has any explanatory power, given the advances of the modern sciences. But demythologization does not threaten Christian kerygma because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world. It is simply the cosmology of a prescientific era. Still, myth can serve a second function as a symbolic expression of the destiny of man. As Rudolf Bultmann himself 36

Ricœur, “La critique de la religion,” 8. Paul Ricœur, “Sens et fonction d’une communauté ecclésiale,” Centre Protestant de recherche et de rencontres du nord, no. 26 (1968): 46. 37



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claims, “The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically or better existentially.”38 Bultmann sought to remove the scandal of the New Testament and to restore its meaning as a call for radical obedience and the transformation of existential self-understanding. The task of demythologization, then, is to recognize the first understanding of myth as a prescientific view of the world that is irrelevant with regard to Christian kerygma, and then to recognize the second understanding of myth within an existential interpretation of faith. Ricœur, however, levels two major criticisms at Bultmann. First, Bultmann mistakenly subsumes the meaning of interpretation according to existential categories. Ricœur shifts his allegiance on this particular matter closer to Barth than Bultmann, for he emphasizes what he calls the “objectivity” of the new being projected by the text. Second, the problem with Bultmann, according to Ricœur, is that the guiding hermeneutic is obedience to the kerygma.39 For Ricœur, hermeneutics must also include a moment of personal appropriation, moving from the text’s meaning to its life significance. After the critique of religion, there must be a moment of reinterpretation, which is the subject of his second essay, “Le langage de la foi.” After the destructive moments of demystification and demythologization that critique the symbol as the representation of a false reality of an alienated consciousness and premodern mythological worldview, Ricœur gestures toward a renewed understanding of religion that restores and regenerates the reader. “Le langage de la foi” focuses on the problem of communication, that is, how to communicate the kerygma in any comprehensible discourse. The problem of communication presupposes interpretation, and the problem of hermeneutics, in turn, is primitive to Christianity. For, as Ricœur notes, Christianity developed in and reinterpreted Jewish culture. Notions of Jesus as “Messiah,” “Son of Man,” and “Lord” were all reinterpretations based on “a prior writing” (écriture).40 Ricœur puts it succinctly: “hence there is 38

Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller, vol. 1 (London: SPCK, 1953). 39 Another critique that Ricœur levels is that, for Bultmann’s hermeneutics of demythologization, God is decontextualized language, unencumbered by the mythological framework that carries the biblical message. As has been indicated earlier, for Ricœur, kerygma and myth cannot be so easily separated. 40 Paul Ricœur, “Mythe et proclamation chez R. Bultmann,” Cahier du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, no. 8 (1967): 21.

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hermeneutics in the Christian order because the kerygma is the rereading of an ancient Scripture.”41 And again, “the New Testament becomes itself a sort of writing [écriture], and, in becoming a sort of writing, poses in its turn a problem of interpretation similar to the Old Testament.”42 That Scripture interpreted a prior writing and that it itself became writing suggests not only the primitive problem of interpretation but also the separate modern problem of the gap between the proclamation—the kerygma—and our culture. As Ricœur writes, “This distance is double .­ .  . the distance between our culture (scientific, technological, political, etc.) and the cultural vehicle in which the first Christian predication was expressed and before it, the predication in Israel.”43 Christian tradition and indeed Scripture itself is constituted by a history of interpretation that requires both a moment of criticism and reinterpretation. The Word of God and History Ricœur found in Ebeling a figure who advanced Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of kerygma and Scripture by considering the role of history and tradition in a way that his predecessor overlooked. In an important essay, “Contribution d’une réflexion sur le langage à une théologie de la parole,” Ricœur considers the connection and movement between the Word of God and God as Word in Christ, the Word of primitive predication and its actualization in modern predication. He appropriates from German church historian Gerhard Ebeling the concept of the “process of the Word” to name this movement that accounts for the priority of the Word of God and its mediation in Scripture and in history and tradition.44 That Bultmann was an exegete and Ebeling a church historian is important for Ricœur because, through his scholarly training, Ebeling determines that the history of the Church is not so much a history of dogmas as “it is the history of predication and it is the history of the interpretation of Scripture across predication. Thus, it is not in the job of the exegete, but in the understanding, in sum, of the destiny of the Church and of its predication that is constituted by the 41 Paul Ricœur, “Préface à Bultmann,” in Le conflit des interprétations: Essais d’herméneutique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 375. Paul Ricœur, “Preface to Bultmann,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 383. 42 Paul Ricœur, “R. Bultmann,” Foi et éducation, no. 78 (1967): 20–21. 43 Paul Ricœur, “Doctrine de l’homme,” Cahier du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest (1966): 20. 44 Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 43. Ricœur draws from Ebeling’s collection of essays entitled Word and Faith. See Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963). Ricœur translates Ebeling’s term Wortgeschehen into French as le procès de la parole.



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dominating problem of hermeneutics after Bultmann.”45 In short, Ebeling’s insight ties interpretation and history, especially church history, together in a way that Bultmann’s existential interpretation overlooks. Ebeling, Ricœur notes, discovers the hermeneutical underpinnings of church history by turning to Luther and the Reformation and his readings of the Bible. Indeed, Ebeling radicalizes the historical significance of the Reformation, for it initiated what Ricœur calls an “exegetical revolution.”46 Prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church, so goes the argument, gave an ontological interpretation of the event of revelation as the once and for all disclosure of eternal truths. The double nature of Christ, both divine and human, fed into the understanding of Scripture, constituted by holy and profane history, and finally transmitted by the tradition of the church.47 The doctrine of the infallibility of the church belonged to sacred history, Ebeling observes, which in turn was ultimately rooted in the metaphysical realism of the Word and Christ’s divine nature. Insofar as the church remains hermetically sealed from profane history, it remains the carrier of immutable and eternal teachings. For this reason, Ricœur highlights Ebeling’s attention to the significance of relics for the Catholic Church. Relics do not merely remind us of the past, nor are they dead remains of the past, but rather they exemplify “realistic metaphysical actualization”—in them, the unique past event of revelation is itself present.48 Luther’s insight, according to Ebeling, is that instead of grounding the church and its history in a “metaphysical realism,” he turns to the Word itself. His claim to sola fide was revolutionary, for Ebeling shows that its anticlerical, antisacramental protest was a fundamental critique of the notion of “realistic metaphysical actualization” embedded in the Catholic Church and implicit throughout its understanding of history and tradition of Christ and Scripture.49 The unique historical origin and event of Jesus Christ, it was argued, could only become another unique event through interpretation. The bridge between revelation and the present is fundamentally located in the relationship between Word and interpretation. “It is uniquely in this junction between an event of the word [parole] and another word which interprets it,” Ricœur notes regarding Ebeling’s insight, “that a history of

45

Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 36. Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 43. 47 Ricœur, “L’événement de la parole chez Ebeling,” 25. 48 Gerhard Ebeling, “The Significance of the Critical Historical Method for Church and Theology in Protestantism,” in Word and Faith, 34. 49 Ebeling, “Significance of the Critical Historical Method,” 56. 46

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the Church is possible, and that History constitutes itself.”50 In short, the exegetical revolution that Luther initiated was one where the Word replaced the ontological and metaphysical structure of the Catholic Church. It is precisely at the interface between Word and history over the contested meaning of the church where Ricœur quotes Ebeling: “I consider the category of interpretation alone open to assume the theological question of the essence of the Church and of its history because in it is seized the structural manner which is absolutely historical in the continual actualization of the process of the Word.”51 By focusing on the concept of process of the Word (Wortgeschehen), Ebeling underlines that it is neither an instantaneous eruption of the Word that does not require interpretation nor a hermeneutics that diminishes the Word of God, but rather it is both a process and of the Word. This movement from the historical Word to the attestation of the Word in writing culminates in the proclamation of the Word. Ricœur writes, “The word came, but as it became text, it is a matter of converting constantly from text to the word, and this is the process; the process which it still specifies frequently the movement from writing [écriture] to predication or from text to proclamation.”52 Scripture is not the Word per se, but becomes the Word again through proclamation. In the movement from text to proclamation, from written word to spoken word, it is not so much an exposition of a historical understanding of the text as past proclamation as it is proclamation in the present. Such an understanding of proclamation belies the radicality of Luther’s critique of the metaphysical realism of the Catholic Church: the church is not a relic of past proclamation that remains present and eternally so; rather, it is involved in a history where a word that once came must come again anew. The task of theology, as Ricœur views it, is both systematic, unifying the domains of theology under the concept of the process of the Word, and critical, confronting the hermeneutics of the process of the Word with diverse disciplines. Ricœur’s understanding of the process of the Word, however, goes one step beyond Ebeling by shifting from text to action. As he states in a lecture importantly entitled “Le soi dans le miroir des Écritures,” the reader configures the internal narrative of the text, but also the text itself refigures and transforms the self.53 The language of the Bible as a “mirror” echoes John Calvin’s understanding of its theological or moral use that reveals a state of misery and 50

Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 42. Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 43. 52 Ricœur, “Ebeling,” 44. 53 Ricœur, “Le soi dans le miroir des Écritures,” 50–51. 51



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sin. Yet, if the Bible is a mirror, it is also a “whip”—to use Calvin’s language—that serves a pedagogical function. Ricœur states, “Biblical faith is instructed—in the sense of formed, clarified, educated—in the network of texts that preaching renews each time to the living word.”54 Thus, the pedagogical use of the law has the force of exhortation by urging one to shake off sluggishness and chastise imperfection. Ricœur writes, “Understanding oneself in front of the text is not something that just happens in one’s head or in language. It is what the gospel calls ‘putting the word to work.’ In this regard, to understand the world and to change it are fundamentally the same thing.”55 In employing the methodological concept of the process of the Word, he not only endeavors to show the inextricable link and movement from the Word of God, biblical hermeneutics, and church proclamation in history but also argues for its extension to the realm of ethics. Reinterpreting Symbols and Narratives from the Christian Tradition in Light of an Ethics of Recognition Thus far, analysis has been restricted to understanding Ricœur’s theological method. An examination of the nature and task of theology is necessary because Ricœur’s understanding and interpretation of Christian anthropology and ethics is dictated and guided by his method. After a lengthy but necessary prolegomena on theological method, then, we can now return to the issue of Ricœur’s interpretation of particular symbols and narratives within church history and Christian tradition and their relation and contribution to the existential-phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition discussed earlier. Christian Existentialism and Theological Anthropology The chronological and logical development of the concept of recognition in Ricœur’s philosophical writings begins with the study of Karl Jaspers’ existentialism. In 1947 Ricœur published two major works on Jaspers’ thought that helped introduce the German thinker to a French audience. Those two works appear to be strictly philosophical even as Ricœur acknowledges the importance of “ciphers” within Jaspers’ thought. Yet he follows those works up with an important essay in 1949 entitled “Le renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne par les philosophies de l’existence.”56 54

Ricœur, “Le soi dans le miroir des Écritures,” 54. Ricœur, “Naming God,” 234. 56 Paul Ricœur, “Le renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne par les philosophies de l’existence,” in Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 43–67. 55

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The new insights of existentialism, Ricœur claims, would enable deeper and more concrete reflection on Christian faith and thereby renew “Christian philosophy.” Existentialism could free Christian philosophy from the abstractions of what he calls the “non-existential” approaches, exemplified in the so-called proofs for the existence of God. “In putting into parentheses concrete existence,” Ricœur notes that these nonexistential approaches “hold in suspension the experience of Christian existence, the experience of sin, of grace, of the person and of the Church, the eschatological expectations of this Church.”57 Existentialism, then, lifts the brackets of the classical nonexistential approach and thereby opens up an avenue for retrieving an analysis of concrete Christian existence. It should not be concluded from this, however, that Ricœur used Jaspers’ existentialism as a basis and justification for Christian existence. In Ricœur’s reflections on Christian philosophy, existentialism seems to be operating on an ad hoc basis reminiscent to, but different from, Barth’s method. For instance, in the foreword to the second edition of his Church Dogmatics, Barth states, “I have cut out in this second issue of the book everything that in the first issue might give the slightest appearance of giving to theology a basis, support, or even a mere justification in the way of existential philosophy.”58 Even as existentialism cannot be the basis or justification of theology, it is employed by Barth so as to clarify “the phenomena of the human.”59 There, he is appreciative of and appropriates from Jaspers’ existentialism to emphasize the historical element in human existence against naturalism and idealism. He writes of Jaspers’ existentialism, for instance, “A new human phenomenon is certainly seen in this philosophy: the historicity of man and his relatedness to another.”60 Yet Barth proceeds to emphasize that while existentialism is helpful in describing “the phenomena of the human,” it is only Jesus who can show “the real human.” Thus, existentialism is, in the end, merely an indirect shadow of the substance of Jesus Christ. Existentialism seems to be operating similarly, but more extensively, in Ricœur’s theological method. It is remarkable in any case that this early essay by Ricœur already indicates and maps out the program that he would pursue in the coming decades. He would proceed to interpret concrete Christian existence—the experiences of sin and grace, the contemporary relevance and 57

Ricœur, “Le renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne,” 47. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd ed., trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), ix. 59 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.2, The Doctrine of Creation, trans. Harold Knight, G. W. Bromiley, J. K. S. Reid, R. H. Fuller (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 71–132. 60 Barth, Doctrine of Creation, 113. 58



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eschatological expectations of the Church—by appropriating the symbols, myths, and narratives within Christian history and tradition. Fallible Man and the Interpretation of the Doctrine of Sin

It is noteworthy that Ricœur begins his interpretation of concrete Christian existence as he does with his analysis of philosophical existence, that is, with the experience of fallibility or, to use specifically Christian language, through the experience of sin. Indeed, as Ricœur was writing L’homme faillible, he devoted two significant articles, entitled “Le philosophe en face de la confession des péchés” (1957) and “Le ‘Péché Originel’ étude de signification” (1960), to the interpretation and meaning of sin.61 Ricœur later acknowledges that his early work on the philosophy of the will was grounded in Protestant culture.62 Perhaps because of his reaction again the modern liberal Protestant culture of his day that focused on the remission of sins, he emphasized the Christian perspective on fallible man. Whatever the case may be, Ricœur’s Christian anthropology and ethics are much indebted to Kant, but the proper starting point, which is consistent with his theological method, is beholden to the Reformed theology of the Word and the proclamation through the confessions of the church.63 For Ricœur, the relationship between Scripture and confessions of faith by the church are constitutive of the unfolding process of the Word. He, for instance, quotes the Confession of Faith, Article 9, as authoritative when it states that the human will is “totally captive to sin.” And, again, he quotes from Article 10: “We believe that the entire descent of Adam is infected with this contagion. The contagion is original sin and a hereditary vice. It is not just an imitation, as the Pelagians, whose errors we deplore, have held.”64 Ricœur’s adherence to theological confession as the starting point, however, is not blind and uncritical, but rather the task for him is “to think what we believe and profess.”65 He makes clear that his critical reinterpretation and appropriation 61 Ricœur, “Le philosophe en face de la confession des péchés”; and Paul Ricœur, “Le ‘Péché Originel,’ étude de signification,” Eglise et théologie, no. 70 (1960): 11–30. Paul Ricœur, “ ‘Original Sin’: A Study in Meaning,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 269–86. 62 Paul Ricœur, “Paul Ricœur: Un parcours philosophique,” Magazine littéraire, no. 390 (2000): 20. 63 When Ricœur refers to the Confession of Faith, he is referring to the French Confession of Faith (1559), also known as the Gallic Confession of Faith or the Confession de la Rochelle, which is authoritative in the French Reformed Church. 64 Ricœur, “Le ‘Péché Originel,’ ” 11; Ricœur, “ ‘Original Sin,’ ” 269. 65 Ricœur, “Le ‘Péché Originel,’ ” 14; Ricœur, “ ‘Original Sin,’ ” 271 (emphasis in original).

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of the doctrine of original sin is not from the perspective of a dogmatician. Nor does he analyze the symbol of original sin from the perspective of a historian, even as he draws on the thought of Augustine extensively and recognizes that his concept of original sin is shaped by his debates and arguments with Manicheanism and Pelagianism.66 In short, it is not abstract speculative, metaphysical, or historical explanation but an interpretation of the traditional doctrine of sin as a concrete description of the human condition. Insofar as any interpretation is mediated by language, history, and tradition, he draws explicitly on the proclamation of the confessional creeds of the church, but insofar as proclamation is an interpretation of concrete Christian existence, its description coheres with the fundamental existential experience of sin. In this latter regard, Kant is a mine of insight and suggestion, particularly in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, on which Ricœur devotes a substantial essay.67 The doctrine of original sin is a deduction of a fundamental aspect of human existence by Kant to describe the experience of tainted wills and evil maxims. According to Kant, humans have a tendency or propensity to evil because we have multiple incentives; humans are embodied creatures influenced by nature and social creatures influenced by others’ esteem. Given Kant’s anthropology, the moral self is at every moment of moral choice torn between the incentives in the world and the incentive of the moral law. As humans can never absolutely repudiate the affections of the world, so too we can never absolutely repudiate the desire to fulfill the moral law for its own sake. Therefore, whether one is morally good or morally evil depends on which of the two kinds of incentives is made the condition of the other. One is morally good if one is able to subordinate the incentives of self-interested desiring of objects in the world and chooses the moral law as the ground of all maxims. Conversely, one is morally evil if the moral law is subordinated and other incentives are chosen as the ground for all maxims. Insofar as the propensity to act upon the determinations of the external natural world (i.e., evil maxims) is ineradicable, evil is, for Kant, “radical” because it goes to the root or ground of all human action. Because evil is located centrally at the heart of individual human personality in free will, Kant’s understanding of evil lies in stark contrast to traditional Christian doctrines of sin and evil. Kant reinterprets the statement that humans are evil by nature to mean that humans are not evil out 66 67

75–92.

Ricœur, “Le ‘Péché Originel,’ ” 13; Ricœur, “ ‘Original Sin,’ ” 271. Ricœur, “A Philosophical Hermeneutics of Religion: Kant,” in Figuring the Sacred,



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of natural necessity through an inherited corrupt will but rather that, in human experience, we can presuppose evil to be subjectively inevitable. Thus, evil cannot be transferred to an object in the natural world, nor can it be transferred to the historical person of Adam: moral responsibility rests squarely in the individual. Following Kant’s insights into the nature of moral existence, Ricœur wants to affirm that, on the one hand, humans always act on freedom—they act on principles and maxims that they determine for themselves—and yet, on the other hand, paradoxically their freedom is so bound up with the propensity to evil at the root of the will that it enacts the evil that was already there. Ricœur found in Kant a mine of resources for elucidating the articles of faith proclaimed by the confessions of the church in a way that coheres with and redescribes concrete Christian existence. Capable Man and the Interpretation of the Doctrine of Grace

There seems to be a decided shift from Ricœur’s early philosophical works on “fallible man” to his later works on “capable man,” which is echoed in his theological writings. Despite the radicality and inextirpability of evil that Ricœur underlines in his earlier works, he affirms the primordial and original disposition to good. “The symbolism of evil,” Ricœur writes, “receives its true meaning from the symbolism of salvation. The symbolism of evil is only a particular province within religious symbolism.”68 If the symbolism of evil, articulated from Augustine through Kant, focuses on the bondage of the will and fallible man, the symbolism of salvation focuses on the freedom of the will and capable man. Put differently, Christianity offers not only a diagnostic and critical power of sin, but more importantly it supposes creative and re-creative power. Ricœur explicitly turns to this issue in a late article entitled “La destinataire de la religion: L’homme capable” (1996). In that essay he argues, in spite of the classical designations of fault, sin, and evil, “that religion has for proposal of assistance, aid, remedy, to this injured man in liberating in him a buried basis of capacity that we can call original goodness, that religion carries out this regeneration by specifically symbolic means that awaken the fundamental moral capacities.”69 As Ricœur’s interpretation of the doctrine of original sin begins in church proclamation and turns to Kant’s discussion on evil to further elucidate what had been proclaimed, in like manner, he employs Kant’s theory of 68 Ricœur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud, 50; Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 40. 69 Paul Ricœur, “La destinataire de la religion: L’homme capable,” Archivio di filosofia: Filosofia della religione tra etica e ontologia, nos. 1–3 (1996): 24.

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moral regeneration to elucidate and reinterpret the doctrine of grace. From the strictly philosophical perspective given by Kant, reason alone elaborates the conditions of moral regeneration and the symbols of grace and salvation. Ricœur writes, In philosophical terms: evil requires a nonethical and nonpolitical transformation of our will, which Kant calls regeneration; it is the task of “religion within the limits of reason alone” to elaborate the condition of possibility of this regeneration, without alienating freedom either to a magical conception of grace and salvation or to an authoritarian organization of the religious community.70

For Kant, religion remains within the limits of pure reason, and the symbol of grace in particular can be considered, as Allen Wood shows, Kant’s fourth postulate of practical reason alongside freedom, God, and the immortal soul.71 Ricœur, however, gives a distinctly Christian theological perspective by asking the prior question: “What about the origins of these symbols, or their structure of meaningfulness, or their entry into the human heart, in short, their Ereignis? Indeed, this difficulty is not the only one to invite us to a radical change of perspective, to a theocentric and no longer an anthropological one.”72 The Christian symbol of grace, then, is not a postulate of practical reason founded on an anthropocentric perspective but is viewed by Ricœur from a theocentric perspective that capacitates humans to ethical life. Entirely consonant with his theological method and the process of the Word, Ricœur reinterprets and appropriates traditional Christian doctrines of sin and grace in a way that he thinks coheres with concrete Christian existence. Using Kant in particular to elucidate and clarify the mixed nature of human beings as it was proclaimed through the church, Ricœur draws from the tradition of church history, in Ebeling’s technical sense of that term, while reinterpreting it. The conviction in grace and moral regeneration in spite of sin and moral depravity lead to his understanding of Christian ethics, to which we now turn. Christian Ethics: Sanctifying the Body (the Temple of the Holy Spirit) and the World (the Fruits of the Holy Spirit) Ricœur’s description of fundamental Christian existence calls forth an ethics, for faith and works—justification and sanctification—are distinguished 70

215.

71

Ricœur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” in Figuring the Sacred,

Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 232–48. 72 Ricœur, “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule,” in Figuring the Sacred, 297.



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but not separated. Indeed, ethics is constitutive of the process of the Word that Ricœur expounds, which begins with the Word of God, hears the attestation of that Word mediated through Scripture and tradition, and finally shapes and forms practice. Ricœur writes, “The Christian philosopher here is he who listens to the Word [Parole] like the other faithful and wants to put it into practice on the ground of humanism.”73 A consideration, then, of the central question regarding the distinct contribution that Christian symbols, narratives, and myths make to ethics is required. On the one hand, Ricœur insists that religion adds nothing new to ethics. He writes, “On the ethical and moral plane, biblical faith adds nothing to the predicates ‘good’ and ‘obligatory’ as these are applied to action.”74 For this reason Ricœur prefers to speak not of “Christian ethics” but of “ethics from a Christian perspective.”75 On the other hand, he argues that biblical faith casts common humanistic morality from a distinct perspective. By appropriating from the symbols and language of creation and re-creation, hope and sanctification within the Christian tradition, Ricœur’s theological writings shine new light on his ethics and politics of recognition. If Ricœur’s ethics of recognition engages the discourse on the gift in his philosophical writings, creation is the symbol of the gift par excellence in his theological writings. In accord with his critical theological method, creation is not naïvely accepted by Ricœur as an etiological myth that explains cosmological origins in a once and for all act, but rather it redescribes variations of giftedness, both in text and in life. “The predicate ‘good’ attached to the process of creation,” Ricœur writes, “returns enriched by the symbols of the gift of the Torah and the gift of the remission of sins. .­ . . Such in terms of its major articulations, is the economy of the gift, gift of creation, gift of the Torah, gift of pardon, gift of hope.”76 The attestation in Scripture of creation and re-creation is to be translated and interpreted from text and enacted in different iterations of giftedness in life. What springs from creation is a sense of renewal and directionality in and through the gift of hope. In an essay entitled “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” it is important to note again that Ricœur begins as “hearer of the Word” and with the proclamation of the kerygma before turning to the philosophical “approximation” of hope found in Kant’s thought. In his turn first to theology and the proclamation of the kerygma, he notes his indebtedness 73

Ricœur, “La question de l’humanisme chrétien,” 326. Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 37; Ricœur, Oneself as Another, 25. 75 Paul Ricœur, “Entre philosophie et théologie: La règle d’or en question,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 69, no. 1 (1989): 8. 76 Ricœur, “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule,” 299. 74

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to Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. “To recognize the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is to enter into the movement of hope in resurrection from the dead, to attain the new creation ex nihilo, that is, beyond death .­ . . a hermeneutics of religious freedom is an interpretation of freedom in conformity with the Resurrection interpreted in terms of promise and hope.”77 Freedom in the light of hope is a defiant affirmation of the originary goodness of creation in spite of sin and death, or, put positively, it implies a logic of surplus and excess at the kerygmatic core of freedom and hope. As Ricœur writes, “The ‘in spite of,’ which holds us ready for disappointment is only the reverse, the dark side, of the joyous ‘how much more’ by which freedom frees itself, knows itself, wills to conspire with the aspiration of the whole of creation for redemption.”78 Next, Ricœur considers what he calls the philosophical approximation of theological hope by turning to Kant. He observes that religion, for Kant, is not simply reducible to a principle of morality but rather satisfies a practical demand for a totality. While the analytic of the “good” will, according to Kant, demonstrates the formal principle of morality, the dialectic of the “total” will reconciles reason and nature, duty and happiness. Even as Kant posits the demands of pure morality freed of all empiricism, he also allows that humans necessarily desire happiness because of their embodiment in the world. Religion, on this account, props up morality, for if there is no hope that virtue is commensurate with happiness, then the moral life collapses. Religion, in short, offers a reasonable hope that sustains the moral life. As Ricœur puts it succinctly, “Moral philosophy engenders the philosophy of religion when the hope of fulfillment is added to the consciousness of obligation.”79 Therefore, the answer to the question “What can I hope for?” is represented in an archetype. In Kant’s philosophy of religion, Christ is reduced to a moral ideal or “holy will,” who acts out of pure duty. This, however, is merely an approximation of theological hope because, for Ricœur, Christ is not the pictorial representation of an idea in the mind of man but 77

Paul Ricœur, “Approche philosophique du concept de liberté religieuse,” in L’her­ méneutique de la liberté religieuse, ed. E. Castelli. Actes du colloque organisée par Le centre international d’études humanistes et par l’Institut d’études philosophiques de Rome (Paris: Aubier, 1968), 219; Ricœur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” in Le conflit des interprétations, 397. Ricœur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” in Conflict of Interpretations, 406 (emphasis in original). 78 Ricœur, “Approche philosophique du concept de liberté religieuse,” 222; cf. Ricœur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” 401; Ricœur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” 410. 79 Ricœur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” 412; Ricœur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” 421.



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a kerygmatic event that confronts and speaks to him. The symbol of the resurrection is the entry into the movement of hope, which philosophy only approaches. It is for this reason that Ricœur writes, “Hope does not primarily belong to philosophical discourse; the theologians of the past were right when they called it a ‘theological virtue’—along with faith and love.”80 The symbols of creation and re-creation and concomitantly of resurrection and regeneration do not merely restore a vision of hope in spite of the ravages and reality of sin and death, but from it overflows a sense of “ethical mission.” “The promissio involves a missio,” Ricœur writes. “The practical awareness of a ‘mission’ is inseparable from the deciphering of the signs of the new creation.”81 The ethical mission is founded on the affirmation of the economy of the gift, represented above all by the symbol of creation, and the conviction in the primordial created goodness of the other, who like me is a creature of God.82 In his philosophical writings, Ricœur offers an ethics of mutual recognition that navigates between the extremes of egoism and self-abnegation. In his theological writings, the mutuality of recognition is grounded in the originary affirmation of the primordial created goodness of both the other and oneself. The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—gives form to this ethics of mutuality that is not reduced to an economy of exchange but instead articulates an economy of the gift. For fear that this precept is interpreted in terms of narrow self-interest, Ricœur offers clarification by adding the following command: “because it has been given to you, you give in turn.”83 Whereas his philosophical reflections on recognition involve a mutuality symbolized in the discourse of the gift, his theological reflections offer new light from a distinctly Christian perspective that is symbolized in the figure of creation and re-creation. The fundamental respect and recognition rendered to the other then is inextricably linked to the esteem of oneself as good, created by God. Ricœur’s notion of ethical mission or “sanctification,” to use traditional theological language, is tied to two other important concepts—incarnation and eschatology. On the one hand, he links the symbol of creation and the originary affirmation of creation with the language of incarnation and the 80

Ricœur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” 204. Ricœur, “Approche philosophique du concept de liberté religieuse,” 220; cf. Ricœur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” 399; Ricœur, “Freedom in the Light of Hope,” 408. 82 Paul Ricœur, “De la volonté à l’acte: Un entretien de Paul Ricœur avec Carlos Oliveira,” in “Temps et recit” de Paul Ricœur en debat, ed. Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 35. See also Ricœur, “Entre philosophie et théologie,” 3. 83 Ricœur, “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule,” 300. 81

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human body as a “temple of the Holy Spirit.” The incarnation of the body and the sanctification of it by the Holy Spirit takes on a historical and political dimension, for civilization is seen as an extension of the human body. The problem of social responsibility of the Christian is not different from that of sanctification of my body. Precisely because my civilization is like the extension of my flesh and adheres to my spiritual destiny, my civilization is, like my body itself, “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” All the problems of incarnation and faith, that is to say all the problems of sanctification must be able to be understood from human history like the human body. .­ . . The problem is always to signify, to incarnate our faith in works which witness that we are new creatures and advance in faith by the same effort of the sanctification of the body and history.84

As the human body is incarnate as a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” so too the Christian is called to incarnate the sanctity of the body extended to civilization through “fruits of the Holy Spirit.” The issue of sanctification and recreation with respect to oneself is linked to the sanctification and re-creation of civilization.85 But while the incarnation of one’s faith through works has positive meaning in the transformation and transfiguration of the world, it nonetheless remains ultimately unfulfilled in human history. “Christian humanism,” Ricœur concedes, “is not something that exists; it is not a harmonious synthesis, a succeeded historical reality.”86 Christian Ethics and the Politics of Recognition Ricœur’s ethics from a Christian perspective follows from his theological commitments and from a method that reinterprets and appropriates the symbols and narratives within Scripture and Christian tradition in a way that redescribes and coheres with concrete Christian existence. The symbols of creation and re-creation are particularly important to understanding his distinctly Christian ethics because they attest to the originary affirmation of human goodness in spite of sin as well as the moral regeneration that capacitates humans to sanctify their own bodies in relation to other bodies. This section considers how Ricœur’s critical interpretation and appropriation of the symbol of creation extend into politics, particularly through the language of the gift of pardon. In a way that is consistent with what has preceded in his interpretation of Christian existence and ethics, Ricœur’s political theology flows from his theological method, which is grounded in 84

Paul Ricœur, “Le Chrétien et la civilisation occidentale,” Le christianisme social, no. 5 (1946): 432. 85 Ricœur, “Le Chrétien et la civilisation occidentale,” 433. 86 Ricœur, “La question de l’humanisme chrétien,” 326.



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the Word of God, mediated by biblical hermeneutics and church history, and reinterpreted and appropriated for contemporary life. For Ricœur, politics is—to quote Romans 13:1—a “divine institution” ordained by God for human history for the “good” of citizens.87 At the same time, Ricœur maintains a realism regarding the prevalence and use of human power and corruption within the institution of politics.88 In short, as he puts it, “The State is this reality in a double sense, at once instituted and fallen.”89 Ricœur’s adherence to the Christian doctrine of sin is the basis for his view that the state’s function and purpose is to constrain wickedness. Politics, from this perspective, is a necessary and legitimate authority given the radicality of evil. The distinct contribution that Christianity makes to political theory, however, on Ricœur’s account, is precisely its introduction of an ethics of love and a logic of excess and superabundance. Perhaps the precarious convergence and paradoxical relationship between love and justice within a political theory of the state is no better expressed than in the tensive relationship between the pardon and punishment. Punishment asserts the inseparability of the act and agent; one is punished according to one’s deeds irrespective of one’s capacities or potentialities. Based on one’s acts, the punitive function of justice assumes a logic of equality and equivalence and ferrets out punishment accordingly. The punishment is proportionate to the crime or, as Ricœur puts it, “The ideal according to the spirit of right would be that pain is equal to the fault.”90 However, the gift and the pardon assume a logic of excess and superabundance that reenacts creation in a way that is not subsumed by the logic of equivalence. The guilty person is pardoned, even if the act is condemned and punished, because of the fundamental belief and affirmation of originary primordial goodness in spite of the radicality and actuality of evil. “Under the sign of forgiveness [pardon],” Ricœur writes, “the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults.”91 What Ricœur is advocating is not a theocracy that brings together Christian faith that rules over and within power politics but a conception of theologico-politics in which the church, under Ricœur’s particular conception of it, serves as an example of 87

Paul Ricœur, “Les aventures de l’état et la tâche des chrétiens,” Le christianisme social, nos. 6–7 (1958): 452–53. 88 Ricœur, “Les aventures de l’état et la tâche des chrétiens,” 453. 89 Ricœur, “Les aventures de l’état et la tâche des chrétiens,” 454. 90 Paul Ricœur, “La logique de Jésus: Romains 5,” Études théologiques et religieuses 55, no. 3 (1980): 420. 91 Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, et l’oubli (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 642. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 493.

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love and forgiveness in politics. In an interview published in 1995, Ricœur states, “I am convinced that there are in this regard, in the notion of the ‘people of God’ and in its composition of perfect ecclesial reciprocity, genuine resources for conceptualizing a political model.” The politics of justice and the logic of equivalence then remain in a perpetual tensive relationship to an ethics of love and the logic of excess and superabundance. It is precisely retaining these two poles in tensive relation that marks the distinct contribution of Christian faith to political theory. Without a place for love and forgiveness, politics would be reduced to a logic of equivalence and serve the minimalistic punitive function for the end of security; without a place for justice in ethical life, there would be no constraints on human wickedness and violence. The dual function that politics serves is grounded in a view of human nature as both fallen and capable. Because humans are capable beings and created good, politics serves the end of not only “stable order” but also “ordered growth”;92 because humans remain fallen and sinful creatures, the political order remains imperfect and is ultimately fulfilled only in the eschaton. Conclusion Ricœur’s systematic and critical theology was constructed through what German church historian and theologian Gerhard Ebeling called “the process of the Word.” There is an inextricable link and movement from the Word of God to biblical hermeneutics to church proclamation over history and tradition and finally in the movement from text to action by focusing on Christian ethics and politics. Ricœur’s theological reflections offer a complex and sophisticated approach that retrieves a post-Enlightenment appreciation of religious tradition on the one hand and yet insists on the ongoing creative interpretation of religious symbols, myths, narratives, and texts for the purposes of personal, social, and institutional transformation. His understanding of the nature and task of Christian theology not only offers a distinctly Christian perspective on the phenomena of recognition in his philosophical writings but also offers a vision of the church as uniquely positioned to serve as a model for institutionalizing the phenomenological, ethical, and political dimensions of recognition.

92

Paul Ricœur, “Faith and Action: A Christian Point of View,” Criterion (Summer 1963): 6.

Chapter six

The Good of Recognition

This study has employed a historical and analytical approach to understanding the concept of recognition in Emmanuel Lévinas’ and Paul Ricœur’s works. It situated the issue of recognition within the social and political realities of their day and contextualized their use and understanding of the concept of recognition in relation to the broader intellectual movements and in relation to the larger themes of their thought. Theirs was a generation when, on the one hand, individuals held acute and deep feelings of anonymity within the malaise of modern mass society. Ironically, as modern technology brought people closer together, it left them more distant and remote from each other. Individuals remained isolated from and anonymous to one another—a peculiar phenomenon of nonrecognition. On the other hand, they belonged to a generation that intensely witnessed and suffered misrecognition, that is, the invidious forms of recognition based on racial, national, sexual, and particularly religious identity both at the interpersonal and institutional level. Given these social and political realities—the peculiar phenomenon of nonrecognition and the vicious forms of misrecognition—they drew on philosophical and theological resources to articulate a response to their situation. The concept of recognition emerged within the intellectual context of the resurrection of Hegel studies in France in the 1930s and 1940s. Jean Wahl, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite all contributed to this renewed interest as they offered compelling interpretations, which 123

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turned “towards the concrete”—to use a phrase coined by Wahl.1 Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s appropriations of the concept of recognition, however, did not simply retrieve what Hegel “really” said but instead reinterpreted him through the new insights of existentialism and phenomenology. Therefore they brought together two movements on the ascent in the 1930s to 1950s in French philosophy—the turn to the concrete in Hegel and the emergence of German existentialism and phenomenology—to reinterpret the meaning of recognition and articulate an ethics and politics of recognition. At the same time that they were appropriating from the philosophical resources available to them to respond to and address the social and political realities of their day, they also drew from the distinct resources of their religious traditions to revive and renew religious life in postwar France in a way that casts their phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition in a new perspective. But while the feelings of nonrecognition and experiences of misrecognition were widespread in their generation, they were also not particular or unique to it. In a statement that is as relevant today as it was when it was proclaimed many decades ago, Lévinas astutely observes: We notice that technical progress itself—to repeat a commonplace—which relates everyone to everyone else, brings with it necessities which leave men in a state of anonymity. Impersonal forms of relation replace direct forms—“short connections,” as Ricœur calls them—in a world in which everything is programmed to excess.2

Indeed, Lévinas calls the problem of anonymity “the essence of modernity.”3 And he dedicates Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.4 1

Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932). 2 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Le pacte: Traité ‘Sota,’ ” in L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1982), 88. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Pact (Tractate Sotah 37a–37b),” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Continuum, 2007), 68. 3 Lévinas, “Le pacte,” 89; Lévinas, “The Pact,” 69. 4 Emmanuel Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1998) (emphasis added). For his observations on the continued racism, imperialism, and hatred of the other, even after the atrocities committed during the Second World War, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Honneur sans drapeau,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 6 (1966): 1.



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The problems of anonymity and discrimination were perhaps felt more acutely in their time than generations past or present, but they also continue and will continue to reassert themselves, for they are embedded in the very nature of human being. A constructive approach, in addition to a historical approach, is employed, for the work is interested in more than simply situating and understanding Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought and subjecting it to critical analyses. It also puts their insights into critical conversation with contemporary social and political theory. While Lévinas never explicitly ot extensively wrote on social and political theory in the way that Ricœur did, both their understandings of recognition hold important insights for it. This concluding chapter, then, will serve as both summary and suggestion. It will summarize the central historical and analytical arguments regarding the phenomenological, ethical, political, and religious dimensions of recognition that have emerged over the course of the project, and it will also constructively relate these insights to contemporary social and political theory. By concluding with reflections in phenomenology, ethics, politics, and religion as they relate to the “good of recognition,” then, it will not only show how Lévinas and Ricœur articulated a response to the pervasive problems of nonrecognition and misrecognition in their day but it will also suggest how their thought can contribute to current discussions about our social and political situation. Reflections in Phenomenology: The Basis of Recognition The phenomenological approaches by Lévinas and Ricœur access a depth in meaning regarding recognition that is simply overlooked and unavailable in contemporary social and political theory. To that end, chapters 2 and 4 were devoted to expositing Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct understandings of recognition in their philosophical writings on phenomenology. It was argued that Lévinas pursues and extends Husserl’s program of phenomenology as a rigorous science that seeks to uncover the “principle of all principles.” Following Husserl, Lévinas critiques the regnant dominance of the naturalistic approach to the sciences, which is based on a methodological principle that has as its starting point a “fact.” By abstracting general laws of reality and being, the naturalistic approach thereby neglects the very turn to the concrete that it propounds. As an alternative to the naturalistic principle grounding the sciences, Husserl proposes a phenomenological perspective as the basis for a rigorous science. By bracketing naturalism, it is not so much that one loses the world as that one all the more regains it in an intimate, more primordial relationship qua consciousness. The distinct contribution

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of Husserlian phenomenology for Lévinas, therefore, is that it shows what primordially exists is not a reality hidden behind the apparent phenomena but the phenomena itself as it appears in consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenological method pursues what naturalism and empiricism seek by presenting us with our genuine self and our truly concrete life. Despite the advances of Husserlian phenomenology in excavating the concrete, it still remains too abstract, theoretical, and intellectualistic, in Lévinas’ judgment, for the constituting act of intentional consciousness neglects our primary attitude toward reality, which is concrete, practical, axiological, and indeed ethical. Beyond the naturalistic principle that begins with facts within the world, beyond the phenomenological principle that begins with the constitution of objects within intentional consciousness, there is an ethical principle—the principle of all principles—which begins with the other. Within this broader conversation regarding the proper nature and task of science, the structure of the present argument proceeded to locate and trace the multiple uses and valences of (re)cognition. Beyond naturalistic cognition and the sensation of mere facts, or things in the world, beyond Husserlian phenomenological cognition and the constitution of the sensation of objects within intentional consciousness, Lévinas uncovers a primordial “pure recognition” of “persons” within ethical relation. By pursuing Husserl’s program to uncover the principle of all principles, Lévinas’ project, then, is intimately intertwined with the fundamental question of the very meaning of a science and involves a deepening of the meaning and broadening of the scope of cognition or knowledge as its methodological basis. His phenomenology accesses a form of cognition—the pure recognition of the other—as a kind of founding principle, or starting point, for an ethics and politics of recognition. Paul Ricœur shares the impulse to articulate a dimension of cognition deeper than naturalistic and empiricist scientific methods. In his earliest works on Jaspers’ existentialism, Ricœur discovers a philosophical method that elucidates concrete human existence apart from the general laws of nature and history found in the regnant sciences of the day. In so doing, he uncovers a deeper and more concrete understanding of recognition tied to the concept of existential freedom, distinct from “natural” or biological needs for recognition satisfied in the objectivities of empirical existence. Ricœur’s appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology pursues and complicates Jaspers’ existential analysis of recognition. His analysis of the phenomenology of the will under conditions of actual human existence begins with a transcendental reflection that explores the conditions of the possibility and fallibility of theoretical knowledge of things, turns to the practical dimension



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of philosophical anthropology by exploring the conditions for the possibility and fallibility of persons, and concludes with the affective dimension. The breach that constitutes human existence manifests itself most deeply and acutely through the tensive relation between the human desires for recognition and inordinate, perverted passions for honor, glory, and vanity. These early reflections are later taken up in Parcours de la reconnaissance, where priority is given to the naturalistic understanding of the term. This mirrors the move he makes in his early thought when he draws from Jaspers and begins with empirical understandings of recognition before turning to more primordial, concrete existential recognition. Likewise, it parallels his employment of Husserl’s phenomenological approach that begins by looking at naturalistic modes of recognition before turning to more primordial phenomenological recognition. Ricœur thereby continues a method of investigation by beginning with the most “ordinary,” naturalistic, or empirical understanding and proceeding to uncover a deeper, more primordial and concrete meaning. Both Lévinas and Ricœur express dissatisfaction with the circumscription of the scope of knowledge or cognition to things or objects based on naturalistic or empiricist methodologies, and instead they employ a phenomenological approach to uncover a more primordial cognitive dimension precisely in the recognition of humans as persons. This shared impulse, however, belies considerable differences between their basis of phenomenology and what recognition precisely means. Lévinas’ phenomenological description of recognition emerges out of a fundamental project to uncover the principle of all principles and expose the most primordial and “essential” dimension of concrete human existence. If Lévinas’ understanding of recognition is located in “pure sensation,” that is, a “passivity beyond all passivity and activity,” Ricœur’s attention to the locus of the will integrates passivity and activity as it is taken up within the dialectic of the voluntary and the involuntary. What is at the centerpiece of Lévinas’ thought—the notion of pure sensation—Ricœur co-opts into an objectivized form and intentional act such that even feeling can in some sense be action.5 Lévinas and Ricœur offer distinct accounts and conceptions of the phenomenon of recognition. By considering both thinkers’ positions on their phenomenology of recognition, the aim of this study is neither to highlight positions that are hostile and foreign to one another nor to dialectically 5 Paul Ricœur, Philosophe de la volonté. vol. 1, Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 148–49. Paul Ricœur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 156.

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move to a higher level of synthesis of the two positions but to gain, by thinking with and through them, an insight into the phenomenon of recognition. The constructive purpose of delineating the phenomenologies of recognition is to address what is amiss in social and political theories. Whatever social or political conceptions of recognition may exist, they presuppose a clarification of its meaning at the primordial phenomenological dimension. The multiple modalities and conceptions of the phenomenon of recognition suggests that the assumed accounts of recognition in social and political theory may be inadequate and thus that the moral assumptions of such theories are insufficient. It is with this in mind that we now consider the implications of Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s phenomenologies with respect to their ethics of recognition. Reflections in Ethics: The Good of Recognition In the area of recognition studies, no one has done more to analyze the moral underpinnings of social movements for recognition than German critical theorist Axel Honneth. Most systematically and comprehensively formulated in The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, his proposals on recognition are at once broader and deeper than the analyses of recognition within political theory.6 They are broader because they present a differentiated theory of recognition within three distinct spheres such that recognition is not reducible simply to the question of political or legal rights. And they are deeper because he seeks to decode the logic, or “moral grammar,” that undergirds social movements and presents the conditions for the possibility of political recognition. The emphasis on a moral grammar is significant for what it rejects—that is, the amoral Hobbesian view of social conflict as a basic and perpetual feature of the human condition grounded in a struggle for self-preservation. The logic and force underpinning and decoded in social conflict, for Honneth, is not amoral self-preservation but moral recognition, or more precisely and primordially immoral disrespect—the slight of being misrecognized or nonrecognized. And such social conflict is not grounded in an atomistic, instrumental rationality dominant in the liberal political tradition traced back to Hobbes but in noninstrumental social relations of recognition. If relations of recognition are necessary conditions for moral subjectivity, as Honneth argues, it follows that social conflicts for recognition are morally justified.

6

Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).



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Honneth’s social theory of recognition, however, remains so concentrated on structuring and emancipating social and institutional life and reality that it overlooks the phenomenon of recognition in its multiple modes in everyday life. In other words, Honneth fails to separate recognitional attitudes from their social settings. Furthermore, his analysis of the normative basis, or moral grammar, of social movements is constituted by a dialectic founded on social struggles and conflicts for recognition. Lévinas and Ricœur contribute to the understanding of recognition in contemporary social theory by not only providing distinct phenomenological accounts of recognition but by also offering alternative accounts of the moral grammar and moral subjectivity that need not necessarily be taken up into a dialectic of conflict and struggle. Indeed, Lévinas’ attempt to take up Husserl’s mantle of pursuing the principle of all principles is not only to uncover an ethical principle that is more primordial than naturalistic or phenomenological principles but to assert an irreducible relation to and recognition of the other as a person, which is more primordial than our dominating relations to others as things or objects that ineluctably lead to struggles for recognition. Lévinas thereby uncovers an ethics of recognition, which serves, in Ricœur’s words, as “a real departure, a beginning entirely original.”7 Whatever else a phenomenology and ethics of recognition means, it originates from the passive sensation or feeling of being radically individuated, chosen, and called to responsibility in and through the encounter with the other. The call to recognize the other before—and without—expectation or hope of reciprocation is Lévinas’ great insight for ethics. But while he presents an origin and starting point for a phenomenology and ethics of recognition, it remains a purified essence that does not consider a full account of the “empirics of human existence.” Lévinas’ commitment to uncovering the principle of all principles brackets the place of empirical desires and motivations such that all desires for recognition are reduced to nonethical ontology or unethical egoism that leads to struggles for recognition. In other words, his position does not seem to allow for Honneth’s moral grammar underpinning struggles for recognition. In these respects, Ricœur’s phenomenological reduction to an “empirics of the will” is illuminating. He pursues an alternative phenomenology and ethics grounded in what he calls a “strong base”8 in ethical subjectivity 7 Paul Ricœur, “Fondements de l’éthique,” Cahiers du Centre Protestant de l’Ouest, nos. 49–50 (1983): 34. 8 Paul Ricœur, “De la volonté à l’acte: Un entretien de Paul Ricœur avec Carlos Oliveira,” in “Temps et recit” de Paul Ricœur en debat, ed. Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 25. See also Paul Ricœur, “Entretien avec Paul Ricœur sur l’effondrement du système communiste en Europe centrale et de l’Est,” in

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wherein the capable person enacts the good of recognition that one senses and wherein one desires and deserves, as a capable being, the good of recognition for oneself in return. Ricœur’s attention to actual concrete human existence amid the tensions and breach between the voluntary and involuntary, the infinite and finite, and finally freedom and responsibility offers a more rounded account that is sensitive to the mixed character of human moral existence as both capable and fallible. Case in point is his complex theory of recognition. While Ricœur finds Honneth’s social theory to be fruitful, particularly for excavating the moral grammar of social struggles for recognition, he proposes an alternative social theory founded on the affirmation of states of peace. For fear that struggles for recognition, even when morally justified, will lead to perverse and inordinate claims, particularly given his assumptions regarding human fallibility, Ricœur affirms an ethics of recognition that allows for the possibility of peaceful experiences of mutual recognition as the basis for social life. By thinking with and through Lévinas and Ricœur, then, the good of recognition can be seen as the basis for ethical life in a way that responds to and provides an alternative for contemporary social theory. Reflections in Politics: Institutionalizing the Good of Recognition The task of this section is to draw out the political implications of Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s respective ethics of recognition and to set them in critical conversation with contemporary political theory on recognition. The effect of Lévinas’ phenomenological reduction to a pure ethics of recognition, negatively formulated, is that it brackets the historical contingencies and relativities of political and moral codes or conventions; positively formulated, it opens up and articulates the primordial ground, norm, and criterion for adjudicating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of government. In a legitimate political order, the state ought to provide the conditions for the flourishing of an ethics of recognition to all. What Lévinas is arguing for is a kind of minimal and limited politics, for true authentic recognition is momentary and interpersonal and cannot be reified, stabilized, and institutionalized. In this regard, against Hegel’s system, the encounter with the other retains its own integrity in a way that is not reducible to merely a moment in the unfolding development of Spirit, which culminates in the state. Conversely, the defining characteristic of illegitimate political orders, Ethique et responsabilité, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeshlimann (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1994), 24.



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on Lévinas’ account, is that they efface the recognition of the face of the other. Despite his claims to a phenomenological method that brackets history, clearly his political philosophy is articulated against the historical backdrop of early twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. “A state in which the interpersonal relationship is impossible,” Lévinas writes, “is a totalitarian state.”9 If Lévinas opposes totalitarian regimes on the grounds that they efface interpersonal recognition, it is on those same grounds that he opposes a classically liberal political order.10 True recognition does not take the form of mere abstract universalistic proclamations by the state; rather, it occurs within the concrete interpersonal realm where persons are individuated. Lévinas’ proposal for what might be called a politics of recognition delicately navigates between the Scylla of misrecognitions by political totalitarianism and the Charybdis of nonrecognitions by political liberalism and offers a genuinely distinct third option that reconceptualizes the organization of social and political space. The contribution of Ricœur’s empirics of the will to an ethics of recognition is not only an appreciation of the possibility of a pure ethics of recognition but also a consideration of humans’ mixed and indeed fallible constitution. The import and effect of this phenomenological basis for political theory is its consideration of the significance of political institutions in the formation and cultivation of an ethics of recognition. To be sure, like Lévinas, Ricœur is acutely aware of the limitations of institutions in effecting and realizing the good of recognition. In his original Vienna Lectures, which would later be revised under the title Parcours de la reconnaissance, he suggests that one of the reasons he chose the symbolic character of the gift to access the phenomenon of mutual recognition is “to express the non-institutional source of life together.”11 Mutual recognition, then, is found most eminently in gestures of ordinary interpersonal life—ways of greeting, saluting, exchanging wishes. Nonetheless, Ricœur clearly sees the import and, indeed, necessary mediation of institutional forms—political and juridical—in the process and course of recognition. The state holds a necessary, negative, and minimalistic function grounded in a philosophical anthropology that describes humans as a disproportion 9

Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophie, justice et amour: Entretien avec Emmanuel Lévinas,” Esprit 80–81, nos. 8–9 (1983): 10. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 105. 10 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1990): 62–63. 11 Ricœur, Vienna Lectures II, folder 3, p. 11, Archives du Fonds Ricœur, Paris.

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between the finite and the infinite, fallible and, indeed, fallen. It is because of the always already possibility of human violence and the perverse use of human capability and power that politics holds a legitimate and necessary function. The political order, however, is not reduced to a Hobbesian minimalist account of “security” construed negatively as the mere absence of war and conflict; instead, Ricœur gives a fuller understanding that includes a more positive, even pedagogical, function of politics. Politics is concerned with not only restricting and constraining a fallible will but also directing and cultivating a morally capable will. Human life together, in spite of all the forces for dispersion and separation, is reinforced in part by political and juridical institutions that create an order grounded not in Hobbesian mutual fear but through trust in mutual recognition. By extending Ricœur’s analysis of the political and juridical dimensions, political acts and legislative promulgations ought to strive for greater and more extensive recognition of persons. They should also consider ways not only to moderate the inextirpable perverse passions for honor and vanity but also to cultivate the fulfillment of proper selfesteem and ethical mutual recognition. While politics alone cannot and does not actualize ethics, such institutional mediations serve as a source of value and motivation to direct the person to realizing his capacities and potential in spite of the inescapable and abiding condition of human fallibility. Whatever their differences with respect to their politics of recognition, Lévinas and Ricœur share the strong conviction in describing a deep phenomenological account of recognition that avoids both the errors of a thin modern liberalism that induced mass societies, on the one hand, and the errors of an overreaching totalitarianism, on the other hand. Their affirmation of the integrity and recognition of persons pushes back against the reign of totalitarianism and the phenomenon of misrecognition. They also aim to correct and amend the oversights of the abstract universalism of the mere declaration of universal human rights at the juridical level, which engenders nonrecognition in favor of a “concrete universalism” that advocates the interpersonal and institutional recognition of each unique particular person. What both Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s positions on the politics of recognition do not address in any sustained fashion, however, are the debates in contemporary political theory about the recognition of group rights as well as individual rights in modern liberal democracies. Their silence on the issue may seem odd because, as their religious writings making plain, they both identify themselves with historically persecuted religious communities in France—Judaism and Protestant Christianity. Yet at best they remain reticent on the issue, and at worst they seem to be at odds with multicultural policies and the demands for group rights through political and



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legal recognition. Lévinas does not explicitly address his resistance of the language of group rights, perhaps because the identification of the other as belonging to one or another group reconstitutes the sort of misrecognition and identity politics that he wishes to avoid. In other words, it perpetuates and falls back into an ontology where the struggle for recognition pervades. Ricœur is more explicit about his reservations regarding identity politics, as he suggests that one of the problems of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition is its lapse into “bad infinity” or “unhappy consciousness.” In an interview given in late 1994, he states, The term “recognition” seems to me much more important than that of “identity” which is the focus most of the time of the debate on multiculturalism. In the notion of identity there is only the idea of sameness; whereas recognition is a concept that directly integrates otherness and allows a dialectic of the same and the other. The demand of identity always involves something violent with respect to others. On the contrary, the search for recognition implies reciprocity.12

The problem of modern society, he points out, is not a lack of desire for recognition but inordinate claims for recognition. This analysis of group claims for recognition and the procuring of an insatiable sense of victimization is derived from a moral anthropology that has a profound understanding of the fallible will and the perverse passion for recognition. Despite Ricœur’s reluctance to embrace the notion of recognizing group rights, there is another way to read him that is at once consistent with his thought and yet justifies demands for group rights. If humans are both fallible and capable, his political theory ought to address not only the issue of perverse inordinate claims for recognition but also the more positive justifiable need for recognition by groups to be granted by just and well-ordered political institutions. Reflections in Religion: Toward the Good of Recognition Lévinas and Ricœur offer neither a strict separationist position that purports a neutral, rigorous, scientific phenomenology, on the one hand, and the irrational presuppositions of a particular faith tradition, on the other, nor a postmodern conception of religion that lacks reference to any determinate or historical religion. While they both maintain a separation between their philosophical and religious thought such that their claims with respect to their phenomenology, ethics, and politics of recognition uphold an integrity 12

Paul Ricœur, La critique et la conviction: Entretien avec François Azouvi et Marc de Launay (Paris: Éditions Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 96. Paul Ricœur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 60.

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independent of religious belief, authority, and tradition, they both acknowledge the distinct resources that their respective religious traditions bring to bear on the recognition of the other. Even as Lévinas seeks to maintain a strict separation between pure philosophy and historical Judaism, there is an intimate relationship between them, and they clearly inform one another. Indeed, it can be argued that the concept of recognition lies at the center of Lévinas’ philosophical and Jewish writings in the reformulation of the very meaning of science: phenomenology as the new science more primordial and concrete than naturalistic and historical sciences, and the new science of Judaism as more primordial and concrete than dogmatic sciences and Wissenschaft des Judentums. The complex interactions between his phenomenology and his Judaism become evident when he reinterprets traditional Jewish doctrines in light of the new advances of phenomenology and, conversely, when he reinterprets the phenomenon and ethics of recognition in specifically Jewish terms. The doctrine of election, for example, is interpreted beyond the boundedness of premodern doctrinal formulations of a historical community and given new meaning within ethico-religious experience that is accessible universally, even as the figure of the Jew holds privileged access to this phenomenon. In turn, the specifically Jewish concept of election sheds new light and perspective on the sense of individuation and the call to responsibility to recognize the other. That Lévinas seeks to reinterpret and revive Jewish tradition in light of modern commitments to universalism and the advances in the sciences is clear, even if his notion of religious tradition remains largely unarticulated and implicit. Ricœur is much more explicit and rigorous in detailing what religious tradition means and how it can contribute to social and political life. Like Lévinas’ works, there is both a strict separation and complex mediation between Ricœur’s philosophical and theological writings. As does Lévinas, Ricœur believes in the integrity of philosophical claims that could stand independently of any empirical or religious presuppositions. At the same time, from a theological perspective—specifically one indebted to a Reformed tradition and the critical retrieval of Karl Barth—he wants to maintain the integrity of theology even as he acknowledges the import of philosophy to clarify its assumptions and concepts. Yet Ricœur’s philosophical and theological writings often intersect. Drawing particularly from church historian Gerhard Ebeling and his concept of the “process of the Word,” Ricœur develops a complex hermeneutics of Christian tradition that bears interesting parallels to and intersects with his general philosophical hermeneutics. The process of the Word recognizes the complex movement



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from the Barthian proclamation of the Word of God through the Bultmannian critique of Barth by an analysis of Christian existence through a postBultmannian biblical hermeneutics that is sensitive to the place of language and tradition. Ricœur’s robust and sophisticated theological hermeneutics offers a way to mediate between, on the one hand, the contribution that symbolic, mythic, and narratives sources of Christian tradition make to the philosophical, ethical, and political concept of recognition and, on the other hand, the contribution that philosophical concepts make to critique and clarify traditional Christian doctrines. For both Lévinas and Ricœur, then, phenomenology is not circumscribed by a neutral, rigorous, scientific methodology that disallows any contribution from the resources of determinate historical religions. Similar to the way that their phenomenologies are broadened to allow for the possible insights of religious symbols and themes, their political thought is not restricted to a space of neutral intersubjective interaction; rather, it is reconceptualized as an ethico-religious task of justice. Contemporary theories on the politics of recognition assume a neutral presuppositionless space that sees no import for religious traditions. Reconceiving politics in terms of an ethico-religious task, as Lévinas and Ricœur argue, shifts the paradigm of politics away from the myth of modern Enlightenment neutrality and universal understanding toward an infinite task that can draw from the rich sources of religious traditions. Conclusion The concept of recognition is of such frequent use that its presence in both everyday and specialized academic language is striking, and yet critical examination of its meaning remains conspicuously absent. Legislative acts are habitually promulgated, public policies written, and social struggles waged all in its name. Its application touches upon a broad spectrum of issues ranging from battles over multiculturalism to questions of national sovereignty and from matters of international human rights to social movements within feminism and civil rights. It is no wonder, then, that in recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of literature on the concept of recognition, as many scholars see in it fruitful possibilities for addressing and understanding our contemporary political and social landscape. But although the concept of recognition is often used, particularly within the language of political and social theory, the precise meaning of recognition is often not clear. Prior to determining issues about multiculturalism and whether it is amenable for modern liberal democracies to recognize groups, prior even to

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understanding the role of recognition in the process of social differentiation and rationalization, it is important and necessary to clarify what recognition exactly means. Phenomenology is an especially insightful method for approaching this issue, and the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur are particularly salient, for they hold such distinct understandings of the phenomenological meaning of recognition. Just as social and political realities pressed upon them and they looked to intellectual resources to make sense of and respond to these realities, so too social and political realities press upon us, and Lévinas and Ricœur provide rich resources to further and deepen reflection on them. By thinking with and through their thought, this work was involved in the historical task of situating their thought within the sociopolitical and intellectual context of their day and the constructive task of relating their insights to emergent contemporary issues in our social and political landscape. The primordial concrete existential-phenomenological dimension of recognition, a parsing out of the multiple ethical modalities of recognition, and the distinct contribution that religious traditions can make to an ethics and politics of recognition are all absent in discussions in contemporary social and political theory. Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s philosophical writings offer a deeper understanding of the phenomenological and ethical modalities of recognition. Whatever else an ethics of recognition involves, surely Lévinas is right to uncover that it is primordially the sense or feeling of being chosen and called to respond to the other. But all forms of mutual recognition need not collapse into an economy of being and struggles for recognition as he suggests. On this point, Ricœur complements Lévinas’ thought. Ricœur provides a realistic assessment of violent struggles for recognition sustained by the perverse passions for recognition by fallible man, acknowledges Honneth’s insights into a moral grammar underpinning social struggles for recognition, but affirms the possibility of mutual recognition for the social and political order. To Lévinas’ insight regarding the primordial sense of being called to recognize the other, Ricœur adds a robust notion of capable man who enacts the good of recognition that one senses and who desires and deserves, as a capable being, the good of recognition for oneself in return. The phenomenological and ethical account that emerges provides not only a “peaceful” alternative to Honneth’s social theory but also a deeper and fuller understanding of recognition for political theory. This volume also considered Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s extensive religious writings and showed how their reflections on the symbols, myths, and narratives of their respective religious traditions—Judaism and Christianity— underpin and contribute to their philosophical proposals for the good of



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recognition. Their reflections on the nature and task of theology present a complex and sophisticated approach that at once retrieves a post-Enlightenment appreciation of religious tradition, on the one hand, and yet appreciates the ongoing creative appropriation and interpretation of religious symbols, myths, narratives, and texts for the purposes of personal, social, and institutional transformation, on the other. In short, in a “postsecular age” that is enjoying the so-called return of religion, their approaches offer a fertile and enriched understanding of Jewish and Christian traditions and the distinct contribution they can make through the import of their symbols and narratives for our contemporary social and political situation.

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Bibliography

Works of Emmanuel Lévinas

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De l’existence à l’existant. Paris: Revue Fontaine, 1947. Reprint, Paris: J. Vrin, 1990. Translated as Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2001. “La réouverture de l’école Normale Israélite Orientale.” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 11 (1946–1947): 2–3. “Le temps et l’autre.” In l’existence, edited by Jean Wahl, 125–96. Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947. Translated as “Time and the Other,” in Time and the Other [and Additional Essays]. Translated by Richard A. Cohen, 39–94. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1987. 1950s “Intentionalité et métaphysique.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 84, no. 4 (1959): 471–79. “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 1 (1951): 88–98. “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 62, no. 3 (1957): 241–53. “Philosophie et ontologie I: Retour à Hegel.” Esprit, no. 229 (1955): 1378–91. “Réflexions sur la ‘technique’ phénoménologique.” In L’œuvre et la pensée de Husserl, 95–118. Cahiers du Royaumont, Philosophie 3. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1959. “Le rôle de l’École Normale Israélite Orientale.” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 91 (1955): 32–38. “La ruine de la représentation.” In Edmund Husserl 1859–1959: Recueil commémoratif publié à l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe, 73–85. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. 1960s Difficile liberté: Essais sur le Judaïsme. Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1963. Reprinted with additional essays, 1976. Translated as Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. “L’École Normale Israélite Orientale: Perspectives d’avenir.” In Les droits de l’homme et de l’éducation: Actes du Congrès Centenaire de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, 73–79. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961. “Honneur sans drapeau.” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 6 (1966): 1–3. “Infini.” In Encyclopaedia Universalis, 8:991–94. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis France, 1968. “Intentionalité et sensation.” Revue internationale de philosophie 19, nos. 71–72 (1965): 35–54. “La laïcité et la pensée d’Israël.” In La laïcité, 45–58. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960. “La mort de Martin Buber.” Amitié judéo–chrétienne, no. 3 (1965): 4–5. Quatre lectures talmudiques. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968.



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“La renaissance culturelle juive en Europe continentale.” In Le renouveau de la culture juive, edited by Emmanuel Lévinas, Moshe Davis, Shaul Esh, and Max Gottschalk, 21–34. Brussels: Éditions de l’Institut deSociologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1968. “La signification et le sens.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 69, no. 2 (1965): 125–56. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. Reprint Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990. Translated as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969. 1970s Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Translated as Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1998. “Evolution et fidélité.” Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 182 (1972): 25–30. “Idéologie et idéalisme.” In Démythisation et idéologie, edited by Enrico Castelli, 135–45. Actes du colloque organisées par Le Centre International d’Études Humanistes et par l’Institut d’Études Philosophiques de Rome. Paris: Aubier, 1973. “Jean Wahl: Sans avoir ni être.” In Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, edited by Jeanne Hersch, 13–31. Paris: Beauchesne, 1976. Noms propres. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976. Translated as Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. “La pensée de l’être et la question de l’autre.” Critique 34, no. 369 (1978): 187–97. “La proximité.” Archives de philosophie 34 (1971): 373–91. “Questions et réponses.” Le nouveau commerce 36–37 (1977): 61–86. 1980s L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1982. Translated as Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Translated by Gary D. Mole. London: Continuum, 2007. “Beyond Intentionality.” In Philosophy in France Today, edited by Alan Montefiore. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin, 100–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Lévinas. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. De Dieu qui vient à l’idée. Paris: J. Vrin, 1982. Translated as Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. “De la sensibilité.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 46, no. 3 (1984): 409–17. “Entretiens Emmanuel Lévinas—François Poirié.” In Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtesvous? edited by Francois Poirié, 61–136. Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987.

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Éthique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982. Hors sujet. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987. Translated as Outside the Subject. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993. “Philosophie, justice et amour: Entretien avec Emmanuel Lévinas.” Esprit 80–81, nos. 8–9 (1983): 8–17. “La proximité éthique.” Spirales: Journal de culture international, no. 18 (1982): 55. La Révélation. Brussels: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1984. “Sur l’idée de l’infini en nous.” In La passion de la raison: Hommage à Ferdinand Alquié, edited by Jean-Luc Marion and Jean Deprun, 49–52. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983. 1990s Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Dieu, la mort, et le temps. Edited by Jacques Rolland. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993. Translated as God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991. Translated as Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Les imprévus de l’histoire. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994. Translated as Unforeseen History. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: Athlone Press, 1994. “Jean Wahl: Neither Having nor Being.” In Outside the Subject, translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1990): 62–71. “Socialité et argent.” In Emmanuel Lévinas, edited by Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour, 106–12. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1991. “Transcendance et hauteur.” In Liberté et commandement, 49–100. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1994. 2000s “Ethics of the Infinite.” In Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Richard Kearney, 65–84. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas. Vol. 1, Carnets de captivité suivi de Écrits sur la captivité et Notes philosophiques divers. Edited by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2009.



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Œuvres complètes d’Emmanuel Lévinas. Vol. 2, Parole et silence et autres conférences inédites au Collège philosophique. Edited by Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier. Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2009. “Séjour de jeunesse auprès de Husserl 1928–1929.” In Positivité et transcendance: Suivi de Lévinas et la phénoménologie, edited by Jean-Luc Marion, 1–8. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. Works of Paul Ricœur Archives Ricœur, Fonds Ricœur —Bibliothèque de l’IPT – Paris, Inventaire. Parcours de la reconnaissance. Autour des œuvres (2001–2005). 1930s “Notes sur les rapports de la philosophe et du christianisme.” Le semeur 38, no. 9 (1936): 541–57. 1940s “Le Chrétien et la civilisation occidentale.” Le christianisme social, no. 5 (1946): 423–37. “La crise de la démocratie et de la conscience chrétienne.” Le christianisme social, no. 4 (1947): 320–33. “Dimensions d’une recherche commune.” Esprit, no. 151 (1948): 837–46. Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophe du mystère et philosophe du paradoxe. Paris: Éditions du temps présent, 1947. “Husserl et le sens de l’histoire.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 54 (1949): 280–316. “Propagande et culture.” L’unité française: Cahiers d’études de la Fédération des Cercles Jeunes France, no. 1 (1941): 54–59. “Le renouvellement du problème de la philosophie chrétienne par les philosophies de l’existence.” In Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne, 43–67. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. and Mikel Dufrenne. Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947. 1950s “Analyses et problèmes dans Ideen II de Husserl.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 56, no. 4 (1951): 357–94. “Les aventures de l’état et la tâche des chrétiens.” Le christianisme social, nos. 6–7 (1958): 452–63. “Discerner pour agir.” Le semeur 48, nos. 7–8 (1950): 431–52. Histoire et vérité, 3rd ed. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955. Translated as History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965.

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Index

affect, affectivity, 75–81, 83, 86, 90, 127 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 12–13, 42 Alquié, Ferdinand, 30 Anerkennung, 2, 11, 18, 66, 67; see also recognition anonymity, anonymous, 1, 2, 20, 39, 40, 60, 123, 124–25; see also nonrecognition appropriation, 105–6, 107, 137 assimilation, 13, 42, 45n12, 47, 52 Augustine, 87, 91, 96, 114–15 Barth, Karl, 15–16, 97, 98, 100–103, 106–7, 112, 134–35; French reception of, 15–16, 100–101 being, 21–31, 36, 39, 70–72, 103–4, 107, 125; beyond, 29–30; economy of, 27–28, 62, 136; see also ontology Bible, 50–51, 97, 102–4, 109, 110–11; see also Scripture Brunschvicg, Léon, 3 Bultmann, Rudolf, 16, 106–9, 135

Calvin, John, 91, 110–11 capability, capable, 66, 86–87, 89–93, 115, 121–22, 130, 132–33, 136 causation, cause, 47, 74–75 character, 77–78 chosen, chosenness, 26, 52, 54, 56–57, 62, 66, 93, 129, 136; see also election church, 96, 101–2, 108–10, 113–15, 121, 122; Catholic, 109–10; Confessing, 16; French Reformed, 113n63; role of the, 93, 96, 101 cognition, 21, 26–28, 36, 39–40, 43–44, 48–49, 58, 61, 62, 81, 82–83, 85, 86, 126–27; ethical, 29–34, 36; naturalistic, 21–23, 73; phenomenological, 24–26; see also knowledge Cohen, Hermann, 12n42 communication, 71–72, 107 community, 14, 43, 49, 51, 58, 60–61, 96, 101–2, 105, 134 Confession of Faith, 115 consciousness, 4, 22–23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 34, 40, 57, 82–83, 125–26; false,

155

156

105–7; intentional, 24–25, 28, 31, 33–36, 126; unhappy, 4–5, 10, 88, 133 covenant, 60 creation, 41, 117–21 culture, 100–101, 108 decision, 74–76 demystification, 105–7 demythologization, 105–7 Descartes, René, 29, 30, 33–36, 85 desire, 10, 28, 35, 77–79, 88, 118, 129–30, 136 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 16, 95 discrimination, 1, 2, 125; see also misrecognition disrespect, 88, 128 distanciation, 105, 107–8 doctrine, 41, 43, 49, 54, 56–59, 96, 109, 113–16, 121, 134–35; see also dogma dogma, 46, 108; see also doctrine Dreyfus affair, 1, 13, 42 duty, 75, 118; see also obligation, responsibility

Index

eschatology, 91, 112–13, 119 esteem, 79–80, 114, 119; self-, 63, 92, 119, 132 evil, 83, 96, 114–16, 121 exegesis, 14, 50–51; see also hermeneutics exile, 40, 51, 53, 56, 58, 62–63 existential, existentialism, 4, 5–11, 65–66, 67–74, 80–81, 83–84, 86, 93, 107–9, 111–12, 124, 126 Existenz, 9, 68, 71–72; struggle for, 71–72, 81 experience, 4, 6, 10, 34, 36, 51–52, 58, 75, 97–98, 104–5, 112; ethico– religious, 48, 51, 53–54, 56–58, 62, 134; naturalistic, 23, 34; phenomenological, 33–34, 57–58; religious, 104–5

fact(s), 21–23, 26, 28, 32–33, 36, 69–71, 73, 125–26 faith, 58, 99, 100–101, 105, 107, 112, 116, 117, 119–20; articles of, 115 fallibility, fallible, 66, 76–77, 80, 87, 89–93, 113, 115, 126–27, 130, 131–33, 136 Ebeling, Gerhard, 95–96, 108–10, 116, fear, 91, 132 122, 134 feeling, 40, 58, 62, 66, 75, 77–81, 83, École Normale Israélite Orientale 129, 136 (ENIO), 2, 14, 42, Ferry, Jean-Marc, 67, 71 ego cogito, 34–35 freedom, 27, 52–53, 69, 70, 72–73, egoism, egoistic, 27–28, 40, 48, 62, 63, 74–77, 80–81, 86–87, 89–90, 93, 87–88, 90, 119, 129 115–16, 118, 126, 130 election, 40, 51–54, 56–58, 60, 61, Frei, Hans, 97 134 Freud, Sigmund, 106 empathy (Einfühlung), 82; see also sympathy Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 16, 95, 96n2 empiricism, empiricist, 21n8, 24, generosity, 89 32–33, 70–72, 75, 78, 80–81, 85, Gifford Lectures, 84, 99 86, 118, 126–27, 129, 134; see also gift, 89–90, 92, 117, 119–21, 131 naturalism Gilkey, Langdon, 98 Enlightenment, 42, 45, 54, 135; post-, given, 25, 33–34, 79, 119 122, 137 glory, 80, 127



Index 157

God, 31, 56, 58, 62, 102, 112, 116, 119, 121–22; Word of, 96, 100, 101–4, 106, 108, 110–11, 117, 121, 122, 135 Golden Rule, 119 grace, 112, 115–16

idealism, 5, 70, 72, 112 identification, identify, 2, 28, 36, 39, 85–86, 133 identity, 133; Jewish, 2, 13–14, 42, 46, 49, 51–55, 57–58, 60–61, 63; Protestant, 15; religious, 15, 20, 97, 123 imagination, 77–78 happiness, 75, 77–78, 118 impression, 22–24, 31, 33 Hegel, G. W. F., 3n3, 19, 39, 51, 53, incarnate, incarnation, 74, 119–20 62, 72, 130; concept of Anerkennung, individuate, individuation, 26, 35, 36, 2, 11, 18, 66, 67; early works at Jena, 39–40, 57–58, 60, 61–62, 66, 93, 4–5, 18, 88; French reception of, 1, 129, 131, 134 2–6, 39, 43, 65, 123–24, Lévinas’ infallibility, 109 reception of, 6–7, 19–20, 26, 28, infinite, 29–31, 36, 39–40, 41, 56, 62, 36–39; Phenomenology of Spirit, 4–5, 77–78, 81, 89–90, 91, 130, 132, 135 8, 96n2; Ricœur’s reception of, 8–11, Institut protestant de théologie, 15 65–67, 82, 83, 87–88 institution, institutionalize, 38, 39, 40, Heidegger, Martin, 16, 55–56, 95, 52–53, 60, 62–63, 90–93, 96, 102, 96n2 121, 122, 123, 129, 130–33, 137 Hering, Jean, 6–7, 10, 22, 55 intentionality, 7, 24–25, 32–34, 49, 83 hermeneutics, 11, 16, 68, 86, 95–98, intersubjective, intersubjectivity, 4, 7–8, 99, 102, 103–11, 118, 121, 122, 26, 68, 79, 83, 89, 135 134–35; see also exegesis intuition, 7, 32, 34 history, 38, 40, 45, 58, 61, 70, 72, involuntary, 72–77, 81, 83, 86, 89, 92, 80, 106, 108–9, 114, 120, 126, 93, 127, 130 131; church, 108–11, 116, 121–22; Israel, 52–53, 57, 60, 108 Hegel’s view of, 4, 51, 53; Jewish, 13, 51–53, 56, 57–58, 61–63; world, Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 17 51–53, 58–59, 63, 70 Jaspers, Karl, 8–9, 11, 66, 67, 68–74, Hobbes, Thomas, 87–88, 90, 91, 128, 80–81, 85, 87, 111–12, 126–27 132 Jesus, 97, 104, 107, 112; as Christ, Honneth, Axel, 67, 83, 88, 90, 128–30, 100–101, 103, 108–9, 112, 118; 136 historical, 103 honor, 79–80; mania for, 79; passion Judaism, 12, 13–14, 42–63, 132, for, 80, 87, 90, 92, 127, 132 134, 136; academic, 46; essence of, hope, 63, 89, 117–19, 129 46, 47, 49; future of, 13, 42, 50; humanism, 117; Christian, 100, 120; modern, 13–14, 42–44, 48–49, 61; Jewish, 54, 58 premodern, 11, 43, 49–50, 54, 61, Husserl, Edmund, 5–11, 17, 20, 22, 134; sources of, 2, 11, 14, 43, 46–47, 24–26, 28, 31–36, 39–40, 43, 44, 49–58, 60–61; science of, 12, 43–63, 55, 57, 62, 65–68, 73, 81–85, 87, 134 125–27, 129 justice, 39, 59, 91–92, 121–22, 135 Hyppolite, Jean, 5, 8n24, 65, 123 justification, 116

158

Index

Kant, Immanuel, 33, 34–35, 75, 78n45, 79–80, 82–83, 85, 96, 113–18 kerygma, 104, 106–8, 117–19 Kierkegaard, Søren, 12 knowledge, 13, 23–24, 26, 28, 31, 48–49, 58, 85–86, 126, 127; practical, 77–78; theoretical, 77–78, 81; see also cognition Kojève, Alexandre, 3–4, 5, 8, 26, 65, 123 Koyré, Alexandre, 3–4, 5, 8, 26, 123 language, 16, 58, 96, 114, 135; ordinary, 84; religious, 102, 104–5, 107, 113, 117, 119 langue, 102–3 law, 39, 59, 60, 63, 75, 78n45, 111, 114 Lindbeck, George, 97, 98, 102, 104–5 linguistics, 68, 102–3, 105 Luther, Martin, 109–10 Manicheanism, 114 Marcel, Gabriel, 9n30, 17, 67n9, 68n12, 69 Marion, Jean-Luc, 20n5 Marx, Karl, 106 master-slave, 4, 5, 10 masters of suspicion, 106 Maury, Pierre, 2, 15, 100 Mauss, Marcel, 89 Mehl, Roger, 2, 15, 100, 101n18 Messiah, messianism, 59–63, 107 metaphysics, 109–10, 114 method, 23, 28, 39, 40, 43, 47, 62, 72, 73, 76, 80, 85, 86, 126–27; historical, 49, 101; phenomenological, 24, 35, 38, 54, 55, 73–74, 126, 131, 136; scientific, 46, 47, 125–27, 135; theological, 96, 111–13, 116–17, 120 misrecognition, 1, 18, 39–40, 89, 123,

124, 125, 131, 132, 133; see also discrimination Moltmann, Jürgen, 16, 95, 118 motivation, motive, 74–76, 81, 84, 88, 89, 92, 99, 129, 132; moral, 66, 75, 88 Mounier, Emmanuel, 69 multiculturalism, 67, 133, 135 myth, mythological, 96, 105–7, 113, 117, 122, 135, 136–37 narrative, 51, 96, 97, 104, 110, 111, 113, 117, 120, 122, 135, 136–37 nature, 23, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76–77, 80–81, 114, 118, 126; science of (Naturwissenschaft), 69–70; state of, 37, 87–88 naturalism, naturalistic, 21–23, 85–86; critique of, 22–26, 28, 32–34, 39–40, 48, 55, 72–73, 75, 81, 112, 125–27, 134; see also empiricism New Testament, 106–8; see also Bible; Scripture Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106 nonrecognition, 1, 18, 39, 123, 124, 125, 131, 132; see also anonymity obligation, 62, 75, 81, 89, 118; see also duty; responsibility ontology, 27, 40, 62–63, 129, 133; beyond, 28–29, 56 Otto, Rudolf, 12, 97 pardon, 92, 117, 120–21 parole, 102–3, 108, 109, 117; le procès de la, 95, 108; see also Word passion(s), 77, 78–81, 87, 90, 92, 127, 132, 133, 136 passive, passivity, 22, 24, 31, 33, 34, 40, 52–53, 57, 58, 61–62, 74, 127, 129; see also suffering peace, 59, 89–90, 130, 136; states of, 87, 93, 130



Index 159

Peiffer, Gabrielle, 6–7 Pelagianism, 113–14 perception, 22–23, 35 persecution, 51, 53, 57, 61, 132; see also suffering person, 38–39, 59–60, 75, 77–79, 82–83, 85–86, 126–27, 129–30, 131–32 phenomenology, 5–11, 14, 24–28, 32–33, 36, 39–40, 41, 43, 49, 55–58, 61–62, 87, 95–96, 124, 125–27, 134–36; existential, 66–68, 73–76, 82–84, 89, 93 philology, 46, 47 politics, 37–40, 51–53, 57–58, 59–61, 63, 79, 81, 90–92, 93, 120–22, 130–33, 135–36 positivism, 70, 72 power, 27–28, 49, 63, 71, 77, 78, 91, 115, 121, 132; will to, 38 Pradines, Maurice, 7, 10, 21–22, 32 principle(s), 20, 38, 75, 83, 102, 115, 118, 125–27, 129; principle of all, 125–27 proclamation, 96, 98, 103, 104, 108, 110–11, 113–15, 117, 122, 131, 135 project, 74 prophecy, prophet, 40, 41, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58 punishment, 92, 121 realism, 53, 61, 91, 121; metaphysical, 109–10 reason, 38, 43, 45, 116, 118 reciprocity, 18, 79, 89, 122, 133 recognition; claims for, 88, 133; desire for, 40, 63, 71, 73, 79–81, 87, 90, 127, 129, 133; good of, 39, 63, 123, 125, 128–37; Hegel’s concept of, 2, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 18–19, 20, 26, 36, 66, 82, 83, 87–88, 123–24; moral grammar of, 83, 88, 128–30, 136; perverse passion for, 80, 133, 136;

politics of, 15, 20, 37, 39, 42, 59, 67, 90, 92, 117, 120, 128, 130–35; struggle for, 4, 10, 19, 26–28, 36, 62–63, 66, 68, 71–72, 81, 82, 83, 87–90, 93, 128–30, 133, 135–36 reduction, 20n5, 24, 25, 35, 36, 59, 87, 93, 129, 130 reference, 85, 102, 104 Reformation, 109 relic, 109–10 religion, 6n8, 11, 44, 46, 48–49, 52, 55–56, 60, 62, 115–18, 133–35; critique of, 106–7; cultural-linguistic model of, 97, 104; essence of, 55, 58; experiential-expressivist model of, 97–98, 104; philosophy of, 41, 55 respect, 74, 75, 77–79, 82–83, 86, 88, 90, 119 responsibility, 26, 36, 39–40, 52–54, 56–58, 61–62, 66, 93, 115, 129, 134; see also duty; obligation revelation, 41, 51, 101, 104, 109 Revolution, French, 12, 13, 44; 1848, 13, 15, 42, 44 rights of man, 12, 13, 15, 42 Rosenzeig, Franz, 12n42, 50 salvation, 115–16 sanctification, 116–17, 119–20 Scheler, Max, 82–83 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 97, 101 science, 21–23, 28, 46, 47, 55, 56, 69–70, 72–74, 106, 125–26, 134 Scripture, 45–46, 101–3, 106, 108–10, 113, 117, 120; see also Bible; New Testament sensation, sensibility, 7, 21–26, 29–36, 39–40, 57, 61–62, 93, 126–27, 129 sin, 111–22 sola fide, 109 solipsism, solipsistic, 25–28, 33, 48, 62, 87 spirit, 4, 39, 51, 70, 130; Holy, 116,

160

Index

120; science of (Geisteswissenschaft), 69–70 state, 53, 59–60, 62, 91, 121; legitimacy of, 37; liberal, 39, 131; role of, 39, 91–92, 130–31; totalitarian, 38–39, 131 structuralism, 89, 102–3 subject, subjectivity, 22–23, 27, 29–30, 31, 33–36, 66, 70–74, 93, 102, 104, 128–29; subject-object, 33–34 suffering, 40, 51–53, 57–58, 61–62, 83; see also passive, passivity symbol, 89, 90, 96, 98, 104, 106, 107, 111, 113–20, 122, 131, 135–37 sympathy (Mitfühlung), 82–83, 88; see also empathy Talmud, 2, 14, 42, 46, 48, 50, 60 theology, 2, 11, 16, 58, 95–103, 110–13, 117–18, 122, 134, 137; Chicago school of, 97–98; dogmatic, 48; liberal, 2, 16, 19, 97, 101; natural, 99; philosophical, 99; postliberal, 97–98; Reformed, 100; Yale school of, 97–98, 101 Tillich, Paul, 99n12 Torah, 13, 46, 60, 117 Tracy, David, 97–98 tradition, 14, 16, 106, 124, 133–37; Christian, 14–15, 96, 100, 108–9, 111–14, 116–17, 120, 122, 134; Jewish, 11, 14, 41–43, 46, 49, 51–52, 54, 57, 61, 96, 134; rabbinic, 46, 49 transcendental aesthetic, 34 transcendental apperception, 34

trust, 91, 132 Université de Strasbourg, 6–7, 9, 14n51, 15, 17, 21, 32, 42, 55, 65; Faculty of Protestant Theology, 6, 15, 55 University of Chicago, 86, 99n12 value, 38, 66, 73, 75–76, 81, 89, 92, 132 vanity, 80, 87, 92, 127, 132 Vienna lectures, 84, 86–88, 90, 131 violence, 27–28, 51–53, 58, 62–63, 91, 122, 132 Visser ’t Hooft, W. A., 2 voluntary, 72–77, 81, 86, 89–90, 93, 127, 130 Wahl, Jean, 3–9, 17, 26, 30, 65, 68–69, 123–24 will, 35, 72, 74–77, 81, 86–87, 113– 16, 118, 127, 132–33; empirical, 65, 81, 87, 90, 93, 129, 131; philosophy of the, 68, 74, 86, 87, 93, 113; pure, 65, 75–76, 87, 90, 93, 98 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 12, 16, 43–46, 134 Word, 98, 100, 102–3, 106, 108–11, 117; process of the, 96, 103, 108, 110–11, 113, 116–17, 122, 134; theology of the, 113; see also parole Wortgeschehen, 95, 108, 110 worth, 40, 62–63, 77, 79–80 Zunz, Leopold, 45