PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTHERN AFRICA 2010 CONFERENCE PAPER CANDESS KOSTOPOULOS New adventures in thinking1: Paul Ricoeurs philosophy

of imagination as a stimulation of action towards liberation

1. Introduction In the past few decades imagination, as a philosophical category or concept denoting subjective agency and accountability, has increasingly become obscured in Western thought (Anderson, 2001; Kearney, 1991). In the wake of this eclipse a number of contemporary thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo, Julia Kristeva, and JeanFranois Lyotard have, to greater or lesser extents, attempted specifically postmodern accounts of imagination (Kearney, 1991:170-209). Few contemporary philosophers have, however, produced such a sustained and meticulous reflection on imagination as did Paul Ricoeur; and it may even be argued that imagination forms the ultimate agenda of his vast and seemingly divergent project (Kearney, 1991:135). Paradoxically though, the concept of imagination remains, to a large extent, under-researched in studies on Ricoeur; and most recent contributions to a contemporary account of imagination subsequently fail to profit from his pivotal research. In this paper I will, therefore, give a critical exposition of Ricoeurs philosophy of imagination, in order to: (1) argue that imagination is the key concept underpinning Ricoeurs philosophical vise of a liberating hermeneutics of praxis; (2) and to point out how his philosophy of imagination can contribute towards a viable contemporary account of imagination. 2. Three themes in Ricoeurs project Paul Ricoeurs vast and divergent philosophical oeuvre, brought to a close by his death in 2005, often conveys the impression, at first glance, of an enormous forest one could readily get lost in (Jervolino, 1990:9). Yet, his project actually follows very coherent lines of development, one of which is often singled out as the central theme of his thought, namely: his philosophical anthropology (De Visscher, 2005:12; Klemm, 1983:45; Madison, 1996:75). Although the destiny of the idea of subjectivity
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Ricoeur as quoted by Domenico Jervolino in The cogito and hermeneutics: the question of the subject in Ricoeur, p. 134.

is, by his own admission (Ricoeur, 1990:xi), the recurring problem addressed by his work, two other important features combine to produce the coherence of his work, namely: method and vision. According to Ricoeur (1990:xi-xiii) these three themes together give coherence to his thought; and when reflecting on the conceptual role played by imagination in his philosophy, one must therefore continually keep in mind that imagination is tied up with all three of the mentioned themes. It is, namely, an integral part of what makes us human; central to Ricoeurs dialectic method of phenomenological hermeneutics; and, most importantly, a fundamental condition of his vision or vise, which he (1990:xi) describes as the elaboration of a hermeneutics of human praxis within the horizon of a poetics of freedom. One cannot, however, reflect on all three themes at once; and therefore I will start from his philosophical method, since the various methodological shifts he affects throughout his work are easily readable instances of deeper-lying conceptual developments in his philosophy. 3. Imagination and Ricoeurs phenomenological hermeneutics Ricoeur begins his own project with an attempt to reveal mans structures or fundamental possibilities by means of a phenomenological reduction. Although he dissociates his method, from the outset, from Husserls transcendental reduction, he is nevertheless still concerned, at first, with the elucidation of essential meanings, resulting from of a Wesensschau or direct and immediate understanding by means of a phenomenological reduction. The most immediate Wesensschau for Ricoeur is the revelation of the human situation as the reciprocity of the involuntary and the voluntary (Ricoeur, 1966:4), where all that is involuntary lacks meaning apart from its relationship to voluntary will. Although the centrality of the cogito, understood as the unifying function of the voluntary will or the I will, is in marked contrast to Ricoeurs later disavowal of the philosophies of the cogito, the beginnings of his vision of selfhood as open to the Other, and his subsequent turn away from a pure phenomenology is already visible. Ricoeurs volitional reorientation of the Husserlian concept of intentionality underscores volition as intention par excellence; and by reformulating the cogito in terms of an I can, thereby placing the intentionality of consciousness in a context of what can and cannot be willed, Ricoeur opens the entire intentional thrust of consciousness to that which is other-than-cogito. Having opened consciousness up in this way, Ricoeur can introduce the socalled mystery of existence into his thought, and emphasize the interpretive quality

of the relation between the phenomenology of essential structures and the mystery of existence. His subsequent turn to hermeneutics is predicated on this initial move out of the sterile circle of the selfsame. Ricoeur, however, never abandons phenomenology for hermeneutics, but instead proposes a graft of these disciplines, resulting in a unique method: the dialectic of distanciation and belonging, or the dialectic of phenomenological distance and hermeneutical understanding, as Henry Venema (2000:37) aptly re-names it. This dialectic allows Ricoeur to steer a careful course between the extremes of complete domination of meaning by consciousness and the domination of consciousness by meaning. Here imagination plays an all important role in Ricoeurs thought; it provides the connecting matrix of activity by virtue of which his philosophical method both presupposes and is presupposed by his ontological assumptions (Venema, 2000:36). By employing a critical and creative combination of Husserls imaginative variations and Kants distinction between reproductive and productive imagination, Ricoeur is able to formulate a theory in which imagination is understood as a decentred meaning-receiving meaning-creating collection of activities. For Ricoeur, the most fruitful way to ascertain the working of imagination is through a properly hermeneutic account of the works of imagination, of which the semantic innovation central to metaphoric utterance is paramount (Kearney, 1991:139). 4. Ricoeurs theory of imagination Because metaphoric utterances involve, not a deviating use of nouns, but a deviating use of predicates, it is ruled by predicative impertinence, as Ricoeur (1991:124) calls the clash produced between different semantic fields by the use of bizarre predicates. In order to respond to this challenge, we produce a new predicative pertinence, which is the metaphor. It is, Ricoeur (1991:124) writes, in the moment of the emergence of a new meaning from the ruins of literal predication that imagination offers its specific mediation. The imagination is thus the apperception of pertinence within impertinence, or a predicative assimilation which enables a specific seeing as an imaging competence generated in and through language. The works of imagination are works in the strong sense implied by the labour connotations of the word; and imagination itself is not a weakened form of perception, but the activity of seeing something as something else. In order to see as the imagination must do two seemingly opposed things: it must suspend the real and it must refer to the real. Here, Ricoeur makes the

most of his semantic reorientation of imagination by introducing the idea of splitreference. According to this principle, the neutralizing function of imagination with regard to the real is but the negative condition for the release of a second-order referential power (Ricoeur, 2007:174). What is abolished, according to Ricoeur (2007:175), is only the reference of ordinary discourse applied to objects which respond to our first-order interest in manipulation and control; this abolishment allows a second-order reference in which our belonging to the life-world and our ontological ties to other beings and to being is allowed to be said. A new reference-effect is thus produced by the imaginations double valence with respect to reference, namely the power of works of the imagination to re-describe reality (Ricoeur, 2007:175). It is this power which also comes to figure prominently in the social imagination, where the imaginative practices of ideology and utopia become the primary instances of the imaginations figuring and its re-description of the sociopolitical landscape. These imaginative practises display a double ambiguity, one arising from the polarity between the two practices and one arising from the polarity within each of them, which consist of the opposition between a positive and constructive side to a negative and destructive side in each (Ricoeur, 2007:181). Both polarities are structural features of the imaginative core which constitutes both ideology and utopia before simply being obstacles to overcome. According to Ricoeur (2007:182), ideology functions in a way similar to a picture of a societal/political grouping, or as an instance of the reproductive imagination; and its specific pathology is manifested in a reinforcement and repetition of social ties in situations that are after-the-fact. Utopia functions in a way similar to fiction, or as an instance of the productive imagination; and its specific pathology is degeneration of viable imaginative variations of society into a mad dream following the logic of schizophrenia. This means that the crisscrossing of utopia and ideology is the result of two fundamental directions of the social imaginary; and that you cannot have one without the other, for even the most reduplicative ideology produces a gap or distance for imaginative variation and even the most erratic form of utopia remains a desperate effort to represent humanity as it fundamentally is. This is why, writes Ricoeur (2007:186), the tension between utopia and ideology is insurmountable.

5. Concluding remarks This, off course, brings us back to Ricoeurs philosophical vision. When he outlines his vision as a hermeneutics of praxis, he admits that this vision addresses the deepest-lying motivations of his work, namely its issuance in an ethical and political

reflection capable of stimulating action towards liberation (Ricoeur, 1990:xiii). By positing the seemingly disparate phenomena of ideology and utopia within in the same conceptual framework, namely that of the social imagination, Ricoeur gives imagination a fundamental place in his own understanding of politics and liberation. If ideology and utopia are so intertwined that the tension between them cannot be surmounted, liberation is, however, either impossible or only possible on the very grounds of the relationship between these two instances of the social imaginary. Ricoeur (2007:187) takes the second option when he says that we reach the sphere of the social only through these two figures of false consciousness. We take possession of the creative imagination, writes Ricoeur (2007:187), only in a critical relation with these two figures of false consciousness; which means, in effect, that ideology must be critiqued from the utopian vantage-point of nowhere whilst the folly of utopia must be cured by the healthy integrative functions of ideology. According to Ricoeur (1986:314) the reflective judgement, in the Kantian sense of the word, of appropriateness or of what is fitting in a given situation is the only way to solve to problems inherent in the social imagination. For although we cannot get out of the circle of ideology and utopia, the judgement of appropriateness may help transform this circle into a spiral. Ricoeur is thus repeating, at the level of the political, some the initial tensions he started with and which can be summarily referred to as tensions resulting from variations between the extremes of complete domination of meaning by consciousness and the domination of consciousness by meaning. In the same way as the imaginative core of Ricoeurs methodology is revealed in the dialectic of distanciation and belonging, so the imagination is again revealed as a meaningreceiving meaning-creating linguistic activity which allows us to see as in the dialectic of ideology and utopia. It is also a revealed as part and parcel of the socalled judgement of appropriateness needed to transform a vicious circle into a healthy spiral. Although his theory of imagination can contribute in various ways to a general contemporary philosophy of imagination, the restricted scope of this paper only allows us to highlight, which seems to me, his potentially most important contribution: a concept of imagination with is divested of both idealist and romantic excess, but still entails sufficient scope for subjective agency and responsibility. Whereas other contemporary accounts of imagination have often struggled to rid imagination of the connotation of false consciousness without either adopting a strict ontological separation between the imaginary and the real or abolishing this distinction all together, Ricoeur has succeeded in proving one possible, and to my mind, viable

way in which the distinctiveness of the imaginary and the real can be preserved without lapsing into either a dichotomy or a confusion. In this way, he has truly made the seemingly outdated concept of imagination available again for new adventures of thinking.

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