Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THE PERPLEXED
DAVID PELLAUER
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continuum
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations
1
2
3
4
5
6
Reading Ricoeur
Freedom and Nature
Ricoeur's Turn to Hermeneutics
The Fullness of Language and Figurative Discourse
Selfhood and Personal Identity
Memory, Recognition, Practical Wisdom
Notes
Bibliography/Further Reading
Index
viii
1
.. 5
il'42
64
90
109
139
145
151
ABBREVIATIONS
C&C
CI
CR
FM
FN
FP
FTA
HHS
HT
IT
J
LLP
MHF
OAA
RJ
RM
SE
T&N
CHAPTER 1
READING RICOEUR
may not know much, if anything, about it, but who do have some
commitment to philosophical inquiry. It can also serve as a contribution to understanding and better appropriating his thought for
those who are already familiar with it to some degree. Because there
is so much material to consider, my perspective is not critical but
rather expository. One could call it a philosophical narrative, given
Ricoeur's own contributions to the theory of narrative discourse. As
such, it proceeds in a basically chronological fashion to present an
overview of his major writings in terms of a few central themes that
run through them and tie them together.
Of course, any exposition must reflect a perspective and some
interpretive choices. Mine reflect decisions about what is centrally
important to understanding his thought and its contribution to philosophy. Such an approach must also inevitably leave things out.
Ricoeur, for example, was very knowledgeable about the writings of
the major figures in history of philosophy and returned to these
figures again and again both in his teaching and in his writing. But I
have chosen to ignore his detailed discussions of other philosophers
except insofar as they contribute to seeing how his work unfolds over
time. I realize that this means there really is not sufficient discussion
here of how and why the history of philosophy was important to
Ricoeur - and how this contributed to his own uIiderstanding of
what he is about as a philosopher. This is a question, therefore, that
any serious reader of Ricoeur who decides to pursue his work
further will consider. I believe what I have said about it here will be
sufficient to show why this is so, but also that it was not necessary to
do so in greater detail here.
Ricoeur was a philosopher who was involved in the world beyond
professional philosophy to a unique degree. Scholars outside the
philosophy guild across a wide variety of disciplines have perceived
his work as important. Besides philosophers, it has been discussed
by historians, literary critics, legal theorists and jurists, biblical
exegetes and theologians, who see in it resources that can help them
in their own efforts. They see that he often addresses challenges to
their work that call for a response on their part, while, at the same
time, they recognize how seriously he takes their fields and has incorporated them into his own project. I have not had the space to pursue
these influences here or to discuss how Ricoeur is read by scholars
in other fields. I do hope, however, that those coming at Ricoeur
from other disciplines will find the account of his work presented
2
READING RICOEUR
CHAPTER 2
it, which it never fully absorbs or exhausts. Philosophy does have its
autonomy in that it chooses its starting point, the question from
which it begins. But this question already is situated and motivated
by something problematic outside of - and prior to - all philosophy:
the non-philosophical or perhaps life, being, or reality. Philosophy
arises therefore in response to this non-philosophical reality that
precedes it, seeking to make it intelligible in ways that are adequate
to what is at issue concerning our experience of it. This idea of
an autonomy without independence for philosophy runs throughout Ricoeur's work, setting limits to what philosophy can achieve
without ever denigrating or denying its achievements. Ricoeur's is
an understanding of philosophy, therefore, that implies that philosophical questions are always capable of being reopened, and also
that there may be unrealized resources in earlier philosophers' works
that can be taken up and developed further. This is one reason why
he will reject all talk about an end of philosophy in the sense of philosophy having exhausted itself. It also accounts for the tension
between continuity and discontinuity that runs through his later
constructive formulations, particularly his theory of narrative discourse but also his 'little ethics' and his philosophical anthropology
of the capable human being.
We need also to note that there are a number of assumptions and
influences operative in the way Ricoeur poses his initial philosophical question and project. These can be taken as sources of his thought
without taking away from the originality of his starting point. First,
drawing on the philosophies of Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger
and Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur sees that the subject-object model that has
characterized philosophical thinking since Descartes is problematic.
It does not finally make sense of our experience of ourselves, others,
or the world we live and act in. This subject-object model presents
itself as a theory of knowledge, but Ricoeur sees that it is based on
what really is a metaphysical model in which a subject is related to an
object through being conscious of that object and representing this
object to itself as subject. This model is metaphysical because it presupposes that the subject and the object in question, or the two of
them in relation to each other, are and must be real. Descartes'
famous discovery of the cogito - our lived experience of our inability to deny our own existence - thus involves both epistemological
and metaphysical aspects. The epistemological aspect is seen in that
fact that in the cogito I know something for certain, that I exist, hence
6
Ricoeur's first step is to consider deciding in distinction from voluntary motion. What separates them is not a temporal but a conceptual interval. What we decide upon is a project, although this project
also needs to be put to the test of whether it can be or is carried out.
In this sense, deciding is a capacity, a notion that will playa much
wider role in Ricoeur's late work where he will move beyond the
question of freedom to consider the self as the capable human being
in a much broader sense, albeit one still closely linked to the question of action. For what makes an action voluntary and characterizes any decision, is that it includes an intention 'that could be
affirmed after the fact as a potential project of a postponed action'
(FN, 41). What is fundamentally at stake here therefore is the claim
that the project might not be carried out, but in any case it 'appears
to be within the power of its author' As such, a decision can be
14
conceived of as both a thought (of what is to be done) and ajudgement (to do it). A decision, therefore, is like an event in the sense that
it comes down to taking a position - so be it! It is not a whim or a
command, but is the act of someone, hence a personal act. 'Hence
its existential import is considerable: it is 1 who project and do something in projecting or doing something' (FN, 48). Next, a decision
looks to, projects a future. This means that it is characterized by a
certain expectation, not so much of the yet to come as of the future
perfect, of what will have come. As such the future and time
in general - is a condition of action, even though our attempt to
describe the voluntary slices it into different, timeless moments.
Finally, as already stated, a decision is a capability. Here Ricoeur
adopts the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's argument
that our most basic lived experience is that of a lived conviction that
'I can' This way of speaking not only expresses this capability; it
links it to something more basic than itself. Even at this most ~sic
level, though, Ricoeur notes that there is a reflexive aspect to every
decision: 1 make up my own mind to do something. 5 This is not something 1 observe, but something 1 do, hence it stands at the limit of the
subject-object model, although it carries within itself 'a vague awareness of the subject pole' (FN, 60), which is why we can reflect upon"
it. One way we do this is through language. We can think and say, 'it
is I who
At the same time, we can also see that not all decisions
need to be explicitly reflected upon or brought to language, although
we may do that after the fact when we realize what we have done. 6
This phenomenology of deciding leads next to the question of
motivation. 'There are no decisions without motives' (FN, 66). The
obvious question is whether such motives are causes. Ricoeur holds
that in terms of their basic meaning they are not. Causes can be
known and understood prior to their effects. This is not true for
motives. That is, a motive only makes sense, only has a meaning in
relation to a decision. We cannot even begin to talk about a motive
apart from some decision, and any decision makes possible questions about its possible motives. Hence their relation is reciprocal. As
Ricoeur puts it, a motive 'determines the will only as the will determines itself' (FN, 67). Motives, therefore, operate more on the level
of meaning than of natural causes. They can thus be said to provide
a basis for, a way to justify, to legitimate decisions. Ricoeur's conclusion is that all that we can say if the question is 'are motives at all
like causes?' is that they incline without compelling.
15
playa role here, and there is no reason to think that this is necessarily a completely rational process, although the process may involve
deliberation. Its conclusion in any case is a decision, even when it is
one not to decide.
Decisions can be a source of novelty. 'The event of choice always
permits two readings: on the one hand, it is tied to the preceding
examination whose end or, more exactly, resolution it is; on the other
hand, it genuinely inaugurates the project as a simple intention of
future action' (FN, 164). Paradoxically, it is our attending to the
process of reaching a decision that resolves this process by identifying it. This is why we can never fully reconcile the two readings just
referred to. We can see this once we recognize that, on the one side,
hesitation plays with different possibilities and reasons for acting,
yet these reasons only become operative once our choice is made,
without that choice being able to be conceived of as completely
unmotivated. Therefore there is good reason to introduce a ce.rtain
indetermination into our definition of freedom, although this s6:ould
not be thought of as an indetermination of indifference. The problem
is how we are to make sense of the claim that to decide and to choose
and to be undetermined are one and the same thing. This is where
the eidetic tips over into the existential and calls for a different
approach, one that Ricoeur announced at the time as a poetics of the
will which could only come after passing through the pro blem of the
fault, of evil. All he will say about it at this point is that if something
like an ontology, a theory of the nature of ultimate reality, is operative here, it is a regional one, not one that can claim to be universally
exhaustive.
Decisions, then, do not make up the whole of voluntary action;
they are just one aspect of them. They have to be put to the test of
being carried out if the power of decision is itself a capacity to set
things in motion. Again, Ricoeur's phenomenological approach will
try to isolate this phenomenon as much as possible in order to
capture something like its essence. Most acts are done as soon as we
think of them, but action can also be delayed. But if a project is
never attempted there is something mistaken about calling it action.
In this sense, there is a basic value operative in action in that willed
acts refer to something that ought-to-be. But as stated, 'moving and
deciding can
be distinguished only in abstraction: the project
anticipates the action and the action tests the project' (FN, 202). A
basic insight here is that this level again brings the body into play,
19
them, although we can reflect upon them. To put it another way, they
are not things that we observe, unlike objects of perception. Here,
Ricoeur again sees something that resists any reduction to disembodied consciousness. 'Cartesian dualism cannot be overcome as
long as we assign thought (project, idea, motive, image, etc.) to subjectivity and movement to objectivity.' The question therefore is how
to reintroduce the body into the cogito 'as a whole and to recover the
fundamental certitude of being incarnate, of being in a corporeal situation' (FN, 217). This is a question that will involve language, a
language where thought and movement would be homogeneous
categories.
Here the idea of a diagnostic approach comes into play. Applying
it to both Gestalt and Behaviourist psychology, Ricoeur argues that
they both end up trying to objectify the ego in just the way he is
arguing finally cannot be done. Yet they do suggest a helpful way of
thinking about voluntary motion and embodiment as a 'dramatic'
relationship in that they show that 'every voluntary hold on the b~dy
repossesses the body's involuntary usage' (FN, 227). By this, Ricoeur
means that voluntary motion is not simply given; it is something
we learn to do through something like a dialogue with our body.
He seeks to confirm this by considering three relevant examples: preformed skills, emotions and habits.
Preformed skills (such as our ability to stand upright) refer to
something prior to reflexes but neither are they instincts. Rather they
refer to 'a primitive pattern of behavior of our body in relation to
perceived objects' (FN, 232). They regulate movement but do not
produce it. Next, emotions presuppose a more or less implicit motivation that precedes and sustains them. As such they give an added
physical aspect to already conscious ends, one that points to a
nascent movement. Hence they are more basic than acquired habits.
Ricoeur further suggests that we can identify what he calls basic emotional attitudes such as wonder or shock, or joy and sorrow, which
can be elaborated by our affective imagination and culminate in
desire, thereby 'echoing and amplifying in the body a rapid, implicit
value judgment' (FN, 256). As such, the phenomenology of emotions
suggests that 'for the idea of a spontaneity of consciousness
we
have to substitute the idea of a "passion" of the soul from the fact of
the body' (FN, 275) wherever there is a possible action. This, in turn,
implies that 'willing only moves on the condition of being moved'
(FN, 276). Consciousness, therefore, can already be seen to have the
21
of finitude' We suffer from our finitude when we realize that we represent only one perspective on the world and values. Similarly, we can
suffer from having to make choices, which not only emphasize our
particularity but also remove us from other possibilities. With this
comes the second moment, the 'sorrow of formlessness' There is
something about us that we do not choose yet that affects us, something we can try to give form to by calling it the unconscious, 'the
spontaneous power of unrecognized tendencies' in us (FN, 449).12
Finally, there is the 'sorrow of contingency' I did not choose to come
into existence, to live. As Heidegger says, we are 'thrown' into existence and into the world, and with it into a space and time that
extends between birth and death. But, unlike Heidegger, Ricoeur does
not define existence in terms of its being toward death. Yes, death represents 'an irrecusable necessity', but 'this necessity cannot be
deduced from any characteristic of existence. Contingency tells me
only that I am not a necessary being whose contradiction would imply
a self-contradiction; it allows me to conclude at most that I can notbe one day, that I can die - for what must begin can end - but not that
I must die' (FN, 458, original emphasis). Once the idea that I will die
is gained, however, the sorrow, and perhaps also the anticipation,
increases. Yet freedom responds to this 'no' of our existential condition with the 'no' of refusal.
This is most clearly seen in its most exaggerated forms: a wish for
totality, for complete self-transparency, and in our desire to say that
we in fact posit ourselves in positing our consciousness. But 'any
ideal derivation of consciousness is a refusal of its concrete condition' (FN, 465, original emphasis) - freedom's no, in other words,
can turn into a form of vanity. Ricoeur's conclusion is that consent
is not a way of refusing necessity but rather of transcending it, particularly as regards evil, through a poetic response rooted in hope.
Ricoeur considers two opposed, imperfect forms of alleged consent
here to give some content to this idea of hope: one is Stoicism, which
is an effort at detachment rather than conciliation; the other Ricoeur
calls Orphism or the hyperbolic consent represented by Nietzsche
and much of Rilke's poetry, a kind of dancing over the abyss. Hope
lies between these polar extremes of exile and confusion and sustains
us in that it allows us to hope that we at least are on the way to conciliation.
Ricoeur's conclusion to this first of his projected three volumes
therefore is that there is ultimately something radically paradoxical
24
about human freedom: 'in reality each moment of freedom - deciding, moving, consenting - unites action and passion, initiative and
receptivity, according to a different intentional mode' (FN, 483). The
paradox lies not between these moments but between the forms of
initiative and receptivity that characterize each of them. What it
reveals is that our freedom is 'only human' and that we can understand it only in terms of certain limit concepts that function like regulative, not constitutive ideas. First of all, our freedom is not creative
like divine freedom; we are not God. Secondly, ours is a motivated
freedom but not in an exhaustive, transparent, absolutely rational
way. Thirdly, it is an incarnate freedom, albeit one capable of graceful acts. Finally, there is the idea of a fully human freedom, one that
would not be limited by the idea of a given fixed character, hence of
a particular finite form. 'These limit concepts have no other function
here than to help us to understand
the condition of a will which
is reciprocal with an involuntary' (FN, 486); as such they still belong
to the level of an attempted description of lived subjectivity. wWat
they teach us is that human freedom is not divine; it does not posit
itself because it is not Transcendence: 'to will is not to create'
INTRODUCING THE FAULT
show that this concept 'designates a characteristic of man's existence' (FM, 2). Something important happens here as regards
Ricoeur's overall philosophy, although it may not have been clear to
the first readers of this work. His philosophical problem is beginning
to expand beyond the problem of human freedom in relation
to nature toward a philosophical anthropology, a philosophical
account of what it is to be human, albeit one that still keeps its focus
on human agency more than on cognition. This philosophical
anthropology will later become the question of what Ricoeur will
call the capable human being who is a social being and lives in a
world organized by social institutions. Here, though, this anthropological understanding of the human condition gets expressed in
terms of what Ricoeur cans the 'pathetique de misere' that characterizes the human condition as one in which a human being does not
completely coincide with him- or herself. This formula is not easy to
translate into English. By 'pathetique' Ricoeur means that what is at
issue is something we undergo as much as we bring it about, som~
thing we suffer, jf you will, where the 'que' ending again conveys
something like a structural condition beyond the more feelingoriented tone of simply saying 'pathos' 'Misere' in turn could as well
have been translated as impoverishment, destitution or wretchedness rather than calqued as 'misery', for Ricoeur's argument will be
that there is a kind of disproportion to human existence, a disproportion that can best be expressed by the tension between our particularity and our ability to transcend our particular points of view.
In Cartesian terms, it is a tension between the finite and the infinite
as expressed by the particularity of our perception and the apparent
universality of what we label as knowledge.
Ricoeur's case depends on showing that human beings exist as
'bringing about mediations between all the modalities and all the
levels of reality' within themselves and outside themselves (FM, 3),
where this can best be demonstrated by drawing not on Descartes
but on Kant, Hegel and Husser! to make use of what they respectively offer as the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the
dialectic between certainty and truth, and the dialectic of intention
and intuition. In choosing this approach, Ricoeur takes a certain
distance from other philosophers of that day whom he sees as focusing only on the finite aspect of human existence. His question
instead is whether the kind of transcendence humans can accomplish is limited to transcendence of their finitude in reaching things
27
outside them in the world or whether it might not also relate to what
he meant to present as the Transcendence that was to answer
the problem of the Fault in the never published third volume of his
Freedom and Nature project. All he will propose at this point,
though, is the suggestion that the infinitude that humans can reach
in their everyday lives may not exhaust the idea of the infinite as it
relates to this other sense of transcendence.
If we were to characterize Fallible Man in relation to the history of
philosophy, it stands closest to the kind of transcendental style of
reflection associated with Kant. That is, what is at issue is finding the
conditions of possibility that make the Fault possible - the possible
(and apparently inevitable) misuse of human freedom for wrong or
destructive ends. But Fallible Man is not merely an example of transcendental reflection in a Kantian mode, for Ricoeur sees that he will
also need to fill in the gap between the lived pathos of actual existence and the more abstract transcendental concept of the idea of fallibility. It is a question, in other words, of attempting to reconcile our
feeling (or what Kant calls 'sensibility') and our thought, a limit that
is never quite reached but that Ricoeur seeks to make intelligible.
An important aspect in how he proceeds to do this will characterize much of his subsequent work. This is that he begins by drawing
on the history of philosophy, particularly Plato and Pascal, in order
to justify his own reference to the destitution of the human condition
rather than simply asserting or assuming it. By showing that this
basic starting point is already implicit in the history of philosophy
and continuous with it, he means to justify taking up the challenge
of understanding fallibility through the kind of pure reflection that
characterizes philosophy, where such reflection will at least be able to
move beyond the vagueness of the idea of 'impoverishment' to identify its distinctive forms.
Such reflection has to begin from the side of the things we experience, not from introspection. It leads to insight into the specific disproportion that characterizes our knowledge of our lived condition.
What it discovers is iliat our awareness of this is the product of a
synthesis of our finite perspective on the world and 'the infinitude
characteristic of determining, of saying, and intending' (FM, 19).
Ricoeur means by this that while we see things only from a certain
point of view, we think them from what Thomas Nagel has more
recently called a 'view from nowhere' The known object is an object
for anyone at any place at any time. But as already stated, this anyone
28
including the values of others, leading finally to the idea of humanity as something that we embody, albeit as seen from just one point
of view. Our character, too, then is something never fully seen in
itself. It is something that we 'read' and refer to indirectly, partly by
relating it to that feeling of otherness that makes us experience ourselves as different from everyone else. Our character therefore is
experienced both as something given, again as something like fate,
but also as something liberating in that it moves us to act. At the
limit, it refers to the very fact that we exist and thus is not the result
of something we do, a fact that we grasp through our interaction
with others.
Happiness is the contrary term of the dialectic operative here. It
refers to the final aim of our concern for totality, for being a whole
person. As such, it serves as the horizon of our every point of view
and our every act. It is not just the sum of our acts, however; it is
intended to be a whole that is more than merely the sum of its parts,
The question is whether such happiness is or can be ever achieved~
reintroducing the question of disproportion, which is indicated by
the fact that our character always keeps us from realizing the entire
range of human possibility: 'Everything human
ideas, beliefs,
values, signs, works, tools, institutions - is within my reach only in
accordance with the finite perspective of an absolutely individual
form of life' (FM, 67). Happiness, therefore, is our aim, and sometimes, maybe often, we feel we are on our way to it, but it is not
certain that we ever get beyond this feeling of being oriented to it.
What then can bring about the synthesis of character and happiness?
Ricoeur answers, again following Kant, that it is the selfthat is aimed
at through this synthesis, a self that is not necessarily the self we experience. This self is the person that we represent to ourselves as a
project to be realized, one whose actions would be congruent with its
existence. And it is on the basis of the idea of this person that we can
derive the idea of respect, both for ourselves and for others, but this
is a fragile synthesis in that it is difficult to carry out in practice. In
part, this is due to the fact that recognizing the idea of us as persons
worthy of respect rightly leads to self-esteem, but self-esteem when
combined with desire can overreach itself and destroy the synthesis
of character and happiness it is intended to unite. Furthermore, there
is always the possibility of discord within the affective synthesis that
seeks to reconcile character and happiness, a discord whose possibility has to be sought in the tension between our disposition toward
31
and aspiration for wholeness, without giving into what Kant called
a theory of radical evil as something constitutive of the human condition. This understanding of evil was something Kant himself
rejected, but it left him having to say that reason could only recognize
the origin of evil as inscrutable.
Ricoeur's next question is to consider just when the disproportion
of human existence becomes 'pathetic', the moment when the
concept of fallibility links up with the lived experience of an impoverished or wretched existence that does not actually fulfil its promise.
As a first approximation to this moment, he returns to the connection between knowing and feeling as it involves degrees of feeling,
where feeling itself, like knowledge, is intentional in that it refers to
something other than itself. Whereas knowledge sets up a cleavage
between the knowing subject and the known object, feeling 'restores
our complicity with the world, our inherence in and belonging to it,
something more profound than all polarity and duality' (FM, 87).
Philosophical reflection can talk about this, but never quite really
capture it experientially or 'know' it except indirectly, leading many
philosophers mistakenly to reduce feeling to something merely subjective or at best having to do with 'values' that themselves are subjective and not objective. Feeling, instead, is like knowing, but also
different from it, pointing to something like an inner conflict within
ourselves. Here is where degrees of feeling come into play, running
from love of the world through need to desire and introducing the
possible mistake of confusing pleasure with happiness. But pleasure is always finite, whereas the perfection of happiness is infinite
because it is meant to be all encompassing. But that we can mistake
pleasure for happiness, prefer it, already points to the possibility of
a bad choice and through it to evil. Indeed, while it may look as
though the origin of evil may lie more on the affective than on the
cognitive level, it is intimately intertwined with both of them.
Still it is feeling that best reveals fragility as always potentially
conflictual in that 'with feeling, the polemical duality of subjectivity
replies to the solid synthesis of objectivity' (FM, 107). This conflict
takes place between subjectivity and objectivity in what Ricoeur
calls the self 'constituted as different from natural beings and other
selves' (ibid.), where this difference is more fundamental and prior
to any self-preference that may make the self wicked. He therefore
seeks to characterize the boundary region that lies between this primordial innocent state and actual existence in terms of the classical
32
The reality of the fault therefore does not follow from its possibility.
Yet no one would deny that it exists. To account for this fact Ricoeur
again has to introduce another shift in method in his next book in
his Freedom and Nature project: The Symbolism of Evil. This change
in method will have a profound influence and a lasting effect on his
subsequent work. Initially, it will provide a way for him to take up
the problem of the fault starting from those myths and symbols by
which people speak of it through an effort to surprise the transition
to its existence 'in the act by "re-enacting" in ourselves the confession that the religious consciousness makes of it' (SE, 3). This new
33
This, too, will have important consequences for his later work when
he turns from symbols per se to a more general reflection on language and its implications for his philosophical anthropology in that
this implies limits to any philosophical approach that confines itself
to considering language only in terms of what can be expressed as
abstract univocal logical propositions.
The symbolics of stain, sin and guilt repeats the movement from
the outside of the cosmic level to the more inward oneiric and imaginative levels of symbols associated with the Fault. For example, we
can say that defilement is more like something that happens to people
than something they deliberately bring about, which is why it resists
reflection regarding why it occurs: 'What resists reflection is the
idea of a quaSi-material something that infects as a sort of filth, that
harms by invisible properties, and that nevertheless works in the
manner of a force in the field of our undividedly psychic and corporeal existence' (SE, 25-26). Defilement therefore represents a
stage in which no clear demarcation has yet been drawn between evil
and misfortune, but it does lead to a feeling of terror or dread associated with the questions why did this happen and what, if anything,
can be done about it? If there is any felt sense of responsibility, it is
more closely tied to the sense of being somehow the victim of an act
of vengeance than the perpetrator of a misdeed,' We. can even think
of this as implying a lesser sense of moral worthiness on the victim's
part than will characterize a more developed guilty conscience. This
is why symbols of defilement are most often associated with purification rituals and the symbolism of cleansing or washing, lustration,
and a vocabulary of purity and impurity.
Yet we can also see the beginnings of a move to confession at this
level, a shift marked by the suspicion that one must have done something to bring about such defilement. In turn, this inchoate confession leads to the demand for a just punishment, perhaps through
something approximating a law, even if it is still one of retribution.
What is at stake here is a demand for restoration to a prior integrity
that has been violated by the defilement, something that already
points to the possible hope that such integrity can be restored.
'Stain' in this sense is the first schema of evil.
With sin we move from the ideas of the pure and the impure to
those of piety and justice in that the symbolics of sin conveys the
idea of breaking a rule or law and doing so 'before God' This is still
a religious transgression more than an ethical one; 'it is not the
36
the final volume of his Freedom and Nature project, the one that was
going to deal with Transcendence as the answer to the Fault. He had
come to see that more work had to be done before he could undertake such a work, much more work, as we shall see.
Here, though, he confines himself to noting that in the modern
world we face the threat of emptying language of all meaning either
by radically formalizing it into a purely abstract combinatory system
or by submitting it to such radical criticism that nothing can any
more be said to mean anything at all. Beyond this desert of criticism,
he maintains, 'we wish to be called again' (SE, 349) and this, he
argues, calls for an approach 'that respects the original enigma of the
symbols, that lets itself be taught by them, but that, beginning from
them, promotes the meaning, forms the meaning in the full responsibility of autonomous thought' (SE, 349-50). This will be possible
because these symbols are already part of language and hence not
radically alien to philosophical thought. What is more, all symbolic
language already includes an element of interpretation, hence s&mething like an incipient hermeneutical theory, one that is capable of
exercising a critical function yet that still recognizes the myth as
myth and the symbol as symbol. Our immediacy of belief has been
lost, but we can hope to hear what they have to say again through
interpretation and thereby aim at a second naivete in and through
the very process of reflection and criticism. l7 To do this, however,
will call for the development of a philosophical hermeneutics - and
we can already see where Ricoeur's subsequent works will come
from. For the moment, though, this appears as a wager on his part,
a wager that in this way we can obtain a better understanding of
human existence and of the bond between human being and the
being of all beings if we follow the indications of symbolic thought.
This will not be exactly equivalent to a Kantian transcendental
deduction of the symbol as making possible a domain of objectivity nor will it be a confirmation of the Cartesian cogito. In fact, it
will lead Ricoeur to call for a second Copernican revolution back to
the object and beyond it, following Kant's own turn to the subject,
in that it will show that the cogito is within being, and not vice versa.
The task will be to elaborate existential concepts, 'that is to say, not
only structures of reflection but structures of existence' (SE, 356-57)
that payoff in increased understanding.
41
CHAPTER 3
we are to talk about interpretation critically is a theory of interpretation. But what Freud shows is that this theory is internally at variance with itself, depending on whether the interpreter approaches
the object of interpretation from a perspective of trust that something meaningful is already expressed there or from one of suspicion
that the meaning, if there is one, lies elsewhere and is only available
through a kind of unmasking approach. 'According to the one pole,
hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of
a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation, or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other
pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion'
(FP, 27). What Ricoeur begins to do therefore is to formulate a
theory of interpretation that will be able to incorporate both these
approaches even while admitting the tension between them. This is
why he proposes that his own theory will have to take up a double
motivation, one that can be characterized as a willingness to suspect,
but also as a willingness to listen. He says this because, as he had
already indicated in The Symbolism of Evil, he is convinced that symbolic language is ultimately rooted in life and is not simply empty or
meaningless language. Freud, Ricoeur sees, stands closer to the pole
of suspicion. Indeed, Freud can be classed with the other two great
'masters of suspicion': Marx and Nietzsche. All three, Ricoeur suggests, can be read as saying things do not mean what they appear to
mean and that this is a lesson we have to learn if we are to get beyond
every form of false consciousness.
What is more, their emphasis on recognizing necessity, once false
consciousness is removed, assuming it can be removed, poses a crisis
for reflective philosophy. They all challenge Descartes' cogito argument in that they call into question the status of the subject pole
within it, by finally reducing subjectivity itself to being nothing more
than a myth or the product of some more basic reality. Ricoeur, on
the contrary, thinks that Descartes was correct in positing the question of the self as the starting point of modern philosophy - but
notice how his language has already begun to shift from 'subject'
to 'self'; we are on the way to Oneself as Another. Ricoeur adds,
however, that this self is not the object of an intuition. It is reachable only through reflection, but reflection that is now itself a process
of interpretation, a process of interpretation that begins from the
object, not from the subject. This is why he says, 'The first truth - I
am, I think - remains as abstract and empty as it is invincible; it has
46
to be "mediated" by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that objectify it' (FP, 43). Because of this, reflection cannot
be simply a question for an epistemological theory meant to justify
science or even, with Kant, duty. It has to be understood as a reappropriation of our very effort to exist, hence as a way beyond
'forgetfulness' and we are pointed toward Ricoeur's late work,
Memory, History, Forgetting. Such reflection does have an ethical
aspect in that it leads from alienation to freedom, but the ethics
here involves more than morality considered as a set of normative
rules - as Ricoeur will argue in greater detail in Oneself as Another
and in The Just and Reflections on the Just.
One more problem has to be acknowledged in light of this commitment to reflection. It is the question whether such a philosophy,
with its commitment to the goal of universality, like all philosophy,
can proceed on the basis of contingent cultural productions and the
kind of equivocal meanings found in symbols, especially when such
an undertaking brings into play the conflict between the plurality of
rival interpretations found in the modern world. The price to pay for
such a hermeneutic philosophy, Ricoeur sees, will be that we have to
give up any immediate claim to universality in favour of the fusion
of contingency and universality to be found in the movement of
interpretation. He also recognizes that the question whether the conflict of interpretations can finally be settled remains an open one. A
critical question in evaluating his contributions to a hermeneutic
philosophy, therefore, will be whether we must conclude that the
conflict of intepretations must always remain unsettled. Or does he
give us the tools to deal with this question? One suggestion is already
present: reflection, Ricoeur holds, finally does not argue, particularly when it comes to choosing its starting point. Rather, like
Kantian transcendental philosophy, it seeks to state the conditions
of possibility whereby empirical consciousness can seek to approximate, if not be made equal to, univocal conceptual thought. But for
Ricoeur this effort is always based on something closer to testimony
and conviction than to some presupposed standard of logical validity. Testimony to one's basic convictions bears witness to a source of
meaning beyond oneself, where this self is not the immediate subject
of reflection discovered in the cogito. This fundamental conviction
is what holds together the hermeneutics of suspicion and that of a
willingness to listen, to trust meaning as given. Both ask: 'Can the
dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of
47
unconscious itself without finally being able to set aside the affects or
feelings that accompany the ideas or representations that seek to
express these hidden forces. That 'psychoanalysis never confronts one
with bare forces, but always with forces in search of meaning' (FP,
151), Ricoeur concludes, means that instinct turns out to be something like a limit concept meant to make possible the intelligibility of
Freud's theory of the intersection of the economic and the hermeneutic in the psyche, a conjunction that the Freudian metapsychology
cannot give up without ceasing to be psychoanalysis.
Ricoeur turns next to Freud's discussions of culture, art, morality
and religion, which he sees as being based on an analogical extension of the interpretation of dreams and neuroses. Hence the validity of these interpretations depends not so much on the cultural
objects considered as on the point of view adopted and the operative concepts used. Yet the application of the metapsychological
model to these new objects does transform Freud's basic model in
that it makes possible the transition to the topography of the ego tid
and superego, which introduces a new economy. Rather than considering everything in relation to the libido alone, 'here the libido is
subject to something other than itself, to a demand for renunciation
that creates a new economic situation' (FP, 156), one that no longer
is solipsistic but rather interpersonal. And this, in turn, calls for a
radical recasting of the theory of instincts. One clear example of this
is the fact that even Freud himself acknowledges that works of art
do not simply look back to infancy. There is a prospective aspect to
them, to the point that they can also be considered as the symbols
of a personal synthesis by the artist rather than as a regressive
symbol of unresolved conflicts. If such is the case, Ricoeur asks,
'could it be the true meaning of sublimation is to promote new
meanings by mobilizing old energies initially invested in archaic
figures?' (FP, 175). If so, the limits of psychoanalysis are not fixed.
And if these limits can be transgressed indefinitely, then it will only
be what Freud himself thinks justifies psychoanalysis that limits it,
namely, his 'decision to recognize in the phenomena of culture only
what falls under an economics of desire and resistances' (FP, 176).
But, at the same time, the door is open to other readings of culture
than this purely reductive one, readings whose task will be 'not so
much to unmask the repressed and the agency of repression to show
what lies behind the masks, as to set free the interplay of references
between signs' (FP, 177).
49
meaning beyond themselves, one constituted through a work of interpretation. Consciousness, it turns out, must become hermeneutic
consciousness.
It does so when the archeological moment of reflection turns into
a teleological one. At the same time, the opposition between these
two kinds of hermeneutics can be resolved if we can show that this
archeology and teleology stand in a necessary dialectical relationship. Ricoeur seeks to show that this is the case by invoking Hegel's
phenomenology of spirit. It is not a question of simply juxtaposing
Freud and Hegel or of some easy eclecticism, but of an 'exegesis of
consciousness' that 'would consist in a progression through all the
spheres of meaning that a given consciousness must encounter and
appropriate in order to reflect itself as a self, a human, adult, conscious self' (FP, 463). This is a self that does not figure in the
Freudian or any other topography of the psyche, nor does it appear
among the vicissitudes of instincts that constitute the theme of
Freud's economics. It is the outcome of a genesis from lower t~
higher that goes beyond this economic level. Still, to link Freud to
Hegel Ricoeur must also argue that there is an element of Freud in
Hegel and vice versa. He does so by arguing that they share a
common problematic. 'The teleology of self-consciousness does not
reveal simply that life is surpassed by self-consciousness; it also
reveals that life and desire, as initial positing, primal affirmation,
immediate expansion, are forever unsurpassable. At the very heart
of self-consciousness, life is that obscure density that selfconsciousness, in its advance, reveals behind itself as the source of
the very first differentiation of the self' (FP, 469). This genesis
reveals itself in the dialectic of recognition, first of oneself, then of
other selves. In this dialectic, desire is mediated, but not eradicated.
Next, Ricoeur argues that such a teleology is already present in
Freud, that his psychoanalysis cannot be understood apart from this
corresponding synthesis. This can be seen in the operative concepts
Freud makes use of (such as identification) as well as in those he thematizes (such as object loss), as well as in certain unresolved problems such as the idea of sublimation. In a word, Freud's own theory
is already dialectical in that analysis does not always lead to a regression to a more primitive stage but is ultimately meant to lead to
something like an education of desire, as when Freud famously says,
'Where id was, there shall ego be.' Ricoeur locates this intersection
between Freud's archeology and teleology in the mixed texture of
53
evil prevents the reflection that works within this circle from ever
turning into absolute knowledge. Recalling what he had said about
the relationship between symbols and thought in The Symbolism of
Evil, Ricoeur now says, 'All symbols give rise to thought, but the
symbols of evil show in an exemplary way that there is always more
in myths and symbols than in all of our philosophy, and that a philosophical interpretation of symbols will never become absolute
knowledge' (FP, 527). This is why the Hegelian framework he is
drawing on must be tempered by a return to Kant, 'that is to say,
from a dissolution of the problem of evil in dialectic to the recognition of the emergence of evil as something inscrutable' (ibid.). But
the symbolism of evil overcome is also one of reconciliation in a
sense that transcends the consolation offered by psychoanalysis.
It speaks of an 'in spite of' that makes room for hope for something more than just consolation, 'thanks to' the transcendent other
grasped in faith.
It is important to see that Ricoeur offers something more thal1 a
mere apology for religious faith here. If faith is thinkable, it must be
a faith that can undergo the process of demystification of false consciousness called for by Freud's reductive hermeneutics. 5 Idols must
die so that symbols can live.
THROUGH STRUCTURALISM TO HERMENEUTICS
Saussure's work was important in that it was taken as demonstrating how linguistics as a discipline, which to that point had largely
been a historical study of different languages and their development
over time, could become 'scientific' It could do so by focusing on an
atemporal 'object' of inquiry that not only would account for the
existence of language but would also permit objective investigation
of its constitutive structures. This is why the label structuralism
came to be applied by those who sought to build on Saussure's work.
What they did was to try to extend Saussure's structuralism to other
disciplines, especially in the social sciences. In a word, they thought
that if Saussure had shown that linguistics could become a genuine
science by adopting a structural approach, this could also be a way
for the other social sciences to attain such status.
Basically, what Saussure argued was that language should be considered in terms of its basic structure, which he called langue, ignoring its use in speech, which he labelled parole. Langue was to be
considered synchronically, that is, by bracketing any reference to
time in order to isolate the structure making up langue as a 'sign
system' What was particularly innovative about what Saussure had
to say about such a system was that it is the differences between the
signs within the system that are fundamental, not the signs themselves. In other words, the signs have no meaning ~xcept in relation
to all the other signs through their differences from them. These
signs themselves are then further analysable into an internal structure combining a signifier and a signified, a distinction that would
have important consequences for the post-structuralist movements
in that it did not require the idea of an external reference beyond the
sign system.
Saussure's ideas seemed to be confirmed by subsequent work in
linguistics applied to the distinctive sounds that make up any language. For any given language, these phonemes were shown to be
limited in number and they could be arranged in terms of oppositions (such as voiced vs. unvoiced), strengthening the idea of a structure that could be defined in terms of its relations, not its elements.
This work came to the attention of the French anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss, who had been trained in philosophy but turned
to anthropology when he moved to Brazil to teach. He spent the
period of the Second World War in New York where he encountered
the Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson who introduced him to
these new developments. Levi-Strauss was subsequently to apply
56
Ricoeur asks: 'who says this is the structure of language (or of any
semiotic system)?' In a way that anticipates his own subsequent work
on the philosophy of language, what Ricoeur reiterates here is his
basic presupposition that philosophy must always begin from something beyond itself that precedes it. What he now can add is that this
non-philosophical starting point is in some way something that we
already understand, albeit not through an understanding that necessarily has been criticized or even reflected upon, in our use of language, a use that is itself already meaningful, otherwise no questions
can be asked. 10 He therefore also sees that it is necessary to question
Saussure's original distinction between langue and parole, where
only the former can be dealt with scientifically, implying that parole
is ultimately beyond rational consideration. He finds a way to do this
through the work of another linguist, the Sanskrit scholar Emile
Benveniste, who had argued that it is also possible to have a linguistics not only of parole but also of what Benveniste called 'discourse',
where discourse is the use of langue to say something. Hence discourse is not just speech, but already meaningful speech.
We can summarize the way Ricoeur spells out this possibility as
follows. At one extreme, semiotic structures are purely formal closed
systems. They are not even yet anything we can call a language. To
become a language, first at the level of langue, the elements of such
a system, even when defined differentially, have to be considered as a
lexicon, as meaningful words. Construing signs as words, however,
means bringing an already existing interpretation to the structure
considered. It already presupposes the fullness of language as spoken
and understood. Later Ricoeur will see that this point leads to a
general critical point that can be directed against later forms of structuralism when they came to hold that the structures they discovered
were 'deep' or underlying structures that generated the 'surface' phenomena we ordinarily take for granted. This, for Ricoeur, is another
version of the hermeneutics of suspicion in that it claims that
nothing really is what it first appears to be. It is only the surface manifestation of an underlying prior reality. But Ricoeur argues that all
these appeals to deep structures always presuppose what they are
supposed to generate, something that can be demonstrated by
showing that there is something on the surface they really can not
account for but presuppose, namely, change. Deep structures cannot
account for this because static structures only can be transformed
into more static structures, and then only if the function that brings
58
where polysemy reigns and there is nothing beyond the internal relations of the sign system to consider. Discourse, moreover, can be
reflective because it can be used to talk about the language used to
talk about anything whatsoever, just as it can also be used to talk
about things other than itself. Hence new ways of considering
meaning are required at this level, ones not found in structuralism
when it limits itself to semiotic systems. Discourse, finally, always
occurs as a real event in time, unlike the atemporal abstract structures discovered by structuralism. These structures do somehow
endure at least in the sense that they can be identified at any time
(and if they do change, they do so only slowly over time) but events
of discourse pass away. They can even be said to vanish.
Ricoeur's key claim here is that although an event of discourse disappears, if only by becoming past, its meaning may endure. This is
what hermeneutic theory has to make sense of, for if meanings do
endure when the event has passed away, these meanings can be 'taken
up' - appropriated will become the applicable technical term - by new
subjects in new times and new contexts. This possibility of meaning
so enduring, Ricoeur proposes, can be confirmed if we shift our
attention from spoken to written (or what Ricoeur calls inscribed)
discourse. For while the event of speaking vanishes, texts remain and
can be read by anyone who knows how to read. Reading, to be sure,
is not always easy, as can be seen in the case of texts from antiquity,
whether from the Bible or from Greece and Rome, where not only is
the language one that is no longer spoken, but the cultural context
that produced the text in question no longer exists in its original
form. In fact, the need to overcome such historical distance was one
of the motivating factors that led to the development of modern
hermeneutic theory that Ricoeur is drawing on as a resource here. He
already sees, for example, that the need to learn a second language
and sometimes as well the need to produce translations as requirements for overcoming such historical distance is something that suggests that today this hermeneutic theory can be extended to respond
to cultural as well as temporal distance. This is a point his developing hermeneutical theory will come more and more to acknowledge.
At the end of his life, he saw that it also required thinking more about
the role translation plays in achieving such understanding of what is
foreign to us."
But to stay here with the idea of a text as an instance of inscribed
discourse, we can say that Ricoeur was able to make a number of
60
important discoveries. As already stated, the original event of discourse that produces a text disappears, as eventually does its author
and the original audience, and its cultural setting. Yet Ricoeur's
argument is that the discourse a text transmits remains potentially
meaningful if it can still be read. His claim is first of all that such
reading is possible because what the text says has both sense and reference. It both says something meaningful and is about something
beyond itself. Furthermore, we discover this sense and reference, on
the one hand, by recognizing the text's genre, something that we
begin by assuming, then confirm, modify or disconfirm through the
process of reading. On the other hand, since any text as an instance
of some genre is also unique as being just this text, we gain further
insight into the text's sense and reference in relation to this uniqueness, something Ricoeur places under the question of grasping
its style. This is another factor that a theory of reading must also
be able to recognize and incorporate. But, most importantly, as intelligible, a text (and by analogy any instance of discourse) is meningful in that it combines this sense and reference. This broader
meaning is not to be identified with something allegedly in the
author's mind or even with the author's intention in producing the
text. Nor is it what the original audience took the text to mean,
although it is possible to try to rediscover what a text might have
meant to its first audience or to attempt to write a history of reception of the text's meaning as a second-order undertaking. No, what
makes the text meaningful in the first place, giving it both sense and
reference, is what Ricoeur calls the world of the text. This is something the text, so to speak, projects not behind but in front of itself.
Discourse we have said is always about something. What texts are
ultimately about is this 'world' where it is a world that readers can
imagine themselves inhabiting. Hence to understand a text (or any
instance of discourse), for Ricoeur, depends on grasping the world
of a text (or of what is said) as one that I or we can imagine myself
or ourselves inhabiting. But since the'!, (or we) in question differ
over time, so too the meaning of the text as appropriated will differ
in some way from time to time and place to place, without for all that
becoming meaningless. Using an image that Ricoeur takes from
Hans-Georg Gadamer, we can say that these horizons of meaning
overlap or even 'fuse' in the act of understanding what is said, hence
they are not beyond comparison with one another. A text becomes
meaningless only when it can no longer be understood. Note this
61
does not mean that one has to accept this meaning or that it is not
open to critique. The only thing claimed is that criticism always
begins from such a first-order hermeneutical understanding, which
itself requires a capacity to understand and to use language. This is
why we can speak of Ricoeur as taking a deliberate linguistic turn
on the basis of his hermeneutical theory, one that brings questions
about language to the fore.
There is one other important point to note about Ricoeur's move
to consideration of language as discourse. Discourse we have said
first occurs at the level of the sentence. It is not, however, confined
to this level. Instances of discourse can be longer than a single sentence. In such cases they are what Ricoeur calls instances of extended
discourse. The questions of meaning and truth take on new dimensions at this level if we take seriously the fullness of language. That
is, we cannot simply say or assume that the meaning and truth of
extended discourse is simply a conjunction of the meaning and truth
of its individual sentences. This is a basic assumption of analytic
philosophy when it seeks to apply models taken from formal logic to
ordinary language. But because such a method does not acknowledge extended discourse as posing a new problem, like structuralism
it is forced to attempt to generate such discourse from its constitutive elements, its sentences. Ricoeur wants instead to consider the
possibility that the meaning and truth of extended discourse is not
reducible to that of its individual sentences. Rather these take on
new values at the level of extended discourse, if only because they
are parts of a larger, structured whole, which is not simply the sum
of its individual parts. Therefore extended discourse calls for new
methods of interpretation in order to be understood. It is insight
into these new methods of interpretation and the understanding that
they provide that Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the fullness of language
will seek to provide.
Another important consequence of Ricoeur's linguistic turn worth
noting is that the notion of symbol will playa lesser role in his subsequent work, without ever disappearing completely. What will take
its place as central to his reflections will be figurative discourse - uses
of language that cannot be captured by the model of the logical
proposition. One can see this shift occurring in the essays 'The
Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection' and 'The
Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as
Semantic Problem' in The Conflict of Interpretations. Ricoeur's point
62
63
CHAPTER 4
During the same period that Ricoeur was coming to terms with
structuralism and beginning to work out the contours of a workable
hermeneutic theory, he was also looking again at phenomenology,
which had provided the framework for his earlier work. What he
now saw was that phenomenology, too, had to be understood in
terms of hermeneutics and, somewhat more surprisingly, hermeneutics could be shown to have a phenomenological dimension. This
insight led him to what he would now call a hermeneutic phenomenology. His argument for this shift in his thinking is found in the
essay titled 'Phenomenology and Hermeneutics' (FTA, 25-52). His
strategy there is worth noting. For the sake of clarity, he sets out the
contrast between Husserl's project of a transcendental phenomenology and his own program of a hermeneutic phenomenology in
terms of an antithetical comparison and contrast. That is, he sums
up both versions of phenomenology in terms of a set of mutually
opposing theses where one side ultimately carries the day. Then,
having laid out the basic parameters that characterize a hermeneutic phenomenology, he turns to Husserl's own texts to show that such
a modification of Husserl's phenomenology is justified because it is
already implicit in them.
Early on, in his notes to his translation of Husserl's Ideas, Ricocur
had already been critical of Husserl's proposal for an idealistic
version of transcendental phenomenology as a way to refute the
possibility of radical scepticism. For Ricoeur, this solution turned
out to be still enmeshed in the subject-object model in that it made
everything depend on the subject pole. What Husserl claimed to discover was a method that was able to take philosophy to a transcendental field where things appeared to a transcendental subject and
64
where they could be known as what they really are. But Ricoeur saw
that this transcendental subject again was no one because it was any
one as a pure knower. Worse, Husserl's method provided no way to
get back to the world of ordinary lived experience and lived subjectivity. This was because his radical method was said to work so by
setting aside every appeal to our everyday natural attitude through
a reduction that would bracket it and its assumptions about the way
the world really is, opening the way to eventual insight into the true
essence of any phenomena. But following Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur
rejected this claim in that he denied the possibility of a complete
reduction, what today we would call a leap to a 'view from nowhere'
In effect, Ricoeur held that while we can question our experience
we never completely escape the everyday lifeworld from which we
always begin. However, this does not mean completely rejecting phenomenology as a useful descriptive approach that seeks to describe
things as they appear to consciousness or the ways in which we might
be conscious of them. It does mean rejecting any claim that we olin
prove conclusively that such an approach provides an exhaustive
account of lived experience, since as we have already seen from his
critique of structuralism and his longstanding claim about the nonindependence of philosophy, Ricoeur believes that there is always
more to lived experience as temporal than any theory can capture,
even while any such theory always presupposes the surplus of available meaning and the encompassing reality it refers to in attempting
to make sense of our lived experience. Phenomenological descriptions for Ricoeur therefore now turn out themselves to be instances
of interpretation that presuppose the fullness of language and the
finitude of understanding. As such, they also presuppose a dialogical rather than monological understanding of language because
our language is something we first learn from others, however reflective or critical we may become of it later on. A workable theory of
knowledge or of reality therefore will not be one that begins from
the idea of an isolated ego or subject. This means that selfconsciousness must turn out to be a result rather than the starting
point of philosophy.
Ricoeur further develops this move to a hermeneutical model of
understanding through a consideration of the history of hermeneutics in light of his analysis of the model of the text considered in the
previous chapter. He does so without ever developing what could be
called a complete hermeneutic theory, at least not in the sense of a
65
did not find taken up either by structuralism or by the analytic philosophy of language that focused on those uses of language translatable into logical propositions or assertions, where the meaning is
taken to be not only fixed over time but also already known - or at
least already there ready to be discovered. Ricoeur instead focuses
his attention on those cases of discourse where this assumption can
be said not to apply, to instances of live metaphor, for example, but
also beyond such live metaphors, to those forms of extended discourse like history, literature and the Bible that not only can be interpreted as saying something novel but also as making a meaningful
claim to truth.
METAPHOR AS A PRIME CASE OF FIGURATIVE DISCOURSE
We can say that this passage is about 'time as a beggar' or as an alldevouring monster, but obviously that only begins to capture what
is said here - and time in the end is not simply a beggar or a monster.
Later the semantic innovation of some live metaphors will be
absorbed into the dictionary (as with the example of the chair's leg),
but at first while we can paraphrase the metaphor, we cannot simply
translate it without remainder into already existing words. This is why
live metaphors are a source of semantic innovations, ones that can be
identified and reidentified as meaningful. Such metaphors also have
a referential dimension. They say something new about reality. The
kind of resemblance they bear to reality is not simply comparative,
however. Using another metaphor - all theories of metaphor, Ricoeur
sees, eventually make use of metaphor - Ricoeur says that what is at
issue here is a kind of 'iconic augmentation' that is not reducible
simply to being an image. The augmentation that occurs is more like
what happened with the invention of oil paints and the effect they had
on the history of art or with the phonetic alphabet and its constquences for writing. Oil paintings were still pictures, but in a fundamentally different manner than what had preceded them. As Ricoeur
says, using still another metaphor, 'the metaphorical meaning is not
the semantic clash' within the metaphorical predication 'but the new
pertinence that answers its challenge.
The metaphor is what forms
a meaningful self-contradictory statement from a self-destructive selfcontradictory statement' (RM, 194). The ontological resemblance,
therefore, occurs on the semantic plane in such a way that sameness
and difference are operative there at the same time. This resemblance
involves a verbal aspect but also goes beyond it by fusing sound, sense,
the sensible, and even feeling.2 An image, it turns out, is the end of the
metaphorical process, not its beginning. In this way, live metaphor
suspends our ordinary way of referring to reality in favour of a
second-order reference that redescribes reality. But this redescription
is itself always another interpretation of the way things really are.
There is a sense of truth at work here that is itself metaphorical. It
operates as a kind of manifestation rather than as a simple relation of
correspondence or coherence. As a heuristic fiction that can lead to
new understanding, such metaphorical truth may even be said to be
the ground for truth as correspondence or coherence.
Ricoeur's philosophy of metaphor skirts paradox when it concludes that 'there is no other way to do justice to the notion of
metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal)
69
Ricoeur's theory of narrative is one of his more developed and influential contributions to knowledge. It extends over the three volumes
70
thing among others, but as that within which we exist. This time can
be partially understood because it is both a datable and a public
time. As Heidegger had already said in Being and Time, it is on this
basis that we learn to reckon with time. Narrative works here by
introducing mediations between the individual events, incidents or
episodes in the plot and the story taken as a whole. In so doing,
it makes use of a wide range of heterogeneous elements including
agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, reversals, and even
unexpected results. In other words, the plot constitutive of narrative
combines a chronological and a non-chronological dimension into
one meaningful whole by extracting a configuration from a followable succession of events. This configured succession leads finally to
what Frank Kermode has called the sense of an ending where a new
quality of time emerges, a meaningful time that encompasses both
cosmic and lived time in a human time marked by something like a
discordant concordance. There is discordance because what narrative says as such never reduces to simply an atemporal idea, but tl!:re
is concordance because this temporal discord is not ultimately
chaotic. In narrative discourse, therefore, we may find a refigured
time that in the best of cases helps us make better sense of the ordinary everyday time of our lives as well as of its limit situations. These
enhanced understandings of time and human action may themselves
subsequently give rise to new forms of narrative configurations.
What is more, such enhanced understanding may in turn give rise to
better understanding of reality itself as temporal. As Ricoeur puts
it, 'making a narrative re-signifies the world in its temporal dimension, to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action
following the poem's invitation' (T&N, 1:81), where this world and
the action referred to was already signified by language about our
actions at the pre-narrative level. Hence, even if time itself is never
directly observed, it can be narrated, and in being narrated it can be
understood in a practical way.
Having said this about narrative in general, Ricoeur next turns to
consideration of its two major branches: history and fiction, to show
that both are included within this more general understanding of
narrative. He also wants to show how they contribute in their own
way to the configuration and refiguration of time that is at issue in
Time and Narrative.
He makes a number of distinct yet related points in his consideration of history. One such claim is that history in the sense of what the
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be. For this reason, any theory of narrative, like the theory of
metaphor, has at some point to confront the question of truth.
Ricoeur suggests, provocatively, the possibility that just as there is a
truth of history as narrated, so too there can be a truth of fiction
where this is a truth that operates at the level of extended discourse,
not at that of the sentence. This is a truth that is not reducible to the
logical conjunction of the truth values of its individual sentences,
which is why a hermeneutics of the text is required to make sense of
it. To see this further, however, we have to move beyond fiction to the
point where it rejoins history under the larger heading of narrative
discourse.
First, though, Ricoeur has more to say about fiction and its possibilities. He considers, for example, the question whether we might
think that the developments in narrative technique can ever be
exhausted, a question that arises as soon as we recognize they can
change. His reply is that we have no way of conceiving such a thing,
since it would leave us with no coherent way to make further sense
of time. Indeed, 'we have no idea of what a culture would be where
no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things' (T&N 2:28).
Next he turns to newer developments in structuralism where, under
the heading of narratology, it seeks to account for every particular
narrative as the surface manifestation of an underlying deep structure that can be shown to generate this surface structure. This was a
new development in that the goal of structural analysis is no longer
simply to identify structures, but also to relate them in terms of a
basic structure and other ones derived from it. This is again a kind
of hermeneutics of suspicion to Ricoeur's eyes. That is, for narratology, the narrative we first read or hear is not really what we have
to understand if we are to make sense of the story told. That is
rather the deep structure that gives rise to - explains - this story.
Apparently, at the limit, if only we can dig deep enough, there is a
basic structure that generates every narrative as a surface manifestation of this deeper reality. Ricoeur's basic argument against the
leading attempts to develop such a narratology is that at some point
they all invoke or presuppose the surface structure they seek to generate. That is, by starting from the narrative told it may be possible
to postulate underlying structures that help us better understand this
narrative, but we cannot finally make the move in the other direction, starting solely from these deep structures up to the narrative.
This is because all such structures are static. They are unable to
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and that of great political events and power. In the second, the distance between the time of narration and the time narrated is
stretched so that we get a glimpse of an eternal time, that of the
magic mountain which stands above everyday events, but not quite
completely since the story ends with the beginning of what the
reader recognizes as the outbreak of World War I and the hero's
descent from the mountain. Finally, in Proust, we find a story that is
itself a narrative of coming to terms with time by recognizing finally
how to turn it into a story, one that moves from lost and misunderstood time to regained, understood time, from lived to narrated
experience. In none of these cases, however, are the general features
of fiction, and through them of narrative, completely abolished.
'This is why the novel has only made infinitely more complex the
problems of emplotment' (T&N, 2:155). Saying is still a form of
doing, 'even when the saying takes refuge in the voiceless discourse
of a silent thought, which the novelist does not hesitate to narrate'
(T&N,2:156).
Fiction and history next need to be brought together in a theory
that will give equal rights to both forms, something that Ricoeur
seeks to do in the third volume of Time and Narrative. However, fictional narrative is usually richer in the information it gives us about
time than is historical narrative, which itself always also conveys
some such understanding. These fictive understandings of time,
found in both fiction and history, can in turn be related to ways of
being in the world and to human action because they start from
already constituted understandings of the world and action, as these
are found in existing ordinary languages. But, at least in the best
cases, they also go beyond such understanding to the possibility of
new understanding and new meaning not only regarding the world
and human action, but also about time itself without ever exhausting its mystery.
This is why Ricoeur begins his third volume on narrative by
looking at leading philosophical theories of time, in order to show
that in each case they leave something unresolved or give rise to new
problems. It is to these failures of speculative thought that narrative
can provide at least a practical solution. It does so when it succeeds
in talking meaningfully about time, without accounting for it fully.
Narrative does this by taking time as human time, a time that stems
from the interweaving of acting and suffering in the story told. In the
case of history, this human time can be related to historical time, a
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time that mediates between lived and cosmic time by rein scribing
lived time on cosmic time. What fiction contributes are imaginative
variations on these historical and human times, variations that may
generate new narrative techniques that historians in turn will learn
to incorporate into their narratives.
Historical time also draws on an already existing understanding
of what we can call mythic time, which is a form of discourse about
time that says something like 'once
in the beginning
in those
days' But historical time goes beyond this undated and undatable
time by drawing on three conditions of possibility. The first of these
is the calendar. A calendar makes possible an overall scansion of
time by referring different dates to a common zero point or axis usually some important founding event - and by allowing different
periods of time to be ordered in relation to this origin either in terms
of their duration, or as cycles, or as recurring biological or social
rhythms. The calendar therefore is what allows us to say not only
that one event came before or after another event, but also to refate
the narrative present of the voice saying this to both these events in
terms of a common time. This 'now point' of speaking about things
in time, however, is not just any point on the time line; it is a lived
present or the representation of such a lived present, which is why
historical time combines both cosmic and lived time. This lived
present, in turn, may be thought of as a new beginning. As Ricoeur
says, 'If we did not have the phenomenological notion of the
present, as the "today" in terms of which there is a "tomorrow" and
a "yesterday," we would not be able to make any sense of the idea of
a new event that breaks with a previous era, inaugurating a course
of events wholly different from what preceded it' (T&N, 3:107).
The second condition of possibility of historical time is the ideas
of a generation and of a succession of generations. A generation is
what sorts people into contemporaries, predecessors and successors,
while joining them together, adding a note of biological and mortal
time to that of the public time of the calendar, at the same time that
it enriches the possible senses of tradition and innovation already
operative at the level of the calendar. Finally, the idea of historical
time requires the combined notions of archives, documents and
traces, which provide an evidentiary basis for talking about what has
happened in historical time. Archives are deposits of historical documents of every kind that historians make use of in their research,
where these documents are the ultimate means of proof for what
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Before leaving the question of narrative discourse, Ricoeur himself looks back on what he has accomplished. We remember that he
had begun with a thesis that he sought to make intelligible and
acceptable. Now he sees that aporias still remain, even when we say
that 'there can be no thought about time without narrated time'
(T&N, 3:341). The first of these aporias has to do with the just mentioned idea of a narrative identity. Subjects recognize themselves in
the stories they tell about themselves. This is an inevitably circular
relation it would seem, but it may also be one that points to the limits
on the answer narration brings to the questions posed by temporality. For narrative identity is not seamless or completely stable, nor
does it, Ricoeur now acknowledges, exhaust the question of what it
is to be a subject, either as someone who can maintain him- or
herself as a self over and through time or as the possible plural
subject of action of a group or community or political entity. In fact,
such narrative identity usually appeals more to the imagination than
to the will, which is why the question of ethics will have to be
addressed further.
Next, narrative never is able to totalize time completely. It always
works in terms of beginnings and endings, even when the beginning
comes at the end. Thus while historical consciousness can be said to
hold together an awareness of past, present and future, as just stated
it never reduces them to something like Hegel's atemporal absolute
knowledge. Historical consciousness always is starting over again
because it itself is fundamentally a temporal form of understanding and self-understanding. Finally, we must say that time itself is
inscrutable. Every attempt to escape time or to constitute it 'reveals
itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed
by the work of constitution' (T&N, 3:261); it itself always takes place
within time. The sense of being 'in' time at issue here remains problematic, more like a mystery than anything like a problem that can
one day be resolved. It is as if we were inside a gigantic windowless
room that we had never been outside of, of which we have no idea
that there is an outside, or if we do have some such idea, the very
effort to think of it as 'outside' inevitably must lead us back to myth
or some form of poetic language in order to express this. Yet these
limits are also ones that narrative itself tries to explore from the
inside, so to speak. It does so by trying to speak of time's other in
forms that may range from songs of praise to lamentation. It does so,
paradoxically, by confessing its own limitations.
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Ricoeur does not try to expand these reflections on narrative discourse to anything like a general theory of possible types of discourse. Still, we may want to ask, for example, given this theory of
language, how many kinds of discourse can we identify? And what
are their specific characteristics? Ricoeur does, however, say some
things about certain other leading forms of discourse that are worth
noting. We have already noted his few comments on philosophical
discourse, which aims to be conceptual, hence univocal discourse,
language used to say exactly what it intends to say. This would be a
form of discourse that somehow escapes the polysemy of words in
the dictionary, the fact that most words there have more than one
meaning. It would also eliminate the plurivocity of discourse at the
level of the sentence and beyond, the fact that it can be read in more
than one way since the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion is
always a part of the hermeneutical field. But since such philosophical discourse is also the discourse we use to formulate our theory of
discourse, any attempt to theorize about it further will rapidly run
into questions of circularity or of an all-encompassing totality, one
that paradoxically would include itself, something like Hegel's philosophy of absolute knowledge which Ricoeur rejects. We must say
therefore that philosophical discourse for Ricoeur is always incomplete. At best, we can wager that it is on the way to an ideal it can
specify but never quite reach. This may explain why he has so little
to say about it, other than to seek to protect it from attempts to
reduce philosophy to something other than itself while at the same
time not allowing it to overreach itself.
He does say more about two other kinds of discourse. These are
religious discourse and political discourse. Ricoeur admits that he
hears something important and meaningful in the Christian gospel
even while he denies that he is doing anything like Christian philosophy. In part, he draws this line separating his lived faith from philosophy because Christian philosophy had a specific meaning in
France during his youth that he wishes to avoid. In part, this line of
separation reflects his concern to acknowledge and remain within
the bounds of the autonomy of philosophical thinking. As regards
the former point, Christian philosophy in France in the first half of
the twentieth century meant the neo-Thomism associated with the
names of such leading Roman Catholic philosophers as Jacques
85
Songs, for example, this book of what looks originally to have been
a collection of erotic poetry that somehow was included in the biblical canon has been read again and again by individual believers and
mystics as speaking of the relation of the soul to God as well as
being used in communal worship to speak of the relation of the
community to God and of God to the community of faith. In terms
of his hermeneutic theory Ricoeur's essays in this volume show how
such a theory must also be able to incorporate what literary critics
and historians call a theory of reception. Such a theory fits well with
the question of narrative identity that Ricoeur discovers at the end
of Time and Narrative in that religious communities - for Ricoeur,
at least Christianity and Judaism; one could add Islam - define their
identity in relation to the foundational texts they privilege, texts that
they read and reread because these texts tell them who they are by
instructing them to read these very texts, another version of a
hermeneutical circle.
A similar point might be made about foundational political documents like the Magna Carta or the American Declaration of
Independence or national constitutions in the way political societies
use and reuse them. They are read as founding the community that
reads them as having just this foundational function. Ricoeur stops
well short, however, of simply equating political and religious discourse. This is because political discourse for him is always internally open to contestation in ways that originary religious discourse
is not. This is why, in an important lecture, he speaks of the 'fragility'
of political language (Ricoeur 1987). Political language is fragile
first of all because it is more a species of the rhetorical use of language than of poetic language. As such, it aims at persuasion, even
in those cases where it may say that it claims certainty, persuasion
intended to link politics to the plane of human action in general. To
succeed it needs a public space of appearance which itself is not
always assured. Furthermore, there need to be rules that govern discussion in this arena, rules that themselves are always open to challenge, if not to misuse. Political discourse also brings into play the
question of authority, at least in the sense of a distinction between
those able to command and those required to obey, always leaving
open the difficult question what is it that legitimates this authority.
Ricoeur's class lectures on ideology and utopia are directly relevant
here. 5 Ideology has a positive function beyond its negative connotations in that it serves to fill the gap between any claimed authority
88
or legitimacy and its actual basis in any given society. The idea of
utopia is linked to it dialectically in that utopian visions and texts
come from a use of the imagination that pictures a better society
when ideology goes beyond this legitimating function and makes
claims to power for which it has no basis.
But political discourse as a form of rhetorical argumentation is
always fragile for other reasons as well, even when all these conditions are met. There is an insurmountable plurality to politics that
differs from the possible accepted plurality of interpretations that
may characterize religious traditions. In the first place, there are
always arguments about good government at the level of particular
policies or laws and how to implement them. There are also arguments possible about the very idea of what constitutes good
government - a large or small state, centralized or decentralized
authority, an emphasis on social conformity or individual freedoms.
Beyond all this, there can even be arguments about the very idea,of
government itself, arguments, according to Ricoeur, that usulf1ly
come down to qifferences over the idea of what finally constitutes a
good life. Hence, for political discourse conflict is inevitable and
cannot be removed once and for all because the possible conceptions
of government themselves are many and finally not reconcilable
under one overarching concept. And, in the end, all political discourse is a use of language always open to sophistic misuse, a point
that makes plausible Ricoeur's subsequent concern for the idea of
'the just' as a way of extending his own ethical position beyond individuals and small intimate groups to the level of society itself. Before
considering that, however, he first turns to the question of narrative
identity he had discovered in his work on narrative. In particular, he
takes it up in relation to the idea of selfhood as a way of getting
beyond the aporias of subjectivity in the subject-object model.
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CHAPTERS
speak of a kind of analogical unity to convey the reality of the agential self. This use of language will not refer to some substance, but
rather draw upon the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality,
although Ricoeur does not pursue what this might mean in any
detail. Instead, he will conclude by returning to the question of the
possibility of certainty that lay behind Descartes' original argument.
His suggestion will be that what we see at the end of these reflections
on selfhood is that another sense of certainty is entailed here, one
that he will call attestation. This, he will say, is a form of non-doxic
belief; that is, it is not a weak form of scientific knowledge. Rather it
links up with the notion of testimony in the sense that selves attest
to their identity and their responsibility through their testimony
about themselves. Obviously, this kind of certainty is always fragile
in some ways, not in the sense that attestation can be shown to be
false, but because it is always threatened by suspicion. We can say to
others and even to ourselves, 'I don't believe you or I don't trust you.'
But this is the price to pay for a discourse aware of its own lack of
foundation and, implicitly, the price to pay for being a self.
Ricoeur begins by drawing on analytic philosophy and its discussion of identifying reference, which he understands as stemming from a semantic approach to the use of ordinary language.
Identifying reference is one such use of language. It designates individuals rather than classifying them in terms of a concept or predicating a property to them, although it also presupposes both these
other uses of language. Analytic philosophers have identified three
such procedures: definite descriptions, proper names, and various
kinds of indicators that pick out individual things. A definite
description is a phrase like 'the first man to land on the moon' Such
a way of referring to an individual already depends on a minimal
sense of otherness in that it isolates this individual as a member of
some class or set. Proper names are different in that they assign a
permanent designation to an individual, one that is open to all kinds
of predication, including negative cases as well as positive ones. Here
we find otherness as designating a single individual in opposition to
all the other members of a class or set. Finally, ordinary language
includes such indicators as the personal pronouns, deictic terms
('this', 'that'), adverbs of time and place, and the verb tenses that
can be used in each case to designate a specific thing. What it is
important to note is that the reference here is relative to some act
of discourse taken as a fixed point and as a real event in the world.
92
these predicates to retain the same sense in each case, but this seems
to be because the person in question is still anonymous at this stage.
It is no one in particular, especially not in the sense of someone who
can also say me and ascribe these predicates to him- or herself.
Ricoeur holds that an appeal to the ideas of oneself as a person and
another as also a person does not resolve what is at issue here because
ascribing consciousness to oneself is something felt, whereas ascribing it to others is something observed. So two problems are posed:
how to 'include in the notion of something self-ascribable the selfdesignation of a subject' (OAA, 38) and, at the same time, how to
preserve the otherness of the other at the same time that we ascribe
this same power of self-designation to him or her (or them). A
related question is whether we can unite these two questions through
an understanding of them as standing in reciprocity with each other.
To do so will require more attention to 'a reflexive theory of utterance', one that does not fall into 'the aporias of solipsism and the
impasses of private experience' (OAA, 39).
This calls for a change in perspective from a semantic to a pragmatic approach, one that shifts the focus from what is said to the
saying or utterance and thereby brings the 'I' and 'you' on stage in
cases of interlocution. 'The question will be finally to determine how
the "I-you" of interlocution can be externalized in a "him" or "her"
without losing its capacity to designate itself, and how the "he/she"
of identifying reference can be internalized in a speaking subject who
designates himself or herself as an I' (OAA, 41). The theory of
speech acts, as developed by IL. Austin and John Searle, has shown
that sometimes saying can be doing, as in cases like 'I promise (you)
that 1 will
Here the speaker, in the first person singular, confronts the hearer or hearers in the second person. The question is
what is the relationship of this speaker to his or her speech act? It
depends on what linguistic theory calls a shifter - that is, an indicator (such as '1', or 'here' or 'there') that applies to different speakers
or different situations in different cases. Such shifters link the speaker
to the utterance, especially in that the 'I' functions as the central pole
around which the other shifters are organized. This 'I' is not something that can be replaced by a designation such as 'the person currently speaking' for there is a logical gap between the 'I' here and the
idea of an entity that can be identified by the semantics of reference.
Still, while the reflexivity involved here does not simply reduce to a
function of what is said, it is a reflexivity without selfhood in the
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and the same thing, an agent. This is why actions are both a certain
physical configuration and 'an accomplishment capable of being
interpreted in terms of reasons for acting which explain it' (OAA,
66). It is also why bringing the question of the agent into consideration adds the question of veracity to that of truth. There is not only
a question of whether something is a correct description of an action
in terms of what happens, but also one of whether we accept or not
the agent's claim to have done it. It is this idea of veracity that will
subsequently provide the link to that of attestation for Ricoeur.
Ricoeur holds that his phenomenological approach does allow for
an explanatory approach to action, but that there is always more in
the phenomenological description even than in any proposed teleological explanation. This something more is 'the conscious orientation of an agent capable of recognizing herself as the subject of her
acts' (OAA, 79). Thus the idea of an intention-to, an intention to do
something, is broader than what is conveyed by applying the adverb
'intentionally' to the description of actions as observable events in
the world and is not derivative from such descriptions. As evidence
of this, Ricoeur notes that analytic approaches tend not to attend to
the verb tenses we use to speak of action; in particular they ignore
the importance of reference to the future, not just as something yet
to come but in the sense expressed by the future perfect tense, as
when we refer to an act that will have been done but has not yet
occurred. This latter example shows that intending to do something
can involve anticipating a passage of time in which the act will
unfold, in contrast to any focus on the act as a point-like event. 1 This,
in turn, suggests that there may be a question about the very idea of
sameness operative in action theory. Perhaps this idea, which is that
of something always the same in the sense that it never changes, is
not the sameness that needs to be applied to the identity of a self
Another question will be whether this focus on a limited idea of
what constitutes an event hinders the understanding of action as
something that can be imputed to an agent-self If so, a different or at least an expanded - ontology is required, one that would 'introduce the question of the mode of being of the agent on some other
basis than that of the analysis of the logical form of action sentences, without in any way denying the validity of this approach'
(OAA, 86). Anticipating where he wants to take this, Ricoeur suggests that this would be an ontology of a 'being in the making, possessing de jure the problematic of selfhood' (ibid.). And to begin to
96
speaker' (OAA, 96) of what is said. For one thing, the ascription here
is not just to a thing in general; it is to oneself or to another self inasmuch as the answer to the question 'who?' refers to something other
than just some 'what' This is indicated by the role mental predicates
like thinking, willing, feeling, can play here. 3 Furthermore, ascription
to a 'who' can run a gamut that runs from a completely anonymous 'one' (someone did this) to a sense of 'someone' in the sense of
anyone (someone will have to clean up), to, finally, a particular
someone, which suggests that we need to get beyond the perspective
of identifying reference if we are to make sense of how an agent can
designate him- or herself in such a way that there is a genuine other
to whom the same attribution can be made.
The related idea of prescribing is helpful here in that it helps us to
move beyond the purely logical idea of ascription by suggesting both
that actions are rule-governed and that agents can be held responsible for what they do. Ricoeur therefore suggests that we use the term
imputation to refer to those cases where we ascribe an action to an
agent who is held responsible for his or her acts and where these
actions are themselves considered to be permissible or not. 4 These
acts - for example, those taken up by criminal courts - tend to be
more complex than those taken as examples when considering the
grammar and logic of action sentences. They also introduce the
related idea of a verdict when we consider them as permissible or
not, as praiseworthy or blameworthy. But, more importantly, they
emphasize in a sense a still-to-be-determined causal tie between the
agent and his or her act in that we presuppose that such acts are
within an agent's power. The idea of an efficient causality returns to
the fore here, but it does so, Ricoeur emphasizes, as the result of a
labour of thinking, not simply as an assumption.
Now, is this a causality that we can attribute to an agent? Ricoeur
thinks the answer is yes, if we see that what this implies is a power to
act in the world, but not to create that world, so there will be some
limits on an agent's responsibility. What these limits may be is not a
factual question, however, because discovering them will also
require taking into account the idea of a decision being made, a
point that will have large consequences when Ricoeur takes up the
question of justice on the basis of the little ethics he begins to layout
at the end of Oneself as Another In terms of the question of selfhood, however, the more immediate problem is how to make sense
of the central idea that agents do intervene in the course of the
dialectically; that is, we need to see that each term depends on the
other for its meaning and that narrative identity lies somewhere
between them. What narrative adds here is the ability to explore this
middle range, up to and including those puzzling cases considered
by Parfit. Furthermore, the practical field revealed in this way is one
that links action theory and moral theory because narrative is never
morally neutral. In this sense, narrative can provide the first laboratory for moral judgement. Narrative can do this because it is constituted through a plot that, as Time and Narrative had already shown,
configures the episodic and the told story into a tensive temporal
whole, one that makes sense of the idea of a permanence over time
as a dynamic identity like the one that applies to the characters in
the story. They may change as a result of the turning points in the
plot, but they also remain identifiable as being the same characters.?
In fact, we can go further and say that characters are themselves
plots. They too are constituted by an internal dialectic 'which is the
exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordHnce
developed by the emplotment of action' in the sense that the character draws his or her singular identity 'from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished
from all others' (OAA, 147). This, again, is a dialectic of selfhood.
and sameness over time that narrative can explore up to the point
where in an example such as Robert Musil's The Man Without
Qualities identity is finally lost because the dialectic breaks down
(and the novel was never completed). The dialectic breaks down
because it reaches a point where selfhood no longer is supported by
sameness and we are returned to Parfit's puzzling cases where the self
is merely the brain or something in the brain that can be moved - or
at least imagined as being moved about -like any other object in the
world. But this only confirms that such examples are drawn from
imaginative variations focused on idem-sameness, not on selfhood
in the sense of ipse-identity. For Ricoeur, this kind of reduction is
based on a denial of the ontological condition of persons as embodied, worldly acting and suffering beings in that it simply removes any
possibility of ipse-identity and selfhood on the assumption that the
category of event does include objectively observable events but not
narrative ones.
But Ricoeur is not yet ready to propose an alternative ontology
because he sees that he needs first to explore further the practical
field revealed through narrative in order to show how it can be said
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to connect description and prescription. The key goal here is to discover a tie between ascription and imputation where ascription
assigns an act to an agent and imputation applies in those cases
where the agent has some obligation to act. As already stated, narrative extends the practical field because of the complex forms
of action it can relate. These complex forms can themselves be
arranged in hierarchies of 'units of praxis' where each unit has its
principle of organization and integrates a variety of logical connections and where these units in turn can be combined in many
different ways up to the level of overall life plans. Two factors now
bring the ethical dimension into view. One is that there is also a question of self-constancy on these higher, long-term levels. Does a character at these higher levels not have to remain the same self over
time? Does he or she not have some felt or even logical obligation to
do so, indicated perhaps by the example of keeping one's promises
as a way of keeping one's word? Second, that a character's actions
can take on intersubjective forms brings into play situations both
where the self can efface itself in the face of other and the fact that
suffering, one's own or that or "another, can be the consequence of
such acts. This gives still more impetus to the question of responsibility already implicit in the question of self-constancy. It also opens
the way to consideration of philosophers like Jean Nabert, Gabriel
Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas, who in different ways all hold that
there is an ethical primacy of the other over the self. 8
This lays the groundwork for adding the question 'who is the
subject of moral imputation?' to those of who is acting, speaking or
narrating, at the same time that it undercuts the idea of a sharp
break between description and prescription. It does so, Ricoeur
argues, because reflection on the analysis of action shows that 'it is
part of the very idea of action that it be accessible to precepts' (OAA,
169, original italics), where moral rules can be shown to be inscribed
within this broader concept of precepts. This insight, in turn, leads
Ricoeur to begin to spell out his own 'little ethics' as a way of providing an overall structure to these moral rules. This is a theory that
without any particular concern for orthodoxy regarding interpretations of Aristotle's and Kant's moral theories will seek to combine
the two traditions. 9 It will do so by formulating its theory in terms
of three stages running from a teleological to a deontological to a
practical level. In this theory, 'ethics' will apply to the first stage as
characterizing the aim of a good life and 'morality' will be used to
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describe how this aim gets articulated in terms of norms that function both as universal rules and a kind of constraint on action. The
final stage will fall under the heading of phronesis, or what Aristotle
called practical wisdom. It has to do with the application of both the
ethical intention and its norms in concrete situations. 10 The question
of selfhood runs across these three stages in terms of the ideas of
self-esteem and self-respect, but self-respect will always be more
fundamental than self-esteem.
The first ethical, and teleological, stage can be summed up by the
ethical intention expressed in the maxim: aiming at the good life with
and for others, in just institutions. Self-esteem draws on this notion
of a good life but really is empty apart from the interaction with
others and incomplete apart from the broader domain of just institutions. In this sense, ethics for Ricoeur depends on unfolding the
whole structure of this ethical intention through someone's putting
it into practice through concrete acts, where as we have seen such
fragmented acts come together in the idea of a whole life that tan be
recounted. Here it is the idea of a narrative unity that will draw
together and hold together the subject of ethics by assigning him or
her a narrative identity, and self-esteem will first appear as the result
of one's self-interpretation of this narrative identity. This narrat~ve
identity will be always open to reinterpretation if the narrative
changes and not subject to verification like truth claims based on
scientific observation.
At the next level of the ethical intention, the ideal relation to
others can be summed up as solicitude for the other, which introduces the question both of whether the self is worthy of such selfesteem and whether such self-esteem does not require the mediation
of the other to realize itself. Ricoeur wants to link both these questions to the self's capacity to act and, in this work, he uses the
example of friendship to illustrate its best case. However, he also
notes in passing that there may be a deeper issue here in that we can
distinguish between reciprocal and mutual recognition, a topic he
will return to in his Course of Recognition. But here, in the best case,
he holds that friendship already borders on justice without itself
turning into justice, something he sees as appearing only at the level
of institutions, thereby giving continuity to the discontinuity in his
preferred ethical intention. Friendship borders on justice because it
is based on giving and receiving, but also because it goes beyond
such exchanges to raise the possibility of benevolent spontaneity
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them. Finally comes the level of institutions and with it the question
of principles of justice and respect for every other that can apply
beyond the face-to-face relation of solicitude. Because of its rootedness in the ethical idea of a good life, Ricoeur argues that at this level
the idea of a just solution must go beyond what can be captured by
purely procedural formulations of justice as well as beyond strictly
utilitarian solutions. Furthermore, there is a place for autonomy at
each level that needs to be acknowledged, even if it is true that such
personal autonomy is something that can only be attested to, not
founded on something outside itself.
Finally comes the stage of applying the ethical intention and the
normative obligation it entails to concrete situations. 'This passage
from general maxims of action to moral judgment in situation',
Ricoeur says, 'requires, in our opinion, simply the reawakening of
the resources of singularity inherent in the aim of the true life'
(OAA, 240), which again will ultimately have to appeal to a conviction that one can testify to but not prove in some other, final ~ay.
That this level may involve conflict requires, Ricoeur adds, a sense of
the tragic dimension of action. This may cause us to doubt ourselves
or to become disillusioned, or it may, as Greek tragedy suggests, lead
to knowledge and catharsis that enable us to go on, albeit not on the.
basis of a direct and univocal teaching, but rather on the basis of
moral judgements made in specific situations. It is, furthermore, one
more aspect of what is involved in our attaining self-recognition.
The question still remains, however: if conflicts are inevitable, why is
this so? And what solution is Ricoeur's little ethics with its commitment to practical wisdom capable of bringing to them? An answer
to the first question is that beyond rules of procedure lies a diverse
range of ideas regarding any good to be distributed and even of ways
to do this. There is no one institutional solution to this diversity. This
is why politics is always a struggle in some ways - for instance, in
order to prevent someone or some party from snatching a monopoly of power. But there can also be conflicts on how to order the
goods a group may in fact agree upon as being desirable. Finally,
there is always the question how we legitimate the institutions
assigned to deal with these questions, to the point of asking whether
they should even exist.
As for the second question, that about how to resolve conflicts,
Ricoeur holds that the Kantian test of universalization is not
sufficient, if only because, unlike Kant, he finds that these rules, even
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108
CHAPTER 6
109
also the fact. that other selves themselves occupy a spectrum that
ranges from those close and well known to me, to large numbers of
distant others, to everybody. This spectrum is one reason Ricoeur
emphasizes the importance of the play of scales found in the histories
recounted by historians.
Thus, Ricoeur finds new questions that have to do with the epistemology of historical research and writing. One of these questions
is the extent to which historians must be said to be dependent upon
memory and to what extent they go beyond it. Another concerns
what we can call the transhistorical dimension of memory, memory
that goes beyond anyone individual's life time and that may extend
over very long time spans, at the limit, over time itself. These two
questions meet when we ask how the truth of the historian's written
history stands in relation to the veracity of an individual or group's
reported memories.
To respond to this question, Ricoeur returns to what we can learn
from the ways historians do history, from their research to their
writing up their results. Using a label borrowed from Michel de
Certeau, he sums up this process as the 'historiographical operation'
Newer developments in the writing of history that had appeared after
the publication of Time and Narrative also influence his thinking
about this historiographical operation. Beyond the emphasis of
the Annales historians on the long time span and social facts that
changed slowly or repeated over time, many European historians had
returned to a focus on individuals and events, particularly those individuals low down the social scale, whose experience had to be teased
from the remaining historical documentation and traces. This change
of focus can be placed under the headings of microhistory and the
history of mentalities, where the emphasis is largely on how individuals, especially those of the lower classes, conceive of and negotiate
their day-to-day lives in a society they may not fully comprehend or
control. There also was an ongoing debate about how historians
should or could deal with the destructive events of the Second World
War, specifically the death camps and the trauma of those who experienced them.
In speaking of the historiographical operation, Ricoeur first
wants to deemphasize the idea that the historian works in discrete
stages: first gathering documents, then examining and criticizing
them, then writing up the history text that results. We make such distinctions to see how historians work, but in fact these stages overlap
114
in such a way that we cannot understand any of them apart from the
others. As Ricoeur puts it, 'Each of the three operations of the historiographical operation stands as a base for the other two, inasmuch as they serve successively as referents for the other two' (MHF,
137). It is the project of writing of history that runs through all
of them. This is why his main question is why can we be confident
about what historians say about the past? Here the question of the
historian's relation to memory returns in force.
Ricoeur introduces his discussion by returning to Plato's famous
attack on writing in the Phaedrus. Is writing a remedy for the weakness of memory or does it poison memory? Better, when is it one or the
other of these possibilities? In other words, when does history serve
memory by reactivating and in some sense preserving the past? When
does history abuse or harm memory? The first requirement for answering these questions is to acknowledge the importance of historians'
work in the archives. This is where they find the documentary evidence
that serves as a warrant for what they say and write. But the mate!fials
found in archives are themselves, Ricoeur emphasizes, derived from
the testimony of individual memories: 'we have nothing better than
testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did
happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person.
and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack
other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies' (MHF, 147). Yet historians do more than accept such testimony, for in recounting what happened, they expand the sense of
space and time beyond what either the documents or the testimonies
they contain actually say. For example, the original reference to the
lived experience of a lived here and now is expanded thanks to the use
of the calendar and historical periodization, as already signalled in
Time and Narrative. A more geometric space is also introduced, one
that can be plotted on a map, where no place is necessarily more privileged than any other. Another addition occurs through the reference
to the encompassing historical time whose own system of dating is
finally extrinsic to the events recounted: 'the present moment with its
absolute "now" becomes a particular date among all the ones whose
exact calculation is allowed by the calendar.
As concerns the time
of memory in particular, the "another time" of the remembered past
is henceforth inscribed within the "before that" of the dated past'
(MHF, 155). This is a time that is neither cyclic nor linear, but rather
dependent on the history recounted. 3
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A further question, therefore, is how more precisely to characterize this representation, which is always the result of an interpretation,
because interpretation is operative at all three levels of the historiographical operation. It is an 'image' of the past, Ricoeur agrees, but
not in the sense of an exact copy, if only because of the role played
by the scale chosen, which can vary and in varying will bring out
different details. Not a copy, the historian's representation of the past
is more like an icon, something we 'see through' to what really is at
issue. 6 To express this, Ricoeur returns to a notion introduced in Time
and Narrative, but not really developed in detail there.? Using a neologism, he calls it representance and means by this that the historian's
representation of the past can be said to 'stand for' (in an active
sense) the past. As such, this 'standing for' is not a matter of simply
putting into words something that was already there, for the historian's use of narrative contributes not only to what is said but how it
is said, but neither is representance completely a matter of invention.
What the historian produces stands at the boundary where invention
and discovery no longer can be distinguished.
The privileged form this takes is, of course, narration, and with it
an emplotment of the recounted events or other phenomena.
'Representation in its narrative aspect
does not add something
coming from the outside to the documentary and explanatory
phases, but rather accompanies and supports them' (MHF, 238).
One way it does so is by introducing the idea of narrative coherence
among events and regarding identities over time. Another way is by
bringing to bear, explicitly or implicitly, some moral evaluation.
Here is the tie to the question whether the historian's representation
can really come to terms with horrific events, ones that we must
condemn as morally unacceptable - and that we may suspect are
finally unrepresentable. An important factor here is that the plot
imposed on the past by any narrative form both integrates what is
recounted and takes a distance on it, opening the way to what one
hopes will be ajustjudgement. This is not always assured, of course,
since historical narrative also makes use of rhetorical devices in its
account and can therefore itself be criticized. Ricoeur's point,
however, is that it is the necessary use of documentary proof and
forms of causal and teleological explanation that finally serves as a
check against simply presenting a fiction claiming to be a history,
even when it may take another historian's history or the testimony
of survivors to show this.
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thing itself gets split into disappearance into and existence in the
past' (MHF, 280); it is a representation of the past as 'having been',
and here epistemology borders on ontology, on the ontology of our
historical condition as beings that exist in the world.
It is left to hermeneutical philosophy to explore the conditions of
possibility of this ontology, where such conditions are existential in
that they shape our understanding of our existence as intelligible
and meaningful. They do so because they structure our existence as
worldly temporal agents. Ricoeur admits that what hermeneutics
can give here does not amount to a logical proof; rather is something
that we appropriate and take up into our own lives by incorporating
it into our self-understanding and action. At its limit, then, this
philosophy leads us to the question of forgetting, not only as an
enemy of memory, but as necessary for such existential appropriation. Beyond this question of forgetting we will also encounter that
of forgiveness.
TO FORGIVE IS NOT TO FORGET
crimes against whole peoples, even against humanity. Can they write
this history? Ricoeur answers that they are incapable of writing one
all-inclusive history that would 'include the history of the perpetrators, the history of the victims, and the history of the witnesses'
(HHS, 325). They must instead aim at and can arrive at a partial consensus on the basis of the histories they do write, histories meant for
an audience that includes not just the ideal types of the historian and
the judge, but also that of another third party, the citizen who is
called upon to appropriate this history into his or her understanding
and future action. The price to pay, however, is that historians need
always to be ready to start over again if they are adequately to deal
with such matters as time continues to pass.
Another test case for the possible limits on history's interpretation
of itself as 'history' is the role interpretation plays throughout the
historiographical operation. Interpretation in this sense has to do
with a second-order discourse that reflects on the whole operation
rather than with the practice of interpretation at each of its stages.
What it points to at this higher level is the conclusion that historical
facts can always be interpreted in another way. Hence there is an
inevitable degree of controversy involved in their representation,
especially since there always remains 'an impenetrable, opaque, inexhaustible ground of personal and cultural motivations' (MHF, 337)
that historians bring to their work. This is reflected in the role 'selection' plays in the historiographical operation, not only through the
question the historian initially brings to the archive, but in the very
choice of documents to be kept there, as well as in the formulation
of any documentary proof and the choice of how to emplot the
result. A subtle interplay of personal and public reasoning is at work
here. All these points, Ricoeur concludes, show why hermeneutics
cannot allow history to claim to totalize itself, even while it can claim
validity for what it does achieve.
Another consideration regarding our historical condition follows
from this discussion. It has to do with the existential categories that
characterize the human condition as not only historical but as
expressed through the structures of what Heidegger had spoken of
as 'being-in-the world', then further explicated in terms of the
notion of 'care' Ricoeur proposes a correction to this analysis in
that Heidegger ignores the question of human embodiment,
especially as this involves what Merleau-Ponty called our 'flesh',
which is both subjective and objective. Secondly, Ricoeur questions
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clearly, we need to consider the abuses as well as the uses of forgetting. Ricoeur lists three types of such imposed forgetting, based
on the three possible abuses of memory listed earlier. These are,
we recall, blocked memories, manipulated memories and obligated
memories. Blocked memories call for some kind of therapeutic
approach that will allow their recovery. Manipulated memories
require instead a critique of ideology that can reveal the distortion
at work on this level, as in their way do obligated memories. Ricoeur
is particularly concerned here with the practice of amnesty, especially when it says not only that no one will be prosecuted for past
deeds, but also that these cannot even be spoken of, and at limit
even recalled or remembered. This, he holds, is too much like a
magical solution to the memory of past discord or suffering and
its consequences in the present. This is why, finally, the question of
forgiveness arises.
Forgiveness constitutes the horizon of both memory and forgetting. 'It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterpllise'
(MHF, 457) in that it cannot completely make up for the unpardonable nature of moral evil, either in the past or the present. This is why
forgiveness is difficult and not something accomplished in a single
step. That it is possible we can see if we compare it to the act of
promise making. Whereas promising binds the agent to his act, forgiving releases him from it. But we must also recognize an important
difference between them because on the political plane there is no
genuine possibility of a completely successful institutional expression of forgiveness. This is shown by the failure of amnesties to
achieve their stated purposes, although Ricoeur does see some hope
in the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions, as in
South Africa, although even in these cases many participants have
admitted these bodies did not accomplish everything people hoped
they would.
Forgiveness is also difficult because there is a gap between any act
and its agent, so to forgive the one may not be to forgive the other.
Moreover, on the side of the agent, we are again faced with the question of 'why such evil?' This is once again the question of the fault,
which when pursued goes beyond any individual agent, however evil
he may be or have been. The limit we run up against, or the region
where thought about forgiveness begins to break down, is that evil is
ultimately not justifiable. It is not rational. Hence it may need to be
answered in another way than through forgiveness, through the use
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of the myths and symbols that speak of overcoming evil. This introduces a vertical dimension into the horizontal one between victims
and their aggressors, one that in the best case recalls (or promises)
that there is forgiveness in such a way as to make forgiveness actually possible on the human plane. It also changes our discourse in
that it brings into play the language of love, a love that does not keep
score, a love that might best be thought of as an unconditional gift.
But this is not to create impunity on the legal or political level. Here
again our language has to change to take up the questions of pardon
and guilt, justice and punishment, a question we shall return to
below.
Ricoeur concludes his reflections on forgiveness by noting that it
is difficult to forgive where it has not been sought or when there is
no sign of repentance. This is a problem for history in that the
victims and the perpetrators of past wrongs may no longer be alive
either to ask for forgiveness or to give or receive it. Hope therefore
comes into play, hope that one day things will all come together and
forgiveness will be achieved, but this is something that cannot be
fully expressed in the transcendental or speCUlative language of philosophy. It depends instead on what Ricoeur calls an optative use of
language and thought. This language would give expression to a
supreme form of forgetting, one characterized by 'a disposition and
a way of being in the world which would be insouciance, carefreeness' (MHF, 505). Until that moment, he reminds us that to forgive
is not to forget, but as his own reading of Song of Songs reminds us,
love is as strong as death. 10
OUR CAPACITY FOR MUTUAL RECOGNITION
That Ricoeur, at the end of his life, should choose to take up the
concept of recognition is not surprising given the emphasis he has
given to the question of personal and communal identity, beginning
with Time and Narrative and pursued in Oneself as Another His
emphasis on our relations to others, so central to his little ethics,
would point him in this direction, as would the contemporary discussion of the 'politics of identity' Beyond these concerns, however,
Ricoeur has a larger target in mind. For one thing, as he points out at
the very beginning of The Course of Recognition, it is striking to discover that there is no established great philosophy of recognition in
the same way philosophers can name leading works in epistemology
126
to new insight into this topic - all can be read as aiming at formulating an adequate concept of what is at issue in recognition. In that
history, we find a trajectory similar to the one in the dictionary from
the active to the passive voice. So this trajectory can be interpreted
as indicating what ultimately is at stake in the idea of recognition,
mutual recognition. In the end, this history shows that there is a
demand for recognition that can only be satisfied by mutual recognition, 'where this mutual recognition either remains an unfulfilled
dream or requires procedures and institutions that elevate recognition to the political plane' (CR, 19).
Another noteworthy aspect of this historical trajectory is that
there is a noticeable shift from an emphasis on recognition as knowledge - in the sense of identifying X and identifying X as Y - to a
sense that goes beyond knowing to something closer to questions
that apply to what we can call 'life together' And tied to this, the
idea of identity plays a role at each station along the way, but it too
shifts its meaning as the course of recognition unfolds, reaching a
culmination in the idea of a genuine identity, 'the one that makes us
who we are, that demands to be recognized' (CR, 21). The course of
recognition, therefore, 'not only detaches itself from knowledge but
opens the way to it' (ibid.).
At first, the emphasis is on knowledge in the sense of being able
to identify something. This occurs prior to raising any question of
truth or falsity. We identify things by distinguishing them, a trait that
will carry through to the end stage of mutual recognition in that this
is what people seek in asking for, even in demanding, recognition
from others. At the next stage, this distinguishing turns into the
question of distinguishing truth from falsity, a stage Ricoeur associates with Descartes, where for Descartes this question of truth is
clearly subsequent to some initial act of identification. Kant adds
the idea of recognizing things in time. This is a significant step in that
it allows us to consider not only the time involved in any act of
recognition, but also the important question of recognition of the
same things over time; for example, the question of recognizing
something again as the same thing. This experience suggests that
time must be thought of not simply as succession but as somehow
accumulative in that it allows us to retain the idea of something as
enduring as the same thing as time passes. The idea of a limit test
case also arises here, that of something unrecognizable, either for
itself or as it appears and reappears in time. This is a possibility that
128
forces us to think further about what allows us to recognize something in the sense of being able to identify it. Ricoeur considers two
key examples here. The first one is the case of something we recognize, that then goes away for a while before coming back again, when
we then recognize it again as the same thing, perhaps after some hesitation. The second, more striking case, drawn from Proust, adds
more complexity to this example in that it acknowledges that things
can change over time. Here the thing (or person) that goes away and
returns has changed its appearance in the meantime (say, by growing
older), but somehow can still finally be recognized as being the
same thing or person we had known in the past. This example clearly
resonates with the question of self-identity over time.
To get to further insight into this phenomenon Ricoeur sees that
we have to move beyond the recognition of things as things to recognizing ourselves and other selves as selves. One striking feature
here is that we recognize ourselves as different from others. In this
sense, there is a 'persistent dissymmetry' (CR, 69) in our relations t~
others that Ricoeur emphasizes more strongly than he had done in
previous works.11 Such self-recognition is closely tied to our capacity to impute responsibility to ourselves and to others, a theme
Ricoeur sums up under the heading 'recognizing responsibility'
Examples of this kind of recognition can be found in history as early
as in The Odyssey with the return of Ulysses to his homeland and in
Sophocles' story of King Oedipus' final recognition and acceptance
of himself when he arrives at Colonus at the end of his life. As
Aristotle already recognized on the basis of examples like these, this
topic also introduces the question of possible deliberation about our
actions prior to doing them, returning us again to the question of
the voluntary and the involuntary, where deliberate action turns out
to be something in the power of the agent, a capacity of the capable
human being.
Examining the phenomenology of this capable human being in
greater detail, Ricoeur concludes that our capacity to act involves
attestation as well as recognition, where a fundamental difference
remains between these two notions. In terms of our use of language,
attestation belongs to the discourse of testimony, whereas recognition
is linked more to the processes of identification and self-identification.
Yet these two intersect in the certitude and assurance we express when
we say 'I can' Beyond this, we also say and experience that we can
impute our action to our self and take responsibility for it. Moreover,
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the demands of justice. Moreover, there is usually something ceremonial about such gift giving when it occurs. More specifically, what
breaks the cycle of reciprocity in such cases is that the gift given in the
case of mutual recognition is priceless, so generous that it does not
call for restitution but rather the response of a 'second first gift' (CR,
242), a gift that we can give to other others. Here the close connection
between recognition and gratitude so evident in French comes into
play. 'Gratitude lightens the weight of obligation to give in return and
reorients this toward a generosity equal to the one that led to the first
gift' (CR, 243). It does so by opening a gap between the first giving
and receiving and the second giving when having received. This affects
both the evaluation of the value of what is given and received, and the
time it may take to complete this process. It is one reason there is
usually something festive about such symbolic exchanges. They take
us outside the everyday world of reciprocal exchanges and introduce
a note of hope expressed more in an optative voice than in a descriptive or normative one, freeing us from the lust for power or the thre~t
and fascination of violence.
If there is an element of struggle in mutual recognition, it is as a
struggle 'against the misrecognition of others at the same time that it
is a struggle for recognition of oneself by others' (CR, 258). Such
misrecognition - which runs the spectrum from disregard to disrespect, to contempt and even denial of the other's humanity - is
always possible because of the fundamental dissymmetry between
oneself and others. In order to integrate mutuality into this dissymmetry, Ricoeur says that we must return to forgetting. If we can
'forget' the dissymmetry, we may then be able to recognize the 'in
between' of our mutual relatedness. For what we exchange though
this space are gifts, not places, and this 'protects mutuality against the
pitfalls of a fusional union, whether in love, friendship, or fraternity
on a communal or cosmopolitan level' (CR, 263). Mutual recognition, in other words, establishes a just distance between us and, with
it, a surplus of meaning in which otherness is affirmed twice over:
'other is the one who gives and the one who receives; other is the one
who receives and the one who gives in return' (CR, 263).
THE JUST
the Just are collections of lectures and essays rather than books
written to present one overall argument. A number of the essays are
devoted to other thinkers - Rawls, Weber, Kant, Arendt, Walzer
among them - and show us Ricoeur working out his own position in
relation to them. These essays are worth reading for their own sake,
as examples of how Ricoeur reads others' works and seeks to think
with them, rather than against them. From our perspective, however,
it is important to consider the two themes that tie these essays
together: the idea of justice and, beyond it, that of the just. When we
do that, we see that we can situate his reflections between two poles.
On the one side stands political philosophy in a broad sense, and
more specifically a concern for questions having to do with law and
its application through the courts. On the other side we find a broader
philosophical reflection, one that seeks a way to do justice to justice
through an examination of the broader category of the just. The
question of the just itself, of course, was already implicated in
Ricoeur's ethics aimed at a life lived with others injust institutions.
Ricoeur's essays addressing the status of law and the role of the
legal system stem largely from his participation in seminars and conferences with judges, legal theorists and historians in the last decade
of his life. The central issue in these essays is how the idea of justice
relates to the legal system and the rule of law. SOrr1ething beyond a
strictly defined notion of legal justice is at stake here, for, as Ricoeur
notes, Aristotle had already seen that the law always deals with cases
in their universal aspect, not in terms of their uniqueness. The just
extends beyond the problem of legal justice, even while incorporating it. This broader idea of the just arises when we take an adjective
- a just solution - and turn it into an abstract noun, concerning
which we then try to grasp the concept this might express. But this
is a concept that still carries the connotation of applying to concrete
and particular cases. It is this double sense of the just as both
abstract and concrete that Rieoeur seeks to make sense of.
One reason he turns to this more general idea of the just is that
political philosophy gets caught up in the question of how to legitimate government or the rule of law, without addressing the problem
of evil by asking 'why evil?' Hence it does not really help us to deal
with the problem of the fault. Still, looking at the questions of the
status of the law and the idea of rights in modern society does give
us a handhold. It allows us to see how these questions work out in
practice in the courtroom in relation to specific instances of conflicts
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and crimes. In the short run, the trial process puts an end to a specific conflict when the judge pronounces a verdict and, where
required, imposes a penalty. Ideally, this sets the parties involved at
a just distance, without necessarily bringing about full mutual recognition or reconciliation between them. Still, in the long run, this
process does contribute to the social peace that makes mutual recognition possible. It does so by strengthening the social bond that
allows us to live together.
Ricoeur acknowledges that this is an ideal picture and that there
are many concrete problems with which the legal system today must
struggle; for example, how to assign responsibility in conflicts that
arise at the level of institutions. The law wants to assign responsibility to some individual, but who this might be is not always clear
in the case of actions stemming from decisions taken in large
bureaucracies. In this regard, Ricoeur willingly involved himself in
arguments over who if anyone was to blame and how to as~ign
responsibility - in the public outcry that arose (exacerbated bl'the
media) regarding HIV-tainted blood transfusions in the early
years of the AIDS crisis in France. This eventually led to a trial of
former government officials who were accused of being responsible.
Ricoeur believed that in this case the close association the law.
assumes between responsibility and guilt breaks down. A government official may have been in charge, but how and where a 'decision' was or was not made remains obscure. His own position is that
what is at issue should be seen more as a political question than a
legal one, and therefore a just solution is more likely to be found in
the political forum rather than the law courts. 14
Related to this example he also asks whether contemporary
society mistakenly tries to deal with such problems by shifting the
focus from individual behaviour to the concept of risk and attempts
to eliminate it, or at least to compensate victims for disasters when
they occur. Clearly, one danger here is the idea that a society can
eliminate all risk from life, and that it therefore has the obligation to
impose regulations that prevent people from doing things that might
injure them. Again, who makes these decisions? Another worry is
that if we agree that all risk cannot be eliminated, then does it follow
that society must compensate any and all victims for their suffering
in a way that restores them to health or to what they had before, or
to what they should have in light of their current situation? Ricoeur
is suspicious of the utopian aspect here insofar as the utopian ideal
135
NOTES
1. READING RICOEUR
2
3
Descartes himself will add that this needs to be further grounded on the
certainty of a demonstration that God exists and that God is not a
deceiver, a point later philosophy often tends to ignore.
Today we might question whether a machine might be able to fulfil this
role. Descartes himself would have denied this.
It is embodied, lived experience that is the meeting place of these two
forms of discourse (FN, 9-10). See Ricoeur's own later discussion with
a leading French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, in What Makes
Us Think, for a more recent version of his position on this question.
'The act of the Cogito is not a pure act of self-positing: it lives on
what it receives and in a dialogue with the conditions in which it
itself is rooted. The act of myself is at the same time participation'
(FN,18).
The French language with its use of reflexive verb forms is more explicit
here:je me decide. Later Ricoeur will develop more fully another notion
139
NOTES
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
NOTES
2
3
5
6
7
8
9
10
II
12
2
3
4
5
'Poetry' here means more than rhymed verse. It potentially includes anything made using language as opposed to those things that occur by
nature.
See 'The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling'
(Ricoeur 1978c) for this latter development.
See, for example, 'The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God' and' "Whoever
Loses their Life for my Sake wilI Find it" , in Figuring the Sacred. Even
in these sermons Ricoeur does not claim to speak with religious authority but as a philosopher who tries to hear what the text has to say.
See, for example, his lectures on the parables in 'Biblical Hermeneutics'
(Ricoeur 1975).
See Ricoeur (1986b).
141
NOTES
142
NOTES
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHYIFURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHY/FURTHER READING
BIBLIOGRAPHYIFURTHER READING
INDEX
Anscombe, G. E. M.
Aquinas, Thomas 33
Aristotle 67-8, 70, 71,97,102-3,
110,129,134
ascription 93, 97-9,102, 106, 113,
142n. 3
attestation 92, 96-7,99,105-7,115,
129
Augustine 12, 71
Austin, 1. L. 94
Bakhtin, Mikhail 79
Benveniste, Emile 58-9
Body, embodiment 5, 8, 14, 16,
19-22,31,39,93,97, 108,
124
Braudel, Fernand 74
capable human being 6,7, 14,27,
90,91,96,106, 109, Ill, 129,
130
cogito 6-7, 12, 13, 18,21,41,46,
47, 52,90-1, 108, 120 see also
subject-object model
shattered 91
conviction 15,47, 105-6, 117,
119
Danto, Arthur 75
Davidson, Donald 95
151
INDEX
Havel, Vaclav 3
Hegel, G. W F. 14,27,51,53,55,
83,84,85, 121, 130--2
Heidegger, Martin 6, 8-9,24, 73,
107,112,122-4
hermeneutics 9, 32,41,42,43,46,
48,50--159-60,62,64,66,83
85,88, 1I7, 120, 122
circle 54, 88
consciousness 51
historical existence 123
Freud 48-9, 55
historical consciousness 83
language 62
ontology 70
phenomenology 64, 70
philosophy 41, 47,50--1,57,120
self 91, 107
suspicion 46, 47, 53, 58, 78, 85,
llO
symbols 45, 62
text 78
understanding 57,62,65,66
historiographical operation
ll4--15, ll7-19, 122
history 38, 39, 50, 57, 66, 67, 71,
72-8,80,82,99,109-10,
112-15,117-24,126,130
distance 60
explanation 76
fact 116, 122
hermeneutics 65-6
hope 83
mentalities 114, 117
microhistory 114
narrative 77, 79-80,118
reception 61, 83
representation 118-19
text 76,82,83, 114
time 71-2, 80-2, 115, 121
truth 78
Hobbes, Thomas 130
hope 23-4,83,87,126, 133
152
INDEX
poetic 84,88
political 88-9
philosophical 126
religious 86
symbolic 26,35,41,46,55
Levi-Strauss, Claude 56-7
Levinas, Emmanuel 102, 142 n. 8,
143 n. II
Locke, John 100
logic
action sentence 98
equivalence 87
formal 35, 62
reciprocity 132
superabundance 87
symbolic 45,66-7
love 30, 32, 50, 52, 126, 131-3
Mann, Thomas 79
Marcel, Gabriel 6, 8, 9, 10, 13,22,
102
Maritain, Jacques 85
Marx, Kar! 46, 110
memory 100, 109-16, II9-20,
123-7
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 65,
122
metaphor 16, 38, 59, 63, 67-70, 77,
78,86, 140n. 7, 142n. 2, 142n.
4
Musil, Robert 101
myth 26, 30, 33-5, 38-43,46, 48,
51,55,57,59,70-1,82,84,
126
time 81
Nabert, Jean 102
narrative 2,6,39,57,59, 70-88, 99,
101-2, 116, 118
discourse 2, 6, 59, 70-3, 78,
82-5, 109
identity 82-4 88-90, 99-101, 103
narratology 78
153
INDEX
narrative (cont.)
point of view 79
understanding 83, III
voice 75, 79
Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 46, 70, 91,
110,120
sameness 99-100
Saussure, Ferdinand de 55-6, 58
Searle, John 94
self, selfhood 7, 8, 14,23,31-4,35,
46--7,53,84,57,89,90-2,95,
98-108,112-13,129,131,
137
constancy 100, 102
esteem 103-4, 106
hermeneutics of 91
identity 96, 129
recognition 105, 129-30
respect 103-4, 106
responsible 106, 129
understanding 40,44,84, 107,
120
semantic innovation 66--7, 69, 72
Shakespeare, William 68, 82
solicitude 103-6
Sophocles 129
Spinoza, Baruch 107
Strawson, P. F. 93
structuralism 43,44,55-61,64,65,
66,67,71,74,78
subject-object model 6--12, 15, 18,
21,23,32,46,47,52,57,64-5,
84,89-91,93,94, 102, 103 see
also cogito
surplus of meaning 54,63,65, 119,
133
symbol 26, 33-43,45,46,47,49,
51-2,54-5,57,62,6366,71,
126, 130, 132-3
154
INDEX
utopia 88-9
veracity 96, Ill, 114
Weber, Max 134, 137
White, Hayden 76
wisdom 22, 50, 87
practical 103, 105-6, 124,
136-7
Woolf, Virginia 79
155