Ricoeur Across the Disciplines 9780826438461

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Ricoeur Across the Disciplines

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Ricoeur Across the Disciplines

Edited by Scott Davidson

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2010 Scott Davidson and contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8264-3846-1 (hardcover)

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in the United States of America

To Lupe.

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Contents

Introduction: Translation as a Model of Interdisciplinarity Scott Davidson 1

Ricoeur and Philosophy: Ricoeur as Teacher, Reader, Writer Adriaan Peperzak

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Ricoeur and Biblical Hermeneutics: On Post-Religious Faith Richard Kearney

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Ricoeur and Theology: Act and Affirmation William Schweiker

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Ricoeur and History: The Ricoeurian Moment of Historiographical Work François Dosse

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Ricoeur and Law: The Distinctiveness of Legal Hermeneutics George H. Taylor

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Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism and Communitarianism Bernard P. Dauenhauer

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Ricoeur and Rhetorical Theory: Paul Ricoeur on Recognition in the Public Sphere Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

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Ricoeur and Women’s Studies: On the Affirmation of Life and a Confidence in the Power to Act Pamela Sue Anderson

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9 Ricoeur and African and African American Studies: Convergences with Black Feminist Thought Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and Scott Davidson

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10 Ricoeur and Education: Ricoeur’s Implied Philosophy of Education Peter Kemp

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Ricoeur and Psychoanalysis Karl Simms

12 Ricoeur and Musicology: Music, Hermeneutics, and Aesthetic Experience Roger W. H. Savage

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Notes on Contributors Index

229 233

Introduction: Translation as a Model of Interdisciplinarity Scott Davidson

If life, as he once said, is the short span of time in which all questioning can emerge, then it is safe to say that Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) lived a full life. Through a remarkably prolific teaching and writing career including the publication of almost forty books and close to one thousand articles, Ricoeur’s thought touches on virtually every important aspect of European intellectual life from the end of World War II to the present time.1 Given that the biographical details of his life and work have been discussed so well elsewhere, it is not necessary to retrace such familiar territory here.2 Moving beyond the preliminary task of introducing and surveying his work, Ricoeur scholarship today needs to focus on the tasks of interpreting, applying, extending, and assessing his oeuvre. In assessing the interdisciplinary impact of Ricoeur’s work across the disciplines, the contributors to this book are taking some important first steps in this direction, and in what follows, I will present the paradigm of translation as the broad framework for this interdisciplinary engagement with his thought. Even though the scope of his work is broad and extends across a wide range of topics, Ricoeur’s style remains remarkably constant throughout. This style might be described generally as the close “reading of texts” (lecture de texte), or textual exegesis. While the primary goal of this methodology is to help the reader to better understand the key ideas of a text, Ricoeur deviates somewhat from the standard practice of this method. Instead of focusing on a single author or text, Ricoeur usually proceeds through a juxtaposition of texts by different authors with differing points of view on an issue. Through careful consideration of opposed and seemingly irreconcilable points of view, Ricoeur strives to work out a fair and balanced mediation between them. Ricoeur’s own creativity and originality is often to be found, as a result, in the new mediations that he accomplishes at the end of his long detours.

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While Ricoeur himself always refused to identify a unifying idea in his work and left this task to his readers,3 Domenico Jervolino recently has proposed one interesting way, among other possible ones, to organize the development of Ricoeur’s work.4 Ricoeur’s philosophy, on Jervolino’s view, is not so much a “philosophy of language” as a “philosophy through language,” and accordingly, its development can be understood in terms of its successive ways of working through language. From this perspective, Jervolino identifies three successive paradigms in Ricoeur’s thought – “symbol, text, and translation” – each of which develops and expands the treatment of language contained in the preceding paradigm.5 Under the first paradigm, Ricoeur discovers the polysemic nature of symbols, as in The Symbolism of Evil (1967). Insofar as symbols carry multiple meanings, they call on the work of interpretation to unveil their hidden meanings and to remove possible sources of misunderstanding. Shortly after this initial phase of discovery, Ricoeur comes to appreciate that all discourse is in fact polysemic and thus that the work of interpretation is a general task of all understanding. The paradigm of the text, which combines words and sentences into a coherent whole, emerges in works such as The Conflict of Interpretations (1969) and From Text to Action (1991). In this second phase of his thought, the work of interpretation – hermeneutics – is applied to texts as well as other text-like products such as actions, monuments, and cultural artifacts. The hermeneutic detour through the text is necessary for the development of a broader understanding of our world and ourselves. In an essay entitled “The Paradigm of Translation” (2004), Ricoeur presents translation as a model of hermeneutics, thereby indicating the emergence of a third paradigm in his thought. With this third stage, Ricoeur regards the task of translation to be inherent in all understanding and thus endorses George Steiner’s claim that “to understand is to translate.”6 The paradigm of translation, though still contained in language, engages a larger linguistic entity than either symbols or textuality: the diversity of languages as such. What, then, explains this paradigm shift from the hermeneutics of texts to the translation of languages? Consider, for instance, the clear differences between the respective roles of the interpreter and the translator. The task of the interpreter is to establish communication between two speakers who do not share a common language. Within an interpersonal context, the task of the interpreter is facilitated by speakers who can come to the assistance of their words through the use of gesture, tone, and so on. The translator, by contrast, is dealing with the relation between an author and reader who not only speak different languages but also are not present to one another. The paradigm of translation, while similar to the

Introduction

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interpretive task of hermeneutics, adds a stronger emphasis on intersubjectivity. In dealing with the difficulties of passing from one language to another, Ricoeur explicitly thematizes the encounter between oneself and another, between what is one’s own and what is foreign. The diversity of languages, in this way, can also shed light on human diversity. After exploring the specific challenges presented by the task of translating from one language to another one, I will propose that Ricoeur’s paradigm of translation provides a fruitful model for understanding the challenges of interdisciplinary scholars who work across the disciplines. Translation begins “after Babel,” so to speak, with the recognition of the irreducible plurality of languages.7 In a world where languages are separated and scattered, the need for translation is undeniable, but yet the nature and possibility of translation still remain deeply mysterious to us. The etymology of the English word “translator” derives from the Latin transfero, meaning “to carry across.” The French word “traducteur,” though also derived from Latin, comes from a different verb, traducere, meaning “to lead across.” These etymological roots would suggest that the task of translation is analogous to a system of exchange and that the translator is a trader who carries ideas from one language to another one. To complicate this overly simplistic model, however, it is important to add that the Latin traducere connects differently to the English language where it forms the basis of the word “traduce,” referring to the act of making malicious or defamatory statements. To translate, this suggests, is not only to trade but also to betray. Does not this etymological duality – the translator as a trader and a traitor – convey the true fate of all translation by suggesting that fidelity and betrayal are inextricable from the work of translation? To translate, as Rosenzweig recognizes, is “to serve two masters”: the author who writes in a foreign language and the reader who reads in one’s own language.8 The drama of the translator emerges from this dual allegiance. If, on the one hand, the translator chooses the author as the exclusive master and imposes the author’s culture in its foreignness, then she or he runs the risk of appearing to be a foreigner, a traitor, to his or her own culture. If, on the other hand, the translator chooses the reader as the exclusive guide and leads the author to the reader’s culture, then she or he runs the risk of stealing the work from its original cultural context. The translator thus faces the perilous task of taking the author to the reader and the reader to the author, without betraying or shortchanging either one of these two masters. Translation occupies a difficult position, because cultures need translation yet strongly resist it. This resistance to translation arises for at least two

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types of reasons. First, cultures resist translation out of the fear that they will be imperialized or misrepresented by other cultures. To be sure, such concerns about betrayal are legitimate, but they can often overlap with another, less justifiable cultural motivation. The resistance to translation can also arise from the false belief that cultures form a pure and selfsufficient whole and thus do not need translation. By exposing cultures to a foreign element, translation plays an important role in breaking up the narcissistic and ethnocentric tendencies that plague cultures. The essence of translation, as Antoine Berman rightly understands, is “to be an opening, a dialogue, a cross-breeding, a decentering.”9 Every culture needs the exchange that is brought about in translation because it expands and thrives through the cross-fertilization of ideas. And, this cross-fertilization can be a two-way street, insofar as the work of translating can both import the alterity of a foreign culture and export one’s own culture to another culture. For both good and bad, then, translation is implicated in every encounter between cultures. Yet, Ricoeur’s paradigm of translation does not apply solely to the interlinguistic challenge of translating a text from one language to another; it also has an intra-linguistic dimension. Among the speakers of a single language, translation refers to the challenges of our everyday interactions with other people, as is evident, for instance, when we say to another person that “we are speaking two different languages.” Such experiences point to the fact that translation is required whenever speakers of the same language – due to the diversity of their age, race, gender, social status, or life experiences – find themselves unable to communicate.10 In addition to dealing with the diversity of speakers in a single language, the paradigm of translation also characterizes an aspect of our relation to ourselves, as when we say “that isn’t what I meant to say.” In this gap between what is said and what is meant, a polysemy emerges in such a way that one experiences oneself as another. Here the task of translation involves not an external other but the other inside oneself. Consequently, this suggests that the paradigm of translation, extending far beyond the concerns of professional translators, provides a conceptual model for our everyday encounters with other cultures, other people, and even ourselves. From this general conclusion, I will now turn to the question of how Ricoeur’s paradigm of translation can serve as a model for understanding the challenges of interdisciplinary work. Is not academic life today, like language, characterized by the fact of plurality, that is, the plurality of disciplines, methodologies, and frameworks? As specialization increases, is not the problem of translation between disciplines heightened? Even within our own disciplines, do we not find

Introduction

5

ourselves to be increasingly separated from one another, as if we are speaking different languages? To the extent that this fragmentation does exist, it follows that different disciplines, as well as single disciplines, do not just have opposing points of view to be mediated; they actually speak different languages. For this reason, the task of the interdisciplinary scholar is more analogous to the task of the translator than the mediator or interpreter. Like the translator, the interdisciplinary scholar is in the service of “two masters” – the discourse of the home discipline and that of the foreign one – and thus faces perils similar to those of the translator. If the scholar only serves his or her home discipline, then he or she betrays the original and robs it of its voice, but if the scholar is entirely faithful to work from another discipline, then he or she thus risks rejection from the home discipline. The interdisciplinary scholar, in trafficking ideas across disciplines, thus faces the difficult challenge of bringing two discourses into contact without betraying or compromising either one. As with translation, the interdisciplinary scholar is likely to meet resistance from both the home and foreign discipline. From the foreign discipline, on the one hand, there is likely to be concern that the interdisciplinary scholar will distort or violate the integrity of the work done within the discipline, while the home discipline will likely fear that the interdisciplinary scholar will violate the established standards and methods practiced in the discipline. While these disciplinary concerns are indeed legitimate, interdisciplinary work can also play a key role in maintaining the vitality of a discipline. Against the tendencies of disciplines to be insular and self-contained, interdisciplinary work challenges this narcissism by introducing new ideas and approaches into one’s own home discipline. This work, though often meeting with resistance, can thereby open new horizons of possibility across the disciplines. By identifying the difficulties as well as the needs for interdisciplinarity, Ricoeur’s paradigm of translation thus provides a good description of the situation facing those who are engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship. Although Ricoeur was late to thematize the paradigm of translation, it should be noted that translation is implicit in his own work from the outset, not so much in the mediations accomplished between different points of view but in the continual willingness to cross the boundaries separating disciplines. In fact, as the chapters of this volume demonstrate, Ricoeur continually draws upon the resources of other fields in developing his views, and in turn, his conclusions can be applied, explicitly or implicitly, to the concerns of scholars working in other fields. In this respect, Ricoeur himself provides a good model for how interdisciplinary scholarship – as the work of translation – can be conducted successfully.

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In the opening chapter of this volume, Adriaan Peperzak, a former student of Ricoeur’s, offers a personal profile of Ricoeur as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. After showing that Ricoeur exemplifies many of the intellectual virtues that all teachers should strive to embody, Peperzak explores some specific points of contrast with his colleague, Emmanuel Levinas. The styles of the two thinkers could hardly be more different. Whereas Ricoeur follows a very patient, painstaking study of what has already been said on a given topic, Levinas has little patience for the philosophical tradition and instead develops his own unique philosophical terminology and insights. Levinas’s hyperbolic and provocative statements could never be accepted by Ricoeur. Yet, in spite of their differences, Peperzak suggests that the two thinkers had great admiration for one another and share some of the same philosophical concerns. While Ricoeur assiduously distinguishes his philosophical from his Biblical writings, Richard Kearney shows how Ricoeur’s Biblical hermeneutics can be instructive to philosophy and faith today. Ricoeur endorses a hermeneutics of suspicion, inspired by Freud and Marx, which calls into question the God of onto-theology, but the movement of suspicion does not have the final word. Instead, it is followed by a hermeneutics of affirmation, or “second naiveté,” which looks toward a faith without religion, a form of belief on the other side of atheism. Kearney labels this new form of belief beyond belief, in a God after God, “ana-theism” and then elucidates what it means to think “after” God (and the death of God) in the context of Ricoeur’s interpretation of the Song of Songs. This anatheistic reading, according to Kearney, recovers the “semantic intersignification” that takes place between the human and the divine. William Schweiker situates Ricoeur’s conception of faith as a mediation between human culture and the divine, in the context of Christian theology. In his own time, Ricoeur mediated between faith and the desert of criticism in order to establish the will to be called again to faith. Today’s theologians, however, are faced with a new set of challenges, insofar as the desert of human capability has taken the place of the desert of criticism. In our time, the various global endangerments to life, such as the threats posed by ecological and technological disasters, have called into question the human ability to act. While this was not Ricoeur’s problem, Schweiker suggests that Ricoeur’s thought nonetheless provides valuable resources for calling us again to human action. A mediating theology, of this kind, can provide a hopeful reconciliation of the suffering caused by human action with the divine aspirations of the world. Between the reality of human suffering and hope for the future, human history unfolds. The French historian, François Dosse, examines Ricoeur’s

Introduction

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substantial contribution, extending over half a century, to the discipline of history. Ricoeur’s book Memory, History, Forgetting, on his view, provides an opportunity for renewed dialogue between historians and philosophers. In this period of doubt where historians are calling into question their working concepts – truth, causality, memory, narrative, time – historians are at last prepared to appreciate the value of this work. Ricoeur, on the one hand, rightly understands the central role of writing and narrative in the construction of history, but, on the other hand, recognizes the distinctiveness of historical writing in its contract of truth with the reader. The historian, in order to live up to this contract, must take on a critical role with regard to memory and forgetting. The historian, Dosse concludes, thus has an obligation both to preserve the past and to undo the faulty memories that distort it. This fidelity to the historical past, at once preserving and correcting it, is also a key component of the institution of law. In examining the implications of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic theory for the field of law, George H. Taylor departs from Gadamer’s claim about the “exemplary significance” of legal hermeneutics and suggests that legal hermeneutics should be regarded as distinctive rather than exemplary. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics clarifies the nature of legal interpretation by insisting on the semantic autonomy of the text. This conception of the text provides a compelling argument against “originalism” in the interpretation of law and aligns Ricoeur with the recent promotion of “textualism” in law, which holds that interpreters should attend to the meaning in the legal text, not the intentions lying behind it. In this way, legal hermeneutics can profit from Ricoeur’s hermeneutic model, even though this model of textual interpretation must be refined to suit the specific demands of its practice. Inspired by Ricoeur’s emphasis on justice in his later writings, Bernard P. Dauenhauer examines Ricoeur’s contribution to the liberal-communitarian debate in contemporary political theory. Dauenhauer takes John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice to be representative of the liberal democratic position and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self as one representative version of communitarian thought. Framed in these terms, Dauenhauer agrees with Michael Walzer’s contention that neither position, as it stands, is conceptually compelling, because neither one has a sufficiently robust conception of the human person. To Ricoeur’s credit, his “communitarian liberalism” improves upon both conceptions of the person. This position, at the same time, accommodates the liberal emphasis on constitutionally inscribed rights and attests to the importance of forgiveness in preserving the level of community necessary for effective political practice. Taking up the central role of recognition in establishing just political institutions, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi suggests that Ricoeur’s later work is

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especially pertinent to rhetoricians who are concerned with the issue of political participation in the public sphere. While rhetoricians are familiar with Ricoeur’s reflections on language, hermeneutics, and metaphor, they have paid little or no attention to his moral and political philosophy. As a corrective to this tendency, Ritivoi puts Ricoeur into dialogue with public sphere theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, and Nancy Fraser. Through a careful analysis, Ritivoi shows that Ricoeur’s notion of recognition is unique in being based on the gift and thereby on the mutuality between the giver and the recipient of recognition. Pamela Sue Anderson makes a case for extending Ricoeur’s phenomenology of “being able” to the field of Women’s Studies by teasing out some of its core ethical and political ideas. Anderson compares Ricoeur’s appropriation of Spinoza’s conatus, as a rational striving to persevere in life, with feminist appropriations of this concept. Like some recent feminist thinkers, Ricoeur derives a connection between affirmation and power, as well as a confidence in one’s own and another’s power to act. Not only does Ricoeur’s philosophy of life offer an alternative to a “death-bound ethics,” it focuses the attention of women and men on the importance of beginning again – in the Arendtian sense of giving birth to new relationships. In so doing, Ricoeur opens up the possibility of a feminist conversation about a common concern of women: a confidence in one’s power to act and to affirm life. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and I contend that, even though Ricoeur remains silent on the question of race throughout his career, race scholars can nevertheless find a number of rich resources in his work, including relevant discussions of agency, personal identity, self-esteem, narrative, history, and memory. Taking a first step in this direction, they establish some remarkable convergences between Ricoeur’s notion of the capable human being (homo capax) and recent scholarship by black feminists such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill-Collins. By examining the human capabilities in which “I can speak, I can act, I can narrate, and I can impute actions to myself,” Ricoeur’s phenomenology provides a valuable framework for addressing the concerns of black feminists. Black feminists, in turn, lend an important dimension of pathos to suffering the loss of capabilities, inasmuch as such losses can often be traced back to deprivation and denial. Peter Kemp examines Ricoeur’s influence on educational theorists such as Bernt Gustavsson, Johannes van der Ven, Franc Morandi, and on his own work. While Ricoeur displayed much interest in educational reform in the 1960s, his enthusiasm for reform waned after the student revolts at Nanterre. Nonetheless, Kemp suggests that an implicit theory of education can be detected in a number of his works. For instance, Kemp makes use of

Introduction

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Ricoeur’s theory of narrative in the development of his own theory of education. The three levels of mimesis in narrative – prefiguration, configuration, and reconfiguration – are shown to provide a balanced alternative to the pitfalls of the two extremes in the French system of education: authoritarianism and pure self-education. Ricoeur’s theory of narrative thus provides an important opening onto genuine dialogue between teachers and students. Karl Simms traces the evolution of Ricoeur’s views on Freudian psychoanalysis and compares them to those of Lacan. While Ricoeur early on is willing to concede that something akin to memory, perception, and judgment in the human psyche is unconscious, he does not accept that this is true of memory, perception, and judgment as such. By the 1960s, after his “hermeneutic turn,” Ricoeur becomes much more sympathetic to the Freudian project. Ricoeur notices that both psychoanalysis and hermeneutics are modes of interpretation, finding meaning in “texts” that would otherwise be unclear. Just one essential difference between psychoanalysis and hermeneutic phenomenology remains: psychoanalysis sees desire as universal and hence psychoanalytic theory as universally applicable, whereas phenomenological hermeneutics sees desire as but one of the facets of intentionality. But, according to Ricoeur, Lacan misinterprets the word “like” in the formula “the unconscious is structured like a language.” For Ricoeur, metaphor is a metaphor of repression, not repression itself and the same can be said of metonymy. Lacan’s inability to grasp the meaning of his own word “like” leads him to conflate human experience with language and, since language is the language of desire for Lacan, to reduce human experience to the experience of desire. In this respect, Lacan fails to move beyond Freud. Roger W. H. Savage examines the potential contribution of Ricoeur’s work to the field of musicology. Against the Romantic elevation of music as a “language beyond language,” ethnomusicology and cultural musicology have united in common cause against the claim that music belongs to an autonomous sphere. In so doing, they reverse this principle and suggest that music’s force is always culturally and socially conditioned. This view, however, eclipses the power of individual works to reconfigure human experience. In this chapter, Savage shows how Ricoeur’s theory of imagination and his meditations on the limits of narrative can contribute to a proper understanding of music’s affective significance. By extending Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis to the domain of music, Savage contends that music has the power to reconfigure our affective experiences of the world.

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As a whole, the contributions to this volume make a compelling case for the interdisciplinary scope and appeal of Ricoeur’s work. While this feature of Ricoeur’s thought has rightly been noted by a number of scholars, this book is the first, to my knowledge, to thematize it explicitly.11 The interdisciplinary effort undertaken here is facilitated by the fact that most of Ricoeur’s books do contain a strong interdisciplinary component, which can be traced back to Ricoeur’s own views on the nature of inquiry. Philosophical inquiry, for Ricoeur, is not its own starting point as if it created meaning out of nothing; instead, it emerges in medias res, out of the rich repository of extant historical, cultural, and social products that give rise to thought. Just as these materials are essential to Ricoeur’s own inquiries, every thinker should seek out material from multiple disciplines, including literature, art, history, linguistics, sociology, and many more. No single book, to be sure, could ever hope to exhaust the interdisciplinary potential of Ricoeur’s work or claim the last word on this topic. There are many other disciplines that could have been included in this book, and with regard to the disciplines represented here, many other themes or orientations could have been explored. Indeed, the paradigm of translation reminds us that it is “always possible to say the same thing in another way” and that every translation thus entails the possibility of a re-translation.12 Consequently, this book can only provide an initial starting point for further discussion of Ricoeur’s influence across the disciplines. As such, it invites a dialogue with its readers, in the hope of inspiring them to develop the implications of Ricoeur’s thought in their own respective disciplines in their own unique ways and, in so doing, to embrace the “grandeur of translation” as well as the “risk of translation.”13

Notes 1

2

3

4

Frans D. Vansina and Pieter Vandecasteele, eds. Paul Ricœur: Bibliography, 1935–2008 (Leuven: Peeters, 2008). See, among many fine examples, Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and David Pellauer, Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2007). See, for instance, his comments in Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1998), 81; and, “A Response by Paul Ricoeur,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 32. Domenico Jervolino, “La question de l’unité de l’oeuvre de Ricoeur à la lumière de ses derniers développements: Le paradigme de la traduction,” Archive de

Introduction

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6

7

8 9

10

11

12 13

11

Philosophie 67 (2004): 659–668. A modified version of this argument also appears in his “Rethinking Ricoeur: The Unity of His Work and the Paradigm of Translation,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008), 225–235. Jervolino, “La question de l’unité de l’oeuvre de Ricoeur à la lumière de ses derniers développements,” 663. Paul Ricoeur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” in On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 24. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998). See Ricoeur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” 22. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 4. For a more detailed discussion of the infra-linguistic aspect of translation, see Paul Ricoeur, “Introduction,” in Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 23–31. See, among others, David Pellauer, Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2007). Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (New York: Routledge, 2003). Ricoeur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” 25. Ricoeur, “A ‘Passage’: Translating the Untranslatable,” in On Translation, 37.

References The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde, trans. W. Domingo et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). From Text to Action, trans. K. Blamey and J.B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991). Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Chapter 1

Ricoeur and Philosophy: Ricoeur as Teacher, Reader, Writer Adriaan Peperzak

During his polemics about the right way of developing the Kantian revolution in philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote: “The kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is.”1 I neither believe that any philosophy results from unconditioned choices, nor that it automatically issues from a character determined once and for all, but who would deny that an original or well-appropriated philosophy carries traces of the thinker’s personality and way of life? In this introductory sketch, I will focus on Paul Ricoeur’s character, insofar as it marks the remarkable teacher, reader, and writer he was. Indeed, his legacy seems to me not only a thinker’s monument – and, in that regard, it is an eminently inspiring gift to everyone who tries to think – but also a quite distinct style, clearly recognizable in the ways he transmitted others’ and his own thinking. To begin with, I will sketch a portrait – albeit incomplete – of Professor Ricoeur as I knew him when I was one of his many students at the Sorbonne. In the second part I will very briefly situate his life and work within the recent history of philosophy, while focusing in the last part on the contrast between his own style and that of his famous colleague, Emmanuel Levinas.

Ricoeur as a Teacher When, for the first time, I heard about Paul Ricoeur, I was a student at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where he often was praised and quoted as one of the best interpreters of Husserl and a prominent specialist in phenomenology. His recently published book on the will was already hailed as a major work of Husserlian phenomenology, comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s

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Phenomenology of Perception.2 From 1957 to 1959, I had the privilege to attend Ricoeur’s courses at the (as yet undivided) University of Paris, to which, a few years earlier, he had moved from Strasbourg to teach “general philosophy.” At the same time I got to know him better as the director of my doctoral thesis. Among the professors his demeanor inspired trust by an impressive combination of seriousness, great erudition, and humble kindness. His hospitality showed in his invitations to his home in Malabry for consultation about research and writing. Ricoeur’s lessons were captivating, not so much because he excelled in shocking or sensational statements, brilliant improvisations, or boasting displays of his knowledge, but rather because of their well-prepared concentration on essentials, his careful outlining of a research program, including the methodological conditions that should be fulfilled, and his accurate accomplishment of the program over the course of the year. At the beginning of a new research project, he unfolded two approaches that could be followed for the study of a certain problem – such as the symbol, negativity, or ancient ontology – as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. He distinguished a short way from another way that would be much longer because it needed several detours. This first phase of the deliberation was then rounded off by the decision that the long way should be taken, because that would avoid the superficiality adherent to the shorter way. Some of the necessary – and sometimes long – detours consisted in a judicious borrowing from scientific research in psychology, linguistics, sociology, ethnology, political, or religious studies, or any of the other sciences that the French gather under the name of “sciences humaines.” Thus the students learned a lesson that Ricoeur, during his entire career, would repeatedly emphasize: philosophy should seriously discuss what the sciences offer and integrate the appropriate results into their own, more speculative, thought. He did not like global or ideological declarations but demanded accurate distinctions and argumentation. He believed that each philosopher should really know at least one science regarding the questions of one’s philosophical specialty. In an often repeated general formula, Ricoeur states that philosophy not only must comprehend or synthetically understand in the speculative sense of comprendre, but also must know and integrate what is necessary to explain (expliquer) the phenomena we think about. We must pass through a phase of explanation before we can reach a well-founded comprehension. “Expliquer pour comprendre” remained his device. That Ricoeur himself took this advice seriously is testified by his intense and time-consuming exploration of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Saussurean, Anglo-American, and Benveniste’s linguistics, the structural anthropology

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of Levi-Strauss, the exegetical studies of Von Radt and Bultman, the phenomenology of religious symbolism presented by Eliade, the theories of literature proposed by Jauss, Benjamin, and Greimas, and the historiography of Braudel and others. Some of his admirers were amazed or even displeased when Ricoeur, after the publication of many existentialist and phenomenological works, turned to Anglo-Saxon philosophy to spend much of his time critically summarizing and appropriating their work on language, law, the person, and history. Emmanuel Levinas, for instance, asked me one day the somewhat rhetorical question of whether I thought that the long chapters dedicated to the “analytical” literature in The Rule of Metaphor were necessary to arrive at Ricoeur’s own understanding of metaphoric language. But for Ricoeur, his “detours” were necessary stepping stones toward a distinct insight that would avoid vague, modish, ideological, or sensational declarations. During his classes Ricoeur was intensely focused, but his concern for the students was also noticeable, especially through the weekly hours during which he commented on the lessons that the students had to give (the so-called leçons d’étudiant) by way of training for the “grande leçon” that was part of the examination for the “agrégation.” I do not remember that he ever made a joke or that we ever laughed in class, but outside of class he could be witty and his friendliness was obvious when he – as one of very few professors – joined a student gathering. Although Ricoeur was already widely known as a leading figure in European philosophy, from my perspective he was in the first place an ideal teacher. Even later, when the international recognition of his name was firmly established, I often called him “the best professor [in philosophy] of the world,” without of course denying his originality and the monumentality of his oeuvre. I am only one of the many for whom he was and remained a convincing role model, whose art not only humbled but also encouraged his students.

Ricoeur as Reader Paul Ricoeur was not a revolutionary thinker. He let sensational fashions and ideological trends go by and seemed altogether uninterested in fame. His entire life he studied and devoured whatever old or new scholars published within the horizon of his own interest – and this horizon was huge – but his selection was judicious and always connected with the welldefined research projects he was accomplishing. The three volumes of his Lectures3 testify to the incredible number of contemporary books he read,

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summarized, clarified, and thoroughly discussed. He wanted to learn from not only other French authors, such as Marcel, Sartre, Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, Nabert, Levinas, Henry, Dufrenne, Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, Weil, Breton, Mournier, Mehl, and Thevenaz, but also from Rosenzweig, Jaspers, Arendt, Landsberg, Patocˇka, Jonas, and Anglo-Saxon thinkers. It is true that Lectures dedicates only one chapter to an American philosopher, John Rawls, but many others receive extensive discussion in the course of Ricoeur’s own later publications. The same is true of some continental philosophers he held in high esteem, such as Heidegger, Gadamer, or Habermas, who hardly figure in Lectures but are thoroughly discussed in many of Ricoeur’s other publications. Not many thinkers are at the same time eager and humble enough to recognize their many debts to other thinkers, but Paul Ricoeur is one of them. Moreover, he always tried hard to be accurate and fair in his critiques. Like many other French philosophers of his generation, Ricoeur had received an education that familiarized him thoroughly with the ancient and modern classics of European philosophy. Moreover, hardly any notable thinker of the twentieth century escaped his attention, and every time he discovered some common interest in another’s work he felt urged to respond. One of the great advantages of reading Ricoeur’s books is that the exposition of his own thought most often is accompanied by a summary and critical appreciation of many other books on the same subject matter. Reading the work of such an exemplary reader saves a lot of time! The Rule of Metaphor,4 for example, is almost a little encyclopedia about the secondary literature on metaphor. What generous gifts are such overviews! Again, this is made possible by the generosity of a master who does not mind to stand in the shadow of others. I do not know of any philosopher discussed by Ricoeur who could feel unfairly attacked or dismissed without argument. Even when one feels that Ricoeur the reader is irritated, Ricoeur the thinker finds praiseworthy suggestions in the texts to which he responds with the critical charity distinctive of unselfish scholars. His benevolent interpretations do not express an indecisive or oscillating stance, however. Most often, he finishes his discussions by formulating a firm, but balanced, position. Ricoeur could be irritated or even angry, for example, when he was unfairly humiliated by some of the Lacanians; but his answers were always to the point and polite, although sometimes quite passionate. Who are his most quoted or referred to authors and how does he deal with them? In his autobiographical work, Réflexion faite,5 he mentions Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers as the thinkers who early on showed him

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the possibility of a philosophy that is close to the concrete experiences of life, but in high school he had already become acquainted with the French tradition of “reflexive philosophy,” characterized by a Cartesian style of reflection on the a priori and a posteriori elements of human consciousness. The phenomenology of Husserl, whose Ideen I he translated in a German military camp during World War II, could still be considered a new, more “worldly” version of reflexive philosophy, but Ricoeur would discover that phenomenology needed a modification that yielded a hermeneutical twist; and this would tighten his connections with Heidegger and – even more so – with Gadamer. An overview of Ricoeur’s entire oeuvre will convince the reader that the classics to which Ricoeur most often turned were Aristotle and Kant, and that all the great thinkers from Plato to Augustine and from Hobbes to Heidegger were sources of challenge and inspiration to his tireless reflections. His conviction that the philosophical heritage is inexhaustible for anyone who tries to rethink and transform its treasures into elements of our own situation taught us a great respect for the tradition. He did not interpret the history of philosophy in a Hegelian way, as if it would display in time what a systematic unfolding of the logic and its concretization could repeat in the form of a synchronic theory of past theories. For him, the real history of philosophy was an ongoing adventure from which some towering heroes of thought have emerged as signposts for those who receive their legacy. This view is clearly visible in Ricoeur’s work, for instance, in the use that he makes in Oneself as Another of Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis and Kant’s main theses about rights, or in the retrieval of Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in Fallible Man.6 Ricoeur never degraded the greatness of philosophy’s past by declaring that “metaphysics” or ontology was dead or bygone. This profound disagreement with some philosophers in his surroundings was probably one of the reasons for not discussing their theories, some of which he could even characterize as “ideological.” Even so, however, he always appreciated the precise and subtle analyses of specific topics that he detected in their work. In his view, such analyses represented a French counterpart to the Anglo-Saxon culture of reasoning and argumentation. As far as the situation of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century is concerned, hardly any leading figure is missing from Ricoeur’s philosophical panorama. No one was therefore better prepared to accept the task of writing a substantial and wide-ranging overview of recent philosophy under the title Main Trends in Philosophy.7 Although he was assisted by other “rapporteurs,” this big volume is a splendid testimony not only to

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Ricoeur’s knowledge of the worldwide diversity of schools and movements in philosophy, but also to his ability to order them according to their affinities and contrasts. The articulation of the overview is modeled on six foci, which mirror the actual situation of philosophy. For the most part, they also represent the disciplines that attracted Ricoeur’s own interests. By describing the variety of perspectives and theses about logic (in a very broad sense), natural and social reality, language, action, and the foundation of humanism, Ricoeur draws a very informative picture of the philosophical community as it had developed after World War II. Again, we can admire his art of combining a clearly outlined perspective with a very high degree of impartiality that allows all the participants to emphasize what is most important to them. In light of his awesome knowledge of ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, Ricoeur, as a thinker in his own right, could not remain passive. From his innumerable review articles and the extensive discussions that fill many pages of his books, one gets the strong impression that he could not read a text without being prompted to react to it by summarizing its quintessence, critically evaluating its arguments, and beginning a dialogue with the dead or living author. His reading thus issued in an elaborate response, and this implied a positioning of his own thought with regard to the topics treated. Always intent on naming his sources and often introducing his own attempts by formulating what he owes to others, Ricoeur often borrows suggestions or articulations to structure his texts. This is obvious, for example, in the composition of Fallible Man, which is perhaps his most underestimated book. Plato’s tripartite division of the soul, Pascal’s contrast between the finite and the infinite, Kant’s threefold distinction of the passions, and several other schemas of the tradition are absorbed in it, while receiving a twentieth-century significance thanks to Ricoeur’s testing and rethinking. The modesty with which Ricoeur recognizes his many debts and the frequency of his references to the past lend his work a more traditional outlook than the one displayed by those authors who cover their traces or are not aware of them. A part of Ricoeur’s creativity lies certainly in his ability to renew, transform, and rearrange hidden or forgotten suggestions so that they become lively parts of contemporary dialogues within the horizons of a different world. Unique and particularly noticeable are Ricoeur’s courage and competence in staging discussions between the Continental approach to philosophy and the Anglo-American brand of analysis, which he patiently studied after he accepted a professorship in Chicago in 1959. Few colleagues from either side of this divide have thanked him for his

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contributions to this necessary mediation, and rare are the “analytic” philosophers who have responded to his advances, but recent developments in philosophy show that he paved the way for discussions that now are considered obligatory for each well-informed philosopher. Gathering the features I have emphasized so far, I would like to draw the following conclusion: as a teacher and commentator, Ricoeur not only exemplifies what all of us should and would like to do but also sets a high standard for measuring a professor’s quality.

Ricoeur as Writer Already in Ricoeur’s very early essays – many of which were published in the journal Christianisme social – two concerns, which accompanied all his further work, are obvious: ethics, never isolated from the basic questions of society and politics, and the relation between philosophy and the Christian faith that inspires Ricoeur’s social and political engagement. Even toward the end of his life he wrote public statements about the rights of the poor and immigrants, while his steady flow of publications on ethics culminated in the publication of his Gifford Lectures under the title Oneself as Another, in which we also find a good deal of epistemology, anthropology, and ontology. His often repeated formula “to live well with and for the others within just institutions” can be understood as the shortest summary of his ethics, but its unfolding mobilizes a host of works from Aristotle to Rawls, Habermas, and Levinas, while many philosophical as well as scientific analyses of language, action, society, and history are also involved in its elaboration. Add to this the three books he wrote in his last years – The Just, Reflections on the Just, and The Course of Recognition – plus many, many articles, and you have already a great oeuvre by itself.8 All his research projects were prepared by an ever-refreshed look at the most appropriate method. Later projects were linked to the unresolved questions accompanying the conclusions of former ones. Sometimes this caused a revision of the method that had hitherto guided the research. However, ethics in a very broad sense – including not only the morality of obligations but also the art of living a good life under the existential, social, political, cultural, religious, and historical conditions of the actual situation – remained the main preoccupation of Ricoeur’s philosophy from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career. The many explorations he undertook into ontology, epistemology, psychology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, history, comparative literature, and so on can be understood as

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excursions at the service of a unifying design, dominated by the ethical perspective, although, at the same time, they yielded many good results in other fields. One might say that those excursions were part of Ricoeur’s constant concern about method and justification – and this brings us to the question of his procedures and thinking style. I will not enter into the development of Ricoeur’s methodical practice and the reflexive, phenomenological, and hermeneutical phases one can distinguish in it. In autobiographical reports and several interviews, he himself has explained this side of his philosophical journey and Jean Greisch’s splendid book, L’itinérance du sens, tells us the rest.9 I will only underline a few features that, taken together, seem to characterize Ricoeur’s philosophical practice. First, I will provide a few remarks that connect with what I have already said about Ricoeur’s teaching. Before he began writing or teaching on a new subject, he felt obliged to read all that seemed useful for a full understanding of the subjects he had to treat in his courses, talks, or invited addresses. Whatever he presented was always carefully thought through. He was amazed that some of his colleagues went to class without notes, because he himself would never give a class or talk without the support of a fully developed text. The way Ricoeur formulated his questions was dialectical. He very often begins a paper or chapter by sketching a contrast between two positions, for instance, those of Husserl and Levinas with regard to intersubjectivity. The second step is then a quite elaborate analysis of both positions: how exactly – from which angles, within which framework, and on the basis of which assumptions – did the two parties approach the problem at stake? Do they show anything that we have not yet seen or that we should not forget and how do both authors justify their handling of it? Making each position as revealing as it can be, he finds some good in both, which changes the initial conflict into a tension between two worthwhile perspectives, neither of which should be neglected or summarily dismissed. Thus he prepares the ground for a less unilateral and more encompassing perspective that would do justice to both positions, while amending them. Up to this point, Ricoeur’s dialectical procedure resembles those of Kant and of Hegel. But, will he follow Hegel’s method, which is animated by a “faith in reason,” according to which reason is capable of reconciling the contending positions by lifting them up to the conceptual level of a complete unification? Will he overcome their contradiction by forging a synthesis that does not lose any element of their partial truth? Or will he rather follow Kant’s manner, which leaves the opposite views behind by

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replacing them with a different, more hybrid position, conserving some aspects of the refuted ones without, however, reaching a transparent insight into the necessity of their fundamental, but differentiated and therefore contradictory unity? Time and time again, Ricoeur’s way of confronting philosophies and looking for a possible reconciliation follows another path, although his manner is closer to Kant’s than to Hegel’s, because neither Kant nor Ricoeur claim that all distinctions can be converted into integral moments of a unifying concept. Instead of a unifying synthesis or a hybrid combination, the impetus of Ricoeur’s (re)thinking of different theses seems to be oriented by the desire for a fair and well-negotiated balance. Instead of a systematic unity, Ricoeur’s discourse is animated by a respect for the singular respectability of every serious thought. To reduce all differences to fully integrated – and thus domesticated – moments of an allencompassing system would be seen as an expression of conceptual violence. True, a balance in philosophy cannot abolish all obscurity, but Ricoeur prefers the justice of a judgment that maintains irreducible distinctions over more pleasing syntheses that risk obscuring or even destroying the characteristics of each individual position. Already in 1955, after the appearance of Jean Hyppolite’s plea for a retrieval of Hegel’s Logic in his Logic and Existence, Ricoeur took the opportunity to distance himself from Hegel’s ideal by writing a review under the title “Return to Hegel.”10 His main objection against Hegel’s dialectic is repeated and illustrated in all Ricoeur’s later work: with all due respect for the conceptual task of clarification and comprehension, insofar as these do justice to the existential and phenomenal reality to which philosophical reflection incessantly must turn in order to bring truth to light, conceptuality – and thus philosophy – cannot fully enlighten and integrate the part of irreducible darkness which inhabits that human and cosmic reality. In this respect, Ricoeur’s dialectical method is more akin to the various dialectics of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, but it would demand more refined comparisons than I can display here to distinguish their specificity and mutual relations. To orient such a comparison, it seems safe to say that, instead of counting on a conclusive union in the form of an identification or meta-identification of all the tensions between opposite views, Ricoeur seeks and expects a middle position that avoids the extremes, which he most often interprets as unilateral exaggerations of isolated aspects. His own position between successful syntheses and wholly unresolved antitheses is hinted at in his selfdescription as a thinker situated “between Kant and Hegel.” Perhaps one could call Ricoeur a post-Hegelian Kantian, even if he amended many and rejected some essential theses of Kant’s philosophy; but over the course of

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his life, he became more Aristotelian than Kantian, more and more preferring Aristotle’s phronesis over the haughty pretensions of the universal, all-commanding or all-absorbing authority of Reason (Vernunft), to which Kant was no less committed than Hegel. In this sense, Ricoeur neither followed Hegel’s “faith in reason” – and even less his looking down on any reasoning of the Verstand – nor Kant’s veneration of Reason as the supreme arbiter of theory and practice. Ricoeur’s cautious attitude regarding the complete unification of all forms of opposition, duality, or tension hangs together with his conviction that the experiential reality of human life and the overwhelming wealth of worldly phenomena do not permit their integral reduction to the status of fitting links within a perfectly coherent philosophy. Life, existence, and phenomenality are richer than the conceptual clarifications even the greatest philosophies may offer. Imagination, symbols, myths, forms of adherence, faith, and art are conceptually inexhaustible, but they lack transparency. Philosophy should accept its dependence on them without giving up its desire of gradual clarification. This attitude fitted well into the sobriety of Ricoeur’s character. He was suspicious of quick solutions and triumphant syntheses, because he was too sharply aware of the difficult, long, accurate, and endless labor that was required in order to not jump over the aporias that emerge as soon as insight and transparency seem close. Ricoeur knew too much to be capable of superficiality, and his style was too sober, serious, and modest to aggrandize each new discovery, as if it were a revolution in Sophia’s history. He was humble enough to call his own thought “ascetic” and “fragmentary,” and these adjectives fit well to describe his extremely well-informed, cautious, deliberative, balancing, and never wholly satisfied thinking. That the desire for systematic unification was not absent from Ricoeur’s indefatigable thinking can be illustrated in many ways. Not only do all his books and papers begin by setting out a program and drawing a vast outline for the present question and the way in which it fits into a broader context, but he is also eager to orient his research by drawing simplified constellations that serve as models and summaries of his research. One of those constellations – probably the most basic and central – is found not only in Oneself as Another, which can be seen as the work to which all of the previous works lead, but also, explicitly or implicitly, in many of his other papers. A condensed explanation of it can be found in a short piece, “Approaching the Human Person.” A summary of the ethos that condenses Ricoeur’s ethics (in the broad sense, explained earlier) is captured in the formula “esteem of oneself; care for the other; desire to live within just

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institutions.”11 Three principles, closely associated with one another but not unified by an encompassing first or super-principle, design the stage within which Ricoeur’s thought moves. Hegel, probably even Kant, would be inclined to show not only that these principles (or perspectives) evoke one another but necessarily belong together as inherent moments of one, more radical, principle’s self-differentiation (Hegel) or at least as three branches of one root (Kant). Ricoeur, however, seems to be content with the philosophical clarification of a threefold perspective on the ethico-political universe. Although his horizon was as wide as theirs, he did not try to be the Spinoza, Kant, or Hegel of the twentieth century.

Ricoeur as Colleague of Levinas I have tried to explain why Ricoeur has remained for me – as, I suppose, for many others – an important role model. He did what all of us should and would like to do, and he did it very well. However, I have not spoken about the innumerable invitations, talks, visiting professorships, addresses, honors, prizes, and eulogies that made him internationally famous, nor about the cruel sufferings that taxed his personal life. If we had to give a complete picture, we could not separate his philosophy from his life, and especially not from his awareness of the omnipresence of finitude, suffering, and guilt. A survey of his fame is secondary, however, because it does not matter for the quality of his thought. What also should not be missing from a complete portrait is Ricoeur’s attitude regarding his Christian faith and his conception of the relations between philosophy, the Bible, the Christian traditions, and theology, but this subject is too big to be treated in the margins of an essay about his philosophical style. Instead, I would like to finish by somewhat sharpening the lines and limits of my sketch by contrasting Ricoeur’s demeanor with that of another, equally famous but very different philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. I never attended a class of Levinas, because he became a professor at the Sorbonne only in 1973. Although I never was a student of Levinas, I have read and reread all of his publications, convened with him at many conferences, and visited him at least as often as my “Doktorvater” Ricoeur. Levinas greatly impressed me and won my deep admiration when, in the spring of 1962, I had to read, within one week, Totality and Infinity,12 which, of course, I did not really understand. And yet, it was a “revelation” – especially from the perspective of my own attempt to escape from Hegel’s all-embracing thought - that I studied in the course of writing my dissertation. Since this

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is not the right place to celebrate the memory of Emmanuel Levinas, I will restrict my remarks to a few aspects of his relations with Paul Ricoeur, in order to complete my picture of the latter. A full study of these relations would certainly be rewarding, but it would demand an entire dissertation in its own right. I cannot say much about Levinas’s teaching style, but friends of mine have told me that his teaching on the obligatory authors and texts was difficult to follow, because he combined it with his own, uncommon way of thinking. His approach to the philosophical tradition was certainly very different from Ricoeur’s. He knew the classics from having studied them at the Universities of Strasbourg and Freiburg after his elementary and high school education in Lithuania and from having taught them at a Jewish institution in Paris. Plato was his favorite, whereas Aristotle did not interest him particularly. As a product of French training in philosophy, he was of course acquainted with Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Malebranche, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. I do not think that Levinas closely followed the entire spectrum of postwar philosophy in Europe, but I am sure that his erudition could not compete with the mental library of Ricoeur. Levinas was well-versed in Russian and French literature, but he did not think that the sciences were important for philosophers. Although Hegel and Marx were very popular in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, joined by Freud somewhat later, Levinas, who counted Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit among the five most important books of Western philosophy, was a very un-Hegelian and un-Freudian (or un-Lacanian) spirit. Encyclopedic syntheses, panoramic overviews, the reduction of all differences to an encompassing unity, and the gathering of all appearances into a transcendental cogito were exactly what he abhorred. He did not have any desire to know everything or to write an allembracing system. In this respect, we could talk about a certain affinity with Ricoeur’s “fragmentary” approach, but, on the other hand, their concern for method and well-articulated composition differed greatly. In his desire to escape the totality, Levinas did not appeal to Aristotle or any mediation through phronesis and balance was not his ideal. On the contrary, he was so fascinated by one central intuition, which he himself called “obsessive” and even “traumatic,” that he often used a highly one-sided and hyperbolic language to make his points. As we will see, Ricoeur was quite shocked by Levinas’s exaggerations and found his writing style excessive. Levinas’s tempo was quite different from that of Ricoeur, who wrote one publication after another. When I asked Levinas whether he had almost finished his second great book, Otherwise than Being,13 he answered that the

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manuscript was in its ninth year and jokingly added that he still needed some time to eliminate its contradictions. His publications use few references or quotes and rarely do we find a sustained discussion comparable to those of Ricoeur. Argumentation is not the most adequate word for Levinas’s writing style; instead, a more Heideggerian than Husserlian kind of phenomenology influences his intuitive descriptions and analyses. Levinas did not care for help from the side of the sciences, either. Perhaps Heidegger convinced him once and for all that philosophy should not expect philosophically relevant information from them. Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, Goethe, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Valéry, Blanchot, Celan figure in his writings, but more as illustrations than to support or suggest integrated thoughts. I do not know much about the collegial relationship between Ricoeur and Levinas during the rather short time that both of them taught in Paris, except that when I visited Ricoeur, he asked me how Levinas was doing, whereas Levinas, when I visited him, asked me whether Ricoeur was doing well. In his publications, Levinas refers sometimes to Ricoeur, whose work he held in high esteem. He delivered a text on “Diachrony and Representation” at a conference that was held in Canada to honor Ricoeur. Both Ricoeur and Levinas participated regularly in the colloquia that were organized by the Instituto Enrico Castelli in Rome, and both were invited to participate in the colloquia hosted by Pope John Paul II in Castel Gandolfo, where – as Levinas jokingly remarked – during a lunch with the Pope, Ricoeur was seated at his right hand, while Levinas sat at his left. When, in January 1986, we were together in Rome for a colloquium on “Intersubjectivity, sociality, religion,” I had been asked to respond to Levinas’s paper, but since I had not received any text from him (when I arrived in Rome, he teased me by saying: “You certainly know already what I am going to say . . .”), I used my allotted time to stage and suggest a confrontation between my two masters, but they did not let themselves be distracted from reading their well-prepared and highly interesting, but extremely different, papers. Ricoeur waited many years before writing on Levinas’s work, although he was very much intrigued by it. In 1989 he published an essay “Emmanuel Levinas: Thinker of Testimony” in which he contrasts Levinas with two other thinkers about the role and meaning of testimony: Heidegger and Nabert.14 In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur discusses Levinas’s work twice: first, in contrast with Husserl, with regard to the alterity that characterizes the phenomenon of intersubjectivity, and then, in the last pages, where Ricoeur explores the ontology that is sought and implied in the former chapters, as a strong

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opponent of Heidegger’s phenomenology of conscience. He criticizes Levinas’s overemphasis on the Other and his neglect of the relative centrality of the ego’s ipseity. With regard to the intersubjective relation, Ricoeur’s main objection is that the demands addressed by the other’s face should not suppress the importance of my own self-esteem, whereas his discussion of Levinas’s negative stance toward Heidegger’s ontology shows that he is shocked by Levinas’s hyperbolic exaggerations, although he prefers Levinas’s analysis of conscience over that of Heidegger. Both passages are good examples of Ricoeur’s wrestling with two of his peers, whom he dialectically confronts with one another in order to prepare a balanced position of his own. Ricoeur has also spoken and written on Levinas on other occasions. There is even a published exchange of letters between them. I hope that someone will one day assemble a complete documentation of the relations that connect both thinkers and comment on it, but here and now, I will restrict my scope to Ricoeur’s last essay on Levinas’s philosophy, titled “Otherwise,” which focuses on the central thesis of Otherwise than Being.15 Ricoeur’s essay was published in French as a small book. It offers the text of two lectures he delivered within a program at the Collège International de Philosophie. He attacks Levinas, while presenting his commentary as a “reading” of that book. The severe, rather passionate, tone of these lectures is somewhat surprising. Ricoeur sounds not only puzzled but irritated and a little exasperated. Yet, his critique is illuminating because it helps us to discover the profound difference between two types of philosophy, which, though probably irreconcilable, are both necessary. Ricoeur focuses on the Levinasian distinction between “the Said” (le Dit ) and “the Saying” (le Dire), for which “the to say” perhaps might be a better translation. Whereas “the Said” stands for all that is or can be stated, spoken, thought, or written about, the verb to say (le Dire) names the addressing through which a speaker or writer addresses, offers, directs, hands on a said, a sentence, a text, or a theory. Levinas uses “the Saying” to evoke my being-for-the-Other, which he also calls responsibility. The Saying expresses each one’s (i.e., each ego’s or rather each me’s) responsibility for the other (autrui, you) one meets. To simplify, when I speak to you or otherwise address you, I exercise my responsibility for you – a responsibility that I have never chosen, because it constitutes and determines me before I get any chance to choose, to refuse, or to reject whatsoever. Ricoeur approaches Levinas’s distinction from a linguistic perspective, when he writes that the Said and the Saying differ as something that is said or stated – a proposition, for example – and an act of stating or saying

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(a said). The Said is studied in a semantic theory, whereas the Saying belongs to the pragmatics of stating as a form of acting. It is not sure that Levinas was familiar with the linguistic theories to which Ricoeur appeals, but perhaps we can understand his distinction between the Said and the Saying by starting from a short description of language on which Ricoeur (not Levinas), referring to Emile Benveniste, insists: “Someone says something about something to someone (other).” I am happy with this formula, especially because it completes the standard formula legein ti kata tinos (saying something about something) by explicitly mentioning the relation between an addressor and an addressee, both of whom are necessary for the phenomenon the formula tries to evoke. The relationship that connects the speaker (or sender) and the one who is spoken to (the receiver) is very often forgotten or obscured, which then yields a truncated understanding of language. Levinas’s focus is not the act of stating, but instead the engagement of the speaker in a face-to-face relation – an engagement that realizes and expresses the inescapable “being-for” or responsibility that binds the speaker to the other who faces him or her. When I speak to you, I speak about something, but I also offer you my speaking to you. Not only philosophical and scientific, but all thematizing speech or writing speaks about all sorts of things, relations, networks, and so on. We are even able to talk about the totality or universe of all things, ta panta and to pan as Parmenides called it, but talking to someone is different. It concretizes a radically different perspective and attitude and it can restrict itself to a minimal said; for example, when I say “Hi!” or “Hello” to you. Talking about things presupposes an observing, gathering, objectifying view. As a philosopher, one thinks about the universe, trying to find an Archimedean standpoint from where one can enjoy a panoramic view. The subject of traditional philosophy is a transcendent or transcendental Ego. Hegel is a good example, but the entire tradition of modern philosophy is a panoramic enterprise. We try to capture every reality in an adequate and wellformed said in order to display it before our audience or readers, whereas the attitude and the perspective involved in speaking to or addressing someone does not objectify you as a piece of my panorama, but respects you as exceptionally and surprisingly rising beyond all other phenomena and the entire universe, whose components and articulations can be distinguished and recomposed by a thinker who remains at a neutral distance. As soon as I reduce you to an interesting object of study, you, as my interlocutor who faces, listens, and responds to me, disappear. What I no longer see then is what you primarily signify to me: that I am responsible for you. Your visage awakens me to my being-for-you, but if I see you as an interesting

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phenomenon that only should be analyzed or explained, all ethical connotations are gone. What Levinas again and again tries to point out is the exceptional “epiphany” or “revelation,” as he calls it, through which your facing me makes me aware of my responsibility for you. Even before I can tell you any “said,” I am already caught in a primordial or “pre-original” relationship that possesses (or “obsesses”) me more than I possess it. Responsibility for the other demonstrates that ethics is first philosophy. In order to succeed in his endeavor, Levinas must overcome many obstacles, including the habits that have resulted from the generally accepted method and training in philosophy. Most philosophers are inspired by a desire for panoramic observation and conceptualization, and they are eager to produce statements about many things. But, if that is all, they forget their basic condition: the addressing of their said to listeners or readers. But how can Levinas speak about speaking to without thematizing the latter and thus reducing it to a said? What sort of language and what kind of thinking are capable of respecting the non-said character of the saying, on which the Said depends? For quite a while it has amazed me that there is so little philosophical literature about the vocative and that Levinas has not more explicitly focused on it to clarify the Saying, but his awareness of the earlier mentioned aporia has led him to the conclusion that such a conversion is inevitable and therefore must be followed by an unsaying (dédire), a kind of retracting or withdrawal of the Said into which the Saying has been transformed. This point is not the only one that Ricoeur finds to be strange. He is also taken aback by Levinas’s rhetoric and what he sees as a lack of argumentation and conceptual analysis. What Ricoeur himself has been doing is one of the best ways to practice philosophy as a meticulous exploration of questionable realities with the help of accurate descriptions of the relevant phenomena, well-thought arguments, and well-formulated texts. What troubles him most of all in Levinas’s project is the combination of a very unconventional manner of phenomenology, a “declarative” or even “kerygmatic” tone and a whole range of emphatic expressions that Ricoeur considers to be excessive or even violent. There are many aspects of Levinas’s oeuvre that may scandalize other philosophers, but I am somewhat disappointed by the fact that Levinas’s intuitive, hyperbolic, and often one-sided style of phenomenology has been an obstacle for a more sustained engagement on the part of Ricoeur. I had hoped that Ricoeur’s explanation of language as the “speaking of someone to someone about something” would have brought him into closer contact

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with Levinas’s “the Saying” than has been the case. Now it is only a posthumous suggestion to link the thought of two masters more intimately than commonly is done. Levinas employs all kinds of tropes and strategies to evoke the extraordinary exceptionality of the face-to-face, the “pre-original” Saying, and the responsibility that precedes everyone’s freedom. He uses traditional expressions, neologisms, words from theology and psychoanalysis, and even hyperbolic predicates to open the readers’ minds, in the hope that they may become aware of the amazing and staggering evasiveness of an intuited event that does not fit into the customary philosophical jargon. Ricoeur hardly hid his irritation with Levinas’s excessive metaphors, so alien to the measured language of his own phroneˉsis. Levinas admired the masterful way in which Ricoeur practiced the classical methods of philosophy, whereas Ricoeur was intrigued by – although sometimes indignant about – Levinas’s uncommon ruptures with the normal ways of doing philosophy. However, allow me to believe that Ricoeur felt a sincere sympathy for Levinas’s radical – perhaps all too radical! – proclamation of his ethical perspective as the key to serious philosophy. Does their difference hide a close proximity? A deep agreement? But how admirable and how different are their philosophies!

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7 8

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Saemmtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Veit u. Comp, 1834), 433. Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté, vol. I: Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1949) [Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966)]. See also MerleauPonty’s Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Paul Ricoeur, Lectures, 3 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1991–1994). Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Du Seuil, 1975) [The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979)]. Paul Ricoeur, Réflexion faite: Autobiographie intellectuelle (Paris: Esprit, 1995). Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Du Seuil, 1990) [Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992)] and Finitude et culpabilité, vol. I: L’homme faillible (Paris: Aubier, 1960) [Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986)]. Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979). Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste (Paris: Esprit, 1995) [The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000)]; Parcours de la reconnaissance (Paris: Stock,

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9 10 11

12

13

14

15

29

2004) [The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)]; and Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste II (Paris: Esprit, 2001) [Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007)]. Jean Greisch, L’itinérance du sens (Grenoble: J. Millon, 2001). Paul Ricoeur, “Retour à Hegel” in Lectures, vol. 2, 173–187. Paul Ricoeur, “Approaching the Human Person,” Ethical Perspectives 6:1 (1999): 45–54. The quotation is taken from p. 54. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1961) [Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)]. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1974) [Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1998)]. Paul Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Levinas: Thinker of Testimony” in Figuring the Sacred, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 108–128. Paul Ricoeur, “Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,” Yale French Studies 104 (2004): 82–99.

Chapter 2

Ricoeur and Biblical Hermeneutics: On Post-Religious Faith Richard Kearney

Paul Ricoeur spoke of faith as “the joy of yes in the sadness of no,” and once described his own Protestant belief as a “chance converted into destiny by a constant choice.”1 He understood that nothing about God could be taken for granted. Indeed, having lived for five years in German captivity during World War II, Ricoeur knew that there could be no return to faith that did not fully acknowledge the dark traversal of the abyss. He also recognized that the trenchant critiques of religion, delivered by atheists such as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, had to be taken seriously. In this way he was prepared to ask: What comes after God? What follows in the wake of our letting go of God? What emerges out of that night of not-knowing, that moment of abandoning and abandonment, especially for those who – after ridding themselves of “God” – still seek God? Implicit in such questions is the desire for a way beyond the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism – a way we might term “anatheism.” Ana-theos, God after God. Such a post-religious faith is, I will argue, intimated both in the writings and the spirited integrity of Paul Ricoeur. He understood this need for another way of seeking and sounding the things we consider to be sacred but can never contain. The sacred is another word for getting back what we’ve given up, as if we were encountering it for the first time – just as Abraham received back Isaac as gift after having given him up as patriarchal project. It is another way of returning to a God beyond the God we thought we possessed. And at stake in this movement of return and reception is not a simple “overcoming” of religion, but a reopening of that space where we are free to choose between faith or non-faith – to inhabit the option of retrieved belief. When Ricoeur endeavors to set forth the character and conditions of a post-religious faith, he is concerned to retrieve this option that operates before as well as after the division between theism

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and atheism, making both of them possible. Put in the terms of a phenomenological hermeneutic, this amounts to an invitation to revisit what might be termed a “primary scene” of religion: the encounter with a radical Stranger who we choose, or don’t choose, to call God. It is a scene that arises according to what Ricoeur, in a similar vein, has called a “tensional” model of metaphor: a fertile encounter between the familiar and the foreign (a scene we will observe in the Song of Songs, e.g.). This, after all, is an option for revisiting the sacred that Gerard Manley Hopkins imagined through various names –“aftering,” “seconding,” “over-and-overing,” or simply “abiding again” by the “bidding” of the everyday. All these verbs are variations on the prefix ana-, defined as “up, in place or time, back, again, anew.”2 They designate, for my own work and for that of Ricoeur, a process of retrieving the divine in a world ostensibly estranged from God, recovering the sacred in a time of disenchantment (Entzauberung) – what Charles Taylor describes as a secularized universe where God’s existence is no longer taken for granted.3

Critical Hermeneutics and the Atheistic Guest Since Ricoeur is ever a thinker of the text, it is fitting that we make our way into the movement of this post-critical faith by way of his texts and the option they evoke. We begin, appropriately, with his postwar essay, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” and the manner in which such categories may play both “host” and “stranger” to one another.4 Ricoeur speaks here of the “religious meaning of atheism,” suggesting that an atheistic purging of the negative and life-denying components of religion needs to be taken on board if a genuine form of faith is to emerge in our secular culture. Assuming the role of a “philosopher” rather than a “preacher,” Ricoeur seeks to indicate certain possibilities of such a post-atheistic faith, rather than fill in the details of what such a faith might mean in a confessional or liturgical context. The discourse of the philosopher is always, he says, that of the perpetual beginner, a “preparatory discourse.” And he adds that this is timely in our period of contemporary confusion, “where the true consequences of the death of religion perhaps still remain concealed,” requiring a “long, slow and indirect preparation.”5 Two underlying elements of religion that call for radical critique, on this view, are taboo and refuge. Under the first heading we have the archaic religious feeling of fear, or more particularly, fear of divine punishment and expiation. Under the second, we find the need for protection and

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consolation. Ricoeur defines religion, accordingly, as a “primitive structure of life which must always be overcome by faith and which is grounded in the fear of punishment and the desire for protection.”6 In this context, atheism discovers its true justification not only as destructive but also liberating. For as it exposes the dissimulating mechanisms of religious fear and infantile dependency – thereby destroying its destructiveness – it can also emancipate new possibilities of existing. And one of these possibilities, suggests Ricoeur, involves a faith situated beyond the level of accusation and protection. In this manner, atheism may be said to emancipate religion from itself, opening the promise of a living faith tucked within the shell of historical religion. That at any rate seems to be Ricoeur’s wager regarding a “post-religious faith.” Under the first category of taboo, Ricoeur invokes the salutary critiques of both Freud and Nietzsche. Unlike other philosophers – for example, British empiricists or Enlightenment positivists who attack religion on scientific grounds as undemonstrable – Freud and Nietzsche developed a new kind of atheistic critique, namely, the critique of religion as a cultural representation of disguised symptoms of fear and need. In this way they did not bother with arguments for proving or disproving the existence of God but concentrated on deconstructing religion to the extent that it is operative in forms of prohibition, accusation, and punishment. They thus advanced a critical “hermeneutics of suspicion” directed toward the illusions of religion and determined to unmask the hidden motivations behind religious piety. This critical hermeneutics took the form of a genealogy resolved to expose religion as the symptom of a conflict of underlying forces. Nietzsche identified the main ulterior motive as a “will to power,” and Freud as a perverted expression of libido resulting in “obsessive compulsion” and neurosis. The aim of Nietzsche’s genealogical readings was to show that the so-called ideal realm of religion is in fact “nothing”: a coverup for a denial of life, an illusory projection of a supersensible world driven by calumny of this earth. The aim of Freud’s psychoanalytic exposé, for its part, was to show that religion operates on the basis of a delusional “phantasm of the primal Father” responding to our infantile dependency. The answer, Freud suggested in his book on Leonardo DaVinci, was a “renunciation” of this Illusory Father, constructed as a double fantasy of fear and protection.7 Only by means of such a radical mourning of the divine Superego, only by letting-go of this phantasm of absolute authority and refuge, could the origin of values be restored to itself, that is, to Eros in its eternal struggle with Thanatos.8 So Nietzsche and Freud, in their respective voices, announce the “death of God.” But the question (once again) is: which God? Ricoeur suggests that it

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is the God of onto-theology, and that such a God deserves to die. The term “onto-theology” was brought into common parlance by Martin Heidegger to refer to the metaphysical concept of a highest and most general Being abstracted from the lived world.9 In Western intellectual history it often coincided with a moralizing deity of accusation and condemnation. Atheistic critique set out to accuse the accusation and condemn the condemnation. It sought to unveil the nihilism at the core of the religious delusion, to reveal the Superego’s lack of power, the Ideal world’s collusion with nay-saying and death. Or as Nietzsche put it, when something is leaning give it a push.10 Atheism, in this sense, is a way in which the illusions of religion self-destruct, exposing themselves for what they truly are: nothing. And so dies the omnipotent God of onto-theology understood as Emperor of the World. So also dies the omniscient God of “self-sufficient knowledge,” which places the “powerful over the good and law over love and humility that are superior to law.”11 And along with the omnipotent and omniscient God goes the omnipresent God who condones evil as well as good. So dies, in short, the Omni-God of theodicy, invoked to justify the worst atrocities as part of some Ultimate Design. This is the God rightly dismissed, in our day, by Richard Dawkins when he invites us to imagine a world with: no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian Partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ-killers,” no Northern Ireland “troubles,” no “honor killings,” no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (“God wants you to give till it hurts”). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing some of it.12 After the hermeneutics of suspicion has done its work, it is no longer possible to return, in Ricoeur’s words, “to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine.” That is why he urges that we acknowledge the positive good of the critique of ethics and religion undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it, he argues, we learn that “the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness.”13 If atheism remains simply a negation, however, it runs the risk of being merely re-active rather than active. The rebel falls short of the prophet. The accusation of accusation, while necessary, may fail to return to a pure affirmation of life, that is, to a recognition that all things in our secular universe

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are in fact, already and always, sacred at heart. Nietzsche did, to be sure, speak of an “innocence of becoming” and embraced the “eternal recurrence of the same.” And it is easy to forget that the “madman” who declared God to be dead began his declaration with the words “I seek God.”14 But by declaring the will to power to be the primary truth of existence, Nietzsche remained confined within a voluntarist universe: a world where even the reaffirmation of life becomes a sort of personal mythology, a willful lyricism of animus and projection, a private fantasy of how things might be, albeit this time on the side of yea-sayers rather than nay-sayers. Hence the option of anatheism. And I stress that it is an “option” rather than a necessity. Anatheism, as signaled in Ricoeur, offers the possibility of retrieving a post-atheistic faith. It allows for a return to a post-religious theism in the wake of Freud and Nietzsche. For Ricoeur, the philosopher as a responsible thinker remains suspended between atheism and faith, between the secular and the sacred. As such, a critical hermeneutic opens up a space where the “prophetic preacher” may envisage the retrieval of a liberated faith within the great religious traditions. Ricoeur imagines in this context a “radical return to the origins of Jewish and Christian faith,” a journey at once “originary and postreligious,” which speaks to our time.15 The philosopher dreams of a prophet who would realize today the liberating message of Exodus that exists prior to the law: “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2). He or she dreams of a faith that speaks of freedom and that proclaims the Cross and Resurrection as invitations to a more creative life, a belief that articulates the contemporary relevance of the Pauline distinction between Spirit and Law and that interprets “sin” less as the breaking of taboo than as the refusal of life. In such a scenario, sin would be exposed as a life lived fearfully “in the infernal cycle of law, transgression and guilt.”16 But the philosopher can only dream of such a faith. It is the business of post-religious believers to actually promote it. The philosopher finds himself in an “intermediate time” between mourning the gods who have died and invigilating the signs of a new return. While looking forward to a “positive hermeneutics,” which would be a recreation of the Biblical kerygma – the prophets and the primitive Christian community – the philosopher cannot, says Ricoeur, enter that promised land. For the philosopher’s responsibility is to “think,” that is, “to dig beneath the surface of the present antinomy until he has discovered the level of questioning that makes possible a mediation between religion and faith by way of atheism.”17 Ricoeur’s argument here is deeply anatheistic. It suggests that to think religiously is to think post-religiously. And it acknowledges that the best an

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anatheist philosopher can do is to disclose a site where the freedom of our human will is rooted in listening to a “word” of which one is neither source nor master. This disclosure, this listening, is one step into a moment that may constitute an antidote to dogmatic theism and atheism. With Dostoyevsky, it may be that moment in which true faith “bursts forth from the crucible of doubt.”18 But it is also a moment, or movement rather, that refuses all absolute talk about the absolute, negative or positive; for it acknowledges that the absolute can never be understood absolutely by any single person or religion. I believe Ricoeur would here acknowledge the liberating force of critical atheism as an integral part of genuine theism, understood as a second faith beyond faith. And he would likewise respect an agnostic atheism that remains just that – a-gnosis, not-knowing – choosing not to make the second move of faith. Indeed, this attention to a primordial event of the word and meaning is the fitting vocation of an anatheist who, at least when philosophizing, provisionally brackets out metaphysical questions of “God” and “religion.” It is a form of existential hearkening to the coming and going, the being and non-being, of meaning prior to any confessional or institutional identification of the nature of that word. But in attending to this landing site, this disposition to listen and receive (often in silence) from something beyond one’s own mastering will, the anatheist philosopher can prepare the ground for believers who may later wish to release the kerygma of their faith from the prison-house of obligation and trepidation. Listening philosophically to the word of existence may thus help us to listen theologically to the word of God, without confounding the two. For existential listening, in Ricoeur’s view, allows us to restore our originary affirmation of life, our primordial desire to be: a desire that preexists the many distortions that have made it a stranger to itself. It invites us to start all over again, from the beginning: Repetition, Recapitulation [Anakephalaiosis]. The word of existence – which affirms the goodness of being in spite of its multiple estrangements – speaks according to the grammar of the prefix ana-. “This affirmation must be recovered and restored,” as Ricoeur says, “because (and here the problem of evil emerges) it has been alienated in many ways. This is why it must be regrasped and reinstated. The task of ethics is thus the reappropriation of our effort to exist. Since our power has been alienated however, this effort remains a desire, the desire to be.”19 Without this ana-ethical turning and returning to existence, the option of anatheist faith is not possible. There is, insists Ricoeur, something that precedes the order of will and obligation and this something is nothing else than “our existence in so far as it is capable of being modified

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by word.”20 In sum, anatheism may be said to express both an existential desire and an eschatological faith. A certain “gap” will always remain between the philosopher’s endless exploration of new beginnings in existence and the practitioner’s proclamation of a return to the word of God. But in spite of this gap, concedes Ricoeur, a certain “correspondence” may appear between a theology that retrieves its own origins and a philosophy that embraces atheism’s critique of religion.21 Anatheism might be described as an attempt to respond to this correspondence. Ricoeur himself does not use this term, but I believe he prepares the ground for a recovery of God after God in his account of what such a recovery might entail: It would return to the roots of Judeo-Christian faith while also being a new beginning for our time . . . It would be a faith that moves forward through the shadows, in a new “night of the soul” – to adopt the language of the mystics – before a God who would not have the attributes of “Providence,” a God who would not protect me but would surrender me to the dangers of a life worthy of being called human. Is not this God the Crucified One, the God who, as Bonhoeffer says, only through his weakness is capable of helping me? He concludes his essay on religion and atheism thus: “The night of the soul means above all the overcoming . . . of fear, the overcoming of nostalgia for the protecting father figure. Beyond the night, and only beyond it, can we recover the true meaning of the God of consolation, the God of Resurrection . . .”22 Nothing is lost in anatheism. Or rather what is lost, as possession, can be retrieved as gift, revisited after the salutary night of atheistic critique – just as Job received back all he lost, and Abraham received back Isaac, and Jesus received his life after death. Even the loving “father” of creation may be anatheistically retrieved as a symbol of life. For if Biblical religion represented God as a Father and atheism bids us renounce the fetish of the father, anatheism suggests that, once overcome as idol, the image of the Father may be recovered as symbol, a symbol generous in its semantic and gender implications. “This symbol,” suggests Ricoeur, “is a parable of the foundation of love; it is the counterpart, within a theology of love, of the progression that leads from simple resignation to poetic life.” Whence his summary of the religious meaning of atheism: “An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin to speak.”23

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Last Testaments and the Eucharistic Hope Almost forty years after this radical reflection, Ricoeur returns to the question of death and resurrection in his final testament, Vivant jusqu’à la mort (2007). Written shortly after the death of his wife, Simone, and revisited as he himself was dying, the author here blurs the distinction between the philosopher and the preacher, and confides to his reader with unprecedented candor. His confidences, in my view, amount to the confessions of an anatheist. Speaking of a certain kind of “grace” accompanying the experience of death, Ricoeur notes that it is not important for this moment of grace that the dying person identifies with a particular religion or confession. Indeed maybe it is only when faced with death that the religious becomes one with the Essential and that the barrier dividing religions (and non-religions like Buddhism) are transcended. Because dying is trans-cultural it is also trans-confessional and trans-religious.24 Admitting his basic suspicion of “immediacy and fusion,” Ricoeur makes one exception for “the grace of a certain dying.”25 He talks about this grace as a “paradox of immanent transcendence,” of an especially “intimate transcendence of the Essential which rips through the veils of confessional religious codes.”26 To encounter such authentic grace one must, Ricoeur writes, forgo the will for one’s own personal salvation by transferring this hope onto others. Here again we confront the basic scriptural paradox that “he who clings to his life loses it and he who lets it go gains it.” Or to put it in James Joyce’s terms, “without sundering there is no reconciliation.” In this context, Ricoeur offers a startlingly refreshing reading of the Eucharist as a celebration of blood-as-wine, transubstantiation being taken as a sign of life and sharing rather than a token of sacrificial blood-letting.27 The Eucharistic commemoration of the giving of one’s life – “Do this in memory of me” – thus becomes an affirmation of the gift of life to and for the other rather than an anxiety about personal physical survival after death. In other words, when Christ said “it is finished,” he meant it. He was offering up his own personal life, in a second gesture of kenotic emptying (the first being the descent of divinity into flesh), so as to give life to others, in both service (Luke 22: 27) and sacrament: the breaking of bread at Emmaus, the cooking of fish for his disciples in the form of the risen servant, and ever after,

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down through human history, in the guise of feeding the “least of these.” Ricoeur concludes his terminal testament with this remarkable note: The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. Hence the link between death-rebirth in the other and service as gift of life. Hence also the link between service and feast. The Last Supper conjoins the moment of dying unto oneself and the service of the other in the sharing of food and wine which joins the man of death to the multitude of survivors reunited in community. And this is why it is remarkable that Jesus never theorized about this and never said who he was. Maybe he didn’t know, for he lived the Eucharistic gesture, bridged the gap between the imminence of death and the community beyond. He marked a passage to glory (through suffering and death) without any sacrificial perspective.28 What Ricoeur is rejecting here, it seems to me, is the notion of Christ’s death as a scapegoating ritual of bloodletting to propitiate a divine bloodlust. He is not rejecting Christ’s act of “sacrificing” his life out of love for others. Ricoeur’s intention is, I believe, deeply anatheistic in its return to a post-sacrificial Eucharist of sharing with the stranger, the other, the uninvited guest. Indeed, the fact that Ricoeur calls himself a “Christian who writes philosophically” rather than a “Christian philosopher” seems to me significant here. For in so doing he is acknowledging the importance of a gap that allows us to freely and imaginatively revisit, and at times retrieve, the often forgotten resources of traditional religion. But there is one last question I wish to ask of Ricoeur: “What exactly does he mean when he speaks of God as a dieu capable, a capable God?” Always one to oppose schismatic oppositions, Ricoeur suggests that the critical encounter between the categories of Greek ontology and biblical theology involved in the translation of Exodus 3:14, opens up new resources for understanding the nature of the divine as being-capable or enabling. (Indeed he might well agree with Derrida that between the “tragic” being of Athens and the “messianic” alterity of Jerusalem, there is “philosophy.”29) Noting the traditional rendition of the Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh as “I am who am,” Ricoeur is more interested in alternative renditions such as “I am who may be” or “I am who will be with you.” The latter acknowledges a certain “divine dynamism” in the Hebrew formulation that in Greek and Latin amplifies the existing range of ontological categories of being and non-being.30 Of particular interest here are the connotations of promise, becoming, and futurity that the Exodic formula contains. Ricoeur is intrigued by the fertile tension emerging from the crossing-over of Greek

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ontology and Biblical theology. “It is truly the verb ‘to be,’ but in none of the senses found in the Greek,” he writes, “There is a sort of enlargement of the meaning of being as a being-with, or being-faithful, that is, the being as accompaniment of a people, another dimension of being.”31 When Aristotle says there are many meanings of being, he had not, says Ricoeur, imagined the being of Exodus 3:14. Ricoeur endorses a mutual amplification of ontologies in the various translations between Greek and Hebrew. Here, finally, we encounter what might be called an eschatology of the possible shared by philosophers and theologians alike. Eschatology is, by Ricoeur’s own admission, his intellectual and spiritual “secret.”32 It usually arises at the end of certain hermeneutic analyses (e.g., Freud and Philosophy) in a relatively allusive fashion. The Greek term “eschaton” serves as a limitconcept for Ricoeur’s work in both philosophy and theology, as suggested by his embrace – in Thinking Biblically – of a medial position between “philosophical theology” and “theological philosophy.”33 This latter-day acknowledgment of an eschatological posse marks something of a departure from Ricoeur’s earlier reservation – what he called his “methodological asceticism” – regarding the intermingling of philosophy and theology.34 In an intriguing essay on the Song of Songs entitled “The Nuptial Metaphor,” Ricoeur pushes his eschatological secret to the point of rhapsodic avowal.35 Here we find the eschatological potential of the divine responding to the liturgical power of the human in the form of a theo-erotic crossing. Commenting on verse 8:6 of the Song – where the shortened and unprecedented allusion to God (shalhevetyah) appears as yah – Ricoeur notes that the famous “seal of alliance” inscribed on the human heart is to be understood as both wisdom and desire. Under the apple tree I awakened you There where your mother conceived you Set me as a seal upon your heart . . . For love is as strong as death . . . Its flame a flash of sacred fire (shalhevetyah) . . . (Song of Songs 8:5–7) Here, suggests Ricoeur, we have a discreet eschaton that respects the incognito of an intimate corps-à-corps where human and divine desires traverse each other. In this nuptial traversal, the “I can” of human being finds its correspondent in the “You can” of sacred love. L’homme capable and le dieu capable respond to each other in an act of daring complicity and co-creation. And it is no accident, I suspect, that Ricoeur chooses the term

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“metaphor” to describe this divine-human exchange, for metaphor is, as noted earlier, precisely that “tensive” power of language that comes alive in the crossing of ostensible opposites – immanent-transcendent, sensibleintelligible, finite-infinite. Reading this text, one realizes that for Ricoeur the divine is “capable” precisely because it is eros as well as agape: a dynamic potency (dunamis, conatus, appetitus) that expresses itself as a desire that is less lack than surplus, an eschatological desire to make human beings more capable of new genesis, incarnation, and natality. Desire to be (désir à être) rather than lack of being (manque à être). Desire beyond desire. Anatheist desire is a love that answers desire with more desire – and death with more life. And in such a process of mutual traversal, desire surely reveals “God” as another name for the “more,” the “surplus,” the “surprise” that humans seek. So what are the implications of such a “capable God” for concrete questions of living and dying? Such an eschatological posse, for Ricoeur, implies a God of enabling service rather than of sacrificial blood-letting, a God who is willing to efface his own being for the sake of giving more being to his beloved creatures. In this sense, we may speak of a God beyond religion (in the sense of confessional absolutism), or at the very least of an interreligious or trans-religious God. I think Ricoeur comes close at this terminal juncture to his Parisian friend, Stanislas Breton, who espoused a form of mystical kenosis whereby divinity becomes “nothing” in order that humanity can become more fully human.36 The notion of divine posse – of an enabling God who says “You are capable!” – repudiates all forms of theodicy and theocracy by returning power and responsibility to humans. And it is interesting that on this point, Ricoeur specifically invokes the great Rhine mystics who “renounced themselves” for the sake of opening to the Essential, to the point of being, in their contemplative detachment, incredibly active in the creation of new orders, in teaching, traveling, and tending to the forgotten of this world. By being available like this to the Essential they were motivated to “transfer the love of life onto others.”37 God thus becomes a God after God, a God who no longer is but who may be again in the form of renewed life. Such a divinity is “capable” of making us “capable” of sacred life, and it does so by emptying divine being into non-being so as to allow for rebirth into more being: life more fully alive. In this option for natality over mortality, the dichotomy between before and after death may be refigured. The space of anatheism opens onto this “may be.” But it is a space of free possibility – beyond impossibility – never a fait accompli. Nothing can be taken for granted. Wagers are called for, again and again.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

See Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). See The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 755–765. Paul Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 440–467. Ibid., 441. Ibid. See Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999). See Freud’s famous conclusion to Civilisation and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 92. See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), based on lectures given by Heidegger in 1957. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Robert Pippen, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Max Scheler, “Love and Knowledge,” in On Feeling, Knowing and Valuing, trans. H. J. Bershady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 160. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2008), 23–24. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” 447. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1954), 93–94. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” 448. Ibid. Ibid. See Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoyevsky: An Interpretation, trans. Donald Atwater (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934), 78–79. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” 452. Ibid., 454. See also my analysis of the ana-erotic paradigm of mystical experience as a return to a second desire beyond desire in “The Shulammite Song: Eros Descending and Ascending,” in A Theology of the Passions, eds. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 306–340. Ricoeur, “Religion, Atheism, Faith,” 455. Ibid., 460. Ibid., 467. See also Ricoeur, “The Critique of Religion,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, eds. Charles Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 213f. Ricoeur talks of returning to a second naïveté of authentic faith after the dogmatic prejudices of the first naïveté have been purged. He speaks accordingly of debunking false religious fetishisms so that the symbols of the eschatological sacred may speak again. Anthony Steinbock sketches a similar move in his distinction between a genuine “vertical” experience of the sacred and “idolatrous”

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

32

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34 35

Ricoeur Across the Disciplines misconstruals of this in Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 211–240. Paul Ricoeur, Vivant jusqu’à la Mort (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 45. Ibid. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91; emphasis in the original. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 131. The full quote is: “No philosophy responsible for its language can renounce ipseity in general, and the philosophy or eschatology of separation may do so less than any other. Between original tragedy and messianic triumph there is philosophy, in which violence is returned against violence within knowledge, in which original finitude appears, and in which the other is respected within, and by, the same” (emphasis in the original). Paul Ricoeur, “From Interpretation to Translation,” in Thinking Biblically, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 331. See also Paul Ricoeur, “La croyance religieuse. Le difficile chemin du religieux,” in Qu’est-ce que la culture? Vol. 6 (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), especially the section “L’homme capable, destinataire du religieux.” Paul Ricoeur, “A Colloquio con Ricoeur,” in Verita del Methodo, ed. Fabricio Turoldo (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2000), 254. Paul Ricoeur, “The Poetics of Language and Myth,” in Debates in Continental Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 99 ff. Ricoeur, “A Colloquio con Ricoeur,” 255. See also Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). Ibid. Ricoeur, “The Nuptial Metaphor,” in Thinking Biblically, 265f. See Ricoeur’s final reference to our notion of divine Posse in one of the last “Fragments” of Vivant Jusqu’à la mort (129–130). This occurs in the context of Ricoeur’s discussion of Marc Philonenko’s reading of the “Our Father.” Remarking that we are concerned in this prayer less with a statement about God’s being (the fact that God is) than an invocation to action and doing, Ricoeur sees here a movement beyond a traditional metaphysics of being to an eschatology of “possibility.” “Une invocation s’addresse à un Dieu qui peut ce qu’il fait” (our italics). Dans les demandes en tu, il est demandé à Dieu de faire qu’il règne . . . Peut-être un Dieu du posse (Richard Kearney). La vision eschatologique est celle d’une complétude de l’Agir” (129–130). Returning to his oft-repeated desire for a hermeneutical re-reading of Aristotle’s dialectic of possibility and actuality, Ricoeur notes that Christ’s appeal to the Father takes the form not just of wish but of expectancy, an act of trust in the accomplishment of action (agir). Here Ricoeur sees a “coupling” of capacities, human and divine, seeking to be realized in a “coupling” of actions. “Forgive us as we forgive others,” and so on. “Le comme opère verbalement ce que la symétrie inégale des deux agir opère effectivement” (130). Ricoeur concludes with an eschatological reinterpretation of Aristotle’s ontology of potency and act, involving a new hermeneutic “coupling,” with its

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37

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own radical charge of semantic inter-animation and innovation: “Telle serait la possibilisation d’une énonciation en terme d’agir. Non grec. Mais possibilité d’une réecriture du verbe être à la façon d’Aristote. Etre comme dunamisenergeia. L’agir rend possible cette réecriture de l’être grec. Comme déjà Exode 3, 14–15. Voir Penser le Bible sur ‘Je suis qui je serai’” (131–132). In this final reflection on the eschatological “capacity” for pardon, Ricoeur conjoins his ontological and theological insights into the transformative power of the “possible.” Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross, trans. Jacqueline Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Ricoeur, Vivant jusqu’à la mort, 76. Other significant contributions to the “God after Metaphysics” debate – which emerged in the wake of the “theological turn” in phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Michel Henry) and in deconstruction (Derrida) – include the recent work of thinkers such as John Caputo, John Manoussakis and Mark Taylor. These thinkers have explored the idea of a messianicity without metaphysics, calling this, paradoxically but tellingly, a “religion without religion.” Caputo’s own notion of the “weakness of God” stems from a reading of Christian kenosis in light of a deconstructionist complicity between mysticism and atheism that, as noted earlier, was already identified by Derrida in Sauf le Nom. Manoussakis and Taylor develop somewhat different conclusions to their respective books, both titled After God, the former veering in a more theistic direction, the latter in a more atheistic one.

Chapter 3

Ricoeur and Theology: Act and Affirmation William Schweiker

Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again. But what the symbol gives rise to is thinking. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil

Ricoeur and Theology? Paul Ricoeur called himself a philosopher who “listened” to the biblical witness. He never claimed to be a theologian, and, furthermore, he insisted, even in one of his last lectures, on the distinction between theology and philosophy.1 Philosophical reflection can engage – must engage – non-philosophical cultural forms including religious texts and symbols, but the truth of philosophical work cannot be determined by appeal to religious convictions or authorities. Theology, he held, is a second-order discourse, that is, the articulation of the meaning and truth of the first-order discourse and practice of a religious community. In contrast, “hermeneutical philosophy . . . will try to get as close as possible to the most originary expression of a community of faith, to those expressions through which the members of this community have interpreted their experience for the sake of themselves and for other’s sake.”2 Theology reflects on the faith of a community. Philosophy seeks to articulate originary expressions through the interpretation of symbols, narratives, and practices, but not for the purposes of a religious community; it is the task of “thinking” as a response to the desire to be called again, as the words that head this chapter note. Theology and philosophy seem, then, to be distinct, if somewhat related, forms of reflection. While many theologians have drawn inspiration from his thought, and granting that Ricoeur coauthored a volume on biblical interpretation, his contribution to theology is nevertheless somewhat difficult to articulate and

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to assess.3 The main problem of clarifying Ricoeur’s contribution to contemporary theology is, of course, the definition of “theology” itself. How theology is defined and in which community it labors will determine the assessment of Ricoeur’s contributions. Further, while theology was once the “Queen of the Sciences,” nowadays it wanders in the desert of criticism. Theology is relegated to a churchly discipline, reduced to other forms of thought (biology, economics, philosophy, et al.), or marginalized as an exotic occupation of university scholars. The root question for this chapter, then, is the extent to which Ricoeur’s inquiry into human capability and fallibility can contribute to a renewed conception of theology. Does Ricoeur help us articulate anew the wish to be called again after the desert of criticism and, if so, what would that mean for “Christian theology?” Typically, theologians indicate that Ricoeur’s philosophy provides methodological aid to theological reflection, say, in his account of narrative, his construal of the arc of interpretation, his work on biblical thinking, or his powerful reflections on human fault, evil, and hope.4 Without denying those contributions, the following inquiry charts two distinct but interrelated forms of reflection in theology, namely, one about the form of theological thinking and the other about the content of its response to the “wish to be called again.” I aim to show that Ricoeur is useful to a form of theology that seeks to move beyond fideism rooted in the biblical witness as well as rational theology rooted in the pretenses of philosophical systems. Ricoeur helps us to articulate this form of theology in terms of an affirmation of life in the face of evil, an affirmation, I contend, rooted in the living God. Clarity about this rootedness requires uncovering the originary Christian experiences of acceptance and assurance that transform what Ricoeur calls human attestation and originary affirmation. This transformation is the work, theologically speaking, of divine grace received in faith. Once the transformation of the originary is grasped, I will show, Ricoeur’s distinction between theology and hermeneutical thinking is dissolved and the theological task renewed.

Theological Thinking In its simplest sense, theology is thinking or speaking (logos) about God (theos). Yet what is meant by “thinking”? How can one “think” about “God”? While there are many accounts and theories of “thinking” as well as many forms it can take, the polysemy of the Greek logos has long suggested a picture of thinking as internal speech or dialogue. In this vein, Ricoeur

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intimates that thinking is best conceived as a human activity that seeks to render a productive tension between senses embedded in language and literal – or factual – statements about reality. Obviously, literal claims about reality and forms of linguistic sense can conflict. It is literally the case that the sun does not set at night but, rather, the earth turns on its axis, and, yet, on the plane of naïve experience and also natural language the sun does set. While we can, and often must, take these as separate domains of rationality with their own logic and norms (e.g., scientific and literary rationality), hermeneutical thinking mediates these differences in order to render them productive. This type of thinking aims at a form of understanding whose object is meaning tethered to but not limited by either states of affairs in the world or linguistic sense alone. The desert of criticism that Ricoeur notes is in part the contention that literal and linguistic senses are supposedly beyond mediation: linguistic sense can and must be reduced to factual statements if it is to be true, or else it will have no connection to the world. In such a case, religious symbols and narratives would be reduced to their ostensive literal claims and thus falsified or seen to be mere human fancy. Yet, do we not want to see the sun “rise” and “set”? That is, do we not want some meaningful congruence between our natural perceptions of the world, our everyday attitudes, and the way things are? Throughout his career, Ricoeur labored to show that certain linguistic forms (symbols, metaphors, narrative) mediate and render productive this clash between different types of statements about reality. Symbols mediate bios and logos; metaphors arise from the clash between literal and figurative claims; narratives configure events against the two conflicting horizons of human time, death and eternity.5 These are the hermeneutical way of “thinking.” That is, these are forms of meaning that, under the power of the imagination, mediate between the regions of sense and existence: biological and rational sense, literal and figurative claims, the finality of death and the infinity of hope. Such meanings, when submitted to hermeneutical thinking, open new ways for human beings to understand and to orient their lives amid intractable tensions that structure existence. To be human is to be a thinking being, but that means a creature who seeks to render meaningful the conflicts of its existence arising from the effort to be. Hermeneutical thinking, Ricoeur intimates, is the enactment of “capable man” in the realm of meaning and understanding. This coheres with a fundamental intuition, according to Ricoeur. “Should we not say,” he writes, “that to exist is to act? Does not being, in the first instance, signify act? Being is act before it is essence, because it is effort before it is

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representation or idea.”6 The issue for theology becomes how an idea or representation of “God” is related to the human effort of being. What then of theology? Theology is thinking about God; it is God-talk. But how can one think or speak about God? Is theology just a second-order discourse, as Ricoeur once held? Or is it, additionally, a form of thinking seeking to articulate and render meaningful the human relation to the divine and thereby orient existence? In a general sense, any discourse about God or the gods is a form of theology, from silent prayers uttered by devout believers to the flow of references to “God” in popular music or extremely refined theological systems. However, an exceedingly wide definition of God-talk would conceal questions germane to theology as a distinct intellectual practice conducted by individuals trained in and committed to the clarity and integrity of that practice. Further, an overly wide conception of “God-talk” too easily obscures questions about the sources of theology, its object, purposes, and criteria, and, further, its possibilities and limits. These questions are especially important to answer for the discipline of theology in a strict or narrow sense. We need, then, a more precise account of the intellectual practice called “theology,” beyond the wide meaning of theology as any form of God-talk. In the history of Christian theology there have been three great options for the practice of theology in a strict sense, with a host of variations among each option. Each one of these accounts of theology entails a different conception of thinking, so clarity about these options is important if we are to explore Ricoeur’s contributions to theology. First, theology can be understood as the articulation and interpretation of the meaning of the Church’s witness, including its basic texts, for the sake of orienting the life of the Christian community. The demand for theology thus arises intrinsically in the life of the Church, and consequently the task of theology is to answer those demands rather than to clarify the meaning and truth of Christian convictions to those outside of the Church. Often called “confessional theology,” this type of theological reflection is about and within the Christian witness. Theology renders articulate and coherent the symbolic world of the Christian witness without questions about how that “world” might relate to other ways of knowing or experiencing reality. As some post-liberal theologians put it, the task is to think within the Church’s narrative and to form the life of the Church so as to be able to live out that story. The claims of theology are “realistic” in the same way that a novel can be “realistic”; the Christian story creates a figural world that the reader, or believer, can enter.7 As a result, theology would not be

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a mediating act because thinking itself is not hermeneutical, in Ricoeur’s sense of the term. A second form of theology seeks to respond to demands and questions extrinsic to the believing community, demands about the intelligibility, truth, and plausibility of faith. The task for this form of theology is to formulate the meaning and to show the truth of Christian convictions in ways that respond to those demands and thereby witness to those outside of the Church while also fortifying the believing community. Usually called “apologetic theology,” on this account theology seeks to answer pervasive and pressing human questions. Here too a specific conception of “thinking” is entailed. That task is to develop a set of univocal concepts or ideas that allow for the translation of symbolic claims into abstract rational ones, to show, for instance, that “God” really means “Good” or “Being” or “creativity.”8 Theology is not a mediating act because, again, thinking is not hermeneutical. The task is simply to show that claims about “God” are grounded in factual claims, empirically or metaphysically. There is a third conception of theology found in the Christian tradition that moves beyond the linguistic “world” of the Christian witness as well as the pretense of apologetic theology. It can be called “mediating theology” insofar as it seeks to mediate between the Christian witness and the general reflection on human existence in the world. It has taken various forms. Although often confused with “apologetic” theology, this kind of theology in its varied forms is decidedly different precisely because the act of thinking is thoroughly hermeneutical in character. Mediating theologians address both intrinsic and extrinsic demands facing a religious community because they insist that adherents dwell neither solely in the Church (the religious community) nor solely in the “world.” Moreover, the force of mediating theologies is the contention that the God of Christian faith is the God of all reality, but the means to speak of the living God, to engage in God-talk, is through the resources of some religious community. A mediating theology notes that God and Christian claims about God are not the same. The divine transcends every possible mode of discourse, including those of one’s own religious community. At a deeper level, a mediating theology shows that the meanings of statements about God are not reducible to the structure of the Church’s narrative or to empirical or metaphysical statements of “fact” precisely because of their mediating or synthetic nature. Two basic human acts are important for a mediating theology, believing and understanding through thinking. As St. Augustine famously held, theology is “faith seeking understanding.” Believing and thinking are

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distinct and yet related human activities in response to the world, others, and the divine. Hermeneutical thinking, as we have seen, aims at understanding and thus to render meaningful tensions or clashes at various levels of human being in the world: biological and rational, literal and figural, finite and yet with the ability to imagine eternity. Believing, on one dimension, is an active response of trust in a source, end, and truth of someone or something with the power to endow life with purpose and meaning. It is, as put in the Letter to the Hebrews, “the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). And the passage continues, “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not seen.” Faith in this dimension is a trusting perception of a source of being and worth not reducible to empirical states of affairs or logical propositions but, hermeneutically speaking, understood through the “word of God.” We can call this “creative faith.” In a more radical dimension, faith is a response of trust suffused with the assurance of being accepted, being loved, that empowers new life. Again, in Hebrews 11, faith is “the assurance of things hoped for.” This “redemptive faith,” as it has been long called, deepens creative faith precisely by overcoming the disruptions and terrors of existence as well as human fault and sin with the assurance that the human inmost power to act is accepted, is loved, and thus renewed for action in the world. This faith is not achieved by human capacities since it arises, shockingly, in and through the sin and brokenness of the human power to act. It is received as grace. These two distinct but interlocking dimensions of faith – conviction and assurance – will be crucial in clarifying Ricoeur’s contribution to theology.9 Theology mediates these acts – believing and thinking – in relation to claims about God funded by the Christian witness and for the sake of orienting life. Theological thinking renders meaningful the differences among God, the world, and human existence in the service of believing. Theology must thereby articulate the originary event or experience that warrants that mediation. Importantly, forms of mediating theology have specified different originary events or experiences that back the work of mediating thinking, the relation of believing and thinking. For instance, Paul Tillich explores human ultimate concern and the ecstasy of reason when grasped by the Ground and Power of Being symbolized as “God.” The method of mediating theology for him is a correlation between a religious symbol, “God,” and a human question, concern about being or not being. Earlier, Friedrich Schleiermacher explored the dynamics of consciousness and insisted on an immediate intuition and feeling of absolute dependence, the “whence” of which is God. Theological thinking for him probes expressions

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of Christian piety through time in order to clarify the shape of Christian consciousness as the presence of Christ in the community. In the ancient church, St. Augustine held that the human love and desire for the highest good is in fact a desire for God as the life of one’s own life. Mediating theology explores these human all-too-human desires and then re-interprets them within the Christian story. Despite differences among mediating theologians, and many others could be mentioned, theology of this kind arises out of an originary concern, feeling, or desire that is articulated through symbolic sources in such a way as to render that originary event meaningful but also to transform it – and thus human existence – in distinctly Christian terms. So, Augustine clarifies that the heart’s longing is not for some abstract “God,” but for the living God revealed in Christ. Tillich clarifies that human ultimate concern is properly the “courage to be” through faith in the Christ. And so on. The question posed for mediating theology, then, is this: How best to specify the meaning of an originary event, experience, or expression and the distinctly Christian understanding of it for the sake of orienting life. Ricoeur’s work has been claimed and criticized by current representatives of all three great options for defining the task of theology. While that is the case, it is the burden of the remainder of this chapter to clarify why Ricoeur’s work resonates most adequately with some form of “mediating” theology precisely because of his hermeneutical account of thinking as rooted in symbols, metaphors, and narratives. This will be the case even though he did not seem to conceive theology in this way but, as noted earlier, drew a line between theology, as a second-order discourse, and philosophy. The chapter, I hasten to add, does not seek to explore the varieties of mediating theology, from ancient thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria or St. Augustine, through medievals such as Thomas Aquinas, to Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Troeltsch, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, and others in the modern age and current postmodern theologians such as David Tracy. It would also be possible to compare and contrast Ricoeur’s thought with the varieties of this kind of theology, but these historical and comparative matters are not the purpose of our inquiry. What follows next is a conception of “mediating” theology informed by but not limited to Ricoeur’s account of hermeneutical thinking.10 As intimated, this requires a shift toward the priority of act and effort in a conception of theology – rather than concern, consciousness, or desire (the three options briefly noted). Christian theology mediates thinking about the human effort to be and faith in the living God. What does that mean? It means an act of reconciliation grounded in an originary assurance of

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acceptance by God in Christ made present in the Spirit that transforms what Ricoeur calls the human attestation of the self and an originary affirmation of being. Stated otherwise, Ricoeur enables us to grasp “creative faith” as constitutive of human beings as acting creatures, while “redemptive faith” deepens and empowers creative faith with the power of new life in the world. One is set free from the bonds of sin and death, to use St. Paul’s language, and freed for new life amid the complexities of existence. This transformation is the shift from human effort – human capability – to divine life, a change from attestation to reconciliation and from affirmation to assurance, which signals how a mediating theology could draw on and yet think beyond Ricoeur’s philosophy. Of course, confessional or apologetic theologians could appropriate his work in different ways given the different purposes of their theological projects. For my purposes, his main contribution is toward a new articulation of a mediating theology.

Mediating Theology Insofar as theology is an act of thinking, then, it both arises from and gives meaning to the effort to be, to exist. Theology in the strict sense, I contend, is normative reflection on the divine in relation to an interpretation of the lived structures of reality for the purpose of orienting human existence. Most profoundly, before “God” is an idea or representation the divine is act, living power. The specific object of theology is God’s relation to reality, which can only be grasped through the interpretation of the lived structures of reality in which the divine is revealed and concealed. The purpose of theological thinking is, thereby, the orientation of human life in relation to God and others amid the limitations and possibilities of lived reality. As a formula, theology is a way of interpreting reality and orienting life. Theology implies some existential perspective, or a way of being in the world religiously, that accounts for different forms of theology. Confessional theology requires a perspective strictly internal to the believing community whereas apologetic theologies adopt a different perspective. A Christian mediating theology, Ricoeur intimates, arises from and returns to a way of being in the world at once biblical and yet also secular and philosophical, beholden to the historical people of God, the Jews, and yet also “Gentile.” He insisted that Christian existence is a distinct “third” option in Western civilization, neither Jew nor Greek. As he put it, “This ‘third man,’ this cultivated Christian, this believing Greek, is ourselves. It is the character of life, the system of thought of this ‘third man’ that we must incessantly

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seek for and rediscover.”11 Reflection on the Christian form of life, the “third man,” must mediate philosophical reflection with attention to the scriptures and their embeddedness in Jewish thought and life. Christian theology, then, can be neither a form of “biblical thinking,” nor, for that matter, just philosophical reflection on Christian belief and practice. Theological thinking is an act of mediation precisely because Christian existence itself is a third way of being. Christian identity, no less than theological thinking, is a mediating one. They each seek to understand and embody the meaning of the Christian message through the interpretation of religious sources and the structures and dynamics of life. Theology is a normative discipline. It must clarify the meaning but also show the truth of beliefs about God, the world, and human existence. Scripture, tradition, rational reflection, and experiences of the divine are “sources” of theological reflection, but they are not the sole means to validate a theological argument. Insofar as theological arguments are about divine power in relation to lived structures of reality that aim to provide right orientation to life, they must meet confessional as well as public demands of validity. Without that dual demand, theological discourse becomes self-validating or a matter of mere religious preference. In either case, theology is unmoored from a religious community, an account of lived reality, and critical reflection on the proper orientation of personal and social life. Theology, as an intellectual practice, must pay a debt to truth and goodness no matter how one conceives of religious practice and experience. Its strategies of validation must thereby be clarified.12 This account of theology as mediating religious sources, as an interpretation of the structures of lived reality, and the orientation of life with specific demands for validity entails several things. Theology is, first, primarily the labor of “practical reason,” since its purpose is the orientation of life amid the structures of lived reality and that is the case no matter how speculative its claims become. As Ricoeur knew, religions provide ritual and symbolic means to empower and guide human life in the face of intractable problems and possibilities of existence, like death, birth, pervasive evil, unjust suffering, reconciliation, or the reality of ecstatic joy. The act of understanding, Ricoeur insists, is a kind of appropriation of meanings into existence and thus is also practical in character. Given this claim about “religion,” theology, drawing on its sources, is a labor of practical reasoning; its aim is not a speculative account of “being” or “God,” nor is it simply an analysis of the Gospel story, but, rather, the orientation of life in relation to God. One engages in theological thinking, and a community cultivates and trains individuals to undertake this task, for the purpose of guiding life, including the life of worship and work.

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Furthermore, theology, strictly speaking, is an intellectual activity that arises within and serves a particular community or tradition even though, on this account, its claims to truth are not limited by that community. Insofar as the object of theological thinking is God in relation to the structures of lived reality and its purpose is to orient life, the subject matter of theology exceeds the bounds of the community within which it is practiced and whose sources it must use. While Christian theology will articulate and assess distinctly Christian beliefs, symbols, and narratives about God and human life, God is, nevertheless, the God of Christians and not a Christian God. The relevant community includes but exceeds the boundaries of the Church. Theology must seek, then, to avoid an invidious tribalism or fideism that falsely identifies the being of God with how Christians (or Jews or Hindus or . . .) talk about God. It must also, on this account, deny rigid boundaries between the Church and the World, the saved and the damned. Liberation from the captivity of theology to the Church and from apologetic abstractions are some contributions of Ricoeur to theology. Christian theology conceived in this fashion does indeed have intrinsic demands that arise from within the churches and their need for meaning and orientation. Yet theology also faces extrinsic demands to speak to a wider social audience, including other religious traditions. These demands arise from the fact that theological thinking engages the lived structures of reality and the challenges of orienting life in an age of profound relations among peoples. Furthermore, theological thinking can and does take a variety of forms depending on the more proximate focus of the dimension of lived reality to be interpreted: for example, liturgical (worship), philosophical (the meaning and validity of claims), historical (the legacy of a religious community), practical (the ordering of the religious community), moral and political (the orientation of good and just lives and communities), and dogmatic theology (the articulation of a body of doctrine). These forms of theology share the general features noted but are differentiated by specific concerns and tasks. This differentiation is a matter of convenience and intellectual precision rather than essential to the definition of theological thinking.

The Gospel of Reconciliation Thus far I have unfolded Ricoeur’s contribution to theology in terms of clarifying hermeneutical thinking and then showing how it coheres with an account of mediating theology. This conception of theology moves beyond Ricoeur’s work insofar as he did not conceptualize what “theological

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thinking” might mean. Along the way I have intimated existential concerns about thinking and believing, attestation and acceptance, affirmation and assurance. Admittedly, every aspect of the earlier mentioned account of theology could be disputed, an alternative account proposed, and, with that in hand, a different assessment of Ricoeur’s thought reached. It is not the purpose of this chapter to engage those alternate positions. What precisely is the Christian witness about “God” in relation to the lived structures of reality? Can Ricoeur help us to formulate that witness and thereby contribute to current theology at another level? There are many ways to formulate the Christian witness in our global time. Some theologians speak of the quest for liberation and Christ as liberator. Others insist that the Church is to witness to a violent world about the reality of peace because of the story of God’s action in Christ. Ecological and theocentric theologians say that the question is about the future of our planet itself, well beyond narrow worries concerning human well-being. The natural world evokes a sense of the divine or must be imagined as the very “body” of God. Sense and imagination will enable people to care for the earth. Traditionalists within all branches of Christianity seek to reassert doctrines and structures of authority within the Church against the threats of secularism. There is also the worldwide explosion of Pentecostal movements with their emphasis on the Spirit. Importantly, these accounts of the Christian witness share something not often noted. The present global situation differs from the mid-twentieth century in that religious questions nowadays – however formulated – are not primarily about the meaning and plausibility of faith against strident secularism and world wars, as was the case for the previous generation. The challenge now is the manifold endangerments to life in every form through violence, oppression, ecological degradation, and distortions in societies, communities, and families. Further, these endangerments find their source in the expansion of human political, social, technological, and medical power. The desert of criticism within which we dwell is the criticism of the human power to act. The many forms of life on this planet – human and non-human – now seem vulnerable to human power and fallibility. In this situation, we see the attempt to counter human power through a return to supposed sacred power and thus the emergence of types of “hypertheism.” Conversely, many people worry about the resurgence of religion and religious power and thereby the need to expand human power, what we might call “overhumanization.”13 Little wonder that religious and non-religious forces seem to clash on the global scene, but from both a Christian and humanistic perspective what matters is forms of life and their endangerments.

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Beyond the desert of criticism about human destruction and endangerment, do we not wish to be called again to a sense of the dignity and responsibility of the human project in relation to some creative and healing power? Is there not a longing for an assurance of the dignity of the human power to act rooted in the integrity of life? As Jürgen Moltmann has noted, “Whether humanity ought to live, or ought to become extinct, is a question which cannot be answered through the dictates of rational expediency, but only out of the love of life.”14 And, further, do we not seek assurance that this love of life includes our own being such that humanity ought to be? Or is humanity and human power a disease upon the earth, something, as Friedrich Nietzsche and others insisted, that must be overcome? The human problematic rooted in the effort to be and the power to act coheres with Ricoeur’s understanding of the Christian message, and in several ways. Clarity about his conception of the Christian message will thereby enable us to take another step of reflection. First, Ricoeur always insisted, against the pretense of some, that human being is not self-grounding or self-constituting. Human power is limited, and Ricoeur reflects on these limits in experiences of fault and evil. He also notes how religious discourse limits the human pretense to the self-constitution of identity. To be human is to be open to a word spoken to one, a word spoken by others and even a divine other. As he wrote in his essay, “The Language of Faith”: In the end, I do not know what man is. My confession to myself is that man is instituted by the word, that is, by a language, which is less spoken by man than spoken to man . . . Is not the Good News the instigation of the possibility of man by a creative word?15 At the core of human capabilities is also a response to a word that instigates the possibility of our humanity. This is, we might say, “creative faith,” which can be explored and articulated philosophically. Yet for the Christian, this word is made flesh in the Christ and in the divine act of creation. Theology must interpret and analyze the lived structure of reality since it is in and through those structures that the possibility of “man” is spoken as well as limits placed on human power and existence. Theological thinking mediates the word “spoken to man” in the biblical witness and the hermeneutical examination of language, capability, and fault. The question then becomes, what is the content of the word spoken to human beings, Christianly understood? Ricoeur understands the core of the Christian message, its inmost power to constitute a human possibility, as

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reconciliation. The “Gospel is in every respect a ministry of reconciliation: of man with man, of Greek with Jew, and finally of oneself with oneself.”16 The possibility of this reconciliation is rooted in human capacities, rather than pretenses, that aim at knowledge, action, and responsibility. Those capacities testify to a word spoken to the human as an originating possibility. Yet reconciliation is needed because of unjust suffering and the reality of evil that haunts human existence. At the core of human being, in our very attestation of acting beings, is a profound vulnerability to fault. This vulnerability arises within finite freedom. Evil can – and does – plague human existence and is given symbolic form in religious texts. What is more, in asymmetrical relations of power, the relations of actor to patient, are found the possibility for violence and oppression.17 Reconciliation is needed, then, because of the facts of evil, violence, and oppression that arise out of and return to the human power to act. Evil and violence are limit experiences because they subvert the originary affirmation of life. This means that the possibility of reconciliation must have a more profound origin than the human will and act. It cannot be rooted solely in human capacities, but, as the originary Christian expression testifies, in God and made real in history through Christ, the subject of the Gospel. Christ is the reconciler, the mediator, and the Gospel founds hope in new life despite evil and violence. That is the gift of redemptive faith. Insofar as theology is Christian, and not (say) Islamic or Hindu theology, it arises from originary expressions of the Gospel of reconciliation and speaks to the “possibility of man” in the face of real evil and violence. Finally, Ricoeur understands the practical meaning and purpose of the Christian message to be consistent with the message of reconciliation. “The time in which we live,” he writes, “is one of planetary consciousness.” In this situation “[w]hat the theologian should rediscover here is that true Christian universalism which is a universalism of ‘intention’ completely distinct from the universalistic ‘pretension’ of the Christianity of the Constantinian Age.”18 Only when theology understands this “intention” of its inmost expression to be rooted in a human possibility and a divine agency can it hope to speak a distinctive word to the needs and longings of an age riddled with endangerments to human and non-human life. As an exercise of practical reason dedicated to providing an orientation to life, Christian theology in our global times must annunciate the Gospel of reconciliation beyond the confines of the Church. Its intention is a reconciliation that reaches all human beings and communities. In biblical terms, God is reconciling the world unto himself. This is the reason why the validity of theological claims cannot be determined solely from within Christian resources.

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Given this interpretation of Ricoeur on “the possibility of man,” the Gospel of reconciliation, the reality of Christian existence as the “third man,” and, finally, the need in our global times for a different kind of universalism with respect to the message of reconciliation, we can now turn to his contribution to articulating the theological question itself, thereby instigating the work of mediating theology. What must be grasped, I contend, is the deepest claim of his philosophical project and how it can help articulate the theological question but also the ways in which the Christian witness transforms that project for an age marked by endangerments to life. This transformation – which is the originary power of Christian faith – is the transformation of attestation to oneself in action into acceptance by God in grace, a transformation from affirmation of being into the assurance of love that arises from within the originary Christian expression of the reconciliation of the world to God.

Act and Affirmation At the core of Ricoeur’s corpus of work is sustained attention to the meaning and task of being human. Humans are incomplete beings who strive for some tentative wholeness in their lives by means of cultural products and practices – including religious ones – that aim to endow life with meaning and also indirectly express the complexity of being. Ricoeur engages in an intricate interpretation of all things human in order to clarify not only the significance of theories, symbols, and works of art, but to catch a glimpse of the meaning of humanity. In Oneself as Another his trajectory of thought comes to its highest expression when Ricoeur explores the various forms of human capability, the “I can,” in terms of “aiming at the good life with and for others in just institutions.” The dynamics of a life with and for others displays indirectly the power of being itself once we grasp the ways in which human capabilities are expressed. As Ricoeur has noted, I look at my work as an attempt to provide a survey of the capabilities, so to say, of the very I can . . . It can be read in terms of four verbs which the ‘I can’ modifies: I can speak, I can do things, I can tell a story, and I can be imputed, an action can be imputed to me as its author.19 Ricoeur’s philosophy articulates both the fragility and the grandeur of human life. He insists that the cogito, the “I,” cannot serve as the undoubted foundation for universal truth. That was the pretense of modern philosophy. It denies that possibility of human being as a word spoken to it. Yet the

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human self is also not an ephemeral thing supervening upon basic forces of nature or society, as is commonly argued in modern and current forms of thought. The “I can,” human capability, includes the ability to hear the word spoken but also the capacity to speak, act, narrate, and be responsible. Mindful of the ambiguity of power, Ricoeur persistently probed human fallibility, fault, and evil, but without succumbing to cynicism or despair. Through human brokenness goodness can and does shine. A human being is a fallible and yet capable creature always aiming at a wholeness, a completion, never attainable in time. As capable creatures, embodied freedom, we can come to wholeness neither in resoluteness toward our death, as Martin Heidegger argued, nor through an act of consciousness (Edmund Husserl), neither in the triumph of the will, as Nietzsche held, nor with a certainty of divine revelation. Human existence is always open both to the ever-present possibility of death and yet in imagination and hope to a horizon of meaning that exceeds finitude and death. Cultural forms, works of art, and religious symbols provide configurations of human temporal existence through which one can grasp via careful interpretation the outlines of basic structures and dynamics of human being. Those same works can donate a vision of reality in which human beings can find their inmost possibilities for life. The hermeneutical discovery is that human being displays itself indirectly in these ambiguous forms of meaning. Incomplete creatures we are, but we are also beings who create meanings in order to discover the truth of our lives and thereby endow existence with significance. Philosophical anthropology, an examination of the meaning of being human, is thus always on the way to ontology. One cannot think the meaning of humanity, Ricoeur believed, without attention to ontological matters, and, conversely, ontological reflection must pass through the realm of the human, designated earlier as the structures of lived reality. This ontology, as noted before, is one that thinks first of effort, the attestation of the self to itself in action, and also an originary affirmation of life. Being is effort before it is idea or representation. The human being is a creature that can and may bring into productive relation fallibility and capabilities and thereby in the creation of meanings display the tensions and dynamics of being itself. Given the hermeneutical turn of thought, a philosophical anthropology is only possible through the examination of the interpretation and understanding of meanings. Ricoeur isolates, as noted before, an analogical dynamic in metaphor, narrative, and symbol that clarifies these paradigmatic forms of meaning creation. These semantic forms articulate, we now

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see, dynamics of human being and, intentionally but indirectly, being itself. They articulate human capability, the “I can.” A metaphor, seen at the level of the sentence, draws together into a productive clash literal and nonliteral claims. In and through this clash, it enables new insight into the subject at hand. Historical and fictive narratives bring concordance to discordant events and thus provide at the level of text a meaning to the flux of human temporality. Symbols, especially religious symbols, articulate the intersection of primal vitalities of life, of bios, with the rigors of thought, logos, and thus display an intelligibility of existence even in its brokenness. So, for Ricoeur, narrative, symbol, or metaphor are valuable not just in themselves, but, much more importantly, as part of a more comprehensive hermeneutic. The creation of meaning through these linguistic forms is a clue to an ontology of the human. They display something about finite human beings, namely, that we are creatures who can and must orient our existence in light of projected possibilities and actual limitations. What does this anthropology, this account of capable man, displayed and examined through various semantic forms, mean for theology? On one level, as I have suggested, it warrants a form of mediating theology rooted in the power to act which engages biblical discourse in its symbolic, narrative, and metaphoric complexity in order to understand the many ways of naming God, interpreting reality, and orienting life. This fact elides any neat distinction between philosophy and theology that Ricoeur was often at pains to highlight. Yet more profoundly, I now suggest, an account of “capable man” provides a way to link a theology of creation and the Gospel of reconciliation that speak to the contemporary desire to be called again, to hear a word of assurance and acceptance about the human project in spite of fault, evil, and violence that endanger life. Some of this mediation between creative and redemptive faith is intimated by Ricoeur. Some of it requires us to think beyond his project. He wrote: I now think that there is a philosophical side to a theology of creation that allows us (maybe this would be the service of the philosopher?) to help the theologian not to cover over too quickly a theology of creation by a theology and christology of redemption. This reminds us that creativeness comes before law, guilt, and even redemption.20 What then is the mediation between creativeness and redemption? On the plane of human existence creativeness is rooted in human capability vulnerable to fault, evil, and violence, which nevertheless manifests an

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attestation to itself and also an originary affirmation of being as effort. The power to act is experienced as good, the effort to be manifests the worth of being.21 Creativity is rooted in a word “which is less spoken by man than spoken to man . . . Is not the Good News the instigation of the possibility of man by a creative word?” Then the question follows: How are act, attestation, and affirmation and the confession of a creative word that founds the possibility of “man” related to the Gospel of reconciliation? This question, I submit, remains undeveloped in Ricoeur’s thought and thus marks the point at which a contemporary mediating theology responsive to the challenges of our global age must think beyond his more proximate contributions to theology.

Theology and the Living God The task of this chapter has been to show the value of resources within Ricoeur’s thought for conceptualizing a type of mediating theology, even though the philosopher did not do so himself. Further, this mediating theology differs from other forms of the same type of theology in that, with Ricoeur, it focuses on human beings as capable creatures who seek some measure of integrity in their existence. At the core of the human capacity to act – the effort to be – Ricoeur articulates the originary experiences of attestation to oneself as an acting being and affirmation of being as effort. This has allowed reclaiming the idea of creativeness that can be a subject of theological thinking. And yet a proper Christian theology, as Ricoeur well knew, must offer a mediation between creation and reconciliation. How to do so? Does the theologian find this mediation in the originary expression of Christ as “second Adam,” as St. Paul might argue? Does a theologian deploy the symbolic force of “new creation” to think the mediation of creation and redemption? Perhaps one can and ought to conceive of this mediation within the Church and the coming Kingdom of God as a “new heaven and new earth”? All of these strategies have been used by theologians, past and present. A theology that is concerned to orient human life amid the structures of lived reality should deploy every way of naming redemption. There is no single and primary symbol, metaphor, or narrative for mediating between creation and redemption. In this respect, the theological project envisioned in this chapter cannot be completed within the confines of these pages. Nevertheless, while a theologian must deploy a range of semantic resources fully to articulate the Gospel of reconciliation and the horizon of creation,

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the core of this mediation can be succinctly examined. It has been intimated throughout this inquiry, even if its suggestiveness cannot be exhausted here. In global times of endangerments to life and the explosive growth of human power where the vulnerability and complexity of power is profoundly marred by violence and oppression of every form of life, the desire to be called again takes the form of a quest for assurance about the human project, the redemption of human capability. In this situation of attestation to power and yet its lack of assurance of worth, the Christian witness is that the Gospel of reconciliation opens people to assurance through acceptance of the very ambiguity of power in the living God. In the Christ, the power of God is made perfect in weakness, which is manifested as the power of new creation through the work of the Spirit. The divine life is the self-transformation of power that creates, transforms, and sustains new life. But this is the transformation of power and not, as others hold, its radical increase or a mystical self-negation of power before God.22 The claim of Christian conscience is a testimony to the assurance of acceptance, to reconciliation, which then becomes active in the responsible use of power to respect and enhance the integrity of life. The originary event of Christian faith is an assurance from within the ambiguity and vulnerability of human power that one’s life and the fragility of all life is accepted within the divine life and thereby transformed and empowered to respect and enhance the integrity of life in oneself, in others, and in the world. Theological thinking plumbs the originary events of acceptance and assurance and seeks to show their meaning in symbolic, metaphoric, and narrative forms for the sake of orienting existence in a global field. That is the universalism of theology that arises out of its practical purpose. God is reconciling the world through the acceptance and yet transformation of the power to act by enabling human beings to be responsible for the vulnerability and fragility of life. Far from removing theology from public debate in order to situate it only in the Church, a mediating theology conceived in this way engages the church, the academy, and also the wider social and even global public. Now we can see why that is the case, and for several reasons. First, as a form of thinking, theology must engage the whole array of natural and human sciences in order to clarify and makes sense of its own attempts at mediating understanding through semantic forms that render productive types of claims. It can only undertake that task if it engages openly and honestly with other disciplines. Second, insofar as a mediating theology takes seriously “capable man” and the practical challenges that human power, both individual and social, pose, it must also engage those disciplines (say, law, sociology, technology, history, globalization theory) that concretely address those

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challenges. Its contribution to the discussion, I have suggested, is to reclaim a sense of the power and ambiguity of “man” and yet also to articulate the global desire to be “called again,” to hear a word of acceptance and assurance about the dignity and responsibility of the human project. A mediating theology of creation and reconciliation must, third, engage in the rough and tumble of current ethical and political reflection about how rightly to orient human existence in the light of real possibilities, daunting challenges, and genuine limits to human power and aspiration. Insofar as a mediating Christian theology analyzes and understands human existence within a field of forces that constitute the lived structure of reality, it will widen ethical and political reflection beyond narrow national or cultural boundaries. Fourth, precisely because Christian mediating theology arises from and returns to the reality of the “third man,” a form of human life at the tensive interface of divergent outlooks, one should expect that it will contribute to and participate in discourse about how best to live religious faith in global times. Surely all of the religions must now be lived in their inmost humane expressions. A theology for this age will want to explore human freedom and responsibility in relation to thinkers working within other traditions and with other resources. Finally, a contemporary mediating theology must dare to speak with the intention of a new universalism, as Ricoeur called it. It must articulate the meaning and truth of reconciliation and the assurance of acceptance on the global field where forces too often and too violently clash in the night. In undertaking this task, Christian theology comes as a servant of the wider good of the integrity of life. Theology mediates distinctly Christian convictions about redemption with ardent commitment to the creative good. Theology across the disciplines? In a time of criticism, the answer to that question would seem to be a simple “no.” Isolating the contributions of Paul Ricoeur to theology, however, it is possible to answer “yes.” More importantly, today it is all the more possible – in fact required – to show the enduring human and religious importance of theological thinking in our age of increasing global consciousness and increasing global endangerment.

Notes 1

2

Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–290. Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace

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4

5

6

7

8

9

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11 12

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(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 37. For this reason, Ricoeur’s magisterial Gifford Lectures were published without the lecture on the “self in the mirror of scripture” originally delivered in Edinburgh. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). See David E. Klemm, “Philosophy and Kerygma: Ricoeur as Reader of the Bible,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008), 47–70; and Dan. R. Stiver, “Systematic Theology after Ricoeur,” The Journal of French Philosophy 16:1–2 (2006): 158–168. On these forms see, respectively, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper Row, 1967); The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and Jon Costello (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1977); and Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988). Paul Ricoeur, “Nature and Freedom,” in Political and Social Essays, eds. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974), 31–32. Also see William Schweiker, “Paul Ricoeur and the Prospects of a New Humanism,” in Reading Ricoeur, 89–108. The most cogent account of this position remains Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). The most powerful form of this kind of theology is so-called Process Theology in the line of Charles Hartshorne. See his A Natural Theology for Our Time (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1967). There is a long tradition of exploring these dimensions of faith, but historically see, especially, John Welsey, “Scriptural Christianity,” in Sermons on Several Occasions (London: Epworth Press, 1975), 32–48. For a fuller account of the conception of theology that informs this chapter, see David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay in Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Paul Ricoeur, “Faith and Culture” in Political and Social Essays, 126. On this, see David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury/Crossroads, 1975); and James M. Gustafson, Intersections: Science, Theology and Ethics (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1996). On the themes of hypertheism and overhumanization, see Klemm and Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future, Chapter 1. Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 49. Also see God’s Life in Trinity, eds. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006). Paul Ricoeur, “The Language of Faith,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), 237. On this, also see William Schweiker, “Imagination, Violence and Hope: A Theological Response to Ricoeur’s Moral Philosophy,” in Meanings in Texts and

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16 17

18

19

20 21

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Ricoeur Across the Disciplines Actions: Questioning Paul Ricoeur, eds David E. Klemm and William Schweiker (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 205–225. Paul Ricoeur, “Faith and Culture,” in Political and Social Essays, 130. These themes dominate Ricoeur’s early work, The Symbolism of Evil, but also his later reflections on action, and also The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Paul Ricoeur, “From Nation to Humanity: Task of Christians,” in Political and Social Essays, 134, 151. Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, 280. Ibid., 283. On this point, see William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See William Schweiker, Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998); and Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). These other options are the claims of thinkers such as Nietzsche and mystical theologians such as Simone Weil.

Chapter 4

Ricoeur and History: The Ricoeurian Moment of Historiographical Work François Dosse

The dialogue between philosophy and history has been quiet for a long time, especially in France where historians are proud of their own discipline and increasingly turn their sights toward their “sister” social sciences instead of philosophy. Philosophy only provokes their defiance, through the rejection of the philosophy of history and the disdain of the traditional position of philosophy that, in this neck of the woods, has always reigned supreme. However, due to a number of recent factors, there is now an opportunity for a renewal of this dialogue. First, the crisis of historicity – a crisis about the future – has run its course through a languid Western world that lacks direction and is often reduced to a compulsion to repeat through a host of commemorative activities. Second, there is an increasingly urgent recourse to historians on the part of a society that has a tendency to confuse the roles of the witness, the expert, the judge, and the historian. This gives the historian a strong impetus for clarification. Moreover, with the loss of the structural values of the great schemas of historical explanation – such as functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, and the other “-isms” that tend to set themselves up as the sole interpretive frameworks of reality – a new period of doubt has arrived. This makes it possible for the historian to enter into a more reflective period, one that questions the meaning of historiographical work. In this favorable climate, Ricoeur’s masterpiece Memory, History, Forgetting has now appeared.1 It is an event in the strong sense of the term, a surprise produced by this high-flyer who has landed on the historian’s terrain and has provided the clarification needed in the present time.

The Contract of Truth Ever since the time of his first work in this domain, Ricoeur has sought to engage in a dialogue with history and historians. In a 1952 paper, Ricoeur

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shows that history arises from a mixed epistemology, an intertwining of objectivity and subjectivity, explanation and understanding. Insofar as it is a dialectic between the same and the other who are separated by time as well as a confrontation between contemporary language and a remote situation, “historical language is necessarily equivocal.”2 Considering the need to take into account the contingent event as well as the permanent structure, Ricoeur defines the role of the historian, and the justification of historical work, to be the exploration of what emerges from humanity: And this reminder sometimes rings as an awakening when the historian is tempted to repudiate his fundamental intention and yield to the fascination for a false objectivity – that of a history in which there would no longer be men and human values but only structures, forces, and institutions.3 Quite early, then, Ricoeur enters the historian’s terrain in order to show that the historian is situated in a tension between the necessary objectivity of the object and his or her own subjectivity. Long before Jacques Rancière’s call for a reconciliation of the historian with his or her object by encouraging the historian not to give into the sirens’ continual enticements for euthanasia, Ricoeur said roughly the same thing.4 Most notably, he rejects the false alternative, which has become increasingly common in historiographical work, between the horizon of objectivity with its scientific ambitions and the subjective perspective with its belief in an immediate experience that can resurrect the past. The aim is to show that the historian’s practice is in constant tension between an always incomplete objectivity and the subjectivity of a methodological regard that is established through a distinction between a good subject, “the researching self,” and a bad subject, “the feeling self.” Ricoeur’s entire effort, in this domain as in other ones, is to show that the investigation into the truth must proceed through necessary and rigorous detours. History proceeds by corrections that arise from one and the same spirit: “this rectification is of the same nature as the rectification represented by physical science in relation to the first arrangement of appearances in perception and in the cosmologies dependent on perception.”5 The historian is positioned both externally to his or her object, due to the temporal distance separating them, and internally, due to the use of intentional knowledge. Ricoeur recalls the rules governing the contract of truth that, ever since the time of Thucydides and Herodotus, guides all historical inquiry and serves as the basis of its methodology. On the first level, the reflecting subject is involved in the construction of

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intelligible schemas. In this respect, with remarkable clarity, Ricoeur proves that he is not duped by the Annales school’s vilification of the methodical school: “Objectivity is just that: a work of methodical activity. We may understand, then, why this activity bears the excellent name of ‘criticism.’”6 Ricoeur values the analytic concern of breaking down the past into intelligible categories and distinct series, in search of causal relations and logical deductions based on theory; however, the incompleteness of historical objectivity requires a high involvement of subjectivity on a number of levels. First of all, subjectivity is implied by the very notion of the historian’s choice – which may either be explicit or implicit but in either case is inevitable – of an object or objects of analysis. The historian arrives at a “judgment of importance”7 that presides over the selection of events and their weight. Theory precedes the observation and determines the choices made. The historian’s subjectivity is thus involved throughout the search to establish the schemas that will serve as interpretive frameworks. Second, the historian is a subject who is invested in the causal links that he highlights, and historical practice is usually naïve in this regard. Here Ricoeur touches on the methodological efforts of historians to distinguish between causes from various orders. Third, the historian’s subjectivity enters into the historical distance that separates the self from the other. Here the historian has the task of translating and speaking in contemporary terms about what is no longer the case and is foreign. There the historian runs into the impossibility of a perfect adequation between his or her own language and the object. This forces the historian to use the imagination in order to bring about the necessary transfer into another present than his or her own and to make it comprehensible for his or her contemporaries. The historical imagination is introduced here as a heuristic tool of understanding. In this respect, subjectivity is a necessary means for arriving at objectivity. Finally, a fourth dimension that renders subjectivity unavoidable is the human aspect of the historical object: “What history ultimately tries to explain and understand are men.”8 Just as much as a desire for explanation, the historian is guided by a desire for an encounter. The concern for veracity is not so much to share the actual beliefs of those whose story is told but to work on the past, in a quasi-psychoanalytic sense of working through, in such a way as to go out in search of the other and to bring about a temporal transfer that is “a real projection into another life.”9 The constitution of historical objectivity in order to better understand the mindset and behavior of people from the past is thus the correlate of historical subjectivity. It opens onto an intersubjectivity that is always open to new interpretations and readings. The incompleteness of historical

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objectivity leaves the historical legacy open to be debated by future generations in an endless search for meaning. It does not, however, leave room for any interpretation whatsoever. Due to Ricoeur’s distinction between the praiseworthy researching self and the feeling self that should be removed, historical objectivity passes from its logical illusions to a necessary, ethical dimension. The veridical dimension of history is a guiding thread for Ricoeur in his later work. It is how history distinguishes itself from other forms of writing, such as the genre of fiction. In this respect, Ricoeur sets up an epistemology of history whose aim and contract with its readers is to attain a level of veracity through writing. The philosopher retraces the path of the historiographical operation at work in three constitutive stages. In the first stage, history breaks from memory when it objectifies testimonies by transforming them into documents. It thereby puts them under the burden of proving their authenticity and employs well-established methods of critique in order to distinguish the true from the false and to remove various types of falsifications. In this phase of documentation, the historian in the archives raises the question of what has actually taken place: “The terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ can legitimately be taken at this level in the Popperian sense of ‘refutable’ and ‘verifiable’.The refutation of Holocaust deniers takes place at this level.”10 At this stage in the work of objectification and traces, the historian takes part in the school of suspicion in order to live up to the trust accorded by the reader. Documentary proof remains in a tension between the force of attestation and the measured use of contestation and the critical eye. The second stage of historiographical operation is the one that Ricoeur characterizes as the search for explanation and understanding. Here Ricoeur distances himself from Dilthey who separates explanation from understanding. Neither one of these terms can be assimilated into the broader notion of interpretation, which unfolds along three stages of historical epistemology: “In this sense, interpretation is a feature of the search for truth in history that runs across these three levels. Interpretation is a component of the very intending of truth in all the historiographical operations.”11 The historian deepens the autonomy of the historical procedure in relation to memory by asking the question “why?” and by making use of the various schemas of intelligibility that are available. The historian deconstructs the mass of documents in order to put them into a coherent and meaningful series: arranging the economic phenomena here and the political or religious phenomena there. The historian establishes models, to the extent possible, to test these interpretive devices. On this level, Ricoeur examines the actual historiographical landscape that is

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characterized by the pragmatic turn that privileges the study of the practices that constitute social and interpretive connections, based on the pluralization of temporalities and the variations in the levels of analysis by a discipline – history – whose horizon is to explain and understand changes.12 Here he especially relies on those who are considered to be “advocates of rigor” – Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Norbert Elias13– and finds the variations of scales14 to be a key idea for escaping from the false alternative between events and the long time span. In this demonstration, he relies particularly on the Italian works of microhistoria and Bernard Lepetit’s work on the structure and representation of social practices.15 The third stage of historiographical operation is historical representation, wherein writing becomes a major factor. As Plato saw in his “Phaedrus,” it was already at the heart of the discipline with the invention of writing as a pharmakon, which is both a remedy for memory that protects it from forgetfulness and at the same time a poison to the extent that it risks becoming a substitute for the effort to remember. History is indeed situated on the plane of writing in each of its three stages, but it is especially the case with respect to this ultimate attempt to bring about the historian’s own writing. At this phase, Ricoeur rejoins Michel de Certeau again in order to analyze the elements of scriptural representation.16 Yet, Ricoeur seeks to avoid the enclosure of writing solely on the discursive level and grants a key place to a concept already employed in Time and Narrative, namely, “standing for” (représentance).17 With this concept, he condenses all of the expectations and aporias linked to the historian’s intentions. “Standing for” is the search for historical knowledge sealed by the pact in which the historian takes up characters and situations that existed before they were told in a story. This notion thus differs from representation to the extent that it implies a viz-à-viz between a text and a referent that Ricoeur characterizes as the “taking place” of the historical text. With the concept of standing for, Ricoeur pays homage to the contributions of the narrativists but also guards against the epistemological blurring of fiction and history, thereby recalling historical discourse’s demand for truth. Attention to the textual, narrative, and syntactical procedures through which history states its truth claims leads to the reappropriation of the contributions by the narratologist lineage, especially as it is developed in the Anglo-Saxon world and known in France thanks to Ricoeur. The development of the narrativists’ theses was fueled by the linguistic turn, the critique of the nomological model, and the consideration of narrative as a field of knowledge and a means of intelligibility. The narrativists were able to show that narrative has an explanatory value, as indicated by the constant use of the subordinate conjunction “because,”

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which can indicate two distinct meanings: succession and consequences. Both chronological and logical ties are affirmed without being problematized. This key word “because” must therefore have its disparate uses disentangled. This work on the explanatory powers of the narrative was undertaken by the narrativist school. In the 1950s, William Dray showed that the idea of causality should be distinguished from the idea of the law.18 He defended a causal system that was irreducible to a system of laws, thus criticizing those who would carry out this reduction as well as those who would exclude all forms of explanation. Later, G. H. Von Wright developed a mixed model based on a so-called quasi-causal explanation,19 which he regarded to be the most suitable for history and the human sciences in general. Causal relations are, according to him, strictly related to their context and the action connected to it. Inspired by the works of Elizabeth Anscombe, he privileges the intrinsic relation between the reasons for an action and the action itself. Von Wright thus distinguishes between the causal connection, which is purely external and pertains to states of a system, and the teleological form of the logical connection pertaining to intentions. The connection between these two heterogeneous levels of explanation, according to Ricoeur, is situated in the configuring characteristics of the narrative: “For me, this guideline is the plot, insofar as it is a synthesis of the heterogeneous.”20 Arthur Danto, likewise, distinguishes the various temporalities within the historical narrative and again calls into question the illusion of the past as a fixed entity in relation to which the historian’s gaze would be mobile. Instead, he distinguishes three temporal positions within a narrative.21 The statement itself already implies two different positions: the described event and the terms in which the event is described. Here one must also add the level of the statement that is situated as another temporal position, that of the narrator. The epistemological consequence of this distinction is shown by the paradox of causality, since a later event can make a prior event appear in a causal relation. Moreover, Danto’s proof calls for a reconsideration of explanation and description as indistinct; history, as it is said, is all cut from the same cloth. Some, like Hayden White, have gone even further in the direction of a poetic construction of history by claiming that the historian’s discourse is not fundamentally different from that of fiction on the level of its narrative structure.22 History, first and foremost, would be writing, a literary artifice. Hayden White situates the transition between narrative and argumentation in the notion of a plot. Ricoeur is thus quite close to the earlier mentioned theses. He gives credit to two major contributions from the narrativists. First, they have demonstrated that “to narrate is already to explain . . . the ‘one because of the

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other’ that, according to Aristotle, forms the logical connection of the plot, is henceforth the necessary starting point for any discussion of historical narration.”23 Second, to the diversification and hierarchization of explanatory models, the narrativists provide an alternative through the wealth of explanatory resources belonging to the narrative. However, in spite of these two advances in the understanding of the historian’s discourse, Ricoeur does not follow the more radical theses of the narrativists, for instance, when they claim that there is no distinction between history and fiction. In spite of their proximity, there remains an epistemological split that is based on the realm of truthfulness in the historian’s contract with the past.

Narrative: The Guardian of Time The need to think the tension between exteriority and interiority, between a thought of the outside and the inside, encouraged Ricoeur to go beyond the various aporias arising from a purely speculative approach to temporality. To conceive and articulate the split between a time that must appear and a time that is conceived as a condition of phenomena is the aim of his trilogy on history, Time and Narrative, published in the 1980s. There Ricoeur returns to and expands his earlier reflections on the realms of historicity conceived as a third time and a third discourse set between the purely cosmological conception of a temporal movement and the subjective approach of an internal time. Aristotle opposes the Platonic identification of time with the revolutions of heavenly bodies and establishes a distinction between the localizable sphere of changes in the sublunar world and an unchanging, uniform time that is the same everywhere. The Aristotelian world is thereby withdrawn from time. Yet, Aristotle runs up against the paradox that time is not movement even though movement is one of its conditions: “It is evident, then, that time is neither movement nor independent of movement.”24 Aristotle is unable to establish a connection between the time measured by the Heavens as a natural clock and the realization that things and human beings undergo the effects of time. He repeats the old saying that “time wastes things away, that all things grow old through time, and that people forget owing to the lapse of time.”25 To this cosmological side of time is opposed an internal, psychological side. Augustine raises the question directly: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”26 He starts from the paradox that if the past is no longer and the future is not yet, then how can one understand

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what time is? Augustine responds by turning toward the present, a broadened present that includes the memory of past things as well as the expectation of future things: “The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception and the present of future things is expectation.”27 For Augustine, there can only be a future and past through the present. This antinomy between cosmological time and internal time cannot be resolved by philosophical speculation, as Ricoeur shows with respect to the confrontation between the theses of Kant and Husserl, which results in a similar aporia: “Phenomenology and critical thought borrow from each other only on the condition of mutually excluding each other.”28 Between cosmic time and internal time, there is the narrated time of the historian. It allows for a reconfiguration of time through specific connectors. Ricoeur thereby situates historical discourse in a tension between narrative identity and the search for truth. The poetics of the narrative appears as the way beyond the aporias raised by the philosophical conception of time. In this respect, Ricoeur prefers the notion of refiguration over that of reference, because it is a matter of redefining the very notion of historical “reality” through the connectors that belong to the third historical time. Among these connectors that are commonly used by historians unproblematically, one finds categories that are quite familiar to historians: “the time of the calendar is the first bridge constructed by historical practice between lived time and universal (cosmique) time.”29 Calendar time is similar to physical time with respect to its measurability but also borrows from the lived-experience of time. Calendar time thus “cosmologizes lived time” and “humanizes cosmic time.”30 The notion of a generation, which has become an essential category of analysis today, is considered by Ricoeur to be another important mediation for historical practice. As Dilthey showed, a generation embodies the connection between public and private time. The notion of a generation attests to indebtedness, beyond the finitude of existence and beyond the death that separates ancestors from the living. Finally, there is the notion of the trace. This notion has taken on such magnitude today that Carlo Ginzburg conceives it as a new paradigm – one that he defines as the indicative trace – differing from the Galilean paradigm.31 An everyday object of the historian, the notion of the trace is concretized in documents and archives but is essential for the reconfiguration of time. Ricoeur borrows the expression of the meaning of the trace from Emmanuel Lévinas,32 inasmuch as it is a disturbance of an order and has meaning without showing anything. But, Ricoeur also inscribes the notion of the trace in its historical place. This notion has already been used in the historical tradition for a long time, since it can be found in the work of Seignobos as well

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as Marc Bloch. This conception of a historical science of traces corresponds on the side of the referent with an ambivalence that resists the closure of sense, since the vestige is both plunged into the present and yet finds its support in a meaning that is no longer there. This notion of the trace, as both ideal and material, is today the essential motive for the large fresco by Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory. It is the unspoken link that joins the past to a weighted present in the reconfiguration of time through its memorable traces. Pierre Nora sees a new discontinuity in the writing of history “that can only be characterized as historiographical.”33 This rupture shifts the attention of historians and leads them to revisit the same objects with regard to the traces left in the collective memory by facts, humans, symbols, and other emblems of the past. This rejection and renewal of the entire historical tradition by this memorial moment that we are living through opens the door for a completely different history. This vast worksite opens onto the history of the metamorphoses of memory and a symbolic reality that is palpable but yet unassignable. By problematizing the notions of historicity and of memory, it is able to exemplify this third time that Ricoeur defines as a bridge between lived time and cosmic time. This is the field of investigation of what Reinhart Koselleck characterizes as our space of experience, that is, the past that has become present. It allows for an exploration of the enigma of the past, since the memorial object in its material or ideal site cannot be described in terms of mere representations. Ricoeur means, and Pierre Nora’s project is not far removed from this, that the past-ness of an observation cannot itself be observed, but only remembered. He directly raises the question of what memory is. Insisting on the role of founding events and their connection with narrative identity, Ricoeur opens the actual historiographical perspective in which Pierre Nora’s enterprise can become a monument of our time. The Annales school’s attempt in the 1960s to break from the narrative was, according to Ricoeur, illusory and contradicted the historian’s project. Fernand Braudel denounced the short time span as illusory in relation to the permanence of the long time span, with its geo-historical basis. Yet, as Ricoeur showed, the rules of historical writing prevented them from falling into sociology, because the long duration remains duration. Braudel, as a historian, is dependent on the discipline of history’s rhetorical forms. Contrary to his own statements, he himself followed the development of a narrative in his thesis that “the very notion of the history of a long time-span derives from the dramatic event in the sense just stated, that is, in the sense of the emplotted event.”34 To be sure, the plot does not have Phillip II but rather the Mediterranean as its subject. Even though this is another type of

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plot, it is a plot all the same. The Mediterranean figures as a quasi-character having its last hour of glory in the sixteenth century before a shift toward the Atlantic and America occurs and, due to which, “the Mediterranean steps outside the spotlight of global history.”35 Plot is thus a requirement for every historian, even the one who stands apart from the classical narrative of politico-diplomatic events. Narration is thus the indispensable means for doing historical work; it joins the space of experience and the horizon of expectation: “Our working hypothesis thus amounts to taking narrative as a guardian of time, insofar as there can be no thought without narrated time.”36 The configuration of time passes through the historian’s narration. The historical configuration thus envisaged moves between a space of experience that evokes the multiplicity of possible paths and a horizon of expectation that defines a future made present, irreducible to anything merely derived from present experience: “Hence the space of experience and the horizon of expectation do more than stand in a polar opposition, they mutually condition each other.”37 The construction of this hermeneutic of historical time provides a horizon that is no longer built by scientific ends alone; it extends toward a human doing, a dialogue to be held between the generations, and acting on the present. From this perspective, one must reopen the past and revisit its potentialities. The present reinvests the past through a historical horizon detached from it. It transforms dead temporal distance into a “transmission that is generative of meaning.”38 The vector of historical reconstitution is thus at the heart of action and the narrative identity makes itself present in the form of sameness (Idem) and selfhood (Ipse). The centrality of the narrative diminishes the power of history to enclose its discourse in a closed explanation of causal mechanisms. It does not allow for a return “to the claims of the constituting subject to master all meaning,” but yet it does not give up on the idea of the unity of history, with its “ethical and political implications.”39

The Event and Its Metamorphoses of Sense In between its dissolution and its exaltation, the event undergoes a metamorphosis due to its hermeneutical recovery. Reconciling the continualist and discontinualist approaches, Ricoeur proposes a distinction between three levels of approach to the event: “1. The internally-significant event; 2. The order and rule of sense, including non-events; 3. The emergence of externally-significant, overmeaningful events.”40 The first level corresponds simply to the description of “what happens” and evokes surprise, the new in

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relation to what is already established. This critical establishment of sources corresponds to the orientation of the methodological school of Langlois and Seignobos. Second, the event is placed in explanatory schemas that correlate it with regularities and laws. This second level subsumes the singularity of the event under the register of the law from which it is derived, to the point of nearly negating the event. Here one can recognize the orientation of the Annales school. A third interpretive moment must follow after this second level of analysis. The event is found again, but this time it is overdeterminate. The event thereby becomes an integral part of a narrative construction that constitutes a founding identity (the storming of the Bastille) or a negative identity (Auschwitz). The event that returns on this level is not the same as the one that was reduced by the explanatory sense or the one that was external to discourse. It engenders a sense: “This salutary recapturing of the overdeterminate event can only thrive at the limits of sense, at the point where it falters through excess and lack: by the excess of arrogance and lack of a capture.”41 Events are only intelligible on the basis of their traces, whether or not they are discursive. Without reducing historical reality to its linguistic dimension, the fixation of the event, its crystallization, is accomplished by naming it. Historical semantics allows for a consideration of the sphere of acting and breaks from physicalistic, causal conceptions. The constitution of the event is derived from its emplotment. This mediation ensures the materialization of the sense of the human experience of time “on three levels through its practical prefiguration, its epistemic configuration, and its hermeneutic reconfiguration.”42 The plot plays the operational role of putting heterogeneous events into relation. It takes the place of the causal relations in physicalist explanations. The hermeneutics of historical consciousness situates the event in an internal tension between Koselleck’s two metahistorical categories: the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. These two categories allow for a thematization of historical time that can be read in concrete experience, with its meaningful displacements such as the gradual dissociation between experience and expectation in the modern Western world. The sense of the event, according to Koselleck, constitutes an anthropological structure of temporal experience and historically established symbolic forms. Koselleck thus develops “an account of the individuation of events that places their identity under the auspices of temporality, action, and dynamic individuality.”43 He thereby aims at a deeper level than that of description by seeking out the conditions of the possibility of the event. His approach has the merit of showing the role of historical concepts, their structuring ability as well as their being structured

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by unique situations. These concepts, which carry our experiences as well as our expectations, are not mere linguistic epiphenomena to be contrasted with “true” history; they do have “their own mode of existence within the language. It is on this basis that they affect or react to particular situations or occurrences.”44 Concepts cannot be reduced to mere rhetorical figures or tools for classifying things into categories. They are anchored in the field of experience where they are born and take on a wide variety of meanings. Can one then claim that these concepts are able to saturate the sense of history to the point of allowing a complete fusion of history and language? Like Ricoeur, Reinhart Koselleck does not go quite that far and instead believes that historical processes cannot be reduced to their discursive dimension: “History is never identified with its linguistic registration and formulated experience.”45 The practical domain, as Ricoeur believes, is the ultimate source of the activity of temporalization. This displacement of the event toward its traces as well as its offspring leads the discipline of history to turn back onto itself in what might be called a hermeneutical circle or a historiographical turn. This new moment calls on us to follow the metamorphoses of sense that take place in the successive changes and slippages of historical writing occurring between the event itself and the present time. The historian thereby investigates the various modes of constructing and perceiving the event on the basis of its textual framework. This movement of returning to the past through historical writing accompanies the exhumation of national memory and confronts the actual moment again. Through historiographical and memorial renewal, historians take on the work of mourning the past and contribute to the reflective and interpretive effort of the human sciences. This recent inflection is allied, for example, with the rejection and renewal of every historical tradition undertaken by Pierre Nora in Realms of Memory and opens the path to a completely different way of doing history.

Toward an Articulation between True History and Faithful Memory In a very Kantian way, Ricoeur was very concerned to avoid excess and the various ways of covering over that it entails. For about five years, Ricoeur sought to reflect on the dialectic between history and memory that was a sensitive and sometimes obsessive point at the end of the twentieth century, a moment for taking stock of disasters. This reflection led him to present

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his final book to readers in general and historians in particular as the concerns of a citizen. At the beginning of this work, he writes: I continue to be troubled by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory – and of forgetting. The idea of a policy of the just allotment of memory is in this respect one of my avowed civic themes.46 Ricoeur seeks to distinguish between two essentially different attempts: being truthful to history and being faithful to memory. While too deep of a mistrust of the mistakes of memory would lead to the consecration of the historian’s point of view, conversely, a recovery of history through memory would create an impasse on the indispensable epistemological level of explanation and understanding. In first carrying out a phenomenology of memory, Ricoeur asks, what good would a truth without fidelity or fidelity without truth be? In order to respond to this initial enigma concerning the representation of the past in memory, Ricoeur makes use of the Greek logos. Plato raised the question of the “what” of memory with the notion of the memory-image (eikôn) in his “Theaetetus.” The paradox of the memoryimage (eikôn) is the presence of an absent thing or the presence of the absent. To this initial approach, Aristotle adds another characteristic of memory with the fact that it bears the mark of time, which draws a dividing line between imagination, on the one hand, and memory that refers to an anteriority, an “already was.” But what are these memorial traces? Ricoeur keeps his distance from reductive enterprises such as that of Jean-Pierre Changeux, for whom the cortex alone would explain all human behaviors. According to Ricoeur, memorial traces belong to three distinct levels: cortical, psychological, and material traces.47 With this third dimension of memory – documentary traces – we are in the historian’s field of study. Documentary traces alone establish an inevitable connection between history and memory. If, as Freud has shown, memory is subjected to pathologies – blockages and resistances – it can also fall prey to manipulation and commands. Yet, in some cases, it can achieve “happy moments” of recognition. This is the case for the involuntary memory described by Proust, but these moments can also be brought out through a recollective memory. The latter work of memory goes together with what Freud called the work of mourning. This small miracle of recognition afforded by memory, however, is inaccessible to the historian, since the historian’s mode of

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knowledge is always mediated by the textual trace that renders historical work forever open and incomplete. If forgetfulness – the third essential term in Ricoeur’s triptych – stands in defiance against both history and memory, Ricoeur is able to distinguish in this veritable black box between what is irreducibly lost, whether through the destruction of cortical traces or the loss of documents, and what is preserved in forgetfulness as the very condition of memory, allowing it to be put to work. This reserve of forgetting, one that is offered for recollection, is a forgetting that preserves: “Forgetting has a positive meaning insofar as having-been prevails over being-no-longer in the meaning attached to the idea of the past. Having-been makes forgetting the immemorial resource offered to the work of remembering.”48 In the war of memories and the rough competition between history and memory, Ricoeur speaks about the undecidability of their relations: “The competition between memory and history, fidelity and truth, cannot be resolved on the epistemological level.”49 This tension leads Ricoeur to ask about the ontological dimension of our historical condition as remembering and historical beings. He reiterates his earlier reflections on historicity and his confrontation with Heidegger’s theses on time. This time, however, Ricoeur opposes a new category to Heidegger’s being-toward-death, which he has always vigorously disagreed with. He replaces it with the notion of being-in-debt, as a possible link between the past and future. This is a key point, the true guiding thread of his demonstration that what has been overcomes the past. In this regard, Ricoeur insists – and this is what is essential for historians – on the fact that the past still exists in the fleeting time of the present. There he rediscovers a passage from Jankélévitch that he cites toward the end of his work: “He who has been, henceforth cannot not have been: henceforth this mysterious and profoundly fact of having been is his viaticum for all eternity.”50 On the basis of this point, memory and history can be approached as two practices and two relations to the past of the historical being in dialectic of binding and loosing. To the extent that history is more distant, objective, and impersonal in its relation to the past, it can play a balancing role in tempering the exclusivity of particular memories. It can thus contribute, according to Ricoeur, to changing unhappy memories into happy ones and pacified memories into just ones. Ricoeur thus provides a new lesson of hope: a re-routing of the relation between the past, present, and future in the discipline of history by a philosopher who reminds historians, who tend to be satisfied with re-enactments and commemorations, about the imperatives of action. Ricoeur again signals to historians that their work should

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seek to “make our expectations more determinate and our experience less so.”51 He calls historians to this work, and it is precisely in this sense that one should understand the conjunction between his notion of the work of memory and Freud’s notion of the work of mourning. In this regard, according to Ricoeur, psychoanalytic practice can be instructive for the historian: the analyst speaks and brings the unconscious to the surface in his words as fragments of incoherent narratives, dreams, and unfulfilled wishes. The aim of this is to end up with a plot that is intelligible, acceptable, and constitutive of a personal identity. In this quest, according to Freud, the patient goes through two mediations. The first mediation is through the other, the one who listens, the psychoanalyst. The presence of a third party who enables a story is indispensable to the expression of the most painful and traumatic memories. The patient speaks to a witness, and the witness helps to remove the obstacles to memory. The second mediation is the patient’s own language which comes from a singular community. The patient draws from the resources of a social practice and, in the social practice of the narrative, encounters the narrative before knowing him or herself. These two mediations provide a social basis for putting the narrative into practice. The cure, through the presence of a third party, creates a unique form of intersubjectivity. As for the words of the patient, the patient’s narratives are sewn out of narratives that precede it and thus are anchored in a collective memory. The patient internalizes the collective memory that crosses through the patient’s personal memory, bursting with the desire for communication, intergenerational transmission, and the Zakhor’s injunction from the Old Testament: “Remember!”52 Memory is thus woven from a fabric that is both private and public. It emerges as a narrative about personal identity that is “entangled in stories”53 and thus turns personal memory into a shared memory. The second lesson to be drawn from psychoanalytic practice concerns the wounded character of memory, whose complex mechanisms aim to work with and thereby repress experienced traumas and painful memories. They can be the basis of various pathologies. Two of Freud’s essays address the treatment of memory on the collective level. They display the active role of memory, the fact that it is work. The analytic cure gives rise to a “work of memory”54 that must pass through memory-filters. These memory-filters can be the source of blockages and lead to what Freud characterizes as the compulsion to repeat on the part of the patient who is attached to his or her symptoms. The second aspect of the work of memory invoked by Freud is even better known: the “work of mourning.”55 Mourning is not just an affliction but a negotiation with the loss of the beloved in a slow and painful

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work of assimilation and detachment. This movement of assimilation through the work of memory and detachment through the work of mourning demonstrates that loss and forgetfulness work within memory to avoid disturbances: “Too much memory recalls especially the compulsion to repeat, which, Freud said, leads us to substitute acting out for the true recollection by which the present would be reconciled with the past.”56 Thus faced with the injunction of the new categorical imperative arising from the work of memory, Ricoeur is inspired by psychoanalytic practice and prefers the notion of the work of memory over that of the duty to remember. Yet, do we not find in this slippage by Ricoeur an abandonment of the command “Remember!” from Deuteronomy. Quite the contrary, Ricoeur affirms the legitimacy of the injunction “Remember!” and seeks to articulate its critical effort. The duty to remember is legitimate, even though it can be abused: “The injunction to remember risks being heard as an invitation addressed to memory to short-circuit the work of history.”57 Ricoeur sees a possible analogy with this phenomenon on the plane of collective memory. Both individual and collective memory must maintain a coherence throughout the duration of an identity that is inscribed in time and action. With respect to the theme of the promise, the trajectory of memory refers to the ipse-identity as opposed to the idem-identity of the self.58 There one encounters a very different situation in which the past does not seek to fade away and, in other cases, there can be attitudes of escape, conscious or unconscious occultation, or the negation of the most traumatic moments of the past. Collective pathologies of memory can also result from situations that are too full of memory. “Commemorations” and the tendency in France to patrimonialize the national past provide a good example of this. There are also the contrary situations of too little memory, as is the case in totalitarian counties where manipulated memory reigns supreme: “The work of history can be understood as a projection, from the level of the economy of drives to the level of intellectual labor, of the work of remembering and mourning.”59 Memory is thus inseparable from the work of forgetting. In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borgès illustrates the pathological nature of someone who retains everything, to the point of leading to madness and confusion.60 Like history, memory is a way of selecting the past, an intellectual construction and not a flow external to thought. As for the debt that guides “the duty to remember,” it runs throughout the triad of the past-present-future: “this reverberation of the aim toward the future on the past is the counterpart of the inverse movement in which the representation of the past weighs on the future.”61 Instead of being a burden carried by present-day societies, debt

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can become a source of meaning. It can provide a re-opening of the plurality of memories of the past and an exploration of the vast resources of unexplored possibilities. This work cannot be achieved without a dialectic of memory and history, through a critical history that distinguishes between a pathological memory with a compulsion to repeat and a living memory with a reconstructive aim: “It is by delivering, through history, on the unkept promises of the prior course of history, whether blocked or repressed, that a people, a nation, or a cultural entity can arrive at an open and living conception of their traditions.”62 Beyond the circumstances that are actually remembered, Ricoeur recalls the role of history’s ethical debt toward the past. The realm of historicity, inasmuch as it is always open toward the future, is no longer the projection of a fully conceived, self-enclosed project. The logic of action holds the field of possibilities open. This is why Ricoeur defends the notion of the horizon in his epilogue on forgiveness. Like a utopia, forgiveness has a liberating role that prevents “the horizon of expectation from fusing with the field of experience. It maintains the separation between hope and tradition.”63 He also defends the notion of obligation with equal vigor; the debt of present generations to the past is the source of ethical responsibility. The role of history thus remains alive. History is not an orphan, as is often believed, that is unable to respond to the challenges of action. The mourning of teleological visions can become an opportunity to revisit the multiple possibilities of the present through the past in order to think about tomorrow’s world.

Notes This chapter was originally written in French and has been translated by Scott Davidson. 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Paul Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 27. Ibid., 40. Jacques Rancière, Les noms de l’histoire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992). Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,” 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Ibid. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 179.

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Ricoeur Across the Disciplines Ibid., 185. See François Dosse, L’empire du sens: l’humanisation des sciences humaines (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 200–208. Jacques Revel, ed. Jeux d’échelles: La Micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: GallimardSeuil, 1996). Bernard Lepetit, ed. Les formes de l’expérience: Une autre histoire sociale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 274–280. William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Georg Henrik Von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge, 1971). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 142. Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 178. Aristotle, Physics IV, 219a9–10; cited by Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 15. Aristotle, Physics IV (221 a 30–221 b); cited by Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 17. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), XI:14; cited by Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 7. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, XI:20; cited by Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 57. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 109. Carlo Ginzburg, “Traces, racines d’un paradigme indiciaire,” in Mythes, emblèmes, traces, ed. Carlo Ginzburg (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 139–180. Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanism of the Other Man, trans. Nidra Poller (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4; emphasis in the original. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 208. Ibid., 214. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 241. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 274.

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41 42

43

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45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

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56 57 58

59 60

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62 63

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Paul Ricoeur, “Événement et sens,” in L’événement en perspective, ed. Jean-Luc Petit (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1991), 51–52. Ibid., 55; emphasis in the original. Jean-Luc Petit, “La construction de l’événement social,” in L’événement en perspective, 15; emphasis in the original. Louis Quéré, “Événement et temps de l’histoire,” in L’événement en perspective, 267. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 232. Ibid., 164. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, xv. See the debate between Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Pierre Changeux in What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeVevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 443. Ibid., 648. Ibid., 602. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 216. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Paris: La Découverte, 1984). Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten vestrickt (Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976). Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-through,” in Standard Edition, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 147–156. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 243–258. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 79. Ibid., 87. See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Paul Ricoeur, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” Projet 248 (1996): 11. Jorge Luis Borgès, “Funes the Memorious,” in Fictions, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 107–116. Paul Ricoeur, “La marque du passé,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (March 1998): 25. Ibid., 30–31. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London: Athlone Press, 1991), 391.

Chapter 5

Ricoeur and Law: The Distinctiveness of Legal Hermeneutics George H. Taylor

In a well-known section of Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes of the “exemplary significance” of legal hermeneutics.1 Gadamer’s claim might suggest that readers of the present volume can skip all the other chapters and read only this one. Yet although that claim might be enticing, I will contend that the reach of legal hermeneutics is more constrained. While I will try to detail some ways in which legal hermeneutics is paradigmatic – particularly in its immersion in application to new cases – more generally I will argue that its insights are more local, more pertinent to and circumscribed within its field. The broader implication is that similar circumscriptions apply to other hermeneutic fields as well. This contention that we best understand hermeneutics by means of its regional variations is, I think, consistent with the general modesty and particularity of Ricoeur’s own claims, although I shall also contend that some of Ricoeur’s own writings on hermeneutics go too far in their universalistic assumptions.2 I will argue, then, that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics offers much to refine the insights of legal hermeneutics, but the discreteness of the field of legal interpretation requires refinement of Ricoeur’s own theory. Legal hermeneutics is distinctive rather than exemplary. It is one of many overlapping rather than coterminous hermeneutic fields. This conclusion is itself consistent with the hermeneutic principle that meaning and application are interrelated: understanding is situated, and the field of application makes a difference as to how meaning in that field is derived. Legal hermeneutics is profitably informed by Ricoeur’s hermeneutics but also extends and refines it. This respectful but not idolatrous furthering of Ricoeur’s work is an approach that he himself, I believe, would approve. The chapter proceeds in three steps. First, I briefly review the main themes of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, particularly his emphasis on the semantic

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autonomy of the text, and provide two kinds of examples drawn from the American legal context that generally support and extend the significance of Ricoeur’s insight. Despite the great contest in the United States between liberal and conservative jurisprudential approaches, remarkably there is significant general consensus that legal interpretation should attend to a text’s meaning rather than to the authorial intention lying behind the text. Yet, internal to this consensus we begin to ascertain the distinctiveness of legal hermeneutics in the debate over the question of whether the semantic autonomy of the legal text requires adherence to its original meaning rather than an evolving meaning. Second, I broaden the assessment of the limitations of Ricoeur’s general hermeneutics as applied to American legal interpretation. While Ricoeur’s hermeneutics emphasizes that the reader’s appropriation of a text leads to greater self-understanding, self-understanding is not the issue for a lawyer or judge interpreting a legal text. Even more importantly, the author of the legal text does retain a significance in legal interpretation that is not required in other fields. Because a legal author – a legislator or court – requires obedience to the terms of a text, its expression is limited to the range of its legitimate authority. I shall show how this attention to the legal author is compatible with Ricoeur’s emphasis on the semantic autonomy of the text. This highlights legal interpretation as a regional rather than general hermeneutic. Third, I show how the law can act as an exemplary form of hermeneutics in its attention to the application of meaning to particular circumstances. Here I want to attend to the poetic – the metaphoric and imaginative – aspects of application of meaning. The distinctive features of Ricoeur’s analysis of application have not received sufficient attention. As Ricoeur very helpfully elucidates, legal analysis partakes of productive imagination in determining the proper application of existing law to new circumstances. The task here is not one of subsumption to prior law but of an interplay between tradition and innovation. As Gadamer anticipated and as Ricoeur more expansively details, legal hermeneutics here does offer insights into a more general hermeneutics in its imaginative correlation between meaning and application. Internal to hermeneutics is a long-standing debate over whether interpretive priority should be granted to the author’s intention or to the meaning of the text. On the former side stand such figures as Friedrich Schleiermacher,3 Emilio Betti,4 and E. D. Hirsch5; on the latter stand figures such as Gadamer6 and Ricoeur.7 It is not my purpose here to rehearse the details of the debate. Rather, I want to show the extent to which contemporary

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American legal hermeneutics supports the side of Ricoeur. Brief delineation of this jurisprudential development will also illuminate the nature of the larger dispute. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is particularly well known for its endorsement of the semantic autonomy of the text. Textual meaning is mediated through its inscription in linguistic signs, and these signs have and retain their vitality independent of the authorial design that inspired them. Ricoeur describes the text’s autonomy in three respects: (1) from the author’s intention; (2) from the cultural and sociological conditions of the text’s production; and (3) from its original audience.8 Due to its semantic autonomy, the text may open up possible worlds of meaning that escape from the author’s “finite intentional horizon.”9 In more recent writings such as The Just, Ricoeur explicitly affirms the parallelisms of this hermeneutics with legal hermeneutics: As one would say in the terms of a nonintentional theory of the literary text, the meaning of a law, if it has one, is to be sought in the text and its intertextual connections, and not in the will of a legislator, juridically symmetrical with the intention attributed to the author of a literary text.10 Although I will later question Ricoeur’s assumption of the “canonical character” of his more general hermeneutics for legal interpretation,11 here I want to illuminate the strengths of his hermeneutic insights by recourse to two sets of legal examples. My initial example will document the significance within the law of the first characteristic of the text’s autonomy mentioned earlier: its separation from the author’s intentional horizon. Aside from a few exceptions, a rather startling convergence in American legal thinking maintains that interpretation should attend to the text’s meaning and not to the separable authorial intention lying behind the text. My example here is drawn from the jurisprudence surrounding one of the most famous cases in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century: Brown v. Board of Education.12 In Brown, the 1954 Supreme Court had to decide whether it was constitutional under the “equal protection” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment13 for states to permit segregated public schools. The Court did examine relevant evidence surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment but held that this evidence was inconclusive as to whether the framers of the amendment thought that it was constitutional for public schools to be segregated. The Court went on to rule on the basis of

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contemporary understandings of equality that segregation was indeed unconstitutional.14 For our purposes, I am less interested in the Court’s logic than in the subsequent arguments about the ruling by scholarly commentators. Should a court interpret the meaning of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection” independent of the intentions of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment or, to the contrary, in deference to those intentions? Consider first the 1971 claim of an author asserting the now hugely minority view that courts must defer to the framers’ intentions. While the author acknowledges that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “equal protection” is couched in general terms, nevertheless, he continues: [S]urely that would not permit us to escape the framers’ intent if it were clear. If the legislative history revealed a consensus about segregation in schooling and all the other relations in life, I do not see how the Court could escape the choices revealed and substitute its own, even though the words are general and conditions have changed.15 The judicial task, under this view, is to figure out what the framers wanted to accomplish, and that is best determined by ascertaining the framers’ intent. Only because the legislative history did not reveal a clear intent did this author approve moving to identify the Fourteenth Amendment’s core meaning – protection of black equality – and on this basis then endorse the Brown Court’s conclusion that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. The opposing, now majority view conspicuously rejects reliance on the framers’ intent and instead emphasizes, in a way that is consonant with Ricoeur, attention to the meaning of the constitutional text. Consider the following argument. With the development of historical understanding of the period surrounding the congressional passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is now an “inescapable fact,” this author maintains, “that those who ratified the amendment did not think it outlawed segregated education or segregation in any aspect of life.”16 Under an interpretation based on intent, then, segregated schools would be constitutional. How can this author reject the implications of this history and nevertheless conclude, as he does, that the Brown result remains appropriate? The answer lies in his argument that legitimate interpretation of the Constitution is based on the meaning of the text, not the intentions lying behind it.17 The historical evidence of intent is irrelevant because the framers introduced into the text only the concept of equality, not their beliefs about segregation. “The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality

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before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the text.”18 A court’s obligation is to the requirements of the text, and if these requirements conflict with the specific intent of the authors or framers, intent must give way to the demands of the text. “Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation.”19 The result in Brown was correct. What is striking about the comparison between the 1971 and the 1990 arguments is not only that the latter reflects the growing jurisprudential movement toward interpretation based on textual meaning rather than intent, but that the arguments were written by the same author: Robert Bork. Bork is a conservative thinker whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected in 1987 precisely because he was too conservative.20 If he himself moved from intent to meaning, that is but dramatic evidence of a larger groundswell of legal scholarship moving in a similar direction. Although a small resurgence of scholars seeks to revitalize interpretive emphasis on legal intention21 – including, oddly, Stanley Fish22 – the overwhelming majority of legal scholars across the political spectrum now endorse granting interpretive priority to meaning in the legal text rather than in the separable intentions lying behind the text.23 Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and liberal scholar Ronald Dworkin both conclude that courts must rest interpretation on what the legal text is saying rather than on what the enacting legislators may have expected the laws to accomplish.24 Widespread agreement in American law, then, supports Ricoeur’s contention that the meaning of a text is distinguishable from its authors’ intentions. As we have seen, Ricoeur argues that the semantic autonomy of the text also entails its independence from its cultural and sociological origins as well as its original audience. On these additional points, American jurisprudence is more conflicted. The claim by conservative American jurisprudence is that the proper attention to a legal text’s meaning – rather than authorial intention – should rest on the text’s original meaning, its meaning as it would have been understood by the educated public at the time of passage. Under this view, attention should be paid to the original meaning of the terms that legislatures enacted and not to the separable intentions of what those who drafted the terms thought they were accomplishing. Liberal commentators, by contrast, argue that textual meaning should be allowed to evolve to encompass meaning contemporary at the time of its application rather than solely at its time of original enactment. This dispute was

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not at issue in Brown, because the question whether segregated schools were unconstitutional could be addressed according to the original meaning of “equal protection.” Conservatives contend that the liberal move to permit legal meaning to evolve allows too much judicial discretion, as judges will be able to find in contemporary meaning whatever meaning aligns with their own political inclinations,25 while liberals contend that legislatures include general terms so that meaning may enlarge to accommodate new understandings.26 A lineage of three decisions from 2002, 2005, and 2008 shows the Supreme Court majority in effect endorsing Ricoeur’s assertion that the autonomy of the text includes its separation from its originating period. Justice Scalia, who is known for his methodological conservatism, is a member of the dissent in all three cases. The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of “cruel and unusual punishments,”27 and in these cases the Court had to decide whether it was cruel and unusual to impose the death penalty on, respectively, someone with extensive mental disabilities, someone under age eighteen, and someone who had raped a child.28 As noted in the 2008 decision, in all three cases the Court held that the appropriate test was not “the standards that prevailed when the Eighth Amendment was adopted in 1791 but . . . the norms that ‘currently prevail.’”29 The judgments did not rest on the original meaning of “cruel and unusual,” because the Eighth Amendment “draw[s] its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”30 In all three cases the Court held that imposition of the death penalty would be cruel and unusual, even while explicitly acknowledging in two of them that the framers of the Eighth Amendment would have held capital punishment to be appropriate in the factual situations alleged. In assessing the “evolving standards of decency,” the Court relied in significant part on social scientific evidence and on evidence of the lack of similar laws in the states, as well as on its own judgment.31 The expectations of the framers, on the majority view, were irrelevant. Justice Scalia dissented principally due to his insistence that the Eighth Amendment’s original meaning should prevail.32 Let me amplify the consequences of a jurisprudence appealing to “evolving standards” by noting that this approach has recently been endorsed by state courts in the United States that have held that same-sex marriages are constitutionally protected under their states’ equal protection clauses. In a case from October 2008, for instance, the Connecticut Supreme Court held that “as we engage over time in the interpretation of our state constitution, we must consider the changing needs and expectations of the citizens of our state.”33 The court concluded that it would be a violation of equal

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protection to apply one set of principles regarding marriage to gay persons and another set to everyone else.34 The decision by the Connecticut court remains in the distinct minority across state jurisdictions in the United States. Often the challenge to these decisions asserts that if there is to be legal change, it should come from popularly elected legislatures rather than courts. As briefly anticipated before, a possible response to this objection is that permitting broad statutory or constitutional language to evolve may be precisely what the enacting legislature meant to say. The legislature inserted broad terms into the statutory or constitutional text so that the meaning of the text could evolve over time and not be constrained by the particular circumstances of its time of origin. When the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment provided for “equal protection” under the law, the enacting Congress knew that the provision would apply to the rights of African Americans after the Civil War, but it may have meant for the provision to apply to other contexts as determined over time. The provision has in fact come to be applied to issues of equal protection on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and religion, with equal protection for sexual orientation now in lively question. A statutory case from 2001 may render the dynamics of evolving meaning more concrete. A 1925 statute exempted from certain limitations workers engaged in “interstate commerce.” At the time of passage, the term “interstate commerce” was understood very narrowly to apply basically to workers themselves engaged in interstate traffic, such as interstate truck drivers. Today most workers are considered to be engaged in interstate commerce, because the goods they produce or services they provide are understood to have interstate effects. While the Court majority restricted the term “interstate commerce” to its meaning in 1925, when the statute was passed, Justice David Souter dissented. He argued that the majority’s decision resulted in a statute “frozen in time,” which would require Congress to amend it whenever the meaning of “interstate commerce” changed. By contrast, he interpreted the statutory language to have a more “elastic reach” on the understanding that the language meant to extend as far as interstate commerce was understood at the time of application.35 According to Justice Souter, Congress introduced broad language so that the statutory meaning could evolve. The examples presented here offer a quick survey of approaches to legal interpretation in the American context in order to assess the fruitfulness of Ricoeur’s general hermeneutics. His endorsement of the semantic autonomy of the text has won widespread support in American law in terms of its

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emphasis on textual meaning rather than the author’s intention. Ricoeur’s argument for the separation of meaning from its moment of enactment remains contested, although the employment of “evolving standards” by courts does remain influential in certain areas of the law such as capital punishment cases. More broadly, some of the debate I have registered in the American legal context begins to raise the question to which I will now turn: Does Ricoeur’s general hermeneutics need to be restructured in the form of a more regional hermeneutics in order to satisfy the particular requirements of the legal landscape? In addressing this question, I want to make three points that differentiate legal interpretation as a kind of regional hermeneutics from Ricoeur’s more general hermeneutics. First, while Ricoeur’s hermeneutics takes as a decisive element the reader’s appropriation of a text for the purpose of increased self-understanding, self-understanding is not the task for the lawyer or judge. Second, hermeneutic interpretation asks a reader to respond to the ethical and normative possibilities, the ways of being-in-the-world, offered by a text. In many areas of the law, by contrast, the focus is on instrumental ordering instead of ethical norms, and in those domains, it is inappropriate for a lawyer or judge to import ethical considerations into the task of understanding the law. Third, while legal interpretation may acknowledge the broad boundaries of general hermeneutics, it may rightly impose delimitations on these boundaries within its own domain. My first point differentiates the tasks of the legal from the general interpreter. Ricoeur’s general hermeneutics wonderfully portrays the personal engagement of the reader in a text and the way the reader’s exposure to the world of the text allows for enhanced self-understanding. We find in his work the following kinds of phrases: to understand a text is to expose ourselves to it and receive from it an “enlarged self”36; interpretation “culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better”37; in interpreting the reader receives a “new mode of being from the text itself”38; text interpretation requires a “final act of personal commitment.”39 It is very relevant to my argument here that Ricoeur explicitly indicates at points that this personal commitment and enlarged self are part of “the paradigmatic character of text interpretation”40 and not just of literary or philosophic interpretation. Legal interpretation, by comparison, does not prototypically involve an act of self-understanding. Instead, a lawyer or judge reads a legal text on behalf of someone else, the client or litigant. Although lawyer and judge may have an investment in a case as a matter of their professional reputation, their self-interpretation is not usually at stake. Even in cases where

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their personal investment may be more acute because of a case’s political or ideological implications, usually the involvement is more instrumental, to pursue a particular end rather than to be potentially transformed themselves. I have, of course, been intrigued in such later books as Memory, History, Forgetting41 and The Just 42 by Ricoeur’s more detailed reflections on the law, where he implicitly appears to modify some of his earlier views. In these works he acknowledges, for instance, the role of the judge as a “third party,”43 so someone whose sense of self is not directly at stake in a legal case. The judge must undertake a “vow of impartiality.”44 Ricoeur rightly unmasks the judicial pretense of impartiality; “the vow of impartiality must,” he says, “be considered in light of the impossibility of an absolute third party.”45 The judge is a human being,46 not a cipher, so impartiality is at best an ideal. Nevertheless, legal interpretation does not typically involve a lawyer’s or judge’s personal investment of self. The reading of the legal text is usually more distanced, more focused on the goals of a client or of the legal system, rather than on oneself. My second observation about legal interpretation is correlative. Sometimes interpreters of the law view constitutional interpretation or interpretation of criminal law as prototypical. In these arenas moral and ethical concerns are often rightly at issue, either in unfolding the underlying moral character of the law or in critiquing morality’s absence or restricted presence. Yet much of the law is simply about creating a system of order in which participants know how to proceed. The law decides, for example, whether we should drive on the right- or left-hand side of the road, and different countries decide the issue differently. Or, even if there may be moral or immoral aspects of the law, it is usually not the function of the judge or attorney to criticize them but rather to work within the law’s existing boundaries whatever the nature of their moral character. In the United States, courts will allow legislatures to promulgate laws as they please as long as there is no constitutional violation and there is at least some rational basis – an extremely deferential standard – for the legislature’s judgment.47 My impressionistic sense in reading Ricoeur’s work on legal interpretation, as in The Just, is that this side of the law, attentive to ordering rather than to ethics or to larger questions of justice, is less part of Ricoeur’s picture.48 As in my prior point, my claim is that in detailing legal interpretation as a regional hermeneutic, we must be careful not to import normative, ethical, or even ontological valences that may not be at stake, in significant parts of the law at least, for either the legal interpreter or the legal world being interpreted. My third and final point about legal interpretation as a regional hermeneutics is that the enterprise of law may require texts to be read in a more

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delimited fashion than available in general hermeneutics. Two sub-points are at stake here, both of which are best illuminated by comparison to interpretation of literature. First, particularly in its finest examples, one of the glories of literature is that a text’s meaning can be plumbed again and again. There is a wealth offered by the text and an inexhaustibility to its meaning, both in its depths and in the potential proliferation of its diverse interpretations. On each reading, the world of the text can continue to enrich and enlarge the self of the reader. Readings in law, by contrast, are more constrained; they are not free but must be attentive to and incorporating of existing doctrine and prior precedent. Robert Cover writes of the “hermeneutics of jurisdiction,”49 whereby variant readings in the lower courts can be eliminated by the Supreme Court, not because the Supreme Court’s readings are necessarily better but because it has the authority to impose the interpretive order it so chooses.50 A second sub-point is that the legal enterprise may impose interpretive delimitations to justify its requirement that we obey its dictates. Again, consider this in contrast to literature. If, to take an often cited example, we find that wave action on a beach has led to small stones realigning into a readable text, we could work our way through the text and the world it presents and enlarge ourselves from the encounter. Aside from miraculous intervention, however, there is no conceivable alignment of the stones that would ever lead us to consider the stones’ text a law that we must obey. To be required to obey any text – and in particular to concede that the state’s coercive power can rightly enforce our obedience to the text – it must be legitimate as a matter of law. At the federal level in the United States, for example, the text must be duly passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the president. For the purposes of literary interpretation, it does not matter who the author of the stones’ meaning is or whether, indeed, there is any author. It does matter a great deal in law who the author is; a text is law only if the author is the body given legal authority to promulgate the law. It might seem at first glance that this attention to the author of the legal text revivifies the author’s role in a way that undermines Ricoeur’s emphasis on the semantic autonomy of the text. Have we not just eliminated any final separation of the author from the legal text? In my view, though, the message is rather different. While it may be critical that we know there was a legitimate author of a legal text, that does not mean we should resuscitate the notion of authorial intent. Interpretive focus remains on the meaning of the text. The question, instead, is whether the text’s meaning needs to be further circumscribed because it is a legal text that asks for our obedience.

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To amplify the nature of this question, let me briefly interject two possible analogical issues in biblical interpretation. First, it may make a difference to how literally or figuratively the biblical text is interpreted, depending on whether we consider the biblical author to be the divine, a human author divinely inspired, or just a wise human. Second, biblical hermeneutics, like legal hermeneutics, does not deem just any text to be legitimate. Consider, for instance, Elaine Pagels’s writings on the Gnostic Gospels. If the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had been incorporated into the New Testament instead of the Gospel of John, New Testament Christology would have been extremely different. But the Gospel of Thomas is not considered to be a legitimate biblical text.51 The best exposition of the delimitations imposed upon legal texts that I have seen comes from Judge Frank Easterbrook, a prolific writer on legal interpretation. Authors of legal texts, he writes, cannot anticipate all the situations to which a text may apply, and the meaning of a legal text is not exhausted until all its potential applications are considered.52 Easterbrook retains a separation between authorial intent and meaning and therefore supports Ricoeur’s notion of the autonomy of the text in this sense. He goes on to acknowledge the potential indeterminacy of legal language, as demonstrated by the more or less broad meanings of “equal protection.” There is a potential, then, for “multiple legitimate meanings of the text. The problems that concern us today were not settled in the past and encoded in authoritative rules; they must be settled by the living.”53 For the law, the living authorities who can determine meaning are judges. Easterbrook argues that a legal theory of meaning must justify the judicial role. For a court to have the power to issue commands that deserve to be obeyed, a theory of judicial review must support the grant of this power. Easterbrook himself is conservative and contends that the only judicial commands that deserve to be obeyed are those based on rules rather than policy.54 Judges, he says, should enforce “only the portion of the text or rule sufficiently complete and general to count as law.”55 Easterbrook’s conclusions remain controversial. As we have seen, other scholars and judges such as Justice Souter or the authors of the capital punishment cases we examined would allow for greater judicial discretion, discretion attuned to “evolving standards” or the law’s “elastic reach.” But Judge Easterbrook’s larger consideration remains and is one that deserves recognition across the legal sphere. In order to be able to impose obedience, the boundaries of judicial interpretation must be justified. Whether a legal theory leads to a more liberal or more conservative methodology, it must justify its form of reading as, precisely, a form of legal reading.

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This assessment grounds more deeply the argument made earlier. Legal hermeneutics is a regional hermeneutics, one with criteria peculiar to its own domain, a domain whose characteristics must be carefully distinguished from those of a general hermeneutics. I find some support for this perspective in the later Ricoeur where in the midst of an analysis of law he now describes his earlier “nonintentional theory” no longer as simply a theory of the text but a theory of the “literary text.”56 As previously noted, Ricoeur offers some recognition of the distinctiveness of legal hermeneutics in, for example, his appreciation that the judge’s interpretive role is not equivalent to the reader of literature. Yet on the same page just quoted he goes on to claim that “[t]he literary enterprise takes on a canonical character for juridical theory as soon as interpretation finds a handhold in the permissions of the text.”57 By contrast, I have contended that the distinctive nature of legal hermeneutics must be more closely defined. Having established some distancing between legal hermeneutics and a general hermeneutics, I now want to turn to some other ways in which the two domains can be drawn more closely together. Legal hermeneutics does indeed have, in Gadamer’s phrase, “exemplary significance”58 for hermeneutics writ large. The law is replete with case after case where existing meanings must be extended to new situations of application. Some legal scholars will argue that this extension to fresh contexts typically unveils new implications of already existing principles,59 but I disagree. Setting aside my effort in prior sections to offer more impartial description of the range of views on legal interpretation, here I will endorse Ricoeur’s and Gadamer’s views on the nature of legal application. The relationship between meaning and application is not one of subsumption. Rather, as Gadamer famously maintains, application involves “co-determining, supplementing, and correcting [a] principle.”60 Meaning is not determined once and for all at the moment of origin but must be reassessed as new circumstances arise. Meaning can change as it is applied; the determination of meaning requires judgment.61 It is at this point of judgment that we shall unfold the dimensions of poetics – of metaphor and imagination – in legal and general hermeneutics. I was much taken in The Just with Ricoeur’s extremely insightful elaboration of what the process of legal application entails. Ricoeur’s precision here goes far beyond Gadamer. “The application of a rule,” Ricoeur says, “is in fact a very complex operation where the interpretation of the facts and the interpretation of the norm mutually condition each other.”62 Ricoeur argues that legal application includes both interpretation and argumentation,63 and he draws a parallel between these two and his earlier interplay

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between explanation and understanding.64 Argumentation is necessary, because the extension of law to a new application is not a mere intuitive leap but requires a judgment of fitness, which requires analysis – explanation.65 As Ricoeur relates, this analysis requires such factors as empirical investigation, interpretation of facts, employment of canons of interpretation, and assessment of precedent.66 But determination of fit requires both the logical face of argumentation and the inventive side of interpretation.67 Ricoeur’s turn to Kant’s theory of reflective judgment in the Third Critique is particularly useful in clarifying, and in fact expanding, the nature of the interplay between argumentation and interpretation. It is true, of course, that Ricoeur has referenced Kant’s theory elsewhere, for example, in his earlier work on hermeneutics68 and in his work on metaphor69; I will return shortly to that latter work. These earlier discussions were more abbreviated, however, and the discussion in The Just marks, to my mind at least, a much more helpful elaboration of Ricoeur’s appropriation of Kant’s thinking. Ricoeur relates that we find in the Third Critique a play between the poles of “the understanding (that is, an ordering function) and the imagination (that is, a function of invention, creativity, fantasy).”70 Ricoeur calls this play the “judicatory imaginary.”71 Interpretation in law is the path that “the productive imagination follows once the problem is no longer to apply a known rule to a presumably correctly described case, as with determinative judgment, but to ‘find’ a rule under which it is appropriate to place a fact that itself must be interpreted.”72 In such cases, the ordering function requires supplementation by the productive imagination in order to extend and transform a rule to a new context. The imagination is thus not extraneous to argumentation but part of the argumentation process.73 The legal imagination is at one level, then, the creativity and invention that lie at the heart of legal application. It is a productive imagination in its creation of new linkages that transform prior understandings and rules. It is a significant contribution for Ricoeur to elaborate the creativity that exists within the very ordinary and routine process of legal application. To round out this discussion of the role played in law by imagination and creativity, I want to take two final steps that build on Ricoeur’s work, although they go beyond his explicit analysis of legal interpretation. First, I want to relate legal application to Ricoeur’s insights about metaphor. As we know, Ricoeur contends that the ground for metaphoric predication arises when customary meaning is no longer sufficient; a gap appears between present understanding and a new set of facts or conditions. Metaphor can cross the gap. “In metaphor,” Ricoeur writes, “‘the similar’ is perceived despite difference.”74 In this sense legal application is metaphoric,

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because it acts to transcend and transform existing legal categories. Application creates resemblance where previously there was simply difference. It is also pertinent to recognize that the creation of metaphoric resemblance is an act of imagination. The relationship between meaning and application is not one of deduction of the particular from the existing general principle but rather a transfer of meaning. Making the transfer requires imagination. “Imagination,” says Ricoeur, “is this ability to produce new kinds of assimilation and to produce them not above the differences, as in the concept, but in spite of and through the differences.”75 The process of legal application is both metaphoric and imaginative: the imaginative interrelation of existing rules and new particularities can create some new metaphoric resemblance across an initial divide. The process of application generalizes the imaginative productivity at work in creative legal judgment. Elaboration of the metaphoric and imaginative nature of legal application specifies the processes by which the evolution of legal meaning, discussed earlier, can occur. My last point is that we may find an interrelation between creativity and law in the way value creation is inculcated in the law as an institution. I find very helpful here Ricoeur’s elaboration of the positive nature of objectification, of the way the “creative energies of life” are objectified in works.76 As we know, for Ricoeur this objectification in works includes not only written texts but action and history as well. My claim would be that legal institutions too can partake and should aspire to partake in this positive objectification of creative energies. If, as Ricoeur writes, the ethical intention is defined “as aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others in just institutions,”77 the issue is how the law as an institution can participate in and nourish this ethical intention, this creation of positive value, and so work toward becoming indeed a just institution. As Ricoeur cryptically notes, at this institutional level also we may find the relevance of Kant’s theory of judgment in the interplay between “the production of nascent meaning and the production of established constraints.”78 Finally, in the law’s inculcation of values we should not neglect that this inculcation may have a “prospective, even prophetic dimension,”79 one last way of indicating the law’s potential for encompassing a productive power of imagination. Legal analysis is creative to the extent that it engages the power of imagination to apply the law to new circumstances. At this level legal hermeneutics is indeed exemplary of a more general hermeneutics. But we must not collapse legal hermeneutics – or other regional hermeneutics – into a general hermeneutics. Instead, we must retain the distinctive traits and concerns of regional hermeneutics such as the law.

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Notes I presented a draft of this essay on October 31, 2008, at a Ricoeur Conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. I thank the conference organizers Joseph Verheyden and Peter Vandecasteele for the opportunity to participate in such an enriching set of sessions on the work of Ricoeur. I also thank Susan Marble Barranca, Boyd Blundell, Maureen Junker-Kenny, Charles Reagan, Dan Stiver, and Alain Thomasset for their comments on my essay. 1

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Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 324. For evidence of Ricoeur’s use of the term “regional hermeneutics,” see Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 296. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1959). See Emilio Betti, “Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften,” in Contemporary Hermeneutics, ed. Josef Bleicher (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 51–94. See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). See Gadamer, Truth and Method. See Ricoeur, From Text to Action. For a useful collection of articles on the debate over meaning and intention within the American context, see Gary Iseminger, ed., Intention and Interpretation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). See Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 298. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in From Text to Action, 83. Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 112. Ibid. 347 U.S. 483 (1954). U.S. Const., Amendment XIV. For further elaboration of the history surrounding the Brown case, see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975). Robert H. Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 13. Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 75–76 (emphasis added). Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid. Note that Judge Bork’s 1990 book was written after this rejection. See Larry Alexander and Saikrishna Prakash, “‘Is That English You’re Speaking?’ Why Intention Free Interpretation Is an Impossibility,” San Diego Law Review 41 (2004): 967–994. For an earlier endorsement of a similar position, see Paul

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Campos, “That Obscure Object of Desire: Hermeneutics and the Autonomous Legal Text,” Minnesota Law Review 77 (1993): 1091 (arguing that “[t]extual meaning and authorial intention are not separable concepts”). Compare Stanley Fish, “Intention Is All There Is: A Critical Analysis of Aharon Barak’s Purposive Interpretation in Law,” Cardozo Law Review 29 (2008): 1109–1146; and Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). For a brief synopsis of this evidence, see Mitchell N. Berman, “Originalism and its Discontents (Plus a Thought or Two about Abortion),” Constitutional Commentary 24 (2007): 385. See Antonin Scalia, “Response,” in A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 144, and Ronald Dworkin, “Comment,” in A Matter of Interpretation, 118. See Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation, 46. See William N. Eskridge, Jr., Dynamic Statutory Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). U.S. Const., Amendment VIII. Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002); Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005); Kennedy v. Louisiana, 128 S.Ct. 2641 (2008). To be more precise, the question in the last case was whether the Constitution bans the death penalty for the rape of a child “where the crime did not result in and was not intended to result, in the death of the victim.” 128 S.Ct. at 2646. 128 S.Ct. at 2649 (citation omitted). 128 S.Ct. at 2649 (citation omitted). The Court held that the evidence showed that those having significant mental impairment or an age under eighteen had a “diminished personal responsibility for the crime.” Kennedy, 128 S.Ct. at 2650. As for the crime of rape of a child, the Court held that the death penalty should not be imposed in cases where the victim did not die. 128 S.Ct. at 2659. Arguments such as these have raised questions about whether Justice Scalia is fully committed to a focus on textual meaning rather than intention. See Dworkin, “Comment,” 120–122 (criticizing in particular Justice Scalia’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence). Kerrigan v. Commission of Public Health, 957 A.2d 407, 481 (Conn. 2008) (citation omitted). Kerrigan, 957 A.2d at 482. City Circuit v. Adams, 532 U.S. 598 (2001). Ricoeur, “Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 88. Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” in From Text to Action, 118. Paul Ricoeur, “Appropriation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192. Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in From Text to Action, 167. Ibid.; emphasis added. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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Ricoeur, The Just. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 295; and The Just, 135. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 295. Ibid., 314. Ricoeur, The Just, 135. See Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (Mineola, NY: The Foundation Press, 1988), 582 (“The [Supreme] Court became willing to resort to purely hypothetical facts and reasons to uphold legislation or . . . to uphold it for virtually no substantive reason at all.”). See Ricoeur, The Just, 148 (“It is by coming to be applied to the sense of moral obligation and its negative double, interdiction, that the law accedes to the normative status ordinary usage recognizes in it . . . [T]he term ‘law’ comes indifferently from the register of law and that of morality.”). Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1982): 57. Cover argued against this centralizing authority of the courts and for a more decentralized hermeneutics where the interpretation of the law by local enclaves might obtain legal protection. This theme has been picked up and advanced in more recent work. See Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Emmanuel Melissaris, Ubiquitous Law (London: Ashgate, 2009); Mark Tushnet, Taking The Constitution Away From the Courts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). See Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 68. Pagels writes that the Gospel of Thomas claimed that individual humans have direct access to God, while the Gospel of John was written in part to refute this claim and assert that the only human access to God is through the mediation of Jesus. Frank H. Easterbrook, “Abstraction and Authority,” in The Bill of Rights in the Modern State, eds. Geoffrey R. Stone, Richard A. Epstein, and Cass R. Sunstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 374. Ibid., 371. Ibid., 372. Ibid., 376. Ricoeur, The Just, 112; emphasis added. Ibid. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324. See Dworkin, “Comment,” 122 (“some of what I have written might strike [Justice] Scalia as saying that the Constitution itself changes [at new points of application], though I meant the opposite”). Gadamer, Truth and Method, 39. Analogous language is found in foundational legal scholarship. Edward Levi, for instance, argues that in common law reasoning, “the classification changes as the classification is made. The rules change as the rules are applied.” Edward H. Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 3–4. Recall that this is not necessarily a liberal methodological move; Frank Easterbrook, as we have seen, presents a similar understanding.

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Ricoeur, The Just, 121. Ricoeur earlier engages in brief elaboration of legal application in Oneself as Another, where he discusses how application involves treating prior precedent as instances of a “principle that remains to be constructed.” Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 277. See Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation” in The Just, 109–126. Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation,” 110, 126. For Ricoeur’s earlier work, see “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections Between the Theory of Texts, Action Theory, and the Theory of History,” in From Text to Action, 125–143. Ricoeur, “Interpretation and/or Argumentation” in The Just, 121. Ibid., 121–125. See Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 70 (“Establishing this fit that makes up the application of the norm to the case presents . . . an inventive and a logical face.”). See Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text,” in From Text to Action, 158 (“[A] text has to be construed because it is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. The relation between whole and parts – as in a work of art or in an animal – requires a specific kind of ‘judgment’ for which Kant gave the theory in the third Critique.”). Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-discplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 303 (referring to Kant’s theory as a predicate for his claim that: “Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination into a ‘thinking more’ at the conceptual level”). Ricoeur, The Just, 97. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 126; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 122. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 196. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 146. Paul Ricoeur, “What is a Text?” in From Text to Action, 112. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172; emphasis in the original. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 220: “A dynamic approach to the constituting of the social bond will . . . surmount the contingent opposition between institutional regularity and social inventiveness, if we speak of institutionalization rather than of institutions . . . Considered from a dynamic point of view, the process of institutionalization oscillates between the production of nascent meaning and the production of established constraints.” See Ricoeur, The Just, 103: “political judgment cannot be limited to retrospection but includes a prospective, even prophetic dimension.”

Chapter 6

Ricoeur and Political Theory: Liberalism and Communitarianism Bernard P. Dauenhauer

Every intellectually and morally responsible political society aims to provide as good a life for as many of its members as it can. This aim serves as the ultimate norm for evaluating the society’s political institutions and practices. Among the generally agreed upon ingredients of a good life are freedom to choose among a variety of opportunities for employment, education, political participation, and so on, a fair distribution of the resources needed to make one’s choices bear good fruit, and conditions of security and stability that give members confidence in their society’s durability. The task for political theoreticians is to determine how best to achieve this overall political aim. What sorts of government, what laws, what sorts of citizen involvement in political decision-making are likely to bring about such a society? Answers to these and other important issues facing a political society presuppose some more or less explicit conception of what it is to be a person. As is well known, whether one adopts an Aristotelian, or a Hobbesian, or a Rousseauian, or a Lockean conception of the person has major consequences concerning what sorts of political institutions and practices can be conducive to a good life for a society’s citizens. At least since the 1971 publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, a staple of Anglo-American political thought has been the liberalismcommunitarianism debate.1 A crucial part of this debate concerns how one ought to conceive of the person, the self who is the citizen, a self that is both the agent and the patient of political life. There is little reason to believe that anyone can develop and fully defend a definitive conception of the self and its kind of identity. Nonetheless, all attempts to do so are not “created equal,” that is, equally flawed. In this essay, I argue that Paul Ricoeur’s conception of the self and its kind of identity is superior to those that underpin liberalism, on the one hand, and communitarianism, on the

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other. Ricoeur’s conception encompasses the strengths of each of these alternatives without suffering from the defects that weaken them. Furthermore, his conception of the self has important implications for sound political practice in the complex world we now inhabit. To make my case, I will first recall some of the salient features of presentday liberalism and communitarianism, paying particular attention to the conceptions of the self operative in them and to the inherent weaknesses each of them suffers from. Then I will take up Ricoeur’s view and point to a few of its significant implications for responsible political practice.

Liberalism The historical origin of liberalism, according to John Rawls, “is the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Something like the modern understanding of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought began there.”2 This freedom of thought ushered in our era of pluralism concerning both religious and non-religious doctrines. For liberalism pluralism is not disastrous. Rather, it is the natural outcome of human reason functioning in free societal institutions. The task for liberal political thought, in Rawls’ view, is thus to answer the question: “How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable religious, political, and moral doctrines?”3 Whatever disagreements liberal political theorists may have with one another, they are united in emphasizing the uniqueness of each person. They agree that each person is an autonomous agent and that this autonomy carries with it entitlements that cannot justly be infringed upon. These entitlements are at the base of all of our sound relationships with one another, including our political relationships. Accordingly, the fundamental issue confronting citizens of modern political societies is how to devise a just or fair system of stable institutions and practices that recognize and protect these entitlements. We are obligated to work for political institutions and practices that distribute to each person his or her fair share of public goods. Put otherwise, we are obligated to make sure that no person is made a scapegoat for the benefit of others.4 The appropriate liberal institutions aim to insure that each citizen has an equal opportunity to seek his or her self-defined personal fulfillment. As both Rawls and Ronald Dworkin make plain, modern liberal political thought and the objectives it aims for rest upon a strongly individualistic

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conception of the person and its kind of identity. Consider first Rawls. A person, he says, is “someone who can be a citizen, that is, a normal and fully cooperating member of a society over a complete life.”5 By virtue of the fundamental moral powers that all persons possess, namely, the power to think and form judgments and the power arising from a sense of justice and a conception of the good, every person can adopt and maintain or revise a conception of the good life, a life that consists in “a more or less determinate scheme of final ends, that is, ends we want to realize for their own sake, as well as attachments to other persons and loyalties to various groups and associations.”6 Rawls does not claim that his conception of the person has the status of metaphysical or ontological truth. Rather, he presents it as the conception that one ought to adopt for the purposes of constructing a theory of a just pluralistic and democratic political society. Under a substantive conception of the self, one might, for example, include the notion that we are all children of a God who has given us a revelation about how we should live. Such a person would have reason to give expression to this belief in several ways. For example, people holding this belief might well be guided by it in their religious affiliations or in how they educate their children. Rawls would not object to their doing so. But he would call for them to confine themselves to the Rawlsian conception of the person when they participate in the political institutions and practices that govern their society. Given his conception of the person, Rawls argues that each person is equally entitled to legal protection of his or her fair share of public goods. Likewise, each person is obligated to accept the obligations that this sharing imposes. Because of the ineliminable differences in the health, talents, and opportunities that distinguish persons from one another, a fair distribution of benefits and burdens cannot reasonably aim for sheer arithmetic equality. To do so would, for example, unfairly disadvantage those who suffer from handicaps not of their own making. It would make them scapegoats. To avoid this, the system for distributing public benefits and burdens ought to insure that whatever social and economic inequalities exist or are produced among individual members are so arranged that they are “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”7 Rawls calls this distributional principle the “difference principle.” Another important and prominent version of liberalism is the one defended by Ronald Dworkin. Though Dworkin’s disagreements with Rawls are by no means insignificant, for present purposes I want to call attention to the affinities between their conceptions of the person and his or her basic rights and responsibilities. No less than Rawls, Dworkin emphasizes

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the uniqueness and autonomy of each person. And like Rawls, Dworkin wants to insure against any form of scapegoating. But unlike Rawls, for his version of liberalism Dworkin looks “not to principles that are distinctly political or even moral but rather to principles that identify more abstract value in the human situation.”8 In Dworkin’s view, there are two such principles that, when taken together, “define the basis and conditions of human dignity.”9 According to the first principle, each human life possesses a special kind of intrinsic value. Once a human life has begun, it matters whether that life successfully realizes its potential or fails to do so. To realize one’s potential is an objective value not only for the person in question but also for the rest of us. For Dworkin, “a human life’s success or failure is not only important to the person whose life it is or only if and because that is what he wants. The success or failure of any human life is important in itself, something we all have reason to want or to deplore.”10 This first principle thus asserts a fundamental equality among all people. Dworkin’s second principle, the principle of personal responsibility, requires each person to accept “a special responsibility for realizing the success of his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judgment about what kind of life would be successful for him.”11 Of course, each of us can rightly seek advice about how we should live, but what each of us ultimately decides is a matter of individual responsibility. This second principle gives expression to the idea of liberty.12 For Dworkin, these two principles are formally individualistic. That is, “they attach value to and impose responsibility on people one by one.”13 They do not deny that some community or tradition may be crucially important to the success of some people. But the principles do demand that each of us take individual responsibility for how we deal with the communities or traditions that are relevant to our specific situations. These two principles are of fundamental importance for democratic politics. Taken together, they call for the recognition that all people “have political rights to whatever protection is necessary to respect the equal importance of their lives and their sovereign responsibility to identify and create value in their own lives.”14 In sum, as the positions of both Rawls and Dworkin exemplify, political liberalism rests on a strongly individualistic conception of the person, the self. For this liberalism, the necessary condition for genuine justice, a justice that accords equality and liberty to each citizen, is the recognition of individual autonomy. Michael Walzer has drawn attention to what he calls the “dissociative impulses” that are at play in liberalism. These impulses are exemplified by

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liberalism’s emphasis on free choice and the individual’s rights against governmental interference. For liberals, a good political society is one in which individual people choose among a maximum number of options. The autonomous individual confronting his, and now her, possibilities—this is much the best thing to be. To live well . . . is to make personal choice. Not any particular choices, for no choice is substantively best: it is the activity of choosing that makes for autonomy . . . We can only choose when we have many choices.15 Given this emphasis on free choice, liberalism demands great respect for the impulses we have to dissociate ourselves from people or institutions that interfere with our freedom to choose as we see fit. With its dissociative tendencies, liberalism “seems continually to undercut itself, to disdain its own traditions, and to produce in each generation renewed hopes for a more absolute freedom from history and society alike.”16 And so, “association is always at risk in a liberal society.”17 Liberalism’s dissociative impulses mesh readily with the strongly individualistic conceptions of the self that Rawls and Dworkin, like most liberal political theorists, adopt. Taken together, these impulses and this conception pose constant threats to the stability that any viable political society must possess. Hence, Walzer rightly concludes: “Liberalism is a self-subverting doctrine; for that reason, it really does require periodic communitarian correction.”18 In the end, though, Walzer himself does not consider communitarianism to be a defensible full-fledged alternative to liberalism in today’s world. Rather, it can serve to protect liberalism against its own tendency to undercut itself.19 Walzer’s perceptive analysis of the liberalism-communitarianism debate is of great value. But he has not sufficiently appreciated the importance for political theory of a properly complex conception of the self. For him, “the central issue for political theory is not the constitution of the self but the connection of constituted selves, the pattern of social relations.”20 Communitarian thought concerning the self is of more importance for political philosophy than Walzer allows.

Communitarianism The term “communitarianism” is probably applicable to a more diverse collection of positions than is the term “liberalism.” What unites this

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collection of positions is at least as much their objections to liberalism as any set of claims they happen to share with one another. That is, communitarians share with one another the conviction that liberalism’s individualism is deeply mistaken, but they disagree with one another concerning what should replace it. For my present purpose of showing the strength of Ricoeur’s conception of the self, I will focus here on the version of communitarianism that Charles Taylor espouses and the understanding of the self to which he subscribes. In Sources of the Self, Taylor argues that a self’s identity qua self is a moral identity. It is the identity of a moral agent as opposed to the physical identity that other sorts of entities possess.21 A self is one who unavoidably makes sense of itself in terms of (a) some sense of respect for and obligations to other people, (b) some understanding of what makes a full and good life, whether of one’s own life or that of others, and (c) some notion of what human dignity is and requires.22 To be an adult self is necessarily to interpret oneself in the light of these three questions. More fully, every self is born into and comes to maturity within some particular human community. And so, I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions, in my intimate relations to the ones I love, and also crucially in the space of moral and spiritual orientation within which my most important defining relations are lived out.23 Every human community is a linguistic community with its own distinctive discourse in which it addresses the issues vital to its members. A person comes to maturity only through living in such a community. And membership in the community carries with it responsibilities not wholly of one’s own choosing. People can, of course, “convert” from the community into which they were born and reared. They may develop an understanding of themselves and of human life that is greatly at odds with the views and evaluations that prevail in their “natal” communities. Nonetheless, whatever the depth of such a conversion, it can only occur as a movement from one particular social place to another particular place, another discursive community. Thus, “one is only a self among other selves.”24 Or, “I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors . . . A self exists only within . . . ‘webs of interlocution.’”25 And all such webs unavoidably impose obligations on those who dwell within them.

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Taylor explicitly draws the contrast between his conception of the self and those found in individualistic liberalism. The liberal conceptions “picture the human person as, at least potentially, finding his or her own bearings within, declaring independence from the webs of interlocution which have originally formed him/her (sic), or at least neutralizing them.”26 What these liberal conceptions fail to acknowledge is that however original a person is, however far he or she goes beyond the confines of thought and value that hold sway in his or her community, “the drive to original vision will be hampered, will ultimately be lost in inner confusion, unless it can be placed in some way in relation to the language and vision of others.”27 In short, however original or autonomous I may be in the conceptions I hold about what counts as a worthwhile way to live my life, I must still make sense of myself through interlocution with people who are somehow fellow members of the discursive community I inhabit and to which I am always somehow indebted.28 Taylor’s conception of the self fits well with the basic communitarian claim that for a good life, we have to “experience our lives as bound up with the good of communities out of which our identity has been constituted.”29 These communities are not like bridge clubs or square-dancing clubs, membership in which has little to do with a normal person’s basic sense of identity or well-being. Rather, the relevant communities are those based on (a) some geographical location that we in some fashion regard as “home,” or (b) some shared history that has moral significance for its members, or (c) some sustained face-to-face interaction marked by sentiments of cooperation, mutual trust, and altruism.30 Unlike liberal organizations, whose members join or leave them at will, communitarian communities are constituted by the durable commitments that their members have to one another. Communitarians take it that there are many different worthwhile forms of communal life in today’s world. Many of these communities do not compete against one another. Indeed, many people today would find that having a full good life would require them to participate in more than one of these communities. For example, one might find that a full good life requires participation in an appropriate professional association, a religious tradition, and some political party or organization. Accordingly, “the distinctive communitarian political project is to identify valued forms of community and to devise policies designed to protect and promote them, without sacrificing too much freedom.”31 Walzer, as I have indicated, recognizes that the dissociative impulses resident in individualistic liberalism threaten a political society’s stability.

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Communitarian concerns, emphasizing as they do the political importance of stable associations, serve as a salutary constraint on these impulses. But these constraints, which Walzer calls communitarianism’s “associative impulses,” pose political dangers of their own. Unbridled, they can pressure some people into conduct they find to be abhorrent. These associative impulses can produce scapegoats. Walzer is led to conclude that individualistic liberalism by itself cannot insure that its dissociative impulses will not induce the collapse of its political society. Nor can any form of communitarianism guarantee that its associative impulses will not produce scapegoats. Because today’s liberalism tends to subvert its own achievements in establishing and maintaining a habitable, stable, pluralistic society, it cannot do without periodic communitarian corrections. But, at least in today’s world, characterized as it is by so much population mobility, communitarianism neither can nor ought to replace liberalism and its distinctive practices and institutions.32 Given that neither individualistic liberalism nor communitarianism have shown themselves to be capable of serving as the doctrinal basis for a modern stable democratic society, it is reasonable to call into question the sources that lead, on the one hand, to liberalism’s excessive dissociative impulses and, on the other, to communitarianism’s excessive associative impulses. At the forefront of these sources are the competing conceptions of the self that figure in them. Liberalism’s conception of the self provides grounds for its dissociative tendencies, while communitarianism’s conception provides grounds for its associative tendencies. Neither conception would call for moderating these tendencies. Indeed, in practice these conceptions have served to justify resistance to any moderation. Nonetheless, as the historical record attests, sound democratic practice requires an ongoing dialectical interplay between these two sorts of tendencies, and Ricoeur’s alternative conception of the self reveals why this is the case.

Ricoeur: A “Communitarian Liberal” For Ricoeur, both political thought and political practice presuppose persons who can and do initiate actions and to whom these actions can be imputed as good or bad, as sensible or foolish, and so on. Persons are constituted as such by a set of powers or abilities to act, each of which is fragile or vulnerable. These powers “achieve their full efficacy only under a system of political existence.”33 Indeed, one can rightly say that the constitutive capacity for action is the mode of being that distinguishes persons from

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other kinds of entities.34 Properly understood, action encompasses not only doing and making but also receiving and enduring. Likewise, it encompasses “saying inasmuch as it is doing, ordinary action, inasmuch as it is intervention in the course of things, narration inasmuch as it is the narrative reassembling of a life stretched out in time, and finally, the capacity to impute to oneself or to others the responsibility for acting.”35 The self constitutes its identity in the course of engaging in these four modes of action, but this identity is both complex and never definitively fixed. Its complexity springs from the self’s fundamental way of inhabiting the world. On the one hand, by virtue of its embodiment, the identity of the self depends upon its material and cultural situation. But, on the other, the self’s identity also depends upon its ability to initiate, to inaugurate something new. Ricoeur refers to these two aspects of identity as idem-identity and ipse-identity. A person’s idem-identity is the identity by virtue of which he or she remains spatiotemporally selfsame. This identity includes not only one’s distinctive biological makeup (e.g., one’s distinctive DNA), but also one’s acquired habits, dispositions, beliefs, and self-assumed roles. This idem-identity is describable in empirical terms. By contrast, a person’s ipse-identity is not empirically evident. It is, rather, discernible as a kind of self-constancy, an ongoing capacity to make commitments and either keep or break them. Self-consistency is that characteristic by virtue of which I am accountable to other people for what I do. The paradigm case that bears witness to the irreducibility of ipse-identity to idem-identity is the promise. A promise commits its maker to a specific action regardless of any inclinations arising from his or her idem-identity. The promise maker’s conscience judges his or her own self-constancy in living up to the promise. It either authorizes or denies authorizing its self to claim the kind of self-constancy that makes one trustworthy.36 It is evident that every agent achieves either idem-identity or ipse-identity only through interaction with other agents. Furthermore, these agents live with and interact as members of a society that antedates them and is expected to outlast them. It is this society that makes it possible for agents to participate in politics and thereby have a political identity.37 More generally, we find help in making sense of how these two modes of temporally extended identity fit together by reflecting on how persons appear as self-identical in both historical and fictional stories. This reflection shows that personal identity, constituted by the interplay of one’s idem-identity and ipse-identity, is at bottom a narrative identity.38 Every narrative recounts initiatives that some person or group of persons has

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taken. These initiatives inaugurate something new. But they also have consequences that last for some time and that form the context for subsequent initiatives. Narratives tell of the dialectical relationship between these initiatives, which take place in some present moment, and some set of recollections and expectations or aspirations that constitute the past and future horizons of every initiative. Narratives give expression to the distinctive mode of time that Ricoeur calls historical time. Historical time is in principle public time. It is the time in which one can recognize sequences of generations and detect traces that predecessors have left behind and learn of debts that one owes to them. Without at least a latent sense of this indebtedness, Ricoeur claims, there could be no meaningful history.39 Historical narratives, then, deal with the interventions of the human power to act into the ordered processes of the material and cultural worlds. They recount moments when agents, who recognize their power to act, actually do so, and sufferers, who are subject to being affected by actions, actually undergo them. Furthermore, they report the outcomes, whether intended or not, of these interventions. In doing so, such narratives are indispensable resources both for sound political reflection and responsible political practice. Ricoeur’s conception of personal identity as a narrative identity can account for both the liberal emphasis on the self as a unique individual and the communitarian emphasis on the self as a member of shared community or society upon which he or she depends to lead a meaningful life. With the liberals, Ricoeur argues that every action, even though it is always part of some interaction, is imputable to a particular agent as his or her own individual performance. There are, for Ricoeur, no higher order agents.40 To maintain its capacity to act and thereby express its ipse-identity the Ricoeurian self must be able to dissociate itself when necessary from persons or institutions that threaten to prevent it from exercising its ability to initiate. Though the self can and often does coordinate its action with the actions of others in order to perform a so-called group action, for example, playing a game as a member of a team, each self’s action remains its own and can be imputed uniquely to it. With the communitarians, on the other hand, Ricoeur agrees that a person can perform an action only if he or she has the benefit of some resources that only a community or society can provide. For example, to make a legally binding will, a will that insures that the testator’s wishes are honored, there must be legal institutions that have the necessary power to enforce the will. The agent’s recognition of the need for these enabling resources gives rise to the associative impulses that communitarians emphasize. The self is

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tied to the community, and the community’s resources are constitutive features of its idem-identity.41 The Ricoeurian conception of the self provides the underpinnings for a distinctive understanding of democratic politics and citizenship. Though he himself, to my knowledge, did not do so, one could rightly say that Ricoeur espouses a “communitarian liberalism.” On his understanding of politics, individual citizens have obligations to their society that they have not contracted for and that they themselves cannot cancel at will. Not only are citizens to discharge these debts, they are also obligated to do what they can to preserve their society and its institutions so that other people, contemporaries and descendents, can benefit from membership therein. These debts to one’s society have their basis in history, but are not a fate. The responsible citizen is one who never forgets that no society or any institutional component of it is perfect. Criticism and reform are never entirely out of place. Accordingly, the communitarian liberal recognizes the importance of refusing to give uncritical allegiance to any regime. In some instances, exercising one’s capacity to dissociate oneself from some project undertaken by one’s society may be a greater manifestation of loyalty than simple acquiescence. But since the exercise of one’s ability to act depends upon some institutionally supported association with other people, dissociation is never free of risk. Hence, all citizens ought to do what they can to insure that their political society accords to each of its members the full-fledged esteem and respect that is due them and required to live a fully human life.42 Such esteem and respect acknowledge each person’s inherent capacities to honor the debts owed to his or her society as well as to make his or her own unique contribution to the society’s ongoing life in common.

Some Implications for Political Practice Ricoeur himself, to my knowledge, never claims to have worked out a comprehensive political philosophy. Nonetheless, he does offer a number of important insights concerning responsible political practice. These insights spring more or less directly from his conceptions of action and the self who performs them. Here I will focus on only a few of these important insights. As I mentioned earlier, Ricoeur emphasizes that all action is, in various ways, interaction. Each one of us is born into a world constituted in large part by the actions of others. Their actions set the context for the sequence

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of actions that I perform. My actions, in turn, contribute to the context in which my contemporaries and successors will act. In short, every action is part of a history of human interaction without which no individual action could make sense. Furthermore, because all action is interaction, every action unavoidably runs the risk of inflicting some measure of harm on some other people. That is, one person’s action can all too often impinge on others in such a way that it interferes, at least for a while, with their own capacities for acting. In these cases, whether intentionally or not, a person’s action causes others to suffer, even to the point that they can feel that their personal integrity has been violated.43 Of course, most actions do not harm anyone. Quite often, we find that we are beneficiaries of what others do. Nonetheless, “the opportunity for doing violence lies within the very structure of human action—to act is to act upon another who undergoes my action.”44 Among the consequences for politics of the interactive character of action are (a) the fact that each action is part of a history of action that gives rise to the unavoidable fragility of every actual political regime, and (b) the fact that all action risks making other people suffer is at the heart of the rationale for a society’s political and legal institutions. Consider first the matter of political fragility. Political practice is unavoidably paradoxical. On the one hand, it aims to organize the society’s members in such a way that they can make decisions together and accomplish things that none of them could do alone. Ricoeur speaks of this aim as the promotion of “power-in-common,” a power constituted by the cooperation of basically equal citizens. But, political life always involves the dominance of some person or persons over others. As history shows, rulers are always tempted both to prolong the duration of their rule and to make their dominance more thoroughgoing. Ricoeur speaks of this political dominance or domination as “power-over.”45 Responsible political practice calls for making power-in-common prevail as much as possible over powerover. But all too often, power-over wins out. In my view, the political fragility that Ricoeur describes sheds important light on the nature of democratic constitutions and on their inevitable limitations. In democratic states, constitutions serve as one of the main deterrents to the pervasive tendencies of rulers to aggrandize their dominance. One major way in which rulers do so is through enacting laws that expand their own powers. Constitutions and the rights they confer upon citizens are designed in large part to curtail this tendency. That is, the basic rationale for constitutions and the rights they accord stems from the fact that, by reason of interaction, every person’s capacity to act is always vulnerable,

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always subject to being stifled by the actions of others, and the ineliminable danger that, in the domain of politics, the ruler will abuse the state power that he or she controls. These constitutional rights are of two sorts. They reflect both the “dissociative” and the “associative” relationships between the citizen and the state. The person who is a citizen, on the one hand, is more than the creature of the state. On the other hand, belonging to and participating in a state is a necessary condition for a person to flourish.46 Constitutional rights recognize both of these sorts of relationship. They give recognition to the individual as well as the communal dimensions of a person’s relationship to society and its members. In so doing, they reflect the kind of complex self, with its narrative identity, that Ricoeur describes. Even though the establishment of a regime of constitutional rights does temper the risk that rulers will abuse the people they rule, it cannot make them fully immune to such abuse. For one thing, constitutional rights are worthless unless they are respected and enforced. But enforcing them against violations, especially violations committed by government officials, is no simple matter. As legal practice in the United States shows, governmental officials often have immunity to punishment for violations of constitutional rights that they commit in the course of discharging their official functions. Giving such immunity may well be a practical necessity for recruiting and maintaining a corps of competent officials, but it also weakens the efficacy of the rights in question. The task, which by its very nature can never be definitively accomplished, is to strike a balance that grants no more immunity than is practically necessary to ensure effective governance.47 The difficulties involved in enforcing constitutional rights point to a more fundamental issue concerning constitutions. Though constitutions are designed to establish a permanent, stable framework for the laws that make political life possible, they neither are nor can be made immutable. They always display marks of the historical era in which they were adopted and ratified. Furthermore, they are unavoidably open to interpretation. In principle, they are always subject to additions, subtractions, and amendments. And they can be wholly abrogated. In short, like the interactions that initially established them and that subsequently interpret and apply them, constitutions can never achieve a definitive, ahistorical validity. These considerations provide evidence that Rawls has overstated the degree of stability that one ought to aim for in a constitution. As part of his ideal theory for a just, stable, pluralistic democratic society, Rawls calls for a constitution that rests on a stable overlapping consensus among its reasonable citizens. By definition, a pluralistic society is one in which its citizens

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disagree among themselves concerning what sets of beliefs, what “comprehensive doctrines,” make for a good life. But if they are reasonable, they will agree with one another that political power ought not be used to repress any comprehensive doctrine that calls for the toleration of other comprehensive doctrines. That is, whatever the differences among these “tolerant” comprehensive doctrines may be, there is an ”overlapping consensus” among their adherents that political power ought not favor, or disfavor, any particular one of these reasonable doctrines.48 The overlapping consensus that underpins a just democratic constitution, Rawls contends, embodies the fundamental ideas concerning both political society and the persons that can be citizens in it. Furthermore, the principles that this consensus upholds “also establish certain substantive rights such as liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, as well as fair opportunity and principles covering certain essential needs.”49 In the process of doing so, this consensus meets “the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority.”50 In striving to fix these issues “once and for all,” Rawls makes it clear that his aim is to remove them from the political agenda. He argues that, unless such matters are protected against political deliberations and decisions based on calculations of social utility or interest, they will remain subject to the vagaries of ever-changing circumstances. Indeed, if these matters are left unsettled, the stakes of political controversy are likely to rise. Insecurity and hostility to public life are likely to grow to dangerous proportions. In sum, “The refusal to take these matters off the agenda perpetuates the deep divisions latent in society: it betrays a readiness to revive those antagonisms in the hope of gaining a more favorable position should later circumstances prove propitious.”51 I readily grant that a just political society needs the kind of stable legal framework that a constitution provides. No sensible constitution is easy to modify or replace. But it does not follow that a constitution ought to settle “once and for all” any political issue. In fact, claiming that any political issue is no longer open to discussion is likely to produce instability rather than stability. Every constitution is in some respects backward-looking. It emerges from a reflection on past political experience. But it is also prescriptive and hence forward-looking. In this respect, there is always something experimental about it. It amounts to a set of proposals concerning how people can live together in a way that will be good for all of them. There is, however, no way to guarantee that any particular constitution will prove to be permanently successful. Rawls himself admits that a political

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society always aims to perpetuate itself regardless of changing circumstances. What possible evidence in favor of any specific constitutional provisions, even those concerning “political basic rights and liberties,” could make them permanently immune to all reasonable challenges? To be more concrete, let me point to the deep emerging challenges that face every political society today. Among these challenges are those arising from climate change, migrations of peoples, and threats of terrorism. The size and scope of these emerging challenges is in many ways unprecedented. Indeed, they threaten to be so severe that they will bring into question the very sustainability of important parts of the way we have become accustomed to live.52 Considerations of this sort support the conclusion that every political constitution is, like everything brought about by human interaction, always an artifact. It is a historical phenomenon and therefore subject to becoming outmoded. Constitutions can reasonably aim to provide no more than the framework for a well-considered, durable but mutable modus vivendi for its citizens. No constitution can establish atemporal ideals against which political practices and institutions are to be measured.53 By his stress on the fragile and historical character of all action and by his conception of the narrative identity of agents, Ricoeur sheds light on why constitutions unavoidably have the limitations that they do. Finally, consider Ricoeur’s conception of forgiveness and the importance he places on the act of forgiving in political practice.54 For him, the kind of self that each of us is and the kind of political identity that we have make the giving and receiving of forgiveness not merely desirable but indeed a practical necessity for any political practice that aspires to be responsible.55 In my view, what Ricoeur says about forgiveness is both as profound and as practically demanding as anything else he says about politics. We are all familiar with how regularly, in everyday life, what we do gives some offense to others and how often what they do offends us to some degree. Similarly, we know that forgiveness, asked for and given, works to heal these hurts and harms. But we often fail to take into consideration harms or evils that become embedded and institutionalized in our political life and have ongoing repercussions both domestically and internationally. Following Karl Jaspers, Ricoeur draws special attention to those moral evils that, by reason of the political offices held by their perpetrators, constitute political evils.56 These are evils that establish laws or official policies that unjustly favor or disfavor some members of the state. The beneficiaries of these injustices, even if they were not perpetrators of them, bear some responsibility for rectifying the damages that have been done.

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Their responsibility arises “independently of their individual acts or their degree of acquiescence in state policies. Whoever has taken advantage of the public order must in some way answer for the evils created by the state to which he or she belongs.”57 Even brief reflection shows how pervasive political evils are. Every political society we know much about has perpetrated injustices of some sort, either against some of its own members or against other people or both. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it is beyond our power to eradicate all of the political evils for which we bear some responsibility. At most, we can do no more than to curtail some of the damages they inflict.58 The pervasiveness and persistence of political evils leads Ricoeur to hold that the most adequate response we can make to the array of moral and institutional evils in which every normal adult is somehow entangled is to offer all other people a radically unconditional forgiveness, a forgiveness that amounts to a declaration to each person that, no matter what, “you are worth more than whatever you do.”59 Ricoeurian forgiveness is always a gift that an individual or group of individuals give. It cannot be made a component of any legal system. It is neither incompatible with nor dependent upon any official action, such as amnesties or pardons. Indeed, it does not preclude legal action that punishes crimes.60 Properly constituted legal systems deal only with specific actions. They do not directly address the personhood of those who perform the actions in question. Ricoeurian forgiveness always has the person, rather than specific actions, at the center of its focus. This radical forgiveness, Ricoeur argues, is the crucial ingredient in any fitting practical response that we, especially we Westerners, can make to our history. Ours is a history replete with “wars of religion, wars of conquest, wars of extermination, subjugation of ethnic minorities, expulsion or reduction of religious minorities to slavery.”61 This history manifests the extravagant pride that peoples take in their political or cultural identity. If there is to be any peace or reconciliation worthy of the name, the individual members of each society will have to come to acknowledge the sufferings of other peoples, especially of the peoples they regard as their enemies. Forgiving even the apparently unforgivable evils such as the Holocaust “has immense curative value, not only for the guilty party but also for the victims.”62 One could hardly be faulted for being deeply skeptical about how politically successful even very widespread Ricoeurian forgiveness would turn out to be. At least at first blush, Ricoeur’s claims for forgiveness may well look utopian, if not downright foolish.

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Animosity of these sorts neither is nor has been rare. Indeed, such animosity is so frequent that it gives plausibility to the Hobbesian view that the natural state of relations among both individuals and states is one of war.63 One could hardly be faulted for being skeptical about how politically successful even widespread Ricoeurian forgiveness would turn out to be. At least at first blush, his claims for forgiveness seem utopian, if not downright foolish. The 2008 military conflict between Georgia and Russia has by no means resolved the deeply rooted hostility between these two peoples. Relations between China and Tibet likewise reflect a seemingly hopeless antagonism. In war, the principal virtues are force and fraud or deception. Whatever peace is to be established comes about through each of the competing parties’ recognition that it is in its own best interests to refrain from seeking competitive advantage by exercising the war virtues. From this “realist” perspective, Ricoeurian forgiveness is at the least politically irrelevant and perhaps even dangerously irresponsible. The historical record certainly provides evidence in support of this “realist” view. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that the conditions that gave “realism” its plausibility no longer obtain. The present threats to the human habitability of substantial parts of the earth are now and for the foreseeable future so severe and imminent that there is little reason to trust that reliance on calculations of national self-interest can successfully deal with them. Consider, for example, the multifaceted challenge of climate change. Only concerted international cooperation has a chance to ward off calamity. It would take blind faith to trust that the policies and practices necessary to meet such a challenge will turn out to be in the national interest of each of the states. Faced with the need for global cooperation among peoples and states that share a history so deeply marked by both physical and cultural aggression, one has reason to resist the temptation to dismiss Ricoeurian forgiveness as politically irrelevant. Perhaps such forgiveness would prove futile. But, on the other hand, what alternative is there that shows more promise for generating the kind of cooperation without which our recent situation will lead to disaster? In any event, both the capacity to forgive and the need to be forgiven spring from the twofold identity that constitutes the Ricoeurian self. By virtue of its ipse-identity, the self is able to offer forgiveness no matter what it has suffered, while in virtue of its idem-identity it can appreciate what it means to be a member of a suffering people. Unfortunately, of course, it is also by virtue of its twofold identity that the self can also refuse to forgive.

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Undoubtedly, it would be foolish to claim that Ricoeur has given the definitive account of the self and its kind of identity. Ricoeur himself makes no such claim. Nonetheless, his position does have the considerable merit of illuminating central issues in political thought and practice. It not only provides a basis for the respective convictions that give both liberalism and communitarianism their appeal. More fundamentally, Ricoeur’s achievement is to have made clear why politics, even at its best, is, like the self, always a work in progress.

Notes 1 2 3 4

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9

10 11 12

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John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971). John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), xxiv. Ibid., xxv. See, e.g., Paul Ricoeur’s comments on Rawls in Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 230. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 19, 30. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 6; also 282–285. Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 9. Ibid., 10. In this context, Dworkin is explicitly focusing on American society, but clearly he regards American society as paradigmatic for liberal democracy. Ibid., 9–10; my emphasis on “any”; Dworkin’s emphasis on “reason.” Ibid., 10. For present purposes, I take it that the extension of Dworkin’s term “a human life” covers only normal adult human beings and normal children. It does not cover embryos or fetuses. Whether this extension is too restrictive is not directly relevant to the issues at stake in this essay. Ibid. Ibid., 32. Michael Walzer, Thinking Politically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 120. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 109–112. Ibid., 111. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 23. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid., 36. Ibid.

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43 44

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Ibid., 37. Ibid., 37–39. Daniel Bell, “Communitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (online), 15. Ibid., 15–17. Ibid., 15. Walzer, Thinking Politically, 110–112. Paul Ricoeur, “Morale, éthique et politique,” in Pouvoirs, Révue française d’étudés constitutionelles et politiques, (1993), 5. Ricoeur’s conception of action corresponds to Martin Heidegger’s conception of Care as the fundamental way in which persons exist and inhabit the world. See Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 74–75. Paul Ricoeur, “De l’Esprit,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 92: 2 (1994): 248. On Ricoeur’s metaphysics of action, see François Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 651–652. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 119–121, 165–168. See also, Paul Ricoeur, “From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 39:4 (1996): 451–454. See Paul Ricoeur, “Individu et identité personnelle,” in Sur l’individu, editor unnamed (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 55–72. This volume contains the papers presented at the Colloque de Royaumont in October 1985. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Ipséité/ Altérité/Socialité,” Archivio di Filosofia 1 (1986): 17–33. Ricoeur presented this latter paper in January 1986, before his Gifford Lectures that later became Oneself as Another. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 165–166. Taylor also concludes that personal identity is a narrative identity. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 47–48. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), 108–118. The theme of indebtedness to others figures prominently in Ricoeur’s later works. These are debts that are in principle never fully repayable. Debts of this sort are of capital importance in his ethical and political thought. Paul Ricoeur, “Practical Reason?” in From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 204. Paul Ricoeur, “Who is the Subject of Rights?” in The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 10. See also Paul Ricoeur, Lectures, vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 162–163. On Ricoeur’s “communitarian liberalism,” see my “Ricoeur and the Tasks of Citizenship,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002), 238–239. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 190. Paul Ricoeur, “Entretien,” in Éthique et responsibilité: Paul Ricoeur, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeschliemann (Neuchatel: Baconniere, 1994), 16. Recall also Hannah Arendt’s remarks on the transgressive character of action in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 240–241. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 220. See also Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 259–261.

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Paul Ricoeur, “Who is the Subject of Rights?” 10. For one study that sheds some light on the issue of enforcing constitutional rights, see Bernard P. Dauenhauer and Michael L. Wells, “Corrective Justice and Constitutional Torts,” Georgia Law Review 35:3 (2001): 903–929. For Rawls’ own account of what counts as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine, see his Political Liberalism, 58–61. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 161. Ibid. Taking these matters off the political agenda amounts to Rawls’ effort to put brakes on what Walzer has called liberalism’s dissociative impulses. See, e.g., Daniel Callahan, “Unsustainable: Hard Truths about the ‘American Way of Life,’” Commonweal 135:12 (June 2008): 12–14. See in this connection, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “A Good Word for a Modus Vivendi,” in The Idea of a Political Liberalism: Essays on Rawls, eds. Victoria Davion and Clark Wolf (Lanham, MD:. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 204–220. Ricoeur’s fullest account of forgiveness is in the epilogue “Difficult Forgiveness” to Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 457–506. Also see Paul Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 21:5 (1995), 3–11; and “Le pardon peut-il guérir?,” Esprit 2 (1995): 77–82. See in this connection, Paul Ricoeur, “Responsibilité et fragilité,” Autres Temps, 76–77 (Spring 2003): 127–141. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 474–478. See also Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Dial Press, 1947). Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 475; translation modified. Bernard P. Dauenhauer, “Responding to Evil,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLV:2 (2007): 207–222. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 493; translation modified. Ibid., 472–474. Ricoeur, “Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe,” 9. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 125. What I call here the “Hobbesian view” does not do full justice to Hobbes’ complete view. But it does point to the widespread belief that the only rational justification for one state to cooperate with another is that its cooperation is ultimately conducive to satisfying its own objectives. In the last analysis, how the other state fares is irrelevant.

Chapter 7

Ricoeur and Rhetorical Theory: Paul Ricoeur on Recognition in the Public Sphere Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

In rhetorical studies, the concept of a public sphere has emerged as a means to engage critically the assumption of homogeneity in a polity, scrutinize the mechanisms that control political participation, and increase the opportunity for active political involvement of citizens. From its inception, however, this work has been faced with a double challenge: to overcome a powerful historical model of public deliberation – that of the Greek polis – as well as an influential contemporary theory that in fact launched the “public sphere” as a central concept – Jürgen Habermas’ model of the bourgeois public sphere.1 As rhetoric scholars, as well as historians and classicists have shown, the Greek polis was defined by the assumption of uniformity among its members.2 Hence, deliberation in the Greek polis was likely to bring together similar points of view and to end in consensus without risking prolonged conflict or continuous disagreement. This assumption of likeness among the members of a polity has carried on through the centuries and reemerged in various historical contexts, often enforced normatively as a way of silencing or dismissing dissenting voices or opinions distinctly different from the (presumed) prevalent opinion. Thus, Habermas’ work has been seen as reinstating this assumption of homogeneity and likeness, especially through its emphasis on rational deliberation as a universal form of communication available to all sociopolitical actors.3 A common concern raised by rhetoric scholars interested in the structure and dynamic of the public sphere is how to articulate a notion of the public sphere that does not create a conceptual setting that will exclude certain actors.4 At the very heart of this concern lies the problem of recognition: How to devise a conceptual model of the public sphere in a way that will recognize diverse actors and allow them equal participation?

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Many of the classic contributions to the topic of recognition approach it primarily as a social and political problem with moral roots as well as consequences. But if we approach recognition from the perspective of Ricoeur’s philosophy, we are encouraged to see it as an ontological problem, one that is more deeply tied up with questions of identity, and thus more difficult to obtain. In his 1967 essay titled “Violence and Language,” he contends that “the confrontation of violence with language underlies all of the problems which we can pose concerning man.”5 This claim is further elaborated by Ricoeur’s use of three examples of violence: in politics, poetry, and philosophy. Political violence, as he sees it, is not limited to specific actions such as revolutions, but also occurs “by harmonizing . . . private languages in a common fable of glory.”6 For Ricoeur, political violence takes place whenever the common will underlying a political organization becomes a restraining factor for individual options. But violence also operates at the heart of poetic expression when it punctures collective and generally accepted meanings in order to achieve particularity of expression. Similarly, in philosophy violence marks the point of departure from previous thought, the abandonment of received ideas in favor of new questions, and the embarking on an intellectual beginning that “is always an exercise of force.”7 Yet, by “using words already burdened with meaning, no philosopher can totally recover the totality of his presuppositions” in order to propose a “particular trajectory” outside “the horizon of a tradition.”8 Violence, then, also includes the impact of an existing discourse or set of ideas upon any new formulations that are necessarily embedded in it. These three illustrations of violence might be seen as the consequence of difference, or rather, various attempts at eliminating it. The pervasiveness of the phenomenon, thus defined, and its grounding within language, gives rise to a permanent dilemma: How can a public sphere escape the ever-present danger of misrecognition as a deliberate manifestation of an ontological violence? In his early writings on political philosophy, Ricoeur contends that “to be non-violent . . . is to respect plurality and diversity.”9 In order to display respect for plurality and diversity, Ricoeur’s solution, I would like to argue, is to establish a theory of identity that requires recognition of another as a way of articulating oneself. This approach no longer makes recognition follow after identity – we recognize individuals identified in a certain way – but makes it part of identity – since to be oneself, a particular kind of self, as I will show shortly, is to recognize another. Ricoeur agrees with Emmanuel Levinas that the imposition of sameness upon otherness is the ultimate manifestation, and the morally most disturbing, of violence.10 But unlike

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Levinas, he does not believe that self-identity encounters the difference of another by trying to subsume it to its own logic, by imposing sameness. As John Wall explains, it is not that selfhood per se causes violence, but that selfhood is violence’s occasion. It would be possible for selves not to do others violence, even if they inevitably do. . . . It is the fact that others depend on selves for nonviolence that makes violence possible in the first place. This paradox makes violence an inscrutable human choice.11 By defining violence as a human choice, we also relegate recognition to the domain of moral choices that individuals, rather than institutions, have to make. The question, then, becomes: What is involved in such moral options? Or, put differently, what makes such moral choices – which set out to avoid, or eliminate the potential for violence – possible? Here I address these questions based on a reading of Ricoeur’s philosophy of identity coupled with his later insights into moral and political philosophy. I will begin by presenting the disciplinary context into which I seek to introduce Ricoeur’s ideas. I then continue by considering two other solutions that could be offered in response to this problem: The first comes from Hannah Arendt’s philosophy and is centered on her concept of the social, and the second comes from a cluster of more recent contributions to the study of recognition, associated especially with the work of Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth. This exegetical detour is necessary in order to establish the extent to which Ricoeur offers an approach that is conceptually preferable to other possible candidates, as well as one that responds more adequately to the challenges faced by rhetorical theorists interested in the public sphere. However, my account of the theorists mentioned earlier is perforce rather brief, as a more detailed presentation of their work remains beyond the scope of this essay.12 My choice of these particular authors as a point of comparison for estimating the significance of Ricoeur’s ideas is based on two criteria: On the one hand, Arendt’s notion of the social is concerned primarily with the potential for violence and (deliberate) misrecognition in the public sphere. As such, it resonates powerfully with Ricoeur’s own account of violence as a pervasive phenomenon with ontological roots and significance. On the other hand, Taylor is one of the interlocutors who Ricoeur himself chose to address in his Vienna lectures later published as The Course of Recognition.13 But more importantly, the protagonists of this essay focus on a set of questions that are all ultimately formed around the central issue of identity.

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Thus, recognition, as I set out to discuss it in this chapter, is an identity problem. My argument will be that, unlike other identity problems that have frequently been reduced to an identity politics, this one requires, and does get from Ricoeur, a different type of intervention. This is an intervention heavily concerned with individual agents and profoundly suspicious of approaches that privilege large social configurations to which individuals may happen to belong – class, gender, ethnic origin, and others. Such an emphasis on individual agents is a broader characteristic of Ricoeur’s thought. As I have argued elsewhere, his moral philosophy encourages us to conceptualize social and political interactions with an interest in the agents themselves, beyond their group affiliations.14

The Exigency for Rhetorical Studies A number of rhetoric scholars have insisted on the importance of moving beyond the model of the Greek polis, as well as that of the bourgeois public sphere theorized by Habermas, in order to avoid an undue emphasis on homogeneity as the basis for decision-making. Gerard Hauser, for instance, argues that the assumption of homogeneity (especially coupled with the normative thrust of Habermas’ theory) risks trumping discursive difference.15 Hauser proposes that we articulate instead a notion of the public sphere as a reticulate, pluralistic structure. His work is animated by an effort to develop an alternative vocabulary that can help us to conceptualize the conditions for broad participation without normative constraints, in addition to the mechanisms that can systematically limit or debilitate it. A similar effort animates the scholarship of Robert Asen, particularly in his insistence upon the importance of understanding how public discourse relies on, and perpetuates, particular ways of imagining people, and can thus circulate stereotypical images that deny certain actors full participation and political representation within the public arena.16 Perhaps the greatest intellectual merit of the rhetorical studies that emphasize pluralism in the public sphere lies in their emancipatory agenda, their commitment to open the realm of rhetorical interactions to actors of various backgrounds. But intellectually, the main challenge this work has faced is how to identify these actors of various backgrounds. The question is not simply how to facilitate access, but also, and more difficultly, how to know who these actors are. Thus phrased, this is a question of social and political recognition, in the specialized sense the term has now acquired through the work of Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth.

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Approaching the conception of the public sphere through the lens of recognition raises an additional set of problems. As Asen points out, to questions concerning the values and aims of the public sphere, theorists and advocates alike now must append questions that seek to elucidate how diverse participants may be included in public debate as diverse participants rather than (as assumed by the bourgeois public sphere) universal citizens.17 However, in trying to increase participation, we must keep in mind Craig Calhoun’s observation that inclusion cannot be reduced to a quantitative matter, or to an issue of proportion – the percentage of the various members of a political community who participate in it.18 What does it mean, then, to offer potential members recognition and thus to give them the opportunity to participate within the public sphere of deliberation? Asen’s answer, endorsed by many rhetoric scholars, is that political recognition and the inclusion it affords are predicated on our ability to develop a model of the public sphere that values “difference within a common enough framework so that questions of fairness and justice be broached by participants themselves. For this to be the case, difference must be viewed as a resource for – not an impediment to – meaningful dialogue.”19 As a heuristic move, this shift toward the participants themselves – now assigned the role and responsibility to decide for themselves what the criteria for inclusion should be, based on how they thematize and reckon with differences among themselves – might have significant theoretical appeal. But as a practical strategy, it may prove rather poor. Based on historical precedents, there are few reasons to believe that agents themselves are any better at making recognition and identification possible, than theorists and the models they propose. In fact, intolerance is a common response to difference from the participants’ perspective, and thus not merely a conceptual artifice. This is why the scholarship that insists on the importance of promoting difference as a key element in a model of the public sphere takes the risk of being politically naïve. In the aftermath of atrocious civil wars, tribal conflict, and ethnic cleansing in several parts of the world, “difference” is a notion that should be approached more carefully, as well as less optimistically. To acknowledge the potentially negative dimension of difference, in the next section I review Hannah Arendt’s concept of the social, as well as her account of recognition as grounded in a shared or similar experience.

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Recognition through Experience Hannah Arendt adds to our understanding of the public the concept of the social, explained in a way that was designed to draw attention to the negative dimension of difference, its potential for becoming a source of fragmentation and misrecognition.20 Her notion of “the social” is predicated on the idea of dispersion and segregation within the public arena, and connected with the rise of the mob and the masses. Arendt believes that the social is structured in accordance with the principle of differentiation, in groups and communities defined by distinct sets of beliefs and values, shaped by distinct histories, and uninterested in merging with others. The fragmentation of communities into subgroups defined variously and sometimes incompatibly by interests, beliefs, or other criteria is, in her view, an inescapable condition of social life. How, then, can a public sphere emerge that allows for difference among groups as well as mutual recognition, thereby making a broad-based solidarity possible? In the social sphere, “what matters is . . . the differences by which people belong to certain groups whose very identifiability demands that they discriminate against other groups in the same domain.”21 As she puts it, rather bluntly: “discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right.”22 In Arendt’s opinion, “the question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and the personal sphere, where it is destructive.”23 For Arendt, social discrimination is precisely what guarantees the maintenance of plurality and respect for difference. But this guarantee is precarious, to say the least, because social discrimination can so easily turn political, and thus become an instrument for eliminating difference and plurality. This conception of difference led Arendt to adopt a risky stance toward a particular political event: the riots produced by the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1959. Criticizing the deployment of Federal Forces, authorized by Presidential Proclamation, Arendt argued that the military intervention was an ineffective way to end segregation, because as a matter of social, rather than political, differentiation, the segregation of schools was in a certain way inevitable.24 She argued that racial discrimination cannot be ended through the desegregation of schools, and she was especially troubled by the fact that the desegregation of schools had placed children in a politically charged setting, demanding from them an intervention that she deemed appropriate only for adults.

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Insofar as Arendt offered a solution to the problem of school desegregation, it was one that could not generally prevent discrimination from entering the political and the personal spheres. She proposed that social differentiation be overcome through religion (and uses the example of Quakerism), because religion is the only area where individuals are seen strictly as human beings, and not in a differentiated manner as black or white, rich or poor, male or female. To the more general problem of how to render discrimination benign and make it a strategy of distinctiveness rather than rejection, she offered an implicit answer, based on her own biographical experience. As a European Jew, Arendt not only deemed herself immune to the accusation of racial prejudice, but also saw herself to be sympathetic to and able to understand the cause and predicament of African Americans.25 The fact that she saw herself to be eminently qualified to understand and talk about the plight of those facing discrimination – whether she was or not – reveals an important theoretical assumption in her work. While the social is, in her view, the locus of fragmentation and negative differentiation par excellence, social identities can become compatible with one another to the extent that they share a similar historical and experiential grounding. Arendt believed that anti-Semitic discrimination made her attuned to the experience of discrimination in general, and gave her an understanding that could not be available to others. Thus, for her the key to overcoming negative differentiation and to obtaining recognition seems to be located at the level of lived experience. In her view, similar experiences afford a certain kind of concrete, first-hand knowledge that makes empathy more likely. They also make possible what Arendt called “seeing through someone else’s eyes,” allowing imagination to “go visiting” and thereby providing a foundation for judgment.26 As Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has shown, Arendt regarded school desegregation and the integration of African American students into the community of white students to be comparable to the experience of Jews seeking assimilation into German society.27 Coming from a family of assimilated Jews, Arendt had a bitter taste of assimilation: to her it could only end in betrayal, and the assimilated person was doomed to becoming a parvenu at best or a pariah at worst. This conflation of historical experiences – the Jews’ in Germany with the African Americans’ in America – produced dubious results. As Philip Hansen has argued, Arendt failed to see that African-Americans seeking to integrate public schools were not parvenus, striving for acceptance where they were not wanted.

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Instead, they were “escaping” the masters’ house, struggling to get out from under their enforced servility and to emerge into the light of the public realm as equals in which equality held sway.28 Along similar lines, Ralph Ellison accused Arendt of not understanding the specifics of the African American experience. As Ellison pointed out, this experience has been always heavily based on the confrontation of “social and political terrors,” and children went through such confrontation as if it were a rite of passage. The parents of the children who risked their lives facing the angry mobs at Central High were aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook of many of these parents (who wish that the problem didn’t exist) the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American.29 Arendt’s conception of the “imagination gone visiting” is predicated on the assumption of a fundamental similarity between the self and the other. Furthermore, this presumed similarity plays out at the level of experience, and it is shared or similar experience that she deems to be a potential source of recognition and thus a solution to the ills of the social. Her critics remind us, however, that recognition through experience can radically falsify the identity of the actors involved, and misrepresent their goals and intentions, only to render them illegitimate from the perspective of another’s frame of experience. Experience thus proves to be a shaky basis for recognizing others, and resemblances at this level risk to conceal much deeper dissimilarities, while also forcing a particular logic upon events and circumstances that should be measured by other standards.

Recognition through Identity: Dilemmas of Authenticity Arendt’s belief that shared experience can facilitate one’s understanding, and in the end also recognition, of another individual is conjoined with another important, unstated assumption: that similar experiences will produce similar identities. This reduction leads her to argue, problematically, against the desegregation of schools and integration of African Americans

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as creating a parvenu out of a pariah. By this logic, one recognizes another as being like oneself. Identity is the fulcrum for most theories of recognition. More recent accounts, however, emphasize precisely the difference, even incommensurability, between identities and strive to avoid a reductionist model that would abstract a concept of identity from a particular historical framework and then place different categories of individuals under its umbrella. Much of the contemporary work on recognition is influenced by Charles Taylor’s account in The Politics of Recognition, an approach that is heavily centered on the idea that identities are distinct, and that to recognize them involves an awareness of their distinction.30 To recognize others, for Taylor, requires knowing their identity and holding it publicly in esteem. In addition to being a social imperative – inasmuch as recognizing others affords them the opportunity to function publicly in accordance with the logic of their own being – recognition is, for Taylor, also a moral, and even a psychological requirement. According to him, individuals exist in “webs of interlocution,” and selves are constructed dialogically through interaction with other selves.31 This conception of identity licenses an understanding of recognition as a process that shapes our self at the very core. Recognition by others is, for Taylor, the source of several psychological components that are critical to the forging and good functioning of one’s self: a sense of self-worth, dignity, and self-confidence. Similarly, those who grant recognition also benefit from it, for to recognize others requires an ability to move beyond one’s own evaluative framework and horizon of expectations, and to be transformed by the discovery and acceptance of other such frameworks and horizons. Recognition, then, is “not just a courtesy owed to people,” but “a vital human need.”32 Unlike Arendt, whose work assumes that knowing and understanding others is aided by occupying a similar historical position to theirs, Taylor stresses the uniqueness of identity. His conception of recognition is predicated on the assumption that what we need to recognize is authentic identities. In Taylor’s view, every individual has a unique way of experiencing the world, and should be allowed to hold those beliefs and convictions that reflect such a unique position. What we recognize, then, is another person’s moral and epistemic scheme, the “background against which (her) tastes and desires and aspirations make sense.”33 Taylor’s emphasis on the authenticity of identity is an important addition, given the risk of a reductionist logic such as the one operating in Arendt. But this requirement has been read by his critics as a remnant of the essentialist theories of identity Taylor set out to refute, through his principle of dialogism at work in the formation of selves.34 Thus, Taylor’s

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dialogism falls short, undermined by his requirement that identities be recognized in a form that must have pre-existed the encounter with others. Furthermore, if identities are already distinctive and authentic and simply need to be recognized as such, how can they also be transformed through the process of recognition at all? One possible way out of this dilemma comes from Nancy Fraser’s modification of Taylor’s theory of recognition, which moves away from the question of authentic identity, and focuses instead on social status, or publicly perceived identities.35 Fraser’s theory of recognition is more keenly aware of the social divisions and the economic inequities that make recognition necessary in the first place, by placing agents into privileged and oppressed positions – and thus assigning them a particular certain status. Even though this account is still focused on identities – perceived identities, rather than the authentic ones envisioned by Taylor – what matters for this conception of recognition is the “order of intersubjective subordination derived from institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitute some members of society as less than full partners in interaction.”36 Recognition, when granted, is no longer measured by the extent to which a unique way of being in the world has been validated. Rather, recognition indicates, more specifically, that “institutionalized patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem.”37 Regardless of which recognition theory is followed, whether the one proposed by Taylor or Fraser, one would also have to acknowledge the importance of providing thick descriptions of the representatives of marginalized groups. To grant them recognition is to know them – as they truly are, or as they have been defined by an intersubjective order derived from institutionalized settings and the values they promote – and to describe and then respect their distinctive identities, or oppressed statuses. In the next section, I discuss the limitations of such an approach, by examining the conceptual pitfalls involved in a theory that makes recognition predicated on (accurately described) identity. My analysis presents Ricoeur’s theory of identity as an alternative approach designed, among other things, to question and move beyond description-based models, by drawing attention to their potential for becoming a source of misrecognition.

Recognition through Description: Dilemmas of Accuracy In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur follows P. F. Strawson and argues that, in logical terms, identification relies on assigning appropriate predicates to

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the person in question.38 As a semantic operation, identification can employ definite descriptions (e.g., the first man to walk on the moon, the inventor of the printing press) or proper names. Ricoeur finds definite descriptions both insufficient and unsatisfactory for self-recognition. Definite descriptions, he contends, are seldom used in concrete situations of interlocution, and “in this respect, if [they] resort to classification and predication procedures, this is with the aim, no longer of classifying, but of opposing one member of a class to all the others. The minimal otherness that is required designates this element of the class, but not the rest of the class.”39 In other words, a definite description such as “the first man to walk on the moon” seeks to identify the person in question based on a differentiation from others still included in the same category of “people who walked on the moon.” Yet, the identification of one person thus depends on a process that is the very opposite of individualization – not someone in particular but in general. Thus, Ricoeur concludes, definite descriptions promise a predicative procedure, but in fact they only work ostensively, that is, if someone can point to the first man to walk on the moon. Proper names, on the other hand, do not even attempt to characterize or signify: they are “rigid designators,” in Saul Kripke’s terms, “limited to singularizing an unrepeatable, indivisible entity . . . without giving information about it,” in Ricoeur’s terms.40 Viewed as identification devices, then, definite descriptions and proper names cannot support recognition, because they are impoverished at the level of the information they contain. In addition, in definite descriptions and proper names “the person . . . remains on the side of the thing about which we speak rather than on the side of the speakers themselves who designate themselves in speaking.”41 When the question “who?” is answered with a proper name or a definite descriptions, there is no basis of reciprocity, since the devices are solely intended to identify a person in contrast to, or differentiation from, others. Identification based on definite descriptions and proper names is committed to referential accuracy (matching a person with a linguistic description), but it is an accuracy envisioned from an abstract, impersonal perspective, rather than from the standpoint of the person recognizing himself or herself. As an alternative to this form of recognition, Ricoeur discusses a pragmatic approach based on indicators – personal pronouns, used alone or in combination with deictic expressions such as “here,” “now,” “then,” or “there.” Indicators communicate a specific kind of information – now, October 15, or I, Andreea Ritivoi – but they also draw attention to the context in which this information would be correct and could be properly understood – it is October 15, when I make these claims, and it is I, Andreea

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Ritivoi, who makes them. Indicators, then, are primarily reflexive rather than referential, insofar as they reflect upon the context of utterance rather than refer to a reality existing beyond the utterance. In this sense, indicators are referentially opaque. In a sentence such as “I am glad to see you,” the pronoun “I” is meaningless unless connected to a specific situation. It cannot be uniquely and unmistakably connected to a person in the same way in which a proper name could. According to Ricoeur, “the utterance that is reflected in the sense of the statement is therefore straightaway a bipolar phenomenon: it implies simultaneously an ‘I’ that speaks and a ‘you’ to whom the former addresses itself.”42 This bipolarity makes individualization based on indicators more propitious for identification in the phenomenological sense discussed by Ricoeur, as a coming together of the self and another. Recognition, then, does not involve persons identified referentially, but rather speaking subjects capable of reflection, that is, aware of not only themselves, but also of those they are addressing. Consequently, recognition thus understood requires an orientation toward another, that is, a perception of another not as a person defined referentially and potentially ostensively, but as another self anchored in a particular situation and in specific relation to other individuals. On the plane of language, such an orientation is made possible through interlocution and in pronouns: the first person pronoun “I,” used by speakers, is “fraught with a strange ambiguity,” points out Ricoeur.43 The first person pronoun is “an empty term which, unlike generic expressions that keep the same sense throughout different uses, designates in each instance a different person for each new use” and thus applies “to anyone who, in speaking, designates himself or herself.”44 This “empty term” constitutes the hospitable linguistic territory on which identification can take place. Identification, thus understood, is a consequence of what Ricoeur calls the “aporia of pragmatics.”45 As a semantically (i.e., referentially) empty term, the first person pronoun “shifts” across contexts and speakers, but it can also be “anchored” in a non-substitutable position when attached to one person in an explicit exclusion of any other: I, AR. “The paradox,” Ricoeur comments, “consists quite precisely in the apparent contradiction between the substitutable character of the shifter and the non-substitutable character of the phenomenon of anchoring.”46 Anchoring can thus be defined as the operation that makes a generic linguistic role, that of a speaker, into an “irreplaceable center of perspective on the world.”47 Linguistically, anchoring is achieved through first-person statements in which referential devices such as proper names or definite

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descriptions intercede. I, ADR, woke up early. I, ADR, am hungry. As an empty term designating a speaker, “I” is immune to misidentification and misrecognition. But in the case of a person designated referentially by name or another description, misidentification and misrecognition become possible. When it overlaps completely with the empty, token-I, the referential, anchored, designation of the person appears less vulnerable to misidentification and misrecognition. The question is: How can such an overlap be achieved, and how long can it be sustained? Is it doomed to fail because recognition will inevitably resort to anchoring? In the everyday life of social and political practices, the token-self and the anchored self rarely coincide. This is, after all, what makes recognition both difficult and necessary. Ricoeur was keenly aware of the cultural pervasiveness and significance of anchoring, as a process that relies on descriptions and connects actors to characterizations, as well as the larger configurations that made such characterizations possible. He acknowledged, to use the apt formulation of Wall, “the dependency of selves on larger social systems which, however, deny entire dimensions of who they are as social persons.”48 In his discussion of Antigone’s tragedy, Ricoeur argued that the source of the tragedy lies in the conflict between equally powerful, and also equally justified but incommensurable, convictions. While Creon is justified in his determination to protect Thebes against future acts of treason, Antigone is also justified in her commitment to honor the memory of her brother. One is devoted to his city, the other to her family. More than a question of commitment or loyalty, this is the way in which they define who they are, as well as how they recognize others – as friends or as enemies. For Creon and Antigone, to dislodge themselves from these spaces of meaning – the city and the family – turns out to be impossible. Their identities remain profoundly anchored, and thus subject tragic mutual misrecognition. As Ricoeur explains, “the source of the conflict lies not only in the one-sidedness of the characters but also in the one-sidedness of the moral principles which themselves are confronted with the complexity of life.”49 But these principles are not unavoidable and inflexible forces, but rather, as Wall points out, “the self’s interpretation of its larger historicity into its own free convictions or chosen grounds for social action.”50 Anchoring, then, is the linguistic equivalent of a process of returning, or re-placing the self into its “larger historicity.” This process does not lead automatically to misrecognition, but it increases the potential for it. Taylor’s approach insists upon the importance of a “fusion of horizons,” where recognition would be predicated on a shared historicity resulting from the effort to see one’s own anchoring from the perspective of

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another’s. Ricoeur seems less optimistic. For him, the conflict between the convictions that come to define the identity of individuals cannot be easily resolved. Rather, this conflict is “intractable”51 – hence his interest in tragedy, and emphasis on the tragic wisdom of realizing that our efforts to live alongside others, and to recognize their rights and claims, often fail. When they do not fail, it is because anchoring becomes temporarily suspended, and the encounter with another unfolds as an exchange between two actors who can each occupy, in turn, the position of a speaking subject, of an “I” addressing a “you.” Although perhaps rare or short-lived, such encounters are possible. To imagine such encounters can help us to refigure a model of recognition that is no longer primarily concerned with the actors’ identity aside from their relationship, one that truly recognizes the dialogue between selves, and situates it at the level of a speech situation. This model of recognition was the focus of Ricoeur’s last philosophical reflections. Unlike Taylor or Fraser, for whom the identity of the agents pre-exists the act of recognition, Ricoeur sees identity as defined in the moment of recognition, through a mutual exchange between the agents granting recognition and those receiving it.

The Topos of Recognition: From Figures of Struggle to States of Peace Writing in 1967, Ricoeur acknowledges that nonviolence does not occur naturally, but must instead be forged through “respect for multiplicity and diversity.”52 A former soldier and prisoner of war, as well as victim of attacks during the turbulent events of May 1968, Ricoeur knew that peace is a rare occurrence in a history shaped by outbursts of violence, whether in political, social, or intellectual affairs – as the three illustrations I mentioned earlier are intended to stress. Nonviolence, he agreed, has an “out-of-place” quality and is rather “untimely,” insofar as it goes against the grain of an established social pattern. In his 2005 Vienna lectures that later became The Course of Recognition, Ricoeur conceded that “the struggle for recognition perhaps remains endless,” but also insisted that what “distinguishes it from the lust for power and shelters it from the fascination of violence is neither illusory nor vain.”53 After reviewing philosophical perspectives on recognition that are also centered on this assumption that recognition is obtained through constant struggling, Ricoeur proposes a heuristic move toward conceptualizing recognition as a “state of peace.” While admitting that “experiences of

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peaceful recognition cannot take the place of a resolution for the perplexities raised by the very concept of a struggle,” he also proposes that we turn “to days of truce, clear days, what we might call clearings, where the meaning of action emerges from the fog of doubt bearing the mark of ‘fitting action.’”54 The paradigmatic situation in which Ricoeur regards recognition as a “state of peace” is that of gift-giving, understood as symbolic mediation “as exempt from the juridical as from the commercial order of exchange.”55 This marks a clear departure from other understandings of recognition, such as Axel Honneth’s notion of an intersubjective recognition granted through legal rights. But it is also a move that relies on a particular conception of the gift – not the one traditionally attributed to Marcel Mauss, but rather a more recent reworking of Mauss’ theory, offered by the French sociologist Marcel Henaff. Why does Ricoeur prefer Henaff to Mauss? While for Mauss the gift belongs to the category of commercial exchanges – indeed it is the archaic form of commercial exchange – Ricoeur begins his attempt at re-conceptualizing it from the perspective of the justifications of the social agents involved. Relying on Marc Rogin Anspach’s insights into the fact that the reciprocity on which the gift is based – giving must be followed by receiving – cannot be reduced to mere exchange, Ricoeur connects the gift to reciprocity – I give to you, and you give to me. What emerges from this relationship of reciprocity is a “third term,” which could be the relation itself, as it gets formed among the social actors. Recognition, then, is not so much about the agent making the initial offering, as the relationship that the offer and the return of the gift shape together. Ricoeur relies on Anspach again: “To give a gift in return, to recognize the generosity of the first giver through a corresponding gesture of reciprocity, is to recognize the relation for which the initial gift is only a vehicle.”56 Ricoeur distinguishes reciprocity from mutuality, by associating the first with systematic relations formed between agents, and the second with a mere exchange.57 Mutuality, then, is “only one of the ‘elementary forms’ of such reciprocity.”58 This distinction allows him to raise the question of what kind of a systematic relation needs to emerge between agents, in order to justify its designation as reciprocity. His answer, inspired by Henaff’s work, is that it is the quality of the relation, and more specifically, its seeming oblivion to itself and ceremonial character.59 The reciprocity of the gift requires, then, a certain shift away from the protocol of the exchange – the fact that the giving must be followed by proper receiving and then by returning – toward the symbolic investiture of the gesture itself. To explain the significance of such a shift, Ricoeur asks a seemingly simple, but indeed

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perplexing question: Why give? If giving is only intended as a way to elicit a return of the gift – “a weak construction when considered phenomenologically,”60 in his view – we risk entangling the gift in a vicious circle, where the gift can only be explained through recourse to another gift. Or, we risk being unable to distinguish “good” reciprocity from “bad” – gifts that are being given for the sake of creating a relationship between agents, from gifts that are only intended to elicit other gifts. To avoid such pitfalls, Ricoeur proposes that we disentangle the three acts reunited under the umbrella of the gift, and think about the return, not as an actual return but as another giving, and that we think about the giving, not as an expectation of a return, but as an innocent, disinterested offer: Does not the risk of the first gift, its being offered, preserve something of the disinterested character of the expectation that first goes with the reception of the gift before turning into an expectation of a gift in return? This expectation itself, which can be indefinitely postponed, even lost sight of and frankly forgotten, can also be the expectation of a surprise, placing the second gift in the same affective category as the first gift, something that makes the second gift something other than a restitution. Instead of the obligation to receive in return, it would be better . . . to speak of a response to a call coming from the generosity of the first gift. Pursuing this, ought we not to place a special emphasis on the second term in the triad: give, receive, give in return? Receiving then becomes the pivotal category, in that the way in which the gift is accepted determines the way in which person who receives the gift will feel obliged to give something in return.61 By shifting the emphasis to the receiving of a gift, Ricoeur accomplishes an important conceptual task: He draws attention to the role played by the participants, the social agents themselves. His approach restores the agent dimension of the gift, against the traditional Maussian understanding that had emphasized primarily its conventional dimension. In Ricoeur’s view, both the giver and the receiver are agents, because the gift requires the receiver to become, in turn, the giver. The logic of the gift entails another gift given in return. This conventional dimension acquires, for Ricoeur, a profound significance. The gift bonds agents, in his view, because it places them into a relationship in which they agree to recognize one another’s presence and identity as intended in a particular way. What one gives, and then receives back, Ricoeur contends, is ultimately “something of oneself.”62 The recognition afforded by the gift, then, is a recognition of relationship

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as well as of identity. The establishment of a relationship also allows for the formation of trust, a key element in the logic of the gift. Ricoeur observes: “if reciprocity does circulate fluidly, it is important that the actors not interrupt this flow, but help maintain it. It is trust that makes this possible.”63 In addition to trust – which remains less developed than one would have liked in The Course of Recognition – Ricoeur offers another important condition that enables the recognition of the gift to establish a particular relationship among identities: the festive character of the exchange. The festive, ceremonial nature of the exchange protects it from degenerating into moralizing obligation and also helps to avoid the transformation of the gift, as a good deed, into a duty. The gesture of giving a gift “cannot become an institution,”64 because that would compromise the fragile bond it makes possible. Generosity would thereby disappear into normative constraints – who should give, when should we give, to whom we should give – and the recognition of a relationship would risk being deflated into claims of entitlement.

Conclusion Let me consider now the overall consequences of the approach outlined earlier for our understanding of recognition in the public sphere. At the center of my argument is a shift away from an important premise that undergirds much scholarship on this topic: that recognition concerns collective identities and affiliations (whether through class, gender, or ethnicity). Instead, Ricoeur encourages us to think about a process of recognition that focuses on individuals and their relationships. This emphasis on the individual does not dismiss the salience of social identities – it does not assume that social identities are not important and perhaps even defining of particular individuals, such as the fact that they are immigrants, members of the working class, or African American. Rather, re-focusing the problem of recognition on individuals allows us to avoid particular analytic pitfalls, such as the lingering essentialism that reifies many distinct features of individuals into one collective conglomerate. More importantly, the emphasis on individuals is more sensitive to particular situations, as it prompts us to look at what happens in a given exchange between the specific actors involved, instead of reducing the exchange to previous ones and subsuming all of them under a particular logic. Rhetorical studies, a field especially concerned with contingency, has only to gain from an approach that is so sensitive to specific situations and to the individuals involved in them.

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Ricoeur’s approach to recognition moves in quite a different direction from the approaches that are usually grouped under the rubric of “identity politics.”65 What he offers instead is a renewed interest in the agents who actively fight for, claim, contest, transform – in other words, choose – their collective affiliation and social identity. But this focus on the individual triggers other important modifications in how we conceptualize recognition. When approached from the perspective of individuals, recognition is no longer only a question of policies and institutional decisions, but also one of personal beliefs and convictions. In other words, the recognition Ricoeur encourages us to contemplate is one that filters into beliefs and convictions and is not limited to the sphere of policies and political decisions. Such recognition is harder to obtain, but possibly more enduring. In rhetorical studies, it is only through such recognition that Asen’s desideratum – that individuals decide for themselves how to deal with difference – can be attained. Recognition, once no longer relegated strictly or mainly to institutions, can be more profound, and in fact, genuine. Such recognition also makes it possible to address Hauser’s concern for a public sphere that is not predicated on homogeneity. Yet instead of a heterogeneity that could easily turn into fragmentation, the recognition envisioned by Ricoeur ensures social and political coherence in a public sphere that can tolerate plurality and difference without being threatened by them.

Notes 1

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Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Richard Graff, Arthur Walzer, and Jane Atwill, eds. The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). Ibid. Paul Ricoeur, Political and Social Essays, eds. David Stewart and Joseph Bien (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974), 88. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 96. Ibid. Ibid., 101. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1981). John Wall, Moral Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 113.

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For a comprehensive discussion of these theorists’ work, see Andrew Schaap, “Political Reconciliation through a Struggle for Recognition?” Social and Legal Studies 13:4 (2005): 523–540; Sune Laegaard, “On the Prospects for a Liberal Theory of Recognition,” Res Publica 11 (2005): 325–348. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006). Hauser, Vernacular Rhetoric. Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35:4 (2002): 345–367. Robert Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35:3 (1999): 115; my emphasis. Craig Calhoun, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 267–280. Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception,” 116. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, intro. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock, Arkansas,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 237–238. Ibid., 238. Ibid.; my emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., 232. Elizabeth Eckford, “Appearance at Little Rock: The Possibility of Children’s Agency,” Politics 28:1 (2007): 19–25. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). Philip Hansen, “Hannah Arendt and Bearing with Strangers,” Contemporary Political Theory 3 (2004): 3–22. Kenneth M. Warren, “Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority,” Boundary 30:2 (2003): 159. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Philosophical Arguments, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 225–256. Ibid. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 231. See Schaap, “Political Reconciliation Through a Struggle for Recognition?” 523–540; Laegaard, “On the Prospects for a Liberal Theory of Recognition,” 325–348. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (2000): 101–120. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), 49. Ibid., 36. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). Ibid., 28.

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Ibid., 29. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 48. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 55. Wall, Moral Creativity, 139. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 249. Wall, Moral Creativity, 145. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 247. Ricoeur, Paul. Political and Social Essays, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), 94. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 246. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 232; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 233. Ibid. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 242–243. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 244. Linda Alcoff, ed. Identity Politics Reconsidered (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

Chapter 8

Ricoeur and Women’s Studies: On the Affirmation of Life and a Confidence in the Power to Act Pamela Sue Anderson

We not only affirm Woman, we continually re-metaphorize her through the ‘as if’. The necessary utopian moment in feminism lies in our opening up the possible through metaphoric transformation. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation A free man [sic] thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life. Spinoza, Ethics That today there is not only a female way of suffering as well as of acting, and that my analysis of common humanity suffers the limits of a male way of thinking and writing is something that I in no way would deny. Ricoeur, Paul Ricoeur and Narrative

Introduction From a very young age Paul Ricoeur knew the pain of bereavement; he was orphaned and lived through the horrors of World War II in Europe; he was bereaved of parents, a sister, a son and a wife; he was surrounded by European philosophers who were preoccupied with death and the power of the negative. Nevertheless, his philosophy retains a self-confessed affirmation of life that, I will argue, derives more from Spinoza than Sartre, more from rationalism than from existentialism. Women have tended to agree in characterizing feminist ethics and metaphysics as a serious political challenge to those masculinist philosophies that have been “death-dealing,” insofar as

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they negate life and perpetuate violence. Life is not just a matter of thinking, but as I intend to demonstrate with the example of Ricoeur, thought has a potent life that can promote the capability of women as much as men. Feminist philosophers have rarely turned to the philosophy of Ricoeur, and the latter never engaged in any sustained way with the former. Nonetheless, those thinkers who do turn to Ricoeur may find rich possibilities for transforming the oppression and injustices that mark the lives of women and of those men decisively damaged by Western forms of patriarchy.1 Some topics addressed by Ricoeur that support transformation of our cultural and historical reality include: metaphor, mimesis, imagination, narrative identity, fiction, history, memory, suffering, and acting. I would like to add to this list human capability, which Ricoeur connects with a confidence in an individual’s own capacities for action and the approbation of these capacities by others, enabling the affirmation of life in its many dimensions. These positive and mutually affirmed capacities of the capable human being in Ricoeur’s last writings are discussed alongside the vulnerabilities of both men and women. The capability for flourishing in this life, in Ricoeur’s sense defined as autonomous action with and for others, is itself vulnerable to natural and historical sources of suffering. In “Autonomy and Vulnerability,” Ricoeur develops new ideas – late in his own life – that remain ripe for further development and, in particular, for development in the context of women’s studies. Ricoeur gives an incisive account of the fragility that manifests itself in certain inabilities of human beings to affirm life, thereby damaging human confidence and depriving capable beings of their powers to act. Feminists, including male feminists, should reflect carefully on Ricoeur’s points about autonomy and “the figures of fragility,” precisely because the latter resonate with women’s suffering of violence, doubt, and lack of approbation in Western societies. Ricoeur observes: Let me now say something about the . . . figures of fragility. If the basis of autonomy can be described in terms of the vocabulary of ability, it is in that of inability or a lesser ability that human fragility first expresses itself. It is first as a speaking subject that our mastery appears to be threatened and always limited . . . we cannot overemphasize this major incapacity. Does not the law rest on the victory language gains over incapacity? . . . violence or discourse. To enter in the circle of discourse [means entering] . . . the domain of agreements, contracts,2 exchanges . . . the universe of the debate made up of a confrontation of arguments, a war of words.

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What immediately comes to mind is the fundamental inequality among human beings when it comes to mastering such language, as inequality that is not so much a natural given as a perverse cultural effect, once the inability to speak well results in effectively being expelled from the sphere of discourse. In this regard, one of the first forms of the equality of opportunity has to do with equality on the plane of being able to speak, explain, argue, discuss. Here the historical forms of fragility are more significant than the basic, fundamental ones, having to do with finitude in general, which means that no one ever completely masters the use of language. These acquired, cultural, and in this sense historical acquisitions call for more thought than does any talk about the finitude of language . . . The picture becomes even more complex if we take into account the connection between affirmation and ability. The confidence I place in my power to act is a part of this very power. To believe that I can is already to be capable . . . To believe oneself unable to speak is already to be linguistically disabled to be excommunicated so to speak. And it is just this dreadful handicap – of an incapacity redoubled by a fundamental doubt concerning one’s ability to speak, and even tripled by a lack of approbation, sanction, confidence, and aid accorded by others to speak for oneself – that you as attorneys and judges are confronted with: being excluded from language is a handicap that we can well call basic . . . Here the incapacities humans inflict on one another, on the occasion of multiple interactions, get added to those brought about by illness, old age, and infirmities, in short, by the way the world is. They imply a specific form of power, a power-over that consists in an initial dissymmetric relation between the agent and the receiver of the agent’s action. In turn, this dissymmetry opens the way to all the forms of intimidation, of manipulation, in short to those kinds of instrumentalization that corrupt service relations among humans . . . People do not simply lack power; they are deprived of it. (Ricoeur 2007b, 76–77) Feminist philosophers could do much with Ricoeur’s points mentioned in this extract. The philosophical significance of these rich insights into human acting and suffering, especially the loss of basic human abilities due to historical-cultural and personal corruption (and not just due to the natural givens of human finitude), is crucial to the legacy of women, possibly more than for the majority of men. While Ricoeur’s account of oneself as another, and its distinctively “reflexive” notion of autonomy that brings together Kant’s moral philosophy and twentieth-century hermeneutics,3 previously provided me with certain crucial elements for a feminist account of autonomy and vulnerability, the present chapter will go beyond that earlier account.4

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To do so, I intend to tease out Ricoeur’s rarely explored reliance on Spinoza’s Ethics, making more explicit the role of the conatus as a rational striving to persevere in life, in the former’s account of our power to act and to affirm ourselves as capable beings. Specifically, I will take up Ricoeur’s expressed interest in Spinoza’s understanding of “each concrete thing or event” as “a mélange of act and possibility”: I am interested . . . in an anthropology of potency and impotency (puissance et impuissance). And in one sense what I find intriguing about Spinoza’s notion of conatus is that it refuses the alternative between act and potency, between energeia and dunamis. For Spinoza each concrete thing or event is always a mélange of act and possibility. And I would be closer here to Spinoza or Heidegger than to Aristotle, for what is the meaning of “an architect in potency” to take Aristotle’s example, if it is not already an architect who is thinking architecturally, making plans, preparing to realize a building project and so on? I would hold to the idea of a profound continuity between dunamis and energeia, since energeia is the ergon and this, as we know from the Ethics, can be translated task. Whether being an architect, doctor, musician and so on is exercised or not, [there] remains an ergon [task]. So that possibility as [the] “capacity” to realize a task is by no means the same thing as possibility as an abstract or logical “virtuality”. (Kearney 2004, 168) As noted already, in “Autonomy and Vulnerability” Ricoeur links the power to act, the affirmation of this power, and “a confidence in one’s own capacity,” confirmed by the approbation of one’s capacity by others. Perhaps the most positive statement, or “attestation,” by Ricoeur for the present chapter is the following: Power, I will say, affirms itself . . . this connection between affirmation and power needs to be emphasized. It governs all the reflexive forms by which a subject can designate him- or herself as the one who can . . . [this] affirmation of a power to act already presents a noteworthy epistemological feature that cannot be proven, demonstrated, but can only be attested . . . a confidence in one’s own capacity, which can be confirmed only through being exercised and through the approbation others grant to it . . . other people may encourage, accompany, assist by having confidence in us – by appeal to responsibility and autonomy. (Ricoeur 2007b, 75; emphasis added) It is essentially in light of the significance of Ricoeur’s reflections on life (see Kearney 2004, 168 and Ricoeur 2007b, 75 above that I insist upon his

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great potential for feminist theory: This potential rests in his phenomenology of human capability attesting to the necessity of a woman’s confidence in her own capacity to act, and this confidence can be confirmed only if both exercised and approved in some fundamental manner.

Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Selfhood and a Phenomenology of “Being Able” In order to understand how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is united with his phenomenology of human capability, it is helpful to tease out a thread running through his reading of modern philosophy. This thread connects acts and possibilities in a manner reminiscent of Spinoza. I have already quoted from an interview with Richard Kearney where Ricoeur makes this connection: “if hermeneutics is right, in the wake of Kant and Gadamer, to stress the finitude and limits of consciousness, it is also wise to remind ourselves of the tacit potencies and acts of our lived existence. My bottom line is a phenomenology of being able” (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004, 167). Ricoeur admits both the role of hermeneutics in the wake of Kant and Gadamer – with no mention of Spinoza – in interpreting the limitations of human consciousness, and the wisdom of a “phenomenology of being able” – of acts and the possibility of acts. The latter is already implicit in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of selfhood, that is, implicit in his elucidation of basic human powers, specifically, those of “I can speak,” “I can act,” “I can narrate,” “I can designate myself as imputable” (ibid., 168; Ricoeur 2005, 114).5 But this becomes more relevant to feminist philosophy and to contemporary writings in women’s studies when Ricoeur adds to his reflections Spinoza’s understanding of human powers to act as manifest in both passivity and activity.Ricoeur himself admits a concern for women’s rights, while retaining his affirmation of a common humanity: “I would like to link the defense of the rights of women to the moral, juridical and political affirmation of the common humanity of the two sexes. It is to this humanity that I apply my analysis of acting and suffering” (Ricoeur in Joy 1997, xlii). However, it must be stressed that this concern with women’s rights and the finitude of individual human beings is not derived from Spinoza.6 What Spinoza contributes to this account is a conception of the conatus, as in the power to act. Ricoeur’s claim about the gender politics of rights is made in the context of his “Response” to a collection of critical essays, including those about and by women, on writing narratives. Here Ricoeur confronts specific questions concerning narratives about women who suffer as a result

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of a lack of power to act. In particular, as noted in the long quotation earlier on “the figures of fragility,” Ricoeur singles out the inability to speak as a “major incapacity,” but the ability to narrate can also be similarly disabled – creating an equally major incapacity. Ricoeur’s first question is about the relation of memory to narrative: Does the rootedness of narrative in memory, combined with the dialectic of acting and suffering, allow me to do justice to narratives composed by women? By giving a place today to the theme of the wounded memory along with that of the therapeutic function of narrative, I hope to have made some progress in this direction. (Ricoeur in Joy 1997, xlii) Second, he addresses a related question. After exploring “the rootedness of narrative in memory,” “its rootedness in the imagination”. He reasons that: The dialectic between memory and imagination unfolds at a deeper level than that of the pair literary fiction and historiography. One consequence is that the dialectic of acting and suffering, along with the visceral and emotional aspects of the latter may be more easily discerned at the point of articulation that links memory and imagination, the former intending a passed past, the latter a possible non-reality. It is also at this primordial level that the junction between the narrative function and corporeality takes place, as well as the multiple fashions of the act of corporeality inhabiting or dwelling within the world. (Ricoeur in Joy 1997, xlii; emphasis added) In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur brings Spinoza into his discussions of how the two intentions – that of memory and of imagination – meet in articulating the role of “the visceral and emotional aspects” of suffering (Ricoeur 2004, 5–7; cf. Joy 1997, xlii). I will return to the significance of those aspects of corporeality for contemporary feminist philosophers. But at this point, Ricoeur expresses surprise that Spinoza does not relate memory to the apprehension of time but, instead, to recollection in “the wake of imagination” and so to “the affections” governed by “things external to the human body.” Ricoeur gives this account: [A] long philosophical tradition, which surprisingly combines the influence of English language empiricism with the rationalism of a Cartesian stamp, considers memory the province of the imagination, the latter having long been treated with suspicion, as we see in Montaigne and

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Pascal. This continues to be the case, most significantly in Spinoza. We read in proposition 18 of the second part of the Ethics: On the Nature and the Origin of the Soul: “If the human Body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, then when the Mind subsequently imagines one of them, it will immediately recollect the others also.” This sort of short-circuit between memory and imagination is placed under the sign of the association of ideas: if these two affections are tied by contiguity, to evoke one – to imagine it – is to evoke the other – to remember it. Memory, reduced to recall, thus operates in the wake of the imagination. Imagination, considered in itself, is located at the lowest rung of the ladder of modes of knowledge, belonging to the affections that are subject to the connection governing things external to the human body, as underscored by the scholia that follows: “this connection happens according to the order and connection of the affections of the human Body in order to distinguish it from the connection of ideas which happens according to the order of the intellect” . . . What is surprising is that memory is not related to [the] apprehension of time. (Ricoeur 2004, 5–6; cf. Ricoeur 2005, 114) What becomes more and more clear is the thread of Ricoeur’s reflections on and appropriations of Spinoza.7 Spinoza is also the thread linking Ricoeur’s earlier focus on ethics as it develops into metaphysics. This becomes apparent in his interview with Kearney: As I get older I have been increasingly interested in exploring certain metaphysics of potency and act. In Oneself as Another, I broach this in my analysis of the capacity to speak, narrate and act. I no longer subscribe to the typically anti-metaphysical Protestant lineage of Karl Barth (though it is true that in early works like The Symbolism of Evil I was still somewhat under this influence)8 . . . If the mainstream and official tradition of Western metaphysics has been substantialist, this does not preclude other metaphysical paths, such as those leading from Aristotle’s dunamis to Spinoza’s conatus . . . Here we find a dynamic notion of being as potency and action (Spinoza reformulates substance as a substantia actuosa) which contrasts sharply with the old substantialist models of scholasticism or the mechanistic models of Descartes. This is a matter of dynamism versus mechanism – the idea of a dynamic in being that grows towards a consciousness, reflection, community. Here I think it is important to think of ontology in close rapport with ethics. And that is why in Thinking Biblically, I endeavour to unravel some of the ontological and eschatological

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implications of the “I am who I am” episode in Exodus 3:14 . . . to include new notions of being-with, being-faithful, being-in-accompaniment with one’s community or people (which is precisely what Yahweh promises Moses when he says “I am he who will be with you”) . . . This recent return to religious thinking is intimately linked with my growing interest in the whole field of action and praxis which increasingly drew me away from the abstract universalism of Kant towards a more Aristotelian ethics of the “good life” (bien vivre). (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004, 166–167; emphasis added) In fact as early as 1997, Ricoeur admits a concern for recognition of the subject who incarnates “the ideal of a good life,” but note that this is not the same as “the attestation” of one’s power to act. Instead, “testimony” is a recognition given to “another who incarnates” (the ideal of) a good life: I would prefer to speak of attestation in order to speak of the kind of certitude and confidence that I apply to our capacity to act (by speaking, doing, telling, assuring my responsibility). The contrary of attestation is precisely suspicion, the driving force behind the hermeneutics of suspicion . . . I reserve the term testimony for the recognition rendered to another who incarnates and exemplifies in my eyes the ideal of a good life. (Ricoeur in Joy 1997, xlii–xliii) Again, the connection between attestation and recognition will be developed further in his Course of Recognition. Yet, prior to that, Ricoeur is already definite about the fundamental role of attestation in one’s being capable: The ultimate purpose of hermeneutic reflection and attestation, as I see it, is to try to retrace the line of intentional capacity and action behind mere objects (which we tend to focus on exclusively in our natural attitude) so that we may recover the hidden truth of our operative acts, of being capable, of being un homme capable. (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004, 167; emphasis in the original) It is in terms of what he calls a “differentiated” phenomenology of “I can speak,” “I can act,” “I can narrate,” and “I can designate myself as imputable” (imputabilitié) – each as instances of “I am able to . . .” – that Ricoeur insists on the (most) basic capacity of a human being. This is the capacity to act and suffer. However, the role of Spinoza in shaping Ricoeur’s phenomenology of being able has not always been so obvious; it was not readily apparent, for

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instance, when Ricoeur (1992) initially proposed a hermeneutics of an acting and suffering self (16f). Instead, we have come to see better retrospectively how Ricoeur finds in Spinoza “the mélange of act and possibility” (Kearney 2004, 168), which, as I am arguing, runs through his understanding of power in both an individual’s affirmation of life and the approbation of an individual’s life by others. Affirmation and approbation are required for an individual’s confidence to exercise her or his power to act. Yet, some readers will have also noticed the post-Kantian dimension to this reflexive autonomy – or self-reflexivity – that Ricoeur stresses in his appropriation of Spinoza. The Kantian dimension had deviated from Spinoza’s Ethics in focusing on the “individual” and her rights. Nevertheless, I will stress the deeply interrelated nature of these notions of affirmation, approbation, and autonomy in Ricoeur’s late philosophical writings.

Conatus and Feminist Transformations after Ricoeur At this stage, it is important to consider both how Ricoeur’s account of autonomy is enhanced by an alternative form of rationality from that associated with Kantian formalism, and how Ricoeur’s conception of autonomy and vulnerability can be further enhanced by feminist transformations of Spinoza’s rational striving to exist fully in this life (see Anderson 2008; Gatens and Lloyd 1999; Lloyd 1994, 2005). The focus of this two-stage enhancement is Spinoza’s conatus. Roughly, Ricoeur’s modification of a Kantian notion of rational autonomy, to include corporeal relations and affections, of power and lack of power, finds support in what Spinoza’s Ethics says about the conatus. Essentially, according to Spinoza, the conatus is a rational striving of each (individual) body and mind to exist fully; it becomes the essence of a rationalist ethics, forcing modification of a strictly formal rationality. And to repeat, confidence can be generated from the very idea of the power to affirm our own existence as well as to approve of another’s. However, as a feminist philosopher, I have elsewhere cautioned that any such form of power in approbation, or mutual recognition, would be risky, if it is not wise in the sense of Spinoza’s rationalist ethics.9 Furthermore, Spinoza’s conception of bodily affections and relations introduces something attractive to those women (philosophers) who suppose that Western philosophers denigrate the emotions. Reason and emotion come into explain how it is possible for the conatus to bind bodies together in love. We will see that individual (human) bodies express love as part of a dynamic and interconnected whole.10

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Before this, we must learn – with Ricoeur – that, in Spinoza’s Ethics, the conatus stands for an individual thing’s endeavor to persevere in its own being against un-wise passions and that this perseverance becomes a thing’s very essence. So individual human bodies, like other individual things, persevere by bringing their understanding to bear on their own passions and by transforming unwise passions into active, rational emotions. To paraphrase Spinoza’s definition: “I understand by emotion an action” when “we can be the adequate cause” of one of the affections of the body, “by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, helped or hindered;” otherwise that emotion is understood to be “a passion.” (cf. Spinoza 2000, 164). Appropriating this understanding of action and passion, we can, then, see how Ricoeur – still following Spinoza – brings the imagination into his account of acting and suffering, ability and inability, power and lack of power; imagination is, like emotion, linked with the conatus. Let us first consider a few crucial points from Spinoza’s own account of imagination and emotion. First, Spinoza treats the “imagination” as a technical term that is driven by the conatus. The activities of the imagination are caught up in the dynamics of the conatus, that is, in the movement and impetus of the mind in its struggle with all of nature to express itself.11 The mind’s joys and sorrows, its loves and hates, are inseparable from the effort to imagine: “The mind endeavours to imagine only those things which posit its power of acting” (Spinoza 2000, 205; Part Three, prop 54). Second, in his general definition of the emotions, Spinoza describes the passions of the mind as “confused ideas”: “by which the mind affirms of its body, or of any part of its body, a greater or lesser force of existing than before, and which when being given, the mind itself is determined to thinking this rather than that” (Ibid, 223; Part Three, General Def). This definition incorporates his understanding of the natures of the following: (1) pleasure as “a man’s [sic] transition from a lesser to a greater perfection” (ibid., 213); (2) pain as “a man’s transition from a greater to a lesser perfection” (ibid.); (3) desire as “the very essence of man, in so far as it is conceived as determined to do something from some given affection of itself” (ibid., 212). So, pleasure or joy, pain or sadness, and desire are at the core of Spinoza’s account of the emotions, while pleasure, pain, and desire are integrated into what it is to be a passion in transition to greater or lesser perfection. Genevieve Lloyd enlarges Spinoza’s definition of the emotions with her account of love, including sexual love. According to Lloyd, “Spinoza’s account makes it impossible to talk of the ‘pain’ of love” (2005, 48). Instead, love is always “joyful” in Spinoza’s sense of this term. His parallel definition

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of the opposite of love, hate, integrates sadness: “hate is ‘sadness associated with an idea of an external cause’” (ibid.). Lloyd continues to build on Spinoza, “What we may see as the disturbance of love, Spinoza sees rather as our being torn by contrary passions” (ibid.).12 Understanding these distinctions must be part of what is meant by Spinoza’s use of reason to “educate” or transform the passions in transition to greater or lesser degrees of perfection.

“Love” and Ricoeur after Feminist Readings of Spinoza According to Lloyd’s radical and, for some at least, provocative feminist interpretation of Spinoza, to understand the operations of imagination and its interactions with the emotions is to learn to replace misleading and debilitating illusions with better fictions that help rather than hinder the free actions of the mind.13 The capacity (potestas) to act and not merely to be acted on, to express one’s own nature and not merely react to the nature of another, is an expression of freedom, but equally of one’s power (potentia) and so of the conatus.14 Spinoza’s way to conquer (mis)fortune lies in the use of reason to understand the operations of the imagination and the passions. The power of reason consists in understanding the passions and increasing one’s freedom. Here Spinoza’s “imagination” is a first kind of knowledge and as such constitutes a necessary step in the education of the passions. More adequate knowledge comes in understanding the errors or fictions that make up socially embedded illusions.15 Debilitating fictions are bound up with a lack of knowledge. For example, the fiction of a free will, according to Spinoza, exhibits an awareness of one’s actions but an ignorance of their causes. An ability to exercise an ongoing critique of illusion generates the highest exercise of philosophical thought: the mind’s understanding of itself as “eternal” with the love of God or Nature as its cause. The latter becomes highly significant in the conclusions of Spinoza’s Ethics (especially Spinoza 2000, 309–316; cf. Gatens and Lloyd 1999, 23–40). Ricoeur, too, is happy in this context to bring in God who is linked with the singular or unique and so with a primary affirmation: “I am not sure about the absolute irreconcilability between the god of the Bible and the God of Being (understood with Jean Nabert as ‘primary affirmation’ or with Spinoza as ‘substantia actuosa’)” (Ricoeur in Kearney 2004, 169).16 I will return later to the question of “God” or metaphysics in Spinoza, but here we face a critical question posed by feminists: does Spinoza’s core

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concept of conatus lead us (only) to a striving for greater self-understanding? More strongly put, is an individual’s effort to persevere in being (as in Ricoeur) in fact directed to a self-sufficiency and ultimately a detachment from the suffering inflected by other bodies? And if so, is this compatible with Spinoza’s explanation of the way in which individual bodies combine in order to create a new body and so a collective life? In order to show how the self is not only strictly speaking detached from the corporeal or corporate in its rational striving to exist fully, let us consider some key points of criticism made by feminist philosophers about individual bodies and gender politics in Spinoza’s Ethics. If we consider carefully the relation of the individual body and the corporate life (of bodies) in Spinoza we will wonder how exactly such feminists as Michèle Le Doeuff or Genevieve Lloyd who follow Spinoza can ensure optimism in a shared joy. In fact, we can ask a similar question of Ricoeur: Can both women and men who strive to affirm life find a mutual joy, even in the face of what Ricoeur admits is “a female way of suffering”? (Ricoeur 1997, xli). One answer to this line of questions would stress that rationality in Spinoza’s account is shared; and this sharing, in turn, increases power and joy. As already seen, Spinoza’s concept of the conatus as the very essence of individual substances is closely connected to the imagination and so to the mind’s endeavor to evoke those things that increase its power to act. Two points need to be linked here. First, to be an individual is to be determined to act through the mediation of “other finite modes,” that is, “that which is in something else and is conceived through something else” (Spinoza 2000, 75; Part I, def. 5)17; and it is likewise to determine these others. Second, imagination assumes the awareness of our own bodies together with others, and so the interaction between bodies essentially involves imagination. Note that in the latter point, “awareness of our bodies” is another way to express Spinoza’s “affections of the human body,” which were discussed earlier in terms of acting and suffering. This alternative expression helps us to understand that bodily awareness of both internal and external relations is not only part of the imagination but also closely bound up with the impetus of the conatus. Remember that from our reading of the conatus, it is the very nature of bodies and minds, as singular individuals, to struggle in order to persevere in being. Our bodies are not just passively moved by external forces. They have their own motion, or movement in a certain relation to rest, which is their own characteristic force for existing. However, this force is not something that individuals exert through their own power alone. For an individual to persevere in existence is for it to act and be acted upon in

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a multiplicity of ways. This clearly allows for corruption and the infliction of a “power over” (Ricoeur 2007b, 77). The more complex the individual body, the more ways it can be affected by and affect other things. The power of the imagination is integral to the continued existence and flourishing of the corporeal individual. So, to define imagination in terms of bodily awareness is to place imagination at the heart of individual well-being and flourishing with one another. We can begin to grasp the collective dimension of Spinoza’s Ethics, once we understand how the conatus, imagination, and bodily awareness function together. Returning to the crucial point about the nature of individual bodies, we must consider the way(s) in which they make up a collective life. To repeat, Spinoza argues that each individual body, in fact each thing, has a conatus that constitutes its very essence and with which it “endeavours to persevere in its being” (Spinoza 2000, 171; Part Three props 6 and 7). This is as true of humans as it is of anything else. Yet, in more exclusively masculine terms, Spinoza cautions men specifically to avoid pity (ibid., 185–187f., 217), since pity is an “effeminate” or “womanish” emotion (ibid., 253; cf. Lloyd 1996, 157–159). In other words, pity is something undergone and as such obstructs the transition of passions to actions; it blocks the education of the emotions, and more generally, hinders life’s conatus. Spinoza describes how each man (sic), by his very nature, is driven to preserve his own existence; his happiness consists in his being able to do just that. So, the conatus for a human being is a drive to actualize the human essence to the greatest possible degree: this means a drive to maximize human activity and to minimize human passivity. To have this drive to maximize activity is the very essence, power, and virtue of the human being (cf. Spinoza 2000, 231–232 and 241; Part Four, props 4 and 20). This model of maximally active self-preservation and so perseverance in being is also Spinoza’s model for freedom and salvation (Spinoza 2000, 310–311; Part Five, prop 36 and Scholium). Thus, Spinoza returns us to the point that a thing is free when it “exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone” (Spinoza 2000, 75; Part One def 7). And this freedom is precisely the problem, insofar as it suggests a natural drive or a necessary form of corporate determinism. If this is the case, we have not found a gender-inclusive picture of either the individual body or collective life (Le Doeuff 1994, 69–70). When it comes to bodies and their individual actions, Lloyd criticizes, on feminist grounds, Spinoza’s attempt to transcend self-centeredness for a corporate life. Crucial to any feminist appropriation of Spinoza’s power to

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exist and an increase in that power of existence is both the affirmation and the approbation of the subject’s power to act (see the quotation from Ricoeur with which I began). Here a tension in Spinoza becomes a problem for feminist philosophers who hope to take up Spinoza’s Ethics. On the one hand, it is immediately attractive to a feminist philosopher that Spinoza rejects the dualism of mind and body where, crudely stated, the body had been given less value – especially in its symbolic association with women – than the mind in previous philosophy, notably in Descartes.18 On the other hand, Lloyd also recognizes that there remain problems implicit in the gender-bias of Spinoza’s account of the “man” of reason (Lloyd 1996, 155–160). This raises serious questions with regard to the repudiation of pity as weak and effeminate might be an indication of a larger issue (for a Spinozist) with any ethics of compassion or care, inasmuch as the latter has become a significant part of feminist ethics. Added to this, Le Doeuff has also voiced strong objections to Spinoza’s deliberate exclusion of women from government, and so the larger sphere of political life, on the basis of woman’s natural inferiority and spiritual weakness (cf. Le Doeuff 1991/2006, 168). Le Doeuff points out that in his very last, however, unfinished political treatise, Spinoza makes absolutely clear that a woman’s weakness and her potential (sexual) distraction of men from their rational emotional life provide definite grounds for Spinoza’s conscious exclusion of women from seventeenth-century political society (Le Doeuff 2003, 104–106; cf. 2006, 206). In her biting words, “Now according to [Spinoza] experience would tend to show that if women are excluded from government and subjected to male authority, it is because [of] a natural weakness of spirit . . .” (104); and she cites Spinoza here: “government by women has ‘nowhere happened, [therefore] I am fully entitled to assert that women have not the same right as men by nature, but are necessarily inferior to them’” (Le Doeuff 2003, 105; cf. Spinoza 1958, 443f.). And yet, once women are seen to have the natural right19 to cultivate knowledge in particular and be part of any government, then we might find Le Doeuff applauding the education of emotions à la Spinoza. In other words, there is something deeply unwitting about Le Doeuff’s own feminist affinity with an ethics of joy: it seems quite close to Spinoza in terms of its affirmation of life and the power to act, even though it is very critical of Spinoza’s views on women as weak and inferior. Likewise, we might wonder whether there remains a similar, problematic tension in Ricoeur’s phenomenology of human capability. Would Le Doeuff’s worry about gender bias, for instance, also apply to Ricoeur’s gender politics? What exactly does Ricoeur mean (in what was quoted

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earlier from Ricoeur 1997, xli–xlii) by “women’s rights,” “a common humanity,” and the human abilities or lack of abilities that are “natural givens of finitude”? Would this also apply to “the figures of fragility” that we have found in Ricoeur? It may not be possible to distinguish “major incapacities” that Ricoeur describes as “historical” from those treated as “natural givens” because of historical-cultural assumptions about a woman’s nature (cf. Ricoeur 2007b, 75–77). To make Ricoeur’s ethical and political theory work, women would have to be regarded as having the same nature as men and so being equally capable. Can this be the case, given that Ricoeur describes “a female way of suffering”? Furthermore, where would Ricoeur stand on the question of the corporate body? How can the affections of the individual and collective bodies interact adequately? Can we imagine how bodies of women and men will flourish, that is, interact and mutually increase their activity and so bring about the love of nature as a whole? Perhaps this imagination of the possible would be what evokes Ricoeur’s utopian vision. Imagination and memory would meet at the point where visceral and emotional aspects of suffering are expressed. As Drucilla Cornell explains, Ricoeur’s study of metaphor and the way it “rules” the literal . . . led him to conclude that “utopianism” is essential to political and ethical theory. We are never simply working within what “is,” because what is, is only “reachable” in metaphor, and therefore, in the traditional sense, not reachable at all. (Cornell 1999, 168) So, in the present context, we might say with Cornell and in the spirit of Ricoeur that: We not only affirm Woman, we continually re-metaphorize her through the “as if.” The necessary utopian moment in feminism lies in our opening up the possible through metaphoric transformation . . . To reach out involves the imagination, and with imagination, the refiguration of Woman. (Cornell 1999, 169) At the very least, we can conclude with those feminist philosophers who transform any gender bias in Spinoza and/or Ricoeur that there is a positive attraction in an unequivocal confidence in a way of thinking and living, in a striving to increase or maximize the power of life. Much of Spinoza’s positive vision depends on bodies acting together as a more and more complex body, and ultimately, making one whole (nature).20

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“New beginnings” in Hannah Arendt’s sense of natality are possible in this affirmation of life.21 I would like to push the feminist reading (or appropriation) of Ricoeur’s late philosophy in the direction of a similarly positive vision, if possible. In Spinoza’s terms, the human body needs for its preservation very many other bodies by which it is continually regenerated (cf. Spinoza 2000, 131f). So, can we maintain this attractive picture for women’s studies and feminist philosophers who follow after Spinoza, Le Doeuff, Lloyd – and now, Ricoeur? It is what we – through the affections of our bodies and the ideas of our intellect – can do that determines our living well. The more we do – as opposed to undergo – rationally and corporately the better we live together. In this context, “to love God” is not to trust in the benevolent purposes of a transcendent creator – the purposes for which we await satisfaction. Instead, it is the mind’s joyful recognition of itself as corporate, that is, as part of the unified whole of nature that expresses an intellectual love of “God.” Thus, the core of love in all its forms is the joy of continued bodily existence. That joy is vulnerable, and yet it is a more sure grounding for our loves than the glorification of unsatisfied desire for a wholly transcendent and disembodied divine (cf. Spinoza 2000, 106–112). At the end of the day, joy in Spinoza’s spirit enhances our endeavors to persevere in being, and so in the life of God or Nature (deus sive natura).22 Each and every individual moves forward in striving for a joyful continuation of the bodily existence that it expresses. In this light, we might agree that an intellectual love of either God or Nature would complete what Ricoeur and those women philosophers who follow after him seek in a phenomenology of being able, to understand power and non-power, in order to increase knowledge consistent with Nature as dynamic matter (substantia actuosa).We conclude, then, with Ricoeur’s vision of how it is we are each “singular” even while beginning and remaining part of a dynamic whole: Ce qui compte, c’est le fait que nous sommes la parcelle d’un grand tout. Le trajet de cette parcelle, qui ne se sait pas parcelle au début, mais qui ne se reconnaît parcelle à la fin . . . J’en viens à cette magnifique citation, la proposition 24 du livre V : Plus nous comprenons les choses singulières, plus nous comprenons Dieu’. J’insiste d’abord sur les choses singulières. Je crois qu’en effet, si Dieu, le divin, dont nous parlons tout à fait au début, a un sens quelconque pour chacun de nous, il n’a rien à voir avec des généralitiés – et, en particulier, des obligations, comme les lois générales de la nature – mais avec des singularitiés. (Ricoeur 1999, 44–46)

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Conclusion Good philosophical writing often includes deep emotional resonances that can be missed or masked by readings that ignore the metaphors, narratives, and imaginary dimensions of philosophical texts. Emotional and conative resonances are and can be further picked up by feminist philosophers in Spinoza as material not only for bringing about change in their activities, but for transforming their vulnerable conditions and inabilities into new possibilities for the activities of corporate life. Likewise, women and men can also look across the range of Ricoeur’s writings and tease out deep emotional insights into human suffering, such as the experiences of time, vulnerability, and fragility. These are not only due to what Ricoeur calls natural givens of finitude but also to what he calls the cultural-historical inabilities depriving individuals of power and their abilities to flourish. Taking emotion as much as reason seriously can of itself unsettle the sharp distinctions between men as confident knowers and actors, while women lack confidence in their own epistemological and political abilities. These distinctions still need unsettling as long as women are rendered fragile figures by Western philosophers. The narrative or imaginary dimensions of philosophical texts exhibit, as we find in the best of Ricoeur’s writings, moods and insights concerning the pain and suffering posed by our human (gendered) experiences. To discover these rich dimensions in his philosophical writings is not only to focus on the dialectic of acting and suffering, but to discover that learning philosophy is inherently pleasurable. Ideally, we should take seriously Ricoeur, Lloyd, Le Doeuff, and those other philosophers who find in Spinoza that the mind’s movement to a greater state of activity is the essence of joy. Affirmation of life over death is joyful and leads to greater knowledge of God or Nature and, in a Spinozist sense, our corporate selves. For Ricoeur, the latter includes the ability, in Arendt’s sense of natality, to begin again within a web of relationships.23 Philosophy’s capacity to respond to even the most painful of subjects, the most hopeless of passions, with a movement that is the continuation of life, becomes the joy or delight that some men and women will want, even today, to agree is “divine,” in the sense that it enhances our true nature. I conclude that a rational striving for the continuation of life in its fullness is an ongoing lesson for those teaching women’s studies: this is something we can and must advocate as part of a dialogue with Ricoeur and Spinoza. The affirmation of life and the confidence in one’s capacities or power to act with other women and men thus constitutes a vision for “Ricoeur and Women Studies.”

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Notes In the first epigraph to the chapter Cornell draws on Ricoeur’s study of metaphor and the way it “rules” the literal. She also argues that this understanding of metaphor led Ricoeur to conclude that “‘utopianism’ is essential to political and ethical theory” (Cornell 1999, 168). In this context, we might conclude that we need more constructive metaphors to re-populate philosophy and provide us with a way out of that “rule” of metaphor that has excluded women and certain subjects from their basic human capability, or power to act, as socially and historically “deprived” (Ricoeur 2007b, 77). The quotation of Spinoza on “life” in the second epigraph could be compared to the quotation from Hannah Arendt that appears in Ricoeur 2004, 489: “Should we not see action as ‘an ever present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin’” (Arendt 1958, 246). But in the latter statement, Ricoeur is not just thinking of meditation on life or action, but on the “fact of natality” (Arendt 1958, 246; 1961, 314; cf. Ricoeur 2004, 604n42). Feminist philosophers have found great significance in Arendt’s conception of natality (cf. Jantzen 1998, 128–157, 231–247), but to be fair Ricoeur made birth, or natality, a focus in his philosophy (Ricoeur 1966 [1950], 433–443; Ricoeur in Arendt 1961, 32), well before it became the focus of feminist debates in philosophy of religion. 1

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To name a few of these feminist theorists, I refer the reader to the work of the following: Helen M. Buss, Drucilla Cornell, Morny Joy, Grace M. Jantzen, Michèle Le Doeuff and Genevieve Lloyd. Le Doeuff addresses the serious problems with the sexist social contract implicit in Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of the subject’s domination over an Other. Le Doeuff exposes in Sartre’s account of bad faith (self-deception) a shocking assumption concerning the role of woman as the Other in the formation of the great philosopher (le grand philosophe); but she also demonstrates how this domination has a source in a certain metaphysical order that can be seen in Rousseau’s account of the moral education of Emile. See Le Doeuff 1994, 60–69. The thread connecting Kant, Spinoza, and hermeneutics in Ricoeur seems be drawn to some degree from the French reflexive philosophy of Jean Nabert. More study could be done on Nabert and Ricoeur; see the “Preface” in Nabert 1992 and in Nabert 1994. In addition, for a late reflection by Ricoeur on Nabert, drawing on the subtleties of Kant and Spinoza to explain the role of “reflexivity” and “primary (originaire) affirmation,” see the “Postface,” in Capelle 2003, 141–153. Anderson 2003, 149–150, 153, 158–159, 161n1, n2, n7, 162n16–17 and 162n19. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of selfhood, of the acting and suffering self, who has the power to speak, act, narrate, and impute actions to him/herself is found in Oneself as Another (Ricoeur 1992, especially 16–23). For a brief account of the reflexive nature of selfhood in this period of Ricoeur’s work, see Anderson 1993b, 227–234. Admittedly, this is a point where I do not remain consistent with Spinoza. I stress the individual woman and her rights.

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This is restated in Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 114–115. For the Barthian imagery, see Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 232–278, especially 271n28 and 277n36. For an early and explicit discussion by Ricoeur of the first and second Adam in Karl Barth’s writing on Romans, see “The Image of God and the Epic of Man” in Ricoeur 1965, 120 (cf. Anderson 1993a, 30n93; 1998b, 189f). Anderson 2009. We will find that Spinoza identifies this dynamic whole, in which human bodies play a part, as Nature or God (deus sive natura). A matter of interpretation is whether Ricoeur and/or I as feminist seek to stress too much the conatus of “a finite individual.” For further, fascinating discussions of sexual love and the way in which bodily pleasures are for Spinoza as important for the well-being of the individual as the cultivation of reason, see Anderson 2008, 214–220; Matheron 1977, 454; and Rorty 2002, 222. For a different and more conservative reading of Spinoza’s account of the imagination, see Scruton 2002, 74, 90–91, and 95f. On the fine distinctions in Spinoza concerning potentia as act, active, and actual, i.e., the essence of an individual mode and potestas as a capacity for being affected, see Deleuze 1988, 97–98. The critical question is: What, if any, role the imagination might play in striving for and achieving intellectual knowledge of God? Nabert 1992; Ricoeur in Capelle 2003, 143–145. Another way to think of Spinoza’s mode is a modification of the one substance that makes up all of God or Nature (deus sive natura); see the “Editor’s Introduction” in Spinoza 2000, 19–26. In this regard, Lloyd (1996) acknowledges that “there is indeed much that is appealing and impressive in the picture Spinoza presents . . . the transcending of self-centred and hence dependent, jealous love; the pursuit of a detached perception of the truths of himself and his situation, transcending the distortions of his limited, unreflective perspective on things; the location of moral worth in a certain style of perception rather than in the will” (159). It is not clear what a “natural right” might be in Spinozist’s Ethics; perhaps the closest thing to this is the human capacity to act rather than merely be acted on or merely undergo such passions as “pity.” For further discussion of Spinoza’s notion of body, bodies and power, see Gatens 1996, 102–113; cf. Spinoza 2000, 131–132, Part Two, postulates on the body. Ricoeur refers to “an ever present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin ([Arendt 1958] 246)” (Ricoeur 2004, 489). Clearly there exists a significant theological issue: Do we exclude “God” and say, “Nature” to avoid any confusion between Spinoza’s one substance and the Christian theistic God? Feminist philosophers of religion might find Spinoza’s alternative “God or Nature” liberatory, since neither would be the personal God of masculinist theology. Arendt 1958, 246; 1961, 314; also see, Ricoeur’s “Preface” in Arendt 1961, 22–23, 32.

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Bibliography Anderson, Pamela Sue. 1993a. Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of Will. Atlanta, GA.: Scholars Press. —1993b. “Having It Both Ways: Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Self,” Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 15, nos 1–2, pp. 227–252. —1997. “Re-reading Myth in Philosophy: Hegel, Ricoeur and Irigaray Reading Antigone,” in Morny Joy, ed. Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 51–68. —1998a. A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell. —1998b. “‘Abjection . . . the Most Propitious Place For Communication’: Celebrating the Death of the Unitary Subject,” in Kathleen O’Grady, Ann Gilroy and Janette Gray, eds. Bodies, Lives, Voices: Gender in Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 189–230. —2002. “Ricoeur’s Reclamation of Autonomy: Unity, Plurality and Totality,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 15–31. —2003. “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender,” Feminist Theory, Vol. 4, no. 2, special issue on Ethical Relations: Agency, Autonomy and Care, edited by Sasha Roseneil and Linda Hogan (August), pp. 149–164. —2008. “Liberating Love’s Capabilities: On the Wisdom of Love,” in Norman Wirzba and Bruce Ellis Benson eds. Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love’s Wisdom. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, chapter 13, pp. 201–226. —2009. “The Urgent Wish: To Be More Life-Giving,” in Elaine Graham ed. Redeeming the Present. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1998, second edition, with an Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —1961. Condition de l’homme moderne. Traduit de l’anglais par Georges Fradier, avec “Préface” de Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Calmann-Levy. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1948. Buss, Helen. M. 1997. “Women’s Memoirs and the Embodied Imagination: The Gendering of Genre that Makes,” in Morny Joy ed. Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 87–96. —2002. “Antigone, Psyche and the Ethics of Female Selfhood: A Feminist Conversation with Paul Ricoeur’s Theories of Self-Making in Oneself as Another,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 64–79. Capelle, Philippe, ed. 2003. Jean Nabert et la question du divin. Postface de Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. Cornell, Drucilla. 1999. Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law. Second edition. Oxford: Rowan & Littlefields Publishers Inc. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

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—1992; 2005. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn, eds. 1996. Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Second edition. London: Routledge. Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge. Gatens, Moira and Lloyd, Genevieve. 1999. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge. Gerhart, Mary. 1995. “Live Metaphor,” in Lewis Edwin Hahn ed. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. La Salle, IL: Open Court, pp. 215–232; and “Reply” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, pp. 233–235. Harris, Harriet A. 2007. “Feminism,” in Chad Meister and Paul Copans eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge, pp. 651–660. Héritier, Francoise. 2004. “Masculine/Feminine: The Thought of the Difference,” in Kelly Oliver and Lisa Walsh eds. Contemporary French Feminism. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–74. James, Susan. 1997. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —1998. “The Power of Spinoza: Feminist Contentions. Susan James Talks to Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens.” Women’s Philosophy Reviews, Vol. 19 (Autumn), 6–28. Jantzen, Grace M. 1998. Becoming Divine: Towards A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Joy, Morny, ed. 1997. Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation Calgary: University of Calgary Press. LaCocque, Andre and Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. Thinking Biblically. Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Le Doeuff, Michèle. 1994. “Mastering A Woman: The Imaginary Foundation of A Certain Metaphysical Order,” in Arleen B. Dallery and Stephen H. Watson with E. Marya Bower eds. Transitions in Continental Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 59–70. —2003. The Sex of Knowing. Translated by Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. London: Routledge. —2006. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. Second edition with an Epilogue. Translated by Trista Selous. New York: Columbia University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1993. Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge. —1994. Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —1996. “The Man of Reason,” in Garry Ann and Marilyn Pearsall eds. Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Second edition. London: Routledge, pp. 149–165. —2002. “Le Doeuff and the History of Philosophy,” in Genevieve Lloyd ed. Feminism and History of Philosophy. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–37.

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—2005. “What a Union!” The Philosophers Magazine, vol. 29, pp. 45–48. Matheron, Alexandre. 1969. Individu et société chez Spinoza. Paris: Minuit. —1977. « Spinoza et la sexualité,” Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 436–457. Nabert, Jean. 1992 [1943] Éléments pour une éthique. Préface de Paul Ricoeur. Paris: Aubier. —1994 [1924] L’Expérience intérieure de la liberté. Préface de Paul Ricoeur. Paris: P. U. F. Reagan, Charles E. 1996. Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated, with an Introduction by Erazim V. Kohak. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [1950. Philosophie de la volonté. 1. Le Volontaire et l’involontaire. Paris: Aubier.] —1965. History and Truth. Translated by Charles Kelbley, second edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. —1967. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —1997. “A Response,” in Morny Joy ed. Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, pp. xxxix–xlv. —1998. “From Interpretation to Translation,” in Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur eds. Thinking Biblically. Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 331–364. —1999. L’unique et le singulier. L’intégrale des entretiens ‘Noms de dieux’ d’ Edmond Blattchen. Brussels, Belgium: Alice Editions. —2002. “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response,” in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 279–290. —2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —2005. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —2007a. Vivant jusqu’à la mort. Paris: Editions du seuil. —2007b. “Autonomy and Vulnerability,” in Reflections on The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 72–90. Ricoeur, Paul in Dialogue with Richard Kearney. 2004. “The Creativity in Language” and “On Life Stories,” in Richard Kearney ed. On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pp. 127–144 and 157–170, respectively. Rorty, Amelie. 2002. “Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love,” in Genevieve Lloyd ed. Feminism and the History of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 204–226. Scruton, Roger. 2002. Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Spinoza, Benedict de. 1958 (unfinished at his death). Tractatus Politicus, in The Political Works, edited and translated by A. G. Wernham. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —2000 (1677). Ethics. Edited and translated by G. H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 9

Ricoeur and African and African American Studies: Convergences with Black Feminist Thought Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and Scott Davidson

In his introduction to Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, Robert Bernasconi observes that: “Given the importance of the notion of race for any understanding of the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would be surprising, even shocking, if the major European philosophers had not addressed it.”1 So, as the author of countless books and articles covering a wide array of issues, it might come as a surprise, even a shock, that Paul Ricoeur never addresses the question of race in his writings. Every thinker, to be sure, emphasizes some issues over other ones, but that a thinker whose work is so deeply immersed in social and political thought should remain silent on one of the central questions of his and our time calls for some explanation. Is Ricoeur’s silence merely a value neutral choice, as if Ricoeur finds nothing to say about this topic? Or, does Ricoeur think that the question of race is somehow secondary and of lesser importance than the other issues addressed in his work? Or, is his silence an expression of white privilege, whereby his whiteness remains un-marked and thus leads Ricoeur to see himself as unaffected by the question of race? There is no readily available answer to these open questions, so our inquiry must follow an indirect, hermeneutic detour through a reading of his work, focusing in particular on his masterpiece Oneself as Another.2 Even though this text too remains silent on the question of race, it nevertheless contains valuable resources for race scholars, especially those involved in African and African American studies, to the extent that it addresses themes that are vitally important in race scholarship, such as voice, agency, personal identity, narrative, and justice.3 It would be a truly immense undertaking, well beyond the scope of a single chapter or even an entire book, to provide anything close to a full treatment of the potential resources in Ricoeur’s

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work for scholarship on race. So, our focus here will be necessarily more modest in scope and will be limited to exploring some remarkable convergences between Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another and recent scholarship in black feminism. The starting point for our inquiry will be a continuous thread that runs through Ricoeur’s sixty-year writing career, namely, that of the capable human being. First inspired by the centrality of the “I can” in Merleau-Ponty’s work, Ricoeur introduces this theme as early as Freedom and Nature (1950), where the capable human being exercises the power to carry out projects in the face of the involuntary conditions of their realization.4 Inasmuch as one’s power to act is always limited by the constraints of involuntary demands, Ricoeur concludes that “each moment of freedom – deciding, moving consenting – unites action and passion, initiative and receptivity.”5 This dialectic between voluntary freedom and involuntary nature establishes the basis for what will become a recurring emphasis in Ricoeur’s work, namely, that human capability is linked not only to action but to the vulnerability of suffering. Almost half a century later, the theme of human capability resurfaces in Ricoeur’s reflections on selfhood in Oneself as Another (1992). Recognizing that human capability is polysemic and thus that the capable human being can be spoken about in many ways, Ricoeur develops a phenomenology of human capability under four headings: I can speak, I can act, I can recount, and I can impute actions.6 These four interlocking dimensions of human capability, which connect Ricoeur’s “fragmentary” studies of the self, will provide the framework for this study. More than an application of Ricoeur’s framework to another field, this connection with black feminism becomes productive by filling a lacuna that Ricoeur recognizes in his own work. Insofar as his task in Oneself as Another is primarily conceptual, Ricoeur remains unable to account sufficiently for the pathos of suffering, as it occurs, for instance, through “the incapacity to tell a story, the refusal to recount, the insistence of the untellable.”7 Black feminism, in response to these and other types of vulnerabilities, provides a rich and detailed portrait of the struggle to have a voice, to become an agent, to tell a story, and to develop self-esteem. In so doing, our contention is that black feminism greatly enhances Ricoeur’s conception of the capable human being as both acting and suffering.

The Speaking Subject: I Cannot Speak In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur develops an account of selfhood that is not a static substance but a dynamic process of becoming. This account is

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supported by a distinction between two types of identity - idem-identity and ipse-identity – each of which are contained within the French term “soi-même.” Identity in the sense of idem refers to some characteristic of a thing that remains the same (même) over time. Ipse-identity, by contrast, “implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of personality.”8 It points to a dynamic type of selfhood (soi) that does not so much “exist” as it is “made.” The self, for Ricoeur, is thus the product of the dialectical relation between these two aspects of identity. Without reflexivity, the self cannot be distinguished from a thing, but without sameness, the self cannot be identified in its constancy over time. So, in Ricoeur’s view, an adequate conception of the self requires a continual and dynamic interplay between these two elements. This conception of selfhood already signals an initial point of convergence with black feminists who have argued, in Ricoeurian terms, that black female identity has been deprived of this dialectical interplay, insofar as it has been constructed in large part by white society. Patricia Hill-Collins, for instance, speaks to this distinction through her analysis of four “controlling images” of black women: the Mammy, the Matriarch, the Welfare Woman, and the Jezebel.9 One effect of “controlling images,” in Hill-Collins’ view, is that they efface the selfhood of black females. Inasmuch as the black female experience is mysterious and unapproachable in white society, controlling images are designed precisely to make it comprehensible by reducing it to general types. In so doing, they render black females transparent to white society, allowing whites to claim full knowledge about the black female experience – an experience that is not their own. Since they do more than provide knowledge of black female experience, the problem with controlling images runs deeper than the fact that they misidentify the black women to whom they refer. Hortense Spillers, in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” describes this problem in the following terms: Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium.” I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.10 Controlling images, as Collins and Spillers keenly perceive, are also a necessary tool for exercising power and control over black women’s lives, socially, economically, and psychologically. In this function, they establish the “normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior,”

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which is necessary for preserving their subservience within white society.11 To counter the distorting role of controlling images, the task of black feminism, described in Ricoeurian terms, would be to combat the idemidentity imposed by white society and to restore the ipse-identity of black women by giving voice to their singular points of view. Indeed, this explains well why so much black feminist scholarship emphasizes the important theme of self-naming and self-defining.12 By identifying how controlling images impose an idem-identity on black women and erase the selfhood or ipse-identity of black women, the earlier discussion issues an important guideline for any adequate account selfhood: an external, identifying reference to a person is not interchangeable with an internal, reflexive description of the self. This is precisely the conclusion that Ricoeur draws at the close of the first two studies in Oneself as Another pertaining to the capacity to speak. Rejecting the tendency to focus exclusively on the semantics of language, Ricoeur emphasizes the important role of a pragmatics of discourse in which language is spoken by interlocutors within a discursive context. This signifies an important shift in the basic unity of analysis from the sentence to the utterance. On the pragmatic level, the theory of speech acts suggests that speaking should be described primarily in terms of action. To speak, following J. L. Austin’s expression, is to “do things with words.”13 A full picture of the “I can speak” thus requires an analysis that goes beyond the level of the locutionary act in which the speaker makes an utterance. In addition to what is said by the speaker, the theory of speech acts also recognizes the illocutionary act that underlies what is said. The illocutionary act pertains to what the speaker does in speaking. In other words, it is the “force” behind a statement in virtue of which it is able to count as a statement, a command, and so forth, for its addressee. Beyond the mere ability to make an utterance, the capacity to speak, on the illocutionary level, refers to one’s ability to get things done with one’s words. The implications of the theory of speech acts point to the social roles and status of individual speakers, namely, their ability to do things with words such as self-naming or self-defining. For this reason, a full account of the capacity to speak would require a more detailed analysis of the various vulnerabilities and deprivations of this capacity tied to the various social roles of speakers. While such an analysis remains well beyond the scope of Ricoeur’s and our own project, we will rejoin this issue as we move from the capacity to speak to the capacity to act. To the extent that speaking is connected to action, Ricoeur concludes that the analysis of the speaking subject must step outside of the philosophy of language.14 The analysis of the speaking subject highlights the dialectical

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interplay taking place between the ipse-identity of the speaking subject who reflexively says “I” and the idem-identity in which the self is spoken about in an indentifying reference. To bridge these two distinct aspects of the speaking subject, it is necessary to go back to the twofold reality of one’s own body. As an idem-identity, one’s own body is a thing, among other things, in the world. But, in addition to belonging to the world of objects about which it speaks, one’s own body is also an anchoring point – a point of view – opening onto the world. This anchoring point is absolutely irreducible, inasmuch as it provides not only the perspective from which one can speak but also the starting point from which one can act in the world. It is on this plane that language intersects with the theory of action.

The Acting Self: I Cannot Act Just as his studies of language emphasize the ways in which a statement necessarily points back to someone who utters it, Ricoeur’s studies of action show how an action can be tied back to an agent who performs it. Modeled on the preceding studies of the theory of language, Ricoeur develops a distinction between the semantics and pragmatics of action. The semantics of action treats actions primarily through identifying references, which is to say from a third-person point of view. While this approach promotes an agent-less theory of action, it is in the pragmatics of action that agents can be tied to their actions and answer to the question of who acts. Without going into the details of Ricoeur’s conceptual analysis here, it should be noted that here too the notion of agency points back to the body in its dual role as a point of view on the world and as an object in the world. As such, the body’s power to act, the “I can act,” is a bridge allowing the agent to initiate a course of events and make something happen in the world. If, as Ricoeur maintains, agency is inextricably linked to embodiment, then a full account of the capability to act would need to explain how various types of embodiment can produce greater or lesser degrees of assurance with regard to power to act. This suggests, again, that differently embodied agents, due to natural or social forces, will encounter different types of obstacles to agency and thus require different types of resources in order to realize their capabilities.15 It is precisely over the issue of embodied agency that black feminists have parted ways with white “Second Wave” feminists.16 “Second Wave” feminism is a movement typically associated with white, middle-class activists who seek to confront and overcome gender-based oppression, as typified by Simone

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de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.17 It has been suggested, for instance, that de Beauvoir’s scholarly legacy lies in “her application of the philosophical categories of Self and Other to the division of gender.”18 Based on these categories, de Beauvoir and other Second Wave feminists identify the various ways in which women have come to embody difference and otherness in a male dominated society: What peculiarly signals the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject – who always regards the self as the essential – and the compulsions of a situation in which she is inessential.19 Whereas women are trapped in the immanence of their embodiment, men come to represent the agency and selfhood that is “associated with the mind, it is an entity that floats free of a body or appears superior to bodily functions.”20 To counter gender biases of these sort and the obstacles they pose to agency, Second Wave feminism seeks to de-stabilize the binaries of man/woman, activity/passivity, and subject/other, and in so doing, to open new possibilities for female agency. In response to Second Wave feminism, however, many black feminists and “Third Wave” feminists have argued that an exclusive focus on genderbased oppression neglects the impact of broader types of oppression – such as economic and racial oppression – that especially characterize the experience of nonwhite women. Black feminists, such as Patricia Hill-Collins, bell hooks, and Hortense Spillers, have documented the various ways in which white women’s experiences, more precisely, “a select group of college-educated, middle-and upper-class, married white women – housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products who wanted more out of life,”21 have wrongly come to define the concerns of feminism.22 In this respect, as Hill-Collins observes, the concept of “black feminism” itself poses a challenge to mainstream feminist theory: Disrupt[ing] the racism inherent in presenting feminism as forwhites-only ideology and political movement. Inserting the adjective “black” challenges the assumed whiteness of feminism and disrupts the false universal of this term for both white and black women. Since many

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white women think that black women lack feminist consciousness, the term “black feminist” both highlights the contradictions underlying the assumed whiteness of feminism and serves to remind white women that they comprise neither the only nor the normative “feminist.”23. Second Wave feminist discourse wrongly ignores the experiences of nonwhite women – those commodified others “who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually – women who are powerless to change their condition in life.” While black feminists acknowledge the importance of gender equality and the right to political participation, they add that the agency of nonwhite women is even more fragile than that of white women, due to the interlocking systems of oppressions of race, class, and gender.24 Black feminists thus call for a much more nuanced account of agency that, like Ricoeur’s, is attuned to the connection between embodiment and agency as well as the specific vulnerabilities to which specific types of embodiment are exposed.25 A full account of the capacity to act, for instance, must be able to account for the unique embodiment of black women, as women and black within a society plagued by sexism and racism, as well as the vulnerabilities correlating with their embodiment.26

The Narrating Subject: I Cannot Tell My Own Story Agency in its fullest sense, as bell hooks recognizes, must involve more than an “oppositional worldview,” or, opposition for its own sake.27 In addition to the struggle against dehumanization and oppression, agency must also include “creative, expansive self-actualization” and the opportunity “to make oneself anew.”28 In their affirmation of agency, it is quite fascinating that many black feminists have turned to artistic expression, and in particular, to narrative. This effort thus corresponds with Ricoeur’s capability “I can recount.” Through narrative, black feminist literature seeks to tell the stories of black women from their own point of view, and in so doing, to give voice to their unique experiences and struggles. One long-standing obstacle to this capability, however, arises due to the fact that the ability of black women to tell their own story has been thwarted for a long time.29 To Toni Morrison’s observation, “I write all of the things I should have been able to read,” Alice Walker adds: “I write not only what I want to read – understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction – I write all the things I should have been able to read.”30 When the lives of black women have been narrated, their stories have usually been told by others. Interpreted by

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others, the black woman is a text but not its author. For this reason, the situation of black women is described well by Ricoeur’s expression that life is a story “in search of a narrator.”31 The aims of black feminist literature resemble Ricoeur’s conception of narrative in a number of interesting ways. Black feminist literature, while not definable by a closed set of features, is concerned primarily with the development of the agency and voice of black women. In this regard, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God offers a prime example.32 Janie Crawford, the novel’s protagonist, symbolizes black women who struggle against the forces of silence and oppression in order “tuh find out about livin’ fur theyselves.”33 The novel actually begins at the end of the story, with Janie Crawford’s return to Eatonville after burying her third husband, Tea Cake. Janie is greeted by her friend Pheoby, to whom she tells her tale. By beginning the story in this way, this literary device enables Janie to tell her own story and thus to exercise the agency that she has won. This ability to tell one’s own story provides the interpretive key to the text. The beginning of Janie’s story is not atypical. Like many women, Janie is married to an older man who she does not love, Logan Killicks. Yet, what makes Janie’s story extraordinary is that she does not accept this fate. Exercising her agency, she leaves Logan Killicks for Joe Starks. Even though Joe Starks turns out to be domineering, his death provides Janie with the financial means to care for herself and an increased confidence in her ability to live as a single woman. More extraordinary still is Janie’s third marriage to Tea Cake, a marriage that she chooses for herself. Janie gives up the comforts of her life and heads further South with Tea Cake where they work together as seasonal laborers. After their attempt to flee a hurricane, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog. He does not seek medical treatment in time, and Janie is forced to kill him after he attacks her. In killing the love of her life, Janie displays a self-love that is able to transcend her attachment to Tea Cake. Alice Walker and other Womanists thus see Janie Crawford as a woman who, in spite of society’s many attempts to silence her, was able to maintain a strong sense of herself. This sense of self is punctuated by her use of language throughout the text – by talking back to her first husband, Logan Killicks, when she tells him that she is thinking about leaving him; by telling her second husband, Mayor Joe Starks, what she thought about him on his death bed; or by defending herself in a court trial against a Black community that would have seen her executed for killing Tea Cake. Throughout this course of events, Janie displays her ability to speak and act for herself. On this reading, Hurston’s novel is less about traditional feminist concerns of gender and more about black women’s struggle for agency, defined especially by the

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task of “telling one’s own story,” or in other words, the development of a narrative identity. Narrative identity, as Ricoeur construes it, ties together the two capabilities already described earlier: the ability to speak and to act. In a narrative, the self seeks to form an identity on the scale of an entire life. The narrative unites particular speech acts and segments of action within the overall connectedness of a life. This connectedness of events is established through the narrative’s plot. The role of the plot is to configure a series of contingent and separate events in such a way that they seem as if they were necessary and unified. The plot not only tells what happened but also reveals something about the characters involved in it. It tells who did what and how. While narratives can be told about the lives of others, whether imagined or real, what is important for narrative identity is that they can also be told about ourselves. Telling one’s own story, more than just summing up one’s life, can be an important way of forming a life plan. Inasmuch as a life plan looks not only to the past but to the future as well, a life plan is an intermediary between what I am (idem-identity) and who I aspire to be (ipse-identity), between “the space of experience” and “the horizon of expectation.”34 The narrative thus maintains a dialectical interplay between these two aspects of selfhood, drawing them into a unified whole. In narrating our own life, we can thus become its coauthors. Due to the vital importance of telling one’s own story for the development of a conception of oneself, the right to speak for oneself, as Edward Said argues, forms the ethical principle at the heart of African and African American Studies, along with other disciplines involved with underrepresented groups. Such disciplines rest on the right of formerly un- or mis-represented groups “to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping their signifying and representing functions, over-riding their historical reality.”35 While there is indeed an ethics of identity to be found in our earlier discussion, Ricoeur’s ethics invokes an ethical dimension of selfhood that transcends the expression of an identity.36 In what follows, this ethical dimension of the self will be described in terms of the development of the capacity for self-esteem.37

The Ethical Self: I Cannot Esteem Myself Under the rubric of the ethical self, our decision to shift the emphasis away from Ricoeur’s conceptual analysis of imputation to the development of self-esteem first stands in need of justification. Imputation signifies the

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ascription of an action to its agent under moral predicates. By joining an action to an agent, imputation is what holds an individual agent accountable for an action on the ethical level and thereby enables the agent to be the subject of praise or blame. Even though Ricoeur focuses primarily on a conceptual level with how the imputation of actions to agents is possible whatsoever, his analysis needs to be situated within its broader context. The discussion of imputation is significant precisely because it provides the basis for self-esteem. Imputation, by tying an action to an agent, enables one’s actions and words to take on a worth for oneself and others. Selfesteem is the ability to recognize oneself as having a value equal to, if not greater than, what one says or does. To the extent that self-esteem thereby represents something like the best case of imputation, it is a legitimate theme to be addressed here. Moreover, it opens the way to another important convergence between Ricoeur and black feminist discourse, because a number of black feminists have sought to understand the capacity for selfesteem and the specific impediments to its development in the black community.38 Focusing on just one example of these efforts, we will examine bell hooks’ discussion of self-esteem in Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem.39 This work, as hooks explains, gets its starting point from the fact that her research again and again has pointed back to the issue of self-esteem.40 While some scholars might scoff at self-esteem as too simple a matter to warrant scholarly attention, hooks suggests that the phenomenon of selfesteem is complex and requires much more than the power of positive thinking. To spell out the multiple dimensions making self-esteem possible, hooks borrows from the work of psychologist Nathaniel Branden who defines self-esteem as “confidence in our ability to think; confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life; and confidence in our right to be successful and happy; the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants, achieve our values and enjoy the fruits of our effort.” The development of self-esteem, if Branden’s account is right, is thus a complex process that calls on the full range of human capabilities – the power to act, to speak, to carry out a life plan, to hold ourselves responsible for it – as well as the confidence to realize them. The development of self-esteem, to be sure, challenges each individual regardless of race, gender, or class. Yet, even though each individual confronts the challenge of developing self-esteem, this need not preclude the possibility that the struggle to develop self-esteem may be more difficult for some individuals than others, based precisely on their group membership. Within this context,

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we can appreciate hooks’ observation that the development of self-esteem may be “more difficult for black folks.”41 The obstacles to self-esteem can be divided between those that emerge internally, through the formation of a self-concept, and those arising externally, through social interactions with others. In a society that perpetuates negative stereotypes and images of blackness, the task of developing a positive conception of oneself is indeed more complicated for blacks than whites. Abundant scholarship, including the work of Patricia Hill-Collins discussed earlier, documents the pervasiveness of negative representations of blacks in literature, film, and mass media as well as the inevitable internalization of these images by blacks. Their result, as hooks notes, is that they “deprive us of our capacity to experience our own agency and alter our ability to care and to love ourselves and others.”42 To counter these negative images, the first step, according to hooks, is for blacks to “decolonize” their minds, which means undoing the various forms of socialization that deliver and reinforce negative stereotypes and false images of blacks. As a result of this process, it becomes possible to develop what hooks calls “freely held human agency,” which is a power of self-determination providing the “rational basis for self-esteem.”43 Yet, the development of self-determination, while necessary, cannot be sufficient, precisely because the task of developing self-esteem involves more than a relation to oneself and more than positive thinking. Self-esteem is also constituted externally through our interactions with other people. When the broader culture accepts or even endorses false images of blackness, then individual black people find themselves to be ensnared in a double bind: either cope with the false images in order to gain social acceptance or combat false images and face social rejection. While coping with false images might be socially advantageous, these social benefits do not come without their costs. The respect of others is acquired at the expense of one’s own personal integrity. By simply coping with false images, one gains the respect of others but, in so doing, diminishes or loses respect for oneself. But self-esteem, as noted earlier, cannot be developed solely within oneself, either. So it is not as if one could just learn to love oneself more regardless of the false images circulating in the broader culture or as if one could develop self-esteem in spite of being involved in unequal and oppressive relations with others. Therefore, the development of self-esteem, as hooks rightly contends, must call for strategies that “promote mutuality” among oneself and others.44 Relations of mutuality offer the sole way to escape from the double bind mentioned earlier,

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inasmuch as they are relations in which one can maintain one’s personal integrity and gain social acceptance at the same time.45 Ricoeur’s work resonates deeply with hooks’ diagnosis of suffering the loss of self-esteem. Self-esteem is indeed tied to a conception of oneself, but Ricoeur would agree that it remains empty without interaction with others. Self-esteem, beyond simply entertaining positive thoughts about oneself, must pass through the filter of our relations to others. If our self-esteem is inevitably tied to others, then this negotiation between oneself and another can be aided by the narrative identity of the self. For, the story of one character is always entangled with the stories of other characters in a narrative, just as the stories of our own lives are always intertwined with the stories of others. It is because others esteem me, Ricoeur explains, that I can esteem myself. But, Ricoeur adds, it is also the case that “I cannot myself have selfesteem unless I esteem others as myself.”46 The esteem for another person and oneself thus proceed hand in hand. The ideal here is a type of mutuality that Ricoeur calls “solicitude” in which the self and the other can display esteem for one another.47 Insofar as solicitude has the power to overcome the various antagonisms between oneself and another, Ricoeur would likely embrace the words, cited by hooks, of the poet Wendell Berry, “We hurt and are hurt and have each other for healing.”48

Conclusion At the end of the phenomenology of the capable human being developed in Oneself as Another, Ricoeur is wary of offering anything more than some general indications regarding a particular ontology that is “in view” as a result of the conception of the self in its acting and suffering developed there. This ontology, Ricoeur suggests, is one in which action would take the place traditionally occupied by substance. As such, being would no longer be understood as a static reality, established once and for all either on a material or formal level, instead it would always be in the making.49 Here Ricoeur cites Aristotle and Spinoza as his primary influences, insofar as they construe human capability in terms of potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia). Human capability does not signify pure potential but productivity, that is, the power to act.50 The active power of the “I can act” is thus tied to Spinoza’s conatus, that is, the effort to persevere in one’s own being.51 On this view, potentiality and actuality, instead of being opposed, are situated along a single continuum of power. Consequently, the quest for empowerment should not be understood as an antagonistic struggle

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between oneself and others. Empowerment, instead of being a vested interest, is an interest shared by all people in realizing their basic human capabilities.52 The effort to be, moreover, forms the basis for understanding the joy and suffering of human life. Joy is tied to the empowerment of the individual through an increase of the effort to be, while suffering is aligned with the decrease of the power of acting. The decrease of the effort of existing, as Ricoeur explains, is where “the reign of suffering, properly speaking, commences.”53 Suffering, in this view, is not defined in terms of physical or mental pain, but by “the reduction, even the destruction, of the capacity for acting, of being-able-to-act, experienced as a violation of self-integrity.”54 If being deprived of a capability is what it means to suffer in the deepest sense, then black feminists provide a valuable contribution to Ricoeur’s project through their detailed and nuanced description of the “reign of suffering” that results from the denial of capabilities. In this way, a productive dialogue emerges between Ricoeur and black feminists, in spite of his silence on the question of race. While Ricoeur’s phenomenology of acting and suffering provides a powerful conceptual framework for black feminist concerns, black feminism, in turn, lends pathos to the vulnerability of embodiment and the suffering tied to the loss of capabilities.

Notes 1

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Robert Bernasconi, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 3. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Another unexplored but interesting connection, within the context of African American Studies, might be found in Ricoeur’s work on history. For instance, the Afro-centric principle of Sankofa dovetails nicely with Ricoeur’s reflections on the relation between the historical past and the present, insofar as Sankofa is an attitude toward the past where the past does not just remain in the past but comes to life in the present. Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. E. V. Kohak (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Ibid., 483. In History, Memory, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Ricoeur later adds to this list: “but also remembering and forgetting, making history and writing it, judging and being judged, understanding his human condition, though the painstaking work of interpretation and translation, which is a way to say something again but differently. And capable also, at the end of a long lifetime journey, of realizing, through the

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difficult experience of forgiving, that humans are worth more than their actions and their faults and that the climax of wisdom is the capacity to be amazed by the splendor of being alive as human beings . . .” (656–657). For further discussion, see Domenico Jervolino, “Rethinking Ricoeur: The Unity of His Work and the Paradigm of Translation,” in Reading Ricoeur, ed. David M. Kaplan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 225–236. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 320. Ibid., 2. Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17:2 (1987): 65–81. Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 72. For instance, Africana Womanism, a variety of black feminism, places a great deal of emphasis on the Afro-centric notion of nommo. Nommo refers to the creative word’s power to give life and to bring something into existence. Under this paradigm, the task of self-naming and self-defining thus becomes its “raison d’être.” See Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanist Literary Theory (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004). J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 54. It would be especially interesting, in this context, to engage recent studies of disability in order to tease out the sense in which Ricoeur might contribute to the current debate. Physical disability provides a clear example in which the capacity to act is vulnerable and requires increased accommodations in order to be fulfilled. First Wave Feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought against inequality and for the right for women to vote. First Wave feminism ends with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, granting women the right to vote. Second Wave Feminism refers to activists who came of age in the 1960s and their efforts to extend the rights gained earlier. These rights include a greater presence in the workforce, the right to safe and legal abortions, and the ending of discrimination in education. Third Wave feminism emerges in the 1980s and is focused especially on localized activism and the inclusion of non-white and economically disadvantaged women. See Rebecca Walker, ed. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995). Also, Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, eds. Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2002). See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1974). Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 2. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxxv. Conboy, Medina, and Stanbury, Writing on the Body, 2. bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2000), 1.

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For an extended discussion of hooks’ critique of white feminism, see Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, “bell hooks and the Move from Marginalized Other to Radical Black Subject,” in Critical Perspectives on bell hooks, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2009), 121–131. Patricia Hill-Collins, “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond,” The Black Scholar 26:1 (2001): 13. See Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought. It is at this juncture that an interesting intersection between Ricoeur’s work on the capacity to act and recent scholarship on disability could be explored. See Martha Nussbaum’s chapter on “Capabilities and Disabilities,” in her Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 155–223. bell hooks also discusses the need to develop a theory and discourse that speaks to the interbraiding of gender and race, asserting that “at the moment of my birth, two factors determined my destiny, my having been born black and my having been born a female.” bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 12. hooks, The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity, 15. Ibid. Ann duCille, for instance, provides the example of a conflict over who is given credit for pioneering the study of black women. Although Toni Cade Bambara’s book Black Woman was the first to compile black women’s views on black womanhood, duCille notes that “it is the white feminist historian Gerda Lerner whom the academy recognizes as the pioneer in reconstructing the history of African American women.” Even though Lerner presents her work as an attempt to recover forgotten and unused sources, many of these sources were already known to black scholars for a long time. This is but one among many instances in which the marginalization of black women’s voices has enabled white scholars to construct successful academic careers. See Ann duCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 27. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 13. Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in Facts and Values: Philosophical Reflections from Western and Non-Western Perspectives, eds. M. C. Doeser and J. N. Kraaj (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 121–132. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper, 2006). Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 192. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: The Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Steven Connor, Postmodern Culture (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 178. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 296. For further discussion of the ethical dimension of capability, see “Ethics and Human Capability,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. J. Wall, W. Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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Beyond the strict context of black feminism, also note Cornel West’s words: “The fundamental crisis in black America is twofold: too much poverty and too little self-love” [Race Matters (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993), 63]. bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self Esteem (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003). Ibid., xi. Ibid., 19. Also see her chapter “Moving beyond Shame,” in Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: Harper, 2001). hooks, Rock My Soul, 18. Ibid., 225–226. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 202. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 193. This ideal is developed more fully in The Course of Recognition, where Ricoeur observes that the capacity for self-recognition “puts us on the way toward the problematic of being recognized.” Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 93. hooks, Rock My Soul, 184. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 86. Ibid., 315. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 3.4. Instead of being power over another, for Ricoeur capabilities are human powers: “the power to designate oneself as the speaker of one’s own words; the power to designate oneself as the agent of one’s own activities, the power to designate oneself as the protagonist in one’s own life-story.” Paul Ricoeur, “Reply to Ted Klein,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. L. E. Hahn (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1995), 367. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 320. Ibid., 190.

Chapter 10

Ricoeur and Education: Ricoeur’s Implied Philosophy of Education Peter Kemp

Education is by nature an indisciplinary project. It involves many disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, and it needs philosophical reflection on how to apply this knowledge to the formation and instruction of people. While Paul Ricoeur never explicitly elaborated a philosophy of education, he has inspired several good philosophical thinkers on education, for instance, Bernt Gustavsson, Johannes A. van der Ven, and Franc Morandi.1 I myself have used the philosophical hermeneutics of Ricoeur in the elaboration of a philosophy of education in my book, Citizen of the World: A Cosmopolitan Ideal for the 21st Century.2 This use of Ricoeur’s work in reflection on education has not been without reason. In fact, he was very interested in education as a philosophical problem of formation, and in June 1968, after the collapse of the French university system during the student revolt, he initially wrote a series of three newspaper articles for Le Monde under the title “Rebuilding the University” and later reprinted in the magazine Esprit, where he described his idea of the fruitful relationship between the teacher and the student.3 Half a year later, he developed his idea of a good university in the age of mass media and large-scale universities in a preface to a book on the concept of the university, also published in Le Monde in 1969.4 And, as early as 1964, he wrote an essay on “Making the University” that became prophetic by its final words: “If this country does not get control of the growth of its university in a reasonable way, it will suffer the educational explosion as a national catastrophe.”5 I will take these analyses as the starting point for a development of the relevance of Ricoeur’s thinking for understanding the role of education in the present time. Then, I will show how Ricoeur could have applied both his theory of interpretation and his ethics of the good life to the question of formation in the educational relationship.

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Making the University The 1964 essay “Making the University” makes clear that the university – and this goes for universities all over the world – cannot function any longer with the growing number of students facing professors who are more their judges than their masters, as if they were the defendants in legal processes and not scholars in need of dialogue with their teachers. The problem of how to be a large-scale institution and to select the best students for higher research could not be solved by the traditional relationships between the teacher and the student. Therefore, Ricoeur claims that the students must participate “in the pedagogy of higher education in ways that are neither paternalistic nor illusionary.”6 He does not deny that the relationship between teacher and student is unequal, “but all pedagogy of higher education has to incorporate the maximum of reciprocity in this asymmetric situation.”7 However, if the university will be able to practice this type of pedagogy, teachers must be released from heavy administrative work; they must have time for other activities than preparing examinations; they must engage in interdisciplinary research; they must overcome the sharp boundaries between the faculties; specialized research should be divided among the different regions; universities should not be part of a central administration but independent enterprises; and finally, universities should listen to the criticism coming from outside of the university. Ricoeur recognizes that a reform of the university in these ways would be very expensive, but he warns that, if it is not made, education will end in a national catastrophe.

The Educational Relationship This catastrophe took place in 1968. In “Rebuilding the University,” Ricoeur developed his view of the relationship between teacher and student as the basis for a reconstruction of the university in an age where the nihilism of society has no other goal than its own growth, while the students want a cultural revolution. In this age, Ricoeur says that “it is necessary to remain revolutionary when making reform.”8 The revolutionary aim is to transform the educational relationship adopted by the centralized state administration of the university system, where important decisions have been made without consulting educational entities and the teachers who belong to them. And, within the university, the professors constituted an oligarchy who chose the form and content of the education and assigned grades.

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They appointed teaching assistants without giving them much influence, “and the students at the bottom of the hierarchy did not participate in decisions at any level.”9 The basis for a revolution of this educational relationship would be a change from a top-bottom style of governance to the construction of a grassroots influence. Such an educational relationship is difficult to maintain, because education is asymmetrical from the beginning and because it aims to apply the competence and experience of the teacher in the learning process. It is therefore tempting to suppose that the students do not know anything, that learning is passing from ignorance to knowledge, and that this transition depends on the power of the teacher. However, Ricoeur notes that the student brings something: talents and tastes, acquired knowledge and parallel knowledge, and particularly a search for personal accomplishment that can only partly be satisfied by instruction, job training and the acquisition of a culture for leisure. Truly speaking, teaching is an asymmetrical relationship, but not only one way. The contract that binds the teacher to the student implies an essential reciprocity that is the principle and basis of collaboration.10 Thus, by contributing to the student’s achievement, the teacher still learns. The teacher, according to Ricoeur, is really taught by his students and receives from them the opportunity and the permission to realize his own desire for cognition and knowledge. This is the reason why one must even say – to paraphrase Aristotle – that education is a shared act of the teacher and student.11 Every cultural revolution in the domain of education, he continues, “is sustained by this conviction, it draws its first movement from this, which is to refuse the relation of domination that is continually reborn in the very practice of education.”12 It is not class domination that leads to educational domination. Class can play a role, but it does not constitute the pedagogical domination that can develop in order to serve every ideology. Those who revolt against this domination can be tempted to believe in the utopia of self-education, saying that the student is his or her own educator and that the teacher is a mere instrument, like a book, manual, or index card. Thus, “the teacher is a living instrument, an expert who is consulted. Everything starts with the

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student and returns to the student.”13 Ricoeur does not deny that this utopia contains an element of truth. It is true in the sense that education is not made for the professors but for the students. A university might even be able to function through this utopia for some time; it would be an enterprise chaired by the students who consult the professors as experts, but it could not function in the long run. In fact, this idea of self-education is simply the inversion of the opposite claim that all too often has inspired university practice, that is, the idea that the students are there for the professors and that they have to be evaluated in terms of their aptitude for reproducing the monologue of the teacher. In opposition to this educational model, Ricoeur pleads for an education that is like a duel, because “confrontation is essential for the common act of the teacher and the student.” He insists that the teacher is not a book that one turns over, nor an expert that one consults. The teacher also has personal goals to achieve as a teacher, and these goals only coincide partly with the student’s desire to achieve. Indeed, the teacher’s goal is not to be a mere instrument for the transmission of knowledge to the student, instead the teacher’s legitimate goal is to express a conviction for which he lives, most often a movement of thought, a tradition that fights for expression. Therefore, teaching is much more than a transmission of knowledge; it is an exercise of power. This is the reason why the relation of domination can arise incessantly, and it is also the reason why the utopia of self-education is false. There is an unavoidable element of conflict in the educational relationship. Ricoeur concludes that this conflict can be stabilized temporarily by a reform that would prescribe rules that all partners in the educational relationship could accept. These rules should not be considered to be perfect, and “pedagogy in its broadest sense for higher education must be practiced in different experimental forms that permit procedures of revision and repair.”14 Among these experimental forms, Ricoeur includes mixed committees consisting of both teachers and students to discuss the form and content of teaching and who can thus prevent the sclerosis of new institutions. In so doing, the “educational relation could be exposed to a true permanent revolution, practised by both parts working together, of the content and form of education.”15 On the basis of this view, Ricoeur developed further details about how the mixed committees could be composed and function and how the restructured universities could play a new role in society according to a reform that permit a permanent revolution.

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Two Competing Demands on the University In his preface to the book on The Concept of the University, Ricoeur analyzes the opposition between two demands placed on a modern university. On the one hand, it must be a research institution in which criticism is allowed and new ideas can be tested. This idea of a liberal university cannot function, if the political society wants to decide the goals of research. On the other hand, it must prepare students for the functions that society needs for its production and administration. These two demands create a conflict, and the fact that many universities are now enormous institutions who have to educate a mass of students makes the conflict even worse. Society cannot spend money on them without demanding useful results, while students cannot accept to spend their time in these institutions without expecting them to contribute to their personal development. This mass of students discovered not only that they have a common problem but also that they are a powerful movement. The result of this was the student revolt. Facing this opposition that led universities into a deep crisis, Ricoeur proposes three measures for overcoming it. First, reform the universities in the direction of a liberal university adapted to our time. This reform must avoid both the constraints of pure utility and the purely destructive rejection of organizations. This renewed liberal university should permit free research and integrate researchers into society, so that they can participate in a responsible way in the scientific, cultural, technological, and spiritual adventures of our time. Second, give students access to participation in the governance of the universities. Professors, assistants, and students must “share words” in discussions about the orientation, development, and purpose of studies. If this practice of participation becomes successful in the universities, it might be a model for the whole society to demolish its authoritarian institutions. Third, establish zones of reception between the university institution and the extra-university world. These zones should be self-governing concerning teaching in the periphery of ordinary teaching and create a connection between the university culture and the non-university culture. A few months after the publication of this text in March 1969, Ricoeur was elected dean of the Humanities faculty at Paris-Nanterre and tried to implement his idea of a community of professors and students in dialogue. It was this relationship between teachers and students he had experienced so close in his first year as professor in Strasbourg and later in the United States, at the University of Chicago. But, he resigned from this position in

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April 1970 after an attack by some students who not only aimed to change the university but who, feeling a loss of hope after de Gaulle took matters into his own hands, wanted to destroy the university along with the rest of society. In this context, he became the target of personal attacks. He felt that he had lost the confidence of the students and that his colleagues did not support him sufficiently. He thus considered this to be a defeat for his idea of a liberal university with a community between teachers and students, and he gave up the idea of including students in university councils, saying later in his conversation with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay that “being a student is not a job.”16 This is probably the reason why he never again wrote about the reform of higher education. Still, it is easy to see how his later philosophy indirectly contributes to a further development of a philosophy of education in line with his idea of an educational relationship based on a dialogue in confrontation between teacher and student. It was under very exceptional circumstances, perhaps difficult to understand for those who did not live through this time, that he experienced the defeat of his idea of a liberal university. He interpreted this defeat to be a demonstration of the impossibility of a university that is hierarchical but convivial and can therefore solve its problems through discussion.17 However, today a student revolt against the university as such is unthinkable, and so it is worthwhile to take up again his idea of a liberal education in order to see whether this idea might not be as impossible as he thought after his defeat at Nanterre.

Crucial Ideas for Education In his book Formation in Our Time (Bildning i vår tid), Bernt Gustavsson presents the idea of formation (Bildung), as defined by Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where it is understood as the process in which the human spirit recognizes itself in the other and therefore travels out into the unknown in order to return home to itself rewarded with an understanding that expands oneself.18 Gustavsson points out that Ricoeur can help us to move beyond the old debate between formation as democratic instruction and the classical concept of formation of the personality, or, between Enlightenment and Romanticism. For a long time an education aiming at a formation or cultivation of the human being was considered to be the opposite of progressive instruction. Formation was considered to be a reactionary goal of education. But, as Gustavsson asserts, formation in our time can be conceived in such a way

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that it connects tradition and criticism. Experience does not prevent but stimulates creativity including new ideas and new perspectives on formation, whereas formation in earlier times often was a shield against change and transformation. Gustavsson finds the opposition between tradition and criticism to be abolished in the same way that Paul Ricoeur connects the critique of ideology in Habermas and the hermeneutics of tradition in Gadamer.19 The Gadamer–Habermas debate concerns the role of the history of effects (Wirkunsggeschichte), as developed in Gadamer’s Truth and Method.20 According to Gadamer, classical hermeneutics (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and others) tried to understand the reading of a text on the basis of an analogy with the personal encounter in a dialogue. Therefore, the aim was to go back to the original author by tracing his or her original influences. Interpretation was a return to the origin. And since this return was considered to be possible, interpretation became a defense of the cultural legacy. Gadamer recognizes that this return to the author is more or less an illusion and that the validity of the interpretation is not dependent on how successful the return might be. The reason given is that we cannot interpret a text without the effects of the whole chain of interpretations that have preceded us and the context of already given interpretations in which we live. Habermas agrees with Gadamer that the return to the origin is impossible and that an interpretation of a text is a linguistic play through which we find motivations for our actions. But, Habermas claims that we must also exercise a critical reading of the texts and that it might be necessary to produce a rupture with the tradition as such. This rupture should be based on present knowledge about ourselves and our society, such as what can be found in Freudian psychoanalysis and the Marxist critique of ideology. According to Habermas, the whole history of effects in which we live might be false, and therefore a critical distance based on the social sciences should guide interpretation. Gadamer’s reply is to observe that neither psychoanalysis nor the critique of ideology themselves could function without interpretation and thus that they cannot adopt an objective, neutral position from which to criticize the whole tradition, either. Ricoeur agrees with Gadamer that the interpretation of texts is not dependent on what we can say about an original author, and that interpreters are actors in a history of effects. He appreciates Gadamer for “attempting to reconcile, rather than oppose, authority and reason.”21 But, he also agreed with Habermas that interpretation involves taking a critical distance from the texts and that psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology can be very useful in this regard. Ricoeur claims that the distance we take with regard

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to the text does not only permit a revolt against possible illusions, manipulations, and seductions of the reader but also allows for our free appropriation of the text’s message and its adaptation to our own situation. Ricoeur thus rejects the alternative presented in Gadamer’s Truth and Method: Either adopt a methodological attitude that prevents the experience of the truth of a work (truth in the sense of the meaning it reveals for the reader) or practice an openness to this truth. Indeed, in his essay on “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Ricoeur claims that it is possible to “escape from the alternative between alienating distanciation and participatory belonging.”22 Ricoeur could also have mentioned that this is a fundamental characteristic of education, to the extent that education is not the delivery of pure knowledge but the real formation of the individual in a living history of effects. This occurs, for instance, when education provides a cultural formation that encourages the student’s personal appropriation of it with a critical distance. In this sense, the critical hermeneutics that Ricoeur develops by inculcating Habermas’ criticism within Gadamer’s hermeneutics presents a model for the good relationship between the teacher and the student. The task of the teacher, on the one hand, is to ensure the transmission of knowledge and culture to the student and, at the same time, to teach the student how to be vigilant, questioning, and critical with respect to what is transmitted. The task of the student, on the other hand, should not only be to place this demand on his or her teacher but on him or her self as well. This would be the real basis for a true community between the teacher and the student in which the teacher transmits knowledge and understanding and the student adapts it to his or her own horizon. Gadamer spoke about a “fusion of horizons” taking place in interpretation, and this is precisely what should happen for the student. The higher education of adults who are responsible for their own formation should also imply student involvement on university councils. Bad experiences brought Ricoeur to believe that the horizontal relationship in reciprocity between teachers and students could not constitute the basis of a hierarchical relationship in which the form and content of education are decided. He also came to conclude that students should not be incorporated in university bodies. This conclusion, however, is not in keeping with his critical hermeneutics and deep conviction that we must always listen to the other. His idea of a community between professors and students was not a deficiency, as he later came to believe. Perhaps the weakness in his articles about the university was that he did not distinguish between listening to the other and giving the other the power of equal co-determination. It is true

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that the students at Nanterre who wanted to destroy the university could not be integrated in the university councils, since they did not want to have to listen to professors. But, his experiences from these unhappy days of “great refusal” should not be generalized to normal university life. Indeed, Ricoeur’s own idea of a critical hermeneutics might allow us to draw a different conclusion concerning the relationship between teacher and student than the one he himself did.

Ethical Formation If education cannot be limited to the transmission of knowledge but must also include a formation that is critically appropriated by the individual, this formation cannot avoid what Johannes van der Ven has called a “formation of the moral self.” Formation must be a moral question about the good, but then the same question arises concerning the formation as was raised about tradition: “How can education escape conservatism and prevent reactionary manipulation of the student?” Van der Ven calls this “the question of what should be transmitted in moral education.”23 And he finds the answer in the three-stage model of ethics developed in Ricoeur’s book Oneself as Another.24 This model consists of three moments of ethical reflection: (1) the Aristotelian moment of an intention “aiming at the good life with and for others, in just institutions”25; (2) the Kantian moment of the moral norm serving as a sieve through which the ethical aim must pass in order to be subjected to the test of its universal validity; (3) a kind of return to the first moment in the form of practical wisdom, the Aristotelian phronesis, by which we can prescribe the right action in conflictual situations where there is no universally valid solution, but only a responsible solution, based on a conviction about the sense of the original ethical aim. In this third phase where no sure norm provides a guide for action, there is a recourse to the ethical aim. This model for ethical thinking implies three corresponding moments in moral education. The first moment is the exposition of an ethical vision of the good life, including all kinds of stories about good and bad actions. These stories show that the good life is something we share in giving and receiving, in friendship and mutual solicitude in exchange of self-esteem. The self can esteem itself because it is esteemed by others, and the other can esteem me because he or she has self-esteem. As such, the self is considered as another, and vice versa. This “dialogical self” cannot establish an

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inter-personal community without a sense of justice in institutions, because inter-personal relationships exist as part of a society where everybody in different ways must take on benefits and burdens for the sake of the whole. The second moment is the testing of the different stories and representations of the good life by universal norms. It is the rational moment corresponding to the critique of tradition, as described earlier. Van der Ven sees two functions in this testing process: “It functions as a critical judge, which may have a purifying effect. Desires become constraints, the good becomes the right, and the optative becomes imperative.”26 But, in its second function, the norm that purifies the vision of the good life only concerns the human being as an agent, never as a suffering patient. It concerns everybody saying with Kant: “Act in such a way that you never treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, simply as a means.” This indistinctiveness and indifference to persons does not relate to individuals in their diversity, specificity, and uniqueness. The concrete suffering of the individual disappears from concern. Therefore, the critical test is a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion for maxims to be followed or not. The third moment is the return to phronesis, practical wisdom. It plays a key role in relation to the different aspects of situation and conflict, taking into account the plurality of moral systems. It signifies a “considered conviction” that has passed through a process of argumentative communication. This last aspect is crucial for Ricoeur as well as for van der Ven, because they both stress the idea that relationships bind individuals together: “the individuals and their relationship go hand in hand and realize themselves in and through each other. They form a dialectical compositum.”27 According to van der Ven, the three-phase model of ethics gives an appropriate answer to the question in our time about which values are to be transmitted in moral education and the moral criteria for evaluating those values. “Knowing what to teach is one thing; knowing for what purpose one teaches it is another,” van der Ven says. Therefore a critical ethics, as found in Ricoeur, is needed in education. In his Philosophy of Education, Franc Morandi adds that education is fundamentally concerned with the other, that is, caring for the other. He cites Ricoeur as the philosopher who has shown how to connect hermeneutics and ethics in the way that we have considered here, reminding us of the following statement in Oneself as Another: it is in unending work of interpretation applied to action and to oneself that we pursue the search for adequation between what seems to us to be best with regard to our life as a whole and the preferential choices that govern our practices . . . Between our aim of a good life and our particular

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choices a sort of hermeneutical circle is traced by virtue of the backand-forth motion between the idea of the good life and the most important decisions of our existence (career, loves, leisure etc.). This can be likened to a text in which the whole and the part are to be understood each in terms of the other.28 According to Morandi, this focus on self-interpretation in the ethical life is the object and principle of education. Education should be connected to the horizon of the other through exchange and care. The exchange is the reciprocity of the esteem of oneself as another and the esteem of the other as oneself. And care for the other is consideration of the other, paying attention to the other, and recognizing the other. Both reciprocity and care are thus essential to education.

Mimesis in Education Ricoeur’s hermeneutics also develops a theory of narrative as a kind of mimesis. In my book Citizen of the World: A Cosmopolitan Ideal for the 21st Century, I have applied this theory to the educational relationship between teacher and student.29 However, in modern theories of education the entire notion of mimesis has been repressed. The position was that we should never mimic anything in the process of learning. Even the philosophers of education who have been inspired by Ricoeur – Gustavsson, van der Ven, and Morandi – have not thought to apply his notion of mimesis to pedagogical transmission. Ricoeur’s idea of mimesis is based on Aristotle’s notion of mimesis in his Poetics. He does not see mimesis as a copy but as play, like the actor’s free enactment of a certain character in his performance on the stage. Ricoeur distinguishes three moments in the mimetic process: the author’s experience of life (mimesis 1); the composition of the work (mimesis 2); the appropriation of it by the reader or the audience (mimesis 3). Modern semiotics has focused primarily on mimesis 2, that is, on the linguistic structures and rules for the actual composition of the text. Ricoeur considers, however, that we need a more comprehensive hermeneutics that entails mimesis 1, which precedes the actual text, and mimesis 3, which proceeds from the “entire arc of operations.” In these three stages, the practical experience of acting and suffering forms and expands the world of the work, the author, and the readers.30 In my book, I describe his theory of mimesis in the following way. Mimesis 1 is the narration’s use of the world of action of the daily life, its foundation

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in the everyday from which mimesis draws its substance. This is the prefiguration of the narration – the pre-understanding of the practical life. We can only retrieve the narrative’s meaning because we already are familiar with the meaning given by the everyday world in which we live and in relation to which we understand the meaning of actions, goals, means, success, defeat, and so forth. We already have the linguistic capabilities to interpret the occurrences of life, bestowing meaning, value, and ethical quality to them, and we also have a notion of time in terms of the relation between past, present, and future. Mimesis 2 is creating and forming the composition of the “plot” in the narrative, according to what Aristotle calls “necessity and reasonability.” In harmony with the order the narrator instates at the start of the story, what occurs seems to follow necessarily and strike us as “plausible” and “credible.” To Aristotle, this order that establishes the story makes it have a beginning, a middle (or the turn of events), and an ending. This is called the “configuration” of the story. The configuration of the plot expresses the reason, idea, or theme behind the story or the play, as when we have followed the entire plot and then recalled or retold it. Narrative competence consists in establishing a configuration of the story by extracting a coherent course of events out of the dispersed occurrences and then combining these different occurrences (the subject, the goal, the means, and so forth) in one plot. In this way, the sequence of events carries the content of the story and explains how and why this and no other order of events could have led to the meaningful end of the narrative. Mimesis 3 completes the mimetic process in that the configuration of the text or the play is not experienced as a narrative if we do not appropriate it. Something happens to us as we follow the story line. We become new persons. This is the re-figuration of our lives. Aristotle describes this, in relation to the Greek drama, as a process of purification of our personal fears and our compassion for others and as a resignation and acceptance of the sentiments that overpower us. Today, we have narratives of a completely different sort, such as the modern novel, and we cannot delimit the re-figuration of the narrative to the intended effects of the Greek drama. Narratives open worlds wherein we can dwell; they reconstruct the world of action. It is, says Ricoeur, an “invitation to see our praxis as . . .” that is, seeing it as we see it modeled in the narrative.31 What Ricoeur calls refiguration is the actual moment of formation of the self and, one might add without contradiction, the formation of “the we.” The appropriation of ideas, conceptions, and tales of the tradition is good both for the individual and for the community; it forms a Self and a

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We without hindering a critical attitude toward the tradition. This process of formation stands opposed to the Socratic method that aids the delivery of what is already dormant in man. Bernt Gustavsson thus rightly claims that this type of formation is both a free process and the realization of a goal put forth by others.32 It is at the same time driven by the need for personal progress and enclosed in an inherited world passed on from a community and a history. Is not this theory of mimesis a theory of the educational process that confirms Ricoeur’s criticism in 1968 of both the master’s authoritarianism and the utopia of self-education?

Final Remarks In spite of the deep disappointment that Ricoeur felt after his experience at Nanterre in 1969 and in spite of the fact that he gave up the hope of ever establishing a living and fruitful community between teachers and students, he nevertheless has inspired new ways of pedagogical thinking. As I have indicated, there is indeed an implied philosophy of education to be found in his work after 1969. To be precise, his critical hermeneutics constitutes a model for the transmission of a legacy in education that opens room for both rejection and renewal of the tradition. Moreover, Ricoeur’s reconstruction of the crucial moments of ethics in terms of the ethical vision, moral norms, and practical wisdom constitutes a model for learning that offers rational and moral insight. Finally, Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis as creative imitation can be applied to a type of learning that gives space for a free and critical appropriation in the educational transmission of knowledge and convictions. Based on my personal experience, Ricoeur was a perfect professor who put this theory into practice in his own teaching. He always listened carefully to his students and then was always precise and relevant in his answers to their questions. He respected their criticisms, valued their opinions, and did not ask them to treat him as a guru. Paul Ricoeur wanted students to be autonomous in a real community of reciprocity despite all of the asymmetry that characterizes institutional relationships.

Notes 1

Bernt Gustavsson, Bildning i vår tid [Formation in our time] (Stockholm: Wahlström & Wiedstrand, 1996); Johannes A. van der Ven, Formation of the Moral Self (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 1998); Franc Morandi, Philosophie de l’Éducation (Paris: Nathan/ HER, 2000).

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Peter Kemp, Citizen of the World: A Cosmopolitan Ideal for the 21st Century (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). Paul Ricoeur, “Réforme et révolution dans l’Université,” in Lectures 1: Autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 380–397. Paul Ricoeur; “Trois ripostes à la crise universitaire,” in Conceptions de l’Université, eds. Jacques Drèze and Jean Debelle (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1969), 8–22. Ricoeur; “Faire l’Université,” in Lectures 1: Autour du Politique, 368–397. Ibid., 373. Ibid. Ricoeur, “Réforme et révolution dans l’Université,” 381. Ibid. Ibid., 382. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 384. Ibid. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). Paul Ricoeur: Réflexion faite. Autobiographie intellectuelle (Paris: Esprit, 1995), 44. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel B. Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 10–20. Gustavsson, Bildning i vår tid, 108. See the papers of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, ed. Karl-Otto Apel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and Critique of Ideology,” in From Text to Action: Essays In Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 280. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in From Text to Action, 76. Van der Ven, Formation of the Moral Self, 155. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Ibid., 172. Van der Ven, Formation of the Moral Self, 161. Ibid., 175. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 179; Morandi, Philosophie de l’Éducation, 109. Peter Kemp, Citizen of the World: A Cosmopolitan Ideal for the 21st Century, Chapter 5. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlan and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 53. Ibid., vol. 1, 83; emphasis added. Gustavsson, Bildning i vår tid, 32–33.

Chapter 11

Ricoeur and Psychoanalysis Karl Simms

Paul Ricoeur’s first encounter with psychoanalysis takes place in his The Voluntary and the Involuntary, the first volume of his Philosophy of the Will.1 The overarching theme of The Voluntary and the Involuntary (as well as, one might say, of all Ricoeur’s philosophy) is “the primacy of conciliation over paradox” in negotiating the relation between these two facets of human existence. Willing, according to Ricoeur, is an act that manifests itself in three modes: decision, movement, and consent. The Voluntary and the Involuntary is elegantly structured: each of these modes is treated in turn, comprising each of the three parts to the book. Each part begins with a “pure description” of the phenomenon, followed by an analysis of the forces that militate against it, followed by a synthesis demonstrating how the “complete significance” of the phenomenon can only be understood through grasping the reciprocity between the voluntarism discovered in its description and the involuntarism manifested in the forces opposing it. To summarise with a brutality that does scant justice to the rich detail of Ricoeur’s exposition, decision is a project I form, which is limited by my general abilities (determined by my intellect, skill, experience, etc.), movement is a negotiation between effort and bodily constraints (which are not only physical, but also encompass my succumbing to habit, etc.), and consent entails the free giving-over of myself to something other than me that becomes a necessity. Within this methodological structure, “the unconscious” occupies merely the second section of Chapter 2 in the Third Part: along with character and the structure, growth and genesis, and birth of life, it is one of the forces that oppose the voluntarism associated with consenting. As Ricoeur puts it: The grandeur and misery of human freedom [are] joined in a kind of dependent independence. This independence of willing is no smaller in effort and consent than in choice. In turn, the dependence of willing

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changes only in direction when it constitutes itself successively as a value offered in the course of motivation, as an organ offered by corporeal spontaneity, and as a necessity imposed by character, the unconscious, and life. (483; all italics Ricoeur’s) The unconscious, then, is but one of three ways in which necessity is imposed on the willing subject, necessity itself being but one of the three ways in which the subject’s freedom is tempered by the involuntary. We have taken this detour through the contextual background to Ricoeur’s earliest work in psychoanalysis to illustrate how, for Ricoeur at this time, influenced as he is by Husserlian phenomenology, psychoanalysis does not hold the key to understanding the whole panoply of life that its proponents claim. Nevertheless, Ricoeur acknowledges that a mere denial of the unconscious, as a strict adherence to Husserl’s method would entail, is not tenable: “Reading works on psychoanalysis has convinced me of the existence of facts and processes which remain incomprehensible as long as I remain prisoner of a narrow conception of consciousness . . . The facts which Freud brought to light cannot be suppressed by a stroke of the pen” (375–376). Even though Ricoeur accepts the challenge psychoanalysis proffers to consciousness, he cannot accept “the doctrine of Freudianism, in particular . . . the realism of the unconscious which the Viennese psychologist developed in connection with his methodology and his therapeutics” (376; italics Ricoeur’s). Ricoeur’s first objection to Freudianism concerns its causalism: the notion that a subject’s intentions are effects caused by hidden affective tendencies. This aspect of psychoanalysis – which Ricoeur identifies as its “naturalistic” point of view – is inimicable to its very method. In order to practice psychoanalysis, one must adopt the position of the natural sciences, which is to say, one must assume that the mental phenomena of the subject are an object that can be subjected to external scrutiny and evaluation. As Ricoeur puts it, this naturalistic point of view constitutes the working hypothesis of the analyst, “it does not constitute a part of the doctrine but of the analytic method itself, in the same way that biology is only possible if we treat the body as an object” (381). The upshot of this is that “all the heuristic capacity” of psychoanalysis “belongs to naturalism,” which means that the subject under psychoanalysis no longer tries to understand himself through introspection, but rather becomes dependent on the interpretive power of the analyst. A case in point is dreams. Ricoeur reminds us that Freud’s entire theory of neurosis is based on his method of dream analysis. As is the case with the

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discourse of the subject generally, so also in dreams, for the psychoanalyst, the “dream has a meaning, that is, can be explained by causes” (382); the dream is a psychic symptom, and “the individuality of dream images is explained by the individuality of a psychic history” (ibid.). Now, in analysis, when a dream is recounted, the progressive interpretation by the analyst constitutes a piece of reverse-engineering of what Freud calls the “dreamwork,” the psychic labor that the unconscious has performed in constructing the dream in the first place. A successful interpretation of a dream is one that arrives at the original meaning that the unconscious began with before constructing the edifice that obscures that meaning. The problem with this, as Ricoeur points out, is that since the elaboration of the original meaning into a dream is entirely unconscious, that the analyst has discovered it by an analysis that performs the dream-work in reverse is at best only a hypothesis. This calls into question the nature of the psychoanalytic cure, which incorporates three elements: the collaboration of the patient with the therapist (he must relinquish any attempt at self-critique), the interpretation of the analyst, and the reintegration of the hidden meaning into consciousness. This last element is crucial: as Ricoeur puts it, psychoanalysis heals “by means of a victory of memory over the unconscious” (384). As Freud himself came to realize quite early in his career, it is not sufficient for the patient to understand the explanation: she must also accept it. The corollary of this, on the side of interpretation, is that interpretation is the opposite of repression; it is the purification of consciousness by the reintegration into it of something that was unconscious, unconscious because repressed. This may be the attraction of psychoanalysis, but for Ricoeur it constitutes a problem. As we have already seen, it depends on the validity of a hypothesis, but that hypothesis is only testable by psychoanalysis itself: “only psychoanalytic practice can decide whether the hypothesis is a good one” (382). Moreover, Someone other . . . has to interpret and know in order for me to be able to become reconciled with myself. Someone other has to treat me as an object, as a field of causal explanation, and to consider my consciousness itself as a symptom, as the sign-effect of conscious forces, in order for myself to become the master of myself once more. (384; all italics Ricoeur’s) Ricoeur reserves his most forceful critique of psychoanalysis, however, for what he calls the Freudian “realism” of the unconscious. This is the

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notion that “the unconscious desires, imagines, and thinks” (385; italics Ricoeur’s). According to Ricoeur, the “realism of the unconscious represents a real Copernican revolution,” and it is precisely this that he finds objectionable in it: “the center of human being is displaced from consciousness and freedom as they give themselves to the unconscious and the absolute involuntary of which we are ignorant and which are to be known by a new natural science” (ibid.; italics Ricoeur’s). This is another facet of the causalism that Ricoeur has already criticized: taken to its conclusion (as indeed Freud does take it), psychoanalysis posits an unconscious that “perceives, remembers, desires, imagines, perhaps wills the death of another and its own, but is not aware of itself” (ibid.). This is a “causal” theory insofar as this posited unconscious then becomes the explanation for any enigma of consciousness, so that consciousness itself becomes “part of the unconscious, as a small circle included within a larger one” (386). For Ricoeur, this is a “mythical” unconscious, which must be attacked “in its principle” (ibid.). “The refusal to conceive of the unconscious as thinking is a foregone conclusion of freedom itself,” Ricoeur writes in referring to what he calls “Cartesian generosity.” (At this point in The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Ricoeur sees Cartesian generosity as being radically incompatible with psychoanalysis, although he amends this view later, in Freud and Philosophy.) “When I conceive of my unconscious as thinking,” writes Ricoeur, I yield to the “cowardice” that Descartes identified as the means whereby we might lose the rights and respect accorded to us as free beings. But in his concern to stand up for freedom, Ricoeur is in danger of losing sight of his philosophical point, which is that, as Husserl says, consciousness is consciousness of something. This “consciousness of . . .” justifies “the use of the word consciousness to designate perception itself,” in which case, it would become by definition impossible to have an unconscious that perceives, since any perception must necessarily entail consciousness. What Ricoeur does not spell out, but which is equally necessary to his position, is that the same argument then extends to the other modes of thought attributed by the psychoanalyst to the unconscious: the unconscious cannot desire, imagine, or will, because desiring, imagining and willing are all intentional states, and “intentionality and consciousness belong together” in the “directedness towards” objects by which Brentano initially defines intentionality (387). Ricoeur then asks whether we should conclude from this that there is no unconscious at all. His answer is that “something” is unconscious, but that the unconscious “does not think, does not perceive, does not remember.” This sets Ricoeur on his path of positing an alternative account of the unconscious from the psychoanalytic one, one that dismisses psychoanalytic

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methodology and doctrine, but which still retains the conception of the “unconscious.” The fact of dream images representing “perceived” objects unknown to the subject in her waking state does not necessarily lead to the psychoanalytic hypothesis of consciousness followed by forgetting. An alternative, “phenomenological” explanation is that the dream impressions fall within a perception that is “unreflected.” While “psychoanalysis forces us to admit that the infra-perceptive ‘impressions’ can be dissociated from their corresponding intentionality and undergo alterations such that they are cloaked by an apparent meaning which seems absurd” (387–388), nevertheless the psychoanalytic unconscious is merely “a ‘psychological’ object which refers to certain impressional aspects implied in some way by unreflecting consciousness” (388), rather than being a self-sustaining independent “real” entity separate from, superseding, or encompassing consciousness. So, if the unconscious does not think, it is the psychoanalyst who gives meaning to dreams and neuroses. In explaining this meaning, Ricoeur reminds us that “the dream becomes a complete thought only upon awakening, as I recount it” (389), a phenomenon described by Freud himself. But, contrary to Freud, “the dream was not that recounting minus the quality of consciousness” (ibid.). Rather, desires expressed in waking language . . . are only desires as conceived by the psychoanalyst or by the subject himself as he adopts them. It is convenient for the psychoanalyst to imagine that this meaning was already given “in the unconscious,” that the “dream work” . . . has changed it in a way to produce the apparent content of the dream, and that analysis undoes what the dream had done. (389) Ricoeur acknowledges that “everything takes place as if this latent meaning, conceived by the waking consciousness, were already hidden behind the manifest contents” (390), but here the “as if” is crucial: it is not necessary to invoke a thinking unconscious for meaning to emerge in the analytic situation. An equally plausible explanation, one that does not compromise consciousness, is that “it is the analyst who thinks, who is intelligent, and his patient after him” (ibid.). This does not negate the validity or efficacy of the psychoanalytic cure: indeed, Ricoeur thinks it gives it greater integrity than that lent by the psychoanalyst’s theory. The patient, according to Ricoeur, adopts “the analyst’s convictions in an intimate way” (ibid.), and it is this that enables the patient to receive a meaning from the absurd thoughts he has been having. That the meaning should come from the analyst and not

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from the patient’s own memories that have been “repressed” does not invalidate the meaning. As Ricoeur puts it, the patient recognizes something in himself which has been banned but it is not yet a fully formed thought which would lack only consciousness. It was no thought at all: it is in becoming a thought that it ceases to be a weight on conscience. Only now do the difficulties and dreams have the dignity of thought, and that thought marks the reconciliation of man with himself. This promotion to thought is what in the last instance has curative value. (390) Ricoeur is thus sympathetic toward psychoanalysis insofar as it is a cure for a disorder of the mind in those cases where consciousness has lost its ability to minister to itself, so to speak. “The true analyst,” he writes, “is not the despot of the diseased consciousness but a servant in the restoration of freedom” (400). However, seeing the role of the analyst in this way is to rescue psychoanalysis from Freudianism. Freud’s entire work, according to Ricoeur, “breathes his mistrust of the place of the will and of freedom” (401), which is why Ricoeur cannot accept that the unconscious is “purely and simply a ‘thing,’ a ‘reality’ homogenous with the nature of objects subject to the law of determinism” (400) – if it were, “it would no longer have room for a voluntary and free superstructure” (400–401). In his earliest encounter with psychoanalysis, then, Ricoeur does not seek merely to refute its findings but to integrate them into a phenomenological understanding of consciousness, and thereby to rescue psychoanalytic theory from the naturalistic, scientistic determinism that has characterized it since its inception by Freud. When Ricoeur returns to psychoanalysis in the 1960s, it is after his “hermeneutic turn” instigated in the closing pages of The Symbolism of Evil,2 but still with the desire to reconcile psychoanalysis with its apparent intellectual opposition – now, phenomenological hermeneutics – and resolve the paradox of accepting the findings of both psychoanalysis and hermeneutics together, rather than simply dismissing psychoanalysis as erroneous or irremediably flawed. Such is the grand project of Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy.3 It is Ricoeur’s premise in Freud and Philosophy that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics. In some ways, this is a commonplace – if “hermeneutics” simply means “interpretation,” then psychoanalysis is self-evidently interpretation before it is anything else: dreams, the discourse of the patient, cultural artifacts, are all interpreted by the psychoanalyst in order to discover their “hidden” meanings. But Ricoeur’s claim is less banal: he

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wishes to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics understood in the philosophical sense. This entails an acknowledgment that “there is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation” (26–27). The theory that Ricoeur favors is not what we might call the “original” version, the manifestation of a revealed truth, but rather a more modern version (post-Schleiermacher, under the influence of Gadamer), the demystification of an illusion. However, this understanding of hermeneutics at once leads Ricoeur into a problem: that, along with psychoanalysis, this philosophical hermeneutics is not quite philosophy. This is because – and, following his investigations in The Symbolism of Evil, this is what now makes psychoanalysis attractive to Ricoeur – hermeneutics and psychoanalysis alike are dependent on the interpretation of symbols. It is of the nature of symbols – in myths, say, or in dreams, or in culture in general – that they have (at least) a double meaning: in dream analysis, for example, it is the task of the analyst to discover the “true” meaning underlying the “representational” meaning, just as earlier Ricoeur himself uncovered the underlying meanings of myths in The Symbolism of Evil. It is Ricoeur’s contention, however, that the underlying “true” meaning does not negate but rather complements the surface signification. This is uncomfortable for a philosophy that requires that each symbol have a unitary discrete meaning (reference) in order for truth to be stated (or, more particularly, for a proposition to be verified). This leads Ricoeur to the conclusion that the kind of truth psychoanalysis deals with is cultural and contingent, somewhat similar to the truths of history. Thus psychoanalysis, insofar as it is a hermeneutics, cannot be a science (as Freud liked to think it was). If Ricoeur finds a rapprochement between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, then this is still not yet sufficient. His grander project is to find a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, the latter now construed as encompassing hermeneutics. This leads Ricoeur to a bold claim, which almost contradicts, and certainly advances upon, his discussion of intentionality in The Voluntary and the Involuntary. There, we recall, the phenomenological claim that intentionality and consciousness belong together was seen as an argument against the alleged realism of the unconscious: an “unconscious intention,” in this view, becomes a contradiction in terms. Somewhat counter-intuitively, in Freud and Philosophy, meanwhile, Ricoeur claims that the notion of intentionality represents a “step towards the Freudian unconscious” (378). This is because, according to Ricoeur, “consciousness is first of all an intending of the other, and not self-presence or self-possession.” Here Ricoeur is moving toward a conceptualization of

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phenomenology derived more from the Husserl of the Crisis in European Sciences than of Ideas. According to the view that intentionality directed toward the other is primary, consciousness “does not at first know itself intending” (ibid.). But even as early as Ideas, Husserl acknowledged that in actual living, the cogito is present insofar as it is implied by every intentional act (i.e., every act of utterance directed toward another person), even though in practice it is very rarely reflected upon. Put simply, every thought is by definition intentional, but in everyday thinking people do not usually think “I intended this” (and if they do, they must necessarily do so after the fact of the original thinking), and it is only a certain kind of philosopher in special philosophical moments who then goes on to say “and this implies the cogito.” Thus the intention (or cogito) underlying thought is unconscious, and according to Ricoeur, “this unawareness proper to the unreflected marks a new step toward the Freudian unconscious” (379). Ricoeur quotes with approval Vergot, who claims that the whole of Freud’s discovery can be summarized as: “the psychical is defined as meaning, and this meaning is dynamic and historical” (ibid.). Freud famously pastiched Descartes’ cogito at the end of his lecture on “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” with the words “Where id was, there ego shall be.” According to Ricoeur, this is a homologue of the phenomenological reduction. But Ricoeur also wants to claim that phenomenology is turned “directly” toward psychoanalysis by its founding philosophic act, the epoche¯ or phenomenological reduction. As Ricoeur writes, “to the extent that consciousness thinks it knows the being-there of the world, it also thinks it knows itself” (377). Thus, in the reduction, what is bracketed-off is not only the ready-to-hand brute appearance of things, but also the pseudo-knowledge of those things that an unreflecting consciousness takes for granted. “Phenomenology begins by a humiliation or wounding of the knowledge belonging to immediate consciousness”; moreover, “the whole of phenomenology is a movement toward the starting point” that is the cogito. Phenomenology finds a “true” beginning – the cogito – which is different from the beginning assumed by the “natural attitude” of immediate consciousness. This displacement of the certainty enjoyed by immediate consciousness is akin, Ricoeur thinks, to the wound dealt to consciousness by psychoanalysis. In either case, a self-misunderstanding is revealed to be inherent to immediate consciousness. A yet further point of contact between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is in their respective views of language. From a phenomenological perspective, language is intentional, but the purpose of this intentionality is to be understood as a dialectic of presence and absence. The adoption of

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language is “a way of making [man] absent to things by intending them with ‘empty’ intentions, and, correlatively, of making things present through the very emptiness of signs” (384). This finds a parallel in the way in which psychoanalysis conceives of the genesis of (the use of) linguistic signs in the individual. In a famous passage of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes the game of “fort-da” played by “a good little boy”: The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it . . . What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of the curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game – disappearance and return.4 Freud then goes on to interpret the game, an interpretation that he claims to be “obvious”: It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. (285) What Freud does not discuss as part of his interpretation – and Ricoeur does not mention that Freud does not mention it – is the accompaniment of the actions by the words “fort” (imperfectly articulated) and “da.” Ricoeur’s interpretation (is this an interpretation of the game, or of Freud’s interpretation?) is thus: “By alternately voicing the two words, the child interrelates absence and presence in a meaningful contrast; at the same time, he no longer undergoes absence as a fit of panic massively substituted for a close and saturating presence” (Ricoeur, Freud, 385). This implies a causal correlation between the removal of the panic and the articulation of the “meaningful contrast,” but this is not explicitly claimed by Freud. Freud merely claims that the game is a substitution for the absence-presence of the mother, and that it is this that has the therapeutic effect. Ricoeur claims a similar substitutive and therapeutic effect for the language that accompanies the game, a point that Freud leaves hanging. Nevertheless, the mere fact that the game is accompanied by vocalization suggests the possibility of such a secondary substitution, of the verbal for the actual, even if it is, from the perspective of the child, an accompaniment rather than a substitution.

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Still, perhaps Ricoeur is stretching the point somewhat when he claims that “the dialectic of presence and absence, which language sets in motion, is now seen to be operative in all forms of the implicit and the co-intended, in all human experience and at all levels” (385). The point is that when man instituted signs, it was in order to give up not only brute presence, but also the intending of presence in absence. This understanding of language as dialectic of presence and absence is, in Ricoeur, complemented by a theory of intersubjectivity that again mediates between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. According to phenomenology, “every meaning ultimately has intersubjective dimensions; every ‘objectivity’ is intersubjective, insofar as the implicit is what another can make explicit,” because “the fact that the perceived thing is perceptible by others brings the reference to others into the very makeup of things qua presumed things; what points to others is precisely the horizon of perceptibility, the invisible other side of the visible” (386). In psychoanalysis, meanwhile, the discourse of the unconscious only becomes intelligible through the mediation of the analyst; this is the entire basis of the “talking cure.” Analytic dialogue, moreover, is only possible because desire is expressed as a demand addressed to the other: the analytic relation (the relation between analyst and analysand) is reciprocal in just the way that intersubjective relations in general are reciprocal according to phenomenology: I posit others as perceiving just as I posit that there is an other, invisible side to things, and I recognize that that is true of others who perceive me, and who perceive objects from their (not my) standpoint. Likewise, for Ricoeur in psychoanalysis “on the one hand, the intersubjective structure of desire makes it possible to investigate desire in the relationship of transference; conversely, the analytic relationship is able to repeat the history of desire because what comes to speech in the field of the derealized discourse is desire in its original status as demand on the other” (389). Seen in this way, psychoanalysis, in its intersubjective dimension, is a phenomenology of desire. “And yet,” writes Ricoeur, “phenomenology is not psychoanalysis” (390). Despite their similarities, phenomenology and psychoanalysis cannot be wholly assimilated to one another; there are unbridgeable differences between them. First, there is no parallel in phenomenology with the psychoanalytic technique of “archaeological excavation” of the subject, whereby the subject’s account of an early past life is interpreted by the analyst. It follows from this that phenomenology’s modification of Cartesian initial doubt into the epoche¯ is not the same as the suspension of consciousness demanded by psychoanalysis. In the latter, the situation of

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consciousness is held to be one of slavery to the unconscious: Ricoeur repeats the charge made in The Voluntary and the Involuntary that psychoanalysis is a form of determinism. The phenomenological epoche¯, meanwhile, is an act of freedom, a freedom of the will that the bracketing itself does not compromise. Second, phenomenology cannot share what Freud calls the “topography” of the psyche. Again reprising The Voluntary and the Involuntary, the unconscious (the not-conscious) of phenomenology is the preconscious of Freud: psychic matter that is latent, but that can be brought to consciousness at will. (Such is the case of knowledge that I possess, but am not using at present. I know my route home this evening, but I do not have to think about it all of the time – I make it accessible to myself when I come to need it.) The Freudian unconscious as such, the properly speaking psychoanalytic unconscious, does not exist for phenomenology, if by “unconscious” psychoanalysis means psychic material that is unreachable unaided by the subject, owing to the mechanism of repression. The “bar” of repression, radically separating the unconscious from consciousness in psychoanalysis, does not exist in phenomenology. At this point Ricoeur is prepared to concede that psychoanalysis has an efficacy that phenomenology is unable to achieve: what Ricoeur identifies as Freud’s “energetics,” or the dynamic economy of psychoanalysis, cannot be accounted for by phenomenology. Specifically, the mechanism whereby literal meaning is related to an intended meaning with which it does not coincide – as in dreams – can only be accounted for psychoanalytically, not phenomenologically. Such mechanisms as the dreamwork are hermeneutic, but they reveal a juncture where hermeneutics is more closely allied to psychoanalysis than phenomenology, since the latter cannot account for a disjunction between one meaning and another within the same symbol or symbolic message. However, it is because the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is at its closest in their respective treatments of language that the difference between them in this respect is the most significant. Here Ricoeur takes issue with Lacan, in the only reference to him in Freud and Philosophy. Lacan famously claimed that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” For Ricoeur, “the problem is to assign an appropriate meaning to the word ‘like’” (400); moreover, “the word ‘like’ must receive no less emphasis than the word ‘language’” (404). Lacan likes to present Freud as some sort of linguist: “In Freud’s complete works, one out of three pages presents us with philological references, one out of two pages with logical inferences, and everywhere we see a dialectical apprehension of experience, linguistic analysis becoming still more prevalent the more directly the

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unconscious is involved.”5 But making logical inferences does not make one a logician, just as making philological references does not make one a philologist, other than in a trivial sense. And certainly, Freud never really engages in “linguistic analysis” at all. Even though his object of study is the discourse of the patient, that discourse is not interpreted linguistically, in much the same way as I don’t engage in motor mechanics when I drive my car. It is with a similar skepticism toward Freud’s alleged linguistic interests that Ricoeur approaches the problem of language in psychoanalysis. For him, “the mechanisms of the unconscious are not so much particular linguistic phenomena as they are paralinguistic distortions of ordinary language.” When psychoanalysis analyzes dreams, what is being analyzed is “something like a text,” except that what is presented is at the level of things rather than words. Lacan claims that “the very topography” of the unconscious is defined by the algorithm S/s, whereby S is the signifier that displaces a signified (s) in order for meaning to emerge. Signifier over signified – an inversion of Saussure’s original diagram illustrating the twofold nature of the sign – becomes the “barred S” of the subject. What Saussure unwittingly discovered was what Freud explicitly discovered: that language as such is metaphorical, and that its “true” meaning, the signified of the signifier, is perpetually beneath the bar – a bar that was merely schematic in Saussure, but that is now elevated to the status of being the bar of repression. Metaphor, in its perpetual submerging of a signified beneath a signifier that displaces it, is repression. And yet, Ricoeur points out, this is not what Freud says. The Lacanian algorithms merely show that “repression and metaphor exactly parallel one another” (402) – they do not demonstrate that repression and metaphor are the same thing. Lacan is useful for Ricoeur insofar as he demonstrates that “there is no economic process to which there cannot be found a corresponding linguistic aspect” (403), but nevertheless it is the “economic” explanation that guarantees the separation of the conscious from the unconscious: withdrawal of cathexis, anticathexis, and so on. According to Freud, the psychical representatives of instincts (or drives) are denied entry into the conscious, but this denial, which constitutes repression, is not itself a phenomenon of language. For Ricoeur, interpreting metaphor as repression merely shows that “the unconscious is related to the conscious as a particular kind of discourse to ordinary discourse” (ibid.), but they are, nevertheless, two separate discourses, and only the latter is, properly speaking, linguistic. Hence Lacan’s “linguistic” interpretation of Freud “has the merit of raising all the phenomena of the primary process and of repression

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to the rank of language” (405), but nevertheless, the distortion that turns the “discourse” of the unconscious into a quasi language “is not itself achieved by language” (ibid.). Moreover, of course, phenomenology does not acknowledge psychoanalytic repression, which brings us to the final respect in which psychoanalysis cannot be assimilated to phenomenology, namely, intersubjectivity. Ricoeur has already identified the fact that both phenomenology and psychoanalysis are predicated on intersubjectivity. Nevertheless, there is a radical difference in the respective ways in which intersubjectivity is conceived by psychoanalysis and phenomenology. For psychoanalysis, analysis is a work. The patient must collaborate with the other in a process of working-through (Durcharbeiten), in order to overcome resistances and bring repressed psychic material to consciousness. This leads to what Ricoeur calls “the most difficult question of analytic technique” (413), the question of transference. According to Freud, “psychoanalysis only deserves the name if the intensity of the transference has been utilised for the overcoming of resistances” (ibid.). Ricoeur at this point brings to bear “the full weight of the difference between phenomenology and psychoanalysis” (ibid.). Transference, says Freud, is at once a means of overcoming the early resistance that contributed to the illness, and itself a new resistance – potentially, the most powerful of all. At the core of the analytic phenomenon (as Freud writes in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”)6 is the sequence resistance, transference, repetition; the mastery of analytic technique consists in “using the transference to curb the patient’s compulsion to repeat in order to lead him back along the paths of remembering” (Ricoeur, Freud, 415). This can be done only within “the closed field of the analytic relationship” (414–415). Since this finds no parallel in a phenomenology of intersubjectivity, it is thus inaccessible to the practicing phenomenologist. Having explored the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis in terms of technique and underlying principles, Ricoeur returns to the hermeneutic dimension of psychoanalysis, in order to question the finding of that hermeneutics in practice, as applied to the cultural sphere. Freud’s formulation of the “Oedipus complex” is, we recall, founded on his well-known interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which appears in its first and fullest form in The Interpretation of Dreams: If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is

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exemplified . . . His destiny moves us because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first murderous wish against our father.7 Ricoeur acknowledges that “this reading is possible, illuminating, and necessary,”8 but he nevertheless “counters” it “with a second interpretation” (Ricoeur, Freud, 516): It appears that Sophocles’ creation does not aim at reviving the Oedipus complex in the minds of the spectators; on the basis of the first drama, the drama of incest and parricide, Sophocles has created a second, the tragedy of self-consciousness, of self-recognition. Thus Oedipus enters into a second guilt, an adult guilt, expressed in the hero’s arrogance and anger. At the beginning of the play Oedipus calls down curses upon the unknown person responsible for the plague, but he excludes the possibility that that person might in fact be himself. The entire drama consists in the resistance and ultimate collapse of this presumption. Oedipus must be broken in his pride through suffering; this presumption is no longer the culpable desire of the child, but the pride of the king; the tragedy is not the tragedy of Oedipus the child, but of Oedipus Rex. (Ibid.) This alternative interpretation regards the play as dealing not with Oedipus’ relation to the sphinx, but to the seer Tiresias. For Ricoeur, this presents a choice of interpretations: “the sphinx represents the side of the unconscious, the seer, the spirit, or mind” (517) – and, as he hints in Freud and Philosophy and makes explicit in his later article “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” Ricoeur here means “spirit or mind” in the Hegelian sense. Understood in this way, certain dualisms open up: the psychoanalytic reading is orientated toward the sphinx, is archaic (concerning the life of Oedipus prior to the action of the play), is on the side of the unconscious, and concerns sex (carnal knowledge), while the alternative reading is orientated towards Tiresias, concerns the truth of the present action of the play, is on the side of consciousness, and concerns light, seeing and the visionary (Hegelian absolute knowledge). It would be easy for Ricoeur to stop there: after all, Oedipus did not know that Laius and Jocasta were his father and his mother, and so although he is responsible for the death of one and the incest of the other as a causal agent, he is not ethically responsible. Intuitively, it seems more attractive as a reading of the play to see Oedipus’ punishment as a punishment for his

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hubris, his vanity in not entertaining the notion that he is the one who has brought about the city’s ills. Thus his blindness becomes a fitting punishment, since it is only then that he can “see” as Tiresias sees and attain true self-knowledge. But Ricoeur goes on to identify these two competing interpretations as representative of two types of hermeneutics more generally: “one is orientated toward the resurgence of archaic symbols and the other toward the emergence of new symbols and ascending figures” (Ricoeur, “Consciousness,” 117). This reveals something about the nature of the symbol: it re-affirms the finding of The Symbolism of Evil that symbols have a dual nature, serving both to repeat previous symbolizations and to open the way, prospectively, to further human possibilities. Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus Rex would be valid if the play were a dream – but it is a play, and as such, a work of culture: “dreams disguise, while the work of culture uncovers and reveals.” The Freudian interpretation of Oedipus Rex is, then, valid as an interpretation of “the lower, inferior and nocturnal part of man” – that it is a false interpretation of the play does not make it a false interpretation of (that aspect of) man. Ricoeur’s task, however, is to understand the whole man: this is the ultimate task of all of his phenomenology, hermeneutics, and philosophy. Thus the “conflict of interpretations,” which arises from these two forms of hermeneutics must be understood dialectally, rather than as a simple opposition. Nor can we say that the two types of hermeneutics are simply complementary: as Ricoeur puts it, “we cannot simply add up Hegel and Freud and give to each a half of man” (118). “Dialectic” in this context means, rather, acknowledging that the two types of hermeneutics are ultimately the same as one another, which means, that they ultimately reveal the same truth: “just as we must say that everything about man is equally physiological and sociological, so we must also say that the two readings in question cover exactly the same field” (117). When “the Freudian [says] that the interpretation of Oedipus Rex in other than psychoanalytic terms expresses no more than the resistance of the self-proclaimed hermeneut to analysis itself” (119), this is true. Freud thus explains Hegel just as Hegel explains Freud.

Notes 1

2

Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966). See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967), 347–357.

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Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1970). Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, eds. James Strachey and Angela Richards (New York: Penguin, 1984), 284. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 424. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1973), 155–156. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards (New York: Penguin, 1973), 364. Paul Ricoeur, “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. Willis Domingo, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 115.

Chapter 12

Ricoeur and Musicology: Music, Hermeneutics, and Aesthetic Experience Roger W. H. Savage

[I]t is when music is not in the service of a text having its own verbal meanings, when it is no longer anything but this tone, this mood, this color of the soul, when all external intentionality has disappeared and when it no longer has a signified that it possesses its full power of regenerating or recomposing our personal experience. Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction

Paul Ricoeur’s conviction—as seems in the epigraph above—that music expresses feelings and moods for which words are lacking contrasts starkly with the perspective of postmodern musicology. At first glance, Ricoeur’s claim that each piece of music “is authentically a modality of the soul”1 even appears to confirm the ideal of music’s metaphysical dignity: an ideal that critical musicologists schooled in postmodern theory and cultural studies struggle against. By asking whether one of the main functions of music is to construct a world of singular essences in the realm of feeling, Ricoeur seems to justify isolating music’s aesthetic quality by setting musical works apart from the world. Accordingly, his claim – that, of all the arts, music perhaps goes the furthest in breaking with reality – might seem initially to justify music’s aesthetically autonomous status at the expense of critical interpretations of music’s social meaning and value. At the same time, this retreat from the world is the condition of reality’s renewal in accordance with the work’s expressive power. Ricoeur’s contention that music’s regenerative power is greater when music withdraws from the world therefore exceeds cultural musicology’s ambition to attribute an extramusical significance to a work’s internal features and processes.

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Although Ricoeur’s remarks on music are somewhat rare, they provide an occasion for reexamining both traditional ideas about music and the more recent attempts to deconstruct those ideas. More specifically, his contention that music conveys moods that affect us “without representing anything of the real”2 invites a critical reevaluation of the role that musical hermeneutics plays in combating ideas of instrumental music’s transcendent ineffability. Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive relation through which individual works model the real offers an alternative to the sterile opposition between the romantic sensibility that music is a “language beyond language” and postmodern deconstructions of this sensibility’s metaphysical pretensions. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical treatment of the productive relation between individual works and reality considerably enriches prevailing perspectives on musical hermeneutics. In fact, Ricoeur’s insight that mimesis is creative provides an important corrective to viewing musical hermeneutics as a method of deciphering a work’s social and political value. Exiling individual works to the recesses of cultural, historical, and sociopolitical analysis paradoxically dissimulates music’s efficacy and obviates the work’s power to speak. This power, inseparable from the aesthetic experience of a work, underlies the work’s expressions of moods and feelings that, in turn, redescribe affective dimensions of our experiences. In response to the conflict between claims regarding music’s aesthetic purity and contextualizing interpretations that set works back into the real life situations of composers, performers, and musical practitioners, a hermeneutics of music aims to uncover the relation between music’s efficacy – its ontological vehemence – and its power to refigure our inherence in the world.

Music Criticism as Hermeneutics of Suspicion The tactic of deconstructing music’s claim to autonomy is an example of the hermeneutics that Ricoeur places under the heading of “suspicion.” According to him, the hermeneutics of suspicion aims to tear away masks that conceal the dissimulating effects of ideological forces, of language, and of the pretensions on the part of the subject to be transparent to itself. This hermeneutics is therefore “not an explication of the object, but . . . [is instead] an interpretation that reduces disguises”3 to expressions of false consciousness. The strategy of unmasking music’s metaphysical transcendence of the world by deciphering hidden political agendas also operates in this vein. For example, in order to dismantle the pretense that music operates independently of social forces and constraints, critical

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musicologists identify processes internal to music with socially constructed representations of gender.4 Turned against the bourgeois celebration that exalts music as the most spiritual of the arts, this hermeneutics of suspicion denounces the dissimulation of music’s social effects under the guise of the autonomous work of art. Ironically, the struggle over the value and meaning of music within musicology has contributed to the occultation of music’s power to affect reality. During the 1980s and 1990s, musicologists such as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik drew on a variety of critical perspectives, including feminist criticism, Derridean deconstruction, the new historiography, and Adorno’s critical theory, in order to challenge the deep-seated conviction that music could be analyzed, interpreted, and understood as an isolated phenomenon. These “new” musicologists (a term that was later replaced first by that of “critical musicologists” and then “cultural musicologists”) maintained that music, as it had been traditionally understood within the field, was a phantasm. For cultural musicologists, music’s aesthetic autonomy masked the real significance of music as a cultural product. Music’s construction as an aesthetic object shielded from social or cultural criticism therefore stood out as the preeminent disciplinary principle against which postmodern musicologists made common cause. When Joseph Kerman called upon musicologists to combat the myopia of a discipline whose methods of analysis and criticism justified a cherished canon of high art works, he opened a door that could not afterward be shut. The “dogged concentration on internal relationships within the single work of art”5 was no longer adequate for the critical intrigues of music’s social and political agendas. The real intellectual milieu of analysis, Kerman maintained, was not scientific but ideological.6 In the interest of legitimating a canon of works whose exemplary value could be logically demonstrated in accordance with the ideology of organicism, the positivist precepts of traditional musicology sealed the work against the intrusion of critical interpretations that would expose references to gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and ethnicity. Hermann Kretzschmar’s musical hermeneutics prefigured the standpoint that was subsequently refashioned in accordance with cultural musicologists’ deconstructive agendas. Kretzschmar proposed to enhance the listener’s aesthetic appreciation by providing a means of discerning the true spirit of a work. The goal of hermeneutics, Kretzschmar wrote, is to penetrate the sense and ideational content that the forms enclose, to search out everywhere the soul under the body, to reveal in every part of

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a work of art the pure kernel of thought, [and] to explain and interpret the whole from the clearest knowledge of the smallest particulars with the use of every aid that technical training, general cultivation and personal endowment make available.7 Instrumental music, in particular, required and even demanded this hermeneutical aid; instrumental music’s deficiency with respect to the representational power of language in fact made it a “born auxiliary art.”8 Kretzschmar accordingly credited music’s lack of independence to music’s failure to communicate in a comparable way to language’s clear expression of thoughts, ideas, and intentions. Musical hermeneutics thus constituted an indispensable aid to understanding the works of the great masters by conceptualizing the expressly intended content for which a work’s form was only the covering shell. Kretzschmar’s recourse to a method of interpretation that made explicit a work’s spiritual content and its mental substance effectively drew a line between music’s formal characteristics and language’s role in identifying extra-musical referents. By vesting musical hermeneutics with the task of explicating meanings attached to structural processes and features, Kretzschmar justified the recourse to ordinary language as an aid to understanding while reinforcing the notion that instrumental music lacked the referential power of speech. However, this notion rests on a concept of language that, Ricoeur reminds us, representative thought advances “when it treats language as Ausdruck, ‘expression’ – that is, as the exteriorization of the interior, and hence as the domination of the outside by the inside.”9 Kretzschmar passed over this vexing nexus of music, language, and subjectivity. Critical musicologists, however, could not ignore the ideological function of the difference between music and language to which Kretzschmar drew attention. Denunciations of the conceit on the part of the subject to posit itself as master of meaning, as well as the suspicion that language erases its metaphysical traces, conspired to defeat the chimera of instrumental music’s ineffability. Consequently, cultural musicologists operating under the banner of postmodern thought rejected music’s metaphysical pretenses as the result of the modernist subject’s hubris. The advantage of attacking the difference between music and language plays itself out in the “polysemy en abîme of discourse”10 that, Ricoeur remarks, is indicative of the transgressive character of postmodernism. Charles Seeger’s formulation of the linguocentric predicament anticipates the deconstructive enterprise. For Seeger, the difficulty of integrating knowledge that is acquired by speaking about music with the “music knowledge of

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music”11 compelled musicologists to employ a less comprehensive scholarly language in order to translate music’s more comprehensive expressions. The incommensurability of these two commutative systems created a situation where the impossibility of mastering the excesses of music’s expressive significance led to rhetorical excesses of synecdochic references. Ricoeur cautions against the “disturbing fecundity of the oblivion”12 of a circular discourse on the impossibility of mastering the rhetorical field in which such a discourse operates. Nevertheless, the allure of reducing this discourse’s circularity to the aporias unleashed by the destruction of the metaphysics of presence was tactically irresistible. Accordingly, the difference between music and language became the first front in the struggle against music’s institution as an aesthetically autonomous entity whose impenetrable ineffability shielded it from critical examination. Lawrence Kramer, for one, insisted that music’s putative unworldliness was a function of this difference. Forcing musicologists either to “use language to present positive knowledge about the contexts”13 of music’s provenance, performance practices, and notation, or to develop a technical vocabulary that “asymptotically draws language so close to the axis of ‘musical knowledge’”14 as to minimize its misrepresentation, precluded criticism. The difference between music as a figure of immediate presence and music as the object of musicological knowledge placed music in the metaphysical position otherwise reserved for speech. The consequences, Kramer concludes, were disastrous. Setting epistemological limits that deny language access to the immediate reality of music stigmatized any attempt to “speak about or like or in some sense with music”15 in rhetorical and subjective ways rather than scientifically descriptive ones. Kramer’s tactical response was to enlist musical hermeneutics in the fight against the metaphysical pretensions of music’s transcendent ineffability. The idea that music was a “language beyond language,” which, as Carl Dahlhaus notes, sprang from the “poetic conceit of unspeakability”16 isolated the experience of a work from its sustaining life-contexts. Kramer consequently sought to demystify this experience, along with its object. He therefore identified three types of hermeneutic windows that could be deployed to ascribe discursive meanings to music: (1) a text, title, program notes, or expressive markings; (2) citations that refer or allude to literary works, visual images, or historical moments or styles; (3) structural tropes. Displaced from its privileged position as a venue for transcendence, music accordingly became the site of an excess and lack. On the one hand, the play between a work’s autonomy and the contingencies of its creation, performance, and reception was, for Kramer, the locus of a pure jouissance that,

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under the sign of absolute music’s erasure, escapes representation. On the other hand, the infinite potential for music to register shared experiences grounded in a common social milieu charged musical hermeneutics with ascribing representative meanings that were embodied by medium-specific patterns internal to a work’s organization. The reading Kramer offers of Haydn’s The Creation illustrates one application of this hermeneutic method. According to him, the introductory movement, Die Vorstellung des Chaos, together with the following recitative and chorus on the first lines of Genesis, play out the Christian myth in which the Word brings order to the universe. In order to identify the “movement from chaos to creation”17 as representing Enlightenment aspirations, Kramer turns to resemblances between musical figures and processes, and the religious and mythical discourses and narratives to which they ostensibly adhere. Following the opening forte attack and the fading of this Urklang into silence, Haydn begins to assemble the “raw materials of harmony”18 by successively adding tones to build the “chaos” chord (C-E flat-A flat). In the wake of this unstable harmony, the music begins to project a semblance of consonance and stability before a second orchestral thrust irrupts in preparation for a return to the chaos chord. The cumulative effect gives Haydn’s representation of chaos a sense of urgency that almost bespeaks “a desire to be lifted into cosmos.”19 The ascending musical figures emulate the “traditional visualization of the cosmos as spatial/spiritual hierarchy.”20 Moreover, the frustrated musical expectations of the representation of chaos’s cadential resolution “betoken a plea for the voicing of the Word as the lux fiat.”21 Thus, Kramer concludes that the staging of the primal consonance representing the penetrating light of creation – the C major triad “creation cadence”22 – has the metaphorical value of invoking a dawning harmonia mundi while praising the Creator who calls the world into existence. The political force of the image of Enlightenment drawn from Haydn’s “The Representation of Chaos” supports Kramer’s claim concerning the tropological nature of music’s meaning. Consequently, for him, the resemblances between the image of creation’s emergence from chaos and humanity’s emancipation from the darkness of myth and superstition harbor the specter of authoritarian reason. As a utopian ritual celebrating the Enlightenment promise of harmony and human perfectibility, the image in The Creation of the triumph of order over chaos equally applies to the “policing of society.”23 Hence, The Creation’s ideological thrust emerges from its legitimation of an instance of violence shrouded in the divine mystery of reason’s primal alliance with transcendent truth. Once illuminated by the demystifying reason of Kramer’s musical hermeneutics, The Creation’s simulation of

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reason and truth succumbs to postmodern suspicions of the Enlightenment project. On this reading, the representation of the Word (Logos) puts an end to chaos by appropriating the disconcerting musical logic behind the chaos chord’s cyclic return without fully mastering it, thereby admitting a place for the admix of terror and pleasure that Jean-François Lyotard has identified with the postmodern sentiment of the sublime.24

Metaphorical Resonances The question immediately arises as to whether a tactic fascinated with denouncing the metaphysics of absolute music exhausts music’s power to speak. Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor offers at least two important advantages that, in contrast to deconstructive agendas, open the way for a renewed understanding of music’s expressive vehemence. First, the work of metaphor exemplifies the paradox that reality’s suspension [epoche¯ ] is only the negative condition for reality’s redescription. In contrast to the accusation that the distance separating a work from reality dissembles the work’s true significance, this paradox provides a way of thinking about reality’s productive mediation through individual works. Second, Ricoeur’s analysis of the metaphorical operation provides a guide for thinking about music’s expressive vehemence. In particular, by extending the metaphor’s semantic bearing to poetic feelings, Ricoeur gives some further indication of music’s mimetic character in refiguring our affective relation to the world. The operative role that imagination plays in the creation of meaning highlights the difference between Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor and the view that metaphor consists in substituting a more figurative term for a literal one. On Ricoeur’s analysis, introducing a semantic impertinence puts predicative tensions into play. For example, taken literally, the statement “The peace process is on the ropes” is nonsense. Placing in proximity two terms belonging to different semantic fields – one related to the diplomacy of peace talks, the other to the combative sport of boxing – introduces the initial semantic clash. The resulting metaphorical attribution places before the eyes, as it were, the combative image of diplomatic accord on the brink of defeat. Hence, the metaphorical statement produces an emergent meaning that resolves the initial impertinence (on the literal level) through the figurative attribution of a new predicative pertinence. In other words, the metaphorical operation schematizes a predicative assimilation of non-literal attributes. Drawing from Kant’s concept of the imagination “as schematizing a synthetic operation,”25 Ricoeur identifies the

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new figurative meaning with the work of resemblance. On his analysis, the “enigma of iconic presentation”26 consists in the way that the predicative assimilation is depicted: by displaying the relations through which the new meaning presents itself “each time the new intended meaning is grasped as what the icon describes or depicts.”27 The resemblances that metaphors create are therefore the concrete milieu in which the meaning schematized by the predicative assimilation can be heard, felt, and read. The significance of this productive moment cannot be emphasized enough. By suspending ostensive, literal references, the metaphorical meaning of the new predicative pertinence redescribes the real in the light of its own heuristic fiction. Overlooking the paradox at the heart of reality’s metaphorical redescription heightens the temptation to reverse the effects of setting music apart from reality by placing it within a special cultural sphere. Ricoeur, however, cautions against ratifying a prejudice we emphatically attempt to resist. He therefore stresses that by regarding the question of music’s, literature’s, and art’s impact on life as irrelevant, we confirm that “the real is the given, such as it can be empirically observed and scientifically described.”28 The paradox that he attributes to metaphor’s power to remake reality accordingly unseats this prejudice, which tends to seal literature, for example, in its own world. George Levine’s plea for a rehabilitated view of the aesthetic as a mode of conduct and expression that operates differently from other modes of social practice similarly takes aim at the idea that works of literature are de facto complicit with reality’s ideological mystification.29 Moreover, the inability on the part of critics to explain how music or literature breaks free of the world in which it is seemingly locked up – in a way that the power of imagination at work impacts reality – tends to multiply the contradictions that ensnare critics who continue to engage with works they denounce. The challenges of reclaiming the aesthetic’s productive force from the effects of consciously differentiating between the pure work of art and material reality are formidable. Moreover, it is difficult to avoid the allure of denouncing how the bourgeois religion of art is complicit with the use to which cultural works are put in the fight for social position and power. In response, Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor warns against modes of criticism that either lock works up in their presumed self-sufficiency, or refuse to acknowledge the effect they have on the moral and political order through expressing their own unique worlds.30 Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, accordingly, provides an important key to the difficulty that arises from music’s apparent inability to refer to or to represent reality in ostensive ways. In appealing to the metaphor-making

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activity of the critic, Anthony Newcomb emphasizes this difficulty in order to offer a solution. Through the analogies between a work’s syntactical features and its expressive content, based on coded conventions of various paradigmatic plots, the critic creates the metaphors suggestive of the referential value of a musical work. Metaphor-making, in this sense, defines the critic’s interpretive role. Expressive interpretation thus complements, and in a sense completes, structural considerations by identifying analogies between the work’s internal organization and the non-aesthetic experiences in which the work’s expressive features are grounded, and to which they ultimately refer. By distinguishing between two modalities of musical meaning and their corresponding modes of interpretation, Newcomb situates the question of music’s metaphorical reference within a field conventionally associated with musical hermeneutics. Within this field, formal interpretation seeks to discover the internal sense of a work’s structural features, while expressive interpretation aims to explicate the meaning of a work for a perceptive listener. By attributing music’s expressiveness to the metaphorical resonances to be discovered between the properties of a work and “properties of experience outside the object itself,”31 Newcomb intends to free the critic from dogmatic constraints. Yet, the real advantage of his venture lies in identifying these resonances with the metaphorical operation as such. For a theory of musical expression that intends to open the referential field to the range of meanings originating with the experience of a work, seeking a “conceptual mechanism for moving from the work’s intrinsic syntactic relations to those relations with other aspects of experience”32 highlights the relation between the listener and the work. Insisting that music’s referential meaning is secondary to the primary meaning of structural properties on which it is predicated eclipses a work’s metaphorical exemplification of moods and feelings. Nevertheless, through Nelson Goodman’s theory of metaphorical exemplification, Newcomb accentuates the contrast between the act of denotation and the process of metaphorical exemplification, which for Newcomb authorizes the critic’s creative metaphor-making to discover or invent resemblances between music’s properties and those drawn from other realms of experience. Reversing the flow of denotation from reference to thing legitimates attributing a referent to a work. The term “green,” for example, can denote the color of a swatch, while the swatch exemplifies the term by expressing “greenness.”33 However, in Ricoeur’s analysis, Goodman’s treatment of exemplification as the obverse of denotation ultimately affects Goodman’s theory of metaphor as such. In reversing the direction of denotation,

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exemplification consists in depicting a property that something possesses. Combined with this reversal of reference, the metaphorical transfer of properties makes exemplification a mode of expression. Consequently, as the “metaphorical possession of non-verbal predicates,”34 expression consists in the exemplification of properties, meanings, and feelings portrayed by singular works. According to Ricoeur, the symmetry of exemplification and denotation by inversion surmounts the “ruinous distinction of the cognitive and the emotive . . . from which that of denotation and connotation is derived.”35 Expression, which is the exemplification in a singular work of this metaphorical possession, belongs to the order of a representation that discloses its meaning in the manner in which it presents it. Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor radically alters the concept of reference. First, the eclipse of the referential mode of ordinary denotation is only the condition for another mode of reference in which heuristic fictions redescribe reality. By holding back from the consequences that “representation can depict a non-existent” thing such as a unicorn and that the “nonexistent also helps to fashion the world,”36 Goodman, as Ricoeur points out, does not adequately account for poetic discourse’s suspension of descriptive references. Specifically, Goodman’s nominalist conception of language cannot account for the “air of rightness that certain . . . fortunate instances of language and art seem to exude.”37 Conversely, verbal and nonverbal predicates that express sounds, images, and feelings (i.e., sensa) that adhere to the sense of a work are part of the emergent meaning. As transferred possessions that retain no primordial right, these sensa are qualities that are no less real than descriptive traits articulated by scientific discourse.38 The work’s expression of its world incarnates the qualities of the work. With the suspension of descriptive references that bind the work’s meaning to an already existing order, this world emerges as the secondorder referent of a work that remakes reality in accordance with itself. By accounting for the place of feeling in the metaphorical process, Ricoeur’s theory offers strong support for the hermeneutical claim that music’s expression of feelings and moods also redescribes affective dimensions of our experiences. According to this theory, the feeling that accompanies and completes this work of imagination in schematizing the new predicative pertinence shares in the semantic bearing of metaphor’s claim to truth. Inasmuch as the “instantaneous grasping of the new congruence [intended by the metaphor] is ‘felt’ as well as ‘seen,’”39 the metaphor exemplifies its mood or feeling by generating this mood or feeling in the thickness of the imaging scene. In this regard, metaphor structures its mood or feeling in the same way as does a poem, whose singular mood is coextensive

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with its verbal structure. Ricoeur comments that: “a poem is like a work of music in that its mood is exactly coextensive with the internal order of symbols articulated by its language.”40 Hence, in the same way that the language of a poem is directed toward “an interior, which is nothing other than the mood structured and expressed by a poem,”41 a musical work achieves its ontological vehemence by expressing a mood. By relating the phenomenological objectivity of feeling to the tensional structure of the truth of metaphorical statements, Ricoeur gives feeling its proper ontological weight. Unlike the act of knowing, feeling manifests “a relation to the world that constantly restores our complicity with it.”42 By uniting an “intention toward the world and an affection of the self,”43 feelings interiorize the reality that we otherwise objectify in order to gain some mastery of it. Accordingly, poetic feelings renew our inherence in the world by intensifying and augmenting the sense of being affected that attests to our non-objectifying insertion in the world. Heidegger comments that, in aiming at our possible modes of attunement to the world, poetical discourse discloses existence.44 His statement resonates with Ricoeur’s insight into the truth of metaphorical redescription. By suspending ordinary emotions, poetic feelings augment the affective field of our experiences through the meaning displayed by a metaphor, poem, musical work, or work of art.

Music as Limit Experience At first glance, Ricoeur’s extension of his treatment of metaphor to the poetics of narrativity would seem to exclude music. In an interview, he states that music is an art that is certainly not mimetic.45 Mimesis, Ricoeur maintains following Aristotle, is an action about action. The correlation between narrative activity and the temporal character of action, according to him, “presents a transcultural form of necessity.”46 The intelligibility of the intermediary moment (mimesis2) in Ricoeur’s three-fold theory of mimesis stems from the capacity of the configuring operation to effect the traversal of the entire arc from reality’s narrative prefiguration (mimesis1) to its refiguration (mimesis3). By mediating between individual incidents and a story as a whole, the emplotment of events “draws a configuration out of a simple succession.”47 Moreover, by bringing such factors together as “agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, [and] unexpected results,”48 the work of configuring actions and events effects the transition between the paradigmatic order of the semantics of action, for example, and the syntagmatic order of

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the plot. Finally, the story as a whole gives a figure to the narrative’s properly temporal characteristics. Thus the “synthesis of the heterogeneous” constitutes the “concordant discordance”49 brought about by the plot’s mediating function. Conversely, Ricoeur’s acknowledgment of the limits of the narrative art enlarges the mimetic field and heightens the paradox of a work’s productive significance. For Ricoeur, the greater the work’s retreat, the “more intense the return back upon the real, as [if] coming from a greater distance,”50 and hence the greater the work’s biting power. Music, Ricoeur claims, goes further than even non-figurative painting in this respect. In possessing a “certain mood . . . without representing anything of the real, . . . [a work] establishes in us the corresponding mood or tone.”51 It is as if, in withdrawing from the world, music intensifies the paradox that Ricoeur identifies with a work’s productive reference – namely, that suspending the real is only the negative condition of reality’s mimetic refiguration. Just as crucially, the intensity of music’s suspension of ordinary references has a correlate in the existential deepening of the experience of time. The deepening of the experience that gives rise to Western thought about time, Ricoeur explains, has two archaic inspirations: Greek and Hebraic.52 For him, the effort to grasp the meaning of time ultimately fails “when time, escaping our will to mastery, surges forth on the side of what, in one way or another, is the true master of meaning.”53 Consequently, the aporia of time’s inscrutability, which Ricoeur identifies with time’s ultimate unrepresentability, “springs forth at the moment when time, escaping any attempt to constitute it, reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed by the work of constitution.”54 In the closing pages of volume three of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur emphasizes how the multiplication of limit experiences in narrative stakes out the borderlines between time and eternity. Moreover, as the narrative art approaches its limits in attempting to draw near the inscrutability of time, other genres of discourse speak in their own ways of time and the other of time. For example, lyric poetry “gives a voice, which is also a song”55 to a meditation on the disproportion between the fragility of human life and the eroding power of time. Beyond these limits of narrative, music’s own explorations of the affective modalities of the soul also have an exemplary value in response to the aporia of time’s inscrutability. The heterogeneity of time that irrupts with music’s creation of special worlds is unique in this respect. In response to the existential deepening of the experience of time, music stakes out the border between time and eternity and gives voice to limit experiences in the face of time’s ultimate

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unrepresentability. Music, as ethnomusicologist John Blacking maintains, could be regarded as a proof of the universe’s spiritual nature.56 Limit experiences gain force in proportion to the feeling of belonging to being in the face of our mortal condition. The disproportion between the time that delivers us over to its ravaging effects and a time beyond time – the nunc stans of the eternal present or a time in illo tempore – gives rise to the melancholia of our mortal condition. This melancholia, Ricoeur reminds us, is the source of the complaisance of accedia, that is, the sadness felt in the face of our own mortality. This sadness is the “specific ‘mood’ of finitude rendered conscious of itself.”57 The sadness of meditative memory, however, is not the final word. Where anguish, which is the underside of absence and distance of being, is the “feeling par excellence of ontological difference,” the sublimation of the mood that arises when anguish delivers itself over to the pensiveness of meditative memory bears witness that “we have a part of us linked to this very lack of being in beings.”58 This is the reason why joy is the “only affective ‘mood’ worthy of being called ontological.”59 While the ontological difference between beings and being indicates a phenomenon that is no longer accessible to hermeneutic philosophy as such,60 music in its own way replies to time’s existential deepening. The ecstatic character of the experiences that A. J. Racy attributes to t‚arab music is one example in which ordinary time is surpassed by the feeling of being “out of time.” T‚arab, Racy explains, is a term used in this secular Middle Eastern tradition for the “extraordinary emotional state evoked by the music.”61 The term t‚arab is related to salt‚anah, an ecstatic state in which the “performer becomes musically self-absorbed (mundamij), and experiences well-focused and intense musical sensations.”62 Significantly, salt‚anah, and t‚arab more generally refer to an “altered sense of time, more specifically as ‘timelessness’ or temporal transcendence.”63 In the super-real world of this ecstatic time, t‚arab performance heightens and intensifies feelings and emotions. The “enchanting melancholy . . . . evoked by the voice,” Racy tells us, “captivates [performers and listeners] through its beauty or rather, [it] overwhelms [them] through its sweet pathos.”64 T‚arab ecstasy, in short, is one poetic reply in which, rendered conscious of itself, the pathos of human finitude is crowned by joy. The musical example that Ricoeur cites comes from a different time and place. For him, the “powerful evocation of a sublime sadness” in Beethoven’s last quartets and sonatas reverses the complaisance toward sadness by completing the work of mourning, which for Ricoeur is also the required path of remembering. Joy “is the reward for giving up the lost object and a token of the reconciliation with its internalized object.”65 In redescribing

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the affective field of our experiences, Beethoven’s late quartets, like t‚arab music and perhaps even Haydn’s Creation discussed earlier, deepen the feeling of belonging to being in proportion to the measure they give of (other than) being’s avowed heights. At this limit, music’s mimetic refiguration of time and the other of time avows the feeling of dependence that Ricoeur contrasts with the “assertion of radical autonomy.”66 Dependence, as opposed to this assertion, is “perhaps the only possible truth of religion, an avowal of an element of passivity in my existence, an avowal that in some ways I receive existence.”67 Ricoeur stresses that the “variety of experiences of passivity, [which are] intertwined in multiple ways in human action” is “the phenomenological respondent to the metacategory of otherness.” Passivity therefore “becomes the attestation of otherness.”68 This attestation of otherness not only prevents the self from assuming the place of an ultimate foundation but also enjoins the self to recognize its dependence upon the otherness of the other. Cultural works’ refiguration of affective dimensions of our experiences through their singular expressions of superreal worlds of time renews the meaning of time in accordance with these worlds, and hence these works’ avowed truth. This avowal notwithstanding, music’s expressions of limit experiences evoke feelings of transcendence in response to the existential deepening of the aporia of time’s ultimate unrepresentability. This hermeneutical understanding of music’s power provides a fitting rejoinder to the suspicion that music’s ineffability masks a sociopolitical agenda. Ultimately, music’s mimetic redescription of the affective dimensions of our experience constitutes a mode of attestation that carries the force of a conviction. The self-assimilation that Ricoeur maintains “is a part of the commitment proper to the ‘illocutionary’ force of the metaphor as speech act”69 exemplifies the affective vehemence of the process of grasping the new congruence of the metaphorical reference that is felt as well as seen. The complex intentionality of feelings, according to which feelings make the thought (dianoia) schematized by a work our own, stands over against and, in a sense, lies beneath critical deconstructions of the myth of music’s transcendent ineffability. By augmenting our affective field, the imaginative exploration of moods and feelings in individual works renews our elective affinities with the world. Correlatively, the acknowledgment of the otherness of the other, which in the final analysis avows the element of passivity in existence, carries the force of an attestation. The force of the conviction that accompanies the mimetic refiguration of my inherence in the world at the same time bears witness to the sense of the injunction that issues from the side of that which, in escaping my power to master it, reveals itself as wholly other. For Ricoeur, the

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philosopher as philosopher . . . does not know and cannot say whether this Other, [which is] the source of the injunction [that enjoins the self in the form of conscience], is another person, . . . [or] ancestors for whom there is no representation, to so great an extent does my debt to them constitute my very self, or God – living God, absent God – or an empty place.70 With this aporia of the Other, philosophical discourse is brought to an end. By asking whether the work of art is “not a model for thinking the notion of testimony,”71 Ricoeur accentuates the value of limit experiences one last time. If “one can speak of truth in relation to the work of art,” he speculates, “it is to the extent that this designates the capacity of the work of art to break a path in the real by renewing the real in accordance with the work itself.”72 The lateral transposition of aesthetic experience into other domains, which he maintains is authorized by the conjunction of the singularity and communicability of the work, in turn foregrounds the exemplarity of individual works. In contrast to efforts by critical musicologists to reverse the practice of abstracting work from the sustaining life contexts, music’s retreat from the real intensifies the paradox at the heart of music’s ontological vehemence. The effect of being drawn to follow exemplary moral acts, which for Ricoeur “is really the equivalent of the communicability of the work of art,”73 similarly underscores the force of individual works. At the limit, works that give voice to a “time beyond time” attest to the heights of the feeling of belonging from the depths of our mortal condition. Each work makes its claim on us by opening us to the world anew. Through redescribing our inherence in the world, music’s expression of pathos and joy continues to bear witness to our being in the face of time’s ultimate inscrutability.

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Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 174. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 174. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 30. “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” (32). See Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 73; see 115 ff. Joseph Kerman, “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7: 2 (1980), 314. Hermann Kretzschmar, “Suggestions for the Furtherance of Musical Hermeneutics,” in Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, vol. 3, ed. E. A. Lippman (New York: Pendragon Press, 1990), 6. Ibid., 9. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 284. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 255. Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 16. See Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 14 ff. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 291. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 15; see Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 11 ff. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 16. Ibid.; original emphasis. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 96. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 76. Ibid. Ibid., 79. “In Haydn’s frame of reference, to represent the dawn of creation is inevitably to stage a first sounding of the primal consonance, the C-major triad: traditionally the chord of nature, the chord of light, and for Haydn’s Austrian audience, the tonic triad of the solemn Mass” (87). Ibid., 87. Ibid., 94. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79 ff.; see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 145; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 148. Ibid. Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection & Imagination. ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 148. George Levine, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1 ff.

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Ricoeur, Ricoeur Reader, 148. Anthony Newcomb, “Sound and Feeling,” Critical Inquiry 10:4 (1984), 625. Newcomb recognizes the “danger . . . that the medium of the interpretation may swamp the music, especially in a culture much more adept verbal than musically. The critic can combat this by returning constantly to the impetus for the particular metaphor in the musical processes themselves . . . and by insisting that the verbal metaphor is only a secondary example from the range of expressive potential in the primary musical meaning” (637). Ibid., 625. Ibid., 622. Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 234. Ibid. The “opposition between representing and expressing will not be a difference of domain (for example the domain of objects or events and the domain of feelings, as in an emotionalist theory), since representing is a case of denoting, and expressing is a variant by transference of possessing, which is a case of exemplifying; and since exemplifying and denoting are cases of making reference, with only a difference of direction. A symmetry by inversion replaces an apparent heterogeneity, by means of which the ruinous distinction of the cognitive and the emotive – from which that of denotation and connotation is derived – could creep back in again” ( 234). Ibid., 233. Ibid., 239; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 238. Hence “they belong to things over and above being effects subjectively experienced by the lover of poetry.” Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process,” 154. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 59. Ibid. Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 85. Ibid., 89. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time¸ trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 205. Paul Ricoeur, “Arts, Language and Hermeneutic Aesthetics,” trans. R. D. Sweeney and John Carroll, http://www.philagora.net/philo-fac/ricoeur-e.htm. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52. Ibid., 65. Ibid. Ibid., 66. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 176. Ibid., 174. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 264 ff. Ibid., 261. Ibid. Ibid., 273.

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67 68 69 70 71 72 73

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John Blacking, “The Context of Venda Possession Music: Reflections on the Effectiveness of Symbols,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 17 (1985): 68–69. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 76. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 106. Ibid.; original emphasis. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, 270. A. J. Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of T‚arab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 295. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 77. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 32. Ibid. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318; original emphasis. Ricoeur “Metaphorical Process,” 154; see also, Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 299 ff. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 355. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 182. Ibid., 173–174; original emphasis. Ibid., 182–183.

Notes on Contributors

Pamela Sue Anderson is reader in philosophy of religion, University of Oxford, UK, and fellow in philosophy, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, UK. She is author of Ricoeur and Kant: A Philosophy of the Will (Scholars Press, 1993), and numerous articles on Ricoeur. She is also the author of A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, 1998) and co-editor of Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (Routledge, 2004). She is also editing New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming, 2009). Bernard P. Dauenhauer is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics and numerous articles on Ricoeur’s thought. He has also written extensively on the place of hope in responsible political practice. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson is assistant professor in the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Race: Toward a Revolutionary Construction of Black Identity (Valencia, 2007) as well as coeditor of Critical Perspectives on bell hooks (Routledge, 2009) and Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY, forthcoming) Scott Davidson is associate professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University. He is the translator of Michel Henry’s works: Material Phenomenology (Fordham, 2008) and Seeing the Invisible (Continuum, 2009). He is also editor of a double-issue devoted to Ricoeur in the Journal of French Philosophy. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is associate professor in the English department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. She has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, a Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Fellow, and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. She is the author of Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (SUNY, 2006). She is also the editor of Interpretation and its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz (Rodopi, 2003).

230

Notes on Contributors

François Dosse is professor of history at IUFM (Créteil). He is the author of the following works: L’histoire en miettes (La Découverte, 1987); Histoire du structuralisme, Le champ du signe, vol. 1 (La Découverte, 1991) and Le chant du cygne, vol. 2 (La Découverte, 1992); L’Instant éclaté (Aubier, 1994); L’Empire du sens (La Découverte, 1995); Paul Ricoeur, les sens d’une vie (La Découverte, 1997); L’Histoire (Hatier, 1999); Les courants historiques en France aux 19e et 20e siècles (Armand Colin, 1999); L’Histoire (Armand Colin, 2000); Michel de Certeau, chemins d’histoire (Complexe, 2002); Michel de Certeau, le marcheur blessé (La Découverte, 2002); La marche des idées, histoire des intellectuels, histoire intellectuelle (La Découverte, 2003); Le pari biographique. Ecrire une vie (La Découverte, 2005); Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, entre le dire et le faire (L’Herne, 2006); Paul Ricoeur et les sciences humaines, with Christian Delacroix and Patrick Garcia (La Découverte, 2007); and Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. Biographie croisée (La Découverte, 2007). Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and the University of Nice. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited fifteen more. His recent trilogy, entitled “Philosophy at the Limit,” is comprised of the following works: On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be (Indiana, 2001), and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (Routledge, 2003). His latest book is Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia University Press). Peter Kemp is executive director of the Center for Ethics and Law, Copenhagen, and professor in the Department of Philosophy of Education at the Danish School of Education, Copenhagen. He is the current president of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies 2003–2008, a member of the International Academy of Philosophy of Sciences and the International Institute of Philosophy (Paris). His major works include: Théorie de l’engagement (Paris, 1973), The Narrative Path (together with David Rasmussen; MIT Press, 1989), Das Unersetzlische (Berlin, 1992), Levinas, une introduction philosophique (Paris, 1997), and Citizen of the World: A Cosmopolitan Ideal for the 21st Century (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). Adriaan Peperzak is the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor in philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. His most recent books are Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Moral, Legal, and Political Philosophy (Kluwer, 2001), Philosophy between Faith and Theology (University of Notre Dame, 2005), and Thinking (Fordham University Press, 2006).

Notes on Contributors

231

Roger W. H. Savage is associate professor of systematic musicology in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include hermeneutics, music criticism, aesthetics, and politics, and the relation between limit experiences of time and trance music. He has published articles in Telos, Philosophy and Literature, The European Legacy, The British Journal of Aesthetics, ex tempore, and Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology. Professor Savage is an associate editor for ex tempore and is the current president of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California Chapter. His book, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism, was recently published by Routledge. William Schweiker is director of the Martin Marty Center and Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School. His books include Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (Fordham University Press, 1990); Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Pilgrim Press, 1998); and Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Blackwell, 2004). Professor Schweiker is also chief editor and contributor to A Companion to Religious Ethics (2004), a comprehensive and innovative work in the field of comparative religious ethics. He is currently finishing Religion and the Human Future: An Essay in Theological Humanism. Karl Simms is senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His books include Paul Ricoeur (Routledge, 2003), Ricoeur and Lacan (Continuum, 2007), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Routledge, 2010). George H. Taylor is professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He was a graduate student of Ricoeur’s at the University of Chicago and was the editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (Columbia University Press, 1986). He has applied Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to legal scholarship in such works as “Derrick Bell’s Narratives as Parables,” NYU Review of Law & Social Change 31 (2007): 225–271; “Metaphor, Objects, and Commodities,” Cleveland State Law Review 54 (2006): 141–174 (co-authored with Michael Madison); “Critical Hermeneutics,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, 76 (2000): 1101–1123; and “Structural Textualism,” Boston University Law Review 75 (1995): 321–385. He also serves as the current president of the Society for Ricoeur Studies.

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Index

Abraham 30, 36 agency 8, 56, 165, 169–72, 175 Annales school 67, 73, 75 Anscombe, Elizabeth 70 Anspach, Marc Rogin 136 Antigone 134, 161 Aquinas, St. Thomas 50 Arendt, Hannah 8, 15, 120, 124, 126–30, 140, 157–61 Aristotelian 21, 71, 102, 149, 189 Aristotle 16, 18, 20–1, 23, 39, 42, 71, 77, 82, 145, 176, 183, 191–2, 221 Asen, Robert 125–6, 139, 140 atheism 6, 30–6, 43 Athens 38, 63, 139 attestation 45, 50–1, 53, 56–61, 68, 145, 149, 224 Augustine, St. 16, 48, 50, 71–2, 82 Austin, J-L 168, 178 autonomy 7, 68, 85–6, 88–90, 93–4, 103, 105–6, 143–5, 150, 154, 212–13, 215, 224 Beauvoir, Simone de 161, 170, 178 Benjamin, Walter 14 Benveniste, Emile 13, 26 Bergson, Henri 23 Bernasconi, Robert 165, 177 Betti, Emilio 85, 98 Bloch, Marc 73 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 36 Borgès, Jorge Luis 80, 83 Bork, Robert 88, 98 Braudel, Fernand 14, 73 Brentano, Franz 198 Breton, Stanislas 15, 40, 43 Buddhism 37 Bultmann, Rudolf 14

Calhoun, Craig 126, 140 capabilities 8, 55, 57–8, 143, 169, 173–4, 177, 180, 192 capability 6, 45, 51, 55, 57–9, 61, 143, 146, 155, 159, 166, 169, 171, 176–7, 179 Cartesian 16, 147, 198, 204 Certeau, Michel de 69, 82, 230 climate change 116 communitarianism 102–3, 106–7, 109, 119 conviction 16, 21, 49, 107, 183–4, 188–90, 211, 213, 224 Copernican revolution 198 The Course of Recognition 18, 29, 124, 135, 138, 140–1, 160, 163, 180 Cover, Robert 93, 100 cultural musicology 9 Danto, Arthur 70, 82 death 6, 8, 31–3, 36–40, 46, 51–2, 58, 72, 78, 89, 99, 142, 158, 164, 172, 198, 208 Derrida, Jacques 38, 42–3 Descartes, Rene 23, 148, 155, 198, 202 desegregation 127–9 Dilthey, Wilhelm 68, 72, 187 Dray, William 70, 82 Dufrenne, Mikel 15 Dworkin, Ronald 88, 99–100, 103–6, 119 Easterbrook, Frank H. 94, 100 effort to be 46, 50–1, 55, 60, 177 Eighth Amendment 89, 99 Ellison, Ralph 129, 140 Enlightenment 32, 186, 216, 217 epistemology 18, 66, 68

234

Index

eschaton 39 eternity 46, 49, 78, 222 ethics 8, 18, 21, 27, 33, 35, 92, 142, 148–50, 155, 173, 181, 189–90, 193, 231 ethnomusicology 9 Eucharist 37–8 evil 33, 35, 45, 52, 55–6, 58–9 existentialism 142 faith 6, 18, 19, 21–2, 30–2, 34–6, 41, 44–5, 48–51, 54–7, 59, 61–3, 118, 159 fallible 58 Fallible Man 16–17, 28, 227, 228 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 12, 28 Fish, Stanley 99 forgiveness 7, 81, 116–18, 121 Foucault, Michel 69 Fourteenth Amendment 87 fragility 57, 61, 113, 143–4, 147, 156, 158, 222 Fraser, Nancy 8, 124–5, 131, 135, 140 freedom 28, 34–5, 56, 58, 62, 102–3, 106, 108, 115, 152, 154, 166, 195–6, 198, 200, 205 Freud, Sigmund 6, 9, 13, 23, 30, 32, 34, 39, 41–2, 77, 79, 80, 83, 196–203, 205–10, 225 Friedan, Betty 170, 178 friendship 189 From Text to Action 2, 11, 83, 98–9, 101, 120, 194 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 7, 15–16, 84–5, 95, 98, 100, 146, 186–8, 194, 201, 231 gift 8, 12, 30, 36–8, 56, 117, 136–8 Ginzburg, Carlo 72, 82 God 6, 30–6, 38–43, 45, 47–54, 56–7, 59–61, 63, 100, 104, 152, 157–8, 160–1, 167, 172, 179, 225, 230 Goodman, Nelson 219–20 Gospels 52–3, 55–6, 59–61, 94, 100 grace 37, 45, 49, 57 Greimas, A. J. 14–15 Greisch, Jean 19, 29

Gustavsson, Bernt 8, 181, 186–7, 191, 193–4 Habermas, Jürgen 15, 18, 122, 125, 139, 187–8, 194 Hauser, Gerard 125, 139–40 Haydn, Joseph 216, 224, 226 Hegel, G. W. F. 19–23, 26, 29, 161, 209, 231 Hegelian 16, 20, 23, 208 Heidegger, Martin 15–16, 23–5, 33, 41, 58, 78, 120, 145, 221, 227 Henaff, Marcel 136 Henry, Michel 15, 43, 229 hermeneutic circle 76, 191 hermeneutics 2–3, 6–9, 32–4, 75, 84–6, 90–5, 97–8, 100, 144, 146, 149–50, 159, 181, 187–91, 193, 200–1, 205, 207, 209, 212–16, 219, 231 Herodotus 66 Hill-Collins, Patricia 8, 167, 170, 175, 178–9 Hindu 56 Hirsch, E. D. 98 Hobbesian 102, 118, 121 Holocaust 68, 117 Honneth, Axel 124–5, 136, 140 hooks, bell 8, 170–1, 174–6, 178–80, 229 hope 6, 10, 25, 28, 37, 45–6, 56, 58, 78, 81, 115, 147, 155, 186, 193, 229 humanism 17 Hurston, Zora Neale 172, 179 Husserl, Edmund 12, 16, 19, 23–4, 58, 72, 196, 198, 202 Hyppolite, Jean 15, 20 idem-identity 80, 110, 112, 118, 167–9, 173 idol 36 imagination 9, 46, 54, 58, 67, 77, 85, 95–7, 101, 128–9, 143, 147–8, 151–4, 156, 160, 217–18, 220 immanence 170 imputation 173–4 incarnation 40

Index intentionality 9, 198–9, 201–2, 211, 224 interdisciplinary 1, 3–5, 10, 182 intersubjectivity 3, 19, 24, 67, 79, 204, 207 ipse-identity 80, 110–11, 118, 167–9, 173 ipseity 25, 42 Islamic 56 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 78 Jaspers, Karl 15, 116, 121 Jauss, Hans-Robert 14 Jerusalem 38 Jervolino, Domenico 2, 10, 178 Job 36 Jonas, Hans 15 Joyce, James 37 jurisprudence 86, 88–9, 99 The Just 18, 28, 64, 86, 92, 95–6, 98, 100–1, 120, 159, 163 Kant, Immanuel 16–17, 19–23, 72, 96–7, 101, 144, 146, 149, 159, 161, 190, 217, 226, 229 Kantian 12, 20–1, 76, 150, 189 kenosis 40, 43 kerygma 34–5 Koselleck, Reinhardt 73, 75–6, 83, 179 Kripke, Saul 132 Lacan, Jacques 9, 205–6, 210, 231 Langlois, Charles-Victor 75 Last Supper 38 Le Doeuff, Michele 153–5, 157–9, 162–3 Lectures 15, 18, 28, 29, 62, 120, 194, 228, 231 Lepetit, Bernard 69, 82 Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 12, 14–15, 18–19, 22–9, 72, 82, 123–4, 139, 230 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15 liberalism 7, 102–9, 112, 119, 120, 121 linguistics 10, 13, 18 logos 45–6, 59, 77 love 33, 36, 38–40, 50, 55, 57, 107, 150–2, 156–7, 160, 172, 175, 180 Lyotard, Jean-François 217, 226 lyric poetry 222

235

Marcel, Gabriel 15, 136 Marx, Karl 6 Marxism 65 Mauss, Marcel 136 mediating theology 6, 48–51, 53, 57, 59–62 mediation 1, 6, 18, 23, 34, 46, 49, 52, 59, 60, 72, 75, 79, 100, 136, 153, 204, 217 memory 7–9, 23, 37, 68–9, 72–3, 76–81, 134, 143, 147–8, 151, 156, 197, 223 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 15, 166 metaphor 8–9, 15, 28, 31, 40, 46, 50, 58–60, 95, 96, 143, 156, 158–9, 206, 217–21, 224, 227 metaphysics 16, 42–3, 120, 142, 148, 152, 215, 217 mimesis 9, 143, 191–3, 212, 221 modern philosophy 26, 57, 146 Moltmann, Jürgen 55, 63 Morandi, Franc 8, 181, 190–1, 193–4 Morrison, Toni 171 music 9, 47, 211–27, 231 mutual recognition 150 Nabert, Jean 15, 24, 152, 159–60, 162–3 Nanterre 8, 185–6, 189, 193 narrative 7–9, 45–8, 58–61, 69–75, 79, 110–11, 114, 116, 120, 143, 147, 158, 165, 171–3, 176, 191–2, 221–2 natality 40, 157–9 New Testament 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 30, 32–4, 41, 55, 58, 64, 225 Nora, Pierre 73, 76, 82 Oedipus 207–9 Old Testament 79 Oneself as Another 16, 21, 24, 28, 57, 63, 101, 119–20, 131, 140–1, 148, 159, 161, 163, 165–6, 176–80, 189–90, 194, 228 ontology 13, 16, 18, 24–5, 38–9, 42, 58–9, 148, 176

236

Index

onto-theology 6, 33 oppression 54, 56, 61, 143, 169, 170–2 originalism 7 originary af rmation 45, 56, 58–9 Other 25, 43, 82, 159, 170, 179, 225 Otherwise than Being 23, 25, 29, 139 Pagels, Elaine 94, 100 Patocˆka, Jan 15 personal identity 8, 79, 110–11, 120, 165 phenomenology 8–9, 12–14, 16, 24–5, 27, 42–3, 72, 77, 146, 148–9, 155, 157, 166, 176–7, 196, 201–2, 204–5, 207, 209, 229 philosophical anthropology 58 phronesis 28 Plato 16–17, 20, 23, 69, 77 plot 70–1, 73–5, 79, 173, 192, 221–2 polis 122, 125 postmodern 50, 211–14, 217 power to act 8, 49, 55–6, 59–61, 111, 144–7, 149–50, 153, 155, 158–9, 166, 169, 174, 176 practical wisdom 189–90, 193 praxis 149, 192 psychoanalysis 9, 13, 18, 28, 187, 195–207 Rancière, Jacques 66, 81 rationalism 142, 147 Rawls, John 7, 11, 15, 18, 102–6, 114–15, 119, 121 reciprocity 132, 136–8, 182–3, 188, 191, 193, 195 reconciliation 6, 20, 37, 50–2, 55–7, 59–62, 66, 117, 200, 223 Reflections on the Just 18, 29 resurrection 37 Romantic 9 Romanticism 186 Rosenzweig, Franz 3, 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 23, 159 the Said 25–7 Sankofa 177 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 142, 159

Saussure, Ferdinand de 206 the Saying 25–8 Scalia, Antonin 88–9, 99–100 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 49–50, 85, 98, 187, 201 Seignobos, Charles 72, 75 self-esteem 8, 25, 166, 173–6, 189 semiotics 191 Socratic method 193 solicitude 176, 189 Souter, David 90, 94 Spinoza, Baruch 8, 22, 142, 145–64, 176, 180 Spirit 23, 34, 50, 54, 61, 63 St. Paul 51, 60 Strasbourg 13, 23, 185 Strawson, Peter 131 structuralism 65 The Symbolism of Evil 2 symbols 2, 13, 21 36, 41, 44, 46, 49–50, 53, 57–60, 73, 201, 205, 209, 221 tarab 223–4 Taylor, Charles 7–8, 41, 107, 119, 125, 130, 140 terrorism 116 textualism 7 theism 6, 30, 34–5 theodicy 33, 40 theory of language 169 Thucydides 66 Tillich, Paul 49–50 Totality and Infinity 22, 29 Tracy, David 50, 63 transcendence 37, 170, 212, 215, 223–4 translation 1–5, 10–11, 25, 38, 48, 121, 164, 177 Troeltsch, Ernst 50 truth 7, 19–20, 34, 44, 47–9, 52–3, 57–8, 62, 66, 68–9, 72, 77–8, 104, 149, 184, 188, 201, 208–9, 216–17, 220–1, 224–5 the unconscious 9, 79, 195–208

Index van der Ven, Johannes 8, 181, 189–91, 193 violence 20, 42, 54, 56, 59, 61, 113, 123–4, 135, 143, 216 Von Radt, Gerhard 14 Von Wright, G.H. 70, 82 vulnerability 56, 61, 144, 150, 158, 166, 177

Walker, Alice 171–2, 178–9 Walzer, Michael 7, 105–6, 108–9, 119–21, 139 Weil, Simone 15, 64 White, Hayden 70, 82, 179 work of mourning 76–7, 79–80, 223 World War II 1, 16–17, 30, 142

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