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Ricoeur on Justice

Among Paul Ricoeur’s last publications were two small volumes of lectures on justice, The Just and Reflections on the Just. These apply the ethics he had formulated in Oneself As Another (see also Solicitude; Ricoeurian Ethics). As in Oneself As Another, he combines Aristotelian and Kantian elements (see also Aristotle and Kant).

Ricoeur notes that Plato and Aristotle often mentioned “the unjust and the just” in that order, and suggests that the initial impulse for justice is a sense of indignation against things like unequal shares, broken promises, and excessive retributions.

He identifies justice fundamentally with equity or fairness, as mediated through institutions and Kantian obligation by universals. In contrast with the I-Thou of friendship, it involves relations of distance with others conceived in the third person. “The other for friendship is the ‘you’; the other for justice is ‘anyone’…. In fact, we have already encountered this ‘anyone’ in those exemplary situations in which our youthful indignation lashes out against injustice: unequal shares, failure to keep one’s word as given, unfair retributions — all institutional circumstances, in the broadest sense of the term, where justice presents itself as a just distribution” (The Just, p. xiii). “An important equation, whereby the just begins to be distinguished from the unjust, presents itself here: the equation between justice and impartiality” (p. xi). It is “under the condition of impartiality that indignation can free itself of the desire for vengeance” (p. xvii; emphasis in original).

He will consider the interaction of two axes: a “horizontal” one of the “dialogical constitution of the self” (p. xii), and a “vertical” one with three levels — an initial Aristotelian one concerned with ends and the good life; an intermediate Kantian one concerned with formal elaborations of procedural justice and universality; and a final one concerned with Aristotelian practical wisdom that also draws on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. He suggests that the Critique of Judgment has more to tell us about justice than the Critique of Practical Reason. Procedural justice, Kantian universality, and deontological obligation here do not supersede or conflict with Aristotelian practical judgment about concrete particulars, but rather mediate its relations to ends. This seems like a very nice way of expressing a harmonization of Aristotelian and Kantian ethics.

Relating justice to Aristotelian ends, Ricoeur wants to defend “the primacy of the teleological approach in the determination of the idea of the just” (p.xvi). “Justice… is an integral part of the wish to live well” (p. xv). “It begins as a wish before it becomes an imperative” (ibid).

According to Ricoeur, the very import of the claim to universality ensures that procedural justice cannot entirely separate itself from a substantive idea of the good in terms of ends. Provisionally adopting John Rawls’ abstraction of equitable distribution of goods as including procedural considerations, he argues that overall equity cannot be realized without “taking into account the real heterogeneity of the goods to be distributed. In other words, the deontological level, rightly taken as the privileged level of reference for the idea of the just, cannot make itself autonomous to the point of constituting the exclusive level of reference” (p. xix; emphasis in original). Ricoeur accepts Rawls’ claim that a pure theory of procedural justice can be developed autonomously, but argues that its real-world applications still require Aristotelian practical judgment.

All people, Ricoeur suggests, have a kind of “power over” others, as a result of the capacity to act. This “offers the permanent occasion for violence in all its forms…. What do we get indignant about, in the case of shares, exchanges, retributions, if not the wrong that human beings inflict upon one another on the occasion of the power-over one will exercises in the encounter with another will?” (p. xvii; emphasis in original). The kind of impartiality that frees indignation from the desire for vengeance, Ricoeur suggests, is embodied in the idea of universally valid law and deontological obligation to avoid harming others.

Ricoeur says actually the most serious issue about justice has to do with what he calls the “tragic dimension of action. It is at this stage that the moral conscience, as an inner forum, one’s heart of hearts, is summoned to make unique decisions, taken in a climate of incertitude and of serious conflicts” (p. xxi; emphasis in original).

The ultimate need for open-ended Aristotelian practical wisdom above and beyond the best discipline of the abstract application of rules, Ricoeur says, is a kind of correlate of the irreducibility of a consideration of ends. This will be the most important thing in the practice of jurisprudence. (Leibniz also suggested something like this with his idea of justice as “wise charity”.) Ricoeur relates such practical wisdom to Aristotle’s notion of (non-sophistical) rhetoric as speaking well in the sense of saying things that are persuasive because rightly said; to hermeneutics; and to poetics. (See also Ricoeur on Practical Reason.)

Justice’s “privileged moment” of mediation through formal universality, while neither self-sufficient nor ultimately decisive, is nonetheless essential to the process. The same kind of mediation appears in Ricoeur’s works in numerous contexts. Freedom is mediated by necessity; our understanding of the self is mediated by a “long detour” through cultural objectifications; open-ended interpretation is mediated by disciplined explanation. Similarly, here an ultimately open-ended approach to justice that begins and ends with Aristotle is enriched and made more rigorous by the additional mediation of Kantian universality.

These examples help clarify the main sense of Ricoeurian (and Hegelian) “mediation”, which is very different from the sort of theologically perfect, transparent mediation invoked, e.g., by Aquinas. Ricoeurian and Hegelian mediation are always bumpy, and the last word is never said.

Narrative Identity, Substance

Narrative identity for Ricoeur is intended as a kind of mean between ordinary logical identity or sameness, which he calls idem identity, and a kind of mediated reflexivity, which he calls ipse identity. Ordinary logical identity is rigid and static, but worse than that, it is often taken for granted. On the cutting edge of its home ground of mathematics, however, it has become recognized that criteria for logical identity of each type of thing need to be explicitly defined. Logical identity then effectively reduces to isomorphism. Sameness effectively reduces to sameness of form, and Leibniz’s thesis of the indiscernability of indiscernability and identity is vindicated.

I have argued, however, that Aristotle’s notion of identity as applied to so-called “substance” not only implicitly anticipates this thesis of Leibniz, but also ultimately circumscribes it with a further processual dimension accommodating continuity through change over time. Independent of the considerations of narrative developed by Ricoeur but potentially interpretable in similar terms, the “identity” of a “substance” for Aristotle is already extended to continuity through change. This kind of situationally appropriate, delimited relaxation of identity criteria allows Aristotle to accommodate “realistic” nuances in the application of common-sense reasoning or material inference that cannot be justified by purely formal logic. Judgments of real-world “identity” are practical judgments, with all the usual caveats.

While Aristotle was very process-oriented, the processes with which he was concerned were short- and medium-term processes, generally not extending beyond the scope of a life. History for Aristotle is mainly an accumulation of accidents, and thus in Aristotle’s sense intelligible mainly in the register of materiality. To the extent that he thinks about history, he treats it in terms of delimited “histories” rather than an enveloping “History”.

Within that accumulation of accidents, however, we can potentially explicate other levels Aristotle left unexplored, like Ricoeur’s historical explanation or Foucault’s “archaeology”. Foucault developed a meta-level account aimed at articulating underlying forms implicit in something like Aristotle’s delimited accumulations of accidents, while I think that after the detour of historical explanation, Ricoeur ultimately wanted to cultivate signposts for an enveloping “History” as metaphors expressing a broader “meaning of life”. In a very general way, Ricoeur’s aim thus resembles Brandom’s “Hegelian genealogy”.

Ricoeur on Foucault

I still vividly recall the moment over 40 years ago when the sharp questioning of unities of all kinds in the preface and first chapter of Michel Foucault’s 1969 work The Archaeology of Knowledge very suddenly awoke me from erstwhile slumber in neoplatonic dreams about the One. Today I would say Foucault like many others was terribly wrong in his reading of Hegel, but I still look on that text as a sort of manifesto of historical method. As Aristotle too might remind us, distinctions are essential to intelligibility and understanding.

Just this year, the work of Paul Ricoeur has become very significant to me. Ricoeur expressed admiration for Foucault’s late work The Care of the Self, but in both volume 3 of Time and Narrative and his late work Memory, History, Forgetting, he criticized The Archaeology of Knowledge rather severely.

Ricoeur did not object to Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuities in (the field Foucault did not want to call) the history of ideas, but rather to Foucault’s closely related polemic against the subordination of such discontinuities to an encompassing continuity of historical “consciousness”, and to his further association of the idea of an encompassing continuity of consciousness with the would-be mastery of meaning by a putatively purely constitutive Subject. Ricoeur as much as Foucault objected to such notions of Mastery, but he still wanted to articulate a kind of narrative continuity of what he still wanted to call consciousness.

Ricoeur scholar Johann Michel in his book Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists agrees that “the subject” for Ricoeur is far from purely constitutive, and “in reality, is not a subject in the substantialist sense” (p. 107). Rather, it is mediate, and only understandable via a long detour through cultural objectifications. As Ricoeur says, consciousness is “affected by the efficacity of history” (Time and Narrative vol. 3, p. 217). “We are only the agents of history insofar as we also suffer it” (ibid, p. 216). Ricoeur’s suffering-as-well-as-acting “subject” gives very different meaning to this highly ambiguous term from the kind of voluntaristic agency attributed to the Cogito by Descartes, and Ricoeur’s “consciousness” is very far from the notion of immediate “consciousness” classically formulated by Locke. I prefer to avoid confusion by using different vocabulary, but agree that the notions Ricoeur wanted to defend are quite different from those Foucault wanted to criticize.

This leaves the question of the relative priority of continuity and discontinuity. Foucault in his Archaeology phase advocated a method grounded in the conceptual priority of discontinuities of meaning, while Ricoeur wanted to give discontinuity an important subordinate role in an approach dedicated to recovering a continuity of consciousness. In my own current Aristotelian phase, I want to emphasize a view that is reconciling like Ricoeur’s, but still puts the accent on discontinuity like Foucault’s. My historiographical notes both tell stories and offer explanations somewhat in the way that Ricoeur advocated, and emphasize the differences and discontinuities favored by Foucault.

Ricoeur also seems to have been troubled by Foucault’s disinterest in what Ricoeur calls the “first-order entities” (p. 218) of history — actual communities, nations, civilizations, etc. (I would note that he is not using “first order” in the logical sense, which is a purely syntactic criterion; he just wants to suggest that these kinds of things are more methodologically primitive for historical inquiry.) I actually think apprehension of something like form comes before apprehension of any substantialized “things”, so my sympathy is more with Foucault on this point. Undoubtedly Ricoeur would say these have a narrative identity rather than a substantial one, which seems fine in itself, but I think any narrative identity must be a tentative result and not a methodological primitive.

Ultimately, I think Ricoeur was motivated by an ethical desire to put people first — a concern Foucault did not make clear he actually shared until The Care of the Self. Ricoeur would also agree, though, that historiography is not simply reducible to ethics, but has largely independent concerns of its own. He seems to have wanted to say that the history of ideas is fundamentally a history of people. I’m a pluralist, so I have no objection to this sort of account as one alternative, but I think people’s commitments tell us who they are more than who holds a commitment tells us about the commitment. I also think higher-order things come before first-order things, and that people are better thought of as singular higher-order trajectories of ways of being throughout a life than as first-order entities. Ricoeur, I believe, was reaching for something like this with his notion of narrative (as opposed to substantial) identity, which I would rather call something other than identity.

Philosophy of History?

Hegel’s Philosophy of History lectures are written in an accessible, semi-popular style and are not without interest, but it is a huge mistake to take them as representative of his core views. “Philosophies of history” had actually been a common genre in late 18th century Germany, as witnessed by the title of Herder’s 1774 book Yet Another Philosophy of History. Works by now-forgotten authors typically took the form of valorizing the present in terms of the past. The triumphalist character commonly associated with Hegel’s philosophy of history in particular was actually a norm of the genre. In conjunction with the common, highly inflationary misunderstanding of Hegel’s “absolute knowledge”, this makes it easy to completely misunderstand what Hegel was getting at, as I did myself for many years.

Though sympathetic to various aspects of Hegel’s thought, Ricoeur in volume 3 of Time and Narrative associates Hegel’s view with insistence on an “impossible total mediation” (p. 202). Quite properly, Ricoeur says what we really want instead is an “open-ended, incomplete, imperfect mediation” (p. 207). “We must renounce consolation to attain reconciliation” (p. 197; emphasis in original). “The realization of freedom cannot be taken as the plot behind every plot” (p. 206). There is no “plot behind every plot” in history. I could not agree more. But careful reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Science of Logic, and other works actually refutes the very widespread idea that Hegel claimed to have achieved a total mediation. In fact, I would say it was Hegel who originally thematized mediation as inherently open-ended, incomplete, and imperfect.

Narrated Time

The third volume of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative returns to more overtly philosophical themes. From the beginning of volume 1, he has been using Augustine’s aporias concerning time as a sort of background to everything else he considers. He had suggested that both Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time consciousness and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology of time — contrary to the intentions of their authors — ended up in aporias similar to Augustine’s.

Ricoeur says that neither a phenomenology of the experience of time nor a “cosmological”, measurement-oriented approach to its objective aspects can avoid some dependency on the other. “The distension of the soul alone cannot produce the extension of time; the dynamism of movement alone cannot generate the dialectic of the threefold present” (vol. 3, p. 21). His hope is that a poetics of narrative, even if it too is unable to resolve the Augustinian aporias, can at least make them “work for us” (p. 4). It will develop the “complicity as well as the contrast” (p. 22) between the two approaches.

He will subordinate the “dimension of reference to the hermeneutic dimension of refiguration” developed in volume 2’s discussion of literary narrative (p. 5, emphasis added). The approach to a “real” historical past can then be understood in terms of a narrative refiguration, rather than vice versa. (This differs significantly from Brandom’s subordination of reference to what might be called a hermeneutic dimension of material inference, but both Ricoeur and Brandom are putting some kind of hermeneutics or interpretation of meaning conceptually ahead of reference to “things” (see also What and Why; Objectivity of Objects). For both of them, reference is still a valid concept, but it is something that potentially stands in need of explanation, rather than something that provides an explanation.)

For Ricoeur here, “pure” semantics and foundationalist epistemology are both superseded by a “hermeneutic of the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal'” (p. 6) he expects will yield insight into both history and fiction. History and fiction are two ultimately interdependent modes of narrative refiguration, so that there is no history without an element of creative fiction, but also no fiction without an element of something like what is involved in historical reconstruction. This seems like an important and valid point.

The main body of this volume contains further elaboration on various matters he discussed before (see Time and Narrative; Ricoeur on Augustine on Time; Emplotment, Mimesis; Combining Time and Narrative; Ricoeur on Historiography; Literary Narrative; Narrative Time). In separate posts, I will selectively comment on a few parts of this. (See Philosophy of History?; Ricoeur on Foucault.)

At the end, he wants to “verify at what point the interweaving of the referential intentions of history and fiction constitutes an adequate response” (p. 242) to the aporia resulting from the interdependence of the phenomenological and “cosmological” views of time. Second, there is the question “what meaning to give to the process of totalization of the ecstases of time, in virtue of which time is always spoken of in the singular” (ibid). He expects the answer here to be less adequate. It will yield “a premonition of the limits ultimately encountered by our ambition of saturating the aporetics of time with the poetics of narrative” (p. 243). Finally, most “embarrassing” of all is the new question, “can we still give a narrative equivalent to the strange temporal situation that makes us say that everything — ourselves included — is in time, not in the sense given this ‘in’ by some ‘ordinary’ acceptation as Heidegger would have it in Being and Time, but in the sense that myths say that time encompasses us with its vastness” (ibid; emphasis in original). This, he suggests, ultimately remains a mystery in the Marcelian sense.

“Narrated time is like a bridge set over the breach constantly opened up by speculation between phenomenological time and cosmological time” (p. 244). “Augustine has no other resources when it comes to the cosmological doctrines than to oppose to them the time of a mind that distends itself” (ibid), but his meditations on Creation implicitly require a “cosmological” time. Aristotle’s cosmological view made time dependent on motion but distinct from it as a measurement of motion, but any actual measurement seems also to depend on some action performed by a soul.

Husserl elaborated a view of something like Augustine’s threefold present, which included memory and anticipation as well as current attention. He spoke of time as constituted through “retention”, “protention”, and a sort of comet-like duration rather than a point-like present. I am barely skimming the surface of a sophisticated development.

Ricoeur was a great admirer of Husserl, but in this case suggests that Husserl failed to achieve his further goal of establishing the primacy of phenomenological time with respect to other sorts of time. For Husserl, Ricoeur says, the constitution of phenomenological time depends on a “pure hyletics of consciousness” (ibid), but any discourse about the hyletic (i.e., relationally “material” in a broadly Aristotelian and more specifically Husserlian sense) will depend on the “borrowings it makes from the determinations of constituted time” (ibid). Thus for Ricoeur, the articulation of what Husserl wanted to be a purely constitutive phenomenological time actually depends on what he had wanted to treat as constituted results. As a consequence, despite Husserl’s wishes, phenomenological time should not be simply said to be purely constitutive.

Heidegger’s “authentic temporality” takes this aporia to its “highest degree of virulence” (p. 245). Being-in-the world does appear as a being-in-time. However, that time remains resolutely “individual in every case” (ibid), owing to Heidegger’s fixation on being-toward-death.

For Ricoeur, the “fragile offshoot” of the “dialectic of interweaving” of the “crisscrossing processes of a fictionalization of history and a historization of narrative” (p. 246) is a new concept of narrative identity of persons and communities as a practical category. A narrative provides the basis for the permanence of a proper name. He alludes to a saying of Hannah Arendt that to answer the question “who” is to tell the story of a life. Without such a recourse to narration, there is an “antinomy with no solution” between simply positing a substantially or formally identical subject, or with Hume and Nietzsche globally rejecting such a subject as an illusion.

(I have proposed a different “middle path” by decoupling actual subjectivity from the assumption of more unity than can be shown, and associating it more with what we care about and hold to be true than with “us” per se. Yet I also find myself wanting to tell a story of how the sapient “I” and the sentient “me” I want to distinguish are nonetheless interwoven in life, which is also what I think Hegel wanted to do.)

Ricoeur here introduces the connection between narrative identity and an ethical aim of “self-constancy” that he developed later in Oneself as Another. “[T]he self of self-knowledge is not the egotistical and narcissistic ego whose hypocrisy and naivete the hermeneutics of suspicion have denounced, along with its aspects of an ideological superstructure and infantile and neurotic archaism. The self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates’ phrase” (p. 247). In Hegelian terms, this is the “self” involved in self-consciousness. In my terms, who we are is defined by what we care about and how we act on that. It is a “living” end or work always in progress rather than an achieved actuality. For Ricoeur, psychoanalysis and historiography provide “laboratories” for philosophical inquiry into narrative identity.

The second aporia concerned the unity or “totality” of time. “The major discovery with which we have credited Husserl, the constitution of an extended present by the continuous addition of retentions and protentions… only partially answers this question” (p. 252). It only results in partial “totalities”.

(While rejecting claims to unconditional “totality”, Ricoeur here accepts the terminology of “totalization” as an aim. I prefer to take something like Ricoeur’s conclusion that we only ever achieve partial “totalities” as a ground for saying that even as an aim, we should speak more modestly of (always partial and local) synthesis rather than “totalization”. To my ear, even as an aim “totalization” sounds too univocal and predetermined. I want to say that an aim of totalization is inherently unrealizable for a rational animal, whereas any end we turn out to have been actually pursuing based on interpretation of our actions must in some sense have been realizable. Ricoeur emphasizes that the mediation involved is imperfect, so that I think the difference in his case is merely verbal, but other authors’ use of “totalization” is more problematic.)

For Ricoeur, “the constitution of a common time will then depend on intersubjectivity” (p. 253), rather than on the unity of a consciousness. We should replace a “monological” theme of fallenness with a “dialogical” theme of being affected by history. Meanwhile, all initiative is in a sense “untimely”. The dialogical character of a historical present opens onto the same space of reciprocity as the making of promises. “[T]he imperfect mediation of historical consciousness responds to the multiform unity of temporality” (p. 257). But meanwhile, “it is not certain that repetition satisfies the prerequisites of time considered as a collective singular” (ibid). In this context he speaks of “an original status for the practical category that stands over against the axiom of the oneness of time” (ibid), and of a return to Kantian practical reason that “can be made only after a necessary detour through Hegel” (p. 258).

Ricoeur proposes “an epic conception of humanity”. Nonetheless, the “good correlation between the multiform unity of the ecstases of time and the imperfect mediation of the historical consciousness” (p. 259) cannot be attributed to narrative. “[T]he notion of plot gives preference to the plural at the expense of the collective singular in the refiguration of time. There is no plot of all plots capable of equaling the idea of one humanity and one history” (ibid). Narrativity does not so much resolve the aporias of time as put them to work.

The final aporia concerned the inscrutability of a unified time. He associates this with our non-mastery of meaning. We are “pulled back” toward an archaic, mythical, poetic form of thinking of the oneness of time that “points toward a region where the claim of a transcendental subject (in whatever form) to constitute meaning no longer holds sway” (p. 263). About returning to an origin we can only speak in metaphors. Finally, he asks if it is possible to speak of a narrative refiguring of the unrepresentability of time. “It is in the way narrativity is carried toward its limits that the secret of its reply to the inscrutability of time lies” (p. 270). “[T]he narrative genre itself overflows into other genres of discourse” (p. 271). Fiction multiplies our experiences of eternity in various ways, “thereby bringing narrative in different ways to its own limits” (ibid). It serves as a laboratory for an unlimited number of thought experiments. It “can allow itself a certain degree of intoxication” (ibid).

“It is not true that the confession of the limits of narrative abolishes the idea of the positing of the unity of history, with its ethical and political implications. Rather it calls for this idea…. The mystery of time is not equivalent to a prohibition directed against language. Rather it gives rise to the exigence to think more and to speak differently” (p. 274). It is only in the context of a search for narrative identity “that the aporetics of time and the poetics of narrative correspond to each other in a sufficient way” (ibid).

Last post in this series: Narrative Identity, Substance

Brandom and Hermeneutics

It’s been a while since I said much about Robert Brandom, though his work — along with my own nonstandard reading of Aristotle — continues to be one of the main inspirations behind everything I write here.

Lately I’ve been devoting a lot of energy to belatedly catching up on the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. To my knowledge, Ricoeur never commented on Brandom during his lifetime, and Brandom has not specifically commented on Ricoeur.

Brandom has, however, in Tales of the Mighty Dead explicitly endorsed some of the broad perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and he has devoted much attention to a “hermeneutics of magnanimity” in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Brandom’s mentor Richard Rorty concluded his famous work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by recommending a general turn from foundational epistemology to nonfoundationalist hermeneutics, and I have previously suggested that Brandom’s work as a whole could be viewed as a novel sort of hermeneutics developed within the analytic tradition.

Brandom’s fundamental concept of the priority of material inference over formal inference puts meaning — and therefore the interpretation of meaning — in the driver’s seat for reasoning, so to speak. This allows for the recovery of a more historic concept of Reason, which ever since Descartes has been mostly replaced by a mathematically based kind of rationality that is more precise and invaluable in technical realms, but also much more rigid, and in fact far more limited in its applicability to general human concerns (see Kinds of Reason).

Even prior to Descartes, Latin medieval logic already moved increasingly toward formalism. Since Frege and Russell, the rigorous mathematization of logic has yielded such impressive technical results that most philosophers seem to have forgotten there is any other way to view logic.

In the 1950s Wilfrid Sellars took the first steps toward initiating a counter-trend, reaching back to the pre-Cartesian tradition to formulate the notion of material inference later taken up by Brandom.

Modern complaints against Reason strongly and wrongly presuppose that it inevitably follows or approximates a formal path. Material inference provides the basis for a fundamentally hermeneutic view not only of Reason but also of logic and logical truth.

I have further stressed the fundamentally ethical or meta-ethical character of material inference, leading to a concept of ethical reason as the most fundamental form of Reason overall in a view that puts material inference before formal logic. As I put it not too long ago, ethical reason may optionally use the more technical forms of reason as tools. Ethical reason, I want to say, has a genuinely active character, but technical reason does not. Ethical reason is fundamentally oriented toward the concrete, like Aristotle’s practical judgment.

I want to say that there is such a thing as logical or semantic reference — saying something about something is not in vain — but a prior hermeneutic inquiry is necessary to ground and explain reference. Moreover, both Aristotle and Kant recognized something like this. Such a perspective is compatible with science, while putting ethical and meta-ethical inquiry first.

A hermeneutic concept of Reason saves us from a false dilemma between formalism on the one hand and question-begging appeals to intuition, authority, or irrational “decision” on the other. (See also Dialogue.)

Narrative Time

For Aristotle, Ricoeur says, “fiction is a mimesis of active characters” (Time and Narrative vol. 2, p. 65). This seems very sound. The notion of activity applicable to a character has a good Aristotelian basis that is entirely independent of the modern notion of consciousness (see digression in last post). It has a richness and ethical relevance that it is hard to attribute to a static formalization of the functional role of a character. Character development over time also does in fact seem to be the main thing that engages me in actual fiction.

(Very different from this, I used to write what I called poetry, in a “language on language” or “texture of the text” style somewhat in imitation of Finnegan’s Wake. This was not fiction and entirely lacked characters, but I felt it had profound meaning of a broadly figurative but mainly nonrepresentational sort, indirectly affecting what I would now call self-consciousness (see digression in last post) as well as expressing aspects of the unconscious. It used long nested series of adverbial phrases modifying previous adverbial phrases in a grammatical way, with the idea of conveying to the reader that we can generate an overflow of meaning while indefinitely deferring mention of a grammatical subject. This was in accordance with my old idea of the conceptual priority of adverbial phrases and parenthetic developments. So, I would emphasize that there is literature apart from narrative and active characters, but that does not detract in the least from the importance of active characters where they are present.)

Fiction is unique in that it can present the subjectivity of third persons in a first-person-like way. It creates a present that is different from the real present of assertion. Ricoeur discusses at length the fictional use of verb tenses, pointing out various ways in which they subtly differ from uses in ordinary assertion. We distinguish between the time of narrating and the narrated time. Like Braudel’s historical time, fictional time has a speed or slowness and a rhythm as well as a length. Fictional time is “folded”. Thomas Mann said that narrating is a “setting aside”, a choosing and excluding. Ricoeur says that thinking draws narrated time out of indifference. Narration brings what is foreign to meaning into the sphere of meaning.

Fictional characters can have something worthy of being called “experience”. We reach a shift toward character by considering that the mimesis of action is implicitly a mimesis of acting beings with thoughts and feelings. Increased emphasis on character leads to notions of point of view and narrative voice. Ricoeur says, however, that in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the notion of narrative voice “is not sufficient to do justice to the fictive experience the narrator-hero has of time in its psychological and metaphysical dimensions” (p. 86). There can be a further shift from characters to the discourse of characters.

Fictional narrative, he says, is constituted as the discourse of a narrator recounting the discourse of the characters. This redoubled aspect would seem to have a relation to the “folded” nature of fictional time. I confess that not being very interested in the re-creation of subjective “presence” per se, until this very moment I have felt genuinely puzzled why anyone would consider narrative to be philosophically somehow “better” than a thick description or other discourse. But if we take narrative in general as discourse about discourse or second-order discourse, this would seem to be strictly richer than first-order discourse, applying nicely to nonfiction cases as well, like history or my own accounts of philosophers.

He notes that several authors consider third-person narrative actually more revealing than first-person narrative. He asks whether the “polyphonic novel”, which seems to have many narrative voices, can still be understood in in terms of emplotment, and wants to suggest that it can. This would mean that the notion of plot cannot be tied down to a “monologic”.

The distinction between utterance and statement within narrative leads to a “reflexive temporal structure” (p. 100). The work is closed upon itself by a formal principle of composition (emplotment), but opens onto a fictional world. A confrontation of the world of the text with the life-world of the reader leads to a “reconfiguration of time by narrative” (ibid).

All fictional narratives are “tales of time”, but only a few are “tales about time” (ibid). He examines examples of these by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust. They exhibit “uncharted modes” of the discordant concordance analyzed by Aristotle. Meanwhile, the sharing of a whole range of temporal experiences between the narrator and the reader refigures time itself in our reading. Time moves further and further away from simple measurement, exposing aporias like those of Augustine.

Next in this series: Narrated Time

Literary Narrative

Resuming the thread on Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, the beginning of volume 2 makes it clear he thinks the stakes in discussing fictional narrative — distinguished from historical narrative by not being oriented toward anything analogous to historical truth — extend well beyond the traditional concerns of literary criticism. (Of course, going beyond those traditional concerns is pretty much the norm for literary critics these days.) Let me say that I am no scholar of literature, though I used to write experimental “language on language” poetry, and have read a bit of literary theory mainly for its philosophical content.

Philosophically, he will defend the “precedence of our narrative understanding in the epistemological order” (vol. 2, p. 7). There will be a great “three-way debate” between lived experience, historical time, and fictional time. He will extensively take up the idea of the “world” projected by a text. There will be a sort of analogy between the place of a structuralist or semiotic analysis of a literary text and the work of explanation in history, but Ricoeur says the analysis will eventually show that literary narrative has different relations to time than historical narrative.

Thinking about literary narrative, he suggests, will turn out to be more helpful in shedding light on Augustine’s paradoxes of the experience of time. In the literary case, there will be a distinction between the time of the act of narration and the time of the things narrated.

The continuing relevance of a notion of plot in modern literature, he says, needs to be shown rather than assumed. Rather than extending and further abstracting the general principle of formal composition that Aristotle had begun to articulate, modern literary studies began with an odd combination of struggle against old conventions, concern for increased realism, and inappropriate borrowing from models of ancient genres. According to Ricoeur, this resulted in a mutilated, dogmatic, not very interesting notion of plot associated mainly with a linear sequence of events, that “could only be conceived as an easily readable form” (p. 9).

Modern novels, on the other hand, have greatly increased the importance of character, and explored the dynamic process of its growth. They may take alternate forms, such as streams of consciousness, diaries, or exchanges of letters. Action accordingly has to be understood in a broader and deeper way no longer limited to external behavior, encompassing things like growth of character and moments in a stream of consciousness. Once this is done, he says, a generalized notion of imitation of action will again apply.

But the early English novelists “shared with empiricist philosophers of language from Locke to Reid” (p. 11) an ideal of purely representational language stripped of metaphor and figurative constructs. “Implicit in this project is the reduction of mimesis to imitation, in the sense of making a copy, a sense totally foreign to Aristotle’s Poetics” (p. 12). I’m more inclined to think so-called literal language is just a limit case of metaphor. I would also note that this representationalist paradigm of transparency is the direct opposite of the “language on language” perspective. “Today it is said that only a novel without plot or characters or any discernible temporal organization is more genuinely faithful to experience” (p. 13). The kind of justification offered, he says, is the same as the one for naturalistic literature — reproduction of experience rather than synthesis. I’m sure someone must have done that, but appeals to experience are somewhat inimical to the structuralist “language on language” view.

Ricoeur wants to suggest that literary paradigms originate “at the level of the schematism of the narrative understanding rather than at the level of semiotic rationality” (p. 15). He will argue that a purely semiotic approach to narrative has the same weaknesses as the positivist “covering law” model in history. I’m a little confused by this, because earlier he more charitably compared the semiotic approach to historical explanation in general, which he had presented as legitimately different from narrative understanding.

He suggests that structural analysis at lower levels like phonology or lexical semantics does not lose nearly as much context of meaning as structural analysis of narrative, which aims to reduce away all temporal elements and replace them with logical relationships. He also says the identity of a style is transhistorical, not atemporal, and that styles are perennial rather than eternal.

He contests the assertion of Roland Barthes that there is an “identity” between language and literature, and that each sentence already has the essential features of a narrative. Behind what Ricoeur is objecting to, I think, may be the additional idea of a strictly compositional, bottom-up interpretation of meaning, which he alluded to earlier. In a formal context like that of structural analysis, compositionality is an extremely important property, but in a broader hermeneutics, I agree with Ricoeur that a bottom-up approach is basically a non-starter. My own past enthusiasm for structuralism had much more to do with its relational, difference-before-identity aspect. I’ve always had severe doubts about any bottom-up reduction when it comes to meaning.

On the other hand, while recognizing many valuable contributions of Husserl and his followers, I fundamentally disagree with what I take to be that tradition’s identification of “consciousness” with what I take Hegel to have sharply distinguished from consciousness as “self-consciousness”.

On my reading, this distinction is the radical “break” in Hegel’s Phenomenology. I have glossed “self-consciousness” as actually other-focused even though it does involve a unity of apperception, and as anything but a species of a genus “consciousness”. I think unity of apperception and Hegelian “self-consciousness” have to do with Aristotelian ethos and what we care about, as a discursive stance in relation to others. I do of course agree that there is consciousness, and that it has a kind of interiority of its own. I also agree that one of its features is something like Husserl’s “living present”, but I think consciousness and the living present belong to what Brandom calls our sentience rather than to what he calls our sapience, which I associate with unity of apperception and “self-consciousness”.

What attitude one takes on this question of the identity or distinctness of consciousness and self-consciousness matters greatly when it comes to something like the debate between structuralism and phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl. I care about rich concepts of reason and feeling, but “consciousness” not so much. I am not worried about the impact of structuralism on the living present, because I see them as pertaining to disjunct domains.

On the other hand, I think Ricoeur is right to be very doubtful whether narrative can be adequately understood without temporality, and right again to reject bottom-up determination of meaning. I am inclined to be sympathetic to his view that temporality cannot be reduced to logic.

I also think it makes a big difference whether one is considering a stereotyped form like the folk tales whose analysis by Vladimir Propp he discusses, or something as complex as a modern novel. Structural analysis may come much closer to yielding comprehensive insight in the one case, while falling much further short in the other. (Ricoeur is not satisfied even in the case of the folk tale.)

Ricoeur also discusses work on a higher level “logic of narrative” concerned with roles of characters, and the narrative grammar of Greimas. He says narrative has more to do with history than with logic. He makes the very valid point that the structuralist notion of the “diachronic” captures only a simple notion of succession. I agree that one should not look to structuralism for rich analyses of time itself, but that does not mean it cannot give us insight about things happening in time, which in turn does not mean it gives us the whole story either.

Next in this series: Narrative Time

Totality

The last post suggests another nuance, having to do with how “total” and “totality” are said in many ways. This is particularly sensitive, because these terms have both genuinely innocent senses and other apparently innocent senses that turn out to implicitly induce evil in the form of a metaphorically “totalitarian” attitude.

Aiming for completeness as a goal is often a good thing.

There is a spectrum of relatively benign errors of over-optimism with respect to where we are in achieving such goals, which at one end begins to shade into a less innocent over-reach, and eventually into claims that are obviously arrogant, or even “totalitarian”.

Actual achievements of completeness are always limited in scope. They are also often somewhat fragile.

I’ll mention the following case mainly for its metaphorical value. Mathematical concepts of completeness are always in some sense domain-specific, and precisely defined. In particular, it is possible to design systems of domain-specific classification that are complete with respect to current “knowledge” or some definite body of such “knowledge”, where knowledge is taken not in a strong philosophical sense, but in some practical sense adequate for certain “real world” operations. The key to using this kind of mathematically complete classification in the real world is including a fallback case for anything that does not fit within the current scheme. Then optionally, the scheme itself can be updated. In less formal contexts, similar strategies can be applied.

There are also limited-scope, somewhat fragile practical achievements of completeness that are neither mathematical nor particularly ethical.

When it comes to ethics, completeness or totality is only something for which we should strive in certain contexts. About this we should be modest and careful.

Different yet again is the arguably trivial “totality” of preconceived wholes like individuals and societies. This is in a way opposite to the mathematical case, which worked by precise definition; here, any definition is implicitly suspended in favor of an assumed reference.

Another kind of implicit whole is a judgment resulting from deliberation. At some point, response to the world dictates that we cut short our in principle indefinitely extensible deliberations, and make a practical judgment call.

Ricoeur on History

Having just treated Ricoeur’s views on historiography at a semi-technical level, and having just received a copy of his collection of essays History and Truth (French ed. 1955), I think this less technical earlier work, roughly contemporary with Freedom and Nature, merits a digression. It gives broad expression to his desire to mediate and reconcile, as well as more specific voice to his personal views on religion and politics.

At this stage, history for Ricoeur particularly meant two special kinds of history — the history of philosophy, and the historical dimension of Christian revelation.

The kind of history of philosophy he wanted to practice would not involve treating views of philosophers as instantiations of generic types of views, but rather treating each philosopher as a singularity. He argues that good history in general is largely concerned with singulars. I would agree on both points. There is a precursor to his later argument about the mediating role of singular causal imputation, and one of the essays begins with the wonderful quote from Spinoza that to better know singulars is to better know God.

In contrast to adherents of philosophical “systems” who would reduce the history of philosophy to moments in a monolithic “philosophy of history” subordinated to a system, he poses the idea of a simultaneously sympathetic and critical account of irreducibly multiple, integral philosophies. Philosophical “problems”, he says, do not eternally have the same meaning.

I find this very admirable, even though Ricoeur at this stage sounds like he uncritically accepted a Kierkegaardian view of Hegel as the bad “systematic” philosopher of history par excellence, whereas I follow more recent readings of Hegel as a leading critic of that sort of thing. On the other hand, he very correctly points out how Hegel reduced away Spinoza’s genuine concern for subjectivity.

Somewhat circumspectly, he suggests that a Christian notion of revelatory events in history creates something like a surplus of meaning that acts as a safeguard against totalizing views of history. I’m generally very nervous about claims of revelation, as revelation is often regarded as an unchallengeable knowledge with self-evident interpretation. Arrogant humans too often claim to just know the will of God, and want to impose their certainty on others. This has nothing to do with piety, and certainly does not reflect any humility or respect for mystery. The idea of a surplus of meaning on the other hand is precisely not a claim to “just know” that meaning.

Ricoeur’s idea of an inexhaustible “surplus” of meaning exceeding any interpretation has been criticized as implying that the meaning then must be predetermined on some virtual level, but that objection seems artificial to me, because Ricoeur’s idea is an acknowledgement of lack of knowledge rather than a knowledge claim. The inexhaustible surplus seems to me to be a less “metaphysical” analogue of the neoplatonic notion that ultimate principles are “supra-essential” and therefore beyond the grasp of rigorous knowledge but only hinted at in symbols, which I think actually reflected a kind of epistemic modesty. This seems to me no more objectionable than Kant’s notion of things in themselves as exceeding our knowledge.

As in the later discussion in Time and Narrative, he ambivalently develops a notion of historical objectivity and truth. On the one hand, he finds the quest for this both necessary and admirable, but on the other he worries that the truth of the historian abolishes both history as grounded in subjective consciousness, and the eschatology associated with revelation. Ricoeur wants to make room for personal faith, without compromising the autonomy of philosophy by asserting its subordination to revealed theology. He advocates for historical objectivity, but remains wary of any objectifying reduction of human or spiritual realities. The antidote to objectification is Marcelian mystery, and a recognition of ambiguity that he associates with faith. Ultimately, he wants to promote hope.

The later, even more nuanced discussion in Time and Narrative carefully weakens this work’s apparent claims on behalf of subjective consciousness, but here too, there is considerable subtlety.

In contrast to Sartre’s identification of freedom with negativity and nothingness, he wants to emphasize the primacy of affirmation. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, he says he wants to emphasize the primacy of a phenomenology of signification and meaning like that developed in Husserl’s early Logical Investigations. Ricoeur already thinks it is an error to treat human perception as if it could be separated from our involvement in language.

One essay is a tribute to Emmanuel Mounier, to whose journal Esprit he was a frequent contributor. Mounier’s “personalist” movement aimed at a new pedagogy to combat modern alienation, combining Christianity and a concern for the individual with a sort of democratic socialism. Another piece deals with nonviolence, and another contrasts Christian Agape with the “punitive violence of the magistrate” (p. 240).

Political power, Ricoeur says, is eminently prone to evil. Utopian belief in the future withering away of the state allowed many to justify a disregard for terrible abuses in the present, while the “false truth” of fascism was morally far worse. Clerical power is as dangerous as political power. “[T]he religious totality and the political totality are genuine totalities of our existence. This is why they are the two greatest temptations for the spirit of falsehood, the lapse from the total to the totalitarian” (p. 189). Ricoeur says that “the Christian has everything to learn from the critique of power elaborated by classical ‘liberal’ thought from Locke to Montesquieu, by the ‘anarchist’ thought of Bakunin, by those who supported the [Paris Commune of 1870], and by the non-Stalinist Marxists” (p. 117).