Symbolism of Evil?

I’m beginning to look at Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil (French ed. 1960). This was the last installment of the projected philosophy of will that he actually produced, concerned with a long detour through the experience of sin, mainly in the Old Testament and Greek traditions. Ricoeur apparently abandoned the projected final philosophical reconciliation that was to follow this, after the current investigation changed his thinking about relations between phenomenology and hermeneutics.

Near the beginning of this work, he speaks first of an experience of confession underlying the symbolism that will be investigated, then of a primitive sense of defilement or impurity. I think confession can have a positive role, but have grave doubts about the notion of impurity.

“[I]mpurity is measured not by imputation to a responsible agent” (p. 27) but rather by a violation of religious Law. He notes the huge place of sexuality in this context, adding that “the defilement of sexuality as such is a theme foreign to the ethics that proceeds from the confession of divine holiness, as well as to the ethics that is organized around the theme of justice or the integrity of the moral person” (p. 28).

Then he seems to argue that the excess of meaning inherent in symbolism will make it possible to reinterpret this nonethical content in terms that can be given ethical meaning. I don’t know yet how this will turn out, but I favor the priority of actual ethics over law, be it religious or civil. I also think sound theology puts the spirit of actual ethics before the letter of positive law.

This work has been criticized for privileging the Judeo-Christian tradition, and for presupposing too much about pre-existing meaning. But in all the works of Ricoeur that I have examined, I’ve been extremely impressed with the quality of argument, and the graceful way in which he combined personal faith with free philosophical development.

Personally, I’m happy with where he left things at the end of Fallible Man, with the potential for both good and evil. I don’t like dwelling on evil, let alone its complication in sin. But I greatly admire Ricoeur, and this is a major work of his that I want to understand.

Constituted Intentionality

It seems to me that Brandom effectively says intentionality — the basis of meaning — as such not only is not a mental act, but not an act at all or in any way reducible to an act, even though intending is certainly a doing. Further, unlike Husserl’s version, Brandom’s intentionality seems to be something constituted by something else. That something else would be processes of mutual recognition both actual and ideal, which I think also normatively but not causally ground judgment and objectivity, knowledge and logic, while in addition incorporating considerations of reasonableness grounded in feeling, associated with the respect in recognition. I think intentionality is a kind of form having to do with linguistic meaning and potentialities for material inference, and that this form is normatively constituted through mutual recognition.

Ricoeur on Husserl’s Ideas II

In Ricoeur’s volume of essays on Husserl, I just discovered a piece on Ideas II. Apparently in this work, Husserl rather surprisingly introduced a notion of “spirit” related to the German notion of Geisteswissenschaft (i.e., social or human science). However, it still seems thinner than that of even a deflationary Hegel.

Ricoeur writes, “In reintroducing the dimension of the person and that of community Husserl completes the ego-psyche polarity with a new schema where spirit (Geist) is not the empirical counterpart of the pure subject of phenomenology but is rather a sort of cultural equivalent much more awkward to situate in the phenomenological structure” (Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, pp. 68-69). Further on, he adds that for Husserl, “Spirit ‘works’… in the world only so far as people understand and approve it” (p. 76). He concludes that Husserl’s “Geist is nothing other than the ego of phenomenology, but without the light of the phenomenological reduction” (p. 80).

“Transgression” as Ordinary?

Ricoeur’s unexpected old talk about a “transgression” (which the translator says in a note should be taken in an etymological sense, without the moral connotation it has in English) — or an overflowing, as I would put it — inherent in ordinary language use and ordinary determination of concepts makes another interesting rebuttal to the Badiouian claim endorsed by some of the Žižekians that only a few extraordinary “Events” and utterly arbitrary acts avoid chaining us to the status quo.

Self, Infinity

Ricoeur’s idea of an ethical Self as an aim is an important new variant in the menagerie of nonequivalent concepts of self. Perhaps this one has been implicit for a while, but I had not clearly made this exact connection. I very much like Aristotelian ends and Brandom’s reading of Kantian unity of apperception as an ethical goal though, so it is a welcome addition. Now I suspect this is behind what Ricoeur later called ipse identity and narrative identity, which had been troubling me.

The same older work of Ricoeur’s also uses the term “infinite” for the relatively modest if still noteworthy kind of freedom that is indirectly apparent in ordinary language use and ordinary determination of concepts. I would probably still choose a different word to avoid other connotations, but have no objection to that meaning. Again though, a couple of later, less clear references to infinity that had troubled me could be explained by this.

Next in this series: “Transgression” as Ordinary?

Fallible Humanity

Fallible Man (French ed. 1960) was the next installment after Freedom and Nature in Paul Ricoeur’s project for a philosophy of will. This account of our fallibility was to set the stage for the following installment dealing with the problem of evil, which I will address separately.

The main body of this shorter book develops a nice interweaving of Aristotelian and Kantian anthropology, with special emphasis on the role of feeling. We are “intermediate” beings, mediating beings, and as such there is an inherent “disproportion” in our relations to self. “[T]his ‘disproportion’ of self to self would be the ratio of fallibility” (p. 4; emphasis in original).

Ricoeur says we can retain neither the Cartesian distinction between a finite understanding and an infinite will, nor any other convenient mapping of “finite” and “infinite” to separate faculties. Character makes us finite, but our participation in language involves us in what he calls a kind of infinity. An ethical Self finally uniting these aspects of our being should be considered as an end and ongoing project rather than an actuality.

Philosophical anthropology has to proceed as a “second order elucidation of a nebula of meaning which at first has a pre-philosophical character” (p. 8). As a consequence, method has to be dissociated from the idea of a starting point. “Philosophy does not start anything independently” (ibid).

He adopts the language of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) on the “pathos” of human “misery”. I don’t like such pessimistic rhetoric, but fortunately Ricoeur says the whole pre-comprehension of this “misery” is contained in the more moderate Platonic myths of the soul.

“The [Platonic] soul… is the very movement from the sensible toward the intelligible… its misery is shown in that it is at first perplexed and searches…. The soul holds opinions and makes mistakes; it is not vision… but an aim. It is not contact and possession… but tendency and tension” (pp. 12-13). “Instead of a well-balanced structure, it is a non-determined movement, a system of tensions which emerges” (p. 14). Plato speaks of an ambiguous power of the soul that is affected by both reason and desire, and results from a kind of mixture. For Plato, the account must take a mythical form, because such matters cannot be explained in terms of permanent realities.

My body is a “zero origin” that ties every perception to a point of view (p. 33). Invoking a common Husserlian theme, Ricoeur notes that perception involves inference about the back sides of things that we cannot see, and so on.

More broadly, our character may be viewed as the summation of many limiting “perspectives”, at the same time that our engagement in acts of conceptual determination implicitly involves a degree of “transgression” of those pre-given limitations (p. 38).

Ricoeur argues that our very ability to recognize something as a perspective implicitly involves a “transgression” or escape from limitation by the perspective. “Therefore, I am not merely a situated onlooker, but a being who intends and expresses as an intentional transgression of the situation” (p. 41). “[T]he project of a phenomenology of perception, wherein the moment of saying is postponed and the reciprocity of saying and seeing is destroyed, is ultimately untenable” (p. 42). “I say more than I see” (p. 44). Referring to Hegel, he adds “We are always already in the dimension of truth” (p. 46). “The fact that the self is at variance with itself is the indefeasible worm in the fruit of the immediate” (ibid; emphasis in original). “Here again we must not move too quickly to the side of the subject, act or noesis, but proceed reflectively beginning with the object, content and noema” (p. 49). Referring to Aristotle, he talks about the “power of the verb” to express affirmation and judgment. “I myself become a synthesis of speech and perspective in this projection of objectivity” (p. 61). “[I]f point of view is a characteristic of openness, namely its narrowness, openness indicates that my point of view is transgressed” (p. 62).

Ricoeur says these considerations suggest something like the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination, in its mediating role between the passivity of sensible intuition and the activity of thought. He also relates them to the experience of time.

“Plato… advised against rushing headlong into the abyss of the infinite or into that of the One but recommended learning to linger in between…. What Plato said of the One we can apply to the totality. Nothing gives rise to deception more than the idea of totality. All too quickly it has been said: It is here, it is there, it is Mind, it is Nature, it is History. Violence is the next step” (pp. 73-74). Instead, the idea of totality should be taken as a task, a Kantian imperative.

Our practical finitude is summed up in the notion of character. Ricoeur provocatively suggests that our practical “infinitude” with respect to the constitution of meaning is summed up in Aristotle’s notion of happiness. What extends the mediation of the Kantian transcendental synthesis of imagination into the practical domain, he says, is the constitution of the person through Kantian respect.

“Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole” (p. 89). There is no science of character. Ricoeur says “My humanity is my essential community with all that is human outside myself…. [M]y character is that humanity seen from somewhere” (p. 93).

Desire too fundamentally involves a kind of openness. We are not enclosed within our desire. But there is also an affective opacity or closing involved in attachment.

Bergson is quoted saying each feeling of sufficient depth represents the whole soul.

“The person is the Self which was lacking to the ‘I’ of the Kantian ‘I think’…. The Self is aimed at rather than experienced…. There is no experience of the person in itself and for itself” (p. 106). The person is the synthesis of the “antithetical notions” of character and happiness. “[T]he person is primarily the ideal of the person” (p. 110).

According to Ricoeur, feeling already overcomes the duality of subject and object. It simultaneously tells us something about both. Feeling is essentially concerned with values, and simultaneously with what is. “If one does not take into consideration the primordial disproportion of vital desire and intellectual love (or of spiritual joy), one entirely misses the specific nature of human affectivity” (p. 140).

Not pleasure itself but a blind preference for pleasure is evil. “[H]appiness, restored by the reflection on the ‘excellences’ of the ‘good’ man, is ultimately the highest form of the pleasant” (p. 148). Thomistic and Cartesian analysis of the passions fails to see the “innocence of ‘difference’ under the cloak of vain and deadly ‘preference'” (p. 163). “[E]ncountering of another person is what breaks the finite, cyclic pattern of the sensible appetite” (p. 168).

Kantian anthropology should learn from Aristotle’s treatment of pleasure, and seek to discover behind passions an innocent quest that is “no longer mad and in bondage but constitutive of human praxis and the human Self” (p. 170). Later he quotes Hegel saying all great accomplishments involve passion, while a morality that simply condemns passion is deadly and too often hypocritical.

“The quest for reciprocity, which no will to live can account for, is the true passage from consciousness to self-consciousness” (p. 184). “I esteem myself as a thou for another” (p. 188). “[T]his belief, this credence, this trust, constitutes the very feeling of my worth” (p. 189). “[I]ts character of belief makes its corruptions possible: what is believed is presumed; and the presumption of the preesumed can turn into the presumption of the presumptuous” (p. 190). According to Ricoeur, the unstable, ambiguous “middle part” of the soul in Plato’s myth mixes the vital and the spiritual. Feeling prospectively binds things together, in the process creating the disproportion of self to self. This is the fragility of the human being, with immense potential for both good and evil.

Next in this series: Middle Part of the Soul

Ricoeur on Recognition

Paul Ricoeur’s very last book The Course of Recognition (French ed. 2004) is a fascinating discussion of the history and variety of concepts of recognition in philosophy, from judgments of identification of things in general to Hegel’s ethical principle of mutual recognition. It is full of insightful remarks on the history of concepts of self, from Homer and Sophocles to Bergson and Husserl. I am myself especially interested in further progress that takes Hegel’s ethical principle as a starting point and is essentially unrelated to concerns of identification, but for its intended scope this is a fine study. Even recognition in the sense of identification turns out to be ramified in all sorts of interesting ways.

The introduction is devoted to a highly nuanced discussion of treatments of the word “recognition” in two large-scale French dictionaries that each included many literary citations, somewhat like the Oxford English Dictionary does. (Of course, as Ricoeur warned, lexicography does not directly translate into philosophy.) The 19th century Littré dictionary gave 23 distinct meanings for recognition, and attempted to show their interconnection in a “rule-based polysemy”. The 20th century Robert evinced a different theory of the interconnection of the different meanings. In both cases, a sort of lexicographical equivalent of the Thomistic doctrine of analogy seems to me to be at work, presenting the diverse meanings as unified after all, by means of a sort of ordered series.

The problem with such an emphasis on recovering unity through analogy is that it tends to reduce away the kind of non-univocity that Aristotle was so careful to point out. In the main body of the book, Ricoeur developed a similar ordered series from philosophical senses of recognition, attempting to connect the final ethical notion of mutual recognition back to purely cognitive or epistemic judgments of identity of things in general, using a discussion of what he calls self-recognition as a capable human being (via his notions of ipse identity and narrative identity of personal selves from Oneself as Another) as a sort of middle term to connect them. In the earlier book, narrative identity was itself supposed to be a sort of mean between the logical identity associated with sameness, on the one hand, and ethical notions of self-constancy and promise keeping that he developed there, on the other. (See also Solicitude.)

Although I think Ricoeur’s notions of self-constancy and promise-keeping are quite valuable and are indeed related to the ethical principle in mutual recognition, I would myself emphasize the difference between these concerns — which seem to pertain to the integrity of ethical beings — and concerns pertaining to the identification of individuals. One seems to address a kind of ethical substantiality associated with responsibility, whereas the other seems to address a kind of uniqueness. I don’t really see any mean between these, but rather an interweaving of strands that remain distinct. (But see Self, Infinity for a new insight on what Ricoeur was aiming at here.)

Nonetheless, the ramifications of the sense of “recognition” that starts from mere identification show how even a narrow concern with logical identity can be broadened in all sorts of unexpected ways. At the dictionary level, the ordered series progresses from recognition of sameness through various shadings of recognition of truth, then to various avowals and confessions, and finally to appreciation and gratitude.

The book’s main philosophical discussion moves from the technical role of an identity-related “synthesis of recognition” in Kant’s account of processes of synthesis, through the aforementioned discussion of notions of self, to an account of Hegelian mutual recognition as an alternative to Hobbes’ famous thesis of the state of nature as a war of all against all, and more positively in terms of Axel Honneth’s emphasis on an emergence of mutual recognition from an underlying “struggle” for recognition.

Ricoeur points out that even Descartes said judgments of identity are inseparable from judgments of difference. Augustine’s view of time as internal to the soul — in contrast to Aristotle, who associated time with a measure of externally perceptible change — is presented as a step toward modern forms of subjectivity, which Locke’s explicit association of personal identity with consciousness and continuity of memory is taken to successfully consummate, in spite of various paradoxes with which it is associated.

Historically this seems right, but to my surprise Ricoeur seems to have viewed it as progress toward a better understanding, whereas I see in early modernity an immense new confusion of subjectivity with selfhood that only began to be sorted out again with Kant and Hegel. “There is no doubt that we owe the decisive impulse in the direction of a what I propose calling hermeneutics of self to the Cartesian philosophy of the cogito and Locke’s theory of reflection” (p. 89; emphasis in original). I would agree as far as a decisive impulse in the direction of emphasis on self is concerned, but I think the confusion of subjectivity with selfhood has greatly impeded understanding of both. (See also Self, Subject.)

In this same context, Ricoeur speaks of Kant’s “effacement of ipseity in the treatment of moral autonomy” (p. 90). I would rather speak of his salutary separation of moral autonomy from notions of self. Moral autonomy is related to our integrity and substantiality as ethical beings — to what we really care about, specifically as made clear by how we show that care in our lives. Our ethical substance is actualized in the adverbial “how” of that care. Other biographical details that contribute to making us distinguishable from others are not really relevant to that.

I also think we love someone first of all in response to that “how” of their caring, and then because we love them for that, other details about them become dear to us.

Though broadly endorsing the ethical concept of mutual recognition, Ricoeur seems to have had a worry about its emphasis on reciprocity, related to his acceptance of Lévinas’ idea of an asymmetrical priority of the Other. I don’t understand this. Mutual recognition applies to relations between rational animals; it does not apply to the kind of relation to God that Lévinas often had in mind. It may well be appropriate to say that each participant should in various ways put consideration of the other before self, but in turn, the other should also do the same. An asymmetry in each direction is perfectly compatible with a symmetry between the directions.

Ricoeur did not live to see Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust, where the ethical concept of mutual recognition finally becomes a guiding criterion for judgment in general, and for the grounding of objectivity in general. I think he would have been highly intrigued by this landmark development. (See also Ricoeurian Ethics.)

Consent?

The final part of Paul Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature was to discuss our “aquiescence to necessity” (p. 341). At one point he says he is looking for a way to ground something like Nietzsche’s amor fati or “love of fate”. The idea would be to explain how to achieve reconciliation to what must be, but without falling into an overly passive stance. Here he notes that “Pure description raises more problems than it resolves or than it presents as resolved” (p. 347).

His attempts to describe various aspects of necessity — principally under the forms of character, the unconscious, and life, which he notes also involve other wills, history, and the whole course of nature — he finds to be irremediably tainted by the “spell of objectivity” (ibid). The problem seems to be that he honestly thinks empirical data — or psychoanalytic theories, in the case of the unconscious — give the best insight into the operations of “bodily necessity” (p. 343), but then his Marcellian concerns about objectification lead him to conclude that none of the work he surveys in this context is usable for achieving the kind of reconciliation he wanted.

He ends up hinting that this will be resolved in a future work that does not rely on a Husserlian “bracketing” of questions related to what Ricoeur calls Transcendence that he had announced would limit the scope of this work. Transcendence, he suggests, will be addressed in the new context of a “poetics” of the will, rather than the modified Husserlian phenomenology he was pursuing here. He seems to have believed that ultimate reconciliation of freedom and necessity could only be achieved through a spiritual relation to Transcendence. Without in any way diminishing the value of such a spiritual relation, I am more optimistic that there is a purely philosophical resolution of this issue, using Aristotelian and Brandomian resources. Meanwhile, having myself already used the term “poetic” to describe statements about spiritual beliefs, I look forward to seeing how he developed this notion of a “poetics”. (See also Phenomenology of Will; Ricoeur on Embodiment; Ricoeur on Choice; Voluntary Action.)

Next in this series: Fallible Humanity

Voluntary Action

Part 2 of Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature is devoted to voluntary action. For Ricoeur, our embodiment is the key to understanding how this works. Careful attention to the phenomena of our embodied existence refutes all dualism of mind and body. The intentionality of action is practical rather than representational. “Action is the criterion of [willing’s] authenticity…. it is not simply a question of subsequently carrying out our plans and programs, but of testing them continuously amid the vicissitudes of reality…. The genesis of our projects is only one moment in the union of soul and body” (pp. 201-202; emphasis in original).

A tacit action accompanies even the most indecisive willing. In the application of any kind of knowledge, it “has to be moved like my body” (p. 204). Will can only be fully understood in the context of effort, but effort in turn can only be understood against a background of spontaneity. Action always involves both a doing and a happening, a combination of active and passive aspects. The body is not the object of action, but its organ. An organ is not an external instrument, but a part of us.

The body as the organ of our action has both preformed skills that form the basis of reflexes and acquired habits, and involuntary movements associated with emotion. The bodily movements associated with emotion are inseparable from the emotion itself. Habit involves a kind of degeneration of voluntary action into automatism, but this very degeneration makes it more easily deployable. Ricoeur here speaks of an involuntary that sustains and serves voluntary action. Habit can help overcome the resistance of emotion, and emotion can help overcome the inertia of habit.

In effort, the body is moved through the mediation of the nonrepresentational “motor intentions” of desire and habit. Accordingly, voluntary movement should not be understood as essentially preceded by representation. Instead, the realization of intentions depends on the living being’s structural subordination of motor montages to intentions. There can be no willing without ability, and no ability without possible willing.

Both ability and a certain spontaneous “docility” of the body exhibited in simple gestures like raising my arm are prior to any experience of effort. There is also “a seeing and a knowing which the will does not produce” (p. 336). On the other hand, if all our acts are attributable to a same self, it is because they participate in a unity of effort. (For more on the same book, see Phenomenology of Will; Ricoeur on Embodiment; Ricoeur on Choice; Consent?)

Next in this series: Consent?

Ricoeurian Choice

Part 1 of Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature is devoted to a rich discussion of choice. He says that to will is to think (p. 41), and that deciding is a kind of judging (p. 43). But also “I project my own self into the action to be done. Prior to all reflection about the self which I project, the myself summons itself… it becomes committed…. Prereflexive self-imputation is active, not observational” (p. 59; emphasis in original).

He develops at length how the interdependence of the voluntary and the involuntary can be seen in processes of choice. “The circle of ethics and practice repeats the more basic circle of motive and decision” (p. 77). Motives partially determine us in certain directions, but in deciding we choose which motives to put first. Deciding involves a combination of analysis and judgment with creativity and risk.

We should not think of a decision as an atomic act coming from nowhere. Hesitation and indecision are valid moments of a genuine process of considering alternatives, and this has implications for the self as well. “[T]his inchoate, problematic mode of myself must be grasped as it presents itself. We have no right to substitute for it the image of the triumphant self which is invariably one” (p. 140). The ambiguity inherent in our embodiment means that our decisions cannot be simply governed by a present totality of inclinations or an evident hierarchy of values (p. 143).

Neither an intellectualist approach that tries to reduce decision to air-tight determination from reasons nor a voluntarist one that turns decision into a creation from nothing is valid. “A living dialectic constantly brings us back from one aspect of choice to the other: choice as the peak of previous growth and as the surge of novelty” (p. 164; emphasis in original). “Thus we must say simultaneously that ‘choice follows from the final practical judgment’ and ‘a practical judgment is final when choice irrupts‘” (p. 181; emphasis in original). “Determination of the act and indetermination of the power do not actually represent two separate moments” (p. 186). (For more on the same book, see Phenomenology of Will; Ricoeur on Embodiment; Voluntary Action; Consent?. In general, see also Fallible Humanity; Ricoeurian Ethics; Oneself as Another; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Potentiality, Actuality; Brandomian Choice.)

Next in this series: Ricoeur on Embodiment