Conflicting Hermeneutics

Returning to Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy, the leading conclusion of book 1 is that “the home of meaning is not consciousness but something other than consciousness” (p. 55). A bit earlier, he develops an important notion of “reflection” he sees as rooted in Fichte, and perhaps more specifically the work of the French Fichtean Jean Nabert.

Reflection, he says, requires a work of deciphering; it is not a “return to the so-called evidence of immediate consciousness…. [R]eflection is not intuition” (p. 47). The Ego Cogito of Descartes is “given neither in a psychological evidence, nor in an intellectual intuition, nor in a mystical vision…. [I]t has to be ‘mediated’ by the ideas, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that objectify it” (p. 43). “A reflective philosophy is the contrary of a philosophy of the immediate…. [A] philosophy of reflection is not a philosophy of consciousness, if by consciousness we mean immediate self-consciousness” (pp. 43-44).

Such a mediation-first perspective is rare among existential-phenomenological thinkers, and seems to me to mark a significant advance, reconnecting with a key insight of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

Earlier, he had stipulated what to me is a very narrow meaning for “interpretation”, tied to a clarification of the notion of symbols he had used in Symbolism of Evil. (My own usage of “interpretation” is closer to Ricoeur’s “reflection”.) He wants to say that a “symbol” is a discrete thing that has a double meaning — an immediate surface one and a deeper one — and that “interpretation” is specifically directed at such symbols. He objects to Ernst Cassirer’s very general use of “symbol” for any kind of signification in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and distances himself from the broad but shallow usage of “interpretation” in Aristotle’s treatise that bears that name, pointing out that like Cassirer’s use of “symbol”, it covers all signification. (He doesn’t mention here that Aristotle’s own deeper hermeneutics — or semantic dialectic — is to be found distributed through other works.)

I have significant reservations about a division into “immediate surface meaning” and meaning requiring interpretation. I think all meaning at least implicitly requires interpretation. For me, the relevant distinction is between cases where we rely on spontaneous, preconscious interpretation from something like the preconscious layer of Kantian synthesis, and cases that we deliberately revisit.

He devotes some pages to contrasting mathematical (“symbolic”) logic’s concern for strict univocity with the ambiguity inherent in the symbols addressed by the phenomenology of religion. Here he seems to be reaching for an understanding that reason can still be reason yet not be strictly univocal, because (I would say) reality itself “overflows”, and is not strictly univocal. At least for me, this goes far beyond a statement about symbols.

He presents psychoanalysis and the phenomenology of religion as two radically opposed kinds of hermeneutics. Here he explains the “fullness of language” referred to at the end of Symbolism of Evil by saying “The fullness consists in the fact that the second meaning somehow dwells in the first meaning” (pp. 30-31). From this perspective, there is a “truth” of symbols. Symbols have a “revealing power” (p. 31). For Ricoeur, the phenomenology of religion takes this approach, whereas psychoanalysis tells us that conscious meaning is just an illusion. Psychoanalysis for Ricoeur develops its own “semantics of desire” in opposition to what is said on the surface.

At this point, I have a serious doubt whether the specific emphasis on symbols is appropriate in talking about Freud. It does undoubtedly have a large applicability to Jung, but we are not talking about Jung here. Freud’s approach was much more global and process-oriented. The Freudian unconscious has operations of “condensation” and “displacement” that are very different from waking logic.

I think Freud’s negative attitude toward religion had less to do with any specifics of psychoanalytic interpretation than with his more general commitment to rather narrow views of scientific explanation that were especially common among medical practitioners in his time.

I also think there is a kind of “truth” of the unconscious that can even be revelatory, though not in a religious sense. Further, I don’t think Freud intended to consign all products of conscious effort to a realm of illusion; his very commitment to a form of science makes this implausible. So, in this context I don’t see the extreme opposition of revelation versus illusion that Ricoeur saw — contrast, yes, but not a polar opposition.

Moreover, the phenomenology of religion is concerned with specifically religious experience under the broad motif of “faith seeking understanding”, whereas the direct and primary concern of psychoanalysis is with the earthly doings of the human psyche. I don’t see the kind of head-on clash here that Ricoeur apparently saw. I have reservations about various details of Freud’s theories, but think his fundamental idea of the unconscious and its different way of processing things is very important. Ricoeur’s own remarks about consciousness that I began with seem to me to allow space for this.

At the end of book 1, he asks, “Can the dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of meaning be understood as an act of reflection, as the first gesture of reappropriation?” (p. 55). “For the moment our perplexity is great. What is offered to us is a three-term relation… reflection, interpretation understood as restoration of meaning, interpretation understood as reduction of illusion” (p. 56). I think both “restoration” and “reduction of illusion” are overly blunt formulations here, but suspect he will refine this later on. (See also Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis; Ricoeur on Freud; Masters of Suspicion?; Kerygma; Myth.)

Next in this series: Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis

Being, Consciousness

It is an intriguing fact that both the idealist Schelling and the materialist Engels recommended in similar language that we put Being before Consciousness. Schelling and Engels were each making a valid point that we should not attribute something like sovereignty to consciousness.

Nonetheless, I tend to think both these terms add more confusion than clarity. I prefer to dwell on actual meanings rather than Consciousness, and — opposite to the recommendation of Heidegger — on actual beings, rather than Being. Aristotle and Hegel both point out the importance of considering things in the full context of their actuality.

Meaning, Consciousness

I generally translate talk about consciousness into talk about meaning and related commitments. It doesn’t seem to me that anything is lost in the conversion; all the content is still there.

The notion of consciousness as a sort of generalized transparent medium of immediate presence that is somehow also tied to our sense of self and agency may seem intuitive, but it is actually the product of a long cultural development. It seems to belong to what Lacan called the Imaginary. Plato and Aristotle addressed the full range of human experience without any dependency on something like this. (See also Intentionality.)

Experience

Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom all work with thick, nonprimitive, structured notions of human experience that do not involve treating consciousness as a transparent medium in which ready-made contents are immediately presented. Aristotle emphasized experience as a product of accumulation over time, as when we say someone is “experienced”. Kant emphasized that all experience is a product of preconscious synthesis that involves complex applications of concepts. Hegel developed a radical critique of the supposed positive role of immediacy. Whereas many previous readings tended to water down the impact of Kant and Hegel by explicitly or implicitly assimilating their work to empiricist or existential-phenomenological views that treat experience as something primitive, Brandom has emphasized how Kant and Hegel anticipated Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the “Myth of the Given”, and developed an innovative “negative” account of the role of immediacy within experience (see Error; Negativity in Experience.)

The bottom line of all of this is that experience cannot be used as an unproblematic beginning point, as if all the difficult issues were separate from it, out there in the world somewhere. There is no such separation; we find ourselves only in and through a process of understanding life and the world. It is the forms brought to light through this process that matter.

Experience can still be a beginning point of sorts, but in the Aristotelian pragmatic sense that gives no privilege to beginnings. (See also Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Sociology of Knowledge?

In my youth, I was very interested in Karl Mannheim’s attempt to develop a sociology of knowledge. Mannheim belongs to the tradition of classical German sociology, which was always much more philosophical than its American counterpart. As a young man in Hungary, he was close to Georg Lukács. Later, he taught at Frankfurt and interacted with members of the early Frankfurt school.

In his doctoral dissertation, Mannheim had argued that epistemology cannot be self-grounding, and suggested that what he at the time called “ontology” should come first. In “The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge” (1925), he argued that the principal characteristic of modernity was a progressive “self-relativization” of knowledge, and attempted to generalize Marx’s concept of ideology into a theory of something like culture.

His most famous work, Ideology and Utopia (1929), was concerned with the fragility of democracy. His naive hopes that a “free-floating intelligentsia” would lead the way to social peace were severely criticized by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. While rejecting economic determinism, Mannheim saw general social-scientific value in the Marxist thesis that “being determines consciousness”. Like the Marxists, what Mannheim had in mind in speaking of “being” was mainly concrete social-historical circumstance. He spoke of thought as inseparable from such being, and sought to distinguish his own “dynamic relationism” from relativism. Later, as a refugee from the Nazis, he among other things proposed a broader “sociology of mind”, with some reference to Hegel.

(Mannheim did not much rely on the term “consciousness”, mentioned above. For a long time now, I have shied away from programmatic use of that term. It does vaguely refer to something, but that something can be more clearly discussed in other ways. Phenomenologists, existentialists, and Marxists tend to indiscriminately broaden the term “consciousness” to include all phases of the Hegelian phenomenology, but in Hegel, Consciousness refers in particular to the most primitive and inadequate phase, which posits a naive, unproblematic distinction between mind and world. In Brandomian terms, such indiscriminate references to “consciousness” imply a reduction of sapience to mere sentience. In common parlance, “consciousness” suggests a naive notion of a transparent mental substance or medium, or a container of mental objects. I’ve many times registered my objection to programmatic “being” talk, as well. See also Being, Existence.)

In spite of preferring to avoid reliance on terms like “being” and “consciousness”, I do still see an important real asymmetry that is loosely picked out by a phrase like “being determines consciousness”. Reality and thought are asymmetrically mutually determining (see Subject, Object). The real (never simply possessed by us, but rather as that which pushes back) always has an edge over thought, and at any given moment exceeds it, provoking further development. That (in conjunction with mutual recognition) is how a non-naive realism can be recovered, and relativism avoided.