Tag: Death

Memory, History, Forgetting — Conclusion

There is a great deal more in Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting that I won’t try to summarize.

Part 2, entitled “History, Epistemology”, is a nice examination of the status of history as an inquiry, with detailed examination of the historiographical approach of the Annales school, but I got more out of his previous discussion of closely related topics in Time and Narrative.

Part 3, “The Historical Condition”, addresses something of the scope of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Its most prominent feature is another still somewhat deferential critique of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein as the central, deep, “existential”, “ontological” reality that is also specific to human being. Heidegger’s existential approach to “historicity” explicitly rules out any constructive engagement with actual history or the historiographical discourse of part 2, whereas Ricoeur would like to build a bridge.

Ricoeur also says Heidegger’s discourse about care ignores our embodiment. As elsewhere and as I do, he objects to the emphasis on “being toward death”. In particular, he does not like Heidegger’s insistence that only our relation to our own death can be “authentic”, not the death of others.

More broadly, with uncharacteristic sharpness he says “What is termed authenticity here lacks any criterion of intelligibility: the authentic speaks for itself and allows itself to be recognized as such by whomever is drawn into it. It is a self-referential term in the discourse of Being and Time. Its impreciseness is unequaled, except for… resoluteness…, which contains no determination, no preferential mark concerning any project of accomplishment whatsoever; conscience as a summons of the self to itself without any indication relative to good or evil…. [T]he discourse it produces is constantly threatened with succumbing to what Adorno called ‘the jargon of authenticity’. The pairing of the authentic with the primordial could save it from this peril if primordiality were assigned a function other than that of reduplicating the allegation of authenticity” (p. 349).

It seems to me that a similar point applies to Heideggerian care. Care by itself is not a sufficient criterion for anything, any more than purely formal Badiouian fidelity is. Caring for others, love, Aristotelian friendship are indispensable. What we care about matters hugely. In place of Dasein, I put ethical being.

Next in this series: Ricoeur on Forgiveness

Meditation on Death?

I’m preparing to write something about Ricoeur’s treatment of the Freudian “death instinct”, but first wanted to separately express some views of my own. I disapprove of attempts to make death into a philosophical theme. Our finitude has plenty of other more illuminating and ethically relevant aspects, and I think the living should focus on life. Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death” seems right to me. In cherishing the memory of lost loved ones, it is the loved ones who are important.

I don’t like early Heidegger’s melodramatic talk about “being toward death”. I don’t even like Plato’s literary representation of what I would call Socrates’ excessive acceptance of his impending execution. Even though it is counterbalanced by more life-affirming passages in other places, the suggestion that the philosopher should welcome death goes too far.

I thoroughly approve of Brandom’s reinterpretation of the Hegelian myth of a “struggle to the death” between competing would-be Masters as a melodramatic extreme illustration of an underlying much more general concept of risk-taking. The importance of risk-taking is the real essence there and the message to carry forward, not struggle against others and not death. (Apart from this, Hegel’s Master serves as an extreme negative example of attitudes that exist but should be overcome.)