Ricoeur on Freud

Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation is based on 1961 lectures given at Yale. It takes up “the problem left unresolved at the end of my Symbolism of Evil, namely the relationship between a hermeneutics of symbols and a philosophy of concrete reflection” (p. xii). The phrasing suggests that he at this time viewed hermeneutics as a “regional” endeavor and not yet as a general philosophical approach, but the current work goes a long way toward generalizing it.

In respect to Freud, it is both a critique and a positive engagement, philosophical rather than psychological. He will read Freud as a “monument of our culture”. Psychoanalysis, says Ricoeur, is an interpretation of culture, but he reads it as conflicting with every other interpretation. This work will inquire into the nature of psychoanalytic interpretation, the self-understanding that emerges from it, and “what self is it which thus comes to self-understanding” (ibid).

Ricoeur says that language is the meeting ground of contemporary philosophical concerns. Sixty years later, this is still largely true. “The present study in no way pretends to offer the comprehensive philosophy of language we are waiting for. I doubt moreover that such a philosophy could be elaborated by any one man. A modern Leibniz with the ambition and capacity to achieve it would have to be an accomplished mathematician, a universal exegete, a critic versed in several of the arts, and a good psychoanalyst.. While we are awaiting that philosopher of integral language, perhaps it is possible for us to explore some of the key connections” (p. 4). Since then, I think Brandom has made phenomenal strides toward that comprehensive account.

Psychoanalysis should be “a leading participant in any general discussion about language…. The fluctuation in Freud’s writings between medical investigation and a theory of culture bears witness to the scope of the Freudian project” (ibid). Though Ricoeur limits his focus to the works of Freud himself, right at this time Jacques Lacan was becoming very famous in France for promoting a strongly language-centered reading of Freud.

Next in this series: Masters of Suspicion?

Ethical Reason, Interpretation

Now I want to say that the ethical reason or practical reason I have in mind is broad enough to subsume not only a consideration of feeling and non-ego-centered meditation, but all sorts of philosophical questions, and all sorts of technical disciplines as well. It is able to learn from things as diverse as structuralism and Marcelian spirituality.

The broad perspective of ethical reason, born in Plato’s dialogues and developed by Aristotle into a generalized approach subsuming many more specific inquiries, was largely lost in early modern thought, but revived again by Kant and Hegel. To this day, much modern thought remains polarized between untenable alternatives of allegedly value-free scientific or technical analysis on the one hand, and subjectivist self-assertion and anti-rationalism on the other.

Ethical reason asks what and why in a spirit of mutual recognition, and in a way that is at once open-endedly interpretive and concerned with values. (See also Rationality.)

Paul Ricoeur

It’s becoming apparent to me that I need to say a whole lot more about Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005). Ricoeur was a leading contributor to 20th century hermeneutics. His early intellectual formation centered on the Christian personalism of his mentor Gabriel Marcel and Marcel’s associate Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the personalist movement and the journal Esprit, as well as the work of the two greatest practitioners of a strongly subject-centered philosophy — Fichte (through Jean Nabert), and Husserl, whose Ideas I Ricoeur translated to French.

Later, he became increasingly concerned with language, discourse, and questions of interpretation. He eventually moved to a sort of “middle path” in regard to subjectivity (see Oneself as Another). Ricoeur’s work is clearly not an instance of the mentalism I am currently concerned to avoid. (I have myself moved toward the middle from the opposite, anti-subject-centered pole, where I started due to concerns about egoism.) In his later work, Ricoeur also engaged with analytic philosophy. While always motivated by spiritual concerns, he carefully kept his philosophy independent of religious doctrine.

Ricoeur’s unifying lifelong concern has been characterized as a sort of philosophical anthropology. Once upon a time, I would have rejected this very description, as antithetical to the important 1960s “structuralist” critique of existentialist “humanism”. In the past I was mainly aware of his criticisms of structuralism as a one-sided “Kantianism without a transcendental subject”, and mistakenly got the impression that he simply associated all “hermeneutics of suspicion” with reductionism. I disagreed with both these positions, and for too long did not bother to look further. One of my late father’s last recommendations to me was that I would probably find Ricoeur very interesting. Now I feel like he will turn out to be a major ally in cultivating the “middle path”.

Linguistic Turn

It’s almost comical to me that modern philosophy had to undergo a linguistic “turn”. Modern philosophy began with a somewhat infantile rejection of discursive reasoning in favor of mathematics, intuition, and common sense. (Perhaps related to this history, I note with some chagrin that the first-listed meaning for “discursive” in several dictionaries is a pejorative one. I mean “pertaining to discourse”.) Even Leibniz and Spinoza had little interest in dialectic and meaning.

To me, meaning is the sea that we inhabit, the air that we breathe. Meaning permeates everything for us meaning-oriented creatures, including our experience of physical nature and matter. Meaning always requires interpretation. Aristotle and Kant were right that discursive reasoning is the true vocation of a philosopher. (See also What and Why; Dialogue.)

Immanence, Transcendence

Immanence and transcendence are both dubious theological concepts. Everything we care about and everything that inspires us belongs in the space of an interweaving that is neither properly immanent nor properly transcendent. Immanence implies an overly simple, immediate presence, and transcendence implies a reification and objectification. On the other hand, the traditional formula of asserting both at once — in spite of its self-contradictory appearance — can be charitably understood as a way of speaking about the real that is neither the one nor the other.

Judgments

I usually think of judgment as a process of interpretation or a related kind of wisdom, but at least since early modern reformulations of Aristotelian logic, “a” judgment has also traditionally meant a logical proposition, or an assertion of a proposition.

An older, but still post-Aristotelian notion is that what the early moderns called a judgment “A is B” should be understood (on the model of its surface grammar) as the potentially arbitrary predication “A is B”. Such a potentially arbitrary predication by itself does not contain enough information for us to assess whether it is good or bad. The predication model was associated with a non-Aristotelian notion of truth as simple correspondence to supposed fact.

L. M. De Rijk, arguably the 20th century’s leading scholar on medieval Latin logic, developed a very detailed textual argument that the understanding of logical “judgments” in such grammatical terms is actually an unhistorical misreading of Aristotle. In the first volume of his Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology, De Rijk concluded that Aristotle’s own logical or semantic use of “is” or “is not” should be understood not in the traditionally accepted way as a “copula” or binary operator of predication, but rather as a unary operator of assertion on a compound expression — i.e., on the pair (A, B), as opposed to its two elements A and B.

I also want to emphasize that Aristotle himself did not admit simple, potentially arbitrary predications as “judgments”. The special form of Aristotelian propositions makes them express not arbitrary atomic claims as is the case with propositions in the standard modern sense, but two specific ways of compounding subclaims. Aristotle’s two truth-value-forming operations of combination and separation (expressed by “is” and “is not”) limit the scope of what qualifies as a proper Aristotelian “judgment” to cases that are effectively equivalent to what Brandom would call judgments of material consequence or material incompatibility (see Aristotelian Propositions). What the moderns would call Aristotelian “judgments” thus end up more specifically reflecting judgments of what Brandom would call goodness of material inference.

Proper Aristotelian “judgments” thus turn out to express not just arbitrary predications constructed without regard to meaning, but particular kinds of compound claims that can in principle be rationally evaluated for material well-formedness as compound thoughts, based on the actual content of the claims being compounded. (Non-compound claims are just claims, and do not have enough content to be subject to such intrinsic rational evaluation, but as soon as there is some compounding, internal criteria for well-formedness come into play.)

So, fortuitously, modern use of the term “judgment” for these ends up having more substance than it would for arbitrary predications. For Aristotle, truth and falsity only apply to what are actually compound thoughts, because truth and falsity express assessments of material well-formedness, and only compound thoughts can be assessed for such well-formedness. The case for the fundamental role of concerns of normativity rather than simple surface-level predication in Aristotelian truth-valued propositions is further supported by the ways Aristotle uses “said of” relations.

Independent of this sort of better reading of Aristotle, Brandom in the first of his 2007 Woodbridge lectures points out that Kant also strongly rejected the traditional analysis of judgment in terms of predication. Brandom goes on to argue that for Kant, “what makes an act or episode a judging in the first place is just its being subject to the normative demand that it be integrated” [emphasis in original] into a unity of apperception. This holistic, integrative view of Kantian judgment seems to me to be strongly supported by Kant’s discussion of unities of apperception in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as by the broad thrust of the Critique of Judgment.

Thus, a Kantian judgment also has more substance than the standard logical notion, but while an Aristotelian “judgment” gets its substantive, rational character from intra-propositional structure, a Kantian judgment gets it from inter-propositional structure.

Intro to Hermeneutics

“Hermeneutics” is derived from the Greek word for interpretation. It has a complex history, with roots in Greek literary interpretation, scriptural interpretation, and Renaissance humanism. In an 1808 work, the German philologist Friedrich Ast formulated a first version of the hermeneutic circle, emphasizing that we encounter a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship between the meaning of the parts and the meaning of the whole in a text. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911) promoted a discipline of hermeneutics as the grounding for a distinctive kind of scientific method for the human sciences. In contrast to Dilthey, Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) emphasized that we do not begin from the outside with a theoretical methodology, but rather find ourselves in the world along with the things we seek to understand.

The name most strongly associated with 20th century hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002). Combining neo-Kantian and Heideggerian influences with a strong interest in Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, Gadamer emphasized that all understanding has the character of a dialogue, and dwelt extensively on Aristotelian phronesis, or practical wisdom regarding concrete situations and what to do.

Another major figure is Paul Ricoeur (1913 – 2005), who dwelt on the nature of human beings as responsible ethical agents, while rejecting claims that the self is immediately transparent to itself, or fully master of itself. He sought to understand subjectivity without falling prey to subjectivism or presupposing a sovereign Subject. Both he and Gadamer also emphasized the irreducible role of language in understanding.

At least on these points, there is an interesting convergence with themes I have been pursuing here. I see philosophy as fundamentally hermeneutic, rather than seeking to formulate a “system of the world”. The kind of semantics I have attributed to Aristotle, along with his use of dialectic, seems to me to be the earliest developed philosophical hermeneutics, with roots in Socratic questioning. Brandom’s mix of semantics with what he calls normative pragmatics, in conjunction with his work on Hegel, can be considered as a very original form of hermeneutics within analytic philosophy.

Many Hegels?

It is common etiquette among contemporary philosophers to preface sharp criticism with kind remarks. I try to do this myself — to find something positive I can say with full sincerity. I hope that my own practice never gives anyone the kind of feeling of insincerity I sometimes get when the subsequent criticism seems to actually undermine the previous praise, rather than rounding it out.

Gilles Bouché’s introduction to Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust moves from weak praise to a valid elementary point about the difficulties of evaluating interpretations of Hegel, but his rhetoric quickly reveals an undercurrent of global hostility that makes me doubt the appearance of an unprejudiced beginning. For some unspecified reason, Brandom is singled out as “bringing his very own criteria to the bench”, as if every serious interpreter did not do just that. The question of the hermeneutic value of Brandom’s work is then shelved.

Bouché correctly notes that A Spirit of Trust is also a major presentation of Brandom’s own philosophy. He then claims that Brandom’s other major work Making It Explicit only discussed assertions and commitments “against the background of a firmament of fixed concepts”. I am aware of no textual evidence that Brandom ever presupposed such a background of fixed concepts — to me, this seems antithetical to his whole approach, which centers on a fine-grained though abstract analysis of open-ended processes of interpretation and evaluation, in contexts framed by dialogue and social relations.

Like some others, Bouché affects surprise that Brandom would “want to present us with an ethics at all”, even though questions related to normativity were already central to Making It Explicit. He claims this can only be understood in terms of a “constitutive limitation” of Brandom’s philosophy. His brief expansion of this presents Brandom’s sharp distinction of human “sapience” from organic “sentience” in extremely unsympathetic light without explaining it at all, and tries to support this by artificially tying it to a claim that Making It Explicit had nothing to offer to a wider circle of readers who expect philosophy to help them with cultural, existential, and political issues.

Twenty years ago, I struggled with the sapience/sentience distinction myself. Now I would emphasize that it is just a distinction between different concerns, one of which Brandom chooses to focus on. (In articles under Subjectivity in the menu, I have elaborated somewhat on both sides of this distinction.) It is true that Making It Explicit is a highly technical work, clearly addressed to professional analytic philosophers, rather than to that wider circle of readers. Analytic philosophy in general is technical, and has little to say directly to that wider circle. But Making It Explicit is an epic reorientation of analytic philosophy, in a direction that ultimately reconnects it with concerns that I trace back to Plato and Aristotle, who did address that wider circle.

Bouché correctly points out that for Brandom, the practices described in Making It Explicit already imply a commitment to realize the kind of community based on mutual recognition and trust that is advocated in A Spirit of Trust. He goes a little too far in identifying Brandom’s philosophy as “exactly what he ascribes to Hegel”, and then characterizes the essays he is introducing as “defend[ing] Hegel” against Brandom’s “supposedly magnanimous” reading.

Brandom makes it very clear that A Spirit of Trust is a selective and highly synthetic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and that he does not intend it to exclude other approaches, even though he does contradict many particular old-school claims about Hegel. I take him at his word on this, and myself find complementary value in, for example, H. R. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder, which is a line-by-line literal commentary on the Phenomenology that does an amazing job of clarifying the fine grain of Hegel’s argument. Harris’ approach could hardly be more different from Brandom’s very high-level reconstruction, but I find both to be invaluable. I have also been impressed by, e.g., Michael John Petry’s exegesis of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, in spite of the fact that Petry is quite disparaging of the Phenomenology. Despite their many differences, Brandom, Harris, and Petry all contribute to a view of a basically very reasonable Hegel, far from from the old stereotype.

In my own modest efforts here, connections with Aristotle — about whom Brandom says nothing at all — are very important. Aristotle helps me understand Hegel and Brandom, and Hegel and Brandom help me understand Aristotle. I am very interested in what I call “historiographical” questions, which directly address the kind of more concrete cultural concerns that Bouché misses in Brandom. I am also very interested in broader questions about the nature of subjectivity, and about ground-level ethics as well as meta-ethics. I don’t think it makes me any less Brandomian to have additional interests that Brandom does not pursue himself. Nor would I dream of faulting Brandom for not devoting his time to my other interests. In one lifetime, it is not possible to do everything. To accomplish something significant, one must have focus.

I believe one of the marks of a truly great philosopher is to be the subject of many different readings that are both interesting and have some plausibility. Some will be better than others and it is appropriate to critically demarcate this, but there will be something to gain from many of them. (See also Why Brandom’s Hegel.)

What and Why

I want to say that questions of what and why of the sort asked by Plato and Aristotle are of vital importance for all ethically concerned people. These are questions of interpretation, and of what I have been broadly calling meaning. For the moment, I’m leaving aside obvious questions of what to do, in favor of these broader questions that implicitly inform them.

What something is and why it is the way it is — or should be the way it should be — are deeply intertwined. Aristotle provides many good illustrations of this. Also, at any given moment, our thinking about why depends on many assumptions about what we are concerned with that may call for review. Conversely, our thinking about each what implicitly depends on many more detailed judgments of why.

It is not practical to question everything at once, so we do it serially as the need arises, striving to be deeply honest with ourselves in our assessments of the relative levels of such needs. We seek the appropriate best balance of considerations, as well as a good balance between thoroughness of questioning on the one hand, and practical responsiveness or needed decisiveness on the other. (See also Context.)

The question why is quite open-ended. It asks for reasons or causes — and then potentially for more reasons or causes behind those — sincerely seeking to explain or justify, in the spirit of Hegel’s notion of a faith in reasonableness without presupposed truths. It arises in ethical deliberation, in general dialogue, and in many other practical circumstances, as well as in more broadly philosophical considerations. It always involves a dimension of explicit or implicit judgments of value and importance, and often interrelates with questions of fact or interpretation of fact. We should pursue it in a spirit of mutual recognition and expansive agency. Brandom’s normative pragmatics provides a good outer frame for why questions, and valuable technical tools for addressing them. (See also “Why” by Normative Pragmatics.)

The question what honestly faces the provisional character of our implicit and explicit classifications and identifications of things. As Kant might remind us, the what-it-is that we “immediately” apprehend depends upon complex processes of synthesis. Every what encapsulates many judgments and inferences. That does not mean our apprehensions are necessarily wrong — far from it — but it opens another huge space of questions an ethically concerned person should be aware of as possibly relevant, and should monitor for potential warning flags. As with why, questions of what also interrelate with questions of fact or interpretation of fact. Brandom’s inferential semantics provides a good outer frame and technical apparatus for approaching what questions. (See also “What” by Inferential Semantics.)

Abstract and Concrete

In contrast to later traditional “metaphysics”, Aristotle recommended we start with the concrete, but then aim to dialectically rise to higher understanding, which is still of the concrete. In any inquiry, we should begin with the things closer to us, but as Wittgenstein said in a different context, we should ultimately aim to kick away the ladder upon which we climbed.

What Aristotle would have us eventually kick away is by no means the concrete itself, but only our preliminary understanding of it as a subject of immediate, simple reference. Beginnings are tentative, not certain. We reach more solid, richer understanding through development.

Aristotle’s discussion of “primary” substance in Categories has often been turned into a claim that individuals are ontologically more primary than form. This is to misunderstand what Categories is talking about. Aristotle explicitly says Categories will be about “things said without combination” [emphasis added], i.e., about what is expressed by kinds of apparently atomic sayings that are used in larger sayings.

The initial definition of substance in the strict or “primary” sense — which he will eventually kick away in the Metaphysics — is of a thing (said) “which is neither said of something underlying nor in something underlying”. (Aristotle often deliberately leaves it open whether he is talking about a referencing word or a referenced thing — or says one and implies the other — because in both cases, the primary concern is the inferential meaning of the reference.)

This initial definition is a negative one that suffices to distinguish substance from the other categories. By implication, it refers to something that is said simply of something, in the way that a proper name is. As examples, he gives (namings of) an individual human, or an individual horse.

“Socrates” would be said simply of Socrates, and would thus “be” — or refer to — a primary substance in this sense. The naming of Socrates is an apparently simple reference to what we might call an object. As Brandom has noted, this picks out a distinctive semantic and inferential role that applies only to references to singular things.

Aristotle then says that more universal namings or named things like “human” and “horse” are also “substances” — i.e., can also refer to singular objects — in a secondary sense, as in “that horse”. Then substance in general is further distinguished, by saying it is something A such that when something else B is said of it, both the naming and the “what-it-is” of B are said of the primary or secondary substance A. (See also Form; Things in Themselves; Definition.)

If a horse as such “is” a mammal of a certain description, then that horse must be a mammal of that description. If a mammal as such “is” warm-blooded, then that horse “is” warm-blooded.

These are neither factual nor ontological claims, but consequences of a rule of interpretation telling us what it means to say these kinds of things. Whether or not something is a substance in this sense is surely a key distinction, for it determines the validity or invalidity of a large class of inferences.

Based on the classification of A as an object reference and B as something said of A, we can make valid inferences about A from B.

When something else C is said of the non-substance B, by contrast, we still have a “naming” of B, but the “what-it-is” or substantive meaning of C does not apply to B itself, but only modifies it, because B is not an object reference. Applying the substantive meaning of C to B — i.e., making inferences about B from the meaning of C — would be invalid in this case.

Just because, say, warm-blooded as such “is” a quality, there is no valid inference that mammals “are” qualities, or that that horse “is” a quality. The concern here is with validity of a certain kind of inference and interpretation, not ontology (or epistemology, either).

In the Metaphysics, the initial referential notion of substance as something underlying is explicitly superseded through a far more elaborate development of “what it was to have been” a thing that emphasizes form, and ultimately actuality and potentiality. The appearance of what might be mistaken for a sort of referential foundationalism is removed. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic.)

I also think he wanted to suggest that practically, a kind of preliminary grasp of some actuality has to come first in understanding. Actuality is always concrete and particular, and said to be more primary. But potentiality too plays an irreducible role, in underwriting the relative persistence of something as the “same” something through change, which motivated the earlier talk about something underlying. The persistence of relatively stable identities of things depends on their counterfactual potentiality, which can only be apprehended in an inferential way. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration.)

It does make sense to say that things like actuality and substance inhere more in the individual than in the species, but that is due to the meanings of actuality and substance, not to an ontological status.