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”.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a tremendously original, highly influential, and troublesome philosopher. What makes his work troublesome is not only conceptual difficulty and a deliberate practice of translating the familiar into the unfamiliar, but also his never clearly repudiated attempt to influence the Nazi movement in Germany. He seems to have been a cultural and linguistic chauvinist who rejected pseudo-biological racism, but nonetheless put hopes in an “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism as an alternative to American and Soviet materialism. This identification puts a dark cloud over the interpretation of his writing, which was, however, generally very far removed from politics. The question is, how much it is possible to detach his work from a stance that seems worse than one of mere bad judgment.

An influential but controversial reader of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Heidegger combined a sympathetic but critical take on Husserl’s phenomenology with an interest in the hermeneutics of Wilhem Dilthey. Widely read as an “existentialist”, he sharply repudiated Sartre’s appropriation of his work. In his later works, he approached philosophy as a kind of poetic meditation.

His most famous thesis was that Western thought largely lost its way from Plato onward, neglecting the question of the meaning of Being in favor of preoccupation with things. While he made good points about the preconceptions involved in our ordinary encounters with things, I think he too sharply rejected “ontic” engagement with empirical, factual concerns in favor of a purified ontology. He also promoted a valorization of what I would call the pre-philosophical thought of the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Parmenides. I think Plato and especially Aristotle represented a gigantic leap forward from this.

Some of Heidegger’s very early work was on the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, who seems to have originated the standard notion of ontology later promoted by Wolff and others. In sharp contrast to the tradition stemming from Scotus, Heidegger argued that Being is not the most generic concept, and wanted to emphasize a “Being of beings” in contrast to their factual, empirical presentation. He did not follow the path of Aquinas in identifying pure Being with God, either, and Aquinas probably would have rejected his talk of the Being of beings.

I think his most important contribution was an emphasis on what he called “being-in-the-world” as a way of overcoming the dichotomy of subject and object. His associated critique of Cartesian subjectivity has been highly influential. In later works, he also recommended putting difference before identity, and relations before things. Although the way he expounded these notions was quite original, I prefer to emphasize their roots in Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (See also Being, Existence; Being, Consciousness; Beings; Phenomenological Reduction?; Memory, History, Forgetfulness — Conclusion.)

Primacy of Perception?

Having mentioned Merleau-Ponty in passing the other day, I should say a bit more. Merleau-Ponty was the leading exponent of existential phenomenology in the 20th century. One of his most central theses was what he called the primacy of perception, developed in his most famous work The Phenomenology of Perception.

The Husserlian and existential phenomenological traditions generally put strong emphasis on immediate consciousness or something like it as a universal common-denominator medium of all apprehension and experience. This is a stance quite opposite to that of Hegelian phenomenology, in which “Consciousness” specifically names the lowest and least adequate of many stages of development, and mediation rather than immediacy comes first in the order of explanation. Nonetheless, there is much of interest.

For Merleau-Ponty in particular, perception was the favored term. He was also especially concerned with our experience of embodiment. “The evidence of the perceived thing lies… in the very texture of its qualities…. We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.” (Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. xii.) This is a nice alternative to the narrow mentalist, representationalist views of Descartes and Locke that still tend to dominate, even today.

Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of perception occupy the same general territory as Kant’s synthesis of intuition, but are concerned with a yet much finer-grained level. They show perception already in itself to be anything but simple and direct. I think Aristotle would have welcomed such elaboration.

From my perspective, the primacy of perception is superseded for us talking animals by a primacy of normative reason and meta-ethics, but most of the detail of Merleau-Ponty’s investigations can stand independent of what happens with the primacy thesis, and thus can be incorporated into a larger perspective framed by meta-ethical considerations. A more limited primacy of perception might apply to the at least analytically distinguishable organic layer of our being — what Aristotle would call the parts of the soul that talking animals have in common with other animals, and Brandom would call our sentience.

As is also the case with Husserl, in spite of a misguided core commitment to an immediacy-first strategy of explanation, Merleau-Ponty’s actual accounts of things are full of subtlety and nuance, and of lasting value for their rich detail. Intellectual honesty led both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in spite of themselves to exhibit what I would interpret as abundant evidence for the always-already mediated character of what presents itself as immediate. They were both already sensitive to the shortcomings of empiricism as it is usually understood, while embodying the best strengths of what might very broadly be considered an alternate vision of empiricism, somewhat related to what William James called “radical” empiricism. (Husserl explicitly adopted a number of notions from James. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on perception and non-adoption of Husserl’s Ego concept brought him even closer. See also The Non-Primacy of Perception.)