Paul Ricoeur

Karl Simms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134562138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most wide-ranging thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. He has developed a unique 'theory of reading' or hermeneutics, which extends far beyond the reading of literary works to build into a theory for the reading of 'life'. For this reason, his work has impacted not only upon literary studies, but upon such disciplines as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, religion, legal studies and politics.
This introductory guide:
* details Ricoeur's most significant contributions to contemporary critical thought
* provides an intellectual context to his key ideas
* explores the debate around his work on good and evil, psychoanalysis, metaphor, narrative, politics and justice
* suggests the continuing relevance of Ricoeur's thought and examines the increasing interest in his work across a range of disciplines.
Karl Simms also provides a guide to further reading, which offers advice on Ricoeur's publications and relevant secondary texts. Refreshingly clear and impressively comprehensive, Paul Ricoeur is the essential guide to an essential theorist.

KEY IDEAS

1

GOOD AND EVIL

In the 1950s Ricoeur had the ambitious aim of completing a monumental three-part Philosophy of the Will. In the event, only the first two parts, The Voluntary and the Involuntary and Finitude and Guilt, were completed (although the latter was itself subdivided into two parts, Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil). These early works form an important precursor to Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutic’ philosophy, which is described in Chapters 2–7 that follow: whatever area of philosophy Ricoeur subsequently turns his attention to, he is always consistent with the ideals he was to set himself in Philosophy of the Will.

Ricoeur’s early thought conceives of life as a ‘dialectic’: on the one hand, I am master of myself and choose and will courses of action (this is the ‘voluntary’), while on the other hand I am subjected to the necessity of being in the world, with all the things beyond my control which that implies, along with the necessity of my being who I am – I have a certain character along with an unconscious mind that defies my will (this being the ‘involuntary’). How we negotiate our lives between the freedom accorded us as human beings and the constraints that are imposed upon us by the fact of our being humans living in the world is, then, the departure point for Ricoeur’s philosophy. Moreover, as an overtly Christian philosopher, Ricoeur is interested in the way good and evil are replicated in, or at least show themselves in, the human dialectic between free will and necessity.

The Voluntary and the Involuntary: Will and the Passions

Ricoeur’s philosophy is motivated by a Christian need to explain the origins of evil in the world, and thus to answer the questions that this problem carries with it, such as Why is there evil in the world?, and Why do people commit evil deeds? His starting point in answering these questions is to investigate one of the ways in which the dialectic of life shows itself, in the conflict between the will and the ‘passions’ – our wants and needs prompted by such biological factors as hunger, sex drive, etc. In order to conduct his investigation, Ricoeur adopts the phenomenological method of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). However, while adopting Husserl’s methods, Ricoeur goes some way beyond his conclusions.

For Ricoeur, Husserl does not really understand the passions (the involuntary), because he does not grasp that there is a reciprocal relation between mind and body – Husserl describes through the mind alone. Ricoeur, meanwhile, draws a distinction between description and understanding: passing beyond description to understanding consists in acknowledging the relation between mind and body, voluntary and involuntary. However, since there is only one will (the voluntary), but there are many (involuntary) passions, a description of the will is still the starting point for Ricoeur’s attempt to ‘synthesise’ the voluntary will with the involuntary passions, because explanation consists in proceeding from the simple to the complex.

Ricoeur’s (1966: 6) description reveals, first, that to will is a type of act, seen as a triad: ‘To say “I will” means first “I decide”, second “I move my body”, third “I consent”’. Ricoeur follows Husserl’s rule that ‘all consciousness is consciousness of something’, and by analogy claims that all willing must have an action as its object – all willing is willing to act. There are three ‘modes’, or ways, of willing: decision, movement and consent. When I decide, the object of my willing is ‘a project I form … to be done by me in accord with my abilities’ (Ricoeur 1966: 7). When I move my body, an action is carried out. When I consent, I acquiesce to necessity: the necessity that things are as they are, that I am alive in a biological body which has its limitations.

According to Ricoeur, each of these three dimensions of willing also involves the will’s opposite, the involuntary. First, when I make a decision, it ‘stands in an original relation not only to the project which is its specific object, but also the motives which justify it’ (Ricoeur 1966: 7). In other words, I do not just do things for no reason. The reasons I have in making a decision are a form of the involuntary – Ricoeur calls them ‘motivation’. Second, in moving my body, I must recognise that my body is as much governed by involuntary motions as by willing: this does not just mean things like breathing, but also when I do things by habit – my will to do those things is being in some sense cheated on those occasions. And third, when I consent, I give myself over to something other than me over which I have no control, and that something is a form of necessity. There are thus three modes of the involuntary standing in relation to the three modes of the voluntary act: the decision is tempered by motivation, the movement of the body is tempered by involuntary motion, and consent is tempered by necessity. These relations then become the lever for Ricoeur to ‘reconquer’ the Cartesian cogito.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the philosophy developed by Husserl, most notably in his book Ideas (1913), and in his series of lectures published as Cartesian Meditations (1931). Phenomenology starts from the position that whatever I perceive I perceive through the senses. Husserl suspends his judgement as to whether what his senses tell him is true: the phenomenologist is engaged in a mental exercise, or thought experiment, whereby judgements about the world around him are ‘bracketed off’. This allows him to engage in phenomenological, or eidetic (eidos is Greek for ‘form’), analysis, which reveals things as they appear as phenomena, this allegedly being more ‘essential’ than as they ‘really’ are, how things really are being a matter of mere speculation. So, a phenomenological analysis of a tree, for example, would not focus on those aspects of the tree that could be reduced to scientific description, such as its chemical composition, its dimensions etc., but rather would concentrate on how the tree appears to me: its movement in the breeze, its changing shape according to the angle from which it is viewed, its changing colour according to the time of day and time of year, etc. None of these aspects of the tree is solely dependent on what the tree consists of as a material object; rather, each is dependent on how the tree, myself, and the world around myself and the tree, all interact with one another. This description of the tree is not a description of how the tree is perceived, although that is its starting point.Rather, it is a description of the phenomenologist’s consciousness of the tree. Perhaps a more important thing than trees that can be described or analysed phenomenologically is consciousness itself. This allows the phenomenologist to enter a happy state of apperception (perceiving that he is perceiving): in this state, the phenomenologist’s consciousness is interacting with itself; he is in a state of self-consciousness. This, for Husserl, is the only way to examine consciousness: consciousness is always consciousness of something, even if that something is consciousness itself.

In Descartes (and the same is true of Husserl), the cogito is something to be performed – it is a mental act. Its performance leads to a separation of the soul (or thinking) from the body, so that the body is then viewed so to speak from the outside, that is, from the perspective of pure thought. But for Ricoeur, because the cogito is a mental act, it is an act of the will. As such, it contains within it the relationship with willing’s other (motivation, motion and necessity) as described in his analysis of the will. In this way, Ricoeur ‘extends’ the cogito to include what Descartes and Husserl excluded from it, namely the personal body. Descartes, says Ricoeur, abstracts acts into facts. Ricoeur’s criticism of Descartes, and of his follower Husserl, is that they are philosophers of the Ego: ‘Ego cogito, ergo sum’; ‘I think therefore

The Cartesian Cogito

The proposition ‘I think therefore I am’ is commonly referred to as the ‘Cartesian cogito’, after its inventor, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), and its Latin formulation, cogito ergo sum. Descartes arrived at the cogito through his Method. The Method, which was an entirely novel departure in philosophy in Descartes’ day, consists in starting without any presuppositions, and looking at the world around you from the standpoint of not expecting to find anything in particular. In looking around, you then adopt a sceptical attitude, questioning whatever you perceive. Doing this, Descartes discovered that he can doubt that the world around him is the real world (a malicious demon inside his head might be deceiving him, or he might be dreaming), or he can even doubt that the world exists at all. However, the one thing Descartes cannot doubt is that he is thinking. From this he deduces that he must exist, must be an existing being in order to do the thinking he’s engaged in hence, ‘I think therefore I am’.

I am’. This leads to an arid, sterile circularity. The Cartesian knows that he is thinking because he is thinking, which is all well and good, but what does he do? The phenomenologist, meanwhile, suspends his judgement, rather than doubts that the world exists, but is still caught up in his mental exercise of apperception, leaving the world unchanged. As a Christian (and a socialist) Ricoeur wants to change the world, but for a philosophy to change the world it must intersect with the world in some way. Ricoeur’s acknowledgement of the will’s being tempered by necessity, which is really an acknowledgement of the influence of the body on any mental act (including the act of performing the cogito), is a way of bringing the reality of the outside world into the mental world of the Cartesian and the phenomenologist. As Ricoeur (1966: 14) puts it, ‘the Ego must more radically renounce the covert claim of all consciousness, must abandon its wish to posit itself, so that it can receive the nourishing and inspiring spontaneity which breaks the sterile circle of the self’s constant return to itself’.

According to Ricoeur, breaking the circle of the self’s constant return to itself is a way of passing ‘from objectivity to existence’. The Cartesian sees the person as divided into the body, which as an object has objective existence, and a soul, which has subjective existence. In removing the distinction between soul and body – or, more precisely, in demonstrating that a soul is impossible, so long as we are in the world, without a body – Ricoeur unites the objective with the subjective under the single heading of ‘existence’. Existence is what subjects have who have the capacity for acknowledging that they have bodies in the material world. Achieving this state of existence, says Ricoeur (1966: 14), ‘requires that I participate actively in my incarnation as a mystery’. To ‘participate actively in my incarnation’ means on the one hand to think of myself through the thought of my having a body, and on the other hand to decide, to move and to consent, all of which in some sense involve my body controlling me, to however small a degree.

But why ‘as a mystery’? ‘What to do with the body’ has always been a problem for philosophers in the Cartesian tradition, such as Husserl. Ricoeur wants to claim that my having a body is not a philosophical problem, but a mystery. The distinction is one originally made by the French Christian philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973): a problem is something to be solved, but a mystery is something which, although we do not know the answer to it, does not require an answer, does not need solving. That I have a body as a pre-given is what remains mysterious (as opposed to problematic) for me. According to Ricoeur, this mystery is a condition of being able to posit the cogito in the first place. The cogito is an act of positing myself, but in order to do this I must participate in the condition that makes the cogito possible in the first place, namely my having a body. Ricoeur’s (1966: 18) aim is to restore ‘the original concord of vague consciousness with its body and its world’. The mystery is to be understood as a reconciliation between Cartesian consciousness (self-consciousness) and objectivity.

Ricoeur’s philosophy, however, is not only a ‘philosophy of mystery’, but also a ‘philosophy of paradox’. The ‘paradox’ is that without the necessity of my having a body and being in the world, I could not have free will, but that free will is tempered by those necessities. Ricoeur identifies three modes of freedom, corresponding to the three modes of the will: freedom of choice, freedom of movement and freedom of consent. Each of these freedoms is ‘paradoxical’ in the sense of requiring some sort of negotiation between one way of thinking and its opposite.

Freedom of choice is tempered by need, but need can be rejected as the motive for an action. This leads to an experience of sacrifice: for example, ‘man is capable of choosing between his hunger and something else’ (Ricoeur 1966: 93). Similarly, without chastity sexuality would not be human sexuality. Needs, then, are another example of the ‘dialectic’ of human life. (‘Dialectical’ here means having something by rejecting its opposite, a definition which Ricoeur again borrows from Gabriel Marcel.) I have a human need for food because I can will to sacrifice it; I have a human need for sex because I have the will to sacrifice it, etc.

Something analogous is true of freedom of movement, which is tempered by emotion and habit, and freedom of consent, which in the very words ‘freedom of consent’ is revealed the paradoxical nature of this formula: consenting is the voluntary act of surrendering freedom. All of these paradoxical formulations describe modes of specifically human freedom, and human freedom is limited by the negative concepts – need, emotion or habit and necessity – which determine it by the possibility of the will’s rejecting them: they are what Ricoeur calls ‘limit concepts’ (a notion borrowed from the German Christian existentialist Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)). ‘These limit concepts’, says Ricoeur (1966: 486), ‘have no other function here than to help us understand, by contrast, the condition of a will which is reciprocal with an involuntary’.

Existentialism

A philosophy initially developed by Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers in the 1920s, and which takes existence to be that which must be assumed by any thinking being. Consequently, existentialism is opposed to Cartesianism, which sets out to prove existence from the fact of thinking. Existentialists take existence, not thinking, to be primary, but the fact of existence is not something that can be proved: rather, existence is a pre-given. Marcel and Jaspers were Christians, and took existence to be a gift from God, who Himself does not exist, since existence is something that only a being in the world can experience, whereas God is outside the world, eternal. Humans are the only animals who can experience existence, rather than merely exist as such, and it is their task in life to interpret that experience.

After the Second World War the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) imported the materialist theory of Karl Marx – that physical reality is the only reality into existentialism, and thereby took existentialism in an atheist direction, causing Marcel to repudiate the term ‘existentialist’. For Sartre, as for his Algerian contemporary Albert Camus (1913–60), the alternative is not between existence and eternity, but between existence and nothing. Existence is the choice or decision not to commit suicide, although again humans are the only animals capable of making this choice. Moreover,humans define themselves not through their thoughts,but through their actions: ‘to be is to do’. Insofar as Ricoeur is influenced by existentialism, he agrees with Sartre concerning the importance of action, but is much closer to Marcel and Jaspers in preserving the at least equal importance of interpretation of that action as a defining characteristic of human life.

Fallible Man: The Fault, Disproportion and Fragility

If man can only be understood as existent, which is to say, as a negotiation between a thinking, willing being who acts, and a being in the world who is subjected to the necessities that the world, including his own body, imposes on him, then this ‘paradoxical’ existence seems a long way from the cert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• WHY RICOEUR?
• KEY IDEAS
• After Ricoeur
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Index