Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought

William Schweiker,John Wall,David Hall

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143508
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Filosofía
• Thema: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This book explores and proposes new avenues for contemporary moral thought. It defines and assesses the significance of the writings of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur for ethics. The book also explores what matters most to persons and how best to sustain just communities.

PART I:
Moral Selfhood, the Good, and the Right

1
Ricoeur’s Reclamation of Autonomy

Unity, Plurality, and Totality

PAMELA SUE ANDERSON

Ricoeur’s Kantian Architectonic

Paul Ricoeur renders Immanuel Kant’s moral and political principle of autonomy with these words: “Dare to learn, taste, savour for yourself!”¹ Interpreted loosely for my purposes this threefold imperative encapsulates Ricoeur’s view of the ethics and meaning of autonomy in public life. His view is more engaging than the prosaic description often given of Kantian autonomy. As one feminist philosopher suggests, the description is in fact a caricature of “a moral superstar [standing] alone on a rock of rational will power,”² forcibly detached by his (sic) own sense of duty from other individuals and from the taint of emotions, or “care,” which might connect him to the concrete vulnerabilities of life. This caricature will clearly not be compatible with Ricoeur’s portrayal of autonomy and arguably not with Kant’s own.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ricoeur reconfigures Kantian autonomy as the capacity of human subjects to make moral law for themselves and so bind themselves to an ethical life in community with other rational beings. Yet in reclaiming autonomy from contemporary disclaimers, his conception is potentially just as demanding as Kant’s. Whatever else might be said of Ricoeur’s relationship to Kant, I will contend that he takes up a thoroughly Kantian architectonic and that he persuasively reclaims autonomy from neo-Aristotelian, postmodern, and feminist disclaimers. The subtitle of my chapter, “Unity, Plurality, and Totality,” contains Kant’s categories of quantity. These three categories have informed Kantian discussions of autonomy in the spheres of both theoretical and practical reason. For some philosophers, especially moral philosophers, these terms will bring to mind Kant’s elaboration of the three moments of a kingdom of ends; implicit are the moments in the progression from the categorical imperative formula of an end-in-itself (unity) to that of ends-in-themselves (plurality) and, ultimately, to that of the complete system of ends (totality).³ This threefold vision of the kingdom of ends should be kept in mind when assessing Ricoeur’s reclamation of autonomy.

Ricoeur’s Kantian architectonic denies neither the value of the formal functions of judgment (that is, universal, particular, and singular) as critical tools, nor the need to work with the material content of real life. Whereas the Kantian vision has tended to be presented as flawless, Ricoeur’s vision of a community of persons as ends-in-themselves does not deny the inevitable gaps and possible inconsistencies in an account of autonomy that aims at completeness rather than simplicity.⁴ In particular, he recognizes that aporia plague the Kantian autonomy that begins reflection at a formal level of unity; and he attempts to confront three aporia at the “places” of (the self’s) receptiveness, passivity, and powerlessness.⁵ I maintain that in confronting the aporia of (1) receptiveness of freedom to the law, (2) passivity of reason to the feeling of respect, and (3) powerlessness of the will to the propensity for evil, Ricoeur remains within a Kantian architectonic.

Ricoeur’s Ninth Study, “The Self and Practical Wisdom,” in Oneself as Another represents these aporia as three figures: (1) the other of freedom in the figure of the law (which freedom gives itself);⁶ (2) the other of feeling in the figure of respect—that is, passive-reason;⁷ and (3) the other of the good in the figure of the penchant toward evil.⁸ Bear in mind that Ricoeur progresses level by level to represent these figures of otherness, aiming to reverse—subsequently—the order of their appearance, and thus to reclaim the autonomy of the self as ipse, not idem; that is, selfhood, not sameness.⁹ Ultimately, he seeks to reconfigure the aporia—at the third moment—in the complete determination of the system of ends in trying cases of moral judgment as singular.¹⁰

A Kantian explanation can be given for the aporia as well as their reconfiguration. These impasses are inevitable insofar as the formal function of judgment, in its universal form, necessarily unifies by excluding the diverse sensible or material content and the complex of relations of real life circumstances. The aporia appear as a result of the exclusion of material parts and social relations. Yet Ricoeur’s systematization of issues holds in view the three forms of judgment and the three categories of unity, plurality, and totality, while developing new arguments that both retain and reverse the distinctions of the conceptual, the sensible, and the full concreteness of action in concert with other persons.¹¹ His reconfiguration preserves the full meaning of autonomy, at each level, form, moment, category, and distinction of a Kantian architectonic, without losing either the flexibility necessary for the plurality of the embodiments of ethical life or the ultimate vision of a harmonious kingdom of ends.

Ricoeur’s reclamation of autonomy develops at the heart of his account of the good and the right in the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth studies of Oneself as Another¹² It forms the core of his “little ethics,” which is his retrospective name for these three studies. Against various schools of potential opponents, his account suggests that there is a deep connection between the good and the right.¹³ The good, on the one hand, is understood, roughly, as living well. In Aristotelian terms, it is the aim of the ethical life, that is, living and faring well. The right, on the other hand, is understood, roughly, as doing what every finite rational being ought to do. In Kantian terms, it is acting autonomously, yet Ricoeur adds the proviso “for and with others in just institutions.” In supplementing Kant, Ricoeur’s complete account of the right becomes increasingly complex. It is, first, upstaged in the Seventh Study by what are Ricoeur’s mediating analyses of the good in Aristotle, but also by what will become his elucidation of the good in the texts of Kant. Next, his account elaborates the right in terms of the norm of autonomy on three levels. These terms are represented by the Eighth Study, “The Self and the Moral Norm,” in its three subsections: “The Aim of the ‘Good’ Life and Obligation,” “Solicitude and the Norm,” and “From the Sense of Justice to the ‘Principles of Justice.’” The movement implicit in these terms means that the right covers both moral and political philosophy. Ultimately, his account reclaims the full meaning of autonomy in the reversal of the levels of judgment in the Ninth Study. This last study proposes that instead of beginning with the formal and universal, we should start with the complete action determined for and with others, and then reflect back upon the autonomy of selfhood (ipseity).¹⁴ So from this, autonomy is not found to be the starting point, but the critical pivot for his little ethics; as Ricoeur will later argue, autonomy as a moral capacity is bound up with interdependence, or the “interpersonal,” rather than independence.¹⁵

It is instructive to restate Ricoeur’s own descriptions of the threefold levels of reflection in his analysis of autonomy before their reversal.¹⁶ First, on the formal level of principles, or Kantian maxims, autonomy is achieved when the faculty of choice (Willkur) sets aside sensible inclinations (or natural desires), in order to follow the rational principle of the will (Willey, this renders universality.¹⁷ Second, on the material level, autonomy is realized when instrumental reasoning is decentered by the respect owed to persons; that is, to others as much as oneself; this renders plurality.¹⁸ Third, on the level of complete determination of all maxims, autonomy is accomplished when a will turned in on itself is recasted by the mediation of those institutional structures created for living well together. This renders justice, or the complete determination of ends-in-themselves, and hence autonomous willing in concert with others.¹⁹

Ricoeur suggests a connection between Aristotle and Kant—as representatives of the good and the right, respectively—in his reversal of formal conceptions of autonomy. Yet notice that he always progresses according to a Kantian architectonic—that is, according to three forms of judgment: of the universal, the particular, and the singular, to three spheres of acting: of unity, plurality, and totality, and to three levels of the formal, material, and the complete determination of autonomy in the harmony of persons who think and act attentive to the good. Moreover, the connection between Aristotle and Kant is played out upon the stage of Ricoeur’s exploration of the self’s intimate relations to otherness, in his words, of “oneself inasmuch as other.”²⁰ Unlike many contemporary portrayals of the Kantian, or Aristotelian, /, Ricoeur represents le soi and not le moi.²¹ The displaced I implicit here is the first-person subject, but it could also be thought to decenter the culturally specific I of Western philosophy that has been gendered as the man of reason. Ricoeur does not equate selfhood with the factual or empirical account of identity (idem) sought by Anglo-American or European philosophers. He does not claim to attest to the self on a first-person basis of an / alone. Instead Ricoeur’s distinctive attestation of self-hood (ipseity) is made on the ontological basis of, initially, a belief in being self-identical (ipse), both active and receptive, but, ultimately and more strongly, a conviction of being oneself inasmuch as other (soi-meme comme un autre) in acting and suffering.²²

Ricoeur illustrates the role of attestation in a distinctive act of willing: that is, promising. Selfhood is being self-same at once bound in promise-keeping, despite change, and unbound in forgiveness, despite the past of shattered promises.²³ I intend to take a critical look at the originality of Ricoeur’s account of promise-keeping in which he claims to disagree with Kant’s assessment of the morality of false promises.²⁴ He also claims to advance beyond Kant with his conception of selfhood as ipseity. Yet a Kantian architectonic still shapes Ricoeur’s conception of autonomy or, in his later terms, it builds /^-autonomy upon a subject with a moral capacity. His essentially post-Kantian conception of a rational subject with certain capacities also creates the possibility and necessity of reconceiving related moral terms such as imputation, responsibility, and conviction.²⁵ I discuss this further later in this chapter.

Ricoeur also admits that the fragility of this picture of autonomy is personally embedded and reflexive. It is quite easily broken down by violence insofar as selfhood is discordant: always both agent and patient. Ironically, violence that disrupts the harmony of persons reveals retrospectively what had been possessed positively as power in common.²⁶ Ricoeur’s distinctive manner of Kantian reasoning is both informed by and informs the larger picture of the hermeneutics of selfhood. Yet, admittedly, his notion of selfhood as ipseity has no exact parallel in Kant.²⁷ Unlike Kant, the autonomous self is neither his starting point (as a datum) nor an a priori concept. Nevertheless, he uses a Kantian framework to locate his ontological claims concerning the self. In this sense, he can be said to supplement Kant.

Ricoeur anticipates the distinctive reclamation of autonomy at the outset of his hermeneutics of selfhood. In his introduction to Oneself as Another, he fixes the autonomy of the self in its relations to otherness:

Never, at any stage, will the self have been separated from its other. It remains, however, that this dialectic, the richest of all, as the title of the work [read as “oneself inasmuch as other”²⁸] recalls, will take on its fullest development only in the studies in the areas of ethics and morality. The autonomy of the self will appear then to be tightly bound up with solicitude for one’s neighbor and with justice for each individual.²⁹

As stipulated by Ricoeur...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Human Capability and Contemporary Moral Thought
• Part I: Moral Selfhood, the Good, and the Right
• Part II: Moral Meanings, Human Fallibility, and Theological Ethics
• Part III: Moral Practice, Responsible Citizenship, and Social Justice
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects