The Good of Recognition

Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Levinas and Ricoeur

Michael Sohn

• Editore: Baylor University Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781481303705
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Philosophische Kritik

The Good of Recognition analyzes the polysemy of recognition operative in the thought of two contemporary French thinkers, Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). Author Michael Sohn shows that recognition—a concept most often associated with Hegel's works—appears prominently throughout the works of Lévinas and Ricœur, which exist at the intersection of phenomenology, ethics, politics, and religion. Sohn situates recognition in the sociopolitical context of Lévinas and Ricœur and excavates the philosophical and religious sources that undergird the two thinkers' use of recognition before contextualizing recognition within the broader themes of their thought.

By reflecting on phenomenology, ethics, and religion in The Good of Recognition, Sohn not only shows how Lévinas and Ricœur articulated a response to the pervasive problems of nonrecognition and misrecognition in their day but also suggests how their thought can contribute to a better understanding of our contemporary social and political landscape.

CHAPTER ONE

SITUATING THE CONCEPT OF RECOGNITION

Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur belonged to a generation that experienced acute feelings of both nonrecognition and misrecognition. They perceptively detected the tragic irony that as technological progress in modern society brought people closer together, it left them more distant and remote from each other.¹ Yet, even as they decried the malaise of anonymity that afflicted isolated individuals in modern mass society, they also witnessed and experienced invidious forms of social discrimination and political persecution. The Dreyfus affair that scandalized French society at the turn of the century remained part of their generation’s cultural collective memory, and Lévinas and Ricœur themselves were both confined in prisoner of war camps in Nazi-occupied France. They articulated a response to these social and political forces by drawing from the intellectual sources available to them. Their thought and works, particularly on recognition, can only be properly understood by situating them within the philosophical and theological context of the day. The concept of recognition, which was scarcely noted in French philosophy, only emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with the resurrection of Hegel studies. And Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s distinct appropriations of the Hegelian term Anerkennung could only take the form that they did with the emergence of existentialism and phenomenology. The confluence of these two major philosophical trends in French thought is the sine qua non for their use and understanding of recognition.

During the same period in which France enjoyed these developments in philosophy, important movements in theology emerged. Thinkers such as Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, and Marc Cohn sought a Jewish cultural renaissance that returned to concrete religious life by retrieving the classical texts and sources of Judaism. Lévinas’ work as director of l’École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO)—an organization dedicated to training teachers to preserve and cultivate Jewish identity through the study of Talmudic texts in the Mediterranean basin—attests to his own commitment to this movement.² Ricœur, too, belonged to a generation in French Protestant thought, initiated by the work of Pierre Maury and W. A. Visser ’t Hooft and pursued by people like Roger Mehl, characterized by disenchantment with modern liberal theology, which sought to renew Christian faith and existence. The overarching intellectual context will be outlined to properly situate and understand Lévinas’ and Ricœur’s thought.

Philosophical Sources

The French Reception of Hegel:
The Emergence of Recognition as an Issue

The question of recognition emerged as an issue out of a broader social and political context of a generation experiencing acute feelings of anonymity and witnessing invidious forms of identification and discrimination. Lévinas and Ricœur found resources for formulating a philosophical response to these historical forces within Hegelian thought or, more precisely, in Hegelian thought as it was received by French intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. The purpose of this section is to account for the emergence of Hegelianism in general and the Hegelian concept of recognition in particular as an issue within France, which in turn made it possible for Lévinas and Ricœur to creatively appropriate it as an issue central to their thought. For Hegelianism in general was not always viewed favorably in France, and the concept of recognition in particular, Hegel scholars today concede, is less prominent in his later thought and has an important but relatively small role, in his early works.³ It should be noted that although this generation of thinkers belonged to the same geographical locale and historical period, there are important differences between them. Those differences notwithstanding, the points of commonality, in broad terms, will set the scene and situate the main thinkers and their arguments.

Alexandre Koyré reported in 1930 that the state of Hegel studies in France was “relatively meager and poor, compared to Germany, England, and Italy.”⁴ The latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century witnessed a reaction against Hegelianism, ranging from indifference to outright hostility. Perceived as applying an absurd dialectic for the aims of abstract theory, Hegel was so thoroughly dismissed that Léon Brunschvicg, a major proponent of neo-Kantianism—the dominant philosophical school at the time—proclaimed that the verdict of history was that Hegelianism had suffered the worst disgrace.⁵ This state of affairs, however, began to change during the 1930s. The positive revival of Hegelian studies is located for some in Jean Wahl’s Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929)⁶ or Koyré’s translations and commentaries on Hegel’s early texts.⁷ Others attribute this revival to Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on Hegel at l’École pratique des hautes études from 1933 to 1939,⁸ attended by students who would become the seminal thinkers in the next generation of French thought.⁹ It is clear, in any case, that the dominance of neo-Kantianism began to wane and Hegelianism was on its ascendency in France.

The revival of Hegel studies signified not a wholesale appreciation of his thought but a certain interpretation of Hegel, one that turned not to his logic or his system but rather to his phenomenology or consciousness—that is, the human elements within his thought found especially in his earlier works. Without denying its idealist impulses and logical structures, Jean Wahl, for instance, discovered the concreteness of experience and history in Hegel’s thought. According to Wahl, the philosophy of Hegel, particularly in his early works, is not reducible to logical formulas and theoretical issues; rather, it is fundamentally grounded in practical concerns. His interpretation of Hegel finds an existential dimension highlighted in the figure of “unhappy consciousness” and traces through motifs of division, sin, and torment, which indicate that human development is a product of alienation and reconciliation. For Wahl, the Hegelian dialectic, before being a method, is the experience of a divided consciousness striving for unity. During that same period, Alexandre Koyré discovered a “humanized” Hegel while translating his early works from Frankfurt and Jena. Koyré retrieves Hegel’s early thought to argue that, at its most profound level, it is concerned with the essential structures of the human spirit.¹⁰ Reversing the priority of logic over human existence, for Koyré, Hegel’s system is fundamentally grounded in anthropology. Perhaps most well known are Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, which present a stunning and dramatic interpretation that made the master-slave relationship and the theme of recognition the centerpiece of Hegel’s thought. Kojève’s account clearly focuses on Hegel’s Phenomenology in isolation from the rest of his corpus. Moreover, his concept of recognition narrowly centers on the master-slave dialectic and the oppositional struggle therein rather than the final mode of mutual recognition. In other words, Kojève sees the struggle for recognition as the final, not the transitional, configuration of intersubjectivity. Whatever distortions or narrow interpretations that Kojève may have introduced, his thought would be influential for the French reception of Hegel, leading one commentator on contemporary French philosophy to observe that, since Kojève, “the Master-Slave relationship has been a constant in French thought.”¹¹

By 1950 the appreciative reception of Hegel was so complete that Koyré, who had only two decades prior reported the relative meagerness and impoverishment of Hegel studies, could now declare:

Since the publication of this report [1930], the situation of Hegel in the world of European philosophy and in particular French philosophy, has changed entirely: Hegelian philosophy has witnessed a veritable renaissance, or better, a resurrection.¹²

Wahl’s monumental Le malheur de la conscience, Koyré’s translations and readings of Hegel’s Jena years, Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology, and Jean Hyppolite’s masterful translation of and commentary on the Phenomenology all contributed to the resurrection of Hegel’s thought in France. To be sure, their interpretations of Hegel had significant differences among them, focusing on one or another aspect of his thought, whether it was the figure of unhappy consciousness for Wahl, the dramatic figure of the master-slave dialectic for Kojève, or the concept of time for Koyré. Despite these differences, it is important to note that, in their retrieval of Hegel, it is the earlier works—his early theological writings, his tentative formulations at Frankfurt and Jena, and finally his Phenomenology—that are studied. From these texts, Hegel’s philosophy reemerged in a way that, without denying his absolute idealism, nevertheless turned “towards the concrete,” to borrow a term employed by Wahl.¹³ This turn to the concrete in the reinterpretation and retrieval of Hegel’s thought marked a shift that enabled the term “recognition,” which had played a relatively minor role within Hegel’s works and his French reception, to emerge as a central concept.

The French Appropriation of Recognition through Existentialism and Phenomenology

Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricœur received their formative education amid this movement to renew and resurrect Hegel studies in France, and indeed their early intellectual biographies intersect with these towering figures in French thought. Lévinas’ first published work, a French translation of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationes, was overseen by Koyré.¹⁴ He attended Kojève’s seminars on Hegel and met with him personally throughout the 1930s.¹⁵ For Lévinas, however, it was Jean Wahl, under whom he would pursue his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne and to whom he would later dedicate his groundbreaking work, Totalité et infini, who would exert the most influence with respect to his understanding of Hegel. Lévinas credits the renewal of Hegel studies in France with Wahl’s publication of Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel in 1930: “The commentary reveals concrete experiences behind the rigorous formalism of Hegel’s system. The mature Hegel no longer seems to have forgotten the anxieties of his youth.”¹⁶

Lévinas was not interested in expositing Hegel’s work per se but rather sought to appropriate his thought in light of contemporary philosophical trends, particularly with ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Situating the Concept of Recognition
• 2 Emmanuel Lévinas: Recognition as Pure Sensation
• 3 Emmanuel Lévinas: A Jewish Perspective on Recognition
• 4 Paul Ricœur: Recognition as Pure and Empirical Will
• 5 Paul Ricœur: A Christian Perspective on Recognition
• 6 The Good of Recognition
• Bibliography
• Index